The Times Great Victorian Lives

The last pageants in which the unfortunate Emperor figured as the favourite of fortune were the arrival with the Army of Metz and the war rehearsal on the heights above Saarbrück, where his son received his ‘baptism of fire.’ While the world was expecting that, whatever might be the issue of the war, victory at first would incline to France, the Emperor was figuring as Commander-in-Chief of all the armies in the field. Had things gone well he would have accepted laurels of ceremony like the Grand Monarque when he travelled in his lumbering coach to see a town taken by one of his Marshals. But in reality, so far as the truth can be arrived at, it seems he only accompanied his troops in the capacity of spectator and adviser, perhaps as arbitrator in the last resort in some vexed question of combinations. Had all gone as well as in Italy, Cæsar’s chariot or charger would have moved along in the middle of his victorious columns, through triumphs and ovations, and over roads strewed with bloody laurels. The great object of the war would have been attained, and Louis the Younger would have been presented to France and Europe as the spoilt child of Victory and Fortune. It was the dream of some such result which led the Prince’s father to tempt this desperate game when he felt the odds were against him. His first proclamation, written in what should have been the flush of sanguine excitement, had somewhat chilled the more ardent spirits. He warned the troops of the formidable work that awaited them on their march in the country ‘bristling with fortresses.’ The anxiety that address shadowed out had more than realized itself. After the famous ‘Tout peut se rétablir’ that followed the defeats of Woerth and Forbach, nothing can be conceived more deplorable than the position of the Emperor. Conscious of an irretrievable error, and moving despondently in the shadow of the approaching end, among disorganized and half-mutinous troops, who in their looks or language made him responsible for their misfortunes, surrounded by Generals who had lost head and heart, and had no comfort to offer to their master, he could do nothing by staying where he was, while he was sure to be made answerable for the defeats which impended when these demoralized troops of his should again be opposed to the disciplined and victorious Germans. The only thing more miserable than the scenes that were passing around him was the news which came from the capital. Paris would only receive him victorious; therefore, Paris would never receive him again. This was where he had been landed by revolving in that vicious circle which had commenced with the coup d’etat. This was the end of the years of strong personal government when he had boasted himself omnipotent for good or evil. It was but a year or two since he had declared that France was the arbiter of Europe, implying that he had the power to enforce her judgments; it was but a year since he had confidently answered for domestic order. Now the Germans were in France, and Paris, as he knew, was on the brink of a revolution. For him and for his son there was no safe home in his wide dominions but the head-quarters of a beaten and retreating army. He had no choice left him when he turned back with Mac-Mahon in that Quixotic enterprise of releasing Bazaine. Mac-Mahon, with candid chivalrousness, has acquitted his master of responsibility for that wild bit of strategy, but the surrender at Sedan must have come as a relief from a situation that was growing intolerable.

Thenceforward the Emperor’s life has a personal rather than a political interest. The surrender of his sword to the King of Prussia symbolized nothing. He had ceased actually to be Emperor when Jules Favre had dared to demand his deposition three weeks before. The Palikao Ministry was Provisional rather than Imperial; it was understood that its precarious tenure of existence depended altogether on the news from the seat of war. With the capitulation of Sedan it ceased to be; the Empress sought safety in flight from Paris, not an hour too soon, and ‘the gentlemen of the pavement’ scrambled into authority over the fresh ruins of the personal power.

