Читать книгу Blood and Iron - John Hubert Greusel - Страница 7

Grossly human is our Bismarck, whose lust for control is idiomatic; let us get this clearly, first of all.

¶ Did you ever see a bulldog battle with one of his kind? The startling fact is this: The dog suddenly develops magnificent reserve force, making his battling blood leap; is transformed into a catapult, bearing down his adversary or by him borne down—it matters not which!—for the joy of battle. To fight is the realization of his utmost being.

¶ A peculiar fact known to all admirers of a fighting bulldog is this: The dog during the fight, looks now and then at his master near-by, as much as to say, “See how well I fight!”

¶ Thus Bismarck looked at his King.

¶ The nature of the pit bulldog is seen in Bismarck’s head. His surly face inspires a sense of dread. There is that in his physiognomy that shows his ugly disposition, when aroused. If you saw that moody face in the crowd, one glance would be sufficient to make you feel how vituperative, short, sharp, murderous the unknown man could be, on occasion.

¶ Yet the fear stirred by the sight of a pit bulldog is ofttimes largely illusionary. The dog at heart is genial in a brute way, and never a more loyal servant than the bulldog to his friends—devoted even to death, to his master.

¶ It is the sense of dread in the bulldog’s head that strikes home! So with Bismarck’s physiognomy. The Iron Chancellor had but to come into the room to make his onlookers experience uneasiness. There was an ever-present suggestion of pent-up power, that could in an instant be turned upon men’s lives, to their destruction!

¶ It is true that Bismarck had his genial side, but it cannot be said that he drew and held men to him. He had thousands of admirers to one friend. During the greater part of his life he was either hated or feared—at best, misunderstood. Like the pit bulldog, Bismarck was born to rule other lives—and he fulfilled his mission.

¶ The element of absolutism in the man, his uncompromising severity, his command of the situation regardless of cost, sorrow or suffering to other men, is seen in his realistic physiognomy. We study these facts more and more, as we go along.

¶ There was always something imperious about this great man. He brooked no interference. His excessive dignity compelled respect. He never allowed familiarities; you could not safely presume on his good nature. He never permitted you to get too near. This abnormal self-confidence conveyed the idea that this giant in physique and in intellectual power was truly cut out for greatness.

One of his favorite pranks, as a boy, was to amuse himself making faces at his sister; he could frighten her by his queer grimaces.

From early youth, he was accustomed to take himself very seriously, and by his offensive manners conveyed an immediate impression of the ironical indifference in which he held humanity, in the mass.

¶ He was a born aristocrat, in a sense of high, offensive partisanship.

¶ Men shrank from him, cursed him, reviled his name; but they respected his intellect, even in the early days when he used his power in an undisciplined way; yes, was painfully learning the business of mastering human lives.

¶ The brute in the man loomed large; the unreasoning but magnificent audacity of the bulldog expressed itself in scars, wounds, deep-drinking bouts, fisticuffs, and in twenty-eight duels.

¶ But he had another kind of courage, greater in import than that expressed by physical combat.

¶ When we say Bismarck’s work is a revelation of his will to power, we emphasize again how unnecessary it is to make him either less or more than a human being. There is a school of writers that never mentions his name except with upturned eyes, as though he were a demigod. The tendency of human nature is to idealize such as Bismarck out of all semblance to the original, creating wax figures where once were men of flesh and blood.

¶ Men rise to power largely in uniform ways; that psychic foundation on which they draw is always grossly human, rather dull when you understand it, always conventional;—and the great Bismarck himself is no exception.

¶ In doing his work, Bismarck is following the psychic necessities of his character; is acting in a very personal way, upheld always by the soldier’s virtue, ambition. There is also a large element of self-love. His idiomatic lust for control is to be accepted as a root-fact of his peculiar type of being. And while on the whole his ambition is exercised for the good of his country, herein he is acting, in addition, under the ardent appetite, in his case a passion, to dominate millions of lives; urged not perhaps so much from a preconceived desire to dominate as from an inherent call to exercise his innate capacity for leadership.

¶ Making allowance for the idea that Bismarck is a devoted servant of the King of Prussia, it is not necessary to believe that Bismarck poses as the Savior of his country. In fact, he distinctly disavows this sacrifice, has too much sense to regard himself from this absurd point of view.

¶ The words carved on Bismarck’s tomb at his own request, “A Faithful German Servant of Emperor William I,” show that however much other men were unable to comprehend the baffling Bismarckian character, the Iron Chancellor himself had no vain illusions.

¶ When he was 83 and about to die, the old man taking a final sweep of his long and turbulent life, asked himself solemnly: “How will I be known in time to come?”

¶ Fame replied: “You have been a great Prince; an invincible maker of Empire, you have held in your hand the globe of this earth; call yourself what you will, and I will write a sermon in brass on your tomb.”

¶ But the Iron Chancellor, after mature reflection, decided that his entire career, with all its high lights and its deep shadows, could be expressed in four simple words, “A Faithful German Servant.” He knew exactly what he was, and how he would ultimately be represented in history.

¶ Think what this means. On those supreme questions of Life and Time involving the interpretation of Destiny—a problem hopelessly obscure to the average man—Bismarck brought a massive mind charged with a peculiar clairvoyance; often, his fore-knowledge seemed well-nigh uncanny in its exact realism; and if you doubt this assertion, all we ask is that you withhold your verdict till you have read Bismarck’s story, herein set forth in intimate detail.

