CHAPTER XXIX.
The dramatic literature of the Hungarians, as may be seen from the preceding chapters, was, at the beginning of the twenties of this century, in a most backward condition. For reasons that it is very difficult to ascertain, some of the most dramatic nations, such as the Italians, have rarely or never excelled in drama-writing; while the English, who do not claim to be either conspicuously emotional or dramatic, have given the world the incomparable dramas of Shakespeare. In Italy, the lack of great dramatists may perhaps be ascribed to the fact, that female parts were, at least down to the end of the last century, played by boys. Yet a glance at the Attic theatre deprives this reason of much of its value. Be this as it may, the great influence of theatres and acting on dramatists can scarcely be denied. In Hungary, at any rate, the very indifferent condition of the theatre in the first three decades of the century bulks large amongst the causes producing a dearth of good Magyar dramas. This becomes evident when we consider that the first really great drama of a Magyar writer, “Banus Bánk” (“Bánk bán”), by Katona, passed unnoticed for over fourteen years (1818-1834), until a great actor, Gabriel Egressy, made it popular. The Hungarians are naturally good actors, and very fond of theatre-going. It will perhaps scarcely be believed in the enlightened west, where so late as November, 1897, one of the leading daily papers of England was permitted to speak of English and French literature as the only two great literatures of the modern world, that in Hungary there has been, and for some time too, a wealth of dramas of an intrinsic value at least as great as that of any British drama written within the last hundred and fifty years, and played by actors and actresses fully the equals of their colleagues at the Comédie Française. This remarkable growth of dramatic literature in Hungary did not, however, begin before the fourth decade of the present century. The epics and ballads of Vörösmarty, Garay, Czuczor, etc., seemed to captivate the public to the exclusion of all other forms of poetry. The patriotic tune ringing, and expected to ring through all popular works previous to the Revolution of 1848, threw their authors into the worship of the heroic past and thus into Romanticism. It was, accordingly, quite natural that dramatists, in order to catch the public ear, indulged rather in heroic ranting and tirades, than in dramatic characterization. The heroes of the tragedies of Charles Kisfaludy ([see page 116]), for instance, are rhetoric blown into the shape of persons. Everything Magyar is perfect; the Magyars are delicately reminded, in pages full of endless adulation, that they are, to use an American phrase, “the greatest, the best fed, and the best clad nation on the face of the globe.” Their heroes are the greatest; their past the most glorious. This sort of jingoism may be tolerated in epics and ballads, where other redeeming features may save the literary value of the work. In dramas it is fatal. Yet it is in the drama where Romanticism may attain to really perfect works. The writer of romantic ballads must, in the end, fall into the snares of an exaggerated patriotism, and thus vitiate his work, rendering it less acceptable to a sober and unchauvinistic posterity. The dramatic writer, on the other hand, need not necessarily run the same risk. If he has power to chisel out of the given material of a nation’s past one or the other truly human character in all its grandeur, and in all its shortcomings, then the historic staging and bygone emotional atmosphere of the past will serve only to set off the dramatic beauties of the work all the more plastically. Arany’s Edward I. in the “Bards of Wales” ([see page 200]), is a ruthless and senseless tyrant that must pall on us in the end. Richard III., on the other hand, can never pall on us; for in him we recognize many an unavowed demon ravaging our own souls. Arany’s Edward I. is a ballad-figure; Shakespeare’s Richard III. is a piece of true humanity. To the dramatic poet it is indifferent from what part of the globe he takes his material; for humanity is spread all over the planet. So a nation’s heroic past too may be quite welcome to him, provided he is a real dramatist. Katona was such. He is rough and inharmonious in language, but there is real dramatic life in his men and women. For the first time in Hungarian Literature the true tone of tragedy was heard. The terrible fate of the Banus comes home to hearers, Hungarian or otherwise; it is yawning out of the abyss of conflicts to which all of us are liable. He is a loyal subject of his king, and yet bursts out in open rebellion; nay worse, he kills his queen. He is a great patriot; yet finally makes a rebellious plot with a foreign adventurer. He is a perfect nobleman; yet ultimately breaks all the laws of true nobility. He is a loving husband; yet contemplates assassinating his beautiful wife. And as he is, so are the other persons of the drama. In them is pictured the conflicting nature of the human heart and character as it really is: rough, unbending, false, yet capable of sublime self-abnegation. Or as Petőfi says: “Rain from heaven turning mud on earth.” The plot is as follows: Bánk, in the absence of King Andrew II. of Hungary justiciar of the country, has reason to believe that Gertrude, the haughty and unpopular queen, countenances the vile designs of her brother Otto on Bánk’s beautiful wife Melinda. A rebellion of the malcontent nobles under Petur is breaking out. Bánk, who ought to quell it by virtue of his office, is thrown out of his moral equilibrium by the news that Melinda has been seduced by Otto. Forgetful of his position, he obeys only the behests of his outraged soul and kills Gertrude. The king returns, the rebellion is put down, and Bánk perishes. In Katona’s drama there is more power than form. It will easily be understood that his chief model was Shakespeare. He himself did not live to see the great success of his only masterpiece; he died broken-spirited in 1830 at Kecskemét, in the thirty-eighth year of his luckless life.
