Francis Henry Gribble

“ In her restlessness, if in nothing else, she reminds one a little of the Empress Elizabeth. One sees her, as one sees the Empress, driven continually from place to place, seeking she knows not exactly what, but always failing to find it; but one does not see her, as one sees the Empress, guarding her secret like a delicate flame which must at all costs be sheltered from the wind. Her disposition is, rather, to expose the flame to all the winds which blow, in the hope that one or other of them may fan it to a blaze. For she is, after all, a Habsburg ”

“ Francis Joseph is the Head of the House as well as the Sovereign Ruler of the Empire; his judgment seat is, in all family matters, the ultimate tribunal. He can grant dispensations, like the Pope; and he sits without assessors—to decide whether hallowed principles or personal inclinations constitute the Higher Law. There are times when he feels that he would like to yield but must not; times when he yields, against his will, to a pressure which wears down his resistance; times when, though there is no particular reason why he should not yield, he simply does not choose to. ”

“ If the laws of romance had governed the business of the world, it would have set the seal on the happiness of a marriage which had begun so happily; but it seems that, as a matter of fact, the happiness had taken wings and fled long before Elizabeth’s charm had conciliated her husband’s enemies to this good purpose—long, also, before the occurrence of those specially tragic events which were to make their reign memorable for tragedy. ”

“ It must be repeated that the common view of the Empress Charlotte as a valiant woman who took matters into her own hands when the Emperor Maximilian was timorous and hesitating cannot stand. She was, in the first place, a vain woman who took purely frivolous views of Imperial responsibilities; in the second place, a woman who lost her mental balance when she discovered that the position for which she had longed had its duties as well as its pleasures, and its perils as well as its privileges. ”

“ But the Archduke Ferdinand Charles had not Francis Joseph’s reverence for caste, and was not to be browbeaten. His rights as a man and a lover were more to him than his rights as an Archduke [291] and a possible heir to the throne; and his instinct told him that he was choosing the better part. Fräulein Czuber had never hoped to be an Archduchess; and he would be delighted to relieve her of awkward embarrassment by ceasing to be an Archduke. ”

“ May all good things attend him in the middle-class retreat which he has found! His demonstration against the Habsburg system has been a fine one, and has been made in time: a safe escape from decadence before the doom was yet in sight; a sane escape, and not one of those—too frequent among the Habsburgs—of which the true nature and underlying motive have been obscured by bizarre eccentricities and crying scandals. Whether Francis Joseph classes the case among those in which Nemesis has smitten him through the members of his family is more than one can presume to say. ”

“ According to the treaties, Lombardy belongs to me. My arms having been unfortunate, I am quite willing to cede the territory to the Emperor Napoleon; but I cannot recognise the wishes of the population, for that is only another phrase for the right of revolution. Use the phrase if you must in your treaty with the King of Sardinia, and in your proclamations to the Italian people—that is no business of mine; but you must clearly understand that I, the Emperor of Austria, emphatically refuse to put my signature to such a form of words. ”

“ Francis Joseph was always able to give his equals, and has gradually learnt to be able to give his inferiors, the impression that he is genial affability incarnate. It is not natural to him to be mean or paltry—he very much prefers to be splendid. But there is, and has always been, at the bottom of his mind, a certain confusion of thought. If he has not mistaken himself for God, at least he has mistaken the interests of the House of Habsburg for that Higher Law to which the ordinary laws of honour and morality which bind ordinary men must be subordinated. ”

“ If the strong hand was a bloody hand, the bloody hand was a strong hand; and Austria did not “muddle through” her difficulties, but carved her way through them. She had nothing as yet to fear from Prussia; she strode with jack-boots through Hungary and northern Italy; and the House of Habsburg—bankrupt, but with the most effective army in Europe—could once more afford to be arrogant. So that we find Francis Joseph, as soon as his position was secure, manifesting his family pride by a proposal that Napoleon III. should be insulted. ”

“ No one will blame her; for no one will believe that her fears were illusory. If there is one circumstance which suggests scepticism of the fact that the percentage of insanity is higher in royal than in other families, it is the fact that members of royal families are unscrupulously ready to accuse each other of insanity, and place each other under restraint. The case of Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg, whom Count Mattatich rescued from her prison like a gallant knight of old, is only one of many cases of which Princess Louisa of Tuscany may have bethought herself. ”

“ The two speeches sound like the last lingering echoes of mediævalism; and Francis Joseph, in spite of the successive shocks which experience has given him, probably retains more mediæval ideas than any other contemporary ruler. The superiority of the Habsburgs to the rest of mankind—at all events, of Austrian mankind—is not, for him, a proposition which needs to be demonstrated; it is a law of thought. He does not argue about it, or expect others to argue about it, but finds it in his consciousness together with his conceptions of space and time. ”

“ About the Empress, on the other hand, it is impossible to read a page from any pen—whether that page be written by an intimate or by a stranger—without feeling oneself in the presence of a mystery which the most favourably placed chroniclers have failed to penetrate. A novelist of genius might perhaps have invented her—Mr. Maurice Barrès, for one, is a little prone to write as if he had invented her; but she was not to be understood by courtiers, secretaries, and ladies-in-waiting. They recite her traits at great length, but almost in vain ”

