The first communiqué of the victor raised a shudder in Europe. The right of conquest, Bismarck announced, was a “sacred right.” Even more sacred were conquests undertaken in order that Germany might live. Prussia’s actions followed, he said, from the “right of the German nation to exist, to breathe, to be united; it is the right and the duty of Prussia to give the German nation the foundation necessary for its existence.” The right of the German nation to live and to breathe—zu leben und zu ath-men—superseded both private right and international law.
This was an extension, into the jurisprudence of nations, of the poetry of militant nationalism. Like other statesmen of the romantic school, Bismarck believed that people craved myths, and required the stimulus of an ideal; he knew that poetry (in the words of the German scholar Jacob Burckhardt) is “a national force and power.” Nothing in his theory of diplomatic prudence was so influential as his myth of a “living” Germany, a Germany which, in its path to vitality, might subdue and extirpate peoples and nations. For Bismarck constituted the state he founded in such a way that he alone possessed the power to restrain the military chiefs of the General Staff, who instinctively embraced his theory of German vitalism. The most durable part of his revolution proved to be, not his diplomacy of moderation, but his cult of blood and iron; a romance that inspired innumerable Germans to “dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death.”
Washington, June 1866
IN THE MONTHS that followed the surrender of Lee and the death of Lincoln, Walt Whitman thought often of the revolution which killed more than 600,000 human beings and liberated four million more. The true story of it, he was convinced, would never be told. “Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the official surface-courteousness of the generals, not the few great battles) of the secession war; and it is best they should not—the real war will never get in the books.”
Only “a few stray glimpses into that life” and “into those lurid interiors” would be “convey’d to the future.” Lincoln himself, “the leading actor in the stormiest drama known to real history’s stage,” would be known only imperfectly in aftertimes. The President’s death, Whitman believed, made America a nation: his spilt blood condensed “a Nationality.” But no artist could truly portray even Lincoln’s physical appearance, “the peculiar color” of his face, the “lines of it, the eyes, mouth, expression.” If Lincoln’s face must be forgotten, what hope for his spirit and his poetry? “The current portraits are all failures,” Whitman said, “most of them caricatures.” Yet he could not forbear to make an attempt of his own. The previous autumn he had brought out a new edition of his war poems. The book was called Drum-Taps. The edition contained, as an appendix, eighteen poems which the poet published under the title Sequel to Drum-Taps. The first of these was called “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” It was his elegy of Lincoln.
Peterhof, July 1866
THEY MET IN a pavilion near Peterhof. On the second floor lay a suite of private rooms. Here the Tsar and Katya became lovers. Afterwards he made a vow, one which Katya later confided to a friend. “Today, alas,” Alexander said, “I am not free; but at the earliest possible moment I will marry you. I consider you, now and forever, as my wife before God.”
Putbus, Isle of Rügen, September-December 1866
AFTER THE TRIUMPH in Berlin, Bismarck collapsed. He went to Put-bus, on the Baltic Isle of Rügen, for a rest cure. He found it difficult even to read; much of the time he sat and stared. “When he sits still,” his wife said, “and looks at the blue sky and green meadows, or turns the pages of a picture book, he is tolerably well.”
Part Three
FREEDOM AND TERROR
Chapter 26
TOWARDS THE ABYSS
Camden, South Carolina, April-December, 1865
THEY WENT DOWN the road, past burned towns, deserted plantations, blackened chimneys. “This is Sherman’s track,” Mary Chesnut thought. She wept.
James Chesnut tried to console her. He pointed to the roses, which had flowered abundantly that spring. “Nature is a wonderful renovator,” he said. There had been no frost since early March, and the vegetation was much advanced; but to Mary Chesnut the effect was funereal. The soft lights, the velvet shadows—nature, fecund and cruel, was mocking her.
They crossed the river at Chesnut’s Ferry. When the ferryman asked his fee, they were unable to pay him. “There was poverty for you,” Mary Chesnut said. They went on to Mulberry. The plantation was in ruins. The cotton was gone, the mills and the gins were wrecked, the big house had been plundered. Doors were smashed, windows had been broken, furniture destroyed. James Chesnut’s father, the old Colonel, was still in nominal possession; but he was a blind, bewildered dotard. He was ninety-three, and walked with faltering steps, feeling his way through the wreckage with his cane.
