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Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches

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Title: Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches

Author: Justin McCarthy


        
Release date: March 30, 2012 [eBook #39298]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN LEADERS: BEING A SERIES OF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES ***




Produced by David Garcia, Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Martin
Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned
images of public domain material from the Google Print
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MODERN LEADERS:

_BEING A SERIES OF_

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES.

BY JUSTIN McCARTHY,
_Author of "Lady Judith: A Tale of Two Continents," etc._

NEW YORK:
SHELDON & COMPANY,
677 BROADWAY and 214 and 216 MERCER STREET.
1872.




CONTENTS.


QUEEN VICTORIA AND HER SUBJECTS.                 7

THE REAL LOUIS NAPOLEON.                        18

EUGENIE, EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH.                 25

THE PRINCE OF WALES.                            35

THE KING OF PRUSSIA.                            45

VICTOR EMANUEL, KING OF ITALY.                  55

LOUIS ADOLPH THIERS.                            66

PRINCE NAPOLEON.                                77

THE DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE.                          85

BRIGHAM YOUNG.                                  96

THE LIBERAL TRIUMVIRATE OF ENGLAND.            106

ENGLISH POSITIVISTS.                           116

ENGLISH TORYISM AND ITS LEADERS.               126

"GEORGE ELIOT" AND GEORGE LEWES.               136

GEORGE SAND.                                   145

EDWARD BULWER AND LORD LYTTON.                 156

"PAR NOBILE FRATRUM--THE TWO NEWMANS."         167

ARCHBISHOP MANNING.                            175

JOHN RUSKIN.                                   183

CHARLES READE.                                 192

EXILE-WORLD OF LONDON.                         202

THE REVEREND CHARLES KINGSLEY.                 211

MR. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.                      223

SCIENCE AND ORTHODOXY IN ENGLAND.              234




INTRODUCTION.


The sketches which make up this volume are neither purely critical nor
merely biographical. They endeavor to give the American reader a clear
and just idea of each individual in his intellect, his character, his
place in politics, letters, and society. In some instances I have
written of friends whom I know personally and well; in others of men
with whom I have but slight acquaintance; in others still of persons
whom I have only seen. But in every instance those whom I describe are
persons whom I have been able to study on the spot, whose character and
doings I have heard commonly discussed by those who actually knew them.
In no case whatever are the opinions I have given drawn merely from
books and newspapers. This value, therefore, these essays may have to an
American, that they are not such descriptions as any of us might be
enabled to put into print by the mere help of study and reading;
descriptions for example such as one might make of Henry VIII. or
Voltaire. They are in every instance, even when intimate and direct
personal acquaintance least assist them, the result of close observation
and that appreciation of the originals which comes from habitual
intercourse with those who know them and submit them to constant
criticism.

I have not made any alteration in the essays which were written some
years ago. Let them stand as portraits bearing that date. If 1872 has in
any instance changed the features and the fortunes of 1869 and 1870, it
cannot make untrue what then was true. What I wrote in 1869 of the
Prince of Wales, for example, will probably not wholly apply to the
Prince of Wales to-day. We all believe that he has lately changed for
the better. But what I wrote then I still believe was true then; and it
is a fair contribution to history, which does not consent to rub out
yesterday because of to-day. I wrote of a "Liberal Triumvirate" of
England when the phrase was an accurate expression. It would hardly be
accurate now. To-day Mr. Mill does not appear in political life and Mr.
Bright has been an exile, owing to his health, for nearly two years from
the scenes of parliamentary debate and triumph. But the portraits of the
men do not on that account need any change. Even where some reason has
been shown me for a modification of my own judgment I have still
preferred to leave the written letter as it is. A distinguished Italian
friend has impressed on me that King Victor Emanuel is personally a much
more ambitious man than I have painted him. My friend has had far better
opportunities of judging than I ever could have had; but I gave the best
opinion I could, and still holding to it prefer to let it stand, to be
taken for what it is worth.

I think I may fairly claim to have anticipated in some of the political
sketches, that of Louis Napoleon, for instance, the judgment of events
and history, and the real strength of certain characters and
institutions.

These sketches had a gratifying welcome from the American public as they
appeared in the "Galaxy." I hope they may be thought worth reading over
again and keeping in their collected form.

JUSTIN MCCARTHY.
48 GOWER STREET, BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON, July 31, 1872.




QUEEN VICTORIA AND HER SUBJECTS.


"And when you hear historians tell of thrones, and those who sat upon
them, let it be as men now gaze upon the mammoth's bones, and wonder
what old world such things could see."

So sang Byron half a century ago, and great critics condemned his verse,
and called him a "surly Democrat" because he ventured to put such
sentiments and hopes into rhyme. The thrones of Europe have not
diminished in number since Byron's day, although they have changed and
rechanged their occupants; and the one only grand effort at the
establishment of a new Republic--that of France in 1848--went down into
dust and ashes. Naturally, therefore, the tendency in Europe is to
regard the monarchical principle as having received a new lease and
charter of life, and to talk of the republican principle as an exotic
forced for a moment into a premature and morbid blossom upon European
soil, but as completely unsuited to the climate and the people as the
banyan or the cocoa tree.

I do not, for myself, quite agree in this view of the aspect of affairs.
Of course, if one were inclined to discuss the question fairly, he must
begin by asking what people mean when they talk of the republican
principle. What is the republican principle? When you talk of a
Republic, do you mean an aggressive, conquering, domineering State,
ruled by faction and living on war, like the Commonwealth of Rome? or a
Republic like that planned by Washington, which should repudiate all
concern in foreign politics or foreign conquest? Do you mean a Federal
Republic, like that of the United States, or one with a centralized
power, like the French Republic of 1848? Do you mean a Republic like
that of Florence, in which the people were omnipotent, or a Republic
like that of Venice, in which the people had no power at all? Do you
mean a Republic like that of Switzerland, in which the President is next
to nobody, or a Republic like that of Poland, which was ornamented by a
King? In truth, the phrase "republican principle" has no set meaning. It
means just what the man who uses it wishes to express. If, however, we
understand it to mean, in this instance, the principle of popular
self-government, then it is obvious that Europe has made immense
progress in that direction since Byron raged against the crimes of
Kings. If it means the opposite to the principle of Divine Right or
Legitimacy, or even personal loyalty--loyalty of the old-time,
chivalric, enthusiastic fashion--then it must be owned that it shows all
over Europe the mark of equal progress. The ancient, romantic,
sentimental loyalty; the loyalty which reverenced the Sovereign and was
proud to abase itself before him; the loyalty of the Cavaliers; the
loyalty which went wild over "Oh, Richard! Oh, mon Roi!" is dead and
gone--its relics a thing to be stared at, and wondered over, and
preserved for a landmark in the progress of the world--just like the
mammoth's bones.

The model Monarchy of Europe is, beyond dispute, that of Great Britain.
In England there is an almost absolute self-government; the English
people can have anything whatever which they may want by insisting on it
and agitating a little for it. The Sovereign has long ceased to
interfere in the progress of national affairs. I can only recollect one
instance, during my observation, in which Queen Victoria put her veto on
a bill passed by Parliament, and that was on an occasion when it was
discovered, at the last moment, that the Lords and Commons had passed a
bill which had a dreadful technical blunder in it, and the only way out
of the difficulty was to beg of the Queen to refuse it her sanction,
which her Majesty did accordingly, and the blunder was set right in the
following session. If a Prime Minister were to announce to the House of
Commons, to-morrow, that the Queen had boxed his ears, it would not
create a whit more amazement than if he were to say, no matter in what
graceful and diplomatic periphrasis, that her Majesty was unwilling to
agree to some measure which her faithful Commons desired to see passed
into law.

Nothing did Mr. Disraeli more harm, nothing brought greater contempt on
him than his silly attempts last session to induce the Commons to
believe, by vague insinuations and covert allusions, that the Queen had
a personal leaning toward his policy and himself. So long ago as the
time of the free trade struggle, the Tories, for all their hereditary
loyalty, complained of and protested against the silent presence of
Prince Albert in the Peers' gallery of the House of Commons, on the
ground that it was an attempt to influence the Parliament improperly,
and to interfere with the freedom of debate. No one has anything to say
against the Queen which carries any weight or is worth listening to. She
is undoubtedly a woman of virtue and good sense. So good a woman, I
venture to think, never before reigned over any people, and that she is
not a great woman, an Elizabeth, a Catherine of Russia, or even an
Isabella of Castile, is surely rather to the advantage than otherwise of
the monarchical institution in its present stage of existence. Here,
then, one might think, if anywhere and ever, the principle of personal
loyalty has a fair chance and a full justification. A man might
vindicate his loyalty to Queen Victoria in the name of liberty itself;
nay, he might justify it by an appeal to the very principle of
democracy. Yet one must be blind, who, living in England and willing to
observe, does not see that the old, devoted spirit of personal loyalty
is dead and buried. It is gone! it is a memory! You may sing a poetic
lament for it if you will, as Schiller did for the gods of Hellas; you
may break into passionate rhetoric, if you can, over its extinction, as
Burke did for the death of the age of Chivalry. It is gone, and I firmly
believe it can never be revived or restored.

I do not mean to say that there are many persons in England who feel any
strong objection to the Monarchy, or warmly desire to see a Republic
substituted for it. I know in England several theoretical
republicans--they are to be met with in almost any company. I have never
met with any one Englishman living in England, who showed any anxious,
active interest in the abolition of the Monarchy. I do not know any one
who objects to drink the usual loyal toasts at a public dinner, or
betrays any conscientious reluctance to listen to the unmeaning eulogy
which it is the stereotyped fashion for the chairman of every such
banquet to heap on "Her Majesty and the rest of the Royal Family." But
this sort of thing, if it ever had any practical meaning, has now none.
It has reached that stage at which profession and practice are always
understood to be quite different things. Every one says at church that
he is a miserable sinner; no one is supposed really to believe anything
of the sort. Every one has some time or other likened women to angels,
but we are not therefore supposed seriously to ignore the fact that
women wear flannel petticoats, and have their faults, and are mortal. So
of loyal professions in England now. They are understood to be phrases,
like "Your obedient servant," at the bottom of a letter. They do not
suggest hypocrisy or pretence of any kind. There is apparently no more
inconsistency now in a man's loyally drinking the health of the Queen,
and proceeding immediately after (in private conversation) to abuse or
ridicule her and her family, than there would be in the same man
beginning with "Dear Sir," a missive to one whom he notoriously
dislikes. Every one who has been lately in London must have heard an
immense amount of scandal, or at all events of flippant joking at the
expense of the Queen herself; and of more serious complaint and distrust
as regards the Prince of Wales. Yet the virtues of the Queen, and the
noble qualities of the Prince of Wales are panegyrized and toasted, and
hurrah'd at every public dinner where Englishmen gather together.

The very virtues of Queen Victoria have contributed materially toward
the extinction of the old-fashioned sentiment of living, active loyalty.
The English people had from the time at least of Anne to our own day a
succession of bad princes. Only a race patient as Issachar could have
endured such a line of sovereigns as George II., George III., and George
IV. Then came William IV., who being a little less stupidly obstinate
than George III., and not so grossly corrupt as George IV., was hailed
for a while as the Patriot King by a people who were only too anxious
not to lose all their hereditary and traditional veneration. Do what
they would, however, the English nation could not get into any sincere
transports of admiration about the Patriot King; and they soon found
that any popular reform worth having was to be got rather in spite of
the Patriot King, than by virtue of any wisdom or patriotism in the
monarch. Great popular demonstrations and tumults, and threats of
marching on London; and O'Connell meetings at Charing Cross, with
significant allusion by the great demagogue to the King who lost his
head at Whitehall hard by; the hanging out of the black flag at
Manchester, and a general movement of brickbats everywhere--these seem
to have been justly regarded as the persuasive influences which
converted a Sovereign into the Patriot King and a Reformer. Loyalty did
not gain much by the reforms of that reign. Then followed the young
Victoria; and enthusiasm for a while wakened up fresh and genuine over
the ascension of the comely and simple-hearted girl, who was so frank
and winning; who ran down stairs in her night-dress, rather than keep
her venerable councillors waiting when they sought her out at midnight;
who openly acknowledged her true love for her cousin, and offered him
her hand; who was at once queenly and maidenly, innocent and fearless.

But this sort of thing did not last very long. Prince Albert was never
popular. He was cold; people said he was stingy; his very virtues, and
they were genuine, were not such as anybody, except his wife and family,
warmly admires in a man; he was indeed misunderstood, or at all events
misprized in England, up to the close of his life. Then the gates of the
convent, so to speak, closed over the Queen, and royalty ceased to be an
animating presence in England.

The young men and women of to-day--persons who have not passed the age
of twenty-one--can hardly remember to have ever seen the Sovereign. She
is to them what the Mikado is to his people. Seven years of absolute
seclusion on the part of a monarch must in any case be a sad trial to
personal loyalty, at least in the royal capital. A considerable and an
influential section of Queen Victoria's subjects in the metropolis have
long been very angry with their Sovereign. The tailors, the milliners,
the dressmakers, the jewellers, the perfumers, all the shopkeepers of
the West End who make profit out of court dinners and balls and
presentations, are furious at the royal seclusion which they believe has
injured their business. So, too, are the aristocratic residents of the
West End, who do not care much about a court which no longer contributes
to their season's gayety. So, too, are all the flunkey class generally.
Now, I am sure there are no three sections of the population of London
more influential in the spreading of scandal and the nursing of this
discontent than the shopkeepers, the aristocrats, and the flunkeys of
the West End. These are actively and demonstratively dissatisfied with
the Queen. These it is who spread dirty scandals about her, and laugh
over vile lampoons and caricatures of which she is the object.

Every one knows that there is a low, mean scandal afloat about the
Queen--and it is spread by the clubs, the drawing-rooms, the shops, and
the servants'-halls of the West End. I am convinced that not one of
those who spread the scandal really believes it; but they like to spread
it because they dislike the Queen. There can be no doubt, however, that
much dissatisfaction at the Queen's long seclusion is felt by persons
who are incapable of harboring any motives so mean or spreading any
calumnies so unworthy. Most of the London papers have always found fault
rather sharply and not over decently with the royal retirement. Mr.
Ayrton, representative of the Tower Hamlets--the largest constituency in
England--openly expressed this sentiment at a public meeting; and though
his remarks were at once replied to and condemned by Mr. Bright, they
met with a more or less cordial response from most of his audience.

There is or was in the House of Commons (the general election has got
happily rid of him), a foolish person named Reardon, a Piccadilly
auctioneer, who became, by what we call in England "a fluke," a member
of the House of Commons. This person moved last session a resolution, or
something of the kind, calling on the Queen to abdicate. The thing was
laughed down--poor Mr. Reardon's previous career had been so absurd that
anything coming from him would have been hooted; and the House of
Commons is fiercely intolerant of "bores" and men with crotchets. But I
have reason to believe that Mr. Reardon's luckless project was concocted
by a delegation of London tradesmen, and had the sympathy of the whole
class; and I know that many members of the House which hooted and
laughed him down had in private over and over again grumbled at the
Queen's retirement, and declared that she ought to abdicate.

"What on earth does it matter," I asked of a member of Parliament--one
of the most accomplished scholars and sharp logicians in the
House--"What on earth does it matter whether or not the Queen gives a
few balls to a few thousand West End people in the season? How can
rational people care, one way or the other?" "My dear fellow," was the
answer, "_I_ don't care; but all that sort of thing is her business, and
she is paid to do it, and she ought to do it. If she were a washerwoman
with a family, she would have to do her work, no matter what her grief."
Now this gentleman--who is utterly above any sympathy with scandal or
with the lackey-like grumblings of the West End--did, undoubtedly,
express fairly enough a growing mood of the public dissatisfaction.

Beyond all this, however, is the fact that people--the working-class
especially--are beginning to ask whether we really want a Sovereign at
all, seeing that we get on just as well during the eclipse of royalty as
in its brightest meridian splendor. This question is being very often
put; and it is probably more often thought over than put into words. Now
I think nothing worse could possibly happen to royalty in England than
that people should begin quietly to ask whether there really is any use
in it. If there is a bad King or Queen, people can get or look for, or
hope and pray for a good one; and the abuse of the throne will not be
accounted a sufficient argument against the use of it. But how will it
be when the subjects begin to find that during the reign of one of the
best sovereigns possible to have, they can get on perfectly well
although the monarch is in absolute seclusion?

George IV. was an argument against bad kings only--Queen Victoria may
come to be accepted as an illustration of the uselessness of the very
best kind of Sovereign. I think King Log was much better calculated to
do harm to the institution of royalty than King Stork, although the
frogs might have regretted the placid reign of the former when the
latter was gobbling up their best and fattest.

Decidedly the people of England are learning of the Queen how to do
without royalty. A small section of her subjects are angry with her and
bitter of heart against her; a much larger number find they can do
perfectly well without her; a larger number still have forgotten her. On
a memorable occasion Prince Albert declared that constitutional
government was on its trial in England. The phrase, like many that came
from the same well-meaning lips, was unlucky. Constitutional government
was not upon its trial then; but Monarchy is upon its trial now.

Do I mean to say that Great Britain is on the verge of a revolution;
that the dynasty is about to be overthrown; that a new Cromwell is to
make his appearance? By no means. It does not follow that even if the
English people were to be convinced to-morrow of the absolute
uselessness of a throne, and a sovereignty, they would therefore proceed
to establish a republic. No people under the sun are more strongly
governed by tradition and "the majesty of custom" than the English.
Cobden used to say that they had a Chinese objection to change of any
kind. The Lord Mayor's show, long threatened, and for a while partially
obscured, has come out again in full gingerbread. There is a functionary
who appears every night at the door of the House of Commons just at the
moment when the sitting is formally declared to be over, and bawls out
to the emptying benches the resonant question, "Who's for home?" I
believe the practice originated at a time when Westminster was
unpeopled, and midnight roads were dangerous, and members were glad to
make up parties to travel home together; and, so a functionary was
appointed to issue stentorian appeal to all who were thus willing to
combine their strength and journey safely in company. The need of such
an arrangement has, I need hardly say, passed away these many
generations; but the usage exists. It oppresses no one to have the
formal call thundered out; the thing has got to be a regular
performance; it is part of the whole business and system; nobody wants
it, but nobody heeds it or objects to it, and the functionary appears
every night of every session and shouts his invitation to companionship
as regularly as if the Mohocks were in possession of Charing Cross, and
Claude Duval were coming full trot along Piccadilly.

Now, this may be taken as a sort of illustration of the manner in which
the English people are naturally inclined to deal with any institutions
which are merely useless, and have the recommendation of old age and
long descent. The ordinary Englishman to-day would find it hard to bring
up before his mind's eye a picture of an England without a Sovereign. If
it were made fully plain to him, and thoroughly impressed upon his mind
that he could do just as well without a Sovereign as with, and even that
Monarchy never could possibly be of use to him any more, I think he
would endure it and pay its cost, and drink its health loyally for all
time, providing Monarchy did nothing outrageously wrong; or
provided--which is more to my present purpose--that no other changes of
a remarkable nature occurred in the meantime to remove ancient
landmarks, to disturb the basis of his old institutions and to prepare
him for a new order of things. This is indeed the point I wish to
discuss just now. I have explained what I believe to be the depth and
strength and meaning of the average Englishman's loyal feelings to his
Sovereign at the present moment. I should like to consider next how that
feeling will, in all probability, be affected by the changes in the
English political system, which seem inevitable, and by the accession,
or expected accession, of a new Sovereign to the throne.

