[1] For a comprehensive understanding of this period see Chart of Civilization in Six Centuries, "Who, When, and What."
For seven hundred years, from the treaty of Verdun (843), to Charles V. (1520), Germany had held the leading position in Europe as the head of the "Holy Roman Empire." The reality had been gradually departing from that alluring title; and now, with the Peace of Westphalia, it was gone.
With a large body of its people accorded full rights, while they were engaged in open war upon the Roman Church, the last link binding Germany to Rome was broken. The Holy Roman Empire was now the German Empire.
And, in very fact, it was no empire at all, but a loose confederacy of miniature kingdoms, administered without any regard to each other, and in great measure independent of Imperial authority.
Great changes had taken place throughout Europe. Louis XIV. was King of France. In England Charles I. had lost his throne and his head, and Cromwell was laying the foundations of a power more enduring than that of Tudor or Stuart. Spain was rapidly declining, and the new Republic of Holland ascending in the scale. Sweden was supreme in the North, and Russia just beginning to be recognized as a power in Europe. Venice and the Italian republics were crumbling to pieces; while across the sea, on the coast of America, a few English, Dutch, and Swedish colonies were struggling into existence.
Richelieu was dead, but the fortunes of France were in the keeping of one quite as ambitious for her as was the Great Minister. There was a new aspirant for headship in Europe. When Ferdinand III. died, Louis XIV. tried hard to be elected his successor. He spent money freely among the Electors, and was only defeated by the sturdy opposition of Brandenburg and Saxony.
Of the people of Germany there is really nothing to tell in the years which followed the Peace of Westphalia. Spiritless and disheartened in their ruined cities, they seemed to have lost all national spirit and even religious enthusiasm. They languidly saw the Catholic Hapsburgs becoming absolute in the land, while the Court at Vienna and the smaller German Courts were absorbed in establishing servile imitations of the Court at Versailles. Churches and schoolhouses were in ruins, but palaces were being built in which the fashions of the French Court were closely imitated, and princes were trying to unlearn their native language and to install that of a cormorant French King, who was planning to devour their demoralized empire!
The one exception among the German rulers of this time was Frederick William of Brandenburg, the "Great Elector." This incorruptible German lost no time in learning French. As soon as peace was declared he set about restoring his wasted territory. He organized a standing army and built a fleet, and he used them, too, to recover Pomerania from Sweden and to circumvent the French King, and so enlarged his boundaries and strengthened his authority that Brandenburg, now next in size to Austria, was treated with the respect of an independent power, and the name of Hohenzollern began to shine bright even beside that of Hapsburg.
From the year 1667 until 1704 Germany was the center of the Grand Monarch's ambitious designs. In 1687, while Prince Eugene was leading a German army against the Turks, and while German princes, excepting the Great Elector, were engaged in copying French fashions, two powerful French armies suddenly appeared upon the Rhine, and the great war which was to involve all Europe had commenced.
It was not love for Germany which brought Holland, England, Spain, and Sweden into this war with France, but fear of the advancing power of a King who aspired to be supreme in Europe.
In the year 1700, an event occurred which intensified the situation. Charles II., the last of the half Castilian and half Hapsburg kings of Spain descended from Charles V., died without children, and that country was looking for the next nearest heir in foreign lands from which to choose a new king. Of the two it found, one was son of the Emperor of Germany and the other grandson of Louis XIV. It was a choice of evils for Europe; as in one case the German Empire with Spain annexed would be a preponderating power, as in the time of Charles V.; and in the other, the grasping Louis would be far on the road to the very end which Europe had combined to defeat!
Inflammable oil, poured on fire, does not make a fiercer blaze than did this question of theSpanish Successionat that time. The embarrassing thing for Louis was that, when he had married the Infanta, he had solemnly renounced the throne of Spain for her heirs! But the Pope, with whom the ultimate decision lay, had more need of the rising house of Bourbon than of the waning Hapsburg, so, after "prayerful deliberation," he concluded that the King might be absolved from that little promise, and that Philip V. was rightful King of Spain.
