The German physicians allege that Dr. Mackenzie drew out pieces of the comparatively healthful right vocal cord. The London specialist denies this. Nothing could be further from the purpose of this work than to take sides upon any phase of the unhappy and undignified controversy which ensued. It is enough here to note the charge, as indicating the view which Prof. Gerhardt and his German colleagues took from the first of Mackenzie’s mission in Berlin.
This double declaration against the theory of cancer having been obtained, the next step was to secure the removal of Frederic. The celebration of the Queen’s jubilee afforded a most valuable occasion. He came to England on June 14th—and he never again stepped foot in Berlin until he returned as Kaiser the following year. Nearly three months were spent at Norwood, and in Scotland and the Isle of Wight. A brief stop in the Austrian Tyrol followed, and then the Crown Prince settled in his winter home at San Remo. On the day of his arrival there Mackenzie was telegraphed for, as very dangerous symptoms had presented themselves. He reached San Remo on November 5, 1887, and discovered so grave a situation that Prince William was immediately summoned from Berlin.
That the young Prince had been placed in a most trying position by the quarrel which now raged about his father’s sick-room, need not be pointed out. The physicians who stood highest in Berlin, and who were backed by the liking and confidence of William’s friends, were deeply indignant at having been superseded by two Englishmen like Mackenzie and Hovell. This national prejudice became easily confounded with partisan antagonisms. The Germans are not celebrated for calm, or for skill in conducting controversies with delicacy, and in this instance the worst side of everybody concerned was exhibited.
One recalls now with astonishment the boundless rancour and recklessness of accusation which characterized that bitter wrangle. Many good people of one party seriously believed that the German physicians wanted to gain access to Frederic in order to kill him. On the other hand, a great number insisted that Mackenzie was deceiving the public, and had subjected Frederic to the most terrible maimings and tortures in order to conceal from Germany the fact of the cancer. The basest motives were ascribed by either side to the other. The Court circle asked what they were doing, then, to the Crown Prince that they hid him away in Italy; the answering insinuation was that very good reasons existed for not allowing him to fall into the hands of the Berlin doctors, who were so openly devoted to his heir.
In a state of public mind where hints of assassination grow familiar to the ear, the mere charge of a lack of filial affection sounds very tame indeed.
That William deserved during this painful period the reproaches heaped upon him by the whole English-speaking world is by no means clear. Such fault as may be with fairness imputed to him, seems to have grown quite naturally out of the circumstances. He was on the side of the German physicians as against Mackenzie; but after all that has happened that can scarcely be regarded as a crime. He could not but range himself with those who resented the tone Dr. Mackenzie and his friends assumed toward what they called “the Court circles of Berlin.”
When he reached San Remo in November, it was to note the death mark clearly stamped on his father’s face; yet he heard the English entourage still talking about the possibility of the disease not being cancer. The German doctors had grievous stories to tell him about how they had been crowded out and put under the heel of the foreigner. Whether he would or not, he was made a party to the whole wretched wrangle which henceforth vexed the atmosphere of the Villa Zirio.
The outside world was subjecting this villa and its inhabitants to the most tirelessly inquisitive scrutiny. Newspaper correspondents engirdled San Remo with a cordon of espionage, through which filtered the gossip of servants and the stray babbling of tradespeople. Dr. Mackenzie—now become Sir Morell—confided his views of the case to journalists who desired them. The German physicians furtively promulgated stories of quite a different hue, through the medium of the German press. Thus it came about that, while Germany as a whole disliked deeply the manner in which Frederic’s case was managed, the English-speaking peoples espoused the opposite view and condemned as cruel and unnatural the position occupied by the Germans, with young William at their head.
As the winter of 1887-8 went forward, it became apparent that the Kaiser’s prolonged life had run its span. The question which would die first, old William or middle-aged Frederic, hung in a fluttering balance. Germany watched the uncertain development of this dual tragedy with bated breath, and all Christendom bent its attention upon Germany and her two dying Hohenzollerns.
