CHAPTER XXVIII.
Outside Hungary, the name of John Arany is seldom heard; and western readers will be astonished to hear that Arany is considered by many of the best known Magyar critics the greatest of the Hungarian poets. Petőfi has never quite pleased the professors of æsthetics and poetry in the various universities and “academies” of Hungary; and there being no Magyar Saint Beuves or August Schlegels, to guide, with tact sustained by learning, and learning eased by tact, the tastes and literary opinions of the professorial minds in Hungary, it is not rare to hear and read of Arany as the greatest poetic genius of the Magyars. We hasten to add, that we readily bow to the greatness and charm, and still more to the merits of Arany. He is a great poet indeed. Nearly every one of his numerous ballads, epics and smaller poems is replete with the glamour of true poetry. In point of language he is, no doubt, the most idiomatic and richest of all Hungarian writers. Yet, with all these gifts and excellencies, he is not equal to Petőfi. Reaching, as he did, an age nearly three times as protracted as that of Petőfi, he could yet not, through any stretch of time or effort, attain to powers which have been bestowed upon very few poets. Petőfi ranks with the world’s greatest poets; Arany ranks only with the great poets of Hungary. To the strictly Magyar Jingo, as well as to the Magyar professor, Arany may appear greater even than Petőfi; we hope to show that his genius is of a nature at once different from and smaller than that of the incomparable Alexander.
The reader will, we trust, permit us to premise a short remark which, especially for English readers, seems indispensable for a right appreciation of Arany. In England there has long ceased to be a peasantry proper; at any rate, there has for now over 400 years been no such peasantry in England, as may still be seen on the continent generally, and in Hungary in particular. The type “peasant” is at once the arch-type of narrow-mindedness, sordidness, naïveté, and spontaneous poetry. He is conservative in the extreme and slow, yet frequently the source of great upheavals and revolutions. His speech is concrete and “terre-à-terre,” yet at the same time full of quaint metaphors and conceits. His thoughts are all on the line of synthesis; and analysis is as strange to him as generalization. He loves Nature; but he is too much at one with it, part of it, to feel poetically the gulf between Nature and Man. Honour and respect for himself and his ancient customs are as the life-atmosphere of his existence; and thus in the social architecture of the continental state to him is allotted the staying force of the pillars, beams and rafters of the building.[3] This, the general picture of the continental peasant, has to be touched up here and there when meant to represent the Hungarian peasant proper. For, luckily for Hungarian poets, the Magyar peasant, while fully as conservative and old-fashioned as his Austrian or German brother, is considerably less sordid, more frank, and altogether more “gentlemanly.” Yet he is a peasant, a part both of Hungary’s civic and natural complexion. Now it is this Hungarian peasant, and his social complement, the rural nobleman, who are the centre of Arany’s poetry. We say “complement,” for it is at present well understood by all close students of continental nobility, that the latter is, in essence and sociological drift, if not in appearance, one and the same phenomenon as the peasantry. Both classes form the conservative or static forces of continental states, and both are necessary conditions for the existence of a bourgeois proper. Without them, or without one of them, the medium or bourgeois element is altogether wanting, or, as in England, of a complexion totally at variance with the continental middle class. Now in Hungary, and more especially still, in the Hungary of Arany’s youth and first manhood (1840-1870), there was no numerous bourgeois proper; and Arany, singing in tones and images flowing from and meant for the two other classes only, is for that very reason toto coelo different from most of the German and French and also from English poets. Modern western literature, in Austria and Germany exclusively; in France almost, and in England largely so, is bourgeois poetry; poetry written by and for the middle and central classes of the community; or at any rate expressive of sentiments and mental states growing in the atmosphere of bourgeois life. The poems of Arany, on the other hand, were growing in the fields and farms of the peasant, and in the manors of the landed nobility; even more in the former than in the latter. Theirs is a spirit charming in its rural breeziness and compact humour; fascinating in its naïveté and coyness; but somewhat out of tune with the modern or bourgeois sentiment. The more the middle or bourgeois class develops in Hungary, the less the fame of Arany will continue unimpaired. His works will be unable to satisfy the poetic needs of a class which he did not know, and with which he had but scant sympathy. His very naïveté, his greatest poetic charm, will be found wanting. Naïveté, like all other tempers of the heart or mind, has its geography, its locus. It does not grow anywhere or everywhere. It requires a peculiar borderland situated where two social classes meet. In that borderland it grows willingly. Such lands are of course to be found only where classes do meet socially. In England, for instance, classes carefully avoid meeting intimately in a social manner; although