When Frederick became King, the Princess soon lost even the slight part which she had won in her husband's affections. His long absence in the first Silesian War gave the finishing stroke to their estrangement. The relations of husband and wife became more and more distant. Years passed when they did not see each other, and icy brevity and coolness can be perceived in his letters to her. Still the fact that the King was obliged to esteem her character so highly maintained her in her outward position. Later, his relations with women influenced his emotions very slightly. Even his sister at Bayreuth, sickly, nervous, embittered by jealousy of an unfaithful husband, was estranged from her brother for years; and not until she had given up all hope of life did this proud member of the House of Brandenburg, aging and unhappy, seek again the heart of the brother whose little hand she had once held as they stood before their stern father. His mother also, to whom King Frederick always showed excellent filial devotion, was not able to occupy a large place in his heart. His other brothers and sisters were younger, and were only too much disposed to hatch obscure domestic conspiracies against him. If the King ever condescended to show any attentions to a lady of the court or of the stage, these were in general as disturbing as they were flattering for the persons in question. When he found intelligence, grace, and womanly dignity united, as in Frau von Camas, who was the Queen's first lady-in-waiting, he expressed the amiability of his nature in many cordial attentions. But on the whole, women did not add much light or splendor to his life, and the cordial intimacy of family life hardly ever warmed his heart. In this direction his feelings were dried up. This was perhaps fortunate for his people, it was undoubtedly fatal to his private life. The full warmth of his human feelings was reserved almost exclusively for his little circle of intimates, with whom he laughed, wrote poetry, discussed philosophy, made plans for the future, and later discussed his military operations and dangers.
His married life in Rheinsberg opens the best period of his younger years. He succeeded in bringing together there a number of well educated, cheerful companions. The little circle led a poetic life of which those who shared in it have left a pleasing picture. Frederick began to work seriously on his education. The expression of emotion easily took for him the form of conventional French versification. He worked incessantly to acquire the refinements of the foreign style. But his mind was also busy with more serious matters. He eagerly sought answers to all the highest questions of humanity in the works of the Encyclopedists and of Christian Wolff. He sat bent over maps and battle-plans, and, along with parts for the amateur theatre and architects' sketches, other projects were in preparation, which, a few years later, were to arouse the attention of the world.
Then the day came when his dying father laid down the reins of government and told the officer of the day to take his orders from the new commander-in-chief of Prussia. How the Prince was judged by his political contemporaries we see from the characterization which an Austrian agent had given of him a short time before: "He is graceful, wears his own hair, and has a somewhat careless bearing; likes the fine arts and good cooking. He would like to begin his rule by something striking. He is a firmer friend of the army than his father. His religion is that of a gentleman: he believes in God and the forgiveness of sins. He likes splendor and things on a large scale. He will reëstablish all the court positions and bring the nobles to his court." This prophecy was not fully justified. We seek to understand other sides of his nature at this time. The new King was a man of fiery, enthusiastic temperament, he was quickly aroused, and the tears came readily to his eyes. Like his contemporaries, he too was passionately eager to admire grandeur and to give himself up to tender feelings in a poetical mood. He played adagios softly on his flute. Like his worthy contemporaries, he did not easily find, in prose or poetry, the full expression of his feelings; pathetic oratory stirred him to tearful emotion. In spite of all his French aphorisms, the essence of his nature was very German in this respect also.
