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西南联大英文课（英汉双语版） [:1705033862]
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37 BISMARCK
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By Emil Ludwig
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BISMARCK, by Emil Ludwig, in his Genius and Character , New York, Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1927, pp. 41-52.
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Emil Ludwig （1881-1948）, German biographer and dramatist, widely known for his studies of Bismarck （1912）, Napoleon （1924）, William Hohenzollern （1925） and Lincoln （1929）.
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Earthly majesty is always akin to the fallen angel, who is proud and unhappy, beautiful but troubled, and whose plans and efforts, though vast, are denied success .
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Powerful frame! How much was Bismarck indebted to his physique although he hardly ever came to actual tests of fist and muscle! His body and his accomplishments were identical:the will of a giant vibrant with the electric charge of magnetic nerves. He was like those mastiffs of his which, precisely because of this resemblance, he loved: strong and nervous, heavy and somber, formidable, and unrelenting towards an offender—loyal to but one person, his master, yet devoted to him until death. Bismarck was as powerful, as nervous, and as dangerous as his dogs.
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Like every strong man, he once saved his own life. An assassin in Unter den Linden had fired one shot at him and was about to fire a second, this time at closer range. It would have been fatal, had not Bismarck seized the man’s right hand and hurled the weapon to the ground. On another occasion, when he was younger, he had plunged into the water after a man who was drowning—and for the rest of his life, among all the insignia of honor which “go with the make-up of a minister,” he took pride only in the medal commemorating this rescue. Again, he saved Prussia, when the king was about to yield to popular pressure and to abdicate, by taking hold of the king’s scabbard and literally shaking him into a mood of self-defense.
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None of these three equally important acts would have been possible without the assistance of his powerful physique. Wherever he went, he was the biggest man present. At a court ball, when he was in his twenties, his stature elicited the admiration of his first master. Emperors of the French and of the Russians, kings, princes, and princesses—all were impressed to see him stoop as he came through the door and then draw himself up again to his full height. Generals and politicians, most of them his opponents for one reason or another, were often astounded, and even terrified by his build.
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And yet his intimates, and sometimes mere government clerks, had seen the giant collapse, convulsed with weeping, tortured with despair, his features twitching and distorted. This is the other side of Bismarck, an aspect of him which the Germans readily gloss over, but without which the nationalistic side of his character could never have been effectual.
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For while the spirit of history was still undecided whether or not to unite the German race after a thousand years of dissent, it produced a man whose own impulses were so rent that he alone was capable of coping with this other division. His own personal struggle, a restless oscillation between pathos and criticism, duty and power, flight and aggression, loyalty and vengeance, had its parallel for him in the condition of Germany; and this almost mystical, yet natural kinship gave him both the desire and the courage to battle for national integration. Almost unknown to himself, a powerful stream of emotion was flowing beneath the craftiness of the politician. This produced a vision, a kind of dream, which gave him consistency of purpose despite the seeming opportunism of his methods. And he could work only at white heat; rapidly, in barely eight years, Bismarck the Prussian forged Germany.
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For Germany could not be subdued except by a man of emotion who, like the artist, was capable of casting his molten feelings into forms of solid iron. It was really an artist who shaped this realm of music into a state.
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But he was also a realist; for this same soil nourishes a race of realists who attempt to balance their weakness for reverie and philosophy by a deliberate propulsion towards externals—their cult of action being, probably through fear, exaggerated into wariness. Bismarck was hard and realistic, with a keen sense of cold facts and an almost total indifference to principles. All during his thirty years of steadily mounting power, and even at the last when he was a dictator, he would ally himself with any party or any platform and oppose any party or any platform, purely as the occasion demanded. He hated passionately, lying awake far into the night. And the next day he would shatter his opponents like a bolt of lightning. But the very moment he had need of them, he would reverse his tactics and become conciliatory. It is absurd to ask just how far such a policy was pursued in the interests of his cause and how far in the interests of his personal power: for this man was a monomaniac who cared for no cause but his own and who felt that he alone could properly defend it!
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Nevertheless Bismarck’s primum mobile was neither the will to power nor the desire for fame—as to witness his long period of aimlessness in youth. At the age of thirty-five, when Bismarck the noble was taking his first steps into politics, Napoleon the parvenu was already emperor. He did not settle upon this career through any desire to be a dictator, nor any theoretical love for a fatherland which did not yet exist, nor through pride in Prussia, his more immediate home. But when he took trowel in hand and began laying stone upon stone, he was moved by the true artist’s wish to produce order out of chaos, to give form to the formless—and along with this went a sound and thoroughgoing misanthropy which led him to ridicule the failures of his predecessors.
