HUNGARIAN LITERATURE. l'ntil mod ern times, literature in the vernacular did not flourish to any very great extent in Hungary. Latin was the general medium of cultured expres sion during the Middle Ages. and even recently it has sometimes sought to :implant the popular tongue in offieial and literary use. There arc. however. documents in Hungarian or :Magyar that belong to the period. most of them being translations of legends and of hooks of the Bible. The earliest Continuous monument of Magyar is a funeral ceremonial dating from about the beginning of the thirteenth century. From the middle of the fifteenth century until the second half of the sixteenth century there was some activity in the way of translating into Hungarian the lives and legends of the saints and the individual hooks of the Bible.
With the religious revolution ordinarily termed the Reformation there was inaugurated a more important era of literary production. Poetry was cultivated by Valkai, Tinudi, Himai, Balassa ; but no very great degree of originality marked the ensuing period, for from then until the clos ing years of the eighteenth century Magyar litera ture was chiefly one of imitation. Considerable attention, however, was shown to some of the more striking forms of literary art. Thus, dur ing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lyric verse was cultivated; the drama was started by Karadi (1569) ; and much prominence was given in the 'seventeenth century to epic verse, by the poems of Zrinyi, Liszti, and (them Before the commencement of the eigh teenth century there also appeared many works of a polemical, legal, and philological nature.
Ihming, the eighteenth century an endeavor was made by the central authorities to subordinate Hungarian life and patriotic feelings to Germanic ideals. The attempt failed, but it resulted tem porarily in an undue production of books in Latin and German, to the detriment of composition in Magyar.
Near the close of the century, and with the advent of the French Revolution. there was a reaction. and societies for the cultivation of the :Magyar tongue were formed, and various period icals• (the first newspaper in Hungarian was started by Rath at Pressburg in the eighth decade of the eighteenth century) founded in the same interest. The new movement, which coincided with the great national awakening in Hungary. bore rich fruit ; and within the first quarter of the nineteenth century all foreign elements gave way before it. The credit of this is largely due,
to Francis Kazinezy, the great linguistic re former, and the poets Csokonai, Dayka, Verseghy, Alexander Kisfaludy, and Virag. The golden age of Hungarian literature was the thirty years pre ceding the revolution of 1848-49. Charles Kis fahnly, brother of Alexander, created the Hun garian drama by his tragedies and comedies, and his contemporary Katnna won great fame as a writer of tragedy. Kiilcsey, by his poems, ballade, prose writings, and orations, exerted a potent influence upon the patriotism of the na tion. Fav's fables and Czuczor's and Vitriis marty's popular epics also did much to evoke and foster a true national feeling. In the lyrics of Alexander Pet6fi, one of the greatest and most original of modern poets, whose "tip Magyars!" became the war-hymn of the Revolution, and in the epic verses and ballads of Arany. Hungarian literature reached its culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. Their contemporary. Bajza, was not only an eminent lyrical poet, but an historical writer and festhetieal critic. .Tosika (a disciple of Scott's) and E6tvits, eminent in the field of fiction, exercised a large influence. In the domain of political literature and journal ism Sz6chenyi, Kossuth, Entviis, and Csengeri hold high rank. In the field of history Horvath, ,TaQzay, and Szalay deserve mention. In 184S the powerful national awakening culminating in revolution supplied a new inspiration. Na tional consciousness prompted Tompa's Folk-tales and Folk•Sogas (1846), and Erdelyi's llungaria-a Polk-Songs and 'Pales (1846-48), with literary and :esthetic essays. Erdelyi's Poems (1844), lyric in the main, exercised a powerful influence over the famous trio, Petiiti, Arany, and Tompa. Arany (18I7-82), the greatest ballad writer, surpassed him in formal perfection, and his greatest work also was a national epic, Toldi, in IA\ elve cantos, celebrating the exploits of Toldi, the Hungarian Samson. Tom pa (1819-68), un excelled for sombre melancholy, struck the popu lar fancy with his Poems (18-17). In drama, Szigligeti (1814-78), with a wonderful mastery of dramatic development and situation, mostly based on intrigue, created a new genre with The Deserter (1843), which still holds the boards. His masterpiece, Mamma (1857), and other successful plays called forth a host of suc cessors, with the results that the Viennese farces and vaudevilles were banished from the Hungarian stage.