The poets and writers of the Magyars, whom we have been studying in the
preceding chapters, were, in a lesser or higher degree, authors of works
whose excellence was, to a large extent, of a relative, or national and
not of an absolute character.
We now approach the study of Alexander Petőfi. His was a genius which,
perhaps alone amongst Hungarian writers, so completely blended the
peculiar national excellencies of Magyar poetry with the broader features
of European literary greatness, as to entitle him to the admiration of
all who can feel poetic beauty, irrespective of nationality or even
language. Real poetry, like real music, appeals to all nations, and to
all times. In Petőfi there is real poetry. Other poets are felicitous
in expression, and the musical cadence of their diction endears them to
their compatriots. Others again create one or two poetical types the
charm of which lends grace and interest to even insignificant verses.
Many more poets again play on religious, moral, or patriotic sentiments,
and thus appeal to the hearts or imagination of readers with whom such
sentiments easily wax overwhelming. In Petőfi there is more than all
that. His language is rich and beautiful; yet it is not in his language
that he excels. He never or very seldom borrows effect from appeals to
morals or religion. He creates poetical phenomena—that is all. Where
before him nobody ever surmised any poetic phenomena at all, there he
conjures up a whole fairy-world of poetic conceptions, figures, events,
or scenes. The true poet discovers the new land by creating it. In Nature
herself there is no more poetry than in a grocer’s shop. Nor is there a
trace of any other thought in Nature. There is no philosophy in it and no
mathematics. Heaven alone knows how Nature is carrying on her business.
She is the most wasteful of managers, and yet she is never bankrupt. She
is as heedless as the most thoughtless of business men, and yet traces
of profound thought appear to be discoverable in her dealings. And so
the mathematician, or the physicist arrives at neatly limbed formulæ
expressing so-called laws of Nature. Yet nothing can be more certain
than that Nature herself is not acting on the lines of laws. To us, to
human beings, it appears convenient and useful to bracket some of the
happenings of infinite Nature between logical ideas, thereby giving us
the satisfaction of “understanding” those happenings. Nature abhors being
understood, yet by dint of an irrepressible desire of man, thinkers will
always attempt at construing her by dressing up natural phenomena in the
jackets of formulæ and in the petticoats of concepts.
It is even so with poetry. There is no poetry whatever in Nature. All
poetry is invented and created by man, just as all music is. He who
invents the greatest number of events, scenes, or types that strike
men as being poetical, is the greatest of poets. It is impossible to
say how he invents them; nor can he or anybody else say where, that
is, with relation to what spot, creature, or phenomenon of Nature he
will invent them. One thing alone is certain, he must _invent_ them.
For centuries before Petőfi was born, Hungary had had the same mixed
population; the same mountains; the same mighty rivers and lakes; and
the same mysterious _puszta_, which to Petőfi suggested an astounding
number of exquisite poems. He alone “understood their mystic language;”
that is, he alone invented the poetry to the substratum of Nature; he
alone wrote the thrilling drama to the dumb flies and staging of Nature
in Hungary. He sees an old ram-shackle inn in the midst of the _puszta_.
To the ordinary mortal the inn is suggestive of nothing more than the
expectation of a poor dinner, of a bad bedstead, of uncanny companions.
To an ordinary poet it may suggest images of decay or regret, more or
less poetical. To Petőfi it suggests intensely poetical scenes of life
exuberant or decadent; the inn (“_csárda_”) is transfigured by him into
a living being; every one of its corners commences to breathe poetry,
music, reminiscences and forebodings. So new and individual a creation
is thus made of that wayside inn, that the painter may find in it new
subjects for his canvas, and the musician new themes for his lyre.
Wherever Petőfi is touched by nature or society, he responds by the
creation of poetic phenomena. The wind blowing over the plains of Hungary
is, in truth, inarticulate; in wafting through the body and soul of the
incomparable poet it turns, as if directed through the pipes of an organ
at the hands of a Bach, to melancholy fugues and majestic oratorios.
