Part 3

“In later times the relations between Goethe and Karl August lasted from the early youth of both until the death of the prince. Goethe was indebted to the Duke of Weimar for a secure position and received through this connection much experience. But intellectual impression he did not obtain from this source, for in spite of Karl August’s considerable capability, a genius he was not.

“In even later times there is the relationship between Richard Wagner and Ludwig II. Wagner had King Ludwig to thank for comfort and a place where he could work in quiet. But the King did not influence the composer intellectually.

“The historical relation between Voltaire and Frederick the Great stands alone. This is no harmonious relationship. In the course of the first fifteen years enthusiasm is abroad; then the friendship is undermined through Voltaire’s undisciplined methods and Frederick’s exasperation. Then again the relationship is renewed, the break is healed and the friendliness is maintained through the lives of both. This is striking evidence of the spirit of world-citizenship that prevailed in the eighteenth century, since the ruler and the writer belong to two different people, even while their language is the same. But the decisive fact here is that both the writer and the ruler are geniuses, the acknowledged geniuses of the period, and that they influence each other.”

Where Georg Brandes excels in portraying great men of the past is in his masterful pictures of contrasts, the analytical and synthetic so nicely proportioned that in its final presentation the picture leaves no doubt but what scholarly devotion to a set task leaves little to be said on the subject beyond what Brandes himself contributes. On the question of the Voltaire relationship with Frederick he writes further:

“When in August, 1736, Voltaire received the first letter from the Crown Prince of Prussia he was in his forty-second year. The writer was 24 years old. Voltaire was famed throughout Europe and looked upon as the most important author of the period. Frederick was a young prince, unknown except for what he had gone through. He had had to suffer for his inclination and peculiar intellectuality, just as Voltaire had to pay a price for his wit and the revolutionary might of his thinking. Both had been the victims of the brutality of the time and the arbitrariness of the system of government.

“The father of Frederick, whom Carlyle idealized, in spite of all his good qualities as organizer, was restive and quick tempered; with all his rectitude often raw and cruel. He had prescribed an educational program for his son that excluded everything unnecessary, among this Latin and literature. The King detested everything foreign. If he permitted French this was simply because German was then scarcely considered a language. He took pleasure in personally giving his subjects a beating on the street in case the one or other incident gave him dissatisfaction.

“When Frederick as a youth studied forbidden things, got into debt, cared nothing for parades of the troops, the father demanded that he should renounce his right to the throne. When he refused he was treated barbarously, called a coward because he did not resist. In 1730 he made an attempt to escape to England. But an intercepted letter to his friend Katte revealed the scheme to the King. Again he was treated abominably and a court-martial was appointed for the purpose of sentencing him to death. That was the custom of the time. Twelve years before, Peter the Great had his son Alexei beaten to death and he himself wielded the knout. When the Prussian court-martial failed to act as blindly as the Russian the King had the prince put in prison in Kuestrin.”

Passing over the years intervening between that earlier time and when Frederick ascended the throne, May 31, 1740, a period replete with letter writing and exchange of compliments describing in Brandes’ inimitable manner, the Danish critic tells of Frederick’s joy that now at last he can come face to face with the object of his admiration.

“Frederick, in spite of the many things to occupy him, makes his debut as a true disciple of Voltaire,” declares Brandes. “His first act is the doing away with torture as punishment, the dissolution of the Potsdam guard, the guard that the father had hired, secured at whatever cost, and calling back a thinker like Wolff to become once more professor at Halle.”

The first meeting between Voltaire and Frederick the Great gives Brandes an opportunity for bringing into play his exceptional faculty for entering into the very minutest description of these contrasting personalities, and while German culture of that day affected the French satirist quite differently from what he experienced on English soil, still there is no doubt that Voltaire’s international outlook was broadened through contact with the King who in his own way stood head and shoulders over his people.

Badly as Voltaire was being treated at home, the fact that the King of Prussia made so much of him and gave his admiration public expression did not fail to improve his status in the eyes of the leading men of France. The time had gone by when Louis XIV dominated Europe so that fear prevailed because of the French generals and armies. A number of defeats like that at Dettingen resulted in the fact that Europe as a whole made merry on account of French politics and French militarism.