Those who ascribe to him a cold heart have judged him unfairly. It is not cold hearts in princes which give the most offense by their harshness. Such hearts are almost always gifted with the art of satisfying those about them by uniform graciousness and tactful expression. The strongest utterances of contempt are generally found close beside the pleasing tones of a caressing tenderness. But in Frederick, it seems to us, there was a striking and unusual union of two totally opposite tendencies of the emotional nature, which elsewhere are engaged in an unending struggle. He had in equal degree the need to idealize life for himself, and the impulse to destroy ideal moods without mercy in himself and in others. This first peculiarity of his was perhaps the most beautiful, perhaps the saddest, with which a human being was ever equipped in the struggles of earth. His was indeed a poetic nature. He possessed to a high degree that peculiar power which endeavors to reconstruct vulgar reality according to the ideal needs of its own nature, and covers everything near with the grace and light of a new life. It was a necessity for him to make over with the grace of his imagination the image of those dear to him, and to adorn the relation to them into which he had voluntarily entered. In this there was always a certain kind of posing. Even where he had the most ardent feelings, he was more in love with the glorified picture of the individual in his mind than with the real personality. It was in such a mood that he kissed Voltaire's hand. As soon as the difference between the ideal and the real person became unpleasantly perceptible, he let go the person and clung to the image. One to whom nature has given this temperament, letting him see love and friendship chiefly through the colored glass of a poetical mood, will always, according to the judgment of others, show caprice in the choice of his friends. The uniform warmth which treats with consideration all alike seems to be denied to such natures. To any one to whom the King had become a friend in his own fashion, he always showed the greatest attention and assiduity, however much his moods changed at particular moments. He could become as sentimental in his sorrow over the loss of such a friend as any German of the Werther period. He had lived for many years on somewhat distant terms with his sister in Bayreuth, and not until the last years before her death, amid the terrors of a burdensome war, did her image rise vividly again before him as that of an affectionate sister. After her death he found a gloomy satisfaction in picturing to himself and others the cordiality of his relations with her. He erected a little temple to her and often made pilgrimages to it. Toward any one who did not approach his heart through the medium of a poetic mood, or incite him to poetic expression of his affection, or who touched a wrong note anywhere in his sensitive nature, he was cold, contemptuous, and indifferent—a king who only asked to what extent the other person could be useful to him; he even pushed him aside when he could no longer use him. Such a character may perhaps surround the life of a young man with poetic lustre and give brightness and charm even to common things, but unless it is coupled with a high degree of morality, a sense of duty, and a mind set upon higher things, it will leave him sad and lonely in later years. In the most favorable cases it will make bitter enemies as well as very warm admirers. A somewhat similar disposition brought to Goethe's noble soul heavy sorrows, transitory relations, many disappointments, and a solitary old age. It becomes doubly momentous for a king, before whom others rarely stand with assurance and on equal terms; for his most sincere friends may yet turn into admiring flatterers, unstable in their bearing, now constrained under the moral spell of his majesty, now, under the conviction of their own rights, fault-finding and discontented.
This need of ideal relations and longing for people to whom he could unbosom himself without reserve, worked at cross purposes with Frederick's penetrating discrimination, and his uncompromising love of truth, which was a deadly enemy of all deception, impatiently resisted every illusion, despised shams, and sought for the essence of things. This scrutinizing view of life and its duties might well offer him protection against those deceptions which oftener annoy an imaginative prince, who gives his confidence, than a private individual. His acuteness, however, showed itself also in savage moods as unsparingly, sarcastically, and maliciously destructive. Where did he get this disposition? Was it Brandenburg blood? Was it an inheritance from his great-grandmother, the Electress Sophia of Hanover, and his grandmother, Queen Sophia Charlotte, those intellectual women with whom Leibniz had discussed the eternal harmony of the universe? The harsh school of his youth certainly had had something to do with it. His insight into the foibles of others was keen. Wherever he saw a weak point, wherever any one's manners annoyed or provoked him, his ready tongue was busy. His gibes fell unsparingly upon friend