Carlyle's Frederick the Great

Front matter

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Preface

This being a book of selections, I have ventured on occasion to take patches of the text from different chapters and sew them into a single paragraph. I have also on occasion cut out the dispensable parts of sentences, —the amplifications and parentheses; a proceeding utterly inadmissible in any other sort of book, and in the case of some authors even in this sort. But Carlyle is not a structural writer ; with him it is the word that matters ; and his sentence often resembles the polypus with which he compares the Russian square at Zorndorf—if you lop away a limb, it immediately ‘ arranges a new life for itself ’.

The editor’s narrative (enclosed in brackets), which carries on the story from one selection to another, is as short as it can be. I have left Carlyle’s system of inverted commas as I found it. He is fond of quoting from stray leaves of his note-books, and putting these passages in commas, although he is only citing himself ; and he does the same thing when he gives voice to his own medita¬ tions through the mouth of ‘ Smelfungus ’ or another. The reader should be warned of this practice, for I have left the commas standing. No attempt has been made at a uniform spelling in the case of proper names and viii Preface

place-names. The English forms will be found in the Notes and Narrative Links; the German forms, as a rule, in the text.

In the Notes and Introduction I have been much indebted to Professor Koser’s biography of Frederick, to the short and very helpful Life by Mr. W. F. Reddaway (Putnam), and to The Evolution of Prussia by Mr. J. A. R. Marriott and Mr. C. Grant Robertson (Clarendon Press). I have also to thank Mr. Spenser Wilkinson for kindly allowing me to use the plans of Rossbach and Leuthen from his French Army before Napoleon (Clarendon Press).

A. M. D. H.

DATES

A. D.

928 Foundation of the North Mark by Henry the Fowler.

1134-1320 The Ascanian Margraves.

1323-73 Bavarian Margraves.

I 373 “ I 4 I 4 Luxemburg Margraves.

1415 Frederick I of Hohenzollem, Burgrave of Nuremberg, becomes Elector of Brandenburg.

1618 Sigismund, Elector of Brandenburg, invested with the Duchy of East Prussia.

1640—88 The Great Elector.

1660 East Prussia freed from the suzerainty of Poland.

1701 Frederick I becomes first King.

-1712 Birth of Frederick the Great (January 24).

^1713 Accession of Frederick William I.

1726 Frederick enters the Army.

1730 The Crown Prince condemned to death for attempted deser¬

tion, and imprisoned in the fortress of Ciistrin (October).

1731 The Crown Prince is reconciled with the King (August), and

restored to his rank in the Army (November).

1732-40 Life at Ruppin and Reinsberg.

1733 Marries Elizabeth Christina, daughter of the Duke of Brunswick-Bevera.

1740 Frederick’s accession (May 31). October 20, death of Charles

VI. December 16, the Prussians invade Silesia. Decem¬ ber 27, Treaty of Alliance with Russia.

1741 April 10, Mollwitz. June 5, Treaty with France. September,

appeal of Maria Theresa to the Hungarians. October 9, secret agreement of Klein-Schnellendorf. Silesia eva¬ cuated by the Austrians. November, agreement of Klein- Schnellendorf repudiated.

1742 End of January, Charles Albert of Bavaria elected Emperor.

Frederick’s foray into Moravia (January-April). May 17,

X

Dates

Am D.

Chotusitz. July 28, Treaty of Berlin (otherwise called of Breslau).

1744 May, Union of Frankfurt. June, new agreement with France.

August 15, Frederick begins the Second Silesian War. September 16, captures Prague. September-December, disastrous campaign in Bohemia, and retreat to Silesia.

1 745 January 26, death of the Emperor Charles VII, followed by

Treaty of Fiissen. February, Silesia cleared of Austrians by the Old Dessauer. May, secret Treaty of Warsaw between Saxony and Austria, with the connivance of Russia. June 3, Saxons and Austrians descend into Silesia. June 4, Battle of Hohenfriedberg. September, Francis of Lorraine elected Emperor. Battle of Sohr. November 23, Hennersdorf. December 15, Kesselsdorf. December 25, Treaty of Dresden.

1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.