they do so frequently in a manner political, commercial and religious. Hence, naïveté is scarcely to be found, either in English life or in English poetry. By a parity of reasoning, American poetry, based on a life with practically no classes whatever, can boast still fewer of the blossoms of naïve types or naïve style. Arany’s world, it is true, is one where the two classes, the nobleman and the peasant, do meet intimately, and thus the flowers of naïveté are plentiful. It is a naïveté shy of display and timid; a naïveté in deeds more than in words; and finally, a naïveté of men rather than of women. It has, when enjoyed in Arany’s own exquisite Magyar, a flavour so pure and hearty, so thoroughly true and poetic as to endear everything it touches. Yet it is the naïveté of the peasant, not of the bourgeois. It is poor in types, and restricted in emotions. It does not respond to the psychical atmosphere of the ever growing bourgeois class in Hungary, and accordingly the numerous readers of that class look for their reading somewhere else. The peasant and the rural nobleman are both captivating types for poets; they do not, however, represent more than a minor aspect of that broad humanity which has so far found its noblest expression in tales, dramas and poems grafted on events or sentiments of individuals outside the clans and septs of peasants and noblemen. The Germans, who have the excellent term of “bürgerliches Drama” (bourgeois drama), have felt that profound change coming over western literature very keenly; and the greatness of their literature is owing to that circumstance in no small degree. As in Hungary, nearly all great writers were, first magnates, and then noblemen (even Petőfi was a nobleman, although he set no value on that fact), so in Germany all the great writers have been without an exception, “Bürger” (bourgeois) proper. Now it is the peculiar greatness of Petőfi that many of his poems appeal to the sentiments and mental attitudes of that specifically modern public, the bourgeois readers, with a force and sympathy as strong as is the charm of many others to the “common people” or peasants of Hungary. It is said of Pico de Mirandola that while he excited the awe and admiration of the most learned and thoughtful men at the end of the fifteenth century Rome and Florence, the maidens and young men of the beautiful city on the Arno were singing with delight his exquisite love-songs. Such is Petőfi; such is not Arany. He cannot properly be enjoyed except in his own Magyar, and by readers intimately acquainted with the two classes he belongs to. Not even when he selects, as he sometimes does, foreign subjects, as in his “The Bards of Wales,” does he become less “clannish.” Of the strongest of all feelings of young humanity, of Love, he has none but epic expression; he never wrote a love-song proper. The women in his epics are mere phantasms, angels or fiends; and his men are peasants or heroes, or both. The point on which he excels every other Hungarian poet, and on which will repose his lasting fame, is his language. It has the raciness of the peasant’s talk with the moderation of refined style. In other countries writers introduced new elements of poetic speech by means of using words or phrases taken or imitated from one of the dialects of their province or county. Even in Shakespeare there are traces of the then Warwickshire dialect, and probably still more of Warwickshire folk-lore. German writers have legitimated innumerable provincialisms. Hungarian, on the other hand, has no dialects, or none to speak of. The writer who wants to find new linguistic affluents can turn only to the stock used by the peasants in the vast plain of Hungary. Arany, replete as he was with all the wealth of the language used by the peasants, knew how to ennoble and purify the language of the farmers and shepherds of the puszta, and to impart to it much of that Greek simplicity and beauty of which, as a scholar, he was so competent a student. As the French language is not rich in words but in idioms, so Hungarian is not rich in words but in word-formations. Especially the verb admits of a variety of forms and terminations enveloping every shade of thought or movement with the glibness of water. It is in such linguistic feats that Arany shows his genius; and since language in Hungary has an importance tenfold more significant than in countries composed of less polyglot peoples, it is quite natural that in the literary appreciation of Arany at the hands of Magyar critics the political element has played a very considerable part. This is, as we stated above, his great merit. Language in all modern countries has at first been the make of the peasant classes. In them there is that mysterious and instinctive power which has produced the splendid series of Romance and Teutonic languages which, by literary craft, have come to be formed into the diction of Dante, Cervantes, Molière, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Arany, in focussing this power with the strength of a mind at once logopoeic and richly stored with knowledge, did an inestimable service to the cause of Magyar Literature and Magyar Nationality. In that respect he occupies in Hungarian Literature a place undoubtedly higher than that of any other Magyar writer. In matter, he could not fully unite the strictly Magyar with the broader European element; in poetic language, on the other hand, he did achieve that union; and it is in that achievement of his that we must look for his specific genius and merit.
