by Rebecca West
When the dancer came back she was committing a worse offence against Slav convention. It happens that Lika, which is a district of Dalmatia, in the Karst, that is to say on the bare limestone mountains, breeds a kind of debonair Highlander, rather hard to believe in, so like is he to the kind of figure that a Byron-struck young lady of the early nineteenth century drew in her album. The girl’s dress was a principal-boy version of this, a tight bodice and kilt of oatmeal linen, with a multicoloured sporran, and she wore the typical male Lika head-dress, a cap with an orange crown, a black rim, and a black lock of fringe falling over the ear and nape of the neck on the right side. It suited her miraculously, and her legs were the shape of perfection. But the rhythm of her dance was very quick and springing; it was in fact a boy’s dance, and she danced it as a girl wanting to emphasize that she was a girl by performing a characteristically male process. She ended standing on the tips of her toes, with her left hand on her hip and her right forefinger touching her chin, her eyebrows raised in coyness; there was never anything less androgynous.
But the attempt to juggle with the two aspects of human sexuality was not the reason why this dance was distressing in its confusion. It was a distress not new to me—I have felt it often in America. I have at times felt suddenly sickened when a coloured dancer I have been watching has used a step or gesture that belongs to ‘white’ dancing; even if the instant before they had been wriggling in an imitation sexual ecstasy and passed into a dull undulation of the Loie Fuller sort or the chaste muscular bound of a ballet movement, the second seemed more indecent than the first, and I have often experienced the same shock when I have seen white dancers borrow the idiom of coloured dancers. There is nothing unpleasant in the gesture known as ’cherry-picking,‘ provided it is a Negro or Negress who performs it; the dancer stands with feet apart and knees bent, and stretches the arms upwards while the fingers pull an invisible abundance out of the high air. But it is gross and revolting, a reversion to animalism, when it is performed by a white person. That same feeling of inappropriateness amounting to cultural perversion afflicted me slightly when I saw this girl’s first dance, more severely when I saw her second, and to a painful degree in the third, which she did to show us that she could do more than mere folk-dances. It was that cabaret chestnut, the dance of the clockwork doll, which is an imaginative cliché of the stalest sort, never again to be more amusing than the riddle ’When is a door not a door?‘ And this was the most excruciating rendering of it that I have ever seen. This Croat girl was so noble a creature that when she did a silly thing she looked far sillier than the silly do. At the end of her dance she ran across the shining floor and stood with her bare arm resting on the golden wreath, her reflection broken loveliness at her feet. ’Some day I will make them give me the first prize,‘ she laughed. ’The poor little one,‘ said Constantine, ’she should be like an icon, your wife will tell you.‘
Zagreb VI
We went up the hill and looked at the archaic statues on the porch of St. Mark’s Church, which is a battered old spiritual keep that has been built and rebuilt again and again since the thirteenth century. ‘This old square is the heart of the town,’ said Constantine. ‘Zagreb is the heart of Croatia, and St. Mark’s Square is the heart of Zagreb, and I think that only once did it fall, and then to the Tartars, to whom all fell. But now they have renamed it the Square of Stefan Raditch, after the great leader of the Croat Peasant Party, who was shot in the Belgrade Parliament in 1928. Here in Croatia they say we Serbs did it, they say our King Alexander plotted it,’ said Constantine, his voice rising to a wail, ‘but it is not so. He was shot by a mad Montenegrin deputy whom he had accused of corruption. The Montenegrins are a Homeric people, they do not understand modern life; they think that if a man attacks your honour you kill him, and it is well. But the Croats do not know that, for they will never travel; they have no idea of going any further than Dalmatia. And why would King Alexander want to kill Raditch? He knew very well that if Raditch were killed the Croats would go mad and would make with the Italians and the Hungarians to kill him also. And so they did. And that is a thing to remember when the King is blamed for suspending the constitution. Always King Alexander knew that he would be killed. It is proof of the lack of imagination of all you English liberals that you forget that a man’s policy is a little different when he knows he is going to be killed.’
