Uncategorized

The length to which my linguistic reach extends, despite the daily exigencies by which I’m stimulated to increase it, isn’t especially long. Try as I might, it seems I haven’t limbs of sufficient length, nor lips of sufficient agility, nor, for that matter, a mind of sufficient capacity for the acquisition of more tongues than just one. In studying the speech patterns of a nation to which my own is foreign, in examining the grammatical idiosyncrasies of a land upon which my feet have never set foot, in attempting to absorb the patois of a tribe different from that of which I am a native son, I’m simply too overwhelmed by the burden. I’m discouraged, deaf, and, most importantly, mute.

As is my stature, as is my temper, the reach with which I’ve been endowed for the acquisition of multiple languages is embarrassingly short. I know not whom to thank for this vital attribute of which I’ve been completely deprived. Maybe it’s a teacher, perhaps a parent, upon whose negligence I ought to lay my blame. Nevertheless, my ability is almost entirely stunted, and it seems not to be an impediment beyond whose restraints I can hope to grow. Even a tenuous and childlike grasp of another language, supplementary to the one in which I was educated and raised, would be an achievement for which I could only pray. A fluidity and a waxing confidence in its use, a proud display of its mastery upon any grandiloquent and bilingual occasion, would be an end of which I couldn’t even dream.

It’s a truth as frustrating as it is sad, but it’s a truth nonetheless. Casting all dreamlike notions of bilingualism aside, it’s a reality to which I’ve been made stubbornly to submit. That said, if nothing else, criticism of oneself and reflection upon one’s own shortcomings and faults never is, in my opinion, a meditation vainly pursued. More often than not, a bit of good can come from this sort of selfish investigation—perhaps even an inducement to improve one’s lot. And while I think that the future of a foreign language included in my repertoire is bleak and very quickly fading (there seems to be, if my anecdotal observations prove correct, something of an inverse relationship between one’s advancement of age and the ease with which he comes into possession a new language), I hope thus to be stimulated. And so, I shall criticize, reflect, and pursue that which always evades my grasp: the bulky weight and the subtle intricacy of the garnering of a second language.

The attainment of a multiplicity of languages, the procurement of the title of “polyglot”, never was, in the opinion of my youth, a special aim for which I had a strong desire. Really, there was never an impetus nor a necessity to know more languages than one. You see, I was reared in a suburban and almost entirely “white” community in the southern half of the state of New Jersey—a region of the world of whose claims to ethnic diversity very little is spoken. Most, if not all of the people by whom I was surrounded spoke—with varying degrees of fluency, aptitude, and intelligibility—some form of what we might call English. A refined speaker of this tongue might categorize it as a somewhat deviant, half-baked, or abused form, but it was English nonetheless.

In the worst of cases, there was, in its use (or, better yet, in its abuse) a strong Philadelphian undertone in which it was bathed. There was an infiltration of neglected “g’s” and overused “cuz’s” (an abridgment of the word, “cousin” for those unaccustomed to this tongue. It was, I should add, a claim of familiarity that I always opted, on the basis of ineloquence, to reject). The English in which I was raised was also quite permeable to the subtle influences of the New York metropolitan area. “A’s” and “O’s”, in the mouths of those to whom the Empire State is home, are most audibly distorted (think of those city-slickers pronouncing the words “talk” and “long”. Now think of those pronunciations without cringing). At its best, straying from the provincial constraints of its colloquialisms and the stickiness of its cheese steaks and its big apples, the English used in this part of New Jersey was honest and clear. It was simple and direct. However lacking in refinement, it was frank enough and it was solid, not unlike its people, for daily and reliable use. It could withstand the travails of a “tri-state” existence—neighboring, as little New Jersey does, the increasingly sizable states of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New York.

While that form of English with which I was brought up was often something quite less than English as properly and elegantly it’s to be understood, it was never anything more. I’m not speaking here of a language by which my beloved English might’ve been superseded, but merely supplemented. There wasn’t, in my opinion, as well as in that of those monolinguists alongside whom I was raised, a sufficiently strong push to acquire a second language in our public schools or in our homes. There was no emphasis to expand our lingual worldview and enrich our voice. Classes dedicated to the teaching of foreign languages were given the most perfunctory attention, not only by those recipients of its instruction (namely, the students), but by those professors from whom it came.

Long sheltered in this monolingual bubble, the fact that I knew but one language mattered to me very little. The lack of so dynamic and, as I’d come to learn, so mellifluous and thoughtful a skill was no impediment to a future occupation in a decidedly English-preferring world. It wasn’t until I moved away from this cautious and homogeneous suburbia of my youth that I was made to realize the ascendancy of other languages, and the relative disregard, if not outright neglect, of my mother tongue. It wasn’t until then that I questioned the value placed upon the English language—to the exclusion of all the others with which I might be met.

Southern Florida, in comparison with southern New Jersey, is different in almost every way: climatically, ethnically, economically, politically, and linguistically, the two portions of these two states share almost nothing in common. Florida is a state not only of endless vegetation and relentless heat, but of perhaps the most diverse accumulation of cultures that the United States has on display. It is, in the best sense of the word, a state of complete heterogeneity and influx. Locals, born and reared in the state, are the only species that can be deemed rare. Their nativity within the boundaries of this peninsula is a badge of honor of which they’re fiercely proud, but they are a dwindling number.

Immigrants, no matter whence they come, are a rising one. So too are they a banality—a group of people yearning for an improvement of their lots in life at which no one blinks. The state is happily rife with them and thinks little of their presence (while thinking only, in terms of the economy and the culture, of their incalculable importance). The final group by which this state is populated, “snowbirds”, who arrive but for a small portion of the year, are an importunacy by which the first two (the locals and the immigrants) are equally bothered. So too are they the source by which the economy is bolstered and so, they are tolerated as are all the rest.

And so, in all, southern Florida is home to an iridescent demographic—an insufferably hot watering hole in whose reflection every color and every shade can be seen. It is the home to Haitians, Cubans, Columbians, Mexicans, Germans, Hollanders, and Americans from the Northeast and Midwest. It’s the home to recent immigrants and obstinate Confederates, dreamers and rebels alike. It is, of all the states composing what’s come to be our grand and full Union, the first upon which our earliest European settlers from the Kingdom of Spain disembarked. Thus, it might be called the oldest, certainly the most diverse and flourishing of all America’s states.

Upon my immersion into this state and its multiplicity of cultures, creeds, and mores, the recognition confronted me that my voice was no longer the one through which all other daily communication was to flow—as it had for the past two decades of my life. It was no longer to be the gatekeeper and the grand inquisitor of all communication by which all thought was to be understood. In many instances of which I thought it worthy to take note, my cherished English wasn’t a primary, nor even, for that matter, a secondary, but a rather unheralded tertiary language to which most speakers paid little mind. Often, Creole—almost always, Spanish—these were the languages to which primacy of use was granted. To be a speaker of English, as was I, felt rather more like being an interloper than an interlocutor whose thoughts and expressions were considered without a care. It was a strange and a thoroughly alienating feeling with which, I suspect, most white, exclusively English-speaking Americans in most parts of this land have very little experience.

The term “nationalism”, though perhaps originally unintended, has lately invited upon itself a noxious connotation. It’s become, much like the exceedingly abused (and, for that reason, valueless) terms “fascist” and “Marxist”, a politically dirty word. As such, it’s not an ideology to which I openly subscribe. Only with a list of solemn reservations and excited amendments would I promote the themes for which it stands. Yet it’s usually from the mouth of the nationalist, however ambiguously or inimically defined, that the strongest defense of the utility, the grace, and the inherent beauty of the English language is to be heard. This was the one, perhaps the only, argument of his by which I was enticed. Most other pundits and thinkers seem quite ill-disposed toward the language which is, much to their displeasure, an inextricable part of their Anglo-American life.

I realized this upon being notified of a book written by the conservative journalist, Richard Lowry. A contributor to the right-leaning publication, The National Review, Lowry authored in his spare time (of which I can only imagine, in the wake of an onslaught of impeachments and elections, there was exceedingly little) a book entitled, The Case for Nationalism. The Israeli author Yoram Hazony produced a work, to whose merit I can personally attest, very similarly named. Written just a year prior, Hazony’s, The Virtue of Nationalism was an international best-seller and an expectedly provocative hit. Indeed, should nationalism fail to resuscitate its image and pull itself out of its current state of disrepair, it wouldn’t be for a lack of the eloquent and persuasive writings with which these two thinkers have treated us.

In his book, Lowry defends the importance of the English language as the primary tongue with which the American people should agree to communicate. He expounded on this view which was, not so very long ago, completely uncontroversial, in the presence of Eugene Robinson on what was, admittedly for the likes of a man like Lowry, an inhospitable set on MSNBC.

