Pictures of German Life in the XVIIIth and XIXth Centuries, Vol. II.

by Gustav Freytag

But the character of the princes produced still more effect than even the situation or character of the people. Their State was constituted differently from any other since the days of Charles the Great. Many princely houses have furnished a succession of Sovereigns who have been the fortunate aggrandisers of their States, as the Bourbons, who have collected wide territories into one great kingdom; many families of princes have produced generations of valiant warriors, none more so than the Vasas and the Protestant Wittelsbacher in Sweden. But there have been no trainers of the people like the old Hohenzollerns. As great landed proprietors on the desolated country they brought about an increase of population, guided the cultivation, for almost 150 years laboured as strict economists, thought, tolerated, dared and did injustice, in order to create for their State a people like themselves—hard, parsimonious, discreet, daring, and ambitious.

In this sense one has a right to admire the providential character of the Prussian State. Of the four princes who have governed it, since the German War up to the day when the grey-headed Abbot closed his weary eyes in the monastery of Sans Souci, each one, with his virtues and failings, has acted as a necessary supplement to his predecessor. The Elector Frederic William, the greatest statesman from the school of the German War—the pompous Frederic, the first King—the parsimonious despot Frederic William I.—and, finally, he in whom were concentrated almost all the talents and great qualities of his ancestors, were the flowers of their race.

Life in the King's castle in Berlin was very cheerless when Frederic grew up; few of the citizens' homes at that rude time were so poor in love and sunshine. One may doubt whether it was the King his father, or the Queen, who was most to blame for the disorder of the family life, both through failings of their nature, which, in the ceaseless rubs of home, ever became greater;—the King, a wonderful tyrant, with a soft heart but rough and violent, who wished to compel love and confidence, with a keen understanding, but so unwary that he was always in danger of being the victim of rogues, and from the gloomy knowledge of his weakness became suspicious, stubborn, and violent; the Queen, on the other hand, an insignificant woman, with a cold heart, a strong feeling of her princely dignity, and much inclination to intrigue, neither cautious nor taciturn. Both had the best intentions, and exerted themselves honourably to make their children good and capable men, but both injudiciously disturbed the sound development of the childish soul. The mother had so little tact as to make her children, even in their tender youth, the confidants of her chagrins and intrigues; for in her chambers there was no end of complaints, rancour, and derision, over the undue parsimony of the King, the blows which he so abundantly distributed in his apartments, and the monotony of the daily regulations which he enforced. The Crown Prince, Frederic, grew up as the playfellow of his elder sister, a delicate child with brilliant eyes and wonderfully beautiful blond hair. Punctiliously was he taught just as much as the King wished, and that was little enough; scarcely anything of the Latin declensions—the great King never overcame the difficulties of the genitive and dative—French, some history, and the necessary accomplishments of a soldier. The ladies inspired the boy—who was giddy, and in presence of the King looked shy and defiant—with the first interest in French literature; he himself afterwards gave the praise to his sister, but his governess also was a clever Frenchwoman. That this foreign acquisition was hateful to the King, gave it additional value to the son; for, in the apartments of the Queen, that was most certain to be praised which was most displeasing to the strict master of the family. And when the King delivered to his family his blustering pious speeches, then the Princess Wilhelmine and the young Frederic looked so significantly at one another that, at last, the faces made by one of the children excited a childish desire to laugh, and produced an outburst of fury in the King! Owing to this the son became, in his early years, an object of irritation to his father. He called him an effeminate fellow, who did not keep himself clean, and took an unmanly pleasure in dress and games.

But from the account of his sister, in whose unsparing judgment it appeared easier to blame than to praise, one may perceive how much the amiability of the highly gifted boy worked upon his entourage; whether he secretly read French stories with his sister, and applied the comical characters of the novel to the whole court, or, contrary to the most positive order, played upon the flute and lute, or visited his sister in disguise, when they recited the rôles of the French comedy together. But even for these harmless pleasures Frederic was obliged to have recourse to lies, deceit, and dissimulation. He was proud, high-minded, magnanimous, with an uncompromising love of truth. Dissimulation was so repugnant to his nature that where it was required he would not condescend to it; and if he was compelled to an unskilful hypocrisy, his position with his father became more difficult, the distrust of the King greater, and the wounded self-respect of the son was always breaking out in defiance.

