War! War! War! From that pregnant day in 1521 when Luther, at Worms, cried: "Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me!" Germany, for nearly three centuries, was never, long at a time, free from bloody strife. In some districts of the empire men and women were conceived in time of war, born in time of war, lived to the Scripturally allotted age of threescore years and ten in time of war, died, and were buried, leaving war to rage for years to come above their unquiet, desecrated graves.
In these disintegrating centuries, women of all classes suffered to the uttermost. The lowest became beasts, like the men who debauched them. By thousands, and tens of thousands, women followed the armies. Every soldier, from the private to the highest officer, was allowed to take with him into the field his wife or mistress frequently both and as many other female relatives as he pleased. Even grandmothers were frequently seen in camp. Schiller's picture of the old marketwoman in Wallenstein's Camp is not overdrawn.
Women in the army cooked, washed, mended, and, more or less skilfully, nursed the sick and wounded. They were not taken to the field, however, as ministering angels. The bald truth is that women were kept in the army for the sole purpose of gratifying man's lust. With every newly recruited regiment that started for the front went hundreds of respectable young girls torn unwillingly from their humble homes. After every decisive battle, women formed a large part of the spoils of war borne off by the victors. Children, mostly born out of wedlock, swarmed. Gustavus Adolphus made a vain attempt to keep women out of the army. He established tent schools for the children. Women in the field were under martial law. Frequently, for minor offences they were stripped, flogged, and drummed out of camp. The discipline of the field schools was very severe. Once, it is related, a cannon ball crashed through a school tent, killing half a dozen children. But the survivors, more afraid of their schoolmaster than of death, kept on with their tasks as if nothing had happened.
For woman there could be, there was, but one outcome of this army life, moral degradation. Grimmelshausen, in hisSimplicius Simplicissimus, one of the greatest satires ever written, gives a horribly revolting picture of women in camp during the Thirty Years' War. There is no doubt that the picture is a true one, for Grimmelshausen, a nobleman and a powerful writer, was an eyewitness of the horrors which he describes in this life story of a vagabond adventurer in the long and terrible war.
Neither wealth nor high birth could screen women from the anxieties, the sorrows, and the miseries of war. Philippine Welser, of Augsburg, was probably the last patrician woman in Germany to receive Renaissance training. The Welser family of burgher-merchant origin, ennobled by royal favor was famous for its upright men and its pious, scholarly women no less than for its enormous wealth. The story of Philippine Welser and her lover--husband,--Prince Ferdinand, son of Emperor Ferdinand I. and favorite nephew of Charles V., contrasts pleasantly with the cruel, coldly selfish treatment of most princely lovers in that war-brutalized age.
According to legend, Philippine Welser first saw "Prince Ferdinand of the Golden Locks" as he rode past her father's house in old Haymarket Square, at the head of a glittering procession. Philippine, a vision of pink and white girlish beauty, stood at a long, open window, looking down on the gorgeous pageant. The prince saluted her. Their eyes met, and straightway, after the old fashion which never quite goes out of date anywhere in the world, either in war or in peace, they fell in love.
At the public ball that evening, in Augsburg's new hall of gold, the prince showed the merchant-banker's fair daughter marked attention, dancing with her often. In the weeks that followed, Prince Ferdinand's intimate friend, Count Ladislaw von Sternberg, was seen almost daily going back and forth between the old Welser house and the archducal palace near the Cathedral.
At last the prince left Augsburg. A few days later Philippine Welser also disappeared down the street which now bears her name. Henceforth her native city knew her no more. She was in Bohemia, with her aunt Katharine, wife of the knight George von Loxan. An imperial castle crowned a neighboring height. Prince Ferdinand suddenly discovered that affairs in his Bohemian inheritance needed his immediate personal attention. He resided at the castle for several weeks, making frequent visits to the Loxan estate. A formal betrothal took place in the presence of a priest, Philippine's aunt, and other witnesses. Through nine years of betrothal and twenty-three of married life, the archduke was true to Philippine. War separated them for years at a time, but their love suffered no diminution. The archduke Ferdinand was a genuine scion of an impetuously loyal race. From Maximilian I., whose heart, by his own command, was placed in the tomb of fair Mary of Burgundy, down to Don John and to unfortunate Rudolph in the nineteenth century, Habsburg princes have ever been ready to cast aside rank, wealth, and power for love.
Sometimes, hiding under the soiled robe of politics, love actually slips into a state marriage, as in the union of Elizabeth Stuart of England with Frederick, Prince of the Palatinate, better known to history as the "Winter King" of Bohemia.
Though not German by birth, Elizabeth, through good and through evil report, so thoroughly identified herself with her husband's interests and people, and became the ancestress of so many famous rulers, among whom are Frederick the Great, Queen Victoria, and Emperor William I., that her story properly deserves a place in any history of German womanhood.
Elizabeth possessed the grace, beauty, and charm of manner common to the Stuarts. To these gifts were added wit, a kindly sense of humor, and an honest loyalty of spirit peculiarly her own. The title she won in Germany, "the Queen of Hearts," seems to have been a spontaneous and well-deserved tribute. Between Elizabeth Stuart and her elder brother Henry, the beloved and manly Prince of Wales, who died at the age of eighteen, the closest love and sympathy existed. Out of many suitors for his sister's hand, Frederick, Prince of the Palatine, was Prince Henry's choice. The two young men loved and respected each other. Together they had ridden, hunted, played tennis and other athletic games, Elizabeth often being an interested spectator of their friendly contests. The dying prince's last words were half-delirious ramblings concerning his sister's marriage to Prince Frederick.
Political exigencies were pressing. As usual, war loomed. Prince Henry's death, therefore, delayed the marriage but a few days. Frederick possessed a sweet and lovable nature. His letters, to this day, strangely win the reader's heart. To the stricken sister, mourning the loss of her idolized brother, the tenderness of Prince Frederick was balm. Her bridegroom had been her dead brother's friend. To loyal-hearted Elizabeth Stuart that memory was far more precious than the diamond rose-wreath crown which her lover brought her from the Palatinate. Yet the glittering coronet it may be seen to-day in Munich was very beautiful. Clear, sparkling, as if made of ice shot through by sunlight, it seems a fit ornament for a young "Winter Queen."
The bridal journey to the Palatine was a triumphal progress. Elizabeth and Frederick were like two children newly escaped from school. They cast convention to the winds. The court chamberlain was in despair. But the two happy lovers only laughed at him and his "precedents." They said they would make new precedents, and they did. In Nörnberg they invited themselves to a burgher wedding. The bride was a Welser, a distant cousin of Philippine Welser. Both Elizabeth and her husband danced at this wedding until after midnight. Prince Frederick, indeed, danced so heartily, says an old chronicler, "that he did twirl some of the maidens with him clean out into the street."
About this time died the Emperor Matthias, successor of Ferdinand I. The Protestant Union earnestly wished to prevent the election of the Catholic Ferdinand, King of Bohemia, as emperor. An opportune uprising of Protestants in Bohemia served as a pretext for placing Frederick of the Palatinate, head of the Protestant Union, upon the throne of Bohemia. The whole world knows the story of that brief, brilliant, winter reign of Frederick and Elizabeth in Bohemia.
The Stuart "Queen of Hearts" was more popular in Bohemia than her Calvinistic husband. Rich presents of money and plate were made to her. A delegation of the wives of the most prominent citizens waited upon her in Prague. Behind them slowly moved nine large wagons loaded with gifts. Among other presents was a baby's entire outfit, including a stately cradle made of ebony and ornamented with gold and precious jewels. The cradle was needed, for Elizabeth bore thirteen children.
