¶ Gradually, he came to think that he alone of his own unaided might did the work.
¶ Last scene of all in this great drama of Bismarck! The octogenarian, in his downfall, is bitterly storming against his enemies.
Consistent to the end, he never weakened. He did not pass under the yoke of defeat by revealing any of those soft virtues that writers who make a wax doll of this mighty man would have us believe.
He raged and stormed impotently in his retirement at Friedrichsruh, and by every loud and insulting means in his power—by voice, pen, by special interviews, in his private letters, in his telegraphic dispatches, in his talks with the old friends or new callers, and to the last scratch of his Memoirs—Bismarck remains unrepentant, turbulent, to the end fighting bitterly against the Fate to which he could not and would not submit.
Temperamentally and psychologically, it was impossible for him to act in any way other than that in which he did act—even as you, in your own life, are true to yourself in storm and sunshine, following some unformulated but idiomatic law of your being.
Bismarck believed himself a chosen instrument in the hands of God and tenaciously clung to the dominant idea that the Bismarck work comprised all the raw materials of German history, affecting the German Empire.
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His face is ashen, his grizzled mustache, eyebrows and hair white as the driven snow.
¶ On the whole, the old man is interested in events not in persons; he does not keep track of individuals; but he studies their work and its effects.
So, in his retirement he talks of big events, mostly; all the while suffers from fits of depression and exhibits a growing moroseness, a peculiar characteristic of highly developed German character.