Richard Harding Davis

Scribners/March, 1897

THERE were two great state ceremonials in two great countries last year; one was advertised in every tongue that speaks through a printing-press, and the fame of it was carried by word of mouth from the Persian Gulf to the mountains of Tibet, from Pekin to Melbourne, and drew four hundred thousand strangers to the city of Moscow. The other was not advertised at all, and the number of fortunate foreigners who found it out, and who journeyed to Budapest to witness it, could almost have been counted on the fingers of two hands. The Coronation at Moscow was very much more than a state ceremonial; it was planned and carried out with the purpose of impressing other states. It marked a new departure in the self-sufficient, solitary attitude of the Russian Empire, and apart from all the solemn significance it held for the Russian people, it was distinctly a play at the royal boxes of Europe and the Grand Stands of the world.

The millennial celebration at Budapest, where the nobles of all the counties of Hungary met to swear allegiance to the King and his crown, differed from it as greatly in comparison as does a quiet family wedding between two people who love each other dearly, differ from a royal alliance brought about for political reasons, and the importance of which is exaggerated as greatly as possible.

This gathering of the clans in Hungary for the Banderium, as the ceremony was called, was probably suggested by the success of the Exposition at Budapest and by the completion of the Houses of Parliament in that city. The nobles wished to take advantage of the presence in that double capital of the many Hungarians who had been brought there by the Exposition, and to signalize the initiation of the Houses of Parliament by some extraordinary event; so this ceremony which celebrated the one thousandth year of the existence of Hungary as a kingdom was suggested, and later was carried through in a manner which made it one of the historical spectacles of the century.

Budapest, as everybody knows, is formed of two cities, separated by the Danube, and joined together like New York and Brooklyn by great bridges. Buda is a city hundreds of years old, and rises on a great hill covered with yellow houses with red-tiled roofs, and surmounted by fortresses and ancient German-looking castles, and the palace of the King, with terraces of marble and green gardens running down to meet the river. It still is a picturesque, fortified city of the Middle Ages.

Pesth, just across the way, is the most modern city in Europe; more modern than Paris, better paved, and better lighted; with better facilities for rapid transit than New York, and with Houses of Parliament as massive and impressive as those on the banks of the Thames, and not unlike them in appearance. Pesth is the Yankee city of the Old World, just as the Hungarians are called the Americans of Europe. It has grown in forty years, and it has sacrificed neither beauty of space nor line in growing. It has magnificent public gardens, as well as a complete fire department; it has the best club in the world, the Park Club; and it has found time to put electric tramways underground, and to rear monuments to poets, orators, and patriots above ground. People in Berlin and Vienna tell you that some day all of these things will disappear and go to pieces, that Pesth is enjoying a “boom,” and that the boom will pass and leave only the buildings and electric plants and the car-tracks, with no money in the treasury to make the wheels go round. I do not know whether this is, or is not, to be, but let us hope it is only the envy and uncharitableness of the Austrian and German mind that sees nothing in progress but disaster, and makes advancement spell ruin. People who live in a city where one is asked to show a passport, a certificate of good health, a police permit, and a residence-card in order to be allowed to mount a bicycle, as I was asked do in Berlin, can hardly be expected to look with favor on their restless, ambitious young neighbors of the Balkans.

All of this, however, has little to do with the Banderium, except that it is interesting to find a people as poetic and picturesque, and as easily moved as are the Hungarians, showing an active concern in municipal government, in the latest inventions in hotel-elevators and smokeless powder; and to find men who are pushing Hungary ahead of all the other “old-established’” monarchies of Europe, and who are delighting in electric tramways and horseless carriages, dressing themselves in the chain-armor of their ancestors, and weeping over a battered gold crown.

The descendants of the men who fought for what is now Hungary, and what was a thousand years ago many separate states and provinces and principalities, were the men who formed the Banderium last June and who swore allegiance to the crown which Pope Sylvester VII gave to Prince Ithen nine centuries before they were born.

It was in their eyes a very solemn ceremony, much too solemn for them to advertise it to the world, as they had advertised their Exposition. In consequence few people saw the spectacle, and it has passed away almost unchronicled, which is most unfortunate, as all of those who took part in the wonderful pageant will have been dust for some nine hundred years before there will be another.

