On the one hand it has broken up the spiritual unity of Medieval Christendom and the political unity of the Holy German Empire into two thousand four hundred petty principalities. It has set up a tribal religion and the pagan idolatry of the State;and, on the other hand, it has broken up the human soul into two water-tight compartments.
Or to express the Lutheran achievement in terms of freedom and despotism, it has, in the first place, killed political liberty by surrendering all ecclesiastical power to the Prince, or to the State incarnated in the Prince. It has brought about the fusion and confusion of spiritual and temporal powers. It has decreed that the religion of the ruler shall determine the religion of the subject.Cujus regio illius religio.From the beginning his own ecclesiastical policy compelled Luther to sanction the bigamy of the Landgrave Philip of Hesse. In the most violent of his tracts he denounced a miserable German peasantry, and he called upon the nobility to massacre those peasants who had only too faithfully obeyed the provocations of the reformer.
And, in the second place, Lutheranism has killed spiritual liberty by creating an inner world of emotions and of dreams and an outer world of social and political activities without any relation to the inner world. It has divorced speculation and action, theory and practice. The German is like the symbolical eagle of the Habsburg. He has two heads, and both look in an opposite direction.
I would say that the poison of Lutheranism has been acting like that mysterious Indian poison called “curare,” which I used to inject in my distant student days when I had to dissect frogs in the Zoological Laboratory at Liége. The “curare” does not kill the nerves, for the frog still suffers under the dissecting knife. Nor does it kill the muscles, for the muscles still react if you stimulate them. Butthe poison cuts the connection between the nerves and the muscles. The nerves can no more transmit their orders to the muscles. Even so Lutheranism has not killed the thinking power of the German people. On the contrary, it has given it a morbid stimulus, as speculation is no more hampered by reality. Nor has it paralyzed their external activities, but it has prevented any connection between the two. It has prevented the thinking from influencing the acting. It justifies the recent damning statement of Prince von Bülow, who ought to be a competent judge, that the Germans have remained an essentially unpolitical people.
At the outbreak of the Reformation there took place in Wittenberg, the Mecca of Lutheranism, a memorable and ominous meeting to which few textbooks take the trouble to allude, and which has had more far-reaching consequences than any meeting known to history. It was the meeting between Dr. Martinus Luther and the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Albrecht of Hohenzollern. Luther advised the Grand Master to secularize his Order, to confiscate its immense territories, and to proclaim himself Duke of Prussia. Under such auspices arose the Prussian State. Under such auspices, at the instigation of the “Champion of Liberty,” was established the most tyrannical despotism of modern times. Under such auspices was consummated the unholy alliance between a “reformed” Germany and a twice “reformed” Hohenzollern Monarchy.
This unholy alliance has been shattered by the war. And with the alliance will vanish the Lutheran creed, with all the evil works that proceeded therefrom.
For four hundred years the German people have followed their preachers, and have been led by them to the abyss, even as in the famous ballad of Burger the German maiden Lenore has fallen under the spell of a corpse and has been driven to the gates of hell.
For four hundred years the German people have been in the grip of their despots. They will be under the spell no more.
For four hundred years the German masses have practised the three theological virtues of Faith, Patience, and Obedience. The long-suffering, docile, and servile Teutons are now ready to surrender to the original sin of rebellion. They are now ready to revert to the methods followed by the peasants massacred by the orders of Luther.
For four hundred years their temporal and spiritual rulers have manufactured a nation of slaves. The war has manufactured a nation of revolutionists. What seemed an inexhaustible inheritance of loyalty and devotion has been wantonly squandered. The Hohenzollern Monarchy has been born in spoliation, baptized in blood, and welded together by iron. Blood and iron are now destroying it. The German armies have been the terror of the world. The day is drawing near when those same German armies will become a terror to their tyrants, and will call them to account for the slaughter of twenty nations.
