Victory

On approaching the task of writing this Note for "Victory" the first
thing I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its
nearness to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was written
and to the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices the book
obtained when first published almost exactly a year after the beginning
of the great war. The writing of it was finished in 1914 long before the
murder of an Austrian Archduke sounded the first note of warning for a
world already full of doubts and fears.

The contemporaneous very short Author's Note which is preserved in this
edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which I consented
to the publication of the book. The fact of the book having been
published in the United States early in the year made it difficult to
delay its appearance in England any longer. It came out in the
thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful
incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter of
reality, tragic enough in all conscience but even more cruel than tragic
and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to think
there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which in the
crash of the big guns and in the din of brave words expressing the
truth of an indomitable faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp
knife at its throat.

The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his power
of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be
that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too
mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgment to
sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on
with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall
stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the
leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be
disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too
awful for our terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by
the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book
pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of
detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and which is
yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.

It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our
fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his
detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly
Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo and the faithful Pedro, Heyst, the
man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine