‘Through places and palaces though I may roam,Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.’
‘Through places and palaces though I may roam,Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.’
‘Through places and palaces though I may roam,Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.’
Since my friend swooped down on me I have been roaming through nothing but places and palaces—especially palaces. Last Sunday, although I was dog tired, he banged at my bedroom-door at the unearthly hour of nine, and bore me off breakfastless to Potsdam and palaced me to such an extent that the sight of an ordinary middle-class dwelling would have been a positive relief.
He conducted me through Babelsburg, the charming summer palace of old Kaiser Wilhelm; he took me all over the Marble Palace, in which the Crown Princes of Prussia reside as soon as they are old enough; and he made me visit every nook and corner of Sans Souci, and gave off the life of Frederick the Great in chapters—a chapter in each room. I have always respected the memory of Frederick the Great because he was so kind to his dogs, and buried them in the palace grounds and put up stones to their memory. For that I long ago forgave him for playing the flute and painting ladies with two right feet and other anatomical eccentricities; but after three hours of Sans Souci I began to resent Frederickthe Great as a personal injustice, and I wasn’t in the least sympathetic when my friend explained to me that the great man was a martyr to the gout and suffered terribly with his nerves.
I was trotted over more Potsdam palaces after Sans Souci, and was graciously admitted to the private apartments of the imperial family, not usually shown to strangers. At any other time I should have felt flattered, but so thoroughly worn out was I that even the sight of the imperial nursery and the imperial clothes-horse, on which the imperial baby-linen is dried in front of the imperial fire, failed to put me in a good temper; and at last, as my friend was dragging me up the steps of another palace to show me a room in which everything was solid silver, I turned round and fled, and never halted until I had jumped into a train that was starting for Berlin, where I arrived just in time to put on a pair of carpet-slippers, and in these I had to rush off to Kroll’s Theatre to see ‘Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor’ ('The Merry Wives of Windsor'), as the performance commenced at the unearthly hour of seven. I have gone through a great deal in my time, but I never expected to have to go through six palaces in one day. After that you will easily understand how the words of the poet who preferred his humble home to roaming through palaces came home to me.
Whena man wakes up in the morning and can’t quite make out where he is, and the first thing that catches his eyes as they wander inquiringly round an unfamiliar bedroom is an electric bell, and underneath it these words:
‘Na sklepnika, rate 1 nou;Na panskou, rate 2 kráte;Na poshluhu, rate 3 kráte;’
‘Na sklepnika, rate 1 nou;Na panskou, rate 2 kráte;Na poshluhu, rate 3 kráte;’
‘Na sklepnika, rate 1 nou;Na panskou, rate 2 kráte;Na poshluhu, rate 3 kráte;’
he may fairly be excused if he feels like a stranger in a strange land. It will probably dawn upon him that somewhere amid these printed specimens of an unknown tongue there is lurking a request that if he wants the waiter he will ring once; that if he requires the chambermaid he will ring twice; and that if he needs the services of the boots he will ring thrice. This is what gradually shaped itself in my mind when I woke up the other morning in Prague, and found myself face to face with the Bohemian or Czechish language.
My earliest recollections of Prague are associated with a piece of well-thumbed music which used to lie about on a piano, and was something to do with a battle. Later on it cropped up occasionally in the schoolroom in connection with a gentleman named Huss, who got into trouble early in the Fourteens;but the world-famous old town fairly burnt itself into my memory in the now almost forgotten lines of poor Prowse, ‘Nicholas’ ofFun:
‘The longitude’s rather uncertain,The latitude’s equally vague;But that person I pity who knows not the city,The beautiful city of Prague.’
‘The longitude’s rather uncertain,The latitude’s equally vague;But that person I pity who knows not the city,The beautiful city of Prague.’
‘The longitude’s rather uncertain,The latitude’s equally vague;But that person I pity who knows not the city,The beautiful city of Prague.’
It was not of the Bohemia over which Francis Josef reigns to-day that the young poet sang, but of that vaster Bohemia which in years gone by was the happy land of the children of art, of letters, and of song. ‘La Vie de Bohème’ exists no more. The old Bohemians have turned their backs upon their tents, and live in stucco villas. They have crushed the clay pipe under the heels of their patent-leather boots, and taken to cigarettes. They have ceased to herd together in the bonds of brotherhood; they go into Society and eye each other superciliously when they get crushed together on the staircases of the nobility.
But, though the old rhyme has lost its reason, it was the one that came back to me first when I found myself in the real Prague of the true Bohemians. These Bohemians, too, have their song, though I doubt if that, too, has not grown old and a little out of fashion. The old national ditty,Kde domof mug, began something like this:
‘Where is my house—where is my home?Streams among the meadows creeping,Brooks from rock to rock are leaping;Everywhere bloom spring and flowersWithin this paradise of ours;There—‘tis there, the beauteous land,Bohemia, my fatherland!’
‘Where is my house—where is my home?Streams among the meadows creeping,Brooks from rock to rock are leaping;Everywhere bloom spring and flowersWithin this paradise of ours;There—‘tis there, the beauteous land,Bohemia, my fatherland!’
‘Where is my house—where is my home?Streams among the meadows creeping,Brooks from rock to rock are leaping;Everywhere bloom spring and flowersWithin this paradise of ours;There—‘tis there, the beauteous land,Bohemia, my fatherland!’
A beauteous land it undoubtedly is, but the language has peculiarities which are not calculated to make itgrateful and comforting to the traveller who has to take it on after he is past his first youth.
When I arose and donned my clothes and oped my chamber-door in Prague to let in the ‘sklepnik’ with my coffee andbrödchen, I had just two days to learn the language, see everything, and be off to Vienna. So, although my sklepnik was busy and the bells were ringing for him all over the house, I held on to him and insisted upon him giving me a short lesson in Czechish. But when I found that even his own name when you call him is not the same name as when you speak of him, and that he became in the course of five minutes’ conversation sklepnick, sklepnickee, sklepnicka, sklepniko, etc., I let him go and take other people their breakfast, and got on with mine.
My panskou was so good-looking that I had serious thoughts of writing a song in her honour, entitled ‘The Prettiest Panskou in Prague,’ and getting somebody to put it into Czechish, that I might send it to her anonymously next Valentine’s Day; but I heard that she was engaged to be married to the poshluhu on the third-floor, and so another example was added to my famous collection of ‘Songs without Words.’
Before I went out to see the sights of Prague I gave myself just a few minutes further private instruction in the language of the land, and sat down with a dictionary and a pipe in front of the printed notice in my bedroom. This time I selected for study the following startling passage: ‘Racte pouzy ucty kancelári stvrzone vyplácenti! Pokrmy a napoje v jidelne oderbrane buatez tamtez zaplaceny.’ I worried at it with my German Czechish dictionary until I felt that if there was any insanity in my family history I should develop the latent Deemingism in my system, and possibly bury the sklepnik, the panskou, and the poshluhu under the same cement; andthen I sent for my guide. My guide was a Bohemian who acquired English early in the sixties in the goldfields of California. He has lost a good deal of it since. ‘Honyrabble zir!’ he said, ‘dat mean, your honour. Dat vat you eats and drinks underneath ze stairs pays for itself dere at ze times, honyrabble zir.’ After a few minutes of serious reflection, I solved this further problem: Racte pouzy ucty kancelári, etc., meant that all meals taken in the restaurant should be paid for at the time, and not put on the bill.
