The Revolutionary Movement of 1848-9 in Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany Part 5

Yet it was not merely offended vanity that irritated the ruler of Europe against Szechenyi. Metternich seems always to have had a preference for the thorough-going men among his opponents. He might hate and desire to crush them; but what pleased him was that he understood the logic of their position and, as he supposed, their motives. The moderate and Const.i.tutional Liberals were always a puzzle to him. But when a man like Szechenyi actually thought that he could work with him, while undermining the centralization which was the essence of his schemes, and appealing to that positive form of patriotism which it was the object of Metternich to crush out, so inconsistent a position drove the Prince beyond the bounds of ordinary courtesy.

Taking advantage of his own high position and Szechenyi's youth, he told him that he was a man lost through vanity and ambition, asked him if he could really confess to his friends the kindly feeling to the Austrian Government which he had expressed to Metternich; and, on Szechenyi making some admission of the difficulties of such a course, "Then," said Metternich, "you must be a traitor either to me or to your friends, that is to yourself."

But if Szechenyi's position was unintelligible to Metternich, he found it far easier to understand another n.o.bleman who came forward a little later and played a different, but hardly less important, part. This was Nicolaus Wesselenyi, the descendant of a family of n.o.bles who had constantly held their own against both king and People. The father of Nicolaus had been a fiery, overbearing man, who had indulged in private feuds, and who had fought scornfully for the special privileges of the n.o.bles. His son had all the fire of his family, and the same love of opposition, but directed by the circ.u.mstances of the time into healthier channels.

It was not, however, at Presburg that the Wesselenyis had hitherto played their princ.i.p.al part, but at the Diet which met at Klausenburg, in Transylvania. The circ.u.mstances and organization of that peculiar province will be more naturally considered in connection with the movements which arose a few years later. For the present, the important point to remember in connection with Wesselenyi's position is, that the Austrian Government tolerated an unusual amount of freedom in the Transylvanian Diet, in the hopes thereby of weakening that larger Hungarian feeling which gathered round the central Diet at Presburg. When both the Hungarian and the Transylvanian Diets were called together in 1830, and a demand was made by the Emperor for new recruits for the army, the House of Magnates in Transylvania showed, under Wesselenyi's leading, a bolder and firmer opposition than the House of Magnates at Presburg. In the central Diet, indeed, the chief opposition to the Emperor came from the Lower House, and the n.o.bles were disposed to yield to the demands of Francis. But Wesselenyi, with his splendid bearing and magnificent voice, stirred up a far more dangerous opposition in Transylvania; and the Government at Vienna began to mark him out as their most dangerous opponent.

But in the meantime new questions were coming to the front in Hungary, and new leaders were being called forth by them. The Polish insurrection of 1830 had roused more sympathy in Hungary than probably in any other country of Europe; and a connection between the two nations was then established which had a not unimportant influence on the subsequent history of Hungary.

The wiser men among the Hungarian leaders saw the great defect which marred all struggles for liberty in Poland. Whatever aspirations may have been entertained by the Polish patriots of 1791, certain it is that, when Poland fell before the intrigues of Russia and Prussia, the new Const.i.tution had not had time to bring about any better feeling between n.o.ble and peasant; and the Polish peasantry looked with distrust and suspicion on movements for freedom inaugurated by their oppressors.

The Hungarian reformers saw that, if they were to make the liberties of Hungary a reality, they must extend them to the serf as well as to the n.o.ble. In spite of the air of freedom of discussion which the County a.s.semblies of Hungary spread around them, there were, at this time, out of the thirteen millions of Hungarians, about eleven million serfs. These were not allowed to purchase an acre of the soil which they cultivated; they paid all the t.i.thes to the clergy and most of the taxes to the State, besides various payments in kind to their landlords; their labour might be enforced by the stick; while for redress of their grievances they were obliged, in the first instance, to apply to the Court over which their landlord presided.

The reigns of Maria Theresa and Joseph II., while modifying the evils of the position of the serf, had taught him to look to the Court of Vienna, rather than to the Diet of Presburg, for help in his troubles.

