tendency may be the most wrong-headed of all possible ways for two
nations to arrive at a _rapprochement_. Now is not the moment for
Germany to make anti-humanistic gestures; to pattern itself upon
Tolstoy’s pedagogic bolshevism; to characterize as ethnical savagery
the rebuke which Goethe administered to the hedonism of the general
humanistic ideal in education. No, on the contrary, it is the time for
us to lay all possible stress upon our great humane inheritance and
to cultivate it with all the means at our command--not only for its
own sake, but in order to put visibly in the wrong the claims of Latin
civilization. And, in particular, our socialism, which has all too
long allowed its spiritual life to languish in the shallows of a crude
economic materialism, has no greater need than to find access to that
loftier Germany which has always sought with its spirit the land of the
Greeks. It is today, politically speaking, our really national party;
but it will not truly rise to the height of its national task until--if
I may be allowed the extravagance--Karl Marx has read Friedrich
Hölderlin: a consummation which, by the way, seems in a fair way to be
achieved.
* * * * *
Beautiful is resolution. But the really fruitful, the productive,
and hence the artistic principle is that which we call reserve. In
the sphere of music we love it as the prolonged note, the teasing
melancholy of the not-yet, the inward hesitation of the soul, which
bears within itself fulfilment, resolution, and harmony, but denies it
for a space, withholds and delays, scruples exquisitely yet a little
longer to make the final surrender. In the intellectual sphere we love
it as irony: that irony which glances at both sides, which plays slyly
and irresponsibly--yet not without benevolence--among opposites, and
is in no great haste to take sides and come to decisions; guided as
it is by the surmise that in great matters, in matters of humanity,
every decision may prove premature; that the real goal to reach is not
decision, but harmony, accord. And harmony, in a matter of eternal
contraries, may lie in infinity; yet that playful reserve called irony
carries it within itself, as the sustained note carries the resolution.
In the foregoing pages I have tried it, this “infinite” irony; and my
readers may judge upon which extreme it more enjoyed playing, at which
side of the eternal contradiction it took keener aim--and draw their
conclusions accordingly; only not too far-reaching ones!
Irony is the pathos of the middle ... its moral too, its ethos. I said
that it is not, in general, the German way to be hasty in deciding
the aristocratic problem--if I may, in this phrase, sum up the whole
complex of contrasted values dealt with in the present essay. We are a
people of the middle, a world-bourgeoisie; there is a fittingness in
our geographical position and in our _mores_. I have been told that in
Hebrew the words for knowing and insight have the same stem as the word
for between.
That German writer who has most urgently pondered upon the problem
of aristocracy was, philologically speaking, greatly daring when
he invented a derivation for the name of the German people: from
_Tiusche-Volk_; that is, _Täusche-Volk_. But, for all that, the idea
is full of esprit. A people that settles in the bourgeois world-middle
must needs be the _täuschende_, the elusive folk: the race that
practises a sly and ironic reserve toward both sides, that moves
between extremes, easily, with non-committal benevolence; with the
morality, no, the simplicity of that elusive “betweenness” of theirs,
their faith in knowledge and insight, in cosmopolitan culture.
Fruitful difficulty of the middle, thou art freedom and reserve in one!
Let them tell us, as they have told us, that this free-handed policy
of ours brings us, in actual practice, to grief. But this practice is
doubtful, this disaster even more so. More than probably it came upon
us for our own best good; more than probably we were more profoundly
striving to bring it about than man ever strives to encompass his
happiness. Again, humility in the face of failure is no more noble than
humility in the face of success; and nothing but defeatism could shake
our faith in the rightness and sanctity of this spiritual attitude of
ours, whose end and aim is justified, not as a craving for freedom or
as ironic reserve, but as a final synthesis and harmony, the pure idea
of man himself.
