Thursday, January 24, 2019

Baron Otto von Bismarck to John L. Motley, April 17, 1863

Berlin,
April 17, 1863.

My Dear Motley: You have given me a great pleasure with your letter of the 9th, and I shall be very grateful to you if you keep your promise to write oftener and longer. I hate politics, but, as you say truly, like the grocer hating figs, I am none the less obliged to keep my thoughts increasingly occupied with those figs. Even at this moment, while I am writing to you, my ears are full of it. I am obliged to listen to particularly tasteless speeches out of the mouths of uncommonly childish and excited politicians, and I have therefore a moment of unwilling leisure, which I cannot use better than in giving you news of my welfare. I never thought that in my riper years I should be obliged to carry on such an unworthy trade as that of a parliamentary minister. As envoy, although an official, I still had the feeling of being a gentleman; as [parliamentary] minister one is a Helot. I have come down in the world, and hardly know how.

April 18. I wrote as far as this yesterday, then the sitting came to an end; five hours' Chamber until three o'clock; then one hour's riding; one hour's report to his Majesty; three hours at an incredibly dull dinner, old important Whigs; then two hours' work; finally, a supper with a colleague, who would have been hurt if I had slighted his fish.

This morning I had hardly breakfasted before Karolyi was sitting opposite to me; he was followed without interruption by Denmark, England, Portugal, Russia, France, whose ambassador I was obliged to remind at one o'clock that it was time for me to go to the House of Phrases. I am sitting again in the latter; hear people talk nonsense, and end my letter. All these people have agreed to approve our treaties with Belgium, in spite of which twenty speakers scold each other with the greatest vehemence, as if each wished to make an end of the other; they are not agreed about the motives which make them unanimous, hence, alas! a regular German squabble about the emperor's beard — querelle d'Allemand. You Anglo-Saxon Yankees have something of the same kind also. Do you all know exactly why you are waging such furious war with each other? All certainly do not know, but they kill each other con amore — that 's the way the business comes to them. Your battles are bloody, ours wordy. These chatterers really cannot govern Prussia. I must bring some opposition to bear against them; they have too little wit and too much self-complacency — stupid and audacious. Stupid, in all its meanings, is not the right word; considered individually, these people are sometimes very clever, generally educated — the regulation German university culture; but of politics, beyond the interests of their own church tower, they know as little as we knew as students, and even less; as far as external politics go, they are also, taken separately, like children. In all other questions they become childish as soon as they stand together in corpore. In the mass stupid, individually intelligent.

When over-reading my letter just before I go to meet in my bed “tired nature's sweet restorer,” I find that under the noisy distractions of parliamentary bullying I have written down a suite of dull commonplaces, and I was about to burn it, but considering the difficulty in this dreary sort of life of finding out an undisturbed moment and a more sensible disposition of mind, I think, like Pontius Pilate, “Quod scripsi, scripsi.” These drops of my own ink will show you at least that my thoughts, when left alone, readily turn to you. I never pass by old Logier's house, in the Friedrichstrasse, without looking up at the windows that used to be ornamented by a pair of red slippers sustained on the wall by the feet of a gentleman sitting in the Yankee way, his head below and out of sight. I then gratify my memory with remembrance of “good old colony times when we were roguish chaps.”1 (Poor) Flesh is traveling with his daughter, I do not know where in this moment. My wife is much obliged for your kind remembrance, and also the children. The little one wrenched his foot in tumbling down a staircase, and my daughter in bed with a sore throat, but no harm in that. They are well, after all.

Now, an affectionate farewell. I can't go on writing such an unorthographic language as English so late at night, but please try it yourself soon again. Your hand looks like cranes' feet, but is very legible. Is mine the same?

Your faithful old friend,
V. Bismarck.
_______________

1 In February, 1888, Prince Bismarck, in his great speech to the German Reichsrath, quoted this college song, adding at the same time that he had learned it from his “dear deceased friend John Motley.”

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 325-30

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