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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Thomas Carlyle's monumental work, "History of Friedrich II of Prussia," spans 21 volumes and delves deeply into the life and reign of Frederick II, also known as Frederick the Great. Written in an engaging, quasi-narrative style, Carlyle articulates the complexities of 18th-century Prussian society, weaving historical fact with philosophical reflection. His use of rich, vivid prose captures not only the political intricacies of Frederick's empire but also the cultural and intellectual currents of the Enlightenment era, setting the work against the broader backdrop of European history. Carlyle's focus on individual agency and moral purpose provides a distinctive lens through which to analyze the period's tumultuous events and personalities. Carlyle, a Scottish essayist and historian, was influenced by the tumult of the Victorian era, notably the rise of national consciousness and the philosophical queries surrounding leadership and morality. His admiration for strong, visionary leaders was a driving force in his portrayal of Frederick II, whom he viewed as a paragon of enlightened despotism. Carlyle's prior works on the French Revolution and his engagement with German philosophy further shaped his approach, ensuring a nuanced portrayal that resonates with contemporary discussions on power and governance. This extensive historical analysis is not only a vital resource for students of history and political theory but also a compelling read for anyone interested in the interplay of power, culture, and individual agency. Carlyle's thorough investigation is essential for understanding the legacy of Frederick II and offers profound insights into the challenges of leadership, making it a significant work in the canon of historical literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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History of Friedrich II of Prussia (All 21 Volumes)
Table of Contents
Introduction
An adamantine will collides with the crowded chessboard of Europe. Thomas Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II of Prussia confronts the drama of a single, relentless character set against the frictions of states, ideas, and armies. Through a vast archive of letters, memoranda, and eyewitness testimony, Carlyle explores how purpose and temperament shape events, and how political necessity tests the conscience. The book invites readers to consider whether history is the march of institutions or the deed of individuals, and what it costs a nation to be forged under pressure. Its central concern is leadership under strain and the making of modern power.
This work endures as a classic because it fuses scholarly exactitude with imaginative sweep, establishing a benchmark for narrative history in the nineteenth century. Carlyle’s portrait of rule, responsibility, and statecraft influenced how later writers would frame biography as a dynamic interplay of character and circumstance. Its pages exemplify a mode of historical writing that insists on moral interpretation while remaining anchored in documentary evidence. The ambition, scale, and stylistic force of the project gave English-language readers a durable framework for understanding Prussia’s rise, and it helped to define the historian’s voice as both archivist and interpreter of public life.
Authored by the Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle, the History of Friedrich II of Prussia was composed and published across the late 1850s and mid-1860s, within the high Victorian era. Issued in multiple volumes over several years, it represents Carlyle’s most extensive historical enterprise. The subject is Frederick II, often called Frederick the Great, whose eighteenth-century career unfolded amid intense European rivalries and intellectual ferment. Carlyle’s purpose was not merely to record events, but to understand the forces of character, duty, and governance that animated them. He sought a narrative strong enough to hold both the meticulous fact and the living, troubling question of power.
The book ranges from the lineage of the Hohenzollern house to the complexities of Frederick’s court, policies, and military exertions, while never losing sight of the intricate European context in which Prussia moved. It investigates correspondence, diplomatic maneuvers, and logistical labors alongside the cultivation of letters and philosophy. Carlyle builds a panorama in which decisions are weighed against consequences, and where national resources, temperament, and time all press upon a ruler. Without reducing events to a single cause, he explores how identity and circumstance intersect, sketching a portrait of governance that is administrative as much as martial, intellectual as much as pragmatic.
Carlyle’s intention was to test his longstanding thesis that character can be a decisive historical force, and that leadership entails exacting responsibilities toward order and truth. Yet he also recognized that no sovereign acts in a vacuum. His narrative thus stages a continual negotiation between necessity and conscience, personal vision and structural constraint. The author’s declared aim is understanding rather than adornment: to assemble the best evidence available and to arrange it so that readers can apprehend both the texture of events and the burdens of command. He seeks not to flatter, but to illuminate the stern arithmetic of rule in a turbulent age.
The research behind this history was famously strenuous. Carlyle spent years gathering primary materials, consulting archives in German states, examining letters, dispatches, and contemporary accounts, and comparing conflicting testimonies. He cross-checked timelines, scrutinized minor details, and tracked the movements of people and supplies to ground interpretation in verifiable fact. This documentary labor undergirds the book’s sweeping scenes with granular credibility. The result is an unusual fusion: a chronicle that is scrupulous in its citations yet alive to human motive and contingency. Readers encounter not only the stage of European politics, but also the paperwork, plans, and pressures that make grand decisions possible.
Stylistically, the work bears Carlyle’s unmistakable energy: brisk, aphoristic turns; sharply etched portraits; and a cadence that can pivot from sardonic aside to solemn invocation. He often steps before the curtain to weigh evidence, question sources, or address the reader directly about method and meaning. The prose strives to translate complexities into a theater of intelligible action without sacrificing nuance. Battlefields and council chambers are rendered with tactile immediacy, yet the narrative refuses to be merely picturesque. It is history as moral inquiry, attentive to cause and effect, to the costs exacted by policy, and to the fragility of order amid collision and chance.
As a monument of Victorian historiography, this book helped confirm the literary potential of serious history in English. Its capacious form, argumentative verve, and documentary backbone made it a touchstone for debates about the aims of historical writing: should history be a ledger of facts, or an interpretation of their significance? The History of Friedrich II of Prussia holds both, demonstrating how narrative can clarify patterns while remaining faithful to evidence. Its classic status rests not only on subject and scope, but on a sustained demonstration that style, when disciplined by research, can be a tool of understanding rather than ornament alone.
The book’s influence radiated through subsequent treatments of political biography and military history, encouraging writers to balance the inward study of temperament with outward structures of policy and logistics. It provided a model for integrating letters, state papers, and personal testimony into a cohesive, character-centered account. At the same time, it provoked counterarguments that refined the field, as later historians emphasized social forces, institutions, and longue durée frameworks. Whether embraced or contested, Carlyle’s approach sharpened the conversation about how to write history that is at once compelling, responsible to sources, and alert to the complex interplay between individual agency and systemic constraint.
For contemporary readers, the work remains strikingly relevant. It examines the pressures of governance under uncertainty, the management of limited resources, and the ethical stakes of decision-making in crisis—topics as urgent now as in the eighteenth century. It also meditates on information itself: how documents are produced, preserved, and marshaled to guide action or justify it. By showing the relentless labor behind each resolution, it invites readers to think critically about leadership beyond slogans. The book’s layered pacing—moving from intimate letters to continental maneuvers—offers a rigorous training in seeing how small causes scale into significant, sometimes irreversible, effects.
