B OOKS.
'CARLYLE'S FREDERICK THE GREAT.*
SECO/ID NOTICE.
Tree events of Frederick's reign described in this volume lie 'in a very small compass, comprising as chief subject the seizure of Silesia in 1741-2. The whole narrative embraces only four years of the hero-king's life, and these by no ineansthe most important, so that, to conclude the work, at least ten more volumes will be required. Carlyle does not waste many words to justify Frederick's piratical first feat of arms. The hero's main reasons for seizing Silesia are bluntly statedas, first, " Weak condition of the Austrian -Court, Treasury empty, War Apparatus brokenin pieces ; inexperienced young Princess to defend a disputed succession ;" secondly, "Silesian War Ties handy to us, and is the only kind. of Offensive War that does." There is no tidal, robber, or burglar, who might not plead the same inducements. However, history has here to do with a noble hero-king, and not with a common ignoble robber. "No fair judge can blame the young man that he laid hold of the flaming Opportunity in this manner, and obeyed the new omen. To seize such an Opportunity, and perilously mount upon it, was the part' of a young magnanimous Xing, less sensible to the perils, and more to the other considerations, thatoone older would have been.'" So -much for moral principles. Mr. Carlyle lets no opportunity pass to inculcate the doctrine that it is physical force which governs the world. Speaking of Austria, after the hero's first success, he exclaims : "This, then, is what the Pragmatic sanc- tion has come to? Twenty years of world-wide 41omaey, cunningly devised spider-threads evtunetting all the world, have issued here. Your Congresses of Canibtay, of Soissvms, your Gramkow-Seekentlorl Machiavelisin, all these might as well have lain in their bed. Real Pragmatic Sanction would have been, A well-trained army and your Treasury full." And on another occasion; "dust Rights! What are rights, never so just, which you cannot make valid? The world is full of such. If you have rights and can 'assert them into facts, do it ; that is worth doing !" It is the doctrine of the Middle Ages, warmed rip into modern philosophy. Nothing is more amusing than Carlyle's abase of all the unhappy authors who, before him, have attempted to delineate the life of the Great Fredericks. Their writings are 'historical dust-heaps," "men- dacities and wiggeries," "learned marine-stores," " pedantisam," " editorial rubbish-waggons," "inhuman cobwebberies," " Dryas- dusts," "enchanted nightmares," " historical shot-rubbish," " cireum- ambient inanity," and so forth. Not one of the many authors .cited in Mr. 'Carlyle's book 'finds grace in has eyes. It would be an in- teresting question to ask where he himself went for his material; whether he ferreted it out of the "rubbish-waggons," or fished it from the depths of his own consciousness. However, though the subject is a rather serious one, considering that Mr. Carlyle pro- fesses to write history and not romance, it is impossible not to admire the quaint and most picturesque manner with which the whole host of writers on Frederick are demolished, like so many enemies who stand in the way of hero-worship. Every one gets his label stuck on the forehead, and, once marked, has to wander about with it to the general edification. And not'only authors, but all men in the slightest degree nnfrientilyto the Great Frederick are labelled. Poor Mauper- tuis remains to his king day the " Flattener ofthe Earth," with the occasional •variation of 'being the 'Prismegistas of the Sciences called Pure ;" King George the Second of England is "little Tack- the=Giant-Killer;" Frederick's sister, Wilhehnina, is "the shrill Princess;" Queen Plieabetle wife of "Philip II., the Termagant of Spain," or, with a slight change, the "'She-dragon of Spam;" Count Belleisle, French ambassador, is the " gyrating sun-god;" and Count Bruit!, the prime-minister of Saxony, "the man of the Three hundred and sixty-five suits of clothes." Professor Konig, of Berne, is beautifully labelled as "a Theological Professorial Syriac-Hebrew kind of man ;" and Voltaire's fair friend, Madame Du Chatelet, is 'cited as a 'jealous I-tempered Algebraic Lady.' Nor do institu- tions, opposed to Pre' crick or his aims, escape labelling. The Ger- man Diet is a "Parliament of Nightmares," presided over, or "under the chief pipership," of the "Prince of the Power of the Air." All other ancient Teutonic institutions are set down as 'Enchanted Wiggeries." In pleasing contrast to this "diluted mendacity" is
the state of things in Prussia; aimo 1740, "where the Three Estates sit all under one Three-cornered Hat."
