BOOKS.
CARLYLE'S " FREDERICK."•
IT has often seemed to us a providential thing that Carlyle wrote his Frederick in numerous stout volumes. As a portrait of the Prussian King, not as ho really was but as Carlyle saw him through a mist of violent reactionary emotion, it is one of the most brilliant pieces of Foglish prose, and also one of the most unmoral and misleading. In modern phraseology, we should not be far wrong in calling it Prussian
propaganda of the most insidious type, abounding in the sophistries of Hegel and Treitschke which have sent the German nation mad with egotism. For Carlyle as for the Germans of to-day Frederick II. was the hero-King, and all his monstrous crimes against law and morality were glossed over or made light of, if they were not condoned and even glorified. He began his reign with the treacherous seizure of Silesia, violating his pledged word as if ho were a modern German or Bulger or Greek King ; ho pounced on his harmless Saxon neighbour, as his successors pounced on Belgium, and justified himself, as they have done, by lies and forgeries ; ho was the real author of the partition of Poland, which has caused continual unrest in Eastern Europe and has largely contributed to the outbreak of the present war. Carlyle could enlarge on Frederick's unquestioned merits as a commander and a domestic despot, but his treatment of Frederick's violent infractions of international right is pitifully evasive. In regard to Poland, for instance, if be does not wholly adopt the modern German theory that what you wish to do—if you are a German—must be right, he puts it forward tentatively, and then takes refuge in the lame remark that after all the reader must judge Frederick for himself. It is the same with the well-known case of the Saxon troops who, after capitulating at Struppen, were compelled to serve in the Prussian Army. Carlyle says that the fact is " questionable "—which is ambiguous, for it is beyond question —but he has no word of reproof for a most detestable action, adding that " Friedrich did not the least dream of making any defence, and will have to take your verdict, each as it may be." If Carlyle had professed to be the cold scientific historian whom Acton detected, stating the facts as he found them and refusing to draw any inferences or point any moral, some excuse might be made for him. But he was nothing of the kind. He deliberately set out to exalt Frederick as a model monarch, and, by minin'iziug his grievous faults, he produced an entirely false impression. From the mere Prussian standpoint Frederick was in his time an efficient and aucoessful monarch, enlarging and consolidating the kingdom that hie father left him. But even in Prussia his work had no lasting qualities. Twenty years after his death his famous Army, to which he and his father had devoted the whole resources of the State, was shattered to pieces on the bayonets of Napo- leon. Prussia was so well dr:lied and so well organized from the top that she collapsed far more quickly and more discreditably than old- fashioned Austria or Spain. The real maker of modern Prussia was Stein, who freed the serfs and established the State on the firm base of a contented peasantry ; but the Hohenzollerns and their flatterers have continued to make the most of the Frederick legend in support of their doctrine that Prussia owes all to her Kings. The glamour of his victories has obscured the fact that he drew his troubles on himself by unprovoked assaults on other States. He enlarged Prussia, but he brought fresh misfortunes on Germany as a whole, both in his lifetime and in the traditions of militarism and the inter-State jealousies which he bequeathed to posterity. The gradual extension of Prussian rule over the whole of the German tribes has been a curse to them and to Europe, because it has infected them with the " robber-morality " which Frederick preached and practised and which his successors have developed to an incredible pitch. Yet this was the King whom Carlyle, turning from his exultation over the French Revolution and over Cromwell, chose in his middle age to worship.
We have said that it was providential that he wrote the biography in many volumes. What we mean is that it has done far less mischief in that form than it might have done if it had been confined to one volume. To the public at large Carlyle's Frederick has always been a sealed book. It has, of course, had many readers, but very few indeed, as compared with those who know and delight in his earlier and happier writings, have had the courage to plough through the three thousand pages or so of Prussian history, or the luck to discover the witty episodes that are embedded here and there in the mass. As a defence of enlightened and unmoral despotism, then, Carlyle's huge work has not had much direct influence. The course of events has now convinced us all, we suppose, that his view of Frederick's statecraft was fundamentally unsound, and the time has come when his biography can be regarded with interest simply as an amusing literary performanoe. Mr. Hughes's • Carlyie:s "Frederick the Gnat." Abridged and LdIted by A. M. D. Hushes.
Oxford : at the Clarendon Frear. Beg
abridgment, made with considerable tact, and representing, we should "ay, rather less than a tenth part of the whole, will certainly be read with pleasure. We recall a collection of the battle-pieces, made years ago by the late Professor Ransome, which has shown many readers how well Carlyle could describe an action ; Prussian officers are said to have used them as a military text-book. Mr. Hughes, not confining himself to battles, gives a good many characteristic passages bearing on Frederick's youth, his activity as statesman and administrator, and his private life, all woven into a consecutive story. We miss, of course, soma of the famous digressions, on the little Court of Frederick's sister and so forth, but we are glad to find Voltaire's lively experiences of the Court of Berlin, which form one of the wittiest chapters in the whole book. The selection represents Carlyle at his best and at his worst, and shows clearly why he received the Prussian order " Pour le Merits" as the most potent literary apologist that Frederick over had. As the editor points out in an introduction, which with the historical notes will be found useful, Carlyle was in the sardonic mood of the Latter-Day Pamphlets when he began his biography in 1853, and the fourteen years of hard labour which he gave to it did not sweeten his temper. His glorification of Frederick is in a sense the expression of his despair over the condition of mid-Victorian England. His praise of the Prussian despot, who was at any rate efficient in his rule, is the counterpart of tho bitter sarcasm with which he wrote in his sixth pamphlet of 1850 of " a Parliament speaking through reporters io Buncombe and the Twenty-seven millions, mostly fools." His commen- dation of Frederick's strict discipline for soldiers and civilians alike finds a parallel in his plea for " industrial regiments "—or forced labour —as a cure for the evils of pauperism. He thought that democracy had failed utterly, and he clamoured for a strong man —" bawling for fire from Heaven in default of the matchbox," as Lowell said. After half a century we can see that the Sage of Chelsea was quite wrong alike in his diagnosis of England's malady and in hie view of Frederick. But the purple patches in his last great book may still give pleasure to a discriminating reader.
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