March came, with its black skies and drifting snow wreaths and bitter winds blown a thousand miles across the Sclavonic sand plains, and laid the aged Kaiser upon his deathbed. Prince William, having alternated through the winter between Berlin and San Remo, was at the last in attendance upon his grandfather. The dying old man spoke to him as if he were the immediate heir. Upon him all the injunctions of state and family policy which the departing monarch wished to utter were directly laid. The story of those conferences will doubtless never be revealed in its entirety. But it is known that, if any notion had up to that time existed of keeping Frederic from the throne, it was now abandoned. William was counselled to loving patience and submission during the little reign which his father at best could have. Bismarck was pledged to remain in office upon any and all terms short of peremptory dismissal through this same brief period.
It was to William, too, that that last exhortation to be “considerate” with Russia was muttered by the dying man—that strange domestic legacy of the Hohenzollerns which hints at the murder of Charles XII, recalls the partition of Poland, the despair of Jena, and the triumph of Waterloo, and has yet in store we know not what still stranger things.
William I died on March 9, 1888. On the morning of the following day Frederic and his wife and daughters left San Remo in a special train and arrived at Berlin on the night of the 11th, having made the swiftest long journey known in the records of continental railways. The new Kaiser’s proclamation—“To my People”—bears the date of March 12th, but it was really not issued until the next day.
During that period of delay, the Schloss at Charlottenburg, which had been hastily fitted up for the reception of the invalid, was the scene of protracted conferences between Frederic, his son William, and Bismarck. Hints are not lacking that these interviews had their stormy and unpleasant side, for Frederic had up to this time fairly maintained his general health, and could to a limited extent make use of his voice. But all that is visible to us of this is the fact that some sort of understanding was arrived at, by which Bismarck could remain in office and accept responsibility for the acts of the reign.
The story of those melancholy ninety-nine days need not detain us long. Young William himself, though standing now in the strong light of public scrutiny, on the steps of the throne, remained silent, and for the most part motionless. The world gossiped busily about his heartless conduct toward his mother, his callous behaviour in the presence of his father’s terrible affliction, his sympathy with those who most fiercely abused the good Sir Morell Mackenzie. As there had been tales of his unfilial actions at San Remo, so now there were stories of his shameless haste to snatch the reins of power from his father’s hands. So late as August, 1889, an anonymous writer alleged in “The New Review” that “the watchers by the sick bed in Charlottenburg were always in dread when ‘Willie’ visited his father lest he might brusquely demand the establishment of a Regency.”
Next to no proof of these assertions can be discovered in Berlin. If there was talk of a Regency—as well there might be among those who knew of the existence of Frederic’s offer to abdicate—it did not in any way come before the public. I know of no one qualified to speak who says that it ever came before even Frederic.
That a feeling of bitterness existed between William and his parents is not to be denied. All the events of the past year had contributed to intensify this feeling and to put them wider and wider apart. Even if the young man had been able to divest himself of the last emotion of self-sensitiveness, there would still have remained the dislike for the whole England-Mackenzie-San Remo episode which rankled in every conservative German mind. But neither the blood nor the training of princes helps them to put thoughts of self aside—and in William’s case a long chain of circumstances bound him to a position which, though we may find it extremely unpleasant to the eye, seemed to him a simple matter of duty and of justice to himself and to Prussia.
The world gladly preserves and cherishes an idealized picture of the knightly Kaiser Frederic, facing certain death with intrepid calm, and labouring devotedly to turn what fleeting days might be left him to the advantage of liberalism in Germany. It is a beautiful and elevating picture, and we are all of us the richer for its possession.
But, in truth, Frederic practically accomplished but one reform during his reign, and that came in the very last week of his life and was bought at a heavy price. To the end he gave a surprisingly regular attention to the tasks of a ruler. Both at Charlottenburg and, later, at Potsdam, he forced himself, dying though he was, to daily devote two hours or more to audiences with ministers and officials, and an even greater space of time in his library to signing State papers and writing up his diary. But this labour was almost wholly upon routine matters.
