the league of 1785 was frederick’s last contribution to the politics of europe. he felt that his days were numbered, but answered the summons of death only by quickening the step with which he had long traversed the routine of daily duty. in his last months he remained true to his long-cherished ideal of life and still proved himself diligent, imperious, stoical, and even gay.
the fatal shock to his health, which was already shaken by gout and dyspepsia, seems to have been given at a review in silesia on august 24, 1785. after the man?uvres of the previous year he had written to the infantry inspector-general of the province that he was more dissatisfied with his troops than ever before. “were i to make shoemakers or tailors into generals, the regiments could not be worse,” declared the king by way of prelude to more particular strictures. he threatened court-martial in the following year to whomsoever should not then fulfil his duty.
death-mask of frederick the great.
from the original in the hohenzollern museum, berlin.
when the time arrived for the visit of 1785 to silesia, no symptoms of disorder could keep the345 king from his post. as he made his usual tour of inspection, thousands of the country-folk flocked in to see him pass and to utter their gratitude for his subsidies. so he arrived at the review of august 22nd-25th, which was held in the plain that lies south of breslau, and which military europe regarded as one of the greatest tactical displays of the year.
on the third morning of the four, frederick insisted on teaching his men their duty by sitting his horse for six hours in a deluge of rain without the shelter of a cloak. in spite of the inevitable chill, he then presided at dinner, at which the duke of york, lafayette, and cornwallis were among the guests. fever and ague followed, but he shook them off in a night and completed the review, the progress through silesia, the journey to potsdam, and the inspection of artillery at berlin. on september 10th, he left his capital for the last time.
at potsdam, on the eve of the grand review, the blow fell. within a month of his indiscretion in silesia he was seized in the night with a fit of apoplexy (september 18–19, 1785). gout, asthma, dropsy, and erysipelas set in, and after days of torment he was compelled to spend his nights in fighting for breath in an armchair. yet no disease could break his spirit. “there is traceable,” says carlyle with fine insight, “only a complete superiority to fear and hope.”
partly, perhaps, because austrian troops might menace the frontiers if his weakness were known, but doubtless in part out of fortitude and pride, he concealed his illness so far as possible from his346 subjects and from his friends. he performed the labours of the cabinet with unclouded brain and with a growing fever of energy. his mind was full of plans for establishing new villages upon the districts reclaimed from the sand, for providing technical instruction in agriculture, and for arranging the coming man?uvres in silesia. he continued to read history day by day, and to converse cheerfully with his friends. once he enquired of the duke of courland whether he needed a good watchman, maintaining that his sleeplessness at nights qualified him to fill the post. after seven months of suffering he entertained mirabeau with lively conversation, though his state was so pitiable as to render the interview painful to his favoured guest.
very early on the morning of april 17, 1786, he left the palace in potsdam town, where he had passed the winter, and made a long, circuitous journey to his favourite abode, sans souci. but the change was powerless to bring relief. some days he was too weak to converse as usual with his guests. on june 30th, however, he shocked his doctor by taking a copious dinner of strong soup full of spices, beef steeped in brandy, maize and cheese flavoured with, garlic, and a whole plateful of pungent eel-pie. four days later he actually quitted his chair for a short gallop on horseback, but the exertion left him prostrate.
again he rallied, and until the middle of august disease and his inflexible determination to accomplish the daily routine struggled for the mastery. on august 10th, he sent a tender little note to his347 widowed sister charlotte of brunswick. “the old,” wrote the dying king, “must give place to the young, that each generation may find room clear for it: and life, if we examine strictly what its course is, consists in seeing one’s fellow-creatures die and be born.” by an almost pathetic chance his last letter, written on august 14th, was to de launay, demanding more minute accounts of the hated excise.
