Divine Fury (28 page)

Saint-Simon based his praise of Napoleon’s scientific and philosophical genius, which he likened to that of Newton, largely on his capacity to organize and set in motion the intellectual forces of his time. It is true that Napoleon was talented in mathematics as a schoolboy, and that his support of the sciences and the arts—from the scientific delegations he brought to Egypt to the founding of France’s great universities, the
grandes écoles
—was considerable. Still, the analogy to Newton will strike most observers today as far-fetched, though it was not at all uncommon at the time. Napoleon himself reportedly dreamed in his youth of becoming another Newton, a Newton of “small bodies” and minute details, the master of finite, if not infinite, space. And as an adult he gave some indication of having attained his goal. The naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, for example, who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, described in awe how, in the midst of preparing for his departure, directing orderlies and aides, and saying goodbye to a forlorn mistress, Napoleon simultaneously debated with Gaspard Monge, the leading mathematical physicist of France, regarding the question of whether Newton had “answered everything.” Napoleon maintained that he hadn’t, and then proceeded to show where the genius of Newton was wanting, apparently trumping the Englishman’s with his own, or at least so it seemed to the astonished Saint-Hilaire. Somewhat later, in a substantial chapter of his classic
On War
devoted to the novel subject of
“military genius,” the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz emphasized how Napoleon repeatedly performed calculations on the battlefield worthy of the “gifts of a Newton or an Euler,” easily grasping and dismissing “a thousand remote possibilities which an ordinary mind would labor to identify and wear itself out in so doing.” Such an intuitive capacity—to find order where others saw chaos or chance, to anticipate movements dependent on infinitely complex variables, and “to perceive the truth at every moment”—could never be learned, Clausewitz said. It required “higher intellectual gifts” and an innate “sense of unity and power of judgment raised to a marvelous pitch of vision.” When this supreme power of divination, “the sovereign eye of genius itself,” was joined to the strengths of character required of the greatest commanders—firmness, staunchness, and sangfroid—the resulting blend of intellect and volition was of truly “historical significance.”
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Napoleon was, then, as his many German admirers in the nineteenth century came to describe him, a
Taten-Genie
, a genius of deeds, who held out the immense possibilities of genius to alter human existence and transform the face of the globe. As such, he was an original type. For though, as Saint-Simon and Clausewitz took pains to emphasize, Napoleon possessed many of the same gifts as earlier men of genius—gifts of intellect, creativity, imagination, and will—he added to them a powerful capacity for action. The vital force that moved him propelled him from the study and the studio into the palace and the stateroom, sent him sweeping across battlefields into the very maelstrom of life. Earlier geniuses had created chiefly with canvas and words. Napoleon created with kingdoms. Human beings were his clay. And whereas earlier geniuses had challenged prevailing norms in art or science, spurning established rules, Napoleon overthrew centuries-old customs, traditions, and laws. A destroyer, he abolished kingdoms. A creator, he made them anew. Here was the basis of a powerful Romantic myth that was at once heir to the original genius of the eighteenth century and a genuine original. Combining creativity with action, originality with deeds, the genius could be a poet of the political, remaking the world in his image. The genius could be a legislator of the world.

The acknowledgment of Napoleon’s legislative power proved more fleeting than the emperor had hoped. Yet even as his kingdom crumbled, and Europeans weighed its tremendous cost in blood, the example of his genius proved fertile, as creative in captivity and death as in life. “World-historical individuals are those who [are] the first to formulate the desires of their fellows explicitly,” the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would famously declare in the year following
Napoleon’s death, his example very much in mind. “When their ends are achieved, they fall aside like empty husks.” Yet their spirit endured. “There is a power within them which is stronger than they are,” and a power that moves through them, and so appears as “something external and alien.”
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Just what that power was—the
divinum quiddam
of special men—constituted a venerable question that continued to exercise Napoleon’s contemporaries while focusing attention on an apparent paradox that his case brought to the fore. How was it that the extraordinary individual—the genius—could be at once the great exception and a representative man, an oracle who spoke like no other and a paragon who spoke for all? On the coast across the sea, within sight of the island of Elba where Napoleon was once a captive, a gathering of mourners scoured the sand in search of answers to such questions. And in the circle of Romantic poets that surrounded them, they helped to formulate an answer, imagining the genius as a prophet, one who legislated for the people even when his authority was denied.

