THE NEW HUNGARIAN NOVEL.■ WE do not pretend to appraise
the absolute literary merits of Maurice Jokai on the strength of having perused, and that in translation, one only of his novels. The pleasure of entering for the first time a completely fresh field,—especially one which is at the same time so like and so different from our own, so full of social elements that we can heartily appreciate, and of varieties which give an intense zest to that appreciation,—is so vivid, that it would be folly to attempt anything like a literary appreciation of Mr. Maurice J6kai's literary powers on the mere reading of this single specimen of his work. Still, we may say that the present reviewer has not enjoyed a novel so much for a very long time. Mr. Patterson has turned the original Hungarian into most readable and idiomatic English, and though we have no means of compar- ing, and no power to compare, his version with the original from -which it is taken, his long residence in Hungary and familiarity with Hungarian literature are, we imagine, fair guarantees of its substantial accuracy.
What we have so much enjoyed in this book is its great variety and vivacity both of incident and character. No one character is studied and delineated in the style to which George Eliot has accustomed us here. All the characters are sketched with a .much slighter hand. But there is scarcely one without its own humour or pathos or characteristic local colour ; and then within two short volumes, what a variety of these, what a vivacity in each of them, and how admirably are they all blended into the tissue of the narrative so as really to contibute to the progress of the tale ! The story is laid during one of the ten years of passive resistance to Austrian rule between the Hungarian war of 1848-9 and the shock given by France to Austria in 1859. ' The tendency of the tale is itself a sign of the times. The " New Landlord " is a generous and impulsive Austrian, who goes to settle in the midst of Hungary on account of the cheapness of the land, and the subject of the story may in some sense be said to be the process of his reconciliation to the old Hungarian landlord of the same district, the old Magyar Chief Garanvolgyi, whose nephew has been thrown into the for- tress of Kufstein for his share in the war of 1849, and who is himself leading the party of passive resistance to all Austrian decrees at the opening of the tale. When the Austrian tobacco monopoly is introduced into Hungary, and old Garanvolgyi finds that he must buy his tobacco at the Government stores or be liable to heavy penalties, he gives up smoking. When an excise is put on wine, so that whoever drinks wine contributes to the Austrian revenue or endangers his own liberty, old Garanvolgyi gives up wine. When news comes that playing cards are to pay duty and to be stamped with the Austrian double eagle, old Garanvolgyi gives up cards. When a game licence is established by the Austrian Government without which no man may shoot even on his own property, and even a saddle can only be used on giving the Austrian authorities a written assurance that it should be used for no purposes dangerous to the Government, old Garanvolgyi gives up shooting and riding. When passports are established between village and village old Garanvolgyi determines to stay always at home. When the Austrian Government gives notice that in consequence of the prevalence of certain hats known to express disloyalty, Hungarians who are anxious to avoid disagree- able consequences must look that they do not wear hats approaching this fashion, old Garanviilgyi resolves not to go beyond his garden, and that only when the weather is fine enough to dispense with
• The New Landlord. Translated from the original Hungarian of Maurice Mai. By Arthur J. Patterson. 2 vols. London: Macmillan.
a hat altogether. And when a stamp is imposed on the paper on which legal documents are written, old Garanvolgyi makes the greatest of all sacrifices, and gives up law-suits altogether, even to the sacrifice of debts due to him. As is the uncle, so is the nephew, the prisoner of Kufstein, who for five years makes himself perfectly happy in the fortress, without asking for books, or for exercise in the open air, or for any one privilege which requires asking for, and yet never resists or disputes a regulation of the fortress of any kind, so deeply rooted is the curious mix- ture of pride and prudence by which these Magyars make their disloyalty known to their conquerors, without giving them any excuse for further severity. The story turns, as we said, on the reconciliation of the family of these Protestant Garanvolgyis, the old landlord's family, to the family of the Austrian and Catholic Ankerschmidt, the new landlord's family, —and admirably, indeed, are the virtues and qualities of the two contrasted and compared. We scarcely know a finer passage anywhere for dry, stern pathos, than that in which old Garanvolgyi, on his first half hostile meeting with Ankerschmidt, justifies himself for not reading a German letter which is the subject of dispute, on the ground that he has " forgotten " the language. Ankerschmidt taunts him with the ironical character of such a fiction as that. We give old Garanvolgyi's reply :—
" Garanvolgyi gave a great sigh, drew his chair nearer to the Knight, and proceeded Noble and gallant sir, a man can forget very, very important things if he chooses. There was a time when I was for twenty-four years the elected governor of this county ; every third year I was elected anew, and I administered justice according to known laws, I maintained order successfully, I defended by word and deed all that the country held precious. That state of things passed away. The first year it often occurred to me, as it were in a dream, that I must go to the county town, that a county sessions was being held, that there were important subjects coming on for discussion. But it was folly thinking so. All that had been put an end to. I had to forget all that, and I did forget it. There was a time when I was a rich man ; if the people were in want, they always sought bread at my house, and found it. That, too, has come to an end. For a long time, whenever I saw men in rags taking off their hats as they pass under my window, I thought that I must go out and ask them why they were in such mis- fortune. A stupid fancy! Things are not with me now as they used to be. That also I had to forget, and I did forget it. I had relations upon whom I had heaped benefits. They betrayed me, they deprived me of the inheritance of my fathers, and I was able to forget my wasted bounty. I had a nephew, a dear lad, the only child of my departed sister ; him I brought up from his cradle, and he was all to me which a son could be to a father—good-hearted, honourable, brave, wise, my pride, my sup- port, the comfort of my old age. No, he did not deceive me ; but he now sits in Kufstein, condemned to twelve years' imprisonment. If he had remained with me, if we had kept on the same road together, even now he might be free; but because I let him go another way, he must now suffer for it, and must waste away the years of his youth between four walls, while I have escaped. For a long time it seemed to me that I was expecting him home, that he was already in his room, that I heard his well known voice, that I recognized his steps in the passage, that it would be of some use to dream of him and to take him by the hand, and say, ' Now thou wilt remain here ;' just as if I should then find him here even when I awoke. This hallucination stuck by me the longest, but I had to forget it, for it was folly (I shall not live to see him again), and I did forget even this sorrow. Sir, I have forgotten what I have lost ; I have forgotten what I have suffered; I have forgotten what I have hoped ; I have forgotten the rain of my country ; I have forgotten my own pride, my own shame ; how then should I not have forgotten that on which I never bestow a thought?"
