CHAPTER II
The House of Habsburg from the standpoint of Eugenics—The “Habsburg jaw”—Degeneracy the consequence of consanguineous marriages—Sound physiological instinct of King Cophetua—And of those Habsburgs who have followed his example—Morganatic marriages—The family organism fighting for its life—Has Francis Joseph understood?—Indications that he has understood in part.
The House of Habsburg furnishes the “horrible examples” in two recent works on the new science of Eugenics: L’hérédité des Stigmates de Dégénérescence, by Dr. Galippe, and L’Origine du Type familial de la Maison de Habsburg, by Dr. Oswald Rubbrecht. The arguments in both cases are based, not only on a study of history, but also on a collation of portraits; and though the writers differ on some points of detail, their general conclusions are identical. For both of them the Habsburgs are “degenerates”; both of them attribute the degeneracy to the same cause. It is, they agree, the cumulative effect of what is technically called “in-breeding”—of a long succession of inter-marriages among comparatively near relatives.
One hears of the physiological law thus violated, whenever the question of a marriage between cousins is mooted. The tendency of such a marriage, we are always told, is to perpetuate and accentuate typical characteristics and weaknesses, both physical and moral. A single marriage between cousins may produce no perceptible evil result; and one can cite cases in which it appears to have produced remarkably brilliant results.[1] But a series of such marriages, continued through generation after generation, invariably and inevitably tells. The family, or the community, in which such unions are the rule, loses vigour and develops peculiarities—a special, readily recognisable, physiognomy, and an unstable mental equilibrium. The transmitted eccentricities—more particularly the mental eccentricities—may skip a generation or leave an individual exempt; but they are always lurking in the background—always to be expected to reappear.
[1] Darwin married his first cousin, and all his sons were men of remarkable ability.
It has been so, and is so, according to Drs. Rubbrecht and Galippe, with the Habsburgs. We have all heard of the “Habsburg jaw”; and Dr. Rubbrecht traces it to its mediæval source, and, standing before a long row of family portraits, carefully and scientifically depicts the Habsburg face:—
“In addition to the underhung lower jaw and the large lower lip, the Habsburg physiognomy presents the following characteristic features: excessive length, and, sometimes, excessive size of the nose; ‘exorbitism,’ more or less pronounced, with a forehead often of considerable height. One would say that the head, squeezed in by lateral pressure, had undergone a concomitant vertical allongation, and had been stretched, and pulled up and down at the same time. According to Dr. Galippe, the lateral flattening of the skull is the fundamental characteristic, and all the other abnormalities follow from it.”
That is what Dr. Rubbrecht makes of the portraits. He generalises only as a student of physiognomy, and does not discuss mental and moral issues, or presume to predict the future. Dr. Galippe is more outspoken:—
“The Habsburgs” (he writes), “having, by their intermarriages, developed a degenerate taint, and having transmitted it, either separately or in conjunction with other taints, both physical and psychical, to the families matrimonially allied with them, have brought into existence a specific type of human animal, by the same means which the breeders of dogs and horses employ for the creation of a new sub-species.”
As for the general consequences of such in-breeding, he continues:—
“Even those aristocratic families which present no original mark of degeneracy disappear quickly. It follows, a fortiori, that those families which, possessing such characteristics, perpetuate them by contracting marriages within the degrees of consanguinity, are doomed to a still more speedy extinction.”
As for the case of the Habsburgs in particular, he concludes:—
“The Habsburgs of Spain have long since been swept off the stage of history, disappearing in sterility or insanity. The Habsburgs of Austria, numerous though the representatives of the House are at the present time, will end by disappearing in their turn as an historic family, if they persist in their errors,—that is to say, in their marriages with blood relations.”
It is a new way of looking at an old problem,—a new thought suggested by the latest of the sciences; and it opens the door to reflections of great and urgent moment to many other royal houses besides that of Habsburg. In a general way, it has long been held to be almost as improper for Kings and Queens to marry their subjects as for angels to marry the daughters of men. A purer and bluer blood ran in their veins than in the veins of their subjects; and to adulterate that blue blood with red blood was to degrade it. They must, therefore, seek their brides and bridegrooms within the magic circle. Kings must marry Queens, and Princes must marry Princesses; and the distinctive exclusiveness of reigning houses must be maintained by a succession of unions between cousins.
That view of the matter has continued to prevail in royal circles—and also in high political and diplomatic circles—long after the students of heredity have established conclusions unfavourable to such courses. The arguments can hardly have failed to reach the ears of those whom they concerned; and the feeling—tacit, if not avowed—has presumably been that Kings, and Queens, and Princes and Princesses are so great and good and glorious that the laws of Nature do not apply to them. But that is not the case. Science shows that Kings cannot override the laws of Nature even in the countries in which they are permitted to override the laws of the land; that the price which Nature exacts for exclusiveness is degeneracy; that hardly any royal family anywhere has failed to pay that price; that the percentage of insanity has, through the ages, been higher among hereditary rulers whose blue blood has thus been protected from admixture than in any other class of the community; and that the sound physiological instinct is that on which King Cophetua acted in the legend, when the bare-footed beggar-maid appeared before him:—
As shines the moon in clouded skies,
She in her poor attire was seen;
One praised her ankles, one her eyes,
One her dark hair and lovesome mien.
So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been:
Cophetua swore a royal oath:
“This beggar maid shall be my queen.”
