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.
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