We must abstain from giving a detailed account of his novels. Their plots are, by themselves, simple, if not purely on the lines of the historic events which they relate. Their author, like Balzac, excels chiefly in psychology and analysis; and although the dialogue is not neglected, it is not made the centre of the tale. In “Gyulai Pál” (1846) is shown the struggle between a noble and high-minded statesman and his ambition. In the attempt at saving his prince, Sigismund Báthori, from the latter’s rival, Balthesar Báthori, Gyulai plunges into a series of crimes, and mortally wounds the heart of his idol, Eleonore, who finally brings about his execution. In “The Widow and Her Daughter” (“Az özvegy és leánya,” 1857) is told, and with greater regard to form and architecture than in Kemény’s other novels, the tragedy of the family of Mikes. A subject admirably suited to the gloom of Kemény’s mental atmosphere is treated in his “The Fanatics” (“A rajongók,” 1859), a story of the curious sect of the Sabbatarians in Transylvania in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century ([cf. page 55]). The Macchiavellian prime minister, Kassai, on the one hand, and the rich and mystic Simon Pécsi, the head of the Sabbatarians, with his beautiful daughter Deborah, on the other, are amongst the leading persons of this terrible novel. No less appalling in its way is “Rough Times” (“Zord idő,” 1862), in which the capture of the Hungarian capital, Buda, by the Turks, is told with magnificent power. In the short novels of Kemény, taking up subjects of modern time (“Love and Vanity” [“Szerelem és hiúság”]; “Husband and Wife” [“Férj és nő”]; “The Abysses of the Heart” [“A sziv örvényei”]); as well as in his smaller tales, such as “Virtue and Convention” (“Erény és illem”); “Two Happy Persons” (“Két boldog”); “Alhi Kmet” (a proper name), etc., Kemény likewise dwells on that fatalisme raisonné as it might be called, that does not permit him, or very rarely, to tarry over the sunny moments of life. Writers like Kemény, in quite modern times, have found means of gently veiling their inner despondency by light touches of melancholy, as is done by Maeterlinck; or by fine irony, as used by Anatole France. In Kemény there is no mercy, not even that of irony. His novels are like the gigantic inundations of the Theiss river in Hungary: you see the floods nearing, often noiselessly, but with distressing rapidity, and in all directions; there is no escaping them; in their inexorable progress they roll onward like a host of innumerable serpents, stifling life and levelling down everything to the sameness of death. When Kemény died (1875), on his small paternal estate of Puszta-Kamarás, in Transylvania, he had himself long been buried by the floods of mental derangement. Reality had shown him no pity either.
CHAPTER XXVII.
The poets and writers of the Magyars, whom we have been studying in the preceding chapters, were, in a lesser or higher degree, authors of works whose excellence was, to a large extent, of a relative, or national and not of an absolute character.
We now approach the study of Alexander Petőfi. His was a genius which, perhaps alone amongst Hungarian writers, so completely blended the peculiar national excellencies of Magyar poetry with the broader features of European literary greatness, as to entitle him to the admiration of all who can feel poetic beauty, irrespective of nationality or even language. Real poetry, like real music, appeals to all nations, and to all times. In Petőfi there is real poetry. Other poets are felicitous in expression, and the musical cadence of their diction endears them to their compatriots. Others again create one or two poetical types the charm of which lends grace and interest to even insignificant verses. Many more poets again play on religious, moral, or patriotic sentiments, and thus appeal to the hearts or imagination of readers with whom such sentiments easily wax overwhelming. In Petőfi there is more than all that. His language is rich and beautiful; yet it is not in his language that he excels. He never or very seldom borrows effect from appeals to morals or religion. He creates poetical phenomena—that is all. Where before him nobody ever surmised any poetic phenomena at all, there he conjures up a whole fairy-world of poetic conceptions, figures, events, or scenes. The true poet discovers the new land by creating it. In Nature herself there is no more poetry than in a grocer’s shop. Nor is there a trace of any other thought in Nature. There is no philosophy in it and no mathematics. Heaven alone knows how Nature is carrying on her business. She is the most wasteful of managers, and yet she is never bankrupt. She is as heedless as the most thoughtless of business men, and yet traces of profound thought appear to be discoverable in her dealings. And so the mathematician, or the physicist arrives at neatly limbed formulæ expressing so-called laws of Nature. Yet nothing can be more certain than that Nature herself is not acting on the lines of laws. To us, to human beings, it appears convenient and useful to bracket some of the happenings of infinite Nature between logical ideas, thereby giving us the satisfaction of “understanding” those happenings. Nature abhors being understood, yet by dint of an irrepressible desire of man, thinkers will always attempt at construing her by dressing up natural phenomena in the jackets of formulæ and in the petticoats of concepts.
It is even so with poetry. There is no poetry whatever in Nature. All poetry is invented and created by man, just as all music is. He who invents the greatest number of events, scenes, or types that strike men as being poetical, is the greatest of poets. It is impossible to say how he invents them; nor can he or anybody else say where, that is, with relation to what spot, creature, or phenomenon of Nature he will invent them. One thing alone is certain, he must invent them. For centuries before Petőfi was born, Hungary had had the same mixed population; the same mountains; the same mighty rivers and lakes; and the same mysterious puszta, which to Petőfi suggested an astounding number of exquisite poems. He alone “understood their mystic language;” that is, he alone invented the poetry to the substratum of Nature; he alone wrote the thrilling drama to the dumb flies and staging of Nature in Hungary. He sees an old ram-shackle inn in the midst of the puszta. To the ordinary mortal the inn is suggestive of nothing more than the expectation of a poor dinner, of a bad bedstead, of uncanny companions. To an ordinary poet it may suggest images of decay or regret, more or less poetical. To Petőfi it suggests intensely poetical scenes of life exuberant or decadent; the inn (“csárda”) is transfigured by him into a living being; every one of its corners commences to breathe poetry, music, reminiscences and forebodings. So new and individual a creation is thus made of that wayside inn, that the painter may find in it new subjects for his canvas, and the musician new themes for his lyre. Wherever Petőfi is touched by nature or society, he responds by the creation of poetic phenomena. The wind blowing over the plains of Hungary is, in truth, inarticulate; in wafting through the body and soul of the incomparable poet it turns, as if directed through the pipes of an organ at the hands of a Bach, to melancholy fugues and majestic oratorios. And so with everything. Petőfi sings love in hundreds of poems, yet he was scarcely ever loved by woman. For nearer as woman is to Nature, she is also more realistic and less charged with poetry than man. What then could she do with one who had unloaded into the chests of his youthful soul all the treasures of poetry, but none of gold? This, however, far from deterring Petőfi or disgusting him, rather stimulated him. He loved much; that is, he loved little. Love was for him, like the puszta, the Theiss river and the Carpathian mountains, an immense suggestiveness; an ocean, the crossing of which led to the discovery of new continents of poetry. Nearly all the pretty or interesting women whom he met, whether the lawless gipsy-girl, the actress, the coy bourgeoise, the lady, the peasant-girl or the hostelry-maid, he loved them all or thought he did. And this was owing not to his extreme youth—he died when six-and-twenty—but to his passion for poetic creativeness. Everyone of the types of women just mentioned served him as an occasion for creating one of those scenes as replete with life poetic as are forests or rivers with life natural. In one sense indeed he was right in saying that he was “the wild flower of boundless Nature” (“A korláttalan természet-Vadvirága vagyok én”). His mode of creation was quite on the lines of that of Nature. A poem grew out of his mind as does a violet out of the ground. In him there is no reflection, no machinery, no hesitation. Every line rolls on with the assurance and self-contentedness of a rose-leaf budding forth from the stem. He has the meditated carelessness of Nature, and also her freshness, her immediateness and spontaneity. More particularly, he is like Nature in Hungary. From the heights of thought as lofty as the peaks of the Carpathian mountains, and as chilling as those snow-clad solitudes (see his superb philosophic flashes in the poems written at Szalk Szt Márton, in 1846), he descends into the tiny nest of homely sentiments as does a lark into the furrow. His indignation, patriotic or otherwise, is as terrible as are the inundations of the Theiss; and side by side with poems flaming with uncontrollable fire and restlessness are poems full of oriental calm and staid repose. Yet, in the poet’s own opinion, he resembled most the puszta or immense plain of Hungary. Petőfi, who had tramped over nearly every part of his country, gave, in a magnificent poem, the palm of beauty to the steppes and pampas of central and southern Hungary. The puszta in Hungary is really a series of some three thousand pusztas, of which the most famous is that of Hortobágy, near Debreczen, the praises of which Petőfi has sung in various exquisite poems. These pusztas differ very much in physical character; some are covered with rich wheat-fields, tobacco plantations, or maize-forests; others again are swamps, or natron-ponds, or again waste lands, or heaths. This diversity of abundance and penury, ecstasy of nature and dreary desert, squares well with the rhapsodic temper of the Magyars in general, and that of Petőfi in particular. After miles and miles of deadly silence, the traveller enters one of the bustling “market-towns,” full of the eccentric and picturesque types of the puszta. There is the dignified farmer or peasant, with his smart, coquettish, and light-tongued wife, or mennyecske (“little heaven”); there are the various shepherds and keepers of sheep (“bojtár”), oxen (“gulyás”), swine (“kondás”), or horses (“csikós”), each in his particular costume and each a different type of the Hungarian Bedouin. The “bojtár,” tending the immense herds of sheep and lambs in the pampas, is mild-tempered, musical and full of secret medical lore. The animals under his care are frequently ill, and he watches their instinctive ways of picking out the herbs that will cure them. So he acquires a knowledge of herbs and an insight into nature which makes him appear a wizard. The “gulyás” tends the big cattle, oxen and bulls, and is naturally