THE SCENE IN BERLIN.
THERE is one side of the gloomily grand scene now trans- acting itself in Berlin which will appeal powerfully to the imagination of existing historians and students of history. It shows so many scenes to have been natural and truthful which we are accustomed to regard as theatric or got-up. We read of the death-bed of Richelieu, or of Louis Quatorze, or of our own William of Orange, with a feeling as if we were reading some- how of a pageant or of a well-acted play, as if every one were more or less posing, and the Court were going through some sad but elaborately prepared ceremonial, to be watched with decorum, indeed, but not with faith. There is an impression of unreality conveyed to the mind even by the best descriptions of such scenes, an impression like that of a herald's account of some great coronation, amidst the pomp of which some mishap or blunder would, as a return to nature, be a relief. Yet though no scene could have seemed more like one prepared by a great painter than that of the Emperor William's death- bed, nothing could have been less artificial or more entirely due to the natural and becoming fittingness of things. Men say 'the concourse was too large; but the great crowd of sixty Princes, Marshals, Generals, statesmen, and officials, who pressed so close that at one moment Prince Bismarck fell back, as a visible warning to them to draw no nearer, were all obeying a call of affection, or duty, or feeling so strong, that not to have obeyed it would have hardened for life the conscience of the man who resisted his inner impulse. The crowd was large; but the dying Monarch had that multitude of relatives, or great coadjutors, or deeply attached friends. Count von Moltke did not faint on purpose; the Iron Chancellor would have controlled his emotion if he could ; the hard veterans who wept, wept because their very souls were stirred by the passing away of one who had been at once their comrade and their chief, and whose departure was the closing of an epoch full, for them, both of glory and of satis- faction. Life for the moment seemed closed as by a catastrophe, and Nature would have her way. Nothing had been prepared, nothing was artificial, nothing was even conventional; it was all as spontaneous and sudden as the sobs of widower or children when the first sods fall into the grave. If, then, this scene was real, so may have been a hundred others about which the English impulse is to distrust the historian, and to condemn all narra- tive as in its essence pictorial, and therefore, if not false, at least exaggerated. So, too, with the scenes outside ; the wave of emotion that swept through the Representative Chamber ; the grief of the vast crowds in the snow-covered streets, grief which, it is said, induced thousands of women to shroud the "Emperor's flowers," the imitation corn-flowers so much used in Berlin, with crape, as the most significant of all possible devices whereby to express their sorrow ; the rush to view the body, which threatened at one moment to pro- duce a huge disaster ; the universal and sudden adoption of mourning,—everything in all this was spontaneous, and so may well have been the emotion which on a hundred recorded occasions we attribute to the courtesy or the subservience of the scribes. We tarn with weary distaste from the long rolls in which Rollin describes the pompous processions of an older world ; but think what the procession of yesterday must have been, with the Princes of Europe, the Ambassadors of the world, and the Paladins of Germany, Generals by the hundred, dignitaries by the score, soldiers in divisions, the people in hundreds of thousands, all marching on, almost endlessly, to do honour to their dead chief, moved with a common thought, a common grief, a common sense that for them the world had become a poorer one. It is a spectacle to make us read history more accurately, and to doubt whether that habit of " discounting " which we nowadays so sedulously cultivate, does tend, as we fancy, to truth. Bearded men can weep for the dead. Heroes can faint as a King's breath passes. A great capital can be moved as one man because of "the loss of an individual," and the world, the true living world, not the world of heralds, can be stirred to the heart by the death of one who was a man like others. That is a statement which this generation, in its supercilious scepticism, is far too much in- clined to deny, or rather to class with those fictions which it is foolish to act on, but unbecoming to question or expose.
The spectacle, too, may teach us to reconsider some of our ideas about the reality of Kingship. There does not exist in Europe a more sarcastic, inquisitive, sceptical population than that of Berlin. A disposition to jeer is the fault which all Germans attribute to them, and which they acknowledge about themselves. This King had lived among them for genera- tions as visible as a cathedral tower. Thet e was not a fault of his which they did not know, or a foible on which they had not passed their gibes. They are, the mass of them, not only Liberals but semi-Republicans in opinion, Berlin even throwing a vast Socialist vote, and for a whole generation they have contended for Parliamentary as opposed to Royal authority. On the other hand, no Monarch of modern times ever sought less than this King of Prussia, to " conciliate " his people by " popular " means. He had drafted them every one into his Army. He had imposed on them heavy taxes. He had defied, withstood, and at least on one occasion, sneered at their representatives. He had told them publicly, with a calm hauteur which had in it the very essence of abso- lutism, that in Prussia the King must be, and should be, "the ultimate pivot of power." From the day of his accession to the day of his death, he had gone his own way, interpreting his duty by light from within, or by selected advice from without, minding popular praises no more than murmurs, pressing on always to the full fulfilment of his own conception of what he had to accomplish. To accomplish it he had risked the lives of a generation, and fought, against the popular wish, two first-class wars. For years at a time, his attitude was one of plain defiance to his people, and he never once took his orders from them, or tried to be like a democratic Cwsar, the conscious expression of their will. Yet because he had ruled greatly, grandly, and with an eye to Prussia as well as to himself, because he had, being King, visibly done his duty as King to the fullest of his ideal of the Kingship, because he had dared and endured and risked as he asked, or rather commanded, his people to risk and endure and dare, even the populace of Berlin clung to him, reverenced him, felt as he died that something at once stately and pleasant had fallen suddenly out of their lives. We English spoil our words by over-much and over-careless use of them ; and we will not talk of the " love " felt for the King, or of the " gratitude " of his people, or of the "worship" they felt for him. But surely, if eyes and ears and wits are not all united to deceive, there was felt for this stern ruler a true loyalty,—the ancient sentiment which made men die round their leader because he was theirs, and because they could trust him to lead. That loyalty was born, no doubt, in part of his qualities, in part of his history, in part of his unbroken success; it was never subjected to the strain of defeat, and was never made to seem foolish by failure; but qualities, history, success, were all accentuated by the fact of the King- ship, by the historic relation of the kingly man with the past of Prussia, with the Army he had made, with the memories of the whole Germanic people. The force of such influences is passing away ; sometimes we all think, whether in glee or sadness, it is dying to revive no more; but it is not passed yet, and we may see, from this example, how strong and how natural it once was, and for a nation what a drawing kind of cement. If the history of this King shows anything, it is that European men are not tired yet of being ruled, even strongly ruled, lithe rule does but succeed; that their hearts can be won by other means than subservience ; that the Kingship is in itself no disqualification in the man who
demands that the millions shall treat him as wiser than they. 'If, in the grand competition of governing systems now going • on, a generation or two of competent Kings should be evolved, that fact may prove one of primary importance, and the history of the next two centuries may be widely different from the one that dreamers and thinkers alike have pictured to themselves. Lord Beaccnsfield, an inaccurate man with strange flashes of insight, had an idea that a revitalisation of Kings—hereditary Kings—was among the possibilities of the future; and certainly in Germany, which at all events thinks itself the best educated of European communities, belief in Kings is not yet among the dogmas that are dead. They are a cultivated people, but with- ont.their hereditary chief they would feel, and allow that they felt, themselves not a little bewildered and in want of guidance.
Previous page