1756 May, Alliance between France and Austria. August 28,

Frederick crosses Saxon frontier. September 9, enters Dresden. October 1, Brown, advancing to relieve Saxon army in Pirna country, is repulsed at Lobositz. October 17, Capitulation of Struppen.

1757 January, Treaty of Westminster. May 6, Battle of Prague.

June 18, Kolin. July, loss of Lusatia. September 9, Kloster Zeven. November 5, Rossbach. November 22, Duke of Brunswick-Bevem defeated and taken at Breslau. Breslau in Austrian hands. December 5, Leuthen.

1758 May, Frederick encamps before Olmiitz. Relinquishes the

siege and retires into Bohemia, July 1-14. August 25, Zomdorf. October 14, Hochkirch. Frederick relieves Neisse November 6; and Dresden November 15.

*759 April-June, Frederick at Landshut. July 23, Zullichau.

August 12, Kunersdorf. September 4, Schmettau surrenders Dresden. End of October, Russians return home. November 21, Maxen.

1760 June 23, Fouquet overwhelmed at Landshut. July 10-29,

Dates xi

A. D.

Siege of Dresden. July 26, Loudon captures Glatz. August 1, Frederick sets out for Silesia, to relieve Breslau. August 3, Loudon raises siege of Breslau. August 15, Liegnitz. October 3-12, raid of Russians and Austrians on Berlin. November 3, Torgau.

1761 August, Loudon unites with Russians in Silesia. Frederick

builds the Camp of Bunzelwitz. September 20, Russians abandon Silesia. October 1, Loudon takes Schweidnitz. October 2, Pitt resigns office.

1762 January 5, death of the Tsarina Elizabeth, and accession of

Peter III. April 9, England refuses further subsidies. May 5, Peace with Russia. June, Alliance with Russia. July 9, the Tsar Peter dethroned, Catharine made Autocrat of the Russias. She recalls her troops from Frederick’s camp. July 21, Burkersdorf. October 9, Prussians recapture Schweidnitz. October 29, Saxony secured by Battle of Freiberg. November 3, preliminaries of Peace between France and England signed.

1763 February, Peace of Hubertsburg.

1764 Treaty of Alliance with Russia. Stanislaus elected King of

Poland (September). Death of the Emperor Francis, and accession of Joseph II.

1768 Religious troubles in Poland ; Russian intervention. October,

Russo-Turkish War.

1769 Joseph II visits Frederick at Neisse.

1770 Frederick returns this visit at Neustadt (August). Austria

annexes the district of Zips.

1771 February, Catharine takes up the idea of a Partition of Poland,

previously mooted by Frederick.

1772 First Partition of Poland.

1778 War of Bavarian Succession begins (July).

*779 War of Bavarian Succession ends (May).

1780 Death of Maria Theresa (November).

* 7^5 January, Austria again threatens Bavaria. July, formation of the Furstenbund.

1786 August 17, death of Frederick.

i

CARLYLE AND FREDERICK

History, on its personal side, is Carlyle’s element. In him, as in the Biblical prophets, the poet (in the larger sense of the word) is a part of the missionary, and History is at once the stuff of his art and the evidence of his doctrine. He can never acquiesce in the effect of the pure imagination, where the mind leaves go of here and now or there and then. He must bind all thoughts and delights to the militant will; and even King Lear, he would say, true though it be as the image of a vital experience, would be truer still if it recorded a fact and had taken, as it were, the immediate stress of life. No one is more impatient of the idea that history is a sort of tale which you may embellish with the fancy. It is the very truth, writing and making itself in the deeds of men, and only to be read with a sacred care. At the same time, as the record of human heroism, it is a poem. All the course of Time, he says, is ‘ an imprisoned Epic, Psalm, or Prophecy’, which it is the his¬ torian’s duty to disimprison.

