BOOKS.

COUNT VITZTHITM'S MEMOIRS.*

BOTH those who have read much, and those who have not, on the subject of the political and diplomatic life in England during the reign of Napoleon III., will be pleased with this book. It takes up the period between the Democratic Revolution of 1848, and the Nationalist Revolutions in Italy and Germany. The latter was partly brought about by the unconscious and "light- hearted" efforts of Count Vitzthnm. The division of the book into chapters is one of the most tiresome that can be conceived. They are alternately memoirs and extracts from the Count's correspondence, public and private ; so that while we read in one chapter his recollections in a more or less continuous narrative, in the next we find the same story told over again in the letters and despatches. The former must have been written down from memory at a much later period, which is the only way of accounting for the glaring inaccuracies to be found in them, one or two instances of which we will give later on.

Count Vitzthum was in appearance, manner, and temper just like any highly educated Junker to be found between the Elbe and the Vistula. He was handsome but awkward, formal but not polite, sensitive but not afraid of offending others, and intelligent without being agreeable. He came to London when the Corps Diplomatique was full of men who shone in society from a cultivation of the graces of life more successfully than he did ; and this gave him an advantage over them in the serious duties of his career, and enabled him to examine for himself the forces brought into play and the general character of those with whom he was brought in contact. Indeed, these volumes abound in fine portraits of the most noted of his colleagues and of other public men. With the exception of those of Lord Palmerston and Louis Napoleon, they are generally fair enough. His opinions on the former were founded on the idea expressed on a triumphal arch at a prize-shooting in the Tyrol,—

" Hat der Teufel einen Sohn So ikeii gewiss Lord Palmerston."

And his first impression of Louis Napoleon was one which he never quite lost,—namely, that he reminded him of" one of those circus-masters who, with a long switch in their hands, superin- tend the performance." Count Vitzthum's position as repre- sentative of the most powerless of German States, was insignifi- cant; but his friendship with the Prince Consort, and his readiness to intrigue against Lord Palmerston or the Emperor, gave him a certain importance which he very much exaggerated.

The first chapter contains all that is tube found about St. Peters-

• St. Petersburg ond Loudon, 185a-lees, Beirtkiscences of Couot Charles Frederick Vitsthsive eon Eckstoedt, late Boson Minister at the Court of Be. James.

Edited, with Preface, by Henry Heave, D.C.L. 2 role. Leaden: Longerana and Co. D387.

burg. He gives a masterly account of the Emperor Nicholas, an& if his anecdotes concerning the causes of his death are correct, the usual one of his having died from a pulmonary attack is untrue. He states, and gives evidence to support the story, that the Emperor, notwithstanding his splendid appearance and the apparent perfection of his power, wee then conscious that the.

ground was mined under his feet, and that the Secret Societies which we call Nihilist were in full force ; while learned doctors —namely, Dr. Granville and Dr. Arndt—had certified their opinion, which the former had imparted to the English Cabinet,.

that the symptoms of hereditary mania had already been dis- played, which showed that he could not live more than two years. We will give two or three examples of the inaccuracies to be found in the chronicle chapters. The first is the Count's descrip- tion of the Battle of Inkerman, containing the causes of the

victory and defeat. He attributes the former to the firmness of the Guards and the battery of "Armstrong gone." Now,

Armstrong grins were not invented till four years later. The defeat is thus accounted for :—

" In reality, the Battle of Inkerman was only lost by the talka- tiveness of the Emperor Nicholas. On paper the plan, according to all who are versed in such matters, was an excellent one ; the Russian general staff had been working at it for weeks under the Emperor's own oyes; the superiority of numbers once assured, the execution of the attack seemed more child's-play, and so delighted was the Emperor Nicholas at the prospect of undoubted success,. that he did not hesitate to confide to Count Munster the plan in all its details. Count Munster only did his duty in immediately reporting to the King of Prussia what the Czar had told him. Just as Frederiok IL, before the Seven Years' War, had received copies of the most- private documents of the Saxon Cabinet through their clerk, Menzel,. at Dresden, whom he had bribed, so Lord Angustue Loftus had a Menzel at Potsdam who sent him copies for which an honorarium was duly paid according to the value of their contents. Thus, the English Ambassador promptly received the despatch of Count. Munster with the Russian plan of the Battle of Inkerman. Loftus. perceiving its importance, had the despatch telegraphed in cipher to London, whence it was immediately forwarded to Lord Raglan, and it arrived just at the right moment to enable that General to make the necessary dispositions and inform Marshal Canrobert of the danger. The latter immediately ordered op Bosquet's division, while Lord. Raglan sent for the Piedmontese."

