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
low, to the pages of his romances and dramas with a brilliancy and
mastery of style that captivated the people, whose idol he still
remains. Scenes from Turkish life--in which, next to Hungarian, he is
particularly interested; historical novels, romances of pure
imagination, short tales, dramatic works, essays on literature and
social questions, came pouring from his surcharged brain and heart. The
very virtues of his work, its intensity, and the boundless scope of its
imagination, sometimes produce a lack of unity and an improbability to
which the hypercritical in the West draw attention with a sense of
superior wisdom; but the Hungarians themselves, who know whereof he
writes, can see no faults whatever in his work. It is essentially
idealistic; the true and the beautiful shine through it with radiant
lustre, in sharp distinction from the scenes of famine and carnage that
abound. His Turkish stories have been described as "full of blood and
roses."

Of his more mature productions, the best known are: "A Magyar Nabob";
"The Fools of Love"; "The New Landlord"; "Black Diamonds"; "A Romance of
the Coming Century"; "Handsome Michael"; "God is One," in which the
Unitarians play an important part; "The Nameless Castle," that gives an
account of the Hungarian army employed against Napoleon in 1809;
"Captive Ráby," a romance of the times of Joseph II.; and "As We Grow
Old," the latter being the author's own favorite and, strangely enough,
the people's also. Dr. Jókai greatly deplores that what the critics call
his best work should not have been given to the English-speaking people.