JOHN RUSSELL.
[It is with Vienna as it appeared in 1825 that we here propose to deal, in the language of a traveller of that period, who has given a graphic account of what was then and there to be seen. Russell’s “Tour in Germany” is a sprightly and interesting work, and the Vienna which he describes, while yet in its chrysalis state, displayed many of the characteristics of the handsome and attractive city of to-day. Our extract begins with a distant view of the Austrian capital.]
On reaching the brow of the low eminences that border to the north the valley through which the Danube takes his course, a magnificent prospect burst at once upon the eye. A wide plain lay below, teeming with the productions and habitations of industrious men. On the east, towards Hungary, it was boundless, and the eye was obstructed only by the horizon. To the westward rose the hills which, beginning in orchard and vineyard, and terminating in forest and precipice, form, in this direction, the commencement of the Alps; and to the south the plain was bounded by the loftier summits of the Styrian mountains. Nearly in the centre of the picture lay Vienna itself, extending on all sides its gigantic arms; and the spire of the cathedral, high above every other object, was proudly presenting its Gothic pinnacle to the evening sun. From this point the inequality of the ground on which Vienna stands strikes the eye at once, and the cathedral has the advantage of occupying the highest point of the proper city; for not only the spire, but nearly the whole body of the edifice, was distinctly seen above all the other buildings of the city.
Every one of the three hundred thousand inhabitants who crowd Vienna and its interminable suburbs seems to reckon it a duty to make his life a commentary. They are more devoted friends of joviality, pleasure, and good living, and more bitter enemies of everything like care or thinking,—a more eating, drinking, good-natured, ill-educated, hospitable, and laughing people,—than any other of Germany, or, perhaps, of Europe. Their climate and soil, the corn and wine with which Heaven has blessed them, exempt them from any very anxious degree of thought about their own wants; and the government, with its spies and police, takes most effectual care that their gayety shall not be disturbed by thinking of the public necessities, or studying for the public weal. In regard to themselves, they are distinguished by a love of pleasure; in regard to strangers, by great kindness and hospitality. It is difficult to bring an Austrian to a downright quarrel with you, and it is almost equally difficult to prevent him from injuring your health by good living.
The city itself is a splendid and a bustling one; no other German metropolis comes near it in that crowded activity which distinguishes our own capitals. It does not stand, strictly speaking, on the Danube, which is a mile to the northward, and is separated from it by the largest of all the suburbs, the Leopoldstadt, as well as by the extensive tract of ground on which the groves of the Prater have been planted and its walks laid out. The walls, however, are washed, on this side, by a small arm of the Danube, which rejoins the main stream a short way below the city, and is sufficiently large for the purposes of inland navigation. On the south, the proper city is separated from the suburbs by a still more insignificant stream, which, however, gives its name to the capital, the Vienna. This rivulet, instead of serving effectually even the purposes of cleanliness, brings down the accumulated refuse of other regions of the town, and its noisome effluvia often render it an effort to pass the bridge across it, one of the most crowded thoroughfares of Vienna.
The proper city is of nearly a circular form, and cannot be more than three miles in circumference, for I have often walked quite around the ramparts in less than an hour. The style of building does not pretend to much ornament, but is massive and imposing; the streets are generally narrow, and the houses lofty, rising to four or five floors, which are all entered by a common stair. There is much more regularity, and there are many more cornices and pillars, in Berlin; in Dresden there is a more frequent intermixture of showy edifices; there is more lightness and airiness of effect in the best parts of Munich; and in Nürnberg and Augsburg there is a greater profusion of the outward ornaments of the olden time; but in none of these towns is there so much of that sober and solid stateliness, without gloom, which, after all, is perhaps the most fitting style of building for a large city. Some individual masses of building, in the very heart of the city, are as populous as large villages....
“The art of walking the streets” in London is an easy problem, compared with the art of walking in them in Vienna. In the former, there is some order and distinction, even in the crowd; two-legged and four-legged animals have their allotted places, and are compelled to keep them; in the latter, all this is otherwise. It is true that, in the principal streets, a few feet on each side are paved with stones somewhat larger than those in the centre, and these side slips are intended for pedestrians; but the pedestrians have no exclusive right; the level of the street is uniform; there is nothing to prevent horses and carriages from encroaching on the domain, and, accordingly, they are perpetually trespassing.
The streets, even those in which there is the greatest bustle, the Kärnthnerstrasse, for example, are generally narrow; carriages, hackney-coaches, and loaded wagons, observing no order, cross each other in all directions; and, while they hurry past each other, or fill the street by coming from opposite quarters, the pedestrian is every moment in danger of being run up against the wall. A provoking circumstance is, that frequently a third part, or even a half of the street, is rendered useless by heaps of wood, the fuel of the inhabitants. The wood is brought into the city in large pieces, from three to four feet long. A wagon-load of these logs is laid down on the street, at the door of the purchaser, to be sawed and split into smaller pieces, before being deposited in his cellar.
