Read Ebook: The Isle of Vanishing Men: A Narrative of Adventure in Cannibal-land by Alder William Fisher

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 576 lines and 30683 words, and 12 pages

? When we say Bismarck's work is a revelation of his will to power, we emphasize again how unnecessary it is to make him either less or more than a human being. There is a school of writers that never mentions his name except with upturned eyes, as though he were a demigod. The tendency of human nature is to idealize such as Bismarck out of all semblance to the original, creating wax figures where once were men of flesh and blood.

? Men rise to power largely in uniform ways; that psychic foundation on which they draw is always grossly human, rather dull when you understand it, always conventional;--and the great Bismarck himself is no exception.

? In doing his work, Bismarck is following the psychic necessities of his character; is acting in a very personal way, upheld always by the soldier's virtue, ambition. There is also a large element of self-love. His idiomatic lust for control is to be accepted as a root-fact of his peculiar type of being. And while on the whole his ambition is exercised for the good of his country, herein he is acting, in addition, under the ardent appetite, in his case a passion, to dominate millions of lives; urged not perhaps so much from a preconceived desire to dominate as from an inherent call to exercise his innate capacity for leadership.

? Making allowance for the idea that Bismarck is a devoted servant of the King of Prussia, it is not necessary to believe that Bismarck poses as the Savior of his country. In fact, he distinctly disavows this sacrifice, has too much sense to regard himself from this absurd point of view.

? The words carved on Bismarck's tomb at his own request, "A Faithful German Servant of Emperor William I," show that however much other men were unable to comprehend the baffling Bismarckian character, the Iron Chancellor himself had no vain illusions.

? When he was 83 and about to die, the old man taking a final sweep of his long and turbulent life, asked himself solemnly: "How will I be known in time to come?"

? Fame replied: "You have been a great Prince; an invincible maker of Empire, you have held in your hand the globe of this earth; call yourself what you will, and I will write a sermon in brass on your tomb."

? But the Iron Chancellor, after mature reflection, decided that his entire career, with all its high lights and its deep shadows, could be expressed in four simple words, "A Faithful German Servant." He knew exactly what he was, and how he would ultimately be represented in history.

? Think what this means. On those supreme questions of Life and Time involving the interpretation of Destiny--a problem hopelessly obscure to the average man--Bismarck brought a massive mind charged with a peculiar clairvoyance; often, his fore-knowledge seemed well-nigh uncanny in its exact realism; and if you doubt this assertion, all we ask is that you withhold your verdict till you have read Bismarck's story, herein set forth in intimate detail.

? How clear the old man's vision to discern behind all his Bismarckian pomp and majesty, in camp, court and combat, only the r?le of faithful servant.

? The phrase on his tomb proclaims the man's great mind. His overbrooding silence, as it were, is more eloquent than sermons in brass.

? In studying Bismarck, the man, we merge his identity in the events of his time; but we must sharply differentiate between the events and the man. We incline to the belief that hereditary tendencies explain him more than does environment. It is Bismarck as a human being, and not the tremendous panorama of incidents leading to German sovereignty that always holds our interest. Life is life, and is intensely interesting, for its own sake.

Thus, we are at once freed from a common fallacy of biographical writing--that vicious mental attitude, as vain as it is egotistical on part of the over-partial historian, who would warp some manifest destiny on human life.

? Bismarck needs no historical explanation, no reference to hackneyed categories in the card-index of Time. Whether his plan was dedicated to this world or to the glory of some invisible God, you may debate as you will, but Bismarck will be neither greater nor less because of flights of your imagination.

? He is a great man in the sense that he did large things, but this does not make him other than he is, nor does his story lose because we know him to be grossly human in his aims. His life does not borrow anything because a certain type of mind professes to see behind Bismarck's history, as indeed behind the careers of all great men, some mysterious purpose apart and beyond human nature's daily needs. It was not necessary for Bismarck to cease to be a human being, to accomplish what he accomplished.

? Also, for the reason that Bismarck was a genius, he is an exception to conventional rules covering the limitations of little men.