The king and queen were too unconventional to please the stiff Bohemian nobility. The young royal couple gave mortal offence once to the entire court by coasting down hill with a lot of school children. The conspicuous costume worn by his majesty on that unfortunate day seems to have been an added injury to court etiquette. He wore, we are told, "a satin fur-trimmed pelisse and a large white hat with long, floating yellow plumes."
But days of childish gayety were well-nigh passed for Frederick and Elizabeth. Sorrow, humiliation, poverty awaited them. Ferdinand II. was triumphantly elected. One of the new emperor's first acts was to confiscate Frederick's principality of the Rhine Palatinate and make it over to a Bavarian Prince. His next act was to send a force under Tilly to regain the Bohemian throne. Frederick made no resistance worthy of the name. Instead, he fled with his family.
Never was royal fall more humiliating. Landless, penniless, almost friendless, Frederick and Elizabeth suddenly found themselves the laughing-stock of Europe. It was a brutal age, a vulgarly coarse age. Minor incidents often show most clearly the progress of civilization. To-day a woman dragged down by her husband's fall is screened.
Not so in Elizabeth Stuart's time. The press of that day lampooned her more unmercifully than it did her unfortunate consort. Cruel cartoons, picturing her in a beggar's dress were scattered broadcast. King James I. offered his daughter an asylum in England, but she answered proudly: "My place while I live is by my husband's side. I shall never forsake him."
So intense was Elizabeth's love for her husband that it practically crowded out all other love except the love for her dead brother. Even of her children she said: "I love them more because they are his than for themselves or for my own comfort." For three days after Frederick's death Elizabeth neither spoke nor ate nor wept. To the day of her own death, her room, sometimes a pitifully poor room for a king's daughter and a king's wife, was draped in black in memory of her husband.
The eldest daughter of Elizabeth and Frederick also an Elizabeth was a diligent student of philosophy. Descartes honored her with his friendship. For many years she corresponded with the great philosopher. In youth, this Elizabeth was very pretty a vivacious, black-haired, brown-eyed beauty, with a slender aquiline nose which tried her sorely by turning unbecomingly red at times. The poverty-stricken Palatine princesses, living as poor relations, first at this court, then at that, kept up courage by sharpening their wits on one another. One day when the annoying nose was blushing, Elizabeth's next younger sister, Louise, said: "Come, it is time to attend the audience of our cousin, the Queen," and Elizabeth answered aggrievedly: "Do you expect me to go with this nose?" To which quick-witted Louise replied: "Do you expect me to wait until you grow another one?"
Elizabeth, perhaps to gain leisure to study her beloved subject, philosophy, entered the Lutheran convent at Herfort, becoming later its abbess. Louise became abbess of a Catholic convent at Naubisson, and a very lively and comfortable, if not exactly moral, abbess she made. A third sister, Henrietta, took to preserves instead of either philosophy or religion. She married, and lived happily ever after among her sticky pots and kettles. Not the least blessed of the three, to judge from her letters, was the lot of practical Henrietta.
At the end of the Thirty Years' War, Germany lay prostrate, bleeding at a thousand wounds. The condition of the peasant women was not greatly improved. They had more cows to milk, it is true; but, on the other hand, they were furnished with fewer books from which to draw mental nourishment. The public schools had gone to ruin. Even the boys were not properly taught. "Our wenches learn nothing," an exceptionally interested father complains.
The old manufacturing interests, like weaving by hand, in which women formerly aided, had declined. Workingwomen in the cities found it hard to earn a living. By losses resulting from the war, many of the genteel poor, ladies born and bred, had been forced into the ranks of the workers. These timid unfortunates became nursery governesses in families of the impoverished nobility, day teachers, court ladies without salary, and the like. The personal secrets of the children of labor are kept only in the archives of solitary human hearts; else, many a story of tragedy, love, and brave self-denial might be written from the bitter experiences of these pioneer women workers. In considering the condition of workingwomen during this unhappy period, the word "Vice," written large, must be constantly kept in mind. It was not a question of temptation to vice; the problem, instead, was how a respectable workingwoman could possibly escape being driven into sin by man's physical force.
The counter reformation, set in motion by the wonderful intellect of Ignatius Loyola, had a mighty influence upon women in certain parts of the empire. "In the year 1551," says Steinmetz, "the Jesuits had no fixed position in Germany. In 1556 they had overspread Franconia, Swabia, Rhineland, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and Bavaria." This rapid but quiet growth of the Society of Jesus was due largely to the influence of a comparatively few rich, intelligent Catholic women, like Maria of Bavaria.
The relation between women and early Jesuitism bears out the old assertion that kicks and beatings increase both canine and feminine affection. Ignatius Loyola himself compared woman to the devil. He writes: "Our enemy imitates the nature and manner of a woman as to her weakness and frowardness. For, as a woman, quarrelling with her husband, if she sees him with erect, firm aspect, ready to resist her, instantly loses courage and turns on her heel, but if she perceive he is timid and inclined to slink off, her audacity knows no bounds, and she pounces upon him, ferociously. Thus the devil," etc.
Ignatius Loyola was magnificently in earnest. He remembered the Medician Papal courts and their scandal. He would have his order endangered by no looseness of priestly morals. His rules were of iron strictness. Moreover, and this greatly to his official advantage, he knew women. Especially well he knew, too, the sentimental, introspective, hero-worshipping woman. The spiritual direction of three such women for a short time gave him more trouble, he afterward declared, than the government of his whole world-spread order. Accordingly, he decreed:
"No woman shall come twice to confession in one day."
"If the female penitents pretend to scruples of conscience, the confessors are to tell them 'not to relate tales and repeat trifles.' Sometimes they must be silenced at once, for if they are truly disturbed by conscience there will be no need of prolixity."
"Consolation and advice to women are to be given in an open part of the church."
Visits to women were also severely restricted. They must be confined to women of rank and consequence. The women visited must be those who have rendered signally important service to the order. Visits must be agreeable to the husband or other ruling male relative of the woman visited. Confession by a woman was always to be witnessed by another priest, stationed near the confessor.
A Jesuit of advanced age and ancient probity once infringed this last order and listened to a woman penitent without witnesses. Loyola called eight priests together and made the old Jesuit scourge himself on his naked back till each of the priests had repeated one of the penitential psalms.
To do all things vehemently has always been a German trait. According to Hasenmuller, a German Jesuit turned Lutheran, many of Loyola's disciples in Germany exceeded their chief in their expressed contempt for women. Some Jesuit priests, he says, expectorated whenever a woman's name was mentioned. Others would eat no dish prepared by a woman. One cried: "When I think of a woman my stomach rises and my blood is up." Another exclaimed: "It grieves me and I am ashamed that a woman brought me into the world."
The emotional element in Jesuitism appealed strongly to women. The general contempt for their sex expressed by Jesuit priests made special notice all the more valuable. No modern woman of fashion who has secured for her drawing room the first appearance of a social lion is more elated thereby than were the few queens, princesses, and women of wealth who, in the early days of the order, were honored by the notice of Jesuit priests. Add to this the fact that the Jesuits were, in general, a picked body of young, strong, handsome men of gracious manners and fascinating address, and we have the secret of their power over women. Small wonder that women worked indefatigably to advance the interests of the new order.
Allied to the Jesuits only by the smarting, chafing tie of persecution were the Jewish women. After the Thirty Years' War there were many of these in Germany. Their descendants, even when Christians, were debarred from entering the Society of Jesus. The babes of Jewish mothers were often forcibly baptized. Freytag quotes a pathetic story told in an old pamphlet written by two Jesuit fathers, Eder and Christel.
One Samuel Metzel was converted to Christianity. His wife refused to forsake her ancestral faith. Her four children were taken away from her and placed in Christian families. She was about to bring a fifth child into the world. In terror lest she should lose this one too, she hid herself in a retired spot. Her oldest little girl unconsciously betrayed the mother's hiding place. When the babe was born the father and the two priests sent a Christian midwife to baptize and kidnap it. Three "pious ladies" accompanied the midwife.
