The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X | Page 6

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