Part 12

Yes, self-willed and despotic he certainly was; up to the most grandiose and down to the pettiest sense of those words. Nobody dared travel without his permission; in granting which, the King decreed the amount of the journey money, down to a farthing: for the burgher so much, for the junker a little more. He awed and astonished all the world by operations that had something superhuman and fantastic about them, such as erecting mighty dams to fight the power of the sea and to wrench from it strips of land which had for centuries been its prey. Or he ploughed the marshes, turned bogs into fields, set ten thousand spades to work to make canals through the swamps of the Oderbruch--callous toward the suffering of his labourers, who might all die off of swamp-fever, so long as they were sacrificed to the future and to his impatient will. If a stranger wanted a good seat at a parade, he had to write to the King, and the King answered in his own hand. Yet it was this very king who one day declared that he would no longer sit silent and endure the obsolete abuses and formalities in the administration of justice; he would mix in and attack the problem himself--and straightway he created the common law of the land, a great and bold reform, a model of reason and fair-mindedness, which all other countries were fain to study and admire.

The army, the administration, service at home and abroad. That was not all. He “mixed into” other matters too, and did not stop with “mixing.” He was his own finance minister (obstinately stingy here; extravagant there, where it was a matter of some large and it might be impossible scheme or other), his own minister for agriculture (who simply refused to believe, because Linnæus and others said so, that the potato was a poisonous plant, and arbitrarily insisted that it be planted), his own minister for commerce (and as such conservative, walking in his father’s footsteps, with prohibited schedules and protection and monopolies, his main idea being that the money should stop in the country), his own minister of works and mines, his own lord chamberlain, and what not besides?--for when a man lives separated from his wife and gets up at three o’clock in the morning, he can get a lot done in the course of the day.

It took a king like this, a man who could work as he could, to show the full meaning of the word “despotism.” Until his time no one had grasped its significance. But the despotism he created was _a new_ kind. He was an enlightened despot--which means that his subjects might think and say what they liked, provided that he, on his side, might do as he chose--an arrangement which it must be admitted was useful to both parties. Religions meant little or nothing to him, he despised them all. Persecuted irreligion found an asylum and even an official status in his kingdom. Lampoons, satires, libels directed against him, moved him not at all. He did not fear brains: his love of them was balanced by his scorn--so long as they were not backed by any power. On being told that one of his subjects had criticized him, he asked: “Has he a hundred thousand men? Then what do you want me to do with him?” Which was cynical, of course. And, indeed, he did have a cynical cast of mind, which betrayed itself even in his dress, that got dirtier and shabbier as time went on; and in the kind of diversions he chose: the habitual blasphemies at his supper parties, the dry, malicious pleasure he had in goading on the literary men and philosophers whom he found in food, in “embroiling” them in disputes and quarrels with each other. Even his mania for work, was there not something cynical, arid, inhuman, misanthropic, about it too, to any healthy and right human sense? For a healthy and right human sense understands--and understood in Frederick’s time too--that career and accomplishment are not all of life; that life has its purely human claims and duties of happiness, to neglect which may be a greater sin than a little easy-goingness toward oneself and others in the matter of one’s work; and again, according to the healthy and right human sense, nobody can be called a harmonious personality who does not understand how to satisfy the just claims of both sides of life. And this king did not, he had no comprehension of these facts, though surely a king ought to know them as well as other people. His insane industry, his insistence on merit and getting things done, was ascetic and somehow horrible in its nature. He hated monks, of course, as he hated all religious and clergy; but he was rather like a monk himself, a monk in a blue soldier coat and yellow waistcoat always spotted with snuff. And he was a cynical old bachelor, and a good share of his ill feeling and his uncanniness had surely to do with his relations with the female sex, which were as a matter of fact no relations at all, and pretty incomprehensible even to his own age, highly capricious as that was in its attitude toward sex matters.

