Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/348

 sciences. Professor Curtius in the address draws the outlines of Moltke 's character as a student, and explains how he is indebted to the teachings of Karl Ritter, the founder of scientific geography, how he clearly develops under the influence of Niebuhr, Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch, and Erman, the physicist. He points out how Moltke, as historian and as an expert cartographer, introduces scientific spirit and work into his great creation, the German General Staff. As a strategist, however, it remains to be said that he follows in the footsteps, puts into practice and develops the methods of General von Clausewitz, the first mind who put war on an empirical and scientific basis. Moltke was intimately acquainted with Gibbon through a nearly completed rendering into German of The History of the Decline and Fall of the 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