VIII. Confrontations
with Illusions and Misinformation

As has probably become evident from previous readings, Hungarian culture has a long tradition of critical self-examination. Such search for a collective ego occasionally resulted either in defensive self-pity or its opposite, masochistic self-hatred. Truly outstanding intellectuals managed to avoid both pitfalls, nevertheless constructively contributing at the same time to the seemingly neverending national pastime: the search for identity.

The example of the two extremes mentioned above is exaggerated. Yet, they may ring a bell upon reading the excerpts that follow. Their authors were two critically-minded 20th century poet-thinkers. The first one, Mihály Babits, scrutinizes the home scene, warning his compatriots of possible aberrations in Hungarian intellectual developments. The other author, Dezső Kosztolányi, points out one good reason for the preoccupation of Hungarians with themselves and their place in Europe, namely, the shocking ignorance of the continent, not only that of the general public but so-called scholars as well, about Hungary's culture.

In 1929 a Frenchman called Julien Benda published a much debated book on "the treason of the intellectuals." His advise to the intellectuals was to stay aloof from current political interests. Babits took issue with this thesis. He thought that intellectuals should actively defend the impartial, humanistic principles of the realm of the mind. Our excerpts touch on a specifically Hungarian dilemma treated in this essay, namely: is there any particular "Hungarian way" to follow? Babits's answer manifests an open attitude to the world, and insists on his country's place in a cultural context that all too often disclaimed and unjustly ostracized Hungary.

Document 1. MIHÁLY BABITS: The Treason of the Intellectuals

[...] We were pacifists, and today - let us be nationalists! I am one, too. This nationalism has the same essence, however, as our pacifism: the denial of the principle of force. We have the more right to protest against violence, we, who never for a moment accepted this principle which is nowadays recognized on this pathetic continent even by the representatives of human spirit who had once vehemently denied it.

One may well ask, why should the treason of the intellectuals concern us, then? What practical consequence could this whole matter have for us? He who poses this question answers it at the same time, since he proves that this issue, so hotly debated by European intellectuals, touches a raw nerve among us, too. Why should the entire world outside of ours, the crisis of the human spirit, the deposition of intellect, or the obscuring of truth concern us? What business of ours are truth and morals if they yield no immediate "practical result" to our nation? Such questions can only arise in an age which has already been poisoned by the treason of the intellectuals, and we too live in such an age. Our great and independent spirits could remain intact from this betrayal, but the contagious air irresistibly infected smaller characters.

This is how the face of Hungarian intellect gained features which lend it the colour of gut-level passion rather than the old, noble expression. "Before me there is no truth, no morality, other than the benefit of my nation," says the Hungarian writer almost automatically. Perhaps such outcry is understandable in passionate moments, but inappropriate if uttered by guardians of truth and morality. This is the twisted morality of the hunted ones, not worthy of the noblest spirits of an undeservedly treated, dignified nation. Not to mention the bad service it renders to the homeland, whose rights it compromises, raising the suspicion as if all national truths were just guided by biased interest.

The beautiful word, Hungarian truth,1 which once meant Hungary's claim to universal truth, is taking on another meaning. On these modern lips, Hungarian truth sounds as if the Hungarians had an entirely different truth, separate from so-called truth as it is known elsewhere - as if truth changed from nation to nation, and was not like a supreme and impartial judge, only a local servant of interest. I know well that this idea, regarded as absurd until recently but nowa-days rationalized even philosophically by modern pragmatism, is not a Hungarian idea but a wave of Europe's current intellectual tendencies. Therefore, this "Hungarian truth" is but a copy of foreign truths, an image of the German, French, and other petty, fragmented truths. All I wanted to show is that this weird tendency has reached us too, it influences us as well. It stems from the spirit of the treacherous intellectuals, and regards the classical concept of truth as something obsolete, as if truth were different not only by nations but also by ages.

How far we are removed from Catholicism and the one and only truth which our religion preaches, along with the oneness of God! God himself is no longer one. The God of the Hungarians was identical with the Christian God for nine hundred years, powerful enough for every people to profess Him as its own, just as any point in the Universe can be regarded as its centre. Today, however, the nations are discontented with their shared religion: they don't even consider God great enough so that they could calmly share in His adoration. This is how some people in our country dream about a kind of old pagan god of their own. The rise of such national religion is just more proof of how little the modern intellectuals care about the concept of truth, even though we refer here to the most sacred Truth, the religious one. No-one can believe that these "proto-Hungarians" yearn for paganism because they believe that paganism is a truer religion than Christianity. No, this question hasn't even occurred to them. Behold, this is the true picture of our current enlightenment. In which past age could one imagine a Christian priest who, having extensively studied the problem, rejected the old pagan religion just because, in his opinion, today's Christianity has already adjusted itself to the Hungarian impulses and suits the Hungarian peasants' taste? The God who adjusts Himself to the impulses of the people, and peasant taste being the decisive criterion in religious matters, in our democratic and pragmatic time all this is self-explanatory. Won't God punish the peoples which look not for the Truth but for the satisfaction of their own racial instincts in religion?

