DEAD SOULS
NIKOLAI GOGOL

“Dead Souls,” the masterpiece of Gogol, is not very widely known among English readers, but it is entitled to a high rank in literature. Perhaps the fact that it is a torso has been one cause of this neglect, for before the second volume was finished the author was overtaken by that madness which clouded his last days. But the first volume is practically complete in itself. It records the efforts of the smug, shrewd, rascally Tchitschikoff to procure from various landowners certain paper transfers of the serfs who had died on their estates since the last enumeration in order to effect a fraudulent loan by means of a list corresponding with the official register. The description of the stranger, of his sudden arrival in a provincial city, of the various estates he visits and the remarkable people he encounters, and then, while his enterprise is prospering, of the sudden spreading of the scandal through the town and his forced flight to other regions—these things are told with a power of portraiture which is amazing. The characters he describes are sometimes grotesque, but they are faithful to the essentials of human nature; even the wild Nozdreff and the massive Sobakevitch are very real. Gogol has been called the Dickens of Russian literature, and his portraits, while fewer in number and variety, are less like puppets than many of those drawn by the English novelist. His description of Pliushkin the miser is quite as striking as that of L’Avare of Molière or Père Grandet of Balzac, while his account of the way the gossip regarding Tchitschikoff started and circulated is as fine as anything in “The School for Scandal.” He calls his book a “poem,” and although it is quite devoid of versification or lofty diction, yet if the word “poem” means a “work of original creative art,” “Dead Souls” will fully justify the name.

It has the same sort of masterly quality as “Don Quixote,” and transports us as completely to the scenes which it describes. His patriotic apostrophe to Russia in the final chapter, and his description of the swift flight of the hero in his troika, are picturesque and eloquent to the last degree.

THE THREE GUARDSMEN
ALEXANDRE DUMAS

Probably there is no better example of the novel of adventure than “The Three Guardsmen,” by Alexandre Dumas. The author claims in his preface a historical origin for his novel. However that may be, the plot seems plausible in spite of its extravagances, and never was there a book in which men conspired and slaughtered each other more merrily, nor in which the mere strenuous life without moral accessories has found a more perfect embodiment.

The book in its way is a masterpiece. The style is simple and luminous to such a degree as would hardly be possible in any other language than that in which it was written. No work in the world is more easy to read, to understand, or to translate. The old French dictum that no words should be used in literature which can not be understood upon the market-place here attains its highest realization.

As for the characters, they are of the simplest type. The dashing devil-may-care soldier and adventurer, the deep drinker, the heavy player, the man who with equal gayety defies the bullets of the enemy and the commonest precepts of morality, has here his apotheosis. Perhaps the hero of the book even more than D’Artagnan himself is Athos, the chief of the three musketeers, who, having made an unfortunate marriage in his youth, has forsaken his name and station and embarked upon a life of mere adventure. We love him and admire him, and yet it is hard to tell why upon any logical or ethical principles we should do either. Yet when he gets very drunk, or when he hangs his wife because he finds that she bears upon her shoulder the mark of a criminal conviction, we feel that he has done in each case exactly the right thing. Generally a novelist seeks by contrasting his hero with more commonplace characters to set him off in relief, but in this novel almost everybody is a hero, and all are equally and superlatively great and admirable, except perhaps the poor woman who has been hanged and comes to life again and engages in divers diabolical plots against the rest of the world.

JANE EYRE
CHARLOTTE BRONTE

“Jane Eyre” is a book which impresses the reader with its power,—I might say its masculine power, were it not for the fact that the author gives us at every turn the woman’s point of view.

The narrative, like that of “David Copperfield,” is in the form of an autobiography, and the plot, which is quite simple, has only that sort of unity which the heroine gives it. Yet the work glows with intense passion and the characters are so faithful to nature that they convince us that vivid personal experience must have come to the aid of the author’s imagination in delineating them.