? Bismarck was a born revolutionist. Look at his terrible jaw, which, like the jaws of the bulldog, when once shut down never lets go till that object is in shreds.

? He was a true bulldog in this that, like the thoroughbred bulldog, Bismarck favored one feed a day. He took a light breakfast, no second breakfast, but at night would eat one enormous meal.

The bulldog follows a similar practice, when eating never looks from the plate, and the water fairly runs from his eyes, with animal satisfaction.

? Bismarck compelled men to do his bidding--as the wind drives the clouds and asks not when or why. It is enough to know that that is the wind's way!

He knew the coward, the thief, the soldier, the priest, the citizen, the king, and the peasant.

He knew how to betray an enemy with a Judas kiss; how to smite him when he was down; how to dig pitfalls for his feet; how to ply him with champagne and learn his secrets; how to permit him to win money at cards, and then get him to sign papers; how to remember old obligations or to forget new favors; how to read a document in more than one way; how to turn historical parallels upside down; how to urge today what he refused to entertain a year ago; how to put the best face on a losing situation; and how to shuffle, cut and stack the cards, or at times how to play in the open.

? He was not a humanitarian with conceptions of world peace or world benevolences. He was for himself and his own ends, which were tied to his political conception of a new Germany.

? And all the time he was helped out by his extraordinary vital powers, his ability to work all night like a horse week after week; go to bed at dawn and sleep till afternoon; then drive a staff of secretaries frantic with his insistent demands.

? Likewise, he was helped out by his remarkable personality. Actor that he was, he sometimes gained his point by his frankness, knowing that when he told the exact truth he would not be believed.

? Also, he could bluff and swagger, or he could speak in the polite accents of the distinguished gentleman; he could gulp a quart of champagne without taking the silver tankard from his lips; in younger years he used to eat from four to eleven eggs at a meal, besides vegetables, cakes, beer, game and three or four kinds of meats; his favorite drink was a mixture of champagne and porter.

? He was a chain-smoker, lighted one cigar with another, often smoked ten or twelve hours at a stretch. His huge pipes, in the drawing room; his beer, in the salons of Berlin; his irritability, his bilious streaks, his flashes of temper; his superstition about the number 13; his strange mixing of God with all his despotic conduct; his fondness for mastiffs; his attacks of jaundice; his volcanic outbursts; his belief in ghosts, in the influence of the moon to make the hair grow; his mystical something about seven and combinations of seven; his incessant repetition of the formula that he was obeying his God--were but human weaknesses that showed he had a side like an everyday common man.

? On top of it all he was great, because he knew how to manage men either with or without their consent; but he always studied to place himself in a strategic position from which he could insist on his demand for his pound of flesh.

? Sometimes, it took years before he could lull to sleep, buy, bribe or win over the men he needed; again when the game was short and sharp, he kicked some men out of his path contemptuously, others he parleyed with, still others he thundered against and defied; but always at the right time, won his own way.

? Yes, even Bismarck's card-playing is subordinated to the shrewd ends of diplomacy. Dr. Busch, the press-agent of Bismarck during the Franco-Prussian war, tells us that Bismarck once made this frank confession:

? "In the summer of 1865 when I concluded the Convention of Gastein with Blome , I went in for quinze so madly that the rest could not help wondering at me. But I knew what I was about. Blome had heard that this game gave the best possible opportunity for discovering a man's real nature, and wanted to try it on with me. So I thought to myself, here's for you then, and away went a few hundred thalers, which I really might have charged as spent in His Majesty's service. But at least I thus put Blome off the scent, so he thought me a reckless fellow and gave way."

Despite vast areas of political bogs, quaking under foot, that one must traverse, our Otto is not inaccessible!

? For many years they hate him like hell-fire itself, this Otto von Bismarck. The Prussians hate him, the Austrians, the Bavarians, to say nothing of the intervening rabble; but our tyrant is strong enough, in the end, to win foreign wars, and then the haters veer about, almost in a night, come up on bended knees and kiss the hand that smites--that hand of Bismarck, at once the best-beloved and the most-hated hand of his time. What more pray do you ask of human nature?

