My title refers to Jan Kott's famous collection of essays entitled Shakespeare: our Contemporary.1 But while Kott analyzed Shakespeare's individual dramas and their messages, 1 am going to focus on Janus Pannonius' social as weil as poetical persona. In so doing, 1 am taking a brief vacation from my usual way of dealing with literature: focusing primarily on the text.
Janus Pannonius, one of the most important neo-Latin poets of the Renaissance is almost entirely unknown to the modern reader. Until recently, research about him had been conducted primarily in Hungarian, and he was relatively neglected even in his closer patria, Croatia.2
Yet, he was a fascinating and multi-sided personality whose life and controversial career were not only quite typical of his own times but, because they embody the archetypal conflict between the state and its intellectuals, would fit - and increasingly so - in modern Central Europe.
J anus' world was very similar to ours. His world, abounding in great voyages attempting the discovery of new continents (while we attempt to penetrate the universe), was the same cruel and dramatically changing world which exposed both the tremendous power and the immense misery of men.
During his time power was forever separated from its theological meaning, and Janus was a bishop who yearned for secular power. As a youngster, he was sent by his uncle, Johannes Vitez, then bishop of Varad, to Italy in order to study with the famous Guarino da Verona and become a boarder in his school at Ferrarra.
The younger man from "North of the Alps'', a region considered uncouth and void of culture by the Italians, suddenly found himself in an atmosphere of international scholarship and sophistication. Guarino
1 Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1964.
2 For the only English-language monograph on Janus Pannonius, see M. D.
BIRNBAUM, ]anus Pannonius: Poet and Politician, Zagreb, 1981.
had students from all over the then known world. Youngsters from Dalmatia, Crete, Rhodes, and France mixed with Poles, Englishmen and Spaniards. Every now and then a member of the Este family would come to audit the famous lectures of the sage (incidentally, the world largely knows about these classes from Janus, who later described them in his panegyric, devoted to Guarino).3
Whatever preliminary studies Janus had completed before his arrival to Ferrara (at the age of thirteen), he must have feit an unpolished country bumpkin among the students who were freely conversing in languages unknown to him or about subjects he had never encountered before.
Central Europe has been always somewhat off-center.
Yet soon he became the pride af Guarino's school and the envy of many of his older comrades. While his uncle was still concerned about his having to struggle with the basics of Latin and Greek, he had already become known for his biting Latin epigrams. His poetry soon became a weapon with which he fought for his own place among the locals. An example is his famous poem:
You attacked me and claimed that a bear was my mother, 1 am ferocious therefore and rough.
A Pannonian bear was indeed my wet-nurse,
But, Gryllus, your mother was not a bear but a bitch.4
lt was, and still is, quite problematic to be Central European and belong entirely to Europe, but Janus' epigrams eased his entry into this arena. They were recited and imitated not merely by the classmates but also by the arrivee, such as Tito Strozzi and Galeotto Marzio. This genre remained his favorite and was most appropriate for his temperament, especially since during the Renaissance, the epigram was a particularly flexible vehicle, allowing for a broad variety of topics, including obituaries. While Janus openly claimed that Martial was his literary model, his originality is quite obvious.
Of course, his erotic poetry caused the greatest gaudium among the students of the straight-laced Guarino. Here is an example:
3 Janii Pannonii Silva Panegirica ad Guarinum Veronensem prceceptorem suum, in his Poemata, edited by Samuel TELEKI, Tr<eiecti ad Rhenum, 1784. (Quotes in the text are from this edition.)
1 Ad Gryllum, Ep. 1, 126.
so
You say you bear my child, always hounding me, Silvia, this charge is dirty and unfair:
If you wander in a forest of roses,
How can you say, "lt was this thorn that pricked me!"5
Janus was sent to Guarino to learn what an educated humanist was supposed to know about the arts and philosophy, but with immediate plans for his later service in the Chancery of the Hungarian royal court.
The blossoming of his creative talent was an unexpected bonus and perhaps later, the cause of much of his unhappiness Chis metamorphosis was of a rare kind: frequently poets turn into bureaucrats, not vice-versa).6 The next station in his life was Padua where he studied law and theology, and where he received his doctoral degree in 1458. Thus, with all formal requirements in his pocket, the young humanist arrived to the court of Matthias Corvinus, to whom Hungarian history refers as the Renaissance king, par excellence.
A few years later, Janus was elevated into the see of Pecs, one of the most lucrative bishoprics of the kingdom, and from that time on his income was stabilized. He still spent most of his time in Matthias' court, leaving the celebration of mass as well as the administration of his estates to others. In these years he was absorbed by power, enjoying the experience greatly.
Deep in his heart, however, he remained a poet, forever bound to his beloved memories of ltaly. He frequently feit alienated in his new ambience, where he found little understanding for his poetry and too few companions to share his interest in philosophy.
"Musis et mihi cano" he wrote in pained fury about the cultural desert he feit had surrounded him.7 In Italy he had become famous for his witty epigrams and his elegant and well-organized panegyrical verse. In Hunga1y his political role brought about an entirely different kind of poetry: the clever epigrams steadily decreased in number, yielding to the lyrical "I" in elegies permeated with loneliness, sadness, and pessimism.
