1772-1825. After a period of decadence, lasting for over sixty years, Hungarian Literature was again brought to a state of revival and progress, which has gone on almost uninterruptedly to the present day. This revival is part of an immense revolution which swept over most countries of continental Europe in the second half of the last century. The most conspicuous and best known event of this Modern Renascence is the series of terrific upheavals and wars commonly called the French Revolution. It is, however, quite evident that the French Revolution was only the politic aspect of a vast movement, which in many countries outside France assumed the garb of intellectual revolutions. Thus the mental achievements that, in their totality, are called the “classical period” of German literature (1750-1805) are in the domain of Thought and Sentiment, a revolution no less colossal and far-reaching than were the ever-memorable proceedings of the French assemblées, or the bloody epics of the Revolutionary campaigns. Both were gigantic onslaughts against the Ancien Régime in institutions, manners, thought and sentiment. Accordingly, the course of both revolutions was—making due allowance for externals—essentially the same. As the French Revolution landed in, or rather was brought to its final consummation in the titanic and all-embracing personality of Napoleon, so German literature met its final trysting-place and culmination in the orchestral mind of Goethe.
The minor nations of Europe were seized by the same Revolution, if in a manner considerably less intense. The very aggressiveness of the French Revolution, its encroachments on the territories of Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria, prevented those minor nations from enacting their Revolution at once in its intellectual and political aspects. While fighting the French, they were all engaged in following them on the lines of the Revolution, first (1790-1830) for intellectual freedom; and then, after the defeat of the French armies (1830-1848), for the very political ideals that the French had been the first to proclaim. For, this was the immense advantage of the French over the other nations on the continent: they had brought their intellectual revolution through men like Turgot, d’Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc., to maturity, before they started for their crusade of politic liberty; whereas the other nations were a generation or two behind-hand, and still in the throes of their intellectual renascence.
This is not the place for a laborious inquiry into the causes of that immense Revolution which has, towards the end of the last, and in the first five decades of the present century, completely altered the face of European civilization. It is nevertheless necessary to give some account of such causes as were instrumental in ripening the intellectual aspect of that Revolution in Hungary. Among the leading causes was a structural change in the population of Hungary on the one hand, and the reaction against the provocative and anti-national measures of the Habsburgs on the other.
Up to the sixties of the last century, the population of Hungary consisted practically of (1) a rural population, comprising both magnates, noblemen and peasants; and (2) a small urban population, comprising largely foreign or Germanized craftsmen and tradespeople. Under such circumstances, literature, which is pre-eminently an urban growth, could not develop. For, not only was the urban population too small and too much immersed in material pursuits, but the only intellectual class, viz., the aristocracy, was living in the country, that is, in an atmosphere unfavourable to continuous literary efforts. By the end of the sixties, however, the structural change, above indicated, took place. Owing to a series of measures issued by Maria Theresa and Joseph II., the rural population of Hungary was liberated from its most odious fetters. Bondage, and a sort of serfdom (jobbágyság), with all its concomitant evils were almost abolished. Numerous rural families left their obscure abodes, repaired to the towns, and urban life, for the first time in Hungarian history, was raised above the low level on which it had been vegetating for centuries. With the increase of urban population came an increase of wealth and comfort; a greater activity in commerce, both mercantile and social. Many a gifted Hungarian, who would have previously spent his days in the obscurity of his county, now willingly lived in one of the rising towns. With an accelerated speed of work came a more rapid appreciation of talent, and a greater number of authors. The influx of the rural population to the town facilitated that mutual action and reaction between Nature and Man, which, in one form or other, is the main spring of literature. In England, too, the great period of Shakespeare was preceded by a similar structural change in the population. The dissolution of the monasteries and the numerous enclosures of commons, depriving as they did, hundreds of thousands of rural people of their means of livelihood, drove them into the towns, which rapidly ozonified that atmosphere of great intellectual stir, without which no great writers are possible. In Germany, too, the period of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe was preceded by a new influx of the rural population into the towns devastated by the thirty years’ war. Nor can it be doubted that Italy, in possession of highly-organized and rich towns long before any other mediæval nation, took, for this very reason, the lead in all literary matters.
This broad fact of Hungarian history (totally neglected by the historians of Hungary, probably because of its very broadness), must therefore be considered as the prime mover in the revival of Hungarian Literature. It created that mysterious propelling power which in times of progress everybody feels and nobody can account for. It was the latent and constant stimulus to renewed mental labour, and to keener delight in it. Like great rivers it was swelled by smaller affluents of causes. Thus that great structural change in nearly all parts of Hungary was accompanied by two structural changes in limited layers of Hungarian society. Maria Theresa, probably with a view of carrying Austrianization into the very hearts of the Hungarian nobles had, in 1760, established the famous Hungarian Guard in Vienna. Each county in Hungary was to send up a few young noblemen to Vienna, where they were clad in sumptuous style, and treated with all the seductive arts of a refined court. Thus a considerable number of Hungarian noblemen were given an opportunity for that higher education and refinement, which in former times had been the privilege of the select few. Vienna was in many ways a centre of Franco-German civilization, and the young Magyar noblemen derived, from a lengthy stay in the Austrian capital, a benefit similar to that for which English gentlemen flocked to Paris in the thirteenth and seventeenth century. This then, constituted one of the minor changes in the intellectual development of one class of Hungarians. There was also another change. Joseph II., in dissolving over a third of the existing monasteries, and a great number of monastic orders too, set free a number of educated men, who would have otherwise led a sterile life in the lonely cells of their monasteries. They now began to devote their unexpected leisure to pursuits of a different kind; and some amongst them became workers in the field of literature. Thus a new source of literary production was opened up.
