the nations of the Occident, for all their chauvinistic talk!
Mr. Du Maurier, in his unmentionable novel, suspects, like Lowell, that a drop of it has lurked in every artistic temperament. And, in sober truth, the drain from Israel throughout the centuries has been immense. In every age, in every country, Jews have been sucked up into the more brilliant life around them, exchanging contempt and danger for consideration and peace. I know an English gentleman who goes about in fear and trembling lest it transpire that he is of the race of the apostles, and he be driven out of decent Christian society.
For the Jew by no means uses his power to help Jews indiscriminately: there is no secret brotherhood of the synagogue. The Jewish journalists have probably never been in a synagogue, except perhaps as children; they are divorced in thought and temper from the body proper. And the only sense in which their pen can be said to have a Jewish bias is in that complimentary sense which makes the Jew synonymous with the champion of sweetness and light, of liberty and reason. In this sense it is true that the Jew is wielding an insidious influence throughout Europe, like the old apostles among the heathen.
'Oh yes, the Jews are very well off in Hungary,' said one of the staff of the 'Pesther Lloyd.' 'There are 150,000 Jews in Budapest; they enter all the professions, and supply two members to the House of Magnates, and nine to the Chamber of Deputies, and there are two State Councillors; and you know with us every member of Parliament 'thous' every other in private as an equal. For the laws, liberal as they are, are not so liberal as the spirit of society. I, mere journalist as I am, have the most friendly talks with the Prime Minister, and am a member of the swellest political clubs. We are a good deal like England, by the way: our middle-classes produce our leaders, our aristocracy lacks eloquence and talent, and has only a court influence. Our House of Commons is the most fashionable club. We have no censor, whereas Austria has an oppressive censorship as well as anti-Semitism. In fact, the influence of Vienna has caused a decline in our own tolerant spirit, and at the best of times a Jew needed to have three times the talent of a Christian to make equal progress in any career.' A consideration which sufficiently accounts for the superiority of the Jewish remnant. Intolerance and persecution are furnaces which, when they do not destroy, temper and anneal and strengthen. It is as with the bare-footed, half-clad, underfed children of the slums: those that do survive are strong indeed. Let my patriotic cicerone, the Jewish architect, testify. First in all his examinations, a violinist, a bicyclist, a gymnast, he was to be gazetted a premier lieutenant as soon as he had completed his military service. He was a linguist, too (as every travelled Hungarian must be, for Hungarian will carry him nowhere), speaking excellent English and reading our magazines regularly. Humani nihil a me alienum puto might have been his motto. Kossuth himself is said to have had a Jewish grandmother. The Jews are largely responsible for the prosperity of Budapest, as they were for that of Vienna, which now turns round upon them. Fancy a country quarrelling with its coal and iron! And the true wealth of a country is even more in its population than in its dead products. I found the Viennese comic papers full of the old anti-Semitic jokes, hashed up, I have little doubt, by the same journalists who are supposed to judaize the press of Europe. Even so in America, are not the Jewish caricatures in Puck often done by a brother of M. de Blowitz? In something of the same spirit, when the notorious Lueger, whose platform was the extinction of the Jews of Vienna, was up for election as Burgomaster of that town, a poor Jew took a bribe of a couple of florins to vote for him. 'God will frustrate him,' said the pious Jew. 'Meantime I have his money.'
The chief surprise of Hungary is its language. Though one knows that Jokai writes in the strange tongue which sticks its verb into the middle of its noun, yet one vaguely thinks of it as of Gaelic or Welsh-something archaic, kept for Eisteddfods and Renaissances-and it is not till one arrives in Hungary that one realises that it is a living, disconcerting reality. The great European languages have affinities with one another: Latin puts one on bowing terms with French and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese; English is not entirely unrelated to German, Dutch, and even Norwegian; old Greek is the key to modern. But in Hungary one comes face to face with an absolutely new language, in which even guesswork is impossible. When 'Levelezo-Lap' means a postcard, and 'ara egy napra' means price per day, you feel that it is all up. The nearest relatives of Hungarian are Turkish and Finnish, the Asiatic ancestors of the race having lived between Finns and Turks; and it bears traces of their migrations, and of the great Mongol invasion of Europe by Djingis Khan.
