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CHAPTER FIFTEEN 

Of Theodore Roosevelt And his Time Volume 2

FROM KHARTOUM TO LONDON—CONTINUED: 

I was immensely impressed with my whole visit to Rome. I attended a dinner given me by Mayor Nathan, the Syndic, and his colleagues of the municipal council. Mayor Nathan was a Jew, who spoke excellent English, and was apparently a good public servant. When I dined with him I had already taken lunch with a number of Members of the Administration, sitting beside the Prime Minister, also a Jew, and a man of more intellectual type than Nathan. Think what a contrast this meant! In the Eternal City, in the realm of the popes, the home of the Ghetto, I lunched sitting beside one Jew who was Prime Minister of Italy, and dined as the guest of another Jew who was the head of the Roman Government itself! The Prime Minister and his colleagues struck me as upright men, sympathizing with liberal and progressive ideas, and anxious to do justice, and also on the whole as cultivated men, well read, and, in short, good fellows; but they did not strike me as possessing very great force. Mayor Nathan was precisely like many an American municipal politician of good type. Pie would have been quite at home as Reform Mayor of any American city of the second class. Among his colleagues were a number of Socialists, mostly parlor or study Socialists of the Latin type, well-meaning people with lofty aspirations, wild eyes, and a tendency to pay over-much heed to fine phrases. What I saw of Italy made me feel that there was infinite need for radical action toward the betterment of social and industrial conditions; and this made me feel a very strong sympathy with some of the Socialistic aims, and a very profound distrust of most of the Socialistic methods. 
The king and queen were delightful people. I had already seen the king, for when I was on my way to Africa he had come down in a battleship to Messina, and at his request I had gone aboard the battleship and had been presented to him; and I had a very genuine respect for him. Moreover, I found him most companionable. There were many things in which both of us were interested, from big game hunting to history and social progress. Some time before he had written asking me to come on a shooting trip with him after ibex, and I was genuinely sorry to refuse; and when I made my formal call upon him he showed me the heads of all kinds of game animals, including for instance the very rare South Italian chamois; and he showed that he took much more than a pure sportsman's interest in them. As for his general reading, I need only mention that I found on his desk, open, a copy of Mahaffy's 'Empire of the Ptolemies,' in which he was interested. I have always had a liking for the early history of the House of Savoy. Happening to say that I supposed that the fact that the House of Savoy had elected to live under Roman and not under Lombard law indicated that it was probably of native and not of invading Germanic origin, the king at once became interested and he told me many queer incidents of early Savoy history; and showed us his noteworthy collection of Savoyard coins, from the earliest to modern times. While I was President he had sent me, together with a handsome edition of Dante, a score of volumes of the original reports and papers of Eugene of Savoy—one of my favorite heroes.
The king showed that he was deeply and intelligently interested in every movement for social reform, and was not only astonishingly liberal but even radical, sympathizing with many of the purposes and doctrines of the Socialists. He took me in to see his children, who were well behaved and simple. When I spoke of how well the queen was bringing them up, he laughed and said, yes, he wished his son to be so trained that if necessary he would be fit to be the First President of the Italian Republic. Later he called for me at the hotel, causing thereby frightful agitation among the hotel attendants and guests, and spent a morning driving me round the city—I had already made the correct formal calls and had left a wreath on Victor Emmanuel's tomb in the Pantheon. He slightly embarrassed me by making me sit on the right-hand in the carriage, as almost all the kings did—I suppose on the theory that I was a kind of ex-sovereign myself; I always wished they wouldn't do it, but after one or two trials I made no further protest, as it always became evident that if I insisted on sitting on the left-hand I should cause a fuss, which was just exactly what I was desirous of not doing. He took me to the cavalry school, where I was greatly impressed by the riding of his officers, and especially by the way in which they took their horses down well-nigh perpendicular banks. Evidently he knew the army and its needs just as he knew the civil and social needs of the country; and in fact I do not see how Italy could have a more intelligent, devoted, and sympathetic ruler. I told him I wished we had a few men like him in the Senate! He asked us— Mrs. Roosevelt and I—to drive out with him and the Queen and spend a day and a couple of nights at their country place not far from Rome, saying that they would dig out some badgers—I think it was badgers—but we had so many other engagements and were so pressed for time that, as he asked me to say frankly whether it would be convenient or not, I begged off, stating that we would infinitely rather go with him to his place, but that it would cause us serious inconvenience in keeping our other engagements; and he at once acquiesced, being as considerate as possible. In a way, I should have liked to see more of him; but after all I am doubtful whether it would have been worth while, for even with the pleasantest and kindliest king there must of necessity be a little that is artificial in association with a civilian foreigner, and especially a civilian foreigner from a huge overseas democracy. To have gone with him on a hunt, where we should have had a real object in common, or to have met him while I was President, when also we would have had interests in common, would of course have been an entirely different thing.