At its most characteristic pitch this poetical history is a mystic vision. ‘ These clear eyes of neighbour Jocelin ’, he writes of his Chronicler Monk in Past and Present, ‘looked on the bodily presence of King John. Lackland, with a great retinue, boarded once for the matter of a fortnight in St. Edmundsbury Convent. O Jocelin, what did he say, what did he do; how looked he, lived he—at the very lowest what coat or breeches xiii had he on ? Jocelin is obstinately silent. With Jocelin’s eyes we discover almost nothing of John Lackland. As through a glass darkly, we with our own eyes and appliances, intensely looking, discern at most: a blustering, dissipated human figure, with a kind of blackguard quality air, in cramoisy velvet, or other uncertain texture, with much plumage and fringing; riding abroad with hawks; tearing out the bowels of St. Edmundsbury Convent by living at rack and manger there. . . . And in this manner vanishes King Lackland ; traverses swiftly our strange intermittent magic mirror; and rides with his hawks into Egyptian night again. How much in all History is at once inscrutable and certain; so dim, yet so indubitable. For King Lackland tt)as there, verily he ; and did live and look in one way or the other; and a whole world was living and looking along with him. There is the grand peculiarity; the immeasurable one; distinguishing to an infinite degree the poorest historical Fact from all Fiction whatsoever/ But why, then, if the meanest shred of life is so precious that he will strain his sight to save it from Time,—why will he not turn rather to the scene before him? Why does he think more of History with its fragments than of the Present with its feast, and peer in darkness when he may see in the light ? It is a fair question, and Carlyle in an Essay on History has answered it. The light of the Present, he there says, rather blinds the eyes than opens them. We are too near the facts to discern their true significance ; but the Past is visibly encased in the mystery of Being, and ‘ the poet’s work is done to his hand \ Thus in History the impressionist and the mystic in him (and he was compounded of both) come together into play. The coat and breeches of King John, of which his eyes would fain lay hold, are at least one note of a strange generation that is gone into silence, and you hear the silence as you hear the note. And the issues of life are clearer, more solemn, fraught with deeper xiv Introduction

pathos and sterner warning— c grim and sad in the depths of j the old dead Time \

This sort of Prophecy or Psalmody,—this visual mysticism— |

is frequent in The French Revolution and in Cromwell. But |

Frederick , on the whole, is set to another key. It is not a book that he wrote from the heart inevitably. The Seven Years’ j War did not lay open the depths of human nature like the great storm in France; nor was its hero a man of men in the same degree as Cromwell. Not that Carlyle is troubled because the King of Prussia broke treaties and bested his enemies at a knavish game. Under all his craft he can see an ultimate honesty, a sense of the vital and practical thing which is the moral sense itself. As far as it goes his admiration of Frederick is very sincere. He displays him in all the ambiguous brilliance of his nature, Prussian and Frenchman in one, nimble wit with iron will and stoic heart, cruel cynicism with a radiant bonhomie , ambition and imperious pride with homely simplicity and the love of books and friends. He brings him now and then nearer to us as one much sinned against by others, lonely, sensitive, impulsive, his many days heavy with labour and poor in joy. Yet the feeling persists that the man was a will rather than a soul, and remains to us what he was to those around him, ‘ radiant but metallic’. It is a marred hero, born to his cost in an * unheroic and unspiritual time. And to Carlyle the feeling was sometimes a burden. He began the book in January 1853, after a month’s visit to Germany in the previous summer to see the portraits belonging to the story and some of its scenes. The first two volumes, extending to the King’s accession, Were published in 1858 ; and in August and September of that year a second tour was undertaken to inspect the battle -fields. A third volume appeared in 1862; a fourth in 1864; the last two in 1866. For most of these fourteen years he enjoyed the help of two volunteer secretaries; one, Joseph Neuberg, a retired

XV

German merchant, who accompanied him on the two occasions to Germany; the other, Henry Larkin, who among his talents had the gift of drawing maps and plans, and straightened out the tangles of the wars. Nevertheless, Carlyle was worried and depressed with the work. He groaned continually over the big unindexed German histories by ‘ pedants and tenebrific persons ’. It is * a task ’, htfivrites to Emerson, ‘ that generally seems to me not worth doing, and that yet must be done. No job approaching to it in ugliness was ever cut out for me ; nor had I any motive to go on except the sad negative one. Shall we be beaten in our old days ? * In 1852 he saw Luther’s room in the Wartburg, ‘ the most venerable of all rooms I ever entered ’. ‘ I kissed his old oak table, looked out of the window down the sheer Castle wall, and over the range of silent woody mountains, and thought to myself, Here for a time lived one of God’s soldiers.’ That is a spirit out of which he might have written a greater ‘ poem ’ than Frederick , and for some years he had thought of either of these men as a subject for a comprehensive work. Why, then, should he have chosen as he did?

