Vienna (part 2)
“The capital is not the monarchy.”
“The capital is not the monarchy.”
I cannot tell you much that is edifying about the theatre in Vienna. The National Theatre company performs alternately at the Burgtheater and the Kärntnertor Theatre(1), and does as well as it can. The men are not so weak a company as the women; but Brockmann stands so far apart and rises so high above the others that his very superiority noticeably upsets the balance.
The others, though some are good, cannot keep up with him, and so he often comes down to their level—especially since his finest years are now behind him. They were performing the tragedy Regulus.(2) I confess it gave me an unusual amount of pleasure, perhaps partly because it treats one of my favourite subjects from history. I think it is a well-made play, as far as one can judge from a single performance, at which I involuntarily gave myself up more to enjoyment than criticism would perhaps allow. There are several minor flaws in the characters, but the whole has a firm, serious, and not un-Roman course. The language is mostly pure and noble, and I was satisfied. It still lacks a good deal to be a masterpiece; but may Apollo grant us more plays like this, and we may hope for masterpieces too. Seeing Brockmann as Regulus will give me pleasure for a long time.
The women in the company are particularly weak, as they tend to be in most theatres. The role of leading young woman has to be given to someone who could with every honour be an abbess at Quedlinburg or Gandersheim. She is a worthy woman and a good actress, but no longer suited to that sort of role.
The Italian singers are no better, in proportion. There is a great deal of trilling and very little singing. The castrato Marchesi mercilessly turns a hero into a version of his own mutilated self, to the distress of any man listening.(3) I cannot understand how such inhumanity could have produced such grievous errors in taste. Let the Italians answer for that, along with much other nonsense, before the court of common sense—if they can.
I, for my part, want no heroes
Who, unmanned and scarcely even girlish,
Squeak out their want of strength
At the very first note,
And crow their absurd fury
Down from the stage
Through dizzy heights of falsetto,
Like Master Rooster’s gelded brood.
If I do not hate the gelding’s singsong
As I hate the tarantella,
May heaven’s judgement
Put me in his class.(4)
Schikaneder runs his enterprise in the suburb by the Wien, where he has built a most imposing theatre that many a theatre director could and should visit to learn from its arrangement.(5) He knows his audience and gives it what it likes. His great strength is local colour, which he often uses with a frankness that does credit both to him and to Viennese tolerance. At his theatre I have heard things said about the national follies of Vienna’s rich and its courtiers which could not be spoken aloud in Dresden without earning a stern rebuke from above for presumption. Several of his plays seem, in the most literal sense, to have been made for himself alone; and I must admit that his extravagant personality as the Tyrolean Wastel gave me extraordinary pleasure.
One can hardly blame cultivated Viennese audiences for going out occasionally to see him and Kasperle, leaving the National Theatre and the Italian singers empty. His performers sing much better for a suburban theatre than the others do for the court. At the theatre by the Wien, costumes are usually neater and more tasteful than the misjudged splendour at court, where the boots of the heroes’ attendants sometimes make a very poor show.
As long as Schikaneder offers farces, comic tales and his own mad operettas, where the Viennese dialect and local manner make a pleasant contribution, he can amuse even people of cultivated taste from time to time. But when he attempts serious plays that demand deeper study and a much higher degree of cultivation, the result must always be very poor. Perhaps he would say that he works for his own theatre, and one cannot argue with that. I would simply not wish to belong to his company. He probably claims to be no more than a middle point between Kasperle and the perfection of acting at the National Theatre. Kasperle and Schikaneder may have more or less achieved their lesser aims; but the National Theatre, as I saw it, is still far from doing honour, by the quality of its work, to the foremost city of our country and the seat of a great monarch.
