A GERMAN HISTORY OF EUROPE FROM 1815 TO 1871.*
THERE appeared not long ago, in an authoritative quarter, an article on modern German historians, classing and appre- ciating them according to their " methods " and " Weltan- schauung," and their relations to the systems of Kant and Hegel, or other schemes of metaphysical thought. This admirable paper, signed by a person of quality, described writers of antediluvian date, and no more characteristic of the Germany of the Bismarckian era, than Macaulay, Arnold, or Grote would be for recent England, or Thierry, Guizot, or Barante, for fin-de-siecle France. Since the late war, the pub- lishers of the Empire have deluged the market with an out- pour of large-scale histories — the names of about thirty occur to us at once—all based on indefatigable study of books and archives, and characterised by fairly objective treatment, to the exclusion of the old-fashioned " pragmatical " teaching and colouring of past events at the call of an individual " cos- mical conception." Many of these works are of high merit. The deficiency of the school is the want of vivid descriptive power, and of the faculty of interspersing narrative with allusion, illustration, and reflection ; also, in the case of books dealing with the modern national period, the tendency of Professors, Docents, and Hausarchivars, with a future before them, to pick their steps warily over the "ignes suppositos cineri doloso " of dynastic ground.
Professor Stern, already known from his books on Milton and Mirabeau, and other works, has now faced a large nnder-
• Geschiehte Europa's ven 1816 iris 1871, Vol. L By A. Storm. Berlin: Hertz, leas, taking. Not having the artistic talent of Thurean-Dangin or Leaky, or the abbreviated pungency of Fyffe, he may have failed to give to this first instalment (he will hardly reach the Surrender of Paris in 1871 under six or seven volumes) a very seductive form. But to the possessors of the genuine historic appetite, his exhaustive pictures of the domestic and foreign transactions of all the countries of civilised Europe, their arts, culture, and economics included, will be welcome. His sketch of the Romantic school, written with much sympathy, assigns a prominent place to our later Georgian poets. As leaders of our insular phase of that movement, he couples Burns and —Tommy Moore ! placing the pair as typical for comparison with Chateaubriand, Madame de Steel, Tieck, and Manzoni. Those of us whose taste has not been corrupted by "psycho- logical analysis," experience the true poetic shiver when they think of the beloved Peri beating her wings at the gates of Paradise, and her musical outburst of joy when Heaven is won. But when our accomplished German assures us that neither in " Kehama" nor " Thalaba " did Southey " make so much as an approach to Moore's superbly coloured creation," we must reply that he prefers " a l'or de Virgile le olinquant de Tame." As to Shelley, Keats, and Byron, they are boycotted ; perhaps the latter is kept back for the Missolonghi stage of the history, On German culture Stern writes well. But under that rubric we find another comparison of a most invidious descrip- tion. The immortal Schubert, one of the very greatest of the gods of art of any time, is placed in parallel line of merit with the wishy-washy Cornelius ; and is described, in obedience to a current Weimar fad, as having received fruitful stimulus from Goethe, whose ideas and suggestions were, in reality, quite beyond his comprehension. For, in- exhaustible and sublime as a creator of melody, Schubert, like some other artists, possessed a minimum, approximating to zero, of the ordinary faculties of the brain. In the same way Professor Stern is free from the prevalent Anglophobia of the professorial, periodical, and Press literature of the new Germany. In 1895 it is strange to bear that, in the age of Wellington and " carotid-artery-cutting " Castlereagh, the Fatherland entertained deep respect for our national character and institutions, and that this sentiment prevailed from the Boot of Italy to the Sound. Amongst the landed features of our public life was our self-government, which was in the hands of the "landed aristocracy,"—i.e., as our author explains for the benefit of Continental readers, the nobility and gentry. Foreigners contrasted our machinery of local powers with the centralisation of France, all centring in Paris, and worked by an army of professional officials who were tyrants to the community and always on the cringe to their superiors in office. From the Prefect downwards, every man had his salary, whereas in England the same work was done gratis by Princes (P), Dukes, Baronets, and so on downwards. The contrast still holds good, and not as regards France only. In Germany, for instance, there are wheels within wheels of local authority whose movement, in normal circumstances, is automatic ; yet, in the last resort, " systematised devolution " means that Landrath, Schulze, Policeman, Biirgermeister, Town or County Councillor, can be directed, or gagged, by the Minister of the Interior, who may probably be open to the arguments of a still higher power. But, after all, as Stern argues, the English interpretation of the word " self " was a little narrow, since it meant almost exclusive possession by the " aristocracy " of government and patronage. For the Army, the Church, the judicial profession, and, chief of all, for Parliament and the Administration, the rule was, "none but lords or gentry need apply."