The first remarkable Hungarian dramatist after Katona is Edward Szigligeti (his real name was Joseph Szatmáry), 1814-1878. From an early date he was in constant contact with the theatre and with actors, and so acquired great practical knowledge of stage-lore. He had deeply studied the art of stage effect, and all his very numerous dramatic works testify to an extraordinary stage-craft. It would, however, be unfair to compare him to writers like Kotzebue in Germany, or Labiche in France. His routine, no doubt, was pre-eminent in many of his pieces; yet, beside and beyond the mere cleverness of the playwright, he had real vis comica and a profound knowledge of Hungarian society. During his life-time that society was slowly but steadily emerging from the semi-civilized state of the former patriarchalism to the forms and usages of modern life. In such periods of transition there is ample material for anyone gifted with a keen sense of humour. The aping of western manners (ridiculed in “Marna,” 1857; “Female Rule” [“Nőuralom” 1862], etc.); the humour of the altered family-life (“Three Matrimonial Commands” [“Házassági három parancs,”] 1850; “Stephen Dalos” [Dalos Pista], 1855; etc.); odd remnants of the former social state, such as tramping actors, the still-life of small towns; all this Szigligeti knew how to dramatize with great effect. Like Charles Kisfaludy he drew with great felicity on the stores of drastic humour pervading a conservative society composed of many a discrepant element and moving onwards on entirely new lines of development. He tried his skilful hand at tragedies too, and “The Shadows of Light” (“A fény árnyai,” 1865,) and “The Pretender” (“A trónkereső”, 1868,) are said to be meritorious. His rare stage-craft and witty dialogue alone, however, could not have raised his name to the height on which it rests, and where in all probability it will continue to rest. Szigligeti’s name is justly famous for being the real founder of what, for lack of a better name in English, must be called the Hungarian folk-drama. In England there is no such thing, and no such word. Already in our remarks on Arany ([see page 195]), we essayed to show that the continental peasantry is generically different from any class of small farmers in England. That peasantry is, in reality, a world of its own. It is as much a world of its own, as is the well-known world of the “upper ten.” He who has never been in what the knowing call “le monde,” will easily confound the sentiments and thoughts of his own world with those of the “monde.” Yet the two worlds are two worlds indeed. Their whole tone and rhythm of life is different. They are written not only in different scales but also for different instruments. It is even so with the world of peasantry in Hungary or in Austria. How silly of some painfully enlightened people to ascribe, for instance, the mass of prejudice and superstition in the Hungarian or German peasantry to a lack of that “Bildung” or school-knowledge which is acquired through books and bookmen! The current belief in witches, fairies, imps and such-like elf-folk, good and bad, grows with the peasantry of those countries, out of the same roots that nourish in the “higher classes” the craving for and the delight in fairy operas and fantastic novels. Each social “world” demands pleasures and distractions of the same kind; each satisfying that craving in a different manner. The urban gentleman and lady while away tedious winter evenings by visits to theatres, where unlikely, demoniac and over-exciting pieces are an everyday occurrence. The peasants in Hungary have no such theatres; yet long winter evenings hang just as heavily on their hands. They therefore while away their leisure-hours by stories fantastic and demoniac, the literal belief in which must needs grow in direct proportion to the lack of all theatrical stage environment. As with superstitions, so it is with all the other great social needs. The Hungarian peasant, when outraged in his sentiments, does not, it is true, fight a duel like the gentleman. Yet he, too, becomes a duellist, retiring into the woods, and fighting society at large as a “szegény legény” or brigand. Plus cela change, plus c’est la même chose.
