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The young Emperor was born in the first month of 1859. The prolonged
life of his grandfather, and the apparently superb physical vitality of
his father, made him seem much further removed from the throne than fate
really intended, and he grew up into manhood with only scant attention
from the general public. There was an unexpressed feeling that he
belonged to the twentieth century, and that it would be time enough
then to study him. When of a sudden the world learned that the stalwart
middle-aged Crown Prince had a mortal malady, and saw that it was a race
toward the grave between him and his venerable father, haste was made
to repair this negligent error, and find out things about the hitherto
unconsidered young man who was to be so prematurely called upon the
stage. Unfortunately, this swift and unexpected shifting of history’s
lime-light revealed young William in extremely repellent colours. Many
circumstances, working together in the shadows behind the throne, had
combined to put him into a temporary attitude toward his parents, which
showed very badly under this sudden and fierce illumination. “Ho, ho!
He is a bad son, then, is he?” we all said, and made up our minds to
dislike him on the spot. Three years have passed, and during that
time many things have happened, many other things have come to light,
calculated to convince us that this early judgment was an over-hasty
one.
So far as I have been able to learn, the first hint given to the world
that there was a young Prince in Berlin distinctly worth watching
appeared in the book “Sociétiê de Berlin. Par le Comte Paul Vasili,”
published at the end of 1883. This volume was, perhaps, the cleverest of
the anonymous series projected by a Parisian publisher to make money out
of the collected gossip and scandal of the chief European capitals, and
utilized by more than one bright familiar of Mme. Adam’s _salon_ to pay
off old grudges and market afresh moss-grown libels. The authorship
of these books was never clearly established. There is a general
understanding in Berlin that the one about that city was for the most
part written by a Parisian journalist named Gerard, then stationed
in Germany. At all events, the evidence was regarded at the time as
sufficient as to warrant his being chased summarily out of Berlin, while
the book itself was prohibited, confiscated, almost burned by the common
hangman. Perhaps Gerard, if he be still alive, might profitably return
to Berlin now, for to him belongs the credit of having first put into
type an intelligent character study of the young man who now monopolizes
European attention.
“The Prince William,” said this anonymous writer, “is only twenty-four
years of age. It is, therefore, difficult as yet to say what he will
become; but what is clearly apparent even now is that he is a young
man of promise in mind and head and heart. He is by far the most
intellectual of the Princes of this royal family. Withal courageous,
enterprising, ambitious, hot-headed, but with a heart of gold,
sympathetic in the highest degree, impulsive, spirited, vivacious in
character, and gifted with a talent for repartee in conversation which
would almost make the listener doubt his being a German. He adores the
army, by which he is idolized in return. He has known how, despite his
extreme youth, to win popularity in all classes of society. He is highly
educated, well read, busies his mind with projects for the welfare of
his country, and has a striking keenness of perception for everything
relating to politics.
“He will certainly, be a distinguished man, and very probably a great
sovereign. Prussia will perhaps have in him a second Frederic II, but
minus his scepticism. In addition, he possesses a fund of gaiety and
good humour that will soften the little angularities of character
without which he would not be a true Hohenzollern.
“He will be essentially a personal king--never allowing himself to be
blindly led, and ruling with sound and direct judgment, prompt decision,
energy in action, and an unbending will. When he attains the throne, he
will continue the work of his grandfather, and will as certainly undo
that of his father, whatever it may have been. In him the enemies of
Germany will have a formidable adversary; he may easily become the Henri
IV of his country.”
I have ventured upon this extended extract from a book eight years old
because the prophecy seems a remarkable one--far nearer what we see now
to be the truth than any of the later predictions have turned out to
be. “Paul Vasili” continues his sketch with some paragraphs about the
Prince’s vast penchant for lower-class dissipated females, concluding
with the warning that if ever he comes under the influence of a’ really
able woman “it will be necessary to follow his actions with great
caution.” All this may be unhesitatingly put down to the French writer’s
imagination.
