The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 10: Prince Otto Von Bismarck, Count Helmuth Von Moltke, Ferdinand Lassalle
History
The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 10: Prince Otto Von Bismarck, Count Helmuth Von Moltke, Ferdinand Lassalle
German literature -- 19th century -- Translations into English; German literature -- 20th century -- Translations into English
Roman Empire_, a translation which, unfortunately, never was printed
and seems to be lost even in manuscript. As his favorite books and
writers Moltke mentions, among others, Littrow's _Astronomy,_ Liebig's
_Agricultural Chemistry_, Clausewitz's _On War,_ Ranke, Treitschke,
Carlyle. It appears, then, that his scientific equipment was of the
most solid sort, enabling him to make the most valuable contributions
to knowledge.
It is impossible to imagine to oneself Moltke breaking into tears,
either of wrath or of despair, in great crises of his life, such as we
know to have been the case with Bismarck. There is a contrast between
these two men in their very makeup. There is tragedy in Bismarck's
soul, in its volcanic eruptiveness and its conflicts. He is nervously
high-strung in the extreme, the very embodiment, in Karl Lamprecht's
terminology, of the type of "Reizsamkeit." He likes to listen to
Beethoven's music and his sense of nature reveals him to be
impressionable, sensitive. His gamut of emotions and feelings, and
their expression, is extraordinary. Moltke, on the other hand, appears
to be always in harmony with himself, he is far less impulsive than
his great contemporary and friend. His feeling, always awake for
nature, has no element of morbid and pathetic sentiment; in the
earlier stages of its manifestation we see it slightly tinged by
Romanticism. But he is at peace with nature, his great comforting
mother. There is no sudden and surprising break in his mental or
spiritual development. The ideal of the strategist, as antiquity saw
it, appears to be consummated in his person. William James, himself an
ardent pacificist, well observed that in the modern soldier there is a
matter-of-factness far removed from the bluff and make-believe of
modern life in general. He might have chosen Moltke as the best type
of this sort of warrior. But there was much more than this scientific
and dutiful soldier; there was at bottom of Moltke's nature a fine
sense of proportion, an artistic vein, and, not the least element, a
Christian philosophy of life just as far removed from mere perfunctory
indifferentism as from cocksure dogmatic bigotry and self-sufficiency.
We have striking evidence of this in the _Trostgedanken_, the
_Consolatory Thoughts on the Earthly Life and a Future Existence_,
which he laid down as the last literary utterance of his full and
eventful career. But this is not all; for most astonishing of all in
the richness of this well-rounded harmony of over ninety years of life
is a lively source of humor, due more to endowment and inheritance
from his mother than to her influence, as his letters to her bear
witness. When war is declared in 1870 he remarks that a new vitality
has entered his carcass, and, on the very eve of his demise, when in
the morning he had attended a session of the Upper House of the
Prussian Diet, loyal to his work and task to the very last moment, he
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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