BOOKS.
BISMARCK.* [FIRST NOTICE.]
FIFTY years ago there sat on the throne of Prussia a man possessed of many and great gifts; but these gifts were calculated rather to enable him to shine in society than to rule a State. It was said of Frederick William IV. by one who had observed him closely, that he was the incarnation of the nineteenth century in so far as it repudiated its immediate predecessor, and he was a victim to the fatal habit of putting things on their edges so as to look all round them and te defer the trouble of making up his mind. During the earlier years of his reign three tendencies were to be traced amongat- the more active-minded portion of the people he was called. upon to govern. First came the French, which was powerfal in the middle and lower classes, taking in the former some- what the colour of the politicians who were combating in the Chambers the Government of Louis Philippe, while in the latter it had a decided Socialist tinge. Then came the High Conservative party, which was frieudlily disposed towards- Austria, but leant much more upon Russia, and believed the Emperor Nicholas to be the stay of all that was good is Germany and Europe. It was influential amongst the Bureaucracy, but had its real strength amongst the so-called) Junkers, a term difficult to translate, because we have not,. nor ever have had, anything in the least like them. They might be described as squires of good birth, fcr the most part of small means, but with immense preten- sions as born to fill the high places of the Army, the Court, and the Administration. Thirdly, there was a very small section, consisting of the We of intelligence, which looked to England and English institutions as affording the best example for Prussia to follow in passing from absolutism to constitutional government.
It was the first of these parties which triumphed in the rather crazy outbreak of March, 1848, and it was the second which triumphed in the equally foolish reaction which followed it. The year before the February troubles in Paris set the match to the mass of explosive material which lay thickly strewn over Europe, the King of Prussia, who had promised a Constitution to his people, presented them with e strange medimval Assembly, which he called the United Diet. In this Diet, which was very unlike anything they had ex• pected, but afforded nevertheless a certain opportunity for the expression of public opinion, Herr von Bismarck, a young squire of Pomerania belonging to a knightly family, made himself conspicuous by the violence of his hostility to modern ideas. He had passed through various schools, had been known at the University chiefly ae a roysterer and swashbuckler, had done some work in the lowest ranks both of the judicial and administrative hierarchy, and had, acquired in his own neighbourhood the kind of reputation) which our own Mohocks of an earlier age desired and obtained Of his achievements in that line he says nothing in the work before us, which is a highly expurgated edition of his doing]. and thinkings, but traces of them will be found in the work • Bismarck. the Man and the Statesman: being the Refleatons and Rominis. center of Otto von Bismarck. 2 vole. Loudon: buiith, Elder. and Co. (32,1 eI the faithful and adoring Busch, which will ever be read as what it was deliberately intended to be, a supplement to the a authorised version" contained in the memoirs. It cannot be too distinctly proclaimed that, revolting as is the work of Busch, it is a perfect photograph of the personage to whose glory it is dedicated. Never had any statesman a more accurate biographer, nor one more entirely worthy of him.
When the Revolution broke out in Berlin, Herr von Bis- marck's first idea was to raise the peasantry in his neigh- bourhood and to march upon the capital. He was so set upon this piece of folly that he threatened to murder then and there his next neighbour, who, being a man of sense, proposed to dissuade them from that course. He went, however, to Berlin and proposed his plan of operations, but was met by the military authorities with the remark that they did not want his peasants, but would not object to have their corn and potatoes. He proceeded to busy himself in various small intrigues, of which an account may be read in the second chapter of these memoirs. How much of the statements may be true it is impossible to say. There is at p. 24 a specially curious story of an interview with the Princess of Prussia, in long after years the Empress Augusta, which sadly wants confirmation. It is exceedingly easy to slander a woman, especially after she is dead. It was, indeed, the thing which Bismarck, through all his life, could do best. The King might, not improbably, have fallen in with the views of those who wished him to atop all revolutionary movements, in /intim, by the use of the troops, if he had not had an eye to his popularity in Germany at large, and to the possible restoration of the Empire. Whether he actually described the Junker who offered him so much advice as " a red reactionary with a scent for blood," or as a man "only to be employed when the bayonet governs unrestricted," we do not know, and it does not much matter. There are authorities for both expressions ; but it is quite clear that the hot- headed zealot was thought all too dangerous. The great mistake the King made was that he had not his Army ready to support his Imperial ambitions, and to take advantage of the weakness of Austria, in 1849. As it turned out, when the crisis of 1850 came, and war with his Southern neighbour was imminent, he had to succumb to the open menaces of Vienna and the veiled menaces of his greater Northern neighbour. One who saw the Emperor Nicholas in the crisis of these affairs, described him to the writer of this article as "the very embodiment of an Arctic storm." It was lucky for Bismarck that he was only officiously, not officially, occupied with Governmental affairs at this dark moment of Prussia's history. Re was soon, however, to be in office as Envoy to the Federal Diet at Frankfort, and for a brief period as Minister at Vienna during the illness of the Prussian Ambassador at that Court. The memoirs pass very lightly over his disagreeable relations with the Austrians at Frankfort, and those personal slights which had so much to do with making him the enemy of the country whose spokesmen they were. His hatred went even further at this early period than has been generally known, as may be gathered from his views with respect to the attitude to be taken by Prussia towards Austria daring the Crimean War as set forth in chap. 5. That chapter, how- ever, is chiefly interesting as showing what Bismarck wished to be believed as to the influences which acted on the mind of the Prince of Prussia at that time, and led him to assume a more than critical attitude towards the persons who were misleading his brother, persons who had, we need hardly say, the full sympathy of his Envoy at Frankfort. The very best men whom Prussia held at that moment—Bethmann-Hollweg, Count Albert Pourtales, and others—are, of course, well abused, and Bunsen, who was then Prussian Minister in London, comes in for very vitriolic censure. The memoir writer is, however, careful not to mention that the Prince if Prussia had bitterly resented the insulting language which the Emperor Nicholas had held towards him on his last visit to Berlin, and probably did not know that, after reading a. copy of a private letter from Bunsen to the King, he [the Prince] had said to the bearer of it : "I cannot tell you, how obliged I am to you for showing me this letter; the writer is now the only man who can make my brother hear reason."
