ralph pite
moment; he is a disruptive energy that decays slowly over time into the rigid forms
ofold age, obsessed with self-perpetuation as his powers fade. Because there is, as it
were, nothing to Napoleon beyond his military talent, it is inevitable that he should
come to impersonate what he overthrows, setting up monarchies in the countries
he liberates and preoccupied by the need to establish a dynasty. On the other side,
Kutuzof seems less to symbolize retributive justice or Mother Russia’s power of ́
resistance than to embody an elemental defiance of death; similarly, the Battle of
Waterloo is won by endurance alone.^35 What commands, Wellington’s aide asks
him, would he want carried out if he were killed. ‘These simply’, Wellington answers,
‘to hold out unto the last’ (Part 3,vii. vii. 38). When another officer arrives asking
for ‘some relief, however temporary’, Wellington can offer none—‘he, I, every
Englishman afield|Must fall upon the spot we occupy,|Our wounds in front’ (Part
3,vii. vii. 48–50). Defeat for the French comes, accordingly, with Wellington’s cry,
‘Aha—they are giving way!’ (Part 3,vii. viii. 74).
This means that there is a nihilist undercurrent to the work’s resignation about
politics. The world is run by tired, elderly men, whose age renders them small-
minded, but they are only young men aged; they show that youthful hopes and
ideals will always peter out in disappointment. It is in the nature of the young
to set out to change the world, and in their nature, too, to become old—first
complacent, then weary, and then frightened. Napoleon recognizes something of
this after Waterloo:
I found the crown of France in the mire,
And with the point of my prevailing sword
Ipickeditup!Butforallthisandthis
Ishallbenothing.
(Part 3,vii. ix. 38–41)‘Great men are meteors’, he says, a few lines later, ‘that consume themselves|To
light the earth. This is my burnt-out hour.’ He is echoing his arch-enemy, Pitt, who
also died convinced he had achieved nothing:
So do my plans through all these plodding years
Announce them built in vain!
His heel on France, monarchies in chains
To France, I am as though I had never been!
(Part 1,vi.vi.46–9)Ambition seems to be broken against forces of obstinate resistance as desire is
thwarted by experience. At this point a patriotic celebration of English resilience—
(^35) The earlier victory at Trafalgar mirrors Napoleon’s, because the French navy is ‘rotten’: ‘Demor-
alized past prayer is the marine—|Bad masts, bad sails, bad officers, bad men,’ as Admiral Villeneuve
acknowledges (Part 1,ii. ii. 11–12). Natural justice early on in the campaign, as talent sweeps aside
corruption, is replaced, after the stalemate of Borodino and amidst the ‘damn close-run thing’ of
Waterloo, by a feeling that war tests the survival instinct.