When you have sufficiently admired Prague itself, and recognised the fact that it is ‘picturesquely situated on the banks of the Moldau’ (vide guide-books), the first thing you do is to explore the venerable Hradshin, or Capitol. High on the Hradshin Hill stands the Archbishop’s Palace, the Schwarzenberg Palace, and the palace of the Emperor, and the famous cathedral dedicated to St. Vitus. On the hottest day of this present May, with thunder threatening and never a breath of air blowing, did I pant through palaces and crawl around cathedrals with the Californian-Bohemian. Many were the wonders that he showed me, and at least a hundred times that day did he call me ‘honyrabble zir.’ At last I became so worn out that it was almost with relief that I saw him suddenly slip up on a stone and turn his ankle. I am afraid he was in great pain; but his ardour and his pace were alike moderated after that, and I was saved from an apoplectic stroke following on over-exertion on a blazing hot day. After the accident, I offered him one arm and hired a native to give another; and between us we led him slowly around the Hradshin, and I allowed him to explain as much as I wanted to know, and then bore him away in triumph to something else. While he was a free agent his lectures were interminable, and he kept me for three-quarters of anhour looking at a brick wall in St. Vitus’s because a Jew boy had been buried behind it some centuries previously.
There are two legends, or perhaps I should say historical facts, which follow you all over Prague—the story of St. John of Nepomuk and the story of Slavata and Martinitz. From the moment you land in Prague to the moment you leave it the names of these three gentlemen are dinned into your ears with damnable iteration. I happened to be in Prague on the eve of the great annual fête of St. John of Nepomuk, and so I had an extra dose of him.
Of course you know the story of the patron saint of Bohemia. You remember that Johanko von Nepomuk was a great preacher in Prague in the fourteenth century. He became almoner to King Wenzel or Venzeslaus IV., the great German Emperor, and King of Bohemia, and confessor to the Queen. The Queen soon afterwards began to look depressed, and tears were often in her eyes. King Wenzel was annoyed. ‘Charlotte,’ he said, ‘why are you always in the blues? It gives me the hump. Cheer up, old lady, or tell me what is the matter.’ The Queen only shook her head and sniffed. Then Wenzel swore several oaths of the period, and went off to the Rev. Mr. Johanko von Nepomuk and said to him, ‘Look here, your reverence, the Queen confesses to you, so you know what is the matter with her, and why she is always snivelling and howling!’ (He was a brutal fellow was Wenzel, and very coarse in his conversation.) ‘Now, then, is it because I bully her, or has she got a love affair—eh, old chap? Own up!’ The Rev. Johanko frowned and shook his head.
‘The secrets of the confessional are sacred. Go to!’
The wicked Wenzel didn’t go to, as you will presently see. He went nap. Soon afterwards, at a royal dinner-party, a capon came up, and the Kinggot a slice from the breast that was slightly underdone. Whereupon, in a rage, he seized the capon, hurled it on the floor, and jumped upon it. (I fancy he suffered with his liver, this Wenzel, and was subject to neurotic blizzards.) Then he sent for the cook and had him spitted alive and roasted in front of his kitchen fire. ‘And see that he is better done than this capon,’ was the King’s final instruction to the cookers of the cook.
The Rev. Mr. Nepomuk, when he heard of this, gave the King a piece of his mind, for which impertinence he was put into prison, and, while there, the King sent for him and said, ‘Now, my friend, are you going to tell me what the Queen confessed?’ ‘Certainly not, sire,’ replied Nepomuk, although, after what had happened to the cook, he guessed his refusal would get him into trouble. It did. Every effort of the King having failed to shake the determination of the rev. gentleman, he was one day seized by soldiers, bound hand and foot, and flung over the big bridge into the Moldau.
King Wenzel fancied no one would know what had become of Nepomuk; but a miracle happened. When the rev. gentleman fell into the water the water retired, and the bed of the river was dry for three days. The body was recovered, and to-day it is in a glass coffin enclosed in a solid silver one in the cathedral on the Hradshin. The saint has moreover in the cathedral a solid silver monument, and silver angels holding golden lamps of immense value hover over his shrine. I shall not forget that silver monument for many a long day. I was so entranced with it that I let the Californian-Bohemian tell me stories about Nepomuk that would have caused the Marines to shake their heads, and it wasn’t until he had called me ‘honyrabble zir’ for the fourteenth time that at last I took his arm and led him limping away.
Ever since this occasion St. Nepomuk has been the patron saint of bridges (he was canonized by Benedict XIII.), and in Bohemia and some parts of Austria his fête-day is kept with the wildest rejoicings. Oddly enough, though the people of Prague always sing ‘St. Nepomuk, protect me’ when they cross a bridge, the bridge from which he was thrown—the glorious Karlsbrücke—- was broken down, and the middle of it carried away, by the great floods of 1890. A wooden bridge does duty while the grand old structure is being rebuilt. As I crossed the portion of the old stone bridge which is still standing I saw a huge gilt altar, erected almost at the point where the arches have been swept away. It was surrounded by hundreds of lamps, and mighty banks of flowers were piled around it. This was the altar to St. Nepomuk, which was being prepared for May 16. On that day thousands of pilgrims come from all parts of Bohemia to visit the bridge, and do honour to the saint. This year they found that the patron saint of bridges had allowed his own bridge to come to grief.
This St. Nepomuk Day in Prague is something you must see to understand. The streets are a dense mass of gay revellers and happy pilgrims from dawn till midnight. All the quaint national costumes of Bohemia light up the beflagged and beflowered thoroughfares. All day long the merry lads and lasses sing Bohemian songs, and dance Bohemian dances in the streets, the squares, and the parks. At night fireworks blaze up from all parts of the town, and a million extra lights make the glorious city on the Moldau a never-to-be-forgotten spectacle.
I lingered in Prague for the fête of St. Nepomuk, and I saw a sight which I shall remember all my days without referring either to notebook or diary. Good old St. Nepomuk! If he had not been thrown over the Karlsbrücke I should not have seen theBohemian national fête. King Wenzel, I owe you one!
The National Theatre in Prague, where only plays and operas in the Czechish language are performed, is one of the finest in Europe. I saw there a Czechish opera entitled ‘Prodaná Nevěsta,’ or ‘The Sold Bride.’ At the ‘Národni Divadlo,’ or National Theatre, the operas are staged in a manner which excites the admiration even of our own Sir Augustus, and the chorus works as I have never seen a chorus work before. Everybody enters into the business of the scene, and fills it up, and the illusion is absolutely perfect.
