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
