THE BARON VON STEIN.[16]
"It is to the great abilities, enlightened patriotism, and enduring constancy of the Baron Stein that Prussia is indebted for the measures which laid the foundation for the resurrection of the monarchy."—Alison.
"Baron Stein," says Bourrienne, "has been too little known;"—and unquestionably, considering what he was to Prussia, and through Prussia to Europe, at the most important crisis of recent history, he is too little known still. Why is this? Plainly, in the first place, because he had the misfortune to be a German statesman, and not a French one;—these French do make such a noise in the world, partly with real cannons, partly with artificial volcanoes and puerile pyrotechny of all kinds, that a man cannot live and have ears without hearing about them. Celebrity is, indeed, a very cheap affair, according to the French fashion; restlessness and recklessness are the main elements of it. Only keep spurting and spitting about obstreperously, and the most stiff ears must at length be converted. As to real character and substantial worth, that must not give you a moment's concern. Is not Catiline to this day as famous a man as Cicero? and is not the celebrity of Bonaparte, who was (pace tanti nominis) nothing better than a bold and brilliant blackguard, equal to that of the Apostle Paul, who was a saint? Yes, verily; and M. Thiers, and the hot war-spirits in France, know it very well: but as for your great, meditative, unobtrusive, honest, truthful, and laborious German—your devoted Scharnhorst, for instance, who fell at Lutzen—the great world hears not of such a man, unless by accident, though his life be a living epitome of the gospel. But there are other Germans, too, as fiery, and hot, and volcanic as any Frenchman, of whom, however, Europe hears but little in proportion to their worth; their reputation suffers partly by the virtue, partly by the vice, of the people to whom they belong; for the people in general are not a noise-making people—this is the virtue—and the German government—this is the vice—are timid and eschew publicity. The Baron von Stein was one of these hot, glowing, impetuous, volcanic Germans—a political Luther, as he has most justly been called; but he had the misfortune to belong to a people who never dreamed of conquering any thing except transcendental ideas in the region of the moon, and beyond it; and he served a good, pious, "decent" master, the late Frederick William III., who, when he was merry, (like a good Christian,) was more inclined to sing psalms than to crack cannons, and prayed heaven every morning that he might die a good man, rather than live a great king. Then, in addition to this, comes the great and authoritative extinguisher of all German political reputation, the Censorship—a "monstrum horrendum ingens," and "cui lumen ademptum" truly; for it will neither see itself, nor allow others having eyes to see for it. An honest and thorough life of Baron Stein is, in fact, in the present slavish state of the Prussian political press, an impossibility; for the sturdy old Freiherr was a declared enemy of the whole race of red-tapists, and other officials of the quill, who, since the peace, have maintained a practical monopoly of public business in Prussia, and who, in fact, keep the monarch's conscience, and tie his hands, much more effectually than chancellor or parliament does in Great Britain. It is only therefore, in the way of scattered notices, drawn from various sources, that a knowledge of such a German statesman as Stein can be obtained; and these sources also, from the same evil influence of the censorship, are necessarily very imperfect; the men who knew Stein, and were in possession of correspondence and other papers that might illustrate his life, are all marked men; to the government of the bureaucracy suspected men—men who had, many of them, like the Baron himself, been, immediately after the peace, subjected to the most odious kinds of moral, and sometimes corporeal, persecution. Their publications, of course, were watched with peculiar jealousy by the Argus-eyed censorship; and we may always be sure that what they do tell us is only the half of what they might have told us, had they dared to speak out. Under these circumstances, the English reader will perhaps be obliged to us for taking the trouble to sketch out a short outline of the life and temper of Baron Stein from such scanty materials as time and chance have thrown in our way; and he will, at the same time, pardon the great deficiencies that must necessarily exist in the execution of such a work.[17]
Henry Frederick Charles, of and at Stein, (vom and zum Stein!) was born in the year 1757, of an old and noble family at Nassau on the Lahn. His father belonged to that higher class of nobility, according to the old German constitution, who held immediately of the Empire, (Reichs: unmittelbare und Landbarfreie,)—a descent which had perhaps a not unimportant effect in influencing the position which Stein afterwards assumed; for while the Baron always acted in the spirit rather of the middle classes than of the princes and their courts, and indeed often indulged in the strongest expressions of contempt for the whole body of princes in Germany, he never forgot his own character as a free and independent baron of the German empire, and was, notwithstanding the popular character of his great measures, in his tone of mind as much aristocratic as democratic. Intended by his father to take office under the Imperial government, he was sent first to Göttingen to study public law and history, and then to Wetzlar, the seat of the Imperial chamber; but the name of the Empire in those days had already lost its power over the minds of ambitious youth. Frederick the Great was the guiding star of the time; and, as if prophetic of the death-blow that awaited the crumbling old edifice from the hand of Napoleon in 1806, Stein, so early as 1780, entered the Prussian service as director of the mines (Bergrath) at Wetter, in