CHAPTER VIII.

THE STATE OF FREDERIC THE GREAT.

(1700.)

What was it that after the Thirty Years' War fixed the eyes of

politicians upon the small State on the north-eastern frontier of

Germany, towards Sweden and Poland, that was struggling against the

Hapsburgers and Bourbons? The heritage of the Hohenzollerns was no

favoured fertile country, in which the peasant dwelt comfortably on

well-cultivated acres, or to which rich merchants brought in galleons,

Italian silks, and the spices and ingots of the new world. It was a

poor devastated, sandy country; the cities were burnt, the huts of the

country people demolished, the fields uncultivated, many square miles

denuded of men and beasts of burden, and nature restored to its

primitive state. When Frederic William, in 1640, assumed the Electoral

hat, he found nothing but contested claims to scattered territories, of

about 1450 square miles,[11] and in all the fortresses of his family

domains, were established domineering conquerors. Out of an insecure

desert did this clever double-dealing Prince establish his State, with

a cunning and recklessness in regard to his neighbours which excited a

sensation even in that unscrupulous period, but at the same time with

an heroic vigour and enlarged views, by which he more than once

attained to a higher conception of German honour, than the Emperor or

any other prince of the Empire.

Nevertheless, when the astute politician died in 1688, what he left

behind was still only a small nation, not to be reckoned among the

Powers of Europe. For though his sovereignty comprehended 2034 square

miles, the population, at the utmost, only amounted to 1,300,000. When

Frederic II., a century later, assumed the dominions of his ancestors,

he only inherited a population of 2,240,000 souls, far less than is now

to be found in the one province of Silesia. What was it then, that,

immediately after the battles of the Thirty Years' War, excited the

jealousy of all the governments, especially of the Imperial house, and

that made such bitter opponents of the hitherto warm friends of the

Brandenbergers? For two centuries, both Germans and foreigners placed

their hopes on this new State; equally long have Germans and

foreigners, first with scorn and then with hatred, called it an

artificial superstructure, which could not maintain itself against

violent storms, and which had unjustifiably intruded itself among the

Powers of Europe. How came it at last that, after the death of Frederic

the Great, unprejudiced judges declared that it would be better to

cease prophesying the downfall of this much-hated State? After each

prostration it rose so vigorously, its injuries and wounds from war

were so quickly healed, as has not been the case with any other; wealth

and intelligence assumed larger proportions there than in any portion

of Germany!

Undoubtedly it was a peculiar nature, a new phase of German character,

which shewed itself in the Hohenzollerns and their people in the

conquered Sclavonian territory. It appears that there were greater

contrasts of character there; for the virtues and failings of its

governors, the greatness and weakness of their policy, appeared there

in glaring contrast: narrow-mindedness became more striking,

shortcomings appeared more conspicuous, and that which was worthy of

admiration, more wonderful. It appeared that this State produced

everything that was most strange and uncommon, and only the quiet

mediocrity, which may elsewhere be useful and bearable, could not exist

there without injury.

Much of this arose from the position of the country: it had as

contiguous neighbours Swedes, Sclavonians, French, and Dutch. There was

scarcely a question of European politics which did not produce welfare

or injury to this State; scarce a complication which active princes did

not take advantage of to put in claims. The failing power of Sweden,

the already beginning process of dissolution in Poland, occasioned

perplexity of views; the preponderating power of France, the suspicious

friendship of Holland, necessitated prompt and vigorous foresight.

After the first year in which the Elector Frederic William took

possession, by force and cunning, of his own fortresses, it became

manifest that there, in a corner of the German soil, a powerful,

circumspect military government would not be wanting for the

preservation of Germany. After the beginning of the French war, in

1674, Europe beheld with astonishment the wary policy that proceeded

from this little spot, which undertook, with heroic daring, to defend

the west frontier of Germany against the all-powerful King of France.

There was, also, perhaps something peculiar in the character of the

Brandenburg people, in which both princes and subjects had an equal

share. The district of Prussia, up to the time of Frederic the Great,

had given to Germany comparatively few men of learning, poets, or

artists; even the passionate zeal of the period of the Reformation

appeared there to be damped. The people who dwelt in the frontier

countries, mostly of Lower Saxon origin, with a small mixture of

Sclavonian blood, were a hard, rough race, not very pleasing in their

modes of life, of uncommonly sharp understanding and sober judgment. In

the capital they had been, from ancient times, sarcastic and voluble in

speech; but in all the provinces they were capable of great exertion,

laborious, tenacious, and of great power of endurance.

But the character of the princes produced still more effect than even

the situation or character of the people. Their State was constituted

differently from any other since the days of Charles the Great. Many

princely houses have furnished a succession of Sovereigns who have been

the fortunate aggrandisers of their States, as the Bourbons, who have

collected wide territories into one great kingdom; many families of

princes have produced generations of valiant warriors, none more so

than the Vasas and the Protestant Wittelsbacher in Sweden. But there

have been no trainers of the people like the old Hohenzollerns. As

great landed proprietors on the desolated country they brought

about an increase of population, guided the cultivation, for almost

150 years laboured as strict economists, thought, tolerated, dared

and did injustice, in order to create for their State a people like

themselves--hard, parsimonious, discreet, daring, and ambitious.

In this sense one has a right to admire the providential character of

the Prussian State. Of the four princes who have governed it, since the

German War up to the day when the grey-headed Abbot closed his weary

eyes in the monastery of Sans Souci, each one, with his virtues and

failings, has acted as a necessary supplement to his predecessor. The

Elector Frederic William, the greatest statesman from the school of the

German War--the pompous Frederic, the first King--the parsimonious

despot Frederic William I.--and, finally, he in whom were concentrated

almost all the talents and great qualities of his ancestors, were the

flowers of their race.

Life in the King's castle in Berlin was very cheerless when Frederic

grew up; few of the citizens' homes at that rude time were so poor in

love and sunshine. One may doubt whether it was the King his father, or

the Queen, who was most to blame for the disorder of the family life,

both through failings of their nature, which, in the ceaseless rubs of

home, ever became greater;--the King, a wonderful tyrant, with a soft

heart but rough and violent, who wished to compel love and confidence,

with a keen understanding, but so unwary that he was always in danger

of being the victim of rogues, and from the gloomy knowledge of his

weakness became suspicious, stubborn, and violent; the Queen, on the

other hand, an insignificant woman, with a cold heart, a strong feeling

of her princely dignity, and much inclination to intrigue, neither

cautious nor taciturn. Both had the best intentions, and exerted

themselves honourably to make their children good and capable men, but

both injudiciously disturbed the sound development of the childish

soul. The mother had so little tact as to make her children, even in

their tender youth, the confidants of her chagrins and intrigues; for

in her chambers there was no end of complaints, rancour, and derision,

over the undue parsimony of the King, the blows which he so abundantly

distributed in his apartments, and the monotony of the daily

regulations which he enforced. The Crown Prince, Frederic, grew up as

the playfellow of his elder sister, a delicate child with brilliant

eyes and wonderfully beautiful blond hair. Punctiliously was he taught

just as much as the King wished, and that was little enough; scarcely

anything of the Latin declensions--the great King never overcame the

difficulties of the genitive and dative--French, some history, and

the necessary accomplishments of a soldier. The ladies inspired the

boy--who was giddy, and in presence of the King looked shy and

defiant--with the first interest in French literature; he himself

afterwards gave the praise to his sister, but his governess also was a

clever Frenchwoman. That this foreign acquisition was hateful to the

King, gave it additional value to the son; for, in the apartments of

the Queen, that was most certain to be praised which was most

displeasing to the strict master of the family. And when the King

delivered to his family his blustering pious speeches, then the

Princess Wilhelmine and the young Frederic looked so significantly at

one another that, at last, the faces made by one of the children

excited a childish desire to laugh, and produced an outburst of fury in

the King! Owing to this the son became, in his early years, an object

of irritation to his father. He called him an effeminate fellow, who

did not keep himself clean, and took an unmanly pleasure in dress and

games.

But from the account of his sister, in whose unsparing judgment it

appeared easier to blame than to praise, one may perceive how much the

amiability of the highly gifted boy worked upon his _entourage_;

whether he secretly read French stories with his sister, and applied

the comical characters of the novel to the whole court, or, contrary to

the most positive order, played upon the flute and lute, or visited his

sister in disguise, when they recited the _roles_ of the French comedy

together. But even for these harmless pleasures Frederic was obliged to

have recourse to lies, deceit, and dissimulation. He was proud,

high-minded, magnanimous, with an uncompromising love of truth.

Dissimulation was so repugnant to his nature that where it was required

he would not condescend to it; and if he was compelled to an unskilful

hypocrisy, his position with his father became more difficult, the

distrust of the King greater, and the wounded self-respect of the son

was always breaking out in defiance.

Thus he grew up surrounded by spies, who conveyed his every word to the

King. With a richly gifted mind and refined intellectual yearnings, he

needed that manly society which would have been suitable for him. No

wonder that the youth went astray. The Prussian passed for a very

virtuous court in comparison with the other courts of Germany; but the

tone towards women, and the carelessness with which the most doubtful

connexions were treated, were there also very great. After a visit to

the profligate court of Dresden, Prince Frederic began to behave like

other princes of his time, and he found good comrades among his

father's young officers. We know little of him at this time, but we may

conclude that he was undoubtedly in some danger, not of being ruined,

but of passing the best years of his life amidst debts and worthless

connexions. It certainly was not the increasing displeasure of his

father that unhinged his mind at this period, so much as an inward

dissatisfaction that drove the immature youth more wildly into error.

He determined to escape to England; how his flight miscarried, and how

great was the anger of Colonel Frederic William against the deserter,

are well known. With the days of his imprisonment in Kuestrin, and his

residence at Ruppin, his education began in earnest. The horrors he had

experienced had called forth in him new powers. He had borne all the

terrors of death, and the most bitter humiliation of princely pride. In

the solitude of his prison he had reflected on the great riddle of

life,--on death, and what was to follow after it. He had perceived that

nothing remained to him but submission, patience, and quiet endurance.

But bitter corroding misfortune is not a school which develops good

alone: it gives birth also to many faults. He learnt to hide his

decisions in his own breast, to look with suspicion on men and use them

as his tools, to deceive and cajole them with a cold astuteness which

was foreign to his nature. He flattered the cowardly, mean Grumbkow,

and was glad when he gradually won the bad man to his purposes; he had

for years to struggle warily against the dislike and distrust of his

hard father. His nature always resisted this humiliation, and he

endeavoured by bitter scorn to atone to his injured self-respect; his

heart, which glowed for everything noble, saved him from becoming a

hard egotist, but it did not make him milder or more conciliatory, and

when he had become a great man and a wise prince, he still retained

some traces of narrow-minded cunning from this time of servitude. The

lion had at times not been ashamed to scratch like a spiteful cat.

