No More Learning

What they did lack was an army and the executive
organs of government, and before they could create them
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BISMARCK
they were crushed not by Germany, nor the princes, but
by Russia and Austria--the two foreign States to which
Liberalism and Nationalism, as Germans understood them,
were anathema. The hero of the reaction was Nicholas i. ,
without whose aid Schwarzenberg and Windischgratz
could not have mastered Prague and Vienna, nor dictated
the surrenders of Vilagos, Olmiitz, and Novara. Liberal-
ism went down. Radical Republicanism does not appear
again as a force to be reckoned with, except perhaps in
sporadic and convulsive efforts in Wurttemberg. But
Liberalism was not killed, neither was its twin, Nationalism.
The defeat and failure of Prussia--also at the hands of
Russia and Austria--was the second outstanding fact in
1851. Prussia, unlike the Liberals of Frankfurt, had both
an army and executive organs of government. Unlike
Austria and almost every other German State, she had not
been mastered by the Revolution. The strength of the
monarchy and the grip of the royal autocracy on the army
and the governing class were as convincingly revealed, as
after the disaster of Jena. But from the March Days until
Olmiitz Prussia was hopelessly divided. The Liberals
under G. von Vincke, the Moderate Conservatives under
Brandenburg, the Constitutionalists led by Radowitz.
the Junker Camarilla, under the Gerlachs, the Militarists
thirsting for a coup d'Etat in the manner of Schwarzenberg,
Windischgratz and Haynau, the pure Particularists exem-
plified in Prince William, ' the Cartridge Prince,' the heir
to the throne, to whom first and foremost Prussia was a
Grossmacht, which must fight for honour and independence,
the Poles in Prussian Poland crying out for national inde-
pendence, the clericals from the Rhenish districts to whom
the secular omnipotence of the autocracy was as dangerous
as the secular atheism of the Revolution, and the Com-
munists of the Vorwarts, founded by Karl Marx from
Prussian Trier and Engels from Prussian Barmen--the
men who created both the socialism of Lassalle and Bebel
--all these whirled in vortices of varying strength round
the King, who could have led if he could have made up his
mind, or could have been deprived of a mind to make up
But Frederick William persistently refused either to frame
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 71
a policy for himself or to carry through a policy ready-
made by any one else. The result was that Prussia failed
to satisfy any single party at home, or the German dynas-
ties and Austria without. The monarchical state cut a
sorry figure in the March Days, in the Schleswig-Holstein
fiasco, in the imposition of a badly drafted, inconsistent,
and mongrel constitution, in the refusal of the Imperial
Crown, in the hasty and ill-prepared Union schemes, in
the Hesse-Cassel business, in the desertion of Radowitz,
in the defiance of, and undignified surrender to, Austria at
Olmutz. Prussia, in short, failed everybody in turn, and
all parties had to drink of the bitter cup that her monarch
ceaselessly brewed. Her prestige both at home and abroad
had sunk to'a low level, and the fall was not arrested in
1851.
These three years had, moreover, laid bare three impres-
sive facts: the categorical refusal of Austria to allow
Prussia either to usurp the Austrian leadership or to exer-
cise an independent initiative in a limited and defined
German sphere, the jealousy and fear of Prussia felt by the
middle States in particular, the appeal to Prussia, as the
sole hope, by all to whom the old system was intolerable.
All three were the expression of forces and ambitions,
separate in their origin and ends from the struggle between
Liberalism and Conservatism, or between the ideals of the
national and the dynastic and territorial State. Hanover,
Bavaria, Wurttemburg, and Saxony--the four kingdoms
--did not take up and then desert the scheme of the Erfurt
Union from fear of Liberalism or attachment to Conser-
vatism. The denunciation of Prussia as aiming at a
League of Secession (Sonderbund) was made, curiously
enough, in the name of German unity--unity through
the dynasties--but Austria and the middle States increas-
ingly felt that the Union would only end as the Zollverein
had done, in an organisation controlled by its most power-
ful member. While Bismarck saw in the scheme the stain
of a sinister surrender to democracy, the Four Kingdoms
saw in it the sinister supremacy of the militarist police
State of Prussia--an instrument for mediatising the poli-
tical independence of the sovereign princedoms; and the
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BISMARCK
truculent pride of Prussian Junkertum was more terrifying
than the levelling doctrines of Prussian Liberals and South
German Democrats. It was not only on the Liberal benches
of the Landtag that Bismarck's stark Prussianism was
neither forgiven nor forgotten, and his defiant prediction
that the day would come when Prussian Junkertum would
justify its claims, was not a day desired at Dresden, Munich,
Herrenhausen, and Stuttgart--least of all at Vienna. The
Liberals had turned a suppliant appeal for Prussia's
strength. To the profound relief of the middle States
and of Austria, Prussia refused to fight either for herself
or for anybody else. She meekly agreed to re-enter the
restored confederation, and to accept as a principle of
conduct that co-operation with Austria, which since 1815
had been simply a euphemism for subordination and self-
effacement.
