TRAVELLER’S MANUSCRIPT
It may well be asked (_it was thus the English traveller began his
nineteenth chapter_) why I should have chosen Grünewald out of so many
other states equally petty, formal, dull, and corrupt. Accident, indeed,
decided, and not I; but I have seen no reason to regret my visit. The
spectacle of this small society macerating in its own abuses was not
perhaps instructive, but I have found it exceedingly diverting.
The reigning Prince, Otto Johann Friedrich, a young man of imperfect
education, questionable valour, and no scintilla of capacity, has fallen
into entire public contempt. It was with difficulty that I obtained an
interview, for he is frequently absent from a court where his presence is
unheeded, and where his only rôle is to be a cloak for the amours of his
wife. At last, however, on the third occasion when I visited the palace,
I found this sovereign in the exercise of his inglorious function, with
the wife on one hand, and the lover on the other. He is not ill-looking;
he has hair of a ruddy gold, which naturally curls, and his eyes are
dark, a combination which I always regard as the mark of some congenital
deficiency, physical or moral; his features are irregular, but pleasing;
the nose perhaps a little short, and the mouth a little womanish; his
address is excellent, and he can express himself with point. But to
pierce below these externals is to come on a vacuity of any sterling
quality, a deliquescence of the moral nature, a frivolity and
inconsequence of purpose that mark the nearly perfect fruit of a decadent
age. He has a worthless smattering of many subjects, but a grasp of
none. ‘I soon weary of a pursuit,’ he said to me, laughing; it would
almost appear as if he took a pride in his incapacity and lack of moral
courage. The results of his dilettanteism are to be seen in every field;
he is a bad fencer, a second-rate horseman, dancer, shot; he sings—I have
heard him—and he sings like a child; he writes intolerable verses in more
than doubtful French; he acts like the common amateur; and in short there
is no end to the number of the things that he does, and does badly. His
one manly taste is for the chase. In sum, he is but a plexus of
weaknesses; the singing chambermaid of the stage, tricked out in man’s
apparel, and mounted on a circus horse. I have seen this poor phantom of
a prince riding out alone or with a few huntsmen, disregarded by all, and
I have been even grieved for the bearer of so futile and melancholy an
existence. The last Merovingians may have looked not otherwise.
The Princess Amalia Seraphina, a daughter of the Grand-Ducal house of
Toggenburg-Tannhäuser, would be equally inconsiderable if she were not a
cutting instrument in the hands of an ambitious man. She is much younger
than the Prince, a girl of two-and-twenty, sick with vanity,
superficially clever, and fundamentally a fool. She has a red-brown
rolling eye, too large for her face, and with sparks of both levity and
ferocity; her forehead is high and narrow, her figure thin and a little
stooping. Her manners, her conversation, which she interlards with
French, her very tastes and ambitions, are alike assumed; and the
assumption is ungracefully apparent: Hoyden playing Cleopatra. I should
judge her to be incapable of truth. In private life a girl of this
description embroils the peace of families, walks attended by a troop of
scowling swains, and passes, once at least, through the divorce court; it
is a common and, except to the cynic, an uninteresting type. On the
throne, however, and in the hands of a man like Gondremark, she may
become the authoress of serious public evils.
Gondremark, the true ruler of this unfortunate country, is a more complex
study. His position in Grünewald, to which he is a foreigner, is
eminently false; and that he should maintain it as he does, a very
miracle of impudence and dexterity. His speech, his face, his policy,
are all double: heads and tails. Which of the two extremes may be his
actual design he were a bold man who should offer to decide. Yet I will
hazard the guess that he follows both experimentally, and awaits, at the
hand of destiny, one of those directing hints of which she is so lavish
to the wise.
On the one hand, as _Maire du Palais_ to the incompetent Otto, and using
the love-sick Princess for a tool and mouthpiece, he pursues a policy of
arbitrary power and territorial aggrandisement. He has called out the
whole capable male population of the state to military service; he has
bought cannon; he has tempted away promising officers from foreign
armies; and he now begins, in his international relations, to assume the
swaggering port and the vague, threatful language of a bully. The idea
of extending Grünewald may appear absurd, but the little state is
advantageously placed, its neighbours are all defenceless; and if at any
moment the jealousies of the greater courts should neutralise each other,
an active policy might double the principality both in population and
extent. Certainly at least the scheme is entertained in the court of
Mittwalden; nor do I myself regard it as entirely desperate. The
margravate of Brandenburg has grown from as small beginnings to a
formidable power; and though it is late in the day to try adventurous
policies, and the age of war seems ended, Fortune, we must not forget,
still blindly turns her wheel for men and nations. Concurrently with,
and tributary to, these warlike preparations, crushing taxes have been
levied, journals have been suppressed, and the country, which three years
ago was prosperous and happy, now stagnates in a forced inaction, gold
has become a curiosity, and the mills stand idle on the mountain streams.
