Without Prejudice Part 20

_Rien, absolument rien._ Give us these things anywhere, give us lights and gardens and music, give us dances and damsels, give us Congo encampments and "_ballons dirigeables_," and thither will we troop to make us merry. Ah! but the incurable conscientiousness of the human race insists on pills with its jam. Or is it that it has never yet dawned upon humanity that jam may be taken without pills? There was a time--it lasted seventy thousand ages according to the Chinese ma.n.u.script which Elia saw--when mankind ate their meat raw. Then, one day, as every schoolboy knows, Bo-bo carelessly set his father's cottage on fire, and, burning the litter of new-farrowed pigs it held, accidentally invented _crackling_. So delicious was burnt pig discovered to be that everybody fell to setting his house on fire to obtain it. "Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (_burnt_, as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it.... By such slow degrees do the most useful and seemingly the most obvious arts make their way among mankind." For seventy thousand ages mankind did without _al fresco_ entertainments. Then some one invented Exhibitions, and mankind found it delicious to promenade the grounds amid twinkling lights and joyous music. But no Locke has yet discovered that musical promenades may be had without elevating a whole Exhibition in the background. At Earl's Court they still keep up a pretence of Industrial Exhibition, though we have long since lost interest in the pretext, and no longer inquire whether the painted scenery that walls in the grounds is called the Alps or the Apennines or the Champs-Elysees. And yet methinks mankind did discover the open-air entertainment, as perchance roast pig was known and forgotten again long centuries before Bo-bo. For what was Ranelagh, what Vauxhall? Were not the gardens of Vauxhall "made ill.u.s.trious by a thousand lights finely disposed," or, as Thackeray puts it, by a "hundred thousand _extra_ lamps, which were always lighted"? Were not "concerts of musick" given nightly by fiddlers in c.o.c.ked hats, ensconced in a "gilded c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l," and was not the price of admission a s.h.i.+lling? "Vauxhall must ever be an estate to its proprietor," wrote Boswell, "as it is peculiarly adapted to the taste of the English nation; there being a mixture of curious show--gay exhibition--music, vocal and instrumental, not too refined for the general ear; and, though last not least, good eating and drinking for those who choose to purchase that regale." But Boswell prophesied ill. Public gardens were always distasteful to English Puritanism, because they lent themselves to rendezvous; and though Boswell, in protesting against the rise of price to two s.h.i.+llings, certifies to the elegance and innocence of the entertainment, and though Mr. Osborne and Miss Amelia walked unharmed in its groves and glades, and it was not Rebecca Sharp's fault that Jos. Sedley got drunk on the bowl of rack punch, still Vauxhall, like Ranelagh and Cremorne, has come down to us with tainted reputation. It died in the odour of brimstone, and only in the magical ink-pool of literature can we still behold the heralded gallants in the boxes junketing with low-bodiced ladies of quality whose patches show piquantly on their damask cheeks. Rosherville remains in ign.o.ble respectability, the place to spend an h-less day, our one uninstructive inst.i.tution, for even "Constantinople" and "Venice"

have a specious background of geographical and even of industrial information: Rosherville, which only once flowered into poetry, and then under another name,--when Mr. Anstey's barber wedded the Tinted Venus with a ring.

And in the magical ink-pool I see you and me still sitting, O Transatlantic Parisienne, as we sat that sunny afternoon--three hundred years ago--in ancient Antwerp, in _oud Antwerpen_, niched in the windowseat of that quaint hostelry which gives on the great market-place, and watching the festive procession. Do you remember the gorgeous costumes of our fellow-burghers, and the trappings of their prancing chargers in those days when life was not plain, but coloured, and existence was one vast fancy-dress ball? How glad we were to welcome the Archduke Martinias of Austria, our sovereign elect, or was it Francois Sonnius, our first Bishop, coming to be installed in our glorious Cathedral, amid the joyous carillons of its bells! Can you not still see the Angels hovering over the Virgin, and the Golden Calf, flower-wreathed, and the Flight into Egypt, on that nave donkey, and "the Flying Dutchman," tugged by a horse, and the gilded galley rowed in make-believe by little children in their Sunday clothes, catching crabs in air, and the incongruous camels bestridden by Arab sheikhs with African pages, and the Persians on ponies, and the Crusaders in their fine foolish coats-of-mail, and the gay courtiers, with clanking swords, and the halberdiers, and the particoloured arquebusiers, and the archers in green and red, and the spearsmen in sugarloaf hats, and the cherubs riding on dolphins? Can you not hear the beating of the drum, and the Ave Maria of the white-robed chorus-boys, and the irrelevant strains of the Danish national anthem, and the j.a.pes of the jester with his cap and bells? What happy times for butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers when, instead of working, they could go in processions, bearing aloft the insignia of their guilds, and when middle-cla.s.s girls, ignorant of the New Womanhood, could loll on triumphal cars with roses in their hair! Do you remember how the topmost divinity smiled to me from her perilous perch, too high to rouse your jealousy, and how the little cherub that sat up aloft besprinkled us mischievously with eau de cologne? Ah, shall we ever again be as happy as we were three hundred years ago? will the wine be ever as red, the potato salad as appetising, or the cheese (did they really enjoy Gorgonzola and Camembert in the sixteenth century?) as delicious as in that ancient Flemish hostelry with its Lutheran motto:

Wie nikt mint Wijn, Wijf en Sangh, Blijft een Geck sijn Leven langh!

Was it from its inscribed beams that Sh.e.l.ley borrowed his famous lyric "Love's Philosophy"? for did we not read:

Den Hemel drinckt, en d'Aerde drinckt: Waerom souden wij niet drinckt?

("Heaven drinks, and earth drinks: why shouldn't we drink?") At any rate it pleased us to recall the delectable lines:

And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea; What are all these kissings worth If thou kiss not me?

But what does it matter what one did three hundred years ago?

Or, what does it matter what one did that dim Arabian night when we set out with the cavalcade of camels in the marriage procession, and the bride cowered veiled in her corner of the coach, and the plump mother smiled archly at us, and the brother and the bridegroom, mounted on Arab steeds, smacked each other's faces in ceremonial solemnity, exactly like "the two Macs" in the music-hall? Was it then, or in the nineteenth century, that we rode the camel together, I on the hindmost peak? "Oh, the oont, oh, the oont, oh, the gawdforsaken oont!" as the poet of the barrack-room sings. He seems to double up like a garden-chair to receive one; then his knees unfold and the rider shoots up; then the camel rises to his full height, and one ducks instinctively for fear of striking the stars. "_Salaam Aleikhoom_," I cried to the drivers, airing my Arabic, which I make by misp.r.o.nouncing Hebrew; and they answered effusively, "Yankee Doodle! Chicago!" Alas for the glamour of the Orient! They had all come from the greater fair, perhaps spent their lives in traveling from fair to fair, mercenaries of some latter-day Barnum.

There was a fine stalwart Egyptian, who stood beating a gong to summon the faithful to improper dances. I gave him a cup of coffee, and he held it on high, and with grat.i.tude effusing from every pore of his dusky face, cried, "Columbus!" Then he mounted a flight of stairs and shouted beamingly, "1492!"

He took a sip, and then his wife called him chidingly, and he fled to her. But he returned to drain the cup in my presence, crying between each sip "Columbus" or "1492." Never before have I bought so much grat.i.tude for ten centimes. Henceforward I found "Columbus" a watchword, and "1492"

a magic talisman, causing dusky eyes to kindle and turbaned heads to nod beamingly.

The town-barber of _Alt Antwerpen_, who was wont to shave me in the sixteenth century, had a beautiful motto:--

I am Hair-dresser, Barber, and Surgeon, I shave with, soap and much delight, Although there are barbers who do it As though they were in a fright.

But it is surpa.s.sed by a hundred delightful things in "The Visitor's Handybook," which the touts in New Antwerp, ignorant of its treasures, press upon the traveller gratis. It opens auspiciously: "The opening pages of our little guide we have devoted to a short review of the city of Antwerp, the streets of which still contain elegant specimens of those quaint and handsome edifices of the Netherlands are truly famous, and which in Antwerp, perhaps more than in any other city, seem to abound."

