Читать книгу For the Right - Karl Emil Franzos - Страница 3

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Not having even been asked to do so, I write this preface from admiration of the book. The translation I have not yet seen, but knowing previous work by the same hand, have confidence in it.

How much the story is founded on fact I cannot tell; a substratum of fact there must be. To know that such a man once lived as is represented in it, might well wake a new feeling of both strength and obligation: here is one who, with absolutely no help from what is commonly meant by education, lived heroically. But be the tale as much a product of the imagination as the wildest romance, it remains a significant fact that the generation has produced a man capable of such an ideal.

For the more evident tendency of art has for some time been to an infinite degeneracy. The cry of "Art for art's sake," as a protest against the pursuit of art for the sake of money or fame, one can recognize in its half wisdom, knowing the right cry to be, "Art for truth's sake!" But when certain writers tell us that the true aim of the author of fiction is to give the people what they want, namely, a reflection, as in a mirror, of themselves--a mirror not such as will show them to themselves as they are, but as they seem to each other, some of us feel that we stand on the verge of an abyss of falsehood. The people--in whose favour they seem to live and move and have their being--desire, they say, no admixture of further object, nothing to indicate they ought not to be what they are, or show them what they ought to be: they acknowledge no relations with the ideal, only with that which is--themselves, namely, and what they think and do. Such writers do not understand that nothing does or can exist except the ideal; nor is their art-philosophy other than "procuress to the lords of hell." Whoever has an ideal and is making no struggle toward it, is sinking into the outer darkness. The ideal is the end, and must be the object of life. Attained, or but truly conceived, we must think of it as the indispensable.

It is, then, a great fact of the age that, such low ends being advocated, and men everywhere insisting on a miserable origin and miserable prospects for humanity, there should yet appear in it a man with artistic conception of a lofty ideal, and such artistic expression of the same as makes it to us not conceivable only, but humanly credible. For an ideal that is impossible is no ideal; it is a fancy, no imagination. Our author keeps his narrative entirely consistent with human nature--not, indeed, human nature as degraded, disjointed, and unworthy, neither human nature as ideally perfect, but human nature as reaching after the perfection of doing the duty that is plainly perceived. In none of its details is the story unlikely. We may doubt if such a man as Taras ever lived; but alas for him who has no hope that such a man will ever be!

The reader must not suppose I would have everything the man did regarded as right. On the contrary, the man becomes bitterly aware of his errors--errors of knowledge, however, of judgment and of belief, be it understood--not of conduct as required by that belief, knowledge, and judgment. His head is at a loss rather than in fault; heart and will are pure. A good man may do the most mistaken things with such conviction of their rectitude as to be even bound to do them. How far he might be to blame for not knowing or judging better, God only could tell. If he could not have known better or judged better, he may have to bear some of the consequences of his mistakes, but he will not have to bear any blame; while his doing of what he believed to be right will result in his both being and knowing what is right. The rare thing is not the man who knows what is right, but the man who actually, with all the power in him, with his very being, sets himself to do that right thing, however unpleasant or painful, irksome or heartrending to him. Such a man, and such only, is a hero.

At the same time, the deepest instruction lies in the very mistakes of the man. The purity of his motive and object confessed, not merely were the means he took to reach his end beyond his administration, but the end itself was imperfect. There are multitudes who imagine they hate injustice when they but hate injury to themselves. They will boil with rage at that, but hear of wrong even to a friend with much equanimity. How many would not rather do a small wrong than endure a great one! Do such men love justice? No man is a lover of justice who would not rather endure the greatest wrong than commit the least. Here we have a man who, to revenge no wrong done to himself, but out of pure reverence for justice, feeling bound in his very being to do what in him lies for justice, gives up everything, wife even and children, and openly defying the emperor, betakes himself an outlaw to the hills, to serve that Justice whose ministers have forsaken her. He will do with what power he has, the thing so many fancy they would do if they had the power they have not--put down injustice with the strong hand. There is a place for this in the order of things; but were the judges of the earth absolutely righteous, the world would never thus be cleansed of injustice. The justest judge will do more for the coming of the kingdom of righteousness by being himself a true man, than by innumerable righteous judgments. The first and longest step a man can take toward redress of all wrong, is to be righteous, not in the avenging of wrong, but in the doing of the right thing, in the working of righteousness. He who could have put down evil with the strong hand had he so pleased, was he who less than any cared to do so. He saw that men might be kept from injustice and be not a whit the more just, or the more ready to do justice when the hand was withdrawn. What alone he thought worth his labour was that a man should love justice as he loved it, and be ready to die for it as he himself died. This man in his ignorance set out to do the thing his Master had declined to do; his end itself was inadequate.

Nor was the man himself adequate to the end. The very means he possessed he was unable to control; and wrong followed as terrible as unavoidable. Vengeance must be left with the Most High; for the administration of punishment, to be just, demands not merely an unselfishness perfect as God's, but an insight and knowledge equal to his. Besides all this, to administer justice a man must have power beyond his own, and must, therefore, largely depend on others, while yet he can with no certainty determine who are fit for his purpose and who are not. In brief, the justest man cannot but fail in executing justice. He may be pure, but his work will not.

One thing I must beg of the reader--not to come to a conclusion before he has come to the end; not to imagine that now or now he may condemn, but to wait until the drama is played out.

It was indeed a bold undertaking when our author chose for his hero a man who could not read or write, who had no special inclination, no personal aptitude for social or public affairs, and would present him attempting the noblest impossibility, from a divine sense of wrong done to others than himself, and duty owed by him to all men and to God--a duty become his because he alone was left to do it.

I have seldom, if ever, read a work of fiction that moved me with so much admiration.

The failures of some will be found eternities beyond the successes of others.

George Mac Donald.