Hungary, in extent larger than the United Kingdom, is, geographically
speaking, one large basin, watered by one large river and its affluents,
and bounded by one imposing range of mountains. The river is called
the Danube, the mountains are the Carpathian offshoots of the Alps.
This geographical unity makes Hungary almost predestined to be the seat
of one nation. The natural unity calls for, it may be presumed, the
national. Yet the very richness of the soil, diversified as it is by
the vegetable and mineral wealth of huge mountains, and the cereal and
animal exuberance of vast plains has, in all times, attracted numerous
tribes from eastern Europe and western and central Asia to the country
of the “blue” Danube, and the “blonde” Theiss. Some of these invaders
succeeded for a time in establishing a kind of dominion over parts of
Hungary. Thus the Huns in the fifth, the Gepidae in the fifth and sixth,
the Avars in the seventh and eighth, numerous Slav tribes in the eighth
and ninth centuries were successively lords of the plains and some
mountainous parts of Hungary. Not one of these peoples, however, could
either maintain themselves as rulers, or quite disappear as dwellers.
Already in the ninth century we find Hungary inhabited by more than
fifteen different nations or portions of nations, offering then the
same gorgeous medley of Humanity that is still so characteristic of the
country. Where the above nations failed, the Magyars signally succeeded.
They and they alone of all the numerous, if not perhaps innumerable
nations that had tried to rear a lasting polity on the columns of the
Carpathians, and behind the moats of the Danube; the Hungarians alone,
we say, succeeded in establishing themselves as the permanent rulers
of the Slav and Turanian peoples of Hungary, and as the members of a
state endowed with abiding forces of order within and power without.
From 996 to 1301 A.D., they took their dukes and kings from the family
of the Árpáds, under whom they had entered (some 100,000 men, women,
and children) the country. Saint Stephen (the first canonized king)
consolidated their constitution. Without attempting to overrate the value
of constitutions either grown or made, and, while laying due stress on
that _geometria situs_, or providential strategy in the location of
nations which has perhaps wrought the major part of History, it is
tolerably certain, that the constitution of Hungary, as developed under
the Árpád dynasty, and as still surviving in some of its essential
elements, has had a most beneficial influence on the public life of the
Magyars. Like that of England, it combines the excellency of the Latin
system of centralization, with the advantages of the Germanic custom of
local autonomy.
Already in the early middle ages, Hungary was divided into counties
endowed with selfgovernment. At the same time there was a centre of
government and legislation in the national assembly or diet, where king
and subjects met to discuss the affairs affecting the peace or wars of
the entire state. In 1222, or seven years after Magna Charta was signed
at Runnymede, the Hungarians forced their King John, whose name was
Andrew II., to sign the Golden Bull, which, like the English Charter,
was to be the text of the country’s constitution, all subsequent laws
being in the nature of commentaries on that text. The elements of the
Hungarian and English constitution being nearly alike, the domestic
histories of the two nations bear, up to the sixteenth century, striking
resemblance to one another. We learn of wars of the “barons” against the
king, such as those under Henry III. and Henry IV. in England; we read
of the constant struggles of the “commons” (in Hungary consisting of the
lower nobility, that is, of knights as distinguished from burgesses),
for broader recognition of their parliamentary rights; of rebellions,
like that of Wat the Tyler, of the peasants against their oppressors, the
landed gentry; and of fierce dynastic struggles, like the Wars of the
Roses. But while these historic parallels may be found in many another
country of mediæval Europe with its remarkable homogeneity of structure,
the distinctive parallelism between England and Hungary is in the
tenacity with which the ruling people of both countries have carried over
their autonomous institutions from the times before the Reformation to
the sixteenth and the following centuries, or to the period of Absolutism
sweeping over Europe ever since Luther had raised his voice for religious
liberty.