Whateverexcellent reasons we may have for doubting the sincerity of the German peace overtures, and whatever grounds we may have for criticizing the unfortunate wording of the American Notes, it must be conceded that President Wilson has rendered a conspicuous service to the Allies by compelling them to face the formidable difficulties of the problem of peace. Henceforth it will be impossible for our rulers to shirk those difficulties. They will have to give us something more tangible than mere vague and solemn abstractions, than mere rhetorical phrases and catchwords: they will have to depend on the support of public opinion. The peace settlement will have to be made by the nations themselves, and not by a few diplomats. It will have to be made in the full light of day and not in the secret and murky and musty atmosphere of chancellories.
As a basis for any discussion on the peace settlement we would lay down the following propositions:
1. We must take good care to retain a firm hold of fundamental principles, and we must remain loyal to the conditions which have been proclaimed from the beginning by the statesmen of the Allies, and which are summed up in the primary aims, the“crushing of Prussian militarism and the liberation of small nationalities.”
2. We must see to it that none of the secret agreements which may have been entered into by the diplomats of the Allies shall be allowed to conflict with those fundamental principles.
3. We must realize that those principles are not particular principles applicable only to Germany and Austria. They are universal principles, applicable to all the Powers. “Prussian militarism” must be crushed everywhere, in Great Britain as well as in Germany, in Finland as well as in Alsace-Lorraine, in Italy as well as in Austria. Nationalities must be liberated everywhere, the Ruthenians as well as the Poles, the Jews as well as the Croatians.
4. We must realize the concrete and deeper meaning of the vague and somewhat confusing phraseology contained in the words “to crush Prussian militarism.” To “crush Prussian militarism” does not mean only to crush the German armies. It cannot mean to crush 100,000,000 German and Austrian people. It does not mean the repression of the legitimate expansion of the Teutonic nations. To “crush Prussian militarism” means to do away with a sinister political system. It means exorcising an evil spirit. And we must clearly understand that, in order to exorcise that evil spirit, we must have the co-operation of the German people themselves. We must help them to achieve their own salvation. We must take in the paradoxical and tragic fact that the awful sacrifice of twenty nations has been mainly a vicarious sacrifice, and that millions of our soldiers have died for the good of the enemy as well as for the good ofEurope—that they have died to make Germany and Austria free.
5. We must realize that this war is a holy war and not a punitive expedition, much less a predatory war. Vengeance must be left to Almighty God. The punishment of the criminals must be left to the people themselves.
6. Peace, if it is to be real, and if it is to be permanent, cannot be achieved by any vindictive policy. From the moment they enter the peace congress the belligerents cease to be belligerents, and become allies in a sacred cause—the reconstruction of the world. From the moment the Central Powers are admitted to cross the threshold of the Temple of Peace they are readmitted to the community of nations, and they are admitted on equal terms.
7. A permanent peace excludes the very idea of any future economic war. We must prevent the Central Powers from entering into any offensive or defensive economic alliance. We must repudiate the sinister delusion of a “Mittel Europa” which is haunting the diseased brains of the Pan-Germanists. On the other hand, we must repudiate any offensive or defensive economic alliance between the Allied Powers. The terms of peace must be engraved on clean white marble.
8. If a permanent peace is to be attained we must remove the deeper causes which brought about the catastrophe. The Central Powers are immediately and directly responsible for the greatest crime of history, and they will bear the penalty for generations to come. They planned the war and forced it on Europe. But the megalomania of the Teutonshas only been one of the contributory causes. The war could never have taken place but for the universally prevailing and universally accepted immorality of European foreign policy, which is writ large in Morocco and Persia, in China and Asia Minor.
9. The principle of nationality, however legitimate in the case of oppressed nationalities, is not a sufficient foundation for the new European order. The principle of nationality, which in the case of small nations leads to the vindication of freedom, on the contrary, in the case of great Powers, leads to an aggressive imperialism. The international principle must therefore take the place of the national principle. Federalism and solidarity must take the place of tribal rivalry and national isolation.
