nothing majestic in them, nothing grave, nothing truly sad or melancholy. Jókai disposes of an inexhaustible humour. This, as will be admitted, cannot be readily imitated in music. In Liszt, humour becomes irony and demoniac scorn. His Polonaise in E major, for example, with its appalling irony at Polish excessiveness, is the musical counterpart to Jókai’s humour. But where Liszt comes nearest to Jókai is in his Rhapsodies. As in Jókai, so in Liszt, there is a constant change of panoramic views; an exquisite wealth of tinkling, sparring and glistening rhythms; a shower of glittering dewdrops and an iridescence of sheets of coloured lights. In a measure, all Jókai’s novels are placed in fairy-land; as all Liszt’s music is on the heights of exultation. And, likewise, the final secret of Jókai’s irresistible charm is in the improvisatory character of his novels. Jókai’s reader does not feel that he is being lectured or moralized or instructed. On the contrary, he feels that he himself, in inspiring, as it were, the author, is co-operating with him in the work, just as the listeners to an improvisatore are doing. The reader is accorded part of the exquisite delight of literary creation and so feels twice happy. This peculiar and inimitable feature and excellence of Jókai is but another manifestation of the rhapsodic character of the Magyars. Petőfi, and he alone, was in his best poems, both rhapsodic and classical. He not only expressed Magyar rhapsodism lyrically, as has Jókai novelistically and Liszt musically, but he also imparted to it that inner form of moderation and harmonious beauty which, if coupled with perfect expression and metre, renders poetry classical. It will now be easily seen why Jókai must needs have the failings of his virtues. The very nature of rhapsodic improvisations works chiefly for effect: it is subjective art, not objective. The production of the artist is not severed from his personality; it is intimately allied with and dependent on it. In Liszt, whose art admits of combining both production and presentation of the work at one and the same time, the subjective or personal factors became so strong as to render him without any doubt the most fascinating artistic individuality of this century. It is, therefore, in vain to expect in Jókai that patient and self-denying care of the objective artist for the structural beauty of his work. It is not the great number of his novels that has prevented him from giving them as much objective proportion and consistency as they have lustre and charm. Mozart died at five-and-thirty, and left more works than Jókai has written; yet nearly every one of the better ones was objectively faultless. It is Jókai’s very art that necessitates that failing in Art. If he had tried to mend it, he would have stunted some of that peerless profusion of fancy which has endeared him to untold millions. He may displease a few hundreds; he will always transport the millions.