STUDIES

III* From what has been said we believed we could establish the following theory: I. The moral principle Just as every fine art finds the object of its concern in the idea of the beautiful and the grand, so too of the dramatist we must presume in advance that, when he takes up his pen, when he pours out his enthusiasm into a surging action, his soul has been filled with reverence for the beautiful and the grand, and that it is for this that he writes his apology in the dramatic work. We may set it down as a rule that the poet should always take up such an idea as he longs to glorify in his work, and should win its victory in defiance of a hundred opposing obstacles. And this constitutes the moral action of the play. No less does this rule pertain to the historical drama, since it may in any case be assumed of the poet that a subject in which no such moral beauty exists will not fire him to the labor of composition. As for its effect, that of course rises to its highest step in the historical work, for besides the fact that the truth of the principle inscribes itself involuntarily upon our breasts, it is at the same time raised out of that theoretical world so often said to be inapplicable to life, into the ranks of undeniable examples. But let us look at what has just been said in the case of our author. In Ajax: The folly of human greatness is set before us. His hero, lifted above the earthly barrier, yearns after immortality; but he is a man, his nature cannot endure the flood of light of the higher spheres, his fate will not let death be cheated of its allotted share; and the hero’s greatness topples, in contrast with the loving man and father who, within the narrow family circle, enjoys nothing but pleasures. [* Fragmentary; it begins with chapter III.] In Philoctetes: every private interest and hatred is taught to subordinate itself to the consecrated word of love of country and glory. In The Women of Trachis: we see the full image of manly perfection personified, a hero who seems unshakably to defy all suffering, who has but one weakness, born precisely of that manly strength which raises him above other men. Yet this one weakness suffices to chain him back to the commonplace, to the dust from which he was taken, to strike down the unshakable one. In Electra: we see punished the evildoer who hides beneath the cloak of justice, who, against the sanctity of family life, became judge of that which it befits God alone to judge. In Oedipus the King: shuddering, we see the threads of our fate woven by a higher hand, against which, however we may struggle, we are nonetheless overtaken irresistibly and with all certainty. In Oedipus at Colonus: in grand letters we see written up the commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” In Antigone, finally: we see sanctified the eternal laws of virtue, which violence may indeed suppress, but which break out victoriously soon enough, taking bloody vengeance on those who battled against them. 2. Persons That the moral principle once taken up may, as we said above, prevail, it is necessary that someone struggle against it; and this struggler is the chief person of the play. But since it is not absolutely necessary that such a person be a single individual—indeed there may be several, especially when the struggle against the moral principle arises from the struggles of several persons against one another—it will be clear that a drama may have several chief persons without its spiritual unity being marred, that unity which consists in the single-directed struggle, thus: Heracles and Deianeira Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, etc. He, however, would be much mistaken who supposed he could send his chief person blindly into battle against the banners of right and justice. Disgust and indignation would seize the spectators were they to see virtue’s temple stormed with unhallowed hands. The chief person must therefore have a title of right on which he can lean. And how easily this comes about, how often does frail and imperfect man come into conflict with the eternal commandments of morality. He sees how, before his finite understanding, these stand in struggle with one another—he chooses among them, and who stands surety to him that his choice has lighted on the holiest? And even if it has, who assures him that he will fight out its victory worthily, and that his frailty, so inadequate to represent the holy, will not one day drive him to stumble? We must take care, therefore, lest this title of right be stronger than the principle against which, in battling, he must fall; for otherwise, instead of the elevated sorrow and yet soothing self-assurance which fills our breast at the triumph of the principle arising from the dramatic hero’s downfall, we are overcome by bitter pain and by tears born of injustice, dragging the spiritual grace of poetry down into the mire of the commonplace. This might happen if one who wished to write an apology for innocence and virtue were to drag a wholly good and faultless person through a thousand sufferings, even if he made that person triumph in the end. But let us look at examples: Ajax’s soul aspires high! What is holier than this striving?—But human strength is finite and must fall in its struggle with the infinite, if, forsaking the Eden of the middle measure, his soul aspires beyond mortality. Has not Philoctetes title enough for hatred against the Atreidae?—Yet a holy calm overcomes our soul, seeing that this hatred must yield before the command of love of country and glory. Heracles, the unshakable hero—can his single weakness remain unpunished, when it is so easily forgiven for the sake of his extraordinary virtues?—No, for through this one weakness he attests that he could not raise himself above the earth, and he must bear the humiliation that has fallen to the lot of every son of earth. Clytemnestra’s title is the sacrifice of her child—a strong title!—But let family life be holy; let the evildoer be punished who, with violent hands, tears its bonds as his own judge. Oedipus the King wishes to ward off the terrible crimes which, by God’s word, he was destined to commit.—Yet the eternal decrees of fate are holy, and no private interest halts their fulfillment. Polyneices and Eteocles fulfill the curse Oedipus pronounced upon himself.—Yet their deed should have been guided by filial reverence rather than by strict right, for woe to the son in whose breast these tones have died, who sets up law against his father. Creon, as king, denies burial to his country’s enemy, and does so justly. Antigone, in burying her brother, performs a virtuous deed.—Yet Creon wishes to subordinate the eternal laws of morality to strict right, and thereby strikes himself down. Since every outward act can be only the consequence of inner perfection and resolve, in order, then, that the struggles of the play’s persons against one another and against the moral principle may be motivated, it is necessary that they have such a character that, in the circumstances in which they exist, their acts flow forth of themselves. Insofar as this is accomplished from the character of the dramatic persons, the work will be coherent and one; but insofar as outer forces exert an influence upon it, the unity is spoiled.—Let this be made clear. And since all these acts, and the struggle against the principle as well, do not stand in the drama as theoretical facts but are represented by living and real men, it is necessary that both they and their characters possess those lesser determinations and particularities which make the individual man individual—distinguished both from one another and from man-as-idea, distinguishing the practical execution of the principle from the man. This individuality is required chiefly in the chief persons, for the subsidiary persons are, as it were, their aids in the execution and the occasioners of the circumstances. It is at the same time clear from this that only those can be dramatic persons who exercise activity of this kind within it. Concerning the character of the hero of the historical play, it is to be noted: Since we are accustomed to judge character from deeds, and these from their circumstances, such a character is to be given to the hero of the historical play as the explicability of his deeds requires—and not such a one as one or two historians, perhaps prompted by hatred or by flattery, ascribe to him, leaving the poet, who cannot reconcile it with his deeds. The characters of the subsidiary persons are to be chosen according to need—that is, such an assembly as the development requires. I consider settled, by what has been said, the question whether only good persons, and how good in spirit, are to be brought into the play. A piece is not moral because it has good persons. I scarcely need say that the persons of one and the same play should be such as could in reality once have come together; that no major person should pass out of the piece in the course of it without his actions reaching their development. Exempt from this rule are those persons whose appearance serves only to explain the actions of other, more important persons, and who themselves take no active part in the complication. As for individuality, every more careful depiction and particularity offers examples; for the characters that motivate the action, the following: Ajax’s ambitious soul. Philoctetes’s hatred of the Greeks, born of his exile. Heracles’s vigor of deed and his longing for love. Electra’s lust for vengeance, born of her beloved father’s death and of unworthy treatment, etc. 3. Action The life and struggle latent in the drama must attest itself in action. Hence dramatic action is only that which either serves to make character known, or contains the struggle against the principle and its triumph. In this we distinguish the beginning of the play’s action, its turning point, and its resolution. The beginning is that part of the play which, in a simple deed, contains in itself either the struggle against the moral principle, or that stumbling which is so natural to our frailty in its heroizing on behalf of holy and eternal things. Thus in Ajax: the resolve on vengeance after the judgment of the arms. In Philoctetes: a solitary hatred that wishes to defy love of country. In The Women of Trachis: on Heracles’s part, love of Iole; on Deianeira’s, the credence, born of womanliness, given to what Nessus told her. In Electra: the blood-guilt of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. In Oedipus: defiance and scorn against the decree of fate—human weakness. In Oedipus at Colonus: the father into exile. In Antigone: the prohibition against the burial of Polyneices. In its turning point the play takes a course entirely opposed to what its beginning gave to surmise, which happens either through the voluntary recognition of the moral fault and the wish to make it good, or through the struggler’s title of right seeming on the very point of triumphing over the moral principle. Examples of the first: In The Women of Trachis: Deianeira’s anxious foreboding after sending the garment.—She would wish to make what has happened not to have happened, to withdraw her deed, but it is too late. In Ajax: the hero perceives his shame, resolves to die, withdrawing into the grave from his shame.—But does he succeed in this? In Oedipus the King: he wishes to punish the evildoer; he appears as judge and as a caring, just king—he himself later to atone. In Oedipus at Colonus: the evil sons wish to take their father back again. Examples of the second: In Philoctetes: the defiant resolve of the seven heroes that they would go home. In Electra: the sense of security born in Clytemnestra from the news of Orestes’s death. In Antigone: the apparent victory won by human law through the death of Antigone and Ismene. The resolution, finally, in spite of the turning point—indeed by its very means—unfolds the play just as its beginning and the triumph of the moral principle require. Thus: In Ajax: by his resolve on death the hero does not attain the aim pronounced in the turning point, for to his disgrace burial is denied him. In Philoctetes: it is precisely through his firm resolve that the prohibiting god is, as it were, called forth. In The Women of Trachis: it is precisely by sending the robe that the anxious foreboding which followed it is so terribly fulfilled. In Electra: the invented news of Orestes’s death was the step toward the punishment of the murderers grown heedless. In Oedipus the King: his own concern and his curse against the murderers bring on his lamentable fate. In Oedipus at Colonus: it is precisely through his sons’ resolve that the wrath of their so abandoned father is roused, and by this their atonement is brought about. In Antigone: through that all-but-apparent victory of man-made law over the moral principle, the unhallowed offender is punished, losing his son and his wife at one stroke. I do not consider it superfluous to note the following after these. From the above definition of the chief person it follows that it is not always the chief person who plays the greatest part, the one most effective for the play’s development. This happens only when the hero, like Ajax, struggles and loses his battle, so to speak, within himself. But as we said, the acts arise not only from character but also from circumstance, and the circumstances, as we have already asserted, are occasioned by the subsidiary persons; and so these often exert in deed a very great influence on the play’s development, chiefly when the play’s turning point is constructed by the second of the manners noted above. Thus Electra and Orestes, Antigone, etc., develop the play most, in place of the chief person who also appears in these same pieces. It is to be noted further that, for all this, the chief person’s deeds should not be determined merely by the influence exerted by the subsidiary persons, and that at least either the beginning or the turning point of the play should depend on the chief person’s free will. Thus in Ajax: both beginning and turning point depend on the chief person. In Philoctetes likewise. In Electra, the beginning. In Oedipus the King, the turning point. In Oedipus at Colonus, the beginning. In Antigone, the beginning and the turning point. Of the resolution we can, as a rule, only repeat what we said: that it should flow from the play’s beginning and turning point as the conclusion flows from the first and second members of a syllogism. It is to be noted, finally, that in the chief person’s punishment there likewise holds that rule of natural law by which the guilty one is to be restrained in his action only so far as that action collides with the established principle. Punishment by death is therefore not always necessary. For one who sins through ambition, exile is enough, for example—which will most certainly touch him more keenly than a glorifying death, etc. Thus for Philoctetes punishment enough for his defiance is that, against his hatred, he must go to the camp of the Atreidae. But even in the choice of the manner of death we must proceed with care, and must suit it to the character and the fault of the person to be punished. Thus Heracles and Ajax themselves put an end to their days, as if to satisfy the sense of their own greatness, which can outwit even the eternal rule of fate. The despairing Jocasta makes an end of herself with a noose, while Oedipus, transfigured in the sense of his innocence and amid the resounding of God’s word, falls asleep. The graves of Polyneices and Eteocles are dug, for their crime against their father, by a brother’s hand and by civil war, while Antigone’s death is sweetened by her union with her beloved. These are the chief features of the theory of action, but by no means all. From the fuller depiction and assembly of the individuality and character of the persons there arise other, subsidiary actions which bind all these principal parts to one another and prepare beforehand its ever-swifter development, and which aid the knowing of character; these stand, as it were, in the background and bring into the whole that liveliness which most characterizes life and thereby the drama, which is the poetry of life. But since the drama is not merely life, but, as we said, only a tasteful bouquet of the flowers of life, it follows that such alien lesser actions cannot be woven into the play as do not possess the qualities just mentioned and which sacrifice the play’s unity to its liveliness. For the development of these lesser actions the same gradation is to be observed as we enumerated for the chief action in its beginning, turning point, and end. But let us look at a few examples. Such are: The story of Ajax’s sword and Hector’s belt. Ajax’s moments of pleasure as a loving man and father, in contrast with the hero. The procuring of his grave by Odysseus. Philoctetes’s sickness, with its promised cure; the downfall of intrigue and cunning beside the triumph of “better honestly than cleverly.” That the lady whom Deianeira took most under her protection steals away her happiness, and that, as punishment, she is left an orphan, abandoned in the world. When the god’s words about Heracles’s war against Oechalia were all but to be falsified, then are they so fearfully fulfilled, etc. The principle pronounced above—that the pain stirred by the play must always be allayed by a certain soothing feeling, lest it dissolve into the tear of the commonplace—is to be understood in so broad a sense that it extends to every one of these subsidiary actions as well. Thus, with Ajax’s downfall, Odysseus’s conduct. With Philoctetes’s fate, the promised cure of his foot. With Oedipus’s blindness, the feeling of what there is, even so, to rejoice at in this world that he might still have seen. With Ismene’s recoiling from the moral deed, her declaration confessing herself guilty too. With the death of Antigone and Haemon, who fall as victims of tyranny, the hope of their union beyond the grave, etc. A question may still arise concerning the historical plays: how much, and how far, invention is permitted in them. On this I think the following rules hold. It is not permitted to invent against history. Outside of history it is permitted to invent such things as, even had they happened, would not have become matters of historical note. The above settles that question, which gives occasion for so much dispute and still more empty words, whether every subject is suited to be a dramatic action, and if not, which they are. 4. Scenes It is plain from what has been said how greatly those are mistaken who, wishing to write a play, suppose they should put together surprising scenes and adapt the characters to the demands of these. And if they can finish this series of scenes with the hero’s death, the play is done. They begin precisely where they should end, deriving the scenes from the various assemblies of the characters, and not the reverse. If, then, one has conceived a fundamental idea, has thought through its beginning, its turning point, and its resolution, let him sit down and write, if he wishes to write a drama; let him not bind in advance, with a worked-out sequence of scenes, the wing of his imagination. And if he heeds what has been said, let him not fear that he will write a work without coherence. 5. The succession of the five acts Thus some like to name that rule by which the first act makes our persons known, the second complicates, the third complicates still more, the fourth shows the way to the resolution, the fifth unfolds the action. First of all, I make so bold as to ask: by what do we make our persons known—is it not, in a play, by their action—for in the play all narration must be far off. Why, then, make our plays’ persons known in the first act and not when “the day’s number presents itself”? Why complicate in the second and third, resolve in the fourth and fifth? What if the complication needs more time, the resolution a few moments, when the play’s simultaneous development requires that one part of the action be complicated sooner or later? But let us look at our master. Teucer, Heracles, Aegisthus, Theseus, Haemon, etc.—when do they appear? At the very end, so to speak, of the play. When do the subsidiary actions enumerated above begin to be complicated and woven? It is enough, then, as a rule, that there be logical order in the whole and a development that occurs at one stroke. The rest, being applicable to the nature of the subject and to the spirit that pervades the whole, is left to the poet’s discretion and insight. IV I still consider some clarifications and observations necessary on all those matters which, from the distance of Sophocles’s age from ours, may have taken on a certain obscurity—as on some of our century’s delusions and errors in this regard. I. Those arising from the people’s moral notions of that time The nearer a given nation stands to its childhood, the closer its relation to the gods, and the more often these intervene directly in the nation’s affairs. It was therefore the natural belief of the young and strong little nation that it regarded bodily sufferings as punishments likewise arising from God’s direct intervention, and thereby raised them to the dignity of those spiritual sufferings which alone can find a place in the drama as a work that offers spiritual enjoyment. Thus in Ajax’s madness, in Philoctetes’s foot-affliction, in the plague that broke out at Thebes, etc., seeing God’s direct punishment, they can raise these to the dignity of dramatic action. Concerning Philoctetes’s foot-affliction, however, which some assert to be the chief subject of the play, I make so bold as to set forth my observations: We asserted above that the subject of a play is that in which the three highlighted principal parts are to be found. But that these principal parts are to be found not in the foot-affliction but in the struggle against patriotism and glory, we have already shown; the chief subject of the play, therefore, is not the foot-affliction but the struggle written of above. But let us look at this foot-affliction in question—into what can we make it? It explains, first, his exile and thereby his hatred; second, the circumstance that no one was found to ferry so troublesome a traveler from the desert island to his country’s shores; and finally, that his never-erring arrows were indispensable to the preservation of his life. We said above that the action must be motivated from the character of the play’s personnel together with the circumstances. This bodily suffering, being raised to spiritual dignity according to the nation’s belief written of above, motivates the action just as another spiritual quality would, and so this whole foot-affliction of Philoctetes is, as it were, a character that motivates the action.— After these bodily sufferings, our attention is drawn by the oracular sayings and the gods who appear. According to the thought of the present age, these are so many Dei ex machina. All the more so since, against our rule which forbids the drama all intervention of outer force, they exert their effect upon the true pulse of the play, the three appointed parts. But according to the thought of that age, as we saw, these were not so absurd. But let us look at our poet too, how warily he uses these means, how he wishes to justify the people’s belief against which he is not permitted to rise. And so he uses chiefly such interventions for motivation, and does this with precision, for the poet must motivate in such a way that his motive does not lose its force before his age: such is the twofold prophecy in Oedipus, the prophecy of Helenus in Philoctetes. But where these exert an effect upon the very pulse of the action, our poet applies them so that, even with their omission, the aim attained through them would stand, and they are brought in rather only for reinforcement. Thus in Philoctetes the appearance of Heracles chiefly represents that idea which, when the parting moment had arrived, roused in our heroes the slumbering feelings of glory and love of country, and, strengthened with the memory of their transfigured friend—whose the arrows were as gifts, and who had himself once stormed the ramparts of Troy—came to the resolve to go to Ilium. In Ajax the madness can be explained from his character even without the intervention of the gods. In Antigone, Tiresias, and in Oedipus at Colonus the oracle’s prophecies, contain in themselves nothing but moral principles, as Oedipus too says, “It is true even without the gods.” In Oedipus the King the prophecy concerning the plague is already plain from the nation’s belief, which even without the prophecy saw in it God’s punishment for a certain crime. The other prophecies that occur pertain so little to the matter that, their effect upon the people’s belief having ceased, they may be omitted without any disturbance. It is easy to draw out the theory of this: namely, these having ceased to be the people’s belief, they are to be wholly omitted from the world of the play as well. Except where the dark and romantic character of the play, together with the age of its story, requires such a thing. But even then only in such a way that the effect they cause may be brought about by natural means as well. Thus Hamlet’s breast, filled with vengeance, may conjure up his father’s spirit, the one urging him to vengeance. Macbeth had witches enough in his ambition, and a specter in his conscience. Brutus’s tender feeling, which suffered only one stumbling born of frailty in the defense of holy liberty, could easily be persecuted by the blood that stained his hand. The raising of burial to such great importance may also strike Sophocles’s reader, when he sees that the denial of it belongs among the play’s constituent parts in Ajax. But this stands otherwise with regard to the ancients. According to their belief, Ajax did not cease to take part in the play until he was buried, for the souls of the unburied found no rest in Hades. Hence Antigone’s life-endangering deed too is sufficiently motivated by that which, according to the notion of the philosophical present, would take on a certain semblance of folly. Nor, finally, can it escape our attention that slaughters and the dead were never shown before the spectators. This circumstance, if we do not wish to deceive ourselves, arose chiefly from that reverence, induced by horror, which by their belief they bore toward their dead. But let us make use of this fact, and not always bring before the spectators butcheries that stir a feebler feeling; let us hold to the rule pronounced above on this subject. And let us be gentle in this too, laying aside the groundless cruelty unbefitting a cultured nation—which so many of our pen-heroes love so much. 2. Those arising from the circumstances of performance of that time Among the Hellenes popular festivals were held, in which the hero and the artist entered into contest, begging as the fairest prize only a simple laurel wreath from the nation’s hand. And the poet too entered the contest, he who wove his people’s flower of history into a fair chain; but how was he to make himself intelligible before this people? He therefore put his chosen subject into the mouths of several, who set it forth, as popularly as possible, through their questions and answers. Soon the very persons were brought onto the stage who were also the persons of his chosen subject, and they told their own story, with a naturally growing effect. Nonetheless, only such stories as took place off the stage; only their outcome and result were brought onto the stage. An example of this is every one of Sophocles’s plays. And in order that those who wished to compete might have all their plays performed (in which they themselves mostly took the chief role), their works had to be of lesser extent, and mostly to begin only there where all the interests of the acting persons converged. Those that preceded being merely recounted. Examples as above. Into the narration of these earlier events and of those that occurred behind the scenes the poets wove their fairest flowers and the whole power of their eloquence. Such are, in Ajax, the narration of the prophecy concerning his death. Electra’s lovely speech depicting her own fate. Hyllus’s report on the manner of his father’s death, etc. Among us the plays, with the ceasing of these circumstances, have gained greater extent, and that principle—that in the play everything be presented and not narrated—being more fully developed, the less often must one narrate the events preceding the play, and still less those that occurred outside it. The single case in which this may precisely happen will come later. The old Greek plays have one more peculiarity: the chorus. It consisted, according to the play’s quality, of old men or of maidens, etc., and its sufficiently many-sided duties, on its ceasing, were variously distributed. Its chief duties were the following: 1. It represented the people’s voice, thus in its hatred of Aegisthus’s tyranny, in its sympathy with Antigone, undeservedly punished, etc.—At present it has often, according to the play’s quality, become superfluous. But would not some good gentlemen of the “worthy old days” wail at this stage representation of the people? 2. It set forth logical reflections and surmises about the future.—These are at present mostly compressed into monologues. 3. It narrated what happened outside and before.—Which, according to what is written above, are at present all brought onto the stage in action. 4. It bore itself with lively sympathy toward a certain person, and even aided that person according to its ability.—Which at present the helper-persons do. And finally, it followed the play’s moral principle and the play’s philosophical course with watchful attention. This part of the chorus’s duty has, for most playwrights at present, ceased, the philosophical complication being their least concern. 3. A few errors of our century’s time Let us cast a glance or two at a few among the faults from which our age suffers most. We often see on our stage that we devote the greatest part of our plays to motivating the struggle against the moral principle. We drag our hero through all those circumstances by which he was determined to such a struggle. This is a great fault, for this is precisely one of the differences between drama and novel: that the novel occupies itself chiefly with this motivation, while the play contains the struggle. Touching the preceding causes only so far as the play’s intelligibility absolutely requires—and this is that one case in which the most important events preceding the play may be precisely told in words. Another fault of our age is that there scarcely exists a play of ours whose chief subject is not love. In such a way, that is, that in tragedy love is used as the title with which the chief person fails in his struggle against a certain (often feebler) principle, while in comedy love is used as such a principle and triumphs over the one struggling against it under another title. This is great one-sidedness. Love is indeed a passion much bound up with human nature, by which one very often comes into conflict with grander moral principles, or which, taken as a moral principle, is often attacked by human folly; but is it not, too, only one passion among the ranks of passions, only one side among those many sides of human weakness through which finite force and the eternal come into regular conflict? Yes, love may be the subject of our plays, but to make it exclusively so means as much as that there is nothing in the mortal that could bring him into conflict with eternal perfection but love—— But it is quite explicable whence we fell into this fault: Among the old Greeks their theater was bound up with their belief. Subjects were taken from the nation’s old history, which the obscurity of national belief covered with sanctification. This ceased among us; our belief is a foreign plant, not bound up with our nation’s romantic childhood. To this we sacrificed our past; with cruel fury we demolished everything that bound us to it, and the naturalized newcomer could not offer us compensation for this. From this side, then, there was no subject of interest to all. The principles of morality and natural law, which might have held common interest among the nations, the priest and tyrant of the sixteenth century monopolized, and, giving forth in pronouncements of power some of their articles turnable to their own advantage, drew the others away from the battlefield of publicity and debate. From this side, then, there was no subject of interest to all. There is in the Hellenic works yet a second thread weaving through them whole, and this is nationhood, paired with the calm arising from the self-assurance of possessing freedom. These sweet words are, in the past centuries—indeed in great part in the present moment too—but tales of the “good old time”; among few peoples does it find an echo, few peoples are able to grasp their holy meaning. “And rather snores, self-satisfied, beneath the tyrant’s sheltering wing.” There are indeed nations among whom this nationhood and love of country rose to a higher step, but how can even these be compared, in whom at least two interests rule—the people, the aristocracy, and their countless gradations—with the simple and free Hellenes, among whom the wallowing rich man, the horny-handed poor man, the one who rose to defend his country, and the master of the chisel were animated by one interest, one pleasure and pain; among whom these manifold but equally beloved children clung with equal love to the parent just toward each of them. Finding, then, no subject able to interest the whole nation equally, they sought and took up love, and sought a hero for themselves in every region of the world; and the Hungarian was compelled to find delight in a hero of Japanese feeling, the Englishman in one of Negro feeling, however far off, however alien to his nature it was, so that he could not grasp the thread of its thoughts and feelings. And if, moreover, the foreign hero came into the claws of a poet of yet another nation, then there was real flaying and man-hunting, when “those certain three ideas which in one scene were given to the Turk were suited in another scene to the Scots” (Bulwer). And then let such a poet become popular, let his nation understand him, to whose feeling the idea he glorifies is so alien. Our country’s literature began to awaken, in this regard, at a very fortunate point. The nation was already all but to be crushed; nationhood was in danger. And with the whole firmness of its youthful fire it then awoke, ready to do battle for it, to guard it from its enemies. We already possess countless excellent works too, breathing national character and love of country. That our laureled poets do not resound on the people’s lips, that they have not yet become so popular, can have no other cause than that the greatest part of our country’s people has not yet become a nation, that it has no interest knit with our country’s interests, and, dwelling as a tenant in its homeland, has scarcely anything besides the payment of rent to remind it of its dwelling, the interest of its homeland unknown to it. In our dramas, however, this lack is still most perceptible. Yet let each beware of seeking in it the nationhood and love of country by weaving his work through with high-flown, strong, liberal sentences, or by pouring love of country and hatred of tyranny into the breasts of all his persons, from the chief person down to the smallest servant. By these we would only be showing how unaccustomed we are to love of country, how little it has passed into the nation’s blood. It is the characters, the action, and the coloring that pervades it that must be national; and the feeling of freedom must attest itself in the calm arising from its possession. The whole must look like a picture painted upon bronze, on which different figures are indeed depicted with the most various coloring, and yet through each one alike there glimmers the gleam of the bronze. For we know in any case that the play’s action is set in motion by passions; let these be at the helm, then—but let these passions be of national character, so that one who knows the nation may, even with the names omitted, recognize within what nation’s circle the play is set. By this, the manners at present known under the title of the German or the French school are, truly considered, nothing other than errors christened with these names (from what has been said); and the true German, French, Hungarian, etc., school will be that which is so much the property of this or that nation that from it, under whatever veil, the nationhood of its people shines forth. Frailly, then, does that writer act who, setting up this or that school as his model, follows its track; for the first, in the usual sense, comes into a certain exaggeration and into errors. In the second, he plants a hothouse plant in his homeland, which will there never be naturalized. V Concerning the execution I must still mention two things. 1. On the sets Among the Greeks sets were not in use; everyone’s imagination soared freely. Among us they were introduced for the sake of greater clarity and intelligibility. But let us keep this for the sake of greater intelligibility. The drama is poetry, reckoned for spiritual enjoyment, whose effect lies in the poem itself, not in a gaudy spectacle that delights the eye. Let our sets therefore be suited precisely to the need of the action; let there be nothing superfluous on them that the action does not explain, so that, with the stage directions usually containing these matters struck out, the play loses nothing of its intelligibility. Thus our master has even the smallest thing explained in words too. He describes in words even the storm in Oedipus at Colonus, Philoctetes’s figure that stirs to pity, etc. And this too is one of the glories of the drama born of sense over the childish, sense-titillating opera, which, without the tailor and the painter, gives only a meager shadow, like one of the many relics resembling the afterworld, from which, if we strip off the gaudy mantle, a loathsome skeleton appears before us. 2. On the language of the drama What we said at the beginning of our treatise about poetry in general, that we asserted of dramatic poetry too. It is life, then, but life more beautifully colored. Its language, therefore, should be simple, brief, and dignified, suited to its subject. Let it, however, be easily intelligible too, so that the nation to which its poet speaks may easily understand it, and, if it goes to the theater, its less-read members need not turn over whole heaps of lexicons, or return home gaping in doubt as to what their poet meant to say. VI I should still speak of comedy; I shall briefly enumerate what pertains to its action, so far as my narrowing space allows. Poetry, within one kind of itself, must also be uniform; therefore all that we have just brought forward about comedies hold. Insofar, however, as this kind of poetry divides into several subordinate species, insofar do the chief rules vary too. Thus the moral principle, whose triumph we wish to win, is clothed in a more cheerful color; further, no principle of great depth and loftiness is chosen, but mostly a lesser, second-rank one, and it is represented by a certain person or persons of the comedy. The title of those who struggle against it is only a conventional rule of decorum, whose downfall, or whose advocate’s coming to insight, is likewise soothing; but instead of the grave, a cheerful feeling overcomes the listeners from the slight punishment of the strugglers, proportioned to their lesser stature.

