A STRANGER'S IMPRESSION OF VIENNA. HERE is one Austrian city
in Austria, and that is Vienna. Every other belongs more or less to some separate nation- ality. Salzburg is German, Prague Bohemian with a German varnish, Buda-Pesth Hungarian, Trieste—to misuse the only word which exactly describes it—Levantine, but Vienna is Austrian, the capital of the Empire, and not of any part of it, a cesspool of nationalities, an orderly microcosm of the chaotic world held together by the Imperial sceptre. The city is the realization of the Ilappurg dream, a place where a dozen nationalities, five languages, three radically different civilizations meet and jostle and struggle and embrace in inextricable and yet orderly confu- sion, with the greatest of these nationalities, the most flexible of these languages, the most hopeful of these civilizations riding calmly, almost indolently, at the top. Necessity has produced in Vienna the result which the Hapsburgs have striven in vain for four centuries to secure throughout their dominions—a working harmony between West and East, an international tolerance, a co- operation, more or less cordial, of the most jarring creeds, races, and systems of society. Jews own the houses in which Ultramontanes inveigh against the laxity which tolerates the Synagogue ; Germans looking as if they had just stepped off the Boulevard des Italiens give the word of command to brown men with almond eyes who glance backwards like Calmucka or startled horses ; engineers exactly like Englishmen and much better educated apportion burdens to women barefooted, barelegged, with apparently— it is not quite the fact, we suppose — only a blue chemise between them and nakedness. Equipages from Long Acre splash men in sheepskin, palaces are watched by sentries who shake their heads when addressed in any tongue spoken by civilized man, and the last telegram from Paris is posted up in languages in which there scarcely exists a book. And all this bizarre jumble of tongues, manners, and ideas produces no dis- order, no hostility, no visible clashing in the streets. The Austrian ideal has been realized in Vienna, and the city where of all others the population is apparently least homogeneous, is also of all others that which apparently requires least police supervision. The German has not absorbed the Magyar or the Croat, the Slovack or the Pole, the Italian or the Romnan, but he has in Vienna varnished them till their collision as they roll produces no visible friction. Stand in the Graben, the Viennese Cheapside, and forget all but what you see, and you cannot avoid the thought that under happier circumstances the Austrian ideal might not have been unattainable. There is the Empire, as in the view of the Hofbnrg it ought to be, with all its races, tongues, creeds, manners, and traditions separate and distinct, yet all peacefully working together to build up external civilization, fusing them- selves without blows into one polite, gentle, it might be high-cul-
tared, and eminently original people. The German who, under Italian guidance, is teaching those Polish workmen where to put on that stucco, is no more hostile to them than is the Slovack woman who brings them water, the dark Croat in uniform who is watching them so curiously, the intensely Viennese coachman. who is driving past as if he had entered for a chariot race, the Jew who will pay them all, or the Americanized German who is protesting at his shop-door that he will not have the way blocked with so many ladders. Vienna is the centre, the depot, the factory, the banking house; not of one, but of many kingdoms, and every turn reminds the stranger of the truth. Besides the endless variety of face and costume among the people,—which, by the way, does not stroll, but walks rather rapidly,—the shops announce their goods in different characters, two at least of which, Hungarian and Hebrew, are never seen in the West, and shopmen speak all tongues with apparently equal readiness. Not that Vienna is cosmopolitan in the Parisian signification of the term, it is only many-nationed, the self-dependent centre of a mighty, though chaotic power.
The next thing which strikes the stranger is the originality of the city itself as a structure. It has obviously never been designed by prince, architect, or people, but has simply grown. The site is one of the strangest imaginable. Gazetteers say Vienna is on the Daunbe, but that is precisely where Vienna is not, and where by every law of economics it ought to have been. How it came where it is, is to the stranger inexplicable ; but there it is, five miles from the great river which ought to pour into its lap the wealth of the greatest valley in Europe, but with which it is as yet entirely unconnected. There is not even a tramway between Vienna and the Danube, and grain is still carried up the bank to the warehouses, sack by sack, by half naked porters on two francs a day. It is nearly a two-hours' walk from the city to the river, and the good Viennese have apparently no intention of abridging the distance, no idea that the expenditure of a million or two might make their city a port of unrivalled importance and 'capacity. We do not know that they would spend the money if they did perceive it, getting on not being the Viennese ideal at all, but only an easy life. They would greatly prefer abusing their Government for not doing it. Between the river and the city-stretches the Prater, the Bois de Boulogne of Vienna, and the Viennese safely lodged in a chair listening to a perfect military band is quite content to leave his glorious river not three miles from his seat, to roll on uselessly, will not even ask that its little affluent, the Donau, which enters the city, be made clean, or -sweet, or useful. A million or two would make Vienna a port on the Black Sea, and even as it is Americans would have a thousand steamers upon its waters. Apart, however, from this strange defect, Vienna enjoys a splendid situation. By land it is the half- way house between East and West, between London and Con- stantinople, it is the centre of a railway network which touches Paris and Belgrade, and it is the natural bonded warehouse for the whole trade between the valley of the Danube and the West. The city itself is gloomily magnificent. Crushed in till recently among fortifications, it has grown, like all such cities, straight into the air. London is not so populated as old Vienna. The streets are narrow beyond Continental example, more narrow than those .of Florence, the