A History of Hungarian Literature/Chapter 1
I
THE HUNGARIAN PEOPLE
A thousand years ago, about the end of the ninth century, events, the results of which proved of great importance, took place in that part of Europe which is encircled by the Carpathians, and watered by the Danube and the Tisza. In that fertile district, known then as the Avar plain, in the very heart of Christian Europe, there suddenly appeared a tribe of wild, pagan horsemen, some one or two hundred thousand strong, who took possession of the country, settled upon it, and made it the centre for their predatory raids. It is astonishing how far those dreaded horsemen wandered in the course of their many campaigns. They poured unchecked over the whole of Europe. Marching northwards they reached Bremen, and reduced it to ashes. Southwards they penetrated as far as Athens, and in the west they camped before the walls of the Eternal City, which Attila himself never reached. They encamped beneath the gigantic arches of the aqueducts, and pitched their tents in Subiaco, in the gardens of Nero. They streamed eastwards, and knocked with their iron maces at the golden gate of Constantinople. They forced their way through the Pass of St. Bernard and through the Pyrenees, and wherever they went, they were as victorious on their steeds as the Vikings in their ships. But as soon as the predatory warriors, who had watered their horses in the Ilissus, Ebro, Elbe, and Tiber, settled down within the borders of Hungary, they founded there a strong and lasting state.
Many another race had from time to time inhabited the plains of the Danube and the Tisza before the Hungarians, but none of them had succeeded in creating a state. The Celts had found a home there, but disappeared thence as from most other regions. At the time of Augustus, the brass eagles of the Roman legions visited the virgin forests of Pannonia. It was there that the wisest and noblest of rulers, Marcus Aurelius, wrote the greater portion of his philosophical works. There, too, was born that unlucky successor of the great Augustus, Romulus Augustulus, the last ruler over the Empire founded by Romulus, and with the pitiable figure of that shadow-like emperor the Romans vanished altogether from Pannonia.
Then the blood-red waves of the migration flooded the country. The Huns came; their greatest leader, Attila, and his followers, built their wooden houses on the plain between the Danube and the Tisza, but they soon disappeared, to be followed for short periods by the Longobards, the Gepida, and the Jazyghiens. Next came the Avar race, but only to be overthrown by Charlemagne.
Last came the Hungarians, who alone succeeded in holding their own, and the state they founded became, through the excellence of its constitution, one of the most powerful in Europe. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the great countries of Europe had not yet attained to real national unity; Hungary, under her kings Louis the Great and Matthias Hunyadi, took the lead in that respect. Every European people has its own special gift. Greece and Italy have the gift of art; Rome has law England political liberty and the power of planting colonies; Germany has metaphysics and scientific method; while France is distinguished by good taste. Hungary's endowment was a strong sense of nationality, that is to say, the desire to found and to maintain a state which knitted the people into an organic whole. Simultaneously with the growth of the national spirit, and lending it strong support, arose the nation's literature. Henceforth Hungarian life and literature developed in perfect sympathy with one another, and kept pace so accurately together that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when new aims opened before the people, and an ardent patriotism enthusiastically welcomed the new ideals of democracy, the nation's literature attained its zenith.
The principal motive of Hungarian poetry is to foster the national idea in the hearts of the people. That powerful racial element is revealed in the efforts of the Hungarians to found a strong and enduring kingdom, and in their continual struggles on behalf of their rights and unity. Their first epic poet, Sebastian Tinódi, wrote his Rhymed Chronicles after the battle of Mohács (1526), one of the greatest catastrophes known to history. What could his lays recount, save the downfall of his country, and her desperate struggles for existence? Valentine Balassa, the most noteworthy Hungarian poet of the sixteenth century, lived at the time when England saw the wrecks of the Invincible Armada floating on the ocean, the waves of which were now freed from the tyrant. But, in Hungary, alas! the poet and hero saw nothing but desolation, and went to meet his fate with a sad heart at the siege of Esztergom, fighting against the Turks. The chief Hungarian epic poet of the seventeenth century, Count Nicholas Zrinyi, happened to be travelling in Italy when Milton was there. Soon the return of each poet was claimed by his country, but the different parts which awaited them are characteristic of the fates of their respective lands. Milton left Italy, and with his pen helped to fight for, and to win, freedom under Cromwell's leadership.[1] Count Zrinyi devoted all his powers, both as general and as poet, to the great task of delivering Hungary from the Turkish yoke, but he did not live to see his aim fulfilled. The ideals of Zrinyi the leader were identical with those of Zrinyi the poet, and his literary work was like a trumpet-call to the nation, to awaken it from the torpor into which it had sunk under the "Turkish Opium," as he called the efforts of the Sultan to ingratiate himself with the subjugated Hungarians. Is it not natural that the leading theme of poets like Zrinyi should be the feeling of nationality?
After all danger from the Turk had passed away the Austrian influence threatened the national independence. At the time when Bishop Percy, in England, began to collect the treasures of ancient folk-lore, Hungarian popular poetry was just beginning to flourish. But by what sad events it was nourished. It sprang from the soil of the battlefield, during the wars of Francis Rákóczy, Prince of Transylvania; its theme was the patriotic but vanquished Kuruc, or national army.
In the nineteenth century, while the poets of England were singing songs of triumph over the downfall of their country's foe, Napoleon, Hungary's sons trembled for their fatherland as they saw the signs of approaching danger, and foresaw a day when they might share the fate of Poland and be obliterated from among the nations. In the poem Szózat (Appeal), which became as popular a national song with the Hungarians as Rule Britannia with the English, the poet Vörösmarty drew the pathetic picture of a great day of burial when the nations of Europe would stand around the grave where the Hungarian nation had been entombed.
About the middle of the nineteenth century John Arany was Hungary's greatest poet His dominant note, like that of Lord Byron, was one of profound melancholy, but how differently were the two poets circumstanced. Byron wrote after Waterloo, while on the heart of Arany was stamped the tragedy of Világos, where the Hungarian army was compelled to lay down its arms, after the whole country had been flooded by the Russian allies, called in by Austria to crush those who dared to struggle for liberty.
It must not be thought, however, that Hungarian literature is exclusively national in its contents and character. Just as the country itself is open to the waters of the Danube, rolling down from the west, so too, from the time of the Middle Ages, its literature received a stream of western ideas. Every epoch in Hungary's intellectual development was closely related to movements in Western Europe. Each new wave of impulse originating there—the asceticism of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Anti-Reformation, the Baroque style, rationalism, romanticism, and the new democratic ideals—reached the borders of Hungary, and left some mark upon its mental life.
- ↑ In his prose pamphlet, Defensio Secunda, Milton states that his mind was stronger than his body, and that therefore he did not court camps, where any common man could be as useful as himself.