Poor oppressed spirit of the German people, how long it had been since the men betwixt the Rhine and the Oder had felt the pleasure of being esteemed above others among the nations of the earth! Now everything was transformed by the magic of the character of one man. The countryman, as if awaking from a fearful dream, looked out upon the world and into his own heart. Long had they lived lethargically without a past in which they could rejoice, or a noble future on which to place their hopes. Now they found at once that they had a portion in the honours and greatness of the world; that a King and his people, all of their blood, had given an aureola of glory to the German nation—a new purport to the history of civilised man. Now they had all experienced how a great man could struggle, venture, dare, and conquer. Now labour in your study, peaceful thinker, imaginative dreamer; you have learnt during the night to look abroad with smiles, and to hope great things from your own endowments. Try now what will gush from your heart.
Whilst the youthful strength of the people fluttered its wings with enthusiastic warmth, what, meanwhile, were the feelings of the great Prince, who was incessantly contending with enemies? The enthusiastic acclamations of the nation bore only feeble tones to his ear; the King received it almost with indifference. In him everything was calm and cold; though, undoubtedly, he had hours of passionate sorrow and heart-rending care. But he concealed them from his army; the calm countenance became harder, the furrows deeper, the expression more rigid. There were but few to whom he occasionally opened his heart; then, for some moments, the sorrows of the man, which had reached the limits of human endurance, broke forth.
Ten days after the battle of Collin, his mother died; a few weeks later, in anger, he drove his brother August Wilhelm away from the army, because he had not carried on the war with sufficient vigour. This Prince died in that same year, of grief, as the King was informed by the officer who reported it. Shortly afterwards he received the account of the death of his sister of Baireuth. One after another his Generals fell by his side, or lost the King's confidence; because they were not able to come up to the superhuman requirements of this war. His old soldiers, his pride, the iron warriors who had gone through the test of three severe wars—they who, dying, still stretched out their hands to him and called upon his name—were expiring in heaps around him; and those who filled up the wide gaps which death incessantly made in his army were young recruits, some of good material, but many bad ones. The King used them, as he had done the others, with strictness and severity; but even in the worst subjects his look and word inspired both bravery and devotion. But he knew that all this would not avail; short and cutting was his censure, and sparing was his praise. Thus he continued to live; five summers and winters came and went; the labour was gigantic; he was unwearied in planning and combining; his eagle eye scrutinisingly scanned what was most distant and most trivial, and yet there was no change and no hope. The King read and wrote in his hours of rest, just as before; he made his verses and kept up a correspondence with Voltaire and Algarotti; but he was resolved all this must soon come to an end, a short and quick one. He carried with him, day and night, what would free him from Daun and Laudon. The whole affair of life sometimes appeared to him contemptible.
The disposition of the man, from whom the intellectual life of Germany dates its new era, deserves well to be regarded with reverence by Germans. It is only possible to give some idea of it by the way in which it breaks out in Frederic's letters to the Marquis d'Argens and Frau von Camas. Thus does the great King speak of his life:—
"1757,June.—The only remedy for my sorrow lies in the daily work I am obliged to do, and in the continual distractions which the number of my enemies occasion me. If I had died at Collin, I should now be in a haven where I should fear no more storms. Now I must navigate on a stormy sea till I have discovered in some small corner of earth, that good which I have never yet found in this world. For two years I have been standing like a wall in which misfortune has made its breaches. But do not think that I am becoming weak; one must protect oneself in these unfortunate times by bowels of iron and a heart of bronze, in order to lose all feeling. The next month will decide the fate of my poor country. My calculation is, that I shall save or fall with it. You can have no idea of the dangers in which we are, nor of the terrors which surround us."
"1758,December—I am weary of this life; the Wandering Jew is less driven about hither and thither, than I; I have lost all that I have loved and honoured in this world; I see myself surrounded by unfortunates whose sufferings I cannot aid. My soul is still filled with the impression of the ruin of my best provinces, and of the horrors which a horde of barbarians, more like unreasoning beasts than men, have practised there. In my old age I have come down almost to be a theatrical king; you will acknowledge that such a situation is not sufficiently attractive to bind the soul of a philosopher to life."
"1759,March.—I know not what my fate will be. I will do all that depends upon me to save myself; and if I am worsted the enemy shall pay dear for it. I have lived, during my winter quarters, as a recluse; I have my meals alone, pass my life in reading and writing, and do not sigh. When one is sorrowful it costs one too much in the long run to conceal one's chagrin incessantly, and it is better to bear one's trouble alone than to bring one's vexations into society. Nothing comforts me but the violent strain, as long as it lasts, which work requires; it drives away sorrowful ideas.
