And when it will end, is not yet clear. But that it ever should have begun, will one day be the astonishment. As if the divinest function of a human being were not even that of believing;of discriminating, with his God-given intellect, what is from what is not; and as if the point were, to render that either an impossible function, or else what we must sorrowfully call a revolutionary, rebellious and mutinous one. O Noltenius, O Panzendorf, do for pity's sake take away your Catechetical ware;and say either nothing to the poor young Boy, or some small thing he will find to be BEYOND doubt when he can judge of it!
Fever, pestilence, are bad for the body; but Doubt, impious mutiny, doubly impious hypocrisy, are these nothing for the mind?
Who would go about inculcating Doubt, unless he were far astray indeed, and much at a loss for employment!
But the sorest fact in Friedrich's schooling, the forest, for the present, though it ultimately proved perhaps the most beneficent one, being well dealt with by the young soul, and nobly subdued to his higher uses, remains still to be set forth. Which will be a long business, first and last!
Chapter XII.
CROWN-PRINCE FALLS INTO DISFAVOR WITH PAPA.
Those vivacities of young Fritz, his taste for music, finery, those furtive excursions into the domain of Latin and forbidden things, were distasteful and incomprehensible to Friedrich Wilhelm: Where can such things end? They begin in disobedience and intolerable perversity; they will be the ruin of Prussia and of Fritz!--Here, in fact, has a great sorrow risen. We perceive the first small cracks of incurable divisions in the royal household;the breaking out of fountains of bitterness, which by and by spread wide enough. A young sprightly, capricions and vivacious Boy, inclined to self-will, had it been permitted; developing himself into foreign tastes, into French airs and ways; very ill seen by the heavy-footed practical Germanic Majesty.
The beginnings of this sad discrepancy are traceable from Friedrich's sixth or seventh year: "Not so dirty, Boy!" And there could be no lack of growth in the mutual ill-humor, while the Boy himself continued growing; enlarging in bulk and in activity of his own. Plenty of new children come, to divide our regard withal, and more are coming; five new Princesses, wise little Ulrique the youngest of them (named of Sweden and the happy Swedish Treaty), whom we love much for her grave staid ways. Nay, next after Ulrique comes even a new Prince; August Wilhelm, ten years younger than Friedrich; and is growing up much more according to the paternal heart. Pretty children, all of them, more or less;and towardly, and comfortable to a Father;--and the worst of them a paragon of beauty, in comparison to perverse, clandestine, disobedient Fritz, with his French fopperies, flutings, and cockatoo fashions of hair!--And so the silent divulsion, silent on Fritz's part, exploding loud enough now and then on his Father's part, goes steadily on, splitting ever wider; new offences ever superadding themselves.
Till, at last, the rugged Father has grown to hate the son;and longs, with sorrowful indignation, that it were possible to make August Wilhelm Crown-Prince in his stead. This Fritz ought to fashion himself according to his Father's pattern, a well-meant honest pattern; and he does not! Alas, your Majesty, it cannot be.
It is the new generation come; which cannot live quite as the old one did. A perennial controversy in human life; coeval with the genealogies of men. This little Boy should have been the excellent paternal Majesty's exact counterpart; resembling him at all points, "as a little sixpence does a big half-crown:" but we perceive he cannot. This is a new coin, with a stamp of its own.
A surprising FRIEDRICH D'OR this; and may prove a good piece yet;but will never be the half-crown your Majesty requires!--Conceive a rugged thick-sided Squire Western, of supreme degree,--or this Squire Western is a hot Hohenzollern, and wears a crown royal;--conceive such a burly NE-PLUS-ULTRA of a Squire, with his broad-based rectitudes and surly irrefragabilities; the honest German instincts of the man, convictions certain as the Fates, but capable of no utterance, or next to none, in words; and that he produces a Son who takes into Voltairism, piping, fiddling and belles-lettres, with apparently a total contempt for Grumkow and the giant-regiment! Sulphurous rage, in gusts or in lasting tempests, rising from a fund of just implacability, is inevitable.
Such as we shall see.
The Mother, as mothers will, secretly favors Fritz; anxious to screen him in the day of high-wind. Withal she has plans of her own in regard to Fritz, and the others; being a lady of many plans. That of the "Double-Marriage," for example; of marrying her Prince and Princess to a Princess and Prince of the English-Hanoverian House; it was a pleasant eligible plan, consented to by Papa and the other parties; but when it came to be perfected by treaty, amid the rubs of external and internal politics, what new amazing discrepancies rose upon her poor children and her! Fearfully aggravating the quarrel of Father and Son, almost to the fatal point. Of that "Double-Marriage," whirled up in a universe of intriguing diplomacies, in the "skirts of the Kaiser's huge Spectre-Hunt," as we have called it, there will be sad things to say by and by.