As they thought it worth while to make an exhibition of theatrical programmes at the Vienna Exhibition, I may as well give you a little bit of a Prague programme (no charge), just to show you how it looks. Here is the one for which in a private box I paid ten kreuzers, and which an old lady obligingly stuck on to the velvet with a pin to prevent its falling over.
PRODANÁ NEVĚSTA.
Komická zpěvohra o třech jednáních. Hudbu složilBedřich Smetana. Slova od K. Sabiny.Osoby:
Coming home from the Divadlo I lost myself, and had a bad quarter of an hour wandering around small back streets and trying to ask my way in Czechish. The theatres begin at half-past six in Prague, some of them as early as five, so that soon after ten there are very few people in the streets. It was half-past ten when I succeeded in getting out of a labyrinth of byways into what looked like a main thoroughfare, and then there was not a soul to be seen—not even a Prague policeman with ostrich feathers in his hat. I wondered how on earth I should get to my hotel, for I hadn’t the faintest idea where it was, and one street was very like another to me. I wandered up and down for a quarter of an hour, hoping a belated wayfarer would come along, but I only met a couple of cats swearing at each other in Czechish, and they fled at my approach.
What was I to do? I didn’t feel inclined to wander about Prague all night. Suddenly a brilliant idea occurred to me. I saw a red light over a door, and outside a bell, with the German for night bell written below it. A doctor lived there. I hesitated a moment, and then I rang it. Presently a gentleman put his head out of an upper window and addressed me in Czechish. I replied in German that I didn’t understand the language. Then he asked me what I wanted in German. I replied, ‘Advice; I am not well. Please come down and feel my pulse and look at my tongue.’ He closed the window, came down and opened the front-door, and asked me to come in. ‘No, thank you,’ I said; ‘I am in a hurry. Come under the lamp-post.’ He came under the lamp-post, looked at my tongue, felt my pulse, and said that I was only a little bilious. I had better go to the chemist’s and get some antibilious pills. ‘Thank you, doctor,’ I said. ‘What is your fee?’ He told me his fee was three guldenfor a night consultation. I paid the money, and then I said to him: ‘And now, doctor, if you will kindly tell me which is my way to the Hôtel Royal, I shall be much obliged to you.’ The doctor gave me minute directions, bowed, put my three gulden in the pocket of his dressing-gown, and went back to bed; and I went back to my hotel and did ditto.
It was rather an expensive method of asking your way, but what are you to do when you are lost in a town where everybody goes to bed at ten, and not a living soul reappears in the streets till the next morning? I don’t know whether the policemen go to bed, but I didn’t see one about. Perhaps they were all having pipes round a quiet corner.
Messrs. Slavata and Martinitz owe their immortality to their having been victims of that excellent Bohemian method of getting rid of an enemy which is called ‘po starotshesku.’ There is a splendid simplicity about the process. It merely consists of taking your enemy by the legs and throwing him out of the window. The higher the window the better for you and the worse for your enemy. Slavata and Martinitz were flung out of the window of a high tower in which the Council Chamber was situated. Although both fell actually on their heads, they figuratively fell on their feet, for a heap of manure received them safely and broke the news that they had arrived at their destination gently to them. They escaped and lived for some years afterwards, but the religious party in whose cause they had made themselves objectionable kept their memory green, and to-day in Prague, after you have honoured St. John of Nepomuk, you are expected to pay homage to the memory of Slavata and Martinitz.
After I had finished the Hradshin, and wandered through the royal palace, I had to lead my guide through the palace of Wallenstein, where he pointedout to me all the mementoes of the mighty general of the Thirty Years’ War in the famous halls. By this time I was so dog-tired that I began to hate Bohemia, and almost to think unkind things about St. John of Nepomuk; and when my guide wanted me to take him over another church, I rose up and politely intimated to him that if he asked me to see anything else that day I would give him a chance of immortality by throwing him into the Moldau at the very spot where Nepomuk perished. I think he saw I meant it, so he allowed me to put him in a carriage and take him home.
I have only hummed one air since I came into Austria, and that is, ‘Oh, them gulden slippers.’ They give you your gulden in a banknote, and a gulden is not quite two shillings. The astonishing rapidity with which those guldens became gulden slippers must be seen to be believed. Cabmen, railway porters, restaurant waiters, and the people generally who expect tips, never have any change, and it is cheaper to give the gulden than to wait while they go to the Bank of Austria to get it changed. If they have change it is of such a character that you are better without it. Eating cheap tinned peas, the colour of the O’Flaherty floral abomination, is a harmless amusement compared with keeping the small coin currency of the Austrian Empire in your pocket with chocolate creams, peppermints, cough lozenges, digestive tablets, and other delicacies of the season.
Undera domed roof, a green garden with flower-beds and gravel paths. In the centre a fountain. The outer circle built as a series of stages, each with a set scene—one a scene from a Russian play, another a scene from a German opera, another a scene from a Hungarian comedy, and so forth, until about a dozen set scenes have been set out. Around, in outer rings, with rooms branching off, various galleries containing old musical instruments, cases of theatrical costumes, portraits of actors and actresses, and working models of stages. Beyond, in the grounds, cafés, restaurants, and wooden theatres in which performances of various kinds are given; also ‘Old Vienna,’ after the manner of ‘Old London.’ That is the Vienna Musical and Dramatic Exhibition of 1892.
I spent two afternoons and one morning in this exhibition, not because I amused myself, but because I felt that it was my duty to see all that was to be seen. Naturally my first endeavour, after I had taken a scamper round, was to find the English department—or the section allotted to England—in order to see what sort of a show my fellow-countrymen had made. The catalogue which I purchased for seventy-five kreuzers informed me that the president of the English committee was Se. KöniglicheHoheit Herzog von Edinburgh, and that among the committee were A. C. Macencie, W. G. Cusins, S. B. Bankroft, Sir George Grow, etc. The correct spelling of names is not a strong point, evidently, at the Vienna Exhibition.
There is a good old proverb which says, ‘Blessed is he that expecteth little, for he shall not be disappointed.’ After wandering wearily about for three-quarters of an hour and closely cross-examining every official I encountered, an obliging Austrian workman, who was doing something to a packing-case, volunteered to take me to the British Section. He led me to a huge vacant space, in which in disorderly array stood a number of dirty empty glass cases. ‘This, sir, is the British Section,’ he said, waving his hand around a few feet of bare wall, and then pointing to a battered old packing-case labelled ‘This side up—with care.’ That, gentle reader, was the British Section as I saw it on May 16, and that was all that there was to see. The British exhibits, I was told, had only just arrived, and they would not be unpacked for several days.
