The Committee of Enquiry, like another Portia, clothed in the
ermine-trimmed robe of Justice and the Law, has unlocked with the
key of Truth the door of the closed chamber. The key lies behind her
inscribed in Dutch with the name that tells its nature. The Committee
then pulls back the curtain, and reveals the horrors that are behind
it. Before the curtain is fully drawn back, Enquiry sinks almost in
collapse at the terrible sight that is disclosed. There hang to pegs
on the wall the bodies of Bluebeard’s victims, a woman, an old man, a
priest, two boys, and a girl still half hidden behind the curtain. The
blood that has trickled from them coagulates in pools on the ground.
Bluebeard himself comes suddenly: he hurries down the steps brandishing
his curved sword, a big, burly figure, with square, thick beard,
and streaming whiskers, wearing a Prussian helmet, his mouth open
to utter a roar of rage and fury. The hatred and scorn with which
the artist inspires his pictures of Prussia are inexhaustible in
their variety: Prussia is barbarism attempting to trample on law
and education, brutality beating down humanity, a grim figure, the
incarnation of “frightfulness.” I can imagine the feelings with which
all Germans must regard the picture that the Dutch artist always gives
of their country, if they regard Prussia as their country. “For every
cartoon of Raemaekers,” said a German newspaper, “the payment will be
exacted in full, when the reckoning is made up.” To this painter the
Prussian ruling power is incapable of understanding what nobility of
nature means. He can practise on and take advantage of the vices and
weaknesses of his enemies; he can buy the services of many among them,
and have all the worser people in his fee as his servants and agents;
but he is always foiled, because he forgets that some men cannot be
bought, and that these men will steel their fellow-countrymen’s minds
to resist tyranny to the last. The mass of men can be led either to
evil or to good.
The Prussian military system assumes the former as certain, and is well
skilled in the way. But there is the latter way, too, which Prussia
never knew and never takes into account as a possibility; and men as
a whole prefer the way to good before the way to evil, when both are
fully explained and made clear. This saves men, and ruins Prussia.