There is no city where more frankness about talking scandal exists than
in Berlin, yet I have sought in vain to find any justification for this
view of the Kaiser’s character, either past or present. The impression
brought from many talks with people who know him and his life intimately
is that this special accusation is less true of him than of almost any
other prince of his generation.
William’s boyhood was marked by one innovation in the family traditions
of a Hohenzollern’s training, the importance of which it is not easy
to exaggerate. His father had been the first of these royal heirs to
be sent to a university. He in his turn was the first to go to a public
school.
It is a solemn and portentous sort of thing--this training of a
Hohenzollern. The progress of the family has been one long, sustained
object lesson to the world on the value of education. No doubt it is in
great part due to the influence of this standing example that Prussia
leads the van of civilization in its proportion of scholars and
teachers, and has made its name a synonym for all that is thorough and
exhaustive in educational systems and theories. The dawn of this notion
of a specially Spartan and severe practical schooling for his heir, in
the primitive and curiously-limited brain of the first King Frederic
William, really marked an era in the world’s conception of what
education meant.
We have all read, with swift-chasing mirth, wonder, incredulity and
wrath, the stories of the way in which this luckless heir, afterward
to be Frederic the Great, got his education stamped, beaten, burned,
frozen, almost strangled into him. The account reads like a nightmare
of lunatic savagery--yet in it were the germs of a lofty idea. From the
brutal cudgeling, cursing, and manacling of Frederic’s experience grew
the tradition of a unique kind of training for a Hohenzollern prince.
The very violence and wild barbarity of his treatment fixed the
attention of the family upon the theory of education--with very notable
results.
Historically we are all familiar with the excessive military twist given
to this education of the youths born to be Kings of Prussia. The picture
books are full of portraits of them--quaint little manikins dressed in
officers’ uniforms--stepping from the cradle into war’s paraphernalia.
The picture of the Great Fritz beating a drum at the age of three, of
which the rapturous Carlyle makes so much, has its modern counterpart in
the photographs of the present child Crown Prince, clad in regimentals
and saluting the camera, which are in every Berlin shop window. But
another element of this stern regimen, not so much kept in view, is
the absolute dependence of the son upon the father, or rather the King,
which is insisted upon.
We know to what abnormal lengths this ran in the youth and early manhood
of Frederic the Great. It did not alter much in the next reign. In 1784,
when this same Frederic was seventy-two years old, a travelling French
noble was his guest at a great review in Silesia. There was also present
the King’s nephew and heir, who two years later was to ascend the throne
as Frederic William II, and who now was in his fortieth year. Yet of
this forty-year-old Prince the Frenchman writes in his diary: “The heir
presumptive lodges at a brewer’s house, and in a very mean way; is not
allowed to sleep from home without permission from the King.”
The results in this particular instance were not of a flattering kind,
and among the decaying forms of the dying eighteenth century--in an
atmosphere poisoned by the accumulated putridities of that luxurious
and evil epoch--even the Hohenzollern of the next generation was not a
shining success. He was at least, however, much superior to the other
German sovereigns of his time, and he had the unspeakable fortune,
moreover, to be the husband of that Queen Louise who is enshrined as
the patron saint of Prussian history. It was she who engrafted a humane
spirit upon the rough drill-sergeant body of Hohenzollern education.
She made her sons love her--and it seems but yesterday since the last
of these sons, a tottering old man of ninety, used to go to the
Charlottenburg mausoleum on the anniversary of her death, and pray and
weep in solitude beside the recumbent marble effigy of the mother who
had died in 1810.
The introduction of filial affection into the relation between
Hohenzollern parents and children dates from this Queen Louise, and
belongs to our own century. Before that it was the rule for the heirs
of Prussia to detest their immediate progenitors. From the time of
the Great Elector, every rising generation of this royal house sulked,
cursed under its breath, went into opposition as far as it dared, and
every fading generation disliked and distrusted those who were coming
after it. Nor were these harsh relations confined to sovereign and heir.