Down in the town we sat and drank chocolate in a café, till Constantine said, ‘Come you must go. You must not keep Valetta waiting.’ Since he was staying in the same hotel as we were, and he looked tired, I said, ‘Come back with us.’ But he would not. ‘I will come later,’ he said, and I am sure he was afraid of meeting Valetta in the lounge and having to admit that Valetta wanted to see us but not him. The Serb, though he seems tough and insensitive, is sometimes childishly hurt by Croat coldness. Some French friends of mine who once attended an international congress of some sort at Zagreb were in the company of a Serb, a middle-aged diplomat, when somebody came into the room with the news that the Croat hospitality committee was not going to ask the Serb delegates to the banquet which was going to terminate the proceedings. The Serb diplomat burst into tears. This story is the sadder because every Croat, who thinks of the Serb as the gendarme who tortures him, would disbelieve it.
When we got to our hotel we found Valetta waiting for us, and we took him up to our room and drank plum brandy, pleased to see him again though we had seen him so recently. He stood by the window, pulled the curtains apart, and grimaced at the snow that fell aslant between us and the electric standards. ‘What a terrible Easter we have given you!’ he laughed, and raised his glass to his lips, smiling on us with the radiance that is usually the gift of traitors, but means nothing in him but kindness and good faith. He went on to apologize for the violence with which he had spoken at lunch-time. ‘I could not help it,’ he said. ‘I know that Constantine is a wonderful man, but he is all for Belgrade, and you will understand how we are bound to feel about that. I am so afraid that as you are just passing through the country, you will not see what we Croats have to suffer. Of course everything is better since 1931, when the King gave us back some sort of constitution; and since the King died it has improved still further. But it is still terrible.
‘You cannot think,’ he said, as we all gathered round the fire with our glasses on our knees, ‘what the censorship here is like. Do you know that that little pamphlet about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which was a kind of three-cornered debate between Stalin and Shaw and Wells, has been suppressed? Think of the absurdity of it! Of course that hardly matters, for it is imported and it could not be called an epoch-making work, but what does matter is that our own great people are persecuted. You have heard of X. Y.? He is a dramatist, and he is really by far the greatest living writer we have. But he is a Communist. Well, never can we see his plays at our theatre. They simply will not let them be performed. And it matters not only for us, but for him, because he is miserably poor. And he is not allowed to make money any way, for when some people arranged for him to give a lecture here in one of our big halls and had sold all the tickets, the police prevented it twenty-four hours before, on the ground that if there were a riot in the hall they could not undertake to keep order. Now, that is sheer nonsense. We Croats might riot about all sorts of things, but we would not riot because X. Y. was giving a lecture. And really, I am not exaggerating, all this means that the great X. Y. is starving.’
‘But wait a minute,’ said my husband. ‘Is it only the Yugoslavian Government that did not want X. Y. to speak? Is there not a chance that the Croat Clerical Party was also rather anxious that he shouldn’t?’ Valetta looked uncomfortable. ‘Yes, it is so,’ he said. ‘They would be against any Communist, wouldn’t they?’ pressed my husband. ‘And they would be in favour of a strict censorship, wouldn’t they?’ ‘Yes,’ said Valetta. ‘Then when you fight for free speech and a free press, you Croats are not only fighting the Serbs, you are also fighting your own Cle
rical Party?’ ‘That is so,’ agreed Valetta; and he added sadly, ‘Our Clerical Party is very violent.’ There he was guilty of an understatement. The Croatian Clerical Party is not a force that can easily be regarded as proceeding from God. It is a party with a long pedigree of mischief-makers, for it descends from the nineteenth-century Party of the Right, which was led by Anton Starchevitch, and its successor, the Party of Pure Right, which was led by Dr. Josef Frank. Both these parties were violently bigoted in their pietism, and professed the most vehement antagonism to the Jews (which implied antagonism to liberalism) and to the Orthodox Church (which, as all Serbs are Orthodox, implied antagonism to the Serbs).