I hear that the emperor has made Mr Kasperle of the Leopoldstadt a baron; and it seems to me that he has earned the title as well as most who receive one. He is also said to have the substantial merit of managing his affairs very well.(6)
Almost nothing is said in Vienna about public affairs. You might visit public houses for months before hearing a single word about politics, so strictly is orthodoxy enforced here in matters of state as well as church. There is a reverent silence in every coffee house, as though High Mass were being celebrated and everyone scarcely dared breathe. Since I am used to speaking my mind easily and openly, though not to raging aloud, acquaintances several times gave me friendly warnings about the invisible watchers.(7) I do not know how far they were right; but I do maintain that those who employ such watchers are very much in the wrong. My carefree openness nearly played a trick on me once.
You know I am no revolutionary: revolutions usually make bad things worse. But I do sometimes let my approval of what I think good be heard more loudly than may be wise. I like the Marseilles March as a piece of music(8), and sometimes, with no particular thought in my head, I find myself humming a few bars through my teeth, just as I might hum a passage from any other piece. Once I did this in Vienna, very much in the wrong place, and naturally it cast a chill over everyone present. I was more afraid for those good people than for myself: the only thought I had was that I liked the tune, and even that barely entered my mind at the time.
It reminded me of an amusing episode at an inn, half serious and half comic, which showed the excessive anxiety in the capital. An honest old lieutenant-colonel, not especially political, had served with the army in Italy during the war and grown accustomed there to being cheerful and boisterous. Business brought him to the capital, where he found a monastic hush in every public place. He found it deeply uncomfortable.
He endured it for a few days, then burst out over a glass of wine with a soldier’s loudness and a wonderfully comic lack of self-consciousness: “What the devil is all this damned piety in Vienna? Can’t one speak here? Or is the whole capital one great Carthusian monastery? A man might forget how to talk. Or is talking forbidden? I’ve heard something about spies posted everywhere—is that true? To hell with this masquerade! I can’t stand it. I mean to speak aloud and enjoy myself.” You should have seen the faces of the company at this opening speech. Some looked solemn, others frightened; some smiled, others nodded politely and meaningfully at the joke. But nobody joined the old campaigner. “I shall get myself back to the army,” he said. “I don’t like this lifeless place.”
When the French advanced to the vicinity of Vienna, it is said that nobody feared the enemy, apart perhaps from the great lords and their dependants; people were much more worried about disorder from their own army in retreat. At that time Bonaparte was beginning to pursue his personal prospects more deliberately, and in doing so happened to spare the Austrians great fear and confusion.(9)
Doctor Gall has just received an imperial order forbidding him to think he can tell what is in people’s heads by looking at their skulls. The reason, it is said, is that this science leads to materialism.(10)
Here in the capital, too, one sees nothing but paper and bad money. The reins made of bad money are familiar; people drive with them as long as they can. Treasury notes are still the least culpable way to conceal poverty, as long as credit holds. But in my view nothing is more ruinous to a state, or more unjust within it, than government securities under the present arrangement of our states.(11)
Once privileges and exemptions are taken into account—though these really contradict public law—the poorer people pay nearly five-sixths of the state’s needs. Yet the holders of government securities, whatever they may be called, are mostly rich and may even belong to those exempted from taxes. Interest on their securities is paid from state revenue, most of which comes from the poorer people.
A popular writer recently tried to prove the benefits of Saxony’s national debt by saying that it gives people a very good place to put their money. By the same reasoning, diseases are a great blessing to humanity because doctors, surgeons and apothecaries make a living from them. That is a peculiar line of thought, though people who have little public spirit and want a safe home for a great deal of money may well follow it.
The result needs little thought: because of the national debt, poorer people are forced to pay interest to the rich on top of their old burdens, whether they wish to or not. Things would be different with a tax register founded on fairness for all. But as matters stand, the rich hold the tax certificates and the poor pay the taxes. Such logic can seem sound only to someone with a box full of tax-backed bonds.
What obligation can the state have to pay interest on the rich people’s capital at the expense of the poor? Yet that is what every national debt comes down to. Every national debt is a crutch, and crutches are only for the lame. The question is too important to discuss further here. I refer you especially to Hume’s essay, the best thing I know on the subject.(12)
It was strange that, at the height of the crisis in the last year of the war, there was a plan to turn Vienna into a military stronghold—the worst thing the government could have done for its own cause. If the French had not needed peace as much as the Germans, or if Bonaparte’s intentions had been different from what he later showed, the result for the Austrian lands would have been terrible.