I am told that the British exhibits, when they are unpacked, will be exceedingly novel and interesting. There is a curious coffin-shaped case still at the Custom House, which is said to contain the skeleton of a dramatic critic who attended everymatinéeto which he was invited. There is a full-length portrait of Mr. William Archer felling the Examiner of Plays to earth with the manuscript of a Norwegian tragedy. There is a wax model of a lady sitting in the stalls at amatinéewith a hat three feet high, and behind her are several gentlemen standing up and dividing the feathers and ribbons on the top of it in order to peep through them at the stage. There is a life-size figure of Mr. Horace Sedger sitting with the map of London in front of him, and pointing outIslington as a provincial town to Mr. W. S. Gilbert. There is the famous ‘No Fee’ banner which was lowered from the gallery of the Olympic as a welcome back to London to Mr. Wilson Barrett; and there is also a complete collection in a glass case of the costumes worn by sandwich-men as advertisements for the West End Theatres of London.
All these things, I am assured, will be exhibited in due time to the gaze of the wondering crowd that will flock to the Vienna Exhibition. That they will give the foreigner an excellent idea of the status of the drama in Great Britain I have not the slightest doubt. Up to the present, unfortunately, so far as the British Section is concerned, ‘there is nothing in it.’
When I found nothing in the English Section, and very little in any other section except the Bavarian and the Russian, I determined to see something, and so I asked for Frederick the Great’s flute. Somebody had told me that it had been forwarded to Vienna from Berlin. The first day that I went to the exhibition I asked many officials where it was, and they directed me to various parts of the building. I found hundreds of flutes of all ages here. As none of them had anything but a number on, and the catalogue would not be ready for a fortnight, I was unable to pitch upon the particular instrument. (There is a catalogue published—the one to which I am indebted for the names of the English committee—but that is only a catalogue of the modern instruments.) On the second day of my visit I made further inquiries, and drove the officials to despair. I suppose I must have asked the same people over and over again without knowing it, for at last when they saw me coming they walked rapidly away and hid behind grand pianos. I heard one man say to another, ‘Lieber Gott, here is this Englander againwho wants Frederick the Great’s flute!’ And the pair disappeared as if by magic.
I was determined not to be beaten, so on the third day I tried again; but the first man I went to, instead of replying, took me to the room of the secretary of the exhibition. The secretary was extremely polite. ‘Ah, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘I am very pleased to see you. You have driven our people very nearly mad. One of them came to me yesterday with a telegram which he wished sent to Berlin, and the entire staff had subscribed to the expense of forwarding it. This was the telegram: “For Heaven’s sake tell us where Frederick the Great’s flute is. There is an Englishman who does nothing but ask us all day long.” I sent that telegram, sir, and have received a reply. Frederick the Great’s flute has not been sent. It is still in Germany.’ Of course, I apologized for the trouble I had given, and blamed the person who had told me the famous instrument was among the German exhibits. Fancy an exhibition of famous musical instruments without Frederick the Great’s flute! It is ‘Hamlet’ without the Prince of Denmark.
In the theatres of Austria, as in those of the German Empire, ladies are expected to remove their bonnets everywhere except in the private boxes. No hats or bonnets are allowed in the stalls, dress circle, pit, or gallery. The reason of this restriction is that hats have of late years assumed such gigantic proportions, that a front row of females would shut out a view of the stage from the rest of the house.
But the ladies—Heaven bless them!—have discovered a way of taking their revenge. They have invented a method of wearing the hair which makes the removal of the hat a mere farce. The authorities are now seriously discussing the question of makinglady playgoers leave their hair in the cloak-room as well as their hats.
I have been peculiarly unfortunate in my attempts to see something of the German and Austrian stage. The fact which I am about to narrate will, I have no doubt, be taken with several grains of salt, but on my honour itisa fact nevertheless. I went to the theatre in Dresden—to the opera—and a lady sat in front of me. She was a charming American lady, with a mass of gray hair, but she wore it absolutely a foot high, after the manner of a pantaloon’s wig. At Prague, when I went to the Czechish Theatre, to my intense astonishment this lady came in with her husband and again sat in front of me. Two days later, on the Sunday night, I went to the Vienna Opera House to see the ‘Puppenfee’ and ‘L’Amico Fritz.’ The seats in front of me were vacant, and I was just congratulating myself on at last getting a view of the stage during a performance, when in walked the lady with the Eiffel Tower hair!
That I should have sat behind the same person, an utter stranger to me, in three towns one after the other, is a coincidence so extraordinary that I think it worth mentioning. I don’t know what the odds against such a treble event coming off are—something in trillions I should fancy—but it did come off. The hair unfortunately did not.
The Prater on Sunday was thronged, and a dozen bands were playing in the excellent coffee gardens scattered about it. But the great sight to me was the ‘Punch and Judy, or People’s Prater.’ Here, among hundreds of merry-go-rounds, Richardson’s shows, outdoor balls, and the general ‘fun of the fair,’ you could walk upon the people’s heads. I should like to take Messrs. M’Dougall and Parkinson through the Punch and Judy Prater of Vienna one day and show them how the toiling masses of a greatcity can enjoy themselves when plenty of cheap amusement and good wholesome refreshment are provided for them.
There is one peculiar custom in certain parts of Austria, notably in Vienna, which it takes an Englishman some time to get accustomed to. When you are generous to anyone the recipient of your bounty makes a tremendous bow and ‘kisses your hand.’ Sometimes this phrase is a mere form of words, ‘Ich küsse die hand’ (the Viennese say, ‘Ich kiss die hand), but frequently the actual performance takes place. A lady gives, say, to the chambermaid of her hotel a gulden, and instantly the chambermaid exclaims, ‘I kiss your hand,’ and does it. I have seen the English ladies thoroughly nonplussed at the unexpected homage.
The porter at the Vienna railway-station who put my portmanteau on a cab told me that he kissed my hand, and my cabman, to my complete discomfiture, actually did it. As soon as I discovered it was a custom of the country, I became rather nervous, and when I went to a little theatre and an old lady handed me a programme, fearing the possible salute, I only gave her a copper coin. She didn’t ‘kiss my hand,’ but went off muttering in the Viennese dialect something which, fortunately for my self-esteem, I was unable to grasp.
I spent a pleasant week in Vienna, but felt rather the worse for wear when I left. The custom of the country is that you should consume a mid-day meal with several glasses of beer, have wine in the middle of it, and finish up with cognac or kummel. Then in the afternoon everybody goes to the Prater, and sits at the first, second, or third coffee-house and drinks more beer—sometimes six glasses, one after the other. The middle-day meal is a terrific one, consisting of six or seven courses; but towards fourthe Viennese get hungry again, and so at the Prater coffee-gardens a man walks about with a basket of enormous sausages in one hand and a pair of scales in the other, and about half a hundredweight of Gruyère cheese under his arm. You have rolls of bread on every little table where you drink your beer, so all you have to do is to cry ‘salami,’ which is sausage, and instantly the gentleman with the basket comes to your table, cuts you as many slices as you require, weighs them, and puts them in front of you on a piece of clean white paper. You then drink your beer and eat your sausage with your fingers, gnawing a piece of bread in between. And thus the happy hours glide away towards evening, and the best military bands of Vienna soothe you with the soft strains of music. It is only in Vienna that you can have Strauss and salami together.
