The perplexities arising out of this American eagerness to witness these royal splendours are innumerable. The resentment arising out of inevitable refusals is a burden which every Ambassador has to bear; and every secretary too. Grievances are of many kinds. It is not so many years since an American Minister was asked by cable—almost ordered—by a distinguished fellow-countryman to engage lodgings for him in London. It is not many more since an eminent statesman, arriving after Levees and Drawing-rooms were over, desired a secretary to arrange that he and his family should take tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle.
These are cases occurring not in musical comedy but in actual life. There are others, relating not to royalty but to society, and to various forms of English life. But it is already only too evident that the diplomatic duties of an Ambassador are not his only anxieties. The others, so far as I know anything about them, have always been borne cheerfully. Everything has been done for the American in London that could be done. He is taken care of to an extent that the Briton abroad never is, nor ever expects to be. But to all human effort there is a limit.
II
MR. JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
Since Mr. Adams's retirement in 1868 we have had three Ambassadors whose ability as diplomatists entitles them to places in the front rank. If you take account of other kinds of ability and of Ministers, there are more than three. Mr. Motley was a brilliant historian whose "Rise of the Dutch Republic" and "History of the United Netherlands" gave him a lasting European reputation and added distinction to American literature. But neither his six years of service as Minister to Austria, 1861-7, nor his year and a half in England, 1869-70, proved him a great diplomatist.
Austria was not then, and is not now, of the first importance from an American point of view. We respect her wise old Emperor. We do not, I think, agree with Mr. Gladstone in saying you can nowhere put your finger on the map and say, "Here Austrian rule has been beneficent." She never was a model to us and is not now. But since we like courage, and clear-sighted decision, and the recognition of facts, and like the men who have these gifts, we have not joined very heartily in the European outcry against the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We are a world-power for certain purposes only. We stand aloof from purely European complications. They are, as a rule, no affair of ours. We learned to our cost, or possibly our mortification, not very long ago, that Austria, "effete" or not, was capable of giving us a lesson in diplomacy; or, at least, in diplomatic etiquette; by which we, or our late President, may or may not have profited.
Mr. Motley, though he wrote excellent dispatches and made no diplomatic or social mistakes in that difficult Austrian capital, had not the smooth temper or the patient arts which are essential to success at critical moments. He was impetuous, explosive, rhetorical; prone to interpret his instructions in the light of his own wishes or convictions. Socially he was a force, even in Vienna, because of his personal charm, his distinction of appearance and of manner. Socially speaking, he was an aristocrat. He was the first American Minister in London to establish himself in a house suitable to the dignity of the post, Lord Yarborough's, in Arlington Street. He was known to be Count Bismarck's friend. That of itself gave him a kind of celebrity, for Count Bismarck was then a comparatively unfamiliar personage in England, where the outlook of the average man on the Continental horizon is not wide.
One of the first questions Count Bismarck asked me when I first talked with him in the Wilhelmstrasse in 1866 was whether I knew Motley.
"Yes."