On the other hand, in his second capacity of popular tribune, Gondremark
is the incarnation of the free lodges, and sits at the centre of an
organised conspiracy against the state. To any such movement my
sympathies were early acquired, and I would not willingly let fall a word
that might embarrass or retard the revolution. But to show that I speak
of knowledge, and not as the reporter of mere gossip, I may mention that
I have myself been present at a meeting where the details of a republican
Constitution were minutely debated and arranged; and I may add that
Gondremark was throughout referred to by the speakers as their captain in
action and the arbiter of their disputes. He has taught his dupes (for
so I must regard them) that his power of resistance to the Princess is
limited, and at each fresh stretch of authority persuades them, with
specious reasons, to postpone the hour of insurrection. Thus (to give
some instances of his astute diplomacy) he salved over the decree
enforcing military service, under the plea that to be well drilled and
exercised in arms was even a necessary preparation for revolt. And the
other day, when it began to be rumoured abroad that a war was being
forced on a reluctant neighbour, the Grand Duke of Gerolstein, and I made
sure it would be the signal for an instant rising, I was struck dumb with
wonder to find that even this had been prepared and was to be accepted.
I went from one to another in the Liberal camp, and all were in the same
story, all had been drilled and schooled and fitted out with vacuous
argument. ‘The lads had better see some real fighting,’ they said; ‘and
besides, it will be as well to capture Gerolstein: we can then extend to
our neighbours the blessing of liberty on the same day that we snatch it
for ourselves; and the republic will be all the stronger to resist, if
the kings of Europe should band themselves together to reduce it.’ I
know not which of the two I should admire the more: the simplicity of the
multitude or the audacity of the adventurer. But such are the
subtleties, such the quibbling reasons, with which he blinds and leads
this people. How long a course so tortuous can be pursued with safety I
am incapable of guessing; not long, one would suppose; and yet this
singular man has been treading the mazes for five years, and his favour
at court and his popularity among the lodges still endure unbroken.
I have the privilege of slightly knowing him. Heavily and somewhat
clumsily built, of a vast, disjointed, rambling frame, he can still pull
himself together, and figure, not without admiration, in the saloon or
the ball-room. His hue and temperament are plentifully bilious; he has a
saturnine eye; his cheek is of a dark blue where he has been shaven.
Essentially he is to be numbered among the man-haters, a convinced
contemner of his fellows. Yet he is himself of a commonplace ambition
and greedy of applause. In talk, he is remarkable for a thirst of
information, loving rather to hear than to communicate; for sound and
studious views; and, judging by the extreme short-sightedness of common
politicians, for a remarkable provision of events. All this, however,
without grace, pleasantry, or charm, heavily set forth, with a dull
countenance. In our numerous conversations, although he has always heard
me with deference, I have been conscious throughout of a sort of
ponderous finessing hard to tolerate. He produces none of the effect of
a gentleman; devoid not merely of pleasantry, but of all attention or
communicative warmth of bearing. No gentleman, besides, would so parade
his amours with the Princess; still less repay the Prince for his
long-suffering with a studied insolence of demeanour and the fabrication
of insulting nicknames, such as Prince Featherhead, which run from ear to
ear and create a laugh throughout the country. Gondremark has thus some
of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an
inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth. Heavy,
bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court and country like an
incubus.
But it is probable that he preserves softer gifts for necessary purposes.
Indeed, it is certain, although he vouchsafed none of it to me, that this
cold and stolid politician possesses to a great degree the art of
ingratiation, and can be all things to all men. Hence there has probably
sprung up the idle legend that in private life he is a gross romping
voluptuary. Nothing, at least, can well be more surprising than the
terms of his connection with the Princess. Older than her husband,
certainly uglier, and, according to the feeble ideas common among women,
in every particular less pleasing, he has not only seized the complete
command of all her thought and action, but has imposed on her in public a
humiliating part. I do not here refer to the complete sacrifice of every
rag of her reputation; for to many women these extremities are in
themselves attractive. But there is about the court a certain lady of a
dishevelled reputation, a Countess von Rosen, wife or widow of a cloudy
count, no longer in her second youth, and already bereft of some of her
attractions, who unequivocally occupies the station of the Baron’s
mistress. I had thought, at first, that she was but a hired accomplice,
a mere blind or buffer for the more important sinner. A few hours’
acquaintance with Madame von Rosen for ever dispelled the illusion. She
is one rather to make than to prevent a scandal, and she values none of
those bribes—money, honours, or employment—with which the situation might
be gilded. Indeed, as a person frankly bad, she pleased me, in the court
of Grünewald, like a piece of nature.
The power of this man over the Princess is, therefore, without bounds.
She has sacrificed to the adoration with which he has inspired her not
only her marriage vow and every shred of public decency, but that vice of
jealousy which is so much dearer to the female sex than either intrinsic
honour or outward consideration. Nay, more: a young, although not a very
attractive woman, and a princess both by birth and fact, she submits to
the triumphant rivalry of one who might be her mother as to years, and
who is so manifestly her inferior in station. This is one of the
mysteries of the human heart. But the rage of illicit love, when it is
once indulged, appears to grow by feeding; and to a person of the
character and temperament of this unfortunate young lady, almost any
depth of degradation is within the reach of possibility.