At ten, after the theatres are over, eating begins again, and is of a most formidable character. The best restaurants are crowded. At Sacher’s you cannot get a table, for all the elegant world from the opera is there. At Leidinger’s there is scarcely room for you to pass between the crowd of feasters and find a place for your hat and umbrella, and at the Old Tobacco-pipe, where the Viennese kitchen proper (or improper if you prefer it) reigns supreme, you sometimes have to wait your turn and stand at the door eagerly watching for a supster to come out that you may go in.
Before I left Vienna, having exhausted the theatres, I did a round of the waxwork exhibitions. These delighted me hugely, many of the subjects being realistic enough to make M. Zola’s hair stand on end. Our Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s is buttermilk compared with the chambers of horrors I saw in Vienna. The whole series of tortures inflicted by the Inquisition are realized in one establishment in the Kohl Market, and the wax figures roll their eyes and quiver with agony, and open their mouths and gasp in so lifelike a manner, that sometimes the country-folks grow indignant and want to get at the Grand Inquisitor and the executioner and lynch them.
The Schneiders, who systematically robbed and murdered servant-girls, are prominent features in all the waxworks of Austria; but they didn’t interest me nearly so much as an elegantly-dressed young gentleman of aristocratic appearance, who won renown some time ago by committing a murder under rather novel circumstances. He was a young man of good family, and at one time had money; but he gambled and lost it, and, being hard up, conceived a highly original plan for replenishing his purse. It is the custom in Austrian as in many European towns for the postman to bring a registered letter up to the room of the person who is to receive it, and to take the signature for it there. As this causes considerable delay on a round, the registered letters are kept back from the ordinary delivery, and sent out by a special postman. Our hero addressed an envelope to himself, put some money in it, registered it, and then made his little arrangements. When the postman came up to his bachelor apartment on the fourth-floor of a big house, he stunned him with a sudden blow, then finished him off, and, taking his bag of registered letters, opened the lot, extracted the banknotes, jewellery, etc., and made tracks with them. He got a very large sum of money, but the postman’s body was quickly discovered, and the aristocratic youth went through the dead-letter office.
But the most ghastly bit of realism of all is, I think, a representation of ‘The Last Moments of Alexander II.’ The Czar lies on a real bed, with his uniform and his linen saturated withblood. His shirt is open to the breast, and a horrible gaping wound is exposed to the eye of the spectator. As the figure breathes convulsively, the eyes roll up in the head, andreal bloodgushes up to the surface of the terrible wound. I have never been so horribly fascinated in my life as I was by that figure of the dying Cæsar, with his life-blood welling up before my eyes. It was shocking, it was brutal, it was hideous; but it held me spellbound by its intense reality. You forgot you were looking at a wax figure in a glass-case. You seemed to be watching a real man dying a horrible death. It was with the greatest difficulty that I prevented myself running for the nearest doctor.
Aftermy nocturnal adventure in Prague, I made up my mind that if I wanted to do Austria thoroughly in a fortnight it was absolutely necessary I should have someone familiar with the tongues of Bohemia and Hungary, to say nothing of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro. I met Herr Julius, cosmopolitan courier, promiscuously at a café in Vienna. We fell into conversation, and I secured him then and there to accompany me upon my Hungarian explorations. Herr Julius not only speaks German, French, English, Italian, and Spanish fluently, but is as a native when it comes to Czechish and Magyar and Croatian.
Herr Julius shares with Albert Edward a taste for good cigars and high-class cookery. In other matters he has a frugal mind. He delights in bargains, and points with pride to his success in various parts of the world. Herr Julius is an object-lesson in economy. He shows me his umbrella, and his face lights up with pride as he informs me that he has had it for some years, and that he bought it for eight shillings in Cairo. He takes off his hat, pats it lovingly, and tells me that he got it in the winter of 1889 in Naples for four shillings and sixpence. He asks me what I think of his boots. I admire them, and he explains that he purchased them of a waiter at Seville for two shillings, because they had been left behind by aGerman prince who died in the hotel. Charmed by these revelations, I venture to ask him what he paid for his suit, and instantly his face assumes an expression of triumph. He asks me to guess. I guess five pounds. ‘No, sir,’ he exclaims, with a grin that displays every tooth in his head, and he has an excellent set; ‘for dis suit I give two pounds five in Tottenhams Court Road more two year ago. Ah, what a suit! I put him away every winter and he comes out die nexto sommer every year better he was before.’
The most picturesque way of going to Budapest from Vienna is naturally down the Danube. But there are slight difficulties in the way. The steamer leaves at seven in the morning, and that means getting up at four o’clock at your hotel. Four o’clock is not my usual hour of rising. It is nearer my usual time of going to bed, and, much as I wanted to take the Danube trip, I could not contemplate that early departure without a shudder. But Herr Julius came to the rescue. ‘You shall go on board the night before, you see, sir,’ he said, ‘and there you shall sleep comfortable, and no get up till so you choose.’ I agreed that this would be one way out of the difficulty, but as I was desirous to go to the Theater an der Wien in the evening, in order to see ‘Heisses Blut,’ a play which had gained considerable vogue in Vienna, I explained that I should have to come on board rather late. ‘That shall not matter,’ replied Herr Julius, ‘you shall pack everythings, pay your bill, go to the theatre, and I shall take your everythings on board de shiff and make you secure one nice cabines. Is that good?’
We took a ‘fiaker’ that afternoon, and drove to the ship, which was lying alongside the quay. There was only one official on board, and he received us with a bow so low that his front hair swept a lot ofcoal-dust from the deck. This official was the second steward. We explained our needs, and he immediately placed the entire vessel at our disposal. It was rarely that passengers came on board at night, but we were welcome. A bed should be made up for the gentlemen in a cabin. The kitchen would be shut at eleven, but cold meat and bread and wine should be left out, and he (the under-steward) would remain ever at the gentlemen’s service. The preliminary arrangements were made, the under-steward swept the deck again with his front hair, and Herr Julius and your humble servant drove back to the town.
I packed and saw my luggage loaded on a cab and taken to the quay, and then I went to the theatre and was hugely entertained by ‘Heisses Blut,’ a musical absurdity written around a well-known Hungarian actress, Fräulein Palma. At ten I left the theatre, made my way to the ship, found an excellent supper waiting for me, went to bed, and slept soundly. When I awoke the ship was well on her way down the Danube, and the excellent Herr Julius was knocking at my cabin-door with a cup of strong tea and the information that it was a fine day, and that there was nobody on board but ourselves, ten dwarfs, a giant, and a performing boarhound.
I soon made friends with the dwarfs. Four of them were the smallest little fellows I have ever seen. They had been all over France and Germany, and had been touring for two years in Spain. The giant also was affable, and an American travelling with them as lecturer favoured me with much curious information.
