“It was the installation on the throne, under the ægis of beauty and charm, of the guardian angel of the Magyars, to whom the young Empress felt herself specially attracted by the memory of her patron saint who belonged to the House of Arpad.”
THE EMPRESS ELIZABETH OF AUSTRIA.
The allusion is, of course, to the Empress’s namesake, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary; and the sentiment stirred by the association bore practical political fruit. It is no depreciation of the work done in later years by Deák and Beust to say that their task would have been vastly more difficult if Elizabeth had not charmed the spirits of the Hungarians, and that it was largely owing to the spell which she had thrown upon them that Deák was able to announce, when asked to name his terms after the disasters of 1866, that Hungary demanded no more after Sadowa than she had asked before.
That was a great achievement—not to be made the less of because it was due to no conscious statesmanship, but merely came about through the idealisation of a beautiful and sympathetic woman by a childlike and romantic race, too long accustomed to be treated as pariahs by the domineering Teutons. If the laws of romance had governed the business of the world, it would have set the seal on the happiness of a marriage which had begun so happily; but it seems that, as a matter of fact, the happiness had taken wings and fled long before Elizabeth’s charm had conciliated her husband’s enemies to this good purpose—long, also, before the occurrence of those specially tragic events which were to make their reign memorable for tragedy.
At first, no doubt, she showed a naïve delight at her sudden elevation to imperial dignity. The dramatic change in her fortunes appealed to her imagination; and it seemed as if all the glories of the world were hers. But—vanity of vanities! The years passed—a few years only—and Elizabeth had learnt the Preacher’s lesson. Even then, one suspects, the desires which haunted her were vague. She did not know exactly what it was that she wanted; but she knew only too well that, whatever it was, neither her marriage nor her exalted rank had given it to her; and we soon begin to hear of her long journeys in pursuit of the fugitive shadow, and of the mysterious melancholy which had visibly settled on her. She was still a young woman when she said to a confidante, apropos of what one is left to guess: “I feel as if something had died in me.” She was not yet thirty when Countess Marie Larisch—a child who had climbed a tree—saw her in tears in circumstances which she has graphically described:—
“I nearly fell out of the tree when I recognised the Empress, who had apparently given up the idea of riding, and was walking quite unattended.... Elizabeth came slowly to my tree, under which was a stone seat. She sat down, clasped her hands in a despairing kind of way, and began to cry silently. I could see that she was greatly distressed, for her face wore a hopeless expression, and occasionally a sob shook her. She then wept unrestrainedly, and at last I wondered whether I dared attempt to comfort her. I bent down, and as the leaves rustled with my sudden movement, the Empress looked up and saw me.”
That is, perhaps, the most typical of all the pictures of her melancholy, though one could take many others from the writings of other chroniclers. She told the child she had been crying because her little daughter had been unwell during the night, but the child did not believe her. She told the child not to tell anyone that she had seen her cry, which she would hardly have troubled to do if her tears had had such a simple source. Some speeches attributed to her at other times would seem to indicate that she cried sometimes for lost illusions, like a child for a broken toy:—
“The happiness which men seek in sincerity and ask from it is controlled by tragic laws. We all live on the edge of an abysm of grief and pain, dug for us by the falsehood of social morality. That is the abysm which separates our actual condition from the condition in which we ought to find ourselves. An abysm is always an abysm. The moment we try to cross it, we fall and break our limbs.”
That is her own confession of melancholy; and we must make what we can of it in the light of what we know. It is not, perhaps, a melancholy of which we shall be able to discover all the causes, but we may be able to arrive at some of them. The quest will bring us back to certain matters already touched upon, and lead us on to other matters. We shall have to speak of the Egeria, the mother-in-law, the formal rigidity of Court etiquette, and the way in which Emperor and Empress endeavoured to escape in different directions from what they were both, in their several ways, coming to regard as irksome imprisoning restraints.