Thus he grew up surrounded by spies, who conveyed his every word to the King. With a richly gifted mind and refined intellectual yearnings, he needed that manly society which would have been suitable for him. No wonder that the youth went astray. The Prussian passed for a very virtuous court in comparison with the other courts of Germany; but the tone towards women, and the carelessness with which the most doubtful connexions were treated, were there also very great. After a visit to the profligate court of Dresden, Prince Frederic began to behave like other princes of his time, and he found good comrades among his father's young officers. We know little of him at this time, but we may conclude that he was undoubtedly in some danger, not of being ruined, but of passing the best years of his life amidst debts and worthless connexions. It certainly was not the increasing displeasure of his father that unhinged his mind at this period, so much as an inward dissatisfaction that drove the immature youth more wildly into error.

He determined to escape to England; how his flight miscarried, and how great was the anger of Colonel Frederic William against the deserter, are well known. With the days of his imprisonment in Küstrin, and his residence at Ruppin, his education began in earnest. The horrors he had experienced had called forth in him new powers. He had borne all the terrors of death, and the most bitter humiliation of princely pride. In the solitude of his prison he had reflected on the great riddle of life,—on death, and what was to follow after it. He had perceived that nothing remained to him but submission, patience, and quiet endurance. But bitter corroding misfortune is not a school which develops good alone: it gives birth also to many faults. He learnt to hide his decisions in his own breast, to look with suspicion on men and use them as his tools, to deceive and cajole them with a cold astuteness which was foreign to his nature. He flattered the cowardly, mean Grumbkow, and was glad when he gradually won the bad man to his purposes; he had for years to struggle warily against the dislike and distrust of his hard father. His nature always resisted this humiliation, and he endeavoured by bitter scorn to atone to his injured self-respect; his heart, which glowed for everything noble, saved him from becoming a hard egotist, but it did not make him milder or more conciliatory, and when he had become a great man and a wise prince, he still retained some traces of narrow-minded cunning from this time of servitude. The lion had at times not been ashamed to scratch like a spiteful cat.

Yet he learnt during these years to respect some things that were useful—the strict economical care with which his narrow-minded but prudent father provided for the weal of his household and country. When, to please the King, he made estimates of a lease; when he gave himself the trouble to increase the profits of a demesne by some hundred thalers; when he thought that the King spent more than was fitting on his favourite fancy, and proposed to him to kidnap a tall shepherd from Mecklenburg as a recruit,—this work was undoubtedly in the beginning only a burdensome means of propitiating the King; for Grumbkow had to procure him a man who made out estimates instead of him, and the officials and exchequer officers gave him hints how, here and there, a profit was to be made, and he always jested about the giants, where he could venture to do so. But the new world in which he found himself, gradually led him on to the practical interests of the people and State. It is clear that the economy of his father was often tyrannical and extraordinary. The King was always convinced that his whole object was the good of the country, and therefore he took upon himself to interfere in the most arbitrary way with the possessions and affairs of private persons. When he commanded that no male goat should be driven with the sheep; that all coloured sheep, grey, black, and mixed, should be entirely got rid of within three years, and only white wool should be permitted; when he accurately prescribed how the sample measure of the Berlin scheffel—which, at the cost of his subjects, he had sent throughout the country—should be locked up and preserved, that they might not be battered; when, in order to promote the linen and woollen trade, he commanded that his subjects should not wear the fashionable chintz and calico, threatening with a fine of 300 thalers and three days in the pillory, all who, after eight months, should have in their house any cotton articles, either nightgowns, caps, or furniture,—such measures of government appeared certainly harsh and trivial; but the son learnt to honour the shrewd sense and benevolent care which were the groundwork of these decrees, and he himself gradually became familiar with a multitude of details, with which otherwise as a prince he would not have been conversant: the value of property, the price of the necessaries of life, the wants of the people, and the customs, rights, and duties of life in the lower classes. He had also a share of the self-satisfaction with which the King boasted of this knowledge of business. When he himself became the all-powerful administrator of his State, the incalculable advantage of his knowledge of the people and of trade became manifest. It was owing to this that the wise economy with which he managed his own house and the finances of the country became possible, and that he was enabled to advance the agriculture, trade, wealth, and education of his people by incessant care of details. Equally with the daily accounts of his kitchen he knew how to test the calculations concerning the crown demesnes and forests, and the excise. His people had chiefly to thank the years in which he was compelled to sit as assessor at the green table at Ruppin for his power of overlooking with a sharp eye the smallest as well as the greatest affairs. But sometimes what had been so vexatious in his father's time happened to himself: his knowledge of business details was not sufficient, so that here and there, just like his father, he commanded what violently interfered with the life of his Prussians, and could not be carried out.

