Don Juan Prim, Count of Reus, Marques de los Castillejos, would now be
forgotten outside Spain were it not that Régnault's splendid equestrian
picture of him, as he is receiving the homage of the people (on a fiery
steed, reminding one of Velasquez), keeps his memory green in everyone
who visits the Gallery of the Louvre. At that time his name was on
every tongue. The victorious general and revolutionary of many years'
standing had since 1869 been Prime Minister of Spain, and had eagerly
endeavoured to get a foreign prince for the throne who would be
dependent upon him and under whom he would be able to keep the power in
his own hands. He had now offered the throne of Spain to Leopold of
Hohenzollern, but without having assured himself of the consent of the
Powers. That of Prussia was of course safe enough, and for six weeks
Napoleon had looked on benevolently at the negotiations, and acted as
though the arrangement had his approval, which Prim had the more reason
to suppose since Leopold was related to the Murat family, and the
Emperor had raised no objection to a Hohenzollern ascending the throne
of Roumania. Consequently, Prim was thunderstruck when France suddenly
turned round and seized upon this trivial pretext for a breach of the
peace.
He was in regular correspondence with the Gallengas, whom he had seen a
good deal of during the years, after the unsuccessful rebellion against
Queen Isabella, that he had spent in London. At that time he had been a
man of fifty, and, with his little body and large head, had looked very
strange among Englishmen. He was of modest birth, but denied the fact.
He was now a Spanish grandee of the first class, but this was through a
patent bestowed on him for courage in the war with Morocco; he had
little education, did not know a word of English, wrote French with a
purely fantastic orthography, but had excellent qualities as a Liberal,
an army chief, and a popular leader. Still, he was not pleased that
Régnault had painted him greeted by the enthusiastic cheers of an
untidy, ragged mob of rebels; he would have preferred to be receiving
the acclamations of regular troops, and of the highest men and women in
the nation, as now, at the conclusion of his career, he really was.
Only a few months later (in December, 1870), he was shot by an assassin
in the streets of Madrid.
In Prim's communications to Gallenga, the attitude of the French
government appeared to me in a most unfavourable light. Ollivier, the
Premier, I had long despised; it did not need much political acumen to
see that he was an ambitious and conceited phrase-monger, who would let
himself be led by the nose by those who had disarmed him. The Emperor
himself was a wreck. I had had no doubt of that since I had one day
seen him at very close quarters in the Louvre, where he was inspecting
some recently hung, decorative paintings. It was quite evident that he
could not walk alone, but advanced, half-sliding, supported by two tall
chamberlains, who each gave him an arm. His eyes were half-closed and
his gaze absolutely dulled. The dressed and waxed moustache, which ran
to a needle-like point, looked doubly tasteless against his wax mask of
a face. He was the incarnation of walking decrepitude, vapid and slack.
Quite evidently he had committed the blunder of trusting to a split in
Germany. In his blindness he explained that he had come to free the
Germans, who had, against their will, been incorporated into Prussia,
and all Germany rose like one man against him. And in his foolish
proclamation he declared that he was waging this war for the sake of
the civilising ideals of the first Republic, as if Germany were now
going to be civilised for the first time, and as if he, who had made an
end of the second Republic by a _coup d'état_, could speak in the name
of Republican freedom. His whole attitude was mendacious and mean, and
the wretched pretext under which he declared war could not but
prejudice Europe against him. In addition to this, as they knew very
well in England, from the earlier wars of the Empire, he had no
generals; his victories had been soldier victories.
I was very deeply impressed, in the next place, by the suicide of
Prévost-Paradol. I had studied most carefully his book, _La France
Nouvelle_; I had seen in this friend and comrade of Taine and of Renan
the political leader of the future in France. No one was so well
acquainted with its resources as he; no one knew better than he what
policy ought to be followed. If he had despaired, it was because he
foresaw that the situation was hopeless. He had certainly made
mistakes; first, in believing that in January it had been Napoleon's
serious intention to abrogate personal control of the state, then that
of retaining, despite the long hesitation so well known to me, his
position as French Envoy to North America, after the plebiscite. That
he should now have turned his pistol against his own forehead told me
that he regarded the battle as lost, foresaw inevitable collapse as the
outcome of the war. When at first all the rumours and all the papers
announced the extreme probability of Denmark's taking part in the war
as France's ally, I was seized with a kind of despair at the thought of
the folly she seemed to be on the verge of committing. I wrote to my
friends, would have liked, had I been permitted, to write in every
Danish paper a warning against the martial madness that had seized upon
people. It was only apparently shared by the French. Even now, only a
week after the declaration of war, and before a single collision had
taken place, it was clear to everyone who carefully followed the course
of events that in spite of the light-hearted bragging of the Parisians
and the Press, there was deep-rooted aversion to war. And I, who had
always counted Voltaire's _Micromégas_ as one of my favourite tales,
thought of where Sirius, the giant, voices his supposition that the
people on the earth are happy beings who pass their time in love and
thought, and of the philosopher's reply to him: "At this moment there
are a hundred thousand animals of our species, who wear hats, engaged
in killing a hundred thousand more, who wear turbans, or in being
killed by them. And so it has been all over the earth from time
immemorial." Only that this time not a hundred thousand, but some two
million men were being held in readiness to exterminate each other.
What I saw in London of the scenic art at the Adelphi Theatre, the
Prince of Wales' Theatre and the Royal Strand Theatre was
disheartening. Molière was produced as the lowest kind of farce,
Sheridan was acted worse than would be permitted in Denmark at a
second-class theatre; but the scenic decorations, a greensward,
shifting lights, and the like, surpassed anything that I had ever seen
before.
More instructive and more fascinating than the theatres were the
parliamentary debates and the trials in the Law Courts. I enjoyed in
particular a sitting of the Commons with a long debate between
Gladstone and Disraeli, who were like representatives of two races and
two opposed views of life. Gladstone was in himself handsomer, clearer,
and more open, Disraeli spoke with a finer point, and more elegantly,
had a larger oratorical compass, more often made a witty hit, and
evoked more vigorous response and applause. Their point of disagreement
was the forthcoming war; Disraeli wished all the documents regarding it
to be laid before parliament; Gladstone declared that he could not
produce them. In England, as elsewhere, the war that was just breaking
out dominated every thought.