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Frederic the Great and his Times. Edited, with an Introduction, By Thomas
Campbell, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1842.
This work, which has the high honor of being introduced to the world by the
author of Lochiel and Hohenlinden, is not wholly unworthy of so distinguished a
chaperon. It professes, indeed, to be no more than a compilation; but it is an
exceedingly amusing compilation, and we shall be glad to have more of it. The
narrative comes down at present only to the commencement of the Seven Years'
War, and therefore does not comprise the most interesting portion of Frederic's
reign.
It may not be unacceptable to our readers that we should take this opportunity
of presenting them with a slight sketch of the life of the greatest king that
has, in modern times, succeeded by right of birth to a throne. It may, we fear,
be impossible to compress so long and eventful a story within the limits which
we must prescribe to ourselves. Should we be compelled to break off, we may
perhaps, when the continuation of this work appears, return to the subject.
The Prussian monarchy, the youngest of the great European, states, but in
population and revenue the fifth among them, and in art, science, and
civilization entitled to the third, if not to the second place, sprang from a
humble origin. About the beginning of the fifteenth century, the marquisate of
Brandenburg was bestowed by the Emperor Sigismund on the noble family of
Hohenzollern. In the sixteenth century that family embraced the Lutheran
doctrines. It obtained from the King of Poland, early in the seventeenth
century, the investiture of the duchy of Prussia. Even after this accession of
territory, the chiefs of the house of Hohenzollern hardly ranked with the
Electors of Saxony and Bavaria. The soil of Brandenburg was for the most part
sterile. Even round Berlin, the capital of the province, and round Potsdam, the
favorite residence of the Margraves, the country was a desert. In some places,
the deep sand could with difficulty be forced by assiduous tillage to yield thin
crops of rye and oats. In other places, the ancient forests, which the
conquerors of the Roman Empire had descended on the Danube, remained untouched
by the hand of man. Where the soil was rich it was generally marshy, and its
insalubrity repelled the cultivators whom its fertility attracted. Frederic
William, called the Great Elector, was the prince to whose policy his successors
have agreed to ascribe their greatness. He acquired by the peace of Westphalia
several valuable possessions, and among them the rich city and district of
Magdeburg; and he left to his son Frederic a principality as considerable as any
which was not called a kingdom.
Frederic aspired to the style of royalty. Ostentatious and profuse, negligent of
his true interests and of his high duties, insatiably eager for frivolous
distinctions, he added nothing to the real weight of the state which he
governed; perhaps he transmitted his inheritance to his children impaired rather
than augmented in value; but he succeeded in gaining the great object of his
life, the title of King. In the year 1700 he assumed this new dignity. He had on
that occasion to undergo all the mortifications which fall to the lot of
ambitious upstarts. Compared with the other crowned heads of Europe, he made a
figure resembling that which a Nabob or a Commissary, who had bought a title,
would make in the Company of Peers whose ancestors had been attainted for
treason against the Plantagenets. The envy of the class which Frederic quitted,
and the civil scorn of the class into which he intruded himself, were marked in
very significant ways. The Elector of Saxony at first refused to acknowledge the
new Majesty. Lewis the Fourteenth looked down on his brother King with an air
not unlike that with which the Count in Moliere's play regards Monsieur
Jourdain, just fresh from the mummery of being made a gentleman. Austria exacted
large sacrifices in return for her recognition, and at last gave it
ungraciously.
Frederic was succeeded by his son, Frederic William, a prince who must be
allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose character
was disfigured by odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never
before been seen out of a madhouse. He was exact and diligent in the transacting
of business; and he was the first who formed the design of obtaining for Prussia
a place among the European powers, altogether out of proportion to her extent
and population by means of a strong military organization. Strict economy
enabled him to keep up a peace establishment of sixty thousand troops. These
troops were disciplined in such a manner, that, placed beside them, the
household regiments of Versailles and St. James's would have appeared an awkward
squad. The master of such a force could not but be regarded by all his neighbors
as a formidable enemy and a valuable ally.
But the mind of Frederic William was so ill regulated, that all his 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 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
Bareuth, 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
halfpence 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 skillfully 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 cudgeled,
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 goalers 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 intimates 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 ascendancy which Lewis 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, "I 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 for ever. 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 for ever 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 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 practice 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 rixdollars 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
cudgeling. 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.
Even if no positive stipulations on this subject had existed, the arrangement
was one which no good man would have been willing to disturb. It was a peaceable
arrangement. It was an arrangement acceptable to the great population whose
happiness was chiefly concerned. It was an arrangement which made no change in
the distribution of power among the states of Christendom. It was an arrangement
which could be set aside only by means of a general war; and, if it were set
aside, the effect would be, that the equilibrium of Europe would be deranged,
that the loyal and patriotic feelings of millions would be cruelly outraged, and
that great provinces which had been united for centuries would be torn from each
other by main force.
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