ONLY GLIMPSES of Salzburg remain: bell-towers, bridges, piazzas, fountains, a dome or two and an impression of cloisters which might all have been flown here by djinns and reassembled as an Italian Renaissance city the wrong side of the Alps.
But I didn’t tarry, and for a depressing reason. The evocative smell of hot ski-wax drifted through many of the windows and swarms of people, little older than me and all bound for the mountains, were clumping the streets with skis over their shoulders. They filled the arcades and the cafés and shouted joyfully to each other as though they were already swooping about the high slopes; worse still, some were English. I loved ski-ing and all this made me feel lonely and out of things. So, early next morning, turning my back on the Salzkammergut and the lakes and the beckoning peaks of Styria and the Tyrol, I slipped away; and soon I was plodding north-west and ever further from temptation through the woods of Upper Austria. I slept in a barn near the village of Eigendorf—too small a hamlet for any map—and the next two nights in Frankenburg and Ried. One of them, spent in a loft where all the racks were filled with apples, was sweet-smelling almost to swooning point. Little has stuck from early Austrian days except the charm of these minor mountains.
* * *
St. Martin, one of Baron Liphart’s castles, the earliest of those houses of friends to whom he had written on my behalf, is my first real landmark. To avoid arriving out of the blue, I telephoned before setting out, and learnt that the owner was in Vienna; but he had asked his agent to look after me if I turned up. Graf Arco-Valley, a great favourite of many English people, called ‘Nando’ (but not by me as we never met[1]) had been at Oxford or Cambridge a couple of generations earlier. The schloss was shut up, the friendly agent told me. But we wandered through its twilit rooms and walked about under the trees in the park. Finally he gave me a feast in the cheerful and pretty inn, urging me to tuck in with the assiduity of a jolly uncle taking a nephew out from school. There were a couple of musicians, a zither-player and a violinist, and everybody sang. He told me at breakfast he had telephoned to the next schloss marked down on the Liphart itinerary: I would be welcome any time, they had said. (Things were beginning to look up! I would have given anything to know what my kind sponsor in Munich had written. It was a change to have favourable reports circulating.) As a result, after a second cow-shed sojourn near Riedau, I found myself in the corner tower of another castle two evenings later, wallowing in a bath of ancient shape, enclouded by the scent of the cones and the pine-logs that roared like caged lions in the huge copper stove.
* * *
The word ‘schloss’ means any degree of variation between a fortified castle and a baroque palace. This one was a fair sized manor house. I had felt shy as I ploughed through the snow of the long avenue late that afternoon; quite baselessly. To go by the solicitude of the trio at the stove-side in the drawing-room—the old Count and his wife and their daughter-in-law—I might, once again, have been a schoolboy asked out for a treat, or, better still, a polar explorer on the brink of expiring. “You must be famished after all that walking!” the younger Gräfin said, as a huge tea appeared: she was a beautiful dark-haired Hungarian and she spoke excellent English. “Yes,” said the elder, with an anxious smile, “We’ve been told to feed you up!” Her husband radiated silent benevolence as yet another silver dish appeared. I spread a third hot croissant with butter and honey and inwardly blessed my benefactor in Munich.
The Count was old and frail. He resembled, a little, Max Beerbohm in later life, with a touch of Franz Joseph minus the white side-whiskers. (Next day he wrote a chit to some private gallery in Linz on the back of a visiting card. After his name was printed: K.u.K. Kämmerer u. Rittmeister i.R.[2] ‘Imperial and Royal Chamberlain,’ that is, ‘and retired Captain of Horse.’ All through Central Europe the initials ‘K.u.K.’—Kaiserlich und Königlich—were the alliterative epitome of the old Dual Monarchy. Only candidates with sixteen or thirty-two quarterings, I learnt later, were eligible for the symbolic gold key that court chamberlains wore on the back of their full-dress uniforms. But now the Empire and the Kingdom had been dismembered and their thrones were empty; no doors opened to the gold keys, the heralds were dispersed, the regiments disbanded and the horses dead long ago. The engraved words croaked loud of spent glories. Rare then, each of those symbols by now must be one with the translucent red button, the unicorn-embroidered robe and the ruby and jade clasp of a mandarin of the first class at the court of Manchus: ‘Finis rerum, and an end of names and dignities and whatsoever is terrene...’) I admired his attire, the soft buckskin knee-breeches and gleaming brogues and a grey and green loden jacket with horn buttons and green lapels. These were accompanied out-of-doors by the green felt hat with its curling blackcock’s tail-feather which I had seen among a score of walking sticks in the hall. It was in Salzburg that I had first admired these Austrian country clothes. They were similar in kind, but less splendid in detail, to the livery of the footmen who kept bringing in those silver dishes. There was a feeling of Lincoln green about them, woodland elegance that the Count carried off with the ease of a courtier and a cuirassier.
I made myself as tidy as I could after my bath. At dinner the Count, drawing on a well-stored but failing memory, recalled ancient journeys he had made as a young A.D.C., attached to an Archduke who was a passionate shot. Out of affability to me, I think, his reminiscences were all connected with the British Isles. ‘Grandes battues’ in County Meath were recalled, and almost antediluvian pheasant-stands at Chatsworth and late-Victorian grouse-drives at Dunrobin; house parties of untold magnificence. “—Und die Herzogin von Sutherland!,” he sighed: “eine Göttin!” A goddess! Ancient balls were conjured up and dinners at Marlborough House; there were discreet hints of half-forgotten scandals; and I saw, in my mind’s eye, hansoms bound for assignations, bowling up St. James’s and turning into a gaslit Jermyn Street. When the name of a vanished grandee escaped his memory, his wife would prompt him. His mind wandered back and away to the estates of a cousin in Bohemia—“The Czechs have taken them away now,” he said with another sigh—and a wild boar shoot which had been held there in honour of Edward VII when he was still Prince of Wales: “Er war scharmant!” I was fascinated by all this. As I listened, the white gloved hand of the Lincoln green footman poured out coffee and placed little silver vermeil-lined goblets beside the Count’s cup and mine. Then he filled them with what I thought was schnapps. I’d learnt what to do with that in recent weeks—or so I thought—and I was picking it up to tilt it into the coffee when the Count broke off his narrative with a quavering cry as though an arrow from some hidden archer had transfixed him: “NEIN! NEIN!,” he faltered. A pleading, ringed and almost transparent hand was stretched out and the stress of the moment drove him into English: “No! No! Nononono—!”
I didn’t know what had happened. Nor did the others. There was a moment of perplexity. Then, following the Count’s troubled glance, all our eyes alighted simultaneously on the little poised silver goblet in my hand. Then both the Countesses, looking from the torment on the Count’s face to the astonishment on mine, dissolved in saving laughter, which, as I put the goblet back on the table, spread to me and finally cleared the distress from the Count’s features too, and replaced it with a worried smile. His anxiety had been for my sake, he said apologetically. The liquid wasn’t schnapps at all, but incomparable nectar—the last of a bottle of a liqueur distilled from Tokay grapes and an elixir of fabulous rarity and age. When we had recovered I felt glad that this marvellous drink had been rescued, above all for the Count’s sake—it was too late a stage in life for any more shocks—and ashamed of my pot-house ways; but they were too kind-hearted for the feeling to last long.
