Bereczky Erzsébet (szerk.): Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Essays about the ideas and the directing of the Drama (Budapest, 1985)

Endre Gellért: "I hear, I hear the coming epoch's song"

Adam „hastes” to a „free land” because „a million must live”. And he forsakes his love for liberty.

In the next scene which is still set in an era of slavery, disappointed in the citizens of Athens who would sell their votes for money, Adam draws a very different picture of the times in which he would like to live:

LUCIFER

Do you not realize that you have been A nobler lord to them than they to you?

ADAM

Perhaps! But still both are perdition, and Under another name fate is the same.

One cannot fight against his destiny —

I never will - And why should I? Why should And ardent heart aspire to greatness? Let Everyone live his life and look for raptures To fill this little span of being with them;

Then let him, drunken, stagger toward his Hades —

Show me another way, and lead me on That I may laugh at virtues and man’s pain!

I want delight, a life in raptures spent —

Where is here the enthusiasm of the Pharaoh, his longing for the new? Adam’s closing words put the accent on „fleeting life”, and it seems that with his references to drunkenness and the gratification of pleasures, he himself makes a lower assessment of the future. His own future. For while Pharaoh learned to struggle for „millions”, for mankind, Miltiades, who is disappointed in his unrealized liberal ideas, cares only about himself.

This duality is observable practically throughout the Tragedy. Adam is either striving for the great ideals of mankind — in these cases he is always impulsively „hasting” toward the new — or looking only for his own pleasures. In the latter case he speaks in the tones of a painfully disappointed man and his striving for the new is really an escape from ideals that could not be realized.

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