Two other living writers I will now commend to you, and then I
shall have done.
The parents of Mr. Belloc, with a happy prevision, anticipated
by some decades the entente cordiale, and their brilliant
son felicitously manifests in his own person many of the admirable
qualities of both races. In England he is reported to be forcefully
French, and it may be surmised that when in France he is engagingly
British. Fortunately for our literature, it is in the language of
his mother that he has found his expression. Many are the beautiful
utterances scattered through his charming works: two of the most
picturesque deal with the greatness of France; the subject of one
is the Ancient Monarchy, and of the other the Great
Napoleon:—
"So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out
and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and
recognised its own nature when the vaults of the Thermæ
echoed heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings.
"Look up the vast valley of dead men crowned, and you may see
the gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long
white beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand
the globe, and in his right the hilt of an unconquerable sword.
There also are the short strong horsemen of the Robertian House,
half hidden by their leather shields, and their sons before them
growing in vestment and majesty and taking on the pomp of the
Middle Ages; Louis VII., all covered with iron; Philip, the
Conqueror; Louis IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they
stand in a widening, interminable procession, this great crowd of
kings; they loose their armour, they take their ermine on, they are
accompanied by their captains and their marshals; at last, in their
attitude and in their magnificence they sum up in themselves the
pride and the achievement of the French nation.
"But Time has dissipated what it could not tarnish, and the
process of a thousand years has turned these mighty figures into
unsubstantial things. You may see them in the grey end of darkness,
like a pageant, all standing still. You look again, but with the
growing light, and with the wind that rises before morning, they
have disappeared."
* * * * *
"There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain
sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that
passed away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him
move along their snows, through the long mysterious twilights of
the northern autumn, in silence, with the head bent and the reins
in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching
towards an ancient solitude and repose. They say it was
Napoleon.
"After him there trailed for days the shadows of the soldiery,
vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It was
as though the cannon smoke at Waterloo, borne on the light west
wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years of
combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of the
year over the endless plains.
"But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the
Guard, and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French
drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the
army was of ghosts and was defeated. They passed in the silence
which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they sleep
in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords."
Time and circumstances have changed our ancient enemies into our
honoured friends, and the race that fought against us at Waterloo
has cemented its friendship towards us with its blood; and as we
look back over the century that divides us from Waterloo we can now
with Mr. Belloc salute the sombre figure of the defeated
conqueror.