When the volume of M. Lévy Brühl appeared in September of last year,
its name was instantaneously found for it by one of the leaders of
historical criticism in France. Ere one week had passed, M. Albert
Sorel had christened it "_l' Idée elle Fait_,"[4] and the public of
Paris had ratified the title by all but universal acclaim.
[4] "_Le Temps_," 9th September, 1890.
In those words M. Sorel proclaimed the concrete sense of the book, and
no doubt was left as to what was the meaning of the author who had so
freely undertaken to investigate the "developments of the German
national conscience."
The pith of the whole lies in Professor Brühl's own expression: "In
German unity," he says, "the idea precedes everything else, engenders
the fact _l'est l'Unité nationale d'abord; Unité l'etat ensuite_," and
nowhere in any historical phenomenon has the idea had a larger part to
claim. But here you have at once to get rid of what, in Sybel's
narrative, rests on mere documentary evidence! All anachronisms have
to be set aside. As against the vigor of Lévy Brühl's living men, the
make-believe of the past, with its caste-governed puppets, stares you
in the face. After the rout at Sédan, after the startling
transmutation of long dormant but still live ideas into overwhelming
facts, you realize how entirely the mere Prussian chronicle of events
in their official garb deals with what is forever extinct. These dead
players have lost their significancy; they but simulate humanity from
the outside,--are simply "embroidered vestments stuffed like dolls
with bran," or like the moth-eaten uniforms of the great Frederick in
the gallery at Potsdam.
When Lévy Brühl, alluding to Stein and his searching reforms after the
disasters of later years, says: "_Il voulait une nation vivante_" he
wanted a living nation! He unchains the great idea from the bondage
where it had lain for centuries, and whence the men of 1813 set it
loose; he reinstates the past even to its legendary sources, and
evokes memories which were those of heroic ages, and which had still
power to inspire the present, and re-create what had once so
splendidly lived. This life is in truth the German idea in its utmost
truth; it was life and power that these men wanted, the life born in
them from their earliest hour and kept sacred through all time by
their poetry, their song, their native tongue.
It is all this which is German and not Prussian. The Hohenzollerns
have nothing to do with all this idealism,--and it is this which
constitutes the peculiar and sovereign spirit of German unity to which
the modern philosophy of Frederick II. was so long a stranger, and to
which the Iron Chancellor became a hearty convert only at the close;
the chivalrous element of the great elector is but a link between what
had been the Holy Roman Empire and what is to be the national union
after Leipsic and the War of Freedom--culminating in its supreme and
inevitable consequence in 1871. The heroes (and they were heroes) of
the distant North were as Brandenburgers, "electors," component parts,
be it not forgotten, of a Teutonic whole, "of one great heart," (as
Bunsen wrote long years ago to Lord Houghton),[5] "though we did not
know it."
[5] Life of Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, by
Wemyss Reid. 2 vols. London, 1891.
Perhaps the greatest superiority of Professor Lévy Brühl lies in the
unity of description he employs in order to bring home to the reader
the unity of the subject he treats. He sees the whole as a whole, as
it really is, all being contained in all, and nothing in past or
present omitted. This is the truth of the Germanic oneness of species,
and the failure to conceive it of most writers of our day is the chief
cause of confusion. It is a vast, coherent vision of things taken in
by mind and eye from the _Niebelungen Lied_ to the wholesale captivity
of the French army, in the autumn of 1870, and when not thus
conceived, incomplete. To those who lived in and through the period
comprised between the war of the Danish Duchies and the re-conquest
of Alsace-Lorraine, no item of even prehistoric times can remain
absent; the spirit of German unity is everywhere, pervades everything,
and those alone who thoroughly master this are capable of painting it
to others' senses.
It is very well to take a Leibniz or Frederick the Great for a
starting-point, but it all goes immeasurably farther back than that.
Luther and his Bible open one large historic gate. The Bible heads
all! In 1813, writes General Clausewitz to the so-called Great Gascon,
the prime impetus was a religious one, and his own words are: "If I
could only hang a Bible to the equipments of my troopers I could do
with them all that Cromwell did with his Ironsides!" Two centuries
before, this had been the feeling of Gustavus Adolphus, who fought for
Protestant Germany with his Bible at his saddle-bow.
