HUNGARIAN LITERATURE
HUNGARIAN LITERATURE
_AN HISTORICAL & CRITICAL SURVEY_
BY
EMIL REICH
DOCTOR JURIS
AUTHOR OF “HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION,” “HISTORICAL ATLAS
OF MODERN HISTORY,” “GRÆCO-ROMAN
INSTITUTIONS,” ETC.
_WITH AN AUTHENTIC MAP OF HUNGARY_
Boston
L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY
[INCORPORATED]
PUBLISHERS
PREFACE.
The present book is the first attempt in the English language at a
connected story of Hungarian literature. The remarkable success achieved
by a few Magyar novelists in English-speaking countries, together with
the growing recognition of the international importance of Hungary as a
state and a nation, seem to justify the assumption, that the Anglo-Saxon
peoples too, are not unwilling to learn more about the intellectual life
of the Magyars than can be found in the ordinary books of reference.
The main object of the author, himself a Hungarian, has been to impress
the reader with a vivid picture of the chief currents and the leading
personalities of Hungarian literature. Magyar literature is too vast a
topic to be fully treated within the very limited space of a small essay
like the present. By introducing the comparative method of historical
investigation and analysis, by means of which Hungarian works are
measured, contrasted to, or compared with works of English, French,
German, Italian or the ancient classical writers, the reader may obtain,
it is hoped, a more life-like idea of a literature hitherto unknown to
him.
No nation outside Hungary has facilities of studying Magyar literature
as great as those offered to the English public in the incomparable
library of the British Museum. Nearly every Magyar work of any importance
may be found there, and the catalogues of those works are, in the strict
sense of the word, correct. This latter circumstance is chiefly owing to
the labours of an English scholar, whose name no Hungarian can pronounce
without a feeling of reverential gratitude. Mr. E. D. Butler, of the
British Museum, the author of the only authentic and comprehensive, if
small, English work on Hungary (his article “_Hungary_” in the last
edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_) is, to our knowledge, the only
English student of Magyar language and literature who has thoroughly
grasped the philology and spirit of that language and the distinctive
qualities of Magyar writers. He will, we trust, pardon our patriotism for
shocking his excessive modesty by this public acknowledgment of his merit.
May this book contribute somewhat to increase the interest of the great
British nation in a nation much less numerous but in many ways akin.
The map of Hungary accompanying this book is, we venture to say, the
first map published outside Hungary based on the most careful comparison
of the original sources. The greatest pains have been taken to ensure
absolute accuracy of names of places and of county boundaries, according
to the most recent data.
EMIL REICH.
17, TAVISTOCK ROAD, W.
_June 15th, 1898_.
[Illustration: HUNGARY PROPER]
HUNGARIAN LITERATURE.
CHAPTER I.
Of the nations in the south-east of Europe, the Hungarians, or Magyars,
are probably the most renowned, and at the same time, the least known.
Although their extensive country has now been in their possession and
under their rule for over one thousand years, and albeit the historic
_rôle_ of the Hungarians, rather than that of Hungary, has been and is
one of no common magnitude, in that, without their secular and successful
fight against Osman ascendancy, Europe could scarcely have maintained
its civilization in the countries east of Munich: yet in spite of all
such claims to attention on the part of western nations, Hungary and the
Hungarians are still largely unknown in England, France and America.
In English-speaking countries no serious attempts have as yet been made
either to tell the stirring story of Hungary’s past, or to analyse the
rich possibilities of her future. Except single and singular features of
Magyar life or natural products, such as the famous “Hungarian” bands
of the Tsiganes or gypsies and their “weird” music; Hungarian flour
and Hungarian wine; and most of all the figure of Hungary’s greatest
political orator, Louis Kossúth; except these and a few more curiosities
relating to Hungary, the proud nations of the west of Europe do not, as
a rule, take notice of all the rest of the life of a nation of eighteen
million persons.
The festivities of the Hungarian millennium celebrated the year before
last, came to the western world as a surprise. Few Englishmen were
prepared to realize the fact that, at a time when their ancestors were
still under small princes of mixed blood, and, moreover, constantly
exposed to, and finally nearly absorbed by foreign conquerors, the
Hungarians had already reared a solid fabric of government on the site
on which for now over a thousand years they have withstood the armies,
the diplomacy and the alien immigration of the Turks, the Germans and the
Slavs. Unconquered by force or disaster, and not denationalized by either
the Germans or Slavs around them, the Hungarians have maintained almost
intact the language and music they brought with them from the Steppes of
Asia; and when in the ripeness of time a Magyar literature was beginning
to develop, it proceeded on lines neither German nor Slav, but thoroughly
Hungarian.
This literature is both in extent and quality, one of the most remarkable
of the lesser literatures of Europe. The number of writers of Magyar
works is no less than 5,000; and their works cover all the provinces of
poetry and of philosophic, historic or scientific inquiry into nature or
man. While accepting the standard of criticism adopted by the recognized
arbiters of literary greatness, we have no hesitation in saying that
Hungarian Literature has a number, if a limited one, of stars of the
first magnitude, and no inconsiderable number of lesser lights. This
fact acquires still greater importance from the consideration that the
bulk of Hungarian Literature properly speaking dates back little over a
hundred years; and that many, far too many Hungarians have, up to recent
times, left their native country and, writing their works in German
or French, added to the literature of nations other than their own.
Comparatively few, exceedingly few, Englishmen have enlisted among the
writers of nations outside the United Kingdom; very many, exceedingly
many Hungarians have, under stress of various circumstances, written in
Latin, German, French or English, and thereby reduced the bulk and often
the quality of Hungarian Literature proper. The number of works in Magyar
published from 1531 to 1711 is 1,793. During the same period 2,443
non-Magyar works were published in Hungary. The preceding two totals
were given in 1879 and 1885 respectively. Up to April, 1897, 404 more
works had been discovered, belonging mostly to the class of non-Magyar
books printed in Hungary down to 1711. When, however, we inquire into
the number of works written by Hungarians and published outside Hungary,
down to 1711, we learn that no less than about 5,000 works were written
and published by Hungarian authors, in 130 non-Hungarian towns, during
the period ending 1711.[1] At a time when all the western peoples had
long ceased to use Latin for all literary purposes, the idiom of Cicero
was still the chief vehicle of thought in Hungary. Nearly all through
the eighteenth, and during the first quarter of the present century, the
number of works written by Hungarians in Latin far outnumbered the works
written by them in Magyar. It was even so with German; and many a famous
German author was really a Hungarian; such as Ladislaus Pyrker, Nicolaus
Lenau, Klein (J. L.), the great historian of the drama, Charles Beck, the
poet, Fessler, the historian, etc.
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.