This story is, as far as regards Inkerman, untrue from beginning to end. The submarine telegraph was not laid before the battle ;. the Piedmontese Army, under General La Marmora, did not. reach the Crimea till six months afterwards ; and the real cause of the Russian defeat was that the corps of 25,000 men under Prince Gortschakoff, which ought to have advanced from the East,. abstained from doing so. It is, however, true with regard to the Battle of the Tchernaya, which took place in August, 1855. The news arrived from Berlin, somewhat as above stated, between 11 and 12 o'clock in London. It was duly considered by the Government, and the cipher despatch conveying a copy of the important orders from the Emperor Alexander, not the Emperor Nicholas, to attack at all hazards, was sent by 3 o'clock to General Simpson, not Lord Raglan, who was then dead ; and the consequence of the indiscretion at Berlin was that the notion, which might have created a certain diversion in favour of the Russians, terminated in a hopeless and useless slaughter, with very little loss to the French and Piedmontese armies engaged. in it.

The second anecdote which is incorrect is the statement that when the Queen gave Lord Palmerston the Garter on the termination of the war, he said to her,—" There is no use in my bribing myself." Lord Palmerston never was upon the terms with the Queen which would have made such a remark possible._ The story is true about Lord Melbourne, and it occurred at the time when the Queen was very young, and was being educated in that peculiar manner which belonged to him, and to him only. We have always understood that the Prince Consort was the person who told the story.

The third anecdote which we believe to be inaccurately told' is that of the visit of Mazzini to Cavour. It recounts how the conspirator in question went to Cavour disguised as an English- man, and astonished him with his knowledge of Italian politics.. We always heard the incident related as of a visit to Prince- Napoleon at Paris.

Of the portraits with which these pages abound, many of them have been sketched in the Greville and Ma1mesbury Memoirs, which in moat particulars they corroborate. M. de Vitzthum, however, was naturally more acquainted with his- brother-diplomats than with the parliamentary politicians, of Greville and Malmesbury. Two of his colleagues are well drawn,—namely, Bunsen and Persigny. The portrait of Baron Bunsen is not Battering, and will hardly be recognised by his

many literary and artistic friends, or by those who read his life in the English edition :—

"Prussia had sent Baron Bunsen as Minister to London, an un- fortunate choice, since he was wanting in so many of those qualities which would have been necessary to surmeant the difficulties of his position ; in fact, it was to realise the pet idea of the Xing—the establishment of a Protestant Bishop at Jerusalem—that Bunsen was first sent to England. He understood how to make some influential personages share the exaggerated opinion he had of himself ; among these, in addition to his own King, was, at all events at first, Prince Albert, who took an interest in arobamlogical studies. Baron Bunsen's artistic dilettantism was a harmless hubby; but that he should have seriously thought himself a statesman was a misfortune for Prussia. The shallow liberalism which was the rage among the Prussian bureaucracy after 1840, did no good to either Germany or Prussia. However, Bunsen shared that weakness with so many that no one would have blamed him for it had he entertained it as an honest con- viction; that was impossible, if only for the reason that he never WRS very particular about the truth. I bad been warned against him in many quarters after my arrival, and listened patiently, therefore, without attaching any value to his declamations, in which he spared nobody. His defects of manner were, as a rule, overlooked, thanks to that supreme indifference with which the insular Englishman is wont to look down on foreigners."