The reason seems to be that he wrote Frederick in the mood of the Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) ; and that book is the final mark of a change in his mind. Nothing after 1845, or even 1843, except The Life of John Sterling and the Address at Edinburgh, is the true Carlyle. For there are two versions of his philosophy, of which the humaner and more helpful is paling in the ’forties beside the other. Whoever would understand him must bear in mind the dismal years between the Reform Bill in 1832 and the acme of Chartism in 1848; for his theory is close to the circumstances of the time, and its temper changes as he views them. He believed that the misery and desperation of the working classes were due to the fact that their rulers had agreed not to govern them, but xvi to leave them alone, as long at any rate as they kept the peace and paid in the tale of work; and this at a time when the industrial revolution had thrust a new order into the frame of the state, and all the questions of modern life—of towns and factories and Capital and Labour—were crying to be answered. With the result that the penury had spread to the brain and heart of the rich, and the wealth of the land was under a spell, for no one enjoyed it. What was worse, the ruling Utilitarian philosophers, from Bentham to Ricardo, had made a theory to mate these practices; a theory in which man is .by nature a seeker after * happiness and that is, as a rule, after wealth, in which virtue is an acquisitive prudence, and the industrial battle an automatic good. To interfere with this conflict for some abstract ethical ideal would be folly, since the weal of the state rested on its intensity, and poverty was the inevitable residue of failure. Carlyle met these facts and this theory of laisstz faire with the passion of a just and merciful and pious man; and the passion ran more and more to the extreme. Was there no force in nature to right the wrong and explode the theory? One unfailing force there was, if it were enlightened —hero-worship. * We needs must love the highest when we see it’ was the important truth in the world; and that man desires happiness apart from the highest was not true at all. But the highest must appear in the flesh, or it would not avail. Ever and again it had appeared in history in a few men or one in an age ; and all the social subordinations came, or once had come, from the reverence of the weaker and lower for the stronger and nobler. Hero-worship was the saving health of the social instinct, the result of all true religion, ‘ the presence of heaven on earth 9 ; and Democracy, understood as the negation of it, was not only anarchy, but atheism. England’s evils would melt away if she found her heroes ; and that was to say, if she found her soul.

xvu

Much of his political speculation is free from any note of tyranny. hero is the crest of a wave; only an heroic

people can' produce him. Fighting and chastising are a minor part of his business ; the major part is to lead and is the moral appeal and the moralizing labour that a Frederick from a buccaneer, and in Burke’s expression, ‘ mellow his usurpations into legality’. ‘The essential element [in William the Conqueror] was not scorching fire, but shining illuminative light ’, such light as ‘ spreads by incalculable con¬ tagion ’. Gurth, the thrall of Cedric, was better off than a modem labourer, for he was sure of his victuals and his work. ‘ But no man is, or can henceforth be, the brass-collar thrall of any man; you will have to bind him by other, far nobler and cunninger methods. Let him go abroad as a trusted one, as a free one, and return home to you with rich earnings at night. Garth could only tend pigs : this one will build cities, conquer waste worlds. How, in conjunction with inevitable Democracy, indispensable Sovereignty is to exist; certainly it is the hugest question ever heretofore propounded to mankind.’ And the pages in which he called his generation to noble living, and stirred them as with battle music, are all afire with fraternity. ‘ Ploughers, Spinners, Builders; Prophets, Poets, Kings; Brindleys and Goethes, Odins and Arkwrights; all martyrs and noble men and gods are of one grand Host; immeasur¬ able ; marching ever forward since the beginnings of the world. The enormous all-conquering flame-crowned Host; noble every soldier in it; sacred and alone noble.’ But then, very often, in the midst of this thrilling strain, there will come another movement, and the master estranges the very hearts that beat to him fastest. ‘ You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices ; you violate his liberty. Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man, is but a less palpable madman ; his true liberty were that a wiser man lay hold of him, and M»o b inspifgT^ It distinguish xvm order and compel him to go a little righter. O, if thou really art my Senior, Seigneur , Elder, Presbyter, or Priest, if thou do know better than I what is good and right, I conjure thee in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never such brass collars, whips, and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices.’ * I understand they do not tolerate freedom of debate on board a Seventy-four.’ This is the argument that leads up to the Discourse on the Nigger Question and the ‘ bene¬ ficent cart whip ’ for ‘ idle Quashee ’, and must always enfeeble his influence. He is never sure of all the difference between flogging a man to salvation (if it were possible) and inspiring him to it.

