¶ Even in his bitter defeats, he had a peculiar idiomatic way of making out that the result was exactly what he desired. It was of course only an adroit explanation to protect his pride; the brazen invention of a nature that would not acknowledge itself in error. Here is Bismarck, to the core.
¶ For a long and turbulent life-time Bismarck’s soul was tried by the very tortures of the damned!
4
Wherein it is set forth that Otto von Bismarck’s massive political genius, combined with his personal foibles, mark him as a heroic figure, side by side with Frederick the Great.
¶ In attempting to depict a consistent Bismarck, we find that his life has been as much misinterpreted through the carping need of envious political critics as through the bad art of historically well-disposed friends.
The perplexing problem is to blend his massive mental grasp, side by side with his strange fits of irritability, his turbulence, his deep-drinking, his gluttony, his wild pranks.
About him at all times, whether expressed or concealed, there floated an ironic derision of the littleness of the average man, whom at heart Bismarck despised.
While the eyes of detractors are everywhere, the voice of hero-worship has likewise conspired to make an impossible idol of a man with very human and ofttimes crying frailties; the biographic truth is to be found somewhere between these two extremes; but even with this clear clue in mind, it is often difficult to reconcile amazing personal and diplomatic inconsistencies with which his career abounds.
¶ Then, too, there is something that strikes like the irony of Socrates, only bitter instead of light; and Bismarck reveals now and then a touch remindful of that Rabelaisian hero whose enormous capacity could only be quenched by draining the river dry. To tell Bismarck’s inner life-story, in a large way, one must often deal with a series of pictures akin to the gods and devils in Dore’s delineations for Dante’s “Inferno.”
It often seems as though every important act of this great man’s life was charged with the significance of Destiny, stands forth vividly against a background of intrigue, superstition, personal follies, the smoke and flame of battle—a heroic figure side by side with such master-spirits as Frederick the Great.