Two incidents of the brief reign are remembered—the frustrated attempt to marry one of the Prussian Princesses to a Battenberg and the successful expulsion of Puttkamer from the Prussian Ministry of the Interior.
The Battenberg episode attracted much the greater share of public attention at the time, not only from the element of romance inherent in the subject, but because it seemed to be an obvious continuation of the Anglo-German feud which had been flashing its lightnings about Frederic’s devoted head for a twelvemonth. Of the four Battenberg Princes—cousins of the Grand Duke of Hesse by a morganatic marriage, and hence, according to Prussian notions, not “born” at all—one had married a daughter, another a granddaughter of the Queen of England. This seemed to the German aristocracy a most remarkable thing, and excited a good deal of class feeling, but was not important so long as these upstart protégés of English eccentricity kept out of reach of German snubs.
A third Battenberg, Alexander, had made for himself a considerable name as Prince of Bulgaria: in fact, had done so well that the Germans felt like liking him in spite of his brothers. The way in which he had completely thrashed the Servians, moreover, reflected credit upon the training he had had in the German Army. In his sensational quarrel with the Czar, too, German opinion leaned to his side, and altogether there was a kindly feeling toward him. Perhaps if there had been no antecedent quarrel about English interference, even his matrimonial adoption into the Hohenzollern family might have been tolerated with good grace.
As it was, the announcement at the end of March that he was to be betrothed to the Princess Victoria, the second daughter of Frederic, provoked on the instant a furious uproar. The Junker class all over Germany protested indignantly. The “reptile” press promptly raised the cry that this was more of the alien work of the English Empress, who had been prompted by her English mother to put this fresh affront upon all true Germans. Prince Bismarck himself hastened to Berlin and sternly insisted upon the abandonment of the obnoxious idea. There was a fierce struggle before a result was reached, with hot feminine words and tears of rage on one side, with square-jawed, gruff-voiced obstinacy and much plain talk on the other. At last Bismarck overbore opposition and had his way. Prince William manifested almost effusive gratitude to the Chancellor for having dispelled this nightmare of a Battenberg brother-in-law.
The solicitude about this project seems to have been largely maternal. Sir Morell Mackenzie says of the popular excitement over the subject: “I cannot say that it produced much effect on the Emperor.” As for the Princess Victoria, she has now for some time been the wife of Prince Adolph of Schaumburg-Lippe.
Although it did not attract a tithe of the attention given the Battenberg marriage sensation, the dismissal of Puttkamer was really an important act, the effects of which were lasting in Germany. This official had been Minister of the Interior since 1881—a thoroughgoing Bismarckian administrator, whose use of the great machinery of his office to coerce voters, intimidate opposition, and generally grease the wheels of despotic government, had become the terror and despair of Prussian Liberalism; To have thrown him out of office it was worth while to reign only ninety-nine days.
Ostensibly his retirement was a condition imposed by Frederic before he would sign the Reichstag’s bill lengthening the Parliamentary term to five years. The Radicals had hoped he would veto it, and the overthrow of Puttkamer was offered as a solace to these wounded hopes. But in reality Puttkamer had been doomed from the outset of the new reign. He was conspicuous among those who spoke with contempt of Frederic, and in his ministerial announcement of the old Kaiser’s death to the public, insolently neglected to say a word about his successor. Questioned about this later, he had the impertinence to say that he could not find out what title the new Kaiser would choose to assume.
Puttkamer’s resignation was gazetted on June 11th, and that very evening Prince Bismarck gave a great dinner, at which the fallen Minister was the guest of honour. In one sense the insult was wasted, for out at Potsdam the invalid at whom it was levelled could no longer eat, and was obviously close to death. Indirectly, however, the affront made a mark upon the world’s memory. We shall hear of Puttkamer again.