and foe alike; and even where silence and patience were demanded by every consideration of prudence, he could not control himself. At such times his soul seemed to suffer some strange transformation. With merciless exaggeration he distorted the picture of his victim into a caricature. On closer examination the principal motive here also appears to be pleasure in intellectual production. He frees himself from an unpleasant impression by improvising against his victim. He makes a grotesque picture with inner satisfaction and is astonished if the victim, deeply offended, in turn takes up arms against him. His resemblance to Luther in this respect is very striking. Neither the king nor the reformer cared whether his behavior was dignified or seemly, for both of them, excited like men on the hunting field, entirely forgot the consequences in the joy of the fight. Both did themselves and their great causes serious injury in this way, and were honestly surprised when they discovered the fact. To be sure, the blows with the cudgel or the whip which the great monk of the sixteenth century dealt were far more terrible than the pin-pricks of the great prince in the age of enlightenment. But when a king teases and mocks and sometimes pinches maliciously, it is harder to forgive him for his undignified behavior; for he frequently engages in an unequal contest with his victims. The great prince treated all his political opponents in this way, and aroused deadly enemies against himself. He joked at the table, and put in circulation stinging verses and pamphlets about Madame de Pompadour in France and the Empresses Elizabeth and Maria Theresa. Similarly, he sometimes caressed, sometimes scolded and scratched his poetical ideal, Voltaire; but he also proceeded in this way with people whom he really esteemed highly, in whom he put the greatest confidence, and whom he took into the circle of his intimate friends. He brought the Marquis d'Argens to his court, made him chamberlain, member of the Academy, and one of his nearest and dearest friends. The letters which he wrote to him from the camps of the Seven Years' War are among the most beautiful and touching records that the King has left us. When Frederick came home from the war it was his fond hope that the marquis would live with him in his palace at Sans Souci. And a few years later this charming relation was broken up in the most painful manner. How was that possible! The marquis was perhaps the best Frenchman that the King had brought into his circle, a man of honor, with fine feelings, fine education, and really devoted to the King; but he was neither a great character nor an especially strong man. For years the King had admired in him a scholar—which he was not—a wise, clear-sighted, assured philosopher with pleasing wit and fresh humor; he had in short set up an extremely pleasing, fanciful image of him. Now, in daily intercourse, Frederick found himself mistaken. A lack of robustness on the part of the Frenchman, causing him to dwell with hypochondriac exaggeration on his poor health, annoyed the King, who began to realize that the aging marquis was neither a great genius nor an intellectual giant. The ideal which he had formed of him was destroyed. Now the King began to make fun of him on account of his weaknesses. The sensitive Frenchman thereupon asked for leave of absence, that a sojourn of a few months in France might restore his health. The King was offended by this ill-humored attitude, and continued his raillery in friendly letters which he sent him. He said that it was rumored that a werewolf had appeared in France. This was undoubtedly the marquis, in the disguise of a Prussian and a sick man, and he asked if he had begun to eat little children. He had not formerly had that bad habit, but people change a good deal in traveling. The marquis, instead of a few months, stayed two winters. When he was about to return, he sent certificates from his physicians. Probably the worthy man had really been ill, but the King was deeply offended by this awkward attempt at justification on the part of an old friend, and when the latter returned, the old intimacy was gone forever. The King would not let him go, but he took pleasure in punishing the renegade by stinging speeches and harsh jokes. Finally the Frenchman, deeply hurt, asked for his dismissal. His request was granted, and the sorrow and anger of the King is seen from the wording of the order. When the marquis, in the last letter which he wrote the King before his death, represented to him again, and not without bitterness, how scornfully and badly he had treated an unselfish admirer, Frederick read the letter without a word. But he wrote with grief to the dead man's widow telling her of his friendship for her husband, and had a costly monument erected for him in a foreign land. The great prince fared similarly with most of his intimates. Magic as was his power to attract, he had demoniac faculties for repelling. But if any one is disposed to blame the man for this, let him be told that hardly another king in history has so unsparingly disclosed his most intimate soul-life to his friends as Frederick.