Yet he learnt during these years to respect some things that were

useful--the strict economical care with which his narrow-minded but

prudent father provided for the weal of his household and country.

When, to please the King, he made estimates of a lease; when he gave

himself the trouble to increase the profits of a demesne by some

hundred thalers; when he thought that the King spent more than was

fitting on his favourite fancy, and proposed to him to kidnap a tall

shepherd from Mecklenburg as a recruit,--this work was undoubtedly in

the beginning only a burdensome means of propitiating the King; for

Grumbkow had to procure him a man who made out estimates instead of

him, and the officials and exchequer officers gave him hints how, here

and there, a profit was to be made, and he always jested about the

giants, where he could venture to do so. But the new world in which he

found himself, gradually led him on to the practical interests of the

people and State. It is clear that the economy of his father was often

tyrannical and extraordinary. The King was always convinced that his

whole object was the good of the country, and therefore he took upon

himself to interfere in the most arbitrary way with the possessions and

affairs of private persons. When he commanded that no male goat should

be driven with the sheep; that all coloured sheep, grey, black, and

mixed, should be entirely got rid of within three years, and only white

wool should be permitted; when he accurately prescribed how the sample

measure of the Berlin scheffel--which, at the cost of his subjects, he

had sent throughout the country--should be locked up and preserved,

that they might not be battered; when, in order to promote the linen

and woollen trade, he commanded that his subjects should not wear the

fashionable chintz and calico, threatening with a fine of 300 thalers

and three days in the pillory, all who, after eight months, should have

in their house any cotton articles, either nightgowns, caps, or

furniture,--such measures of government appeared certainly harsh and

trivial; but the son learnt to honour the shrewd sense and benevolent

care which were the groundwork of these decrees, and he himself

gradually became familiar with a multitude of details, with which

otherwise as a prince he would not have been conversant: the value of

property, the price of the necessaries of life, the wants of the

people, and the customs, rights, and duties of life in the lower

classes. He had also a share of the self-satisfaction with which the

King boasted of this knowledge of business. When he himself became the

all-powerful administrator of his State, the incalculable advantage of

his knowledge of the people and of trade became manifest. It was owing

to this that the wise economy with which he managed his own house and

the finances of the country became possible, and that he was enabled to

advance the agriculture, trade, wealth, and education of his people by

incessant care of details. Equally with the daily accounts of his

kitchen he knew how to test the calculations concerning the crown

demesnes and forests, and the excise. His people had chiefly to thank

the years in which he was compelled to sit as assessor at the green

table at Ruppin for his power of overlooking with a sharp eye the

smallest as well as the greatest affairs. But sometimes what had been

so vexatious in his father's time happened to himself: his knowledge of

business details was not sufficient, so that here and there, just like

his father, he commanded what violently interfered with the life of his

Prussians, and could not be carried out.

The wounds inflicted upon Frederic by the great catastrophe had

scarcely been healed, when a new misfortune befell him as great almost

in its consequences as the first. The King forced a wife upon him.

Heartrending is the woe with which he strove to escape the bride chosen

for him. "I do not care how frivolous she may be, as long as she is not

a simpleton, that, I cannot bear." It was all in vain. With bitterness

and indignation did he regard this marriage shortly before it took

place. Never did he overcome the effect of this sorrow, by which his

father ruined his inward life. His most susceptible feelings, and his

loving heart, were sold in the roughest way. Not only was he made

unhappy by it, but also an excellent woman who was deserving of a

better fate. The Princess Elizabeth of Bevern had many noble qualities

of heart; she was not a simpleton, she was not ugly, and might have

passed well through the bitter criticisms of the princesses of the

royal house. But we fear that, if she had been an angel, the pride of

the son, who was subjected to the useless barbarity of compulsion,

would still have protested against her. And yet this union was not

always so cold as has been supposed. For six years did the goodness of

heart and tact of the Princess succeed in reconciling the Crown Prince

to her. In the retirement of Rheinsberg she was in fact the lady of his

house and the amiable hostess of his guests, and it was reported by the

Austrian agents that her influence was on the ascendant. But her modest

clinging nature was too deficient in the qualities calculated to fix

the attachment of an intellectual man. It was necessary for the

sprightly children of the house of Brandenburg to give vent to their

excitable natures by ready and pointed humour. The Princess, when she

was excited, was as quiet as if paralysed, and she was wanting in the

easy grace of society. This did not suit. Even the way in which she

loved her husband, dutifully and submissively, as if repelled and

overwhelmed by the greatness of his mind, was little interesting to the

Prince, who had adopted, together with French intellectual culture, not

a little of the frivolity of French society.

When Frederic became King, the Princess soon lost the very small share

she had gained in her husband's affections. His long absence during the

Silesian War finally alienated him from her. More and more distant

became their mutual intercourse; years passed without their seeing one

another; an icy brevity and coldness are perceptible in his letters;

but the high esteem in which the King held her character maintained her

outward position. His relations with women after that had little

influence on his inward feelings: even his sister of Baireuth, sickly,

nervous, and embittered by jealousy of an unfaithful husband, became,

for years, as a stranger to her brother; it was not till she had

resigned herself to her own life that this proud child of the House of

Brandenburg, aged and unhappy, again sought the heart of the brother

whose little hand had once supported her when at the feet of the stern

father. The mother also, to whom King Frederic always showed the most

marked and child-like reverence, could participate little in the

feelings of the son. His other sisters were younger, and only inclined

to make a quiet _Fronde_ in the house against him; if the King ever

condescended to show attention to a lady of the court, or a singer,

these were to the person concerned full as annoying as flattering.

Where he found beauty, grace, and womanly dignity combined, as in Frau

von Camas, the first lady of the bedchamber to his wife, the amiability

of his nature appeared by his kindly attentions to her. But, on the

whole, his life received little sunshine from his intercourse with

women, for he had experienced little of the hearty warmth of family

life; in this respect his soul was desolate. Perhaps this was fortunate

for his people, though undoubtedly fatal to his private life; the full

warmth of his manly feelings was almost exclusively reserved to his

small circle of confidants, with whom he laughed, wrote poetry,

philosophised, made plans for the future, and latterly conferred with

upon his warlike operations and dangers.

His life at Rheinsberg, after his marriage, was the best portion of his

youth. There he collected around him a number of highly-educated and

cheerful companions; the small society led a poetic life, of which an

agreeable picture has been bequeathed to us by those who partook of it.

Earnestly did Frederic labour to educate himself; easily did his

excited feelings find expression in French verse; incessantly did he

labour to acquire the delicacy of the foreign style; but his mind also

exercised itself upon more serious things. He sought ardently from the

Encyclopaedians, and of Christian Wolf, an answer to the highest

questions of man; he sat bent over maps and plans of battles; and, amid

the _roles_ of his amateur theatricals and plans of buildings, other

projects were prepared which, after a few years, were to agitate the

world.

Then came the day on which the government passed from the hands of his

dying father, who directed the officer who was to make the daily

bulletin to take his orders from the new military ruler of Prussia.

What judgment was formed of him by his political contemporaries we

discover from the character drawn of him shortly before by an Austrian

agent of the Imperial Court:--"He is agreeable, wears his own hair, has

a slouching carriage, loves the fine arts and good eating, would wish

to begin his government with some _eclat_, is a better friend of the

military than his father, has the religion of a gentleman, believes in

God and the forgiveness of sins, loves splendour and refinement, and

will newly arrange all the court offices, and bring distinguished

people to his court."[12] This prophecy was not fully justified. We

will endeavour to understand other phases of his character at this

time. The new King was a man of fiery, enthusiastic temperament,

quickly excited, and tears came readily to his eyes; with him, as with

his contemporaries, it was a passionate need to admire what was great,

and to give himself up to pathetic, soft moods of mind. With tender and

melting tones he played his adagio on the flute; like other honourable

contemporaries, it was not easy to him to give full expression in words

and verses to his inward feelings, but pathetic passages would move him

to tears. In spite of all his French maxims, the foundation of his

character was in these respects very German.

Those have judged him most unjustly who have ascribed to him a cold

heart. It is not the cold royal hearts which generally wound by their

harshness. Such as these are almost always enabled, by a smooth

graciousness and its suitable expression, to please their entourage.

The strongest expressions of antipathy are generally combined with the

heart-winning tones of a sentimental tenderness. But in Frederic, it

appears to us, there was a striking and strange combination of two

quite opposite tendencies of the spirit, which are usually found on

earth in eternal irreconcilable contention. He had equally the need of

idealising life, and the impulse mercilessly to destroy ideal frames of

mind in himself and others. His first characteristic was perhaps the

most beautiful, perhaps the most sorrowful, that ever man was endowed

with for the struggle of life. He was undoubtedly a poetic nature; he

possessed in a high degree that peculiar power which strives to

transform common realities according to the ideal demands of its own

nature, and to draw over everything about it the pure lustre of a new

life. It was necessary to him to decorate with the graces of his fancy

and the whole magic of emotional feeling the image of those he loved,

and to adorn his relations with them. There was always something

playful about it, and even where he felt most passionately he loved

more the embellished picture of others, which he carried within him,

than themselves. It was with such a disposition that he kissed

Voltaire's hand. If at any time he sensibly felt the difference betwixt

his ideal and the real man, he dropped the real and cherished the

image. Whoever has received from nature this faculty of investing love

and friendship with the coloured mirror of poetical dispositions, is

sure, according to the judgment of others, to show arbitrariness in the

choice of their objects of preference: a certain equable warmth which

bethinks itself of everything suitable appears to be denied to such

natures. To whoever the King became a friend, in his way, to him he

always showed the greatest consideration and fidelity, however much at

particular moments his disposition towards him might change. He could,

therefore, be sentimental in his sorrow over the loss of such a

cherished image as was only possible for a German of the Werther

period. He had lived for many years in some estrangement from his

sister von Baireuth; it was only in the last year before her death,

amidst the terrors of war, that her image as that of a tender sister

again revived in him. After her death he felt a gloomy satisfaction in

recalling to himself and others, the heartfelt tenderness of this

connection; he built her a small temple, and often made pilgrimages to

it. Whoever failed to reach his heart by means of poetical feelings, or

did not stir up in him the love-web of poetry, or who disturbed

anything in his sensitive nature, to him he was cold, contemptuous, and

indifferent,--a King who only considered how far the other could be of

use to him; and he threw him off perhaps when he no longer needed him.