The Count retired early, kissing first the hands and then the cheeks of his wife and daughter-in-law. When he said goodnight to me, his hand felt as light as a leaf. With his free hand he gave my forearm a friendly pat and faded away down a lamplit grove of antlers. Then the elder Gräfin, who had put on spectacles and spread her needlework on her lap, said, “Now come and tell us all about your travels.” So I did my best.
* * *
At this dead time of the year, when agriculture had come to a halt, most of the dwellers in these castles were dispersed until harvest or shooting or school holidays should muster them again. When I think of these havens, later castles at other seasons intrude their memories and the resulting confusion of unlabelled lantern-slides composes a kind of archetypal schloss, of which each separate building becomes a variation.
An archetypal schloss... At once, in my mind’s eye, an angular relic of the Dark Ages confronts the wind on top of a crag. More slowly, a second vision begins to cohere. Staircases entwine. Allegorical ceilings unfold. Conch-blowing tritons, at the heart of radiating vistas of clipped hornbeam, shoot plumes of water at the sky. Both visions are true. But finally a third category emerges: a fair-sized country house, that is, which combines the castle-principle with a touch of the monastery and the farm. It is usually beautiful and always pleasing and sometimes age or venerability demand sterner epithets. A rustic baroque, even if it is only a later superimposition on a much older core, is the presiding style. There are shingle roofs, massive walls whitewashed or mottled with lichen and rectangular and cylindrical towers capped with pyramids or cones or with wasp-waisted cupolas of red or grey tiles. Cavernous gateways breach the arcades of thick and flattened arches. There is a chapel and stables and a coach-house full of obsolete carriages; barns and waggons and sledges and byres and a smithy; then fields and hayricks and woods. Indoors, a pattern of flagstones rings underfoot, or the lighter resonance of polished wood. The spans of elliptical and snow-white cross-vaults spring low in the corners of the rooms and between them flared embrasures taper to tall double windows that are tight shut and ice-flowered in winter, with bolsters between them to foil draughts. In summer the tilt of the slatted shutters guides the glance downwards to leaf-shadows on cobblestones and a battered fountain or a sundial. The pockmarked statues are curdled with lichen. Scythes swish through deep hayfields. There is an interlock of orchards and slanting meadows; and beyond them, cattle and woods and a herd of deer that lift all their antlers simultaneously at the sound of a footfall.
As I shut my eyes and explore, looking-glasses throw back the faded reflections: the corroborative detail assembles fast. In portraits,[3] the solemn seventeenth-century magnates in lace collars and black breastplates are out-numbered by descendants in Addisonian periwigs and powder. Later, by slender figures romantically moustached, and dressed in white uniforms that conjure up pictures of Sarah Bernhardt in l’Aiglon. Lancers’ torsoes taper into their sashes like bobbins. Red and white ribbons cross their breasts and sometimes the Golden Fleece sprouts from those high star-crusted collars. Hands rest on the hilt of a sabre looped with a double-headed-eagle sabretache.[4] Others nurse a plumed shako, a dragoon’s helmet or an uhlan’s czapka with a square top like a mortar-board and tufted with a tall aigrette. In later pictures, pale blue replaces these snowy regimentals, in melancholy homage to the progress in firearms and marksmanship since the battle of Königgrätz. The passion for the chase breaks out over the walls and stags’ antlers spread their points among the panoplies. There are elks’ horns from the frontiers of Poland and Lithuania, bears from the Carpathians, the tushes of wild boars twisting up like moustaches, chamois from the Tyrol and bustards, capercaillies and blackcock; along every available inch of the passages, the twin prongs of roe deer, calligraphically inscribed with a faded date and the venue, multiply forever. A respectable assembly of books fills the library. There is a missal or two in the hall, the Wiener Salonblatt and Vogue lie anachronistically about the drawing room and perhaps a poetical grandson or great-niece has left a pocket-volume of Hyperion or the Duino Elegies on a window-sill. Miniatures and silhouettes constellate the spaces between the portraits and the looking-glasses. Heraldic details abound: crowns or circlets with nine, seven or five pearls celebrate the owner’s rank and stamp his possessions as plentifully as brands on a ranch. On a handy shelf the small gilt volumes of the Almanach de Gotha, a different colour for each degree, fall open automatically, like the Baronetage in the hands of Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall, at the castellan’s own family. Biedermeier tables are crowded with photographs. Scores of summers have faded the green, the royal blue, the canary and the claret-coloured velvet of their frames. Between his embossed crown and a signature turned yellow with age, Franz Joseph presides like an agathos daimon. The Empress, goddess-like among a photographer’s cardboard turrets, gazes into the distance with her hand on the head of an enormous deer-hound. Sewn into her habit, she clears prodigious fences; or with a swan-like turn of her throat, she looks over her bare shoulder under piled-up tiers of thick plaits or cascading coils that are sprinkled with diamond stars.
The libraries of all these castles contained Meyer’s Konversations-lexikon. As soon as I decently could, I would beg to be let loose among its many volumes, with the plea that questions had cropped up on the road that it was a torment to leave unsolved. This often caused surprise, always pleasure: at the least, it solved the problem of entertainment, and sometimes it stirred a kindred curiosity, leading to searches in the library through dense columns of Gothic type. Meyer was sometimes backed up by the Larousse XXème Siècle or the Encyclopaedia Britannica; once, miraculously, in Transylvania, and once, later on, in Moldavia, all three were present. Atlases, maps and picture books were loaded into one’s arms at bedtime.
Shaded paraffin lamps, I think, not electricity, light up a few of these rooms after dark. I’m sure candles lit the music when I turned over for someone at the piano—I can see the glitter of their flames in the removed rings at the end of the keyboard as clearly as I can hear the lieder of Schubert and Strauss and Hugo Wolf, and Der Erlkönig at last. Music played a leading part in all these households. The sound of practising winds along passages, sheet music and bound scores scatter the furniture. The variously shaped instrument cases gathering dust in the attics, bear witness to palmier days when the family and its staff and its guests would assemble for symphonies. Now and then, the pipes of an organ cluster in the hall, and a gilt harp gleams in a corner of the library with all its strings intact.
After I had said goodnight and made my way book-laden along an antlered corridor and up a stone spiral to my room, it was hard to believe I had been sleeping in a byre the night before. There is much to recommend moving straight from straw to a four-poster, and then back again. Cocooned in smooth linen and lulled by the smell of logs and beeswax and lavender, I nevertheless stayed awake for hours, revelling in all these delights and contrasting them with joy to the now-familiar charms of cow-sheds and haylofts and barns. The feeling would still be there when I woke up next morning and looked down from the window.
The last sunrise of January was sliding across a lawn, catching the statues of Vertumnus and Pales and finally Pomona at the far end and stretching their thin and powdery shadows on the untouched snow. Rooky woods feathered the skyline and there was a feeling in the air that the Danube was not far.
* * *
Castles were seldom out of sight. Clustering on the edge of country towns, recumbent with sleepy baroque grace on wooded ledges or beetling above the tree tops, they loomed from afar. One is aware of their presence all the time, and when the traveller steps over the border of a new sphere, he feels like Puss-in-Boots when the peasants tell him that the distant chateau and the pastures and the mills and the barns belong to the Marquis of Carabas. A new name impinges. For a stretch it is Coreth or Harrach or Traun or Ledebur or Trautmannsdorff or Seilern; then it dies away and gives place to another. Perhaps I struck lucky; for when, on the road or during halts at an inn, the theme of the local castle-dwellers cropped up, as they invariably did, there were no Cobbett-like diatribes. The villagers would speak of the local castellan and his family in the possessive tones they might have used for a font or a roodscreen of great antiquity in the parish church. Feelings were often warmer than this; and when bad luck, gambling, extravagance or even total imbecility had sent a local dynasty into decline, this eclipse of a familiar landmark was bewailed as yet another symptom of dissolution.
