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 ............