people live in flats and single rooms, and the stately houses tower into the air as if seeking perpetually the sunshine they yet cannot obtain. Space has been, as it were, fought for, till in old Vienna there is not a mean house, and -scarcely one which enjoys a full blaze of light. The effect is -curiously Austrian, that of a city gloomy, inconvenient, and half -civilized, yet infinitely imposing and durable. Despite the multi- plicity of signs, the profusion of shops, the visible love of colour, there is nothing tawdry or meretricious ; all is as dignified as if the -old Spanish spirit still lingered in the capital, as it does in its palace. This stateliness is the more remarkable because, the Cathedral excepted, the buildings are by no means grand. Even St. Stephen's is cluttered up by houses till half its external grandeur is lost, though nothing, fortunately, can interfere with the solemn beauty of its interior, with its mighty forest of pillars, black with age and healthy neglect, and its unique effects of light. By some peculiarity in its architecture, which the writer is not architect enough to comprehend, the mighty length of the central aisle is divided by shadows into three. Near the doorway all is bright, then comes a great space of shadow so deep that the eye scarcely pierces it, and then a flood of light upon the chancel. The spectator, therefore, himself standing in a glare, looks through a -cloud of darkness to the priests, revealed under the fullest blaze, an effect which, scenic as it may seem in our description, in reality deepens the emotion of slight awe from which no stranger who enters the pile can be wholly free. The prevail- ing colour of the building, as of all the old city, is dark grey, not the result of smoke, but of age, a grey which immensely adds both to its stateliness and its gloom. Round this city the true Vienna, old and grand but a mere clump of building, cover- ing less space than the City of London, circles a series of bright, smiling avenues, partly lined with houses, and called by strangers boulevards, or by the people "Rings." They have been planted on the old glacis which once hemmed in the city, and when finished they will be unsurpassed in Europe, the whole forming concentric rings of trees and bright, buff-coloured palaces, many of them adorned to pro- fusion outside with gilding and colour. A certain richness and luxuriousness of taste marks the Viennese architects of to-day, which, though it may degenerate into vulgarity, undoubtedly for the present prohibits sameness. The buildings go on slowly, for the Viennese are not speculative, and business men cling to the ancient city, the very hotel-keepers preferring their worm-eaten caravan- serais to the bright structures of the boulevards ; but in ten years they will be finished, and Vienna will then be externally at once London and Paris. Round the Rings, again, stretch villages, or rather fauboins, radiating outwards like spokes from an axle, and capable of almost infinite extension. They are not pretty yet, for they are badlypaved, badlydrained, wanting in trees, and deficient in gutters; but they are lined with houses fortunately erected on the old idea that a house is to hold many families—the grand secret of avoiding meanness in city architecture—and the improvements will come with peace and English capital. it is here that the professional classes live, on terms which ought to make Vienna the most attractive of residences for the Continental English. Actuated, we imagine, chiefly by a vague fear of a despotism which no longer exists, they throng in Dresden, and Frankfort, and Munich, and avoid a city where all the delights of a great capital, of an exquisite countryside—twelve minutes and sixpence take you to a miniature Alps — are combined with rare cheapness and the pleasantest society. A fiat of five good rooms costs in Vienna 50/. a year, and the writer was assured on undeniable authority that a family could live in easy comfort for 400/. a year, a comfort immensely increased by the fact that etiquette allows ladies to walk by day- light unattended, and by the most marked external peculiarity of Vienna, the perfection of the means of locomotion. Ornuibuses go everywhere, barouches can be hired at every corner for eight shillings the half day, and cabs as good as English broughams are driven for sixpence the quarter of an hour at a rate which would make the driver of a London hansom stare. The Viennese whips are the best in the world, they will not drive slowly, they use the swift Hungarian horses which are not harnessed till they are seven years old, and they are the only persons visibly under strict police discipline. They do not drink, and for a genuine Viennese to be uncivil is an impossibility. The city, moreover, is perhaps the most orderly in the world. The only visible sign of authority is the gendarme, planted like a sentry at each cross-road, just where in London the " island " would be, to keep the Viennese whips in order ; but the streets are as safe by day and night as those of London, magnificently lighted, and freer than any city in Europe from the social evil. Vienna is said to be dissolute, probably is so, but partly from careful regulation, partly from some beneficial pecu- liarities in its manners, its laxity is not apparent to the eye. There is no Haymarket in Vienna, no part of the city which cannot be traversed at any hour with the most ab- solute freedom from annoyance, insult, or personal danger. Distances, owing to the peculiar shape of the city—a wheel with a second tire half-way between the axle and the exterior— are not great, and though the inhabitants complain that the police are careless, they are probably better governed—for municipal purposes, we mean—and less governed than the people of any European capital, London alone excepted. Talk is free, if print- ing is not, and the population, well off, indolent, and disposed to luxury, avenges itself for every act it disapproves by satire, satire as keen and almost as ill-natured as that of Paris. Shut out from politics, encouraged to seek pleasure, exempt by the subdivision of property from poverty, and enjoying a beautiful though not serene climate, the Viennese have become the Tuscans of Ger- many. "All our vices," said a keenly intelligent Austrian to the writer, "official, national, and social, may be described in a sen- tence, From the Kaiser to the water-carrier, we confuse leisure with idleness.'"
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