Budapest in 1908
“Can these things be.
And overcome us like a summer’s cloud,
Without our special wonder?”
- Shakespeare: Machbeth, Act 3, Scene 4
W. B. Forster Bovill: Hungary and the Hungarians, 1908 - CHAPTER VII
BUDAPEST AS IT IS
Art in Budapest a Century Ago
“Tis the privilege of Art
Thus to play its cheerful part,
Man in Earth to acclimate.
And bend the exile to his fate.”
- Emerson
W. B. Forster Bovill: Hungary and the Hungarians, 1908 - CHAPTER VI
BUDAPEST & ART
To Budapest I came with a mind eager to receive its myriad impressions. Budapest has never really disappointed me. It is of towns, towny. Many things I have grown to dislike, but others to love more. When I first arrived it struck me as better than I expected - and I had expected much. Now that I know the byways, and can unattended find my way through its less frequented avenues of communication, it seems to need a less oratorical municipal council. Despite this national weakness, the city is justly styled Budapest the Beautiful. It is the capital, and forces are continually emanating from it, which are but dimly realised in the districts I have already described. Here is much of the history, and all the machinery of the nation.
Hungarian Puszta - 100 years ago
“Down there on the ocean expanse of the lowlands
I am at home, that is my world;
my soul is like an eagle freed from prison,
when I behold the limitless expanse of level country.”
- Petőfi
W. B. Forster Bovill: Hungary and the Hungarians, 1908 - CHAPTER V
ON THE GREAT PLANE
Hortobágy and the Puszta
The poet was right. How well he expressed in a single sentence all that I put into the last chapter! Petőfi sang as a Magyar feels. The puszta was his rightful home, for there beats the great heart of the race. When first I visited Hortobágy it was but to stand amazed. Just imagine the impression created by a consciousness of being on a vast plain 300 square miles in area, the characteristics of which are immensity and the cattle from a thousand hills. Its very treelessness strikes a silent note of appeal. You yearn for a something you are accustomed to, then when it is not forthcoming settle down cheerfully to the absences of the grassy plain, its quaint huts like oases, and those picturesque acacia groves.
Where the Magyar Reigns
“The shades of night have fallen o’er the low plains.”
- Poushkin
W. B. Forster Bovill: Hungary and the Hungarians, 1908 - CHAPTER IV
WHERE THE MAGYAR REIGNS (Kassa - Tokaj - Debrecen)
The traveller from Berlin to Budapest cannot avoid Kassa (Kosice). It was night when I entered Kassa (Kosice), and political demonstrations rendered an otherwise uncommonly quiet town unusually turbulent. There was little to be seen at such an hour, but I realised the “stone age” was not over, and sought the comparative peace of a barber’s shop. Hungarian barbers are good, and in the country places inexpensive. Both are a consolation to the man with a strenuous beard and a meagre purse. This, of course, is true of England - in a few places.
The Carpathians and its Peoples in 1908
“I would not give up the mists that spiritualize our mountains for all the blue skies of Italy.”
- Wordsworth
W. B. Forster Bovill: Hungary and the Hungarians, 1908 - CHAPTER III
THE CARPATHIANS AND ITS PEOPLES
If you want to see Hungary and the Hungarians, begin where I did, away in the Carpathians. Come over from Berlin to Oderberg, thence to Tátra Lomnitz, where the very best hotel in Hungary may be found. How well I remember my first sight of those dim grey heights known as the High Tátra!
Modern Hungary 100 Years Ago
“I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.”
- Canning
W. B. Forster Bovill: Hungary and the Hungarians, 1908 - CHAPTER II
MODERN HUNGARY
MODERN Hungary practically begins with the emergence of the nation from the torpor consequent upon the cruelties, which followed Világos. For ten years a kind of passive resistance was practised which in a quiet way frustrated all schemes for the centralisation and Germanisation of Hungary. The first sign of repentance or recognition of value was shown at the close of the war with Italy, which ended so disastrously. In 1860 it was impossible to collect the taxes. The Hungarians are adept at passive resistance. Everybody was seized with an inability to pay their taxes. Neither was it any good seizing goods and submitting them to public auction, for the Austrian official could never find a purchaser.
The Glowing Past
. . . Let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed; some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives; some sleeping kill’d.
- William Shakespeare, Richard II.
W. B. Forster Bovill: Hungary and the Hungarians, 1908 - CHAPTER I
THE GLOWING PAST
“The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -
Of cabbages - and kings.” -Lewis Carroll
The Magyar enjoys retrospect. The songs of today are unsung; the books of today remain unread; the men of today, save in the arena of politics, are unknown.
Introduction to Hungary and the Hungarians
“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and
instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
- Dr. Johnson
To start out for a long holiday in a country and then to settle down there is sufficient proof of the enchanting qualities of scene and character resident therein. To see the initial sights as one of an organised crowd is one thing, and to revisit and re-see them alone, amid the blessed silence of one’s own irresistible self, is quite another thing.