Westphalia. In 1784 we find him ambassador at Aschaffenburg. He was then made president of all the Westphalian chambers, and in active connexion with this province we find him remaining till 1804, when, on occasion of the death of Struensee, one of the Prussian ministers, he was called to Berlin, and made minister of finance and of trade and commerce by Frederick William III. In this capacity he remained till the opening of the year 1807, when, as the Conversations Lexikon asserts, being at Königsberg with the king, after the battle of Jena, "on account of some differences with the cabinet" he resigned his situation, and retired to his estates in Nassau. We notice this retirement and the alleged cause of it particularly, because, as will appear in the sequel, Stein, with all his talent, seems to have been a man of a peculiar temper, and not so easily to be managed on many occasions as he was both willing and able to manage others. However, whatever the cause of the resignation might be, Frederick William had sense enough to see that these were not times when Prussia could want the services of any man of real talent and energy; and accordingly, (some say on the recommendation of Napoleon,) so early as the harvest of that same year, he called the baron back and made him prime-minister. Here was a situation worthy of a great man; Prussia, after the battle of Jena, overthrown, prostrate, and bleeding beneath the iron tramp of insolent France. How to convert this Prussia into the Prussia that in a few years afterwards was destined to be a chief instrument employed by Providence in the overthrow of the general European tyrant—here was a problem!—one worthy of the worthiest man that the kingdom of the Great Frederick could find; and most worthily did the Baron von Stein execute the mission. The reforms which he boldly planned, and no less boldly executed, in that critical year 1808, followed out as they were by his able successor, Count Hardenberg, are sufficient to place him in the very first rank of modern statesmen. He actually changed a nation of serfs, by a single bloodless blow, into a free people; he did that for Prussia, morally and socially, which Frederick the Great had done only geographically; he caused it to rank side by side with the more civilized and advanced, as opposed to the semi-barbarous (Russia) and stationary or retrograde (Austria and Spain) powers of Europe. To detail at large the important social changes thus effected in a single year by this most energetic man, would lead us too far from our biographical purpose here, and prevent us from making such a free use as we should desire of the correspondence published by Von Gagern and Hormayr. We shall therefore content ourselves with a short quotation from Mr Alison's sixth volume; and may refer the reader, at the same time, to the more detailed and yet succinct statement of the same matter given by Mr Russell—Tour in Germany, vol. ii. p. 116.
"So clearly were his ideas formed, and so decided his conviction as to the only means which remained of reinstating the public affairs, that he commenced at once a vigorous, but yet cautious system of amelioration; and, only four days after his appointment as Minister of the Interior, a royal decree appeared, which introduced a salutary reform into the constitution.
"By this ordinance, the peasants and burghers obtained the right, hitherto confined to the nobles, of acquiring and holding landed property, while they in their turn were permitted, without losing caste, to engage in the pursuits of commerce and industry. Landholders were allowed, under reservation of the rights of their creditors, to separate their estates into distinct parcels, and alienate them to different persons. Every species of slavery, whether contracted by birth, marriage, or agreement, was prohibited subsequent to the 11th November 1810; and every servitude, corvée, or obligation of service or rent, other than those founded on the rights of property or express agreement, was for ever abolished. By a second ordinance, published six weeks afterwards, certain important franchises were conferred on municipalities. By this wise decree, which is in many respects the Magna Charta of the Prussian burghs, it was provided that the burghers should enjoy councillors of their own election, for regulating all local and municipal concerns: that a third of the number should go out by rotation, and be renewed by an election every year; that the council thus chosen should assemble twice a-year to deliberate on the public affairs; that two burgomasters should be at the head of the magistracy, one of whom should be chosen by the king from a list of three presented, and the other by the councillors; and that the police of the burgh should be administered by a syndic appointed for twelve years, and who should also have a seat in the municipal council. The administration of the Haute Police, or that connected with the state, was reserved to Government. By a third ordinance, an equally important alteration was made in favour of the numerous class of debtors, whom the public calamities had disabled from performing their engagements, by prohibiting all demand for the capital sums till the 24th June 1810, providing at the same time for the punctual payment of the interest, under pain of losing the benefit of the ordinance. Thus at the very moment that France, during the intoxication consequent on the triumphs of Jena and Friedland, was losing the last remnant of the free institutions which had been called into existence during the fervour and crimes of the Revolution, Prussia, amidst the humiliation of unprecedented disasters, and when groaning under the weight of foreign chains, was silently relaxing the fetters of the feudal system, and laying the foundation, in a cautious and guiltless reformation of experienced grievances, for the future erection of those really free institutions which can never be established on any other bases than those of justice, order, and religion."