Themes of duty, discipline, legitimacy, and the shaping of national identity course through the narrative, interleaved with reflections on culture, philosophy, and the tensions of the Enlightenment. Carlyle is fascinated by endurance: of institutions under strain, of a ruler’s resolve, and of a people negotiating burdens and expectations. The book also interrogates memory—what is remembered, who preserves it, and how posterity judges. It asks readers to reconcile admiration for competence with recognition of cost. In doing so, it resists caricature, presenting power as a field of trade-offs where even the clearest vision must wrestle with time, chance, and constraint.
Sprawling across multiple volumes—often presented in many parts, in some editions exceeding twenty—the History of Friedrich II of Prussia stands as an ambitious synthesis of documentary patience and narrative fire. It endures because it confronts perennial questions: what leadership demands; how nations are steered; why character matters; where principle yields to necessity. Readers return to it for the vigor of the telling, the density of evidence, and the disciplined scrutiny it brings to power. In its pages, the past feels both remote and immediate, instructing without sermon, compelling without simplification. That is the secret of its lasting appeal and continuing force.
Synopsis (Selection)
Thomas Carlyle’s multi-volume History of Friedrich II of Prussia narrates the rise of Prussia through the life and reign of Frederick the Great. Drawing on letters, state papers, and battlefield topography, it blends political, military, and administrative history. The work opens by setting the European context and the Hohenzollern lineage that shaped Brandenburg-Prussia. Carlyle follows events in chronological order, tracing how a modest electorate developed disciplined institutions and a durable army. The series aims to show how policy, character, and circumstance intertwined to produce Prussia’s emergence as a great power, while documenting the conflicts and administrative reforms that defined Frederick’s long rule.
The narrative begins with the medieval roots of the Hohenzollerns, the acquisition of the Mark of Brandenburg, and the consolidation of authority amid the Holy Roman Empire’s shifting structure. Carlyle emphasizes the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War and the recovery under the Great Elector, who built standing forces, fostered immigration, and established fiscal controls. These foundations, along with strategic acquisitions and pragmatic diplomacy, created the system Frederick would inherit. By examining early rulers and regional constraints, the work explains the political geography of north-central Europe and the structural pressures that made disciplined governance, fiscal rigor, and military readiness essential to state survival.
After the Great Elector, Frederick I assumed a royal title in 1701, symbolizing elevated status, while his son, Frederick William I, imposed austerity, frugality, and relentless organizational discipline. The canton system, efficient taxation, and a carefully maintained army became hallmarks. Prince Frederick grew up under exacting expectations, cultivated literature and music, corresponded with French thinkers, and clashed with his father, culminating in punishment and confinement after a failed flight and the execution of a companion. Later reconciled, he governed at Rheinsberg with intellectual pursuits and practical training. Carlyle presents this period as preparation for rule, highlighting administrative habits and the formation of a capable command style.
Frederick ascended in 1740 amid European uncertainties over succession, finance, and alliances. His move into Silesia initiated the First Silesian War, framed by competing claims and strategic calculations. Early battles revealed the strength and limits of the Prussian system, testing infantry precision and leadership. Diplomatic exchanges and interim treaties reflected a fluid balance of power. By the conclusion of the conflict, Prussia had reshaped its position in Central Europe. Carlyle integrates battlefield description with cabinet decisions, showing how Frederick’s calculated risks aimed at securing a defensible economic and strategic base that could sustain the administrative and military reforms inherited and refined.
Renewed fighting in the Second Silesian War intersected with the wider War of the Austrian Succession. Prussia’s operations sought to confirm gains and deter encirclement. Battles emphasized maneuver, speed, and disciplined firepower, while diplomacy balanced threats and opportunities. The settlement that followed left Silesia in Prussian hands and recognized a new regional equilibrium. Carlyle examines the interplay of war finance, logistics, and leadership, noting the demands placed on the bureaucracy at home. The conclusion of hostilities allowed consolidation: legal adjustments, administrative tightening, and careful management of resources, all aimed at sustaining military readiness while stabilizing internal governance and external relations.
The Seven Years’ War posed a graver test. Facing multiple coalitions, Frederick preempted, then endured sustained pressures on several fronts. Campaigns included sharp victories and significant reverses, with operations at Prague and Kolin, Rossbach and Leuthen, and later Zorndorf and Hochkirch illustrating alternating momentum. Carlyle follows marches, supply lines, and staff work, portraying the strain on manpower and treasury. He outlines the diplomatic chessboard: Britain’s support, Austrian and Russian coordination, and shifting minor-state alignments. The narrative underscores the endurance of Prussian institutions under continuous threat, while noting the cost to population, infrastructure, and the administrative apparatus sustaining prolonged conflict.
Crisis peaked after heavy losses and near exhaustion. Defeat at Kunersdorf and subsequent setbacks exposed the limits of resilience, with enemy incursions reaching Prussia’s heartland. The turning point came not from battlefield surprise but diplomatic and dynastic change: the death of a key adversary and a resulting shift in alliance policy altered the strategic calculus. Peace negotiations concluded in the Treaty of Hubertusburg, restoring prewar territorial arrangements. Carlyle emphasizes how survival, rather than expansion, defined the war’s outcome for Prussia. The settlement confirmed the state’s stature, preserved Silesia, and validated the administrative and military system under extraordinary stress.
Postwar governance focused on reconstruction and efficiency. Frederick prioritized legal rationalization, fiscal discipline, and economic development, including agricultural promotion, land reclamation projects like the Oderbruch, and canal works to facilitate trade. Religious tolerance and pragmatic civil administration aimed to maximize human capital. Cultural patronage continued alongside practical reforms, even as relations with intellectuals, notably Voltaire, oscillated between admiration and dispute. In foreign policy, Prussia participated in the First Partition of Poland, consolidating territorial continuity, and waged the limited Bavarian Succession War, demonstrating preference for maneuver and negotiation over decisive battles. Carlyle documents these measures as instruments of stability and controlled growth.
In Frederick’s final years, routine governance, close supervision of officials, and extensive correspondence defined the court at Sanssouci. His death in 1786 closed a reign that elevated Prussia to great-power rank through institutional rigor, territorial consolidation, and measured diplomacy. Carlyle’s overarching message presents the formation of a modern state through continuous work, administrative exactness, and strategic calculation. The biography’s breadth—military campaigns, domestic policy, and European diplomacy—seeks to show how leadership interacts with structure and circumstance. The work concludes by situating Frederick’s legacy within shifting continental balances, emphasizing the durability of systems he shaped and the precedents they set.