Such an endowment undoubtedly may have surrounded the life of a young

man with a bright halo; it invested the common with variegated

brilliancy and pleasing colours; but it must be united with much good

moral worth, feeling of duty, and sense of what is higher than itself,

if it is not to isolate and make his old age gloomy. It will also, even

in favourable circumstances, raise up the bitterest enemies, together

with the most devoted admirers. Somewhat of this faculty prepared for

the noble soul of Goethe bitter sorrows, transient connexions, many

disappointments, and a solitary old age. It was doubly fatal for a

King, whom others so seldom approach on a dignified and equal footing,

to whom openhearted friends might always become admiring flatterers,

unequal in their behaviour, now servile under the courtly spell of

majesty, now discontented censurers from a feeling of their own rights.

With King Frederic, however, the yearning for ideal relations, this

longing for men who could give his heart the opportunity of opening

itself unreservedly, was crossed in the first place by his penetrating

acuteness of perception, and also by an incorruptible love of truth,

which was inimical to all deceptions, struggled against every illusion,

despised all shams, and searched out the depths of all things. This

scrutinising view of life and its duties was a good shield against the

illusions which more often afflict a prince of imaginative tendencies,

where he has given confidence, than a private man; but his acuteness

showed itself also in a wild humour which was unsparing in its

remorselessness, sarcasm, and ridicule. From whence did these

tendencies arise in him? Was it Brandenburg blood? Was it inherited

from his great-grandmother, the Electress Sophia of Hanover, or from

his grandmother--that intellectual woman, the Queen Sophia Charlotte,

with whom Leibnitz corresponded on the eternal harmony of the world?

Undoubtedly the rough training of his youth had contributed to it.

Sharp was his perception of the weaknesses of others; wherever he spied

out a defect, wherever anything peculiar vexed or irritated him, his

voluble tongue was set in motion.

His words hit both friends and enemies unsparingly: even when silence

and endurance were commanded by prudence, he could not control himself;

his whole spirit seemed changed; with merciless exaggeration he

distorted the image of others into a caricature. If one examines this

more closely, one perceives that the main point in this was the

intellectual pleasure; he freed himself from an unpleasant impression

by violent outbursts against his victim; he had an inward satisfaction

in painting him grotesquely, and was much surprised if, when deeply

wounded, his friend turned his weapons against him. In this there was a

striking similarity to Luther. Undoubtedly the club blows dealt by the

great monk of the sixteenth century were far more formidable than the

stabs which were distributed by the great Prince in the age of

enlightenment. That it was neither dignified nor suitable was a point

for which the great King cared as little as the Reformer: both were in

a state of excitement as if in the chase, and both, in the pleasure of

the struggle, forgot the consequences; both, also, seriously injured

themselves and their great objects, and were honestly surprised when

they discovered it. But when the King bantered and sneered, or

maliciously teased, it was more difficult for him to draw back from his

unamiable mood; for his was generally no equal struggle with his

victim. Thus did the great Prince deal with all his political

opponents, and excited deadly enmity against himself; he jeered at the

Pompadour, the Empress Elizabeth, and the Empress Maria Theresa at the

dinner table, and circulated biting verses and pamphlets. That bad man,

Voltaire, he sometimes caressed, sometimes scolded and snarled at. But

he also treated in the same way, men whom he really esteemed, and who

were in his greatest confidence, whom he had received into the circle

of his friends. He had drawn the Marquis d'Argens to his court, made

him his chamberlain, and member of the Academy; he was one of his most

intimate and dearest companions. The letters which he wrote to him from

the camp during the Seven Years' War are among the most charming and

touching reminiscences that remain to us of the King. When he returned

from that war, his fondest hope was that the marquis would dwell with

him at Sans Souci. A few years afterwards this delightful connection

was dissolved. But how was this possible? The marquis was the best

Frenchman to whom the King had attached himself; a man of honour and of

refined feeling and cultivation, truly devoted to the King. But he was

neither a remarkable nor a very superior man. For years the King had

admired him as a man of learning, which he was not; he had formed to

himself a pleasant poetical idea of him, as a wise, clear-sighted, safe

philosopher, with agreeable wit and lively humour. Now, in the

intercourse of daily life, the King found himself mistaken; a certain

sentimental tendency in the Frenchman, which dwelt upon its own morbid

hypochondria, irritated him; he began to discover that the aged marquis

was neither a great scholar nor a man of strong mind; the ideal he had

formed of him was destroyed. The King began to quiz him on account of

his sentimentality; the sensitive Frenchman begged for leave of

absence, that he might travel to France for some months for his health.

The King was deeply wounded at this touch of temper, and continued, in

the friendly letters which he afterwards wrote to him, to quiz this

morbid disposition. He said, "That it was reported that there was a

_loup garou_ in France; no doubt this was the marquis as a Prussian, in

his invalid guise. Did he now eat little children? This bad conduct he

would not formerly have been guilty of, but men change much in

travelling." The marquis remained two winters instead of a few months:

when he was about to return, he sent the certificate of his physician;

probably the good man was really ill, but the King was deeply wounded

at this unnecessary verification from an old friend, and when the

marquis returned, the old connection was spoiled. Yet the King would

not give him up, but amused himself by punishing his unconfiding friend

by pungent speeches and sharp jests. Then the Frenchman, most

thoroughly embittered, demanded his dismissal; he obtained it, and one

may discover the sorrow and anger of the King from his answer. When the

marquis, in the last letter he wrote to the King before his death, once

more represented, not without bitterness, how scornfully and ill he had

treated an unselfish admirer, the King read his letter in silence. But

he wrote sorrowfully to the widow, of his friendship for her husband,

and caused a costly monument to be erected to his memory. Such was the

case with most of his favourites: magical as was his power of

attracting, equally demoniacal was his capacity of repelling. But it

may be answered, to any one who blames this as a fault in the man, that

in history there is scarcely another king who has so nobly opened his

most secret soul to his friends, like Frederic.

Frederic II. had not worn the crown many months, when the Emperor

Charles VI. died. Everything now impelled the young King to play a

great game. That he should have made such a resolution was, in spite of

the momentary weakness of Austria, a sign of daring courage. The

countries which he ruled counted not more than a seventh of the

population of the wide realm of Maria Theresa. It is true that his army

was superior in number to the Imperial, and still more in warlike

capacity; and, according to the representations of the time, the mass

of the people was not so suitable as now to recruit the army. Little,

too, did he foresee the greatness of character of Maria Theresa. But in

his preparations for the invasion the King already showed that he had

long hoped to measure himself with Austria; he began the struggle in a

spirit of exaltation that was decisive of his future life and for his

State. Little did he care for the foundation of his right to the Duchy

of Silesia, though he employed his pen to demonstrate it to Europe. The

politicians of the despotic States of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries troubled themselves little on such points. Whoever could give

a good appearance to his cause, did so; but the most improbable

evidence, the shallowest pretences, were sufficient. Thus had Louis

XIV. made war; thus had the Emperor carried out his interests against

the Turks, Italians, Germans, French, and Spaniards; thus had a portion

of the advantages gained by the great Elector been marred by others.

Just where the rights of the Hohenzollerns were most distinct--as in

Pomerania--they had been most wronged: by none more than the Emperor

and House of Hapsburg. Now the Hohenzollern sought for revenge. "Be my

Cicero and prove the justice of my cause, and I will be the Caesar to

carry it through," wrote Frederic to his Jordan after the entrance into

Silesia. Gaily, with winged steps, as to a dance, did the King enter

upon the field of his victories. Still did he carry on the enjoyments

of life, pleasant trifling in verses, intellectual talk with his

intimates upon the amusements of the day, on God, nature, and

immortality; this converse was the salt of his life. But the great work

on which he had entered began soon to have its effect on his character,

even before he had been under fire in the first battle; and it

afterwards worked on his soul till his hair became grey, and his fiery

enthusiastic heart became hard as iron. With the wonderful acuteness of

perception that was peculiar to him, he observed the beginning of this

change. He reviewed his own life as though he were a stranger. "You

will find me more philosophic than you think," he writes to a friend;

"I have always been so, now more, now less. My youth, the fire of

passion, the desire for fame, nay--to conceal nothing--even curiosity

and a secret instinct, have driven me from the sweet repose which I

enjoyed, and the wish to see my name in the newspapers and history have

led me away. Come here to me; philosophy maintains her claims, and, I

assure you, if it were not for this cursed love of fame, I should think

only of quiet comfort."

And when the faithful Jordan came to him, and Frederic saw this man,

who loved peaceful enjoyment, timid and uneasy in the field, the King

suddenly felt that he had become an altered and a stronger man than him

whom he had so long honoured for his learning, who had improved his

verses, given style to his letters, and was so far superior to him in

knowledge of Greek. And in spite of all his philosophic culture, he

gave the King the impression of a man without courage; with bitter

scorn the king shook him off. In one of his best improvisations, he

places himself as a warrior, in contradistinction to the sentimental

philosopher. Unfair, however, as were the satirical verses with which

he overwhelmed him, yet he soon returned to his old kindly feeling. But

it was also the first gentle hint of fate to the King himself: the like

was often to happen to him again; he was to lose valuable men, true

friends, one after the other; not only by death, but still more by the

coldness and estrangement which arose betwixt his nature and theirs.

For the path on which he had now entered was to add strength to all the

greatness, but also to all the one-sidedness, of his nature. And the

higher he raised himself above others, the more insignificant did their

nature appear to him; almost all who in later years he measured by his

own standard were little fitted to bear the comparison. The

disappointment and disenchantment he then felt became sharper, till at

last from his lonely height he looked down with stony eyes on the

proceedings of the men at his feet. But still, to the last hour of his

life, the penetrating glance of his brooding countenance was

intermingled with the bright beams of gentle human feeling. It is this

which makes the great tragic figure so touching to us.

But now, in the beginning of his first war, he still looks back with

longing to the quiet repose of his "Remusberg," and deeply feels the

pressure of the vast destiny before him. "It is difficult to bear good

fortune and misfortune with equanimity," he writes. "One may easily

appear to be indifferent in success, and unmoved amid losses, for the

features of the face can always be made to dissemble; but the man, his

inward nature, the folds of his heart, will not the less be assailed."

He concludes, full of hope: "All that I wish is, that the result of my

success may not be to destroy the human feelings and virtues which I

have always owned; may my friends always find me such as I have been."

At the end of the war he writes: "See, your friend is a second time

conqueror. Who would, some years ago, have said that a scholar in the

school of philosophy would play a military _role_ in the world--that

Providence should have chosen a poet to upset the political system of

Europe?"[13] So fresh and young were the feelings of Frederic when he

returned in triumph to Berlin from the first war.

