OLD FRITZ.*

As Lord Rosebery says in his introduction, this is a very human book. Frederick the Great, Prussia's only really able King, has been eulogized and criticized in hundreds of volumes, but we have never read anything giving so simple and homely a picture of him as that drawn by his admiring Swiss reader. Henri do Catt, a cultivated young man of twenty-seven, was studying history at Utrecht in the year 1755 when he met by chance on a canal barge a lively gentleman in a cinnamon coloured coat and a large round wig, who called himself the " first musician of the King of Poland." The stranger invited Catt into his cabin, conversed affably with him on polities, philosophy, and religion, and told him incidentally that " the study of which I know least is politics—it is a study of deceit agreeing very little with my character." Next day Catt heard that his genial new friend was the King of Prussia. Six weeks later ho received from Berlin a definite invitation to enter Frederick's service. He agreed, but was prevented by illness. The invitation was repeated two years later, and this time Catt set out for Prussia, joining the King in Breslau in March, 1758. " I want you to follow me and to keep me company during tho time that this wretched war still lasts," said Frederick ; " I require only one thing from you, and that is that you serve me with that honesty which forms the base of your character. . . . It is especially important to me in the present circumstances to have around me honest souls." Thus the honest Catt became reader, or, as Lord Rosebery more accurately puts it, " literary crony," to the King, and followed him in his campaigns, conversing with him daily, not on Shakespeare and the musical glasses, but on Racine, Voltaire, religion, and kingeraft, and, at exciting moments, on the war itself. Catt kept a diary, with Frederick's know- ledge, and noted his master's conversations. From this diary he com- piled, at a later date, his memoirs, which were intended to cover the twenty-four years that he spent in Frederick's service, but which deal in full only with the two years from 1758 to 1760, and end abruptly with a few pages on the years 1761 and 1762. Thus his book presents Frederick in the very crisis of his fate, battling against a host of enemies, and only saved from utter ruin by the help of Pitt, for whom of course there is not a word of gratitude or recognition. The memoirs, written in French, are preserved in the Prussian Archives, and wore published, in German, some thirty years ago. They had been used long before by German writers like Rodenbeek, from whom Carlyle took a few excerpts

concerning this " very harmless" Catt. Carlyle described the memoirs, apparently without having seen the manuscript, as " not very Bos- wellian," but said that they deserved printing. Of their genuineness and fundamental accuracy there is no question. Honest Catt, though not blind to his master's weaknesses, had a real admiration for him, and his obvious sincerity and freedom from malice must have been rare qualities in the Court of Potsdam.

Frederick's literary tastes naturally have prominence in these memoirs. He was a voracious reader of Latin and French authors, and ho made a practice of learning by heart anything that pleased him. During his long carriage journeys he would learn "several hundred lines by Racine or by Voltaire, or a few pages of Fleshier or of Bossuet." Once he recited a good part of Cicero's " Pro Marcello " to the admiring Catt, and he was always quoting Lucretius, but as a rule he preferred the French classics, and especially Racine :—

" One day, as he was raising his voice and rising with great vivacity to declaim the passages he know by heart—and he knew a great many-- i a new lackey, who spoke French rather well and who was in attendance, believing that ho was being called, from time to time interrupted the

King, who in a tone of declamation sent him to all the In

• Frederick the Crest: the Memoirs of his Reoder Henri dr Cali (1718-1760). Translated by F. S. Flint. With an Introduction by Lord Rosebery. 2 vols. London: Constable and Co. (218. net.] truth, Sir,' said the lackey to me, when I left., 'I was in a fine fright. I thought truly that the King's head was turned. if this continues, I very much fear that this sad thing will lead to an unlucky end. How he strode up and down, how he shouted ' "

He wept over the scene in Britannicus where Burros exhorts Nero to consider the public weal, duly impressing Catt, who remarks : "'the language of the King, which I believed to be truth itself, attached me to him in so true and affectionate a manner, that certain discrepancies have not been able to weaken the keen regard which I conceived."

