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

by Gustav Freytag

"1762, May.—I am passing through the school of patience; it is hard, tedious, terrible, indeed barbarous. I only help myself out of it by looking on the universe in general, as from a distant planet There everything appears to me infinitely small, and I pity my enemies for taking so much trouble about such trifles. Is this old age, is it reflection, is it reason? I regard all the events of life with far more indifference than formerly. If there is anything to be done for the welfare of the State, I can yet apply some strength to it; but, between ourselves, it is no longer with the fiery vehemence of my youth, nor the enthusiasm that then animated me. It is time that the war should come to an end, for my preachings become tedious, and my hearers will soon complain of me."

To Frau von Camas he writes:—"You speak of the death of poor F——. Ah, dear mamma, for six years I have mourned more for the living than for the dead."

Thus did the King write and grieve, but he held out; and any one who is startled by the gloomy energy of his resolves, must guard himself from thinking that these were the highest expressions of the powers of this wonderful mind. It is true that the King had moments of depression, when he desired death under the fire of the enemy rather than seek it from his own hand out of the phial which he carried about him. It is true that he was firmly determined not to bring destruction on his State by allowing himself to live as a prisoner of the Austrians. There was a fearful truth in all that he wrote; but he was of a poetic disposition; he was a child of the century, which had such a craving for great deeds, and took delight in the expression of exalted feelings; he was, to his heart's core, a German, with the same longings as the immeasurably weaker Klopstock and his admirers. The contemplation and decided utterance of this last resolve gave him inward freedom and cheerfulness. He wrote concerning it also to his sister of Baireuth, in the dismal second year of the war, and this letter is particularly characteristic;[^[19]] for she also had decided not to outlive the fall of her house; and he approved this decision, to which, however, he paid little attention, being immersed in the gloomy satisfaction of his own reflections. Both these royal children had once secretly recited together the rôles of French tragedies in the strict parental house; now their hearts beat again in unison, both thinking of freeing themselves, by an antique death, from a life full of illusions, errors, and sufferings. But when the excited and nervous sister fell dangerously ill, Frederic forgot all his stoical philosophy, and, with a passionate tenderness that still clung to life, he fretted and grieved about her who was the dearest to him of his family; and when she died, his sorrow was, perhaps, more severe from feeling that he had enacted a tragic part in the tender life of the woman. Thus, strangely, was mixed in the greatest German that arose in the eighteenth century, poetical feeling and the wish to appear charming and great with the earnest life of reality. The poor little Professor Semler, who, in the midst of the deepest emotion, still studied his attitudes and prepared his compliments, and the great King, who, in calm expectation of the hour of death, wrote in finely-formed periods concerning self-destruction, were both sons of that same time in which the pathos that found no worthy expression in art twined like a creeper round real life. But the King was greater than his philosophy; in fact, he never lost his courage, nor the stubborn strength of the German, nor the quiet hope which is needful to man for every great work.

And he held out. The strength of his enemies became less, their Generals were worn out, and their armies shattered, and at last Russia withdrew from the coalition. This, and the King's last victory, decided the question. He had triumphed, he had preserved the conquered Silesia to Prussia; his people exulted, the faithful citizens of his capital prepared him a festive reception, but he avoided all rejoicings, and returned alone and quietly to Sans Souci. He wished, he said, to live the rest of his days in peace and for his people.

