COFFINS OF FREDERICK THE GREAT (RIGHT) AND FREDERICK WILLIAM I. (LEFT) IN THE GARRISON CHURCH AT POTSDAM.
Berlin, however, rejoiced that Frederick was no more. The cry of the hour was, Back to Frederick William I! Led by a silly King (1786–1797) Prussia plunged into a Teutonic reaction. Good-humour, pomp, aggressive orthodoxy, the use of the German speech, and a grandiose foreign policy marked the royal condemnation of Frederick’s practices. Prussia was tempted by profits in Poland and in Germany to regard the convulsions of France with narrow selfishness. On the field of Jena, twenty years after Frederick’s death, she paid the price of all her errors (1806). Next year her Russian ally agreed with Napoleon that she should lose half her land, forego the right to arm, and submit for the future to be hemmed in by four hostile States.
Prussia was rescued from this plight by forces which found no place in Frederick’s system. Great ministers now gained ascendancy over the King. The nation flung off the fetters of feudalism, all classes joined in the War of Liberation, and the final triumph in 1813–1815 was inspired by the spirit not of autocracy but of German nationality. The memory of Frederick faded into that of a ruler of that old despotic type which the sovereigns, in defiance of the claims of their people, were striving to restore.
It was the spirit of nationality, however, that in the long run revived Frederick’s renown. The German people cried out for an organisation that should be closer and more virile than the federation into which they had been formed after the overthrow of Napoleon. In 1848–49, while Austria was paralysed by revolt, they turned hopefully to Prussia for leadership, but the reigning King refused to accept an Imperial crown at the hands of the mob. From that time onwards, however, the theory gained wide credence that it was the destiny of Prussia to unite and to regenerate Germany.
When in 1866 she worked her will with Austria, and when in 1871 the Imperial crown was handed to her over the body of prostrate France, the Hohenzollern legend grew. Results so glorious, men thought, could have been achieved only because a long series of national heroes had worked towards a common goal. The Hohenzollerns, and Frederick chief among them, were extolled by a thousand pens as the pioneers of a solid and triumphant Germany. A generation which salutes by the title of “Great” the Emperor whom Bismarck was wont to hoodwink and cajole is logically compelled to regard Frederick as superhuman.
The student who reviews the life-work of Frederick without either the sympathy or the bias of German patriotism may return a calmer answer to the question,—Is Frederick rightly termed “The Great”? Having followed the main steps in his long career, we may at its close sift out and set down those qualities and achievements, if such exist, which entitle him not merely to a place among the great, but to a place in that small circle of the world’s heroes whose memory is so illustrious that greatness is always coupled with their names.
As a thinker, Frederick falls very far short of greatness. Though he struggled all his life with the problem of the World and its Maker, he convinced himself only that nature furnished irresistible proof of an intelligent Creator, but that the idea of an act of creation was absurd. In no department of thought was his range of vision long, but he saw with wonderful clearness so far as his sight could penetrate. The very fact that all objects within his ken seemed so distinct prevented him from realising that great forces might lie beyond. Thus the method of progress which he followed was that of devising ingenious improvements in a world that was settled and known. Though he witnessed the American Revolution and died within three years of the great explosion in France, he seems to have had no suspicion that the framework of the world might change.
This lack of sympathy with the deeper currents of human progress reveals itself by many signs in almost all the phases of Frederick’s activity. In the art of war, indeed, he had witnessed too great an advance during his own career not to suppose that further advance was possible. He had himself given the infantry a mobility then unrivalled. He had introduced horse-artillery, and created the finest cavalry in the world. In his old age he turned to account the lessons of wars in both hemispheres, by raising his artillery to the importance of a separate arm and experimenting with the straggling tactics of the Americans.
Literature and learning, however, he regarded with a less open mind. While Voltaire lived, he viewed him as the sole surviving man of letters. He treated the work of young Goethe, his own fervent admirer, with contempt and showed himself no less blind to the latent possibilities of natural science and mathematics. What he saw clearly was that these studies claimed much devotion, but sometimes failed to produce practical results. “Is it not true,” he demanded of d’Alembert, “that electricity and all the miracles that it reveals have only served to excite our curiosity? Is it not true that the forces of attraction and gravitation have only astonished our imagination? Is it not true that all the operations of chemistry are in the same case?” Euler himself had failed to make the fountains at Sans Souci play successfully, and the King jeered at geometricians as the very type of the pig-headed. In the campaign of 1778 an officer who trusted his theodolite in preference to his eye was bidden to go to the devil with his trigonometry.
None of Frederick’s opinions or whims can be termed unimportant, for his power was so unfettered that he could embody any of them in acts of State. The building of the New Palace furnishes a hint of how great might have been the consequences had he given rein to a single enthusiasm in the sphere of art. But with this reservation it is in the domain of statecraft, especially in his system of foreign policy, his economic doctrine, and his theory of the organisation of the State, that we must seek the true measure of his mind.