TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE EMPEROR OF AUSTRIA.
THERE is one condition of the present European problem, the precise relation of the Eastern Courts to each other, which no one, or at least no one outside a minute diplomatic circle, even professes to understand, and that is the true personal character of the Emperor of Austria. In the politics of the Continent, Francis Joseph of Hapsburg is the one unknown quantity. There is something unique and separate, even mysterious, if you will think of it, about the position of this man. He is past middle age ; he has been for thirty-nine years the head of a first-class European Monarchy, living under as fierce a light as ever beat upon a throne ; he has had a career truly wonderful in the contrast between its cata- strophes and their consequences ; he is at this moment an essential factor in every great European combination,—and yet he is, outside his own dominion at all events, almost perfectly unknown. A hundred pens have been busy about the events of his reign ; in the long annals of his House, that reign has been the moat eventful ; in all events he has been at least the principal actor,—and yet, if to-morrow he stood revealed as a quixotic gentle- man, ready for any adventure on behalf of a great cause, or as a Greek of the Lower Empire, crafty and politic as Justinian, the ordinary European politician would feel scarcely any surprise. Something is known of all other Sovereigns, even when they are lay-figures ; but this one, who actually rules, who is the active as well as the nominal master of eighteen European States, stands back in the shadow, con- trolling a vast army, guiding able diplomatists, carrying out large schemes, but always so far hidden in the gloom as to be personally irrecognisable. He is the most interesting of figures, but no one close to him ever describes him, and the profes- sional watchers, such as special correspondents, who respect no one else, tacitly combine, probably from an uneasy conviction of their own ignorance, to leave him alone. We cannot remember since 1849 even one serious attempt to analyse the character of the Emperor. Some men in his position stand revealed by their history ; but the history of the Emperor Francis Joseph baffles ordinary comprehension by its unexpectedness. He has been the unluckiest of Sovereigns, and one of the most successful ; the most detested, and the best obeyed. From the day when, as a boy of eighteen, he was ordered by the Family Council to dethrone his father, as otherwise all hope for the House was lost, down to the present moment, he has never succeeded in any great undertaking, and he is ten times as powerful, as popular, and as respected as he was then. Beaten in battle after battle, flung out of Kingdom after Kingdom, tricked successfully by Frenchman, Italian, and German, his vast army follows him with hearty obedience, he has gained, not lost, in European position, and there is not a diplomatist in the world who, when Austria wants anything, has not a secret doubt whether, when all is ended, Austria will not be found tranquilly proud of the secure possession of the object which seemed so unattainable. With half his dominions in insurrec- tion in 1848, the Emperor was in 1850 their absolute and rather cruel lord. Beaten in 1860 by France, beaten in 1866 by Prussia, driven in the former year out of Lombardy, and in the latter out of Germany, obliged in 1848 to beg alms from Russia, and in 1867 to yield to the Magyars, he site in 1887 as great a monarch as ever, with as many people, a greater army, larger revenues, and a far more secure position, the pivot of the great alliance on which the future of Europe hangs ; but still, in comparison with his rivals, scarcely known. He has never won a great battle, for Custozza was a side-issue, and Lissa is half-forgotten, but he is a great military force ; he has failed repeatedly in diplomacy—just think of the Schleswig- Holstein business, and the little, the nothing, permanently achieved at Olmiitz—and be has acquired grand pro- vinces without drawing a sabre or firing a shot. He has fired on his own capital, and is the only Sovereign in Europe who dare lounge about it ; he has ruthlessly oppressed half his subjects—recollect, Francis Joseph supported Haynau —and has won them all back so thoroughly, that loyalty to his person is the cement of his many Kingdoms. Ho has shown fierce ambition at every turn, and he is regarded as the one ruler who may be trusted not to use any successes he may gain to further schemes of aggrandisement. There are men who should know, and who are rarely mistaken, who say that he is not an able $tate charioteer ; but he drives, and has
driven for years, eighteen horses abreast, and they all go on the course he dictates, and he stands all the while quite tranquil, and not perceptibly touching the reins. Yet, in spite of his success, there are facts in his career which justify the depreciatory opinion. The appeal to the Emperor Nicholas involved a risk no Sovereign should have rue, and ought to have alienated Hungary for ever ; the desperate expedient which reduced Galicia might have pro- duced anarchy throughout his dominions ; the war of 1860 was waged without ability and without perseverance ; a military Emperor ought to have known in 1866 that he was not ready to fight Prussia ; and there has been vacillation, or rather a perpetual hesitation between two plans, in the whole management of the great project for revindicating in the Balkans the empire lost in Italy. Nevertheless, no wise man will say that the Emperor is unwise.
