Hungarian literature

by Emil Reich

CHAPTER I.

Of the nations in the south-east of Europe, the Hungarians, or Magyars, are probably the most renowned, and at the same time, the least known. Although their extensive country has now been in their possession and under their rule for over one thousand years, and albeit the historic rôle of the Hungarians, rather than that of Hungary, has been and is one of no common magnitude, in that, without their secular and successful fight against Osman ascendancy, Europe could scarcely have maintained its civilization in the countries east of Munich: yet in spite of all such claims to attention on the part of western nations, Hungary and the Hungarians are still largely unknown in England, France and America.

In English-speaking countries no serious attempts have as yet been made either to tell the stirring story of Hungary’s past, or to analyse the rich possibilities of her future. Except single and singular features of Magyar life or natural products, such as the famous “Hungarian” bands of the Tsiganes or gypsies and their “weird” music; Hungarian flour and Hungarian wine; and most of all the figure of Hungary’s greatest political orator, Louis Kossúth; except these and a few more curiosities relating to Hungary, the proud nations of the west of Europe do not, as a rule, take notice of all the rest of the life of a nation of eighteen million persons.

The festivities of the Hungarian millennium celebrated the year before last, came to the western world as a surprise. Few Englishmen were prepared to realize the fact that, at a time when their ancestors were still under small princes of mixed blood, and, moreover, constantly exposed to, and finally nearly absorbed by foreign conquerors, the Hungarians had already reared a solid fabric of government on the site on which for now over a thousand years they have withstood the armies, the diplomacy and the alien immigration of the Turks, the Germans and the Slavs. Unconquered by force or disaster, and not denationalized by either the Germans or Slavs around them, the Hungarians have maintained almost intact the language and music they brought with them from the Steppes of Asia; and when in the ripeness of time a Magyar literature was beginning to develop, it proceeded on lines neither German nor Slav, but thoroughly Hungarian.

This literature is both in extent and quality, one of the most remarkable of the lesser literatures of Europe. The number of writers of Magyar works is no less than 5,000; and their works cover all the provinces of poetry and of philosophic, historic or scientific inquiry into nature or man. While accepting the standard of criticism adopted by the recognized arbiters of literary greatness, we have no hesitation in saying that Hungarian Literature has a number, if a limited one, of stars of the first magnitude, and no inconsiderable number of lesser lights. This fact acquires still greater importance from the consideration that the bulk of Hungarian Literature properly speaking dates back little over a hundred years; and that many, far too many Hungarians have, up to recent times, left their native country and, writing their works in German or French, added to the literature of nations other than their own. Comparatively few, exceedingly few, Englishmen have enlisted among the writers of nations outside the United Kingdom; very many, exceedingly many Hungarians have, under stress of various circumstances, written in Latin, German, French or English, and thereby reduced the bulk and often the quality of Hungarian Literature proper. The number of works in Magyar published from 1531 to 1711 is 1,793. During the same period 2,443 non-Magyar works were published in Hungary. The preceding two totals were given in 1879 and 1885 respectively. Up to April, 1897, 404 more works had been discovered, belonging mostly to the class of non-Magyar books printed in Hungary down to 1711. When, however, we inquire into the number of works written by Hungarians and published outside Hungary, down to 1711, we learn that no less than about 5,000 works were written and published by Hungarian authors, in 130 non-Hungarian towns, during the period ending 1711.[1] At a time when all the western peoples had long ceased to use Latin for all literary purposes, the idiom of Cicero was still the chief vehicle of thought in Hungary. Nearly all through the eighteenth, and during the first quarter of the present century, the number of works written by Hungarians in Latin far outnumbered the works written by them in Magyar. It was even so with German; and many a famous German author was really a Hungarian; such as Ladislaus Pyrker, Nicolaus Lenau, Klein (J. L.), the great historian of the drama, Charles Beck, the poet, Fessler, the historian, etc.

In comparing Hungarian Literature with the literature of the Germans, French or English, we cannot but recognize, for the reasons just mentioned, that the splendour and comprehensiveness of the Literature of those nations cannot be found in that of the Magyars. At the same time we make bold to point out an advantage which Hungarian Literature has over the literature of many another nation, if not in the past, certainly in the future. This advantage is in the Hungarian language. The Magyars have a language of their own. It is not a borrowed language; not one taken from another nation, in whose use it had been for centuries.

The Americans, both in North and South America, although they are in nearly everything else the counterparts of their European parent-nations, have yet preserved the idioms of the latter. In politics, social constitution, individual temper, and attitude of mind, the North and South Americans are—a long stay in that continent has convinced us of that—utterly different from either the English or the Spanish. The Americans proper have indeed built up, or developed into a nation of their own. For good or for bad, they have a distinct and novel national personality. One thing excepted; that one thing, however, is a vital element in the intellectual activity of a nation. We mean, of course, Language. The Americans have moulded and coloured all the old elements of their nationality into organs with a tone and hue of their own. Language alone they have, with slight differences, taken over and preserved in the very form and woof in which the English and Spanish had left it in the old colonies. Hence there is between the Americans, as a new nation, and their language, as an old and foreign idiom, a discordance and discrepancy that no genius can entirely remove. The words of a language are mostly gentry of olden descent. Between them there are associations and tacit understandings ill-fitted for an environment essentially different from their original cast. This discrepancy has, there can be little doubt, exercised a baneful influence on the literature of the American nations. It has baulked them of the higher achievements, and neither in the literature of North America nor in that of South America can we meet with literary masterworks of the first rank. Between the poets and writers of those nations and the languages they are using there is much of that antagonism which has always been found to exist between the cleverest of Neo-Latin poets and the language of Rome. Latin is a dead language; and all the intellectual atmosphere and soil that nurtured and developed it have long since ceased to stimulate. Accordingly, the Politiani and Sadoleti, the Sannazari and Buchanani, and all others who in modern times have tried to revive Latin literature have entirely failed. As with individuals so it is with nations. The Belgians, or the Swiss in Europe are, like the Americans, in the false position of having each a distinct nationality of their own with languages not their own. This fundamental shortcoming has rendered and will probably, in all times, render them incapable of reaching the lofty summits of literature. Language is intimately allied to literature; language is the mother, and thought the father of literary works. Any lack of harmony in the parents must needs show in the offspring.

Now the Hungarians have not only a language of their own, but also one the possibilities of which are far from being exhausted. For the Hungarians therefore there is no danger of a false position, of an initial vice in the growth of their literature; and moreover there are immense vistas of literary exploits still in store for future generations. The quarries and mines of the Latin and Teutonic languages have, it may be apprehended, been worked so intensely as to leave scant margins for new shafts. French has changed little in the last three generations, and English and German little in the last two; while Italian and Spanish have long reached the beautiful but stereotyped plasticity of ripeness. Hungarian, on the other hand, is a young language. The number of people using and moulding it has been considerably increased in the last generation, and most of its gold-fields and diamond-layers have not yet been touched by the prospector’s axe. There is thus an immense future still open for Hungarian Literature, and this prospective, but certain fact ought never to be lost sight of in a fair appreciation of the literary efforts of the Hungarians.

Literature being a nation in words, as history is a nation in deeds, it would be impossible to grasp the drift, or value the achievements of Hungarian Literature without some knowledge of the Magyar nation in the past and in the present. It may be therefore advisable to premise a few remarks on Hungary and her history before entering on a narrative of Hungarian Literature.