Gábor Halász
Preface to The Treasury of English Literature
(1943)
We are reminded of those flowers that spring, bud and blow before our very eyes in short films. This is the way the progress of literature strikes us as
reflected in the leaves of an anthology, the demonstration a little artificial in its methods perhaps but edifying all the same, the movement rapid from seedtime through to flowering. We watch it assume its characteristic shapes, note how it selects some specific form only to abandon it through sheer boredom a few pages later, see it obey the dictates of passing fashions and ideologies while jealously maintaining one or two essential traits, and observe it learning from other literatures even as it takes on its final unique identity. We register all its whims, how one era favours drama while another prefers lyrical poetry or the novel, how old popular forms disappear for long periods. We feel successive waves pass over us, the strong tidal flood of talent that appears at certain intervals alternating with unruffled, predictable stretches of flat water. We can follow the emergence of latent ideologies and the decline of old ones, the gradual growth of a style, its absolute dominance and its first failures. We observe the mysterious laws by which it functions, how the balance between instinct and intellect, authority and liberty, form-making and form-breaking alters over time. Within a few pages the taste for unfettered decorativeness yields to pious asceticism, puritanism becomes a laughing stock; religious faith gains new life or withers away, people prefer to laugh or to cry: we, at our ease meanwhile, leaf through the dramatic scenes of centuries. We could end up thoroughly sceptical about these powerful counter-currents did we not feel their desire and energy, sensing each new enthusiasm and the way the notion of eternal beauty haunts them all. Now and then masterworks serve as compensation for paths long abandoned.
English literature is particularly rich in revivals. The mystical flame of inspired medieval Catholicism dies only to flicker into life again in the nostalgic desires of the late nineteenth century. The pragmatic philosophers who turn experience into law are always complemented by one or two poets whose eyes, in a fine frenzy rolling, glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven and give airy nothing an earthly habitation and a name. The energetic Elizabethans, so hungry for money, blood and sway, so greedily expansive, are replaced by an introverted generation following conventional virtues just as the rigours of puritanism are succeeded by the excesses of the restoration, only so that, with the passing of centuries, the two battalions might once again confront each other in Georgian, and in Victorian costume. Baroque enthusiasm and tension settle down at the beginning of the eighteenth century only so that they might vex the poets of our own day. Realism survives the cult of abstract beauty, persists through the Renaissance, gains strength in the Age of Reason, and eventually triumphs only to be challenged by the aestheticism of another cult of beauty. Shakespeare is truly reborn in the work of the Romantics, so that he might return and conquer ever since in newer forms, newer interpretations. The sweetness of Spenser returns in Keats, the high-spirits of Fielding reappear in Dickens; every century has seen a new edition of Bacon with his pragmatic precepts. Hypocrisy raises its head from time to time, alternating with self-critical periods, Little Englandism is succeeded by the imperialist dream: there has never been a literature more exotic and more insular, more commonsense and more poetical, more mature and more juvenile or unfinished.
There was never a classical era, as the term is understood in France. The Elizabethan age burned with the fevers of puberty: adolescents of titanic dimensions stormed heaven with one masterpiece after another, the whole country could barely contain itself, the notion of adventure established itself as part of the instinctive godhead. Beneath their veneer of respectability and high-seriousness the Victorians trembled with a sense of undischarged debt, with anxiety and terrible inner schisms. Their Romanticism was closer to its source than their Classicism was. Keats was more Greek than Poe, here the Racinean model went unheeded. The greatest of them fell short of perfection; their enormous achievements were crowned by enormous defects: the most abject idolizers of form failed to get form quite right, the language, even in the hands of true artists, was never quite mature. The grotesque and the poetical prospered equally in this rich eternal mulch, their orchestration contained both the harsh trumpet and the emollient flute. Clowns cavorted, fairies sang. The poet was not afraid to adapt the most colloquial of voices but was capable of the most abstract; the dramatist was farcical one minute and funereal the next; the novelist could chatter and still engage in sombre discourse. Poets wrote nonsense verses with a straight face, essayists occupied themselves with trivialities; yet enormous visionary poems appeared and brilliant perceptions flooded from the pens of thinkers.
