III.

“Voltaire’s ‘Charles XII,’” says Brandes, “stands as a portrait of a remarkable man, executed by a master. It caused Europe to take an interest in the Sweden of that time comparable with what Denmark must thank Shakespeare for in the case of Hamlet.

“Characteristically enough, Voltaire starts his story by a dramatic contrast between the two main persons, Charles XII and Peter the Great, both of whom are sketched in detail. Peter is immediately brought on the scene because no matter how great the interest of the author in the Swedish King’s grandly-planned character and his remarkable fate, his real hero is not Charles, but Peter; not only that bellicose and obstinate in Peter’s character that plunged his country into misfortune, but the sovereign who in spite of the brutal in the pleasures that he sought, in spite of the wildness and cruel vengefulness was an educator, a civilizing influence who conquered a barbarism many centuries old, and introduced industry, technique, building art, science among a people gifted in a way, but fighting against innovations.

“With that clarity that is Voltaire’s foundation quality as historian he places Polish society and the Polish nation side by side with the Swedish and the Russian, and thus the description of August the Strong’s and later Stanislaw Leszczynski’s personalities is as necessary as a background as the characterization of the Swedish and Russian nature through the presentation of Charles XII and Peter the Great.”

With regard to Voltaire’s relations to Russia as a whole, Brandes tells how Frederick the Great looked with jealous eyes on the attention that Voltaire paid to the Russian people in depicting the life-work of Peter, since he looked for undivided devotion of the man whose pen in that day was enough to shed luster on a country. Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great, while uncouth in many ways, was not without taste for intellect and wit, and in approaching Voltaire after becoming Empress sent him her portrait surrounded by large diamonds. But it was in the person of Catherine II that Voltaire a second time enters into acquaintance with a sovereign who is also a genius, a decided and reformative genius, who puts herself into apprenticeship under him and does everything to show him how grateful she is for what he has done.

“There are certain parallels between Frederick and Catherine,” states Brandes. “Both were of German antecedents and had in their blood German respect for intellectual superiority, the German taste for knowledge and mental values. But neither one stood in any cultural relation to Germanism; both wrote and spoke French to perfection. Both were Voltairians to their fingers’ tips. But in spite of their love for French civilization neither one of them had ever seen Paris or France.”