At the close of the Seven Years' War, Maria Theresa had spent the
twenty-three years of her reign in a fruitless struggle with Frederick.
Instead of dismembering his kingdom and reducing him to a plain
Margrave of Brandenburg, she had lost Silesia and was compelled to
listen to the praises of her enemy resounding through Europe and to
hear him called "the Great."
It was a bitter pill for her nine years later, when she had to confer
with the Prussian King as an equal, over the partition of Poland, and
to see him further enriched by a goodly slice of that unhappy country.
But before that event, and just two years after the conclusion of the
war, Francis I. died (1755). He had worn the title, but she had
wielded the power and guided the events ever since that day when, with
her infant son in her arms, she had captured the Hungarian Diet at
Presburg.
And now that son was Joseph II. But the scepter was still in reality
to remain with her while she lived, and in fact her name was to be the
last ray of splendor which should illumine the throne of Austria. But
these were sunset glories after a long and troubled day, while in
Prussia was the brightness of the dawn.
That friendship with Louis XV. so eagerly sought by Maria Theresa led
to a very momentous alliance of a different sort. The Empress and the
French King together arranged a marriage between her fair young
daughter Marie Antoinette and Louis, the young Dauphin of France.
How should the Empress of Austria, born, nurtured, and fed in the very
center of despotism--not hearing or heeding the current ideas about
human rights and freedom--entirely misunderstanding the past, the
present, and the future--how should she suspect the terrific forces
which were accumulating beneath the throne of France, or that it would
become a scaffold for her child? Hapsburg and Bourbon, to her mind,
were realities as fixed and enduring as the Alps.
She saw no special significance in the fact that thirteen English
colonies in America were in rebellion and setting up a novel form of
government for themselves. That was England's affair, not hers, and
would in time, like other rebellions against properly constituted
authority, be put down.
She did not live to see the end of this struggle, nor the events to
which it led in France. Her death occurred in 1780. Her son, Joseph
II., strange to say, was imbued with the new ideas of human rights.
Great was the astonishment of Frederick and of Europe, when this young
man set about the task of establishing a new and progressive order of
things in Austria; and it was a strange spectacle to behold a Hapsburg
trying to force upon his people reforms they did not desire, and rights
which they did not know how to use.
His plans were high and noble, but he failed to see that they were too
sweeping and too suddenly developed to be permanent. His people were
not ripe for emancipation from old shackles, which they had grown to
like and venerate. In striving to free the church from the Jesuits,
and to emancipate the serfs in Hungary, he had accomplished nothing,
and had created chaos. Depressed by the failure in his great design of
reformation, Joseph's health gave way. He died in 1790 and was
succeeded by his brother Leopold II.
It is not to be supposed that Frederick felt much sympathy with the
free young Republic established in America. And if he sent a sword of
honor to Washington in 1783, it was because he recognized the greatness
of the man; and perhaps, too, because he felt a malicious pleasure in
the humiliation of George III.!
The intellectual awakening which this King had failed to understand had
wrought a mighty change in Germany. Lessing had been the first to
break away from an enfeebling imitation of French _Sentimentlalism_.
The genius of Goethe and Schiller awakened a new spirit in literature,
that of _Romanticism_, and there commenced that intellectual convulsion
known as _Sturm und Drang_, or storm and stress period. While Goethe
and Schiller were supreme in the kingdom of letters, Herder and the
Schlegels were great in history and criticism; Humboldt and Ritter in
geographical science; Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Kant in philosophy;
Fouque and Tieck in imagination, and Jean Paul Richter in the
mysterious ether of transcendental thought.
When Karl August called Goethe to his Court in Saxe-Weimar, among that
group of other illustrious authors, and gave to Weimar the name of the
"German Athens," it was a Golden Age for Germany.
It is interesting to recall that it was Luther who gave the first
impulse to this movement, by revealing to the people the riches of
their own tongue. In his translation of the Bible, and in his hymns,
so grandly simple, he created the modern German language.
The influence of Luther was felt in another art, too. The enthusiasm
awakened by the singing of his hymns revolutionized the form of
ecclesiastical music. In this Golden Age in Germany music, too, had
become a great art, with such immortal names as Mozart, Gluck, Haydn,
and Beethoven; and the period of great orchestration also had
commenced.[1]
Although Frederick's tastes led him so strongly to letters and to
music, these two arts had attained this rich development in Germany
without any assistance from him. When he died in 1786 the monument he
left was a Kingdom of Prussia; equal in rank with any of the Great
Powers of Europe, enlarged in territory, rich in population, with a
great army and an overflowing treasury.
As Frederick the Great had no son, this splendid inheritance passed to
his nephew Frederick William II.
With the new ascendency of Prussia in the German Empire, a process
which had long been going on was accelerated. That empire had become a
fiction, a form from which the substance had long ago departed; almost
its only remaining relic being an Imperial Diet, where thirty solemn
old men supposed they were holding the venerated structure together by
weaving about it, and repairing, the thin, worn threads of tradition.
The German Empire had in its best time existed by grace of God and
force of circumstances, more than by reason of a sound and perfect
organism. It always struggled with fatal inherent defects. Its life
currents never flowed freely and had been growing more and more
sluggish for centuries. And now, they had ceased to flow at all.
There was no vital relation whatever between its various parts. Of
national feeling there was absolutely none. Lessing, one of the
greatest Germans of that time, said, "Of the love of country I have no
conception!"
And what was there to inspire patriotism in this great empty shell of
despotism! The shattered lifeless old structure was wrong at its very
foundation. It was built upon feudal injustice; that injustice which
compelled the people to bear the whole burden of taxation, from which
it exempted the nobility and the clergy. England had long ago
redressed this grievous wrong. France was just preparing to free
herself from it by a tremendous convulsion. Germany had been offered
emancipation at the hands of her enlightened and gracious Emperor
Joseph, but so spiritless and benumbed had she become that she could
not understand his message.
He was attempting a vain task in trying to infuse new life into the
empire. There were no living channels to convey the current. The only
thing to be done with it was to sweep it away--and the man and the time
for doing this were close at hand. The surface calm which existed
while Leopold II. was repairing the disorder left by his reforming
brother Joseph, was the calm which precedes the hurricane.
[1] See Chart of Civilization in Six Centuries, "Who, When, and What."