which they were handsomely ridiculed by Juvenal, seem to have paid little
respect to trees, probably because, besides the palm, so few were known
to them. There is, however, according to that wonderful book, Sir James
Fraser’s “Golden Bough,” some evidence to show that they believed that
spirits haunted trees; at any rate, the tamarisk was sacred to Osiris—the
god and ruler who represented the principle of good, as his brother
Typho did that of evil. The story of the death of Osiris is curious as
a contradiction of the idea of immortality with which deity is usually
endowed. The god, having become King of Egypt, devoted himself to the
civilization of his people, and to further that end, set out to travel
over the world, leaving his wife Isis to reign in his place. When he
came back, Typho, with other conspirators, among whom was an Ethiopian
queen, named Aso, plotted to kill his brother. So, having procured the
exact measurement of Osiris, he caused a box to be made to fit him, and
having invited Osiris to a feast, he caused the box, which was of rare
workmanship, to be brought in, saying he would give it to any one present
whom it would fit. All the guests tried it in vain; at last Osiris laid
himself down in it, and the conspirators, rushing forward, fastened down
the lid with nails and molten lead. Then the box was carried to the
riverside. It floated down the stream and was carried by the waves of
the sea to the coast of Byblos, and lodged in the branches of a tamarisk
bush. There is much more of this fable in Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s great
book—not all of it very edifying reading; but that is how the tamarisk
became a sacred tree.
While treating of the superstitions and legends belonging to trees, it
has been impossible to avoid touching upon the belief in ghosts. That
faith exists in every part of the world. The fetichists of the African
priests, the totemists of North America, the wildest savages of the
South Seas with their uncouth idols, the aborigines of Australia and
New Zealand—all stand in terror of ghosts. I long years ago translated
a collection of Pekingese stories of haunted houses; but in many moves
and journeys the manuscript has been lost—no great matter of regret,
for these tales are always the same, the two leading causes for
apparitions being remorse or revenge. The story of the ghost of Sakura
Sōgorō, perhaps the most famous ghost story of the Far East, which I
have translated in my “Tales of Old Japan,” has, apart from its local
colouring, no feature differing from many such traditions which have been
handed down in Europe. But the true interest of these superstitions, call
them fables, myths—what you will—lies in the proof that all over the
world there is implanted in man the instinctive conviction that death is
not the end of all things—the mere return of dust to dust, of ashes to
ashes; if that were so, there could be no thought of ghosts. The belief
depends upon the existence of that mysterious intuitive feeling that when
the thread of fate has been severed, there still remains another life
which death itself cannot kill, and that other life is the soul.
* * * * *
But the fairies—where are they? Can it be that the Bakémono-zakura—the
haunted cherry trees of Japan—when they were ruthlessly torn out of the
soil of the country of the gods ten years ago, indignantly burst their
barken bonds, and taking wing for refuge to the sacred groves of Mount
Fugi, from some wild bird’s eyrie watched their beloved old homes being
wafted away to new and uncertain climes across the terrors of the Pacific
Ocean? And yet often, even here, I see a merry band of flaxen-haired
dwarfs playing about the enchanted trees. Fairy-land is rich in surprises
and mystifications. Who knows? Perhaps these little sprites are
themselves fairies who have chosen for their abode the forsaken dwellings
of the dark eastern Bakémono—“good folk” sent by a kindly Providence to
shed a fleeting ray of the sunshine of poetry over the wintry prose of an
octogenarian’s life.
QUEEN VICTORIA AND MARIE THERESIA
Rarely, indeed, does the student in history come across two personalities
so entirely in unison at almost all points as those of the Austrian
Empress Marie Theresia and our own Queen Victoria. Both were essentially
great Sovereigns, both essentially good women. Our own Queen exercised
an authority which was in one sense even more remarkable than that of
the Empress; for whereas the latter was a commanding figure in an age
when the glamour of autocracy had not yet faded away, Queen Victoria,
by sheer force of character, maintained the prestige of royalty against
the flowing tide of a democracy which was becoming daily more and more
self-asserting. Indeed, she did more than maintain it—she summoned it
from the dead; for in the two reigns which preceded hers it had perished,
as men then thought, without hope of resurrection.