a rough fellow, fond of fight and of wild rollicking. He frequently wrestles with enraged bulls that have fled into the swamps, or with the poachers and robbers roaming over the puszta. The “kondás” is the lowest type of those herdsmen. He is sullen, hard of access, and irascible, and easily turns into a robber. The most brilliant type is the “csikós.” He tends the immense herds of horses browsing in the prairies of Hungary. As the violin and the furulya (or sort of piccolo) are the national instruments of the Magyars, so the horse is their national animal. “The Magyar is created for being on horseback” (lóra termett a magyar), the Hungarian proverb holds. Peasant or nobleman, all are keen horsemen, and so intense is their love of the horse that, like Arabs, Hungarian poets treat the horse as a poetical character. The csikós is dashing, quick at repartee, an excellent dancer and singer or rather improvisatore, and grown to his horse. He knows every patch of his puszta, and every trick and dodge of horse-dealing and—horse-stealing. The girls idolize him. In his fluttering, highly-coloured costume, he is the very martial, bold and provoking youth whom girls will worship. Amidst these types of the puszta, none the least fascinating is the “szegény legény,” or “poor lad.” He is the robber and brigand of the puszta, and the romantic interest attaching to him grows out of the belief that he took to his lawless profession after having been thwarted in life or baffled in love. But of all the phenomena of the puszta, the Fata Morgana, or mirage, in Hungarian “déli báb,” is the most striking. On a sultry afternoon in summer, cities appear in mid-heaven, images of towers and castles, immense lakes and forests. They shine sometimes with a peculiar, supermundane lustre, and the traveller thinks he is walking in fairy-land. Then suddenly they disappear. Such is the puszta.
The influence of the puszta on the Magyar poets is undeniable; and Petőfi, more than any other Hungarian poet, seems to be the high-priest and devotee of the peculiar charms of the great plain. The real relation, however, between the poet and his country is that between the traveller and the mirage. It is in the eyes of the former that the latter is forming, and there alone. Petőfi creates the Fata Morgana, with which he fills the vast horizon of his beloved puszta. Although professionally a lyric poet, his lyrics are of the purely objective kind. Many of his best poems might be told in prose, and in any other language, without losing much of their charm. There is, in his best works, an abiding fond of poetry, quite independent of the music or picturesqueness of his words, or the strikingness of his similes. Heine, in his best moments, rivals without always equalling him. Petőfi’s poems are mostly very short; they, as it were, only state the poetic scene which then works on the imagination or heart of the reader quite alone. When Heine speaks of the lonely pine-tree standing on the snow-covered heights of the north, dreaming of a palm perched in the far east on a rock burning with the heat of the sun of the desert, he strikes a chord that will vibrate in us long after and beyond the two simple stanzas in which he tells the story of the two trees. This is objective poetry. It is in this that Petőfi excels. Already in some of his earliest poems he writes perfect objective poetry. In “The Stolen Horse” (“Lopott ló,” 1843) we are told of one of those fleeting scenes in puszta-life, in which the poet by seizing the pregnant point where present, past and future meet, gives us the story of several lives in words so few as to seem insufficient for the telling even of a short anecdote. A csikós dashes on a stolen horse over the vast plain. The rich owner of the noble animal, happening to pass by, recognizes his property, and calls upon the csikós to stop and surrender the horse. The fellow takes no heed, and storms onward. Suddenly he stops, and turning round to the owner, he exclaims, “Don’t miss your horse too badly; you have so many of them. One heart was in my breast, and alas! your daughter has wrecked it;” and disappears in the desert. The story of the poor boy’s love for the haughty daughter of the rich man, her cruelty, the father’s pride, the boy’s vengeance, his entrance on the wild life of a “poor lad,” or robber; all that is pictured and suggested in the few words. In another poem, the first line of which is “The wife of the inn-keeper loved the vagabond” (“A csaplárosné a betyárt szerette,” 1844), the whole tragedy of true love thwarted by lawless love is told in a few lines. The vagabond (“betyár,” really “robber”) loves the maid of the wife of an inn-keeper in the puszta. The wife loves the robber, and being cut by him, drives away the poor girl, who dies of cold in the puszta. The robber thereupon kills the woman, and dies on the gallows, without regret, for “his life was no longer worth to him a pipe of tobacco.” Another poem describes the wild rollicking of the boys in the village inn at night. A knock is heard at the window, and a harsh voice bids the boys to stop lest the quiet of the squire be disturbed. The boys only hold forth all the louder. Another knock at the window is heard. In mild tones a man asks the fellows to stop yelling, for his poor mother is ill. At once all the frolic is at an end, and the boys leave the inn. It is in such scenes, all expressed in the simplest and yet idiomatic language, that Petőfi’s genius shines forth. Of him indeed it may be said that no colour, tint or instrument with which to touch and stir up the human heart was alien to him. Considering his extreme youth and the intense gravity of his pathos, his exquisite and genuine humour is nothing short of marvellous. It is the humour of a mature mind, full of ripe suavity and mellow joyousness. Of Petőfi’s humour we could not use Hood’s lines:
“There’s not a string attuned to mirth
But has its chord in melancholy.”