By Emil Ludwig
BISMARCK, by Emil Ludwig, in his Genius and Character, New York, Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1927, pp. 41-52.
Emil Ludwig （1881-1948）, German biographer and dramatist, widely known for his studies of Bismarck （1912）, Napoleon （1924）, William Hohenzollern （1925） and Lincoln （1929）.
Earthly majesty is always akin to the fallen angel, who is proud and unhappy, beautiful but troubled, and whose plans and efforts, though vast, are denied success.
Powerful frame! How much was Bismarck indebted to his physique although he hardly ever came to actual tests of fist and muscle! His body and his accomplishments were identical:the will of a giant vibrant with the electric charge of magnetic nerves. He was like those mastiffs of his which, precisely because of this resemblance, he loved: strong and nervous, heavy and somber, formidable, and unrelenting towards an offender—loyal to but one person, his master, yet devoted to him until death. Bismarck was as powerful, as nervous, and as dangerous as his dogs.
Like every strong man, he once saved his own life. An assassin in Unter den Linden had fired one shot at him and was about to fire a second, this time at closer range. It would have been fatal, had not Bismarck seized the man's right hand and hurled the weapon to the ground. On another occasion, when he was younger, he had plunged into the water after a man who was drowning—and for the rest of his life, among all the insignia of honor which “go with the make-up of a minister,” he took pride only in the medal commemorating this rescue. Again, he saved Prussia, when the king was about to yield to popular pressure and to abdicate, by taking hold of the king's scabbard and literally shaking him into a mood of self-defense.
None of these three equally important acts would have been possible without the assistance of his powerful physique. Wherever he went, he was the biggest man present. At a court ball, when he was in his twenties, his stature elicited the admiration of his first master. Emperors of the French and of the Russians, kings, princes, and princesses—all were impressed to see him stoop as he came through the door and then draw himself up again to his full height. Generals and politicians, most of them his opponents for one reason or another, were often astounded, and even terrified by his build.
And yet his intimates, and sometimes mere government clerks, had seen the giant collapse, convulsed with weeping, tortured with despair, his features twitching and distorted. This is the other side of Bismarck, an aspect of him which the Germans readily gloss over, but without which the nationalistic side of his character could never have been effectual.
For while the spirit of history was still undecided whether or not to unite the German race after a thousand years of dissent, it produced a man whose own impulses were so rent that he alone was capable of coping with this other pision. His own personal struggle, a restless oscillation between pathos and criticism, duty and power, flight and aggression, loyalty and vengeance, had its parallel for him in the condition of Germany; and this almost mystical, yet natural kinship gave him both the desire and the courage to battle for national integration. Almost unknown to himself, a powerful stream of emotion was flowing beneath the craftiness of the politician. This produced a vision, a kind of dream, which gave him consistency of purpose despite the seeming opportunism of his methods. And he could work only at white heat; rapidly, in barely eight years, Bismarck the Prussian forged Germany.
For Germany could not be subdued except by a man of emotion who, like the artist, was capable of casting his molten feelings into forms of solid iron. It was really an artist who shaped this realm of music into a state.
But he was also a realist; for this same soil nourishes a race of realists who attempt to balance their weakness for reverie and philosophy by a deliberate propulsion towards externals—their cult of action being, probably through fear, exaggerated into wariness. Bismarck was hard and realistic, with a keen sense of cold facts and an almost total indifference to principles. All during his thirty years of steadily mounting power, and even at the last when he was a dictator, he would ally himself with any party or any platform and oppose any party or any platform, purely as the occasion demanded. He hated passionately, lying awake far into the night. And the next day he would shatter his opponents like a bolt of lightning. But the very moment he had need of them, he would reverse his tactics and become conciliatory. It is absurd to ask just how far such a policy was pursued in the interests of his cause and how far in the interests of his personal power: for this man was a monomaniac who cared for no cause but his own and who felt that he alone could properly defend it!
Nevertheless Bismarck's primum mobile was neither the will to power nor the desire for fame—as to witness his long period of aimlessness in youth. At the age of thirty-five, when Bismarck the noble was taking his first steps into politics, Napoleon the parvenu was already emperor. He did not settle upon this career through any desire to be a dictator, nor any theoretical love for a fatherland which did not yet exist, nor through pride in Prussia, his more immediate home. But when he took trowel in hand and began laying stone upon stone, he was moved by the true artist's wish to produce order out of chaos, to give form to the formless—and along with this went a sound and thoroughgoing misanthropy which led him to ridicule the failures of his predecessors.
