Hungarian Literature: An Historical and Critical Survey

Of the nations in the south-east of Europe, the Hungarians, or Magyars, are probably the most renowned, and at the same time, the least known. Although their extensive country has now been in their possession and under their rule for over one thousand years, and albeit the historic r™le of the Hungarians, rather than that of Hungary, has been and is one of no common magnitude, in that, without their secular and successful fight against Osman ascendancy, Europe could scarcely have maintained its civilization in the countries east of Munich: yet in spite of all such claims to attention on the part of western nations, Hungary and the Hungarians are still largely unknown in England, France and America.

In English-speaking countries no serious attempts have as yet been made either to tell the stirring story of HungaryÕs past, or to analyse the rich possibilities of her future. Except single and singular features of Magyar life or natural products, such as the famous ÒHungarianÓ bands of the Tsiganes or gypsies and their ÒweirdÓ music; Hungarian flour and Hungarian wine; and most of all the figure of HungaryÕs greatest political orator, Louis Kossœth; except these and a few more curiosities relating to Hungary, the proud nations of the west of Europe do not, as a rule, take notice of all the rest of the life of a nation of eighteen million persons.

The festivities of the Hungarian millennium celebrated the year before last, came to the western world as a surprise. Few Englishmen were prepared to realize the fact that, at a time when their ancestors were still under small princes of mixed blood, and, moreover, constantly exposed to, and finally nearly absorbed by foreign conquerors, the Hungarians had already reared a solid fabric of government on the site on which for now over a thousand years they have withstood the armies, the diplomacy and the alien immigration of the Turks, the Germans and the Slavs. Unconquered by force or disaster, and not denationalized by either the Germans or Slavs around them, the Hungarians have maintained almost intact the language and music they brought with them from the Steppes of Asia; and when in the ripeness of time a Magyar literature was beginning to develop, it proceeded on lines neither German nor Slav, but thoroughly Hungarian.

This literature is both in extent and quality, one of the most remarkable of the lesser literatures of Europe. The number of writers of Magyar works is no less than 5,000; and their works cover all the provinces of poetry and of philosophic, historic or scientific inquiry into nature or man. While accepting the standard of criticism adopted by the recognized arbiters of literary greatness, we have no hesitation in saying that Hungarian Literature has a number, if a limited one, of stars of the first magnitude, and no inconsiderable number of lesser lights. This fact acquires still greater importance from the consideration that the bulk of Hungarian Literature properly speaking dates back little over a hundred years; and that many, far too many Hungarians have, up to recent times, left their native country and, writing their works in German or French, added to the literature of nations other than their own. Comparatively few, exceedingly few, Englishmen have enlisted among the writers of nations outside the United Kingdom; very many, exceedingly many Hungarians have, under stress of various circumstances, written in Latin, German, French or English, and thereby reduced the bulk and often the quality of Hungarian Literature proper.Ê