frederick, like his ancestors, died at his post. the great elector, whose only fear was that dropsy might unfit him to govern, held a privy council within two days of the end. frederick william amid all his torments spent his last days in private conference with his heir. frederick, an older man than either, began work at five o’clock on the morning of tuesday, august 15th. he made the arrangements for a review at potsdam and dictated despatches of weight with all his wonted clearness. on wednesday he failed, struggling in vain to give his weeping general the parole. all that day he lay in his chair dying, attended by valets, ministers, and physicians. in the evening he slept, and when eleven o’clock struck he enquired the time and declared that he would rise at four. towards midnight he asked for his favourite dog and bade them cover it with a quilt. then for more than two hours his faithful valet strützky knelt by his chair to keep him upright, passing both his arms around the half-unconscious king. at twenty minutes past two in the morning of august 17th, frederick passed quietly away.
hertzberg closed his eyes and led his nephew and348 successor, frederick william, to the corpse. the king had willed to be buried on the terrace of sans souci, but he could now command no longer. throughout one day, august 18th, he lay in state at potsdam. in the evening his coffin was borne to a vault in the garish church of the potsdam garrison, where it rests by the side of his father’s.
frederick’s fame, as was inevitable in the case of one who died on the eve of the french revolution, has fluctuated with the current of subsequent events. the world that he quitted paid to his memory the homage due to one who had been for a generation the foremost among its princes. among his poorer subjects traces of a warmer feeling may be discerned. the legend of the prussian soldier who boasted all his life that frederick had answered his challenge with the words, “dog, hold thy peace,” is doubtless symbolic of the attitude of many of the rank and file. it would be idle to imagine that multitudes of humble serfs did not bewail the loss of the father whose charity succoured them in time of need and whose equity they could always invoke against oppression. it would be no less idle to imagine that among his veteran servants no hearts beat in unison with the heart of general lentulus, who craved the honour of following his great chief as rear-guard, since zieten, who died earlier in the year, had secured the place of pride in the van.
coffins of frederick the great (right) and frederick william i. (left) in the garrison church at potsdam.
berlin, however, rejoiced that frederick was no more. the cry of the hour was, back to frederick william i! led by a silly king (1786–1797) prussia plunged into a teutonic reaction. good-humour,349 pomp, aggressive orthodoxy, the use of the german speech, and a grandiose foreign policy marked the royal condemnation of frederick’s practices. prussia was tempted by profits in poland and in germany to regard the convulsions of france with narrow selfishness. on the field of jena, twenty years after frederick’s death, she paid the price of all her errors (1806). next year her russian ally agreed with napoleon that she should lose half her land, forego the right to arm, and submit for the future to be hemmed in by four hostile states.
prussia was rescued from this plight by forces which found no place in frederick’s system. great ministers now gained ascendancy over the king. the nation flung off the fetters of feudalism, all classes joined in the war of liberation, and the final triumph in 1813–1815 was inspired by the spirit not of autocracy but of german nationality. the memory of frederick faded into that of a ruler of that old despotic type which the sovereigns, in defiance of the claims of their people, were striving to restore.
it was the spirit of nationality, however, that in the long run revived frederick’s renown. the german people cried out for an organisation that should be closer and more virile than the federation into which they had been formed after the overthrow of napoleon. in 1848–49, while austria was paralysed by revolt, they turned hopefully to prussia for leadership, but the reigning king refused to accept an imperial crown at the hands of the mob. from that time onwards, however, the theory gained wide350 credence that it was the destiny of prussia to unite and to regenerate germany.
when in 1866 she worked her will with austria, and when in 1871 the imperial crown was handed to her over the body of prostrate france, the hohenzollern legend grew. results so glorious, men thought, could have been achieved only because a long series of national heroes had worked towards a common goal. the hohenzollerns, and frederick chief among them, were extolled by a thousand pens as the pioneers of a solid and triumphant germany. a generation which salutes by the title of “great” the emperor whom bismarck was wont to hoodwink and cajole is logically compelled to regard frederick as superhuman.
