APPENDIX II MY SCIENTIFIC-LITERARY ACTIVITY
My many years of practical study of the Asiatic world, of which I have attempted to give an account in the preceding pages, were necessarily followed as soon as I had leisure and quiet by a period of literary activity. During those years of travel such a vast amount of material had been accumulating that I must needs put some of it in writing, and relate some of the things I had seen and experienced. And now that the beautiful summertime of my life is past, and I look back upon that period of literary work, I must preface my account of these labours by stating that in point of quantity, quality, and tendency these productions were quite in keeping with my previous studies. A self-educated man, without any direction or guidance in my studies, without even a definite object in view, my literary career must necessarily also be full of the weaknesses, faults, and deficiencies of the self-made man. Just as there are poets by nature, so I was a scholar by nature, but as there is not and could not be a "scientifica licentia," in the same way as there is a "poetica licentia," so the difficulties I had to fight against were proportionally as great as the deficiencies and blunders which criticism rightly detected in my works. Hasty and rash as I had been in acquiring knowledge (for which a powerful memory and a fiery zeal are chiefly to blame), I was equally impatient to accomplish the work on hand. When once I had begun to write a book, I gave myself neither rest nor peace until I saw it finished and printed on my table, regardless of the saying, "Nonum prematur in annum." Unfortunately my labour lay chiefly in as yet unfrequented regions of philology and ethnography, consequently the authorities at my disposal were very limited, and the few that were available were hardly worth consulting, so I did not trouble with them.
Besides, to make a thorough study of ancient authorities went quite against the grain with me. I did not care to be always referring to what others had said and done and to enter into minute speculations and criticisms in regard to them. To use the expression—I objected to chew the cud that others had eaten. From a strictly scientific point of view this was no doubt a grave fault in me. It has always been the novel, the unknown, and untold which attracted me. Only quite new subjects took my fancy, only in those regions did I burn with desire to earn my literary spurs, and although I had not much fear of any one overtaking me in the race, I was for ever hurrying and hankering after novelty and originality, not to say fresh revelations. I was always in a rush, and so did not give the necessary care and attention to the work on hand. When in the biographical notices about my insignificant person, which have appeared from time to time, I see myself described as a learned man, this most unfitting qualification always surprises me, for I am anything but learned in the ordinary sense of the word, and could not possibly be. To be a scholar one needs preparation, schooling, and disposition, all of which I lacked; of a scholar one can say, "Non nascitur sed fit," while all through my life, in all my sayings and doings I have always acted under the influence of my naturally good or bad qualities, and have been solely guided by these. The dark side and the disadvantages of such a character do undoubtedly weigh heavily, but the mischief done is to a certain extent rectified by its very decided advantages. Lack of caution makes one bold and daring, and where there is no great depth, there is the greater extension over the area one has chosen for one's field of operation. In this manner only can it be explained why my literary activity encompassed such various regions of Oriental knowledge, and why I could act as philologist, geographer, ethnographer, historian, ethnologist, and politician all at once. Of all the weaknesses and absurdities of the so-called learned guild, the conventional modesty of scholars has always been the most hateful and objectionable to me. I loathed nothing so much as the hypocritical hiding of the material advantage which scholars as much as, if not more than other mortals have in view, and nothing is to my mind more despicable than the professed indifference to praise and recognition; for we all know that scholars and writers are the vainest creatures born.
Since I am not a professional scholar, I need not be modest according to the rules of the trade, and as I am about to speak of my literary activity, and discuss and criticise my own work, I will leave scholarly modesty quite out of the question, and freely and frankly give my opinion on the products of my pen.
