He
was a linguist, too (as every travelled Hungarian must be, for Hungarian
will carry him nowhere), speaking excellent English and reading our
magazines regularly. _Humani nihil a me alienum puto_ might have been his
motto. Kossuth himself is said to have had a Jewish grandmother. The Jews
are largely responsible for the prosperity of Budapest, as they were for
that of Vienna, which now turns round upon them. Fancy a country
quarrelling with its coal and iron! And the true wealth of a country is
even more in its population than in its dead products. I found the
Viennese comic papers full of the old anti-Semitic jokes, hashed up, I
have little doubt, by the same journalists who are supposed to judaize
the press of Europe. Even so in America, are not the Jewish caricatures
in _Puck_ often done by a brother of M. de Blowitz? In something of the
same spirit, when the notorious Lueger, whose platform was the extinction
of the Jews of Vienna, was up for election as Burgomaster of that town, a
poor Jew took a bribe of a couple of florins to vote for him. "God will
frustrate him," said the pious Jew. "Meantime I have his money."
The chief surprise of Hungary is its language. Though one knows that
Jokai writes in the strange tongue which sticks its verb into the middle
of its noun, yet one vaguely thinks of it as of Gaelic or
Welsh--something archaic, kept for Eisteddfods and Renaissances--and it
is not till one arrives in Hungary that one realises that it is a living,
disconcerting reality.
Pages:
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427