The Hungarian nobles who were to ride in the procession, the dignitaries of the Austrian Court, the Diplomatic Corps from Vienna, all poured into Pesth on the 7th of June.

At that time the city was beautifully dressed in honor of their coming; arches and banners shaded the streets, and grandstands, covered with red cloth and ornamented with fluttering flags, lined the route of the procession from the new Houses of Parliament, across the bridges, up the green hillsides of Buda to the Emperor’s palace, where the nobles were to pass in review before marching back to Pesth. The Exposition had already filled the town with Hungarians and Austrians, and every hotel was overcrowded, and every cafe chantant overflowed upon the pavements, and the music of the Tziganes rose and fell at each street-corner. Peasant men in snow-white petticoats and high boots, and broad sombreros, with silver buttons on their coats and waistcoats, and peasant women in velvet bodices and gayly colored kerchiefs, filled the Exposition grounds and paraded the streets in groups of twenty or thirty from each village; soldiers in skin-tight breeches, and gypsies and mountaineers, tanned to a dark-red brown, with short china pipes hanging from their lips, swaggered past in national costumes that have not changed insomuch as the matter of a red sash, or a silver jacket, or an embroidered cap, from what they were a hundred years ago.

The visiting strangers made their headquarters at the unique club of which I have already spoken; at least, they met there every evening, and those who were dining out at some official banquet hurried there as soon as they were free. It was a most remarkable club and a most remarkable gathering. The club itself is the hobby of two Hungarian gentlemen, and they have bestowed as much thought and money upon it as they have given to their own homes. Englishmen, Frenchmen, and cosmopolitans, from all over the world, who have seen the Union and the new Metropolitan Clubs in New York, the Jockey and the Union in Paris, and any half dozen clubs in London, will tell you that in no great city is there such a club as this one, which is virtually unknown, and lies hidden away in the outskirts of a park at Pesth. It stands on the edge of the woods, and those who have come to the Banderium dined each night on its broad balconies and lawns, under the open sky, in the light of the wavering candles, which showed the faces and bright dresses and the jewels of the women, and the uniforms of the men, against the dark green background of the forest about them.

Munkacsy, the Hungarian painter, Count Teleki, the explorer, tanned with the fiercest of African suns, and Kossuth, a descendant of the great Kossuth, were among the men who sat every evening in groups around the fairylamps. With them were the sons and grandsons of Andrassy, Apponyi, Szechenyi, names that are as highly honored in Hungary as are those of our first three Presidents with us, and there was a stray English duke, with three attendant peers, who had received a hint of the ceremony that was to take place at Buda, and who had posted in hot haste across the Channel to see eleven hundred noble horses ridden by eleven hundred Hungarian nobles. There was the Prince Liechtenstein, just returned from the Coronation, with new honors heavy upon him, and Sir Edmund Monson, the English Ambassador to Vienna, upon whom the honors were to fall a month later, and there were lesser diplomats and grizzled old generals in white tunics, and boy officers in light blue, and swells in tweed suits and nobodies in evening dress. It was a most informal and charming collection of people, and they all seemed to know one another intimately, and acted accordingly. Inside the club there was a great ballroom in the style of the Second Empire, and reading-rooms and libraries with walls of red morocco books, and vast banqueting-halls, and rooms for whist and silence, or for the more noisy games of roulette and the petits chevaux. It was a succession of lessons in good taste, even while it made you gasp at the money it must have cost somebody — certainly not the club members, for they are too few, and the club is too inaccessible for them to spend much of their time or money there. It appears to be just what it is, the hobby of two rich men, who have robbed the bric-a-brac shops of Europe to make it beautiful, and who have searched every club to get the best ash-tray, the best hand-bell, the best cook, and the best musician.