That mutual character of the sentimental longing--of the sons of spirit
for nature, of the sons of nature for spirit (for, as we found, it
is not spirit alone that is sentimental)--argues a higher unity as
humanity’s goal; which she, in very truth the standard-bearer of all
aspiration, endows with her own name, with _humanitas_. That instinct
of self-preservation, full of reserve as it is, felt by the German
people in their central position as a world-bourgeoisie, is genuine
nationalism. For that is the name we give to a people’s craving for
freedom, to the pains they take with themselves, to their effort after
self-knowledge and self-fulfilment. So too the artist is loyally and
devotedly convinced that his only thought is to wrest his own work and
his very own dream out of the block of stone; and yet, in some solemn
and moving hour, may learn that the spirit which possessed him had a
purer source, that from the stone he carved there is emerging a loftier
image than he knew.
Folk, and humanity. It was a seer out of the east, one of those who,
like Goethe, Nietzsche, and Whitman, have looked long into the slowly
mounting dawn of a new piety--it was Dmitri Merezhkovsky who has said
that the animal contains the beast-man and the beast-god. The essence
of the beast-god is as yet scarcely comprehended by man, though it is
only the union of the beast-god with the beast-man which will some
day bring about the redemption of the race of mankind. This “some
day,” this idea of a redemption, which is no longer Christian and
yet not pagan either, carries in itself the solution of the problem
of aristocracy, as well as justifying, yes, sanctifying, all ironic
reserve on the subject of ultimate values.
We have treated with some assurance of great natures, great creative
artists, children of God, in whom the beast-god was strong, as also
their sense of self, their feeling for repose, for woman, for the
people; we have enjoyed the wit of those world-spirits who tempered
and humanized their confessed egotism with a strain of the didactic
impulse. More hesitantly we have trenched upon the god-man sphere of
those others, their emotional opposites, the men of deeds, the sons of
spirit, the saintly and sickly. The true saying of that Russian that
the essence of the beast-god is as yet scarcely apprehended by man
might strengthen our faith in the ironic doctrine that there is more
of grace among those who at bottom “can love nobody but themselves.”
But well we know that there is no deciding the question which of these
two lofty types is called to contribute more and better to the highly
cherished idea of a perfected humanity.
1922
II
FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE GRAND COALITION
FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE GRAND COALITION
An Abstract for the Hour
Well, where shall I begin? The writer of history--and in this case the
historical essayist as well--is always subject to the temptation to
which Wagner so magnificently succumbed when, with no more in view than
the presentation of his hero’s downfall, he found himself lured by a
pedantic enthusiasm deeper and deeper into his folktale, and urged to
include a larger and larger area of his background, until at last he
fetched up against the first beginnings and origins of all things; and
there, at the lowest E of the prelude to the prelude, he solemnly and
almost soundlessly set to. But both space and time vigorously protest
against my following Wagner’s example in this sketch of the origins of
a war, the repetition--or continuation--of which we are seeing today.
Rather let me be strict with myself; and since I must begin somewhere,
let me make my beginning with the profound mistrust, the deep-seated
and, to be quite fair, the rather well-founded mistrust felt by all the
world for Frederick II of Prussia.
Consider: here is a young man, boyish of feature, elegantly built,
if rather plump, “the nicest little creature in the kingdom,” a
stranger said of him; fresh-coloured, chubby-cheeked, with large,
short-sighted, sparkling blue eyes and a nose that made a straight
line with his forehead and had a naïve little rosy tip. And this nice
young man is a crown prince, with a perfectly well-known past that has
been somewhat dissipated and by turns alarming and alarmed; by way of
being a _libre-penseur_ too, a pert young philosopher and littérateur,
author of the highly humanistic _Antimachiavelli_. He is totally
unmilitary, so far as can be seen, a civilian of the civilians, even
effeminate; runs up bills, and has his heart set on the pomps and
vanities. And now this young man becomes king--having proved so devoid
of honourable feeling as not to have been provoked by any cudgellings
or neck-twistings on the part of his fearsome papa to put a bullet
through his brain or even to resign in his brother’s favour. And as
king so conducts himself that nobody knows what to think. The day that
he ascended the throne went for ever after by the name “_La journée
des dupes_.” Almost everything turned out contrary to expectations.
Those who had trembled before the revenge of the new master were
not punished, while those who dreamed that their day had come found
themselves disillusioned. The poets and fortune-hunters who swarmed
round the throne and could not huzza loud or long enough, visibly drew
in their horns; and a jolly fellow from Rheinsberg, who knew no better
than to strike up confidently in the key of former days, received a
sparkling blue glance and the cutting words: “_Monsieur, à présent je
suis roi._” In other words, the joke is played out. It is precisely
the scene in Shakespeare, perhaps the finest in the whole of him, where
somebody, with just such a look, says to somebody else: “I know thee
not, old man.”