I thoroughly liked and respected almost all the various kings and queens I met; they struck me as serious people, with charming manners, devoted to their people and anxious to justify their own positions by the way they did their duty—it is no disparagement to their good intentions and disinterestedness to add that each sovereign was obviously conscious that he was looking a possible republic in the face, which was naturally an incentive to good conduct; I was very glad to have met them; and it was pleasant to see them for a short while; but longer intercourse, or renewed intercourse, would have been unnatural unless there had been, as there was not, some real intellectual interest, or other bond in common, and if there was any such, it happened not to develop itself.
I was much amused, by the way, when I reached Borne, at finding that our Ambassador was engaged in an intricate controversy with the puffyfaced, entirely pompous and well-meaning local baron who was Court Marshal or Master of Ceremonies, or something of the sort; the Ambassador wishing to have me treated with the courtesies granted a visiting sovereign, and the Court Marshal taking the entirely proper view that I was simply a private citizen, with no title or no claim to any precedence. I hastily interfered, telling the Ambassador that I absolutely shared the views of his opponent, that I wished him himself to act upon, and to notify all our other ambassadors that they were to act upon, the theory that I was purely a private citizen, with no claim to any position of precedence at all, and that at any function, formal or informal, I should be perfectly happy to walk or sit or stand anywhere, and below any one, just as the local people desired—or not to appear at all, unless they expressly wished it. I added that I was really speaking less in a spirit of humility than of pride. I have a hearty and sincere respect for a king who does his duty and acts decently, and am delighted to show him any kind of formal courtesy which is customary; but I have no patience with a sham and least of all a snobbish sham; and of all snobbish shams there is none more contemptible than that of the democrat who loudly contends that he is such and yet wishes in private or public life to grasp privileges which give the lie to his contention. To me there is something fine in the American theory that a private citizen can be chosen by the people to occupy a position as great as that of the mightiest monarch, and to exercise a power which may for the time being surpass that of Czar, Kaiser, or Pope, and that then, after having filled this position, the man shall leave it as an unpensioned private citizen, who goes back into the ranks of his fellow-citizens with entire self-respect, claiming nothing save what on his own individual merits he is entitled to receive. But it is not in the least fine, it is vulgar and foolish, for the President or ex-President to make believe, and, of all things in the world, to feel pleased if other people make believe, that he is a kind of second-rate or imitation king. It is as if a Roman ex-dictator wished to be treated like a king of Pergamum or Antioch! The effort to combine incompatibles merely makes a man look foolish. The positions of President and King are totally different in kind and degree; and it is silly, and worse than silly, to forget this. It is not of much consequence whether other people accept the American theory of the Presidency; but it is of very much consequence that the American people, including especially any American who has held the office, shall accept the theory and live up to it.
However, in this case, the Italian king insisted upon treating me upon "the most favored guest" principle. When we dined at the palace, by the way, I struck one bit of etiquette which I did not strike at any other court. I had endeavored to dispose of my hat when I left my coat in the, anteroom, but it was returned to me with every symptom of surprise and horror, and as the other male members among the guests retained theirs, I went on with mine. When the royal party came in, and I was brought up to the queen to take her in to dinner, I again thought it was time for me to get rid of the hat. But not a bit of it! I found I was expected to walk in with the queen on my arm, and my hat in my other hand—a piece of etiquette which reminded me of nothing with which I was previously acquainted except a Jewish wedding on the East Side of New York, where the participants and guests of honor wear their hats during the ceremony, and where, on the occasions when I was Police Commissioner, and occasionally attended such weddings, I would march solemnly in to the wedding-feast with the bride, or the bride's mother, on one arm, and my hat in my other hand. Both at the Italian Court and at the East Side weddings, however, some attendant took the hat as soon as I sat down at the table. 

At dinner I took as great a fancy to the queen as I had already taken to the king. I sat between the queen and her niece—whom she had always treated as an elder daughter or younger sister—the Princess Royal of Servia. Both spoke French, not English. I am sorry to say that I am too much like Chaucer's Abbess in that my French is more like that of Stratford-at-Bow, than to French of Paris. But still, such as it is, I speak it with daring fluency; and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The queen is a really fine woman, with a strong touch of the heroic in her, and I greatly liked the princess also. They interested me because, to an American, it was curious to meet cultivated women, fond of reading, whose acquaintance with books barely touched the limits of English literature. In other words, they were cultivated people of the Balkans of southeastern Europe. They knew French well and some German, but very little English. Both had a passionate love for the Montenegrin land, for its people and its history, and they were delighted when they found that I really did know its history and shared to the full their admiration for it. They were also interested to find that I knew Carmen Sylva's writings, especially her translations of the Rumanian folk-songs; and the various translations of the poetry of the Balkan Slavs. The princess was in sympathy a thorough Montenegrin and not a Servian, and I found respected the Bulgarians more than she did the Servians. I was amused to find that the princess knew all about my family, and put me many questions about my elder daughter, whom she laughingly referred to as "the Princess Alice."
