

E-text prepared by Christine Bell & Marc D'Hooghe
(http://www.freeliterature.org)



MAJESTY

A Novel

by

LOUIS COUPERUS

Newly Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

With a Preface by Stephen McKenna







New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1921




PREFACE


The betting-book in one of London's oldest and most famous clubs
contains a wager, with odds laid at one hundred sovereigns to ten, that
"within five years there will not remain two crowned heads in Europe."
The condition--"in the event of war between Great Britain and
Germany"--was imposed by the date of the wager, for one member was
venturing his hundred to ten at a moment when another was dining with
him to kill time before the British prime minister's ultimatum took
effect: the imperial German government had to deliver its reply before
midnight, by Greenwich time, or eleven o'clock, by Central European
reckoning.

Since the fourth of August, 1914, the King of the Hellenes, the Czar of
Bulgaria, the Emperor-King of Austria-Hungary, the German Kaiser and a
host of smaller princes have abdicated and sought asylum in countries
left neutral by the war; the Czar of All the Russias also abdicated, but
was executed without an opportunity of escape. Thus, though republican
and royalist may protest that the wager was too sanguine or too
pessimistic, the challenger must have taken credit for his prescience,
as three of the great powers and two of the lesser converted, one after
another, their half-divine sovereign into their wholly material scapegoat;
by no great special pleading he might claim that the bet was won in
spirit if not in fact when the morning of Armistice Day shewed monarchy
surviving only in Spain, Italy, Roumania and Greece, in the small
liberal kingdoms of Scandinavia and the Netherlands, in the minute
principality of Monaco, in the crowned republic of Great Britain and
Ireland and in the eternal anachronism of the Ottoman Empire. And the
time-limit of five years had been exceeded by only three months.

In the peaceful period, four times longer, between the publication of
_Majesty_ in 1894 and the outbreak of the Great War, historians were
kept hardly less busy with their record of fallen monarchs and
extinguished dynasties: King Humbert of Italy was assassinated in 1900;
King Alexander of Servia, with his queen, in 1903; King Carlos of
Portugal, with the heir-apparent, in 1908; and the Sultan Abdul Hamid
was deposed and imprisoned in 1909. Before the year 1894 no ruler of
note had removed himself or been removed since the assassination of the
Czar Alexander II in 1881; this study of "majesty" in its strength and,
still more, in its weakness was published at a time when even the
autocrat was more secure on his throne than at any period since "the
year of revolution," 1848.

If _Majesty_ is to be regarded as a _roman a clef_, there is a
temptation, after six and twenty years, to call Couperus 'prophetic:' to
call him that and nothing else is to turn blind eyes to the intuitive
understanding which is more precious than divination, to ignore, in one
book, the insight which illumines all and to overlook the quality which,
among all the chronicles of kings, penetrates beyond romance and makes
of _Majesty_ an essay in human psychology. So long as the fairy-tales of
childhood are woven about handsome princes and the fair-haired daughters
of kings, there is no danger that the setting of royalty will ever lose
its glamour; so long as "romantic" means primarily that which is
"strange," the writer of romance may bind his spell on all to whom
kings' houses and queens' gardens are an unfamiliar world; so long as
the picturesque and traditional hold sway, the sanction and titles of
kingship, the dignities and the procedure, the inhibitions and aloofness
of royalty will fascinate, whether they like it or not, all those in
whose veins there is no "golden drop" of blood royal. A romance of
kingship, alike in the hands of dramatist, melodramatist and sycophant,
is certain of commercial success.

The strength of this temptation is to be measured by the number of
novels written round the triumphs and intrigues of kings, their amours
and tragedies, their conflicts and disasters: King Cophetua and "King
Sun," Prince Hal and Richard the Second, Louis the Eleventh and Charles
the First, a king in hiding, a king in exile, a king in disguise; so
long as he is a king, he is a safe investment for the romantic writer.
But the weakness of those who succumb to this temptation is to be
measured by their failure to make kings live in literature. Those few
who survive beyond the brief term of ephemeral popularity survive more
by reason of their office than of themselves and Jan de Witt makes
little show beside Louis the Sixteenth; their robes are of so much
greater account than their persons that the feeblest German prince cuts
a more imposing figure than the strongest president of the Swiss
Confederation.