They did not have to leave Budapest to find the musician. His name is Berkes, and no one who has not been to Budapest or to Vienna has ever heard him, for the Hungarians say naively that were he to leave them and play elsewhere, they would never be able to get him back again, as those who heard him once would keep him with them forever. He is the king of the gypsy musicians and the master of their melody. His violin seems to be just as much a part of him as are his arms or his eyes or his heart. When he plays, his body seems to stop at the neck, and he appears to draw all of his strength and feeling from the violin in his hands, the rest of him being merely a support for his head and his instrument. He has curious eyes, like those of a Scotch collie—sad, and melancholy, and pleading—and when he plays they grow glazed and drunken looking, like those of an absinthe drinker’s, and tears roll from them to the point of his short beard and wet the wood of his violin. His music probably affects different people according to their nerves, but it is as moving as any great passage in any noble book, or in any play that I know, and while it lasts he holds people absolutely in a spell, so that when the music ceases, women burst into tears, and I have seen men jump to their feet and empty the contents of their pockets into his lap; and they are so sure to do this, that their servants take their money away from them when they are dressing to dine at some house where Berkes is announced to play. One night a Frenchman dipped a two-thousand-franc note into a glass of champagne and pasted it on the back of the man’s violin, and the next day Berkes sent it back to him again, saying that to have this compliment paid him by a foreigner in the presence of his countrymen was worth more to him than the money.

The Hungarian music is typical of the people, who are full of feeling and moved by sudden gusts of passion. To a nation of a calmer and more phlegmatic nature, the ceremony of the Banderium could not have meant so much, nor would they have taken it so seriously; but to the Hungarians, who cherish the independence of their kingdom, and who never speak of Francis Joseph as the Emperor, but as the King of Hungary, this swearing allegiance to the crown was a ceremony heavy with meaning, and surrounded by the most sacred traditions of the life of the nation and of their own families.

It was interesting in consequence to see the same blasé young men who the night before at the Park Club had discussed the only way to break the bank at Monte Carlo, dressed the next morning in the clothes that their ancestors had worn, or in others like them, carrying the same banners under which their great grandfathers had fought, weeping with emotion around a battered gold crown, studded with gold stones, and cheering their King, who, not many years before, had sentenced some of the very nobles before him to death.

You cannot imagine Americans or Englishmen doing the same thing; in the first place they have no national costume should they wish to put one on, and in the second place their fear of ridicule or their sense of humor, which is sometimes the same thing, would keep them from wearing it if they had. But there was nothing ridiculous in what these Hungarians did. They were too much in earnest and they were too sincere. Later, when I met some of them in London in varnished boots and frock coats, I wondered if they could possibly be the same men I had seen prancing around on horses covered with harnesses of silver and turquoise, and themselves dressed in brocades and in silk tights, with fur-trimmed coats and velvet tunics. But at the time it seemed a most appropriate costume, for one knew they were merely carrying out the traditions of their family, and that they did not wear these particular clothes because they were beautiful or becoming, but because they were the costume, not only of their country, but of their race, and as much a part of their family history as an Englishman’s coat of arms, and because once, long before, one of their name had fought in a similar costume, and stained its brocade with blood.

The day of the ceremony was as beautiful as blue skies and a warm, brilliant sun could help to make it, and a soft summer breeze shook out the flags and banners, and stirred the leaves upon the great hill on which Buda stands, and ruffled the surface of the Danube so that it flashed like a thousand heliographs. In the streets were hurrying groups of gayly dressed peasants, fine stalwart men and simple, kindly faced women, and pretty girls of a dark, gypsy type, with black eyes and red lips with that peculiar curve which leaves the white teeth bare. Soldiers of the Empire stood at ease along the quaint streets of clean, round cobblestones and yellow-faced houses, each marking the holiday with an oak leaf in his cap or helmet. There was no crowding or pushing, but everywhere excellent good humor and good feeling, and from time to time bursts of patriotic pride as a state carriage, or some body of horsemen, passed to take a place in the procession.

The King’s palace stands on the top of the hill of Buda, and the tribunes for the Diplomats and the Cabinet face the courtyard of the palace, making the fourth side of the square in which the riders were to pass in review before the Emperor. It was more like a private garden-party than a national celebration, for everyone in the tribunes seemed to know everyone in the streets below, and the spectators moved about, and talked and criticised, and named each new arrival as he or she drove up to the doors of the great gray palace opposite. The sun beat down with a little too much vigor, but it showed us every uniform at its best, and it flashed on the jewels and on the sword-blades of the attendant cavalry, and filled the air with color and light.