On the 1st day of June Frederic had been conveyed by boat to Potsdam, where he wished to spend his remaining weeks in the most familiar of his former homes, the New Palace, the name of which he changed to Friedrichskron. He was already a dying man. Two clever observers, who were on the little pier at Gleinicke, described to me the appearance of the Emperor when he was carried up out of the cabin to land. Said one: “He was crouched down, wretched, scared, and pallid, like a man going to execution.” The other added: “Say rather like an enfeebled maniac in charge of his keepers.”
Yet, broken and crushed as he was, he was Kaiser to the last. The announcement of Putt-kamer’s downfall came on June 11th. Frederic died on June 15th.
It was in the late forenoon of that rainy, gray summer day that the black and white royal standard above the palace fell—signifying that the eighth King of Prussia was no more. A moment later orderlies were running hither and thither outside; the troops within the palace park hastily threw themselves into line, and detachments were at once marched to each of the gates to draw a cordon between Friedrichskron and all the world besides.
In an inner room in the great palace the elder son of the dead Kaiser, all at once become William II, German Emperor, King in Prussia, eighteen times a Duke, twice a Grand Duke, ten times a Count, fifteen times a Seigneur, and three times a Margrave—this young man, with fifty-four titles thus suddenly plumped down upon him, * seated himself to write proclamations to his Army and his Navy.
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.
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?
The opening month of 1889 was a momentous period in the history of the young Emperor. The decoration of Puttkamer, who stood in all eyes as a type of the late Kaiser’s bitterest and most malignant foes, put the finishing touch to the demonstrative unfilial stage of William’s career. Men had been brought by this deed to think as badly of him as they could—when lo! the whole situation suddenly changed. This crowning act of affront to his father’s memory was also the last. From that very month it is a new William who presents himself for consideration.
It is not possible to put the finger upon any one special cause for the change in the Kaiser’s views and feelings which from this time began to manifest itself. There were in truth many reasons working together to effect this alteration, at once so subtle and so swift.
In its essence the abrupt new departure was due to the awakened consciousness in William’s mind that the Bismarcks had been making a fool of him. Royalty can bear any calamity better than this. The saying ascribed to Louis XVIII, “For the love of God, do not render me ridiculous!” puts into words the thought that has lain closest to every monarch’s heart since kings have had a being. And it was in William’s nature to regard himself and his position with exceptional seriousness.
It would be extremely interesting to follow the mental processes by which William all at once reached this realizing sense of his position, and saw how poor and contemptible a figure he had been made to cut in the eyes of the civilized world. As it is, we can only glance briefly at the more obvious of the causes which led to this welcome awakening.
First of all, the High Court of Leipsic, on January 4th, threw out the indictment which Bismarck had been so savagely pressing against Dr. Geffcken, for the treasonable publication of a part of the Emperor Frederic’s diary. The official ransacking of all his correspondence, and that of his most intimate associates, had revealed nothing save additional proof that the late Princess Alice of Hesse, Sir Robert Morier, and Dr. Geffcken were close friends of Frederic and his wife—which, of course, everybody knew before, but which the Bismarckian journals had paraded afresh as a reason for new insults to the dead Kaiser’s memory and to the widowed Empress Frederic. The prompt adverse decision of the court dealt a sharp blow to this scandalous abuse of power.
In addition, the Bismarcks were meanwhile conducting a fierce public campaign against Sir Robert Morier, the British Ambassador at St. Petersburg—or rather, through him, against the honour of the late Emperor. Their accusation, based upon some alleged verbal statement of Marshal Bazaine, made at a time when he was most hopelessly discredited and new in exile, was that Frederic had systematically revealed the secrets of the German Army plans to Morier, who had sent them to England to be wired across to France. When Sir Robert Morier produced Bazaine’s written denial of the alleged utterances and sent it to Herbert Bismarck, with a polite request for a withdrawal of the odious charge, he received a letter of refusal, couched in grossly insulting terms. This controversy, culminating about the time of the collapse of the Geffcken prosecution, no doubt contributed much to the opening of William’s eyes.
