One can easily understand that all these trifles were little to my taste. I had always been fond of simplicity and natural manners. All these formalities and superficialities were hateful to me, but at that time I had to yield to necessity and make the best of a bad job; nay, even be grateful to my instructors for their well-meant advice in these matters.
Honestly speaking, I have found among these people some very noble-minded friends who, from purely humane motives, interested themselves in me, and whose kind treatment I shall not forget as long as I live. Amongst these I would especially mention Lord Strangford, already referred to, a man of brilliant scientific talents, and possessing a quite extraordinary knowledge of geography, history, and the languages of the Moslem East. He had lived for many years on the banks of the Bosphorus as Secretary to the Embassy, and was not only thoroughly acquainted with Osmanli, Persian, and Hindustani, but also with the Chagataic language, then absolutely unknown in Europe. He could recite long passages from the poems of Newai. He was as much at home in the works of Sadi, Firdusi, and Baki as in Milton and Shakespeare, and well informed as regards the ethnography and politics of the Balkan peoples, and the various tribes of Central Asia and India. Lord Strangford, indeed, was to me a living wonder, and when he shook his long-bearded, bony head in speaking of Asia and criticising the politics of Lord Palmerston, I should have liked to note down every word he said, for he was a veritable mine of Oriental knowledge. It is very strange that this man was not used as English Ambassador at one of the Oriental courts, and it has often been laid to Lord Palmerston's charge that he, the illustrious Premier, was not well disposed towards his Irish countryman, who sometimes expressed his resentment of the slight in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette, the Saturday, or the Quarterly Review. As far as I am concerned Lord Strangford was always a most kind and considerate patron, one of the best and most unselfish friends I had in England, and his early death was a great grief to me. He died of brain fever, and, as Lady Strangford afterwards wrote to me, holding in his hand the volume of my Chagataic Grammar which I had dedicated to him.
Next to the noble Lord Strangford I would mention the great mathematician, Mr. Spottiswoode, who often asked me to his house; also Sir Alexander Gordon, in Mayfair, whose sister, knowing something of Egypt, took a special interest in my travels. I was also a welcome guest at Lord Houghton's, both in town at Brook Street and in the country at Ferrybridge, Yorkshire. The lunch parties at his town residence were often of a peculiarly interesting nature. The master of the house, a lover of sharp contrasts, used to gather round his table the fanatical admirer of Mohammedanism, Lord Stanley of Alderley, and the equally fanatical Protestant Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Wilberforce known as "Soapy Sam." Most lively disputes took place at times in defence of the teachings of Christ and Mohammed, in which the disputants did not deal over-gently with one another, and their forcible attacks upon each other's convictions sometimes caused the most ridiculous scenes. Still finer were the meetings at Ferrybridge, Lord Houghton's country seat. During one visit there I made the acquaintance of such celebrities as Lord Lytton, afterwards Viceroy of India; the poet Algernon Swinburne, who used to read to us passages of his yet unpublished poem, Atalanta in Calydon, over which the slender youth went into ecstasies; and last, but not least, of Burton, just returned from a mission in the North-West of Africa. Burton—later Sir Richard Burton—was to spend his honeymoon under the hospitable roof of the genial Lord Houghton. The company, amongst which Madame Mohl, the wife of the celebrated Orientalist, Jules Mohl, specially attracted my attention, had met here in honour of Burton, the great traveller, and as he was the last to arrive, Lord Houghton planned the following joke: I was to leave the drawing-room before Burton appeared with his young wife, hide behind one of the doors, and at a given sign recite the first Sura of the Koran with correct Moslem modulation. I did as arranged. Burton went through every phase of surprise, and jumping up from his seat exclaimed, "That is Vambéry!" although he had never seen or heard me before. In after years I entertained the most friendly relations with this remarkable man, whom I hold to be, incontestably, the greatest traveller of the nineteenth century, for he had the most intimate knowledge of all Moslemic Asia; he was a clever Arabic scholar, had explored portions of Africa together with Speke, and gone through the most awful adventures at the court of Dahomey; he had explored the unknown regions of North and South America, and also made himself a literary name by his translations of the Lusiade and The Thousand and One Nights; in a word, this strangely gifted man, who was never fully appreciated in his own country, and through his peculiarities laid himself open to much misunderstanding, was from the very first an object of the greatest admiration for me. His contemporary and fellow-worker, Gifford Palgrave, I also reckoned among my friends. He was a classical Englishman, first belonging to the Anglican and afterwards to the Roman Catholic Church. For some time he was in the service of the Society of Jesus, as teacher in the mission school at Beyrût; and as he was quite at home in the Arabic language, he under-took a journey into the then unknown country of Nedjd, the chief resort of the Wahâbis, about whom his book of travels contains many interesting new data. Being a classical orator, he used to fascinate his audience with his choice language, and what Spurgeon has been in the pulpit and Gladstone in Parliament, that was Palgrave in the hall of the Geographical Society. I liked the man fairly well, only a peculiar twinkle of the eye constantly reminded me of his former Jesuitism. In David Livingstone, the great African explorer, I found a congenial fellow-labourer, whose words of appreciation, "What a pity you did not make Africa the scene of your activity!" sounded pleasant in my ears.