Some things which the youth does in his very first days of power have
literary _habitus_, are rather high-handed and self-assertive. He
abolishes the torture--so much the better for the thieves! He declares
that the gazettes need not be afraid to be a little amusing, they will
not be prosecuted; and annuls the censorship (and puts it back a year
later). He proclaims religious toleration--that is his much-talked-of
enlightenment, of course. But what has become of that dream of
Parnassus, that court of the muses, where fashion and wit should
reign and all be careless, voluptuous, and gallant? It is nowhere
at all. The new lord turns out to be, of all things in the world, a
rigid economist. No rise in the pay of officials. No reduction of the
high tariffs, however much certain people may have counted on relief.
The chancelleries of the kingdom are notified that the financial
system of his dear departed Majesty will continue strictly in force.
Finance-Minister Boden, a much-hated skinflint, remains in office.
There is no such thing as trust, or easy-going, or _laissez-aller_.
Everybody is watched as never before. And Baron von Pöllnitz actually
said, with a sigh: “I’d give a hundred pistoles to have the old man
back again!”
No revolutionary changes of system, then. No loosening of the reins
of government, no new faces in the Ministry. But one thing, at least,
will surely be different: this is a civilian of civilians who reigns,
he stands for literature and silk dressing-gowns and a definite
end to Potsdam militarism. Surely the corporal’s baton has gone out
of fashion! Well, just here everybody gets the greatest surprise of
all. The slack and rather sensual young philosopher comes out as an
impassioned soldier: he has no thought of weakening the military basis
of the State. Weaken it? He strengthens the army by fifteen battalions,
five squadrons of hussars (introduced on the Austrian model), and
a squadron of _gardes du corps_, bringing it up to a round ninety
thousand men. The uniform once cursed and jeered at he is never seen
out of. His conservatism extends to the retention of all the existing
military ranks. “The army organization is a monument of His Majesty our
dearly beloved father’s wisdom in government; it is, in essentials, not
to be tampered with.” A few barbarities in the recruiting system are
done away with: the flogging of cadets, maltreating the common man,
have to be frowned on for his credit’s sake. But that is all. What
seems to need change is the _meaning_ of the institution, the spirit in
which it is employed--its political significance, in short. And just
here is the suspicious thing.
The military had been something like a foible of the deceased
sovereign, a barbaric and rather costly fad, a laughing-stock at all
the courts of Europe, where it had never weighed in the scale of
affairs. All at once it becomes “the power of the State”--Frederick’s
phrase in one of his first letters as ruler--a curiously practical
conception, further borne out by the way he sets to work to purge the
establishment of the quaint flourishes it had as a fad of the deceased
King. The regiment of giants, a sight worth looking at, but not good
for much else, is done away with, appears for the last time at the
funeral ceremonies of Frederick William. Only a battalion of grenadier
guards is left, for the sake of filial piety. “The power of the State.”
Prussia’s representatives at foreign courts begin suddenly to speak
a language that makes one doubt one’s ears. Prussia takes the stage;
Prussia unmistakably means to be treated as the not negligible entity
she really is. Her astonishing young king behaves as though Prussia
were not so much a state of the German empire as a European one. He
lets it be known that he is not minded for ever to span the bow and
never to let it go, as Europe has long mocked at Prussia for doing.
But what shall we make of all this? Had he been a comedian all this
time? Count Seckendorff once wrote about him to Vienna when he was
still crown prince: “His greatest fault is his dissimulation and
falseness, which makes it necessary to exercise the very greatest
caution in what one tells him.” Yes, that is evidently true.
Seckendorff goes on: “He told me he was a poet, he could write a
hundred lines in an hour. And a musician too, a moral philosopher,
a physicist, a mechanic. What he never will be is a statesman or a
commander-in-chief.” Looked at from this end, it seems as though the
young man had deliberately dissimulated in this respect as well. For
the last surprise is the greatest of all; for the first time it betrays
what is actually to be expected of him.