There was rage in Vienna. The Emperor Leopold I. and his disappointed son the Archduke Karl declared they would wrest the throne from Philip and have vengeance upon Louis, who with swelling pride was declaring that "the Pyrenees had ceased to exist."
When Leopold called upon the German states to arm, the Great Elector of Brandenburg was dead. But his son Frederick took advantage of the opportunity. He would assist the Emperor on one condition, that he be permitted to assume the title of King! An embarrassment arose in the fact that traditional custom permitted only one King among the Electors (King of Bohemia), and therefore the Elector of Brandenburg could not be also King of Brandenburg.
The difficulty was overcome by adopting for the new kingdom the name of his detached duchy of Prussia, that province which had been snatched from Russia by the Teutonic knights long before, and had then been appropriated by that masterful Hohenzollern who was then head of the Order, as his own kingdom. It was this high-handed proceeding which thereafter inseparably linked the name of Hohenzollern with that of Prussia.
So, in 1701, the Elector and his wife traveled in midwinter to Königsberg, almost in the confines of Russia, where he was crowned Frederick I. of Prussia, and then returned to Berlin in Brandenburg, which thereafter remained his capital. And so it was that Prussia—the name of a small Slavonic people on the frontier—became that of the entire kingdom of which Berlin was the capital.
England and Holland were in alliance with Leopold—not for the sake of setting up the Hapsburg, but rather to put down the great Bourbon who began to wear the prestige of invincibility. England entered the alliance languidly at first, but when the French king threw down the glove by recognizing the exiled Stuart (son of James II.) as the heir to her throne, she needed no urging and sent the best of her army into Germany under the command of the man who was going to destroy that prestige of invincibility, and to hold in check the arrogant king.
Marlborough and Prince Eugene formed a combination too strong for Louis. Marlborough's great victory at Blenheim in 1704 virtually decided the contest, although it continued for many years longer. He was created Duke of Marlborough and received the estate of Blenheim as his reward.
But the long war outlived the enthusiasm it had created. England grew tired of fighting for the Hapsburgs; there were court intrigues for Marlborough's downfall, and finally he was recalled, and cast aside like a rusty sword. Louis, too, had grown old and weary, and so in 1713 the Peace of Utrecht terminated the long struggle. Philip V. was left upon the throne of Spain, with the condition that the crowns of Spain and France should never be united.
The disappointed Archduke Karl had now succeeded to the Imperial throne as Karl VI. If the life of a nation be in its people, there was really no Germany at this time. There was nothing but a wearisome succession of wars and diplomatic intrigues, and new divisions and apportionments of territory. Prussia was expanding and Poland declining, while Hungary and Naples, and Milan and Mantua, were fast in the grasp of Austria. Indeed, to tell of the territorial changes occurring at this period is like painting a picture of dissolving elements, which form new combinations even as you look at them.
At the North, too, there were these same changing combinations, where had arisen two new ambitious kings. Charles XII. of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia were at war; and Denmark and Poland were lending a hand to defeat the Swedish King. Peter the Great was extending his Baltic provinces and preparing to build his new capital of St. Petersburg (1709); but Charles XII. was defeated by Prussia and Hanover, in his attempt to make of Sweden one of the great powers of Europe. His death in 1718 ended that dream.
Not since the infamous Irene's deposition at Byzantium had there been a woman on the throne of the Cæsars. When Karl VI. issued the decree called the "Pragmatic Sanction," providing that the crown should descend to female heirs in the absence of male, he forged one of the most important links in the chain of events. This secured the succession to his little daughter Maria Theresa, who was born in 1717. The link had need to be a strong one, for there were to be twenty years of effort to break it. But it held.
At about this same time there was another important link forging in Prussia, where Frederick William I. had succeeded his father Frederick I. as king. By these two events the long spell was to be broken.
