epics and ballads, where other redeeming features may save the literary value of the work. In dramas it is fatal. Yet it is in the drama where Romanticism may attain to really perfect works. The writer of romantic ballads must, in the end, fall into the snares of an exaggerated patriotism, and thus vitiate his work, rendering it less acceptable to a sober and unchauvinistic posterity. The dramatic writer, on the other hand, need not necessarily run the same risk. If he has power to chisel out of the given material of a nation’s past one or the other truly human character in all its grandeur, and in all its shortcomings, then the historic staging and bygone emotional atmosphere of the past will serve only to set off the dramatic beauties of the work all the more plastically. Arany’s Edward I. in the “Bards of Wales” (see page 200), is a ruthless and senseless tyrant that must pall on us in the end. Richard III., on the other hand, can never pall on us; for in him we recognize many an unavowed demon ravaging our own souls. Arany’s Edward I. is a ballad-figure; Shakespeare’s Richard III. is a piece of true humanity. To the dramatic poet it is indifferent from what part of the globe he takes his material; for humanity is spread all over the planet. So a nation’s heroic past too may be quite welcome to him, provided he is a real dramatist. Katona was such. He is rough and inharmonious in language, but there is real dramatic life in his men and women. For the first time in Hungarian Literature the true tone of tragedy was heard. The terrible fate of the Banus comes home to hearers, Hungarian or otherwise; it is yawning out of the abyss of conflicts to which all of us are liable. He is a loyal subject of his king, and yet bursts out in open rebellion; nay worse, he kills his queen. He is a great patriot; yet finally makes a rebellious plot with a foreign adventurer. He is a perfect nobleman; yet ultimately breaks all the laws of true nobility. He is a loving husband; yet contemplates assassinating his beautiful wife. And as he is, so are the other persons of the drama. In them is pictured the conflicting nature of the human heart and character as it really is: rough, unbending, false, yet capable of sublime self-abnegation. Or as Petőfi says: “Rain from heaven turning mud on earth.” The plot is as follows: Bánk, in the absence of King Andrew II. of Hungary justiciar of the country, has reason to believe that Gertrude, the haughty and unpopular queen, countenances the vile designs of her brother Otto on Bánk’s beautiful wife Melinda. A rebellion of the malcontent nobles under Petur is breaking out. Bánk, who ought to quell it by virtue of his office, is thrown out of his moral equilibrium by the news that Melinda has been seduced by Otto. Forgetful of his position, he obeys only the behests of his outraged soul and kills Gertrude. The king returns, the rebellion is put down, and Bánk perishes. In Katona’s drama there is more power than form.