So Runs the World

So Runs the World, by Henryk
Sienkiewicz,

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Title: So Runs the World
Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz,
Release Date: December 30, 2003 [EBook #10546]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE WORLD ***

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SO RUNS THE WORLD
BY HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ

AUTHOR OF "QUO VADIS," ETC.
Translated by S.C. de SOISSONS

Contents
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ
ZOLA
WHOSE FAULT?
THE VERDICT
WIN OR LOSE

PART FIRST
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ.
I once read a short story, in which a Slav author had all the lilies and
bells in a forest bending toward each other, whispering and resounding
softly the words: "Glory! Glory! Glory!" until the whole forest and then
the whole world repeated the song of flowers.
Such is to-day the fate of the author of the powerful historical trilogy:
"With Fire and Sword," "The Deluge" and "Pan Michael," preceded by
short stories, "Lillian Morris," "Yanko the Musician," "After Bread,"
"Hania," "Let Us Follow Him," followed by two problem novels,
"Without Dogma," and "Children of the Soil," and crowned by a
masterpiece of an incomparable artistic beauty, "Quo Vadis." Eleven
good books adopted from the Polish language and set into circulation
are of great importance for the English-reading people--just now I am
emphasizing only this--because these books are written in the most
beautiful language ever written by any Polish author! Eleven books of
masterly, personal, and simple prose! Eleven good books given to the

circulation and received not only with admiration but with
gratitude--books where there are more or less good or sincere pages,
but where there is not one on which original humor, nobleness, charm,
some comforting thoughts, some elevated sentiments do not shine.
Some other author would perhaps have stopped after producing "Quo
Vadis," without any doubt the best of Sienkiewicz's books. But
Sienkiewicz looks into the future and cares more about works which he
is going to write, than about those which we have already in our
libraries, and he renews his talents, searching, perhaps unknowingly,
for new themes and tendencies.
When one knows how to read a book, then from its pages the author's
face looks out on him, a face not material, but just the same full of life.
Sienkiewicz's face, looking on us from his books, is not always the
same; it changes, and in his last book ("Quo Vadis") it is quite different,
almost new.
There are some people who throw down a book after having read it, as
one leaves a bottle after having drank the wine from it. There are others
who read books with a pencil in their hands, and they mark the most
striking passages. Afterward, in the hours of rest, in the moments when
one needs a stimulant from within and one searches for harmony,
sympathy of a thing apparently so dead and strange as a book is, they
come back to the marked passages, to their own thoughts, more
comprehensible since an author expressed them; to their own
sentiments, stronger and more natural since they found them in
somebody else's words. Because ofttimes it seems to us--the common
readers--that there is no difference between our interior world and the
horizon of great authors, and we flatter ourselves by believing that we
are 'only less daring, less brave than are thinkers and poets, that some
interior lack of courage stopped us from having formulated our
impressions. And in this sentiment there is a great deal of truth. But
while this expression of our thoughts seems to us to be a daring, to the
others it is a need; they even do not suspect how much they are daring
and new. They must, according to the words of a poet, "Spin out the
love, as the silkworm spins its web." That is their capital distinction
from common mortals; we recognize them by it at once; and that is the

reason we put them above the common level. On the pages of their
books we find not the traces of the accidental, deeper penetrating into
the life or more refined feelings, but the whole harvest of thoughts,
impressions, dispositions, written skilfully, because studied deeply. We
also leave something on these pages. Some people dry flowers on them,
the others preserve reminiscences. In every one of Sienkiewicz's
volumes people will deposit a great many personal impressions, part of
their souls; in every one they will find them again