Outside of France Louis the Beloved did not count. All eyes were directed toward the King of Prussia. Every power tried to draw him within its particular circle. The English strove to keep alive his dislike of France. It would mean much to the French nation, who so far had been unable to retain her former allies and had been unsuccessful in gaining new ones, if it by any possibility could enter into an alliance with just that King whose name spelled ingenious energy. Frederick was a hero to Voltaire. On the other hand, Voltaire was the idol of the King. At any rate, therefore, it was worth the trial to utilize the poet as secret diplomat.

What followed has been dealt with exhaustively by many able pens, but Brandes manages to give the historical facts a setting so picturesque and informing that the entire relationships between Frederick the Great and Voltaire appears in a new light and illustrates pointedly what the French nation owed to the man whose doctrines were the cause of a persecution that reflects little glory on the period so far as France was concerned. Nevertheless, Francois de Voltaire has found in the twentieth century no writer who to better purpose brings out the particular qualities that places him among the great internationalists than Georg Brandes has done in his monumental work.

III.

“Voltaire’s ‘Charles XII,’” says Brandes, “stands as a portrait of a remarkable man, executed by a master. It caused Europe to take an interest in the Sweden of that time comparable with what Denmark must thank Shakespeare for in the case of Hamlet.

“Characteristically enough, Voltaire starts his story by a dramatic contrast between the two main persons, Charles XII and Peter the Great, both of whom are sketched in detail. Peter is immediately brought on the scene because no matter how great the interest of the author in the Swedish King’s grandly-planned character and his remarkable fate, his real hero is not Charles, but Peter; not only that bellicose and obstinate in Peter’s character that plunged his country into misfortune, but the sovereign who in spite of the brutal in the pleasures that he sought, in spite of the wildness and cruel vengefulness was an educator, a civilizing influence who conquered a barbarism many centuries old, and introduced industry, technique, building art, science among a people gifted in a way, but fighting against innovations.

“With that clarity that is Voltaire’s foundation quality as historian he places Polish society and the Polish nation side by side with the Swedish and the Russian, and thus the description of August the Strong’s and later Stanislaw Leszczynski’s personalities is as necessary as a background as the characterization of the Swedish and Russian nature through the presentation of Charles XII and Peter the Great.”

With regard to Voltaire’s relations to Russia as a whole, Brandes tells how Frederick the Great looked with jealous eyes on the attention that Voltaire paid to the Russian people in depicting the life-work of Peter, since he looked for undivided devotion of the man whose pen in that day was enough to shed luster on a country. Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great, while uncouth in many ways, was not without taste for intellect and wit, and in approaching Voltaire after becoming Empress sent him her portrait surrounded by large diamonds. But it was in the person of Catherine II that Voltaire a second time enters into acquaintance with a sovereign who is also a genius, a decided and reformative genius, who puts herself into apprenticeship under him and does everything to show him how grateful she is for what he has done.

“There are certain parallels between Frederick and Catherine,” states Brandes. “Both were of German antecedents and had in their blood German respect for intellectual superiority, the German taste for knowledge and mental values. But neither one stood in any cultural relation to Germanism; both wrote and spoke French to perfection. Both were Voltairians to their fingers’ tips. But in spite of their love for French civilization neither one of them had ever seen Paris or France.”

IV.

There is a reference to Voltaire’s internationalism and view of life in the closing chapter of Brandes’ work on the great Frenchman which sums up his personality in a most conspicuous manner, as follows:

“There exists a curious little planet, the highly gifted population of which is distinguished among other things by its equally thoughtless tendency to praise and condemn. It poisons its wise men, it crucifies its saviors, its heroes and thinkers it burns at the stake, its deliverer it puts into prison, then releases them, utilizes them, applauds them after they have died, and then usually puts them into a hole as one would filth or treasure.

“The giant from Sirius discovered this little planet in the universe and found that it was populated by what to him seem funny little creatures, mostly concerned with making existence unpleasant for each other, to destroy and eliminate each other. He did not underestimate their many no doubt valuable and lovable qualities. Now and then he saw them aid each other.

“But he wondered at their marked predilections to misunderstand, ill use and praise their leading personalities. Those who would drag these little beings out of that mudbed of stupidity into which they not unseldom had strayed they liked best of all to drown in this mire. Afterwards they would raise statues in honor of these same individuals, in earliest times made of wood or stone, later of gold and ivory, more recently of marble and bronze. When this was done they took pleasure in throwing all kinds of filthiness on these statues, cleanse them again, then once more defile them, and after a long period let them appear finally in their true shape and color.”

Here we have the story of Francois de Voltaire in a nutshell.

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

A Table of Contents has been added.