BOOKS.
LIFE AND TIMES OF STEIN.*
VETS is a most disappointing book. A deficiency almost complete in the power of pictorial writing has spoiled the result
of great labour, great knowledge, and much careful thought.
The biography, to begin with, is a failure. The reader who toils patiently through these sixteen hundred pages will know much about Stein, the times in which he lived, the people among whom he moved, and the kind of policy which he ap- proved; but he will not necessarily know Stein, and will probably be less interested in him and his work than he was when he began. The imaginative picture of him which most educated
men have formed will have disappeared, and no definite likeness of him will have taken its place. Mr. Seeley has been a little too conscientious for the nineteenth century. He has thought it necessary to give all the facts and many of the documents upon which his opinions are founded, to print all he knows of his hero's official work, and to tell us all the circumstances by which he found himself impeded, and the 'consequence is that we often lose sight of the man himself, without gaining any clearer idea of general history. The book is full of information, and would be a perfect brief for any one who sat down to write in sixty pages an essay on Stein ; but it wearies the reader who sought for a biography or, at all events, a history, and only fads annals, and who longs in vain for a stirring chapter, or a memorable passage, or even a brilliant paragraph. There is none such throughout the work. Instead of these, he finds an even but soraetimes dull flow of very minute narrative, very impartial, very accurate, and occasionally, as in the accounts of Napoleon's policy in Spain and Russia, very suggestive, but on the whole uninteresting, and even tedious. The materials have not been thoroughly worked up, and the result is dough, not bread. Mr. Seeley himself could make it infinitely better by mere ex- cisions, but at present there is a redundancy of official detail, an absence of coup d'ccil, and a great surplusage of pages nearly as wearisome, not to' say unintelligible, as this :- "TI is fortunate that the narrative of Stein's rise through the official' hierarchy and of his struggle with the influence of Beyme 'has given the reader Borne acquaintance with the administrative system which he reformed. I need not explain again what is meant in Local Government by a War and Domains Chamber, nor in Central Government by the General Directory or by the Cabinet. We know that those Orders in Cabinet, of which some have been given in fall, and which were sometimes called Immediate Decisions, did not receive the counter-signature of any Minister. We became familiar long since with the peculiar nature of the Prussian Cabinet, and with the abusive influence of the Cabinet Secretaries. The Privy Council of State we know to have fallen into abeyance, though still nominally subsisting. The General Directory, created originally by Frederick William I., we have observed to have shown a tendency to dissolve into a number of committees for particular branches of government, the Presidents of these committees assuming gradually the.eharacter of Ministers. We have seen bow Frederick the Great had chosen to govern not through this Directory, but alone with his Cabinet Secretaries. The consequence of this had been greatly to strengthen the tendency to dissolution in the Directory. It had now ceased to be the instrument of bringing the Ministers together and creating a common understanding among them, while at the same time other Departments had been created, directed by Ministers who had not even nominally a place in the Directory. The fatal defect of this system may be described in one word, by saying that it exposed the country to fall into a condition in which there should practically be neither King, nor Prime Minister, nor governing Council."
After all, one object of a book is to be readable, and though history has often been written too brilliantly, we do not believe that to make it valuable it is necessary also to make it tedious. Nothing is lost by interesting the reader, while much is lost by a mode of narration which makes the student, after the perusal of the first and third volumes, commence the second with a feel- ing that it is a duty which he owes to himself, and not a pleasure which he owes to the author. He must work through the book for the sake of the subject, but except in the additions to his knowledge, which are considerable, and a few political sugges- tions, he reaps no adequate reward.
• Life cad rime of Stein. By J. B. Seeley. Cambridge University Press.