We then come to M. de Persigny, who was most assuredly the most singular choice over made by any monarch as a diplomatic agent in a foreign State. There is in it no exaggeration what- ever, either in the character of the man or in the mode in which

he blurted out what he had to say, or rather what he thought, and which no one but himself would have said :—

"Fialin, created Count by the Pope, and later on Doe de Persigny by Napoleon III., had ever since the Strasburg adventure, in which be took part as sub-officer of the Guides, remained the most loyal adherent of his Emperor. He had shared his exile in England, had let fly in Boulogne the Imperial Eagle so jeered at by the newspapers, and was perhaps the only man who, in times of weal or woe, dared to tell the Imperial parvenu the truth. Persigny, an insignificant man of middle height, was a self-taught person. Destitute of the rudiments of knowledge acquired at school, he had employed the year of his exile in completing his defective education. Ile knew England better than most of his countrymen. His axiom that no French Government could hold out against the hostility of the English Press and Stock Exchange, had become with him an article of faith from his long residence in England and his study of the secret history of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. According to his view, Charles X. owed his fall not to the July ordinances, but to his attempt to defy the English Press by his alliance with Russia, while Louis Philippe was driven away because he had planned the Spanish marriages with Guixot, and thereby had broken his word to England. It is not surprising that Persigny, in spite of his manners, which savoared only too often of the guardroom, should enjoy a certain popularity in England, and that his honesty, in contrast to the Stook Exchange speculators in Paris, should be highly appreciated. The eccentricities of his pretty young wife, if smiled at, were judged with leniency."

Specimens of this faithful Ambassador's conversations are scattered through different pages of the book.

Apart from these personal sketches, the chief importance of the work lies in the gradual development of the German policy, and in the reports of the conversations with the Prince Consort. Count Vitzthum complains of the Prince for being a German intellectual Liberal of the period antecedent to 1840, one who had left Germany before the events of 1848.49, and missed the experiences of those years. Thus, for instance, "he believes that the only reason why the Frankfort Parliament had no practical result was because the German people have not yet learned to yield to majorities. The Diet he etill regards as a calamity, a tool in the hands of the Auetrian Jesuits, who only make use of it to keep down all progress in Germany, and check every healthy development in the bad. He thinks it due to Europe alone, and not to the Diet, that in spite of the irre- concilable dissension between Austria and Prussia, Germany has hitherto been saved from civil war." We have always con- sidered that the enlightened view of Germany taken by the Prince was taken because he had not experienced the shocks of 1848, and because it had been allotted to him not only

"sine parte pericli belli certamina magna tueri

but also,—

" Certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate Models atque dies, niti prrestante labors

Ad Gammas emergere opes, reramque potiri."

At all events, he never looked forward, as did Counts Beast and Vitzthum, to the fulfilment of German aspirations through the childish idea of what they called the "Trim Partei," which was to balance the power and neutralise the rivalry of Austria and Prussia. In one interview with the Prince, we find :—

" The Prince began by observing that we [that is, the Tricia] might think ourselves fortunate that the Prince of Prussia was not a Victor Emanuel, and that there was no Cavour among the Ministers. He enlarged on this idea in the course of conversation, and warmly recommended the Italian transactions as a wholesome subject of study. Just as the Princes there lost country and people from their trusting to Austria, so it would happen to us [that is, the Tries] if we failed to take warning in time. As there the populations were driven to join Sardinia, whom they hated, simply to escape from Austrian oppression, which was crashing all life out of the country, so also it would fare with Germany."

Such were the wise and pregnant remarks made by the idealist and unpractical cloister Liberal to the agent who tried to interest him in the little meetings of small Princes and their counsellors at Wurzburg or Bamberg.

