CHAPTER II.
Hungary, in extent larger than the United Kingdom, is, geographically speaking, one large basin, watered by one large river and its affluents, and bounded by one imposing range of mountains. The river is called the Danube, the mountains are the Carpathian offshoots of the Alps. This geographical unity makes Hungary almost predestined to be the seat of one nation. The natural unity calls for, it may be presumed, the national. Yet the very richness of the soil, diversified as it is by the vegetable and mineral wealth of huge mountains, and the cereal and animal exuberance of vast plains has, in all times, attracted numerous tribes from eastern Europe and western and central Asia to the country of the “blue” Danube, and the “blonde” Theiss. Some of these invaders succeeded for a time in establishing a kind of dominion over parts of Hungary. Thus the Huns in the fifth, the Gepidae in the fifth and sixth, the Avars in the seventh and eighth, numerous Slav tribes in the eighth and ninth centuries were successively lords of the plains and some mountainous parts of Hungary. Not one of these peoples, however, could either maintain themselves as rulers, or quite disappear as dwellers. Already in the ninth century we find Hungary inhabited by more than fifteen different nations or portions of nations, offering then the same gorgeous medley of Humanity that is still so characteristic of the country. Where the above nations failed, the Magyars signally succeeded. They and they alone of all the numerous, if not perhaps innumerable nations that had tried to rear a lasting polity on the columns of the Carpathians, and behind the moats of the Danube; the Hungarians alone, we say, succeeded in establishing themselves as the permanent rulers of the Slav and Turanian peoples of Hungary, and as the members of a state endowed with abiding forces of order within and power without. From 996 to 1301 A.D., they took their dukes and kings from the family of the Árpáds, under whom they had entered (some 100,000 men, women, and children) the country. Saint Stephen (the first canonized king) consolidated their constitution. Without attempting to overrate the value of constitutions either grown or made, and, while laying due stress on that geometria situs, or providential strategy in the location of nations which has perhaps wrought the major part of History, it is tolerably certain, that the constitution of Hungary, as developed under the Árpád dynasty, and as still surviving in some of its essential elements, has had a most beneficial influence on the public life of the Magyars. Like that of England, it combines the excellency of the Latin system of centralization, with the advantages of the Germanic custom of local autonomy.
Already in the early middle ages, Hungary was divided into counties endowed with selfgovernment. At the same time there was a centre of government and legislation in the national assembly or diet, where king and subjects met to discuss the affairs affecting the peace or wars of the entire state. In 1222, or seven years after Magna Charta was signed at Runnymede, the Hungarians forced their King John, whose name was Andrew II., to sign the Golden Bull, which, like the English Charter, was to be the text of the country’s constitution, all subsequent laws being in the nature of commentaries on that text. The elements of the Hungarian and English constitution being nearly alike, the domestic histories of the two nations bear, up to the sixteenth century, striking resemblance to one another. We learn of wars of the “barons” against the king, such as those under Henry III. and Henry IV. in England; we read of the constant struggles of the “commons” (in Hungary consisting of the lower nobility, that is, of knights as distinguished from burgesses), for broader recognition of their parliamentary rights; of rebellions, like that of Wat the Tyler, of the peasants against their oppressors, the landed gentry; and of fierce dynastic struggles, like the Wars of the Roses. But while these historic parallels may be found in many another country of mediæval Europe with its remarkable homogeneity of structure, the distinctive parallelism between England and Hungary is in the tenacity with which the ruling people of both countries have carried over their autonomous institutions from the times before the Reformation to the sixteenth and the following centuries, or to the period of Absolutism sweeping over Europe ever since Luther had raised his voice for religious liberty.
All nations of Europe had constitutions more or less similar to that of England during the Middle Ages; for there was after all a very considerable amount of Liberty extant in mediæval institutions. But at the threshold of the sixteenth century, when new worlds were discovered by the genius and daring of the Portuguese and the Italians, the better part of the old world, that is, its Liberty, was completely lost, and sovereigns became absolute and peoples slaves. Three nations alone amongst the larger states remained unaffected by the plague of absolutism then spreading over Europe; they alone preserving intact the great principles of local autonomy, central parliaments, and limited power of the Crown. These were the English, the Poles and the Hungarians. In these three countries alone there was practically no dead past as against a presumptuous present. The nation’s past was still living in the shape of actual realities, and the growth of the constitution was, in spite of all sudden ruptures and breaks, continuous and organic. What the Stuarts were to England, the Habsburgs were to Hungary during the seventeenth century. Hence in both countries we notice continual rebellions and wars, both parliamentary and other. The Stuarts, however, were little aided by foreign powers in their attempts at crushing the autonomous rights of the English nation. On the contrary, one of the greatest statesmen of modern times, William of Orange, came, and with him several great powers of Europe, to the rescue of the people of England; and thus the end of the seventeenth century was also the termination of Absolutism in England. In Hungary it was the grave of Liberty. The Hungarian Stuarts, or the then Habsburgs, far from being deserted by the other Great Powers of Europe, were most efficiently abetted by them. This happened of course in a way apparently quite alien to any desire to destroy the liberties of Hungary. Vienna, the capital of the Habsburgs, was, in 1683, besieged by the hitherto fairly invincible Turks, and Austria was menaced with utter ruin. The war being, on the face of it, a crusade, the Christian powers, and, chiefly, fat and gallant John Sobieski, King of Poland, came to the succour of Leopold of Austria. The Turk was beaten, and not only out of Austria, but also out of Hungary, where he had been holding two-thirds of the counties for over one hundred and fifty years. Hungary was almost entirely liberated from her Mahometan oppressor, and, such is the illogicality of History, for the very same reason nearly lost her autonomous existence. For the evil of foreign saviours now told on the Magyars. Had they driven back the Turk by their own efforts, the result would have been an unprecedented electrization and stimulation of all the forces of the nation. The Greeks after Salamis; the Romans after Zama; the English after Trafalgar had won not only a victory over an enemy, but an immeasurably increased vitality fraught with novel energies. The Hungarians after the capture of Buda and the Battle of Zenta, both achieved by Austria’s foreign allies and foreign generals, had defeated the Turks indeed; but their own ends too. Never was Hungary in a lower state of national stagnation than shortly after the peace of Carlovitz (1699), which put a formal end to Turkish rule in most of the Hungarian counties. Prince Francis Rákóczy II., who started the last of the Great Rebellions of the Magyars previous to 1848, and after the above peace, found no Holland rich in capital, no Brandenburg ready to hand with well-trained regiments, no Austria willing to avert side-blows from enemies, to help him in the manner in which the asthmatic Prince of Orange was helped against James II. and his powerful abettor. And when Rákóczy too had expended his forces in vain, Hungary fell into a decrepitude but too natural in a nation whose foreign foe had been conquered by its domestic oppressor.