The German genius has always been either ideologist or artist. This people has never produced the pure homo politicus.
For this reason he was all the more violent in his opposition to the ideologists. He had little enough respect for philosophy, but he positively despised the pedants of the Frankfort variety, who had insisted, while the country ran riot, on examining in the light of ultimate philosophical principles every proposition laid before the assembly. A landowner from the Pomeranian back-country, he placed a low value on city-bred intellectuals and professional men. He was self-taught, a political primitive; he stepped abruptly into the arena without previous experience or training, and also, of course, without party prejudices. Stammeringly, he hurled his doctrine of German unity at the astonished ranks of the diet until the king had singled him out. What could attract a sickly dreamer like Frederick William to this uncouth giant except that obscure element above and beyond the intellect which they had in common? Did this stranger arrive from his provincial estate with a fully worked-out plan of action? On the contrary, he had nothing but the vaguest notion of what he wanted, nothing but courage and the mutterings of anger.
For there was heavy cargo of courage in this powerful hulk: a proud self-consciousness formed the ballast for a vessel shaken with antinomies, and this alone assured it of a voyage without mishap. Bismarck's first word to a king was a rebuke, as was also his last: March '48, March '9o. When not fighting, he was hardly more than a misanthrope and a scoffer: his great energies were drained by doubt, cynicism, and melancholy. But the presence of an enemy restored them to unity, converted them into action and purpose, and gave him self-reliance by providing an external force against which his self-reliance could be directed. And the nearer an enemy, the keener his capacity for action. He fought with a deeper devotion in domestic issues than against a foreign foe. Bismarck hated the German politicians Windhorst and Richter, but not Napoleon.
At bottom Bismarck was a thorough revolutionary. His first appearance as he came out of the oak forests of his birthplace and threw himself with fury into the narrow machinations of party politics; his attitude towards the kings and princes of his own country, and later towards foreign kings and emperors;the bold and simple “No” which he hurled at the political maxims of his times; his insistence upon ruling without interference from others; his continual threat of resigning; the splendid clarity, informality, and newness of his diction—all these defiant traits of a freedom-loving temperament belong to a man who, had he been born of the submerged classes, would have advanced behind the red flag.
He was not like Goethe who needed order to encompass his own chaos: he was disharmonic through and through, neither resting nor wanting rest. For it is not ideas, but emotions, which make the revolutionary; and the man who champions tradition with a fresh and terrorizing passionateness is often more revolutionary than a man who fights tradition with a calm pen or among the ranks of the many.
In reality, Bismarck created a new form of politics, in Germany at least. He revolutionized the methods of dealing with popular rebellions, founded the new school of diplomatic practice which openly struck terror instead of employing flattery and craft as in the school of Metternich. After a dinner in London, when he had outlined his program with astounding firmness, Disraeli, who saw him in the true perspective, said to his guests: “Take care of that man, he means what he says.”
With these strong impulses to break the bonds of custom, with so much courage and self-reliance, such forcefulness, and scorn—what kept him faithful to the old forms? What led him to decide socially against the future? What linked him with dynasties which had already begun to lose their meaning?
His blood. When he was being trained in the hunt, the old woodsman whose great-grandfather had served a Bismarck in the time of young Freddy called the boy “Herr Junker.” He saw the inadequacy of his class, their degeneration and idleness, the futility and mismanagement with which many of his cousins fulfilled their inherited offices; and he saw the intelligence, industry, and pride of common citizens triumph over the mummified prejudices of the nobility—yet he constituted himself the guardian of his class and summoned his genius to its defense.
Above all else he defended the king. Not that he considered the king's blood to be better than his own: for more than once he told the Hohenzollerns to their faces that the Bismarcks had tenanted the realm longer than they. But he saw in the king the apex of a pyramid which, if truncated, would seen odd, and perhaps even ludicrous. He was unwilling to imperil the hereditary prerogatives of his name; like the usual noble, the usual landowner, he was loath to relinquish any worldly possessions for theoretical reasons; he could never porce himself from this sense of superiority which found its sanction in the very force of character behind it—and thus he gave unto the king that which was the king's.