Historical Context
Thomas Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II of Prussia unfolds across central and eastern Europe during the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on Brandenburg–Prussia and the sprawling contest for power among Habsburg Austria, Bourbon France, Romanov Russia, and the maritime Britain. The book’s temporal core runs from Frederick II’s birth in 1712 to his death in 1786, though Carlyle backlights the narrative with earlier Hohenzollern history. The setting is an archipelago of territories—Brandenburg, Prussia, Pomerania, Cleves, Mark, and, later, Silesia—stitched by military roads, canals, and a disciplined bureaucracy. It is an era of cabinet wars, cameralist administration, and a mercantile economy reshaped by constant mobilization.
Socially, the world Carlyle depicts is hierarchical and agrarian, dominated by Junker landholders, serf labor east of the Elbe, Lutheran and Calvinist traditions, and a court centered on Berlin and Potsdam. The Prussian state cultivated a standing army in peacetime, exact taxation, and managerial oversight of resources such as timber, grain, and woolens. Urban centers—Berlin, Königsberg, Breslau—grew as administrative and commercial hubs, while Silesia’s industries and mines became flashpoints of wealth and conflict. The Enlightenment’s rationalizing ethos infused governance, yet dynastic claims and balance-of-power calculations—especially over Silesia—repeatedly determined the trajectory of the realm Carlyle chronicles.
Carlyle begins with the Hohenzollern rise from margraves of Brandenburg to electors and, after 1618, to rulers of Brandenburg–Prussia. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) ravaged the Mark, but the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) consolidated territories and autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire. Frederick William, the Great Elector (r. 1640–1688), forged a standing army, centralized taxation, and secured sovereignty in Ducal Prussia by the Treaty of Wehlau (1657) and Oliva (1660). These structural foundations are repeatedly invoked by Carlyle as the sinews enabling Frederick II’s later exploits; his narrative treats the Great Elector as prototype of disciplined statecraft and prudent expansion.
Frederick I crowned himself King in Prussia at Königsberg in 1701, but it was Frederick William I (r. 1713–1740), the Soldier-King, who constructed the military-fiscal machine. He instituted the canton system for conscription, built a peacetime army exceeding 80,000, pared court expenditure, and professionalized the General Directory (1723). His obsession with tall grenadiers and drill masked a broader program of frugality, social order, and administrative reliability. Carlyle portrays this reign as the iron framework inherited by Frederick II, emphasizing the continuity of institutions, revenue discipline, and officer-Junker symbiosis that would carry Prussia through existential war.
Frederick II, born in Berlin on 24 January 1712, endured a harsh upbringing. In 1730 he attempted to flee paternal tyranny, was arrested, and saw his friend Hans Hermann von Katte executed at Küstrin; Frederick was confined and then rehabilitated. He married Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern in 1733 and presided over a small court at Rheinsberg, cultivating philosophy and music. Carlyle uses these early crises to frame Frederick’s character: stoic self-command, intellectual breadth, and a steely resolve formed under duress. The episodes function in the book as moral prelude to rule—private suffering converted into public duty and methodical governance.
Frederick II acceded on 31 May 1740 and, within months, invaded Habsburg Silesia as the War of the Austrian Succession began. He cited dynastic claims amid the European scramble following Emperor Charles VI’s death (1740) and the challenge to Maria Theresa. Prussian forces seized Glogau; at Mollwitz (10 April 1741) Frederick’s cavalry faltered but Prussian infantry steadied the field. Chotusitz (17 May 1742) secured advantage, and the Treaty of Breslau (11 June 1742) ceded most of Silesia to Prussia. Carlyle interprets this as a calculated strike leveraging preparedness against imperial disarray, inaugurating Prussia’s ascent to great-power rank.
Renewed conflict in the Second Silesian War (1744–1745) saw Frederick invade Bohemia, suffer reverses, then win decisive victories. Hohenfriedberg (4 June 1745) on Silesian ground crushed Austrian-Saxon forces; Soor (30 September 1745) followed, and Marshal Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau triumphed at Kesselsdorf (15 December 1745). The Treaty of Dresden (25 December 1745) confirmed Prussia in Silesia. Carlyle treats these campaigns as proof of disciplined maneuver, rapid concentration, and moral stamina, presenting them as the crucible that honed Frederick’s command style and validated the Soldier-King’s institutional bequest in fire and decision.
The Diplomatic Revolution (1756) realigned Europe: Austria reconciled with France, while Britain and Prussia concluded the Convention of Westminster (16 January 1756). Fearing encirclement, Frederick preemptively invaded Saxony in August–September 1756, precipitating the Seven Years’ War. He won at Lobositz (1 October 1756), struck Prague (6 May 1757), but was checked at Kolin (18 June 1757). Carlyle underscores the audacity of preemption, the peril of coalition warfare, and the essentiality of British subsidies and maritime pressure. The book positions these opening moves as the hinge upon which Prussia’s survival and Frederick’s reputation would turn.
The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) forms the heart of Carlyle’s narrative, and he renders it with logistical, diplomatic, and tactical granularity. Facing an Austrian–French–Russian–Saxon–Swedish axis, Frederick relied on interior lines, drilled infantry, and rapid marches to offset numerical inferiority. The dual masterstrokes of 1757—Rossbach (5 November) against the Franco-Imperial army and Leuthen (5 December) against Austria—displayed oblique order, deception, and concentrated attack, reshaping European perceptions of maneuver. But attrition bit deeply. At Zorndorf (25 August 1758) against Russia, neither side yielded. Hochkirch (14 October 1758) proved costly, a dawn surprise by Daun. Kunersdorf (12 August 1759), near Frankfurt an der Oder, brought catastrophe; Prussia’s army was shattered, and the kingdom seemed near collapse. The 1760 campaign mixed resilience and harassment: Liegnitz (15 August) restored initiative; Torgau (3 November) delivered a pyrrhic victory. In 1760, Austro-Russian forces briefly occupied Berlin, signaling the war’s reach into the Prussian heartland. Strategic salvation arrived in 1762 with the so-called Miracle of the House of Brandenburg: Empress Elizabeth of Russia died (5 January), Peter III withdrew Russia from the war and made peace, and Sweden followed. With France exhausted and Austria isolated, the Treaty of Hubertusburg (15 February 1763) restored the status quo ante, confirming Prussia’s possession of Silesia. Carlyle links operational detail to state endurance: meticulous supply, canton recruitment, and fiscal improvisation (including coin debasement) sustained armies often exceeding 100,000 in the field. He emphasizes discipline as moral economy—order extracting victory from scarcity—while acknowledging civilian suffering, devastated provinces, and losses approaching two hundred thousand soldiers, a staggering toll for a polity of roughly five to six million.