Volumes have been written about this fierce, miserly King Frederick William and his coarse brutalities. But his reign was the rough, strong bridge which led to a Frederick the Great, and the reign of the Great Frederick was that other bridge which led to a powerful and dominating kingdom of Prussia,—from which was to spring a new German Empire!
If Frederick William was a tyrant of the most savage sort, on the other hand he organized industry, finance, and an army. If he was a miser in his family, he brought wealth and prosperity to his people. If he beat and cudgeled his own son for playing the flute, he left that son a kingdom and an army which were the foundation of his greatness.
His hatred for all that was French, for art, for the formalities and even the decencies of life, was an enraged protest against the prevailing affectations and artificiality of his time.
We can imagine how the polished and refined Court at Vienna must have regarded this Prussian King. Austria, entirely Catholic, in a state of moral and intellectual decline, sat looking backward and sighing for the return of the spirit of the Middle Ages. Prussia, altogether Protestant, had set her face toward a future which was to be greater than she dreamed.
In 1736 Maria Theresa was married to Francis of Lorraine. In 1740 she succeeded her father Karl VI., on the Imperial throne; and that very same year Frederick William of Prussia died, and was succeeded by his son, who was to be known as Frederick the Great.
Through the barren period succeeding the Thirty Years' War some vital processes were going on; indeed that most vital of all processes, thought, was active. Broken into fragments as by an earthquake, the people had been left without one healing touch from the hands of their infatuated rulers. It was a sorry spectacle to see those German princes gayly arraying themselves in French finery while their country was a ruin. Did they not know that a wound might better not heal at all, than to begin by forming new tissue at the top!
Whatever capacity Germany had for being, was in those neglected fragments. If she ever developed into greatness it must be along the line of their elemental tendencies, and by being German, not French.
So a nation, helpless, broken, disorganized, out of harmony with itself and with others, could not act, but it could think. And in this time of chaos and confusion there commenced mighty stirrings in the thought of Germany. Slumbering in that chaos were the germs of wonderful music and a wondrous literature.
The gloomy and despondent Spinoza had found peace in discovering that the reality of things was not in political overturnings, nor in the disappointing facts and phenomena which we call life, but in theEternal Order, of which we are all a part.
He might have discovered the same sustaining truth in religion; but Spinoza's mind led him to seek it instead in a philosophical system which should harmonize the discordant facts of existence. This was the foundation of German speculative philosophy, which took possession of the German mind and which by progressive steps was to lead to a union with a science,foundedupon the despised facts of life—and finally, whether they wished it or not—a harmonizing of both with RELIGION.
With deeply philosophical mind the great German, Leibniz, was investigating the truths of the natural world; and Handel also belongs to this time of soul-awakening during a period of national neglect and depression, while at this very time there was also borne in a stimulating wave from England, where Newton had revealed the fundamental law and the "ETERNALorder" of thephysicaluniverse.
It would seem like a dim twilight to us if we should go back to it now; but then these new lights were very dazzling, almost blinding people with their splendor.
It was into such a world as this that Frederick the Great was ushered in 1712. Few children, be they princes or peasants, have ever had a more unhappy childhood. If he had not been born to be a King, Frederick's tastes would have led him to be a musician or a poet. A son whose chief pleasures consisted in playing the flute, and reading French books, became an object almost of aversion to the austere Frederick William. In the midst of severities past belief Frederick obtained most of his education in secret, at the hands of Frenchémigrés, who formed his taste after French models, the influence of which could be traced throughout his life. His passion for music was pursued also in the same secret way.
The tyranny and the beatings to which he was subjected became at last so intolerable that, when he was eighteen years old, Frederick determined to run away. His adored sister Wilhelmine was his confidante. His bosom friend, Lieutenant Von Katte, was his accomplice. A letter to Von Katte, written at this time, fell into other hands and was sent to the King.
