sspool 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
Bete Humaine" fails as completely as the visionary A 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. His genius is analytic, but also
imaginative and constructive; it is not forever going upon botanizing
excursions. He paints things and thoughts human.

The greatest genius assimilates unconsciously the best with which
it comes in contact, and by a subtle chemistry of its own makes new
combinations. Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, and the realists, as well as
all the forces of nature, have helped to make Henryk Sienkiewicz; yet
he is not any one of them. He is ne