Art. 8.-HUNGARY OF TO-DAY.

WHEN one contracts the habit of spending a month or more out of each year on the Orient Express the glamour of a transcontinental voyage begins to wear off. In the inevitable battle for a waggon-lit seul'-that is to say, for a compartment where you can snore from Calais to Constantinople without intimate competition-the exultation over victory or the indignation at defeat, so keen in the earlier days, dwindle into mild reflexions upon the rapacity of one's fellow-man. Once on that polyglot train the babble of tongues that seven years ago were mostly unintelligible and always mysterious no longer excites curiosity or even interest. Such are the uses of familiarity. But though the Orient Express has lost its glamour, I confess that whenever it bears me across four or five frontiers to Hungary the prospect of again seeing Budapest, even after a short absence, never ceases to give me a thrill of anticipation. For me, Budapest has a charm and an appeal to the æsthetic possessed by no other city of Europe. Most of my friends from England and America seeing for the first time, black and sharp against a setting sun, the silhouette of medieval Citadel, royal Palace, and Coronation Church that crown with tower, spire, dome, and rampart the ancient hill of Buda-'for centuries the prize in the struggle between East and West'-or who watch at night the Danube flashing back a thousand lights, have said: 'How is it we did not know it was so beautiful?'

And then, of course, as in every other country, come the disillusionments and the irritations, less or greater according to the provincialism of the foreign visitor. When you desire something done and when two Hungarians are there to do it, there will almost certainly ensue a torrent of conversation worthy of an Eastern bazaar. They love to talk. To the foreigner this loquacity is all the more annoying because, with rare exceptions, he is unable to understand a word that is said. The Magyar language is unlike any other known language, and no one knows exactly from which part of Asia it originated. The Hungarians are very

proud of it, and it undoubtedly has been and still is a vital factor in the preservation for over a thousand years of the Magyars as a nation, in spite of almost unparalleled difficulties. The language does not lend itself to brevity in expression, but I am more inclined to attribute the prolixity of the average Hungarian to national temperament than to any defect of his native tongue. A wise old Hungarian banker once said to me, 'The trouble with my country is too much wine, too much paprika, and too much talk.' Paprika is a national product almost as much in evidence as national pride. It appears in some form or other in most Hungarian dishes, and until 'Sweet Pepper' became one of the 'best sellers' was generally and quite reasonably mistaken by the cautious English visitor for cayenne pepper and therefore eluded. Excessive consumption of paprika is supposed to make for hot-temper, just as when I was a boy we thought all Anglo-Indians must be 'peppery' because they ate so much curry powder. There may be something in the theory; certainly my old banker friend was right in describing his own countrymen as hottempered and talkative. The influence of wine upon national character, especially in a wine-growing country such as Hungary, is a question far too complex and controversial for me to tackle, but from personal observations over two or three years in almost all parts of Hungary, I should not say that wine drinking appreciably affected the efficiency of the country.

In any mention of the irritations encountered by foreigners-and I fear that most of us imperfect people allow our opinions of a foreign country to be disproportionately influenced by what we find irritating or what we cannot understand-one must write about Hungarian noise. The Hungarians delight in noise. Noisy music: noisy colours: noisy meetings: motors with horns tooting only for exuberance and exhausts blowing through the city streets with a roar that would have terrified the occupying Turks into speedy evacuation -these abound. To betray in any public or private place approval of the Cigány (Gipsy) band playing Hungarian music is to bring to your side, or rather to within an inch or so of your ear, the leader of the band, who, with violin and body swaying to the tune, will

play until you find some way of escape. The nearer he is to the ear, and the longer and louder he plays, the happier the average Hungarian becomes. I have watched many a time in country towns and villages peasants toughened by years of toil in the sun, high booted, bearded, and illiterate, throw their heads back on their chairs and lie, as if in a trance, for perhaps more than an hour while the little brown Cigány fiddles into their ears the airs of old Hungary. The comparison is absurdly incongruous, but the sight always recalled to my mind the picture of Svengali hypnotising Trilby.

