A SISTER OF FREDERICK THE GREAT: WILHELMINA OF BAIREUTH.* RICHARD

WAGNER, receiving company at the Wahnfried on

an " off " night of one of the first cycle performances of the Nibelungen, was complimented by an English guest on the notoriety conferred by the Musician of the Future on his little Bavarian town. "Yes," said the composer, "before the time of my trilogy the place was so little known by the German post-office, that letters addressed to Bairenth were constantly sent to Beyrout in Syria. Siegfried and the dragon Fafner have altered all that. Correspondence for Beyrout now often comes here." Wagner was putting historical fact into jocose shape. As capital of one of the three hundred States of the Holy Roman Empire, Baireuth had its golden age, and could boast of ornaments like Frederick the Great's sister, the Wilhelmina of Miss Cuthell's chronicle, of the great statesman Hardenberg in his budding administrative days, and of the humourist Jean Paul Richter. Then on the annexation of the little principality, first to Prussia and finally to Bavaria, came a " Twilight of the Gods," a period afterwards followed by the revival of which Wagner was so proud.

The ideal biographer should be first artisan, then artist.

Miss Cuthell show's well in the former capacity by her skill in quarrying the extensive material of her subject and her industrious archival researches in Berlin and London, and also by her examinations of certain controversial questions touching the authenticity of the Margravine's memoirs raised by writers like Schlosser, the ghastly Droysen, and Ranke. But as artist the lady leaves something to desire. She wanders off her main road into side-lanes of detail, which, though good ?eading in themselves, are not always pertinent to her central topic, and suggest to the critical mind the Horatian Nunc non erat his locus. Her style, always gay, is at times jerky; of pedigrees and page references to her authorities the two volumes have not a vestige, and dates are omitted with a systematic frequency which would have made Gibbon and Carlyle furious.

Wilhelmina, born in 1709, was the eldest child of Frederick

William I., the second Prussian King, whose wife was Sophia Dorothea, daughter of our George I. Physically considered, she was no illustration of the new law of heredity, for her body, fragile in build and enfeebled by weak health, showed a wide departure from the historic Hohenzollern type. But in spirit, intelligence, culture, sense of royal dignity, and capacity for action she was a worthy relative of the Great Elector and of some of his modern descendants. The power of pen visible in her reminis- cences and letters made Sainte-Beuve call her an gcrivain francais of the highest order. Her memoirs are here and there liable, as Carlyle said, to a subtraction of twenty-five per cent, to make them harmonise with facts; but is not all autobiographical work Dichtung and Wahrheit? No wonder if veracity gave way to mendacity, or at least to exaggeration, when she related, e.g., how her father one day beat her with his fists till she was black and blue, sampled her underfoot, and confined her for some months under military guard to a garret in the Palace, where she was half starved, and told that these cruelties might be the preface of worse things to come. The solidity with which the Prussian Ostrogoth had established the new Monarchy on a rocher de bronze made his little child good value in the matrimonial market, and King George was well disposed towards a double marriage scheme planned by Queen Sophia Dorothea, under which the small Wilhelmina was one day to wed our infant Prince, afterwards Heir-Apparent, whose sister would eventualli be the wife of Wilhelmina's baby • Wilhelmina, Margravitte of Baireuth. By Edith E. Cuthell. 2 Tole. London : Chapman and Hall. [21e. net.]

brother Fritz. As the issue of a labyrinth of personal and diplomatic discussions, which as described in the volume before us would be easier to follow if the writer had condescended to sprinkle her narrative with a few dates and genealogies, the plot

collapsed, and when Wilhelmina reached her twenty-second year she was forced, par ordre du mufti, to accept the hand of the prospective Margrave of Baireuth, who, to believe her own questionable arithmetic, was her seventh Royal suitor. The repugnance with which the victim at first regarded her

young husband soon gave way to esteem, and even love.

The Princelet was agreeable, a good musician, not without culture, and his behaviour to her was at first irreproachable. Since, too, her miniature Court was by no means devoid of a fair measure of gaiety and splendour, and as Wilhelmina's existence was further enlivened by visits to and from her

Berlin relatives, she had no reason to complain of her lot. • Of her halcyon years she writes : " I loved the Prince pas-

sionately: our union was the happiest " ; but she fell at last under the influence of " the green-eyed monster," for her husband yielded to irregular "attachments." The sense of her domestic downfall was lessened by her absorption in other interests. Always busy at her easel, slie painted, for instance, and sent to Berlin, a copy of a Vandyck belonging to the Margrave, who, says our authority, had a knowledge of the styles of " Guerchini and Annabel Caraveggio," names not to be found in any European catalogue! Though not equalling as a musical executant her brother Fritz, whose performances on the flute were as notable as his manoeuvres of his " myrmidons of Mars," the Margravine played well on the harpsichord and lute, and her knowledge of composition

enabled her to send Voltaire his Semiramis scored for operatic performance. No wonder she planned the new opera house,

which, we are told, can almost hold its own against Wagner's great building, and has still, according to our authoress, the third largest stage in Europe. The Margrave, after his acces- sion, by widening the narrow streets, and partly removing

the fortifications of his dingy, plebeian Residenzstadt, had transformed Baireuth into a modern civilised city with hand- some buildings and gardens. Wilhelmina's ambition as an improver was not satisfied by her theatre. She planned. and finished the New Hermitage and its adjoining " Temples," a

fine complex of marble colonnades, halls and rooms loaded with splendours of rococo decoration, and gardens full of grottoes, arbours, statuary, and other leauties of horticultural adornment, besides the great waterworks which still play to the delight of the Wagnerian pilgrim.