The barbarities which followed make one think this Hohenzollern should have been in a madhouse instead of on a throne. It was a small matter that he beat his son until his face was covered with blood, for he had done that before; but he sent him as a prisoner of state to Prussia. He then annulled the sentence of imprisonment passed by the court-martial upon Von Katte, and ordered his immediate execution. To inflict more suffering he ordered that the hanging take place before the window of the cell where his son was confined!
When this was carried into effect the young prince fainted, and lay so long insensible that it was thought he was dead.
The King then insisted that he be tried by court-martial; and when the court decided that it had no authority to condemn the Crown Prince, he overruled the decision and ordered his execution.
The horror and indignation caused by this extended as far as Vienna. The Emperor Charles VI. informed the King of Prussia that the Crown Prince could only be condemned capitally at an Imperial Diet. The King answered, "Very well; then, I will hold my own court on him at Königsberg. Prussia is my own and outside the confines of the empire, where I can do as I please."
But the fury of this madman was abating. He did not resent it when a daring attendant reminded him that "God also ruled—even in Prussia." Finally he was satisfied with humiliating his son by making him work for one year in the lowest position in the departments of the government.
At the wedding festivities of his sister Wilhelmine, Frederick secreted himself among the servants in humble attire. He was discovered, and the King, who must have been in a genial mood that night, pulled him forth from his hiding, and leading him to the trembling queen said, "Here, madam, our Fritz is back again!" And the reconciliation made three aching hearts glad.
For the ten succeeding years Frederick was permitted to reside in his own castle near Potsdam, and the relations with his father became kinder and almost cordial. The son in his castle pursued his philosophical studies, corresponded with Voltaire, and played the flute to his heart's content.
But he did other things too, as the future demonstrated. The study of profound subjects, conversation, and intimate friendships with learned men, trained his active mind to wonderful acuteness, and when he applied this to the study of history, when he read of the dignity of kings, and of what stuff greatness was made in the past—he formed his own ideals for the future. When Frederick William died in 1740 he was prepared to take the reins of government with a comprehensiveness of grasp of which his austere father was incapable, and with clearly defined plans to make Prussia great.
Six months later Maria Theresa succeeded to her father's throne. She had no fear of this young flute-playing King of Prussia, and was fully occupied in defending her own Imperial rights, which were assailed by the Elector of Bavaria, who claimed to be Emperor Karl VII., by virtue of a descent superior to hers.
But the war of theAustrian Succession, in which she was soon involved, was quickly overshadowed by a greater conflict, which was immediately commenced by the bold and ambitious young Prussian King.
He claimed, by virtue of some obscure transaction in the past, that Silesia belonged to him. But he gallantly offered, if it was returned to him, to support Maria Theresa's cause in the fight with her kinsman of Bavaria over the succession.
The offer was rejected, and almost before the ink in the correspondence was dry, a Prussian army, with Frederick at its head, was in the heart of the disputed province.
Two characteristics marked Frederick's movements—the perfect secrecy with which they were planned, and the swiftness with which they were carried out. He formed his own plans, and even his Prime Minister did not know of their existence until he was ordered to execute them. The cunning methods then prevailing in Courts, by which foreign ambassadors defeated designs while they were maturing, were powerless against this young King, as none but himself knew what was going to happen. He gave his personal and unremitting care to every detail of government, and astonished his people by the prodigies of labor he performed, and the sacrifices of his time, rest, and comfort.
Of course this ancient wrong done his family in the matter of Silesia was only a pretext. Frederick had made up his mind at Potsdam that Prussia must be solidified by bringing together her detached provinces, and he had long ago drawn a new map in his mind, which should include Silesia.
Nature had endowed him with a bold and aspiring genius. He had a consciousness of strength, combined with a belief that he was a chosen instrument appointed by fate to perform a definite work: the raising of Prussia to the first rank in the German empire.
When we see Frederick's ideal of a despotic personal government, with a divinely appointed ruler leading his country to greatness, independent of ministers and advisers,—it is easy to recognize the model which is being studied by a certain young ruler in Europe to-day!