Robinson, an ordinarily incisive reporter for The Washington Post, looked with suspicion at Lowry as the latter explained to him (and the liberals by whom he was surrounded) the importance of English as this nation’s primary language of choice. Upon hearing this, most could be felt, if not seen to be rolling their eyes. Its education in the schools and its prioritization in the commerce of ideas, Lowry argued, should be something upon which we, as a country, universally agree. It’s not, as he contended, a language irreverently to be subordinated to infrequent and stifled use. It’s not to be a language by which, after having used it, we should be embarrassed and ashamed. It’s not a language diffidently to be uttered behind clenched and unforthcoming teeth out of the mouth of a drooping head. It should, on the contrary, be a language deeply ingrained in our bones, daily practiced in our discourse, perfectly refined in our readings, proudly expressed in our exclamations, and universally used from coast to coast—be that coast contiguous with the border of Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean Sea.

I’ll admit, fully and from the outset, my partiality leans toward the opinion of which Lowry is so uniquely convinced. In the estimation of an English-speaker such as myself, Lowry’s is a position, it should come as no surprise, in whose utterance my own predilection finds a warm and genial friend. His is a stance behind which I can align my own. I find echoing in his elevation of English as the vital language upon which this nation was built the ringing drumbeat of my own personal, now peculiar thought.

Yet it’s not English for English’s sake that I think Lowry is correct. English is an invaluable and, at times, even a delectable language behind which our support collectively ought to gather. But is it, in our impartial evaluation, the most mellifluous of languages known to and spoken by man? Now there is a subject worthy of our exploration and, probably, of our very heated debate.

Is it, I ask, the most effervescent, the most descriptive, and the most memorable of tongues to which we’ve been exposed? Is it the most poetic, the most arresting, the most playful, and the most fun of all those countless dialects by which our air has become tickled and saturated? Is it the most nimble and forceful in eliciting an idea, the most capable of forwarding the contemplation of a thought? Is it not only the most cautious and discerning, but the most trenchant and acute? Is it the most warmly-inclined toward the application of prose, the most precisely-tuned toward the pursuit of science, and the most expressive of the thoughts of the literary muse to which our species has been so salubriously exposed?

Since that tower of Babylon collapsed upon the weight of its own impious reach, has English come the closest to scraping, once again, that grumbling belly of God? Is it the strongest and the most resilient of all edifices of speech yet to have been built? Will it not soon ascend to an even higher level atop whose ceiling we can’t, as of yet, even imagine ourselves perched? Is it a divine dialect, the apotheosis of speech? Is it, in conclusion, the language to which all those other vulgar tongues aspire, or the ideal—as if Platonically conceived—of which all those lesser languages merely participate?

Sir Philip Sidney, second most famous of all Elizabethan poets (William Shakespeare, of course, being the first), thought differently when it came to his assessment of the English language. He was unequivocal in thinking it the quintessence of all speech. Might we accuse him of a bias toward his native tongue? Might we assail him of being blindly Anglo-centric? If we must, so too must I accuse myself. To him, to me, to English above all else, there is no language superior to our own.

In his Defense of Poesy, his masterful work of prose for which, ironically, he’s become most famous, Sidney bestows upon the English language the primacy of which we moderns (if we find ourselves in the camp of a Robinson) think it so undeserving. Some people, he admits, will say that English is a “mingled” language. That is, to say, a language at whose core and in whose very constitution many borrowed pieces are to be found. But is there, I wonder, anything at all wrong with being not quite so purely bred?

English is, as is the nation in which it’s most commonly spoken and of which it is, at least till this point, the chief and official language, an amalgamation of ideas from every corner of the land. Aryan (or Indo-European) at its spring and source, Greek and Latin at its base, French in its refinement, German in its sentiment, and Spanish in its exuberant vitality and life, English is the polyphonic and grateful result. English, imbued with all, is a discriminating inheritor of all that’s best been said. It is a copious vessel of speech. “And why not so much the better”, Sidney says, in “taking the best of both the other” and, as the world expands its boundaries and us, our appetite for words à la carte, of all?

I won’t retreat from my goal of learning a second language—however heavy a burden it may be. I won’t forgo this noble attempt, this polyglot’s pursuit—however unlikely it is successfully to end. A dauntless soldier striving for the epaulets of good and variable speech, I’ll trudge through convoluted conversations and tongue-twisting grammar books and apps if only slightly to expand the palate of my narrowly English tongue. But I’ll not forget those vintage words of Sidney, nor those most recent ones of Lowry. A nationalist by any other name, I’ll not, at least on this point, fail to elevate my own native tongue. English is, despite all the abuse by which it’s been cudgeled, excoriated, and abused, a beautiful and a useful language. We should be proud to have it; prouder still, to speak it.

For at least the past three, each century—from the eighteenth until the twenty-first—has borne witness to an impeachment proceeding upon which, in light of the current events in which we’re engulfed, it would be worthwhile to remark. Failing to do so, I think, would be—contrary to the reputation of which we’ve grown so proud—utterly remiss. It certainly would be an uncharacteristic act, a display of omission to which we, a people ever conscious of our past, are uniquely unaccustomed. Are we not, after all, a people—before all others in the world—for whom historical literacy is of chief import? Are we not always eager to apply the lessons of the past to our life as it spins today?

Beginning in the eighteenth century, the world witnessed the impeachment of Warren Hastings—the tyrant of India and pilfering politician about whom I wrote in the article prior to this. In the nineteenth century, America, still in the growing pains of her adolescence, saw the impeachment of Andrew Johnson—about whom I’ll comment below. In the twentieth, Richard Nixon, before resigning himself from his office, inched dangerously close toward the precipice of impeachment. Later in that same century, Bill Clinton, laudably as centrist as he was lascivious, endured an impeachment process from which he almost didn’t escape. And, nearing the second decade of the twenty-first, we bear witness to the impeachment of Donald Trump.

The life of Warren Hastings is a very distant, if not totally recondite, history; that of Johnson, slightly less so, yet he’s the person to whom we turn our attention in this installment of the “Impeachment” series by which I’ve lately busied myself. It’s a series at whose conclusion we may (or may not) find ourselves talking about the impeachment of Donald Trump. Should that time come, we’ll talk of the event not as historians (for such scholars avail themselves of the distance of time and the breadth of their scope), but as contemporaries very much caught up in the heat of moment and the propinquity of the act.

That being said, we turn to Andrew Johnson. We face him and gaze upon the peculiarities of his life. What an unprepossessing image to behold! Never has so anomalous an American president danced off the pages of history and frightened our eyes! However, before one’s complete immersion into the picture of Johnson can take place, the proper scene—at once both celebratory and melancholy—must be set. The celebration, of course, wasn’t without good cause, nor shall it be said to have been inapt; it accompanied the conclusion, by the beginning of the year 1865, of our nation’s first wholly internal military affair—the Civil War.

It came as that most disastrous and unforgettable half-decade of fraternal strife wore itself out to the sigh of its exhausted conclusion. A sanguinary lustrum of brotherly bloodshed, a five-year-period of horror and death, the Civil War had come to its natural end. Over half a million Americans—men in whose indistinguishable veins the same blood and the same spirit of their shared Founders yet beat—were strewn like corpses over countless graves. From Vicksburg to Gettysburg, the Wilderness to the Seven Pines, Antietam to New Orleans and every contested outpost from Florida to Maine, the American male population was reduced by some two-percent. No war since, certainly no war prior, had exacted from this still-maturing nation so much of its virile and valuable flesh.

The Union, victorious, earned the right to relish this moment—for the spoils of war belonged to none other than it. Of course, this sense of success and this exhalation of glee were tempered by the sober acknowledgement that so many, indeed, a nearly unthinkable amount, had died for a cause far in excess of what they themselves, in their time and place, could conceive. They died, be it consciously or not, for the liberty of their own fellow human beings, a population—stolen from Africa and destined to toil—toward whom they might’ve felt only the feeblest pull of sympathy. The people for whom they fought and died had been, since their arrival on the shores of Virginia in the early seventeenth-century, shorn of all human dignity. They were pulverized into a powder of impotent dust and dehumanized in the bonds of servility. All this for the immutable offense of being slightly darker in hue than the white European’s tone of skin.

The Union soldiers, all three-hundred-and-twenty thousand of them, died in the course of that war for their fellow black man. They died, though unbeknownst to them and recognized only much later in time, for his full and constitutional liberation and his ability to be free. Ultimately, they died for the preservation of a splintered land of which they’d all be, one day—irrespective of black skin or white—equal members. These hundreds of thousands of enlisted men, without whose mortal sacrifice the war surely would’ve been lost, paid the ultimate price—as we’re prone, with both reverence and euphemistic nonchalance, to call a soldier’s last breath. Liberty for all, these men once again proved, never is, nor ever can be, a commodity purchased on the cheap. It’s bought only with blood.

Those Northerners who survived, while scarred, were jubilant, and rightly so. But the trumpets of triumph soon breathed their last gasp. In the blink of an eye, they changed from mirthful to mournful as the baptism of a new founding gave way to a death. Freedom’s hymn, a song only recently learned, turned into a nation’s first dirge.

