NIKITA THE COMEDIAN
The discontented Serbs could now no longer, as in days gone by, look hopefully towards Cetinje. Rumours and something more than rumours were circulating as to Nikita's character. For many years that very shrewd person was going to gull the Western world which, meeting him on the Riviera, was enchanted by his picturesque costume. But if Queen Victoria and Mr. Gladstone had gone to ask the Montenegrins they would have found that he was hated, and not only in the Brda and the parts bordering on Herzegovina but even in old Montenegro. His adherents were chiefly to be found among the Njeguši, his own clan, and in the family of his wife. Certain English devotees of Nikita have actually been to Cetinje, have, as they proudly tell us, been embraced by him and have enormously admired his alfresco audiences when he settled all manner of problems to the perfect satisfaction of these tourists. Some of them, with a decoration or so and with memories of dinners and shoots, have written books that are a song of praise; and if Nikita's subjects tell these gentlemen and others, including members of the British Parliament, who have not been to Cetinje—but who know just as much as the travelled ones about Montenegro—if they tell them that Nikita is a ruffian, the answer will probably be that he who says such things must have a grievance, and that those foreigners who have criticized him, Miss Edith Durham, Baron d'Estournelles de Constant and Mr. Nevinson, are altogether mistaken. I do not propose to make a long and dreary catalogue of his iniquities, but only to mention a few items.... It was in Montenegro a matter of common knowledge that the wheat which Russia sent in large quantities for his famine-threatened people was not given but was sold to them by Nikita, the proceeds being shared by himself and four or five privileged families, the Petrović, Vukotić, Martinović and Jabučani. A member of one of these families became so affluent that he built himself a house, and a gentleman who still survives, Tomo Oraovac by name, wrote on this in the year 1878 a rather humorous poem which he called "The Red House." Oraovac was at the time an official, the intendant of the Montenegrin army at Kotor, and he naturally had to resign his post. The Tzar sent a certain General Ritter to examine the charges and, as one result, a Russian decoration was conferred upon Oraovac; according to etiquette it was transmitted through Nikita, and that personage gave it to a friend of his, a Turk at Podgorica. Nikita is apt to disarm one by the quaintness of his ways. Later on, Oraovac, who was one of Montenegro's earliest schoolmasters, organized the intelligentsia for the purpose of obtaining a Constitution. Nikita was not yet ready to grant such a thing, and his representative who attended one of Oraovac's meetings at Podgorica inflicted upon him two grave wounds. The reformer was then expelled—the powerful intervention of one of Nikita's cousins saved his life—his mother and both his brothers, more Montenegrino, were likewise expelled and his house was bestowed upon a certain Kruša, who lived in it for forty years. One must add, with respect to the Russian wheat, that Nikita did not sell it for cash—the wars of that period had left the land in such distress that no cash was available. And so the wheat was delivered in exchange for bonds that would some day become payable. When the wars of the seventies were over, an edict was issued, and from end to end of the country, so goes the story, men had to sell their sheep and cattle and horses, their sticks of furniture, their land itself, to meet their obligations. Meanwhile the Austrian frontiers had been closed. No selling was possible outside the land, and selling within it was only permitted to certain specified persons, agents of the Prince, and at fixed prices. The profits were enormous; the country was ruined, and from that time date the great emigrations to America, as was pointed out by Mr. Leiper the Serb-speaking Scot in his admirable contributions to the Morning Post.... Nikita loved to bestow things upon himself. A famous hero, Novak Voujošević, killed seventeen Turks in one day, and when he went, in consequence of an invitation, to Petrograd, the Tzar presented him with a sword on which were the Russian crown and the Montenegrin crown in diamonds. When the old warrior came back to Cetinje, Nikita said that such a weapon could not possibly be worn by a simple man; he therefore abstracted the diamonds and gave it him with false ones in their place. Nikita could not endure criticism, but those persons, including myself, who have charged him with inhuman treatment in the case of Vladimir Tomić, an intelligent young judge, were acting on faulty information. The tale was that Tomić, after being incarcerated, was soused with petrol and so badly burned that he lost his reason. As a matter of fact, this neurasthenic young man—whose imprisonment was due to his having wantonly insulted the whole Royal Family—poured the petrol on himself. Eventually, when Radović came into