Here are some more gems: "Visitors will be naturally anxious to secure a comfortable apartment, in selecting which the following list will be found of service:--see advertis.e.m.e.nts, all of which can be strongly recommended." "Facing you is the King's Palace; not a very attractive one; however, as a rule, not open to the public, but admission may sometimes be obtained although at great trouble during the absence of the King." "It was formally inaugurated by the presence of the Queen, Princess Beatrice, and a numerous compagny representing the European Benches and Pairs." "A wonderfully painted ceiling, in which the attendant can point out some marvellous effects." "The Visitor's Handybook" is in its thirteenth free edition, and is worth double the price. Antwerp is very strong linguistically. The _quatre langues_--Flemish, French, English, and German--make a universal confusion of tongues, and the whole town is nothing but a huge open Flemish--French dictionary, every shop-sign or street-name being translated. A few st.u.r.dy burghers stick to the old tongue, and sometimes English rules the roast. "The Welsh Harp" (which is Antwerp way) is a sailor's cabaret near the quay. There is even a trace of Irish influence in the etymology of Antwerp as given in the official handbook; for Antigon, the giant who used to cut off the hand of any s.h.i.+pman that refused him tribute, and whose throwing it (_Handwerpen_) into the river gave the name to the city, is stated beforehand to have lived in the castle of Antwerp. They are not dest.i.tute of wit, the Belgians, if I may judge by some specimens I heard. It is a local joke to refer to the famous "_dirigeable_" balloon, which burst in the latter days of the Exhibition, as the "_dechirable_" balloon. "They pooh-pooh the past nowadays," said a tram-conductor to me, "but when I look at the Cathedral and Rubens' 'Descent from the Cross' I think our forefathers were _a.s.sez malins_." A seedy vendor of lottery-tickets declared that every one of them would draw a prize. "Wherefore, then, my friend," quoth I, "do you not keep them?" "_Je ne suis pas egoste_," he said, with a shrug. To defend myself against his masterful solicitousness, I stated solemnly that lotteries were illegal in England, and that if I returned thither with a lottery-ticket the British Government would throw me into prison.

But he was not daunted: "_Appuyez-vous sur moi_," he replied rea.s.suringly.

BROADSTAIRS AND RAMSGATE

A story is current in the Clubs that Mr. Henry James innocently went to Ramsgate, in order to possess his soul in peace. 'T was the height of the rougher Ramsgate season, and there is something irresistibly incongruous in the juxtaposition of the rarefied American novelist and the roaring sands of Albion. In the which juxtaposition the story leaves him; and we are ignorant of whether he turned tail and fled back to quieter London, or whether he stayed on to collect unexpected material. Our a.n.a.lytical cousin's stippling methods are, it is to be feared, but poorly adapted for the painting of holiday crowds, which require the scene-painter's brush, and lend themselves reluctantly to nuances. The colours have not that dubiety so dear to the artist of the penumbra; the sands are as yellow as the benches are red; and the n.i.g.g.e.rs are quite as black as they are burnt-corked. The love-making, too, is devoid of subtlety. When you see--as I saw last Bank Holiday on Ramsgate beach--Edwin and Angelina asleep in each other's arms, the situation strikes you as too simple for a.n.a.lysis. It is like the loves of the elements, or the propensity of carbon to combine with oxygen. An even more idyllic couple I came upon p.r.o.ne amid the poppies on the cliff hard by, absorbing the peace and the suns.h.i.+ne, steeping themselves in the calm of Nature after the finest Wordsworthian manner. But presently there is the roll of a drum, and the scream of a fife in distress rises from below, and Angelina p.r.i.c.ks up her ears. "I wish they'd come up 'ere," she murmurs wistfully; "I'd jump up like steam; I could just do a dance."

Yet all the same their seclusion among the wild flowers on the edge of the cliff showed a glimmering of soul. Not theirs the hankering for that strip of sand near the stone pier, which a worthy dame of my acquaintance once compared to a successful fly-paper. Scientific investigation shows the congestion at this particular spot to be due to the file of bathing-machines which blocks the view of the sea from half the beach. To the bulk of the visitors this yellow patch _is_ Ramsgate, just as a small, cocoanut-bearing area of Hampstead woodland is the Heath, most of whose glorious acres have never felt the tread of a donkey or a cheap tripper. Not that there are many other attractions in Ramsgate, which is administered by councillors more sleepy than sage. Having literally defaced their town by a railway-station, built a harbour which will not hold water, constructed a promenade pier in the least accessible quarter, and provided a band which plays mainly "intervals," they naturally refuse to venture on further improvements, such as refuges on the parade, or trees in the shadeless streets, and, in the excess of their zeal, have even, so I hear, declined the railway company's offer to give them a lift (from sands to cliff), and Mr. Sebag Montefiore's offer to allow the public gardens to be continued right through his estate on towards Dumpton. Even so, these worthy burghers have more of my regard than their brethren of Margate, who have sacrificed their trust to the Moloch of advertis.e.m.e.nt. Stand on Margate Parade and look seaward, and the main impression is Pills. Sail towards Margate Pier and look landward, and the main impression is Disinfectant Powder.