England has, just now, something very nearly approaching to manhood
suffrage; and to manhood suffrage it will probably come before long. The
ballot will, doubtless, be introduced. The Irish Church is as good as
dead. I cannot doubt that the English State Church will, ultimately, and
before very long, succumb to the same fate. Not that this logically or
politically follows as a matter of necessity; and nothing could be more
unwise in the interest of their own cause than the persistency with
which the Tories keep insisting that the doom of the one is involved in
the doom of the other. The Irish Church is the foreign church of a
miserably small minority; the English Establishment is the Church of the
majority, and is an institution belonging to the soil. The very
principle which maintains the English Church ought of right to condemn
the Irish Church. But it is the fact that an agitation more influential
than it seemed to the careless spectator, has long been going on in
England for the abolition of the State Church system altogether; and
there can be no doubt that the fate of the Irish Establishment will lend
immense courage and force to that agitation. Revolutionary movements are
always contagious in their nature, and the movement against the Irish
Church is in the strictest sense revolutionary. The Dutch or the Scotch
would have carried such a movement to triumph across rivers of blood if
it were needful; and no man of spirit could say that the end would not
be worth the cost. I assume, then, that the overthrow of the Irish
Church will inflame to iconoclastic fervor the movement of the English
Dissenters against all Church establishments. I do not stop just now to
inquire whether the movement is likely to be successful or how long it
may take to accomplish the object. To me, it seems beyond doubt that it
must succeed; but I do not care to assume even that for the purpose of
my present argument. I only ask my readers to consider the condition of
things which will exist in England when a movement resting on a suffrage
which is almost universal, a movement which will have already overthrown
one State Church within Great Britain, proceeds openly and exultingly to
attack the English Church itself, within its own dominions. I ask
whether it is likely that the institution which is supposed to be bound
up inseparably with that Church, the Monarchy which is based upon, and
exists by virtue of religious ascendency, is likely to escape all
question during such a struggle, and after it? The State Church and the
Aristocracy, if they cannot always be called bulwarks of the throne, are
yet so completely associated with it in the public mind that it is hard
even to think of the one without the others, and yet harder to think of
the one as existing serene and uninjured after the decay or demolition
of the others.

Now, the Aristocracy have, as Mr. Bright put it so truly and so
effectively the other day, already capitulated. They have given up all
notion of any longer making the laws of the country in the interest of
their own class. One of the first things the Reformed Parliament will
do, when it has breathing-time to think about such matters, will be to
abolish the purchase system in the army, and throw open promotion to
merit, without reference to class. The diplomatic service, that other
great stronghold of the Aristocracy, will be thoroughly reorganized and
made a real, useful department, doing solid work, and open to talent of
whatever caste; or it will be abolished altogether. Something will have
to be done with the House of Lords. It, too, must be made a reality, or
dismissed into the land of shadows and the past. Efforts at reforming
it, while it stands on its present basis, are futile. Its existence is,
in its present form, the one great objection to it.

The good-natured, officious Lord Shaftesbury went to work, a few months
ago, to prepare a scheme of reform for the House of Lords, in order to
anticipate and conciliate the popular movement which he expected. He
could think of nothing better than a recommendation that the House
should meet an hour earlier every evening, in order, by throwing more
time on their hands, to induce the younger Peers to get up debates and
take part in them. This, however, is not precisely the kind of reform
the country will ask for when it has leisure to turn its attention to
the subject. It will ask for some reorganization which shall either
abolish or reduce to a comparative nothing the hereditary legislating
principle on which the House of Lords now rests. A set of law-makers or
law-marrers intrusted with power only because they are born to titles,
is an absurd anomaly, which never could exist in company with popular
suffrage. "Hereditary law-makers!" exclaimed Franklin. "You might as
well talk of hereditary mathematicians!" Franklin expressed exactly what
the feeling of the common sense of England is likely to be when the
question comes to be raised. I expect then, not that the House of Lords
will be abolished, but that the rule of the hereditary principle will be
brought to an end--that the Aristocracy there, too, will have to
capitulate.

Now, I doubt whether an American reader can have any accurate idea,
unless he has specially studied the matter and watched its practical
operation in England, of the manner in which the influence of the Peers
makes itself felt through the political life of Great Britain. Americans
often have some kind of notion that the Aristocracy govern the country
directly and despotically, with the high hand of imperious feudalism.
There is nothing of the kind in reality. The House of Lords is, as a
piece of political machinery, almost inoperative--as nearly as possible
harmless. No English Peer, Lord Derby alone excepted, has anything like
the political authority and direct influence of Mr. Gladstone, Mr.
Disraeli, or Mr. Bright. There are very few Peers, indeed, about whose
political utterances anybody in the country cares three straws. But, on
the other hand, the traditional _prestige_ of the Peers, the tacit,
time-honored, generally-conceded doctrine that a Peer has first right to
everything--the mediaeval superstition tolerated largely in our own time,
which allows a sort of divinity to hedge a Peer--all this has an
indirect, immense, pervading, almost universal influence in the
practical working of English politics. The Peers have, in fact, a
political _droit du seigneur_ in England. They have first taste of every
privilege, first choice of every appointment. Political office is their
pasture, where they are privileged to feed at will. There does not now
exist a man in England likely to receive high office, who would be bold
enough to suggest the forming of a Cabinet without Peers in it, even
though there were no Peers to be had who possessed the slightest
qualification for any ministerial position. The Peers must have a
certain number of places, because they are Peers. The House of Commons
swarms with the sons and nephews of Peers. The household appointments,
the ministerial offices, the good places in the army and the church are
theirs when they choose--and they generally do choose--to have them. The
son of a Peer, if in the House of Commons, may be raised at one step
from his place in the back benches to a seat in the Cabinet, simply
because of his rank. When Earl Russell, two or three years ago, raised
Mr. Goschen, one of the representatives of the city of London and a
partner in a great London banking-house, to a place in the Cabinet, the
whole country wondered: a very few, who were not frightened out of their
propriety, admired; some thought the world must be coming to an end. But
when the Marquis of Hartington was suddenly picked out of West End
dissipation and made War Secretary, nobody expressed the least wonder,
for he was the heir of the House of Devonshire. Indeed, it was perfectly
notorious that the young Marquis was presented to office, in the first
instance, because it was hoped by his friends that official duties might
wean him from the follies and frivolities of a more than ordinarily
heedless youth. Sir Robert Peel the present, the _magni nominis umbra_,
is not, of course, in the strict sense, an aristocrat; but he is mixed
up with aristocrats, and is the son of a Peer-maker, and may be regarded
as claiming and having the privileges of the class. Sir Robert Peel was
presented with the First Secretaryship as something to play with,
because his aristocratic friends, the ladies especially, thought he
would be more likely to sow his wild oats if he were beguiled by the
semblance of official business. A commoner must, in fact, be supposed to
have some qualification for office before he is invited to fill a
ministerial place. No qualification is believed necessary for the near
relative or connection of a Peer. Even in the most favorable examples of
Peers who are regular occupants of office, no special fitness is assumed
or pretended. No one supposes or says that Lord Clarendon, or Lord
Granville, or Lord Malmesbury has any particular qualification which
entitles him, above all other men, to this or that ministerial place.
Yet it must be a man of bold imagination indeed, who could now conceive
the possibility of a British Cabinet without one of these noblemen
having a place in it.

All this comes, as I have said, out of a lingering superstition--the
faith in the divine right of Peers. Now, a reform in the constitution of
the Upper House, which should purge it of the hereditary principle,
would be the first great blow to this superstition. Julius Caesar, in one
of his voyages of conquest, was much perplexed by the priests, who
insisted that he had better go back because the sacred chickens would
not eat. At last he thought the time had come to prove his independence
of the sacred chickens, "If they will not eat," he said, "then let them
drink"--and he flung the consecrated fowls into the sea; and the
expedition went on triumphantly, and the Roman soldiers learned that
they could do without the sacred chickens. I think a somewhat similar
sensation will come over all classes of the English people when they
find that the hereditary right to make laws is taken from the English
Peerage. I do not doubt that the whole fabric of superstition will
presently collapse, and that the privilege of the Peer will cease to be
anything more than that degree of superior influence which wealth and
social rank can generally command, even in the most democratic
communities. The law which gives impulse and support to the custom of
primogeniture is certain to go, and with it another prop of the mediaeval
superstition. The Peerage capitulates, in fact--no more expressive word
can be found to describe the situation.

Now, in all this, I have been foreshadowing no scheme of wild, vague,
far-distant reform. I appeal to any one, Liberal or Tory, who is
practically acquainted with English politics, to say whether these are
not changes he confidently or timidly looks to see accomplished before
long in England. I have not spoken of any reform which is not part of
the actual accepted programme of the Radical party. To the reform of
the House of Lords, of the military and diplomatic service; to abolition
of the law of primogeniture, the whole body of the Liberals stands
pledged; and Mr. Bright very recently renewed the pledges in a manner
and with an emphasis which showed that change of circumstances has made
no change in his opinions, brought no faltering in his resolution. The
abolition of the English Church is not, indeed, thus openly sought by so
powerful a party; but it is ostentatiously aimed at by that solid,
compact, pertinacious body of Dissenters who, after so long a struggle,
succeeded at last in getting rid of Church rates; and the movement will
go on with a rush after the fall of the Irish establishment. Here then
we have, in the not distant future, a prospect of an England without a
privileged Aristocracy, and with the State Church principle called into
final question. I return to my first consideration--the consideration
which is the subject of this paper--how will this affect the great
aristocratic, feudal and hierarchical institution of England, the Throne
of the Monarch?

The Throne then will stand naked and alone, stripped of its old-time and
traditional surroundings and associations. It cannot be like that of
France, the throne of a Caesar, a despotic institution claiming to
exercise its despotism over the people by virtue of the will and
delegated power of the people. The English Crown never can be an active
governing power. It will be the last idol in the invaded sanctuary. It
will stand alone, among the pedestals from which popular reform has
swept the embodied superstitions which were its long companions. It must
live, if at all, on the old affection or the toleration which springs
out of custom and habit. This affection, or at least this toleration,
may always be looked upon as a powerful influence in England. One can
hardly imagine, for instance, anything occurring in our day to dethrone
the Queen. However one class may grumble and another class may gibe, the
force of habit and old affection would, in this instance, prove
omnipotent. But, suppose the Prince of Wales should turn out an
unpopular and ill-conditioned ruler? Suppose he should prove to be a man
of low tastes, of vulgar and spendthrift habits, a maladroit and
intermeddling king? He is not very popular in England, even now, and he
is either one of the most unjustly entreated men living, or he has
defects which even the excuse of youth can scarcely gloss over.

An illustrated weekly paper in London forced itself lately into a sudden
notoriety by publishing a finely-drawn cartoon, in which the Prince of
Wales, dressed as Hamlet, was represented as breaking away from the
restraining arms of John Bull as Horatio, and public opinion as
Marcellus, and rushing after a ghost which bore the form and features of
George IV., while underneath were inscribed the words, "Lead on; I'll
follow thee!" This was a bold and bitter lampoon; I am far from saying
that it was not unjust, but I believe it can hardly be doubted that the
Prince of Wales has, as yet, shown little inclination to imitate the
example or cultivate the tastes of his pure-minded and intellectual
father. Now suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Prince of Wales
should turn out a George IV., or suppose, and which would be far worse
from a national point of view, he or his son should turn out a George
III. And suppose further that, about the same time any great crisis
should arise in England--suppose the country entangled in a great
foreign war, or disturbed by some momentous domestic agitation--can any
one doubt that the Crown, in its then isolated condition, would be
really in danger?

We must remember, when the strength of English institutions is boasted,
that they have not, since 1815, stood any strain which could fairly be
called critical. England has never had her national strength, her
political position, or even her _prestige_ seriously imperilled since
that time. Even the Indian war could not be called a great supreme
trial, such as other nations have lately had to bear. No one, even for a
moment, could have doubted how that struggle would end. It was bitter,
it was bloody; but the life of the nation was not staked upon it, even
had its issue been uncertain; and its issue never was uncertain. It
would be superfluous to say that England has passed through no ordeal
like that to which the United States were lately subjected. She has not
even had to confront anything like the crisis which Prussia voluntarily
invited, which Austria had to meet, in 1866. It will be time to consider
English feudal institutions, or what may remain of them, safe and
firmly-rooted, when they have stood the worst result of such a crisis as
that, and not been shaken down.

What I contend is that there is nothing in the present condition of the
English public mind, and nothing in the prospect of the immediate future
to warrant the almost universal assumption that the throne of England is
founded on a rock. The stupidity of loyalty, the devotion as of the
spaniel to his master, of the idolator to his god, is gone. I doubt if
there exists one man in England who feels the sentiment of loyalty as
his grandfather would have felt it. The mass of the people have learned
satisfactorily that a sovereign is not a part of the necessary machinery
of the government. The great problem which the Duke of Wellington used
to present for solution--"How is the Queen's Government to be carried
on?" has been solved in one and an unexpected sense. It can be carried
on without a queen. Here then we have the institution proving itself
superfluous, and falling into public indifference at the very same
moment that some other institutions which seemed always involved with it
as its natural and necessary companions, are about to be broken to
pieces and thrown away. He must, indeed, be full of a verily
transcendental faith in the destinies and divinity of royalty who does
not admit that at least there is a time of ordeal awaiting it in
England, such as it has not encountered before during this century.

To me it seems that the royal principle in England is threatened, not
with sudden and violent extinction, but with death by decay. I do not
expect any change of any kind to-morrow or the day after, or even the
week after next. I do not care to dogmatize, or predict, or make guesses
of any kind. I quite agree with my friend Professor Thorold Rogers, that
an uninspired prophet is a fool. But I contend that as the evident signs
of the times now show themselves, the monarchical principle in England
does seem to be decaying; that the national faith which bore it up is
sorely shaken and almost gone, and that some of the political props
which most nearly supported it are already being cut away. There may,
indeed, be some hidden virtue in the principle, which shall develop
itself unexpectedly in the hour of danger, and give to the institution
that seemed moribund a new and splendid vitality. Such a phenomenon has
been manifested in the case of more than one institution that seemed on
the verge of ruin--it may be the fortunate destiny of British royalty.
But unless in the sudden and timely development of some such occult and
unlooked-for virtue, I do not see what is to preserve the monarchical
principle in England through the trials of the future.

Let it be remembered, too, that the one great plea hitherto always made
in England for monarchy, is that it alone will work on a large scale.
"We admit," it was said, "that your republican theory looks better and
admits of more logical argument in its favor. But we are practical men,
and we find that our system, with all its theoretical disadvantages,
will work and stand a strain; and your republican theory, with all its
apparent advantages in logic, is not suited for this rough world. Our
machinery will stand the hardest trial; yours never did and never will.
Don't tell us about Switzerland. Switzerland is a little country. Kept
out of the stress and danger of European commotions, and protected by a
guarantee of the great powers, any constitution ought to work under such
advantages. But a great independent republic never did last; never did
stand a sudden strain, and never will." So people thought and argued in
England--even very intelligent people, until at last it became one of
the British Philistine's articles of faith, that the republican
principle never will work on a large scale. When Sir John Ramsden
declared in the House of Commons at the beginning of the American civil
war, that the republican bubble had burst, and all Philistinism in
Britain applauded the declaration, the plaudits were given not so much
because of any settled dislike Philistinism had to the United States, as
because Philistinism beheld what it believed to be a providential
testimony to its own wisdom and foresight. Since then Philistinism has
found that after all republicanism is able to bear a strain as great as
monarchy has ever yet borne, and can come out of the trial unharmed and
victorious.

The lesson has sunk deeply. The mind of something better than
Philistinism has learned that republics can be made to work on a large
scale. I believe Mr. Gladstone is one of the eminent Englishmen who now
openly admit that they have learned from the American war something
which they did not know before, of the cohesiveness and durability of
the republican system. Up to the time of that war in fact, most
Englishmen, when they talked of republican principles, thought only of
French republicanism, and honestly regarded such a system as a brilliant
empty bubble, doomed to soar a little, and float, and dazzle, and then
to burst.

That idea, it is quite safe to say, no longer exists in the English
mind. The fundamental, radical objection to republicanism--the objection
which, partly out of mere reaction and partly for more substantial
reasons, followed the brief and romantic enthusiasm of the days of
Fox--is gone. The practical Englishman admits that a republic is
practicable. Only those who know England can know what a change in
public opinion this is. It is, in fact, something like a revolution. I
think the most devoted monarchist will hardly deny that if some
extraordinary combination of chances (after all, even the British Throne
is but a human institution) were to disturb the succession of the house
of Brunswick, Englishmen would be more likely to try the republican
system than to hunt about for a new royal family, or endeavor to invent
a new scheme of monarchy. Here, then, I leave the subject. Take all this
into account, in considering the probabilities of the future, and then
say whether, even in the case of England, it is quite certain that
Byron's prediction is only the dream of a cynical poet, destined never
to be fulfilled among human realities.




THE REAL LOUIS NAPOLEON.


"How will it be with him," said Richard Cobden to a friend, one night,
as they spoke of a great and successful adventurer whom the friend was
striving to defend--"how will it be with him when life becomes all
retrospect?" The adventurer they spoke of was not Louis Napoleon; but
the inquiry might well apply just now to the Emperor of the French. Life
has reached that point with him when little more than retrospect can be
left. In the natural course of events, there can be no great triumphs
for Louis Napoleon still to achieve. Great blunders are possible, though
hardly probable; but the greatest of blunders would scarcely efface the
memory of the substantial triumphs. "Not heaven itself," exclaimed an
ambitious and profane statesman, "can undo the fact that I have been
three times Prime Minister." Well, the Fates--let them do their
best--can hardly undo the fact that the despised outcast of Constance,
and Augsburg, and London, and New York, whom Lord Palmerston excused
himself to Guizot for tolerating, on the ground that really nobody
minded the dull, harmless poor fellow; the Fates cannot undo the fact
that this man has elected himself Emperor of the French, has defeated
the Russians and the Austrians, and made a friend and ally of England.

So much of the past, then, is secure; but there are hardly any triumphs
to be won in the future. If one may venture to predict anything, he may
venture to predict that the Emperor of the French will not live to be a
very old man. He has already led many lives--fast, hard, exhausting
lives, "that murder the youth in a man ere ever his heart has its will."
Exile, conspiracy, imprisonment, hard thinking, hard working, wild and
reckless dissipation, prolonged to the very outer verge of middle life,
the brain, the nerves, the muscles, the whole physical and mental
constitution always strained to the utmost--these are not the ways that
secure a long life. Louis Napoleon is already an "_abgelebter mann_"--an
outworn, used-up, played-out man. The friends and familiars with whom he
started in life are nearly all gone. Long since laid in earth is the
stout form of the wild Marquis of Waterford, who was a wonder to our
fathers (his successor to the title ran away with somebody's wife the
other day; and I thought Time had turned back by thirty years when I
read of the _escapade_, with the name, once so famous, of the principal
performer), and who rode by Louis Napoleon's side at the celebrated,
forgotten Eglintoun Tournament, and was, like Louis Napoleon, one of the
Knights Challengers in that piece of splendid foolery. Dead, lang syne,
is Eglintoun himself, the chivalrous Earl of the generous instincts and
the florid, rotund eloquence, reminding one of Bulwer Lytton diluted. I
do not know whether the Queen of Beauty of that grand joust is yet
living and looking on the earth; but if she be, she must be an embodied
sermon on the perishableness of earthly charms. De Morny is dead, the
devoted half-brother, son of Louis Napoleon's mother, the chaste
Hortense, and the Count de Flahault--De Morny, the brilliant, genial,
witty, reckless gambler in politics and finance, the man than whom
nobody ever, perhaps, was more faithful to friendship and false to
morality, more good-natured and unprincipled. I have seen tears in men's
eyes when De Morny died--in the eyes of men who owned all the time,
smiling through their tears like Andromache, that the lost patron and
friend was the most consummate of _roues_ and blacklegs. Walewski is
dead--Walewski of romantic origin, born of the sudden episode of love
between the great Napoleon and the Polish lady--Walewski, who, like
Prince Napoleon-Jerome, carried his pedigree stamped upon his
face--Walewski, the lover of Rachel, and, to do him justice, the steady
friend of Poland. Old Mocquard is gone, the faithful scribe and
confidant: he is dead, and the dramas he would persist in writing are
dead with him, nay, died even before him. I do not know whether the
faithful, devoted woman who worked for Louis Napoleon, and believed in
him when nobody else did; the woman to whose inspirings, exertions, and
ready money he owes, in great measure, the fact that he is now Emperor
of the French--I do not know whether this woman is alive or dead. I
think she is dead. Anyhow, I suppose the dignity of history, as the
phrase is, can hardly take account of her. She helped to make an
Emperor, and the Emperor, in return, made her a Countess; but then he
had to marry--and so we take leave of the woman who made the Emperor,
and do our homage to the woman who married him. All those are gone; and
St. Arnaud, of the stormy youth, and Pelissier, the bland,
sweet-tempered chevalier, who, getting into a dispute (on his way to be
governor of Algeria) with the principal official of a Spanish port,
invited that dignitary to salute a portion of the Pelissier person which
assuredly the foes of France were never allowed to see--all these are
gone, and many more, and only a very few, fast fading, of the old
friends and followers remain. Life to Louis Napoleon must now, indeed,
be nearly all retrospect. His career, his Imperial reign may be judged
even now as fairly and securely as as if his body had just been laid
beside that of his uncle, under the dome of the Invalides.