Other travellers, such as Speke, Grant, Kirk and others, I was also proud to reckon among my friends; and in the field of literature I would mention in the first place Charles Dickens, whose acquaintance I made at the Athenæum Club, and who often asked me to have dinner at the same table with him. Dickens was not particularly talkative, but he was very much interested in my adventures, and when once I declined his invitation for the following evening with the apology that I had to dine at Wimbledon with my publisher, John Murray, he remarked, "So you are going to venture into the 'Brain Castle,' for of course you know," he continued, "that Murray's house is not built of brick but of human brains." Among politicians, artists, actors, financiers, generals—in fact in all classes and ranks of society—I had friends and acquaintances. I had no cause to complain of loneliness or neglect; any one else would no doubt have been supremely happy in my place, and would have made better use also of the general complaisance. But I was as yet absolutely new to this Western world; I was as it were still wrapped in the folds of Asiatic thought, and, in spite of my enthusiasm for modern culture, I had great difficulty in making myself familiar with the principal conditions of this phase of life, with its everlasting rushing and hurrying, the unremitting efforts to get higher up, and the cold discretion of the combatants. In fact, my first visit to England made me feel gloomy and discouraged.
This depression was yet enhanced by the disappointment in regard to the material results of my book, and the rude awakening out of my dreams of comparative prosperity. To judge from the enthusiastic reception of my work both in Europe and America, and after all the laudatory criticisms of the Press, I expected to get from the sale of the first edition a sum at least sufficient to ensure my independence. The newspapers talked of quite colossal sums which my publisher had paid or would pay me, and I was consequently not a little crestfallen when at the end of the year I received the first account, according to which I had made a net profit of £500, a sum of which I had spent nearly a third in London. The modest remainder, in the eyes of the former Dervish a small fortune, was as nothing to the European accustomed to London high-life, and not by a long way sufficient for the writer, anxious to make a home for himself. The vision of all my fair anticipations and bold expectations vanished as a mist before my eyes, and after having tasted of the golden fruit of the Hesperides, was I to go back to my scantily furnished table, nay, perhaps be reduced again to poverty and the struggle for daily bread? After twenty years of hard fighting I was back again where I was at the beginning of my career, with this difference, that I had gained a name and reputation, a capital, however, which would not yield its interest till much later.
I am therefore not at all surprised that in my desperate frame of mind I clutched at a straw, and looked upon a professorship at Pest and the doctor's chair of Oriental languages as the bark of salvation upon the still turbulent ocean of my life. True, my cold reception at home had somewhat sobered me, and made the realisation of even this modest ambition not quite so easy of attainment, but my longing for my native land and for a quiet corner admitted of no hesitation, no doubt. With incredible light-heartedness I disengaged myself from the embrace of the noisy, empty homage of the great city on the Thames and sped to Pest to present myself to my compatriots after my triumphal campaign in England and crowned with the laurels of appreciation of the cultured West. As may be supposed, my reception was somewhat warmer but not much more splendid than on my return from Asia. Small nations in the early stages of their cultural development often follow the lead of greater, mightier, and more advanced lands in their distribution of blame or praise. The homely proverb, "Young folks do as old folks did," can also be applied to whole communities, and, especially where it concerns the appreciation and acknowledgment of matters rather beyond the intellectual and national limits of the people, such copying or rather echoing of the superior criticism is quite permissible and excusable. On my return from England my compatriots received me with marked attention, but Hungary was still an Austrian province, and in order to attain the coveted professorship I had to go to Vienna and solicit the favour of an audience with the Emperor. The Emperor Francis Joseph, a noble-minded monarch and exceptionally kind-hearted—who was not unjustly called the first gentleman of the realm—received me most graciously, asked some particulars about my travels, and at once granted me my request, adding, "You have suffered much and deserve this post." He made only one objection, viz., that even in Vienna there are but few who devote themselves to the study of Oriental languages, and that in Hungary I should find scarcely any hearers. On my reply, "If I can get no one to listen to me I can learn myself," the Emperor smiled and graciously dismissed me.
I shall always feel indebted to this noble monarch, although, on the other hand, from the very first I have had much to bear from the Austrian Bureaucracy and the fustiness of the mediæval spirit which ruled the higher circles of Austrian society; perhaps more correctly from their innate ignorance and stupidity. The Lord-High-Steward, Prince A., whom I had to see before the audience, regardless of the recommendations I brought from the Austrian Ambassador in London, received me with a coldness and pride as if I had come to apply for a position as lackey, and while royal personages of the West, and later on also Napoleon, had shaken hands with me and asked me to sit down, this Austrian aristocrat kept me standing for ten minutes, spoke roughly to me, and dismissed me with the impression that a man of letters is treated with more consideration in Khiva and among the Turkomans than in the Austrian capital.
And this, alas! hurt me all the more, as the social conditions at home in my native land were no better. Here also the wall of partition, class distinctions and religious differences rose like a black, impenetrable screen adorned with loathsome figures before my eyes, and the monster of blind prejudice blocked my way. The enormous distance between the appreciation of literary endeavours in the West and in the East grew in proportion as I left the banks of the Thames and neared my native land; for although the public in Hungary warmly welcomed their countryman, re-echoing the shouts of applause from England and France, nay, even looked upon him with national pride, I could not fail to notice on the part of the heads of society and the leading circles a cold and intentional neglect, which hurt me.