It will now be perhaps somewhat clearer that the Hungarian peasantry, qua peasantry, lends itself to dramatization in the same way as does any other of the “worlds of men.” The common humanity of men is to be found in that peasantry too; but it is modified, coloured, and discoloured, “timbred” and attuned in a different mood. It admits of tragedies proper; of comedies; and of burlesques. It is Szigligeti’s great merit to have discovered this new dramatic ore. Without in the least trying to diminish his glory, we cannot but add, that through the great revolution coming over Hungary as over the rest of Europe, in the period from the third to the seventh decade of this century, a revolution social no less than political, the peculiar and distinct character of the world of peasants became, by contrast to the rising bourgeoisie and the changing nobility, much more easily discernible than it had been ever before in Hungary. Yet Szigligeti was the first to seize on that dramatic res nullius; and both for this discovery and the excellent specimens of folk-dramas which he wrote, he deserves all credit. His most remarkable folk-dramas are: “The Deserter” (“Szökött Katona,” 1843); “The Csikós” (1846); and “The Foundling” (“Lelencz,” 1863).
We can here only mention the dramas of Sigismund Czakó, who for some time before his voluntary death in 1847, was very popular; of Charles Obernyik (1816-1855); and of Ignatius Nagy; the two latter being very popular before the Revolution of 1848, owing to their excessively “patriotic” dialogues. A far higher place in Hungarian dramatic literature is due to the noble Count Ladislas Teleky, who also died by his own hand. His “The Favourite” (“A Kegyencz,” 1841), the subject of which is taken from the time of the Roman Emperor Valentinian III., is credited with great force of irony, dramatic truth and power of imagination. In Charles Hugo (recte Charles Hugo Bernstein), 1817-1877, the Hungarian drama might have gained a dramatic power of rare quality, had the overweening self-infatuation of the author, together with his poor knowledge of Magyar, not rendered him a victim to his first success. He is one of the numerous Titans of the Hungarian capital, who cannot do anything half-way creditable unless they fail to gain reputation. No sooner do they become “famous,” than they cease to be either interesting or productive. Hugo’s “Banker and Baron” (“Bankár és Báró”) had not only a great, but an extraordinary success. Not only incense was strewn before the poet, but, to use Lessing’s phrase, the very censer was hurled at his head. The enthusiastic crowd carried the author bodily from the theatre to his favourite Café. This unhinged poor Hugo’s mental equilibrium. He considered himself a second Victor Hugo; and so never wrote any other great drama. The merit of “Banker and Baron” is very considerable. It is one of the then few attempts at writing a real bourgeois drama, in which the common human heritage of virtues and vices, affections and passions, is presented with great force and dramatic vivacity.
Of a style and tone quite different from the preceding dramas is the “dramatic poem,” as the author calls it, entitled “The Tragedy of Man,” by Emericus Madách (1829-1864). In that great poem there is revealed all the sombreness of profound melancholy, wailing over the bootless struggle of Man since the unlucky moment of his creation. As the reader may have noticed in the course of the present work, the Hungarians, as a nation, are strongly inclined to pathos; just as the English are to satire and the French to irony. In the youthful members of the Magyar nation that bent is at times so strong as to dominate all the other modes and faculties of the soul. Hence the astounding wealth of grave Largos in Hungarian music, and the melancholy and despondent tone in many a great work of Hungarian poetry. Few poems can compare in unaffected sadness and thus twice saddening effect with Arany’s “Epilogus.” Madách’s “Tragedy of Man” (“Az ember tragédiája”) is, as it were, the funeral march of humanity. It would be utterly wrong to compare it to Goethe’s “Faust.” Although there is a general similarity in the drift of the two works, yet the poem of the luckless and suffering county official of an obscure Hungarian province is essentially different from the drama of the Jupiter of German literature. Madách’s poem is, reduced to its skeleton, a philosophy of History. He takes us from the hour when Adam and Eve were innocently walking in the Garden of Eden, to the times of the Egyptian Pharaohs; then to the Athens of Miltiades; to sinking Rome; to the adventurous period of the Crusaders; into the study of the astronomer Kepler in the seventeenth century; thence into the horrors of the French Revolution; into greed-eaten and commerce-ridden modern London; nay, into the ultra-socialist state of the future, in which there will be no family, no nation, and no individuality amongst the countless individuals; and where the ideas of the preceding ages, such as Religion, Art, Literature, will, by means of scientific formulæ, be shown up in all their absurdity; still further, the poet shows the future of the earth, when ice will cover the whole of its surface, and Europeans and other human beings will be reduced to the state of a degraded brute dragging on the misery of existence in some cave. In all these scenes, Adam, Eve and the arch-fiend (Lucifer) are the chief and constantly recurring personæ dramatis. In