1. Travels in Central Asia.
This work, which appeared in several editions in various European and Asiatic languages, is interesting reading because of the curious methods of travel and the novelty of the adventures. Incognito journeys had been made before my time to Mecca and Medina by Burton, Burckhart, Maltzan, Snouck-Hurgronje, and others, but as a Dervish living on alms, and undergoing all the penalties of fakirdom, I was certainly the first and only European. However interesting the account of my adventures may be, the geographico-scientific results of my journey are not in adequate proportion to the dangers and sufferings I underwent. Astronomical observations were impossible, neither was I competent to make them. Orography and hydrography were never touched upon. The fauna and flora were closed books to me, and as for geology, I did not even know this science by name before I came West. But on the other hand, I can point out with pleasure that in certain parts of Central Asia I was the first European traveller, and have contributed many names of places to the map of the region, and furnished many facts hitherto unknown about the ethnographical relations of the Turks in these parts. What made my book of travels popular was unquestionably the account of my adventures and the continual dangers in which I found myself. The European reader can hardly form any conception of my sufferings and privations; they evoked the interest and the sympathy of the cultured world; but he who has read the preceding pages, and is acquainted with the struggles of my childhood and youth, will not be surprised that the early schooling of misery and privation I underwent had sufficiently hardened me to bear the later heavy struggles. The difference between the condition of a poor Jew-boy and a mendicant Dervish in Central Asia is, after all, not very great. The cravings of hunger are not one whit easier to bear or less irksome in cultured Europe than in the Steppes of Asia, and the mental agony of the little Jew, despised and mocked by the Christian world, is perhaps harder than the constant fear of being found out by fanatical Mohammedans. As my first publication was so much appreciated, I enlarged, at the instigation of my friends, my first account, and published—
2. Sketches from Central Asia,
in which on the one hand I elaborated the account of my adventures with fresh incidents, and on the other introduced those ethnographical, political, and economic data which I was unable to incorporate in my traveller's account written in London, as the documents needed for this were left behind at home in Pest. With this book, likewise translated in several languages, I attracted more attention in scientific circles, in consequence of which I was nominated honorary member of a geographical society; but still from a scientific point of view this book does not deserve much attention, for in spite of many new data, it is altogether too fragmentary, and bears the unmistakable stamp of dilettantism. To be an expert ethnologist I ought to have known much more about anthropology and anatomy, and particularly the want of measurements indispensable to anthropological researches, made it impossible for me to furnish accurate descriptive delineations. Only the part about the political situation, i.e., the rivalry between England and Russia in Central Asia, was of any real value. This part, which first appeared in the columns of the periodical Unsere Zeit, was freely commented upon and discussed in official and non-official circles. To this article I owe my introduction into political literature, and at the same time the animosity of Russia, I might say the violent anger which the Russian press has ever since expressed at the mention of my name. In Chapter VIII. I have referred more fully to this part of my literary career, and will only mention here that I did not enter upon this course with any special purpose in view, or with any sense of pleasure. All I cared for was to make known my purely philological experiences, and accordingly as soon as I returned from London I set to work upon my—
3. Chagataic Linguistic Studies.
The fact that I, a self-taught man, with no scholastic education—a man who was no grammarian, and who had but very vague notions about philology in general should dare to venture on a philological work, and that, moreover, in German; that I should dare to lay this before the severe forum of expert philology—this, indeed, was almost too bold a stroke, wellnigh on a par with my journey into Central Asia. Fortunately at that time I was still ignorant of the furor teutonicus, and the spiteful nature of philologists. I was moving, so to speak, on untrodden ground, for with the exception of the specimen Chagataic passages published by Quatremere in his Chrestomathie Orientale, and what was published in the original by Baber and Abulghazi, East Turkish was an entirely unknown language to Western Orientalists. I began by giving specimens of national literature, proverbs, and the different dialects of Turkish inner Asia. Then I gave a whole list of East-Turkish books of which no one in Europe had ever heard, and I published the first East-Turkish dictionary which the French scholar Pavel de Courteille incorporated in his later issued work, Dictionnaire Turk-Oriental. He says in his preface, "J'avoue tout de suite, que j'ai mis à contribution ce dictionnaire, en insérant dans mon travail autant que je le pouvais, le livre le plus instructif qui fait grand honneur à son auteur," as he called this my first philological production (Preface, p. xi.). But still more did it surprise me to find that the Russian Orientalist, Budagow, who was so much nearer akin to this branch of philology, used my work in his elaborate dictionary; and so, although the critical press took little notice of my first philological efforts, I was nevertheless encouraged to persevere, and began to realise that without being a scholarly linguist one can yet do useful work in this line. "It is but the first step that costs," says the proverb. My Chagataic linguistic studies were soon followed by isolated fragments on this subject, and the more readily they were received the deeper I endeavoured to penetrate into the ancient monuments of the Turkish language. As a result of these efforts appeared my—