When the Jewish mother saw that the midwife baptized her newborn babe, she "sprang frantically from her bed and with vehement cries tore the infant from the woman's arms." The "pious ladies" sent for masculine help. The city judge, with armed men, entered the room and "tried to separate the now little Christian son from his mother. But as she, like a frantic one, held the child so tightly clasped in her arms, they desisted, fearing to stifle the babe, and the judicious judge contented himself with strictly forbidding the Jews in the house to try to make a Jew of the child." The Lord Count of the empire, when appealed to, decided that the child must be delivered to its father. The priestly historians add, with evident pride and satisfaction: "Not long after, the mother who had so stubbornly adhered to Judaism gave in and was baptized."
When the plague swept Germany, the Jesuits and their women coadjutors were magnificent in their self-forgetfulness and unremitting work of succor. Splendidly, too, as a rule, did they stand by one unfortunate class of women the so-called witches of the seventeenth century. It was a Jesuit priest, the noble Frederick von Spee, who, when asked by the Elector of Mainz why his hair had turned white at the early age of forty, replied: "Sire, it is because I have accompanied to the stake so many women accused of witchcraft not one of whom was guilty."
The persecution of so-called witches grew to fearful proportions in the seventeenth century. No ugly old woman who had village enemies was safe from arrest and execution on a charge of witchcraft. The following statistics from the small district of Drachenfels are typical, as in every other town of the empire similar conditions prevailed.
Between July, 1630, and December, 1631, and between November, 1643, and May, 1645, ninety-two out of the eight hundred inhabitants of the district were executed for witchcraft. Every second house furnished at least one victim. Sometimes four or five out of a single family were accused. The youngest woman burned was twenty-nine years of age. The others were between fifty-five and eighty. Confessions were secured by the use of the rack and other horrible tortures. The confessions were always similar, a mere echo of the stories told around every village hearth on winter evenings. The alleged witch had sickened cattle. She had sought at midnight the woodland dancing place of evil spirits or had ridden through the air on a broomstick. She had made a compact with the devil, etc., etc.
But confession was not considered evidence enough. Accomplices must be declared. Just here, sometimes, splendid heroism came in, as in the case of Frau Merl of Drachenfels. Neither the rack, the thumbscrew, nor ice-cold water poured over her could induce her to name as co-witch any but dead women. Through three courts they dragged her case. There was even a chance of saving her own life if she would implicate certain other suspected persons. Instead, however, she went alone to the stake. One wishes that Von Spee might have walked beside her, whispering words of consolation.
A minor cause of woman's degradation in this unhappy age of her history was the prevalence of drunkenness. An official map was once issued that showed drinking districts, places being marked as "ever drunk," "mostly drunk," "half drunk," etc. "No drunk" did not exist even as an imaginary geographical line.
From the lowest strata of society to the highest women were made miserable by this evil of intemperance. The intoxicated peasant knocked his wife down and kicked her. The cultured prince, inflamed by wine and anger, slapped my lady's face at the royal dinner table before the whole court.
Riehl, in hisHistory of the Physical Development of the German People, devotes one chapter to the gradual "Divergence of the Sexes." He makes the interesting suggestion, which reflection and observation seem to confirm, that three hundred years ago woman was far more masculine in her personal appearance, even in her anatomy and physical strength, than now. He calls attention to the almost manly expression and cast of features shown in the portraits of bygone famous beauties like Marie Stuart and others.
Louisa of Orange-Nassau, wife of the great elector, Frederick William (1640-1688), was a remarkable woman. She was self-poised, loving, earnest, virtuous, pious in a helpful, practical fashion, founding girls' schools, hospitals, and similar institutions of ethical and civic value, and interested in every department of her husband's manifold activity. When he travelled, she journeyed with him, carefully watching to keep away from him both draughts and bores. On a long military march of four hundred miles from Berlin to the relief of Konigsberg she accompanied him, sharing all his hardships without a complaint.
Frederick William built for his wife a pretty country place north of Berlin, which they calledOranienburg(Orange Burg). Louisa made this place a genuine Dutch homestead. Much of Frederick William's youth was spent in Holland, where he wooed and won his bride. Theirs was a true love marriage. Louisa bore him two sons; the elder died young, the younger, Frederick, became the first king of Prussia.
Frederick William was often in a state of ebullition, and many women would have found life with him a hell upon earth. But Louisa of Orange had love, patience, and great good sense. She was happy in his love, and he in hers. "At the moment of her death," says Carlyle, "when speech had fled, he felt from her hand, which lay in his, three slight, slight pressures. 'Farewell!' thrice mutely spoken in that manner, not easy to forget in this world."
Reasons of state compelled the elector to contract another marriage. His second wife, Dorothea of Holstein, was a most practical housewife and gardener. Under her energetic direction the palace shone like a new pin. She took a great interest in the planting of trees. Unter den Linden, the now fashionable avenue of Berlin, was, primarily, a project of Dorothea's. Her dairy was wonderfully remunerative, and it was even rumored that she held a controlling interest in a brewery. Thrifty Dorothea certainly was; comfortable to live with, either as wife or stepmother, she evidently was not. She never filled the vacant place in Frederick William's heart. "Ah! my poor Louisa," the great elector, now growing to be the old elector, often exclaimed; "I have not my dear Louisa now. To whom shall I turn for help and comfort?"
Between Dorothea and her stepson, the crown prince Frederick, a constant state of warfare existed. Political enemies even accused Dorothea, without a shadow of truth, of attempting to poison him. At last Frederick withdrew entirely from his father's court, leaving his stepmother and his four stepbrothers in possession of the field. This wearing domestic friction, combined with much political opposition, embittered the last years of the elector's life. He died in 1688; but he had not lived in vain. His private life was honorable; his morals were above reproach. In his conjugal fidelity, he stands a solitary figure upon the threshold of a new and still more debased age.
War was not the sole cause of woman's degradation in this unhappy period. French influence, proceeding from the brilliant, evil court of Louis XIV. (1643-1715), debased her incalculably. Like a moral miasma, this influence permeated every stratum of German society. Upon the innocent and the guilty woman alike its effect was deadly. This destructive conquest over the brain and soul of Germany was not made in a single generation, for, in the beginning, men of the stamp of the great elector and women like his beloved Louisa fought against the subtle, poisonous influence.
For half a century a German princess lived at the very fountain head of corruption, the court of Louis XIV., and remained pure. Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate was a granddaughter of Elizabeth Stuart. Her father was Carl Ludwig, Prince of the Palatinate, to whom had been restored a part of his paternal inheritance the Rhine Palatinate. She was educated by her father's sister, Sophia, Electress of Hanover, whom she loved devotedly. To this aunt, through fifty years of life in a corrupt and foreign atmosphere, which to the end she hated, the exiled German princess poured out her heart in letters that, to the historian, have proved of priceless value. Ranke says: "Nowhere else is the uncleanness of French and German national spirit during this epoch so perfectly photographed as in the correspondence of Elizabeth of Orleans with her aunt, the Electress of Hanover."
At the age of nineteen, in the year 1671, Elizabeth Charlotte was married to Philip, Duke of Orleans, only brother of Louis XIV. It was a loveless marriage. Louis XIV. brought about the union for the sake of securing the neutrality of the Prince of the Palatinate in an approaching war between France and Holland. At the time of her marriage Elizabeth was a bright, wholesome, companionable girl. Her husband, a widower of thirty-two, was commonly suspected of being at least accessory to the poisoning of his first wife, Henrietta, a sister of Charles II. of England. In the correspondence of Elizabeth and her aunt, the Duke of Orleans is always referred to as "Monsieur."