There was another strong personality on the throne at Vienna. To have her crown threatened by a powerful combination, and at the same time a war of conquest waged against her in her own Austria, was a heavy burden to be borne by a young girl of twenty-four years. But Maria Theresa maintained herself with astonishing bravery and firmness. She listened to the counsels of her ministers, and then decided for herself; even her husband Francis being unable to sway her judgment.
France, Spain, and Saxony sustained the claims of the Bavarian Archduke to her throne; and when a French army was on the Danube and Vienna threatened, she fled to Hungary and made a personal appeal to the Hungarian Diet to stand by her. She promised the restoration of rights for which they had been contending, and by her personal charm and radiance captured the wavering nobles, who placed on her head the crown of St. Stephen. They cheered wildly as she galloped up "the king's hill," and waved her sword toward the four quarters of the earth in true Imperial fashion.
Then she appeared before the Diet in their national costume with her infant son Joseph in her arms, and in an eloquent speech depicted the dangers which beset her, and the enthusiastic nobles drew their sabers, shouting, "We will die for ourKing, Maria Theresa!"
This saved Vienna. The support of Hungary arrested the advance toward the capital, and the invading army moved instead on to Prague, where her rival was crowned King of Bohemia, and later at Frankfort was proclaimed Emperor Karl VII.
While these distracting combinations were engrossing the young sovereign, Frederick had invaded Silesia, and when the second Silesian war ended in 1742, Prussia held that province, and was enriched by 150 large and small cities, and about 5000 villages.
England, Holland, and Hanover now came to the support of Maria Theresa against Karl VII. and his French ally.
The wary Frederick saw that, with such a coalition, Austria's success was certain, and he also saw that, if victorious, her next step would be to try to recover Silesia. So he offered to join France in support of Karl VII., and threw himself into the war of the Austrian succession.
This lasted three years longer and was concluded by the Peace of Dresden (1745), which again confirmed Prussia in the possession of Silesia, left Maria Theresa's husband wearing the disputed Imperial title as Francis I., and to Frederick left the more unique and renowned title of "the Great," which was bestowed by acclamation on his return to Berlin.
Frederick's first care was to heal the wounds inflicted by the two Silesian wars.
It is interesting to speculate upon what this man might have been, had his childhood been spent in an atmosphere of kindness and love, and had his heart and intelligence been symmetrically nurtured and trained.
But he was trained as the tree is trained which is blasted in its youth by lightnings, then twisted and distorted by hands which defeat its natural tendency upward and sunward!
An eager and impressionable boy with warm affections, acute intelligence, and a strong sense of justice had been subjected to inhuman barbarities in his own home. In his heart-hunger he turned to pursuits for which he had a passionate love, and was nourished in secret upon a poisonous diet. A nature which in the fire of his youth had been full of generous enthusiasms was embittered by suffering, and then became cold and cynical under the teachings of Voltaire.
So fascinated had he become with this man that he regarded him as the most exalted of beings, and his friendship a treasure above all others. Faith, hope, love, and filial respect were, through this influence, destroyed in the germ before they had time to unfold; and in the place of everything sacred was a cynical cold-blooded search after what these philosophers of the eighteenth century were pleased to call—truth. And the way to discover this truth was to analyze, dissect, and then to demolish!
So there had been created a strangely composite man, compounded of elements native to himself, to that undeveloped barbarian Frederick William, and to Voltaire! Joined to a strong practical common sense in the management of affairs was a passion for insincere, unsound, and shallow French ideals. And combined with the most despotic and arbitrary of wills, was an inflexible regard for the right of the humblest. While he despised the beliefs of Protestant and Catholic alike, he declared "I mean that every man in my kingdom shall have the right to be saved in his own way." And he secured that right for his people, too!
