inclinations became passions, and all his passions partook of the
character of moral and intellectual disease. His parsimony degenerated
into sordid avarice. His taste for military pomp and order became a
mania, like that of a Dutch burgomaster for tulips, or that of a member
of the Roxburghe Club for Caxtons. While the envoys of the Court of
Berlin were in a state of such squalid poverty as moved the laughter of
foreign capitals, while the food placed before the princes and
princesses of the blood-royal of Prussia was too scanty to appease
hunger, and so bad that even hunger loathed it, no price was thought too
extravagant for tall recruits. The ambition of the King was to form a
brigade of giants, and every country was ransacked by his agents for men
above the ordinary stature. These researches were not confined to
Europe. No head that towered above the crowd in the bazaars of Aleppo,
of Cairo, or of Surat, could escape the crimps of Frederic William. One
Irishman more than seven feet high, who was picked up in London by the
Prussian ambassador, received a bounty of near thirteen hundred pounds
sterling, very much more than the ambassador's salary. This extravagance
was the more absurd because a stout youth of five feet eight, who might
have been procured for a few dollars, would in all probability have been
a much more valuable soldier. But to Frederic William, this huge
Irishman was what a brass Otho, or a Vinegar Bible, is to a collector of
a different kind.
It is remarkable that though the main end of Frederic William's
administration was to have a great military force, though his reign
forms an important epoch in the history of military discipline, and
though his dominant passion was the love of military display, he was yet
one of the most pacific of princes. We are afraid that his aversion to
war was not the effect of humanity, but was merely one of his thousand
whims. His feeling about his troops seems to have resembled a miser's
feeling about his money. He loved to collect them, to count them, to see
them increase; but he could not find it in his heart to break in upon
the precious hoard. He looked forward to some future time when his
Patagonian battalions were to drive hostile infantry before them like
sheep; but this future time was always receding; and it is probable
that, if his life had been prolonged thirty years, his superb army would
never have seen any harder service than a sham fight in the fields near
Berlin. But the great military means which he had collected were
destined to be employed by a spirit far more daring and inventive than
his own.
Frederic, surnamed the Great, son of Frederic William, was born in
January, 1712. It may safely be pronounced that he had received from
nature a strong and sharp understanding, and a rare firmness of temper
and intensity of will. As to the other parts of his character, it is
difficult to say whether they are to be ascribed to nature, or to the
strange training which he underwent. The history of his boyhood is
painfully interesting. Oliver Twist in the parish workhouse, Smike at
Dotheboys Hall, were petted children when compared with this wretched
heir apparent of a crown. The nature of Frederic William was hard and
bad, and the habit of exercising arbitrary power had made him
frightfully savage. His rage constantly vented itself to right and left
in curses and blows. When his Majesty took a walk, every human being
fled before him, as if a tiger had broken loose from a menagerie. If he
met a lady in the street, he gave her a kick, and told her to go home
and mind her brats. If he saw a clergyman staring at the soldiers, he
admonished the reverend gentleman to betake himself to study and prayer,
and enforced this pious advice by a sound caning, administered on the
spot. But it was in his own house that he was most unreasonable and
ferocious. His palace was hell, and he the most execrable of fiends, a
cross between Moloch and Puck. His son Frederic and his daughter
Wilhelmina, afterwards Margravine of Baireuth, were in an especial
manner objects of his aversion. His own mind was uncultivated. He
despised literature. He hated infidels, papists, and metaphysicians, and
did not very well understand in what they differed from each other. The
business of life, according to him, was to drill and to be drilled. The
recreations suited to a prince were to sit in a cloud of tobacco smoke,
to sip Swedish beer between the puffs of the pipe, to play backgammon
for three half-pence a rubber, to kill wild hogs, and to shoot
partridges by the thousand. The Prince Royal showed little inclination
either for the serious employments or for the amusements of his father.