All nations of Europe had constitutions more or less similar to that
of England during the Middle Ages; for there was after all a very
considerable amount of Liberty extant in mediæval institutions. But at
the threshold of the sixteenth century, when new worlds were discovered
by the genius and daring of the Portuguese and the Italians, the better
part of the old world, that is, its Liberty, was completely lost, and
sovereigns became absolute and peoples slaves. Three nations alone
amongst the larger states remained unaffected by the plague of absolutism
then spreading over Europe; they alone preserving intact the great
principles of local autonomy, central parliaments, and limited power of
the Crown. These were the English, the Poles and the Hungarians. In these
three countries alone there was practically no dead past as against a
presumptuous present. The nation’s past was still living in the shape of
actual realities, and the growth of the constitution was, in spite of
all sudden ruptures and breaks, continuous and organic. What the Stuarts
were to England, the Habsburgs were to Hungary during the seventeenth
century. Hence in both countries we notice continual rebellions and wars,
both parliamentary and other. The Stuarts, however, were little aided by
foreign powers in their attempts at crushing the autonomous rights of the
English nation. On the contrary, one of the greatest statesmen of modern
times, William of Orange, came, and with him several great powers of
Europe, to the rescue of the people of England; and thus the end of the
seventeenth century was also the termination of Absolutism in England.
In Hungary it was the grave of Liberty. The Hungarian Stuarts, or the
then Habsburgs, far from being deserted by the other Great Powers of
Europe, were most efficiently abetted by them. This happened of course
in a way apparently quite alien to any desire to destroy the liberties
of Hungary. Vienna, the capital of the Habsburgs, was, in 1683, besieged
by the hitherto fairly invincible Turks, and Austria was menaced with
utter ruin. The war being, on the face of it, a crusade, the Christian
powers, and, chiefly, fat and gallant John Sobieski, King of Poland,
came to the succour of Leopold of Austria. The Turk was beaten, and not
only out of Austria, but also out of Hungary, where he had been holding
two-thirds of the counties for over one hundred and fifty years. Hungary
was almost entirely liberated from her Mahometan oppressor, and, such
is the illogicality of History, for the very same reason nearly lost
her autonomous existence. For the evil of foreign saviours now told on
the Magyars. Had they driven back the Turk by their own efforts, the
result would have been an unprecedented electrization and stimulation
of all the forces of the nation. The Greeks after Salamis; the Romans
after Zama; the English after Trafalgar had won not only a victory over
an enemy, but an immeasurably increased vitality fraught with novel
energies. The Hungarians after the capture of Buda and the Battle of
Zenta, both achieved by Austria’s foreign allies and foreign generals,
had defeated the Turks indeed; but their own ends too. Never was Hungary
in a lower state of national stagnation than shortly after the peace of
Carlovitz (1699), which put a formal end to Turkish rule in most of the
Hungarian counties. Prince Francis Rákóczy II., who started the last
of the Great Rebellions of the Magyars previous to 1848, and after the
above peace, found no Holland rich in capital, no Brandenburg ready to
hand with well-trained regiments, no Austria willing to avert side-blows
from enemies, to help him in the manner in which the asthmatic Prince
of Orange was helped against James II. and his powerful abettor. And
when Rákóczy too had expended his forces in vain, Hungary fell into
a decrepitude but too natural in a nation whose foreign foe had been
conquered by its domestic oppressor.
The political bankruptcy of the Hungarians by the beginning of the
eighteenth century is of such importance for the study of the history of
their literature, that we cannot but attempt to search for some of the
reasons and causes of this national disaster. The principal cause was, it
would seem, the lack of that very class of citizens which had in England
so potently contributed to the ultimate victory of popular freedom—the
middle class. Hungary never recognized, nor tolerated the complicated
maze of semi-public and semi-private institutions collectively called
Feudalism. Whatever the merits or demerits of that mediæval fabric may or
may not have been, it is certain that the rise of the _bourgeois_ class
is owing directly, and still more indirectly to the action and re-action
of Feudalism. The parallelism between England Poland, and Hungary pointed
out above, must now be supplemented by the statement, that England alone
of these three commonwealths had, through the invasion and conquests of
the French Normans, received a large infusion of feudal institutions,
and that therefore England alone was to create that powerful class of
burgesses and yeomen, which was entirely lacking in both Poland and
Hungary. Without such a class of “mean” citizens no modern nation has
been able to consolidate its polity; and Hungary in the seventeenth
century, being totally devoid of such a class, was in the long run bound
to be wrecked by such a deficiency. We shall see how heavily the absence
of a middle class told on the growth of Hungarian Literature.