Budapest is, as the guide-books say, ‘picturesquely situated’ on both sides of the Danube; Buda is on one side, and Pest is on the other. It takes you a little time after you arrive in Hungary to find outwhere you actually are, because the Hungarians in their intense Magyarism have abolished all German names, signs, notices, and indications. A traveller, for instance, who wanted to get off the Danube steamer at Pressburg, the first big stopping-place in Hungary one gets to after leaving Vienna, would probably pass Pozsony by. But Pozsony is Pressburg, though there is nothing but your guide-book to let you know it. At one time in Hungary names of streets, etc., were put up in the two languages; now the German is all taken down and Magyar reigns supreme.
No national movement in Europe has of late years made such tremendous strides as Magyarism. The Hungarians have Home Rule, and mean to stick to it. The Emperor of Austria reigns only as King of Hungary. Hungary has its own Parliament, makes its own laws, and has its own postage-stamps. The Austrians are not so unpopular as they were in years gone by, when the Hungarians called them ‘damned Germans;’ but there is still a strong feeling against Austrian interference. As I write these lines all Budapest is bubbling over with excitement about the death of General Klapka, the hero of Komorn, one of the patriots of the former stormy days. Klapka died in one of the hotels here. The Austrian officials—so the Hungarians say—tried to get him buried quietly and at once, whereupon Budapest rose up, and the voice of the Magyar was heard in the land. ‘Is he a drowned dog, this our hero,’ the Hungarians said, ‘that he should be flung into the earth at once? No! we—we his fellow-countrymen, his fellow-sufferers in days gone by, his fellow-patriots now, will honour him dead as we loved him living!’ And so General Klapka had a grand Hungarian funeral, and thousands upon thousands of Hungarians flocked to the ceremony.
There are two things you never get away from in Budapest—red pepper, called páprïka, and czigani, or gipsy music. On every table you have dark red pepper in a salt-cellar, and in every hotel you find the gipsy band worrying away at the fiddlestrings.
The Hungarian ladies are famed for their beauty, and Budapest has a reputation which would not recommend it as a summer residence to Messrs. M’Dougall and Parkinson. The poet might here indulge in ‘a dream of dark women’ to his heart’s content. The baths for which Budapest is renowned are conducted on principles not altogether in accordance with English ideas of morality, and are frequently meeting-places for affairs of gallantry. The modest Englishman with insular prejudices has all his work cut out to avoid blushing at the propositions which are made to him by the couriers and guides attached to the principal hotels, propositions made not with a grin and a whisper, but with a stately bow, and in the ordinary tone of general conversation.
The Hungarian or Magyar language is startling in its peculiarities. When you wish to bid anyone good-day you say ‘Yonapol,’ and if you meet anyone to whom you wish to be polite you say ‘Alarzatos Szolgaya'—‘I am your humble servant.’ That is the ‘Adieu’ of Hungary, and takes the place of the Viennese ‘I kiss the hand.’ Everybody in Hungary is ‘your humble servant.’
My favourite stroll in Budapest when I am tired of red pepper and the gipsies is the bridge which connects Buda and Pest and makes them one town. The Danube here is 1,800 feet broad, and until the bridge was built in 1849 the only means of connection was a bridge of barges, and in the winter, when the Danube was swollen, this was frequently unsafe, and all connection between the two towns was suspended. The English engineers, Clark and Tiernay,built this bridge, but the opposition of the Hungarian nobles was tremendous. They had the right of crossing the old bridge free by reason of their rank, but Baron Sma, of Vienna, who found the £500,000 necessary for the undertaking, claimed the right to levy toll for the space of eighty-five years, and so everyone has to pay toll at the present day. The Hungarian nobleman still feels that he is sacrificing himself to ‘a d——d German’ every time he pulls out the kreuzers demanded by the bridge-keepers.
The old Hungarian prejudices remain, but, alas! the old Hungarian costumes are rapidly disappearing. The young noblemen still drive four spanking horses in a mail-phaeton, and now and then one sees the Hungarian coachman in high boots, light blue coat and silver buttons, and the pork-pie hat with long ribbons hanging down behind it. But the bulk of the populace have abandoned high boots and frogged coats, and now and then one even sees a tall hat on a Hungarian head.
The high Wellington boots are still worn by the peasant women and the peasant men, but not by the better classes. The high hat is not so generally adopted as modern trousers and boots, because for many years it was the sign of a ‘German.’ Herr Julius can remember the day when a man in a high hat was yelled at by the roughs wherever he went, and many a luckless owner of a chimney-pot was bonneted in public amid the jeers of the bystanders. ‘A Schwoab!’ the people would cry directly they espied the obnoxious topper. ‘A Schwoab’ means a German, and sounds suspiciously like ‘a swab.’ ‘Német’ is another name for a German. I am assured this feeling has passed away, but I know better. ‘The King of Hungary’ comes to his palace at Buda now for three months in the year, and the Austrians talk their German language and wear theirchimney-pots without being insulted; but the Hungarians still look upon all things Austrian askance, and it did not need the demonstration and the speeches which the recent attempt to bury Klapka György Tabornok quietly has called forth to prove that the patriotic Magyar still chafes beneath the Austrian yoke.
I am going to the theatre in Budapest to see a Magyar melodrama, entitled ‘A Betyár Kendöje’ ('The Brigand’s Handkerchief'). They call the theatre a Szinház. That is a little startling, but when you have got accustomed to fogado for a hotel, and you have to tell the porter to look after your podgyars for luggage, and you learn that ó nö is an old woman, and that Vienna is Bécs, and bor is wine, and viz—not namely—is water, and Isten is God, you are prepared for anything.
I like fruit, but when the waiter asks me if I will take some ‘gyümöics’ I hesitate. (In parentheses, the most exquisite thing I have eaten in Hungary is the fogas, a Lower Danube fish. Cold, with sauce Tartare, it is delicious. The red-pepper dishes I have not fallen so violently in love with, although páprïka huhn and gulyás are by no means to be despised.)
I started to go to the theatre the other night, but I found that the play was ‘Hamlet, Dankiralfy,’ which is ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,’ and I thought better of it. It may interest the general reader to know that the performance took place on Vasárnap (which is Sunday), Május 22-én, and was ‘Eredeti népszinmü dalokkal 4 szakaszban. Irta Abonyi Lajos. Zenéjét Nikolics Sándor.’
The Magyar melodrama, entitled ‘The Brigand’s Handkerchief,’ turned out to be a very old friend. It was only ‘Falsely Accused’ in a foreign language. A Hungarian brigand, having behaved badly to hisyoung wife and attempted to murder her to slow music in the snow, she leaves him and enters the service of a dear old lady under an assumed name. The dear old lady’s son falls in love with her, and asks her to marry him. But she says there are reasons which stand in the way, and, being the leading lady, has a long soliloquy all to herself in the centre of the stage. In the meantime the brigand has fallen into the toils of a gipsy girl, who dances Hungarian dances and sings Hungarian songs at a low Hungarian public-house. The brigand is made drunk with fourteen bottles of wine and fourteen lighted candles, and agrees to go out at night with the gipsy girl and do a little house-breaking. I can’t tell you why, when the fourteen bottles are placed on the table for the brigand, a lighted candle is placed by each bottle. It seemed to me a fearful waste of tallow, but I presume it is a custom of the country.