office, he was released and, a few years later, he died in his native village.... The Montenegrin records are crowded with the names of those whom Nikita drove into exile for no other reason than that they had gone abroad for an education and would no longer be disposed to regard his methods as quite up to date. With the exception of the few favoured families Nikita was all against anyone acquiring riches; he deliberately put obstacles in the way of plum cultivation, and in such a state of poverty did he keep the Montenegrins that the Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, whose official connection with Montenegro dates back to 1878, addressed to Nikita an open letter with reference to the decreasing population, as to which the statistics had been destroyed. On account of the rigorous taxation a great many of the people were forced to migrate to America, from where they sent almost everything they earned to their unhappy relatives; these were compelled to pay up to 100 per cent. interest on the loans which they had been obliged to negotiate, so that they could not meet the taxes. And there would have been some consolation had those taxes been productive; but by far the larger part of them, as of the loans raised in Vienna (with the Boden Credit and the Länder Bank) and at Constantinople were devoted to the Court and its favourites, for rewards, journeys, decorations—every thing in fact, save the needs of the people. It suited Nikita very well to keep his people in dire poverty and ignorance. Such has been the poverty of the Montenegrins that it was no uncommon sight to see them cultivating so minute a polje that the wheat which it produced would give no more than half a loaf. And meanwhile they were not allowed to exploit the wealth of the forests. Figs, olives, grapes and plums could all have been cultivated with profit, and in the lower regions oranges and lemons and tobacco. But there was the deliberate policy to keep the population from enriching themselves. Occasionally their native wit gained for them a surreptitious triumph. Thus it happened that a poor peasant's son went up into the higher lands to tend the flocks of one who was more prosperous. By some means the boy discovered that the mountain torrent of his new abode dived underneath the rocks and subsequently reappeared and was the stream which ran past his old home. He turned this knowledge to effect by killing a lamb and throwing it into the water. His parents, down below, retrieved the lamb. Various other animals went the same journey, until the farmer ascertained what the boy was doing; and then the day arrived when the poor peasant, watching by the stream, saw the body of his son being carried down towards him.
Very few schools were opened; for example the Vasojević, who are the most numerous tribe not only of Montenegro but of all the Serbian lands, had to content themselves with one school, built in 1882. In 1869 there was established a seminary with three classes, that was afterwards converted into a high-school of four classes; but both of these were frequently closed, the true reason being that the Russian subsidies given for the school were spent on the various needs of Nikita's Court. (By the way, at one time when Montenegro had this one high-school and one hospital the three sons of Nikita were in possession of ten palaces.) In 1869 the Russian Empress caused a girls' college to be opened at Cetinje. It was one of the best institutions in the whole Peninsula; many Serb and Yugoslav girls, in addition to the Montenegrins, gathered at Cetinje. This college was the centre from which education and modern ideas spread out to the remotest corners of Montenegro; in 1913 it was obliged to close—the Court had long been looking at it with a very jaundiced eye.... Russia, Serbia, Italy, France and even Turkey offered free education to a certain number of young Montenegrins. But only the sons of the favoured families were able to get passports to go abroad; there was scarcely anything Nikita feared as much as education.... And if one asks why no patriot could be found to kill this prince one is given two reasons, the first being that his semi-secret treaty with the Austrians provided that they should come into Montenegro if he were killed, and secondly, because of the old-time custom of vicarious punishment. In 1856, for instance, Nikita's father attacked the Počara Kuči, burned their houses, and is reputed to have slain more than 550 children, women and old men, including the septuagenarian grandfather of Tomo Oraovac, on the ground that these people had set up a kind of republic, independent both of Montenegro and of the Sultan and declined to pay the former any taxes. These measures were taken against them in the summer when most of the men were with their herds in the mountains. Three children survived. The Great Powers protested, consuls were sent and ultimately the Počara Kuči, who had always helped the Montenegrins against the Turks, consented to pay taxes. It was for these reasons that Nikita was never assassinated.