I read somewhere of a famous diver who, on account of his known boldness, was called upon to seek out, at the bottom of the sea, a ship that had sunk a few weeks before with all aboard, and to bring up its more notable treasures.—The diver descended, found the ship, went through its compartments—all were empty! He stood at the last door, which shut the captain’s room. There the water must have penetrated last of all. It cost him an effort to force the door, but what a sight awaited him here! The whole company of the ship had fled there from the rushing flood, and there death had overtaken them. For weeks they had been in this recess with the same despairing faces, the same startling postures, hands clasped, hair on end, as in their last moments. The lover still seemed to be defending his beloved from inescapable death; to the priest’s convulsive kneeling a bitter smile had attached itself; the captain stared with heart-stopping coldness, as if to say, “My power is at an end; let fate be fulfilled.” While the crew either crouched and stood about with an expression sunk in dull despair, or, in the sense of their manly strength, still seemed to struggle with their fate even in the hopeless moment.—Now, when the diver forced the door, the water so long shut in came into motion, and the dreadful figures all began to move, as if they had awakened to new life, though a thin mold covered their faces, though death looked out from their glazed eyes.—The diver stood petrified on the threshold, while the specters approached him with outstretched arms.—Scarcely had he come to himself from his terror when he fled to the surface of the sea, and there was no power that could induce him to descend again into the mysterious realm of the sea-bottom. Such a feeling as may have seized this diver in the sunken ship was the feeling that entered my soul on reading Lélia. I saw human figures moving, but how spectral, how terrible is that life of which they are merely the agents.—Indeed, if present-day social life is such as it is here painted, then it is the sunken ship, which may the beneficent ocean, may unstoppable time, bury forever, and as soon as may be.—But in the interest of humanity I am more inclined to believe that this is not the life which is there shown to us in that mysterious world, that life is up above, over the waves, beneath the rays of the golden sun, among the smiling flowers, and that down here we have been led, into the sunken ship which fate had beneficently hidden from us, only by a god-tempting, errant soul.—— Greatness will say, perhaps, that I therefore do nevertheless admit that the world painted in Lélia really does exist, and so it may also be painted in art.—That it exists or may exist, I admit; but that it may be painted in art, I deny.—I do not wish here to bring up the old classical age, in which sculptor, painter, and poet sought only the beautiful, the pleasing, and the perfect as the object of their art—for that happy age had a religion too of such a kind that, woven only of such objects, it naturally naturalized this direction in the arts as well. From that age we know no distorted figures, no martyr-like images racked into cripples, no lamentable stories that cast down the soul or leave it in despair; and if now and then there appears a Laocoön struggling with a serpent, a Prometheus bleeding from the vulture, or a Philoctetes pining in his wounds, in these too the manly defiance and dignity remain, and those lovely figures that surround them cast, as it were, a transparent veil over them, to soften the wildness of their aspect.—Setting this age aside, then, I take as my model only the romantic school brought in by Christianity.—Upon that religion which proclaims eternal renunciation, self-conviction, and a mystic future, whose founder bled to death on a cross and left his dead, mangled corpse to our altar, which has its martyrs and witches, its specters and devils, which paints death as a skeleton and seeks its salvation in self-mortification—upon its poetry too this stamp had naturally to be branded. Thus arose the romantic school. But in this too, do not the better artists surround the bleeding crucifix with lovely female figures?—Do we see a Shakespeare shaping his pieces of nothing but madmen? There beside Hamlet is his Ophelia, there beside Lear the dear, good daughter. Beside Cabanis, Arion.—We use much shadow, many rocks in our landscapes, but flowers grow by the rock, the shadows are transparent.—Lélia, however, is not built thus. Its figures are, one and all, sick souls; they torment one another, pursue with passion that they may bleed, like the Anchorite, that we may clap our hands together—why does this happen? But let us look at the facts. Why does Lélia torment this poor Sténio, like a cat the mouse writhing in its claws, with which it still plays before it kills it? If the disillusionments through which she has passed are really such that they estranged her heart forever from love and killed out of it the poetry of life, then that game in which she nonetheless offers hope, in which she now and then makes it appear that she feels, is a real scandal, for it lies about the holiest feelings. Without our seeing a higher, nobler aim which she could attain only thus, and which would excuse her conduct before us. But can a woman be at all an interesting figure without this poetry of life? Woman, who is herself the poetry of our life, with whose essence it is so fused that, if no longer in love, then it reveals itself in maternal care, in daughterly obedience, in the thousand forms of duty and piety, and accompanies her to the grave. Without them woman is a colorless, scentless flower—a man may live out his days without these holy feelings, and may even so make an interesting figure in a tale; but let him be ever so cynical, let him call those feelings prejudices, fancies in his lonely, bleak hours, yet with reverence and aching pleasure does the womanly temperament bow before their tender, contact-intolerant appearance. True, our great artists too have painted women who wished to defy these feelings—there is Macbeth’s wife, Lear’s two evil daughters, etc.—but in this struggle every one of them fails, perishes; and so it is precisely this that shakes the soul, that the principles do indeed triumph and that against them the weak individual is nothing. In Lélia it is otherwise, if love has indeed died out of her breast: she appears already steeled after the battle, using the charms received from nature to make havoc around her, and laughing at her victories, until she wearies of this too and rests from it as well in the convent—like a victorious warrior. But if the susceptibility to love still lives in her breast, her figure is no less faulty: can she wish for a better, nobler heart than the poet’s—can she imagine a greater self-denial—and by what is the torturing of both motivated? I can well appreciate self-conquest, renunciation in love, but let the reason be worthy of the human breast renouncing this its holiest possession, the divinity’s dearest gift; and this reason can be none other than piety toward such bonds of the adored object as it would make her unhappy to tear apart. Every other motivation, every other justification degenerates into wretched dwarfishness in face of the great idea of love.—Lélia is not bound by such ties; she disposes freely of her heart and of that happiness which only a loving woman can offer; and when she nonetheless demands renunciation of Sténio and self-denial of herself, she acts like that pitiable ascetic who, amid God’s beneficent gifts, would do a pleasing deed by mortifying his body. This again is one of the unaesthetic excrescences of the romantic direction born of Christianity.—Between the comic and the tragic a single line divides the boundary. To use great means for slight things, and conversely, gives birth to the comic. In the battle of frogs and mice, what makes the laughable? That its heroes are frogs and mice; let us give these heroic speeches, these deeds, to the names of famous warriors, and the whole poem turns serious. Let us make Don Quixote a knight, his Dulcinea, out of a kitchen-maid, an interesting lady, and his love becomes lofty out of the ridiculous.——For the motive of Miklós Zrínyi’s death let us put, in place of the homeland, a greyhound which both parties wish to possess, and it becomes ridiculous. The renunciation of Lélia and Sténio we are unable to motivate by anything, and so, were it not so infinitely sad, it becomes extraordinarily ridiculous. So much for the essence of the novel, for the whole turns more or less on this. But let us look yet at a few single ideas in it. In every aesthetic work I seek the beautiful; this I hold to be its aim, not the moral; this is necessary in it only so far as, when our moral sensibility is wounded, the sense of the ugly seizes us. Therefore I shall make my observations setting out not from the moral but only from the idea of the beautiful.—I take first that scene in which Lélia, making use of her unhappy lover’s transport and of other favorable circumstances, plays him into the arms of another woman, and then even mocks the man’s love for not having noticed his deception. To the superficial examiner she wishes to drag the ideal into the dust, to debase it; yet if we examine the matter, it is precisely in this that the ideal has its most brilliant victory, precisely this that raises Sténio’s love among the stars. The objects of the material world we touch, taste, see; each of them has a measurable, appraisable value on which everyone is agreed and which everyone knows. But if the spirit, the ideal, is added, then the material object is transformed; then its value, its impression, is no longer that which the whole world sees, tastes, and feels, but something entirely other, that dwells in our soul, that we feel but cannot explain. So it is for the believer with the roughly carved wooden cross, for the warrior with the rag of the banner that led him through battles, for the lover with his adored lady. And if we smuggle before the believer a piece of poor wood, while on the wings of his adoration he soars on, before this too, into heaven; if we raise above the warrior a poor rag, beneath which his enthusiasm carries him onward, and in his veins seethes the same confidence that seethed beneath his banner—does he become ridiculous, or does he not prove precisely this, that in his soul there seethes that something loftier toward the adored object which spiritualizes the matter? Sténio’s deception too is the most brilliant proof of his love, and to drag it thus into the dust offends aesthetic taste. Now let us look at Magnus. In him the representative of religion is personified in struggle with man. Religion is just such an idea as love, just as love may indeed be called the religion of the heart.—In the presentation of these ideas there are, in my view, only two paths: either we must see them in their ideal height, or drawn down entirely into the worthlessness of the dust.—If in Magnus the religious sensibility was present in that higher aspect, then how worthless is the means by which it was not only shaken in him but toppled in a heap. A mocking smile or two of Lélia’s, a witty remark or two, suffice to overturn the great idea in Magnus—if, on the other hand, Magnus regarded religion only from the second aspect, how could its soul-killing specter remain so far in his brain as to bring him into so tragic a situation as that in which we find him in the closing sections of the novel, and into which he comes, in a barely comprehensible manner, so to speak without any struggle?—The fundamental idea in Magnus is beautiful, if we take religion and love as two lofty ideas in whose struggle the human breast fails; but this struggle must be worthy, and its psychological development should make the novel—but small means in great matters, or great means for attaining small ones, as I said, always constitute the comic, and if it nonetheless demands the opposite effect, it offends the aesthetic sense. Finally, let us look yet at the figure of Valmarina, who likewise plays a prominent role in the novel.—His figure, I said, but to outline this firmly is as hard as a fleeting cloud, as a doubtful figure of mist.—He has, so to speak, no individual type that would form him into a self-standing whole; and so he is wanting in the first requisite of a character in a tale. What is it that draws us to one man more than to another, that estranges us from one man more than from another? Those sharply outlining qualities which separate him from all others, be they virtues, weaknesses, or peculiarities. Valmarina possesses none of these; he is a personified idea, and what an idea? The true, unmistakable child of that romantic school which, by my assertion, Christianity brought in, of that sickly conception of art which our religion established.—There is the sinful youth, the lifelong expiation and purification—the fantastic life-aim that loses itself in indefinite mists. We see that he wishes to do something great, we wait to see what it will be, we read that he struggles, that he fails, but deed, but struggle, we do not see—his cause cannot interest us, nor his fall; we do not feel the sufferings of his struggle. The beauty of single passages cannot be doubted, though there is scarcely one that is not the seductive flower of those directions I have condemned, which may be summed up under the name of the new romanticism, which do indeed draw a man, but draw him as the whirlpool draws the ship—below there is darkness, and life there is death, as in the sunken ship—from which, if we return beneath the light of the beneficent sun, we may make a vow with the diver: to return there nevermore.

AESTHETICS AND

SOCIETY

Inaugural address at the Kisfaludy Society (April 2, 1862) I do not wish to weary the honorable Society’s patience with a definition of the essence of the beautiful, knowing in advance that this would in any case remain fruitless and barren. What has remained a riddle to the greatest minds of two and a half millennia, a new two and a half millennia will probably not clear up either—if only by that unchangeable, eternal law which so precisely circumscribes the thought-world of the whole human race that the spirit cannot break out of it, as out of the magic circle of popular belief. Who could define light in such a way as to give even the blind a fitting notion of its essence? Or sound in such a way that even the deaf might understand it? Surely no one; of both, our senses alone can testify. By two senses man is nobler than the whole created world; by two senses, which are his alone, he stands above the animal; with one of these two senses he distinguishes good from evil, with the other he tells the beautiful apart from the ugly. Let us pass over, however, the notion of the good, which does not belong to my purpose, and remain only at the examination of the beautiful, which is so akin to it in so much. And if we must resign ourselves to the impossibility of defining its essence, let us not therefore believe that we have thereby surrendered the absolute being of the beautiful as well. The beautiful and the ugly will exist in themselves forever, and we too shall always be informed of their existence by that sense which may be called the distinctively human one. We shall indeed often find men who, for all their other excellent qualities, have no susceptibility for the beautiful, or in whom the sense of the beautiful reveals itself in the most perverse direction. But in such cases let us not doubt the existence of the beautiful, but think of the deficiency of the organ that apprehends it. The worthiest man too may be deaf—and pathology offers examples enough of the perverse working of a single sense; thus, to mention but one, there are otherwise quite sound and strong eyes which are unable to distinguish only certain colors, most often red from blue and blue from green, so that they find nothing offensive in a landscape painted with these colors interchanged. Nor should even this shake our faith in the absolute being of the beautiful, nor lead us into the mistaken idea that the notion of the beautiful is only a conventional notion, if we observe that only cultivation after noble examples and long practice develops the sense of the beautiful to higher degrees—for our other senses too develop and sharpen only through practice. The infant must learn the rules of perspective; the young hunter scales the glaciers of the high mountains only after practice; the young mother only after nights of vigil learns to discern, from her child’s babbling, nature’s tones of joy and pain. Every skill, every master’s trick, is only the offspring of practice; indeed the whole education and cultivation of man is nothing other than the rousing, through practice, of his slumbering spiritual qualities. But I seem to hear the question of our age, inclined toward materiality: What aim, then, can the inquiries into the beautiful have, what use have the aesthetic sciences in general? And on the answer we are able to give to this question depends, at the same time, this Society’s claim too to public recognition and support, since it is precisely this Society’s task to advance and spread aesthetic studies. In my view the benefit of aesthetic cultivation is twofold: first to the individual, second to society. As regards the individual: if all our striving in life comes down to this, if the whole struggle of our new civilization is directed toward this, that we secure a pleasant existence for ourselves and thus satisfy our senses, which we hold in common with the animal, must we not above all strive to make a wellspring of delight also of that sense which is ours alone, of which no other created being has even an inkling, while in every other sense-born delight one creature or another competes victoriously with us? Truly, in a man of classical cultivation the sense of the beautiful opens a whole new world before his soul, gilds nature, pours over it a warmer coloring, and thrills it through with sweet song. It breathes life into the works of the human mind, and, making them equal in right with God’s creatures, exalts the soul which it has rendered capable of enjoying them. Only such a man can say that he has seen the world with human eyes.—Only to such a man do the words of Scripture also apply, that we do not live by bread alone. But the importance of aesthetic cultivation is a hundredfold greater when it has passed into the life of a nation. Since the beginning of the historical era, how many nations have stepped forth onto the battlefield of action, and how many nations have set again from it! And what is it that has passed from them as a legacy to the late age? Not their grand battles, not the struggles of principle in their forums, not the heaped-up treasure-piles of bustling industry, but only the fresh fruits of their aesthetic cultivation. The raging of their wars has long since quieted; for the most part one and the same shroud of decay covers their enemies together with them. Their forum struggles we no longer understand; the idea that fired them has grown obsolete. The amassed heaps of treasure have run out, and their capricious deity, who knows where it has pitched a newer camp for itself. And out of all this bustle, all this clamor, which one who lived amid it imagined so grand, believed so endless, only the sweet ringing of a single lute thrills across to us enchantingly—a faint song which, in the head-numbing din, perhaps no one even noticed, or which at most sweetened the resting warrior’s hours of leisure. Now this alone brings us news of the struggles of its age and of the crumbling giants of the struggle, who cast a shadow over a whole generation and who now interest us, now affect us, only so far as the enchanting song raised them from daily events into poetry, and ennobling art drew a radiant mantle over them. Who would still know the house of the heroic Atridae without the tragedians, who the heroes of the Iliad without Homer?—Whom would little Greece’s war with Persia interest more than the struggles of countless other peoples, whose very names have long since fallen into oblivion, did we not dig up from the dust, on the plains of Marathon, together with the holy bones of the warriors, the very models of the arts? Had not a creative genius immortalized the name of every destroying hero. Rome’s world-dominion no longer affects our present cultivation; we should at most remember it as we do the Mongol world-dominion, did not the spirit of a Horace or a Cicero make it nobler. Spain loses the gold mines of Peru. As punishment for its sins, it sank back from political greatness into the abyss of despair and misery. But its Calderón, its Cervantes, and its Murillo secured its name with evergreen, sinless wreaths. England’s overseas colonies, as may foreseeably be expected, longing for independent flourishing, will one day break away from it. World commerce will forsake its white shores, as it forsook Venice and the Hansa cities, and will seek a new camp for itself; but England’s greatness its Shakespeare, its Byron, its Hogarth have already lifted beyond all times. Germany, which, considering the greatness of its people-element, wallows in so disgraceful a state of dismemberment and cannot extricate itself from it to struggle into national being, becomes one and great in its literature, in its school of painting and of music. But I shall not weary the honorable Society’s patience with the endlessly extensible series of examples; even this much is enough to prove that the increase of our aesthetic cultivation will secure our own national self—which through centuries has stood in continuous life-and-death struggle for its existence—above and more strongly than won battles, than the oath-sealed letter of safe conduct of unsteady politics. Our Árpád, our Toldi, who until now interested only us and nourished our patriotic piety, whose upright traits of character, like the rays of the setting sun, paled in proportion as the effect of their deeds upon us diminished ever more with distance—at the creative inspiration of a Vörösmarty, an Arany, have awakened anew in poetry’s exalting glory, and henceforth affect not only our reverent hearts but all who hide within their breasts the human sense of the beautiful. A few more such masterpieces, and our language stands where we need no longer fear it from the petty decay of being absorbed, for it will be retained with us not by the enchanting bonds of childhood recollections, nor will sympathetic fellow-feeling teach it to the foreigner, but that eternal cult of the beautiful which does not let the Greek and Latin tongues die out. And yet poetry forms only a small part of the realm of aesthetic cultivation; where still are painting, sculpture, music, each of which is sufficient, in its noble development, to secure a nation’s immortality. But aesthetic cultivation does not reach its boundary even at the boundary of all the fine arts; it overflows them and acts beyond them too, like the sense of right which the hall of jurisdiction does not shut in. It is there in every moment of life, in every trifling object, like the sun, which not only gleams back from the mirror of shining bodies but is present also in the color and shading of everything else. In a word, it is like salt: though not itself a food, it is there in the savor of every food, and without it everything is savorless. In the apportioning of our daily occupations, in the arrangement of our house, in the bearing of our body, in the choice of the most trifling everyday tool or implement, our aesthetic culture reveals itself. In a common clay water-jug of the Greek people, in whom hitherto the aesthetic sense awoke to the purest self-awareness, there is the beautiful form, there the grace. And while the man without aesthetic sense, hoarding gold or precious stone in its formlessness, robs it of half its value, the old Greek, out of a colored, worthless pebble, created with his inspiration a cameo worth a treasure. He extends his sense for the beautiful all the way to the folds of his cloak, to the knot of his sandal, which he was able to shape in more than seventy ways. The myth of Orpheus, then, who with the ringing of his lyre built cities and tamed wild beasts, is no foolish tale. The people that by its shepherd-fire conceives folk songs, and plants flowers beneath its windows, stands, in moral and spiritual respects too, far above that which, in the squalid circle of its hut, broods silently within itself. I read somewhere that the bodily very ugly people of a whole region took on a nobler form within one generation, when their aesthetically cultivated priest replaced his distorted altar-pictures and ungainly holy statues with more artistic and more pleasing ones.—And truly, who would dare decide with full certainty whether the Sinai gods owe their ugliness rather to their worshippers, or these their grimacing features to their idols. But let us leave the wide realm of aesthetics and remain only at that one kind of its expression which it practices in the living word or the written letter. We have grown accustomed to that prejudice that the legitimacy of aesthetics extends only to the boundary of so-called belles-lettres. In scientific treatments we overlook the most formless form; indeed, careful craftsmanship, pleasing polish, already rouses in many a suspicion regarding the depth of the content. In our county minutes the most offensive expressions swarm; in our political oratory taste suffers, at every step, a new injury; our daily papers, finally, seem to compete in the ne plus ultra of neglect of artistic form. It would indeed now be high time for aesthetics to bring its dominion over all these objects to validity, and, with regard to their outward form, to draw them just as much before the judgment-seat of its criticism as any work of belles-lettres—indeed more strictly than that, for they work more powerfully toward ruining the nation’s taste and dulling its sense of the beautiful than an unsuccessful song dying away in its modest circle, or a clumsy tale scarcely listened to. A single solecism on the lips of Athens’s most celebrated orator was enough to strike the ear of the lowliest cobbler—and to make the most popular man impossible. Thucydides, the great historian, before the people gathered at the Olympic games, entered the contest to win a wreath for the outward form of his grand work. In a word, only of the half-animal Centaurs did the poet say that they were “born without the Graces,” claiming everything purely human as a subject of the beautiful. And truly, this spirit is now beginning to seize the truly great anew. And while the scientific giant Humboldt’s Cosmos shows us such formal perfection, we too possess, in a Deák, a Szalay, living proofs that the Graces belong to the retinue of the goddess of science, and that the great thought always wishes to struggle into being only in a noble and pleasing form. But though we see the tendency of the newer age improving in this regard too, we cannot deny, nonetheless, that we still always lag a giant distance behind the age of Greece’s aesthetic flourishing, and involuntarily there presses upon us the question: what could have been those factors which then acted so extraordinarily favorably upon the flourishing of the human spirit—everywhere and always the same—and which at present are probably wholly lacking. The thorough examination of all this would lead far beyond the appointed circle of my modest address, within whose bounds I may hope to claim the honorable Society’s patience. And so, with a few fragmentary thoughts, a few sparks of an idea, I mark rather than illuminate the chief moments; hoping rather to rouse the ideas than to exhaust the subject. The chief motive for the calling forth of those masterworks lies in Greek life itself, of which a relatively very slight, insignificant part passed in the solitude of the family circle and domestic homeliness, the greatest part being real public life, divided between the noise of the forum and the nobler pleasures of the academies and circuses. In the Olympic games, in the theaters, the whole nation was, so to speak, present. Before its face appeared the poet, the artist, the scholar, for a wreath. Face to face he saw his judge, in whose aesthetic sense he could trust, to whose reception the majestic grandeur of the whole assembly made every breast susceptible. He knew well that the noisy storm of applause would forever lift his name out of the circle of decay before his nation, while the unappealable verdict of displeasure would humble it to the ground. How much livelier effects, how much grander moments, than in the present! when the writer, with the profiteering assistance of a quack bookseller, sends his work into the world, before an audience that is yet only to be formed. Who knows who will even deign to read that book? And if one does read it, one reads, perhaps, the painful thrill of the struggling heart at such a time as when one wishes to lull oneself to sleep in bed, and the lofty calm at such a time as when one wishes to drive an inconvenient thought from one’s head. Thus the poet’s whole reading public appears before him almost as an ideal person, whose recognition does not delight, whose disapproval does not alarm, and both of which alike neither spur on nor exalt. Furthermore, in those days literature gave no bread, only a wreath; and though it offered the highest that the grateful country could offer according to the notions of the time, and the simple green garland made the poet equal in right with the victorious general, with the elder of the country grown gray in council—yet it did not serve as sustenance, and so there was reason to write not much, but indeed excellently. To this was added the ignorance of an easy and cheap means of reproduction, the costliness of writing materials—all so many grounds why, on the one hand, weighing the difficulties of producing the work against its value, the mediocre or downright bad was stifled at its very birth; and, on the other, why that brief and compact manner of writing was developed which we admire in the ancients and observe but very rarely in those of today. Therefore we do not meet among the ancients with the present-day writing-mania, except perhaps in the one grammarian Didymus, who wrote 3,500 books. The length of a book in those days corresponds roughly to a single chapter of one of our novels, and so we may measure Didymus against a prolific novelist. And yet he owes the survival of his name only to Athenaeus, who, rather out of mockery and as a warning example, remembers him with the remark that, often forgetting what he himself had written, he went into battle even against his own theses. How they differ from these, to the disadvantage of the beautiful, are our present conditions! Literature too has become a breadwinning trade like everything else. But if the idea-circle of the whole human race is circumscribed by strict law, this holds even more for the individual’s treasure of thought, for the creative power of his imagination, so that each of us can dispose only of a certain capital of the understanding, which is exhausted just as the flower’s scent is, as the glow of the summer firefly is. Oh, how many there may be who could fill a single volume with great, beautiful, and new thoughts; but the bookseller pays by the sheet, and in place of one volume twenty come into being. The noble wine, whose single pure drops would intoxicate our spirit, blurred in the sea of savorlessness, breeds only a sickening disgust.—The gold which would have been enough to shape a solid artistic goblet will overlay a paper colossus with only a thin gold-leaf, which wears away from day to day until it is gone.—Oh, how many thus exchange their wreath for a piece of bread. How many live a short, comfortable life at the price of their name’s eternal glory. Most harmful of all, however, to aesthetic cultivation was that into the fine arts, into the country of the purely beautiful, other notions too began to be smuggled, and to seek their expression there. The true masterwork of beauty can have no other point of departure and final aim than the beautiful itself. In the sense of its dignity it cannot give itself as a servant to the validation of any other notion, to the attainment of any other aim; and even moral good itself it can admit only so far—not to rule over it, but to ally itself with the notion of the beautiful—insofar as, being so akin to it, its absence would make us feel a lack, while its presence serves the fullness of its harmony, and touches with its sister those same sweet, soothing, and lofty strings. But many a writer of recent times has believed the whole realm of the beautiful—which is endless only before the creative genius—to be exhausted, and, in order nonetheless to show something new, began to exaggerate the colors, the forms.—The exaggerated color and form drew yet more exaggerated ones after it—writer and audience acted upon each other; and finally: just as the excessive gourmand no longer delights in the fine savor of dishes, and only spices and pungencies still excite his lips; as the worn-out voluptuary at last finds some sensation of pleasure only in the scourging of his back; as to the Turk lacking aesthetic culture the random tuning of the instruments at the opera house pleased best; as for the man of sunken morality the deadly excitement of games of chance replaces all his nobler pleasures, or the great public finds amusement in a man’s execution: just so, and by these same states of soul and motives, the interesting, the exciting, as the principle of newer art, came to the orphaned place of the beautiful, whose fleeting, scent-like spiritual effect no longer satisfied anyone.—And though the more excellent, the more poetic souls, feeling that this new deity does not possess the dignity of the old, wished to exalt it and, consecrating it at least the bearer of nobler principles, formed tendency-poetry, in place of one idol they brought forth only two, and did not replace the deity that had flown away. Thus was born, in particular, the present-day novel, the monstrous child of our age’s wondrous notions of art, which, with its volume-rich extent, stands in no proportion either to the duration of our life or to our circumscribed spiritual faculties.—For who can devote, out of his short life—claimed in ever more directions by the daily increasing store of material both of things-to-be-known and of aesthetic pleasures—long weeks to the enjoyment of a single aesthetic creation, a span of time that would suffice to gain a notion of a special science, or to live through a whole world of the masterworks of antiquity? Truly no one but our own age’s blasé child, to whom even this short life is long; who shuns the thought that would rouse him to self-awareness, and seeks to fill the sense of the void with cards or a novel.—But such a work of art is no less contrary to our spiritual capacities. Who could breathe artistic unity and poetic life into a picture a mile long, or into a piece of music lasting for days? And were there such a one, who would be capable of feeling it out from there as a whole? Surely no one. A Homer makes the grand actions of his Iliad play out before our eyes in a span of time scarcely enough for many a newer writer to acquaint with each other his two lovers, between whom every obstacle is scarcely more than a woven garden-hedge. And now, though in a belated place, I have come to mention a motive which—considering its importance—I should perhaps have put in the first place, and this is that abundance of study and richness of knowledge which characterizes the writers of the classical age, but which shines too in the works of the newer great masters. In Homer’s heroic poems is contained the whole knowledge of his age. Not only the tragedians but the lyric poets too lay open before us the world-view of all Greece’s sages; indeed, from the jests of the seemingly clownish comic poet Aristophanes too, a hundred kinds of the most serious knowledge gleam forth. Among the newer ones, a Dante, a Milton, a Shakespeare, or a Goethe laid down in a few thin volumes such a treasure of knowledge that the host of those who mine it forms by now a whole library. True, the further back in time we go, the easier it was for the poet to say something new. Owing to the limited and unchangeable being of the human soul, the same that was thought two thousand years ago we too certainly often think anew; but that thought which was then new in literature would now have become worn-out plagiarism. True, the circle of knowledge was formerly ever narrower, and so more easily mastered. It was ever more of a merely speculative character, and so, being itself already in great part poetry, more easily assimilable to the poetic work than, after Bacon, the gigantically growing material knowledge founded on positive facts. But who can say that this can no longer be exalted to itself by poetry? Only the great spirit is needed, and a whole world of matter rouses to life. True it is too that those great poets did not by any means produce all their precious pearls themselves. So much creative power as is revealed in a Homer or a Shakespeare, an Aristophanes and a Molière, might even surpass the spiritual strength of a single man. A part of their treasures is a veritable lion’s share, which they snatched from feebler spirits. But it is all one: the names of these feebler ones would long since have fallen into oblivion anyway. The scent of their flowers the wind of decay would have carried off unnoticed, while thus, bound into masterly wreaths by the giant artists, they not only make these latter’s names immortal but at the same time proclaim the apotheosis of the human spirit as well. True, finally, it is too that out of great writers of established name we often expound such beauties as truly never even crossed their minds, and so, at the cost of our own beautiful ideas, we heap ornaments upon those already rich. But though I by no means believe that those three thousand lost writers whose names Athenaeus cites would have been of like phenomenon with those that survived—indeed I should hold this belief to be a delusion like that of the archaeologist who, when one day only Goethe survives of German literature, and a single copy of the catalogue of the Leipzig book-fair, should mourn a Goethe in every entry of it—yet I look with anxious dissatisfaction upon that preponderant tendency of our age’s poets, with which, shrinking with horror from all study, they regard it as the slayer of inspiration, with which they brand the appellation “scholar” almost as a mockery of poetry, and do not take into account that, just as music, this most scent-like expression of the human spirit, is akin precisely to the most rigid thing, to mathematics, so poetry is the near neighbor of dry logic. And just as with this latter, its whole realm lies in the clearing-up of the most hidden oppositions and likenesses, in the unfolding of the greatest subtleties. They do not take into account that a likeness which we begin on the moonbeam, continue on the inkstand, and end on the earthquake, can, being unlogical, for that very reason be unpoetic too; or that what a child would blush at the ignorance of, a grown man will not be inspired by the loftiness of. I too admit that the poet is born. Yes, like the general, the politician, the musician—in a word, everyone who is called to one thing or another. He upon whom his genius does not smile will, after no study, carry his cause forward; but if it does smile, by this smile it does not yet release him—indeed, coaxingly, it lures its favorite to learning. In vain do we give sword or pen, plow-handle or chisel into the hand which we do not instruct in its handling; and we need only look around to see how the wave-sea of one short century covers over every name of ephemeral glory, and only those remain on its mirror whose laurels rooted in thorough and laborious studies. I have left for the end the mention of the most powerful lever that worked toward the creation of the old age’s masterworks, and this is religion. Religion is the poetry of the reason, and poetry the religion of the heart. What more natural than that these two kinds should kindle the flames of their inspiration at each other’s torch?—But religion, to answer this aim, must be free of all orthodox defense, of all entrenchment of true belief; it must supplely conform to the ever-creating modifications of the people’s spirit. Such was the religion of our masterworks’ homeland, with its poetic flowers and its root deeply interwoven into the nation’s primal history; while Egypt, where a priestly caste watched over rigid orthodoxy, could never bring forth Pindars and Aeschyluses. How much charm, what a world of thought, was conjured by a single mythological name which the poet touched in his song! For us, who lack belief in it, pages would be needed to make up for its ideas. There has remained, too, in every age, a lively sense that faith and poetry are inseparable twins—the two separate, mutually completing poles of the magnet—and in the age of the rebirth of the arts it was again faith that inspired painting, architecture, and music. That orthodox rigidity could less stand in the way of these; worst off was their sibling that expresses itself in words, for it could most easily draw upon itself the severity of the Inquisitions. In its pressed situation its more timid priests threw themselves back into the arms of the Olympian gods, and though they reaped the least success—for far from their gods affecting their works with life, those gods themselves would have had need of the quickening faith in order to rise from their dead—yet this school, with its chill sepulchral breath and its ornaments robbed from the dead, haunted among us almost to the last decade. The bolder spirits, however, tried their fortune in three directions. Either they submitted themselves to the yoke of strict orthodoxy and sought inspiration within its circle; in this direction Dante, Tasso, Milton advanced, all the way to Klopstock, with more or less success, but with the indisputable mark of the rigidity of the dogma’s authority. Or they created a new deity, lying outside the entrenched orthodoxy, awaiting inspiration and glory from it. But the cult of the dubious-charactered chivalric virtue and of the woman-idol forced into an ideal brought forth not inspiration but sickly dream-vision, not glory but Bengal fire only, bringing a whole great empire of human feelings into opposition not only with the sober world-view of the classical age but with human nature in general. Though from this school scarcely a name survives besides that of the brilliant Ariosto, the false direction even now exists, partly in its original form in German literature, partly only in its principle and counter-effect in French, which, refashioning the figures of manly virtue and womanliness according to the no less sickly standpoint of present-day society, set up in place of the toppled idol a god just as little akin to human nature and likewise just as devoid of dignity. The men of the third direction, finally, spied out that faith which the people’s eternally young creative power, its inexhaustible poetry, unnoticed creates alongside the rigidly regulated religion, to fill the void of its heart—for its own household use, so to speak. With which it peoples the sunlit valley with fairies, the bottom of the mine with dwarfs, the rock-tumbled crag with witches, and the desolate reaches of far steppes with gardens bearing golden apples; with which it hangs a flower-arabesque on every less-guarded legend and weaves the holy tradition through with sweet episodes. Let no one say that our enlightened age no more believes in all these than in the gods of Olympus. Shattering, grand events, in which a higher hand directing the world’s fate becomes, so to speak, visible, make men prejudiced. We see our greatest and most enlightened men regard, before a decisive battle, trifling chances as good or ill omens. Anxiously they watch the bird’s flight or hear the jumbled sounds of waking dawn. Now and then we are startled by a mysterious prophecy, and the fantastic figures of nursery-tales, the whole world of childhood memories, take on before us the color of reality, in the solemn moments of our life. He who mourns his dead beloved shudders at the sight of a falling star, and the happy lover hears a fairy’s encouraging word in the softly whispering breeze. This is the inexhaustible poesy of the human breast. A masterly poetic work is that means which puts our soul into a solemn mood fit to receive like impressions, like faith. Certainly the great spirits of antiquity believed just as little in their Olympian gods as we in the dream-figures of popular belief. But when the grand tragedy of the house of Cadmus played out before their eyes, they doubted, in the midst of their inspiration, just as little about the gods’ intervention as we accept Macbeth’s witches as real beings and do not regard Banquo’s ghost as a savorless jest. This, then, is the path on which I believe the exalting effect of Hellas’s lost Olympus may be made up for in literature. Great examples stand before us in proof of it, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Byron’s Manfred and his mysteries, in Goethe’s Faust and his ballads. But an immense, hitherto scarcely suspected treasure-heap still lies before us in our holy books, our legends, our sagas, of which our excellent ones have begun to dig up only single grains—and how radiant even these already are in the artist-hand of a Tompa!—Truly, only a bold and shaping spirit is needed to open a new world before us. Nor let us fear that, on account of taking up the mythological element, we should perhaps be compelled to exclude from our poetry the conquests of our positive and real knowledge. As the ancients were able, beside their Olympus, to validate in their works the philosophical principles of Zeno and Epicurus, so the examples of the newer masters I have cited may set us at ease that we too, with our present knowledge, shall be capable of doing this—only let the shaping and masterly hand not be lacking.