For his house still flourished with manly vigor; the nihilism of an age of increasing transvaluations had not yet broken through his feudalistic code; and tradition was still powerful enough to extend its influence when aided by so faithful a scion. It seems as though this Junker inherited absolutely nothing from his mother, he was so totally lacking in any evidence of her bourgeois blood. Fifty years later—and Bismarck, with his temperament and will power, his fearlessness and independence, would have been a leader of the new era.
Thus he remained all his life a royalist, and grounded his work on dynasties. He himself asserted that his loyalty to the king was purely the result of his faith in God, yet this faith was forced to take strange shapes. He was a Protestant, highly unmystical, inveterately rationalistic. For years, up to the day of his death, he kept a prayer book lying on his night table; it was interleaved with blank sheets on which he jotted down the political ideas that came to him at night: truly a Bismarckian species of devotion.
In any case, no such transcendental reasons prompted him to show the least respect for other princes, and especially other German ones, even though they too felt that they ruled by pine right. On the contrary, he was scornful and heaped irony upon their heads. In the whole line of Prussian kings he loved no one, not even the great Frederick—and he cared still less for the rulers under which he himself had served. But he was bound to them by a feeling for feudal ties which must have been handed down through many generations, since blood alone can explain it. The noble granted fealty to his king through expecting fealty of his vassals. So great was the love of freedom in this revolutionary temperament.
The relationship always remained essentially one of equal to equal. And while he always observed the formalities, singing himself “most humbly” or “most obediently,” he eyed the conduct of his master with suspicion and bit the golden chain when he felt its pressure.
At last he even bit the master's hand—and nothing shows Bismarck's latent revolutionary tendencies more clearly than the way he rose up at the first provocation against the one authority he had recognized, the king. The significant fact is not his going, but his way of going: every detail of this drama, in which a powerful old man was called upon to comply with the arbitrary wishes of a weak young sovereign, points to the imperiousness, the intransigence, and the thorough independence of his character. The hereditary nobility of his blood provided a rigid code which would not permit him to conceive of his work in terms of the German people rather than in terms of Prussian kings. But nothing, not even the faith he paraded so readily, could hinder another kind of nobility, the nobility of his temperament, from defying a prince by God's grace exactly as the young idiot deserved.
At times in the past he had ventured cautious criticisms or had, though always with the bearing of the liegeman, openly voiced objections when behind closed doors. But now, aroused like a mastiff, he broke into a rage against the master who had struck him unjustly. Bismarck's fall disclosed impulses which his inherited code had kept concealed for years. Only the lack of a great opponent, and the legend which the Germans built up around the mere pretext of a reconciliation, have been able to obscure for a time the violence of this outburst.
Yet even now he winced at the thought of open rebellion. Was youth all that this old man of seventy-five needed? Or were his royalist leanings still an unsurmountable obstacle? In any case, he did not go beyond farewell tirades in which he fired disturbing truths point-blank at his king and the other princes. Then he retired in fury to his den, hurling out stones which crackled the dilapidated royal masonry.
But the steel edifice of the state remained standing. For twenty-eight years Bismarck had governed; twenty-eight years after he was gone, the old dynastic system collapsed—and Germany's enemies watched to see the entire structure fall into ruins.
But it held! Not a stone, except those which the enemy extracted, was loosened. Indeed, at the very height of calamity, skilful hands were at work making the pillars more solid than before. And it now became evident that whereas most Germans had revered the royalty as the very foundation of the empire, it had been merely a brilliant but unnecessary facade.
The survival of the state is the surest evidence that the important part which Bismarck assigned to royalty in his political scheme was purely a concession to his class—one might almost call it a weakness. For as the ruling houses fell and the empire endured, Bismarck's precautions for the future, despite all this baggage of tradition, were justified by their results. After the tempest, people looked about them and saw that the man who had done this was much more modern than he himself had ever hoped to be.
When the empire was founded at Versailles, amidst the medieval roar of victorious cannon, the golden mirrors in the Glass Gallery of the palace reflected only the forms of warlike princes; the industrious masses were elsewhere. When in the same hall forty-eight years later the empire was sentenced to atone and pay for its defeat, the golden mirrors no longer reflected a single royal figure. The last three emperors of Europe had been slain or deposed. Twenty-two German dynasties had been deprived of power—not by compulsion from without, hardly even by the natives themselves, but by corrosion, by the rust of an era which had served its purposes and was now ready for death.