¶ How clear the old man’s vision to discern behind all his Bismarckian pomp and majesty, in camp, court and combat, only the rôle of faithful servant.

¶ The phrase on his tomb proclaims the man’s great mind. His overbrooding silence, as it were, is more eloquent than sermons in brass.

¶ In studying Bismarck, the man, we merge his identity in the events of his time; but we must sharply differentiate between the events and the man. We incline to the belief that hereditary tendencies explain him more than does environment. It is Bismarck as a human being, and not the tremendous panorama of incidents leading to German sovereignty that always holds our interest. Life is life, and is intensely interesting, for its own sake.

Thus, we are at once freed from a common fallacy of biographical writing—that vicious mental attitude, as vain as it is egotistical on part of the over-partial historian, who would warp some manifest destiny on human life.

¶ Bismarck needs no historical explanation, no reference to hackneyed categories in the card-index of Time. Whether his plan was dedicated to this world or to the glory of some invisible God, you may debate as you will, but Bismarck will be neither greater nor less because of flights of your imagination.

¶ He is a great man in the sense that he did large things, but this does not make him other than he is, nor does his story lose because we know him to be grossly human in his aims. His life does not borrow anything because a certain type of mind professes to see behind Bismarck’s history, as indeed behind the careers of all great men, some mysterious purpose apart and beyond human nature’s daily needs. It was not necessary for Bismarck to cease to be a human being, to accomplish what he accomplished.

¶ Also, for the reason that Bismarck was a genius, he is an exception to conventional rules covering the limitations of little men.

¶ Bismarck was a born revolutionist. Look at his terrible jaw, which, like the jaws of the bulldog, when once shut down never lets go till that object is in shreds.

¶ He was a true bulldog in this that, like the thoroughbred bulldog, Bismarck favored one feed a day. He took a light breakfast, no second breakfast, but at night would eat one enormous meal.

The bulldog follows a similar practice, when eating never looks from the plate, and the water fairly runs from his eyes, with animal satisfaction.

¶ Bismarck compelled men to do his bidding—as the wind drives the clouds and asks not when or why. It is enough to know that that is the wind’s way!

He knew the coward, the thief, the soldier, the priest, the citizen, the king, and the peasant.

He knew how to betray an enemy with a Judas kiss; how to smite him when he was down; how to dig pitfalls for his feet; how to ply him with champagne and learn his secrets; how to permit him to win money at cards, and then get him to sign papers; how to remember old obligations or to forget new favors; how to read a document in more than one way; how to turn historical parallels upside down; how to urge today what he refused to entertain a year ago; how to put the best face on a losing situation; and how to shuffle, cut and stack the cards, or at times how to play in the open.

¶ He was not a humanitarian with conceptions of world peace or world benevolences. He was for himself and his own ends, which were tied to his political conception of a new Germany.

¶ And all the time he was helped out by his extraordinary vital powers, his ability to work all night like a horse week after week; go to bed at dawn and sleep till afternoon; then drive a staff of secretaries frantic with his insistent demands.

¶ Likewise, he was helped out by his remarkable personality. Actor that he was, he sometimes gained his point by his frankness, knowing that when he told the exact truth he would not be believed.

¶ Also, he could bluff and swagger, or he could speak in the polite accents of the distinguished gentleman; he could gulp a quart of champagne without taking the silver tankard from his lips; in younger years he used to eat from four to eleven eggs at a meal, besides vegetables, cakes, beer, game and three or four kinds of meats; his favorite drink was a mixture of champagne and porter.

¶ He was a chain-smoker, lighted one cigar with another, often smoked ten or twelve hours at a stretch. His huge pipes, in the drawing room; his beer, in the salons of Berlin; his irritability, his bilious streaks, his flashes of temper; his superstition about the number 13; his strange mixing of God with all his despotic conduct; his fondness for mastiffs; his attacks of jaundice; his volcanic outbursts; his belief in ghosts, in the influence of the moon to make the hair grow; his mystical something about seven and combinations of seven; his incessant repetition of the formula that he was obeying his God—were but human weaknesses that showed he had a side like an everyday common man.

¶ On top of it all he was great, because he knew how to manage men either with or without their consent; but he always studied to place himself in a strategic position from which he could insist on his demand for his pound of flesh.

¶ Sometimes, it took years before he could lull to sleep, buy, bribe or win over the men he needed; again when the game was short and sharp, he kicked some men out of his path contemptuously, others he parleyed with, still others he thundered against and defied; but always at the right time, won his own way.

¶ Yes, even Bismarck’s card-playing is subordinated to the shrewd ends of diplomacy. Dr. Busch, the press-agent of Bismarck during the Franco-Prussian war, tells us that Bismarck once made this frank confession:

¶ “In the summer of 1865 when I concluded the Convention of Gastein with Blome (the Austrian), I went in for quinze so madly that the rest could not help wondering at me. But I knew what I was about. Blome had heard that this game gave the best possible opportunity for discovering a man’s real nature, and wanted to try it on with me. So I thought to myself, here’s for you then, and away went a few hundred thalers, which I really might have charged as spent in His Majesty’s service. But at least I thus put Blome off the scent, so he thought me a reckless fellow and gave way.”