The greatest English poetry is a marvellous tapestry of visions and images. From its very beginnings Anglo Saxon poetry is characterized by the range of its metaphors. From Langland’s medieval dream-vision through the works of Milton and the Romantics, the art of the seer was kept alive, though it required ever more artificial ways of keeping it fresh. The difference between Langland’s vision and Coleridge’s opium dream is merely a matter of nervous stimulation: the vision itself is equally bold, equally modern; Blake’s extraordinary imagery was inspired by Milton: the difference in styles is insignificant compared to the eternal urgency of seeing and making see. Milton’s courage helped us envisage creation; he populated earth, sea and air with seething images of life and showed us angels falling dizzy and headlong through space; vast frescoes were generated by his almighty words. Dramatists shook earth and heaven with their outpourings in order to provide a fitting arena for the passions, the characters of even comic writers such as Ben Jonson let loose a torrent of metaphors and similes when they speak, mobilizing whole legions of images to animate their burlesques. Their rich circumlocutions entirely lack the dry sting of Moličre’s repartee; everyone is an orator of Falstaffian proportions, full of low-wit or high-sentence. Shakespeare’s tirades and Donne’s verse work at the limits of swaggering rhetoric, replete with ingenious comparisons, their images crawling with detail; the complex visions of Browning and Swinburne will differ from theirs only in external form not essence. After Shelley’s clouds of immaterial imagery the Preraphaelites’ language seems the almost tangible product of arts and crafts decorativeness, but there is the same hallucinatory quality in both. Comparing certain passages of Jonson’s Volpone with some of Wilde’s Herodias and putting aside the immeasurable differences of time and taste, we sense their shared passion for displaying vast swathes of precious, multi-patterned silk, their mutual desire to strew words about as if they were dispensing jewels.
Naturally, the scenery too glows with miraculous colours: their poetry is a feast for the eyes. The blue Italian sky, the wild ocean, the sparkling Swiss snows haunt them in their dreams of flight: the foggy shores, lakes and hills of home soothe their restlessness; they embark on voyages with Childe Harold, they hide with Ossian among the valleys. Milton shows us the underworld, Blake opens up the deserts of nightmare, Wordsworth and Tennyson resonate with the melancholy of familiar landscapes; the near and the distant, that which might be and that which never was are equally soaked through with atavistic experience, with the Celtic adoration of trees, stones, hills and waters, with the almost animalistic closeness of nature that even today remains unbroken and full of mystical power in Lawrence’s poetic prose. Progress and technology, those things they swore by, did no harm to their dreams: no more than the smoke of factories their silky lawns. During the last century, at the very height of the industrial revolution, there flourished the most fairy-tale kind of romanticism: poets at the centre of an immense empire were captivated by images of frail beauty.
The poets’ unworldliness was more than balanced by the realism of the novelists. Even during the Renaissance with its courtly masques, their predecessors, the pamphleteers, were preoccupied by what lay directly before them, the cares, obsessions and delights of city life as it effected both the poor and the bourgeoisie. Diarists in the seventeenth century dedicate themselves to recording everyday life; in the next century it is the journalists who populate their articles with memorable characters. From here it is one short step to the creation of convoluted plots and personalities in the novel. This realism resembles poetry in that it is applied to matters both far off and close at hand: there are those who seek adventures on the high seas, on distant shores: shipwreck and travel retain their fascination over centuries. Heroes wander into inns, down roads, through urban alleys, are entertained on country estates, find their devotion put to various tests, overcome their enemies and have their own steadfastness rewarded. The novel serves as a catalogue of vices and a school of virtues at least in its English manifestations; it shows the struggle of the pure-hearted with the dark treacherous forces of life. However perilous the world may be it is full of amusement, and, above all, it swarms with fascinating people: no one will ever meet as many as the hero of an English novel does on his complicated adventures! The inn at Canterbury where an entire company of pilgrims meet together by chance provides the model: such meetings recur on countless occasions. The English novel, unlike the French or the Russian, is unfamiliar with the story of the soul in isolation; its characters are chiefly social creatures, surrounded by a gaggle of families, friends, acquaintances and strangers. Even Robinson Crusoe has company, he is so preoccupied by various domestic arrangements. The miser comprises a multitude: the English like their privacy but prefer it in the confines of the crowded club drawing room.