Now it is plain that you cannot compare the crew of a Seventy-four to a civil Society; for a warship exists for a circumscript end, to which the only means is naval discipline. Right and wrong, in respect of the working of the ship, and within reason, are simple and absolute ; they are, and only can be, by the will of the officer. But Carlyle is always hoping for a civil state as harmonious as if its good and evil were equally determinate; in which, if any discord arose, the loyal and the recalcitrant would be as opposite to one another morally as the angels in Milton. He is always thinking of those single-minded periods when men seemed to ‘ stand all together against the Evil thing ’, and Justice to radiate ‘ as the all-victorious Light-Element ’. The good in man, he says, sinks down through the ‘ vortices and cross-currents ’ of evil to a centre of beauty and order. Or shams and injustices are ‘ an obstruction ’ flung off in the clash of true forces, that these ‘ may remain and embrace brother-like in some resulting force ’. Yes; but when they are flung off, and all goes well, how is it that disease returns and your bells are jangled? For one thing, of course, the heart of man is wicked, and, as Aristotle says, ‘ becomes tired ’ of his virtues. But there are also the laws of growth, the surprises of

XIX truth, the enlargement of desires; whereby the order of one age is a burden to the next, and the new at variance with the old. Carlyle is not only open to these truisms, but possessed by them; his whole reading of history is of an evolution in which the creative and affirmative ages are succeeded by the critical in a spiral ascent. And yet he will not have it that discussion and dispute are all to the good if light and power come of them; or that, as thought presses on to act, the outer liberty is a furtherance and earnest of the inner. He clings to the notion that the dubitative or deliberative consciousness is a sort of disease or a sort of froth upon the mind that aspires and divines. It is the fallacy of killing the goose and demanding the golden eggs. ‘ You talk ’, he says in effect, ‘ of the consent of the subject to the sovereign will. Let me tell you that, when most profitable, the consent is tacit and unreasoned, and men will obey a true hero by instinct, although their tongues rebel.’ Instinct will tell them whether the hero is true; and from this it follows that, so long as a sovereign power maintains itself, it is felt to be, and must be, just and right. We know since the French Revolution that, if it were not, it could not last, or could not last for long. ‘ Might and right, if you give them time, are one and the same. 5 It was easy, when despair urged him, to go further, and to say : the more might the more right, the more sovereignty the better.

Despair began to urge him towards 1850 when he took, in Lowell’s phrase, to ‘ bawling for fire from heaven in default of the matchbox ’. He found himself in what may be called the second depression of the Revolution. The first, after the first wave, was the period of Byron and Shelley. Then came the rally of the twenties, and the crisis of 1832. Carlyle had other hopes than the revolutionaries, but he was with them on the whole, believing that good would rise to the top if the nations were shaken up. The chief aim of his Essays and of

b 2

XX

Sartor Resartus is to propound a gospel for the times, and to give news of the revelation of mystery and divinity in Goethe and the German writers. Then came, in 1837, his Epic of the French Revolution, as of ‘ a God in wrath ’. In the forties (i Chartism 1840, Heroes 1841, Past and Present 1843, CromtOell 1845) he turns from the ‘ fire from below ’ to the ‘ light from above ’, and teaches the doctrine of the saving man. But more especially in certain portions of his Cromwell , the harder note was coming on. The Reform Bill had cast out Satan by Beelzebub, and England had sunk in his sight ever deeper into cant, incompetence, and misery. In the Latter-Day Pamphlets he empties out his vials of despair, and loses altogether that thought of ‘inevitable Democracy’. His account of the national nursery in Prussia under Frederick William and Frederick the Great is meant for a picture of a better world. But most men have received as a warning what he intended for a model.