The Edict of Maria Theresa, called the Urbarium, had granted the peasant the right of leaving the land when he pleased, or of remaining if he liked, while he complied with certain conditions; and by this act he was allowed to bequeath the use of his land to his descendants.

Further, a right of appeal had been granted from his landlord's decision to the official court at Buda, known as the Statthalterei. By the same law the labour to be performed by the peasantry had been fixed, instead of being left to the will of the lord, as heretofore.

The reforms of Joseph II. had, like most of his attempts, been too vigorous to be lasting; but he had done enough to strengthen in the minds of the oppressed peasantry of Hungary the desire to look to the Emperor as their liberator. Thus the satisfaction of the claims of humanity had tended to weaken Const.i.tutional freedom.

The bitter feeling between n.o.ble and peasant was ill.u.s.trated most painfully in the year 1831, when an outbreak of cholera in Hungary was attributed by the peasantry to the poisoning of the wells by the n.o.bles. Agrarian risings had followed, and more than fifty peasants had been hung without trial.

Such was the state of feeling when the Diet of 1832 met at Presburg.

Had the leader of the movement for agrarian reform been a mere champion of Const.i.tutionalism, the work of drawing together the peasant and n.o.ble might have been more difficult. But fortunately the work fell into the hands of a man who, though not deficient in powers of oratory, was far less a popular leader than a thoughtful and humane student of affairs. This was Francis Deak, then thirty years of age, trained, like so many leaders of the time, for the bar, and already known as a speaker in the County a.s.sembly of Zala. He was not a man of the delicate, cultured type of Szechenyi; nor did he possess the commanding figure and lion voice of Wesselenyi. He was broad and st.u.r.dy in figure, his face was round and humorous, and his eye twinkled with fun. Yet he was not without a deep shade of melancholy.

He was a man who inspired in all who came near him a sense of entire trust in his honesty and steadiness of purpose; and this feeling, though unlike the enthusiasm which is roused alike by the highest genius and by merely popular gifts, was yet exactly the form of confidence needed to enable Deak to do the special work which lay before him.

The question of the reform of the Urbarium he at once made his own.

Besides the miseries of the peasantry above mentioned, they were continually exposed to all kinds of petty tyrannies. Their horses were liable to be seized by tourists through the country, and soldiers were billeted upon them. Deak demanded the extension to the peasant of the right of buying land, and better security for person and property.

But it soon became evident that, whatever exceptions there might be to the rule, the Magnates of Hungary were not prepared to surrender their privileges. The point which the reformers specially insisted on in the new Urbarium was a clause enabling the peasant to free himself from his feudal dues by a legal arrangement with the landlord. Thirteen times the Lower House of the Diet pa.s.sed the clause; thirteen times the House of Magnates rejected it; and when at last that House consented to pa.s.s it, the Emperor vetoed it.

The reformers were now clearly justified in calling on the people to recognize them as their champions against both n.o.bles and sovereign.

But in order to prevent this recognition the Government had forbidden any publication of the debates.

Wesselenyi had met this difficulty in the Transylvanian Diet by introducing a private press of his own, with the help of which he circulated a report of the proceedings. This so alarmed the Government that they dissolved the Transylvanian Diet and established an absolute ruler in that province. Wesselenyi then transferred his eloquence to the House of Magnates in Presburg, where he thundered against the Government for opposing the liberties of the peasantry, denouncing them in the following words: "The Government sucks out the marrow of nine million of men (_i.e._, the peasantry); it will not allow us n.o.bles to better their condition by legislative means; but, retaining them in their present state, it only waits its own time to exasperate them against us. Then it will come forward to rescue us. But woe to us! From freemen we shall be degraded to the state of slaves."

But the work which Wesselenyi had half done for Transylvania was to be carried out for Hungary more thoroughly by a man who had been gradually rising into note. This was Louis Kossuth, of whom it may be said that, more than any other man in Europe, he was the author of the Revolution of 1848. He was a few years older than Francis Deak, and, like him, was trained as a lawyer. He had been appointed, in the exercise of his profession, arbitrator between several wealthy proprietors and their dependants. In this position he gained the confidence of many of the peasantry, and he was also able to give them help in the time of the cholera.