This hovering Ichabod feeling was everywhere epitomized by old photographs of Franz Josef, battered and faded but cherished; rather strangely, perhaps. His reign had been a succession of private tragedies and public though peripheral erosion. Every few decades some irredentist-loosened fragment of the Empire was detached or—occasionally and worse still—rashly annexed. But these regions were far away at the Empire’s fringes, their inhabitants were foreign, they spoke different languages, and life at the heart of the Empire was still serene and cheerful enough to muffle these shocks and omens. After all, most of that huge assembly of countries, slowly and peacefully acquired through centuries of brilliant dynastic marriage—‘Bella gerunt alii; tu, felix Austria, nubes!’—was still intact; and until 1919—when the centrifugal break-up spared only the Austrian heartlands—a buoyant douceur de vivre had pervaded the whole of life. Or so it appeared to them now, and many seemed to look back to those times with the longing of the Virgilian farmers and shepherds in Latium when they remembered the kind reign of Saturn.
* * *
At Eferding, where I stayed the night, the baroque palace that filled one side of the central square belonged to a descendant of Rüdiger von Starhemberg, the great defender of Vienna in its second siege by the Turks. The name was once more on everyone’s lips, owing to the present Prince Starhemberg’s rôle as commander of the Heimwehr: a Home Guard or militia, I was told, ready to foil any attempted seizure of power by either of the political extremes. I had seen columns of this corps on country roads, dressed in grey uniforms and semi-military ski-caps, shouldering raw-hide knapsacks with the brindled and piebald marking turned outwards. Rather mild they had seemed, to eyes and ears attuned to the fiercer tempo and the stamping and barking the other side of the German border; but they did not escape the accusation of fascism by one half of their opponents. After Dr. Dollfuss, Starhemberg’s picture was the one most often seen in public places: which—again compared to Germany—was not much. They showed a tall, handsome young man with a high-bridged nose and a rather weak chin.
* * *
The scene was beginning to change. My path followed a frozen woodland stream into a region where rushes and waterweed and marsh vegetation and brambles and shrubs were as densely entangled as a primeval forest. Opening on expanses of feathered ice, it was like a mangrove swamp in the Arctic circle. Encased in ice and snow, every twig sparkled. Frost had turned the rushes into palisades of brittle rods and the thickets were loaded with icicles and frozen rainbow-shooting drops. Of birds, I could only see the usual crows and rooks and magpies, but the snow was arrowed with forked prints. It must have teemed with water-fowl at a different time of year and with fish too. Nets were looped stiffly in the branches and a flat-bottomed boat, three-quarters sunk, was frozen in for the winter. It was a white, hushed region under a spell of catalepsy.
The hush was broken by a succession of claps from a lagoon. A heron was slowly hoisting itself off the ice; then a spiral of slower wingbeats lifted it to the top of a Lombardy poplar that was dark with a multitude of dishevelled nests. Its mate, looking enormous as it paced a white pool, cumbrously followed it; and a minute later, I could see their beaks projecting side by side. They were the only ones there, wintering it out in the nearly-empty heronry. The other nests would fill up towards the close of the tadpole season.
It was a marvellous place; an unusual place; I couldn’t quite make it out—half mere, half frozen jungle. It finished at a bank where a row of poplars was interspersed with aspen and birch and willow among blackberry-thickets and hazel. On the other side of this barrier the sky suddenly widened and a great volume of water was flowing dark and fast. In midstream, cloudy with the hemispherical ghosts of weeping-willows, an island divided the rush of the current. There was an answering line of ice on the other bank, then reeds and woods and a fluctuation of timbered mountain.
This second meeting with the Danube had taken me unawares; I had reached it half a day sooner than I thought! As it streamed through those wooded and snowbound ranges the river made an overpowering impression of urgency and force.
My map, when I dug it out, said that the mountains opposite were part of the Bohemian Forest. They had followed the north bank ever since the river had entered Austria a mile or two east of Passau, about thirty miles upstream.
* * *
“In cold weather like this,” said the innkeeper of a Gastwirtschaft further down, “I recommend Himbeergeist.” I obeyed and it was a lightning conversion. Spirit of raspberries, or their ghost—this crystalline distillation, twinkling and ice-cold in its misty goblet, looked as though it were homoeopathically in league with the weather. Sipped or swallowed, it went shuddering through its new home and branched out in patterns—or so it seemed after a second glass—like the ice-ferns that covered the window panes, but radiating warmth and happiness instead of cold, and carrying a ghostly message of comfort to the uttermost fimbria. Fierce winters give birth to their antidotes: Kümmel, Vodka, Aquavit, Danziger Goldwasser. Oh for a thimble full of the cold north! Fiery-frosty potions, sequin-flashers, rife with spangles to spark fuses in the bloodstream, revive fainting limbs, and send travellers rocketing on through snow and ice. White fire, red cheek, heat me and speed me. This discovery cast a glow over the approach of Linz. A few miles on, round a loop of river, the city appeared. It was a vision of domes and belfries gathered under a stern fortress and linked by bridges to a smaller town at the foot of a mountain on the other bank.
* * *
When I got to the fine sweeping piazza in the middle of the city I chose a promising-looking coffee house, kicked off the snow, went in and ordered two boiled eggs. Eier im Glas! It was my latest passion. The delight of tapping the eggs all over with a bone spoon before removing the fragmented shell and sliding the fragile contents into a tumbler intact, then a slice of butter...travellers’ joys. I had chosen more luckily than I knew; for as well as staying me with eggs, the young proprietor and his wife put me up for two nights in their flat over the shop. Better still, next day being Sunday, they lent me some boots and took me ski-ing. The whole of Linz was picnicking on the Pöstlingsberg—the mountain that rose from the opposite bank—and then swirling down its icy and rutted slopes. Starting without any practice, I was soon battered black and blue, but the sorrows of Salzburg were exorcized.
I hobbled round Linz by twilight. Pargeted façades rose up, painted chocolate, green, purple, cream and blue. They were adorned with medallions in high relief and the stone and plaster scroll-work gave them a feeling of motion and flow. Casemented half-hexagons jutted from the first storeys, and windowed three-quarter-cylinders blunted the corners, both of them soaring to the line of the eaves where they shelved into wasp-waists and re-expanded spherically to the same circumference, forming buoyant cupolas and globes; and domes and pinnacles and obelisks joined these decorative onions along the city’s skyline. At ground-level, spiral commemorative columns rose twirling from the flagstones of the piazzas and hoisted radiating, monstrance-like, counter-Reformation bursts of gold spikes in mid-air. Except for the fierce keep on the rock, the entire town was built for pleasure and splendour. Beauty, space and amenity lay all about. In the evening Hans and Frieda, my hosts, took me to a party in an inn and next morning I set off down the Danube.
