My life and loves Vol. 3

by Frank Harris

  I can call back the days desirable,

  And live all bliss again between your knees, For where else can I find that magic spell Save in your heart and in your Mysteries, I can call back the days desirable.

  CHAPTER V

  Bismarck and Burton

  The period that began in 1890 was memorable for many reasons: Sir Richard Burton, one of the greatest of Englishmen, whom I have elsewhere compared with Sir Walter Raleigh, died in October at Trieste, and left life poorer to some of us. Stanley, another explorer, was married to Miss Dorothy Tennant, and almost immediately hideous stories of cruelties perpetrated on the African natives during his last expedition shocked the conscience of England. When they said that Miss Tennant, who was a very charming girl, was going to marry the lion of the season, I said it seemed to me true: "She was about to marry the king of beasts," for Stanley was to me always a force without a conscience. Browning died in December, 1889, and Tennyson a couple of years later. Parnell, too, came to the crisis of his fate about this time, and in France, Renan's death left a sad gap.

  But the event that marked the time and gave supreme significance to it was the dismissal of Bismarck. His fall in 1890 shook the world. For nearly thirty years, from 1862 on, Bismarck had dominated Europe. Few remember his beginnings, though he himself has told how.

  When I first came into office, the king showed me his written abdication. I had first of all to re-establish the royal power, for it was shaken and shattered. I was successful. Yet I am not an absolutist. There is always danger in one-man government. Parliamentary opinion and a free press are necessary to a satisfactory monarchial system…

  Universal suffrage was the spirit of the Frankfort Parliament. I adopted it in the Constitution of the North German Confederation and afterwards of the Empire, because it was necessary to counteract the Austrian influence, and it was my aim, therefore, to satisfy all classes.

  Bismarck's judgments of his imperial masters are curiously characteristic: while in their service, he spoke well of them. On his tomb Bismarck directed that there should appear these words:

  Here rests Prince Bismarck

  Born 1st April, 1815

  Died — A faithful German Servant of Emperor William the First

  He wrote: "The old Emperor William was not a great statesman but a man of sound judgment and a perfect gentleman. He was true to those who worked with him. I was deeply attached to him. The Emperor Frederick, too, was a noble man-a sharp sword, so to speak, with a short blade." But after Bismarck died in 1898 and his Memoirs by Busch were published, we got the other side. As he said himself: "I lack altogether the bump of veneration for my fellow men." And so we find what Bismarck really thought of Emperor William the First: "When anything important was going on, he usually began by taking the wrong road, but in the end he always allowed himself to be put straight again… His knowledge of affairs was limited and he was slow in comprehending anything new."

  Bismarck found it hard to conceal his contempt for the Crown Prince Frederick. It even comes out in spiteful little outbursts such as this: "The Crown Prince, like all mediocrities, likes copying, and other occupations of the same sort, such as sealing letters, etc."

  And finally Bismarck's opinion of the Kaiser who dismissed him was written in vitriol even before the final break:

  I cannot stand him (Wilhelm the Second) much longer. He wants even to know whom I see, and has spies set to watch those who come in and go out of my office… It comes of an overestimate of himself, and of his inexperience of affairs, that can lead to no good. He is much too conceited: he is simply longing with his whole heart to be rid of me. in order that he may govern alone (with his own genius), and be able to cover himself with glory. He does not want the old mentor any longer, but only docile tools. But I cannot make genuflections nor crouch under the table like a dog. He wants to break with Russia, and yet he has not the courage to demand the increase of the army from the Liberals in the Reichstag.

  It is interesting to read that in a letter to the Chancellor, the Crown Prince Frederick at Portofino described his eldest son as "inexperienced, extremely boastful and self-conceited."

  Bismarck's opinions of his masters are to my mind not only self-revealing but true, and his contemptuous condemnation of Wilhelm the Second has been justified by the result.

  Like most of the leading men of the nineteenth century, like Tennyson and Hugo, Gladstone, Salisbury and Parnell, Bismarck was a convinced believer, not only in God and divine providence, but also in a life after death; he even believed in apparitions, ghosts, and supernatural signs.

