Book Description

There exist plenty of surveys of the modern history and political conditions of Austria. Mr. Henry Wickham Steed’s “The Habsburg Monarchy” is the most recent, and probably the best, though Mr. R. P. Mahaffy’s “Francis Joseph I.: His Life and Times”—a smaller and less pretentious book—is also very good. One knows equally well where to turn for gossipy compilations—some of them authoritative, and others devoid of authority—dealing with the inner life of the Austrian Court. Sir Horace Rumbold has treated the subject with the dutiful reticence of a diplomatist in “The Austrian Court of the Nineteenth Century”; Countess Marie Larisch and Princess Louisa of Tuscany, occupying positions of greater freedom and less responsibility, have in “My Past” and “My Own Story” lifted the veil with indignant gestures, and pointed fingers of scorn at the intimate pictures which they have revealed. M. H. de Weindel, again, has written of “François-Joseph Intime”; while the enterprise of an American journalist has contributed “The Keystone of Empire,” “The Martyrdom of an Empress,” and “The Private Life of Two Emperors—William II. of Germany and Francis Joseph of Austria.” This bibliographical list—to which additions could easily be made—might seem to indicate that the ground has already been well covered; but that is not the case. There exists no life of Francis Joseph, and no History of Austria, in which the personal and political aspects of the subject are considered in their relation to each other. The assumption of writers who have previously treated the theme has been that tittle-tattle is tittle-tattle, and that history is history, and that the two can never meet. The two things, however, are liable to meet anywhere; and in the country and period here under review they are continually meeting. 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. It follows that the personality of the Habsburgs matters in a sense in which the personalities of rulers who are mere figure-heads does not matter; and that personality—the collective personality as well as the separate personalities of individual members of the House—can only be gauged by those who study their private lives in conjunction with their public performances. The history of the property (seeing that it comprises peoples as well as lands) includes and implies the history of the owners of the property. Our spectacle, in so far as one can sum it up in a sentence, is that of an Empire continually threatened with dissolution under the control of an historic family continually displaying all the symptoms of decadence. The political and the personal factors in the problem are perpetually interacting; and one of the questions which the political prophet has to consider is: Will not the decadence of the family hasten the dissolution of the Empire? Whence it follows, as a secondary sequence, that, in the history of modern Austria, tittle-tattle matters; for it is only by the careful study of the tittle-tattle that we can hope to discover whether the Habsburgs of to-day are true or false to the proud and impressive traditions of their House. In their case, as in that of any other House, a stray story of a romantic or scandalous character might properly be ignored as appertaining to the domain of idle gossip; but when stories of that kind meet us at every turn—and meet us with increasing frequency as time proceeds—we are no longer entitled to dismiss them with superior indifference. They are significant; the key to the situation is to be found in them. Tittle-tattle, in short, when one encounters it, not in sample but in bulk, ceases to be tittle-tattle, but attains to the dignity of history, and furnishes the raw material for the generalisations of the political philosopher. The annals of the House of Habsburg furnish a case in point—the best of all possible cases. There is no House in Europe whose annals are richer in incident and eccentricity; and the eccentricities, whether romantic or scandalous, are such as to challenge the scientific investigator—whether he be a student of eugenics or of politics—to group them and see what inferences he can draw. The present writer has decided to take up the challenge; and, in order to take it up, he will be obliged to deal with a good many matters besides the political manœuvres of the Emperor and his Ministers. “John Orth” pelting the Emperor with the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece; “Herr Wulfling” cracking nuts in a tree with Fräulein Adamovics; Princess Louisa of Tuscany, first bicycling with the dentist in the Dresden Park, and then appealing to her son’s tutor to come and “compromise” her in Switzerland—all these are matters which may suggest reflections quite as far-reaching as anything that we read about Francis Joseph’s skill in extricating his country from embarrassments with rival Powers and keeping the peace (in so far as it has been kept) between Ruthenians and Galicians.