"But ah! when work is ended, then gloomy thoughts become vigorous as ever. Maupertuis is right: the amount of evil is greater than of good. But it is all the same to me; I have nothing more to lose, and the few days that remain to me do not disquiet me so much that I should take a lively interest in them."
"1759, 16th August.—I will throw myself in their way, and have my head cut off, or save the capital. I think that is determination enough. I will not answer for the success. If I had more than one life I would resign it for my Fatherland; but if this stroke fails I hold myself at quits with my country, and I may be allowed to take care of myself. There is a limit to everything. I bear my misfortunes without losing my courage. But I am quite determined, if this undertaking fails, to make myself a way out, that I may not be the sport of every kind of accident. Believe me, one requires more than firmness and endurance to maintain oneself in my position. But I tell you openly, if any misfortune happens to me you must not calculate upon my outliving the ruin and destruction of my Fatherland. I have my own way of thinking. I will neither imitate Sertorius nor Cato; I do not think of my fame, but of the State."
"1760,Oct.—Death would be sweet in comparison with such a life. If you have any sympathy with my situation, believe me I conceal much trouble with which I do not grieve or disquiet others. I regard death like a Stoic. Never will I live to see the moment which would oblige me to conclude a disadvantageous peace. Either I will bury myself under the ruins of my Fatherland, or, if this consolation appears too sweet to the fate which pursues me, I will make an end of my sufferings as soon as it is no longer possible to bear them. I have acted, and continue to act, according to this inward feeling of honour. I have sacrificed my youth to my father, and my manhood to my Fatherland. I think, therefore, I have acquired the right to dispose of my old age. I say it, and I repeat it—never will my hand sign a humiliating peace. I have made some observations upon the military talents of Charles XII.,[18]but I have never considered whether he ought to have killed himself or not. I think that, after the taking of Stralsund, he would have done wiser to annihilate himself; but, whatever he did or left undone, his example is no rule for me. There are people who learn from prosperity. I do not belong to that class. I have lived for others; I will die for myself I am very indifferent as to what others may say concerning it, and assure you I shall never hear it. Henry IV. was a younger son of a good house who achieved his good fortune; it did not signify much to him. Why should he have hung himself in misfortune? Louis XIV. was a greater king, had greater resources; he got himself out of difficulties well or ill. As regards me I have not the resources of this man, but I value honour more than he did; and, as I have told you, I guide myself after no one. We calculate, if I am right, 5000 years since the creation of the world; I believe that this reckoning is far too low for the age of the universe. The country of Brandenburg has existed this whole time, before I did, and will continue after my death. States are preserved by the propagation of races, and as long as this continues, the masses will be governed by ministers or Sovereigns. It is much the same whether they be rather more simple or rather more clever; the difference is so little that the mass of the people scarcely discover it. Do not, therefore, repeat to me the old answers of courtiers; self-love and vanity cannot entirely alter my feelings. It is not so much an act of weakness to end such unhappy days, as it is cautious policy. I have lost all my friends and dearest relations. I am to the last extent unfortunate. I have nothing to hope; my enemies treat me with contempt and derision, and in their pride are prepared to trample me under foot."
"1760,Nov.—My labours are terrible, the war has continued during five campaigns. We neglect nothing that can give us means of resistance, and I stretch the bow with my whole strength; but an army should be composed of arms and heads. Arms do not fail us, but heads are no longer to be found; if you would only give yourself the trouble to order me some of the sculptor, Adam, they would serve me as well as those I have. My duty and honour keep me steadfast; but, in spite of stoicism and endurance, there are moments when one feels some desire to give oneself up to the devil. Adieu, my dear Marquis, may it fare well with you, and pray for a poor devil who will betake himself to that meadow where the asphodels grow if the peace does not take effect."
"1761,June.—Do not count upon peace this year. If good fortune does not abandon me, I shall get out of the business as well as I can; but next year I shall still have to dance on the tight-rope and make dangerous bounds when it pleases their very Apostolical, very Christian, and very Muscovite Majesties to call out, 'Jump, Marquis!' Ah, how hard-hearted men are! They tell me, 'You have friends.' Yes, fine friends, who cross their arms and say, 'Indeed, I wish you all happiness!' 'But I am drowning—hand me a rope!' 'No, you will not drown.' 'Yet I must sink the very next moment.' 'Oh, we hope the contrary; but, if it should happen, be assured we would place a beautiful inscription on your tomb.' Such is the world. These are the fine compliments with which I am greeted on all sides."