He shirked the duties of the parade; he detested the fume of tobacco; he
had no taste either for backgammon or for field sports. He had an
exquisite ear, and performed skilfully on the flute. His earliest
instructors had been French refugees, and they had awakened in him a
strong passion for French literature and French society. Frederic
William regarded these tastes as effeminate and contemptible, and, by
abuse and persecution, made them still stronger. Things became worse
when the Prince Royal attained that time of life at which the great
revolution in the human mind and body takes place. He was guilty of some
youthful indiscretions, which no good and wise parent would regard with
severity. At a later period he was accused, truly or falsely, of vices
from which History averts her eyes, and which even Satire blushes to
name, vices such that, to borrow the energetic language of Lord Keeper
Coventry, "the depraved nature of man, which of itself carrieth man to
all other sin, abhorreth them." But the offences of his youth were not
characterized by any peculiar turpitude. They excited, however,
transports of rage in the King, who hated all faults except those to
which he was himself inclined, and who conceived that he made ample
atonement to Heaven for his brutality by holding the softer passions in
detestation. The Prince Royal, too, was not one of those who are content
to take their religion on trust. He asked puzzling questions, and
brought forward arguments which seemed to savor of something different
from pure Lutheranism. The King suspected that his son was inclined to
be a heretic of some sort or other, whether Calvinist or Atheist his
Majesty did not very well know. The ordinary malignity of Frederic
William was bad enough. He now thought malignity a part of his duty as a
Christian man, and all the conscience that he had stimulated his
hatred. The flute was broken; the French books were sent out of the
palace; the Prince was kicked and cudgelled, and pulled by the hair. At
dinner the plates were hurled at his head; sometimes he was restricted
to bread and water; sometimes he was forced to swallow food so nauseous
that he could not keep it on his stomach. Once his father knocked him
down, dragged him along the floor to a window, and was with difficulty
prevented from strangling him with the cord of the curtain. The Queen,
for the crime of not wishing to see her son murdered, was subjected to
the grossest indignities. The Princess Wilhelmina, who took her
brother's part, was treated almost as ill as Mrs. Brownrigg's
apprentices. Driven to despair, the unhappy youth tried to run away.
Then the fury of the old tyrant rose to madness. The Prince was an
officer in the army: his flight was therefore desertion; and in the
moral code of Frederic William, desertion was the highest of all crimes.
"Desertion," says this royal theologian, in one of his half crazy
letters, "is from hell. It is a work of the children of the Devil. No
child of God could possibly be guilty of it." An accomplice of the
Prince, in spite of the recommendation of a court martial, was
mercilessly put to death. It seemed probable that the Prince himself
would suffer the same fate. It was with difficulty that the intercession
of the States of Holland, of the Kings of Sweden and Poland, and of the
Emperor of Germany, saved the House of Brandenburg from the stain of an
unnatural murder. After months of cruel suspense, Frederic learned that
his life would be spared. He remained, however, long a prisoner; but he
was not on that account to be pitied. He found in his jailers a
tenderness which he had never found in his father; his table was not
sumptuous, but he had wholesome food in sufficient quantity to appease
hunger; he could read the Henriade without being kicked, and could play
on his flute without having it broken over his head.
When his confinement terminated he was a man. He had nearly completed
his twenty-first year, and could scarcely be kept much longer under the
restraints which had made his boyhood miserable. Suffering had matured
his understanding, while it had hardened his heart and soured his
temper. He had learnt self-command and dissimulation: he affected to
conform to some of his father's views, and submissively accepted a wife,
who was a wife only in name, from his father's hand. He also served with
credit, though without any opportunity of acquiring brilliant
distinction, under the command of Prince Eugene, during a campaign
marked by no extraordinary events. He was now permitted to keep a
separate establishment, and was therefore able to indulge with caution
his own tastes. Partly in order to conciliate the king, and partly, no
doubt, from inclination, he gave up a portion of his time to military
and political business, and thus gradually acquired such an aptitude for
affairs as his most intimate associates were not aware that he
possessed.
His favorite abode was at Rheinsberg, near the frontier which separates
the Prussian dominions from the Duchy of Mecklenburg. Rheinsberg is a
fertile and smiling spot, in the midst of the sandy waste of the
Marquisate. The mansion, surrounded by woods of oak and beech, looks out
upon a spacious lake. There Frederic amused himself by laying out
gardens in regular alleys and intricate mazes, by building obelisks,
temples, and conservatories, and by collecting rare fruits and flowers.
His retirement was enlivened by a few companions, among whom he seems to
have preferred those who, by birth or extraction, were French. With
these inmates he dined and supped well, drank freely, and amused himself
sometimes with concerts, and sometimes with holding chapters of a
fraternity which he called the Order of Bayard; but literature was his
chief resource.
His education had been entirely French. The long ascendency which Louis
the Fourteenth had enjoyed, and the eminent merit of the tragic and
comic dramatists, of the satirists, and of the preachers who had
flourished under that magnificent prince, had made the French language
predominant in Europe. Even in countries which had a national
literature, and which could boast of names greater than those of Racine,
of Moliere, and of Massillon, in the country of Dante, in the country of
Cervantes, in the country of Shakespeare and Milton, the intellectual
fashions of Paris had been to a great extent adopted. Germany had not
yet produced a single masterpiece of poetry or eloquence. In Germany,
therefore, the French taste reigned without rival and without limit.
Every youth of rank was taught to speak and write French. That he should
speak and write his own tongue with politeness, or even with accuracy
and facility, was regarded as comparatively an unimportant object. Even
Frederic William, with all his rugged Saxon prejudices, thought it
necessary that his children should know French, and quite unnecessary
that they should be well versed in German. The Latin was positively
interdicted. "My son," his Majesty wrote, "shall not learn Latin; and,
more than that, I will not suffer anybody even to mention such a thing
to me." One of the preceptors ventured to read the Golden Bull in the
original with the Prince Royal. Frederic William entered the room, and
broke out in his usual kingly style:--
"Rascal, what are you at there?"
"Please your Majesty," answered the preceptor, "----was explaining the
Golden Bull to his Royal Highness."
"I'll Golden Bull you, you rascal!" roared the Majesty of Prussia. Up
went the King's cane; away ran the terrified instructor; and Frederic's
classical studies ended forever. He now and then affected to quote Latin
sentences, and produced such exquisitely Ciceronian phrases as these:
"Stante pede morire;" "De gustibus non est disputandus;" "Tot verbas tot
spondera." Of Italian he had not enough to read a page of Metastasio
with ease; and of the Spanish and English, he did not, as far as we are
aware, understand a single word.
As the highest human compositions to which he had access were those of
the French writers, it is not strange that his admiration for those
writers should have been unbounded. His ambitious and eager temper early
prompted him to imitate what he admired. The wish, perhaps, dearest to
his heart was that he might rank among the masters of French rhetoric
and poetry. He wrote prose and verse as indefatigably as if he had been
a starving hack of Cave or Osborn; but Nature, which had bestowed on
him, in a large measure, the talents of a captain and of an
administrator, had withheld from him those higher and rarer gifts,
without which industry labors in vain to produce immortal eloquence and
song. And, indeed, had he been blessed with more imagination, wit, and
fertility of thought than he appears to have had, he would still have
been subject to one great disadvantage, which would, in all probability,
have forever prevented him from taking a high place among men of
letters. He had not the full command of any language. There was no
machine of thought which he could employ with perfect ease, confidence,
and freedom. He had German enough to scold his servants, or to give the
word of command to his grenadiers; but his grammar and pronunciation
were extremely bad. He found it difficult to make out the meaning even
of the simplest German poetry. On one occasion a version of Racine's
Iphigenie was read to him. He held the French original in his hand; but
was forced to own that even with such help he could not understand the
translation. Yet though he had neglected his mother tongue in order to
bestow all his attention on French, his French was, after all, the
French of a foreigner. It was necessary for him to have always at his
beck some men of letters from Paris to point out the solecisms and false
rhymes of which, to the last, he was frequently guilty. Even had he
possessed the poetic faculty, of which, as far as we can judge, he was
utterly destitute, the want of a language would have prevented him from
being a great poet. No noble work of imagination, as far as we
recollect, was ever composed by any man, except in a dialect which he
had learned without remembering how or when, and which he had spoken
with perfect ease before he had ever analyzed its structure. Romans of
great abilities wrote Greek verses; but how many of those verses have
deserved to live? Many men of eminent genius have, in modern times,
written Latin poems; but, as far as we are aware, none of those poems,
not even Milton's, can be ranked in the first class of art, or even very
high in the second. It is not strange, therefore, that, in the French
verses of Frederic, we can find nothing beyond the reach of any man of
good parts and industry, nothing above the level of Newdigate and
Seatonian poetry. His best pieces may perhaps rank with the worst in
Dodsley's collection. In history, he succeeded better. We do not indeed
find in any part of his voluminous Memoirs either deep reflection or
vivid painting. But the narrative is distinguished by clearness,
conciseness, good sense, and a certain air of truth and simplicity,
which is singularly graceful in a man who, having done great things,
sits down to relate them. On the whole, however, none of his writings
are so agreeable to us as his Letters, particularly those which are
written with earnestness, and are not embroidered with verses.
It is not strange that a young man devoted to literature, and acquainted
only with the literature of France, should have looked with profound
veneration on the genius of Voltaire. "A man who has never seen the
sun," says Calderon, in one of his charming comedies, "cannot be blamed
for thinking that no glory can exceed that of the moon. A man who has
seen neither moon nor sun cannot be blamed for talking of the unrivalled
brightness of the morning star." Had Frederic been able to read Homer
and Milton, or even Virgil and Tasso, his admiration of the Henriade
would prove that he was utterly destitute of the power of discerning
what is excellent in art. Had he been familiar with Sophocles or
Shakespeare, we should have expected him to appreciate Zaire more
justly. Had he been able to study Thucydides and Tacitus in the original
Greek and Latin, he would have known that there were heights in the
eloquence of history far beyond the reach of the author of the Life of
Charles the Twelfth. But the finest heroic poem, several of the most
powerful tragedies, and the most brilliant and picturesque historical
work that Frederic had ever read were Voltaire's. Such high and various
excellence moved the young Prince almost to adoration. The opinions of
Voltaire on religious and philosophical questions had not yet been fully
exhibited to the public. At a later period, when an exile from his
country, and at open war with the Church, he spoke out. But when
Frederic was at Rheinsberg, Voltaire was still a courtier; and, though
he could not always curb his petulant wit, he had as yet published
nothing that could exclude him from Versailles, and little that a divine
of the mild and generous school of Grotius and Tillotson might not read
with pleasure. In the Henriade, in Zaire, and in Alzire, Christian piety
is exhibited in the most amiable form; and, some years after the period
of which we are writing, a Pope condescended to accept the dedication of
Mahomet. The real sentiments of the poet, however, might be clearly
perceived by a keen eye through the decent disguise with which he veiled
them, and could not escape the sagacity of Frederic, who held similar
opinions, and had been accustomed to practise similar dissimulation.
The Prince wrote to his idol in the style of a worshipper; and Voltaire
replied with exquisite grace and address. A correspondence followed,
which may be studied with advantage by those who wish to become
proficients in the ignoble art of flattery. No man ever paid
compliments better than Voltaire. His sweetest confectionery had always
a delicate, yet stimulating flavor, which was delightful to palates
wearied by the coarse preparations of inferior artists. It was only from
his hand that so much sugar could be swallowed without making the
swallower sick. Copies of verses, writing desks, trinkets of amber, were
exchanged between the friends. Frederic confided his writings to
Voltaire; and Voltaire applauded, as if Frederic had been Racine and
Bossuet in one. One of his Royal Highness's performances was a
refutation of Machiavelli. Voltaire undertook to convey it to the press.
It was entitled the Anti-Machiavel, and was an edifying homily against
rapacity, perfidy, arbitrary government, unjust war, in short, against
almost everything for which its author is now remembered among men.
The old King uttered now and then a ferocious growl at the diversions of
Rheinsberg. But his health was broken; his end was approaching; and his
vigor was impaired. He had only one pleasure left, that of seeing tall
soldiers. He could always be propitiated by a present of a grenadier of
six feet four or six feet five; and such presents were from time to time
judiciously offered by his son.
Early in the year 1740 Frederic William met death with a firmness and
dignity worthy of a better and wiser man; and Frederic, who had just
completed his twenty-eighth year, became King of Prussia. His character
was little understood. That he had good abilities, indeed, no person who
had talked with him, or corresponded with him, could doubt. But the easy
Epicurean life which he had led, his love of good cookery and good wine,
of music, of conversation, of light literature, led many to regard him
as a sensual and intellectual voluptuary. His habit of canting about
moderation, peace, liberty, and the happiness which a good mind derives
from the happiness of others, had imposed on some who should have known
better. Those who thought best of him, expected a Telemachus after
Fenelon's pattern. Others predicted the approach of a Medicean age,--an
age propitious to learning and art, and not unpropitious to pleasure.
Nobody had the least suspicion that a tyrant of extraordinary military
and political talents, of industry more extraordinary still, without
fear, without faith, and without mercy, had ascended the throne.
The disappointment of Falstaff at his old boon companion's coronation
was not more bitter than that which awaited some of the inmates of
Rheinsberg. They had long looked forward to the accession of their
patron, as to the event from which their own prosperity and greatness
was to date. They had at last reached the promised land,--the land which
they had figured to themselves as flowing with milk and honey; and they
found it a desert. "No more of these fooleries," was the short, sharp
admonition given by Frederic to one of them. It soon became plain that,
in the most important points, the new sovereign bore a strong family
likeness to his predecessor. There was indeed a wide difference between
the father and the son as respected extent and vigor of intellect,
speculative opinions, amusements, studies, outward demeanor. But the
groundwork of the character was the same in both. To both were common
the love of order, the love of business, the military taste, the
parsimony, the imperious spirit, the temper irritable even to ferocity,
the pleasure in the pain and humiliation of others. But these
propensities had in Frederic William partaken of the general unsoundness
of his mind, and wore a very different aspect when found in company with
the strong and cultivated understanding of his successor. Thus, for
example, Frederic was as anxious as any prince could be about the
efficiency of his army. But this anxiety never degenerated into a
monomania, like that which led his father to pay fancy prices for
giants. Frederic was as thrifty about money as any prince or any private
man ought to be. But he did not conceive, like his father, that it was
worth while to eat unwholesome cabbages for the purpose of saving four
or five rix-dollars in the year. Frederic was, we fear, as malevolent as
his father; but Frederic's wit enabled him often to show his malevolence
in ways more decent than those to which his father resorted, and to
inflict misery and degradation by a taunt instead of a blow. Frederic,
it is true, by no means relinquished his hereditary privilege of kicking
and cudgelling. His practice, however, as to that matter, differed in
some important respects from his father's. To Frederic William, the mere
circumstance that any persons whatever, men, women, or children,
Prussians or foreigners, were within reach of his toes and of his cane,
appeared to be a sufficient reason for proceeding to belabor them.
Frederic required provocation as well as vicinity; nor was he ever known
to inflict this paternal species of correction on any but his born
subjects; though on one occasion M. Thiebault had reason, during a few
seconds, to anticipate the high honor of being an exception to this
general rule.
The character of Frederic was still very imperfectly understood either
by his subjects or by his neighbors, when events occurred which
exhibited it in a strong light. A few months after his accession died
Charles the Sixth, Emperor of Germany, the last descendant, in the male
line, of the House of Austria.
Charles left no son, and had, long before his death, relinquished all
hopes of male issue. During the latter part of his life, his principal
object had been to secure to his descendants in the female line the many
crowns of the House of Hapsburg. With this view he had promulgated a new
law of succession, widely celebrated throughout Europe under the name of
the Pragmatic Sanction. By virtue of this law, his daughter, the
Archduchess Maria Theresa, wife of Francis of Lorraine, succeeded to the
dominions of her ancestors.
No sovereign has ever taken possession of a throne by a clearer title.
All the politics of the Austrian cabinet had, during twenty years, been
directed to one single end, the settlement of the succession. From every
person whose rights could be considered as injuriously affected,
renunciations in the most solemn form had been obtained. The new law had
been ratified by the Estates of all the kingdoms and principalities
which made up the great Austrian monarchy. England, France, Spain,
Russia, Poland, Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, the Germanic body, had bound
themselves by treaty to maintain the Pragmatic Sanction. That instrument
was placed under the protection of the public faith of the whole
civilized world.