the student who reviews the life-work of frederick without either the sympathy or the bias of german patriotism may return a calmer answer to the question,—is frederick rightly termed “the great”? having followed the main steps in his long career, we may at its close sift out and set down those qualities and achievements, if such exist, which entitle him not merely to a place among the great, but to a place in that small circle of the world’s heroes whose memory is so illustrious that greatness is always coupled with their names.
as a thinker, frederick falls very far short of greatness. though he struggled all his life with the problem of the world and its maker, he convinced himself only that nature furnished irresistible proof of an intelligent creator, but that the idea of an act of creation was absurd. in no department351 of thought was his range of vision long, but he saw with wonderful clearness so far as his sight could penetrate. the very fact that all objects within his ken seemed so distinct prevented him from realising that great forces might lie beyond. thus the method of progress which he followed was that of devising ingenious improvements in a world that was settled and known. though he witnessed the american revolution and died within three years of the great explosion in france, he seems to have had no suspicion that the framework of the world might change.
this lack of sympathy with the deeper currents of human progress reveals itself by many signs in almost all the phases of frederick’s activity. in the art of war, indeed, he had witnessed too great an advance during his own career not to suppose that further advance was possible. he had himself given the infantry a mobility then unrivalled. he had introduced horse-artillery, and created the finest cavalry in the world. in his old age he turned to account the lessons of wars in both hemispheres, by raising his artillery to the importance of a separate arm and experimenting with the straggling tactics of the americans.
literature and learning, however, he regarded with a less open mind. while voltaire lived, he viewed him as the sole surviving man of letters. he treated the work of young goethe, his own fervent admirer, with contempt and showed himself no less blind to the latent possibilities of natural science and mathematics. what he saw clearly was that these studies claimed much devotion, but sometimes failed to352 produce practical results. “is it not true,” he demanded of d’alembert, “that electricity and all the miracles that it reveals have only served to excite our curiosity? is it not true that the forces of attraction and gravitation have only astonished our imagination? is it not true that all the operations of chemistry are in the same case?” euler himself had failed to make the fountains at sans souci play successfully, and the king jeered at geometricians as the very type of the pig-headed. in the campaign of 1778 an officer who trusted his theodolite in preference to his eye was bidden to go to the devil with his trigonometry.
none of frederick’s opinions or whims can be termed unimportant, for his power was so unfettered that he could embody any of them in acts of state. the building of the new palace furnishes a hint of how great might have been the consequences had he given rein to a single enthusiasm in the sphere of art. but with this reservation it is in the domain of statecraft, especially in his system of foreign policy, his economic doctrine, and his theory of the organisation of the state, that we must seek the true measure of his mind.
in his conception of the political world and of prussia’s place in it, acuteness and lack of profundity are again apparent. the acuteness is indeed impaired because of the existence of two political factors, honesty and women, that frederick never understood. the former, it is true, was so rare that his ignorance of its nature hampered him but little, save when augustus frustrated all his plans in 1756,353 and when in the later stages of the seven years’ war louis xv. fulfilled his unprofitable engagements with the queen. but during frederick’s lifetime women played an unusually prominent part in europe, and his misjudgment of them was a serious political defect. prussia suffered severely for his belief that maria theresa was pliable, elizabeth of russia incapable, the pompadour insignificant, and catherine ii. shallow.
in general, however, frederick was as gifted a tactician in politics as in war, and in both he knew how to profit by experience. compared with his handling of france in his early years, his handling of russia from 1762 to 1779 shows an advance as marked as that of his guardianship between mollwitz and leuthen. the circumstances of the age favoured a policy of opportunism for prussia. dexterity, not depth, was profitable, and frederick therefore earned handsome rewards—silesia, east frisia, and west-preussen.
the pillars of his system, none the less, were built of crumbling stone. the triumphs of his successors have to this day shored up some among them—that profit ranks before promises in affairs of state, that morals are to be reserved for manifestoes, and that the rectitude of an act is determined by its success. some, on the other hand, were swiftly demolished by the course of subsequent events. that austria was prussia’s most dangerous foe, that the german princes were her least desirable allies, and that lasting concord with russia was expedient, may be regarded as mistakes, natural enough but damaging354 to frederick’s reputation for profound statesmanship.
