A Short History of Germany Part 8

But such a being as this, one who has turned to adamant in heroic mold, cannot sympathetically comprehend the finer currents about him. There was going on, quite unnoticed by King Frederick, an awakening in the German mind, and while he was building a structure of material greatness, there had commenced, un.o.bserved by him, another structure, which was to be the chief glory of Germany.

The pa.s.sion for speculative thought awakened by Spinoza was stirring the German soul to its depths. Kant had found that Spinoza's _Eternal Order_ must be a _Moral Order_. That the moral instincts which guided mankind, and were the all in all, were the G.o.d in us, the in-dwelling of the Divine. Thus was embodied the essence of Christianity in a new and speculative philosophy.

Klopstock and Lessing were creating a national literature, which revealed for the first time the strength, resources, and unsuspected beauty of their own language, and which was for the first time being used to express a genius untouched by foreign influence.

But all unconscious of this new, rushing stream of life, Frederick was entertaining Voltaire, spending his evenings in listening to the latest satirical verses of that vain and gifted Frenchman, and laughing at the latest witty epigram from Paris.

It had been one of Frederick's dreams, in his youth, to have his great friend some day reside in his Court. In 1750 this was realized, and the King and the poet settled down to what was to be an everlasting banquet of sympathetic tastes and opinions, seasoned with mutual admiration and friendship!

Frederick felt that he was something of a poet himself, and that he was only prevented by cares of state from letting the world find it out.

The wily Frenchman had been the literary confidant of his royal friend, and many pages of verses had been submitted to him during their long correspondence, and had received flattering commendation from the great critic. So one of the pleasantest features in this closer companionship was expected to be this drop of honeyed praise to sweeten the evening after the day's work was done.

But Frederick's verses bored Voltaire very much, and the royal host began to discover that his great guest was selfish, and cold, and jealous, and even malignant. The nimbus of fascination began to fade.

He could be cutting and satirical as well as Voltaire. The great poet was no less hungry for praise than he, and it was an easy matter to yawn and be bored by his verses, too. And so they became gradually estranged, and finally enemies. They parted in anger, and Voltaire returned to France, to write bitter satires about the King, whose character and ideals he had been one of the chief agents in forming.

There was then in Germany a man whose glory was to outshine Voltaire's or that of any contemporary in Europe, even as the sun does the stars.

But Frederick's ear could not detect music in his own language, nor was his stunted soul attuned to the native and sublime harmonies of Goethe's genius.

CHAPTER XIII.

There had been a time when two nations in Europe could fight each other to the death without disturbing their neighbors, but since there had developed in the sixteenth century that larger unity of European states, there was no such isolated security.

So when, in 1755, England and France came into collision over the boundaries of their American colonies, the shock was felt all over Europe. Just as the earthquake which swallowed up Lisbon at that very time had made the sh.o.r.es of Lake Ontario tremble, so the peace of Germany, which had lasted for eleven years, was broken by an event in far-off Canada.

The two contending parties, England and France, began after the fashion of the time to look about for allies. Maria Theresa, who had invitations from both countries to join them, was considering which could best serve her own private interests. England, since 1714, had been ruled by Hanoverian kings, which practically annexed her to Hanover. It was by no means sure that she could get a.s.sistance from that nation in recovering Silesia--which was to be the price of her alliance. She decided that her best policy was to secure the aid of Louis XV., who would be glad to help her in her plans against Frederick, in return for the a.s.sistance of Austria in this war with England.

As astute and profound as any statesman in Europe, this wonderful Empress adopted means and methods entirely feminine to carry out her immense design.

She knew that Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, was mortally offended with the King of Prussia, on account of some disparaging remarks he had made about her, so she deftly used that to her own advantage.

Then--perfectly understanding how to reach the enslaved Louis XV.--she wrote a flattering letter to Mme. de Pompadour, then in the full tide of her ascendency over the king.

With the greatest secrecy these negotiations were carried on, and at last the compact between the three great powers was concluded and everything ready to commence a war upon Prussia in the spring of 1757; even to the agreement as to the way in which they should cut up and divide among themselves the kingdom of Prussia!