4. Uiguric Linguistic Monuments,
which was one of the hardest and best paying labours I accomplished in Turkology, and which advanced me to the title of specialist in Turkish languages. From the Turkish Grammar by Davids, and an article of Joubert's in the Journal Asiatique, I had heard of the existence of a mysterious Uiguric manuscript, and when Lord Strangford, moreover, drew my attention to it, and advised me to try and decipher it, I burned with ambition, and did not rest until I had secured the loan of this precious manuscript from the Imperial Library at Vienna. The faint, uncertain characters, the value of which I had to guess in many cases, the curious wording, and the peculiarly original contents of the text, exercised an overpowering charm over me. For more than a year I gazed daily for hours at the sybillic signs, until at last I succeeded bit by bit in reading and understanding the manuscript. My joy was boundless. I immediately decided to publish the deciphered portion, and when, after much trouble and expense, for the type had first to be made, I saw the imposing quarto before my eyes, I really believed I had accomplished an important work. I was strengthened in this idea by the extremely appreciative comments of my colleagues, and yet it was but a delusion, for my knowledge of the dialects in the northern and north-easterly frontier districts of the Turkish languages, was not sufficient to enable me to understand the entire manuscript, and to accomplish the deciphering of the entire document. My better qualified and more thoroughly versed successor, Dr. W. Radloff, was able to show better results at once, and the only satisfaction that remains to me from this laborious task is the fact that to me belongs the right of priority; and that Dr. Radloff, following in my footsteps, attained after thirty years a higher standpoint and wider view, is due in a large measure to the fact that in course of time he managed to secure a copy of the Kudatku Biliks written in Arabic characters, and consequently more legible.
And so my Uiguric Linguistic Monuments, in spite of many faults and defects, ranks among the showpieces of my scientific-literary activity. In any case I had proved that without being a schooled philologist one can be a pioneer in this line. Following up this only partially successful experiment, I continued for some time my researches in the field of Turkology. I wrote an—
5. Etymological Dictionary of the Turkish Language,
the first ever written on this subject of philology, in which, without any precedent, I collected, criticised and compared, until I succeeded in finding out the stems and roots, and ranged them into separate families. On this slippery path, on which even the greatest authorities in philology sometimes stumble, and by their awkward fall bring their colleagues with them and amuse the world, I, with my inadequate knowledge of the subject, stumbled and slipped all the oftener. In spite of all this, however, even my bitterest rival could not deny that I had succeeded in unravelling the etymology of a considerable number of Turkish words, and in giving a concrete meaning to many abstract conceptions. So mighty is the magic charm of discovery that for months together, by day and by night, I could think of nothing but Turkish root-words, and as I generally worked from memory, and never in my life, so to speak, took any notes, it was a real joy to me to follow up the transitions and changes of an idea to its remotest origin. As a matter of fact this kind of study, apart from my inadequate knowledge, was not at all in keeping with my tendencies. Under the delusive cover of etymological recreation the dry monotony of the study soon became irksome, and I was quite pleased when this etymological pastime led me to the investigation of the—
6. Primitive Culture of the Turko-Tartar People.
Here I felt more at home and stood on more congenial ground, for here philology served as a telescope, with which I could look into the remotest past of Turkish tribe-life, and discover many valuable details of the ethnical, ethical and social conditions of the Turk. As I have made up my mind to be entirely frank and open in this criticism of my own work, I am bound to say that I consider this little book one of the best productions of my pen. It abounds in valuable suggestions, mere suggestions unfortunately, about the ethnology of the Turk, which could only flow from the pen of a travelling philologist who united to a knowledge of the language, a penetration into the customs, character and views in general of the people under consideration, and who had it all fresh in his mind and could speak from practical experience. The recognition which this little book received from my fellow-philologists was most gratifying to me, and was the chief cause which led me to write about—