He goes forth a second time to maintain Silesia. Again he is conqueror;

he has already the quiet self-confidence of an experienced General;

lively is his satisfaction at the excellence of his troops. "All that

is flattering to me in this victory," he writes to Frau von Camas.[14]

"is, that by rapid decision and bold man[oe]uvres, I have been able to

contribute to the preservation of many brave men. But I would not have

one of the most insignificant of my soldiers wounded for idle fame,

which no longer dazzles me."

But in the middle of the struggle the death of two of his dearest

friends occurred, Jordan and Kayserlingk. Touching are his

lamentations. "In less than three months I have lost my two most

faithful friends--people with whom I have daily lived, agreeable

companions, estimable men, and true friends. It is difficult for a

heart so sensitive as mine to restrain my deep sorrow. When I return to

Berlin I shall feel almost a stranger in my own Fatherland, isolated in

my home. It has been your fate also to lose at once many persons who

were dear to you; but I admire your courage, which I cannot imitate. My

only hope is time, which brings all things in nature to an end. It

begins by weakening the impressions on our brains, and only ceases by

destroying ourselves. I now dread every place which recals to me the

sorrowful remembrance of friends I have for ever lost." And again, a

month after, he writes to a friend, who endeavoured to comfort him:

"Do not think that the pressure of business and danger distracts one's

mind in sorrow? I know from experience that it is unsuccessful. Alas! a

month has passed since my tears and my sorrow began, but since the

first vehement outburst of the first days I feel as sorrowful and as

little comforted as in the beginning." And when his worthy tutor,

Duhan, sent him some French books of Jordan's, which the King had

desired, in the latter part of the autumn of the same year, he wrote,

"The tears came into my eyes when I opened the books of my poor

departed Jordan, I loved him so much, and it is very painful to me to

think that he is no more." Not long after, the King lost the friend

also to whom this letter was addressed.

The loss of his youthful friends in 1745 made a great wrench in the

inward life of the King. With these unselfish, honourable men died

almost all who made his intercourse with others happy. The relations

upon which he now entered were altogether of another kind: the best of

his men acquaintance only became the intimates of some hours, not the

friends of his heart. The need of exciting intellectual intercourse

remained, indeed it became even stronger. For there was this peculiar

characteristic in him, that he could not exist without cheerful and

confidential relations, nor without the easy, almost unreserved, talk

which through all the phases of his moods, whether thoughtful or

frivolous, touched lightly upon everything, from the greatest questions

of the human race to the smallest events of the day. Immediately after

his accession to the throne, he had written to Voltaire, and invited

him to come to him. Voltaire came, at the cost of much money, for a few

days to Berlin; he gave the King the impression of his being a fool,

nevertheless Frederic felt an immeasurable respect for the talent of

the man. Voltaire appeared to him the greatest poet of all times,--the

Lord High Chamberlain of Parnassus, where the King so much wished to

play a _role_. Ever stronger became Frederic's wish to possess this

man. He considered himself as his scholar; he wished his verses to be

approved of by the master. Among his Brandenburg officers he languished

for the wit and intellect of the elegant Frenchman; there was also much

of the vanity of the Sovereign in this: he wished to be as much a

prince of _bels esprits_ and philosophers as he had been a renowned

General. Since the second Silesia war his intimates were generally

foreigners; after 1750 he had the pleasure of seeing the great Voltaire

established as a member of his court. It was no misfortune that the bad

man only remained a few years among the barbarians.

It was in the ten years from 1746 to 1756 that Frederic gained an

importance and a self-confidence as an author, which up to the present

day is not sufficiently appreciated in Germany. Of his French verses

the Germans can only judge imperfectly. He had great facility as a

poet, and could express without trouble every mood in rhyme and verse.

But in his lyrics he has never, in the eyes of Frenchmen, entirely

overcome the difficulties of a foreign language, however carefully they

may have been revised by his intimates; indeed, he was wanting always,

it appears to us, in that equal rhetorical harmony of style which in

the time of Voltaire was the first characteristic of a renowned poet,

for we find commonplace and trivial expressions in splendid diction,

together with beautiful and pompous periods. His taste, too, was not

assured and independent enough; he was in his aesthetic judgment rapid

in admiring and short in deciding, but in reality far more dependent on

the opinions of his French acquaintance than his pride would have

admitted. The best off-shoot of French poetry at that time was the

return to nature, and the struggle of truth against the fetters of old

_convenances_, This was incomprehensible to the King. Rousseau long

appeared to him an eccentric poor devil, and the conscientious and pure

spirit of Diderot he considered as shallow. And yet it appears to us

that in his own poems, and especially in the light improvisations with

which he favoured his friends, there is frequently a richness of poetic

detail and a heart-winning tone of true feeling which they, especially

his pattern Voltaire, might envy him.

Like Caesar's "Commentaries," Frederic's History of his Time forms one

of the most important monuments of historical literature.[15] It is

true that, like the Roman General and like every practical statesman,

he wrote the facts as they were reflected from the mind of one who took

part in them; all is not equally appreciated by him; he does not do

justice to every party, but he knows incomparably more than those who

were at a distance, and enters, not quite impartially, but at the same

time with magnanimity to his opponents, into some of the innermost

motives of great occurrences. He wrote sometimes without the great

apparatus that a professional historian must collect around him; it

therefore happens that his memory and judgment, however authentic they

may be, sometimes leave him in the lurch; finally, he wrote an apology

of his house, his policy, and his campaigns, and, like Caesar, he is

sometimes silent, and interprets facts as he wishes them to be brought

before posterity. But the open-heartedness and love of truth with which

he deals with his own house and his own doings, are not less worthy of

admiration than the supreme calm and freedom with which he views

events, in spite of the small rhetorical flourishes which belonged to

the taste of the time.

Equally astonishing as his fertility is his versatility. One of the

greatest of military writers, an important historian, a facile poet, a

popular philosopher, and practical statesman, also even an anonymous

and very copious pamphlet writer, and sometimes journalist, he is

always ready for everything: to portray with his pen in the field

whatever fills, warms, and inspires him, and to attack in prose and

verse every one who irritates or vexes him, not only Pope and Empress,

Jesuits and Dutch newspaper writers, but also old friends if they

appear to him lukewarm, which he could never bear, or threaten to fall

away from him. Never--since the time of Luther--has there been so

contentious, reckless, and unwearied a writer. As soon as he puts pen

to paper he is, like Proteus, everything, sage or intriguer, historian

or poet, just as situation required, always an excitable, fiery,

intellectual, and sometimes also an ill-behaved man; but of his kingly

office he thinks little. All that is dear to him he celebrates by poems

and eulogies: the exalted precepts of his philosophy, his friends, his

army, his freedom of faith, independent inquiry, toleration and the

education of the people.

Victoriously did the mind of Frederic extend itself in all directions.

Nothing withheld him when ambition drove him on to conquer. Then came

years of trial, seven years of fearful, heart-rending cares; the period

when the rich soaring spirit undertook the most difficult task that was

ever allotted to man; when almost everything seemed to fall from him

which he possessed for himself, of joy and happiness, hopes and

egotistical comfort; when everything charming and agreeable to him as

man was destined to die to him, that he might become the self-denying

Prince of his people, the great official of the State, the hero of a

nation. It was not with the lust of conquest that he this time entered

upon the combat; it had long been clear to him that he had now to

struggle for his own and his kingdom's life. But so much the loftier

grew his resolution. Like the storm-wind, he wished to break the clouds

which gathered on all sides round his head. By the energy of his

irresistible attacks he thought to dissipate the storm before it burst

upon him. He had hitherto been unconquered; his enemies were beaten

whenever he had fallen upon them with the irresistible instrument

in his hand--his army. This was his hope, his only one. If this

well-tested power did not fail him now, he might save his State.

But in his first encounter with the Austrians, his old enemies, he saw

that they also had learnt of him and had become different. To the

uttermost did he exert his power, and at Collin it failed him. The 18th

of June, 1757, was the most fatal day in Frederic's life; he found

there what twice in this war tore the victory from him: that he had too

little estimated his enemies, and had expected what was beyond human

powers of his valiant army. After being stunned for a short time,

Frederic roused himself with fresh energy. From an offensive he was

driven to a desperate defensive war: on all sides the enemy broke into

his little country; he was in deadly struggle with every great Power of

the Continent, the master of only four millions of men, and a conquered

army. Now he proved his generalship by the way in which, after his

losses, he retreated from the enemy, then pounced upon and beat them,

when they least expected him, by throwing himself now against one, and

now against another army, unsurpassed in his dispositions,

inexhaustible in his expedients, and unequalled as leader of his

troops. Thus he maintained himself, one against five, against Austria,

Russia, and France, each one of which exceeded him in strength; and at

the same time against Sweden and the German troops of the Empire. Five

long years did he struggle against this enormous preponderance of

power,--each spring in danger of being crushed by the masses alone, and

each autumn again in safety. A loud cry of admiration and sympathy

echoed through Europe; and among the first unwilling eulogisers were

his most violent enemies. It was just in these years of changing

fortune, when the King himself was experiencing the bitter chances of

the fortunes of war, that his generalship became the astonishment of

all the armies of Europe. The method in which he arrayed his lines

against the enemy, always the quickest and most skilful; how he so

often, by moving in echelon, pressed back the weakest wing of the

enemy, outflanked and crushed it; how his newly created cavalry, which

had become the first in the world, charged upon the enemy, broke their

ranks and burst through their hosts,--all this was considered

everywhere as a new step in the art of war, as an invention of the

greatest genius. The tactics and strategy of the Prussian army were,

for almost half a century, the pattern and model for all the armies of

Europe. Unanimous was the judgment that Frederic was the greatest

commander of his time, and that before him, throughout all history,

there had been few Generals to compare with him. That smaller numbers

should so frequently conquer the larger, that when beaten they should

not dissolve away, but, when the enemy had scarcely recovered their

wounds, should be able to re-encounter him as before, so threatening

and so disciplined, appeared incredible. But we not only extol the

generalship of the King, but also the clever discretion of his infantry

tactics. He knew well how much he was restrained by the consideration

of magazines and commissariat, by the thousands of waggons full of

stores and daily necessaries for the soldiers which must accompany him,

but he also knew that this was his safest course. Once only, when after

the battle of Rossbach, he made that wonderful march into Silesia,

forty-one German miles in fifteen days, being in the greatest danger,

he advanced through the country, as other armies do now, supporting his

men by the billeting system. But he immediately returned to his former

wise custom.[16] For if his enemies should learn to imitate this

independent movement, he would certainly be lost. When the country

militia of his old province rose up to withstand and drive away the

Swedes, and valiantly defended Colberg and Berlin, he was much pleased,

but took care not to encourage popular warfare; and when his East

Friesland people rose of their own accord against the French, and were

severely handled by them, he roughly told them it was their own fault,

as war ought to be carried on by soldiers, and that tranquil labour,

taxes, and recruiting were for peasants and citizens. He knew well that

he was lost, if a popular war were excited against him in Saxony and

Bohemia. This very narrow-mindedness of the cautious General with

respect to military forms, which alone made the struggle possible, may

perhaps be reckoned as one of his greatest qualities.