Recent events seem specially to invite and authorize that judgment.
Within the past twelve months, the genuine character of Louis Napoleon
has displayed itself, strikingly, nakedly, in his policy. He has tried,
in succession, mild liberalism, severe despotism, reactionary
conservatism, antique Caesarism, and then, in an apologetic, contrite
sort of way, a liberalism of a rather pronounced character. Every time
that he tried any new policy he was secretly intriguing with some other,
and making ready for the possible necessity of having to abandon the
former and take up with the latter. He was like the lady in "Le Diable
Boiteux," who, while openly coquetting with the young lover, slily gives
her hand behind her back to the old admirer. So far as the public could
judge, Louis Napoleon has, for many months back, been absolutely without
any settled policy whatever. He has been waiting for a wind. Such a
course is probably the safest a man in his position can take; but one
who, at a great crisis, cannot originate and initiate a policy, will not
be remembered among the grand rulers of the world. I do not remember any
greater evidence given in our time of absolute incapacity to seize a
plan of action and decide upon it, than was shown by the Emperor of the
French during the crisis of June and July. So feeble, so vague, halting,
vacillating was the whole course of the government, that many who detest
Louis Napoleon, but make it an article of faith that he is a sort of
all-seeing, omnipotent spirit of darkness, were forced to adopt a theory
that the riots in Paris and the provinces were deliberately got up by
the police agents of the Empire, for the purpose of frightening the
_bourgeois_ class out of any possible hankering after democracy. No
doubt this idea was widely spread and eagerly accepted in Paris; and
there were many circumstances which seemed to justify it. But I do not
believe in any such Imperial stage-play. I fancy the riots surprised the
Government, first, by their sudden outburst, and next, by their sudden
collapse. Probably the Imperial authorities were very glad when the
disturbances began. They gave an excuse for harsh conduct, and they
seemed, for the time, to put the Government in the right. They restored
Louis Napoleon at that moment, in the eyes of timid people, to that
position, as a supreme maintainer of order, which for some years he had
not had an opportunity effectively to occupy. But the obvious want of
stamina in the disturbing force soon took away from the Imperial
authorities this opportune _prestige_, and very little political capital
was secured for Imperialism out of the abortive barricades, and
incoherent brickbats, and effusive chantings of the "Marseillaise." In
truth, no one had anything else to offer just then in place of the
Empire. The little crisis was no test whatever of the Emperor's hold
over his people, or of his power to deal with a popular revolution. To
me it seems doubtful whether the elections brought out for certain any
fact with which the world might not already have been well acquainted,
except the bare fact that Orleanism has hardly any more of vitality in
it than Legitimacy. Rochefort, and not Prevost Paradol, is the typical
figure of the situation.

The popularity and the success of Rochefort and his paper are remarkable
phenomena, but only remarkable in the old-fashioned manner of the straws
which show how the wind blows. Rochefort's success is due to the fact
that he had the good-fortune to begin ridiculing the Empire just at the
time when a general notion was spreading over France that the Empire of
late had been making itself ridiculous. Louis Napoleon had reached the
turning-point of his career--had reached and passed it. The country saw
now all that he could do. The bag of tricks was played out. The
anticlimax was reached at last.

The culmen, the crisis, the turning-point of Louis Napoleon's career
seems to me to have been attained when, just before the outbreak of the
Schleswig-Holstein war--so small a war in itself, so fateful and
gigantic in its results--he appealed to the Emperors and Kings of
Europe, and proposed that the nations should hold a Congress, to settle,
once and forever, all pending disputes. I think the attitude of Louis
Napoleon at that moment was dignified, commanding, imperial. His
peculiar style, forcible, weighty, measured--I have heard it well
described as a "monumental" style--came out with great effect in the
language of the appeal. There was dignity, and grace, there was what
Edmund Burke so appropriately terms "a proud humility," in Louis
Napoleon's allusion to his own personal experience in the school of
exile and adversity as an excuse for his presuming to offer advice to
the sovereigns of Europe. One was reminded of Henry of Navarre's
allusion to the wind of adversity which, blowing so long upon his face,
had prematurely blanched his hair. I do not wonder that the proposed
Congress never met. I do not wonder that the European governments put it
aside--some with courteous phrase and feigned willingness to accept the
scheme, like Russia and Austria; some with cold and brusque rejection,
like England. Nothing worth trying for could have come of the Congress.
Events were brooding of which France and England knew nothing, and which
could not have been exorcised away by any resolutions of a conclave of
diplomatists. But that was, I think, the last occasion when Louis
Napoleon held anything like a commanding, overruling position in
European affairs, and even then it was but a semblance. After that, came
only humiliations and reverses. In a diplomatic sense, nothing could be
more complete than the checkmate which the Emperor of the French drew
upon himself by the sheer blundering of his conduct with regard to
Prussia. He succeeded in placing himself before the world in the
distinct attitude of an enemy to Prussia; and no sooner had he, by
assuming this attitude, forced Prussia to take a defiant tone, than he
suddenly sank down into quietude. He had bullied to no purpose; he had
to undergo the humiliation of seeing Prussia rise in public estimation,
by means of the triumph which his unnecessary and uncalled-for hostility
had enabled her to win. In fact, he was outgeneralled by his pupil,
Bismarck, even more signally than he had previously been outgeneralled
by his former pupil, Cavour. More disastrous and ghastly, by far, was
the failure of his Mexican policy. That policy began in falsehood and
treachery, and ended as it deserved. Poetic and dramatic justice was
fearfully rendered. Never did Philip II., of Spain, never did his
father, never did Napoleon I., never did Mendez Pinto, or any other
celebrated liar, exceed the deliberate monstrosity of the falsehoods
which were told by Louis Napoleon or Louis Napoleon's Ministers at his
order, to conceal, during the earlier stages of the Mexican
intervention, the fact that the French Emperor had a _protege_ in the
background, who was to be seated on a Mexican throne. The world is not
much affected by perfidy in sovereigns. It laughs at the perjuries of
princes as Jove does at those of lovers. But it could not overlook the
appalling significance of Louis Napoleon's defeat in that disastrous
chapter of his history. Wisdom after the event is easy work; but many,
many voices had told Louis Napoleon beforehand what would come of his
Mexican policy. Not to speak of the hints and advice he received from
the United States, he was again and again assured by the late Marshal
O'Donnell, then Prime Minister of Spain; by General Prim, who commanded
the allied forces during the earlier part of the Mexican expedition; by
Prince Napoleon, by many others--that neither the character of the
Mexican people nor the proximity of the United States would allow a
French proconsulate to be established in Mexico under the name of an
Empire. It is a certain fact that Louis Napoleon frequently declared
that the foundation of that Empire would be the great event of his
reign. This extraordinary delusion maintained a hold over his mind long
after it had become apparent to all the world that the wretched bubble
was actually bursting. The catastrophe was very near when Louis
Napoleon, in conversation with an English political adventurer, who then
was a Member of Parliament, assured him that, however the situation
might then look dark, history would yet have to record that he, Louis
Napoleon, had established a Mexican Empire. The English member of
Parliament, although ordinarily a very shrewd and sceptical sort of
person, was actually so impressed with the earnestness of his Imperial
interlocutor that he returned to London and wrote a pamphlet, in which,
to the utter amazement of his acquaintances, he backed the Empire of
Mexico for a secure existence, and said to it _esto perpetua_. The
pamphlet was hardly in circulation when the collapse came. If Louis
Napoleon ever believed in anything, he believed in the Mexican Empire.
He believed, too, in the certain success of the Southern Confederation.
No Belgravian Dundreary, no _exaltee_ Georgian girl, could have been
more completely taken by surprise when the collapse of that enterprise
came than was the Emperor Napoleon III., whose boundless foresight and
profound sagacity we had all for years been applauding to the echo.
"That which is called firmness in a King," said Erskine, "is called
obstinacy in a donkey." That which is called foresight and sagacity in
an Emperor, is often what we call blindness and blundering in a
newspaper correspondent. The question is whether we can point to any
great event, any political enterprise, subsequent to his successful
assumption of the Imperial crown, in regard to which Napoleon III., if
called upon to act or to judge, did not show the same aptitude for rash
judgments and unwise actions? Certainly no great thing with which he has
had to do came out in the result with anything like the shape he meant
it to have. The Italian Confederation, with the Pope at the head of it;
the Germany irrevocably divided by the line of the Main; the Mexican
Empire; the "rectification" of frontier on the Rhine; the acquisition
of Luxembourg; these are some of the great Napoleonic ideas, by the
success or failure of which we may fairly judge of the wisdom of their
author. At home he has simply had a new plan of government every year.
How many different ways of dealing with the press, how many different
schemes for adjusting the powers of the several branches of legislation,
have been magniloquently announced and floated during the last few
years, each in turn to fail rather more dismally than its predecessor?
Now, it seems, we are to have at last something like that ministerial
responsibility which the Imperial lips themselves have so often
described as utterly opposed to the genius of France. Assuredly it shows
great mental flexibility to be able thus quickly to change one's policy
in obedience to a warning from without. It is a far better quality than
the persistent treachery of a Charles I., or the stupid doggedness of a
George III. But unless it be a characteristic of great statesmanship to
be almost always out in one's calculations, wrong in one's predictions,
and mistaken in one's men, the Emperor has for years been in the habit
of doing things which are directly incompatible with the character of a
great statesman.

Contrasting the Louis Napoleon of action and reality with the Louis
Napoleon of the journals, I am reminded of a declaration once made by a
brilliant, audacious, eccentric Italian journalist and politician,
Petruccelli della Gattina. Petruccelli was, and perhaps still is, a
member of the Italian Parliament, and he had occasion to find fault with
some office or dignity, or something of the kind, conferred by Count
Cavour on the Neapolitan, Baron Poerio, whose imprisonment and chains,
during the reign of the beloved Bomba, aroused the eloquent anger of Mr.
Gladstone, and through Gladstone's efforts and appeals became the wonder
and the horror of the world. Petruccelli insisted that Poerio's
undeserved sufferings were his only political claim. "You know perfectly
well," he said, in effect, to Cavour, "that there is no such man as the
Poerio of the journals. It suited us to invest the poor victim with the
attributes of greatness, and therefore, we, the journalists, created a
Poerio of our own. This imposed upon the world, but it did not impose
upon you, and you have no right to take our Poerio _au serieux_." I do
not know whether the journals created an imaginary Poerio, but I am
convinced that they have created an imaginary Louis Napoleon. The world
in general now so much prefers the imaginary to the real Louis, that it
would for the present be as difficult to dethrone the unreal and set up
the real, as it would be to induce the average reader to accept Lane's
genuine translation of the "Arabian Nights" instead of the familiar
translation from a sprightly, flippant, flashy French version, which
hardly bears the slightest resemblance to the original. English
journalism has certainly created a Disraeli of its own--a dark, subtle,
impenetrable, sphinx-like being, who never smiles, or betrays outward
emotion, or is taken by surprise, or makes a mistake. This Disraeli is
an immense success with the public, and is not in the least like the
real Disraeli, who is as good-natured and genial in manner as he is bold
and blundering in speech and policy. So, on a wider scale, of Louis
Napoleon. We are all more or less responsible for the fraud on the
public; and, indeed, are to be excused on the ground that, enamored of
our own creation, we have often got the length of believing in it. We
have thus created a mysterious being, a sphinx of far greater than even
Disraelian proportions, an embodiment of silence and sagacity, a dark
creature endowed with super-human self-control and patience and
foresight; one who can bend all things, and all men, and destiny itself
to his own calm, inexorable will.

I do not believe there is anything of the sphinx about Louis Napoleon. I
do not believe in his profound sagacity, or his foresight, or his
stupendous self-control. I have grown so heretical that I do not even
believe him to be a particularly taciturn man. I am well satisfied that
Louis Napoleon is personally a good-natured, good-tempered, undignified,
awkward sort of man, ungainly of gesture, not impressive in speech, a
man quite as remarkable for occasional outbursts of unexpected and
misplaced confidence as for a silence that often is, if I may use such
an expression, purely mechanical and unmeaning. I calmly ask my
_confreres_ of the press, is it not a fact that Louis Napoleon is
commonly made the dupe of shallow charlatans, that he has several times
received and admitted to confidential counsel and conference, and
treated as influential statesmen and unaccredited ambassadors, utterly
obscure American or English busybodies who could hardly get to speech of
the Mayor of a town at home; that he has entered into signed and sealed
engagements with impudent adventurers from divers countries, under the
impression that they could render him vast political service; that he
has paid down considerable sums of money to subsidize the most obscure
and contemptible foreign journals, and never seemed able for a moment to
comprehend that in England and the United States no journal that can be
bought for any price, however high, is worth buying at any price,
however low; that his personal inclinations are much more toward quacks
and pretenders than toward men of real genius and influence; that Cobden
was one of the very few great men Louis Napoleon ever appreciated, while
impostors, and knaves, and blockheads, of all kinds, could readily find
access to his confidence? Of course, a man might possibly be a great
sovereign although he had these weaknesses; but the Louis Napoleon of
journalism is not endowed with these, or indeed with any other
weaknesses.

Those who know Paris well, know that there is yet another Louis Napoleon
there, equally I trust a fiction with him of the journals. I speak of
the Louis Napoleon of private gossip, the hero of unnumbered _amours_
such as De Grammont or Casanova might wonder at. I have heard stories
poured into my patient but sceptical ears which ascribed to Louis
Napoleon of to-day, adventures illustrating a happy and brilliant
combination of Haroun Al Raschid and Lauzun--the disguises of the Caliph
employed for the purposes of Don Juan. Now, Louis Napoleon certainly
had, and perhaps even still has, his frailties of this class, but I
reject the Lauzun or Don Juan theory quite as resolutely as the sphinx
theory.

What we all do really know of Louis Napoleon is, that having the
advantage of a name of surpassing prestige, and at a moment of
unexampled chances not created by him, he succeeded in raising himself
to the throne made by his uncle; that when there, he held his place
firmly, and by maintaining severe order in a country already weary of
disturbance and barren revolution, he favored and stimulated the
development of the material resources of France; that he entered on
several enterprises in foreign politics, not one of which brought about
the end for which it was undertaken, and some of which were ludicrous,
disastrous failures; that he strove to compensate France for the loss of
her civil liberty, by audaciously attempting to make her the dictator of
Europe, and that he utterly failed in both objects; for here toward the
close of his rule, France seems far more eager for domestic freedom than
ever she was since the _coup d'etat_, while her influence over the
nations of Europe is considerably less than it was at any period since
the fall of Sebastopol. Now, if this be success, I want to know what is
failure? If these results argue the existence of profound sagacity, I
want to know what would show a lack of sagacity? Was Louis Napoleon
sagacious when he entered Lombardy, to set Italy free from the Alps to
the sea, and sagacious also when, after a campaign of a few weeks, he
suddenly abandoned the enterprise never to resume it? Was he wise when
he told Cavour he would never permit the annexation of Naples, and wise
also when, immediately after, he permitted it? Was he a great statesman
when he entered on the Mexican expedition, and also a great statesman
when he abandoned it and his unfortunate pupil, puppet, and victim
together? Did it show a statesmanlike judgment to bully Prussia until he
had gone near to making her an irreconcilable enemy, and also a
statesmanlike judgment then to "cave in," and declare that he never
meant anything offensive? Was it judicious to demand a rectification of
frontier on the Rhine, and judicious also to abandon the demand in a
hurry, when it was received as anybody might have known that a proud,
brave nation, flushed with a splendid success, would surely have
received it? Did it display great foresight to count with certainty that
the Southern Confederation would succeed, and that Austria would win an
easy victory over Prussia? Was it judicious to instruct an official
spokesman to declare that France had taken steps to assure herself
against any spread of Prussian influence beyond the Main, and to have to
stand next day, amazed and confounded, before an amazed and amused
Europe, when Bismarck made practical answer by contemptuously unrolling
the treaties of alliance actually concluded between France and the
principal States of South Germany? Was it a proof of a great ruling mind
to declare that France could never endure a system of ministerial
responsibility, and also a proof of a great ruling mind to declare that
this is the one thing needful to her contentment? All this bundle of
paradoxes one will have to sustain, if he is content to accept as a
genuine being that monstrous paradox, the Louis Napoleon of the press.
Of course, I do not deny to Louis Napoleon certain qualities of
greatness. But I believe the public was not a whit more gravely mistaken
when it regarded the King street exile as a dreamy dunce, than it is
now, when it regards Napoleon III. as a ruler of consummate wisdom.

There was much of sound sense as well as wit in the saying ascribed to
Thiers, that the second Empire had developed two great statesmen--Cavour
and Bismarck. I do not know of any one great idea, worthy of being
called a contribution to the science of government, which Louis Napoleon
has yet embodied, either in words or actions. The recent elections, and
the events succeeding them, only demonstrate the failure of Imperialism
or Caesarism, after a trial and after opportunities such as it probably
will never have again in Europe. I certainly do not expect any complete
collapse during the present reign. Doubtless the machine will outlast
the third Emperor's time. He has sense and dexterity enough to trim his
sails to each breeze that passes, and he will, probably, hold the helm
till his right hand loses its cunning with its vital power. But I see no
evidence whatever which induces me to believe that he has founded a
dynasty or created an enduring system of any kind. Some day France will
shake off the whole thing like a nightmare. Meantime, however, I am
anxious to help in dethroning the Louis Napoleon of the journals rather
than him of the Tuileries. The latter has many good qualities which the
former is never allowed to exhibit. I believe the true Louis Napoleon
has a remarkably kind and generous heart; that he is very liberal and
charitable; that he has much affection in him, and is very faithful to
his old friends and old servants; that people who come near him love him
much; that he is free and kindly of speech; that his personal defects
are rather those of a warm and rash, than of a cold and stern nature.
But I think it is high time that we were done with the melodramatic,
dime-romance, darkly mysterious Louis Napoleon of the journals. He
belongs to the race of William Tell, of the Wandering Jew, the Flying
Dutchman, the Sphinx to whom he is so often compared, the mermaid, the
sea-serpent, Byron's Corsair, and Thaddeus of Warsaw.




EUGENIE, EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH.