The political bankruptcy of the Hungarians by the beginning of the eighteenth century is of such importance for the study of the history of their literature, that we cannot but attempt to search for some of the reasons and causes of this national disaster. The principal cause was, it would seem, the lack of that very class of citizens which had in England so potently contributed to the ultimate victory of popular freedom—the middle class. Hungary never recognized, nor tolerated the complicated maze of semi-public and semi-private institutions collectively called Feudalism. Whatever the merits or demerits of that mediæval fabric may or may not have been, it is certain that the rise of the bourgeois class is owing directly, and still more indirectly to the action and re-action of Feudalism. The parallelism between England Poland, and Hungary pointed out above, must now be supplemented by the statement, that England alone of these three commonwealths had, through the invasion and conquests of the French Normans, received a large infusion of feudal institutions, and that therefore England alone was to create that powerful class of burgesses and yeomen, which was entirely lacking in both Poland and Hungary. Without such a class of “mean” citizens no modern nation has been able to consolidate its polity; and Hungary in the seventeenth century, being totally devoid of such a class, was in the long run bound to be wrecked by such a deficiency. We shall see how heavily the absence of a middle class told on the growth of Hungarian Literature.
During the eighteenth century and up to 1815, the great and scarcely interrupted wars of the Habsburgs enlisted all the powers of Hungary. In 1741 the Magyars, and they alone, saved Austria from what seemed to be inevitable dismemberment. From that date onward to the campaign of 1788 the History of Hungary is but a chapter in that of Austria. Towards that latter date the wave of Nationalism started in France had reached Hungary. Like the Belgians and the Czechs (Bohemians), the Hungarians too began to revolt from the anti-nationalist and egalitarian autocracy of Emperor Joseph II., one of the characteristic geniuses of the last century, who was exceedingly enlightened on everything else but his own business. The old Magyar institutions, and weightiest amongst them, the Magyar language was, by the Hungarian diet, alas! not by the Hungarian people, decreed to be the public language of the country. Resistance to Joseph’s “reforms” became so serious, as to prevail upon the dying monarch to revoke them, 1790; and under his successor, Leopold II., 1790-1792, who was of a less aggressive temper, Hungarian nationality seemed to approach its revival. This was, however, not to be.
The French Revolution, although essentially a nationalist movement, forwarded in Europe outside France, for nearly two generations after its rise, none but the cause of the monarchs. The Hungarians, who gave Austria many of her best generals, and fought in nearly all the battles of the Revolutionary Wars from 1792 to 1815, were in the end shorn of all their hopes and expectations by the successful fop who directed Austria’s policy from 1809 to 1848. Prince Metternich had not the faintest conception of the rights or wants of the Hungarians; and having brought to fall, as he thought he did, the French Revolution and its personification, Napoleon Buonaparte, he could not but think that a small nation, as the Hungarians, would speedily and lastingly yield to high-handed police regulations, to gagging the public conscience, and to unmanning the press. The year 1848 witnessed the final victory of the French Revolution all over Europe. Hungary, foremost amongst the countries where oppressed nations were demolishing the bulwarks of tyranny, freed herself from the yoke of Austrian ministers. The Austrian armies were driven out of Hungary; the Habsburgs were declared to have forfeited the crown of St. Stephen; and but for the help of Russia, the Austrian monarchs would have been deprived of more than one half of their empire. When a now nameless Hungarian general surrendered to the Russians at Világos (1849), Hungary was bodily incorporated with the Austrian Empire, and Czech and Austrian officials were sent down to germanize and denationalize Hungary. In 1860 the reaction set in. The nation, offering a passive resistance of a most formidable character, brought the Vienna Cabinet to its senses; and when, at Königsgrätz (July, 1866), the Prussians had routed the armies of Austria, Hungary’s greatest political sage, Francis Deák, aided by the Austrian minister, Count Beust, restored the ancient Magyar autonomy and independence. Ever since (1867) Hungary’s relation to Austria has been that of confederation for purposes of foreign policy, and absolute independence for the work of domestic rule. The Emperor of Austria is at the same time the King of Hungary; and thus the two halves of the Empire are united by a personal link. Law and its administration; Parliament and municipal government; commerce and trade; in short, all that goes to form the life of a separate nation is, in Hungary, of as independent a character as it is in Austria. A Hungarian must, like any other foreigner, be formally naturalized in order that he may be considered an Austrian citizen, and vice versâ.