Our chair, as we have hinted, is an easy one; and throwing ourselves back into its luxurious embrace, we have raced through the swift paragraphs of morning journalism, or lingered, as is our wont, upon the piquancy of occasional romance, with all the gravity of a stoic, and all the glow of Epicurus. We are writing now, while the street and the salon are lighted up with the full flush of the Hungarian enthusiasm. It amounts to a frenzy; and may well give to the quiet observer a text on which to preach of our national characteristics.
And firstly, we are prone to enthusiastic outbursts, we love to admire with an ecstasy; and when we do admire, we have a pride to eclipse all rivals in our admiration. We doubt if ever at Pesth, in the best days that are gone, or that are to come, of Hungarian nationality, the chief of the nation could receive more hearty and zealous plaudits than have welcomed him upon our sunny Bay of New York. A fine person, an honest eye, and an eloquent tongue—pleading for liberty and against oppression—stir our street-folk—and we hope in Heaven may always stir them—to such enthusiasm as no Paris mob can match.
But, secondly—since we are speaking sermonwise—our enthusiasm is only too apt to fall away into reaction. We do not so much grow into a steady and healthful consciousness of what we count worthy, as we leap to the embrace of what wears the air of worthiness; and the very excess of our emotion is only too often followed by a lethargy, which is not so much the result of a changed opinion, as of a fatigue of sentiment. Whether this counter-action is to follow upon the enthusiasm that greets the great Guest, we dare not say. We hope—for the sake of Hungary, for the sake of Liberty, and for the sake of all that ennobles manhood—that it may not!
Thirdly, and finally, as sermonizers are wont to say, we are, at bottom, with all our exciting moments, and all our fevers of admiration, a very matter-of-fact people. We could honor Mr. Dickens with such adulation, and such attention as he never found at home; but when it came to the point of any definite action for the protection of his rights as an author, we said to Mr. Dickens, with our heart in his books, but with our hands away from our pockets, “we are our own law-makers, and must pay you only in—honor!”
How will our matter-of-fact tendencies answer to the calls of Kossuth? We are not advocates or partisans—least of all—in our Easy Chair: we only seek to chisel out of the rough block of every day
talk, that image of thought which gives it soul and intent.
That the enlarged ideas of Kossuth—independent of their eloquent exposition from his lips—will meet with the largest and profoundest sympathy from the whole American people, we can not have a doubt. Nor can we doubt that that sympathy will lend such material aid, as was never before lent to any cause, not our own. But the question arises, how far such sympathy and individual aid will help forward a poor, down-trodden, and distant nation, toward the vigor of health and power. Sympathies and favoring opinion may do much toward alleviating the pains of wounded hearts and pride; they may, by urgency of expression, spread, and new leaven the whole thought of the world; but he is a fast thinker who does not know that this must be the action of time.
We can not but believe that the strongest sympathy, and the most generous proffers of individual aid will, after all, help very little toward practical issues, in any new endeavor of Hungary to be itself again. Poor Poland is a mournful monument of the truth of what we say. How then is our great Guest to derive really tangible aid in the furtherance of what lies so near his heart?
We pose the question, not for political discussion, but as the question which is giving a slant to all the talk of the town. To break peace with Austria and with Russia, and openly to take ground, as a government, with the subdued Hungarians, is what very few presume to hint—much less to think soberly of. The great Hungarian, himself, would hardly seem to have entertained such a possibility. We suppose his efforts rather to be directed toward the enkindling of such a large love of liberty, and such international sympathy among all people who are really free, as shall make a giant league of opinion, whose thunders shall mutter their anathemas against oppression, in every parliament and every congress; and by congruity of action, as well as congruity of impulse, fix the bounds to oppression, and fright every tyrant from advance—if not from security.
In all this we only sketch the color of the Hungarian talk.