Part 8 (2/2)

_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 famis.h.i.+ng 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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.

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