On the evening of April the 14^th, at a well-attended theater in heart of Washington D.C., the president was shot in the back of the head. Certainly conspicuous with a height of over six feet and a half, he and his beloved Mary Todd were enjoying the performance of the British comedy, My American Cousin at the historic Ford’s Theater. A dashing, though disaffected young rebel by the name John Wilkes Booth found his way, within a few inches, to President Lincoln’s body. Strengthened prior to his arrival by two shots of whiskey, compelled by the laments of his now-lost Dixie, and situated so desirably close to the man for whom he felt nothing but detestation, Booth made good on his vow and struck the fatal blow.

Within a few hours, Lincoln would be dead. This, however, was unknown to Booth. Frantic, he leapt from the box from which, only moments prior, the President was watching the play. Upon impacting the stage (which was, unexpectedly for him, unforgivingly hard) the actor-turned-assassin broke his leg. Though hobbled, he was not finished. At the exhortation of his adrenaline (a most hortatory hormone, if ever one inhabited the blood), Booth stood up, composed himself, and cried out, Sic semper tyrannis! The audience, stunned by the excitement of the sound and the eloquence of Booth’s Latin, knew not what to do. Arrested in place, it simply couldn’t react, much less think. Booth, histrionic and homicidal, fled the scene.

Just like that, the tide of American history altered course. Immediately, the blithe revelry by which the North was suffused changed. News quickly spread of this successful assassination attempt and, disconcertingly, the hunt for its perpetrator was still underway. Booth, though vigorously pursued, was able to stave off detection for a surprisingly long time. Not a day later, Lincoln—seemingly indomitable in the face of all other things by which he’d been confronted—succumbed to his fatal wound.

James Russell Lowell, abolitionist, satirist, poet, and sage, summarized best the cloud of sorrow under which the nation (or, at the very least, the North) now stood. The concluding lines of his essay on Lincoln deserve, in full, their reproduction here:

“Never before that startled April morning did such multitudes of men shed tears for the death of one they had never seen, as if with him a friendly presence had been taken away from their lives, leaving them colder and darker. Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the silent look of sympathy which strangers exchanged when they met on that day. Their common manhood had lost a kinsman”.

Indeed, a kinsman—perhaps the greatest of all—was lost. In his place, a barbarian was gained.

There was, as we sit and look back, nothing particularly alluring about Lincoln’s successor. The best that can be said about Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth and most ignominious of our forty-five presidents to date, is that he was a Unionist southerner at time when such men were in high demand. He was a War Democrat upon whom the North could, if only hesitatingly, rely. This, however, ought not to be deemed so high a bar that, by having cleared it, we should dispense so easily with our praise. Johnson was good in the “least bad” sense of the word (a sense to which, sadly, we ourselves have become lately accustomed in the choice of those by whom we’re to be represented). He was, more than anything else, a political expedient whose qualities shone only in the utter darkness of the time.

Born of humble origins, Andrew Johnson was a man from whom the spark of genius, though admittedly only selectively bestowed, had been completely withheld. Lincoln was also the product of a simple and lowly stock, but—an autodidact and a moralist to his core—he was able to raise himself on the wings of his industry and the force of his innate brilliance. Johnson, incorrigibly bound to the earth, never was able to elevate his image in the eyes of his fellow men.

This wasn’t because said men had become accustomed to gazing upon so towering a stature as was Lincoln’s. Surely, any successor to this radiant and inimitable man would seem—both physically and historically—diminutive in the long cast of his shade. But Johnson seems to have been made of inherently dark matter—a tenebrous contrast to Lincoln’s beautiful light.

A tailor’s apprentice in his youth, Johnson was impecunious until he tapped into the profits of high office and cultivatable land. He began as the governor of the state of Tennessee (the state to which he fled as a boy from the rigors of Raleigh, North Carolina), before becoming a United States Senator, before then returning to Tennessee to become the state’s wartime governor. He was at the height of his power with the eruption of the Civil War and benefitted mightily from the side with which he chose to ally himself.

He was not, throughout the duration of Lincoln’s first term, the Vice President as he would soon become. That distinction, though not then so eminently distinct, belonged to the consummate statesman from Maine, Hannibal Hamlin. Utterly bored with the role of which he was the first Republican occupant, and seeing no purpose for his continuance therein, Hamlin slid away from Lincoln’s 1864 re-election campaign. He went on, to borrow from the jargon of baseball, to hit for what you might call the political “cycle”: he served, by the time of the conclusion of his illustrious career, as a senator, a member of the House of Representatives, a governor, a foreign minister to Spain, and, of course, as a vice president of the United States. The presidency, that highest and most distinguished of all offices, eluded him. That, however, is only because he couldn’t wait.

How differently might’ve history progressed had he been more patient? He was an avowed abolitionist, an opponent to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a liberal-minded progressive, a defected Democrat, a nascent Republican, an enlightened politician, and a stalwart supporter of the Lincolnian creed. Reconstruction, had it fallen unexpectedly into his lap, might’ve been less tumultuously pursued than it otherwise was. With greater expedition and magnanimous haste, he might’ve raised from the ashes a land, now left fallow in the absence of the watering sweat of its slaves, that would take, under the tutelage of another, many torturous decades to regrow. Reconciliation with the now-dissolved Confederacy, though perhaps more severely imposed, might’ve lessened the time spent in mutual unease that still persists between the South and North.

With wistful forbearance, we return to the reality of the world and the sad facts on the ground; for an imaginative wanderer, such as I, avoidance of such alluring counter-factuals is usually the best of paths to take. The incumbent Lincoln replaced the wearied Hamlin with a man more conformable to the Southern unionists’ tastes. Within the passage of only a few months, the replacement would prove tragic. This man, in whose presence slaveholders and bigots alike felt ominously at ease, was none other than the aforementioned Andrew Johnson. Lincoln thought that Johnson’s fidelity to the Union’s cause, however speciously expressed, was absolutely vital to the country as it moved forward from war to peace.

Johnson, as stated, was a professed Unionist. At least he was in word. Admittedly, the Unionists of his day were cut in a variety of cloths, but, at their best, they joined in their rejection of the belief that another man could be enslaved. Johnson had no such scruples. He was a slaveholder, and a rather acquisitive one, at that. He was unpersuaded by the maxim, toward which—over the passage of years—Lincoln had become inclined, that all men, having been born free, should remain so for life. In his lifetime, Johnson gathered no fewer than ten slaves (and probably, given his druthers, he would’ve purchased many more). Certainly, the Thirteenth Amendment, against whose installment he pertinaciously fought, wouldn’t have gotten in his way; he advocated for its defeat, as he did for each of the other two Reconstruction Amendments that subsequently were to pass. In time, in spite of his intransigence, those three amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—would become the trinity of liberty by which the nation was to be founded anew.

In choosing Johnson as his newest running-mate, Lincoln was merely examining and, by examining, understanding the exigencies of the map. Only the most peripheral of Southern redoubts were in his grasp. New Orleans, that dizzy, sub-tropical entrepôt of sugar, provocation, and Creole creeds, was a reliable friend to the Union; the rest of Louisiana, on the contrary, was not. Neither was the state of South Carolina (in whose very bosom the war itself began), but its verdant, wind-swept sea islands off its eastern coast most assuredly were. The Keys of Florida, like a tickling finger stretching from that state’s southernmost tip, were also in the possession of the federal, rather than the confederal, government. The mainland, much to its current embarrassment, stood unwaveringly aloof.

Tennessee was the only Southern state, in its entirety and without regional exemption, over which the Union had more than only a marginal influence. As such, and doubtless to Johnson’s morbid delectation, the Emancipation Proclamation had no baring within the borders of his state. A fact of which most Americans have no knowledge, the Emancipation Proclamation granted to many territories and states a number of, shall we say, charitable exemptions. Any state or city from which the Lincoln administration could expect fidelity to the Union cause would be exempted from this extraordinary and long-awaited fiat. Its preliminary proclamation, uttered a full year prior to its final roll-out, was supposed to be an inducement for the voluntary movement of Southern states to the Northern way of life. Much to Lincoln’s frustration, though probably not to his overwhelming surprise, none of the states to which his inducements were extended was sufficiently tempted to change its ways. Those ways, long since ingrained, were inveterate. Those people, long since hardened, were recalcitrant.

Johnson, however, couldn’t be happier; he reaped the benefits of his state’s immunity to Lincoln’s historic decree. He enjoyed, at least for the next few years, the unencumbered retention of his slaves. For Johnson’s slaves, the Emancipation Proclamation meant only a continuation of their legally-protected vassalage and plight.

Standing astride two movements—one clinging to and the other sprinting away from the institution of legal slavery—Johnson was bound to fall. Upon his accession to the presidency in the spring of 1865, he landed in the Oval Office straddling an untenable position. Latently a bigot, now overtly a racist, his sympathies clearly aligned with the plight of his cousins and brothers in the South. He did all he could to stymie the efforts of freedmen and northern liberals attempting to alter their habits and implement change. Conveniently, Congress was out of session at the time, which allowed Johnson the ability to act both as executive-in-chief and maker of law. Much to the despair of the Union, that’s exactly what he did.