The gipsy lady dresses herself up as a man, and puts pistols in her belt, and off she goes with the brigand straight to the house of the dear old lady at midnight. All is quiet, only the unhappy wife is about, and she has just packed up everything she has in the world in a small pocket-handkerchief, and is about to leave the house of her benefactress clandestinely, in order to avoid the pathetic love-making of her young master. The brigand and brigandess enter. The wife, who has returned to her bedroom for a pocket-handkerchief—one her husband gave her on her wedding-day—comes out, and is about to be shot by the brigandess, when the brigand starts, and exclaims in the Magyar language, ‘Heaven, it is my long-lost wife!’ and dashes the pistol from his fair (or, rather, dark) accomplice’s hand, while the injured wife falls fainting on the floor. At that moment the young master, having heard a noise, rushes in; thebrigandess escapes, but the brigand is seized after a violent struggle, thrust into an inner room, and the keys turned upon him. Then off rushes the young master to fetch a policeman. The wife recovers, says, ‘O Isten’ (Isten is the Magyar for the Deity), ‘my husband will be executed if he is caught and recognised as the notorious brigand.’ So she unlocks the door, and promptly bids him leave by the window, which he does, after giving off a short speech.
You can guess the rest. When the police enter and find the man gone and the girl trembling, they at once accuse her of being an accomplice, and of having let the robber in and also of having let him out. The man has dropped a pocket-handkerchief of a peculiar pattern. On searching the girl they find one of the same make in her pocket. Evidently they were accomplices. So the girl is arrested.
The last act takes place at the police-station. The heroine has a bad time and weeps, but refuses to clear herself. Enter the brigand husband, who says, ‘I am here. I am So-and-so, the notorious brigand. I broke into the house. This woman released me because I was her husband. See, here are the other five handkerchiefs of half a dozen I inherited from my mother. The sixth I gave to Marie on our wedding-day, and that is how our handkerchiefs are of the same pattern.’ The police at once arrest the husband, and the wife is free. The husband is dragged off. A shot is heard. He has killed himself. At that moment the young master rushes in, and exclaims, ‘Marie, will you marry me now?’ Marie falls into her young master’s arms and says, ‘Yes—if you will wait.’ I think she added, ‘Until after the funeral,’ but I am not sufficiently master of Magyar to commit myself absolutely on the point.
Some years ago the crowded house which greetedthis Magyar melodrama would have been impossible. Half the audience, though Hungarian, would not have understood their own language. They would have wanted it translated into German.
To understand the immense strides which Magyarism has made one must look back a little. To-day hardly a German word is to be heard in the thoroughfares, and no German words disfigure the public announcements, the sign-posts, the playbills, or the street corners. There are many thousands of Hungarians who do not even understand German. Think of this, and then remember that in 1840 a movement for the reintroduction of the Magyar language at the University of Pest met with but scant encouragement outside the town. The police then spoke German, the army spoke German, the lectures of the University were delivered in Latin. Up to the year 1790 there was not even a professor at the University whospokeMagyar. To-day in the towns everything is Magyar and nothing is German.
To-day (it was ‘to-day’ when this was written), in the hotel at which I am staying, the patriots have a dinner. Their dining-room adjoins the writing-room in which I am penning (or rather pencilling) these lines. Great speeches are being made, and every now and then the room rings again with the Magyar cries of ‘Elyen! Elyen!’ (Bravo! bravo!) and ‘Hayunk, hayunk!’ (Hear, hear). There is in the room, writing, a young man with a coal-black beard, fierce gleaming eyes, and the milk-white teeth for which the Magyars are renowned. He listens to the speeches that come through the closed door, and presently, as one of the speakers makes a great point amid a roar of applause in the next room, he springs to his feet and shouts ‘Elyen! Elyen!’ too. Then, catching my astonished gaze, he smiles, begs me to excuse him, and explains that he is the son of aHungarian exile, that he was born in Egypt, whither his father fled to escape imprisonment for his political opinions in the days of tyranny, and that he is thinking of those years of exile now, and the father who died in a far-off country for love of his native land.
I left Budapest on Monday morning by the Orient express for Munich, and Herr Julius, who saw me to the railway-station, wept on my breast and whiled away the time with anecdotes of his past career. Herr Julius had once saved a nice little fortune—many thousands of florins—and he wanted to invest it. He knew many of the financial barons of Vienna. He asked their advice, and, acting on it, he bought the ‘obligations’ of a local company. These obligations cost him five hundred florins each, and they were soon to be worth a thousand, and Herr Julius would make a fine thing of his investment. But the best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley, and the great ‘krach’ came suddenly, and with it widespread ruin. Companies were scattered before the winds like chaff. Great financial houses came tumbling down as though they had been built of cards, and Vienna rang with the cries and curses of the ruined and undone. The ‘obligations’ which Herr Julius had bought rattled down in value till at last they became almost worthless. In despair the poor fellow was glad to take five florins each for the ‘obligations’ for which he had paid five hundred, and he was lucky to get that, for a day or two afterwards the bubble burst utterly, and the ‘papers’ he had held were not worth a kreuzer each!
‘Ah, sir,’ says Herr Julius, his eyes filling with tears, ‘after that my little fortune was gone, not for months did I sleep. I beat my breast, I tore my hair, I could eat nothings; my life was to me one great burthen. At last I say to myself, Julius, old man, this does not do; your little fortune it hasgone, but you must cheer yourself and begin again the battle of life. So one day I say to myself, I will forget, I will drown care, I will go out and enjoy myself, and laugh with the rest. The first day that I shake the sorrow from my mind I go to the Prater in the afternoon. I enter the third coffee-house; I sit in the garden and listen to the band. I drink my beer and feel hungry. The man come with salami; I say I will eat, and I buy for twopence halfpenny some salami.
‘Well, sir,’ continued Herr Julius, ‘the man he weigh me out my salami, and he spread out a piece of paper, and he put upon it my six slices. I drink a good draught of beer. I pick up my salami, and I say, “Julius, after all life is good, still can you have your beer and salami.” At that moment my eye it catches the piece of paper. I look at it. It has print on it. It has a number. Ach, leiber Gott! it is my “obligation” for which I have paid once five hundred florins. On that has the sausage man served me with twopennyworth of salami! That night again I sleep not.’
