Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/214

 recognized. The longer he speaks the more the peculiar attractions of his way of speaking become manifest. His expression is original and fresh, pithy and robust, honest and straightforward."

Bismarck did not write out his speeches, and the published accounts of what he said are copied from the official stenographic reports. Logically Bismarck never left a sentence incomplete, but grammatically he often did so, when the wealth of ideas qualifying his main thought had grown to greater proportions than he had anticipated. His diction was at all times precise, which led to a multiplicity of qualifications—adjectives, appositions, adverbs, parentheses, and the like. Desirous of convincing his hearers, he often felt the need of repeating the same thought in various ways until he at last hammered it in, as it were, with one big blow—with one phrase easily remembered and readily quoted. It is these phrases which have given the names to many of his speeches, namely: "The Honest Broker," "Practical Christianity," or "We shall never go to Canossa."

He himself readily quoted from the sayings and writings of other great men; and was in this respect wholly admirable both for the catholicity of his taste and the singular appropriateness of his citations. He was apparently as familiar with the great authors of antiquity as with the modern German, French and English writers. Nor was he afraid of using a foreign tongue when no German phrase occurred to him to match the exact meaning of his thought.

The reader will realize, even more than the hearer, that it was not the form of Bismarck's speeches which swept his audiences off their feet, and often changed a hostile Reichstag or Diet into an assembly of men eager to do his bidding, but that it was his firm grasp on the realities of life and his supreme command of everything which makes for true statesmanship. His policies were not based on snap judgments, they were the result of serious thought. All this showed in his speeches, and made him one of the most powerfully effective speakers of all times.