Baby Broadstairs has known better how to guard its dignity and its beauty; so that d.i.c.kens might still look from Bleak House on as dainty a scene as in the days when he lounged on the dear old, black, weather-beaten pier. I spent a week at Broadstairs in the height of a Dynamite Mystery. We were very proud of the Mystery, we of Broadstairs, and of the s.p.a.ce we filled in the papers. Ramsgate, with its contemporaneous murder sensation, we turned up our noses at, till Ramsgate had a wreck and redressed the balance. For the rest, we made sand-pies, and bathed and sailed, and listened to a band that went wheezy on Bank Holiday. Broadstairs boasts of one drunkard, who does odd jobs as well. He is tall, venerable, and melancholy, and has the air of a temperance orator. "Joe's one of the best chaps on the pier when he's sober," said his mate to me sorrowfully; "but when he's drunk he makes a fool of himself." This was not quite true; for Joe was not always foolish. Why, when two gentlemen came down from London in a gipsy caravan to teach us Theosophy, and all Broadstairs fluttered towards their oil-lamp, leaving the band to tootle to the sad sea waves, I could not get him to mount the Cheap Jack rostrum in opposition! The most I could spur him to was an indignant defence of London against the lecturer's denunciation of it as an immoral city, a pit of unrighteousness. "'T ain't true!" he thundered raucously. "Many's the gent from Lunnon as has behaved most liberal to me." One day there was an attempt to disturb Joe's monopoly as drunkard, and I am afraid I had a hand in it. A human caricature in broken boots addressed me as I lay on the beach (writing with a stylographic pen and blotting the sheets with the sand), and besought me to buy sprigs of lavender. He proved to me by ocular demonstration that he had no money in his pockets; whereupon I proved to him by parity of reasoning that I had none in mine either. However, I remembered me of a penny postage-stamp (unlicked), and tendered it diffidently, and he received it with disproportionate benedictions. Later in the day he reappeared under my window, hurling up maudlin abuse. He had got drunk on my postage-stamp!

I told him to get along with him, which he did. For some time he staggered about Broadstairs in search of its policeman. He came across him at last, and was straightway clapped into an open victoria and driven across the sunny fields to Ramsgate. Meantime, Broadstairs was left unprotected--perhaps Joe kept an eye on it.

Broadstairs has also a jolly old waterman, who paddles about apparently to pick up exhausted bathers. One morning as I was swimming past his boat he warned me back. "Any danger?" I asked. "Ladies," he replied, ambiguously enough. It thus transpired that his function is to preserve a scientific frontier between the s.e.xes. Considering that the ladies one meets at sea are much more clothed than the ladies whose diaphanous drapery one engirdles in ball-rooms, this prudery is amusing. It is consoling to remember that the Continental practice prevails in many a quaint nook along our coasts, and that the ladies are sensible enough to walk to and from their bathing tents, clothed and unashamed. Strange to say, Broadstairs has placed its ladies' machines nearest the pier, for the benefit of loungers armed with gla.s.ses; and I must not forget to mention that the boatman himself holds a daily _levee_ of mermaidens, who make direct for his boat and gambol around the prow. If anything needs reforming in our marine manners, it is rather the male costume. Why we men are allowed to go about like savages, clothed only in skins (and those our own), is to me one of the puzzles of popular ethics. What is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. At Folkestone, where the machine-people are dreadfully set against ladies and gentlemen using the same water, promiscuous bathing flourishes more nakedly than anywhere on the Continent; and the gentlemen have neither tents nor costumes. In Margate and Deal the machines are of either s.e.x, and the gentlemen are clad in coloured pocket-handkerchiefs. At Birchington I bathed from a boat which was besieged by a bevy of wandering water-nymphs, begging me to let them dive from it. And they dived divinely!

Though the _profanum vulgus_ takes possession of our strands, and Edwin and Angelina are common objects of the sea-sh.o.r.e, yet I cannot help thinking that there is many a vulgar British beach that would ravish us did we light upon it in other lands. Oh, how picturesque! What a gay grouping of colour! What an enchanting medley of pink parasols and golden sand and chintz tents and white bathing-machines, and blue skies and black minstrels and green waters, and creamy flannels and gauzy dresses!

