SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER.

FUBLISHED MONTHLY AT Five Dollars PER ANNUM-JNO. R. THOMPSON, EDITOR AND PROprietor.

VOL. XV.

RICHMOND, JANUARY, 1849.

NO. 1.

public in France was necessary to rouse formal,

GLIMPSES AT EUROPE DURING 1848. palsied Germany, to give new hopes to Poland,

MAGYAR AND CROAT.

to overthrow the proud medieval house of Habsburg and to break the chain that rivetted Italy to its eternal oppressor.

Paris was, as usual, the spark that set fire to The past year, which has just closed its iron all the combustible material of the Continent. gates for ever, has been full of solemn warnings. The flame spread rapidly and the proportions of The God of Nations has caused the sun of pros- the gigantic conflagration are hardly yet deterperity to shine with unwonted splendor upon this mined. Far from it; but ideas, institutions and continent, whilst dark night has fallen upon the men begin, at least here and there, to appear in fairest parts of the Old World. Ours has been the dark mêlée : tendencies are showing themthe triumph of the sword and the victory of the selves and taking form, plans for the future are race; powerful and honored abroad, prosperous marked out and cognate elements combine for and happy at home-who would not be grateful common purposes. We begin to see the two for such blessings? But fearful and sad has been great principles now agitating the Continent of the fate of our transatlantic brethren; thrones Europe: the desire of forming new political inhave been overturned and kings banished from stitutions and the resurrection of the nationality their land; nations have risen in arms to fight of ancient races. against their own kindred and the voice of liberty has been drowned in the cries of murdered patriots.

The latter, a movement only about sixteen years old, is by far the most important and the most interesting; it has already overthrown an ancient dynasty and broken up Empires of a

There is in faet no epoch in modern history, when Europe has been so universally, so deeply thousand years' standing; thanks to it, Germany agitated. Neither the bloody times of religious excitement during the thirteenth, nor the uninterrupted wars of the seventeenth, not even the period of awful commotion at the end of the last century, can show us any year so full of sudden revolutions and thorough changes as the year 1848. From all sides and at every instant do we see the political stage invaded by new actors, so unexpectedly appearing and so little known before, that we have hardly time to examine their features and trace their origin to centuries long past, when a new race appears and claims its part in the great drama.

is no longer German, Hungary no longer Hunnish, and Greece no longer Greek. By its magic touch there rises in the very centre of Germany a Bohemian nation, counting millions, speaking a new language and claiming its own time-honored institutions! In the land of the proud Magyar, five millions of Croats suddenly shake off their fetters, invoke the memory of their ancestors, who fell defending their hearths and their faith against the legions of Trajan, and send an army to enter triumphantly the old Imperial city! Moravia all at once remembers its Selavonic origin and joins the great League into which even That the French Revolution has produced this Silesia, that richest province of poor Prussia, is great European movement, is only in some res- anxious to be admitted. All clamor, all fight for pects true. For the revolution of last February the restoration of their nationality, but all at the was not a political movement; it was not brought same time claim greater liberty and perfect inabout by a party, or the people, nor foreseen by dependence. For it is the people, the so-called those who profited by it, much less by those who low people, who alone had preserved the nationfell its victims. It was, as all the world now al tongue of their forefathers. Now, of a sudknows, nothing less than a social revolution, full den, nobles and scholars, high and learned men, of bloodshed, meanness and sadness. Still it remember their long-forgotten mother tongue, has its providential end, which will characterize seek for its purer forms in distant centuries, free it in history, when the smallness of means, the it from the rust of ages and wield the polished infirmity of agents, the miseries of detail, will weapon from the professor's desk and the preachdisappear in the distance, leaving nothing on its er's pulpit, in the salon and the Parliamentary broad canvass but great world-moving events. Hall, in behalf of their great and noble cause. For nothing less than the establishment of a Re-Tired of being French, or German, or Magyar,

VOL. XV-1

they will now only belong to their own country; | of all Slave-nations, claimed proudly their rig for this purpose they seek out and associate and refused to send representatives to the G themselves with the low and the humble, who man Diet at Frankfurth. For German Prind for so many centuries have been the modest, but and Tchech Kings might have formed an a true representatives of their common race, and ance, they said, but what had the Slave to do by birth aristocrats, by interest monarchists, they a German Parliament? A Slave Congress w now preach the purest democracy! held at the famous old city of Prague, and he