"1762,Jan.—I have been so unfortunate throughout this whole war, with my pen as well as with my sword, that I do not believe in any fortunate occurrences. Yes; experience is a fine thing. In my youth I was as ungovernable as a young colt, that gallops about the meadow without bridle; now I am as cautious as an old Nestor: but I am also grey and wrinkled with care, and weighed down by bodily suffering; and, in a word, only good enough to be thrown to the dogs. You have always admonished me to take care of myself; show me the means, my dear friend, when one is hauled about as I am. The birds which one delivers to the wantonness of children, the tops which are whipped by those little monkeys, are not more tossed about and misused than I am now by three furious enemies."
"1762,May.—I am passing through the school of patience; it is hard, tedious, terrible, indeed barbarous. I only help myself out of it by looking on the universe in general, as from a distant planet There everything appears to me infinitely small, and I pity my enemies for taking so much trouble about such trifles. Is this old age, is it reflection, is it reason? I regard all the events of life with far more indifference than formerly. If there is anything to be done for the welfare of the State, I can yet apply some strength to it; but, between ourselves, it is no longer with the fiery vehemence of my youth, nor the enthusiasm that then animated me. It is time that the war should come to an end, for my preachings become tedious, and my hearers will soon complain of me."
To Frau von Camas he writes:—"You speak of the death of poor F——. Ah, dear mamma, for six years I have mourned more for the living than for the dead."
Thus did the King write and grieve, but he held out; and any one who is startled by the gloomy energy of his resolves, must guard himself from thinking that these were the highest expressions of the powers of this wonderful mind. It is true that the King had moments of depression, when he desired death under the fire of the enemy rather than seek it from his own hand out of the phial which he carried about him. It is true that he was firmly determined not to bring destruction on his State by allowing himself to live as a prisoner of the Austrians. There was a fearful truth in all that he wrote; but he was of a poetic disposition; he was a child of the century, which had such a craving for great deeds, and took delight in the expression of exalted feelings; he was, to his heart's core, a German, with the same longings as the immeasurably weaker Klopstock and his admirers. The contemplation and decided utterance of this last resolve gave him inward freedom and cheerfulness. He wrote concerning it also to his sister of Baireuth, in the dismal second year of the war, and this letter is particularly characteristic;[19]for she also had decided not to outlive the fall of her house; and he approved this decision, to which, however, he paid little attention, being immersed in the gloomy satisfaction of his own reflections. Both these royal children had once secretly recited together therôlesof French tragedies in the strict parental house; now their hearts beat again in unison, both thinking of freeing themselves, by an antique death, from a life full of illusions, errors, and sufferings. But when the excited and nervous sister fell dangerously ill, Frederic forgot all his stoical philosophy, and, with a passionate tenderness that still clung to life, he fretted and grieved about her who was the dearest to him of his family; and when she died, his sorrow was, perhaps, more severe from feeling that he had enacted a tragic part in the tender life of the woman. Thus, strangely, was mixed in the greatest German that arose in the eighteenth century, poetical feeling and the wish to appear charming and great with the earnest life of reality. The poor little Professor Semler, who, in the midst of the deepest emotion, still studied his attitudes and prepared his compliments, and the great King, who, in calm expectation of the hour of death, wrote in finely-formed periods concerning self-destruction, were both sons of that same time in which the pathos that found no worthy expression in art twined like a creeper round real life. But the King was greater than his philosophy; in fact, he never lost his courage, nor the stubborn strength of the German, nor the quiet hope which is needful to man for every great work.
And he held out. The strength of his enemies became less, their Generals were worn out, and their armies shattered, and at last Russia withdrew from the coalition. This, and the King's last victory, decided the question. He had triumphed, he had preserved the conquered Silesia to Prussia; his people exulted, the faithful citizens of his capital prepared him a festive reception, but he avoided all rejoicings, and returned alone and quietly to Sans Souci. He wished, he said, to live the rest of his days in peace and for his people.
The first three-and-twenty years of his reign he had struggled and fought, and established his power throughout the world; three-and-twenty years more was he to rule over his people as a wise and strict father. The ideas according to which he guided the State—with great self-denial, but also self-will, aiming at the highest, but also ruling in the most trifling matters—have been partly set aside by the higher culture of the present day; they express the knowledge which he had gained in his youth, and from the experiences of his early manhood. The mind was to be free, and each one to think as he chose, but to do his duty as a citizen. As he subordinated his pleasure and expenditure to the good of the State, restricting the whole royal household to about 200,000 thalers, and thought first of the advantage of the people, and not till then of his own; so were all his subjects to be ready to do the duties and bear the burdens he might impose upon them. Each was to remain in the sphere in which his birth and education had placed him; the nobleman was to be landowner and officer; the sphere of the citizen was the city, commerce, industry, teaching, and invention; that of the peasant was field labour and service. But each in his position was to be prosperous and comfortable. There was to be equal, strict, rapid justice for all; no favour for the noble or rich, but rather, in doubtful cases, for the poor man. The number of working men was to be increased, each occupation made as remunerative and as prosperous as possible; the less that was imported from abroad the better; everything to be produced at home, and the surplus to be disposed of beyond the frontiers. Such were the main principles of his political economy. Incessantly did he endeavour to increase the number of morgens of arable land, and to procure new places for settlers. Swamps were drained, lakes drawn off, and dykes thrown up; canals were dug, and advances made for the establishment of new manufactories; cities and villages rebuilt more solid and convenient than before, under the active encouragement of government; the provincial credit system, the fire-insurance society, and the royal bank were established; popular schools everywhere founded, well-informed people encouraged to come, and the education and discipline of the ruling official class promoted by examinations and strict control. It is the business of historians to enumerate and extol all this, and also to recount some vain attempts of the King which failed from his endeavour to guide everything himself.