He had been, as I said, rather a dissipated youth. When he was fifteen years old, he visited the luxurious court of Dresden, where he liked it not a little, and fell in love head over ears with the Countess Orselska, the daughter and favourite of Augustus II; but the King, who was somewhat jealous, offered him instead the Countess Formera, a well-shaped damsel, displaying her first in the guise of a living picture. This lady accordingly became Frederick’s first mistress. Afterwards he got hold of the Orselska as well. Such tales are legion: for instance, there is one about the Freifrau von Wreech, whom he used to visit when he was at Küstrin, and who supplied him with candles and books, and even with money, which he is supposed never to have refunded, though Frau von Wreech gave birth to a child which her husband never acknowledged. Then there was the daughter of a Potsdam precentor, who was publicly whipped and sent to the house of correction “for life.” And in Ruppin and Rheinsberg he had his fill of debauchery; but Seckendorff wrote to Prince Eugene that “it seemed the body was not strong enough for the demands made upon it by the desires, and the Crown Prince appears to seek in his dissipations a reputation for gallantry rather than to gratify actual sinful inclinations.” All which might be true and might not. But it is certain that none of these affairs had anything to do with passion in any higher or deeper sense, any more than they had with genuine feeling or warmth of heart. Frederick, when quite young, declared that all he wanted of women was pleasure, and that, having enjoyed, he despised them. He had never been in love. Then came a _malheur_; there is talk of an operation following; and from then on something was broken in his nature. He soon ceased to act the voluptuary; woman had played out her brief and not too honourable rôle in his life.

Misogyny is now deep-seated in his nature. Henceforth one cannot imagine him in any tender situation--it would seem grotesque. His marriage, of course, was no marriage at all; but that does not signify, since it was a forced one. It was not merely that the other sex left him cold. He hated it, he poured scorn on it, he could not endure it anywhere near him. His wife’s ladies complained: “We do not ask that the King should love us; but that he simply cannot stand us--that is hard.” The wife of his hypochondriac friend d’Argens was allowed, as a particular favour, to live in Sans Souci; save for this the palace was a sort of cloister. But a cloister is not quite a natural place to live in. The Italian dancer Barberini passed for some time as the King’s mistress; but Voltaire, on the subject of the relationship, expressed himself thus: “_Il en était un peu amoureux parce qu’elle avait les jambes d’un homme._” So it too was hardly the regular thing. Frederick’s masculinity was obviously not attracted in the orthodox way by the feminine counter-pole. Possibly the long years of soldiering contributed to this state of things and weaned his interests from the other sex. There are many cases of military who were or who became women-haters. This man, brought up in an atmosphere of French femininity, may have grown so accustomed to the maleness of camps that at last he “could not stand the smell” of women. And this was in the Frenchest of centuries, a woman’s century _par excellence_, saturated with the perfume of the _Ewig-Weibliche_. His conception of soldiership, ascetic to begin with (the highest soldier in his command durst not in the field eat off anything but tin), made him so anti-feminine that the soft appeal of love and marriage was quite shut out. He did not like his officers’ marrying, he wanted them to be cloistered warriors like himself; and expressed his view in the witticism he made, that his officers “should find their happiness in the sword and not in the ...” Anyhow, they should find it in the sword. In 1778, out of the seventy-four officers of a regiment of dragoons there was just one married.

Now why was all that? Perhaps at bottom it was not a little political. We must not forget that the most powerful countries in Europe were at that time ruled by women: the Empress Elizabeth, the Empress-queen of Austria, and the Pompadour. Frederick despised and affronted them to the point of political gaucherie. Aloud, at table, before all his lackeys, he called them “the three first wh...s in Europe.” This though he knew, or, rather, because he knew, that no remark of his escaped the spies of foreign courts. In any case, the ugly word may have fitted two of them, but certainly it did not Maria Theresa; in vituperating that chaste and childishly high-minded woman he obviously only levelled at the sex. The Little Mother, Elizabeth, on the other hand, did lay herself open by her weakness for strong drink and muscular military; but these very weaknesses were what kept her a powerful potentate, and it was most injudicious of Frederick to make them the theme of scurrilous little rhymes, which of course came to her ears and made the mistress of Russia his envenomed and everlasting enemy. And why could he not bring himself to the point of a few friendly words with the Pompadour, after she had daintily taken pains to meet him half-way--and considering she was the actual ruler of France? She was only a butcher’s daughter, named Poisson, the wife of a publican and procurer, and herself a procuress to boot. Admitted and conceded, that was what she was. But in the first place, what is the good of being an enlightened despot if you cannot look beyond such small matters? And in the second, she was rather more than delicious, with that clever, roguish little head and that billowing embroidered frock--its measured décolletage sagely half-hiding, half-revealing delights which an all-Christian king had known how to value. Scarcely a sign betrayed the filth whence she came and which remained her element. She knew how to preside discreetly over a privy council. Frederick, when he wantonly repulsed her, was aiming at the female rather than at the concubine. “I do not know her,” he said: “_Je ne la connais pas._” Anybody else, in his place, would have rued that, later. Maria Theresa--foundress of the chastity commission, pious and faithful wife--displayed more self-control. “_Princesse et Cousine_,” she wrote; “_Madame ma très chère Sœur_”--it sounds scandalous, but it had to be done, for Silesia’s sake. As for Frederick’s bearing toward the Empress-queen herself, it sets in the clearest light his callousness where the sex was concerned. All the chroniclers and critics, chivalrous before everything else, speak of his behaviour as abominable.

