1772-1825.
1772-1825. After a period of decadence, lasting for over sixty years,
Hungarian Literature was again brought to a state of revival and
progress, which has gone on almost uninterruptedly to the present day.
This revival is part of an immense revolution which swept over most
countries of continental Europe in the second half of the last century.
The most conspicuous and best known event of this Modern Renascence is
the series of terrific upheavals and wars commonly called the French
Revolution. It is, however, quite evident that the French Revolution
was only the politic aspect of a vast movement, which in many countries
outside France assumed the garb of intellectual revolutions. Thus the
mental achievements that, in their totality, are called the “classical
period” of German literature (1750-1805) are in the domain of Thought
and Sentiment, a revolution no less colossal and far-reaching than were
the ever-memorable proceedings of the French _assemblées_, or the bloody
epics of the Revolutionary campaigns. Both were gigantic onslaughts
against the _Ancien Régime_ in institutions, manners, thought and
sentiment. Accordingly, the course of both revolutions was—making due
allowance for externals—essentially the same. As the French Revolution
landed in, or rather was brought to its final consummation in the titanic
and all-embracing personality of Napoleon, so German literature met its
final trysting-place and culmination in the orchestral mind of Goethe.
The minor nations of Europe were seized by the same Revolution, if in a
manner considerably less intense. The very aggressiveness of the French
Revolution, its encroachments on the territories of Italy, Switzerland,
Germany and Austria, prevented those minor nations from enacting their
Revolution at once in its intellectual and political aspects. While
fighting the French, they were all engaged in following them on the lines
of the Revolution, first (1790-1830) for intellectual freedom; and then,
after the defeat of the French armies (1830-1848), for the very political
ideals that the French had been the first to proclaim. For, this was the
immense advantage of the French over the other nations on the continent:
they had brought their intellectual revolution through men like Turgot,
d’Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc., to maturity, before they
started for their crusade of politic liberty; whereas the other nations
were a generation or two behind-hand, and still in the throes of their
intellectual renascence.
This is not the place for a laborious inquiry into the causes of that
immense Revolution which has, towards the end of the last, and in the
first five decades of the present century, completely altered the face of
European civilization. It is nevertheless necessary to give some account
of such causes as were instrumental in ripening the intellectual aspect
of that Revolution in Hungary. Among the leading causes was a structural
change in the population of Hungary on the one hand, and the reaction
against the provocative and anti-national measures of the Habsburgs on
the other.
Up to the sixties of the last century, the population of Hungary
consisted practically of (1) a rural population, comprising both
magnates, noblemen and peasants; and (2) a small urban population,
comprising largely foreign or Germanized craftsmen and tradespeople.
Under such circumstances, literature, which is pre-eminently an urban
growth, could not develop. For, not only was the urban population
too small and too much immersed in material pursuits, but the only
intellectual class, viz., the aristocracy, was living in the country,
that is, in an atmosphere unfavourable to continuous literary efforts. By
the end of the sixties, however, the structural change, above indicated,
took place. Owing to a series of measures issued by Maria Theresa and
Joseph II., the rural population of Hungary was liberated from its most
odious fetters. Bondage, and a sort of serfdom (_jobbágyság_), with all
its concomitant evils were almost abolished. Numerous rural families
left their obscure abodes, repaired to the towns, and urban life, for
the first time in Hungarian history, was raised above the low level on
which it had been vegetating for centuries. With the increase of urban
population came an increase of wealth and comfort; a greater activity
in commerce, both mercantile and social. Many a gifted Hungarian, who
would have previously spent his days in the obscurity of his county, now
willingly lived in one of the rising towns. With an accelerated speed
of work came a more rapid appreciation of talent, and a greater number
of authors. The influx of the rural population to the town facilitated
that mutual action and reaction between Nature and Man, which, in one
form or other, is the main spring of literature. In England, too, the
great period of Shakespeare was preceded by a similar structural change
in the population. The dissolution of the monasteries and the numerous
enclosures of commons, depriving as they did, hundreds of thousands of
rural people of their means of livelihood, drove them into the towns,
which rapidly ozonified that atmosphere of great intellectual stir,
without which no great writers are possible. In Germany, too, the period
of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe was preceded by a new influx of the
rural population into the towns devastated by the thirty years’ war. Nor
can it be doubted that Italy, in possession of highly-organized and rich
towns long before any other mediæval nation, took, for this very reason,
the lead in all literary matters.
This broad fact of Hungarian history (totally neglected by the historians
of Hungary, probably because of its very broadness), must therefore be
considered as the prime mover in the revival of Hungarian Literature.
It created that mysterious propelling power which in times of progress
everybody feels and nobody can account for. It was the latent and
constant stimulus to renewed mental labour, and to keener delight in
it. Like great rivers it was swelled by smaller affluents of causes.