Frederick had worn the crown only a few months when the Emperor Charles VI. died. Now everything urged the young King to risk a master-stroke. That he determined upon such a step was in itself, in spite of the momentary weakness of Austria, a token of bold courage. The countries which he ruled had perhaps a seventh as many inhabitants as the broad lands of Maria Theresa. True, his army was for the time being far superior to the Austrian in numbers and discipline, and according to the ideas of the time, the mass of the people was not then in the same way as today available for recruiting purposes. Nor did he fully realize the greatness of Maria Theresa. But even in the preparations for the invasion the King showed that he had long hoped to measure himself against Austria. In an exalted mood he entered upon a struggle which was to be decisive for his own life and that of his State. He cared little at heart for the right which he might have to the Silesian duchies, and which with his pen he tried to prove before Europe. For this the policy of the despotic States of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had no regard whatever. Any one who could find a plausible defense of his cause made use of it, but in case of need the most improbable argument, the most shallow pretext, was sufficient. In this way Louis XIV. had made war; in this way the Emperor had followed up his interests against the Turks, Italians, Germans, French, and Spaniards; in this way a great part of the successes of the great Elector had been frustrated by others. Just where the rights of the Hohenzollerns were the plainest, as in Pomerania, they had been most ruthlessly curtailed, and by no one more than by the Emperor and the Hapsburgs. Now the Hohenzollerns sought their revenge. "Be my Cicero and prove the right of my cause, and I will be your Cæsar and carry it through," Frederick wrote to Jordan after the invasion of Silesia. Gaily, with light step as if going to a dance, the King entered upon the fields of his victories. There was still cheerful enjoyment of life, sweet coquetry with verse, and intellectual conversation with his intimates on the pleasures of the day, on God, nature, and immortality, which he considered the spice of life. But the great task upon which he had entered began to have its effect upon his soul even in the early weeks, even before he had passed through the fiery ordeal of the first great battle. And from that time on it hammered and forged upon his soul until it turned his hair gray and hardened his fiery heart into ringing steel. With that wonderful clearness which was peculiar to him, he watched the beginning of these changes. He even then viewed his own life as from without. "You will find me more philosophical than you think," he writes to his friend. "I have always been so—sometimes more, sometimes less. My youth, the fire of passion, the longing for glory, and, to tell you the whole truth, curiosity, and finally, a secret instinct, have forced me out of the sweet peace which I enjoyed, and the wish to see my name in the gazettes and in history has led me into new paths. Come here to me. Philosophy will maintain her rights, and I assure you that if I had not this cursed love of fame, I should think only of peaceful comfort."
When the faithful Jordan actually came to him and the King saw the man of peaceful enjoyment timid and uncomfortable in the field, he suddenly realized that he himself had become another and a stronger man. The guest who had been honored by him so long as the more scholarly, and who had corrected his verses, criticized his letters, and been far ahead of him in the knowledge of Greek philosophy, now, in spite of all his philosophical training, gave the King the impression of a man without courage. With bitter derision Frederick attacked him in one of his best improvisations, contrasting the warrior in himself with the weak philosopher. In however bad taste the ridiculing verses were with which he overwhelmed Jordan again and again, the return of the old cordial feeling was just as quick; but it was the first gentle hint of fate for the King himself. The same thing was to befall him often. He was to lose valuable men, loyal friends, one after another; not only by death, but still more by the coldness and estrangement which arose between his nature and theirs. For the way upon which he had now entered was destined to develop more and more all the greatness, but also all the narrow features, of his nature, up to the limit of human possibility. The higher he rose above others, the smaller their natures inevitably appeared to him. Almost all whom in later years he measured by his own standard were far from able to endure the test, and the dissatisfaction and disappointment which he then experienced became again keener and more relentless until he himself, from a solitary height, looked down with stony eyes upon the doings of the men at his feet; but always, even to his last hours, the piercing chill of his searching glance was broken by the bright splendor of soft human feelings, and the fact that these were left to him is what makes his great tragic figure so affecting.
