Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 397, November 1848. Various
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p>Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 397, November 1848
A GLIMPSE AT GERMANY AND ITS PARLIAMENT
We are not old enough to have been politically detained at Verdun. Our impressions of Napoleon are soured by no recollections of personal tyranny; and though a near relative wasted the better portion of his life in the dreary enjoyments of that conventional fortress, we do not carry the spirit of clanship so far as to entertain on that account a revengeful hatred towards the memory of the Corsican. At the same time, it must be confessed that, towards the latter part of this past August, the idea of Verdun more than once recurred unpleasantly to our mind. It became clear to us that, for this year at least, there was little probability of our realising certain visions of Highland sport which had been called up by a perusal of the exciting work of the Stuarts. Her Majesty was coming down to Balmoral, and, in consequence, the red deer of Aberdeenshire were safe, at least from a private rifle. The grouse, with a degree of obstinacy truly irritating, had again failed, and we were little disposed to levy war against the few and feeble remaining broods of the cheepers. The Duke of Sutherland, with a just economy, had shut up his rivers, and given the salmon a jubilee; so that there was no hope of throwing a fly on the surface of the Shin or the Laxford. On the other hand, there seemed to be plenty of sport, and no want of shooting on the Continent. Licences were not required, and restrictive seasons unknown. The odour of gunpowder was distinct in Paris as early as the month of February; and ever since then there had been occasional explosions and discharges all over the face of Europe. True, a garde mobile, or a gentleman in a blouse, especially when provided with a rusty detonator and bayonet, is an awkward kind of sportsman to encounter. Barricades may be curious structures to inspect; but it is not pleasant to be on either side of them when the Red Republic is in question; and still more ungenial to be placed exactly in the centre, as once occurred to a worthy bailie of our acquaintance, who, having been sent to Paris in 1830, on a special mission to fetch home some stray voters for an impending election in the west, found, to his intense horror, that the diligence in which he was located was built up as a popular defence; that the bullets were whistling through the windows; and that even his patron, St Rollox, seemed deaf to his intercessions for rescue.
But as we do not happen to hold stock in the French lines, and therefore have not thought it necessary, as yet, to identify ourselves with any of the parties who are presently contending for the palm of mastery in France; as the crusade under the white flag or the oriflamme in favour of the descendant of Saint Louis has not yet been openly proclaimed or enthusiastically preached by any bearded representative of Peter, the Miraculous Hermit; and as, moreover, we had seen quite enough of France in her earliest stages of paroxysm, and had no wish to behold the professors of the vaudeville and palette engaged, in the present dearth of money, at the novel occupation of cobbling shoes for the Sardinian soldiery in the ateliers nationaux– we resolved to abstain from Paris in the meantime, and rather to bend our steps towards Germany, then in the full ferment of the Schleswig Holstein affair. Germany has been an old haunt of ours from our boyhood. So far back as 1833, we had the pleasure of witnessing a tight little skrimmage between the Heidelberg students and the soldiery in the square of Frankfort; and since that time we have watched with great interest the progress of the arts, literature, and sciences, and the development of the interior resources of the country. Right sorry were we, though not altogether surprised, to learn that quiet Germany had lighted her revolutionary pipe from the French insurrectionary fires; that Mannheim, Heidelberg, and Hanau, those notorious nests of democracy, had succeeded in perverting the minds of many throughout the circle of the Rhenish provinces; and that studentism, once comparatively harmless, had become utterly rampant throughout the land. For although we never could, even in our earlier years, take any deep pleasure in cultivating the society of the Burschenschaft, but, on the contrary, rather regarded them as a race to be eschewed by all who had a wholesome reverence for soap and a horror for the Kantean philosophy, we were not unpleased at the national spirit which they exhibited long ago; and more than once, in the vaults of the Himmels-leiter and Jammerthal, at Nuremberg, we have joined cordially in the chorus of defiance to French aggression —
'Sie sollen ihn nicht haben
Den Deutschen freien Rhein!'