He possessed a quick and keen sensibility, which was the source of many of his faults and of his virtues. A curious ill.u.s.tration of this quality is shown in his renunciation of field sports, in consequence of reading a pa.s.sage in a Persian poet on the duty of humanity to all living things. No doubt it was to this sensibility that he owed a large part of that matchless eloquence which was to be so powerful an engine in the revolutionary war. It was connected, too, with the keen statesmanlike instinct which enabled him to see so often the right moment for particular lines of action; and which, had it been united with a wider sympathy, stronger nerves, and a more scrupulous conscience, might have made his career as useful as it was brilliant.

[Ill.u.s.tration: KOSSUTH LAJOS.]

This instinct it was which enabled him to see at this crisis that nothing could be effected for Hungary until the work done in the Diet was better known to the main body of the people. The private press which he now started may have been suggested to him by Wesselenyi's attempt in Transylvania; but its work was carried out with an ingenuity and resourcefulness which were altogether Kossuth's own. The Government became so alarmed at this press that they wished to purchase it from him, but, wherever print was hindered, he circulated written correspondence. Nor did he confine his reporting to the debates in the Diet of Presburg, for he circulated also reports of the county meetings.

The Count Palatine, the chief ruler of Hungary, tried to hinder this work; but the county officials refused to sanction this prohibition, and thus deprived it of legal force.

The Government was now thoroughly roused; and in May, 1837, Kossuth was indicted for treason, arrested, and kept for two years in prison without any trial.

But great as was the indignation excited by this arrest, it was as nothing compared to the storm which was aroused by the prosecution and imprisonment of Wesselenyi. The Government had marked him out during the Transylvanian debates as an enemy who was to be struck on the first opportunity. The printing of the Transylvanian reports would have been followed very speedily by a prosecution, had he not escaped into North Hungary; but his speech against the Government in the Presburg Diet gave a new opportunity for attack.

The enthusiasm which his prominent position, impressive manner, and high rank had caused had been strengthened in Transylvania by the extreme personal kindness which he had shown towards his peasantry; and one of them walked all the way from Wesselenyi's Transylvanian estate to Vienna to pet.i.tion, on his own behalf and that of one hundred fellow-peasants, that their landlord might be restored to them.

Had Francis been still on the throne, it is possible that Metternich would have offered further resistance to the popular demands. But Francis had died in 1835, the year before the closing of the Diet. His successor, Ferdinand, though, chiefly from physical causes, too weak to hold his own against Metternich, was a kindly, easy-tempered man, not without a sense that even kings ought to obey the law.

But whether Metternich or Ferdinand were to blame in the matter, the concessions of the King were made in a hesitating and grudging manner which took away their grace, and made the defeat more vividly apparent both to victors and spectators.

A more popular Chancellor of Hungary, Anton Mailath, was appointed; another member of the same family was made chief justice; and about the same time the Transylvanian Diet was restored. Hoping that he had now conciliated popular feeling, Metternich, in 1839, called together the Diet of Presburg and demanded four million florins and thirty-eight thousand recruits.

But the members of the a.s.sembly had been instructed by their const.i.tuents to oppose any demands of the Government until Wesselenyi, Kossuth, and the members of a club who had been arrested at the same time, were liberated. And while Deak still led the opposition in the Lower House, Count Louis Batthyanyi came forward as the champion of freedom in the House of Magnates. Finally, the Emperor consented, not only to grant an amnesty to Wesselenyi, Kossuth, and others, but to pa.s.s that clause about the peasants' dues which he had vetoed in 1836.

The Diet then voted the money, and was dissolved.

Thus, while in Italy a new faith was springing up which was to supply a force to the struggles for liberty that they had previously lacked, in Hungary the different, but hardly less effective, power of old traditions of Const.i.tutional freedom was checking Metternich in his full career of tyranny, and forcing him to confess a defeat inflicted, not by foreign diplomatists, but by that very people who had rallied round Maria Theresa in her hour of danger, and who had sternly rejected the advances of Napoleon when he had invited them to separate their cause from that of the House of Austria.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] "He congratulated me on the fact that circ.u.mstances had spared me the tremendous ordeals usually undergone; and seeing me smile at this, he asked me severely what I should have done if I had been required, as others had been, to fire off a pistol in my own ear, which had been previously loaded before my eyes. I replied that I should have refused, telling the initiators that either there was some valve in the interior of the pistol into which the bullet fell--in which case the affair was a farce unworthy of both of us--or the bullet had really remained in the stock: and in that case it struck me as somewhat absurd to call upon a man to fight for his country, and make it his first duty to blow out the few brains G.o.d had vouchsafed to him."--_Life and Writings of Mazzini, Vol. I._

