Throne-Makers. William Roscoe Thayer

Since 1789 every European people has been busy making a throne, or seat of government and authority, from which its ruler might preside. These thrones have been of many patterns, to correspond to the diversity in tastes of races, parties, and times. Often, the business of destroying seems to have left no leisure for building. In England alone have men learned how to remodel a throne without disturbing its occupant; as we in America raise or move large houses without interrupting the daily life of the families who dwell in them.

To portray the personality of some of the conspicuous Throne-Makers of the century is the purpose of the following studies. I have wished to show just enough of the condition of the countries under review to enable the reader to understand what Bismarck, or Napoleon III, or Kossuth, or Garibaldi, achieved. I have been brief, and yet I trust that this method has afforded scope for exhibiting that influence of the individual on the multitude which—however our partial science may try to belittle it—was never more strikingly illustrated than by such careers as these in our own time.

The group of Portraits which follow require no special introduction. In the “Tintoret” and “Giordano Bruno” I have brought together as compactly as possible, for the convenience of English readers, what little is known about these two men. Berti’s work on Bruno, from which I have drawn largely, deserves a wider recognition than it has received outside of Italy; whoever reads it will regret that that eminent scholar was prevented from completing his volume on Bruno’s philosophy. The sketch of Bryant was written in 1894, that of Carlyle in 1895, on the occasion of their centenaries.

My thanks are due to the proprietors of The Atlantic Monthly, The Forum, and The American Review of Reviews for permission to reprint such of the following articles as originally appeared in those periodicals.

W. R. T.

8 Berkeley Street, Cambridge,

December 8, 1898.

THRONE-MAKERS

Table of Contents

BISMARCK

Table of Contents

One by one the nations of the world come to their own, have free play for their faculties, express themselves, and eventually pass onward into silence. Our age has beheld the elevation of Prussia. Well may we ask, “What has been her message? What the path by which she climbed into preëminence?” That she would reach the summit, the work of Frederick the Great in the last century, and of Stein at the beginning of this, portended. It has been Bismarck’s mission to amplify and complete their task. Through him Prussia has come to her own. What, then, does she express?

The Prussians have excelled even the Romans in the art of turning men into machines. Set a Yankee down before a heap of coal and another of iron, and he will not rest until he has changed them into an implement to save the labor of many hands; the Prussian takes flesh and blood, and the will-power latent therein, and converts them into a machine. Such soldiers, such government clerks, such administrators, have never been manufactured elsewhere. Methodical, punctilious, thorough, are those officers and officials. The government which makes them relies not on sudden spurts, but on the cumulative force of habit. It substitutes rule for whim; it suppresses individual spontaneity, unless this can be transformed into energy for the great machine to use. That Prussian system takes a turnip-fed peasant, and in a few months makes of him a military weapon, the length of whose stride is prescribed in centimetres—a machine which presents arms to a passing lieutenant with as much gravity and precision as if the fate of Prussia hinged on that special act. It takes the average tradesman’s son, puts him into the educational mill, and brings him out a professor—equipped even to the spectacles—a nonpareil of knowledge, who fastens on some subject, great or small, timely or remote, with the dispassionate persistence of a leech; and who, after many years, revolutionizes our theory of Greek roots, or of microbes, or of religion. Patient and noiseless as the earthworm, this scholar accomplishes a similarly incalculable work.

A spirit of obedience, which on its upper side passes into deference not always distinguishable from servility, and on its lower side is not always free from arrogance, lies at the bottom of the Prussian nature. Except in India, caste has nowhere had more power. The Prussian does not chafe at social inequality, but he cannot endure social uncertainty; he must know where he stands, if it be only on the bootblack’s level. The satisfaction he gets from requiring from those below him every scrape and nod of deference proper to his position more than compensates him for the deference he must pay to those above him. Classification is carried to the fraction of an inch. Everybody, be he privy councilor or chimney-sweep, is known by his office. On a hotel register you will see such entries as “Frau X, widow of a school-inspector,” or “Fräulein Y, niece of an apothecary.”

This excessive particularization, which amuses foreigners, enables the Prussian to lift his hat at the height appropriate to the position occupied by each person whom he salutes. It naturally develops acuteness in detecting social grades, and a solicitude to show the proper degree of respect to superiors and to expect as much from inferiors—a solicitude which a stranger might mistake for servility or arrogance, according as he looked up or down. Yet, amid a punctilio so stringent, fine-breeding—the true politeness which we associate with the word “gentleman”—rarely exists; for a gentleman cannot be made by the rank he holds, which is external, but only by qualities within himself.

Nevertheless, these Prussians—so unsympathetic and rude compared with their kinsmen in the south and along the Rhine, not to speak of races more amiable still—kept down to our own time a strength and tenacity of character that intercourse with Western Europeans scarcely affected. Frederick

Скачать книгу