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He seems to have repented of the enthusiastic tone of Stadion's Austria of 1809 -which he had been childish enough to have shared in up till his residence in Paris-as a folly of youth. At all events, he never again lent himself to any such illusions. When there was a question of making an appeal to the Tyrolians to rise in 1813, and the Emperor Francis expressed his moral indignation against so revolutionary a measure, Metternich also expressed himself in the most contemptuous way regarding everything which reminded him of the dangerous principles of Kalisch," laughed at Count Stackelberg, who had the simplicity to talk warmly of the revival of Prussia, and is said to have in Ratiborschitz (during the armistice) promised the accession of Austria to the great alliance only on the condition that no appeal was made to the peoples. "We can only steer toward the maintenance of the cause of sovereigns. It is amusing, although both psychologically and historically unimportant, that the same man should have begun his literary career as a youth of twenty with a call to a rising and arming of the people. The failure of the spring campaign of 1813 could of course have only strengthened the Minister in his sceptical conviction, for after Grossgörschen, he still spoke of "the Prussian army which exists only in name.” He had already become the practical man who believed in the palpable powers alone, and from now onward evidence itself could not convince him that apart from cabinets and battalions there was anything else in the life of nations that should be taken into account. It is plain that if it is an advantage for a historian to have "made history," this has also its disadvantages. The professor of history is not only superior to the practical man in his more conscientious and methodical use of the original sources, but he often keeps a clear view of the moving forces of history, which are easily lost sight of when one has been too much accustomed to fix his eyes on the trees instead of the forest.

As has been said, no exception whatever can be taken to the director of Aus

*So Bernhardi. Oncken appears to have known nothing of this clause.

trian policy during the decisive years 1812 and 1813. But the limits of his mind may be pointed out, and the true nature of his policy indicated. Nothing could be to use a favorite expression of Metternich's-more correct than this policy, when we think of the situation of Austria, and Metternich conducted it with dignity and pride, not merely toward the conqueror, but also toward his own emperor; but it was Austrian, not German policy. "In relation to Austria, the expression of German feeling,' as it manifested itself after the catstrophe of Prussia and the northern parts of Germany in the higher strata of the population there, has simply the value of a myth." God forbid that we should blame him for this. Although himself born and educated in the Empire, he had yet, as in duty bound, become entirely an Austrian; and if, in 1805, of course under Hardenberg's influence, he still felt the fall of the Elector of Bavaria as a betrayal of the father. land, now in 1813, when the German Empire had ceased to exist, when all South Germany fought under the French flag, and when even Prussia was obliged to join the forces of the Emperor of the French, the idea of the German fatherland could have for a practical statesman at the head of Austria really no more than the "value of a myth.' And if he grudged great results to Prussia, was he not perfectly right? He was no apostate like his creature Gentz, who already, long before he entered Metternich's school, railed at the religion of his fathers and the country of his birth; nay, made his position by fouling his nest, and then translating into his own sophistico-rhetorical language his master's anti-Prussian policy, for he himself never had a single political idea unless he borrowed it from some one. who desires to form a conception of the moral superiority of the Minister who claimed the full responsibility for his deeds, and on whom the life and death of a great State depended, over the cowardly trembling writer whom he employed, and whom he sheltered with his responsibility, should read the vile Memoir of Gentz on the Congress of Vienna (II. 473-514), and Metternich's noble words. to the Emperor before he finally declared against France (12th July, 1813): "Can

He

I count on your Majesty's firmness in case Napoleon does not accept Austria's basis of peace? Is your Majesty immovably determined, in that event, to commit the righteous cause to the decision of the arms of Austria and the rest of united Europe? . . . Can I reckon on this, that his Majesty will stand true to his word, and seek his salvation in the closest union with the allies?" "I must have no obscurity about this point, for every step I take will, without the exact est statement of your Majesty's pleasure, bear the stamp of an unpardonable ambiguity. We should thereby, instead of the chance of peace, and an advantageous peace, incur only the chance of universal animadversion, and of the probable ruin of the monarchy, and I should, with the best intentions for the good of the State, have become merely the unfortunate instrument of the annihilation of all political consideration, of all moral elevation, and of the dissolution of all inward and outward bonds of government." We know from Stadion that such language was necessary, that it was impossible to calculate for so much as a quarter of an hour on the Emperor Francis," who was accustomed to leave his Ministers in the lurch, to take himself off after a lost battle, and to recommend them to the good God" (Gentz). Metternich knew that, and spoke and acted accordingly. It was because he knew how to speak and act with so much decision, after he had for three long years known how to be silent and inactive, that he attained the greatest results which he attained in his whole career. Metternich's greatest moment were the three years from 1811 to 1813. All that went before was only preparation; all that came after was only the unremitting attempt to bring into a system and to formulate as principles what a particular situation and peculiar circumstances suggested to a fine mind as the way of salvation out of straits.

