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Contents

Preface
Dear relations
The Bardy family
Crazy Marcsa
Comorn
Mor Perczel
Gergely Sonkolyi
The unlucky weathercock
The two brides
The brewer
The Szekely mother
A ball

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Preface

Jokai is one of the most popular of the Hungarian prose writers of fiction that sprang up a few years before the late war. His wit, flowing style, and vivid descriptions of Hungarian life as it is, joined to a rich fancy and great intensity of feeling, soon made him a favourite with Hungarian readers.

Among the earlier of his productions, those best known are a novel entitled, "The Common Days," and a collection of minor tales, published under the title of "Wild Flowers."

The present volume has been written for the most part since the late memorable national movement, and embodies descriptions of several of the direst scenes in the civil war which devastated Hungary from the year 1848 to 1850.

Most of the Hungarian literati were, at the close of the war, either roaming in foreign countries, or wandering in disguise through their native land; and the field of literature for a long tune threatened to remain neglected and barren - a monument of national grief and desolation! Those patriotic writers who had for years wielded the pen with the noblest impulses thought to do their duty best by letting their highest faculties lie dormant; and laid aside the lyre rather than bring unacceptable offerings to a fatherland laid low, and at the mercy of foreign swords. And who will deny that there is sometimes great virtue in silence, and that the tongue that speaks not is often more eloquent and heroic than that which dares to utter sublime truths even at the foot of the gibbet? Many of the noble-hearted of Hungary resigned themselves to such a martyr-like silence, and persevere in it to the present day; while the great bulk of the people, unwilling to enhance the triumph of their victorious enemies by a show of unavailing lamentation, followed their example. Pesth, which had been the scene of literary activity, was at once deserted; the bards of Hungary, abandoning their homes to the wantonness of a foreign soldiery, went back to the districts whence they had come, there to mingle with those peasants whose chivalry and patriotism afforded constant themes to their lyres. Their renewed intercourse with their rustic countrymen served again to revive their hopes, quenched as in the grave.

In the sketches of Jokai, the reader will find many original delineations of Hungarian life among the middle-class nobility - a race of men whose manner of life and thought cannot fail to be interesting, however cursorily described. But the Hungarian peasant is in his way no less attractive. Nothing can be wilder than his dress, consisting of a sheepskin cloak (bunda), or a similar habit of the coarsest cloth, a shirt, scarcely reaching below the waist, and wide linen drawers, to which boots do not often form the necessary complement; yet his easy demeanour, delicate feelings, and especially his language, are such as to put him on a level with the educated classes. In conversation he will often use a more dignified style than a noble, who, by his exclusive privileges, has had ample scope for oratory in the county assemblies - select with astonishing tact the best lyrical productions of the day, and immortalize the lay by a tune of his own composition. These qualities of the Hungarian rustic - an insight into whose character will be given to the reader by a few camp scenes contained in this volume - must appear the more striking if we remember that the class to which he belongs was for centuries in a state of serfdom, from which it was only liberated by the late Revolution.

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The latest production of Jokai's pen is a novel entitled The Magyar Nabob, which is highly praised. His strictly historical pieces, depicting scenes of the civil war, though recalling the more vividly to mind the dreary and not yet forgotten past, were most eagerly read in Hungary; nor will the English reader peruse without deep emotion the fate of the Bardy family, contained in this volume.

Within the last two years, the state of literature in Hungary, if judged by the number of new books published, appears astonishingly progressive. The chief reason of this phenomenon may be found in the denationalizing measures of the Government, attempting to suppress the national idiom by excluding it from the public schools, and substituting in its place the German-a policy attempted without success by Joseph II. about the end of the last century.

That the people-though now perhaps more willing than ever to give their full support to literature-are inclined to look with some suspicion at the productions of a press in the hands of foreign authorities, and that many branches of a more serious nature than novel-writing must remain excluded from the sphere of literary activity in a country subjected to martial law, need hardly be remarked.

Besides, some of the more prominent and elder authors still persevere in their sad mournful silence, while others have sunk from a state of patriotic gloom into mental imbecility. But whatever shape Hungarian literature may henceforth assume, it is undoubtedly true that much that has issued within the last few years from the Hungarian press is worth translating; and I believe that the present volume, presented in a faithful and easy translation, and likely to be soon followed by several others of a similar class, will be found to introduce the English reader to scenes hitherto undescribed, and to characters as interesting as unusual.

Emeric Szabad

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