CHAPTER XX.
The rôle of Kazinczy as mentor and model for the younger generation of his time was now allotted to a very gifted poet, Charles Kisfaludy, brother of Alexander ([see page 101]). He was born in 1788, and like his brother, became a soldier in the Austrian army. His proud father, on learning that he had, in 1811, thrown up his military career, disowned him; and Charles had to rough it in wild wanderings over Europe amidst great privations. Yet his mind, singularly widened by the view and study of European civilization, was thereby so strengthened and developed, that on his return to his country (1817), he contrived to rise from abject poverty to comparative comfort by his own literary exertions. His dramas, some of which he wrote in the course of a few days, were at once so intensely relished by the public, that Kisfaludy, who produced with equal ease poetic works of lyric or epic character, quickly became the centre of the literary life of Hungary. The “Aurora,” a literary periodical founded by him in 1822, was enriched by the contributions of the foremost writers, mostly his followers; and he himself was the rallying personality for the new literary movement. Alas! his body, less elastic than his mind, could never overcome the effects of his wanderings, and he died of consumption in 1830.
In Kisfaludy the influence of the literary ideals of the French and Germans is easily traceable. Like his models he was steeped in romanticism and worship of the distant past. Yet he was saved from the sickliness and namby-pambiness of many a German or French romantic poet by his strong sense of humour. In his dramas (“Stibor Vaida,” “Irén,” etc.) he frequently manifests strong dramatic vitality. It is in his comedies and gay stories, that he excels. His humour is broad, subtle, sympathetic and well worded. In his tragedies he did not succeed in creating a type, this, one of the safest criteria of a poet’s genius. In his comedies (“Csalódások” [“Disappointments”]; “Kérők” [“The Wooers”]; “Leányőrző” [“Girl’s Guard”], etc.) on the other hand, he has given types of undying vitality; such as “Mokány,” the rough, humorous and honest young country squire. If we consider the fact here so frequently alluded to, that social life in Hungary was up to the thirties of this century exclusively life among the county-families in the country, or in small towns; if, moreover, we remember that such life on a small scale, where each person stands out in bold relief and unencumbered by the numerous social mediocrities of large towns, is the proper foster-earth of rich personalities: it will be easy to see, that social life in Hungary in Kisfaludy’s youth was bristling with delightfully original types of men and women. They only waited for the hand of the poet to spring into their frames, and form valuable pictures. Country-life and small towns in Hungary, to the present day, are full of the most delightful types, both men and women; and the reputation of a Dickens might have been acquired by him who would have told the “adventures” and freaks of, for instance, the quaint, many-tongued sires of the county of Sáros. Kisfaludy, with the true poet’s eye saw those types, and put them bodily on his canvas. They talk on his pages that very language, full of savoury adjectives and verbal somersaults, that they used when meeting at the halls of their friends, at the “Casino” of the place or at the table in front of the Swiss Confiserie, in the sleepy streets of their county capital. In his novels, “Tollagi János” Sulyosdi Simon” moved the pathetic and lofty young girl; the coquettish and charming young wife (or “little heaven,” “mennyecske” as the Hungarian word has it); the quaint old maid, and the still quainter old bachelor. Here Kisfaludy is at his best; and in showing his fellow-writers some of the wealth to be found in their own country, he did Hungarian Literature and Hungarian nationality an immense service. In some of his lyrical poems, and especially in his truly majestic ode to the memory of the disaster of Mohács (1526), written in dystichs, Kisfaludy is frequently more than clever; in that ode he soars to the sublime. His “Eprészleány” (“Girl Gleaning Strawberries”) is a charming idyll.