10. Any permanent peace settlement must involve the unreserved acceptance of a new political philosophy and the practice of a new political system. No peace is possible through the old methods of a balance of power, of alliances and counter-alliances, of assurance and reassurance treaties. Any balance of power is unstable and precarious and can only be maintained by a competition of armaments. The distinction between offensive and defensive alliances is essentially unreal. Under the old dispensation a defensive alliance became offensive as soon as it felt strong enough to assume the offensive. It is the system of alliances which led to armaments, and not the armaments which were responsible for the alliances. It is therefore futile to speak of disarmament as long as we do not repudiate the traditional European principle of the “balance of power.”
11. It also follows as a corollary that no peace is possible merely through a readjustment of boundaries, through compensations and annexations of territories. We might recast the whole map of Europe, we might dismember the German Empire, we might dismember the Austrian Empire, we might dismember the Turkish Empire, and yet entirely fail to achieve the objects for which we entered the war. On the other hand, we might achieve those objects without shifting one single milestone of the political boundaries of Europe.
12. We must clearly realize that the issue of peace and war is not a military issue, but a political issue, and that the political issue itself is a moral issue. It is not aMachtfrage, but aRechtfrage. It is not a question to be settled by diplomats of the old school; it can only be solved by constructive and democratic statesmanship.
13. To say that “we must crush Prussian militarism” is only a vague and unsatisfactory way of stating that we must establish democratic government. Militarism is not a matter of foreign policy, but of domestic policy. Militarism is but theultima ratioof reaction, and all nations are allies against the one common enemy, reactionary government.
14. It is therefore futile to say that the future congress must not interfere in the internal government of any belligerent Power. If any European Power after this war were still to be ruled by a reactionary government based on brute force and oppression, that government would still have to maintain a large army in order to keep down the liberties of its people, and such an army wouldsooner or later be used against the foreign enemy in the name of imperial national aspirations, in the name of a higher civilizing mission.
15. Therefore, the one problem before the European Congress is to establish government in Europe on a constitutional and democratic basis, and to grant aMagna Cartato all nations, great and small. The establishment of such a government, and not any annexations or compensations, would alone guarantee a permanent peace.
16. All civilized nations must be equally interested in the maintenance of peace and in the establishment of the new international order. Therefore, all neutral nations, including the United States of America, must join the congress as signatories and guarantors of the peace settlement.
17. The new democratic charter shall be placed under the guardianship of a Supreme Constitutional Court. Such a Court would not be a secret diplomatic Sanhedrin, but a democratic Tribunal. Such a Court would be essentially different from the Hague Tribunals of the past, and the democracies of the world would be directly interested in enforcing its decrees.
18. There is one immediate sanction to the constitutional settlement just outlined—namely, the Sovereign Will of the people of Europe. Revolution is knocking at the door. Unless a constitutional charter be granted, unless democratic government be firmly established in Europe, it will be wrested from their rulers by the nations themselves. All the signs of the times confirm us in the conviction that the only alternative to the establishment of democraticgovernment for all the nations participating in the congress is universal civil war. The peacemakers of to-morrow have it in their power not only to crush “Prussian militarism,” but to prevent an appalling upheaval which would shake human society to its foundations.
Itis generally assumed, even by those writers who are most strongly opposed to the sinister policy of the Hohenzollerns, that at least their domestic relations present an edifying contrast with the private immorality of the other Royal Houses of Europe. The world has been made familiar with the Court scandals of the Habsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Georges, and has heard little of the Hohenzollern Dynasty. But that is merely because the “amours” and the family squabbles of the Hohenzollerns are so much less picturesque and so much less interesting than those of a Henry IV. or of a Louis XIV., and because they have been hidden under a thick cloud of hypocrisy. The most brilliant of French historians, Monsieur Albert Sorel, has torn the veil from this hypocrisy and has laid bare the sordid story of Frederick William II.
As an illustration of the manner in which the official historians of Prussia have narrated thehistory of the dynasty, it is instructive to compare the following character-sketch of the successor of Frederick the Great with the idealist portrait of Treitschke (“Germany History,” vol. i.), who would make us believe that Frederick William II. was a paragon of all the private virtues.