A howl of obloquy pursued the Emperor over the Belgian frontier to his seclusion at Wilhelmshöhe. It was not unnatural. The war was in great measure his; it had brought unspeakable suffering and bitter humiliation on the country, and his accomplices execrated him for not influencing them for their own good, in virtue of the authority their votes had vested in him. But dispassionate spectators regarded the fallen man with very different feelings. It was not only that such startling reverses might well have silenced harsh judgment, but the manner in which he bore them commanded involuntary respect and esteem. People who had called him a charlatan at the Tuileries confessed him to be a man when they saw him in the depths of misfortune. The wonderful result of his ambitions had been blighted so late in his life, that all hope was over for him; his pride was stung by the thought that his career had closed in humiliation; that posterity would denounce him as an impostor who had owed his rise and reputation to luck rather than genius; that the son, like the father, would begin life in proscription and exile, and find it the harder to repeat his father’s successes among opponents forewarned by his father’s example. With reflections so bitter gnawing at his mind, with his physical maladies conspiring to produce intense depression, he not only preserved his apparent serenity, but displayed invariably that dignified courtesy which denotes a mind too stable to be easily shaken. Nor was the effort merely a passing one. It has lasted from then till now. Beset by a mortal malady which would have made most men irritable and captious, the Emperor has shown himself invariably calm and strong. Nothing, perhaps, is so admirable in the life of this remarkable man as the silence he has consistently preserved with regard to those whose ill-advised counsels, incapacity, and self-interested falsehoods contributed so largely to his ruin. Ungrateful protégés, from whom he should have been sacred, have sought to make him their scapegoat, as he has been abused and calumniated by bitter enemies. He has neither remonstrated nor recriminated in person or by deputy. The wranglers might tell their stories as they would, they might be sure enough he would never contradict them. History will find much to reproach him with, but it is certain his contemporaries have been very unjust to him.

We have lingered long on the last year of his reign, pregnant as it was with events which have shifted the landmarks of history. We may dismiss his sojourn at Chislehurst in a line or two. His life passed there uneventfully and in apparent tranquillity. Silent, self-reserved, and self-controlled, he did not take the world into the secret of his regrets or remorse. If his party raised their heads again and bragged of a new revolution to their profit while France was struggling still in the social and financial chaos into which they had cast her, we have no reason to believe he gave them encouragement. Disappointed adventurers might talk and act madly when life was short. But the Emperor returned to England, whose life and people he had always liked, and lived like an English country gentleman, whose shattered health condemns him to retirement and the society of a few intimates. There were attached friends with him when he died, and if constancy should command friends few men deserved friends better.

It was unfortunate for his reputation that he was spared to live out his life. Had he succumbed some years ago to the first attacks of the disease he died of, he would have found eulogists enough to justify his policy by its brilliant success, and to deny that the Imperial system carried the inevitable seeds of dissolution. Had it collapsed after his decease they might have urged that the collapse was but a proof the more of his unrivalled genius, – that such a man could leave no successor to develope the ideas he had originated. As it is, it can hardly be doubted that his contemporaries will do him injustice, and that his memory will be, in a measure, rehabilitated by posterity. Unless absorbing ambition is to be pleaded as an excuse by Pretenders born in the people, we must judge his political morality severely. The Coup d’Etat was an offence almost more venial than the systematically relaxing and demoralizing nature of the rule that followed it. His best excuse was that he honestly believed himself and his system better adapted to the French than any other that could be substituted for it; and subsequent errors seem to have shown that he was not altogether wrong. In considering himself to the best of his lights, he did the best he could for his country. His foreign policy was generous and consistent, until personal motives compelled him to arrange a series of sensational surprises. His enlightened commercial ideas cost him some popularity among the Protectionist supporters of his dynasty. England at least had nothing to reproach him with, and the firmness with which he had held to her friendship assured him a friendly welcome when he sought refuge on her shores.

As might be presumed from the marvellous vicissitudes of his career, few men showed stranger or subtler contrasts in their nature. He owed his rise to the unflinching resolution with which he pursued a fixed idea; yet he hesitated over each step he took, and it was that habit of he sitation that ruined him in the end. His strong point was that no disappointment discouraged him, and so long as he felt he had time to wait, his patience was inexhaustible. Confined at Ham, in place of dashing himself against his prison bars, he turned quietly to his studies, and educated himself for the destinies in store for him. After the ridicule of his failures on the frontiers and in the Chamber of Deputies, he tried again as if nothing had happened. It was significant of the man that he succeeded in France in spite of ridicule, yet there may have been cool policy in the deeds that changed ridicule to terror on the 2d of December.

