BOOKS.
CARLYLE'S FREDERICK THE GREAT.*
[SECOND NOTICE.]
HAVING driven the French back over the Rhine by the decisive battle of Roasbach, Frederick once more turned against the Aus- trians, whom he encountered at Leuthen, in Silesia. " Leuthen is a long Hamlet of the usual littery sort, with two rows, in some parts three, of farm houses, barns, cattle-stalls ; with Church, or even with two Churches, a Protestant and a Catholic ; goes from east to west above a mile in length." Here the Austrian Commander- in-Chief, Prince Karl, had fortified himself, the whole village being " crammed with Austrians spitting fire from every coign of vantage ; Church and Churchyard especially a citadel of death." After a tough encounter, Frederick's troops storm the village, the leader of the vanguard " smashes-in the Church Gate of the place, nine muskets blazing on him through it ; smashes, after a desperate struggle, the Austrians clean out of it, and conquers the citadel." Once ejected from their strong position, Prince Karl's army never rallied ; it "went all asunder at the first push, and flowed then, torrent-wise, towards all its Bridges over the Schweidnitz Water, towards Breslau by every method." A last stand at the bridges proved of no avail . " Schweidnitz Water is a biggish, muddy stream in that part ; gushing and eddying ; not voiceless, vexed by mills and their weirs. Some firing there was from Croats in the lower houses of the Village, and they had a cannon at the farther Bridge-end, but they were glad to get away • History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, called F'rederich the Great. By Thomas Carlyle. Vole. V.aud VI. London: Caspasan and Hall.
and vanish in the Night ; muddy Weistritz singing hoarse adieu to their cannon and them." The Prussians follow in rapid pur- suit, with flying banners, many regiments singing hymns " of the homely Te-Deum kind." " And thus they advance, melodious, far-sounding, through the hollow Night, once more in a highly remarkable manner. A pious people, of right Teutach stuff, tender, though stout ; and, except perhaps Oliver Cromwell's handful of Ironsides, probably the most perfect soldiers ever seen hitherto." This comparison of Prussian recruits inspired by the drill-serjeant with the famous band of Puritan volunteers is very remarkable, as showing the striking development Mr. Carlyle's doctrine of hero-worship has undergone in the course of twenty years. It required a long chain, and one with a good many links, to bind together two such men as the English Cromwell and the Prussian Frederick. There is clearly room within the folds of this elastic doctrine of hero-worship for more than one Napoleon or Czar Peter.
The battle of Leuthen, described as " the most complete of all Frederick's victories," and " one of the prettiest feats ever done by man in his Fighting Capacity,"—some twenty thousand units of " human stuff " having been killed and wounded,—did not bring the great results expected from it. Frederick got Breslau, but was driven back from the siege of Olmiitz, " an ancient, pleasant little City, in the Plains of Miilzen, romantic, indistinct to the English mind. . . . has its Prince-Archbishop and ecclesiastic outfittings . . . trades in leather, and Russian and Moldavian droves of oxen." The King, anxious to get, not at the " eccle- siastic outfittings," but at the more useful " droves of oxen," besieged the romantic little city for seven weeks, with no other result but a fatal loss of time. While he was besieging, a Russian army of 90,000 men invaded eastern Prussia, committing fearful ravages, "arson, theft, and murder done on the great scale ;" so that Frederick had to hasten up for relief. He met the enemy near the village of Zorndorf, in the province of Branden- burg, a country " by nature a peat-wilderness, far and wide, but tamed extensively . . . the cultivated spaces lying like light- green islands with black-green channels and expanses of circum- anbient Fir." The "monstrous tug of Battle" that took place in these peat regions in the last days of August,1758, is described with extraordinarily graphic power by Mr. Carlyle.