Now, for a light but not funny intellectual exercise, consider the following absurd idiocy. If somebody, for example an academic, openly accused the French language of being a barbaric tongue which reflects an inferior state of culture, probably nobody would bother to refute his statement. If passed about a less familiar language, however, a similarly nonsensical judgment could be deemed as an educated assessment.

Dezső Kosztolányi - poet, writer, and lover of the Hungarian language - dared to take to the court of conscience and scholarly impartiality a respected French linguist for slandering Hungarian culture. As a sad statement about the century, Kosztolányi's polemical essay documents that countries out of political favour with the big powers, winners of the most recent and most destructive war in history, were targets for the most outrageous accusations presented in a pseudo-objective manner. The same essay also brings home the original meaning of the idiom, "the treason of the intellectuals" - in this case, a betrayal of both scholarship and human fairness. Finally, this selection seems appropriate to finish the readings of the present collection by returning to the starting topic: the uniqueness of the Hungarian language. This language has been the keystone of Hungarian identity and national principle for more than a thousand years, and the fanatical yet moving insistence on its use and renewal is, in the eyes of many, still a guarantee of the future of Hungary.

Document 2. DEZSŐ KOSZTOLÁNYI: "Open letter" to Antoine Meillet

My Dear Sir, After having read your book (Les Langues dans l'Europe nouvelle), I feel it necessary to approach you publicly. I am not a linguist. I am a writer who, while struggling with his material, often and gladly speculates about linguistic phenomena. In this letter only an ardent, enthusiastic layman tackles those questions on which you, scholar of comparative Indo-Germanic linguistics,2 are an authority. Pain made me decide to write this letter. In your work, you belittle that intellectual and spiritual community to which I belong, that language which eleven million people speak. I speak to some degree on their behalf. This gives me courage.

From your analyses, from your conclusions, but even more from your allusions that concern us, it more or less appears that: we [Hungarians] are rootless tyrants; our whole literary production thus far is worthless junk; our language lacks origin and is uncouth, has no past, and even less future. In the past, according to you, only the oligarchy saved it from death, which may still set in, and may be desirable, in the interest of a higher principle.

Personal grievance passes quickly, but the one that struck me while reading your work still has not passed. I have little hope that I can convince you of the untenability of your interpretation, and of your glaring errors. I do have the hope though, that I can at least clarify my feelings and thoughts, and can gain a little relief for myself while writing. I know that my situation is awkward. I am directing an open letter to a world-famous celebrity of the Parisian College de France who will perhaps not even read it. As I work, I imagine that I am arguing and communicating, when it is only a monologue. Is this ridiculous? Almost every man is this laughable. When they are conversing with each other, they are for the most part only conducting monologues. I don't even care that I will be laughable. As long as we breathe, we must fight for truth. The rest is not our concern.

In your book's new second edition you provide an overview of European languages as they have been shaped and arranged in the post-war period (p. 288). You treat the Hungarian language harshly. [...] For every language and literature you have some words of praise, or at least excuse - except Hungarian. At times it actually appears as if you despised this miraculous orphan of the Finno-Ugric language family, whose parents died early, and whose relatives have moved to distant foreign lands in the maelstrom of history, and who still survived against all odds. This should be yet one more reason for you, the sensitive scholar of comparative linguistics, to be that much more curious and forgiving. You, however, are more cruel and malicious to Hungarian than was its own destiny. Compared to it, you even defend the German language, which you, as you had mentioned earlier, do not want for either your body or soul. You write:

"If the German language had remained the language of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it would at least have kept its prestige of being the language of this empire. When Hungarian was accepted as the official language of half the dual monarchy, the privileged position of the German language was over. The German settlers and the Jews, of whom there are many in Hungary, and who played important roles before the war, were forced to learn Hungarian if they wished to succeed in the Hungarian state. As a result, the influence of the currently used German language was lost. This was because in Hungary the ruling class spread its language with force."

Following this "objective" historical description comes a linguistic description, similarly objective.