The King looked after all his dominions, and not least after that child of sorrow, the newly won Silesia. When he conquered this large province it had little more than a million of inhabitants.[20]Greatly was the contrast felt between the easy-going Austrian government and the strict, restless, stirring rule of Prussia. At Vienna the catalogue of forbidden books was greater than at Rome; now ceaseless bales of books found their way into the province from Germany: all were free to buy and read, even the attacks upon their own ruler. In Austria it was the privilege of the nobility to wear foreign cloth; in Prussia, when the father of Frederic the Great had forbidden the import of foreign cloth, he first dressed himself and his princesses in home-made manufacture. At Vienna no office was considered distinguished for which anything more was required than representation: all the work was the affair of the subalterns; the lord of the bedchamber was more considered than a deserving General or minister. In Prussia even the highest in rank was little esteemed if he was not useful to the State; and the King himself was the most precise official, for he looked after every thousand thalers that were saved or disbursed. He who in Austria left the Roman Catholic faith was punished with confiscation and banishment; in Prussia every one could change his religion as he chose, that was his affair. In the Imperial dominions the government felt it burdensome to look after anything; the Prussian officials thrust their noses into everything. In spite of the three Silesian wars, the country was far more flourishing than in the Imperial time; a century had not been sufficient to efface the traces of the Thirty Years' War; the people remembered well how in the cities heaps of ruins had remained from the Swedish time, and everywhere near the newly-built houses, the dismal wastes caused by fire. Many little cities had still blockhouses in the old Sclavonian style, with straw and shingle roofs, which had long been scantily patched. Under the Prussians, not only the traces of the old devastation, but even of the Seven Years' War, soon disappeared. Frederic had fifteen large cities built up with regular streets at the King's cost, and some hundred new villages constructed and occupied by freehold colonists; he had laid on the landed proprietors the heavy burden of rebuilding some thousands of homesteads, and occupying them with tenants with hereditary rights. In the Imperial time the imposts had been far less, but they were unequally apportioned, and the heaviest burdens were on the poor; the nobles were exempt from the greater part; the method of raising them was ill arranged; much was embezzled or squandered, and little proportionately found its way into the Emperor's coffers. The Prussians, on the other hand, had divided the country into small circles, valued the collective acreage, and in a few years had withdrawn all exemptions from taxes; the country now paid its ground tax, the cities their excise. Thus the province bore a double amount of burdens with greater ease, only the privileged murmured; and in this way it was able to maintain 40,000 soldiers, whilst formerly there had been only 2000. Before 1740 the nobles had acted the part of fine gentlemen; any one who was a Roman Catholic, and rich, lived at Vienna; others, who could afford it, went to Breslau. Now the greater number of the landed proprietors dwelt on their properties. Krippenreiters had ceased; the noblemen knew that the King considered it honourable in him to care for the culture of his ground, and that he showed cold contempt towards those who were not landlords, officials, or officers. Formerly, law-suits were incessant and costly, and could scarcely be carried on without bribery and great sacrifice of money; now the number of lawyers became less, because decisions were so rapid. Under the Austrians the caravan traffic with the east of Europe had undoubtedly been greater; the Bukowins and Hungarians, and also the Poles, became estranged, and already looked to Trieste; but new sources of industry arose, large manufactories of wool and cloth, and in the mountain valleys linen, were established. Many were dissatisfied with the new time, some were in fact oppressed by its harshness, but few ventured to deny that on the whole there was improvement.