The Austrians and the middle States miscalculated,
because they ignored the Revolution and its results. The
Prussia that re-entered the dynastic family party, termed
the Federal Diet at Frankfurt, was not the Prussia of 1847.
Since 1851 Prussia had a written constitution, a Parliament
of Two Houses, a franchise, if a restricted one, a budget
which had to be voted by the Lower House, even if she
had not been given a ministry responsible to the Landtag.
In a word, she had the organs through which the consti-
tutional party could organise, develop, and focus the shat-
tered Liberalism of 1848 and link it up with the shattered
Liberalism from the Memel to the Donnersberg. And
neither the Camarilla nor the Haynaus, neither the Stahls of
the Kreuzzeitung, nor a Schwarzenberg, nor a Bach could
prevent the Prussian intellectuals from thinking, or could
muzzle the Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit--the freedom to
teach and to learn? of the universities, or prohibit men
like Gneist, Sybel, Virchow, Vincke, Forckenbeck, Unruh,
from working and corresponding with a Bennigsen, a
Roggenbach, a von der Pfordten, a Bassermann, or a
Stockmar in Hanover, Bavaria, Baden and Coburg. More
dangerous still, they could not keep even the Junkers from
reading and thinking, and one Junker in particular, Otto
von Bismarck-Schonhausen.
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 73
It was no less a miscalculation to infer that the Euro-
pean situation would retain the features of 1848-51--a
happy and 'healthy' antipathy to revolution and a magic
power to re-establish reaction, that Russian absolutism
would invariably be proof against Austrian ingratitude
and treachery, that Italy would fail to produce a states-
man, and always end in a Novara, that the young and new
Emperor of Austria, Francis Joseph, would exchange dy-
nastic selfishness for wisdom, that Prussia would always be
governed by a Frederick William iv. and a Manteuffel, and
be hypnotised by a Camarilla, and that the Eastern Ques-
tion and Schleswig-Holstein would not again trouble the
Chancelleries. Liberalism and Nationalism were like the
gout, always causing local pains, neglect or mistreatment
of which would drive them into attacking the heart.
In May 1851, Germany could read that his Majesty the
King of Prussia had been pleased to appoint Herr von
Bismarck-Schonhausen to be Councillor of Legation, and
on July 15 to be the Prussian federal representative and
plenipotentiary, at the Frankfurt Diet. Germany knew
little and cared less about the revived Diet. It was on the
point of forgetting Bismarck. That an irreconcilable
Junker should represent reactionary Prussia in the obsolete
Federal Diet was in the nature of things. The making of
a statesman who would solve the German problem was the
last result Germany looked for from Junkertum, Prussia,
and Frankfurt.
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? CHAPTER III
THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN, 1851-1862
? I. Bismarck at Frankfurt, 1851-1859
The eleven years from May 1851, when Bismarck was sent
to Frankfurt, to September 1862, when he became Minister-
President of Prussia, are not great years in the history of
Prussia, but they are great years in the history of Europe,
in which the stage was prepared for the drama in which
Bismarck made himself the leading figure. In the de-
velopment of his personality, the crystallisation of the
principles of his statecraft, they are the central, critical,
and decisive period.
Emphasis of this conclusion does not imply that in 1862,
when this second phase ended, Bismarck had already
reached the mastery of technique and the maturity of ex-
perience and conviction which high and responsible office
alone could consummate; nor that in 1862 his develop-
ment was arrested and that he had nothing more to learn;
still less that he came into power with a cut-and-dried
programme, and merely required the opportunity and the
political authority to carry it out. Such a conclusion
would ignore the opportunism, which he rightly and
proudly regarded as one of the most conspicuous features
--one of the idies mattresses of his statecraft--and rob of all
significance another and no less justifiable claim that he
was a learner all his life.
The results of this decade must be sought in the
subtle, gradual, but profound changes in Bismarck him-
self. They can only be measured by comparing the man
who went to Frankfurt with the man who deliberately
accepted the challenge that the Minister-Presidency
thrust upon him in 1862. Frankfurt provided the
74
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 75
indispensable experience for interpreting the full signi-
ficance of the German problem for Germany and Prussia.
The ministerial posts at Petersburg and Paris enabled him
to complete the experience by correlating it to the know-
ledge of the political conditions of the European situation.