His output lessened, with the exception of a brief period followi!1g his ambassadorial trip of 1465 to Italy - as if a renewed immersion in the source had revitalized all his creative energies.
1 Ad Silviam, Ep. I, 147.
6 Franz Kafka was a modern exception.
7 Ep. I, 40.
All in all, Janus suppressed the poet in himself and permitted more and more of his time and concerns to be taken up by politics. He also suffered from the harsh climate of Hungary. He was consumptive and the cold Hungarian winters undermined his fragile health. In a century when the idealized human body was admired by artists and poets alike, the detailed naturalism and existentialist accentuations with which he describes the symptoms of his illness transport us to .our own century.
Munch, Kokoschka or Schiele could be worthy illustrators of these lines:
Just as if sharpened arrows had been stabbed through my rib cage, Saliva thickens with blood gathering in my mouth.
Added to this, I'm gasping for air, refused by my lungs, While my wretched inside is feverish, burning up.
He goes on:
What does life mean if it is spent in such suffering:
Life equals health, and he who cannot conquer illness No langer Jives, but perishes slowly, day by day.8
These words express a tremendous fear: at the age of thirty, Janus was not ready to die. lt was not the joys of youth he was unwilling to give up, rather he worried about his "name" and future reputation as a poet if he was forced to leave unfinished works behind - a mere torso instead of a complete corpus.9
Yet, as the years went by, he increasingly turned to the problems of administration, the theory of government, and the inunediate questions of military defense against the Ottoman army looming large on the southern horizon. (The extraliterary role of today's writer has a long history.)
Following the footsteps of King Sigismund of Luxembourg, Matthias Corvinus reaffirmed the power of the Hungarian throne, and strove for a strong monarchy. A brilliant strategist, as well as a cunning and unscrupulous politician, Matthias made a mistake when choosing some of his proteges. He tried to feudalize his humanists by granting them the benefices of lucrative episcopates and paid for their services to the centralized kingdom from the coffers of the Church. lt must have seemed
8 Et. 1, 10.
9 In our century, Mikl6s Radn6ti shared this profound fear.
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a clever plan, but actually, it was a rather naive one for him: he failed to recognize that the new feudal Jords would not wish to continue to labor against their new vested self-interest.
And in Janus' case resistance was motivated by more than mere self-interest: his own political concepts were broader and more universal than Matthias' expedient program, and soon the king and his once favorite humanist were on a collision course. Power wanted, as always, to incorporate the intellectual. 10
In my book on Pannonius, I attempted to prove that what had been widely described as Matthias' original ideas about government were simply modelled on the rule of King Sigismund of Luxembourg. So was his ultimate goal, the crown of the German-Roman Emperor. Soon it became clear to Janus that for the sake of this goal, Matthias was ready to ignore the increasing Turkish <langer, and was willing to reach compromises, and to make pacts with the dreaded enemy whenever possible.
Matthias needed more and more money for his wars against the West, and the rights and privileges of the barons and prelates were accordingly curtailed. This finally led to two armed rebellions of the estates. Janus separated himself from the first one, but just a few years later, in 1471, he became the intellectual Jeader of the second conspiracy against Matthias.11
The conspiring magnates and prelates planned to remove Matthias and replace him with the young Casimir, grandson of the Polish king.
However, as 1 have shown, the conspirators were more deeply involved with Venice and the ideology of the Republic as has so far been acknowledged.
Janus, as so many representatives of contemporary dissent in Central Europe, came from the dass of the privileged and turned against a power he had first served and later learned to despise.
The plot against Matthias was discovered, and the King, with his sharp sense for expediency, disarmed and amnestied most of the magnates.
But there was no forgiveness for Janus. The spiritus rector, the revolting mind, could not hope for mercy; he had to flee. Exhausted physically and mentally, Janus could not bear the hardships of his flight or the psychological effects of the failed plot. He died on his way to Italy in
10 The only moral response is resistance (like Rilke's famous phrase: immer dagegen).
11 lt was the revolt of the mind and, therefore, easy to defeat.
the fortress of his friend and co-conspirator, Oswaldus Thuz, bishop of Zagreb, on March 27, 1472. He was not yet thirty-eight.
The insurgent nobles wrongly believed that Matthias had lost the mass-support on which his rnle had necessarily relied. In fact, they themselves had lang ceased to represent the interest of the lesser nobility - which feit betrayed by them ever since the plot of 1467. Yet Janus and his group judged the potential results of Matthias' policies correctly. The king was not able to save his lands from the repeated attacks of the Turks, and his reaching for the German-Roman crown led him to the 1485 invasion against Frederick III. Meanwhile, at harne, he was forced to return power to the estates. He was obliged to proclaim the "decretum maius," and soon all was back to the point where his and Janus' roads had first separated. The humanist poet had been right. Similarly, in the recent Central European upheavals, several poets have proved to be better judges of reality than the politicians oppressing them.
Guarino hoped to combine in his students the qualities of the bios theoretikos and the bios praktikos, but in reality his students were not quite ready to face the complexities of the daily politics of government.