The first fact to be remembered about Stein is that his usual appellation, " Baron von Stein," misrepresentanot only his posi- tion, but him. He was not a Prussian noble, but the Freiherr vom Stein, "Knight of the Empire," independent sovereign of a small territory on the borders of Nassau, owing no allegiance to any one or any thing, save the Holy Roman Empire alone. This fact was the key to Stein's life and to his character. He never was a " junker," and never a German subject, but always a Prince, entitled, even though he could not live by his dominion, to speak to Princes as an equal, and to all other men as a social superior. It was to his birth, of which he was always and in- tensely conscious, that he owed the blunt, not to say brutal, frankness in dealing with Kings which always stood in his way; his faculty for uttering cruel reprimands, without disliking the officials reprimanded, which earned him so much hate; and the inner hauteur which made friends like Niebuhr declare that it was impossible to keep up true friendship with a man of such high birth. The sense that no man not a king could be his equal never quitted him, and combined with a cer- tain coldness of disposition—he liked his wife, for example, but was content to live years away from her, and liked his friends, but did not much care to see them—to make him a lonely man even in the thickest crowd. His birth, on the other hand, helped to preserve his exceptional self-respect and a dignity of life quite unique among his contemporaries, freed him from all illusions about the great, and gave him that detestation of the petty Princes of Germany, who thought themselves above him —him the Freiherr, responsible only to God—which undoubtedly was one moving spring of his policy, which was to create some- how, anyhow, a living Germany. The ninth of ten children of his father, born in 1757, he was, by a family arrangement not unusual in that day, declared the head of the family, and the only one of the boys entitled to marry, and after studying poli- tical science at Gottingen, and trying life for a few months in the house of an Imperial jurist at Wetzlar, he decided, probably from admiration of Frederick the Great, to enter the Prussian civil service. In this he passed twenty-four years, rising with some rapidity, until in 1804 we find him forty-six years old and Minister of Finance, and respected among officials as a thinker, a man of business, and a statesmen of rare firmness of character. He had acquired, of course, great knowledge of Prussia, and set himself at once to work to remedy the confusedness which was the grand defect of his own, as of all other departments of the administration. He was, indeed, throughout his career a great and clear-sighted, though harsh administrator, able in choosing instruments, but capable of intense dislikes, especially for men at once able and dissolute. He was, in fact, a ruler, and a stern one, as even his Boswell, Arndt, describes him :—
"The Baron Karl vom Stein was of middle height, rather Short and squat than tall and slender, the body strong, with broad German shoulders, legs and thighs well rounded, feet with clear instep, all at once strong and fine, marking the man of old family ; bearing and gait alike firm and measured. On this body sat a stately head, with a broad, receding forehead, as artists tell us the great man often hat% the nose strongly aquiline; below, a fine, tight month, and chin which
it must be confessed was a little too long and too pointed His hurricane nature, how liable he was to gales and storms of pas- sion, how at times his impatience made him a slave to fury which might then hurry him to all lengths, this infirmity he was quite con- scious of, and at times accused himself beyond all reason, as, in fact, it was his way, like a truly humble, honest man, not merely to confess it, but also to make compensation where he thought he had hurt good people by excessive vehemence and irritability. I have known cases enough of this where both myself and others were concerned. Often enough has the brave, pious man, speaking of long past years, espe- cially of his youth, in the consciousness of this passionateness, which was natural to him and of other fiery, inborn impulses, such as whirl and boil in mighty souls, said, 'Believe me, a man should never boast of his nature. We are all poor sinners, as Dr. Luther says. There was the stuff for a villain in me,lhad not my boyhood and yotth been curbed by a pions mother and yet more pious elder sister."
And he gradually spread through the higher officials an idea of his greatness, his firmness, and his ability, which induced them to press him upon the King; and Frederick William, by a decree dated Memel, October 4th, 1807, created him virtual Premier, not by declaring him such, but by making him member and usually President of all the Committees among which the supervision of public busi- ness was distributed. The King, a weak, but tenacious man, could not from the first endure the hot-sonled Freiherr, who bullied him, to speak plainly, whenever the good of the country required it, and who would not let him consult the. favourites in whom he had confidence. He once even threatened Stein with Spandau. for insolence, but probably reflecting that he had
no legal power over a Freiherr, drew his pen through the threat, leaving the words, however, legible for Stein to read ; and always regarded him as a necessary, but most unpleasant man. Stein, however, speedily justified the selection. The country was nearly ruined by the French war, by the partition, and by the French exactions—Napoleon, in fact, treating it as a con- quered province—and it became necessary to do something, if possible, which should increase the wealth of the whole land at once. Fortunately substantial power in Prussia belonged then, as now, not to the nobles, but to the officials, and a plan had been drawn up by the highest of them, which Stein adopted, pressed upon his master, and finally, on October 8th, 1807, promulgated as law for the whole monarchy, the famous Edict of October, which at a blow abolished serfage, declared every man in the monarchy free, and established free-trade in land, the foundation of modern Prussia. It was not, however, till 1811 that Harden- berg, a dissolute but most able man, with a sort of Jacobin energy in him—a Fox, with legal power—completed