It is this example of King Cophetua—and the moral which the eugenists read into it—that we shall need to bear in mind when we endeavour to appreciate those incidents in the latter-day history of the House of Habsburg which are commonly supposed, whether rightly or wrongly, to have been most distressing to the head of the family. That history has largely, and indeed mainly, if not quite entirely, been a history of revolt on the part of the sons—and even the daughters—of the House against the splendid restrictions and inherited obligations which hedged them about as members of an uniquely illustrious race.
The revolt has expressed itself in many ways: some of them, in the world’s view, creditable and even honourable; others in a greater or less degree scandalous. We have seen—and we shall see yet again in these pages—one Habsburg throwing off the panoply of state, to live his own mysterious life in the remote Balearic Isles, and another Habsburg disappearing for ever—unless those are right who assure us that he bides his time, in hiding, for some dark political reason, and will “come again”—as the navigating officer of a merchant vessel. There have also been intrigues which have ended in tragedy, and morganatic marriages with actresses and other persons deemed “impossible” in imperial circles; and there has been at least one elopement of a Habsburg Princess, who, having failed to live harmoniously with a Crown Prince, found that even a professional pianist could not permanently satisfy her craving for romance.
One knows the ordinary comment on these proceedings: “All the Habsburgs are mad,—all of them except Francis Joseph; and here is another Habsburg proving himself (or herself) as mad as the others, if not madder.” The remark is not profound; but it is often, in a rough way, true. John Orth, “Herr Wulfling,” Princess Louisa of Tuscany:—all these (and not these only) have done strange things,—things which one would hesitate to put forward as the sole and unsupported proofs of the possession of well-balanced minds. This is not the page for the detailed account of such proceedings; but it is pertinent and proper, even here, to remark the startling frequency of their occurrence. It is not a case of the discovery of a single skeleton in a single cupboard—a phenomenon which any research into any family history is apt to bring to light. The impression, when one reviews the recent annals of the House of Habsburg, is of continuous rattling of skeletons in all the cupboards, and of one sane and strong man—the accepted and now the hereditary Head of the House—going gravely through his troubled life, not unmoved, indeed, by the ghostly noises, but, at least, without allowing his composure to be too visibly disturbed by them: a man of whom one may say, giving a somewhat new sense to old and hackneyed lines:—
Si fractus illabatur orbis,
Impavidum ferient ruinae.
But that is not the only view of the matter which it is permissible to take. One may also, with the conclusions of science to back one, regard the eccentricities of the more eccentric Habsburgs, if not as the best proofs of sanity that they are capable of giving, then as instinctive and desperate, if not always very intelligent, endeavours to escape from the imminent fate which the eugenists have foretold for them. The family, we may take it, no less than the individual, is an “organism,” albeit only partly conscious of itself; and our spectacle, we may add, is that of an organism blindly fighting for its life. The fight may not be very wisely conducted, not having been begun until the work of destruction was too far advanced; but it is nevertheless a fight worth fighting, and one of which we should follow the vicissitudes, not with horror or with merriment, but with intelligent sympathy. For degeneracy is too high a price to pay for haughty exclusiveness; and it is better to flee from the City of Destruction late in the day, followed and attended by the cry of scandal, than to remain in it and be overwhelmed.
That, at any rate, is the appreciation of the Habsburg scandals—or of a good many of them—which will commend itself to eugenists and sociologists, who will esteem the revolts sound in principle, even though they allow them to be occasionally extravagant in detail. The individual makers of the scandals need not be assumed to have acted from any higher or deeper motive than the satisfaction of what has more than once proved to be only a passing inclination. The whole circumstances of their upbringing, and the precepts of duty and propriety impressed upon them from childhood, make that unlikely. But the physiological instinct behind the admitted motive has been a sound one. Looked at from the viewpoint of the individual, it had been the instinct of King Cophetua; looked at from the point of view of the race, it has been the instinct of self-preservation.
It has been the tragedy—or one of the tragedies—of Francis Joseph that the years of his reign have coincided with the years of this stage in the Habsburg struggle for continued existence. Chosen for his august and exalted post as the sanest and healthiest Habsburg available—albeit the son of an epileptic father and the nephew of an epileptic uncle—he has looked down from above on the exciting incidents and varying vicissitudes of that struggle. One does not know whether to regard his tragedy as the greater on the assumption that he understood the inner meaning of the spectacle or on the assumption that he did not understand it. In the former case there would be more of pathos, in the latter case more of irony, in the drama; but it is impossible to say for certain whether he has understood or not.
The probability, in the lack of direct evidence, is that he has understood in part. One might draw that inference from his occasional indulgence, as well as from his occasional severity, towards the rebels against the laws, both written and unwritten, of his House; and one has no right to infer the contrary from the fact that he himself has not rebelled. He is a Habsburg as well as an Emperor, and may very well have felt the impulses which appear to have become common to the race, though he has had both exceptional reasons and exceptional facilities for repressing them. One knows, at any rate, that he, like so many other members of his family, has sought, and won, the friendship of women outside the charmed circle of the royal families, and that the lady in whose company he seems, in the last years of his long life, to find the most agreeable respite from the cares of State, is not an Archduchess, and was once an actress. That fact must surely have helped him to understand.
But these are matters for subsequent consideration. The ground is now clear; and we may proceed, without further delay, to genealogy and biography.