This knowledge of the tides, rocks, shallows, and winds he
had hitherto conspicuously lacked. To-day we are able
to trace from original and unimpeachable sources the
process of its acquisition and the sediment of conviction
that it slowly deposited. By 1862 he had decided that
there was a German, and not merely a Prussian, problem
to be solved; that the negative and defensive Junkertum
of 1848-51 would not do, and that Prussia must find a
Prussian solution that was also applicable to Germany.
A new diplomacy, new principles of action, a new atti-
tude of mind, and a new interpretation of Prussia's interest
therefore, were imperatively required to rescue her from
the blunders of the past and the menace of the future--
surrender to Liberalism or surrender to Austria.
Last and not least, the man Bismarck became inspired
with the ambition to devise and execute the new policy.
The growth, scope, and quality of a man's ambition are
always as decisive as the increase of his knowledge and the
development of his intellectual powers. In 1862, Bis-
marck had attained the supreme conviction that he could
both save his beloved Prussia and solve the German pro-
blem, and that no one else could do both. Character and
creed harmonised in a final union.
The European framework throughout this critical,phase
of development is important. In 1851, the coup cPEtat at
Paris and the proclamation of the Empire in the following
year made a violent rupture in the stratification of Europe.
Henceforward the seismographs of the Chancelleries were
nervously watched for the red record of further upheavals
that would test the stability of every State. The advent
of Cavour to office and the inauguration of the Risorgi-
mento at Turin, were even more important than the down-
fall of the French Republic and the inauguration of the
neo-Caesarism at Paris, but 'the man of December,' the
sphinx without a secret, held Europe spell-bound. The
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? 76
BISMARCK
greatness and significance of Cavour were ignored or under-
rated and misinterpreted until his death revealed what
Italy and Europe had lost. The watershed of the nine-
teenth century was, in fact, crossed in the Crimean War,
in which the sound British fear of Russian autocracy and
of the terrorism of Europe by Nicholas 1. leaped into
flame. The struggle between a Liberal West and the
Russia of 1854, fought out in the Crimea, not merely in-
volved Great Britain and Russia in bitter antagonism for
two generations, but thrust the Near Eastern Question
into a prominence that it never again lost; it broke up
the entente between Austria and Russia; it brought Great
Britain and Italy together, and, curiously enough, made
an Anglo-French entente very difficult to maintain. Most
important as an immediate result was the crippling of
Russia's strength and ability to buttress up the monarchies,
legitimism and autocracy of Central Europe; the Crimean
War, the Treaty of Paris,- the death of Nicholas 1. , and the
internal situation in Russia deprived Alexander n. of the
desire or the capacity to repeat the policy of his inflexible
predecessor.
At the Congress of Paris the diplomatic salute was taken
by Napoleon in. , though Cavour compelled the nervous
diplomatists of 1856 to recognise that the Italian Question
was a malady, calling for surgery, and not for opiates and
soothing poultices. Every Foreign Office in Europe, in-
cluding that of the Vatican, was now ruefully aware that
the Near Eastern Question brought the Habsburg dynasty,
ruling over its mosaic of denationalised and submerged
races, in whom the memories of 1848 continued sullenly
to glow, into irreconcilable collision with Russia. No
Foreign Office was more painfully aware than that of the
Vatican (except, perhaps, the series of distracted ministers
who came, tried and failed at the Ball-Platz in Vienna)
that the Italian Question opened up issues far wider and of
deeper import than maintenance of the Treaties of 1815,
the continuance of the Austrian flag on the citadel at
Milan and on the Piazza di San Marco at Venice, or the
barbarism of a Bomba at Naples. Ultramontanism was
the weapon of the Papacy, and was rightly so named, for
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 77
its strength lay beyond the Western Alps, where it had
planted itself in the Tuileries, and had its unofficial legate,
the Empress, at the table and couch of the Emperor;
beyond the Northern Alps, its roots were deep in the
separatist and clerical Bavaria, in the mediaeval 'Priests'
Alley' of the Main, in Rhenish Prussia, and in Prussian
Poland, whose nobles rubbed shoulders with the Prussian
Junkers in the cabinet of the King, and whose ladies whis-
pered in the drawing-room of the Queen of Prussia.
Across the Eastern Alps, in the city of St. Stephen, what
more devoted son was there than the Habsburg who was
Apostolical King of Hungary? In these years the offen-
sive strategy was being constructed that leads from the
Proclamation of the Immaculate Conception of the
Blessed Virgin in 1854 to the Syllabus of 1864 and the
Vatican Decrees of 1870.