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The German genius has always been either ideologist or artist. This people has never produced the pure homo politicus .
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For this reason he was all the more violent in his opposition to the ideologists. He had little enough respect for philosophy, but he positively despised the pedants of the Frankfort variety, who had insisted, while the country ran riot, on examining in the light of ultimate philosophical principles every proposition laid before the assembly. A landowner from the Pomeranian back-country, he placed a low value on city-bred intellectuals and professional men. He was self-taught, a political primitive; he stepped abruptly into the arena without previous experience or training, and also, of course, without party prejudices. Stammeringly, he hurled his doctrine of German unity at the astonished ranks of the diet until the king had singled him out. What could attract a sickly dreamer like Frederick William to this uncouth giant except that obscure element above and beyond the intellect which they had in common? Did this stranger arrive from his provincial estate with a fully worked-out plan of action? On the contrary, he had nothing but the vaguest notion of what he wanted, nothing but courage and the mutterings of anger.
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For there was heavy cargo of courage in this powerful hulk: a proud self-consciousness formed the ballast for a vessel shaken with antinomies, and this alone assured it of a voyage without mishap. Bismarck’s first word to a king was a rebuke, as was also his last: March ‘48, March ‘9o. When not fighting, he was hardly more than a misanthrope and a scoffer: his great energies were drained by doubt, cynicism, and melancholy. But the presence of an enemy restored them to unity, converted them into action and purpose, and gave him self-reliance by providing an external force against which his self-reliance could be directed. And the nearer an enemy, the keener his capacity for action. He fought with a deeper devotion in domestic issues than against a foreign foe. Bismarck hated the German politicians Windhorst and Richter, but not Napoleon.
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At bottom Bismarck was a thorough revolutionary. His first appearance as he came out of the oak forests of his birthplace and threw himself with fury into the narrow machinations of party politics; his attitude towards the kings and princes of his own country, and later towards foreign kings and emperors;the bold and simple “No” which he hurled at the political maxims of his times; his insistence upon ruling without interference from others; his continual threat of resigning; the splendid clarity, informality, and newness of his diction—all these defiant traits of a freedom-loving temperament belong to a man who, had he been born of the submerged classes, would have advanced behind the red flag.
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He was not like Goethe who needed order to encompass his own chaos: he was disharmonic through and through, neither resting nor wanting rest. For it is not ideas, but emotions, which make the revolutionary; and the man who champions tradition with a fresh and terrorizing passionateness is often more revolutionary than a man who fights tradition with a calm pen or among the ranks of the many.
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In reality, Bismarck created a new form of politics, in Germany at least. He revolutionized the methods of dealing with popular rebellions, founded the new school of diplomatic practice which openly struck terror instead of employing flattery and craft as in the school of Metternich. After a dinner in London, when he had outlined his program with astounding firmness, Disraeli, who saw him in the true perspective, said to his guests: “Take care of that man, he means what he says.”
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With these strong impulses to break the bonds of custom, with so much courage and self-reliance, such forcefulness, and scorn—what kept him faithful to the old forms? What led him to decide socially against the future? What linked him with dynasties which had already begun to lose their meaning?
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His blood. When he was being trained in the hunt, the old woodsman whose great-grandfather had served a Bismarck in the time of young Freddy called the boy “Herr Junker.” He saw the inadequacy of his class, their degeneration and idleness, the futility and mismanagement with which many of his cousins fulfilled their inherited offices; and he saw the intelligence, industry, and pride of common citizens triumph over the mummified prejudices of the nobility—yet he constituted himself the guardian of his class and summoned his genius to its defense.
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Above all else he defended the king. Not that he considered the king’s blood to be better than his own: for more than once he told the Hohenzollerns to their faces that the Bismarcks had tenanted the realm longer than they. But he saw in the king the apex of a pyramid which, if truncated, would seen odd, and perhaps even ludicrous. He was unwilling to imperil the hereditary prerogatives of his name; like the usual noble, the usual landowner, he was loath to relinquish any worldly possessions for theoretical reasons; he could never divorce himself from this sense of superiority which found its sanction in the very force of character behind it—and thus he gave unto the king that which was the king’s.
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For his house still flourished with manly vigor; the nihilism of an age of increasing transvaluations had not yet broken through his feudalistic code; and tradition was still powerful enough to extend its influence when aided by so faithful a scion. It seems as though this Junker inherited absolutely nothing from his mother, he was so totally lacking in any evidence of her bourgeois blood. Fifty years later—and Bismarck, with his temperament and will power, his fearlessness and independence, would have been a leader of the new era.
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