Frederick, through secret agents, was perfectly well informed of their plans. He saw that his ruin was determined upon, and could only be prevented by unhesitating courage. He determined to antic.i.p.ate them.

Before the allied armies were ready, he made one of his catlike leaps into the neutral territory of Saxony, and was in Dresden, half way to Prague, with seventy thousand men.

This so disconcerted the plans of the allies that there was a pause, and conferences were held, in which it was concluded to ask Sweden to join the coalition. Finally, that almost forgotten body, the Diet of the German Empire, formally declared war against Prussia, and the Third Silesian War, or the Seven Years' War, had commenced.

As the avowed object of this great combination was not the recovery of Silesia but the dismemberment of the kingdom, to deprive Frederick of his royal t.i.tle, and to reduce him to a simple Margrave of Brandenburg, it is easy to see the incentive he had to great deeds.

England and a few small German States were his allies; but, as George II. heartily disliked him, he received small a.s.sistance from him, and stood practically alone with half of Europe allied against him.

There were great victories and great defeats during the seven years which followed. There were times when the cause of Prussia seemed lost, and other times when that of the Allies appeared hopeless. But the tide of victory more often set toward Frederick's standard than that of his adversaries. He defeated the Austrians at Prague; the Imperial and French army at Rossbach; a Russian army at Zorndorf; and these and a hundred other names stand in the annals of Prussia for monumental courage, daring, and sacrifice.

In the confused narrative of advancing and retreating armies, of battles and of slaughter, but one distinct impression remains. That is amazement--amazement that so many thousands were willing at the bidding of one ambitious man to die, to lay down their bodies in that heap of dead, for Prussia's greatness to rise upon! That not one was ready to reproach him for having brought these calamities upon them for the sake of Silesia; but instead, with twenty thousand still lying unburied upon one field, that they respond with infatuated enthusiasm to his appeal for more!

But Prussia owes her rise to just such infatuation as this.

_Acquisition_ and _conquest_ are written on her foundation stones, the chief of which were laid by her Great Frederick.

It is pleasant to tell of peace once more. The Allies, wearied of the long war, gradually withdrew from Austria. Being unable to carry it on alone, Maria Theresa was compelled to abandon her dream of ruining Frederick. With bitterness of heart and humiliation she consented to give up Silesia forever as the price of a peace she did not desire. In 1763, the articles were signed (the Peace of Hubertsburg) and the Seven Years' War was over.

Frederick was now called "the Great" throughout Europe; and Prussia took her place among the "Five Great Powers."

The next thing to be done was to repair the desolation left by seven years of war. Nearly fifteen thousand houses were in ashes. So many men had been consumed in the army that there were not enough left to till the fields, nor horses to draw the harvest.

The practical King, antic.i.p.ating this, had been enforcing the cultivation of the much despised potato; and this useful tuber saved Prussia and Silesia from famine, and some of their neighbors as well.

For as many as twenty thousand famishing people came from the trampled and burnt corn-fields of Bohemia to feed upon the Prussian potato and live.

Again the people set about the oft-repeated task of repairing the devastation of war. Indeed for 150 years they had always been either enduring the horrors of a great conflict, or healing its wounds and building up the waste places it had made. Can we wonder that they were strong and serious? The weaklings were winnowed out by these great storms, and the chastened souls of those who survived knew little of pleasure. Religion, which had once been their solace and refuge, had lost much of its power on account of the bitterness of sectarian strife.

A few men groping for a solution of the problems of sin and suffering, and for the meaning of this troubled existence, thought they had found it in the new philosophy. France, under the teachings of Voltaire and Rousseau, had cast off the restraints of religious faith without providing any subst.i.tute, but Germany, more provident, was building a s.p.a.cious house for the soul's refuge when the old was demolished; untrammeled freedom of thought was inscribed upon its doors, and PHILOSOPHY was enshrined within!

