After all, this joke was made up of the rudest boasting. There is something in it and its attending circumstances which remind one of the last war in Europe. Rome declared war against Persia, and the Roman cry was ‘The Tigris for a boundary!’ ‘To Susa!’ ‘To Ecbatana!’ and so forth. The later cry of the enraptured Gauls, ‘Le Rhin! le Rhin!’ ‘À Berlin! à Berlin!’ seem like Irish echoes of the old cry. What disaster came of it Gibbon tells and readers of history remember, but even among the degenerate Romans there was no one ignoble enough to set an example to the poor French feuilletonist, who said of the brave German officers that they would be too proud to brush French boots with their blonde moustaches. Brave Frenchmen must have shuddered at this wretched jest, and Louis Napoleon, who loved a good joke though he never made one, must have curled his lip with indignation if he read the piece of miserable wit over his coffee at Metz.
In Prussia, which dates as a kingdom from the year 1702, there is not one of its seven kings who can be called a wit, though more than one had what is far better, strong, far-seeing, uncommon sense. Unclean in their vagaries the Prussian royal jokers have assuredly been, and one or two admitted of no liberty whatever being taken with them, as far as repartee went. So stern were the most of the Prussian margraves, electors, and dukes, that, to express the peril of joking with them, there arose the well-known popular proverb, ‘It is advisable not to eat cherries with princes.’ The queens of Prussia, on the other hand, brought their own wit with them into the royal family, and there was not a sharper lady among them than Queen Sophia Charlotte, the first queen of Prussia. Leibnitz, whom she delighted to honour as a man and a philosopher, once asked her if she could imagine the infinitely little? ‘Why, of course I can!’ exclaimed the hilarious queen. ‘What a question to ask the wife of Frederick the First!’
There was good common sense in the humour of Frederick the Great of Prussia. In his hours of joviality with his boon companions, smoking and drinking around a table, in a cottage specially devoted to such recreation, the king was understood to be absent. Frederick gave the loosest rein to his own spirit of jesting, and took the roughest jokes of his guests with perfect good temper. He has been immoderately praised for this control over himself; but in truth there was none. He could always escape from raillery that was tinged with bitterness. At critical moments, when an ordinary mortal, hard pressed by satirical assailants, would lose his equanimity and fly into a rage, Fritz could quietly remark, ‘Friends, the king has come back;’ after which observation he neither joked himself nor was attacked by the jokers. Neither did the king bear any ill-will if his own jesting was turned roughly against him, and he was made to smart by a repartee more stinging than the royal sarcasm which gave it birth.
There was often a childlike simplicity about the old soldier-king. He would joke and laugh with the children in the streets of Potsdam, as he slowly rode along on his veteran Molwitz gray. He loved to have them at his stirrup, and watch them struggling to kiss his boot or pat the proud old horse; and he would laugh joyously if their young throats set up the famous chorus:
Victoria! with us is God!
The haughty foe lies there!
One Saturday afternoon they carried the matter further than his patience would tolerate, and Fritz, raising his crutched cane menacingly, cried out in affected anger, ‘Young rascals! to school with you all! to school!’ The cry was met by a counter-shout from the ragamuffins of ‘Ha! ha! Papa Fritz don’t know that there’s no school on Saturday afternoon!’ At which the absolute king rode away rebuked. His humour, however, made such rebuffs welcome. He took truths from the popular tongue with alacrity. After the Seven Years’ War, riding towards Sans Souci, he recognised an old fruit-woman near the Brandenburg Gate, whom he remembered to have seen there before the war broke out. Fritz at once greeted her with a ‘Well, mother, how have the times been treating you?’ ‘Middling,’ was the concise reply; ‘but where have you been for this ever so long?’ ‘Don’t you know, mother, I have been making war for these seven years past?’ ‘How should I know?’ asked the venerable Pomona, ‘and why should I care?
“Rabble fight, and rabble slay;
And rabble are friends another day.”’
Fritz laughed aloud, and rode away in high good humour. Do you think it would be safe, say, for a prince of the blood to enter into colloquy with the apple women at the Marble Arch or the fruit-sellers at St. James’s Gate, when the guard is being relieved? Frederick William the Third had a quiet humour of his own. There is one sample of it which reminds one of what Henry the Fourth said to the mayor of a town whose speech the king could hardly hear for the accompanying braying of a donkey: ‘One at a time, gentlemen, if you please!’ When Frederick William visited one of his provincial towns for the first time, the chief clerical official of the district read to him a bombastically inflated address. The king grew uneasy as the flattery was piled, and at length he cut it all short, with an angry observation to his adjutant, Colonel von Witzleben, ‘Can’t stand any more of it! The man is pelting me with untruths.’ The king and the crown prince were good mimics, and both brought their powers into play at a moment when a farce was being acted in Berlin, which attracted all play-goers who loved a laugh, king and court included. There was a favourite scene in this farce, wherein a workman and his master quarrelled and were reconciled. Great fun was caused by the way in which the workman propitiated his wrathful master, by awkwardly holding out his hand, and saying, in dialect, ‘Now, measter, nevertheless, no animosity on no account!’ To this, said again and again, the master invariably replied, ‘You know me better; am I not always that one which’—— In the expression given to these phrases by the two low comedians there was a world of stage humour which delighted their audience, the sovereign and his family, as much as any there. It happened at this time that the king was kept waiting for his dinner by the tardiness of the crown prince to appear. Now if we common mortals can bear only with impatience being kept so waiting, you may judge if a king with an appetite considers such an offence to be much below high treason. Frederick William at last sat down in dudgeon; all his family sat down too, in silence, looking at the crown prince’s vacant chair, with a feeling that there was a storm coming. When his majesty had just concluded his soup, his tardy royal highness entered the room. Seeing how matters stood, he put on the sheepish look of the actor who played the workman in the farce, approached the king in a loutish fashion, extended his hand awkwardly, and exclaimed with country accent, ‘Now, measter, nevertheless, no animosity on no account!’ Frederick William took up the joke immediately. He put on the look of the other actor, assumed his air and accent, and answered in his very voice, squeezing his son’s hand the while, ‘Fritz, thou knowest me better; am I not always that one which’—— You may suppose what a satisfied audience listened to that bit of dialogue; and may lose yourself in conjecture as to how a similar scene might be gone through with H.R.H. the Prince of Wales and H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh giving imitations of Mr. Compton and Mr. Buckstone in ‘Box and Cox.’