Why?
He was leaving Prussia—with enormous difficulty to be sure—but he was leaving it at last. He was returning, as he hoped, to France. He had made a final trial of courts and kings—and found them wanting. Liberty was whispering and wooing him again—the siren he had loved and deserted, and whom he was to love again and desert no more. His blessed monotonous work at his “Annals” made him “forget all the Freytags.” For five hours a day, whether he was living in palaces or in prison, with princes or with jailers, he “laboured tranquilly” at that book. The comic side of the situation appealed to him. He knew, or said he knew, that he deserved some of his misfortunes. And above all—far above all—the dream and the night were ending, and with the dawn of a new day came the courage, the fight, and the energy to win it.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE “ESSAY ON THE MANNERS AND MIND OF NATIONS”
The arrival of Voltaire at Mayence rang down the curtain upon the greatest act of one of the most famous dramas of friendship in the world. It left Frederick enraged: first of all with himself; secondly, with blundering Freytag, whose blunders the King ostensibly approved, according to his principle, in a formal document written for that purpose; and only thirdly with Voltaire. With his muse taught by that Voltaire, Frederick abused the teacher in spiteful epigrams, and then dealt him a blow which shook Voltaire’s whole life, as a lover will kill the mistress who has been false to him not because he has loved her too little, but too much.
As for Voltaire, he was both angry and sorry. In that mean, world-famous story of their quarrel he must have known well enough that he had been too often most aggravating, méchant, and irrepressible. Yet that letter he wrote on July 9th from Mayence to Madame Denis, seen and meant to be seen by Frederick, gave a view of the situation not wholly false. The King “might have remembered that for fifteen years he wooed me with tender favours; that in my old age he drew me from my country; that for two years I worked with him to perfect his talents; that I have served him well and failed him in nothing; that it is infinitely below his rank and glory to take part in an academical quarrel and to end as my reward by demanding his poems from me at the hands of his soldiers.”
Adoring and quarrelling, passionately admiring and yearning for each other when they were apart, admiring and fighting each other when they were together—that is the history of the friendship of Frederick and Voltaire. If it be true that the great are no mates for common people, still less are they mates for each other. Even in fabled Olympus, gods could not live in peace with gods.
It is not unworthy of remark that their connection conferred far greater benefits on the King than on the commoner. Voltaire had consistently trained and taught the royal intellect from that first letter written in August, 1736, to the Prussian heir-apparent. He had been such a master as kings do not often find—and his royal pupil had gained from him such advantages as kings are seldom wise enough to use.
But for Voltaire himself—for the most fruitful literary producer of any age—those three years in Prussia were comparatively barren and unprofitable. True, in 1751, “The Century of Louis XIV.” had appeared; but all the materials for it had been collected, and by far the greater part of the book written, before Voltaire came to Prussia at all. The “Poem on Natural Law” (not published till 1756), a few improvements to “Rome Sauvée,” the beginnings of that “magnificent dream,” “The Philosophical Dictionary,” were, as has been seen (except “Akakia”), his only other works written in Prussia. For a while the author of the “Henriade” and the “English Letters” was chiefly famous as the enemy of d’Arnaud, Hirsch, and Maupertuis; as the hero of the low comedy of Frankfort; and as the guest “who put his host’s candle-ends into his pockets.”
If without Voltaire the glory of Frederick would have been something less glorious, without Frederick the great Voltaire would have been greater still.
Flourishing Mayence, with its Rhine river flowing through it, its fine castles, its fine company, its indifference to the opinion of Frederick, and its warm enthusiasm for Frederick’s guest, friend, enemy, might well have seemed Paradise to Voltaire. He was free. His social French soul was delighted with many visitors. He worked hard too. He spent three weeks in “drying his clothes after the shipwreck,” as he phrased it himself. But for one fear, he would have been happy. It was not only in Prussia that Frederick was Frederick the Great. His name was everywhere a power and terror. Why should prudent France embroil herself with the greatest of European sovereigns for the sake of clasping to her breast an upstart genius who was always making mischief whether he was at home or abroad, and who had been punished for his abominable, free, daring, unpalatable opinions a hundred times without changing them?