Frederick the Great’s base tolerance produced dissolvent effects. Not proceeding from respect of religious beliefs, it engendered contempt for them. As, apart from the curb of religion, the new society of Prussia had no tradition of social morals to rely upon, corruption entered in and consumed it. The King’s scepticism took possession of his subjects, who translated it into deeds. It was good “form”; everyone in Berlin took it up and conducted himself accordingly. The leaven of licence and sensuality which mars all the literature of the century fermented without let or hindrance in those coarse souls. An immature civilization had overstimulated imaginations and senses without abating the brutality of the primitive passions. In Prussia people lacked the delicate taste, the genteel habits, the light wit, which in France qualified the depravity of the age. A heavy dissoluteness was paraded in Prussia. Officials, the gentry, women, all fed their minds on d’Holbach and La Mettrie, taking their doctrines seriously and applying them to the very letter.
Add to this that in the newly built Prussian capital society, utterly artificial as it was, an improvised amalgam of incongruous elements, was predisposed,so to speak, to dissoluteness. Berlin swarmed with army men who had no family life and whose whole day was not occupied with military duties. Men of letters, adventurers of the pen and of the sword, attracted by Frederick’s reputation and reduced to intrigue and all sorts of expedients for a living; a nobility, very poor, very proud, very exclusive, weighed down by royal discipline and thoroughly bored; a bourgeoisie enlightened, enriched, but relegated to a place of its own; between these groups, separated one from the other by etiquette or prejudice, a sort of demi-monde where they met, chatted and enjoyed themselves at their ease, the foyer of “French ideas,” the hub of affairs and intrigues—Jewish society, the richest and most elegant in Berlin. With the marvellous pliancy of their race the Jews had assimilated the new civilization and took their revenge from the political exclusion of which they were the victims by bringing together in their salons all the intellectual men in Berlin, all the attractive women, all desirous of liberty and freed from prejudice. Such was Berlin in the days of Frederick.
One of the finest cities in Europe, wrote Forster in 1779; but the Berliners! Sociability and refined taste, he found, degenerated in them into sensuality, into libertinage (he might almost say voracity), freedom of wit and love of shining in shameless licence and unrestrained debauch of thought. The women in general were abandoned. An English diplomat, Sir John Harris, afterwards Lord Malmesbury, hadthe same impression: Berlin was a town where, iffortismight be translated by “honourable,” you could say that there was not avir fortis nec femina casta.
If you consider that outside Jewish homes money was scarce, and that temptations are all the stronger the less means you have of satisfying them, you can see why in many minds disorder of ideas and corruption of morals opened a new wound, the most dangerous, in sooth, and the most repugnant in nations—venality. Mirabeau, in his “Secret History,” indelibly recorded all the vices ofce noble tripot, Berlin. On this head his famous pamphlet is a picture in violent colours, but true nevertheless. Cynicism there seems merely local colour. “‘Rottenness before Ripeness’—I am very much afraid that must be the motto of Prussian power.... What cannot money do in a house so poor?”
It required Frederick’s hand of iron to set in motion these complicated springs, to regulate the unwieldy machine, keep together these elements collected with no little ingenuity and ready to go to pieces. But that hand was weighty and hard. There were signs, in the upper classes at all events—the only classes then taken into account—of a sort of muffled revolt against this implacable disciple. Besides, the Prussians entertained queer illusions as to the future. Frederick had deceived his subjects just as he had deceived himself regarding the durability of his work. They did not understand to what an extent theirpower was the personal power of their King. Proud to the point of infatuation of the rôle he had made them play, they imagined it was their own doing, and that Frederick’s soul would survive in them. They expected from a new reign the same glory abroad, the same security at home, the same relative prosperity, with a yoke less rough and a discipline less severe, not understanding that the very roughness of the yoke and the severity of the discipline were conditions necessary to the duration of the work. The mercantile protective system, which had built up industry; the administration of taxes, which poured money into the State coffers; the economy, which immobilized this money in the treasury, hampered and irritated all who wished to work and trade, all who reflected on the natural conditions of commerce and industry; but it was these things alone that enabled the poorest Government in Europe to be better armed than the richest, and to keep in the van. In a word, people wanted the spring to relax, and failed to see that to slacken the spring meant annihilating the State.
