The reader must be content to meet this stout and fervent man as he is, not expecting that his genius will consult our tastes or prejudices, or that his head will stoop at all for the sake of our company.  Then beneath his dense paragraphs and through his rambling pages his humility will greet us, and fraternal regards draw us irresistibly to him.  He is a man for a people’s reading, notwithstanding all the involutions of style and thought which might suggest a different judgment.  He certainly does not write like Cobbett or Franklin, nor has he the thin, clear polish of the popular historian.  Yet his shrewdness and tenderness will touch all simple-minded men; and twenty Cobbetts, or people’s writers, sharply rubbed together, could never light the flame of his imperial imagination, for it is a kind of sunshine, sometimes hot enough, but broad, impartial, and quickening, wherever there is something that waits to grow.

And scarcely one man in a century appears so highly gifted with that wonderful quality for which we have no better name than Humor.  His humor is the conciliation that takes place between love and knowledge.  The two tendencies create the bold and graceful orbit on which his well-balanced books revolve.  With one alone, his impetuosity would hasten to quench itself in the molten centre; and with the other alone, he would fly cynically beyond the reach of heat.  This reconciling humor sometimes shakes his book with Olympic laughter; as if the postprandial nectar circulated in pools of cups, into which all incompatibilities fall and are drowned.  You drink this recasting of the planet’s joys and sorrows, contempt and contradictions, while it is yet fluent and bubbling to the lip.  There are all the selfish men, and petulant, intriguing women in it, all their weaknesses, and the ill-humor of their times.  But the draught lights up the brain with an anticipation of some future solution of these discords, or perhaps we may say, intoxicates us with the serene tolerance which the Creative Mind must have for all His little ones.  Is not humor a finite mood of that Impartiality whose sun rises upon the evil and the good, whose smile becomes the laughter of these denser skies?

It is plain from what we have said that the task of translating this novel must be full of difficulties.  There are strange words, allusions drawn from foreign books that are now a hundred years old or more and never seen in libraries; the figurative style makes half the sentences in a page seem strange at first, they invite consideration, and do not feebly surrender to a smooth consecutive English.  Just as you think you are at the bottom of a paragraph and are on the point of stepping on the floor, he stops you with another stair, or lets you through:  in other words, you are never safe from a whimsical allusion or a twist in the thought.  The narrative extends no thread which you may take in one hand as you poke along:  it frequently disappears altogether, and it seems as if you had another book with its vocabulary and style.