And--_ciel!_ what cherubic children! and--_corpo di Bacco!_--what pretty women! What frank _abandon_ to the airy influences of the scene! What unconventionality! What unrestraint! See how that staid old _signor_ allows himself to be buried and excavated by the _bambino_. Watch that charming _maman_ unblus.h.i.+ngly bathing _bebe_. Note that portly _matrona_ careering upon the _asino_! What cares she for her dignity? Listen to the babel--"[Greek: hokae pokae, hokae pokae]" "Drei s.h.i.+es a pfennig!" "Your photograph, _senorita?_" Look! the coquettish _contadina_ is slapping the face of the roguish _vetturino_! How the good-natured crowd, easily pleased, gathers round the Ethiopian troubadour, trolling in unison his amorous catches!--

_Daisy, Daisy, donne-moi ta reponse._

And hark! Do you not hear in the distance the squeak of _Puncinello_? Ah!

why have we none of this happy carelessness in England?--we who take our pleasures _moult tristement_--why have we not this lightheartedness, this _camaraderie_ of enjoyment? Why cannot we throw aside our insular stiffness, our British hauteur, and be natural?

I journeyed to Broadstairs, late at night, riding in a three-horsed brake with many a jocund pa.s.senger. And then something happened. Something ineffably trivial, and yet a matter of life and death. We were bowling merrily along the country lanes in the fragrant air. It was a dark, starless night, but so warm that the easterly sea-breeze fanned us like a zephyr. And through the gloom a flash-light leaped and waned, flickered and died and gleamed again with electric brilliance--"the Winnaker(?) light from France," a garrulous inhabitant a.s.sured us; a rare phenomenon to be seen only once in a decade, when an east wind clarifies the atmosphere, and allows the rays to pierce through two dozen miles of strait. It seemed like La Belle France winking amicably to us across the waters. And a little to the left twinkled "The Green Man"--no friendly public-house, but a danger-signal from behind the Goodwin Sands, likewise visible but by miracle.

And as we marvelled at these jewels of the night, that shamed the absentee stars, the brake stood still with a jolt and a shock that threw our gay company into momentary alarm. But it was nothing. Only a horse fallen down dead! One of our overworked wheelers had suddenly sunk upon the earth, a carcase. Dust to dust! Who shall tell of the daylong agony of the dumb beast as he plodded pertinaciously through the heat, ministering to the pleasures of his masters? Had he been a man, how we should have praised him, belauded the beauty of his end, telling one another sanctimoniously that he had died in harness. As it was we merely stripped him of his harness and deposited it in the brake! We unhitched the leader and put him between the shafts, side by side with the other horse, both incurious and indifferent, wasting nor glance nor nasal rub upon their defunct comrade. We men feign better. And then we drew him to the edge of the track, a rigid, lumbering ma.s.s; and the garrulous inhabitant discussed the value of the carcase, and the driver cracked his whip, and the living horses stirred their haunches, and in a moment we were spanking along, leaving our fellow-creature to darkness and solitude. Only the flash-light from France glimmered upon the poor dead beast, coming all the way to cheer him; only the green eye from beyond the Goodwins blinked upon his unheaving flanks.

And from far ahead came back to his deaf ears with ever-diminis.h.i.+ng intensity our noisy madrigal--most music-hall, most melancholy--his only dirge:

Mary Jane was a farmer's daughter, Mary Jane did what she oughter.

She fell in love but all in vain.

O poor Mary! O poor Jane!

BUDAPEST

The Millennial Exhibition of Budapest--for which the Directors gave me a season ticket as soon as they heard I was leaving--professes to celebrate the foundation of Hungary; but 896 is a very long time ago, and the event does not seem to have been reported in the newspapers of the period.

