THE DESPAIR OF CENTRAL EUROPE

" I BELIEVE you and I are necessary to bring the Monarchy out of the labyrinth . . . into safe harbour : and I am infinitely grateful to Providence that we have found each other." So wrote Tisza, the great Hungarian die-hard, to Count Burian in 1915, when the latter was Foreign Minister. of the Dual Monarchy.

The Emperor Charles himself had not so great a respect for this pillar of his throne. In conversation with Count Karolyi Burian was mentioned, and the Emperor's only remark is said to have been : " He is very stupid, isn't he ? "

It is easy, of course, to quote the event—the completi collapse of the Monarchy—in ridicule of Tisza's confidence. Count Burian himself admits that " the value of one's direction of diplomacy is measured by one's success." But it may be argued that success, under the circumstances, was out of the reach of any human being. Count Burian goes on : " And yet I look upon my period of office with a calm conscience." On the whole, he might : conscientiousness is not a virtue it would be worth while to deny 'him. It was through no fault of his that he failed—no fault except his omission to be born a genius. These Memoirs show him what the general verdict of such writers as Nowak have hitherto assumed him to be--a thoroughly conscientious man, fairly well trained on the technical side, not so stupid as to be unable to see a plain point, or as to make a really silly mistake (such as Charles himself was given to doing), but very slow in the uptake, unable to follow at all the chameleon-like changes of situation which characterized the political history of Central Europe in the latter stages of the War.

His book will be of a certain value to the historian. It does not appear to descend at all to the level of the wantonly mendacious propaganda which has been jetting like a fountain from Central Europe during the last few years. He seems to be honestly trying to tell the truth—and often reveals it quite unconsciously. For instance, to take a point which one is able to check—events in Hungary at the time of the fall of the Monarchy in Austria :—

" The King and tho ex-Prime Minister endeavoured in vain to effect the transition from ono government to the other by traditional methods of procedure. One candidate after another was nominated and attempted to stand. They no longer found any support in the party leaders, who had completely lost their authority and self-confidence since the unrestrained revolutionary elements had taken the field. In the end the ill-starred Michael Kiirolyi ventured to offer to-form a cabinet. He was entrusted with this duty by the King, and nominated Prime Minister. He delivered to the Arch,- . duke Joseph his oath of allegiance as such, but his ephemeral power was held solely from the usurping national council,' which rested on nothing. . . Not for long, it is true, but long enough to . do untold mischief."

It would be difficult to imagine an account which showed more ignorance of what was actually happening in Budapest • at the time of the October Revolution ; and it sheds yet further light on the extraordinary lack of any real grasp of what was going-on in his domains which characterized the Emperor and his surroundings at .every step. Even • Stephan Tisza, the last bulwark of the old order, recognized • wheri Kozolyi's Government -conic that it was.a Government' • resting so authoritatively on the sovereignty of the people (which was " nothing," of course; to a • Royalist) that he offered his services to his life-long enemy; the man who represented every political' current which he had used his vast bulk to stem. As for Karolyi's being nominated by

• the King, the King's authority was by then altogether in abeyance, and what of it remained was purely in-the lianas

of the Archduke, whOm lie had appointed Viceroy, and whose so-called " nomination ". of Karolyi was practically a military surrender—after even the Police Force had transferred its -allegiance to. -the National Council- _ .As for the National

Council being a usurper, it is perfectly true that from the constitutional point of view it was ; but it would never have been called into being at all if the constitutional House of Deputies had been at all adequate to the situation. A House elected by the notorious Hungarian electoral system, and which allowed itself to be bullied and forcibly maltreated by its leaders, never had in the historical sense any real dignity or authority at all, and was utterly unable to cope with really big events when they arose. If it had been at all adequate to its task, the Revolution would have proceeded by absolutely constitutional means : it was only despair of getting a House of any real authority that led to the creation of the National Council at all.

When one turns from Count Burian to Count Kitrolyi, how- ever, one is faced with a personality of very different calibre, both as politician and as writer. Count Burilm's Memoirs will be read by the few who make a conscientious study of con- temporary history, and who cannot very well afford to neglect them, even though they might like to. Count Kftrolyi's Memoirs should have a very much wider public. Look at them first from the point of view of writing : if one knew nothing whatever of Hungary or its history they would yet make fas- cinating reading. The author has no small element of the literary artist in him : I don't mean that the style is peculiarly elegant, that it is full of polished eloquence : it has something far more important than that—an extraordinary feeling of vividness, of illumination. By a few sentences or an anecdote he lights up and explains a state of society, a man's character, or a- situation in a way that (for want of a better word) one can only call witty. What more brilliant opening could an auto- biographer have who was himself born one of the greatest aristocrats in his country and forced by his intelligence into the very opposite camp, than to tell the story of the particularly shady way in which his ancestor first got his title and the fortunes of his family were founded ? It is a book of great length, and it is difficult to quote passages to show what I mean ; but anyone who starts reading it is bound to be struck by its extraordinary fascination. However, for the present review it is more Karolyi as a poli- tician than Karolyi as an author who must be considered. I suppose that the three tragic figures (so far as there were any human tragic figures) in the collapse of the Empire are really the Emperor himself, Stephan Tisza, and Kirolyi. In the case of the Emperor one sees the disaster which must inevitably befall an amateur of no great ability driven by circumstances into playing an important part in politics. As Kirolyi says, " If his stature had not been heightened by a crown, he would not have been noticed among his fellow men " : and the tragedy lies in the spectacle of this young man, untrained for his great office, in a state of general good intention and anxiety to do his best for his country, yet incapable of ever grasping in the least what was really happening, the course that history was taking : surrounded by advisers competent in technical training, perhaps, but, so far as their intelligence was con- cerned, almost equally blind to the real course of events ; and by sheer good intention doing infuntely more harm than a thoroughly unscrupulous and Machiavellian monarch would have done in his place.

