On my eleventh birthday I had been taken to the theater for the first time. “The White Lady”[[2]] was given. Ah, but that George Brown! (“What joy to be a soldier!”) Yes, that is the comeliest profession—next to that of opera tenor. For anything more captivating than that singer,—I still remember his very name, Theodor Formes, so the impression must have been deep,—anything more chivalrous I had never dreamed of. The prince destined for me must look like that. He would not even have to be a prince; only, if possible, in case he was not a tenor,—I would not have given Herr Formes the mitten,—at any rate a soldier. In telling this I see that I was a silly girl, to be sure, but not a genuine child. That is probably due to my not having had any playmate of my own age, but living only in the world of books, whose heroes were themselves not children but grown people, whose fortunes turned mostly upon love and marriage.
The most important thing in the universe, anyhow, was my little person. The course of the world was only the machinery whose wheels were all geared for the purpose of preparing a radiant good fortune for me. Was I alone such a foolish, conceited child, or is this center-of-the-world feeling a natural feeling in general among children and creatures of limited intelligence? Is modesty a noble fruit which ripens only on the tree of experience and knowledge?
It is just by this that the type of a man or of a class may be authentically gauged—by what appears important. Of notable importance to me in those days of childhood, besides the all-overtopping “I,” were the Christmas festival; the great spring house-cleaning; the Old Ladies’ Home at Brünn; chestnut-gathering in the paths of the Augarten, carpeted with autumn leaves; Fritzerl’s visits, my mother’s beautiful singing, this mother’s axiomatic great love for me, and my love for her, which was so great that when she went to Vienna for two or three days I would sob for hours as if my heart were broken.
With such a circle of importance I might frame all the various sections of my life, and thereby most clearly realize the phases, from that first memory of the important pattern of braid on the white cashmere frock down to the ideal of an assured international reign of law, which to-day appears to me a thing so important as to discount everything else.
Here it is a question of something that is yet to come into existence, and I think that attention to such things is but rare. Most people—and with them I in the earlier epochs of my life—take the surrounding world and the prevailing conditions as something given, axiomatic, almost unalterable, upon whose origin one thinks but little, and upon making any possible change in it not at all. As the air is here for breathing, and one is not called upon to make any change in it, so the given social order—political and moral—is here to furnish the atmosphere, the vital air, of our social existence. Of course one does not think that in these words, for the conception I speak of is altogether artless; that is, it exists rather in sensation than in consciousness, just as we also, without becoming conscious of it, draw breath constantly and do not think of the quantity of nitrogen and oxygen in the air.
The recollection of a visit to the country in the year 1854 has remained vividly fixed in my memory. To this day I see before me different pictures of the castle, garden, and forest of the domain of Matzen, while so many other scenes which I have since looked upon have vanished from my memory. A peculiar camera it is that one carries in his head, in which many pictures etch themselves so deeply and clearly, while others leave no trace. It must be that the apparatus just snaps open for a moment in the brain, but remains closed most of the time, so that the outer world does not get photographed.
Then was not the first time that I had been at Matzen, but of the earlier visit I have only a very dim idea. I only see myself carried into the drawing-room in the nurse’s arms to be caressed there by the lady of the house, Aunt Betty Kinsky, and her two grown daughters, Rosa and Tinka. In the year 1854, when my mother was invited to Matzen again, Aunt Betty no longer held sway there; she had died some years previously, and the daughters had married away,—Rosa to a Baron Hahn in Graz, Tinka to General Count Crenneville, commandant of the fortress of Mainz. Mainz, you know, was at that time an Austrian garrison. How things do shift on this changeable surface of our earth—where everything, indeed, is in a continual process of change; but more swiftly and unexpectedly than mountains and valleys, than the forests and cities of a country, do its political boundaries and dependencies change.
To come back to Matzen, which still stands on the same spot, but which I have not seen again since then,—it was at that time under the dominion of a newly married couple. On the same day when Emperor Franz Joseph celebrated his wedding with Elisabeth of Bavaria, Count Christian Kinsky, the present lord of Matzen and Angern, had brought home his bride, Countess Therese Wrbna. A handsome and happy young couple.
A merrier, wittier man than “Christl” Kinsky cannot be imagined. To this all Vienna society bears witness. Even at an advanced age, in the anything but merry position of provincial marshal, he was able to bring gayety and good humor even into the party-rent provincial assembly hall.
The castle, old and towered, stands on a wooded mountain; from the second story a door leads out to a bit of level ground on which a decorative garden is planted, and before the garden grill lies the forest. A pavilion stands in the garden, and on the table in it lay colored glasses, blue, yellow, red. They had me look out upon nature through these (this memory dates from an earlier visit at Matzen, when I was still quite small), and to see this blue forest, this yellow garden, this green sky, was a magical surprise to me—I screamed with happiness. Oh, there is nothing to beat having been just lately born, and feeling as new everything—everything—that the world offers; tasting everything for the first time. It would be fine to keep being born over again and keep beginning everything over again from the start, traversing again the magic realm of surprises that dazzles us with the first colored glass, with the first Christmas-tree candle, somewhat later with the first kiss, and always as an undreamed-of virgin country....