During the three days between the death and burial of Frederic
the world saw and heard nothing of his successor save these two
proclamations to the Army and Navy. This in itself was sufficiently
strange. It was like a slap in the face of nineteenth-century
civilization that this young man, upon whom the vast task of ruling an
empire rich in historical memories of peaceful progress had devolved,
should take such a barbaric view of his position. In this country
which gave birth to the art of printing, this Germany wherein Dürer
and Cranach worked and Luther changed the moral history of mankind and
Lessing cleared the way for that noble band of poets of whom Goethe
stands first and Wagner is not last, it seemed nothing less than
monstrous that a youth called to be Emperor should see only columns of
troops and iron-clads.
The purport of these proclamations, shot forth from the printing press
while the news of Frederic’s death was still in the air, fitted well the
precipitancy of their appearance. William delivered a long eulogy upon
his grandfather, made only a passing allusion to his father, recited the
warlike achievements and character of his remoter ancestors, and closed
by saying: “Thus we belong to each other, I and the army; thus we were
born for one another; and firmly and inseparably will we hold together,
whether it is God’s will to give us peace or storm.”
Exultant militarism rang out from every line of these utterances. The
world listened to this young man boasting about being a war lord, with
feelings nicely graded upon a scale of distances. Those near by put
hands on sword hilts; those further away laughed contemptuously; but all
alike, far and near, felt that an evil day for Germany had dawned.
The funeral of old William at Berlin in March had been a spectacle
memorable in the history of mankind--the climacteric demonstration of
the pomp and circumstance of European monarchical systems. A simple
military funeral, a trifle more ornate than that of a General of
division, was given to his successor. The day, June 18th, was the
anniversary of Waterloo.
It may have been due to thoughts upon what this day meant in Prussian
history; more probably it reflected the chastened and softening
influences of these three days’ meditation in the palace of death; from
whatever cause, William’s address to the Prussian people, issued on the
18th, was a much more satisfactory performance. The tone of the drill
sergeant was entirely lacking, and the words about his father, the
departed Frederic, were full of filial sweetness. The closing paragraph
fairly mirrors the whole proclamation:
“I have vowed to God that, after the example of my fathers, I will be a
just and clement Prince to my people, that I will foster piety and the
fear of God, and that I will protect the peace, promote the welfare of
the country, be a helper of the poor and distressed, and a true guardian
of the right.” Pondering upon the marked difference between this address
and the excited and vain-glorious harangue to the fighting men of
Germany which heralded William’s accession, it occurred to me to inquire
whether or not Dr. Hinzpeter had in the interim made his appearance at
Potsdam. No one could remember, but the point may be worth the attention
of the future historian.
Studying all that has since happened in the variant lights of these
proclamations of June 15th and June 18th, one sees a constant struggle
between two Williams--between the gentle, dreamy-eyed, soft-faced boy of
Cassel, and the vain, arrogant youth who learned to clank a sword at his
heels and twist a baby moustache in Bonn. Such conflicts and clashings
between two hostile inner selves have a part in the personal history
of each of us. Only we are not out under the searching glare of
illumination which beats upon a prince, and the records and results of
these internal warrings are of interest to ourselves alone.
William, moreover, has one of those nervous, delicately-poised,
highly-sensitized temperaments which responds readily and without
reserve to the emotion of the moment. Increasing years seem to be
strengthening his judgment, but they do not advance him out of the
impressionable age. In the romantic idealism and mysticism of his mind,
and in the histrionic bent of his impulses, he is a true son of his
father, a genuine heir of the strange fantastic Ascanien strain, which
meant greatness in Catharine II, madness in her son Paul, and whimsical
staginess in his grand-daughter Augusta.
Like his father, too, his nature is peculiarly susceptible to the
domination of a stronger and more deeply rooted personality. The wide
difference between them arises from this very similitude. Frederic spent
all his adult life under the influence of the broad-minded, cultured,
and high-thinking English Princess, his wife. William, during these
years now under notice, was in the grip of the Bismarcks.
The ascendency of this family, which attained its zenith in these first
months of the young Kaiser’s reign, is a unique thing in the history of
Prussia. The Hohenzollerns have been hereditarily a stiff-backed race,
much addicted to personal government, and not at all given to leaning
on other people. From 1660 to 1860 you will search their records in
vain for the name of a minister who was allowed to usurp functions not
strictly his own. The first Frederic William was a good deal pulled
about and managed by inferiors, it is true, but they did it only by
making themselves seem more his inferiors than any others about him. No
Wolsey or Richelieu or Metternich could thrive in the keen air of the
Mark of Brandenburg, under the old kingly traditions of Prussia.