Elizabeth's ideal of manhood was the older German ideal, an honest, fearless man, an enthusiastic hunter, a skilful horseman, a sturdy drinker, and, withal, a stout-handed Christian, ready at a moment's notice to knock down an old church and build a new one on its site, or, if his faith lay the other way, to fight to the last ditch for the old church against the new. Therefore, there must have been bitterness at the young wife's heart when she penned the following very accurate description of her bridegroom:
"Monsieur has extremely ladylike manners. He cares for nothing so rude as horses and hunting. He cares for nothing, in fact, except the Court receptions, for dainty eating, dancing, and fine toilettes. In short, his tastes are all effeminate."
She gives an equally merciless picture of herself: "I must be very ugly. I have little eyes, a short, thick nose, and a flat, broad face. I am little and thickset. Naturally, I hate mirrors and never injure my self-esteem by looking into one if I can help it." Though Elizabeth was not beautiful, she must have possessed the charm of a thoroughly honest, humorous, and impulsively kind nature. Her boy-cousins and young friends in Germany called her "Comrade" and "Bub." Louis XIV. was very fond of his German sister-in-law. She walked, rode, and hunted with him frequently. Except when he persecuted Germany, she liked the king extremely well.
Although no love existed at any time between the Duke of Orleans and his wife, one point, remarkable in that universally loose age, must be noted. They were true to each other. She writes in later years: "I never had any reason to complain of Monsieur in respect to his behavior so far as other women were concerned." She had no "love affair" in all the years she lived with him. A cabal, seeking to fasten scandal upon her in connection with the Chevalier Sincsanct, utterly failed to produce proof against her, or even to cast public suspicion upon her. She had three children, two boys and a girl. The oldest boy died at the age of three years. The struggle of Elizabeth's life was to preserve her two remaining children from the impure influences around them, and it was a long and bitter fight. Her daughter she saved. Her son, afterward Regent of France during the long minority of Louis XV., owed all that was good in him and that was much, in spite of his excesses to the prayers, the love, the admonitions of his mother. In her efforts to train the children rightly Elizabeth was constantly thwarted by her husband. Philip was entirely controlled by two bad men, the Chevalier de Lorraine and the Marquis d'Essiat. Both hated Elizabeth because of her moral influence over the king. By her efforts, many of their iniquitous plots against women were frustrated. The only way they could punish her was through her children. Madame de Maintenon, whom Elizabeth treated disdainfully, was believed by the duchess to have been an accomplice in the plan to remove her children from her influence.
Madame de Maintenon loved the children of the king's former mistress, Montespan, as if they were her own. Two of these children, Mademoiselle de Blois and the Duke of Maine, were still unmarried. It was now proposed, ostensibly by the king, that Elizabeth's son, the Duke of Chartres, should marry Mademoiselle de Blois. Also, it was planned, that her daughter Charlotte should at the same time become the wife of the young Duke of Maine. Elizabeth was furious. She refused her consent. Saint-Simon, in his Memoirs, says of her at this time:
"She belongs to a nation which abhors bastards and mesalliances. Moreover, she has a determined character which forbids all hope that she may ever consent."
The Duke of Chartres a boy of eighteen promised his mother to refuse to contract the alliance. Then, the Abbé Dubois, who had great influence over him, secured a contrary promise. When the king himself urged the duke to marry Mademoiselle de Blois, the youth became confused and said he would leave the decision to his parents. Whereupon, his father, without more ado, had the engagement announced that evening at the court dinner. Elizabeth wept throughout the meal. Louis XIV., it is said, made awkward attempts at consolation by passing her the choicest dishes. At the circle which followed, her son came up to kiss her hand. The memory of his broken promise was fresh in her mind. To the astonishment of the polished French court, she boxed the boy's ears soundly. An awful silence followed this impulsive piece of maternal discipline. The young duke, scarlet with mortification, stood abashed. His poor little pale bride-elect grew whiter than ever; Elizabeth, hardly making a reverence to the king, left the room. The people of Paris sided with the duchess. They threatened the life of Madame de Maintenon if the other proposed marriage, between Elizabeth's daughter and the Duke of Maine, was insisted upon. "I am very grateful to my friends, the Parisian mob," Elizabeth writes to her aunt.
From this time the breach between Elizabeth and her husband was complete. She was also estranged from her son. Her daughter was kept at a long distance from her amidst the most corrupt surroundings. Elizabeth became very lonely. The king, because of her opposition to the seizure of the Palatinate, now ignored her. Her husband seldom spoke to her. Her daughter was away but had been happily married. Her son, at this time, was very dissolute and avoided meeting her. She writes:
"Here in this great court I live, a hermit. Day after day I spend alone in my library. If visitors come I see them a few minutes, speak of the weather or the newspaper, then back again to my solitude."
In 1701 her husband died. By her aunt Sophie's sensible advice, reconciliation followed with the king and also with good-natured Madame de Maintenon. Her son, after one or two successful campaigns in Spain, returned to France loaded with honors. He turned again to his mother with the old affection of his boyhood. Much may be forgiven the Duke of Chartres because of his sincere, even if tardy, goodness to his mother. Her old age was made happy by him. To others he might seem a heartless, dissipated roué, to her he was the eighth wonder of the world the strong, tender, manly son on whom she leaned. Her daughter, too, by frequent, loving letters brought her comfort.
The Duchess of Orleans died December 8, 1722. Beside her coffin her son, then Regent of France, clasped his sister in his arms and the two wept bitterly for their German mother.
Few women have been more loyal to their native country than Elizabeth of Orleans. A day or two before her death she said: "In everything I am now, what I have been all my life, wholly German. I despise those Germans who, from choice, speak and write habitually in a foreign tongue. Such sycophants are not worth a hair."
More fully than any other woman of her day, Elizabeth of Orleans represents the nobler side of German womanhood in a period of national debasement.
Vice was the keynote of the first half of the eighteenth century in Europe. The moral miasma rising from that sink of iniquity, the late court of Louis XIV., and, infinitely more, that of Louis XV., enveloped Germany. Every little German court imagined itself a Versailles. Each German princeling esteemed himself a "Sun god." Mistresses were considered as necessary furnishings to every palace as tables or chairs. Augustus the Strong, of Saxony, is said to have been the father of three hundred and fifty-four illegitimate children. Vice spread through all ranks, often blighting the innocent no less than the guilty woman. Everywhere woman was man's toy. Faded, broken, ruined, she might be cast aside at his caprice. Without semblance of law, he might hold her captive, as in the case of the beautiful Baroness Cosel, a discarded mistress of Frederick Augustus of Saxony, who was kept in prison for fifty years by his majesty's command. Later, as we shall see, the wife of Prince George Louis of Hanover afterward George I. of England suffered a similar fate.
War continued. There were no long intervals of peace. Drunkenness, if possible, increased; certainly it did not decrease. Obscene practical jokes were constantly played. Ordinary conversation was interlarded with indecent words and the most vulgar phrases. Society was rotten to the core.
In a dumb, sub-conscious sort of way, the coarse eighteenth century felt that its balance wheel was badly out of gear, and it attempted, though futilely, to remedy the lawlessness born of vice and war by hedging in each class, almost each individual, of the social order by a thousand petty ceremonials. The eighteenth century was the age of etiquette. Rank was cringingly worshipped. Titles became of paramount importance in the eyes of the middle classes. Borne satirizes this title worship:
"I divide the Germans into two classes those who are Aulic Councillors, and those who would be so if they could. Were I a German prince, it would be quite otherwise. I would make all my subjects happy. I would make them all Aulic Councillors, without discrimination of rank, title, property, family, sex, or age. Then we should read in the Frankfort Weekly Advertiser, 'On the 13th inst. died Mr. Aulic Councillor Schinderhannis, after a few struggles, by hanging, in the thirty-sixth year of his active life. How powerfully this would inflame our patriotism.'" Women received the full benefit of their husband's titles. Borne says:
"At a dinner we sat in this order. Myself, Mrs. Upper Criminal Councilloress, Mr. Finance Councillor, Mrs. Upper Paymistress, Mr. Court-theatre Director, Mrs. Privy-Legations Councilloress, Mr. State Councillor, Mrs. Salt-mines Inspectoress. I was placed, happily, between two lovely women. Mrs. Upper Criminal Councilloress was one of the mildest, sweetest creatures in the world and Mrs. Tax-Gatheress was very captivating. I fell in love with them both. As for my host and hostess, I could hardly look at them without bursting into tears when I recollected that two such amiable persons were the only individuals present without titles."
