XVII The King of Bavaria
At that time Louis I., who wore the Bavarian crown, was a man sixty-one years old. He, “the most German of the Germans,” as he had been styled, was by an odd freak of fortune born in France. His father, Max Joseph, though brother of the Duke of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, commanded a regiment in the French service, and it was at Strasbourg that the child was born in 1786. His father’s grenadiers shaved off their moustaches to stuff his pillow with. The name bestowed on him in baptism was that of his godfather, the ill-fated King of France. But the Revolution soon drove him with his family across the Rhine, to Mannheim and to Rohrbach. Death quickly cleared the boy a path to the throne. His father presently succeeded his brother as Duke, and a few years later upon the extinction of the elder line of the Wittelsbachs, became Elector of Bavaria.
Even in the stormy first decade of the nineteenth century princes had to be educated, and in the year 1803 we find Louis at Göttingen, sitting at the feet of Johannes Müller, who infused him with a lively sense of nationality and a reverence for all things German. This was to stand the Prince in good stead in the dark days that followed. Those were years of profound humiliation for Germany, of poignant suffering for her people. Even in the ’forties few Germans took pride in the name, some of them settled in London and Paris, deeming it almost a reproach. In his country’s blackest night the Bavarian prince loudly proclaimed his faith in a glorious dawn. He exulted in the name of German. He was “teutsch” (as he always wrote the word) to the very core.
He was German not least in his passion for the South. Italy was his first, last, and best-beloved mistress. In her bosom he was inspired with that love for the arts which was stronger even than his patriotism. Returning to Germany, he saw with disgust his father embrace the alliance of Napoleon and turn his arms against Austria—German fighting German. At Strasbourg, on hearing the news of the capitulation at Ulm, he dared to say to the Empress Josephine: “The greatest victory for me will be when this, my native city, is united to Germany.” He accompanied Max Joseph to the Emperor’s headquarters at Linz in 1805, when Bavaria was erected by the conqueror’s decree into a kingdom. The new Crown Prince made no secret of his antipathies. Anxious to win him over, Napoleon carried him off to Paris, and only succeeded in disgusting him by his irreverence during divine worship. Louis was a devout and sincere Catholic. From the Tuileries he intrigued for the overthrow of his host and gaoler with Czar Alexander. His father got wind of these negotiations and recalled him to Munich. Thence he was sent to join the Bavarian army in Prussia. With unspeakable bitterness he heard that the victory of Jena was celebrated at his father’s capital with a Te Deum and public rejoicings. In January 1807, in the train of the conquering army, he reached Berlin. There his first act was to unveil a bust of Frederick the Great!
At the beginning of the campaign against Russia, at Napoleon’s request, which was practically a command, Louis took the head of the Bavarian army. Years after, he refused to sanction the publication of a work on his military achievements at this time. With the war-weary veteran of De Vigny’s tale, he might have said: “J’ai appris à detester la guerre, en la faisant avec énergie.” For he was no carpet knight. Though compelled to draw the sword against men of his own race and their allies, he wielded it well. Under a hot fire he led his troops across the Narew, and at Pultusk won the Grand Cross of the Order of Max Joseph. Such services could not blind Napoleon to his lieutenant’s real sympathies. In his indignation against what he considered the ingratitude and treachery of his ally’s son, he is reported to have exclaimed: “Quoi m’empêche de fusilier ce prince?” He dared not go to such desperate lengths. Instead, he superseded Louis in the command of the Bavarian army, at the beginning of the campaign of 1809, by one of his own marshals, Lefebvre, Duke of Danzig. To the Prince was assigned simply the command of a division. He fought well at Abensberg, where the mot d’ordre was Bravoure et Bavière. “It is to Germans that the Emperor owes this victory over Germans,” he boasted bitterly.