When this occurs, as it often does, at every third or fourth door, the street just loses so much of its breadth. Nothing remains but the centre, and that is constantly swarming with carriages, and carts, and barrows. The pedestrian must either wind himself through among their wheels, or clamber over successive piles of wood, or patiently wait till the centre of the street becomes passable for a few yards. To think of doubling the wooden promontory without this precaution is far from being safe. You have scarcely by a sudden spring saved your shoulders from the pole of a carriage, when a wheelbarrow makes a similar attack on your legs. You make spring the second, and in all probability your head comes in contact with the uplifted hatchet of a wood-cutter. The wheelbarrows seem to be best off. They fill such a middle rank between bipeds and quadrupeds, that they lay claim to the privileges of both, and hold on their way rejoicing, commanding respect equally from men and horses.
To guide a carriage through these crowded, encumbered, disorderly, narrow streets, without either occasioning or sustaining damage, is, perhaps, the highest achievement of the coach-driving art. Our own knights of the whip, with all their scientific and systematic excellencies, must here yield the palm to the practical superiority of their Austrian brethren. Nothing can equal the dexterity with which a Vienna coachman winds himself, and winds himself rapidly, through every little aperture, and, above all, at the sharp turns of the streets. People on foot, indeed, must look about them; and, from necessity, they have learned to look about them so well, that accidents are wonderfully rare, and very seldom, indeed, does it happen that the Jehus do not keep clear of each other’s wheels. The hackney-coachmen form as peculiar a class as they do in London, with as much esprit de corps, but more humor, full of jokes and extortion. It is said that the most skilful coachman from any other country cannot drive in Vienna without a regular education. A few years ago, an Hungarian nobleman brought out a coachman from London; but Tom was under the necessity of resigning the box, after a day’s driving pregnant with danger to his master’s limbs and carriage....
Vienna has some very noble public squares, though no people requires them less for purposes of recreation; for, when amusement is their object, they hasten beyond the walls to the coffee-houses of the glacis, or the shades of the Prater, the wine-houses and monks of Kloster-Neuburg, or the gardens of Schönbrunn. The best of these squares happen to be in parts of the city where the fashionable world does not often intrude; they are not planted, but they are excellently paved; they are not gaudy with palaces, but they are surrounded by the busy shops and substantial and comfortable dwellings of happy citizens, and are commonly adorned with some religious emblem or a public fountain. Both the temples and fountains have too much work about them; there is too much striving after finery of sculpture, a department of art in which the Austrians are still very far behind. The consequence is, that there are crowds of figures which have no more to do with a basin of water than with a punch-bowl.
The Graben, an open space in the most busy part of the town, and entered at both extremities, by the narrowest and most inconvenient lanes in Vienna (although, on Sundays and festivals, it is the great thoroughfare of all classes, from the Emperor to the servant-girl), is embellished with two fountains. The fountains themselves are simple and unaffected; but it was necessary to have statues. Therefore at the one well stands Joseph explaining to the Messiah his Hebrew genealogy, and at the other St. Leopold holding in his hands a plan of the Monastery of Neuburg! The artist of the fountain in the Neumarkt, or New-market, seems to have felt the want of congruity in this union of holy saints with cold water, and he placed on the edge of his basin four naked figures, representing the four principal rivers of Austria, pouring their waters into the Danube, whose genii surround the pillar that rises from the centre. But even here comes something Austrian and absurd. The basin is so small that half a dozen of moderately-sized perch would feel themselves confined in it; yet these four emblematical figures are anxiously gazing into the tiny reservoir, and brandishing huge tridents to harpoon the invisible whales which are supposed to be sporting in the waters....
Vienna is no longer a fortified city; promenading is the only purpose to which the fortifications are now applied; and, from their breadth and elevation, they are excellently adapted for it. In one part they look out upon the gradually ascending suburbs; on another the eye wanders over intervening vineyards, up to the bare ridge of the Kahlenberg, from which Sobieski made his triumphant attack against the besieging Turks, traces of whose intrenchments are still visible; in another it rests on the waters of the Danube, the foliage of the Prater, and the gay crowds who are streaming along to enjoy its shades. The twice successful attacks of French armies having proved the ramparts, or bastions, as they are universally called, to be useless for the protection of the citizens, trees, benches, and coffee-houses have taken the place of cannon, and rendered them invaluable as sources of recreation to this pleasure-loving people. On Sundays and holidays, so soon as the last mass has terminated (which it always does about mid-day), they are crowded to suffocation with people of all ranks.