  In 1866, just before the war between Prussia and Austria, Bismarck, according to Busch, had been exceedingly cast down: when he was shot at five times and wasn't even grazed, he took it as a sign of divine approbation and was immediately lifted into the happiest humor.

  One must think of what Bismarck accomplished even though handicapped by brainless masters! In 1866 he beat Austria and made Prussia the first military power in Europe. He welded many German states into one on the anvil of war, and after 1870 he developed the industries of his people in the most unexpected and successful ways. I have already related how he had profited by the socialist teachings of Lassalle, how in fifty ways he had fostered industry so that every one felt an added incentive to labor and a sure understanding that an extra effort would lead on to fortune. Considering that he was born and bred an outrageous individualist in an aristocratic tradition and yet created a new record as a social reformer, one can only wonder at the profound morality which led him always towards justice. He knew instinctively, as Lincoln knew, that "labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration."

  His fall was treated excellently in the English press. Punch had a famous cartoon on it entitled, "Dropping the Pilot."

  But Bismarck was not so great a man, in my opinion, as Sir Richard Burton: in force of character, in daring and in strength, they were not unlike; but Burton had a wider intelligence, a larger mind, and a richer generosity and kindliness of nature.

  To me the difference between the fates of Bismarck and Burton gives rise to many reflections. For thirty years Bismarck had supreme power and made Germany the first state in Europe — I had almost said in the world; but England denied Burton almost everything. Although he had served the foreign office with extraordinary ability, they refused him even the usual retiring pension.

  In my last visit to him in Trieste, I couldn't help asking him how it came about, why the English authorities were so down on him, and he said smiling, "You will laugh if I tell you. I think I blundered in my first talk with Lord Salisbury.

  He called me 'Burton'; his familiarity encouraged me, and I spoke to him as 'Salisbury.' I saw him wince, and he went back immediately to 'Mr. Burton,' but out of cheek or perversity I kept up the 'Salisbury.' He was so ignorant; he didn't know where Mombassa was; and the idea that I had brought back treaties handing over the whole of Central Africa to Britain merely filled him with dismay. He kept repeating, 'dreadful responsibility — dreadful'; he was in reality, I believe, a very nice old lady." I could not help laughing.

  Burton's judgment of Lord Salisbury was justified to me later in a peculiar way. One evening Teresa, Lady Shrewsbury, after meeting me somewhere at dinner, offered to take me home in her brougham. I thanked her warmly, for she was always interesting, knew everybody, and had a real salon in London.

  Arthur Balfour had been one of the chief personages at the dinner. I asked her what she thought of him. "I know him very slightly," she replied, "but think him very distinguished-looking."

  "I'm afraid," I said, "that his outward is the best part of him." "Strange," she said, "that reminds me that once, driving like this a few years ago with Lady Salisbury, I asked her what she thought of her husband's good-looking nephew. 'Oh, my dear," she replied, 'he's nothing for us women: I don't believe he has any more temperament than my poor old Bob!'"

  So Lord Salisbury was judged by his wife very much as Si
r Richard Burton had judged him.

  When Burton showed me his translation of The Arabian Nights and I saw that he had described every sort of sensuality with the crudest words, I got frightened for him; still, I told him that I would help him so far as I could and put myself at his disposal. I would have liked him to modify some of the bestialities; however, as I have said elsewhere, it wasn't my business to condemn a great man but to help him; and I am proud of the fact that partly through my help he made ten thousand pounds out of the venture. No one could be with Burton for an hour without feeling his extraordinary force of character and the imperial keenness of his intelligence. If England had treated him as she should, he would have given her a glorious empire, the whole central plateau of Africa from the Cape to Cairo, without a war, and no one would be astonished now that I should compare him with Bismarck; but England couldn't use her greatest man of action!