In the revolt of the Tyrolese against the Bavarian yoke imposed on them by the French, his heart went out to the gallant insurgents. He pensioned a son of the patriot Speckbacher, and condoled with Hofer’s wife on the execution of her husband. Napoleon’s indignation knew no bounds. “This prince,” he declared, “shall never reign in Bavaria!” He destined the crown for Eugène Beauharnais, or one of his children.
But it was Louis’s policy that triumphed in 1813. With delight he beheld his father desert the sinking ship of France, and from Salzburg (then belonging to Bavaria) he issued a proclamation, urging all the German people to rise against the common oppressor. Wrede, with a Bavarian army, threw himself across the path of the retreating French at Hanau, to find that the wounded eagle’s talons could still snatch a bloody victory. In the campaigns of 1814 and 1815, Louis took no active part. His father dreaded that he might fall into the hands of Napoleon, who regarded him with intense hatred. The Prince had to be content with the part of Tyrtaeus, and in odes, not deficient in merit, stirred the patriotic feelings of his countrymen.
After Waterloo he sheathed the sword that he had wielded reluctantly, but not ingloriously. “I was never a general,” he said, “but a soldier, yes—with all my heart.” He was now free to devote himself to matters which more strongly, perhaps, appealed to him. At Vienna and London he watched over the interests of the arts. He pleaded (and not unsuccessfully) for the restitution of the artistic treasures Napoleon had carried off, and wrote on the subject of the Elgin marbles with judgment and critical acumen. He sought the acquaintance of the brilliant and the learned, presiding over a côterie of painters, sculptors, and literati. The winters of 1817-8 and 1820-1 he spent in the Eternal City, residing at the Bavarian Embassy or at the Villa Malta on the Pincio. He knew Canova and Thorwaldsen, and laid the foundations of his firm and life-long intimacy with the sculptor, Wagner. On the Neue Pinakothek at Munich is a picture by Catel, representing one of those joyous and scholarly réunions in which Louis delighted. He is shown seated at a table in a humble osteria on the Ripa Grande, in the company of Thorwaldsen, Wagner, the artists Veit, Von Schnorr, and Catel himself, the architect Von Klenze, Professor Ringseis, Count Seinsheim, and Colonel von Gumppenberg. It was in such company, and beneath the blue sky of Italy, that “the most German of the Germans” was happiest. His æsthetic faculties were altogether exotic. His style of literary composition is compared by an English writer to a dislocation of all the limbs of a human body.
“Nothing can be more un-German, more opposed to the genius of the language, than this extraordinary style, the like of which is not to be found in the whole range of German literature.10 It is an aberration of which we have an English example in ‘Carlylese.’”
Louis succeeded his father as King of Bavaria in October 1825. He was then in his fortieth year. A shrewd connoisseur, he had devoted nearly all his income as Prince to the acquisition of objects of art. It was his ambition to make his capital a new Florence, and to carry out this design the strictest economy was introduced into all departments of the state. The Munich we know was mainly his creation. To him we owe the Glyptothek, of which he had conceived the idea at least as far back as 1805; the beautiful Au Church, the Royal Chapel, the Ludwigskirche, the Church of St. Boniface, the splendid throne-room, the bronze monument to the Bavarian soldiers who fell in the Russian campaigns. The quaint old German city was completely transformed. Unfortunately, the royal Mæcenas failed to recognise the worth of native models, such as were to be found in Nuremberg. All his buildings were duplicates, or close imitations, of others on the south side of the Alps. The Triumphal Arch in Ludwigstrasse, with its bronze car drawn by lions, was obviously suggested by the well-known models of Paris and Rome. To Louis’s zeal we are indebted also for the Pinakothek and the colossal statue of Bavaria. Finally, in 1830, on the anniversary of the battle of Leipzig, the King laid the foundation-stone of the Walhalla, the temple of German greatness, thus accomplishing a design he had formed twenty-five years before. Lofty as was the execution, the conception was loftier. It took place
“just after the Emperor Francis II. had uncrowned himself, declaring that the Holy Roman Empire—the empire of a thousand years—was at an end. It was at such a time, when the fabric that had stood for ten centuries had crumbled into dust; when the tramp of the conqueror threatened to efface all ancient institutions; when every existing dynasty of the continent of Europe was trembling for its existence; when principalities were being moulded into kingdoms, kingdoms dismembered or destroyed, God’s very barriers trampled down and passed; when works of art, the heirlooms of a nation, were torn from the land that had produced them to deck the capital of the conqueror; when victory followed victory—Marengo, Hohenlinden, Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland; when king’s crowns and mitres, like withered leaves, lay strewn upon the ground, and when it might well be feared that in that ancient land soon nothing would be left of its former self to recognise its identity—at such a moment was it, when devastation threatened to put out the lights which had been shining for ages, that the Prince Royal of Bavaria, then twenty-three years of age, resolved to build a monument to the glory of his country.”11
There were the elements of greatness in Louis of Bavaria. In magnanimity of soul he was very far the superior of those sovereigns to whom historians have accorded the title of “the great.” Nor was he lacking, as we have seen, in the will and capacity to give to his loftiest conceptions practical shape.
