Luther is the one predominant Teuton of the centuries, after the close of the middle ages, and though he ceases to be present in the flesh in 1516, he never dies. The inspiration of the German soul endures and lives in every variety of art or expression. Luther is perpetuated in Handel, and technically, even his "_Feste Burg_" is the first note of the "_Inspirate_" in "_I Know That My Redeemer Liveth!_"
It is only the most inattentive of historical students who can afford to ignore this. No modern æsthetician from the Rhine to the Spree affects to dispute the succession of Teutonic thought, in its various forms of passion, from Beethoven to Goethe, from Schiller, Jean Paul, or Weber, or Ravner, or Kleist, or Immermann, down to the latest high priest of the pre-historic cult--down to Richard Wagner himself! It was precisely this that the Emperor Frederick knew as crown prince, and that the chancellor had to learn. With the crown prince all was present. The farthest past was with him; the leaves of the _uralte_ forests had whispered their dream lore in his ears as in those of the _Siegfried_ of the Niebelungen; he had seen Otto von Wittelsbach strike dead his very Kaiser for breach of faith[6] and stood by at the Donnersberg, when mighty Rudolph's son slew Adolf of Napan for his base attempt at usurpation. He knew it all, legend or chronicle; no secret was hidden from him, and the national pulse beat in him with fiery throb from the first hour when the national conscience had been touched. The chancellor was chilled by his own statecraft, and the king, as he then was, had witnessed the Napoleonic wars.
[6] The heroic founder of the Bavarian monarchy, Otho of Writtelsbach, was betrayed shamefully by his friend, the Emperor Philip, of Suabia, and slew him for his treachery. This is one of the oldest dramas on the German stage.
Between the crown prince and Bismarck, however, there existed one point of contact. Each was a _Deutsche Student_, and there, later on, was to be found the true conversion of the chancellor to national ideas.
As in every genuine lover of his country (and that Prince Bismarck is), there lay latent in the famous "White Cuirassier" the same ideal capacity of warlike action and intellectuality that so distinguished Frederick II. No one understood better the complex son of Carlyle's roystering barrack hero, no one knew in reality more deeply that the ideas planted by him in men's minds were those of the majesty of intelligence, of the royalty of humanity's brain power.