Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/273

 MADÁCH 259 main idea of the book : 11 Search not for the secret wh ich a divine wisdom has mercifully hidden from thy sight." God points to love and spiritual aspirations for consolation, and sets the happiness of individual life agaiost the unhappy fate of the race . E ven if the history of mankind as a wbole should prove sad and disappoi nting, God has blessed the life of the individual with many joy s and hopes. This book of Madách is the first in Hungarian literature which deals not with the life of one man, or of the nation, but with mankind as a whole. But The Tragedy of Ma n marks a new departure in other respects as well. There are two contending elements in it, imagination and reflec­ tion. The author' s ideas do not always rise to the poetic level, and we sometimes have metrical prose rather than true poetry, though as prose it is undoubtedly of high quality. This pecul iarity in its language makes the poem a characteristic product of its age . Th e same transition from imagination to philosophical reflection wh ich we find in it, is to be traced on a targer scale in the whole of the literature of the period. It is one of the defects of Madách's poems that his philosophical reflection is not beautified by imagination , but remains abstract and logical. Another imperfection is in the drawing of his characters. The plan of the poem demands that at each epoch of the wo rld's history a complete transformation should take place in the soul of Adam, but as such a change is only conceivable as te result of a long process of development, it could not possibly occur as abruptly as it is made to do. For instance, we see that in the mind of Adam, as the Egyptian Pharao h, the conception of a thoroughly demo­ eratic state spri ngs into being instantaneously, but this is