“Throughout life,” says the writer just quoted, “King Louis ordered his expenses with the exactness of a debtor and creditor account in a banker’s ledger. The necessary monies for certain undertakings were assigned beforehand for each coming year. Every separate expenditure was provided for from specified sources, and each rubric had a corresponding one belonging to it, whence its expenses were to be defrayed.”
No Bond Street dealer could be a shrewder judge of the value of a work of art than the Bavarian prince; he was no wasteful dilettante, but brought to bear on the embellishment of his capital the keenest business instincts. He watched with unflagging attention the fluctuations in the prices of the treasures he coveted. We find him comparing Thorwaldsen’s and Canova’s estimates of the value of the Barberini Faun, and refusing to pay an extra scudo for the carriage of a statue. Yet he was not a niggard. Those he honoured with his friendship he never left to want. A sick or indigent artist had only to bring his need to the King’s notice, to receive liberal relief. He was a warm-hearted and constant friend. His last letter to Wagner is as affectionate in tone as the first he addressed to him forty-eight years before. The permanency of his friendships was in a great degree due to his good sense in making them. His associates were men, not only of genius and learning, but of sterling worth and character. They were not the kind of men to flatter his vanity, or to humour his foibles. Returning to Rome after his accession, Louis announced his intention of continuing the course of life he had pursued as Prince, but thought he ought to assume some little outward state. Wagner replied: “The King of Spain certainly used to drive about in a coach and six, with footmen in grand liveries; but, notwithstanding, I never heard that any one had the least respect for him. Simplicity is most consistent with dignity: and the course you formerly pursued, sire, will be the best to pursue in the future.”
To this artist-king Germany owes its first railway. A short but very important line was constructed by his command from Nuremberg to Fürth in 1835, and was followed up by lines connecting Munich with Augsburg and Nuremberg with Bamberg. In these projects may be traced the inception of the whole German railway system. Thanks also to Louis, the steamboat first ploughed German waters, a service being inaugurated under his auspices on the Bodensee. The important canal connecting the Danube with the Main, and affording thereby direct water communication between the North Sea and the Black Sea, bears the King’s name, and was executed at his order. The idealist, the man whom some writers in their ignorance dismiss as half-minnesänger, half-virtuoso, was keenly alive to the material needs of his subjects. The commercial treaties concluded with Würtemberg in 1827 and with Prussia in 1833 laid the foundations of the Zollverein, itself the basis of the political unity of all Germany. The empire owes much to Louis I. Had he been the monarch of a more powerful state, the imperial crown might have been his. “Were such a dignity offered to him,” his brother-in-law, Frederick William, is reported to have said, “the King of Bavaria would accept it for the sake of the picturesque costume!” The sneer evinced a knowledge of the weaker side of a noble character, but it is still open to question whether a Wittelsbach would not have more worthily filled the imperial throne than a Hohenzollern. Humanity and the arts would surely have been gainers.