The Immoralist/Preface
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.