Fraternity-Testvériség, 1960 (38. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1960-09-01 / 9. szám
FRATERNITY 5 man’s aspirations, but somewhat overburdened by metaphysics. The Hungarian playwright, Imre Madach, she felt, had produced a better synthesis of approximately the same ideas in his Tragedy of Man. “Making the abstraction of the author’s being a countryman of ours,” she wrote, “the play was superior to Faust.” In all, her reading was probably not unusual for a woman of her day with her background and interests, but was remarkable in comparison with that of most of the women of the period. No novels are mentioned in Mme. Ruttkay’s letters. With all her modern opinions, Mme. Ituttkay in 1876 was in her sixties, and, as events proved, not quite in tune with the younger generation. Partly to please her friend, partly to supplement her meager income, she agreed to take Miss Nelly Wells, a niece of Miss Kenyon, whom she had known as a little girl in Plainfield, New Jersey, to board with her. Her letter of acceptance is full of her plans to “promote the mental advancement of (Miss Kenyon’s sister’s) treasure” and to do all in her power “to make the dear child happy and contented.” Things went well for nearly a year, but by April 1877, a strain had appeared in the relationship between the older and younger woman that for a time threatened the friendship of Mme. Ruttkay and Miss Kenyon. Mme. Ruttkay’s letter describing the difficulties might pass as a plot summary for a Henry James novel. She wrote that Nelly felt she was “perfectly able to take care of herself,” a notion to which Mme. Ruttkay objected, “not as if she would do anything improper, but she is imprudent, and likes too much what she calls ‘fun’ and what may lead her into perplexities which she, young as she is, could not unravel.” Specific instances then follow: The young man you alluded to in your letter was a young man who rented a room from me ... I asked him to call some times, on the recommendation of people who knew him since his childhood, but when I found it was likely to end in a so-called flirtation, I inquired into the matter and heard from his friends that he is engaged to a young lady in London . . . The music teacher is another person who came once — but I have not invited him to come again . . . not only because I have always considered what is called with you flirtations as something below the dignity of a high-minded girl, but because it fritters away Nelly’s precious time. Nelly left shortly afterward, and Mme. Ruttkay never repeated the experiment. The incident was virtually unavoidable simply because of Madame Ruttkay’s absolute standards of morality. Everything in life was measured by her in terms of morality. Darwin she could dismiss with a sentence, “Has he benefited humanity by connecting it so closely with the animal? Does not a great part of humanity take too readily to animal propensities?” Similarly, her concepts of morality were determinants of her politics. Much as she loved Hungary, she found her countrymen “politically immoral” in their complacency and hyperloyalty to the Habsburg regime. Her concept of political morality helps to explain her lack of sympathy with the Communist and Anarchist agitators of the end of the nineteenth century. Writing shortly after May Day of 1892, she complained:
