Those vivacities of young Fritz, his taste for music, finery, those
furtive excursions into the domain of Latin and forbidden things, were
distasteful and incomprehensible to Friedrich Wilhelm: Where can such
things end? They begin in disobedience and intolerable perversity; they
will be the ruin of Prussia and of Fritz!--Here, in fact, has a great
sorrow risen. We perceive the first small cracks of incurable divisions
in the royal household; the breaking out of fountains of bitterness,
which by and by spread wide enough. A young sprightly, capricions and
vivacious Boy, inclined to self-will, had it been permitted; developing
himself into foreign tastes, into French airs and ways; very ill seen by
the heavy-footed practical Germanic Majesty.
The beginnings of this sad discrepancy are traceable from Friedrich's
sixth or seventh year: "Not so dirty, Boy!" And there could be no lack
of growth in the mutual ill-humor, while the Boy himself continued
growing; enlarging in bulk and in activity of his own. Plenty of new
children come, to divide our regard withal, and more are coming; five
new Princesses, wise little Ulrique the youngest of them (named of
Sweden and the happy Swedish Treaty), whom we love much for her grave
staid ways. Nay, next after Ulrique comes even a new Prince; August
Wilhelm, ten years younger than Friedrich; and is growing up much more
according to the paternal heart. Pretty children, all of them, more or
less; and towardly, and comfortable to a Father;--and the worst of them
a paragon of beauty, in comparison to perverse, clandestine, disobedient
Fritz, with his French fopperies, flutings, and cockatoo fashions of
hair!--
And so the silent divulsion, silent on Fritz's part, exploding loud
enough now and then on his Father's part, goes steadily on, splitting
ever wider; new offences ever superadding themselves. Till, at last,
the rugged Father has grown to hate the son; and longs, with sorrowful
indignation, that it were possible to make August Wilhelm Crown-Prince
in his stead. This Fritz ought to fashion himself according to his
Father's pattern, a well-meant honest pattern; and he does not! Alas,
your Majesty, it cannot be. It is the new generation come; which cannot
live quite as the old one did. A perennial controversy in human life;
coeval with the genealogies of men. This little Boy should have been the
excellent paternal Majesty's exact counterpart; resembling him at all
points, "as a little sixpence does a big half-crown:" but we perceive
he cannot. This is a new coin, with a stamp of its own. A surprising
FRIEDRICH D'OR this; and may prove a good piece yet; but will never be
the half-crown your Majesty requires!--
Conceive a rugged thick-sided Squire Western, of supreme degree,--or
this Squire Western is a hot Hohenzollern, and wears a crown
royal;--conceive such a burly NE-PLUS-ULTRA of a Squire, with his
broad-based rectitudes and surly irrefragabilities; the honest German
instincts of the man, convictions certain as the Fates, but capable of
no utterance, or next to none, in words; and that he produces a Son
who takes into Voltairism, piping, fiddling and belles-lettres,
with apparently a total contempt for Grumkow and the giant-regiment!
Sulphurous rage, in gusts or in lasting tempests, rising from a fund of
just implacability, is inevitable. Such as we shall see.
The Mother, as mothers will, secretly favors Fritz; anxious to screen
him in the day of high-wind. Withal she has plans of her own in regard
to Fritz, and the others; being a lady of many plans. That of the
"Double-Marriage," for example; of marrying her Prince and Princess to
a Princess and Prince of the English-Hanoverian House; it was a pleasant
eligible plan, consented to by Papa and the other parties; but when it
came to be perfected by treaty, amid the rubs of external and internal
politics, what new amazing discrepancies rose upon her poor children and
her! Fearfully aggravating the quarrel of Father and Son, almost to
the fatal point. Of that "Double-Marriage," whirled up in a universe
of intriguing diplomacies, in the "skirts of the Kaiser's huge
Spectre-Hunt," as we have called it, there will be sad things to say by
and by.
Plans her Majesty has; and silently a will of her own. She loves all her
children, especially Fritz, and would so love that they loved her.--For
the rest, all along, Fritz and Wilhelmina are sure allies. We perceive
they have fallen into a kind of cipher-speech; [_Memoires de Bareith,_
i. 168.] they communicate with one another by telegraphic signs. One
of their words, "RAGOTIN (Stumpy)," whom does the reader think it
designates? Papa himself, the Royal Majesty of Prussia, Friedrich
Wilhelm I., he to his rebellious children is tyrant "Stumpy," and no
better; being indeed short of stature, and growing ever thicker, and
surlier in these provocations!--
Such incurable discrepancies have risen in the Berlin Palace: fountains
of bitterness flowing ever wider, till they made life all bitter for Son
and for Father; necessitating the proud Son to hypocrisies towards his
terrible Father, which were very foreign to the proud youth, had there
been any other resource. But there was none, now or afterwards. Even
when the young man, driven to reflection and insight by intolerable
miseries, had begun to recognize the worth of his surly Rhadamanthine
Father, and the intrinsic wisdom of much that he had meant with him, the
Father hardly ever could, or could only by fits, completely recognize
the Son's worth. Rugged suspicious Papa requires always to be humored,
cajoled, even when our feeling towards him is genuine and loyal.
Friedrich, to the last, we can perceive, has to assume masquerade in
addressing him, in writing to him,--and in spite of real love, must have
felt it a relief when such a thing was over. That is, all along, a sad
element of Friedrich's education! Out of which there might have come
incalculable damage to the young man, had his natural assimilative
powers, to extract benefit from all things, been less considerable. As
it was, he gained self-help from it; gained reticence, the power to keep
his own counsel; and did not let the hypocrisy take hold of him, or be
other than a hateful compulsory masquerade. At an uncommonly early age,
he stands before us accomplished in endurance, for one thing; a very
bright young Stoic of his sort; silently prepared for the injustices
of men and things. And as for the masquerade, let us hope it was
essentially foreign even to the skin of the man! The reader will judge
as he goes on. _"Je n'ai jamais trompe personne durant ma vie,_ I
have never deceived anybody during my life; still less will I deceive
posterity," [_ Memoires depuis la Paix de Huberrtsbourg,_ 1763-1774
(Avant-Propos), OEUVRES, vii. 8.] writes Friedrich when his head was now
grown very gray.