"At any rate, Hungarian is not the language of an old civilization. The vocabulary bears the mark of every kind of external influence. It is crammed full of Turkish, Slavic, German, and Latin loan-words, and has itself barely had any lasting effect on neighbouring languages."

As for the roots of our civilization, I bring up the fact that in our press in Buda, they had already printed two books in 1473. János Apáczai Csere, a student of Descartes, wrote his philosophical prose in Hungarian in 1653, at a time when in Europe only Descartes dared to use the national language, and all other scholars and writers wrote in Latin. You also err in regard to our loan-words. Every modern European linguist claims that the originality of a language depends on its spirit and structure, not on how many loan-words have diffused in it during contacts with various peoples. If you were right, we could surely discard the English language as well, since it is made up in equal proportion of Romance and Germanic elements: its Anglo-Saxon vocabulary is so tiny that it can be barely measured. But even the facts you provide in your allegations are false. If we analyze a written Hungarian text or scraps of Hungarian speech heard on the street at random, in terms of the origins of the words, the results always show that ninety percent of these words are of ancient Finno-Ugric origin. This has been verified. Our academy's newest dictionary, which is far from being complete, indicates a word-pool of 122,067. Out of these, 330 are of old Turkish, 756 of Slavic, and 1393 of German origin, but these latter ones are gradually disappearing from the everyday language, and are only used in a few Transdanubian dialects. As a result, the number of our German loan-words is not even half of the registered one. Our Latin loan-words are insignificant.

The French language adopted 604 words from German, 154 words from English, and 15 words from Russian. I admit, it was a justified adoption, on the basis of Indo-German kinship, and as a kind of trade among relatives. But French also borrowed 146 words from Semitic-Hamitic Arabic, 99 words from Asian languages, 44 words from our Turkish relatives, and 4 words from us: hussard, shako, soutache, and cocher.3 As often as you mention a coach - and you do mention it often - you unknowingly pay homage to our sixteenth-century industry's humble victory, and to the village of Kocs, in Komárom county. In those days they manufactured a covered "kocs" - wagon4 there, which came into fashion in foreign countries as well. I publish these data on the basis of H. Strappers's Dictionnaire synoptique d'etimologie francaise. If, however, I immediately characterized your language in this way to an uninformed child who does not know French as yet, and wanted to make it appear as a trashy thieves' nest, then - I believe - I would not be entirely well-intentioned.

Do you weigh other languages in this manner? In the same chapter I read this:

"The Czech language has a long past, and it became a civilized language in the nineteenth century. With strong determination, the Czechs created for themselves a flawless language of civilization. The Rumanians have a highly developed literary language, which, belonging to the Romance linguistic group, is equal in rank with the great Western European languages. The Croatians possess one of Europe's most enchanting literary languages."

Such characterizations differ from the previous one, not only in terms of appreciation but in their tone as well. We cannot find anything objectionable in the assessments. We do not question the beauty or the expressive power of any language. To this day we have not had a linguist who would have belittled the Czech, Romanian, or Croatian language because they are different from ours. If there was such a linguist, I am sure that he would be barred from the academic community immediately by our serious scholars.

The degree to which the above characterization is different from the one concerning us becomes evident when we further read the charges brought against us:

"The Hungarian language does not belong to the same linguistic family as the majority of languages spoken in Europe, especially in this part of Europe. Its structure is complicated, and no-one can learn it easily. It is totally unknown outside of Hungary. A Hungarian who does not know any other, widely-used language, is incapable of making himself understood outside of his country's borders, and it is unlikely that he will be able to find an interpreter anywhere. A scholarly treatise which appears in Hungarian, no matter how valuable, is condemned to remain unknown; it must be translated, or summarized in a major foreign language."

I ask you: is it a scholarly evaluation that a language's "structure is complicated"? Is it a linguistic criterion that "no-one can learn it easily"? I ask you: is your enchantingly musical and sparking clean mother tongue so easily learned by foreigners? I ask you: is it not yourselves who are most amazed when you notice only after ten minutes that the guest with whom you were conversing is not a born Frenchman? Is it not you yourselves who display as a miracle the foreigner who writes French flawlessly and artistically?

The author of this French linguistic work is obsessed by the idea of a myriad deficiencies in the Hungarian language. After 43 pages, when he contemplates the isolation of languages on a purely abstract basis, he repeats himself word for word.

"The increase in the number of civilized languages in Europe causes an inconvenience which steadily grows. The citizens of small nations who have not learned another civilized language and only speak their national language are muted as soon as they leave home. A Hungarian who only speaks Hungarian cannot make himself understood anywhere in the world. If he wants to leave his country, he has to take an interpreter with him. The European who is passing through Hungary becomes confused, even if he speaks more than one language, because everything goes on in Hungarian (tout s'y fait en magyar)."

