The rapid growth of Hungarian Literature since 1825, shows chiefly in
works of poetry proper; that is, in verse. Hungarian prose had in the
first ten years of this period received no development similar to that
of Hungarian verse. Yet many a writer had tried his hand at the creation
of Hungarian literary prose. The reason of this belated advance of
Hungarian prose was owing mainly to the late introduction of the Magyar
language into the schools. Not before a language has hewn its way through
the thickets of philosophy, the subtleties of distinctions in physics
and chemistry, or the awkward bulkiness of historical facts, will it be
supple and flexible enough to do efficient service for the innumerable
needs of prose. Without a prose ready for all the turns and twists of
serious thought, great historical or philosophical works are almost
impossible. The difficulty was overcome in Hungary by applying prose
first to novels, and then to History or Philosophy. Novels and romances,
taking as they do the place of the epics in olden times, have also a
national or more than literary importance. And we find that nations
without great epics are also, as a rule, without great novels of their
own. The astounding progress made in Hungary in epic literature proper
bade fair to inaugurate the forthcoming of a novelistic literature.
Vörösmarty and Czuczor were soon to have their followers in prose—the
novelists. The frequency of rich types in Hungarian society could not
but favour that branch of literature. In fact, the greatest difficulty
for Hungarian novelists then, and to a large extent even now, was not
to discover and work out a good subject, but to hunt up a sufficient
number of readers. In the thirties and forties of this century, most of
the cultivated individuals in Hungary were so familiar with German and
even with French, that they could and did easily gratify their novelistic
appetites with the innumerable products from the pens of German and
French novelists. People will seldom relish or crave for lyric or epic
poems of nations other than their own. They will ordinarily prefer
homemade verse. With novels it is quite different. There is scarcely any
exaggeration in stating that Lord Lytton’s novels have been read more
extensively in Germany and Austria-Hungary than in England. The same
applies respectively to George Sand, the French, and Mme. Flygare-Carlén,
the Swedish novelist. Hungarian novelists had, therefore, to contend
against formidable competition from abroad. But there was another and
equally grave difficulty to conquer. The public in all countries has a
fatal tendency to take up one author as the “standard” author in a given
department of literature, and to give all other authors in the same
field the cold shoulder. The less intense the interest which the public
takes in that department, the more it will be inclined to believe in the
“standard” man. In Hungary, that evil tendency has wrought great injury
to novelists. At once a few of them became the “standard” novelists.
Nobody wanted to hear of any other. By this means the rise of other,
perhaps greater novelists, was retarded, if not altogether foreclosed;
and the “standard” man, eagerly seizing on the great favour bestowed upon
him, poured forth scores of novels, irrespective of the higher demands
of Art. The consequence was that he deteriorated. For one good novel he
gave ten bad ones. Having a sort of literary monopoly, he did not heed
adverse criticism. The public, on the other hand, did not care to learn
of a new novelist, and, as actually happened in Hungary, almost entirely
neglected a real genius for no other reason than that mental laziness,
which in countries with less abundant literature is perhaps one of the
most baneful of obstacles to the success of a writer.
The preceding remarks appear to be necessary for a right appreciation
of Hungarian novels. Foreign readers, and perhaps more especially the
English, are apt to admire in Hungarian novels such qualities as strike
them as new and “weird,” because German, French, or English novelists
do not excel in them. Thus foreign readers will easily be impressed,
and in many cases unduly so, by the great picturesqueness of Hungarian
novelists. This quality, commendable though it no doubt is, will induce
many a foreign critic to overrate the value of this or that Hungarian
novel. In Hungary, picturesque turns of phrases are of the very
commonest. They do not strike a Hungarian critic as being particularly
meritorious. Hence the reader of the present work must not be astonished
at some of the subsequent severe judgments passed on Hungarian novelistic
celebrities. Far from trying to deter English or French readers from
the reading of such novels as they will find criticised adversely, we
would rather advise them to enjoy those novels without further regard to
the views of the writer. We have in so criticising of necessity placed
ourselves on a basis rather Magyar than European, and we are fully aware
of the marked difference in taste to be found in the various nations
of Europe. If the novelists and poets of one nation were to be judged
by the taste of another, Thackeray could hardly be regarded as a great
novelist, and Tennyson scarcely as a great poet. Yet both are in England
recognized as two of the best writers in English literature.
Of the great novelists of Hungary, four stand out as peculiarly
excellent. Their names are Nicolas Jósika; Joseph Eötvös; Sigismund
Kemény; and Maurus Jókai. The first three belong to the class of
Magnates, being Barons; the last is a commoner by birth. It is rather
curious, that the Magnates, who have in the present century given no poet
of the first order to Hungary, should in the field of Hungarian novel
writing have furnished three writers of the first rank, of whom one,
Baron Kemény, has done work not unworthy of the greatest novel-writer of
the century.
The first of the four to attract general attention in Hungary was
Baron Joseph Jósika. He was born in 1794 at Torda, in Transylvania.