Thus here also the two great principles of lib-were, for the first time since long centuries, u erty and nationality are found faithful and formi- ted the supple, cunning and fanatic Bohemi dable allies; the inflexible prejudices of race, with his own brother, the Moravian and the S kept unalloyed and strangely tenacious by the vaque from Northern Hungary, the warlike, re patriarchal life of the Sclavonic nations, com-less Pole, sadly Frenchified, and the Esclay bine with their innate love of liberty, and must nian, Croat and Serbian with his fierce and sa and will in the end be triumphant, even at the age air, his long pointed mustaches, and his fa risk of shaking European society to its very foun- bronzed by a Southern sun-not to speak of dations. For many causes have of late coope- Greek Slave and the Cossack of Bessarabia a rated to rouse the feeling of nationality in differ- Transylvania. Here were seen the represen ent parts of the Continent. German science has tives of twenty millions of reckless, grim s for years been successfully engaged in reviving diers, all speaking the same tongue, though the memory of the former glory of ancient ra- different dialects, and all united under the sa ces, still in existence, though almost forgotten, white banner with its red cross, that cross wh and thus aroused them to a consciousness both adorned alike the patched jacket of the p of their power and their degradation; the revi- Tchech, the rough lambskin of the Croat, a val of Greece, as an independent kingdom, with the purple velvet of the Dalmatian. They ca all its display of enthusiastie patriotism, has kin- from the foot of the Ural where they bent th dled the sleeping flame and given new courage knees to the Czar, and from the shores of and new life to the despairing, whilst gigantic treacherous Adriatic under the gentle sceptre Russia has first nurtured the almost sublime idea the infallible Pope, from the fertile banks of a Panslavism, that curious resurrection, now the Oder under Prussia's Christian King, a half accomplished, of all the Sclavonie nations from the marshy shores of the Danube wh and their union into one great Empire, with Russia for its head, Poland its heart, Bohemia its arm, and the feet of the giant resting on the Bosphorus and the Adriatic.

the Crescent reigns,--but they all met as bre ren, as members of an ancient, honored race children of a common father, and whenever t met, one shout for free Slavia" rent the ai When, therefore, Germany first raised the ban- It was among this motley crowd of brill ner of a One United Germany, it was at once costumes and wretched rags, that public at saluted by a cry of insurrection from the Oder tion was attracted by half-a-dozen young n and the Vistula, the Moldau, Save and Drave who everywhere appeared together, silent, n and from all along the banks of the Lower Dan- smiling, always courteous. There was not] ube. Slave arose against Teuton, and king- remarkable in their dress: a red cloak with doms that had formed part of Germany, until mine falling over the left shoulder, a red or all traces of national difference seemed to have ple cap of curious shape, and a sword at the disappeared, abandoned the tottering Empire formed a costume like many others; and v and rejected with the oppressor's rule his not addressed they would answer with equal flu less hated language. In vain did German pa- in German, Latin or the Sclavonic dialect, c triots plead that the Sclavonian minority ought Illyrian. But they were evidently men w to follow the great national movement of Ger- hearts were sad and whose grief bore he many-in vain did they point to the smaller sat- upon them; only when some strange o ellite following his sun and the tender parasite would rise, and in a language but barely ab winding around the venerable tree, and in vain maintain its claim of kindred to the great was Bohemia called a dagger in the very heart vonic family, speak of the distant Adriatic of Germany. For it was in this ancient king- its smiling plains, they rose like one man, dom that the Tchechs, a fierce and fiery race, full with a voice full of deep emotion, exclaim of energy, and excited by their enthusiasm for Zivio! Zivio !* the recovery of their national independence, first

* Following European custom, we use the word Slave as the generic name of all Sclavonian tribes, whose po litical union is known as the 'Panslavism.'