And so with everything. Petőfi sings love in hundreds of poems, yet he
was scarcely ever loved by woman. For nearer as woman is to Nature, she
is also more realistic and less charged with poetry than man. What then
could she do with one who had unloaded into the chests of his youthful
soul all the treasures of poetry, but none of gold? This, however, far
from deterring Petőfi or disgusting him, rather stimulated him. He loved
much; that is, he loved little. Love was for him, like the _puszta_, the
Theiss river and the Carpathian mountains, an immense suggestiveness;
an ocean, the crossing of which led to the discovery of new continents
of poetry. Nearly all the pretty or interesting women whom he met,
whether the lawless gipsy-girl, the actress, the coy _bourgeoise_,
the lady, the peasant-girl or the hostelry-maid, he loved them all or
thought he did. And this was owing not to his extreme youth—he died when
six-and-twenty—but to his passion for poetic creativeness. Everyone
of the types of women just mentioned served him as an occasion for
creating one of those scenes as replete with life poetic as are forests
or rivers with life natural. In one sense indeed he was right in saying
that he was “the wild flower of boundless Nature” (“_A korláttalan
természet-Vadvirága vagyok én_”). His mode of creation was quite on the
lines of that of Nature. A poem grew out of his mind as does a violet
out of the ground. In him there is no reflection, no machinery, no
hesitation. Every line rolls on with the assurance and self-contentedness
of a rose-leaf budding forth from the stem. He has the meditated
carelessness of Nature, and also her freshness, her immediateness and
spontaneity. More particularly, he is like Nature in Hungary. From the
heights of thought as lofty as the peaks of the Carpathian mountains,
and as chilling as those snow-clad solitudes (see his superb philosophic
flashes in the poems written at Szalk Szt Márton, in 1846), he descends
into the tiny nest of homely sentiments as does a lark into the furrow.
His indignation, patriotic or otherwise, is as terrible as are the
inundations of the Theiss; and side by side with poems flaming with
uncontrollable fire and restlessness are poems full of oriental calm
and staid repose. Yet, in the poet’s own opinion, he resembled most
the _puszta_ or immense plain of Hungary. Petőfi, who had tramped over
nearly every part of his country, gave, in a magnificent poem, the palm
of beauty to the steppes and pampas of central and southern Hungary.
The _puszta_ in Hungary is really a series of some three thousand
_pusztas_, of which the most famous is that of Hortobágy, near Debreczen,
the praises of which Petőfi has sung in various exquisite poems. These
_pusztas_ differ very much in physical character; some are covered with
rich wheat-fields, tobacco plantations, or maize-forests; others again
are swamps, or natron-ponds, or again waste lands, or heaths. This
diversity of abundance and penury, ecstasy of nature and dreary desert,
squares well with the rhapsodic temper of the Magyars in general, and
that of Petőfi in particular. After miles and miles of deadly silence,
the traveller enters one of the bustling “market-towns,” full of the
eccentric and picturesque types of the _puszta_. There is the dignified
farmer or peasant, with his smart, coquettish, and light-tongued wife,
or _mennyecske_ (“little heaven”); there are the various shepherds and
keepers of sheep (“_bojtár_”), oxen (“_gulyás_”), swine (“_kondás_”), or
horses (“_csikós_”), each in his particular costume and each a different
type of the Hungarian Bedouin. The “_bojtár_,” tending the immense herds
of sheep and lambs in the pampas, is mild-tempered, musical and full
of secret medical lore. The animals under his care are frequently ill,
and he watches their instinctive ways of picking out the herbs that
will cure them. So he acquires a knowledge of herbs and an insight into
nature which makes him appear a wizard. The “_gulyás_” tends the big
cattle, oxen and bulls, and is naturally a rough fellow, fond of fight
and of wild rollicking. He frequently wrestles with enraged bulls that
have fled into the swamps, or with the poachers and robbers roaming
over the _puszta_. The “_kondás_” is the lowest type of those herdsmen.
