PRINCE BISMARCK'S LETTERS.*

ONLY one observation need be made about the work of the trans- lator of the Iiismarckbrieft,—it is well done. Herr Maxse ought, however, to have made some reference to the original German collection. The translation is dedicated, by permission, to the Princess Bismarck. The Prince, it may be believed, therefore,

has no objection to the English people seeing him in dressing- gown and slippers.

Several of these letters, having been translated before, are well known here. That, for example, to "my dear heart," describing the capitulation of Napoleon III., after the battle of Sedan, is familiar as most household words eight years old. Bismarck's account, too, of the accident by which he was once photographed in the company of Faulein Lucca, in 1865, is tolerably well known, although, perhaps, the simplicity of the Confession of Faith therein contained—a trusting Theism, not unlike Cromwell's or Garibaldi's—has not been estimated at its proper value as a factor in a great political career. Of others of the Letters, the fascinating work of M. Julian Klackzo on The Two Chancellors has pre- sented us with a précis. But the translation of the whole collection is a work which was worth doing. During the late debates on the Socialism Repression Bill, the Chancellor showed himself singularly, almost morbidly, anxious that his personal and political doings should not be misunderstood. The publication of his Letters is the best Apologia that could have appeared. A

perusal of the collection—an excellent recreation after a good day's work, and indeed an admirable appetiser for dinner—leads one to the conclusion that Bismarck could have been anything that a man of Teutonic origin can be, and that he would have been always strong. As a letter-writer pure and simple, he is superior to two men with whom he has some impulses in common, Byron and Burns. Ile is simpler and more natural than either. The passion of love, which is the most genuine thing in them, is in him simply domestic emotion, kept well in rein by the evident belief that Providence—for " Providence," not too closely analysed, sums up the Bisrnarckian creed—had designed him for a life of action, and that therefore persons must play a secondary part to general principles. He appears devoid of affectation, and he writes, unlike the great peer and the still greater peasant, as if he were heedless as to whether contemporaries or posterity should read what he had written. As a letter-writer, too, Bismarck is superior to himself as a speaker. He once said of his oratorical efforts, "I am not capable of working upon your feelings, or obscuring facts with a play of words." In his letters, although when he deals with politics he does anything but ob-

scure facts, he possesses a capacity for playing upon words which would have made the fortune of half-a-dozen of our modern humourists. In many respects he resembles Scott, specially in his quick relish for what is objectively beautiful and subjectively amusing, although there is a particular aroma in his humour which suggests Tbackeray in his vanitas van itatum vein. We quote from two of the pleasantest of his early letters, written to his wife

during the Frankfort mission. The first is written from Ofen :—

" The look-out is delightful. The castle lies high ; beneath me, first, the Danube spanned by the susponsion-bridge, then Pesth, and farther off the endless plains beyond Pesth, dissolving into the blue-red even- ing haze. Near Pesth, or the loft, I look up the Danube ; far, very far away, to my left—I mean on the right bank—the river is girded by the town of Ofen ; then come the mountains blue and still bluer, and then a brownish-red in the evening sky which forms the glowing background. In the centre of the two towns lies a wide water-mirror, like that at Linz, broken by the suspension-bridge and a wooded island. The journey here, at all events from Gran to Posth, would also have pleased you; imagine the Odenwald and Taunus pushed near to each other, and the space between filled with the waters of the Danube. The dark aide of the journey was the sunny side ; it burned to that extent, that one would have thought tokay was to be grown on board the vessel ; and there was a great crush of travellers; but only conceive it, not a single Englishman !—they cannot yet have discovered Hungary. There were, however, queer follows enough from all eastern and western nations, some clean, some dirty. My particular travelling companion • Prince Bismarck's Leiters to his Wife, his Sister, and others,from 1844 to 1870. Translated from the 'German by Fitsh. Masse. London: Chapman and Hall. 1878. was a very pleasant general officer, with whom I sat almost the whole time smoking on the paddle-box. I am beginning to be impatient as to where Hildebrand is. I am leaning out of the window—half in a reverie over the moonlight, half longing for him as for one's sweetheart —for I require a clean shirt. If you could only be here for a moment, and could throw a glance down on the dead silver of the Danube, the darkening hills on the pale-red background, and on the lights which are twinkling below us in Pesth, Vienna would then, I fancy, sink con- siderably in your estimation matched against Buda-Pestb, as the Hungarians term it. You see that I am also a dreamer over Nature's handiwork. And now, as Hildebrand has at last arrived, I will tone down my feverish blood with a cup of tea, and then to bed. Last night I had only four hours of sleep, and the Court is shndderingly early here ; the young Emperor himself gets up at five o'clock, and I should therefore be hut a bad courtier if I slept much longer myself. There- fore with a side-glance on a huge teapot, and a tempting plate of cold meat in jelly, and other good things, as I observe, I say good-night to you from far away. Where did I get that song from which has been haunting me the whole day?— , Over the blue mountain, over the white sea-foam,

Come thou beloved one, come to thy lonely home.'