A later Duchess of Saxe-Weimar and her son made their little Thuringian capital a " German Athens " by giving " stars " like Wieland, Goethe, and Schiller their courtly patronage. In Wilhelmina's time no such luminaries were above the German horizon. " Good society " in Baireuth only talked of hunting, fishing, and farming, and the occasional visits of strangers of culture were few and far between. To this Margravine the principality was indebted for a library and for an important impulse given to the china manufactory. She was the foundress of the College of

Arts and Sciences, as well as of the University of Erlangen, which was opened with due religious and military pomp, the

first Chancellor being a semi-French doctor of high scientific attainments who had been sent by Fritz from Berlii to Baireuth to give the Margrave medical help in an illness. Our authoress says :- "The `Baireuth Pallas,' as the Margravine was addressed in

the opening speech, writes to Frederic as follows I have been to see the inauguration of the University. I , have found it much increased in professors and students. We have some very clever pupils, which makes me hope it will succeed. I went by curiosity to a German debate. It was on the divisibility of matter.

Wilhelmina is not quite correct or frank in this matter.' She herself gave the theses to be debated on, and showed herself to be, not only a thinker, but an fait with Wolff's philosophy. The first was: 'It is not to be denied that matter can think.' The second : It is by no means essential that compound things must consist of units.' "

The high stature of her intelligence is perceptible in the fact that Withelmina, the friend of Voltaire and an adorer of French literature, divined the superiority of the German mind in thought, and made the encouragement of native genius her aim. In consequence, she ordered the debates of the above- mentioned theses to be conducted in German.

One of her special activities lay outside the horizon of the normal ewig weibliche. During the Seven Years' War she

acted as Frederick's Intelligence Department for South Germany, employing her own spies, pumping deserters, collecting information, weighing rumours, and sending her brother long cyphered reports by her own couriers, all with a systematic completeness and regularity recommend- able to Mr. Haldane as pattern-work for his new office. Once when two thousand Austrian Hussars marched through Baireuth the Margravine dragged her frail body from her invalid couch into the hot street to see them pass and count them one by one, next day minutely reporting to Frederick their numbers and appearance. All this was Wilhelmina's private work, the Margrave being officially ranged with his troops on the side of Frederick's enemies. With Voltaire, at this time in France, Frederick and his sister were in constant correspondence, and the grasp of military affairs shown in • Wilhelmina's letters to the philosopher is startling. Of her exhaustive epistolary summary of the three months' opera- tions subsequent to the battle of Kolin her biographer rightly says that it would do credit to any "war-correspondent" or historian. At this time the Margravine had fallen, as the authoress puts it, under "the shadow of death," yet she kept acting as a detached Fbreign Office in her brother's interests.

She instituted at different dates five separate sets of negotiations with Austria's French ally, and after the Prus- sian defeat of Kolin, decided to journey to Paris to bring her powers of pacific persuasion to bear on Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour. The collapse of her health hindered the execution of this scheme, a damper on which was further put by Frederick's announcement that he was not ready to cringe to his enemy. He wrote : " No crown, my dear sister, is worth a mean action."

Voltaire was a. main pivot of the said diplomatic moves. Their acquaintanceship dated from their meeting at the Royal castle of Rheinsberg at the commencement of her brother's reign : it continued during the Frenchman's long residence in his paradis des philosophes, Berlin, and was maintained by correspondence after his rupture with Frederick, and during his retirement to Les Delices, near Geneva. Neither in thought nor style are her letters on philosophic and practical topics inferior to his : in wit Voltaire had the upper hand. Her tinge of orthodoxy prevented her responding to his ecrasez l'infame, and her diluted faith in "the King can do no wrong" helped her to dissent from some of the contentions of the author of the Henriade regarding Henri IV. and the " Roi Soleil." In one of the Margravine's frequent prostra- tions by illness she wrote thus :— " I am reading the memoirs of Sully. I have run thrOugh all those which I have on the history of France. These private memoirs give one a much better idea than general histories, where the author so often attributes great actions, political as well as military, to those who took but little part in them. I have come to the conclusion that you have had very great men, and very ordinary Kings. Henri IV. would perhaps never have reigned, or would not have maintained his position, without Sully ; and Louis XIV., without Louvois, Colbert, or Turenne, would never have acquired the name of Great. Such is the world. Oblations are made to grandeur and not to real greatness."

Voltaire's reply was full of bantering finesses. Telling her "Royal Reverence" that she was the first Princess to praise Sully above the victor of Ivry, he said : " For me, weak mortal that I am, I declare that I love the weaknesses of this good King more than all the. austere virtues of his Ministers." If there is a want of measure in the assertion of our authoress that the correspondence of Wilhelmina and Frederick gives "a picture of the most devoted brotherly and sisterly affection the world has ever seen," it must be allowed that as an unbroken flood of deep feeling their letters stand alone. The warm current of their mutual sympathy sur- vives, interrupted at times by misunderstandings on the King's part, to the last, Wilhelmina's attachment to • her brother serving her as a constant lodestone in life, Frederick's thoughts of his sister never failing him amidst the glories of victory or the pains of defeat. Weakened by

protracted disease, Wilhelmina died on the morning of the terrible Prussian reverse of Hochkirch : when the news

reached her brother four days later, he gave way to his tears and to expressions of unutterable grief. In the gardens of the palace of Sans Souci may be seen the Temple of Friend- ship, where " Wilhelmina in classical drapery, her large eyes riveting the spectator, sits bolding her dog Folichon on her knees." Thither " alter Fritz," leaning on his crutch, loved to wander sadly thinking of the sister he had lost. His marble tribute to her little spaniel was anticipated at Baireuth. In the garden of the Hermitage is a mausoleum where Folichon' rests in a tomb copied from Virgil's so-called grave near Naples.