  I have never told how we came to know each other intimately. Captain Lovett Cameron, his lieutenant on several of his African journeys, had introduced me to him; but I was awkward and self-conscious and made some conventional foolish remark that caused Burton to turn from me contemptuously. I confessed my fault to Cameron afterwards, who insisted that the faux pas could easily be repaired. "You've no idea how generouskind Dick is; as soon as he gets to know you, he'll cotton to you," and he fixed a meeting for the morrow in Pall Mall at one of the clubs.

  I thought over the meeting and arranged what I'd say. It had suddenly come into my head that Burton knew Lord Lytton and that they were friends. As soon as the three of us met next day, I shot off my bolt. "The other morning," I began, "I walked down Pall Mall just behind two men curiously differentiated in clothes and in person; the one was a little dandy, high heels, yellow kid gloves, tall hat, rouged cheeks-he evidently wore corsets too; the other, a very tall man, swung along with a sombrero on his head and a heavy stick in his hand. I was near enough to hear them talk. The dandy was intent on persuading his companion. "Ah, Dick," he began, "delicacies escape you men of huge appetite; you miss the deathless charm of the androgyne: the figure of the girl of thirteen with sex unexpressed as yet, slim as a boy with breasts scarcely outlined, and narrow hips; but unlike a boy, Dick; no lines or ugly muscles, the knees also are small; everything rounded to rhythmic loveliness-the most seductive creature in all God's world."

  "You make me tired, Lytton," cried the big man in a deep tone, "you cotquean, you! Your over-sweet description only shows me that you have never tried the blue-bottomed monkey!"

  "First-rate," cried Burton laughing to me, "you have hit off Lytton to the soul, which probably means that my portrait, too, is life-like."

  From that hour on the ice was broken between us and we became friends, and I soon found Burton, as Cameron had said, determined unconditionally to forgive all injuries, one of the noblest spirits I have met in this earthly pilgrimage!

  It was Burton who discovered the source of the Nile, for on that memorable journey of '58 Speke was merely his lieutenant; and when they reached Ujiji, on the eastern side of Lake Tanganyika, Burton was the first to proclaim the obvious fact; yet when Speke returned to England and claimed the honor of the discovery, Burton said nothing about the matter; there was in him at all times a real generosity.

  Who can forget the verse in which he embodied his stalwart creed?

  Do what thy manhood bids thee do,

  From none but self expect applause:

  He noblest lives and noblest dies

  Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

  When Burton died, Swinburne wrote for me a long elegy on him in the Saturday Review, which ends with this couplet that appealed to me intensely.

  The royal heart we mourn, the faultless friend Burton-a name that lives till fame be dead.

  Like Burton, Bismarck, too, had intimate little messages for me. On the occasion of his seventy-second birthday he said a thing that brought him close to me, for it has been my experience all through my life. "Out of the eight thousand letters of sympathy," he said, "that I have received, a quarter came from women-that pleased me greatly: I regard it as a good sign, for it is my experience that one doesn't reach the female sympathy as easily as the male; besides, women have never liked me: I don't know why; perhaps I couldn't speak nicely enough to them." Yet, if gossip is to be believed, he was more than nice to Pauline Lucca-the great Jewish singer — when she visited Berlin once.

  Bismarck made an extraordinary impression on me. I always see him as I saw him first in the Reichstag: he would often sit for hours without speaking or suddenly get up in the middle of a debate and go out, and one felt at once that the Chamber had become common; vitality, distinction, any possibility of the extraordinary had gone out of the atmosphere.

  One day, I shall never forget it, though it must be now nearly fifty years ago, he had been baited in the House, and at length, some socialist, I think it was little fiery Bebel, used the word wagt (dare) about his reticence. "The Imperial Chancellor does not tell us whether the edict has come from himself or from the Emperor, er wagt es nicht zu sagen," he added. (He dares not speak out.) Bismarck started up, his three hairs bristling on his bald head, and stalked out towards his persecutor. "Who says wagt to Bismarck?" he jerked out with intense passion. The whole House broke into applause, while the little socialist fairly cowered on his seat as the great man continued. "You can either take it that the project came from His Majesty, the Emperor, and was approved by his Chancellor, or that the project came from the Chancellor and was approved by His Majesty, the Emperor. And whichever you fancy the more probable, you can make it square with what you think is constitutional, exactly as it suits you: wie Sie wollen." The contempt of the corps-student for the little Jew raged in the disdain of voice and manner and words. He strode back to his place and went right on out of the House.