I express my sympathy with Herr Julius, and the Orient express steams into the station. In his excitement at bidding me farewell Herr Julius drops his overcoat, which he carries over his arm. Instantly the platform is spread as for a feast. Herr Julius has carefully collected the débris of dinners for which I have paid without availing myself of all the privileges to which I am entitled. Oranges roll about in every direction; sweet biscuits are crushed under the heels of hurrying porters; pink prawns and white radishes make the dull platform gay with colour; the wing of a fowl and the leg of a goose fall together on to the line. Here is a piece of cheese, there half a dozen lumps of sugar. Herr Julius gives a wild shriek, falls upon his hands and knees, and proceeds togather up the fragments that remain. And while he is still collecting these remnants of our many feasts the engine whistles, and the Orient express bears me away. I thrust my head out of the window, and the last glimpse I get of Herr Julius shows me that remarkable man busily engaged in picking gravel and cinders from a small piece of Gruyère cheese. I paid for it, and he is determined that it shall not be wasted.
I only spent one day in Munich, and then I fled to the Bavarian Alps. The customs of the city were too much for me. From early morn till late at night the Munichers drink beer and eat radishes the size of turnips. I had great difficulty, not being Sandow, in lifting up the mug of beer which was brought to me at a beer-garden. Putting it down I found a sheer impossibility. But I sat at a table with a fine young Bavarian, who put away ten huge mugs of the national beverage in rapid succession. I was taken to one garden—the Lion Brewery Garden—where the average sale is 10,000 litres a day, and there are fifty such establishments in full swing in Munich.
Notbeing able to drink beer and eat turnip radishes, and the theatres all being closed, I went off to the mountains and made for Herrenchiemsee, the lovely lake on which the wide world’s wonder, King Ludwig’s gorgeous palace, is situated. Weird and woful is the tale of Bavaria’s mad monarch, Ludwig II. He was cursed with that form of insanity which is called ‘la folie des grandeurs.’ He rode about in carriages of eye-dazzling magnificence, the panels of which were hand-painted by great artists at a cost of a thousand pounds per panel, and his carriages were always drawn by eight cream-white horses. He dressed himself up as Lohengrin and sailed about the lonely lakes at midnight on the back of a mechanical swan. The palace that he built at Herrenchiemsee is a blaze of golden glory. His bed alone cost £20,000, and he ruined himself before the palace was half finished. The magnificence of the state apartments and the famous Hall of Mirrors beggars description. Only a madman afflicted with the ‘folie des grandeurs’ would have commenced such a dwelling-place. Everything in it is real gold, real silver, and real marble, and all of the most exquisite workmanship. A peacock (if ever a peacock brought ill-luck this one did) which stands in the vestibule cost £7,500. The interior decoration of one roomalone cost £21,000. For a writing-table in the royal study the King paid £2,000, and throughout the entire palace the cost of everything is in proportion. No wonder the King found himself penniless at last, and his subjects unwilling to supply him with further funds for his mad extravagance. It was the building of this palace which led to the terrible tragedy on the Starnberg Lake which filled all the world with horror.
For some time previous to 1886 the King had exhibited strong symptoms of insanity. He had retired from active participation in affairs of state, and lived only for his marvellous private operatic performances and the building of his peerless palace. It was not exactly a sane thing for a king to dress himself up as the hero of a Wagner opera and sail about on a swan’s back, and it was, to say the least of it, odd for him to come mysteriously at midnight on a golden steamer across the silent lake to his lonely palace and order all the hundred thousand candles to be lighted that he might march about it and fancy himself a god.
On the hottest day of a hot week I went to the Starnberg Lake to visit the scene of the tragedy. Just at the spot where Ludwig dragged the doctor into the lake on the evening of Whit Sunday and murdered him the Prince Regent has erected a memorial, and here there burns day and night a blood-red lamp. Long after night had fallen on the lonely island, and the dull red ray of that lamp fell upon the silent waters, I sat by the water’s edge and brooded over the strange, sad story of the Starnberg Lake.
It was Baron von Lutz, the brother of our own Herr Meyer Lutz, that master of melody, who for many a long year wielded the merry bâton of Gaiety burlesque, who really put an end to the madpranks of Ludwig of Bavaria. When the King could get no more money to finish his ‘enchanted palace’ with, he ordered Freiherr von Lutz, the Bavarian Minister-President, to find him the sum he needed at once. Herr Meyer Lutz’s brother informed the King that the country was not in a position to comply with such a demand. Immediately the King wrote to the Baron to say that unless he sent the sum within twenty-four hours the eminent composer of ‘Faust Up to Date’ would have to go into mourning for him, as his head would be cut off. This letter Baron von Lutz at once brought before the Ministry, and the result was that a Commission sat, and declared the King to be insane and incapable of managing his own affairs.
Ludwig was at this time at his castle of Hohen Schwangau in the mountains. Thither the Commissioners, accompanied by Dr. Gudden, the Asylum director, repaired, directly Prince Luitpold, the King’s uncle, had accepted the Regency and authorized the arrest of his nephew. The Commissioners informed the King he was a prisoner, but others learned the news also. These others were the men of the mountains, who worshipped their monarch almost as a god—many of them, indeed, believing him to be superhuman. These brave fellows, arming themselves with axes and choppers and guns, came pouring down the mountains, and swore that they would slaughter the Commissioners and set the King free.
The situation looked so threatening that the King was secretly conveyed that afternoon to a little castle on the Starnberg Lake, where he could be more effectually guarded. One night only did the poor mad King spend there. On the evening of the second day—Whit Sunday, 1886—he went for a walk with Dr. Gudden and the attendants. He talked so calmly and rationally that when he saidpleasantly, ‘Doctor, must these fellows follow us about everywhere? It isn’t exactly what I care for,’ the doctor sent the men back to the castle. The King and the doctor went on along the edge of the lake alone, and were partly hidden from sight by the trees. What happened after that no human being can say with certainty; but it is conjectured that the King, saying he was tired, sat down on a seat, and invited the doctor to sit beside him. Suddenly the King sprang up and rushed to the lake. The doctor ran after him and seized him. The King then gripped the doctor by the throat, gave him a fearful blow in the face which stunned him, and then held him under the water till he was drowned. Then, freeing himself from the dead man’s grasp, he walked on and on into the deep blue lake—on and on until the quiet waters closed over his head, and his mad dream of splendour ended in the eternal sleep of death.
No one can look upon the spot where the poor mad King died, and think of that gorgeous palace which was his glory and his life, and which stands unfinished to this day, without a pang of pity. It would be easy to moralize upon it. ‘The vanity of human wishes’ writes itself large on the quiet waters that lave the foot of the lonely memorial to Bavaria’s hapless King. I have no doubt I should have moralized had I had time. But my programme was not mapped out for that sort of thing, and so I turned sadly away from the melancholy shore, gave one last look at the dim red lamp and the dying Saviour on the cross, and went quietly to the landing-stage and took the last boat to the opposite shore, and thence made my way by train to Munich, where I arrived just in time to pack up, make a light supper, and catch the Paris-bound Orient express at 1.15 a.m.