The Arena. Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891. Various
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of the diet around his imperial majesty.
But a king of Prussia, always on horseback, leader in military times, defender of a frontier greatly disputed by formidable enemies, whose soil looks like a dried-up marsh from which the ancient Slav race had been obliged to drain off the water, is required to direct his subjects as a general does an army. The intellectual, political, and military grandeur of Frederick the Great augmented this power and assured it to his descendants for a long epoch. It has happened to each king of Prussia since that time to perform some colossal task, grounded in an irreducible antinomy. Frederick William II. devoted himself to the reconciliation of Calvinism and Lutheranism as divided in his days as during the thirty years war, which was maintained by the heroism of Gustavus Adolphus, and repressed by the exterminating sword of Wallenstein. Frederick William IV. endeavored to unite Christianity and Pantheism in his philosophical lucubrations; the Protestant churches were deprived of their churchyards and statues by virtue of and in execution of Royal Lutheran mandates, as was also the Catholic Cathedral of Cologne, restored to-day in more brilliant liturgical splendor with the sums paid for pontifical indulgences. Bismarck did as he liked with the empire when it was ruled by William I., and did not foresee what would be the irremissible and natural issue of the system to which he lent his authority and his name. When William I. snatched his crown from the altar, as Charlemagne might have done, and clapped it on his head, repeating formulas suited to Philip II. and Charles V., the minister was silent and submitted to these blasphemies, derived from the ancient doctrine of the divine right of kings, because they increased his own ministerial power, exercised under a presidency and governorship chiefly nominal and honorary. But a thinker of his force, a statesman of his science, a man of his greatness, should have remembered what physiologists have demonstrated with regard to heredity, and should have known that it was his duty and that of the nation and the Germans to guard against some atavistic caprice which would strike at his own power. The predecessor of Frederick the Great was a monomaniac and the predecessor of William the Strong was a madman. Could Bismarck not foresee that by his leap backwards he ran the risk of lending himself to the fatal reproduction of these same circumstances, of transcendental importance to the whole estate, nay, to the whole nation? A king of Bavaria singing Wagner’s operas among rocks and lakes; a brother of the king of Bavaria resembling Sigismund de Caldéron by his epilepsy and insanity; Prince Rudolph showing that the double infirmity inherent in the paternal lineage of Charles the Rash and in the maternal line of Joanna the Mad continues in the Austrians; a recent king of Prussia itself shutting himself up in his room as in a gaol, and obliged by fatality to abdicate the throne of his forefathers during his lifetime in favor of the next heir, must prove, as they have done, what is the result of braving the maledictions of the oracle of Delphi, and the catastrophes of the twins of Œdipus with such persistency, in this age, in important and mature communities, which cannot become diseased, much less cease to exist when certain privileged families sicken and die. Not that I would ask people to do what is beyond their power and prohibited by their honor. There was no necessity, as a revolutionist might imagine, to overturn the dynasty. A very simple solution of the problem would have been to take against the probable extravagances of the Fredericks and Williams of Prussia the same precautions that were taken in England against the Georges of Hanover. These last likewise suffered from mental disorders. And so troubled were they by their afflictions that they were haunted by a grave inclination to prefer their native, though unimportant hereditary throne in the Germany of their forefathers to the far more important kingdom conferred on them by the parliamentary decision of England. But the English, to obviate this, showed themselves a powerful nation and respected the dynasty. Bismarck wished to make the king absolute in Prussia; he desired that a Cæsar should reign over Germany; and to-day the king and the Cæsar are embodied in a young man who has set aside the old Chancellor, and believes himself to have received from heaven, together with the right to represent God on this earth, the omnipotence and omniscience of God himself. Can it be doubted any longer that history reveals an inherent providential justice? To-day we see it unfold itself as if to show us that the distant perspectives of the past live in the present and extend throughout futurity.
