The Life of Bismarck, Private and Political; With Descriptive Notices of His Ancestry
By . Translated and edited, with Explanatory Notes and Appendices, by KENNETH R. H. MACKENZIE, F. S. A., F. A. S. L. New York ; Harper and Brothers.
THIS book is a fine illustration of what may be termed the high toryism of biography ; for it would be hard to come upon a chronicle in this age which so accepts and conserves every fact as the best possible one in the premises. The original German biographer of Count Bismarck has nowhere in this volume allowed the steady stream of his paneygric to be turned aside by the most stubbornly rocky and tortuous places in his hero’s career. The reader must be a lover of ex parte statement, or a determined spirit, at least, who remains wide awake through all the lapses of this conservative dulness. There is, too, such a flavor of Prussia and nothing but Prussia in every page, that one could hardly fall asleep in the perusal of the book without seeming to be invited thereto by the strains of Ich bin ein Preusse. The latter portion of the work especially would almost appear to have been written to the music of that soulstirring air; and it would be no very fanciful use of language to call this entire Life of Bismarck a mild sort of prose paraphrase of the Prussian national hymn.
The biographer has evidently had the best sources to draw from. It is, therefore, only the greater pity that he has produced a book which is worth so little as a contribution to general historical knowledge. The private letters of Bismarck to his wife and sister are not only the most valuable but the most readable portions of the volume. The humor and vigor of the Minister-President’s epistolary style seem all the more delightful from their dull setting in the text. There are, indeed, two things which the most casual reader will have no difficulty in discovering : first, that Bismarck is a greater man than his biographer ; and, second, — which is a finer point, —that the biographer is a greater man than his translator.
The Preface by the English editor and translator is a gratuitous excursion back into the times and opinions of the Tudors and Stuarts, in a positive attempt to convert us at the start to Bismarck’s policy of the divine right, not of kings, but the king of Prussia. That a British subject could be found in this age to write himself down thus two hundred years behind the most laggard of Anglo-Saxon thought is something almost incredible. It is certainly an evidence of superiority in the German biographer that he mourns feebly over the slight early tendencies to liberalism in Bismarck, and accepts his last policy without argument. In the introductory portions of the work, treating of the ancestral history of the family, we have a striking instance of the practical working of the divine right of misgovernment on the Bismarcks themselves. We are called upon to admire the patriotism with which they suffer themselves to be dispossessed of their hereditary estates by a certain electoral prince, because these lands stood in the way of the sovereign’s hunting-grounds. The early chapters, indeed, furnish about the only sample in the work of that exhaustive handling of a subject which seems to be the natural outgrowth of the German mind’s inherent honesty. The humorist who gave the improbable account of two large folio volumes written by some patient Teuton on the digestion of a flea would find something almost as absurd in the difficulty which our present biographer has with a certain Claus von Bismarck and others of the great chancellor’s ancestors who are recorded to have been “freemen of the guild of tailors.” A tailor, being proverbially the ninth part of a man, could hardly be a patrician ; and the evident pain with which the author struggles to prove that these sartorial fractions of humanity were real integers of noble blood is certainly pathetic. But there is, it must be confessed, less of opinion and more of fact in the account of “ The Bismarcks of Olden Time,” and this makes it more valuable than the average matter of later portions of the book. One is not, however, on that account disposed to quarrel with the translator for abridging these introductory chapters, for they are still a trifle tedious and have at best the kind of interest merely of “ The British Peerage ” or the “ Almanach de Gotha.”
The career of Bismarck is too well known to be followed here, even in the briefest summary. It is sufficient for the present purpose to say that, with the exception of a tolerably interesting account of his boyhood and youth, and some intolerably uninteresting anecdotes of his manhood, his present biographer has thrown very little light upon the particular events of the MinisterPresident’s history about which the world is most curious. The Schleswig-Holstein outrage is almost entirely passed over; and that other measure, the Prusso-Russian treaty for the suppression of the Polish insurrection, in which not even our faithful eulogist can find anything to praise, is dismissed in the following impudent sentence : “ The internal meaning of this [convention] and its reaction require some further explanation which it is not desirable at present to give.” We can sympathize even with the clumsy English of the foot-note, in which the translator condemns this assumption and the hiding of a “ very small personality ” “ behind weighty cloudiness and the permission to copy Bismarck’s correspondence.”