THE GREAT STROSSMAYER
While the Serbs of Serbia and Montenegro no longer placed any trust in their princes, they had good cause to give more and more of their confidence to Strossmayer, who remained for more than half a century at Djakovo and never, on account of Magyar opposition, became a prince of the Church. He saw that the Starčević policy with respect to Bosnia was a retrograde step, since it was causing the Serbs of that province, who until the occupation had been on good terms with the Catholic minority and the Serbs of Croatia—about 40 per cent. of the population—to stand very much aloof from the Croats. This state of things was naturally very pleasing to the Magyar imperialist Ban, Count Khuen-Héderváry, whereas Strossmayer's Yugoslav idea would have, owing to the intermingling of the two religions, a particularly favourable ground in Bosnia. It may be that Leo XIII.'s conception of drawing back the Slavs to Rome will remain a dream, but his and Strossmayer's policy of an alliance would have been a blessing to the Yugoslavs, and primarily in such provinces as Bosnia and Croatia. Negotiations were begun in 1882, between Strossmayer and the Serbian Government, with a view to establishing a Concordat. Serbia's Roman Catholic subjects—who, by the way, were not very numerous—would be placed under a patriotic priest depending not on Austria-Hungary but directly on Rome. And thus the fence between them and their Orthodox kindred would be gradually broken down. It would be foolish to assert that Strossmayer and his fellow-workers were able to make all the Yugoslavs dismiss their religious differences and remember their national affinities. Orthodox and Catholic Slav have for so long been divided that their approach to one another must often be slow and is liable to be interrupted by the manœuvres of third parties. The Austrians were pretty successful, just before and during the Great War, in setting the Catholic and Orthodox Bosniak at each other's throat, and this antagonism will endure for a while in remote districts, such as in a certain village of the Sandjak where one found, in the summer of 1919, that the Catholic chief official and his wife were compelled to dismiss their Orthodox maid, since the villagers would not allow her to continue to serve in a Catholic house. But Strossmayer's statesmanship went a long way towards breaking down these barriers. "I have had to set my face against your mission," said von Khevenhüller, the Austro-Hungarian Minister, to Father Tondini when this Italian Barnabite, in whom Strossmayer had every confidence, came to Belgrade. "It is one of our principles, inherited from Schwarzenberg and Metternich," said the Minister, "that we should exercise a sort of control over the Serbian Catholics by having them under the jurisdiction of an Austrian Bishop." When Strossmayer visited Belgrade, for the purpose of conducting confirmations, he was driven at once, amid the booming of cannon, to the royal palace. And if the negotiations were allowed to drag it was obviously not due to any Orthodox fanaticism. Talking of fanaticism, one had instances in Bosnia and in Slavonia, not long ago, of Catholic priests who discarded Strossmayer and endeavoured to get their flock to use a different pronunciation from that of the Orthodox. It was because he strove to bring them together that the great bishop was so heartily disliked in Vienna and Pest. It had been decided in 1883 that, unless he made his political submission, he was to be interned at the Trappist monastery of Banjaluka. But if he were no longer in a position to spend the great resources of the bishopric—to say nothing of the removal of his personal influence—the Cause would have suffered enormously. Therefore he listened to the prayers of his friends and submitted. "Be glad," said he to Radić, the Croat patriot—"be glad that you are not a priest." His successful efforts to bring about the moral and intellectual awakening of the Yugoslavs were most unpopular in those two capitals. But on the wide Slavonian lands and far beyond them one would find the sturdy farmers imitating his new methods—his own estate was so large that he paid 35,000 florins a year in taxes. The tall, thin prelate might be walking with you in his garden, telling you with simple eloquence—and in Latin, for choice—how much he regretted that Doellinger had not submitted, as did his adored Dupanloup, to the dogma of Papal Infallibility, when one of those painted carts would rattle round the corner and in two minutes this father of his people would be deep in a technical discussion with the peasant as to which of the episcopal stallions or bulls he should borrow for the improvement of his stock. When Strossmayer consecrated the cathedral which he had built at Djakovo he exclaimed that in the hour of his departure from this world his last prayer would be for the union of his people. "Almighty everlasting God," he cried, "have mercy upon my brave people and unite them!" As a very old man, verging on the nineties, with brilliant eyes peering out from under a great forehead and physically so fragile that in walking from one room to another he had to put his arm round my neck, he was still in every direction working to this end. Six months earlier, in June 1903, Khuen-Héderváry had been recalled and, after his twenty years of oppression, the young men of Croatia, Catholic and Orthodox, in harmony with the Slovenes, were forming the Serbo-Croat Coalition. This was a great step in the direction of the Yugoslavia which Strossmayer did not live to see.