To reform Frederick’s monarchy would have required no less genius than it took to create it. Reform, however, was indispensable, since Frederick alone was capable of holding up the composite edifice he had built. Hence a threatening and wellnigh inevitable catastrophe. “All will go on almost of its own accord, so long as foreign affairs are quiet and unbroken,” wrote Mirabeau after Frederick’s death.“But at the first gunshot or at the first stormy situation the whole of this little scaffolding of mediocrity will topple to the ground. How all these underling Ministers would crumple up! How everyone, from the distracted chief to the convict-gang, would shout for a pilot! Who would that pilot be?”
Frederick’s nephew, who was called upon to succeed him, was not made for so great a rôle. In every respect he offered a complete contrast to the Prince whose weighty heritage he took up. Frederick in person was infirm and sober; all his prestige lay in the gaze of his great eyes, which, as Mirabeau put it, “at the will of his heroic soul, carried fascination or terror.” Frederick William II. was abel homme, highly sanguine, very robust, fond of violent exercise and coarse pleasures. “The build and strength of a Royal Guardsman,” wrote the French Minister d’Esterno, who had no liking for him. “An enormous machine of flesh,” said an Austrian diplomat who saw him at Pillnitz in 1791. “The true type of a King,” according to Metternich, who was presented to him in 1792 at Coblenz, at the time of the German crusade against France and the Revolution. “His stature,” he added, “was gigantic, and his corpulence in keeping. In every company he stood a head higher than the surrounding crowd. His manners were noble and engaging.” He expressed himself with a certain effort, in little abrupt phrases. There was nothing in him to recall the implacable and sovereign irony of Frederick.
“His look,” said one apologist, “does not betoken a man of genius, but German candour shines on his brow.” Strange candour, scarcely recognizable if you take the word in its common and proper sense. It must be taken, as was then the practice in Germany, through translations of Rousseau, in the equivocal and refined acceptation which reconciled innocence with indecency, virtue with every disorder of the imagination and the heart. Ecstatic and sensual, devout and licentious, a prey to violent appetites, tormented by scruples, superstitious and debauched, believing in ghosts, with a tendency towards cabal, Frederick William had a taste for ethics and a feeling for religion. He spoke of them with respect, with awe, with emotion. In his case it was a natural penchant and at the same time a pose, the attitude of every heir-presumptive towards the crowned head, a way of winning admiration and captivating by force of contrast.
He and those around him might be gulled by this “German candour.” Not so Frederick. In his Memoirs he draws his nephew as he was in 1765, at the age of twenty-one, at the time of his first marriage with Elizabeth of Brunswick: “The young husband, without any morals, given over to a life of debauchery, was daily guilty of infidelity to his wife. The Princess, who was in the flower of her beauty, was shocked at the slight regard shown for her charms. Soon she plunged into excesses almost as bad as her husband’s.” In 1769 they were divorced. Frederick Williammarried a Princess of Darmstadt. The second marriage was no happier than the first. The Princess did not retaliate, though she did not lack incentives to do so. The Prince lapsed back into his dissolute habits. Apart from many passing fancies, he had a recognized mistress-in-chief. This person, who managed always to retain the favour, if not the love, of Frederick William, was the daughter of a humble musician. She married the Prince’svalet de chambre, became Madame Rietz, and was afterwards made Countess of Lichtenau. Frederick William by the first marriage had had a daughter, Princess Frederica, who was brought up by the Queen, the discarded, not to say repudiated, wife of Frederick the Great. The father, when visiting the girl, fell in love with one of her maids-of-honour. Her name was Mademoiselle de Voss, and she came of a good house, being cousin to one of the King’s Ministers, M. de Finckenstein, and sister of a President of the Chamber. “This beauty, who to my mind is very ugly,” wrote Mirabeau, “is a mixture of prudery and cynicism, of affectation and ingenuousness; she has a natural wit of a kind, some schooling, manias rather than desires, a gaucherie which she strives to cover by an appearance ofnaïveté.... All her charm lies in her complexion, and even that I find wan rather than white; a very beautiful neck. It was this mixture of unique licence, they say, which she combined with the airs of innocent ignorance and vestal severity, that captivated the Prince.”
