KOLOMAN MIKSZÁTH _(born in Sklebonya in 1849) is without doubt the best
loved writer of Hungary. Why should he not be? He has something of the
witty descriptive powers of Heine, the fluent unforced narrative of
Dumas, and a peculiar charm which is all his own. He is a painter of
inimitable miniatures, glowing with color, truthful in action, a
veritable Meissonier of the pen._
_In these, spiritedly drawn, richly peopled, diminutive little pictures
we see all Hungary pass before us: the burger class, the petty nobility,
the church, the state and the peasant. Sometimes these stories are
ironic--because Mikszáth is numbered among the humorists--sometimes
idyllic, sometimes realistic, and sometimes they are bitter and
incisive, and strike home with a certain fatal touch of intimité,
telling truths from which we can not get away. He has been a productive
writer, and we do not need to go out of his native Hungary for a worthy
parallel, when we pause to recall that Maurice Jokai wrote three hundred
novels and tales._
_Mikszáth is author of a novel, “Mácsik the Mighty,” which reproduces
the life of the petty nobility in upper Hungary. His short stories are
collected into many volumes, such as “Club and Corridor,” which stories
were first published in the daily he himself edited, “Pesti Hirlap” (The
Times of Budapest)._
_Other books are “Slovak Brothers,” “Madame Paul Szontagh,” “The City
That Had No Men,” “The Magic Caftan,” “The Miraculous Umbrella.”_
_We include two stories; one, from the writers own experience in a small
community where he was made judge at the age of twenty three; the
other--“Fiddlers Three,” from that remarkable book of fantastic and
imaginative writing, which is strung together in a series of tales under
the name of “The Deaf Blacksmith.”_
_In 1887 he began to take an interest in politics and became a member of
the Reichstag, where he threw his influence with the Liberal party._
_This union of the poet and the wit, the romantic dreamer and the shrewd
and bitter critic of life, is one of the gifts of Hungary and its
neighboring peoples to the world of letters. It is seldom found in the
Teuton or the Latin, even in a slight degree._
_A volume of the short stories of Mikszáth was published in America some
years ago. His first appearance in English was the short story, “The
King’s Clothes,”[11] which antedated the book._