He is sullen, hard of access, and irascible, and easily turns into a
robber. The most brilliant type is the “_csikós_.” He tends the immense
herds of horses browsing in the prairies of Hungary. As the violin and
the _furulya_ (or sort of piccolo) are the national instruments of the
Magyars, so the horse is their national animal. “The Magyar is created
for being on horseback” (_lóra termett a magyar_), the Hungarian proverb
holds. Peasant or nobleman, all are keen horsemen, and so intense is
their love of the horse that, like Arabs, Hungarian poets treat the horse
as a poetical character. The _csikós_ is dashing, quick at repartee,
an excellent dancer and singer or rather improvisatore, and grown to
his horse. He knows every patch of his _puszta_, and every trick and
dodge of horse-dealing and—horse-stealing. The girls idolize him. In
his fluttering, highly-coloured costume, he is the very martial, bold
and provoking youth whom girls will worship. Amidst these types of the
_puszta_, none the least fascinating is the “_szegény legény_,” or “poor
lad.” He is the robber and brigand of the _puszta_, and the romantic
interest attaching to him grows out of the belief that he took to his
lawless profession after having been thwarted in life or baffled in
love. But of all the phenomena of the _puszta_, the Fata Morgana, or
_mirage_, in Hungarian “_déli báb_,” is the most striking. On a sultry
afternoon in summer, cities appear in mid-heaven, images of towers
and castles, immense lakes and forests. They shine sometimes with a
peculiar, supermundane lustre, and the traveller thinks he is walking in
fairy-land. Then suddenly they disappear. Such is the _puszta_.
The influence of the _puszta_ on the Magyar poets is undeniable; and
Petőfi, more than any other Hungarian poet, seems to be the high-priest
and devotee of the peculiar charms of the great plain. The real relation,
however, between the poet and his country is that between the traveller
and the mirage. It is in the eyes of the former that the latter is
forming, and there alone. Petőfi creates the Fata Morgana, with which he
fills the vast horizon of his beloved _puszta_. Although professionally
a lyric poet, his lyrics are of the purely objective kind. Many of his
best poems might be told in prose, and in any other language, without
losing much of their charm. There is, in his best works, an abiding
_fond_ of poetry, quite independent of the music or picturesqueness
of his words, or the strikingness of his similes. Heine, in his best
moments, rivals without always equalling him. Petőfi’s poems are mostly
very short; they, as it were, only state the poetic scene which then
works on the imagination or heart of the reader quite alone. When Heine
speaks of the lonely pine-tree standing on the snow-covered heights of
the north, dreaming of a palm perched in the far east on a rock burning
with the heat of the sun of the desert, he strikes a chord that will
vibrate in us long after and beyond the two simple stanzas in which
he tells the story of the two trees. This is objective poetry. It is
in this that Petőfi excels. Already in some of his earliest poems he
writes perfect objective poetry. In “The Stolen Horse” (“_Lopott ló_,”
1843) we are told of one of those fleeting scenes in puszta-life, in
which the poet by seizing the pregnant point where present, past and
future meet, gives us the story of several lives in words so few as to
seem insufficient for the telling even of a short anecdote. A _csikós_
dashes on a stolen horse over the vast plain. The rich owner of the
noble animal, happening to pass by, recognizes his property, and calls
upon the _csikós_ to stop and surrender the horse. The fellow takes no
heed, and storms onward. Suddenly he stops, and turning round to the
owner, he exclaims, “Don’t miss your horse too badly; you have so many
of them. One heart was in my breast, and alas! your daughter has wrecked
it;” and disappears in the desert. The story of the poor boy’s love for
the haughty daughter of the rich man, her cruelty, the father’s pride,
the boy’s vengeance, his entrance on the wild life of a “poor lad,” or
robber; all that is pictured and suggested in the few words. In another
poem, the first line of which is “The wife of the inn-keeper loved
the vagabond” (“_A csaplárosné a betyárt szerette_,” 1844), the whole
tragedy of true love thwarted by lawless love is told in a few lines.
The vagabond (“_betyár_,” really “robber”) loves the maid of the wife
of an inn-keeper in the _puszta_. The wife loves the robber, and being
cut by him, drives away the poor girl, who dies of cold in the _puszta_.