The influence of music, their own original kind of music, upon a people so virile is remarkable even after one makes full allowance for its appeal to a national fondness for noise. The virility is easy to understand and to explain once you realise that the Hungarians are first and last an open-air, out-of-doors people. This is true not only of the agriculturists, who constitute about 60 per cent. of the population, but also of the industrial and office workers in the towns. In the summer evenings the banks of the Danube for several miles around Budapest are brown with human bodies-brown because men, women, and children in Hungary tan themselves in the sun, indeed the sunbath lasts much longer than the actual bathing. They are perhaps the cleanest people on the Continent, and as one observes the physique of the stripped thousands along the banks, or those swimming in the natural springs or the floating baths that are almost without number in the neighbourhood of Budapest, one is inclined to think they are also the finest people physically. They are perpetually keeping themselves 'fit.' Evening after evening the Danube is packed with rowing craft. I have never seen so many boats on any river. Outrigger after outrigger goes by, and in many of them are men past middle age, bald-headed, taking their daily exercise in bathing costume after office hours with scull or oar. Always a sport-loving people, particularly keen on riding and shooting, the Hungarians are to-day developing athletics on what might be called English lines. The doings of their representatives at the last Olympic Games and subsequently at athletic meetings in England-and they did quite well-were followed with a national pride and interest far more

intense than anything I have seen elsewhere. But most significant is the new-found devotion for Association football. In little villages, isolated from the rest of the world by vast stretches of wheat plains, you will find the goal-posts. In Budapest, to watch what is only an inter-club football match on a Sunday afternoon, there are often twenty or thirty thousand spectators. Where the newspaper offices display news bulletins you can scarcely pass in the street for the crowds awaiting football results. There is more betting to-day on football than on horse-racing. The ambition of the average Hungarian boy is not to slaughter thousands of his enemies, but to have enough money to buy a pair of football boots. The old order is changing, and what the change will lead to no one can foresee. The middle-aged politician who never played football in his life, and probably never saw it played until quite recently, is not in the least able to judge how this new spirit and this new preoccupation of the rising generation will affect the future.

One of the few unimpaired survivals of the old order is devotion to swordsmanship. This is natural in a people that venerate so deeply the memory of their first king, St Stephen, who did not hesitate to use the sword, and use it with effect, in converting Hungary to Christianity. Moreover, despite football, the Hungarians have not forgotten Kinizsy, whom my friend 'George A. Birmingham,' in his delightful book, 'A Wayfarer in Hungary,' thus describes :

'There was a mighty Hungarian warrior, one Kinizsy, whom the Turks called a superhuman devil. It was his habit to fight with a huge sword in each hand, which perhaps terrified his enemies but must have been inconvenient to the man himself. He once celebrated a victory by a dance of triumph, carrying, as he pranced about, the bodies of three dead Turks, one in each hand and one gripped between his teeth'

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In international sabre contests the Hungarians are to-day generally able to carry off the spoils.' It is with sabres that their duels are still fought. To English ears the survival of the duelling code sounds so anachronistic as to be almost on a par with cannibalism. I am afraid the Hungarians are impenitent. Reproved for

their uncivilised methods they will probably reply: 'When our personal honour is attacked we fight to protect it, because honour is as dear as life. When your personal honour is attacked you hire a lot of lawyers, wash any amount of dirty linen in the courts, and someWe times get satisfaction in the shape of money. don't care to measure our honour by a pecuniary

standard.'

In all the crises and vicissitudes which occurred in connexion with the reconstruction of Austria and Hungary my heart was never more nearly in my mouth than on account of a duel. Hungary was confronted with financial ruin. The negotiations between the Allied Powers and within the Reparation Commission, upon which her fate rested, were at their most critical and delicate stage. If that stage could be successfully passed I felt fairly sure that a plan of reconstruction could be arranged, with the aid of the League of Nations, and an international loan floated. Just at that crisis Count Bethlen, the Prime Minister of Hungary, on whose personality depended, to an extraordinary degree, the success of the whole plan, both from an external and internal point of view, was challenged to a duel by a political opponent. I was as near despair as I have allowed myself to be in all my lost causes.' If the Prime Minister refused the challenge on the sensible and obvious grounds of the national emergency, I knew perfectly well that he would lose his influence at home. No man in Hungary, not even the Prime Minister, may decline such a challenge with political or social impunity. If he fought the duel he would lose his influence abroad because a refined outside world would say it was impossible to regard a country as civilised whose Prime Minister, at a moment of national peril, fought duels with his political opponents. Moreover, the internationl bankers would close their safes with a horrified bang. If the duel was fought and had a fatal result-the complications suggested by such a possibility were not altogether mitigated by assurances from various friends that in spite of his apparently frail physique Count Bethlen was a magnificent swordsman. Fortunately for Hungary it never became necessary to put that qualification to the test because, to my intense relief, a Court of Honour