The below is transcribed from the first (and probably only) edition of Hungary,
by C.A. Macartney, London 1934. A fascinating account by this eminent
historian of the Hungarian gentry (lower nobility) class in the
1930s, of the type discussed in this blog.
To the reader of romances,
and even to the ordinary tourist, especially if he or she travels
with good recommendations, the magnate, with his country mansion, his
polished manners, his reminiscences of Vienna and Ascot, his charming
wife who, like himself, speaks excellent English, and is in all
probability his third or fourth cousin through at least one common
ancestor, is the typical Magyar. Not so to the born Hungarian, who
envies the magnate and pays him every form of respect, but in a
corner of his heart despises him for his foreign ways, and is well
aware that the magnates are only the facade of the “nation”,
while the solid fabric is composed of the lesser nobles, the old
servientes regis, known
to-day in popular parlance as the “gentry”.
The
name is an apt one, for the English word “noble” has altogether
too exalted a social connotation, whereas the name of gentleman, in
its heraldic sense of armiger, exactly describes the status of this
class. Even more exact, to those familiar with Irish conditions,
would be the name of squirreen: for the smaller landowners of Hungary
and Ireland have much in common, both in their political function,
their manner of living, even their personal character, and their
numbers. The true grandee is rare everywhere, even in Hungary, and
has, moreover, never been a wholly national figure. In recent
centuries, in particular, he has tended to represent foreign
influences and even foreign interests. But the country gentleman is
as native to the country, and as familiar spectacle in it, as the
stork which nests on his roof-tree. It is he, more than the magnate,
more than the peasant, far more than the merchant or manufacturer,
who has made, and keeps Hungary what it is.
It
is impossible, of course, to draw an absolute distinction between the
magnates and the gentry. The true and decisive line in Hungarian
society comes always, not between the rich nobleman and the poor, but
below the latter. At all times it has been easy for a rich family of
gentry to marry into the aristocracy and itself acquire a title,
while the poorer scions of magnates' houses perforce live a life
indistinguishable from that of the gentry.
Yet
the traditional world of the typical representative of the gentry is
very different from that of the magnate. Instead of half a dozen
castles, a white-washed one-storied country house, sheltered from the
weather by a few straggling acacias; instead of vast estates
scattered over Hungary, administered by a dozen trained managers and
cultivated by thousands of subject (for that is what they amount to),
a few scores or hundreds acres, a few peasants, every one of whom he
has known from infancy, a Swabian bailiff, half servant, half friend;
instead of the palace in Vienna and the jaunts to Paris or Bad
Gastein, an occasional week in Budapest with perhaps and agricultural
congress for an excuse; instead of the cosmopolitan gaiety of courts
and capitals, a game of cards in the evening with the local priest,
the district magistrate, or the notary, with perhaps a neighbour who
has driven 5 miles of miry road to take a hand, and once or twice in
the winter, a ball in the County Town for his daughters to meet the
officers of the garrison. For other distractions, a walk over the
dewy stubble, a shot at a covey of partridges or a hare; for other
cares, the endless intricacy of local affairs, the pre-occupation
with the falling prices of wheat or wine, and the eternally
unsatisfactory nature of the labour market.
It
is not without justice that the gentry regard themselves as the
representatives par excellence
of the Hungarian nation. In the first place, they have a historical
claim, which fact in itself is not without importance; for the
Magyars, with their passionate devotion to their national traditions,
are always prepared to rally around a class which represents those
traditions, and are indulgent even towards a weakness if it is
ancestral. And the Hungarian gentry, whatever the ancestry of the
present components of that class (and it is only a little less mixed
than that of the magnates), are spiritually, the true linear
descendants of Arpad's warriors. The position of the magnates is the
offspring of a flirtation with Western feudalism; but Hungary's
ancient constitution was made by and for the spiritual ancestors of
the gentry, and in preserving it they have in fact been defending,
not their own interests alone, but the work of Arpad and St. Stephen
also.
In
the days when all the “nation” was national in the modern sense
of the word, the defence of their liberties by the gentry was chiefly
of value to their own class; to a lesser extent also to the
sovereign, but certainly not to the peasants, who might easily have
fared better under fewer masters. But during the long centuries after
1526, when the Crown represented a foreign domination, the magnates
and the Catholic Church were its supporters and the foreign colonists
its instruments, the gentry earned a more genuine title to call
themselves the representatives of Hungary; for it was due to their
efforts, and to honourable alliance of Protestant Churches, that
Hungary's constitution was preserved tolerably intact and with it her
whole national life saved from the greatest debilitation, perhaps
from total extinction.
After
generations typified the Hungarian gentleman of those days in the
figure of the “tablabiro” [basically interchangeable with the
szolgabiro], the County magistrate. For it was in the Counties that
Hungarian national life was preserved. The dynasty determined all
questions of major policy on its own initiative and in its own
interests.
But
the internal administration had to go on, and although the Crown
encroached upon it here and there, it perforce left most of it in the
hands of the old authorities, who were precisely the gentry (since
the magnates had gone flocking to Vienna). The County was the domain
of the tablabiro, where he played his part for good and evil, in the
making of Hungary – a part the influence of which is strong in
Hungary to-day.