But there was another characteristic of the Prussian State that made an impression on the Silesians, and soon obtained a mastery over their minds. This was the devoted Spartan spirit of those who served the King, which frequently appeared in the lowest officials. The excise officers, even before the introduction of the French system, were little liked; they were invalid subaltern officers, old soldiers of the King, who had won his battles, and had grown grey in his service. They sat now at the gates, and smoked their wooden pipes; they received very little pay, and could indulge themselves in little, but were from early dawn till late in the evening at their post, did their duty skilfully, quickly, and punctually, like old soldiers, received and faithfully delivered up the money as a matter of course. They thought always of their service: it was their honour, their pride; and long did the old Silesians continue to relate to their descendants how much they had been struck by the punctiliousness, strictness, and honesty of these and other Prussian officials. There was in every district town a receiver of taxes; he lived in his small office room, which was perhaps at the same time his bedroom, and received in a large wooden dish the land tax which the village magistrate brought to his room once a month. Many thousand thalers were noted down on the long list, and were delivered to the last penny into the State coffers. Small was the salary of even such a man as this; he sat, received and packed away in bags, till his hair became white, and his trembling hands could no longer lay hold of the two-groschen pieces. And the pride of his life was, that the King knew him personally, and, if he ever came through the place during the change of horses, he fixed on him silently his large eyes, or, if he was very gracious, inclined his head a little towards him. The people regarded with a certain degree of respect and awe these subordinate servants of a new principle. And not the Silesians only; it was something new in the world. It was not as a mere jest that Frederic II. had called himself the first servant of his State. As on the battlefield he had taught his wild nobles that the highest honour was to die for the Fatherland, so did his unwearied care and high sense of duty imprint upon the soul of the meanest of his servants on the most distant frontiers his great idea, that his first duty was to live and labour for the good of his King and country.
Though the provinces of Prussia, in the Seven Years' War, were compelled to do homage to the Empress Elizabeth, and remained for some time incorporated in the Russian Empire, yet the officials of the districts under the foreign army and government ventured secretly to raise money and provisions for their King, and great art was required for the passage of the transports. Many were in the secret, but there was not one traitor; they stole in disguise through the Russian camp in danger of their lives. They discovered afterwards that they earned little thanks by it, for the King did not like his East Prussians; he spoke depreciatingly of them; seldom showed them the same favour as the other provinces; he looked like stone whenever he learnt that one of his young officers was born between the Vistula and Memel, and never entered his East Prussian province after the war. But the East Prussians were not shaken in their veneration for him: they clung with true love to their ungracious master, and his best and most intellectual panegyrist was Emmanuel Kant.
The life in the King's service was undoubtedly a rough one: incessant were the work and deprivations; it was difficult for the best to do enough for so strict a master, and the greatest devotion received but curt thanks; if a man was worn out he was probably coldly thrown aside; the labour was without end everywhere,—new undertakings—scaffoldings of an unfinished building. To any one who came into the country this life did not appear cheerful, it was so austere, monotonous, and rough; there was little of beauty or pleasure in it; and as the bachelor household of the King, with his obedient servants and his submissive intimates taking the air under the trees of a quiet garden, gave the impression of a monastery to a foreign guest; so he found in the whole Prussian regime, something of the self-denial and obedience of a large industrious monastic brotherhood.
Somewhat of this spirit had passed into the people themselves. But we honour in this an enduring service of Frederic II.: still is this spirit of self-denial the secret of the greatness of the Prussian State, the last and best guarantee for its duration. The excellent machine which the King had erected with so much intelligence and energy could not eternally last; it was shattered twenty years after his death; but that the State did not at the same time sink,—that the intelligence and patriotism of the citizen were in a condition to create a new life on new foundations under his successors,—is the secret of Frederic's greatness.
Nine years after the conclusion of the last war, which led to the retention of Silesia, Frederic increased his kingdom by a new acquisition, not much less in number of miles, but with a scanty population: it was the district of Poland, which has since passed under the name of West Prussia.