There is to be noted, as evidence against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the neurotic quality of its rebels. It is as if the population were so drugged and depleted that they never raised their voice unless they were stung by some inner exasperation. It has been mentioned that Kossuth, the Magyar patriot and scourge of the Slavs, was himself pure Slovak and had no Magyar blood in his veins. Even so, Starchevitch, who loathed the Serbs, was himself, as Constantine had told us beside his grave, born of a Serb mother, and Dr. Frank, whose anti-Semitism was frenzied, was a Jew. Such Slav patriots as these were meat and drink to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who hated her Slav subjects. They made it easy for her to rule according to that counsel of Hell, Divide et impera. The famous Ban Khuen-Héderváry, whose rule of Croatia was infamously cruel, made a point of granting the Serb minority in Croatia special privileges, so that the Croats would be jealous of them, and there was thus no danger of Serbs and Croats joining together in revolt against Hungarian rule.
The state of mind this produced in the populace can be read in one of the numerous trials that disgraced the Austro-Hungarian Empire so far as Croatia was concerned from the beginning of the twentieth century till the war. This was the famous ‘Agram trial’ (Agram was the Austrian name for Zagreb) which arraigned fifty-three Serbs of Croatia for conspiracy with the free Serbs of Serbia against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The charge was flagrant nonsense, cooked up by the Ban, Baron Rauch, a stupid brute, and Count Aehrenthal, the Austrian Foreign Minister, who belonged to the company of Judas and Fouché; but for evidence they never had to turn to Austrians or Magyars. Nearly all the two hundred and seventy witnesses brought by the prosecution, who were nearly all flagrantly perjured, were Croats. They were all willing to swear away the lives of their fellow-Slavs to the authorities they hated; yet there is no difference between Croats and Serbs except their religion.
The Croat Clerical Party, therefore, has always worked with a motive power of anti-Serb hatred, which naturally created its material. The Serbs retorted with as bad as they got, and the Orthodox Church showed no example of tolerance to the Roman Catholics. The greatest of nineteenth-century Slav patriots of the pacific sort, Bishop Strossmayer, once announced his intention of visiting Serbia, and the Serbian Government had to make the shameful confession that it could not guarantee his personal safety. But the greatest stimulus to anti-Serb feeling has lain outside Croatia, in the Roman Catholic Church itself. During the last sixty years or so the Vatican has become more and more Ultramontane, more and more predominantly Italian in personnel; and since the war of 1914 it has become more and more terrified of Communism. Can the Roman Catholic Church really be expected to like Yugoslavia?—to like a state in which Croats, who used to be safely amalgamated with Catholic Austrians and Hungarians, are outnumbered by Orthodox Serbs, who are suspected of having no real feeling of enmity towards Bolshevist Russia?
There are two indications, one small and one massive, of the Roman Catholic attitude to Yugoslavia. In all Slav countries there have been for many years gymnastic societies for young Slavs, called ‘Sokols,’ or ‘The Hawks,’ after an original made in Czechoslovakia, where boys and girls are given physical training and instructed in their nationalist tradition and the duties of a patriot. These are, indeed, the models from which the Italian Fascisti copied the Balilla and Avanguardisti. After the war, the Roman Catholic Church started rival societies called ‘The Eagles’ in both Croatia and Slovenia. It is extremely difficult to see what motive there can have been behind this move except to weaken the state loyalty of the Roman Catholic Yugoslavs; the Church could not possibly fear that the Sokols would interfere with the religious views of their members, for the Czech and Croatian Sokols had always been predominantly Catholic. The more important indication of the pro-Italian and anti-Slav attitude of the Roman Catholic Church is her callousness towards the unhappy Slovenes who were incorporated in Italy under the Peace Treaty. These six hundred thousand people are the worst-treated minority in Europe except the German Tirolese. ’Have bugs a nationality when they infest a dwelling? That is the historical and moral position of the Slovenes living within our borders,‘ once said the Popolo d’Italia. The 1929 Concordat which Pope Pius XI signed with Mussolini did not adequately protect the religious rights of the Slav minority, and the Slovenes no longer enjoy the right, which they prized highly, of using the Slovene liturgy in the churches. The Slav so loves his language that this was a gesture of hostility to the Slav soul.