Decidedly the best little- 'bits of painting in the volume are the sketches of several Silesian towns and villages where important actions took place in the first campaign of Frederick. These bits are quoted as "Tourist's notes, September, 1858;" but it is no secret that the tourist in question was Mr. Carlyle himself, who went toGermany in the autumn of 1858, to have an ocular view of the field of his hero's exploits. The following is a picture of Mollwils, and of German Doifs, or villages, generally : " All these Doris, nd indeed most 'German ones, are made an one type, an agglomerate of Clusty farmyards, -with their stalls and barns ; all the * Ilistury of,rradrich IL, of Prussia, called Frederick the Great. By ThomaaCarlyle• 'Volume III. London: Chapman and Hall. farmyards huddled together in two rows - a broad negligent road between, seldom mended, never swept except by the elements. Generally, there is nothing to be seen on each hand but thatched roofs, dead clay walls, and wooden gates; sometimes a poor public-house, with probable beer in it; nowhere any ;.hop, never any patch of swept pavement or trim gathering- place for natives of a social gossipy turn. The road lies sleepy, littery, ';good only for utilitarian purposes. In the middle of the Village stands Church and 'Churchyard, with probably some gnarled trees around it ; Church often larger than you expected; the Churchyard always fenced with high stone-and-mortar wall, is usually the principal military post of the place. Mollwitz, at the present day, has something of whitewash here and there; one of the farmer people, or more, wearing a civilized prosper- ous look."
More lively and picturesque still is the sketch of the field and people of Chotusitz, the place of the greatest of Frederick's battles in the ,campaign of 1742 : " A dim people, those poor Czech natives; stupid, dirty-skinned, ill- given ; not one in twenty of them speaking any German, and our drago- man a fortuitous Jew pedlar, with the mournfullest of human faces, though a head worth twenty of those Czech ones—poor oppressed soul! The Battleplain bears rye, barley, miscellaneous pulse, potatoes, mostly insig- nificant crops. . . . . Chotusitz itself is a poor, litters place, standing whitewashed but much unwept, in two straggling rows, now wide enough apart, utterly silent under the hot sun ; not a child looked out on us, and I think the very dogs lay wisely asleep. Church and steeple are at the farther or south end of the Village, and have an older date than 1742. High up on the steeple, mending-the clock-hands, or I know not what, hung in mid sir, one Czech, the only living thing we saw. Population may be three or four hundred, all busy with their teams or otherwise, wewill hope. Czaslau, which you approach by something of avenues, of human roads (dust and litter still abounding), is a much grander place, say of 2000 or more : shiny, white, but also somnolent; vast market-place or central square, sloping against you ; two shiny hotels on it, with Austrian uni- forms loitering about, and otherwise great emptiness and silence. The shiny Hotels (shine due to paint mainly) offer little of humanly edible, and, in the interior, smells strike you as—as the oldest you have ever met before. A people not given to washing, to ventilating! Many gospels have been preached in those parts, and abstruse Orthodoxies, sometimes with fire and sword, and no end of emphasis; but that of Soap-and-Water (which surely is as Catholic as any) has not yet got introduced there."
