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The première of “LILIOM” at Budapest in December, 1909, left both playgoer and critic a bit bewildered. It was not the sort of play the Hungarian capital had been accustomed to expect of its favorite dramatist, whose THE DEVIL, after two years of unprecedented success, was still crowding the theatres of two continents.

One must, it was true, count on a touch of fantasy in every Molnar work. Never had he been wholly content with everyday reality, not in his stories, or in his sketches or in his earlier plays; and least of all in THE DEVIL wherein the natural and supernatural were most whimsically blended. But in LILIOM, it seemed, he had carried fantasy to quite unintelligible lengths. Budapest was frankly puzzled.

What did he mean by killing his hero in the fifth scene, taking him into Heaven in the sixth and bringing him back to earth in the seventh? Was this prosaic Heaven of his seriously or satirically intended? Was Liliom a saint or a common tough? And was his abortive redemption a symbol or merely a jibe? These were some of the questions Budapest debated while the play languished through thirty or forty performances and was withdrawn.

Almost ten years passed before it was revived. This time it was an immediate and overwhelming triumph. Perhaps the wide circulation of the play in printed form had made its beauty and significance clearer. Perhaps the tragedy of the war had made Molnar’s public more sensitive to spiritual values. Whatever the reason, Budapest now accepted ecstatically what it had previously rejected, and Molnar was more of a popular hero than ever. From which it may be gleaned that Hungary takes its drama and dramatists more seriously, disapproves them more passionately and praises them more affectionately than we Americans can conceive. In Paris I once saw an audience rise en masse, because the sculptor Rodin had entered the auditorium, and remain on its feet cheering until he had taken his seat. Something of the kind greets Molnar whenever he appears in public, and nothing is more certain than that he is the hero, the oracle, the spoiled darling of club, salon and coffee house in which artistic Hungary foregathers.

But the years immediately following the first production of LILIOM were for him a period of eclipse. It was the first time that even the threat of failure had cast its shadow across his career. He became timid, wary of failure, too anxious to please his public. His subsequent plays were less original, less daring, more faithful to routine. Never again did he touch the heights of LILIOM; and some of his best friends aver that he never will again until he has banished the dread of failure that obsesses him.

An odd situation, truly, and in some aspects a tragic one. Genius lacking the courage to spread its wings and soar. A potential immortal bidding fearfully for the praise of a coffee-house clique. Is it vanity? Is it abnormal sensitiveness? Biographical data cast little light on the enigma.

Franz Molnar was born in Budapest on January 12, 1878, the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant. He graduated from the Universities of Geneva and Budapest. His literary career was begun as a journalist at the age of eighteen. He wrote short sketches and humorous dialogues of such beauty and charm that he became a national figure almost at once, and the circulation of his newspaper increased until it was foremost in Budapest. Then he married Margaret Vaszi, the daughter of his editor, herself a journalist of note. Two years later he was divorced from her, and subsequently he married an actress who had played rôles in his own plays.

For a portrait of him as he is today you have to think of Oscar Wilde at the height of his glory. A big pudgy face, immobile, pink, smooth-shaven, its child-like expressionlessness accentuated by the monocle he always wears, though rather belied by the gleam of humor in his dark alert eyes. His hair is iron-gray, his figure stocky and of about medium height. A mordant wit, an inimitable raconteur, he loves life and gayety and all the luxuries of life. Nothing can persuade him out of his complacent and comfortable routine. He will not leave Budapest, even to attend the première of one of his plays in nearby Vienna. The post-war political upheaval which has rent all Hungary into two voluble and bitter factions left him quite unperturbed and neutral. His pen is not for politics.

Yet it is a singularly prolific pen. His novels and short stories are among the finest in Hungarian literature. He has written nine long plays and numerous short ones. A chronology of his more important dramatic works is as follows:

1902 A DOKTOR UR (The Doctor).

1904 JOZSI.

1907 AZ ÖRDÖG (The Devil).

1909 LILIOM.

1911 TESTÖR (Played in this country as “Where Ignorance is Bliss”).

1913 A FARKAS (Played in this country as “The Phantom Rival”).

1914 URIDIVAT (Attorney for Defence).

1919 A HATTYU (The Swan).

1920 SZINHAZ (Theatre: Three One-Act Plays).

Undoubtedly the greatest of these is LILIOM. Indeed, I know of no play written in our own time which matches the amazing virtuosity of LILIOM, its imaginative daring, its uncanny blending of naturalism and fantasy, humor and pathos, tenderness and tragedy into a solid dramatic structure. At first reading it may seem a mere improvization in many moods, but closer study must reveal how the moods are as inevitably related to each other as pearls on a string.

And where in modern dramatic literature can such pearls be matched—Julie incoherently confessing to her dead lover the love she had always been ashamed to tell; Liliom crying out to the distant carousel the glad news that he is to be a father; the two thieves gambling for the spoils of their prospective robbery; Marie and Wolf posing for their portrait while the broken-hearted Julie stands looking after the vanishing Liliom, the thieves’ song ringing in her ears; the two policemen grousing about pay and pensions while Liliom lies bleeding to death; Liliom furtively proffering his daughter the star he has stolen for her in heaven. … The temptation to count the whole scintillating string is difficult to resist.

What is the moral of LILIOM? Nothing you can reduce to a creed. Molnar is not a preacher or a propagandist for any theory of life. You will look in vain in his plays for moral or dogma. His philosophy—if philosophy you can call it—is always implicit. And nothing is plainer than that his picture of a courtroom in the beyond is neither devoutly nor satirically intended. Liliom’s Heaven is the Heaven of his own imagining. And what is more natural than that it should be an irrational jumble of priest’s purgatory, police magistrate’s justice and his own limited conception of good deeds and evil?

For those who hold that every fine dramatic architecture must have its spire of meaning, that by the very selection of character and incident the dramatist writes his commentary on life, there is still an explanation possible. Perhaps Molnar was at the old, old task of revaluing our ideas of good and evil. Perhaps he has only shown how the difference between a bully, a wife-beater and a criminal on the one hand and a saint on the other can be very slight. If one must tag LILIOM with a moral, I prefer to read mine in Liliom’s dying speech to Julie wherein he says: “Nobody’s right … but they all think they are right. … A lot they know.”

BENJAMIN F. GLAZER.

New York, April, 1921.