It is rare for an English writer to attempt a full, in-the-round depiction of voyages to the extreme tropics of the soul. If Balzac and Flaubert are painters, Dickens and Thackeray are caricaturists, sketching in unforgettable outline, presenting us time and again with a gesture here, a speech there, each repetition rendering a larger than life existence. Dickens’s style has sometimes been explained by reference to the tradition of wandering comedians, and it is true, there is something in him, as in his rather more naive predecessors and his more carefully refined descendants, of the puppeteer or the Commedia dell’Arte in that his characters appear improvized: they leap into being only to deliver some witty riposte or pull a wry face, the rest of the time they are supernumeraries, motley foot-soldiers. Their patchwork garments and endless jostling lend colour and mood to the novel, they point up the illusion of po-faced reality and supply their own community of human warmth.
Even when talking of the tragedy of the individual soul, as in the works of Emily Brontë or Thomas Hardy, it is the embodying of a single twisted passion or dumb failed ambition that takes the eye, its sharp contrasts obviating all intervening tones in the desire to pitch up the sense of tension or give us a premonition of eventual doom. Amusers and dispiriters have equal recourse to ancient well-worn devices: they amuse us with the follies of chance and horrify us with the fickleness of blind fate. The true heroes of the English novel—whether this be comic or tragic—are always circumstances, those unforeseen twists and turns of fortune, the ambuscades of destiny. The most characteristic English ordeal is to be tempest-tossed and yet survive. The novel’s ups and downs reveal the miraculous staying power of the type.
The type speaks to us, directly, without poetic disguise, in the centuries-old tradition of the English essay. This does not moralize in the strict sense of the word, but arranges its ideas around tiny details, the peculiarities of life. One English anthology presents its largest selection under the heading: "dreams, fancies, curiosities" and its smallest under the heading: "wisdom". And, indeed, it would be hard to include Thomas Browne’s hyperactive, baroque language and arguments, Addison and Steele’s Enlightenment raillery and Lamb’s romantic playfulness under any other heading but "curiosities". But when dealing with the English we must take the most extreme notions as seriously as we take Swift’s Irish panacea, the Modest Proposal: under the apparently nonsensical grotesquerie there lurks a highly comprehensible critique, an intellectual predisposition that not only bears but actively seeks self-criticism. They are as happy to point out their national vices as others are their virtues: criticism enjoys unlimited freedom even in the face of public authority to the extent that it brags of its liberties. Hume himself expresses astonishment at the freedom of the press, wondering how it was possible to achieve it in such perfect form when all commonsense was against it and no power can tolerate its excesses. Leader and led engage in a war of words, one impressing with the vehemence of its onslaught, the other with the patience it shows in its own defence, each respecting the role of the other. Those famous letters of Junius in which he hectors and lectures the king are imaginable only in a country where the institution of monarchy is held in religious awe. The person is nothing, the office is everything: both critic and criticized agree on this.
Certain features of this cult of self-knowledge are handed down from generation to generation in almost dogmatic fashion. Pragmatism above all. Bacon constructs his philosophy, Burke a political theory out of the antipathy to abstruse ideas. Matthew Arnold uses it as a critical yardstick. Hatred of hypocrisy follows: Samuel Butler rails as furiously against the "cant" of the seventeenth century puritans, as Byron does against the vulgar bourgois of his time or Galsworthy the polite society of our own. And so it goes with arrogance, with snobbism, with money-grubbing: all provide fertile themes for successive generations of satirists.
The tradition of self-knowledge determines not only the values but the very style of didactic prose. The French essay, even in its most dogmatic form, contains an element of self-portrait; the English, for all its eccentricity and idiosyncratic flavour, always balances this with the impersonal. Not even the most intimate of essays deal with the person of the author, at most they treat of his hobbies. They are rarely confessional, preferring to disseminate opinion, they find self-revelation alien but are nevertheless outspoken; they avoid the rhapsodic but are clearly fired by their convictions. Even the voices of those who chatter are darkened by something deeper: the easy pose of the dandy wears a lead lining. De Quincey constructs a tract from capricious material, Wilde erects a theory of art based on ideas of paradox; both of them, indeed all the "strange" crew, employ the entire arsenal of style to defend their essential perceptions. And when pathos takes the stage, as in Burke and Macaulay, its momentum is unstoppable; arguments and images crowd on each other’s heels with an unparalleled force and clarity; one enormous breath carries those complex clauses forward towards their target. They never degenerate into mere rant: you can trust every part of them, they are compounded of firm, noble material. Miraculously enough, this feeling of confidence does not desert us in the twists and turns of courtly prose or baroque circumlocution. The contemplative voice of every period has a vaguely Victorian tone: serious, authoritative. The artificial tropes of Donne’s sermons refer to the age; their high moral intent is timelessly English.