The Italian queen herself was obviously a fine and noble woman, and she was the real peasant queen, the Saga queen, the queen of the folk stories and fairy-tales—the kind of queen whom the hero meets when he starts out with his wallet and staff and travels "far and far and farther than far," and finally comes to a palace up to which he strolls, and sees the king sitting in front of the door looking at the sheep or the chickens. To be king or queen in a country like Italy at the present day means unending strain and worry, and both the king and the queen were faithfully and conscientiously and wisely, and with great self-devotion and self-abnegation, doing everything they could to meet the difficulties of an uncommonly difficult situation. They are loving and faithful to each other—I know you share my bourgeois prejudices against domestic immorality, which are stronger directly in proportion as the social position of the offenders is higher—and it was good to see their relations, together and with their children. The queen spoke with horror of war and violence, and mentioned that she did not think she could ever strike a blow herself, unless in defense of her children, or if her husband was attacked by an assassin; and as she spoke her eyes smoldered and she straightened her tall form. She loves to talk of her life at home in Montenegro, and one anecdote she told me gave me an insight into the reason why the Montenegrins show a more than medieval devotion to their sovereign. She said that when she was a child a famine came to the people, who were finally reduced to eat only rice; and her father, then reigning prince and present king, summoned his family together, and told them that "their mother had much to do and needed meat and would continue to eat it, but that he and the children would from that time on eat only rice, until the people too had more than rice to eat; and his proposal was carried out to the letter.
After leaving Rome Mrs. Roosevelt and I tried to repeat the drive over the Cornichi which we had taken twenty-three years before on our honeymoon, doing it the reverse direction. We started in an old-style three horse carriage —not a motor—from Spezia, and as we had been able to conceal the fact that we were going to Spezia our first day's drive to Sestri Levante was delightful, and we enjoyed the night at a funny little old-style hotel, the waves washing the wall beneath our balcony. But they found us out even before the end of this afternoon, and the officers of the municipality called upon us that evening, and the band gave us a serenade; and next day both the natives and the tourists all along our route had heard about our coming; and by noon it had become evident that the enjoyment of our trip was at an end, and we abandoned it. After that, throughout my stay in Europe, the visits to Arthur Lee and yourself, and my twenty-four hours with Edward Grey in the valley of the Itchen, and through the New Forest, represented the only occasions when I was able to shake off my semi-public character for more than an hour or two at a time.
We spent a week with Mrs. Roosevelt's sister at her house at Porto Maurizio; then I left Mrs. Roosevelt and Ethel there, for I wished them not to get over-tired, while Kermit and I made a flying trip to Vienna and Budapest.
I had originally intended to come straight home to America from Africa. I abandoned this idea on receiving the invitation to deliver the Romanes lecture at Oxford, because this was an invitation I wished to accept; and I appreciated being asked to deliver the lecture. It was the kind of thing I was really glad to do. But immediately afterward I was asked to speak at the Sorbonne. This again I was glad to do. When I accepted, however, I was certain that the Kaiser would not stand my speaking in England and France and not in Germany; and, sure enough, I soon received from the German Ambassador, by his direction, a request to speak at the University of Berlin; and this again I was glad to do. I then felt that I had entered into all the engagements I could carry through without hurrying myself, and I endeavored to avoid making any others; and I also endeavored to avoid visiting any other countries save France, Germany, and England. But I soon found that while the different rulers did not really care a rap about seeing me, they did not like me to see other rulers and pass them by; and that the same state of mind obtained among the peoples.
At Messina the King of Italy had made a point of my returning to Italy, and the municipality of Rome had—then a year in advance—made such representations about my coming through Rome as to make it evident that I would give grave offense if I went round it in order to get up into France. Accordingly I had to go. Then the Austrian Ambassador (a Hungarian), whom I like, raised a perfect clamor against my omitting Austria; and I also found that the Hungarians would really have had their feelings hurt if I did not visit Hungary. Then the Norwegian Minister to Washington, and our own Minister in Norway, both wrote me that the Norwegians would feel permanently aggrieved if after having received the Nobel Prize I failed to come to Christiania and give the Nobel Lecture customary in such cases, inasmuch as I was giving addresses in Berlin, Paris, and Oxford. As soon as I accepted this, I found that Sweden and Denmark would in their turn have had their feelings injured to the last point by failure on my part to visit them when I was so near, and that Holland was already making great preparations because, on account of my Dutch descent, they claimed a certain proprietorship in me. As I had to pass through Belgium, and as the Belgians had been very kind to me in Africa, I was glad to stop there also, I had not intended to be presented to any sovereign; for I have the strongest feeling about the attitude of so many Americans in desiring to be presented to the different sovereigns. The latter, poor good people, must be driven nearly mad by such requests; for which there is no warrant whatever, in the great majority of cases.
Moreover I believed that the sovereigns could not care to see me; an attitude of mind with which I most cordially sympathized. I can imagine nothing more dreary than being called upon to receive retired politicians, who have no official standing and no right to any official honors, and who nevertheless may be sensitive if they are not given the honors to which they have no claim. However, the unfortunate sovereigns evidently felt that it would be misunderstood if they did not show me attention, and through the ambassadors or foreign ministers I was requested to visit almost every country in Europe, and to visit the sovereign of every such country. Switzerland was an exception. Here I had been asked to attend the Calvin Quadricentenary which I could not do; and as I was not asked by the Government until my trip was half over, when I was eagerly endeavoring to cut out every possible engagement, I did not go there. The result has been that to this day I am now and then called upon to explain why I did not go there; and to my concern I found that I had hurt the feelings of a great many good people who thought I had slighted them—not that they would ever have dreamed of caring one way or the other if it were not for the fact that they saw a fuss made about me in other countries; whereupon they illustrated Lincoln's view that "there's a deal of human nature in mankind" by promptly proceeding to feel injured.