" Certain discrepancies " is the significant phrase here. Catt hints that he saw through Frederick's literary pose and benevolent professions. But the pose was well sustained. When Catt went to see the King after the disastrous rout at Hecht:it-eh, " ho came up to nto with a rather open air and, in a quiet voice, he repeated to mo these lines from Mithridate, looking at me in a very- singular manner "--varying the lines spoken by Milhridatcs in defeat, with a reference to the Austrian victor Daun instead of to Pompey. And Frederick was not content to read ; he was incessantly scribbling verses, essays, histories, even sermons, and trying them on the patient Catt, who had been warned at the outset by the Marquis D'Argens and Sir Andrew Mitchell never to criticize the Royal efforts. Catt says that he found the King, on the eve of Zorndorf, writing verses in a very small room of the mill, and that Frederick excused himself on the ground that ho had made all his plans and might be allowed " to scribble and rhyme just like anybody else." This anecdote is said to be coloured for artistic effect. But we need not doubt Catt's repeated statements that whenever Frederick had a personal bereavement, a defeat or a success, he set himself to write an ode or an epistle on it, in the conventional French manner of his day. The epistle on the death of his sister, the Margravine of Bay- reuth, occupied him, at intervals, for years, and Catt's continual refer- ences to it inevitably suggest that Frederick's grief was also a pose. When Frederick was not reading or versifying, lie played the flute, which, as Lord Rosebery suggests, was to him what tobacco is to a modern man. In the Highlands, we believe, the chanter of the bagpipes is still used as a solace for an idle hour, like Frederick's flute.

Fortunately the King's intimate conversations with Catt did not always turn on literature. Ho recounted the sufferings of his youth under a stupid and brutal father. Thus his tutor was teaching him Latin, when the King caught them. " `Ah, rogue, Latin to my son f Get out of my sight,' and he gave him (the tutor) a volley of Licks and blows with his stick, accompanying him in this cruel manner into the inner room." After pulling the boy's hair and smacking his face, the irate father departed with the threat : " if I catch you again at your mensa, I will let you know what is what." The tyrant, who afterwards forced him to witness his friend Katte's execution, doubtless gave Frederick's nature a permanent twist, as Lord Rosebery suggests. Yet at times Frederick would try to persuade Catt that old Frederick William was really a good fellow after all. He recalled his meeting with the great Prince Eugene, whose advice to him is worth repeating now :- " Bo always on the great side when you are drawing up plans of campaign. Make them as vast as possible, for you will always fall short of what you intended. Meditate unceasingly on your profession, your operations and those of generals who have made themselves famous. This meditation is the only means of acquiring that prompt- ness of the mind to grasp everything, to imagine everything, that fits the circumstances in which you may happen to find yourself."

He delighted to persuade Catt and himself that he would like to retire into private life at Sans Souci, leaving the cares of State to his nephew. He sketched an ideal scheme of education, very similar in principle to that of the Signora Montessori and totally un-Prussian in spirit. Though an inveterate cynic, he loved to discuss immortality with the pious Catt, who in religious matters was fully a match for his master, according to his own account. Frederick, like many unbelievers, was super- stitious. He believed in premonitions given by dreams, though he would not openly admit his belief, and he thought that he had unlucky days, notably June 18th. His courtiers said that Frederick often promoted or dismissed a man after dreaming of him, and that Balbi- " mon cher Balbichon "—who, after enjoying the highest favour, was disgraced for failing to take (Mosta; had been drawn from obscurity because of a Royal dream. Frederick, like his successors, could assume the airs of a devout lover of peace. " You will agree," he Said once, " that it is cruel to send so many brave and worthy people into the other world, and why ? For a few wretched roods of earth and a few huts." And the man who had first provoked war with Austria by seizing Silesia went on to say : ." At least my intentions have always been pure." Another day he said to Catt, with reference to a burning village :- " You must confess that war is a very cruel thing. What-a life for these poor soldiers, who, while they are being drilled, receive more blows than bread, and who, though they may be less beaten when on cam- paign, retire most of them with gashes and minus a few limbs. . . . You must confess that the Queen's obstinacy and my own make many people unhappy, and that there are very few wars as disastrous as the une we are waging now."