His rule was a despotism, but it was a despotism of intelligence and justice. He called himself the first official servant of the state, and no clerk in his kingdom gave such faithful service as he. He arose at four o'clock in the morning. He made himself personally acquainted with every village and landed estate in his kingdom, which he treated as if it were a great private enterprise and interest, for which he was responsible.
He was a reformer without heart; a King intent upon the well-being of his people, without tenderness; a leader prepared, if need be, not to lead, but to drag Prussia with a rough hand up the rugged path of virtue and prosperity; and determined to make his nation great, whether it wanted to be or not!
There were many pleasanter companions and gentler fathers in his day. There were sovereigns who did not terrify wrong-doers and children on the street with uplifted canes. But this Frederick, with character scarred and distorted, was the one man in Europe who was converting a kingdom into a POWER, and the one man of his age whom history would call GREAT!
But such a being as this, one who has turned to adamant in heroic mold, cannot sympathetically comprehend the finer currents about him. There was going on, quite unnoticed by King Frederick, an awakening in the German mind, and while he was building a structure of material greatness, there had commenced, unobserved by him, another structure, which was to be the chief glory of Germany.
The passion for speculative thought awakened by Spinoza was stirring the German soul to its depths. Kant had found that Spinoza'sEternal Ordermust be aMoral Order. That the moral instincts which guided mankind, and were the all in all, were the God in us, the in-dwelling of the Divine. Thus was embodied the essence of Christianity in a new and speculative philosophy.
Klopstock and Lessing were creating a national literature, which revealed for the first time the strength, resources, and unsuspected beauty of their own language, and which was for the first time being used to express a genius untouched by foreign influence.
But all unconscious of this new, rushing stream of life, Frederick was entertaining Voltaire, spending his evenings in listening to the latest satirical verses of that vain and gifted Frenchman, and laughing at the latest witty epigram from Paris.
It had been one of Frederick's dreams, in his youth, to have his great friend some day reside in his Court. In 1750 this was realized, and the King and the poet settled down to what was to be an everlasting banquet of sympathetic tastes and opinions, seasoned with mutual admiration and friendship!
Frederick felt that he was something of a poet himself, and that he was only prevented by cares of state from letting the world find it out. The wily Frenchman had been the literary confidant of his royal friend, and many pages of verses had been submitted to him during their long correspondence, and had received flattering commendation from the great critic. So one of the pleasantest features in this closer companionship was expected to be this drop of honeyed praise to sweeten the evening after the day's work was done.
But Frederick's verses bored Voltaire very much, and the royal host began to discover that his great guest was selfish, and cold, and jealous, and even malignant. The nimbus of fascination began to fade. He could be cutting and satirical as well as Voltaire. The great poet was no less hungry for praise than he, and it was an easy matter to yawn and be bored by his verses, too. And so they became gradually estranged, and finally enemies. They parted in anger, and Voltaire returned to France, to write bitter satires about the King, whose character and ideals he had been one of the chief agents in forming.
There was then in Germany a man whose glory was to outshine Voltaire's or that of any contemporary in Europe, even as the sun does the stars. But Frederick's ear could not detect music in his own language, nor was his stunted soul attuned to the native and sublime harmonies of Goethe's genius.
There had been a time when two nations in Europe could fight each other to the death without disturbing their neighbors, but since there had developed in the sixteenth century that larger unity of European states, there was no such isolated security.
So when, in 1755, England and France came into collision over the boundaries of their American colonies, the shock was felt all over Europe. Just as the earthquake which swallowed up Lisbon at that very time had made the shores of Lake Ontario tremble, so the peace of Germany, which had lasted for eleven years, was broken by an event in far-off Canada.
The two contending parties, England and France, began after the fashion of the time to look about for allies. Maria Theresa, who had invitations from both countries to join them, was considering which could best serve her own private interests. England, since 1714, had been ruled by Hanoverian kings, which practically annexed her to Hanover. It was by no means sure that she could get assistance from that nation in recovering Silesia—which was to be the price of her alliance. She decided that her best policy was to secure the aid of Louis XV., who would be glad to help her in her plans against Frederick, in return for the assistance of Austria in this war with England.
