The Nameless Castle | Page 2

idealism, imagination, and
devotion that overflowed in two directions from this boy of seventeen.
With some of the inherited artistic talent, which in his relative
Munkacsy amounted to genius, he felt most inclined toward painting
and sculpture, and finally consecrated himself to them. In his library at
Budapest there now stands a small, well-executed bust of his wife in
ivory; and on the walls hang several landscapes and still-life paintings,
which he showed with a smile to an American visitor, who stood silent
before them last winter, hoping for some inspiration of speech that
would reconcile politeness with veracity and her own ideals of good art.
If a "deep love for art and an ardent desire to excel" will "more than
compensate for the want of method," to quote Sir Joshua Reynolds,
then Jókay would have been a great painter indeed. While he never was
that, his chisel and brushes have remained a recreation and delight to
him always.
Apparently he was diverted from art to literature by a trifle; but in the
light of later developments it is simple enough to see which was really
the greater force working within. The Academy of Arts and Sciences,
founded by Szécheni, offered a prize for the best drama, and Jókay won
it. He was then seventeen, for careers began early in olden times. When
twenty-one his first novel, "Work Days," met with great applause; other
romances quickly followed, and, as they dealt with the social and
political tendencies that fanned the revolution into flame two years later,
their success was instantaneous. His true representations of Hungarian
life and character, his passionate love of liberty, his lofty idealism for
his crushed and lethargic country, aroused a great wave of patriotism
like a call to arms, and consecrated him to work with his pen for the

freedom of the common people. Henceforth paint-brushes were cast
aside.
Pétofi and Jókay, teeming with great ideas, quickly attracted other
writers and young men of the university about them, and, each helping
the other, brought about a bloodless revolution that secured, among
other inestimable boons, the freedom of a censored, degraded press.
And yet the only act of violence these young revolutionists committed
was in entering a printing establishment and setting up with their own
hands the type for Pétofi's poem, that afterward became the war-song of
the national movement. At that very establishment was soon to be
printed a proclamation granting twelve of their dearest wishes to the
people. From this time Jókay changed the spelling of his name to Jókai,
y being a badge of nobility hateful to disciples of the doctrine of liberty,
fraternity, equality.
About this time Jókai married the Rachel of the Hungarian stage, Rosa
Laborfalvy. The portrait of her that hangs in her husband's famous
library shows a beautiful woman of intense sensitiveness, into whose
face some of the sadness of her rôles seems to have crept. It was to her
powers of impersonation and disguise that Jókai owed his life many
years later, when, imprisoned and suffering in a dungeon, he was
enabled to escape in her clothes to join Kossuth in the desperate fight
against the allied armies of Austria and Russia. Since her death he has
lived in retirement.
The bloodless revolution of 1848, which suddenly transformed
Hungary into a modern state, possessing civil and religious liberty for
which the young idealists led by Kossuth had labored with such
passionate zeal, was not effected without antagonizing the old
aristocracy, all of whose cherished institutions were suddenly swept
away; or the semi-barbaric people of the peasant class, who could little
appreciate the beneficent reforms. Into the awful civil war that followed,
when the horrors of an Austrian-Russian invasion were added to the
already desperate situation, Jókai plunged with magnificent heroism.
Side by side with Kossuth, he fought with sword and pen. Those who
heard him deliver an address at the Peace Congress at Brussels two

years ago felt through his impassioned eloquence that the man had
himself drained the bitterest dregs of war.
While Kossuth lived in exile in England and the United States, and
many other compatriots escaped to Turkey and beyond, Jókai, in
concealment at home, writing under an assumed name and with a price
on his head, continued his work for social reform, until a universal
pardon was granted by Austria and the saddened idealists once more
dared show their faces in devastated Hungary.
Ripe with experience and full of splendid intellectual power, Jókai now
turned his whole attention to literature. The pages of his novels glow
with the warmth of the man's intensity of feeling: his pen had been
touched by a living coal. He knew his country as no other man has
known it; and transferred its types, its manners, its life in high degree
and