Bismarck rose upon the ruins of those traditions. In 1862 the Prussian
Diet and Prussian society generally were in open revolt against the new
king, William I. Constitutionalism and the spread of modern ideas had
made the old absolutist system of the Hohenzollerns impossible; budgets
were thrown out, constituencies were abetted in their mutiny by the
nobles, and the newspaper press was fiercely hostile. The King, a frank,
kindly, slow-minded old soldier, did not know what to do. The thought of
surrendering his historic prerogatives under pressure, and the resource
of sweeping Berlin’s streets with grape-shot, were equally hateful to
him. In his perplexity he summoned his Ambassador at Paris to Berlin,
and begged him to undertake the defence of the monarchy against its
enemies. He made this statesman, Otto von Bismarck, Minister of the
King’s House and of Foreign Affairs, and avowedly a Premier who had
undertaken to rule Prussia without a Parliament.
It was the old story of the Saxons, being invited to defend the British
homestead, and remaining to enjoy it themselves.
The lapse of a quarter of a century found this King magnified into an
Emperor, enjoying the peaceful semblance of a reign over 48,000,000 of
people, where before he had stormily failed to govern much less than
half that number. He had grown into the foremost place among European
sovereigns so easily and without friction, and was withal so honest and
amiable an old gentleman, that it did not disturb him to note how much
greater a man than himself his Minister had come to be.
The relations between William I and Bismarck were always frank, loyal,
and extremely simple. They were fond of each other, mutually grateful
for what each had helped the other to do and to be. It illumines one of
the finest traits in the great Chancellor’s character to realize that,
during the last eighteen years of the old Kaiser’s life.
Bismarck would never go to the opera or theatre for fear the popular
reception given to him might wound the royal sensitiveness of his
master.
Bismarck, having all power in his own hands, became possessed of that
most human of passions, the desire to found a dynasty, and hand this
authority down to his posterity. There was a certain amount of
promising material in his older son Herbert--a robust, rough-natured,
fairly-acute, and altogether industrious man--ten years older than the
Prince William, now become Kaiser. The strength of Prince Bismarck’s
hold upon the old William was only matched by the supremacy he had thus
far managed to exert over the imperial grandson. He dreamed a vision of
having Herbert as omnipotent in the Germany of the twentieth century as
he had been in the last half of the nineteenth.
The story of his terrible disillusion belongs to a later stage. At
the time with which we are dealing, and indeed for nearly a year after
William’s accession in June of 1888, the ascendency of the Bismarcks was
complete. Men with fewer infirmities of temper and feminine capacities
for personal grudges and jealousies might possibly have maintained
that ascendency, or the semblance of it, for years. But a long lease of
absolute power had developed the petty sides of their characters. During
the brief reign of Frederic they had had to suffer certain slights and
rebuffs at the hands of his Liberal friends who were temporarily brought
to the front. To their swollen _amour propre_ nothing else seemed
so important now as to avenge these indignities. The new Kaiser they
thought of as wholly their man, and they proceeded to use him as a rod
for the backs of their enemies.
It remains a surprising thing that they were allowed to go so far in
this evil direction before William revolted and called a halt. For what
they did before a stop was put to their career it is impossible not to
blame him as well as them. In truth, he began by being so wholly under
their influence that even his own individual acts were coloured by their
prejudices and hates.
If he had been momentarily softened by the pathetic conditions
surrounding his father’s funeral, his heart steeled itself again soon
enough under the sway of the Bismarcks. He entered with gratuitous zest
upon a course of demonstrative disrespect to his father’s memory.
Frederic had been born in the spacious, rambling New Palace at Potsdam,
and in adult life had made it his principal home. Here all his children
save William were born, and here William himself spent his boyhood, as
Mr. Bigelow has so pleasantly told us, * playing with his brother Henry
in their attic nursery, or cruising in their little toy frigate on the
neighbouring lakes. Here Frederic at the end came home to die, and in
the last fortnight of his life formally decreed that the name of the New
Palace should henceforth be Friedrichskron--or Frederic’s Crown.
* New Review, August, 1889.
All who have seen the splendid edifice, embowered in the ancient royal
forest parks, will recognize the poetic and historic fitness of the
name. From its centre rises a dome, surmounted by three female figures
supporting an enormous kingly crown. There was a time when Europe talked
as much about this emblematic dome as we did a year or so ago about the
Eiffel Tower, though for widely different reasons. It was not remarkable
from any scientific point of view, but it embodied in visible bronze
a colossal insult levelled by Frederic the Great at the three most
powerful women in the world. When that tireless creature emerged from
the Seven Years’ War, he began busying himself by the construction of
this palace. Everybody had supposed him to be ruined financially, but he
had his father’s secret hoards almost intact, and during the six years
1763-9 drew from them over £2,000,000 to complete this structure.