In all save their outward appearance the likeness between the two august
ladies was such that it almost seemed as if the one was the reincarnation
of the other; as if the soul of the mighty Austrian had passed into the
Queen. An earnest and deep piety was the foundation of both characters,
though they would have been utterly opposed in the form of its exercise.
Marie Theresia was the faithful daughter of the Church of Rome, Queen
Victoria the no less faithful and loving child of the Reformation. In
both religion was a passion.
There has been a recent republication of the “Memoirs of Frau Pichler,”
the Viennese poetess and authoress, whose _salon_ at the end of the
eighteenth and during the early part of the nineteenth century was so
famous that people said that there were two things which no stranger
coming to Vienna could afford to miss seeing—St. Stephen’s Cathedral and
Frau Pichler. Those memoirs, admirably edited and furnished with copious
notes by one Emil Blümml, throw an interesting light upon the private and
intimate life of Marie Theresia, and as we follow these reminiscences,
we cannot but be struck by the many links in the chain of similarity of
which I have spoken above.
Both Queen Victoria and the Empress were deeply penetrated with that
sense of the Royal Caste which is too apt to raise an insurmountable
boundary against social intercourse. But if Royalty itself stands apart,
there is also an instinctive aloofness from it in those who are of
high position but yet subjects; so that the intimacies of Sovereigns
and royal personages are found rather among their personal attendants
than among the nobles and powerful officials who form their courts.
Especially is this bound to be the case where princesses are concerned.
Their tirewomen and dressers are far more capable than chamberlains and
secretaries of state of judging their private idiosyncrasies; so, in
order to know what manner of woman this or that queen may have been, we
are fain to climb the backstairs—where such a way is open to us, as it is
in the case of Marie Theresia.
[Illustration: THE EMPRESS MARIE THERESIA.
_From an engraving after a painting by Mytens._
[_To face p. 130._]
The adoption of Frau Pichler’s mother by the great Empress is just such a
pathetic story, not without a pinch of the salt of romance, as would have
touched the kind heart of Queen Victoria, and, indeed, we can well fancy
her in like circumstances behaving exactly as Marie Theresia did.
In the month of May, 1744, the Wolfenbüttel Regiment of Infantry was
moved from Hungary to Vienna. A poor old lieutenant, fifty years of age,
named Friedrich Hieronymus, a widower, had contrived—with what pains and
anxiety who can tell?—to take with him on the march his only child, a
little daughter aged four. Hardly had he reached Vienna when he caught
a chill, inflammation of the lungs set in and he died, full of terror
for the future of his little Charlotte, whom he was to leave penniless
and destitute in what was to him a foreign country, among strangers
professing a religion which was abhorrent to him—for he was a Protestant.
His last tender words were for her. “Poor child! what will become of
thee?” Throughout her long life those painfully uttered words, torn from
the dying man’s soul, remained graven in her heart, unforgettable. His
brother officers, good charitable souls, probably themselves none too
well furnished with this world’s goods, took charge of the babe, who
became from thenceforth the “fille du Régiment.” The pathetic story came
to the ears of Marie Theresia, who had a soft place in her heart for the
Wolfenbüttel Regiment, which was named after the family of her mother,
the Empress Elizabeth. She sent for the child, but the officers of the
regiment, deeply imbued with a sense of loyalty to their dead comrade,
did all that was in their power to hinder the babe from falling into the
hands of an aggressively religious Catholic.
They hid her in a suburb of Vienna, but the Empress’s agents were
too clever for them, and the child was brought to Court, where, as
the Wolfenbüttlers had foreseen, she was brought up in the strictest
doctrines of the Roman Church, under the charge of a Spanish lady,
Isabella Duplessis, and was specially educated with a view to entering
the Empress’s service as tirewoman. Her life was now very different from
what might have been expected for the baby that followed the drum. She
became the playmate of the Imperial children, amongst them of the unhappy
Queen Marie Antoinette, and so the years went by in all the luxury of a
sumptuous court.
Little Charlotte proved herself worthy of her good fortune; indeed,
so quick and nimble-witted was she, that when she had reached the age
of thirteen she was already deemed fit to enter upon her duties about
her great mistress, not only as tirewoman, but also as reader. To this
end she had been early handed over to the care of Gräfin Fuchs, the
tenderly-loved nurse and governess of the Empress, who had such an
affection for her that when she died she was buried in the vault of the
Capucins, the last home of the Imperial Family.