There are certain men and women in history who seem to have a
peculiarity, independent of their merits or demerits, greatness or
littleness, virtues or crimes--a peculiarity which distinguishes them
from others as great or as little, as virtuous or as criminal. They are,
first and above all things, interesting. It is not easy to describe what
the elements are which make up this attribute. Certainly genius or
goodness, wit or wisdom, splendid public services, great beauty, or even
great suffering, will not always be enough to create it. The greatest
English king since the First Edward was assuredly William the Third; the
greatest military commanders England has ever had were Marlborough and
Wellington; but these three will hardly be called by any one interesting
personages in the sense in which I now use the word. Why Nelson should
be interesting and Wellington not so, Byron interesting and Wordsworth
not so, is perhaps easy enough to explain; but it is not quite easy to
see why Rousseau should be so much more interesting than Voltaire,
Goethe than Schiller, Mozart than Handel, and so on through a number of
illustrations, the accuracy of which nearly all persons would probably
acknowledge. Where history and public opinion and sentiment have to deal
with the lives and characters of women, the peculiarity becomes still
more deeply emphasized. What gifts, what graces, what rank, what
misfortunes have ever surrounded any queens or princesses known to
history with the interest which attaches to Mary Stuart and Marie
Antoinette? Lady Jane Grey was an incomparably nobler woman than either,
and suffered to the full as deeply as either; yet what place has she in
men's feelings and interest compared with theirs? Who cares about Anna
Boleyn, though she too shared a throne and mounted a scaffold?

_Absit omen!_ I am about to speak of an illustrious living lady, who has
in common with Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette two things at least: she
has a French sovereign for a husband, and she has the fame of beauty.
But she has likewise that other peculiarity of which I spoke: she is
interesting. It is only speaking by the card to say that by far the most
interesting of all the imperial and royal ladies now living is Eugenie,
Empress of the French. I think there are princesses in Europe more
beautiful and even more graceful than she is, or than she ever could
have been; I fancy there are some much more highly gifted with
intellect; but there is no woman living in any European palace in whom
the general world feels half so much interest. There is not the
slightest reason to believe that she is a woman of really penetrating or
commanding intellect, and should she be happy enough to live out her
life in the Tuileries and die peacefully in her bed, history will find
but little to say about her, good or bad. Yet so long as her memory
remains in men's minds, it will be as that of a princess who had above
all things the gift of being interesting--the power of attracting toward
herself the eyes, the admiration, the curiosity, the wonder of all the
civilized world.

"We count time by heart-throbs, not by figures on a dial," says a poet
who once nearly secured immortality, Philip James Bailey. There
certainly are people whose age seems to defy counting by figures on a
dial. Ask anybody what two pictures are called up in his mind when he
hears the names of Queen Victoria and the Empress of the French, no
matter whether he has ever seen the two illustrious ladies or not. In
the case of the former I may safely venture to answer for him that he
sees the face and figure of a motherly, homely body; a woman who has got
quite beyond the age when people observe how she dresses; to whom
personal appearance is no longer of any importance or interest. In the
case of the latter he sees a dazzling court beauty; a woman who, though
not indeed in her youth, is still in a glorious prime; a woman to
captivate hearts, and inspire poets, and set scandal going, and adorn a
ball-room or a throne. The first instinctive idea would be, I think,
that the Empress of the French belonged positively to a later generation
than the good, unattractive, dowdyish Queen of England. Yet I believe
the difference in actual years is very slight. To be sure, you will find
in any almanac that Queen Victoria was born on the 24th of May, 1819,
and is consequently very near to fifty-one years of age; while the fair
Eugenie is set down as having been born on May 5th, 1826, and
consequently would now appear to be only in her forty-fourth year. But
then Queen Victoria was born in the purple, and cannot, poor thing, make
any attempt at reducing by one single year the full figure of her age.
History has taken an inexorable, ineffaceable note of the day and hour
of her birth; and even court flattery cannot affect to ignore the
record. Now Eugenie was born in happy obscurity; even the place of her
birth is not known by the public with that certainty which alone
satisfies sceptics; and I have heard that the date recorded as that of
her natal hour is only a graceful fiction, a pretty bit of polite
biography. Certainly I have heard it stoutly maintained that if any
historian or critic were now to be as ungallant in his researches as
John Wilson Croker was in the case of Lady Morgan (was it not Lady
Morgan?), he would find that the birth of the brilliant Empress of the
French would have to be dated back a few years, and that after all the
difference between her and the elderly Queen Victoria is less an affair
of time than of looks and of heart-throbs.

About a dozen years, I suppose, have passed away since I saw the Empress
Eugenie and Queen Victoria sitting side by side. Assuredly the
difference even then might well have been called a contrast, although
the Queen was in her happiest time, and has worn out terribly fast since
that period. But the quality which above all others Queen Victoria
wanted was just that in which the Empress of the French is supreme--the
quality of imperial, womanly grace. I have never been a rapturous
admirer of the beauty of the Empress; a certain narrowness of contour in
the face, the eyes too closely set together, and an appearance of
artificiality in every movement of the features, seem to me to detract
very much from the charms of her countenance. But her queenly grace of
gesture, of attitude, of form, of motion, must be admitted to be beyond
cavil, and superb. She looks just the woman on whom any sort of garment
would hang with grace and attractiveness; a blanket would become like a
regal mantle if it fell round her shoulders; I verily believe she would
actually look graceful in Mary Walker's costume, which I consider
decidedly the most detestable, in an artistic sense, ever yet indued by
mortal woman. Poor Queen Victoria looked awkward and homely indeed by
the side of this graceful, noble form; this figure that expressed so
well the combination of suppleness and affluence, of imperial dignity
and charming womanhood. Time has not of late spared the face of the
Empress of the French. Lines and hollows are growing fast there; the
bright eyes are sinking deeper into their places; the complexion is
fading and clouding; malicious people now say that, like that of the
lady in the "School for Scandal," it comes in the morning and goes in
the night; and the hair is apparently fast growing thin. But the grace
of form and movement is still there, unimpaired and unsurpassed. The
whitest and finest shoulders still surmount a noble bust, which, but
that its amplitude somewhat exceeds the severe proportions of antique
Grecian beauty, might be reproduced in marble to illustrate the contour
of a Venus or a Juno. I have seldom looked at the Empress of the French
or at any picture or bust of her without thinking how Mary Wortley
Montagu would have gone into bold and eloquent raptures over the superb
womanhood of that splendid form.

Well, the face always disappointed me at least. It seems to me cold,
artificial, narrow, insincere. It wants nobleness. It does not impress
me as being the face of a frivolous woman, a coquette, a court
butterfly; but rather that of one who is always playing a part which
sometimes wearies. If I were to form my own impressions of the Empress
of the French merely from her face, I should set her down as a keen,
politic woman, with brains enough to be crafty, not enough to be great.
I should set her down as a woman who needs and loves the stimulus of
incessant excitement, just as much as a certain class of actress does.
Indeed, I think I have seen in the face of more than one actress just
such an habitual expression, off the stage, as one may see in the
countenance of the French Empress. I fear that sweet and gracious smile,
which is said to be so captivating to those for whose immediate and
special homage it is put on, changes into sudden blankness or weariness
when its momentary business has been done. Sam Slick tells us of a lady
whose smile dropped from her face the moment the gazer's eyes were
withdrawn "like a petticoat when the strings break;" and if I might
apply this irreverent comparison to the smile of an Empress, I would say
that I think I have noted just such a change in the expression of the
brilliant Eugenie. Indeed, it must be a tiresome part, that which she
has had to play through all these resplendent years; a part thrilling
with danger, made thorny by many sharp vexations. Were the Empress of
the French the mere _belle_ of a court, she might doubtless have
joyfully swallowed all the bitternesses for the sake of the brightness
and splendor of her lot; were she a woman of high, imperial genius, a
Maria Theresa, an Anne of Austria, she might have found in the mere
enjoyment of power, or in the nobler aspirings of patriotism, abundant
compensation for her individual vexations. But being neither a mere
coquette nor a woman of genius, being neither great enough to rise
wholly above her personal troubles, nor small enough to creep under them
untouched, she must have suffered enough to render her life very often a
weary trial; and the traces of that weariness can be seen on her face
when the court look is dropped for a moment.

The Empress seems to have passed through three phases of character, or
at least to have made on the public opinion of France three successive
and different impressions. For a long time she was set down as a mere
coquette, a creature whose soul soared no higher than the aspiration
after a bonnet or a bracelet, whose utmost genius exhausted itself in
the invention of a crinoline. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any
invention known to modern Europe had so sudden and wonderful a success
or made the inventor so talked about as Eugenie's famous _jupon
d'acier_. A sour and cynical Republican of my acquaintance once declared
that anybody might have known the Empress to be a _parvenue_ by the mere
fact that she could and did invent a petticoat; for he maintained that
no born emperor or empress ever was known to have done even so much in
the way of invention. Decidedly, the Empress did a great deal of harm in
those her earlier and more brilliant days. To her influence and example
may be ascribed the passion for mere extravagance and variety of dress
which has spread of late years among all the fashionable and would-be
fashionable women of Europe and America. It is not too much to say that
the Empress of the French demoralized, in this sense, the womanhood of
two generations. How literally debauching her influence was to the
women immediately under its control, the women of the fashionable world
of Paris, I need not stop to tell. Graceful, gracious, and elegant as
she is, she did undoubtedly succeed in branding with a stamp of
vulgarity the brilliant court of the Second Empire. It is not wonderful
if scandal said coarse and bitter things about the goddess of
prodigality who presided over the revels of the Tuileries. The most
absurd stories used to be told of the amusements which went on in the
private gardens of the palace and in its inner circles; and the levity
and occasional flightiness of a vivacious young woman thirsting for
fresh gayeties and new excitements were perverted and magnified into
reckless and wanton extravagances. Of course it was inevitable that
there should be scandal over the birth of the Prince Imperial. Were the
Empress Eugenie chaste as ice, pure as unsunned snow, she could not,
under the circumstances, escape that calumny.

About the time of her sudden and mysterious escapade to London, the
Empress began to emerge a little from the character of a mere woman of
fashion, and to become known and felt as a politician. People say that
some at least of the influence and control which she began to obtain
over her husband was owing to her knowledge of his many infidelities and
his reluctance to provoke her into open quarrel. Unless Eugenie was
wholly free from the jealousy which is supposed to lie in the heart of
every other woman, she must have suffered cruelly in this way for many
years. In her own court circles, at her own side, were ladies whom
universal report designated as successive _maitresses en titre_ of the
Emperor Napoleon. Stories, too, of his indulgence in low and gross
amours were told everywhere, and, true or false (charity itself could
not well doubt that some of them were true), must have reached the
Empress's ears. She suffered severely, and she took to politics--perhaps
as a harassed man sometimes takes to drinking. Her political influence
was, in its day, simply disastrous. She was always on the wrong side,
and she was always impetuous, unreasoning, and pertinacious, as cynical
people say is the way of women. She became a devotee of the narrowest
kind; and just as Madame de Maintenon's religious bigotry did infinitely
more harm to France than the vilest profligacy of a Pompadour or a
Dubarry could have done, so the religious fervor of the Empress Eugenie
threatened at one time to prove a worse thing for the State and for
Europe than if she had really carried on during all her lifetime the
palace orgies which her enemies ascribed to her. Reaction,
Ultramontanism, illiberalism, superstition, found a patroness and leader
in her. She fought for the continued occupation of Rome; she battled
against the unity of Italy; she recommended and urged the Mexican
expedition. Louis Napoleon is personally a good-natured, easy-going sort
of man, averse to domestic disputes, fully conscious, no doubt, of his
frequent liability to domestic censure. What wonder if European politics
sometimes had to suffer heavily for the tolerated presence of this or
that too notorious lady in the inner circles of the French court? "Who
is the Countess de ----?" I once asked of a Parisian friend who was
attached to the Imperial household--I was speaking of a lady whose
beauty and whose audacities of dress were then much talked of in the
French capital. "The latest favorite," was the reply. "I shouldn't
wonder if her presence at court cost another ten years of the occupation
of Rome."

With the Empress's introduction to politics and political intrigue, the
era of scandal seems to have closed for her. She dressed as brilliantly
and extravagantly as ever, and she would take as much pains about her
toilet for the benefit of Persigny and Baroche and Billault at a Council
of State as for a ball in the Tuileries. She received the same sort of
company, was surrounded by the same ladies and the same cavaliers as
ever. But she ceased to be herself a subject of scandal--a fact which is
not a little remarkable when one remembers how many bitter enemies she
made for herself at this period of her career. She seems to have
seriously contemplated the assumption of a great political and religious
part--the part of the patroness and protectress of the Papacy. I believe
she studied hard to educate herself for this part, and indeed for the
work in politics generally which devolved upon her. The position of
Vicegerent, assigned to her by the Emperor during his absence in the
Lombardy campaign, stirred up political ambition within her, and she
seems to have shown a remarkable aptitude for political work. She
certainly sustained the opinion expressed by John Stuart Mill in his
"Subjection of Women," that the business of politics, from which laws in
general shut women out, is just the one intellectual occupation in
which, whenever they have had a chance, they have proved themselves the
equals of men. When Eugenie was raised to the Imperial throne, she
appears to have had no better education than any young Spanish woman of
her class, and that certainly is not much. A lady once assured me that
she was one of a group who were presented to the Empress at the
Tuileries, and that there being in the group two beautiful girls from
America, to whom Eugenie desired to be particularly gracious, her
Imperial Majesty began to ask them several questions about their native
land, and astonished them almost beyond the capacity to reply by kindly
inquiring whether they had come from New York "over the sea, or over the
land." But the Empress has read up a good deal, and mastered much other
knowledge besides that of geography, since those salad days. Meanwhile,
she became more and more the divinity of the Ultramontanes; and the
French court presented the interesting spectacle of having two rival and
extreme parties, one led by the Emperor's wife, and the other by his
cousin, Prince Napoleon, between whom the Emperor himself maintained an
attitude something like that of the central figure in a game of seesaw.
I presume there can be little doubt that the Empress regarded her
husband's portly cousin with a cordial detestation. She is not a woman
endowed with a keen sense of humor, nor in any case would she be quite
likely to enjoy anything which was humorous at her own expense; and
Prince Napoleon is credited broadly with having said things concerning
her which doubtless made his friends and followers and boon companions
laugh, but which, reported to her, as they assuredly would be, must have
made her cheek flame and her lips quiver. Moreover, the Red Prince was
notoriously in the habit of turning into jest some things more sacred in
the eyes of the Imperial devotee than even her own reputation. She
feared his tongue, his reckless wit, his smouldering ambition. She
feared him for her boy, whose rival and enemy he might come to be; and
Prince Napoleon had more sons than one. Therefore the rivalry was keen
and bitter. She was for the Pope; he was for Italy and the Revolution.
She sympathized with the South in the American civil war; Prince
Napoleon was true to his principles and stood by the North. She favored
the Mexican enterprise; he opposed it. She was for all manner of
repressive action as regarded political speaking and writing; he was for
a free platform and free press. Her triumph came when, during the
Emperor's visit to Algeria, Prince Napoleon delivered his famous Ajaccio
speech--a speech terribly true and shockingly indiscreet--and was
punished by an Imperial rebuke, which led him to resign all his
political offices and withdraw absolutely from public life for several
successive years.

But just when the Empress seemed to have the field all to herself, her
political influence began somehow to wane. Perhaps she grew a little
weary of the work of statecraft; perhaps she had not been so successful
in some of her favorite projects as she had expected to be. The Mexican
expedition turned out a dismal, ghastly failure, and that enterprise had
always been regarded as the joint work of the two influences which
cynical people say have usually been most disastrous in politics--the
priest and the petticoat. Then the idea of working out the scheme of
European politics from the central point of the Tuileries was suddenly
exploded by the unexpected intrusion of Prussia, and the dazzling
victory in which the Bonaparte as well as the Hapsburg was overthrown
and humbled. The old framework of things was disjointed by this
surprising event. A new political centre of gravity had to be sought for
Europe. France was rudely pushed aside. The fair Empress, who had been
training herself for quite a different condition of things, found
herself now confronted by new, strange, and bewildering combinations.
One thing is highly to her credit. I have been assured by people who
claim to know something of the matter, that her earnest influence was
used to induce the French Government to accept, without remonstrance,
the new situation. While Louis Napoleon was committing the inexcusable
blunder of feeling his way towards a war with Prussia, and thereby
subjecting himself to the ignominy of having to draw hastily back, the
voice of the Empress, I am assured, was always raised for peace. But I
think the new situation was too much for her. She had made up for a game
of politics between the Pope and Italy; when other players and other
stakes appeared, the Empress was disinclined to undertake a new course
of education. She thereupon passed into the third phase--that of
philanthropic devotee, Lady Bountiful, and mother of her people; and
since then, if she cannot be said to have grown universally popular, she
may fairly be described as having got rid of nearly all her former
unpopularity. Her good deeds began to be magnified everywhere, and even
ancient enemies were content to sing her praises, or, at least, to hear
them sung.

Undoubtedly she has a kindly, charitable heart, and can do heroic as
well as graceful things. Her famous visitation of the cholera hospitals
may doubtless have been done partly for effect, but even in this sense
it showed a lofty appreciation of the duties of an Empress, and could
not have been conceived or carried out by an ignoble nature. When the
cholera appeared in Madrid, the fat, licentious woman who then cumbered
and disgraced the throne of Spain, fled in dismay from her capital; and
this act of peculiarly unwomanlike cowardice told heavily against her
and hurried her deeply down into that public contempt which is so fatal
to sovereigns. The Empress Eugenie, on the other hand, dignified and
served herself and her husband by her fearless exposure of her own life
in the cause of humanity and charity. Kindly and generous deeds of hers
are constantly reported in Paris, and these things go far in keeping up
the superstition of loyalty. Every one knows how gracious and winning
the Empress can be in her personal relations with those who approach
her. Sometimes her demeanor and actions come into sharp contrast with
those of other sovereigns in matters less momentous than the visiting of
death-charged hospital wards. I have heard of an American lady who once
made some rich and complete collections of specimens of American
foliage, collected them at immense labor, arranged them with exquisite
taste in two large and beautiful volumes, and sent one as an offering to
Queen Victoria, the other to the Empress of the French. From the British
court came back the volume itself, with a formal reply from an official
intimating that Her Majesty the Queen made it a rule not to accept such
gifts. From Paris came a letter of genial, graceful acceptance, written
by the Empress Eugenie herself, full of good taste, good feeling, and
courteous, ladylike expression. These are small things, but womanly tact
and grace seldom have much opportunity of expressing themselves save in
just such small things.

The Empress then has of late years faded a little out of political
life. I think it may be taken for granted that although she is a quick,
clever woman, with talents far beyond the mere inventing of bonnets and
petticoats, she is not gifted with any political genius, not qualified
to see quickly into the heart of a difficult question, not endowed with
the capacity to surmount a great crisis. I have never heard anything
which induces me to think that Eugenie's intellect and power would count
for much in the chances of the dynasty should Louis Napoleon die while
his son is yet a boy. Like Louis Napoleon himself, she was twice
misjudged: first when people set her down as an empty-headed coquette,
and next when they cried her up as a woman with a genius for government.
So far as one may venture to predict, I think she would not prove strong
enough for the place, if evil fortune should throw upon her the task of
preserving the throne for her boy.

