PERSONAL PERSONAGES.
NEWSPAPERS have an obstacle to contend with in their daily record of history which very often escapes attention, and that is the difficulty they have both in obtaining and diffus- ing that clear impression of the minds of the leading personages in the world which those who may read the history a century hence will probably possess. This knowledge is very often essen- tial to the comprehension even of daily facts, and is always essen- tial to the understanding of their general bearing; yet it is sometimes unattainable by publicists, and almost invariably unattainable by their readers. Foreigners very seldom quite understand the govern- ing men even of free countries, men who are incessantly before the public ; and of the Personal Personages, as they may be called, the men who are powerful from other reasons than their eloquence or their official acts, it is hard to get and harder to publish the merest outline of truth. Nobody, perhaps, in possession of great power was ever studied with more painful attention than the Emperor Napoleon, and certainly nobody ever was described with less of respectful reticence. He was known by thousands as a private individual, he was surrounded as Emperor by enemies and spies, he lived in critical, censorious, gossipy Paris, it has been the interest of his successors to publish unpleasant scandals about him ; yet we doubt if a hundred Englishmen are aware of his grand defect as an administrator, ever think of him as a saunterer, a victim to an excessive, almost abnormal, indolence. The daily, hourly, work, hard disagreeable work, work about de- tails, work compelling him to scold, and censure, and hurt a hundred men a day, which Frederick the Great delighted in, and which would have saved France, was almost impossible to him. He would have died of the distasteful toil, would, we believe, scarcely have attempted it even had he known the ruin his favourites were working by their neglect, indolence being, in natures like his, a passion as strong as opium-eating. This de- fect, though perfectly well known to his intimates, was entirely unknown to the majority of men, yet it may well have been the one which ultimately proved fatal. Take Marshal Prim again. Nobody, perhaps, ever stood forward more distinctly before the world, nobody had lived more in public, nobody had been more carefully watched ; yet among average Englishmen how many have any distinct conception of Prim, how many know what manner of man he was, have any fixed opinion as to the motives which impelled him to adopt his almost unintelligible policy ? Was he a patriot, or a would-be Caesar, or a mere soldier? a vain man, or a covetous man, or a plain man? How many are there who can answer those questions as they will be answered a century hence ? Yet till they are an- swered, who can write with any approach to accuracy the history of an interregnum which depended mainly upon the personal characteristics of the Dictator ? A dozen diplomatists doubtless think they know all about him, and how many of them agree in their delineation of his character ? There is a stately man reigning down there in Vienna, whose personal alliance is of the last importance to Englishmen, for if with it we might not secure the alliance of Austria, against it we certainly should have no chance, the Emperor still swaying not only the Army and society, but Count von Beust ; yet how many Englishmen have the faintest conception of the manner of man Francis Joseph is, whether he is essentially a tyrant, as they thought in 1849, or at heart a constitutionalist, as they want to believe now ; whether he is, as men used to say in 1856, liable to fits of headstrong resolve, or whether, as men reported after Sadowa, he is a sadly patient politician? Does anybody even so much as know for certain whether he is an Ultramontane or not? and yet think what issues may de- pend on that, how that must modify all future Austrian legislation. Bismarck is better known, the epigrammatic phrase "A Junker of genius" happening not to be so inaccurate a description of his inner self as epigrams usually are ; but who knows anything of the loftiest figure in Europe, the new Charlemagne, the proud old man who accepts God as a kind of partner, yet is probably pious ; who weeps over a hospital ward, yet can starve Paris down ; who shows no sign of purely intellectual capacity, yet never chooses the wrong man ; who must have a vast ambition, yet waves aside an Imperial Crown ? To know King William's mind is to understand
the war, and how much is known of it abroad? Absolutely nothing at all. There are not five men in England, there are pro- bably not ten in the world, who understand accurately and cer- tainly the impulse which led King William after Sedan to Paris ; or what is the nature of the self-distrust which makes him deem himself an involuntary instrument, a divinely-chosen weapon of retribution, yet leaves him free to desire territory ; or whether indeed that self-distrust or that desire is his. And then his son. The Crown Prince married an English princess, and partly from that cause, partly from his occasional graciousness to Englishmen, but chiefly from his bearing, we all here think of him with a certain hope ; but who among us all really knows him, who is certain that he is more than a Hohenzollern ? He looks it, and the face is usually a true index of character ; but then faces are inherited. It may be Queen Augusta, not Crown Prince Fritz, who is looking through those steady, searching eyes ; some far-away ancestress who has given that seemingly kindly mouth. No one is or can be certain about him, and yet he may give the tone to a new epoch.
We doubt very greatly whether this ignorance is ever likely to be much dispelled. The power of the individual does not decline—four or five deaths would even now change Europe— but the power of the public to understand an individuality does. Inquisitiveness, no doubt, is greater than ever. Publicity is greater than ever. Analytical ability, if not greater, is more diffused than ever. But the ruling men of the world are as con- scious of these things as the subject men, and the former do not like them, and they have discovered defences which are nearly imper- vious in etiquette and formalism. No King now fails to make of his palace a Castle of Silence, where nothing done or said produces a reverberation loud enough to be heard outside. Even at Windsor the rule is to be blind, deaf, and dumb, and in the despotic Courts a breach of the rule would be summarily avenged. No public man, except perhaps Count Bismarck, ever allows himself to be natural in public,—to say exactly what he thinks, to let the public into that chamber wherein he keeps his inner self. In his most unguarded moments he still remembers that he is under that " fierce light which beats upon a throne," and shelters himself in an impalpable white fog, which the light somehow does not pene- trate. The old utterances of Kings are full of their individuality. Modern Sovereigns, Napoleon partially excepted, all talk alike in public, King William's colloquial telegrams being merely a con- cession to the homeliness of German taste, and no more an evi- dence of character than Maria Theresa's exclamation in the theatre, " My Fritz has a boy ! " was proof that she was not the proudest woman in Europe. Statesmen of old lived in public, and worked in Cabinets ; ours work in Cabinets, and live their true lives within their own four walls. Many of them, like General Grant, Count von Moltke, and at times the Emperor Napoleon, defended themselves from curiosity and criticism by a systematic silence sometimes curiously at variance with their natural tastes, while all either catch or affect the trick of the diplomatic caste. The desperate effort made by American journalists to break through this defensive reticence has, on the whole, proved a failure, the statesmen " interviewed," either refusing to reply to interrogatories, or replying in speeches as reticent and as well-considered as any other of their deliverances in public. The Courts are not likely to surrender their etiquettes, and they are likely more and more to conciliate the journalists, who, already indisposed to break through the etiquettes of per- sonal criticism, will, we conceive, become more and more reserved, till at last it will be as difficult for the Times to discuss a states- man like Bismarck, as it would be for Mr. Ayrton in the House to analyze the character of the Queen. There may be gain of a kind in this reticence, for the "fierce light" does not altogether improve the character of those upon whom it falls, rendering them cynical if they despise it, and weak if they are sensitive to it, but the gain is most certainly not a gain to the daily history of the world.
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