That friendship with Louis XV. so eagerly sought by Maria Theresa led to a very momentous alliance of a different sort. The Empress and the French King together arranged a marriage between her fair young daughter Marie Antoinette and Louis, the young Dauphin of France.
How should the Empress of Austria, born, nurtured, and fed in the very center of despotism—not hearing or heeding the current ideas about human rights and freedom—entirely misunderstanding the past, the present, and the future—how should she suspect the terrific forces which were accumulating beneath the throne of France, or that it would become a scaffold for her child? Hapsburg and Bourbon, to her mind, were realities as fixed and enduring as the Alps.
She saw no special significance in the fact that thirteen English colonies in America were in rebellion and setting up a novel form of government for themselves. That was England's affair, not hers, and would in time, like other rebellions against properly constituted authority, be put down.
She did not live to see the end of this struggle, nor the events to which it led in France. Her death occurred in 1780. Her son, Joseph II., strange to say, was imbued with the new ideas of human rights. Great was the astonishment of Frederick and of Europe, when this young man set about the task of establishing a new and progressive order of things in Austria; and it was a strange spectacle to behold a Hapsburg trying to force upon his people reforms they did not desire, and rights which they did not know how to use.
His plans were high and noble, but he failed to see that they were too sweeping and too suddenly developed to be permanent. His people were not ripe for emancipation from old shackles, which they had grown to like and venerate. In striving to free the church from the Jesuits, and to emancipate the serfs in Hungary, he had accomplished nothing, and had created chaos. Depressed by the failure in his great design of reformation, Joseph's health gave way. He died in 1790 and was succeeded by his brother Leopold II.
It is not to be supposed that Frederick felt much sympathy with the free young Republic established in America. And if he sent a sword of honor to Washington in 1783, it was because he recognized the greatness of the man; and perhaps, too, because he felt a malicious pleasure in the humiliation of George III.!
The intellectual awakening which this King had failed to understand had wrought a mighty change in Germany. Lessing had been the first to break away from an enfeebling imitation of French Sentimentlalism. The genius of Goethe and Schiller awakened a new spirit in literature, that of Romanticism, and there commenced that intellectual convulsion known as Sturm und Drang, or storm and stress period. While Goethe and Schiller were supreme in the kingdom of letters, Herder and the Schlegels were great in history and criticism; Humboldt and Ritter in geographical science; Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Kant in philosophy; Fouqué and Tieck in imagination, and Jean Paul Richter in the mysterious ether of transcendental thought.
When Karl August called Goethe to his Court in Saxe-Weimar, among that group of other illustrious authors, and gave to Weimar the name of the "German Athens," it was a Golden Age for Germany.
It is interesting to recall that it was Luther who gave the first impulse to this movement, by revealing to the people the riches of their own tongue. In his translation of the Bible, and in his hymns, so grandly simple, he created the modern German language.
The influence of Luther was felt in another art, too. The enthusiasm awakened by the singing of his hymns revolutionized the form of ecclesiastical music. In this Golden Age in Germany music, too, had become a great art, with such immortal names as Mozart, Gluck, Haydn, and Beethoven; and the period of great orchestration also had commenced.[[1]]