his economic errors have been discussed in earlier chapters of this book. where an original thinker would have reflected and enquired, frederick plunged into ill-judged action. while he claimed for prussia a place among the great powers, he was bent on administering her resources as despotically as though she were a farm and he the steward. his thrift and industry palliated but could not cure the evils which flowed from this confusion. the birth of individual enterprise was retarded, while by the concentration of its attention upon petty cash the hereditary tendency of the prussian government to be sordid was intensified. the king, though admirably acquainted with the details of the production of material wealth, was insensible to the vastly greater value of goods which cannot be seen or handled. how, it may be wondered, could his government foster honour, initiative, or independence—qualities which in the long run are the fundamentals even of material success?
in foreign policy frederick was successful, and in economic practice his failure was qualified. but his lack of true insight into the functions of government was fraught with terrible consequences for prussia. judged by the standard of the age, it is true, frederick’s administration was a pattern to the world. the state, as the fashion then was, interfered everywhere and with irresistible strength. its machinery, though cumbrous, ran smooth and true, and the actual expense was small. “if prussia355 perishes,” wrote mirabeau, “the art of government will return to its infancy.”
from the same pen, however, came a verdict, damning, indeed, yet unshaken by appeal to reason or to the event. “if ever a foolish prince ascends this throne we shall see the formidable giant suddenly collapse, and prussia will fall like sweden.” frederick secured his own triumph by making it impossible to succeed him.
against this department of his statecraft a double indictment must be brought. he was not profound enough to see that the machine which he laboured to render indissoluble was such that only an unbroken series of monarchs as gifted as he could guide it. nor was he wise enough, though he knew that the next steersman of the state would be a fool, to alter the machine so as to give it some power of self-direction.
the folly of tacitly assuming that successors like himself would be forthcoming was shared by frederick with many of the great autocrats of history. men abhor the thought of a vacuum created by their own disappearance. the self-abnegation of a washington is as much rarer as it is wiser than the augmented industry of an aged louis xiv. yet the sketch that has been given in this book of the all-embracing activity of the king, who nominated even the sergeants and corporals in an army of 200,000 men, and allowed no branch of his civil hierarchy the least real independence, suffices to show how improbable it was that an ordinary prince could put himself in frederick’s place, and how fatal it would be to the government if he did not.
356 frederick himself stated clearly the ruin that would ensue if a king of prussia relaxed his grip on the finances, embarked upon schemes of premature aggression, or paused to enjoy his kingship. his nephew and heir, to look no further into the future, was a man whom he knew to be likely to commit all these faults. the remedy was to call into existence a body outside the throne and to entrust to its keeping some share in the power which had grown too great for the monarchy to wield. in the bureaucracy frederick possessed a body of loyal and upright men who were not connected with any dangerous caste. yet so far from training them for partial independence, he continued to treat them, from the general directory downwards, like schoolboys who deserved to be flogged. his standing recipe was to keep them between fear and hope. in 1780, to cite only one instance from many, he wrote to the chamber for west-preussen: “ye are arch-rogues not worth the bread that is given you, and all deserve to be turned out. just wait till i come to preussen!” it is not surprising that men of birth and capacity hesitated to serve in the administration during frederick’s lifetime and that narrow-minded pedantry soon became its distinguishing feature after he died. the king bequeathed an impossible task to posterity and the catastrophe of the prussian state at jena was the result.
frederick the second, king of prussia.
after the painting by chodowiecki.