Those who stand out in despite of their romantic setting, the human,
perplexed Hamlets and vacillating, remorseful Richards, are inevitably
few; and few they are likely to remain so long as the frame outshines
the picture and the prince is labelled and left a celestial being apart,
or labelled and dragged into passing sentimental contrast with men less
exalted; it would seem that to regard a king first as a man and
afterwards as an hereditary office-holder was to waste his romantic
possibilities. This, nevertheless, is what Couperus has set himself to
do in _Majesty_; he presents his family of kings as a branch of the
human family; their dignity ceases to be stupefying when all are equally
high-born; they wear their uniforms and robes as other men wear the
conventional clothes of their trade; and, stripping them of their titles
and decorations, he paints his group of men and women who have been born
to rule, as others are born to till the soil; to marry for love or
reasons of state, as others marry for love or reasons of convenience; to
experience such emotions as are common to all men and to face the
special duties and dangers apportioned to their caste by the
organization of society:

_"... The Gothlandic family,"_ says Couperus, _"... lived [at
Altseeborgen] for four months, without palace-etiquette, in the greatest
simplicity. They formed a numerous family and there were always many
visitors. The king attended to state affairs in homely fashion at the
castle. His grandchildren would run into his room while he was
discussing important business with the prime minister.... He just patted
their flaxen curls and sent them away to play, with a caress.... From
all the courts of Europe, which were as one great family, different
members came from time to time to stay, bringing with them the
irrespective nuances of different nationality, something exotic in
accent and moral ideas, so far as this was not merged in their
cosmopolitanism."_

To this "one great family" the organization of society apportioned with
one hand special privileges and exemptions, with the other special
hardships and dangers. Revolution, to these professional rulers, was
what successful trade rivalry is to a store-keeper; assassination was a
daily risk to which store-keepers are commonly not exposed:

_"... Such is the life of rulers: the emperor lay dead, killed by a
simple pistol-shot; and the court chamberlain was very busy, the masters
of ceremonies unable to agree; the pomp of an imperial funeral was
prepared in all its intricacy; through all Europe sped the after-shudder
of fright; every newspaper was filled with telegrams and long
articles...._

_"All this was because of one shot from a fanatic, a martyr for the
people's rights._

_"The Empress Elizabeth stared with wide-open eyes at the fate that had
overtaken her. Not thus had she ever pictured to herself that it would
come, thus, so rudely, in the midst of that festivity and in the
presence of their royal guest...."_

It is to be understood, none the less, that she had always expected it
to come: assassination is one of the special risks attaching to majesty
at all times when one form of kingship or the whole institution of kings
is debated and criticized. _"When the intellectual developments or
culture of a race,"_ wrote Heine, in _The Citizen Kingdom in 1832,
"cease to accord with its old established institutions, the necessary
result is a combat in which the latter are overthrown. This is called a
revolution. Until this revolution is complete, so long as the reform of
these institutions does not agree at all points with the intellectual
development, the habits and the wants of the people, during this period
the national malady is not wholly cured and the ailing and agitated
people will often relapse into the weakness of exhaustion and at times
be subject to fits of burning fever. When this fever is upon them, they
tear the lightest bandages and the most healing lint from their old
wounds, throw the most benevolent and noble-hearted nurses out of window
and themselves roll about in agony, until at length they find themselves
in circumstances or adapt themselves to institutions that suit them
better."_

So much for the race, in the gripe of growing-pains; but what of the
nurses? How little benevolent or noble-hearted soever they be, nurses
are bound by the honour of their profession and by personal pride not to
forsake their patients. In one passage of _Majesty_ the crown-prince is
shaken by fundamental doubts of his own inherited right to rule; he
questions and analyses until he is brought to heel by his imperial
father who remembers that an excess of "victorious analysis" rotted the
intellectual foundations of the old order and prepared the way for the
logical French revolution. In another passage the boy realizes without
any qualification that he at least is unfitted for the burthen of empire
and that it is better to abdicate in favour of his brother or to commit
suicide than to play Atlas with a world that he cannot sustain; once
more, his imperial father silences any admission that his own flesh and
blood can be too degenerate for the task of majesty. And so, at the
moral sword-point, this hereditary nurse is held to the duty and
privilege of standing by an hereditary patient whom he cannot relieve
with "the most healing lint" and who may at any moment throw him out of
window.

Not even in thought may majesty abdicate: a prince inherits his
philosophy as he inherits his title.

_"Life is so simple,"_ proclaims the collectivist Zanti.

_"'As you picture it, but not in reality,' objected Herman._

_"Zanti looked at him angrily, stopped still, to be able to talk with
greater ease, and, passionately, violently, exclaimed:_

_"'And do you in reality find it better than I picture it? I do not,
sir, and I hope to turn my picture into reality. You and yours once,
ages ago, made your picture reality; now it is the turn of us others:
your reality has lasted long enough....'_

_"Othomar, haughtily, tried to say something in contradiction; the old
man, however, suddenly turned to him and, gently though roughly, with
his penetrating, fanatical voice which made Othomar shudder:_

_"'For you, sir, I feel pity!... Do you know why? Because the time will
come!... The hour will come. Perhaps it is very near. If it does not
come in your father's reign, it will come in