PAUL GYELAPS TALES.*

THE exact relation of cause and effect subsisting between the political circumstances of a nation and the character and position of its literature is an interesting subject for speculation, to which we cannot pretend to do justice within the limits of this article. That the literature of Germany was developed later than those of Spain, France, and England was in great measure due to the peculiarly subordinate and unnational role played by Germany in the drama of European history between the Reformation and the French Revolution. The development of Russian literature was deferred to a still later period by the still less fortunate position of

that country. As far . the course of letters takeb literature presents points both oi—

two just mentioned. Compared with either Germans or Russians, the Hungarians are but a handful of men. Their whole history is one of a struggle, protracted through centuries, not for glory, not for aggrandizement, but for bare existence. The consciousness of their numerical weakness and national danger can he traced in their literature, which bears to a great extent what Mr. Matthew Arnold would call the "note of provinciality." Hun. gary and men and things Hungarian are almost exclusively the themes of all Hungarian literature, whether history, poetry, or prose fiction. And if a Hungarian author does treat foreign subjects, how inferior is he to himself when describing native scenes and native characters! This is strikingly exemplified in M. Jokers Hungarian Nabob. Full of extravagancies and impossi. bilities as are both the French and Hungarian scenes and characters in that romance, the reader yet feels that the latter have in them some savour of reality, which all the author's liveliness of imagination fails to impart to the former. This provincial character of Hungarian literature, which is, perhaps, common to those of all the lesser nations, is aggravated by the peculiar position of their language. Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese are languages spoken by small nations, but their similarity to those spoken by nations of greater literary importance causes them to be occasionally learned by foreigners. But the Magyar, to use the forcible expression of one of his own peasant songs, is "the very true orphan upon earth." His language is as strange to his Slavonic neighbours as it is to the Teutonic and Romance-speaking peoples. Hence a Hungarian author can reckon upon no audience or criticism beyond the narrow limits of his native land.

The character of a literature is further affected by the general spirit of the age. It is, perhaps, an unfortunate thing for Hungarian literature that its present immature stage of development is synchronous with democratic bustle, railways, and the daily press. These influences have tended to tempt many writers, by nature worthy of better things, to haste and slovenliness, to aim at quantity rather than quality, at producing a momentary effect rather than a zeii,w4 i; risi. The intense interest felt by the Hungarians in politics and the free public life traditional among them have contributed to throw the literary energy of the country into the columns of the political journals. What reviews are in Russia, newspapers are in Hungary. Nor should we omit to notice one additional source of slovenliness, as it is eminently characteristic of the country. During the persecution, more or less severe, to which Magyarism was subjected by the Austrian Government from 1849 to 1859, it was considered a sacred and patriotic duty to encourage the national literature. This was understood by a half-educated public, peculiarly open to the arts of that patriotism which Dr. Johnson described as "the last refuge of a scoundrel," to mean the indiscriminate purchase of all books, good, bad, and indifferent, which appeared in the national language. It is a striking proof of the tendency of the human mind to be blinded by protectionist fallacies, that many Hungarians, who are very far from being uneducated, and by no means wanting in shrewdness, failed to see that such a patronage was more injurious to their national literature than the severest, even the unfairest, criticism.

It is because slovenliness is the besetting sin of contemporarY Hungarian literature, that the author whose name stands at the head of this article more especially demands our favourable notice. M. Gyulai at least appreciates the truth that in literature quality is of more importance than quantity. He is said to have astonished a fellow littirateur by expressing a wish to put all he had to say in one book, and that a short one. He is known in his own country principally as the author of a biography of the poet Vorosmarty, which is substantially a history and a criticism of Hungarian literature during the first half of this century. :That literature was in great measure an artificial production, originated by a section of the educated classes iii rivalry of contemporarY German literature. The criticisms of Leasing served, as it were, for its starting-point ; but through Kisfaludy, the Italian pota through Berzsenyi and others, the old Latin classics, exercised great influence over it, and contributed to impress on it a still more exotic stamp. Attempts were, however, made by Czuczor and others to give it a more popular character. This problem was at length solved in 1842 by the appearance of Feta, whose sooga were modelled on the Ne'pdalok (German Volkslieder) of the Wag, peasantry, and yet contained enough delicacy of sentiment and originality of thought to recommend them to the cultivated class!! Voriismarty himself was the first to recognize the merits of 1113 youthful rival. Petofi's lyrics for the most part present to the uncritical reader an appearance even more unstudied and careless

than those of Heine, and after his death in 1849, during the prevalence of foreign oppression and mistaken patriotic patronage alluded to above, were eagerly used as models by the mass of idle young men, whose education had been prematurely closed by the war, while the cessation of free public life had forced them into literature. Feta thus exercised one decidedly bad influence on the literature of his native country, by flooding it with a quantity of subjective lyrical poetry written by men whose capacities

seldom surpassed and often fell short of mediocrity, than which no form of literary exertion is more unprofitable. These untaught, uncultivated,—or, to use an expressive Hungarian word, betydr,— geniuses argued that because Petofi led a life of vagabondage, ran

away from school, enlisted as a common soldier, became a strolling player, and wrote poetry which had passed into the mouths of the peasantry, therefore the true qualifications of a poet were =limited ignorance, bad manners, eccentric dress, and defiance of criticism, good taste, and common sense. In 1861