ON WOMAN,

PARTICULARLY FROM AN AESTHETIC

Inaugural address at the Academy (April 18, 1864) “When the honorable Academy received me into its brilliant circle, this acted upon my self-awareness, so wanting in merit, rather as an advance granted to good will and zeal for the future than as an over-rich reward for the slight day’s labor which my powers have so far permitted me to accomplish in the field of the mother tongue and of aesthetics.—But it was, nonetheless, the cultivation of the dear mother tongue and of aesthetics that laid this welcome debt of honor upon me; and so, when from the mother tongue—woman, and from aesthetics its close mutual relation, again brought woman to my mind, a very natural chain of ideas led me to the subject of my inaugural address.” For God’s sake!—someone may exclaim—why woman?—is she not already the subject of nine books out of ten in any case; have we not already heard enough of her in prose, in verse, glorified, reviled, sung, with a sneering smile, learnedly and ignorantly? What new thing could this subject still yield? But in my view it is precisely this manifold conception, this perpetual return to her, that shows the subject to be inexhaustible, like the charm of spring, like the deep of the sea. And if I do not succeed in calling forth from it something new and enjoyable, the deficiency lies not in the barrenness of the subject but in my own unworthiness. The great classification of humanity according to the two sexes acts far more deeply upon the human being, whether physical or moral, than some intelligent being could surmise who, far from our earthly bonds and sexual relations, wished to attain the knowledge of them either through bleak ratiocination or through induction drawn from the other phenomena of living nature. Woman is not simply a human being who at the same time happens incidentally to be of the female sex, as bleak logic dictates, but to her last fiber a peculiar something—specifically woman. And while analysis shows, throughout the whole of living nature, that with its gradual perfecting the sexual element is pressed ever more into the background—for, to take an example, while in the plant, as flower, it plays the chief role, setting upon the plant the crown of existence, in the bird it declares itself only in its warbling and in the splendor of its plumage, and in the most highly developed animals the two sexes become almost equal, so that in the clever pointer, the steel-muscled horse, the bloodthirsty tiger, beyond a certain shading of the difference of strength it scarcely declares itself in anything else—the human being, who comes next in the series, at once exhibits that consistent inconsistency of great nature which protests so effectively against all bleak forcing into systems, against all cataloguing, and the difference between the two sexes steps forth too strongly not to surprise us. The average circumference of the brain of the male of the Caucasian race is almost two inches greater than that of the woman’s brain. It is notable that this difference, which only the newer science has established, the old art already surmised, an art which possessed so unattainably fine a sense in idealization, and that on every ancient Greek statue of Venus one finds a head diminished beyond the regular proportion.—I could adduce countless further examples of the old art’s fortunate sense of idealization, but, since they do not strictly belong to my address, I wish to single out only two. Again it was only the newer science that established how the facial angle widens throughout the whole animal world in proportion to the intellectual standing of the particular species, while in the human being it most nearly approaches the right angle. And lo, on the old statues we find the right-angled facial profile in its boldest extreme, which, exaggerated by a single line further, would lead to monstrosity; but over this line watches the genius, to which alone it is permitted to play so bold a game. Further, the proportion of the human limbs could not have been unknown to the old artists, and if they portrayed human beings they strictly kept to it; but in their standing statues of the gods we consistently see the lower leg somewhat lengthened, and this small liberty, in the interest of idealization, does not miss its due effect. But I return to my subject. From the skeleton of what animal species, besides that of the human being, can its sex be determined? And this great difference, which begins in the two most notable parts of the organism, the brain and the skeleton, runs through the whole. A proportionally far more considerable part of woman’s body is constructed for sexual purposes. Her blood is more abundant in proportion to her body-weight, her circulation swifter, her temperature higher, her constitution more nervous. It is very natural that this difference, lying deep in her organism, should permeate woman’s whole soul-world too, and determine her sphere of ideas, her activity, differently from the man’s. And so it is by no means an empty phrase that woman thinks through her heart. Woman develops early, but never attains full manly maturity; she grasps and learns more easily, but, wanting in creative genius, does not rise among humanity’s guiding spirits. She always represents only the suffering, never the penetrating element, and hence, while she furnishes the dearest contingent of dilettantism, she has never essentially advanced art and science. This irrefutable fact we cannot ascribe to a training of opposite tendency. The greater part of those men whom genius has possessed likewise broke their way by main force toward their vocation from paths of the most contrary tendency—and conquered, for the spirit is stronger than every earthly obstacle. The beautiful and the extraordinary affect woman more strongly, and so she is also more enthusiastic for it than the man.—Therefore, where the power of the moment decides, there woman is ready for self-sacrifice; where enduring struggle is required, the man stands his ground. Every persecuted new religious sect has its enthusiastic women martyrs, every popular uprising its tigress-women. At every dreadful spectacle and execution she is present in plenty, seeking excitement, but she goes too to the bed of the plague-stricken, from which the deliberate man recoils. With bare hand she batters the gate of the Bastille, but to the laborious waging of war, whose fire the inclemency of the weather cools, whose poetic glaze the natural obstacles and the disagreeableness of privations wipe away, only the man is equal. The Maid of Orleans too carried her role, in the rapture of enthusiasm, as far as the king’s coronation; from there her glory peeled away. Rarely will a woman give herself to the unbreakable-zealed labor of the missionary, being more frightened by a single tedious day of monotonous wandering in the wilderness than by the bayonet piercing her heart in the midst of the sweet intoxication of enthusiasm. On woman’s finer bodily frame, as the contrast to the male forms bristling with strength and more angular, the serpentine, or, according to Hogarth, the line of grace, is dominant. Her whole figure breathes charm. Therefore, where Greek sculpture portrays acrobat-women, strength is only the ground that serves to set off grace, while on the male statues grace is set forth only as the noble companion of strength. Therefore the old architect, where he wishes to set off the magnitude of the weight, applies atlases for its support; where he wishes to refine it, as it were to render it airy, caryatides. Woman’s subordinate bodily and spiritual strength seeks protection, tending; and in the soul of the stronger man it stirs the very feelings stirred by the abandoned child, the withering flower, the benumbed bird, and all that, as if in entreaty, lifts its eye to us, as though to say: see, you are mighty—I am weak—under your care it revives that without you would perish—and fragrance, song, prayer, glaze, all that is mine: shall be your reward. And the awakened consciousness becomes good will, and this, on the ladder of esteem, leads toward idealization and the nobler aesthetic enjoyment, until it develops into the full plenitude of love.—Yes, woman is the embodiment of love, and the wildest man bows to her rose-switch; he is tamed, like the bloodthirsty beast beside the helpless child; for even the flower opening in our path we avoid, and we do not tread upon the wriggling little beetle.—Samson lays his head in Delilah’s lap, Heracles sits down to the distaff, and this momentary self-forgetting is the less shameful the more truly a man is he who commits it. A moment, and the man comes to himself again, while the preponderance of woman’s sexual relations makes love so essential a part of her whole sphere of life that it is able to fill the entire course of her life. There may be a woman who all her life did nothing else but love: now as child, now as woman, now as mother; while in a man’s life love can fill but a very slight void, and that man looks back upon a truly bleak life who did nothing else but love. Even woman’s beauty keeps pace with her sexual development, and the flowering of both coincides, while male beauty attains its plenitude in the time of vigor of deed and of spiritual maturity. But from these it follows of itself that beauty and the destiny for love, with every aberration of their consciousness, are too a preeminently womanly property. Vanity carried to extremes can declare itself only in an Elizabeth Báthory, the savage lust for pleasure only in a Lucretia Borgia.—Only a Mary Stuart could dress before the mirror as she stepped onto the scaffold. Already the old mythology personified every charm and every magic of love in women, just as in the female figures stripped of these holy things it set before us the model-images of the bleak. There we find Venus, the Graces, the Horae,—while opposite them stand the Bacchantes, the Furies, the Harpies. Again it is not some conventional settlement, but her sexual relations, that cause woman to be the founder of the family, the holder-together of the domestic circle.—For the attainment of nature’s great aims she uses such means as are stronger than all ratiocination. Who reflects on the fact that nourishment is necessary to the maintenance of our body? We grow hungry, we seize the food and eat.—Of the oxidation of the blood we gained a notion only after millennia, when we had already for millennia drawn the fresh air into our lungs with a feeling of pleasure. Who reflects on the coming generation when he sighs for the object of his love? And when nature destined the human being for social development, it placed woman at the center of the family and entrusted to her the guarding of the domestic altar, and bound her to all these with far stronger bonds than any brilliant dialectic or philosophico-moral ratiocination could replace. How much greater destruction does one faithless desertion of her womanly duties bring upon the whole family existence than the man’s straying. The parental relation to the child is so infinitely stronger in the mother than in the father, and through the holy trinity of mother’s milk, mother tongue, and motherly instruction she not only lays the foundations of the family but plants in the soul of the human being awakening to consciousness the germ of all that piety, tender relation, and holy idea whose natural guardian is woman. And the echo of those prayers which, with clasped hands, half-conscious, we heard from our mother: accompanies us through life, and our heart feels the ideas, because they were born with it, and the more holy because they have no name, their ground obscure—but the more strongly they work, even though bleak reason, because it cannot dissect them, would christen them prejudices.—And woman’s image too remains forever before us, like a magnet which draws the freely roaming man back, each time, to the domestic altar. And this effect overflows the family circle to the noblest root of national existence, and therefore the poet, in the contemplation of his people’s sinking, justly broke out in this cry of pain: “Degenerate was his mother’s blood!... ” Thus woman labors quietly, noiselessly, in her modest domestic circle, and yet with vast effect upon the whole. Like the coral-making insect, which brings continents into being; like the surging air, which we do not even notice, but whose absence would suddenly be conspicuous, together with our destruction. The girl-child, scarcely able to move, tends a doll, plays at housekeeping, sets in order and tidies from the equator to the poles; while the boy fights and destroys. The bird, the flower: the girl’s favorite; the dog, the horse: the boy’s. And the recognizing apotheosis of woman in this her vocation we find in the most ancient times. In Rome as the Vestal virgins, in newly discovered Mexico as the sun-virgins, they guarded the sanctity of the domestic altar. At the altar of the northern peoples’ Nehalennia the bride received into her hand the consecrated distaff, as the emblem of her vocation. And the pure defense of the pieties the old tragedians glorified not in a man, but in an Antigone. After the day of mourning at Mohács too the men continued their ferocious work, driven by party passion, tearing and gnawing one another’s breast.—It was a woman who thought also of the dead and had them buried. But precisely because woman is the guardian of holy things of so tender a kind, resembling the glaze of the flower, once she is torn out of her appointed sphere, once she has stripped off the feelings of piety and, setting herself above the dear prejudices, wishes ratiocinatingly to analyze all that ought only to be felt, she sinks far more deeply, and is harder—not to say never—able to raise herself morally again, than we see in the man in countless cases.—Her lesser spiritual strength and her greater passionateness cooperate in this, and so, just as it is woman who furnishes the ideal-images of the moral and aesthetic beautiful, so too only woman is able to produce the very utmost of the moral and aesthetic ugly. A notable psychological proof of this is the belief in witchcraft, which not only ruled among us but is at home in the northernmost parts of Asia among the Tungus, as among the Pehuenche savage peoples of South America. Everywhere it is attributed only to woman that, for the ruin of humanity, she can enter into a pact with the evil spirits—perhaps precisely because happiness too can be stolen down for us from heaven only by woman. To woman’s eye is attributed the power with which she may corrupt her enemy—because they feel its magic, with which it pours forth blessedness. Only of woman is it supposed that she can league with the devil, she who perhaps descended from heaven as an angel. From all this—so I believe—it follows that the philosopher who, setting out from the abstract concept of the human being, and regarding the sexual difference as only a very subordinate something, proclaims the equal standing of man and woman in society—the so-called emancipation of woman—acts very mistakenly and hardly does good service to those whom he wishes to favor.—He who is not content that the rose-bush’s swaying branch should bear a fragrant flower, but wishes that it should at the same time furnish mighty beams—he who demands of the proud oak that it should at once fill the air with the fragrance of flowers—does not know nature. True, the principle grows stronger every day according to which there exist in nature no abrupt breaks, no oppositions without transition. Even the newest geology explains, by a chain of continuous slow influences and transitions, many a formation that was hitherto ascribed to violent, suddenly occurring revolutions. So too between man and woman this rigid partition-wall is wanting. There are slow transitions of these two characters, but these neither the social philosopher nor the aesthetician takes as the object of his study, where the sound whole is in question, just as the natural scientist does not take the labyrinth of hybrid plants or the mule-animals—at most he registers them. But if now and then a meteor flares up and there is born such a woman as, inspired by a lofty spirit, raises herself above the barriers of her sex, she will, in spite of all our ratiocination, make herself equal to the man; and let her do so—dearly enough has she purchased this place, for she has most certainly renounced for it all those advantages of her sex which would have made her brilliant, and perhaps happy, in that direction.—A Shakespearean genius’s coming forth is never hindered by the rules of Aristotle.—Galileo proclaimed the turning of the earth in defiance of the contrary articles of faith. But it is not the pale theory of the woman-emancipation held by the scholar who knows no cheerful life that could endanger, in the future, the right conception of woman’s natural place. As neither did that perverse situation of woman which, throughout the whole historical past, ruled so offensively for woman, so injuriously for humanity, spring from quite other sources. There is in the human being a certain inclination: to observe, develop, magnify every trifle that nature indicates. This inclination is the wellspring of everything beautiful and great, but at the same time of everything bad and ugly that man has ever brought about. It was this that traced out, in the barely usable original form of the cereals and domestic animals, that germ apt for development which later made them our most useful instruments of life.—It was this that taught us to subdue the natural forces, one by one, to our service. It is the mother of every art: showing it, in magnification, the principle of idealization.—But on the other hand there is scarcely an absurd popular custom, a perverse principle, or a sinful social relation that was not likewise born of this inclination. This holds from slavery to lawful man-slaying, from tattooing to the crinoline. The former are far grander and graver subjects than that I could enter upon their examination even thus incidentally, in an address of another tendency. It was enough to have marked them; the thinking man will recognize in them the applicability of my principle. Of the latter sort I bring forward a few, because they are the results of the immediate but lopsided observation of the human body and of sexual relations, and lead of themselves to the exposition of the broader application of similar lopsided conceptions touching the standing of women. The man of a savage people, with whom existence and struggle are one, very naturally sets much store by valor. The scar is to him his chief adornment, and he strives to make it more visible with paint. But in us is the artist-inclination, which makes the simple more pleasing, furnishes it with ornament, and the ornament becomes a symbol. The symbols of valor serve to frighten the enemy—and there, on the Indian’s skin, is a whole heroic poem. If then his wife likewise desires this living pictorial chronicle, so that she too may visibly display the virtues of her circle, who will wonder at it? And the rational history of tattooing stands before us. The race-trait of one people is the elongated narrow head; of another, the broad nose or the swollen lip.—This national trait everyone would like to possess as fully as possible; but thousands possess it, and the human being, by his inclination to magnification, is not content with the common stock—he wants something preeminent. He presses the child’s head between boards, that it may be still longer and narrower; he widens the lip and nose with artificial pendants; but this does not remain the secret of one, and this absurd procedure becomes a popular custom. We know that hair-powder was created by the coquetry of a graying favorite-woman, the crinoline by a vanity, in one woman, stronger than the feeling of her motherly dignity—and that the principle “a regum ad exemplum” for a time raised it to law.—The insipid philosophy of China regarded that one side of woman’s destiny which makes her the guardian of the hearth-fire and the representative of family stability, and, that she might more easily fulfill this, not carried away by the temptation of free mobility, deformed her feet. From a far more shameful point of view yet does another, likewise Chinese, school of philosophy regard woman, whose head, Lao-tse, speaks thus: Three kinds of flesh are needed for happiness: pork for the table, mule-flesh for traveling, woman-flesh for the bed. With such principles, then, that country in which the husband first sees his wife when she is brought into his house; where bigamy rules and children are exposed: though it comprise a third of humanity, has never yet recorded a single ideal-image of woman; it stagnates and grows torpid, because it itself excludes from its circle the genii of beauty, enthusiasm, and life. Old Sparta, that grandiose barracks, regarded woman only insofar as it had need of her to bring its heroes into the world, but already withdrew even their rearing from her. To exchange wives, to expose girl-children, was permitted. And this perverse conception avenged itself here too. Never in Sparta could a true family life, a gentler morality, and an exalting art take root. In Athens more of woman’s many-sided vocation was already taken into account, and with what surprisingly brilliant result. Nevertheless the gynaeceum here too drew certain barriers about her—shut off the flower-fragrant charm of woman’s conversation from the world of men, and even this one void, which, however strongly we feel it, we are just as unable to explain by reasons, in what a wonderful way it strove to fill itself through the peculiar institution of the hetaerae. And how consistent the result. The greater part of their distinguished women left to us, the Aspasias and Sapphos, are either from this class of hetaerae, or their poets took them over from that half-fabulous heroic circle in which woman still moved with a freedom corresponding almost to our present conception, in the midst of a society of simple morals. Certain Scythian peoples burned off the right breast of their daughters, that the bow-string, when drawn, might have a firmer support against the quiver. This one custom sufficiently characterizes the whole situation of woman, who, forcibly transformed into a man, was left only so much of her womanliness as was just necessary that the race might breed on. Of these peoples’ women, then, a few amazonian queens are all that defied oblivion. The Jews regarded women for the most part from the point of view of their motherhood.—Undeniably a higher point of view, and one that bore nobler results than the conception of many another people—but the contempt for the barren woman, the practice of concubinage, the man’s one-sided right to thrust away his spouse, are so many shameful debasements of woman. Jewry too, then, did not remain exempt from the influence of Oriental ideas, but on the other hand we meet too with the traces of conceptions that breathe the present appreciation of woman’s standing. And from the books of the Old Testament there step before us such distinguished female figures as inspire the artist and the poet alike even today. In the other Eastern countries woman’s lot was truly lamentable, almost bestial, and, alas, for the most part remains so to this day. The more sensual man there debases woman to the mere instrument of his lust. He gives and takes her as a commodity, whose value is determined only by her material charms. Crowded together, shut away, he jealously guards her, in the feeling of the insufficiency of his own worth, and keeps far from her, together with the free air, every sphere of activity and spiritual elevation. In India he takes her with him to the grave, like his dear household implements. In Damascus he has her set before the door, sends her to face misery, since her charms can serve him no longer. This was woman’s standing in the great Eastern empires that have passed away, as among the old Arab, who, all the same, exposed his girl-child to the wild beasts rather than that she should fall a victim to misery or shame. What a peculiar pain-shriek this is of offended nature! What a singular assertion of right by woman’s natural sphere, that those debased, shut-away creatures occupied themselves with their trinkets, painted their faces, decked themselves out, just as the present-day European lady, freely hunting for conquest. That their names were Sobeiha (dawn), Zahra (flower), Nariha (lovely), Saida (fortunate), Amida (faithful), etc., as though they could have been lovely, could have roused the dawn, could have been faithless or fortunate. And there beside them we find the poet too, in the long row of the Hafizes and Saadis,* who sang love-songs just as feeling and true, paid homage to woman just as purely, as though love could have existed—and as though there had been one who could earn his homage. This sad picture the religion of Mohammed too could change but little.—He too admits only four women, from the members of his own family, into the men’s paradise; the rest have a separate paradise, where their reward is half that of the slaves. Most of them descend into hell.—The men, on the contrary, will have, each one, the strength of a hundred men, and the houris serving their pleasure are Allah’s separate, ever-young creatures. Yet here and there a juster conception of woman’s situation nonetheless flashes up in the Koran. It restricts unlimited polygamy to four, which, indeed, the permitted concubinage demolishes again. In one place it speaks thus: “However you may strive, you cannot love your wives equally; strive at least to give none a particular preference.” And in the seventh chapter it commands men to love women and to have regard for their weaknesses. After all this we cannot wonder if the whole East, from Semiramis and Rhodopis down to the sultan-mothers, immortalized not a single woman for woman-virtues. All those who survived are either creatures of dubious worth who rebelled against their sex and for a time played, well or ill, a man’s role, or wretches plying the intrigues of the seraglio. Westward a more smiling picture opens before us. The poison of polygamy does not wither in its root woman’s whole nobler existence. Every advantage the man ascribes to himself stands in the consciousness of his strength, who, as nature’s lord, wishes to stand above his wife too. In Rome marriage was from the beginning ceremonious, and represented the violent abduction, as though it wished to say: the weaker owes obedience. And indeed the husband held a guardian’s power over his wife, but already the first Romans bound themselves not to put their abducted Sabine women to the mill or to other servile labor. If a man took a captive woman to wife, she became at once free, and, with a tender allusion, during the marriage ceremonies the bridegroom drew the ring—that emblem of bondage—onto the fourth finger of his bride, from which, according to an old Egyptian tradition, a little vein leads straight to the heart. The use of Christian ceremonies was permitted only under Julian. But woman always moved with full freedom in society, and she directed the first rearing of her children. True, the institution of concubinage existed throughout the whole Roman empire—and in its Eastern part only wise Leo, in the Western the eleventh century, abolished it; but the concubine held as legal a standing as the wife, only with somewhat more restricted rights, and so it was brought about rather by faulty social relations than by the disdain of woman. In its later times the dowry already gained for woman an ever more independent standing in regard to her husband, even in old Rome, which Cato the censor and the comic poets did not fail to scourge with mockery. Finally Justinian made woman equal in right with man. In consequence of these more favorable relations there appears already in Roman history a whole row of model-images of distinguished mothers, faithful wives, virtuous daughters, down to the age of the corruption of public morals, upon which we shall later cast a glance. To the Germanic peoples is commonly ascribed the introduction of the modern reverence for woman in place of the old perverse conception, but hardly with enough justice.—They too bought their wives just so from their parents, under the various titles of morgengabium, mundium, faderfium, as their other contemporaries. They too exercised a guardian’s power over them. Faithlessness they regarded from precisely that point of view which keeps in sight only the consequence, as did all peoples down to the development of Christian morality; and while they did not allow the woman a complaint on account of her husband’s faithlessness, the latter was free to thrust away his wife. Finally they too valued woman at little, except for her motherhood. Among the Germans, for example, the killing of a woman capable of becoming a mother was fined at 600 solidi, and only 200 for one still immature or barren. Among the Franks the fine for a mother-capable mature woman ran to 24, for a blessed one to 28, for a barren one to 8 thousand denarii. But what marvelous things do we yet find in their surviving laws concerning women! Truly we do not know whether to pity rather the limited horizon of the lawgiver, or that woman-virtue so wanting in all foundation, which stood in need of such protection. Here are a few examples.—The free Lombard who squeezes the finger of a free woman pays 600 denarii—if her arm, as much again. Above the elbow 1400; for the breast 1800.—By Bavarian law he who pulls out a woman’s comb pays 12 solidi. Their countless surviving female figures fall mostly already into the age of the idolizing of woman, and come forth in connection with it. To this period would belong most of all the ladies of the Nibelung-saga; but I confess that even among these I can find no model ideal-image standing, in aesthetic interest, above the ladies of any half-savage people. Into a fuller dissection of it, however, I do not enter, wishing to treat the said poem elsewhere and more thoroughly. Of the Hungarian race’s conception of woman’s standing, if we knew nothing else, we might proudly adduce this one appellation: feleség [wife, lit. “half-ness”]—The husband never exercised a guardian’s power over his wife; indeed, the girl became of independent right precisely through her marriage, while her husband was regarded only as her natural plenipotentiary. Down to the age of the Anjous, when feudalism came into our country too, son and daughter shared equally. And that worthy standing which our laws secure to the widow, conferring upon her even the exercise of her husband’s political right, testifies sufficiently to the chivalrous nation’s pure conception, surpassing its contemporaries in much, of woman’s nobler standing. Hungarian history can then show such a row of distinguished women as any nation might be proud of. Not with borrowed manly properties, but with true woman-virtues do they shine, as apostles of faith, patrons of learning, loving mothers, faithful wives. And if one or another, like Mária Szécsi, attempts to break out too of the circle of her sex, she reconciles us with herself as soon as she bows of her own accord to the rose-switch of love. Truly I do not know where the virtues of her sex alone would have raised a woman to so great a giant as Ilona Zrínyi.—If the men of my nation were not strong enough to maintain the honor of the Hungarian name, this woman would be enough to keep it alive through millennia. I do not wish to multiply the pictures drawn from various climates and centuries; this would lead only to repetitions. Humanity is so unchangeably one—human nature in its chief character-traits remains so similar through all centuries and civil standings—that we can study through, with living eye, all the peoples of the whole past even today, in the present-day peoples standing on a similar degree of cultivation and living under roughly similar influences. Homer’s heroes and women, with their natural, simple world-view, will come alive before us in the middle class of the sober, healthy Hungarian race. There will stand before us Odysseus and his Penelope, perhaps in a well-to-do tenant of the plain. Paris in a younger brother who has seen the world, who, having seen through the world’s vanity, drew himself under the protecting wing of the elder brother who remained the farmer. And we shall find Helen too, who saw fairer days but now resigns herself to her lot, and after the day’s toils lies down with quiet conscience at her husband’s side; she does not mind, however, if her Menelaus carries her off again. And beside her will be Andromache, the domestic, dear woman who has not yet lost from her eye the tower of her village; and there will be everything else, only the walls of Troy are wanting. Perhaps a peasant young wife will make us understand the Book of Ruth; an honest farmer some patriarch. The customs of the Germanic people we shall find in some Tatar people—China and the East stand almost motionless in any case. But the testimony of all these pictures is in any case only this: that all these ages and peoples grasped only one or another moment of woman’s grand vocation, and, developing and magnifying it, called forth perverse and painful situations. They broke the mirror, that its single snatched-out fragments might cast back a distorted shape. They demolished the statue, that with its scattered limbs they might rouse disgust in place of the wonder befitting the whole. And so it went on until Christianity, grasping woman’s vocation in its whole plenitude, raised it to the place of reverence befitting it. But let no one believe that Christianity’s purified notions of woman’s situation stepped forth ready and armed, like Minerva from Jupiter’s head. Just as little as all its other great principles permeating society, which developed to their full plenitude only slowly; indeed some of them, even after so many centuries, are in travail to this day, like—to mention but one—the abolition of slavery. Christianity in general did not thrust into the world one compact, shut-off whole, standing utterly anew from its alpha to its omega; hardly thus would it have had that vast vital force which afterward filled the world. No.—Christianity gathered into a camp the warriors of humanity who for centuries had bled here and there, isolated and with little success, and gave them a camp-word, that they might recognize one another. It observed the cry of woe which raw violence had outshouted, and gave the idea a consecrated banner, that it might continue its struggle. Of the reverence for woman too we find an example here and there already in the most distant ages, among the least civilized peoples. Thus among the savage peoples of America, where polygamy never prevailed, and though they bought their wives, like the Germans, or the poorer ones served for them, like the Jewish patriarchs, woman always held an honorable, free standing. Especially characteristic is the following. At the discovery of America the natives carried on wars of extermination against one another, but from old time a covenant stood among them that they regarded the Delaware nation as woman, that this was not permitted to mix in the quarrels, and that every party was bound to bear toward it the greatest reverence and forbearance. If we—so they said—destroy one another, let the Delawares remain, to keep up our race. But similar examples occur only sporadically, and the appreciation of woman’s place, which at all times kept pace with the people’s cultivation, was raised to real validity truly by Christianity. This it was that made woman equal in right with man; this it was that, in the judging of faithlessness and other relations, set a moral foundation in place of the utilitarian ones; and, by the union of the two fairest flowers of womanliness—virginity and motherhood—it created in Mary so divine an ideal of woman, and raised it as a model into heaven, as even the proud man might envy her. But this is well so; let woman be equal in right with man, let her stand above him in reverence. Would she too wish that violent barriers should keep her in her natural sphere? This would breed the feeling of bondage—but let her be held back by that nameless something which, conceived precisely in the feeling of her right, ceaselessly whispers in her ear: it would not become you to use your rights to the extreme; the surrender of these extremes is only the dear requital of that homage with which the man raised you above himself. The men of the most democratic states least of all exercise their freedom to the extreme toward others. They are held back by decorum and piety—those two preeminent feelings of woman. The most revered men strive most modestly to ward off incense from themselves—and modesty again is a peculiar woman-virtue. Then, reverence resembles in much that credit of which a financier said to his friend, who reproached him for not having exploited it better, since he possessed it in so boundless a measure: “I possess it in such measure precisely because I use it little; were I to draw on it strongly, it would cease.” So the rendering and the demanding of reverence too have their limits. If someone offers me his hand, I believe he does it from the heart; if for some service he declares himself my debtor, that too I can accept; but if for a trifle he offers to give his blood and life, his eternity and salvation, for me, then I have no confidence that he would take upon himself the trouble of uttering a single good word in my interest. While the Roman emperor desired human homage, he could, by his conception, hold it earned; but when he had himself proclaimed God, he either raved or mocked. In the Christian conception too there lay such a germ of the reverence for woman as, in the receptive and romanticism-inclined temper of the barbarians beginning to be civilized, under the influence of the ferment of the age and of the feeling of youthful vigor, set out upon a gigantic development. In that age everything grand and extraordinary was ascribed to woman and to love. The castle hanging on the sheer cliff-wall was built by a woman, its bottomless well was dug by love. A woman raised the bold arches of the crumbling Roman aqueduct, and the mountain region’s labyrinth of rock was thrown together helter-skelter by an amorous devil. The reverence for woman became idolatry, with no less harm to woman than the older raw conception had done. Woman was again torn out of her natural sphere and became like the quack, who is at last himself compelled, for the sake of the deceived multitude, to believe in his useless remedies, and for his forced pathetic role secretly seeks a compensation suited to his inclinations. And truly history has preserved from no age so many dreadful female figures as precisely from this period of the woman-ideals among the Germanic peoples, with whose long row I do not wish to weary anyone. This age too passed away, like everything against nature; that age in which men wandered to the Holy Land with one woman’s colors, in which another’s hermit-lover gazed for thirty years at her window, or descended for her glove among the lions. But the pale specter of this age, the more disgusting because its life-warmth has run out, still walked long among us, indeed in part walks among us to this day. The comedy of madrigals and ritornelles, of etiquettes and courtships, which between the wings of the stage regards least of all that woman before whom it kneels on the boards, still runs among us with its sickly, perverse world-view. We hold it unseemly to name a single garment by its own name, we recoil from the openness of Aristophanes or Shakespeare, with which their humor treats every matter alike—while with delight we relish the sugared double-meaning, the veiled allusions to all those subjects which we declare loathsome, and do not even notice that precisely this is the most loathsome obscenity. In our love-declarations, our songs, we say such gigantic things that, had habit not worn them out, our women would truly be compelled to laugh in our faces. For the price of a single glance we promise our salvation, but in ready cash we should probably fall considerably lower. We wish to die for the not-sufficiently-gracious girl; but precisely then we are perhaps doctoring our head-cold. Nothing delights us any more—so we say—and then we send for a ticket to the circus. In a word, we create in our works and in our own soul-world such sickly world-views, such contrary social relations, as are neither fit nor proper to the man’s vocation. What an indefinite world-pain steps before us often from the soul of such a youth as stands but at the threshold of life; what a contrary struggle between feelings which true life-wisdom condemns; what a disgusting striving toward unattainable aims, instead of that quiet resignation which the aesthetic and moral sense alike command! Let us not wonder, then, if nine-tenths of the unhappy inmates of the madhouse were brought there by love and the Apocalypse. In both they sought something that is not in them. How different the world-view of the old classics and great masters touching women and love. From Pindar to Horace, from Homer to Shakespeare. What simplicity in the conception of relations, in the formulation of desires and wishes, and in resignation to unalterable fate. How different too the conception of the present-day common man. And let us therefore not believe that he perhaps does not even feel. He too has his heart’s trouble if he must part from his beloved, his heart breaks just the same, but with less ostentation. And if he wades through the deadly trouble, he resigns himself to his lot, faithfully fulfills his new duties, and is silent. He, then, who wishes to sing true human feeling, or to paint a true female figure, but cannot, from our social relations, separate the healthy from the sickly, the true from the affected, let him turn to these pure sources. Let him read the folk song and the classics, let him look around among the living women of the people, and everywhere he will find equal, because true, human feelings welling up. The women of the Bible, of Homer, or of Sophocles feel just as those whom Shakespeare created, and as the peasant girl or the high-ranking lady feels who moves before us;—and if this latter professes otherwise, it is either affectation or a sickly excrescence of our relations, which nature does not know. Only thus can we make acquaintance with woman’s true sphere and with the specific woman-characters. And in our art-works we shall no longer fall into that very habitual fault of being able to rechristen every lady of our work a man, every man a lady, without any conspicuous deficiency. An Esther, a Delilah, a Tamar, what specific woman-characters, in good and in bad alike. Can we imagine a man with the train of thought of Antigone, Clytemnestra, Deianeira? How wholly otherwise Juliet loves than Romeo. How wholly other a murderer is Lady Macbeth than her husband. Lady Percy, Cleopatra, Portia, how various and yet what a perfect drawing of the unified woman. Today, indeed, we have come so far as to regard Ruth or Lady Percy as very common women—we do not find Juliet sufficiently in love.—Antigone or Desdemona sufficiently suffering. There is not in all these that feverish agitation which burns on the cheeks of the Lady of the Camellias, that sickly nervousness which rouses interest in the writhings of the newer novel-hero dragged onto the rack of social relations. But there is the ever-young nature, and if it no longer interests anyone, truly the fault lies not in these model-images. I have set up the kaleidoscope of woman’s vocation and woman’s character; many a motley, glittering, partly fantastic figure moves in it, presses before us in an inexhaustible series, and almost dazes and confounds us.—But the examining eye will recognize the few colored ground-figures from which the whole dazzlement is modulated. Such is woman with all her virtues and faults; such she must be. Let us not wish to improve upon her; one property taken away would spoil the whole of her plenitude. He would be a fool who should say: it is good in fire that it warms, only let it not burn; it is dear in wine that it cheers, only let it not intoxicate. Let us accept woman too, then, such as God created her for us, for only thus can her love be such as Petőfi sang it: A single dewdrop’s worth of it is sweeter
Than a whole sea turned honey;
But a single dewdrop’s worth of it is deadlier
Than a whole sea turned poison. Let us not glorify her beyond her desert, nor look down upon her; the self-respect of our manly dignity demands both alike.—If we overvalue her, we humble ourselves; for only he deserves woman who feels that he is a man. The poet who sang: Ehret die Frauen! sie flechten und weben
Himmlische Rosen in’s irdische Leben. also said this: Ich bin ein Mann! Wer ist es mehr?
————
Zu Gottes schönem Ebenbild
Kann ich den Stempel zeigen. If, on the contrary, we look down upon her, again we belittle ourselves; for so long as we do not renounce our manliness and do not wish to become half-men, we are compelled to confess that woman will always remain the most preeminent and most legitimate object of our aesthetic and poetic world.—Those relations which she weaves into our fate gild the desert of our life, fill the void of our yearning soul; as the old Hungarian poet already expressed it: A little love, a little wine:
Ambition—and at the last, dust. As the modern Heine sings it: Und wäre nicht das bischen Liebe,
So gäb’ es nirgends einen Halt. All this the singers of every age and clime proclaim in a thousand forms. And truly, if we regarded the fairy of all these enchantments as so worthless a creature, deserving our disdain, we should give the greatest proof of our own wretchedness. But if someone, to escape this alternative, professes himself a sufferer of blaséness, that fashionable disease in which neither woman nor anything else any longer inspires, in which, with wise Solomon, we regard everything as vanity of vanities, and in place of the serenity of joy mockery sits on our lips over those simple souls who still find something beautiful; to such as these I have no word; reflection cannot help their trouble, for it lies in a deep moral corruption, born of that animal greed with which they fell upon enjoyment.—Nor does my pity belong to them, but to the age in which they were born, were I to see their number in considerable growth; for blaséness united with cynicism, like a poisonous abscess on the corrupted organism, breeds only in such a time as has something rotting in the deepest of its social relations.—It was there in the age of Augustus and under the emperors, when Horace’s satires arose, Juvenal cracked his lash and Martial scattered his witticisms. Cicero’s relation with his daughter found believers. Cato sold off his wife. To Augustus’s banquets the notables of Rome resorted. The blood flowing in the circuses no longer excited enough. To Julia, Augustus’s daughter, a British woman, whom she had reproached for having to do with several men, could answer: “You do in secret and forbidden what I do openly and freely.”—And Metellus Numidicus the censor spoke thus in the Senate: “If the human race could survive without women, we should gladly free ourselves of this great trouble—but as it is, it is everyone’s duty to sacrifice his own peace to the welfare of the state.” Single such unfortunates were always to be found. Wise Solomon too, after he had grown weary of his three thousand wives and had written the Song of Songs and the Preacher’s book of wisdom, composed under the influence of such a malady his last work, from which I quoted above. But the multitude has a good stomach; it consumes such single foci of disease, and I sound after them the words of a great man, Martin Luther’s: Der nicht liebt Weib, Wein und Gesang,
Der bleibt ein Narr sein lebenlang.

