Yet in some respects Frederick had gained. His talent for diplomacy grew with the need for it. His father’s schooling had this effect—that he learned to outwit his father. The closing years of Frederick William’s life were cheered by the mirage of a good son and a good husband, which of all Frederick’s fabrications was perhaps the cleverest. Progress in diplomacy was attended by increase of self-control. Frederick learned in a hard school to disguise his true emotions and to feign what he did not feel. Hence arises a difficulty which Carlyle constantly encounters as he strives to approach his hero with paternal sympathy and to penetrate into his inner man. He is forced to speak of Frederick’s “polished panoply,” and to describe him as “outwardly a radiant but metallic object to mankind.”
The King’s handiwork may be discerned in the increasing poverty of affection that his son displayed. Frederick William had killed his friend, proscribed his associates, banished his sister, placed his mother under a cloud, and forced upon him a wife whom he despised. It is not surprising that Frederick’s heart, never of the tenderest, grew harder year by year. He turned to the friendship of men, always difficult for kings to win, and doubly difficult for an autocrat who was not prone to self-sacrifice. It was remarked of him in later life that he softened only in illness, and that the sure sign of his recovery was renewed harshness towards those about him. His intimates were chiefly devotees of art and letters, among whom Voltaire was chief. But the very name of Voltaire, whom Frederick first adored and then expelled, hints at the transient nature of these ties. As his sister, his mother, and Madame de Camas were one by one removed by death, he became bankrupt of affection, and his old age was consoled only by the fidelity of his servants and of his dogs.
Such was Frederick at his marriage, but his very defects contributed for a time to his social success. An accomplished man, with great flashing eyes and flexible, resonant voice, “musical even in cursing,” he had a genuine relish for the circle of which he was the centre. His schooling had given him skill in seeming what he pleased, and whatever affection he possessed was given to his friends. At Rheinsberg, where he built himself a house and lived from 1736 till 1740, he was gay, hospitable, and refined, living in apparent amity with his wife and fitting himself by study and by administration to fill the throne in his turn.
The year after Frederick’s marriage, the year 1734, was of high importance in his career. The war of the Polish Succession had broken out between France and the Empire, and Prussia fulfilled her obligations by sending an auxiliary force of ten thousand men to serve on the Rhine under Eugene. In this campaign, which proved inglorious, Frederick played the part of an eager novice, dogging the footsteps of the aged hero and copying even his curt manner. There he laid to heart several fruitful facts—that the great commander never accepted praise to his face, that the enemy feared him more than they feared his army, and that other German troops cut a sorry figure beside the men of Prussia. And—though his father had ordered him to keep out of harm’s way—he proved by his calm while cannon-balls were splintering trees around him that the traditional courage of the Hohenzollerns had descended to him.
Next year (1735) he begged to go to the war again, but the King, who had been near death from dropsy, put him off with a journey to Ost-Preussen. This was the first of those official tours of inspection which later became one of the chief occupations of Frederick’s years of peace. In 1736 he began a far more agreeable pursuit. It was then that he established himself at Rheinsberg, and, that, to quote his own testimony, he began to live.
To live, in Frederick’s vocabulary, meant to read. He plunged into books, comparing, annotating, analysing, and learned by four days’ trial the lesson of the zealous freshman—that man needs more than two hours’ sleep a day. To the remonstrances of the doctors he replied that he would rather suffer in body than in mind. Books were supplemented by conversation, the society of ladies, music, theatricals, literary effort of every kind. His Anti-Machiavel, a treatise on the duty of princes, attracted the attention of Europe, and men of liberal mind awaited with impatience the moment at which he would be able to put his virtuous maxims into practice. Meanwhile he revelled in intercourse with philosophers and learned men. Frederick styled his house “the temple of friendship,” and his guests rejoiced to find that the palace of a Crown Prince could be Liberty Hall.
Yet the hand of Frederick William was not entirely invisible. Thrice every Sunday must the master of the house tear himself from philosophy to go to church, and he was also compelled to read the sermons which his father’s favourite chaplains had composed. His own select preacher was Voltaire, with whom and with his intimates he “reasoned high Of providence, fore-knowledge, will and fate, Passion and apathy and glory and shame.” From history he learned much for every department of life; from philosophy chiefly contempt for religion and a deep-rooted fatalism which sustained him at many moments of disaster. He speaks of
“this Necessity, which orders all things, directs our intercourse and determines our fate.” “I know too well that we cannot escape from the inexorable laws of fate ... and that it would be folly to desire to oppose what is Necessity and was so arranged from all eternity. I admit that consolation drawn from the impossibility of avoiding an evil is not very well fitted to make the evil lighter, but still there is something calming in the thought that the bitter which we must taste is not the result of our fault, but pertains to the design and arrangement of Providence.”
In such discussions passed many hours of the halcyon period, 1736–1740. Of perhaps higher value was the insight into the possibilities of human providence which Frederick gained during his visits to Ost-Preussen. There he saw how the hand of his father had turned a wilderness into the most blooming of his provinces, so that a land which the King had found swept bare of men by the plague now contained half a million prosperous inhabitants. When at last (May 31, 1740) he took the place of the father whose last hours his presence had consoled, it was with a conviction that if his foreign policy had been contemptible, he had shown himself heroic at home.