What could anyone expect from such assurances? It was known that Vienna could not have held out for eight days; and what would have followed if the enemy had taken it by force? The Viennese were certain it would not come to that, but that very confidence made the preparations ill judged. The government could have followed the minister’s maxim decisively from the start, though I would not defend the rest of his conduct. On this point he was entirely right, provided the relative strengths had been properly weighed: the capital is not the monarchy. In some states it is far from beneficial that the capital should have so much influence over the whole country.
As you know, I am seldom in the right frame of mind for art or learned pursuits. Since the field here is so large, I shall say no more about them. You can ask Schnorr, who will probably return sooner than I do.
I can say that everywhere in Vienna I was treated with a good nature and helpfulness perhaps uncommon in capitals. Even the peculiar inspection at the barrier was carried out politely, so far as manner went. The only boorish encounter—and thoroughly boorish it was—took place on my last day at the Italian Chancellery, where the police had sent me to exchange my old passport for a new one.(13)
In the waiting room they were courteous enough to announce me at once to the president, a kind of minister whom I otherwise do not know, when I said I was in a hurry. He already had my Dresden passport in his hand when I entered. “Who are you?” he asked, staring like an ox, his face like Moloch’s, in the thickest Viennese dialect. I respect the speech of every province as long as it serves humanity; the good nature of the honest Viennese has rarely made me wish their pronunciation were better. I offered a little prayer to holy Humanity for patience, then gave my name and pointed to the passport.(14)
“Where do you want to go?”
“It says in the passport: Italy.”
“Italy is big.”
“For the present, Venice; then farther on.”
“There is far too much of this disreputable rabble wandering about.”
Well, my friend, what was I to do? Answer the man as he deserved? He could easily have found ways to hold me up for at least eight days, if he did not send me back altogether, for he was a sort of minister. I struggled to suppress an old military surge of anger. “Count Metternich in Dresden must know what he is doing and to whom he gives passports. He is responsible for it,” I said, as firmly as I could manage.(15)
The man inspected me from my close-cropped head, down my Polish coat, to the buttoned overtrousers around my sturdy cowhide boots.(16)
“Where do you want to go after that?”
“Chiefly to Sicily.”
He stared again and asked, “What do you want to do there?”
If I had told him the plain truth—that I merely wanted to take a walk and stretch the diaphragm I had compressed by sitting over the printing of Klopstock’s Odes—he would probably have had no idea what I meant and thought I had escaped from Bedlam.(17) “I want to study Theocritus there,” I said.
Heaven knows what he thought. He looked at me, then at the passport, then at me again, and wrote something on the document. I later saw that it was an order to issue a new one.
“But you must not stay in Venice.”
“I have no intention of doing so,” I answered with all the surliness of my dark mood, “and you are giving me no desire to stay here either.” He stared at me once more, handed back the passport, and I left.
Someone told me the man’s name and said that this was entirely in character, and that he enjoyed the emperor’s great trust and favour. So much the worse for the emperor, for him, for the Viennese and for everyone who has to deal with him. His face bore the stamp of his soul; I could see that at the first glance, without ever having spent an hour listening to Gall. I have deliberately forgotten his name. I remember only that, to no credit of our nation, he was a German, though president of the Italian Chancellery. “Is this a foretaste of Italy?” I thought. “It is beginning well.”
I took the passport across to the chancery office, where the document was to be prepared, and found the reverse of the coin: a wholly different tone. They addressed me as “Your Grace” so often that my modesty hardly knew what to do. At once I received a large sheet of fairly good Latin which, in the emperor’s name, strongly recommended me to all his higher and lower officials.
If only the president had been a little more courteous, the same effort—or much less—would have made the business pleasanter for us both. The new passport was marked gratis, yet they charged me two gulden. Despite that curious interpretation of the word, I gladly paid at once and was happy to escape the excess of rudeness and politeness together.(18)