The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing and
tremendous the event becomes. The destruction of a city is a large
event, but it is one which repeats itself several times in a thousand
years; the destruction of a third part of a nation by plague and famine
is a large event, but it has happened several times in history; the
murder of a king is a large event, but it has been frequent.
The murder of an empress is the largest of all large events. One must
go back about two thousand years to find an instance to put with this
one. The oldest family of unchallenged descent in Christendom lives in
Rome and traces its line back seventeen hundred years, but no member of
it has been present in the earth when an empress was murdered, until
now. Many a time during these seventeen centuries members of that
family have been startled with the news of extraordinary events—the
destruction of cities, the fall of thrones, the murder of kings, the
wreck of dynasties, the extinction of religions, the birth of new
systems of government; and their descendants have been by to hear of it
and talk about it when all these things were repeated once, twice, or a
dozen times—but to even that family has come news at last which is not
staled by use, has no duplicates in the long reach of its memory.
It is an event which confers a curious distinction upon every
individual now living in the world: he has stood alive and breathing in
the presence of an event such as has not fallen within the experience
of any traceable or untraceable ancestor of his for twenty centuries,
and it is not likely to fall within the experience of any descendant of
his for twenty more.
Time has made some great changes since the Roman days. The murder of an
empress then—even the assassination of Caesar himself—could not
electrify the world as this murder has electrified it. For one reason,
there was then not much of a world to electrify; it was a small world,
as to known bulk, and it had rather a thin population, besides; and for
another reason, the news traveled so slowly that its tremendous initial
thrill wasted away, week by week and month by month, on the journey,
and by the time it reached the remoter regions there was but little of
it left. It was no longer a fresh event, it was a thing of the far
past; it was not properly news, it was history. But the world is
enormous now, and prodigiously populated—that is one change; and
another is the lightning swiftness of the flight of tidings, good and
bad. “The Empress is murdered!” When those amazing words struck upon my
ear in this Austrian village last Saturday, three hours after the
disaster, I knew that it was already old news in London, Paris, Berlin,
New York, San Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay,
Madras, Calcutta, and that the entire globe with a single voice, was
cursing the perpetrator of it. Since the telegraph first began to
stretch itself wider and wider about the earth, larger and increasingly
larger areas of the world have, as time went on, received
simultaneously the shock of a great calamity; but this is the first
time in history that the entire surface of the globe has been swept in
a single instant with the thrill of so gigantic an event.
And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world this
spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the answer. He is at the
bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates of degree and
value go: a soiled and patched young loafer, without gifts, without
talents, without education, without morals, without character, without
any born charm or any acquired one that wins or beguiles or attracts;
without a single grace of mind or heart or hand that any tramp or
prostitute could envy him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an
incompetent stone-cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy,
offensive, empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking,
human polecat. And it was within the privileges and powers of this
sarcasm upon the human race to reach up—up—up—and strike from its far
summit in the social skies the world’s accepted ideal of Glory and
Might and Splendor and Sacredness! It realizes to us what sorry shows
and shadows we are. Without our clothes and our pedestals we are poor
things and much of a size; our dignities are not real, our pomps are
shams. At our best and stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and
teach, and believe, but only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.
And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often
forget—or try to: that no man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in one
way or another all men are mad. Many are mad for money. When this
madness is in a mild form it is harmless and the man passes for sane;
but when it develops powerfully and takes possession of the man, it can
make him cheat, rob, and kill; and when he has got his fortune and lost
it again it can land him in the asylum or the suicide’s coffin. Love is
a madness; if thwarted it develops fast; it can grow to a frenzy of
despair and make an otherwise sane and highly gifted prince, like
Rudolph, throw away the crown of an empire and snuff out his own life.
All the whole list of desires, predilections, aversions, ambitions,
passions, cares, griefs, regrets, remorses, are incipient madness, and
ready to grow, spread, and consume, when the occasion comes. There are
no healthy minds, and nothing saves any man but accident—the accident
of not having his malady put to the supreme test.
