Equilibrium – Mihai Eminescu
Excerpt from an article a young Mihai Eminescu (Romania’s national poet) wrote in Budapest during the national federalisation crisis following the 1868 Austro-Hungarian Compromise.
… Let us research these three points each and see if any of them can provide the rationale for the exceptional attitude of the Hungarians in Austria, an attitude that has given them the authority to rule over nations that are essentially different from theirs, just as big in number and not in any way backward in culture. The first reason for which a peoples can hegemonize another is their moral superiority. The measure of the civilisation of a peoples today is a sonorous language apt to express: through sounds – notions, through logical sequence and accent – thoughts, through ethical accent – sentiments. The way of stringing along notions after notions in a phrase, a more concrete or more abstract characteristic of the notions in themselves, all of these, if a language is to be national, must belong to the language, because if it is to be otherwise, it is too easy for a man to speak German with, e.g. Hungarian verbal material. Besides that, the civilisation of a peoples consists especially in the development of those human tendencies which in general are necessary to all people, be they great or small, poor or rich, these principles have to constitute the base and the directive for all human life and activity. The more this knowledge and principles that should be common to all are developed, the more this respective peoples is civilised. For, the intellectual class does not constitute a civilisation, something that must be common to all the strata of a population. There are peoples that posses a respectably high intelligence, without being civilised; there are others that, without having a high intelligence, meet all the criteria of civilisation. The sciences (except for what is public domain) must present things that are personal to a nation, through which it has contributed to the enlightenment and advancement of humanity; the literature and the arts must be golden mirrors of the reality in which a peoples move, a new, original, personal chord in the greater harmony of humanity. The legislation must be the application of rights through laws in relation to the needs of a peoples, such that the explication and application of rights through laws should not contradict their spirit. The industry must belong to that peoples and must be protected from competition; and its keeper, commerce, must be exchanged for gold, and gold, the purse that feeds the labourer and clothes the agriculturalist, must be in the hands of the same nation too. We declare it to be understood, although we do not concede it, that someone can be in servitude to a vigorous nation that submits you through its brute power, or of another, that blinds you with the shine of its civilisation. But for us to be the servants of … whom? The most faded population in Europe, whose vanity and boastfulness are nothing but a long and disgusting don-quixotade. For in what are these people superior to us? Do they have something that we do not? Do they have language? Do they have sciences? Do they have arts? Do they have legislation? Do they have industry? Do they have commerce?
What do they have? Language? They should be ashamed of it. The sound of it makes rocks tremble in fear; the way of stringing thoughts, of abstracting notions and tropes, in a single word the infiltrated spirit of this rough, barren, awkward material is a copy after the spirit of the German language. They speak German with Hungarian verbal material. Sciences? What new thing have they discovered in science? Through what have they contributed to the advancement of mankind? The history of civilisations has recorded nothing but a zero.
Legislation? Rights and laws are in eternal contradiction. It is a malicious and undigested compilation of the most contradictory principles, principles that mutually exclude each other. Next to an unjust and partial constitution, liberal as it concerns the Hungarians, one often finds medieval laws that are more barbarous than barbarity itself.