I don't know who must have sung that to me 'in old lang

Take, again, this description of a Hungarian village :— " After a comfortable breakfast under the shadow of a lime-tree, like ours at Schoenhausen, I got into a very low peasant-cart filled with sacks of straw, and with three horses from the steppes in front; the lancers loaded their carbines, mounted, and away we went at a rattling gallop. Hildebrand and a Hungarian valet-de-place on the front straw sack, and the coachman, a dark-brown-coloured peasant, with moustache, broad-brimmed bat, long black hair shining with bacon-fat, a shirt which falls short of the stomach and permits the view of a hand-breadth belt of the owner's own dark brown skin, cut off by the white trousers, of which each leg is wide enough for a woman's petticoat, and which reach down to the knees, where the spurred boots commence. Imagine turf firm and level as a table, on which for miles one sees as far as the horizon nothing but the high, bare trees at the draw-wells, dug for half-wild horses and oxen, thousands of whitish-gray oxen, with horns as long as one's arm and shy as deer; ragged, seedy-looking horses, herded by mounted, half-naked shepherds, armed with lance-like sticks; endlesa herds of pigs, amongst which invariably a donkey carrying the fur coat (bunda) of the shepherd, and occasionally himself ; also large flocks of bustards, hares, mice-like marmots; occasionally near a pond of brackish water, wild geese, ducks, and plovers. Such were the objects which during the three hours which we took for a thirty-five miles' drive to Ketskemet, flew past us and we past them, with a short halt at a csarda (lonely inn)."

It may be said that there is a good deal of the "champagne and porter" mixture, by which expression he once characterised his oratory in such descriptions as these, but both the ingredients in the compound are of the best quality. Altogether a draught of Bismarckbriefe is as enjoyable as a supper of haggis followed by toddy in one of the Nodes Ambrosianw, and is not so calculated

to induce indigestion.

While Bismarck is revealed in his letters as a man, large in all re- spects, in his love of nature, in his Berserkir fancy, and even in his simplicity of faith, they also give us some insight into his views as a politician. He does not, in writing to his kindred, enter into the minute details of his work as Ambassador and Minister, but some- times in a few trenchant sentences he gives what he thinks of the diplomatists whom he came across. What, for example, could be better than this, written from Frankfort in 1851 :—

"Nothing but miserable trifles cl; these people trouble themselves about, and the diplomatists here strike me as being infinitely more ridiculous, with their important ponderosity concerning gathered raga of gossip, than even a member of the Second Chamber in the full conscious- ness of his dignity. If foreign events do not occur, and these we super- humanly clever beings of the Band can neither foretell nor direct, I know very well what we shall have arrived at in one, two, or five years' time, and am prepared to reach tho same end in twenty-four hours, if only the others will be truthful and sensible for one single day. I never doubted that they all cook with water, but such a plain, bare-faced water-soup, without even the faintest trace of stock, astonishes me. Send the village clerk, X—, or Herr v . . . (?) arsky, from the turnpike lodge, here ; and after they have been properly washed and combed, I will make a sensation with them amongst the diplomats. I am making giant strides in the art of saying nothing in a great many words. I write reports pages long, as rounded and polished as leading articles ; and if Manteuffel, after he has read them, can say what is in them, he can do more than I can. We all play at believing that each of us is crammed full of ideas and plans, if he would only speak, and we are every one of us perfectly well aware that all of us together are not a hair better as to knowledge of what will become of Germany than gossamer Summer. No one, not even the most malicious democrat, can form a conception of the charlatanism and self-importance of our assembled diplomacy."

These letters, especially from St. Petersburg, abound in such pro- phecies as, "I see in our relation with the Bund an error of Prussia's, which, sooner or later, we shall have to repair, ferro et igni, unless we take advantage betimes of a favourable season to

employ a healing remedy against it ;" and "I do not comprehend why we so gingerly start back from the idea of a representation of the people, be it of the Bund or in a Customs and Union Par- liament." What would the Chancellor's opponents not give at present, to have a revelation in letters of his connection with Lassalle and the Socialistic movement ?

We have no space to give more quotations from a book so pleasant and so eminently quotable ; but we may say, in conclu- sion, that the reader will find Prince Bismarck always readable and likeable,—not least likeable when the possibility of his enemies being able to drive him from politics into the private life of a country squire makes him not angry, but only Shakespearean. It is well that we should all—Englishmen, in particular—be reminded, at the present time, by the most commanding and most successful personality of the time, that there are things more to be thought of in life than "the prospect of a continued regime of truffles, despatches, and Grand Crosses."