fact, all these scenes are meant to be prophetic dreams of Adam, which Lucifer causes him to have in order to disgust him with humanity in advance, and so, by driving him to suicide, to discontinue humanity. In paradise, Adam learns and teaches the lesson of man’s incapability of enduring bliss; in Egypt, Adam, as Pharaoh, experiences the bottomless wretchedness of tyranny, where “millions live for the sake of one;” in Athens he is made to shudder at the contemptible fickleness of man when part of a crowd; in sinking Rome he stands aghast at the corruptibility of mankind, and in the Crusades at their fanaticism; in the study of Kepler he comprehends the sickening vanity of all attempts at real knowledge, and in Paris he is shown the godless fury of a people fighting for the dream called Liberty. So in the end, Adam, despairing of his race, wants to commit suicide, when, in the critical moment, Eve tells him that she is going to be a mother by him; whereby his intention of discontinuing his race by suicide is baffled. Adam then prostrates himself before God, who encourages him to hope and trust, making him feel that man is part of an infinite and indestructible power, and will struggle not quite in vain. Like Goethe’s Faust, the great poem of Madách was not meant for the stage; yet, like Faust, it has proved of intense effect on the stage too. It is, as may be seen, a philosophic poem excelling rather in the beauty and loftiness of the thoughts conveyed or suggested than by power of characterization or dramatic vigour. In general literature we should like to compare it most to the “De rerum natura” of Lucretius. The powerful melancholy of the Roman is of a kind with the gloom of the Hungarian; and while the former dwells more on the material and religious aspect of man, and the latter on social phenomena in all their width and breadth, yet both sing the same tempestuous nocturne of Man’s sufferings and shortcomings, illuminating the night of their despondency by stars of luminous thought. Madách died at too early an age to finish more than this one masterpiece. His other poems are inferior.
Dramatic literature in Hungary in the last thirty years has been growing very rapidly; and both the drama of the “world” folk, and that of the “world” monde has met with very gifted, nay, in some cases, exceedingly gifted writers. During that period, Hungary has completely regained its absolute autonomy, and the Hungarian State, from having had an annual revenue of not quite sixteen millions in 1867, has now a revenue of over forty million pounds a year. Budapest has grown to be a town of over six hundred thousand inhabitants; and the general progress of Hungary, material as well as intellectual, social and political, has been such as, relatively, that of no other country in Europe in the same period. In the midst of the dramatic movement of all organs of the Hungarian commonwealth, the drama proper could not but make great strides too. It is here impossible to do justice to each of the very numerous and talented Hungarian dramatists of our day. We should only like, in treating of a necessarily small number of modern Hungarian writers of dramatic works, to premise a remark in the interest of a better understanding of their literary value. The English or American public are, as a rule, very much inclined to think little of things of which they have “never heard.” We are not blaming them for that. Reading as they do great newspapers every day, they naturally come to think that, to alter the old legal phrase, “what is not to be found in the ‘paper,’ that does not exist.” Hungarian dramas are seldom or never translated for the English stage; they are never talked about in the press; hence, the general public will tacitly assume that they can be worth but little. However, it is with Hungarian dramas as with Hungarian fruit. Although Hungary produces exquisite fruit of all kinds, and in enormous quantities too, the English consumer of fruit has never heard of “Hungarian apples” or “Hungarian grapes,” while he is quite familiar with American or Tasmanian apples of an inferior quality. The reason of that is simple: the Hungarians are still in the infancy of the great art of export. It is even so with the Hungarian drama. It is not being cleverly enough exported; it wants active agents and middlemen to bruit it about. We venture to say that the western nations are the losers by ignoring or overlooking, as they do, the modern Hungarian drama. In taking the trouble to make the acquaintance of the dramas of Eugene Rákosi, Edward Tóth, Gregory Csiky, Lewis Dóczi, Lewis Dobsa, Joseph Szigeti, John Vajda, Árpád Berczik, Stephen Toldy, Anton Várady, Lewis Bartók, etc., etc., they would find that together with the greatest European mines for ore proper, Hungary has also many a profound mine of ore dramatic, no less than fine specimens of coins minted out of that ore. There is now a “tradition” of no inconsiderable duration in the art of acting; and several actors of the very first quality, such as Rose Laborfalvy (the late Mrs. Jókai), Louise Blaha, Lendvay, Egressy, etc., have set examples and models, inspiring both the poet and the actor. The theatres at Budapest are magnificently equipped, and being, as they are, part of the great national treasure, they partake to a great extent of the nature of a temple, and are visited, not as places of sheer distraction, but as localities of national rallying and spiritual elevation.