Frederick William was one of those complex libertines who find in clever resistance a whet to their passion and a solace to their scruples. The siege of Mademoiselle de Voss lasted nearly two years. The outs and ins of this strange romance were the common talk of the Court. It had not yet reached its dénouement when Frederick the Great’s death stopped its course for several weeks. King from August 17, 1786, onwards, Frederick William seemed to forget everything but affairs of State. But Mirabeau affirms, after September 8, “the fervour of the novice began to abate.” Mademoiselle de Voss, he added, was on the point of yielding. The King, to make her comfortable, had set up an establishment for his daughter Frederica; Mademoiselle de Voss did the honours. The year passed, however, without the vestal’s surrendering. She loved the King, but the honour of the family still weighed more with her than love. She set rigorous conditions to her capitulation: a left-handed marriage, the written consent of the Queen, and the removal of the titular mistress, Madame Rietz. On this last point the King was inflexible; he gave in on the other two. The Queen gave her consent, with the stipulation that there should be no real divorce or public separation; she kept her title of Queen and her position as lawful wife. The rest, it appears, was of no great interest to her. It only remained to conclude the marriage, but, under the circumstances, that was a delicate and ticklish business.
By hook or by crook a precedent had to be found: the Prussian Consistory proved amenable, and authorized the marriage. The marriage was celebrated in July, 1787, in the Chapel Royal of Charlottenburg. Mademoiselle de Voss took the title of Countess of Ingenheim. Her happiness was short-lived. She died in the month of March, 1789. “All Berlin is in mourning,” wrote M. d’Esterno. “The Countess of Ingenheim is cruelly regretted by the people, the royal family, and even the Queen, much less for the person of the said Countess as because of the increase of credit which her death will bring to Dame Rietz, the old habitual mistress, who is said to be very avaricious and a great intriguer.”
The literature of the day shed tears over the royal bereavement, celebrated the “virtues” of this susceptible monarch, and contrasted with the withering scepticism of Voltaire and the criminal frivolity of the French the tender abandon with which Frederick William gave himself up to “nature’s sweetest inclination.” “Women-haters,” wrote Baron de Trenck, “have been the scourges of humanity. The King of Prussia has a great soul, full of sensibility; in love he is capable of a tender attachment: he knows the value of his mistress. Supposing he gives her a million, the money is divided among the members of the household who are citizens. He will not rob an honest man of the spouse who constitutes his happiness, he will not sacrifice Rome for Cleopatra. He wants to pleaseall by himself. For twenty months he courted Mademoiselle de Voss, he married her, he was faithful to her, he wept over her ashes. Every citizen wise enough to know human weaknesses must wish that if he made a fresh choice it would fall on an object as worthy of his heart. So let him enjoy a happiness which belongs to the simple peasant as it does to kings.” This hypocritical twaddle, this licentious casuistry, was “very good style” in Germany then, and was highly appreciated.
The distraction which Trenck desired for the afflicted soul of the King was not long in presenting itself. In 1790, on the anniversary of the Countess of Ingenheim’s death, Mademoiselle Dœnhof was presented at Court. Everyone there was busy consoling Frederick William. A claimant had even been put forward in the person of a young lady called Viereck, a friend of Mademoiselle de Voss, who had taken the latter’s place with Princess Frederica. Unhappily for Mademoiselle Viereck’s friends, she was dark and in no way recalled the dear departed. Mademoiselle Dœnhof, on the other hand, was, according to the French Minister, “so perfectly fair that, while pretty in artificial light, in daylight she was as yellow as a lemon.” With the same charms as Mademoiselle de Voss, she had the same jumble of pietism and virtue. It was once more a case of marrying. The King saw no difficulty in the way. “I am separated from the Queen,” he wrote to Mademoiselle Dœnhof; “Madame d’Ingenheimhas left me a widower; I offer you my heart and hand.” He made no concealment of it, openly declaring that he had grounds for repudiating the Queen, but he refrained from taking action upon them in order to maintain the dignity of the throne.