Energy often exhausts itself in language: Guarino and his students were convinced that culture and education bring about a milder humanity. By now we know that civilization does not have a civilizing effect. Janus entirely identified himself with his own education and shared Guarino's political ideals as represented in the government of the Venetian Republic. In his mind, weapons had to yield to the toga; violence could be tempered by logic. But what is to be done when the discourse of the opposition is reduced to the narrative of silence?! lt is obvious that Janus' thinking (so frequently shared by the intellectuals of today) had very little in common with the pragmatism of Matthias. The discourse with power is always one-sided.
Janus belonged to that international network of humanists who had homelands in name only: in reality, they had none but the one they chose; no mother tongue, but the language through which they believed they were able to reach the largest number of readers, Latin. Sirnilarly, many of our twentieth-century Central European writers (Kundera, etc.), who until now lived in exile, chose English or French as their vehicle.
Had there been no change, they might have lost the national character of their writing as well. Neither Janus' poetry nor his prose have any identifiable Hungarian or Croatian characteristics. His work is permeated by the intellectual universalism of a humanist Europe, and belongs to it
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more than to any one country. In this sense, he is more a modernist than most contemporary authors of many national literatures.
In Hungary, however, he belonged to a new dass which achieved its first victory with the election of Johannes Hunyadi, father of Matthias, to the regency and until his fall Janus' career is the most typical example for the new mobility of his dass. He became Bishop of Pecs and Ban of Slavonia without inherited title or wealth. Indeed, in Central Europe the writer's has always been a respected role.
Hungarian, Polish, Croatian, etc. humanism had something of a hothouse character in the fifteenth century, while as a contradictio in adjecto, it already satisfied some local needs. As western Humanism reached Central Europe it had lang ceased to be a revolutionary ideology, and became the property of a stabilized new dass. On the contrary, in the court of Matthias, Humanism became the ideological weapon of the
"modern" dergy which was almost entirely made up of the lesser nobility who, owing to their newly acquired benefices, eventually turned into magnates. I have mentioned the immediate consequences of this transition before. Not only was Janus committed to the short-term goal of overthrowip.g Matthias, but he was ultimately unable to exchange his deep beliefs in a humanist universalism for a narrow nationalism, frequently ready to compromise. National interests are not objective values. There were several modern humanists from France to Hungary who faced the same choice and could not make it. lt is true, Janus longed for peace, but also for power; for the great dream of the century, but also for immediate success. Surrounded by the military barons he wrote of ingenium, the civilizing force of culture.
Tom between republicanism and his loyalty to Matthias, Janus - like many of our contemporaries - was unable to create an ideology for himself which could satisfy his moral needs. (lt has always been tempting to compromise; that is not the discovery of our century.) Furthermore, Janus remained above all a poet. In the middle of a military campaign, falling ill, he saw himself not as a dying statesman, but as a dying poet who poses the desperate question: "nisi nomen erit?"
As a convinced humanist, Janus felt equal to his king, and refused to relinquish his rights as counsellor because of intimidation. As it happened then, and as it has time and again since, when faced with naked power, the weakest withdraw and the strongest redirect their energies. Those like J anus - the ones in the middle - get destroyed. The road to despotism is frequently paved with the graves of the moral opposition.
janus' fate was no accident. By the last quarter of the fifteenth century, even in Hungary, the principles of social co-operation had been replaced by autocratic systems. In many courts of Europe the humanists were reduced to decorative roles or decided to retreat into private life - again, a situation with parallels in last forty years.
The effects of the Renaissance were only seemingly universal; in reality they were limited to a very thin stratum of society. Its representatives, eo ipso, separated themselves from the masses. This cosmopolitan rootless-ness, the charge still made against modern intellectuals, created a tragic inner conflict. Only those for whom the embracing of a religion was possible could find solace. In the latter part of the fifteenth century, there was an exodus away from "this world" which had recently been hailed as the best. 12
This tendency is evident already in the work of Ficino where Humanism becomes a vehicle of escape from this world to a purer one of the divine Logos. The next century brings Erasmus, Luther, and so on.
In the crisis of our century, philosophy became atomized - in the sixteenth, it was religion that split. janus, who remained an agnostic, could not, or would not, make this leap. Although he shared the views of Manetti and Ficino about the value of man, he differed from them in his unwillingness to sacrifice his belief in the autonomy of this world.
For him this was the only world, and man was here not to search for his Creator, but to meet his fellow men. Yet, with the exception of a few youthful epigrams (highly critical of organized religion), janus never attacked, or paid much attention to the subject of religion. He looked for fame and not for deliverance. Therefore, although he turned into a frustrated bureaucrat, he never became a frustrated poet. In this, he had it better than some of our contemporaries. He experienced great political blows, but never - as some of our contemporaries have done - became disappointed in his ideals, according to which the individual was, at least potentially, the most important element in the universe - something worth fighting for. In addition, janus was deeply convinced that his political concepts promoted the cause of European civilization. Only after he realized that his poetry (with its allegorical advise to Matthias) generated no political response, did he turn to action.
12 There are many modern examples of a newly-found religiosity among intellectuals
12 There are many modern examples of a newly-found religiosity among intellectuals