In spite of the advice given by Hippolochus to Glaucus, it is not always
an unmixed advantage so to excel as to make oneself indispensable. This
little Charlotte soon found out, for her skill in hairdressing was such
that the Empress, who was so particular about her hair that she would
sometimes have it done and undone four or five times before she was
satisfied, could not do without her. Marie Theresia, who was without a
spark of coquetry and had neither eyes nor thought for any man but her
husband, had all a woman’s instinctive love of display, and took a great
delight in her beauty for its own sake.
None of the other tirewomen had Charlotte’s cunning fingers, and the
same thing applied to her reading. German, French, Italian and Latin
came to the child with equal facility, and all these were found in the
dispatches which she had to read aloud to the Empress. French and Italian
were the languages of the Opera and of the elegances of the Court. On one
occasion when the Empress was expecting a baby, she had a bet with Count
Dietrichstein as to the sex of the infant. She wagered for a girl, he for
a boy—the Empress won. The Count sent her a piece of porcelain with a
portrait of himself kneeling, and these words written by Metastasio, the
Poet Laureate of the Court:
“Perdo, è ver, l’ augusta figlia
A pagar m’ ha condannato,
Ma s’ è ver che a te somiglia
Tutto il mondo ha guadagnato.”
A pretty compliment! The babe, Marie Antoinette, born to be Queen of
Beauty and of Sorrow, was worthy of it.
Talking of languages, it is strange to read of how small account German
was at the Court of Vienna. The Emperor Francis I., as a Lorrainer,
hardly understood it and never spoke it, and the people of his service
were mostly Lorrainers or Netherlanders. The Empress herself did not
speak correct German; she used the vulgarest Viennese patois, and Frau
Pichler tells an amusing story of how a young Saxon lady, who had been
appointed as one of her mother’s colleagues, came to her in despair one
morning to beg her help. The Empress had ordered her to go and fetch “das
blabe Buich.” What could her Majesty mean? Charlotte laughed, and told
her to go and get “das blaue Buch.” The Saxon girl, Karoline Mercier,
would not believe her—but the blue book it was. If she could not master
German, the Empress, like Queen Victoria, was familiar with French and
Italian. Our Queen was very fond of showing her fluency in German and
French, and on her drives would often stop her carriage for the joy of a
chat with some poor Italian organ-grinder in his own soft tongue. Latin,
which the Empress knew intimately, was the means of communication with
her Hungarian magnates. She loved the language and them, for so she was
reminded of the day—the 11th of September, 1741—when she, threatened
by half Europe with the loss of the states which the hostile Powers
had once guaranteed, went to Pressburg, met the nobles of Hungary in
their parliament, and appealed to them for protection for herself and
her child, the future Emperor Joseph. Her cry for help was not in vain.
Touched to the quick by the sight of the lovely weeping Empress, the
proud Magyars, old and young, the flower of a noble chivalry, drew their
swords and swore to die for the beautiful woman, who was their _King_. A
universal conscription was decreed. It was a triple triumph, upon which
she loved to look back—the triumph of Virtue, of Right, and last, but not
least, of Beauty.
The service of Marie Theresia’s handmaidens was no sinecure. In summer
she rose at five o’clock—in winter a little later—and rang for her
girls, who had to appear fully dressed in hoop-petticoats, and with
the marvellous edifices of hair which the fashion of the day exacted.
To achieve this, the young ladies had to get up in the middle of the
night, and this was especially hard upon Charlotte, who had night after
night to read aloud for long hours after the Empress had gone to bed.
But Charlotte was so quick, and knew the Empress’s taste so well that,
whatever happened, she must be present at the morning toilette, and ready
to attend upon her mistress during and after supper—a light meal, of
which Her Majesty always partook in her private room. Busy worker as the
Empress was, she seems to have depended entirely upon having her State
papers read aloud to her, and so Charlotte became acquainted very early
in life with many important State secrets. But she was a discreet little
soul and knew how to hold her tongue, and so retained the confidence of
her Imperial mistress so long as that wonderful woman lived.
The portrait which Frau Pichler has left behind her of the great lady,
partly drawn from her mother’s stories of her, partly from her own
memories of the days when as a little girl she used to be taken by
special command to Schönbrunn or the Burg in Vienna, is fascinating.