However, as a Hungarian explained to me, when you are counting by thousands you are not particular to a year or two, so perhaps it was not precisely ten centuries ago that the foundation of Hungary was inaugurated by a national a.s.sembly that created "the Const.i.tution of Pusztaszer." After all, have not those irrepressible German savants discovered that Christ was born in the year 6 B.C.? At any rate, there is no doubt that the Magyars did steal a country some time or other in the remote past, or in more political language, did obtain a footing in Europe by ousting the Slav tribes that peopled the great plain bounded by the Carpathians and the Danube and the Tisza. They came from Central Asia, on a late wave of that big "Westward ho!" movement of the Eastern peoples, a race of shepherds changed into an army of mounted archers, and pitched their tents first in Galieia, uniting their seven tribes under the great chief Arpad; but, hara.s.sed continually by local tribes with unp.r.o.nounceable names, they moved farther westwards to their present quarters, where, after a vain but spirited attempt to annex Europe generally, they settled down to comfort and civilisation, ceased to offer white horses to idols, and embraced Christianity.

It seems that land-thieves are called conquerors; and after a thousand years of possession of their stolen goods, the glamour of a divine sanct.i.ty gets over the past, and high-minded natives live and die for the country which seems to have been theirs from time immemorial, and in which their holiest feelings are enrooted. What makes national robberies moral is the fact that there is honour among the thieves. The morality of crowds is, in fact, as different from that of individuals as "the psychology of crowds" which has just engaged the attention of an ingenious scientist. Into the original conquerors of a country a miscellaneous a.s.sortment of other races always gets absorbed, as the Franks by the Gauls, the Turkish Bulgarians by the Slavs. The Hungarians absorbed into themselves Italians, Germans, and Czechs, and the modern Hungarian is, according to Arminius Vambery, a typical product of the fusion of Europe and Asia, Turanian and Aryan. And that is the sort of way in which after a few centuries we get the chauvinistic cries: "Germany for the Germans," "Poland for the Polish," "Hungary for the Hungarians." In truth, no nation has a right to anything it cannot hold by might. And who shall determine what a nation is? Who are the Americans? Who are the English? "Norman and Saxon and Dane are we." And once upon a time some of us threw up our country and sailed away in the _Mayflower_. For patriotism is not the only bond of brotherhood. Men may be the sons of an idea as well as of a soil. There was a Hungarian girl selling silver at a stall, who had spent four years in Chicago. Never have I heard better American, except it be from a Budapest man who had come back to revisit his native town, and was disgusted with its smallness and slowness. _Per contra_, I met an American girl in Switzerland who had lived much in Germany, and whose English had such a Teutonic intonation that it was difficult to realise she was not speaking German. And language is but typical of the rest. All other national characteristics are imbibed as subtly. What makes a nation is a certain common spirit,--_Volksgeist_, as the German psychologists have christened it,--and this spirit exercises a hypnotic effect over all that comes within its range, moulding and transforming. There is action and reaction. The nation makes the national spirit, and the national spirit makes the nation. The flag, the const.i.tution, the national anthems, the national prejudices, the language, the proverbs--these are the product of the people they produce.

I am inclined to allow more importance to education and environment than to actual birth in a country, and to believe that for a "native," birth is only an etymological necessity. Natives are made as well as born. The "born" native has merely the advantage of prior arrival, and if the "foreign" immigrant is only of a plastic age he may come to love the step-mother-country more than one of her own sons, educated abroad. This consideration would solve every _Uitlander_ question: is the national spirit strong enough to suck in the foreigners? Can the nation digest them, to vary the metaphor--a.s.similate them to its own substance? I once proposed to a biologist--who flouted it--that a definition of Life might be "the power of converting foreign elements, taken in as food, to one's own substance." Thus, a plant sucks up chemical elements and makes flowers; a man turns them to flesh. Here is a piece of meat: eaten by a dog it runs to tail and teeth, for a cat it makes fur and whiskers, for a bird feathers, for a woman a lovable face. And so the test of life in a nation would be its power of transforming its immigrants into patriots.

Only a dead nation is afraid of foreigners.

The figure has its limits, however: one cannot gulp down too large a piece of meat. And there are things inedible--substances which no stomach can digest. The Americans will never make Yankees of their Chinese. On the other hand, nowhere have I found more ardent patriots than among the Jews. Englishmen in England, Americans in America, Italians in Italy, Frenchmen in France, and only not Russians in Russia because they are not allowed to be, they are rabid Hungarians in Hungary; and if I have caught any enthusiasm for Hungary it is from the lips of a young and brilliant Jew, Vidor Emil, who piloted me about Budapest, and who, under Marmorek Oszkar, another young Jew, built "Old Buda," perhaps the most interesting feature of the Millennial Exhibition. This Jewish patriotism, which loves at once Israel and some other nation, may appear curious and contradictory; but human nature is nothing if not curious and contradictory, and this dual affection has been aptly compared to that of a mother for her different children. And besides, in a contest the love of Israel goes down before the more local patriotism. French and German Jews fought each other in the Franco-German war, and probably it is only persecution that accentuates the consciousness of Jewish brotherhood.

