Wales? Will England and her statesmen endure the rule of a profligate
sovereign? No country can have undergone in equal time a greater
revolution in public taste and sentiment at least, if not in morals,
than England has since the time of George the Fourth. No genius, no
eloquence, no political wisdom or merits could now induce the English
people to put up with the open and undisguised excesses of a Fox; nor
could any English statesman of the rank of Fox be found now who would
condescend to pander to the vices of a George the Fourth. Thirty years
of decorum in the Court, the Parliament, and the press have created a
public feeling in England which will not long bear to be too openly
offended by any one. But, although I may seem at first to be enunciating
a paradox, I must say that all this is rather in favor of the chances of
the Prince of Wales than against them. It will take so small a sacrifice
on his part to satisfy everybody, that only the very extravagance of
folly could lead him long astray on any unsatisfactory course, when once
he has become directly responsible to the nation. We are not exacting in
England as regards the private conduct of our great people. We only ask
them to be publicly decorous. Everywhere in English society there is a
quite unconscious, naive sort of Pharisaism, the unavowed but actual
principle of which is that it matters very little if a man does the
wrong thing, provided he publicly acts and says the right thing. I am
perfectly satisfied that the great bulk of respectable and Philistine
society in England would regard Robert Dale Owen, with his pure life and
his views on the question of divorce, as a far more objectionable person
than the veriest profligate who did evil stealthily, and professed to
maintain the theory of a rigid marriage bond. The Prince of Wales will
therefore need very little actual improvement in his way of life, in
order to be all that his future subjects will expect, or care to ask. No
one wants the Prince to be a man of ability; no one wishes him to be a
good speaker. If Albert Edward were to rise in the House of Lords some
night, and deliver a powerful and eloquent speech, as Prince Napoleon
has often done in the French Senate, the English public would be not
only surprised but shocked. Such a feat performed by a Prince would seem
almost as much out of place, as if he were to follow the example of
Caligula or Nero and exhibit himself in the arena as a gladiator. Of
course the idea of the Prince of Wales fulminating against the policy of
the Crown and the Government, after the fashion of Prince Napoleon,
would be simply intolerable to the British mind of to-day--a thing so
outrageous as indeed to be practically inconceivable. The Prince of
Wales's part during the coming years, whether as first subject or as
ruler, is as easy as could well be assigned to man. It is the very
reverse of Bottom's; it is to avoid all roaring. He must be decorous,
and we will put up with any degree of dulness; he must be decent, and we
will all agree to know nothing of any private compensations wherewith he
may repay himself for public propriety. All the influences of English
statesmanship, rank, religion, journalism, patriotism, Philistinism, and
flunkeyism, will instinctively combine to screen the throne against
scandal, if only the throne will consent to allow of the possibility of
such a protection. I have hardly ever known an Englishman whose
hostility to monarchical institutions went so far that he would not be
ready to say, "We have got a monarchy; let us try to make the best we
can of it." Therefore the Prince of Wales must be the very Marplot or
L'Etourdi of princes, if he cannot contrive to make himself endurable to
a people who will bear so much rather than be at the trouble of a
change. Of course it is possible that his faults may become grosser and
more unmanageable with years (indeed, he is quite old enough already to
have sown his wild oats long since); and it would be a hard trial upon
decorous English statesmen and the English public to endure an openly
profligate King. Yet even that nuisance I think would be endured for one
lifetime at all events, rather than encounter the danger and trouble of
any organic change.
