At the present day most people of culture outside Hungary know the name
of Jókai, the Hungarian novelist; few, if any, know the name of Sigismund
Kemény. Yet, of the two, Kemény is probably the greater writer. He is the
Balzac of Hungary, less Balzac’s fame. For, strange to say, in Hungary
itself, the novels of Kemény are very little known; and although several
Magyar critics of the highest authority have declared Kemény to be the
greatest novelist of the Hungarians, yet the reading public in Hungary
neither buys nor reads the masterpieces of the Transylvanian baron. This
lack of general appreciation seems to be somewhat inherent in the very
kind of genius possessed by men like Balzac and Kemény. The former, it
is true, has a well-known name, and his works have spread over Europe
and America. Yet, even in France, the full grandeur of his genius has
not yet been recognized. Balzac has, as yet, no statue in Paris, which
city he has described more ingeniously than any other writer. Even in
his native town of Tours his statue was erected only in quite recent
times. The _Académie_ has never admitted him within her circle; and the
French are not yet aware that in Balzac they have their Shakespeare in
prose. Indeed, nobody short of Shakespeare will stand comparison with the
gigantic genius of Balzac. Both have created a long series of grand types
of humanity endowed with an undying life and charm of their own. To both
the secrets and puzzles of the human soul were transparent; and both had
the powers of philosophic analysis and poetic synthesis in equal shares.
Shakespeare, too, had to bide his time; and twenty-eight years after his
death, John Milton does not even mention his dramas as necessary reading
for a young gentleman’s education. Considering, then, the fate of Balzac
in France, with an eager reading public immeasurably more numerous than
that of Hungary, we need not wonder that Kemény suffered with tenfold
intensity from the drawbacks peculiar to his Balzacian genius.
We said, Kemény is the Balzac of Hungary. We did not say, he was equal to
Balzac. In Hungary a full-fledged Balzac can as yet not be expected. No
amount of native genius will enable a man to overcome obstacles such as
stand in the way of him who should undertake to do for Hungarian society
what Balzac did for French. The France of Louis-Philippe was infinitely
better adapted to the writing of its “_Comédie humaine_,” than the
Hungary of Kemény’s time.
Hungary is far from being as homogeneous as is France. In the latter
country, despite much variety in language and social institutions, there
is one pervading common spirit in all classes and peoples of the state.
Whether Norman or Gascon, the citizen of France is chiefly a Frenchman,
with distinctly French ideas and sentiments. France is the country
of the French. Hungary is not the country of the Hungarians; it is a
trysting-place of nations rather than the country of one nation. There
are not only classes and ranks, but each class or rank differs according
to the nation it belongs to. The Magyar _bourgeois_ is not like the Slav
_bourgeois_; and both differed, especially in Kemény’s time, from the
German _bourgeois_. No one, certainly not Kemény, can claim an intimate
knowledge of all the nations in Hungary; and thus no one has, as yet, so
profoundly impregnated himself with as immense an array of social facts
as had Balzac before he wrote his great novels. Balzac knew the entire
anatomy and physiology of the peasant, the soldier, the clergyman, the
provincial, the Parisian, the maid, the _concierge_, the _bourgeoise_,
the _grande dame_, the actress, the scholar, the lawyer, the speculator,
the _viveur_, the diplomatist—in short, of every shade of character that
went to form French society. In Hungary, such a knowledge could not be
acquired. Familiarity with ten to twelve languages is required to know
the full anatomy and physiology of the peasants in Hungary alone. To
do, therefore, for Hungarian society what Balzac had done for French;
to write the Hungarian “_Comédie humaine_” has so far been practically
impossible; nor did Kemény do it. And yet, within the narrow limits of
his arena, Kemény worked with the spirit and genius of Balzac. That
his capacity was essentially akin to that of the great French writer
there can be no doubt. It was not of the same comprehensiveness. Balzac
had humour and wit; Kemény had none. Balzac had an exquisite sense
of proportion, if not always in his style, at least always in the
architecture of his plot; Kemény had not. Balzac was an encyclopædist of
the human heart, in that he knew women as well as men; Kemény knew men
far better than women. Balzac’s range of observation being greater, his
mind was subtler even than that of Kemény. Yet, with all that, Kemény’s
genius was essentially akin to that of Balzac. He, too, had that vast
knowledge of historic events and that interest in scientific researches
that suggested to Balzac innumerable shades and innuendoes of thought,
and _aperçus_ on every form and phase of life. Kemény, like Balzac,
had studied much in books and nature and man; he also had that love
of realism—that following up of mental or emotional waves into their
minutest recesses in the face or voice or gestures of persons. The
outward or material appearance of man: his dress, house, arms, art-work,
or contrivances were a matter of profound study to Kemény, as they were
to Balzac. Although intensely analytical, he is equally great at and
fond of descriptions. He paints nature, more especially that of his
beloved Transylvania, as one intimate with mountains, rivers and forests.
He knows their language and physiognomy; his landscapes are like the
choruses in Greek tragedies. They form part of the scenes; not only of
the scenery. They are like the contrapuntal bass to the melodies of his
novels. But in what Kemény resembles Balzac most is his inexorableness.
There is no other word for it. In nearly all his novels, as in most of
those of Balzac, man is crushed down pitilessly, remorselessly. Without
making any deliberate show of pessimism, Kemény is intensely pessimistic.
