BOOKS.
CARLYLE'S FREDERICK THE GREAT.*
FIRST NOTICE.
EXACTLY twenty-two years ago, in May, 1840, Thomas Carlyle de- livered before a crowded audience, comprising the galaxy of metro- politan rank and fame, a series of lectures on " Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History." The sixth and last of these lectures treated of the hero as king : " the highest form of heroism, that which we call kingship." The hero-king, Carlyle exclaimed, " is practically the summary for us of all the various figures of heroism ; priest, teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to command over us, furnish us with constant practical teaching, tell us for the day and hour what we are to do." How many kings, according to this definition, the world had ever seen, the orator did not inform his audience; but only coupled the names of Cromwell and Napoleon with his theory. The idea of setting up Frederick II. of Prussia as a hero-king must have entered Carlyle's mind at a later period. It is rumoured that the author's acquaintance with Chevalier Bunsen, and his successor in the ambassadorial dignity, Baron von Usedom, had something to do with this new direction of thought. It is in the nature of hermit philosophers—to which class Thomas Carlyle un- doubtedly belongs—to be influenced by strong individual convictions rather than the broad current of public opinion, and it may have been thus that the strange idea of making a hero of the third King of Prussia gradually acquired form and shape. The very difficulty, nay impossibility, of forming a divine statue out of such material naturally impeded the task, making the labour an immense work of art. So it happened that the history of Frederick the Great is coming to be Carlyle's opus magnum. Probably this history of Frederick will for * History of Friedrich H. of Prussia, caned Prisforttok the Urea& By Thomas Carlyle. Volume lli. London: Chapman and R.U. ever remain one of the finest pieces of literary-painting, as well as ORO of the most marvellous attempts at special pleading, extant in our own or any language. It is with the just .published third volume that the real history of the Prussian hero-king begins. The preceding two volumes were nothing but a somewhat bulky prelude, serving only as a pedestal for the greatness of the coming hero. Nothing less than the master- hand of the historian of the French Revolution was required to make the subject-matter of these two volumes even readable. Shadowy Burgraves of Hohenzollern struggling with still more shadowy Mar- graves and Ritters, in the dreary plains of Brandenburg and Pome- rania, and sleepy Electors diplomatizing with sleepier 'kaisers of the Holy Roman Empire, are not exactly things in which particular interest is felt now-a-days. However, Carlyle's passionate worship of physical force and energy found vent in such occasional outbursts of glowing language as to bring life even into this chaos, and to invest the world of shadows with at least some appearance of reality. The interest could not but grow in coming to more modern times on ground tolerably familiar to the general reader. None could help admiring the extraordinary poetic skill which made a demi-god even out of such an unmitigated brute as Frederick William I. of Prussia. In Germany itself, where more books have been written on the life and times of Frederick IL than on almost any other historical subject, this apotheosis of the recruiting king and his Pasha rule created perfect amazement. The fact that the German translation was published by the Prussian court printer at Berlin, and the addi- tional fact that the history was highly lauded in the columns of the ultra-Conservative ireuz-Zeitung, made the uninitiated think for a moment that there were two Carlyles in this country—the Radical author of the " French Revolution," and the reactionary biographer of Frederick II. The innocent Germans as yet have not come to comprehend how, with thorough honesty, both natures can be united in one; and how the admiration of physical force, disguised under the name of hero-worship, can carry a philosopher and thinker beyond the realms of good sense, and even of what is generally acknowledged to be truth. Here in England the curious literary phenomenon is more than understood ; it is felt in its effects. No author of the present day, passing as liberal, has exercised and is exercising such a deep influence in favour of ultra-Conservatism as Thomas Carlyle. The brilliancy alike and the paradox of his speech, which have gained him so many admirers, chiefly among the younger generation, serve but to swell the number of those who believe that despotism is the great panacea of all social evils affecting the present generation. It would not be going too far to say that Carlyle is answerable, to a very large extent, for the pronounced Conservative feeling which has lately set in among us. The new volume of Friedrich is distinguished in an eminent degree by all the beauties and all the extravagances which marked the former