Liberalism and Nationalism, in their slow, but steady
renaissance from the debacle of 1848, had the constructive
and reconstructed reply of the counter-Reformation to
reckon with sooner or later. Prussia had already crossed
swords with the claims of the Roman Catholic Church as
a cosmopolitan organisation in her Rhenish Provinces in
the decade between 1830 and 1840, and had failed to
secure a decision in favour of the omnipotent and secular
State. The Kulturkampf of 1873 lay, not in the logic of
history so much as in the logic of the humanist mind, once
Austria and Austrianism had been overthrown and the
Tuileries were in flames, Napoleon an -exile at Chislehurst
and the Bourbons nerveless emigrSs at Frohsdorf. Liberal-
ism, Nationalism, and Prussianism in combination made
the Kulturkampf a foregone conclusion. But it was
Cavour, the Risorgimento, and the Liberal unification of
Italy--with the Rome of the Papacy omitted, but depen-
dent henceforward on the stability of the Second Empire
--that opened the battle by challenging the alleged right
of an ecclesiastical sovereign to bar the consummation of
Nationalism in a modern State.
The compact of Plombieres led to the Annus Mirabilis
of 1859. Magenta and Solferino, despite Villa Franca,
followed by Garibaldi's expedition of The Thousand, and
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BISMARCK
the collapse of the dynasties in Italy, set every Liberal and
Nationalist pulse beating feverishly throughout Europe.
At Kiel and Rendsburg, in the Duchies of Schleswig-
Holstein, at Posen, Warsaw, Cracow, and Lemberg in dis-
membered Poland, at Bucharest and Jassy in the Danubian
principalities, at Buda-Pesth in Hungary, no less than in
the universities and capital of a federated but disunited
Germany, the vital spark of faith and hope burned in reply
to the beacons lit in Turin, Florence, and Palermo.
'Italy's year' coincided with a change of sovereign at
Berlin, when Prince William became regent for his brother
(October 26, 1858), and with the advent of a Liberal
Ministry in Great Britain, whose action quietly but de-
cisively checkmated an Austrian counter-stroke against
the unification of the Italian South with the North.
The intellectual movement was no less impressive. It
was the period when the modern mind of the nineteenth
century was being made. The year 1859 is memorable for
Darwin's Origin of Species, but between the years 1854
and 1870 the annals of Europe are studded with famous
names and remarkable achievements in every department
of intellectual and imaginative effort--Tennyson, Brown-
ing, Swinburne, Stubbs, Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, Lister,
Clerk-Maxwell and the Pre-Raphaelites in England,
Pasteur, Victor Hugo, Taine, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve and
the Barbizon School in France; Virchow, Helmholtz,
Mommsen, Sybel, Droysen, Wagner, Brahms and Karl
Marx in Germany. And if the United States had done
nothing but produce Abraham Lincoln, Grant and Lee,
it had accomplished much. Had the United States not
proclaimed in memory of ' its honoured dead . . . that we
here highly resolve . . . that government of the people, by
the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth'?
Europe since 1849 had been gripped in the years of
Arctic reaction. Warm water was once more steadily
flowing beneath the frozen surface, and great fissures
were now cracking through; the floes, loosened and
sapped from beneath were grinding, packing, breaking
away, and toppling over. 'The God of battles,' Bismarck
had predicted in 1849, 'would throw the iron dice that
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN
would decide. ' The first casts of those iron dice had been
thrown at Inkerman, the Malakoff Redoubt, and at
Solferino.
Prussia since 1851 had endured a drab and fatigued re-
action, administered by timid and second-rate ministers.
The hand of the police and the Minister of the Interior
was heavy on personal liberty, the freedom of the press,
and everything and everybody suspected of Liberal views,
which were identified with revolution. But, despite
every discouragement, the constitutional Liberals retained
their hold on the middle class, and in the Lower House of
the Landtag they consolidated a critical and earnest oppo-
sition, which in both sections of the party--the Moderates
and the Radicals--was affiliated by a common programme
with Liberalism in Hanover, the Saxon principalities,
Baden, and the more democratic South. As in Italy under
the Risorgimento official Liberalism, though without office
quietly shed the idea of reform by revolution.
The dividing lines in the opposition to the dominant
system were determined rather by the differences between
a moderate Liberalism and a drastic Radicalism; the old
revolutionary party was substituting economic Socialism
for political Jacobinism, finding its inspiration not in the
school of Mazzini, but in that of Marx, and transforming
the struggle for political rights into the class war, the piti-
less contest of an exploited industrial proletariat against
the organisation of society under capitalist direction and
for capitalist ends. Constitutional Liberalism tended more
and more to be the creed of a middle class, the importance
of which was enhanced by economic development; it
steadily aimed not at overthrowing the dynasties but at
converting them, at victory by persuasion and moral pene-
tration, at unification by agreement expressed through
all the organs of the national life, the universities, the
parliaments, the press, the machinery of parties, and an
irresistible public opinion, disciplined into the possession
of a common will. It was this programme and method on
which Bismarck poured contempt.