* * *
But not immediately. On their suggestion, I took a tram a few miles off my track and then a bus, to the Abbey of St. Florian. The great baroque convent of Augustinian Canons stood among low hills, and the branches of the thousands of apple trees all round it were crusted with lichen and bright with rime. The buildings, the treasures and the marvellous library, all—excepting the pictures—have merged in a universal and coruscating oblivion. Just before leaving, I stood for a moment in front of the twin belfries with a friendly Canon. Following his pointing forefinger, we gazed along a succession of freak gaps in the mountains. As the crow flies, this trough runs south-west for over a hundred and sixty miles, clean across Upper Austria to the northern marches of the Tyrol and Upper Bavaria to a point where the peak of the Zugspitze just discernibly floats, half-ghostly and half-gleaming.
When I turned my back on these ranges, the pictures indoors still crowded my mind. They unloosed vague broodings on how large a part geography and hazard play in one’s knowledge and one’s ignorance of painting.
* * *
It had struck me in Holland that an average non-expert, gallery-sauntering inhabitant of the British Isles would know the names, and a little of the work, of scores of Dutch, Flemish and Italian painters and of twenty Frenchmen at the very least. Equally certainly, of half a dozen Spaniards: all thanks to geography, religion, the Grand Tour and the vagaries of fashion. But his total—mine, that is—for the entire German-speaking world is three: Holbein; Dürer; and, palely loitering, Cranach. Holbein, because he seems almost English, and Dürer because he is the sort of genius one can’t help knowing about, an original and universal phenomenon, well up on the slope leading to the Da Vinci class. Recent visits to a few German galleries, especially in Munich, had now given more substance to Cranach and added Altdorfer and Grünewald to this list.
Though these painters are unlike each other, they do have some important things in common. They all come from southern Germany. They were all born in the last forty years of the fifteenth century. All of them were active in the early decades of the sixteenth, first under the Emperor Maximilian—‘the Last of the Knights,’ a belated survivor of the Middle Ages—and then under his half-Spanish, High Renaissance grandson and successor, Charles V. The whole of German painting seems to crowd into this sixty years’ span: a sudden abundance, with nothing but mediaeval workshops to herald it and no real follow-up. It was Germany’s moment, brought about by the Renaissance in Italy and by the spread of humanist studies at home and stimulated and tormented by the rise of Protestantism. Luther’s active life fits the time-span almost to a second; and all five painters finished on the Protestant side. (Grünewald, the oldest, was deeply troubled and finally reduced to inaction. Holbein, the youngest, took things in his stride. It is hard to think of them as contemporaries but their lives overlapped for forty years.) Two main channels of approach and flight linked south Germany with the outside world. The more natural one followed the Rhine to Flanders and led straight to the studios of Brussels and Bruges and Ghent and Antwerp. The other crossed the Alps through the Brenner Pass and followed the Adige to Verona, where an easy path unwound to Mantua, Padua and Venice. Fewer took the second way but it was the more decisive in the end. It was a fruitful polarity and German painting was spinning, as it were, on a Van der Weyden-Mantegna axis.
As I walked along the Danube, I was traversing, without knowing it, an important minor sub-division of art-history. ‘The Danube School,’ an arbitrary term which is often enclosed in inverted commas, covers exactly the period we have been talking about and it embraces the Danube basin from Regensburg to Vienna, taking in Bohemia to the north as far as Prague, and to the south the slopes of the Alps from the Tyrol to Lower Austria. Dürer and Holbein, although they are from the near-Danubian towns of Nuremberg and Augsburg, are not included: the one is too universal, the other, perhaps, too sophisticated or a decade or so too late. Grünewald, geographically, is a fraction too far west and they probably need him for an equally arbitrary Rhenish School. Otherwise, he would fit in admirably. This leaves Cranach and Altdorfer: Danubian stars of the first magnitude among a swarm of lesser-known regional masters.
On the evidence I encountered then, I hated Cranach more with each new picture. Those pale-haired, equivocal minxes, posturing in muslin against the dark, were eerie and uncongenial enough; but, in juxtaposition with the schadenfreude of his martyrdoms, they become deeply sinister; and this thought flowed on directly to the stark detail of the minor masters of the Danube School and perhaps, if one followed it through, to the whole disturbing theme of realism in Germany.
Some of these Danube School paintings are wonderful. Others are either moving or touching or likeable and, to a stranger like me, they had an immediate appeal which had no connection with their technical Renaissance advances, about which I knew nothing. Indeed, the aspect that took my fancy was precisely the mediaeval and the Teutonic spirit that completely changed the Renaissance atmosphere of these pictures: the emerald green of the sward, that is, the sap green of the woods, the dark conifer forests and bosky spurs of Jurassic limestone; the backgrounds full of snowy spikes—distant glimpses, without a doubt, of the Grossglockner, the Reifhorn, the Zugspitze and the Wildspitze. This is the scenery through which the flight into Egypt, the journey of the Magi and the footpaths to Cana and Bethany uncoil! A barn with leaky thatch shelters the Nativity in an Alpine glade. It is among fir-cones and edelweiss and gentians that the Transfigurations, Temptations, Crucifixions and Resurrections take place. The actors in a picture by Wolf Huber are Swabian peasant girls, bewildered gaffers with tangled beards, goodies with dumpling cheeks, crab-apple crones, marvelling ploughboys and puzzled woodmen—a cast of Danube rustics in fact, reinforced, in the wings, by a whole bumpkin throng. The scenes they present have enormous charm. They are not naïve pictures, very far from it; but the balance between rusticity and sophistication is such that to contemplate one of them is to sit on a log under a northern welkin while the incidents of scripture are wonderingly and urgently whispered in one’s ear. They affect one like folk-tales in thick Swabian or in Tyrolese or Bavarian or Upper Austrian dialect. Everything rustic and simple in these pictures is wonderfully real; a convincing earthiness reigns side by side with a most melting piety. But, unless the woods and the undergrowth are goblin country, there is little hint of a spiritual or supernatural feeling in these happenings—except in a different and an adverse sense. For example, in some of these canvasses and panels the laws of gravity seem to exert an unnaturally powerful pull. The angels, unlike their soaring congeners in Italy or Flanders, are poor flyers and ill-equipped for staying up long. The severe Bürgermeister’s features of the Holy Child have the ferocity, sometimes, of a snake-strangling infant Hercules. He looks heavier than most mortal babies. Once these symptoms have been observed, everything else begins to go wrong, and in a way that is rather hard to define. Complexions become pasty and suet-like, eyes narrow to knowing and spiteful slits and sparks of madness kindle. The middles of faces are simultaneously flaccid and clenched, as though a bad diet had prematurely rotted away every tooth in their heads, and often, for no clear reason, features start sliding out of shape. Noses fall askew, eyes grow bleary and mouths hang open like those of snowmen or village idiots. There is something enigmatic and unexplained about this spreading collapse. It has no bearing on the holiness or the villainy of the character affected and, clearly, nothing to do with technical capacity. It is as though a toxin of instability and dissolution had crept into the painter’s brain.
But, when the theme shifts from pastoral scenes to martyrdoms, their intentions become baffling beyond all conjecture. These pictures are the opposite of their equivalent Byzantine scenes. There the executioner and his victim wear an identical expression of benign aloofness, and the headsman, as an artisan of beatitude flourishing a sword-shaped key to salvation, has an equal claim on our approval. Italians may not attempt this detachment in their martyrdoms, but feelings for sacredness and dignity in the painter’s mood engage both the striker and the struck in a ceremonial choreography of grandeur that keeps horror at a distance.
