In 1847, besides continuing my regular studies at school, I began to devote myself to private studies; for it must be owned that the gymnasiums were rather badly managed in Hungary at that time. In addition to reading the greatest variety of literary productions, on travels, which I all-eagerly devoured, I was learning French. Besides my native language, Hungarian, I had acquired German early in life. At about nearly the same time I had mastered Sclavonian, and as my studies at school had rendered me familiar with Latin and Greek, I found myself, not quite sixteen years old, conversant with so many principal languages that acquiring the idioms kindred to them had become a comparatively easy task for me.
I always took special delight in memorizing. Children have very vague ideas about natural gifts, and when I was able to increase the number of words which I could master in one day from ten to sixty and even to a hundred, my exultation knew no bounds. I must frankly own, however, that I had not at that time the faintest conception as to what the result of these successful exertions, which so flattered my vanity, might be.
Thus it happened that from the private study of French I gradually passed over to the study of the remaining branches of the Latin family. I did the same thing with the Germanic languages, and, beginning with English, I soon eagerly extended my studies to Danish and Swedish. I pursued the same method with the Sclavonic dialects, and as I never omitted, in the zeal of learning, to read out loud and to hold conversations with myself in the languages I was learning, I had acquired, in a surprisingly short time, a certain kind of proficiency in all these languages which my youthful conceit made me imagine was perfection itself; and I am afraid I had rather an exalted opinion of myself at that time.
Vanity injures the character of a man in most cases, but it proves at times a very wholesome incentive to exertion. In this instance the conceit which was the result of my undisciplined imagination made me abandon the path of public studies I had entered upon, and induced me to continue my studies by myself. The friendly reader will ask what was the object of this self-education. Indeed I myself did not then know. "Nulla dies sine linea" ("No day without a line") was the maxim ever present in my mind, and even when I was devoting from eight to ten hours daily to teaching, I contrived to make such good use of the remaining time as considerably to improve in my own studies.
LITERARY STUDIES.The pleasures of general literature had now taken the place of the dry and monotonous memorizing of different languages of former years. I drew to my heart's content from the rich and varied fountain of the mental products of nearly all the European nations. The bards of Albion, the troubadours of Servia, the minstrels of Spain and the inspired poets of Italy; Lomonosoff, Pushkin, Tegnér, Andersen, Ochlenschlaeger, nearly all the muses of the present age and of the past ages beguiled my hours of leisure. I always read out loud, and frequently noted down in writing on the margin of the pages I read my feelings whenever any passage happened to strike my imagination.
Owing to this habit of loud reading and the violent gestures with which I would often accompany it, the plain people who were about me often thought me wrong in the mind; and upon one occasion this conviction had so grown upon them that I actually lost my position as a teacher, on that account. But what cared I for the small criticisms of these people, so long as my mind was peopled with Tasso's struggle before Jerusalem, Cid's valiant deeds, and Byron's heroes and heroines? Yet, I must confess, no scenes had such a charm for me as those acting in the land of the rising sun, Asia—which then seemed to me so very far away—with her gorgeously brilliant robe, richly covered with pearls and gems, constantly floating before my eyes. How could it be otherwise with one who, in his youth, had read "The Arabian Nights," and who, as in my case, was by birth and education half an Asiatic himself.
I knew Asia as the land of the most fantastic adventures, as the home of the most fabulous successes; and, having led an adventurous life at an age when I was a child still, and being already in pursuit of some great good fortune, my first yearnings after distant lands pointed already to Asia.
In order to be enabled soon to gratify this longing, I thought it necessary to make myself, in the first place, familiar with the languages of Asia; and I began at once with the Turkish language. The Ural-Altaic dialect gave me less trouble than it would have given most Occidental people owing to its affinity with the Magyar language. I found it all the more difficult to master its strange characters without a teacher or any direction. For whole days I went on drawing the letters with a stick on the sand, until I became, at length, familiar with the value of the diacritical points, that is, the distinguishing marks indispensable to a correct pronunciation of the letters and words. In this way I steadily improved. I was in want of a dictionary, but I could not afford to pay the high price asked for it, a "Bianchi" costing then nearly forty florins; and as I was compelled to trace the meaning of the single words through the labyrinth of the Turkish text by the aid of a so-called literal translation, "Wickerhauser's Chrestomathy," it did happen to me that after I had got through with the study of a bulky volume, I found out that I had been doing it all in a wrong way, and was obliged to do it all over again. Such bitter disappointments occurred to me more than once in the course of my autodidactic career; but what labour or task will ever restrain the ardour of youth or damp its enthusiasm?
PESTH—THE STARTING PLACE.