So long as the Prince of Wales keeps out of politics, he may hold his
place well enough; the England of to-day could far better endure even a
George the Fourth than a George the Third. I have little doubt that the
Prince of Wales, when he comes to be King, will be discreet in this
matter at least. He has never indeed shown any particular interest in
political affairs, so far as I have heard. He seems to care little or
nothing about the contests of parties. Some three or four years ago, at
the time of the celebrated Adullamite secession from the Liberal party,
there was some grumbling among Radicals because it was reported that the
Prince of Wales had expressed a wish to make the acquaintance of Robert
Lowe, the brilliant, eccentric chief of the secession, and had had Lowe
brought to him and spent a long time talking with him; and it was urged
that this was done by the Prince to mark his approval of the Adullamites
and his dislike of radicalism. But just about the very same time the
Prince took some trouble to make the acquaintance of John Bright, and
paid what might have been considered very flattering attentions to the
great popular tribune. The Prince has more than once visited the Pope,
and he has likewise more than once visited Garibaldi. Indeed, he seems
to have a harmless liking for knowing personally all people who are
talked about; and I fancy he hunted up the Pope, and Garibaldi, and John
Bright, and Robert Lowe, just as he sends for Mr. Toole the comic actor,
or Blondin, or Chang the giant. Nothing can be safer and better for the
Prince in the future than to keep to this wholesome indifference to
politics. In England we could stand any length of the reign of King Log.
I shall not venture to conjecture what might happen if the Prince of
Wales were to develop a perverse inclination to "meddle and muddle" in
politics, because I think such a thing highly improbable. My impression
is, on the whole, that things will go on under the reign of the next
sovereign in England very much as they have been going on under the
present; that the Prince of Wales will be induced to pay a little more
attention to decorum and public propriety than he has hitherto done; and
that the people of England will laugh at him and cheer for him, talk
scandal about him and sing God save him, and finally endure him, on
somewhat the same principle as that which induces the New York public to
endure overcrowded street-cars and miserable postal arrangements--just
because it is less trouble to each individual to put up with his share
of a defective institution, than to go out of his way for the purpose of
endeavoring to organize any combination to get rid of it.
THE KING OF PRUSSIA.
Ronsard, in one of his songs addressed to his mistress, tells her that
in her declining years she will be able to boast that "When I was young
a poet sang of me." In a less romantic spirit the writer of this article
may boast in old age, should he attain to such blest condition, that
"When I was young a king spoke to me." That was the only king or
sovereign of any kind with whom I ever exchanged a word, and therefore I
may perhaps be allowed to be proud of the occasion and reluctant to let
it sleep in oblivion. The king was William, King of Prussia, and the
occasion of my being spoken to by a sovereign was when I, with some
other journalists, was formally presented to King William after his
coronation, and listened to a word or two of commonplace, good-humored
courtesy.
The coronation of King William took place, as many readers of THE GALAXY
are probably aware, in the old historic town of Koenigsberg, on the
extreme northeastern frontier of Prussia, a town standing on one of the
inlets of the Baltic Sea, where once the Teutonic Knights, mentioned by
Chaucer, were powerful. Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" had brought
Koenigsberg prominently before the eyes and minds of English-speaking
readers, just previously to the ceremony in which King William was the
most conspicuous performer. It is the city where Immanuel Kant passed
his long and fruitful life, and which he never quitted. It is a
picturesque city in its way, although not to be compared with its
neighbor Dantzic. It is a city of canals and streams, and many bridges,
and quaint, narrow, crooked streets, wherein are frequent long-bearded
and gabardined Jews, and where Hebrew inscriptions are seen over many
shop-windows and on various door-plates. In its centre the city is
domineered over by a Schloss, or castle-palace, and it was in the chapel
of this palace that the ceremony of coronation took place, which
provoked at the time so many sharp criticisms and so much of popular
ridicule.
The first time I saw the King was when he rode in procession through the
ancient city, some two or three days before the performance of the
coronation. He seemed a fine, dignified, handsome, somewhat bluff old
man--he was then sixty-four or sixty-five years of age--with gray hair
and gray moustache, and an expression which, if it did not denote
intellectual power, had much of cheerful strength and the charm of a
certain kind of frank manhood about it. He rode well--riding is one of
the accomplishments in which kings almost always excel--and his military
costume became him. Certainly no one was just then disposed to be very
enthusiastic about him, but every one was inclined to make the best of
the sovereign and the situation; to forget the past and look hopefully
into the future. The manner in which the coronation ceremony was
conducted, and the speech which the King delivered soon after it,
produced a terrible shock of disappointment; for in each the King
manifested that he understood the crown to be a gift not from his
people, but from heaven. To me the ceremonies in the chapel, splendid
and picturesque as was the _mise en scene_, appeared absurd and even
ridiculous. The King, bedizened in a regal costume which suggested Drury
Lane or Niblo's Garden, lifting a crown from off the altar (was it, by
the way, an altar?) and, without intervention of human aid other than
his own hands, placing it upon his head, to signify that he had his
crown from heaven, not from man; then putting another crown upon the
head of his wife, to show that _she_ derived her dignities from him; and
then turning round and brandishing a gigantic sword, as symbolical of
his readiness to defend his State and people--all this seemed to me too
suggestive of the _opera comique_ to suit the simple dignity of the
handsome old soldier. Far better and nobler did he look in his military
uniform and with his spiked helmet, as he sat on his horse in the
streets, than when, arrayed in crimson velvet cloak and other such stage
paraphernalia of conventional royalty, he stood in the castle chapel,
the central figure in a ceremonial of mediaeval splendor and worse than
mediaeval tediousness.