Congress, however, wouldn’t long countenance so odious, illiberal, and reactionary a Commander-in-Chief. In its most productive and prodigious session to date, it wrote and passed a number of bills whose resonances still echo in the American ear today. These included, among others, the Reconstruction Act, which apportioned five distinct military districts throughout ten of the eleven seceded states. Each would be delineated as a territory, hopefully buffeted by the staunch sympathies of a Republican populace, over which a Union general would preside. Deaf to President Johnson’s objections, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments would also pass through this Congress. Finally (and perhaps surprisingly, if only for the irrelevance with which it’s considered by us today) the Tenure of Office Act was signed into law. This, more than the others, proved to be the most consequential act of Congress as it related to the impeachment proceedings to come.

The breach of this law, implemented in the year 1867, was the spark that led to the explosion that was President Johnson’s impeachment. Though handily inscribed into the Constitution’s second Article, impeachment—of a sitting president, at the very least—hadn’t a precedent in American political life. Thus, within the span of a few short years, the nation witnessed with dizzying rapidity two very traumatic “firsts”: that of the assassination of a sitting president, and that of his successor’s impeachment. Not to mention, of course, the Civil War in whose foreground all of this had transpired.

The Tenure of Office Act, now since rescinded from the statute books, was designed to impede the president’s ability unilaterally to dismiss federal public officials—typically officers and members of his own cabinet—with whom he had grown to develop, for lack of a kinder word, poor relations. Just as the president had been required to obtain, on the recruitment and installment of these same officers, the Senate’s “advice and consent”, so too would he be made to procure its permission for their release. Johnson, in a word, was barred from firing officials who’d been given the proverbial “green-light” by the Senate’s infallible approval.

Undoubtedly, one could argue, and not without the helpmate of good reason, that the Senate was overstepping its bounds by implementing what can only be described as a petty law. Its intention, quite obviously, was to fetter a president of whose motivations it was highly—and, as time would prove, justifiably—suspicious. It wanted to remove the possibility of a purgation of Republican, Unionist influences on which Lincoln’s White House was so carefully built. At the very least, it seems to have been an act of invigilation of a president in whom the Senate had lost much of its confidence. Surely, it was an effort to truncate Johnson’s power and to move that which remained of it into the Senate’s much more capable hands.

It didn’t take long for Johnson to run afoul of this new Act. At the time of its installment, the Secretary of War was an Ohioan by the name of Edwin Stanton—a venerable man of whom students of American history should be made to stop and take note. There are many good qualities for which he’s remembered, but he strayed, as do we all, quite far from the perfection expected of a statesman. He was, as his colleagues soon learned, a man as assiduous as he was disputatious, as masterful as he was mercurial. While organizing the Union’s massive military response to the casus belli that was the attack on Fort Sumter, he micromanaged from Washington many things of which he had no intimate knowledge that were going on in the field. This, naturally, frustrated the Union generals to whom his orders trickled.

Being of a prickly character himself, Johnson, after war’s end, found Stanton to be insufferable. Here was a Lincoln appointee, a hold-over from the prior administration, with whom he simply could not get along—though one wonders, considering the obstinacy of his own temperament, how sincerely he actually tried. Exasperated by Stanton’s antics and indifferent toward Congress’s decree, Johnson decided to fire the man for whom he’d lost all patience. Stanton did not take the news graciously, but Johnson was resolute. More than that, he was impenitent and not at all inclined to bend to Congress’s will. An overt and insolent breach of a duly-passed law, the Congress moved swiftly to impeach the president.

The articles raised against him were eleven in number, of which, ultimately, only three were pursued. Those that were most damning highlighted Johnson’s blatant subversion of Congress’s Tenure of Office Act. As it is today, both in the political systems of America and England (from whom, I add with thanks, our own protocol is a direct inheritance), impeachment is a two-step process: the lower of the two houses in a bicameral system votes for the impeachment, while the higher votes to acquit or to convict. In this case, by only one vote, the thirty-ninth Congress chose the former option of the two. After a three-month process, a duration of time after which Johnson was very minimally esteemed and completely without credibility, the president would retain his office. He would do so until the next election had its say.

As students of this age, we must ask ourselves the following question: did Johnson’s offense fall under the rubric of bribery, high crimes, and misdemeanors—that trifold of ambiguity for which presidents and civil servants are to be impeached? Did he so egregiously infringe upon the Constitution that it warranted his premature removal from office? A scholar more perspicaciously-inclined toward the subtleties of the law might have for you an answer. Doubtless, it would be convincing, unequivocal, and clear. I, however, can offer one not. My conclusion, humbly held, is that it is, in most cases, the prerogative of the people to decide an elected official’s fate. Such was the case with Johnson, and so should it be.

The act of impeachment, a type of political censure currently on the tip of everyone’s tongue, has a long precedence in the English-speaking world. It has permeated, indeed, at the most contentious of times, defined the political tempests of the past three centuries. In the eighteenth-century, the world became aware of the infamous case against Warren Hastings (about which, at some length, I’ll write below). In the nineteenth, America witnessed the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, successor to and subverter of Lincoln’s restorative dream. In the twentieth, there was the impeachment of Richard Nixon and later that of Bill Clinton. The former, a Republican, was merely mendacious and resigned for his deceit; the latter, a Democrat, was promiscuous as well. Now, nearing the second decade of the twenty-first, we witness the impending impeachment of Donald Trump.

The last on this list is not my concern; in the coming days and weeks, enough ink will be spilt in his service. I’ll not contribute to the growing blot. Instead, I’ll focus on the first—on the great historical event that was the impeachment of Warren Hastings.

That said, some background will be a necessary accompaniment for the fullest appreciation of his peculiar case.

Though an English matter, we must begin with the Dutch. Following the lucrative, and yes, at times cruelly exploitative precedent established by those genial giants of Holland (by whom, at the distance of a few miles across the southern tip of the North Sea, the English were flanked) the Brits created their own version of a company whose foreign ventures would be focused, to the exclusion of all other subsequent lands colored in her majesty’s red, on the Asiatic east. Unoriginally, they called their new business the “British East India Company” when, in 1709, it was organized and first sent abroad.

The Dutch, a people of naval, commercial, and—as its inhabitants of today probably hope we’ll forget—colonial mastery behind whom not only the English, but the rest of Europe always trailed (the Empire State was, of course, initially known as New Amsterdam, as it would persist for nearly a decade before the birth of the Duke of York), had established its own “Dutch East India Company” over a century before. It was, in its time, a paragon of profitability and a shining source of the Netherland’s national pride. It remains, in ours, an exemplar of a truly global corporation by whose success, both literally and financially, all boats were made to rise. It was a corporation, at once protected by the state yet unfettered by its grasp, around which the incipient roots of the modern stock market grew. In more ways than one, we have it to thank for our own beloved Wall Street—a road on which we Americans all travel with hopeful expectation of a worthwhile yield.

England, not unfeeling to the influence of her neighbor’s extraordinary success, sought to cut for herself a slice of this prodigious pie. As stated, she was not so haughty as to be beneath mimicry. As it was to the Dutch so many years prior, a government-sanctioned monopoly was given to the British East India Company as the eighteenth century forged ahead. The British were following the Dutch step for step. In possession of this frankly anti-Smithian, anti-capitalistic decree, the British East India Company was given the exclusive and legally inviolable right its trade on the subcontinent of India. As you might’ve guessed, however, theirs wasn’t the only company for whom the Indian environment was deemed deliciously fertile ground. Late-comers to this dangerous game of international trade, the English were made to contend—sometimes quite bloodily—with the Dutch, French, and native armies by whom they were preceded and now confronted. No territorial claim, regardless of the protective barrier that is the expected advantage of age, was assumed to be privileged, and each approached the other with a sense of mutual suspicion and inhospitality. All sought for the adornment of their own empire and the inflation of their own purse a piece of this crumbling Mogul world.

It was about this time that the name of Robert Clive, a name wholly anathema to the liberal and humanitarian sentiments that so nobly distinguish us today, entered into the pages of history. That same British East India Company for which he worked (and, in time, in whose name he would become a military governor) had been recently dispossessed of its crown jewel—the entrepôt of Calcutta. This was a result of those aforementioned fights. Armed with a force of about three thousand men (of whom some two thousand were native Indians, with the remainder being of European descent), he defeated a phalanx of fifty-thousand. The slaughter was indiscriminate and the carnage widespread. We recognize the event, to the shame of the English-speaking world, as the Battle of Plassey. It was the inaugural event which would mark, for at least the next century to come, what would be Britain’s dominance in that region of the world.