If the claims of the King on Silesia had been doubtful, it required all the acuteness of his officials to put a plausible appearance on the uncertain rights to a portion of the new acquisition. The King himself cared little about it; he had, with almost superhuman heroism, defended the possession of Silesia in the face of the world; that province had been bound to Prussia by streams of blood; but in this case, political shrewdness was almost all that had been required. Long, in the opinion of men, was the conqueror deficient in that justification which it appeared was only given by the horrors of war and the accidental fortune of the battle-field. But this last acquisition of the King, which was made without the thunder of cannon or the flourish of victory, was, of all the great gifts for which the German people had to thank Frederic II., the greatest and most beneficial. During many hundred years the much-divided Germans were confined and injured by ambitious neighbours; the great King was the first conqueror who extended the German frontier further to the east. A century after his great ancestor had in vain defended the Rhine fortresses against Louis XIV., he again gave the Germans the emphatic admonition, that it was their task to carry laws, education, freedom, cultivation, and industry into the east of Europe. His whole country, with the exception of some old Saxon territory, had been won from the Sclavonians by force and colonisation; never since the great migration of the Middle Ages had the struggle for the wide plains on the east of the Oder ceased; never had his house forgotten that it was the guardian of the German frontier. Whenever the struggle of arms ceased, politicians contended. The Elector Frederic William had freed the Prussian territories of the Teutonic order from the Polish suzerainty. Frederic I. had brought this isolated colony under the crown. But the possession of East Prussia was insecure; the danger was not, however, from the degenerate Republic of Poland, but from the rising greatness of Russia. Frederic had learnt to consider the Russians as enemies; he knew the high-flown plans of the Empress Catherine; the clever Prince knew how to grasp at the fitting moment. The new domain—Pommerellen, the Woiwodschaft of Kulm and Marienburg, the Bishopric of Ermland, the city of Elbing, a portion of Kujavien, and a part of Posen—united East Prussia with Pomerania and the Marches of Brandenburg. It had always been a frontier land; since ancient times people of different races had thronged to the coast of the Northern Sea: Germans, Sclavonians, Lithuanians, and Finns. Since the thirteenth century, the Germans had forced themselves into this debatable ground as founders of cities and agriculturists; orders of knights, merchants, pious monks, German noblemen, and peasants congregated there. On both sides of the Vistula arose towers and boundary stones of the German colonists. Above all rose the splendid Dantzic,—the Venice of the Baltic, the great sea-mart of the Sclavonian countries, with its rich Marien-church and the palaces of its merchants; behind it, on the other arm of the Vistula, its modest rival Elbing; further upwards, the stately towers and broad arcades of Marienburg, where is the great princely castle of the Teutonic Knights, the most beautiful edifice in the north of Germany; and in the luxurious low-countries, in the valley of the Vistula, were the old prosperous colonial properties, one of the most favoured districts of the world, and defended by powerful dikes against the devastations of the Vistula. Still further upwards, Marienwerder, Graudenz, Kulm, and in the low countries, Netzebromberg, the centre of a strip of Polish frontier. Smaller German cities and village communities were scattered through the whole territory, which had been energetically colonised by the rich Cistercian monasteries of Oliva and Pelplin. But the tyrannical severity of this order drove the German cities and landed proprietors of West Prussia, in the fifteenth century, to annex themselves to Poland. The Reformation of the sixteenth century subdued not only the souls of the German colonists, but also those of the Poles. In the great Polish Republic, three-fourths of the nobility became Protestants, and in the Sclavonian districts of Pommerellen, seventy out of one hundred parishes, did the same. But the introduction of the Jesuits brought an unhealthy change. The Polish nobles fell back to the Roman Catholic Church, their sons were brought up in the Jesuits' schools as converting fanatics. From that time the Polish State began to decline; its condition became constantly more hopeless.
There was a great difference in the conduct of the Germans of West Prussia with respect to proselytising Jesuits and Sclavonian tyranny. The immigrant German nobles became Roman Catholic and Polish, but the citizens and peasants remained stubborn Protestants. To the opposition of languages was added the opposition of confessions; to the hatred of race, the fury of contending faiths. In the century of enlightenment there was a fanatical persecution of the Germans in these provinces; one Protestant church after another was pulled down, the wooden ones were burnt; when a church was burnt, the villages lost the right of having bells; German preachers and schoolmasters were driven away and shamefully ill-used "Vexa Lutheranum dabit thalerum" was the usual saying of the Poles against the Germans. One of the great landed proprietors of the country, Starost of Gnesen, from the family of Birnbaum, was condemned to death, by tearing out his tongue and chopping off his hands, because he had copied into a record from German books some biting remarks against the Jesuits. There was no law and no protection. The national party of Polish nobles, in alliance with fanatical priests, persecuted most violently those whom they hated as Germans and Protestants. All the predatory rabble joined themselves to the patriots or confederates; they hired hordes who went plundering about the country and fell upon small cities and German villages. Ever more vehement became the rage against the Germans, not only from zeal for the faith, but still more from covetousness. The Polish nobleman Roskowski put on a red and a black boot: the one signified fire, and the other death; thus he rode from one place to another, laying all under contribution; at last, in Jastrow, he caused the hands, feet, and finally the head of the Evangelical preacher Wellick to be cut off, and the limbs to be thrown into a bog. This happened in 1768.