There were not wanting at Berlin clever people ready to take advantage of these foolish excesses of the arrogant and over-confident Bismarcks. Their arbitrary and despotic courses had offended many besides those who would naturally be opposed to them politically, and there now sprang up, as out of the earth, a singular combination of the most diverse political elements, united only in their hatred for the Bismarcks. In this incongruous alliance Radicals and Jew-baiters joined hands, and ultra-Conservatives stood side by side with the Empress Frederic’s Liberal faction. The headquarters of this odd combination were at the residence of Alfred Count von Waldersee.
This powerful personage, who for years, as Quartermaster-General, was in training as Moltke’s visible heir, and was until recently at the head of the greatest fighting machine the human race ever saw, is still but little known to the general public. This is because press popularity and interesting personal qualities and connections have nothing whatever to do with a man’s promotion in the German Army. Heroic actions on the field advance him no more than does the advertising faculty in times of peace. He rises to each place because he is judged to be fittest for that particular post, and this judgment sternly sets aside all considerations not immediately concerned with the duties of that post.
Thus it happens that of Count von Waldersee, who is one of the most important military officers in the world, not much is known save that he is now grey and bald, and has for his wife a very astute and influential American lady.
Twenty-seven years ago an elderly prince of the Schleswig-Holstein family produced a temporary sensation by renouncing his ancestral rank, in order to marry a beautiful young Miss Lee, whom he had met at Paris. He was then just the age of the century—sixty-four—and the bride, who, with true American courage, states the year of her birth in the Almanach de Gotha, was twenty-six. Less than a year later the bridegroom, who had been given the title of Prince de Noër at the Austrian Court, died in Syria. Nine years afterwards—in 1874—his widow married Count Waldersee, and went to Berlin to live.
It happened, in 1881, that young Prince William of Prussia was wedded to a Schleswig-Holstein Princess, to whom the Countess Waldersee, by her first marriage, stood in the relation of great-aunt. Young William and Waldersee were already friends. This connection between their wives led to a closer intimacy, the results of which have been tremendous in Germany.
I have said that the home of the Waldersees now became the centre of the rising opposition to the Bismarcks. Count Waldersee himself represented the ancient Prussian nobles’ traditions of an absolute monarchy and a Hohenzollern’s unlimited kingly power—traditions which were all at war with this Bismarckian usurpation of authority. The Countess Waldersee, with the privilege of an American, was able to gather into association with this aristocratic conservatism many elements in German political life which, under any other roof than hers, would have been antagonistic. Here it was that the women’s conclave was formed—the young Empress Victoria and her widowed mother-in-law, the Empress Frederic, joining hands with the Countess Waldersee—with the blessing of the aged Empress Augusta, who all her life long had hated Bismarck, resting upon their work.
Bismarck had been supreme for so many years, and had put so many of these feminine cabals under his feet in bygone days, that he failed to recognize the deadly peril which confronted him in this newly-unmasked battery. He proceeded to charge upon it with all his old recklessness of confidence, and with his accustomed weapons of newspaper insults, personal browbeatings and threats to resign. To his great bewilderment nothing gave way. He had come at last upon a force greater than himself. He maintained the struggle for over a year—scornfully at first, and later with a despairing tenacity as pitiful as it was undignified, until at last he was fairly cudgeled off the field.
This was the trick of it: Bismarck, in all his extended series of conquests over previous attacks by the women of the Court, had had the King at his back. He was supported by old William in his long campaign against the old Empress and the English Crown Princess. He had had the sanction of young William in his warfare upon the Empress Frederic. It had been with royal consent that he bore himself like the foremost man in Prussia, and he had allowed himself to forget the importance of this fact. The tables were completely turned upon him the instant these adroit and sagacious women whispered in young William’s ear, “Why not be foremost man in Prussia yourself?”