two. There are splendid passages of unsurpassed paint- ing, and there are chapters of political Machiavellism verging on the absurd. The volume begins with Frederick's accession to the throne, and the hero-king throughout fills the central figure in the picture. To elevate him, all other personages on the stage are knocked down indiscriminately, and thrown into the dust. Even Frederick's genial sister, Wilhelmina, fares no better than the test, and is smothered under a heap of ridicule, as the " shrill princess." The only persons who find some sort of mercy with the historian are the king's generals, Schwerin, the two Dessauers, and others, who get some small share of praise for being faithful instruments of the will of the Master. Frederick is left from the beginning to stand out above the rest in superhuman grandeur, a real despot king. Car- lyle's whole admiration is for the father's famous saying: "I am establishing the king's sovereignty like a rock of bronze." The son, we are informed at the outset, "is not the man to awaken Par- liamentary sleeping-dogs, well settled by his ancestors." The modus operandi of Government, started by the young hero-king at his accession, is described as follows : " Friedrich's three principal Secretaries of State,' as we should desig- nate them, are very remarkable. Three Clerks he found, or had known of, somewhere in the Public Offices, and now took, under some advanced title, to be specially his own Private Clerks : three vigorous long-headed young fellows, Eichel, Schuhmacher, Lautensack the obscure names of them, out of whom, now and all along henceforth, he got immensities of work in that kind. They lasted all his life ; and, of course, grew ever more expert at their function. Close, silent, exact as machinery, ever ready, from the smallest clear hint, marginal pencil-mark, almost from a glance of the eye, to clothe the Royal Will in official form with the due rugged clearness and thrift of words ; came punctually at four in the morning in summer, live in winter ; did daily their day's work, and kept their mouths well shut. A very notable trio of men, serving his Majesty and the Prussian nation as principal secretaries of state on those cheap terms, nay, almost as Houses of Parliament, with Standing Committees and Appendages ; so many Ade of Parliament, admittedly rather wise, being passed daily by his Majesty's help and theirs. Friedrich paid them rather well ; they saw no society, lived wholly to their work and to their own families. Eichel alone of all the Three was mentioned at all by mankind, and that obscurely."
Since King Bomba has fallen from his eminence, and the Serene Elector of Hesse-Cassel has come to grief, such model ministers as these, "exact as machinery," and who " keep their mouths well shut," are, alas ! nowhere to be found in the world. What would not the third Napoleon give for such " three vigorous long-headed young fellows," gagging the " Parliamentary sleeping-dogs.."
Carlyle's marvellous skill in word-painting shows itself nowhere so much as in ridiculing personages displeasing to him. The objects of such ridicule are numerous in this volume, extending to all individuals who said or did anything against his Prussian hero. Foremost amongst them stands M. de Maupertuis, the famous French mathematf.
ciao, who wrote a book on the configuration of the earth, and for a long time was the guest of the King of Prussia, but afterwards offended his Majesty. This really meritorious savant is an endless butt of ridi- cule to Mr. Carlyle :
" No reader guesses in our time what a shining celestial body the Man- pertuis, who is now fallen so dim again, then was to mankind. In culti- vated French society there is no such lion as M. Maupertuis since he re- turned from flattening the Earth in the Arctic regions. The Exact Sciences—what else is there to depend on ?' thinks French cultivated society ; and has not Monsieur done a feat in that line?' Monsieur, with fine ex-military manners, has a certain austere gravity, reticent loftiness, and polite dogmatism which confirms that opinion. A studious ex-military man—was Captain of Dragoons once, but too fond of' study—who is con- scious to himself, or who would fain be conscious, that he is, in all points, —mathematical, moral, and others—the man. A difficult man to live with in society. Comes really near the limit of what we call genius of origi- nality—poetic greatness in thinking—but never once can get fairly over said limit, though always struggling dreadfully to do so. Think of it ! A fatal kind of man, especially if you have made a lion of him at any time. Of his envies, deep-hidden splenetic discontents and rages, with Voltaire's return for them, there will be enough to say in the ulterior stages. He wears—at least ten years hence he openly wears, though I hope it is not yet so flagrant—a red wig with yellow bottom (crittiere fauna); and, as Flattener of the Earth is, with his own flattish red countenance and im- pregnable stony eyes, a man formidable to look upon."