But the King's face, bearing, and manner, as I saw him in Koenigsberg,
and immediately afterwards in Berlin, agreeably disappointed me. It was
one of the best faces to be seen among all the throng at banquet and
ball and pageant during those days of gorgeous and heavy ceremonial. At
the coronation performances there were two other personages who may be
said to have divided public curiosity and interest with the King. One
was the illustrious Meyerbeer, who composed and conducted the coronation
ode, which thus became almost his swan-song, his latest notes before
death. The other was a man whose name has lately again divided attention
with that of the King of Prussia--Marshal MacMahon, Duke of Magenta.
MacMahon was sent to represent the Emperor of the French at the
coronation, and he was then almost fresh from the glory of his Lombardy
battles. There was great curiosity among the Koenigsberg public to get a
glimpse of this military hero; and although even Prussians could hardly
be supposed to take delight in a fame acquired at the expense of other
Germans, I remember being much struck by the quiet, candid good-humor
with which people acknowledged that he had beaten their countrymen.
There was, indeed, a little vexation and anger felt when some of the
representatives of Posen, the Prussian Poland, cheered somewhat too
significantly for MacMahon as he drove in his carriage from the palace.
The Prussians generally felt annoyed that the Poles should have thus
publicly and ostentatiously demonstrated their sympathy with France and
their admiration of the French general who had defeated a German army.
But except for this little ebullition of feeling, natural enough on both
sides, MacMahon was a popular figure at the King's coronation; and
before the ceremonies were over, the King himself had become anything
but popular. The foreigners liked him for the most part because his
manners were plain, frank, hearty, and agreeable, and to the foreigners
it was a matter of little consequence what he said or did in the
accepting of his crown. But the Germans winced under his blunt
repudiation of the principle of popular sovereignty, and in the minds of
some alarmists painful and odious memories began to revive and to
transform themselves into terrible omens for the future.
For this pleasant, genial, gray-haired man, whose smile had so much of
honest frankness and even a certain simple sweetness about it, had a
grim and bloodstained history behind him. Not Napoleon the Third himself
bore a more ominous record when he ascended the throne. The blood of the
Berliners was purple on those hands which now gave so kindly and cheery
a welcome to all comers. The revolutionists of Baden held in bitter hate
the stern prince who was so unscrupulous in his mode of crushing out
popular agitation. From Cologne to Koenigsberg, from Hamburg to Trieste,
all Germans had for years had reason only too strong to regard William
Prince of Prussia as the most resolute and relentless enemy of popular
liberty. When the Pope was inspiring the hearts of freemen and patriots
everywhere in Europe with sudden and splendid hopes doomed to speedy
disappointment, the Prince of Prussia was execrated with the Hapsburgs,
the Bourbons, and the Romanoffs. The one only thing commonly said in his
favor was that he was honest and would keep his word. The late Earl of
Clarendon, one of the most incautious and blundering of diplomatists
(whom after his death the English newspapers have been eulogizing as a
very sage and prince of statesmen), embodied this opinion sharply in a
few words which he spoke to a friend of mine in Koenigsberg. Clarendon
represented Queen Victoria at the coronation ceremonies, and my friend
happened in conversation with him to be expressing a highly disparaging
opinion of the King of Prussia. "There is just this to be said of him,"
the British Envoy remarked aloud in the centre of a somewhat
miscellaneous group of listeners--"he is an honest man and a man of his
word; he is not a Corsican conspirator."