Frederick has not been on the throne for half a year when Charles VI
dies; and scarcely is the Emperor below ground when Frederick, to the
great consternation of his own ministers, generals, and relatives and
the rest of the world as well, lays some sort of claim to Silesia.
By the letter of the law and by virtue of solemn compacts, the claim
is wholly unfounded; or, if you like, founded on the divers acts of
perfidy and presumption which Brandenburg has had from time immemorial
to endure from Austria. In any case it is a claim which Frederick,
unless Maria Theresa acquiesces, and that she cannot possibly do, is
prepared to maintain with the sword. “Everything is in readiness,” he
writes to Algarotti; “I have only to put into effect the plans I have
had a long time in my head.” A long time? And everything in readiness?
Without saying a word to a soul? Without betraying by the smallest
sign that he had such ideas in his head? Well, he has certainly been
a dissembling, reserved, solitary young man, all the conviviality on
the Remusberg to the contrary notwithstanding! To Voltaire, on the
other hand, he writes: “The Emperor’s death upset all my peaceful
ideas.” This in order that Voltaire in France might not suppose that
the attack had been a matter of long preparation. Oh, a young man both
particularly solitary and particularly sly!
However, there it is: Frederick invades the imperial domains--he,
Margrave of Brandenburg, who, as hereditary arch-chamberlain, has had
to hand the wash-basin to Maria Theresa’s ancestors. “_C’est un fou,
cet homme là est fol_,” said Louis XV, who after all must have known
something about the game of politics. A piece of bravado, a perfectly
reckless beginning, says all Europe. And the English Minister in
Vienna is even then of the opinion that Frederick ought to be outlawed.
But bravado or no--Austria is in bad form, things turn out well for
Frederick. There is the battle of Mollwitz, where he is beaten and
takes to his heels for ten miles, while Schwerin comes up and wins the
day for him. Not a glorious day for the King, but a victory none the
less. Then Bavaria has hankerings after the imperial crown, France
supports her, Austria is hard pressed. On top of that comes Chotusitz,
where Buddenbrock throws the Austrians into the burning village; and
Maria Theresa, who would rather lose a whole province to Bavaria than
a single village to Prussia (she hates this Frederick with the whole
strength of her femininity), must, anguish in her white bosom, tears in
her blue eyes, sign a peace that assures to the King Upper and Lower
Silesia and the Duchy of Gratz. He has them, they are his.
What else? A round two years have passed when Frederick makes war
again--ostensibly as an elector of the realm to bring succour to the
hard-pressed Bavarian emperor, but actually because Maria Theresa
has meanwhile been rather too successful against France and Bavaria,
and Frederick suspects that when she has finished with the others
she will turn round and take Silesia away from him again: beautiful,
never-to-be-forgotten Silesia--she bursts into tears whenever she hears
it mentioned. And she is not without powerful friends: for instance,
King George II of England, conqueror of the French and ally of the
Empress-queen since Worms, 1734. King George wrote to her in these
very words: “_Madame, ce qui est bon à prendre est bon à rendre_”--the
letter fell into Frederick’s hands. England and Austria have helped
each other defend the territories which each had possessed up to 1739.
Up to 1739? That was, to be sure, before Frederick took Silesia. And
there are similar pacts entered into between Austria and Saxony. The
Austrian historians call heaven to witness that the Empress had not
at that time planned any attack, but it was enough for Frederick. He
stood very well with France: since June he had had with Richelieu
a twelve-year offensive alliance; he is not without diplomatic
safeguards. In these two years he has increased the “power of the
State” by eighteen thousand “moustaches,” as Voltaire called them;
greatly strengthened and rebuilt the Silesian fortresses; and in the
middle of the summer of ’44 he strikes again, without even declaring
war; falls upon Bohemia eighty thousand strong, marches through Saxony
without even asking the Elector’s leave, marches toward Prague, marches
actually against Vienna.
