Scenes and memories

Preface

My dear Children,

The impressions gathered together in this book, though written most of them in this last decade, are all of them taken from very voluminous recollections jotted down at a much earlier period. If one day any of you think it worth while to publish these wider recollections, they will give a true picture of the world as it has appeared to me ; for it has, throughout, been my aim to give an exact representation of my impressions of events, things, and people. That will be their only merit. I must explain, however, that the last chapter of this book, ' The Mysterious City,' which has never been published, is a fantasy written to please a friend long since passed away, by collating records about some very interesting but unknown villas around Florence of which he had taken the photographs. The events I allude to are all true, and most of them I witnessed myself during my frequent and long sojourns in the Mysterious City ; it will, however, be readily understood that names could not be given, though many of them will easily be guessed by those who knew the Florence of that day.

vi PREFACE

I wish to thank the Editor of the Nineteenth Century and After for so courteously allowing articles to be reproduced ; and I should like to add a word of grateful remembrance to his predecessor, Sir James Knowles, a man of singular charm and perspicacity, who accorded me the hospitality of the Review he founded for thirty years.

I have nothing more to say except that my life has been lived very much in chapters. I gratefully record that in each chapter, in many different countries, I have found true and faithful friends, whose affection has followed me into many chmes urtil the thread became invisible to mortal eyes, though I feel that it is tightly held by those ' gone before to the unknown and silent shore.'

Perhaps this little book, which speaks of more restful days, when charm and romance had not yet been throttled in the turmoil of our present era, may open a small window in the minds of some younger generation to what life held fifty years ago. So little in comparison with to-day, and yet so much more !

Ever, my dear children,

Your loving

Mother.

Unlawater House, October 1912.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. A Child's Recollections . . . i

II, Court and Society at Berlin in the Fifties : A Reminiscence

Chapter I

It may not be uninteresting in these days, when life is such a rush and all that happens is so soon forgotten, to retrace the manners, habits, and customs, half a century ago, of a society and a country which then was, as a whole, hardly in the throes of its birth. The Germany of to-day was at that time only the barely conceived ideal of a few elect minds. The great masses never dreamt of such possibilities. My first recollections go back to the early forties ; and though I was a very small child then, they are quite clear, and I am certain that they are not second-hand, as after the death of my parents, which occurred before I was grown up, the whole tenor of my life was changed, and those I lived with knew nothing of these early associations.

I passed the first years of my life in an ancient castle built by Henry the Fowler, Emperor of Germany. It dated back to some time in the ninth century ; but I suppose it must have been a strong place even before that, as the Romans called it ' Bicheni/ which the Wends, on whose frontier it was built, changed later on to ' Puechau.'

The Emperor Henry had placed it there to protect the rich bishopric of Wurzen against the incursions of the heathen, whom it was his policy to push more and more eastwards.

The part built by the Emperor, and which still bears his name, is almost untouched, and stands beyond the moat. The castle itself is a great and picturesque irregular pile, romantic and mysterious, with inner court and many terraces on different levels all around it.

It stands on an eminence and looks out far over the land, over great oak-forests, rich pastures, and winding rivers, to a range of blue, once volcanic, hills. Some small towns and many villages with glowing red roofs and shimmering church spires gleam in the distance, and towers built by Romans, Goths, or Markomanns command many of the important places.

We were there in the heart of a very old country, which was the centre of Saxony, before some of its best provinces were lost by its rulers' weak and francophile policy during the Napoleonic wars.

A deep ravine, spanned by a narrow bridge, almost a viaduct, divided the church from the castle, and I used on Sundays to stand with my nurse under the great horse-chestnuts and watch the castle people walk across, two and two ; for there was not room for more abreast. They all carried great black hymn-books and nosegays, and the women were bareheaded.

Up the winding road from the village came the peasants with their families. The married women still wore the richly embroidered caps with flowing ribands and the stiff wide Elizabethan ruff. Flowered silk handkerchiefs were crossed over their breasts, and the large satin aprons trimmed with lace nearly covered the whole of their skirts. The girls often wore little wreaths of artificial flowers.

All of them, men and women, young and old, brought their posies of bright garden flowers mixed with pungent herbs, to keep themselves awake in the drowsy summer heat during the long hours of the sermon.

