Lucus a non lucendo

Gyula Benczúr: Kálmán Mikszáth (1910)

Kálmán Mikszáth (1847-1910), one of the greatest 19th-century Hungarian novelists was also a keen politician, a respected parliamentary representative, a pleasant man of society and an extremely fertile journalist. The vibrant liveliness of the thousands of his feuilletons is greatly enhanced by the innumerable references taken from the most various contemporary sources, from daily political skirmishes (which in those times were no less disgusting than today) through well-informed gossips to advertisements: he wove the texture of his texts like the mayfly larva constructs its multicolored and unique house from the most heterogeneous materials to be found on the bottom of the lake. To contemporary readers these memes were just as comprehensible as King Juan Carlos’ “Why don’t you shut up?” or “the coffee of Zapatero” are to us. But nowadays for a complete understanding of that complex and vivid background we need a half page of footnotes to each line of Mikszáth. And such footnotes which restore to life a bygone world are often just as delightful as the lines they expose.

Here is for example the introduction of the 1885 article “Sasok” [Eagles]:

If one lives for about nine years in Pest, he begins to hear about the “eagles”. (If only for eight years then not yet.) First he believes they speak about the eagles in the zoo, but in nine years there will surely arrive a lazy moment when he might ask: well, what are those eagles? And then he will hear the following explanation:
– Well, the eagles, my lord, are a company ruling in the affairs of the city. They are the most powerful ones around. They all are good friends, twenty bodies with one soul, because they number at least twenty. (Jesus Mary! A twenty-headed eagle!) By the way, they are the bravest old gentlemen who still care for public affairs. Pál Királyi is their head.
– What, the old Pál Királyi? I would have never believed him to bear the nickname of “eagle”. “Lucus a non lucendo.” Where did they take this name from?
– From the Golden Eagle Hotel.
– Aha! That makes sense. But I have to confess that first I have thought of the zoo.
And if one lives for nine more years here, he will perfectly forget about this dialogue and about the eagles as well, because Budapest has this peculiarity that it is unable to assimilate you. You can live here from the age of ten to ninety, and yet you will always feel like a traveler in transit. This is an ill presage, gentlemen. I’m afraid it will never become a metropolis.

Let us now pass over the still today threatening prophecy of Mikszáth, and let us rather focus on the philological problems. Concerning the “eagles” and their connection with the Golden Eagle Hotel – as well as the whereabouts of the long forgotten Golden Eagle Hotel itself – it would not be difficult to write an exhaustive footnote on the basis of Balázs Draveczky’s article in the 1998 edition of the Tanulmányok Budapest múltjából (Studies from the past of Budapest).

The Golden Eagle – Arany Sas – Hotel was an illustrious inn of the old Pest before city planning in the 1890s, following the example of Hausmann’s Paris, cut a never healing wound in the romantic texture of the little medieval streets of the inner town with the sharp sword of modern Lajos Kossuth street – an act which in Budapest was euphemistically labeled “urbanism”, but in Rome, where the same happened  some years later, was much more frankly called “sventramento”, that is “disemboweling” of the city. The new street also swept away the Golden Eagle Hotel which until 1893 stood at the corner of the Neue-Welt-Gasse (marked on the 19th-century map as “gold. Adler”). On its place was built the National Casino which between 1945-1990 fuctioned as the Palace of Soviet Culture (running a fantastic Russian and Georgian restaurant – mmm…)

The street network of the inner city of Budapest in the 19th century and now. The building of the central avenue around 1900 has swept away the historical center of the city,
of which some photos are published here

The inn standing inside the old city walls (whose traces are still to be discovered in the inner courtyards of some of the houses along the old Land-Strasse or modern Múzeum körút), immediately at the gate, was the favorite hotel and restaurant of the countryside nobility visiting the capital as well as of the civil servants of the County Hall at the opposite side of the street. It was a small Hungarian island in the then overwhelmingly German core of Pest, regularly visited by the most renowned writers, poets and politicians of the age. Some since then typical plates of the Hungarian restaurant menu were invented here – like székelykáposzta, inspired by journalist and archivist József Székely, or palócleves which was composed precisely in honor of Mikszáth by János Gundel, the founder of one of the most renowned dynasties of chefs in Budapest. The Golden Eagle was also immortalized in several works of Gyula Krúdy, the unsurpassable chronicler of the cuisine of fin-de-siècle Budapest.