Any
Hungarian must be an ingrate who should deny his country's debt to
its old defenders. “Who”, writes Jokai at the opening of one of
his novels, “preserved intact the nation's manners, its
receptiveness to culture, its holy love of the fatherland? Who was
its pioneer in the path of religion, knowledge, and virtue? The good
old tablabiros. Who was it to whom the Magyar owes it that he did not
crumble away after 300 years of history, like the avalanche fallen
into the valley, but when the magnates forsook him, when the
peasantry sank into misery or counted for nought in the scales of
destiny – yet lived, bloomed again, and grew strong? We owe
everything, everything to those mocked, despised old tablabiros, now
crumbled to dust and laid for ever to rest.”
It
would be futile to deny that the picture had another side.
Indirectly, the Hungarian gentry were, indeed, defending the national
life of their whole country against Vienna; but the actual system
which they were championing, with so much courage and ingenuity, was
a narrow one of class privilege. The “nation” was only a small
fraction of the population of Hungary, and the constitution, so far
as the work of the Counties was concerned, was simply the instrument
for the perpetuation of the privileged position of that minority. The
stately periods in which many a County “congregation” was wont to
celebrate the ancient liberties of the Hungarian nation – and many
meetings spent the greater part of their time in declaiming and
applauding orations to this effect – boiled down, only too often,
to a determination not to release their unfortunate serfs from the
innumerable burdens under which they groaned, or to assume the share
of taxation which the welfare of the country demanded.
The
life of the gentry was a narrow one, in every respect. It was not
only that they confined all power and privilege to their own class;
as a class, they were singularly limited in their activities and
outlook. They travelled little, beyond the bounds of their own
Counties. Their horizons were bounded by the little society of their
own immediate neighborhood, with its local politics, its markets, its
junketing at election times. They consorted only with their likes,
and these consisted of men, not merely of their own class, but also
of their own occupation. The only small variant was when some of them
entered the Church, where they were little else but landed gentry in
priestly robes. Even the army became an unpopular career after the
old feudal levy had been replaced by a standing force. It was felt to
be an instrument of the dynasty, and not the nation, and was left
largely to the Serbs and Croats to officer. The only profession,
except the Church, which the sons of the gentry frequented in large
numbers (politics were rather a second nature to all gentlemen than a
separate career) was that of the Law, in which they developed an
extraordinary talent (which has become a national heritage) both in
interpreting obscure points of constitutional law in defence of their
country's interests, and in fighting out the interminable suits to
which the tangled system of entail, further confused by the Turkish
occupation, gave rise in almost every family.
Yet
with all their weaknesses, the Hungarian gentry kept the flame of the
nation's life burning into the nineteenth century, and successfully
led the movement of national revival which culminated in 1848. For
although the great inspirer of the new Hungary, Count Szechenyi, was
an aristocrat, yet the re-establishment of Hungarian liberty was
indisputably the work of the gentry under Kossuth. The magnates acted
only the part of intermediaries between the nation and the Crown, and
when events were heading for a crisis, were driven increasingly to
act simply as brakes on the wheel.
Again,
in the years which followed 1849, if it was the magnates who brought
about the Compromise with the Crown, it was the gentry who, by their
stubborn resistance to the Bach administration, had driven Francis
Joseph from autocracy into compromise. The magnates led the nation
into the promised land, but it was the gentry who had made the
journey possible.
[Economic
oppression of the gentry class]....The result of this prolonged
series of misfortune was to change the economic basis of the gentry
class altogether. While the proportion of the large estates to the
total cultivable area remained, and remains, almost unchanged, that
of the medium-sized estates, from 100 to 1,000 yokes, dwindled
steadily. In the early years of the twentieth century it was not more
than 15 per cent, and even of these estates, a not inconsiderable
proportion were in the hands of wealthy peasants, and others belonged
only in name to their titular owners, but in reality, to the holders
of the mortgages on them. Only a fraction of the old gentry had
maintained their position on the land intact; the majority were
driven gradually but implacably into the towns.
In
most countries such a process would have meant the political, as well
as the economic disintegration of the gentry, unless they proved
capable of themselves taking charge of the new economic forces which
were developing in Hungary; and this, as a class, they failed
signally to do. Their lack of taste and capacity for business has
remained as pronounced as ever, and even to-day there is hardly a
single Magyar, of true Magyar stock, possessed of an appreciable
income not derived from land – which amounts, under present
circumstances, to saying that there are hardly any wealthy Magyars at
all.
But
to suppose that the inability of a Hungarian gentleman to make money
would be regarded either by himself or anyone else in the country as
a sign of weakness would be to reckon without either the conservatism
of Hungarian society, or its habitual and magnanimous refusal to
identify wealth with power.
“Many
of the old gentry”, writes Count Mailath, in a lament on the
weakness of the Hungarian middle class, “instead of increasing
their numbers by combining with the 'small men' who engage in other
occupations and are of a practical turn of mind, esteem them but
little and do not care to consort for them. They make all the greater
efforts to create links with the upper classes of society; they wish
to become powerful and famous men and to make their fortunes...For
them the aim of education is not to teach them anything, but to allow
them to live easily, to display a greater luxury, and to await, if
need be, some high post. This hollow but apparently brilliant manner
of living exercises a charm on the other 'small men' who follow their
example: their ideal becomes that of getting a good job, so that they
may play a part and at the expense of the State and become Meltosagos
(your Honour) or Nagysagos (your Worship). The little official plays
at the great lord and has no time to occupy himself with his poor
family.”
