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 chateau, 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?