The last chapters of the book are taken up with a very Jenkins-like account of “ A Ball at Bismarck’s,” and of his house and estate of Varzin ; and these chapters are not without a certain kind of interest, because, despite what the wise may say, the spirit of Jenkins has a Stronghold in the weakness of universal human nature. Even that weakness, however, can hardly endure some of the anecdotes which are told over beer of Bismarck’s furnishing in the garden of his house in Berlin. Accept these examples : —
“In the year 1848 there was a great deal rumored about a falling away of the Rhine provinces. ‘ Where are they going to fall to ?’ asked Bismarck.”
“Bismarck allowed another deputation to whine for a long time about universal military service and the weight of taxation ; he then said very seriously and in a tone of great astonishment, ‘ Dear me, these gentlemen probably thought they could become Prussians for nothing ?’ ”
If we do not see the remarkable humor of this latter “anecdote,” we certainly have a fine insight into the working of the policy which just now rules the North German Confederation.
Scarcely any one could have written so much about Bismarck without giving evidences enough of his sublime stubbornness and masterly combination in carrying out his plans to leave the impression of a certain kind of greatness on the mind of the reader; but it hardly goes to establish the claims of the Minister - President to tenderness for human life when, in a letter written to his wife from the field of battle, we find in the same paragraph that speaks of the twenty thousand dead around him this calm sentence : “ Send me a French novel to read.”
“ Now,”exclaims his biographer, “in Bismarck there is no trace of apostasy throughout his political life, and perhaps in no statesman can an enduring political principle be more easily discovered and followed into detail.” What, then, is this enduring political principle ? If the world did not know pretty well already, it can learn in euphemistic language on page 164 : “ Bismarck’s real policy consists in forcing parties unwilling to do so to work and strive for the monarchy.” To which is immediately added this very doubtful prophecy, that “ in royal Prussia no party can any longer exist with the object of weakening the royal power.”
The greatest difference, it strikes us, between the Count von Bismarck and the average diplomatic hero of Miss Mühlbach is just this persistency with which he has carried his stolid mediæval ideas in the face of everything. That is why the world is talking about him and naming towns and colors and hats after him.
It is well, however, to recall that in the late struggle, as far as Germany was concerned, the sympathy of the advanced opinion of this age was with the Central States. They went with Austria when they dared, because Roman Catholic Austria was more liberal than Protestant Prussia, under Bismarck. In spite of all the fine writing that has been done about a United Germany, we have had repeated in this latter half of the nineteenth century the old fight of Charles I. against his Parliament; and the divine right of a very reactionary old Prussian king has triumphed, because Bismarck has had the genius to make it triumph. The late granting of universal suffrage in Prussia has been only in the same spirit and in the same interests in which it has been granted in France. No one will doubt that good has come and is still to come to Germany from the Prussian victories ; but that was not and never has been even the declared object of Bismarck and his policy. The crushing of Austria and the aggrandizement of Prussia have been his great design and achievement. The press, and the excellent school system of the North German Confederation are preparing the way for the parliamentary struggle yet to come, and the final triumph of constitutional government will, it is hoped, be the ripe fruit of the present Union.
We cannot agree at all with Bismarck’s biographer, and in dismissing him we will say for his hero that the panegyrist does not seem to rise to anything like a just appreciation of the strength or even the admirable qualities of the famous chancellor. Great powers must be granted, of course, to the man who has humbled Austria and defied France, but still he is responsible to the age in which he lives; and, judged by what it holds dearest in its thought and its achievement, Bismarck is, in the better sense, neither great nor good