They had enough to eat, and much domestic help; the poverty of a ruined planter was relative. Cuffee, the gardener, promised to stay as long as “old Marster” lived, and the kitchen garden was in a flourishing condition. Scipio, the old Colonel’s man, also elected to remain, to care for his former owner; and Molly continued to look after her mistress. But there was no cash, other than the small sums Molly brought in; she went about Camden hawking eggs and butter.
James Chesnut was bitter about his losses. Other planters had gone home before the war ended and saved something of their estates. He had stayed at his post, and had returned to find a desolation. He was, at first, wild for scapegoats. It was “the habit of all men,” Mary Chesnut wrote, “to fancy that in some inscrutable way their wives are the cause of all evil in their lives.” But he later begged her pardon; he had only himself to blame for his misfortunes.
There remains yet something of honor and pride, of life.
It was his consolation. He could now act the final part of the tragedy. A ruined Cavalier, a knight of sorrowful countenance. Adversity was a test of virtue, the trial that separated the true gentleman from the impostor. Stripped of his plumage, a walking anachronism, James Chesnut would never be nobler. Ruin suited him—was in his case a more natural vocation than politics. At last he could live proudly aloof, in the shade of his shattered porticos.
Her husband had still his “smatch of honour,” his fragment of romance. What, Mary Chesnut asked, had she? She was forty-two when the war ended, but “a hundred, in thought and feeling.” She had no children. She no longer had even Buck. Her protégée had, since breaking off her engagement to Sam Hood, been seen riding out with Rawlins Lowndes, a handsome rice planter. But Buck was miserable—a sacrificial virgin, vainly seeking an altar. She was said to have lost twenty pounds and to have become a “perfect wreck.” Her family took her away, to spend the winter in Paris.
The revolution had come, and it had destroyed. “A feeling of sadness hovers over me now, day and night, that no words of mine can express,” Mary Chesnut wrote. There “are nights here with the moonlight, cold & ghastly & the whippoorwills, & the screech owls alone disturbing the silence when I could tear my hair & cry aloud for all that is past & gone.”
Paris, Saint Petersburg, and the Crimea, May-December 1867
WHATEVER THE TRAGIC FLAW that dooms a revolution, accountability ultimately rests with the leadership. In the spring of 1867, Tsar Alexander traveled to Paris. One night, shortly before the clocks struck twelve, he left his room in the Elysée Palace and knocked on the door of Count Adlerberg’s chamber. The Tsar wanted to go for a walk.
The startled Count suggested that His Majesty would perhaps like someone to accompany him.
“But I don’t need anyone to accompany me,” Alexander said. “I’ll manage on my own. But, my dear man, give me a little money.”
“How much does His Majesty require?”
“I have no idea, how about a hundred thousand francs?”
The money, though it was a great sum, was instantly procured, and the Tsar went out into the Paris n
ight. He was not quite alone. French and Russian police detectives discreetly shadowed the master of eighty millions. Alexander hailed a cab and drove to the Rue Basse-du-Rempart. There he alighted and, taking out a piece of paper, examined it in the lamplight. Evidently it was an address. He turned and passed into a courtyard, only to discover that it was the wrong house. In the meantime, however, the gate had shut behind him. The Tsar was unable to open it. As he stood there puzzled, one of the agents who had been following him came over and pointed to a rope that hung near the gate. Alexander pulled the rope and the gate opened. He soon found the house he sought.
Katya was waiting for him. Their affair had progressed since the summer of 1866, but the secret had become known, and in order to avoid scandal it had been arranged that Katya should leave Russia and live, for a time, abroad. She dutifully boarded a train. Alexander, however, found the separation painful; he was now deeply in love with the girl. His letters to her were written in a strain of romantic adoration. She was the “dear Angel” of his soul, “my life, my all,” “ma petite femme adorée.” He resolved that she should quit her place of exile at Naples and go to Paris, where he could meet her when he visited the city during the World’s Fair which Louis-Napoleon had organized to prop up his sagging régime.