II
Bismarck was on his guard against Frederick the Good, from whom a progressive policy was expected on account of his philosophical ideas, and a liberal and parliamentary government on account of the domestic influences which surrounded him. Knowing the humanitarian tendencies which sparkled in his disappointed mind, and the ascendency exercised over his diseased heart by the loved Empress Victoria, Bismarck availed himself of the terrible infirmity with which implacable fate afflicted the second Lutheran Emperor of Germany, and retained the imperial power in his own person, as though William I. were not dead. The enormous corpse of the latter, like that of Frederick Barbarossa, made a subject for analogous legends by German tradition, was replaced by another corpse, and in the decomposition consequent to his frightful infirmity, the unfortunate Frederick III. seems to have realized the title of a celebrated Spanish drama, “To Govern After Death” (Reinar Despues de Morir). All that he could do, when already ravaged by cancer, when the microbes of a terrible disease, like the worms of the sepulchre, were attacking and destroying him, was to open up a vista to timid hope, and to publish certain promises animated by an exalted humaneness, in spite of and unknown to the Chancellor who was not consulted in these declarations, which might be said to have descended from heaven on the wings of the angel of death. Bismarck went to and fro among the doctors, who naturally refused to declare the terrible disease mortal, and prepared to vanquish the moribund will of Frederick and the British notions of his widow, fearing that when the last breath of the imperial life had ceased the whole policy of Germany would have to be changed, as a scene in a theatre must be changed if it has been hissed. It was certain that there was as great a difference between the ideas of the Emperor William I. and those of Frederick III., separated by so brief a space, as between those of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and those of the Emperor Frederick II., his successor, after the long period of two hundred years had changed the capital features of the Middle Ages; the first was an unalloyed Catholic, notwithstanding his dissidences with the Guelph cities, and even with the Pope a stern Cæsar, like the good Roman Cæsars in time of war and defence, a veritable orthodox crusader, whose piety was concealed as in a colossal mountain whence he awaited the reconquest of outraged Jerusalem by the Christians; whereas the second was an almost Pantheistic poet and philosopher, whose Catholicity was mingled with Orientalism, who was equally given to the discussion of theological and of scientific questions, who followed the crusades in fulfilment of an hereditary tradition, who penetrated into the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre by virtue of an extraordinary covenant with the infidel, and whose own beliefs were so cosmopolitan that they brought down a sentence of excommunication upon himself and of interdiction upon his kingdom. To Pope Innocent III., the former typified the Catholic emperor of the Middle Ages; Frederick II. appeared to him very much the same as in our days the Lutheran emperor appeared to Prince Bismarck, who took every possible precaution against the humanitarianism and parliamentarism of his dying pupil, and at the same time impelled his eldest son, the next heir to the crown, with all his influence and advice towards absolutist principles and reactionary propensities. No upright mind can ever forget the terrible desecration committed when, a few days before the death of his father, young William spoke of the empire as of a possession which it was to be understood he had already entered upon, and awarded the arm and head of his iron Chancellor the title of arm and head connatural with the Cæsarian institution. I know of no statesman in history who has given, under analogous circumstances, such proof of want of foresight as was given by Bismarck, comprehensible only if the body could assume the authority of the will, as did his, and if the intelligence could disappear, as did his, in an hydropic and unquenchable desire for power. Frederick, holding progressive ideas opposed to those of Bismarck and of William, would have greatly considered public opinion, and on account of that consideration would have perhaps respected, till the hour of his death, the Pilot, who, dejected by the new direction of public government, inferred that irreparable evil must result therefrom. When Maurice of Saxony trod on the heels of Charles V., whom he had defeated at Innsbruck, he was asked why he did not capture so rich a booty, and replied: “Where should I find a cage large enough for such a big bird?” Assuredly the conscience and mind of such a parliamentarian and philosopher as was Frederick III., must have addressed to him a similar question when he inwardly meditated sacrificing the Chancellor’s person and prescinding his power: “Where should