A
FIRE BURNS ON THE
T
USCAN COAST
, defying the morning heat. Wood-smoke, pine and lime, incense and decaying flesh. The fierce pop and crackle of flames: a splinter or a shard of bone? Watery eyes wonder in silence, before the hands go in, plunging, amid ash and embers and smoke. A poet is dead. A genius has fallen. May the gods take him . . . all but his heart.

The story of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s seaside cremation at the ancient Italian city of Viareggio in 1822—and of the dramatic rescue of his smoldering heart from the bier—might well have been scripted, and in a certain sense it was, presented from the time of his death as a Romantic set-piece, and embellished ever since. The young poet, not yet thirty years old, had disappeared five weeks earlier in the shipwreck of his schooner, the
Ariel
, also named the
Don Juan
, evoking the masterpiece of Shelley’s intimate rival, Lord Byron. Drowned in the Ligurian sea and washed up on the beach, Shelley’s body was discovered by his friend Edward John Trelawny, the Romantic adventurer who would later join Byron on his doomed journey to Messolonghi to fight in the Greek War of Independence, a self-conscious attempt to wed genius to action in the Napoleonic mode. It was Trelawny who rescued Shelley’s heart from the fire—badly burning his hand in the process—and it was Trelawny who had arranged the seaside cremation, which local authorities demanded for reasons of health.
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Yet the group in attendance that day—including Byron and Trelawny, the poet Leigh Hunt, and Shelley’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley—ensured that the cremation would be read ever after as much more than a precautionary measure of public sanitation. Bringing wine and oil and incense, they doused the flames as if Shelley were an ancient hero, giving the avowed atheist a fittingly pagan end. Byron swam in the sea afterward in full view of the island of Elba. And they transformed with their pens and their presence a place of death into a Romantic
genius loci
, with Shelley as the guardian of the place.

Indeed, in snatching Shelley’s heart from the fire, Trelawny and his friends were initiating a process of consecration, like that which attends all geniuses who speak beyond the grave, endowing this “relic,” as they later called it, with sacred significance. “What surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire,” Trelawny marveled. And so it remained, entire, if not intact, taken by Hunt and then guarded by Mary for years, enclosed, the legend goes, within a copy of Shelley’s “Adonais,” an elegy on the death of Keats.

. . . his fate and fame shall be

An echo and a light unto eternity!”

Bits of skull and jawbone were also spirited away from the cremation pit, or so it was claimed by the many who proudly displayed such fragments in their Victorian cabinets of curiosity. Others cherished them more intimately in small blue opaque jars, or kept strands of Shelley’s hair in lockets, close to the breast.
Cor cordium
reads the Latin inscription on the tombstone in Rome where some of his ashes were eventually laid. “Heart of hearts.”
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What Shelley himself would have thought of this corporeal traffic is impossible to know. Certainly, he appreciated the celebrity of great achievement—the “Poet’s food is love and fame,” he once wrote in his poem “An Exhortation.” Given that he died starved of the one, though not the other, as his brilliant wife, Mary, ensured, he likely would have been gratified by the many memorials and shrines later erected in his honor—at Viareggio, in Rome, at University College, Oxford, and in the Speaker’s Corner at Westminster Cathedral. It is also true that he shared with his circle a Gothic taste for the morbid and macabre. Byron himself, whose own heart and brain would be removed and preserved against his wishes, reportedly requested Shelley’s skull at the cremation, and Mary showed no aversion to harboring his heart. Even
so, an atheist might be supposed to frown at the veneration of relics, especially his own.
¹⁷