The robber thereupon kills the woman, and dies on the gallows, without
regret, for “his life was no longer worth to him a pipe of tobacco.”
Another poem describes the wild rollicking of the boys in the village inn
at night. A knock is heard at the window, and a harsh voice bids the boys
to stop lest the quiet of the squire be disturbed. The boys only hold
forth all the louder. Another knock at the window is heard. In mild tones
a man asks the fellows to stop yelling, for his poor mother is ill. At
once all the frolic is at an end, and the boys leave the inn. It is in
such scenes, all expressed in the simplest and yet idiomatic language,
that Petőfi’s genius shines forth. Of him indeed it may be said that no
colour, tint or instrument with which to touch and stir up the human
heart was alien to him. Considering his extreme youth and the intense
gravity of his pathos, his exquisite and genuine humour is nothing short
of marvellous. It is the humour of a mature mind, full of ripe suavity
and mellow joyousness. Of Petőfi’s humour we could not use Hood’s lines:
“There’s not a string attuned to mirth
But has its chord in melancholy.”
It is playful humour, laughing a broad, sound laugh. He is not as witty
as Heine or Byron, but neither is he as cutting. In his famous poem
ridiculing the Magyar _hidalgo_ (“_A magyar nemes_”) there is nothing but
broad thrusts of a well-handled sword. There is no pricking with needles,
nor any guffaws of a satyr.
Literary critics in Hungary and elsewhere have, in their anxiety for
classification and cataloguing, placed Petőfi amongst the so-called
folk-poets, and nothing is more frequent than a comparison of Petőfi
with Burns and Béranger, the _chansonniers_ of Scotland and France
respectively. However, the comparison is untenable. While humour, pathos,
tenderness and descriptive powers will readily be accorded, and in great
measure, to the Scotch singer, he can hardly be compared to Petőfi in
that distinctively creative power, which not only touches sentiment, not
only finds charming words and images for things external or internal,
but also and chiefly discovers new poetic continents, so to speak, new
mines of poetic gold. The very range of subjects covered by the poetry of
the Hungarian poet is considerably wider than that of the Scotch bard;
and in the last two years of his life Petőfi was raised, partly by his
own genius and partly by the events of his time, to the position of a
nation’s prophet. This very position acted on his poetic gifts with a
force that Burns never experienced, and accordingly, every comparison of
the two poets is radically false. The same remark applies to Béranger.
The entire atmosphere of his famous _chansons_ is so different from that
of Petőfi’s songs, as to render a comparison of the two impossible.
Béranger sings the glories of the great Revolution and of Napoleon’s
time. He is sweet, fresh, graceful, full of _élan_ and smartness. He
creates a _genre_, a mode of poetry, but a limited one. Petőfi was
impressed by both poets; he knew Burns and Béranger well, and studied
them, together with Shelley, Byron, and Heine, pretty carefully. But
he never imitated them, and for the simple reason that he could not do
so. He was in the best sense of the word, original, that is, creative.
He could imitate no one, and no one could imitate him. Petőfi cannot be
classified; he is a class by himself. He cultivates, it is true, the
manner and tone of the folk-song (“_népdal_”), and so to superficial
critics he may appear only as the best folk-song writer of Hungary. He
is infinitely more than that; in 1846, for instance, he did not write a
single “_népdal_” (folk-song); he is Hungary’s greatest poet. In him is
embodied the entire poetical genius of a nation, in whose single members
we may frequently find the gift of improvisation and poetic invention.
The rhapsodic vein so conspicuous in the everyday life of Hungary, and
the exaggerations of which have vitiated many an effort, literary or
musical, comes out in Petőfi in its full vigour and full beauty. Like
all great poets, he is intensely truthful. There is no sham whatever in
him, no affectation and no false note. His passion is terribly real, and
his mirth, true joy. Nowhere can this absolute truthfulness be noticed
with greater clearness; nowhere does it shine forth more imposingly
than in one of Petőfi’s wildest, and apparently most exaggerated poems,
“The Madman” (“_Az őrült_”). It is a monologue of a mad Titan, whose
fine intellect has been unhinged by ingratitude of friends, treachery
of women, and undeserved reverses. We do not hesitate to say that there
is in the whole range of European literature no other single poem
representing the demoniac charm of a mind at once vigorous and diseased
with equal force and truth. Constantly moving on the edges of abysses
than which the human mind or heart does not know any more appalling, the
“madman” yet talks with a power and lucidity so overwhelming as to send
through his hearers the holy shivers of religious prostration. Distorted
in form, terribly true in substance; such is the character of this unique
poem, in which all the serpents of scorn and pain seem to wriggle
beneath the leaves of the beautiful word-foliage.