Such was the state of the country shortly before the Prussian occupation. Dantzic, which was indispensable to the Poles, kept itself, through this century of decay, from the rest of the country; it remained a free State under Sclavonian protection, and was long adverse to the great King. But the country and most of the German cities energetically helped to preserve the King from destruction. The Prussian officials who were sent into the country were astonished at the wretchedness which existed at a few days' journey from their capital. Only some of the larger cities, in which German life was maintained by old trading intercourse within strong walls, and protected strips of land exclusively occupied by Germans,—like the low countries near Dantzig,—the villages under the mild government of the Cistercians of Oliva, and the wealthy German districts of Catholic Ermland, were in tolerable condition. Other cities lay in ruins, as did most of the farms on the plains. The Prussians found Bromberg, a city of German colonists, in ruins; it is not possible now accurately to ascertain how the city came into this condition;[21]indeed the fate of the whole Netze district, in the last ten years before the Prussian occupation, is quite unknown. No historians, no records, and no registers give any account of the destruction and slaughter with which that country was ravaged. Apparently the Polish factions must have fought amongst themselves; bad harvests and pestilence may have done the rest. Kulm has from ancient times preserved its well-built walls and stately churches, but in the streets the covered passages to the cellars projected over the rotten wood and the fragments of brick from the dilapidated buildings; whole streets consisted of such cellars, in which the miserable inhabitants dwelt. Twenty-eight of the forty houses of the great market-place had no doors, no roofs, no inhabitants, and no proprietors. In a similar condition were other cities.
The greater number of the country people lived in circumstances which appeared to the King's officials lamentable; especially on the frontiers of Pomerania, where the Windish Kassubes dwelt; the villages were a collection of old huts, with torn thatched roofs, on bare plains, without a tree and without a garden; there was only the indigenous wild cherry-tree. The houses were built of wooden rafters and clay; going through the house door, one entered a room with a large hearth, without a chimney; stoves were unknown; no candle was ever lighted, only fir chips brightened the darkness of the long winter evenings; the chief article in the miserable furniture was the crucifix, and under it a bowl of holy water. The dirty, forlorn people lived on rye porridge, or only on herbs, which they made into soup, or on herrings, and brandy, in which both women and men indulged. Bread was almost unknown; many had never in their life tasted such a delicacy; there were few villages in which there was an oven. If they ever kept bees, they sold the honey to the citizens, as well as carved spoons and stolen bark; and with the produce, they bought at the fairs, coarse blue cloth dresses, with black fur caps, and bright red handkerchiefs for the women. There was rarely a weaving-loom, and the spinning-wheel was unknown. The Prussians heard there no national songs; there were no dances, no music, nor indeed any of the pleasures which the most miserable Poles partake of, but stupidly and silently the people drank bad drams, fought, and reeled about. The poor noble also differed little from the peasant; he drove his own rude plough, and clattered in wooden slippers about the unboarded floor of his hut. It was difficult, even for the Prussian King, to make anything of these people. The use of potatoes spread rapidly, but the people long continued to destroy the fruit trees, the culture of which was commanded; and they opposed all other attempts at cultivation. Equally needy and decaying were the frontier districts with Polish population; but the Polish peasant preserved, in his state of poverty and disorder, at least the vivacity of his race. Even on the properties of the greater nobles, such as the Starosties, and of the crown, all the farming buildings were ruined and useless. If any one wished to forward a letter, he had to send a special messenger, for there was no post in the country; indeed, in the villages no need of it was felt, for a great portion of the nobles could not read or write, more than the peasants. Were any one ill, no assistance could be obtained but the mysterious remedies of some old village crone, for there was no apothecary in the whole country. Any one who needed a coat, did well to be able to use a needle himself, for no tailor was to be found for many miles, unless one passed through the country on a venture.[22]He who wished to build a house, had first to ascertain whether he could get labourers from the west. The country people still kept up a weak struggle with hordes of wolves, and there were few villages in which men and beasts were not decimated every winter.[23]If the small-pox broke out, or any other infectious illness came into the country, the people saw the white figure of the pestilence flying through the air and settling down on their huts; they knew what such appearances betokened; it was the desolation of their homes, the destruction of whole communities; with gloomy resignation they awaited their fate. There was hardly any administration of justice in the country; only in the larger cities were powerless courts. The Starosts inflicted punishment with arbitrary power; they beat and threw into horrible jails, not only the peasant, but even the citizens of the country towns who rented their houses or fell into their hands. In their quarrels amongst themselves they contended by bribery, in any of the few courts that had jurisdiction over them. In later years, even that had almost fallen into disuse, and they sought revenge with their own hands.