Recent events seem to me to prove that the imperial system is less
strong and more shaky than most of us would have supposed six months
ago. I for one do fully believe that the recent disturbances are the
genuine indications of a profound and bitter popular discontent. I beg
the readers of THE GALAXY to be very cautious how they form an estimate
of the situation from the correspondence and editorial articles of the
London press. If the "Times" believes Bonapartism safe and strong in
Paris, I have only to remark that the "Times" believed the same, almost
up to the bitter end, of Bonapartism in Mexico. There are very few
London journals which can be trusted where the politics of France are
concerned. Not that the journals are bribed; everybody knowing anything
of the London press knows how absurd the idea of such bribery is; but
that all London Philistinism (and Philistinism does a good deal of the
writing for the London papers) considers it genteel and respectable, and
the right sort of thing generally, to go in for the Empire and sneer at
revolution. I have read with no little wonder many of the comments of
the London, and indeed some of the New York journals, on Henri Rochefort
and his colleagues. One would think that in order to prove a certain
revolutionary movement powerless and contemptible, you had only to show
that its leaders were themselves contemptible and disreputable persons.
Some of the journals here and in London write as if the Empire must be
safe because the satire of the "Lanterne" and the "Marseillaise" seems
to them coarse and witless, and because they have heard that Henri
Rochefort is an insincere man, of doubtful courage and tainted moral
character. One longs to ask whether the "Pere Duchesne" and the "Vieux
Cordelier" were publications fit to be read in the drawing-rooms of
virtuous families; whether Mirabeau's private character was quite
blameless; whether Marat and Hebert had led reputable lives; whether
Camille Desmoulins was habitually received into the highest circles;
whether Theroigne de Mericourt was the sort of young woman one's wife
would like to invite to tea. The imbecility with which certain
journalists go on day after day trying to assure themselves and the
world that imperialism has nothing to fear at the hands of a movement
led by scurrilous and disreputable men, has something in it at once
amusing and provoking. The strength of a revolutionary movement is not
exactly to be estimated by the claims of its leaders to carry off the
_prix Monthyon_ or the Holy Grail. Perhaps if it were to be so
estimated, it would be hard to say where the victory should go in the
present instance. For the worst of Rochefort's colleagues have never
been accused of any profligacies and basenesses so bad as those which
universal public opinion ascribes to the leading Bonapartes and some of
their most influential supporters. Undoubtedly there is a great deal of
scurrility and even worse in the papers conducted by Rochefort. It is
not in good taste to go on asking who was the mother of De Morny, who
was the father of Walewski; how the present Walewski, Walewski _fils_,
comes to be called a count, and who was his mother, and so on; and the
direct and libellous attacks on the Empress are utterly indefensible. If
one were making up a memoir of Henri Rochefort, or engaged in a debating
society's controversy on his character, one would have to admit that he
is by no means a model demagogue, a pattern patriot. But one might at
the same time hint that, judging by historical precedent, he is probably
all the more formidable as a revolutionary leader for that very reason.
His literary attacks on the Government are by no means all vulgar, or
scurrilous, or contemptible. There was fresh and genuine humor as well
as telling satire in the "Lanterne's" early declaration of allegiance to
the Napoleons, the purport of which was that, feeling bound to express
his devotion to a Napoleon, Rochefort had selected as the object of his
loyal homage Napoleon the Second, the sovereign who never coerced the
press, or corrupted the Senate, or robbed the nation of its liberty, or
exiled its patriots, or carried on a Mexican expedition, or impoverished
the country to maintain a gigantic army. But there is one thing
certain--that whether Rochefort is witty or not, wise or not, he has
waked an echo throughout France and Europe in general which even very
wise and undeniably witty enemies of the Empire did not succeed in
creating. Nothing he has written will compare in artistic strength of
satire or invective with Victor Hugo's "Chatimens" or "Napoleon le
Petit." Eugene Pelletan's "Nouvelle Babylone" was a prolonged outpouring
of indignant eloquence by a gentleman, a scholar, and a thinker.
Rogeard's "Propos de Labienus" was a piece of really fine sarcasm. But
not the most celebrated of these attacks on the Empire created anything
like the sensation which Rochefort has succeeded in creating by the
constant "pegging away" of his bitter, envenomed, and unscrupulous pen.
Indeed, the reason is obvious--at least to those who, like me, believe
that the great mass of the Parisian population (the army, the officials,
and the priests not counted) are heartily sick of Bonapartism, and would
get rid of it if they could. Rochefort assails the Empire and the
Emperor in a style which they can understand. He is a master of a
certain kind of coarse, rasping ridicule, which delights the disaffected
_ouvrier_; and he has no scruple about assailing any weak place he can
find in his enemy, even though in doing so the heart of a woman has
likewise to be wounded. An angry and disaffected populace delights in
this kind of thing. The fact that Rochefort has created such a sensation
is the best proof in the world that the Parisian populace is angry and
disaffected. Rochefort has a happy gift of epithets, which goes a long
way with admirers and followers such as his. I doubt whether a whole
chapter could have described more accurately and vividly the person,
character, and career of Prince Pierre Bonaparte than Rochefort did when
he branded him as "a social bandit." Personally, Rochefort is not
qualified to be a demagogue in the sense that Danton was a demagogue,
and he can make no pretension to be a revolutionary leader of a high
class. But he can incite a populace, madden the hearts of disaffected
crowds, as the bitter tongue of a shrill woman might do, and as the
tongue of a great orator might perhaps fail to do. Doubtless Rochefort
and his literary sword-and-buckler men are not strong enough to create a
serious disturbance of themselves alone. But if a moment of general
uncertainty and unsettlement came, they might prove a dangerous
disturbing force. If, for example, there should come a crisis which of
itself rendered change of some kind necessary, when all the chances of
the future might depend upon a single hour or perhaps a single decisive
command, and when it was not certain who had the right, who would assume
the responsibility to give the command, then indeed the bitter screams,
and jeers, and invectives of these reckless literary bravos might have
much to do with the ordering of the situation. If, for example, the
Emperor were to die just now, who shall venture to say how much the
chances of the Empress and her son might not be affected at that moment
of terrible crisis by the pens and the tongues of Rochefort and his
followers?

Some time, in the natural course of things, the Empress may expect to
have to face such a crisis. It is highly probable that the time will
come while yet her boy is young and dependent upon her guardianship and
care. Has she won for herself the affection, confidence, and loyalty of
France, to such an extent that she could count upon national support? I
am convinced that she has not. She is much liked and even loved by those
who know her. They have countless anecdotes to tell of her affectionate
ways as a mother, of her generosity and kindness as a woman. But
although she has outlived many of the early prejudices against her, she
is still regarded with distrust and dislike by the older families of
France; and I am confident that a large proportion of the working
classes in Paris and the large towns delight to believe the worst things
that malice and slander can say to her detriment. The priests and the
shopkeepers are probably her best friends; but I am not aware that
priests and shopkeepers have ever proved themselves very powerful
bulwarks against sudden popular revolution. The generals and the army
might of course remain perfectly loyal to her; probably would if they
had no time to consider the situation, and there were no favorite rival
in the way (if Prince Napoleon, for example, were a brilliant soldier,
she would not have a ghost of a chance against him); but it must be
remembered that the loyalty of an army is something like the
epigrammatic description of the honor of a woman: when there is any
deliberation, it is likely to be lost; and the claims of the Empress are
certainly not such as absolutely to forbid deliberation and render it
impossible. Much of course would depend on the woman herself. There was
a moment when Catharine of Russia's unfortunate husband might have
carried all before him if he had only seized the chance; and he did not
seize it, and so lost all. There was a moment when Catharine might have
utterly failed if she had not risen to the height of the crisis, and
seized the opportunity with both hands; and she did rise to the height
of the crisis, did seize the opportunity, and so won all. Place Eugenie
in such a position, and is she a woman to win? Is she in fact a woman of
genius? I think not. Nothing that I have ever heard of her--and I have
known many who were her intimate friends--has led me to believe her
endowed with a quick, strong, commanding intellect. Mentally she seems
to be narrow and shallow; in temper she is quick, capricious, full of
warm personal affections and almost groundless personal dislikes. I have
a strong idea that no matter what the urgency of the crisis, she would
stay to make herself picturesque before taking any public action; and I
venture to think she would be guided by counsel only where she happened
to have a personal liking for the counsellor. She cannot, I fancy, be
trusted at a great crisis to make the fortune of her son. Enough if she
do not mar it at such a time.

Political considerations apart, one can only wish her well. Her face is
one which ought to smile sweetly and gracefully through history. If fate
and France will endure the Bonapartes for another generation or so,
there will be some consolation to gallant and romantic souls in the
thought that thereby this gracious, queenly woman will be allowed to
make a happy end of her brilliant, not untroubled life. Thus far we may,
in summing up her career, describe her, first, as a bright, vivacious
young coquette, with a dash of the adventuress about her, ranging the
world in search of a husband; then a woman suddenly and surprisingly
raised to the dazzling rank of an Empress, and a little bewildered by
the change; then a splendid leader of the world's fashion, magnificently
frivolous and heedless; then a political _intrigante_, the supreme
patroness of Ultramontanism; and now a quiet, queenly mother, verging
toward that kind of devoteeism in which some satirical person declares
that coquetry in France is sure to end. She is not a woman to make any
deep impression on history. She has neither gifts enough nor faults
enough. As a politician she has been a failure, and perhaps worse than a
failure; but she has been fortunate enough to escape from all public
responsibility for her mistakes, and may get quietly into history as
merely an intelligent, good-natured, and beautiful woman. Posterity will
probably see her and appreciate her sufficiently in her portrait by
Winterhalter: a name, a vague memory, and a smooth fair picture with
bright complexion, shining hair, and noble shoulders, alone carrying
down to other times the history of the Third Napoleon's wife. Only great
misfortunes could redeem her from this destiny of half oblivion; and
history has names enough that are burnt by misfortune into eternal
memory, and may well spare hers. One great claim she has to a liberal
construction of her character: her personal enemies are those who do not
know her well; her intimates seem to be always her friends. She has one
good quality, which her husband with all his faults likewise possesses:
she has never in her imperial splendor forgotten or neglected or been
ashamed of old acquaintances and friends. I have heard scores of
anecdotes from people who know her well--I have heard one such anecdote
since I began writing this article--which prove her to be entirely above
the mean and vulgar weakness of the _parvenu_, who shrinks in her
magnificence from any acquaintanceship or association likely to remind
her of less brilliant days. Taken on the whole, the Empress Eugenie is
better than her fortunes and her surroundings might have made her. She
is, I think, a woman much more deserving of respect than Josephine
Beauharnais, whose misfortunes, joined with the quiet pathetic dignity
of her retirement and her later years, have made the world forget the
levities, frivolities, and follies of her earlier life. She has shown a
quicker and better appreciation of the duties and difficulties of her
station, and the temper of the people among whom she had to live, than
was at any time shown by Marie Antoinette. Whether she could ever under
the most favorable conditions prove an Anne of Austria may well be
doubted; and we must all hope for her own sake that she may never be put
to the proof. She has at least made it clear that she is no mere Reine
Crinoline; she has shown that she possesses some heart, some courage,
and some brains; she has had sense enough to retrieve blunders, and
merit enough to live down calumny. The best thing one can hope for her
is that she may never again be placed in a position which would tempt
and allow her to make political influence the instrument of religious
bigotry. The greatest woman her native country ever produced, Isabella
of Castile, became with all her virtues and genius a curse to Spain,
because of her bigotry and her power; and there was a time when it
seemed as if the Empress Eugenie was likely to make for herself an
odious fame as the chief patroness of a conspiracy against the religious
and political liberties of the south of Europe. Let us hope that in her
future career she may be saved from any such temptation, and that she
may be kept as much as possible out of all political complications where
religion interferes; and if she be thus graced by fortune, it is all but
certain that whatever her future years may bring, she will deserve and
receive a genial record in the history of France.




THE PRINCE OF WALES.


"It is now sixteen or seventeen years," says Edmund Burke, in that
famous passage to which one is almost ashamed to allude any more, so
hackneyed has it been, "since first I saw the Queen of France, then the
Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which
she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision." That glowing,
impassioned apostrophe did more to make partisans and admirers for poor
Marie Antoinette among all English-speaking peoples, probably for all
time, than any charms, or virtues, or misfortunes of the Queen and the
woman could have done. I can never of late read or recall to mind the
burning words of Burke, without thinking of a certain day in March some
seven years ago, when I stood on a platform in Trafalgar Square, London,
and saw a bright, beautiful young face smiling and bending to a vast
enthusiastic crowd on either side, and I, like everybody else, was
literally stricken with admiration of the beauty, the sweetness, and the
grace of the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. In truth, I am not in
general an enthusiast about princes or princesses; I do not believe that
the king's face usually gives grace. In this instance the beauty of the
Princess Alexandra had been so noisily trumpeted by literary lacqueys
already, that one's natural instinct was to feel disappointed, and to
say so, when the Princess herself came in sight. But it was impossible
to feel disappointment, or anything but admiration, at the sight of that
bright, fair face, so transparent in the clearness of its complexion, so
delicate and refined in its outlines, so sweet and gracious in its
expression. I think something like the old-fashioned, chivalric,
chimerical feeling of personal loyalty must have flamed up for the
moment that day in the hearts of many men, who perhaps would have been
ashamed to confess that their first experience of such an emotion was
due to a passing glimpse of the face of a pretty, tremulous girl.

If ours were days of augury, men might have shuddered at the omens which
accompanied the wedding ceremonies of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
When Goethe, then a youth, surveyed the preparations for the reception
of Marie Antoinette at Strasbourg, on her way to Paris, he observed
significantly on the inauspicious fact that in the grand chamber adorned
for her coming, the tapestry represented the wedding of Jason and Medea.
The civil authorities of London certainly did not greet the fair
stranger with any such grisly and ghastly emblazonings; but there were
other and even more inauspicious omens offered by chance and the hour.
The sky darkened, a dreary wind whistled; presently the rain came down
in drenching streams that would not abate. There was a mourning-garb at
the wedding--the black dress of the Queen, who would not lay aside her
widow's-weeds even for that hour; and the night of the wedding, when the
streets of London were illuminated, the crowd was so great that, as on a
memorable occasion in the early married life of Marie Antoinette, people
were crushed and trampled to death amid the universal jubilation.

Well, we defy augury, with Hamlet. But I think some at least in the
crowd who welcomed Alexandra felt a kind of doubt and pity as to her
future, which needed no inspiration from omens and superstition. No
foreign princess has ever been so popular in England as Alexandra; and
assuredly some at least of the affection felt for her springs from a
pity which, whether called for or not, is genuine and universal. The
last time I saw the Princess of Wales was within a very few days of my
leaving England to visit the United States. It was in Drury Lane
Theatre, then fitted up as an opera house in consequence of the recent
burning of Her Majesty's Theatre. The Prince of Wales, his wife, and one
of his sisters were in their box. I had not seen the Princess for some
time, and I was painfully impressed with the change which had come over
her. Remembering, as it was easy to do, the brightness of her beauty
during the early days of her marriage, there was something almost
shocking in the altered appearance of her face. It looked wasted and
haggard; the complexion, which used to be so dazzlingly fair, had grown
dull, and, if I may say so, discolored; and I must be ungracious enough
to declare bluntly that, to my eyes at least, there seemed little trace
indeed of the beauty of a few years before left in that dimmed and worn
countenance. "Only the eyes remained--they would not go." Of course, it
must be remembered that the Princess was then only just recovering from
a long, painful, and exhausting illness; and she may have--I truly hope
she has--since then regained all her brightness and beauty. In any case,
it would be unjust indeed to assume that the wasted look of the Princess
was to be attributed to domestic unhappiness. But even a very
matter-of-fact and unsentimental person, looking at her then, and
remembering what she so lately was, might be excused if he fancied that
some of the unpropitious omens which surrounded the Princess's marriage
had already begun to justify themselves in practical fulfilment.

For even at the time of the marriage of the Prince and Princess there
were not wanting prophets of evil who predicted that this royal union
would not prove much happier than state-made marriages commonly are.
Even then there were stories and reports afloat which ascribed to the
Prince habits and tendencies not likely to promote the domestic
happiness of a delicate and refined young wife, hardly more than a mere
child in years. Indeed, there was already considerable doubt in the
public mind as to the personal character of the Prince of Wales. He
certainly did not look a very intellectual or refined sort of person
even then, and some at least were inclined to think him, as Steerforth
says of little Em'ly's lover, "rather a chuckle-headed kind of fellow,"
to get such a girl. There was, certainly, a breath of serious distrust
abroad. On the Prince's coming of age, and again, I think, on the
announcement of his approaching marriage, the London daily papers had
set themselves to preaching sermons at him; and a very foolish chorus of
sermons that was which broke out from all those tongues together. The
only marked effect of this outburst of lay-preaching was, I fancy, to
impress the public mind with the idea that the Prince was really a very
much more dreadful young man than there was any good reason to believe
him. People naturally imagined that the writers who poured forth such
eloquent, wise, and suggestive admonitions must know a great deal more
than they felt disposed to hint at; whereas, I venture to think that, in
truth, the majority of the writers were disposed to hint at a great deal
more than they knew. For, indeed, almost all that is generally and
substantially known of the Prince of Wales has been learned and observed
since his marriage.

Still, even before, and long before the marriage, there were ominous
rumors. Those that I mention I give simply as rumors--not, indeed, the
mere babble of the streets, but as the kind of thing which people told
you who professed to know--the talk of the House of Commons, and the
clubs, and the fashionable drawing-rooms and smoking-rooms. People told
you that the Prince and his father had had many quarrels arising out of
the extravagance, dissipation, and wrong-headedness of the former; and
there was even a painful and cruel report thus whispered about that the
death of Prince Albert was the result of a cold he had taken from
walking incautiously in a heavy rain during excitement caused by a
quarrel with his son. Stories were told of this and that _amour_ and
_liaison_ in Ireland when the Prince of Wales was with the camp on the
Curragh of Kildare; of his excesses when he was a student at the
University; of his escapades at many other times and places. Certain
actresses of a low class, and other women of a still lower class, were
pointed out in London as special favorites of the Prince of Wales. Of
course every man of sense knew, first, that stories of this kind must be
taken with a large amount of allowance for exaggeration; and, next, that
the public must not expect all the virtues of a saint to belong to the
early years of a prince of the family of Guelph. In England public
opinion, although it has grown much more exacting of late years on the
score of decorum than it used to be, is still disposed to look over
without censure a good deal of extravagance and dissipation in young and
unmarried men, especially if they be men of rank. Therefore, if the
rumors which attended the early career of the Prince of Wales had not
followed him into his married years, the world would soon have forgotten
all about his youthful indiscretions. But it became a serious question
for the whole nation when it began to be whispered everywhere that the
Prince was growing worse instead of better during his married life, and
when to the suspicion that he was wasting his own youth and his own
credit came to be added the belief that he was neglecting and injuring
the young and beautiful woman whom state reasons had assigned to him as
a wife. In good truth, it is really a question of public and historical
interest whether the Queen of England is likely to be succeeded by an
Albert the Good or another George the Fourth; and I am not therefore
inviting the readers of THE GALAXY to descend to the useless discussion
of a mere piece of idle court scandal when I ask them to consider with
me the probabilities of the future from such survey as we can take of
the aspects of the present.

Those who saw the Prince of Wales when he visited this country, would
surely fail to recognize the slender, fair-haired, rather graceful youth
of that day in the heavy, fat, stolid, prematurely bald,
elderly-young-man of this. It would not be easy to see in any assembly a
more stupid-looking man than the Prince of Wales is now. On horseback he
shows to best advantage. He rides well, and the pleasure he takes in
riding lends something of animation to his usually inexpressive face.
But when his eyes and features lapse into their habitual condition of
indolent, good-natured, stolid repose, all light of intellect seems to
have been banished. The outline of the head and face, and the general
expression, seemed to me of late to be growing every day more and more
like the head and face of George the Third. Anybody who may happen to
have a shilling or half-crown of George the Third's time, can see on the
coin a very fair presentment of the countenance of the present
heir-apparent of the English throne. Whether the Prince of Wales
resembles George the Fourth in character and tastes or not, he certainly
does not resemble him in face. Even a court sycophant could not pretend
to see beauty or grace in our present Prince.

