Titans of History (35 page)

The shrine to Voltaire erected by the French revolutionaries in the Panthéon acknowledges their debt to him. It bears the inscription: “He taught us how to be free.” Voltaire had begun the process of translating the ideals of the Enlightenment into reality, and his words became the first bomb thrown against the
ancien régime
. He once told a friend, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.”

1709–1784

Here lies Sam Johnson:—Reader, have a care,
Tread lightly, lest you wake a sleeping bear:
Religious, moral, generous, and humane
He was: but self-sufficient, proud, and vain,
Fond of, and overbearing in dispute,
A Christian and a scholar—but a brute
.

Soame Jenyns, suggested epitaph for Dr. Johnson (1784)

Samuel Johnson was one of the most versatile, erudite and accomplished writers in the history of English literature. In addition to his remarkable and ground-breaking
Dictionary
, he also wrote copiously in a wide range of other genres: essays, literary
criticism, travel writing, political sketches and satires, a tragedy, biography, poetry, translations, sermons, diaries, letters and pamphlets. He was a master conversationalist and a spiky, magnetic and brilliant figure in London society. Through the biography written by his disciple James Boswell, we can still appreciate one of the reigning personalities of literary history as though he were alive today.

Johnson's early years did not show much promise. As a child he suffered from both scrofula (tuberculosis of the lymph glands), which affected his sight, and smallpox, which disfigured his face, making him at best peculiar to look at. Throughout his life he was also prone to depression and had all manner of odd tics and twitches that now suggest Tourette's syndrome. Despite these disadvantages, the young Samuel was a bright boy and grew up in a family of booksellers in Lichfield. But poverty obliged him to leave Pembroke College, Oxford, after only a year, without taking a degree.

In 1735 he married Elizabeth Porter, a local widow twenty years his senior. Failing to obtain a teaching post, Johnson decamped to London in 1737 and began working for the
Gentleman's Magazine
, for which he wrote parliamentary sketches. He had already written a stage tragedy,
Irene
, and worked on satirical poems, biographies such as
The Life of Mr. Richard Savage
, and a catalog of the Harley collection of books and manuscripts.

It was in 1746 that Johnson began his
magnum opus
. He was commissioned to write a new English dictionary, and the project dominated the next nine years of his life. Nothing on such a scale had previously been undertaken, and the
Dictionary
proved to be a masterpiece of scholarship. It broke new ground in lexicography, encompassing a vast array of words from a gigantic pool of source material, and even made a good stab at discovering the etymology of many of the words that were included. The
Dictionary
was also a demonstration of Johnson's pithy and precise style. In a
characteristic flash of witty self-deprecation, Johnson defines a lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.”

The
Dictionary,
published in 1755, was immediately recognized as a work of brilliance, and Johnson was awarded with an honorary MA from Oxford before the book was even finished. In the meantime he had continued to write copiously in other genres. His essays in
The Rambler
dealt with matters as varied as capital punishment, good parenting and the emergence of the novel, and are replete with eminently quotable epigrams—such as “No man is much pleased with a companion, who does not increase, in some respect, his fondness for himself.” Johnson had the same gift as Oscar Wilde for pointing out, with razor-like wit, the contradictions inherent in human nature.

Johnson lost his wife in 1752. He never married again, but his house was a refuge to friends from a variety of odd backgrounds. Ex-prostitutes, indebted unlicensed surgeons, female writers—a particular favorite with Johnson—all stayed under his roof. But Johnson was just as popular in the higher strata of society, receiving patronage from the Treasury and conversing with men like the American founding father, philosopher and inventor Benjamin Franklin. In 1763 Johnson met the young Boswell in a bookshop and took him on as a protégé. Boswell was a devoted fan, and his biography tells us much about Johnson's life and scintillating conversation which otherwise might have been lost.