Having spent many years in the military service of Austria, and in
travels abroad, he retired in 1818 and withdrew to Transylvania, where
he pursued historic and literary studies, relating chiefly to his own
province. Transylvania harbours many of the most glorious traditions
of Hungarian history. For generations, especially in the seventeenth
century, it was practically the only home of Magyardom. There is no lack
of romantic, picturesque, or startling facts in the public or social
life of that country; and Jósika, whose heart had, through his first
luckless marriage, learned the depths of sorrow, as through his second
wife he learned the bliss of true love, Jósika was in a position to do
full justice to the wealth of picturesque characters and scenery in
Transylvania’s past. His first novel, “_Abafi_,” was published in 1836,
and at once received general applause on the part of the critics, and,
what was still more important, at the hands of the public. Its subject
is taken from the troubled times of Sigismund Bátori, when Turks,
Austrians and Magyars, were fighting and intriguing for the possession of
Transylvania, in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. Bátori’s
mighty and tainted personality, with all his cruelty, heroism, astuteness
and audacity, is, together with that of the Turkish conquerors, pashas,
and court people, the personal background to the hero of the novel,
Oliver Abafi, who rises from conduct dissipated and lawless, to the
heights of noble self-sacrifice. The story is told with great power of
description and impersonation. The reader cannot fail to feel as if quite
at home in that agitated corner of Europe, where some of the historic
agencies met in deadly conflict, and where men and women breathed much
of that grand air of great events, which colours them in tints unknown
to the people of less eventful times. The novel is intensely interesting
and will convey a more life-like picture of its period than many a dull
historic volume.
Equal to, and if possible, even more fascinating, is Jósika’s novel,
“The Bohemians in Hungary” (“_A csehek Magyarországban_”). This novel
goes back to older times still. It pictures the state of Hungary in the
middle of the fifteenth century, when the Bohemian (Czech) Hussites were
invading Hungary. Of all the innumerable sects and heresies from the end
of the twelfth century to the rise of Protestantism, the Hussites were no
doubt the most powerful. From the depths of the forests ranging round the
river Main, to the mountains encircling Hungary and Transylvania, these
heroic and fanatic warriors spread the terror of their name. But for
some grave political mistakes and unforeseen reverses of Vitovt, one of
the greatest of the historic Slavs (flourished 1380 to 1430), who wanted
to found a Slav empire, reaching from the western confines of Bohemia,
to the walls of holy Moscow, the Slavs, on the basis of Hussitism, and
under leaders like Ziska, and the Procops, might have for ever reduced
the historic _rôle_ of Germany to that of a small power. Theirs would
then have been a great empire, strongly unified in language, creed and
traditions. No Austria would have been possible; and Hungary would have
probably been submerged in the Slav flood. It is the story of the lives
of some of these wild and terrible Czechs in the north and north-west
of Hungary which forms the subject of the powerful novel of Jósika.
The castles of the Czech leaders were real fortresses of Slavdom, and
the population of those parts of Hungary being largely Slav to the
present day, the danger for Hungary was very great. Fortunately for the
independence of the Magyars, their young king Matthew Corvinus, son of
John Hunyadi, was a match for the Bohemians. One by one he destroyed
their castles, liberating thousands of prisoners, and ridding the
country of the Slav invasion. His illustrious figure shines in Jósika’s
novel like the youthful emblem of that historic vitality which has kept
Hungary in a ruling position over Slav and Germanic tribes these last
thousand years. The picturesqueness of Jósika’s novel is extraordinary.
Male and female characters of intense fascination move in the castles,
battlefields, dungeons and mountain-paths described by the novelist.
Komoróczy, the knight and robber; the glorious king and his romantic
love; Elemér, the hero, called “the Eagle”; the charming widow, who
defies with a dimpled smile the most ruthless of amorous men; Jews, at
once grand in suffering and commonplace in their greed; all these and
many more scenes and portraits reconstruct that memorable time when the
Renascence was rising over the dying gloom of the Middle Ages.
It is impossible to tell here, even very briefly, the plots and
characters of the very numerous novels written by Jósika both in Hungary
and at Dresden, whither he retired after escaping the Austrians, who
had sentenced him to death as one of the prominent members of the
Hungarian “rebels.” All these novels are historic in subject, and even
quote, sometimes, chapter and verse from the chronicles on which they
are based. The most famous are “_Esther_;” “_Francis Rákóczy II._,” the
hero of which is the most popular of all Hungarian princes who ever
revolted from the Habsburgs; “A Hungarian Family during the Revolution”
(“_Egy magyar család a forradalom alatt_”); “The Last Báthory” (“_As
utolsó Báthory_”). Jósika is easily compared to and measured by Walter
Scott. Yet there is in the very tendencies of their works a marked
difference. Scott, in writing his novels, was prompted more by his
literary tastes and proclivities than by any consideration of politic
aims. Both Scotland and England were during his life-time (1771-1832)
at the height of their triumphal career. His novels were romantic work
pure and simple. England being at the head of the powers combating the
French Revolution, her literary geniuses, too, followed lines opposed to
modern Liberalism; in other words, they became romantic. Hungary, on the
other hand, was, during the life-time of Jósika, an oppressed country,
and after a short period of glory during her war of independence, she
vegetated for over ten years in a torpor caused by a fiercely reactionary
government. Into Jósika’s novels, therefore, there necessarily entered
a political element, which coloured his work with a tint unknown to the
great Scotchman’s tales. And this, together with the circumstance of
his becoming rapidly a “standard” novelist, explains Jósika’s literary
eminence and also his literary failings. In his attempt to use the story
of Hungary’s past as a means of reviving her present, he naturally
lost sight of some of the purely literary laws of novel-writing. His
characters being already given by history, he neglected to elaborate
their psychology. Events happen rather unto or by them, than through
them. The inner machinery of motives is sometimes clumsy or too flimsy.
Being much in demand as a “standard” novelist, he wrote much; too
much. Yet with all these occasional shortcomings, Jósika is one of the
most splendid novelists of the picturesque class. Few Hungarian books
recording Hungary’s past will give the foreign reader a more pleasing
and, at the same time, instructive picture of the romantic days of that
great country. The professorial critic, reposing on the tattered laurels
of his victims, if not on his own, will find much to rebuke in Jósika.
The youth of Hungary and the unprejudiced foreigner will always read him
with delight.