They were Croats,-Croats of the sou Hungary, and a curious race of men. He slavery for a thousand years and more, the

* Hurrah.

brethren in fierce simplicity, "we are Romans." They were content to be Slaves.

been less fortunate than even the smallest of European races-for never during that long series of centuries, and amidst all the overthrows And Slaves the Croats are, even the first born and changes of which their country has ever of the Sclavonic race; for their traditions say been the theatre, had they found the hour or the that when Rome's Proconsuls made the yoke of place to recover their independence as a people. the Eternal City unbearable, ancient Illyria (of And yet, in spite of Macedonia and Rome, their which the Croatia of our day formed part) sent first but not successful enemies, in spite of the Bul- three armies out under the command of three garians who imposed their own name upon a brothers. Tchech, Leck and Russ were their part of their native land, in spite of the Turks, names and three great kingdoms they founded: who for centuries have occupied the larger por- Bohemia, Poland and Russia. But the vast tion of their country-in spite even of the Magy-steppes of Illyria were a sad inheritance; they ar and the Austrian who reign over the rest, they were the gigantic high roads on which tribe had remained uncorrupted and undismayed amid after tribe, nation after nation, poured down all the vicissitudes of time. The cry of nation- from the mysterious East upon the fertile lands ality had been heard far away in their vast step- of Middle Europe. They came by hundreds of pes and found an echo in their hearts, warmly thousands, they came by millions, and the poor attached to the memory of their forefathers and Sclavonians bowed their head like the pliant reed full of ardent love of independence. They had before the storm and rose again after it had passed. shaken off the yoke of the Magyar: a handful Six times had they seen fierce and savage hordes of men, they had risen against millions of a proud pass through their land towards the West, never and warlike race that had ruled them since time to return, when there came a still fiercer horde immemorial, and now they had come to claim and a more savage tribe from the distant Ural the assistance of their brother Slaves. For Slaves mountains. They were brothers of those Huns they had ever been, and Slaves they were yet who, under Attila, had filled Western Europe with heart and soul. But the Magyar hated with horror and carnage—the last on the native them, for he was their conqueror-and the Teu- soil of the Croat, but invincible warriors and a ton hates the Slave. powerful nation. Millions followed each other

tury, fearful enemies, striking terror into their foes by their countless numbers and strange tactics, until finally they found themselves lords of the soil and gave to their new conquest its Latin name Hungaria. But Magyar was the name by which they were then known to their brethren and Magyar they are still in their features, language and manners. Brave and intelligent, they hide under the calm and reflective physiognomy of an Oriental nation, a passionate heart and an enthusiastic spirit.

And with this hatred they had lived for a thou-in vast armies during the whole of the ninth censand years, conqueror and conquered in the same land, yet ever separated by all the external signs which perpetuate the remembrance of the victory of one and the defeat of the other race :— the Magyar, always on horseback, always in arms, proudly displaying the insignia of command and showing himself master of the soil; at his side the not less proud Croat, cultivating under the rude dominion of foreign masters fields whose harvest would not be his, covered with miserable sheepskins, chained to the glebe, with no traditions but slavery and no legal existence but in the Germany gave them civilization and the blesswords of his lord: plebs misera, gens contribuens ings of the Christian faith, their great king, St. aut potius nulla! Stephen, a constitution breathing liberty and But now the Croat's ancient nationality was equality, and the race became a mighty and reresuscitated; a long forgotten people they reap-nowned nation. The whole of Illyria owned them peared on the stage and claimed their place allegiance, and Hungary was already one of the among the nations of the earth and their vote in the affairs of Europe.

With the modesty of true pride they spoke not of the days of ancient Rome when their fathers owned all the rich lands from Drave to Danube, from the foot of the Alps to where now stands the city of Belgrad and where the mighty river suddenly turns its course towards the East. They disdained to quote their own historians who, carried away by their pride and patriotism, count the imperial Assyrian and the illustrious Trojan among the ancestors of their race; they disdained even to say with the unlettered of their own

powers of the earth, when their king Mathias entered Vienna and was crowned Emperor of Germany. Still they retained their laws from the times of St. Stephen and preserved them nobly through all the invasions of Tartars, the conquests of Turks and even the wars with great Austria; for those institutions were based upon that only solid foundation of all legislation, national genius, which it were well for the European nations of our day not so entirely to abandon for the sake of mere theoretical liberty or fantastic notions of nationality.

About the year 1000.

