“One of his most happy, most memorable inspirations he suddenly drew one day from the libretto of the Freischütz.
“In this opera of Weber, Max, the good and unfortunate hunter, borrows a cartridge from Robin, the evil spirit, and immediately kills an eagle, one of whose feathers he proudly sticks in his cap. He then asks for some more cartridges, but Robin tells him that they are 'enchanted balls,’ and that, in order to obtain them, he must surrender himself to the infernal spirits and deliver his soul to them. Max draws back, and then Robin, sneering, tells him that he hesitates in vain, that the bargain is made, and that he has already committed himself by the ball he made use of: 'Do you think, then, that this eagle was a free gift?’ Well! when in 1849 the young orator of the Mark of Brandenburg had to implore the Prussian chamber not to accept for the King of Prussia the imperial crown which the parliament of Frankfort offered him, he ended by crying out: 'It is radicalism which offers this gift to the king. Sooner or later this radicalism will stand upright before the king, will demand of him its recompense, and, pointing to the emblem of the eagle on that new imperial flag, it will say: Did you think, then, that this eagle was a free gift?’”
The suggestion will doubtless present itself immediately to the minds of many of our readers that the poetic myth of the Freischütz is likely to be fulfilled in sober, actual reality when the German imperial drama is played out, and that Bismarck will prove to have been the Robin of William I. But this is an anticipation, and we return to our sheep and our young wolf. An equally marked and well-known trait of Bismarck’s style in speech and writing is a cold, biting, ironical humor, which often assumes the outward guise of frankness, sometimes ferocious, sometimes farcical, but always dangerous and often deadly when the master of the weapon is wielding it in a real fight. The general tone of his disposition is contemptuous and misanthropical, as of one who alternately sneers and laughs at mankind in general, on the whole despising the game of life, yet going in for deep play with all his soul when the chance presents itself, for mere occupation and amusement; just as he plunged into the Burschen-life in his youth and hunted bears at a later period in Russia. There is no trace of philanthropy in his character; as an enemy he is relentless, and no gentle or noble sentiments hamper his progress in the way of his policy of “blood and iron.” Yet there is a most tender and devoted affection manifested in his letters to his sister, Malvina von Arnim—“Maldewinchen”; so far as we know he has been a kind husband and father; there seems really to be something genuine in his long friendship for Prince Gortchakoff; and all the world knows that he risked his life to rescue a servant from drowning. The impression we have received from all we have ever read or heard about him is, that his natural disposition, like that of Napoleon, is generous and noble, but, like his, has been perverted by ambition.
His early life did not promise any great achievements. He went by the name of “Mad Bismarck,” and was always restless, unsettled, without steady application to any definite aim. What his real inward convictions are or have been, in religion, philosophy, and the higher sphere of political ethics, is very difficult to determine, at least for us who are at a distance; or even to decide how far he has ever formed and cherished any deep and settled convictions at all. Practically, he has been a Pyrrhonist and Epicurean, a heathen and a materialist, using all things and all ideas as so many counters of no value except for his own game. The opinions which he professed at the outset of his political career were those of “the party of the cross,” that old-Prussian, religious, monarchical, conservative party represented by the illustrious Baron von Gerlach, which has been in opposition to the administration of the chancellor, and is now in a quasi-alliance with the Catholic party.
“'I belong—' such was the defiant declaration of Herr von Bismarck in one of his first speeches in the chamber—'I belong to an opinion which glories in the reproaches of obscurantism and of tendencies of the middle age; I belong to that great multitude which is compared with disdain to the most intelligent party of the nation.’ He wanted a Christian state. 'Without a religious basis,’ said he, 'a state is nothing but a fortuitous aggregation of interests, a sort of bastion in a war of all against all; without this religious basis, all legislation, instead of regenerating itself at the living sources of eternal truth, is only tossed about by human ideas as vague as changeable.’”
What can be finer or truer than this statement, in which the whole of his own policy as chancellor of the German Empire is condemned in advance out of his own mouth? In every important respect his avowed opinions and political action were diametrically opposite to those of a later date. In fact, his bold and even extravagant advocacy of the cause of the house of Hapsburg, at a moment when (1850) the attitude of Prussia towards Austria was most humiliating, was the first occasion of launching him into the career of foreign affairs. He was sent, with much misgiving on the part of the king and his minister, as Prussian plenipotentiary to the Diet of Frankfort; and here he began to go to school to Prince Gortchakoff, now commenced that world-renowned friendship between these two statesmen which has altered the course of history and for whose dénoûement we are at this moment intently watching.