The young Kaiser’s thirtieth birthday came on January 27, 1889. We can put down to about that date his advance to an independent position in front of everybody else in his kingdom—including the Bismarcks. No single striking event marked the change; but the feeling that the change had come spread with strange swiftness throughout the length and breadth of Germany. The half-intuitive sense that Bismarck was done for ran like wildfire over the country. The Iron Chancellor for thirty years had done his best to reduce German manhood to the serf-like condition of the courtier, and it is proverbial that there is no other keenness of scent like that of courtiers for the fall of a favourite.
The open reconciliation between William and his mother belongs to a somewhat later period, but the spirit of it was already in the air. The terrible news of the death of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, which came on January 30th, is also to be taken into account as bearing upon this change at Berlin. The Austrian heir-apparent was only six months older than William, and of late years they had not been friends. Rudolph had been peculiarly intimate with the Prince of Wales and with the late Emperor Frederic, and had not concealed his sympathy with the English view of William’s behaviour. His tragic ending now produced the most painful and softening effect upon the emotional young Kaiser. He could only be restrained from going incognito to the funeral at Vienna by the urgent pleas of the stricken Austrian Emperor, and he made obviously sincere expressions of grief to the friends of the Prince of Wales, which went far toward removing the ill-feelings between them.
As it became apparent that the young Kaiser had thrown off his Bismarckian leading-strings, and, after a miserable interlude of small personal persecutions and revenges, was at last coming to comprehend the vastness of his duties and responsibilities, the world began watching him with an interest of another sort.
It was not easy for outsiders to follow with much clearness the details of the fight which Bismarck was now making to retain his position and prestige. No one but a German politician could understand the excitement about the appointment of the National Liberal, von Bennigsen, to the Governorship of Hanover—an act, by the way, which definitely ranged the ultra-Tories against Bismarck—or apprehend the significance of Bismarck’s fruitless attempts to secure the dismissal of Court Chaplain Stocker, who was too much a partisan of Waldersee’s. The general public preferred rather to study the personality of the young Kaiser as revealed by his individual acts and utterances.
William’s fondness for travelling had from the first attracted attention. It is not generally known that in order to gratify this taste he at the beginning of his reign decided to devote to it the money which would be saved by foregoing a coronation ceremony. This decision accorded with historic Prussian precedents. From the year 1701, when Prussia was raised to royal estate, and the first King was crowned with such memorable and costly pomp at Königsberg, no Hohenzollern had a coronation ceremony until William I put the crown upon his own head in October of 1861. Each of the intervening monarchs held instead what is called a Hudligung, or solemn homage from the assembled representatives of the estates of the realm—a curious ceremonial relic from feudal times which survived into the present century in its antique form as a public function in the Schloss Platz. William I’s avowed reason for breaking over the rule was that during his predecessor’s reign a Constitution had been promulgated in Prussia, and that this new-fangled innovation rendered it necessary to remind people anew of the powers and prerogatives of the monarch by visible signs of crown and sceptre.
Young William was so enthusiastic a follower of his grandfather that people assumed he would imitate him in this, all the more because his own tastes are toward display. Upon this theory there has been a great deal printed about a forthcoming coronation which never comes. Only last year an unusually impressive statement appeared to the effect that William, moved by meditating upon the historic splendours of the old Holy Roman Empire, intended to have himself crowned German Emperor in the famous mediaeval church of the ancient imperial city of Frankfort-on-the-Main. The idea is a beautiful one, but there is no fact at the back of it. According to William’s present intention, he will not be crowned at all.
In the restless course of his travels during these first six months William had made numerous speeches, almost every one of which contained a sentence or two of enough significance to be reprinted everywhere. As a rule his utterances at foreign Courts were polite and amiable to a fault, while his speeches at home, made among cheering after-dinner audiences in various parts of Germany, were characterized by much violent extravagance of language. The most intemperate of these harangues were reserved for his State visits to the provincial divisions of Prussia. At the beginning of last year, on the occasion of a visit of this nature to Königsberg, capital of East Prussia, he was led by his enthusiasm into so fervid a strain of eloquence, and flourished the metaphorical sword so recklessly, that one of the Russian papers ironically congratulated the world upon the fact that Prussia only had thirteen provinces, and that the Kaiser had now exhausted the rhetorical possibilities of eleven of them.
