250 HUNGARIAN LITERATURE thirty-eight years of age, and had gain ed some reputation as a member of Partiament by his speeches, the fiery character of wh ich was c ongenial to the temper of that stormy epoch . The Tragedy of Mar was the first of his dramas to be published (r86r), and it was also the last he wrote, for he died in r864. Th e Tragedy of Man is a poem of the type of Goethe's Faust and Byron's Ca in. It is not one man, nor even a group of men, that the poet has chosen as the subject of his theme, but, boldly enough, the whole of mankind. His h ero is Adam, the eternal type of humanity. The work displays the whole history of man, not merely his past, but his present, and even his future. We witness the whole process of man's development, up to the time when the human race will be extinguished, and its earthly home become frazen and uninhabitable. Seen through the eyes of the poet, that history appears a huge, grim tragedy. Th e problem for the poet to solve was, h ow to compress such an immense subj ect within the narrow limit of a single drama. Th e opening scene is Jaid on biblical ground, in Eden. Adam yields to the temptation of Lucifer and tastes the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge . After losing Eden, the fallen man and his mate have to endure the hardships of exile, and they long to cast a giance into the far-off future to see what is to be the outcome of their toils and sufferings. Lucifer, whose aim is to destroy the n e wly created human race at the very outset, causes the pair to sink into a deep sl eep, and evokes a succession of visions wh ich reveal the future of human ity, and in which Adam beholds scene after scene of the world's future, hímself taking an active part in each .