the reform by declaring the peasants free owners of two-thirds of the soil, and compensating the landlords by making them equally free proprie- tors of the remainder. It is characteristic at once of Mr. Seeley's want of pictorial power and of his strict impartiality, that he spends pages in showing that Stein did not originate this great measure, though he accepted and carried it, and that he was opposed to peasant proprietorships, but gives us no adequate account of the miseries from which it relieved the Prussian people, or the changes it produced in Prussian popular life. This edict passed, Stein set himself to the work of his life, the defeat of Napoleon, whom he regarded, as he avows, as "a man with hell in his heart and chaos in his head." His method was a systematised and organised in- surrection of the whole people, an idea suggested to him by the Spanish insurrection, and as Mr. Seeley thinks, by Fichte's elo- quent lectures on the subject. In a report to the King, dated 11th August, 1808, he directly proposed this plan, submitting also a detailed report from Scharnhorst, the great military organiser who originated the modern army of Prussia, showing how it was to be carried out. Stein was for immediate action, but the King, a weak man, with a certain reflective far-sightedness often found in such characters, refused, declaring that Russia was not ready, and that he did not trust either Austria or his own people. The truth was that he distrusted Stein, as too thoroughly "German," instead of Prussian, and feared the popular movement would become democratic. When the patriotic Minister recommended the formation of the Tugen- bunds, associations really directed against Napoleon, the King sanctioned them, 'but only on condition that their members took no part in politics ; and when Napoleon de- nounced Stein by name, the King abandoned him. He only remained Minister long enough to favour the scheme which ultimately delivered Prussia—Scharnhorst's scheme of passing all citizens through the military mill, and making the army and the population conterminous—and a few grand civil reforms. Stein seems to have trusted Scharnhorst entirely, even accept- ing rebukes from him as to his own great drawback, his irrita- bility, and is therefore entitled to much of Sclutrnhorst's credit. He, moreover, carried out a municipal reform which created a petty Parliament in every town, and woke up once more the dying interest of the people in public affairs; and he reduced the administrative system of Prussia, previously a mass of confu- sion, into effective order, by measures described by Mr. Seeley in great and confusing detail.
On November 24th, Stein retired, leaving documents which showed that he had conceived the idea of changing Prussia into a free Parliamentary State. His views were caught at by the people, and Stein became the most popular man in all Germany, and the one most hated by Napoleon.' He retired at first to Austria, but after four years of life marked mainly by secret efforts to rouse Germany, he was summoned to Russia in 1812 by an autograph letter from _the Czar. He remained there during Napoleon's invasion and retreat, and gained great influence over the mind of Alexander, a Sovereign whom, per- sonally, he rather despised, as " a weak and sensual Prince," but who at the crisis of his life displayed a most heroic firmness, refusing absolutely to negotiate until the French were out of Russia. Alexander trusted him entirely, and. it was by his in- fluence that Stein was made first Dictator of East Prussia, then occupied by a Russian army, and afterwards Emperor of Ger- many "—that is, Chief of the Central Administration placed by the Allied Powers—Russia, Austria, .Prussia, and England—in possession. of all German territory which had not belonged to
those Powers before 1805. Those territories were to be ad- ministered for the purposes of the war by Boards, but Stein, as Chief, was to appoint the Boards, and in fact to reign,—a strange position, indicating the unlimited con- fidence of four great Governments, and one, too, which we suspect would not have been assigned even to Stein but for the aeci- dent of his birth. As Administrator he bullied the Princes,. raised a war revenue, collected an army nominally of 150,000- men, and until the Allies entered Paris in triumph was, in all but name, a German Sovereign. Then his career ended. His views about German Federation were rejected, there was no adequate place for him, the " Ebenbiirtig," with their cus- tomary folly, had not made him a King, as they could have done almost without remark, by giving him an enlarged Nassau, and he retired, to live thenceforward, till June 29th, 1831, in West- phalia and Nassau as a great political noble, often consulted and sometimes employed, but no longer a leading personage in Europe. His death was probably not noticed out of Germany,. and except in Prussia he left no permanent mark. There, however,. and consequently in Germany, his name is stamped for-ever, though part of the credit which attaches to him belongs to the able staff officer, Scharnhorst, whom Europe has forgotten, and to Hardenberg, his great rival, with the insight and the disso- luteness of Fox and the energy of a Prussian official. In his later years, Stein was supposed to be reactionary, and was con- demned as a mere aristocrat; but he remained what he had always been,—an able Whig, caring little for liberty, but caring much for the strong national action, which can only be secured when people and executive are in harmony through popular re- presentation. There have been as able men, and many men more fortunate ; but Stein was almost alone in this,—that he always dared carry out into immediate action, over broad areas,. the plans he had devised or had accepted. He did not merely approve them, he made them working laws, octroyed them, as it were, as effective measures. He never rejected help, never cared for servility, never regarded men much, except for their utility to the State, had just that prejudice of birth which belongs to- Princes—that is, he would employ anybody, but recognised few as equals—and was, in fact, a great German King, who never obtained a crown. He will be better known by all who read Mr. Seeley's book, but of them all, but few will be grateful to Mr. Seeley.
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