The earliest and most interesting of these speeches was delivered at Frankfurt-am-Oder just two months after his accession. He referred of his own volition to the undoubtedly foolish talk that had been heard during his father’s brief reign, of Frederic’s alleged idea of giving back Alsace-Lorraine, an imputation which William characterized as shameful to his father’s memory.
“There is upon this point but one mind,” he went on amid loud hurrahs, “namely, that our eighteen army corps, and our 42,000,000 people should be left upon the field rather than that we should permit a solitary stone of what we have gained to be taken from us.”
Equally characteristic, and perhaps even more important as a clue to the manner in which the young Kaiser’s conceptions of his position shaped themselves, was his celebrated rebuke to the Burgomaster and municipal authorities of Berlin, which has for its date, October 28 1888. That we may the better comprehend this, it will be well to glance for a moment at the remarkable development of the new Berlin.
Twenty years ago—that is to say, when the Empire was founded—Berlin was of course much the largest city within the new German boundaries, but it was scarcely a capital in the sense that Paris, Vienna, or London is. Frankfurt-am-Main was the great banking centre of Germany; Hamburg was its commercial metropolis; Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and even smaller towns were more esteemed as places of fashionable residence and resort. Berlin was big and powerful, and rich in manufactures, no doubt, but nobody thought of it as beautiful or attractive, and nobody wanted to live there who could maintain himself in pleasanter surroundings.
The change which has been wrought in all this since 1870 is only to be matched by the phenomenal growth of great cities in the American West. Europe has seen nothing like it before. Within these twenty years Berlin has grown like a veritable Chicago. And not only has it attracted to itself hundreds of thousands of new citizens, and spread itself out on the Brandenburg plain over new square miles of stately brick and mortar and asphalt, but it has sapped the pre-eminence of its more ancient rivals, each in its speciality. Berlin has so absorbed the monetary power of the Empire that Frankfort is now scarcely thought of as a banking centre at all, and even Amsterdam and Paris are dwarfed financially. In similar fashion, the German nobility and wealthy classes, instead of scattering their town homes among a dozen local centres of social life, swarm now all to Berlin, and bid so strenuously for available building sites that prices for land and houses and floor rents are higher there than anywhere else in Europe.
Obviously, it is the establishment of the imperial Court in Berlin which has done this, and both the strength and weakness of the imperial system are reflected in greatest perfection of form and colour in the social conditions of this mighty new metropolis.
The enormous concentration here of rich or pretentious young nobles in the various regiments of the Guard Corps; of the ablest and most influential soldiers of Germany in the General Staff and the central military offices; of the cleverest politicians and administrators in the various civic departments, and of the great aristocratic and monied classes who must live where the Court is settled and the Reichstag meets and the finance of Europe is controlled—all this makes Berlin a peculiarly responsive mirror of the ideas and methods of German government.
In turn Berlin has imposed its character with increasing force upon the whole German people. The dear old indolent, amiable, incapable, happy-go-lucky, waltz-loving Vienna used to be the type of what people had in mind when they spoke of the sentimental German. Berlin has made Vienna seem now as remote and non-German almost as Pesth itself, and instead has impressed its own strongly-marked individuality upon the new Empire—energetic, exact, harsh under slight provocation, methodical as the multiplication table, coldly just to law-abiding people, and a fire-and-steel terror to everybody else.
As might be naturally expected in this bustle of busy officials, of bankers and merchants burdened with a novel wealth, of the ceaseless rattle of bayonets and clatter of swords and spurs, art and literature are pretty well pushed to the wall. The vast new growth of Berlin and the rush toward it of German wealth, rank, and fashion, have drawn in their train a certain current of painters and writers, but nothing at all in proportion with the expansion in other lines of activity. Berlin’s new supremacy has not affected Leipsic as the book centre of German-speaking people, or Munich and Düsseldorf as homes of art study.
