Three Masters

Excerpt from Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky The three essays which comprise this book were penned at various times in the course of ten years. Yet though they were composed at fairly long intervals, it is in no fit of caprice on the part of the author that they are assembled under one cover. A conviction of their essential uniformity has prompted him to bring these three greatest novelists of the nineteenth century together; to show them as types which, for the very reason that they contrast each with the others, also complete one another in a way which makes them combine to round off our concept of the epic portrayers of the world, the writers of romances. When I say that I consider Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoeffsky the supremely great novelists of the nineteenth century, it must not be thought that I am casting a slur on the achievements of Goethe, Gottfried Keller, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Thackeray, Victor Hugo, and many others. From the works of each of these distinguished men you may select a novel and tell me, with good reason, that it excels any single work of my chosen trio - or at any rate any single work by Balzac or Dickens. But this brings me to the distinction I wish to draw between the writer of one (perhaps even more than one) outstanding novel, and what I term a true novelist - an epic master, the creator of an almost unending series of pre-eminent romances. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.