1705041907 Thus he remained all his life a royalist, and grounded his work on dynasties. He himself asserted that his loyalty to the king was purely the result of his faith in God, yet this faith was forced to take strange shapes. He was a Protestant, highly unmystical, inveterately rationalistic. For years, up to the day of his death, he kept a prayer book lying on his night table; it was interleaved with blank sheets on which he jotted down the political ideas that came to him at night: truly a Bismarckian species of devotion.

1705041908

1705041909 In any case, no such transcendental reasons prompted him to show the least respect for other princes, and especially other German ones, even though they too felt that they ruled by divine right. On the contrary, he was scornful and heaped irony upon their heads. In the whole line of Prussian kings he loved no one, not even the great Frederick—and he cared still less for the rulers under which he himself had served. But he was bound to them by a feeling for feudal ties which must have been handed down through many generations, since blood alone can explain it. The noble granted fealty to his king through expecting fealty of his vassals. So great was the love of freedom in this revolutionary temperament.

1705041910

1705041911 The relationship always remained essentially one of equal to equal. And while he always observed the formalities, singing himself “most humbly” or “most obediently,” he eyed the conduct of his master with suspicion and bit the golden chain when he felt its pressure.

1705041912

1705041913 At last he even bit the master’s hand—and nothing shows Bismarck’s latent revolutionary tendencies more clearly than the way he rose up at the first provocation against the one authority he had recognized, the king. The significant fact is not his going, but his way of going: every detail of this drama, in which a powerful old man was called upon to comply with the arbitrary wishes of a weak young sovereign, points to the imperiousness, the intransigence, and the thorough independence of his character. The hereditary nobility of his blood provided a rigid code which would not permit him to conceive of his work in terms of the German people rather than in terms of Prussian kings. But nothing, not even the faith he paraded so readily, could hinder another kind of nobility, the nobility of his temperament, from defying a prince by God’s grace exactly as the young idiot deserved.

1705041914

1705041915 At times in the past he had ventured cautious criticisms or had, though always with the bearing of the liegeman, openly voiced objections when behind closed doors. But now, aroused like a mastiff, he broke into a rage against the master who had struck him unjustly. Bismarck’s fall disclosed impulses which his inherited code had kept concealed for years. Only the lack of a great opponent, and the legend which the Germans built up around the mere pretext of a reconciliation, have been able to obscure for a time the violence of this outburst.

1705041916

1705041917 Yet even now he winced at the thought of open rebellion. Was youth all that this old man of seventy-five needed? Or were his royalist leanings still an unsurmountable obstacle? In any case, he did not go beyond farewell tirades in which he fired disturbing truths point-blank at his king and the other princes. Then he retired in fury to his den, hurling out stones which crackled the dilapidated royal masonry.

1705041918

1705041919 But the steel edifice of the state remained standing. For twenty-eight years Bismarck had governed; twenty-eight years after he was gone, the old dynastic system collapsed—and Germany’s enemies watched to see the entire structure fall into ruins.

1705041920

1705041921 But it held! Not a stone, except those which the enemy extracted, was loosened. Indeed, at the very height of calamity, skilful hands were at work making the pillars more solid than before. And it now became evident that whereas most Germans had revered the royalty as the very foundation of the empire, it had been merely a brilliant but unnecessary facade.

1705041922

1705041923 The survival of the state is the surest evidence that the important part which Bismarck assigned to royalty in his political scheme was purely a concession to his class—one might almost call it a weakness. For as the ruling houses fell and the empire endured, Bismarck’s precautions for the future, despite all this baggage of tradition, were justified by their results. After the tempest, people looked about them and saw that the man who had done this was much more modern than he himself had ever hoped to be.

1705041924

1705041925 When the empire was founded at Versailles, amidst the medieval roar of victorious cannon, the golden mirrors in the Glass Gallery of the palace reflected only the forms of warlike princes; the industrious masses were elsewhere. When in the same hall forty-eight years later the empire was sentenced to atone and pay for its defeat, the golden mirrors no longer reflected a single royal figure. The last three emperors of Europe had been slain or deposed. Twenty-two German dynasties had been deprived of power—not by compulsion from without, hardly even by the natives themselves, but by corrosion, by the rust of an era which had served its purposes and was now ready for death.