Wilhelmine, Margravine of Baireuth, records in her memoirs how, at the
age of six, she was so much surprised at being fondled and caressed by
her mother, on the latter’s return from a prolonged journey, that she
broke a blood vessel. * It seems safe to say that down to the family of
Frederic William III and Louise, no other reigning race in Europe had
ever managed to engender so much bitterness and bad blood between elders
and juniors within its domestic fold. The change then was abrupt. The
two older boys of this family, Frederic William IV and William I, lived
lives as young men which were poems of filial reverence and tenderness.
The cruel misfortunes of the Napoleonic wars made the mutual affection
within this hunted and homeless royal family very sweet and touching.
Perhaps the most interesting of all the reminiscences called forth by
the death of the old Kaiser was furnished by the publication of
the letters he wrote as a young man to his father--that strange
correspondence which reveals him resolutely breaking his own heart and
tearing from it the image of the Princess Radziwill, in loving obedience
to his father’s wish.
* “Memoirs of Wilhelmine, Margravine of Baireuth,”
translated by H.R.H. Princess Chri of Wilhelmine, Margravine
of Baireuth, translated by H.R.H. Princess Christian,
London, 1887
This trait of filial piety did not loom so largely in William’s son, the
late Frederic III, as one or two random allusions in his diary show. And
in his son, in turn, its pulse beats with such varying and intermittent
fervour that sometimes one misses it altogether.
Young William, as has been said, was the first of his race to be sent
to a public school, the big gymnasium at Cassel being selected for
the purpose. The innovation was credited at the time to the eccentric
liberalizing notions of his mother, the English Crown Princess. The old
Kaiser did not like the idea, and Bismarck vehemently opposed it, but
the parents had their way, and at the age of fifteen the lad went, along
with his twelve-year-old brother Henry, and their tutor, Dr. Hinzpeter.
They were lodged in an old schloss, which had been one of the Electoral
residences, and out of school hours maintained a considerable seclusion.
But in the school itself William was treated quite like any ordinary
citizen’s son.
It may have been a difficult matter for some of the teachers to act as
if they were unconscious that this particular pupil was the heir of the
Hohenzollerns, but men who were at the school at the time assure me they
did so, with only one exception. This solitary flunkey, knowing that
William was more backward in his Greek than most of his class, sought
to curry favour with the Prince by warning him that the morrow’s
examination was to be, let us say, upon a certain chapter of Xenophon.
The boy William received this hint in silence, but early the next
morning went down to the classroom and wrote upon the blackboard in
big letters the information he had received, so that he might have no
advantage over his fellows. This struck me when I heard it as a curious
illustration of the boy’s character. There seems to have been no excited
indignation at the meanness of the tutor--but only the manifestation of
a towering personal and family pride, which would not allow him to win a
prize through profiting by knowledge withhold from the others.
During his three years at Cassel William was very democratic in his
intercourse with the other boys. He may have been helped to this by
the fact that he was one of the worst-dressed boys in the school--in
accordance with an ancient family rule which makes the Hohenzollern
children wear out their old clothes in a way that would astonish the
average grocer’s progeny. He was only an ordinary scholar so far as his
studies went. At that time his brother Henry, who went to a different
school, was conspicuously the brighter pupil of the two. Those who were
at Cassel with the future Emperor have the idea that he was contented
there, but he himself, upon reflection, is convinced that he did not
like it. At all events, he gathered there a very intimate knowledge of
the gymnasium system which, as will be seen later on, he now greatly
disapproves.
At the age of eighteen William left Cassel and entered upon his
university course at Bonn. Here his tutor, Hinzpeter, who had been his
daily companion and mentor from childhood, parted company with him, and
the young Prince passed into the hands of soldiers and men of the world.
The change marks an important epoch in the formation of his character.
There is a photograph of him belonging to the earlier part of this
Cassel period which depicts a refined, gentle, dreamy-faced German
boy, with a soft, girlish chin, small arched lips with a suggestion of
dimples at the corners, and fine meditative eyes. The forehead, though
not broad, is of fair height and fulness. The dominant effect of the
face is that of sweetness. Looking at it, one instinctively thinks “How
fond that boy’s parents must have been of him!” And they were fond in
the extreme.