Admirable as these laws and institutions were, | under Austrian rule! Bloody are the pages of they still bore from the beginning the germ of his history during the sixteenth and seventeenth their final destruction in them; their leading prin- centuries, for fearful is the struggle between the ciple being that the only means of governing the proud freeman and the cunning oppressor. The strange diversity of subjugated populations by accounts of their rebellion form the most lamenthe few and the strong, was the paramount table history of any nation, and such were the strength of the royal power. This principle was effects of their stubborn resistance and the licenhanded down as a government-tradition to all tiousness and cruelty of the Imperial armies, the successors of St. Stephen. Besides, the that at one time human flesh was publicly sold Magyars gave laws only for themselves, the con- in the land of the noblest race of Europe! quering nation; they only were thus organized, The skillful policy and the patient genius of remaining forever a victorious army in the land the Austrian sovereigns were directed towards of those who have ever been nothing more than a complete change of their constitution; an abplebs contribuens. They were all of them no- solute monarchy was to be established and the bles and warriors, owning the land by the right language, the customs and the laws of the Magof their sword and holding it under the title of a yar were gradually suppressed. Their pride military fief. Hence their barbarous latin term was broken, and never was a race prouder of Insurrection for the military service that every their tongue and more jealous of their liberty. Magyar is obliged to render for his fief, hence also the Magyar word Hussar for the soldier, whom every twenty had to send mounted into the field.

Even the Magyar of our day shows it yet in every word, in every action. His tall, muscular stature is that of the man given from early childhood to rude bodily exercise; the fierce, piercing

Thus they prospered and became more pow-look speaks of unyielding pride, and his costume, erful abroad and more tyrannical at home, ex- the brilliant "dolman" of the Hussar, richly emtorting from their weakened monarchs greater broidered in gold and pearls and but partly covliberties and higher privileges-but always for ered by the "Attila" tunic of black velvet, rethe Magyar alone; the Croat, the German, the minds him constantly, in form and name, of his Roumain or Walachian remained still plebs nulla. lofty descent. The noble Magyar-and every Their period of greatness and success was how- Magyar is noble-never appears without his large ever rapidly drawing to an end. The Turk, curved sabre, trailing on the ground, and whilst their fearful neighbor, had grown bolder and more elsewhere the Halls of Legislature are closed to and more dangerous, until the Crescent threat- the armed man, the Magyar enters them boldly, ened once more to banish Christianity from Eu- his left hand on his sword and his brethren say : rope. Army after army was poured into the He had his arms and he has voted; his vote then fertile valley of the Danube, and fortress after was a free vote! The Magyar loves his language, fortress fell into the hands of the Infidel. And and a beautiful, sonorous language it is, by its a strange king was the king of the Magyar, natural loftiness and majesty of expression well whom Providence called upon to resist Soliman fitted for a people of warriors and orators, and the Magnificent, the conqueror of Rhodus. Na- the very fact that it is an idiom separated from ture had marked him for a strange fate, for, born all other known tongues in the world, a language before his time, he was a bearded youth in his fourteenth, and a gray headed man in his eighteenth year. Betrothed even before he was born and crowned when two years old, he ascended the throne at ten, was married at fifteen and died at twenty. What a master for the proudest nobility of Europe! What an adversary for the first general of his age! Three hundred thousand Turks invaded the land of the Magyar, and at the fearful battle of Mohacz fell forever the national life and independence of Hungary; a part of the beautiful country was made a Turkish province, the remainder passed under the do- greatness. minion of Austria, and Hungary, after a race of unparalleled brilliancy and after a most heroic and romantic resistance takes foreign masters and is buried in the history and the monarchy of Austria. A sad fate has been the fate of the Magyar sition in the monarchs of Austria, or a national

"without a mother or sisters," but adds to its peculiar charms. That the Magyar is often carried away by his national pride, and in solemn earnest assures us that his Lords are more noble than all the kings of the earth, that some of them trace their descent through Attila up to Noah, or that St. Stephen is the first saint in Heaven, and that the Revelation was given to the world in the language spoken in Heaven, in Magyar, is a failing also of other nations of Europe and may well be pardoned in a people sighing under a foreign yoke and delighting in dreams of former