RELIGIOUS DISPUTES BETWEEN SERBS AND ROUMANIANS
Between Serbs and Roumanians of the Banat an ecclesiastical dispute was on the horizon. The Roumanian Orthodox body had suffered a severe loss through the Uniate Church, which captured many of the old Orthodox places of worship. Thus the famous little church of Huniadora, whose frescoes have been so glowingly described by Mr. Walter Crane, fell into their hands. This occurred in many cases at the wish of a small part of the congregation—and this part might consist of gipsies—whereupon the majority would be obliged to build themselves another church. The Greek Catholic Uniate Church was apt to lose its national Roumanian colouring and admit the Magyar language, which was occasionally resented by the faithful. Thus, as the Bishop of Caransebes (now the Metropolitan of Roumania) told me, there came into a church at Tergul, near Moros-Varshahel, a woman with a basket of eggs. When she perceived that she could not understand the language that was being used she put down her basket and uttered a loud curse, "May thunder and lightning strike this church!" she cried. And after the service had begun in a church near Grosswardein the wife of a clergyman pulled the priest's beard, while other ladies tore off his robes. Nevertheless this Uniate Church continued to exist and it was natural that the Orthodox Roumanians should seek in some way to compensate themselves for their losses. They had, as we have mentioned above,[59] been given hospitality by the Serbian Church and given the use of a monastery for the education of their priests. They now suggested that it would be well if the Serbs handed over to them a number of the Banat monasteries, and when the Serbs declined they started a great lawsuit at Buda-Pest. Professor Iorga, the historian, told me that he thought his countrymen were justified in that these monasteries were originally neither Serbian nor Roumanian, but Roman Catholic, being erected, in pursuance of their propaganda, by the French dynasty which the Hungarians had over them in the fourteenth century. Their nomenclature, said the Professor, is neither Serb nor Roumanian, they had no privileges from Serb or Roumanian princes and he believed that they only passed to the Serbs after having been abandoned by the Catholics. A line on p. 145, vol. i., of the Monumenta Vaticana Hungariæ (Buda-Pest, 1887):
"Item Stephanus Sacerdos de Beesd solvit I fertonem"
appeared to lend colour to this view, for the name Beesd might have been slavized into Besdin and this might be the record of a payment made, between 1332 and 1337, to the Pope. It is only fair to say that the learned Magyar Jesuit who presides over the episcopal library at Gjula Fehérvár (Alba Julia in Roumanian) did no more than say that these surmises were possible. He was, as a matter of fact, much more interested in the political situation and in another book, the oldest printed Bible in Roumanian (of 1582 and in Slav characters) which, as he pointed out with half a sigh, was published by one Magyar through the liberality of another. The charming Bishop of Caransebes, as he sat with me one Sunday morning in his rose garden, did not receive Professor Iorga's idea with approbation. The Professor, he thought, was too fond of originality and he himself preferred to claim some of the monasteries on equitable instead of on historical grounds. They were founded after all, he said, for the people of the Banat and of those a majority were now Roumanian. (But in Caras-Severin, the chief stronghold of his countrymen, there are no ancient monasteries with the exception of some ruins. The Roumanians are not ostentatiously religious; they do not take kindly to the building of churches and in their portion of the Banat one usually finds churches of wood, some of these being 150 years old.) But another librarian, this time a German at Veršac, poured cold water on Professor Iorga. Only one Roman Catholic religious house, he said, was founded by that French dynasty in the Banat and this was at Egres, near the Maroš, where the wife of Louis of Anjou built a church which remained Catholic and is now in ruins. The monastery of Besdin was founded in 1539 and a Serb-Slav psaltery which is kept there has, on p. 270, the following words: "In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. So that all people shall know when a beginning was made to build the monastery of Besdin. It was begun in the year 