We suppose, though we offer the suggestion well knowing how imperfect the data are, that the Emperor Francis Joseph was originally a proud and rather headstrong man, not cruel, but indifferent to suffering, and intent, like most of his predecessors, on attaining his will by force ; but that the terribly severe training of forty years has made of him as accomplished a diplomatist as his natural powers will allow him to be. Those powers do not permit him to see far, or to recognise facts needing imagination to reveal them, or to appeal to masses of men with immediate success ; but within those limitations they are really great. He is not a General, or he would win battles ; he is not an administrator, or his army would be easier to mobilise ; he is not a financier, or his Treasury would be in better heart ; but the Emperor can make his States pull together. He understands men so far as to find able instru- ments, though seldom of the first class ; and in finding them he has no prejudices, as he proved when he snatched up that Protestant bourgeois, Benet. He knows how to make the weight of his Empire felt without exposing it to all the risks of war—vide the history of 1855—and he has the most perfect patience of any man in Europe. He never fidgets the Powers, and never suggests grand changes. He waits even for that Turkish heritage he covets, as the Czars cannot per- suade themselves to wait ; and only the Turks, taught by cruel experience, know that they have in the world no more dangerous foe than Austria. Constantly devoted to a single aim, the greatness of the House of Hapsburg, which to him is Austria, Hungary, the world, he is, in pursuit of that object, absolutely passionless, and will embrace his greatest enemy or throw over his dearest friend. It must have been a bitter pill to the Emperor to abandon the petty States-of Germany which had risked so much for his sake ; but with his House at stake, he signed their sentences without a sigh, so escaping without the surrender of one acre of his own land. And it must have been a bitterer pill still to recognise the little Savoyard, a cadet, in his eyes, of his own line, as Sovereign of Italy ; and a poisonous draught to yield to the detested Hohenzollern, the secular Protestant foe, the Imperial throne of Germany. Yet King Humbert and Kaiser William are the Emperor's dearest allies, and the alliance, while it pays, and it may pay for centuries, will be honestly maintained. He betrayed Russia in 1855, as Prince Schwartzenberg admitted, in a style the Russians have never had the wisdom to forgive ; but if it were clearly safe, and he saw the road, he would to-morrow join the Czar in another grand partition, and adhere to it loyally enough. He is not false by nature, rather the reverse, remaining still, in his own eyes, head of the Holy Roman Empire, first gentleman in the universe ; but his conception of duty is to think first of the great heritage entrusted to him by his ancestors, and to see that this, at all events, be not diminished. It is through this passionlessness that he, absolutist to the core of his heart, is able to bear the fretful constitutionalism of his subjects, and to reconcile, by a calm assumption of impartiality, their ever-conflicting demands. " It is needful to us," and so Hungary may go free, and Dealt may be great, and religions may be tolerated, and even the lllussulmans of Bosnia may be assured of special protection. Victory never elates the Emperor of Austria, as we see in the patience with which he waits for that legal sovereignty in Bosnia the want of which would pat Prince Bismarck beside himself ; and defeat, as we saw in '60 and '66, only induces him to use the new conditions as foundations upon which to build. If we add that the Emperor has been made by his history slightly callous, and would expend soldiers or servants like shells for an adequate end, and that he controls perfectly an inner pride as haughty as that of any ancestor—and there has been no pride like that of this semi-Spanish House, which claims to
represent Charlemagne—we have given what we feel to be an imperfect and yet, in parts, accurate view of the Emperor, who- is holding every week a military council against Russia, bat sends to St. Petersburg no remonstrances, no offer, and no inquiry. He waits for the struggle to come, with a calm resolve that, be the end what it may, his House shall be acknowledged in yet another State.
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