This important quality in the historical
novel is truer and more lively in the Polish writer, and then he
possesses that psychological depth about which Walter Scott never
dreamed. Walter Scott never has created such an original and typical
figure as Zagloba is, who is a worthy rival to Shakespeare's Falstaff.
As for the description of duelings, fights, battles, Sienkiewicz's
fantastically heroic pen is without rival.
Alexandre Dumas, notwithstanding the biting criticism of Brunetiere,
will always remain a great favorite with the reading masses, who are
searching in his books for pleasure, amusement, and distraction.
Sienkiewicz's historical novels possess all the interesting qualities
of Dumas, and besides that they are full of wholesome food for
thinking minds. His colors are more shining, his brush is broader,
his composition more artful, chiselled, finished, better built, and
executed with more vigor. While Dumas amuses, pleases, distracts,
Sienkiewicz astonishes, surprises, bewitches. All uneasy
preoccupations, the dolorous echoes of eternal problems, which
philosophical doubt imposes with the everlasting anguish of the
human mind, the mystery of the origin, the enigma of destiny, the
inexplicable necessity of suffering, the short, tragical, and sublime
vision of the future of the soul, and the future not less difficult to
be guessed of by the human race in this material world, the torments
of human conscience and responsibility for the deeds, is said by
Sienkiewicz without any pedanticism, without any dryness.
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