I present this book for what it is worth--a fruit filled with bitter
ashes, like those colocinths of the desert that grow in a parched and
burning soil. All they can offer to your thirst is a still more cruel
fierceness--yet lying on the golden sand they are not without a beauty
of their own.
If I had held my hero up as an example, it must be admitted that my
success would have been small. The few readers who were disposed to
interest themselves in Michel’s adventure did so only to reprobate him
with all the superiority of their kind hearts. It was not in vain that
I had adorned Marceline with so many virtues; they could not forgive
Michel for not preferring her to himself.
If I had intended this book to be an indictment of Michel, I should
have succeeded as little, for no-one was grateful to me for the
indignation he felt against my hero; it was as though he felt this
indignation in spite of me; it overflowed from Michel on to myself; I
seemed indeed within an ace of being confounded with him.
But I intended to make this book as little an indictment as an apology
and took care to pass no judgment. The public now-a-days will not
forgive an author who, after relating an action, does not declare
himself either for or against it; more than this, during the very
course of the drama they want him to take sides, pronounce in favour
either of Alceste or Philinte, of Hamlet or Ophelia, of Faust or
Margaret, of Adam or Jehovah. I do not indeed claim that neutrality
(I was going to say ‘indecision’) is the certain mark of a great
mind; but I believe that many great minds have been very loath to ...
conclude--and that to state a problem clearly is not to suppose it
solved in advance.
It is with reluctance that I use the word ‘problem’ here. To tell the
truth, in art there are no problems--that are not sufficiently solved
by the work of art itself.
If by ‘problem’ one means ‘drama,’ shall I say that the one recounted
in this book, though the scene of it is laid in my hero’s soul, is
nevertheless too general to remain circumscribed in his individual
adventure. I do not pretend to have invented this ‘problem’; it
existed before my book; whether Michel triumph or succumb, the
‘problem’ will continue to exist, and the author has avoided taking
either triumph or defeat for granted.
If certain distinguished minds have refused to see in this drama
anything but the exposition of a special case, and in its hero anything
but a sufferer from disease, if they have failed to recognize that
ideas of very urgent import and very general interest may nevertheless
be found in it--the fault lies neither in those ideas nor in that
drama, but in the author--in his lack of skill, I should say--though
he has put into this book all his passion and all his care, though he
has watered it with many tears. But the real interest of a work and
the interest taken in it by an ephemeral public are two very different
things. A man may, I think, without much conceit, take the risk of not
arousing immediate interest in interesting things--he may even prefer
this to exciting a momentary delight in a public greedy only for sweets
and trifles.
For the rest, I have not tried to prove anything, but only to paint my
picture well and to set it in a good light.
I WILL PRAISE THEE;
FOR I AM FEARFULLY AND
WONDERFULLY MADE
_Psalms, cxxxix, 14_
(TO THE PRIME MINISTER, MR. D. R.)