Frederick William iv. , who had never owned a will, was
now rapidly losing his mind. The Regency of 1858 under
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8o
BISMARCK
Prince William, inaugurated the ' new era. ' The repres-
sive internal administration was relaxed: a ministry with
strong Liberal leanings under Prince Anthony of Hohen-
zollern was formed; and on August 14, 1859,tne German
National Union, founded by Bennigsen of Hanover, issued
from Eisenach an authoritative programme for the united
constitutional and democratic parties. It demanded a
national and independent German foreign policy, a strong
and constitutional central administration for the whole
of Germany in the place of the Diet; and, most significant
of all, it insisted that this Central Power, vested with mili-
tary and diplomatic control, must be in the hands of
Prussia, and that the initiative to establish it must come
from Prussia. All Liberals and Democrats were urged
henceforward to work for the establishment of German
unity on a constitutional basis under Prussian direction
and control--a Prussia to be Liberalised by its assumption
. of the directorship.
The Nationalist passion, vibrating in this remarkable
document, is no less noticeable than its stress on constitu-
tional rights. In 1859, Liberalism and Nationalism looked
with eager hope to the Prussia of the 'new era. ' Two
appointments, however, might have given pause to all
who dreamed of the Prussian army as an instrument for
the Eisenach programme. In 1858, Colonel von Moltke
had been appointed Chief of the General Staff--though
not yet the important office it subsequently became--and
Albrecht von Roon, the intimate friend of Bismarck, and
an unflinching Conservative, replaced the Liberal General
Bonin as Minister of War. Moltke, though the public did
not know it yet, was the ablest of the Clausewitz School.
Roon as a minister regarded himself as the Greek horse
introduced by Providence into the Liberal Troy. And he
was determined, like our George n. , to keep the army free
from the interference of the scoundrels in the House of
Commons.
The National Union concentrated public attention on
the urgency of national unification, the abolition of the
Federal Diet, and a national and united foreign policy in
view of the danger from France and the attitude of Austria.
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 81
The cry from Schleswig-Holstein was becoming louder
every year. What the Danubian principalities were to the
Eastern Question, the Duchies were to the German pro-
blem. They concentrated the local malady in a European
framework, and no single European Power could move
without tripping over treaties and conventions, and with-
out stirring the jealousy and fear of every other Power.
The Danish Radicals at Copenhagen were bent, like the
Sublime Porte, on playing off the Powers against each
other, and by the equilibrium of a skilfully poised selfish-
ness achieving their own ends. Bennigsen, Duncker,
Brockhaus, and the other distinguished signatories of the
Eisenach Programme agreed with the diplomatist who
said that the reform of the Diet was like cutting off the
hump on a hunchback--fatal to the hunchback and useless
to the surgeon. By ending and not mending could Ger-
many alone obtain a truly national and vigorously executed
foreign policy on behalf of German interests. When the
National Union traced the root of all difficulties to Vienna
they went to the heart of the matter.
Amongst the bad sleepers of Europe none slept so badly
as Francis Joseph, and on his dynastic bed the Habsburg
ruler threshed restlessly from left to right and from right
to left, and could find no repose. Within his dominions
it was indeed constitutions, counter-constitutions, recon-
stitutions, order, counter-order, disorder. The Crimean
War placed Austria at the parting of the ways; the com-
pact of Plombieres and the war of 1859 aggravated the
dilemma. The retention of her supremacy in Italy con-
flicted with the retention of her presidency in Germany;
jealousy of Prussia demanded an understanding with
France; Milan and Venetia involved her in war with
Turin and Napoleon; she broke with Russia in order to
keep in close touch with the Western Powers and prevent
a Russian protectorate of the Danubian principalities and
the Balkans; but German Nationalism demanded oppo-
sition to France: the middle German States expected
Austria to save them from a Prussian hegemony; German
Liberalism called for the abolition of the Bund and the Diet,
and would only support Austria if she made concessions
B. F
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? 82
BISMARCK
fatal to her control in Germany and suicidal in Italy and
Hungary. 'There is only one statesman in Europe,'
Metternich had said in 1856, 'M. de Cavour, and he is
against us. ' Cavour was the most brilliant and effective
Liberal statesman in Europe since Canning: his death in
1861 was a tragic blow to the whole cause of Liberalism
on the Continent; and it came at the unhappy moment
when Liberalism in Germany needed genius outside
Germany as an ally. Russell and Palmerston were not a
compensation for Cavour. Nor did Cavour's death bring
relief to Austria. Had Metternich lived to 1861 he might
have repeated his judgment: 'There is only one states-
man in Europe, Herr von Bismarck, and he is against us. '
Bismarck asserted more than once that when he went to
Frankfurt in May 1851, he was 'an Austrian with the
political views that I brought, so to speak from my home,
sharpened by the struggle with the attacks of the Revo-
lution of 1848 against principles that I valued'; and he
maintained that his personal political convictions coin-
cided with his official instructions in the determination
to carry out the policy outlined in his Olmiitz speech.