There is a beautiful portrait drawing of the Empress-queen, by Meytens, in the copperplate collection in Berlin. There is the sumptuous rococo head, majestic and sturdy at once, proud and naïve: the pure brow, with a little diadem above it crowning the powdered hair that falls in curls upon the royal shoulders. There is the double chin, childishly dignified, the clear eyes, the powerful hooked nose, the wholesome mouth, full without being coarse. Her voice is said to have had a compelling charm. Court and people idolized her. She reigned in the fear of God, piously, patriarchally, comfortably. To her husband, Franz of Lorraine, a famous petticoat-chaser, she was a loyal wedded wife, conniving at all his shortcomings. When he died, she turned to his sobbing mistress, Princess Auersperg, and said: “My dear Princess, we have both lost much.” She was as good-natured as that. When her son, Duke Leopold of Tuscany, made her a grandmother for the first time, she was so beside herself for joy that she ran in her night-dress through the castle corridors to the Burgtheater, where there was a performance. Leaning out over the balcony of the royal box she called down into the house: “Poldy’s got a baby! And, to cap the climax, on my wedding-anniversary! Isn’t he a love?” We hear her call, we share the rapture of her audience. She was not yet four-and-twenty when her father died and bequeathed her the burden of the crown. Her health tottered beneath the defeat of Mollwitz and the ensuing crisis; for, to add to everything else, she was with child. “For all my realms were the field of battle,” she later wrote, “and I knew not where I could be brought to bed in peace.” Yet with what lofty spirit, what touching courage, she bore herself! Still weak from her lying-in, on her arm the infant whom in tears and troubles she had brought into the world, the crown of Saint Stephen on her head, she stood in Pressburg before the assembly of the Empire and summoned the chivalry of her Hungary to the defence of her insulted majesty. And the magnates--one can see them--in frenzied enthusiasm swung their crooked sabres and pressed round the throne with the cry: “We will die for our King, Maria Theresa!” But Frederick was without bowels of feeling for this majestic weakness; probably the pale maternity of his enemy only added fuel to the flames of his masculinity, and rather roused disgust than reverence. Throughout the long, inhuman struggle to which the two Silesian wars were the prelude, the thought that he was dealing with women never left him a moment. It recurs in countless of his utterances of that time; who knows if the shameful thought of being defeated by three women was not what stiffened his back? At the thanksgiving service after the victory of Mollwitz he gave out the text from I Timothy ii. 12: “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be silent.”--Maria Theresa, when she heard about it, was not a little wroth. She had a name for him, at once childish and oracular; it seems to show that her woman’s intuition pierced the secret of his character. She never named him save as “the bad man.” The bad man. Yes, that he was, with the emphasis as much on man as on bad. The mysteries of sex are very profound, never will they be quite explained. Was it that this king could not endure women because he was such a bad man, or that he was such a bad man because he could not endure women? A riddle not to be unriddled. But that the two things were somehow dependent on each other--of that I feel certain.

“The bad man”: he was that to everybody, though it was Maria Theresa who by preference and from the depths of her heart gave him the name. There was always a whispering and a plotting and a conspiring round about him--defensively, of course, in the end, and as precautionary measures--all directed against him; he had always to realize it, even when he knew nothing specific; and he parried, as well as he could, ten years long. Yes, we must agree that during all that time he was, diplomatically speaking, on the defensive against his worse nature--though one might, indeed, get the impression that even this behaviour was dictated by sheer malice and in order to lead honest people by the nose.... To sum up, the constellation of great powers was at that time as follows:

The traditional, three-hundred-year-old rivalry between France and Austria was a settled factor, a political constant, which it seemed would have to be reckoned with to all eternity. It had brought France and Prussia together and the alliance of June 1744 had still up to ’56 to run. But that alliance had become rather loose and unreliable, after Frederick withdrew--prematurely, in the view of France--from the War of the Succession. As for England, her hostility toward France was if possible even more venerable than that country’s toward Austria. France loomed large upon the continent, France had a fleet, overseas interests (there were disputes in America, more precisely in Canada)--in short, quite enough to make England keep a sharp eye on her. And George II could endure Frederick as little as anybody else. He too, though not a female, had been satirized in an epigram. And so England clave to Russia, where the amateur of strong drink and muscular soldiers sat enthroned; and did this with especial reference to Prussia; Prussia being still regarded as an ally of France, and in a position, in case of war between the latter and the English, to attack England on her continental heel of Achilles--in other words, Hanover.... The attitude of Saxon Poland was particularly curious, involved, and timid--under an Augustus anything but Strong, or, rather, under his prime minister and head of the Cabinet, Count Brühl, a great spender, a great roué and intriguer, who presently ruined the country financially and after that politically too. This man possessed two hundred pairs of shoes, eight hundred embroidered night-shirts, five hundred suits of clothes, one hundred and two watches, eight hundred and forty-three tobacco-boxes, eighty-seven rings, fifty-seven smelling-bottles, twenty-nine coaches, and fifteen hundred wigs. But I digress.--On Sweden Frederick thought he could count, his sister Ulrike being crown princess there. French influence, also, was paramount in that country--that is, it drew subsidies from France.

The intrigues, the war of pens and plottings against a greater Prussia, began, so to speak, while the ink was still wet on the signatures to the Peace of Dresden. Next to Austria, where the alienation of Silesia was regarded as entirely temporary, the chief source of the intrigues was Russia; Austria, of course, always played the rôle of diplomat with a light touch, whereas Russia, at all times clumsy, at all times ready to conspire, hammered away at the war and the annexation of East Prussia. I mentioned that Russia’s leader of foreign affairs was Bestuchev, the imperial chancellor, who took care, by arrangement with the Austrian and English agents, to feed the alcoholic hatred of his mistress for the King of Prussia, and to hold the resources of his half-savage country at the service of Austria. Scarcely any relations now subsisted between the courts of Berlin and Saint Petersburg. A sort of latent state of war obtained. Every spring, troops assembled in the Baltic Provinces and threatened to overflow the Prussian border. But there had to be some show of conducting matters in the European way; so all sorts of documents were drawn up on parchment, with secret clauses and everything proper and in order.

The fact was that as early as 1745 an alliance had been entered into by the maritime powers and the Saxon-Polish and Hungarian courts--the famous Warsaw Alliance, so-called. It had only been ratified in the spring of that year, at Leipsic, and looked harmless enough on the surface, but it had a secret clause, the Warsaw Agreement, signed only by the monarchs of Hungary and Poland, which was definitely directed against the robber of Silesia. Scarcely had the Peace of Dresden been signed, when Vienna, through the proper diplomatic channels, let it be known in Dresden that she hoped the Warsaw Agreement was still in force. Brühl would have been delighted to utter a hearty yes in reply; but that he was afraid to; began to wriggle, and through all the following years continued to wriggle, until the arrival of the catastrophe. Saxony had come off unharmed from the Peace of Dresden; contrary to her expectations, for when Frederick was fighting in Bohemia she had attacked him in the rear. But he contented himself with an indemnity--the victor of Soor and Kesselsdorf was just then behaving with great moderation, not to say magnanimity. Brühl, however, hated Frederick; at that time everything political had a strong personal coloration, and the hatred of the luxurious and effeminate minister-president toward the ascetic and industrious soldier was inborn and indestructible, it yielded nothing in violence to the Austrian brand. Brühl would have been delighted to give it free vent; but there was the outward attitude of Saxony toward the Prussian states, and there was the abominable superiority of the Prussian army. “The Warsaw Agreement,” answered Brühl: yes, it subsisted, and then again, it did not subsist. It subsisted conditionally. It subsisted on condition that it did no harm to Saxony. It subsisted on condition that Russia joined it. It was indispensable that Russia should join--if she did, then by all means. It went without saying. “_Parfaitement_,” replied Austria, and applied to Russia; and Russia barely waited to be asked, she was on the spot at once, with clumsy and unlimited zeal. In the year ’46 a defensive alliance--only defensive, of course--was arranged between Austria and Russia. It contained a secret clause, to the effect that if the King attacked either of them, he should be held to have forfeited Silesia thereby--beloved, lamented Silesia, which grew dearer and dearer to the Empress-queen, the more she saw what Frederick knew how to get out of it; Catholic Silesia, whose possession by a heretic and criminal cried to heaven. Brühl was politely invited to come in ... but Brühl still wriggled. No, no signature, no official commitment, it was too dangerous. And as they were sure of his good intentions, they let him off the signature, in God’s name. If anybody accuses Saxony of having joined an alliance against Frederick, he lies. Saxony had preserved its neutrality, Saxony had not signed. That it had done its utmost, with Austria, to stir up trouble in Saint Petersburg is another matter. It was neutral, none the less; it had not signed.