As astute and profound as any statesman in Europe, this wonderful Empress adopted means and methods entirely feminine to carry out her immense design.
She knew that Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, was mortally offended with the King of Prussia, on account of some disparaging remarks he had made about her, so she deftly used that to her own advantage. Then—perfectly understanding how to reach the enslaved Louis XV.—she wrote a flattering letter to Mme. de Pompadour, then in the full tide of her ascendency over the king.
With the greatest secrecy these negotiations were carried on, and at last the compact between the three great powers was concluded and everything ready to commence a war upon Prussia in the spring of 1757; even to the agreement as to the way in which they should cut up and divide among themselves the kingdom of Prussia!
Frederick, through secret agents, was perfectly well informed of their plans. He saw that his ruin was determined upon, and could only be prevented by unhesitating courage. He determined to anticipate them. Before the allied armies were ready, he made one of his catlike leaps into the neutral territory of Saxony, and was in Dresden, half way to Prague, with seventy thousand men.
This so disconcerted the plans of the allies that there was a pause, and conferences were held, in which it was concluded to ask Sweden to join the coalition. Finally, that almost forgotten body, the Diet of the German Empire, formally declared war against Prussia, and the Third Silesian War, or the Seven Years' War, had commenced.
As the avowed object of this great combination was not the recovery of Silesia but the dismemberment of the kingdom, to deprive Frederick of his royal title, and to reduce him to a simple Margrave of Brandenburg, it is easy to see the incentive he had to great deeds.
England and a few small German States were his allies; but, as George II. heartily disliked him, he received small assistance from him, and stood practically alone with half of Europe allied against him.
There were great victories and great defeats during the seven years which followed. There were times when the cause of Prussia seemed lost, and other times when that of the Allies appeared hopeless. But the tide of victory more often set toward Frederick's standard than that of his adversaries. He defeated the Austrians at Prague; the Imperial and French army at Rossbach; a Russian army at Zorndorf; and these and a hundred other names stand in the annals of Prussia for monumental courage, daring, and sacrifice.
In the confused narrative of advancing and retreating armies, of battles and of slaughter, but one distinct impression remains. That is amazement—amazement that so many thousands were willing at the bidding of one ambitious man to die, to lay down their bodies in that heap of dead, for Prussia's greatness to rise upon! That not one was ready to reproach him for having brought these calamities upon them for the sake of Silesia; but instead, with twenty thousand still lying unburied upon one field, that they respond with infatuated enthusiasm to his appeal for more!
But Prussia owes her rise to just such infatuation as this.Acquisitionandconquestare written on her foundation stones, the chief of which were laid by her Great Frederick.
It is pleasant to tell of peace once more. The Allies, wearied of the long war, gradually withdrew from Austria. Being unable to carry it on alone, Maria Theresa was compelled to abandon her dream of ruining Frederick. With bitterness of heart and humiliation she consented to give up Silesia forever as the price of a peace she did not desire. In 1763, the articles were signed (the Peace of Hubertsburg) and the Seven Years' War was over.
Frederick was now called "the Great" throughout Europe; and Prussia took her place among the "Five Great Powers."
The next thing to be done was to repair the desolation left by seven years of war. Nearly fifteen thousand houses were in ashes. So many men had been consumed in the army that there were not enough left to till the fields, nor horses to draw the harvest.
The practical King, anticipating this, had been enforcing the cultivation of the much despised potato; and this useful tuber saved Prussia and Silesia from famine, and some of their neighbors as well. For as many as twenty thousand famishing people came from the trampled and burnt corn-fields of Bohemia to feed upon the Prussian potato and live.
Again the people set about the oft-repeated task of repairing the devastation of war. Indeed for 150 years they had always been either enduring the horrors of a great conflict, or healing its wounds and building up the waste places it had made. Can we wonder that they were strong and serious? The weaklings were winnowed out by these great storms, and the chastened souls of those who survived knew little of pleasure. Religion, which had once been their solace and refuge, had lost much of its power on account of the bitterness of sectarian strife.