I had precisely the same experience with Russia. I do not for a moment believe that the Russians wished to see me, and least of all the Czar; they would have been anything but pleased had I come; but inasmuch as I never went near Russia, they all now feel slightly aggrieved; and only the other day I received a warm invitation from the Czar to come to Russia this summer, together with a complaint about my not having visited it already. I did not deem it necessary to explain in full, as no good would come of it; but I would hate to go to Russia in any way as guest of the ruling authorities, and feel that I was thereby stopped from speaking on behalf of Finland, of the Jews, of the persecuted Russian liberals, and of all the many other people upon whom the iron despotism of the bureaucracy bears with such crushing weight.
I said above that I doubted whether the sovereigns cared to see me. I am now inclined to think that they did, as a relief to the tedium, the dull, narrow routine of their lives. I shall always bear testimony to the courtesy and good manners, and the obvious sense of responsibility and duty, of the various sovereigns I met. But of course, as was to be expected, they were like other human beings in that the average among them was not very high as regards intellect and force. Indeed the kind of driving force and energy needed to make a first-class President or Prime Minister, a great general or War Minister, would be singularly out of place in the ordinary constitutional monarch. Apparently what is needed in a constitutional king is that he shall be a kind of sublimated American Vice-President; plus being socially at the head of that part of his people which you have called "the free masons of fashion." The last function is very important; and the king's lack of political power, and his exalted social position, alike cut him off from all real comradeship with the men who really do the things that count; for comradeship must imply some equality, and from this standpoint the king is doubly barred from all that is most vital and interesting. Politically he can never rise to, and socially he can never descend to, the level of the really able men of the nation. I cannot imagine a more appallingly dreary life for a man of ambition and power.
The kings whom I saw were not as a whole very ambitious or very forceful, though fine, honest, good fellows; and the monotony of their lives evidently made them welcome any diversion in the shape of a stranger, who gave them an entirely new point of view, and with whom, because of the nature of the case, they knew they could be intimate without any danger of the intimacy being misconstrued, or leading to unpleasant situations in the future. They had made the advances, not I; they knew that I was not coming back to Europe, that I would never see them again, or try in any way to keep up relations with them; and so they felt free to treat us with an intimacy, and on a footing of equality, which would have been impossible with a European, the subject of some one of them (I think this was why they asked us to stay in the palaces).
In a way, although the comparison sounds odd, these sovereigns, in their relations among themselves and with others, reminded me of the officers and their wives in one of our western army posts in the old days, when they were all shut up together and away from the rest of the world, were sundered by an impassable gulf from the enlisted men and the few scouts, hunters, and settlers around about, and were knit together into one social whole, and nevertheless were riven asunder by bitter jealousies, rivalries, and dislikes. Well, the feelings between a given queen and a given dowager-empress, or a. small king and the emperor who on some occasion had relished bullying him, were precisely the same as those between the captain's lady and the colonel's spinster daughter, or the sporting lieutenant and the martinet major, in a lonely army post.
As we traveled, we found that the royalties at one court were almost sure to have written to their kinsfolk at the next court (for they are all interrelated) things about us, just exactly as people would write from one army post to another in the old days. They were always sure to wish to hear from me about some of the things that I had done while I was President, especially the building of the Panama Canal, the voyage of the battle fleet, the handling of the coal strike, and various matters concerning the control of the trusts and the control of the mob, and the relations of both with Socialism; and they were at least as anxious to hear about my regiment, and especially about my life in the West, evidently regarding it as an opportunity to acquire knowledge at first-hand and at close range concerning the Buffalo-Bill and Wild-West side of American existence.
   
    Most of them had obviously read up my writings for the occasion, and would appeal to me for enlightenment upon points which they could not understand; and then when I illustrated these points by stories and incidents, they would usually need further enlightenment about some of the expressions I used in telling the stories, and they would evidently solemnly write or tell one another just what these expressions were. Accordingly, after the usual formal and perfunctory conversation with the new king or crown prince, or whoever it was, he would, with a little preliminary maneuvering, ask me if I would mind repeating the story I had told some preceding king about this, that, or the other frontier hero who had afterward become a public servant holding my commission—wishing to know just how and why it was that Benjamin Franklin Daniels, afterward Marshal of Arizona, had his ear "bit off" in the course of the exercise of his duties as peace officer, or why Hon. Seth Bullock, who was Marshal in South Dakota, and was to meet me in London, had regarded homicide as a regrettable but inevitable incident of a political career in territorial days; or he might (and in two cases actually did) say'' I beg your pardon, but I do not quite understand what is a two-gun man," which would necessitate a brief review of the exercise of the right of private war under primitive conditions in the Far West, and the advantages accruing to the cause of virtue if its special champion was able to use a revolver in either hand. All these small kings had vague ambitions, which they knew would never be gratified, for military distinction, and hunting dangerous game, and they always had questions to put about the Spanish War and the African trip. They also all stood distinctly in awe of the German Kaiser, who evidently liked to drill them; and both the big and the small ones felt much jealousy of one another, and at the same time felt joined together and sundered from all other people by their social position.