In the Crown Prince Frederic’s diary, written while the German
headquarters were at Versailles, are these words:--
“_This is William’s thirteenth birthday. May he grow up to be an able,
honest, and upright man, a true German, prepared to continue without
prejudice what has now been begun! Heaven be praised; between him and
us there is a simple, hearty, and natural relationship, which we shall
strive to preserve, so that he may thus always look upon us as his
best and truest friends. It is really an oppressive reflection when one
realizes what hopes have already been placed on the head of this child,
and how great is our responsibility to the nation for his education,
which family considerations and questions of rank, and the whole
Court life at Berlin and other things will tend to make so much more
difficult_.”
The retirement of Dr. Hinzpeter from his charge was an event the
significance of which recent occurrences have helped us to appreciate.
When history is called upon to make her final summing up upon William’s
character and career, she will allot a very prominent place to the
influence of this relatively unknown man. A curious romance of time’s
revenge hangs about Dr. Hinzpeter. He is a native of the Westphalian
manufacturing town, Bielefeld, and was a poor young tutor at Darmstadt
when he was recommended to the parents of William as one exceptionally
fitted to take charge of their son. The man who gave this recommendation
was the then Mr. Robert Morier, British Minister at Darmstadt. Nearly a
quarter of a century later Sir Robert Morier was able to see his ancient
and implacable enemy, Bismarck, tripped, thrown, and thrust out of
power, and to sweeten the spectacle by reflecting that he owed this
ideal vengeance to the work of the tutor he had befriended in the old
Darmstadt days.
It is more than probable that the idea of sending the young Prince to
the Cassel gymnasium originated with Dr. Hinzpeter. At all events, we
know that he held advanced and even extreme views as to the necessity of
emphasizing the popular side of the Hohenzollern tradition.
This Prussian family has always differed radically from its other German
neighbours in professing to be solicitous for the poor people rather
than for the nobility’s privileges and claims. Sometimes this has sunk
to be a profession merely; more often it has been an active guiding
principle. The lives of the second and third Kings of Prussia are filled
with the most astonishing details of vigilant, ceaseless intermeddling
in the affairs of peasant farmers, artisans, and wage-earners generally,
hearing complaints, spying out injustice, and roughly seeing wrongs
righted. When Prussia grew too big to be thus paternally administered
by a King poking about on his rounds with a rattan and a taker of notes,
the tradition still survived. We find traces of it all along down to our
times in the legislation of the Diet in the direction of what is called
State Socialism.
Dr. Hinzpeter felt the full inspiration of this tradition. He longed
to make it more a reality in the mind of his princely pupil than it had
ever been before. Thus it was that the lad was sent to Cassel, to sit on
hard benches with the sons of simple citizens, and to get to know what
the life of the people was like. Years afterwards this inspiration was
to bear fruit.
But in 1877 the work of creating an ideally democratic and popular
Hohenzollern was abruptly interrupted. Dr. Hinzpeter went back to
Bielefeld, and young William entered the University of Bonn. The
soft-faced, gentle-minded boy, still full of his mother’s milk, his
young mind sweetened and strengthened by the dreams of clemency,
compassion, and earnest searchings after duty which he had imbibed from
his teacher, suddenly found himself transplanted in new ground. The
atmosphere was absolutely novel. Instead of being a boy among boys,
he all at once found himself a prince amongst aristocratic toadies. In
place of Hinzpeter, he had a military _aide_ given him for principal
companion, friend, and guide.
These next few years at the Rhenish university did not, we see now,
wholly efface what Dr. Hinz-peter had done. But they obscured and
buried his work, and reared upon it a superstructure of another sort--a
different kind of William, redolent of royal pretensions and youthful
self-conceit, delighting in the rattle and clank of spurs and swords and
dreaming of battlefields.
Poor Hinzpeter, in his Bielefeld retreat, could have had but small
satisfaction in learning of the growth of the new William. The parents
at Potsdam, too, who had built such loving hopes upon the tender and
gracious promise of boyhood--they could not have been happy either.