NAPOLEON, by Emil Ludwig. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, Boni and Liveright, New York. $4.00.

IT is an age of "revelations," of intimate biography, when no historical figure is a hero to any fair-minded man who will read the truth as presented by the modern biographer. Realism is the watchword, and while it mercifully covers a multitude of sins for the biographer, it exposes those of his subject even more satisfactorily. Ludwig's "Napoleon" is in the realistic and intimate vein, it is inexorable in its determination "to examine this man's inner life; to explain his resolves and his refraining, his deeds and his sufferings, his fancies and his calculations, as issuing from the moods of his heart." The result is psycho-analysis at its best and at its worst.

Ludwig indeed has laid himself open to comparison with the French author, who with others of various nationalities, was commissioned to write in the vein peculiar to himself and to his nationality a book about "the Elephant." His book appeared as "L'Elephant etc sec3 Amours." Certainly Napoleon's amours form as prominent a feature of Ludwig's biography as any other detail of his private or his public life, though not so prominent as to necessitate a modification of the title in the French manner. But an author is subject to grave charges when he deliberately proportions his treatment to feature the sensational and erotic at the expense of the significant. More, it is impossible to determine what is gossip and what is historical fact, for his voluminous quotation of Napoleon's words is from many sources, varying in authenticity from soberest records to the completely apocryphal. Where Napoleon fails to leave words of moment on a weighty occasion, Ludwig soliloquizes for him. These is scarcely a clue to the authority for a single passage, though occasionally Bourienne is mentioned. There is not even a modest bibliographical list.

The range of the book is indeed enormous, covering as it does Napoleon's early life in Corsica, the tremendous activity of his years of power, and the six years of solitude in St. Helena, which are described as fully as any other period in his life. The tempo and the style are swift, an artistic device to convey the energy of the subject. It is successful too in suggesting the development of Napoleon's plans with the progress of his achievements. No premature dreams of world dominion are attributed to the Artillery officer when he is still intriguing unsuccessfully for mastery of Corsica.