CHAPTER XXXII
The summing up—The probable future of Austria—The probable future of the House of Habsburg—Questions both personal and political which will be raised when Francis Joseph dies—The extent to which he has been “in the movement”—The faithful companion of his old age.
Francis Joseph, at the moment of writing, has passed not only his eighty-third birthday, but the sixty-fifth anniversary of his accession. Since the death of the late Regent of Bavaria, he has been the doyen of European rulers; and his reign has been longer than that of any modern monarch except Louis XIV., who came to the throne as a small child. His health is naturally the subject of constant preoccupation and infinite precaution on the part of his entourage; and last year he was kept indoors at Schönnbrunn from the middle of October until the middle of April. To what extent he is now able to govern, as well as to reign, only his Ministers know; but it is understood that, while they mobilise the army, he prays that there may be peace in his time.
Most likely he will get his way. There prevails throughout Europe, as well as throughout Austria, a sentimental feeling that he has suffered enough, and that it would be cruel to disturb his last days with war or civil commotion. That sentiment may be expected to count for more than the impatience of those Ruthenian deputies who have taken to silencing their German rivals in the Reichsrath by banging gongs and sounding motor-horns. It might not be so if the problems to the discussion of which the sounding of those motor-horns is an emotional contribution were quite ripe for settlement; but the day of reckoning must still be deferred a little. It is not before the blowing of motor-horns that the walls of Jericho will fall down flat; and it is improbable that Francis Joseph will live to see the solution of the problem which their tumult heralds.
Still, there the problem is; and we must take a final glance at it before we quit the subject. It is an old problem in a new form: a fresh presentation of the problem propounded by that Resettlement of Europe in 1815, which served as our historical starting-point—the problem arising out of the claims of ignored but inextinguishable nationalities. The shifting of the orientation of the Austrian outlook from the Italian to the Balkan peninsula, so often acclaimed as an act of wise statesmanship, has only restated that problem in a fresh shape. For the Italia Irredenta which was a thorn in the side of Austria in the past, it has substituted a Servia Irredenta which will prove a thorn in the side of Austria in the future.
In the days when the change was effected, the Servians were a despised people; and the Austrians and Hungarians believed the Turks, who declared that, in their many battles with the Servians, they had only seen their backs. They took that view alike of the Servians within the Empire—the Servians of Illyria, Dalmatia, Croatia, and other regions—and of the Servians of the independent kingdom of Servia. The former, it seemed to them, were naturally their slaves; the latter were a feeble folk, incapable, and never likely to be capable, of delivering those slaves from servitude. But now they are not so sure. Their Bosnian war established the unexpected truth that men of Servian race not only hated Austrian domination, but could make a good fight for their independence. The recent Balkan war has renewed the warning; and it remains to be seen what will happen now that there is a strong Servia—at least as strong as the old kingdom of Sardinia—to which the unredeemed Servians can look for their redemption. The situation, in short, reproduces in almost every particular the conditions which led to the formation of the kingdom of United Italy.
It is a situation in which there is one incalculable factor: the internal dissensions of the Balkan peoples. Those enmities are undeniably acute; and Austria is clearly determined to foment them, in order to postpone, if not to frustrate, the welding together of a formidable Balkan Confederation. That is the obvious inwardness of her recent support of Bulgaria and Albania. The plan may answer for the moment; but it can hardly avail in the long run, for two reasons. Albania is too disorganised to count; Bulgaria is too weak to have any future except as a member of a Balkan Confederation; and there is also Roumania to be reckoned with—Roumania, which may prove to be at once a consolidating influence in the Balkans, and an influence hostile to Austria.
The fact that there is a Roumania Irredenta as well as a Servia Irredenta may be expected to draw the Servians and the Roumanians together; and their ultimate purpose in drawing together would obviously be to raise the questions of the two unredeemed territories simultaneously. If that should happen, the history of United Italy can hardly fail to repeat itself in the Danubian States. That it would so repeat itself there was one of Mazzini’s political predictions; and he exhorted his countrymen, when the day came, to go over to Macedonia and help the Slavs. If they should ever do so, they will certainly want to help themselves to the Trentino at the same time; and they might alternatively—Triple Alliance or no Triple Alliance—demand the Trentino as the price of their neutrality.
