The social division between the different castes—between the noble and the non-noble—was absolute in those days; and of course both parties were the losers in sundry respects by such separation. But the results were not bad in all respects. One was an exceeding simplicity and absence of any affectation of finery or morgue on the part of the noble class, and a corresponding easy-going freedom from the small forms of social ambition on the part of the non-noble. There was among the latter no attempt or thought of attempting to enter the noble society. It was out of the question; and as far as I could see such entry did not appear to be an object of ambition, or the impossibility of it to occasion either heart-burning or jealousy. In the case of the ladies of the deux mondes, the separation was absolute and without exception. But I was told that in some few cases the young men of the upper class might be seen in the houses of certain of their non-noble fellow-citizens, but never with any reciprocity of toleration. In respect of mere wealth and luxury in the manner of living, there were many bourgeois families on a par, and in many cases on far more than a par, with those of the nobles. And no doubt it frequently occurred that the social law which forbade all intercourse between the two septs, was felt to be as inconvenient and as much a matter of regret on one side of the barrier as on the other. But, noblesse oblige, and the law was not transgressed.
In the case of foreigners, however, or at least of English foreigners, we were very soon given to understand that the law in question was not applicable. We were perfectly free to make acquaintances in either world, and some of the most valued friends we made in Vienna, and some of the pleasantest hospitalities we accepted, were found in bourgeois houses. I remember two different instances of a very amusing curiosity on the part of certain noble ladies, which prompted them to avail themselves of our chartered liberty in the matter, for the obtaining of tidings of the ways and manners of the inmates of certain houses, which there was no possibility of their ever having an opportunity of observing for themselves. But on ransacking my memory for instances of the kind, I must say that all that occur to me, refer to curiosity of the upper respecting the nether world; and that I do not recollect any vice versâ cases.
I have said that the rule of exclusion as regards all that part of the Vienna world not nobly born was absolute. But if absoluteness can be conceived as ever becoming more absolute, the social law did so in the case of Jewish families. These were numerous, and many of them in respect of wealth, and more in respect of culture, were on a par with the best and highest portion of the Viennese society. I remember one Jewish family in particular, consisting of a widow and her daughter and her niece, with whom we became intimately acquainted, and in whom and whose surroundings we found a level of high culture (taking that word in its largest extension to all that goes to form the idiosyncrasy of a human being), far in advance of anything we met with among their social superiors.
In fact the grand monde of that far distant day in Vienna was frivolous, unintellectual, and, I am afraid I must say, uneducated to a remarkable degree. It had its own peculiar charm, which consisted in the most perfectly high-bred tone of manner combined with complete simplicity, the absolute absence of any sort of affectation whatever, and great good-nature. But in all my experience of them there was not to be found a salon among them of equal social attraction to that of my above-mentioned Jewish friends.
But all this refers to the social conditions of a day, which, as my recent visits to Vienna have shown me, is one passed away and gone. It belongs to the days when “Vater Franz” was, or, to be accurate, had only two years previously ceased to be, the idol of Austrian, and especially Viennese loyalty and affection. The most striking instances of the devotion of all classes of the population to their emperor were constantly narrated to me. I specially remember the tale of one occasion, when the emperor had remained shut up in the palace for three or four days—or perhaps the period was somewhat longer—because he had caught a cold. A cloud seemed to have passed over the blue Vienna sky. The occasion of his first drive through the streets of the city after his little indisposition was an ovation! The people filled the streets, and hung about his carriage. Market women poked their faces in at the window to assure themselves that “Vater Franz” was restored to them none the worse for his confinement. It was, to the best of my remembrance, on every Thursday, at that time, that it had been the emperor’s practice to devote a certain number of hours in the day to receiving any one of his subjects who had notified in the proper quarter a desire to speak with him. But might not some socialist or nihilist, or other description of radical, have easily shot him at one of those entirely unguarded interviews? Aye! but I am writing of half a century ago, before such things and persons had appeared upon the scene. And assuredly the possibility of such a catastrophe had never entered into the brain of any man, woman, or child in the Kaiserstadt.
There was one among the many acquaintances we made at Vienna who belonged in nowise to any division of its society, but who was, like ourselves, to be met with among them all. This was old John Cramer the pianist. I took a great liking to him. The mingled simplicity, bonhomie, shrewdness, and old-world courtesy of the old man delighted me. He was full of old-world stories, generally ending any anecdote of some one of the many notable personages he had known with a sigh, and “Well, peace to his manes!” pronounced as one syllable, as I have mentioned in an earlier page. For old John Cramer had lived in the days before the schoolmaster had gone “abroad” so widely as in these latter times. The old maestro had just written a monody to the memory of Malibran, then recently lost to the world of music prematurely. “It is full of feeling,” writes my mother, “and, as I listened to this veteran pianist, as he performed for me his simple and classic little composition, and marked the delicacy and finish of his style, unincumbered by a single movement in which the conceptions of a harmonious genius are made to give way before the meretricious glory of active fingers, I felt at the very bottom of my heart that I was rococo, incorrigibly rococo, and that such I should live and die.”
Another specialty, which in those days gave to Vienna much of the physiognomy which made it different in outward appearance from any other of the great capitals of Europe, and which would not be observed there at the present time, was caused by the heterogeneousness of the countries which compose the empire, and the very motley appearance of the specimens of all of them which might be found in the capital. A Parisian tells you in France that a provincial in the streets of Paris is as recognisable at a glance as if he were ticketed on the forehead. And so he may be to a Parisian. But the eccentricities of his appearance are not such as to impart any variety to the moving panorama in the streets of Paris as it appears to a stranger. The Breton, the Provencal, the Bearnais makes himself look, when he visits Paris, as much like a Parisian as he can, and flatters himself no doubt that he succeeds perfectly. But Croatians, Bohemians, wild-looking figures from Transylvania might be seen in the streets of Vienna, precisely as they might have been seen in their own distant homes. Strange and not a little sinister looking groups of Hungarian gipsies, encampments outside and at the foot of the walls, of Bohemian waggoners, caftaned Jews from the distant parts of Galicia, all added to the strangeness and much to the picturesqueness of the city. I remember one especial group, the extreme barbarism of whose appearance, incredible filthiness, and wild, picturesque, but very forbidding physiognomies, particularly attracted my attention. I was told that they were gipsies from Croatia.
On the whole it is—or rather I should say was—evident that one has travelled far eastward to reach Vienna, and the whole physiognomy of the place is modified by that fact.
I am unwilling to close this chapter of my Vienna reminiscences without mentioning a lady, whose very exceptional histrionic talent had impressed me as vividly as it did my mother, who has given an honourable place in her volumes to Madame Rettich. I subsequently became intimate with her very charming daughter in Italy, and it is from her that I learned the fact that her mother had been the first actress to personate Goethe’s “Gretchen” on the stage. Considerable doubt had been felt as to the expediency of the attempt. But Madame Rettich made it—not for the first time at Vienna, but at some provincial theatre—with entire success.