ARTICLES

I From Nógrád. Losonc, June 24. We held our general assembly at an extraordinary place and time. Let no one seek the cause in public interests that brook no delay. Let him look around, and, if he sees ruling the spirit which does not allow the representatives of single jurisdictions to rise into representatives of the universal homeland, let him learn that this spirit, shriveling smaller still in our county life, does not let even a single jurisdiction be taken whole into our bosom, and, tearing apart the parts it has embraced, sets them up against one another as rivals. Thus our present assembly too was only an entertainment granted to the Losonc district. Its title was the fixing of the harvesters’ share-price, which we have nonetheless for several years now established not bindingly but only as a guideline; as was said in the first year: as a transition to the complete abolition of price-fixing. Will our years of trial be shorter than those of the Jews wandering in the wilderness?—Our central chief justice’s deeply moving report drew upon itself the attention of our Estates, otherwise sunk in private conversations: in our county, especially in its lower part, for some little time fire has followed fire. Our most flourishing villages lie in ruins. Several settlements have several times in succession become the scene of devastation; the people, in terrified groups, exchange their deserted villages for the vastness of the forests, from which they do not depart even in the face of rains threatening their health and their furniture with ruin. The rumor flying about the arsonists endangers the personal safety of peaceable travelers. And because we are accustomed to seek extraordinary causes for extraordinary things, a petition for martial law was proposed, but the victorious party thought it could be content with strict police measures alone.—Another, more deeply rooted disease, in our view, both of them left out, and this is, first: the lack of popular education. Indeed, the in great part incompetence of our so-called popular educators too. Secondly: the lack of an organ speaking directly to the people and enlightening it about its interests. Finally, the lack of mutual fire-insurance institutions. Would that those who can do something about all this might take it to heart!—It came up on this occasion that the prohibition against pipe-smoking between villages is broken most often precisely by the officials. We have already seen the spirit of this act declare itself in grander matters too, and on a national scale. Perhaps it is a national character-trait which we must faithfully preserve with our Eastern race!—The fitting of our county hall with lightning-rods was proposed; we did not support it. There is in any case so little that is able to electrify.—But why do I complain? What a lively debate suddenly arose! The clatter of swords, the noise reaches into the street, so that the passerby stops and trembles: perhaps freedom and nationality are threatened by danger! He steps into our hall, our faces burn; it is true that we do not listen to one another, but we give no reasons either. The holy image of Rákos rises again; and the stranger is already, almost with joy, withdrawing the charge that there is no subject able to inspire en masse, when he learns that this inspiring thing, never failing of its effect, is nothing other than—the raising or lowering of the price of meat. Shall I, after my usual custom, write the result? Does anyone still read the political papers for this? One of our county’s aristocratic families, Count F. P., having sold his extensive estates to Marquis Pallavicini, had his admonitory letter on the matter read out. There are names which we know only from history as noble patriot-names; we hope the case will be similar with the buyer, the Marquis.—A peculiar spectacle was the contradiction and counter-contradiction of the attorneys of several interested parties; and when after this a decree was read out urging the more diligent collection of the tax, although last year not only the current tax was collected but a considerable sum of our old arrears too was cleared off: it occurred to me that we are indeed a queer people, die auf dem Stuhl des Schlendrians sitzen [who sit on the chair of slovenly routine].—The day ran out. Its cartage cost the taxpayer 400–500 silver florins. Where is the power that could have kept up the Estates’ patience longer than one long day? and yet in one day we perhaps did not even do the people 400–500 florins’ worth of good. But the Losonc district had its assembly. Our first deputy-lieutenant therefore expressed thanks to the Estates, who set even the straw of public affairs before their own hay—though as few as possible could take this thanks upon themselves—and the assembly dispersed.—We feel a keen lack in the camp of progress. The leader’s tent remained empty. A man who struggled undauntedly for the demands of every age, at home and at three diets, has gone to his rest. This man is János Prónay; he may rest, for he has already acted; we honor his memory best if our bosom ripens his words into fruits. As characteristic of the execution of our laws and resolutions, I cannot pass over in silence that our first deputy-lieutenant, wishing to put into effect that resolution of ours by which a small assembly was ordered to be held on the first Monday of every month, could not, for lack of officials, hold the very first such resolved assembly. There is an example of it in our history, someone says, that this negligent execution is sometimes good; and contentedly he forgives our fine system if it is a hundred times bad.—How can it go better elsewhere, if with us, even with two successive manly and reforming presidencies, and with an Estate participating moreover sufficiently in comparison with the rest, it still does not go well;—however, to get by, somehow or other, we get by. 2 From Nógrád. B.-Gyarmat, August 21–22. Who would complain of our system of education? I send my articles to town like so many wild, frolicsome children; and by the time they step before the great world they are such mild, incense-scented, pious souls that I feel the tears of fatherly joy in my eyes.—But seriously. Truly, were my name not “Timon,” a county man as I am, I should hardly correspond with a liberal paper, so many petty interests and vanities does one run up against; and what if this paper openly utters that principle toward which all liberalism finally presses, if it thereby sees the time of so many a provincial notability’s devaluation drawing near and, terrified, pronounces a curse upon the spirit that actually appears, which it wished only to conjure onto the wall from its camera obscura, amid the spectators’ applause; truly with such a paper only a Timon, able to renounce popularity, can correspond, who at most answers thus: Machtet Ihr nicht so viel Lumpen,
hatt’ ich nicht so viel Papier.— If I wished to communicate only the so-called “interesting subjects,” which mostly consist by now of belatedly arriving instructions, I could finish my letter very briefly; but I believe that the acquainting of you with the other side of county life: our social relations and internal administration, is hardly less interesting than the first; and therefore, although when these are treated the greater part of the Estates leaves the assembly, I too can recommend my readers at most a similar act, if henceforth my letters, regularly treating these too, serve up before the public that chicory-coffee which somewhat substitutes for the publicity so many at least say they desire.— We accepted the deadline for the closing of the diet, keeping before our eyes above all the example of perpetual redeemability, which, after the long, fruitlessly remaining struggles of one diet, at another diet became law without contradiction. Let journalism, then, work until the next national assembly so that whom the voice of the common interest does not bend, public opinion may morally compel, and that the legislature may not be obliged to resort to bargaining between parties, that mother of all bad laws, which it is many times harder to remedy than the lack of a law.—In consequence of the motion of our chief justice H., accepted with the amendment of the assessor S. H., we instructed our deputies not to give their vote to the granting of the tax until they should receive clear instruction on this point. From the trouble of writing the history of the passing of this resolution and a little commentary, as I mentioned, our system of education and my “county patriotism,” which has in vain rubbed off on me too, spares me. In my pocketbook I noted these three lessons: 1. Much that is good in thought is bad in utterance. 2. It is a fine civic virtue to hold an opinion contrary to the majority, and yet to defend the majority’s rights. 3. To sacrifice one’s conviction to private hatred, and to cloak oneself in civic virtue, is not the finest thing either.—The municipal chief-inspectors we rejected after a short debate.—In the selection of those subjects which we wish to have preliminarily treated yet during the present diet, beyond the towns, religion, and the Hungarian language, easy feasibility chiefly served as the key. Eligibility for office and the right to hold property I rank among them, however, that, declaring the nation’s public opinion through this too, we may at least prepare its winning for the future.—The alternative of the upper Estates between broader civic qualification and direct election gave occasion to a longer committee debate; the majority thought direct election rather to be retained, because this is the common-law principle, which, once established, could hardly be changed so easily, while value, being changeable, the raising or lowering of civic qualification will in any case come repeatedly onto the carpet, and that can easily be broadened.—However, lest a fresh debate again rob time from the assembly, we gave no instruction at all, or, what is still worse, we recommended the defense of the mother-instructions to the bitter end.—We should think that, for the sake of avoiding longer assembly debates, the above procedure was very heroic, did it not occur to us whether it is not again the majority’s part to take this with silence, or not? The Polytechnic, the elementary schools, and the making of the Hungarian language the language of the schools by simple decrees, precisely at the time when the country aims at the establishment of these by law, roused in us the apprehension that the nation’s right of disposal over education is thereby endangered; we saw that the matter could not be left without a word, but as to the how our opinions branched apart; the deliberation proceeding, after the ancient custom, without any preliminary conference, any preparation (which we hold a disgrace), only the next day at verification should we have wondered, had we been accustomed to pay attention at all at verification, that our resolution had turned out such as perhaps no one wanted; for its brief content is that, for the saving of this national right, a protest should be entered in our county minute-book!—Read it: a county minute-book protest!—We shall cover the county’s needs with home-made paper. Our house-treasury must be considerably increased for the repair of county buildings and the increase of county post-horses. On our solitary-system prisons too a great sum of money is spent; about the supplying of our need in this respect we shall decide later. Of all this I shall inform you more fully when our president too submits his report on the state of the county.—The Ludovicean Butler-foundations, which are applied to the schooling of 6 youths of our county, were awarded to the deserving—but were not paid out, for the simple reason that not a penny has yet been sent into the treasury—last year short by a half, etc.—A popular-education book was recommended by its author to the county’s patronage; we handed it over for examination to our national institute, which was set up for the spreading of the Hungarian element, and, they say, still exists even now—and has a fine capital.—My letter already stretches to length, but two more things characteristic of our present condition: A certain great family, by the sale of its estates, could both have set its own affairs in order and made its children (having only daughters) happy. Distant relations, by ancient right, hindered the sale; and the family is free to be ruined, its estates free to pass into the hands of a few profit-seeking usurers; while, perhaps with the impossibility of satisfying a part of its creditors, it is forbidden to make itself and its children happy.—O holy aviticity!—glorious institution!—A certain taxpayer the magistrate condemns in a suit; he makes no objection, but the lord says his jurisdiction was bypassed, and hinders the execution. Armed force, they say, cannot be given, because it was not the condemned man who resisted.—What does not happen under the cloak of legality, at the cost of justice!—Our law-courts begin on November 11, our assemblies on the 18th. 3 From Nógrád. B.-Gyarmat, September 26. For the examination of the financial committee’s work a commission was named on the occasion of our last assembly, in which every political color and non-color was represented. And there was a hitch at once on the threshold. There were those who thought they could recognize the specter of common burden-bearing even in the domino of the committee work, and cried out for incense. There were others who by no means believed there lurked even the shadow of equality in taking not a single thread from the taxpayer’s burden, but increasing his burden even with the armor of the tax-exempt. While others, reflecting in faith that the world too was created out of nothing, found in this work germ enough of a world of national unity and equality to be created.—After a long struggle the votes stood equal, until our presiding deputy-lieutenant too declared himself, and the question was so decided that our deputies should strive to carry through the principle of equal burden-bearing on the broadest possible basis; lest the government nonetheless gain a disposal without responsibility in our financial affairs, if the above-said principle should not be feasible in whole already on account of the shortness of time, let a national committee be named to make the necessary preparations by the next diet. And in the 3 million florins now to be granted, we wish the taxpaying people to share only with the carrying-through of the principle of proportionality; this not being feasible, let the nobility rather bear it itself than together with the taxpayer on so precarious a basis, containing in itself only a fresh imposition of burden.—We indeed hope no blessing from a subsidy, but consistently with that martial-law mode of legislation by which we compel our deliberation, through intolerable laws, to the passing of more preliminary laws, we support the subsidy too only that, by its unbearable burden and fruitlessness, it may open, though with pain, the cataract of the eye of those concerned before the sun of eternal justice. The other essential question, namely touching management and collection, we accepted the dissenting opinion of G. and his colleagues in its whole extent. The mode of our connection with Fiume defended by B. H. found not a single party-adherent. In the rest, a small change excepted, the whole work, even with its not-best key, was approved.—The day of the assembly came; D. O.’s splendid extract was read out; and there was occasion for edifying reflection, super eo: philistinism.—I am not indeed a philologist, but I have nonetheless often pondered how this timely word might be translated into Hungarian, and I settled on “spectabilis.” God forbid that under this name I should understand the body of assessors [táblabíró], whom it is the fashion indeed to mock, but who in our present standing is nonetheless the chief upholder of our moral strength in the provinces; as the example of those declining counties too proves, in which it lost its preponderance against the more dependent officials.—I reflected, then, on the harsh times which now strike our true spectabiles; truly evil times, in which events chase one another so swiftly that what every peaceable citizen but lately turned from with disgust, he now accepts with both hands as a lesser evil. Evil times, in which we had scarcely been able to rejoice at our deliverance from the lion’s claws when the hydra stands again before us. And what we started up sweating from the dream of but the other day, we dare not even speak against today under the tyrant influence of public opinion. So it happened that at our assembly there was no one who would have defended the inviolability of Article 1, Title 9. There was no one who would have opposed the pronouncing of the principle of common burden-bearing, and who at most wished to turn the matter by attaching to it one or two impossible conditions; and when by some of us the house-tax was urged and proposed to be clearly put into instruction, every one of them was very glad even of the leaving of the structure intact. Since at our last assembly we had instructed our deputies not to grant the usual tax until the arrival of clear instruction, it was a great question what was to be done in this matter.—The circumstances not having changed since, it could perhaps not, without some inconsistency, have been simply granted. There was neither cause enough to refuse it, nor force enough to give it weight; we thought it most expedient, then, to leave it to our deputies to urge into law all those subjects which would pour blessing upon the homeland, and to leave the granting of the tax to their discretion in proportion to the hoped-for success. The majority of the speakers already supported this opinion; thereupon our president the deputy-lieutenant, taking up the subject with his usual eloquence, advised the granting of the tax without any clause, and, for the saving of the right to have a say, the urging of the lowering of the amount; recommending to the Estates resignation in this. And there was approval from blaring throats which but a moment before had been in the contrary opinion, and the resolution was born. Timon laughed that his opinion of public opinion was again so confirmed, and softly prayed over to himself that scene of Julius Caesar in which Brutus and Antony orate one after the other to the people. The assessor B. L. wished to grant only 100 silver florins for the pay of a drummer who, on the day of disasters, would summon the nation. That this drummer would probably drum only to deaf ears may, besides other well-founded reasons, be surmised from this too, that when a certain sum of money was proposed to be applied to the reviving of the noble levy, the motion became a voice dying away in the wilderness.—The third subject of our assembly was the arrangement concerning the soldiery. My readers know that in the numerous arsons that occurred in our county a common soldier was found guilty; this common soldier was shot by his guard while escaping, and the countless sufferers of damage remaining without satisfaction, fresh suspicions and forebodings gained ground, which in several places degenerated even into actual assaults against the soldiery.—By the new military disposition this same soldiery would again remain in our county, and since the county would thereby come into a very disagreeable situation, the Estates, for the upholding on all sides of right and equity, resolved on a petition for the placing of another regiment in our county. Our deputy-lieutenant wished to continue the assembly the next day, but on account of the impatience of the Estates hurrying home at breakneck speed, this too, like so many other public affairs, remained a pium desiderium. Had there been but a little election, that galvanizer of our bosoms’ energy, had there been participation—tongues forever silent would have been loosed, etc.—but as it is! 4 From Nógrád. B.-Gyarmat, November 18–26. A late letter again! you will exclaim, and I do not say that I wished to keep up the national character, I do not say that on our bad roads, which in our present circumstances are far freer institutions than the good ones—and so out of sheer radicalism—it was delayed; you would still think I wish to parody. I tell you, then, that you are the cause; why did you choose me for a correspondent, precisely at the end of the diet, whose thought yearns away to the seventh county, whose letters accordingly are only pinings after a happy future and broken hopes in the present.—Many as yet untreated deputy-reports we took cognizance of, because the diet had already come to an end. If we look back on the nearest year and a half, we see many an idea, sown as a little seed, growing imperceptibly amid a hundred counter-struggles, like the tree which will bear its fruits for a late age. The giving of instructions crumbles of itself, finished works are sent to our jurisdictions, and these, though they cling strongly in word to their instructing mark, will nonetheless support the Trieste railway, lay it but before them. Public opinion develops with giant strides, every timely idea has become common property and is carried abroad over the homeland in a hundred rays. The nation learns to unite and becomes such a moral power as the simple negation of the old-fashioned can no longer face. And finally we have learned to trust in ourselves alone, for of our present it may be said: nous ne vivons jamais, nous attendons la vie. (We do not yet now live, we only await life.)—Our deputies will make their report in January. The bishop of Zagreb wrote an exculpatory letter on the charges of Illyrism; who still denies the power of the public spirit? At our last assembly, a proposal for a statute prohibiting the grazing of the meadows from the thaw being set as a subject of deliberation; after every speaker had recognized its expediency from the economic point of view, and the majority its regulability by statute in keeping with our laws: the proposal was accepted. The provisional president of the recently formed provincial branch industry-association, Joób Desseöffy, making a report to the Estates on the association’s behalf, asked that the county pronounce its approval and support of the aim; this, on the strength of the diet’s resolution, taking place amid great enthusiasm, the county resolved henceforth to cover its needs, insofar as it too is a consumer, with home products.—The letter of Hont county was read, concerning the removal of Kossuth from journalism;—the letter was taken cognizance of until the next diet.—A little domestic scene presented itself, which we do not write up if only because we can give neither side wholly the right, and, let anyone say what he will, we like to belong to a party; a party has given birth to everything good and lofty; to seize a party the gods too came down to the walls of Troy; from the point of view of a party I shall always write my letters to the Pesti Hírlap. There was hardly a wiser law than ostracism; the people’s confidence is the grave of freedom; since one great champion of our progress-party slumbered into a better life, the public spirit and participation with us grow apace, everyone trusts more in his own strength, and, as from the sown dragon’s teeth, a warlike people springs up. But in our administrative affairs, which would precisely demand the greatest conscientiousness, more attention and less conversation would be desirable; now no one pays heed to these, trusting that the matter flows off well of itself; and it happened that, after, on repeated reminder, a popular-education subject was read out and the Estates were asked to comment: there was great silence and inquiry as to what the talk was about! And no one knew, until the president briefly laid the matter out again.—Where is there a more aristocratic institution than our county system? Let it be a matter of a rich, a very powerful, and especially over-the-nobility-disposing family, and the row of orators springs up like mushrooms, while the poor man’s cause is decided amid general inattention by the clerk; against Count F. P. a bill-of-exchange claim was adjudged by the bill-court, the suit was appealed; and the securing was hindered; in the meantime the new law intervened, which strips the registered bill of its bill-force; after the law’s arising the bill was registered, and armed force was asked of the county for the execution of the hindered securing; this we refused, though almost with one mind, yet after very long orations, because the suit being appealed, it cannot be regarded as concluded, and so, the nature of the suit’s object having essentially changed during the course of the suit, it was adjudged not to fall under the bill-court’s disposal.—A widow’s petition was read, in which she complains of the endless lengthening-out of a cause of hers laid before the county: the clerk’s office, she says, long ago handed it to the chief justice; the chief justice answers that he long ago handed it to the opposing party’s attorney; this one returns that he handed it to another magistrate for examination; this one happily was not present, and so could not pass the responsibility-without-responsibility further on.—I have said already that there exists with us a national institute for the spreading of the Hungarian language; this now had its reorganization; it gave two thousand twenties each for the securing of the Gyarmat and Losonc infant-asylums, and will apply its capital, running to some 20–24,000 paper florins, as the foundation of a county savings-bank to be formed.—Our convict-labor institution was reopened these days, the work around the prison being given up. 5 From Nógrád. Baculology and something more. From two sides has the little magisterial extemporization that occurred at Gács already been mentioned in these pages, and the matter begins to gain national fame. In Hungary, the classical land of the cudgel-stick, 10 strokes of the cane procure national fame! it does not die away, like “the nightingale’s song” in the “hurricane” of cane-strokes! Many strove after fame in Babylon and many were beaten within its walls; for the first time now this combination of the two succeeded—who still denies progress? Truly I was strengthened still more in the faith that, just as every free institution, for want of the people’s spiritual development and of public opinion, hangs uselessly on its tree like an unripe fruit, so let the people have not even a single article of constitution, but let it be strong in spirit, and it will ripen the ideas of the freest institutions, until they descend of themselves among it like ripe fruit, and the public spirit will be a strong guarantee of their blooming; witness Prussia!—But let us turn to the fact: the magistrate M., by our present institutions, holds power to punish ill-defined police misdemeanors. With us the sole panacea for every misdemeanor is the stick, as regards non-nobles; if then the judge, by his lawful and legal insight, for which no one can stand surety, saw the committed prank to be such as he had before punished countless times, without any subsumption, with 10 strokes of the stick, if since then no law has changed the institution, I believe he could not, without injustice toward all hitherto punished, make an exception in this one case.—What is the consequence from this? It is certainly not my intention to defend the fact, but I wish to bring out that fallacy which lies in the conservatives’ procedure; if the poisonous fruit grows, they are the first to cry anathema upon it, they devise the witticisms about “gács-ing” and “acting the joiner”; they show, against their will, that things are not good if the tree can bear poison, yet if someone says: the root must be cut out, the institution must be changed, they will not for the world lay hand to the axe, but only go on scolding the fruit.—Yes, in my view the institution here is faulty, the people ripe for its changing, as it shows by finding the old intolerable; and so long as we draw no line between police and criminal misdemeanors, so long as we uphold our satrapal system as the palladium of our Eastern descent, so long let us not take amiss what thus happens.—To entrust freedom to individualities, though it may often be salutary, is nonetheless a more precarious thing than freedom secured by law, though within narrower bounds. I speak, going back, a few words of our law-courts, which may serve as a general picture. Scarcely has the time yet passed when sayings of this kind: “25 for him, he is a Jew anyway,” or “12 for him, that he may not stand before the court in vain,” were the order of the day; when a landowner of a neighboring county, as presiding judge, said: “I have already agreed with my miller, he gives me 50 florins, I give him 12 strokes”; or when a magistrate of one county adjudged even 24 strokes in a pledge-suit. This time has passed; but we owe it only to individualities, only to the power of public opinion, not to reforms. Thanks to the diligence and zeal of our second deputy-lieutenant and of the attorney’s office, we no longer have detainees waiting years for a sentence (under the court they received sentence in 89); but can this make up for bad institutions? if changing judges at every court now adjudge half a year for two stolen sheep, now three months for six; while the charge of inconsistency weighs upon no one, because—as a veteran official and colleague of ours remarked—anything can be fastened on the county, for no one takes the fault upon his own person, and among so many people it crumbles away so that at last it becomes nothing. What can make up for the institution? if a great inquisitor sends in at the beginning of May a wanderer whose clothes are ragged and who has no passport in his pocket, that he may rest in prison until the middle of August—insofar as the work around the new prisons can be called rest—and finally be condemned in prisoner-keeping costs, then may continue his journey, and for the little delay may console himself like the noble man who cannot, from the highway for which he does not pay, have himself dragged out for half a day—and pays. What can make up for the institution? if it sometimes even comes to light that the voluntary confessions are spiced with cuffs, etc., and other such little appurtenances are met with too of the usual written procedure, which we at least have long kept with doors open to anyone. Finally, what makes up for the institution? if, for example, in many an infanticide the judge is compelled, with revolted feeling, to doubt: is the malefactor more guilty, or the judicial procedure, which, by the perversity of our social relations and its moral prejudice, leads into the abyss precisely the better-feeling victim? The greatest part of our prisoners are formed by the shepherds and cottars, these proletarians of our homeland, for whom Count D. E. raised his voice with fatherly solicitude, that the protective-association would make their needs dearer. I can assure the noble count that these are clad in such Adamic simplicity, and purely in fabrics made by themselves, that this fine fatherly solicitude too may quiet down, and if we have factories where these people will find some livelihood besides theft, I am sure they will appear before our court in smaller number, and from their mode of earning in better clothes, not in such national—rags. Another part of our prisoners come into the cool through drunkenness and through that peculiar itch for bravado, to settle affairs of honor with the back of an axe; this, I think, is the remnant of insurrectional heroism, that the lack of education. Inveterate wickedness or cunning is very rare; our prisons, where even twenty are shut up together, sentenced, detained, faulty and guilty, are veritable caverns of crime and unhealthiness.—After a week’s working Themis went to sleep for a quarter-year, good night! till we meet again at the—stick. From my assembly-report I left out the letter of Sáros county complaining of military misdemeanors, in which it calls for a petition. Our resolution was that we must wait to see whether this misdemeanor will be punished, as is to be hoped, or not? in which case alone it will become a grievance.—Our quarterly general assemblies begin on January 13. At Csesztve, December 14. 6 From Nógrád. B.-Gyarmat, January 13–18. The deputies’ report being set for this quarterly assembly of ours, and the deliberations being led in person by our publicly respected lord-lieutenant, we flocked together more numerously than usual. After the lord-lieutenant’s pithy opening speech, our first deputy-lieutenant took the floor. The time has come, he said, to make his usual report on the standing of the county and on all branches of internal government; but the renewal of officials being already at hand in any case, when both he and the body of officials must give account before the Estates of how, during their three years’ labor, they have answered the demands of the age and of justice and the confidence which raised them to their places; and that they may look with quiet bosom toward the future; he postponed his detailed report too to that time. The first court-counsel ordinance was read, with expressions, pronounced in the minutes too, of appreciative joy, which, though it arose in a private matter, has certainly become of historical notability. Our deputies then made their official report; first Kubinyi F. gave by word some sketch of the more extensive written work, whose 1st part contains the subjects treated but not submitted, the 2nd the submitted but not royally approved, the 3rd those formed into law, the 4th the grievances, where we became acquainted with very interesting data, especially regarding the Parts. The last and most interesting part of the report sets forth their individual views both on the obstacles that hinder greater success and on what is next to be done. They say that, with the progress-banner once seized, one cannot stand still without stepping back, and, marking out the points at which the subjects are to be taken up again at the next diet, they advise the preparing in good time of instructions relating only to general principles, that these may rather ripen into public opinion and complete the laws that fulfill the nation’s will only by half. They say that, since in the meantime the counties cannot be left out of the reckoning, we must strive by their means to put our principles into effect as far as possible within the barriers of the law, and to execute these existing laws strictly.—The practical use of this interesting report is far greater still for the future, for it is as it were a mirror of the whole diet procedure, of the manner in which things stand and of the deficiencies; being therefore received with warm participation, our due satisfaction with our deputies, our appreciation and thanks were ordered to be entered in the minutes.—For the manner of putting into effect the law on public works a committee was named, and we saw again a lesson that, so long as the law tolerates a barrier between person and person, we give occasion to a hundred anomalies and to different interpretations in different authorities. Certainly there are few authorities where one would wish to apply the new law as conscientiously as with us—exempla sunt odiosa—yet we run upon a hundred reefs, round which we have sailed, who knows with what fortune?—Thus: do physicians, apothecaries, etc., owe public work?—we excepted them. Is the carrying of official correspondence likewise to be reckoned among public works, or to fall under such an arrangement as the post-horses? In the first case it is to be feared that it will eat up the greatest part of the common force; in the second it serves as a fresh and considerable imposition on the house-treasury. We ranked it among public works.—He who holds a half house-plot works only half as much as the whole-plot holder; how then shall he who holds 6 houses work, as a simple housed cottar? we so resolved. There are places with us where one house-plot is held by 32 persons; these will work in common 12 days, a 32-house cottar 96 days.—Our standing committee occupied with diet-subjects was instructed to prepare in good time instructions relating to chief principles, and to give its opinion too on what would be to be done by the jurisdictional way, by the next diet.—A lieutenancy-council ordinance was read, which orders the by-laws of all associations existing in our county to be submitted, forbidding henceforth the forming of societies without the confirmation of their by-laws. The submitting of our publicly known associations to our next general assembly was resolved, and for that time we reserved to ourselves the detailed examination of the ordinance, entering into its principles. The investigation of the chief magistrate Gellén, made on the president’s request, into the inequitable treatment committed by the magistrate M. I. upon a manufacturer, was read. In consequence of which the county strictly disapproved in the minutes M.’s procedure against this untimely spirit, attested in the county’s instructions too. And henceforth the cudgeling, as regards manufacturers, craftsmen, village judges, and other such people, was by resolution taken out of the magistrates’ hands.—It being often experienced that several attorneys carry off the suits, partly from the judge, partly from the suit-archive, and detain them a long time, to prevent this it was resolved that the attorney who carries off a suit should enter it in a minute-book kept for that very end, together with the term within which he promises to bring it back; which if he should neglect, he binds himself to pay 20 silver florins, which, with the injured party as plaintiff, will, on the strength of this obligation, be exacted by the verbal way.—The common force, the property-proportion necessary for the levying of diet-costs, and, for the coming renewal of officials, the nobility, the same committee will register, and its post-horses the noble treasury will pay.—The accounts of the building of the prison were examined; its costs above 28 thousand florins we covered mostly by the collection of old arrears and by economy; the cartage of wood, stone, etc., our taxpayers did.—That the building may be used expediently, considerable side-wings are still needed; a debate arose, who should pay for them? agreement was easy that the nobility should, but whether it should be imposed on them with binding force, as at the building of our county hall, or only as a free offer, we long debated, until it became a resolution that it should be imposed by property-proportion equally on everyone; but its payment should be left to the feeling of magnanimity and civic duty. Heaven grant much fortune!—I promised that I would report on the state of our treasuries, prisons, etc., but I too postpone it to the time when our deputy-lieutenant makes his report.—Our lord-lieutenant graced us with his presence till Thursday morning; he put into effect the office-eligibility of non-nobles by the appointment of a few assessors and jurors; he endowed our infant-asylum and our clerks’ pension-fund with considerable sums, and, departing from among us, our old reverence and love accompanied him still.—I must mention here the noble offer of Katalin Feley-Agner, an inhabitant of Vác, who sacrificed 400 silver florins for the benefit of our B.-Gyarmat infant-asylum—every laudatory commentary is superfluous, where the deed speaks.—The 1489 florins 30 kreuzers come in at the diet for our county’s fire-victims was distributed, by certain established categories, together with the sum collected in the county.—After the election of court-assessors we set our next assemblies for April 14. 7 From Nógrád. B.-Gyarmat. For June 23 an extraordinary general assembly was announced, on the subject of the levying of diet-costs; we heard in it many fine things too, only the above-written subject itself was left out, the audit-office not being able to get ready with its work.—This image is yours, homeland! At your diet too there is everything, only legislation is always-always left out.—The lawful time of the renewal of officials having run out, we asked for its holding. In many a county on such an occasion great words resound, indeed the officials even resign, if they are assured that they will be detained, and may bring a heroic sacrifice to the homeland, that they may—serve further. But the age of spectacular farces has run out; we know that to leave the county in anarchy is no great patriotism, and we simply ask for the renewal of officials. For a correspondent of abler pen than mine, what a brilliant prospect. Ferenc Kubinyi reminded the Estates that the law ordering the reannexation of the Parts is not yet put into effect; he proposed therefore that the royal attorney be called upon to execute it even with armed force. This motion, with the amendment of Károly Huszár, namely that the royal court be asked whether it has had its sentence executed, after a short deliberation went through. 8 From Nógrád, November 11. At our general assembly, the minutes of the interim small assemblies being read out, attention was roused by that small-assembly resolution dated October 6, which named a deputation for the installation of the new acting lord-lieutenant of Heves county. Thirty-six spoke on this subject.—K. F. opened the deliberation with an inspiring oration.—He said: how to pronounce the principle and to attest the contrary on the field of action not only does no good, but, on account of our weak moral standing, brings the principle itself into prostitution.—And we, who first raised an anxious voice, who first called the country’s jurisdictions to wakeful attention—with what face shall we step before the homeland and the next diet, if we fall the object of the (perhaps somewhat premature) victory-shouting mockeries of the Budapesti Hiradó, through a faction which, inconsistently with the principle pronounced by our general assembly, named a deputation for the adorning of a solemnity which could only increase our anxiety. He therefore advises that the small assembly’s resolution be disapproved and this written to Heves county.—Hereupon B. L. took the floor, condemning the president alone, for why did he lay this subject under deliberation, which could call forth a resolution standing in such opposition to the county’s spirit.—The president leaves K.’s speech without analysis, because it moves on the field of deliberation, but shows the dangerous side of B.’s principle, which the president could use against the opposition too just as B. now wished it used against the conservatives; whereas the firm standing of a president can be only so long as he is equitable toward every party and, respecting the public’s rights, suspends the judging of a subject not on his own will but on the public’s will, as in the present case he too did. For the rest, he entrusts his political life undisguised to the public’s judgment. K. K., our county’s most eloquent orator: he wishes the pieties to be held in respect; such a piety he holds a county’s participation in its neighbor’s joy; but we do not now live in such a time in which a jurisdiction’s joy is shared unconditionally by the neighbor; Heves may rejoice, for in the person it hopes a good exchange, but Nógrád may be anxious, for its principle is other. He brought forward an old statute (passed at the reannexation of the seaboard), which forbids the small assemblies from naming complimentary deputations; the speaker does not condemn the assembly so much, but, using that Roman example of one who said: “choose the wisest and most deserving”—he condemns the president the deputy-lieutenant most for his procedure in this. F. the assistant-clerk brought forward against the obsolete statute the contrary practice of several years; he asserted that this deputation is not in opposition to the county’s earlier resolution, because Heves had an administrator even before the rumoring of the new system; and it was rooted in the law, which permits the lord-lieutenancies attached to often-vacated offices to be filled by deputy. And the present change in the person is in any case joyful for Heves. Sz. H., one of our finest capacities, remarked: that this does not yet exclude the fact that, if a new system really exists, the county, having pronounced its anxiety on this point, could not consistently send a committee. The general assembly having the undeniable right to alter the small assembly’s resolutions, however, when this has already gone into effect, this cannot happen otherwise than by a non-approval made in the minutes and the informing of the erring Heves. The majority on the subject was already clear that the small assembly’s resolution cannot be approved; only between “disapproval” and “non-approval,” “communication” and “non-communication” with Heves was there still a difference of opinion, and—if we can rank man among principles—the outbursts of those who “wished, withdrawing the responsibility from the assembly, to lay it on the president alone.”—It was brought forward that for the president, gathering together a few men dependent on him, it is easy to overturn the county’s resolutions; it was answered that, although the small assembly was held at the time established by resolution and in the county-seat itself, out of superfluous caution it was even circulated throughout the county. I do not wish to weary the reader with the further enumeration of the disputations, for whoever knows county assemblies long ago met the soul-killing host of repetitions. He knows well that he who begins his speech with such sayings: “I do not wish to be personal”—is unable to the very end to part from the person—he knows well that he who promises to orate “briefly” and “only to the matter,” speaks at the greatest length and most strongly; and he who thinks to do his party great services, often leads its cause onto such ground where the better man begins to waver, whether it would not be better to turn back, or pours the cold water of his ideas over the already kindled enthusiasm.—I do not wish, above all, to probe further the many details of our today’s disputation, lest the reader, who has hitherto known our county’s deliberations by their manly composure, be compelled to believe that we too sank among those counties which could perhaps no longer even deliberate in the dark, because they would not see which principle whom defends.—And indeed our assembly soon regained its old calm; our county is too strong for a little wind to be able to carry it away. Our resolution was: “that the small assembly’s procedure is not approved in the minutes, being contrary to the spirit of our April resolution.” Let the B.-P. Hiradó learn that it is not always he who rejoices earliest who rejoices best. For, as a distinguished writer said: “the tree sheds its leaves, but the tree thereby grows.” On the second day, on the logical consequences of this resolution, we determined: that the paying of respects in the county’s name, by the body of officials or by anyone, to anyone, and so to the deputy possibly to be appointed in place of our beloved lord-lieutenant too, is forbidden; this resolution being advised beforehand also by the consideration that the purity of the principle and its independence of the person should thereby the more stand out. On this occasion Count Z. J. set forth a fine image in Christ, whom they bore in solemn procession to Jerusalem, where a few days later they crucified him; which the president completed thus, that surely it will be dearer too to every honest man if the threat of crucifixion come first, and after fuller acquaintance the reverence. On the third day it went into resolution: that the money-sum remaining over from the noble treasury, after the covering of all unavoidable needs, be applied to the buying-up of grain, which, being sold in spring at a moderate price, may ease the want. On K.’s motion, steps were taken for the acquiring, on the nation’s behalf, of H. I.’s library of scientific worth. Sz. I.’s appointment being communicated to us, we declared indeed our joy as regards the person, but, the lieutenancy-council being arranged by law, we made our protest on that point.—We received the letter of Varasd, in which it complains of E.’s removal from the lord-lieutenancy without a suit, and recommends his cause to our support; this, after a short and manly disputation, gave birth to a petition and to a noting for the diet.—For the averting of famine a committee was sent out.—So much for today: any more notable subjects that may yet occur Timon will hasten to communicate to you. 9 From Nógrád. (Continuation of the general assembly.) Our prisons built on the solitary system being finished, a committee was named to give an opinion on their application. This submitted its work, which was based on the part of the penal code applicable by the county too. The debates got going; it was said that the solitary system cannot be put into effect outside a diet, that the 1000 silver florins of yearly cost bound up with the putting-into-effect cannot, as a standing burden, be forced upon the nobility, as the work advises, that it is not in the county’s power to set up the new inspector’s office without lieutenancy-council approval. The three champions of this opinion, S. G., the assessor Sz. M., and the veteran champion R. F., accustomed to fight to the bitter end, long contended with the vast majority, which brought as answer that, just as the now-prevailing modes of punishment are not ordered by law, so to replace them with more perfect ones, which are in no case against the law, is possible even outside a diet; the more so because, comparing the dreadful prisons of some counties with the good and healthy prisons of other counties, there will certainly be a greater difference than between the latter prisons and the solitary system. Neither can this be christened a standing burden, because it will last only until the end of the next diet, from which, in this pressing need of the age, we cannot but hope provision;—indeed not even for that time is the nobility burdened directly, for all these costs will be made up partly by money in the treasury, partly by money still to be collected. Finally, we need not fear higher obstacles either, because, our prison’s solitary-system plan being approved by the lieutenancy council, it tacitly contained in itself its application too. The solitary system, then, will shortly be applied, and as chief inspector the assembly’s public named Andor Sooky by common will.—I mentioned the committee sent out to prepare a proposal for the easing of the coming dearth. It was proposed that the distilling of brandy from potatoes be forbidden, and a great quantity of foodstuff thereby saved for the needy; everyone sees the salutary side of this motion, but at the same time one cannot but see its shadow-parts too, the thousand difficulties of carrying it through.—Then the official upon whom the weight of the three short years presses, etc., etc.; a shade of opinion developed, then, which advises the setting of a certain term. And the two more kindred shades, instead of fusing, accusing each other, after the ancient custom, with the greatest passion of cause-betrayal—again ancient custom—naturally those who wanted nothing remained in the majority. A few useful little resolutions were renewed, namely: noisy banquets, church-fairs, etc., are forbidden; the magistrate shall not adjudge tavern-debt beyond one florin, etc. And the subject was concluded.—We made arrangements for the just distribution of the grain in the county granaries. We prepared preliminary plans for the application of the public works. Our next quarterly general assembly we set for January 19. Our law-courts for the 12th.

