Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source:
http://www.archive.org/details/forright00suttgoog
Not having even been asked to do so, I write this preface fromadmiration of the book. The translation I have not yet seen, butknowing previous work by the same hand, have confidence in it.
How much the story is founded on fact I cannot tell; a substratum offact there must be. To know that such a man once lived as isrepresented in it, might well wake a new feeling of both strength andobligation: here is one who, with absolutely no help from what iscommonly meant by education, lived heroically. But be the tale asmuch a product of the imagination as the wildest romance, it remains asignificant fact that the generation has produced a man capable of suchan ideal.
For the more evident tendency of art has for some time been to aninfinite degeneracy. The cry of "Art for art's sake," as a protestagainst the pursuit of art for the sake of money or fame, one canrecognize in its half wisdom, knowing the right cry to be, "Art fortruth's sake!" But when certain writers tell us that the true aim ofthe author of fiction is to give the people what they want, namely, areflection, as in a mirror, of themselves--a mirror not such as willshow 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 theirbeing--desire, they say, no admixture of further object, nothing toindicate they ought not to be what they are, or show them what theyought to be: they acknowledge no relations with the ideal, only withthat which is--themselves, namely, and what they think and do. Suchwriters do not understand that nothing does or can exist except theideal; nor is their art-philosophy other than "procuress to the lordsof hell." Whoever has an ideal and is making no struggle toward it, issinking into the outer darkness. The ideal is the end, and must be theobject of life. Attained, or but truly conceived, we must think of itas the indispensable.
It is, then, a great fact of the age that, such low ends beingadvocated, and men everywhere insisting on a miserable origin andmiserable prospects for humanity, there should yet appear in it a manwith artistic conception of a lofty ideal, and such artistic expressionof the same as makes it to us not conceivable only, but humanlycredible. For an ideal that is impossible is no ideal; it is a fancy,no imagination. Our author keeps his narrative entirely consistent withhuman nature--not, indeed, human nature as degraded, disjointed, andunworthy, neither human nature as ideally perfect, but human nature asreaching after the perfection of doing the duty that is plainlyperceived. In none of its details is the story unlikely. We may doubtif such a man as Taras ever lived; but alas for him who has no hopethat such a man will ever be!
The reader must not suppose I would have everything the man didregarde