Not here. Meaty, unshaven louts with breastplates crooked, hanging shirt-tails and codpieces half-undone have just reeled out of the Hofbräuhaus, as it were, reeking of beer and sauerkraut and bent on beating someone insensible. A victim is found and they fall on him. Leering and winking with bared teeth and lolling tongues, they are soon sweating with exertion. These ostlers, butchers, barrel-makers, and apprentices, and Landsknechts in moulting frippery are expert limb-twisters, lamers, stoners, floggers, unsocketers and beheaders to a man, deft with their bright tools and rejoicing at their task. The painters’ windows must have looked out on scaffolds where the wheel, the block and the gallows drew frequent crowds. Certain details, which are more rare in other painters, recur with great regularity here. Four burly tormentors, with their crossed staves bending under their weight, force an enormous crown of thorns on their victim’s head and a fifth batters it home with a three-legged stool. When another prepares him for scourging, he places a boot for purchase in the small of the victim’s back and hauls on the bound wrists till his veins project. The heavy birch-rods need both hands to wield them and broken twigs and smashed scourges soon litter the floor. At first the victim’s body looks flea-bitten. It is spotted later on, like an ocelot’s, with hundreds of embedded thorns. At last, after a score of indignities, the moribund carcass is nailed in place and hoisted aloft between two pot-bellied felons whose legs are snapped askew like bleeding sticks. The last touch of squalor is the cross itself. Ragged-ended and roughly barked lengths of fir and silver-birch have been so clumsily botched together that they bend under the weight of the victim as though about to collapse, and the special law of gravity, tearing the nail-holes wider, dislocates the fingers and expands them like a spider’s legs. Wounds fester, bones break through the flesh and the grey lips, wrinkling concentrically round a tooth-set hole, gape in a cringing spasm of pain. The body, mangled, dishonoured and lynched, twists in rigor mortis. It hangs, as Huysmans says in his description of Grünewald’s altarpiece in Colmar, ‘comme un bandit, comme un chien.’ The wounds turn blue; there is a hint of gangrene and putrefaction in the air.
Yet somehow, and most contradictorily, Grünewald escapes the category I have in mind. The thorn-speckled carcass on the cross is part of an old formula; the horror is extreme; but, thanks to the harrowing poignancy of the attendant mourners and some exempting streak of genius, it is a feeling of drama and tragedy that has the last word,[5] removing it—for me, that is—to the atmosphere and mood of ‘Woofully araid,’ the extraordinary poem on the Passion by his exact English contemporary, Skelton.[6]
Critics and apologists blame these cruel scenes on the infectious savagery of the Peasants’ War of 1523. This shattering sequel to the religious conflict left few southern Germans untouched. Even if some of these pictures were painted earlier—and the Isenheim altarpiece, for one, ante-dates it by a decade—the cruel temper of the times may well have influenced contemporary painting. But, even if it did, the results are unusual and ambiguous: the horrors of the Thirty Years’ and Peninsula Wars affected Callot and Goya in a way that leaves no doubt about their attitude to those wars or the purpose of their work. What, then, are these? Grim heirlooms from the Dark Ages, unenlightened by the Renaissance but animated by its techniques, bursting out under savage stimuli? Perhaps. But religious painting is, ipso facto, didactic. What do these pictures enjoin? It is impossible to say. At Byzantium, an impartial grace exalted both the virtuous and the wicked and joined their hands in abstraction. Here, an opposite agency is at work. Good and evil, kneaded from the same yeastless dough, are united in squalor until both become equally base; and in this equality in abjection, horror chases pity away. Dignity and tragedy take wing together, and one gazes in perplexity. Are saints being martyred or felons slowly despatched? On whose side is the painter? No answer comes.
Perhaps the mood was inescapable. There are certainly traces of it, much reduced, in a few of Altdorfer’s pictures. But he outshines his fellow-Danubians like a lyre-bird among carrion-crows. He was from Regensburg. I hadn’t been there yet—I missed it when I turned south at Ulm—but I have seen it since, and it explains much. Here, at the northernmost point of the river, a hundred and thirty miles upstream from the Abbey of St. Florian, the ancient stronghold of Ratisbon spans the Danube with a bridge that rivals all the great bridges of the Middle Ages. Those battlements and steeples, wrapped in myth, dominate one of the most complete and convincing mediaeval cities of the world. Anyone who has wandered in these streets can understand why the holy pastorals which his colleagues turned into dialect folk-tales, shift, under his hand, into the mood and the scenery of legends. The episodes of scripture—which are nowhere more splendidly manifest than in his great altarpiece at St. Florian’s—are suddenly clothed in the magic and the glamour of fairy stories; fairy stories, moreover, where the Mantua-Antwerp axis, uncoiling brilliant strands into the fabric, has been most potently spinning. Under the gothic interlock of cold whites and greys that canopy hallowed scenes in Flanders, the Biblical characters, clad in robes of lilac and mulberry and lemon and the shrill sulphur hue Mantegna loved, evolve and posture with convincing Renaissance splendour. Pontius Pilate—velvet-clad, mantled in dark sapphire, tasselled and collared like an Elector and turbanned like a Caliph—twists his sprinkled hands between ewer and salver under a magnificent baldaquin of scumbled gold. Through the lancets and the cinquefoils and beyond the diamond panes, the fluted rocks ascend and the woods and cliffs and cloud-banks of Gethsemane frame a luminous and incandescent sunset that presages Patinir. Though the centurions are knights in dark armour, no mortal smith ever wrought those helmet-wings and metal flourishes and knee-flutes and elbow-fans, even on the anvils of Augsburg and Milan in Maximilian’s reign. It is the fabulous harness that flashed later on every pre-Raphaelite Grail-seeker and greaved and gauntleted the paladins in the Coloured Fairy Books. Shifting from Divinity to sacred fable, the same ambience of magic isolates lonely knights among millions of leaves and confronts St. Eustace and the stag with its antlered crucifix in a forest full of hazards and spells.
He is very various. Tufted with spurge and dockweed, a tumble-down cowshed flickers strangely across the meadows with the grisaille highlights of the Nativity. Transparent Babylonian palaces pile capricious tiers of arcaded galleries among shoals of cloud. Palaces, moreover which are elaborated with the almost-completely mastered secrets of perspective which Dürer had brought back from Bologna and Venice. Intoxicating times! It must have been as though Dürer, from the tallest tower in Nuremberg, had floated an invisible geometry over Franconia: a geometry which webbed the air with dotted lines, gridded mountainous duchies, soared across Swabia and Austria and Saxony in chessboard vistas and carelessly loosed off volleys of parallels towards the sovereign bishoprics of the Rhine.[7]
I didn’t know it then but some of his country-pictures—wildernesses with no scriptural episode, nothing human, not even a tumbling Icarus to justify their existence—are the first pure landscape paintings in Europe. I only understood on a journey years later how faithfully his landscape echoes the actual Danube. It was his amazing Alexander-schlacht—Alexander’s victory over Darius at Issus—that pointed the way: I was looking upstream from Dürnstein (on that later journey) with my mind full of the great pictures I had been recently gazing at, when an apocalyptic flash revealed that the painted stretch of water in the picture was no Asian river, not even the Granicus. It was the valley of the Danube in the throes of one of its hundreds of battles. It must have been. But, on this first visit, how could I have realized it? The battle in the painted canyon is fought out under a lurid October sunset and the rival armies, like windswept cornfields bristling with lances and poppied with banners, collide in an autumnal light. Whereas the battlefield on my first encounter was dulled with snow, with all contours muffled and fanfares hushed.