With characteristic insolence he reared upon the dome, in the act of
upholding his crown, three naked figures having the faces of Catherine
of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria, and Mme. Pompadour of France,
each with her back turned toward her respective country. The irony was
coarse, but perhaps it may be forgiven to a man who had so notably come
through the prolonged life-and-death struggle forced upon him by these
women.
At all events, it was an intelligent and proper thing to give the palace
the name of Friedrichskron, and one would think that, even if the
change had been less fitting than it was, the wish of the dying man
about the house of his birth could not but command respect.
One of William’s first acts was to order the discontinuance of the new
name, and in his proclamation he ostentatiously reverted to the former
usage of “New Palace.”
To glance ahead for a moment, there came in September an even more
painful illustration of the unfilial attitude to which William had
hardened himself. The _Deutsche Rundschau_ created a sudden sensation by
printing the diary of Frederic, from July 11, 1870, to March 12th of
the following year, covering the entire French campaign and all
the negotiations leading up to the formation of the German Empire.
Quotations have already been made in these pages showing that this diary
demonstrated authoritatively the fallacy of Bismarck’s claim to be the
originator of the Empire. Frederic and the others had had, in fact, to
drag him into a reluctant acceptance of the imperial idea. The shock
of now all at once learning this was felt all over Germany. Every mind
comprehended that the blow had been aimed straight at the Chancellor’s
head. Nobody seemed to see, least of all Bismarck, that the diary really
gave the Chancellor a higher title than that of inventor of the Empire,
and revealed him as a wise, far-seeing statesman, who would not submit
to the fascination of the imperial scheme until he made sure that its
realization would be of genuine benefit to all Germany. So far, indeed,
was he from recognizing this that he allowed the publication to rob him
of all control over his temper.
The edition of the _Rundschau_ was at once confiscated, and on September
23rd Bismarck sent a “report” to the Emperor upon the diary. He set up
the pretence of doubting its genuineness as a cloak for saying the most
brutal things about its dead author. The charge was openly made that
Frederic could not be trusted with any State secrets owing to the fear
of “indiscreet revelations to the English Court,” and therefore “stood
without the sphere of all business negotiations.” Further, he asserted
that the portions of the diary expressing willingness to force the
Southern States into the Empire must be forgeries, because “such ideas
are equally contemptible from the standpoint of honourable feeling and
that of policy.” In conclusion he pointed out that, even if the diary
were genuine, Frederic in giving it for publication would be a traitor
under Article XCII of the Penal Code.
Of the genuineness of the diary there was, of course, no question
whatever in anybody’s mind, least of all in Bismarck’s or William’s. Yet
the young Kaiser permitted this gross attack by the Chancellor upon his
father’s honour and patriotism to be officially published, and gave his
consent to a prosecution of those responsible for the appearance of the
diary in the _Rundschau_.
The story of the prosecution is a familiar one. Dr. Geffcken was found
to be the friend to whom Frederic had entrusted this portion of his
diary, and he was arrested and thrown into prison, to be brought before
the imperial tribunal at Leipsic. The ingrate Friedberg put his talents
at the disposal of the Bismarcks to draw up the case against him.
The houses of Geffcken and Baron von Roggenbach were ransacked, and a
correspondence covering many years was seized and searched by Bismarck’s
emissaries. These letters were said to contain many compromising
references to the Crown Princess, Princess Alice, Sir Robert Morier,
and others whom Bismarck alleged to be in a conspiracy against him. This
charge of being desirous of the Chancellor’s downfall grew indeed to be
the principal item in the attack upon Geffcken.
The indictment for high treason was at last, on January 2, 1889, brought
before the Judges of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Leipsic, and
they threw it out with ignominious swiftness. Geffcken himself, badly
broken in health and mind, was released on the 4th. This was Bismarck’s
first public mishap under the new reign, and it attracted much surprised
attention at the time, as showing both the Chancellor’s lack of
intelligent self-restraint in getting into a fury over a revelation which
really redounded to his credit, and his ignorance of German law. The
opening month of the year 1889, in which this happened, was invested
with importance in another way, as we shall see in due course.
But for the time, returning now to the middle of 1888, William seemed
to delight in exhibiting himself to the public eye as the man of the
Bismarcks. One of his earliest acts was to make a special journey to
Friedrichsruh to visit the Chancellor, and the most popular photograph
of the year was that representing him standing on the lawn in front of
this château, in company with Bismarck and the famous “Reichshund.” In
Berlin, too, people noted his custom of paying early morning calls at
the house of Herbert Bismarck, and wondered how long this enthusiastic
self-abasement would last.
