THE EMPIRE

MILITARY ORATORY.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

PARLIAMENTARY eloquence made no great figure under the Directory. Under the Consulate and the Empire, it lost its freedom and its voice. The Press itself was decapitated by the fatal shears of the Censorship. To the agents of revolution had succeeded the agents of organization; to the theoretical politicians, the men of practical business; to the orators, the jurists. In the Legislative Body, the Senate, the Council of State, the Pulpit, the Bar, true eloquence had become unknown. Eloquence-that great art of impassionating and swaying the masses by means of emotional and figurative expression-passed to the military men, or rather to one alone of them, to Napoleon Bonaparte.

The military eloquence, attributed to the ancients, is no better than a fiction of their historians and their poets. To harangue soldiers, not in the circus and from the elevation of the tribune, but in the presence of the enemy, as is reported of their generals, would have been admirable, I am far from denying it; but it was plainly impossible.

These expressions: "Come and take them," of Leonidas to Xerxes; of Epimenondas dying: "I leave two immortal daughters, Leuctra and Mantinea;" of Cæsar: "I came, I saw, I conquered:" these apothegms may well have been spoken, precisely because they are but apothegms. But from a sentence of some syllables to a harangue of

some pages, there is a wide distance. There is all the dis tance from truth to falsehood.

If, in fact, in the Chamber of Deputies, in a hall where the repercussion of sounds is favored by its acoustical construction, there are a hundred members at least, out of four hundred, who never hear very distinctly the loudest and most practised speakers, how could the generals of antiquity have made themselves heard, upon the ground which they may chance to occupy on the battle-field, before the extended line of a hundred thousand warriors, amid wind and rain, which scatter and drown his words at four paces from the orator? The greater part of these monstrous armies were but a horde of barbarians of all countries, chained together under the rod of a master, knowing neither to read or write, or make themselves intelligible to one another, and understanding each other perfectly but for the purposes of theft, murder and pillage. But the illusion favors the predilections for antiquity. We unhesitatingly believe those historians who make Alexander, Scipio, Hannibal, speak as if Alexander, Scipio, Hannibal were elaborators of standard phrases, and who in the thick of the melee, had been specially careful not to derange by a comma the grammatical symmetry, or the cadence and measure of a gerund or a su pine.

Moreover, all these fictions of discourse go back but a little way. The Greeks were fine speakers, and the heroes of old Homer harangue almost as well as they fight. Virgil and he have even not been satisfied with making speeches for mortal men. In their superabundance, they furnish them to the gods of Olympus. In imitation of them, Tasso puts subtle and labored orations in the mouth of Rinaldo, of Solyman and of Godfrey, who, in their quality of warriors, prided themselves upon not knowing how to spell a solitary letter of the Turkish or the French alphabet. Milton goes farther he ascribes speeches, very beautiful assuredly, to the winged seraphim of heaven and to the angels of the bottomless pit, to excite the divine and the infernal militia

to fight bravely-with the condition, however, of never hill. ing each other, since bodiless souls are insusceptible of death.

The lengthy harangues of Quinctius Curtius are but rhetorical essays, which this historian puts in the mouth of his Alexander, who is a mere swaggerer. Polybius, Thucydides, Sallust, Plutarch clothe the Greek and Roman heroes in the livery of their own style. It is not Germanicus we read in the "Annals," it is Tacitus unadulterated. Livy makes no end of his harangues, and this harmonious phrase-maker of the drawing-rooms of Mecænas, does not reflect that he would not have been understood even by the generals of ancient Rome. It would be pleasant to see him introduce the Chamberlains of Tarquin lisping the patois of the Etrurian dialect, amid inextinguishable laughter, in the polished court of Augustus. It would be very much as if Madame de Sévignè would try to make herself under. stood by the kitchen-maids of King Childebert.

The most elegant of our men of letters, M. Villemain, would not polish, would not round or point his period with more finish in his carefully closed cabinet, than does the rude Coriolanus under the walls of infant Rome, or the ferocious Arminius in the swamps of Germany.

Galgacus, for example, was a sort of savage, bristled, hairy and bearded from head to foot. He emitted from a shrill gullet certain inarticulate cries, brandishing his sword meanwhile. He was not well versed in prosodial elisions or ablatives absolute, and it is more than probable that he had not had time to finish his philosophy at the University of Oxford. Very well! Tacitus makes him a rhetorician, a species of perpetual secretary of the French Academy. His whole speech is varnished and brushed. Nothing is wanting exordium, plan, proofs, peroration, and besides, logic, vehemence, color. Add to which, an admirable painting of manners and the style of the great masters. He might have been envied by Cicero.

These historians had all spent their youth sweating mind