Tuesday, January 12th. After breakfast it snowed a few minutes. A little later it commenced to snow in earnest,—great, fat, lazy flakes falling out of a leaden sky. From one of the castle windows the Count and I watched them against the background of some fir trees in the garden below. “That is good,” said Count Apponyi. “That will be good for my wheat-fields just sprouting. It will cover them and keep them warm. I have now long been hoping for the snow, which is overdue.” Some moments later I said, “The falling snow is for me one of the most beautiful motions in nature.” He replied: “To me falling snow always suggests Patience. A flake of snow? Ce n’est rien! (with a gesture). But it falls and falls, never hurrying, each little flake a distinct entity, and at last it makes the world beautiful—and it also covers my wheat-fields.”
The Hungarian nobles receive an education very different from ours. If anything, it leads to greater individuality. From infancy they learn four languages—their native one, and German, French, and English. To this is added an elaborate knowledge of courtesy, custom, precedence, and manners which is taught them from childhood. The boys are also trained to ride and shoot. They are sent to school between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, where they learn Latin very thoroughly and get a smattering of other things. They almost unconsciously absorb the knowledge of managing the great estates which constitute their wealth. They have a taste for reading and prefer rather serious literature. With a perfect knowledge of Latin, English, German, and French, nearly all masters are open to them in the original. They miss only a few: Dante, Cervantes, and the ancient Greeks, although the more scholarly ones like Apponyi know Greek. Since they have much leisure, they often possess by the time they are thirty an extraordinarily interesting amount of knowledge. In Hungary everyone from peasants to counts is musical.
We took lunch today in the perfectly splendid old castle of the Karolyi Hunyadis at Ivanka. The other guests were the Countess Herberstein and an Austro-Hungarian General of Division, whose name I did not catch. Count Apponyi and I drove over together from Eberhard and after luncheon took the train from the neighboring station of Pozsony Ivanka. I was received with the most extravagant cordiality by the Hunyadis on account of services which I had been able to render to members of their family in the course of my work at the Embassy in Paris.
The Hunyadi castle was really as fine or finer than some of the smaller ones which I visited along the Loire last spring, and it was the more impressive because it was “alive”—inhabited—and furnished with the most magnificent appointments. The stair-hall particularly recalled some of those splendid old French ones, being in the same sort of yellow Caen stone.
While we were waiting for a train today, Count Apponyi informed me quite seriously that Hungary was not the least feudal, either in theory or practice.
The Hungarians harbor no animosity against Britain and France and really deserve the chivalrous friendship of these two nations. They are the only people in the present conflict who, in the heat and excitement of war, have on all occasions behaved like good sportsmen. When trains of Russian prisoners arrive at Hungarian stations, the people manifest no hostility, but greet them with kindness and sympathy and offer them food and flowers. The populace has not molested alien enemies, and their government has not indulged in wholesale internments of enemies’ subjects. In Hungary I found British horse trainers, English tutors, and French governesses going tranquilly about their peaceful occupations. English tailors advertised their business in the Hungarian newspapers, and their clients went to them as readily as they would have gone in peace time. French chefs and servants were, as a matter of course, retained in the employ of noble families, and were treated with unvarying consideration and sympathy by their Hungarian fellow-servants. This attitude has been steadfastly maintained in spite of the wholesale imprisonment by the Allies of such Hungarian subjects as were left within their territory at the opening of hostilities. Of the nations which I have studied Hungary is the only one involved in the present conflict which has not stooped to reprisal and retaliation.
It was a curious demonstration of the difference in the national temperament of the Teutonic and Magyar races to mark how diametrically opposed was the manner in which the two peoples regarded the efforts of the American Embassy in Paris to safeguard their respective subjects. As I, during the earlier weeks of the war, had been closely associated with these efforts, everyone I met had something to say to me upon the matter.