Yet the documents which two humble citizens were called upon to sign at that momentous hour did not involve the destruction of Bismarck's work, but only of the work of William the Second. It was William who had fostered, and Bismarck who had opposed, all those policies which eventually involved Germany in war. Foreign colonies and a marine were typical instances of all that the founder of the state had not wanted. Had he really raised the empire on the point of a victorious sword? Or had he not, rather, employed the sword purely as a means of overcoming Europe's resistance to German unity? Did he not for twenty years thereafter, resist all the temptations of imperialism, all the enticements of militaristic expansion? And was it not Bismarck who, braving the anger of the king and all the generals at Nikolsburg, created the prototype of a modern peace: without cession of territory, without indemnity, dictated solely by the desire to restore friendly relations with the enemy as quickly as possible? Was Bismarck really of the past?
At the end he broods, despite protestations of homage, alone and in exile. When he is nearly eighty, and people try to argue him into the tranquillity proper to his years, he looks at them from under his bushy eyebrows and asks, “And why should I be tranquil?” The wife is gone upon whom he had lavished all the warmth which he repressed in his frigid dealings with the outer world. This woman had been his haven of retreat. All the yearnings for quiet, woodland and home which troubled this restless, knotty character were embodied in her—even though his equally strong love of executive activity and political organization always kept him occupied in the service of the state. The more turbulent his career, the more peaceful his marriage had to be—and was.
He had a critical mind which readily turned to history and to literary composition; and he was by nature a woodsman and a huntsman, a rustic who resented all officialdom. His sojourns in the country, which he had accepted in his youth, without thinking, were deliberately protracted in later years—for it was here that he derived the strength to breathe in ministerial chambers, in the closets of a castle, and in the halls of a parliament which he despised. This antinomy between the scene of his activity and the landscape of his heart never ended, for it was merely the symbol of a chronic indecision;and when, at the last, he had full leisure to enjoy the silence of his forests, he longed to be back in the turmoil which he had cursed for years.
This was his human lot. Bismarck was not happy by nature, and he knew it.
But he accepted life like a man, did his work with substantial materials, saw the vision of his thirties realized in his sixties, and for ten full years could look upon himself as the arbiter of the Continent. Yet he could never rid himself of the fear that all this might vanish overnight if he were not there—and in his last weeks his daughter heard him praying aloud for the future of Germany.
In a long coat, and a wide hat, peering out grimly like a Wotan, he could be seen, at the end, among the prehistoric oaks of his forests, walking about slowly and alone, between two mastiffs.
Notes
Bismarck （1815-1898）, the great German statesman, the one man responsible for welding a German nation out of the many German principalities. The fallen angel is, of course, Satan.This brief sentence at the top of the page beautifully describes the Satan given in the opening books of Milton's Paradise Lost.
Powerful frame, strong body or physique.
mastiffs, one of a breed of powerful, smooth-coated dogs, valued chiefly as watchdogs.
assassin, one who practices secret murder.
Unter den Linden, under the linden trees, the name of a street in Berlin, Germany.
the king, Frederick William IV （1797-1888）, William I, German Kaiser （1871-1888）, Prussian king （1861-1888）.
about to yield in 1862, because of opposition to the king's army program in Parliament. Bismarck was just then appointed minister-president, and after he had failed to secure approval of the king's program, he dissolved Parliament, and in direct violation of the constitution, collected and expended state revenue. He assumed control of the entire government and suppressed all opposition.
scabbard, sheath of the sword.
elicited, drew out or drew forth; evoked.
convulsed, shook violently （literally and figuratively）.
gloss over, cover up; explain away; say as little as possible.
after a thousand years of dissent. Charlemagne was able to bring most of the present Germany into the bounds of his empire by his energetic conquest of the Saxons, but the unity of his empire was ephemeral. The breakdown of the state was signalized in the Treaty of Verdun （843） when the three sons of Louis I, the Pious, pided the territories, the eastern portion going to Louis the German. The eastern territories never achieved a real unity; five great duchies, Saxony, Franconia, Lorraine, Bavaria, and Swabia, developed, and were dominant. From that time down to Bismarck's day, these and many other pisions that later sprang up kept Germany from becoming a united nation.
rent, torn apart; dissociated.
coping, meeting with; dealing with.
oscillation, changing repeatedly back and forth; fluctuation.
white heat, great heat; under great compulsion; at a great speed.