III.

In fact, the great system on which Metternich in later years was wont to pride himself, was first formed after 1815. This system, whereby everything which could hinder Austria from playing a leading part in Central Europe was simply "evil," or, what was the same thing in the newly-invented language, "Ja

cobinism"- this system consisted, as is well known, in simple immobility. Things should remain exactly as they had been rearranged with so much trouble in 1814 and 1815. When anything rose up, it must be put down. Whatever existed was holy, even the Sublime Porte. Whoever attacked it was wicked. Andrew Hofer himself, if he had been alive, would have been treated as a godless Jacobin. Talleyrand had invented Legitimacy; Metternich invented "Right." "He is fortunate who can say to himself that he does not stand in the way of eternal right. This testimony my conscience does not deny. me." What this eternal right properly was first appears in a clear shape in the course of the autumn of 1814 under the influence of Talleyrand. Till then he felt his way, and did not as yet know whether the "eternal right" was in favor of Louis XVIII. or of Napoleon II.; nay, he contended at first against the deposition of Napoleon I., as against a violation of the non-intervention principle.

the

(How beautifully this illustrates unity of this life" can only be fully measured by one who bears clearly in mind the whole polemic of Metternich after 1830 against the "revolutionary innovation of the so-called non-intervention principle.") So, too, he was in the beginning decidedly in favor of Murat, whose Neapolitan kingdom was very convenient for Austria, and whose wife had been one of the Paris flames of the Chancellor; and it was much later that he discovered the "eternal right" was not on the side of the crowned Hussar. In 1810 he opposed very decidedly the partition of Turkey, but in spite of the

eternal right" laid claim to a share for Austria, if it came to a partition, and not only a share, but the greater share.” Even a bit of the patrimony of Peter might be allowed to come to Austria without the "eternal right" being violated thereby; and the eight years from Campo Formio to Presburg sufficed to establish Austria's "eternal right" to the possession of Venetia. But it was especially the question of the incorporation of Saxony in Prussia, that "immoral proceeding" as Talleyrand termed it, which showed how very wavering Metternich's idea of the eternal right" still was in the year 1814..

At first he had, like Castlereagh, the Czar Alexander, and everybody else, thought the thing quite natural, correct, nay, self-evident, and had also admitted as much formally to Prussia. It was not till the Emperor Francis stated to him plainly that he would have nothing to do with the affair that he undertook the defence of the King of Saxony, and then only "in order not to leave this part to France to perform.' It was not till Talleyrand promised to support him that he began to have patriotic and legitimist scruples, and branded the incorporation of Saxony in Prussia as a sin against "the common fatherland" (sic!). There would have been nothing in it if he had not promised the opposite, and if he had simply explained that Austrian interests did not permit an aggrandizement of Prussia, which would give that Power too great a preponderance in North Germany. What could be more justifiable from the Austrian point of view than that he should rather see Poland restored than Prussia strengthened, and that he should fear Prussia's supremacy in NorthGermany-like Russia's dominion over Poland-more than the influence of France in South Germany? That had shown itself already in the end of 1813 in Frankfort, and at the beginning of 1814 in Chatillon. He remembered too well the League of the Princes (1785), which he had already described in his first dispatch in 1801 as founded by Prussia for the carrying out conveniently its long-cherished views of supremacy.” He knew very well the intentions of Prussia, never on any occasion abandoned, which were bent on nothing else but on making the destiny and existence of a great part of Germany instrumental, according to time and circumstances, to Prussian schemes of aggrandizement." The existence of such a jealousy of Prussia in his mind, before he devised the great system of "the eternal right," implied no kind of moral fault. Indeed, he thought, even in 1804, that a true statesman, a Frederick Il, would have understood how, in the position of Prussia, "to make himself to make himself the most powerful king of the Continent. If a man entertains such quite positive views of the duties and aims of statesmen, it is, to say the least, bad taste to speak of the interests of GerEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXI., No. 6

many as those of "the common fatherland." A man like Metternich, who knew Germany and its history, should have left it to the French to represent the maintenance and protection of the Central States of Germany as a defence of German freedom.

