III.
The onus of blame devolves on Bismarck’s native ideas, which persisted in him from his cradle and resisted the revelations of his own personal experience as well as the spirit of our progressive age. In Bismarck there always subsisted the rural fibre of the Pomeranian rustic, in unison with the demon of feudal superstition and intolerance. In politics and religion he was born, like certain of the damned in “Dante’s Inferno,” with his head turned backwards by destiny. A quarrelsome student, a haughty noble, pleased only with his lands and with the privileges ascribed to the land owner, incapable of understanding the ideal of natural right and the contexture of parliamentary government, a Christian of merely external routine and formalist liturgy, he excited in the pusillanimous Frederick William, in his earliest counsels and during his early influence in the crisis of ‘48, a horror of democratic principles and progressist schools which led him to salute the corpses of his own victims, stretched out on the beds of his own royal palace, and to prostrate himself at the feet of Austria in the terrible humiliation of Olmutz, that political and moral Jena of the civil wars of the Germanic races. Very perspicuous in discerning the slightest cloud that might endanger the privileges of the monarchy and aristocracy, he was blind of an incurable blindness with respect to the discernment of the breath of life contained in the febrile agitations of new Germany, which discharged from its revolutionary tripod sufficient magnetism and electricity between the tempests, similar to those which flash, and thunder, and fulminate, from the summits of all the Sinais of all histories, to inflame a higher soul in any other more progressive society. The world cannot understand that he should have been perturbed by the external clamor of the revolution, when the idea of Germanic unity had become condensed in the soul of the nation, revealing itself by volcanic eruptions, like an incipient or radiant star; he could not understand how the Congress of Frankfort, cursed by him, foreshadowed the future, as though inspired by tongues of fire; and could not avail himself of all that ether whose comet-like violence, cooled down in the course of time, was to compose the new German nationality, and was to give it a greater fatherland where its inherent genial nature should glow and expand. In his shortsightedness, in his lack of progressive spirit, in his want of the prophetic gift, he imagined the principle of Germanic unity lost at Olmutz, like the principle of Italian unity at Novara, and ridiculed those who, certain of the immortality of such principles, foretold for both a Passover of Resurrection. He never understood the innermost essence and intrinsic substance of the principle, to which it owes its force and glory, sufficiently to adopt it, until he had witnessed its success in Italy, insulted in his speeches during the tempestuous dawn of the new common idea. It is on this account that I am rendered indignant by any comparison of Bismarck and Cavour, as I am rendered equally indignant by a comparison of Washington and Bonaparte. The father of the Saxon fatherland of America, and the father of the Italian fatherland in Europe, alike rendered worship to goodness, and never deviated from right in any degree; whereas the founders of French imperialism and of Germanic imperialism, much addicted to violence and very vain of their conquests, relinquished something as great and as fragile and sinister as the works produced by the genius of evil and outer darkness in all theogony. In the last years of the reign of Napoleon III., during the discussion of a message in the French Legislative Corps, Rouher extolled the public and private virtues of the emperor. My late lamented friend, Jules Favre, replied to him in a speech worthy of Demosthenes: “You may be content to be the minister of such a Marcus Aurelius; to such paltry dignities, I prefer the higher privilege of calling myself a citizen of a free country.” Bismarck preferred to maintain himself in power by the help of his kings—quite the contrary of what Gladstone does, who maintains his sovereign. Whom can he blame but himself? Emperors are accustomed to be ferocious with their favorites when they are weary of them. Just as Tiberius expelled Sejanus, just as Nero killed Seneca, just as John II. hanged D. Alvaro de Luna, just as Philip II. persecuted Antonio Perez till he died, just as Philip III. beheaded D. Rodrigo Caldéron, William II. has morally beheaded Bismarck, without any other motive than his imperial caprice. Sic volo, sic jubeo. So now will the Chancellor venture to present himself in parliament because he has been dismissed from the royal palace like a lackey? Quæ te dementia cæpit? When, after Waterloo, Napoleon, adopting the theatrical style of an Italian artiste, suitable to his tragical disposition, and repeating a few badly learned Plutarchesque phrases, suitable to the classical education of his age, asked the English, his enemies, to accord him hospitality, as in ancient times Themistocles might have petitioned his enemies the Persians, the English replied by sending him to St. Helena. Bismarck in disfavor and disgrace solicits an asylum from his enemies, the commons, whom he has never defeated, yet whom he has always disdained. And as the English condemned their troublesome guest to live on a gloomy little island, the electors condemn their repugnant petitioner to a second ballot. But the Chancellor will be completely undeceived; he possesses no qualifications whatever for the position he has chosen. An orator, a great orator, he one day failed to keep his pledged word, and the apostate word condemns him to never regain the executive power through its intervention. In the sessions of parliament he will resemble the plucked and cackling hen thrown by the Sophists into Socrates’ lecture-room. The admired Heine, so fertile in genial ideas, represented the gods of Phidias and Plato, besides being downfallen and vagabond, selling rabbit skins on the seashore, and being forced to light brushwood fires by which to warm their benumbed bodies during the winter nights. To-day the writers, salaried by Bismarck, known as reptiles, now turn on him, for a similar salary, the venomous fangs which he formerly aimed at his innumerable enemies. And yonder, in the parliament where formerly he strode in with sabre, and belt, and spurred boots, a helmet under his arm, a cuirass on his breast, he will now enter like a chicken-hearted charity-school boy, and that assembly which he formerly whipped with a strong hand, like school-boys, laughed at and caricatured in often brutal sarcasm, ridiculed at every instant, ignored in the calculation of the budget and the army estimates during long years, and sometimes divided and dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon.