And then follow such paragraphs as the following, which determine the real value of the work: 

“The voice of the God of Poetry sounded so beautiful that it performed a miracle.  Behold!  In the Ambrosian night the gold spear standing on the Acropolis of Athens trembled, and the marble head of the gigantic statue turned toward the Acropolis in order to hear better....  Heaven and earth listened to it; the sea stopped roaring and lay peacefully near the shores; even pale Selene stopped her night wandering in the sky and stood motionless over Athens.”

“And when Apollo had finished, a light wind arose and carried the song through the whole of Greece, and wherever a child in the cradle heard only a tone of it, that child grew into a poet.”

What poet?  Famed by what song?  Will he not perhaps be a lyric poet?

The same happens with “Lux in Tenebris.”  One reads again and again the description of the fall of the mist and the splashing of the rain dropping in the gutter, “the cawing of the crows, migrating to the city for their winter quarters, and, with flapping of wings, roosting in the trees.”  One feels that the whole misery of the first ten pages was necessary in order to form a background for the two pages of heavenly light, to bring out the brightness of that light.  “Those who have lost their best beloved,” writes Sienkiewicz, “must hang their lives on something; otherwise they could not exist.”  In such sentences—­and it is not the prettiest, but the shortest that I have quoted—­resounds, however, the quieting wisdom, the noble love of that art which poor Kamionka “respected deeply and was always sincere toward.”  During the long years of his profession he never cheated nor wronged it, neither for the sake of fame nor money, nor for praise nor for criticism.  He always wrote as he felt.  Were I not like Ruth of the Bible, doomed to pick the ears of corn instead of being myself a sower—­if God had not made me critic and worshipper but artist and creator—­I could not wish for another necrology than those words of Sienkiewicz regarding the statuary Kamionka.

Quite another thing is the story “At the Source.”  None of the stories except “Let Us Follow Him” possess for me so many transcendent beauties, although we are right to be angry with the author for having wished, during the reading of several pages, to make us believe an impossible thing—­that he was deceiving us.  It is true that he has done it in a masterly manner—­it is true that he could not have done otherwise, but at the same time there is a fault in the conception, and although Sienkiewicz has covered the precipice with flowers, nevertheless the precipice exists.

On the other hand, it is true that one reading the novel will forget the trick of the author and will see in it only the picture of an immense happiness and a hymn in the worship of love.  Perhaps the poor student is right when he says:  “Among all the sources of happiness, that from which I drank during the fever is the clearest and best.”  “A life which love has not visited, even in a dream, is still worse.”