Clive, in the model of an Anglican Cortes or Pizarro—nonpareil conquerors yet incorrigible fiends—was immune to the moral fallout of the atrocities that he had ordered. His consolation was that competition was now reduced. For him, with the added enticement of the profit to be had by the loot, that was enough. His scruples wavered not when told that, by effect of his design, the local Indian population upon whose lands his company had intruded, had been, for all intents and purposes, cleansed. Added to injury was the insult of insufficient food. The people, rendered politically incapable of supporting their own state, would now hardly be able to stand on their own two feet. It’s estimated that the famine of 1770 (for which Clive must be deemed solely responsible) reduced by at least a third the Indian population over which he sadistically presided. So desperately malnourished, the people couldn’t conceive of a revolt. While they might’ve had the intention, they lacked the vitality and the strength to effectuate this physically-demanding and vigorous aim. What’s more, the superior arms by which Clive and his men were advantaged would make any attempted fight against the British empire completely suicidal. Really, for the British troops under Clive’s command, there was no worry of a potential Indian insurrection or a movement toward resistance that couldn’t easily be squelched.

Thus, Bengal—thanks in part to the oft-associated instruments of commerce and cannon, word and sword—was established as a British territory. A fact of which we’re all aware, it remained so for many years (it wouldn’t be until 1947 that independence was declared). But Clive, comfortable with his purloined possessions and heavily-laden with coin, decided to move back to England and continue his conquest there. He was, to use the derisive nomenclature of the day, a nabob of the worst kind—one who, after entering the world with the burden of an inauspicious origin, went out to India, made a “killing” (sadly, in more ways than one), and returned to England a very wealthy man. In that ostensibly democratic nation, he sought political advancement with his wealth—a vote upon which one can always rely.

Upon his departure from the British East India Company, Clive was succeeded by the man to whom we’ll turn as the subject of the remainder of this article: Warren Hastings.

So far as our beloved “rags-to-riches” stories continue to prevail upon and move us, we should be stirred by hearing an account of the life of Hastings. Though previously titled, his family had fallen into an impecunious station out of which it couldn’t easily emerge. It was, from the time of his birth, Hastings’s challenge to raise himself up from this lowly and lonely beginning. His mother, having been delivered of the boy, failed to survive his infancy; she died soon after giving birth. His father, desperate for the kind of position of which he thought himself a rightful heir, sought his fortune on the western side of the globe. Whereas his son would later sail east, Hastings the elder opted for the Caribbean and the west. Little is recorded of his subsequent exploits.

Exiguously educated due to the failing of his funds, Hastings decided to enter into a trade. That profession for which he was best-suited, the navigation of the sea, is that same intrepid pursuit for which every British youth still yearns. Verily, as an insular people surrounded by Neptune’s awesome breadth, the desire for oceanic adventure is in the British man’s blood. Hastings was no exception to this enticement of the sea. Desperate for a voyage and, through a voyage, an advancement in his social standing, he enrolled himself as a volunteer under the command of that same Clive with whom we’ve already been acquainted. Hastings, under the tutelage of that tyrant, shared in the campaign of Calcutta, the rapine of the indigenous people’s labor, and the profit of his own person.

Militarily astute, Hastings was also administratively quite savvy. In the governance of a foreign land, such an ability is, as one can imagine, of almost incalculable value. Thus, he rose with a rapidity that would’ve dazzled his absentee father. In time, he became Governor of India—a nearly regal designation. Seemingly inheritances of Clive, Hasting’s politics were as severe as his morals were loose. He learned well from his teacher. He was accused by a local Indian official of bribery. Indeed, it was commonly assumed that there was “no species of peculation from which (Hastings) has thought it reasonable to abstain”. A full enumeration of his crimes was coming into existence with the oversight of a curious Parliamentary committee—a committee at whose head Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke sat in restive anticipation of an inevitable duel.

Upon Hastings’s retirement from his gubernatorial Indian reign, he returned to England—exhausted, wealthy, though not devoid of a desire for more. Awaiting him in the country of his birth was not the peerage nor even the pension for which he had come to hope, but a series of invectives and a charge of immorality to which he’d be made to respond. Edmund Burke, the consummate conservative and Irish-born MP, made an inquiry into Hastings’s dealings while he was the governor of that wretched Asian land. The House of Commons, in the transference of these materials to the ever-so bothersome Burke, was somewhat unforthcoming; Burke, it’s known, had become a rather contentious figure around whom a political schism was beginning to form. This rupture would be clearer at the outset of the French Revolution. Though oratorically brilliant and philosophically sound, he wasn’t prone to making Parliamentary friends. He was all passion and disputation and, to the discouragement of his interlocutors, he was usually right. No man could better convey a true opinion. Probably, though, he didn’t even need every last parcel of evidence attesting to Hastings’s misconduct of which those legislatures were in jealous possession. A small portion was enough to impeach.

And…impeach he did. At the very least, he tried. Burke organized and laid forth before the House of Commons a bill of charges against the now disreputable Hastings. The Hibernian conservative was now waging open political warfare against the returning Indian despot by whom he was so irrepressibly angered. At first, content with Hastings’s published denial of his alleged wrongdoing, the House declined to prosecute Burke’s case. This setback, though frustrating, was mercifully short-lived; Fox, politically far more potent than Burke, joined him in support of his cause. So too did Richard Sheridan, a fellow Irishman and Ciceronian who sat beside Burke in the House. This brought to Burke’s corner many a wavering Whig. So too, in time, did the younger William Pitt—precociously still in the second decade of his life. He was, as was his vaunted father, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and had no difficulty in serving as the party’s whip.

All forces, with the weighty exemption of the disgruntled Tories, were on board to impeach. The articles were presented in the House. Burke, being inclined to prose, left the speaking on this occasion to the estimable Sheridan, who was, at this point, an accomplished poet. For five hours, the author of The Rivals presented to the gathered MPs a list of the multitudinous crimes of which the fallen Hastings ought to be found guilty. Suspicions must arise when so histrionic and verbose a performance is deemed necessary for the conviction of a man. Facts, soberly stated, ought to win the day if there really is a day to be won. Sheridan, however, wasn’t fluent in the language of brevity. When finally he concluded, another vote was taken. This time, after its initial failure, the vote passed in favor of the impeachment of Hastings. Jubilant, Burke prepared the case that would be argued before the Peers.

It would be in the House of Lords, that landed and aristocratic body of noble names and sibilant S’s, where conviction would be procured. This time, however, Burke, rather than Sheridan, would be the one personally charged with prosecuting the case against Hastings. There, he would stand before that august body of the England’s elite and impugn the retired governor for having committed “high crimes and misdemeanors”—that ambiguous infringement of the law with whose lack of clarity we Americans continue to struggle. This subsequent stage of the impeachment proceeding was the event of the century—and that’s saying quite a lot; it was a century rife with events. A revolution in America had just concluded and another in France was underway.

Burke, in a deluge of a denunciation that was the accumulated result of the past seven years, made arguably his most historic speech. Its peroration is worth quoting at length:

“I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors.

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has betrayed.

I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonored.

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted; whose properties he has destroyed; whose country he has laid waste and desolate.

I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice he has violated.

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life”.

A classicist at heart, as every conservative unconsciously is, Burke employed to great effect the use of the anaphora—an originally Greek instrument of speech. Made most famous by that greatest of modern orators, Winston Churchill, and his “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” address, the anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the outset of sequential lines. Used immoderately, it becomes redundant; it becomes a phrase, suddenly lacking in originality, that’s both tiresome and over-wrought. Used, however, with the vigor of emphasis and the care of restraint, it becomes an unforgettable mantra. It becomes a phrase that now sits outside of time—like a spoken spirit living in an atemporal realm—that can’t help but lodge itself into the listener’s ear.

Indeed, I hear, again and again, as I reflect upon this resounding speech its concluding line: “I impeach him in the name of human nature itself”. Is there, if not “human nature itself”, any other authority of commensurate universality and clout to whom one can apply? Is there an invocation more fundamental than the ideal of Man in seeking the passage of judgment against man? I think not. Burke knew this, but was able to conceive of it because of the breadth of his sympathy and the capacity of his thought. Being a partly-Catholic Irishman in a fully-Anglican land, he knew only too well and too acutely what it was like to be in the oppressed class. He had walked in every man’s shoes—a sojourn at whose end one can’t help but feel for his fellow man. It’s as if Burke had within his very soul all the sentiments, grievances, and pains by which our poor species is burdened. And no one, with the painful exception of the African slave, was more burdened than the Indian was. Thus, Burke donned his footwear and went to work.

Irrespective of the unmentioned facts of the case (for whose details I refer you to another source), one can’t help but align his sympathies with and lend his support to Burke. This is especially true after being washed in the tidal force of his profuse wisdom and the wave of his rhetorical arc. But, perhaps in imitation of those cliffs of Dover behind which they stood, the Peers were unmoved. The saltiness of Burke’s censure failed to erode their insistence to acquit. They had no desire to damage the reputation of Hastings, much less to send him away ignominiously in shackles.

