CHAPTER XXV.
The second great novelist in that period was Eötvös. Born in 1813, he received a careful education, and after extensive travels in western Europe, embraced the judicial career for a time. When still a young man, at the age of six-and-twenty, he published his first great novel, “The Carthusian” (“A Karthauzi,” 1839-40). This remarkable work had an immense effect. It was read with equal delight in the palaces of the magnates, and in the closets of the middle-class people. It charmed the young and moved the old. It seemed to express the very innermost cravings and mental propensities of the then Hungarian public. More than that. It expressed a state of feeling then almost universal on the continent of Europe. Like Goethe’s “Werther,” it lent expression to what lay dormant and unexpressed in the hearts of millions of Europeans. The sultry atmosphere then weighing on continental Europe had engendered a morbid melancholy in many a high-strung man and woman. Life seemed to be full of unsolved and unsolvable problems; full of forces disruptive and disintegrating, causing unease uncertainty and distress. All the nobler efforts of men in building up their private or public fortunes appeared to be blighted and marred by the demoniac perverseness of the political and social powers of the time. A brooding meditativeness seized people, and fresh and vigorous deeds being impossible, pale and despondent reflections embroiled men in a dumb struggle against destiny. Such was the mental temper of a very large class of men and women in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy. Eötvös himself had, from early youth, been given to that morbid meditativeness and self-destructive sensitiveness of the age; and the sorrowful condition of his country only increased his pathetic melancholy. Hungarian young men and women, then and now, are naturally very much more pathetic and grave than the youth of any other country. They have neither the virile alacrity of the British youth so agreeably manifested in the games and muscular amusements of young England; nor the precocious polish and gaiety of French youths. Theirs is a heavy mood, similar to that of the Largos of Hungarian music, but followed by no Friss or Vivace. To souls tuned in such minor keys, the “Karthauzi” came as the very revelation of their deepest secrets. Hitherto the epics and novels written in Hungary had been retrospective work. They narrated the woes and joys, the troubles and glories of past ages. In Eötvös’ novel there was, practically for the first time, a work of introspective actualité; a work appealing to the reader himself, and not only to his historic imagination. The queries tormenting the young men and women of that age were here subjected to an analysis full of psychological inquisitiveness, enveloped in the gloaming of poetic descriptions of Nature. The plot of the novel is of the simplest. Gustavus, a French nobleman, in whose agitated soul are accumulated all the tempest-laden clouds of his age, seeks in vain to find peace and consolation in Love, Pleasure and Ambition. Julia, his first love, deserts him for an unworthy “other one;” Betti, his second love, he rejects himself. And so, tossed from one rock of discord to the other, he finally enters the order of the Carthusians, and there, amidst steady work and in firm faith, finds the only solution that can await characters like his: Death. Goethe, with the terrible serenity of judgment so peculiar to him, once remarked, that there are, as he called them, “problematic characters, who can do justice to no situation in which they may be placed.” Such a character is Gustavus. But such was also the general and typical character of his time; and hence the immense effect of the novel. Even the chief and serious deficiency of the novel, being as it was, the deficiency of numerous Hungarian minds of that time, only helped to increase its popularity. Eötvös could never quite overcome the inner contrast between his Franco-German education and the Magyar character of his works. Of all the great Hungarian writers, his language is the least Magyar in form and savour. The European and the Magyar were constantly battling in him and frequently to the detriment of the latter. His was not that power of blending European and national culture into a new and harmonious composition. That power is distinctively the characteristics of the classical writers of nations. It belongs only to the highest form of genius. But the reading public of the “Karthauzi” was largely recruited from amongst people in whom that conflict between western and Magyar culture had likewise not been brought to a harmonious issue. They thus found in the great novel that very failing of their own class, without which, according to Grillparzer’s profound remark, success is hardly obtainable in any profession.