Luther is the one predominant Teuton of the centuries, after the close
of the middle ages, and though he ceases to be present in the flesh in
1516, he never dies. The inspiration of the German soul endures and
lives in every variety of art or expression. Luther is perpetuated in
Handel, and technically, even his "_Feste Burg_" is the first note of
the "_Inspirate_" in "_I Know That My Redeemer Liveth!_"
It is only the most inattentive of historical students who can afford
to ignore this. No modern æsthetician from the Rhine to the Spree
affects to dispute the succession of Teutonic thought, in its various
forms of passion, from Beethoven to Goethe, from Schiller, Jean Paul,
or Weber, or Ravner, or Kleist, or Immermann, down to the latest high
priest of the pre-historic cult--down to Richard Wagner himself! It
was precisely this that the Emperor Frederick knew as crown prince,
and that the chancellor had to learn. With the crown prince all was
present. The farthest past was with him; the leaves of the _uralte_
forests had whispered their dream lore in his ears as in those of the
_Siegfried_ of the Niebelungen; he had seen Otto von Wittelsbach
strike dead his very Kaiser for breach of faith[6] and stood by at the
Donnersberg, when mighty Rudolph's son slew Adolf of Napan for his
base attempt at usurpation. He knew it all, legend or chronicle; no
secret was hidden from him, and the national pulse beat in him with
fiery throb from the first hour when the national conscience had been
touched. The chancellor was chilled by his own statecraft, and the
king, as he then was, had witnessed the Napoleonic wars.
[6] The heroic founder of the Bavarian monarchy, Otho of
Writtelsbach, was betrayed shamefully by his friend,
the Emperor Philip, of Suabia, and slew him for his
treachery. This is one of the oldest dramas on the
German stage.
Between the crown prince and Bismarck, however, there existed one
point of contact. Each was a _Deutsche Student_, and there, later on,
was to be found the true conversion of the chancellor to national
ideas.
As in every genuine lover of his country (and that Prince Bismarck
is), there lay latent in the famous "White Cuirassier" the same ideal
capacity of warlike action and intellectuality that so distinguished
Frederick II. No one understood better the complex son of Carlyle's
roystering barrack hero, no one knew in reality more deeply that the
ideas planted by him in men's minds were those of the majesty of
intelligence, of the royalty of humanity's brain power.
Count Bismarck proved his political foresight by the rapidity with
which he seized on the Schleswig-Holstein question as being the axis
on which turned the entire evolution (if ever it should be possible!)
of the imperial German unity. About that he hesitated not one moment.
He adopted the whole theory of Dahlmann, who alone spoke it out in
words in 1848-9, but he feared to plunge at one leap into the vortex
of his own threatening conclusions and tried for several years to
stave off the "pay day." He was somewhat slower to recognize the
identity of feeling through all the Germanic races, to realize the
equally strong vibration, the psychologic harmony quivering through
heart and soul from North to South, through the mysteriously hidden
dramas of fifteen hundred years. He believed himself a narrow
Particularist Borussian, a "Pomeranian Giant," and let a score of
years go by before clearly making out by touch that the strange change
of tonality, of sound, and significance that superposed the patriotism
of the South to that of the North was a mere inharmonic change, and
that according to the rotation of the two circles, each, in reality,
underlay the other in turn.
It would be a fatal mistake to imagine that M. von Bismarck allowed
himself to be led into the Danish campaign. He did nothing to bring it
about, but the instant it showed itself on the cards he took advantage
of it in the most predetermined, authoritative way, leaving his
Austrian accomplice and victim no possibility of escape. From the hour
when, in 1853, he boarded Count Richberg on the Carlsbad Railroad, and
forced his enemy of the _Francfort Bund_ to become his humble servant
and carry out all his designs, to the hour when, in 1865, he drove
Franz Joseph to sign the Condiminium on what he knew was a mere waste
paper, he was resolved to turn to account the extraordinary
opportunity offered him by the incredible blindness and insensate
terror of revolution of his allies. In the Austrians, the dread of
what the smaller States, encouraged by Hungary, might attempt,
paralyzed every other consideration, and besides that, the abortive
little plans of Count Beust, in Saxony, served to point out to him
what other Germans were, in a purely German sense, thinking of, and he
decided that the grand historic game thrust upon his perceptions and
waited for by all around him, should be played by himself alone. Then
he played it, not before seeing at once what it must entail, but by no
means assured that he could win.
And then, they who watched him nearest and knew him best, know how he
played that game, mindful of every event that filled the long history
of the past, living over again all the struggles, all the glories and
defeats of all the European nations far or near, finding examples both
to imitate or avoid, losing sight of nothing, from Gregory VII. to
Gutenberg, from papal obscurantism to the Reformation's blaze of
light; from Wallenstein's murder to the treaty of Utrecht; from
Richelieu to the scaffold of Louis XVI., and while calculating every
catastrophe, keeping steadily on his way.
This, the fearful period between the Crimean War, when first Cavour
stepped forth to the incident of Ems, when the die was cast, this was
the really magnificent passage in the great chancellor's career, for
this was the time of possible doubt when responsibility lay so heavy
that to elude it might be called prudence, and which to have survived
is already a proof of superiority over common humanity.
And here we assert the true grandeur of the precursor,--of the one
whom we have called the inventor, and who undeniably was so--of
Cavour! There can be no question that his own intimate familiarity
with the details of the Bond of Virtue and the War of Freedom[7] of
the glorious epoch when modern Germany headed and achieved the
victorious movement against the world's debasement,--brought
distinctly to Bismarck's mental vision the splendor of Cavour's
impossibly unequal contest for Italian freedom! The situations were
essentially much alike, but so much grander for the Italian statesman,
Italy's odds being so immeasurably longer! But still the likeness came
out, and the future chancellor could in no way aspire to be an
initiator. The end was still a gigantic one, and one to which no true,
brave patriot dared be false as an ideal,--but how as to the
execution? As to the practical means of carrying out conceptions that
might daily be doomed to alteration?
