The failure of the marriage—Difficulty of explaining it—The two
conflicting personalities—Francis Joseph’s personality obvious—The
Empress Elizabeth’s personality mysterious—Her sympathy with the
Hungarians, and its political importance—Her confession of melancholy.
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 outcome of it—what the world has been allowed to see of its
outcome—can only be understood, in so far as it is intelligible at
all, if we examine it in the light of a personality which perplexed
Europe for a generation, perplexing it more and more as years went on.
Not two personalities, be it observed, but one. There are some
personalities which fail to create an atmosphere of mystery even
behind an impenetrable screen; and Francis Joseph’s personality is of
that type. One always feels that, beyond what one knows of him, there
is very little to be known. It is characteristic of all the Habsburgs
that they cannot cross the road without striking an attitude which
shows us exactly where they stand and what they think of things; and
it is easy enough to accept the present Emperor as typical of the
Habsburgs at their best. He comes before us, frank and brave, adaptable
and affable, but, at the same time, proud as Lucifer; infinitely
gracious to those who do not presume—readily regarded by such as a
gallant soldier who has grown into a genial old gentleman, anxious to
make things pleasant for everybody—yet seeming, at some crises of his
fate, to mistake himself for God, and the Archdukes for the archangels;
not because they behave as such, but because they are Habsburgs and
ought to.
That is a perfectly simple type; one does not complicate it when one
adds that Francis Joseph has always been a punctual observer of Roman
Catholic ritual, and, taking the _métier_ of Emperor seriously, has
risen early throughout a long life in order to work at it with all the
diligence of a devoted civil servant. All that—down to and including
the occasional ceremonial washing of the feet of the poor, in imitation
of his Master Christ—has been the straightforward fulfilment of an
intelligible programme. If Francis Joseph had washed the feet of the
poor because he had felt that they needed washing, and would not
otherwise get washed, the case would have been different, and one
would have suspected subtlety in his character. But he has only washed
them gingerly—after servants had seen to it that they were already
clean—in the manner of an actor aiming at spectacular display; and one
no more finds anything subtle or elusive in that piece of symbolism
than in anything else that he has done.
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; telling us of her kindnesses, her eccentricities, her
vanities, but still leaving us at sea—puzzled by the melancholy which
preceded the apparent occasions for melancholy, and by the restlessness
which chased her, like a gadfly, from the haunts of men, unless it was
that she herself pursued—she knew not exactly what—and never found
it. Countess Marie Larisch seems to have been more in her confidence
than anyone else; but Countess Marie Larisch only saw what she was
capable of seeing—which assuredly was not all. One may admit all
Countess Marie Larisch’s facts, and yet doubt the completeness of her
portrait.
And if Elizabeth’s confidante, in so far as she had one, did not
understand, how was her husband—a mere man—a mere soldier—a mere
Habsburg—to do so? He, being, as the French say, _tout en dehors_,
could not possibly comprehend her who was _tout en dedans_. His
happiness in marriage—as long as he actually was happy in it—must
have depended on the assumption that his wife was as simple and
translucent as himself: as simple and translucent as Cinderella or
the Sleeping Beauty. He fell in love with her in that belief, as any
other gallant young soldier might have done; and there is no doubt
whatever that he was very passionately in love. “As much in love as any
lieutenant in my army,” was his own way of putting it; and when his
bride came down the Danube to join him, he ran to greet her on her boat
before the gangway was made secure, and very nearly fell into the water.
That, as he did not actually slip in, was an auspicious beginning;
and it is on record that Emperor and Empress and everybody else said,
and sincerely meant, the right and proper and auspicious things. “The
bride,” said the Austrian people—and the Hungarian people too—“is
the most beautiful woman in all Christendom.” “I am glad,” Elizabeth
wrote in the veteran Radetzky’s album, “that I am about to belong to
a country which possesses an Emperor who is so great and good, and a
hero of Radetzky’s valour.” “Never before,” said Francis Joseph to
O’Donnell—the officer who had grappled with the tailor Libenyi, on the
day of the attempted assassination—“did I feel so grateful to you
for saving my life, for never before did I value my life so much”; and
he showed his joy by pardoning prisoners and giving 200,000 florins to
the poor; while the sympathies of the whole people followed the young
couple when they departed on their honeymoon, and gathered edelweiss
together, like any other honeymooning couple:—
“The recollection of that April day,” wrote a witness of the scene,
“will never be effaced from my mind. The old among us felt themselves
young again, the sorrowful became glad, the sick forgot their pains,
and the poor their poverty. All alike were eager to see the companion
whom the Emperor had chosen as the partner of his life. God only knows
how many tears of joy ran down our cheeks, and what ardent prayers
were uttered by our lips.”