As his fame grew Johnson turned out another pair of fine works: an admired edition of Shakespeare's plays in 1765 and
The Lives of the Poets
, which came out between 1779 and 1781. Johnson was often tart, if not harsh, on his contemporaries—when asked to pick the better of the two minor poets Smart and Derrick, he replied that there was “no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” But despite this gruffness, he had a warm heart and a fond regard for his friends. He died in 1784 and was buried in
Westminster Abbey, a sign of the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries—an esteem that has not diminished over the succeeding centuries. “I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl,” he once said. “Let him come out as I do, and bark.”

1712–1786

A man who gives battle as readily as he writes an opera … he has written more books than any of his contemporary princes has sired bastards; he has won more victories than he has written books
.

Voltaire, 1772

The outstanding soldier-statesman of his age, the paragon of gifted kingship, Frederick the Great prefigured Napoleon. The most enlightened monarch of his day, Frederick was an aesthete and lover of the arts—an accomplished writer, composer, flautist and wit. Famed in his youth as a philosopher prince, on acceding to the throne in 1740, at the age of twenty-eight, this apparent milksop astonished Europe's crowned heads by becoming the most formidable ruler of the age.

With his typically wry wit, Frederick once declared that he had infected Europe with warfare just as a coquette infects her clients. Introspective and self-critical, Frederick's analysis and planning were always immaculate, his quick mind the first to seize the advantage on the battlefield. His martial qualities inspired in his formidably well-trained army the utmost respect and loyalty, despite
the horrific privations his campaigns put them through. When Napoleon reached Berlin twenty years after Frederick's death, he paid homage at Frederick's tomb. As he entered, he declared to his men: “Hats off, gentlemen! If he were alive, we would not be here!”

Frederick waged war to serve his state's interests, but he was never militaristic. He deplored war's effects and he abhorred hypocrisy. At other times he could be firmly pragmatic: “If we can gain something by being honest, we will be it; and if we have to deceive, we will be cheats.”

In 1740 he boldly and ruthlessly invaded Austria's rich province of Silesia, unleashing almost twenty years of savage warfare across central Europe, but he kept the territory. Europe's hypocritical old guard was quick to share in the spoils when Frederick initiated the partition of the increasingly anarchic Poland. “She weeps, but she takes,” Frederick wryly commented of Empress Maria Theresa when she took her slice of Poland.

The man who refused to wear spurs because he thought them cruel to horses abolished torture within days of coming to the throne. He banned serfdom in all his new territories, and in an age when capital punishment was decreed for stealing bread, the famously liberal Frederick signed only eight or ten death warrants a year. He once reprieved a father and daughter from the death sentence for committing incest on the grounds that one could not be absolutely sure about the girl's paternity. The atheist Frederick's religious tolerance extended to welcoming the Jesuits to Prussia—a sect that crowned heads all over Europe were trying to expel.

The first of Europe's enlightened despots, Frederick was tireless in fulfilling his self-designated role as the first servant of the state. Every day he forced himself to rise at 4 a.m., ordering his servants to throw a cold wet cloth in his face if he seemed reluctant. Even such an early start as this barely gave him time to do all he wanted. At his court, which he filled with artists, writers,
musicians and philosophers, he practiced the flute four times a day, held concerts after supper, conducted a vast correspondence with philosophers and statesmen, wrote poetry, and administered the affairs of state.

His endurance was as striking as his luck. He was prone to fits of depression and despair, but he never gave up. “Fortune alone can deliver me from my present position,” he declared at one point during the Seven Years' War (1756–63). The timely death of his inveterate enemy Empress Elizaveta of Russia in 1762 brought about a volte-face in foreign policy as his ardent admirer Peter III came to the Russian throne. Having teetered on the brink of total annihilation early in the war, Prussia emerged triumphant from it.

Frederick's insecurity may well have been instilled in him by his miserable youth. His father Frederick William I's contempt for his son was famous. “What goes on in that little head?” the austere, violent, volatile Frederick William would demand suspiciously of his “effeminate” son, whose lifelong love for all things French directly contravened his father's orders. Matters came to a head when the eighteen-year-old Frederick tried to flee his wretched existence. After he was caught and imprisoned, his best friend (and some say lover) Hermann von Katte was executed outside the window of his cell.