II. POLEMICAL ARTICLES

We have fallen behind in everything. We slept a hundred-year sleep; time rushed on around us, civilization rushed on; but no one held it against the hero that he turned to rest after a battle fought and won. And if, in the midst of a Europe blossoming in prosperity, our country’s fields, its industry, its public spirit lay fallow, there yet lived in its inhabitants the consciousness that their fallowness had been ploughed up by that very battle which saved universal civilization for mankind; and if the dreams of our repose were glorious in the manner of “extra hungariam non est vita,” who would have held it against the hero either, if upon the mounds of graves he dreamed of greatness and freedom? But forever pointed back to the healed scar, begging alms from those he had saved, this would tear down our magnanimity; and the longer the sleep, the more painful the self-knowledge of the waking, the more shameful the sense of subjection. Free and independent is that man only, says a sage, who in the covering of his needs depends on no other. This rule holds so far even in the mutual relation of the material and the spiritual world that, just as a self-respecting beggar furnished with loftier notions of freedom belongs among the rarities, so on the faces of all those men who have secured their fate by their own strength there radiates a certain kind of self-contentment, openness, and dignity. And let us now cast a glance at our country: the Hungarian, as if a curse of fate lay upon him, looks with mistrustful eye on everything homegrown; renouncing himself, he leans on the arm of the foreigner, and, amid his natural riches, is incapable of living on with even the least comfort without that foreigner’s friendship. The great mass of our produce, which could supply the greater part of the population with the necessary manufactures and, through the livelihood of domestic processing, offer the occasion to procure them, we now scatter abroad, that we may take a small part of it back in manufactures—thus depriving the lower classes of society both of the livelihood and of the great sum of these manufactures. But even this is not enough; by the laws of industrial development, luxury grows daily; the Hungarian, blindly carried away, wishes to follow it, but his inner wealth has not increased, for the soil, even for the great, scarcely yields more grain than twenty years ago, we do not raise its value by manufacture after the foreign example, and so—for all that we make up our expenditures even with the ever-flowing revenue of our mines—money daily dwindles in our country, and we rush unstoppably toward material bondage. But let us consider too the interests of the universal monarchy: beyond doubt the firmest component of the Austrian estate, and the one most fit for the development of yet many new forces, is Hungary; its maintenance and its flourishing are therefore a vital question. Or is it not certain that, even if our country did not for some years yet cease to be a good market for its other parts, now incapable of further development, in those few years, without the development of domestic industry, it would be wholly exploited, and, while it struggled with the specter of final impoverishment, every vital force dying out in part along with the germs slumbering within it, the market of the industry-plying parts would indeed cease as well, and the whole estate would be threatened with final ruin.—The idea of an industrial association was therefore sounded in our country too. The idea was sounded, which is most fitting for us, who can look for help from nowhere outside ourselves. Most fitting for a people which still hopes for a future, and which, able to be inspired for the homeland’s happiness, soars too high to strike against the crag of foolish fashion and petty vanity; and such a nation I love to believe ourselves; and where is the man who will let himself be shamed by the example of lofty women in little sacrifices of comfort, if the homeland’s welfare asks only such things—not blood, not self-sacrifice—of that homeland for which blood and self-sacrifice too have already often enough been a holy offering. There is no longer an untrodden road before us; we need only look into history to see smoking altars on which young, old, child, and woman, with enthusiasm, heaped foreign goods, and their breasts beat high beneath homespun frieze, for they knew that the rising smoke is sweet to the god of peoples, for in it lies the birth of a once-more-blossoming homeland. And yet—who would believe it—upon this plan too lies the curse that is the lot of everything lofty. Against this plan, which aims at the homeland’s flourishing and thereby at the very existence of all parties, a faction likewise rises up, and the protective association, instead of a common uniting bond, becomes an apple of Eris, as in a sick body every nourishment turns to poison.—I called it a faction, for if it were the public opinion of a great part of the nation that, concerning the sacrifices of vanity and slight comfort to be made for the homeland’s happiness, says that great exaltation is needed for its persuasion—which, struggling against the more inspiring belief in easy victory, falls into a far greater sin, and, despairing in advance of the outcome and of the nation’s character, breaks its staff over it, though of the man who renounces himself even the gods renounce, which, at the hearing of philippics, cries not battle but counts up the grammatical errors and comes forward with sophisms bearing on petty, detail-creeping contingencies: of such a nation, I say, I should have to despair as to its future. But let us look at the soundness of their reasons. Because Hungary cannot cover all its own needs, therefore let us not secure for it even what it can cover. Truly, to this jesting reason I can answer only with a jest, and a Tisza-region gentleman comes to mind who, when his gardener could not make a garden on the surface of the ice, drove him off, on the ground that he had no need just then of a gardener. If the protective association comes to be, he says, many a foreign article too will be sold as a Hungarian article; therefore they will not secure the marketability even of the genuine Hungarian articles—whereas precisely this follows from it: that there is need of greater domestic production and so of the support of it, for hitherto it does not answer our needs, nor can its development be hoped for, if it must hide under a foreign name.—The exclusion of foreign articles will work like a reward for bad work. Count D. E.’s very often-declared antipathy to every foreign example prompted him, presumably, now too to close his eyes toward the foreign world—in which how this exclusion worked, its most perfect industrial works show. But if we deny even the facts of history, then there is no ground for dispute. But indeed Count D. E. renounces in advance all hope of domestic competition; he calls our enthusiasm a fire of straw, and warns the parties concerned in advance to beware of building enterprises upon it—for which the homeland owes him great thanks. He brings forward further that the foreign world will perhaps give its articles below the manufacturing price, and that in the competition we shall go under. Natural, from D. E., is this reasoning, for he has lost his faith in our nation’s character; he believes that a lowering of prices, which could not even last for long, will be enough to make the Hungarian break the word given to his homeland. Or does he mean the price-lowering only on such articles as will not be under the association’s protection? Then what harm? at most the foreign world gets less money from us. As a worthy crown to the whole, the writer brings forward one more reason, which again shows that the B. Híradó is founding a peculiar political school: he raises his voice for the keeping-whole of the interests of those who trade in foreign goods, and warns in full earnest that for this we may sacrifice the flourishing of domestic industry—for this merchant-body’s, he says, spirited collaboration with us, namely that for the shipping of our money abroad it is so kind as to accept certain interest from us. I confess this theory took me by surprise. From the placing of merchant-trade and industry face to face I never believed one could draw out the pereat of industry, when national wealth was certainly formed not by such trade but by industry, which creates trade for itself but is not created by it. So sound, then, are Count D. E.’s counter-reasons. In them I find only the new proof of an old doctrine: that there was no holy principle, no truth, which at its rise was not fought against. I see in them the fulfillment of a natural law, by which the day arises out of night.—But why do I deal in such great examples?—There comes to mind the German philistinism which, after the French war, wished to bring back the old, uncomfortable mail-coaches, only because the far more practical new ones had been introduced by the French. Let the Budapest bell-ringer ring, then, and let everyone in the country ring with him according to his ability, that the nation may unite at this altar too; and if a little faction yet contends against us, this will be ranked among us by that very factor which they raised to such great importance—and that is: fashion.

I went about as an apostle in the cause of the industry-protection association, using also my refutations published in these pages to win over the adherents of the B. H. But there were many who, shaking their heads, said: We shall await the leader’s reply; who knows what turn it will give the matter, what favorable enlightenment it will pour over assertions that seem so wrong-headed.—And the 83rd number of the B. H. appeared. Count D. E., under no. I, does indeed mean to cudgel me down, but yet—thanks, a thousand thanks to him in the cause’s name!—The people has judged between us. I could not grasp this success, until an aged assessor enlightened me as follows: The defense of a wrong cause demands much more skill than that of a good one, which fights itself out on its own. There are, then, certain stratagems of war which county presidents and journalists use in such cases; these blind the ignorant, but to the eyes of the more practiced they are unfailing marks of the cloaked—emptiness. I shall enumerate a few: If the principle to be overthrown is so far recognized that one cannot soberly stand up against it, we must approve it, extol it; only we would wish one little modification, that we too may rank ourselves among its zealots.—But the little modification is then like one who would heartily approve the almanac, but would only wish the calendar left out of it.—Thus does Count D. E. in his points 3, 18, 19; he approves the raising of domestic industry—who would be against it—only the noise, the action, the signs of life would be left out; 32, 37: one need only wait, leave the thing to itself.—That is: one need do nothing. Only the subscribing patriots are those factors on which enterprises may be built. Another method: we approve the principle, and at the end fasten on, with a mournful air, a but, and, affecting a patriotic grief, tie to the principle such a circumstance as, its impossibility or aimlessness being shown, lets us pronounce death over the whole; by no means advising the supply of the seen deficiencies, or some other expedient arrangement. The listener, convinced that a friend of the cause speaks, does not greatly examine the but, and shares his sorrow that the principle is not for this world. Thus does Count D. E. when, after approving the principle, he attaches to the protective association, as inevitable consequences, the frauds that will frustrate its aim—keeping deep silence that men have cheated hitherto too—he tells of the razor that does not cut and the cloth that is rags, and leaves out the competition developing in the homeland too—21, 22, 24, 25. And he draws a conclusion: because N. died on Friday, therefore Friday killed N. It is good to approve the subject, to promise its support, in such a circumstance as when it need no longer be supported—to promise our help for the time when there will no longer be an enemy. “I’ll teach you to walk when you’re a man,” or: “I’ll help you when you no longer beg”; this is comfortable too, and fine things can be said this way—indeed we can gain by it a certain veneer of statecraft, if we use it cleverly.—Thus does Count D. E. in points 29–32, and further in the 29th. If the subject to be overthrown is soul-stirring, exciting: we mix it duly with the gruel of boredom and the long broth of dismemberment and dissection; attention grows weary, and the patience-lost, to be rid of it, says yes.—Thus does Count D. E. with Kossuth’s whole letter. It is often successful, especially in the counties, to soothe men of greater authority with flattering words, that we may contend the more securely; vanity is a great factor in politics.—Count D. E. tried this too, but hardly found his man. If we cannot refute the defensive reasons, we proclaim aloud, with a chivalrously contemptuous smile: “The reasons brought forward collapse of themselves before the insight of everyone who lays claim to sober sense; their refutation would be a waste of time” and so on. And many a man is ready to disown his own sense and doubts himself, whether the thing is so, and dares not pronounce his counter-opinion, because it lays claim to sober sense. Thus does Count D. E. when he harps on youthful prepotency. If it is possible—and what is not possible!—let us make the most serious subject ridiculous; if the laughers are on our side, the victory is ours. Thus does the bell-ringer of the B. H., out of whom a better genius once spoke unguardedly. Or let us refute a few of the weaker reasons, a few thoughts torn out and wrong-headedly put together, and keep silent about the strong ones, as if nothing had happened, and celebrate the victory; many a man goes with the glitter.—Thus does the worthy leader chiefly with E.’s latest articles. More expedient than all these, to draw out of the matter obscure warnings, ill-omened prophecies: who knows what lies at the bottom?—The third step will come, and so on; this terrifies the weak, and these are the majority.—Thus does Count D. E. in the 6th and other points. Finally, if we must despair of the maintaining of some institution, because the god of right so wills it, and so we would content ourselves with its maintenance even modified, we by no means pronounce this: let us contend for its keeping whole to the last gasp, and if, after a long struggle, we acquiesce, as a gracious concession, in its modification, and the progressives rejoice over the victory won: we may laugh, for precisely that has happened which we wished. This is the general direction “and principle of the Budapesti Hírlap, which so many have sought in it in vain.” The good old man has finished, and I once more say thanks to Count D. E., for through him I learned these fine doctrines. I must still, much grieved, return to his great wrath. If a man of national authority raps us on the knuckles, against whom we have neither strength nor courage to stand up, we are wont to act like the schoolmaster who, beaten by his wife, in his great wrath—did nothing—but went to school and tormented his pupils. Kossuth is the housewife, Count D. E. the schoolmaster, his school is Timon—who, for the rest, does not wish to hide under this name, if only that the worthy leader of the B. H., who wisely discovered (as an English traveler discovered Pest) that this name is the legal property of a Greek sage, may not cite him for the penalty of the mask.—In Count D. E.’s remaining points I found not one that is not sufficiently refuted in my friend L. Tóth’s well-grounded treatises. And so, by way of farewell, I present my third thanks: that the worthy leader, in one of his points, finds the human race growing old—thus he will surely not deem the non-noble inhabitants of my homeland too unripe for the exercise of political rights.—K. Csesztve, December 10, 1844.

REPLY TO THE OPEN LETTER ON THE MATTER OF CENTRALIZATION

In numbers 98–99 of the Jelenkor, the article “The Defense of the County,” on account of its cleverly spun pseudo-reasonings and its persuasive manner, calls for a refutation, which we here attempt; and from the editorship’s well-known equity we hope, in the name of my fellow partisans, for its acceptance in the matter of centralization. “The county will swallow centralization,” this is the principal thesis of the writer, Mr. Keresztúry, and in this confident belief he mocks as martyrs the little battalion that fights for the principles of the Pesti Hírlap, and out of whose circle centralization, according to K., will never break forth; because against it is the feeling of the people both within and without the bulwarks of the constitution. The former out of jealousy for its rights; the latter, because it may more easily hope for entry into the lower county sphere of rights than into the higher legislative category. If these things stand thus, let us not spin our reasoning further, let us lay down the weapon on which the people’s blessing does not rest. Our country is not a tabula rasa, its citizens are not carved out of stumps, and our words will become—and should become—flesh only if sympathy embraces them. But if we too have succeeded in giving voice to the thought that lives, like a secret intimation, in the breasts of many: then let our small number not dishearten us—12 apostles carried abroad the words of redemption, they were crucified, but the cross was set upon the altar. And hope sustains us that this latter is the case.—For how could we suppose of that privileged order, which with a magnanimity unexampled in history lays its material interest at the feet of the common good, that out of foolish jealousy it should oppose the reform which it otherwise recognizes as salutary—the more so when its rights are not even thereby curtailed, as we shall show! But life too proves our assertion. This privileged class drew up the bill on the national financial administration, urged the annual diet, the transferring of verification to the diet, and so on—so many levers of centralization. And the people outside the bulwark will certainly feel a greater sympathy toward that newer idea which already at its birth brought with it, as an integral part of itself, the endowment of every citizen with constitutional rights, than toward the county, of which for 8 centuries (?) it felt only the weight.—How Mr. K. can call the political influence to be won in the county a lower sphere of rights than that which the centralized country gives its citizens, we cannot grasp, when in his whole article he is precisely showing how much even of our individual influence we lose through centralization; and so he would surely, if Mr. K. had good logic, place that lower sphere of rights—which the man outside the bulwark more easily hopes to attain—in the centralized country. But weightier is the charge that the Pesti Hírlap, by this new doctrine of theirs, has bred division and is driving the homeland to ruin or casting it into stagnation, disputing about dogmas while at the gate the enemy’s weapon clatters; and so does 99 times more harm than the pre-transubstantiation Pesti Hírlap. How can anyone lay claim to good logic who, with a principle condemned to the circle of a few martyrs, a few lines lower topples a nation’s fate and casts a chock under the wheel of progress! Truly, if we believed our homeland so unviable that the forming of a new and peaceful political party could already cast it down in a heap, we should not hope that it would live through even the next decade—which, with the development of public life, will inevitably form parties and show stronger movements of life in the existing ones; and yet we seek the very blossoming of our homeland precisely in the future. To the charge of dogmas let our previous articles answer, and we may boldly ask our readers: did we ever neglect to follow with watchful attention the age’s needs and its practical good? That through all these our chief principle runs like a red thread is natural; this every man owes to the principle that has ripened in him into firm conviction. But if Mr. K. holds it to be a mere dogma, why these great guns against it? if it is a vital question, why this charge? (and that it is a vital question we shall show). That we cause 99 times more harm than the former Pesti Hírlap—since this sentence of Mr. K.’s already presupposes that the old Pesti Hírlap too caused harm—can, before those who hold the former Pesti Hírlap to have been useful [whose number is legion. The writer.], be only most flattering to us, for Mr. K. ascribes to us 99 times more effect and so, in their eyes, more good. But this subject coming up on the carpet, we cannot omit to say a few words about the former and the present Pesti Hírlap. Many set these two periods in such opposition, and draw between them such parallels, as do not at all hold up if a man looks more deeply into things. Publicity, public life, national self-consciousness were in perfect (?) stagnation. What was here most urgently to be done? First the nation had to be shaken out of its apathy, that there might be an ear to heed our word. The self-consciousness and public spirit had to be set in motion, that there might be a heart to turn into blood the words taken in by the ear. We had to firm up and purify our present national condition, for the road to the future can be prepared only through the present, only the present can give birth to a happier future.—In all these the flame-word of K. L. succeeded in celebrating a brilliant triumph. The past was overcome, and now, when we had to turn to the future, do you suppose K. L. would have continued his former role, would have agitated the contending crowd by holding before its eyes the perversity of its situation, without pointing to the future: “Lo! there is the bread!”? Surely not; he would now take the age’s needs, the future’s fate, under an almost scientific dissection, and those who, after blazing agitation, are so much against their taste for the dry scientific treatise, would gape at the deep-meaning articles from that pen which had seemed so glorious to them so long as it sounded the summons, but just exactly so long; the struggle itself—oh how tedious! It is clear, then, that the two Pesti Hírlaps are not in themselves contradictory; on the contrary, the former had to rouse and secure the present, that we might provide for the future. K. L. might indeed have had another view of this future, but even if so (which his several very valuable articles do not show), then that there should be different constitutional parties existing and contending is surely an outflow of his principles, for in this battle at most the worse principle is annihilated, not the homeland.—But we have strayed too far. Back, then. After these stirring words—which in the extract were so dwarfed because we drew off their tinsel—Mr. K. very desirably says: “But to the matter,” and let us see! “1st. The Pesti Hírlap’s logic is bad, which sets the county, a single institution, in opposition to centralization, which is a whole constitution. Or it simply does not dare to pronounce its ultimate aim, directed at the overthrow of the whole constitution; thus its logic is mystic too.” First I ask: what is that chief feature which characterizes every constitution?—surely nothing other than the securing of the nation’s certain participation in the powers of state. The different measure and manner make the different constitutions. What did the Hungarian constitution choose as such a manner in legislation?—the county through representatives. What in execution?—largely the county within its own sphere. What in oversight?—the county through petitions and grievances. What does the Pesti Hírlap’s centralization want? It too wishes to secure the nation’s participation in the powers of state, but it wishes a change only as to the manner—this being able, in its conviction, to happen more purposefully in all three branches through the united national force. And so its logic is not faulty in setting county and centralization in opposition; and it is not mystic, because everyone who has any conception of the constitution in general, and of the Hungarian constitution in particular, knows—or if not, can find it clearly in the Pesti Hírlap—what it means to want centralization in the county’s place. 2nd. “The Pesti Hírlap’s logic is bad, because if governmental unity is compatible with the county, why break against it? and that it is compatible we shall show”—then we shall endeavor to show the contrary. But supposing, not granting, that Mr. K. succeeded in this, his syllogism would still always be defective, because we ascribe to centralization (as we shall show) several more advantages over the county besides governmental unity, which one would have to prove one by one of the county too. 3rd. “Wretched is the constitution, even amid the greatest welfare, in which every manifestation of public life is impossible, and the Pesti Hírlap wants this, breaking against the county, whose general assemblies, especially with our bulwarks widened, will become popular assemblies.” The starting point is perfectly true; but we believe it holds the other way round too, for wretched would be that constitution as well in which the citizen could hold popular assemblies, hold diets, at his own whim, and would have no shelter to lay his starving body, wrapped in rags, to rest of an evening. That centralization promotes welfare more than the county—later; for now let us answer straight to the charge. With the idea of centralization there go together, both in conception and in practice: 1st, the idea of the jury. 2nd, the more extended working of journalism, with the firmer founding of public opinion. 3rd, the election of deputies, not confined merely to one class of the people. 4th, the annual diet. 5th, the gathering of vast petitions. 6th, popular assemblies too, as in England. Does not public life declare itself more, and through these, than in our county system? Many will not wish to accept the example of England, as though France alone and solely were the homeland of centralization; and all the faults and deficiencies of the French constitution were at the same time the unavoidable consequences of centralization. These are much deceived. Let us look at the above three functions of centralization (to be described more fully later) in legislation, execution, and oversight, over against the county, and let us say: do we not find them in England too? Centralization, then, potentiates public life still more, and is in no way against popular assemblies. 4th. “The greater the share the nation has in the legislative, executive, and overseeing power, the stronger it is. We share in legislation, though the prince holds it for the greatest part. Execution is largely with the counties. Oversight—which demands ceaseless watching and the prior prevention of unlawful acts, and not merely a subsequent calling-to-account and possible punishment, which often comes too late—is likewise with our counties, whose very genesis points to this [easier said than proven; we might know perhaps a quite different genesis.—The writer.], and which legislation by its very nature cannot even do. The Pesti Hírlap, however, leaves only a ’slight’ influence in legislation. It takes execution out of the county’s hand, because it does not trust it, gives it to a minister, but does not trust him either, for it demands an accounting—what vacillation!—and so puts the nation under the guardianship of its officials. Oversight it wishes to exchange merely for the calling-to-account to be entrusted to the diet, the mystification of oversight.” If all these things stand thus, then let the century pronounce a curse upon its betrayers. But let us not let ourselves be blinded by great words, as many are, and let us draw off the gilt nutshell, which is mostly empty. 1st. Legislation. The county takes part in legislation through instructed deputies who represent its autonomy. Even if it succeeds, with great difficulty, in struggling up to a relative majority out of the provincial interests and the maze of instructions which the honest representative of the county’s autonomy cannot lose sight of, even if it succeeds in carrying the matter through the upper table of wholly separate interest, though it remain 50 years at the nation’s wish: the government—which is neither represented in the diet, nor has the diet’s majority within it, as something wholly separated and alien—may for 50 years refuse its consent. But the age advances, its wishes change, and so the turn often comes for something only when its time is already past. We, on the contrary, by no means wish to keep only this small part in legislation, as Keresztúry asserts. But before we say what we want, we must analyze the government. From the state of nature into social life man could step only in two ways: voluntarily or under compulsion. In the first case he could recognize no other governing power than the common will, which did not exclude the individual’s will. But since the will is not always centered, the majority’s will was sanctified, which yet leaves the individual will so far uninjured as it has hope and right to come to a majority. In the second case the conqueror’s right of fist is the chief whirlpool; for eyewash it perhaps permits its conquered to declare their will, but gives or refuses its consent as a separate lord. Now we wish the nation to be represented in the diet, not the single classes of single provinces. The represented nation will have some majority, and this will represent the governing spirit, whose, as it were, bone-and-flesh-become agent, accounting steward, is the minister [for that assertion of Mr. K.’s, that centralization would not help the divergent pulling of the 52 counties, because this springs not from the county but from the situation, does not hold. Just as, for instance, in a partition-suit among brothers we must play a wholly different role if we are chosen as judge than if as one party’s attorney, so the honest county deputy can keep his eye only on his county’s interests, the people’s representative on the whole nation’s.—The writer.]. If the majority changes, on what does the minister base his standing further? how is he to be the organ of a principle that is already in the minority? His star has set with his party, the new ruling party demands a new agent more suited to itself. The nation, then, will never be in opposition to its government; but is one with it, and may without hindrance promote the age’s salutary ideas. The progressive party may come to government just as the conservative may, and what does the prince care for this? What is his interest in it: by what principles they strive to make themselves happy, what does this draw from the splendor of his crown, so long as his subjects are loyal and contented. And of the nation’s demoralization one chief factor—the countless political apostasy—will cease; on the contrary, opinions, firmed up, will rather contend manfully, for no party will be excluded from popularity, none from the hope of the governmental portfolio. Now let us compare the legislative procedure, the county’s and the centralized, with the two theoretical states—and let us judge. 2nd. Execution. Execution may be regarded as the hand of the governing spirit. The governing spirit being the majority, its responsible steward is the minister; hence, in matters concerning the whole homeland, there can soberly be no other executor than the minister. But besides, what power is fittest for this? Surely that which 1. far from local and personal influence, regards the homeland from a higher viewpoint as one great whole; 2. which executes everywhere alike; 3. which can most easily be called to account; 4. can least be negligent. The county looks, and can naturally look, only to its own little interest; how should it set out from a national viewpoint? how should it have an overview of the whole homeland’s interest, and if this collided with its own strength, how should it sacrifice that for others? [There is a county resolution that leaves its road toward the neighboring county in a neglected state, because otherwise the price of wheat would fall! There is another that finds the lieutenancy-council’s measure on brandy-distilling superfluous, because in its county there is no need. There is a county that will not have the Fiume railway within its bounds, out of jealousy for its nationality.—If you cross from county Y into county X, you pay 10 florins in tax instead of the 5 you paid before; is it then another homeland? From these it is clear that centralization better promotes welfare too.—The writer.] The minister, representing the “nation’s spirit,” will regard the whole country as one great unit, and, being answerable to the whole country, will work in the whole’s interest. The execution of the clearest law requiring interpretation, every county interprets differently: the minister, on the other hand, executes uniformly. The county is in itself an aristocratic institution. Law for the greatest part has for its object the limiting of some individual willfulness or power. The executive official is chosen by the county, and in this the powerful have the greatest weight; for execution the county can answer to no one, as we shall show; the official, however, answers to the county and in this again to the over-powerful. Thus the over-powerful, against whom the law is chiefly meant to limit, keeps the official in dependence and calls him to account. With centralization all this is unthinkable. It is the minister’s vital question to keep the contentment of that majority which made the law, which he can effect only by strict execution. And so he can least be negligent—which, by the above sketch, is so organic a fault of the county that an official may exercise it unpunished, and against which only personal honesty guards [I know an official whose scontro carries even 3000 (!) numbers. How to force him to settle? The general assembly (what an account-taker! a popular assembly!) only laughs.—The writer.]. But personal honesty cannot be used as a political guarantee; therefore, when we demand of the minister so strict an accounting, we do not vacillate, as Keresztúry asserts, but carry our deed through consistently. From the theory of the state described above it also follows that everyone subordinates his own individual will to the powers of state only so far as the maintenance of the commonwealth requires. Hence family and so, most strictly taken, local matters can surely fall only under self-determination, self-government. Centralization, then, is not only not against local self-government, but sets its development as one of its chief tasks—distinguished from the provincial and satrapal systems, and well separated, further, from those matters which by wrong-headed practice came under fragmented handling and which, being by their nature of national interest, demand such arrangement: such as roads, taxes, statutes of the weight of laws, and so on. Centralization, then, does not place the nation under the guardianship of its officials, as the satrapal magistrate’s office does. [See examples in “The Village Notary.”—The writer.] 3rd. Oversight. There are more important branches of execution which the county does not handle, and these are the national revenues and expenditures, enterprises, school and judicial matters, and so on. The overseer of these, then, is the county—let us see how. With protests, with petitions, which availing nothing, the unlawful act is not prevented, Mr. K.’s assertion notwithstanding. There remains, then, nothing else but to resort to grievance, indeed to the diet. The grievance does not pass the two tables either, or waits in vain for a resolution; for why should the government give this, being in no connection with the diet? A grand oversight! Or they say: yes indeed, but the nation has preserved its right by protests, and if it comes to strength or to favorable circumstances, it will win it for itself. This it does anyway, even if it never made a protest; the strong nation’s is everything, and such a protest shows a constitution as a mirage-veil does! With centralization the minister loses his majority if he is unfaithful, and is overthrown. So simple is the execution of that written law, and truly such are its objects, that we need not tremble at responsible handling. What, after all, could the minister do that would not stake his own existence? Overturn the constitution, found a tyranny? If this were possible—besides that he can obtain money and military force only from the nation, that every portfolio is handled by another individual—is it not possible, and even more so now, despite the counties’ protest, petition, grievance, which are like buzzings, not even worth attention, in the ear of one resolved on such a coup d’état? And in any case it is more to be feared with a government which forms in itself a power independent of the nation’s spirit than with one which, based on the nation’s majority, receives its life from it; truly with such a one we cannot imagine a case in which, forgetting that he is a son of the homeland, it could tear its interest from the homeland’s, regarding the latter only as a larder. These are only senseless great words, or does Mr. K. understand it thus, that the minister should pocket the sum of the budget and not wish to give an account? Then he would be a common robber, and would take his sentence from the court independent of him. This, we believe, is all more than the mystification of responsibility. By these we have clearly shown, I believe, that the idea of centralization is no dogma, but indeed a vital question, which swells every artery of national life, the vein of the universal homeland, and so not only does not diminish but considerably increases the influence of individual citizens in legislation and oversight, and leads execution back only to its more theoretical and more purposeful source. Finally it serves to secure the common welfare, order, and freedom. And so we are not unfaithful citizens of the homeland, for we do not wish to overturn the constitution in the theoretical sense; on the contrary, precisely because we wish a stronger one, we seek more effective instruments in place of the unfit. And that we may do this peacefully and undisturbed, it is our civic duty to defend the present condition—which secures this capacity to us—from ruin to our last breath; nor shall we ever bargain over it for anything but a stronger one. But the second part of Mr. K.’s treatise contains these three theses: 1st. Whether the county’s faults are corrigible. 2nd. Whether governmental unity can exist alongside them. 3rd. Whether a responsible government is possible. To what end should we tear down an already existing constitution for one yet to be established, even if that one be good, when the establishing too is easier. And to these theses, even after what has been said above, we must bow our heads, if they are so solved that the county supplies all those advantages of centralization which we have pointed out.—Let us see them point by point. The county’s faults are corrigible. Here Mr. K. confesses time to be the cause of all the county’s faults—to his great contentment, because he holds them most easily corrigible thereby; to our great anxiety, because it is our conviction that every other fault is more easily mended than that which time has developed. This can happen in two ways: either the institution has remained in its first purity, but time has rushed on and it can no longer meet its demands. For example, the first kings’ justice done by word of mouth, the traveling royal judges, were all so many good and fitting institutions, yet—even had they remained in their original purity, together with the banderial system that often saved the homeland from peril—who would wish to apply them anew now? Time has outgrown them.—Or the institution, without any outer influence, has developed faults purely out of its own bosom, and these too are incorrigible, because they found their germ in its inmost being. For example, the Venetian commonwealth, the declining Roman empire, the medieval hierarchy, and so on. In all of them was the germ which had later to develop so frightfully. Whether, then, the county has remained what it was at its rise, as Keresztúry says in the first part of his treatise—the county having exercised an overseeing power already in its first genesis—or whether it fell only with time into its enormous faults, as is said in the second part—to which we only add that it became what it is, too, only with the passage of time—its faults are already theoretically incurable. But Mr. K.’s condition was to show the contrary; how does he keep his promise? He brings forward a few faults, namely: the aristocratic color, the preponderance of the officials, electoral excesses, the falling of internal administration as a sacrifice to little political aims. There are indeed more essential deficiencies than these, but of which we are convinced that Mr. K. will solve them all if they come to mind. For of each in turn he says: “This will be easy to remedy”—“who would dare doubt the human mind”—and with this he has untied the knot. We only set here Mr. K.’s own words, that all this is not enough merely to believe, but must also be proved.—Let us follow further. Governmental unity can be established alongside the county. Here first of all—when he has already written pages against it—he probes the meaning of the Pesti Hírlap’s centralization and brings charges against it, but these have all come up already in their place, and so let us turn cleanly to the matter. The chief fault, says K., is that we have no jus scriptum completum, and that the higher power has let the county loose now wider, now tighter. These deficiencies being supplied and the counties being coordinated, let us set a certain term within which every resolution shall be submitted to the government. The government, again, within a fixed time, annuls the unlawful ones, and the county, as a collective authority, is bound to answer for the harm that arises after the disregard of the annulment. The lack of a systematic code is in any case great; but if we observe that, of the two adduced governmental models, a code favorable to the nation can be soberly hoped for only under the first, again it is only centralization that stands before us promising a code, for this answers to the governmental model under the first number. The countless fruitless attempts even under the present forms prove our word.—If, further, it is so that the higher power can indeed let the county loose wider and narrower, then the county is only the plaything of this higher power, only a mouse which the cat lets go and again seizes. Then this is so organic a fault of the county that it destroys its whole worth. It is a great fault too that the counties are not coordinated. But again I ask: is this too to be hoped for? who is to coordinate? The counties’ representatives themselves? against the upper table, and without the government! It is another thing if a represented nation speaks, in whose word the government’s word too is already contained. From these it appears that the operation of correction is not so exceedingly easy. But further: To a county resolution submitted within a certain term, if unlawful, an annulment arrives within a certain time. The county not accepting the annulment is answerable for all the harm flowing therefrom. Let us pause a little. Mr. K. and his fellow-partisans hold it for one of the county’s eminent qualities that it prevents unlawful higher measures. There comes, then, an order recognized as unlawful; it is prevented; this resolution is submitted; and that government which sent the order naturally annuls this resolution. The county either accepts this or not. If it accepts, the whole was only a comedy, and though the order was indeed harmful to the homeland, the county will never be called to account, for only the government could call it to account, but its will was fulfilled and so it surely will not do so.—If it does not accept, the government calls it to account, and being itself in the scale, will naturally judge it guilty; and how does it execute? again through the county, or by force? In the first case the county naturally does not execute, because it believes itself in the right; in the second: we should give into the government’s hand a force-power separated from the regular executive power, together with the judging, with which it could reach into our constitutional wheels. This would be a real concentration of all power in a power distinct from the nation. We do not want this. Or do we take the whole suit to the diet? Then from the much-praised oversight there will indeed be a calling-to-account. And of what a kind! The government, as it stands in the present system, as we showed above, cannot be forced to account. The county?—why, gentlemen! let us not confuse concepts, let us not believe the county a collegial authority: it is a popular assembly, which after its dispersal is nothing! who ever saw a popular assembly made answerable as an authority? I, for instance, have the right (not the duty) to go to the theater; I do not go, I cannot go; a riot happens—shall I too be locked up for it? Let us observe, too, how much harm may happen from execution even between the non-acceptance and the annulment. Let us observe that one county will recognize something as lawful which another holds unlawful; and so there will indeed be no unity. And so, I believe, we have sufficiently illuminated the question. Finally: Governmental responsibility the county directly presupposes. Sicut figura docet. “Hitherto no one was bold enough to undertake a responsible portfolio amid the hodgepodge of the corpus juris”—why, whom was it offered to?—But seriously. We assert that the county excludes governmental responsibility. For what is the county? In the first part of my treatise I showed that it is that vis inertiae of the nation which in legislation, execution, and oversight in some measure supplies, or replaces, the active force of centralization; thus they exclude each other. The county, as it is, could blossom only over against the government of the second model; centralization can exist only under the first. Our assertion is proved too by the countless laws urging accountability but remaining only a dead word. For what sanction can such a law have under the second model and so with a county system? Mr. K. says nothing positive, galloping over the whole lightly, as over the county’s faults, and closes his article: let us too, then, close its analysis, and we believe we have treated both principles theoretically and relatively, not setting against the pure idea a sheer abuse. And now, with the conviction that we have succeeded in making it others’ conviction too—how, alongside the county, neither governmental unity nor responsibility can exist, nor its faults be corrected—we take our leave of the gentle reader, until we meet again.