With his unquestionable ability and some extraordinary gifts, it must be confessed he owed much to fortune. She repeatedly did wonderful things for him when his circumstances were critical. He came to count with too great confidence on her favours when they were showering down on him, and he drew recklessly on his prestige instead of nursing it against gloomier days. It had been his aim to persuade his subjects that he was something more than mortal; when his mishaps proved his mortality, they resented the deception he had practised on them, and trampled their idol in the dust. It is not in our province now to speculate as to the influence of his rule on France, or to examine how far France is to be blamed for the vices and corruption of the Empire. If he misunderstood the people he governed when he treated them rather like children than men, we can only repeat, the fault was a venial one. Had he been born in a station beneath the influence of those ambitions that tempt men to become criminal, he would have lived distinguished and died esteemed. As it is, if the circle of his devoted friends has sadly dwindled since his fall and abdication, we trust for the honour of human nature that there are many who mourn him sincerely, in common gratitude.

The Times had been concerned for days with the former Emperor’s deteriorating condition. His death, following an emergency operation designed to break up his kidney stones, was announced on 10 January 1873. Five days later his supporters issued a manifesto, stating that ‘the Emperor is dead but the Empire is living and indestructible’. All hopes of reviving the Empire died when Napoleon’s son, Eugène Louis, the Prince Imperial, was killed in Zululand, fighting with the British army, on 1 June 1879. Following his detention in Germany, the deposition of the Bonaparte dynasty and the declaration of the Third Republic in September 1870, Napoleon and his family had retired to Camden Place at Chislehurst in Kent. It was here that he died. In 1881 the Empress Eugénie moved to Farnborough in Hampshire, where she constructed a flamboyant domed mausoleum for her late husband and her son in 1887. She herself was interred there after her death in 1922. As this obituary consistently suggests, British responses to Napoleon Ill’s policies as Emperor were at best ambiguous, and at worst suspicious and antipathetic. He and Eugénie had forged an amicable personal relationship with Queen Victoria, but many British critics, including this otherwise fair-minded obituarist, seem to have found the term ‘charlatan’ an appropriate description of both the Emperor and his régime.

WILLIAM CHARLES MACREADY

Actor: ‘A deep and subtle insight into the shades and peculiarities of character.’

27 APRIL 1873

IT SOUNDS A little strange, even to the ear of veteran playgoers, to record the death of Macready, the favourite of half-a-century ago, the contemporary of the Keans and the Kembles, more than 20 years since his retirement from the stage. As our obituary of yesterday mentioned, William Charles Macready died on Sunday at Cheltenham, at the ripe age of 80 years.

The son of a gentleman who had not been very fortunate as lessee and manager of one or two provincial theatres, he was born in the parish of St. Pancras, London, on the 3rd of March, 1796. He was educated at Rugby, with a view to following one of the learned professions, probably either the Bar or the Church. But it was not his destiny to become either a Judge or a Bishop. His father was suffering from pecuniary embarrassments, and it became necessary for the son to turn his hand to some line of life where he could be earning money, instead of spending it. Accordingly, he appeared on the boards for the first time at Birmingham in June, 1810, performing the part of Romeo, when he had little more than completed his 17th year. His appearance is traditionally said to have been successful, and he remained with his father’s Company until the year 1814 or 1815, performing at Bath, Birmingham, Chester, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Glasgow, and in other large provincial towns, with similar results. In September, 1816, he made his first appearance on the boards of a London theatre, performing Orestes in The Distressed Mother, at Covent Garden. Here, too, his success was undoubted, but he had difficulties to overcome. To use the words of a writer in the English Cyclopedia, ‘Kemble, Young, and Kean had taken a sort of exclusive possession of the characters of Shakespeare in which, at a later period, Macready was destined to display such excellence. With a resolute industry, however, a deep and subtle insight into the shades and peculiarities of character, and a style at once original and simple, he made a certain range his own. He won applause as Rob Roy and Gambia; but it was in the Virginius of Sheridan Knowles that his true position was first fully demonstrated. ’

From this time he continued to rise steadily in the favour of the public; and he increased his reputation abroad by well-timed visits to America and to Paris in the years 1826-28.