Thus, a full eight years and two hundred sessions after the initial opening of the impeachment proceedings, he was let go. The Peers, finding Burke insufferable and Hastings contrite, decided not to convict him. This dénouement, after nearly a decade’s time, was a somewhat unsatisfactory ending. It was an anti-climactic scene to what had been a riveting cause celebre. In the opinion of the upper echelon of English society, the Peer’s verdict was considered just; sure, Hastings had a devilish tendency to go about his work without the anchoring weights of morality and humanity, but he had, in fact, secured for England what would be, for at least the next two centuries, its beloved crown jewel. That must be worth something. He brought to heel that unstable subcontinent from whose sundry herbs and spices and uncompensated labor the crown would, without scruple, continue to profit.

But profit, for all his depravity and foreign intrigues, was the one thing of which Hastings now found himself in acute need; a decade of sustained legal fees had exhausted his pilfered funds. More valuable still, his public image had been damaged almost beyond the point of repair. A remedy could be sought for at least one of these two painful loses. Ill-suited to genteel poverty, Hastings reached out to his old employer for help. He found the East India Company more appreciative of his efforts than was Burke, and the company agreed to award him a sizeable annuity. It proved to be a pension on which—in luxuriant comfort on a newly-acquired estate—he could live out the rest of his three decades of life. Restored to his erstwhile wealth, he was also nearly returned to his former prestige. Time, as we know, has a way of acting as a solvent in whose currents all sins tend quietly to disappear. Before his death at the age of eighty-five, the public’s opinion had largely turned in his favor. Not quite a hero, he was at least celebrated as an important, imperial man. England’s empire thanked him for his endeavors—no matter the cruelty by which they were achieved.

That marks the conclusion of the impeachment of Warren Hastings. Charged in the House, acquitted by the Lords, it set a precedent not unfamiliar to us today. Even the worst of men can escape a public death. Such is the prestidigitation of the political stage.

Napoleon, while a dictator, was no mere dilettante; his conquest of every field of knowledge was as ruthless as it was complete. He approached his studies as he did his wars—perhaps with the added knowledge and enticement that his wars themselves would soon be studied. For so international a man, in both acquisition of territory and capacity of scope, this should come to us as no surprise. To him, having absorbed all, no intellectual pursuit could ever be too foreign. All thinking was within the confines of his expansive reach. No subtlety was too minute for his grand and perceptive approach; no science too nebulous for his clear-sighted thought; no philosophy too slippery for the strength and resolution of his grip.

Being that he was an Italian by birth, one isn’t surprised to learn that he was a Renaissance man by nature. He was a Vitruvian by disposition, a soldier by training, and, ultimately, a hero by the acclaim of all. It was in his blood. He was Scipio, Caesar, and da Vinci all bundled into one diminutive man. Polymathy, that unique trait of which only a select few humans, throughout all of history, have been in actual possession, was the very life-force at the center of the marrow of his bones. Exiting that osseous place of origin, this blood infused a body capable of every physical and intellectual feat. Never idle, he exerted himself indefatigably in the pursuit of them all.

Though educated almost exclusively in the military arts, Napoleon was able to cultivate a shrewd, discerning, and trenchant literary sense. His favorite author, as is all the world’s, was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe was the wunderkind of Weimar and the master of every genre who turned Germany into an ecstasy and himself into a sage. He remains the patriarch from whom so many writers, flatteringly cut in a post-Shakespearean cloth, descend. He is the author to whom all of us—fallen Fausts as we are—pay perennial homage with our silly writings and readings that strive toward his phantasmagorical scope. Few succeed in reaching his heights, fewer still in appreciating their view.

Like Napoleon, he too had something of the Italian inquisitiveness and adaptability in his bones. A kindred species (though certainly one more inclined to discharge word than sword and sentiment than salvo) he’s deserving of that shared title of polymath. Though, to note, in contrast with that ventured by Napoleon, Goethe’s journey through Italy was rather a literary than a sanguinary affair—an aesthetic than a fistic one. Napoleon conquered that fertile boot, while Goethe was overcome by its beauty.

Nevertheless, Goethe was, for Napoleon, what Homer was to Alexander. We note here, if only to make a point of chronological clarity, that hundreds of years separated the lives of the latter two. As for the former, Goethe and Napoleon, they lived together in what we might call contemporaneous disunion, being that the poet’s Prussia and the despot’s France were, for the duration of their adult lives, at internecine odds. One might add that Goethe, indefatigable in both literature and life, preceded the birth of Napoleon by two decades. He survived him by one.

Alexander, that greatest of conquerors, that Macedonian menace before whom all Eurasia quaked, kept by his side throughout the torments of his life a cherished copy of the Iliad. It was with him through the course of his every campaign. The copy was given to him by none other than “The Philosopher” himself—the peripatetic Aristotle. Indeed, it was the same Aristotle, no cleverly-named philosophical facsimile, by whom the conqueror was, as a boy, so thoroughly educated in science, philosophy, and a smattering of war. In it were annotations written in the hand of Plato’s finest pupil, and Alexander slept with it beneath his pillow every single night. Accompanying it, one might add, was a prudently-placed dagger—an appendage that Achilles might’ve advised and a necessity that Aristotle might’ve mourned.  

For Napoleon, slightly less forthcoming than Alexander in his appreciation for the epic tale, The Sorrows of Young Werther was his book of daily choice. It was rather tragic than epic, though not necessarily in the classical sense. It was a consummate expression of sentiment and pain. It was a deep and probing psychological journey, a vessel to the soul aboard which all feeling men could climb. Travelling through its pages, one was made acutely to feel again, as never he had before. The cost of this, of course, was the fact that Werther never again would feel at all.

In so regarding Werther as a masterful and seminal work, Napoleon was not outside the opinion of the continent and the consensus of its people. Werther was, in one production, the quintessence of the phenomenon of Sturm und Drang—the movement, originally exported by France, by which Germany was completely swept away. It was the feeling and romantic child begotten by that destructively brilliant and infamously fertile Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The more impressionable youth into whose hands his ideas fell into possession, seeking imitation of the eponymous hero Goethe named, decided to dress, to weep, and to commit self-violence as did he. Not since Cleopatra had suicide been so fashionable; not until Chekhov would it be so ubiquitous again.

Thus, upon his arrival at Erfurt in 1808, Napoleon insisted on making the acquaintance of the author who had, until that point and at a distance, so dominated his life. It was left to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, a regional figure of some noble repute, to facilitate the arrangement of the legendary meeting. No legs needed pulling, however, to get the two together, as Goethe was only too happy to oblige. In a moment of what I can only call misplaced humility, perhaps in the face of a conqueror and a king, Goethe declared Napoleon “the greatest mind the world has ever seen”. Was this sycophancy? Apparently not; Goethe seems to have been entirely sincere. If so, never has so exuberant a statement been made of a statesman. What’s more, Goethe seems to have lapsed into a momentary stupor of self-unawareness. Undoubtedly, he was the brighter star in that intellectual orbit, and there could be no diminution of his enduring light.

Yet still, all men, no matter the height of their brilliance nor the length of their reach, are prone to moments of profound unwisdom. Goethe wasn’t immune to this transitory lapse. Like his countrymen Kant and thereafter Hegel, he was desirous of one solid and unified Europe. Such a unification might bring, in the words of that Konigsberg Scotsman, a condition of perpetual peace. It was to be a continent of recognizable manners and customs over which one singular man, in this case, Napoleon, could comfortably preside. Mutual enmities and ancient quibbles would be no more. Internecine and interminable wars (of religion, territory, love, and the like) would dissolve into the ragged pages of eons past.  

Hopeful for the prospects of this future to come, and impressed by the man by whom it might be secured, Goethe was smitten with Napoleon’s presence. Even more was he enthused by his promise. The infatuation, unexpectedly, was doubly returned. Upon their departure, Napoleon, in speaking of Goethe to a friend, remarked, Voila un homme!—now there is a man!

The same might’ve been said of him. Indeed, more much more was said—before being angrily redacted. For a species to whom music is absolutely vital, most humans on this side of erudition know of Beethoven’s strained relationship with Goethe’s idol. Napoleon revealed, among so many other expanding traits, a discriminating taste in music. Literature wasn’t his sole forte. Revolution, war, and kingship are, after all, themes appropriately conducive to song. And France, as euphonious as it was (and still is) amorous, loved to hear its symphonic odes. There was, at the time, no better master of the craft than Beethoven himself.

He composed his Eroica between 1803 and 1804. It was, to borrow a word from the now neighboring, now consuming French, his chef d’oeuvre. It was, in a word, his best work, his masterpiece beneath which all other of his silent scribblings would be ranked. Initially, its dedicatory note was written to that Corsican king whom Goethe had met with such sincere applause. Beethoven, evidently more ardent than Goethe in his republican political views, was a supporter of Bonaparte only at the outset of his rule. The ravages of the Revolution had exhausted their stay and the Directory was very much on the precipice of anarchy. France, being in a state of disrepair, needed for its preservation a man of stability and courage. Beethoven saw in Napoleon a temporary speed-bump en route toward a calm and republican reign. Blindly optimistic at the nineteenth century’s start, he quickly became disillusioned with what was taking shape. Napoleon, he thought, was regressing right back toward the monarchical and brutal mean.

