The Hungarians, like the English, have little idiosyncrasy for pessimism. This mood of viewing things is the outcome of mental struggles, from which the better minds of both countries have been saved by their intense political life. Pessimism is eminently the nursling of thought. In Hungary there is, as in England, much more acting than thinking. Whatever there may be of pessimism in the Hungarians is used up in some of their superbly-despondent folk-songs. For Kemény’s pessimism the time has not yet come. Perhaps he would have impressed his contemporaries far more deeply had he chosen not to write historic novels. Nearly all of his great novels are historic novels. As history, they are really incomparable. If we possessed a hundred historic novels, describing a hundred important periods of general history, in the manner, with the graphic power and true intimacy with the past, so peculiar to Kemény, we should know history infinitely better. Kemény has something of the erudition of a Gierke or John Selden, with the plastic descriptiveness of a great painter. Read his Transylvanian novels, and you have a clearer, more vivid and more correct knowledge of Transylvanian history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than you could gather from the study of the various chroniclers and memoir-writers of that time, such as Reicherstorffer, Schesaeus, Sigler, Heltai (see page 47), Verantius, Tinódy (see page 47), Somogyi (Ambrosius), Stephen Szamosközy, Nicolas Oláh, Zsámboky, Michael Brutus, Francis Forgách, Nicolas Istvánffy, Francis Mikó, Gregory Petthő, Kraus, the Bethlens, Haner, etc. Kemény is thus one of the best historians of Hungary. Nor can we think much less of him as a novelist. He engages our interest in the characters of his tales; they work on our imagination, they appeal to our hearts. More particularly to Hungarians, the actors of Kemény’s novels appear as individuals full of charm and significance. To use one of Ben Jonson’s happy phrases, they are “rammed with life”—life national, patriotic, historic. And yet, with all these commanding excellencies in his novels, Kemény has, there can be little doubt, committed a grave blunder in literary strategy, in investing the output of his vast intellectual mines in historic novels. Had he been less of a historian, he might have written his historic novels at a smaller loss of literary efficiency. His very greatness as a historian debarred him from approaching Balzac still more closely. For his faithfulness as a historian prevented him from elaborating fully those types of humanity, the creation of which is Balzac’s glory. Such types cannot, as a rule, be found in history. History, or that part of reality in which human beings are the actors, is full of blurred types of mongreldom and bastardy. No line in the features of man, as a real phenomenon, is drawn out purely and to its legitimate term; good and bad, sublime and vile, sentiments