The danger is perceived, of course, in Vienna; and there are those in Vienna who have their plan for meeting it. The Archduke Francis Ferdinand himself is generally understood to have a plan: the transformation of the Dual Monarchy into a Triple Monarchy—the third of his Trinity of Kingdoms to be a Kingdom of Slavs. To some the idea seems a brilliant inspiration; to others a counsel of despair. It derives most of the value which it has from the fact that a majority of the Slavs within the Empire are Catholics, whereas a majority of the Slavs without the Empire belong to the Orthodox Church, and that the Catholics despise the Orthodox as their inferiors in piety and civilisation. The Archduke, as a very religious man—the sort of man whom people speak of as being “in the hands of the Jesuits”—relies, apparently, upon differences of creed to keep the Slavs divided and weak, in spite of the brotherhood of race.
He may be right; but there are not wanting indications that he is wrong. Even in the Balkans religious fanaticism is no longer the force that it used to be; and the Austrian police has recently had all its work cut out to prevent inopportune explosions of sympathy with Servian successes, in Croatia. There, and in Bosnia, and in Dalmatia, just as of old in Lombardy and in Venetia, explosions have only been prevented—perhaps one should say have only been deferred—by the policy of sitting on the safety-valve; and when that policy has to be adopted, things never fail to happen which make the oppressed difficult to reconcile. Moreover, there is a further difficulty, already indicated on a previous page: the difficulty which has its double root in Slav numbers and Austro-Hungarian pride.
Of all the races which make up the composite Empire, the Slavs are the most numerous. Admitted to the Empire on equal terms, they will be in a position to control it—to control, that is to say, the Austrians and Hungarians who have hitherto controlled them. If that were allowed to happen, the condition of things created might be as intolerable to the Austrians and Hungarians as is the existing state of things to the Slavs. Foreseeing this, they will be reluctant to take the step which will compel them to bow their necks; and, if they do take it, yet another “unredeemed” question will be raised: the question whether the Teutonic portion of the Habsburg dominions should not be regarded as Germania Irredenta. The Pangermanists of Prussia already, as we know, take that view of it; and Slav predominance might easily create a Pangermanist party in Austria also. Indeed, the nucleus of a Pangermanist party already exists there.
One doubts, therefore, whether the plan of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand—bold though the conception is—will prove to be a panacea. It strikes one as an artifice—a piece of diplomatic jugglery; and the forces which really determine the course of history are forces which mere juggling is powerless to control. The real rivalry of the Europe of to-day and to-morrow is the rivalry between Teuton and Slav; and that is a rivalry which has its origin, not merely in conflicting material interests, but in fundamental antipathies of character. As long as Teutons are anywhere ruling over Slavs, no policy of “live and let live” is feasible; and as the Slavs increase in numbers and in racial self-consciousness, the clash is bound to come. When it does come—when the unredeemed Slavs, assisted by the unredeemed Roumanians, insist upon their redemption—Austria will have played her part on the stage of European history, and the curtain may be rung down.
That is one of the predictions with which we may leave our subject; but there is also another speculation which it would be difficult to avoid. What of that House of Habsburg which has so long been the personal incarnation of the Austrian Empire? Whither is it tending? On what will its ultimate destiny depend? Will the family problems prove to be more easily soluble than those of the Empire itself? Will it still be in the future, as it has been in the past, the unifying principle of a complex political system? One doubts it—one cannot help doubting it—for various reasons.
The question before us—before Austria, rather—is the question of the importance which the world of the immediate future will attach to family pride and the exclusiveness of an imperial caste; and that is a question about which the world of to-day does not quite seem to have made up its mind. It has gained a little knowledge without losing an equal proportion of prejudice, and has reached a point at which it finds it equally difficult to live either with its superstitions or without them. It is moved—it cannot help being moved—by the formidable array of facts by which the Eugenists demonstrate that the path to degeneracy is paved with consanguineous marriages; but, at the same time, it cannot easily shake off its instinctive reluctance to accord imperial dignity to the offspring of a healthy young woman of what it regards as the “lower orders.” It is, the world feels, very embarrassing to have to choose between a degenerate and a person of inferior social status.