In a moment of furor, a not uncommon manifestation of the German musician’s irrepressible wrath, Beethoven leapt upon his composition’s title page. At its very top, the name “Buonaparte” was inscribed with the attention of a patron and the reverence of a subject. At its bottom rested his own authoring name. Pen in hand and heart on sleeve, he cried out, “Is then he (Napoleon) too nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he will trample on all the rights of man, and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others and become a tyrant”. Not yet blind, Beethoven, in uttering this statement, was uncannily far-seeing. His next action varies with the teller of the tale. In one variation, he scratched out Napoleon’s name with so grave an intensity that he tore through the page. In another, he simply tore his work in two and tossed its fragments to the floor. Either way, his erstwhile devotion to the Corsican was in tatters.

The amended, painfully elongated title is far less potent than that simple one word, Eroica, by which it was preceded. Beethoven’s greatest work, upon its final release, bore the title, Sinfonia eroica per festeggiare il sovvenira d’un gran uomo—“Heroic symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man”. A great man, indeed, punctuating an insufferably garrulous title.

Till now, we’ve spanned that timeless continuum of literature and music, of the written word and the immortal sound. What, then, is left to us but a brief adventure into the realm of art? The Napoleonic Age, you’ll see, was a particularly fine one for that medium’s expression—a testament to the Frist Consul’s prime aesthetic taste. Though in conquest of all, his artistic palate was surprisingly welcoming to many flavors and types. He was a man, and his was an age, conducive not only to the strictures of classical norms—to those sublime restraints of line, order, proportion, and reason; all qualities of which the greatest of generals must inherently be fond—but to the vibrant and romantic explosions of color and depth that were emerging at the time as well. Hence, Napoleon retained in his artistic retinue the likes of David (his consummate classicist), Gerard (a fellow Italian), Gros (an expert equestrian), Prud’hon (a breath of romantic imagination) and, perhaps best of all, Canova—a master of marble and, as we might justly call him, a true Phidias of both Paris and Rome.  

In terms of its commitment to artistic patronage, the age of Napoleon didn’t quite equal that of Louis XIV, nor, for that matter, that of those Medici popes. As for the latter, it was a consequence of their spectacular and rather shameless misallocations of taxes and tithes that the Vatican was to be adorned. A king’s profligacy is something that, as humble subjects, we must countenance and obey, having no recourse to tenure change outside of a coup d’etat.

But are we so ready to forgive the spendthrift habits of a bishop of Rome—mediator, as he is, between earth and God? What are we to make of the infallibility of his papal sins? Should not these Vicars of Christ, these descendants of Peter, be held to a higher, perhaps more heavenly standard? At the rumbling outset of the sixteenth-century, their avaricious pursuit of fine art might’ve been, after all, the chief instigation of the Reformation that was simmering and exploding across the Alps. But, we must ask ourselves, who wouldn’t willingly fund with his congregants’ coins a school of Raphael’s Athens or a Michelangeloan Sistine wall? The sublimity of their work, I think, was worth the irreparable damage that was done to the church and the consequent schism that engulfed the creed. In appreciation of their misappropriation of their funds, Julius, Leo, and their like must be pardoned in the eyes of apostates and the art-loving world.

Napoleon, at his best, made only pretensions to Catholicism. Mars, rather than Jesus, would always be the first and most convincing god to whom he prayed. Thus, he felt no compunction in acquiring through force and curating with distinction Europe’s finest collection of art. The manner by which he came into possession of so resplendent a display was, as you can imagine, not entirely gracious. With the scrupulosity of a conqueror and the intemperance of a trigger-happy aesthete, he denuded from all of the national galleries over which he now presided their best pieces of art. In the time of Troy, when that impregnable ancient city of Hector finally fell, the spoils of war were women (chiefly those of whom the House of Priam was composed). In that of Napoleon, the spoils were the most alluring and voluptuous works of art. It was in this way that France’s Louvre came into possession of such historic pieces as Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross, Correggio’s The Madonna of Saint Jerome, and Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana. Unslakable in his artistic thirst, Napoleon placed his straw in every nation’s fountain, inhaled, and swallowed at will.

Art, though doubtless the most attractive, certainly wasn’t the only thing festooning Napoleon’s France. Having satisfied his pleasure with all things literary, musical, sculptural, and pictorial, he decided now to punctuate his new and revolutionary society with all the greatest advancements of science. All else was dross in the shadow of science’s glimmering gold.

He was himself, perhaps excepting that most enlightened of despots Frederick the Great, the first modern European ruler with a thoroughly scientific past. He was steeped in all forms of it during the long and productive course of his education. The Franciscan instructors by whom he was taught at his preparatory academy at Brienne knew that science and utility (two inheritances, one might add, of the proudly anti-clerical Enlightenment and its seminal production, the Encyclopedie) were to be essential in the coming advancement of the age. They thus fed their Corsican student (who’d only just recently arrived to France from that small, vulnerable island) with all of the mathematics, mechanics, geometry, physics, geology, and geography that the wide-eyed wunderkind could handle. In surfeiting him so, they didn’t count on his capacity being what it was; boundless was the volume of his unusually retentive brain. Quickly did he embrace and eventually did he apply all of that science with which he was brought into contact.

Probably, it was his unfailing grasp of science, in association with his resolute determination and his indomitable gaze, that set the course for his future success. Thus, due to his abiding appreciation of its potential application and its undeniable worth, there was no greater champion of science than Napoleon Bonaparte. Recognizing the men by whom these mountainous and minute sciences were to be moved, he decided to bestow a primacy of distinction on such leading figures in the scientific fields as Alessandro Volta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Georges Cuvier, and—at the mercy of an abbreviated name—Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. These men produced works and conducted experiments that Napoleon could not only applaud from afar, but scrutinize himself under the subtle magnification of his royal microscope.

We might be tempted, at this conclusive point, to resign ourselves and agree with Goethe. Perhaps, as he proclaimed, Napoleon really was “the greatest mind the world has ever seen”. Surely, with its hundreds of years, it hasn’t produced one of commensurate aptitude and spirit since. Thomas Carlyle, displaced from the tumult of Napoleon by just a few years, considered him a hero of the most remarkable kind—albeit one slightly inferior to his own countryman Cromwell. Patriotism, even for him, proved too great an impediment to impartiality. Carlyle would never be wholly reconciled to the French, but he couldn’t avoid the inclusion of Napoleon on his laudatory list of “greats”.

We mustn’t hesitate, then, in giving Napoleon his due. He was, in embracing the consensus of Goethe and Carlyle, great at many things. Always, we remember him as a dictator, but never will we synonymize his name with that of dilettante.

As someone classically-inclined yet linguistically-inept, it pains me to admit that my grasp on the Latin language is not firm. Approaching it, my fingers are but sieves, blunt and busy utensils through whose spaces those ancient words flow. I should say, though, that the failure of my possession of this subtle and consequential tongue isn’t for my lack of trying to hold it. It simply is, for me, that which was Proteus before Menelaus; elusive, frustrating, and incapable of being caught. I can hold it, maybe for a moment, but only for the use of a conversational quip or a rare and brilliant apercu. Just as quickly, Latin—for me—is gone. Just as quickly I’m rendered mute, stabbing at my memory to mimic Horace or Montaigne.

Perhaps even worse, it’s no longer taught, not even its very rudiments, in the languishing halls of our once fine public schools. To the modern reader and ear, Latin has been deemed too esoteric to warrant its instruction. It’s now deemed far too impractical, affected, and, for those reasons, moribund to be deserving of a semester’s constrained and vital time. But only the truly learned will acknowledge Latin as a friendly, albeit foreign tongue with which they’re at least peripherally familiar.

And who among us, in this supposedly enlightened age, wouldn’t want to be considered learned? Who, living on this side of omniscience, wouldn’t want in her possession every morsel of knowledge available to touch? Who wouldn’t desire to know each iota of fact, every truth concealed, every discovery and hypothesis onto which a brain’s restive avariciousness can latch? Or is it the case that one wants only to seem so, not truly to be learned? Once the sole aim toward which all people, of all mental capacities, endeavored, it’s become an attainment, as of late, of which we’d all rather fall complacently short. Mediocrity, in the concern of the intellectual pursuit, has a greatly increased currency today.

Latin, thus, is left forlorn—as so many other essential subjects are. But our focus here is on that progenitor to the Italian, the French, the Provencal, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the oft-forgotten Romanian languages. Instruction in Latin, in this ancient language from which—alongside its Greek parent and predecessor—all these European languages and their various colloquial dialects have sprung is almost entirely absent from all general curricula to which we commit our studies. We are, it seems, a vulgar people basking in the contentment of a vulgar tongue.  