However this may be, the more realistic and utilitarian his policy became the more idealistic and theoretical became his language. Since 1815 he was, in fact, sure of his point; he had discovered the principle on which his whole policy rested; and not only all those who took their stand upon the work of the Vienna Congress, but also all those who, during the Congress, had opposed its decisions, were now simply revolutionaries. Nay, he lent retrospectively to his earlier feelings a definite bearing and character, which they in no wise possessed at the time. He had always justly feared and hated Prussia, as the most dangerous rival of Austria in Germany. His very first dispatch, already referred to (written from Dresden, 2d November, 1801), breathed this hatred with a juvenile naïveté which never came back to him in later years. And his feelings toward Prussia were not only justified by the interests and traditions of Austria; the " astute policy" of the Prussia of Lombard and Beyne, of Haugwitz and Lucchesini, was, in fact, the most untrustworthy and weakest which one could possibly think of. Of course he hated and feared the policy of the opposite party just as much as he hated the head of that party, Freiherr von Stein, with a double hatred, first as the representative of Prussia, and next as an idealist, in whose presence he felt as uncomfortable as, for the opposite reason, Gretchen was in the neighborhood of Mephistopheles. But it was much later that he first discovered the revolutionary spirit in Prussia, and also in Stein. We have seen how he spoke in 1808 of the rising in Spain. When he looked back on that period forty years later he spoke of nothing but the "revolutionary spirit which had, in the year 1807, assumed the mantle of Prussian patriotism, and afterward the Teutonic colors, and which was represented in the years 1812 and 1813 by Freiherr von Stein, General Gneisenau," and others, and he mourned over "the revo

43

lutionary seed which had borne so much fruit in Prussia since 1808, and (1813) spread its blades over an extensive field." His anxious factotum, Gentz, that "fearless spirit," as he calls himself, had already begun before him to scent the revolutionary spirit in Prussia, his fatherland, and in Frederick William III., from whom he once demanded that he should give his country the freedom of the press. He began as far back as 1813, when he saw to his horror that the war of liberation might develop into a war of freedom," to reduce to a system of policy his fear of all spontaneous action; he named Stein "le véritable perturbateur du repos public de l'Alleinagne et de l'Europe;" he thought things could not go on in Prussia "without an ascendancy worse than that of the French resulting from it." "There must be a return of belief, there must be a return of obedience, there must be a thousand times less reasoning, or Government could no longer be carried on. The evil has assumed gigantic proportions, and threatens a radical dissolution." That was, however, too strong even for Metternich. He thought his representative inclined more than was good "to paint the situation in the most glaring colors, and mocked at Gentz for shuddering at the sight of certain operations, as if shots fell in the field of thought;" of which we may say, by the way, that it is the only word in both volumes that has a personal character. After 1814, however, the master went beyond the servant. Revolution became the red rag to him. He lost all control, all discrimination, when he spoke of it; Lombard and Haugwitz were classed with Arndt and Jahn, Gneisenau with Robespierre. So much can system and self-confidence blind the cleverest men. "The Prussian Particularists and abstract Teutomanes'' of 1813 were Jacobins. The central gov ernment of the conquered countries (1813), which was formed by "the heads of the popular party," and, among others, by the passionate politician, Stein, organized the revolution, which would infallibly have broken out in Germany but for the subsequent exertions of the united courts for their own salvation and that of their peoples." The shrewd, experienced man of the world entirely lost his

gauge of men, of their social position, and of what that involved, and still more of their ideas themselves. A thoroughly aristocratic nature like that of Stein thus became to him like a democratic leveller, and he thought a Count Confalonieri would play the part of a Danton.

The volumes yet to come will enlighten us regarding the Metternich of the period of peace from 1815 till 1848. But a document recently published throws a peculiar light on his position toward the "revolution." This is a fragment from Count Confalonieri's manuscript Memoirs, which M. Tabarrini has given us in his excellent Biography of Gino Capponi.* This "reprieved" and severely health-broken man had been released for two days of his chains, which had left painful wounds upon him, when Metternich offered to pay him a visit (1824). It is not agreeable to see a man not at heart bad degrading himself to be the instrument of the freaks of tyranny of Francis, or to hear one nobleman urge another nobleman in the most pressing way to dishonor; for what else was it when he asked the Count to impeach his sworn comrades, and especially the Prince Carignan (Charles Albert)? One would fain turn away from this spectacle, although it is a great satisfaction, after these attempts to seduce, to refresh one's self with the chivalrous steadfastness of the Italian.

