As to Dürrenstein, it has special claims to attention. Richard had managed to offend Leopold of Bavaria in the crusades in the Holy Land, and on his way home, being shipwrecked near Trieste, wandered through his enemy’s country until he was seized, imprisoned, and held to ransom. None of his unfortunate subjects knew where he was, and the story goes that his minstrel Blondin, wandering for many months in disguise, at length found him out by singing the first verse of a song Richard had himself composed, to which the monarch responded by the second verse. Whether this happened at Dürrenstein or at Trifels, where he was afterwards removed, remains in doubt.
If Aggstein is fine, Dürrenstein is more so, because the crumbling ruins, mounted on a peak and surrounded by torn and precipitous fragments, appeal more peculiarly to English-speaking people owing to the halo of romance. The walls are fast falling to pieces, the stones and pinnacles that stand are hardly distinguishable from the curiously vertical and narrow lumps of rock which rear themselves at all heights around; the railway has driven a wedge through the very rock in which the building was founded, yet a granite mass is pointed out still as the chamber in which Richard was confined for fifteen weary months!
With the considerable market-town of Krems we end the bit of the Danube known as the Wachau, which began at Mölk, and is the favourite “short trip” of the citizens of Vienna, who are carried thence by rail and river in hundreds during the fine-weather season. Happy they to have such delightful scenery within such easy reach.
After Krems the scenery is again tame to Vienna and calls for no special comment, except for the castle of Greifenstein with its romantic story. From this castle there is a fine panorama of forest and plain and of the island-bestudded Danube itself. Before reaching Vienna, pass Klosterneuberg, and finally see the branch of the river, known as the Danube canal, going off, only to rejoin the main stream below the city.
CHAPTER VII
VIENNA AND THE VIENNESE
The exclusiveness of the Court of Vienna has become a byword; so strictly is the right of entry criticised that few indeed of those who pass through the country ever gain a glimpse of the highest circles of all. The nobles of Austria-Hungary rigidly keep within their class limits; they do not meet and mingle with the upper middle class as is the custom in so many countries; there is no overlapping, no exchange of social courtesies; marriages are confined to their own class, and a girl who marries outside it is considered an outcast. The aristocracy suffer therefore from a lack of fresh blood in their veins; they are not constantly recruited either by marriages or by the ennobling of commoners as in England, where—though it may be a source of merriment to see the tide of peerages setting in this or that way according to the political party in power—at all events there is always a constant stream of new life flowing toward the upper classes. And the aristocrats do not suffer. There is a marvellously refining influence in place and state and dignity, and the third generation of the soap-earl or the brewer-baron takes his place as naturally and easily in gentle society as the son of a hundred earls.
The Austrian nobles, however, would never receive recently ennobled peers. The sixteen quarterings are to them a necessary passport to friendliness. It is said that on one occasion when an Austrian noble had been setting forth the impossibility of associating with those he did not consider his equals, the Emperor rebuked him by saying, “If I, like you, wished to confine myself to the society of my equals, I should have to go down into the Capuchin vault [where the Hapsburgs are buried] to find them.”
Not only by the want of new blood do the nobles of the Dual Monarchy suffer, but also from an exclusiveness in regard to the occupations that they consider it dignified for their sons to follow. In England not so very long ago there were only three openings for the sons of gentlemen—Law, the Church, or the Services—and the Austrian nobleman has not arrived even so far as that. To him politics and the army are the only openings, and by this narrowing and stultification of interests originality and initiative are deadened. All the healthy energetic life that might be his is monopolised by the upper middle classes, who prosper accordingly, and have an upper class or aristocracy of their own. Though the government of the country is in reality an oligarchy, very different from the autocracy of its great neighbour Germany, yet at the same time it is the class below that of the nobility which gets the most fun out of life and is most in evidence.
The Austrians are naturally bright and pleasure-loving, for on the basis of their German ancestry, which gives them a certain simplicity, are implanted the livelier qualities of the French and Italians, with which races their own has mingled. It is to this mingling with other nations that the noble classes have survived at all and not died out enfeebled by marriages with too near kin. Mr. Whitman sums up some of the foreign alliances thus:
The Princes Rohan point to Brittany; the Princes Mensdorf-Pouilly, the Counts Dampierre, the Bouquoy to France; the Hoyos to Spain; the Princes Croy, the Counts Fiquelmont to Belgium; the Dukes of Beaufort-Spontin to Lorraine; the Princes Odescalchi, Clasy, Montenuovo, the Counts Palavacini, Bianchi, Paar, Montecuculli, and many others to Italy. Moreover, the aristocratic population of Austria itself has long had nearer home, in the Hungarian, the Polish, the northern Italian aristocratic element, a large variety of noble blood with which to renovate itself, and thus to counteract the ill effects so often seen in princely houses of too close intermarriage.