The simple fact of the matter was that the men whom we have just mentioned were the representatives of what we have described as the English tendency, which now, for the first time, began to exert a distinct influence upon affairs. It was not strong enough to lead Prussia to join the Western Powers, but it was strong enough to bring about various good things, the best of which was the marriage of the heir to the throne with the Princess Royal of England. Nothing is more curious in all Bismarck's history than his pronounced dislike to England, not because he thought she was in any way unfriendly to his country, but because he feared that her example would be too attractive in Germany, and because, not being what Englishmen understand by a gentleman, his vanity was irritated by all intercourse with them. He felt his inferiority, and believed himself to be despised by people who were not troubling themselves about him. See for an illustration of his feeling p. 132.
The English marriage, which did not take place till the year 1858, was highly disagreeable to the Russian party, which had had its own way till the health of Frederick William IV. broke utterly down, and in it is to be found the key to the malignant hostility with which Bismarck ever pursued the heir to the throne. No falsehood was daring enough for him to make use of to injure the man who had become connected so closely with the detested islanders. Readers of Dr. Busch will find evidence of this scattered all through his pages. If there ever was a man who lived for his duty it was he who after- wards became the Emperor Frederick. Yet he is represented by Bismarck in Basch's book as a mere frivolous pleasure- seeker ! If it is worth while for a statesman to leave intention- ally erroneous statements behind him, it would be surely worth while to clothe them with a certain amount of plausibility. More plausible was his complaint that the English bride influenced her husband. Of course she did. Who ever heard of a successful marriage in which the husband did not influ- ence the wife, and the wife the husband ? His marriage introduced the young man into a new and much wider world, brought him into relations with countless new interests and the politics of half mankind. Naturally that was disagree- able to the narrow-minded Pomeranian squire who had been trying to exercise both over Frederick William IV. and his brother an infi uence directly opposed to that of Bunsen Humboldt, and others who, accustomed to wider horizons,1 could not look at things from a mere provincial point of view. Bismarck's dislike to superiority of every kind comes out all through his history. He served his King, but he hated him for being King, and sneered at him behind his back whenever he dared. "The King," he said, for example, "is a horse who refuses his leaps, but I'll get the old jade over!" Yet heartily as he hated social superiority, he hated intellectual superiority even more. That was an element in his lifelong detestation of the Crown Princess. It is hardly possible to imagine that he really believed her to be the kind of person who meddles in the details of politics. Brought up under the eye of her father, she had a keen interest in the larger questions and larger movements of her time, political, social, educa- tional, and literary, but to see in her a political woman in the ordinary sense, say a sort of glorified Princess Lieven, was simply absurd. It involved a total misconception of a character whose lines were sufficiently well defined to make it by no means difficult to comprehend. Her mother-in-law, although very unlike her in many ways, had also the con- spicuous demerit in the eyes of Bismarck of having been brought up under the influence of very intelligent star. roundings. His hatred for her and her brother, the Grand Duke of Weimar, who was certainly at some critical times exceedingly friendly to him, was almost insane.
After the Prince of Prussia had become Regent, Bismarck was moved, much against his wish, from Frankfort to St. Petersburg. Chap. 10, one of the most interesting in this book, gives an account of his residence there, but it formed only an episode in his life, and we need not farther allude to it. In 1862 he was transferred from St. Petersburg to Paris, but never settled there, and was presently recalled to Berlin, thanks chiefly to the well-intentioned machinations of General von Boon, who did good service to his country as a military organiser, but was the avowed and deadly enemy of Parlia. mentary government. No sooner had Bismarck reached the capital than he was made Minister-President, his Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre were over, and the period in which he was to make history had begun.
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