In 1826 Sir Walter Scott set about his fictional Letters of Malachi
Malagrowther Esq. to be published in the Edinburgh Weekly Journal and designed
to knock on the head proposals recently put forward to “change everything
in Scotland to an English model”. Scott was the most loyal of Scots—loyal
to the Union, loyal to his Scottish heritage and over-loyal to his friends,
a quality that ruined him financially. In his measured defence of his nation,
there are parallels to be found with the mingled patriotism and realism
that politically moderate Hungarians, such as Count István Széchenyi,
exhibited in their conception of a more equal relationship between their
country and the rigidly absolutist Habsburg state. Another entry in Scott’s
Journal for February 26th, 1826, evokes the tone of this struggle for balance
in the mind of a patriotic, moderate conservative: “Spent the morning and
till dinner on Malachi’s second epistle to the Athenians. It is difficult
to steer betwixt the natural impulse of one’s national feelings setting
in one direction, and the prudent regard to the interests of the empire
and its internal peace and quiet, recommending less vehement expression.
I will endeavour to keep sight of both. But were my own interests alone
concerned, damn me but I would give it them hot!”
If one broadens the canvas from personal feelings to that of a national
identity, one can see that the Anglo-Scottish contribution to European
culture, and the position of Scotland culturally, politically and economically
with regard to England, has some thought-provoking implications for the
possible development of Hungary in the context of Habsburg hegemony. David
Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and other giants of the Scottish Enlightenment
were the products of a Presbyterian-based, democratically organised educational
system coupled with the economic benefits that flowed from the Act
of Union with England of 1707. As Jerry Muller has pointed out, their Calvinist
heritage linked Scottish academe to the tradition of the great universities
of the Netherlands, the Scottish development of Roman law brought its legal
institutions closer to the continental legal framework than were those
of England, while a historically determined tendency to draw inspiration
from non-English sources, as well as links going back to “the auld alliance”,
created a powerful axis with the thinkers of the French Enlightenment.
Scottish intellectuals were often more genuinely cosmopolitan than their
English counterparts (the Grand Tour of English milords being more an Olympian
survey of foreigners coupled with a little opportunistic antiquity purchasing);
theirs was a “provincial cosmopolitanism” implying a strong and pragmatic
impulse for self-improvement.1 In other words, these “North Britons”,
as the Lowland Scots intelligentsia preferred to style itself, capitalised
on their distinctive cultural traditions to bring something distinctive
to the notion of “Britain” and “British”, just as their descendants were
to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by going out and running the British
Empire, since they were denied the plum jobs in the English establishment.
Perhaps it is no accident that the upwardly mobile Scot, Adam Clark, was
the one who went abroad and grew in stature in his job as Baumeister supervising
the construction of the Chain Bridge between Pest and Buda, while his superior,
the Englishman Tierney Clark, was content to be (and could afford to be)
a stay-at-home administrator of the project. Equally it may be significant
that Adam Clark nobly supported the cause of his adopted Hungary in the
1848 War of Independence, while Tierney Clark was notoriously contemptuous
of it.
The North Britons were anxious to be distinguished from the folk museum
of the Highlands on their back doorstep—it was usually Lowlanders
and others who, as factors to the Highland landowners, were responsible
for some of the most brutal of the so-called “clearances” when the feudal
subsistence economy of the Highlands was being destroyed to make way for
intensive sheep-runs, and whole clans were driven into exile in North America
or the Antipodes. On the other hand, it was the Lowlander and antiquary,
Sir Walter Scott, who rekindled the national myth of the Land of the Gaels
that reinforced Scottish identity, succeeding in large measure in the invention
of a Kulturvolk, despite the discredit potentially attaching to such an
enterprise after the literary forgeries of Ossian. Certainly much
of Scott’s almost unparalleled international success as an author, not
least in Hungary, may be attributed to his achievement in re-inventing
a nation that had lost its independent statehood, and doing so by invoking
a historical continuity that upheld national dignity. Robert Walsh in his
Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England (1832) encounters
a bookseller in Transylvanian Hermannstadt who has just placed a huge portrait
on his wall of “Le sieur Valtere Skote, l’homme le plus célèbre
en toute l’Europe”.2 French and German translations of Scott’s novels formed
a sizeable part of his stock. John Paget encountered an impoverished Jew
on his Hungarian travels, who pulled from his pocket a well-thumbed German
translation of Ivanhoe, assuring the Englishman that he had read many others
of Scott’s works and expressing profound dismay on learning that the great
man was no longer alive.3
From the point of view of a progressive conservative, Scott’s genius
lay in reconciling national aspirations with historical and political realities.