The wounds inflicted upon Frederic by the great catastrophe had scarcely been healed, when a new misfortune befell him as great almost in its consequences as the first. The King forced a wife upon him. Heartrending is the woe with which he strove to escape the bride chosen for him. "I do not care how frivolous she may be, as long as she is not a simpleton, that, I cannot bear." It was all in vain. With bitterness and indignation did he regard this marriage shortly before it took place. Never did he overcome the effect of this sorrow, by which his father ruined his inward life. His most susceptible feelings, and his loving heart, were sold in the roughest way. Not only was he made unhappy by it, but also an excellent woman who was deserving of a better fate. The Princess Elizabeth of Bevern had many noble qualities of heart; she was not a simpleton, she was not ugly, and might have passed well through the bitter criticisms of the princesses of the royal house. But we fear that, if she had been an angel, the pride of the son, who was subjected to the useless barbarity of compulsion, would still have protested against her. And yet this union was not always so cold as has been supposed. For six years did the goodness of heart and tact of the Princess succeed in reconciling the Crown Prince to her. In the retirement of Rheinsberg she was in fact the lady of his house and the amiable hostess of his guests, and it was reported by the Austrian agents that her influence was on the ascendant. But her modest clinging nature was too deficient in the qualities calculated to fix the attachment of an intellectual man. It was necessary for the sprightly children of the house of Brandenburg to give vent to their excitable natures by ready and pointed humour. The Princess, when she was excited, was as quiet as if paralysed, and she was wanting in the easy grace of society. This did not suit. Even the way in which she loved her husband, dutifully and submissively, as if repelled and overwhelmed by the greatness of his mind, was little interesting to the Prince, who had adopted, together with French intellectual culture, not a little of the frivolity of French society.

When Frederic became King, the Princess soon lost the very small share she had gained in her husband's affections. His long absence during the Silesian War finally alienated him from her. More and more distant became their mutual intercourse; years passed without their seeing one another; an icy brevity and coldness are perceptible in his letters; but the high esteem in which the King held her character maintained her outward position. His relations with women after that had little influence on his inward feelings: even his sister of Baireuth, sickly, nervous, and embittered by jealousy of an unfaithful husband, became, for years, as a stranger to her brother; it was not till she had resigned herself to her own life that this proud child of the House of Brandenburg, aged and unhappy, again sought the heart of the brother whose little hand had once supported her when at the feet of the stern father. The mother also, to whom King Frederic always showed the most marked and child-like reverence, could participate little in the feelings of the son. His other sisters were younger, and only inclined to make a quiet Fronde in the house against him; if the King ever condescended to show attention to a lady of the court, or a singer, these were to the person concerned full as annoying as flattering. Where he found beauty, grace, and womanly dignity combined, as in Frau von Camas, the first lady of the bedchamber to his wife, the amiability of his nature appeared by his kindly attentions to her. But, on the whole, his life received little sunshine from his intercourse with women, for he had experienced little of the hearty warmth of family life; in this respect his soul was desolate. Perhaps this was fortunate for his people, though undoubtedly fatal to his private life; the full warmth of his manly feelings was almost exclusively reserved to his small circle of confidants, with whom he laughed, wrote poetry, philosophised, made plans for the future, and latterly conferred with upon his warlike operations and dangers.

His life at Rheinsberg, after his marriage, was the best portion of his youth. There he collected around him a number of highly-educated and cheerful companions; the small society led a poetic life, of which an agreeable picture has been bequeathed to us by those who partook of it. Earnestly did Frederic labour to educate himself; easily did his excited feelings find expression in French verse; incessantly did he labour to acquire the delicacy of the foreign style; but his mind also exercised itself upon more serious things. He sought ardently from the Encyclopædians, and of Christian Wolf, an answer to the highest questions of man; he sat bent over maps and plans of battles; and, amid the rôles of his amateur theatricals and plans of buildings, other projects were prepared which, after a few years, were to agitate the world.