Archdukes, it is true, have been bred to deviate from the normal human type; but they have not all deviated from it in the same direction. Brilliance, as well as beauty, may go with decadence. Genius and madness are allied, and eccentricity is the cousin of both of them; the diseased fruit of a diseased stock may sometimes seem to make up in splendour for what it lacks in strength. We shall see how the various cases of the Archdukes and Archduchesses confirm that truth—Francis Joseph alone among them combining a fair endowment of ability with a plausible resemblance to the average man.
Indeed, we have already seen him doing so. In his married life we have seen him as the average man puzzled by the exceptional woman—puzzled but pursuing to the last. In his political life we have seen him flexible rather than strong, wise in his selection of counsellors, but sometimes knowing better than they did, and always, in later years at least, cutting the right figure in the eyes of the world: an Emperor, indeed—“something like an Emperor,” as people say—magnificent, authoritative, genial, and affable, though of an affability on which none must venture to presume. It may be, of course, that there is more here of appearance, carefully kept up, than of the reality which compels appearance to conform to it; but one’s impression, in any case, is of an Emperor whom the discipline of a strict education and early responsibilities has, as it were, standardised.
But, if the Emperor has been standardised, the Archdukes have not. They have gone as they have pleased, differing from other people as Habsburgs must, but not differing from them in the pursuit of any uniform ideal—often, indeed, striking extraordinary attitudes in their strenuous endeavours to get back to the manners and methods of ordinary mankind. Already we have met a few of them: the Crown Prince Rudolph, a man of letters, a rake, and perhaps a potential rebel; “John Orth,” a musician, a pamphleteer, and a hot-tempered visionary pelting the Emperor with the insignia of the Golden Fleece. It remains, leaving those stories behind us, to complete our picture of the Habsburg Court with a review of the proceedings of some of the others.
We may even go back a little way for the purpose; for, though the memory of the more distant events has been effaced by recent excitements, Francis Joseph has had trouble with his brothers as well as his son, his grandchildren, his nephews and nieces, and his cousins. Maximilian, as we have seen, wounded his feelings by more than one offensively pointed bid for popularity at his expense. Charles Louis is described by Countess Marie Larisch as “a fat old man with brutish instincts,” and accused by her of ill-treating his wife, who, on her part, was understood to be in love with her Chamberlain. The proceedings of the third brother, Louis Victor, are still wrapped in a shroud of mystery which it might be indiscreet to try to tear; but his career as a butterfly of fashion was cut suddenly short by Francis Joseph’s peremptory command to him to leave Vienna for Salzburg and stay there.
That is the end of the list of brothers, but only the beginning of the list of eccentric or otherwise unsatisfactory Archdukes. Whether any general impression of an abstract Archduke will result from an enumeration of the performances of several concrete Archdukes is dubious; but it will nevertheless be worth while to make out a list in the hope that the figures will somehow group themselves into a subject picture.
1. The Archduke Rainer, a second cousin, was long the most brilliant representative of Habsburg culture: a Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Vienna, the Head, for fifty years, of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, the organiser of more than one International Exhibition, and a collector who ransacked the Coptic monasteries of the Lybian Desert for papyri, and brought two entire ship-loads of them home with him to Trieste—a collection which Orientalists have not yet finished sorting, though they have been at the task for half a century. His marriage caused no trouble, for he was united in time to an Archduchess who shared his simple tastes. He always, indeed, had his aspirations after the simple life and the common lot; but his manifestations of those longings did not cause much inconvenience. Just as the Empress Elizabeth once startled the company at a Court banquet by calling for a slice of sausage and a glass of beer, so the Archduke Rainer is said to have expressed a desire, on a similar occasion, for boiled mutton and caper sauce—a dish first served to him by the landlady of a Brighton lodging-house. But there certainly was no harm in that; nor was there any harm in the Archduke’s passion for travelling in Switzerland under an assumed name, dining at table d’hôte, and so hearing at first hand the gossip current about his more lively relatives. The Archduke Rainer was an Archduke for whom his collection of papyri was Archdukedom large enough; and he was an ornament to the House of Habsburg, as he would have been an ornament of any house of which he was a member.
2. The Archduke Henry—Archduke Rainer’s brother—was chiefly distinguished for his morganatic marriage with the actress, Leopoldine Hoffmann; and that story is chiefly interesting for the light which it throws upon the gradual evolution of Francis Joseph’s attitude towards such marriages. He accepted such a union in the case of the brother of the Empress who married the actress Henrietta Mendel; but Bavarian mésalliances were, of course, outside his purview. Habsburgs, he considered, should maintain a higher standard of matrimonial exclusiveness than Wittelsbachs. He expressly forbade the Archduke Henry’s marriage; and the priest who performed it is said only to have been entrapped into doing so by a trick played on him at a luncheon party. However that may have been, the Archduke fell into disgrace, and was absent from Vienna for fifteen years, spending most of the time in Switzerland. Then he was recalled, and pardoned, and restored to the dignities of which he had been deprived. A title of nobility was, at the same time, bestowed upon his wife; and when both he and she died, as they did almost immediately afterwards, the Archduke Rainer, who had no children of his own, adopted their orphaned daughter. The promotion of the “unclassed” bride and her child—unclassed, of course, only from the haughty Habsburg viewpoint—may be said in some measure to have foreshadowed events which were to befall thereafter.
3. The Archduke Louis Salvator—John Orth’s elder brother—has acquired for himself a kind of renown as the student hermit of the Balearic Islands. He lives the simple life there, attired, according to his niece, Princess Louisa, in “sandals and loose linen trousers,” toiling like a labourer, with a sunburnt visage, in a vineyard of his own, with a yacht always at hand, ready to take him to sea whenever a fit of restlessness comes upon him. They speak of him as a pagan in his tastes, a worshipper of the sun, and of what else one knows not—perhaps of houris, for he is a bachelor, and perhaps not. He has erected statues in his mysterious grounds to a private secretary, to whom he was attached; he has been shipwrecked, and he has written books. The Empress Elizabeth was the only member of the House who showed much sympathy with him, sharing, as she did, his love of solitude, his aversion from splendour, and his detestation of the well-dressed crowd which has so little to do, except to be well-dressed. What the Russian novelists—or their French critics—call impuissance de vivre would seem to be the note of his passion for undisturbed seclusion; and he has written of his yacht as his sole place of refuge:
“It was the only place which I could call my home—the only place in which I really felt at home. In all my palaces and places of residence in Austria and Hungary, and even on my beloved Island of Majorca, I feel just as if I were in a hotel, and almost as if I were in a prison. There is no sense of home in such places—no sense of home whatsoever.”
4. The Archduke Charles Salvator—another of John Orth’s brothers—also fled from splendour, but fled in another direction. His manner of seeking the common lot was to mingle with the common people; and he mingled with them in third-class railway carriages, and on the tops of omnibuses and tram-cars. He also taught himself a trade—Louis XVI.’s favourite trade of locksmith—and is said to have excelled at it. The police did not like him, for his habits gave them trouble; but the accidents which they feared never happened. A traitor to the Archducal ideal, perhaps, he was a traitor to nothing else; and he lived and died harmlessly.