Yes, this was and is the character of the King of Prussia. In good and
evil he kept his word. You might trust him to do as he had said. During
the greater part of his life the things he promised to do and did were
not such as free men could approve. He set out in life with a genuine
detestation of liberal principles and of anything that suggested popular
revolution. William of Prussia is certainly not a man of intellect or
broad intelligence or flexibility of mind. He would be in private life a
respectable, steady, rather dull sort of man, honest as the sun, just as
likely to go wrong as right in his opinions, perhaps indeed a shade more
likely to go wrong than right, and sure to be doggedly obstinate in any
opinion which he conceived to be founded on a principle. Horror of
revolution was naturally his earliest public sentiment. He was one of
the princes who entered Paris in 1815 with the allied sovereigns when
they came to stamp out Bonapartism; and he seemed to have gone on to
late manhood with the conviction that the mission of honest kings was to
prevent popular agitation from threatening the divine right of the
throne. Naturally enough, a man of such a character, whose chief merits
were steadfastness and honesty, was much disgusted by the vacillation,
the weakness, the half-unconscious deceitfulness of his brother, the
late Frederick William. Poor Frederick William! well-meaning, ill-doing
dreamer, "wind-changing" as Warwick, a sort of Rene of Anjou placed in a
responsible position and cast into a stormy age. What blighted hopes and
bloody streets were justly laid to his charge--to the charge of him who
asked nothing better than to be able to oblige everybody and make all
his people happy! Frederick William loved poetry and poets in a feeble,
_dilettante_ sort of way. He liked, one might say, to be thought to like
the Muses and the Graces. He used to insist upon Tieck the poet reading
aloud his new compositions to the royal circle of evenings; and when the
bard began to read the King would immediately fall asleep, and nod until
he nodded himself into wakefulness again; and then he would start up and
say, "Bravo, Tieck! Delightful, Tieck! Go on reading, Tieck!" and then
to sleep again. He liked in this sort of fashion the poetic and
sentimental aspects of revolution, and he dandled popular movements on
his royal knee until they became too demonstrative and frightened him,
and then he shook them off and shrieked for the aid of his strong-nerved
brother. One day Frederick William would be all for popular government
and representative monarchy, and what not; the next day he became
alarmed and receded, and was eager to crush the hopes he had himself
awakened. He was always breaking his word to his people and his country,
and yet he was not personally an untruthful man like English Charles the
First. In private life he would have been amiable, respectable, gently
aesthetical and sentimental; placed in a position of responsibility amid
the seething passions and conflicting political currents of 1848, he
proved himself a very dastard and caitiff. Germany could hardly have
had upon the throne of Prussia a worse man for such a crisis. He was
unlucky in every way; for his vacillation drew on him the repute of
hypocrisy, and his whimsical excitable manners procured for him the
reproach of intemperance. A sincerely pious man in his way, he was
almost universally set down as a hypocrite; a sober man who only drank
wine medicinally on the order of his physicians, he was favored
throughout Europe with the nickname of "King Clicquot." His utter
imbecility before and after the massacre of those whom he called his
"beloved Berliners," made him more detestable to Berlin than was his
blunt and stern brother, the present King, who gave with his own lips
the orders which opened fire on the population. A more unkingly figure
than that of poor, weak, well-intentioned, sentimental, lachrymose
Frederick William, never in our days at least has been seen under a
royal canopy.
It was but natural that such a character or no-character as this should
disgust his brother and successor, the present King. Frederick William,
as everybody knows, had no son to succeed him. The stout-hearted William
would have liked his brother and sovereign to be one thing or the other;
a despot of course he would have preferred, but he desired consistency
and steadfastness on whatever side. William, it must be owned, was for
many years a downright stupid, despotic old feudalist. At one of his
brother's councils he flung his sword upon the table and vowed that he
would rather appeal to that weapon than consent to rule over a people
who dared to claim the right of voting their own taxes. He appears to
have had the sincere stupid faith that Heaven directly tells or teaches
kings how to rule, and that a king fails in his religious duty who takes
counsel of aught save his own convictions. Perhaps a good many people in
lowlier life are like William of Prussia in this respect. He certainly
was not the only person in our time who habitually accepted his own
likings and dislikings as the appointed ordinances of Heaven. In my own
circle of acquaintance I think I have known such individuals.
