Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/250

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236 HUNGARIAN LITERATDRE eye, and as he, ashamed of his weakness, tried to wipe it away unnoticed with the palm of his hand, it trickled down his littie finger." Another characteristic is his way of presenting a mental phenomenon by means of i ts effects u pon the body. He describes the impotent wrath of George Toldi, for example, as follows : " All the blood rushed to his bead, so that he could only see indistin ctly, although it was broad daylight. The statues seemed to dance around hím as he nearly fell in his giddiness. Then a cold wave seemed to run down his body. How cold he was ; and yet how the beads of perspiration stot>d out upon his fore­ head. Then slowly his face became ashy pale, as if there were not so much blood left in hím as would furnish one sip for a gnat." That description offers a concise physiology of anger. The Hun kings form the subj ect of another trilogy. Bttda's Death is the title of the first part. In this, Arany combined the fragments from various old chronicles into one great whole and described the comhat between the two brothers, Attila and Buda. What the Arthurian legends were for Tennyson, an i nexhaustible fount of inspiration, the Hun and Magyar chronicles were for Arany. Aceording to those chronicles, the H uns were the ancestors of the H ungarians, so that when the H ungarians entered Europe in the tenth century and occupied their country, they were really taking possession of their Hun inheritance, and Arany accepted this theory of the relation­ ship between Huns and Hungarians. After Attila's death, say the chroniclers , his two sons Csaba and Aladár struggled for the crown, the Goths siding with Aladár and the Huns with Csaba.