CHAPTER XV.
1772-1825.
In the literature of all civilized nations we meet with certain writers, whose great effect on their contemporaries was owing less to the absolute excellency of single works of theirs, than to the general tone and power of suggestion inherent in all their individuality. Such are, in England, Dr. Johnson and Thomas Carlyle; in France, Diderot and Renan; in Germany, Hamann and Herder. Without being creative geniuses, they influence their time as if they were such. One does so by the brilliancy of his talk, like Johnson; the other by pamphlets or essays de omni re scibili, like Herder; a third by boldly attempting to rear a new intellectual world in the place of the fabric of old literature and knowledge, like Diderot. The merit of such men is immense, yet relative. They deserve more highly of literary men, than of literature. They spread interest in or taste for good literature. They are critical, not constructive; and so decidedly preparatory and temporary is their work, that in the whole range of the world’s literature there has so far been one man, and one alone, whose genius shone equally in this preparatory or critical work, and in the still more precious work of positive creativeness too. That man was Lessing. In him the critical faculty did not seriously impair the creative; and he rendered immense services to German literature both by what he destroyed, by what he suggested and by what he created.
Hungarian Literature was fortunate enough to find one of those initiators and suggestive stimulators during the period of its great revival, in the person of Francis Kazinczy (1759-1831). His work has frequently been compared to that of Lessing. No greater injustice could be done to Kazinczy. To compare him to the author of “Laokoon,” “Emilia Galotti,” and “Anti-Goetze,” is to render him much smaller than he really was. Without being a Lessing by far, he had a very considerable and beneficial influence on Hungarian writers, many of them greater than he. He was the son of a well-to-do gentleman of the county of Bihar, which has a population of both Magyars and Roumanians, and does not therefore belong to the counties where the purely Magyar spirit is permeating all the phases of life. To this circumstance, no less than to his education, must be ascribed Kazinczy’s little sympathy with the strongly Magyar and nationalist aspirations of the Debreczen school. His youth he spent chiefly in North Hungary, where the study of German literature was then rife in the better circles of society. Having acquired a competent knowledge of German, French and English, he poured forth, since 1791, numerous, most carefully composed translations from Shakespeare (Hamlet), Goethe, Molière, Klopstock, Herder, Lessing, etc. From 1794 to 1801 he was kept in various state prisons, for having been, as was alleged, implicated in the conspiracy of Martinovics. This terrible experience left no particular traces either on his mind or on his character. Subsequently, as previously, nay during his imprisonment, he was busy with the elaboration of essays, critical, historical, or novelistic, all of which had two distinct aims: first—to reform the Hungarian literary language, by the introduction of new words and especially new idioms; secondly, to reform Hungarian Literature by modelling it after the standard of Greek masterpieces. Both lines of reform were in the right direction. The Hungarian language was in Kazinczy’s youth still far from developed. Its vocabulary was limited mostly to the designation of things material, and quite fallow for the production of terms expressing things abstract or æsthetic. It resembled a country in which there is abundant currency in the shape of small coin; it lacked gold coins and bank-notes of great value. Yet like Hungary itself, its language was replete with gold-mines. In the rich and racy vocabulary of the common people there was both overt material and abundant hints for material hidden under the surface. Kazinczy, instead of taking these hints—instead of coining his new terms and idioms from the language of the common people, as he ought to have done, preferred to coin them according to standards taken from the western languages of Europe. In this he was grievously mistaken. There are unfortunately very few, if any, true dialects of the Hungarian language. This, the greatest drawback to Magyar writers, as the reverse of this deficiency is the greatest advantage to the writers of Germany, France, Italy or England, was rendered very much more harmful by Kazinczy, in that he totally neglected the few dialectic features together with the common household language of the people. In his efforts to enrich the language he thus could not but obtain results of an inferior type. His syntactic moves have not been followed on the whole; and of his new words few have gained general recognition.
He was much more successful in the second of his life-long efforts; in the introduction of the æsthetic ideals of the Greeks into Hungary. We have seen above, that the neglect of the study of Greek literature in Hungary had, in the preceding periods stunted the growth of Hungarian Literature. Literature, like sculpture, is born of Greek parents; and none but nations trained in the Hellenic world of ideas, can make a literature proper. In Germany, Lessing, Wieland, Herder and Goethe were so profoundly imbued with Hellenic modes of thought and moulds of expression, that many of their best works have, as has been felicitously remarked, enriched ancient Greek literature. So deep were in Germany, through the works of these men, the furrows of Greek thought, that even writers like Schiller, who did not know Greek, were full of the Greek spirit of beauty and moderation, and amongst its most ardent propagators. It was from these German Hellenes that Kazinczy learned the great and invaluable lesson of Greek idealism, that spiritual atmosphere in which the human intellect feels as different from its ordinary sensations, as does the human body in a river. Kazinczy was the first of the Hungarian writers whose soul had undergone the process of Platonization, to use this clumsy but expressive word for a process, the chief stages of which are an increased familiarity with mental tempers, the greatest exponent of which was Plato. In Kazinczy’s wide correspondence with nearly all the literary men of his age; in his greater and smaller works; in his personal interviews with the leading men of his time; he invariably, and with noble persistency, endeavoured to instil Hellenic ideals of form, of beauty, of serenity. He had clearly seen how much German literature had been benefited by the adoption of those ideals; he sincerely and fervently wanted to confer the same boon on the literature of his own country. This endeavour constitutes his greatness, as its success does his historic importance. His own poems are mediocre; yet he has the merit of being the author of the first sonnets in Hungarian; his forte lies in his prose works, and there chiefly in his translations from the classical writers of Rome, Germany, France and England. It was also his indefatigable activity which gave rise to a wholesome literary controversy about the nature and limits of a radical reform of the Hungarian language as a vehicle of literature. This controversy merits special mention.
Omitting the names of some learned precursors, whose works have not much advanced the philological study of the Hungarian language, it may be stated, that the first to subject that idiom to a careful and systematic study based on researches into its historical development, was Nicolas Révai. In his Elaboratior Grammatica Hungarica (1806, 2 vols.), he summed up his previous essays, and placed Hungarian philology on a tolerably sure basis, after the manner subsequently adopted by Jacob Grimm for Germanic philology. Although he still hankered after the purely imaginary affinity between Magyar and the Semitic languages, he yet succeeded in clearing up many a vital point in Hungarian historic grammar. With regard to the then wanted reform of the language, he taught that that reform ought to proceed on the lines of the laws of language as discovered by a close study of the ancient remains of Hungarian Literature. He was vehemently opposed by Verseghy ([see page 85]), who taught that the reform ought to be guided, not by the bygone forms of Hungarian, but by those actually in force. It is now pretty clear, that while the science of language is sure to be enriched by methods of study such as that of Révai, the art of language is more likely to gain by the advice of Verseghy. Kazinczy, who possessed neither Révai’s philologic erudition, nor Verseghy’s powers of philologic analysis, but who adopted principles of reform from both, Kazinczy became the centre of the passionate warfare that now arose for the golden fleece of “Pure Magyar.” The Conservative party, whose headquarters were at Debreczen, Somogy, Szeged, and Veszprém, were called orthologues; the adherents of Kazinczy, neologues. Satyric writings were published by both; by the orthologues: “Búsongó Amor,” 1806, and the still more famous “Mondolat,” 1813; by the neologues: “Felelet,” 1816, written by Kölcsey and Szemere; and chiefly, the prize-essay of Count Joseph Teleki, in 1817. In the end most of the work of the neologues has been accepted by the nation.