In peace, Frederick reorganized governance along cameralist lines: the General Directory coordinated finance, war, and domains; provincial chambers supervised taxation and agriculture. He tolerated diverse confessions—Lutheran, Calvinist, Catholic, and Jewish communities—and pragmatically employed Jesuits in Silesian schools. Economic measures included drainage of the Oderbruch, settlement schemes for colonists, canal improvements, and promotion of Silesian textiles and mining. War finance had debased coinage; peacetime reforms sought stabilization. Carlyle’s account connects these policies to a vision of the monarch as first servant of the state, translating battlefield discipline into administrative regularity, yet not disguising the coercion underpinning rural labor and conscription.
Frederick cultivated an intellectual court at Sanssouci, convening savants and, most famously, Voltaire (resident 1750–1753). Their relationship foundered amid quarrels over the Abbé de Prades affair and Voltaire’s pamphlet Doctor Akakia, culminating in Voltaire’s detention at Frankfurt am Main in 1753. The Berlin Academy received patronage; French remained the court language; music and architecture signaled refinement beside barracks and magazines. Carlyle uses these episodes to illustrate the paradox of enlightened absolutism: a ruler conversant with philosophy and science who nevertheless maintained stringent censorship in war and prioritized raison d’état when intellect collided with utility.
The First Partition of Poland (1772) followed the Bar Confederation (1768–1772) and Russian intervention in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’s affairs. Prussia annexed most of Royal Prussia—excluding Danzig and Thorn—thereby linking Brandenburg with East Prussia via the Netze District and West Prussia, including Ermland. Austria and Russia also took vast tracts. Frederick pushed roads, canals, and colonization to integrate the new corridor. Carlyle presents the partition as cold arithmetic of power and geography, scrutinizing its administrative aftermath while noting its moral ambiguity—necessity and opportunity in tension, a recurrent theme in his treatment of eighteenth-century statecraft.
The War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–1779) pitted Prussia against Joseph II’s Austria over Bavarian inheritance claims. Campaigns in Bohemia saw maneuver and supply raids more than pitched battles, earning the nickname Potato War. Russian and French mediation produced the Treaty of Teschen (13 May 1779): Austria gained the Innviertel from Bavaria; Prussia secured prestige as defender of the German balance against Habsburg aggrandizement. Carlyle reads this limited war as Frederick’s late-career demonstration of deterrence by readiness—leveraging fortified positions and logistics to restrain expansion without courting annihilating battle, a strategic prudence born from the Seven Years’ ordeal.
Prussia’s social order under Frederick rested on the Junker officer corps, canton-based conscription, and seigneurial control over peasants east of the Elbe. Townsmen prospered in trades tied to the army and state contracts; rural subjects bore corvée burdens and wartime requisitions. Serfdom persisted in the provinces even as the crown promoted technical schools and agronomy. Carlyle intermittently lifts the curtain on this social machinery—muster-rolls, quartering, grain magazines—to show the human substrate of victories. His narrative connects tactical brilliance to a disciplined but unequal society, where duty and obedience were ideals, and coercion was the instrument binding land, army, and treasury.
The Anglo–Prussian connection shaped the mid-century wars. The Convention of Westminster (1756) aligned Prussia with Britain, which supplied subsidies and shielded Hanover. British victories at Minden (1 August 1759) and on global fronts—Quebec (13 September 1759), naval triumphs—strained France and relieved pressure on Frederick. Subsidies after 1758 reached hundreds of thousands of pounds annually, crucial for recruitment and supply. Carlyle threads these transnational linkages through his campaign narratives, presenting Frederick as the continental keystone in a global conflict and highlighting how oceanic power, credit, and diplomacy buttressed Prussia’s survival in Europe’s central theater.
Carlyle’s history functions as political criticism by exalting duty, competence, and veracity against the laxity and verbosity he associated with modern politics. Through the figure of Frederick, he criticizes administrative corruption, court frivolity, and alliance perfidy, holding up disciplined governance as remedy to systemic drift. Yet he also foregrounds the costs: coin debasement, requisitions, and civilian devastation expose a militarized state’s social toll. The book thereby interrogates the moral calculus of raison d’état—asking whether order and survival excuse aggression—without reducing its judgments to platitudes or sentimentality.
As social critique, the work exposes class divides and structural injustice: Junker privilege, peasant subjection, and urban dependency on state contracts. Carlyle’s admiration for energy does not erase the burdens borne by soldiers and taxpayers, which he records in marches, sieges, and levies. He depicts an enlightened absolutism that tolerates faiths yet compels labor; that builds roads yet seizes provinces. By reconstructing decisions around Silesia and Poland, he invites readers to confront the ethics of power beyond slogans. In doing so, the book offers a stern diagnosis of eighteenth-century Europe’s political maladies and a provocation to Carlyle’s own nineteenth-century audience.
Author Biography
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and moral thinker whose career spanned much of the nineteenth century. A dominant figure in Victorian debates, he forged a prophetic, highly idiosyncratic prose that sought moral order amid industrial and political upheaval. His reputation rests on works that blend narrative power with social criticism, including Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution: A History, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Past and Present, and later studies of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. Admired for energy and insight yet often contested for authoritarian leanings, Carlyle helped define how his age argued about history, leadership, and the modern condition.
Raised in the Scottish Borders, Carlyle studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he pursued mathematics and immersed himself in wide reading. After a period teaching in Scottish schools, he turned to writing and translation, finding in German literature a decisive influence. He translated and introduced British readers to authors such as Goethe and Schiller, publishing Life of Schiller and the anthology German Romance in the later 1820s. The spiritual questioning and idealism of German thought, combined with the rational habits of Scottish education, shaped his belief that literature and history should serve as moral inquiry rather than mere entertainment or compilation.
By the late 1820s and early 1830s, Carlyle emerged as a formidable essayist, contributing to leading periodicals. Essays like Signs of the Times and Characteristics criticized mechanical thinking and utilitarian simplifications, calling for inward renovation. During a period of rural seclusion at Craigenputtock in southwestern Scotland, he composed Sartor Resartus, an experimental fiction-philosophy that satirizes modernity through a metaphor of clothing. Initially serialized and received ambivalently in Britain, it nevertheless won devoted readers, notably in the United States, where Ralph Waldo Emerson helped secure publication. Sartor’s mixture of irony, spiritual urgency, and inventive form established the tone that would mark his mature work.
Carlyle’s breakthrough as a historian came with The French Revolution: A History in the later 1830s. Its dramatic, episodic scenes and choral voices offered a new kind of narrative history. A completed draft of the first volume was accidentally destroyed in the household of John Stuart Mill, compelling Carlyle to rewrite the book, an episode that later fed the work’s legend. In subsequent social polemics, notably Chartism and Past and Present, he attacked what he called the cash nexus, condemning laissez-faire complacency and urging responsible leadership. These writings made him both a scourge of industrial modernity and a moral provocateur in public debate.
