The Crimes of England | Page 6

the
bench outside his home of exile would be a much more genuine
memory of the real greatness of his race than the modern and almost
gimcrack stars and garters that were pulled in Windsor Chapel. From
modern knighthood has departed all shadow of chivalry; how far we
have travelled from it can easily be tested by the mere suggestion that
Sir Thomas Lipton, let us say, should wear his lady's sleeve round his
hat or should watch his armour in the Chapel of St. Thomas of
Canterbury. The giving and receiving of the Garter among despots and
diplomatists is now only part of that sort of pottering mutual politeness
which keeps the peace in an insecure and insincere state of society. But
that old blackened wooden sign is at least and after all the sign of
something; the sign of the time when one solitary Hohenzollern did not
only set fire to fields and cities, but did truly set on fire the minds of
men, even though it were fire from hell.
Everything was young once, even Frederick the Great. It was an
appropriate preface to the terrible epic of Prussia that it began with an
unnatural tragedy of the loss of youth. That blind and narrow savage
who was the boy's father had just sufficient difficulty in stamping out
every trace of decency in him, to show that some such traces must have
been there. If the younger and greater Frederick ever had a heart, it was

a broken heart; broken by the same blow that broke his flute. When his
only friend was executed before his eyes, there were two corpses to be
borne away; and one to be borne on a high war-horse through victory
after victory: but with a small bottle of poison in the pocket. It is not
irrelevant thus to pause upon the high and dark house of his childhood.
For the peculiar quality which marks out Prussian arms and ambitions
from all others of the kind consists in this wrinkled and premature
antiquity. There is something comparatively boyish about the triumphs
of all the other tyrants. There was something better than ambition in the
beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at least a lover; and
his first campaign was like a love-story. All that was pagan in him
worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all that was
Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of Victories.
Henry VIII., a far less reputable person, was in his early days a good
knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we might almost
say that he was a fine old English gentleman so long as he was young.
Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there must have been some
cause to make that Christian maiden cast flowers on his dishonourable
grave. But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt from the first of
the charnel. He came out to his first victory like one broken by defeats;
his strength was stripped to the bone and fearful as a fleshless
resurrection; for the worst of what could come had already befallen him.
The very construction of his kingship was built upon the destruction of
his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had surrendered
to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only repeat it and
repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers surrender to his gibbet
and his whipping-post; he could 'make the souls of the nations
surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as he had been
broken; while he could break in, he could never break out. He could not
slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity. Thus he stands alone among
the conquerors of their kind; his madness was not due to a mere
misdirection of courage. Before the whisper of war had come to him
the foundations of his audacity had been laid in fear.
Of the work he did in this world there need be no considerable debate.
It was romantic, if it be romantic that the dragon should swallow St.
George. He turned a small country into a great one: he made a new

diplomacy by the fulness and far-flung daring of his lies: he took away
from criminality all reproach of carelessness and incompleteness. He
achieved an amiable combination of thrift and theft. He undoubtedly
gave to stark plunder something of the solidity of property. He
protected whatever he stole as simpler men protect whatever they have
earned or inherited. He turned his hollow eyes with a sort of loathsome
affection upon the territories which had most reluctantly become his: at
the end of the Seven Years' War men knew as little how he was