During the first war, to be sure, he still looked back with longing to the calm peace of his "Remusberg," and felt deeply the exaction of the tremendous fate which had already involved him. "It is hard to bear with equanimity this good and bad fortune," he writes; "one may appear indifferent in success and unmoved in adversity, the features of the face can be controlled; but the man, the inward man, the depths of the heart, are affected none the less." And he concludes hopefully, "All that I wish for myself is that success may not destroy in me the human feelings and virtues, to which I have always clung. May my friends find me as I have always been." And at the end of the war he writes: "See, your friend is victorious for the second time! Who would have said a few years ago that your pupil in philosophy would play a soldier's part in the world; that Providence would use a poet to overthrow the political system of Europe?" This shows how fresh and young Frederick felt when he returned to Berlin in triumph after his first war.
For the second time he took the field to assert his claim to Silesia. Again he was victorious. He had already the calm confidence of a tried general. His joy at the excellence of his troops was great. "All that flatters me in this victory," he wrote to Frau von Camas, "is that I could contribute by a quick decision and a bold manoeuvre to the preservation of so many good people. I would not have the least of my soldiers wounded for vain glory, which no longer deceives me." But in the midst of the contest came the death of two of his dearest friends, Jordan and Kayserlingk. His grief was touching: "In less than three months I have lost my two most faithful friends, people with whom I had lived daily, pleasant companions, honorable men, and true friends. It is hard for a heart that was made so sensitive as mine to restrain my deep sorrow. When I come back to Berlin, I shall be almost a stranger in my own fatherland, lonesome in my own house. You too have had the misfortune to lose at one time several people who were dear to you. I admire your courage, but I cannot imitate it. My only hope is in time, which can overcome everything in nature. It begins by weakening the impressions on our brains, and only ceases when it destroys us utterly. I anticipate with terror visiting all the places which call up in me sad memories of friends whom I have lost forever." And four weeks after their death he writes to the same friend, who tried to console him: "Do not believe that pressure of business and danger give distraction in sadness. I know from experience that that is a poor remedy. Unfortunately only four weeks have passed since my tears and my sorrow began, but after the violent outbursts of the first days, I feel myself just as sad, just as little consoled, as at the beginning." And when his worthy tutor, Duhan, sent him at his request some French books which Jordan had left behind, the King wrote, late in the autumn of the same year: "Tears came into my eyes when I opened the books of my poor dear Jordan. I loved him so much, it will be hard to realize that he is no more." Not long after the King lost also the intimate friend to whom this letter was addressed.
The loss, in 1745, of the friends of his youth was an important turning point in the King's mental life. With these unselfish, honorable men almost everything died which had made him happy in his intercourse with others. The intimacies into which he now entered as a man were all of another kind. Even the best of the new acquaintances received perhaps his occasional confidence, but never his heartfelt friendship. The need for stimulating intellectual intercourse remained, and became even stronger and more imperative, for in this too he was unique; he never could dispense with cheerful and confidential companions, with light, almost reckless conversation, flitting through all shades of human moods, thoughtful or frivolous, from the greatest questions of the human race down to the little events of the day. Immediately after his accession he had written to Voltaire and invited him to his court. He had first met the Frenchman in 1740 on a journey near Wesel. Soon after, Voltaire had come to Berlin for a few days, at heavy expense. He had even then impressed the King as a jester, but Frederick felt nevertheless an infinite respect for the talent of the man. Voltaire was to him the greatest poet of all times, the master of ceremonies of Parnassus, where the King himself was so anxious to play a part. Frederick's desire to have this man in his train became stronger and stronger. He regarded himself as his pupil; he wished to have all his verses approved by the master; among his Brandenburg officials he pined for the wit and spirit of the elegant Frenchman, and finally, his vanity as a sovereign was concerned—he wanted to be a prince of the beaux esprits and philosophers, as he had become a glorious leader of armies. After the second Silesian war his intimates were mostly foreigners. After 1750 he had the pleasure of seeing the great Voltaire also as a member of his court. It was no misfortune that this unworthy man endured for only a few years his sojourn among the barbarians.