forged, built up; shaped; made.
this realm of music, German musicians and composers, such as Beethoven （1770-1827）, Mendelssohn （1809-1847）, Schumann （1810-1856）, Wagner （1813-1883）, and Brahms （1833-1897）, and the Austrian Schubert （1797-1828）, are well known in the field of music.
wariness, state of being cautious; cautiousness.
monomaniac, one whose mind is deranged upon a single subject only.
primum mobile （first moved）, with Aristotle, the highest physical sphere, or heaven of the fixed stars, which is in immediate contact with God, and derives its circular motion, the most perfect of all motions, directly from him; hence, any deep-seated impulse or urge.
Napoleon the parvenu. A parvenu is a person of obscure origin who has gained wealth or a high position; an upstart, in other words. Napoleon came from an obscure family, while Bismarck came from a family that had a long history back of it; therefore Napoleon is called the parvenu, while Bismarck is entitled the noble.
misanthropy, hatred of mankind.
ideologist or artist, idle theorizer or artist （musician, painter and such）; philosopher or artist.
homo politicus, political man; political being; the practical administrator.
pedants of the Frankfort variety. Frankfort refers to the town Frankfort am Main in Germany where the Frankfort National Assembly was held in 1848-1849. A preliminary parliament （the Vorparlament） met in March, 1848, in response to popular demand and called an assembly, the parliament which convened May 13, 1848. Its president was Heinrich von Gagern （1799-1880）. Delegates from all the German states gathered for the purpose of discussing plans for the unification of Germany. The delegates were of all political complexions from radical democrats to conservative royalists. There was much conflict among them and it was only after much travail that a constitution for a united Germany was drawn up. The rivalry of Austria and Prussia further complicated the problem, and the whole scheme ended in failure when Frederick William IV of Prussia, partially from fear of Austria, partially because he did not wish to have a crown given him by commoners, refused the headship of the proposed empire. Though it failed, the Parliament's proposals were valuable to Bismarck later in the formation of the empire.
Pomeranian back-country, the uncultivated regions of Pomerania, North Prussia. Bismarck came from an old Brandenburg family.
political primitive, one unlearned in politics; one who entered the field of politics without any previous experience in it.
heavy cargo of courage, much courage.
the ballast, is any heavy substance put into the hold of a ship or the car of a balloon to steady it. Ludwig states that a proud self-consciousness kept Bismarck's head clear and steady, even in spite of his other handicaps.
antinomies, opposition of one to another.
mishap, misfortune; accident.
March '48, March '90. Bismarck was present at Potsdam on that March evening, 1848, when Frederick William IV announced to the assembled officers the order for the withdrawal of the troops—a capitulation to the Revolution. Bismarck went home and at once wrote a letter to the king in which he rebuked him for conceding so readily to the mob. On March 14, 1890. Windthorst consulted Bismarck about the forthcoming session of the Reichstag. The next day the Emperor in person demanded an explanation of what had passed, and Bismarck was dragged from bed to wait upon the unexpected visitor. Both men lost their temper. Repeatedly pressed, Bismarck at last submitted his resignation. On March 20, the official Gazette announced the acceptance of the resignation by the Kaiser.
Windhorst, leader of the Center Party, formed of Catholics and Clericals, in the Reichstag. Richter, leader of the South German Popular Party in the Reichstag.
political maxims, political principles then held in highest respect.
behind the red flag of Communism. Had Bismarck been born of the poorer classes, he would have become one of the leaders of social revolt to-day.
flattery and craft as in the school of Metternich. Metternich （1773-1859）, Austrian statesman, minister of foreign affairs for Austria from 1809. The period 1815-1848 has been called “the age of Metternich,” for during this time he was not only master of Austria, but chief arbiter of Europe. His skilful diplomacy depended upon his adroit use of flattery. His system depended upon political and religious censorship, espionage, and the suppression of revolutionary movements.
saw him in the true perspective, saw him as he really was;understood him well.
His blood, his descent; his lineage; his ancestry; his aristocratic ancestry.
young Freddy, Frederick the Great （1712-1786）, king of Prussia from 1740-1786.