When first I was admitted to church and seated on a very high-backed leather-covered chair, all my attentipn was absorbed by the monuments of armoured knights and farthingaled dames below, and the tremendous cheeks of puffing seraphs on the bright blue cassettone ceiling above. Whatever there was left, was devoted to an interminable row of hour-glasses which I longed to turn, and which were ranged on a bracket against the whitewashed wall.

Near the church stood the manse, a fine sixteenthcentury building, grey and severe, with a tall steep roof and low rounded porch with stone seats. A trellised walk led from the church to this porch, and on each side of it there were great tangles of bright flowers, tall hollyhocks and flaming poppies, lilies and roses, with borders of mignonette and stocks.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, seeing for the first time our parson's newly married young wife standing in that garden. She was a lovely English girl, quite young, of the Book of Beauty type. She wore a pale green dress, rather transparent, and a fine long gold chain round her neck, with glittering rings on her fingers.

The peasants who lived in the village below were all very happy and well off. They had great well-built houses, cool in summer, warm in winter, under their high-tiled roofs, and many maids and serving-men, though they themselves and their sons also laboured in the fields. They had much cattle in their stables, and the wives and daughters and maids looked after that, and cooked and baked and washed. During the long winter evenings the women all sat together in the great warm room, spinning ; whilst the men sang or smoked their pipes, sitting on the bench that ran round the monumental stoves.

Behind their houses were great shady orchards with tarns and clear wells and rippling rivulets into which the sun only shone in the early spring before the leaves had come out. I often gazed down from the castle into these mysterious shadows ; for out of one of the tarns a cry came at times, so strange, so sad and hopeless that my imagination was enthralled by it and filled by vague and wondrous thoughts, for I was told it was the ' Unke ' which called there, a creature never seen and which never dies. I believed, like every German child, that if undetected at midnight on St. John's Eve, I could slip out and spread a blue kerchief on the side of the tarn, I should find a little golden crown upon it in the morning.

The castle was, as I have said, very large and rambling, with inner and outer courts and towers, and long passages filled with armour and pictures of my ancestors, which rather frightened me in winter, for houses were neither lit nor warmed in those days, and that is conducive to fear.

There was on one side a wide moat without water, in which fruit-trees grew. It was carpeted with the greenest turf, and the kennels were there.

We were kept, like most children of that time, under strict disciphne, and not allowed to roam beyond the sight of nurses or governesses ; and when one day my mother, sitting on a terrace close to a court which led to the kitchen, told my brother, aged nine or ten, to dehver a message to the cook, he said : ' But where is the kitchen ? '

We children had a wing of the castle set apart for us, and no stranger ever penetrated there. We were never allowed to speak German, except on the rare occasions when we were out of hearing of our governesses, of which we always had one English and one French. Only the babies had German nurses. As we got older the staff of pedagogues was increased by my brothers' tutors, and drawing and music masters, and German was allowed at meals. There were always many guests, especially in summer, and nobody thought it extraordinary that some of them should remain for months together. One of them was Mr. Evelyn, an Irishman and a great fisherman. He lived with us for the best part of the year since I can remember, until my father's death.

One day a Prince and Princess Poniatowski arrived for a short visit. She was a very beautiful Irishwoman, nee Laura Temple. My parents had known them at Dresden, which was at that time full of exiled Poles. They remained six or seven months, because they had no money to travel with. Mr. Evelyn admired his lovely countrywoman, who used to sit beside him when he was fishing, as she had nothing else in the world to do. I sometimes accompanied them, and though only four or five, quite took in the situation and was extremely annoyed, as I dishked Princess Poniatowska for always wearing my mother's clothes ; and what exasperated me beyond expression was her using a white moire parasol, with a very long fringe and lined with sunset colour, which had come straight from Paris. In my baby mind I docketed the Princess as what I now know to mean an adventuress.

My mother had a girl friend, a Countess S , who,

married to a Russian diplomat at Berlin, did not know how to dispose of her summer, so she came with a number of children and Russian servants and settled at Puechau for six months, till my little brother spoke more Russian than German.

The shootings in those days before the Revolution of 1848 were very extensive, for they were not broken up, as now, by the peasant properties. The peasants owned the land, but had not the right to shoot over it. My father, like nearly all Germans of his class, was a devoted sportsman, and in autumn and winter we saw very little of him, as he used to go off alone or with a friend for several weeks together to some of his other places to shoot.