III. LIBERALISM AND

I Today, thanks to Providence, nothing can lay claim to longer survival, still less to final victory, that does not adopt as its own the so-often-misunderstood or misinterpreted, condemned and defiled gospel of the advancing spirit of the age—the doctrine of liberty, fraternity, and equality. With our own eyes we saw doctrines branded as political heresies which that same enemy soon recognized. Principles persecuted which that same power soon set upon its own banners. Words pronounced in hiding which were at once proclaimed in the street. And these are those conquests of which we cannot tell the day on which they were born, cannot show the diploma that secures them, but which precisely for that reason perhaps need not fear a day on which they might be revoked, need not dread an arbitrary command by which they might be abolished. They have become such common property, such a condition of life, as the air, the light, and the water—who could still dream of limiting these? Let us look back over the history of fourteen years, and we shall find that, by the cooperation of circumstances by no means favorable, indeed in defiance of the most unfavorable, in this time more ideas of liberty have passed into the body and blood of the whole nation, more principles have risen into universally recognized truth—which before dared rise only softly and fearfully even in the more intimate circles of the opposition—than how many were bought at the price of so much noble blood. The negation of liberal principles keeps up its existence only by continual bargaining; every day it gives up a step, the price of one day’s life. It is like a dam against a powerful stream; it cannot stop the stream, only hold it back, and for itself it can expect only diminution, never increase. Even the mighty cataracts of Niagara have drawn back miles within demonstrable time; yet how much more powerful than Niagara’s flood is the flood of the age’s spirit, which God breathes; how much weaker the dam that man’s hand builds than those which God set before the stream. For the final victory too of our Hungarian cause, our national politics, the only decisive question is therefore: does it agree with the universal ideas of liberty, or does it stand hostile against them? If it agrees, we may look toward the future with calm patience; we need not, attaching ourselves to the politics of despair, tie all our hope to the uncertain and deceptive shaping of external relations, expect the turn of our fate for the better exclusively from world-shaking contingencies—all these may indeed further and hasten our cause, may spare us a few days of suffering, but just as the general expects sure success only from his battle-plan and not from such chance turns, which he only seizes on occasion and uses with joy: so too the victory of our cause must lie within the cause itself, and in the omnipotence of those ideas of liberty of which it is the bearer. Our cause is liked to be presented, over yonder, as wholly selfish, closed-off, and running diametrically against the high politics of today’s free world-view. Our justice-of-the-peace politics they paint as the ne plus ultra of narrow-mindedness and of the ideas of the Middle Ages. If this is true, our cause is condemned. Let us examine the matter a little more closely. The first and chief point of our politics is that we wish, and with God’s help shall, maintain the political individuality of Hungary. So long as a socialistic world-order—possible perhaps after new millennia—does not root out that common instinct, grounded in the history of millennia, of every existing country in the world; so long as that weakness of human nature does not die out, by which even his most wretched individuality a man gives up only with pain, even in the direction of the promise of an everlasting blessedness; so long as common feeling does not adopt suicide as a virtue, and the morality of the binding force of bilateral contracts is not regarded as a ridiculous prejudice: so long this first point of our politics stands in no opposition to the present age’s liberal, broader world-view, which still rests on the basis of the old morals. It stands in opposition all the less because, over against the annihilation of our individuality, the hope of blessedness too gleams before us as compensation only very uncertainly. And if we establish this chief point, all the rest connected with it is solved of itself. Over yonder they want parliamentary government; we want it too. They urge democratic institutions; this is likewise our wish. They demand systematic jurisprudence, a free press, religious equality; for all these we were already fighting when they were still asleep. But we want all this measured to our own individuality; we want it through ourselves, to which our right, by God’s law and the human sense of right, I have shown above. Or should we renounce the chief principle, our individual existence, that we may have a better chance of winning all these fine ideas? Why, the greatest part of all these we need not win, we already possess all these; and that we are precisely at this moment hindered from disposing of them is only such a misfortune as the liberal high politics and broader world-view can make fortunate with the theory of forfeiture of rights only when it has kicked the basis of common morality wholly from under foot. Then are we, the thousand-year students of constitutionalism, who have stood gloriously through so many hard trials, to go over to the “ABC”-learners, to mend thoroughly the faults we may have committed? To the “ABC”-learners, I say—who have indeed not displayed hitherto the particular genius of constitutionalism, who even after two years’ study often do not notice when they write an “x” before them in place of a “q.” Second point: the question of the nationalities. Over against us they proclaim the unconditional equal rights of the nationalities. We have formulated the equal rights of the linguistic nationalities up to the bounds of the unity of the political nation. The former, like every excess, is a thoughtless sound; the latter is an embodied idea. The former, in its short existence colliding with a thousand impracticabilities and forced to return to equal oppression, became a ridiculous bombast; the latter is a tangible practical solution, in every single relation a guiding rule, which won the approval of all Europe, and shows a surety in the past, because in Hungary linguistic nationality never gave a right, took no right, was never the cause of political advantage or disadvantage. So I believe this second point too is decided in our favor from the standpoint of universal liberty. Third point: internal government. An official hierarchy that reaches, in a continuous chain from above downward, to the pot of the private hearth, and which, in the sense of the camp over yonder, can alone truly answer to the idea of responsible government. Or an elected official in the lower spheres, and a popular-representative municipality—this is the real justice-of-the-peace politics, this is what better answers to the age’s ideas of liberty; the discussion of this requiring a somewhat larger space, I reserve it as the subject of my second article. II At the end of my first article I set as the aim of these present lines the showing that municipal government too—this par excellence justice-of-the-peace politics—answers to the universal ideas of liberty better than the systematized official hierarchy. In the latest time, however, the secret and for that very reason most dangerous enemies of our national independence and of its indispensable condition, parliamentary government, have so taken up the stratagem of presenting county self-government—grown together with Hungarian life, with the people’s sympathy—as a real antipode to parliamentarism (which according to them is inseparable from bureaucracy), and thus of pulling down the chief condition of the people’s life precisely through the people’s own vitality and love—that I must above all drop a few words to clear this up. On the lowest grades of organic life the brain, this central government, is entirely lacking, but on the various parts of the body nerve-knots form, and these severally exercise the reaction necessary for the individual’s maintenance, at the stimulus of every external impression. When the brain develops, it sends its will to all the parts of the body, and these work according to it, while it in turn becomes responsible for their welfare. It holds back the foot from the dangerous step, raises the arm in defense, creates thought. A real monster, however—such as does not exist in nature—he would wish to fashion in his imagination who would so extend the brain’s rule that the stomach too should digest only at its command, the heart beat at its command, the skin, the lungs, the muscle of the fingers work only at its command. While its attention was taken up by the one, the rest would lie idle; while it brought profit here, ruin would follow in a hundred places. Just so it stands in state life, which likewise forms an organism. Our masked enemies can adduce only French examples for the togetherness of parliamentary government and rigid centralization; yet France is a very poor example in the science of constitutionalism, for we have indeed often seen brilliant theories born in it with great noise, but never a lasting, secure, and calm constitutional life flowing in it; and its every relapse was the result of a rigid centralization which wished to subordinate to its will even that the heart should beat, the stomach digest. We, on the contrary, need cite only one example, which eclipses and renders superfluous all others—England, the classic and happy soil of constitutionalism, where we see parliamentary government most beautifully wedded to self-government. After England, our country is the one where self-government is coeval with the national existence. And only so long as the nation clings to it does it show itself entitled to demand constitutional existence. When, after the October days, the first county assembly was held in Pest, a leftover Bach-type official, seeing the multitude thronging into the county hall from far districts, exclaimed: “Who still says that this Hungarian governing costs less than ours? why, just that enormous per-diem due to so many people on this one day would have been enough for us to govern for half a year.” He could not even imagine that the farmer leaves his plough, the craftsman lays down his tool, the lord parts from his comfort, that each of them tears one day out of his family life, toils, sweats, goes without everything, to consecrate it gratis to the public cause. The Hungarian, if he sees his fellow fall on the road, steps up to him and raises him; while that individual strained through Bach-type civilization cries out for a policeman, because he long ago forgot how to act for himself. To such a people we may then give a constitution in the finest phrases—it remains written promise; while to the other let us give room, that God’s free air may touch it, and with the air there descends into it the constitution’s life-giving civic feeling too. The former has already come to where the stomach digests, the heart beats, only at the brain’s command; while in the latter the everyday working of life flows unnoticed and of itself, expecting help from the brain only in critical moments and in decisive matters. True, county life, as it was most lately shaped, took into its organism many a component that does not square with parliamentary government. Such are especially the instructions given to deputies, and the “respectful setting-aside,” performed unconditionally, of higher orders whether in private or public affairs. That I can have no intention even of defending all these, I need say only to those who do not know, or have forgotten, that when, under the leadership of Baron Eötvös, Csengery, and Szalay, years ago, the “Pesti Hírlap” first raised its voice against all these in favor of parliamentary government, and the new idea that appeared among us, and its grandeur—which has since ripened into so gladdening a common conviction—then bred in many a place antipathy and almost everywhere consternation; I too, with my friend Pál Szontagh, belonged among the few who, hastening to the raised banner, strove to serve it according to their ability. But it is not in these that I find the essence of county life; all these are the results of those special relations and that painful necessity of which other peoples can have no conception, and in which our state life has languished for centuries. Among other peoples parties stand face to face, one of which fights perhaps for more aristocratic, the other for more democratic directions; from a freer or more limited viewpoint demands for the individual a narrower or wider sphere of activity; a sugar-law, a customs-tariff is the lever or the toppler of the statesmen. They would hold him a sufferer from delirium who began his speech against the government by saying that the homeland is in danger, for this has no meaning there; the whole striving of the opposition is to put the government into opposition and sit in its place itself. The patriot who looks on from a distance may rest assured that whichever wins, he will be governed by such a special son of the homeland as can have no other devise than: “in this great world beyond this there is no place for me.” With them this was always quite otherwise. For us, our whole state life is one centuries-long giant struggle for our national existence against non-existence. Our government was a constantly attacking foreign camp, whose roots lay not in the soil of the homeland. In the organism there was no brain—no responsible internal government—it is no wonder, then, if the single ganglia, the nerve-knots, took over the role of life-maintenance, if every county became a piece of a country in itself. Give us the longed-for brain, this directing inner central government, and the working of the nerves will sink to its proper measure. In place of the giving of instructions, when at our county assemblies a debate arises over public affairs, it will work as the declaration of public opinion, and already by the very form of its origin will supply, still more strongly, the resolutions of the English popular assemblies. In place of the preventive measure of “respectful setting-aside,” the government’s subsequent responsibility will give ample indemnification. And if anyone should object that, alongside this, an ill-willed government may overturn the constitution, and by this very means escape subsequent responsibility, while the county is forced to assist its procedure: to him I answer only that no law or constitution can oblige anyone—that any citizen, under any circumstances, should lend a hand in plain treason to the homeland—and that in such extreme cases everyone will feel his duty. But wherein the essential advantage of municipal internal government over the bureaucratic hierarchy of centralization is to consist—to whose defense, in the interest of the universal ideas of liberty, I have undertaken—I shall treat in my next article.

SPEECHES

I. COUNTY LIFE

Honorable Estates and Orders,

A wish of my breast, coeval with my consciousness—to be able to set even the smallest wheel turning in the great machine of public affairs—was fulfilled a year and a half ago, when I had the good fortune to be enrolled among the notaries of this county. Great was the longing in my breast to answer to this office, but small the strength, small the sphere of action, to deserve by deeds the trust advanced to me on the strength of good hope alone. The more painful to me, therefore, is that compulsion which, on medical orders, owing to the frequent ailing of my throat, drives me to resign, and which leaves me, in place of the self-assurance of a man who has answered to his office in everything, only the hope of the honorable Estates’ gracious indulgence for those faults of which nature is guiltier than I myself.—Yet there are several roads of life that strive toward the same goal, and there remains to me the hope that, by inspiration for the common good and by unshakable diligence, I shall succeed in satisfying in some measure that sacred debt from which fate, on my present road, debars me—this hope remaining the more, because there is but one band that binds me to my life and to this green table, only at one stroke can it break, and this band is the constitutional citizen’s love of country.

Gentlemen! A wise man says, and he is right, that the only independent and free man is the one who does not depend on another in the covering of his needs. This doctrine so justifies itself in the mutual relation of the spiritual and the material world too, that just as a beggar conscious of his higher human dignity is among the rarities, so upon all those who owe their well-being to their own toil a certain kind of dignity shines. Let us now cast a glance at our country: Our raw products are immense; transformed into manufactures they could cover the greater part of the population with goods of comfort, and by the costs of working them up could offer the poorer sort too a means of acquiring them. But fate’s hand has long beaten the Hungarian, that he should always rage in his own blood; the Hungarian wants no native manufacture, he squanders his produce upon foreign lands, bearing too the heavy customs costs of export and import, so that the rich man may buy back at a price a small part of those same products in the form of manufactures, while the poor man, stripped of his first necessities, of his means of livelihood, drags out the burden of crime.—What is more, as a natural consequence of foreign domestic economy, luxury too grows; the Hungarian, whom centuries have accustomed to aping, rushes blindly after it, and while industrial transformation does not increase his domestic economy, while his land yields scarcely more grain than twenty years ago, though he eke out his expenses with the income of the ever-flowing mines, he rushes unstoppably toward final impoverishment and material bondage, whose unavoidable consequence is spiritual servitude too. And if the people is wretched, if the middle estate—the surest guarantor of all peaceful progress—is ruined, what then is the gilded froth worth upon the surface of society’s swamp?— And yet we suffered long and were silent. Like the faithful of Mecca we turned imploring toward the legislature, saying: if Hungary is the most viable part of the universal monarchy, the part most capable of development, shall it be precisely this that, like a stepchild, is sacrificed to the others? we said that for a few years yet we may indeed form the secure market of our sister nations, but the treasure is not inexhaustible even in us, and if we become beggars, Austria’s market too will really cease, and the whole structure will topple.—We broke out at times in just bitterness, declaring to our government the quo usque tandem abutere.—But our suffering was not appreciated, our threat was mocked, and to our plea they threw a glove in our face, on which is written that outside our own strength there is no help for us, that we must help ourselves when the question of being and non-being arises. The idea of the industry-protective association was therefore sounded; the course we must travel already stands broken open before us, history sets its success indisputably before us in the well-being and industrial development of France, England, and the United States. Only energy, only endurance is needed. There were examples abroad, where young, old, child, and woman bore the foreign goods, with enthusiasm, to the bonfires, and the breast beat high beneath the homespun frieze, because they knew that a late but happy posterity would bless their names.—And we, whose fathers shed blood for the homeland, who love to sound in assembly halls the “my life for my country” kind of flowers—shall we now, when the homeland asks only some small renunciation, some small toil, discomfort, and perhaps a sacrifice in money, coldly step back? Let such a one no longer speak, amid the sounding of such applause, of grievances to be redressed, nor of patriotism—for wretched indeed is he whom the spirit of patriotism cannot fire, yet he is virtuous even by comparison with one who bears a tongue of flame for his crest above a cold breast.—Let no one say that the homeland has no need of his single person. In Greece death was the punishment of him who in a revolution seized no party, and in patriotic movements everyone who is not with us is against us.—Let no one say that this will act upon the least perfect native works like a prize upon bad workmanship, for it is the child that must be taught to walk, not the man; and let only the consumption of home manufactures be secured, let even those that already exist no longer be forced to creep under a foreign mask in order to win themselves a sale, and domestic competition, as the necessary consequence of all this, will soon set in and secure us against every grievance.—As for the motive drawn from the possibility of frauds and extortions, my remark on it is very brief. There is no object so sacred, no principle so pure, that hardened wickedness and obstinate intrigue may not turn it from its aim; but are we to follow that lowland gentleman who, when his gardener could not lay out a garden on the ice of the Tisza floods, drove him off, saying that thus he had no need of a gardener at all? Let a protective association, then, be every true patriot’s “Ego Carthaginem delendam”; let everyone do apostle’s work for this sacred aim according to his ability; let there be only energy in our breasts—with this several counties saved our constitution under the commissions—for the nation out of which energy has fermented away, over it has tolled, and justly, the bell of death, for he who renounces himself, him the gods too renounce. Behold, here I lay before you the roll of the worthy who have signed thus far; I lay it before you with the sacred sense of civic duty, that there are women among them too.—The institute is yet tender, but my soul’s faith is great that soon this register will be one with the register of all patriots; and if the homeland thus fuses together, if this institute, after Vörösmarty, verse... perhaps will knit together
what fate has not woven into one;
then, when a man is needed at the breach,
let no one,
machine-cowardly, stay behind. verse Be pleased to constitute yourselves. As president I make so bold as to recommend István Trajtler, a man in his years and his experience, a youth in his fire and his energy.

Honorable Assembly! A little while ago I still regarded approval, applause—in a word, popularity—as the fair prize of the civic career. Since then I have gained the conviction that the breast which lives for humanity must despise the individual man.—There rose before me too the great memory of our Rákóczi, who, when he was lavishing the best drops of his heart on the battlefield of religious freedom, experienced from those very men for whom he bled the most treason born of mistrust—solely because fate had willed that he too be born in the oppressing church: yet he remained unshaken. Nor do I expect grace from the mightier, distinction from the more spiritual party; unshaken I pronounce my opinion, faithfully following the god of my breast. There has again arrived in the matter of religion a gracious royal rescript; yet in it, anywhere but in its name, there is hardly any grace. With fifty-two tongues the nation cried out for balm upon that rift which is conjured between confession and confession by him whose sin in this God may forgive, but the nation cannot. With fifty-two tongues the hundred thousands of this homeland demanded reciprocity toward the other hundred thousand citizens of this same homeland, that there be no envy among them—and this, I believe, is a fair desire. With fifty-two tongues we demanded, finally, an honest, straightforward law, which should exclude all misunderstanding, ruse, and priestly intrigue, which should be like Providence, before which every interest gladly bows. The royal rescript came, and instead of balm gives a new wound—instead of fusion it creates, between neighbor and neighbor, a new rift in the consecrated inwardness of family life. It tears up that family life which stood before, which taught us to lisp the sacred names of child, parent, spouse before ever we became citizens, for whose sole securing we renounced half of our natural rights, which has but one altar, and this the altar of the god of love. And now, when a few who denied nature have striven to cleave this altar in two, proclaiming aloud that the god of love is not one, and that the society of him who offers with bread can bring no blessing to him who offers with the wafer; now, when for this we cried out, because man is a social being, because nature will not be reasoned away—now this graceless resolution is dealt among us, which debases the household altar into a market square, the parents from gentle supporters into trafficking soul-merchants, making the children witnesses of a thousand disputes, from whose breasts assuredly the devout reverence toward parent and religion will early be torn. We asked for fusion with our neighbors, and we gained the dissolution of our most inward household life. But is the vaunted reciprocity present in the rescript at all? On the one side stands a mighty, organized clergy, holding in its hand the golden keys of absolution, with the blood-cross of fanaticism, making ready to freeze the embrace of man, woman, child, parent.—On the other side, a poor servant of God, without money or absolution, mingled in among the rest of the citizens. Where here is the reciprocity in the bargain? But even were it present, that is reciprocity in servitude, which does not heal but doubles the ill. Is there, finally, even the germ of an honest, straightforward law in this rescript?—When blasphemy was brought up at the diet, without a law being passed against it, we were scandalized. And yet blasphemy is only a word, which harms no one. Fraud, breach of one’s word, stands in this rescript as embodied blasphemy, and are we to legalize it?—Are we to pour the cursed poison of crime into still uncorrupted breasts, to declare that spouse may deceive spouse unpunished, may break at one stroke the promise pledged with the oath of fidelity? Where is there a closer, holier bond than the marriage bond? Are we to stamp upon this the mark of crime, to destroy the people’s piety toward it, and—besides having ravaged one of society’s sweetest happinesses—to root out of the people the virtue of honor and word-keeping, to have broken those two holiest relics of the commonwealth which, once a state has prostituted them, it would no longer deserve the name of state? There are things which it is useful for the government to handle as nurses handle sugar, and when the child cries, quiet it with a little piece.—There are others which the government now and then throws among us, as a sly boy throws an apple among his playmates, that while they wrangle over it with all their fire, he may pick the dainties from their pockets.—But to give, in mockery of the nation’s whole desire, a deeper wound instead of balm, a soul-market instead of reciprocity, the sanctioning of word-breaking instead of a manly law, in a matter that is true before God, nature, and reason, is a bold experiment; I could bring examples, for sometimes the rod too unites.— My motion, then, is the following: let us reject the rescript decidedly; we saw in the affair of the Croats that a manly stand avails. We have no time to dawdle, for the time grows over our heads; after our gracious sovereign there may come to our throne such a prince as an impenetrable wall of Jesuits will divide from his nation.—Let us beg His Majesty to hear our fair desires, for if these again die away before the footstool of the throne, we shall be compelled to go from village to village gathering petitions under a single appeal, by which we shall call upon the powers that guarantee the Peace of Linz to the defense of our cause. Let this too be written to His Majesty with a subject’s homage, but manfully.

Balassagyarmat, January 13, 1845. Honorable Estates! If on a smooth and comfortable road the herald advances swiftly and surely toward his destination, faithfully filling his office, he assuredly deserves grateful recognition. But if the road is unbroken, thorny, and barren, if in spite of all this the herald presses firmly and unshakably toward his appointed goal, nobly bearing his burdens, then he practices civic virtue, and so long as a noble breast lives he may safely reckon on warm respect.—Now, our last diet was the herald whom the nation sent forward to meet a happier future, to declare that the people wishes to act, and under the banners of liberty and progress will act.—The road was unbroken, a hundred obstacles rolled in the way—on the part of the government, of the internal structure of the legislative body, of ourselves. And so, though a hundred of our fair hopes suffered shipwreck on these, yet many a salutary seed was sown (as we saw from the deputies’ report), out of which so many fair flowers will unfold, if the soil into which it fell—the national life—is strengthened. And by reason of these very circumstances our deputies deserve a double thanks. But after our thanks let us lay aside the so fashionable, rehearsed anger which, for all its ornate words, so easily softens; let us put away the foolish lamentation that ill befits us, and turn to the field of action; let us too do something for the bringing into life of our principles, which our legislature already permits us to do; and for the future let us lay bare our wounds with manly candor, let us say where it hurts, that they may be healed, for the hidden wound only festers, but does not cease to pain. And now let us consider, first of all, the government as one of the obstacles to our progress. The government, by its very concept, is a power flowing from the majority of the state’s will, to which the minority naturally subordinates itself. If the government does not rest on this foundation, if it is a force holding principles contrary to the great majority of the nation, then it is no longer a government but a camp hostile to the nation, with which, in perpetual struggle, each party will strive to seize as much of the field as it can, to paralyze as far as possible, with clauses and smuggled-in provisions, the other party’s worked-out plans; and hence it comes that the government prepares no data, no preliminary labors—nay, hinders their preparation—and thus are born one-sided, unsatisfactory laws. The government never knows in advance what step it will take during a diet; like a resolute fencer it yields a step only under the greatest pressure, as it did over the Hungarian language. And so it falls into a hundred self-contradictions, striving at least in their execution to frustrate the laws passed with its extorted consent, as happened with the Partium.—Hence it comes that the most ingenious men who wish to take part in public affairs must deny their true conviction, and, while they move in the lower spheres, must proclaim the principles that stand well with the nation, but on attaining a higher station the opposite principles professed by the government, and thus, debased into apostates, become the prey of that demoralization for which our nation has grown notorious. Whereby the nation’s true public opinion on any matter can never be surely known. Whereas, were the government and the nation’s majority always in agreement, as constitutionally would befit, all this would cease.— In this regard a step of a significance long unparalleled in Hungarian history was taken at the last general assembly: distrust was pronounced; and I believe that if we carry the already-grasped idea undauntedly further, we should practically succeed in winning out this great question, which is the chief requisite of all constitutionality. The government will come to see that it must either procure itself a majority, or lean on the arm of the existing majority, if it wishes to remain a government. And let it succeed even several times in procuring a majority contrary to the nation’s interest—only let the principle be accepted—I do not tremble, for the strengthened nation will know how to win back its own interest.— No lesser obstacle to success is the internal structure of our legislature. The two-chamber system by its nature presupposes that in the lower house every interest of the nation and every order of its inhabitants be represented, that from here the people’s voice may powerfully proclaim what pains it, what it demands—in a word, what it holds it may justly desire. The upper table, consisting likewise of the recognized capacities and best men of the lower house’s people, and having one interest with it, should not sit there with the design of doing everything to obstruct the lower house’s desires, but, recognizing the rights, should take counsel only on the how, only on the most peaceful and most effective execution—in a word, should revolve around the “what is advisable.” At present, how is the lower house to raise its voice to the dignity of the people’s voice, when it represents but one class; how can it claim that the upper house recognize in it a higher power, when both, representing only a single class apiece, may with right regard themselves as equal; how can it hope for weight to its reasons when it pleads in the people’s interest, while instead of thirteen million it represents only five hundred thousand, who may with right ask who entrusted them with the guardianship of the nation; how can it claim support on the nation’s part, when it consists of that class of the nation which the nation knows only by its pressure. Important steps have indeed been taken in this regard. The principle of common bearing of burdens, become blood, can be overthrown only by intrigue, that of the towns only by the present mode of bargaining; eligibility for office and for landholding has been pronounced; the regulation of public works will breed trust in the people toward the privileged class that brought it about. It is our duty, then, to translate these principles, already accepted at the diet, as far as possible into practical life. And for the future, the regulating of the diet, the transformation of the lower table into a representative table—and not the introduction of non-representation—claims chief attention, that in our country there be not, as now, only lord and servant, but citizen. The third obstacle, finally, is we ourselves. Seeing our enormous backwardness and the endless series of our tasks, our desires accumulate frightfully from one diet to the next. We expect a giant labor of every diet, while a law can be effective, can be more than written grace, only if it is so far prepared, has so far passed into the people’s blood, that the public spirit supports its success. But how can countless and wholly heterogeneous matters be prepared at one time, especially with a restricted press; how can it be asked of the legislature that it bend its study to several wholly heterogeneous subjects; finally, how can it be asked that a whole heap of newly passed laws pass into the people’s life, especially if the people could not even be enlightened beforehand by way of the press? A step has been taken in this regard on the part of the Estates: the principle of an annual diet has been accepted, which, by checking the accumulation of subjects, confines the interim agitation and the legislature’s study to fewer subjects, and thus makes both more thorough. It remains for us, then, to go on urging this principle, and, striving to bring it practically into life, to ask for a diet as soon as may be. So likewise the detailed instructions, by the very nature of parliamentary debates, hold back every approach, every fusion, and bring it about that a law is never the common agreement, but always only the result of a two- or three-vote majority. At the expense of respect for the laws, it follows from such instructions that the deputy finds in them the justification of all the inconsistencies he has committed, of their forced misinterpretations—in a word, of all demoralization. Some step has been taken in this regard by laying finished labors before the authorities; it remains for us to declare that henceforth we wish to furnish our deputies with instructions confined to general principles only, having no reason to fear for our rights so long as we hold in our hands the power of recall without cause. In consequence of my exposition, then, my opinion is concentrated in the following: Though I should wish to expect everything from a truly constitutional legislature and from this alone, yet in our present circumstances the counties are such factors in that process which lies between the passing of laws and their bringing into life that we cannot leave them out of account. Nor can we leave out of account that almost everything we have won we have succeeded in winning not by legislation but by the nation’s practical demonstrations; and therefore, on the begun course of progress—where every halt is a step backward—we must strive to bring into life within our sphere every principle accepted by the legislature, and to prepare for the future. Therefore let our standing committee occupied with diet matters: firstly, lay before us a proposal on the manner of fulfilling the laws; secondly, give an opinion on what should be done by the county’s path until the next diet, toward the furthest possible spreading and preparation of our principles, whether already sounded or but one-sidedly successful. Thirdly—it being the chief thing, if we wish to advance, that we mark out the road and even out its obstacles, which, as I had the honor to expound, are not few—let it set about preparing the instructions, and that, firstly, by establishing general principles concerning what is to be done, after whose acceptance one may only then go suitably into particulars.