From Petőfi emanates the very soul of poetry and of all art: enthusiasm,
inspiration. After having written comic epics, love-poems, and
genre-pictures with a success never before witnessed, Petőfi, on the
approach of the revolutionary period, wrote those inflammatory patriotic
songs, the power of which was officially recognized by the Hungarian
Government, who had enormous numbers of Petőfi’s patriotic poetry printed
at their expense and distributed among the soldiers of the revolutionary
armies. His poems were then a national event, and they may in justice be
compared to a series of different “_Marseillaises_.”
We began our characterization of Petőfi by saying that he, perhaps alone
amongst Hungarian writers, completely blended Hungarian with European
elements. We may now state the reason of this his peculiar excellence.
Petőfi, like all classical poets, while very great as a master of
form, owes less to the beauty or ornaments of his language than to the
objective beauty of his imagery, personifications and poetic scenes.
For such as largely identify literature with great word-feats, Virgil
will be greater than Homer (as was commonly believed in the seventeenth
century); Tennyson greater than Shelley; Platen greater than Heine; and
Arany (see page 194) greater than Petőfi. This is, however, not the
judgment of such as gauge poetic greatness by the measure of objective
beauty contained in a given work. The importance of form in poetry can
hardly be exaggerated, and the necessity of paying the closest attention
to the rules of form will be felt by no one more keenly than by the
student of Hungarian Literature. Yet in attempting to find a measure
of comparison between great poets, who all more or less excel in form,
there can be no doubt, that he who is richer in objective beauty is also
the superior poet. It is this superiority that raises Petőfi head and
shoulders not only over the rest of the Hungarian poets, but also above
most other poetic writers of modern Europe. The types of the _puszta_,
which we have essayed to sketch above, the women, and events of his time;
all these and many more Magyar subjects were by Petőfi so _objectivated_,
and given an independent poetic existence of their own, that they cease
to be familiar to Hungarians only. They grow on the German, French or
English reader with equal sympathy, and Petőfi thus needs less commentary
for the foreigner than any other Hungarian poet. His works are like
the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt, which appeal to Americans with the
same irresistible force as to Magyars, as the present writer has had
abundant opportunity of experiencing in the United States. Yet the same
Magyar melodies and turbulent cadences that Liszt, and Liszt alone,
succeeded in _objectivating_, utterly fail of effect in countries other
than Hungary when played by Hungarian gypsies in unadulterated Magyar
fashion. This, then, is the deepest and truest secret of Petőfi’s immense
power: while embracing mostly Magyar subjects, he so _objectivates_ them
as to render them enjoyable and sympathetic to non-Magyar readers too.
National poets inferior to Petőfi give their nation songs which other
nations too possess, and the only difference between them is that of
language. Petőfi gave Hungary and the rest of the civilized world what
no nation other than the Hungarian possesses. As the Hungarian nation
itself has an individuality so marked and so different from the other
nations of Europe, as to entail upon it an historic and social vocation
_sui generis_, so the poems of Petőfi, as the most felicitous exponent
of Hungarian nationality, add to the types of poetry produced by other
nations, a type, a species so individual and so richly personal as to
endow it with a literary vocation altogether its own. If we are to reduce
this peculiarly Magyar element to the precincts of a word, we should say
it is the rhapsodic element. By this we mean a peculiar temper of the
inspired mind pervading its joyous, humorous, meditative or despondent
moods alike. As Liszt is the greatest exponent of this rhapsodic
element in music, so Petőfi is in poetry. Most other rhapsodic poets or
musicians, Magyar or otherwise, have badly failed, some by degenerating
into rant or redundancy, others by becoming formless. Petőfi alone
succeeded in raising rhapsodies to the level of true art.