And so, evasive of my seeking grasp and the deficiencies of my thought, Latin remains absent from me. And I remain a man in whose mouth vulgarity is little kept in check. I’d very much like to become a master of that ancient Roman tongue—that forceful and virile and direct manner of speech in whose stolid presence our own circumlocutions look so aimless and weak. I want to be a proud polyglot of yesterday’s and today’s linguas franca, a pedantic student of every term, a man for whom no modern etymology might prove too obscure in the arcane illuminations of his mind. I’d like to be able to mold and manipulate words, to feel and contort phrases, to discharge at my wit a language that spans hundreds of centuries and thousands of thoughts.

Yet I must humble myself and affix to my learning a far narrower allotment of time. Daily is my struggle not only to refine the waning eloquence of my own native tongue (a daunting task in and of itself), but to acquire—by compulsion of environment and social and occupational need—that verbal inheritance from those once grand kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Spanish, rather than Latin, is, admittedly, the more exigent linguistic demand on my studies. It’s the daily practice toward which my oral efforts turn. Bilingualism, with all of its ambidextrous and mellifluous glee, all of its continental American application for what will be endless, multi-ethnic years to come, is the end toward which all my idle thoughts and structured studies are directed. I’m committed, as annually I am, to the acquisition of more than one tongue—Spanish being my sole hope and alternative to English.  

Unfortunately, in the midst of this often-abortive pursuit (my Spanish-speaking goals are either too lofty, or, more probably, my own exertions too lazy for their realization), little time for the learning of Latin has allowed itself to seep in. Without Latin, Spanish is only a partial saturation; the former is the baptismal and life-giving water without which the body dies. Yet that Roman language, remarkably undismayed by the coldness of my neglect in preference to its Iberian offshoot, hasn’t abandoned me as I’ve turned away from it. With noble defiance and triumphant conceit, it abides.

Latin permeates, indeed perpetuates and strengthens, our speech—whether we know it or not and whether we’re English-speaking or not. For most everyone west of the Caspian Sea, the language is the preamble of our common culture, the peroration of our divergent life. It is a thread by which we’re all tied, a bond by which we’re all connected, and a home to which we can all, from time to time, return. We ought to take a moment to acknowledge the robust, resilient, and yes—eloquent fibers of this cord and the flames of this hearth in which we find collective and continuous pleasure and warmth.

Some Latinisms are more common than others. Among these, we glance unthinkingly across such familiar words as data, bonus, ego, ergo, digit, per se, and per capita. To our modern ears, largely dumb to the echoes of our etymological past, words like these feel purely and originally English. However fond we might be of professing ownership over that which we find and of which we make good use, these words must be considered, to abuse an idiom, as American as is apple pie. In a way, they most certainly are, if those who put these words to their best and most conversant use are to be called their truest possessors. In that case, these words must be ours, and no one else’s.

English is, for all its tendency toward universal observance and its peremptory demand for international use, a fundamentally welcoming language. Its hegemony, its dominance, conceal from view the unique heterogeneity on which it’s based, by which it’s always made new. It may be hegemonic in appearance, but it’s actually quite demotic in use. At times, it’s even indiscriminate in the way it constructs itself and adapts with the time. At its best, it’s as acquisitive as it is inventive—taking from all other cultures in equal proportion to that which it makes up on its own. It recognizes its own gaps, refuses to accept these inadequacies, scans the globe for their fulfillments, and accrues with hunger a patchwork of foreign predicates, nouns, feelings, and dreams. It discovers, and often appropriates, that which it lacks. It’s a smorgasbord of an international dietary diction, a various platter of a hot and living verbal stew into whose bubbling pot every finger on earth can dip and have a taste.

We can dip still deeper into the depths of the pool of Latin, that language which is, at once, the hearty stock and muscular meat of our savory linguistic meal. Never can we thank its every nutritive contribution, even if we—as voracious in our learning as we are unslakable in our thirst—proceed to drink it to its dregs.

In both scholarly and lay contexts, many Latinisms arrive to us in small packages. We number here such famous and, for being so famous, quotidian abbreviations as AD—a measurement of two millennia and nineteen years; A.M.—a measurement of twelve hours and countless caffeinated drinks; and C.V.—a measurement, though often inflated, of one’s hard-won prestige and success. Added to these are the equally recognizable e.g., i.e., et al., and etc. Later in the day of our dialogue, we speak of the P.M., as later in the dusk of our life, we think of ourselves post-mortem.

Many more, indeed countless other abbreviations soon follow these select but common few. Physicians and medical practitioners know best their PRN drugs, their Ph.D superiors, and the M.D. fellows by whom they’re surrounded. The nurses, with stoic resolve and quiet aptitude, know the constant stat orders by which they’re to be assailed. Lawyers, appending to their proud names the two letters J.D., speak of pro rata, pro bono, and habeas corpus, and often drift, as faceless specters haunting the diseased corridors of a hospital’s vulnerable wing, wherever men and women of the medical trade walk.

Emerging from that miasma of professional talk, there are numerous other Latinisms that can be deemed distinctly “lay”. Most of us have sprinkled them in our speech; some of us are cognizant of their daily presence; all of us know them by heart. Awash in the positivity of the morning, beaming with the auspicious promise of the dawn’s early light, we’ve all said to ourselves with the rise of the sun, carpe diem—Seize the day! We tinge our ambition with the sadness of a suicide as we recall the voice of Robin Williams shouting, as the mesmerizing teacher in his Dead Poets Society, these very same words. To this day, we cherish the character and mourn the actor, taking from both a haunting inducement to make of this day what we will. From his mouth to our own will, it’s the daily exhortation to conquest with which one stirs herself awake.

As that same sun sets, in triumphant review of its brief but blazing celestial course, its daily solar jaunt, a victorious veni, vidi, vici might not be mistakenly heard. The coming, perceiving, and the conquering of this earthly life is what, if we’re to adopt a truly Caesarian approach, a life well and fully-lived is really all about. And still descending, that radiant Phoebus now lost to the shade of the night, we’re reminded that we too, at an hour yet unannounced, must cease to exist. Our restive soul will leave this fragile body behind and we’ll enter, without hope of egress, the realm of the dark. In stoic cogitation of the abyss or the heaven that’s to come, we utter to ourselves with rueful redundancy, memento mori—a remembrance of the inevitability of death.

Being that we are human, our mortality is in-built—an ominous consideration for which that same Caesar, who allegedly was, at least in his own thinking, quite nearly divine, had little patience. To him, the famous Terence line, homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (“I am human, and thus, nothing human is alien to me”) simply couldn’t apply. He was no mere human, and thus felt no human effect. Everything mortal, then, was alien to him. Yet, in the end, his semi-divinity—this unique aspect of his imagination around which his later mythology was to be built—failed his fragile biology, his usurped regality. Until his (forewarned) flesh encountered the sharp end of Brutus’s knife, he was god, tyrant, king, but not man merely. Vivat rex and Sic semper tyrannis held the tension of his reign, held the passions of the Roman royalists and republicans alike, but to him, there could be levied no ad hominem attack. There was, after all, no man, but only an Olympian at which to aim.

So yes, we all must die. Memento mori tells us so. But this moribund reality ought not to be an impediment to life—to the enjoyment of our dwindling days. Should you have been so lucky to have engaged within their course, within their twenty-four fickle hours in the activity of coitus—be it interruptus or of the consummative kind—you’d have a Latin legacy to thank. Nine months hence, assuming the fertility of the womb and the vitality of the seed, you might receive for your effort the dedicatory title of optimus parentibus—an homage to “excellent parents” that every literate and grateful Latin boy or girl knows. Should you prove, in cruel time, to be a parent absentee, your stripling of a youth would require for his safeguarding a chaperone in loco parentis—someone in the your, the parent’s, place.

This excursion into Latin, I fear, has lasted far too long. My reach, it seems, has exceeded my feeble grasp. Yes, my hold on this language, feeling with the passage of these paragraphs neither firmer nor more resolute, must retreat from its original task. Latin, a possession of all, is now yours to pursue. Exhausted of both patience and knowledge, I leave without mention the dolce et decorum, the non-sequitur, the mea culpa, and the now politically notorious quid pro quo with which we’ve all become distressingly fluent. I overlook ad hoc, de jure, and de facto and so many other, useful terms with which to garnish our oratorical entrées.

A nota bene, however, with which to depart: Latin, at its worst, slips into jargon. It becomes pretentious, exclusive, and obscure. Should it descend farther still, it risks sesquipedality. Nowadays, it might be best if used only briefly and sparingly, but that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be learned. Learn it we must. Immanuel Kant, not a Latin but a Scottish-descended German sage, said it best: Sapere aude. Let this be your stimulus to embark upon the language’s pursuit and wisdom’s lofty end. Whether you capture it or not, you’ll be glad for the attempt.