Before I had seen them I had realized in a vague way that a king's life nowadays must be a very limited life; but the realization was brought home to me very closely on this trip. I can understand a woman's liking to be queen fairly well (that is, if she is not an exceptional woman), for if, as is sometimes the case, as was the case for instance with both the Queen of Norway and the Crown Princess of Sweden, she has made a love match, she has the ordinary happiness that comes to the happy woman with husband and children, and in addition the ceremonial and social part would be apt to appeal to her and to be taken seriously by her. But as for the man! It would be very attractive to be a king with the power of a dictator, and the ability to wield that power, to be a Frederick the Great, for instance, or even a man like the old Kaiser "William, who if not exactly a great man yet had the qualities which enabled him to use and be used by Bismarck, Moltke, and von Boon. But the ordinary king—and I speak with cordial liking of all the kings I met—has to play a part in which the dress parade is ludicrously out of proportion to the serious effort; there is a quite intolerable quantity of sack to the amount of bread. If he is a decent, straight, honorable fellow, he can set a good example—and yet if he is not, most of his subjects, including almost all the clergymen, feel obliged to be blind and to say that he is; and he can exercise a certain small influence for good on public affairs in an indirect fashion. But he can play no part such as is played by the real leaders in the public life of to-day, if he is a constitutional monarch.
Understand me. I do not mean that he fails to serve a useful purpose, just as the flag serves a useful purpose. Only a very foolish creature will talk of the flag as nothing but a bit of dyed or painted bunting, because it is a symbol of enormous consequence in the life and thought of the people. Similarly, the king may serve a purpose of enormous usefulness as a symbol, and I have no question that for many peoples, it would be a misfortune not to have such a symbol, such a figurehead. I am not speaking of the king from the standpoint of his usefulness to the community, which I fully admit; I am merely saying that from his own standpoint, if he is a man of great energy, force and power, it must be well-nigh intolerable to have to content himself with being simply king in the figurehead or symbol fashion. When I went to Vienna, I met Harry White, an old friend and the best man in our diplomatic service, who had, most unfortunately and improperly, and for reasons of unspeakable triviality, been turned out of the service by President Taft. Without White's help I really do not see how I could have gotten through my Austro-Hungarian experience. The Hengelmiillers, the Austrian representatives in Washington, had crossed the ocean to meet me, and I was so flooded with attractive invitations, public and private, both in Vienna and Budapest, that I hardly had one moment to myself. I did, however, get an hour to visit certain bookstores, because I wanted to buy some of the old German hunting books. The popular reception in Vienna was even greater than the popular reception in Rome; I was received very much as I was received when as President I visited San Francisco, or Seattle, or St. Louis, or New Orleans. The streets and squares around the hotel were blocked with crowds, and when I drove to Schonbrunn to dine with the Emperor, the whole route was lined on both sides with onlookers. It was evident to me that the people did not in the least understand my real position, although I had done everything in my power to make it plain; they thought of me as still the great American leader, the man who was to continue to play in the future of American politics something like the part he had played in the past. Moreover this was the view that almost all the statesmen took. No explanations of mine were treated as anything but rather insincere and affected self-depreciation, and my statement of the bald fact that under our system and traditions an ex-President became of little or no importance was always greeted with polite but exasperating incredulity; and I finally gave up any attempt to do more than at each successive capital to state the fact with entire clearness, and then to let them refuse to believe it if they chose. I hated to have them deceive themselves; but they absolutely refused to let me undeceive them, and that was all there was about it.
The Emperor was an interesting man. With him again I had to speak French. He did not strike me as a very able man, but he was a gentleman, he had good instincts, and in his sixty years' reign he had witnessed the most extraordinary changes and vicissitudes. He talked very freely and pleasantly, sometimes about politics, sometimes about hunting; and after my first interview, when he got up to tell me "good-by," he said that he had been particularly interested in seeing me because he was the last representative of the old system, whereas I embodied the new movement, the movement of the present and the future, and that he had wished to see me so as to know for himself how the prominent exponent of that movement felt and thought. He knew that I disliked the old king of the Belgians who was just dead, and suddenly asked me if I would have visited Belgium if he had been alive; and when I said no, he responded that he quite understood why, and added "c'etait un homme absolument mediant,'' explaining that there were very few men who were absolutely and without qualification "mechant," but that Leopold was one.