I remember seeing him start for these expeditions in what was called a Pirsch-Droschke — a carriage which, I suppose, exists no more. It was very light, made to go over the worst roads. Always painted and lined with green, it had a narrow seat which joined the back seat to the box. Astride on this seat one could comfortably take rights and lefts without stopping the carriage. On the box beside the coachman, in green, sat the Leihjdger, liveried in the same colour. These men, who exist in every great German or Austrian house, are not the usual keepers who live in cottages in or near the woods. They live in their master's house and attend to his personal wants, accompanying him wherever he goes. They are often in a confidential position, having enjoyed a good education and knowing everything about forestry, which in Germany is a recognised career. As they grow older they are generally provided with a good situation as head keeper at one of their master's places.

My mother also moved about a good deal. Brought up amongst the mountains of Silesia, she longed for the hills when the great heats of summer came. There were hardly any railways in Germany then, and we travelled in a huge Berline, to which (I heard my mother's maid say) there were twenty-nine boxes attached. They each of them had their separate place into which they fitted. On the best of roads this enormous machine required four horses to pull it, and in hilly countries we always had six. There was room for six inside, but I never remember going more than four, for we often posted all night, and my brother and I regularly went to bed, whilst my mother and Miss Page, the nursery governess, sat on the other seat. The maid and footman sat in the dickey. We travelled all over Germany in this way, and to Belgium, Holland, and even to Poland.

My father went every summer, as most people in society did in those days, to Carlsbad or Marienbad, and sometimes we accompanied him. These places were at that time very select, and the resort of crowned heads, ministers, and diplomatists, and all that was best in European society. Everybody knew who everybody else was, and all consorted together on a footing of dignified intimacy unknown to our days. French was the language which was generally spoken, and all wrote it fluently and correctly. Good manners, ease, and gaiety were the prevailing features.

Thus it happened that, even as a small child, I was quite familiar with the great names of England, France, Russia, and Austria, as I heard them continually mentioned in conversation, and knew many of their bearers by sight as friends of my parents.

Diplomats, in those days, could not go home every year as they do now, and many of them visited us in the summer and autumn. The Court of Dresden was then a much-coveted post, and Puechau was in easy reach, as the first railway that was built in Germany went from Dresden to Leipzig, and passed within five miles of us.

I remember especially the Marquis d'£ragues, Louis Philippe's envoy. A sympathetic interest was attached to his pretty wife, who had been the heroine of a tragic cause celebre in which she had shown a courage and devotion which might have ruined her whole life. She used to wear long Book of Beauty ringlets, and her two little daughters were my bosom friends. Then there was Mr. Forbes, who remained as H.B.M.'s Minister at Dresden for nearly forty years. He used to come accompanied by his two sisters. The elder. Lady Adelaide, a fat and jolly red-faced old lady, had been Byron's lanthe when his years ' nearly doubled ' hers. No trace was left of lanthe ; but to my childish imagination the admiration of the great poet surrounded her for ever with a halo of beauty.

We were at a very early age initiated to the classic literature of England and France, and knew it better than the German, because this — Schiller excepted — was too abstruse, and Goethe was not allowed. There were only few children's books then, except fairy tales ; and illustrated papers, the ruin of the children of to-day, did not exist. Before I was seven, I fell rapaciously on TeUmaque, and repeated pages of Racine and Corneille by heart. A little later on Walter Scott and Dickens, Cooper, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, which were all in easy reach as they were published by Tauchnitz at Leipzig, excited my deepest interest ; and before I was fifteen I had read all the English classics, nor was that exceptional, as all the girls who were fond of reading did the same.

Things are quite changed now that the national feeling is so strong. German children do not speak French and English with the fluency and ease so common in former days, nor are they so much at home in the literature of foreign countries. They are also less cosmopolitan and polished than we were, though they may know more in other special hues, and will probably develop into much cleverer men and women than we have become.

Ancient history, especially that of Greece, always so attractive to the German mind, we knew thoroughly, and the wars of the Greeks and Trojans appeared to us as occurrences of yesterday. We were thus enabled to understand and enter into the spirit of the Iliad

A CHILD'S RECOLLECTIONS ii

and the Odyssey, and to see their heroes as Hving characters.

Young as we were, the poHtics of the day, which my father frequently discussed before us, aroused our lively interest. My father sat in the first or hereditary chamber, and was an eloquent speaker with a profound and intuitive insight into coming events. He predicted in speeches still remembered — and at the time of Germany's greatest disruption, feebleness, and humiliation — its gradual development, its coming power, and glorious future.