In the general corruption of early eighteenth century society the single resource for a woman of fine feeling was to turn to God. Small wonder that, when Mysticism revived under the name of Quietism, it found thousands of followers among German women. During that shameful, or, rather, shameless, half century it would seem that the only pure men, the only happy families, left in Germany must be sought for in the ranks of the despised Quietists. Certainly, from no other class did woman, as woman, receive the slightest consideration or respect. Of the Quietists' attitude toward women, Freytag says:
"For the first time since the ancient days of Germany, with the exception of a short period of chivalrous devotion to the female sex, were German women elevated above the mere circle of family and household duties. For the first time did they take an active share, as members of a great society, in the highest interests of humankind. Gladly was it acknowledged by the theologians of the Pietists that there were more women than men in their congregations, and how anxiously and zealously they performed all the devotional exercises, like the women who remained by the cross when all the apostles had fled. Their inward life, their striving after the love of Christ and light from above, were watched with hearty sympathy, and they found trusty advisers and loving friends among refined and honorable men. The new conception of faith, which laid less stress on book-learning than on a pure heart, worked on women like a charm."
Jacob Spener was the great apostle of Quietism in Germany. He introduced and practised a refined mysticism that won him hosts of followers among women. Personal holiness was the constant theme of Spener's teaching.
Just as the marvellous subjective songs of Keats and Shelly were born of emotional Methodism in England, so, also, lyric poetry in Germany sprang from Quietism. The soul struggles of individual seekers after God ripened into a rich literary harvest by which the world will long continue to be nourished.
Two autobiographies of Quietists, by Johann Peterssen and his wife Johanna (born Von Merlau), are of extreme interest.
As in the case of all children in that militant age, Johanna's earliest recollections are of war. One day her mother was alone in the house except for her three little children a girl of seven, a babe, and Johanna, aged four. Suddenly a regiment was heard marching down the road. The mother knew, only too well, what horror that might mean for herself and her little girls. Very hastily she knelt and prayed that they might be saved. Then she led her little ones to a tall field of corn near the house, bidding them lie down between the rows and to keep quite still. Suckling the babe, she, too, lay down in the corn. They were not discovered. When the last military straggler had passed, mother and children hurried to the nearest town for safety. As soon as they were well within the gates, Frau Merlau bade the children kneel down and thank God for their deliverance. The oldest girl objected to the delay. She wanted her supper. "What is the use of praying now?" she asked. "We are safe here." At that moment Johanna's religious experience began. She writes: "Then was I grieved to the heart at this ungrateful speech of my sister, that she would not thank God. I rebuked her for it."
From that day the little maid thought and dreamed almost wholly of spiritual mysteries. Soon after, believing that the midwife brought babies from heaven, she sent by that functionary a greeting to Jesus. At the age of nine Johanna lost her good mother. Her father, a stern, saturnine man, hired a housekeeper, a captain's wife.
"But she was an unchristian woman and did not forget her soldier tricks," writes Johanna. For once when she saw some strange turkeys on the road she seized the best of them. To cook this stolen roast the housekeeper sent Johanna up into a high tower to throw down some loose dry boards. The child fell and lay stunned for a long time. When she regained consciousness and returned to the house she was well scolded for her clumsiness. Johanna refused to go to the table. "I sat apart," she writes, "because I would not eat any of the stolen fowl. It appeared to me truly disgraceful, though I was too timid to say so." It makes a pathetic little picture this baby's martyrdom for conscience' sake.
At the age of twelve, soon after her confirmation, Johanna was sent as maid of waiting to the court of the Countess of Solms Roedelheim. The countess was partially insane. "She imagined I was a little dog and often beat me," Johanna writes. "Whenever we rode over the flooded meadows, she would push me out of the carriage, bidding me swim." Prayer was the lonely, unhappy child's only solace. The countess grew so violent that, at last, Johanna was transferred to the court of the Duchess of Holstein. She accompanied the stepdaughter of the duchess on her bridal journey to Austria, and, in spite of her ever nagging conscience, had an agreeable time.
"The drums and trumpets sounded beautiful on the water," says she; "only I could not help being worried to think I was going to a popish country. Whenever we stopped at an inn I sought a solitary place, fell on my knees and prayed God to prevent my good fortune from working injury to my salvation."
The Duchess of Holstein loved Johanna like a daughter. Johanna laments her own fancied worldliness in girlhood: "I practised myself in all kinds of accomplishments, so that I excelled in these vanities. They were dear and pleasing to me. I had also a real liking for splendid dress because it became me well. People considered me Godly because I liked to read and pray and went to church and could always give a good account of the sermon. I even knew what had been preached upon the same text the preceding year. I was looked upon as a Godly maiden, but I was not really a true follower of Christ."
Nevertheless, Johanna was not worldly enough to suit the bridegroom a gay young lieutenant-colonel to whom her friends had affianced her. He broke the engagement because he complained, "though pretty and well-born, she is altogether too pious."
Johanna was glad to be free. She writes: "I always felt that among the nobility there were many evil habits that were quite contrary to Christ's teaching lust, drinking, and many idle words for which an account must be given to God."
Upon a journey by a slow boat to the baths at Emser, a great thing happened in Johanna's life. Among the passengers, she noticed a studious looking man with a pleasant voice and refined manners. She writes:
"By God's special providence, he seated himself by me, and we fell into a spiritual discourse which lasted some hours, so that the four miles from Frankfort to Mainz seemed to me only a quarter of an hour's journey. We talked without ceasing, and it seemed just as if he read my heart. Then I gave vent to all concerning which I had hitherto lived in doubt. Indeed, I found in this new friend what I had despaired of ever finding in any man in the world. Long had I looked around me to discover whether there really were in the world any true doers of God's word, and it had been a great stumbling block to me that I had found none. But when I perceived in this stranger such great penetration that he could see into the very recesses of my heart, also such humility, gentleness, holy love and earnestness to point the way of truth, I felt that I desired, above all things, to give myself wholly up to God." The man whom Johanna met on the boat was Jacob Spener. Johanna's conversion was complete. She withdrew from court gayeties, dressed simply, lived plainly. At first she was remonstrated with, then ridiculed unmercifully, and, finally, let alone.
Johanna's marriage with Johann Peterssen was most happy. Together they worked for God and for what they believed to be his cause Quietism. Persecution, poverty, sorrows were theirs. But these crosses, though hard to bear, they believed to be God's revelation of Himself. An apocalyptic vision, too, they declared, had been vouchsafed them. Sustained by the unseen bread of faith, they lived to a great age, true to one another, to their fellowmen, and to God.
Very different is our next picture, taken from the court of Hanover. From the moment of her arrival, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia and Princess of the Palatinate, had felt herself at home in Germany. But her youngest daughter, though born in Germany, was never at home there. Sophie, Electress of Hanover, was thoroughly English. Mistress of five languages, she loved only English, and, from choice, would have spoken that alone. She knew more English history than the English ambassadors accredited to her husband's court. To gain, through her remote claim, the English throne either for herself or her descendants, Sophie of Hanover all her life saved, and gathered, and schemed, and relentlessly crushed human obstacles. At the age of eighty, her old eyes gleaming, she said: "I could sink into the grave perfectly happy if I knew that the words 'Queen of Great Britain and Ireland' would be inscribed upon my tombstone." She died within sight of the promised land, only a few weeks before Anne Stuart.