One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the
pleasure derived from being noticed. Perhaps it is not merely common,
but universal. In its mildest form it doubtless is universal. Every
child is pleased at being noticed; many intolerable children put in
their whole time in distressing and idiotic effort to attract the
attention of visitors; boys are always “showing off”; apparently all
men and women are glad and grateful when they find that they have done
a thing which has lifted them for a moment out of obscurity and caused
wondering talk. This common madness can develop, by nurture, into a
hunger for notoriety in one, for fame in another. It is this madness
for being noticed and talked about which has invented kingship and the
thousand other dignities, and tricked them out with pretty and showy
fineries; it has made kings pick one another’s pockets, scramble for
one another’s crowns and estates, slaughter one another’s subjects; it
has raised up prize-fighters, and poets, and village mayors, and little
and big politicians, and big and little charity-founders, and bicycle
champions, and banditti chiefs, and frontier desperadoes, and
Napoleons. Anything to get notoriety; anything to set the village, or
the township, or the city, or the State, or the nation, or the planet
shouting, “Look—there he goes—that is the man!” And in five minutes’
time, at no cost of brain, or labor, or genius this mangy Italian tramp
has beaten them all, transcended them all, outstripped them all, for in
time their names will perish; but by the friendly help of the insane
newspapers and courts and kings and historians, his is safe to live and
thunder in the world all down the ages as long as human speech shall
endure! Oh, if it were not so tragic how ludicrous it would be!
She was so blameless, the Empress; and so beautiful, in mind and heart,
in person and spirit; and whether with a crown upon her head or without
it and nameless, a grace to the human race, and almost a justification
of its creation; _would _be, indeed, but that the animal that struck
her down re-establishes the doubt.
In her character was every quality that in woman invites and engages
respect, esteem, affection, and homage. Her tastes, her instincts, and
her aspirations were all high and fine and all her life her heart and
brain were busy with activities of a noble sort. She had had bitter
griefs, but they did not sour her spirit, and she had had the highest
honors in the world’s gift, but she went her simple way unspoiled. She
knew all ranks, and won them all, and made them her friends. An English
fisherman’s wife said, “When a body was in trouble she didn’t send her
help, she brought it herself.” Crowns have adorned others, but she
adorned her crowns.
It was a swift celebrity the assassin achieved. And it is marked by
some curious contrasts. At noon last Saturday there was no one in the
world who would have considered acquaintanceship with him a thing worth
claiming or mentioning; no one would have been vain of such an
acquaintanceship; the humblest honest boot-black would not have valued
the fact that he had met him or seen him at some time or other; he was
sunk in abysmal obscurity, he was away beneath the notice of the bottom
grades of officialdom. Three hours later he was the one subject of
conversation in the world, the gilded generals and admirals and
governors were discussing him, all the kings and queens and emperors
had put aside their other interests to talk about him. And wherever
there was a man, at the summit of the world or the bottom of it, who by
chance had at some time or other come across that creature, he
remembered it with a secret satisfaction, and _mentioned _it—for it was
a distinction, now! It brings human dignity pretty low, and for a
moment the thing is not quite realizable—but it is perfectly true. If
there is a king who can remember, now, that he once saw that creature
in a time past, he has let that fact out, in a more or less studiedly
casual and indifferent way, some dozens of times during the past week.
For a king is merely human; the inside of him is exactly like the
inside of any other person; and it is human to find satisfaction in
being in a kind of personal way connected with amazing events. We are
all privately vain of such a thing; we are all alike; a king is a king
by accident; the reason the rest of us are not kings is merely due to
another accident; we are all made out of the same clay, and it is a
sufficiently poor quality.
Below the kings, these remarks are in the air these days; I know it as
well as if I were hearing them:
THE COMMANDER: “He was in my army.”
THE GENERAL: “He was in my corps.”
THE COLONEL: “He was in my regiment. A brute. I remember him well.”
THE CAPTAIN: “He was in my company. A troublesome scoundrel. I remember
him well.”
THE SERGEANT: “Did I know him? As well as I know you. Why, every
morning I used to—” etc., etc.; a glad, long story, told to devouring
ears.
THE LANDLADY: “Many’s the time he boarded with me. I can show you his
very room, and the very bed he slept in. And the charcoal mark there on
the wall—he made that. My little Johnny saw him do it with his own
eyes. Didn’t you, Johnny?”