All this tumultuous inner life was growth: the growth and unfolding of a great and earnest soul; and the awakening of new capacities for being and doing. There was a rapturous surprise in discovering these capacities, and speculative thought and literature became an absorbing pa.s.sion.

CHAPTER XIV.

At the close of the Seven Years' War, Maria Theresa had spent the twenty-three years of her reign in a fruitless struggle with Frederick.

Instead of dismembering his kingdom and reducing him to a plain Margrave of Brandenburg, she had lost Silesia and was compelled to listen to the praises of her enemy resounding through Europe and to hear him called "the Great."

It was a bitter pill for her nine years later, when she had to confer with the Prussian King as an equal, over the part.i.tion of Poland, and to see him further enriched by a goodly slice of that unhappy country.

But before that event, and just two years after the conclusion of the war, Francis I. died (1755). He had worn the t.i.tle, but she had wielded the power and guided the events ever since that day when, with her infant son in her arms, she had captured the Hungarian Diet at Presburg.

And now that son was Joseph II. But the scepter was still in reality to remain with her while she lived, and in fact her name was to be the last ray of splendor which should illumine the throne of Austria. But these were sunset glories after a long and troubled day, while in Prussia was the brightness of the dawn.

That friendship with Louis XV. so eagerly sought by Maria Theresa led to a very momentous alliance of a different sort. The Empress and the French King together arranged a marriage between her fair young daughter Marie Antoinette and Louis, the young Dauphin of France.

How should the Empress of Austria, born, nurtured, and fed in the very center of despotism--not hearing or heeding the current ideas about human rights and freedom--entirely misunderstanding the past, the present, and the future--how should she suspect the terrific forces which were acc.u.mulating beneath the throne of France, or that it would become a scaffold for her child? Hapsburg and Bourbon, to her mind, were realities as fixed and enduring as the Alps.

She saw no special significance in the fact that thirteen English colonies in America were in rebellion and setting up a novel form of government for themselves. That was England's affair, not hers, and would in time, like other rebellions against properly const.i.tuted authority, be put down.

She did not live to see the end of this struggle, nor the events to which it led in France. Her death occurred in 1780. Her son, Joseph II., strange to say, was imbued with the new ideas of human rights.

Great was the astonishment of Frederick and of Europe, when this young man set about the task of establishing a new and progressive order of things in Austria; and it was a strange spectacle to behold a Hapsburg trying to force upon his people reforms they did not desire, and rights which they did not know how to use.

His plans were high and n.o.ble, but he failed to see that they were too sweeping and too suddenly developed to be permanent. His people were not ripe for emanc.i.p.ation from old shackles, which they had grown to like and venerate. In striving to free the church from the Jesuits, and to emanc.i.p.ate the serfs in Hungary, he had accomplished nothing, and had created chaos. Depressed by the failure in his great design of reformation, Joseph's health gave way. He died in 1790 and was succeeded by his brother Leopold II.

It is not to be supposed that Frederick felt much sympathy with the free young Republic established in America. And if he sent a sword of honor to Washington in 1783, it was because he recognized the greatness of the man; and perhaps, too, because he felt a malicious pleasure in the humiliation of George III.!

The intellectual awakening which this King had failed to understand had wrought a mighty change in Germany. Lessing had been the first to break away from an enfeebling imitation of French _Sentimentlalism_.

The genius of Goethe and Schiller awakened a new spirit in literature, that of _Romanticism_, and there commenced that intellectual convulsion known as _Sturm und Drang_, or storm and stress period. While Goethe and Schiller were supreme in the kingdom of letters, Herder and the Schlegels were great in history and criticism; Humboldt and Ritter in geographical science; Fichte, Hegel, Sch.e.l.ling, and Kant in philosophy; Fouque and Tieck in imagination, and Jean Paul Richter in the mysterious ether of transcendental thought.

When Karl August called Goethe to his Court in Saxe-Weimar, among that group of other ill.u.s.trious authors, and gave to Weimar the name of the "German Athens," it was a Golden Age for Germany.