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If music, then, was not to be his life work, what about literature? Surely this field would offer opportunities for such a creative youth as Benjamin Henry Latrobe. And there was a family precedent: his father had published several translations as well as original works dealing with Moravian matters, had translated David Crantz's History of the Moravian Church, and had written a history of the Moravian missions in Labrador. The son, in fact, out of his experience in Europe did produce two books, one published in 1788 and the other a year later. The first, Chracteristic Anecdotes . . . to Illustrate the Character of Frederick the Great, was a translation of a book then popular in Germany, with the addition of a preface and various notes and stories about Latrobe's own experiences, one of which has already been cited. The second was Authentic Elucidation of the History of Counts Struensee [sic] and Brandt and of the Revolution in Denmark in the Year 1772 . . . , a translation of the amazing account of an eye witness usually identified as S. O. Falkenskiold, with an extensive introduction by Latrobe.
These two publications evidence how Latrobe's mind and personality had matured since the childlike letter to Dr. Fruauff only four years earlier; not only has he become a master of his native language, writing it in some passages with marked skill and effective design, but he also shows himself definitely interested in the great political disputes then tearing England in two. And the choice of the works he translated is significant; both of them deal with the essential problem of the relation of government to the popular welfare, and both show that Latrobe was already dedicated to the radical side of political and economic questions. To a young man brought up in the unselfish idealism of the Moravian brotherhood, the chasm between the mob and the aristocracy in the England of the 1780's must have been shockingly apparent; even if Latrobe had broken away from the dogmas of the Moravian faith, he was still the product of its somewhat egalitarian and communal thinking.
Not that this attitude would make him a revolutionary in the French sense of 1789; rather, it would make him want to do something about social reform and to make those in power do something about it. Thus in the first of these books he strove to give the English a truer picture of Frederick the Great; he shows him "doing something about it." He tells of the land banks, the tremendous expenditures for improving agriculture, the attempts often so pitifully unsuccessful to make the feudal landowners more conscious of their responsibilities as well as their rights. Yet he was puzzled, as so many had been, by the basic inconsistencies in Frederick's character his rigidity, his refusal to change his mind even when confronted by irrefutable evidence that he was wrong and, on the other hand, surprised and pleased at the king's musical knowledge, his grasp of cultural as well as military affairs, and his personal understanding of common soldiers and uncouth peasants. One of the anecdotes he relates concerns a conversation between Frederick and an old peasant; here the king is speaking and, as Latrobe explains in a footnote, "The King of Prussia pronounced what the old man said in the broad provincial dialect of that country [Silesia], I have attempted to imitate it, in the Yorkshire dialect":
Father! Can you tell me, why the two sovereigns quarrelled? "O dear-a-me, yea," replied the burgher, "that's what a can, th' top and bottom on 't. When ahr elector war a youngster, he larn'd at th' univarsity o' Utrecht, and thear wur th' King o' Sweden, tew, when he wur prince; and thear ye mun noa, they fratch'd, and wur ohlus at loggerheads: and nah a tell'd ye th' thing as 't is."
Then, too, as an Englishman and this is the main evidence of Latrobe's complete acceptance of the Anglo-Saxon-Norman idealism of the English-speaking world--he was immensely bothered by the dichotomy of a despotism that accomplished things as contrasted with a free country that did nothing. Look not here, he warns the reader, for anything corresponding to English liberty; the basic liberties of Prussia of which so much has been written are not liberties in the English sense but merely the rights enjoyed by the Prussian nobility to be free from interference, to exploit their tenants to the last degree.
Thus the book is a puzzled book, just as it deals with a puzzling character in a changing and puzzling world. But in this very puzzlement there is something symptomatic of Latrobe's character. Theoretically he believed in English liberty to the uttermost. He was a passionate supporter of Charles James Fox. Personally he was always a hater of oppression, yet in practice he saw that democratic action had often resulted merely in schism and in futility, and he admired action and results. Evident in this book, therefore, are the foundations of a fundamental split in him a split that at times of discouragement could result in an almost complete cynicism with regard to the effects of political action, yet a split that never resulted in his abandonment of his basically democratic ideals. It is only with this in mind that we can understand the complexities of his reactions to America later.
--Talbot Hamlin, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 21-4.
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