* * *
The link between journeys and painting, especially this sort of journey, is very close. There was plenty to think about as I made my way through the snow-bound monastic orchards; and it occurred to me, in the silent fields that followed, and for the hundredth time since my landing in Holland, that so far one painter had presided over every stage of this Winterreise. When no buildings were in sight, I was back in the Dark Ages. But the moment a farmhouse or a village impinged, I was in the world of Peter Brueghel. The white flakes falling beside the Waal—or the Rhine or the Neckar or the Danube—and the zigzag gables and the muffled roofs, were all his. The icicles, too, and the trampled snow, the logs piled on the sledges and the peasants stooped double under loads of faggots. When children with woollen hoods and satchels burst out of a village school with a sudden scamper of miniature clogs, I knew in advance that in a moment they would be flapping their arms and blowing on mittened fingers and clearing a space to beat a top in, or galloping down a lane to slide on the nearest brook, with everyone—children, grown-ups, cattle and dogs—moving about in the wake of their own cloudy breath. When the wintry light crept dimly from slits close to the horizon or an orange sun was setting through the branches of a frozen osier-bed, the identity was complete.
* * *
I headed north-east, treading downhill through the snow, and each step sank deeper. Rooks crowded the trees and the fields below were white and grey parallelograms bordered by many willows. Streams crossed them under lids of ice to join a slatey loop of the river; and the hushed and muffled scenery was the background of Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow. Only the hunters themselves were missing, with their spears and their curly-tailed dogs.
I crossed the river to the lights of Mauthausen by a massive and ancient bridge. A tall fifteenth-century castle thrust out into the river and, under its walls, Hans and Frieda were on the quay, true to the vaguest of rendezvous; and I realized, as we waved to each other from afar, that another cheerful evening lay ahead.
* * *
A foothill path next day. The river Enns, which I had crossed by twilight, came winding out of its valley and into the Danube, where it turned downstream to plait a long pale green strand of clear mountain water into the dun-coloured flux. I fetched up at Perg, which lies a few miles from the northern shore. The river, flooding the frozen fields, had been wandering in a tangle of deviant and rejoining streams; at Ardagger, the mountains closed in again. Each time this happened, solemnity invaded.
I slept in the village of Grein that night, just upstream from a wooded and many-legended island. Old perils haunt these defiles. The name itself is thought to be onomatopoeia for the cry of a sailor drowning in one of the whirlpools, for the rapids and reefs of this stretch of the Danube smashed up shipping for centuries. Sailors who fell overboard were allowed to drown: they were looked upon as propitiatory offerings to some Celtic or Teutonic god still surviving in secret from both pre-Roman and pre-Christian times. The Romans, before confronting this menacing reach, threw coins into the stream to placate the river-god Danubius; and later travellers took the sacrament before making the passage. Maria Theresa’s engineers made the journey safer, but the hidden spikes were never completely destroyed till the 1890’s. Until then everything hung on the pilot’s skill and to some degree it still does; the creases and ruffles turning into sudden cartwheel-twirls amidstream, bear witness to the commotion below. To outwit these hazards, vessels were lashed together like catamarans and steadied by hawsers from the shore. Those travelling upstream were towed by teams of horses and oxen—twenty, thirty and sometimes fifty strong—and escorted by troops of pikemen, to keep robbers at bay. The battlements of Werfenstein, whose castellans lived by wrecking and by plunder, beetle greedily over the rapids; but Barbarossa’s army, heading for the Third Crusade, was too numerous to tackle. The castle-dwellers gazed through the arrow-slits and gnawed their knuckles with frustration as the Crusaders trudged downstream.
* * *
The Danube, particularly in this deep gorge, seemed far wilder than the Rhine and much lonelier. How scarce was the river traffic by comparison! Perhaps the fear of ice-jams kept boats at anchor. I could walk for hours without hearing a siren. At rare intervals a string of barges, usually from one of the Balkan Kingdoms, would toil upstream with a cargo of wheat. After delivering their freight and loading up with planks or paving stones, they would glide downstream again with the current. These cargoes were quarried and felled from the banks. Huge horseshoe-cavities were blasted out of the cliffs, and the mountains, from the water’s edge to their summits, were a never-ending stand of timber. Deep in snow, the nearly perpendicular rides sundered the forests in long white stripes that were scattered with thousands of felled tree-trunks like the contents of spilled match-boxes. Smaller trunks were cut and stacked in clearings and I could hear the sound of the felling and the voices of the woodmen long before I saw them. From the riverside, every mile or so, rose the zing of a circular saw and the echo of planks falling, where cloudy ghosts covered in sawdust were dismembering sledge-load after sledge-load of forest giants.
The only other men in these woods were foresters: loden-clad figures in clouted boots who live among deer and squirrels and badgers and polecats. One of them, every now and then, with a gun in the crook of his arm and ice on his whiskers and his eyebrows and a pipe with a lidded china bowl, would materialize among the trees like a vision of Jack Frost. Sometimes we would keep each other company for a mile or two while Breughel dogs trotted alertly ahead. There was plenty of game in these mountains; the cloven slots I noticed in the snow were the prints of roedeer, as I had thought, and once or twice I caught brief glimpses of them, standing at gaze for a moment, then bounding for cover with a scattering of snow from the low branches. But Styria and the Tyrol, the gamekeepers all agreed, those were the places! I learnt that when a young hunter stalks and lays low his first stag, his Jäger marks the occasion with a sort of wood-land blooding that sounds so hoarily ancient and redolent of feudal forest law—or the defiance of it—that the little ceremony has stuck in my mind ever since. The Jäger breaks off a branch and strikes the novice three times across the shoulders, quite hard, saying as he does so, a line for each swish:
Massed shadows, tilting down from the sierras, filled the bottom of the canyon. Here the Danube followed a winding corridor which expanded without warning to giant circular ballrooms and closed again just as abruptly; and for leagues on end this widening and shrinking ravine was empty of all but a cottage and a barn or two and a scattering of castles and lonely towers and hermitages, all crumbling to fragments. They broke through the forest mass, disintegrating on vertiginous spikes of rock high overhead. As I climbed the hill-path, the ruins fell level and then dropped below and the mountains opposite changed from a wall of branches into a maze of moraines and clefts and buttresses with a ripple of meadows and solitary hamlets along their crests, all of them invisible till now and basking in the sunlight which was denied the lower world. Increasing height laid bare new reaches of the river like an ever-lengthening chain of lakes, and for those rare stretches where the valley ran east and west, the sunrise and the sunset lay reflected and still and an illusion lifted each lake a step higher than its predecessor until they formed gleaming staircases climbing in either direction; and at last the intervening headlands lost touch with the other shore and the watery stairs, now far below, cohered in a single liquid serpent.
At first, only a saw or an axe or the bang of a gun broke the silence of these forests. Soon other sounds would impinge: snow sliding from a branch, a loose rock starting a small avalanche, an occasional barge sending its siren ricochetting from cliff to cliff. Hidden streams, hardly noticed at first, were seldom out of earshot; but the waterfalls, though they were visible for miles, seemed inaudible until I was on them. I could see them cataracting from ledge to ledge, dividing and joining again, vanishing under the trees and dropping in long parabolas to the river; and all in silence, with seemingly as little motion as white horsetails swaying in the faintest of breezes. Then my path would round a spur of rock and a murmur which had been growing slowly was all at once loud as thunder. From a ledge stalactitic with icicles tons of pale liquid jadeite crashed among the rocks, and the spray of its impact loaded the branches with fans of frozen drops. A trough of boulders and a tunnel of ice and frozen bracken rushed it to the cliff’s edge and there, in a cloud of mist, flung it clear of the clustering stalactites and the tree-tops and sent it booming into the abyss and out of sight. Then the ensuing furlongs would hush the roar and slow the headlong pace to the ruffle of a faraway horsetail again.
