This work is one that challenges attention for its ambitious character and its high aim. It is an historical novel,--or, rather, as the author prefers to call it, "An Historical Study in Fiction." It is the result of long and careful study of the period of which it treats, and hence is the product of genuine sympathies and a freshly-fired imagination. The field is Europe, and the period is the beginning of the sixteenth century,--a time when the fading glow of the later Renaissance is giving place to the brighter glories of the dawning Reformation.
The book deals, in a broad sense, with the grand theme of the progress of intellectual liberty. Many of its characters are well-known historical personages,--such as Erasmus, Sir Thomas Moore, Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII. of England, Francis I. of France, the disturbing monk Martin Luther, and the magnificent Pope Leo X.; other characters are of course fictitious, introduced to give proper play to the author's fancy and to form a suitable framework for the story.
Interwoven with the more solid fabric are gleaming threads of romance; and bright bits of description and glows of sentiment relieve the more sombre coloring. The memorable meeting of the French and English monarchs on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, with its gorgeous pageantry of knights and steeds and silken banners, and all the glitter and charm of chivalry, furnish material for several chapters, in which the author's descriptive powers are put to the severest test; while the Waldensian heroes in their mountain homes, resisting the persecutions of their religious foes, afford some thrilling and dramatic situations.
"An Iceland Fisherman" is really a poem in prose. It has a pure idyllic quality so unlike most of the work which now comes from French hands that one must go back to "Paul and Virginia" to find a worthy companion volume. Other French writers, George Sand notably, have written idyllic chapters, but "An Iceland Fisherman" is a complete idyl from beginning to end. M. Loti is an impressionist of the most delicate quality. He feels with the keenest sensibility the moods and phases of each passing hour. In this little volume one is made aware of all the strange, lonely beauty and terror of the North Seas. Few writers have made so keen an observation of those elusive phases through which sky and sea pass in a day or a season, and still fewer have had the faculty of transferring these subtle things into speech.--_The Christian Union, New York._