It is easy to see, by the papers, that the magistrate and the
constables and the jailer treasure up the assassin’s daily remarks and
doings as precious things, and as wallowing this week in seas of
blissful distinction. The interviewer, too; he tries to let on that he
is not vain of his privilege of contact with this man whom few others
are allowed to gaze upon, but he is human, like the rest, and can no
more keep his vanity corked in than could you or I.
Some think that this murder is a frenzied revolt against the criminal
militarism which is impoverishing Europe and driving the starving poor
mad. That has many crimes to answer for, but not this one, I think. One
may not attribute to this man a generous indignation against the wrongs
done the poor; one may not dignify him with a generous impulse of any
kind. When he saw his photograph and said, “I shall be celebrated,” he
laid bare the impulse that prompted him. It was a mere hunger for
notoriety. There is another confessed case of the kind which is as old
as history—the burning of the temple of Ephesus.
Among the inadequate attempts to account for the assassination we must
concede high rank to the many which have described it as a “peculiarly
brutal crime” and then added that it was “ordained from above.” I think
this verdict will not be popular “above.” If the deed was ordained from
above, there is no rational way of making this prisoner even partially
responsible for it, and the Genevan court cannot condemn him without
manifestly committing a crime. Logic is logic, and by disregarding its
laws even the most pious and showy theologian may be beguiled into
preferring charges which should not be ventured upon except in the
shelter of plenty of lightning-rods.
I witnessed the funeral procession, in company with friends, from the
windows of the Krantz, Vienna’s sumptuous new hotel. We came into town
in the middle of the forenoon, and I went on foot from the station.
Black flags hung down from all the houses; the aspects were
Sunday-like; the crowds on the sidewalks were quiet and moved slowly;
very few people were smoking; many ladies wore deep mourning, gentlemen
were in black as a rule; carriages were speeding in all directions,
with footmen and coachmen in black clothes and wearing black cocked
hats; the shops were closed; in many windows were pictures of the
Empress: as a beautiful young bride of seventeen; as a serene and
majestic lady with added years; and finally in deep black and without
ornaments—the costume she always wore after the tragic death of her son
nine years ago, for her heart broke then, and life lost almost all its
value for her. The people stood grouped before these pictures, and now
and then one saw women and girls turn away wiping the tears from their
eyes.
In front of the Krantz is an open square; over the way was the church
where the funeral services would be held. It is small and old and
severely plain, plastered outside and whitewashed or painted, and with
no ornament but a statue of a monk in a niche over the door, and above
that a small black flag. But in its crypt lie several of the great dead
of the House of Habsburg, among them Maria Theresa and Napoleon’s son,
the Duke of Reichstadt. Hereabouts was a Roman camp, once, and in it
the Emperor Marcus Aurelius died a thousand years before the first
Habsburg ruled in Vienna, which was six hundred years ago and more.
The little church is packed in among great modern stores and houses,
and the windows of them were full of people. Behind the vast
plate-glass windows of the upper floors of a house on the corner one
glimpsed terraced masses of fine-clothed men and women, dim and
shimmery, like people under water. Under us the square was noiseless,
but it was full of citizens; officials in fine uniforms were flitting
about on errands, and in a doorstep sat a figure in the uttermost
raggedness of poverty, the feet bare, the head bent humbly down; a
youth of eighteen or twenty, he was, and through the field-glass one
could see that he was tearing apart and munching riffraff that he had
gathered somewhere. Blazing uniforms flashed by him, making a sparkling
contrast with his drooping ruin of moldy rags, but he took no notice;
he was not there to grieve for a nation’s disaster; he had his own
cares, and deeper. From two directions two long files of infantry came
plowing through the pack and press in silence; there was a low, crisp
order and the crowd vanished, the square save the sidewalks was empty,
the private mourner was gone. Another order, the soldiers fell apart
and enclosed the square in a double-ranked human fence. It was all so
swift, noiseless, exact—like a beautifully ordered machine.