An intellectual woman, an energetic woman, a virtuous woman, using the word "virtue" in its narrower sense of chastity, a wonderfully able woman, was Sophie of Hanover. An amiable woman, a lovable woman, a generous woman, except occasionally for policy's sake, she most certainly was not. But the hardness of her life should in some measure extenuate the hardness of her heart.
Sophie possessed a keen analytical intellect that saw, without the slightest tinge of emotion, clear down to the bottom of things. She passed an almost loveless childhood in a royal nursery far away from her mother, whom she never understood or cared for, and a sunless girlhood as governess in the household of her brother Carl Ludwig, to whom the Rhine Palatinate had been finally restored. Prince Carl and his wife lived a cat and dog life. Disgraceful scenes were continually occurring between them, sometimes even at the court table. The only member of the Palatine household in the least congenial to Sophie was her quick-witted niece Elizabeth Charlotte, afterward Duchess of Orleans.
Even bridal joys unalloyed were not to be poor, plain Sophie's. Duke George William of Hanover, to whom she had been affianced, refused her after seeing her, and, as if she were no more than a horse, foisted her upon his younger brother Ernest Augustus, at that time Bishop of Osnabrueck, but later, through Sophie's clever scheming, Electoral Prince of Hanover.
Delving into the records of the court of Hanover, during the reign of Ernest Augustus and Sophie, is like working in a sewer; the worker is sickened by filth. A part of the time the electress escaped from the court's noxious atmosphere into the purer, higher, colder regions of philosophy. There was no courtier's flattery in the praise Leibnitz gave to Princess Sophie's intellectual ability.
But Sophie of Hanover by no means dwelt continuously on Alma's heights. Much of the time she was down among the sewer filth, contemptuous of it always, but using it, for lack of more durable material, as a temporary foundation for the steps which she meant should lead her and hers up to the English throne. If Sophie of Hanover had been a different kind of person, a gentle, timid, pious woman, or a gay, pleasure-loving, lust-responding woman, the two characteristic types of her age, Edward VII. would not be ruling in Great Britain to-day. Neither, for that matter, would the present German emperor, descended from the electress's daughter, the gifted Sophie Charlotte, be seated upon the throne of the Hohenzollerns.
The attitude of the Electress of Hanover to her unhappy daughter-in-law Sophie Dorothea was unfortunate for both women. Poor little Sophie Dorothea! In passing judgment upon her, the historians all seem to forget her extreme youth at the time of her marriage. Of this petted, spoiled, beautiful child of sixteen, even Thackeray says: "She was a bad wife;" and he sneers at her even while he is relating facts that should go far to justify her in any missteps she may have made in trying to escape from a boorish husband whom she found odiously cruel and selfish. The girl lived in hell; and she sought, through passionate, disinterested love, to gain what to her seemed heaven.
Sophie Dorothea was half French. Her mother, Eleanor d'Olbreuze, one of the very few pure women connected with the court of Hanover in the eighteenth century, was a Frenchwoman of good family. Eleanor d'Olbreuze was legally married to Duke George William of Celle, elder brother of Ernest Augustus of Hanover, although the Electress Sophie did all in her power to prevent the marriage of her former fiance with the beautiful Frenchwoman. Sophie Dorothea was a brunette of the most perfect type, with vivid color and a charming rosebud mouth. Her neck, bust, and arms were beautiful. By nature she was happy, lively, witty, and affectionate.
On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Sophie Dorothea awoke in her pretty yellow and white chamber with the pleasant consciousness of a happy day before her. Her betrothal to a neighboring young noble of the house of Wolfenbuttel was to be celebrated. The girl was not wildly in love with the youth accepted by her parents. But she was satisfied. She had known him all her life, and she liked him well enough, in neighborly, frank, girlish fashion.
It was somewhat late, for Sophie Dorothea was rather an indolent little princess. As she lay there dreaming, with her beautiful dark eyes wide open, her mother, pale and agitated, entered the chamber. The Duchess of Celle hurriedly informed her daughter that there had been a complete change of plans. Early that morning, after travelling all night in her haste, the Electress Sophie had arrived at the castle. It was the wish of the reigning house, the electress said, that Sophie Dorothea should marry her cousin, George Louis of Hanover, son of the Elector Ernest Augustus and his wife, Sophie. The proposed marriage with the Prince of Wolfenbuttel had therefore been hurriedly abandoned.
Now Sophie Dorothea knew her cousin George well. She hated and despised him. Fastidious to a degree, she called her cousin a lout, and declared amid a storm of tears and sobs that she would never marry him. Duke George William was called in to persuade or command his daughter. He came, bringing with him as a gift from the Duchess of Hanover a picture of George Louis set in diamonds. Sophie Dorothea did not receive this love token prettily. She threw it against the opposite wall with such force that the miniature was hopelessly smashed, and the precious stones were scattered on the floor.
But Sophie of Hanover gained her point, as she did always. The marriage was consummated, and the immense fortune of Sophie Dorothea was tightly secured to the reigning electoral house of Hanover. Sophie of Hanover never made a pecuniary mistake. In the present instance the wily electress figured so closely that little Sophie Dorothea was practically left without a penny.
The pretty, lively young bride found the court life of Hanover, with its interminable rules of etiquette, stupid and tiresome. Of her bridegroom even his mother said:
"Sophie Dorothea will find her match in him. A more obstinate, pigheaded boy than my son George never lived. If he has any brains at all they are surrounded by such a thick crust that nobody has ever been able to discover what is in them." He did not want to marry this girl, but was tempted by her ten thousand pounds a year.
Two children, a boy and a girl, were born to George Louis and Sophie Dorothea. The electress superintended the babies and interfered at every turn to thwart her daughter-in-law's wishes concerning them. The prince was harsh, cold, and sullen toward his young wife. The elector was always kind, but Sophie Dorothea found his conversation wearisome and his gallantry distasteful.
The beautiful little princess was very homesick. Nobody cared. She was unutterably lonely. Nobody cared. She was very dull. Nobody tried to entertain her. Then Koenigsmark came. Koenigsmark, the dashing, Koenigsmark, the handsome, with whom she had played in childhood when he was a page in her father's palace. Koenigsmark cared. Koenigsmark loved her. In some respects, Koenigsmark may have been the villain some historians have painted him, but he was genuinely in love with his old playmate, now the neglected, unhappy wife of Prince George Louis of Hanover.
Into this, her first real love experience, Sophie Dorothea threw herself, body and soul. She writes to Koenigsmark:
"I belong so truly to you that death alone can part us. No one ever loved so strongly as I love you. Why am I so far from you? What joy to be with you, to prove by my caresses how I love and worship you! If my blood were needed to ransom you from danger I would give it gladly. I cannot exist without seeing you. I lead a lingering life. I think of our joy when we were together and then of my weariness to-day. Ah, my darling, why am I not with you in battle? I would gladly die by your side. Once more, good-bye. I belong to you a thousand times more than to myself." The woman who wrote these passionate words was a mother. In name, at least, though less well treated than her husband's mistresses, she was a wife. But she was also a starving woman, hungering and thirsting for expressed affection.
Koenigsmark and Sophie Dorothea planned an elopement. Discovery followed. Koenigsmark was secretly murdered by agents of old Countess Platen, one of the Elector Augustus's mistresses. Sophie Dorothea was consigned to the dreary castle of Ahlden a prisoner for life, and there she lived almost half a century. There, while her husband sat on the English throne, she ate her heart out, slowly. Her son grew up and became, after her death, George II. of England. Her daughter married the Crown Prince of Prussia and became the mother of Frederick the Great and of Wilhelmine, Princess of Baireuth.