Our concern at present, however, is only with the fine-spun theories of the man, and not with his moral worth. He thought there would be no more ground for alarm from Jacobins, anarchists, and open revolutionists, if a government were not weak and already actually ruined. "No, the preaching of these cannibals can no longer give any cause for fear. But it is different with the so-called pure Liberals, the doctrinaires, the philanthropists, those who band themselves together for the advancement of enlightenment and of general civilization... These are the men, the opinions, the propaganda, which do injury to governments in peaceful times; these are what alone we

* Gualterio had before this published a letter of Confalonieri's brother-in-law, Casati, which gives information about this visit. A full account of the long interview is given by Tabarrini, pp. 155-188.

have now to fear and extirpate. Their opinions are gilded; they are listened to; they insinuate themselves slowly into the mind; they seduce, persuade, corrupt the very people who would be horrified by revolutionary ideas if they appeared in less seductive guises. Your adherents are now our only foes.

You see that I am open with you. The times are gone by when politics was an art of secrecy and deception; it is now one of openness and publicity (!). Austria makes no mystery in the world of its political principles. It is strong enough to uphold them unconditionally in its own States, and it is sufficiently listened to and respected to make them accepted in other States. Europe will come to see that it owes its preservation to it. France will attend to us better than it has yet done. I venture to pledge my word that Europe will in a few years be more peaceful than it has ever been before.'

In a few years"

Turkish dominion in Greece was overthrown against the will of Austria, the legitimate dynasty in France was dethroned, émeutes had become chronic in Paris, and downright insurrection flamed in Poland, in Italy, in Spain.

It is known that the Chancellor never learned anything from all this, but remained after, as before the July Revolution, the man of Carlsbad and Laibach still. His Autobiography shows that in 1844-nay, even in 1852-after his whole system, his Weltordnung had broken down, he still cherished the same views. "It has seldom happened to me," said he, in 1834, to Varnhagen, and in imand in important things never, to have to retract anything or to confess myself to have been wrong." Reaction remained his political ideal, and he believed himself to be a Conservative, whereas he was only an inverted revolutionary. The fundamental error of continental politicians of the two opposite schools, who always identify reaction and conservatism, and look upon the Church as the necessary ally of the Conservative interest, was thoroughly shared in by Metternich and his school. The true Conservative has too firm a belief in the preserving powers of society to seek to help them by violent reaction. He thinks superstition and priestcraft a greater danger to the State or to peaceful development than

freedom and publicity, which are the only atmosphere for sound normal life. To the reactionary, on the other hand an artificial standstill, where possible artificial retrogression, artificially maintained secrecy and darkness and silence, constitute the sum of all statesmanship, and the very breath of life of its activity. Unlimited freedom does not frighten the Conservative so long as the supremacy of law is not called in question. He allows the laity to speak and write, so long as politicians alone are allowed to act. He stands in no way opposed to change, but only to overthrow, just as also he does not contend against alteration of laws according to times and circumstances, but only to legislation according to à priori theories. The reactionary, on the other hand, resembles the revolutionary in his partiality for such theories, and for violent production of certain definite social conditions, and in his impatience of the opinions of others. Now Metternich was the archetype of the reactionary of the nineteenth century, and, what is worse, he was so, not from temperament, like his master, who could endure no contradiction, nor from conviction, like Joseph de Maistre. tion came in his case as an afterthought, and his temperament was mild, goodhearted, and disposed to toleration.

Convic

The whole profound political wisdom of which he knew how to talk so much was at bottom nothing but the old Austrian policy which prevailed before the time of Joseph II., and to which the Emperor Francis obstinately desired to return after his unhappy experiment with Stadion. It was the will of the Emperor Francis, from first to last, that decided things, and Metternich was only its most willing and obedient instrument. Of course he will have us believe that he did everything, and the I, I, I, adsum qui feci, is especially in these posthumous delineations intolerably prominent. He is reported to have once said in his exile that he had often ruled Europe, but never Austria; in other words, that he had no power in internal affairs, but was omnipotent in foreign relations. That is also, however, to be taken with reserve; but it is certain that at home Francis, and Francis alone, prescribed what was to be done. Metternich was only the adroit servant who found the