_PUCK, June 27th, 1888._
It will be well for Germany if, in the doubtful years that lie ahead of
her, she has not reason to regret the loss of the brave and high-minded
man whose sad reign came to an end two weeks ago. Frederick the
Third inherited his father’s strength and his lofty sense of duty,
yet his character was made at once broader and gentler by his better
understanding of the spirit of his day. He was eminently the man for
the hour, and the courage with which he enunciated his principles and
took his stand for tolerance and modern ideas, under circumstances
which might well have served as an excuse for inaction, showed that he
would not have been unequal to greater emergencies. Had he lived, he
would have made the most of peace, as his father made the most of war,
and his talent complemented that of William, and was singularly fitted
to the duties from which he was so soon taken.
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“SHAKE!”
_PUCK, May 4th, 1887._
“How often all Europe goes into what we slang-loving Americans call a
keniption fit over a political ‘incident!’ We don’t care to attempt an
exact definition of the word ‘keniption;’ but we are quite willing to
explain that an ‘incident,’ in European politics, means a small affair
of great importance. A native peasant pokes his umbrella into a foreign
ambassador’s eye--that is an incident. A foreign ambassador pokes his
umbrella into a native peasant’s eye--that also is an incident. On such
incidents the fate of nations hangs. It may be the Mortara incident, or
the Benedetti incident, or, as it is now, the Schnaebeles or Schnaebele
or Schnaebelé incident, (how does he spell his gallicised German name?)
but no year can pass without its incident, over which the press must
shriek, and diplomats must excite themselves, and quarts of honest ink
and ohms of good electric force must be wasted.
* * * * *
“The incident himself--there is generally a personality to the
incident--is, as a rule, a most unimportant individual. There are
exceptional cases, of course. Benedetti was a man of importance. He had
too much importance, mayhap. But he would never have written his name
in large script upon history’s page had he not been snubbed in a public
park. So is it with Schnaebeles. He is world-famous to-day, who will
never do anything else in his life that will get his name in American
or English newspapers. He has been arrested by Germany, he, a French
official, and he is an incident. He is an incident who does not amount
to much, it seems; but still he is an incident. Twenty, thirty, forty
years from now, a withered, snuffy, oddly dressed old man will sit,
perchance, in front of some Paris café, sipping his eau sucrée or his
syruped vermouth, and the boulevardier who passes by will say to his
friend; ‘That is Schnaebele.’
“‘And who is Schnaebele?’ the friend will inquire, wonderingly.
“‘Why, have you forgotten your history? The hero of the Schnaebele
incident--in 1887--or ’78--which was it? When we were so near going to
war with Germany.’
“‘Ah, bah!’ his friend will reply; ‘un marron glacé! Qu’est-ce que tu
me donnes!’
“And that is what it is to be an incident.”--PUCK, _May 4th, 1887_.
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