Sophie Dorothea was constantly making plans to escape. But all such plans proved futile, for she was surrounded by spies. Her one true friend through life, her mother, died. Soon after, an official in whom she had placed implicit confidence betrayed her almost accomplished plan to escape and live quietly in a distant country. This last blow shattered her mind. She wrote one last, madly cursing letter to King George challenging him to meet her before a twelvemonth and a day at the judgment bar of God. A few days later she died of brain fever. A soothsayer had once told King George that he would not outlive his divorced wife a year. Therefore, the superstitious king did his utmost to keep the captive in good health. Physicians were ordered to visit her frequently, and she was permitted daily exercise, both riding and walking, in the open air.
Soon after Sophie Dorothea's death, King George's health began to fail. He started for his beloved Hanover. Just outside Osnabriick a folded paper was thrown into the royal carriage. It was Sophie Dorothea's last maledictory letter. After reading it the king fell down in a fit from the effects of which he died.
As every human emotion of love in princely marriage was crushed out by reasons of state policy, so religion was subjected entirely to expediency. When the Electress of Hanover was asked concerning her daughter, Sophie Charlotte: "Of what religion is the princess?" she replied: "The princess is of no religion, as yet. We are waiting to see what faith the man whom she marries may prefer her to profess." When it was decided that the Prince of Brandenburg should marry her it was found by the politicians that the princess "of no religion at all" suited him exactly. Sophie Charlotte remained true to her early training, or rather to her lack of training. She was a vigorous freethinker to the end of her days. She was much more worthy the name of philosopher than her mother. "She insists, always," wrote Leibnitz, her lifelong friend and admirer, "in knowing the Why of the Why." At Berlin, Sophie Charlotte held a genuinely intellectual court. She gathered around her the foremost scholars of the day. Where scholarship was concerned, the first Queen of Prussia ignored race, creed, and even social station. She cordially welcomed to the circle of her friendship any man or woman with brains. The queen had inherited the grace and tact of her grandmother, Elizabeth Stuart. She was immensely popular. Sophie Charlotte possessed an ever ready sense of humor. She dearly loved to set an infidel and a court chaplain arguing against each other. She delighted in doing things incongruous to the occasion. At her husband's magnificent coronation, during the most solemn and impressive moment, she calmly took a pinch of snuff, thereby drawing down on her careless head the displeasure of her royal consort. Up to the hour of her death, Sophie Charlotte jested. When dying she is said to have declined religious consolation on the very true ground that she knew exactly what the parson would say, and it was, therefore, not worth while to trouble him. "My funeral will give the king a grand opportunity to enjoy a magnificent display," she whispered. It did. Splendor-loving Frederick buried his wife with the utmost pomp.
Sophie Charlotte left a son, afterward Frederick William I. of Prussia, who married unfortunate Sophie Dorothea's daughter, also named, for her mother; Sophie Dorothea. The world knows well through Carlyle and, also, though one-sidedly, through the memoirs of Wilhelmine, sister of Frederick the Great, the story of this union.
This second Sophie Dorothea was not a happy woman. The fate of her imprisoned mother weighed heavily upon her. Secretly, she corresponded with her mother, and did her best to set her free. Again, as in the case of the Electress of Hanover, England furnished the life ambition of a German princess. Sophie Dorothea ardently wished to effect a double marriage between her two children, Frederick and Wilhelmine, and the son and daughter of George II., then crown prince of England. Disappointment at the failure of this project, embittered and shortened her life.
The tall grenadiers, the royal cane and the parsimony of Frederick William and their effect upon his thoroughly subjugated family are well-known. The intense brotherly and sisterly love that existed between Frederick and Wilhelmine was cemented, verily, by a bond of affliction. Hunger and blows were often the portion of these sensitive royal children. Wilhelmine writes of their "summer vacation":
"We had a most sad life then. We were awakened at seven every morning by the King's regiment, which exercised in front of the windows of our rooms on the ground floor. The firing went on incessantly, piff, puff, and lasted the whole morning. At ten we went to see our mother and accompanied her into the room next the King's, where we sat and sighed all the forenoon. Then came dinner time. The dinner consisted of six small, badly cooked dishes, which had to suffice for twenty-four persons, so that some had to be satisfied with the mere smell. At table nothing else was talked of but economy and soldiers. The Queen and ourselves, too unworthy to open our mouths, listened in humble silence to the oracles which were pronounced. After dinner the King slept in his armchair for two hours, and we had to keep as still as mice until he awoke. Then we read with the Queen. When, at last, the King went to his tobacco parliament we were free for a little while."
That Frederick and his sister grew up, under this repressive system, into nothing worse than a pair of neurasthenics seems almost a miracle.
During the eighteenth century there were two distinct types of history-making men in Germany the Frenchified-German, fond of pageants and rich raiment, and the rugged, harsh, yet true-hearted, fighting men of the Dessauer stamp.
The Prince of Anhalt-Dessau was the field-marshal of Frederick William I. To Dessau the science of warfare owes an enormous debt. When a young man, this impetuous prince fell in love with the daughter of an apothecary named Fos. In spite of all obstacles of birth and wealth, he determined to marry the girl of his choice; and because he was, says Carlyle, "perhaps the biggest mass of inarticulate human vitality", certainly, one of the biggest then going about in the world, marry her he did. In spite of Dessauer's being, to quote Carlyle again, "a very whirlwind of a man," the marriage was most happy.
During the first half of the eighteenth century French practically superseded German as the language of polite society. The virile German language largely owes its rehabilitation to a woman, Luise Gottsched, wife of Johann Christopher Gottsched, the famous scholar. As usual, fame has been unjust: the husband has received all the credit, while the wife did all, or nearly all, of the work. Luise Gottsched was one of the brightest women of the eighteenth century. She wrote, exceedingly well. But after her husband began his Dictionary of the German Language and his Model Grammar, Luise was obliged to do what a clever woman whose husband writes a dictionary is always obliged to do, drop all her own literary work to assist him. Morning, noon, and night, year in and year out, Luise Gottsched toiled at this verbal drudgery; and when she was sick, worn out at the age of forty-seven, her husband whined, publicly, because she did not always "answer pleasantly" when he called her from her invalid's couch to copy his interminable manuscripts. She died at the age of fifty-nine. One happy time, though, Luise Gottsched had before she died. She saw Maria Theresa at Vienna. If the following extracts seem somewhat servile, it must be remembered that the letter was written in an age in which royalty worship was a part of life. In fact, Luise Gottsched's delighted description is mainly valuable as a true reflection of the popular feeling about royalty in the eighteenth century. The glimpse it gives of that noble woman, Maria Theresa (1740-1780), is also interesting. The good empress's simple, friendly reception of the husband and wife, her divination of what this visit to Vienna meant in their narrow lives, her kindly desire that they should see all there was to see of interest these things are charmingly illuminative. They make one understand the enthusiastic shout of her Hungarian subjects: "We will die for our King, Maria Theresa." This is what Luise Gottsched wrote:
"To Fraulein Thomasius, of Troschenreuth and Widersberg, at Nürnberg.
"VIENNA, September 28, 1749.
"MY ANGEL:
"First, embrace me. I believe all good things should be shared with one's friends. Hence must I tell you that never, in all my life, have I had such cause to be joyfully proud as on this day. You will guess at once, I know, that I have seen the Empress. Yes, I have seen her, the greatest among women. She who, in herself, is higher than her throne. I have not only seen her, but I have spoken with her. Not merely seen her, but talked with her three quarters of an hour in her family circle. Forgive me if this letter is chaotic and my handwriting uneven. Both faults spring from the overwhelming joy I feel in the two delights of this day the privilege of meeting the Empress and the pleasure of telling your Highness of the honor.