With a language thus handicapped, it was a mistake to have scarcely a word of any other tongue in an Exhibition designed to attract Europe. The only scrap of English I saw was in the 'French Theatre,' in the show of 'Living Pictures,' the (London) director of which had forgotten to alter the titles printed beneath the frames. Even in giving the names of foreign authors the Hungarians preserve their habit of placing the Christian name second; so that I saw in the booksellers' windows works by Eliot George, Kock Paul, and Black William.
Hungary is still in the flush of youth, high-spirited, brilliant, enthusiastic, and a little out of perspective in its national consciousness. But who would ever do anything if he saw his true place in the cosmos? The rapid rise of Budapest-unprecedented save in the gold countries-into a capital of European importance, has shed a buoyant optimism, refreshing enough in this jaded century, over the inhabitants of that beautiful city. 'We are the Vienna of the future,' cried my cicerone, 'and already Vienna is feeling our rivalry. The retired Jewish merchants who went there to spend their fortunes are now coming to us; the anti-Semitism of Vienna is at once the cause and the effect of bad business. And Vienna is on the downward grade; we are on the upward. Vienna has never been the capital of Austria,-which is a mere federation of races,-as Budapest is the capital of Hungary. The German is proud of Vienna, yes; but the Czech looks to Prague, the Pole to Cracow, the Austro-Italian swears by Trieste.'
He also complained that there is rather a tendency to think of Hungary as subject to Austria, instead of an associated state; and that this tendency is fomented by the Austrian papers, whose references to Hungary insinuate this conception. The Hungarian papers, whose tone would counteract it, not being in German, are not read by the rest of Europe. Hungary had always beaten Austria. She had never been defeated save by allies of Austria. But Hungary, which is so mettlesome and restive in her patriotism, whose great son, Kossuth, would never even accept the compromise with the House of Hapsburg, has yet no compunction in dominating inferior races, in grinding Serbs, Croats and Roumanians into her own pattern. The Hungarians, who are in the minority, are yet moulding these alien nationalities to their own will. But
Still the Hungarians have the qualities of their defects. Unlike the Turks, their neighbours, they are a race with a future, and Budapest is from one point of view one of the sightliest capitals of Europe. What town has a fairer situation? With Parisian Pesth sitting stately on one bank of the Danube, and Turkish Buda climbing up the hills in a series of hanging gardens crowned by gilt domes and cupolas on the other, the two joined by wonderful bridges, she exhibits an unsurpassed contrast; and at night, when the long stretch of the river is a-twinkle with lights reflected as shining spears, she may even vie with Venice or the Thames Embankment. From the Andrassy Avenue, a beautiful Boulevard, with its cafes and book-shops, and pleasant interludes of flower-beds and fountains, you may get, in a few minutes-crossing the Danube on a great steamer, and ascending the heights of Buda by a funicular railway-to a spot where, seated in an avenue of chestnut trees and looking on the villa-strewn slopes of sleeping hills, or watching the sun set in splendour behind them, you may forget that you are living in a bustling modern town, and one with an Exhibition to boot.
You may dream of the picturesque days when, as shown in Ujvary's great panorama of the sister towns in 1680, Buda was by far 'the better half,' and Pesth was a tiny spot. You may visit the tomb of Gul Baba, father of the roses, a shrine of pilgrimage to all good Turks. You may find a good quarter of an hour in the Church of St. Matthias, whose spire comes up white amid the green as you turn a corner; a curious monument, that was three centuries a-building; its interior suffused, like St. Mark's, by a golden glow, its coloured windows original in shape, and no two pillars or capitals alike in design, yet all contributing to a quaint unity and harmony. And it is at Buda that the chief national buildings stand, usually flanked by chestnut trees, and the statues in memory of the wars. Here is the War-Office of the Territorial Army (which is distinct from the joint Austro-Hungarian army); here are the Premier's Palace, the Houses of Parliament, and the King's Palace of many windows set on a breezy hill, and now being enlarged at a cost of thirty million florins. Fortunate Francis Joseph, to command such a panorama from his bedroom window: his hanging gardens, that slope towards the Danube, flowing with molten sparkle, spanned by