The millions of pine needles that cross-hatched the sunbeams sprinkled the paths with an entrancing broken light. An icy zest crackled among the branches, and I paced through these sparkling woods like a Huron. But there were moments in the early morning when the dense conifers and the diaphanous skeletons of the hardwoods were as insubstantial as plumage, and the early mists, hovering in the valleys, floated the transparent peaks on air and enclosed the rock-pinnacles in diminishing smoke-rings of vapour. At these moments the landscape below seemed to have moved far from Central Europe, further even than Red Indian forests; all the way to China. The painter’s red-inkstone cypher, trailing its lightly brushed-in kite’s tail of ideograms, should have stamped the pallor of the sky.
Footpaths corkscrewed down-hill from these uplands; down, down until the trees thinned and the sunlight died away. Meadows would appear, then a barn, then an orchard and a churchyard and threads of smoke ascending from the chimney-pots of a riverside hamlet; and I was back among the shadows.
Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.
There was always a Golden Hart or a White Rose for bread and cheese among the huddle of roofs, or for a coffee and Himbeergeist. Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in the tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures...a widowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.
* * *
After supper and filling in my diary in the front room of the inn in Persenbeug—I think I must have been staying there on the charitable-burgomaster principle—I started to sketch the innkeeper’s daughter Maria while she busied herself over a basket of darning. I was talking to her about my visit to St. Florian: either it had been the wrong time for sightseers or a day when the Abbey was officially shut. The janitor was adamant. I told him it was my only chance—I had come all the way across Europe to see the Abbey; and at last, when I must have sounded on the brink of tears, he had begun to melt. He had handed me over to the friendly Canon in the end, who showed me all. Maria laughed. So did a man at the next table who lowered the Neue Freie Presse, and looked over his spectacles. He was a tall and scholarly-looking figure with a long amusing face and large blue eyes. He was dressed in leather breeches and a loden-jacket, and a big dark dog with Breughel tendencies called Dick lay quietly beside his chair. “You did the right thing,” he said. “In Germany you would only have got in by shouting.” Maria and two watermen, the only other people in the Gastzimmer, laughed and agreed.
The Danube inspires those who live on its banks with an infectious passion. My companions knew everything about the river. They rejoiced in the fact that, after the Volga, which was almost too far away to count, it was the largest river in Europe; and the man in loden added that it was the only one that flowed from west to east. The watermen were full of lurid descriptions of the hazards of the Strudengau and their tales were amply borne out by the others. The man in loden, I discovered, spoke perfect English, but except in the frequent case of a word I didn’t understand, he stuck to German out of politeness to the others. The Danube, he said, played a rôle in the Nibelungenlied that was just as important as that of the Rhine. I hadn’t read it yet but I admitted I had never connected the story with any river but the latter. “Nor has anyone!” he said. “That’s because of Dr. Wagner! Magnificent sounds, but very little to do with the actual legend.” Which part of the Danube? “Exactly here! All the way downstream, right into Hungary.”
We looked out of the window. The flood was rushing by under the stars. It was the widest river in Europe, he went on, and the richest by far in interesting life. Over seventy different kinds of fish swim in it. It had its own species of salmon and two distinct kinds of pike-perch—stuffed specimens of a few of them were hung round the walls in glass cases. The river was a link between the fish of Western Europe and those that populated the Dniestr, the Dniepr, the Don and the Volga. “The Danube has always been an invasion route,” he said. “Even above Vienna, you get fish that never venture west of the Black Sea otherwise. At least, extremely seldom. True sturgeon stay in the Delta—alas!—but we get plenty of their relations up here.” One of them, the sterlet, was quite common in Vienna. It was delicious, he said. Sometimes they ventured as far upstream as Regensburg and Ulm. The biggest of them, another sturgeon-cousin called the Hausen, or Acipenser Huso, was a giant that sometimes attained the length of twenty-five feet, and, in very rare cases, thirty; and it could weigh as much as two thousand pounds. “But it’s a harmless creature,” he went on. “It only eats small stuff. All the sturgeon family are short-sighted, like me. They just fumble their way along the bottom with their feelers, grazing on water plants.” He shut his eyes and then, with a comic expression of bewilderment, extended his fingers among the wine glasses with an exploratory flutter. “Its true home is the Black Sea and the Caspian and the Sea of Azov. But the real terror of the Danube is the Wels!” Maria and the watermen nodded their heads in sad assent, as though a Kraken or the Grendel had been mentioned. The Silurus glanis or Giant Catfish! Though it was smaller than the Hausen, it was the largest purely European fish and it sometimes measured thirteen feet.
“People say they eat babies if they fall in the water,” Maria said, dropping a half-darned sock into her lap.
“Geese, too,” one of the watermen said.
“Ducks,” the other added.
“Lambs.”
“Dogs.”
“Dick had better look out!” Maria appended.
My polymath neighbour’s reassuring pats on the shaggy scalp at his side were rewarded by a languorous gaze and a few tail-thumps, while his master told me that a swallowed poodle had been cut out of a catfish a year or two before.
“They are terrible creatures,” he said, “terrible and extraordinary.”
I asked him what they looked like and he repeated the question ruminatively to himself. “Beastly!” he said at last. “You see, they have no scales, they are quite smooth. Dull-coloured and slimey. But the face! That’s the thing! It has great blunt features and hateful little staring eyes.” As he spoke, he lowered his brows in a scowl and somehow contrived to make the large frank eyes behind the lenses contract and protrude simultaneously in a glare of venomous rage—“and its mouth!” he went on, “its mouth is the worst of all! It’s underslung and fitted with rows of terrifying little teeth.” He widened his mouth to a slit that sank balefully at both ends and thrust out his lower jaw in a hideous Habsburg jut. “And it has long, long whiskers,” he said, spreading his finger-tips across both his cheeks, “sweeping out on either side.” He fanned them airily away and over his shoulders like the long barbels of the giant catfish streaming in the current. “It looks like this!” he said, slowly rising from his chair and, as he did so, he thrust the dreadful mask towards us across the wine glasses. It was as if the great fish had swum in silently through the door. Maria said “Herr Jesus!” with a nervous laugh, and the dog jumped up and barked excitedly. Then his features resumed their normal cast, and he sat back again smiling at our amazement.
I had chanced on a gold mine! ‘Enquire Within About Everything’: flora, fauna, history, literature, music, archaeology—it was a richer source than any castle library. His English, mastered from governesses with his brothers, was wide in range, flawless in its idiom and polished by many sojourns in England. He was full of stories about the inhabitants of Danubian castles, of which he was one, as I had more or less gathered from the others’ style in addressing him: his lair was a battered Schloss near Eferding, and it was the empty heronry I had noticed there which had first excited him when he was a boy about the fauna of the river. He had a delightful Bohemian, scholar-gipsy touch.