Thus that great structural change in nearly all parts of Hungary was
accompanied by two structural changes in limited layers of Hungarian
society. Maria Theresa, probably with a view of carrying Austrianization
into the very hearts of the Hungarian nobles had, in 1760, established
the famous Hungarian Guard in Vienna. Each county in Hungary was to send
up a few young noblemen to Vienna, where they were clad in sumptuous
style, and treated with all the seductive arts of a refined court. Thus
a considerable number of Hungarian noblemen were given an opportunity
for that higher education and refinement, which in former times had
been the privilege of the select few. Vienna was in many ways a centre
of Franco-German civilization, and the young Magyar noblemen derived,
from a lengthy stay in the Austrian capital, a benefit similar to that
for which English gentlemen flocked to Paris in the thirteenth and
seventeenth century. This then, constituted one of the minor changes in
the intellectual development of one class of Hungarians. There was also
another change. Joseph II., in dissolving over a third of the existing
monasteries, and a great number of monastic orders too, set free a
number of educated men, who would have otherwise led a sterile life in
the lonely cells of their monasteries. They now began to devote their
unexpected leisure to pursuits of a different kind; and some amongst them
became workers in the field of literature. Thus a new source of literary
production was opened up.
To these structural changes in the population of Hungary, that is, to the
home and internal cause of a potential revival, now came the external
agency of those anti-national measures against Hungarian institutions,
which Maria Theresa, with fine womanly tact, had used in a tentative
manner, but which were applied by Joseph II. in the most reckless and
irritating fashion. Joseph had one ideal: the homogeneous Austrian
state. Like all ideals it was unrealisable. It was worse than that:
it was suicidal. The Austrian empire has its very _raison d’être_ in
the heterogeneity of its constituent parts. To level down the Austrian
“lands” to one and the same pattern, is to deprive them of all vitality.
They live by contrast to one another. Unable to be quite independent each
by itself, they would, if unconnected by some common tie, only serve to
aggrandize either Prussia, Russia or Italy, and so upset the balance
of Europe in a fatal manner. United by the dynastic tie, they form an
imposing, if incongruous whole, the component parts still retaining very
much of a strong individuality. Any attempt at forcing them into blank
uniformity must needs be answered by a still stronger attempt on their
part to rend the dynastic tie asunder. The various provinces have, since
1648, and with respect to Hungary, since 1711, made no civil war on one
another. Not one of them had, as had Prussia in Germany since Frederick
II.’s time, or England since Cromwell’s time, the supremacy over the
rest. Their sole union and bond was in their common dynasty. To try to
reduce them to one and the same level, as Joseph II. did, was both the
worst dynastic and national policy imaginable. The Austrian provinces,
then or now, if reduced to complete uniformity, will first of all
abolish the dynasty—as superfluous. In the _egalitarian_ ordinances of
Joseph II. there was so much that was subversive of the very pillars and
coping-stones of the whole Austrian edifice, that the Hungarians, as well
as all the other nationalities under his rule (Belgians, Czechs, Poles,
etc.), forthwith rose in a body in defence of their privileges, charters,
rights; in fact, of their existence severally and collectively. The
Emperor wanted to abolish the Hungarian language, Hungarian institutions,
Hungarian society. At once the Hungarians, who had then almost entirely
neglected their language, learned to regard it as the chief palladium
of their nationality. Hungarian periodicals were started; such as the
“_Magyar Múzsa_” (since 1787); “_Magyar Múzeum_” (since 1788, in Kassa);
“_Mindenes Gyűjtemény_” (since 1789); “_Orpheus_” (since 1790, edited
by Kazinczy); “_Urania_” (since 1794, edited by Kármán), etc. Hungarian
actors were encouraged; Hungarian literary societies were started, the
oldest being that founded by John Kis, at Sopron, in 1790. These efforts
were immeasurably increased in efficiency by the publication of very
numerous Magyar works in nearly all _genres_ of literature, and in styles
and “schools” of great divergency. The members of the Guard naturally
proceeded on French lines, taking the great French writers, and chiefly
Voltaire, as their model. The foremost members of the new urban element,
which also included many an unfrocked monk, coming as they did from the
country where the Magyar language and folk-poetry had never died out, and
where the national pulse beat strongest, proceeded on national lines.
The older country-gentry, and numerous released monks, conversant above
all with Latin literature, proclaimed the classical metres and forms as
the only safeguard and aim of literature; while another section of the
new urban element followed in the wake of the Germans, whose classical
writers were just then at the height of their fame. This great divergence
of schools was in itself proof of the definite revival of Hungarian
Literature. In the spiritual republic, no less than in the political,
parties are of the very essence of vigorous life. By the end of the
last century there could have no longer been any doubt about the strong
vitality of Hungarian Literature.