I have no calculated eloquence that can talk the grace of sanctity even onto a less important subject; but the subject to which I now wish to speak is in itself so great, so sacred, that it need only be made known to be worshipped, that all the praise heaped upon it—like titles tacked onto the name of God—is bad for it, detracts from its dignity. Montesquieu says that one chief condition of a free state is a well-defined and worked-out penal code, for only this can secure personal safety. If we set about working this out, honorable Estates, let us abandon the patching mode we have followed till now; let us consider that for our labor a long posterity will bless or curse us; and let us either fashion something good and perfect from its roots, or leave the old quite as it is, which at least, by its consistent badness, [the predicate remained in his pen] a next-following generation which will have strength enough to break upon its breast the whole bundle of prejudices; and let us not make the yoke endurable with cushions, that long ages yet may drag at it. Setting out from this point of view, I wish the jury to be raised to the sine qua non of our penal code—juries to whose concept it answers that no citizen may be condemned until he has been judged guilty by the cooperation of his fellow citizens and of law-learned judges.* If I had a Demosthenic tongue to deliver philippics against the present system, if I could describe in letters of flame the horrors * From the sum of free citizens, in the sense of a jury of peers: 5 law-learned, 12 jurymen.—Public hearing, secret vote, free to write in the newspapers. that are covered with the perpetual darkness of secrecy, could call up the blood of the innocent who fell as victims of the law, you would forever shudder, honorable Estates, at this system. I do not say that our present individuals are bad, but they may be; and if they may, there is an end of liberty! Napoleon used to say, let him be set before a court-martial and shot; and a judge may be base enough to fulfill the command,* a judge may be so possessed by the idea of a crime that he no longer examines whether it happened or not, but, assuming it happened, sets himself to demonstrate it with the sharpest wit; and there is caning, as in some provinces too, and torture, of which we too have seen examples; the terrified innocent grows confused, confesses, and signs his own death.—How many a witch was burned for a confession; or is the inquisitor’s hand exempt from every moral and physical torture?—To entangle a man in questions, to beat him, to make life loathsome to him in the dark dungeon, to lay before the wholly alien judge documents from which one word, one inflection, one gesture is missing that might just have saved him—to lead him like a slave, in fetters, before the dread bench, and even to tell him that by his confession he can help his lot**—a frightful state, which, once it is abolished, we shall look back on with horror, and ask in wonder how it could last so long.— Whereas with the juries the grand English ceremony, by which the accused set before it is asked whether he wishes to be judged before God and his nation, already expresses their dignity. In this the accused stands before his nation, for there is on the one side the trust of the best of his nation chosen by himself, while on the part of the judges there is the sense of dignity, inspiration, and finally the control of the universal people; here accused, accuser, and judge stand face to face, without so many intervening obscurers; here no word, no moment is lost; one can at once take up an explanation, in spoken defense—here the brand of disgrace is not yet stamped on, and the punishment can never come into such a sad contradiction with the disgrace as I have already seen, that the judge condemned the nation’s man as guilty; for judge and nation are one—whom he condemns as judge, that man he will, as nation, also abhor; and if these two are not joined, the punishment ceases to be punishment. Bribery cannot reach jurymen, for they are the nation—such an abuse cannot take root among them, that I might enumerate by way of dissertation, after a famous German criminalist, that they cooperated in the death-sentence of twenty thousand men; for after their momentary constitution they vanish again, like Poplicola, among the people. And by them alone are we saved from that dilemma, that if we establish certain degrees of punishment, we sacrifice the innocent, that we shall have quarter-guilty men, if we are not to depend on the government’s grace;* for from what principles would one decide the former—indeed from the principles of probability and against arbitrariness; but here arbitrariness need not be feared, and men drawn from every order of the state, seeing it from many sides, will also bring it out better.—Plato: “The laws are often very stubborn and unjust in single cases”—and indeed we judge not only law-learned men, and not according to its niceties, but as the people understands it. Perhaps some would again choose a middle road, would say one may accept publicity, judicial independence, and so forth, but not the whole. These act most illogically, for they see the whole is good, and would tear off only one part of what grew together, ripened together, and fused into one. Does it not occur to them that they, as Mölcker says, defend the castes and act precisely against the principles of constitutional monarchy, which posits the citizens’ common labor on the common cause? They act like the priest of the conservative church, who opposes the layman’s intervention in matters of church government; like the line-soldier who hates the national guard; like the minister who harangues against the representatives—not to reckon here those who are in such extraordinary sympathy with the old that they wished to bring back even the old post-coaches in place of the comfortable new ones the French carried into Germany. I might appeal to the love with which the nations that possess this institution are devoted to it, so that they would lay it and their national existence down at one stroke, notwithstanding that the faults of this system all come to light, while those of the other mostly fall asleep. I might appeal to Hume, Burke, Russell, Brougham, Peel, Montesquieu, Möser, Liebenstein, Rotteck, Klüber, Grolmann, Duttlinger, and Aretin, who says: let freedom of the press and the jury be preserved, and everything will come back. I might appeal to history. I might say that the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans according to Cicero—who says that no Roman could be condemned otherwise than by his people according to agreement—the old Germanic and Frankish tribes, who according to Tacitus would have held it a disgrace to be judged by single men, knew this judgment. Nay, I might appeal to our own history, by which the assembly actions, the election of justices of the peace, and even a law of St. Stephen which runs thus: “Nemo pro jure habeatur nisi possessio testimonium dederit.” I might appeal, finally—no slight argument in our moneyless age—to the lesser cost, were the cause itself not so sacred that it has no need of recommendation.

When I would speak on so important a subject as life, I must first of all remark that, by the rules of sound logic, it is not we who wish to abolish the punishment of death—and to whom, by my conviction, I too belong—who should be compelled to bring forward grounds of defense, but those who are for such punishments. Because, going back to natural simplicity, capital punishment is indeed the institution, and so the thing to be proved; or should we not look strangely on one who, for instance, wished to introduce the witch-trial or the Inquisition, and asked grounds of us who would hinder it, and, not finding enough, introduced it—when often the simplest thing has precisely no ground, because an axiom cannot be demonstrated. Therefore even without any ground, and so forth. Yet in the present question we stand so happily that we can bring forward direct grounds of defense too, after the example of countless distinguished men. From which, so far as my small ability allows, I single out the following: Man as man has a certain sphere of right, which is so exclusively his own that the moment another man extends his imagined sphere of right within its bounds too, he wrongs him by this; and even in his natural state man has the right to replace himself, and to pursue the violator of his right until he withdraws. But men may be blinded by passion, may see their grievances greater than the truth—nay, the dangers of the weak—and might incline to further pursuit; and therefore, standing together in society, they entrusted the redress of such grievances to that which can do it more surely, more coldly, and more certainly. Setting out from this basis, the chief requisites of all punishments are: 1. The repelling of each into his own sphere of right. 2. The ceasing of the power to harm. 3. Strictly measured to every crime, and certain, and 4. equal upon everyone. 5. Exemplary, reparable. 6. Aiming at amendment. Let us see how the punishment of death answers to these requisites: 1. The repelling of each into his own sphere of right. Men have a sphere of right only so long as their personality lasts; man’s personality is sacred and inviolable; if he steps out of his sphere of right, let him be repelled into it—but is he to lose his own sphere of right together with his personality, which lasts only to the grave?—Truly, with this exposition the grave of our county system would be dug; the cure is heroic, as if we shot the patient dead, but it does not turn to health. Or does he perhaps enter as a citizen, and suffer as a man—and what a useful citizen he might be. 2. The ceasing of the power to harm cannot be effected.—If this holds, then I have no further objection, for in the natural state too there is jus inculpatae tutelae. Thus the French regicide; but to curb a wretched criminal—then let us go back into the natural state, if society too holds toward a criminal, with whom it is in a state of war, only the talion, only the right of like-for-like; or is crime permitted against crime, and is unnecessary killing not a crime? Or are we to remain in society nonetheless because 3. the punishment surely reaches the criminal, while there we often perish ourselves. Let us look at the punishment of death: it is so cruel, so inhuman, that the sense of right shudders against it, so that when by right it is pronounced, it must often be mitigated. What arises from this? Contempt of a law that is not certain; the hope of impunity; nay, the injured too are not satisfied; an incitement to evil, and a heaven-crying 4. inequality, which now strikes with death what at another time it pardons. And woe to the country whose laws the nation regards as the whims of tyrants. 5. There is an end then of the exemplariness which so many praise; the fallen victims are martyrs, men make verses on them; and the spectacle? He is much deceived who believes that a dear price deters, and why?—“It does not deter the criminal, it casts down the innocent spectator.” Bentham.—It spoils the citizen’s calm contentment. Who thinks of the punishment, when everyone hopes for good? Nay, the example habituates, as in the French Revolution. 6. Or has it the fourth requisite, which wishes the punishment strictly measured to every crime? As to the measurement to every crime, we mostly do it from a legal title; among degrees of wickedness there are tiny gradations, between being and not-being an enormous one—how shall they be measured against each other? or the executioners?—— 7. Sad cases reparable. 8. Aiming at amendment!—Livingston. Vivo ego, dicit Dominus Deus: nolo mortem, sed ut convertatur impius a via sua et vivat. We might say, finally, that the irremediably corrupt man, who as citizen and man can only be harmful, may be killed.—But Fichte: every man must honor humanity in his fellow man, cannot despair of his amendment, cannot destroy one who strives toward this higher aim, as Scripture too says. Hence, until grounds are brought against it—grounds for its practicability so weighty as will be able to outweigh the grounds founded on the right drawn from nature, on God, and on virtue—I shall struggle firmly and constantly against the punishments of death, which are nothing other than legalized cruel killings of the defenseless, practiced by larger groups in defiance of the natural law, drawn perhaps from the ill-understood principles of economy, in the talion that demands crime for crime.

(Fragment) The nation, as a nation, attests its existence in its political and juridical functions. And if those organs by which it does this are not forced upon it from above, but are not pressed upon its neck from below either—if instead they rise from its own breast like its own dear children, and, endowed in their breasts with the principles and convictions of the people that chose them, represent the nation’s life and will—then the nation may boast of its self-government and its freedom, for it has embodied the idea of the people’s sovereignty. Hence it is clear, after Wesselényi, that offices and the electoral privilege exist for the state, and not that individuals may possess a privilege; and further, that just as every nobleman in thesi has the right of holding office, yet the unfit man does not hold it, so too in election, though the right remains inviolate. Approaching this concept, our constitution of the eight hundreds pressed forward, and what was still wanting we awaited from the divinity of the future and the strength of our own breast—until in the latest times our awakening grew terrible. The enraged nobility raises a murderous dagger against its own breast, and so many a broken breast, the work of so many storm-laden centuries, was dragged unstoppably toward an untimely grave. But I do not speak of this—great men cried out, and not with bare complaint but with counsel too, to which to join my slight word it is not perhaps some self-conceit, but the constitutional citizen’s duty that compels me, by which in every important matter he is bound to cast his vote to the right or to the left.—With my slight ability I shall take as my task only this: how the Hungarian constitution did indeed press toward the realizing of these principles, and, if it did indeed so press, how this striving may at present, in the electoral moment, be crowned with success...

(Fragment) The party that, ashamed of its own color, struggles under the mask of another party, has broken the staff over itself, has confessed that it can bind its faithful to itself only by mystification, that it is the other party’s color that must win, and that the moment it steps out in its true shape it is at once lost.—— And yet so do the Budapest newspaper men. They say that they must have free trade— The regulation of the relations of villeinage— The regulation of the towns— Association shares—and so forth. And every honest Hungarian who, convinced of the crookedness of the present relations, sees the need of reforms, with a calm conscience, lulled by these fine inscriptions, not even looking into the book’s contents, accepts the party.—Only let it not be too late to be disenchanted when they dish out the articles before him. They want free trade—how? why, even we do not desire so much in the present circumstances of things! But let us examine more deeply, and our wonder will cease.—Of what can trade consist? Of raw products and manufactures. How do the raw products stand with us?—There is peasant land, town land, noble land, large and small proprietors.—The peasant pays tax, is tithed, pays the priest, the schoolmaster, and so forth; he must also live, if indeed he still must, and finally he may sell the small remainder, which now makes a twentieth of his toil and his food; the small nobleman no longer pays tax, pays neither priest nor schoolmaster, but his food consumes two-thirds of his produce, and so what is to be sold makes a third of the whole sum.—The great lord keeps no fundus instructus, his villeins work the land, he gets the tithe for nothing, on the rest only the land-value weighs, and so he gets his produce quite clear; now these three kinds of produce go to one market—and let them compete together—this too is not free trade. If, then, we have raised the banner of free trade, this we must above all abolish.—Now, can there be free trade here with the manufactures? There stand the guilds; and in Budapest, because there are energetic dicasteries in the vicinity, they extort not quite so much, but elsewhere—this again is not free trade...

Honored founding assembly! Before we begin the thorough discussion of the statutes, I do not hold it out of place to speak—partly as a simple member of the future association, partly as one who had the good fortune to take part in the framing of these statutes here to be laid before you, and whose ideas are thus in some part identical with them. With a pleasant feeling, but not surprised, I see how numerously you have flocked to the founding of this association. Not surprised, I say, because I am not among those who believe that the spirit, like steam-power, can with impunity be shut up, barred from its beneficent activity, in a narrow boiler; rather I well know that if we close every valve through which the power before contributed to the moving of a hundred wheels, it will find that little side-pipe by which it can take its way toward the smallest wheel, and here, concentrating all its force, will by its grand working raise the frail instrument to eminence.—And how could this have been otherwise, especially in Nógrád, where there dwells so much intelligence, so much strength of soul as would do honor to a province that boasts a civilizer’s standing. But perhaps someone objects that the sphere and task of an economic association is so modest, has so little of those brilliant careers which had spoiled our strivings, that it cannot serve to satisfy so much talent and strength here gathered together. To this I answer only with Tacitus’s words: “Peragit tranquilla potestas quae violenta nequit.” Or can the sphere of such an association appear slight, whose aim is the raising of agriculture and thereby of material well-being? Truly not; for, firstly, however we may reason, in the last analysis every taxable capacity of the state, and thus its material strength, falls back upon agriculture, and so its raising is the flowering of the state—wherefore Frederick the Great could justly say: “I should think the man who grew two ears of corn where one grew before greater than any statesman and any scholar.” Secondly: above material well-being the nation’s treasure is its sense of moral worth, which lies in the faithful keeping of the ideas left to it as a sacred tradition, in the independence of conviction.—Of the independence of conviction, in our frail age, well-being, property, is, alas, the surest guarantee; this wards off the dangerous attempt at purchasability from him to whom the keeping of the nation’s great treasure, the idea, is entrusted. And above all other property it is precisely landed property which, differing from every other mode of livelihood, binds with the strongest chains to the native bound, and justifies our great poet’s words: “Beyond this great world there is no place for you; whether fate’s hand strike or bless you, here you must live and die.”—And the aim of the economic association is precisely the furthering of the enrichment of this landed class, of which Cicero already said so aptly: “Agricultura nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius.” Thirdly: finally, to us Hungarians the attainment of the aims touched on above is especially important, since the chief palladium of the survival of our nationhood lies precisely in the faithful keeping of the possession of the soil won with blood, in the showing of our spiritual superiority, and in the moral dignity of independent conviction. I am therefore convinced that, as numerously as you have flocked to the founding of this association, with such zeal will you contribute to its development; and then the most brilliant success cannot fail, for the Hungarian who, when he took up the sword, was Christendom’s first soldier, when he sat on his legislator’s seat always grasped his age, when the homeland demanded sacrifice earned Europe’s esteem—if he gathers his talents around this peaceful but beneficent banner, he will likewise be capable of carrying out no everyday things. Having said this as one unassuming member of the future association, I must make a few general observations on the draft statutes to be presented, as one who had the good fortune to take part in their drafting. It is already our accustomed lot that all the good we from time to time succeed in realizing we owe only to our own strength and our own endurance. I bring this up not as a complaint, for I well know that protection can call forth only hothouse plants, which are not fit for the open field; that the wings it lends are only Icarus’s wings of wax, which melt in the hotter sun, and we plunge into the abyss. The wings that carry us high must be wings organically developed out of our own strength; and therefore our desire too is no other than that of those merchants whom Louis XIV asked what he should do in the interest of trade’s flowering, and to which they answered: “Sire! laissez nous faire”—Lord, let us move. The permission to move is there; the means of being able to move will be the statutes. These are not carried to the petty paragraphing of specialities; rather they are only general ideas, in which, in my view, the germ of the organizing development is contained, and beyond this it would at present be a pity to go. Who would prepare a garment in advance for the youth still only now developing, into which to force his limbs; who can say in advance which part will develop the more richly, which will lag, what need shows itself here, what surplus appears there? Therefore be pleased to regard the whole of the statutes, the spirit that breathes through them. But besides, it is not the goodness of the statutes that makes associations or states great, but the public spirit that upholds them. Rome, under the very laws under which it grew great, bent into the yoke of slavery when civic virtue died out of the citizens’ souls. Those Christian doctrines which led the first Christians to martyrdom could not drive off indifference once the spirit had grown cold. But I do not wish to heap example upon example, and only ask that, if the spirit which breathes through this draft wins your approval, we not dispute single points and the application of single points to the developing need, but leave them to time. By the situation of my dwelling-place toward the towns that may come into question, if I saw their claims and advantages in balance, I might truly be like Leibniz’s hay-eating animal, which, set exactly midway between two wholly equal bundles of hay, since it was not more strongly drawn by either, perished of hunger in the middle for want of a ground of decision.—But here there is not even the shadow of doubt, of equal drawing-power. In every organism there is an appointed place, there is a heart toward which the blood of the whole body is directed—we may draw the blood artificially toward the liver or the kidney, we may cause inflammation, a momentary congestion, but not a healthy pulsing of the blood; this will go again and again back to the heart, that it may live and give life. What, then, are those pulsings of public life which show us where that heart is which is appointed to unite and distribute the life? The first such pulsing lies in the newspaper literature. Let us look over the post offices of all our county towns—which receives the most papers—and we shall find an outstanding quantity in one of our towns. The second such pulsing is the bustle of trade; let us look over again the registers of our towns, and we shall see a difference beyond all comparison as to the markets of that same town of ours. The third such pulsing is where science has built itself a settled nest, where schools and libraries flourish, where the wandering Thalia now and then rests, and is not compelled, driven off by hunger, to wander straightway onward. Of such a town there is but one in our county. The fourth and mightiest pulsing—nay, the most palpable testimony of viability—is when the mortally wounded, the ruined organism can struggle up again by its own strength, and after a few short years can proudly show its healed scars. And this viability that same town has again shown, and this town is Losonc. For the seat of our association, then, in my view, no other can even enter into competition with it. The bringing forward of other side considerations, if they aim at the regard of personal comfort, I should regard as insulting precisely to those concerned, for they would be suspected of narrowness toward the common interest. If, on the other hand, certain unpleasant recollections or antipathies were brought forward as a pretext, I should hold it still more insulting, likewise to those concerned; for the mightier we know a man to be and the more we respect him, the less shall we suppose in him the inclination to pettiness and the lust for revenge; in strength is contained mercy—forgetting.

Most Eminent Cardinal Prince-Primate! By the very first resolution of the very first general assembly of the Nógrád County economic association, your Eminence, as one of the great landed proprietors of our county, was elected its honorary member. To make this resolution known to your Eminence with solemn respect was laid upon us as our duty. Slight as may appear, before the vain love of glory of the material man, the distinction which the honorary membership of an economic association offers to a man who, rising step by step, has attained the utmost of rank and splendor, we are convinced that your Eminence will look on it with other eyes, and, faithful to the spirit of Scripture, will take the poor man’s penny for as much as the rich man’s splendid offerings. Yes; for there is a kind of recognition which, though least strong of all, yet of all most uplifts; which, though least splendid of all, yet of all most sweetly touches; which loses not its charm even when, sated with every worldly glory, we have grown used to regarding it as the vanity of vanities—and this is the sympathetic devotion of our fellow citizens. But this is natural, this too is a proof of the superiority of spirit over matter; for while the latter, after a span’s existence, crumbles away together with the power from which it borrowed its splendor, public opinion, personifying enjoyments of eternal youth in its chosen ones, confers their immortality upon their bearers too. Long ago the purple of the Szelepcsényis fell away, the cross of merit of the Szécsényis dropped off, while their one-time bearers still live in grateful memory, as the victorious heroes of our constitutional struggles. Your Eminence lately won a twofold triumph. First as our country’s chief priest, who saw an immoral, reverenceless system—which by statistical data brought yearly three hundred proprietors, three hundred sinews of the national strength, to ruin, which by the forced, arbitrary disposing of labor and money killed in the germ every well-being capable of development—collapse like a giant standing on feet of clay, not by rude violence but for want of the support of that all-upholding public opinion, justifying the Latin saying: peragit tranquilla potestas, quae violenta nequit.—And you held a triumph the second time as the one surviving dignity of our old constitutional existence, to whom, as homage before historical right, these fateful words were addressed: “You have become the victor.”— And yet, when the Nógrád County economic association elected precisely your Eminence from among its great landed proprietors as its honorary member, it was not these triumphs that guided its act. The jubilation of joy is premature where, only on the morning of the battle, the banners are loosed to the wind, where the goal is indeed in prospect but the obstacles of the road that leads to it are still unknown to us. What makes your Eminence’s election to honorary membership of our economic association lofty is precisely this: that our homage does not hasten to greet the uncertain rising sun, but turns with reverence to the great ideas of the past. This reverent devotion to our constitutional past is the offspring of our eight-century national life, which accompanies us into the house of God, to the place of amusement, which is there like salt in every food on which body and soul are nourished; which, hidden though for eleven years, we yet kept sacredly, that on the first occasion we might present our homage before it—and this homage we have presented in the person of your Eminence, who, like the ark of the covenant to Israel suffering in bondage, remained among the ruins of our trampled institutions as the single standing sign in our hard days. This glance back into the past is at the same time the single ray of hope of the uncertain future; for if we see the banner of old glorious battles wave again, we believe that the old ideas, the old glory, are again there beneath it. Your Eminence, the anointed bearer of this old banner, will not let slip from beneath his feet that firm foundation which, like Antaeus, is the wellspring of his strength, standing on which he may safely say: longus post me ordo est idem petentium decus—and which foundation is none other than the one and indivisible book of the eight-century historical development of our constitution, from which, as from a living organism, even a few pages cannot, may not be torn out without the whole collapsing like dead matter.

II. THE DIET

The diet now at the threshold will, by my conviction, belong among those few legislatures which, forming a new epoch, decide over the nation’s being and non-being, its glory and its disgrace. It is fair, nay necessary, then, that the electors, who lay the most sacred interest of the homeland and of themselves into the hands of their popular representative, not contenting themselves with the security that lies in their candidate’s past—and which was perhaps the spur that they turned toward him with their honoring trust—should demand of him too an open political confession of faith, for whose exact keeping the manly sense of honor stands surety. On the other hand, however, the very importance and gravity of the subject, the enigmatic character of the future development, the daily growing influence of the European formations upon the fate of single countries, make it impossible to issue so detailed a political program that—since politics, in Lajos Kossuth’s words, is the science of exigencies—anyone could promise adherence to it in all circumstances, without either the sanctity of the given word or the good of the homeland being endangered by it. But there are general principles which one may, nay must, confess as unshakable foundations; which it is forbidden to give up even from considerations of utility; for which to die is the duty not only of the individual, but by whose betrayal it is, for a nation too, a disgrace to barter life in place of death—for among goods life is not the highest. These fundamental principles, I—who was fortunate to be set up by the trust of many for the hard, but for that very reason glorious, career of the popular representative—sum up in three words, and these three words are: “Liberty, equality, fraternity!” By liberty I understand my homeland’s integrity, guarded against all incorporation; the keeping, free from all foreign influence, of the right of disposing over its own affairs and especially over its two greatest treasures, the people’s blood and money; the flower of our eight-century constitutional struggles, the government founded on personal responsibility, together with county self-government and freedom of the press, those two strongest supporters. Secondly. By equality I understand equality under the laws, equal rights of the religions, and the abolition of all feudal recollections. Thirdly. By fraternity, alongside the fair regard for the linguistic claims of the different-tongued races of the people, the fraternal fusion of them all in the Hungarian rights and duties of citizenship. These principles are indeed laid down already in the laws of 1848 too, which are for us the sole possible starting point of all further state life; and so nothing remains but for me to add to them the words of two great men.—Particularly what our country’s prince-primate said to the deputation of the Nógrád County economic association: “That never backward, but always forward”—and with Martin Luther’s world-historical apostrophe: “I have spoken; I could not do otherwise; so help me God. Amen.” Given at Balassagyarmat, March 12, 1861.

With a constricted breast and abashed I step onto this seat to thank the undivided trust of the Gyarmat electoral district, with which it elected me its diet representative. For if I measure my undeserving self against this great distinction, it truly appears to me that it is entrusted to me only as advance pay, against a future which I have yet to earn, and not as a reward for the past. For what could I have done to earn this distinguished station in the sad past which excluded all civic activity, which forced the citizen off every field of cooperation, beyond that neutral resistance which never bows to the standing arbitrary government, never bargains with it, never recognizes it? And even now, if I weigh my slight talents against the enormous weight of my mission, there are only two things that embolden me to struggle with it. First, the trust of this electoral district, which adds the strength of a people thirty thousand strong to my strength. Second, the conviction that at the next diet too there will be need not so much of brilliant talents as of manly endurance, which neither power’s smile bewitches nor its frowning brow drives back—and in these two things we have had occasion enough to test our strength in the time gone by. Most honored electoral assembly, of this alone will there be need now, when, under the flattering mask of imperial unity, of the imperial council, the homeland of the Hungarian is drawn into question, when its thousand-year-old most sacred right, the right of disposing over soldiers and tax, is meant to be taken away, and what twelve years of violence did not succeed in doing is now meant to be attained by the path of legality, by the nation’s suicide. Here we stand under God’s free heaven; but I should dread to stand under it again before his striking power—and yet I love to look on the radiant sun—if I were to lend a helping hand in any part to the carrying out of these designs. Among you I have spent my life thus far in honor; I wish boldly to look you in the eye henceforth too, and I wish to die among you too in honor; but I could not do so if I shared this plan of murdering the people. Oh, if I might hope that this diet may also enter upon the passing of laws furthering the interests of individuals, I should hold it my sweetest duty to further these too in the interest of my electors; but now there is only one thing I can surely promise you, and which you too will surely set before all your private interests, and that is, that to the last breath I shall strive to save the homeland. When that power which presses toward the annihilation of our homeland shall see that the diet declares, as one man—as I love to believe—for the cardinal rights whose keeping was made its office, it may, nay probably will, dissolve it; this is in its power; it may persecute even its single members; this too is possible; but it is not in its power to hide from Europe the word that has been spoken, the declaration of the whole representation of the nation, which Europe will hear with attention; as it was in its power to drag the men of ’48 to prison and scaffold, but not to annihilate their victoriously resurgent ideas—and so the coming diet will not be without result, it will fulfill its mission.—It may be that what does not succeed with us at the diet, the imperial council will attempt to construct directly by means of you; but I believe and know that you will no more enter upon this crime of treason, the constituting of the imperial council, than your representative, and thereby set the seal of approval on its procedure. I repeat, gentlemen, hard times may stand before us, but the victory of our cause on the field of legality is certain, as our divine master was crucified for his teaching, but his doctrine became victorious for all eternity.— And now I turn once more to you, my Slovak-tongued electors, saying a twofold thanks for the trust you have shown me; for by it you have not only honored my person, but have given proof too that you have grasped that all-important truth which alone can lead our cause to victory: that the interest of the peoples of Hungary, of whatever tongue, of whatever religion, is but one; that when the Hungarian defends his own freedom, he fights thereby for the freedom of his Slovak brother too; that the most zealous fighters of Protestant religious freedom were always found in the ranks of the Catholics.—That in good and ill fortune we are called to rejoice together or to suffer together.