It is impossible not to admire such marvellously picturesque lan- guage, and at the same time not to regret that Cathy+ le should not have given to the world more literary painting and less political ser- mon. He is the Turner of literature, painting. in colours as glow- ing and as graphic as the greatest of our English landscape painters. It seems a sorrowful waste that such powers should be devoted to +whitewashing despot kings, advocating human bondage, and worslri ping physical force. Even if bent on setting up battle-captains, better men might have been found than the Hohenzollern king. For example, the following hero, splendidly drawn in a dozen lines : " Zisca was buried in his skin, at Czaslan finally; in the church of St. Peter and St. Paul there ; with due epitaph, and his big mace or battle- club, mostly iron, hung honourable on the wall close by. Kaiser Ferdinand, Karl V.'s brother, on a Progress to Prag, crane to lodge at Czaslau, one afternoon: 'What is that,' said the Kaiser, strolling over this Peter and Paul's Church, and noticing the mace. Ugh ! Faugh !' growled he angrily, on hearing what ; and would not lodge in the Town, but harnessed again and drove farther that same night. The club is now gone; but Zisca's dust lies there irremovable till Doomsday, in the land where his limbs were made. A great behemoth of a war captain ; one of the fiercest, infiexiblest, ruggedest creatures ever made in the form of man. Devoured Priests with appetite, wherever discoverable. Dishonourers of his sister ; murderers of the God's-witness John Huss : them may all devils help.! Beat Kaiser Sigismund Supra-Granonaticans again and ever again, scattering the Ritter hosts in an extraordinary manner ;—a Zisca conquerable only by Death, and the Pest Fever passing that way."
What a figure such a priest-devouring Ziska hero, a true Sclavonic Cromwell, would have become under Carlyle's fiery pen, had he but chosen him instead of the son of the recruiting king, a man whom all imagination in the world is unable to lift above the standard of a Czar Peter.
It is a rather singular fact that, simultaneous with this attempt of one of the greatest of living "Pinglish 'writers to apotheosize Fre- derick IL, exactly the opposite movement is setting in in Prussia. the life and times of Frederick have been variously and nnmeronsl investr'gated of late by German historians, with the acknowl greatre that the mart was not a great king, and scared great generaL A recent writer happily calls him a cross gsrvvaen
Charles XII. of Sweden and Louis XIV. of France. Not even the Prussian adulators of Frederick II. deny that in some respects he was almost contemptible in his littleness. Being a declared Atheist, he was very tolerant in religious matters ; but his petty des- potism in political affairs surpassed all belief. The stays he fitted round the Prussian body politic have lasted to this day. It is to Frederick, too, that is owing that incubus of bureaucracy under which the poor country has been suffering as under the worst of grannies ; as well as that system of "armed peace" which has sucked the life- blood out of her veins. Finally, the want of all moral principle, which so eminently distinguished the rule of Frederick IL, has done an amount of mischief not yet exceeded, and severely commented upon by philosophical historians of modern days. As to more individual tsppreciation, Frederick's relation to his wife and family, his love of French superficialities, his contempt of everything Gentian, even the language, his cold-blooded cruelty and heartlessness, and other per- sonal traits, will bear no investigation whatever. Over all this matter, however, Mr. Carlyle gets very easily by characterizing the whole of the previous histories of Frederick, down to his own, as fabulous and "Dryaeclust."
"My friend, you will be luckier than I, if, after ten years, not to say,
even a
in a sense, twenty years, thirty years, of reading and rummaging in those sad Prussian Books, ancient and new (which often are laudably authentic, too, and exact as to details), you can gather any new character whatever of Friedrich, in any period of his life, or conceive him, as a Human Entity at all ! It is strange, after such thousandfold writing, but it is true, his History is considered unintelligible to mankind at this hour ; I t chaotic, enigmatic, in a good many points. . . . And then the anger of bystanders, uncandid, who got hurt by him; the hasty malevolences, the stupidities, the opacities ; enough, in modern times, what is saying -much, perhaps no man's motives, intentions, and procedure have been more belied, misunder- stood, misrepresented, haringhis life. Nor, I think, since fhat, have many men fared worse, by the Limner or Biographic class, the favourable to him -sad the unfavourable; or been so smeared of and blotched of, and reduced to a mere blare and dazzlement of crosslights, incoherences, macre- dibilities, in which nothing, not so much as a human nose, is clearly dis- cernible by way of feature."
Allah il Allah: there is but one God, and Thomas Carlyle is his Prophet !
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