Lecturing in London in the early 1840s, Carlyle developed his theory of exemplary leadership in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. He pursued this vision in Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, which sought to rehabilitate Cromwell, and in the multivolume History of Friedrich II of Prussia, called Frederick the Great, a decades-long labor. Across these works he distrusted parliamentary routine and doctrine, favoring what he regarded as sincere, energetic will embodied in individuals. His dense, allusive rhetoric—by turns satiric and exalted—aimed to shake readers from complacency and to dramatize history as a theatre of conscience rather than a procession of facts.
Carlyle’s public authority also carried deep controversies. Latter-Day Pamphlets railed against mid-century liberal pieties, and an 1849 essay on labor in the Caribbean, later retitled with an offensive racial epithet, defended coercive schemes that are now, and were then by many, condemned. His skepticism toward democracy and empire’s victims placed him at odds with significant contemporaries. Yet his circle and reach were wide: he corresponded with Emerson, argued with Mill, and influenced figures such as John Ruskin. Generations of readers found in him either a bracing corrective to complacency or a troubling advocate of hierarchy, a tension central to his reception.
In later years, Carlyle’s output slowed but his stature remained high. He served as Rector of the University of Edinburgh in the mid-1860s, delivering an address that revisited themes of work, duty, and education. Essays like Shooting Niagara returned to politics with characteristic alarm. He died in the later nineteenth century, leaving a large body of history, criticism, and correspondence. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries his legacy has been persistently reassessed: his style and narrative power continue to draw study, while his politics invite rigorous scrutiny. Today he is read as a key, conflicted witness to the ambitions and anxieties of Victorian modernity.
History of Friedrich II of Prussia (All 21 Volumes)
Volume 01
Book I. — BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. — 1712.
Chapter I. — PROEM: FRIEDRICH'S HISTORY FROM THE DISTANCE WE ARE AT.
About fourscore years ago, there used to be seen sauntering on the terraces of Sans Souci, for a short time in the afternoon, or you might have met him elsewhere at an earlier hour, riding or driving in a rapid business manner on the open roads or through the scraggy woods and avenues of that intricate amphibious Potsdam region, a highly interesting lean little old man, of alert though slightly stooping figure; whose name among strangers was King FRIEDRICH THE SECOND, or Frederick the Great of Prussia, and at home among the common people, who much loved and esteemed him, was VATER FRITZ—Father Fred—a name of familiarity which had not bred contempt in that instance. He is a King every inch of him, though without the trappings of a King. Presents himself in a Spartan simplicity of vesture: no crown but an old military cocked-hat—generally old, or trampled and kneaded into absolute SOFTNESS, if new;—no sceptre but one like Agamemnon's, a walking-stick cut from the woods, which serves also as a riding-stick (with which he hits the horse "between the ears," say authors);—and for royal robes, a mere soldier's blue coat with red facings, coat likely to be old, and sure to have a good deal of Spanish snuff on the breast of it; rest of the apparel dim, unobtrusive in color or out, ending in high over-knee military boots, which may be brushed (and, I hope, kept soft with an underhand suspicion of oil), but are not permitted to be blackened or varnished; Day and Martin with their soot-pots forbidden to approach.
The man is not of godlike physiognomy, any more than of imposing stature or costume: close-shut mouth with thin lips, prominent jaws and nose, receding brow, by no means of Olympian height; head, however, is of long form, and has superlative gray eyes in it. Not what is called a beautiful man; nor yet, by all appearance, what is called a happy. On the contrary, the face bears evidence of many sorrows, as they are termed, of much hard labor done in this world; and seems to anticipate nothing but more still coming. Quiet stoicism, capable enough of what joy there were, but not expecting any worth mention; great unconscious and some conscious pride, well tempered with a cheery mockery of humor—are written on that old face; which carries its chin well forward, in spite of the slight stoop about the neck; snuffy nose rather flung into the air, under its old cocked-hat—like an old snuffy lion on the watch; and such a pair of eyes as no man or lion or lynx of that Century bore elsewhere, according to all the testimony we have. "Those eyes," says Mirabeau, "which, at the bidding of his great soul, fascinated you with seduction or with terror (portaient, au gre de son ame heroique, la seduction ou la terreur)." [Mirabeau, Histoire Secrete de la Cour de Berlin, Lettre 28?? (24 September, 1786) p. 128 (in edition of Paris, 1821)]. Most excellent potent brilliant eyes, swift-darting as the stars, steadfast as the sun; gray, we said, of the azure-gray color; large enough, not of glaring size; the habitual expression of them vigilance and penetrating sense, rapidity resting on depth. Which is an excellent combination; and gives us the notion of a lambent outer radiance springing from some great inner sea of light and fire in the man. The voice, if he speak to you, is of similar physiognomy: clear, melodious and sonorous; all tones are in it, from that of ingenuous inquiry, graceful sociality, light-flowing banter (rather prickly for most part), up to definite word of command, up to desolating word of rebuke and reprobation; a voice "the clearest and most agreeable in conversation I ever heard," says witty Dr. Moore. [Moore, View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland and Germany (London, 1779), ii. 246.] "He speaks a great deal," continues the doctor; "yet those who hear him, regret that he does not speak a good deal more. His observations are always lively, very often just; and few men possess the talent of repartee in greater perfection."
Just about threescore and ten years ago, [A.D. 1856—17th August, 1786] his speakings and his workings came to finis in this World of Time; and he vanished from all eyes into other worlds, leaving much inquiry about him in the minds of men;—which, as my readers and I may feel too well, is yet by no means satisfied. As to his speech, indeed, though it had the worth just ascribed to it and more, and though masses of it were deliberately put on paper by himself, in prose and verse, and continue to be printed and kept legible, what he spoke has pretty much vanished into the inane; and except as record or document of what he did, hardly now concerns mankind. But the things he did were extremely remarkable; and cannot be forgotten by mankind. Indeed, they bear such fruit to the present hour as all the Newspapers are obliged to be taking note of, sometimes to an unpleasant degree. Editors vaguely account this man the "Creator of the Prussian Monarchy;" which has since grown so large in the world, and troublesome to the Editorial mind in this and other countries. He was indeed the first who, in a highly public manner, notified its creation; announced to all men that it was, in very deed, created; standing on its feet there, and would go a great way, on the impulse it had got from him and others. As it has accordingly done; and may still keep doing to lengths little dreamt of by the British Editor in our time; whose prophesyings upon Prussia, and insights into Prussia, in its past, or present or future, are truly as yet inconsiderable, in proportion to the noise he makes with them! The more is the pity for him—and for myself too in the Enterprise now on hand.