He was a Conservative with liberal ideas, and also deeply interested in social questions, and used among other things often to refer to the Malthusian theories which made such a stir in Europe. He little thought that there was a small mite of seven listening with all her ears, and whose hair actually stood on end at the idea that the world was becoming so over-populated that there would soon be no room to lie down, and everybody would have to stand up.

The decay of the Church in Germany also preoccupied my father much. He had been a good deal in England, and was persuaded that the reason why the religious question there was so alive and actual, was because the clergy were mainly gentlemen, highly educated, who were socially on a par with the best in the land, and thus were able to influence all the classes. I often heard him say that if another son were born to him he should go into the Church. This would have been an unheard-of thing in Germany, and showed how much he had this question at heart.

The German clergy were, however, as a rule, well educated as far as science and learning went. In all great houses the tutors of the boys, before they went to public schools, were Candidaten — young men who had been ordained and were waiting for livings.

My father, who had between twenty and thirty livings in his gift, often assembled the most learned of his clergymen around him, and the conversation was frequently carried on in Latin, which they as well as my father spoke quite fluently. My father also resorted to Latin when speaking to his friends of things I was not to understand, quite forgetting that the smattering I had acquired in the Latin lessons I shared with my brother enabled me to gather the sense of all that he said.

I . think people never remember sufficiently how much small children really do understand and notice. Few remember now the famous proces of the Due de Praslin, who murdered his wife a year or two before the Revolution of 1848. The account of it was pubhshed in a French pamphlet, which my mother read out to her sister whilst she was painting. I was sitting on the floor cutting out pictures. I did not lose a single word ; I was deeply interested, and remember most of the details to this day.

The aunt just referred to was my mother's eldest sister, an old maid full of character and with a good deal of cleverness. She remembered all about the Napoleonic wars, and inspired me with a fine hatred of the ' Corsican brigand.' My mother's father was one of the men best hated by Napoleon, because he had held the only Prussian fortress which never surrendered. I remember on great occasions a set of fine damask tablecloths being used, with an inscription woven into them from ' The grateful citizens of Colberg ' for having preserved their town from the invader. It was he also who later on planned the junction of the Prussians with Wellington at Waterloo, and who, not only as a soldier but as a politician, had always opposed the French influence which had for 200 years crippled German development, and which, during the first years of the nineteenth century, exercised so baneful an influence over the weak and vacillating king, and through him on the fortunes of Prussia.

I did not wonder that nearly all the conversation was carried on in French in deference to our many foreign guests, and also I vaguely realised that it was la langue dij)lomatique, which had to be kept up at any cost ; but when the village people, especially the old men and women, interlarded their remarks with French words, it roused my indignation. They had been young during the French occupation, and the two places we lived at most were on the very edge of the great battlefields around Leipzig. Many of the villagers had seen Napoleon and his generals : the Emperor had passed through the place and dined at the castle. Marshal Ney had slept for six weeks in my room, and Marmont was quartered close by. I knew that the country had suffered inexpressibly during those wars, though I did not then realise that the reason why the trees of all the avenues were so small was because they had been cut doMoi, and the houses were so bare because they had all been plundered and robbed.

My paternal grandfather owned large tracts of the country around Leipzig and many houses in the town, and my father remembered, when he was quite small, Napoleon visiting his young and pretty mother, who had fled into the town and was the great lady there. He said the Emperor wore a black coat with frogs, and was not unamiable, for at that moment, just after the battle of Jena, the Saxons were his allies. My grandfather, however, was a patriot and loathed this unnatural alliance ; and before the battle of Leipzig he retired to his country place, ordering his agent, whom he left in town, to make a feu de joie in case of success of a copse of very fine old oaks which grew upon a knoll and could be seen for many miles over the flat country. However, when the battle was won, the agent thought it a pity to set fire to the old oaks, and there they stand to this day.

Before my days of lessons began I used to accompany my parents to some of their other places, and delightful pictures of them still float in my mind. I remember especially a big sort of palace where there were many functions. It stood on the margin of a lake, on marshy ground. The rooms were large and bare, with stuccoed ceilings ; but what endeared it particularly to me was that my English nurse on Sunday morning took me into the kitchen, a place I had never seen, and taught me to make a plum pudding.

