A MAURICE JÓKAI (1825-) BY EMIL REICH MONG the numerous novelists and humorists of Hungary, Jókai is, in the opinion of his compatriots and the rest of his contemporaries, facile princeps. The number of his novels, articles, and sketches is legion; yet in all of them there is scarcely a dull page. Everything he has written is swelling and palpitating with the intense vitality of thought and sentiment so characteristic of the Hungarians. Like all nations with whom conversation or the living word is more important than written or dead vocables, they endow the expressions of their inner life with a power of spontaneity and wit that must appear to more book-ridden nations as elemental. As in their music the originality of rhythm and counterpoint, so in their literature we cannot but perceive a striking originality of ideas and framework. From the earliest dawn of Hungarian literature as such,—that is, from the seventeenth century onward,—a great number of Magyar writers have struck out literary paths of their own, thus adding materially to the wealth of modern European literature. Kazinczy, Berzsenyi, Kölcsey, and the Kisfaludys, who wrote in the latter half of the last, and in the first three decades of the present century, not only labored at a close imitation of Greek, Roman, or French and German models, but also created new literary subjects and some novel literary modes. The Hungarian writers have been able to lend their works that intimacy between word and sentiment which alone can be productive of high literary finish. The language of the Magyars is one of the idioms of Central Asia, related to Finnish on the one hand and Turkish on the other. It has no similarity whatever with the Aryan languages. It is sonorous and agglutinative; rich in verbal forms and adjectives; and unlike French, without any stubborn aversion to the coining of new words. It has a peculiar wealth of terms for acoustic phenomena, which is but natural with a people so intensely musical as are the Hungarians. And finally, the language of the Magyars is their most powerful political weapon in the struggle against the Slavic nations inhabiting Hungary. Hence the majority of Hungarian writers are at once poets and politicians. Petöfi, the greatest of |