Bismarck was very fond of enlarging on his favourite theory of the male and female European nations. The Germans themselves, the three Scandinavian peoples, the Dutch, the English proper, the Scotch, the Hungarians and the Turks, he declared to be essentially male races. The Russians, the Poles, the Bohemians, and indeed every Slavonic people, and all Celts, he maintained, just as emphatically, to be female races. A female race he ungallantly defined as one given to immense verbosity, to fickleness, and to lack of tenacity. He conceded to these feminine races some of the advantages of their sex, and acknowledged that they had great powers of attraction and charm, when they chose to exert them, and also a fluency of speech denied to the more virile nations. He maintained stoutly that it was quite useless to expect efficiency in any form from one of the female races, and he was full of contempt for the Celt and the Slav. He contended that the most interesting nations were the epicene ones, partaking, that is, of the characteristics of both sexes, and he instanced France and Italy, intensely virile in the North, absolutely female in the South; maintaining that the Northern French had saved their country times out of number from the follies of the "Méridionaux." He attributed the efficiency of the Frenchmen of the North to the fact that they had so large a proportion of Frankish and Norman blood in their veins, the Franks being a Germanic tribe, and the Normans, as their name implied, Northmen of Scandinavian, therefore also of Teutonic, origin. He declared that the fair-haired Piedmontese were the driving power of Italy, and that they owed their initiative to their descent from the Germanic hordes who invaded Italy under Alaric in the fifth century. Bismarck stoutly maintained that efficiency, wherever it was found, was due to Teutonic blood; a statement with which I will not quarrel.
As the inventor of "Practical Politics" (Real-Politik), Bismarck had a supreme contempt for fluent talkers and for words, saying that only fools could imagine that facts could be talked away. He cynically added that words were sometimes useful for "papering over structural cracks" when they had to be concealed for a time.
With his intensely overbearing disposition, Bismarck could not brook the smallest contradiction, or any criticism whatever. I have often watched him in the Reichstag—then housed in a very modest building—whilst being attacked, especially by Liebknecht the Socialist. He made no effort to conceal his anger, and would stab the blotting-pad before him viciously with a metal paper-cutter, his face purple with rage.
Bismarck himself was a very clear and forcible speaker, with a happy knack of coining felicitous phrases.
His eldest son, Herbert Bismarck, inherited all his father's arrogance and intensely overweening disposition, without one spark of his father's genius. He was not a popular man.
The second son, William, universally known as "Bill," was a genial, fair-headed giant of a man, as generally popular as his elder brother was the reverse. Bill Bismarck (the juxtaposition of these two names always struck me as being comically incongruous) drank so much beer that his hands were always wet and clammy. He told me himself that he always had three bottles of beer placed by his bedside lest he should be thirsty in the night. He did not live long.
Moltke, the silent, clean-shaved, spare old man with the sphinx-like face, who had himself worked out every detail of the Franco-Prussian War long before it materialised, was an occasional visitor at our Embassy, as was Gustav Richter, the fashionable Jewish artist. Richter's paintings, though now sneered at as Chocolade-Malerei (chocolate-box painting), had an enormous vogue in the "'seventies," and were reproduced by the hundred thousand. His picture of Queen Louise of Prussia, engravings of which are scattered all over the world, is only a fancy portrait, as Queen Louise had died before Richter was born. He had Rauch's beautiful effigy of the Queen in the mausoleum at Charlottenburg to guide him, but the actual model was, I believe, a member of the corps de ballet at the Opera. Madame Richter was the daughter of Mendelssohn the composer, and there was much speculation in Berlin as to the wonderful artistic temperament the children of such a union would inherit. As a matter of fact, I fancy that none of the young Richters showed any artistic gifts whatever.
Our Embassy was a very fine building. The German railway magnate Strousberg had erected it as his own residence, but as he most tactfully went bankrupt just as the house was completed, the British Government was able to buy it at a very low figure indeed, and to convert it into an Embassy. Though a little ornate, it was admirably adapted for this purpose, having nine reception rooms, including a huge ball-room, all communicating with each other, on the ground floor. The "Chancery," as the offices of an Embassy are termed, was in another building on the Pariser Platz. This was done to avoid the constant stream of people on business, of applicants of various sorts, including "D.B.S.'s" (Distressed British Subjects), continually passing through the Embassy. Immediately opposite our "Chancery," in the same building, and only separated from it by a porte-cochère, was the Chancery of the Austro-Hungarian Embassy.
Count W——, the Councillor of the Austrian Embassy, was very deaf, and had entirely lost the power of regulating his voice. He habitually shouted in a quarter-deck voice, audible several hundred yards away.