"Friedrich pours steadily along, horse and foot, by the rear of Zorndorf—Russian Minotaur scrutinizing him in that manner with dull bloodshot eyes, uncertain what he will do. It is eight in the morning, hot August ; wind a mere lull, but southernly if any Infantry pours along, like a ploughman drawing his furrow, heedless of the circling crows. Crows or Cossacks, finding they are not regarded, set fire to Zorndorf, and gallop off. Zorndorf goes up readily, mainly wood and straw ; rolls in big clouds of smoke far northward in upon th3 Russian Minotaur." As at Rossbach, so here, again, General Seidlitz, commander of the Prussian horse, decided the day by a brilliant cavalry charge. " Seldom was there seen such a charge ; issuing in such deluges of wreck, of chaotic flight, or chaotic refusal to fly. The Seidlitz cavalry went sabring till, for very fatigue, they gave it up, and could no more The Russian infantry stand to be sabred as if they had been dead oxen. More remote from Seidlitz, they break open the suttlers' brandy casks, and in a few minutes get roaring drunk. Their officers, desperate, split the brandy casks ; soldiers flap down to drink it from the puddles ; furiously remonstrate with their officers, and kill a good inlay of them, especially the foreign sort. ' A frightful blood-bath,' by all the Accounts : blood-bath, brandy-bath, and chief Nucleus of Chaos then extant above ground." So frightful was the carnage on this day of Zorndorf, that when both armies had spent their gunpowder, " then began a tug of deadly massacring and wrestling man to man, with bayonets, with butts of muskets, with hands, even with teeth (in some Russian instances), such as was never seen before." But the Russians even now " stood like sacks of clay, like oxen already dead." These horrors lasted till nightfall, when, the battle being still undecided, " wild Cossack parties are scouring over all parts of the field; robbing the dead, murdering the wounded, doing arson, too, wherever possible." The fighting continued for forty-eight hours longer, with no re- sult on either side, both armies "lugging and tugging, flinging one another about, and describing figures of 8 round each other for three days before it ended." There were some thirty-three thousand men killed and wounded in this " monstrous tug of Battle," Frederick losing " above the Prussian third man." The great King fancied he had achieved, if not a "glorious victory," at least some sort of success, and, praising his generals, " turned his sun-eyes upon Seidlitz with a fine expression in them." This picture about the " sun-eyes " of the Prussian hero—lean and haggard at this time, with an occasional twinge of the gout—is a bit of metaphor of which the gold-sticks at Berlin will be jealous.
The battle of Zorradorf was followed by that of Kunersdorf, in which the Russians.gained a complete victory. It is curious to see how this affects the description. The first stage of the- battle, which was fa7ourable to Frederick, is described with great mi- nuteness, as a " glorious beginning ;" but the latter part, in which the success changed into a thorough defeat, gets passed over with extraordinary rapidity. " And indeed the Battle, from this point onwards becomes blurred and confused to us, only its grosser tea- time visible henceforth." Even the great fact, acknowledged by all historians, not excepting Prussian official writers, that the defeat was owing to the utter want of generalship of Frederick, is not "visible" to Mr. Carlyle. He warmly defends the " Olympian " King, who, against the advice of all his generals, including the in- domitable Seidlitz, decided upon hurling his best troops against an almost impregnable Russian position, and thus brought on the ca- tastrophe. " Seidlitz, though it is an impossible problem to storm batteries with horse, does charge in for the Russian flank in spite of its covering battery; but the torrents of grape-shot are insufferable; the Seidlitz people torn in gaps, recoil, whirl round, and do not rank again . . . . And, in brief, from this-point onwards all goes aback with the Prussians more and more." The hero-King, seeing everything go against him, lost his head, gave up the military command to one of his generals, signed his abdication from the throne, even talked of suicide, and finally ran away. Of course it is not runni g here, but merely a " tragic " event, indistinctly alluded to. "Another thing of the same tragic character, is that of handing over this Army to Finck'a charge. Order there is to Finch of that tenor ; and along with it the following notable Auto- graph,—a Friedrich taking leave both of Kingship and of life." The next night his Royal Majesty slept well, though only on a " truss of dry straw," with " a single sentry at the door ; " and having slept well, the royal " sun-eyes " took a more cheerful view of kingship and life. Frederick, we learn, " is at all times of beautifully practical turn ; and has in his very despair, a sobriety of eyesight, and a fixed steadiness of holding to his purpose, which are of rare quality." This is not meant as irony, but, to judge from all that precedes and follows, a sober, serious expression of hero-worship on the part of Mr. Carlyle.
The period of the war following the battle of Kunersdorf, when Frederick was always, or nearly always, unlucky, is hurried over with great rapidity, on the plea that there being no great battles, no "blood-bath" worth speaking of, the " remaining Two Cam- paigns may fairly be condensed to an extreme degree." However, these " remaining two campaigns " of the Seven Years' War still fill a much greater space than the long period of peace which fol- lowed. To Mr. Carlyle, his hero is nothing if not a fighting man, a "war captain;" and to his adminiatrative capacity, certainly the most notable feature in this moat notable of Hohenzollern Kings, he pays little attention. Amor liugly, the quarter of a century from 1763 to 1786, daring w dee Frederick strove, with much wisdom, though in constant assertion of the l'Etat c'est noi policy, to heal the wounds of the seven years of murder and rapine, is sketched only in dim oatline. With the war, we are toll, the " Hercules. labours of this King have ended, and what was required of him in
World-History is accomplished. On the grand World- Theatre the curtain has fallen for a New Act ; Friedrich's part, like everybody's for the present, is played out. In fact, there is during the rest of his Reign, nothing of World-History to be dwelt on anywhere." If this talk about " world-theatre" and " world-history " means anything, it must be the teaching that the chief object of human beings, the "mission " of mankind in fact, is that of fighting and mutual destruction. That, from the end of the Seven Years' War till the commencement of the French Revolution, "that universal Burning-up, as in hell-fire, of Human Shams," there is no " history," Mr. Carlyle repeats over and over again, while speaking of the peaceable part of Frederick's reign. All the strivings of poor humanity to get a little wiser, a little better, a little nearer to the supreme command of " peace and goodwill upon earth," Mr. Carlyle condemns as " Shams." There is such an immense amount of this old talk about "Shams," of which readers of Mr. Carlyle have had so much already, in the concluding part of Frederick's life-story, that the whole book might go by the title.