In her youth the Empress had been extremely beautiful, and though in
middle life she grew large and unwieldy, and had to be taken up to her
rooms in a lift—wafted through the air by fairies, as it seemed to the
child whom she took with her—she retained to the end that wonderful
gift of grace and of what is called “presence,” which is so keenly felt
and so impossible to describe. Kindly she was, too, and of a motherly
sweetness with children. Frau Pichler tells us how on one occasion, when
the Empress had sent her to an adjoining room on some small errand,
she slipped and fell, breaking her fan, and burst into tears. The kind
Empress hurried after her, comforted her, and gave her a new fan—a
precious relic, to be treasured as we may well believe for a lifetime.
Marie Theresia was the daughter of the Emperor Charles the Sixth, who,
being without a male heir, named her as his successor by “pragmatic
sanction”—a Byzantine term for an ordinance issued arbitrarily by the
head of an empire or kingdom. She succeeded to the various thrones of
her father on his death in 1740, and associated with herself as Emperor
her husband, Duke Francis of Lorraine, who had been her play-fellow and
whom she had married in 1736. In spite of his numerous infidelities, she
adored him. Albeit, so far as politics were concerned, he was no great
help to her; so though he bore the title of Emperor, she remained unaided
at the helm. Hers was no easy task. In spite of scraps of paper and
guarantees, a coalition between Prussia, France, Bavaria, the Palatinate,
Saxony, Sardinia, Naples and Spain—a pack of hungry war-dogs, all tearing
at her on every side, each howling for his pound of flesh—threatened to
devour her. She had only England and Hungary on her side; but, like Abdul
Hamid in our own times, she could count upon the quarrels between her
foes. Prussia was the arch-enemy. Prussia, which we are now told, was the
original subject of the “Hymn of Hate,” written, _teste_ the _Morning
Post_, by the revolutionary Herweg in 1841, for which Herr Lissauer,
who substituted England for Prussia, has been decorated by a grateful
Kaiser.[12] Prussia, of which Heine wrote: “I utterly loathe this
Prussia, this stiff, hypocritical, sanctimonious Prussia, this Tartuffe
among the nations.”[13]
Like our own Queen, Marie Theresia was essentially a woman of business.
She personally directed the affairs of her Empire, issuing her commands
to her ministers, and the little orphan Charlotte, as we have seen,
for many years acted as her secretary and reader. The duties were no
sinecure, and although no doubt the position of a young lady of the Court
was one of great luxury in some respects and greatly coveted, there were
also some hardships with which those chosen maids had to put up. The
Empress was large and corpulent; she could not bear warmth, and so her
ladies had to perform their duties in a thorough draught, even when snow
was being driven in at the windows, falling on to the State papers which
Charlotte was reading aloud to her.
In spite of her dread of heat, so long as her limbs would carry her,
the Empress, devout and exact in all religious observances, would on
Corpus Christi day, in the height of summer, piously accompany the
sacred procession on foot. One broiling June day she came back from this
ceremony violently heated and tired, having walked half across the town
under the sun, had to be undressed, and have her hair taken down, and sat
in a thorough draught, eating strawberries and drinking lemonade, while
Charlotte brushed and combed out her hair, which was so wet that the poor
girl had to keep wiping her hands. How Marie Theresia would have enjoyed
one of Queen Victoria’s picnics on Lochnagar in a November blizzard!
One of the difficulties with which those responsible for the management
of the public ceremonials in which our Queen took part had to deal,
was the regulation of the temperature. The enduring of heat was to her
as to Marie Theresia, a misery and an impossibility. She could put up
with any other discomfort and fatigue; but heat was unbearable. The
Emperor Joseph, who did not inherit his mother’s imperviousness to cold,
had to visit her in furs. Kaunitz, a privileged minister, was the only
person who dared to shut the window. “How do you manage when you go to
Balmoral?” I once asked Lord Beaconsfield, who was a chilly mortal. “The
Queen is very gracious,” was the answer, “she excuses me from going
there.”