These changes may come, too, in time, particularly if the young Emperor exerts himself to achieve such an end. Up to the present, he has been too busy even to think of such a thing. The exactions of his daily routine of labour are so great that he simply has no time for the softer and more intellectual side of life, even if the taste were there. He has found leisure to sit for several portraits since his accession, but that seems to have been the sum of his attention to art. As for literature, an observant official in Berlin assured me of his conviction that William had not had the time to read a single book since his accession.
Whatever may come in the future, it is undeniable that the author now cuts a poor figure in Berlin. The city’s drift is toward material things—toward business, official rank, and martial perfection. Even the most prosperous and popular writers of books in Berlin strive to obtain some small post in the civil service in order to command social position. Among many instances of this brought to my notice one will serve as an illustration. Ernst von Wilderbruch is the most successful of contemporary Berlin playwrights, but on his card you will read that he is a Counsellor of Legation at the Foreign Office. This office yields him a salary equal to a twentieth part of his income from his plays, but it is of the greatest importance to him because it insures his rank. Here in England Edmund Gosse has an official place—just as in Boston Robert Grant holds a post in the municipal service. But can you fancy either of these gentlemen putting the fact on his card, or preferring to be known as an official rather than as a writer?
Even the splendid University of Berlin exerts a liberalizing influence rather through the public political attitude of its professors than by the diffusion of literary tastes among the community. This fact, together with the recollections which associate the late Emperor Frederic with bookish people, and the irritated consciousness that a very large proportion of Germany’s present authors are Jews and Radicals, gives the contemptuous attitude of Berlin’s aristocratic and military classes toward literature a decided political twist.
This is rendered the more marked by the overwhelming Radicalism of the city’s electorate. The immense balloon-like rise of the value of land, and the tremendous race to erect buildings everywhere, brought to the city a great concourse of artizans and labourers from all parts of Germany. Competition gave them big wages, but it also incited the formation of powerful trades’ unions, the best of which were in effect Radical clubs, and the worst of which became centres of Socialist agitation. Berlin has six members in the Reichstag, of which four are Radicals, or Freisinnige, and two are Social Democrats. One of the Radicals is Prof. Rudolph Virchow, and one of the Socialists is Paul Singer, a Jew. The municipal institutions of Berlin, so far as they depend upon the popular vote, are also in the hands of the Radicals.
So much for the new Berlin. On Oct. 28, 1888, William, who had just returned from his Italian visit, the last of his series of journeys for that year, received the Burgomaster and a delegation from the Town Council, who came to the Schloss to congratulate him upon his return. They presented an effusively loyal address, clearly intended as a peace-offering from the Radical city to the new sovereign, and announced the intention of erecting a great fountain in the Schloss-Platz to commemorate the event.
William received this polite expression with studied insolence. After ironically commenting upon the unexpectedness of such a demonstration, he brusquely told them to build more churches in Berlin and to choke off their Radical editors, who, during his absence, had shamelessly discussed the most private affairs of his family. He had been particularly angered by their insistence upon drawing comparisons between himself and his late father, an affront which he would not longer tolerate. He was about to take up his residence in Berlin, and “considering the relations which existed between the municipal authorities of Berlin and this Radical section of the press,” he concluded that his hearers could stop this editorial impudence if they liked. Their address was full of loyal professions; very well, let them put these into practice.
Having said this in his roughest manner, William turned on his heel and left the room without shaking hands with the Burgomaster or so much as nodding to his colleagues.
This happened four months or so before the change in the young Kaiser’s views and attitude which has been dealt with above. It is not out of place here, however, because, although William was now swiftly and with steady progress to alter his opinions on most other public subjects, he has not even yet altogether outgrown the notion that editors ought to wear muzzles.