as a thinker, then, even in politics and administration, frederick falls very far short of greatness. his powers were, in reality, those of a man of action. the versatility with which he entered into every357 department of government in turn is no more astounding than the clearness with which he perceived the immediate obstacles to be overcome in each, the courage with which he faced them, and the force, swift, steady, and irresistible, by which he triumphed. the wonderful energy which prompted him to bear on his own shoulders all the burden of the state in war and peace, and to put forth all his strength at every blow, was yet more marvellous because it was susceptible of control. frederick, as we have seen, ceased from the labours of the seven years’ war, only to undertake the reconstruction of the economic life of a great kingdom. by mere overflow of force he finished his history of the war early in the year after that in which peace was made. yet, with all his energy, he was able to realise that not seldom force needs the help of time. he was gratified when some of his enterprises began to repay him after twenty years, and he declined to aggrandise prussia beyond the limit which his statesmanlike instinct taught him that her strength would warrant.
among frederick’s powers, then, energy alone is truly great, but his energy was such that to him few achievements were impossible. if we turn from his powers to his performance, we find his name associated with three great phenomena of history. under his guidance prussia rose at one step from the third to the highest grade among the powers. he was, moreover, the pattern of the monarchs of his time, the type of the benevolent despots of the later eighteenth century. finally, in the great series of events by which germany has become a united358 military empire his life-work fills a conspicuous place. how far, we may enquire, should his work in any of these three fields compel the admiration of succeeding ages?
that part of the hohenzollern legend which portrays frederick as the conscious or semi-conscious architect of the modern german empire finds little support in the record of his life. sometimes, it is true, he used the language of teutonic patriotism and posed as the indignant defender of german liberties against the hapsburg. but he posed with equal indignation as the protector of polish or swedish “liberties” against a reforming king or as the champion of protestantism against powers who might be represented as its foes. the whole course of his life witnessed to his preference for french civilisation over german, and to his indifference as to the race of his subjects and assistants, if only they were serviceable to the state. his point of view was invariably and exclusively prussian. it would never have occurred to him to refuse to barter his rhenish provinces for parts of bohemia or poland because the former were inhabited by germans and the latter by slavs. he was far from being shocked at the suggestion that he might one day partition the empire with the hapsburgs. he struggled for equality with austria, never dreaming of the time when his descendants should expel her from germany and assume the imperial crown. thus, though his work was a step towards their triumph, it was unconscious. he must be judged by viewing his achievements in relation to his own designs.
359 frederick’s influence upon his contemporaries was enormous, and in many respects it cannot be overpraised. he found what has been styled “sultan and harem economy” prevalent among his peers, together with a tendency to regard the income of the state as the pocket-money of the ruler. for this he substituted in europe a great measure of his own ideal of royal duty. fearing nothing and hoping little from any future state, he was yet too proud to flinch from an atom of the lifelong penance that he believed was prescribed for kings by some law of nature. duty to his house and duty to his state were to him the same, and they dictated a life of incessant labour for his subjects’ good, and forbade the appropriation of more than a living wage. other sovereigns followed the prussian mode, and “benevolent despotism” came to be regarded as the panacea for the ills of europe. though it hardly survived the storm of the revolution, it was instrumental in removing many abuses and in promoting during several decades the comfort of the common people. thanks in great part to frederick, irresponsible monarchy became impossible for ever.
frederick’s fame, none the less, finds its most solid basis in the achievement to which all else in his life was subordinate,—the successful aggrandisement of prussia. though it may be true that another and a better way lay open to him, that the path which he marked out led straight to jena, that he owed much of his success to fortune, and that his work was rescued by forces which he had not prized, in spite of all it is to him that prussia owes her place360 among the nations. by his single will he shaped the course of history. his rule completed the fusion of provinces into a state, his victories gave it prestige, and the success of his work of aggrandisement was great enough to consecrate the very arts by which it was accomplished. two decades after his death a king of prussia entered his tomb by night, seeking inspiration to confront napoleon. the architects of modern germany declare that all that they have built rests upon the foundations that he laid. as long as the german empire flourishes and the world is swayed by the principles of its founders, so long will the fame of frederick the great remain secure.
