Without Dogma by Henryk Sienkiewicz, Fiction, Literary, Classics

Readers of Henryk Sienkiewicz in America, who have known him only through Mr. Curtin's fine, strong translations, will be surprised to meet with a production so unlike Fire and Sword, and The Deluge, that on first reading one can scarcely believe it to be from the pen of the great novelist. Even to those most unfamiliar with his history, it grows lifelike and real as it speaks to us from the pages of these historical romances. Only a very great genius can unearth the dusty chronicles of past centuries and make its men and women live and breathe and speak to us. These historical characters are not mere shadows, puppets, or nullities, but very real men and women, our own flesh and blood. His warriors fight, love, hate; they embrace each other; they laugh; they weep in each other's arms; give each other sage counsels, with a truly Homeric simplicity. They are deep-versed in stratagems of love and war, these Poles of the seventeenth century! They have their Nestor, their Agamemnon, their great Achilles sulking in his tent. Oddly enough, at times they grow very familiar to us, and in spite of their Polish titles and faces, and a certain tenderness of nature that is almost feminine, they seem to have good, stout, Saxon stuff in them. Especially where the illustrious knights recount their heroic deeds there is a Falstaffian strut in their performance, and there runs riot a Falstaffian imagination truly sublime. . . .