The young Bismarck, as depicted is apocalyptic book, is a surprising personality. He was both his father's son and his mother's son, and since father and mother!
Were exact opposites, his spirit was tumultuously divided within him, From his father he inherited the Pride which was the ruling characteristic of one who had been too proud to fight even in the War of Liberation, or to seek official apointments of any kind, or even to seek restoration to. the knightly From his ambitious middle-class] mother, daughter of a Liberal, he inherited a piercing and dispassionfate intelligence and a restless longing for po And the capacity] of hatred was the result of an unhappy and perplexed hoyhood.- At Aix, then a famous spa where three ations met amicably, he was the fad Junker," a riotous pleasure-seeker who kept up the family reputation for hard drinking and gargantuan eating (he once amazed the company by devouring 150] oysters!) and had numerous love Jaffairs, several of them with Eng-
He did his best to get freed from the liability to military. found business and official service utterly uncongenial, because his pride was too great to submit to any authority. "There we have a picture! Jof Bismarck "the born dictator, aware of his Jown powers, uninfluenced by loyalty a King or by the fear of God, unmoved by love of the homeland or by a sense of responsibility towards the masses; the great soloist, the misanthrope, the fighter, the revolutionist, restlessly awaiting change; the adventurer, who despises that which exists because of its jstagnaney; the man whose nervous energy makes him wish not to administer but to transform, who desires to command as his own in-ight might dictate, and cannot tolerate a superior"
His journey to England is amus-reading. On landing in Hull he was reproved for whistling on Sunday, se returned on board. the ship and sailed to Scotland! iked London and commended "the extraordinary civility and obligi ness of the English, which is quite contrary to my expectations." The native appetite impresses him as much as the native civility: "This is the country of great eaters!" He was a Byronist—Pelhamism was beyond him, naturally. A man of the world, with a touch of elegance his exuberance, he could not stick the rustic squirearchy of his Pomer-
Prussian Macchiavell, ful career arg failing to everybody main owns of bia wondey-But at every boist this biographer throws new Tight on the spiritual growth of the man-in-himself. {sa triumph of psychological analysis to show how this product of period of storm and. stress, thi yeasty Junker, came to believe that Prossia was the entre of the world, ind the whole world a State in need of being Prussianized.
"If an angel had come down from Heaven," said Prokesch, "Bismarck would not have admitted him unless: hho had worn a Prussian cockade.
Yet, if he out-Prussianed all Prussians, he could be as smooth and subtle as Macchiavell, In the inception and prosecution of the three wars which made Imperial Germany hho was the chief, almost the sole, driving-power, and the other pro tagonists are puppets in comparison, His ruthless will overcome the bitter opposition of the people, who wanted none of these measures of aggression. And behind it all we are made to feel the often occluded force of vast and sleepless intelligence, The real man was seldom revealed least of all in the four intimate conversations ko had with Napoleon ILL, between 1857 and 1861, who learnt to. know him only at' their fifth. meeting—at Sedan. Always] the French were as alien to hi the English were uncongenial, "But never under-rated a. possible antagonist of Germany, and it is teasy to guess-—though an apposite word cannot be discovered—how this lifelong opponent of a war on two fronts. would have resisted a wart on three fronts, the third being the ubiquitous front of England's sea-power.
When Withelm If, succeeded, he was the greatest treasury of political Knowledge and sagacity in the world, and it was that magniloquent poseus's unpardonable blunder to Ihave cast him off.A scholar. might a well have burnt his library!
The Moral Every vital word of Bismarck and hhis associates is set down in the' great book, og vast and various as the German countryside, of which Bismarck (like Cromwell) was] essentially an emanation, Out of} its dark shadows the face of a truly tremendous personality emerges like portrait by Rembrandt, What is the moral? Herr Ludwig is no moralist, yet lessons for Germany and for the other nations of the world stick out.all over his book like the plums in a big plum leake. The German Prinees hi Vanished into the inane, But Bis-marek's work survives, and Bismarck, with it, "After thirty years, Herr Ludwig on the last of ages, "the Germans stand beside Bismarck's grave, and lower their flags to salute" him." It is true,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.