7. The Turkish People in their Ethnological and Ethnographical Relationship.
In this work, planned on a much larger scale, I endeavoured to incorporate my personal experiences of the Turks in general, and also to introduce the notes and extracts gleaned on this subject from European and Asiatic literature. In both these efforts I had certain advantages over others. In the first place no ethnographer had ever had such long and intimate intercourse with members of this nation, and secondly, there were not many ethnographers who could avail themselves as well as I could of the many-tongued sources of information. Here again I found myself on untrodden paths, and the accomplished work had the general defects and charms of a first effort. On the whole it was favourably criticised, and I was therefore the more surprised that the book had such a very limited sale. I flattered myself I had written a popular book, or at least a book that would please the reading public, and I was grievously disappointed when, after a lapse of ten years, not three hundred copies had been sold. I came to the conclusion that the public at large troubles itself very little about the origin, customs and manners, the ramifications and tribal relationships of the Turks, and that geography and ethnography were only appreciated by the reading public as long as they were well flavoured with stirring adventures. In my book about the Turkish people I gave a general survey of all the tribes and branches of the race collectively, and although no such work had ever been written about any other Asiatic tribal family, I was mistaken as to its success. In spite of my favourable literary position in England, all my endeavours to issue an English edition of this work were in vain.
East Turkish, both in language and literature, being one of my favourite studies, and always giving me new thoughts and ideas, I published simultaneously with my Turkish People, an Ösbeg epic poem entitled—
8. The Sheibaniade,
which I copied from the original manuscript in the Imperial Library at Vienna during several summer vacations, and afterwards printed at my own expense. The copying was a tedious business. The writing of 4,500 double stanzas tried my eyes considerably, but the historical and linguistic value of the poem were well worth the trouble. It is a unique copy. Neither in Europe nor in Asia have I ever heard of the existence of a duplicate, and it was therefore well worth while to make it accessible for historical research. The beautiful edition of this work, with facsimile and a chromo-photographic title page, cost me nearly fourteen hundred florins, and as scarcely sixty copies were sold I did not get back a fourth of the sum laid out upon it. The scientific criticism was limited to one flattering notice in the Journal Asiatique. The rest of the literati, even Orientalists, hardly deigned to take any notice of my publication, for the number of students of this particular branch of Oriental languages was, and is still, very small in Europe; even in Russia it does not yet receive the attention it so richly deserves.
I can therefore not blame myself that I was urged on in this branch of my literary career by the hope of moral or material gain; it was simply my personal liking and predilection which made me pursue these subjects. Only occasionally, when forced thereto by material needs, perhaps also sometimes for the sake of a change, I left my favourite study and turned to literary work which could command a larger public and give me a better chance of making money by it.
Thus it came about that soon after my return from Central Asia I published the account of my—
9. Wanderings and Experiences in Persia.
But this was familiar ground, fully and accurately described elsewhere, both geographically and ethnographically. It was at most my exciting personal adventures as pseudo-Sunnite amongst the Shiites which could lay claim to any special interest, perhaps also to some extent its casual connection with my later wanderings in Central Asia; for the rest, however, this volume has little value, and with the exception of England, Germany, Sweden, and Hungary, where translations appeared, it has attracted no notice to speak of. Not much better fared my—
10. Moral Pictures from the Orient.
This had already appeared in part in a German periodical, Westermann's Monthly, and was further enlarged with sketches of family life in Turkey, Persia, and Central Asia, interspersed with personal observations on the religious and social customs of these people. As far as I know there are, besides the original German edition, a Danish and a Hungarian translation of this work, but although much read and discussed, this book has not been of much, if any, material benefit to me, beyond the honorarium paid me by the "Society of German literature." With this book I have really contributed to the knowledge of the Orient in the regions named just as with my—
11. Islam in the Nineteenth Century
I directed the attention of the reading public to those social and political reforms which our intervention and our reformatory efforts in the Moslem East have called forth; but practically both the one and the other were failures. It was not at all my intention to write a sort of defence of Islam, as was generally imagined, but I endeavoured, on the contrary, to show up the mistakes, weaknesses and prejudices which characterised this transition period, indeed I ruthlessly tore away the veil; but on the other hand I did not hesitate to lay bare our own neglects and faults. My object was to correct the judgment of Europe in regard to the Moslem society of Asia, and to point out that with patience and a little less egotism and greed we should accomplish more; that we are not yet justified in looking upon Islam as a society condemned to destruction, and in breaking the staff over it. As a purely theoretical study, perhaps also on account of my very liberal religious notions expressed therein, I have not been able to publish this book in England; hence the circle of readers was very limited, but all the more select, and I had the satisfaction of having stirred up a very serious question.