Then the Emperor stepped out upon the balcony of the palace and saluted, and the people arose and remained standing until one of the Archduchesses, a little girl in pink, and the Empress in deep black, had taken their places beside him, and the members of the Court, the women in the national costume of Hungary, and the men in military uniforms, had grouped themselves back of these three figures, and had crowded the windows so that the old palace bloomed like the wall of an Oxford College when the window-gardens are gorgeous with color, and stand out from the gray stone like orchids on the limb of a dead tree. In the procession that followed there were eleven hundred mounted men in silks, in armor, in furs, and in cloth of gold, and many state carriages gilded and enamelled, and decorated with coats of arms and velvet trappings.

It would have been too theatrical and fantastic had it not been that it was an historical pageant, and correct in every detail, and that the fairy princes were real princes, the jewels real jewels, and the fur the same fur that a few months before had covered a wolf or a bear in the mountains of Bosnia and Herzogovina, which had been hunted by these same men who now wore their skins. For an hour the nobles passed in dazzling, glittering groups, each rivalling the next, and all making one long line of color that wound along the shady streets, in and out upon the hillside, and down across the great ridge like a many-colored scarf of silk and gold. Each group was preceded by its banner, and each standard-bearer was accompanied by heralds on foot, and by attendant squires on horseback, dressed in the colors of the province or burgh or municipality from which they came.

There was no regular uniform, and the costumes varied from the days of the Iron Age to those of Maria Theresa, who had given some of the same uniforms we saw that day to the forefathers of the men who wore them. But in the dresses of the later centuries there was a certain uniformity, and although the materials and colors differed greatly, the fashion was the same. There was a long shirt of silk or satin, silk tights embroidered with gold or silver, high boots of colored leather, and a sleeveless cloak of brocade or velvet, trimmed with fur. The cap was of velvet surrounded with fur, with an aigrette in front, ornamented with diamonds. The greater number of the horses were magnificent black stallions, with as distinguished pedigrees as those of the men who rode them, and their trappings were as rich as those worn by their masters. The average cost of each rider’s uniform, and of the harness for his horse, was five thousand dollars, some single costumes, on account of the jewels, were worth many times that sum. The state contributed nothing to this spectacle; each rider paid for his carriage and for the equipment of his horses and attendants.

Of course there were many features of the procession which stirred the hearts and memories of the native spectators, but which were lost on the stranger—certain devices on the banners, certain uniforms that recalled a great victory, or some peculiarity of decoration or weapon that none but the descendants of a certain family, or the inhabitants of a particular village, were allowed to bear. But the spectacle as a spectacle could be appreciated by anyone, whether he knew the history of Hungary or not. Those Englishmen present who had seen the Queen’s Jubilee procession said that the Banderium was much finer, and those who had witnessed the entry of the Czar into Moscow found it, if not so impressive, at least as beautiful. The Czar’s entry was a modern, military pageant, the Banderium was a moving panorama, an illustration of the history of Hungary by some of the very men themselves who had helped to make it or by their sons and grandsons.

There were so many different combinations of color that it is impossible to select any one as being much more beautiful than the others. In one notable group the men wore canary yellow silk from head to foot, trimmed heavily with silver. Their boots were yellow, their capes were yellow, and the tall plumes in their peaked caps were yellow; another group wore gray velvet with gray fur and silver; another, purple velvet with gold; another, blue velvet with ermine and silver. There were never more than twenty men at the most in any group; sometimes there would be but five or six, but the costume of each one was as rich, whether he rode or walked, as any court dress of any emperor of Europe. The horses were covered with velvet saddle-cloths, heavy with jewels and gold and silver ornaments. Some were hung from the head to the tail with strings of gold coins that one could hear jangling for a hundred yards as they advanced stamping, and tossing their heads, and others were covered with leopard and tiger skins, or with a harness of red morocco leather, or with blue turquoises that lay in beautiful contrast upon the snow-white coat and mane. Some of the provinces which dated back to the beginning of civilization were represented by men with the arms of the days of the Goths and Vandals, and the fierce simplicity of their appearance made the silks and satins of those next in line seem foolish and theatrical. These descendants of the earliest warriors were perhaps the most effective figures in the procession. Some of them wore black armor, some gold, some silver, and others the plain steel shirt of chain armor, which clung to them like a woolen jersey. Their legs were bound with raw leather thongs, and on their heads they wore steel casques with a bar of steel running from the helmet to the chin to protect the face from sword-thrusts, and each rider held before him a great spear, from each side of which sprouted black eagle’s feathers. There was something so grim and fierce in their appearance that the crowd along the sidewalks stood awed as they passed and then burst into the most enthusiastic cheers heard that day.

