Produced by Rick Niles, John Hagerson, Josephine Paolucci, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
1921
This book is not a novel, but rather the confession of a free spirittelling of its mistakes, its sufferings and its struggles from themidst of the tempest; and it is in no sense an autobiography either.Some day I may wish to write of myself, and I will then speak withoutany disguise or feigned name. Though it is true that I have lentsome ideas to my hero, his individuality, his character and thecircumstances of his life are all his own; and I have tried to give apicture of the inward labyrinth where a weak spirit wanders, feelingits way, uncertain, sensitive and impressionable, but sincere andardent in the cause of truth.
Some chapters of the book have a family likeness to the meditationsof our old French moralists and the stoical essays of the end of theXVIth century. At a time resembling our own but even exceeding itin tragic horror, amid the convulsions of the League, theChief-Magistrate Guillaume Du Vair wrote his noble Dialogues, "De laConstance et Consolation ès Calamités Publiques," with a steadfastmind. While the siege of Paris was at its worst he talked in hisgarden with his friends, Linus the great traveller, Musée, Dean of theFaculty of Medicine, and the writer Orphée. Poor wretches lay dead ofstarvation in the streets, women cried out that pike-men were eatingchildren near the Temple; but with their eyes filled with thesehorrible pictures these wise men sought to raise their unhappythoughts to the heights where one can reach the mind of the agesand reckon up that which has survived the test. As I re-read theseDialogues during the war I more than once felt myself close to thattrue Frenchman who wrote: Man is born to see and know everything, andit is an injustice to limit him to one place on the earth. To the wiseman the whole world is his country. God lends us the world to enjoy incommon on one condition only, that we act uprightly.
May, 1920
[Footnote 1: This Introduction was published in the Swiss newspapersin December, 1917, with an episode of the novel and a note explainingthe original title, L'Un contre Tous. "This somewhat ironical namewas suggested—with a difference—by La Boëtie's Le Contr' Un; butit must not be supposed that the author entertained the extravagantidea of setting one man in opposition to all others; he only wishesto summon the personal conscience to the most urgent conflict of ourtime, the struggle against the herd-spirit."]
This book is not written about the war, though the shadow of the warlies over it. My theme is that the individual soul has been swallowedup and submerged in the soul of the multitude; and in my opinion suchan event is of far greater importance to the future of the race thanthe passing supremacy of one nation.
I have left questions of policy in the background intentionally, as Ithink they should be reserved for special study. No matter what causesmay be assigned as the origins of the war, no matter what thesessupport them, nothing in the world can excuse the abdication ofindividual judgmen