So Runs the World | Page 5

the Soil."
The charm of Sienkiewicz's psychological novels is the synthesis so
seldom realized and as I have already said, the plastic beauty and
abstract thoughts. He possesses also an admirable assurance of
psychological analysis, a mastery in the painting of customs and
characters, and the rarest and most precious faculty of animating his
heroes with intense, personal life, which, though it is only an
illusionary life, appears less deceitful than the real life.

In that field of novels Sienkiewicz differs greatly from Balzac, for
instance, who forced himself to paint the man in his perversity or in his
stupidity. According to his views life is the racing after riches. The
whole of Balzac's philosophy can be resumed in the deification of the
force. All his heroes are "strong men" who disdain humanity and take
advantage of it. Sienkiewicz's psychological novels are not lacking in
the ideal in his conception of life; they are active powers, forming
human souls. The reader finds there, in a well-balanced proportion,
good and bad ideas of life, and he represents this life as a good thing,
worthy of living.
He differs also from Paul Bourget, who as a German savant counts how
many microbes are in a drop of spoiled blood, who is pleased with any
ferment, who does not care for healthy souls, as a doctor does not care
for healthy people--and who is fond of corruption. Sienkiewicz's
analysis of life is not exclusively pathological, and we find in his
novels healthy as well as sick people as in the real life. He takes colors
from twilight and aurora to paint with, and by doing so he strengthens
our energy, he stimulates our ability for thinking about those eternal
problems, difficult to be decided, but which existed and will exist as
long as humanity will exist.
He prefers green fields, the perfume of flowers, health, virtue, to Zola's
liking for crime, sickness, cadaverous putridness, and manure. He
prefers l'âme humaine to la bête humaine.
He is never vulgar even when his heroes do not wear any gloves, and
he has these common points with Shakespeare and Molière, that he
does not paint only certain types of humanity, taken from one certain
part of the country, as it is with the majority of French writers who do
not go out of their dear Paris; in Sienkiewicz's novels one can find
every kind of people, beginning with humble peasants and modest
noblemen created by God, and ending with proud lords made by the
kings.
In the novel "Without Dogma," there are many keen and sharp
observations, said masterly and briefly; there are many states of the
soul, if not always very deep, at least written with art. And his merit in

that respect is greater than of any other writers, if we take in
consideration that in Poland heroic lyricism and poetical
picturesqueness prevail in the literature.
The one who wishes to find in the modern literature some aphorism to
classify the characteristics of the people, in order to be able afterward
to apply them to their fellow-men, must read "Children of the Soil."
But the one who is less selfish and wicked, and wishes to collect for his
own use such a library as to be able at any moment to take a book from
a shelf and find in it something which would make him thoughtful or
would make him forget the ordinary life,--he must get "Quo Vadis,"
because there he will find pages which will recomfort him by their
beauty and dignity; it will enable him to go out from his surroundings
and enter into himself, i.e., in that better man whom we sometimes feel
in our interior. And while reading this book he ought to leave on its
pages the traces of his readings, some marks made with a lead pencil or
with his whole memory.
It seems that in that book a new man was aroused in Sienkiewicz, and
any praise said about this unrivaled masterpiece will be as pale as any
powerful lamp is pale comparatively with the glory of the sun. For
instance, if I say that Sienkiewicz has made a thorough study of Nero's
epoch, and that his great talent and his plastic imagination created the
most powerful pictures in the historical background, will it not be a
very tame praise, compared with his book--which, while reading it, one
shivers and the blood freezes in one's veins?
In "Quo Vadis" the whole alta Roma, beginning with slaves carrying
mosaics for their refined masters, and ending with patricians, who were
so fond of beautiful things that one of them for instance used to kiss at
every moment a superb vase, stands before our eyes as if it was
reconstructed by a magical power from ruins and death.
There is no