to him, it seems incredible that there was ever a time of indecision as
to what career he was best fitted to follow. The idle life of the
nobility into which Maurus Jókay was born in 1825 had no attractions for
a strongly intellectual boy, fired with zeal and energy that carried him
easily to the head of each class in school and college; nor did he feel
any attraction for the prosaic practice of law, his father's profession,
to which Austria's despotism drove many a nobleman in those wretched
days for Hungary. It was Pétofi, the poet, who was his dearest friend
during the student-life at Pápa; idealism ever attracted him, and, by
natural gravitation toward the finest minds, he chose the friendship of
young men who quickly rose into eminence during the days of revolution
and invasion that tried men's souls.

For a time Jókay, as he then wrote his name, was undecided whether to
choose literature or art as an outlet for the 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.