He was on his way back from an antiquarian visit to Ybbs, the little town immediately across the river. His goal there had been the carved tomb of Hans, Knight of Ybbs: “A figure,” he said, “of knock-out elegance!” He showed me a snapshot the parish priest had given him. (It was so striking that I crossed the river to see it next day. The Knight, standing in high relief in a rectangle which is deeply incised with gothic lettering, was carved in 1358. Falling in battle in the same decade as Crécy and Poitiers, he was an exact contemporary of du Guesclin and the Black Prince: at the very pinnacle, that is, of the age of chivalry. He is in full plate armour and the fingers of his right gauntlet curl round the shaft of a lance from which a pennant flutters. Those of the other, under an elbow bent at an angle which shifts the breastplated torso to one side from a wasp waist, are spread on the cross-hilt of a two-handed sword, to which a notched shield is strapped. His pointed steel cap is ridged like an almond and chain mail covers cheek, chin and throat like a nun’s wimple: similar to that arrangement, with starched linen in lieu of metal, which gives a knight-like look to the nuns in some Orders. A huge oak-leaf-crested and slit-eyed tilting helm balances on one of his plated shoulders. The sinuous flow of the carving gives a lively, poetical and debonair stance to the Knight which is probably unique in such effigies.)
At the mention of the Ritter von Ybbs, I asked him the exact meaning of von. He explained how a ‘Ritter von’ and an ‘Edler von’—Knight, or Nobleman, ‘of’ somewhere—were originally feudal landowners holding a fief, and usually an eponymous one, in knight’s fee. Later it simply became the lowest rank in the scale of titles. Its fiendish aura in England, due to the military bent of Prussian junkers, is absent in Austria where a milder, squire-ish feeling hovers about the prefix. This was the cue for an excursus on Central European aristocracy, conducted with great brio and the detachment of a zoologist. I had got the hang of it on broad lines; but what about those figures who had intrigued me in Germany: landgraves, margraves, rhinegraves and wildgraves? Who was the Margravine of Bayreuth and Anspach? The answers led him to a lightning disquisition on the Holy Roman Empire and how the tremendous title had pervaded and haunted Europe from Charlemagne to the Napoleonic Wars. The rôles of the Electors—the princes and prelates who chose the Emperors until the Crown became an unofficial Habsburg heirloom, when they ratified it still—were at last made clear. Between his election and accession, I learnt, a prospective Emperor was styled King of the Romans. “Why!” he said, “there was an English one, King John’s son, Richard of Cornwall! And his sister Isabella married the Emperor Frederick II, the stupor mundi! But Richard never succeeded, poor fellow—as you know”—a tacit, all-purpose nod seemed the best response here—“he died of grief when his son Henry of Almain was murdered by Guy de Montfort at Viterbo. Dante writes about it...” By this time I had stopped being surprised at anything. He explained the mediatization of lesser sovereign states when the Empire was dissolved; and from here, at a dizzy pace, he branched into the history of the Teutonic Knights, the Polish szlachta and their elective kings, the Moldowallachian hospodars and the great boyars of Rumania. He paid brief tribute to the prolific loins of Rurik and the princely progeny they scattered across the Russias, and the Grand Princes of Kiev and Novgorod, the Khans of Krim Tartary and the Kagans of the Mongol Hordes. If nothing had interrupted, we would have reached the Great Wall of China and flown across the sea to the Samurai world.[9] But something recalled us nearer home: to the ancient, almost Brahminic Austrian rules of eligibility and the stifling Spanish ceremony of the Court which had survived from the times of Charles V. He was critical of the failures of the nobility at crucial moments, but he was attached to it nevertheless. The proliferation of central European titles came under mild fire. “It’s much better in England, where all but one reverts to Mister in the end. Look at me and my brothers! All handle and no jug.” Would he have liked titles to be done away with?[10] “No, no!” he said, rather contradictorily. “They should be preserved at all costs—the world is getting quite dull enough. And they are not really multiplying—history and ecology are against them. Think of the Oryx! Think of the Auckland Island Merganser! The Great Auk! The Dodo!” His face was divided by a grin: “You ought to see some of my aunts and uncles.” But a moment later his brow was clouded by concern. “Everything is going to vanish! They talk of building power-dams across the Danube and I tremble whenever I think of it! They’ll make the wildest river in Europe as tame as a municipal waterworks. All those fish from the East—they would never come back! Never, never, never!” He looked so depressed that I changed the subject by asking him about the Germanic tribes who had once lived here—the Marcomanni and the Quadi—I couldn’t get their odd names out of my head. “What?” He cheered up at once. Those long-haired Wotan-worshippers, who peered for centuries between the tree-boles, while the legionaries drilled and formed tortoise on the other bank? His eyes kindled, and I drank in more about the Völkerwanderungen in a quarter of an hour than I could have gleaned in a week with the most massive historical atlases.
The others had stolen away to bed hours before. The third bottle of Langenlois was empty and we stood up too. He paused in front of a glass case in which a bright-eyed and enormous stuffed trout was swimming urgently through a tangle of tin water-weed. “It’s a pity you didn’t go on over the hills from St. Florian,” he said. “You would have got to the little town of Steyr, and the Enns valley”—this was the green tributary I had watched curling out of the hills opposite Mauthausen—“It’s only half a dozen miles. Schubert wrote the Trout quintet there. He was on a walking tour, like you.”
He whistled the tune as we strolled along the snow-covered quay, with Dick bounding ahead and sliding comically out of control on the concealed ice. The steeple of Ybbs stood clear above the roofs and the tree-tops the other side. Above the roofs of our own shore, almost inevitably, a large baroque castle soared into the starlight. “You see the third window on the left?” the polymath asked. “It’s the room where Karl, our last Emperor, was born.” After a pause, he went on whistling the tune of The Trout. “I always think of streams running down to the Danube,” he said, “whenever I hear it.”
[1] Alas! Too late now. He died in the 1960’s.
[2] Ruhestand.
[3] For all their charm, few of these portraits, except in castles of great splendour, are at all well painted.
[4] By a minor freak of history, the only uniforms where these vanished insignia survive are those of a regiment of the British Army: Franz Josef was honorary colonel-in-chief of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards. They commemorate him still with the Habsburg double-eagle cap badge and the Radetzky March.
[5] There are, too, mystical and medical causes, abstruse but valid, for the erupting and purulent Isenheim details. They were expressly stipulated by the Antonite monks in their directions to the painter. The altarpiece was destined for their Isenheim hospital which was dedicated to the cure of diseases of the skin and the blood, plague, epilepsy and ergotism, and the details are depicted for a strange reason. Contemplation of these painted symbols by the patients comprised the initial stage of their healing. It was a religious act in which the promise of miraculous healing was held to reside.
[6] The refrain, with the spelling modernized, is:
Woefully arrayed,
My blood, man,
For thee ran,
It may not be nayed;
My body blue and wan,
Woefully arrayed.
[7] But his perspective was still short of solution! The ends of all those volleys pepper the target area with near-misses, instead of converging on a single bull’s eye, as, half a century before, Brunelleschi had discovered and Alberti had written that they should. The northward journey of ideas was beset with delays.
[8] ‘One for the lord, one for the serf, one for the ancient woodman’s right.’
[9] I loved all this. I was soon suspiciously expert in all the relevant socio-historical lore, to which others might give a grosser name. But I would have been genuinely taken aback if anyone had taxed me with snobbery.
[10] They had been, officially, but nobody paid the slightest attention.