The Golden Eagle was also home of several illustrious table societies. The most eminent of them was that of the Eagles, founded in the 1870s and described in the 1930s by the renowned chef and cuisine author Elek Magyar as “the academy of all table societies in Pest”. Its members belonged to the parties of opposition, including several eminent figures of the anti-Hapsburg war of independence of 1848-49 like Pál Királyi, chief editor of the opposition journal Jelenkor. The society also included two important Mayors of Budapest, Károly Ráth, the founder of the society, and Károly Kamermayer, the great builder of fin-de-siècle Budapest who resigned of his position in the same year when the Golden Eagle was pulled down. Thus it was no wonder that the Eagles also had a considerable influence on the affairs of the city.

All right, the golden and other eagles have been checked off. But what about the idiom “Lucus a non lucendo”?

This phrase enriches the texture of Mikszáth’s text with one more layer of contemporary life, that of the adages collected during high school classical curriculum and frequently applied in everyday conversation. Its literal meaning is “forest from not shining”. But its real meaning will be clear only if we know that it was attributed to Quintilian who mocked the convoluted etymologies of his age by telling that these even derive ‘forest’ [lucus] from ‘shining’ [luceo], because the forest does not shine.

However, the precise locus of Quintilian sounds somewhat different. He formulates it like this in chapter 1.6.34 of his Institutio Oratoria:

etiamne a contrariis aliqua sinemus trahi, ut „lucus” quia umbra opacus parum luceat, et „ludus” quia sit longissime a lusu, et „Ditis” quia minime dives?

and sometimes we even accept the derivation of words from their contrary, like ‘forest’ [lucus] from the fact that its dense leaves do not let sunshine in [luceat], like ‘school’ [ludus] from the lack of playing [lusus], and the name of Dis [Pluto, the god of the nether world] from his not being rich [dives].

The formula lucus a non lucendo – as the excellent blog of classical etymologies Laudator Temporis Acti points it out – first occurred only in Virgil’s 4th-century commentator Servius, whose work became an essential reference work for the Middle Ages. Servius comments the name of the Parcae in Aeneis 1.22 in the following way:

et dictae sunt parcae kata antiphrasin, quod nulli parcant, sicut lucus a non lucendo, bellum a nulla re bella.

They are called parcae “kata antiphrasin” [in the contrary sense], as they have no mercy [parco], just like the name of ‘forest’ [lucus] comes from not shining [luceo], and that of ‘war’ [bellum] from the fact that it is absolutely not beautiful [bellus].

Servius’ authority proved stronger than Quintilian’s irony. As Henri de Lubac points it out in his monumental Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l'Écriture, the method kata antiphrasin became an accepted etymological principle under the technical name aetymologia ex contrariis, thus paving the way to modern psychoanalysis where a symbol can also refer to the contrary of itself. Alanus ab Insulis for example explains in his De planctu naturae (PL 210.459d) written in the late 12th century:

Lucifer… qui cum totus sit tenebrosus, tamen per antiphrasin dictus est Lucifer, sicut lucus a non lucendo quia minime lucet.

Lucifer, who is completely dark, is called ‘light-bearer’ by the principle of contraries, just like lucus a non lucendo, that is the forest from being absolutely non-shining.

This much-traveled Latin phrase is also used in this sense in the above dialog by Mikszáth when he hears that Pál Királyi, the former officer of the war of independence, the chief editor of a journal of opposition and the president of the National Party is called an ‘eagle’. Lucus a non lucendo? And by telling this he refers, after the eagles in the zoo, the Golden Eagle, and the table society of the Eagles, to a fourth meaning of the word ‘eagle’, a meaning which is unspoken but is clear to everyone: the Doppeladler, the two-headed Hapsburg eagle.

“Magyarisches Golgotha”. Cartoon in the journal Musketen