Thus William of Prussia strode through life sword in hand menacing and,
where he could, suppressing popular movement. Yet he was saved from
utter detestation by the admitted integrity of his character--a virtue
so dear to Germans, that for its sake they will pardon harshness and
sometimes even stupidity. People disliked or dreaded him, but they
despised his brother. There was a certain simplicity, too, always seen
in William's mode of living which pleased the country. There was no
affectation about him; he was almost as much of a plain, unpretending
soldier as General Grant himself. Since he became King, anybody passing
along the famous Unter den Linden might see the white-haired, simple old
man writing or reading at the window of his palace. He was in this
respect a sort of military Louis Philippe; a Louis Philippe with a
strong purpose and without any craft. Therefore, when the death of his
brother in 1861 called him to the throne, he found a people anxious to
give him credit for every good quality and good purpose, willing to
forget the past and look hopefully into the coming time. They only
smiled at his renewal of the coronation ceremonies at Koenigsberg,
believing that the old soldier thought there was something of a
religious principle somehow mixed up in them, and that it was the
imaginary piety, not the substantial pomp, which commended to his mind
so gorgeous and costly an anachronism. After the coronation ceremonies,
however, came back the old unpopularity. The King, people said, has
learned nothing and forgotten nothing since he was Prince of Prussia.
Every act he did after his accession to the crown seemed only more and
more to confirm this impression. It was, I think, about this time that
the celebrated "Diary" of Varnhagen von Ense was published by the niece
of the deceased diplomatist; a diary full in itself of the most piquant
interest, but made yet more piquant and interesting by the bitter and
foolish persecution with which the King's officials endeavored to
suppress the work and punish its publishers. I have not read or even
seen the book for years, but the impression it made on me is almost as
distinct just now as it was when I laid down the last of its many and
vivacious volumes.
Varnhagen von Ense was a bitter creature, and the pen with which he
wrote his diary seems to have been dipped in gall of special acridity.
The diary goes over many years of Berlin court life, and the present
King of Prussia is one of its central figures. The author does not seem
to have had much respect for anybody; and King William was evidently an
object of his particular detestation. All the doings of the days of 1848
are recorded or commented on, and the pages are interspersed with
notices of the sharp ungenial things said by one royal personage of
another. If the late Frederick William chose to say an ill-natured thing
of Queen Victoria of England, down goes the remark in Varnhagen's pages,
and it is chronicled for the perusal of all the world. We learn from the
book that the present King of Prussia does not live on the most genial
terms with his wife Augusta; that Augusta has rather a marked
inclination towards Liberalism, and would find nothing more pleasant
than a little coquetry with Revolution. Varnhagen intimates that the
illustrious lady loved lions and novelties of any kind, and that at the
time he writes she would have been particularly glad to make the
acquaintance of Louis Blanc; and he more than hints at a decided
inclination on her part to _porter le pantalon_--an inclination which
her husband was not at all likely to gratify, consciously at least. Of
the progressive wife Varnhagen speaks with no whit more respect than of
the reactionary husband; and indeed he seems to look with irreverent and
cynical eyes on everything royal that comes under his observation.
Throughout the whole of the diary, the figure of the present King comes
out consistently and distinctly. William is always the blunt, dull,
wrong-headed, I might almost say pig-headed soldier-fanatic, who will do
and suffer and make others do and suffer anything, in a cause which he
believes to be right. With all Varnhagen von Ense's bitterness and
scorn, he gives us no worse idea of King William than just this. But
judging from the expression of the King's face, from his manner, and
from what I have heard of him in Berlin and elsewhere, I should say
there was a good deal of individual kindness and bonhomie in him for
which the critic did not give him credit. I think he is, on the whole,
better than Varnhagen von Ense chose to paint him or see him.