In 1845, Eötvös published another great novel: “The Village Notary” (“A falu jegyzője”). It was meant to be a scathing satire on the corruption, backwardness and general administrative misery of public county life in Hungary. Eötvös, whose conceptions of the state and its organs were formed largely after the models of German, Austrian and French organizations, was deeply convinced of the utter insufficiency of that local selfgovernment, which in Hungary had nearly always been one of greater independence than that even of England. In Hungary all the leading and influential officials in the counties were elective, and from among the noble class of the county only. Being more than underpaid, they frequently abused their power, and contrived to secure a relatively large income by means of exactions and terrorizations of all kinds. The typical figure of these squires was the szolgabiró, or under-sheriff, as he may be termed, if with inaccuracy, who presided over nearly all the public affairs of one of the districts into which counties are divided. His administration was frequently carried on pasha fashion indeed; and the poorer classes were much at his mercy. Eötvös, who thought that the strongly centralized and systematized organization of French or German local governments was undoubtedly much superior to the system obtaining in Hungary, published his novel with the intention of bringing about a change in public opinion, and so finally a change in the county-system itself. To the immense benefits accruing to the Hungarians as a nation through the very system of local selfgovernment which Eötvös so cruelly exposed, he was insensible. That county-life, in spite of all its crying abuses, was the only and indispensable preliminary schooling for the functions of government in council or parliament; that these rough and uncultured county-gentry in Hungary, as well as their brethren in England, were far better fitted for some of the most important tasks of government and politics than the most methodic and punctual official in French or German local offices, to all that Eötvös paid no serious attention. His warm-hearted love of Equality and Right made him boil over at the sight of many an injustice—at the hands of men whose inferiority in point of knowledge and western culture rendered them easy objects of contempt to one who gauged all political greatness by the standard of France or Germany. Eötvös, the politician, entertained of course the same ideas about the value of the old Hungarian county-system, as did Eötvös the novelist. He was a “centralist”; and the number of his followers has been very great to the present day. They still maintain that even the present remnants of the old county-system in Hungary are very injurious to the Magyar state; and that nothing short of a total overhauling, or—to talk plainly—abolition of that system, and the introduction of French centralization in its lieu can save the kingdom of St. Stephen. In more recent times the historic work of Béla Grünwald on the social and political condition of Hungary from 1711 to 1825 (“A régi Magyarország”) has elaborated the ideas of Eötvös with the armoury of learned footnotes and systematic chapters. The novel of Eötvös is still the text of all the loud centralists in Hungary, to whom the county selfgovernment is an absurd anachronism. As a matter of fact, on the continent, Hungary is the only country where local selfgovernment is still extant. Nor can there be any doubt, that that local selfgovernment alone enabled the Magyars to hold their supremacy over the numerically stronger nations in their country. Taking the British constitution as the model of all representative government, we cannot go astray in claiming for such government three absolutely indispensable elements. First, a parliament proper, consisting of two Chambers or Houses; secondly, a cabinet proper; and thirdly, two or three real and energetic political parties, the numerous members of which take an intense interest in every one of the political issues of the day. Applying this standard to the United States, for instance, we find, that the Americans while having a federal, two-chambered parliament and also two or more genuine parties, yet have no Cabinet proper; and hence many of the features of political corruption that were rampant in England in the times from Charles II. to George III., when the Cabinet was still forming, and not yet formed, may be noticed in the United States at the present day. In the same way France has a Cabinet indeed, and also a two-chambered parliament; but genuine political parties, with members intensely interested in politics, are wanting. Hence the instability and irregularity of the French representative government. In Hungary, and there alone, the student of politics will find a perfect replica of the British constitution, in that the fine superstructure of Parliament and Cabinet is based on the broad pedestal of genuine political parties. The members of these parties take a real, passionate and untiring interest in political questions of any kind, and hence there is a real public opinion, a real nation. This basis of the political life in Hungary, where has it been quarried from but in the local selfgovernment of the counties? Interest in the mostly arid questions of politics can be acquired only by early and constant contact with men who make it almost the chief interest of their lives. It is in the county halls, and in the social reunions of the county-gentry, that the young Magyars learn the great lesson of dispensing authority, commanding respect and discussing public business with tact and prudence. It is there that men were formed who could at all times find resources to withstand the anti-national policy of the Habsburgs or the occasional rebellions of the Slav or Roumanian peasantry. Of the country-gentlemen in Hungary indeed may be said, what Macaulay wrote of the English esquire of the seventeenth century: that “his ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian. Yet he was essentially a patrician, and had, in large measure, both the virtues and vices which flourish among men set from their birth in high place, and accustomed to authority, to observance and to self-respect.” (History of England, Ch. III.) It was amongst these rough squires that the two great parties of England were formed. It was likewise amongst the much derided táblabirók and szolgabirók (squires and justices) of Hungary, that the men of 1825 and 1848 were formed; and in our time they have given Hungary one of the indispensable elements of representative government: real political parties.
It appears necessary to dwell at some length on the great historic and political questions underlying the famous novel of Eötvös. No doubt, every Hungarian cannot but wish to see that novel in the hands of all who take an interest in Hungary. For, “The Village Notary” contains capital portraits of many a quaint, wild or pathetic type of inner Hungary. The down-trodden notary (Tengelyi); the tyrannical szolgabiró (or squire) Paul Nyúzó (meaning: flayer); Viola, the honest peasant, who being shamefully wronged betakes himself to the forest and pusztas (prairies) to lead the life of a robber; Mrs. Réty, the wife of the chief magistrate of the county, who is entangled in a fearful domestic tragedy, etc., etc. Moreover, the novel contains excellent pieces of irony and satire; and being reared on the broad idea of social reform never sinks to mere pamphleteering. Yet, with all that, we cannot but protest against the misstatement of the political importance of county-life in Hungary as advanced in that novel. Fully acknowledging, as we do, its literary value, which is diminished only by the heavy and un-Magyar diction, we deprecate its judgment on an institution without which Hungary would have long been reduced to the level of a mere province of Austria. Eötvös, like most idealists bred in the school of German idealism, could not endure rough Reality. He forgot, that for the making of history, as for that of bread, unclean matter is, at certain stages, an indispensable element.
We have two more novels by Eötvös: “Hungary in 1514” (“Magyarország 1514 ben,” 1847), which is a fair picture of the time of the peasant-rebellion in Hungary, under George Dózsa; and “The Sisters” (“A nővérek,” 1857), a feeble story with many ideas on Education.
On Eötvös, as a writer on politics, and the Philosophy of History, [see page 251]. It may here be mentioned that Eötvös, who was President of the Academy, was frequently called upon to deliver commemorative discourses on the lives and merits of deceased members of the Academy and the Kisfaludy Society ([see page 113]). His speeches are, as a rule, of great oratorical power, and illuminated with grand conceptions of Life and Literature. He was eminently an orator, not a rhetor; and although he seldom reached the magnificence of Kölcsey ([see page 107]), he is no unworthy follower of him.