The dinner at Schonbrunn was interesting, of course, and not so dull, as those functions are apt to be. The Emperor and all the Austrian guests had one horrid habit. The finger-bowls were brought on, each with a small tumbler of water in the middle; and the Emperor and all the others proceeded to rinse their mouths, and then empty them into the finger-bowls. I felt a little as if the days of Kaunitz had been revived—I believe that eminent servant of Maria Theresa used to take a complete toilet-set with him to dinner, including a tooth brush, which he used at the close of the feast. However, all of the guests were delightful; and both the men and the women who came in after dinner were on the whole charming. I was told that Viennese society was frivolous, but it happened, I suppose naturally, that those men whom I saw were most of them interested in real problems of statecraft and warcraft. However, the world that lives for amusement was much in evidence at the Jockey Club. This struck me as a typical Viennese institution. Only the higher nobility belong, and a few outsiders of note. The people were charming, well bred, with delightful manners, joining to the love of sport among corresponding Englishmen, a love of gambling, and a propensity to fight duels, which gave them a different touch, and living in a world as remote from mine as if it had been in France before the Revolution. They hailed me with the utmost good comradeship, because they were almost all big game hunters, and were immensely interested in my African hunt, and were also much interested in my regiment and my experiences in the Spanish War.
Of course the fact that I had been President, and at the same time had done the kind of thing in war and sport which it would have gratified their ambitions to do, also impressed them; and then, to my intense amusement, I found that they were in cordial sympathy with me because I had attacked the big financial interests, and because I frankly looked down on mere moneyed men, the people of enormous wealth who had nothing but their wealth behind them, and whose power was simply the power of the "money touch." There was to me something very humorous in finding what in America was regarded as a democratic movement against the powerful and arrogant aristocracy of wealth was among these Viennese looked upon as a movement fundamentally in the interests of the right kind of aristocracy, because it was teaching the man of mere money bags that his money by itself simply rendered him vulgar, and entitled him to no consideration. In the same way I was much amused to find from casual remarks made by my hosts that what they called the "Kleiner Adel" were not admitted to the club any more than the financiers were.^1 They had not such feeling against me and Kermit. We represented men of a totally alien life.
I found that they already knew that I as strongly objected to Americans marrying into their titled families as they could object themselves. This gave them, on the one hand, a feeling of understanding and sympathy with me, and, on the other hand, put our relations just as they ought to be; that is, they felt they could be absolutely courteous to me, and establish absolutely good relations with me, just as they could with an Arab Sheik, and ask me to their houses and visit my house and yet not be afraid of any complications following. One or two of them had a slight curiosity to find out exactly why I objected as strongly to any closer alliance with them as they did to any closer alliance with Americans; but most of them were too well bred to think it worth while to make inquiries. To those that did make the inquiries I laughed and told them that they would understand my position if they realized that I wished to keep for myself and all my kinsfolk and all my people an attitude which would make us respect equally and feel equally at home with Andreas Hofer on one side and Count Andrassy on the other, and that such an attitude could only be kept as long as their people and our people met on a footing of entire equality and good-will, but with full recognition of the fact that any attempt at too intimate relations would result in showing utter discordance. In other words we could really enjoy not merely friendship, but a substantial measure of intimacy, if we did not try to make it too close; because if we came too close we should find that our systems of life were fundamentally irreconcilable, although each might have many good points and might be the best for a given set of surroundings.
I visited the riding-school, one of the very few places in Europe where one can still see the manege as it is described in that great book of the Duke of Newcastle's—I think it is his—in the seventeenth century; and I inspected a Hungarian Hussar regiment, which interested me immensely, and where again I was received with the most genuine cordiality as a fellow soldier, all the officers, who of course had themselves seen no actual fighting, being very anxious to know about my regiment. I was very much impressed by both the officers and the enlisted men, and also by the horses.
We went out to lunch with a perfect old trump, Count Wiltczek, who had a castle a few miles out of Vienna which he had restored, so that it looked exactly as it did in the Middle Ages and was similarly arranged within—although he had embellished it with books and pictures of a later period. On this trip—here while visiting this castle, just as at Cairo—I was helped for the first time in my life by the fact that I had always gratified my thirst for useless information. I have never demanded of knowledge anything except that it shall be useless. Now this means that while I know nothing that the average scholar does not know, yet that I know a good deal as to which the average politician or man of affairs is abysmally ignorant; and as naturally my life has been chiefly led among politicians and men of affairs, when it was not led among frontiersmen, there are a great many things I have studied about which I have rarely or never had a chance to speak—largely, my dear sir, because it is only occasionally that I am thrown for a few hours intimately in your company! Until I went abroad this time I doubt if I had ever derived the slightest benefit, however small, from such things as a knowledge of Moslem travels in the thirteenth century, or Magyar history, or the Mongol conquests, or the growth of the races of Middle Europe and the deeds of their great men. On this occasion, however, my knowledge of these things really added to my pleasure, and brought me into touch with people. For instance, Wiltczek hugely enjoyed finding that, besides a general interest in sport and in medieval ways and customs, I had taken it for granted that his family, if not Czeck, was of Polish origin, and descended from the Piasts and from Boleslav the Glorious; that when he showed me a portrait of Batory, I was familiar with that Hungarian king of Poland and his wars against Ivan the Terrible; that I knew the details of Rudolph's fight with Ottocar of Bohemia;, and so on and so on. He took a great fancy to Kermit, whom he called "leetle" Kermit—for although Kermit was nearly six feet, Wiltczek towered above him—led him round by the hand through most of the building, and then kissed him good-by! Kermit is an impassive person, and was much less upset by this than an English boy would have been; still he was distinctly embarrassed; and I had fearful apprehensions myself when I came to say good-by, but fortunately the Count merely enfolded me in a bear-like arm clasp.
