The Arena | Page 6

it of most writers of our day is the chief cause of confusion. It
is a vast, coherent vision of things taken in by mind and eye from the
Niebelungen Lied to the wholesale captivity of the French army, in the

autumn of 1870, and when not thus conceived, incomplete. To those
who lived in and through the period comprised between the war of the
Danish Duchies and the re-conquest of Alsace-Lorraine, no item of
even prehistoric times can remain absent; the spirit of German unity is
everywhere, pervades everything, and those alone who thoroughly
master this are capable of painting it to others' senses.
It is very well to take a Leibniz or Frederick the Great for a
starting-point, but it all goes immeasurably farther back than that.
Luther and his Bible open one large historic gate. The Bible heads all!
In 1813, writes General Clausewitz to the so-called Great Gascon, the
prime impetus was a religious one, and his own words are: "If I could
only hang a Bible to the equipments of my troopers I could do with
them all that Cromwell did with his Ironsides!" Two centuries before,
this had been the feeling of Gustavus Adolphus, who fought for
Protestant Germany with his Bible at his saddle-bow.
Luther is the one predominant Teuton of the centuries, after the close of
the middle ages, and though he ceases to be present in the flesh in 1516,
he never dies. The inspiration of the German soul endures and lives in
every variety of art or expression. Luther is perpetuated in Handel, and
technically, even his "Feste Burg" is the first note of the "Inspirate" in
"I Know That My Redeemer Liveth!"
It is only the most inattentive of historical students who can afford to
ignore this. No modern æsthetician from the Rhine to the Spree affects
to dispute the succession of Teutonic thought, in its various forms of
passion, from Beethoven to Goethe, from Schiller, Jean Paul, or Weber,
or Ravner, or Kleist, or Immermann, down to the latest high priest of
the pre-historic cult--down to Richard Wagner himself! It was precisely
this that the Emperor Frederick knew as crown prince, and that the
chancellor had to learn. With the crown prince all was present. The
farthest past was with him; the leaves of the uralte forests had
whispered their dream lore in his ears as in those of the Siegfried of the
Niebelungen; he had seen Otto von Wittelsbach strike dead his very
Kaiser for breach of faith[6] and stood by at the Donnersberg, when
mighty Rudolph's son slew Adolf of Napan for his base attempt at

usurpation. He knew it all, legend or chronicle; no secret was hidden
from him, and the national pulse beat in him with fiery throb from the
first hour when the national conscience had been touched. The
chancellor was chilled by his own statecraft, and the king, as he then
was, had witnessed the Napoleonic wars.
[6] The heroic founder of the Bavarian monarchy, Otho of Writtelsbach,
was betrayed shamefully by his friend, the Emperor Philip, of Suabia,
and slew him for his treachery. This is one of the oldest dramas on the
German stage.
Between the crown prince and Bismarck, however, there existed one
point of contact. Each was a Deutsche Student, and there, later on, was
to be found the true conversion of the chancellor to national ideas.
As in every genuine lover of his country (and that Prince Bismarck is),
there lay latent in the famous "White Cuirassier" the same ideal
capacity of warlike action and intellectuality that so distinguished
Frederick II. No one understood better the complex son of Carlyle's
roystering barrack hero, no one knew in reality more deeply that the
ideas planted by him in men's minds were those of the majesty of
intelligence, of the royalty of humanity's brain power.
Count Bismarck proved his political foresight by the rapidity with
which he seized on the Schleswig-Holstein question as being the axis
on which turned the entire evolution (if ever it should be possible!) of
the imperial German unity. About that he hesitated not one moment. He
adopted the whole theory of Dahlmann, who alone spoke it out in
words in 1848-9, but he feared to plunge at one leap into the vortex of
his own threatening conclusions and tried for several years to stave off
the "pay day." He was somewhat slower to recognize the identity of
feeling through all the Germanic races, to realize the equally strong
vibration, the psychologic harmony quivering through heart and soul
from North to South, through the mysteriously hidden dramas of fifteen
hundred years. He believed himself a narrow Particularist Borussian, a
"Pomeranian Giant," and let a score of years go by before clearly
making out by touch that the