Maupertuis being thus caricatured, he is made to do duty as clown in the picture of the hero-king; the "Flattener of the Earth" serving as representative of ignoble art and science, and setting off the noble art of war and despotism as illustrated in the centre por- trait. Whenever some fault or meanness of the hero has to be hidden, the clown caricature is thrust forward to divert the attention of the reader. This is strikingly. manifest in the description of the Battle of Mollwitz. It is notorious, and beyond doubt, that the hero-king ran away in this first. of his battles like a common coward. The fact is thoroughly well established, has never been denied, and there is no mystery whatever about it. Yet Carlyle glosses it over in the following words : "Indisputable it is, though there is deep mystery upon it, the King vanishes from Mollwitz Field at this point for sixteen hours, into the regions of Myth, into Fairyland,' as would once have been said ; but re-appears unharmed in to-morrow's daylight." A little further on we learn that " Friedrich was snatched by Morgante into Fairyland, carried by Diana to the top of Pindus (or even by Proserpine to Tartarus, through a bad sixteen hours), till the Battle-whirlwind subsided. Friendly imaginative spirits would, in the antique time, have so construed it ; but these moderns were malicious, valetish, not friendly ; and wrapped the matter in mere stupid worlds of cobweb which require burning. Friedrich himself was stone-silent on this matter all his life after."—That this account is very unsatisfactory, and far from heroic, Carlyle himself seems to feel, and therefore follows it up, to divert the attention of the reader, with one of his splendid pictures in which the "Flattener of the Earth" is made to figure. It will be seen that there is not much of the "friendly imaginative spirit" so loudly claimed for a hero-king, but so utterly disregarded in the case of a detested " follower of the Sciences called pure " in this sketch. There is rather in the narrative much of the "malicious, valetish, not friendly," it being, besides, somewhat against historical truth.
"Friedrich's adventure is not the only one of that kind at Mollwitz ; there is another, equally indubitable, which will remain obscure, half- mythical, to the end of the world. The truth is, that right wing of the Prussian army was fallen chaotic, ruined; and no man, not even one who had seen it, can give account of what went on there. The sage Mauper- tuis, for example, had climbed some tree or place of impregnability (' tree' Voltaire calls it, though that is hardly probable), hoping to see the Battle there. And he did see it, much too clearly at last! In such a tide of charging and chasing on that Right Wing, and through all the Field in the Prussian rear ; in such wide bickering and boiling of horse-currents- which fling out, round all the Prussian rear-quarters, such a spray of Austrian hussars for one element--Maupertuis, I have no doubt, wishes much he were at home, doing his sines and tangents. An Austrian hussar party gets sight of him, in his tree or other standpoint (Voltaire says elsewhere he was mounted on an ass, the malicious spirit!) too certain the Austrian hussars got sight of him: his purse, gold watch, all he has of movable is given frankly ; all will not do. There are frills about the man, fine laces, cloth ; a goodish yellow wig on him, for one thing—their Slavonic dialect, too fatally intelligible by the pantomime accompanying it, forces sage Maupertuis from his tree or standpoint; the big red face flurried into scarlet, I can fancy, or scarlet and ashy-white mixed, and— let us draw a veil over it! He is next seen shirtless, the once very haughty, blustery, and now much humiliated man, still conscious of supreme acumen, insight, and pure science ; and, though an Austrian prisoner, and a monster of rags, struggling to believe that he is a genius, and the Trismegistua of mankind. What a pickle! The sage Maupertuis, as was natural, keeps passionately asking of gods and men for an Officer with some tincture of philosophy, or even who could speak French. Such officer is at last found ; humanely advances him money, a shirt, and suit of clothes, but can in no wise dispense with his going to Vienna as prisoner. Thither he went accordingly, still in a mythical condition."
This is no doubt an exceedingly clever piece of painting, and in Carlyle's best style. It has only one fault, that of not being true. Maupertuis was in the snit of the flying hero-king when taken a prisoner by the Austrians ; and all the striking description about shirtless" and " monster of rags"—it ought to have been ex- plained, too, how a man can be both "shirtless" and "a monster of rags"—are pure invention, and malicious banter, supplied by Voltaire and others. Though Carlyle affects to disbelieve Voltaire, yet he repeats the stories with evident relish, giving a daub or two in his own grotesque manner. But woe to Voltaire and others when they utter a word against the hero-king ! The " Vie privie," in which the old friend of Frederick told the world many things evidently but too true, and most of them otherwise confirmed, is condemned as a heap of lies and utter fabrication ; and even the Memoirs of the King's tender-hearted sister Willielmina—a woman superior to her brother both in heart and head—are sneered at and abased whenever they do not fit into the preconceived idea of the hero-king. All this would be very beautiful in a novel, but it is not history.
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