After leaving Vienna I went to Hungary. On the way to Budapest, we stopped for lunch at Count Apponyi's. Apponyi met us at the station (where there was the usual reception) and drove us to his castle. It was interesting to an American to pass successively through various villages each consisting only of Slavs, Magyars or Germans. Apponyi is a really fine fellow. He had been in Washington with the Inter-Parliamentary Peace Congress, and had dined with me at the White House. He represented a type of Liberal much more common in Continental Europe prior to 1848 than at present; but in some ways, purely Hungarian. In Hungary, in striking contrast to what was the case in France, in Italy, and I believe in Spain, and certainly in much of Germany, I found that Liberalism and very strong religious feelings were not regarded as incompatible. In France and Italy devout Catholics were almost always reactionary, not only in matters ecclesiastical but in matters governmental; and Liberals were always anticlerical—probably inevitably so.
In Hungary I met many Liberals, most of them Catholics, some of them Calvinists, who were good "church people" in much the same sense that so many of my associates in America are good church people; and in consequence they felt that I understood them and that they were in sympathy with me, as they could not be expected to be in sympathy with men sharing their political views who at the same time ridiculed, or at least were wholly unable to understand, their religious views. Apponyi was a devout Catholic, but he was not only an advanced Liberal in matters political but also in matters ecclesiastical; he was a staunch friend of many Protestants, and later took me round to see the younger Kossuth, a Protestant. In this respect he was like an American Liberal of the best type; yet in matters purely political it was half amusing, half melancholy, to realize the doctrinaire limitations of his attitude. He was in theory an almost irrational advocate of immediate international peace; just as the Norwegians also were, in theory; and he and the Norwegian delegates, whom I had met among the various international peace delegations, were all for universal arbitration and disarmament, and for passing high-sounding resolutions in favor of immediate peace all over the earth, resolutions which always remind me of Tilman Joy's sneer in one of John Hay's poems, at those who "resoloot till the cows come home,'" and cannot and will not give practical effect to their resolutions; and yet he represented the violent and extreme Hungarian party which was practically working for a separation from Austria that would probably bring war; just as the Norwegian peace people were at the very time championing separation from Sweden, a separation which certainly told against peace and might well have produced immediate war. In other words, these peace champions of Hungary and Norway, who in word and in resolution, and in proclamation at their conventions, went much further in demanding arbitration and peace than I was willing to go (simply because for a really cool and far-sighted man to act as they were acting would have been base hypocrisy) were, as regards the only practical matters where they could give effect to their theories, doing all they could to provoke war. This is not an exceptional attitude among professional peace advocates. I have met it again and again. In my own country I have had labor unions and similar organizations pass resolutions, and send them to me, demanding that we cease building up the Navy and insist on universal international arbitration, at the very same time that they demanded that I adopt the policy of Japanese exclusion in such form as would certainly have brought us war with Japan. War would probably have come if I had either yielded to their wishes as to the form which the policy of exclusion was to take (in accordance with their wishes), or had failed to keep at the highest point of efficiency the American Navy. It would certainly have come if I had yielded to their wishes in both regards. Apponyi in Hungary was honestly convinced that he was standing up for the oppressed and for the cause of righteousness by insisting that the Magyar should be at least on an equality with the Austrian German; and he was shocked and puzzled by finding that a large number of Hungarian Slavs regarded his attitude, and the attitude of the Magyars, toward them as itself an attitude of pure oppression, and which showed the fundamental hypocrisy of the Magyar attitude toward the German.
One reason why he and the other Hungarian politicians whom I met got on well with me was probably the fact that I knew a good deal of Hungarian history and Hungarian constitutional claims; that I understood, for instance, that the Emperor of Austria was not emperor in Hungary, and always alluded to him as the king—to give him his full, and delightful title, "apostolic king"—while I was in Hungary ; that I understood that the analogy between England and Ireland was to be found, not in Austria's attitude toward Hungary, but in Hungary's attitude toward Croatia, etc., etc. As I have said, any ordinary scholar with a good second-hand knowledge of history is acquainted with all this as a matter of course; but among politicians the one-eyed is apt to be king—so far as concerns foreign history, or indeed so far as concerns any branch of abstract knowledge not dealing with applied politics, applied economics, or money-making.
