A History of Hungarian Literature/Chapter 3
III
THE MIDDLE AGES
It was in the tenth century that the Hungarians came from Asia, founded their state, and embraced Christianity, and were thus brought into contact with the Europe of the Middle Ages, and shared in its civilisation. Some features of that civilisation were common to every country. All the nations of Christendom possessed the two fundamental institutions of the Church and Chivalry. And community of religion in those days, when religion was the chief source of light for men, meant vastly more than it does now. The mass, the liturgy, and the majority of the legends were the same everywhere. Two stars shone in the sky during the long night of the Middle Ages: religion and the spirit of chivalry. The relics of Hungarian literature which have come down to us from that epoch reveal the influence of only one of those two great luminaries—religion. All the works inspired by the genius of chivalry have been lost. There is a whole library of legends in prose, laboriously inscribed on parchment and decorated with initials by pious monks and nuns; but they all breathe a spirit of fervent piety, and are not concerned with chivalry.
The first brilliant figure of the later Renaissance was King Matthias Hunyadi, whose great name evoked the slumbering forces of the national poetic genius.
The religious spirit was undoubtedly the most prolific source of literature during the Middle Ages. Religion played a very large part in the life of the people. All that was noblest in them was derived from it; whatever knowledge they had was connected with it, indeed without it their minds would have been almost blank. Chivalry was for the few, but religion was the only luminary on the mental horizon of the multitude, and but for it they would have been almost in darkness. It is not surprising, therefore, that the literature which has come down to us from the Middle Ages is nearly all religious. If we wish to know what men were like in those days we must read their hymns, written on vellum, and bound in leather with brass clasps; their books of tales, adorned with elaborate initials; their chronicles, with their quaint coloured illustrations, in which certain stiff, meagre figures may be recognised by their crowns to be kings; or, perhaps, an occasional fragment of a song, scribbled by some enamoured notary or clerk on the margin of his account books, during the time of the carnival.
The greater part of what has come down to us consists of sacred tales or legends. The earliest Hungarian book (that is, the first large codex) contains the legends relating to St. Francis of Assisi. It is called the Ehrenfeld Codex, after its present owner. Many a legend gathered round the lives of the Hungarian national saints. The most notable came from the line of the Árpád kings (eleventh to thirteenth century). Among them were St. Stephen, who induced his people to embrace Christianity (died in 1038); his son, St. Imre, who died in his early youth; the chivalrous hero, St. Ladislas (eleventh century); St. Elizabeth, daughter of King Andrew II.; and St. Margaret, daughter of King Béla IV. The literature of legend is a vast forest, the trees of which are wrapt in a mystical moonlit haze. Let us for a moment enter the dense, tangled forest; we shall probably find no straight path, but above us we may see the stars of heaven shining through the leaves.
Every age has a different conception of space and time, of the place occupied in the Universe by Man, and of the changes which the whirligig of time brings to mankind and to the world in general. The man of the Middle Ages was convinced that his little Earth was the centre, and the chief concern of the Universe. Such a conception is entirely childish to our mind. He imagined Heaven to be so near the earth that "our world" and "the other world" might easily communicate with each other. The "other world" was the really important thing. Nature, as we understand it, had little interest for him.
Why pay careful heed to nature and her works? Whenever it should prove necessary or beneficial, the skies would open and a host of glorious spirits would descend upon the earth. In seeking for help against the many physical ills of earthly life, the man of those times never attempted to subjugate the powers of nature and make them serve his purposes, but tried instead to win the active benevolence of supernatural powers. There were no difficulties, no obstacles nor wants, with which miracles could not cope, and it was by miracles that vice was punished and virtue rewarded. Only hard experience in the school of life could correct those views, and bring the lucidum intervallum of truth.
Those conceptions are abundantly illustrated in the Hungarians legends. When the coachman falls asleep, the carriage tears on its way in perfect safety for the sake of St. Ladislas (1094) who is inside. When his army is perishing from lack of food in an uninhabited district, at the prayer of the saint-king, large herds of oxen and buffaloes rush out from the wood. When a poor blind girl goes to the tomb of St. Ladislas her blind eyes fall to the ground, and she sees them fall, for new eyes have been given her. The first Christian king, St. Stephen, heals every one of whom tidings are brought to him, by cutting a slice of his own loaf of bread and sending it to the sufferer.