Wherever the Jews have perfect equality and have been tempted out of the Ghetto, there the beginnings of disintegration are manifest. And who shall say how much Jewish blood dilutes the nations of the Occident, for all their chauvinistic talk!

Mr. Du Maurier, in his unmentionable novel, suspects, like Lowell, that a drop of it has lurked in every artistic temperament. And, in sober truth, the drain from Israel throughout the centuries has been immense. In every age, in every country, Jews have been sucked up into the more brilliant life around them, exchanging contempt and danger for consideration and peace. I know an English gentleman who goes about in fear and trembling lest it transpire that he is of the race of the apostles, and he be driven out of decent Christian society. _Cherchez le Juif_ is, indeed, no empty cry, whenever a new artistic or journalistic planet swims into our ken. That the Jew rules over the Continental press is not quite so untrue as most anti-Semitic cries. "Have you any Christians on your staff?" I said to the editor of the great Budapest newspaper, "Pesther Lloyd," a fine figure of a man, long-bearded and benevolent, like an ancient sage. He pondered. "I think we have one," he said. On the other hand, there are many German and Austrian papers on which there is only one Jew. And in any case the real meaning of the cry is ludicrously untrue.

For the Jew by no means uses his power to help Jews indiscriminately: there is no secret brotherhood of the synagogue. The Jewish journalists have probably never been in a synagogue, except perhaps as children; they are divorced in thought and temper from the body proper. And the only sense in which their pen can be said to have a Jewish bias is in that complimentary sense which makes the Jew synonymous with the champion of sweetness and light, of liberty and reason. In this sense it is true that the Jew is wielding an insidious influence throughout Europe, like the old apostles among the heathen.

"Oh yes, the Jews are very well off in Hungary," said one of the staff of the "Pesther Lloyd." "There are 150,000 Jews in Budapest; they enter all the professions, and supply two members to the House of Magnates, and nine to the Chamber of Deputies, and there are two State Councillors; and you know with us every member of Parliament 'thous' every other in private as an equal. For the laws, liberal as they are, are not so liberal as the spirit of society. I, mere journalist as I am, have the most friendly talks with the Prime Minister, and am a member of the swellest political clubs. We are a good deal like England, by the way: our middle-cla.s.ses produce our leaders, our aristocracy lacks eloquence and talent, and has only a court influence. Our House of Commons is the most fas.h.i.+onable club. We have no censor, whereas Austria has an oppressive censors.h.i.+p as well as anti-Semitism. In fact, the influence of Vienna has caused a decline in our own tolerant spirit, and at the best of times a Jew needed to have three times the talent of a Christian to make equal progress in any career." A consideration which sufficiently accounts for the superiority of the Jewish remnant. Intolerance and persecution are furnaces which, when they do not destroy, temper and anneal and strengthen. It is as with the bare-footed, half-clad, underfed children of the slums: those that do survive are strong indeed. Let my patriotic cicerone, the Jewish architect, testify. First in all his examinations, a violinist, a bicyclist, a gymnast, he was to be gazetted a premier lieutenant as soon as he had completed his military service. He was a linguist, too (as every travelled Hungarian must be, for Hungarian will carry him nowhere), speaking excellent English and reading our magazines regularly. _Humani nihil a me alienum puto_ might have been his motto. Kossuth himself is said to have had a Jewish grandmother. The Jews are largely responsible for the prosperity of Budapest, as they were for that of Vienna, which now turns round upon them. Fancy a country quarrelling with its coal and iron! And the true wealth of a country is even more in its population than in its dead products. I found the Viennese comic papers full of the old anti-Semitic jokes, hashed up, I have little doubt, by the same journalists who are supposed to judaize the press of Europe. Even so in America, are not the Jewish caricatures in _Puck_ often done by a brother of M. de Blowitz? In something of the same spirit, when the notorious Lueger, whose platform was the extinction of the Jews of Vienna, was up for election as Burgomaster of that town, a poor Jew took a bribe of a couple of florins to vote for him. "G.o.d will frustrate him," said the pious Jew. "Meantime I have his money."

