Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/114

100 the poets, his contemporaries, were great in the real ms of verse.

Literature sprang into life and grew with amazing rapidity. The different, and often antagonistic literary schools, the popular, the high-classical, and the national, became united. Whatever was weak or false in them vanished. Ali that was really valuable developed to a higher degree. Just as through Kazinczy a rich prose language was gained, so now, by the powerful creations of Vörösmarty, a brilliant and purely Hungarian poetical language was called into life. The poetry of the new era had two roots; one drew the living sap from Latin soil, and the other struck deep into the native earth. Latin influence predominates in the earlier poems, but it yields to the growth of a distinctly national spirit and style.

Every modern nation has had to pass through the study of the classical poets before attaining to its own highest literary development. The Latin races completed that part of their preparation at the time of the Renais­sance, and naturally had a flourishing literature long before the Hungarians, who took up the study so much later. In Vörösmarty, the first poet of the great age, classical influence is still predominant, but later, in Petőfi and Arany, we see the triumph of the new spirit.

The more fruitful source of the new poetry was purely national. The great literary transformation which is indicated by the poetry of Petőfi and Arany may be described by saying that they used and transfigured the popular traditions, folk-lore, and ballads, raising them to the highest level of poetry.

Hungarian literature is, in fact, the record of Hungarian patriotism. The ideas of nation, fatherland and race are much more pronounced in it than in other