His stage-management of George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822 managed to
flatter all interested parties: the Highlanders with the myth that the
roots of Scottish identity lay in the (substantially invented) culture
of the Gael, the “North Britons” with an emphasis on their contribution
to the British weal and the Hanoverian monarch with a show of loyalty and
affection which survived even the spectacle of the corpulent German
libertine sporting a kilt. The kind of ingenious marriage of myth and political
convenience that Scott pulled off was closer to the “synthesis of enlightened
Empiricism and romantic nationalism” to be found in the thinking
of Zsigmond Kemény and others of the “Literary Deák Party”
than to Széchenyi’s quasi-mystical Herderian idea of the individual
nation’s unique mission, still less the myopic populism of Kossuth.4
Interestingly, Kemény, who stood for “mediatory liberalism”, was
a popularizer of Lord Macaulay’s intensely Whig-orientated, Protestant
and materialistic History of England in Hungary, drawing lessons from it
for his homeland in a long review of Antal Csengery’s translation into
Hungarian of the first part of the history published in 1853. Baron Eötvös
was also of this group and it was he who coined the pregnant phrase “peaceful
co-existence” (békés együttélés), a pragmatic
locution that suggested a way of reconciling national aspiration with political
and economic reality long before it acquired its particularised twentieth
century meaning.
A curious insight into Kossuth’s (by comparison) more fundamentalist
line of thought is given by remarks recorded of him at an interview with
Gladstone in 1861, when the ex-Governor-President solicited support for
his country against Austrian imperialism. He was told of “the difficulty
that England would be under in favouring for the Austrian Empire a legislative
disruption which she could not accept herself in somewhat parallel circumstances”.
Kossuth rejoined that, Hungary being proportionately larger than Austria,
the situation was as if the House of Commons sat in Edinburgh, not London.
Gladstone, one of the rather few British politicians who was notably liberal
in nationality questions, was unable to see the force of this remark, and
most educated Scotsmen of the time would probably have found its reverse
implication that Scotland was a colony of England both untrue and offensive.
Kossuth was closer to the grain of history, if not to reality, when he
later predicted that Ireland would eventually become one of the United
States of America.5
It has been well said of Széchenyi that he envisaged “social
reform as serving a national end”,6 a point underlined in his book Stadium
where he stresses that all inhabitants of Hungary should enjoy legal equality
or “civil status” (polgári lét). Scotland’s history held
a certain allure for Hungarians precisely because it had been transmuted
from independent kingdom to partner with England under one Stuart crown,
then to a vital constituent of Britain after the 1707 Act of Union; and
this without losing its distinctive culture or its institutional particularities,
such as its currency (the proposed abolition of which stimulated Scott’s
Malachi letters), the legal system, the educational framework and much
of the arrangements for local government. By the time Adam Smith wrote
The Wealth of Nations, the majority of Scots were forward-looking,
industrious and pragmatic, as befitted a country with economic growth rates
equalling, in time even exceeding, those of England, and with a rising
merchant and technocratic middle class, of which Adam Clark himself was
to become a member through his skill and application. The situation would
however have been even better, were not between a fifth and a third of
Scottish lands entailed, like the feudal lands of Hungary, and with the
same consequences of lack of investment and an illiquid or non-existent
land market. If Smith’s remarks seemed especially relevant to Hungary,
it was because he could look out of his back window and observe that hitherto
hereditary land owners had little incentive to improve the productivity
of their land and their feudal dependents none at all. On the other hand,
dynamic, ambitious Scots had decided to make the union with England work
to their advantage, even whenever possible, to scale the heights of the
English establishment. Had Habsburg Austria been as economically dynamic
as England at that time, the moderate reformers who wanted partnership
between Hungary and Austria, not an uncertain and probably doomed autarchy,
might have had an easier task of political persuasion.
That Scottish growth rates were in large measure also the result of
the customs union with England distinguished the position of Scotland further
from that of Hungary, which the Habsburgs were tempted to treat as a colony
in the way Britain treated Ireland, periodically making concessions
when they were hard-pressed with a view to withdrawing them at a more opportune
moment. No doubt Adam Smith’s espousal of free trade stemmed in part from
the local Scottish experience, but he also drew from it the vital
distinction between “the mean principle of national prejudice” (mercantilism
in effect being the pursuit of an undeclared war where another’s loss was
the protagonist’s gain) and the “noble one of the love of one’s own country”.7
The success of the Scottish merchant class was doubtless attributable to
Presbyterian virtues such as self-control, industriousness, and the deferral
of gratification, but was also due to the enlightened pragmatism of
the cosmopolitan provincial, a pragmatism that regulated the Calvinist
tendency to self-destruct on the altar of predestination. Adam Smith himself
was a Whig in politics and a Deist in religion — again, he had only to
look out of his back window to see the downside of Presbyterianism at work.