The Tsar’s visit had a diplomatic as well as an amorous purpose. After Sadowa, the pressures of the world crisis became more intense. As Bismarck’s revolution unfolded and the power of Prussia grew, her neighbors to the east and west attempted to put their differences aside and draw closer to one another. Louis-Napoleon was waiting on the platform of the Gare du Nord when the Tsar’s train pulled in, and he had thoughtfully arranged that, in driving to the Elysée Palace, their cavalcade should avoid the Boulevard Sébastopol, which commemorated the Anglo-French victory over Russia in the Crimean War.
Paris, with its degenerating mœurs, dripped decadence. The crinolines favored by the Empress Eugénie had gone out of style, and women no longer concealed their figures beneath accumulations of drapery. It was an age of décolletage; and at a ball in the Tuileries the beautiful women of the Second Empire flaunted their bosoms. The Tsar appeared to enjoy himself immensely, and for a time his diplomatic projects seemed to prosper no less signally than his romantic ones. But there was to be no entente. During a military review at Longchamp in the Bois de Boulogne, a Polish patriot drew a revolver and fired two bullets at the Tsar. Alexander came away unhurt, but the second attempt on his life threw an unflattering light on the contradictions of his revolution. The autocrat who freed the serfs continued to oppress the Poles. Alexander, preferring to overlook the perplexities of his policy, blamed the French. Surely Louis-Napoleon’s security services—his army of gendarmes and mouchards—could have done a better job of protecting a guest. The dream of a Franco-Russian rapprochement faded.
Several times during the visit, Alexander was seen to stare vacantly into space, with the curious faraway look that Prince Kropotkin had once noticed in his eyes. When the great Napoleon had stared thus into the vacancy, his expression, men recalled, was that of one who “looks into another world” and beholds visions of power and possibility. By contrast, the vacant gaze of Alexander betrayed, not the ecstasies of prepotency, but its apprehensions. During what remained to him of life, Alexander was never quite free from dread of assassination. “Why,” he asked, “do they hound me down like a wild beast?”
He must have guessed the answer. The reds hounded him precisely because he had allied his dynasty, however tenuously, with the forces of freedom, and in doing so had threatened their apocalypse. The dreamers hated him with a hatred they never extended to his more reactionary predecessors, Alexander I and Nicholas I, or to his more reactionary successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II. They were determined to break the liberal sovereign, in body and spirit.
The Tsar returned to Russia, and Katya became his professed mistress. Her detractors insinuated that she was privy to the machinations of the Pan-Slavs, who urged the Tsar to solve his problems by marching on Constantinople in the name of militant nationalism. But there is no evidence that she played a part in the formulation of policy. Alexander seems to have sought in Katya a respite from the burdens of politics and diplomacy. He installed her, in Saint Petersburg, in a house on the English Quay, with servants and carriages, and he arranged that she should visit him regularly in the Winter Palace. There was a low door in the façade, to which she was given the key. Having passed into the palace, she would ascend a staircase that led to a suite of rooms on the third story. The Tsar’s father, Nicholas, had once occupied the apartments, and ever since his death they had been left undisturbed. In Nicholas’s study, beneath paintings of battles and portraits of illustrious tsars, the two lovers dallied.
When Alexander went to Tsarskoe Selo, Katya accompanied him, and was settled in a nearby villa. Her assignations with the sovereign took place in a wing of the Catherine Palace, in a little room that overlooked the rose gardens. But the favorite rendezvous of the lovers was the Crimea. Driving through a country with charms to rival those of Greece, the Tsar sometimes ordered the carriages to stop at the Gates of Baidar, an eminence that commanded striking views of the Black Sea and the Iayla Mountains. Here the imperial party, forgetting, for a moment, the stresses of autocracy, could dine al fresco on the terrace of a taverna. When the lovers reached Livadia, they threw off all constraint. The Tsar visited Katya openly, and rode over to her house on one of his Arabian stallions.