Then there is Tisza, a man whose own stature did approach to the heroic, although it was heightened, as well, by the tragic buskins of his position as the embodiment of the old order, of a theory of government and of society in a state of inescapable dissolution a man with the disposition and the ability of a real autocrat, whose autocracy was broken up by the enormous subterranean forces at work, and who was of nature incapable of adapting himself to new methods, he had at last no better method of preventing the secession of Yugo-Slavia from the Empire than to threaten their leaders with his riding-whip, and finally died as the sale victim of the othcrwisj bloodless October Revolution.

Then there is Count Kirolyi himself. He alas arc ow the aristocracy, and almost alone among the ynlitteimns, reAlked the obsoleteness of Magyar autocracy, alone had any mil sense of the movement of the times. He was born, one might almost say, in the eighteenth century on his first admission to the

House as a deputy he fought a duel. with Tisza, then President of the Chamber--not a modern bogus affair of pistols shot into

the air, but a two-hours' fight, thity-five rounds in all, with swOrdswhich only ended when- he-received- a armed in-Ins'

oid-arm. It seems incredible that such a thing should take place in so-called parliamentary government in Europe in the

twentieth century ! During the twenty years of his political`..' career (and partly owing to his agency) history moved forward./ some two hundred years at least. But when history moves at such a pace, at such break-neck speed, there are few men who can successfully ride it ; it ceases to be a question of men at all, but of movements, of which men are at the most mere symbols, unless they are men of such a genius as is only born into the world every few centuries. It is no insult to Kfirolyi to say that he is not that. Only one man in this gene- ration has succeeded in riding the storm and directing it—I mean Lenin, who, however one may abhor the result of his achievement, was certainly the most effective figure in con- temporary history. Kitrolyi was not a Lenin : he had not, perhaps, the narrow-mindedness necessary to a great leader : he had no doctrinaire panacea for mankind, no cut-and-dried political invention to impose on the world. He was simply a man of clear sight in a miasmic society : without having, the ambition of the autocrat or a Messianic delusion he completely devoted himself, at whatever personal' cost, to bringing about the transition to a decent social organism which he saw to be both necessary and. inevitable. He did not master, and never attempted to master, the forces at work : he was content to be their most able minister. If he had been a genius of the kind of Napoleon or Lenin, he would have made himself the greatest figure in Hungarian politics first, and brought about his reforms after. As it was, he gave expression and cohesion to the forces of reform, and was lifted by them (as he well deserved to be) into the position of leader of his country.

That is as far as the present Memoirs take one : there is still to come a volume giving its account of his short period of power ; the transition to Bela Kun and Bolshevism and the fearful reaction, the recrudescence of the old order, and the White Terror, which it provoked. If Karolyi could have stopped the course of events at the October Revolution, and built up his country afresh on its basis, no reaction would have been possible : but there were abnormal forces at work with which he could not possibly cope ; the pressure of the Allies, the starvation and poverty of the country—things which ten years of the most able government could hardly alleviate, and which drove the nation to such a pitch of desperation that they were bound to swing yet further to the Left ; and having done so, to revolt against the absurdities of Communism and be easy prey to the skilful attack of their former masters. How the old over-lords returned, and the terrible vengeance they have taken on Kitrolyi, is known in the main : it will never be fully known until Karolyi's own account of it appears. He is now, of course, an, exile : born one of the richest and largest landowners in Europe, he was recently living in a small flat in an unfashionable part of London. His great estates he gave to the peasants, as the first act of that land reform which he was never able to carry out on the other landowners. The returning oligarchs have sequestrated all his other property, driven him into perpetual exile, and are following him with a persecution of peculiar malevolence : they even tried to get .him denied in England that _asylum of which in the old clays of the revolution of Hungary against Austria their national heroes had been so glad to avail them- selves. Their propagandist department has pursued him and his wife with every sort of calumny and vilification, to which until this moment he has been utterly unable to reply, except indirectly in the Memoirs of his Minister of Nationalities, Oscar Jaszi. At last the tide seems turning ; and with the advent of authoritative information such unintelligent and malodorous calumnies as those, for instance, advanced by Miss' Cecile Tormay in her book on the Revolution will be laughed out of court. Count Kitrolyi's own restraint is extraordinary : one of the reasons, he says in his introduction, why he has delayed so long to reply was the hope that he would - be able to eliminate bitterness from his attitude. He still fears that there may be too much .: and yet there has probably seldom been a political hook in which the author's opponents have been treated with greater fairness. One of its most extraordinary features is the objectivity with which he is able to appeeeiate the qualities of his opponents, even_Tism„, and to see the good in men who, were unable to see the far more obvious good in himself.