It is, therefore, not sensible to trust the Roman Catholic Croat to like and understand the Orthodox Serb, or even to discourage the artificial hatred that has been worked up between them in the past. ‘Do you not think, Valetta,’ said my husband, ‘that the Belgrade Government knows this, and therefore bargains with the Church, giving it assistance in its anti-Communist campaign on condition that it keeps the anti-Serb and Croatian Separatist Movement within bounds?’ Valetta hesitated. ‘It may be so,’ he said, his long fingers fiddling with the fringe of a cushion. ‘And there is another thing,’ said my husband; ‘there is the present Concordat.’2 He paused. In 1937 all the Serbian parts of Yugoslavia were up in arms because the Government had signed a Concordat with Pope Pius which gave the Roman Catholic Church immense advantages over the Orthodox Church: in any town where the Roman Catholics were in an absolute majority over the Serbs all the schools without exception were to be Roman Catholic; the child of a Roman Catholic mother and an Orthodox father was to be brought up as a Roman Catholic even if the mother were received into the husband’s Church; it was to be far easier for Roman Catholic soldiers to practise their religion than for the Orthodox soldiers, and so on. The terms were so grossly favourable to the Roman Catholics that the Government made it very difficult for the Serb public or for foreigners to obtain the text of the Concordat. ‘Yes,’ sighed Valetta, ‘this wretched Concordat. We none of us want it here, in Croatia, you know.’
‘Yes, I do not think you Croats want it,’ said my husband, ‘but your Church does. And don’t you feel that the Church would never have been able to extort such terms from the Belgrade Government if it had not been able to trade some favours in return? I suspect very strongly that it has said to the Belgrade Government, “If you give us these concessions we will see to it that the Croatian Peasant Party never seriously menaces the stability of the Yugoslavian state.“ ‘ Valetta rocked himself uneasily, ’Oh, surely not, surely not,‘ he murmured. ’But for what other reason can the Belgrade Government have granted this preposterous Concordat?‘ pressed my husband. ’I cannot imagine,‘ said Valetta. ’Oh, I suppose you are right!‘ He rose and went to the window and drew back the curtains, and looked again on the bright snow that drove out of the darkness through the rays of the street lamps.
‘Is it not the tragedy of your situation here,’ suggested my husband, ‘that you Croats are for the first time discovering that your religion and your race run counter to one another, and that you are able to evade that discovery by putting the blame on the constitution of Yugoslavia? The Croats, like all Slavs, are a democratic and speculative people. You lived for long under the Habsburgs, whom you could blame for every interference with individual liberty. Since the great pro-Croat Strossmayer was a Bishop you could even think of the Roman Catholic Church as the arch-opponent of the Habsburgs, and therefore the protector of liberty. Now the
Habsburgs are swept away you should see the Roman Catholic Church as it is: not at all democratic, not at all in favour of speculative thought; far more alarmed by the vaguest threat of social revolution than by any actual oppression, provided it is of monarchical or totalitarian origin, and wholly unsympathetic with any need for free expression but its own. You should proceed to the difficult task of deciding whether you can reconcile yourself to this bias of the Church for the sake of the spiritual benefits it confers upon you. But you are postponing this task by letting the Church throw the blame for all its suppressions of free speech and free press on Belgrade.’
‘It is possible that you are right,’ said Valetta, coming back and taking his seat by the fire. ‘Nothing is ever clear-cut here.’ ‘Do you never get down to a discussion of first principles?’ asked my husband. ‘This business of social revolution, how is it regarded by the Croat politicians such as Matchek of the Croat Peasant Party?’ ‘We never speak of such things, it is too soon,’ said Valetta. ‘But if they want to become a separate autonomous canton, surely they must have some idea of the kind of society they want to found?’ ‘No,’ answered Valetta, ‘it is felt that it would be premature to discuss such things. Oh, I know it is wrong and naive and foolish, but that is how our people feel.’