Ever louder became the expression of sorrow and admiration with which

Germans and foreigners watched the death struggle of the lion beset on

all sides. As early as 1740, the young King had been extolled by the

Protestants as the partisan of freedom of conscience and enlightenment,

against Jesuits and intolerance. When, a few months after the battle of

Collin, he so entirely beat the French at Rossbach, he became the hero

of Germany, and there was a burst of exultation everywhere. For

two centuries the French had inflicted the greatest injury on the

much-divided country; now the German nature began to oppose itself to

the influence of French culture, and now the King, who had so much

admired Parisian verses, had as wonderfully scared away the Parisian

General. It was such a brilliant victory, the old enemy was so

disgracefully overthrown, that it rejoiced all hearts throughout the

Empire; even where the soldiers of the Sovereigns were in the field

against King Frederic, the citizens and peasants rejoiced secretly at

his German blows. The longer the war lasted, the firmer became

the belief in the King's invincibility, so much the more did the

self-respect of the Germans rise. After long, long years, they had at

last found a hero, of whose warlike fame they could be proud, who would

accomplish what was almost more than human. Numberless anecdotes about

him circulated through the country; every little trait of his

composure, of his good humour and friendliness with the soldiers, or of

the fidelity of his army, flew hundreds of miles; how, when in peril of

death, he played his flute in his tent; how his wounded soldiers

sang chorales after the battle; how, he had taken off his hat to a

regiment--he has since been often imitated in this,--all these stories

were carried to the Neckar and the Rhine, printed and listened to with

glad smiles and tears of emotion. It was natural that the poets should

sing his praises; three of them had been in the Prussian army, Gleim

and Lessing as secretaries to the General in command, and Ewald von

Kleist, the favourite of a young literary circle, as an officer, till

at last he was struck by a ball at Kunnersdorf. But still more touching

to us is the faithful devotion of the Prussian people; the old

provinces, Prussia, Pomerania, the Marches, and Westphalia, had

suffered indescribably from the war, but the proud pleasure of having a

share in the hero of Europe made even the most inconsiderable man

forget his own sufferings. The armed citizens and peasants for years

marched to the field as militia-men. When a number of recruits from

Cleves and the county of Ravensberg, after a lost action, fled

from their banners and returned home, they were denounced by their

country-people and relations as perjured, expelled from the villages,

and driven back to the army.

There was no difference in the opinion abroad. In the Protestant

cantons of Switzerland as warm an interest was taken in the fate of the

King as if the descendants of the Ruetli men had never been separated

from the German Empire. There were people there who became ill with

vexation when the King's affairs were in a bad state.[17] It was the

same in England. Every victory of the King excited in London loud

expressions of joy; houses were lighted up; pictures and laudatory

poems were sold in the streets; and Pitt announced, with admiration, in

Parliament every new act of the Great Ally. Even in Paris, at the

theatre and in society, the feeling was more Prussian than French. The

French jeered at their own Generals, and the clique of Pompadour, which

was for the war, could hardly, as we are informed by Duclos, appear in

public. At Petersburg the Grand Duke Peter and his adherents were so

Prussian that at every loss sustained by Frederic they secretly

mourned. The enthusiasm reached even to Turkey and the Great Cham of

Tartary; and this respectful interest outlasted the war in a great

portion of the world. The painter Hackert, when travelling through a

small city in the middle of Sicily, received fruit and wine from the

magistrates as a gift of honour, because they had heard that he was a

Prussian, a subject of the great King to whom they wished to show

honour. Muley Ismail, Emperor of Morocco, caused the crew of a vessel

belonging to a citizen of Emden, which had been carried off by the

Moors to Magador, to be released without ransom; he sent them newly

clothed to Lisbon, and assured them that their King was the greatest

man in the world; that no Prussian should ever suffer imprisonment in

his country, and that his cruisers should never attack the Prussian

flag.

Poor oppressed spirit of the German people, how long it had been since

the men betwixt the Rhine and the Oder had felt the pleasure of being

esteemed above others among the nations of the earth! Now everything

was transformed by the magic of the character of one man. The

countryman, as if awaking from a fearful dream, looked out upon the

world and into his own heart. Long had they lived lethargically without

a past in which they could rejoice, or a noble future on which to place

their hopes. Now they found at once that they had a portion in the

honours and greatness of the world; that a King and his people, all of

their blood, had given an aureola of glory to the German nation--a new

purport to the history of civilised man. Now they had all experienced

how a great man could struggle, venture, dare, and conquer. Now labour

in your study, peaceful thinker, imaginative dreamer; you have learnt

during the night to look abroad with smiles, and to hope great things

from your own endowments. Try now what will gush from your heart.

Whilst the youthful strength of the people fluttered its wings with

enthusiastic warmth, what, meanwhile, were the feelings of the great

Prince, who was incessantly contending with enemies? The enthusiastic

acclamations of the nation bore only feeble tones to his ear; the King

received it almost with indifference. In him everything was calm and

cold; though, undoubtedly, he had hours of passionate sorrow and

heart-rending care. But he concealed them from his army; the calm

countenance became harder, the furrows deeper, the expression more

rigid. There were but few to whom he occasionally opened his heart;

then, for some moments, the sorrows of the man, which had reached the

limits of human endurance, broke forth.

Ten days after the battle of Collin, his mother died; a few weeks

later, in anger, he drove his brother August Wilhelm away from the

army, because he had not carried on the war with sufficient vigour.

This Prince died in that same year, of grief, as the King was informed

by the officer who reported it. Shortly afterwards he received the

account of the death of his sister of Baireuth. One after another his

Generals fell by his side, or lost the King's confidence; because they

were not able to come up to the superhuman requirements of this war.

His old soldiers, his pride, the iron warriors who had gone through the

test of three severe wars--they who, dying, still stretched out their

hands to him and called upon his name--were expiring in heaps around

him; and those who filled up the wide gaps which death incessantly made

in his army were young recruits, some of good material, but many bad

ones. The King used them, as he had done the others, with strictness

and severity; but even in the worst subjects his look and word inspired

both bravery and devotion. But he knew that all this would not avail;

short and cutting was his censure, and sparing was his praise. Thus he

continued to live; five summers and winters came and went; the labour

was gigantic; he was unwearied in planning and combining; his eagle eye

scrutinisingly scanned what was most distant and most trivial, and yet

there was no change and no hope. The King read and wrote in his hours

of rest, just as before; he made his verses and kept up a

correspondence with Voltaire and Algarotti; but he was resolved all

this must soon come to an end, a short and quick one. He carried with

him, day and night, what would free him from Daun and Laudon. The whole

affair of life sometimes appeared to him contemptible.

The disposition of the man, from whom the intellectual life of Germany

dates its new era, deserves well to be regarded with reverence by

Germans. It is only possible to give some idea of it by the way in

which it breaks out in Frederic's letters to the Marquis d'Argens and

Frau von Camas. Thus does the great King speak of his life:--

"1757, _June_.--The only remedy for my sorrow lies in the daily work I

am obliged to do, and in the continual distractions which the number of

my enemies occasion me. If I had died at Collin, I should now be in a

haven where I should fear no more storms. Now I must navigate on a

stormy sea till I have discovered in some small corner of earth, that

good which I have never yet found in this world. For two years I have

been standing like a wall in which misfortune has made its breaches.

But do not think that I am becoming weak; one must protect oneself in

these unfortunate times by bowels of iron and a heart of bronze, in

order to lose all feeling. The next month will decide the fate of my

poor country. My calculation is, that I shall save or fall with it. You

can have no idea of the dangers in which we are, nor of the terrors

which surround us."

"1758, _December_--I am weary of this life; the Wandering Jew is less

driven about hither and thither, than I; I have lost all that I have

loved and honoured in this world; I see myself surrounded by

unfortunates whose sufferings I cannot aid. My soul is still filled

with the impression of the ruin of my best provinces, and of the

horrors which a horde of barbarians, more like unreasoning beasts than

men, have practised there. In my old age I have come down almost to be

a theatrical king; you will acknowledge that such a situation is not

sufficiently attractive to bind the soul of a philosopher to life."

"1759, _March_.--I know not what my fate will be. I will do all that

depends upon me to save myself; and if I am worsted the enemy shall pay

dear for it. I have lived, during my winter quarters, as a recluse; I

have my meals alone, pass my life in reading and writing, and do not

sigh. When one is sorrowful it costs one too much in the long run to

conceal one's chagrin incessantly, and it is better to bear one's

trouble alone than to bring one's vexations into society. Nothing

comforts me but the violent strain, as long as it lasts, which work

requires; it drives away sorrowful ideas.

"But ah! when work is ended, then gloomy thoughts become vigorous as

ever. Maupertuis is right: the amount of evil is greater than of good.

But it is all the same to me; I have nothing more to lose, and the few

days that remain to me do not disquiet me so much that I should take a

lively interest in them."

"1759, 16_th August_.--I will throw myself in their way, and have my

head cut off, or save the capital. I think that is determination

enough. I will not answer for the success. If I had more than one life

I would resign it for my Fatherland; but if this stroke fails I hold

myself at quits with my country, and I may be allowed to take care of

myself. There is a limit to everything. I bear my misfortunes without

losing my courage. But I am quite determined, if this undertaking

fails, to make myself a way out, that I may not be the sport of every

kind of accident. Believe me, one requires more than firmness and

endurance to maintain oneself in my position. But I tell you openly, if

any misfortune happens to me you must not calculate upon my outliving

the ruin and destruction of my Fatherland. I have my own way of

thinking. I will neither imitate Sertorius nor Cato; I do not think of

my fame, but of the State."

"1760, _Oct_.--Death would be sweet in comparison with such a life. If

you have any sympathy with my situation, believe me I conceal much

trouble with which I do not grieve or disquiet others. I regard death

like a Stoic. Never will I live to see the moment which would oblige me

to conclude a disadvantageous peace. Either I will bury myself under

the ruins of my Fatherland, or, if this consolation appears too sweet

to the fate which pursues me, I will make an end of my sufferings as

soon as it is no longer possible to bear them. I have acted, and

continue to act, according to this inward feeling of honour. I have

sacrificed my youth to my father, and my manhood to my Fatherland. I

think, therefore, I have acquired the right to dispose of my old age. I

say it, and I repeat it--never will my hand sign a humiliating peace. I

have made some observations upon the military talents of Charles

XII.,[18] but I have never considered whether he ought to have killed

himself or not. I think that, after the taking of Stralsund, he would

have done wiser to annihilate himself; but, whatever he did or left

undone, his example is no rule for me. There are people who learn from

prosperity. I do not belong to that class. I have lived for others; I

will die for myself I am very indifferent as to what others may say

concerning it, and assure you I shall never hear it. Henry IV. was a

younger son of a good house who achieved his good fortune; it did not

signify much to him. Why should he have hung himself in misfortune?