Honored House of Representatives! Gibbon, the great English historian, says: “Had Alaric been in the council at Ravenna, he would probably have proposed the very measures which Honorius’s ministers, against him, indeed resorted to!” This scene repeats itself everywhere in world history where states have set out toward dissolution; for countries are upheld not by the goodness of their institutions but by the public spirit, not by the brilliance of theories but by civic virtue; and, as our laureled poet says: verse “The prop, the cornerstone of every country
is pure morality, which if it rots,
Rome falls and bends into the slave’s yoke.” verse And what Gibbon writes of the crumbling Roman empire, all this we see with our own eyes renewing itself in the council of the Vienna gentlemen, as a startling sign of the times; for just as Cincinnatuses and Aristideses, Perényis and Csánys, can be born only of a nation with a great future, so Heliogabaluses and Oleanders, Brucks and Eynattens can spring up only where, after Hamlet, there is something rotten in the commonwealth. This rottenness we all bitterly felt for twelve years; in those twelve years of which we may justly say with Tacitus: “Magnum profecto dedimus patientiae documentum.” But whose horrors were already so masterfully painted before me that I will not add my pale colors to them, and enter only upon the examination of this: whether those Austrian statesmen who dared with such sacrilegious hands to seize the wheel of historical development and human right, and whose politics success—the eternal scale-pan of the science of government—has long condemned, had at least, as an ideal, so great, so inspiring an idea as might serve as an excuse for their procedure. One of the ideas that guided these statesmen was the unity of the empire. To make of the heterogeneous countries conglomerated under the Austrian dynasty one homogeneous state, as happened in Spain, France, or Great Britain, would be a fine and great idea, only that it came fourteen hundred years too late; and since du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas, this seemingly great idea too truly became ridiculous, exactly like Don Quixote’s striving to restore the age of chivalry, which yet came not fourteen but only a half-century too late—as the lofty ideal of the crusades, in its own time, would become ridiculous if warmed over in our days. Before still the nations and states had won their individual development, while the whole was yet a chaos, then the elements could unite into larger organisms; but even then not at the word of single directing sages, but preparing themselves a life-principle, making history in secret, softly, as all things and always in organizing nature! But he who steps in among already existing, life-glad organisms and wishes to fuse them together must begin with killing, and will indeed call forth ruin, rottenness, but never life. Those very learned doctors, besides, who understand everything, ought to know too that nations belonging to distinct families of peoples never fused together even in those organizing centuries; and, to mention but two examples, as the American race never unites with the European but rather dies out, as the Turk and the Greek dwelling mixed do not fuse, so the Altaic Hungarian too can never fuse with the Indo-Germanic peoples; but, gentlemen, neither will he die out, for he has a world-historical mission, of which he has played out only the first act. For this reason, then, the Austrian statesmen with their unitary Austria appear to me like the seven sleepers of the legend, who, awaking long after, offered the world a coin that had long ceased to be current. The second guiding idea of the Austrian statesmen was that they should civilize us, as men called to spread civilization to the East. This whole starting point rests partly on gross ignorance, partly on malicious deception. The Hungarian nation, from the age of St. Stephen, always stood on the level of the rest of Europe’s civilization, nay in many cases above it; whereof, not to weary the House’s patience with this detailing, I single out only a few examples. There stands, in the most superstitious centuries, the law of our King Kálmán on the non-existence of witches; there stands, in the time of the first crusades, our nation’s enlightened bearing. There stands the fact that feudalism could never reach with us such flowering as it reached, with the whole annihilation of the state, among our neighbors. There stands, finally, as a brilliant page, our religious tolerance from the first time of Protestantism, when throughout Europe the pyres of heretics blazed. But whence too did our scholarship draw new nourishment? In the first times, from the sages of Constantinople; later, under the kings of the house of Anjou, from Italy and France, whose universities our youth visited in preponderant number; and only when the religious reformation, become a need of the age, raised its voice precisely in Germany did we begin to seek out German science; and even then, I ask, was it not precisely the predecessors, in spirit and in power, of the present Austrian statesmen who always strove, down to the latest times, to hinder, to paralyze the blessed effect of ideas in our country? Did not Kazinczy, finally, the re-creator of our literature, naturalize Latin, Greek, and French models in place of German? Where, then, are we to seek the result of the German civilizing mission in the East? In the Danubian principalities, in Poland, in Russia, French culture, French ideas flourish. The German guests who have moved to us share with us not only bread and salt, not only joy and danger, but customs, culture, and patriotic feeling. Or shall we turn elsewhere? To America, where the German gladly forgets his nationhood and the memories of his servitude for the free institutions of the great English nation; or to Africa, where again English missionaries chiefly proclaim the word. How they spread civilization among us during the last twelve years—this too was set forth in brilliant speeches; I remark only that when Bach, the inventor of the democratico-absolute form of government, dished out his civilizing results to the world in his Rückblick, it was partly a shameless twisting of the facts—as for instance when he enumerates with how many three- and four-class schools he presented our country; for he is silent that he abolished far more of our six- and eight-class schools. He is silent that, while in our former institutions the propertyless thirst for knowledge could educate itself for nothing, the heavy burdens of his even the wealthy can scarcely bear. Partly, too, it was the displaying of results which arose by no means through the government’s patronage—nay, against the government too—under the fertilizing breath of the advancing national genius; and so he plays the ridiculous role of that cock which ascribed the breaking of the dawn to its crowing. Truly so much arrogance recalls to me these words of the German poet: verse Wo ist des deutschen Vaterland?
Wo’s Pulver einer einst erfand,
Und heut’ noch jeder denkt dabei:
Dass er der Mitterfinder sei. verse A still truer thermometer of civilization than all these, however, is political maturity and freedom. And in this regard we may ask Europe’s peoples with self-respect, may ask our disordered, unfortunate neighbors, whose betterment we wish from the heart: who stood, century by century, more in advance than we, and who stands even now, in right and feeling, stronger than we, if not in fortune and material strength. Our Magna Charta is contemporary with the English; what the Geneva sage could only set up as a theory in the last century in his Contrat social—was, in our state’s formation, already a historical fact a thousand years before. What the world-shaking French Revolution could only pronounce amid bloody struggles, on the sovereignty of the people, was with us formulated as law in 1790, that all majesty is with the nation; and what was pronounced in law, practice brought into life, and our great countryman Széchenyi addressed every mixed session thus: “Most exalted homeland.” And us, who have such antecedents, they wished by twelve years of harassment—in which, speaking with the Roman writer, “Vidimus quod ultimum esset in servitute”—like the people of Israel in the Babylonian captivity, to force, deserting our laws written with the finger of God, to take service with a Baal whose godhead nothing else proves than the property of a million poor going up in smoke on its insatiable altar, and the flowing blood of human sacrifices. But though during these twelve years their action knew no bound, so that to it fit St. Bernard’s words, “facitis quia potestis, an autem oporteat, quaestio est”—it came out at last that non oportebat; their thunderbolts, which they hurled at us, did just as little harm as once the pope’s ecclesiastical curse, pronounced at once against the Turk breaking into Europe, the comet appearing in the sky, and the locusts. The attempt did not succeed; violence was weaker than the spirit. What did not succeed for the inventor of the democratico-absolutistic form of government, Schmerling, the inventor of absolutistico-democracy, attempts anew, and that under the banners of the constitution; for the greatest victory of the constitutional ideas is that in our age one can fight even against them only under the color of freedom. We stand, then, today again where we stood in 1850, only that the ground is still more shameful; now the murder of the nation is meant to be carried out with us, by us, by the lawful path, which violence did not succeed in doing; and while the terror of dragonnades runs through the country, plundering us of our last pennies that with these the army of the Duke of Modena may be paid; while the hirelings of an unknown power carry fright into peaceful dwellings, while the officials of that same power, released from our laws, dispose over us; while, in stepping down the steps of this House, we have at the same time left the ground on which our ancestral laws are respected: meanwhile we, the legislative body of Hungary, are like a sea-robber’s false flag for the deceiving of foreign lands, set on the pillory.— Yet I believe firmly that the result will be the same; for my nation’s political maturity is far too great not to see through that the Bach and the Schmerling system, to use a trivial Spanish proverb, are the same dog with only a different collar. I believe the result will be the same, if we too, like the Roman senate under the irruption of Brennus’s barbarians, wrapped in our togas, await their blows motionless in our lawful places. This lawful ground I see occupied in most points of the motion of the deeply honored representative Ferenc Deák, and therefore I too add my vote to it. But precisely because we are in so extraordinarily delicate a position, I fear the giving up of the least such ground as ill will might point to in later steps. To this caution an example warns from the very latest days. The counties organized themselves, the counties sent up addresses, though they well knew that they did not stand on wholly lawful ground—only that they might make possible the diet, in which the nation might declare itself as such, and might declare itself with the strictest keeping of law and constitution. And lo, already we hear the counties’ addresses brought forward as arguments for our writing too;—we hear the first yielding step brought forward as a ground for taking the second too. We are upon the slope of departure from strict right, which our enemies will soon use to deduce from it the logic of the third step of compromise—of which, taking the word in its true sense, I believe no one in this House dreams; for to compromise means as much as to be willing to yield something of one’s demand too, and our demands can no more be objects of yielding than to be or not to be, than life and death. Let us avoid, then, even the appearance of it; the address presupposes an answer, this a counter-answer; out of all this ill will—and we have to do with no good friends—may construe a compromise; and truly, he who hands me his ultimatum but stays in the antechamber justly rouses in me some suspicion that this is not yet his last word. Therefore I support the amendment of the honored representative Kálmán Tisza, and the form of the resolution; for this I hold to be cautious politics in the defense of our rights. It is said that all precedent is for the address; but for the position in which we stand I have not yet heard a precedent cited from history; and so, until I hear it, neither do I seek a precedent for the resolution. It is said that the resolution binds no one but ourselves. And whom does the protestation of the weak man wronged in his rights bind, whom the cry of the collapsing fighter? No one, is it not, and yet everyone in whose breast a noble feeling dwells, nay even him who feels with a blush that he is the cause of this cry. And now, when the word in moments circles the world, let us not fear that our word will sound away into deaf ears, let us not fear that it will not reach the ear of that power which is the cause that we have no lawful government among us, which could be the sole lawful means of communicating with it, which is the cause that we are a mutilated parliament, and thus incapable of the exercise of that distinguished legislative act, of addressing the throne. And if this power should wish to step onto a ground on which it is possible that we might join hands, let no one say that it cannot do so without an address; there is written in our code the road that leads to this ground.—Until then we may write a petition to the conqueror, may beg and beg: Lord! the harassment, the misery thou sendest upon us is already much, lighten our burden; but an address, as to the nation’s sovereign, until then we cannot send. Precisely for this reason, then, because I know that our word in the form of a resolution too will vibrate through the world, I too believe what the honored representatives said, that our diet will not be without result; for now, in the present, I expect no other result than this, that the world understand us; and I believe in the sure being of our existence in the future, for this understood word will be the word of right, truth, and progress. The dark waves of bitterness may yet break over us once more; but our victory is only a question of time, raw violence can reap only an ephemeral victory, the idea rises and becomes common property, for which its first utterers bled. I wish to reflect only on a few ideas raised partly in the House, partly among our neighbors. To speak of the placetum after what was said before me would be a struggle against the dead; I wish only to remark further that the right of the placetum was never directed against the independence of the Hungarian Catholic church, only against the influence of a political foreign power;—and just as our country flourished best under King Matthias, who upheld the right of the placetum with an iron grip, so under Ulászló, the right of the placetum being violated, we know the lamentable consequences. Very honored speakers brilliantly proved that Austria’s great-power standing is not the unitary Austria, nay, is the very condition of dualism. To this I remark only that even were it the contrary, we could never accept the principle of opportunity as an argument, without at the same time sanctioning every robbery, every oppression of the weaker, without recognizing with it that he who cannot be a lord of his own property has a right to his fellow man’s pocket.—But besides, does it belong to our happiness that we be a great power? have we ever heard that a Belgian envied a Russian subject for this? Finally our neighbors say that we stand on revolutionary ground. If he stands on revolutionary ground who tramples historical rights underfoot; if he stands there who, stripped of all reverence, violently plants new institutions in place of demolished old ones: then it is they who stand on revolutionary ground, over against the conservative Hungarian nation; and Europe’s interest is to lead us to victory against them, lest, after unbearable harassments forced onto that ground, we increase by one the ranks of those murdered nations, one of which last year rose rejuvenated and menacing from its dead, while the bloody specter of another, like Banquo’s ghost, still ceaselessly frightens European diplomacy.

Honored House of Representatives! If we look back over world history, we shall find that every age had its peculiar guiding idea, which, like leaven, set in motion the whole world of inert matter, and developed out of the tasteless mixture the noble spirit, the life-giving spirit, which can be nothing other than freedom. This is the single idea which, though as old as the world, is yet as young as the spring; which, though as indestructible as the basalt rock, is yet as sensitive as the pollen-laden flower-stalk. In the judging of every newly appearing idea, then—whether it is the guiding idea of the age, and in what sense—the sole measure that can serve is its capacity in the furthering of the cause of freedom. And so, just as on the one hand the unifying strivings of the ancient Greek tribes, the universalizing tendency of the Roman state, the new world-view of Christianity, the synthesis of the Reformation, and the noble intoxication of the French Revolution justly earn our full recognition: so on the other hand the circus factionalism of the Greek empire, the embittered war of the Homoousion and Homoiousion confessions of faith, the hair-splitting of the scholastic philosophers—how many angels can stand on the point of a fine needle—the tulip-madness or the finance-operation of a Law, whose pendant our days bring forth, though in their own time they came forward with no less noise than the true ideas of the age, being divided from us by a span of time, dwindle to one rank with the rapping spirits and the table-turning, which fate seems to throw among us now and then only as a child’s plaything, that we may see how, even alongside such trash, the human spirit halts for a moment, and that the sense of shame may hold us back from the presumption which, amid continual upward striving, in the feeling of our heavenly origin, would easily lead us into temptation. Among the ideas that have appeared in our age, the question of the nationalities will doubtless take the most distinguished place. And that especially with us, by reason of our peculiar relations. And it seems to be the Hungarian’s world-historical mission, which set him as a sentinel at his present perilous place on the great highway of the migrations of peoples, which wedged him,* as indestructible matter, among such tribes whose fusion would perhaps threaten even the present civilization, which set him up as a bulwark of freedom and Christianity against the inbreaking Islam—now again directs him to solve the nationality question, nowhere yet solved, on the foundation of right, in the interest of freedom. Nationhood expresses two concepts: A political nationhood founded on historical development, or a distinct racial descent and a distinct language. In the first sense it resembles the cockade which we wear in the public market of public life, that everyone may see to what camp we belong. In this sense nationhood is a public-law concept, and its regulation, its satisfaction, belongs in the sphere of politics and diplomacy. In the second sense it is a homely garment in which we enjoy the delights of family peace, so personal a, so to speak, spiritual private right—like culture, like the right of exercising one’s religion—which the state not only need not, but may not, wish to direct and regulate, having only the duty of defending it from all external violence. The role of political nationhood—noble, because it walks arm in arm with freedom—is as old as the history of humanity. We find it among the Jews formulated into an article of faith, that Israel is God’s chosen people, and with this shibboleth we see miracles performed, Canaan conquered, the torments of the Babylonian captivity endured.—We find it again during the Greek freedom-struggles on the plain of Marathon, in the pass of Thermopylae; there in the tragic end of Decebalus and in the struggle of Karageorge—in a word, everywhere where the flowing blood of breasts receptive to freedom teaches kindred-feeling souls to warm. But why cite every brighter page of all world history? I need only prove with a few data that all these great deeds are truly and solely the results of political nationhood, and not of racial and linguistic nationhood, which until the latest times scarcely awoke to consciousness. We know that embittered war which the Jewish race, split into two, waged against one another to its final destruction. * According to the Slav writer Kollár. We further know too that even in the flowering time of the people of Israel, the Old Hebrew tongue became only a priestly tongue, and the Syro-Chaldaic language drove it finally out of common life. From these it is, I believe, clear that the Jewish people’s great deeds were led not by racial and linguistic but by political nationhood. We know that the fairest flowers of Greek eloquence and valor were brought forth by the defensive war against Macedon, and yet the Macedonians spoke the same language, were children of the same race with them; and so again it is clear that here too the noble spring was not linguistic and racial but political nationhood. But, to mention only one more of the hundred examples of antiquity, let us look at the Wallachian nation’s war with Trajan; and whichever of the two hypotheses of this nation’s descent be true, it will testify for my assertion. For if the Wallachians formed two branches of the same stock with the Romans, then Decebalus’s people fought the lion’s struggle against their kin of race and language, surely for no other thing than its historically developed political nationhood. But if the Wallachians or Dacians were a nation of distinct race and language, conquered by Trajan, when they let themselves be so easily Romanized by their conqueror’s soldiers, they proved only that after the loss of their political nationhood they laid no great weight any more on keeping their linguistic nationhood. Exactly as the Bulgarians, of whom it is a sure historical fact that they are not of Slav origin, that they had a distinct language, which, losing it together with their independence, they took the Slav for their own. Of the period of the migrations one could heap up similar examples to weariness; the Celts, the Gauls, the Iberians, and the Lombards, with countless other peoples, sacrificed against the rushing flood their race and their language, but not their institutions or their political existence, and by now their forms of state, their customs, have seeped, unscathed, even into the newest science of the state, the newest codes of law. From this period, however, I wish to single out for the proof of my assertion only one, less known fact, which Tollius recorded in 1687 on page 42 of his book entitled Itinerarium Hungaricum: when the empire of the Vandals in Africa ceased, a few thousand Vandals, he says, moved back into their old homeland, the shores of the German North Sea, and there formed a few communes; but although they were again among their kin of race and language, for several centuries they could not fuse with them. They did not have recourse to the Brandenburg judges, but settled their affairs secretly among themselves according to their old African laws; they did not honor the ducal officials, but indeed the descendants of their ancient princes, who, mingled among them, went about in rags. This, I believe, is a brilliant proof that the satisfaction, the greatness, of linguistic nationhood is not yet the contentment and happiness of the patriot breast. Lest, however, anyone say that old examples have no weight against new ideas, let us look about in the newest age too. The language of Belgium and France is one, and does little Belgium nevertheless wish to sacrifice its historical nationhood for the benefit of the growth of its linguistic nationhood? Do Alsace and Lorraine assert their German race against the French nationhood, with which the glory of the past, the brilliant deeds of a Kléber and others, have so fused them, as we were fused with the Croats, with the Serbs, by the alternately brilliant and mournful pages of eight hundred years’ history, as we were fused by the indelible sacred blood of the Damjaniches and the Zrínyis? Do the immigrant peoples of various tongues in great free America—whose historical nationhood, after all, is rooted in scarcely some eighty-odd years—claim, beyond their personal rights, to win currency for their political nationhood? But could the Emperor Napoleon III himself, the great proclaimer of the politics of nationhood, have understood any other nationhood than the political? Surely not; this his procedure thus far proves, but it is proved especially by this, that the idea he proclaimed became the idea of the age, and so of freedom, because it creates and welds together; whereas had he understood the torn, sporadic linguistic nationhoods, his idea would have become the idea of servitude, a mad fancy that breaks apart and tears asunder. It is proved, finally, by the result; for while the Austro-Italian provinces gravitate unstoppably toward great Italy, because an Austrian political nationhood could never be born, the developed civic spirit keeps the Swiss Italian cantons in peaceful order. And now let us examine: is there, can there be, within the bounds of Hungary, any other historical or political nationhood than the Hungarian? To this question I must answer decidedly no. It is a historical truth that on this soil which we call our homeland, from the most ancient times no lasting state could ever be formed, not even under the Roman rule, which was so eminent a master of organization. It was only the Hungarian race that, appearing twice on this field, twice vanished after a brilliant but ephemeral existence, that on its third return, under the leader Árpád, it might build on firm foundations a state which, defying tempest and storm, stands to this day. This I brought up simply as a fact, and by no means as an argument for the Hungarian nation’s right to this soil over against its earlier possessors; for he who, against the conquests made in the time of the migrations and the historical developments that followed them, would assert the right of the earlier possessors, would declare the nations existing at present not only in Europe but in almost the whole world to be intruders into their own countries; and, to pass over the example of the Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Franks, and other better-known peoples, I note only two facts. First, that even in far East India the memory of a conquered native and a victorious foreign occupying people was kept indelibly by the much darker complexion of the pariahs and the much lighter of the Brahmins. Second, that at the discovery of America the Spaniards found this same fact there too, and that according to the popular tradition lighter-colored conquerors had come from the north to write law for the darker inhabitants. One essential difference, however, exists between all these conquerors and the Hungarian nation, and this difference is that while those either dissolved the foreign nationalities, often with fire and sword—like the millions of Slavs who dwelt in the northern part of present-day Germany—or condemned them for their nationhood to slavery, as the blue-blooded noble families of England and France, who all derive from the conquering nationalities, testify to this day, over against the citizens and peasantry descended from the conquered: The Hungarian, meanwhile, with magnanimous self-confidence, left every conquered race unharmed. In his eight-century collection of laws not one is to be found directed against any foreign nationhood, but very many directed to their defense. And more eloquently than all this speaks the fact that all these nationalities, which it would have been so easy for the mighty conqueror to annihilate, not only rejoice in flowering among us to this day, but, alas, can also serve as a pretext for a few zealots, by the deliberate or unconscious confounding of the most sacred ideas and grander designs, to bring the matter to the point where they might lead a nation of less elevated soul to repent of its magnanimity. And yet the Hungarian, not contenting himself with having persecuted no one for his nationhood, gave every nationhood an equal share, according to the stages of his constitution’s development, in all his freedom.—At the very beginning Werbőczy forms his nation not exclusively from his own race but from the distinguished men of his country. Already in the age of St. Stephen, Hunt and Pázmán, Germans, Count Bogomér, a Czech, and many others step within the ramparts of our constitution as the founders of our first families. The old curial suits have preserved a whole host of our foreign-named noble families from the most ancient time. Princes and grandees of Wallachia, Serbia, and Bosnia longed after the distinction and are gladly received as members of the Hungarian nation, as Hungarian nobles. And what proves my assertion still more is that very numerous Wallachian, Slav, Ruthenian, and Serb noble family which down to 1848 shared with us in every good of the constitution, while the millions of the most thoroughbred Hungarian race languished in the yoke of feudalism and rightlessness, until they saw, together and in one measure with their brethren of other tongues, the dawn of freedom break over their races. But even the assertions of our foreign-tongued countrymen themselves, whose validity it is not now my task to examine—that the Hunyadis were Wallachians, Kinizsi a Serb, the Zrínyis and the Frangepáns Croats, the Garas Slavonians, the Révays and the Beniczkys Slavs, and so forth—testify only for me; for they show palpably that political nationhood in our country was always only one, and this the Hungarian, that our countrymen of various races always recognized this. And I, for my part, shall always be content if my countrymen of foreign race will compete with the Hungarian to approach, in patriotism and readiness for sacrifice, the men enumerated above and confessed as their own. This appreciation of every language, and this historical development of the purely Hungarian political nationhood, brought it about that in Hungarian history the nationality question never even occurs down to the accession of the house of Austria. And as often as, since that time, it has been drawn into the foreground, it never happened in the interest of freedom, but always in that of reaction. And a movement which has such a genesis justly warns us to caution, on the one hand in the judging of its worth and its bearing, on the other in the critical examination of its emblems, glimmering in distant mist, which may be hung out precisely as a lure for the noblest souls, above interests hiding in obscurity. Against Ferenc Rákóczi II the valiant Serb people was armed with all kinds of promises; and when the freedom-struggle was beaten down, and years later Rákóczi’s son broke in from exile to make a desperate attempt, it was precisely the deceived Serbs who flocked around his unfortunate banners. In 1848 the attempt was repeated, though with half-success; but let us not touch the still unhealed wounds which, as brother hands struggling in the dark, we dealt one another from this side and that. I have proved, I believe, sufficiently, that of any other political nationhood in Hungary than the Hungarian there can be no word. All those claims, then, which rest on the contrary of this, as on a premise, vanish of themselves. Thus we cannot recognize any such demands of the single nationalities as they deduce either from a more compact dwelling-together, or which might lead to a separate territory—among which the forming of peculiar institutions or offices too may justly be reckoned. And if our Serb, or in the new style Serbian, countrymen would perhaps support some of these latter from their privileges, let them well consider that to invoke a privilege, for one who awaits the recognition of his rights from natural right and the enlightened spirit of the age, is not an altogether logical procedure.—Let them well consider that the privilege invoked was given only to the lately immigrated small fragment of the Serbs who have dwelt in our country for centuries, who by this immigration wished for a moment to escape sure final ruin, with the public reservation of being able to wander back. The privilege, which was logical for one seeking refuge as a temporary guest, becomes untenable for one who wishes decidedly to remain among the citizens of the homeland. We cannot recognize further that the majority of single counties might determine the county’s language to the exclusion of the other languages; for the natural consequence of this would be that, instead of the single county, the majority of the whole country should decide the language of all the counties—which surely would not be unfavorable to the Hungarian. We must protest, finally, on the strength of the established principles, against the notion, as if single nationalities should be represented by congresses called by whatever name, and might formulate their claims. Within the bounds of Hungary I recognize no other representation than the one that sits in this House, whose senders entrusted their chosen ones with all their interests and desires; and these will surely, as they will know it their duty to keep sacredly the interests of their senders, so will they have manliness enough not to let themselves be imposed upon by any manufactured and unconstitutional ostentations. After all this, the question of the nationalities in our country is to be led back solely to the satisfaction of the racial and linguistic nationalities, whose principle, as I touched at the very beginning of my speech, can be no other than the exercise of personal freedom, exactly as that of the various religious confessions, since these two questions are most strikingly analogous to each other. The wellspring of religion and of nationhood is not the head but the heart. Both are nourished by a dark presentiment of the future and a reverent honoring of the past. As religion, in the time of its boiling up, demanded territory with the formulation “cujus regio illius religio,” and demanded much else that did not befit it, so linguistic nationhood now, in the time of its boiling up, again demands such things as do not befit it. But as into the settled, purified religions peaceful tolerance descended, so it will descend among the nationalities too, and this too will see, as that saw, that its salvation lies only in the exercise of personal freedom. This hovered, as to the religions, before Franklin’s eyes when he wrote thus: “The more religions exist in a country, the less can one be the tyrant of the rest, the less can it become the guiding spring of the parties.” This may have hovered before St. Stephen’s eyes too, as to the races, when among the counsels he wrote for his son he says thus: “Regnum unius linguae imbecille et fragile est.” This hovered before the eyes of the appointed committee, when in its proposal, which I support in its whole extent, it gave its opinion for the satisfaction of the linguistic nationalities on the principle of personal freedom, up to that bound which divides it from the recognition of political nationhood. The absolute power may outbid us, may promise more; it writes into its bond too a twofold, threefold sum, which it has not the least intention of paying. But our adversaries too know that the people’s voice is God’s voice, and that the representatives of a constitutional nation will not, in penance for broken oaths and bloody sacrifices, go barefoot on pilgrimage to Rome. The absolute government may outbid us; its striving will be frustrated, I believe, on the one hand by the bitter disenchantments, the heavy wounds, of our freedom-struggle, and by all that sacred blood, shed beside the common national banner, whose share my country’s citizens of every tongue brought so emulously and so honestly. But oh, how easily peoples forget. Otherwise they would not so long be slaves.—And what if we too should forget? No matter; even then we may not let our action be guided by the outbidding. To wish to fan a single nationhood, as such, from whatever interest, beyond justice, is just as contrary to freedom and to the nation’s dignity as to wish to oppress it. And to offer, in order to save the homeland from reaction’s outbidding, such a satisfaction as would lose the historical nationhood, would be like drowning a man in water to save him from fire, like shooting ourselves in the head for fear of the enemy. We remember the great Sertorius, who, banished by Rome’s senate, when called by Mithridates to a union, to the latter’s great wonder agreed to no such point as might impair the rights of Rome’s senate. A federated Hunnia is one in meaning with Hungary’s absorption into the Reichsrat—nay, this latter is so much the better, for it would consecrate us a member of a grander state. Let no one mention Switzerland’s example with its three nationalities either. That is the joining of three sturdy, separately developed men for a common aim. Hungary’s breaking apart into several nationalities would be the dissolution of one powerful organism into its three elements: water, earth, air. Let us never, then, lose from sight that the motive of our steps must not be the satisfaction of the nationalities at any price—a design which individual vanity and intriguing ill will could in any case, every time, so easily frustrate, for though the mass of the people is commonly good, its leaders are not always so. But indeed, it must be this: that we feel, in the calm of our conscience, that we have done everything within the bounds of honor.

Honored Gentlemen! Joy and pride fill my breast in this solemn moment; for, feeling my utter want of all merit, I regard both this honor and this homage not as brought to my person, but as that with which you approve the procedure of that House of Representatives in which, by your trust, I too could be fortunate enough to be one of the common soldiers. We did not bring home, according to the wish of our heart, salutary laws; you know on whom the responsibility for this too weighs. But like the Spartan warrior whose mother, handing him his shield, dismissed him with these words, “With this, or upon this”—we too brought back unscathed the shield on which the sacred lines of our ancestral constitution and the laws of 1848 were written, and we gave up of these not one letter, in exchange for vain alluring promises. The absolute power pronounced condemnation on us for this procedure, and appealed to the people. We appeal too. We greet the absolute power on the ground where it is compelled to recognize the principle of the people’s sovereignty. Let it be judge between us. But you, gentlemen, not even awaiting this appeal, are perhaps the first in this whole country who, with this your homage to the procedure of the House of Representatives, have already answered the question, and with manly resoluteness, over against that power which holds in its hand the material force and the means of terror, have given the right to that power whose every strength is the law and the citizens’ readiness for sacrifice. The representative of such electors finds it easy to draw strength in the hardest times, for he need not seek far for his example of civic duty. Such a struggle, which has such electors, may boldly look the future in the face. Raw violence never was and never will be a lasting foundation of politics; one may lean on bayonets, but cannot sit on them. We offered the government every requisite of the state’s security, as the Sibyl offered Tarquin the nine books of the prophecies, asking as the sole price our imprescriptible ancestral freedom. It was refused; one after another we now throw the books on the fire, and the price will always remain the same. When the last too has turned to ashes, the responsibility will be his before the whole world, not ours; for it is he who ties the insoluble Gordian knot, which can be cut in two only with the sword, and then the judgment of the world declaring for us will be no indifferent thing. And once more thanking you for your approving recognition of the procedure of the House of Representatives—of which any little part falls to me too—I believe I give voice to the common wish when I cry out: Long live the homeland.

In 1640 a wild American cured the Loja Jesuit Juan López de Cañizares of the intermittent fever with cinchona. This coming to the knowledge of the viceroy of Peru, he sent out his court physician to examine the matter, who, with scientific thoroughness, addressed to the Indian first of all this question: what is the intermittent fever? It is, answered the questioned man, what none of us knows, but which I can cure. The theoretical doctors of Austria, ailing of a thousand ills, are likewise at hand; before them stands the Indian of our historically developed relations, justified by the experience of centuries, which always cured the intermittent fever brilliantly; but this is not enough for the learned doctors, because these relations know nothing of their theories. Yes, we do not know what that einheitliche Monarchie is, what that Machtvollkommenheit is, what that new constitutionalism with absolute means is; but we did indeed know how Austria could stand firm within amid many a world-shaking storm, commanding with respect without—all this with simple barbarian wit.— Truly our circumstances would be extraordinarily ridiculous, were they not so very sad. And then someone wonders whence humor came so suddenly into our literature, into our temper—as if we had not bought it dearly enough. It is an old story, but still ever new, that when Tiberius asked a Pannonian chieftain why he had revolted, he answered: Because you sent us wolves in place of shepherds. It is an old story too that Quinctilius Varus, who was sent poor to rich Syria and returned rich from poor Syria, when he later went to Germania to civilize the inhabitants who according to him had nothing human but their shape, carried law-books and lawyers thither with him. Scarcely a year ago similar experiments grew obsolete among us, and their failure would have been enough for the simple Indian to give up his theories. But the fixed ideas of the theorists are more dangerous than the simple man’s errors, for their doctrines must stand at any price; they believe at most that the experiment was still too small, and that it must be multiplied. The alchemist who let half his fortune go up in smoke surely sends the other half too up the chimney, but does not give up his idea of making gold from lead.—— On this side of the Király-hágó they wish to kill democracy with aristocracy, beyond the Király-hágó aristocracy with democracy. Only one thing they wish to destroy everywhere alike: constitutionality. But perhaps my charge is strong.—Do they not proclaim far and wide that they will save the county system, this ancient institution of the Hungarian? Indeed they will save it, as of old the Turk saved the Hungarian ladies, to drag them into his harem.—But the practical-minded Hungarian sees through the sieve; every committee will become a Mihály Dobozy, who well knew that “Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht,” and would rather kill the county institution himself—this dear lady, who has faithfully kept the people’s sympathy and respect in defiance of all intrigue—than give up her honor. Of those donna Dulcineas whom, under the name of Pest or Nógrád county, of Bihar or Nyitra county, the Don Quixote of the absolute power will then embrace, all the world will know well that, despite his fantastic dream, they are no duchesses—only kitchen-maids. Thus the destroying experiments begin again, and go on from track to track.—One tree falls after another, one grove after another. And if the better man seeks in wonder that strong legal title, that need above all things, without whose existence he cannot even conceive such audacious grasping into all that exists, such unhallowed scattering of all that is sacred to our breasts, I can answer only with Goethe’s epigram, which he wrote on the stork nesting on the church: verse Und wie kann er mit Reverenz
Sein Recht darauf beweisen,
Als durch die löbliche Tendenz
Auf’s Kirchendach zu — verse After such procedures there is scarcely anything left that could still be destroyed, except perhaps the press, which still after a fashion gives signs of life.—It needs no great prophetic gift to pronounce that its hours too are counted. Rotteck says: If the jury and a free press are introduced into a despotism, the despot’s throne soon falls. But who here speaks of despotism? perhaps say the peace-zealots, the quiet enthusiasts. Does it not proclaim a constitution everywhere, even where the bayonets work, and freedom even where the fetters are forged?—Why, what is now happening is all only a real stomach-strengthener—true Russian caviar, which makes the appetite for the grand constitutional dinner. But though I should like to cry out with Tertullian: Credo quia absurdum est—there comes to my mind nonetheless, against my will, the inexorable logic of principles once set up, which flies unstoppably to its goal like a loosed arrow. He who makes for the bog-girt castle of the einheitliche Monarchie and the Machtvollkommenheit, let him set out in patent-leather shoes or in cowhide boots, let him advance with goat-leaps or crawl over the windings of the eel—will indeed arrive muddy. The politician’s first sin against the people’s freedom is like the first theft. It is the beginning of many a career promising well enough, which then ends on Golgotha. It is like the avalanche which, when it sets out cleanly, playfully, down the slope, would shudder at itself if it saw how much filth, how much terror, will cling to it, until, laying waste, it reaches the valley’s floor! Let us not wonder, then, if such politicians strive to remove from themselves the free word, in which they think to recognize the startling of their conscience. Tsar Paul too issued a ukase that, if the head be spoken of, the expression “bald,” if the nose, the expression “snub,” should be avoided under penalty of flogging to death. The ukase was kept, but the tsar nonetheless remained bald and snub-nosed. And shall only our gentlemen, who are forced by the inexorable decree of fate again and again to return to the stiffest absolutism, leave the press its freer movement?—No; they who so affect the biblical morals and orthodoxy will not do so, if only because the prophet Elijah too had forty-two children torn apart by a bear, because they mocked him as bald. How indeed could they do otherwise? They will silence everything, as they began it in childish enough fashion with the mutilation of the county minute-books, with the cutting out of single resolutions. Do these gentlemen believe that the spirit of the county resolutions, fearful to them, is glued to that half-sheet of paper, that with the foolish letter condemned to the fire there will turn to ashes too that patriotic feeling which, dwelling as a living thought in the breasts of hundreds of thousands, found in the minute-books themselves only a pale expression?—Is there no history for these gentlemen, from which they might read that the Reformation found in the pyre of John Hus not a grave but a fresh argument? That the earth, in defiance of Galileo’s prison, did not stand still?—Did Tacitus write in vain for these gentlemen almost two thousand years ago, when he says thus: “ut monumenta clarissimorum ingeniorum in comitio ac foro urerentur (scilicet, illo igne vocem populi Romani, et libertatem senatus, et conscientiam generis humani aboleri arbitrabantur);———ne quid usquam honestum occurreret.———adempto per inquisitiones et loquendi audiendique commercio, memoriam quoque ipsam cum voce perdidissemus, si tam in nostra potestate esset oblivisci, quam tacere.” And when thus everything shall fall silent, by the progressive development of human desires they will still not content themselves with this. They will desire a word too, a flattering word, which may also quiet their conscience; and they will follow the example of the Libyan grandee Psaphon, who, wishing to be held a god, taught countless birds these words: “Psaphon is a great god,” and let them loose to proclaim his glory.—Our gentlemen too are already teaching a great cage-bird a like phrase—in the Reichsrat. So far all may still go well, but what follows then?—Will they content themselves with the glory of destruction, not even thinking of rebuilding? The enthusiastic poetic temper, the revolutionary hero, may content himself with the French saying, “Bâtir est beau, détruire est sublime”; this will never exhaust the duties of a statesman, of whom above all things the world demands construction. They will begin, then, perhaps with reviving the Bach system anew. Only let them well consider that an idea once dead can nowhere be roused to new life more hardly than precisely in politics. It bears on its forehead the trial-stamp that it is not viable. Let them well consider that the same instrument rarely does service a second time.—Everyone reaches for it with distrust. Every government resembles, more or less, the scarecrow, which works only until the first bird settles on it. The greater lever of its activity is the preconception attached to its strength, the nimbus that surrounds it, rather than the force at its disposal itself.—And the Bach system has played out its role. The history of the French Revolution proves how far men grow accustomed to the prison, to the proscription, to the guillotine—how many an orator used as the striking conclusion of his speech the act of shooting himself in the head. And shall such warmed-over arguments work upon us, who know all the horrors of the Roman empire from tolerably close—scarcely even excepting that they sought a man from the crowd for the gallows that had remained empty—with the fright of novelty’s surprise? I scarcely believe it.—And can Austria too, in its sober senses, wish to begin anew this dangerous experimentation, notwithstanding that through centuries it seems to be its world-historical mission to be the stiff negation of all progress in politics, of all revolution in the spiritual world? Austria must beware, I say, of trusting unconditionally in its proverbial star of fortune; for though it still stands before orthodox diplomacy as an axiom that Austria’s existence is a political necessity in Europe, it has already happened that such an axiom crumbled to dust at one mighty word, together with all the inferences built upon it. The earth too stood still for centuries, and from this theory flowed all the reasoning of science.—Galileo spoke, and the earth set out.—And in such a case only the devotion of satisfied peoples could fittingly replace the foundation slipping from beneath the feet of the men of government.