On the third day after this, at the appointed hour, I waited upon Prince Metternich. In the outer antechamber an elderly well-conditioned red-faced usher, in loosely made clothes of fine black cloth, rose from a table, and on my announcing myself, said, "If you will go into that apartment, and take a seat, his Excellency will be disengaged in a short time." I now entered a large apartment, looking out on the little garden of the bastion: an officer, in a fresh new white Austrian uniform, stood motionless and pensive at one of the windows, waiting his turn with a most formidable roll of papers. The other individual in the room was a Hungarian, who moved about, sat down, and rose up, with the most restless impatience, twirled his mustachios, and kept up a most lively conversation with a caged parrot which stood on the table.
Two large pictures, hanging from the wall opposite the windows, were a full length portrait of the emperor in his robes, the other a picture of St. John Nepomuck, the patron saint of Bohemia, holding an olive branch in his hand. The apartment, although large, was very simply furnished, but admirably decorated in subdued colours, in the Italian manner. A great improvement has lately taken place in internal decoration in Vienna, which corresponds with that of external architecture. A few years ago, most large apartments were fitted up in the style of Louis XV., which was worthy of the degenerate nobles and crapulous financiers for whom it was invented, and was, in fact, a sort of Byzantine of the boudoir, which succeeded the nobler and simpler manner of the age of Louis XIV., and tormenting every straight line into meretricious curves, ended with over-loading caricature itself.
I found Prince Metternich in his cabinet, surrounded with book-cases, filled mostly with works on history, statistics, and geography, and I hope I am not committing any indiscretion in saying that his conversation savoured more of the abstractions of history and political philosophy than that of any other practical statesman I had seen. I do not think that I am passing a dubious compliment, since M. Guizot, the most eminently practical of the statesmen of France, is at the same time the man who has most successfully illustrated the effects of modifications of political institutions on the main current of human happiness.
It must be admitted that Prince Metternich has a profound acquaintance with the minutest sympathies and antipathies of all the European races; and this is the quality most needed in the direction of an empire which comprises not a nation, but a congregation of nations; not cohering through sympathy with each other, but kept together by the arts of statesmanship, and the bond of loyalty to the reigning house. The ethnographical map of Europe is as clear in his mind's eye as the boot of Italy, the hand of the Morea, and the shield of the Spanish peninsula in those of a physical geographer. It is not affirming too much to say that in many difficult questions in which the mezzo termine proposed by Austria has been acceded to by the other powers, the solution has been due as much to the sagacity of the individual, as to the less ambitious policy which generally characterizes Austria.
The last time I saw this distinguished individual was in the month of November following, on my way to England, I venture to give a scrap of the conversation.
Mett. "The idea of Charlemagne was the formation of a vast state, comprising heterogeneous nations united under one head; but with all his genius he was unequal to the task of its accomplishment. Napoleon entertained the same plan with his confederation of the Rhine; but all such systems are ephemeral when power is centralized, and the minor states are looked upon as instruments, and not as principals. Austria is the only empire on record that has succeeded under those circumstances. The cabinet of Austria, when it seeks the solution of any internal question, invariably reverses the positions, and hypothetically puts itself in the position of the provincial interest under consideration. That is the secret of the prosperity of Austria."
Author. "I certainly have been often struck with the historical fact, that 1830 produced revolutions then and subsequently in France, Belgium, Poland, Spain, and innumerable smaller states; while in Austria, with all its reputed combustible elements, not a single town or village revolted."
Mett. "That tangible fact speaks for itself."