“ His wife is a clever woman who knows how to bide her time, and does not go out of her way to make unnecessary enemies. He himself has his party, which looks likely to be the party of the future. The blow which he has struck at the Habsburg system is the hardest blow which that system has yet sustained, because he has struck it with dignity and self-restraint, gratifying the instinctive Habsburg craving for the infusion of fresh blood without provoking any of those scandals which give the enemy occasion to blaspheme. ”

“ They might come of healthier stock than Archdukes and Archduchesses; their blood might be freer from the taint of insanity; and they might be less likely to leap their horses over poor people’s coffins when they were sober and undress to dance in cafés when they were drunk. Nevertheless they were unfit—grossly and impossibly unfit—to be married by Archdukes; and if the Archduke Francis Charles did not take that view of the matter, then he should be an Archduke no longer, but should depart—an imperial castaway—and hide his shame in a foreign land. ”

“ One may take the liberty of doubting whether her respect for the memory of her friend, the Empress, was the sole reason why the proposed morganatic marriage was not concluded. There must also have been representations from many quarters—from the Emperor’s Ministers as well as from his daughters—that while such a marriage would cause a public and family scandal, it would hardly, in the circumstances, add anything appreciable to the happiness and privileges of either party. On that point one is certainly entitled to prefer one’s own judgment to the lady’s account of the self-denying ordinance. ”

“ He was far more a dreamer than a man of action; but action—or, at least, the attempt at action—was the inevitable outcome of his dreams. The Archduchess Charlotte, being vain and ambitious, saw to that.
Legend—for she has passed into legend, though she is still alive—represents Charlotte as Maximilian’s superior in energy and capacity,—the sort of woman who is resolved to keep her husband up to the mark and make a man of him; but it is hard to see upon what evidence that estimate of her rests. Assuredly, she was more anxious to be an Empress than Maximilian was to be an Emperor ”

“ The failure of a marriage—of a royal marriage as of any other—is necessarily wrapped in mystery. The full facts are never made known; and one always feels that the facts kept secret were probably more important than the facts disclosed. Moreover, personality—that mysterious thing which none of us ever reveals completely to any one observer—inevitably counts for more than the tangible events on which we can lay our fingers. So with this marriage of Francis Joseph’s. ”

“ The Archduke Otto—brother of the present heir-apparent, and consequently Francis Joseph’s nephew—was the most amazing of all the Archdukes, and the one whose case most fittingly illustrates the usual generalisations about Habsburg degeneracy. The common people rather liked him; for he had the negative merit of not being proud, and was, in the main, the sort of gay and festive buffoon to whom the hearts of the common people, when untrammelled by considerations of morality, go out. ”

“ If there is something beautiful in the thought that two human beings who love and respect one another are joined before God in holy matrimony, so there is something uncommonly repulsive in the idea that such a union can be formed without any preparation and remain a lie from the altar to the grave.
“I regret I was not born in humble circumstances in some fisherman’s hamlet on the seashore. There one is nearer to happiness and peace than in our high positions and in our complex society. Happiness depends on living naturally, and what increases our distance from nature decreases our happiness. ”

“ They not only admire the statesman who has acquired a prestige to which he was not born, and has used it to recover by diplomacy what he has lost in war; they also cherish an affectionate sympathy for the man at whom calamity has dealt blow after blow, whom no blow, however cruel, has struck down, and who, in spite of innumerable sorrows, has continued to confront the world with a dignified, if melancholy, composure. He has had, they perceive, no less trouble with his family than with his Empire ”

“ The Archduke Louis Salvator—John Orth’s elder brother—has acquired for himself a kind of renown as the student hermit of the Balearic Islands. He lives the simple life there, attired, according to his niece, Princess Louisa, in “sandals and loose linen trousers,” toiling like a labourer, with a sunburnt visage, in a vineyard of his own, with a yacht always at hand, ready to take him to sea whenever a fit of restlessness comes upon him. ”

“ An Empress sallying into the highways and byways to seek a guardian angel for the Emperor, and finally extracting one from the coulisses, and presenting her, with the result that she becomes the friend of the family as well as the Emperor, and the Emperor takes a continual delight in her society for thirty years—that, indeed, is an amazing picture, not to be accepted, even on Countess Marie Larisch’s authority, without corroborative evidence. ”

“ The impression, when one reviews the recent annals of the House of Habsburg, is of continuous rattling of skeletons in all the cupboards, and of one sane and strong man—the accepted and now the hereditary Head of the House—going gravely through his troubled life, not unmoved, indeed, by the ghostly noises, but, at least, without allowing his composure to be too visibly disturbed by them: a man of whom one may say, giving a somewhat new sense to old and hackneyed lines ”