I think that to the eye of the cynic or the satirist the Prince of Wales
shows to greatest advantage when he sits in his box at an advanced hour
of some rather heavy classic opera, or has to endure a long succession
of speeches at a formal public dinner. The heavy head droops, the heavy
jaws hang, the languid eyes close, the heir-apparent sinks into a doze.
Loyalty itself can see nothing dignified or kingly in him then. I have
watched him thus as he sat in his box during some high-class, and to
him, doubtless, very heavy performance at the Italian opera, and have
thought that at times he might remind irreverent and disloyal observers
of Pickwick's immortal fat boy. I have sometimes observed that his
little dozes appeared to afford innocent amusement to his sisters, if
any of them happened to be in the box; and occasionally one of the
Princesses would playfully poke her slumbering brother in the princely
ribs, and the Heir of all the Ages would open his eyes and smile
languidly, and try to look at the stage and listen to the music; and
then, after a while, the heavy head would sink once more on the vast
expanse of shirt-front in which the Prince seems to delight, and the fat
boy would go to sleep again. But this would only happen at certain
performances. There were times when the Prince had eyes and ears open
and attentive, even in the opera house. His tastes in general, however,
are not for high art in music or the drama. He is very fond of the
little theatres where the vivacious blondes display their unconcealed
attractions. There are, as everybody knows, several minor theatres in
London where the audience, or, I should say more properly, the
spectators, will be found to consist chiefly of men, while, on the other
hand, the performers are chiefly women. These are the temples of the leg
drama. "_Piece aux jambes? Piece aux cuisses!_" indignantly exclaims
Eugene Pelletan, denouncing such performances in his "Nouvelle
Babylone"; and he goes on to add some cumulative illustrations which I
omit. Well, the Prince of Wales loves the _piece aux jambes_, and the
theatres where it flourishes. He constantly visits theatres at which his
wife and sisters are never seen, and in which it would be idle to deny
that there are actresses who have made themselves conspicuous objects of
popular scandal.

Now, I am far from saying that this necessarily implies anything worse
than a low taste on the part of the Prince of Wales. But there are
stations in life which render private bad taste a public sin. In London,
of late, there has been a just outcry against a certain kind of
theatrical performance. It is held to be demoralizing and degrading that
the stage should be made simply a show-place for the exhibition of
half-naked women, for the audacious display of legs and bosoms. Now, I
beg to say for myself that I have entire faith in the dramatic as in
every other art; that I believe it always when truthfully pursued
vindicates itself, and that I think any costume which the true and
legitimate needs of the drama require is fitting, proper, and modest. I
regard the ballet, in its place, as a graceful and delightful
entertainment; and I do not believe that any healthy and pure mind ought
to be offended by the kind of costume which the dance requires. But
artists and moralists in London alike objected, and justly objected, to
performances the whole purpose, and business, and attraction of which
was the exhibition of a crowd of girls as nearly naked as they could
venture to show themselves in public.

Now this was undoubtedly the kind of exhibition which the Prince of
Wales especially favored and patronized. Night after night, even during
the long and lamentable illness of his young wife, he visited such
theatres, and gazed upon "those prodigies of myriad nakednesses."
Likewise did he much delight in the performances of Schneider--that high
priestess of the obscene, rich with the spoils of princes. I say
emphatically that there were actions, gestures, _bouffonneries_
performed amid peals of laughter and thunders of applause by this fat
Faustina in the St. James's Theatre, London, which were only fit to have
gladdened the revels of Sodom and Gomorrah. And this woman was,
artistically at least, the prime favorite of the Prince of Wales; and
when his brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, reached England for the first
time after his escape from the Fenian bullet in Sydney, the _par nobile
fratrum_ celebrated the auspicious event by hastening to the theatre
where Schneider kicked and wriggled and helped out the point of
lascivious songs by a running accompaniment of obscene gestures.

So much at least has to be said against the Prince of Wales, and cannot
be gainsaid. All that he could do by countenance and patronage to
encourage a debauching and degrading style of theatric entertainment, he
has done. He is said to be fond of the singing of the vulgar and low
buffoons of the music-halls, and to have had such persons brought
specially to his residence, Marlborough House, to sing for him. I have
been assured of this often by persons who professed to know; but I do
not know anything of it myself, nor is it indeed a matter of any
importance. The other facts are known to everybody who reads the London
papers. The manager or manageress of a theatre takes good care to
announce in the journals when a visit from the Prince of Wales has taken
place, and we all thus come to know how many times a week the little
theatric temples of nakedness have been honored by his presence.

Am I attaching too much importance to such matters as this? I think not.
The social influence and moral example of a royal personage in England
are now almost the only agencies by which the royal personage can affect
us for good or evil. I hold that no man thoughtful or prudent enough, no
matter what his morals, to be fit to occupy the position assigned to the
Prince of Wales, would be guilty of lending his public and constant
patronage to such exhibitions and amusements as those which he
especially patronizes. Moreover, the Prince has often shown a disregard,
either cynical or stupid--probably the latter--for public opinion, a
heedlessness of public scandal, in other matters as well. He has made
companionship for himself among young noblemen conspicuous for their
debauchery. At a time, not very long ago, when the Divorce Court was
occupied with the hearing of a scandalous cause, in which a certain
young duke figured most prominently and disgracefully, this young duke
was daily and nightly to be seen the close companion of the Prince of
Wales.

Let me touch upon another subject, of a somewhat delicate nature. I have
said that there were times when our Prince was always wide awake at the
opera house. There is a certain brilliant and capricious little singer
whom all England and Germany much admire, and who in certain operatic
parts has, I think, no rival. Now, public scandal said that the Prince
of Wales greatly admired this lady, and paid her the most marked
attentions. Public scandal, indeed, said a great deal more. I hasten to
record my conviction that, so far as the fair artiste was concerned, the
scandal was wholly unfounded, and that she is a woman of pure character
and honor. But the Prince was credited with a special admiration for
her; and I am sure the Prince's father under such circumstances would
have taken good care to lend no foundation, afford no excuse, for
scandal to rest upon. Now, I speak of what I have myself observed when I
say that the Prince of Wales, whenever he had an opportunity, always
demeaned himself as if he really desired to give the public good reason
for believing the scandal, or as if he was too far gone in infatuation
to be able to govern his actions. For he was always at the opera when
this lady sang; and he always conducted himself as if he wished to
blazon to the world his ostentatious and demonstrative admiration. When
the prima donna went off the stage, the Prince disappeared from his box;
when she came on the stage again, he returned to his seat; he lingered
behind all his party at the end, that he might give the last note of
applause to the disappearing singer; he made a more pertinacious show of
his enthusiasm than even the military admirer of Miss Snevellicci was
accustomed to do. Now, all this may have been only stolidity or
silliness, and may not have denoted anything like cynicism or coarse
disdain of public opinion; but whatever it indicated, it certainly did
not, I think, testify to the existence of qualities likely to be found
admirable or desirable in the heir to a throne.

Of the truth or falsehood of the private scandals in general circulation
concerning the Prince of Wales I know nothing whatever. But everybody in
England is aware that such stories are told, and can name and point out
this or that titled lady as the heroine of each particular story. It
need hardly be said that when a man acquires the sort of reputation
which attaches to the Prince of Wales, nothing could be more unjust or
unreasonable than to accept, without some very strong ground of belief,
any story which couples his name with that of any woman belonging to the
society in which he moves. Obviously, it would be enough, in the eyes of
an English crowd, that the Prince should now pay any friendly attention
to any handsome duchess or countess in order to convert her into an
object of scandal. I am myself morally convinced that some of the titled
ladies who are broadly and persistently set down by British gossip as
mistresses of the Prince of Wales are as innocent of such a charge as if
they had never been within a thousand miles of a court. But the Prince
is a little unlucky wherever he goes, for scandal appears to pursue him
as Horace's black care follows the horseman. When the Prince of Wales
happens to be in Paris, he seems to be surrounded at once by the same
atmosphere of suspicion and evil report. Some two years ago I chanced to
be in Paris at the time the Prince was there, and I can answer for it
that observers who had never heard or read of the common gossip of
London formed the same impression of his general character that the
public of London had already adopted. The Prince was then paying special
attention to a brilliant and beautiful lady moving in the court circles
of the French capital, a lady who had but very recently distinguished
herself by appearing at one of the fancy balls of the Tuileries in the
character of the Archangel Michael or Raphael--it does not much matter
which--and attired in a costume which left the company no possibility of
doubting the symmetry of her limbs and the general shapeliness of her
person. Malicious satirists circulated thereupon an announcement that
the lady was to appear at the next fancy ball as "La Source," the
beautiful naked nymph so exquisitely painted by Ingres. This lady
received the special attentions of the Prince of Wales. He followed her,
people said, like her shadow; and a smart pun was soon in circulation,
which I refrain from giving because it contrives ingeniously to blend
with his name the name of the lady in question, and I am not writing a
scandalous chronicle. This was the time when the Prince made his royal
mother so very angry by attending the Chantilly races on a Sunday. When
he came back to London he had to take part in some public ceremonial--I
forget now what it was--at which the Queen had consented to be present.
Her Majesty was present, and I have been assured by a friend who stood
quite near that a sort of little scene was enacted which much
embarrassed those who had to take part in the official pageantry of the
occasion. Up came the Prince, who had travelled in hot haste from Paris,
and with a somewhat abashed and sheepish air approached his royal
mother. She looked at him angrily, and turned away. The Duke of
Cambridge, her cousin, made an awkward effort to mend matters by
bringing up the Prince again, and with the action of a friendly and
deprecating intercessor presenting the delinquent. This time, I am
assured, the Queen, with determined and angry gestures, and some words
spoken in a low tone, repelled intercessor and offender at once; and the
Prince of Wales retired before the threatened storm. The Duke of
Edinburgh, who had been lingering a little in the background--he, too,
had just come from Paris, and he had been to Chantilly--anxious to see
what kind of reception would be accorded to his brother, thought,
apparently, that he had seen enough to warrant him in keeping himself at
a modest distance on that occasion, and not encountering the terrors of
what Thackeray, in "The Rose and the Ring," describes as "the royal
eye."

I have little doubt that Queen Victoria is a somewhat rigorous and
exacting mother, and I should be far from accepting her frown as
decisive with regard to the delinquencies of one of her sons.
Cigar-smoking alone would probably be accounted by the Queen a sin
hardly allowing of pardon. Her husband, Prince Albert, was a man so pure
of life, so free from nearly all the positive errors of manhood, so
remarkably endowed with at least all the negative virtues, that his
companionship might easily have spoiled her for the toleration of
natures less calm and orderly. I suspect that the Queen is one of that
class of thoroughly good women who, from mere lack of wide sympathies
and genial toleration, are not qualified to deal to the best advantage
with children who show a little inclination for irregularity and
self-indulgence. Nor do I believe that the Prince of Wales is the wicked
and brutal profligate that common libel makes him out. The shocking
story which one sees so often alluded to in the London correspondence of
certain American papers, and which attributes the long illness of the
Princess of Wales to the misconduct of her husband, I believe to be
utterly unfounded and unjustifiable. One of the London medical journals,
the "Lancet" I think it was, had the courage to refer directly to this
monstrous statement, and to give it an emphatic and authoritative
refutation. If the worst things said of the Prince of Wales with any
appearance of foundation were true, it is certain that he would still
not be any worse than many other European princes and sovereigns. I have
never heard anything said of the Prince of Wales half so bad as the
stories which are believed everywhere in Paris of the enormous
profligacies of Prince Napoleon; and it would be hardly possible for
charity itself to doubt that up to a very recent period the private life
of the Emperor of the French himself was stained with frequent and
reckless dissipation. Those who were in Vienna anywhere about the autumn
of 1866, will remember the stories which were told about the fatal
results of the exalted military command given by the imperial will to
certain favored generals, and the kind of influence by which those
generals had acquired imperial favor. Common report certainly describes
the Empress of Austria as being no happier in her domestic relations
than the Princess of Wales. Everybody knows what Victor Emanuel's
private character is, and what sort of hopeful youth is his eldest son,
Umberto. Therefore, the Prince of Wales could doubtless plead that he is
no worse than his neighbors; and even in his own family he might point
to other members no better than himself. The Duke of Cambridge, for
instance, has often been accused of profligacy and profligate
favoritism. I wish I could venture to repeat here, for the sake of the
genuine wit and keen satire of it, a certain epigram in Latin, composed
by an English military officer, to describe the influence which brought
about the sudden and remarkable promotion of another officer who was not
believed to be personally quite deserving of the rank conferred on him
by the Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the British army. But
the position of the Prince of Wales is very different from that of the
Duke of Cambridge, and he has to face a public opinion quite unlike that
which surrounds Prince Napoleon or the Emperor of the French. People in
France are not inclined to make any very serious complaint about the
amours of a prince, or even of an emperor. I do not venture to say that
there is much more of actual immorality in Paris than in London; but,
assuredly, a man may, without harm to his public and political
influence, acknowledge an amount of immorality in Paris which would be
utterly fatal to his credit and reputation in London. Moreover, some of
the illustrious profligates I have mentioned are distinguished by other
qualities as well as profligacy; but I cannot say that I have ever heard
any positively good quality, either of heart or intellect, ascribed to
the Prince of Wales.

Unless his face, his head, his manners in public, and the tastes he so
conspicuously manifests wholly belie him, the heir to the British throne
is a remarkably dull young man. He cannot even deliver with any decent
imitation of intelligence the little speeches which Arthur Helps or
somebody else usually gets up for him when the exigencies of the
situation compel the Prince to make a speech in public. He is reputed to
be parsimonious even in his pleasures, and has managed to get himself
deeply into debt without being supposed to have wasted any of his
substance in obedience to a generous impulse. The Prince inherited a
splendid property. His prudent father had looked well after the revenues
of the duchy of Cornwall, which is the appanage of the Prince of Wales
(even in some very dingy parts of London you may if you hire a house
find that you have the Prince of Wales for a landlord), and the property
of the heir must have been raised to its very highest value. Yet it is
notorious that a very few years after he had attained his majority,
Albert Edward had contrived to get deeply immersed in debt. There was
for some time a scheme in contemplation to apply to Parliament for an
addition to the huge allowance made to the Prince of Wales; and the
"Times" and other newspapers were always urging the fact that the Queen
left the Prince to perform nearly all her social duties for her, as a
reason why the nation ought to award him an augmented income. It puzzles
people in London, who read the papers and who study, as most Britons do,
the occupations and pastimes of royalty, to know where the lavish and
regal hospitalities take place which the Prince of Wales is supposed to
dispense on behalf of his mother. However, the project for appealing to
the generosity of Parliament seems to have been put aside or to have
fallen through--I have read somewhere that the Queen herself has agreed
to increase her son's allowance out of her own ample and well-hoarded
purse--and the English public are not likely to be treated to any
Parliamentary debate on the subject just yet. But this much is certain,
that the same almost universal rumor which attributes coarse and
dissipated habits to the Prince of Wales attributes to him likewise a
mean and stingy parsimony where aught save his own pleasure is
concerned; and even there, if by any possibility the pleasure can be
obtained without superfluous cost.

This then is the character which the son of the Queen of England bears,
in the estimation of the vast majority of his mother's subjects. Almost
any and every one you meet in London will tell you, as something beyond
doubt, that the Prince of Wales is dull, stingy, coarse, and profligate.
As for the anecdotes which are told of his habits and tastes by the
artists and officials of the theatres which he frequents, I might fairly
leave them out of the question, because most of them that I have heard
seem to me obvious improbabilities and exaggerations. They have
nevertheless a certain value in helping us to a sort of historical
estimate of the Prince's character. Half the stories told of the humors
and debaucheries of Sheridan and Fox are doubtless inventions or
exaggerations; but we are quite safe in assuming that the persons of
whom such stories abound were not frugal, temperate, and orderly men. If
the Prince of Wales is not a young man of dissipated habits, then a
phenomenon is exhibited in his case which is, I fancy, without any
parallel in history--the phenomenon of a whole watchful nation,
studying the character and habits of one whose position compels him to
live as in a house of glass, and coming, after years of observation, to
a conclusion at once unanimous and erroneous. But were it proved beyond
the remotest possibility of doubt that the Prince is personally chaste
as a Joseph, temperate as Father Mathew, tender to his wife as the elder
Hamlet, attached to his mother as Hamlet the younger, it would still
remain a fact indisputable to all of us in London, who have eyes to see
and ears to hear, that the Prince is addicted to vulgar amusements; that
he patronizes indecent exhibitions; that he is given to the
companionship of profligate men, and lends his helping hand to the
success and the popularity of immoral and lascivious women.

What is to be the effect upon England of the reign of the Prince of
Wales? Will England and her statesmen endure the rule of a profligate
sovereign? No country can have undergone in equal time a greater
revolution in public taste and sentiment at least, if not in morals,
than England has since the time of George the Fourth. No genius, no
eloquence, no political wisdom or merits could now induce the English
people to put up with the open and undisguised excesses of a Fox; nor
could any English statesman of the rank of Fox be found now who would
condescend to pander to the vices of a George the Fourth. Thirty years
of decorum in the Court, the Parliament, and the press have created a
public feeling in England which will not long bear to be too openly
offended by any one. But, although I may seem at first to be enunciating
a paradox, I must say that all this is rather in favor of the chances of
the Prince of Wales than against them. It will take so small a sacrifice
on his part to satisfy everybody, that only the very extravagance of
folly could lead him long astray on any unsatisfactory course, when once
he has become directly responsible to the nation. We are not exacting in
England as regards the private conduct of our great people. We only ask
them to be publicly decorous. Everywhere in English society there is a
quite unconscious, naive sort of Pharisaism, the unavowed but actual
principle of which is that it matters very little if a man does the
wrong thing, provided he publicly acts and says the right thing. I am
perfectly satisfied that the great bulk of respectable and Philistine
society in England would regard Robert Dale Owen, with his pure life and
his views on the question of divorce, as a far more objectionable person
than the veriest profligate who did evil stealthily, and professed to
maintain the theory of a rigid marriage bond. The Prince of Wales will
therefore need very little actual improvement in his way of life, in
order to be all that his future subjects will expect, or care to ask. No
one wants the Prince to be a man of ability; no one wishes him to be a
good speaker. If Albert Edward were to rise in the House of Lords some
night, and deliver a powerful and eloquent speech, as Prince Napoleon
has often done in the French Senate, the English public would be not
only surprised but shocked. Such a feat performed by a Prince would seem
almost as much out of place, as if he were to follow the example of
Caligula or Nero and exhibit himself in the arena as a gladiator. Of
course the idea of the Prince of Wales fulminating against the policy of
the Crown and the Government, after the fashion of Prince Napoleon,
would be simply intolerable to the British mind of to-day--a thing so
outrageous as indeed to be practically inconceivable. The Prince of
Wales's part during the coming years, whether as first subject or as
ruler, is as easy as could well be assigned to man. It is the very
reverse of Bottom's; it is to avoid all roaring. He must be decorous,
and we will put up with any degree of dulness; he must be decent, and we
will all agree to know nothing of any private compensations wherewith he
may repay himself for public propriety. All the influences of English
statesmanship, rank, religion, journalism, patriotism, Philistinism, and
flunkeyism, will instinctively combine to screen the throne against
scandal, if only the throne will consent to allow of the possibility of
such a protection. I have hardly ever known an Englishman whose
hostility to monarchical institutions went so far that he would not be
ready to say, "We have got a monarchy; let us try to make the best we
can of it." Therefore the Prince of Wales must be the very Marplot or
L'Etourdi of princes, if he cannot contrive to make himself endurable to
a people who will bear so much rather than be at the trouble of a
change. Of course it is possible that his faults may become grosser and
more unmanageable with years (indeed, he is quite old enough already to
have sown his wild oats long since); and it would be a hard trial upon
decorous English statesmen and the English public to endure an openly
profligate King. Yet even that nuisance I think would be endured for one
lifetime at all events, rather than encounter the danger and trouble of
any organic change.