But Stein was too fierce and fiery a spirit, not merely too ardent, but too open and reckless a "French-hater," to remain long as prime-minister of Prussia under such a suspicious and jealous-eyed master-general of continental police as Napoleon. An intercepted letter revealed Stein's sentiments to the French; and by order of Napoleon, Hardenberg, a man of a more smooth and polite exterior, (though as true a German at heart,) was nominated in his place. The reforming baron, after felling a few gigantic trees, was obliged to surrender the work of perfect clearing of the social forest to a not unworthy successor, himself retiring, or (to speak more properly) being banished to Prague. There he lay in a convenient central position, like a lion nursing his wrath, ready to start off in any direction—back to Prussia, south to Vienna, north to Petersburg, or wherever any thing substantial, by word or deed, was likely to be done against the man whom his soul hated with an intensity of moral indignation truly grand, even out-Bluchering Blucher. Stein indeed hated Napoleon, not for one good reason only, but for four: first, as he was a Frenchman, vainglorious and false; second, as he was a conqueror; third, as he was a tyrant and an oppressor; fourth, as he was a godless man and a heathen. In Prague, therefore, Stein remained, in company with Justus Eumer, the banished Elector of Hesse-Cassel, Karl von Nostez, and many French emigrants, as it were in a secret-burning focus, and hidden metropolis of anti-Gallican spirit,[18] for a few years, waiting not patiently, but, in his fashion, with extreme impatience, for the coming of the great day of political retribution, in which he believed as firmly as in God, and in the last judgment. German writers speak with patriotic enthusiasm of the "noctes cænæque deûm"—"diegöttlichen Abende," which, with Pozzo di Borgo and other choice spirits, Stein spent in this important period, when events no less unexpected than great were knocking at the door. It must have been a god-like treat, indeed, in these terrible times, when a man in Germany could hardly draw his breath for fear of Davoust, to have seen launched from the dark, fiery, Saracenic eyes of Deutschland's political Luther, those "thundering fulgurations"[19] of indignant German hate, which were soon to be followed by a tempest of more indignant cannon-balls; but few and feeble, amid the barrenness of German political literature, are the voices from those prophetic times that have been wafted to British ears. The following short notices from Varnhagen von Ense are all that we have been able to recover.
"Stein lived at Prague in a very retired manner; for though on familiar terms with the most noble families, by ancient family connexions, and by social position, he made great demands on those whom he admitted to his intimacy. German truth and honour, scientific culture, decision and firmness of character, and, if possible, talent and wit, were qualities not easily found combined; but such a combination he required to secure his friendship and respect. He was often forced, indeed, to content himself with some one of these qualities separately; and for myself, my principal recommendation to his notice consisted, I suppose, in my having travelled a good deal in Germany, in my having been at Paris and seen Napoleon, and, more than all, in my having fought against the tyrant. When introduced to him first, I was at once struck by something abrupt in his manner; it seemed to me he was a person who in every thing he did or said, asserted his own superiority to the mass of mankind, and was accustomed to work in all things without respect for time, place, or person. There was at the same time an unconstrained simplicity about him, and an utter want of pride and pretence in his manner. In conversation on public affairs, and matters of social economy, he was most animated and most instructive; once started on a subject of this kind, he was carried along irresistibly by his own enthusiasm; and any ignorance displayed, or doubt expressed, by those with whom he agreed, only served as a spur to set his ideas more on the gallop. And he would go with the most admirable patience into long details of fact, in order to bring round his adversary to his opinion. I was struck particularly by the decidedly polemical character of his remarks: ever and anon he drew this or the other Prussian statesman into the argument, and in criticising severely their conduct, seemed not seldom to give as much ease to his own heart as instruction to me. His whole manner was such as in the Opposition side of a British Parliament might have produced the most extraordinary effects. In his extreme fits of eloquent indignation, a sort of convulsive tremor would seize his whole voice and movements; he would shut his eyes, and could scarcely bring out his words with the due articulation. But immediately thereafter he would become calm again; and with what a breadth and penetration of glance did he then look through his adversary, reading every secret objection on his countenance, and preparing a new and more terrible onset to carry the citadel of his doubts by storm! To converse with him was indeed to carry on a continued battle; for it pleased him, even when the person with whom he conversed for the moment agreed with him, to consider him as an adversary, and to argue with him as in all points a decided opponent of his views: always, however, without any ill-will or the least personal feeling. This sort of animated irritation gave a peculiar charm to Stein's conversation; the Emperor Alexander, in particular, was quite charmed with the roughness and bluntness of his manner; for, except by a slight admixture of humour, Stein never attempted to tame the rudeness of his address, even in the presence of the most august personages.