[4] As an instance of his way of carrying out this idea may be mentioned his feeling to Savoy. He felt that in race, language, and possibly in sympathy, Savoy might naturally gravitate towards France, while its geographical position and the modes of life of its inhabitants might naturally connect it with Switzerland. He therefore desired that by the deliberate vote of an elected a.s.sembly, not by a fict.i.tious Napoleonic plebiscite, Savoy should decide the question of its connection with Italy, France, or Switzerland. Mazzini expressed a hope that it would decide in favour of Switzerland.

[5] "Mais M. Bulwer parler de faire la guerre, et faire la guerre sont choses bien differentes."

[6] Doc.u.ment 158 to Gualterio Gli Ultimi Rivolgimenti Italiani.

CHAPTER IV.

LANGUAGE AND LEARNING AGAINST DESPOTISM. 1840-1846.

Contrast between position of German language in North Germany and in Austrian Empire.--Condition of Germany between 1819 and 1840.--Literary movements.--Protest of the Professors of Gottingen against abolition of Hanoverian Const.i.tution.--Effect of the protest on other parts of Germany.--Position and character of Frederick William III.--His struggle with the Archbishop of Cologne.--Accession of Frederick William IV.--His character and policy.--Ronge's movement of Church Reform.--Robert Blum's share in it.--Language movement in Hungary.--Position and history of Croatia.--Louis Gaj and the "Illyrian" movement.--"The Slavonic ocean and the Magyar island."--Kossuth's treatment of the Slavonic movement.--Count Zay's circular.--The "taxation of the n.o.bles."--Szechenyi's position.--Deak's resignation.--The Croats at Presburg.--Kossuth's inconsistency.--Ferdinand's intervention in the struggle.--The struggle of races absorbs all other questions.--History of Transylvania.--The "three nations."--The position of the Roumanians.--Effect of Joseph II.'s policy in Transylvania.--The "Libellus Wallachorum."--Andreas Schaguna.--Stephan Ludwig Roth.--General summary of the effect of the revival of national feelings.

'Twas from no Augustan age, No Lorenzo's patronage, That the German singers rose; By no outward glories crowned, By no prince's praise renowned, German art's first blossom blows.

From her country's greatest son, From the mighty Frederick's throne, Scorned, the Muse must turn away.

"_We_ have given thy worth to thee;"

"Let our heart-beats prouder be;"

Can each German boldly say.

So to loftier heights arose, So in waves more swelling flows German poet's minstrelsy.

He in ripeness all his own, From his heart's deep centre grown, Scorns the rule of pedantry.

So sang Schiller; and, while in Germany the Muse was ascending to the heights in which Schiller gloried to see her, the opposite process had been producing opposite results under the rule of another German sovereign. Frederick II. of Prussia preferred bad French to the best utterances of his own country; and so the German Muse was free to develope in her own way. Joseph II. of Austria felt his heart warmed with the greatness of German traditions; he looked round on dominions inhabited by men of different races and languages, and, perceiving that these differences led to continual misunderstandings, and hindered any great work of common reform, resolved to extend the blessings of German language and literature to all the races of his dominions. To them, he thought, a change would prove a bond of union; while neither Bohemian, Hungarian, nor Croat could claim for their native tongues, however dear to them, such glorious a.s.sociations and traditions as were already connected with the language which was to take their place.

The consequence of this n.o.bly intended effort has been that German is, to this day, a badge of tyranny to the majority of the people of the western half of the Austrian Empire; and if it has almost ceased to be so in the eastern half, that is simply because its supremacy has been replaced by the no less crus.h.i.+ng tyranny of another language which was offered to the various populations of the Hungarian kingdom by its rulers, as a symbol of national freedom and unity.