Prussia was to accept the presidential authority of Austria,
and to co-operate loyally on terms of equality with Austria
in all German affairs, on the basis of common Conservative
principles with common Conservative ends. The char-
acter of this union and the calculable results of its efficacy
reconciled him to the ' surrender ' involved in the Con-
vention of Olmiitz. But Bismarck in 1851 was not an
'Austrian' in the sense that he was prepared to sacrifice
the interest of Prussia to Austrian supremacy. His
Prussian Junkertum and the unlimited independence of his
own personality would have forbidden the surrender, even
if he had not clearly indicated that the egoism and interest
of Prussia must be the sole basis of her policy. Equality
with Austria within the Diet was an essential for Prussia;
she was not a Hanover, a Saxony, or a Bavaria, still less a
Baden or a Hesse-Cassel.
The eight years at Frankfurt were for Bismarck a period
of continuous disillusion and enlightenment--disillusion
as to the interpretation that Austria placed on the co-
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN
83
operation of Prussia, enlightenment as to the principles
which Austrian policy implied. The successors of
Schwarzenberg at Vienna, not unnaturally, calculated on
the humiliated Prussia of 1851. Austria lived in the past
because it was impossible to live for a new future without
jettisoning the only principles that kept the Empire of
Francis Joseph together. But the Ball-Platz did not
reckon on Bismarck. As early as 1851 a dispatch to Berlin
struck a note of warning. Bismarck was at the outset in-
ferior to the Austrian representatives in knowledge of the
ground and in technique; he had not at his disposal the
public or personal prestige, the machinery and the count-
less levers--ultramontane, dynastic, Conservative, and
social--by which Austria, entrenched in an historic ascend-
ancy, worked the middle and petty States to her will.
The two famous incidents of the cigar and the shirt-
sleeves delighted all the gossip-mongers of the higher dip-
lomacy. Hitherto, no one but 'Austria' dared smoke at
the meetings; but Bismarck lit his cigar at once, and before
long even the petty 'States followed his example. Re-
ceived by Count von Thurn in his shirt-sleeves, Bismarck
pulled off his coat. 'I agree,' he said, 'it is a hot day. '
These were trifles, but precious trifles. What was more
important was the thoroughness with which he mastered
his new profession. As with agriculture so with diplo-
macy, he was determined to penetrate to the heart of the
business. 'No human being,' he wrote to his wife, ' not
even the most malicious sceptic of a democrat, would
believe the. charlatanry and imposture hidden in this
Diplomacy. ' His power of work was inexhaustible; his
physique responded to any strain he chose to put on it,
and his brains were far superior to those of his rivals. It
is clear from his official reports, written with a verve, vivid-
ness, and command of the subject-matter that have made
them classical documents in German history, and from
his private correspondence, that he was reading, studying
and reflecting on much outside his official duties.