? Now here is a strange reality: If you look at the general outlines of the German map in 1815, you will see that the frontiers trace in a startling way the scowling outlines of Frederick the Great, "Old Fritz," who first dreamed this German unity idea.

But mighty Frederick is in the royal tomb these many years; and a new Frederick in spirit is rapidly learning the business of king-maker and empire-builder.

? Behind the name Bismarck is a story extraordinary, compounded of the intrigues, blood and passions of Austria, Russia, Italy, France, Belgium, Bavaria, Spain, and England.

Volumes would not suffice to give you the bewildering details; mountains of diplomatic letters, orders, telegrams, truths, half-truths, shuffling, cutting and stacking; you go confusedly from palace to people, prince to pauper, university to prison pen--all the way from Waterloo to Versailles, where William I received at last his great glory, German Emperor.

? Bismarck's story is best told in flashes of lightning--as you try to picture a bolt from the black skies.

? Yet this Bismarck is not inaccessible if we get at his inner side, grasp the man's essence.

Strong arm and tireless brain Time asked;--a man who could neither be bent, broken nor brow-beaten; a man who would for 40 years follow a plan by no means clear; often had to go out in the dark and find his way, all old landmarks lost, and no pole-star in sight.

? I dwell on one outstanding fact, all down through his career: I mean Bismarck's power to conceal pain. Hurricanes of insulting criticisms swept around his head, year after year, but on the whole Otto's attitude was that of the mountain that defies the storm. He would never give in that, as it seemed to onlookers, a shaft of disagreeable truth had struck home; that a soft-nosed bullet, well aimed, had torn his flesh or broken a bone; or that a dagger-thrust, going directly through his coat of the White Cuirassier had pierced his heart.

? Even in his bitter defeats, he had a peculiar idiomatic way of making out that the result was exactly what he desired. It was of course only an adroit explanation to protect his pride; the brazen invention of a nature that would not acknowledge itself in error. Here is Bismarck, to the core.

? For a long and turbulent life-time Bismarck's soul was tried by the very tortures of the damned!

Wherein it is set forth that Otto von Bismarck's massive political genius, combined with his personal foibles, mark him as a heroic figure, side by side with Frederick the Great.

? In attempting to depict a consistent Bismarck, we find that his life has been as much misinterpreted through the carping need of envious political critics as through the bad art of historically well-disposed friends.

The perplexing problem is to blend his massive mental grasp, side by side with his strange fits of irritability, his turbulence, his deep-drinking, his gluttony, his wild pranks.

About him at all times, whether expressed or concealed, there floated an ironic derision of the littleness of the average man, whom at heart Bismarck despised.

While the eyes of detractors are everywhere, the voice of hero-worship has likewise conspired to make an impossible idol of a man with very human and ofttimes crying frailties; the biographic truth is to be found somewhere between these two extremes; but even with this clear clue in mind, it is often difficult to reconcile amazing personal and diplomatic inconsistencies with which his career abounds.

? Then, too, there is something that strikes like the irony of Socrates, only bitter instead of light; and Bismarck reveals now and then a touch remindful of that Rabelaisian hero whose enormous capacity could only be quenched by draining the river dry. To tell Bismarck's inner life-story, in a large way, one must often deal with a series of pictures akin to the gods and devils in Dore's delineations for Dante's "Inferno."

It often seems as though every important act of this great man's life was charged with the significance of Destiny, stands forth vividly against a background of intrigue, superstition, personal follies, the smoke and flame of battle--a heroic figure side by side with such master-spirits as Frederick the Great.

Like Frederick the Severe, this Bismarck is very human indeed, and has his crying weaknesses, and his enemies, God knows, tried for forty years to get rid of him by intrigue, often by assassination; yet until his great duty is done he must hold firmly to his place, must do the work which brings him no peace, or rest, only trouble year after year.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet