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.
CHAPTER XXVI.
At the present day most people of culture outside Hungary know the name of Jókai, the Hungarian novelist; few, if any, know the name of Sigismund Kemény. Yet, of the two, Kemény is probably the greater writer. He is the Balzac of Hungary, less Balzac’s fame. For, strange to say, in Hungary itself, the novels of Kemény are very little known; and although several Magyar critics of the highest authority have declared Kemény to be the greatest novelist of the Hungarians, yet the reading public in Hungary neither buys nor reads the masterpieces of the Transylvanian baron. This lack of general appreciation seems to be somewhat inherent in the very kind of genius possessed by men like Balzac and Kemény. The former, it is true, has a well-known name, and his works have spread over Europe and America. Yet, even in France, the full grandeur of his genius has not yet been recognized. Balzac has, as yet, no statue in Paris, which city he has described more ingeniously than any other writer. Even in his native town of Tours his statue was erected only in quite recent times. The Académie has never admitted him within her circle; and the French are not yet aware that in Balzac they have their Shakespeare in prose. Indeed, nobody short of Shakespeare will stand comparison with the gigantic genius of Balzac. Both have created a long series of grand types of humanity endowed with an undying life and charm of their own. To both the secrets and puzzles of the human soul were transparent; and both had the powers of philosophic analysis and poetic synthesis in equal shares. Shakespeare, too, had to bide his time; and twenty-eight years after his death, John Milton does not even mention his dramas as necessary reading for a young gentleman’s education. Considering, then, the fate of Balzac in France, with an eager reading public immeasurably more numerous than that of Hungary, we need not wonder that Kemény suffered with tenfold intensity from the drawbacks peculiar to his Balzacian genius.
We said, Kemény is the Balzac of Hungary. We did not say, he was equal to Balzac. In Hungary a full-fledged Balzac can as yet not be expected. No amount of native genius will enable a man to overcome obstacles such as stand in the way of him who should undertake to do for Hungarian society what Balzac did for French. The France of Louis-Philippe was infinitely better adapted to the writing of its “Comédie humaine,” than the Hungary of Kemény’s time.
Hungary is far from being as homogeneous as is France. In the latter country, despite much variety in language and social institutions, there is one pervading common spirit in all classes and peoples of the state. Whether Norman or Gascon, the citizen of France is chiefly a Frenchman, with distinctly French ideas and sentiments. France is the country of the French. Hungary is not the country of the Hungarians; it is a trysting-place of nations rather than the country of one nation. There are not only classes and ranks, but each class or rank differs according to the nation it belongs to. The Magyar bourgeois is not like the Slav bourgeois; and both differed, especially in Kemény’s time, from the German bourgeois. No one, certainly not Kemény, can claim an intimate knowledge of all the nations in Hungary; and thus no one has, as yet, so profoundly impregnated himself with as immense an array of social facts as had Balzac before he wrote his great novels. Balzac knew the entire anatomy and physiology of the peasant, the soldier, the clergyman, the provincial, the Parisian, the maid, the concierge, the bourgeoise, the grande dame, the actress, the scholar, the lawyer, the speculator, the viveur, the diplomatist—in short, of every shade of character that went to form French society. In Hungary, such a knowledge could not be acquired. Familiarity with ten to twelve languages is required to know the full anatomy and physiology of the peasants in Hungary alone. To do, therefore, for Hungarian society what Balzac had done for French; to write the Hungarian “Comédie humaine” has so far been practically impossible; nor did Kemény do it. And yet, within the narrow limits of his arena, Kemény worked with the spirit and genius of Balzac. That his capacity was essentially akin to that of the great French writer there can be no doubt. It was not of the same comprehensiveness. Balzac had humour and wit; Kemény had none. Balzac had an exquisite sense of proportion, if not always in his style, at least always in the architecture of his plot; Kemény had not. Balzac was an encyclopædist of the human heart, in that he knew women as well as men; Kemény knew men far better than women. Balzac’s range of observation being greater, his mind was subtler even than that of Kemény. Yet, with all that, Kemény’s genius was essentially akin to that of Balzac. He, too, had that vast knowledge of historic events and that interest in scientific researches that suggested to Balzac innumerable shades and innuendoes of thought, and aperçus on every form and phase of life. Kemény, like Balzac, had studied much in books and nature and man; he also had that love of realism—that following up of mental or emotional waves into their minutest recesses in the face or voice or gestures of persons. The outward or material appearance of man: his dress, house, arms, art-work, or contrivances were a matter of profound study to Kemény, as they were to Balzac. Although intensely analytical, he is equally great at and fond of descriptions. He paints nature, more especially that of his beloved Transylvania, as one intimate with mountains, rivers and forests. He knows their language and physiognomy; his landscapes are like the choruses in Greek tragedies. They form part of the scenes; not only of the scenery. They are like the contrapuntal bass to the melodies of his novels. But in what Kemény resembles Balzac most is his inexorableness. There is no other word for it. In nearly all his novels, as in most of those of Balzac, man is crushed down pitilessly, remorselessly. Without making any deliberate show of pessimism, Kemény is intensely pessimistic. As in Balzac the overpowering demon of modern times is money, after which all crave, all run and rush, jostling, panting, jading; so in Kemény, the bane of man appears under the form of those small mistakes and errors which dig the grave of all hopes. The great passions, vices and crimes do not, in Kemény’s novels, act as the causes of the final downfall of his heroes or heroines. His heroes do not die from strokes of lightning, shooting forth from the black clouds of their terrible passions or heinous crimes. On the contrary: such lightnings rather illumine their road to success. They end, as it were, through a fire caused by a carelessly dropped match. The ghastly irony of real life, which no unbiassed observer can have failed to notice, is shown in his novels in all its terrible working. The melancholy of Eötvös is sweet and soothing; the gloom of Kemény is discomforting, distressing, just because Kemény never seems to be deliberately pessimistic. While reading his novels, the reader is so struck with the beauty of those gems of original and profound ideas and remarks, which Kemény strews in prodigious abundance over the objects and persons of his novels, that the persistent gloom and despair dominating nearly all his works, do not become so painful to the reader. It is when we have finished the book; when we overlook the whole of the plan; when we have laid our ear on the throbbing heart of each of the persons with whom we had been through several volumes; it is when the novel in its entirety has entered our mind, that we feel deserted by all hopefulness, and embittered by the foul destiny reigning over man’s best efforts. There can be but little doubt that the indifference, with which Kemény has been so far received in Hungary, is largely owing to his pessimism. The Hungarians, like the English, have little idiosyncrasy for pessimism. This mood of viewing things is the outcome of mental struggles, from which the better minds of both countries have been saved by their intense political life. Pessimism is eminently the nursling of thought. In Hungary there is, as in England, much more acting than thinking. Whatever there may be of pessimism in the Hungarians is used up in some of their superbly-despondent folk-songs. For Kemény’s pessimism the time has not yet come. Perhaps he would have impressed his contemporaries far more deeply had he chosen not to write historic novels. Nearly all of his great novels are historic novels. As history, they are really incomparable. If we possessed a hundred historic novels, describing a hundred important periods of general history, in the manner, with the graphic power and true intimacy with the past, so peculiar to Kemény, we should know history infinitely better. Kemény has something of the erudition of a Gierke or John Selden, with the plastic descriptiveness of a great painter. Read his Transylvanian novels, and you have a clearer, more vivid and more correct knowledge of Transylvanian history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than you could gather from the study of the various chroniclers and memoir-writers of that time, such as Reicherstorffer, Schesaeus, Sigler, Heltai ([see page 47]), Verantius, Tinódy ([see page 47]), Somogyi (Ambrosius), Stephen Szamosközy, Nicolas Oláh, Zsámboky, Michael Brutus, Francis Forgách, Nicolas Istvánffy, Francis Mikó, Gregory Petthő, Kraus, the Bethlens, Haner, etc. Kemény is thus one of the best historians of Hungary. Nor can we think much less of him as a novelist. He engages our interest in the characters of his tales; they work on our imagination, they appeal to our hearts. More particularly to Hungarians, the actors of Kemény’s novels appear as individuals full of charm and significance. To use one of Ben Jonson’s happy phrases, they are “rammed with life”—life national, patriotic, historic. And yet, with all these commanding excellencies in his novels, Kemény has, there can be little doubt, committed a grave blunder in literary strategy, in investing the output of his vast intellectual mines in historic novels. Had he been less of a historian, he might have written his historic novels at a smaller loss of literary efficiency. His very greatness as a historian debarred him from approaching Balzac still more closely. For his faithfulness as a historian prevented him from elaborating fully those types of humanity, the creation of which is Balzac’s glory. Such types cannot, as a rule, be found in history. History, or that part of reality in which human beings are the actors, is full of blurred types of mongreldom and bastardy. No line in the features of man, as a real phenomenon, is drawn out purely and to its legitimate term; good and bad, sublime and vile, sentiments and deeds, are lumbering higgledy piggledy across each other. The poet or artist, who is truest to reality, is untruest to poetry and art. At all times the attempt at realism in art has landed where has the attempt at materialism in philosophy—in impotence. Historic novels, if very historic, as are these of Kemény, must thus necessarily benumb the creative power of the poet. And so they have. Had Kemény, instead of the past, embraced the present; had he followed in the wake of Balzac in fetching from the depth of Hungarian humanity some of the arch-types of European humanity, as was done by the author of “Père Goriot” with regard to French humanity, Kemény would stand out as one of the greatest writers of European literature. As it is, he is only one of the great writers of Hungarian Literature. What is perhaps more astonishing still in that choice of the historic novel by Kemény, is the fact that he was for years engaged in a profession than which very few can attach us more intently to actual, present life. Kemény was one of the most influential and hardest-worked political journalists of his time. In the columns of the “Pesti Napló” he poured out, in astounding profusion, leading articles about all the great events and persons of his time. In these articles he showed profound knowledge of the very pulse and heart of his age; and such was his power of exposition, analysis and appreciation of the fleeting occurrences of the day, that his political articles have been a matter of admiration both to his contemporaries and subsequent historians. As a rule, great politicians do not write historic novels. They are too much imbued with the spirit of their own age, in the direction of which they have had no small share, to be inclined, or even able, to familiarise themselves with the spirit of ages bygone. Kemény is an exception, and while this certainly testifies to the comprehensiveness of his mind, it renders the strategic mistake above mentioned more marked still.