That, nevertheless, is the choice which lies before Austria in the immediate future. Francis Ferdinand, as we have seen, has married beneath him; his marriage is “morganatic.” That is to say that, when he comes to the throne, the heir to the throne will not be his son, but his nephew. That nephew is a young man about whom comparatively little is known; but when Francis Ferdinand goes into the matter, he will do so with the following facts before him:—
1. The heir to the throne is the son of the family scapegrace, who used to dance in cafés in puris naturalibus.
2. This heir is married to a lady who comes of the decadent Bourbon Parma stock.
3. This young man, and his wife, and his family are taking precedence of his own wife, whom he loves, and the healthy[7] children whom she has borne him.
[7] Apparently healthy, though there is, unhappily, a strain of insanity in the Chotek family also. Nothing was known or suspected of it at the time of the marriage; but the Duchess of Hohenberg’s father had to be placed under restraint before his death. One may hope that the weakness was developed too late in life to be transmitted.
The superstition of caste would, indeed, be strong in Francis Ferdinand if he regarded that as a right and proper state of things; and the mere fact that he married as he did, in the face of the opposition which he encountered, shows clearly that, whatever superstitions may still retain a hold on him, that particular superstition has relaxed its grip. Is he likely—human nature being what we know it to be—to accept an affront inflicted in the name of a superstition which he has abandoned? Can we expect his wife and his children to press him to do so?
Obviously we cannot. The thing might have happened in bygone ages—or even in comparatively recent ages—when universal opinion drew a religious as well as a social distinction between hereditary sovereigns and their subjects, and the personal dignity of the individual counted for nothing in comparison with that great impersonal principle. It cannot happen now that all impersonal principles are in the melting-pot and so many postulates which men used to grant as they now grant the law of gravitation are being brought to the bar of opinion to be cross-examined. The postulate which bids the progeny of an Emperor who married for love take a lower seat than the son and grandsons of the family scapegrace will assuredly be questioned by the next Emperor of Austria; and it will be found that it has nothing to say for itself. It may die fighting; but it will die; and the whole of the Habsburg superstition will die with it. What will happen then lies in the lap of the Gods.
It is, however, precisely because of its gradual approach to such problems as these that one finds the reign of Francis Joseph such an intensely interesting period of history. It is interesting from the personal point of view as the story of Nemesis overtaking the oppressor; the story which we have presented symbolically as the story of the fulfilment of Countess Karolyi’s curse. Philosophically it is interesting as the age of transition from mediæval to modern ideas: the age in which both nationalities and individuals have stormily asserted their right to live their own lives in their own way. In both these matters we see, in Austria more clearly than anywhere else, the hungry generations treading down the past.
It is seldom that so complete an evolution of outlook is co-extensive with the life of a single sovereign; perhaps, indeed, Francis Joseph’s reign has been unique in that respect. In any case, he has witnessed all these changes, and lived through all these intellectual and emotional experiences. His rôle, while doing so, has been to keep up appearances; but, if we could penetrate to the realities behind the appearances, we should assuredly find that he had not himself been unaffected by the transformations going on around him. That is the true moral of the story of his affection for Frau Schratt, and of the rumour of his desire to give that lady his left hand in marriage. He felt what the other Habsburgs felt, though he controlled his feelings better. Seeing what the other Habsburgs were doing, he had the impulse to be “in the movement,” though he resisted it. He, like the rest, has sometimes had the intuition that happiness lay in living one’s own life rather than the corporate life of one’s country; and there are moments when his biographer feels that, in spite of all the pomp and glory which have attended his public career, the day of days for him must have been the day on which he met Frau Schratt, who, after twenty-eight years of mutual devotion, now totters down the hill with him at the journey’s end.
Photo Adèle
FRAU SCHRATT.
Daily, for a little while, when health permits, he sits with her and wonders.... We will leave him wondering.