So long as the Prince of Wales keeps out of politics, he may hold his
place well enough; the England of to-day could far better endure even a
George the Fourth than a George the Third. I have little doubt that the
Prince of Wales, when he comes to be King, will be discreet in this
matter at least. He has never indeed shown any particular interest in
political affairs, so far as I have heard. He seems to care little or
nothing about the contests of parties. Some three or four years ago, at
the time of the celebrated Adullamite secession from the Liberal party,
there was some grumbling among Radicals because it was reported that the
Prince of Wales had expressed a wish to make the acquaintance of Robert
Lowe, the brilliant, eccentric chief of the secession, and had had Lowe
brought to him and spent a long time talking with him; and it was urged
that this was done by the Prince to mark his approval of the Adullamites
and his dislike of radicalism. But just about the very same time the
Prince took some trouble to make the acquaintance of John Bright, and
paid what might have been considered very flattering attentions to the
great popular tribune. The Prince has more than once visited the Pope,
and he has likewise more than once visited Garibaldi. Indeed, he seems
to have a harmless liking for knowing personally all people who are
talked about; and I fancy he hunted up the Pope, and Garibaldi, and John
Bright, and Robert Lowe, just as he sends for Mr. Toole the comic actor,
or Blondin, or Chang the giant. Nothing can be safer and better for the
Prince in the future than to keep to this wholesome indifference to
politics. In England we could stand any length of the reign of King Log.
I shall not venture to conjecture what might happen if the Prince of
Wales were to develop a perverse inclination to "meddle and muddle" in
politics, because I think such a thing highly improbable. My impression
is, on the whole, that things will go on under the reign of the next
sovereign in England very much as they have been going on under the
present; that the Prince of Wales will be induced to pay a little more
attention to decorum and public propriety than he has hitherto done; and
that the people of England will laugh at him and cheer for him, talk
scandal about him and sing God save him, and finally endure him, on
somewhat the same principle as that which induces the New York public to
endure overcrowded street-cars and miserable postal arrangements--just
because it is less trouble to each individual to put up with his share
of a defective institution, than to go out of his way for the purpose of
endeavoring to organize any combination to get rid of it.




THE KING OF PRUSSIA.


Ronsard, in one of his songs addressed to his mistress, tells her that
in her declining years she will be able to boast that "When I was young
a poet sang of me." In a less romantic spirit the writer of this article
may boast in old age, should he attain to such blest condition, that
"When I was young a king spoke to me." That was the only king or
sovereign of any kind with whom I ever exchanged a word, and therefore I
may perhaps be allowed to be proud of the occasion and reluctant to let
it sleep in oblivion. The king was William, King of Prussia, and the
occasion of my being spoken to by a sovereign was when I, with some
other journalists, was formally presented to King William after his
coronation, and listened to a word or two of commonplace, good-humored
courtesy.

The coronation of King William took place, as many readers of THE GALAXY
are probably aware, in the old historic town of Koenigsberg, on the
extreme northeastern frontier of Prussia, a town standing on one of the
inlets of the Baltic Sea, where once the Teutonic Knights, mentioned by
Chaucer, were powerful. Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" had brought
Koenigsberg prominently before the eyes and minds of English-speaking
readers, just previously to the ceremony in which King William was the
most conspicuous performer. It is the city where Immanuel Kant passed
his long and fruitful life, and which he never quitted. It is a
picturesque city in its way, although not to be compared with its
neighbor Dantzic. It is a city of canals and streams, and many bridges,
and quaint, narrow, crooked streets, wherein are frequent long-bearded
and gabardined Jews, and where Hebrew inscriptions are seen over many
shop-windows and on various door-plates. In its centre the city is
domineered over by a Schloss, or castle-palace, and it was in the chapel
of this palace that the ceremony of coronation took place, which
provoked at the time so many sharp criticisms and so much of popular
ridicule.

The first time I saw the King was when he rode in procession through the
ancient city, some two or three days before the performance of the
coronation. He seemed a fine, dignified, handsome, somewhat bluff old
man--he was then sixty-four or sixty-five years of age--with gray hair
and gray moustache, and an expression which, if it did not denote
intellectual power, had much of cheerful strength and the charm of a
certain kind of frank manhood about it. He rode well--riding is one of
the accomplishments in which kings almost always excel--and his military
costume became him. Certainly no one was just then disposed to be very
enthusiastic about him, but every one was inclined to make the best of
the sovereign and the situation; to forget the past and look hopefully
into the future. The manner in which the coronation ceremony was
conducted, and the speech which the King delivered soon after it,
produced a terrible shock of disappointment; for in each the King
manifested that he understood the crown to be a gift not from his
people, but from heaven. To me the ceremonies in the chapel, splendid
and picturesque as was the _mise en scene_, appeared absurd and even
ridiculous. The King, bedizened in a regal costume which suggested Drury
Lane or Niblo's Garden, lifting a crown from off the altar (was it, by
the way, an altar?) and, without intervention of human aid other than
his own hands, placing it upon his head, to signify that he had his
crown from heaven, not from man; then putting another crown upon the
head of his wife, to show that _she_ derived her dignities from him; and
then turning round and brandishing a gigantic sword, as symbolical of
his readiness to defend his State and people--all this seemed to me too
suggestive of the _opera comique_ to suit the simple dignity of the
handsome old soldier. Far better and nobler did he look in his military
uniform and with his spiked helmet, as he sat on his horse in the
streets, than when, arrayed in crimson velvet cloak and other such stage
paraphernalia of conventional royalty, he stood in the castle chapel,
the central figure in a ceremonial of mediaeval splendor and worse than
mediaeval tediousness.

But the King's face, bearing, and manner, as I saw him in Koenigsberg,
and immediately afterwards in Berlin, agreeably disappointed me. It was
one of the best faces to be seen among all the throng at banquet and
ball and pageant during those days of gorgeous and heavy ceremonial. At
the coronation performances there were two other personages who may be
said to have divided public curiosity and interest with the King. One
was the illustrious Meyerbeer, who composed and conducted the coronation
ode, which thus became almost his swan-song, his latest notes before
death. The other was a man whose name has lately again divided attention
with that of the King of Prussia--Marshal MacMahon, Duke of Magenta.
MacMahon was sent to represent the Emperor of the French at the
coronation, and he was then almost fresh from the glory of his Lombardy
battles. There was great curiosity among the Koenigsberg public to get a
glimpse of this military hero; and although even Prussians could hardly
be supposed to take delight in a fame acquired at the expense of other
Germans, I remember being much struck by the quiet, candid good-humor
with which people acknowledged that he had beaten their countrymen.
There was, indeed, a little vexation and anger felt when some of the
representatives of Posen, the Prussian Poland, cheered somewhat too
significantly for MacMahon as he drove in his carriage from the palace.
The Prussians generally felt annoyed that the Poles should have thus
publicly and ostentatiously demonstrated their sympathy with France and
their admiration of the French general who had defeated a German army.
But except for this little ebullition of feeling, natural enough on both
sides, MacMahon was a popular figure at the King's coronation; and
before the ceremonies were over, the King himself had become anything
but popular. The foreigners liked him for the most part because his
manners were plain, frank, hearty, and agreeable, and to the foreigners
it was a matter of little consequence what he said or did in the
accepting of his crown. But the Germans winced under his blunt
repudiation of the principle of popular sovereignty, and in the minds of
some alarmists painful and odious memories began to revive and to
transform themselves into terrible omens for the future.

For this pleasant, genial, gray-haired man, whose smile had so much of
honest frankness and even a certain simple sweetness about it, had a
grim and bloodstained history behind him. Not Napoleon the Third himself
bore a more ominous record when he ascended the throne. The blood of the
Berliners was purple on those hands which now gave so kindly and cheery
a welcome to all comers. The revolutionists of Baden held in bitter hate
the stern prince who was so unscrupulous in his mode of crushing out
popular agitation. From Cologne to Koenigsberg, from Hamburg to Trieste,
all Germans had for years had reason only too strong to regard William
Prince of Prussia as the most resolute and relentless enemy of popular
liberty. When the Pope was inspiring the hearts of freemen and patriots
everywhere in Europe with sudden and splendid hopes doomed to speedy
disappointment, the Prince of Prussia was execrated with the Hapsburgs,
the Bourbons, and the Romanoffs. The one only thing commonly said in his
favor was that he was honest and would keep his word. The late Earl of
Clarendon, one of the most incautious and blundering of diplomatists
(whom after his death the English newspapers have been eulogizing as a
very sage and prince of statesmen), embodied this opinion sharply in a
few words which he spoke to a friend of mine in Koenigsberg. Clarendon
represented Queen Victoria at the coronation ceremonies, and my friend
happened in conversation with him to be expressing a highly disparaging
opinion of the King of Prussia. "There is just this to be said of him,"
the British Envoy remarked aloud in the centre of a somewhat
miscellaneous group of listeners--"he is an honest man and a man of his
word; he is not a Corsican conspirator."

Yes, this was and is the character of the King of Prussia. In good and
evil he kept his word. You might trust him to do as he had said. During
the greater part of his life the things he promised to do and did were
not such as free men could approve. He set out in life with a genuine
detestation of liberal principles and of anything that suggested popular
revolution. William of Prussia is certainly not a man of intellect or
broad intelligence or flexibility of mind. He would be in private life a
respectable, steady, rather dull sort of man, honest as the sun, just as
likely to go wrong as right in his opinions, perhaps indeed a shade more
likely to go wrong than right, and sure to be doggedly obstinate in any
opinion which he conceived to be founded on a principle. Horror of
revolution was naturally his earliest public sentiment. He was one of
the princes who entered Paris in 1815 with the allied sovereigns when
they came to stamp out Bonapartism; and he seemed to have gone on to
late manhood with the conviction that the mission of honest kings was to
prevent popular agitation from threatening the divine right of the
throne. Naturally enough, a man of such a character, whose chief merits
were steadfastness and honesty, was much disgusted by the vacillation,
the weakness, the half-unconscious deceitfulness of his brother, the
late Frederick William. Poor Frederick William! well-meaning, ill-doing
dreamer, "wind-changing" as Warwick, a sort of Rene of Anjou placed in a
responsible position and cast into a stormy age. What blighted hopes and
bloody streets were justly laid to his charge--to the charge of him who
asked nothing better than to be able to oblige everybody and make all
his people happy! Frederick William loved poetry and poets in a feeble,
_dilettante_ sort of way. He liked, one might say, to be thought to like
the Muses and the Graces. He used to insist upon Tieck the poet reading
aloud his new compositions to the royal circle of evenings; and when the
bard began to read the King would immediately fall asleep, and nod until
he nodded himself into wakefulness again; and then he would start up and
say, "Bravo, Tieck! Delightful, Tieck! Go on reading, Tieck!" and then
to sleep again. He liked in this sort of fashion the poetic and
sentimental aspects of revolution, and he dandled popular movements on
his royal knee until they became too demonstrative and frightened him,
and then he shook them off and shrieked for the aid of his strong-nerved
brother. One day Frederick William would be all for popular government
and representative monarchy, and what not; the next day he became
alarmed and receded, and was eager to crush the hopes he had himself
awakened. He was always breaking his word to his people and his country,
and yet he was not personally an untruthful man like English Charles the
First. In private life he would have been amiable, respectable, gently
aesthetical and sentimental; placed in a position of responsibility amid
the seething passions and conflicting political currents of 1848, he
proved himself a very dastard and caitiff. Germany could hardly have
had upon the throne of Prussia a worse man for such a crisis. He was
unlucky in every way; for his vacillation drew on him the repute of
hypocrisy, and his whimsical excitable manners procured for him the
reproach of intemperance. A sincerely pious man in his way, he was
almost universally set down as a hypocrite; a sober man who only drank
wine medicinally on the order of his physicians, he was favored
throughout Europe with the nickname of "King Clicquot." His utter
imbecility before and after the massacre of those whom he called his
"beloved Berliners," made him more detestable to Berlin than was his
blunt and stern brother, the present King, who gave with his own lips
the orders which opened fire on the population. A more unkingly figure
than that of poor, weak, well-intentioned, sentimental, lachrymose
Frederick William, never in our days at least has been seen under a
royal canopy.

It was but natural that such a character or no-character as this should
disgust his brother and successor, the present King. Frederick William,
as everybody knows, had no son to succeed him. The stout-hearted William
would have liked his brother and sovereign to be one thing or the other;
a despot of course he would have preferred, but he desired consistency
and steadfastness on whatever side. William, it must be owned, was for
many years a downright stupid, despotic old feudalist. At one of his
brother's councils he flung his sword upon the table and vowed that he
would rather appeal to that weapon than consent to rule over a people
who dared to claim the right of voting their own taxes. He appears to
have had the sincere stupid faith that Heaven directly tells or teaches
kings how to rule, and that a king fails in his religious duty who takes
counsel of aught save his own convictions. Perhaps a good many people in
lowlier life are like William of Prussia in this respect. He certainly
was not the only person in our time who habitually accepted his own
likings and dislikings as the appointed ordinances of Heaven. In my own
circle of acquaintance I think I have known such individuals.

Thus William of Prussia strode through life sword in hand menacing and,
where he could, suppressing popular movement. Yet he was saved from
utter detestation by the admitted integrity of his character--a virtue
so dear to Germans, that for its sake they will pardon harshness and
sometimes even stupidity. People disliked or dreaded him, but they
despised his brother. There was a certain simplicity, too, always seen
in William's mode of living which pleased the country. There was no
affectation about him; he was almost as much of a plain, unpretending
soldier as General Grant himself. Since he became King, anybody passing
along the famous Unter den Linden might see the white-haired, simple old
man writing or reading at the window of his palace. He was in this
respect a sort of military Louis Philippe; a Louis Philippe with a
strong purpose and without any craft. Therefore, when the death of his
brother in 1861 called him to the throne, he found a people anxious to
give him credit for every good quality and good purpose, willing to
forget the past and look hopefully into the coming time. They only
smiled at his renewal of the coronation ceremonies at Koenigsberg,
believing that the old soldier thought there was something of a
religious principle somehow mixed up in them, and that it was the
imaginary piety, not the substantial pomp, which commended to his mind
so gorgeous and costly an anachronism. After the coronation ceremonies,
however, came back the old unpopularity. The King, people said, has
learned nothing and forgotten nothing since he was Prince of Prussia.
Every act he did after his accession to the crown seemed only more and
more to confirm this impression. It was, I think, about this time that
the celebrated "Diary" of Varnhagen von Ense was published by the niece
of the deceased diplomatist; a diary full in itself of the most piquant
interest, but made yet more piquant and interesting by the bitter and
foolish persecution with which the King's officials endeavored to
suppress the work and punish its publishers. I have not read or even
seen the book for years, but the impression it made on me is almost as
distinct just now as it was when I laid down the last of its many and
vivacious volumes.

Varnhagen von Ense was a bitter creature, and the pen with which he
wrote his diary seems to have been dipped in gall of special acridity.
The diary goes over many years of Berlin court life, and the present
King of Prussia is one of its central figures. The author does not seem
to have had much respect for anybody; and King William was evidently an
object of his particular detestation. All the doings of the days of 1848
are recorded or commented on, and the pages are interspersed with
notices of the sharp ungenial things said by one royal personage of
another. If the late Frederick William chose to say an ill-natured thing
of Queen Victoria of England, down goes the remark in Varnhagen's pages,
and it is chronicled for the perusal of all the world. We learn from the
book that the present King of Prussia does not live on the most genial
terms with his wife Augusta; that Augusta has rather a marked
inclination towards Liberalism, and would find nothing more pleasant
than a little coquetry with Revolution. Varnhagen intimates that the
illustrious lady loved lions and novelties of any kind, and that at the
time he writes she would have been particularly glad to make the
acquaintance of Louis Blanc; and he more than hints at a decided
inclination on her part to _porter le pantalon_--an inclination which
her husband was not at all likely to gratify, consciously at least. Of
the progressive wife Varnhagen speaks with no whit more respect than of
the reactionary husband; and indeed he seems to look with irreverent and
cynical eyes on everything royal that comes under his observation.
Throughout the whole of the diary, the figure of the present King comes
out consistently and distinctly. William is always the blunt, dull,
wrong-headed, I might almost say pig-headed soldier-fanatic, who will do
and suffer and make others do and suffer anything, in a cause which he
believes to be right. With all Varnhagen von Ense's bitterness and
scorn, he gives us no worse idea of King William than just this. But
judging from the expression of the King's face, from his manner, and
from what I have heard of him in Berlin and elsewhere, I should say
there was a good deal of individual kindness and bonhomie in him for
which the critic did not give him credit. I think he is, on the whole,
better than Varnhagen von Ense chose to paint him or see him.

From Alexander Humboldt, as well as from Varnhagen von Ense, we learn a
good deal of the inner life of kings and queens and princes in Berlin.
There is something almost painful in reflecting on the kind of life
which Humboldt must have led among these people, whom he so cordially
despised, and whom in his private chroniclings he so held up to scorn.
The great philosopher assuredly had a huge treasure of hatred locked up
in his heart. He detested and scorned these royal personages, who so
blandly patronized him, or were sometimes so rough in their
condescending familiarity. Nothing takes the gilt off the life of courts
so much as a perusal of what Humboldt has written about it. One hardly
cares to think of so great, and on the whole so noble a man, living a
life of what seems so like perpetual dissimulation; of his enduring
these royal dullards and pert princesses, and doubtless seeming
profoundly reverential, and then going home of nights to put down on
paper his record of their vulgarity, and selfishness, and impertinence.
Sometimes Humboldt was not able to contain himself within the limits of
court politeness. The late King of Hanover (father of the now dethroned
King George) was a rough brutal trooper, who had made himself odious in
England as the Duke of Cumberland, and was accused by popular rumors of
the darkest crimes--unjustly accused certainly, in the case where he was
charged with the murder of his valet. The Duke did not make a very bad
sort of King, as kings then went; but he retained all his roughness and
coarseness of manner. He once accosted Humboldt in the palace of the
late King of Prussia, and in his pleasant graceful way asked why it was
that the Prussian court was always full of philosophers and loose
women--describing the latter class of visitors by a very direct and
expressive word. "Perhaps," replied Humboldt blandly, "the King invites
the philosophers to meet me, and the other persons to please your
Majesty!" Humboldt seems to have had little liking for any of the
illustrious personages he met under the roof of the King of Prussia. A
brief record he made of a conversation with the late Prince Albert (for
whom he expressed a great contempt) went far when it was published to
render the husband of Queen Victoria more unpopular and even detested in
Ireland than another George the Fourth would have been. The Irish people
will probably never forget that, according to the statement of Humboldt,
the Prince spoke contemptuously of Irish national aspirations, declared
he had no sympathy with the Irish, and that they were as restless, idle,
and unmanageable as the Poles--a pretty speech, the philosopher remarks,
to be made by the husband of the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland.
Some attempt was made when this record of Humboldt's came to light to
dispute the truth of it; but Humboldt was certainly not a liar--and
anyhow the Irish people believed the story and it did no little
mischief; and Humboldt in his grave might have had the consolation of
knowing that he had injured one prince at least.

What we learn of the King of Prussia through Humboldt is to the same
effect as the teaching of Varnhagen's cynical spirit; and I think, if
these keen irreverent critics did not do him wrong, his Majesty must
have softened and improved with the responsibilities of royalty. In many
respects one might be inclined to compare him with the English George
the Third. Both were indeed dull, decent, and fanatical. But there are
some wide differences. George the Third was obstinate in the worst
sense; his was the obstinacy of a stupid, self-conceited man who
believes himself wise and right in everything. Now, I fancy the King of
Prussia is only obstinate in what he conceives, rightly or wrongly, to
be questions of duty and of principle; and that there are many subjects,
political and otherwise, of which he does not believe himself to be the
most competent judge, and which therefore he is quite willing to leave
to the consideration and decision of others. For instance, it was made
evident that in the beginning of the transactions which were followed by
(although they cannot be said to have caused) the present war, the King
more than once expressed himself willing to do certain things, of which,
however, Count von Bismarck subsequently disapproved; and the King
quietly gave way. "You know better than I do; act as you think best,"
is, I believe, a quite common sentence on the lips of King William, when
he is talking with this or that trusted minister. Then again it has been
placed beyond all doubt that George the Third could be, when he thought
fit, the most unabashed and unscrupulous of liars; and not even hatred
itself will charge King William with any act or word of falsehood or
duplicity.