For dreams were all the Austrian left him from the times of the chivalrous Ferdinand, whom he called in to his aid and made his king, to save him from the Infidels, to the days of fallen Metternich. Not that there was a tyrannical dispo

hatred against the Magyar, but the Habsburgs | abolishing all his reforms in Hungary. He signed had ever turned their eyes only to the Occident, it, strangely enough, in Magyar, the very language and their ambition had always been to retain for he had proscribed, but the decree, far from beAustria her rank as a Western power. All in-ing an avowal of his wrongs, was merely an act terests and exigencies, not subservient to this of extreme weakness.

their great aim, were set aside and overcome. Soon after this fatal acknowledgment of his Thus the immense Empire gradually crystalli-error, which only increased the discontent prezed around the small hereditary provinces in vailing in Hungary, the French revolution broke Germany; Italian, Bohemian, and Slave were out and its disastrous consequences threatened equally sacrificed to these German tendencies, once more the very existence of the House of and the whole policy of Austria reduced itself Austria; and once more did the Magyars show to her resistance of all development of constitu- their loyalty and gallantry; they granted willingtional rights at home and the claims of nation-ly and joyfully horses, money and men, all that ality abroad. was asked, begging in return only that their chilPrompted by such motives, she deprived the dren might be allowed to fight under their own Magyars, one by one, of their high privileges, re-officers. Nobly, most nobly, did the brave Husgardless of all the solemn promises made by every sars fight and again the Magyar helped to save Emperor before his election as king of Hungary the Austrian Empire. But not Republics alone and in spite of the humble prayers and urgent re-are ungrateful. Never was country worse remonstrances of the oppressed race. A German warded than Hungary, for all the sacrifices Governor took the place of their self-chosen she had made for the cause of Europe and of Palatin, military and civil offices were given to Austria. The moment her treasures and arstrangers, foreign troops were sent into their mies were no longer needed, her services were land and quartered on nobleman and priest, and forgotten and only her former resistance reeven their faith, that of Calvin, was not spared membered. Again were Imperial Commissaby their catholic masters. ries sent to govern the kingdom, again was the Magyar language proscribed, their national Diet abolished and their most sacred rights disregarded. How their proud, independent spirit could so long brook such injustice and tyranny would be almost inexplicable but for the skill, firmness and conciliatory spirit of the Viceroy or Palatin Joseph, one of the Austrian Archdukes, and the immense superiority of Austria as one of the Great Powers of Europe.

And still the Magyars, fretting and sighing under the hard yoke, were a noble and a loyal race; for when the great Frederick drove Maria Theresa from all her hereditary states, Hungary became the asylum of the fugitive Empress, who, the royal infant in her arms, appeared in the midst of the assembled nobles to implore their assistance for their king. And they drew their swords and crowding round their august guest they cried: Moriamur pro rege nostro! Their devotion and their bravery saved the Austrian monarchy and they were told that the slave who had saved his master's life was free!

But the patience of the Magyars was at last exhausted; their national pride, so long suppressed, at last awoke and after aspiring for centuries with a noble ambition to the liberty they But soon both their loyalty and their services had enjoyed in days long gone by, they broke were forgotten, when Joseph II. sacrificed all the chains with which force and cunning, unsurthat was left of freedom and independence in the passed in modern times, had so long fettered land of the Magyar to his fanciful plans of mak- them. They now showed that they had not in ing Austria one great homogeneous monarchy. vain obtained the name of the Englishmen of The kingdom was treated like a conquered pro- the East. Their Magnates, members of the vince, royal commissaries exercised unlimited higher nobility and rarely seen without their retipowers, the last privileges were taken from cities nue of several hundred men, or maintaining, like and communities and a simple imperial edict the Esterhazy, whole regiments at their own exabolished with one stroke all the rights and im- pense, formed an Upper Chamber, closely remunities of the Magyar nobles! The adminis-sembling the House of Lords, whilst their Electration of justice was reorganized after German tive Chamber was in every respect a faithful copy models, the Magyar language was prohibited of the Lower House of England. Nor was the and the German imposed as the tongue of him division of the kingdom into counties wanting, who thus conquered Hungary in times of undis- with their system of representation and indepenturbed peace. The Magyars trembled with in- dent administration; they had their clubs under dignation at such unmerited insult, but before the name of casinos, the large balconies of their they could rise to avenge their grievously offen- massive houses were their hustings and public ded race, Joseph, unhappy, sick and doubting banquets gave ample opportunity for political himself, signed, with trembling hand, a decree oratory. Their Magnates followed the example