It was noon, now. Two hours of stillness and waiting followed. Then
carriages began to flow past and deliver the two or three hundred court
personages and high nobilities privileged to enter the church. Then the
square filled up; not with civilians, but with army and navy officers
in showy and beautiful uniforms. They filled it compactly, leaving only
a narrow carriage path in front of the church, but there was no
civilian among them. And it was better so; dull clothes would have
marred the radiant spectacle. In the jam in front of the church, on its
steps, and on the sidewalk was a bunch of uniforms which made a blazing
splotch of color—intense red, gold, and white—which dimmed the
brilliancies around them; and opposite them on the other side of the
path was a bunch of cascaded bright-green plumes above pale-blue
shoulders which made another splotch of splendor emphatic and
conspicuous in its glowing surroundings. It was a sea of flashing color
all about, but these two groups were the high notes. The green plumes
were worn by forty or fifty Austrian generals, the group opposite them
were chiefly Knights of Malta and knights of a German order. The mass
of heads in the square were covered by gilt helmets and by military
caps roofed with a mirror-like glaze, and the movements of the wearers
caused these things to catch the sun-rays, and the effect was fine to
see—the square was like a garden of richly colored flowers with a
multitude of blinding and flashing little suns distributed over it.
Think of it—it was by command of that Italian loafer yonder on his
imperial throne in the Geneva prison that this splendid multitude was
assembled there; and the kings and emperors that were entering the
church from a side street were there by his will. It is so strange, so
unrealizable.
At three o’clock the carriages were still streaming by in single file.
At three-five a cardinal arrives with his attendants; later some
bishops; then a number of archdeacons—all in striking colors that add
to the show. At three-ten a procession of priests passes along, with
crucifix. Another one, presently; after an interval, two more; at
three-fifty another one—very long, with many crosses, gold-embroidered
robes, and much white lace; also great pictured banners, at intervals,
receding into the distance.
A hum of tolling bells makes itself heard, but not sharply. At
three-fifty-eight a waiting interval. Presently a long procession of
gentlemen in evening dress comes in sight and approaches until it is
near to the square, then falls back against the wall of soldiers at the
sidewalk, and the white shirt-fronts show like snowflakes and are very
conspicuous where so much warm color is all about.
A waiting pause. At four-twelve the head of the funeral procession
comes into view at last. First, a body of cavalry, four abreast, to
widen the path. Next, a great body of lancers, in blue, with gilt
helmets. Next, three six-horse mourning-coaches; outriders and coachmen
in black, with cocked hats and white wigs. Next, troops in splendid
uniforms, red, gold, and white, exceedingly showy.
Now the multitude uncover. The soldiers present arms; there is a low
rumble of drums; the sumptuous great hearse approaches, drawn at a walk
by eight black horses plumed with black bunches of nodding ostrich
feathers; the coffin is borne into the church, the doors are closed.
The multitude cover their heads, and the rest of the procession moves
by; first the Hungarian Guard in their indescribably brilliant and
picturesque and beautiful uniform, inherited from the ages of barbaric
splendor, and after them other mounted forces, a long and showy array.
Then the shining crown in the square crumbled apart, a wrecked rainbow,
and melted away in radiant streams, and in the turn of a wrist the
three dirtiest and raggedest and cheerfulest little slum-girls in
Austria were capering about in the spacious vacancy. It was a day of
contrasts.
Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state. The first time was in 1854,
when she was a bride of seventeen, and then she rode in measureless
pomp and with blare of music through a fluttering world of gay flags
and decorations, down streets walled on both hands with a press of
shouting and welcoming subjects; and the second time was last
Wednesday, when she entered the city in her coffin and moved down the
same streets in the dead of the night under swaying black flags,
between packed human walls again; but everywhere was a deep stillness,
now—a stillness emphasized, rather than broken, by the muffled
hoofbeats of the long cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand, and
the low sobbing of gray-headed women who had witnessed the first entry
forty-four years before, when she and they were young—and unaware!
A character in Baron von Berger’s recent fairy drama “Habsburg” tells
about that first coming of the girlish Empress-Queen, and in his
history draws a fine picture: I cannot make a close translation of it,
but will try to convey the spirit of the verses:
I saw the stately pageant pass:
In her high place I saw the Empress-Queen:
I could not take my eyes away
From that fair vision, spirit-like and pure,
That rose serene, sublime, and figured to my sense
A noble Alp far lighted in the blue,
That in the flood of morning rends its veil of cloud
And stands a dream of glory to the gaze
Of them that in the Valley toil and plod.