It is of this Figure, whom we see by the mind's eye in those Potsdam regions, visible for the last time seventy years ago, that we are now to treat, in the way of solacing ingenuous human curiosity. We are to try for some Historical Conception of this Man and King; some answer to the questions, "What was he, then? Whence, how? And what did he achieve and suffer in the world?"—such answer as may prove admissible to ingenuous mankind, especially such as may correspond to the Fact (which stands there, abstruse indeed, but actual and unalterable), and so be sure of admissibility one day.
An Enterprise which turns out to be, the longer one looks at it, the more of a formidable, not to say unmanageable nature! Concerning which, on one or two points, it were good, if conveniently possible, to come to some preliminary understanding with the reader. Here, flying on loose leaves, are certain incidental utterances, of various date: these, as the topic is difficult, I will merely label and insert, instead of a formal Discourse, which were too apt to slide into something of a Lamentation, or otherwise take an unpleasant turn.
1. FRIEDRICH THEN, AND FRIEDRICH NOW.
This was a man of infinite mark to his contemporaries; who had witnessed surprising feats from him in the world; very questionable notions and ways, which he had contrived to maintain against the world and its criticisms. As an original man has always to do; much more an original ruler of men. The world, in fact, had tried hard to put him down, as it does, unconsciously or, consciously, with all such; and after the most conscious exertions, and at one time a dead-lift spasm of all its energies for Seven Years, had not been able. Principalities and powers, Imperial, Royal, Czarish, Papal, enemies innumerable as the seasand, had risen against him, only one helper left among the world's Potentates (and that one only while there should be help rendered in return); and he led them all such a dance as had astonished mankind and them.
No wonder they thought him worthy of notice. Every original man of any magnitude is;—nay, in the long-run, who or what else is? But how much more if your original man was a king over men; whose movements were polar, and carried from day to day those of the world along with them. The Samson Agonistes—were his life passed like that of Samuel Johnson in dirty garrets, and the produce of it only some bits of written paper—the Agonistes, and how he will comport himself in the Philistine mill; this is always a spectacle of truly epic and tragic nature. The rather, if your Samson, royal or other, is not yet blinded or subdued to the wheel; much more if he vanquish his enemies, not by suicidal methods, but march out at last flourishing his miraculous fighting implement, and leaving their mill and them in quite ruinous circumstances. As this King Friedrich fairly managed to do.
For he left the world all bankrupt, we may say; fallen into bottomless abysses of destruction; he still in a paying condition, and with footing capable to carry his affairs and him. When he died, in 1786, the enormous Phenomenon since called FRENCH REVOLUTION was already growling audibly in the depths of the world; meteoric-electric coruscations heralding it, all round the horizon. Strange enough to note, one of Friedrich's last visitors was Gabriel Honore Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau. These two saw one another; twice, for half an hour each time. The last of the old Gods and the first of the modern Titans;—before Pelion leapt on Ossa; and the foul Earth taking fire at last, its vile mephitic elements went up in volcanic thunder. This also is one of the peculiarities of Friedrich, that he is hitherto the last of the Kings; that he ushers in the French Revolution, and closes an Epoch of World-History. Finishing off forever the trade of King, think many; who have grown profoundly dark as to Kingship and him.
The French Revolution may be said to have, for about half a century, quite submerged Friedrich, abolished him from the memories of men; and now on coming to light again, he is found defaced under strange mud-incrustations, and the eyes of mankind look at him from a singularly changed, what we must call oblique and perverse point of vision. This is one of the difficulties in dealing with his History;—especially if you happen to believe both in the French Revolution and in him; that is to say, both that Real Kingship is eternally indispensable, and also that the destruction of Sham Kingship (a frightful process) is occasionally so. On the breaking-out of that formidable Explosion, and Suicide of his Century, Friedrich sank into comparative obscurity; eclipsed amid the ruins of that universal earthquake, the very dust of which darkened all the air, and made of day a disastrous midnight. Black midnight, broken only by the blaze of conflagrations;—wherein, to our terrified imaginations, were seen, not men, French and other, but ghastly portents, stalking wrathful, and shapes of avenging gods. It must be owned the figure of Napoleon was titanic; especially to the generation that looked on him, and that waited shuddering to be devoured by him. In general, in that French Revolution, all was on a huge scale; if not greater than anything in human experience, at least more grandiose. All was recorded in bulletins, too, addressed to the shilling-gallery; and there were fellows on the stage with such a breadth of sabre, extent of whiskerage, strength of windpipe, and command of men and gunpowder, as had never been seen before. How they bellowed, stalked and flourished about; counterfeiting Jove's thunder to an amazing degree! Terrific Drawcansir figures, of enormous whiskerage, unlimited command of gunpowder; not without sufficient ferocity, and even a certain heroism, stage-heroism, in them; compared with whom, to the shilling-gallery, and frightened excited theatre at large, it seemed as if there had been no generals or sovereigns before; as if Friedrich, Gustavus, Cromwell, William Conqueror and Alexander the Great were not worth speaking of henceforth.
All this, however, in half a century is considerably altered. The Drawcansir equipments getting gradually torn off, the natural size is seen better; translated from the bulletin style into that of fact and history, miracles, even to the shilling-gallery, are not so miraculous. It begins to be apparent that there lived great men before the era of bulletins and Agamemnon. Austerlitz and Wagram shot away more gunpowder—gunpowder probably in the proportion of ten to one, or a hundred to one; but neither of them was tenth-part such a beating to your enemy as that of Rossbach, brought about by strategic art, human ingenuity and intrepidity, and the loss of 165 men. Leuthen, too, the battle of Leuthen (though so few English readers ever heard of it) may very well hold up its head beside any victory gained by Napoleon or another. For the odds were not far from three to one; the soldiers were of not far from equal quality; and only the General was consummately superior, and the defeat a destruction. Napoleon did indeed, by immense expenditure of men, and gunpowder, overrun Europe for a time: but Napoleon never, by husbanding and wisely expending his men and gunpowder, defended a little Prussia against all Europe, year after year for seven years long, till Europe had enough, and gave up the enterprise as one it could not manage. So soon as the Drawcansir equipments are well torn off, and the shilling-gallery got to silence, it will be found that there were great kings before Napoleon—and likewise an Art of War, grounded on veracity and human courage and insight, not upon Drawcansir rodomontade, grandiose Dick-Turpinism, revolutionary madness, and unlimited expenditure of men and gunpowder. "You may paint with a very big brush, and yet not be a great painter," says a satirical friend of mine! This is becoming more and more apparent, as the dust-whirlwind, and huge uproar of the last generation, gradually dies away again.
2. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
One of the grand difficulties in a History of Friedrich is, all along, this same, That he lived in a Century which has no History and can have little or none. A Century so opulent in accumulated falsities—sad opulence descending on it by inheritance, always at compound interest, and always largely increased by fresh acquirement on such immensity of standing capital;—opulent in that bad way as never Century before was! Which had no longer the consciousness of being false, so false had it grown; and was so steeped in falsity, and impregnated with it to the very bone, that—in fact the measure of the thing was full, and a French Revolution had to end it. To maintain much veracity in such an element, especially for a king, was no doubt doubly remarkable. But now, how extricate the man from his Century? How show the man, who is a Reality worthy of being seen, and yet keep his Century, as a Hypocrisy worthy of being hidden and forgotten, in the due abeyance?
To resuscitate the Eighteenth Century, or call into men's view, beyond what is necessary, the poor and sordid personages and transactions of an epoch so related to us, can be no purpose of mine on this occasion. The Eighteenth Century, it is well known, does not figure to me as a lovely one; needing to be kept in mind, or spoken of unnecessarily. To me the Eighteenth Century has nothing grand in it, except that grand universal Suicide, named French Revolution, by which it terminated its otherwise most worthless existence with at least one worthy act;—setting fire to its old home and self; and going up in flames and volcanic explosions, in a truly memorable and important manner. A very fit termination, as I thankfully feel, for such a Century. Century spendthrift, fraudulent-bankrupt; gone at length utterly insolvent, without real MONEY of performance in its pocket, and the shops declining to take hypocrisies and speciosities any farther:—what could the poor Century do, but at length admit, "Well, it is so. I am a swindler-century, and have long been—having learned the trick of it from my father and grandfather; knowing hardly any trade but that in false bills, which I thought foolishly might last forever, and still bring at least beef and pudding to the favored of mankind. And behold it ends; and I am a detected swindler, and have nothing even to eat. What remains but that I blow my brains out, and do at length one true action?" Which the poor Century did; many thanks to it, in the circumstances.
For there was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to sink altogether into the ape condition. And in that whirlwind of the Universe—lights obliterated, and the torn wrecks of Earth and Hell hurled aloft into the Empyrean; black whirlwind, which made even apes serious, and drove most of them mad—there was, to men, a voice audible; voice from the heart of things once more, as if to say: "Lying is not permitted in this Universe. The wages of lying, you behold, are death. Lying means damnation in this Universe; and Beelzebub, never so elaborately decked in crowns and mitres, is NOT God!" This was a revelation truly to be named of the Eternal, in our poor Eighteenth Century; and has greatly altered the complexion of said Century to the Historian ever since.
Whereby, in short, that Century is quite confiscate, fallen bankrupt, given up to the auctioneers;—Jew-brokers sorting out of it at this moment, in a confused distressing manner, what is still valuable or salable. And, in fact, it lies massed up in our minds as a disastrous wrecked inanity, not useful to dwell upon; a kind of dusky chaotic background, on which the figures that had some veracity in them—a small company, and ever growing smaller as our demands rise in strictness—are delineated for us.—"And yet it is the Century of our own Grandfathers?" cries the reader. Yes, reader! truly. It is the ground out of which we ourselves have sprung; whereon now we have our immediate footing, and first of all strike down our roots for nourishment;—and, alas, in large sections of the practical world, it (what we specially mean by IT) still continues flourishing all round us! To forget it quite is not yet possible, nor would be profitable. What to do with it, and its forgotten fooleries and "Histories," worthy only of forgetting?—Well; so much of it as by nature ADHERES; what of it cannot be disengaged from our Hero and his operations: approximately so much, and no more! Let that be our bargain in regard to it.
3. ENGLISH PREPOSSESSIONS.
With such wagon-loads of Books and Printed Records as exist on the subject of Friedrich, it has always seemed possible, even for a stranger, to acquire some real understanding of him;—though practically, here and now, I have to own, it proves difficult beyond conception. Alas, the Books are not cosmic, they are chaotic; and turn out unexpectedly void of instruction to us. Small use in a talent of writing, if there be not first of all the talent of discerning, of loyally recognizing; of discriminating what is to be written! Books born mostly of Chaos—which want all things, even an INDEX—are a painful object. In sorrow and disgust, you wander over those multitudinous Books: you dwell in endless regions of the superficial, of the nugatory: to your bewildered sense it is as if no insight into the real heart of Friedrich and his affairs were anywhere to be had. Truth is, the Prussian Dryasdust, otherwise an honest fellow, and not afraid of labor, excels all other Dryasdusts yet known; I have often sorrowfully felt as if there were not in Nature, for darkness, dreariness, immethodic platitude, anything comparable to him. He writes big Books wanting in almost every quality; and does not even give an INDEX to them. He has made of Friedrich's History a wide-spread, inorganic, trackless matter; dismal to your mind, and barren as a continent of Brandenburg sand!—Enough, he could do no other: I have striven to forgive him. Let the reader now forgive me; and think sometimes what probably my raw-material was!—
Curious enough, Friedrich lived in the Writing Era—morning of that strange Era which has grown to such a noon for us;—and his favorite society, all his reign, was with the literary or writing sort. Nor have they failed to write about him, they among the others, about him and about him; and it is notable how little real light, on any point of his existence or environment, they have managed to communicate. Dim indeed, for most part a mere epigrammatic sputter of darkness visible, is the "picture" they have fashioned to themselves of Friedrich and his Country and his Century. Men not "of genius," apparently? Alas, no; men fatally destitute of true eyesight, and of loyal heart first of all. So far as I have noticed, there was not, with the single exception of Mirabeau for one hour, any man to be called of genius, or with an adequate power of human discernment, that ever personally looked on Friedrich. Had many such men looked successively on his History and him, we had not found it now in such a condition. Still altogether chaotic as a History; fatally destitute even of the Indexes and mechanical appliances: Friedrich's self, and his Country, and his Century, still undeciphered; very dark phenomena, all three, to the intelligent part of mankind.
In Prussia there has long been a certain stubborn though planless diligence in digging for the outward details of Friedrich's Life-History; though as to organizing them, assorting them, or even putting labels on them; much more as to the least interpretation or human delineation of the man and his affairs—you need not inquire in Prussia. In France, in England, it is still worse. There an immense ignorance prevails even as to the outward facts and phenomena of Friedrich's life; and instead of the Prussian no-interpretation, you find, in these vacant circumstances, a great promptitude to interpret. Whereby judgments and prepossessions exist among us on that subject, especially on Friedrich's character, which are very ignorant indeed.