Széchenyi’s remark that he wished to hear more of the the noble
Hungarian and less about the Hungarian nobles is very much in the spirit
of mainline Scottish thought which rejected the anachronistic feudalism
still evident in parts of the country and favoured the trajectory of self-improvement
that Walter Bagehot sardonically described as “showing how, from being
a savage, man rose to become a Scotchman”.8
Such sentiments bring us back to Széchenyi’s view that the idea
of the nation must be linked to the idea of national progress, which in
turn should be viewed as an aspect of universal progress. In his surprisingly
passionate defence of Walter Scott in his study of The Historical Novel,
Georg Lukács remarks that “Scott gives a perfect artistic expression
to the basic progressive tendency of this period, that is the historical
defence of progress”. In support of this he quotes Balzac’s view that Scott
passed from “the portrayal of past history to the portrayal of the present
as history,” and wrote “the only possible novel about the past ... the
struggle of the serf or citizen against the nobility, of the nobility against
the church, of the nobility and church against the Monarchy.”9 The transmogrification
of a conservative Scottish baronet into a Marxist saint is a feat only
the Jesuitical Lukács could perform with such dexterity. Nevertheless,
his jargonistic reference to “the progressive tendency” does indeed draw
attention to the way in which Scott’s career demonstrated that conservatism
was by no means incompatible with a belief in social, political and scientific
progress. Contemporary Britain supplied numerous examples of this phenomenon:
it was the young Tory, Benjamin Disraeli, who pointed out in his novel
Sybil (1846) that Britain consisted of two nations, the rich and
the poor, and aspired in his political career to make of these two nations
one in which all had a stake.10 Sir Robert Peel’s abolition of the
corn laws may surely be seen as a progressive measure, especially when
one looks at the sort of politicians who have from time to time subsequently
urged a return to protectionism. Scott himself was a political conservative,
Hanoverian loyalist and the founder of a journal (The Quarterly Review)
that often expressed highly reactionary opinions, though these were not
in articles written by Scott himself.
What is superficially a paradox about Scott has a simple internal logic:
in his fiction and antiquarianism he rehabilitated pre-Reformation Scotland,
the history which had been largely suppressed and always denigrated by
the kirk. It was a revival of the past that rejoined the separated strands
of Scottishness, the creation of a healing mythology that addressed itself
also to a more pluralistic, hopefully more tolerant present. This was not
only a Scottish, but indubitably a British tendency, a form of Vergangenheitsbewältigung
whereby reform and progress, to be assured of success, had to be presented
in conservative guise, the workings of what Disraeli drily characterized
as “sound Conservative government ... Tory men and Whig measures.” This
characteristic of the British certainly did not go unnoticed by Hungarian
visitors such as Ferenc Pulszky, who comments in his journal of his English
journey: “One comes to a people which, in view of the political reform
is placed before all other peoples, but where one finds everywhere the
most conservative custom and habits that are sanctified by centuries of
use, das System des Stillstandes, which, driven out of politics, has taken
root in fashion.”11 The survival, up to the second millennium, of
an Upper House largely based
on inheritance suggests that Pulszky was being
over-generous in asserting that conservatism had been “driven out of politics”,
but he had spotted one of the ways in which the British ruling elite managed
change without losing face.
1 Jerry Z. Muller, Adam Smith in His Time and Ours. Princeton, 1993.
pp. 22–23.
2 Robert Walsh, Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England.
London, 1832. p. 302.
3 John Paget, Hungary and Transylvania (2 Vols.). London, 1839. Vol.
1. pp. 120–121.
4 For a detailed examination of the synthesis achieved between Romanticism
and the empiricism of the Enlightenment, see Mihály Szegedy-Maszák,
“Enlightenment and Liberalism in the Works of Széchenyi, Kemény
and Eötvös” (from which this remark is taken) in: Hungary and
European Civilisation, ed. György Ránki. Budapest. p. 24.
5 I have taken the details of this meeting and Kossuth’s remarks from
Neville C. Masterman: “Gladstone’s Meeting with Kossuth”. New Hungarian
Quarterly Vol. XXII No. 82. Summer 1981. pp. 179–180.
6 See László Péter, “Language, the Constitution
and the Past in Hungarian Nationalism” in: The Habsburg Legacy: National
Identity in Historical Perspective. Austrian Studies 5. Ed. Ritchie Robertson
and Edward Timms. Edinburgh, 1994. p.17.
7 Muller, op. cit. p. 184.
8 Walter Bagehot, “Adam Smith as a Person” (1876), reprinted in The
Works of Walter Bagehot.Vol. 3. Hartford, 1889. p. 277.
9 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel. Originally published in
Russian, 1937; this English translation from the German by Hannah and Stanley
Mitchell. London, 1982. pp. 63, 83.
10 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (first published 1845). London – New
York, 1985. Book IV. Ch. 8. p. 299. “I was told that the Privileged and
the People formed Two Nations”.
11 Ferenc Pulszky, Aus dem Tagebuche eines in Großbritannien
reisenden Ungarn. Pesth, 1837, p. 5.
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