"This morning at ten we went to the palace. We took our places where Baron Esterhazy, who procured us admission, told us to stand. He supposed, as we did, that we, with the hundreds of others who were waiting, might be permitted to see her Majesty as she passed through the apartment on her way to the Royal chapel. After half an hour we had the happiness of seeing the three Princesses go by. They asked the Court-mistress who we were. Then, on being told our names, they turned and extended their hands for us to kiss. The eldest Princess is about ten years old. As I kissed her hand, she paid me a compliment. She said she had often heard me highly spoken of. I was pleased, of course, and very grateful for her remarkable condescension. Forgive me if this sounds proud. Worse is to follow. I cannot tell of the incredible favor of these exalted personages without seeming to be vain. But you well know that I am not vain.
"About eleven o'clock, a man-servant, dressed in gorgeous livery, came and told us to follow him. He led us through a great many frescoed corridors and splendid rooms into a small apartment which was made even smaller by a Spanish screen placed across it. We were told to wait there. In a few moments, the Mistress of Ceremonies came. She was very gracious to us. In a little while, her Majesty entered followed by the three Princesses. My husband and myself each sank upon the left knee and kissed the noblest, the most beautiful hand that has ever wielded a sceptre. The Empress gently bade us rise. Her face and her gracious manner banished all the timidity and embarrassment we naturally felt in the presence of so exalted and beautiful a figure as hers. Our fear was changed to love and confidence. Her Majesty told my husband that she was afraid to speak German before the Master of that language. 'Our Austrian dialect is very bad, they say' she added.
"To which my man answered that, fourteen years before, when he listened to her address at the opening of the Landtag, he had been struck by the beauty and purity of her German. She spoke, on that occasion, he said, like a goddess.
"Then the Empress laughed merrily, saying, ''Tis lucky I was not aware of your presence or I should have been so frightened that I should have stopped short in my speech.' She asked me how it happened that I became so learned a woman. I replied, 'I wished to become worthy of the honor that has this day befallen me in meeting your Majesty. This will forever be a red-letter day in my life.'
"Her Majesty said, 'You are too modest. I well know that the most learned woman in Germany stands before me.' My answer to that was, 'According to my opinion, the most learned woman, not of Germany only, but of all Europe, stands before me as Empress.'
"Her Majesty shook her head. 'Ah, no,' she said, 'my familiar acquaintance with that woman forces me to say you are mistaken.'"
Maria Theresa's husband joined the group and chatted most affably. Some of the younger children were called in and properly reverenced. Then the empress asked the visitors if they would like to see her remaining babies, upstairs. Of course, the Gottscheds were enchanted at the thought. Following the mistress of ceremonies, they went upstairs "to the three little angels there," whom they found in the not exactly celestial act of "eating their breakfast under the care of the Countess Sarrau."
After kissing "the little, highborn hands," the happy visitors were conducted through the private rooms of the palace, "an honor," Frau Gottsched writes, ecstatically, "not vouchsafed to one stranger out of a thousand." Not the least pleasant part of the whole visit naturally was the return to the waiting room, now full, where all "congratulated them upon the unusual honor shown them."
Luise begs her friend, a bit insincerely perhaps, to "burn this letter and tell no one of its contents lest people may accuse us, hereafter, of being proud."
In the eighteenth century the peasants of Germany were fairly well off. Some of the most cruel political disabilities of the peasant class had been removed. Agriculture, in consequence, had made great strides. In the towns the condition of the workingwomen was about the same as in the seventeenth century. To escape man's lust was still the main problem of any virtuous working girl who was unfortunate enough to possess a pretty face.
The chief diversion of rich and poor, alike, was the theatre. Acting was the first profession, except teaching, opened to German women. Dramatic art in Germany, when about to expire from sheer vulgarity, was saved by a woman. She died a martyr to the cause of purity in art.
Frederica Caroline Weissenborn was born in Reichenbach. Her father, a physician, was a man of Calvinistic sternness. Caroline had a lover, Johann Neuber, an actor. Her father, learning of his daughter's infatuation, determined to "whip it out of her." In those days all fathers whipped their grown-up daughters, and their wives too, if they felt like it. But Caroline did not propose to be whipped. She jumped from a two-story window and, with no bones broken, landed in a hedge. Young Neuber, the actor, seems to have been strolling near the hedge that day, for he appeared promptly upon the scene and took Caroline to a neighboring town, where they were speedily married. Fate led the couple to Leipzig. Both Neuber and his wife played there. They became friends with the Gottscheds. Gottsched was deeply interested in the restoration of the German drama. Caroline Neuber was the one woman in the world to carry out, to improve and broaden, the pedant's plans. Upon Luise Gottsched, of course, fell the immense labor of translation and arrangement. The three worked enthusiastically. Neuber kept the accounts and did the marketing.
But the heart and soul of the new movement to improve the German stage was Caroline Neuber, keen-sighted, energetic, sympathetic. Caroline Neuber organized a theatrical troupe upon moral lines hitherto unknown in the history of the stage. All unmarried actresses of the troupe lived with her. She watched their conduct closely and insisted upon decorum. The unmarried actors of the company were obliged to dine at her table. No tavern temptations were to be put in their way. Madame Neuber began by presenting only classic tragedies, but public demand forced her to alternate tragedy with farce. From Hamburg she wrote: "Our tragedies and comedies are fairly well attended. The trouble we have taken to improve taste has not been thrown away. I find here various converted hearts. Persons whom I have least expected to do so have become lovers of poetry, and there are many who appreciate our orderly, artistic plays."
Of Caroline Neuber, Lessing says: "One must be very prejudiced not to allow to this famous actress a thorough knowledge of her art. She had masculine penetration, and in one point only did she betray her sex. She delighted in stage trifles. All plays of her arrangement are full of disguises and pageants, wondrous and glittering. But, after all, Neuber may have known the hearts of the Leipzig burghers, and put these settings in to please them, as flies are caught with treacle."
For a while, Madame Neuber scored a brilliant success in Saxony. Then the public, following a corrupt court, grew tired of classical poetry and virtue on the stage, and clamored for its old diet of buffoonery and immorality. Neuber refused to lower the standard of her plays. In 1733 her contract with the court theatre expired, and the king refused to renew it. He placed a Merry Andrew at the head of the court theatre. In Hamburg and Saint Petersburg, Madame Neuber received similar treatment. But this true artist would not give up her fight for a pure stage. She wrote:
"We could earn a great deal of money if we would play only the tasteless, the obscene, the cheap blood-curdling or the silly, fashionable plays. But we have undertaken what is good. We will not forsake the path as long as we have a penny. Good must continue good."
Caroline Neuber and her husband were growing old. They were bitterly poor. They played subordinate, but never immoral, parts now in any troupe that would take them. They had broken with Gottsched, whose wife was dead. One good friend, Dr. Loeber, remained, however. Dr. Loeber gave the old couple a room, rent free, in Dresden. In the war of 1756, Prussian soldiers, quartered in Dresden, slept in the same room with the Neubers. But the soldiers treated the aged actress with the greatest respect. Not an indecent word was ever uttered by them in her presence. Not a pipe was ever laid upon her poor little writing table. When her husband died in that over-crowded attic, Prussian soldiers bore him, tenderly and reverently, to his grave.
In 1760 the city was bombarded. A shell crashed through the roof of the room where old Madame Neuber lay ill. Dr. Loeber carried her for safety to a suburban village. But the owner of the house to which she was taken, when he found out who she was, refused to let an actress die under his roof; so she was moved again, this time to a room in a cottage nearby. From her bed she could see the vine-covered slopes of Pillnitz. Dying, she folded her withered hands, and murmured: "I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help."