This feeling of confidence has drawn foreigners too to its literature. Enchanted by Shakespeare and the great poets, the foreign reader was grateful for the long burning fevers of Shakespeare’s genius, for the Byronic sense of destiny, for Wilde’s intoxicating notion of beauty, for the romantics’ purest ecstasy, but there was something about the entire literature which demanded his attention and commanded his loyalty; he trusted it as he trusted English cloth and knew he could only benefit from it. The ethical values of the Enlightenment, the economic values of liberalism and the political values of the Victorians were conveyed to the continent by enthusiastic intermediaries like essential industrial products, the preconditions of civilization. People read English authors not just because they wanted to be amused but because they felt they had to; a visit to England was not merely an excursion but an education. In the Renaissance and the Baroque period it was the English that learned from the continent, but from Locke onwards the balance of debt shifted; the island-nation’s list of pupils was headed by no less a man than that prince among writers, Voltaire. In the nineteenth century it was European pilgrims that gathered at the Canterbury hostelry.
Naturally Hungarians too were to be found among them. Bessenyei followed Voltaire, his hero, to England in spirit, and set his course by Pope; Kazinczy
grew merry on Sterne’s comic invention and wept to the delicate sensibility of Young. The reform generation hastened to take lessons from Macaulay, and faithfully broadcast his message. The romantics waxed wroth on Shakespeare and grew bold on Byron; the mid-century realists nurtured their self-confidence on the English novelists. Vörösmarty, Petoýfi and Arany tried their teeth on Shakespeare’s immortal dramas; the cohort of translators headed by Károly Szász absorbed the humble scholarly spirit. Popular feeling sought its inspiration in Burns; the longing for liberty found it in the Irish poet, Moore. The fin-de-sičcle woke from Byronism to conquer Byron himself in the brilliant translations of Emil Ábrányi, confirmed the universality of Burns through the splendid mediation of József Lévay, garnered the rich crop of the novelists, paid due attention to the political and economic masters, paid due homage to contemporary science through Darwin and Spencer, neglecting only the poetry of the period. That discovery awaited a new crop of artists, the Nyugat generation.
These revived the practice of Shakespeare translation, explored the deeper lyrical reaches of Milton, brought to a perfect musical pitch the ethereal voices of Shelley and Keats, presented the major Victorians, Tennyson and Swinburne, in the full pomp of their golden maturity and caught the languid autumnal light of the great decadent, Wilde. As if independent in spirit and content, these foreign poems were reborn in the hands of Babits, Kosztolányi and Árpád Tóth, who admired them for what they were, for their thousand miraculous shades of tone, for the sparkling firework display of their metaphors, and their never quite attainable beauty. And this was why their taste remained indifferent to the more intellectually abstruse, more tortuously wrought verse of other periods that
required other qualities. The hidden treasures of the baroque had to wait for Loýrinc Szabó and his younger contemporaries to bring them to notice.
Our selections are intended to highlight two processes: the development of the literature received, its changes of style, its vanishing and recurring motifs, its favourite subjects and outstanding practitioners and their various states of consciousness; and, at the same time, to demonstrate the nature of their reception and show how Hungarian taste reacted to the influences exerted on it. Where the energy of the text allowed we have reproduced older translations, contemporary experiments; in other words this anthology is not just a collection of original works but a survey of Hungarian translation. Rather than provide lexicographical entries, our short notes are intended to provide a commentary on overall developments, like subtitles to a wonderful, exciting, fast moving film.
It was the example of Mihály Babits’s history of literature and his launching upon a reader of world literature that emboldened us, providing us with an exemplary model. Of course, his programme was different from ours. He was concerned with an alternative history: he wanted to complement his own major work with his experience of style in a unified account, in which the quotations served primarily as illustration. He was an artist speaking of the secrets of his studio, of the ever new devices of his ancient fellow practititoners. The critic cannot adopt his method: he can only be infected by his enthusiasm and observe the hidden inner currents of literature.
Gábor Halász: "Az angol irodalom kincsesháza elé" in: Tiltakozó nemzedék (A Protesting Generation), Budapest, Magvetoý, 1981, pp. 507–514