Petofi's relations requested M. Gyulai to edit his miscellaneous works. He made the accomplishment of that task subservient to a critical purpose, sedulously pointing out to the admirers and $oi-disant imitators of the poet that, like all other artists, Petofi had served a severe apprenticeship before he became a masterbard. And what M. Gyulai taught as biographer of V orosmarty and editor of Petofi, he exemplifies in the two volumes of Sketches ond Pictures before us. Tie limits of this article will not allow us to do more than notice briefly one or two of them. Among tales so nearly equal in merit our choice must necessarily be arbitrary. Let us take "The Miser's Death ": "The village of Fenyiid" [so the story commences] "is situate in the comity of Touts, not far from the mountains of Gorgdny. The scenery is delightful ; the village shabby, not so much the houses as the inhabitants. In their midst rises the church ; not far from that two Jewish distilleries ; at the end of the village a row of gypsy huts. Here, as everywhere else, the Hungarian has his Jew and his Gypsy, the necessary supplements, as it were, of his nationality."

Torjai, the miser of the piece, is then introduced to us. He is a "nobleman," i.e., in the Hungarian sense of the word, but it is so far from answering the idea we attach to it, that he is not

even a gentleman. He often boasted to his servants that he started from home on a white horse with five florins in his pocket, having left behind eight younger brothers and sisters, who would have diminished his share of the paternal inheritance to a few farrows. By serving first as farm bailiff, then as land steward, to magnate landed proprietors, he had contrived, by dint of picking and stealing, combined with the strictest economy, to accumulate enough money to set up as a landed proprietor himself. His tumbledown unsightly dwelling shows plainly enough what little store he sets on mere appearances. The most he seems to care for is that it should not come down about his ears. Nor was the improvement in his pecuniary circumstances reflected in his dress, which remained as cheap and shabby as ever. It was to land lords of this description that the reforms of 1848 were most unpalatable, and

"No one in Hungary or Transylvania felt profounder grief than did

Torjai when he found that the peasants, for whose labour, as constituting no small part of the property, he had paid so much, were no longer bound to work on his fields, and that he was further to pay taxes ;1st as if he were a peasant himself. In vain did he go out into the street and cough so violently that they could hear him at the other end of the 'village; but few took off their hats to him. In vain did he "lute the magistrate of the hundred twice as low as he had been used to do; he no longer showed himself ready to levy executions on his poor debtors. In vain did the crops come up so well ; there was no one to get them in, and if they were got in, why the half of them would go to the tax-gatherer. There he sat for days on the covered terrace in front of his house, and to his foreman abused the peasants, who eat and drank and danced without caring what became of their former kind lord and the Diet which had reduced honest men to beggary. Then he complained to his housekeeper, Sarah, that the world was going to rack and rein, that they should die of hunger ; and told her not to cook so much as before, nor to expect her former wages."

The habitual meanness of the man, his occasional acts of hesitating generosity to a nephew who seems likely to make a figure in the world and do credit to his family, the desperate

resistance which he offers on his deathbed to the inquisitive greed his relatives, are depicted with M. Gyulai's conscientious fidelity to nature and able selection of details. When the old

at length expires amid the threats and curses of his own kin,

f°rnler Peasants merely observe what a pity it was that he had not died before, when they had to work for him ; now there was no in his death. The three relatives,—his drunken brother iSainuelt his resolute bullying nephew Joseph, and his sister-inmw, the wife of a Protestant pastor, whose conversation is full of unction, and who insists strongly on the duty of providing for her own household, which if she neglected she would be worse than an infidel,—are contrasted together with grimly effective humour: One ray of light is allowed to illumine this dark picture of the meanest of human passions. An orphan girl, whose mother, a French governess, had knocked one night at Torjai's door, and died after a short illness, tends the old miser with almost filial affection to the very last.

It is curious to see three of the elements which form the interest of "The Miser's Death" recombined in an entirely different story, "The Last Master of an Old Court-House." There, again, we have a landlord dying slowly amid the hostility of his former tenantry, persecuted by the undutiful conduct of his own relations, and tended on his deathbed by an orphan taken into his house from charity. But M. Radnothy is quite a different character from the miser Torjai. He is the last scion of a family of rank and power, who has played an important part in the administration of the country, and, if too much under the influence of aristocratic prejudices, is also sustained by the consciousness that his sufferings are undeserved. The description of the proud old gentleman wasting away in the sole companionship of a confidential servant, with whom he relives their common past, is one of the most pathetic pictures ever drawn ; and yet such is the self-restraint of our author, that the taste of the most fastidious reader is never jarred.