Ferenc Molnar, Hungarian Playwright

Whenever Ferenc Molnar, the Hungarian playwright, is discussed, his name is associated with bons mots, a mondaine psychology, and a kind of sentimentality in which wistfulness and artificial fantasy mingle with love-making rather than with love. The discriminating miss breadth and depth in his plays; they miss the divine law of which Alexander Pope speaks that is “at once the source and end and the test of art.” In the boom years of his greatest popularity in Hungary, it was a criterion of savoir vivre to attend his plays. At times he was severely criticized, but his suavity, his unhampered manner of expression helped the expansion of the theatrical area of Hungary, though he imposed no obligations of deep thinking upon his audiences. His acclaim abroad, of which much was sound and fury, required a re-definition of his place in Hungarian stage-literature with reference to the native drama. The pro and con remarks warrant the conclusion that his universal success was not justified on purely aesthetic grounds. On the other hand, despite his overused technique, it is apparent that by discarding inherited patterns he supplied the theatre of his native land with devices of dramatic expression that were amusing, incalculable, and sometimes artistic. He was unswerving in his theatrical aims, he discovered a new range of possibilities. Hungary never had a Restoration period similar to that of England; however, in some respect, Molnar could be considered a striking example of the polished, dexterous and frivolous violation of patriotic and romantic conventions of the Hungarian stage. As critics pointed out, he himself created a theatrical convention affected by Oscar Wilde, Henri Bataille, Tristan Bernard, Alfred Capus and other western European playwrights, but he also transcended the qualities of his western models and differed from them. In matters of taste the socio-economic stratum that Molnar represented was the upper bourgeoisie, notwithstanding his alleged and true sympathies for underpaid wage earners, or for former human beings, as Maxim Gorkij called homeless vagrants. The quality of his attainments substantiates this classification. Seen against the theatrical horizon of Hungary he differs from traditional playwrights by having his plays built around characters whose main interest was determined by carnal love in its sentimental and ironic aspect, urbanity, cynicism, that is by a carpe diem philosophy in which individual gratifications were the basic impetus of action, and not national, social, or cosmic responsibilities. Molnar had the makings of a cosmopolitan; in fact, the local color of most of his plays is not of decisive importance, though, as Aurel Karpati, the Hungarian critic stated in a panegyric article, Molnar and Budapest develóped at the same time.