Page - 256 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 5256 Therefore it would be desirable that after this fortunate discovery about the Scythian peoples and languages no one dares to write of the Huns, whom many have considered the forefathers of the Hungarians; at first, they should learn more about the Scythian and the Turkish lan- guage, following the example of our Sajnovics, who leaving behind his homeland took long journeys in northern Europe and in Asia [sic]; de- spite this, some do not cease building imaginary systems before assem- bling sufficient material from experience […].150 The tenor of these remarks appears to belong to someone imbued with a sense of triumph over having received what he had expected and hoped for. As we shall see in more detail, by this time Kollár had been engaged for several years in polemical activities directed at the political and fiscal privileges of the Hun- garian nobility. He thus had a distinct stake in emphasizing that the Demon­ stratio dealt a blow to the Hun–Hungarian discourse of origin and identity, which was one of the cornerstones of the noble ideology—although as a schol- ar he also pretended to suspend judgment, and addressed to the opponents a rhetorical invitation to counter Sajnovics on the ground of as abundant and sound empirical evidence as he had collected in support of his own argument. Whether or not Kollár played a role, via Van Swieten, in instigating the linguis- tic inquiry of the expeditionists, the results satisfied him greatly, and his con- tributions had an important part in the development of an atmosphere in which the credibility of Hell’s efforts to present himself as a Hungarus patriot in the 1770s was questionable in the eyes of a broad segment of the country’s elite. 4 Authority Crumbling The items discussed in this chapter all point to a Maximilian Hell prepared to vindicate his place as the hero who “came, saw, and conquered” all obstacles, emerging as the celebrated and unquestionable authority on everything from natural history and geophysics to linguistics and astronomy. Nothing went ac- cording to plan. On some of these subjects, he either failed to publish anything at all (as in the case of morild and other zoological and botanical matters) or published much too late (posthumous weather reports with climatic delibera- tions); on others, he encountered problems of attribution (the linguistic 150 [Kollár], “Joannis Sajnovics S.J. Ungari Tordasiensis & c. Demonstratio,” 22.