A book which, to my great surprise, had an extraordinary success was my publication in English of the—
12. Life and Adventures of Arminius Vambéry, written by Himself,
which in a very short time passed through seven editions, and was extraordinarily popular in England, America and Australia. It is in reality one of my most insignificant, unpretentious literary efforts, written at the request of my English publisher, and is by no means worthy of the reception it had. This made me realise the truth of the proverb: "Habent sua fata libelli," for the book is nothing but a recapitulation of my wanderings, including my experiences in Turkey and Persia, which were now for the first time brought before the English public. But what chiefly secured its friendly reception was a few short paragraphs about my early life, a short resumé of the first chapter of the present work, and these details from the life of a self-made man did not fail to produce an impression upon the strongly developed individuality of the Anglo-Saxon race. I am not sure how many editions it went through, but I have evident proofs of the strong hold this book had upon all ranks and classes of English-speaking people. Comments and discussions there were by the hundred, and private letters expressive of readers' appreciation kept flowing in to me from the three parts of the world.
Curiously enough this book excited interest only with the Anglo-Saxons; to this day it has not been translated in any other foreign language, not even in my Hungarian mother-tongue. Society in Eastern Europe still suffers from the old-world delusion that nobility of blood is everything, and considers that it could not possibly condescend to be edified by the experiences of a poorly-born man of obscure origin; but the Anglo-Saxon with his liberal notions revels in the story of the terrible struggles of the poor Jewish boy, the servant and the teacher, and of what he finally accomplished. This is the chief reason which made the most insignificant of my books so popular with the Anglo-Saxons, a book with which I promulgated more knowledge about Moslem Asia than with all my other works put together, more even than many highly learned disquisitions of stock-Orientalists.
I will not deny that the unexpected success of this book was my principal inducement in writing the present Autobiography.
In my various literary productions I had chiefly aimed at a diffusing of general knowledge about the Moslem East, but at home (in Hungary) I had often been reproached with absolute neglect as regards the national Magyar side of my studies. I therefore decided to publish my views about the—
13. Origin of the Magyars
in a separate volume. In different scientific articles I had already hinted at the manner in which I intended to treat this still open question. I pointed out that Árpád and his warriors who, towards the close of the ninth century founded what is now Hungary, were most certainly Turkish nomads forming a north-westerly branch of the Turkish chain of nationalities; that they pushed forward from the Ural, across the Volga, into Europe, and established in Pannonia what is now the State of Hungary. The ethnology and the language of the Magyars is a curious mixture of dialects, for the Turkish nomads during their wanderings incorporated into their language many kindred Finnish-Ugrian elements, and in the lowlands of Hungary they came upon many ethnological remains of the same original stock. All these various elements gradually amalgamated and formed the people and the language of Hungary as it is now. Considering this problematic origin, and the elasticity of philological speculation, it stands to reason that much has been written and argued in Hungary about the origin of the nation. Many different views were held, and at the time that I joined in the discussion, the theory of the Finnish-Ugrian descent of the Magyars held the upper hand. My labour, therefore, was directed against these, for on the ground of my personal experiences in the manner of living and the migrations of the Turkish nomads in general, based upon historical evidence, I endeavoured to prove the Turkish nationality of Árpád and his companions. I conceded the mixed character of the language with the reservation, however, that in the amalgamation not the Finnish-Ugrian but the Turko-Tartar element predominated. Philologists opposed this view in their most zealous and ablest representative, Doctor Budenz, a German by birth; he pleaded with all the enthusiasm of an etymological philologist for the eminently Ugrian character of the Magyar tongue. The arguments of the opposing party were chiefly based upon what they considered the sacred and fundamental rules of comparative philology; but to me these threw no light upon the matter, and were not likely to convince me of my error. The struggle, which my fanatical opponents made into a personal matter, lasted for some time, but the old Latin proverb: "Philologi certant, lumen sub judice lis," again proved true in this case. The etymological Salto Mortales and the grammatical violence of the opposing school had rudely shaken my confidence in the entire apparatus of comparative philology. I realised that with such evidence one might take any one Ural-Altaic language and call it the nearest kindred tongue of the Magyar. The etymological connection between the Tartar words "tongue" and "navel"—because both are long, hanging objects—and the use of fictitious root-words to explain the inexplicable, with which my learned opponent tried to justify his theory, were altogether too fantastic and too airy for my practical notions. So I gave up the struggle and satisfied myself with the result that the home-bred Magyars were no longer exclusively considered to be of Finnish-Ugrian extraction, as used to be the case, and that even my bitterest opponent had to allow the possibility that Árpád and his warriors were originally Turks.
