All the same, I recognise the plausibility of quite other views, and I know that the opinions both on art and life of the author of this book, so far as they have revealed themselves to me, are such as receive the warm support of some of the wisest and best minds of our time.
It does not surprise me to hear that the Academy of France has lately crowned “The Power of a Lie,” for both its morality and its excelling power are of the kind which at the present moment appeal most strongly to the French mind. That they will also appeal to a certain side of the Anglo-Saxon mind I confidently believe; and I am no less sure that however a reader may revolt against certain aspects of the teaching of this fine book, he will find that it stirs and touches him and makes him think.
H. C.
ISLE OF MAN, July 1908.
[PART I]
[CHAPTER I]
THE night was falling as Knut Norby drove homewards in his sledge from a meeting of the school committee. The ice on Lake Mjösen had not been safe for some little time, and he had promised his wife to go round by the high-road. But various annoyances in the course of the day had irritated the old man, and down by the craggy promontory he suddenly tightened the reins and turned off on to the ice. “It has borne others already to-day,” he thought, “and there is no reason why it shouldn’t bear me.” The horse pricked up its ears, and stepped timidly over the rough ice; but Knut roused it with a smart touch of the whip, and the sledge bounded from hummock to hummock until it reached the smooth, shining surface of the lake.
When one annoyance follows close upon another, the feeling induced is like that of a blow falling upon a place where there is a wound already. First of all to-day, the old man had been outvoted in a school committee matter; it was against that wretched parish schoolmaster. When, in the midst of this annoyance, his son-in-law came and asked for a fresh advance upon his inheritance, it seemed to the old man like downright extortion; but when, an hour later, he heard that Wangen, the merchant, had failed, the couple of thousand krones for which he himself was liable assumed the proportions of an overwhelming calamity. “I shall soon be keeping half the parish,” he thought. “People really seem to be doing their very best to rob me of my last shilling.”
The horse was a long, black stallion, with a red-brown wavy mane and easy motion. The old man himself was almost hidden in a great bearskin coat with the collar turned up. The darkness was beginning to fall out on the ice, and one by one lights appeared in the farms upon the snow-covered country surrounding the bay.