When I was received in the legislative hall at Budapest, I was at first a little bit puzzled to know why they so immensely appreciated my allusions to Arpad, St. Stephen, Mathew Corvinus, and other Hungarian heroes, to the battle of Mohacs, to the provisions of the Golden Bull of one King Bela, and to the curious indirect results of the Bogo-mil heresy, and the double part played by racial and religious considerations in causing the Protestants of Hungary and Transylvania to side with the Turk rather than with the Austrian; ultimately I found that the reason was their sensitiveness to the fact that all these names meant nothing whatever to the public men of other European countries. Evidently they felt as regards the ignorance they encountered concerning their own national history when they went to Berlin, Paris, or London, much as an American felt forty or fifty years ago, when he found that Europe quite simply ignored the men and events that he had believed to be of capital importance. It was the feeling of injured dignity natural to the man who does not like to have his cherished heroes and their deeds treated as provincial, and who is not as yet sufficiently self-confident to realize that such treatment reflects, not on him or them, but on those who really show themselves provincial by failing to appreciate the fundamental importance of what has happened outside their own kin. To a Hungarian the fact that the Golden Bull was analogous to the Great Charter, and was issued about the same time that the latter was signed, seemed of such interest that he could not understand an Englishman never having heard of the said Golden Bull; and in consequence he was much pleased to find that an ex-President from across the ocean had heard about it, and knew for instance that it solemnly reserved to the nobles the right of revolution if the king misbehaved himself—I did not think it necessary to elaborate the comparison between this and the action of certain South American republics in inserting into their constitutions a guarantee of the right of secession.
In Vienna they had been very much pleased when, while President, I had cordially approved the action of Austria in changing the title, although not really the substance, of the Austrian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ultimately I hope that the Balkan States will be able to stand by themselves, perhaps in some sort of confederacy; but as yet the example of Servia is not sufficiently encouraging to make me believe that Bosnia and Herzegovina would make more progress alone than under Austria; for Austrian rule bears no resemblance to Austrian rule half a century ago, and in any event is infinitely preferable to the rule of the Turk. In Hungary they knew that I had approved of this action, and were on the whole glad—the Austrian Governor of the two provinces (Kallay) did a really remarkable work in developing them—but the Magyars were a little uneasy at anything that tended to increase the Slav populations of the Dual Empire.
In Budapest the Austrian archduke who represented the empire and who was a very good fellow, but whose name I cannot now remember, gave me a lunch, and the Prime Minister a dinner, and the head of the Opposition another dinner, and I was taken out to see a stock-farm where I took lunch. The really interesting part, however, was meeting the people themselves. They were delightful. Of course I became hopelessly mixed as to their names; it was impossible to meet a couple of hundred men and women, even very intimately, for forty-eight hours, and disentangle them completely from the couple of hundred different men and women I had met in the previous forty-eight hours, or the couple of hundred whom I met in the preceding forty-eight hours. However, the general impression was very vivid.
I was struck in Hungary, as later in Holland and the Scandinavian countries, by the fact that I was really more in sympathy with the people whom I met than with the corresponding people of the larger continental nations. Their ways of looking at life were more like mine, and their attitude toward the great social and economic questions more like those of my friends in America. The Hungarian women, for instance, were almost the only women of Continental Europe with whom I could talk in the same intimate way that I could with various American and English women whom I have known—Mrs. Lodge, Mrs. La Farge, Mrs. Selmes, and other friends, of my own country, and Lady Delamere and Mrs. Sanderson of your country, whom I met at Nairobi, and Lady Spring Bice, and others. The Hungarian women were charming. They seemed to have the solid qualities of the North Germans, and yet the French charm, which the North Germans so totally lacked. I was genuinely sorry to think that I should never see them again. I greatly liked the Hungarian men. Whether it was simply an accident, or whether those I met were typical, I cannot say, but I certainly met an unusual number who were both interesting, and interested in things that were worth while; and who were keenly alert about political and economic matters, and yet were enthusiastic sportsmen or were well read or had other interests that were not merely stodgy. Teleki, the African explorer, was one; either his wife or his sister-in-law had written a novel worth reading. By the way, a Hungarian novelist whose books I had always liked, the author of "St. Peter's Umbrella," also called on me, and later caused me no slight embarrassment by giving an interview in which he contrasted my attitude of appreciation of his novels with the lack of such appreciation on the part of the Austrian imperial family!
At the different dinners and in the houses I visited I found almost everybody able to speak English, and well acquainted with whatever of note was written in either French, English, or German. Of course there is not much written in Magyar, and in order to hold communion with the rest of the world cultivated people in Hungary have to know foreign languages in a way that it is not necessary for Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Germans, and so they are pleasanter for foreigners to get on with. One of the leading public men I met—I think an ex-Prime Minister—was a Calvinist, and I was interested to see the strong impress that Calvinism had stamped upon the Magyar character. Evidently the Calvinistic theology was much more of a force with him than with most even of the descendants of the Puritans with whom I am intimate in America; and while the liberalizing spirit of the age and of his political party and the needs of Hungary had greatly broadened him, he still retained to a curious degree traits which reminded me all the time of those of men with whom I was familiar in my own country. His ancestors and mine had been at the Synod of Dort together three centuries before, and though he was very much broader and more tolerant than they were, he was not able to look at their work from quite the detached standpoint that to me seemed the only possible standpoint. But he was a fine fellow, and I was in thorough sympathy with him; and his wife was a brilliant and charming woman. Altogether I could not overstate how thoroughly at home I felt in Hungary, and how I enjoyed myself in spite of the rush in which I was kept.