And the whole picture of the old man is in perfect keeping with this noble piece of imaginative sophistry. To an Englishman the whole Hungarian war—both the war of arms and the greater war of civil resistance which followed rendered more intelligible by this grand and impressive historical picture. Nor is his generous foe, the German knight Ankerschmidt, less vivid, though to an Englishman his is a much more common-place character. His passionate impulses, his high chivalry, his simple and even gullible trustfulness, his slowness to believe and conceive the infinite dishonesty and chicanery of the German official administration of Hungary, and the good-humour with which, on the whole, he learns by his own experience the painful lesson of the rascality of those of his fellow-countrymen through whom Hungary is plundered, make a very happy pendant to old Garanvolgyi's keen and humorous knowledge of the world, his stern self-restraint, and nonchalant pride. But besides these two strongly painted principal figures, there are a host of minor ones of the most admirable vividness. There is the Austrian spy, the agent of the Cabinet Noir, Straff, alias Count Bogumil, with a num- ber of other aliases, whose cunning and rapacity are so great as to outwit himself. The picture of this man's scoundrelly qualities in the chapter called "The Screw of Archimedes" is wonderfully graphic. The rascal persuades one of Ankerschmidt's daughters to run away with him and make a private marriage, knowing that she has a considerable independent fortune left her by her mother. As it turns out, however, this fortune is dependent on her marrying to
her father's satisfaction, and when it appears that the man is a regularly paid spy, he will not give her a penny. Therefore the wretch maltreats his wife in order to procure by terror what he could not get in any other way, and when with shattered nerves she takes refuge with her father, threatens a lawsuit to compel her to return to him unless the old gentleman will pay. Of course, Ankerschmidt is only too eager to pay ; but the fellow raises his price whenever his last demand is conceded, trusting to the infinite compassion of the father and the daughter's terror of him. He only forgets to allow for his wife's delicacy, and the terrible pressure of the uncertainty on her nerves, and when he has screwed his terms just up to 6,0001., she dies before he has concluded the bargain, and he gets nothing. The story of this Archimedes-screw of his and its failure is most powerfully told. Then there is the rascally lawyer Grisak, and his various accomplices in the official circles and out of them, through the villany of one of whom the great inundation of the Theiss is caused,—this is an historical incident ; and as a contrast to all this rascality there is the admirable figure of Garanvolgyi's simple-hearted, old house- steward Kampos, the first to be taken in by Straff, the Austrian spy, and the quaintness of whose credulity, when it is practised upon on the patriotic side, exceeds even that of the Austrian victims, but whose coolness and shrewdness in dealing with open enemies,—the Austrian police,—serves for a scene as admirable as some of Sir Walter Scott's pictures of Scotch cunning in dealing with Claverhouse and his men. The humour with which all the trickery of the story is detailed, and with which the different types of trickery—Magyar and German,—are distin- guished, is one of the most striking features.
Nor are the women less graphically sketched. The bel esprit, Madame Pajtay, may be a little overdone, though her selfish cunning, its successes and discomfitures, are ren- dered exceedingly entertaining. In her, intrigue seems to be carried rather beyond what is natural, because the woman is clever enough, and she must have seen that duplicity so broad was running the most obvious and needless risks of exposure. But the German prude and flirt, Miss Natalie, the gouvernante of Ankerschmidt's family, is a perfect sketch as far as she goes ; and the little heroine Fraulein Elise is one of the sweetest and most delicate little bits of rapid sketching that we have seen for many a day. On the whole, we can honestly say that a larger number of original and novel social sketches—slight, no doubt, but very graphic—have never as far as we remember been comprehended in so brief and rapidly moving a tale as in this Hungarian story of the New Landlord. The portion of the tale which describes the inundation of the Theirs is exceedingly spirited.
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