1705041926

1705041927 Yet the documents which two humble citizens were called upon to sign at that momentous hour did not involve the destruction of Bismarck’s work, but only of the work of William the Second. It was William who had fostered, and Bismarck who had opposed, all those policies which eventually involved Germany in war. Foreign colonies and a marine were typical instances of all that the founder of the state had not wanted. Had he really raised the empire on the point of a victorious sword? Or had he not, rather, employed the sword purely as a means of overcoming Europe’s resistance to German unity? Did he not for twenty years thereafter, resist all the temptations of imperialism, all the enticements of militaristic expansion? And was it not Bismarck who, braving the anger of the king and all the generals at Nikolsburg, created the prototype of a modern peace: without cession of territory, without indemnity, dictated solely by the desire to restore friendly relations with the enemy as quickly as possible? Was Bismarck really of the past?

1705041928

1705041929 At the end he broods, despite protestations of homage, alone and in exile. When he is nearly eighty, and people try to argue him into the tranquillity proper to his years, he looks at them from under his bushy eyebrows and asks, “And why should I be tranquil?” The wife is gone upon whom he had lavished all the warmth which he repressed in his frigid dealings with the outer world. This woman had been his haven of retreat. All the yearnings for quiet, woodland and home which troubled this restless, knotty character were embodied in her—even though his equally strong love of executive activity and political organization always kept him occupied in the service of the state. The more turbulent his career, the more peaceful his marriage had to be—and was.

1705041930

1705041931 He had a critical mind which readily turned to history and to literary composition; and he was by nature a woodsman and a huntsman, a rustic who resented all officialdom. His sojourns in the country, which he had accepted in his youth, without thinking, were deliberately protracted in later years—for it was here that he derived the strength to breathe in ministerial chambers, in the closets of a castle, and in the halls of a parliament which he despised. This antinomy between the scene of his activity and the landscape of his heart never ended, for it was merely the symbol of a chronic indecision;and when, at the last, he had full leisure to enjoy the silence of his forests, he longed to be back in the turmoil which he had cursed for years.

1705041932

1705041933 This was his human lot. Bismarck was not happy by nature, and he knew it.

1705041934

1705041935 But he accepted life like a man, did his work with substantial materials, saw the vision of his thirties realized in his sixties, and for ten full years could look upon himself as the arbiter of the Continent. Yet he could never rid himself of the fear that all this might vanish overnight if he were not there—and in his last weeks his daughter heard him praying aloud for the future of Germany.

1705041936

1705041937 In a long coat, and a wide hat, peering out grimly like a Wotan, he could be seen, at the end, among the prehistoric oaks of his forests, walking about slowly and alone, between two mastiffs.

1705041938

1705041939 Notes

1705041940

1705041941 Bismarck （1815-1898）, the great German statesman, the one man responsible for welding a German nation out of the many German principalities. The fallen angel is, of course, Satan.This brief sentence at the top of the page beautifully describes the Satan given in the opening books of Milton’s Paradise Lost .

1705041942

1705041943 Powerful frame, strong body or physique.

1705041944

1705041945 mastiffs, one of a breed of powerful, smooth-coated dogs, valued chiefly as watchdogs.

1705041946

1705041947 assassin, one who practices secret murder.

1705041948

1705041949 Unter den Linden, under the linden trees, the name of a street in Berlin, Germany.

1705041950

1705041951 the king, Frederick William IV （1797-1888）, William I, German Kaiser （1871-1888）, Prussian king （1861-1888）.

1705041952

1705041953 about to yield in 1862, because of opposition to the king’s army program in Parliament. Bismarck was just then appointed minister-president, and after he had failed to secure approval of the king’s program, he dissolved Parliament, and in direct violation of the constitution, collected and expended state revenue. He assumed control of the entire government and suppressed all opposition.

1705041954

1705041955 scabbard, sheath of the sword.

1705041956

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