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No. 32. — Vienna, 12 August 1898. — Second Year.

Bismarck.

Berlin Letter from Redivivus.

— 8 August.

It is no more than fair that the impression produced by the tidings of Bismarck's death should go on working for some weeks in the thoughts and feelings of his contemporaries. A whole generation has fed upon the living man; now one must grow accustomed to the fact that the world has become poorer by that great historical personality, even if one need not at once utter the resigned cry: “Les Dieux s'en vont!” True it is that overpowering individualities — les Dieux — grow ever rarer, and Otto Bismarck, who on occasion laid about him against individualism with his giant's club, was quite unquestionably himself the most individual personality of the last five decades. But what holds of the single man is not always true of the whole as well. In one of his beautiful letters to his sister Bismarck wrote, more than half a century ago: “The actors say: after nine o'clock all is over.” For him it was nine o'clock on that 20th of March 1890 on which he received his dismissal. And curious enough it was that the place beside the throne, which he had so long and so unassailably occupied, now fell empty, so that upon the throne itself a strong individuality, that of the young Emperor, might come into its right. Historically taken, it was after all only an Ote-toi que je m'y mette that was accomplished. The Germans have no occasion to shed tears over it. Their Bismarck they have had, and whatever he could by any means accomplish for the greatness and the glory of Germany, that he accomplished. That he left behind him a pupil who, travelled under new world-conditions, at once and while he yet lived took his inheritance to himself, is a great good fortune; and that this pupil is the Emperor himself is only now coming to the full consciousness of the German people.

It lies, to be sure, in the nature of things that the pupil, in striking out upon other roads towards the goals which the master pointed out, should appear as one fallen away. Spinoza at times looks like an opponent of Cartesius, although he is his continuator. But little depends upon that. What the contemporary sees is seldom the whole truth. What is certainly discernible is for the present only this: that through three decades the German national character embodied itself wholly and completely in the personality of Bismarck, just as the stage of development of those three decades brought with it; and in that alone is revealed the monumental quality of all historical personality. When the Bismarck era was over, the figure of the young Emperor stretched itself aloft, just as self-sovereign, just as irresistible, turned towards the same goal, only different in birth and upbringing, in speech and gesture — other times, other songs.

It becomes no one to play the old off against the new, or to draw complacent inferences from the new about the old. One mistakes the spirit of history if one makes the great historical personality, which after all is never more than an instrument, responsible for what it has wrought in good as in evil. The Frenchman or the Pole, the Social Democrat or the Ultramontane who imagines that he may hold an inexorable judgment of the dead over Bismarck is very far indeed from the most elementary requirements of historical justice. When the time has come that needs a Bismarck, it is also the time when blows must fall, walls must crash down, towers must topple. The human personality which in such epochs accomplishes the work is exactly such as it must be according to the commandment of history; and because it is singled out to be a historical personality, it must in the end be lifted beyond hatred and beyond favour alike. It is what it is, to cite a famous word of Gambetta's.

In this train of thought it is nevertheless very attractive to observe how various the utterances upon Bismarck's passing are. They swing between ecstatic admiration and bloody hatred. And one cannot even say that the hatred of the Poles and of the Social Democrats is undeserved; it simply has nothing to do with historical justice. That Bismarck would not let the German Empire be turned into a socialist state of the future, but rather held down Social Democracy by the most violent means, could hardly be laid to his charge; and that he strove to preserve Germany from the dangers of Polish separatism was his duty and his bounden obligation.