“Herr Junker, ” a young German noble or squire, especially a member of the Conservative Aristocratic Party in Prussia.
mummified prejudices of the nobility, the preconceived judgments or opinions of the nobility that had been adhered to all these years although they were antiquated and out of fashion.
the Hohenzollerns, the family name of the then ruling family in Prussia. Frederick I （died 1400） acquired the margraviate of Brandenburg and built up the real greatness of the family. For 500 years （down to 1918, when the Kaiser had to abdicate in Germany） the Hohenzollerns ruled, gradually building up a powerful state. Frederick the Great, by his victory over Austria in 1740, made Prussia a major power. He is perhaps the greatest of the Hohenzollerns.
had tenanted the realm longer than they, had lived in Germany as a family longer than the Hohenzollern family.
truncated, cut off at the top or end.
nihilism,a name first applied by Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons（1862）to the theory held by many Russian revolutionists that it was necessary to destroy existing economic and social institutions, whatever was to be the nature of the better social order for which the destruction was to prepare.
transvaluations, changing values.
fifty years later, to-day.
inveterately, deep-rootedly; habitually; pronouncedly.
interleaved, bound with blank sheets inserted between other leaves of the book.
fealty, faithfulness to one's lord; fidelity.
bit the golden chain, rebelled against his royal master. All through, Ludwig keeps up the comparison of Bismarck with his mastiffs.
not his going, but his way of going, Bismarck and the new Kaiser had come into open conflict over many matters; Bismarck was determined to embarrass the Emperor; the Emperor was as determined to humble the aged imperial chancellor; Bismarck finally resigned. He refused to accept any favors from the throne.
intransigence, refusal to compromise; refusing to be reconciled, to be agreeable or to remain a faithful follower.
liegeman, sworn or faithful follower.
winced, shrank as from a blow; drew back; hesitated.
twenty-eight years Bismarck had governed, from 1862 to 1890，when Bismarck's resignation was asked for.
twenty-eight years after, from 1890 to 1918, the end of the World War.
a brilliant but unnecessary facade, a very attractive but really unnecessary false front or decoration.
in 1871, after the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck, the creator of the new German Empire, became its first chancellor. William I was proclaimed emperor.
the industrious masses, the working classes; those not of the royalty.
forty-eight years later, 1918, when the peace conference at the end of the Great World War was held at Versailles.
the last three emperors of Europe. In 1872, Bismarck had formed the Three Emperors League （Germany, Russia, and Austria）, in order to isolate France in diplomacy.
twenty-two German dynasties, the rulers of the twenty-two states that made up the Germany previous to 1918.
two humble citizens. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, Germany being represented by Mr. Herman Müller and Dr. Bell.
Nikolsburg, the treaty of Nikolsburg, July 26, 1866, between Prussia and Austria, concluding the Seven Weeks' War. Bismarck counseled a moderate peace, for he desired Austria as a future ally.
prototype, pattern; original or model that others later have copied.
haven of retreat, refuge; shelter; place of refuge.
sojourns, periods of residence or stay.
protracted, lengthened; prolonged.
ten full years, from the formation of the German-Austrian Alliance in 1879 to William II's accession in 1888.
arbiter, arbitrator; final authority in settling discussions.
Wotan,Wagner's name for Woden, the chief Germanic god, called by the Norse Odin. Woden has one eye, for he gave the other for some of his knowledge. In southern Germany, Woden was especially the god of battle.
Questions
1. What keynote to Bismarck's character is found in the opening quotation?
2. Of what importance was his powerful physique?
3. In what ways did his character lack unity? How did this parallel the condition of Germany?
4. What was his attitude towards principles?
5. What was his primum mobile?
6. Was Bismarck ideologist or artist?
7. What attracted Frederick William to Bismarck?
8. Under what conditions could Bismarck act effectively? What drained his energies when not fighting?
9. Why must he be said to be a revolutionary at bottom?
10. What new form of politics did he create?
11. Why did Bismarck continue to champion the old social order?
12. When the dynastic system of Germany collapsed, what still remained? Did the destruction involve the work of Bismarck?
13. How had Bismarck's marriage been his “haven of retreat”?
14. How does he resemble his two mastiffs?
参考译文
【作品简介】
《俾斯麦》一文选自埃米尔·路德维希所著《天才与品格》，纽约哈考特布雷斯公司1927年出版，41—52页。
【作者简介】
埃米尔·路德维希（1881—1948），德国传记作家、戏剧家，以研究俾斯麦（1912）、拿破仑（1924）、威廉-霍亨索伦（1925）和林肯（1929）而著称。