Fraternity-Testvériség, 1960 (38. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1960-09-01 / 9. szám
4 FRATERNITY were draped in black. Budapest had never witnessed such a great demonstration of sympathy as the funeral procession. Taking care of her brother was Madame Ruttkay’s first obligation throughout their years together in Turin, but she always managed to find time for her own intellectual advancement. When everday life intruded too far upon more philosophical interests, she would complain, half-humorously to Miss Kenyon: “II ne faut jamais vouloir l’impossible.” I, at the present, have to content myself with making preserves! You see what a great difference there is in our existence; you are collecting food for the mind — Alas! — I am preparing it for the body. But let not any work whatever be disparaged. I am consoling myself with the reflection that the body is, after all, the only possible tenement of the mind and soul, and some of us must minister to it. (August 2, 1379) Such protestations were, however, more from modesty than any other cause. Mme. Ruttkay’s mind received sustenance enough, in spite of her household duties. The letters to Miss Kenyon are full of references to books and writers that had affected her, and time and again she shows herself to be an intelligent student of literature and philosophy. For example, in a letter of April 4, 1882, she devoted six pages of an eight- page letter to a lengthy analysis of Fenelon’s writings and their effect on her, ending with an apology for her apparent heresy: “Do not feel disappointed nor fear for your friend because she enjoy’s Fenelon’s writings. The soul as well as the body has its appointed time of needing stronger or weaker food.” Rousseau also supplied strong food to the ladies of the period, and Mme. Ruttkay recommended the Confessions to Miss Kenyon. An anecdote she recounted gives an indication of her position among the blue stockings of the day: When I arrived in America I had the book (Rousseau’s Confessions) on my table, when one of my new acquaintances (a very intellectual woman, whose friendship I enjoyed many years) called on me. I told her of my plan to open a little school in a country place. She listened, looked at the book, and said, “But you must not keep that book on your table, else you will not get one scholar.” I asked her if she read the book, and she said, “Oh, no, never.” “Read it,” I said. “You know we can become virtuous only after knowing the good and evil, and choosing the good, else we can only be ignorant.” She took the book and brought it back some weeks after, saying, “I don’t find in it anything so terrible. What do people mean by fearing it so much?” (May 6, 1883) But such avant-garde predilections were somewhat rare even in Mme. Ruttkay. Her favorite writers in English were Emerson and Browning, and she shared a love with Miss Kenyon for Goethe. Browning she found difficult, because although she could “see the deep meaning and beauty in detached sentences, the connection of the whole is broken into by some words entirely new to me.” She had no such trouble with Emerson, whom she considered one of the greatest benefactors of the entire human race for his “lofty spirit,” nor with Goethe, whom she described in similar terms. Faust she believed to be Goethe’s finest statement of
