And still less reason is there for dwelling on the intellectual and religious independence of German character. Absence of constraint in scientific inquiry and religious conduct is indeed the very palladium of German freedom. Nowhere is higher education so entirely removed from class distinction as in the country where the imperial princes are sent to the same school with the sons of tradesmen and artisans. Nowhere is there so little religious formalism, coupled with such deep religious feeling, as in the country where sermons are preached to empty benches, while Tannhauser and Lohengrin, Wallenstein and Faust, are listened to with the hush of awe and bated breath by thousands upon thousands.
In all these respects—socially, intellectually, religiously—Bismarck was the very incarnation of German character. Although an aristocrat by birth and bearing, and although, especially during the years of early manhood, passionately given over to the aristocratic habits of dueling, hunting, swaggering and carousing, he was essentially a man of the people. Nothing was so utterly foreign to him as any form of libertinism; even his eccentricities were of the hardy, homespun sort. He was absolutely free from social vanity; he detested court festivities; he set no store by orders or decorations; the only two among the innumerable ones conferred upon him which he is said to have highly valued were the Prussian order of the Iron Cross, bestowed for personal bravery on the battlefield, and the medal for "rescuing from danger" which he earned in 1842 for having saved his groom from drowning by plunging into the water after him.
All his instincts were bound up with the soil from which he had sprung. He passionately loved the North German plain, with its gloomy moorlands, its purple heather, its endless wheatfields, its kingly forests, its gentle lakes, and its superb sweep of sky and clouds. Writing to his friends when abroad—he traveled very little abroad—he was in the habit of describing foreign scenery by comparing it to familiar views and places on his own estates. During sleepless nights in the Chancellery at Berlin there would often rise before him a sudden vision of Varzin, his Pomeranian country-seat, "perfectly distinct in the minutest particulars, like a great picture with all its colors fresh—the green trees, the sunshine on the stems, the blue sky above. I saw every individual tree." Never was he more happy than when alone with nature. "Saturday," he writes to his wife from Frankfort, "I drove to Rüdesheim. There I took a boat, rowed out on the Rhine, and swam in the moonlight, with nothing but nose and eyes out of water, as far as the Mäuseturm near Bingen, where the bad bishop came to his end. It gives one a peculiar dreamy sensation to float thus on a quiet warm night in the water, gently carried down by the current, looking above on the heavens studded with moon and stars, and on each side the banks and wooded hilltops and the battlements of the old castles bathed in the moonlight, whilst nothing falls on one's ear but the gentle splashing of one's movements. I should like to swim like this every evening." And what poet has more deeply felt than he that vague musical longing which seizes one when far away from human sounds, by the brook-side or the hill-slope? "I feel as if I were looking out on the mellowing foliage of a fine September day," he writes again to his wife, "health and spirits good, but with a soft touch of melancholy, a little homesickness, a longing for deep woods and lakes, for a desert, for yourself and the children, and all this mixed up with a sunset and Beethoven."
His domestic affections were by no means limited to those united to him by ties of blood; he cherished strong patriarchal feelings for every member of his household, past or present. He possessed in a high degree the German tenderness for little things. He never forgot a service rendered to him, however small. In the midst of the most engrossing public activity he kept himself informed about the minutest details of the management of his estates, so that his wife could once laughingly say that a turnip from his own fields interested him vastly more than all the problems of international politics.
His humor, also, was entirely of the German stamp. It was boisterous, rollicking, aggressive, unsparing—of himself as little as of others—cynic, immoderate, but never without a touch of good-nature. His satire was often crushing, never venomous. His wit was racy and exuberant never equivocal. Whether he describes his vis-à-vis at a hotel table, his Excellency So-and-So, as "one of those figures which appear to one when he has the nightmare—a fat frog without legs, who opens his mouth as wide as his shoulders, like a carpet-bag, for each bit, so that I am obliged to hold tight on by the table from giddiness"; whether he characterizes his colleagues at the Frankfort Bundestag as "mere caricatures of periwig diplomatists, who at once put on their official visage if I merely beg of them a light to my cigar, and who study their words and looks with Regensburg care when they ask for the key of the lavatory"; whether he sums up his impression of the excited, emotional manner in which Jules Favre pleaded with him for the peace terms in the words, "He evidently took me for a public meeting"; whether he declined to look at the statue erected to him at Cologne, because he "didn't care to see himself fossilized"; whether he spoke of the unprecedented popular ovations given to him at his final departure from Berlin as a "first-class funeral"—there are always the same childlike directness, the same naïve impulsiveness, the same bantering earnestness, the same sublime contempt for sham and hypocrisy.
And what man has been more truthful in intellectual and religious matters? He, the man of iron will, of ferocious temper, was at the same time the coolest reasoner, the most unbiased thinker. He willingly submitted to the judgment of experts, he cheerfully acknowledged intellectual talent in others, he took a pride in having remained a learner all his life, but he hated arrogant amateurishness. He was not a church-goer; he declined to be drawn into the circle of religious schemers and reactionary fanatics; he would occasionally speak in contemptuous terms of "the creed of court chaplains"; but, writing to his wife of that historic meeting with Napoleon in the lonely cottage near the battlefield of Sedan, he said: "A powerful contrast with our last meeting in the Tuileries in '67. Our conversation was a difficult thing, if I wanted to avoid touching on topics which could not but affect painfully the man whom God's mighty hand had cast down." And more than once has he given vent to reflections like these: "For him who does not believe—as I do from the bottom of my heart—that death is a transition from one existence to another, and that we are justified in holding out to the worst of criminals in his dying hour the comforting assurance, mors janua vitae—I say that for him who does not share that conviction the joys of this life must possess so high a value that I could almost envy him the sensations they must procure him." Or these: "Twenty years hence, or at most thirty, we shall be past the troubles of this life, whilst our children will have reached our present standpoint, and will discover with astonishment that their existence, but now so brightly begun, has turned the corner and is going down hill. Were that to be the end of it all, life would not be worth the trouble of dressing and undressing every day."
We have considered a few traits of Bismarck's mental and moral make-up which seem to be closely allied with German national character and traditions. But, after all, the personality of a man like Bismarck is not exhausted by the qualities which he has in common with his people, however sublimated these qualities may be in him. His innermost life belongs to himself alone, or is shared, at most, by the few men of the world's history who, like him, tower in splendid solitude above the waste of the ages. In the Middle High German Alexanderlied there is an episode which most impressively brings out the impelling motive of such titanic lives. On one of his expeditions Alexander penetrates into the land of Scythian barbarians. These child-like people are so contented with their simple, primitive existence that they beseech Alexander to give them immortality. He answers that this is not in his power. Surprised, they ask why, then, if he is only a mortal, he is making such a stir in the world. Thereupon he answers: "The Supreme Power has ordained us to carry out what is in us. The sea is given over