To these structural changes in the population of Hungary, that is, to the home and internal cause of a potential revival, now came the external agency of those anti-national measures against Hungarian institutions, which Maria Theresa, with fine womanly tact, had used in a tentative manner, but which were applied by Joseph II. in the most reckless and irritating fashion. Joseph had one ideal: the homogeneous Austrian state. Like all ideals it was unrealisable. It was worse than that: it was suicidal. The Austrian empire has its very raison d’être in the heterogeneity of its constituent parts. To level down the Austrian “lands” to one and the same pattern, is to deprive them of all vitality. They live by contrast to one another. Unable to be quite independent each by itself, they would, if unconnected by some common tie, only serve to aggrandize either Prussia, Russia or Italy, and so upset the balance of Europe in a fatal manner. United by the dynastic tie, they form an imposing, if incongruous whole, the component parts still retaining very much of a strong individuality. Any attempt at forcing them into blank uniformity must needs be answered by a still stronger attempt on their part to rend the dynastic tie asunder. The various provinces have, since 1648, and with respect to Hungary, since 1711, made no civil war on one another. Not one of them had, as had Prussia in Germany since Frederick II.’s time, or England since Cromwell’s time, the supremacy over the rest. Their sole union and bond was in their common dynasty. To try to reduce them to one and the same level, as Joseph II. did, was both the worst dynastic and national policy imaginable. The Austrian provinces, then or now, if reduced to complete uniformity, will first of all abolish the dynasty—as superfluous. In the egalitarian ordinances of Joseph II. there was so much that was subversive of the very pillars and coping-stones of the whole Austrian edifice, that the Hungarians, as well as all the other nationalities under his rule (Belgians, Czechs, Poles, etc.), forthwith rose in a body in defence of their privileges, charters, rights; in fact, of their existence severally and collectively. The Emperor wanted to abolish the Hungarian language, Hungarian institutions, Hungarian society. At once the Hungarians, who had then almost entirely neglected their language, learned to regard it as the chief palladium of their nationality. Hungarian periodicals were started; such as the “Magyar Múzsa” (since 1787); “Magyar Múzeum” (since 1788, in Kassa); “Mindenes Gyűjtemény” (since 1789); “Orpheus” (since 1790, edited by Kazinczy); “Urania” (since 1794, edited by Kármán), etc. Hungarian actors were encouraged; Hungarian literary societies were started, the oldest being that founded by John Kis, at Sopron, in 1790. These efforts were immeasurably increased in efficiency by the publication of very numerous Magyar works in nearly all genres of literature, and in styles and “schools” of great divergency. The members of the Guard naturally proceeded on French lines, taking the great French writers, and chiefly Voltaire, as their model. The foremost members of the new urban element, which also included many an unfrocked monk, coming as they did from the country where the Magyar language and folk-poetry had never died out, and where the national pulse beat strongest, proceeded on national lines. The older country-gentry, and numerous released monks, conversant above all with Latin literature, proclaimed the classical metres and forms as the only safeguard and aim of literature; while another section of the new urban element followed in the wake of the Germans, whose classical writers were just then at the height of their fame. This great divergence of schools was in itself proof of the definite revival of Hungarian Literature. In the spiritual republic, no less than in the political, parties are of the very essence of vigorous life. By the end of the last century there could have no longer been any doubt about the strong vitality of Hungarian Literature.
CHAPTER XIII.
1772-1825.
The first of these “schools” to publish serious works with the intention of reforming the literature of Hungary, were the members of the Hungarian Guard at Vienna, and chiefly George Bessenyei (1747-1811).[2] In 1772 he published a tragedy, entitled “Agis” (“Agis tragédiája”) in which he attempted to give, within the strict rules of the Franco-Aristotelean tri-unity of time, place and action, a model for his contemporaries. In point of language, Agis is not without some merits; as a dramatic work it has long been regarded as a failure. Bessenyei was more successful in his comedies (“Philosophus,” etc.), in which he even contrived to create a type, Pontyi, representing the narrow-minded, ultra-conservative country-squire of his time. His style is held to be much better still in his prose works containing philosophical essays after the rationalistic fashion of his epoch. Amongst the numerous colleagues and literary followers of Bessenyei were: Abraham Barcsai (1742-1806), Alexander Báróczi (1735-1809), who excelled chiefly in translations from the French; Ladislas Baranyi, Joseph Naláczi, Bessenyei’s own brother, Alexander, who tried his hand at Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” etc. To the Bessenyei circle (“Bessenyei György társasága”) belonged also Paul Ányos (1756-1784), in whose mournful and sentimental poems there are many traces of genuine poetry. Nor must Joseph Péczeli be forgotten (1750-1792), who through his numerous translations from French and English works (Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts”) and his “Fables” (“Mesék”) deserved highly of Hungarian Literature.