The Birth of Yugoslavia. Henry Baerlein
by the Hungarian delegates and approved by the Emperor on November 17. This rather melodramatic affair would have been thought worthy of at any rate a few lines by most of us if we had written a whole book, nay two books, about Rieka. But our friend Mr. Edoardo Susmel glides, as gracefully as possible, over it. In his Fiume Italiana he is as peu communicatif as a carp. His other book,[51] written in French, simply and beautifully says of this law of 1868 that it is "a precious heritage transmitted from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which period there was condensed"—or shall we say made palpable?—"the spirit which is jealous of the municipal liberties." "Down to this day," says he, "Rieka is in complete possession of her charter. Rieka has to-day still got her great charter. This constitutional charter … " and so on and so on. But these modern coryphées of Rieka and Dalmatia are so forgetful.
RIEKA'S HISTORY, AS TWO PEOPLE SEE IT
Mr. Susmel begins by saying that the origins of the Italianity of Rieka lose themselves in the story of Rome. He knows—none better—that the Romans came to these parts. They disappeared—but of course one can't put in every detail. Anyhow, they left an arch, a lot of coins, some vases, etc.; and a few of these are depicted in Mr. Susmel's book. What a relief it must have been to innumerable people as they turned his pages and discovered that he had forgotten to include the illustrations of our Roman Wall, of the Pont du Gard and of the glorious aqueduct that traverses Segovia! From the time of the "Krpitsa" onwards a regular colonization began. Italians were urged to come from their own country—but if Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who studied the question on the spot, is accurate in his diagnosis that Fiume is Italian "with that intensity of feeling bred by alien rule and the sudden victorious liberation therefrom" (Land and Water, May 29, 1919), it certainly does seem a little strange that the Italians should think in this way of the Magyars who invited them and were so good to them. They were told, no doubt, by the Magyars that the Croats would not hurt them, that the city council would always be Italian, that if the saucy Croats asked for schools—as indeed their numbers entitled them to do—well, they would receive no reply. ("Show me a single Croat school!" cried the Italian mayor triumphantly to me in 1919.) The Magyars spent vast sums on the harbour, making the other little harbours of Croatia obsolete, and they were not going to lose their grip of the town for want of proper legislation. They were surprised that more "regnicoli" (Italians from Italy) did not respond; but the renegades made up for them. "Passionate and justified," said Mr. Hilaire Belloc in 1919,[52] is Italian feeling with respect to Fiume. But this writer, who says he travelled to the Adriatic with a view to ascertaining the real facts, did not altogether waste his time, since one of his two adjectives is quite correct. With regard to the renegades no questions were ever asked, if only one helped to keep Rieka from the Croats, if, for example, on a voting paper for the Croatian Diet one put the word "nessuno" (no one). Mr. Susmel, I see, says that the Diet's continued invitation to the town that it should send its deputies to Zagreb was a display of "incredible obstinacy."
AND THE SLOVENES ARE COERCED
The Ausgleich was of ill-omen to the Slav subjects of Hungary. It was not much more auspicious for the Slovenes, Istrians and Dalmatians. The Slavs seem to have been the Habsburgs' nightmare. Why the million and a quarter of Slovenes—people who do not approach the Basques, for instance, in pugnacity—should be the butt of everlasting coercion and repression may seem inexplicable. When the German-Austrians of Triest, even after the Italians in Italy had begun to claim the town, allied themselves with the Triest Italians "to fight," as they declared, "the common enemy," it can surely not have been these quiet Slovenes who had won for themselves by great industry a place in the town which is situated in their province. The "common enemy" to whom the German-Austrians referred must have been Russia. And so the Southern Slavs of the Balkans and of the Adriatic owed part of the bad treatment they received not to their own vices but to the organizing virtues which their larger brother was supposed to have.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] Memorie per la storia degli arvenimenti che seguirono in Dalmazia la caduta della Republica veneta, by G. Cattalinich, 1841.
[37] This is perpetuated by the initial letters of the saying "Samo sloga Srbina spasava" ("Only in the union of Serbs is salvation"), which are placed round the cross in Serbia's coat of arms.
[38] Cf. La Dalmatie de 1797–1815, by the Abbé Paul Pisani. Paris, 1893.
[39] His fame as a teacher was such that several towns entreated him to settle in their midst. In 1845 the inhabitants of Stara Zagora sent him this curious letter: "When Philip, King of Macedonia, invited Aristotle to be the tutor of his son, he wrote to him: 'I am happy, in the first place, because God has given me a son, and, secondly, because this son was born in your time. … ' And we also, we thank God, firstly, because it has been granted to us to found a school, and, secondly, because we know that under your direction it will be a real school. That is why we supplicate and pray that you will come to us and be our teacher."
[40] Smail Aga, Vice-Governor of Herzegovina, had earned for himself the greatest detestation of the Montenegrins, whom he harried, and of his own unhappy subjects. In August 1840 he was attacked by a small band of heroes, men of Montenegro and of Herzegovina. He and a large number of his men were killed. A translation of this celebrated poem was made by Mr. J. W. Wiles at Salonika, and printed there, under difficult circumstances, entirely by Serbian refugees.
[41] Cf. Fiume Italiana. Rome, 1919.
[42] According to the census of 1857 the figures were: Serbs, 452,500; Roumanians, 414,900; Germans, 394,100; Magyars, 256,100; Jews, 12,500; Gipsies, 600.
[43] Their German origin had become so completely obliterated that they no longer spoke anything but Croat. It is curious in this connection to note that Kossuth, the champion of Magyarism, was of Slav blood; that Rieger, the Czech leader, was of German blood; and that Conscience, chief of the Flemish movement, had a French father.
[44] Cf. Seton-Watson's The Southern Slav Question. London, 1911.
[45] Cf. Letters of Count Cavour, edited by Gl. Chiala, vol. iv. pp. 139–140.
[46] This lady, the Princess Julia, subsequently married the Duke of Aremberg. She died in February 1919 in Vienna at the age of eighty-eight. In the early sixties she came on a mission to England to enlist sympathy for Serbia's final struggle for independence. Much to her annoyance she found that it was necessary to ask through the Turkish Embassy for an audience with Queen Victoria. However, the Ambassador was a very affable person, who completely mollified the Princess. It was to her that Palmerston made one of his famous puns. Her dress caught in a door and he stepped forward with the words: "Princesse, la Porte est sur votre chemin pour vous empêcher d'avancer."
[47] As a matter of fact he was walking with a girl called Catharine, also a relative, a lame girl more remarkable for wit and wisdom than for physical beauty. She and Michael are celebrated in one of Serbia's most famous songs. There has been