The first three-and-twenty years of his reign he had struggled and fought, and established his power throughout the world; three-and-twenty years more was he to rule over his people as a wise and strict father. The ideas according to which he guided the State—with great self-denial, but also self-will, aiming at the highest, but also ruling in the most trifling matters—have been partly set aside by the higher culture of the present day; they express the knowledge which he had gained in his youth, and from the experiences of his early manhood. The mind was to be free, and each one to think as he chose, but to do his duty as a citizen. As he subordinated his pleasure and expenditure to the good of the State, restricting the whole royal household to about 200,000 thalers, and thought first of the advantage of the people, and not till then of his own; so were all his subjects to be ready to do the duties and bear the burdens he might impose upon them. Each was to remain in the sphere in which his birth and education had placed him; the nobleman was to be landowner and officer; the sphere of the citizen was the city, commerce, industry, teaching, and invention; that of the peasant was field labour and service. But each in his position was to be prosperous and comfortable. There was to be equal, strict, rapid justice for all; no favour for the noble or rich, but rather, in doubtful cases, for the poor man. The number of working men was to be increased, each occupation made as remunerative and as prosperous as possible; the less that was imported from abroad the better; everything to be produced at home, and the surplus to be disposed of beyond the frontiers. Such were the main principles of his political economy. Incessantly did he endeavour to increase the number of morgens of arable land, and to procure new places for settlers. Swamps were drained, lakes drawn off, and dykes thrown up; canals were dug, and advances made for the establishment of new manufactories; cities and villages rebuilt more solid and convenient than before, under the active encouragement of government; the provincial credit system, the fire-insurance society, and the royal bank were established; popular schools everywhere founded, well-informed people encouraged to come, and the education and discipline of the ruling official class promoted by examinations and strict control. It is the business of historians to enumerate and extol all this, and also to recount some vain attempts of the King which failed from his endeavour to guide everything himself.

The King looked after all his dominions, and not least after that child of sorrow, the newly won Silesia. When he conquered this large province it had little more than a million of inhabitants.[^[20]] Greatly was the contrast felt between the easy-going Austrian government and the strict, restless, stirring rule of Prussia. At Vienna the catalogue of forbidden books was greater than at Rome; now ceaseless bales of books found their way into the province from Germany: all were free to buy and read, even the attacks upon their own ruler. In Austria it was the privilege of the nobility to wear foreign cloth; in Prussia, when the father of Frederic the Great had forbidden the import of foreign cloth, he first dressed himself and his princesses in home-made manufacture. At Vienna no office was considered distinguished for which anything more was required than representation: all the work was the affair of the subalterns; the lord of the bedchamber was more considered than a deserving General or minister. In Prussia even the highest in rank was little esteemed if he was not useful to the State; and the King himself was the most precise official, for he looked after every thousand thalers that were saved or disbursed. He who in Austria left the Roman Catholic faith was punished with confiscation and banishment; in Prussia every one could change his religion as he chose, that was his affair. In the Imperial dominions the government felt it burdensome to look after anything; the Prussian officials thrust their noses into everything. In spite of the three Silesian wars, the country was far more flourishing than in the Imperial time; a century had not been sufficient to efface the traces of the Thirty Years' War; the people remembered well how in the cities heaps of ruins had remained from the Swedish time, and everywhere near the newly-built houses, the dismal wastes caused by fire. Many little cities had still blockhouses in the old Sclavonian style, with straw and shingle roofs, which had long been scantily patched. Under the Prussians, not only the traces of the old devastation, but even of the Seven Years' War, soon disappeared. Frederic had fifteen large cities built up with regular streets at the King's cost, and some hundred new villages constructed and occupied by freehold colonists; he had laid on the landed proprietors the heavy burden of rebuilding some thousands of homesteads, and occupying them with tenants with hereditary rights. In the Imperial time the imposts had been far less, but they were unequally apportioned, and the heaviest burdens were on the poor; the nobles were exempt from the greater part; the method of raising them was ill arranged; much was embezzled or squandered, and little proportionately found its way into the Emperor's coffers. The Prussians, on the other hand, had divided the country into small circles, valued the collective acreage, and in a few years had withdrawn all exemptions from taxes; the country now paid its ground tax, the cities their excise. Thus the province bore a double amount of burdens with greater ease, only the privileged murmured; and in this way it was able to maintain 40,000 soldiers, whilst formerly there had been only 2000. Before 1740 the nobles had acted the part of fine gentlemen; any one who was a Roman Catholic, and rich, lived at Vienna; others, who could afford it, went to Breslau. Now the greater number of the landed proprietors dwelt on their properties. Krippenreiters had ceased; the noblemen knew that the King considered it honourable in him to care for the culture of his ground, and that he showed cold contempt towards those who were not landlords, officials, or officers. Formerly, law-suits were incessant and costly, and could scarcely be carried on without bribery and great sacrifice of money; now the number of lawyers became less, because decisions were so rapid. Under the Austrians the caravan traffic with the east of Europe had undoubtedly been greater; the Bukowins and Hungarians, and also the Poles, became estranged, and already looked to Trieste; but new sources of industry arose, large manufactories of wool and cloth, and in the mountain valleys linen, were established. Many were dissatisfied with the new time, some were in fact oppressed by its harshness, but few ventured to deny that on the whole there was improvement.