The warning was prophetic. The Prince of Prussia turned out to be far superior to Victor Emanuel as a soldier, and, so far as the selection of men went, as a statesman; while the assertion that there was no German Cavour was very soon falsified by the rise of the present Chancellor. The Prince's general views on Germany are to be found in his letter to Lord John Russell of March 18th, 1860. Not only did he point out the want of a Victor Emanuel or a Cavour to Count Vitzthum, but in that letter he showed the inevitable result of keeping up the small Courts. They always had been, and always must be, a nucleus of intrigue for France and Russia, and were incompatible with the greatness and independence of Germany. The idealism and learned liberalism of the Prince has borne practical fruit in the present rigime of the Fatherland. The letter of the law of the Band and of the treaties of 1815 were with the Particnlarists. But the forces at work outside law and treaties have, as usual, in the long-ran prevailed. What is, however, difficult to reconcile, is the Prince's opinion on Germany with that on Italy. The emancipation of that country never seems to interest the Prince more than it does Count Vitzthum, or the aristocratic society of Europe. In Germany, and to a limited extent in England, the Prince was a Liberal. But in the rest of Europe he was a thorough Prince. He calls the Emperor Napoleon's efforts in behalf of Italy a crime. Both he and the "Tries Partei " were ready to hound on Germany to defend the Quadrilateral in 1860. And, oddly enough, they were angry with the Emperor for making the war, for stopping it, and for the terms which, according to our judgment, he very naturally demanded as a final settlement of it.

The concluding portions of this work contain the history of the part the writer and his friends played in the Schleswig. Holstein question. The absurd antics indulged in by the German agents embarked in it are well described. The Baud rights under the treaties, the pedigree legal rights of the unconsulted agnates, and the violent war rights invented by Prussia, all find a place. But in one little sentence at p. 219, Vol. II., we find the key which unlocked this complicated arrangement of bolts and screws;—" This unhappy dispute had been made the pre- text ever since 1848 for a deep-reaching national agitation. As is frequently the case at such times, a song, which since 1848 had been repeated in every key, and every street, played a great part in exciting the passions of the people." "Arndt's ' Was

1st des Dentachen Vaterland ?' and Becker's ' were the precursors of • Schleswig-Holstein Meer umschlungen.' "

Count Vitztham asserts more than once that the Treaty of 1852 for the integrity of the Danish monarchy was extorted from Lord Palmerston, in the midst of his Don Pacifico diffi- culties, by Baron Brunow. For this statement there is not a tittle of evidence. The Treaty was one of Lord Palmerston's efforts to restore harmony, and close up the wounds of 1848. When the real struggle began, after the death of the King of Denmark, Count Vitzthum played a not unimportant part, and came off with flying colours. He got the Times to insert a long letter, in which he entered into the Schleswig-Holstein question ab ore, beginning with Charlemagne, a method dear to every German. He then placed himself in communication with the leaders of the Opposition, Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, who, as meal, were ready, for the purpose of "dishing the Whigs" and creating a bond of union with the Court, to fly from all their principles, to disregard the feelings of all their party, and to dress up each a resolution in the House of Commons as would disarm the Government, and prevent them from taking action. When this successful intrigue was complete, Lord John Russell was able still to give a thoroughly good answer to his opponents. He believed in the goodness of his case, but he did not see the necessity of performing the Quixotic action of resisting alone the aspirations of a nation of forty-four millions of Germans, at a moment when neither of the other signatories to the Treaty —namely, France, Russia, or Sweden—were willing to interfere.

Count Titztlum was triumphant ; so were the "Tries Partei " and the unconsulted agnates, but for a few short months. A heavy punishment awaited them all. After Count Vitzthnm's dealing with the Opposition in England, it was not very probable that those who had the best means of knowing his mode of dealing, would wish to perpetuate his stay in this country. In fact, it appears that one of them said to him,—" Well, I think it is high time for you to go, because you are beginning to know us too well." Count Beast, his chief, was forbidden to attend the conferences after Sadowa. He also knew too much. Hanover was destroyed, Saxony's independence completely nullified, the Duke of Angus- tenburg rejected, and every object, absurd or real, important or -trifling, for which Count Vitzthum had intrigued, struggled, and written to the Times, including his deductions from Charle- magne, were blown to pieces by the Ten Days' War. However, -his book remains. It is, and will be, a standard work on English and European history, and not the less so because it is a Jubilee monument to the memory of the late Prince Consort.