Then we went to a great castle high up in the mountains. It was situated on the watershed between Saxony and Bohemia, and a small town clustered round its giant walls. It had been partially abandoned, but the arched ceilings and great halls beautifull}^ carved with rich ornament excited my mother's admiration, and she wished to restore it as an ideal summer residence, for it was in the midst of immense fir-woods and 2500 feet above the sea. We visited various other places ; but the one I loved best was not far from Dresden, beyond the valley of Tharand. My mother took us children there sometimes for a few days in May. It was a little whitewashed castle, with round towers and pointed red-brick roofs. It stood on the side of a valley overhung by lovely woods. All around it was a carpet of the greenest finest grass, intersected with small rivulets bubbling over silvery sand and enamelled with buttercups, daisies, forget-me-nots, primroses, and violets in such luxuriance as I have never seen since.

In the autumn we nearly always moved to a place not far distant from Puechau, but where the shooting was particularly good. The house had been built by a favourite of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, and later King of Poland. The Elector eventually beheaded the favourite, who is supposed to walk about with his head under his arm. The house, which was only inhabited for a few weeks every year, had big halls and staircases, and was hung with many pictures of the royal Saxon family. It was very cold, for the walls were not six or seven feet thick as at Puechau, and I trembled with fear and cold if after dark I had to go to a distant part. The country around was flat, with a river winding through meadows, and dark fir-woods which stretched as far as one could see gave it a melancholy beauty. Here my father's woods marched with Crown property, all forest, which extends to a distance of more than forty miles. This is what is called the ' Wittenberger Heide,' and it takes two days to ride through it. Only one little inn stands in the middle of the forest ; besides that, there are no other habitations of any sort.

As the year '48 approached, and signs of unrest began among the people, we moved about less, and Puechau, which in itself was a strong place, was further fortified with iron doors and shutters, for hordes of rabble led by agitators roamed about the country, burning and sacking the houses of the aristocracy. Not far from us Prince Schoenburg's fine place was burnt to the ground and several others. My father had the peasants drilled so as to be able to defend the village, and our walks were limited to the gardens, for the country was overrun by vagabonds.

My parents were much beloved by all around them, yet there were many acts of petty spite, and the thing which hurt my father most was the maiming of the splendid white stag and hinds (red deer, and very rare) which the King had given him. I used often from my tower window to watch, in the summer evenings, a herd of deer swimming through the lake below : the stately white stag with his two hinds, always a little apart from the others, shimmered golden in the setting sun.

We used every other year to spend the winter in Dresden. When we returned there after the Revolution, we found all our cots riddled with bullets, for in front of our house there had been a barricade and the hottest fighting, as the ' Turnerhaus,' a students' club, was just opposite. My father, who had returned to Dresden when the fighting began, said the dead lay in piles of six and seven before our door. Our house was a fine old one, with a large garden at the back, which joined on to the ' Promenade ' that extends to the far-famed Bruehlsche Terrasse, the rendezvous of the best society. We were taken there daily by our governesses, and walked two and two very smartly dressed, like well brought up children. One day, when I was only four or five, my father said he would take me out. I was somewhat frightened at the unwonted honour, and just before reaching the Bruehlsche Terrasse, at a place where there were some arches in the wall, he stopped, and pointing to a tall lady who, accompanied by a gentleman, was coming towards us, said : ' Let us hide and surprise mamma.' The lady wore a lilac bonnet and dress with a green cloak — a costume I had often seen my mother in.

We squeezed back into the arch, and at the moment the lady came up we rushed out upon her — I with a shrill scream of delight. What, however, was my dismay when, clinging to the lady's knees, I looked up into the face of a stranger, and I saw my father, hat in hand, making profound bows and uttering a string of excuses. The lady laughed and kissed me and picked up my glove, which in my fright I had dropped on the snow, and put it on for me. Both the gentlemen and lady seemed to be much amused. My father told me afterwards that they were the King and Queen.

My father was on a very good and intimate footing with the King, and when the troublous times came he supported him with moral influence and material help. He was therefore deeply disappointed when the King weakly fled from Dresden, leaving it a prey to disorder and dissension. From this time my father inclined more and more to Prussia, where he also had large estates, for he saw in Prussia's ascendancy the only chance of saving Germany.

I often went to Court in my infantine days, for Prince John, the King's brother, had a number of children.