Louis XIV. was a greater king, had greater resources; he got himself

out of difficulties well or ill. As regards me I have not the resources

of this man, but I value honour more than he did; and, as I have told

you, I guide myself after no one. We calculate, if I am right, 5000

years since the creation of the world; I believe that this reckoning is

far too low for the age of the universe. The country of Brandenburg has

existed this whole time, before I did, and will continue after my

death. States are preserved by the propagation of races, and as long as

this continues, the masses will be governed by ministers or Sovereigns.

It is much the same whether they be rather more simple or rather more

clever; the difference is so little that the mass of the people

scarcely discover it. Do not, therefore, repeat to me the old answers

of courtiers; self-love and vanity cannot entirely alter my feelings.

It is not so much an act of weakness to end such unhappy days, as it is

cautious policy. I have lost all my friends and dearest relations. I am

to the last extent unfortunate. I have nothing to hope; my enemies

treat me with contempt and derision, and in their pride are prepared to

trample me under foot."

"1760, _Nov_.--My labours are terrible, the war has continued during

five campaigns. We neglect nothing that can give us means of

resistance, and I stretch the bow with my whole strength; but an army

should be composed of arms and heads. Arms do not fail us, but heads

are no longer to be found; if you would only give yourself the trouble

to order me some of the sculptor, Adam, they would serve me as well as

those I have. My duty and honour keep me steadfast; but, in spite of

stoicism and endurance, there are moments when one feels some desire to

give oneself up to the devil. Adieu, my dear Marquis, may it fare well

with you, and pray for a poor devil who will betake himself to that

meadow where the asphodels grow if the peace does not take effect."

"1761, _June_.--Do not count upon peace this year. If good fortune does

not abandon me, I shall get out of the business as well as I can; but

next year I shall still have to dance on the tight-rope and make

dangerous bounds when it pleases their very Apostolical, very

Christian, and very Muscovite Majesties to call out, 'Jump, Marquis!'

Ah, how hard-hearted men are! They tell me, 'You have friends.' Yes,

fine friends, who cross their arms and say, 'Indeed, I wish you all

happiness!' 'But I am drowning--hand me a rope!' 'No, you will not

drown.' 'Yet I must sink the very next moment.' 'Oh, we hope the

contrary; but, if it should happen, be assured we would place a

beautiful inscription on your tomb.' Such is the world. These are the

fine compliments with which I am greeted on all sides."

"1762, _Jan_.--I have been so unfortunate throughout this whole war,

with my pen as well as with my sword, that I do not believe in any

fortunate occurrences. Yes; experience is a fine thing. In my youth I

was as ungovernable as a young colt, that gallops about the meadow

without bridle; now I am as cautious as an old Nestor: but I am also

grey and wrinkled with care, and weighed down by bodily suffering; and,

in a word, only good enough to be thrown to the dogs. You have always

admonished me to take care of myself; show me the means, my dear

friend, when one is hauled about as I am. The birds which one delivers

to the wantonness of children, the tops which are whipped by those

little monkeys, are not more tossed about and misused than I am now by

three furious enemies."

"1762, _May_.--I am passing through the school of patience; it is hard,

tedious, terrible, indeed barbarous. I only help myself out of it by

looking on the universe in general, as from a distant planet There

everything appears to me infinitely small, and I pity my enemies for

taking so much trouble about such trifles. Is this old age, is it

reflection, is it reason? I regard all the events of life with far more

indifference than formerly. If there is anything to be done for the

welfare of the State, I can yet apply some strength to it; but, between

ourselves, it is no longer with the fiery vehemence of my youth, nor

the enthusiasm that then animated me. It is time that the war should

come to an end, for my preachings become tedious, and my hearers will

soon complain of me."

To Frau von Camas he writes:--"You speak of the death of poor F----.

Ah, dear mamma, for six years I have mourned more for the living than

for the dead."

Thus did the King write and grieve, but he held out; and any one who is

startled by the gloomy energy of his resolves, must guard himself from

thinking that these were the highest expressions of the powers of this

wonderful mind. It is true that the King had moments of depression,

when he desired death under the fire of the enemy rather than seek it

from his own hand out of the phial which he carried about him. It is

true that he was firmly determined not to bring destruction on his

State by allowing himself to live as a prisoner of the Austrians. There

was a fearful truth in all that he wrote; but he was of a poetic

disposition; he was a child of the century, which had such a craving

for great deeds, and took delight in the expression of exalted

feelings; he was, to his heart's core, a German, with the same longings

as the immeasurably weaker Klopstock and his admirers. The

contemplation and decided utterance of this last resolve gave him

inward freedom and cheerfulness. He wrote concerning it also to his

sister of Baireuth, in the dismal second year of the war, and this

letter is particularly characteristic;[19] for she also had decided not

to outlive the fall of her house; and he approved this decision, to

which, however, he paid little attention, being immersed in the gloomy

satisfaction of his own reflections. Both these royal children had once

secretly recited together the _roles_ of French tragedies in the strict

parental house; now their hearts beat again in unison, both thinking of

freeing themselves, by an antique death, from a life full of illusions,

errors, and sufferings. But when the excited and nervous sister fell

dangerously ill, Frederic forgot all his stoical philosophy, and, with

a passionate tenderness that still clung to life, he fretted and

grieved about her who was the dearest to him of his family; and when

she died, his sorrow was, perhaps, more severe from feeling that he had

enacted a tragic part in the tender life of the woman. Thus, strangely,

was mixed in the greatest German that arose in the eighteenth century,

poetical feeling and the wish to appear charming and great with the

earnest life of reality. The poor little Professor Semler, who, in the

midst of the deepest emotion, still studied his attitudes and

prepared his compliments, and the great King, who, in calm expectation

of the hour of death, wrote in finely-formed periods concerning

self-destruction, were both sons of that same time in which the pathos

that found no worthy expression in art twined like a creeper round real

life. But the King was greater than his philosophy; in fact, he never

lost his courage, nor the stubborn strength of the German, nor the

quiet hope which is needful to man for every great work.

And he held out. The strength of his enemies became less, their

Generals were worn out, and their armies shattered, and at last Russia

withdrew from the coalition. This, and the King's last victory, decided

the question. He had triumphed, he had preserved the conquered Silesia

to Prussia; his people exulted, the faithful citizens of his capital

prepared him a festive reception, but he avoided all rejoicings, and

returned alone and quietly to Sans Souci. He wished, he said, to live

the rest of his days in peace and for his people.

The first three-and-twenty years of his reign he had struggled

and fought, and established his power throughout the world;

three-and-twenty years more was he to rule over his people as a

wise and strict father. The ideas according to which he guided the

State--with great self-denial, but also self-will, aiming at the

highest, but also ruling in the most trifling matters--have been partly

set aside by the higher culture of the present day; they express the

knowledge which he had gained in his youth, and from the experiences of

his early manhood. The mind was to be free, and each one to think as he

chose, but to do his duty as a citizen. As he subordinated his pleasure

and expenditure to the good of the State, restricting the whole royal

household to about 200,000 thalers, and thought first of the advantage

of the people, and not till then of his own; so were all his subjects

to be ready to do the duties and bear the burdens he might impose upon

them. Each was to remain in the sphere in which his birth and education

had placed him; the nobleman was to be landowner and officer; the

sphere of the citizen was the city, commerce, industry, teaching, and

invention; that of the peasant was field labour and service. But each

in his position was to be prosperous and comfortable. There was to be

equal, strict, rapid justice for all; no favour for the noble or rich,

but rather, in doubtful cases, for the poor man. The number of working

men was to be increased, each occupation made as remunerative and as

prosperous as possible; the less that was imported from abroad the

better; everything to be produced at home, and the surplus to be

disposed of beyond the frontiers. Such were the main principles of his

political economy. Incessantly did he endeavour to increase the number

of morgens of arable land, and to procure new places for settlers.

Swamps were drained, lakes drawn off, and dykes thrown up; canals were

dug, and advances made for the establishment of new manufactories;

cities and villages rebuilt more solid and convenient than before,

under the active encouragement of government; the provincial credit

system, the fire-insurance society, and the royal bank were

established; popular schools everywhere founded, well-informed people

encouraged to come, and the education and discipline of the ruling

official class promoted by examinations and strict control. It is the

business of historians to enumerate and extol all this, and also to

recount some vain attempts of the King which failed from his endeavour

to guide everything himself.

The King looked after all his dominions, and not least after that child

of sorrow, the newly won Silesia. When he conquered this large province

it had little more than a million of inhabitants.[20] Greatly was the

contrast felt between the easy-going Austrian government and the

strict, restless, stirring rule of Prussia. At Vienna the catalogue of

forbidden books was greater than at Rome; now ceaseless bales of books

found their way into the province from Germany: all were free to buy

and read, even the attacks upon their own ruler. In Austria it was the

privilege of the nobility to wear foreign cloth; in Prussia, when the

father of Frederic the Great had forbidden the import of foreign cloth,

he first dressed himself and his princesses in home-made manufacture.

At Vienna no office was considered distinguished for which anything

more was required than representation: all the work was the affair of

the subalterns; the lord of the bedchamber was more considered than a

deserving General or minister. In Prussia even the highest in rank was

little esteemed if he was not useful to the State; and the King himself

was the most precise official, for he looked after every thousand

thalers that were saved or disbursed. He who in Austria left the Roman

Catholic faith was punished with confiscation and banishment; in

Prussia every one could change his religion as he chose, that was his

affair. In the Imperial dominions the government felt it burdensome to

look after anything; the Prussian officials thrust their noses into

everything. In spite of the three Silesian wars, the country was far

more flourishing than in the Imperial time; a century had not been

sufficient to efface the traces of the Thirty Years' War; the people

remembered well how in the cities heaps of ruins had remained from the

Swedish time, and everywhere near the newly-built houses, the dismal

wastes caused by fire. Many little cities had still blockhouses in the

old Sclavonian style, with straw and shingle roofs, which had long been

scantily patched. Under the Prussians, not only the traces of the old

devastation, but even of the Seven Years' War, soon disappeared.

