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

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