  This scene taught me that Bismarck was the most impressive person I had seen up to that time-impressive, of course, chiefly for his courage, but also for his insight. Bit by bit I came to see that he was altogether unscrupulous, determined to make Germany the first country in Europe.

  If Ms voice had been as impressive as his great frame and imperious manner, he would have been simply overwhelming! As it was, it was impossible to be in his presence and hear him speak without being impressed by his greatness of character.

  The only time I met Bismarck to speak to was an event in my life. We had a literary society in Gottingen, his old university. The house he had lived in was shown on the edge of the ramparts; as a corps-student he had fought half a dozen duels, and all successful, thanks chiefly to his great height and length of reach. For some reason or other, the civic authorities in my time passed a law shutting up all drinking places, and all Kneipen even (the places where students drank) at one o'clock in the morning. The corps-students objected to this, defied the civic ordinance, and soldiers were ordered out to close the drinking places. At once the corps-students sent a deputation to the Chancellor to beg him to defend their liberties.

  Hearing of this, I called on the literary society to do likewise, pointed out that we didn't drink or make night hideous for quiet citizens in the morning hours, and finally three of us were selected to go to Berlin and call upon Bismarck, and see if we could not win him to the cause of freedom. Next day, my friend, von H-, and a man whose name I've completely forgotten, and myself started for Berlin. Von H-, we agreed, was to be the spokesman, and he recited to us an excellent speech.

  All went happily at first: I drafted a letter to Prince Bismarck, begging him to hear us for a few minutes as students of his old university. We got a letter from his secretary: the Chancellor would see us at eleven next morning in the Wilhelm Strasse. Needless to say, we were punctual, but when the door opened and Bismarck rose before us at his desk, the courage of my companions oozed away: they both stood bowing like automata with heels together, for all the world as if they had hinges in their backs.

  "Begin!" I whispered to von H-, but he bowed again and again, and s
aid nothing. I saw I'd have to speak or be shamed, so I stepped forward and simply said that we had come as members of a literary society; we were not idlers, but students, intent on improving ourselves: we didn't drink or annoy peaceable citizens by howling songs in the small hours, so we hoped he'd order the civic authorities in Gottingen to leave us alone. The closing time seems reasonable," Bismarck replied curtly.

  "Why shouldn't we talk all night, so long as we don't annoy anyone?" I countered.

  "You come into the category of student societies (Verbindungeri)," he said.

  "It's difficult to differentiate."

  "Good laws shouldn't oppress the well-behaved," I objected. "I'm sure there's a student behind the Chancellor!"

  "Richtig!" he exclaimed, his face lighting up. "But," the thought came: "the well-behaved don't feel laws as oppressive. You can surely say all you have to say before one o'clock in the morning!"

  "Why shouldn't we talk all night if we want to and don't annoy others? As a student Prince Bismarck would not like to have been coerced by soldiers, and we were told that we should be shot down like dogs if we resisted."

  "Richtig!" he barked again. "The soldiers had their orders-scharf geladen!"

  "It's mere despotism," I cried, "indefensible and intolerable tyranny; the Gessler hat sort of thing." He shrugged his shoulders, smiling, and I turned, bowing, and went to the door, for I feared that I had been too bold, while my companions went on bowing like wooden automata. At the door Bismarck called me back: "Are you a German?" he asked.

  "An American," I replied.

  "So…" he interjected, smiling as if at length he understood my boldness. "So!

  The Declaration of Independence stops at the frontier," and he laughed genially.

  When we got outside, my companions congratulated me; but I turned angrily on Von H-: "Had you told me you were going to say nothing, I'd have prepared something: as it was, I was beaten!"