It was said above that Petőfi’s works are not in need of much commentary,
even for the foreigner. We may now add that the only commentary needed is
a knowledge of Petőfi’s life. Petőfi’s short life as a poet was coeval
with the great awakening of the Magyar nation to the full consciousness
of its position and its rights. He was born in 1823, in Kis-Körös,
and was the son of a well-to-do butcher, by the name of Petrovics,
husband to a Slav woman, called Mary Hruz. For historians who believe
in the race-theory, there is ample room for speculation, sympathetic or
malevolent, in the fact that the beloved mother of Hungary’s greatest
Magyar poet belonged to the “race” of the Slavs, whom all staunch Magyars
are disinclined to reckon amongst human beings. “_Tót nem ember, kása nem
étel_” (“The Slav is no human being, and porridge is no meal”), holds
the Hungarian proverb. Fully convinced as we are that there is no truth
whatever in the race-theory, we can only see in the fact of Petőfi being
the child of a Slav mother and a Magyar (or Magyar-speaking) father
a providential fact creating Hungary’s greatest poet from amongst a
_milieu_ saturated with both of the main elements of Hungarian society:
Magyar and Slav. Young Petőfi spent his youth in the large plains between
the Theiss and the Danube, and the impressions of that picturesque
portion of Hungary have left their indelible traces on his imagination.
At the age of fifteen, Petőfi was deprived of the comfort he had so far
enjoyed, by the financial failure of his father. From that time onward
he led a life replete with hardships of all kinds. At school he was a
failure, and even in poetics, as he has told us in one of his humorous
poems, he was “ploughed.” Being somewhat too fond of the inspiration of
the wine-cup, or at least being credited with such fondness, he soon
fell out with his hosts, his teachers and finally with his father. From
the misery of his position he tried to save himself by volunteering as a
private in the Austrian army. The very harsh treatment he had to endure
as a soldier told on his health, and although he had still moral strength
left to scribble his poems on the planks of the sentry-box in which he
mounted guard during the bitter winter, he at last was dismissed from
the service on account of symptoms of consumption. In the following two
or three years we find him tramping over all Hungary, writing verse,
and eking out a miserable livelihood by means of acting on provincial
stages. The great poet long believed in his vocation as an actor, and
obstinately stuck to a determination that met nowhere with any serious
encouragement. Meanwhile, however, his verses had made him a well-known
poet, and soon the idol of the country. In his travels to the north of
Hungary he was received, more especially at Kassa and Eperjes, with
honours usually accorded only to royalty. The nation felt that he was the
living personification of all the political and poetical aspirations of
the Magyars then struggling for manifestation. In 1846 he made, in the
county of Szathmár, the acquaintance of that strange and ill-balanced
girl, who was to become his wife. Juliet Szendrey was her name. She was
the daughter of a steward on one of the great estates of a Hungarian
nobleman, and had from early years shown symptoms of that malady which is
now more widely known under the name of “new womanism,” or “_féminisme_.”
Accordingly, she was eccentric and aimless, and when Petőfi made love to
her she was at a loss how to respond to a feeling so simple and natural.