It is heavy going. Now and then things look desperate. Charles
of Lorraine hurls himself from Alsace into Bohemia and threatens
Frederick’s Silesian connexions; the Saxon army has the King in the
rear--there is an awkward retreat, due to several foolish decisions
on Frederick’s part, by his own later confession--he learned much
from them. By the next year his generalship shows itself devilishly
improved! Soor follows on Hohenfriedberg; after he has annihilated
the Saxons at Kesselsdorf, Count Harrach comes as broker to Dresden,
and Maria Theresa confirms the cession of Silesia, while Frederick
recognizes her husband, the gallant Francis of Lorraine, as German
emperor. Why not?--Charles VII is dead, and Frederick never set great
store by him anyhow.
But why does he make peace with Habsburg? Because he sees that fortune
has been with France in the Netherlands, and so, for the present,
the Empress-queen’s preponderance is not very great. Also, to the
huge dissatisfaction of France, he makes peace with England too,
withdraws with his booty--Silesia--and sagely resists for the next
three years--for so long does the War of the Pragmatic Sanction go on
between France and Austria supported by the sea powers--all attempts to
draw him out of his neutrality. By the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which
finally brought the struggle to an end in favour of Maria Theresa, he
gets his Silesian “acquisition” expressly guaranteed.
But one thing we must say: if the Silesian “acquisition” be considered
robbery, a piece of property snatched in defiance of justice--and
people did so consider it, and so it was--then they should not have
solemnly guaranteed it to the robber. That they did so guarantee it
meant that they left it to time to right the wrong (as time can do) and
that Europe and Maria Theresa from then on renounced all machinations
and conspiracies against the robber, and accepted the _fait accompli_.
But this they did not do, Maria Theresa in particular did not do it.
She did not abandon the hope that she might yet get Silesia back,
despite the Peace of Aix; and that is a black mark against the name
of that splendid, simple, high-hearted woman, who was otherwise so
deserving of all the interest and sympathy she got from Europe. But why
was it that Europe--or its courts and governments--never felt easy on
the score of this king? Because of the great mistrust, with which our
story began, and which the King repaid with interest. The mistrust was
rooted in his fundamentally strange, enigmatic character. Europe knew
it to be a danger; and its later manifestations kept her constantly
holding her breath.
The fact was that of all the powers who had gone to war over the
Pragmatic Sanction, Frederick alone had gained something, had even
gained a great deal. That he kept the splendid province was the least
of his gains. But this beggarly young Prussia, with its poor two
million souls, had measured itself beside, or against, Austria, as an
equal; it had squeezed in among the great powers of Europe, and claimed
to speak in all their counsels as one of them; it had forced them to
reckon with Prussia as a political factor not merely weighty, but even
decisive--for Frederick had managed to stage himself in the popular
imagination as the balance-wheel of European equilibrium, at least so
far as the relations between France and Austria were concerned. Now,
it is very hard on Europe to be forced to change its attitude like
that. It takes her centuries. She struggles, she scolds, she sneers;
she denies the new factor any political, cultural, above all any moral
justification, she cannot utter enough spite and venom against the
newcomer, she sees nothing but a speedy ruin in store for him; and, if
her prophecies do not look like fulfilling themselves with measurable
haste, then all the old-established society of states are ready to bury
the hatchet of their private quarrels over prestige and interests,
however vital, in order to fall on the kill-joy and crush him. She
will do that, or try to, twice, if need be, within a hundred and fifty
years. Simple people like Frederick’s philosopher friend Jordan, even
in the second Silesian war, can never understand why it is that “the
accounts in the newspapers are never favourable to us.” Yes, it was
strange. But the newspaper accounts could not prevent Frederick from
keeping Silesia. And now, at least, with the guarantee safe in his
pocket, surely he is satiated and satisfied? Apart from measures taken
against him--was he, on his side, well and peacefully minded?
He did not give the impression that he meant to disarm immediately. He
kept his army, after the Peace at Dresden, on a footing of a hundred
and forty thousand men; there were in addition the “supernumerary
troops,” whose strength he doubled, so that he had at his disposition
a trained reserve of sixteen thousand men. That made a hundred and
fifty-six thousand “moustaches,” an absurd figure for a country of
Prussia’s relative rank and economic resources. Louis XV had not so
many soldiers, certainly not so many beastly good ones. For Frederick’s
army, out of all compass as far as numbers went, was put through its
paces in a way that was the talk of Europe.