During the eighteenth century and up to 1815, the great and scarcely
interrupted wars of the Habsburgs enlisted all the powers of Hungary. In
1741 the Magyars, and they alone, saved Austria from what seemed to be
inevitable dismemberment. From that date onward to the campaign of 1788
the History of Hungary is but a chapter in that of Austria. Towards
that latter date the wave of Nationalism started in France had reached
Hungary. Like the Belgians and the Czechs (Bohemians), the Hungarians too
began to revolt from the anti-nationalist and _egalitarian_ autocracy
of Emperor Joseph II., one of the characteristic geniuses of the last
century, who was exceedingly enlightened on everything else but his own
business. The old Magyar institutions, and weightiest amongst them, the
Magyar language was, by the Hungarian diet, alas! not by the Hungarian
people, decreed to be the public language of the country. Resistance
to Joseph’s “reforms” became so serious, as to prevail upon the dying
monarch to revoke them, 1790; and under his successor, Leopold II.,
1790-1792, who was of a less aggressive temper, Hungarian nationality
seemed to approach its revival. This was, however, not to be.
The French Revolution, although essentially a nationalist movement,
forwarded in Europe outside France, for nearly two generations after
its rise, none but the cause of the monarchs. The Hungarians, who
gave Austria many of her best generals, and fought in nearly all the
battles of the Revolutionary Wars from 1792 to 1815, were in the end
shorn of all their hopes and expectations by the successful fop who
directed Austria’s policy from 1809 to 1848. Prince Metternich had not
the faintest conception of the rights or wants of the Hungarians; and
having brought to fall, as he thought he did, the French Revolution and
its personification, Napoleon Buonaparte, he could not but think that
a small nation, as the Hungarians, would speedily and lastingly yield
to high-handed police regulations, to gagging the public conscience,
and to unmanning the press. The year 1848 witnessed the final victory
of the French Revolution all over Europe. Hungary, foremost amongst
the countries where oppressed nations were demolishing the bulwarks of
tyranny, freed herself from the yoke of Austrian ministers. The Austrian
armies were driven out of Hungary; the Habsburgs were declared to have
forfeited the crown of St. Stephen; and but for the help of Russia, the
Austrian monarchs would have been deprived of more than one half of their
empire. When a now nameless Hungarian general surrendered to the Russians
at Világos (1849), Hungary was bodily incorporated with the Austrian
Empire, and Czech and Austrian officials were sent down to germanize
and denationalize Hungary. In 1860 the reaction set in. The nation,
offering a passive resistance of a most formidable character, brought the
Vienna Cabinet to its senses; and when, at Königsgrätz (July, 1866), the
Prussians had routed the armies of Austria, Hungary’s greatest political
sage, Francis Deák, aided by the Austrian minister, Count Beust,
restored the ancient Magyar autonomy and independence. Ever since (1867)
Hungary’s relation to Austria has been that of confederation for purposes
of foreign policy, and absolute independence for the work of domestic
rule. The Emperor of Austria is at the same time the King of Hungary;
and thus the two halves of the Empire are united by a personal link. Law
and its administration; Parliament and municipal government; commerce
and trade; in short, all that goes to form the life of a separate nation
is, in Hungary, of as independent a character as it is in Austria. A
Hungarian must, like any other foreigner, be formally naturalized in
order that he may be considered an Austrian citizen, and _vice versâ_.