Well, the Hungarian is again the resounding example of a linguistic cripple, not the Lithuanian, Basque, or any other peoples. It is always the poor Hungarian who is muted outside of his borders. Only he grabs at everything, and only he howls for an interpreter, even though it is "unlikely" that he can find one. Well, is the Frenchman who does not speak another language besides French so endlessly at home lecturing in [...] Chicago or Peking? Is a Portuguese who does not speak other languages so talkative in Warsaw, or a Pole in Lisbon? Furthermore, why is the astoundingly educated multilingual European so pitiful when he becomes "painfully" confused in Budapest, where every schoolboy at least stutters in one or two languages? Why is the thought so amazing, so gruesome, that "everything goes on in Hungarian" here? We do not find it amazing or gruesome that everything goes on in Bulgarian in Sofia, or that everything goes on in Japanese in Tokyo. We also find it very delightful and understandable that in Paris everything goes on in French. The only thing we find incomprehensible is that a professor of comparative linguistics finds this so incomprehensible.

But everything becomes understandable as soon as the author throws off the mask of objectivity, and his indictment becomes a funeral speech:

"If Hungary's oligarchic system would have conceded to the popular movement sweeping through the world, the Hungarian language would have been swept away with the ruins of the aristocratic order which forced this language on others. Only this order's political strength protected the Hungarian language. This language does not harbour an authentic civilization."

Is this rationalism? No: this is linguistic oligarchy. We should cry, but we end up laughing. We have never come across such a ridiculous distortion of historical facts in a serious work. According to this, our language was not upheld by poverty-stricken serfs who remained faithful to it even under one-hundred-fifty years of Turkish rule. Not by the lower nobility, which fought a life-and-death struggle with the Germanizing Habsburgs for Hungarian schools and for Hungarian jurisdiction. It was not our language reformers who guarded and supported this language, who made our rural idioms attain literary status. Not Kazinczy,5 our Malherbe, who was a prisoner for seven years because of his French conceptions of freedom, nor Gergely Czuczor,6 our Littre, the compiler of our first large dictionary. He was a down and out peasant's son who was sentenced to death because he stood up for his language and his people. He was later granted mercy, and spent six years in imperial prisons. No, it was not those who grafted our language hoping for better centuries, who made it shoot into bloom. [...] No, ladies and gentlemen: it was the oligarchs, who only knew French and German, the aristocrats who hunted with greyhounds, those principled, noble counts who bowed to the lackeys of the imperial palace in Vienna, and revelled in Paris with their cosmopolitan allies, the rich.

It seems that you are as unfamiliar with our language as with the history of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. But no: you surely do know the latter. Of the Czechs you write:

"The aristocracy, which flattered the Habsburgs, became Germanized due to its contact with the Austrian nobility. With the country's economic progress, however, a national bourgeoisie developed. It demanded its own place, stood firmly by its right to have Czech schools, and designed Czech public education from school to university."

Further, you write of the Czech language reform movement, which occurred later than ours, and cannot be compared to ours in terms of significance, duration, and social impact:

"The national concern went so far as to weed out even the German words that had penetrated into the Czech vocabulary in great numbers."

From this we learn that numerous German words penetrated even this pure and perfect language of civilization.

Subsequently, you state: "A language is valuable only in so far as it is a vehicle of original civilization. It isn't necessary for the civilization to be widely spread; it is enough if it has a character of its own. However, it is difficult to wipe out an authentic language of a civilization once it has developed."

After we found out that our language is not part of an original civilization, that it doesn't have a character, our last hope is that at least its literature will rescue it, which has already started to circulate in the world, even if not always its most valuable products have been translated. You only have one single sentence about Hungarian literature, however: "[This] literature lacks prestige."

If one is truly familiar with a literature in the original (since one cannot judge it from summaries), and passes such judgement about it, arguing with him would be improper. Everyone has the right to form his own opinion. But the above is not your own personal opinion - it is the opinion of others. A conclusion drawn from the assumed views of other people, which creates the false illusion that it is the world's generally shared opinion. In its stated form, it is an exaggeration. Our literature actually has a certain prestige. Sándor Petőfi left an impression on the whole of Europe, and the greatest authors of the nineteenth century placed him among the immortals: Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, with admiration. Only we know, who enjoy him in our sweet mother tongue, that he deserves this rank also by virtue of his deep inner value. Too bad that I cannot familiarize you with this aspect of Petőfi. Maybe you wouldn't even desire it. You only questioned the civilizing influence of our literature abroad. For this reason, I will quote a few random opinions that contradict you.