It is easy to say, in the light of subsequent events, that the joy was
too bright to last, and that the hope arose, only to be overcast; but
it is difficult, setting superstition aside, to say why it was so,
though it is not impossible to trace some of the steps by which it
came to be so. In this exalted household two factors which are often
seen at work in humbler households were presently, though not quite
immediately, to play their part: a mother-in-law and an Egeria.
The pity was the greater because, from the point of view of politics
and the dynasty, the Emperor’s beautiful bride promised to be, and
indeed was, an asset of great value. The popularity for which he had to
work hard she achieved without an effort by the indefinable charm of
her youth and loveliness, especially among the romantic and chivalrous
Hungarians, who had not yet forgiven Francis Joseph for the severities
of 1849. She had Hungarian blood in her veins, though her Hungarian
ancestors were remote; and she had no responsibility for the atrocities
of the repression. On the contrary, she made it clear to Hungarians
that she sympathised with their sufferings and delighted in their
country: its vast spaces and its heroic patriots, indomitable even
though conquered.
Amnesties, as we have seen, attended her arrival among them—amnesties
which she may or may not have inspired, but of which she certainly got
all the credit. Whatever she was or was not, she was, at any rate,
tender-hearted and impulsive with the impulsiveness of a generous girl
who feels instinctively that all the people who are locked up ought to
be let out and given a second chance, unless they are really dangerous
criminals. The Hungarians, in consequence, fell in love with her to
a man, with a passion different from, but more enduring than, her
husband’s; and one of them—Count Alexander von Bertha—wrote of her
marriage:—
“It was the installation on the throne, under the ægis of beauty and
charm, of the guardian angel of the Magyars, to whom the young Empress
felt herself specially attracted by the memory of her patron saint who
belonged to the House of Arpad.”
[Illustration: THE EMPRESS ELIZABETH OF AUSTRIA.]
The allusion is, of course, to the Empress’s namesake, Saint Elizabeth
of Hungary; and the sentiment stirred by the association bore
practical political fruit. It is no depreciation of the work done in
later years by Deák and Beust to say that their task would have been
vastly more difficult if Elizabeth had not charmed the spirits of the
Hungarians, and that it was largely owing to the spell which she had
thrown upon them that Deák was able to announce, when asked to name his
terms after the disasters of 1866, that Hungary demanded no more after
Sadowa than she had asked before.
That was a great achievement—not to be made the less of because it
was due to no conscious statesmanship, but merely came about through
the idealisation of a beautiful and sympathetic woman by a childlike
and romantic race, too long accustomed to be treated as pariahs by the
domineering Teutons. 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.
At first, no doubt, she showed a naïve delight at her sudden elevation
to imperial dignity. The dramatic change in her fortunes appealed to
her imagination; and it seemed as if all the glories of the world were
hers. But—vanity of vanities! The years passed—a few years only—and
Elizabeth had learnt the Preacher’s lesson. Even then, one suspects,
the desires which haunted her were vague. She did not know exactly what
it was that she wanted; but she knew only too well that, whatever it
was, neither her marriage nor her exalted rank had given it to her; and
we soon begin to hear of her long journeys in pursuit of the fugitive
shadow, and of the mysterious melancholy which had visibly settled
on her. She was still a young woman when she said to a confidante,
_apropos_ of what one is left to guess: “I feel as if something had
died in me.” She was not yet thirty when Countess Marie Larisch—a
child who had climbed a tree—saw her in tears in circumstances which
she has graphically described:—
“I nearly fell out of the tree when I recognised the Empress, who
had apparently given up the idea of riding, and was walking quite
unattended.... Elizabeth came slowly to my tree, under which was a
stone seat. She sat down, clasped her hands in a despairing kind of
way, and began to cry silently. I could see that she was greatly
distressed, for her face wore a hopeless expression, and occasionally
a sob shook her. She then wept unrestrainedly, and at last I wondered
whether I dared attempt to comfort her. I bent down, and as the leaves
rustled with my sudden movement, the Empress looked up and saw me.”
That is, perhaps, the most typical of all the pictures of her
melancholy, though one could take many others from the writings of
other chroniclers. She told the child she had been crying because
her little daughter had been unwell during the night, but the child
did not believe her. She told the child not to tell anyone that she
had seen her cry, which she would hardly have troubled to do if her
tears had had such a simple source. 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.”
That is her own confession of melancholy; and we must make what we can
of it in the light of what we know. It is not, perhaps, a melancholy
of which we shall be able to discover all the causes, but we may be
able to arrive at some of them. The quest will bring us back to certain
matters already touched upon, and lead us on to other matters. We shall
have to speak of the Egeria, the mother-in-law, the formal rigidity of
Court etiquette, and the way in which Emperor and Empress endeavoured
to escape in different directions from what they were both, in their
several ways, coming to regard as irksome imprisoning restraints.