Steadily did the King grow more and more unpopular after his coronation.
All the old work of prosecuting newspapers and snubbing, or if possible
punishing, free-spoken politicians, came into play again. The King
quarrelled fiercely with his Parliament about the scheme of army
reorganization. I think he was right as to the scheme, although terribly
wrong-headed and high-handed in his way of forcing it down the throats
of the people, and, aided by his House of Peers, he waged a sort of war
upon the nation's representatives. Then first came to the front that
extraordinary political figure, which before very long had cast into the
shade every other in Europe, even including that of the Emperor
Napoleon; that marvellous compound of audacity and craft, candor and
cunning, the profound sagacity of a Richelieu, the levity of a
Palmerston; imperturbably good-humored, illimitably unscrupulous; a
patriot without lofty emotion of any kind, a statesman who could
sometimes condescend to be a juggler; part bully, part buffoon, but
always a man of supreme courage, inexhaustible resources of brain and
tongue--always in short a man of genius. I need hardly add that I am
speaking of the Count von Bismarck.

At the time of the Schleswig-Holstein campaign, there was probably no
public man in Europe so generally unpopular as the King of Prussia,
except perhaps his Minister, the Count von Bismarck. In England it was
something like an article of faith to believe that the King was a
bloodthirsty old tyrant, his Prime Minister a combination of Strafford
and Sejanus, and his subjects generally a set of beer-bemuddled and
servile blockheads. The dislike felt toward the King was extended to the
members of his family, and the popular conviction in England was that
the Princess Victoria, wife of the King's son, had a dull coarse
drunkard for a husband. It is perfectly wonderful how soon an absurdly
erroneous idea, if there is anything about it which jumps with the
popular humor, takes hold of the public mind of England. The English
people regarded the Prussians with utter detestation and contempt. Not
only that, but they regarded it as quite a possible and even likely
thing that poor brave little Denmark, with a population hardly larger
than that of the city of New York, could hold her own, alone, against
the combined forces of Austria and Prussia. One might have thought that
there never was a Frederick the Great or an Archduke Charles; that the
only part ever played in history by Germans was that of impotent
braggarts and stupid cowards. When there seemed some prospect of
England's drawing the sword for Denmark, "Punch" published a cartoon
which was very popular and successful. It represented an English sailor
and soldier of the conventional dramatic style, looking with utter
contempt at two awkward shambling boobies with long hair and huge
meerschaums--one booby supposed to represent Prussia, the other Austria;
and Jack Tar says to his friend the redcoat: "They can't expect us to
_fight_ fellows like those, but we'll kick them, of course, with
pleasure." This so fairly represented the average public opinion of
England that there was positively some surprise felt in London when it
was found that the Prussians really could fight at all. Towards the
Austrians there was nothing like the same ill-feeling; and when
Bismarck's war against Austria (I cannot better describe it) broke out
shortly after, the sympathy of England went almost unanimously with the
enemy of Prussia. Ninety-nine men out of every hundred firmly believed
that Austria would clutch Italy with one hand and Prussia with the
other, and easily choke the life out of both. About the merits of the
quarrel nobody in England outside the range of a very few politicians
and journalists troubled himself at all. It was settled that Austria had
somehow come to represent the cause of human freedom and progress; that
the King of Prussia was a stupid and brutal old trooper, hurried to his
ruin by the evil counsels of a drunken Mephistopheles; and that the
Austrian forces would simply walk over the Prussians into Berlin. There
was but one newspaper in London (and it has since died) which ventured
to suggest, first, that perhaps the Prussians had the right side of the
quarrel, and next, that perhaps they would have the better in the fight.

With the success of Prussia at Sadowa ended King William's personal
unpopularity in Europe. Those who were prepared to take anything like a
rational view of the situation began to see that there must be some
manner of great cause behind such risks, sacrifices, and success. Those
who disliked Prussia more than ever, as many in France did, were
disposed to put the King out of their consideration altogether, and to
turn their detestation wholly on the King's Minister. In fact, Bismarck
so entirely eclipsed or occulted the King, that the latter may be said
to have disappeared from the horizon of European politics. His good
qualities or bad qualities no longer counted for aught in the estimation
of foreigners. Bismarck was everything, the King was nothing. Now I wish
the readers of THE GALAXY not to take this view of the matter. In
everything which has been done by Prussia since his accession to the
throne, King William has counted for something. His stern uncompromising
truthfulness, seen as clearly in the despatches he sent from recent
battle-fields as in any other deeds of his life, has always counted for
much. So too has his narrow-minded dread of anything which he believes
to savor of the revolution. So has his thorough and devoted Germanism. I
am convinced that it would have been far more easy of late to induce
Bismarck to make compromises with seemingly powerful enemies at the
expense of German soil, than it would have been to persuade Bismarck's
master to consent to such proposals. The King's is far more of a typical
German character (except for its lack of intellect) than that of
Bismarck, in whom there is so much of French audacity as well as of
French humor. On the other hand, I would ask my readers not to rush into
wild admiration of the King of Prussia, or to suppose that liberty owes
him personally any direct thanks. King William's subjects know too well
that they have little to thank him for on that score. Strange as the
comparison may seem at first, it is not less true that the enthusiasm
now felt by Germans for the King is derived from just the same source as
the early enthusiasm of Frenchmen for the first Napoleon. In each man
his people see the champion who has repelled the aggression of the
insolent foreigner, and has been strong enough to pursue the foreigner
into his own home and there chastise him for his aggression. The blind
stupidity of Austria and the crimes of Bonapartism have made King
William a patriot King. When Thiers wittily and bitterly said that the
Second Empire had made two great statesmen, Cavour and Bismarck, he
might have said with still closer accuracy that it had made one great
sovereign, William of Prussia. Never man attained such a position as
that lately won by King William with less of original "outfit" to
qualify him for the place. Five or six years ago the King of Prussia was
as much disliked and distrusted by his own subjects as ever the Emperor
of the French was by the followers of the Left. Look back to the famous
days when "Bockum-Dolff's hat" seemed likely to become a symbol of civil
revolution in Germany. Look back to the time when the King's own son and
heir apparent, the warrior Crown Prince who since has flamed across so
many a field of blood, felt called upon to make formal protest in a
public speech against the illiberal, repressive, and despotic policy of
his father! Think of these things, and say whether any change could be
more surprising than that which has converted King William into the
typical champion and patriot of Germany; and when you seek the
explanation of the change, you will simply find that the worst enemies
of Prussia have been unwittingly the kindest friends and the best
patrons of Prussia's honest and despotic old sovereign.

I think the King of Prussia's subjects were not wrong when they disliked
and dreaded him, and I also think they are now not wrong when they trust
and applaud him. It has been his great good fortune to reign during a
period when the foreign policy of the State was of infinitely greater
importance than its domestic management. It became the business of the
King of Prussia to help his country to assert and to maintain a national
existence. Nothing better was needed in the sovereign for this purpose
than the qualities of a military dictator, and the King, in this case,
was saved all trouble of thinking and planning. He had but to accept and
agree to a certain line of policy--a certain set of national
principles--and to put his foot down on these and see that they were
carried through. For this object the really manly and sturdy nature of
the King proved admirably adapted. He upheld manfully and firmly the
standard of the nation. His defective qualities were rendered inactive,
and had indeed no occasion or chance to display themselves, while all
that was good of him came into full activity and bold relief. But I do
not believe that the character of the King in any wise changed. He was a
dull, honest, fanatical martinet when he turned his cannon against
German liberals in 1848; he was a dull, honest, fanatical martinet when
he unfurled the flag of Prussia against the Austrians in 1866 and
against the French in 1870. The brave old man is only happy when doing
what he thinks right; but he wants alike the intellect and the
susceptibilities which enable people to distinguish right from wrong,
despotism from justice, necessary firmness from stolid obstinacy. But
for the wars and the great national issues which rose to claim instant
decision, King William would have gone on dissolving Parliaments and
punishing newspapers, levying taxes without the consent of
representatives, and making the police-officer the master of Berlin. The
vigor which was so popular when employed in resisting the French, would
assuredly otherwise have found occupation in repressing the Prussians. I
see nothing to admire in King William but his courage and his honesty.
People who know him personally speak delightedly of his sweet and genial
manners in private life; and I have observed that, like many another old
_moustache_, he has the art of making himself highly popular with the
ladies. There is a celebrated little _prima donna_ as well known in
London as in Berlin, who can only speak of the bluff monarch as _der
suesse Koenig_--"the sweet King." Indeed, there are not wanting people who
hint that Queen Augusta is not always quite pleased at the manner in
which the venerable soldier makes himself agreeable to dames and
demoiselles. Certainly the ladies seem to be generally very enthusiastic
about his Majesty when they come into acquaintanceship with him, and to
the _prima donna_ I have mentioned his kindness and courtesy have been
only such as are well worthy of a gentleman and of a king. Still we all
know that it does not take a great effort on the part of a sovereign to
make people, especially women, think him very delightful. I do not,
therefore, make much account of King William's courtesy and _bonhomie_
in estimating his character. For all the service he has done to Germany
let him have full thanks; but I cannot bring myself to any warmth of
personal admiration for him. It is indeed hard to look at him without
feeling for the moment some sentiment of genuine respect. The fine head
and face, with its noble outlines and its frank pleasant smile, the
stately, dignified form, which some seventy-five years have neither
bowed nor enfeebled, make the King look like some splendid old paladin
of the court of Charlemagne. He is, indeed, despite his years, the
finest physical specimen of a sovereign Europe just now can show.
Compare him with the Emperor Napoleon, so many years his junior--compare
his soldierly presence, his manly bearing, his clear frank eyes, his
simple and sincere expression, with the prematurely wasted and crippled
frame, the face blotched and haggard, the lack-lustre eyes which seem
always striving to avoid direct encounter with any other glance, the
shambling gait, the sinister look of the nephew of the great Bonaparte,
and you will say that the Prussians have at least had from the beginning
of their antagonism an immense advantage over their rivals in the
figurehead which their State was enabled to exhibit. But I cannot make a
hero out of stout King William, although he has bravery enough of the
common, military kind, to suit any of the heroes of the "Nibelungen
Lied." He never would, if he could, render any service to liberty; he
cannot understand the elements and first principles of popular freedom;
to him the people is always, as a child, to be kept in leading strings
and guided, and, if at all boisterous or naughty, smartly birched and
put in a dark corner. There is nothing cruel about King William; that is
to say, he would not willingly hurt any human creature, and is, indeed,
rather kind-hearted and humane than otherwise. He is as utterly
incapable of the mean spites and shabby cruelties of the great
Frederick, whose statue stands so near his palace, as he is incapable of
the savage brutalities and indecencies of Frederick's father. He is, in
fact, simply a dull old disciplinarian, saturated through and through
with the traditions of the feudal party of Germany, his highest merit
being the fact that he keeps his word--that he is "a still strong man"
who "cannot lie;" his noblest fortune being the happy chance which
called on him to lead his country's battles, instead of leaving him free
to contend against, and perhaps for the time to crush, his country's
aspirations after domestic freedom. Kind Heaven has allowed him to
become the champion and the representative of German unity--that unity
which is Germany's immediate and supreme need, calling for the
postponement of every other claim and desire; and this part he has
played like a man, a soldier, and a king. But one can hardly be expected
to forget all the past, to forget what Humboldt and Varnhagen von Ense
wrote, what Jacobi and Waldeck spoke, what King William did in 1848, and
what he said in 1861; and unless we forget all this and a great deal
more to the same effect, we can hardly help acknowledging that but for
the fortunate conditions which allowed him to prove himself the best
friend of German unity, he would probably have proved himself the worst
enemy of German liberty.




VICTOR EMANUEL, KING OF ITALY.


I have before me just now a little silver coin picked up in Savoy very
soon after Italy had become a kingdom, and Savoy had ceased to be part
of it. That was in truth the only thing that made the coin in any way
specially interesting--the fact that it happened to be in chance
circulation through Savoy when Savoy had no longer any claim to it. So,
for that little scrap of melancholy interest I have since kept the coin
in my purse, and it has made many journeys with me in Europe and
America; and I suppose I can never be utterly destitute while it remains
in my possession. Now, the head which is displayed upon that coin is not
of kingly mould. The mint has flattered its royal master much less than
is usual with such portrait painters. An English silver or gold coin of
this year's mintage will still represent Her Majesty Queen Victoria as a
beautiful young woman of twenty, with features worthy of a Greek statue
and a bust shapely enough for Dryden's Iphigenia. But the coin of King
Victor Emanuel has little flattery in it. There is the coarse, bulldog
cast of face; there are the heavy eye-brows, the unshapely nose, the
hideous moustache, the receding forehead, and all the other beauties and
graces of the "bloat King's" countenance. Certainly the face on the coin
is not bloated enough, and there is too little animalism displayed in
the back of the head, to do justice to the first King of Italy.
Moreover, the coin gives somehow the idea of a small man, and the King
of Italy finds it not easy to get a horse strong enough to bear the load
of Antony. But for a coin it is a wonderfully honest and truthful piece
of work, quite a model to other mints, and it gave when it was issued as
fair an idea as a little piece of silver could well give of the head and
face of Europe's most ill-favored sovereign.

What a chance Victor Emanuel had of being a hero of romance! No king
perhaps ever had such a chance before, and missed it so persistently.
Europe seemed at one time determined, whether he would or no, to make a
hero, a knight, a _preux chevalier_, out of the son of Charles Albert.
Not Charles Edward, the brilliant, unfortunate Stuart himself, not
Gustavus Adolphus even seemed to have been surrounded by such a romantic
rainbow of romance and of hope. When, after the crowning disaster of
Novara, Victor Emanuel's weak, vacillating, unlucky, and not very
trustworthy father abdicated the crown of Sardinia in favor of his son,
the latter seemed in the eyes of liberal Europe to represent not merely
the hopes of all true Italians, but the best hopes of liberty and
progress all over the world. There was even then a vague idea afloat
through Europe--although Europe did not know how Cavour had already
accepted the idea as a principle of action--that with her tremendous
defeats Piedmont had won the right to hoist the standard of one Italy.
This then was the cause which the young King was taken to represent. He
had been baptized in blood to that cause. He represented Italy united
and free--free from Austrian and Pope, from political and religious
despotism. He was at all events no carpet knight. He had fought bravely
on more than one fearful field of battle; he had looked on death closely
and undismayed; he had been wounded in fighting for Italy against the
Austrian. It was said of the young sovereign--who was only Duke of Savoy
then--that on the night of Novara, when all was over save retreat and
humiliation, he shook his dripping sword at the ranks of the conquering
Austrians and exclaimed, "Italy shall make herself for all that!"
Probably the story is substantially true, although Victor Emanuel may
perhaps have used stronger expressions if he spoke at all; for no one
ever doubted his courage and coolness in the hour of danger. But true or
not, the anecdote exactly illustrated the light in which the world was
prepared to regard the young sovereign of Sardinia--as the hope of Italy
and of freedom, the representative of a defeat which he was determined
and destined to convert into a victory.

Not many years after this, and while the lustre of his misfortunes and
the brilliancy of his hopes still surrounded him, King Victor Emanuel
visited England. He was welcomed everywhere with a cordiality of
personal interest and admiration not often accorded by any people to a
foreign king. Decidedly it was a hard thing to look at him and yet
retain the thought of a hero of romance. He was not then nearly so
bloated and burly as he is now; and he was at least some dozen or
fourteen years younger. But even then how marvellously ill-favored he
was; how rough and coarse-looking; how unattractive in manner; how
brusque and uncouth in gesture and bearing; how liable to fits of an
apparently stolid silence; how utterly devoid of grace and dignity! His
huge straw-colored moustache, projecting about half a foot on each side
of his face, was as unsightly a piece of manly decoration as ever royal
countenance displayed. Yet the public tried to forget all those external
defects and still regard him as a hero of romance somehow, anyhow. So
fully was he believed to be a representative of civil and religious
freedom in Italy, that one English religious society of some kind--I
forget which it was--actually went the length of presenting an address
to him, in which they flourished about the errors of Popery as freely as
if they were appealing to an Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great.
Cavour gave them very neatly and tersely the snub that their ignorance
and presumption so well deserved; and their address did not obtain an
honored place among Victor Emanuel's memorials of his visit to England.

He was very hospitably entertained by Queen Victoria, who is said to
have suffered agonies of martyrdom from her guest's everlasting
cigar--the good soul detests tobacco as much as King James himself
did--and even more from his occasional outbursts of roystering
compliment and canteen love-making toward the ladies of her staid and
modest court. One of the household edicts, I think, of Queen Elizabeth's
court was that no gallant must "toy with the maids, under pain of
fourpence." Poor Victor Emanuel's slender purse would have had to bear a
good many deductions of fourpence, people used to hint, if this penal
decree had prevailed in his time at Windsor or Osborne. But Queen
Victoria was very patient and friendly. Cavour has left some pleasant
descriptions of her easy, unaffected friendliness toward himself.
Guizot, it will be remembered, has described her as the stiffest of the
stiff, freezing into petrifaction a whole silent circle by her
invincible coldness and formality. I cannot pretend to reconcile the
conflicting accounts of these two eminent visitors, but certainly Cavour
has drawn some animated and very attractive pictures of Queen Victoria's
almost girlish good-humor and winning familiarity. However that may be,
the whole heart of free England warmed to Victor Emanuel, and was ready
to dub him in advance the chosen knight of liberty, the St. George of
Italy, before whose resistless sword every dragon of despotism and
superstition was to grovel in the dust.

So the King went his way, and the next thing the world heard of him was
that he was in league with Louis Napoleon against the Austrian, and that
the child his daughter was to be married to the obese and elderly Prince
Napoleon, whose eccentric genius, varied accomplishments, and thrilling
eloquence were then unrecognized and unknown. Then came the triumphs of
Magenta and Solferino, and it was made plain once more to the world
that Victor Emanuel had the courage of a true soldier. He actually took
a personal share of the fighting when the Italians were in action. He
did not sit on his horse, far away from the bullets, like his imperial
ally, and direct the movements of the army by muttering "_C'est bien_,"
when an aide-de-camp galloped up to announce to him as a piece of solemn
farce that this or that general had already accomplished this or that
operation. No; Victor Emanuel took his share of the fighting like a
king. In the affair of San Martino he led an attack himself, and
encouraged his soldiers by bellowing in stentorian voice quite a clever
joke for a king, just as he was about to charge. A crack regiment of
French Zouaves (the French Zouaves were soldiers in those days) was so
delighted with the Sardinian King that it elected him a corporal of the
regiment on the field of battle--a quite wonderful piece of compliment
from a Zouave regiment to a foreign sovereign. Not so long before had
Lamoriciere declared that "Italians don't fight," and here was a crack
Zouave regiment enthusiastic about the fighting capacity of an Italian
King. The irony of fate, it will be remembered, decreed soon after that
Lamoriciere should himself lay down his arms before an Italian general
and Italian soldiers.

Out of that war, then, Victor Emanuel emerged still a hero. But the
world soon began to think that he was only a hero in the field. The sale
of Savoy and Nice much shocked the public sentiment of Europe. The house
of Savoy, as an English orator observed, had sprung from the womb of the
mountains which the unworthy heir of Savoy sold to a stranger. As the
world had given to Victor Emanuel the credit of virtues which he never
possessed, it was now ready to lay on him all the burden of deeds which
were not his. Whether the cession of Savoy was right or wrong, Victor
Emanuel was not to blame, under the hard circumstance

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