CHAPTER XXIV.
The rapid growth of Hungarian Literature since 1825, shows chiefly in works of poetry proper; that is, in verse. Hungarian prose had in the first ten years of this period received no development similar to that of Hungarian verse. Yet many a writer had tried his hand at the creation of Hungarian literary prose. The reason of this belated advance of Hungarian prose was owing mainly to the late introduction of the Magyar language into the schools. Not before a language has hewn its way through the thickets of philosophy, the subtleties of distinctions in physics and chemistry, or the awkward bulkiness of historical facts, will it be supple and flexible enough to do efficient service for the innumerable needs of prose. Without a prose ready for all the turns and twists of serious thought, great historical or philosophical works are almost impossible. The difficulty was overcome in Hungary by applying prose first to novels, and then to History or Philosophy. Novels and romances, taking as they do the place of the epics in olden times, have also a national or more than literary importance. And we find that nations without great epics are also, as a rule, without great novels of their own. The astounding progress made in Hungary in epic literature proper bade fair to inaugurate the forthcoming of a novelistic literature. Vörösmarty and Czuczor were soon to have their followers in prose—the novelists. The frequency of rich types in Hungarian society could not but favour that branch of literature. In fact, the greatest difficulty for Hungarian novelists then, and to a large extent even now, was not to discover and work out a good subject, but to hunt up a sufficient number of readers. In the thirties and forties of this century, most of the cultivated individuals in Hungary were so familiar with German and even with French, that they could and did easily gratify their novelistic appetites with the innumerable products from the pens of German and French novelists. People will seldom relish or crave for lyric or epic poems of nations other than their own. They will ordinarily prefer homemade verse. With novels it is quite different. There is scarcely any exaggeration in stating that Lord Lytton’s novels have been read more extensively in Germany and Austria-Hungary than in England. The same applies respectively to George Sand, the French, and Mme. Flygare-Carlén, the Swedish novelist. Hungarian novelists had, therefore, to contend against formidable competition from abroad. But there was another and equally grave difficulty to conquer. The public in all countries has a fatal tendency to take up one author as the “standard” author in a given department of literature, and to give all other authors in the same field the cold shoulder. The less intense the interest which the public takes in that department, the more it will be inclined to believe in the “standard” man. In Hungary, that evil tendency has wrought great injury to novelists. At once a few of them became the “standard” novelists. Nobody wanted to hear of any other. By this means the rise of other, perhaps greater novelists, was retarded, if not altogether foreclosed; and the “standard” man, eagerly seizing on the great favour bestowed upon him, poured forth scores of novels, irrespective of the higher demands of Art. The consequence was that he deteriorated. For one good novel he gave ten bad ones. Having a sort of literary monopoly, he did not heed adverse criticism. The public, on the other hand, did not care to learn of a new novelist, and, as actually happened in Hungary, almost entirely neglected a real genius for no other reason than that mental laziness, which in countries with less abundant literature is perhaps one of the most baneful of obstacles to the success of a writer.
The preceding remarks appear to be necessary for a right appreciation of Hungarian novels. Foreign readers, and perhaps more especially the English, are apt to admire in Hungarian novels such qualities as strike them as new and “weird,” because German, French, or English novelists do not excel in them. Thus foreign readers will easily be impressed, and in many cases unduly so, by the great picturesqueness of Hungarian novelists. This quality, commendable though it no doubt is, will induce many a foreign critic to overrate the value of this or that Hungarian novel. In Hungary, picturesque turns of phrases are of the very commonest. They do not strike a Hungarian critic as being particularly meritorious. Hence the reader of the present work must not be astonished at some of the subsequent severe judgments passed on Hungarian novelistic celebrities. Far from trying to deter English or French readers from the reading of such novels as they will find criticised adversely, we would rather advise them to enjoy those novels without further regard to the views of the writer. We have in so criticising of necessity placed ourselves on a basis rather Magyar than European, and we are fully aware of the marked difference in taste to be found in the various nations of Europe. If the novelists and poets of one nation were to be judged by the taste of another, Thackeray could hardly be regarded as a great novelist, and Tennyson scarcely as a great poet. Yet both are in England recognized as two of the best writers in English literature.
Of the great novelists of Hungary, four stand out as peculiarly excellent. Their names are Nicolas Jósika; Joseph Eötvös; Sigismund Kemény; and Maurus Jókai. The first three belong to the class of Magnates, being Barons; the last is a commoner by birth. It is rather curious, that the Magnates, who have in the present century given no poet of the first order to Hungary, should in the field of Hungarian novel writing have furnished three writers of the first rank, of whom one, Baron Kemény, has done work not unworthy of the greatest novel-writer of the century.