7058 from the creation of the world, that is 1539 from the Birth of Christ ... Joseph Milutinović, archimandrate, built it, and his monks and the Christians helped him. Written by me: Leontic Bogojević, administrator and monk." Beesd and Besdin, said the librarian, are from the same root, signifying that which has no bottom, an abyss, and the marshes in the Banat are numerous. The Beesd of the above citation is, said the librarian, a place between the rivers Temes and Berzava; Catholics were there in the fourteenth century, but the founders were Slavs. The burly archimandrate of Besdin, whose constitution had withstood twenty-seven years of marshes and mosquitoes, was extremely scornful of his adversaries' pretensions. "They wanted to prove that they built it! Not one stone, not a single stone! Then they argued that something was due to them as they had paid a part of the church taxes. We had invited them!" ... Most of the Serbs acknowledge that their monasteries in the Voivodina, as elsewhere, are not under present conditions as meritorious as in the Middle Ages when the people from twenty or thirty villages would meet there and listen to the blind guslar-player. Sometimes one of their few monks is a man of erudition, such as the well-known Bishop Nicholai Velimirović or Ruvarac the great historian, who in thirty years freed his monastery from debt and left large sums for charities. On the other hand we have the archimandrate Radić, who ruled several monasteries in succession; he never drove with less than four horses in his carriage and he drove so recklessly that between eight and sixteen horses were rendered worthless every year. The Radical party desired, after paying fixed salaries to the archimandrates and monks, to give two-thirds of the rest to clerical funds and one-third to schools. But the Austro-Hungarian Government had an understanding with the clerical party and prevented the public from exercising any control over these funds. The twenty-seven monasteries in the Voivodina, Syrmia and Croatia could have supported three Universities, so richly endowed are they with lands; the Roumanians did in fact with some of the revenues of their one monastery of Hodosh maintain the Arad seminary. There is no knowing what other monasteries the Roumanians would have secured if the Great War had not intervened, for the Pest judges knew every morning which of the two litigant countries their own country happened to prefer.
What the Serbs of the Banat had, in the political world, to contend against may be illustrated by some incidents of the career of Dr. Svetozar Miletić, who after having been a deputy for twenty-five years was charged with high treason for having sent volunteers into Serbia at the time of the Serbo-Turkish War; even if this was true it can scarcely be said to have constituted high treason against Hungary. The witnesses against him were two forgers, released ad hoc from prison, his own witnesses were hundreds. He was condemned to six years' imprisonment, at the expiration of which he was in such a state that he had to be transferred to an asylum, where he died. The pitiful dodges of the dominating Magyar minority are by this time well enough known; it was their argument that certain villages, say ten miles from a town, had to give their votes in that town, while intervening villages of other nationalities were obliged to present themselves at a booth twenty miles in another direction, because if such methods had not been employed then the more ancient and more reputable Magyar culture would have been entirely swamped by the wicked non-Magyars. Thus the three million Slovaks in Hungary were represented at Buda-Pest by three deputies.[60] "Hungary," says the delicious Aubrey Herbert, M.P., in the Oxford Hungarian Review (June 1922), "Hungary was situated amongst reactionary neighbours, and any loosening of her hold upon the non-Magyar population threatened her very existence. The path of spectacular liberalism was closed to her...." The ballot was supposed to be secret in the towns, where the Magyars could hope to exercise an appropriate control; but even in the towns they thought it more advisable to take no risks. Some of the dead were permitted to vote; but only if they were faithful Magyar dead. And in Dr. Miletić's constituency no arrangements were made to ferry the living—on the large lake of Mutniatsa the boats were hidden and the voters were compelled to swim across.