Hungarian literature

by Emil Reich

In comparing Hungarian Literature with the literature of the Germans, French or English, we cannot but recognize, for the reasons just mentioned, that the splendour and comprehensiveness of the Literature of those nations cannot be found in that of the Magyars. At the same time we make bold to point out an advantage which Hungarian Literature has over the literature of many another nation, if not in the past, certainly in the future. This advantage is in the Hungarian language. The Magyars have a language of their own. It is not a borrowed language; not one taken from another nation, in whose use it had been for centuries.

The Americans, both in North and South America, although they are in nearly everything else the counterparts of their European parent-nations, have yet preserved the idioms of the latter. In politics, social constitution, individual temper, and attitude of mind, the North and South Americans are—a long stay in that continent has convinced us of that—utterly different from either the English or the Spanish. The Americans proper have indeed built up, or developed into a nation of their own. For good or for bad, they have a distinct and novel national personality. One thing excepted; that one thing, however, is a vital element in the intellectual activity of a nation. We mean, of course, Language. The Americans have moulded and coloured all the old elements of their nationality into organs with a tone and hue of their own. Language alone they have, with slight differences, taken over and preserved in the very form and woof in which the English and Spanish had left it in the old colonies. Hence there is between the Americans, as a new nation, and their language, as an old and foreign idiom, a discordance and discrepancy that no genius can entirely remove. The words of a language are mostly gentry of olden descent. Between them there are associations and tacit understandings ill-fitted for an environment essentially different from their original cast. This discrepancy has, there can be little doubt, exercised a baneful influence on the literature of the American nations. It has baulked them of the higher achievements, and neither in the literature of North America nor in that of South America can we meet with literary masterworks of the first rank. Between the poets and writers of those nations and the languages they are using there is much of that antagonism which has always been found to exist between the cleverest of Neo-Latin poets and the language of Rome. Latin is a dead language; and all the intellectual atmosphere and soil that nurtured and developed it have long since ceased to stimulate. Accordingly, the Politiani and Sadoleti, the Sannazari and Buchanani, and all others who in modern times have tried to revive Latin literature have entirely failed. As with individuals so it is with nations. The Belgians, or the Swiss in Europe are, like the Americans, in the false position of having each a distinct nationality of their own with languages not their own. This fundamental shortcoming has rendered and will probably, in all times, render them incapable of reaching the lofty summits of literature. Language is intimately allied to literature; language is the mother, and thought the father of literary works. Any lack of harmony in the parents must needs show in the offspring.

Now the Hungarians have not only a language of their own, but also one the possibilities of which are far from being exhausted. For the Hungarians therefore there is no danger of a false position, of an initial vice in the growth of their literature; and moreover there are immense vistas of literary exploits still in store for future generations. The quarries and mines of the Latin and Teutonic languages have, it may be apprehended, been worked so intensely as to leave scant margins for new shafts. French has changed little in the last three generations, and English and German little in the last two; while Italian and Spanish have long reached the beautiful but stereotyped plasticity of ripeness. Hungarian, on the other hand, is a young language. The number of people using and moulding it has been considerably increased in the last generation, and most of its gold-fields and diamond-layers have not yet been touched by the prospector’s axe. There is thus an immense future still open for Hungarian Literature, and this prospective, but certain fact ought never to be lost sight of in a fair appreciation of the literary efforts of the Hungarians.

Literature being a nation in words, as history is a nation in deeds, it would be impossible to grasp the drift, or value the achievements of Hungarian Literature without some knowledge of the Magyar nation in the past and in the present. It may be therefore advisable to premise a few remarks on Hungary and her history before entering on a narrative of Hungarian Literature.

CHAPTER II.

