LETTER XV.
The Palace of Schoenbrunn—Hietzing, the Summer Retreat of the Wealthy Viennese—Country-House of the American Consul—Specimen of Pure Domestic Happiness in a German Family—Splendid Village Ball—Substantial Fare for the Ladies—Curious Fashion of Cushioning the Windows—German Grief—The Upper Belvidere Palace—Endless Quantity of Pictures.
Drove to Schoenbrunn. It is a princely palace, some three miles from the city, occupied at present by the emperor and his court. Napoleon resided here during his visit to Vienna, and here his son died—the two circumstances which alone make it worth much trouble to see. The afternoon was too cold to hope to meet the emperor in the grounds, and being quite satisfied with drapery and modern paintings, I contented myself with having driven through the court, and kept on to Hietzing.
This is a small village of country-seats within an hour’s drive of the city—another Jamaica-Plains, or Dorchester in the neighbourhood of Boston. It is the summer retreat of most of the rank and fashion of Vienna. The American consul has here a charming country-house, buried in trees, where the few of our countrymen who travel to Austria find the most hospitable of welcomes. A bachelor friend of mine from New York is domesticated in the village with a German family. I was struck with the Americanism of their manners. The husband and wife, a female relative and an intimate friend of the family, were sitting in the garden, engaged in grave, quiet, sensible conversation. They had passed the afternoon together. Their manners were affectionate to each other, but serious and respectful. When I entered, they received me with kindness, and the conversation was politely changed to French, which they all spoke fluently. Topics were started, in which it was supposed I would be interested, and altogether the scene was one of the simplest and purest domestic happiness. This seems to you, I daresay, like the description of a very common thing, but I have not seen such a one before since I left my country. It is the first family I have found in two years’ travel who lived in, and seemed sufficient for, themselves. It came over me with a kind of feeling of refreshment.
In the evening there was a ball at a public room in the village. It was built in the rear of a café, to which we paid about thirty cents for entrance. I was not prepared for the splendour with which it was got up. The hall was very large and of beautiful proportions, built like the interior of a temple, with columns on the four sides. A partition of glass divided it from a supper room equally large, in which were set out perhaps fifty tables, furnished with a carte, from which each person ordered his supper when he wished it, after the fashion of a restaurant. The best band in Vienna filled the orchestra, led by the celebrated Strauss, who has been honoured for his skill with presents from half the monarchs of Europe.
The ladies entered, dressed in perfect taste, à la Parisienne, but the gentlemen (hear it, Basil Hall and Mrs. Trollope!) came in frock coats and boots, and danced with their hats on! It was a public ball, and there was, of course, a great mixture of society; but I was assured that it was attended constantly by the most respectable people of the village, and was as respectable as anything of the kind in the middle classes. There were, certainly, many ladies in the company, of elegant manners and appearance, and among the gentlemen I recognised two attachés to the French embassy, whom I had known in Paris, and several Austrian gentlemen of rank were pointed out to me among the dancers. The galopade and the waltz were the only dances, and dirty boots and hats to the contrary notwithstanding, it was the best waltzing I ever saw. They danced with a soul.
The best part of it was the supper. They danced and eat—danced and eat, the evening through. It was quite the more important entertainment of the two. The most delicate ladies present returned three and four times to the supper, ordering fried chicken, salads, cold meats, and beer, again and again, as if every waltz created a fresh appetite. The bill was called for, the ladies assisted in making the change, the tankard was drained, and off they strolled to the ball-room to engage with renewed spirit in the dance. And these, positively, were ladies who, in dress, manners, and modest demeanour, might pass uncriticised in any society in the world! Their husbands and brothers attended them, and no freedom was attempted, and I am sure it would not have been permitted even to speak to a lady without a formal introduction.
We left most of the company supping at a late hour, and I drove into the city, amused with the ball, and reconciled to any or all of the manners which travellers in America find so peculiarly entertaining.
These cold winds from the Danube have given me a rheumatism. I was almost reconciled to it this morning however, by a curtain-scene which I should have missed but for its annoyance. I had been driven out of my bed at daylight, and was walking my room between the door and the window, when a violent knocking in the street below arrested my attention. A respectable family occupies the house opposite, consisting of a father and mother and three daughters, the least attractive of whom has a lover. I cannot well avoid observing them whenever I am in my room, for every house in Vienna has a leaning cushion on the window for the elbows, and the ladies of all classes are upon them the greater part of the day. A handsome carriage, servants in livery, and other circumstances, leave no doubt in my mind that my neighbours are rather of the better class.
The lover stood at the street door with a cloak on his arm, and a man at his side with his portmanteau. He was going on a journey, and had come to take leave of his mistress. He was let in by a gaping servant, who looked rather astonished at the hour he had chosen for his visit, but the drawing-room windows were soon thrown open, and the lady made her appearance with her hair in papers, and other marks of a hasty toilet. My room is upon the same floor, and as I paced to and fro, the narrowness of the street in a manner forced them upon my observation. The scene was a very violent one, and the lady’s tears flowed without restraint. After twenty partings at least, the lover scarce getting to the door before he returned to take another embrace, he finally made his exit, and the lady threw herself on a sofa and hid her face—for five minutes! I had begun to feel for her, although her swollen eyes added very unnecessarily to her usual plainness, when she rose and rang the bell. The servant appeared and disappeared, and in a few minutes returned with a ham, a loaf of bread, and a mug of beer? and down sets my sentimental miss and consoles the agony of parting with a meal that I would venture to substitute in quantity for any working man’s lunch.