From the palace the procession countermarched to the Houses of Parliament, and in its central chamber the heads of each deputation gathered around the crown and swore allegiance to it. But it was significant that they swore this allegiance when the crown was resting on a cushion in their new Houses of Constitutional Liberty and not in a palace on the head of a king. That ceremony came later when they returned again to the palace in Buda, and the Emperor addressed them, and they interrupted his speech from the throne with cheer after cheer. Some of these men present were those whom early in his reign the Emperor had sentenced to death, but whose fealty and admiration he had won later by his own personality, and tact, and goodness of heart. It was a curious spectacle—these white-haired noblemen, tall, proud, and fierce-eyed, looking in their velvet and furs and golden chains like living portraits of the old masters, waving their jeweled caps at the little unkingly Emperor in his colonel’s uniform, padded and tightly laced, and with smug side-whiskers, like an English inspector of police. There was the contrast in it of the chivalry and dash and poetry of the Middle Ages, with the constitutional law-abiding monarchy of modern times.

And one wondered as to what will follow when Francis Joseph passes away?

Will they cheer an Archduke as they cheered him, with the tears rolling down their cheeks?

One asks, “What has an Austrian Archduke done for Hungary, for Austria, or for himself, even? Does anyone in the United States know the names of these Archdukes or Archduchesses; has he ever heard of them or read of them?”

Of course he has never seen them, because they constitute “the most exclusive Court in Europe.” That has always been their boast, as it will be their epitaph. They are the most exclusive Court in Europe, so exclusive that they have not tried to learn the language of the twin monarchy of Hungary, nor sought, by any deed or act, to win the regard or respect of the sixteen millions of people over whom some day they hope to reign. They are like a colony of people who hide themselves from the rest of the world in a deep wood and say to each other, “Look how exclusive we are! There is no one in this wood but ourselves;” and who, by repeating their own names daily and talking of no one but themselves, have learned to think that they are the people of greatest consequence in the world, when, as a matter of fact, the world outside of the wood is going about its business in the sunshine, working and scheming and pushing ahead, forgetting that the most exclusive Court of Europe exists. We know a little of the princes of other countries, and even of the pretenders, for they do something. They explore Africa or Tibet; they open hospitals, or race yachts, or win a Derby; they are at least picturesque and ornamental, and it is pleasant to see them ride by in fine clothes and with mounted escorts.

I once heard an American tourist say to a British workman outside of St. James’s Palace on a Levee day, “And I suppose you pay taxes to support this?” The workman said, “Yes, it costs me about sixpence a year; isn’t it worth the money?” And the American, becoming suddenly conscious of the fact that he had been standing for two hours watching the show of royalty, and that it had not cost him even sixpence, was honest enough to own that it was.

But what excuse have the Austrian royalties ever offered for their right to exist? It is not quite enough that they have sixteen quarterings, and that they are exclusive, and only come out of their highly polished shells once in a great while, when one of them shocks half of Europe with a horrible scandal, or a silly marriage. For it is only when such things happen that we learn anything of the most exclusive Court in Europe; when one of its Archdukes tramps a stable-boy under his horse’s hoofs, or comes out of the wood into the world — to marry a dancing-girl.

Perhaps the eleven hundred men who represented all of Hungary at the millennial celebration will cheer one of these Archdukes when he comes to the throne. But it may be that when the time comes, they will prefer a king who can speak their own language, and that we may hear them cheer one of their own people.