The dislike, amounting to positive hatred, which Mr. Carlyle expresses for men of learning, scholars, and authors in general, is curiously illustrated in a sketch of the poet Gellert, stuck into the last volume of The History of Friedrich, and which is a perfect gem in its way. "Readers have heard of Gellert," exclaims
Frederick's historian ; " there are, or there were, English Writings about him, Lives, or I forget what : and in his native Protestant Saxony, among all classes, especially the higher, he had, in those years, and onwards to his death, such a popularity and real splendour of authority as no man before or since. Had risen, against his will in some sort, to be a real Pope, a practical Oracle
in those parts His class-room (he lectures on Morals, some Theory of Moral Sentiment, or such like) is crowded with blue uniforms (ingenuous Prussian officers eager to hear a Gellert), in
these Winters Plainly the Trismegistus of mankind at that date . . . . He had written certain thin Books, all of a thin, languid nature ; but rational, clear ; especially a Bnk of Fables in Verse, which are watery, but not wholly water, an I have still a languid flavour in them for readers A modest, despondent kind of man, given to indigestions, dietetics, hypo- chondria ; of neat figure and dress ; nose hooked, but not too much A man of some real intellect and melody ; some, by .no means much ; who was of amiable, meek demeanour ; studious to offend nobody, and to do whatever good he could by the established methods ; and who, what was the great secret of his success, was of orthodoxy perfect and emi- nent. Whom, accordingly, the whole world, polite Saxon orthodox world, hailed as its Evangelist and Trismegistus. Essentially a common-place man ; but who employed himself in beautifying and illuminating the common-place of his day and generation :—infinitely to the satisfaction of said gene- ration. ' How charming that you should make thinkable to us, make vocal, musical, and comfortably certain, what we were all inclined to think, you creature, plainly divine.' And the homages to Gellert were unlimited and continual ; not pleasant all of them to an idlish man in weak health . . . . Poor Gellert fell seriously ill in December, 1769 ; to the fear and grief of all the world : 'estafettes from the Kurfdrst himself galloped daily, or oftener, from Dresden for the siek bulletin ;' but poor Gellert died all the same (13th of that month) ; and we have (really with pathetic thoughts, even we) to bid his amiable existence in this. world, his bits of glories and him, adieu for ever."
It is impossible not to admire such graphic writing ; but the admiration is mixed with indignation in seeing the vile purposes. which all this brilliancy of word-painting is made to serve. In the same breath in which Mr. Carlyle sneers at poets and other low "human stuff," he speaks of military despotism as the sub- litnest thing upon earth, and applauds tyrants for crushing the life out of whole nations. Here is what Mr. Carlyle has to say about the partition of Poland, in which his hero King took a lead- ing part. " The Partition of Poland was an event inevitable in Polish history, an operation of Almighty Providence and of the eternal Laws of Nature." We wonder whether Mr. Thomas Carlyle would think it goal logic if an 'assassin were to strike him down in the street, under the plea of acting according to the "eternal Laws of Nature." The following is au equally precious. bit of moral philosophy :—" Friedrich, in regard to Poland, I cannot find to have had anything considerable either of merit or of demerit, iii the moral point of view, butsbnply to have accepted and put in his pocket, without criticism, what Providence sent." Will not Herr von Bismark and his Royal master hail these words —English words too—with extreme satisfaction? What is there to prevent Prussia swallowing, not only Schleswig-Holstein but all. Denmark, when such dee.* according to the interpretation of the high-priest of the " eternal Laws of Nature," are not only quite right "in the moral point of view," but even backed by " Provi- dence?" There never was a doctrine put forth more useful to thieves and despots than this final result of the preachings on Heroes and Hero-Worship.
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