The learned world outside naturally took but little part in this essentially Magyar controversy, and I was, therefore, all the more pleased to see Ranke, the Nestor of German historical research, siding with me. He referred to the historical evidence of one Ibn Dasta and Porphyrogenitus, who had declared that the Magyars overrunning Hungary at the close of the ninth century were Turks. In Hungary itself the majority of the public shared my views, and the seven hundred copies of the first edition of my book were sold in three days.
This, of course, was due more to the national and political than to the purely scientific interest of the question, since the Magyars, proud of their Asiatic origin, very much disliked, nay even thought it insulting that their ancestors should have to claim blood-relationship with poor barbarians of high northern regions, living by fishing and hunting, Ostiaks, Vogules, and such like racial fragments. The Hungarian priding himself on his warlike spirit, his valour, and his independence, would rather claim relationship with Huns and Avars, depicted by the mediæval Christian world as terror-spreading, mighty warriors; and the national legend correctedly accepted this view, for as my further researches revealed, and as I tried to prove in my subsequent book, entitled—
14. Growth and Spread of the Magyars,
the present Magyar nation has proceeded from a gradual, scarcely definable settlement of Ural-Altaic elements in the lowlands of Hungary. Originally as warriors and protectors of the Slavs settled in Pannonia, they became afterwards their lords and masters, something like the Franks in Gaul and the Varangians in Russia, with this difference, however, that the latter exchanged their language for that of their subjects, and became lost among the masses of the subjugated people, while the Magyars to this day have preserved their language and their national individuality intact, and in course of time were able to establish a Magyar ethnography. Looking at it from this point of view, not Asia but the middle Danube-basin becomes the birthplace of Magyarism. Its mixed ethnography, formerly known by various appellations, became through its martial proclivities a terror to the Christian West, and compelled Charlemagne to bring a strong Christian coalition against it in the field. This first crusade of the Occident, bent but did not break the power of the Ural-Altaic warriors, who ruled from the Moldau as far as the borders of Upper Austria; for the remnants retiring behind the Theis soon after received reinforcements from a tribe of Turks known as the "Madjars," i.e., Magyars, under the command of Árpád, whose descendants accepted Christianity and established the Hungary of the present day, both politically and ethnically.
Curiously enough this ethnological discussion was not at all agreeable to my so-called paleo-Magyar compatriots. The romantic legend of the invasion of Árpád into Pannonia with his many hundred thousand warriors, sounds more beautiful in the ears of the Magyar patriots, than their prosaic derivation from a confused ethnical group; as if there were any single nation in Europe which is not patched and pieced together from the most diverse elements, and only in later times has presented itself as an undivided whole. In the Hungarians, however, this childish vanity is the more ridiculous since it is much more glorious, as a small national fragment, to play for centuries the rôle of conqueror, and in the strength of its national proclivities to absorb other elements, than to conquer with the sword and then to be absorbed in the conquered element as Franks, Varangians, and others have been. Truly nations, as well as individuals, have to pass through an infant stage, and I am not surprised that this conception of mine, and my solution of the ethnological problem, did not find much favour in Hungary.
Before concluding this review of my scientific-literary activity, I should mention that I also have ventured into the regions of history, a totally unknown field to me, wherein, as is the case with many hazardous expeditions, I betrayed more temerity than forethought. My book on the—
15. History of Bokhara,
in two volumes, published in German, Hungarian, English, and Russian, has done more harm than good to my literary reputation. The motive for writing this book was the purchase of some Oriental manuscripts I discovered in Bokhara, which, I thought, were unknown in Europe. To some extent this was the case, for of Tarikhi Narshakhi, and the history of Seid Rakim Khan both of which furnish rich material for the history of Central Asia, our Orientalists had never heard. But in the main I was working under a delusion, owing to my insufficient literary knowledge; some passages, especially in the ancient history of Central Asia, had already been worked out by learned scholars, and it was only about modern times that I could tell anything new.