The first of the four to attract general attention in Hungary was Baron Joseph Jósika. He was born in 1794 at Torda, in Transylvania. Having spent many years in the military service of Austria, and in travels abroad, he retired in 1818 and withdrew to Transylvania, where he pursued historic and literary studies, relating chiefly to his own province. Transylvania harbours many of the most glorious traditions of Hungarian history. For generations, especially in the seventeenth century, it was practically the only home of Magyardom. There is no lack of romantic, picturesque, or startling facts in the public or social life of that country; and Jósika, whose heart had, through his first luckless marriage, learned the depths of sorrow, as through his second wife he learned the bliss of true love, Jósika was in a position to do full justice to the wealth of picturesque characters and scenery in Transylvania’s past. His first novel, “Abafi,” was published in 1836, and at once received general applause on the part of the critics, and, what was still more important, at the hands of the public. Its subject is taken from the troubled times of Sigismund Bátori, when Turks, Austrians and Magyars, were fighting and intriguing for the possession of Transylvania, in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. Bátori’s mighty and tainted personality, with all his cruelty, heroism, astuteness and audacity, is, together with that of the Turkish conquerors, pashas, and court people, the personal background to the hero of the novel, Oliver Abafi, who rises from conduct dissipated and lawless, to the heights of noble self-sacrifice. The story is told with great power of description and impersonation. The reader cannot fail to feel as if quite at home in that agitated corner of Europe, where some of the historic agencies met in deadly conflict, and where men and women breathed much of that grand air of great events, which colours them in tints unknown to the people of less eventful times. The novel is intensely interesting and will convey a more life-like picture of its period than many a dull historic volume.
Equal to, and if possible, even more fascinating, is Jósika’s novel, “The Bohemians in Hungary” (“A csehek Magyarországban”). This novel goes back to older times still. It pictures the state of Hungary in the middle of the fifteenth century, when the Bohemian (Czech) Hussites were invading Hungary. Of all the innumerable sects and heresies from the end of the twelfth century to the rise of Protestantism, the Hussites were no doubt the most powerful. From the depths of the forests ranging round the river Main, to the mountains encircling Hungary and Transylvania, these heroic and fanatic warriors spread the terror of their name. But for some grave political mistakes and unforeseen reverses of Vitovt, one of the greatest of the historic Slavs (flourished 1380 to 1430), who wanted to found a Slav empire, reaching from the western confines of Bohemia, to the walls of holy Moscow, the Slavs, on the basis of Hussitism, and under leaders like Ziska, and the Procops, might have for ever reduced the historic rôle of Germany to that of a small power. Theirs would then have been a great empire, strongly unified in language, creed and traditions. No Austria would have been possible; and Hungary would have probably been submerged in the Slav flood. It is the story of the lives of some of these wild and terrible Czechs in the north and north-west of Hungary which forms the subject of the powerful novel of Jósika. The castles of the Czech leaders were real fortresses of Slavdom, and the population of those parts of Hungary being largely Slav to the present day, the danger for Hungary was very great. Fortunately for the independence of the Magyars, their young king Matthew Corvinus, son of John Hunyadi, was a match for the Bohemians. One by one he destroyed their castles, liberating thousands of prisoners, and ridding the country of the Slav invasion. His illustrious figure shines in Jósika’s novel like the youthful emblem of that historic vitality which has kept Hungary in a ruling position over Slav and Germanic tribes these last thousand years. The picturesqueness of Jósika’s novel is extraordinary. Male and female characters of intense fascination move in the castles, battlefields, dungeons and mountain-paths described by the novelist. Komoróczy, the knight and robber; the glorious king and his romantic love; Elemér, the hero, called “the Eagle”; the charming widow, who defies with a dimpled smile the most ruthless of amorous men; Jews, at once grand in suffering and commonplace in their greed; all these and many more scenes and portraits reconstruct that memorable time when the Renascence was rising over the dying gloom of the Middle Ages.
It is impossible to tell here, even very briefly, the plots and characters of the very numerous novels written by Jósika both in Hungary and at Dresden, whither he retired after escaping the Austrians, who had sentenced him to death as one of the prominent members of the Hungarian “rebels.” All these novels are historic in subject, and even quote, sometimes, chapter and verse from the chronicles on which they are based. The most famous are “Esther;” “Francis Rákóczy II.,” the hero of which is the most popular of all Hungarian princes who ever revolted from the Habsburgs; “A Hungarian Family during the Revolution” (“Egy magyar család a forradalom alatt”); “The Last Báthory” (“As utolsó Báthory”). Jósika is easily compared to and measured by Walter Scott. Yet there is in the very tendencies of their works a marked difference. Scott, in writing his novels, was prompted more by his literary tastes and proclivities than by any consideration of politic aims. Both Scotland and England were during his life-time (1771-1832) at the height of their triumphal career. His novels were romantic work pure and simple. England being at the head of the powers combating the French Revolution, her literary geniuses, too, followed lines opposed to modern Liberalism; in other words, they became romantic. Hungary, on the other hand, was, during the life-time of Jósika, an oppressed country, and after a short period of glory during her war of independence, she vegetated for over ten years in a torpor caused by a fiercely reactionary government. Into Jósika’s novels, therefore, there necessarily entered a political element, which coloured his work with a tint unknown to the great Scotchman’s tales. And this, together with the circumstance of his becoming rapidly a “standard” novelist, explains Jósika’s literary eminence and also his literary failings. In his attempt to use the story of Hungary’s past as a means of reviving her present, he naturally lost sight of some of the purely literary laws of novel-writing. His characters being already given by history, he neglected to elaborate their psychology. Events happen rather unto or by them, than through them. The inner machinery of motives is sometimes clumsy or too flimsy. Being much in demand as a “standard” novelist, he wrote much; too much. Yet with all these occasional shortcomings, Jósika is one of the most splendid novelists of the picturesque class. Few Hungarian books recording Hungary’s past will give the foreign reader a more pleasing and, at the same time, instructive picture of the romantic days of that great country. The professorial critic, reposing on the tattered laurels of his victims, if not on his own, will find much to rebuke in Jósika. The youth of Hungary and the unprejudiced foreigner will always read him with delight.
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.