Arts and literature? A bad translation from the German language, and everyone knows how bad translations can be. Industry? German. Commerce? In the hands of the Jews. Thusly, there is nothing in which these people can claim to be superior to us Romanians, and we will necessarily prove how they cannot even have anything in that sense, neither can they constitute a moral authority for us. There is no single intelligence in the world which is a worse expression of its people than the Hungarian one. Let’s attempt to analyse the spirit – not of the Hungarian people, whose intelligence we will never be able to know – but that of the coterie that governs it, at the same time governing us too by way of a diplomatic fiction. Formed in miserable schools, whose only aim was the propagation of a lie, in which they have learned nothing but fanaticism, receiving an education which had as its principles the extinguishing of everything that pure, humane, and noble in one’s soul, they have infiltrated into the heads of the young and therefore docile generation several systematic principles, which are in flagrant contradiction with everything that is most noble in the spirit of our century. In this way, these people have become transcendental. These systematic principles of theirs, deductively gathered from a falsified history, pulled from an exaggerated conception of their own nation, from a falsified notion of rights – what else can they be except lies! These deceitful principles are however the basis on which they judge things in public life; that’s why it’s not surprising that all the consequences that result from these falsified principles are not, cannot, be anything but false. We should not be surprised that they apply the greatest principles of a people’s public life in the way they apply them; because they have understood them in a backward way, because the fabric of their false fundamental notions has made them incapable of thinking straight. Who doesn’t know the accusation that is laid to us Romanians for demanding for ourselves what they have demanded for themselves? How backwards, how wonderful must the head of a person be who makes a crime for others out of what he considers for himself a virtue! Everything that constitutes their inner life is a lie. Why should we be surprised when election day is for them drunkenness, beatings, and homicides? Let us not be surprised if all notions have a completely different meaning when they are looked at through a spiritual prism that falsifies everything. The same way you cannot come to an understanding with a man whose language and notions differ from yours to the point that they remain untranslatable for you, because you don’t have the notions that he does, as he doesn’t have yours: – in the same way you cannot come to an understanding with Hungarian intelligence. Reconciliation or transaction have no place here, because the divergence in fundamental notions and systematic principles conditions an eternal divergence in their deductions. Thusly, there is no place here for that sweet and peaceful way, that will remain forever misunderstood. You tell him that the Romanian nation wants such and such thing, he responds to you that the Romanian nation does not even exist. And then try to come to an understanding with such a man! We Romanians cannot proceed but only with a total disregard for these transcendental humans, which we’ve been attached to by an edict of the throne and from which we can just as easily be detached from. In substance, the blame is not theirs, for a generation as such cannot be guilty of the false direction of its spirit. The blame lies with their brainless magnates, whose vanity makes them think that in this country, which is more ours than theirs, they will be able to Magyarise even the rocks. Magnates that started their life with fanatical and exalted writings, only to finish it in a madhouse or in the yeast of their own drunkenness and debauchery; old children that stain their white hair with everything that is most degrading, most obscene, most telluric in this nature that we call human. Let’s take a full look underneath the purple rags they cover their profound misery with and let’s see how concrete facts collide with those statistical abstractions which they present to the world and how their entire public life is a parody – those sixteen million Hungarians which they deceive Europe with are but a lie. Who doesn’t remember how they changed the names of individuals in entire districts, to the point that the poor German residents didn’t even know what their name is. In this way, using appearances, they want to deceive the German or Romanian being. Fortunately, this attempt, besides being perfidious, is then also eminently vain. These people themselves, with their state, with their parliament, with their ministry are nothing but a lie, a fiction – do you gentlemen think that this ministry is justified to be the ministry of the Romanian people? Nothing less than that, because the justification has to proceed from the Romanian people as such; and this people was not even asked anything during this new state reform. Is this parliament the expression of the Romanian people? No… because it is not even the expression of the Hungarian one; because that would require we forget the beatings and the homicides during the latest elections, the petty manipulations of the government and of its corrupt parties, the exceptional situation of Transylvania, the accusations lied at opposition candidates or candidates of foreign nationalities, the intimidation of the people through threats, all of these we would have to forget in order to be able to say that this lie that is called the parliament of Hungary is an expression of the peoples living in it. And then, how many ways will the people that hold the purse of the state in their hand not find to influence and corrupt the state even more? Do you ever wonder how state funds are voted and decided on?
Hungarians are superior in nothing to the nations which they live together with; and this palace of tall lies which they have deceived Europe with, when looked at from up-close, is the ridiculous form of a ridiculous pretension. Kant calls the ridiculous the spontaneous dissipation of a great expectation into nothing, meaning: parturiunt montes, nascitur ridiculus mus [Mountains will go into labour, and a silly little mouse will be born]. And with all this being said, this ridiculousness is sad in itself; which proves that the definition of the German philosopher has much going against it. It is sad to see a nation in the heart of Europe that is still stuck in the Middle Ages, seized by a febrile spiritual epidemic, a nation that is small in number and fantastical in aspirations but one that political fortune has unwisely given supremacy over nations that are just as large in number and no backwards in culture. This fiction has to be reduced to its proper value and the nominal value it has now must be dissipated, this nominal value that is surprising and which conceals in itself a most infamous failure.
Federațiunea, Pesta, 11 May 1870
I have published a modest collection of Eminescu's editorials in English translation, the first publication of Eminescu's editorial work in English.
See the link: https://www.amazon.com/Old-Icons-New-Mihai-Eminescu/dp/1701693917/