It was indeed a forlorn country, without discipline, without law, and without a master; it was a wilderness, with only a population of 500,000 on 600 square miles—not 850 to the mile. And the Prussian King treated his acquisition like an untenanted prairie; almost at his pleasure he fixed boundary stones, or removed them some miles further. And then he began, in his admirable way, the culture of the country; the very rottenness of its condition was attractive to him, and West Prussia became, as Silesia had hitherto been, his favourite child, that he washed and brushed, and dressed in new clothes, sent to school, controlled, and kept under his eyes, with incessant care like a true mother. The diplomatic contention about the acquisition still continued, but he sent a troop of his best officials into the wilderness; the districts were divided into small circles; the whole surface of the country valued in the shortest time, and equally taxed; and every circle provided with a provincial magistrate, a judicature, a post, and a sanitary police. New parishes were called into life as if by magic; a company of 187 schoolmasters were introduced into the country; the worthy Semler had sought out and drilled some of them. Numbers of German artisans were hired, machine and brick makers; digging, hammering, and building began all over the country; the cities were reinhabited; street upon street arose out of the heaps of ruins; the Starosties were changed into crown property; new villages were built and colonised, and new agriculture enjoined. In the course of the first year after taking possession of the country, the great canal was dug, three German miles in length, uniting the Vistula by means of the Netze with the Oder and Elbe; a year after, the King had given directions for this work, he saw loaded boats from the Oder, 120 feet long, passing from the East to the Vistula. By means of the new water-wheels, wide districts of country were drained and occupied by German colonists. The King worked indefatigably; he praised and blamed; and, however great the zeal of his officials, they could seldom do enough for him. In consequence of this, the wild Sclavonian tares, which had shot up, not only there but also in the German fields, were brought under, so that even the Polish districts got accustomed to the new order of things; and West Prussia, in the war after 1806, proved itself almost as Prussian as the old provinces.
Whilst the grey-headed King was creating and looking after everything, one year passed after another over his thoughtful head; all about him was more tranquil, but void and lonely, and small was the circle of men in whom he confided. He had laid his flute aside, and the new French literature appeared to him insipid and prosy; sometimes it seemed as if a new life sprouted up under him in Germany, to which he was a stranger. Unweariedly did he labour for the improvement of his army and the welfare of his people; ever less did he value his tools, and ever higher and more passionate was his feeling of the great duties of his position.
But if his struggles in the Seven Years' War may be called superhuman, equally so did his labours now appear to contemporaries. There was something great, but also terrible, in the way in which he made the prosperity of the whole his highest and constant object, disregarding the comfort of individuals. When, in front of the ranks, he dismissed from the service with bitter words of blame the Colonel of a regiment which had made a great blunder at a review; when, in the marsh lands of the Netze, he calculated more the strokes of the ten thousand spades than the hardships of the labourers, who lay, stricken with marsh fever, in the hospital he had erected for them; when be overstepped in his demands what the most rapid action could accomplish,—terror as of one who moved in an unearthly element mingled with the deep reverence and devotion of his people. Like Fate, he appeared to the Prussians, incalculable, inexorable, and omniscient; superintending the smallest as well as the greatest things. When they related to one another that he had endeavoured to control Nature also, but that his orange-trees had been frozen by the last spring frosts, then they secretly rejoiced that there were limits even for their King, but still more that he had borne it with such good humour, and had made his bow to the cold days of May.
With touching sympathy the people collected all the sayings of the King in which there was any human feeling that brought him more into communion with them. So lonely were his house and garden, that the imaginations of his Prussians continually hovered about the consecrated spot. If any one was so fortunate as to come into the neighbourhood of the castle on a warm moonlight night, he would perhaps find open doors without a guard, and he could see the great King in his bedroom, sleeping on his camp-bed. The scent of the flowers, the night song of the birds, and the quiet moonlight were the only guards, almost the whole regal state, of the lonely man.
For fourteen years after the acquisition of West Prussia, did the oranges of Sans Souci bloom; then did Nature reassert her empire over the great King. He died alone, only surrounded by his servants.
In the bloom of life he was completely wrapped up in ambitious feelings; he had wrested from fate all the high and splendid garlands of life,—he, the prince of poets and philosophers, the historian and the General. No triumph that he had ever gained contented him; all earthly fame had become to him accidental, uncertain, and valueless; an iron feeling of duty, incessantly working, was all that remained to him. Amid the dangerous alternation of warm enthusiasm and cool acuteness, his soul had reached its maturity. He had, in his own mind, surrounded with a poetical halo, certain individuals; and he despised the multitude about him. But in the struggles of life his egotism disappeared; he lost almost all that was personally dear to him, and he ended by caring little for individuals, whilst the need of living for the whole became ever stronger in him. With the most refined self-seeking, he had desired the highest for himself; and at last, regardless of himself, he gave himself up for the public weal and the lowest. He had entered life as an idealist, and his ideal had not been destroyed by the most fearful experiences, but rather ennobled, exalted, and purified; he had sacrificed many men to his State, but no man so much as himself.
Great and uncommon did this appear to his contemporaries; greater still to us, who can perceive, even in the present time, the traces of his activity in the character of our people, our political life, our arts, and literature.