a ballroom, or a conference, he darted swift glances everywhere, as if to take in the general situation. His dispatches from Rome were so intimate and personal, that each had to be laid personally before Emperor William, who was curious about Italy. Jagow displayed rare genius in characterizations of men who swayed the destinies of Italy and in estimates of national and international situations. He could read Giolitti like a book and took the measure of Sonnino, Salandra and San Giuliano accurately. This was Jagow's strong point. He never showed much grasp of principles, but human nature could not elude him. He had the reputation of understanding women—a most important thing in a diplomatist at the court of Victor Emmanuel III. Jagow was not of the blood and iron breed, nor was he a hearty drinker and eater like Bismarck, nor dour and implacable like the older Moltke. He was the poetical, Hamlet-like Prussian, sweet of manner, and could conceal incredible sophistication beneath an aspect of ineffable simplicity. The English might say that the dreaming and soulful Prussian passed away when William II became a warlord, but it was not so. That type survived in Jagow, who might have stept out of Göthe's "Wilhelm Meister," so romantic was he, so susceptible to beauty. Jagow, unlike Bethmann-Hollweg, had not read the philosophers. His mind had the bent of Bülow's, who loved Merimée, Carducci, Dante, and the art of Siena. While Bülow was epigrammatic and witty, Jagow was a good listener. He made no epigrams and his enemies denied that he could make them, whereas Bülow scarcely opened his mouth "without there flew a trope." Jagow understood you. His smile was not that of amusement, but that of comprehension, and he let you lead. One could not grow intimate with him without thinking of the warning that the Prussian is a "faux bonhomme”—a sophisticated person, that is to say, knowing things well while manifesting all the artlessness of a child. Generations of Jagows had served Kings of Prussia. They hailed from that Mark of Brandenburg of which William II always made so much in his orations. The family was aristocratic to the fingertips, but no consciousness of that was apparent in the manner of Jagow in his relations to the lower-born Helferichs and Dernburgs, or even with Socialists. He knew that a modern period had come in German annals and the aristocracy of finance, boasting Ballins and Gwinners, had to be tolerated, side by side with the aristocracy of the sword and old paternal acres. For popular opinion, such as the Reichstag gave a voice and all that sort of thing, he had disdainful shrugs of the shoulders. Not even Bismarck attached more importance to the work of journalists. He was accused in Paris papers of being the organizer of a German press campaign. He deemed it a perfectly legitimate thing to feed the public as from a spoon with ready-made views of imperial policy, or things that people "must think officially.". Imagine a quiet, well-contained little man, well groomed, carrying a cane, wearing spats, arriving at the Wilhelmstrasse at ten in the morning. Jagow, the foreign minister of the German Empire, was that man. He had a small, carefully groomed mustache on a long upper lip. In winter he wore a long overcoat carefully brushed. Patent leather boots shone resplendently below. Once inside, valets helped him off with his hat and overcoat, and secretaries placed documents on his desk. He was accustomed to the world's ways and to the ways of lackeys, could be sympathetic to former German ministers, former German secretaries of embassy, former German attachés who came to pour into his receptive ear their several complaints and disillusions. They formed a melancholy procession to his office, those whilom diplomatists whom Emperor William had told to seek other careers. Their faces were long and their tales dolorous, but Jagow had smiles for them, and the flower at his buttonhole was not fresher than his face. Every complaining caller departed from him soothed and sustained. Recreation in the ordinary sense seemed to have been denied him, his constitution never having been sufficiently robust. His four years as ambassador in Italy built him up wonderfully and Rome saw him go with real regret. Never was a diner out, at least in the German diplomatic corps, so abstemious. His principal exercise was walking. Like Bülow, he took an occasional fancy to animal pets, but he was not followed everywhere by a little dog after the fashion of at least one former imperial chancellor. Jagow took to flowers, music, poetry, and pictures. He was too good a courtier to run counter to Emperor William's well-known taste in art. For that reason it was hinted with some malice that one never found the Foreign Minister at an exhibition of secessionists in art, but he would halt in ecstasy before some battle-picture of a school dear to William II. Had he not sprung from a long line of Prussian Junkers he might have become an artist of distinction, or at any rate a brilliant student of the arts.46 46 Adapted from a compilation by Alexander Harvey in Current Opinion, based on Irving S. Wile's "Men About the Kaiser" and articles in the Figaro and Gaulois (Paris) and the Tribune and Giornale (Rome). ALEXANDER FEODOROVITCH KERENSKY, PREMIER OF RUSSIA Kerensky was born in 1882. He was a Socialist of the moderate type and in the Provincial Government set up the revolution of March, 1917, he first served as Minister of Justice and later as Minister of War. Kerensky, in the crisis that followed within a few months, seemed to some observers destined to become Russia's Washington rather than its Napoleon-guiding it through stormy seas into a haven of peaceful democracy, rather than distorting its democracy into an ultimate imperialism. In a sense Kerensky's voice had been the first resounding voice of the revolution. After listening to the Czar's edict dissolving the Duma, it was he who rose in his place and said: "We will not go, we will stay here," and they stayed. So staying, the Duma accomplished the first act of the revolution-it was an act destined to be as historic as the refusal of the States General of France to disperse at the command of Louis XVI. Kerensky again gave evidence of possessing the instinct of leadership when, on the first day of July, 1917, having gone to the front, he called on his soldiers to charge the German trenches, declaring that if they failed to do so he would make the assault alone. In that act he sounded the note of personal appeal, the cry of individual valor that was needed by an army that had been disintegrated by German intrigue and had become hesitant and vacillating in its conception of duty. With a roar and a rush his troops responded and Russia