The chief surprise of Hungary is its language. Though one knows that Joka writes in the strange tongue which sticks its verb into the middle of its noun, yet one vaguely thinks of it as of Gaelic or Welsh--something archaic, kept for Eisteddfods and Renaissances--and it is not till one arrives in Hungary that one realises that it is a living, disconcerting reality. The great European languages have affinities with one another: Latin puts one on bowing terms with French and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese; English is not entirely unrelated to German, Dutch, and even Norwegian; old Greek is the key to modern. But in Hungary one comes face to face with an absolutely new language, in which even guesswork is impossible. When "Levelezo-Lap" means a postcard, and "ara egy napra" means price per day, you feel that it is all up. The nearest relatives of Hungarian are Turkish and Finnish, the Asiatic ancestors of the race having lived between Finns and Turks; and it bears traces of their migrations, and of the great Mongol invasion of Europe by Djingis Khan.

With a language thus handicapped, it was a mistake to have scarcely a word of any other tongue in an Exhibition designed to attract Europe. The only sc.r.a.p of English I saw was in the "French Theatre," in the show of "Living Pictures," the (London) director of which had forgotten to alter the t.i.tles printed beneath the frames. Even in giving the names of foreign authors the Hungarians preserve their habit of placing the Christian name second; so that I saw in the booksellers' windows works by Eliot George, k.o.c.k Paul, and Black William.

Hungary is still in the flush of youth, high-spirited, brilliant, enthusiastic, and a little out of perspective in its national consciousness. But who would ever do anything if he saw his true place in the cosmos? The rapid rise of Budapest--unprecedented save in the gold countries--into a capital of European importance, has shed a buoyant optimism, refres.h.i.+ng enough in this jaded century, over the inhabitants of that beautiful city. "We are the Vienna of the future," cried my cicerone, "and already Vienna is feeling our rivalry. The retired Jewish merchants who went there to spend their fortunes are now coming to us; the anti-Semitism of Vienna is at once the cause and the effect of bad business. And Vienna is on the downward grade; we are on the upward.

Vienna has never been the capital of Austria,--which is a mere federation of races,--as Budapest is the capital of Hungary. The German is proud of Vienna, yes; but the Czech looks to Prague, the Pole to Cracow, the Austro-Italian swears by Trieste."

He also complained that there is rather a tendency to think of Hungary as subject to Austria, instead of an a.s.sociated state; and that this tendency is fomented by the Austrian papers, whose references to Hungary insinuate this conception. The Hungarian papers, whose tone would counteract it, not being in German, are not read by the rest of Europe.

Hungary had always beaten Austria. She had never been defeated save by allies of Austria. But Hungary, which is so mettlesome and restive in her patriotism, whose great son, Kossuth, would never even accept the compromise with the House of Hapsburg, has yet no compunction in dominating inferior races, in grinding Serbs, Croats and Roumanians into her own pattern. The Hungarians, who are in the minority, are yet moulding these alien nationalities to their own will. But _que voulez-vous?_ The inhabitants of many nations have adopted Christianity, the nations themselves never. Perhaps the next step for the Christian missionaries is to found international Christianity.

Still the Hungarians have the qualities of their defects. Unlike the Turks, their neighbours, they are a race with a future, and Budapest is from one point of view one of the sightliest capitals of Europe. What town has a fairer situation? With Parisian Pesth sitting stately on one bank of the Danube, and Turkish Buda climbing up the hills in a series of hanging gardens crowned by gilt domes and cupolas on the other, the two joined by wonderful bridges, she exhibits an unsurpa.s.sed contrast; and at night, when the long stretch of the river is a-twinkle with lights reflected as s.h.i.+ning spears, she may even vie with Venice or the Thames Embankment. From the Andra.s.sy Avenue, a beautiful Boulevard, with its cafes and book-shops, and pleasant interludes of flower-beds and fountains, you may get, in a few minutes--crossing the Danube on a great steamer, and ascending the heights of Buda by a funicular railway--to a spot where, seated in an avenue of chestnut trees and looking on the villa-strewn slopes of sleeping hills, or watching the sun set in splendour behind them, you may forget that you are living in a bustling modern town, and one with an Exhibition to boot.

You may dream of the picturesque days when, as shown in Ujvary's great panorama of the sister towns in 1680, Buda was by far "the better half,"