I went to bed and rose at nine, and she was sitting at breakfast with the rest of the family, playing as good a knife and fork as her sisters, though, I must admit, with an expression of sincere melancholy in her countenance.
The scene, I am told by my friend the consul, was perfectly German. They eat a great deal, he says, in affliction. The poet writes:—
“They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings.”
For silent read hungry.
The Upper Belvidere, a palace containing eighteen large rooms, filled with pictures. This is the imperial gallery and the first in Austria. How can I give you an idea of perhaps five hundred masterpieces you see here now, and by whom Italy has been stripped. They have bought up all Flanders, one would think, too. In one room here are twenty-eight superb Vandykes. Austria, in fact, has been growing rich while every other nation on the continent has been growing poor, and she has purchased the treasures of half the world at a discount.[[4]]
It is wearisome writing of pictures, one’s language is so limited. I must mention one or two in this collection, however, and I will let you off entirely on the Esterhazy, which is nearly as fine.
“Cleopatra dying.” She is represented younger than usual, and with a more fragile and less queenly style of beauty than is common. It is a fair slight creature of seventeen, who looks made to depend for her very breath upon affection, and is dying of a broken heart. It is painted with great feeling, and with a soft and delightful tone of colour which is peculiar to the artist. It is the third of Guido Cagnacci’s pictures that I have seen. One was the gem of a gallery at Bologna, and was bought last summer by Mr. Cabot of Boston.
“The wife of Potiphar” is usually represented as a woman of middle age, with a full, voluptuous person. She is so drawn, I remember, in the famous picture in the Barberini Palace at Rome, said to be the most expressive thing of its kind in the world. Here is a painting less dangerously expressive of passion but full of beauty. She is eighteen at the most, fair, delicate, and struggles with the slender boy, who seems scarce older than herself, more like a sister from whom a mischievous brother has stolen something in sport. Her partly disclosed figure has all the incomplete slightness of a girl. The handsome features of Joseph express more embarrassment than anger. The habitual courtesy to his lovely mistress is still there, his glance is just averted from the snowy bosom toward which he is drawn, but in the firmly curved lip the sense of duty sits clearly defined, and evidently will triumph. I have forgotten the painter’s name. His model must have been some innocent girl whose modest beauty led him away from his subject. Called by another name the picture were perfect.
A portrait of Count Wallenstein, by Vandyke. It looks a man, in the fullest sense of the word. The pendant to it is the Countess Turentaxis, and she is a woman he might well have loved—calm, lofty, and pure. They are pictures, I should think, would have an influence on the character of those who saw them habitually.
Here is a curious picture by Schnoer—“Mephistopheles tempting Faust.” The scholar sits at his table, with a black letter volume open before him, and apparatus of all descriptions around. The devil has entered in the midst of his speculations, dressed in black like a professor, and stands waiting the decision of Faust, who gazes intently on the manuscript held in his hand. His fingers are clenched, his eyes start from his head, his feet are braced, and the devil eyes him with a side glance, in which malignity and satisfaction are admirably mingled. The features of Faust are emaciated, and show the agitation of his soul very powerfully. The points of his compasses, globes, and instruments emit electric sparks toward the infernal visitor; his lamp burns blue, and the picture altogether has the most diabolical effect. It is quite a large painting, and just below, by the same artist, hangs a small, simple, sweet Madonna. It is a singular contrast in subjects by the same hand.
A portrait of the Princess Esterhazy, by Angelica Kauffman—a beautiful woman, painted in the pure, touching style of that interesting artist.
Then comes a “Cleopatra dropping the pearl into the cup.” How often, and how variously, and how admirably always, the Egyptian queen is painted! I never have seen an indifferent one. In this picture the painter seems to have lavished all he could conceive of female beauty upon his subject. She is a glorious creature. It reminds me of her own proud description of herself, when she is reproaching Antony to one of her maids, in “The False One” of Beaumont and Fletcher:—
“To prefer
The lustre of a little trash, Arsinoe,
Before the life of love and soul of beauty!”
I have marked a great many pictures in this collection I cannot describe without wearying you, yet I feel unwilling to let them go by. A female, representing Religion, feeding a dove from a cup, a most lovely thing by Guido; portraits of Gerard Douw and Rembrandt, by themselves; Rubens’ children, a boy and girl ten or twelve years of age, one of the most finished paintings I ever saw, and entirely free from the common dropsical style of colouring of this artist; another portrait of Giorgione’s wife, the fiftieth that I have seen, at least, yet a face of which one would never become weary; a glowing landscape by Fischer, the first by this celebrated artist I have met; and last (for this is mere catalogue-making), a large picture representing the “Sitting of the English Parliament” in the time of Pitt. It contains about a hundred portraits, among which those of Pitt and Fox are admirable. The great Prime-Minister stands speaking in the foreground, and Fox sits on the opposite side of the House listening attentively with half a smile on his features. It is a curious picture to find in Vienna.
One thing more, however—a Venus, by Lampi. It kept me a great while before it. She lies asleep on a rich couch, and, apparently in her dream, is pressing a rose to her bosom, while one delicate foot, carelessly thrown back, is half imbedded in a superb cushion supporting a crown and sceptre. It is a lie, by all experience. The moral is false, but the picture is delicious.
| [4] | Besides the three galleries of the Belvidere, Leichstenstein, and Esterhazy, which contain as many choice masters as Rome and Florence together, the guide-book refers the traveller to sixty-four private galleries of oil paintings, well worth his attention, and to twenty-five private collections of engravings and antiquities. We shall soon be obliged to go to Vienna, to study the arts, at this rate. They have only no sculpture. |