In dealing with the affairs of State both rulers showed themselves to
be women of strong character and indefatigable industry. Their methods,
of necessity, differed widely. The one, as I have said above, was an
autocrat; the other, a constitutional Sovereign, deeply imbued with the
sense of her own limitations, and yet such a mistress of public business,
of constitutional law and of precedent, that she often dominated the
councils of her ministers, many of whom recognized in her their guide and
instructress in cases of difficulty. Nowhere was this more evident than
in her treatment of foreign affairs. There she was no more a negligible
quantity than Marie Theresia had been; no matter who might be Secretary
of State, there was always a very real power in the background, and that
power was the Queen. It would be easy to multiply instances, but we need
only point to two cases: the Danish Duchies’ question in 1864, where, in
obedience to what she believed to be the wishes of her dead husband, she
took what is now shown to have been an unfortunate line; and, secondly,
the dispute with the United States on the Trent question in 1861, where
she, with the assistance of the Prince Consort, used all her influence to
hinder what would have been a disastrous war, an unthinkable calamity.
The mention of the Prince Consort brings into strong relief two pictures,
in which it is difficult to say whether we are more startled by the
likeness or puzzled by the violence of the contrasts. In both cases
we see a marriage of true love, in each of which a prince of a small
reigning family was raised, not for reasons of State, but by pure
affection, to share the glories of a vast empire and a throne before
which countless peoples bowed. There the likeness between the two
husbands comes to an end.
In Prince Albert Queen Victoria found not only a faithful and devoted
lover, but a helpmate, who was ever at her side, and, young as he was,
shared the heavy burthens which she had to bear, and brought to her
councils all the store of wisdom and statesmanship with which he had
been endowed by that astute mentor, Baron Stockmar. Not the least part
of his merit was his self-effacement; yet in spite of it he aroused
unreasoning jealousies, for which his intimacy and the Queen’s with
the same old German physician was in no small measure accountable. The
Emperor Francis, on the contrary, was of no assistance to Marie Theresia.
Strikingly handsome, physically as grand a man perhaps as Prince Albert,
he had none of the Prince’s serious qualities. He was essentially and
fatally charming, but of politics and the affairs of State he took no
heed; all that he cared for were his flirtations, his bric-à-brac, and
his collection of coins and medals.
He was what is called “a dangerous man,” and when “a dangerous man”
is an Emperor to boot—Well! But such as he was, his Empress loved him
with all her soul, content to take upon her own shoulders the drudgery
of sovereignty, and leaving to him its gewgaws and the enjoyment of
a brilliant idleness. If she ever knew of them she forgave him his
infidelities, and, like our Queen, worshipping the ground upon which
her husband trod, she never looked at another man, nor cared for any
admiration but his. As Frau Pichler rather quaintly observes, had she
done so her maidens must have known of it. We are told that no man is a
hero to his valet. For a woman to be virtuous to her Abigail, she must
be as chaste as Diana before those compromising visits to Endymion, of
which we may be sure that her nymphs were well aware.
No breath of scandal ever dimmed the mirror of the Empress’s fair fame.
Queen Victoria herself was not more stern in the repression of anything
approaching loose or unseemly talk. She considered it to be the duty
of persons in high places to repress any lack of decorum, and their
privilege to set an example to be followed by others. To her daughter,
the Queen of Naples, she wrote: “It is our duty to remember that a word
in season or a grave look will silence those who indulge in unlicensed
speech, and have an excellent general effect.” Nothing better nails
to the counter the lies of Frederic the Great, so characteristically
Prussian, than the fact that the capital, which up to her time had been
notorious for the laxity of its morals, was described by Sir John Moore
towards the end of her reign in very laudatory language. “I can imagine,”
he says, “no city in Europe where a young gentleman would see fewer
examples, or have fewer opportunities of deep gaming, open profligacy, or
gross debauchery than in Vienna.” This, as her biographer, Mary Maxwell
Moffat, says, is a great testimony to the uplifting influence of the
Empress-Queen. That the influence was personal is proved by the relapse
of Vienna during the nineteenth century. By precept and example, she
cast out the swine, but when she was gone they came back again.
It was the irony of fate that neither the Empress’s virtues, her great
beauty, her sweet disposition, nor the prestige of her glorious position
were able to clip the wings of her flighty and too attractive husband.
That she had some inkling of her failure is clear from the advice that
she once gave to her favourite maiden Charlotte: “Be warned and do not
marry a man who has nothing to do.” Queen Victoria was more fortunate.
Her marriage remained a union of hearts, of which time itself had no
power to relax the bonds.