Professional critics were merciless. They seemed to take a malicious pleasure in running me down; especially was this the case in Russia, where I was already hated for my political opinions and activity. The Oriental historian, Professor Grigorieff, made a special point of proving the worthlessness of my book, and tried to annihilate the anti-Russian publishers. The second criticus furiosus was Professor von Gutschmid, a learned man, but also a nobleman of the purest blood, who for his God and king entered the arena, and also wanted to wreak his anger upon me because he took me for a German renegade, and for my desertion of the bonds of Germanism considered me worthy of censure. For his well-deserved correction of my scientific blunders I am grateful to the man, but I deny the accusation of being a renegade. I have never quite understood why in Germany the honour of German nationality should be forced upon me; why I should be taken for a Hamburger, a Dresdener, a Stuttgarter, since my ancestors for several generations were born Hungarians, and my education had been strictly Magyar.
It is this very Magyar education, and the complete amalgamation of myself with the ruling national spirit of my native land which induced me to Magyarise my German name, as has been the custom with us for centuries. Considering that Germans with purely French, Italian, Danish, Slav, and other names figure in German literature and politics, without the purity of their German descent being at all questioned, one might readily regard the Hungarian custom of Magyarising our names as childish and unmotived. Yet this is not so. Small nations like Hungary, constantly threatened with the danger of denationalisation, all the more anxiously guard their national existence in the sanctity of their language, and tenaciously hold to their national characteristics. With such people it is quite natural that they should lay more stress than is absolutely necessary upon the outward signs. The Hungarian born, who in his feelings, thoughts, and aspirations, owns himself a true Hungarian, desires also in name to appear as a Hungarian, because he does not want to be mixed up with any foreign nationality, as might easily be the case with a prominent writer. On these grounds Petrovich has become Petöfi, Schedel Toldy, Hundsdorfer Hunfalvi, etc., and for this reason also I Magyarised my name.
But to come back to my History of Bokhara, I must honestly confess that the ambition of writing the first history of Transoxania brought me more disillusionment than joy, for in spite of the praise bestowed upon me by the uninitiated, I had soon to realise that I had not studied the subject sufficiently, and had not made enough use of available material.
I fared somewhat better with my second purely historical work, published simultaneously in America and England—
16. The Story of Hungary.
In this I had but the one object in view, namely to introduce the history of my native land into the series called "The Story of the Nations." As I wrote only a few chapters myself, and am indebted for the rest to Hungarian men of the profession, I can only lay claim to the title of editor, but this literary sponsorship gave me much pleasure, for the History of Hungary, which first appeared in English, and was afterwards translated into different languages, has had a sale it could never have had in Hungary itself. The service hereby rendered to my compatriots has, however, never been appreciated at home; the very existence of the book has been ignored.
This closes the list of my personal publications, partly scientific, partly popular, in the course of twenty years. Of my journalistic activity during this same term, I have spoken already (Chap. VIII.).
I cannot hide the fact that as I increased in years my creative power visibly decreased. What I learned in the sixties, or rather tried to learn, did not long remain in my memory, and could not be called material from which anything of lasting value could be made. Only the custom of many years' active employment urged me on to labour, and under the influence of this incitement appeared my smaller works.
1. The Travels and Adventures of the Turkish Admiral Sidi Ali Reis, in India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Persia, during the years 1553-1556. London, 1899.
2. Noten Zu den Alttürkischen Inschriften der Mongolei und Siberiens. Helsingfors, 1899. (Notes to the Old Turkish Inscriptions of Mongolia and Siberia.)
3. Alt-Osmanische Sprachstudien. Leiden, 1901. (Old Osmanli Linguistic Studies.)
It never entered my mind to try to attract the special attention of the profession with these unassuming contributions. It is not given to all, as to a Mommsen, Herbert Spencer, Ranke, Schott, and others, to boast of unenfeebled mental powers in their old age. Sunt atque fines! And he who disregards the approach of the winter of life is apt to lose the good reputation gained in better days.