The contrasts of England and Germany are infinite. The newest ideal of our advanced statesmanship is the separation of the integral parts of these islands into fragments. The recent work of the enlightened majority among the Germans, now ratified by the entire nation, has been the slow but sure extinction of Home-rule by the surrender of local prerogative and the growth of the central Imperial power. After 1815, the King of Prussia had before him an analogous problem of territorial assimilation. Throughout the Monarchy, from the Memel to the Meuse, local Parnells and Healys were at work heaping coals on the fires of provincial antagonism, which burned briskly enough to trouble even the autocratic Frederick William 1H. and his Austrian bottle-holder, Metternich. There was then no organised " Centrum ; " but the Catholic Rhinelanders hated the Monarch and the Protestant culture of which he was the centre. The Saxons of the annexed province of Magdeburg were furious at the disruption of their ancient allegiance to the House of Wettin, while in Poland the " Sarmatian " idea never slumbered. Silesia, so loyal in the rising against Napoleon, was showing Particu- larist feelings, and there was even a separate " Pomeranian nation," which, again, was split into German and Swedish halves. This tension was aggravated by the cross-pur- poses subsisting between the Conservative East and the democratically disposed West of the King's domains, each portion claiming to be the predominant partner. One point which made the Rhine provinces and Westphalia polar to Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Preussen, was the difference in landed tenure. Typical in the East was the Rittergut, or large estate of the nobility ; in the West, the peasant's holding. The owner of a Rittergut enjoyed the entire local patronage, and inherited extensive patrimonial functions that exempted his estates from the ordinary civil authority. This was hardly a misfortune, for, in spite of the beginnings of reform started by Stein and Hardenberg, the general administration was, in many respects, in a highly muddled state, and was enfeebled by the coexistence of fiscal and judicial systems framed on a variety of patterns. As Stern's history proceeds, we shall learn how all this multiplicity was gradually turned—pace our Home-rulers—into unity, or, at least, into something like it, for complete identity of institutions is, in Prussia, still a desideratum.
The Frederick Williams—III. and IV.—who reigned from 1797 to 1861, have been exalted to the skies by Hohenzollern hacks, amongst whom, as regards his dynastic adulation, Ranke takes a prominent place. A foreigner will conclude that both these monarchs were destitute of the fine family qualities manifested by the Great Elector, or old Fritz, or by the two elder Hohenzollerns of our own time. Stern's pic- ture of Frederick William III. is something of an antidote to the hosannas of the reactionary Treitschke ; but though writing from the safe seclusion of Zurich, he seems paralysed by a certain unwillingness to treat " All-Highest-the-Same " like a common mortal. Allowance must be made for the effect on Frederick William's character of the misfortunes of Prussia during the Napoleonic oppression. But the fact remains that he was of poor intelligence, disliked ability in others, had a dry, suspicions temperament, and, like some other Potsdam authorities, believed himself to be in direct communication with heaven, of which his proceedings as a ruler offered no visible sign. As theologian, he may be said to have succeeded, for he attained his grand religious ideal, which was, not the Disestablishment of State Churches, but the amalgamation of Lutherans and Calvinists into a single body. Acting as absolute personal head of the spiritual communities of Prussia with delegated divine authority (except in the Western Provinces, where local synods were allowed to meet and manage under suitable official control), the Royal ecclesiastic drove the recalcitrant congregations of the Kingdom into one fold, finally forcing upon them the adoption of the Prayer-book and Liturgy of the Court Church of Potsdam. The so-called " Union " was the work of many years, and it was effected, in some places, by Dragonnades which, if not of the genuine Louis XIV. type, involved outrageous and cruel conflicts of soldiery and congregations.
Frederick William's attempt to achieve a political Eirenikon was leas successful. In 1810, and again in 1815, he had promised by solemn edicts to grant his people a repre- sentative Constitution, an undertaking guaranteed by the thirteenth article of the statute of the German Bund. In Bavaria, Wiirtemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt the rulers kept faith with their subjects, popular institutions were estab- lished, the Press was fairly free, there was no Censure ; and those were the beginnings of reasonable Liberal progress. Even in Hanover, Saxony, and Mecklenburg the old Diets had been resuscitated, and things were improving. But the old despotism of Prussia stood untouched by the example of the neighbouring States. The notables of the Kingdom—the martyrs and heroes of the Napoleonic era—kept pressing their Sovereign with unanimous voice to redeem his pledge to his people. The Chancellor Hardenberg, the Corsican's great victim "le nomme Stein," W. von Humboldt, and their com- peers, all were urging that course. And, startling as the fact may sound in 1895, when no officer in the German Empire dares to utter, or even to entertain, Liberal sentiments, the military Paladins of the times headed the party. Glorious old Bliicher*
York, and Gneisenau joined fortissimo in the chorus of admoni- tion. To such entreaties the King remained deaf—the more the word Parliament was reiterated, the more the result was " Le Roi s'avisera." This chapter of evasion of solemn pro- mises, which brought Prussia into great contempt with the more-advanced Germans of the South, is fully related by the historian. The struggle for a Prussian Constitution dragged on through various stages of resistance and evasion—amongst them the pretended grant of effective Provincial Diets—till 1847, when Amurath to Amurath having succeeded, the more intellectual, more fantastic, though less upright Frederick William IV. convoked the desired Parliament, under circum- stances which brought the Monarchy to the brink of ruin.
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