As in Balzac the overpowering demon of modern times is money, after
which all crave, all run and rush, jostling, panting, jading; so in
Kemény, the bane of man appears under the form of those small mistakes
and errors which dig the grave of all hopes. The great passions, vices
and crimes do not, in Kemény’s novels, act as the causes of the final
downfall of his heroes or heroines. His heroes do not die from strokes
of lightning, shooting forth from the black clouds of their terrible
passions or heinous crimes. On the contrary: such lightnings rather
illumine their road to success. They end, as it were, through a fire
caused by a carelessly dropped match. The ghastly irony of real life,
which no unbiassed observer can have failed to notice, is shown in
his novels in all its terrible working. The melancholy of Eötvös is
sweet and soothing; the gloom of Kemény is discomforting, distressing,
just because Kemény never seems to be deliberately pessimistic. While
reading his novels, the reader is so struck with the beauty of those
gems of original and profound ideas and remarks, which Kemény strews in
prodigious abundance over the objects and persons of his novels, that
the persistent gloom and despair dominating nearly all his works, do not
become so painful to the reader. It is when we have finished the book;
when we overlook the whole of the plan; when we have laid our ear on the
throbbing heart of each of the persons with whom we had been through
several volumes; it is when the novel in its entirety has entered our
mind, that we feel deserted by all hopefulness, and embittered by the
foul destiny reigning over man’s best efforts. There can be but little
doubt that the indifference, with which Kemény has been so far received
in Hungary, is largely owing to his pessimism. The Hungarians, like the
English, have little idiosyncrasy for pessimism. This mood of viewing
things is the outcome of mental struggles, from which the better minds of
both countries have been saved by their intense political life. Pessimism
is eminently the nursling of thought. In Hungary there is, as in England,
much more acting than thinking. Whatever there may be of pessimism in the
Hungarians is used up in some of their superbly-despondent folk-songs.
For Kemény’s pessimism the time has not yet come. Perhaps he would have
impressed his contemporaries far more deeply had he chosen not to write
historic novels. Nearly all of his great novels are historic novels.
As history, they are really incomparable. If we possessed a hundred
historic novels, describing a hundred important periods of general
history, in the manner, with the graphic power and true intimacy with the
past, so peculiar to Kemény, we should know history infinitely better.
Kemény has something of the erudition of a Gierke or John Selden, with
the plastic descriptiveness of a great painter. Read his Transylvanian
novels, and you have a clearer, more vivid and more correct knowledge
of Transylvanian history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
than you could gather from the study of the various chroniclers and
memoir-writers of that time, such as Reicherstorffer, Schesaeus,
Sigler, Heltai (see page 47), Verantius, Tinódy (see page 47), Somogyi
(Ambrosius), Stephen Szamosközy, Nicolas Oláh, Zsámboky, Michael Brutus,
Francis Forgách, Nicolas Istvánffy, Francis Mikó, Gregory Petthő, Kraus,
the Bethlens, Haner, etc. Kemény is thus one of the best historians of
Hungary. Nor can we think much less of him as a novelist. He engages our
interest in the characters of his tales; they work on our imagination,
they appeal to our hearts. More particularly to Hungarians, the actors of
Kemény’s novels appear as individuals full of charm and significance. To
use one of Ben Jonson’s happy phrases, they are “rammed with life”—life
national, patriotic, historic. And yet, with all these commanding
excellencies in his novels, Kemény has, there can be little doubt,
committed a grave blunder in literary strategy, in investing the output
of his vast intellectual mines in historic novels. Had he been less of a
historian, he might have written his historic novels at a smaller loss
of literary efficiency. His very greatness as a historian debarred him
from approaching Balzac still more closely. For his faithfulness as a
historian prevented him from elaborating fully those types of humanity,
the creation of which is Balzac’s glory. Such types cannot, as a rule, be
found in history. History, or that part of reality in which human beings
are the actors, is full of blurred types of mongreldom and bastardy. No
line in the features of man, as a real phenomenon, is drawn out purely
and to its legitimate term; good and bad, sublime and vile, sentiments
and deeds, are lumbering higgledy piggledy across each other. The poet
or artist, who is truest to reality, is untruest to poetry and art.
At all times the attempt at realism in art has landed where has the
attempt at materialism in philosophy—in impotence. Historic novels, if
very historic, as are these of Kemény, must thus necessarily benumb the
creative power of the poet. And so they have. Had Kemény, instead of
the past, embraced the present; had he followed in the wake of Balzac
in fetching from the depth of Hungarian humanity some of the arch-types
of European humanity, as was done by the author of “_Père Goriot_” with
regard to French humanity, Kemény would stand out as one of the greatest
writers of European literature. As it is, he is only one of the great
writers of Hungarian Literature. What is perhaps more astonishing still
in that choice of the historic novel by Kemény, is the fact that he was
for years engaged in a profession than which very few can attach us more
intently to actual, present life. Kemény was one of the most influential
and hardest-worked political journalists of his time. In the columns
of the “_Pesti Napló_” he poured out, in astounding profusion, leading
articles about all the great events and persons of his time. In these
articles he showed profound knowledge of the very pulse and heart of his
age; and such was his power of exposition, analysis and appreciation of
the fleeting occurrences of the day, that his political articles have
been a matter of admiration both to his contemporaries and subsequent
historians. As a rule, great politicians do not write historic novels.
They are too much imbued with the spirit of their own age, in the
direction of which they have had no small share, to be inclined, or even
able, to familiarise themselves with the spirit of ages bygone. Kemény is
an exception, and while this certainly testifies to the comprehensiveness
of his mind, it renders the strategic mistake above mentioned more marked
still.
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.