Even on week-days, so long as the weather permits it, the coffee-houses, surrounded with awnings, are the favorite resort of persons, chiefly gentlemen, who prefer breakfasting in the open air, and in the evening they are the favorite resort of both sexes, especially of the middle classes. An orchestra in the open air furnishes excellent music; as night comes on (and the crowd always increases with the dusk) lamps are hung up among the trees, or suspended from the awnings. The gay, unthinking crowd sits to be gazed at, or strolls about from one alley to another to gaze,—good and bad, virtuous and lost, mingled together, sipping coffee or keeping an assignation, eating an ice, or making love. Till ten o’clock, when the terrors of the Hausmeister drive them home, the ramparts, and the glacis below, form a collection of little Vauxhalls.
The glacis itself, the low, broad and level space of ground which stretches out immediately from the foot of the ramparts, and runs entirely around the city, except where the walls are washed by the arm of the Danube, is no longer the naked and cheerless stripe which it used to be. Much of it has been formed into gardens belonging to different branches of the imperial family; the rest has been gradually planted and laid out into alleys, and two years ago the Emperor, in his love for his subjects, allowed a coffee-house to be built among the trees. Beyond the glacis, the ground in general rises, and along these eminences stretch the thirty-four suburbs of Vienna, surrounding the city like the outworks of some huge fortification, and finally surrounded themselves by a brick wall, a mere instrument of police, to insure the detection of radicals and contraband goods, by subjecting everything and every person to a strict examination....
Though the suburbs, from the greater regularity of their streets, the smaller height of their buildings, and the general elevation of the site, are in themselves more open and airy than the city, yet, owing to the absence of pavement and the presence of wind, they can scarcely be said to be more healthy. Vienna, though lying in a sort of kettle, and not at so absolute an elevation as Munich, is more pestered by high winds than any other European capital. In the proper city the streets are paved, and excellently well paved; but throughout the immense suburbs they present only the bare soil. This soil is loose, dry, and sandy, and the wind acting upon it keeps the city and suburbs enveloped in a thick atmosphere, loaded with particles of sand, which medical men do not pretend to deny has a perceptible influence on the health. From the summit of the Kahlenberg, an eminence about two miles to the west, I have seen Vienna as completely obscured by a thick cloud of dust as ever London is by a cloud of smoke; and our smoke is, in reality, the less disagreeable of the two. When the wind is moderate, and allows the dust to settle, rain commonly follows, and the suburbs are converted into a succession of alleys of mud....
The Prater of Vienna is the finest public park in Europe, for it has more rural beauty than Hyde Park, and surely the more varied and natural arrangement of its woods and waters is preferable to the formal basin and alley of the garden of the Tuileries. It occupies the eastern part of that broad and level tract on the north of the city, which is formed into an island by the main stream of the Danube on the one side, and the smaller arm that washes the walls on the other. They unite at its extremity, and the Prater is thus surrounded on three sides by water. The principal alley, the proper arive, runs from the entrance in a long straight line for about half a mile. Rows of trees, consisting chiefly of horse-chestnuts, divide it into five alleys. The central one is entirely filled with an unceasing succession of glittering carriages, moving slowly along its opposite sides in opposite directions; the two on each side are filled with horsemen, galloping along to try the capacity of their steeds, or provoking them into impatient curvetings, to try the effect of their own forms and dexterity on the beauties who adorn the open calèches.
The two exterior alleys are consecrated to pedestrians; but those of the Viennese who must walk, because not rich enough to hire a hackney-coach, are never fond of walking far, and, forsaking the alleys, scatter themselves over the verdant lawn which spreads itself out to where the wood becomes more dense and impenetrable. The lawn itself is plentifully strewed with coffee-houses, and the happy hundreds seat themselves under shady awnings or on the green herbage, beneath a clump of trees, enjoying their ices, coffee, and cigars, till twilight calls them to the theatre, with not a thought about to-morrow, and scarcely a reminiscence of yesterday.
But though the extremity of this main alley be the boundary of the excursions of the fashionable world, it is only the beginning of the more rural and tranquil portion of the Prater. The wood becomes thicker; there are no more straight lines of horse-chestnuts; the numerous alleys wind their way unconstrained through the forest maze, now leading you along in artificial twilight beneath an overarching canopy of foliage, and now terminating in some verdant and tranquil spot like those on which fairies delight to dance; now bringing you to the brink of some pure rivulet, which trickles along unsuspectingly to be lost in the mighty stream, and now stopping you on the shady banks of the magnificent river itself.