The Consistory did not require to deliberate a second time; precedents had been established, and they were followed. The marriage took place on April 10, 1790, and it was the Court preacher, Zœllner, who consecrated it, as he had consecrated that with Mademoiselle de Voss. The Queen gave the bride girandoles of diamonds. The Queen-Dowager received her, and everyone at Court made a fuss of her. All the same, she was no more successful than Mademoiselle de Voss in getting rid of Madame Rietz. This favourite, who had been given 70,000 crowns to take her departure, remained, took an officer as her lover, and even got the King to promote him.
And so, in 1790, the King of Prussia, Mademoiselle de Voss’s widower, had three wives living: the Princess of Brunswick, who was repudiated; the Princess of Darmstadt, who, although divorced, still kept the rank of Queen; and Mademoiselle Dœnhof, morganatic wife. This third wife, wrote one diplomat, will not be the last, for “those the King longs for will also want to be married.” The Prince in any case was always ready. Polygamy, in his eyes, was a prerogative of royalty. As the result of a Court intrigue in 1792 he had himself separated from MademoiselleDœnhof, crowning by this divorce the strange series of his conjugal evolutions. Then he offered his heart and hand to a lady called Bethmann, a banker’s daughter whom he had known at Frankfurt, and found very much to his liking. This young person, in the words of Lord Malmesbury, was “all sentiment and all fire”; but she had principles and discretion. She had misgivings about the character of the marriage and the constancy of the bridegroom. She refused, thus sparing the Berlin casuists the trouble of a deliberation still more ticklish than before. I know not whether these accommodating theologians, reared in the school of Voltaire and Frederick, took these simultaneous marriages very seriously or not; abroad they afforded subject for ridicule, and Catherine the Great, who herself did not feel bound to observe so many formalities, was highly amused at them; “that big lout of a Gu”—such was her name for Frederick William in her letters to Grimm—“that big lout has just married a third wife; the libertine never has enough legitimate wives; for a conscientious libertine, commend me to him.”
Frederick William loved women. Women, however, did not govern him. But if he escaped the influence of mistresses, he fell under the influence of favourites, and the people were none the better off. Badly brought up, kept apart from State affairs by his uncle, distrusting others because he was very distrustful of himself, he knew nothing of the art of government, and dallied with vaguereform projects. The Ministers whom Frederick left behind, although very second-rate, made him ill at ease. He was afraid of being considered under their thumb; besides, these Ministers represented ideas and a system which he affected to condemn. “The King will be led just because he is afraid of being so,” wrote Mirabeau. The fear of being governed by his Ministers delivered him into the hands of underlings, who promptly gained a mastery over him by humbling themselves before him, reassuring his suspicious pride, flattering his passions—above all, exploiting the shortcomings of his mind. Frederick William desired the good of the State; he had a hazy but quite keen idea of the necessity of counteracting the excesses of Frederick’s Government; but his intentions rambled, and his reform fancies, more mystical then political, proceeded not so much from the idea of the interests of the State as from the influence of a secret doctrine with which he was imbued. The statesman in him was but an adept in magic; for Ministers he took mere charlatans. Skilled conjurers replaced at Potsdam Frederick’s “judicious Ministers.”
