BOOKS
BY Thomas E. Watson.
Note: Reviews are by Mr. Watson unless otherwise signed.
On the Field of Glory. By Henryk Sienkiewicz. Little, Brown & Co., Boston.
After the reader has finished reading this book he disapproves of the title. He has been taken into ancient Poland, where the winter snows lie deep, where the wolves of the forest come with the night to make danger for the traveler. He has been shown how the upper class lived in the time of the Soldier-King, John Sobieski. He follows the thread of a passionate and tender and happily ended love-story. He laughs with and at the four brothers, the huge, rude, boisterous, but brave and good-hearted foresters. He feels impressed by the genius of the author during the whole time, for he knows that this strange Polish world, with its unfamiliar men and women, is a creation born of the mental processes of a great literary artist.
It is not an historical novel in the sense that “Quo Vadis” was. There is no field of glory at all. John Sobieski does not appear before us as Nero was made to do in the book just named.
The John Sobieski of this novel might be any other King. So far as we are told about his appearance, manners, dress, personal peculiarities, he might have been Rudolph of Hapsburg or Henry of Valois.
There are no battles, no sieges, no heroic advance or retreat. As the book closes, the Polish army has set out from Cracow to Vienna; and that’s as near as we approach the field of glory.
With the heroine the reader never gets in full sympathy. She drives away the man who has always loved her and whom she loves without knowing it.
She then consents to wed her hideous, lecherous, old guardian. More indignant than the bride, the spirits of the Unseen World resent this unnatural union, and they prevent it by claiming the groom while the marriage feast is being eaten.
With the hero the reader is on good terms from first to last, for his is a fine character finely drawn.