“ All this, Countess Marie would have us think, is an allegory; but it is safer to leave the veil hanging over the facts, or alleged facts, which she means it to allegorise. Fairy Stories are not evidence—least of all when one only gets them, as in this case, at second hand; but, if this Fairy Story cannot be trusted for facts, at least it can be trusted for atmosphere, and both Elizabeth’s and Francis Joseph’s attitudes towards life seem to be displayed in it. ”

“ Austria is not one of the “inevitable” countries, like England and Spain, bound to have a separate existence under some form of government or other because of their geographical situation and the national characteristics of their inhabitants. There is no Austrian nation: only a medley of races which detest each other, bound (but by no means welded) together for the supposed convenience of the rest of Europe, and unified only by the fact that its component parts all appertain to the dominions of the House of Habsburg. ”

“ The question before us—before Austria, rather—is the question of the importance which the world of the immediate future will attach to family pride and the exclusiveness of an imperial caste; and that is a question about which the world of to-day does not quite seem to have made up its mind. It has gained a little knowledge without losing an equal proportion of prejudice, and has reached a point at which it finds it equally difficult to live either with its superstitions or without them. ”

“ In public affairs, that is to say, Francis Joseph has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, a luck like that which is said to attend the British Army and save it from the consequences of its blunders. It is only in his private life that misfortune has pursued him so closely and incessantly that, when the news of the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth was broken to him, he covered his face with his hands and broke down, exclaiming: “What! Is there no sorrow possible to man which I am to be spared?” ”

“ Some speeches attributed to her at other times would seem to indicate that she cried sometimes for lost illusions, like a child for a broken toy:—
“The happiness which men seek in sincerity and ask from it is controlled by tragic laws. We all live on the edge of an abysm of grief and pain, dug for us by the falsehood of social morality. That is the abysm which separates our actual condition from the condition in which we ought to find ourselves. An abysm is always an abysm. The moment we try to cross it, we fall and break our limbs.” ”

“ One can only insult one’s equals. Any day on which the Head of the House of Habsburg decides a point of precedence takes rank as a Judgment Day—a day on which there can be only one answer to the question: Shall not the Judge of All the Earth do right? ”

“ The postulate which bids the progeny of an Emperor who married for love take a lower seat than the son and grandsons of the family scapegrace will assuredly be questioned by the next Emperor of Austria; and it will be found that it has nothing to say for itself. It may die fighting; but it will die; and the whole of the Habsburg superstition will die with it. What will happen then lies in the lap of the Gods.
It is, however, precisely because of its gradual approach to such problems as these that one finds the reign of Francis Joseph such an intensely interesting [350] period of history. ”

“ Apparently, indeed, it is only as a linguist and a figure-head—the sublime figure-head of the Habsburgs who need a figure-head so badly—that he possesses genius; in other respects he seems to have been, as Herr Wulfling was, at a later date, to the Princess Louisa of Tuscany, “a very ordinary man.” In any case, he proved himself a very ordinary general, whom very ordinary generals were able to defeat—partly, perhaps, because his Hungarian soldiers showed great alacrity in deserting him; but he sulked, with characteristic Habsburg sullenness, over the terms of peace. ”

“ In every newspaper office some stranger presents himself, from time to time, offering to tell the truth, as he has heard it from one of the very few who knew it; now and again the stranger’s offer is accepted. But, as a matter of fact, all the queer stories thus circulated can be traced to one of two sources,—neither of them sources in which any confidence can be placed.
The boon companions who were with Rudolph at Meyerling were Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg, Count Hoyos, and Count Bombelles; and they, at any rate, have never taken the newspapers into their confidence. ”

“ He went to Ischl, and met Princess Helen. She was very charming, but—still more charming, as it seemed to Francis Joseph, was her younger sister, Princess Elizabeth: the Cinderella who was kept in the background.
Elizabeth had not been trained for any great position. She was only sixteen: a madcap and a child of nature—accustomed, in so far as anyone in her station might be, to the untrammelled freedom of a highlander. She roamed the woods and the mountains—though not, as the author of “The Martyrdom of an Empress” tells us, with a gun in her hand, in pursuit of game. ”

“ Archdukes, it is true, have been bred to deviate from the normal human type; but they have not all deviated from it in the same direction. Brilliance, as well as beauty, may go with decadence. Genius and madness are allied, and eccentricity is the cousin of both of them; the diseased fruit of a diseased stock may sometimes seem to make up in splendour for what it lacks in strength. We shall see how the various cases of the Archdukes and Archduchesses confirm that truth—Francis Joseph [273] alone among them combining a fair endowment of ability with a plausible resemblance to the average man. ”

“ Our picture must be, not only of a great and successful ruler, but also of a brave old man, tried in the fire but not consumed by it, bowed down by sorrows but not broken by them, maintaining [9] the mediæval majesty of royal caste in the presence of his peers, at a time when other Habsburgs—one Habsburg after another—were flinging the prejudices of royal caste to the winds and making, as it must have seemed to him, sad messes of their lives, after the manner of those reprobate relatives who, even in middle-class families, are spoken of, if at all, with bated breath. ”