Whether or not Shelley would have approved the practice, it is safe to say that he would have understood it—understood the lingering impulse to search for something extraordinary—something sacred even—in the remains of the special dead. Both he and Byron, after all, possessed extensive collections of Napoleonic memorabilia, including a snuffbox of the emperor’s and an assortment of commemorative medals that Shelley presented to Byron for his thirty-fourth birthday. A similar impulse had moved the followers of Descartes to hallow his bones, even to carve rings from the recovered bits that turned up during the French Revolution. And a similar impulse summoned pilgrims well into the twentieth century to gaze in wonder at appendages as strange and diverse as Napoleon’s purported penis, Kant’s skull, Galileo’s finger, and both Lenin’s and Einstein’s brains. But what beyond titillation and frisson did these onlookers hope to experience? Just what, if anything, did they hope to see?
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Shelley himself provides an important clue in a celebrated passage of his
Defence of Poetry
(1821), calling attention to a mysterious power, a “power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions,” that is detectable in special men. The “person in whom this power resides,” Shelley insists, is compelled to serve it, for it is “seated on the throne of their own soul.” And though often hidden, this vital force is made manifest when it is released and discharged, above all into works of creation.

It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present. . . . Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

As the oft-cited last line of the passage makes clear, Shelley located this special power to channel and capture the spirit of the age in “poets,” a term that he uses broadly, like others of the day, to refer to rarefied creators across a variety of media. Shelley’s poets are not only philosophers
and artists in the broadest sense of the word, they are also “the institutors of laws & the founders of civil society,” as well as holy men and religious figures who attempt to articulate the “agencies of the invisible world.” The work of poets can thus assume many forms, and the terms Shelley used to describe their power are similarly eclectic. His references to mirrors and electric life, spirit and the invisible world, echo terms regularly employed to describe genius and great men. Here was the
furor poeticus
moving through man, Shaftesbury’s vocal looking glass, surveying the world and human nature, reflecting truth back onto the self. Here was the vital energy, the flash of inspiration, the sweep of sublime imagination, and the two-way traffic (“communicating and receiving”) that had long governed the conception of those special beings who traffic between the gods and men. Here, finally, was Hegel’s world-historical individual who at once possesses and is possessed by the spirit of the times. The poet, like the genius, is what Shelley calls a “hierophant,” one who, as the Greek etymology of the word suggests, “shows” or “reveals” the “sacred.” And though, strictly speaking, that function does not render the poet sacred himself—an object of worship or a harvest site for relics—the confusion may be forgiven. For, in truth, Shelley’s poet, like the Romantic genius of which he forms a type, is an exalted man, a privileged being, charged with a special mission and power. He is, Shelley says, a “prophet.”
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Derived from the Greek
prophētēs
, and used in scripture as the translation of the Hebrew
nabi
, a mouthpiece or spokesman of God, the word is rich in religious resonance and commands an important place in Romantic discourse. In the Judeo-Christian context, it had been most often employed in reference to the prophets of scripture, such as the lawgiver Moses, the visionary Ezekiel, or Jeremiah or John the Baptist, who preached repentance and prepared the way of the Lord. But there was also a long tradition in the classical and pagan world of thinking of the poet as a prophetic being—an oracle, seer, or shaman. Over the course of the eighteenth century, those two traditions drew closer together. Seminal poets such as William Blake and the German author of
Der Messias
(The Messiah), Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, spoke ecstatically in prophetic tongues, while biblical and literary scholars cultivated an enhanced appreciation for the purely poetic qualities of scripture, emphasizing its genius and original power. The celebrated Anglican bishop and Oxford professor of poetry Robert Lowth, for example, insisted in his influential studies of the Old Testament that the prophetic and the poetic were one. At the same time, influential critics, such as the German philosophers Hamann and Herder, called attention to the sublimity and imaginative
force of the prophetic language of scripture. Such work paved the way for reconceiving the ancient correspondence between prophecy and poetry. Its echoes can be heard in a range of Romantic pronouncements, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s celebrated observation that “sublimity is Hebrew by birth” to the German critic Friedrich Schlegel’s dictum that “no one is a poet but the prophet” to the short-lived Romantic author Novalis’s reflection that the poetic sense “has a close kinship with the sense of prophecy and for the religious, oracular sense in general.” Yet it was ultimately the shock of the French Revolution and its convulsive Napoleonic aftermath that brought out the augur in observers, who strained to see the future’s horizon through the dust of crashing altars and toppled thrones. The period is well named. It was, indeed, the “time of the prophets.”
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