Frederick's affairs were not going well when he moralized in this strain, without realizing his own responsibility any more than the Kaiser does when he apostrophizes his " old God." Yet, hypocrite as he was, Frederick's courage provokes admiration. Cates memoirs deal with the most critical period of the Seven Years' War, including the

rout of Roohkiroh, the suguinary repulse at Kuricradorf, whom the

despised Russians showed themselves the better men, and the capitulation of Finck at ;flaxen, which Frederick's Staff had foreseen as the result of his reckless strategy. But Catt never found his master in utter despair, though after liochkirch Frederick -showed him some opium pills which he always carried in a locket, intending to commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner. As the war dragged on the odds against Frederick grow heavier, yet he was always busy with new schemes for evading his apparent fate. Almost the only occasion on which he showed genuine alarm before Catt was when he heard in January, 1760, that his verses, including satires on his old ally England and on Russia, had been surreptitiously printed abroad and were likely to hamper his diplomacy.

Even if one could judge a Prussian impartially at this time, Frederick as seen by the admiring Catt was not an engaging personality. Ho was slovenly in person, gross in his habits—suffering continually from colic, which his physicians ascribed to his voracity in devouring pies— and capricious in his treatment of his best and most faithful servants. His Staff feared him, but criticized him mercilessly, and not without reason, behind his beak, within hearing of the discreet Catt. In our English phrase, we should say that Frederick was no gentleman. His did much for Prussia, and yet it has been a misfortune for the Prussians that such a man should have been their national hero. Lord Rosebery in his very admirable introduction, while contending that a great general must be almost inhuman, concludes that Frederick had divested himself too completely of human traits and become a heartless intellect.. He points out, however, that Frederick had no liking for " frightfulness," at any rate as practised by the Austrians, and ordered pillagers to be hanged. Lord Rosebery admits to the full Frederick's zeal and industry as a civil administrator, but adds with truth that " a county court judge would have been a greater blessing to Prussian justice than Frederick's meddlesome interference." He reminds us that Frederick showed so little regard for public feeling as to import French tax- gatherers to collect his Customs and Excise duties. His much-vaunted, system was a personal despotism, and under the guidance of his weak successors it collapsed at the touch of Napoleon's hand. What, asks Lord Rosebery, did Frederick bequeath to Prussia ?- "Well, he bequeathed his name and fame as a great conqueror. He became in a secular sense the Patron Saint of Germany. To him they looked up, to him they could always appeal when they contem- plated some peculiarly flagrant act. . . . Ile bequeathed territory, power, and comparative prosperity, but he also bequeathed the terrible heritage of systematic perfidy. He bequeathed, too, what is not so easily transmissible, an heroic and indomitable tenacity. . . . How splendid a figure had his cause been just.. . Finally, he bequeathed the doctrine that all was right for Prussia, which had a code of public morality which did not apply elsewhere. The end, the aggran- disement of Prussia, justified any means. But no such extenuation was valid for any other country. Prussia, to apply a common proverb. might steal a horse when another Power might not look over a hedge. When Joseph II. attempted to annex Bavaria, not by spoliation but by agreement with the Elector, the stern Prussian moralist was up in arms at once to prevent so obvious an iniquity. And now when we hear Prussia which starved Paris denouncing to God and man a blockade which affects her supply of food, we plainly discern once more the voice and heritage of Frederick. . . . Systematic perfidy, rapacity, and hypocrisy, these would seem to be the sinister inheritance that Frederick bequeathed to his people."

Lord Rosebery goes on to say that Frederick's sinister character never- theless deserves study :- " For if his spirit and example be allowed to permeate the world, there is little hope for the future of mankind. Nations will become mere herds of wild beaets, preying on each other when occasion offers, and planning with bestial cunning the favourable opportunity for treacherous attack."

Frederick has had his full share of glory. But Lord Rosebery suggests that his contemporaries Howard, Jenner, and Wesley, who in their several ways were preserving and solacing humanity instead of destroying it, may hereafter be ranked higher than " the wanton conqueror who, possessing consummate qualities of brain and fortitude, was a curse to his age and to his kind."