once more seemed a factor in the war. It was a stroke such as Napoleon in his youth more than once used with revolutionary soldiers, notably at the bridge of Lodi. Physically frail-a fine soul in a sorely racked body-Kerensky became the most interesting figure in the war drama at that time. Kerensky was born in Tashkend, Turkestan, in Asiatic Russia, of pure Russian blood, his parents not rich. He studied in Moscow and was educated to be a lawyer. In childhood he had seen the sufferings of Siberian exiles which ever afterward affected his views of political questions. He began his work as a lawyer by defending "political criminals," men who had now become the real revolutionists of Russia. During the uprising of 1905 he became a speaker among the working classes and continued to defend Jews and political criminals against the old régime, often without taking money for his work. Elected to the Fourth Duma from Saratoff on the Volga, he became a leader of the Trudoviki, or Labor group, winning wider popularity. When at the beginning of the war Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaivitchnot the warrior Grand Duke Nicholas, but another-accused the Jews of being traitors, Kerensky made a fearless speech against him in the Duma. Two weeks before the revolution Minister Protopopoff had been planning to send him to Siberia; papers revealing the plan afterward came into his hands. He had often been pursued by spies of the old régime. A young man in the early thirties, neither tall nor short, his figure characterized by a stoop that came from much poring over books, brown hair brushed straight up, the forehead lined and seamed, a sharp nose and chin, quick, restless, steel-gray eyes, lips comprest with a very obvious decision-such was the personal impression Kerensky gave. He wore a black or gray sack-suit even on formal occasions. In his face was a peering expression that indicated near-sightedness. His hands often wandered restlessly to a pencil in his waistcoat pocket as he talked. It was not easy for him to sit still. In the middle of a conversation he would leap out of his chair and pace restlessly to and fro. As he talked, nervously and in a low tone, it was not easy to understand upon what his great reputation as an orator was based. One had to hear him in the Duma, or when he confronted a Labor group, to comprehend that. In his earnestness he would sometimes advance close to an interlocutor and seize the lapel of his coat while talking. Anything but a dandy in his dress, his boots often sadly needed polish. Kerensky's pleadings in local courts were made in a theatrical manner. He would fold his arms and glare in disconcerting fashion at an opposing witness, or at a judge who ventured to correct him, or at a lawyer with whom he was battling. That stare in the Duma had prodigious effects. He would swiftly launch a torrent of words, and yet each was distinct and telling. He would fold his arms and gaze about in a tense, strained, alert fashion when a pin could be heard to fall and then he would fire a shot-an epigram it might be, or a charge of turpitude, or a crushing citation of what Peter the Great had said, or what Pushkin said, and a sensation would ensue. Kerensky was most at home at a workingmen's meeting in Petrograd or Moscow. One thought of Marat. He had the same passion for the mob, the unfed sons of toil. His perfect sincerity made him the idol of labor-unions. He risked imprisonment by scorning openly a favorite device of the old bureaucracy-drafting men and exiling them to remote places upon a plea of administrative necessity. Protopopoff, the incarnation of bureaucracy, who once secured a decree against Kerensky, did not dare thus to banish him. Kerensky had striking resourcefulness in denunciation. He had called his predecessor at the Ministry of Justice "a crocodile without tears," had said Stürmer spoke Russian "with a Hohenzollern accent," and coined the phrase that there are two kinds of democracy— "the kind the people want and the kind the people get." Interrupted in the Duma by a remark that socialism was a dream, Kerensky retorted: "Yes, and capitalism is a nightmare." This readiness of tongue helped him to hold his own in that most turbulent of organizations in Petrograd, the Soviet or Council of Workers' and Soldiers' delegates. It was his influence at the Council that led to the adoption of the red flag as an emblem of the triumph of the people over autocracy. Others had favored a modification of the old Muscovite standard, but Kerensky would hear only of a red flag, use of which had been forbidden in many a bureaucratic rescript. Kerensky had an intuitive realization of crowd psychology. He could leap on a table at a moment's notice and gain attention when he made some happy remark that put every one in a good humor. He knew how to bring forward a practical suggestion at the right time, or how to wave his arm dramatically in a crisis and then shout "Follow me!" He loved an uproar, but could quiet crowds with a word. There was a touch in him of Camille Desmoulins, the journalist leader of the French Revolution. There were times when by great effort he could shout almost with the lung power of Danton. And yet his influence was in the main on the side of moderation. He kept a restraining hand on radical leaders in the Workers' and Soldier's Council. In his waiting-room in Petrograd might sometimes have been seen a dozen dingy civilians and some soldiers sitting on rickety chairs around the wall, the room quiet, the visitors wearing that distant, meditative expression that seemed to have settled like a common mask upon the people of Petrograd since they had caught a glimpse of primitive Russia at the outbreak of the revolution. The double doors that led into his inner office would open suddenly, and then one would see "a man of middle height, with close-clipt brown hair, flashing eyes and a sullen mouth," who surveyed his callers, and when he saw the soldiers, cried out abruptly in a rough voice, “Come on, comrades," whereupon they arose, shook hands, and went inside. Fifteen minutes later the doors would open again, and the soldiers would emerge smiling. Kerensky had learned revolutionary enthusiasm from France and stability from Great Britain, but he was a Russian first and last, and left no doubt in the minds of French and British that Russia "would henceforth endeavor to manage her own destiny." He had apparently "swung Russia away from license toward restraint; from oratory toward action; from a temporary autocracy of workmen and soldiers toward general tolerance." He once said that an autocracy of workmen or an autocracy of soldiers "is as bad as an autocracy of aristocrats," and Russia "should have no aristocracies. |