A few men groping for a solution of the problems of sin and suffering, and for the meaning of this troubled existence, thought they had found it in the new philosophy. France, under the teachings of Voltaire and Rousseau, had cast off the restraints of religious faith without providing any substitute, but Germany, more provident, was building a spacious house for the soul's refuge when the old was demolished; untrammeled freedom of thought was inscribed upon its doors, and PHILOSOPHY was enshrined within!
All this tumultuous inner life was growth: the growth and unfolding of a great and earnest soul; and the awakening of new capacities for being and doing. There was a rapturous surprise in discovering these capacities, and speculative thought and literature became an absorbing passion.
At the close of the Seven Years' War, Maria Theresa had spent the twenty-three years of her reign in a fruitless struggle with Frederick. Instead of dismembering his kingdom and reducing him to a plain Margrave of Brandenburg, she had lost Silesia and was compelled to listen to the praises of her enemy resounding through Europe and to hear him called "the Great."
It was a bitter pill for her nine years later, when she had to confer with the Prussian King as an equal, over the partition of Poland, and to see him further enriched by a goodly slice of that unhappy country.
But before that event, and just two years after the conclusion of the war, Francis I. died (1755). He had worn the title, but she had wielded the power and guided the events ever since that day when, with her infant son in her arms, she had captured the Hungarian Diet at Presburg.
And now that son was Joseph II. But the scepter was still in reality to remain with her while she lived, and in fact her name was to be the last ray of splendor which should illumine the throne of Austria. But these were sunset glories after a long and troubled day, while in Prussia was the brightness of the dawn.
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 FrenchSentimentlalism. The genius of Goethe and Schiller awakened a new spirit in literature, that ofRomanticism, and there commenced that intellectual convulsion known asSturm 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]
Although Frederick's tastes led him so strongly to letters and to music, these two arts had attained this rich development in Germany without any assistance from him. When he died in 1786 the monument he left was a Kingdom of Prussia; equal in rank with any of the Great Powers of Europe, enlarged in territory, rich in population, with a great army and an overflowing treasury.
As Frederick the Great had no son, this splendid inheritance passed to his nephew Frederick William II.
With the new ascendency of Prussia in the German Empire, a process which had long been going on was accelerated. That empire had become a fiction, a form from which the substance had long ago departed; almost its only remaining relic being an Imperial Diet, where thirty solemn old men supposed they were holding the venerated structure together by weaving about it, and repairing, the thin, worn threads of tradition.
The German Empire had in its best time existed by grace of God and force of circumstances, more than by reason of a sound and perfect organism. It always struggled with fatal inherent defects. Its life currents never flowed freely and had been growing more and more sluggish for centuries. And now, they had ceased to flow at all. There was no vital relation whatever between its various parts. Of national feeling there was absolutely none. Lessing, one of the greatest Germans of that time, said, "Of the love of country I have no conception!"
And what was there to inspire patriotism in this great empty shell of despotism! The shattered lifeless old structure was wrong at its very foundation. It was built upon feudal injustice; that injustice which compelled the people to bear the whole burden of taxation, from which it exempted the nobility and the clergy. England had long ago redressed this grievous wrong. France was just preparing to free herself from it by a tremendous convulsion. Germany had been offered emancipation at the hands of her enlightened and gracious Emperor Joseph, but so spiritless and benumbed had she become that she could not understand his message.
He was attempting a vain task in trying to infuse new life into the empire. There were no living channels to convey the current. The only thing to be done with it was to sweep it away—and the man and the time for doing this were close at hand. The surface calm which existed while Leopold II. was repairing the disorder left by his reforming brother Joseph, was the calm which precedes the hurricane.
[1] See Chart of Civilization in Six Centuries, "Who, When, and What."