“In later years Frederick gave up shaving, and merely clipped at his beard with scissors. He seldom washed any part of his person, even his hands and face. In that respect he was very different from his father,[15] who used soap and water freely, and often complained of his son’s dirtiness. One of his valets concluded from his master’s dislike of water that he must be afflicted with a kind of hydrophobia. His height has been variously stated, the extreme ranges being 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 7½ inches. He was neither thin nor fat; in his youth he was rather inclined to stoutness, but he became very thin before he died. His complexion was tanned—doubtless because it was seldom washed, like a tramp’s to-day; but unlike a tramp’s, it was touched up with red paint. His eyes were prominent and blue-grey.”
People who never wash themselves acquire a curious complexion which is distinguishable to a doctor at a glance, for it is quite different from the healthy tan of sun and air.
Hardly had he come to the throne when he attacked Maria Theresa, and marched his army into Silesia without warning. The iron ramrod of the Prussians proved successful, giving Frederick’s troops a far greater rapidity of fire than was possible to the wooden ramrod of the Austrians. But I am not now concerned with Frederick’s glories, and if you are interested in them you will get a far more vivid account of them from Lord Macaulay than I would care to write, even if I could; a later writer has referred scoffingly to “Macaulay’s lurid style.” All that I set out to prove was that this great man did not die of syphilis, as wicked slanders have said of him.
Maria Theresa humbled, and Prussia for the first time on the map as a war-state, Frederick returned home to a well-deserved rest, and built himself the palace of Sans Souci, where he settled down to form a great centre of literature and arts on the lines of the French Academy.
He was hardly a German in many ways; his favourite language was French, and his great ambition was to be a poet. Although he could speak three languages he could spell none; and a writer in the Quarterly for 1847 gives some instances of his peculiarities in that respect.
When writing a letter he used to add, in his own handwriting, some words often of bitter jibe or of sardonic humour; and these words were generally wrongly spelt. Thus, he used to spell “winter” hiverd, “actress” actrisse, “old” vieu, and “pay” peyer. That he never learned to spell “pay” properly was doubtless because he hated to think of such a thing; throughout his life, economy was his ruling passion.
To improve his spelling, grammar, and poetical construction, he invited Voltaire to stay with him at Sans Souci, and everyone knows that the two poets did not get on well together. Macaulay took the squabble too seriously, and worked himself up into a rage over it, with much about Voltaire’s “withering irony,” and other early Victorian and exaggerated phrases. It has been left for Mr. Lytton Strachey, the man who told us the truth about Queen Victoria, to tell us the truth about the famous Voltaire-Frederick squabble, and he makes it possible to compress it into a phrase. They were two poets, each trying to overreach the other. Frederick, in the eyes of the world, won, because he had the greater poet arrested, thus winning by the only way he knew—by force of arms; also he dared to call Voltaire a monkey. In our war-hospital, I remember, we had a monkey as a pet, which used to live at the top of one of the entrance gate-posts. When the descendants of Frederick the Great used to emulate him by letting loose poison gas, it was the duty of the quartermaster-serjeant to put the poor little shivering beast into a gas-helmet. At about that time Lytton Strachey’s book came out, and I sometimes read it as I looked at the monkey and heard the incessant tramp of feet that, to me, is the chief remembrance of the war, apart from the disgusting nature of the wounds and the thundering noise. And as the tramping men, marching to death in interminable thousands, looked up astonished at the monkey, I used to wonder at the effrontery of the king who would compare one of the greatest intellects that ever lived in France to that of a monkey. Voltaire got his revenge, more deadly than Marie Antoinette’s. In 1759, the most glorious year of Frederick’s life, he published Candide, which, though a joyful satire on Leibnitz’ philosophy that this was the best of all possible worlds, contained, if I am not much mistaken, a far more deadly description of the new style of civilised warfare introduced by the Great Frederick. Listen (I quote from Mr. Philip Littell’s translation):
“No,” said Dr. Pangloss, “Miss Cunegonde was ripped open by the Bulgarian soldiers, after having been violated by many; they broke her father’s head for attempting to defend her; my lady, her mother, was cut in pieces; my poor pupil was served just the same as his sister; and, as for the castle, they have left not one stone upon another, not a barn, nor a sheep, nor a duck, nor a tree.” For “Bulgarian” read “Prussian,” and you will see the great improvements that Frederick made in war. Voltaire, like Anatole France, had an unrivalled power for saying the utmost possible in the fewest words; and yet some blockheads try to deceive themselves by saying that Anatole France is not of the school of Voltaire! I suppose they do so because they have made up their minds that Voltaire was a wicked man and an atheist, whereas Anatole France is at least now an accepted wit and therefore can say what he likes.
But two years after Voltaire died, Frederick used to pray to his God—if he had any—“Divin Voltaire, ora pro nobis!” that is to say, he acknowledged that Voltaire had triumphed. This to me seems characteristic of the man who bullied Maria Theresa.
Of course the Seven Years’ War was a very wonderful feat of endurance for the Prussian people, just as was the Great War; and in it Frederick won a reputation which was marvellous till a yet greater arose in the art of slaughter. The history of it is repulsive, in that it shows the triumph of unscrupulous burglary against people who only wanted to be left in peace. The results of our own war were better at least on paper, though fortunately it did not produce any man so great as Frederick.