March 1, 2015

Finest Hour 157, Winter 2012-13

Page 20

By Winston S. Churchill

St. Helena, by R.C. Sherriff, author of the Great War drama Journey’s end, premiered on 4 February 1936 to poor reviews, but was rescued by Churchill’s letter to The Times, opposite.

The taste and judgement of the theatre-going public have cordially endorsed the opinion which I ventured to express two months ago upon the admirable presentation of Napoleon at St. Helena by Mr. Sherriff and Mlle. Jeanne de Casalis.

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The critics had used this play very roughly on its first night at the Old Vic. It had apparently wandered round the London producers’ offices for a couple of years without finding anyone willing to undertake it. For a fortnight it had played to very thin houses, and was at its last gasp. But once attention was publicly drawn to its exceptional merit it received widespread and general recognition. It had delighted many thousands of well-informed people, and is now apparently assured of a long and remarkable success.

The subject is indeed one which fascinates the imagination. Apart altogether from being the last phase in the life of the greatest man of action ever known to human records, the story of Napoleon’s captivity and death upon the rock of St. Helena is in itself one of the most moving tragedies of history.

Six bitter years of narrowness and monotony, mocked by false hopes, accompanied by an infinity of petty vexations, and closing in illness, pain and protracted death, form the shadow without which twenty years of prodigy, power, and glory would be incomplete.

All attempts to place Napoleon upon the stage or the screen necessarily challenge the mental picture which we each of us have formed of the great Emperor. Disillusionment and even a sense of irritation are almost inevitable. These reactions are usually aggravated as the performance proceeds.

What is remarkable about Mr. Kenneth Kent’s personification is that these feelings die away as one act succeeds another. He seems more like Napoleon at the end than at the beginning, and we are left with an impression of intimacy and reality which is in this class of drama unique.

Here is the Corsican ogre with his hundred crimes, his hundred battles, and the deaths of several millions of human beings upon his head, caught at last by his one indomitable enemy and flung with a handful of followers, mostly strangers to him, to rot and die on a volcanic islet lost in the wastes of the ocean.

“Hold that rascal Boney,” said in effect the Secretary of State to Sir Hudson Lowe. “Keep him fast, with as little expense and publicity as is possible, till we are rid of him for ever.”

Meanwhile all the great affairs of the world proceeded, and the Sovereigns of the Holy Alliance reigned undisputed in splendour with their pomp, their conferences and Acts of State. Yet at the distance of a century world-history takes little note of them. All its attention is focused upon the lonely figure in his ocean prison.

Alexander, the Emperor Joseph, Louis XVIII, the Regent—who bothers much about them and the glittering circles in which they moved? In fact, one may almost say that the history of the world in the six years after Waterloo is the captivity and death of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Minute examination has been made of the character and conduct not only of every member of Napoleon’s suite but of every person, great or small, old or young, on the island of St. Helena who came in contact with him. All their qualities, good, bad or indifferent, their private lives, all they said and wrote, their foibles, their follies, their meannesses or their generosity have been the subject of elaborate and searching scrutiny.

Drawn from their obscurity by contact with the Great Man, they are exhibited or gibbeted for all time to an ever larger and more curious audience. Time passes and the night of time comes on. All is forgotten; all is swallowed and lost in the mist and darkness. But the light of Napoleon glows red, baleful, ever strengthening, as the years roll by. All who won his smile win fame; all who incurred his anger or contempt are smitten. In this there is scant justice and often rank injustice. But it extends to every quarter of the globe, to every member of his family, to every Sovereign, Minister or official concerned with his fate, and it will last as long as books are written and read or stories told.

In those six years the legend grew in Europe that Napoleon stood for Freedom, Liberalism, Democracy, for the French Revolution, for the downfall of tyrants, for the rights and advance of the common people in every land.

As Byron wrote:

Conqueror and Captain of the Earth thou art, She trembles at thee still….

The hopes of countless millions gripped in the old monarchical and aristocratic systems sought him and his isle across the vast distances. A plebiscite in France, in England, in Austria would have acclaimed him as Dictator of the proletariat. These ideas were far removed from any true foundation.

Napoleon was a military tyrant, a conqueror, a man of order and discipline, a man of mundane ambitions and overwhelming egotism; but his grandeur defied misfortune and rises superior even to Time. Heartbroken, bored to death and deserted by almost everyone, retiring morosely into the confines of Longwood, then into his garden, into his darkened chamber, and finally to his camp bed, he yet reigned in the hearts of men with an authority he never exercised upon the Imperial throne.

In this good play we see him in the toils, by turns fierce and gentle, wise and petulant, captivating and repulsive. There is hardly a word in the dialogue which did not issue from his lips; there is hardly a movement or gesture which he makes for which there is not authentic record. His haters and admirers will draw the impressions which their prejudices or sympathies require.

The Holy Alliance and the British Government were well advised to guard him well. A brigade of infantry, a squadron of the Fleet, 600 cannon mounted in the island batteries, vigilance untiring—all were needed for the safety of the Old Regime—nay, for the peace of Europe, bled white by twenty years of war.

These precautions did not fail. The hero-monster expired in their anxious grip. History has given him a long revenge.

Even the fame of Wellington, who had slept at The Briars on his way from India, is lessened, and his stature limited when he could write to Admiral Malcolm, “Tell Boney that I find his apartments at l’Elysée-Bourbon very comfortable, and that I hope that he likes mine at The Briars as much.” The victor of Waterloo should have had a truer sense of proportion.

But why not see the play?

First published in the Daily Mail, 8 April 1936 (Cohen C491); subequently republished in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), III 269-71. Reprinted in Finest Hour by kind permission of Randolph S. Churchill, Curtis Brown Ltd. and the Churchill Literary Estate.