Frederic had fifteen large cities built up with regular streets at the

King's cost, and some hundred new villages constructed and occupied by

freehold colonists; he had laid on the landed proprietors the heavy

burden of rebuilding some thousands of homesteads, and occupying them

with tenants with hereditary rights. In the Imperial time the imposts

had been far less, but they were unequally apportioned, and the

heaviest burdens were on the poor; the nobles were exempt from the

greater part; the method of raising them was ill arranged; much was

embezzled or squandered, and little proportionately found its way into

the Emperor's coffers. The Prussians, on the other hand, had divided

the country into small circles, valued the collective acreage, and in a

few years had withdrawn all exemptions from taxes; the country now paid

its ground tax, the cities their excise. Thus the province bore a

double amount of burdens with greater ease, only the privileged

murmured; and in this way it was able to maintain 40,000 soldiers,

whilst formerly there had been only 2000. Before 1740 the nobles had

acted the part of fine gentlemen; any one who was a Roman Catholic, and

rich, lived at Vienna; others, who could afford it, went to Breslau.

Now the greater number of the landed proprietors dwelt on their

properties. Krippenreiters had ceased; the noblemen knew that the King

considered it honourable in him to care for the culture of his ground,

and that he showed cold contempt towards those who were not landlords,

officials, or officers. Formerly, law-suits were incessant and costly,

and could scarcely be carried on without bribery and great sacrifice of

money; now the number of lawyers became less, because decisions were so

rapid. Under the Austrians the caravan traffic with the east of Europe

had undoubtedly been greater; the Bukowins and Hungarians, and also the

Poles, became estranged, and already looked to Trieste; but new sources

of industry arose, large manufactories of wool and cloth, and in the

mountain valleys linen, were established. Many were dissatisfied with

the new time, some were in fact oppressed by its harshness, but few

ventured to deny that on the whole there was improvement.

But there was another characteristic of the Prussian State that made an

impression on the Silesians, and soon obtained a mastery over their

minds. This was the devoted Spartan spirit of those who served the

King, which frequently appeared in the lowest officials. The excise

officers, even before the introduction of the French system, were

little liked; they were invalid subaltern officers, old soldiers of the

King, who had won his battles, and had grown grey in his service. They

sat now at the gates, and smoked their wooden pipes; they received very

little pay, and could indulge themselves in little, but were from early

dawn till late in the evening at their post, did their duty skilfully,

quickly, and punctually, like old soldiers, received and faithfully

delivered up the money as a matter of course. They thought always of

their service: it was their honour, their pride; and long did the old

Silesians continue to relate to their descendants how much they had

been struck by the punctiliousness, strictness, and honesty of these

and other Prussian officials. There was in every district town a

receiver of taxes; he lived in his small office room, which was perhaps

at the same time his bedroom, and received in a large wooden dish the

land tax which the village magistrate brought to his room once a month.

Many thousand thalers were noted down on the long list, and were

delivered to the last penny into the State coffers. Small was the

salary of even such a man as this; he sat, received and packed away in

bags, till his hair became white, and his trembling hands could no

longer lay hold of the two-groschen pieces. And the pride of his life

was, that the King knew him personally, and, if he ever came through

the place during the change of horses, he fixed on him silently his

large eyes, or, if he was very gracious, inclined his head a little

towards him. The people regarded with a certain degree of respect and

awe these subordinate servants of a new principle. And not the

Silesians only; it was something new in the world. It was not as a mere

jest that Frederic II. had called himself the first servant of his

State. As on the battlefield he had taught his wild nobles that the

highest honour was to die for the Fatherland, so did his unwearied care

and high sense of duty imprint upon the soul of the meanest of his

servants on the most distant frontiers his great idea, that his first

duty was to live and labour for the good of his King and country.

Though the provinces of Prussia, in the Seven Years' War, were

compelled to do homage to the Empress Elizabeth, and remained for some

time incorporated in the Russian Empire, yet the officials of the

districts under the foreign army and government ventured secretly to

raise money and provisions for their King, and great art was required

for the passage of the transports. Many were in the secret, but there

was not one traitor; they stole in disguise through the Russian camp in

danger of their lives. They discovered afterwards that they earned

little thanks by it, for the King did not like his East Prussians; he

spoke depreciatingly of them; seldom showed them the same favour as the

other provinces; he looked like stone whenever he learnt that one of

his young officers was born between the Vistula and Memel, and never

entered his East Prussian province after the war. But the East

Prussians were not shaken in their veneration for him: they clung with

true love to their ungracious master, and his best and most

intellectual panegyrist was Emmanuel Kant.

The life in the King's service was undoubtedly a rough one: incessant

were the work and deprivations; it was difficult for the best to do

enough for so strict a master, and the greatest devotion received but

curt thanks; if a man was worn out he was probably coldly thrown aside;

the labour was without end everywhere,--new undertakings--scaffoldings

of an unfinished building. To any one who came into the country this

life did not appear cheerful, it was so austere, monotonous, and rough;

there was little of beauty or pleasure in it; and as the bachelor

household of the King, with his obedient servants and his submissive

intimates taking the air under the trees of a quiet garden, gave the

impression of a monastery to a foreign guest; so he found in the whole

Prussian regime, something of the self-denial and obedience of a large

industrious monastic brotherhood.

Somewhat of this spirit had passed into the people themselves. But we

honour in this an enduring service of Frederic II.: still is this

spirit of self-denial the secret of the greatness of the Prussian

State, the last and best guarantee for its duration. The excellent

machine which the King had erected with so much intelligence and energy

could not eternally last; it was shattered twenty years after his

death; but that the State did not at the same time sink,--that the

intelligence and patriotism of the citizen were in a condition to

create a new life on new foundations under his successors,--is the

secret of Frederic's greatness.

Nine years after the conclusion of the last war, which led to the

retention of Silesia, Frederic increased his kingdom by a new

acquisition, not much less in number of miles, but with a scanty

population: it was the district of Poland, which has since passed under

the name of West Prussia.

If the claims of the King on Silesia had been doubtful, it required all

the acuteness of his officials to put a plausible appearance on the

uncertain rights to a portion of the new acquisition. The King himself

cared little about it; he had, with almost superhuman heroism, defended

the possession of Silesia in the face of the world; that province had

been bound to Prussia by streams of blood; but in this case, political

shrewdness was almost all that had been required. Long, in the opinion

of men, was the conqueror deficient in that justification which it

appeared was only given by the horrors of war and the accidental

fortune of the battle-field. But this last acquisition of the King,

which was made without the thunder of cannon or the flourish of

victory, was, of all the great gifts for which the German people had to

thank Frederic II., the greatest and most beneficial. During many

hundred years the much-divided Germans were confined and injured by

ambitious neighbours; the great King was the first conqueror who

extended the German frontier further to the east. A century after his

great ancestor had in vain defended the Rhine fortresses against Louis

XIV., he again gave the Germans the emphatic admonition, that it was

their task to carry laws, education, freedom, cultivation, and industry

into the east of Europe. His whole country, with the exception of some

old Saxon territory, had been won from the Sclavonians by force and

colonisation; never since the great migration of the Middle Ages had

the struggle for the wide plains on the east of the Oder ceased; never

had his house forgotten that it was the guardian of the German

frontier. Whenever the struggle of arms ceased, politicians contended.

The Elector Frederic William had freed the Prussian territories of the

Teutonic order from the Polish suzerainty. Frederic I. had brought this

isolated colony under the crown. But the possession of East Prussia was

insecure; the danger was not, however, from the degenerate Republic of

Poland, but from the rising greatness of Russia. Frederic had learnt to

consider the Russians as enemies; he knew the high-flown plans of the

Empress Catherine; the clever Prince knew how to grasp at the fitting

moment. The new domain--Pommerellen, the Woiwodschaft of Kulm and

Marienburg, the Bishopric of Ermland, the city of Elbing, a portion of

Kujavien, and a part of Posen--united East Prussia with Pomerania and

the Marches of Brandenburg. It had always been a frontier land; since

ancient times people of different races had thronged to the coast of

the Northern Sea: Germans, Sclavonians, Lithuanians, and Finns. Since

the thirteenth century, the Germans had forced themselves into this

debatable ground as founders of cities and agriculturists; orders of

knights, merchants, pious monks, German noblemen, and peasants

congregated there. On both sides of the Vistula arose towers and

boundary stones of the German colonists. Above all rose the splendid

Dantzic,--the Venice of the Baltic, the great sea-mart of the

Sclavonian countries, with its rich Marien-church and the palaces of

its merchants; behind it, on the other arm of the Vistula, its modest

rival Elbing; further upwards, the stately towers and broad arcades of

Marienburg, where is the great princely castle of the Teutonic Knights,

the most beautiful edifice in the north of Germany; and in the

luxurious low-countries, in the valley of the Vistula, were the old

prosperous colonial properties, one of the most favoured districts of

the world, and defended by powerful dikes against the devastations of

the Vistula. Still further upwards, Marienwerder, Graudenz, Kulm, and

in the low countries, Netzebromberg, the centre of a strip of Polish

frontier. Smaller German cities and village communities were scattered

through the whole territory, which had been energetically colonised by

the rich Cistercian monasteries of Oliva and Pelplin. But the

tyrannical severity of this order drove the German cities and landed

proprietors of West Prussia, in the fifteenth century, to annex

themselves to Poland. The Reformation of the sixteenth century subdued

not only the souls of the German colonists, but also those of the

Poles. In the great Polish Republic, three-fourths of the nobility

became Protestants, and in the Sclavonian districts of Pommerellen,

seventy out of one hundred parishes, did the same. But the introduction

of the Jesuits brought an unhealthy change. The Polish nobles fell back

to the Roman Catholic Church, their sons were brought up in the

Jesuits' schools as converting fanatics. From that time the Polish

State began to decline; its condition became constantly more hopeless.

There was a great difference in the conduct of the Germans of West

Prussia with respect to proselytising Jesuits and Sclavonian tyranny.

The immigrant German nobles became Roman Catholic and Polish, but the

citizens and peasants remained stubborn Protestants. To the opposition

of languages was added the opposition of confessions; to the hatred of

race, the fury of contending faiths. In the century of enlightenment

there was a fanatical persecution of the Germans in these provinces;

one Protestant church after another was pulled down, the wooden ones

were burnt; when a church was burnt, the villages lost the right of

having bells; German preachers and schoolmasters were driven away and

shamefully ill-used "_Vexa Lutheranum dabit thalerum_" was the usual

saying of the Poles against the Germans. One of the great landed

proprietors of the country, Starost of Gnesen, from the family of

Birnbaum, was condemned to death, by tearing out his tongue and

chopping off his hands, because he had copied into a record from German

books some biting remarks against the Jesuits. There was no law and no

protection. The national party of Polish nobles, in alliance with

fanatical priests, persecuted most violently those whom they hated as

Germans and Protestants. All the predatory rabble joined themselves to

the patriots or confederates; they hired hordes who went plundering

about the country and fell upon small cities and German villages. Ever

more vehement became the rage against the Germans, not only from zeal

for the faith, but still more from covetousness. The Polish nobleman

Roskowski put on a red and a black boot: the one signified fire, and

the other death; thus he rode from one place to another, laying all

under contribution; at last, in Jastrow, he caused the hands, feet, and

finally the head of the Evangelical preacher Wellick to be cut off, and

the limbs to be thrown into a bog. This happened in 1768.