But there was another characteristic of the Prussian State that made an impression on the Silesians, and soon obtained a mastery over their minds. This was the devoted Spartan spirit of those who served the King, which frequently appeared in the lowest officials. The excise officers, even before the introduction of the French system, were little liked; they were invalid subaltern officers, old soldiers of the King, who had won his battles, and had grown grey in his service. They sat now at the gates, and smoked their wooden pipes; they received very little pay, and could indulge themselves in little, but were from early dawn till late in the evening at their post, did their duty skilfully, quickly, and punctually, like old soldiers, received and faithfully delivered up the money as a matter of course. They thought always of their service: it was their honour, their pride; and long did the old Silesians continue to relate to their descendants how much they had been struck by the punctiliousness, strictness, and honesty of these and other Prussian officials. There was in every district town a receiver of taxes; he lived in his small office room, which was perhaps at the same time his bedroom, and received in a large wooden dish the land tax which the village magistrate brought to his room once a month. Many thousand thalers were noted down on the long list, and were delivered to the last penny into the State coffers. Small was the salary of even such a man as this; he sat, received and packed away in bags, till his hair became white, and his trembling hands could no longer lay hold of the two-groschen pieces. And the pride of his life was, that the King knew him personally, and, if he ever came through the place during the change of horses, he fixed on him silently his large eyes, or, if he was very gracious, inclined his head a little towards him. The people regarded with a certain degree of respect and awe these subordinate servants of a new principle. And not the Silesians only; it was something new in the world. It was not as a mere jest that Frederic II. had called himself the first servant of his State. As on the battlefield he had taught his wild nobles that the highest honour was to die for the Fatherland, so did his unwearied care and high sense of duty imprint upon the soul of the meanest of his servants on the most distant frontiers his great idea, that his first duty was to live and labour for the good of his King and country.

Though the provinces of Prussia, in the Seven Years' War, were compelled to do homage to the Empress Elizabeth, and remained for some time incorporated in the Russian Empire, yet the officials of the districts under the foreign army and government ventured secretly to raise money and provisions for their King, and great art was required for the passage of the transports. Many were in the secret, but there was not one traitor; they stole in disguise through the Russian camp in danger of their lives. They discovered afterwards that they earned little thanks by it, for the King did not like his East Prussians; he spoke depreciatingly of them; seldom showed them the same favour as the other provinces; he looked like stone whenever he learnt that one of his young officers was born between the Vistula and Memel, and never entered his East Prussian province after the war. But the East Prussians were not shaken in their veneration for him: they clung with true love to their ungracious master, and his best and most intellectual panegyrist was Emmanuel Kant.

The life in the King's service was undoubtedly a rough one: incessant were the work and deprivations; it was difficult for the best to do enough for so strict a master, and the greatest devotion received but curt thanks; if a man was worn out he was probably coldly thrown aside; the labour was without end everywhere,—new undertakings—scaffoldings of an unfinished building. To any one who came into the country this life did not appear cheerful, it was so austere, monotonous, and rough; there was little of beauty or pleasure in it; and as the bachelor household of the King, with his obedient servants and his submissive intimates taking the air under the trees of a quiet garden, gave the impression of a monastery to a foreign guest; so he found in the whole Prussian regime, something of the self-denial and obedience of a large industrious monastic brotherhood.

Somewhat of this spirit had passed into the people themselves. But we honour in this an enduring service of Frederic II.: still is this spirit of self-denial the secret of the greatness of the Prussian State, the last and best guarantee for its duration. The excellent machine which the King had erected with so much intelligence and energy could not eternally last; it was shattered twenty years after his death; but that the State did not at the same time sink,—that the intelligence and patriotism of the citizen were in a condition to create a new life on new foundations under his successors,—is the secret of Frederic's greatness.