That Germany, under her peculiar constitution, should retain her own, and that the boundaries should be strictly preserved, seemed to us a highly proper, laudable, and patriotic sentiment; but, when the Teutonic youth went further, and demanded an immediate return to the mediæval system, and the glorious times of the Empire, we must confess that their aspirations seemed to us to savour slightly of insanity. We are, constitutionally, an admirer of the ancient times. We do not think that people are happier, or wiser, or better, or that they fulfil one whit more conscientiously their duties to God and man, when cooped up and collected within the dingy alleys of a commercial town, instead of treading the free soil which gave their fathers birth. We are not especially affected to the over-increase of factories, neither would we award an ovation to any one for breeding up human beings expressly for the production of calico. But not, on that account, would we willingly recur to the days of the forays and the raids. We don't want to see the clans reintegrated, the philabeg on every hip, and the hills covered with caterans, each ettling at his skian-dhu. We have no desire to cross the Border of moonlight night at the head of a score of jackmen, and, more majorum, regale our ears with the lowing of the Northumbrian kine. We do not consider such a feat necessary, simply because a remote ancestor was afflicted with too earnest a desire for the improvement of his patrimonial breed of cattle, and, having been unluckily found on the wrong side of the Tweed, died, like a poet as he was, with some neck-verses in his mouth, at a place denominated Hairibee. But our German friends – more especially the students – have long been haunted by some such ideas. The Robbers of Schiller, and the Goetz von Berlichingen of Goëthe, have had a poisonous effect upon the fancy or fantasy of the young. They have long been dreaming of doublets, boots, and spurs, and it needed but a little thing to set them utterly crazy. Their modern school of painting has for years been even more mediæval than their literature; and what the poets began, Schnorr and Cornelius have been rapidly bringing to a head. No one who is intimate with the German character, will lightly undervalue the effect of such a popular sentiment, when an actual opportunity for outbreak is afforded in revolutionary times.
This feeling, absurd as it is, has been greatly favoured and fostered by the infinitesimal division of Germany at the Treaty of Vienna, and the maintenance as sovereignties of small states, which ought long ago to have been remorselessly absorbed. By that settlement Germany was declared to consist of no less than thirty-eight separate and independent states, with no other tie of union than an annual diet at Frankfort. Previous to the Revolutionary wars, there were actually about three hundred sovereign rulers in Germany, each of whom might have worn a crown, if he could only have found money enough to buy one. This was a miserable farce and a caricature, and it could not possibly last. The King of Man was a powerful potentate in comparison with some of these autocrats; and if there had been a royal house of Benbecula, the crown-prince of that insular Eden would have been a proper match for the daughter of their sublime Highnesses of Fugger-Kirchberg-Weisenborn, or Salm-Reifferscheid-Krautheim. The French invasion blew away a crowd of these little sovereigns, like mites from the surface of a cheese; but, very unfortunately, a tithe of them were permitted to clamber back. Some of the larger German states thought to fortify their position, and to obtain an ascendency in the Diet, by maintaining several of the minor principalities intact, and, in return, commanding their votes. Hence the retention as sovereign princedoms of the three Anhalts, the two Schwartzbergs, the two Hohenzollerns, the two houses of Reuss, the two Lippes, Waldeck, Lichtenstein, and Homburg – territories, the outlines of which you can hardly discover on an ordinary map of Europe, or even on one of Germany. These are the instances which we think the most objectionable and absurd, but the case of several others is not much better. For example, there are four sovereign Saxe Duchies, besides the kingdom of Saxony proper.
Thirty-eight, then, were preserved by the Congress of Vienna, whereas, for the sake of stability, there should not have been more than five. The remaining German states might have been absorbed, as were many more, into Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Hanover; and, in this way, power would have been consolidated, a balance preserved, and entire centralisation avoided. Instead of which, for more than thirty years there has been a constellation