St. Elizabeth is also helped by a benevolent miracle when once, in her embarrassment, she deviates from the strict truth. This miracle is narrated in the Érdi Codex with childish naïveté. "It came to pass on a day when it was very cold, that the lady St. Elizabeth, taking good care that nobody should see her, carried the crusts and remnants of dinner to the poor outside the gate, a thing she had been forbidden to do. And lo! her father, the King (Andrew II.) suddenly stood before her. He was astonished to see her all alone and walking so hurriedly, and said to her: "Whither goest thou, my child Elizabeth? What art thou carrying?" The King's noble daughter, being very timid and gentle, felt ashamed, and could not answer anything but "I carry roses." But her father, being a wise man, remembered on a sudden that it was not the time of the year for roses, so he called her to him and looked at what she was holding in her lap, when, oh! wonderful! the crusts had all become roses. Oh, immortal, blessed, immaculate purity! The ever blessed King of Heaven did not let the words of His beloved handmaid bring her to shame. And her father, filled with wonder, said: "If this maiden lives she will be great." The forces of nature had not to be laboriously conquered as they are to-day; they were all expected to be at the service of morality, blessing or injuring, to enforce her precepts. A bright star descended from Heaven and shone above the tomb of St. Ladislas. The beasts of the field either became tame domestic animals or performed symbolical duties. When St. Benedict died a martyr's death near the river Vág, an eagle hovered above the water for a whole year. Over the death-bed of St. Elizabeth there fluttered a bird, singing sweetly. Among these legendary figures is St. Margaret, daughter of King Béla IV., clad in a coarse, hairy garment, her tortured body sore with self-inflicted wounds, around her waist a hempen girdle studded with sharp nails, and in her hand a scourge, while the tearful eyes are filled with a look of pain and yet of exaltation. The nun, in that age, was not less heroic than the knight.
What extremes religious fanaticism reached, and how in its exaltation it trampled under foot everything which we hold sacred in human life, is clearly reflected in the mirror of these legends. When St. Elizabeth was informed of the death of her husband, who had gone to the Holy Land in accordance with her advice, the legend tells how "she offered her fervent thanksgivings to God." As soon as her neighbours were aware that she had become a widow, alone and unprotected, they turned against her and robbed her of all her estates. "And then," says the narrative, "the noble daughter of the king was driven to live in a pig-sty where she poured out her thanks to God for all her trials and misery. When morning came she rose and went to the monks, who were named after St. Francis, and implored them to sing a Te Deum laudamus for her. As she passed along the street she was met by an old woman whom in former times she had loaded with charity. This old woman now thrust her into the mud. Elizabeth offered prayers of thanksgiving for this also." The saint saw more and more the vanity of worldly things. She wished to remain in her state of abject poverty. "And, therefore," continues the legend "in order that she might be quite free from worldly cares, she prayed to her Lord Jesus that He should enable her to despise all earthly interests and pleasures, and even to forget her children and cease to love them thenceforth." And from that day she beheld wondrous visions, heavenly voices spoke to her, and much comfort and bliss were vouchsafed to her from the heavens above.
We have seen that to the thought of the day, heaven and earth, the natural and the miraculous, were all blended into one, and in the people's idea of time there was the same lack of discrimination. They knew of no difference between the people of one period and those of another. As the world was then, so it had ever been, and would for ever continue to be. Even the most learned men had not the faintest conception of the enormous changes which had taken place in men's thoughts, their laws and habits, and in human life altogether. That their age was itself the result of a long historical development, and the starting-point for a further course of change in the whole mental and material condition of mankind, never occurred to the human mind during the thousand years of the Middle Ages. Men knew nothing with certainty of the past, and to the future they gave no thought. To improve the conditions of their own life, or to lessen the burdens of humanity, was no concern of theirs. The very idea of progress was foreign to their minds. Hence the great naïveté with which the painter of that time treats his almost solitary subject, the Bible. The characters of the Old and New Testament are to him exactly like the people he meets every day, so that all his representations of the past are full of internal and external anachronisms.
This want of knowledge gave the artist a kind of assurance, the boldness of naïveté, but his work is far inferior to reality. The frescoes in the cathedral at Kassa, representing Jerusalem at the time of Christ, make it look exactly like the town of Kassa in the fifteenth century.
It is this lack of the chronological sense which has falsified the chronicles. In them the times of Attila the Hun, and the Hungarian Árpád, are mixed up together, although they were really separated by an interval of five hundred years. They tell us that the Hungarians occupied the country some ten or twenty years after the death of Attila, whose two grandsons fought under the banner of Árpád. One of the earliest chroniclers, the "anonymous scribe of King Béla" (Anonymus Belae Regis notarius) actually took the names of the Hungarian leaders from Dares Phrygius's Destruction of Troy, where the author describes Castor and Pollux, Hector and Paris. To the chronicler, the Trojan War and the doings of Attila and of Árpád, were very much the same.
Any one who fails to realise the vast difference between the mental life of that day and of our own, as the rationalists of the eighteenth century failed, and as also did George Bessenyei, a follower of Voltaire, in Hungary, will never understand the real spirit of the Middle Ages, and neither will he who is content with merely following the political controversies of the period. It was to the absence of any control over the impulses of the natural man that many an outburst of violence was due. How many cruel and thoughtless deeds may be found even in the life of St. Stephen himself. He blinded his relative, the innocent Basil, in order that he might not claim the throne. Yet Stephen was one of the most pious and thoughtful monarchs of the Middle Ages. Foreign chroniclers, when describing King Kálmán the Wise, agree that he surpassed all contemporary monarchs in knowledge and wisdom, yet he, also, punished his rebellious brother Álmos and his young son by depriving them of sight. Even Louis the Great and John Hunyadi displayed some of the wild ferocity of the times in their wars.
In Hungary, the Middle Ages were less marked by religious zeal and exaltation, and also by intolerance, than in the Western countries. The character of its people has always been distinguished for sobriety and reserve. This, undoubtedly, was advantageous in so far as it aided political development, but, on the other hand, it deprived the nation of the literature of religious fervour. Nevertheless, Christianity was blended with the strong national feeling of the Hungarians, and each profoundly modified the other instead of developing along separate lines. Proof of this is furnished by many historical tales and monuments.
The Blessed Virgin is not only a religious idea, but also the patron saint of Hungary. One of the Hungarian kings, St. Ladislas (1094), was canonised, and renowned as a most pious Crusader, yet he was at the same time the most popular and chivalrous soldier of the battlefield. He is the only king whose memory has been enshrined equally in the folk-lore, in sacred legends, and in the frescoes on the walls of churches. He forms the favourite subject alike of the sculptor and of the writers of the clumsy but well-meaning lyrics sung by the priests. Miniature painters, chroniclers, poets, metal workers, and coiners all glorify him. He was the first national ideal of the people to be immortalised in art, and his equestrian statue is the finest relic of the sculpture of the Middle Ages. The church, the folk-lore, and the Latin verses in the Peer Codex have all helped to preserve some remembrance of this ideal knight. The idealistic and chivalric qualities of the Middle Ages in Hungary reached their zenith in his personality.
The spirit of an epoch is expressed not only by the written word, or by statues and pictures, but also by its architecture. In Hungary, as in most other countries, all the great edifices of the Middle Ages were ecclesiastical. Men were content to live in small, dark houses and narrow streets, but their cathedrals were lofty and magnificent buildings, embodiments in stone of their religious zeal. The four most famous ancient monuments in Hungary are all creations of the religious spirit; the Norman cathedral at Ják, the Gothic dome at Kassa, the basilica at Pécs, and the high altar at Lőcse. Every branch of art received its inspiration from religion, and statues and pictures reveal exactly the same naïveté and the same religious fervour as the parchment books of that little library which has been bequeathed to the present generation as the Hungarian literature of the Middle Ages.
The type of ancient Hungarian ecclesiastical architecture is a cathedral, with strongly-built, fortress-like towers at each of the four corners, showing the two prevailing sentiments of the times—the religious and the warlike—cathedral and fortress in one.
Individual characteristics had not much chance of development, and there is accordingly a great scarcity of subjectíve lyric poetry. Every man, whether knight, priest, or artisan, was a member of a community. It is the normal which thrives best in such associations, and distinctively individual features are little cultivated. Whenever we find feelings other than those of religion, in the poetry or art of the Middle Ages, we are struck by their nebulous, indistinct character. The human soul seems to have been hidden from men by a veil, as Nature was, and consequently psychological observation did not exist; people examined neither their own souls nor the souls of others. In the poetry of that period action was everything, and the inner, psychological process which precedes action and leads to it was nothing.
If we may be permitted to use the language of geology, the soul of the Hungarian people during the Middle Ages might be said to show in section three different strata. At the bottom is the primitive pagan nature, brought from their Asiatic home. The next shows a more cultured mental condition, the result largely of intercourse with Turkish, Slavish, German, and Italian neighbours. Last comes Christianity, introducing a multitude of new features into the life of the people. In the absence of sufficient literary remains we can only gather as best we may, by the aid of analogy, what are the thoughts and feelings which belong to each stratum.