Such was the state of the country shortly before the Prussian

occupation. Dantzic, which was indispensable to the Poles, kept itself,

through this century of decay, from the rest of the country; it

remained a free State under Sclavonian protection, and was long adverse

to the great King. But the country and most of the German cities

energetically helped to preserve the King from destruction. The

Prussian officials who were sent into the country were astonished at

the wretchedness which existed at a few days' journey from their

capital. Only some of the larger cities, in which German life was

maintained by old trading intercourse within strong walls, and

protected strips of land exclusively occupied by Germans,--like the low

countries near Dantzig,--the villages under the mild government of the

Cistercians of Oliva, and the wealthy German districts of Catholic

Ermland, were in tolerable condition. Other cities lay in ruins, as did

most of the farms on the plains. The Prussians found Bromberg, a city

of German colonists, in ruins; it is not possible now accurately to

ascertain how the city came into this condition;[21] indeed the fate of

the whole Netze district, in the last ten years before the Prussian

occupation, is quite unknown. No historians, no records, and no

registers give any account of the destruction and slaughter with which

that country was ravaged. Apparently the Polish factions must have

fought amongst themselves; bad harvests and pestilence may have done

the rest. Kulm has from ancient times preserved its well-built walls

and stately churches, but in the streets the covered passages to the

cellars projected over the rotten wood and the fragments of brick from

the dilapidated buildings; whole streets consisted of such cellars, in

which the miserable inhabitants dwelt. Twenty-eight of the forty houses

of the great market-place had no doors, no roofs, no inhabitants, and

no proprietors. In a similar condition were other cities.

The greater number of the country people lived in circumstances which

appeared to the King's officials lamentable; especially on the

frontiers of Pomerania, where the Windish Kassubes dwelt; the villages

were a collection of old huts, with torn thatched roofs, on bare

plains, without a tree and without a garden; there was only the

indigenous wild cherry-tree. The houses were built of wooden rafters

and clay; going through the house door, one entered a room with a large

hearth, without a chimney; stoves were unknown; no candle was ever

lighted, only fir chips brightened the darkness of the long winter

evenings; the chief article in the miserable furniture was the

crucifix, and under it a bowl of holy water. The dirty, forlorn people

lived on rye porridge, or only on herbs, which they made into soup, or

on herrings, and brandy, in which both women and men indulged. Bread

was almost unknown; many had never in their life tasted such a

delicacy; there were few villages in which there was an oven. If they

ever kept bees, they sold the honey to the citizens, as well as carved

spoons and stolen bark; and with the produce, they bought at the fairs,

coarse blue cloth dresses, with black fur caps, and bright red

handkerchiefs for the women. There was rarely a weaving-loom, and the

spinning-wheel was unknown. The Prussians heard there no national

songs; there were no dances, no music, nor indeed any of the pleasures

which the most miserable Poles partake of, but stupidly and silently

the people drank bad drams, fought, and reeled about. The poor noble

also differed little from the peasant; he drove his own rude plough,

and clattered in wooden slippers about the unboarded floor of his hut.

It was difficult, even for the Prussian King, to make anything of these

people. The use of potatoes spread rapidly, but the people long

continued to destroy the fruit trees, the culture of which was

commanded; and they opposed all other attempts at cultivation. Equally

needy and decaying were the frontier districts with Polish population;

but the Polish peasant preserved, in his state of poverty and disorder,

at least the vivacity of his race. Even on the properties of the

greater nobles, such as the Starosties, and of the crown, all the

farming buildings were ruined and useless. If any one wished to forward

a letter, he had to send a special messenger, for there was no post in

the country; indeed, in the villages no need of it was felt, for a

great portion of the nobles could not read or write, more than the

peasants. Were any one ill, no assistance could be obtained but the

mysterious remedies of some old village crone, for there was no

apothecary in the whole country. Any one who needed a coat, did well to

be able to use a needle himself, for no tailor was to be found for many

miles, unless one passed through the country on a venture.[22] He who

wished to build a house, had first to ascertain whether he could get

labourers from the west. The country people still kept up a weak

struggle with hordes of wolves, and there were few villages in which

men and beasts were not decimated every winter.[23] If the small-pox

broke out, or any other infectious illness came into the country, the

people saw the white figure of the pestilence flying through the air

and settling down on their huts; they knew what such appearances

betokened; it was the desolation of their homes, the destruction of

whole communities; with gloomy resignation they awaited their fate.

There was hardly any administration of justice in the country; only in

the larger cities were powerless courts. The Starosts inflicted

punishment with arbitrary power; they beat and threw into horrible

jails, not only the peasant, but even the citizens of the country towns

who rented their houses or fell into their hands. In their quarrels

amongst themselves they contended by bribery, in any of the few courts

that had jurisdiction over them. In later years, even that had almost

fallen into disuse, and they sought revenge with their own hands.

It was indeed a forlorn country, without discipline, without law, and

without a master; it was a wilderness, with only a population of

500,000 on 600 square miles--not 850 to the mile. And the Prussian King

treated his acquisition like an untenanted prairie; almost at his

pleasure he fixed boundary stones, or removed them some miles further.

And then he began, in his admirable way, the culture of the country;

the very rottenness of its condition was attractive to him, and West

Prussia became, as Silesia had hitherto been, his favourite child, that

he washed and brushed, and dressed in new clothes, sent to school,

controlled, and kept under his eyes, with incessant care like a true

mother. The diplomatic contention about the acquisition still

continued, but he sent a troop of his best officials into the

wilderness; the districts were divided into small circles; the whole

surface of the country valued in the shortest time, and equally taxed;

and every circle provided with a provincial magistrate, a judicature, a

post, and a sanitary police. New parishes were called into life as if

by magic; a company of 187 schoolmasters were introduced into the

country; the worthy Semler had sought out and drilled some of them.

Numbers of German artisans were hired, machine and brick makers;

digging, hammering, and building began all over the country; the cities

were reinhabited; street upon street arose out of the heaps of ruins;

the Starosties were changed into crown property; new villages were

built and colonised, and new agriculture enjoined. In the course of the

first year after taking possession of the country, the great canal was

dug, three German miles in length, uniting the Vistula by means of the

Netze with the Oder and Elbe; a year after, the King had given

directions for this work, he saw loaded boats from the Oder, 120 feet

long, passing from the East to the Vistula. By means of the new

water-wheels, wide districts of country were drained and occupied by

German colonists. The King worked indefatigably; he praised and blamed;

and, however great the zeal of his officials, they could seldom do

enough for him. In consequence of this, the wild Sclavonian tares,

which had shot up, not only there but also in the German fields, were

brought under, so that even the Polish districts got accustomed to the

new order of things; and West Prussia, in the war after 1806, proved

itself almost as Prussian as the old provinces.

Whilst the grey-headed King was creating and looking after everything,

one year passed after another over his thoughtful head; all about him

was more tranquil, but void and lonely, and small was the circle of men

in whom he confided. He had laid his flute aside, and the new French

literature appeared to him insipid and prosy; sometimes it seemed as if

a new life sprouted up under him in Germany, to which he was a

stranger. Unweariedly did he labour for the improvement of his army and

the welfare of his people; ever less did he value his tools, and ever

higher and more passionate was his feeling of the great duties of his

position.

But if his struggles in the Seven Years' War may be called superhuman,

equally so did his labours now appear to contemporaries. There was

something great, but also terrible, in the way in which he made the

prosperity of the whole his highest and constant object, disregarding

the comfort of individuals. When, in front of the ranks, he dismissed

from the service with bitter words of blame the Colonel of a regiment

which had made a great blunder at a review; when, in the marsh lands of

the Netze, he calculated more the strokes of the ten thousand spades

than the hardships of the labourers, who lay, stricken with marsh

fever, in the hospital he had erected for them; when be overstepped in

his demands what the most rapid action could accomplish,--terror as of

one who moved in an unearthly element mingled with the deep reverence

and devotion of his people. Like Fate, he appeared to the Prussians,

incalculable, inexorable, and omniscient; superintending the smallest

as well as the greatest things. When they related to one another that

he had endeavoured to control Nature also, but that his orange-trees

had been frozen by the last spring frosts, then they secretly rejoiced

that there were limits even for their King, but still more that he had

borne it with such good humour, and had made his bow to the cold days

of May.

With touching sympathy the people collected all the sayings of the King

in which there was any human feeling that brought him more into

communion with them. So lonely were his house and garden, that the

imaginations of his Prussians continually hovered about the consecrated

spot. If any one was so fortunate as to come into the neighbourhood of

the castle on a warm moonlight night, he would perhaps find open doors

without a guard, and he could see the great King in his bedroom,

sleeping on his camp-bed. The scent of the flowers, the night song of

the birds, and the quiet moonlight were the only guards, almost the

whole regal state, of the lonely man.

For fourteen years after the acquisition of West Prussia, did the

oranges of Sans Souci bloom; then did Nature reassert her empire over

the great King. He died alone, only surrounded by his servants.

In the bloom of life he was completely wrapped up in ambitious

feelings; he had wrested from fate all the high and splendid garlands

of life,--he, the prince of poets and philosophers, the historian and

the General. No triumph that he had ever gained contented him; all

earthly fame had become to him accidental, uncertain, and valueless; an

iron feeling of duty, incessantly working, was all that remained to

him. Amid the dangerous alternation of warm enthusiasm and cool

acuteness, his soul had reached its maturity. He had, in his own mind,

surrounded with a poetical halo, certain individuals; and he despised

the multitude about him. But in the struggles of life his egotism

disappeared; he lost almost all that was personally dear to him, and he

ended by caring little for individuals, whilst the need of living

for the whole became ever stronger in him. With the most refined

self-seeking, he had desired the highest for himself; and at last,

regardless of himself, he gave himself up for the public weal and the

lowest. He had entered life as an idealist, and his ideal had not been

destroyed by the most fearful experiences, but rather ennobled,

exalted, and purified; he had sacrificed many men to his State, but no

man so much as himself.

Great and uncommon did this appear to his contemporaries; greater still

to us, who can perceive, even in the present time, the traces of his

activity in the character of our people, our political life, our arts,

and literature.