Having given Petőfi some cruel samples of the waywardness of her temper,
it occurred to her that she might inflict even more pain on her father by
marrying the poor poet, and consequently she did so against the wish of
her parent. The young couple lived in very primitive lodgings in Pest,
and Madame took her fame as the wife of a great man with very grand
airs. She so intensely appreciated the happiness of being wedded to a
young genius and an affectionate husband, that she married, not quite
a year after Petőfi’s disappearance on the battlefield of Segesvár, a
man in every way infinitely inferior to Petőfi. Can anything prove the
Fata Morgana character of poetry and of poets more cruelly than the ever
infamous conduct of that highly cultivated woman, who, after having been
idolized and, in verses, immortalized by one of the greatest of poets,
showed her worthlessness by marrying a mediocrity before a single year
had elapsed after the glorious death of her husband, whose infant son
still required all her care? But let us return to the poet. A few months
after his marriage Petőfi began his political career by announcing to
the people of Pest the abolition of the censorship, and by reading to
the enthusiastic crowd his famous poem, “Rise o’ Magyar” (“_Talpra
magyar!_”), on the Ides of March, 1848. Towards the end of the same
year he took service in the revolutionary army, and was attached to
the Polish general, Bem, a hero wounded in untold battles for liberty,
and then serving the cause of the Magyars in Transylvania. Few letters
are more touching than the letters written by Petőfi in fair French to
the old warrior, his “father,” as he calls him. Bem, himself a genius
of character, at once felt and recognized the genius of Petőfi, and
with great tact smoothed over difficulties arising from the poet’s wild
insubordination. Against the advice and in spite of the entreaties of
numerous friends, who wanted to save the poet for his country, Petőfi
took actual part in various battles. He was last heard of in the battle
of Segesvár, in Transylvania, on July 31st, 1849, where he died as he had
long wished, fighting for his country. “To live for love, and die for
one’s country”—he had not only sung it....
The works of Petőfi are both lyrical and epical; his novelistic attempts,
“The Rope of the Hangman” (“_A hóhér kötele_”) are crude, so are his few
essays in the drama. Amongst his epics, “_Childe John_” (“_János vitéz_”)
is the best. It is a comic epic, or rather a fairy-story told with
exquisite humour and exuberance of fancy. Another excellent comic epic of
his is “_Bolond İstók_.” His lyrical poems are very numerous and cover,
as has been already indicated, the whole range of human sentiment.
Perhaps it is not superfluous to remark that there is in all the works
of Petőfi not a word likely to jar on the ear of the most fastidious
moralist. Like himself, his works all breathe the purity and health of
untainted youth.
The reader will now perhaps expect a laborious statement of the
shortcomings and failings of Petőfi as a poet. And many a Hungarian
critic has, apart from his professional duty to fall foul of this or
that feature in the literary physiognomy of poets, pointed out some
grievous drawbacks in Petőfi’s works. Thus, most critics have, while
lauding the splendid lyrical subjectivity of Petőfi, pointed out his
alleged incapacity to write anything else than himself. His chief
deficiency, it has been asserted, is his lack of objective imagination,
such as was possessed by the great epic and dramatic writers of European
literature. To this the answer is, it appears to us, very simple.
Petőfi never wrote a work intended to be an epic proper; nor were his
attempts at dramatic composition really serious. He cannot, therefore,
be legitimately reproached with having failed where he did not intend to
succeed. He never deliberately worked for such achievements of objective
imagination as show in the creation of dramatic personalities. Yet most
of his perfect poems manifest, as we have tried to show above, that
very objective imagination in the rarest form of strength. Hungarian
literary criticism is still, we regret to say, in a stage of development
considerably lower than Hungarian literary composition. Hence such
judgments on Petőfi. Can we pronounce otherwise on the literary critics
of Hungary, who have so far produced no single comprehensive study on the
works of a poet who is at once their greatest and most famous genius?
Genius has this peculiarity that its works are easy to enjoy but hard
to criticise. In reality, it takes another genius, a critical one, to
appreciate it adequately. In this respect, foreign literary criticism has
been relatively more just to Petőfi. In all the countries of Europe and
America, Petőfi’s name has been steadily spreading, and numerous attempts
at translations of his works have been made in both hemispheres. We do
not think that Petőfi is untranslatable. His very objectiveness renders
him more fit for free and yet faithful translations than, for instance,
Arany (see page 194). Another reason is that Petőfi lays less stress on
form and metre than other poets of an equal rank. He who fully seizes
the beauty of the poetic subject-matter in Petőfi’s poems can render
them more or less adequately in any language. More, however, than by
translation might be achieved by Hungarian artists who by picturing the
paintable features of Petőfi’s poems, would contribute most potently
to a general appreciation of his genius. There are hundreds of perfect
pictures to be taken from his works, provided the painter takes them from
him in the way in which Petőfi took them from nature.