In the interval between the two festivals an incident occurred which could not but awaken in the mind of the nation a suspicion of the king's fickleness. On the 4th of October 1840, a royal order in council was published which intimated, to prevent any misunderstanding, that the king, in expressing his appreciation of the loyalty of the Estates, had by no means declared himself to be in favour of a representative constitution as formulated in the ordinance of the 22nd of May.
The princes and nobles were to take the oath of allegiance in the palace, the citizens were to pay homage in the great square outside the so-called Lustgarten. But from early morning rain fell in torrents. For two whole hours the citizens stood outside the square, getting soaked through, whilst the king listened, indoors, to the speeches of princes, nobles, and clergy, and gave the rein to his own eloquence.
At last he stepped out on the balcony. But on this occasion people were prepared to hear him speak; there was no question of improvisation. Berlin would have felt itself insulted if the king, who had made a speech at Königsberg, had received its homage in silence. And speak he did. Every one could see the motion of his hands, but the size of the square and the sound of the wind and the rain prevented his words being heard. Every time he stopped speaking, the attentive crowd, imagining that the speech was concluded, broke forth in loud acclamation; but the king waved his hand, and proceeded. The rain poured, but still he spoke. All watched his gesticulations. Four times the multitude shouted "Hurrah!" in the belief that he had done, and four times he began again. He promised to rule as one who feared God and loved man, with his eyes open when attending to the needs of the people and of the times, closed when called on to do justice—but the antithesis was lost in the whistle of the wind and the rush of the rain. He shouted: "Will you promise, while I am striving so to do, to stand by me, in prosperity and in adversity? If so, give an answer in that plainest, finest word of our mother-tongue, an honest 'Ja!'" Shouts of "Bravo! bravo!" from the square. They thought he had finished. But the king waved his hand and continued. At last he concluded by turning the downpour of rain to account in his peroration, by taking it as a favourable omen—though this also was lost on the audience. "So help me God, I will keep the promises which I have made here and at Königsberg! In sign hereof I raise my right hand to heaven. Proceed we now with our high festival, and may God's blessing fall like his fertilising rain upon us this day!"
But God's fertilising rain completely extinguished the festive spirit, poured its chilling prose over both audience and orator.
No one could observe that any promises were kept, but neither could any one name any particular promises that had been made by his Majesty. The new king and his government soon showed themselves in their true light.
Eichhorn was nominated Minister of Public Worship (Kultusminister) in place of the late Count Altenstein, the patron of Hegel and the Hegelians. Eichhorn had already shown Pietistic leanings; it was reported that he intended to introduce strict regulations regarding the observation of holy-days, and possibly also rules of church discipline binding on all Government officials. The indignation roused by this report was so great that advantage was taken of the first possible opportunity to display it. Racine's Athalie was put on the stage by the king's special request. There was no fault to be found with the play itself, but it had a religious subject and had been originally written for the inmates of a convent. On the occasion of its first performance, January 4th, 1841, it was hissed by the audience, a demonstration the meaning of which every one understood. People were much more exasperated with the minister than with the king; for no one doubted that the king was a sincerely religious man, whereas the life Eichhorn had lived and the company he had kept led them to conclude the opposite of him. And when it came to his making public use of the expression, "the Christian state," that is the state of which the unorthodox cannot be reckoned true citizens, war was waged against this "square circle," as the expression was called, with all the weapons of sober earnest and of mockery. Unfortunately the king had, a few months before this, in one of his fits of political liberalism, possibly influenced by his appreciation of wit, abolished the censorship of caricature-drawing. So now Eichhorn was to be seen everywhere, in the shape of a squirrel (Eichhorn = squirrel) gnawing leaves, cracking the empty nut of the Christian Church, &c., &c. The ungrateful caricaturists did not even respect the king; and Heine, the greatest caricaturist of the age, ridiculed royal indecision in the following lines of Der neue Alexander:
"Ich ward ein Zwitter, ein Mittelding, das weder Fleisch noch Fisch ist,
Das von den Extremen unserer Zeit ein närrisches Gemisch ist.
Ich bin nicht schlecht, ich bin nicht gut, nicht dumm und nicht gescheute,
Und wenn ich gestern vorwärts ging, so geh ich rückwärts heute."[3]
[3] I'm neither fish nor flesh, neither this nor that, but a queer compound of the extremes of the day; I'm not bad, I'm not good, not stupid and not clever; if I walked forwards yesterday, I'll walk backwards to-day.
But Eichhorn was not content with Christianising the State, he aimed at Christianising science. He was particularly desirous to oust known Hegelians from all good and influential appointments, the Hegelian philosophy being distasteful to the king, because it left no play for his imagination.
It was by the king's wish that Schelling was brought from Munich to Berlin to fill the professorial chair left vacant by the death of Hegel, that from that vantage ground he might propound his new philosophy, that Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation) which, like some quack remedy, had been kept secret for years, and yet puffed as if it were to introduce a new era. He received a larger salary than had ever before been given to a Prussian university professor (it was declared that he was almost as well paid as a premiere danseuse); and it was certainly not the king's fault that, in spite of all Schelling's endeavours, there seemed no possibility of eradicating Hegelian unorthodoxy. As a matter of fact, Schelling was a failure. He could not but feel that he was regarded with contempt by the whole youth of a nation. Ch. Kapp wrote a clever description of the court thinker's various metamorphoses since the days of his youth, his apostasy from himself, the humbug in his reconciliation of faith and thought; and Ludwig Feuerbach, in his energetic language, styled him the philosophical Cagliostro of the nineteenth century, and his philosophy a theosophic farce.