It was in the autumn of 1837 that he added to his many engagements and responsibilities by undertaking the post of lessee and manager of Covent Garden Theatre. Here his labour was immense. In the words of the writer already quoted, ‘he did not overlay the drama by too gorgeous scenery or by too minute attention to the details of costume, as though they were to be the principal attractions, but strove to make them appropriate to the situation and feeling of the scene as a whole.’ He also endeavoured to purify the atmosphere of his theatre by the exclusion of immoral characters and of all that could justify the suspicions and attacks of the enemies of drama. It cannot, however, be said that the financial results corresponded to his praiseworthy attempt; and at the end of two years he resigned his management. At the close of his management, however, his friends not only entertained him at a public dinner, but presented him with a more solid ‘testimonial’ of their sympathy.

After a short performance at the Haymarket, we find him next undertaking the management of Drury Lane, undeterred by his experience at the rival house. His management here was distinguished by the introduction of musical dramas set forth in the highest style of scenic illustration, among which we ought to particularize Acis and Galatea and The Masque of Comus. It also marked the introduction of new dramas to the public, including many of the best pieces of Serjeant (afterwards Mr. Justice) Talfourd, Sheridan Knowles, and the late Lord Lytton, then better known to the world by the familiar name of Bulwer, who was his firm and fast friend for many years, and who wrote for him both Richelieu and the Lady of Lyons. As the great French Cardinal Macready achieved one of his chief histrionic triumphs; but still, with reference to financial results, his management was not successful. Accordingly, he resigned it at the end of a second season; and it is not a little remarkable that in his parting address he took occasion to denounce the injurious operation of the dramatic monopoly which then prevailed. This step he followed up by a petition to Parliament for its removal, and before long he had the satisfaction of seeing his wishes realized.

In 1849 Macready again paid a professional visit to North America; and on this occasion it will be remembered that a quarrel raised by the well-known American actor named Forrest, lately deceased, gave rise to a riot in the Astor Opera-house at New York while the performance was going on, in which Macready’s life was endangered. The riot was not suppressed until the military were called out; shots were fired, and several persons killed.

Returning to England towards the close of the same year, Mr. Macready entered upon his last engagement at the Haymarket; but his health was not good, and he soon after retired, fortunately in good time to enjoy his professional honours in private life, but not until he had completed the representation of all his principal characters. It was in February, 1851, that he took his formal farewell of the stage and was entertained at a public dinner in London, the chair being filled by his old friend Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, whom he has now followed to the grave.

After his retirement from public life, he took up his residence first at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, and subsequently at Cheltenham, where, as we have said, he breathed his last on Sunday. At Sherborne he employed his leisure time in literary pursuits, and nothing pleased him better than to deliver lectures at the local Mechanics’ Institutes and other similar institutions for the benefit of the humbler classes of society; and both there and at Cheltenham he did his best to promote the cause of popular education. About 25 years ago Mr. Macready published an edition of the poetical works of Pope, which was originally prepared and privately printed by him for the use of his children, to whom it is de dicated.

Despite being born into the theatre, Macready had claims to be a gentleman and, as this obituary argues, he consistently strove to render both his profession and his art as an actor and manager ‘respectable’. Gradually emerging from the long shadows cast by his popular contemporaries, Edmund Kean and John Philip Kemble, he achieved a singular reputation in playing non-Shakespearian roles. He remained the victim of professional jealousy, notably during his visit to New York in 1849 when the American actor, Edwin Forrest, fomented a riot at the Astor Opera House. Macready barely escaped with his life, and the military had to be called in to suppress the disturbance in which seventeen men were killed and thirty wounded. He was manager of Covent Garden 1837-1839 and of Drury Lane Theatre 1841-1843. It was as part of a series of important revivals of Shakespeare plays at the former theatre that Macready mounted a production of King Lear in January 1838. It was the first stage performance since the seventeenth century to dispense with Nahum Tate’s happy ending and to reintroduce the character of the Fool. Macready took leave of the theatre in a farewell performance of Macbeth at Drury Lane on 28 February 1851 and retired to Cheltenham, where he died on 27 April 1873.

DAVID LIVINGSTONE

Missionary and explorer: ‘Fallen in the cause of civilization and progress.’

1 MAY 1873

THE FOLLOWING TELEGRAM, dated Aden, the 27th inst., has been received at the Foreign Office from Her Majesty’s Acting Consul-General at Zanzibar:-

‘The report of Livingstone’s death is confirmed by letters received from Cameron, dated Unyanyembe, October 20. He died of dysentery after a fortnight’s illness, shortly after leaving Lake Bemba for eastward. He had attempted to cross the lake from the north, and failing in this had doubled back and rounded the lake, crossing the Chambize and the other rivers down from it; had then crossed the Luapuia, and died in Lobisa, after having crossed a marshy country with the water for three hours at a time above the waist; ten of his men had died, and the remainder, consisting of 79 men, were marching to Unyanyembe. They had disembowelled the body and had filled it with salt, and had put brandy into the mouth to preserve it. His servant Chumas went on ahead to procure provisions, as the party was destitute, and gave intelligence to Cameron, who expected the body in a few days. Cameron and his party had suffered greatly from fever and ophthalmia, but hoped to push on to Ujiji. Livingstone’s body may be expected at Zanzibar in February. Please telegraph orders as to disposal. No leaden shells procurable here.’

A plain Scottish missionary, and the son of poor parents, David Livingstone yet came of gentle extraction. The Livingstones have ever been reckoned one of the best and oldest of the Highland families. Considering that his father and himself were strong Protestants, it is singular that his grandfather fell at Culloden fighting in the Cause of the Stuarts. And that the family were Roman Catholics down to about a century ago, when (to use his own words) ‘they were made Protestants by the laird coming round their village with a man who carried a yellow staff’ to compel them, no doubt, to attend the established worship. More recently the Livingstones were settled in the little island of Ulva, on the coast of Argyleshire not far from the celebrated island of Iona, so well known in the annals of medieval missionary enterprise.

Dr. Livingstone’s father, one Neill Livingstone, who kept a small teadealer’s shop in the neighbourhood of Hamilton, in Lanarkshire, is represented by him, in

a biographical sketch prefixed to his volume of Travels, as having been too strictly honest and conscientious in his worldly dealings ever to become a rich and wealthy man. The family motto, we are told by one writer, was ‘Be honest.’ He was a ‘deacon’ in an independent chapel in Hamilton; and he died in the early part of the year 1855. His son was born at East Kilbride, in Lanarkshire, in or about the year 1816. His early youth was spent in employment as a ‘hand’ in the cotton-mills in the neighbourhood of Glasgow; and he tells us, in the book to which we have already referred, that during the winter he used to pursue his religious studies with a view to following the profession of a missionary in foreign parts, returning in the summer months to his daily labour in order to procure support during his months of renewed mental study.

While working at the Blantyre mills, young Livingstone was able to attend an evening school, where he imbibed an early taste for classical literature. By the time he was 16 years of age he had got by heart the best part of both Horace and Virgil. Here also he acquired a considerable taste for works on religion and on natural science; in fact, he ‘devoured’ every kind of reading, ‘except novels.’ Among the most favourite books of his boyhood and early manhood, he makes special mention of Dr. Dick’s Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of a Future State. His religious feelings, however, warmed towards a missionary life; he felt an intense longing to become ‘a pioneer of Christianity in China,’ hoping that he might be instrumental in teaching the religion to the inhabitants of the Far East, and also that by so doing might ‘lead to the material benefit of some portions of that immense empire.’ In order to qualify himself for some such an enterprise he set himself to obtain a medical education, as a superstructure to that which he had already gained so laboriously; and this he supplemented by botanical and geological explorations in the neighbourhood of his home, and the study of Patrick’s work on the Plants of Lanarkshire.