Prussia may have grown in grandeur but Frederick did not. Toward the end of Frederick's life, a visiting dignitary encountered an elderly “gardener” at the Sanssouci summer palace and had a friendly chat. Only later, when he was introduced to Prussia's king, did he realize who he had been talking to.

But he could turn nasty—in his wit, in his disciplining of his army, in his repudiation of his wife. His sexuality mystified contemporaries—there were allegations of affairs with male guardsmen. Certainly there were no mistresses. Perhaps he was asexual. He fell out spectacularly with his old correspondent Voltaire, who abused
him in print as a miser and a tyrant. His pursuit of war to advance his country simultaneously exhausted its resources. His emphasis on the primacy of the state meant that his rule was never as enlightened as Voltaire had hoped.

Frederick's lifelong conservatism translated itself increasingly into rigidity with age. With typical self-deprecation, he frequently said that he had lived too long.

1725–1798

Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life
.

Giacomo Casanova

The name of Casanova or, to give his full name, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt, is synonymous with womanizing and wild living. Indeed, in his racy and scandalously frank memoirs,
Histoire de ma vie jusqu'à l'an
1787 (
The Story of My Life Until 1787
), this tall, dark and handsome self-appointed hero presents himself as “the world's greatest lover,” describing his many conquests, as well as his early life, adventures and travels, in salacious detail. It may therefore come as a surprise to find that the notorious philanderer, who sired many children out of wedlock and was himself, it was rumored, the illegitimate son of a Venetian nobleman, was also a highly cultured man—and that is his real claim to fame. Whether they are mainly fact or boastful fiction, his memoirs are the greatest ever written.

Precociously intelligent, Casanova attended the University of Padua from the age of thirteen, obtained a doctorate in law at the
age of sixteen (ironically, perhaps, his studies included moral philosophy), took holy orders, and also considered training as a doctor.

“The idea of settling down,” he wrote, “was always repulsive to me.” The adventurous and talented Casanova was always on the move. He started out working in the church in Venice but was soon expelled under something of a cloud, due to his sexual appetites and dandified appearance. From there he had a short-lived career as a military officer, stationed in Corfu, then as a theater violinist in Venice. He took a variety of jobs before leaving Venice in 1748, under suspicion of attempted rape (though he was later acquitted).

Born into a world of artists, con artists and courtesans, Casanova represented a sparkling conflation of two 18th-century social types—the society fraud and the man of letters. He was one of the fascinating mountebanks and charlatans who entertained, mesmerized and swindled the royal courts of the age, claiming variously to be noblemen, necromancers, alchemists (who could turn base metals into gold), Kabbalists, magi and hierophants. The first of them was the so-called Comte de Saint-Germain (1710–84), who claimed to be 2000 years old and able to remember the Crucifixion (his valet claimed to remember it too); Louis XV gave him 10,000 livres. The ultimate was Count Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–95), born Giuseppe Balsamo in Sicily, who made a fortune in courts across Europe claiming, among other feats, that he could convert urine into gold and offer eternal life. His seductive wife, born Lorenza in Sicily, accompanied him as Serafina, Princess di Santa Croce. After a rock-star-style tour of Europe, Count Cagliostro was finally embroiled in the Diamond Necklace Affair that so damaged Queen Marie-Antoinette, and he died in 1795 in an Italian prison.

But it was also a very literary age, when the fame of witty letter-writers, such as Casanova, spread throughout Europe. The greatest
letter-writer of the era (along with Voltaire) was the genuine high aristocrat Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne (1735–1814), Belgian grandee, Austrian field marshal and international courtier, wit and socialite, who managed to be friends simultaneously with Emperor Joseph II, Catherine the Great of Russia, and King Frederick the Great. His hilarious letters were copied from court to court, and he finally died at the Congress of Vienna.