Frankfurt was not an education in itself; most of Bis-
marck's contemporaries there learned little that they did
not know already, and most of which was useless, or forgot
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? 8+
BISMARCK
what they had already learned; but Bismarck by self-
imposed toil turned the sand of routine into the gold
of political experience. He studied everything--men,
women, machinery. His dispatches are filled with vivid
vignettes--penetrating miniature and character sketches
of the diplomatists who made the Frankfurt world--de-
scriptions of a ball or a reception, in which he will note how
the celebrated actress, Henrietta Sontag, now the Countess
Rossi, has improved her face-powder since he saw her in
Berlin; or, with brief scorn, point out that the morals of
this or that figure in their society offends his German
standards. Bismarck knew that whatever the malicious
gossip of idle and irresponsible tongues might say of him-
self or his political methods his private life and personal
probity were invulnerable. His zeal and industry set him
tracking down Austrian intrigues in hidden bypaths and
the green-rooms of the political stage. It was at Frank-
furt that he learned to look for the ubiquitous and secret
hand of clerical and ultramontane wire-pullers, and to
understand how public opinion could be manipulated
through newspapers, if skilfully worked. This side of his
activities laid bare many sordid secrets, and the acquisition
and the experience weakened his belief--never very
strong--in human nature. The marked contempt of later
years for the sincerity of public opinion, for newspapers,
for journalists, who could always be bought, for all the
dark magic of an official press bureau, for diplomatic re-
connaissances by the circulation of lies, for lashing up
public sentiment by dictated paragraphs inserted in
avowedly independent journals--the whole sinister and
dirty stock-in-trade that exploited the servility and cun-
ning of a Busch or subsidised with appropriated funds a
Counter-Reptile-Press--all this can be traced to his
Frankfurt period. The vengeance that a policy of reality
--Realpolitik--exacts from its disciples is the necessity of
using an unclean world as it would use you, and of assum-
ing that the psychology of a nation is that of Tammany
Hall. Yet unquestionably as Bismarck was tainted and
degraded by the development of the coarser and more
brutal fibres in his autocratic personality, he never him-
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 85
self mistook intrigue for diplomacy, nor made the coining
of phrases a substitute for a policy. He evinced at Frank-
furt one of the most striking and permanent of his char-
acteristics. Passionate by nature, with a nervous system
that strung itself beyond the pitch of every affair or crisis,
he always remained uncannily cool in thought. His brain
worked as if packed in ice, when feeling within was red-hot,
and the words were ready to flow like lava.
He enjoyed his life, and he enjoyed his work, which
sharpened and heightened his physical appetites. Motley,
his Gdttingen friend, has described the large and generous
geniality of the Bismarcks' house in Frankfurt--the un-
assuming but lavish hospitality, the freedom of the house
where the guest became a member of the family, incited to
call for meat and drink in any quantities at any hour, the
children running in and out or sprawling on the floor,
books, papers, music, flowers, scattered about, the hostess
smiling and self-possessed, and her lord striding in and
out, sitting up half the night at his desk, yet as alert and
buoyant as if he had slept the clock round, always ready
to eat, drink, smoke, discuss politics or the merits of North
or South German cattle, dream through a Beethoven
sonata, or swim in the summer moonlight in the Main.
In a word, the German domesticities set in the atmosphere
of the grand manner. Bismarck did not have to pose in
order to be the aristocrat who belonged to a class born and
bred to command.
His travels were partly official, but largely voluntary.
In three years he saw most parts of non-Prussian Germany.
We find him at Darmstadt, Cassel, Hanover, Dresden and
Munich; he was twice in Vienna, stayed in Ostend, bathed
on the North German coasts, toured in Northern Italy,
and paid two visits (in 1855 and in 1857) to Paris. He
invariably met the men who had made, or were about
to make, the Europe of his day, and formed his judgment
on their ability and nerve. Gortschakov, Beust, Bach,
Schmerling, Rechberg, the Duke of Augustenburg, Prince
William at Coblenz, Persigny, Napoleon 1n. , and many
others came into the record. He presented himself to
the ex-chancellor, Metternich, at Johannisberg, and the
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? 86
BISMARCK
Princess notes both her own and her husband's pleasure
at the wit and sound Conservative principles of the tall and
soldierly Prussian noble. It was fitting that the veteran
Austrian who had known all the great men of a wonderful
past should place the wasted hand of the old diplomacy
in the relentless grasp of the new. In that polished
drawing-room, haunted by the ghosts of vanished empires
and the fair women whom its owner had loved and lost,
the Imperial Chancellor to come paid his homage to the
Imperial Chancellor fallen and an exile, and listened with
cynical deference to the political wisdom of ' a garrulous
old gentleman. ' Cavour was the one European statesman
of the first rank whom Bismarck never met. An Imagin-
ary Dialogue between the Minister-President of Sardinia
and the Prussian Plenipotentiary at Frankfurt, with
Austria and Liberalism as its theme, would be a fitting
tribute to Landor. But Napoleon in. he had already
come to know at the Tuileries. They were to meet often,
these two, between 1855 and 1870, and for the last time
at the weaver's cottage on the Donchery road on the grev
morrow after Sedan.
Bismarck's interest in the home politics of Prussia
Vincke, and presently declined re-election for the Lower
House; and though in 1854 he was created by the King a
member of the Upper House (Herrenhaus), he did not
often attend its debates. The growing alienation from
the creed and methods of Kreuzzeitung and Gerlach Con-
servatism completed his reluctance to waste his nights on
countless cigars in stuffy trains to and from Berlin. Not
in Prussia under Manteuffel were the lessons and the
realities of life to be found. One official task after another
was laid upon his shoulders. He endeavoured, but with-
out success, to persuade the Diet to accept and guarantee
the Protocol of 1852, which settled for ten years the fate
of Schleswig-Holstein, and which Bismarck himself was
later to fling into the waste-paper basket; he strove to
interest the Diet in the creation of a German Navy, and
the effort ended in the sale by auction of the ships in
existence; he wrestled with the question of a Federal Army
steadily evaporated.