Carlyle writes the following on Petőfi: "In his songs, Petőfi expresses a sublime humanity that bears a resemblance to Goethe, the lyric poet, with whose greatness he ranks equal."

In Hermann Grimm's words: "I regard Petőfi as one who must be ranked among the greatest poets of all nations."

Heine writes: "I cannot find his match in Germany. Such ancient tones of Nature seldom appear in my own poetry."

Finally, I quote the most distinguished representative of contemporary French spirit: Paul Valéry, member of the French Academy, who writes this about the short stories of some modern Hungarian writers whose works have been translated into French: "They remind me of Flaubert and Maupassant in their conciseness and perfection."

With your opinion you can consider yourself an outsider, most honoured professor, among the company of such geniuses. Let me assure you: you are not completely alone. In times past, there were always some who tolled our death knell. Herder predicted that "The Hungarians form the smallest minority of their country's population among the Slavs, Germans, Romanians and other nationalities now; as centuries pass, even their language will be scarcely found."

Herder wrote this in 1820.7 Three years later Petőfi was born, who is known and talked about by many more people around the world than that colourless Romantic German. Prophesying is risky; nevertheless, we have already become used to such death-prophecies as well, and face them with a certain hardiness. Our peasants believe that if someone is given out to be dead, he will enjoy a long life. It seems to come true also for nations and languages, whose fate is not decided by idealistic or rationalistic linguists, but by more irrational and more merciful forces. This is our only consolation.

Further, the bulky (205 page) appendix at the end of your book cheers us up. An informative register proves that in modern Europe one hundred twenty languages are spoken. These languages are ranked in order of the number of speakers. These statistics were compiled by your one-time student, Mr. L. Tesniere, professor at the University of Strasbourg. From his comments it seems that he is not much of a friend of our culture, either. Despite his antipathy, he had to place the Hungarian language in the eleventh spot among the hundred and twenty. He was able to "demote" our language by combining Dutch and the very different Flemish language8 - thus, the total of their speakers outnumbers Hungarian by barely one and a half millions. In terms of speakers, our language is preceded by German, Russian, English, Italian, French, Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, Romanian and Dutch. It is followed, not even closely, by Czech and Moravian, Greek, Belorussian, Swedish, Catalan, Bulgarian, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Slovak, [European] Turkish, Albanian, etc. Perhaps our "isolation," which seems to be such a concern for you, should not be a cause for alarm. Occupying the eleventh place means that our language is actually among the larger ones in Europe. We don't fall behind on the world list either. As we can learn, in the twentieth century 1.8 billion people speak 1500 languages world-wide. Our global ranking is the twenty-ninth. [...]

But wait a minute! At the head of the list a mammoth number demonstrates that 400 million people, a quarter of the world's population, speak Chinese. Everything is relative. These first scribes of mankind who still think of the same thing, all 400 million of them, when they see those strange signs of theirs that we cannot decipher - according to your theory they could rightly regard any great nation a dwarf, any world language an isolated, barbaric patois. But they would be wrong. Neither the number of speakers nor the civilization are objective indicators of the greatness of a language. You mention yourself that the Babylonian language, once carrier of the whole Asian culture, disappeared without trace. Likewise the Egyptian one, unparalleled for 4000 years, perished completely. It is only since a century ago that we have been able to decipher its written relics. Civilization cannot be measured - least of all by the arbitrary criterion whether somebody finds a language melodious or pleasant-sounding. Such criteria are meaningless and valueless.

After this momentary flare-up of my pride, I am once again overcome by humility, love, and admiration toward all languages. It is just as impossible to answer questions such as, what sense it makes that a people speaks its own language (for instance, that we speak Hungarian) as it is impossible to rationalize the meaning of existence. It leads us to a secret.

The other day I was wandering around in a forest without encountering a single soul. I came to a clearing where I noticed a rare flower which can only be found in our country. We call it goldenflax; our scholars call it Linum dolomiticum. I stood looking at it. I was wondering why its leaves were so perfect, why it was so graciously resilient, why its petals were golden, and why it bloomed at all, since I was probably the only one who set eyes on it before it would die. In spite of these questions the goldenflax still blooms around here profusely, all over. The flowers don't care about the meaning of their existence, nor about the fact that somewhere else people are admiring other beautiful flowers. While the flower blooms, it is perfect, and it turns towards the sun to gain perfection. After it dies, new ones spring to life. They bloom and die just as everything else around them does, just as "big" and "small" nations do, just as "civilization" does. To live and die: this is perhaps what life is all about.