The doctrine of the strong man is half a truth, and therefore half a romance. It is a point of view that throws up the masses and sublimities, and dwarfs the plains. But by this line of sight he can often see more, and more justly, than the man without a prejudice. There are some who think, for instance, that his portrait of Frederick William is ‘ a splendid tour de force ’; but this is a case where the historian reads the facts by the inner light and his own idea of moral values. Carlyle’s account is at least an illuminative conjecture, and is commonly counted a great act of historical redress. On the other hand, the ‘ worshipper ’ is too unwilling to blame his hero, and falls at times into a vein of excuse that is simply immoral. Even his reading of the facts is subject to the bias. It seems, for instance, that he has quite under-estimated the element of ambition in Frederick when he ascended the throne. According to Professor Koser, the greatest authority xxi on the subject, it is wrong to suppose, as Carlyle does, that the young King was sated with Silesia, and ceased after its acquisi¬ tion to covet other men’s goods. He dallied for a time with the thought of making Prussia the warder of the Reich , and the Prussian King a Mayor of the Palace with more territory to boot; and that hope was blended with the fear for Silesia in the inception of the second war. 1 Again, it is all in keeping with his theory that Carlyle has lifted the personal factor till the others are out of sight. All the drift of general and impersonal causes, all the web of usual things he either skimps or leaves aside. Thus he has skimped the account of the King’s innumer¬ able labours in the internal government—his industrial schemes and ventures—the porcelain factory, the tobacco monopoly, and so forth ; his tariff treaties and wars ; his amendments in the tenure of land ; his new villages in the wastes ; his canals and drainages, and matters like these. We hear much of the army marching and fighting, but little of its recruitment and its methods of discipline. We hear of the legal reforms, but not of the causes that lamed them. It is the chief count in the judgement of posterity that Frederick marched in the first files of his age, but never before them ; that the idea of citizen¬ ship did not touch him ; that the royal absolutism, resting on the army, and that again on a feudalized state, was his sum of wisdom; and that in consequence both army and state were severed from the fresh springs of strength in the age of the Revolution, and fell into that predicament from which the scourge of Napoleon and the labours of Stein were destined to redeem them. But these are aspects that Carlyle does not care to regard, and he leaves obscure the whole structure of Prussian society and even the administrative system.

The present volume has been put together for those many

1 See further the note on the Partition of Poland (p. 357).

XXII who would be glad to make acquaintance with the main moments of the story, as simply a study of personal and national character. On the principle that ‘ a big book is a big evil’ the main moments alone have been taken, and much has been left that is only not of the first importance. In this way the reader will certainly miss the chief marvel of the work—the abundance of the power that etches on the memory so vast a number of figures and personalities, of incidents and landscapes from all the field of the subject and all its borders and approaches, from the records of a dozen countries and a thousand years. But the descriptive gift is at any rate at its highest pitch in some of these selections, and all together are a fair example of Carlyle’s minor style, as we may call it, in the writing of history. Frederick is not written in flame and darkness, like the French Revolution, but in clear and affluent light. None of the battles are rendered in the solemn tone of the story of Dunbar; but one and all are great combinations of precision and power. The mystic temper is not so rife as elsewhere ; the element is shrewd wisdom and a masterful humour, and Emerson called it ‘ the wittiest book in the world ’. Moreover, these Prussians belong, as Frenchmen do not, to the true venue of Carlyle’s insight, so that the reader does not suspect that they are seen vividly but seen amiss. It is true, the events through which we are now living have branded the philosophy of the book. They have written the vices of ‘ the Prussian idea * so large that he who runs may read them, and Prussia, and all Germany after her, are plainly at enmity at this hour with the better genius of our kind. And yet there is an element of indispensable value in the Prussian creed. Logically it knows no right and wrong beyond the borders of the land; but it builds on the neutral excellences of work and discipline and the will to do or die. Carlyle has seen the excellences and blinked the vice. He loves strength and valour, but he loves