To Englishmen, the sources of knowledge or conviction about Friedrich, I have observed, are mainly these two. FIRST, for his Public Character: it was an all-important fact, not to IT, but to this country in regard to it, That George II., seeing good to plunge head-foremost into German Politics, and to take Maria Theresa's side in the Austrian-Succession War of 1740–1748, needed to begin by assuring his Parliament and Newspapers, profoundly dark on the matter, that Friedrich was a robber and villain for taking the other side. Which assurance, resting on what basis we shall see by and by, George's Parliament and Newspapers cheerfully accepted; nothing doubting. And they have re-echoed and reverberated it, they and the rest of us, ever since, to all lengths, down to the present day; as a fact quite agreed upon, and the preliminary item in Friedrich's character. Robber and villain to begin with; that was one settled point.
Afterwards when George and Friedrich came to be allies, and the grand fightings of the Seven-Years War took place, George's Parliament and Newspapers settled a second point, in regard to Friedrich: "One of the greatest soldiers ever born." This second item the British Writer fully admits ever since: but he still adds to it the quality of robber, in a loose way;—and images to himself a royal Dick Turpin, of the kind known in Review-Articles, and disquisitions on Progress of the Species, and labels it FREDERICK; very anxious to collect new babblement of lying Anecdotes, false Criticisms, hungry French Memoirs, which will confirm him in that impossible idea. Had such proved, on survey, to be the character of Friedrich, there is one British Writer whose curiosity concerning him would pretty soon have died away; nor could any amount of unwise desire to satisfy that feeling in fellow-creatures less seriously disposed have sustained him alive, in those baleful Historic Acherons and Stygian Fens, where he has had to dig and to fish so long, far away from the upper light!—Let me request all readers to blow that sorry chaff entirely out of their minds; and to believe nothing on the subject except what they get some evidence for.
SECOND English source relates to the Private Character. Friedrich's Biography or Private Character, the English, like the French, have gathered chiefly from a scandalous libel by Voltaire, which used to be called Vie Privee du Roi de Prusse (Private Life of the King of Prussia) [First printed, from a stolen copy, at Geneva, 1784; first proved to be Voltaire's (which some of his admirers had striven to doubt), Paris, 1788; stands avowed ever since, in all the Editions of his Works (ii. 9–113 of the Edition by Bandouin Freres, 97 vols., Paris, 1825–1834), under the title Memoires pour servir a Vie de M. de Voltaire,—with patches of repetition in the thing called Commentaire Historique, which follows ibid. at great length.] libel undoubtedly written by Voltaire, in a kind of fury; but not intended to be published by him; nay burnt and annihilated, as he afterwards imagined; No line of which, that cannot be otherwise proved, has a right to be believed; and large portions of which can be proved to be wild exaggerations and perversions, or even downright lies—written in a mood analogous to the Frenzy of John Dennis. This serves for the Biography or Private Character of Friedrich; imputing all crimes to him, natural and unnatural;—offering indeed, if combined with facts otherwise known, or even if well considered by itself, a thoroughly flimsy, incredible and impossible image. Like that of some flaming Devil's Head, done in phosphorus on the walls of the black-hole, by an Artist whom you had locked up there (not quite without reason) overnight.
Poor Voltaire wrote that Vie Privee in a state little inferior to the Frenzy of John Dennis—how brought about we shall see by and by. And this is the Document which English readers are surest to have read, and tried to credit as far as possible. Our counsel is, Out of window with it, he that would know Friedrich of Prussia! Keep it awhile, he that would know Francois Arouet de Voltaire, and a certain numerous unfortunate class of mortals, whom Voltaire is sometimes capable of sinking to be spokesman for, in this world!—Alas, go where you will, especially in these irreverent ages, the noteworthy Dead is sure to be found lying under infinite dung, no end of calumnies and stupidities accumulated upon him. For the class we speak of, class of "flunkies doing saturnalia below stairs," is numerous, is innumerable; and can well remunerate a "vocal flunky" that will serve their purposes on such an occasion!—
Friedrich is by no means one of the perfect demigods; and there are various things to be said against him with good ground. To the last, a questionable hero; with much in him which one could have wished not there, and much wanting which one could have wished. But there is one feature which strikes you at an early period of the inquiry, That in his way he is a Reality; that he always means what he speaks; grounds his actions, too, on what he recognizes for the truth; and, in short, has nothing whatever of the Hypocrite or Phantasm. Which some readers will admit to be an extremely rare phenomenon. We perceive that this man was far indeed from trying to deal swindler-like with the facts around him; that he honestly recognized said facts wherever they disclosed themselves, and was very anxious also to ascertain their existence where still hidden or dubious. For he knew well, to a quite uncommon degree, and with a merit all the higher as it was an unconscious one, how entirely inexorable is the nature of facts, whether recognized or not, ascertained or not; how vain all cunning of diplomacy, management and sophistry, to save any mortal who does not stand on the truth of things, from sinking, in the long-run. Sinking to the very mud-gods, with all his diplomacies, possessions, achievements; and becoming an unnamable object, hidden deep in the Cesspools of the Universe. This I hope to make manifest; this which I long ago discerned for myself, with pleasure, in the physiognomy of Friedrich and his life. Which indeed was the first real sanction, and has all along been my inducement and encouragement, to study his life and him. How this man, officially a King withal, comported himself in the Eighteenth Century, and managed not to be a Liar and Charlatan as his Century was, deserves to be seen a little by men and kings, and may silently have didactic meanings in it.
He that was honest with his existence has always meaning for us, be he king or peasant. He that merely shammed and grimaced with it, however much, and with whatever noise and trumpet-blowing, he may have cooked and eaten in this world, cannot long have any. Some men do COOK enormously (let us call it COOKING, what a man does in obedience to his HUNGER merely, to his desires and passions merely)—roasting whole continents and populations, in the flames of war or other discord;—witness the Napoleon above spoken of. For the appetite of man in that respect is unlimited; in truth, infinite; and the smallest of us could eat the entire Solar System, had we the chance given, and then cry, like Alexander of Macedon, because we had no more Solar Systems to cook and eat. It is not the extent of the man's cookery that can much attach me to him; but only the man himself, and what of strength he had to wrestle with the mud-elements, and what of victory he got for his own benefit and mine.
4. ENCOURAGEMENTS, DISCOURAGEMENTS.
French Revolution having spent itself, or sunk in France and elsewhere to what we see, a certain curiosity reawakens as to what of great or manful we can discover on the other side of that still troubled atmosphere of the Present and immediate Past. Curiosity quickened, or which should be quickened, by the great and all-absorbing question, How is that same exploded Past ever to settle down again? Not lost forever, it would appear: the New Era has not annihilated the old eras: New Era could by no means manage that;—never meant that, had it known its own mind (which it did not): its meaning was and is, to get its own well out of them; to readapt, in a purified shape, the old eras, and appropriate whatever was true and NOT combustible in them: that was the poor New Era's meaning, in the frightful explosion it made of itself and its possessions, to begin with!
