Without Dogma | Page 3

He has a passionate fondness for the Lithuanian, and paints him
and his surroundings most lovingly.
His student days were spent at Warsaw. He devoted himself afterward
to literature, writing at first under a pseudonym. He does not seem to
have won immediate recognition. He spent some years in California; a
series of articles published in this connection in a Polish paper brought
him into notice.
In 1880, various novelettes and sketches of his production were
published in three volumes.
In 1884 were given to the Polish public the three historical novels
which immediately gave their author the foremost place in Polish
literature. It is a matter of pride that the first translation of these great

works into English is the work of an American, and offered to the
American public.
He is a prolific writer, and it would be impossible to attempt to give
even the names of all his minor sketches and romances. Some of them
have been translated into German, but much has been lost in the
translation.
Sienkiewicz is still a contributor to journalistic literature. He has
travelled much, and is a citizen of the world. He is equally at home in
the Orient or the West, by the banks of the Dnieper, or beside the Nile.
Probably there is scarcely a corner of Poland that he has not explored.
He depicts no type of life that has not actually come under his own
observation. The various social strata of his own country, the condition
of its peasantry, the marked contrast between the simplicity of that life
and the culture of the ecclesiastic and aristocratic bodies, the religious,
poetic, artistic temperament of the people,--all these he paints in a
life-like fashion, but always as an artist.
So much of the writer. Of the man Sienkiewicz there is little to be
obtained. Like all great creative geniuses, he is so completely identified
with his work that even while his personality lives in his creations it
eludes them. He offers us no confidences concerning himself, no
opinions or prejudices. He does not divert the reader with personalities.
He sets before us certain groups of men and women, whom certainly he
knows and loves, and has lived among. He sets them in motion; they
become living, breathing creations; they assume relations in time and
space; they speak and act for themselves. If there be a prompter he
remains always behind the scenes. Admire or criticise or love the actors
as you will, you cannot for a moment doubt that they are alive.
This is the supreme miracle of genius,--the fine union of dramatic
instinct, the aesthetic sense, and an intense, vital realism; not the
realism of the cesspool or the morgue, but the realism of the earth and
sky, and of healthy human nature. We are inclined to believe that
Henryk Sienkiewicz has answered an often discussed question that has
much exercised the keenly critical intellect of this age. One school of
thought cries out, "Let us have life as it is. Paint anything, but draw it
as it is. Let the final test of all literary works be, 'Is it real and true?'"
To the romantic school quite another class of ideas appeals; to it much
of the so-called realistic literature seems very bad, or merely "weary,

stale, flat, and unprofitable." The profoundest utterances of realism do
not impress it much in themselves. It insists that art has something to
say to literature, that in this field as elsewhere holds good the law of
natural selection of types and survival of the fittest.
While each school has its down-sittings and up-risings, its supporters
and its critics, neither school has yet exhausted the possibilities of
literature. The novel's aim is to depict Life, and life is neither all
romance nor all realism, but a curious mixture of both. Man is neither a
beast nor a celestial being, but a compound. Though he can crawl, and
may have clinging to him certain brute instincts that may be the relics
of his anthropoidal days, he has also, thank God, divine desires and
discontents, and certain rudimentary wings. And neither school alone is
competent to paint him as he is. The author of "La Bête Humaine" fails
as completely as the visionary À Kempis. Neither realism nor romance
alone will ever with its small plummet sound to its depths the human
heart or its mystery; yet from the union of the two much perhaps might
come.
We believe that just here lies the value of the novels of Henryk
Sienkiewicz. He has worked out the problem of the modern novel so as
to satisfy the most ardent realist, but he has worked it out upon great
and broadly human lines. For him facts are facts indeed; but facts have
souls as well as bodies.