Part 8

But the King's face, bearing, and manner, as I saw him in Königsberg, 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 Königsberg 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 Königsberg, 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 Königsberg. 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 René 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 æsthetical 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 Königsberg, 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.

From Alexander Humboldt, as well as from Varnhagen von Ense, we learn a good deal of the inner life of kings and queens and princes in Berlin. There is something almost painful in reflecting on the kind of life which Humboldt must have led among these people, whom he so cordially despised, and whom in his private chroniclings he so held up to scorn. The great philosopher assuredly had a huge treasure of hatred locked up in his heart. He detested and scorned these royal personages, who so blandly patronized him, or were sometimes so rough in their condescending familiarity. Nothing takes the gilt off the life of courts so much as a perusal of what Humboldt has written about it. One hardly cares to think of so great, and on the whole so noble a man, living a life of what seems so like perpetual dissimulation; of his enduring these royal dullards and pert princesses, and doubtless seeming profoundly reverential, and then going home of nights to put down on paper his record of their vulgarity, and selfishness, and impertinence. Sometimes Humboldt was not able to contain himself within the limits of court politeness. The late King of Hanover (father of the now dethroned King George) was a rough brutal trooper, who had made himself odious in England as the Duke of Cumberland, and was accused by popular rumors of the darkest crimes--unjustly accused certainly, in the case where he was charged with the murder of his valet. The Duke did not make a very bad sort of King, as kings then went; but he retained all his roughness and coarseness of manner. He once accosted Humboldt in the palace of the late King of Prussia, and in his pleasant graceful way asked why it was that the Prussian court was always full of philosophers and loose women--describing the latter class of visitors by a very direct and expressive word. "Perhaps," replied Humboldt blandly, "the King invites the philosophers to meet me, and the other persons to please your Majesty!" Humboldt seems to have had little liking for any of the illustrious personages he met under the roof of the King of Prussia. A brief record he made of a conversation with the late Prince Albert (for whom he expressed a great contempt) went far when it was published to render the husband of Queen Victoria more unpopular and even detested in Ireland than another George the Fourth would have been. The Irish people will probably never forget that, according to the statement of Humboldt, the Prince spoke contemptuously of Irish national aspirations, declared he had no sympathy with the Irish, and that they were as restless, idle, and unmanageable as the Poles--a pretty speech, the philosopher remarks, to be made by the husband of the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Some attempt was made when this record of Humboldt's came to light to dispute the truth of it; but Humboldt was certainly not a liar--and anyhow the Irish people believed the story and it did no little mischief; and Humboldt in his grave might have had the consolation of knowing that he had injured one prince at least.

What we learn of the King of Prussia through Humboldt is to the same effect as the teaching of Varnhagen's cynical spirit; and I think, if these keen irreverent critics did not do him wrong, his Majesty must have softened and improved with the responsibilities of royalty. In many respects one might be inclined to compare him with the English George the Third. Both were indeed dull, decent, and fanatical. But there are some wide differences. George the Third was obstinate in the worst sense; his was the obstinacy of a stupid, self-conceited man who believes himself wise and right in everything. Now, I fancy the King of Prussia is only obstinate in what he conceives, rightly or wrongly, to be questions of duty and of principle; and that there are many subjects, political and otherwise, of which he does not believe himself to be the most competent judge, and which therefore he is quite willing to leave to the consideration and decision of others. For instance, it was made evident that in the beginning of the transactions which were followed by (although they cannot be said to have caused) the present war, the King more than once expressed himself willing to do certain things, of which, however, Count von Bismarck subsequently disapproved; and the King quietly gave way. "You know better than I do; act as you think best," is, I believe, a quite common sentence on the lips of King William, when he is talking with this or that trusted minister. Then again it has been placed beyond all doubt that George the Third could be, when he thought fit, the most unabashed and unscrupulous of liars; and not even hatred itself will charge King William with any act or word of falsehood or duplicity.

Steadily did the King grow more and more unpopular after his coronation. All the old work of prosecuting newspapers and snubbing, or if possible punishing, free-spoken politicians, came into play again. The King quarrelled fiercely with his Parliament about the scheme of army reorganization. I think he was right as to the scheme, although terribly wrong-headed and high-handed in his way of forcing it down the throats of the people, and, aided by his House of Peers, he waged a sort of war upon the nation's representatives. Then first came to the front that extraordinary political figure, which before very long had cast into the shade every other in Europe, even including that of the Emperor Napoleon; that marvellous compound of audacity and craft, candor and cunning, the profound sagacity of a Richelieu, the levity of a Palmerston; imperturbably good-humored, illimitably unscrupulous; a patriot without lofty emotion of any kind, a statesman who could sometimes condescend to be a juggler; part bully, part buffoon, but always a man of supreme courage, inexhaustible resources of brain and tongue--always in short a man of genius. I need hardly add that I am speaking of the Count von Bismarck.

At the time of the Schleswig-Holstein campaign, there was probably no public man in Europe so generally unpopular as the King of Prussia, except perhaps his Minister, the Count von Bismarck. In England it was something like an article of faith to believe that the King was a bloodthirsty old tyrant, his Prime Minister a combination of Strafford and Sejanus, and his subjects generally a set of beer-bemuddled and servile blockheads. The dislike felt toward the King was extended to the members of his family, and the popular conviction in England was that the Princess Victoria, wife of the King's son, had a dull coarse drunkard for a husband. It is perfectly wonderful how soon an absurdly erroneous idea, if there is anything about it which jumps with the popular humor, takes hold of the public mind of England. The English people regarded the Prussians with utter detestation and contempt. Not only that, but they regarded it as quite a possible and even likely thing that poor brave little Denmark, with a population hardly larger than that of the city of New York, could hold her own, alone, against the combined forces of Austria and Prussia. One might have thought that there never was a Frederick the Great or an Archduke Charles; that the only part ever played in history by Germans was that of impotent braggarts and stupid cowards. When there seemed some prospect of England's drawing the sword for Denmark, "Punch" published a cartoon which was very popular and successful. It represented an English sailor and soldier of the conventional dramatic style, looking with utter contempt at two awkward shambling boobies with long hair and huge meerschaums--one booby supposed to represent Prussia, the other Austria; and Jack Tar says to his friend the redcoat: "They can't expect us to _fight_ fellows like those, but we'll kick them, of course, with pleasure." This so fairly represented the average public opinion of England that there was positively some surprise felt in London when it was found that the Prussians really could fight at all. Towards the Austrians there was nothing like the same ill-feeling; and when Bismarck's war against Austria (I cannot better describe it) broke out shortly after, the sympathy of England went almost unanimously with the enemy of Prussia. Ninety-nine men out of every hundred firmly believed that Austria would clutch Italy with one hand and Prussia with the other, and easily choke the life out of both. About the merits of the quarrel nobody in England outside the range of a very few politicians and journalists troubled himself at all. It was settled that Austria had somehow come to represent the cause of human freedom and progress; that the King of Prussia was a stupid and brutal old trooper, hurried to his ruin by the evil counsels of a drunken Mephistopheles; and that the Austrian forces would simply walk over the Prussians into Berlin. There was but one newspaper in London (and it has since died) which ventured to suggest, first, that perhaps the Prussians had the right side of the quarrel, and next, that perhaps they would have the better in the fight.