Hungary, in extent larger than the United Kingdom, is, geographically speaking, one large basin, watered by one large river and its affluents, and bounded by one imposing range of mountains. The river is called the Danube, the mountains are the Carpathian offshoots of the Alps. This geographical unity makes Hungary almost predestined to be the seat of one nation. The natural unity calls for, it may be presumed, the national. Yet the very richness of the soil, diversified as it is by the vegetable and mineral wealth of huge mountains, and the cereal and animal exuberance of vast plains has, in all times, attracted numerous tribes from eastern Europe and western and central Asia to the country of the “blue” Danube, and the “blonde” Theiss. Some of these invaders succeeded for a time in establishing a kind of dominion over parts of Hungary. Thus the Huns in the fifth, the Gepidae in the fifth and sixth, the Avars in the seventh and eighth, numerous Slav tribes in the eighth and ninth centuries were successively lords of the plains and some mountainous parts of Hungary. Not one of these peoples, however, could either maintain themselves as rulers, or quite disappear as dwellers. Already in the ninth century we find Hungary inhabited by more than fifteen different nations or portions of nations, offering then the same gorgeous medley of Humanity that is still so characteristic of the country. Where the above nations failed, the Magyars signally succeeded. They and they alone of all the numerous, if not perhaps innumerable nations that had tried to rear a lasting polity on the columns of the Carpathians, and behind the moats of the Danube; the Hungarians alone, we say, succeeded in establishing themselves as the permanent rulers of the Slav and Turanian peoples of Hungary, and as the members of a state endowed with abiding forces of order within and power without. From 996 to 1301 A.D., they took their dukes and kings from the family of the Árpáds, under whom they had entered (some 100,000 men, women, and children) the country. Saint Stephen (the first canonized king) consolidated their constitution. Without attempting to overrate the value of constitutions either grown or made, and, while laying due stress on that geometria situs, or providential strategy in the location of nations which has perhaps wrought the major part of History, it is tolerably certain, that the constitution of Hungary, as developed under the Árpád dynasty, and as still surviving in some of its essential elements, has had a most beneficial influence on the public life of the Magyars. Like that of England, it combines the excellency of the Latin system of centralization, with the advantages of the Germanic custom of local autonomy.

Already in the early middle ages, Hungary was divided into counties endowed with selfgovernment. At the same time there was a centre of government and legislation in the national assembly or diet, where king and subjects met to discuss the affairs affecting the peace or wars of the entire state. In 1222, or seven years after Magna Charta was signed at Runnymede, the Hungarians forced their King John, whose name was Andrew II., to sign the Golden Bull, which, like the English Charter, was to be the text of the country’s constitution, all subsequent laws being in the nature of commentaries on that text. The elements of the Hungarian and English constitution being nearly alike, the domestic histories of the two nations bear, up to the sixteenth century, striking resemblance to one another. We learn of wars of the “barons” against the king, such as those under Henry III. and Henry IV. in England; we read of the constant struggles of the “commons” (in Hungary consisting of the lower nobility, that is, of knights as distinguished from burgesses), for broader recognition of their parliamentary rights; of rebellions, like that of Wat the Tyler, of the peasants against their oppressors, the landed gentry; and of fierce dynastic struggles, like the Wars of the Roses. But while these historic parallels may be found in many another country of mediæval Europe with its remarkable homogeneity of structure, the distinctive parallelism between England and Hungary is in the tenacity with which the ruling people of both countries have carried over their autonomous institutions from the times before the Reformation to the sixteenth and the following centuries, or to the period of Absolutism sweeping over Europe ever since Luther had raised his voice for religious liberty.