While it did last, this influence of the Bismarcks was so powerful and
all-pervasive that it is very difficult to follow the thread of the
young Kaiser’s own personality through the busy period of his first
half-year’s reign. One continually confronts this embarrassment of
inability to separate what he himself wanted to do from what was
suggested by these powers behind the throne. We know now that the Kaiser
possesses a strongly-marked individuality and an unusually active and
fertile mind. Doubtless these asserted themselves a great deal at
even this early stage, but there is little or nothing to guide us in
distinguishing their effects.
The truth seems to be that at this time, in these opening months of his
reign, William’s inclinations ran so wholly in Bismarckian channels that
even what he himself initiated was in practice a part of the Bismarcks’
work.
This is especially true of the young Kaiser’s first important step in
the field of international politics. He had been on the throne for less
than four weeks when he started off to pay a State visit to the Czar of
Russia. He had not been invited, and it was apparent enough in Russian
Court circles that his hasty and impulsive descent upon their summer
leisure was as unwelcome as it was surprising. He himself appears to
have been swayed both by memories of his grandfather’s injunction
to friendliness toward Russia, and by Bismarck’s desire to make a
demonstration of unfriendliness to England.
This note of anti-English prejudice is dominant throughout all that
immediately followed. During Frederic’s brief tenure of power, in April
of 1888, Queen Victoria had made a journey to Berlin, and had spent
several days in the company of her dying son-in-law and afflicted
daughter at the palace of Charlottenburg. Her coming was not at all
grateful to the Junker class, and it was rendered highly unpopular among
Berliners generally by a curiously tactless performance on the part
of the Empress Frederic. To properly receive her royal mother it
was necessary to refurnish and decorate a suite of rooms in the
Charlottenburg Schloss, and orders were sent to London for all this new
furniture, and for English workmen to make the needed alterations. As
may be imagined, this slight upon the tradesmen and artizans of Berlin
was deeply resented, and there was considerable ground for nervousness
lest the Queen should have some manifestation of this dislike thrust
upon her notice during her stay. Fortunately, this did not happen, but
Prince William behaved so coldly toward his grandmother that her Majesty
could have had no doubt as to the attitude of his friends.
Later on, after Frederic’s death? came confused stories about the
arbitrary and unjust way in which his widow had been treated, both
personally and as regarded her property rights. These matters are all
settled now, and were the subject of great exaggeration even then, but
they created so much bad blood at the time that the Prince of Wales in
the following autumn left Vienna upon a hastily improvised and wholly
fictitious hunting tour, rather than remain and meet his nephew, Kaiser
William, who was coming that way.
Nothing very notable occurred during the July journeys to Russia,
Sweden, and Denmark, and the autumnal trip to Austria and Italy
presented no incidents of importance save this sudden flight of the
indignant Prince of Wales, and a distinctly unpleasant bungling of the
visit to the Pope. This latter episode has become famous in the annals
of Prussian brusqueness and incivility. The young Kaiser in his white
cuirassier uniform and eagle-capped helmet bluntly told the venerable
Pontiff that his dreams of regaining temporal power were all childish
nonsense, and the still ruder Herbert Bismarck broke up the interview
by forcing his way into the Pope’s private apartments, dragging amiable
young Prince Henry with him as a pretext for his boisterous insolence.
This was thought to be a smart trick at the time, and Herbert and the
German Ambassador openly chuckled over it.
William himself is said to have remarked to King Humbert after his
return from the call upon Leo XIII: “I have destroyed his illusions.” At
least the Holy Father no longer indulged illusions as to what the German
Emperor was like--but in his mild, tranquil manner confided to certain
members of his intimate household the pious fear that William was a
conceited and headstrong young man, whose reign would end in disaster.
These journeys did little more than confirm the world in sharing the
Pope’s unfavourable opinion of William. Both by his ostentatious visit
to Russia before even his two allies of the triple compact had been
greeted, and by his marked avoidance of England while visiting all the
other maritime nations of the north, he was credited with desiring to
offend the country of his mother’s birth. That country returned his
dislike with interest.
Finally, on the 1st day of January, 1889, he put the capstone upon this
evil and unfilial reputation which he had been for a year building up in
the minds of English-speaking people. Badly as the outside world thought
of him by this time, it learned now with amazement that he had selected
for special New Year’s honours the ex-Minister Puttkamer. The one
important act of Frederic’s reign had been the dismissal of this man, to
whom William now, with marks of peculiar distinction, gave the order of
the Black Eagle.
A groan of despairing disgust rose from every part of the globe where
people were watching German affairs. How could any good thing whatsoever
be expected from such a son?