Unlike as was Arany’s personality to that of Petőfi: the former modest and retiring, the latter self-assertive and dashing; their careers too were equally different from each other. Arany’s life (1817-Oct. 22nd, 1882), was one of quiet work first as a teacher, and later on (1860), as president of the Kisfaludy Society, and since 1864, as Secretary of the Academy of Science. The latter part of his life was distressed by persistent ill-health. In character Arany belonged to the select few, who have never stooped to any baseness whatever and never lost sight of the ideals of their youth. He was the intimate friend of Petőfi, who at once recognized his greatness, and the tolerant patron of the younger generation of writers. The nation mourned his death as a national calamity.
Arany is, almost exclusively, a poet of epic songs, epics proper and ballads. Of the former his most finished works are the Toldi Trilogy, consisting of “Toldi” (the name of the hero, published in 1847); “Toldi szerelme” (“The love of Toldi,” published in 1879); and “Toldi estéje” (“The eve of Toldi,” published previously in 1854). These three epics, written in rhymed six-feet stanzas of eight lines each, tell the life-story of an historic Magyar peasant-hero of the fourteenth century, in the times of King Lewis, justly called the “Great.” He is of herculean strength, of violent temper, but good-hearted, simple, a loving son, and a loyal friend and subject. His struggle against his wicked brother; his love for Piroska, whom, in a passage at arms, he foolishly wins for another wooer; his despair at seeing the idol of his heart the wife of another; finally, his declining years when he finds himself out of accord with the changed times, and retires home to be put into the grave he had dug for himself. Such is, in the main, the contents of the three epics, into which the wizard language of Arany has infused the charms of real poetry. It would be idle to compare Arany’s art with that of Goethe’s “Hermann und Dorothea.” Goethe’s hero too is rather a peasant farmer than a bourgeois. Yet all the other figures of Goethe’s masterpiece are endowed with life so intensely bourgeois, as to secure admiration for the work in all times to come. Arany’s hero; his dear old mother; his brother; his love, etc., scarcely leave the boundaries of peasant-world; and while his epic will thus for ever charm the youth of Hungary, it may in future cease to be an object of lasting admiration on the part of the more mature classes of the nation.
The same great qualities of linguistic verve and intense poetic sentiment are to be found in the other epical poems of Arany. In the “Death of Buda” (Buda halála, 1864), he sings the legendary story of Attila’s murder of his own brother Buda (Bleda). In this exquisite epic Attila (or Etele, as Arany calls him), is pictured as a hero of the magnificent type, and nothing could be more removed from the poet’s “Etele,” than the conventional or historic Attila. Tragical energy and incomparable language render this poem one of intense charm. It was intended for one of three great epics narrating the cycle of Hun legends; of the other two we have only fragments. The romantic story of Wesselényi and Mary Szécsi ([see page 58]), was made into a charming epic by Arany, under the title “The capture of Murány” (“Murány ostroma,” 1849). In “The Gypsies of Nagy Ida” (“A nagyidai czigányok,” 1852), Arany gave vent, in form of a satirical burlesque, to his profound sorrow over his country’s decadence, after the suppression of the liberal movement in 1848-1849. His ballads are generally considered to represent the best specimens of Magyar ballad-writing. It must certainly be conceded that few ballad-writers, whether in or outside Hungary, have so completely hit the true ballad-tone, or internal ring of thought and word adapted to subjects so utterly out of keeping with our modern sentiment. It may be doubted whether Chopin himself in his ballad in F major has so felicitously intuned the lay of olden romance as has Arany in his mostly sombre ballads, such as “Duel at midnight” (“Éjféli párbaj”), “Knight Pázmán” (“Pázmán lovag”), “Marfeast” (“Ünneprontók”). As in the best English or German ballads, events are, as a rule, only indicated, not described, and hurry on to their fatal termination with terrible speed. All is action and fierce movement.
In addition to his activity as a creative poet, Arany also did much for the introduction of foreign and classical literature into Hungary by way of translations. His most successful work in that line were the translations of several dramas of Shakespeare (Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, King John), and more especially still his most exquisite (—pace all the German philologists!—) translation of the comedies of Aristophanes.
We ought now to devote a considerable space to a poet who, in his time, was generally associated with Petőfi and Arany. We mean Michael Tompa (1817-1868). While it is now impossible to rank Tompa with either Petőfi or Arany, he yet occupies a very conspicuous place in Magyar literature. His intense love of nature, his profound religious sentiment, and his fine humour entitle him to be considered as foremost amongst the lesser lyrical glories of Hungary. We can only regret that we cannot give here more than this bare indication of the peculiar individuality of the author of the “Flower-fables” (Virágregék).