Of all these mystical adventurers, the one whose influence was perhaps the most baneful for the Prussian State was Wœllner, a pure intriguer. Son of a country pastor, he worked his way into the household of General d’Itzenplitz; after wheedling the mother, he ended by marrying the daughter. Frederick, who was anything but indulgent to mis-alliances,had him clapped into prison in Berlin. The hatred of Wœllner for the Philosopher-King dated from that day. At that time he was a rationalist and a disciple of Wolf; he became a Freemason. But already in high society in Germany the wind no longer set in the direction of pure Deism. Wœllner, always a perfect sceptic, changed his convictions. Considering himself as fitted as any other for the apparition business and the mystery industry, he decided to turn “honest broker” between the powers of this world and those of the next, basing his credit with the former on that which he claimed with the latter. He joined the Rosicrucians, and soon became one of the leading lights of the Order.
Thus he knew the man who was to counterbalance his favour at the Court of Berlin and one day share with him Frederick’s Government, the Saxon Bischoffswerder. The son of a small noble, an officer of fortune, come like so many others to seek service in Prussia, he had wormed his way into the favour of the Prince-Royal, and had quickly taken him in.
Mistresses and favourites, Rosicrucians and valets, theosophists andfemmes galantes, on the whole got on very well together and agreed surprisingly. It was but a step from the laboratory of the Rosicrucians to the boudoir of Madame Rietz, and these mystic personages cleared it without a scrap of shame. They formed a close alliance with thevalet de chambreand his wife, themaîtresse d’habitude, who throughout all the matrimonial pranks of the Kingmanaged to preserve her credit by artifices analogous to those which at Versailles had so long maintained that of Madame de Pompadour.
Around them swarmed a crowd of subordinate intriguers, the “clique,” as they were called in Berlin, ready for all sorts of jobs behind the scenes at Court, in the Army, in politics, in diplomacy—above all, in finance. Needy and greedy, they had a firmly established reputation in Europe for venality. “I maintain,” declared Mirabeau, “that with a thousand louis you could, if need be, know perfectly all the secrets of the Berlin Cabinet.... So the Emperor has a faithful record of every step of the King, day by day, and could know everything he planned, if he planned anything.” These were the methods, as Custine affirmed in 1792, that every diplomatist in the world employed; all the Ministers who resided in Berlin used them with more success and more generally than elsewhere.
Such was the strange band of adventurers who pounced on the monarchy and the treasury of Frederick the Great. Their course of action, very complex and very powerful, was well designed to captivate a fantastic and voluptuous bigot. However, they would never have gained more than an antechamber or alcove influence, they would never have risen to political influence, had they not known how to pervert the noblest inclinations of the King, whilst flattering the lowest. Mediocre and secondary as was his place in the line of the Hohenzollerns,Frederick William was not devoid of all royal qualities. He was brave, he was kind-hearted, or rather he was a man of “sensibility”; he desired the public weal; he had suffered, like the nation, from the pitiless régime of Frederick; like the whole nation, he wanted to reform the State by lightening the yoke. He believed himself inspired from on high, “illumined,” and called by Providence to restore the morals and faith of a country which, he was told, and he himself believed, was perishing through the scepticism of men’s minds and the looseness of men’s morals.
How could he combine such tendencies with such tastes, such aspirations with such passions, such beliefs with such debauchery? It was just therein that he showed himself a weak character and a mystic; that was why he joined theurgic sects instead of submitting to the Church; why he believed in visions more than in the Gospel, listened to a ventriloquist mimicking the voice of Frederick instead of listening to the voices of the Ministers, the great King’s disciples; that is why he distrusted wise, thoughtful, experienced people and surrendered himself to charlatans and favourites.
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND
BY THE SAME AUTHORH. IBSENLA LIBERTÉ ET LE DÉTERMINISMEESSAIS DE PHILOSOPHIE ET DE LITTÉRATURE (2 VOLS.)THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (1905)THE BALKAN QUESTIONCARDINAL NEWMAN AND HIS INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS THOUGHTVICTOR HUGOLIFE OF TOLSTOYTHE ANGLO-GERMAN PROBLEMHOW BELGIUM SAVED EUROPEEUROPE’S DEBT TO RUSSIATHE FRENCH RENASCENCE
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