I cannot understand how any German can criticise Bismarck, but there are official prigs who do; little decorated bureaucrats who live their lives out poring over papers, with an eye out for a "von" before their bourgeois names, and as void of audacity as a sheep; men who creep up the stairway to promotion and recognition, clinging with cautious grip to the banisters. One sees them, their coats covered with the ceramic insignia of their placid servitude, decorations tossed to them by the careless hand of a master who is satisfied if they but sign his decrees, with the i's properly dotted, and the t's unexceptionably crossed. They are the crumply officials who melted into defencelessness and moral decrepitude after Frederick the Great, and again at the glance of Napoleon, and who owe the little stiffness they have to the fact that Bismarck lived. It is one of the things a full-blooded man is least able to bear in Germany, to hear the querulous questioning of the great deeds of this man, whose boot-legs were stiffer than the backbones of those who decry him.
"Give me the spirit that, on this life's rough sea, Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind, Even till his sail-yards tremble and his masts do crack, And his rapt ship run on her side so low That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air. There is no danger to a man that knows What life and death is--there's not any law Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful That he should stoop to any other law."
He was no worshipper of that flimsy culture which is, and has been for a hundred years, an obsession of the German. He knew, none knew better indeed, that the choicest knowledge is only mitigated ignorance. He surprised Disraeli with his mastery of English, and Napoleon with his fluency in French, both of which he had learned from his Huguenot professors. The popular man, the popular book, the popular music, picture, or play, were none of them a golden calf to him. He mastered what he needed for his work, and pretended to no enthusiasm for intellectualism as such. He knew that there is no real culture without character, and that the mere aptitude for knowing and doing without character is merely the simian cleverness that often dazzles but never does anything of importance. "Culture!" writes Henry Morley, "the aim of culture is to bring forth in their due season the fruits of the earth." Any learning, any accomplishments, that do not serve a man to bring forth the fruits of the earth in their due season are merely mental gimcracks, flimsy toys, to admire perhaps, to play with, and to be thrown aside as useless when duty makes its sovereign demands.