It would be idle to suppose that these two men traced out beforehand the common policy which they have since pursued in concert. It was impossible for any human sagacity to foresee the conjunctures which have since arisen, and have furnished to Bismarck the opportunities of which his genius has availed itself to destroy and to upbuild great political fabrics. They could only plan, in general, the aggrandizement of Russia and Prussia, by the breaking down of the traditional policy of coalition and balance among the European powers. All that we can see clearly respecting the incipient working of Bismarck’s mind at this period is, that he contracted an aversion for Austria, a contempt for the German confederation, and a mean opinion in general of the diplomats who had the management of the European state-craft. The idea of a new era of absolutism in a few great, conquering nations—an absolutism “tinged with popular passions,” or, according to his favorite expression,“spotted with red”—dawned on his mind and became gradually more distinct. Some extravagant projects were at times bubbling in his restless brain, and he often threatened to abandon the career of regular diplomatic service and go into politics “in his swimming-drawers.” But when the Prussian administration proposed to him to go to Russia as resident ambassador, with a view, as he expressed it, of “putting him on ice” to cool him down, he consented to don a “bear-skin” instead of the aforesaid habiliments of a sans-culottes.
On the 1st of April, his birth-day, 1859, Herr von Bismarck arrived in the capital of the Russian Empire, of which his former colleague at Frankfort was already the chancellor. Among the Russians he was extremely popular; for he took extraordinary pains to make himself agreeable to them, and seemed to have turned himself into a Russian, for the time being, in donning the bear-skin. Notwithstanding his outward hilariousness, he was inwardly morose, dissatisfied with the course which Prussian and European politics were following, and feeling himself condemned to honorable exile and inaction. He was once so severely ill through chagrin that his life was in danger. He said on his recovery that he had gone “half-way to a better world,” and expressed regret that he had not completed the journey. He thought of abandoning politics altogether, and with difficulty overcame his impatience sufficiently to bide his time a little longer. Gortchakoff said that Russia “did not sulk, but meditated.” Bismarck sulked and meditated. But meanwhile the course of events was preparing for him his opportunity. The strange and mixed drama in which Napoleon III., destined to be its principal victim, was the chief actor—whose critical moments were Sebastopol, Solferino, Sadowa, Sedan—was going on. This great actor, once regarded as a sphinx of political wisdom, but now designated by no more honorable title than the “dreamer of Ham,” holds a conspicuous place in the group of those apparently and temporarily great men to whom belongs the epitaph sadly composed for himself by the expiring Joseph II., Emperor of Austria: “Here lies the man who failed in all his undertakings.” More than this, he is a signal instance of that blind fatuity by which those men who set themselves to counteract the order of divine Providence are seduced, as the King of Israel was by the “lying spirit” in the mouth of his prophets, to ruin themselves and become the executioners of divine vengeance on their own persons.
If Louis Napoleon had had good sense and moral principle enough to imitate Charlemagne, he might have confirmed his dynasty, established France in solid power and prosperity, and earned true glory as a benefactor of Christendom. But he was not “of the seed of those men by whom salvation was brought to Israel.” He aspired to imitate Cæsar and Napoleon without possessing their genius. He imitated the profligacy of Cæsar in his youth, the perfidy of Napoleon in his old age. His early vices avenged themselves in the pain and disease which unmanned and incapacitated him for action in the last eventful crisis of his career. His criminal alliance with Carbonari and conspirators in his youth entangled him afterwards in a mesh which he had not courage, even if he had the wish, to break. By his alliance with the Turk he prepared an enemy in Russia, who became one principal cause of his final downfall and the humiliation of France, while he gained nothing beyond a momentary prestige of glory for his army. By his Italian campaign, and his subsequent support of Prussia against Austria, he weakened the power which would otherwise have befriended France in her dire distress; and he built up a kingdom which abandoned and betrayed him, at the cost of incurring the malediction which falls on all betrayers and oppressors of the Holy See.
By his greed of territory in annexing Savoy he alienated for ever his former ally, England. By the war above alluded to and his miserable Mexican fiasco he used up the splendid army of France, and was found minus habens when the day of destiny came on him unprepared. He deliberately fostered the military and political increase of Prussia, and then madly dragged down upon France that terrible power which, having first outwitted, in the second place crushed him.