[7] The celebrated victory of the Great Elector, that made
Prussia into a kingdom.
There it was again that the figure of Cavour arose supreme; his long,
inexhaustible patience, his undying hopes, his sacrifices day by day
of the very springs of life for a self-imposed duty,--these were his
titles to immortal fame, these constituted his sovereign right to
success. But was not the worst probation over when Waterloo was won,
and was it not an accepted theory that the Vienna Congress had settled
all the vexed questions of ancient Europe? Any further movement,
therefore, might seem merely a disturbance. This, for conservative
statesmen above all, was a dilemma.
Germany had liberated not Germany only, but the world in 1813, and had
already had her Cavours!
There was no denying it: the Cavour of Germany was Stein. But was the
work done? Had the Congress of Vienna settled anything, for was that
still left to do without which the independence and well-being of
forty millions of Germans was unguaranteed, and the peace of all
Europe uninsured? If so, what remained to be achieved? to complete
what the German Cavour, the Precursor Stein, had begun, to embody and
make real the glorious dreams of which Queen Louise had been the
symbol, the Joan of Arc?[8]
[8] I would recommend every student of history to read
attentively the extraordinary article of M. Paleologue
in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ entitled "_La Reine
Louise de Prusse Comment se Fait une Legende_." It is a
poetic but true suite to Professor Lévy Brühl's
magnificent study.
That, indeed, brought the Hohenzollerns on the scene, and lent to
prosaic history its legend, giving to Frederick's "big battalions" the
white-robed heroine who should lead them on.
Whether, through the long years of indecision, during which disorder
and revolution seemed the danger to be averted, the future
"Chancellor of Iron" matured his plans after the manner of Newton, by
"forever thinking of them" is still a question to be adequately
answered by himself alone. This much is certain that when, in 1863-64,
the subject of the Duchies cast its shadow on the path, it revealed
its importance to Bismarck, as it had done fourteen years previously
to Dahlmann, and stood forth distinctly as the initial syllable of the
one mystical word, _Unity_.
_Schleswig-Holstein_ was, as a matter of fact, and by all its several
complications, the German question; it was its sign and portent, and
if action of some sort were not taken thereupon, the door set ajar was
closed upon the future, for a generation at least. Palmerston's
declaration, than which no unwiser one was ever made, touching the
insanity of the man who should seek to understand the enigma of the
Danish Duchies, was adopted in England solely from the dense and
inconceivable ignorance of the British mind on all German topics, and
the equally inexplicable but inborn dislike of all British politicians
to grapple with any serious study of them.
It was the problem to which no German of the North could show
indifference; and it was the one subject which brought Prussia to the
fore, and put her reigning house in the van, forcing the Hohenzollerns
into predominance. This was a crucial point, and wondrous to record!
the will of Bismarck on that exceedingly curious detail brought the
Hapsburgs together with the Hohenzollerns; Frederick with
Marie-Therèse, Wallenstein's camp with Rebels, in an unescapable
atmosphere of rank Germanism!
But here again the first step of the forthcoming ruler was taken in
obedience to an irresistible, though, perhaps, unavowed, national
suggestion. The sense of _all_ that the past had given to German
history, to the power of German thought, formed a part of Bismarck's
very nature, and spite of the timidity of his experienced statecraft,
he could not disobey the promptings of the German conscience.
When the quick-witted French public applied to Professor Lévy Brühl's
work the title of "The idea whence comes the fact," they awarded it
its permanent signification; it is the development of the German
conscience that causes the imperial unity of Germany, and no one is
more thoroughly aware of that than the famous chancellor.
We feel with whomsoever was a witness of the crowning struggle, that
nothing can even paint its gigantic character more aptly than the
concluding phrase of the now famous French historian:--
... "Thus was formed the virtual German nation,--the nation that
willed to be, and for long years could not be because reality refused
to bear out practically all its ideals. It was in truth, _l'ame qui
cherche un corps_!"
These words can never be improved upon. The chancellor knows their
truth, as the _Kronprinz_ knew it, but the years lying between them
threw a certainty of glory into one which the other could not attain
to,--and Bismarck, too, was a man of old Prussia, of her ancient
traditions and formalities, while the crown prince was modern amongst
moderns--a soldier, yes! but pre-eminently a man, a citizen; but
though each felt his conviction differently, its strength was one and
the same in both.
The unity of Germany was the creation of no individual. German unity
and the imperial unity sprang from the whole past of German history
and German thought. The State existing now is the outcome of Germany's
own self, of the idea, of the soul of Germany.
"SHOULD THE NATION OWN THE RAILWAYS?"[9]