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 87
and was defeated by the fear of Prussia and the jealousy
of Austria and her allies. The renewal of the Zoll-
verein brought him into the centre of the German
problem.
Austria, under the able guidance of Briick, aimed at
either securing her admittance into the Customs Union,
which Prussia had formed, or at persuading the Southern
Union to break away and unite with the Austrian Empire.
It was the ever-recurring riddle in an economic form of
German organisation. Austria in the economic, no less
than in the political, sphere demanded that the whole of
the Habsburg dominions must be included or she would
break up the inner unity achieved or demanded by
Prussia. The economic creed of the protectionist Austrian
Empire conflicted both with the free-trade policy of the
Zollverein and the tightening bonds between the Southern
and Northern Unions. Bismarck had the unravelling of
the tangle, and at Vienna he met the Austrian ministers
in their lair. It was his first struggle in big affairs, and he
won his first victory. The Austrians intended to isolate
and then coerce Prussia, by seducing the South from its
economic union with the North. Bismarck met the
Austrian menace with a courteous, but firm defiance.
Prussia would maintain the Zollverein at all costs. The
Southern Union was thereby left to choose between the
Northern Customs Union and Austria. Bismarck cor-
rectly reckoned that economic self-interest and not senti-
ment would decide the issue. Prussia had more to offer
to South Germany than Austria; she was strong enough
to stand on her own feet. Headquarters at Berlin were
timid, nervous, and irresolute. Bismarck brushed the
charge of disloyalty and anti-German separatism aside;
even if the charge were true, which it was not, the interest
of Prussia was the decisive criterion. This plain attempt
to sacrifice Prussia to Austrian manufacturers and agricul-
turists, and to rob her of the political influence behind the
Zollverein, must be defeated. And it was. Prussia made
one concession. Twelve years hence the arrangements
were to be reconsidered. In 1863, Bismarck was Minister-
President, and the power to determine Prussian policy was
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? 88
BISMARCK
in the hands, not of a Manteuffel, but of Austria's most
relentless foe.
The whole affair set Bismarck thinking with renewed
energy on cardinal problems--the principles of Prussian
foreign policy, the meaning and consequences of Austrian
ambitions, the relations of Prussia with the middle and
petty States, the defects of the Federal Diet as an organ-
isation for Germany. Under the stimulus of events he
was exploring and appreciating the European frame-
work, the new groupings of the Powers, the new forces
manifestly at work. Facts, and reflections always drove
him back on one supreme question: Was it possible for
Prussia to co-operate loyally with Austria? And if it
were not, what must be the consequences of a rupture for
both States?
There is no need to question the sincerity of Bismarck's
desire in 1851 to maintain an alliance between Austria and
Prussia for common ends. The policy and the principles
of the alliance satisfied his political creed and outlook;
antagonism to, and a breach with, Austria involved the
abandonment of a traditional creed and instincts, estrange-
ment from the friendships and ideals of his manhood, a
drastic and dislocating rearrangement of his political faith,
and the patient, painful, and perilous groping after a new
policy in ah unmapped and shifting future. We can catch
in the more personal documents many glimpses of doubt
and genuine regret. It would be so easy to renounce
intellectual independence, remain an obedient and un-
questioning servant of the monarchy, take the appropriate
reward for obedience in ribbons and stars, or retire to
Schonhausen, and under the blue sky of summer or the
wintry sleets cast off this festering world of politicians and
intrigues and live and die a Bismarck as his ancestors had
done. Opportunity, said Disraeli, is more powerful even
than conquerors or prophets. A demomc time-spirit
moulded Bismarck's environment and his character. 'I
am not a man,' pronounced Napoleon, 'I am a force. '
Bismarck hacked out his daily way, because he was a fierce
and proud Prussian, and because he was also becoming a
great German. In the air all round him the German
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? THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN 89
atmosphere vibrated with indefinable national aspirations,
and his spirit responded unconsciously to the spiritual
inspiration that fired his heart and steeled his brain. And
it was the decree of Providence. He believed in a God
Whose will ordered the world and chose the human instru-
ments of His purpose.
The Crimean War was a disconcerting searchlight in
an obscure night. The German intellectuals, no less than
the German courts, were bewildered: for in every party
sentiment was in antagonism to principles.