All nations of Europe had constitutions more or less similar to that of England during the Middle Ages; for there was after all a very considerable amount of Liberty extant in mediæval institutions. But at the threshold of the sixteenth century, when new worlds were discovered by the genius and daring of the Portuguese and the Italians, the better part of the old world, that is, its Liberty, was completely lost, and sovereigns became absolute and peoples slaves. Three nations alone amongst the larger states remained unaffected by the plague of absolutism then spreading over Europe; they alone preserving intact the great principles of local autonomy, central parliaments, and limited power of the Crown. These were the English, the Poles and the Hungarians. In these three countries alone there was practically no dead past as against a presumptuous present. The nation’s past was still living in the shape of actual realities, and the growth of the constitution was, in spite of all sudden ruptures and breaks, continuous and organic. What the Stuarts were to England, the Habsburgs were to Hungary during the seventeenth century. Hence in both countries we notice continual rebellions and wars, both parliamentary and other. The Stuarts, however, were little aided by foreign powers in their attempts at crushing the autonomous rights of the English nation. On the contrary, one of the greatest statesmen of modern times, William of Orange, came, and with him several great powers of Europe, to the rescue of the people of England; and thus the end of the seventeenth century was also the termination of Absolutism in England. In Hungary it was the grave of Liberty. The Hungarian Stuarts, or the then Habsburgs, far from being deserted by the other Great Powers of Europe, were most efficiently abetted by them. This happened of course in a way apparently quite alien to any desire to destroy the liberties of Hungary. Vienna, the capital of the Habsburgs, was, in 1683, besieged by the hitherto fairly invincible Turks, and Austria was menaced with utter ruin. The war being, on the face of it, a crusade, the Christian powers, and, chiefly, fat and gallant John Sobieski, King of Poland, came to the succour of Leopold of Austria. The Turk was beaten, and not only out of Austria, but also out of Hungary, where he had been holding two-thirds of the counties for over one hundred and fifty years. Hungary was almost entirely liberated from her Mahometan oppressor, and, such is the illogicality of History, for the very same reason nearly lost her autonomous existence. For the evil of foreign saviours now told on the Magyars. Had they driven back the Turk by their own efforts, the result would have been an unprecedented electrization and stimulation of all the forces of the nation. The Greeks after Salamis; the Romans after Zama; the English after Trafalgar had won not only a victory over an enemy, but an immeasurably increased vitality fraught with novel energies. The Hungarians after the capture of Buda and the Battle of Zenta, both achieved by Austria’s foreign allies and foreign generals, had defeated the Turks indeed; but their own ends too. Never was Hungary in a lower state of national stagnation than shortly after the peace of Carlovitz (1699), which put a formal end to Turkish rule in most of the Hungarian counties. Prince Francis Rákóczy II., who started the last of the Great Rebellions of the Magyars previous to 1848, and after the above peace, found no Holland rich in capital, no Brandenburg ready to hand with well-trained regiments, no Austria willing to avert side-blows from enemies, to help him in the manner in which the asthmatic Prince of Orange was helped against James II. and his powerful abettor. And when Rákóczy too had expended his forces in vain, Hungary fell into a decrepitude but too natural in a nation whose foreign foe had been conquered by its domestic oppressor.

The political bankruptcy of the Hungarians by the beginning of the eighteenth century is of such importance for the study of the history of their literature, that we cannot but attempt to search for some of the reasons and causes of this national disaster. The principal cause was, it would seem, the lack of that very class of citizens which had in England so potently contributed to the ultimate victory of popular freedom—the middle class. Hungary never recognized, nor tolerated the complicated maze of semi-public and semi-private institutions collectively called Feudalism. Whatever the merits or demerits of that mediæval fabric may or may not have been, it is certain that the rise of the bourgeois class is owing directly, and still more indirectly to the action and re-action of Feudalism. The parallelism between England Poland, and Hungary pointed out above, must now be supplemented by the statement, that England alone of these three commonwealths had, through the invasion and conquests of the French Normans, received a large infusion of feudal institutions, and that therefore England alone was to create that powerful class of burgesses and yeomen, which was entirely lacking in both Poland and Hungary. Without such a class of “mean” citizens no modern nation has been able to consolidate its polity; and Hungary in the seventeenth century, being totally devoid of such a class, was in the long run bound to be wrecked by such a deficiency. We shall see how heavily the absence of a middle class told on the growth of Hungarian Literature.