Most of the leading dramatists of the last five-and-twenty years are still alive, and it is, therefore, twice difficult to pass a final judgment on their works. Mr. Eugene Rákosi, both as a journalist and a drama-writer, occupies a very conspicuous place, and if better known in the west of Europe, would certainly be read, and his pieces seen, with marked interest. Like Mr. Dóczi, who is a high official in the common department of Austria-Hungary, he has that subtle and unanalyzable force of surrounding his scenes, and also frequently his persons, with the splendour of poetic suggestiveness. In his “Endre and Johanna,” “Wars of Queens” (“Királynék harcza”), “The School of Love” (“Szerelem iskolája”), he does not make it his chief point to create, entangle, still more embroil, and then finally solve a “problem,” although he is a master of scene and situation-making. Nor do he and Mr. Dóczi care to be “realists.” They are satisfied with being poets. Mr. Dóczi has in his “The Kiss” (“Csók”) ventured on writing in words what hitherto has only been a success in the tones of Mendelssohn: a drama moving in mid-air, in midsummer night, with gossamery persons and fairy-ideas, away, far away from our time and land. In that he has been signally successful, and Mendelssohn’s overture to the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is not sweeter and airier than Mr. Dóczi’s “Kiss.” Like Mr. Rákosi, Mr. Dóczi is a master of Hungarian and he wields the German idiom too with the same grace and energy.
In our opinion Gregory Csiky (born 1842, died recently) was the strongest dramatic talent amongst the modern dramatists in Hungary. He is what people are pleased to call a “realist;” that is, his shafts are sunk into the dramatic mines of the society in the midst of which he lives. His strong satire and broad humour, his finely-chiselled language and the bold and true way of his dramatization raise him to the level of the best of contemporary dramatists in any country. In his “The Proletarians” (“A Proletárok”) he has seized on a large class of déclassés in Hungary, who by the precipitated legislative reforms after 1867 were deprived of their previous means of living, and so turned to parasitic methods of eking out an existence. That class is brought to dramatic life full of humorous, sad, and striking phenomena. There is not in this drama, any more than in Csiky’s other dramas (“Bubbles” [“Buborékok”], “Two Loves” [“Két szerelem”], “The Timid” [“A szégyenlős”], “Athalia,” etc.) the slightest trace of that morbid psychologism which has made the fortune of Ibsen. It is all sound, fresh, penetrating and vibrating with true dramatic life. Last, not least, there is much beauty of form and construction. Csiky, who has published very valuable translations of Sophocles and Plautus, is thoroughly imbued with the classic sense of form and with the real vocation of the drama as the art-work showing the emotional and mental movements of social types, and not of some pathologic excrescence of society. In other words, he does not muddle up, as Ibsen does, the novel with the drama.
Amongst the writers of “folk-dramas,” Edward Tóth (1844-1876), occupies a very high place. His “The Village Scamp” (“A falu rossza”) tells the touching story of a young peasant who, disappointed in love, loses all moral backbone and is finally saved by the fidelity of a woman. The drama is full of scenes taken from Hungarian peasant life, which is far more dramatic than peasant life in Germany. The Hungarians have, till quite recently, never had a Berthold Auerbach, or a novelist taking the subject of his novels from peasant life. They have dramatists of peasant life instead; and a short comparison with the peasant dramas written by Austrians, such as those of Anzengruber, will show the decided superiority of the Hungarians. One strong element in the folk-dramas of Tóth and of Francis Csepreghy (1842-1880, author of “The Yellow Colt” [“A sárga csikó”], “The Red Purse” [“Piros bugyelláris”]), is the folk-poems and folk-songs, sung and danced. By this incidental element of tone and verse, which, as a sort of inarticulate commentary on the dramatic scenes does duty for the philosophic reflections of the non-peasant drama, the hearer is brought into intimate touch with the very innermost pulsation of the life of the “folk.”