While Alexander dwelt in his alternative world, Count Shuvalov administered the Empire. He was a capable vizier, one whose aristocratic manners belied uncommon talents and real abilities. The Count was a grand seigneur to his fingertips, at ease in every drawing room, at home with every pretty woman. He was an adroit dispenser of praise, that art which, when practiced unskillfully, is called flattery, but which, when undertaken by a master, is known as charm. A thorough man of the world, he had learnt the art of making profligacy appealing. “Count Shuvalov is out driving in his carriage,” his majordomo would inform callers when the Count was making love. His enemies loudly condemned, and secretly envied, his numerous seductions. Yet they could not assert that the exertions of the voluptuary detracted from the labors of the statesman. Disraeli, who sat across the table from Shuvalov at the Congress of Berlin, testified to the Russian’s skillfulness as a negotiator. “Schu” fought his battles “with marvelous talent and temper,” Disraeli wrote to his friend Lady Bradford. “He is a first rate parliamentary debater, never takes a note, and yet in his reply never misses a point.”
Alexander himself did not yet wholly lose the power of initiative; he sold Alaska to the United States in the face of considerable opposition, hoping through this gesture to strengthen Russia’s relations with a rising free state. But Shuvalov was now the dominant figure in Russia. His views of the world crisis differed from those of his master. He “prepared one reactionary measure after another,” Prince Kropotkin said, “and when Alexander showed reluctance to sign any one of them, Shuvalov would speak of the coming revolution and the fate of Louis XVI, and, ‘for the salvation of the dynasty,’ would implore him to sign the new additions to the law of repressions.” But such speechmaking eventually became tiresome, and Shuvalov dispensed with it. He discovered an easier method of governing the Tsar. When Alexander went off to hunt bears in the forests of Novgorod, Shuvalov followed with a portfolio of orders and decrees. “A couple of bears would be killed by Alexander,” Kropotkin wrote, “and there, in the excitement of the hunting festivities, Shuvalov would obtain his master’s signature to any scheme of repression, or robbery in the interests of his clients, which he had concocted.”
Lucerne, Switzerland, May 1869-March 1870
IN A SPRING NOON in 1869, a young professor of philology made his way to a villa overlooking Lake Lucerne. Passing through the gate, the professor heard the notes of a piano, and an anguished voice repeating a refrain—
Verwundet hat mich
der mich erweckt.
. .
He who has awakened me
Has dealt me this wound. . .
It was a fatal moment: the young professor was enchanted. Germany could never afterwards be the same. The young professor was Friedrich Nietzsche, and he had been pierced by the genius of Wagner.
The two men who between them created the music of the German revolution soon became close friends. Nietzsche, who earlier in the year had been installed in the chair of philology at Basel, became an intimate of the circle at Triebschen, Wagner’s villa overlooking Lake Lucerne. He was just twenty-four, yet it was evident that he possessed astonishing depths. These, however, he carried lightly, and even the arrogant Cosima, the mistress of the house, found him sympathetic. (Cosima had, by this time, left her husband, Hans von Bülow, and she was now pregnant with Wagner’s son, Siegfried, who was born in June 1869.)
To Nietzsche, Wagner unfolded his hopes for art and revolution. More than ever, the composer identified his music with the resurrection of the German nation. “One thing is now clear to me,” he said, “with Germany’s well-being stands or falls my art-ideal.” Without Germany’s greatness, his art was only a dream; if the dream were to become reality, “then as a matter of course Germany also must achieve its predestined greatness.” Wagner did not doubt that Germany would triumph; he shared the confidence of his patron, King Ludwig, who believed that “the other peoples of the earth will pay homage to ours and bow before its spirit.” The difficulty lay, not in the revival of Germany, but in the realization of the art-ideal. Wagner had given the world Tristan und Isolde, which received its first performance in Munich in 1865. But much remained to be done. How was he to establish the little artistic city-state which alone could create the proper mold for German culture? He soon found a solution to the problem. He would erect, in northern Bavaria, a temple of the muses at Bayreuth.
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