Nor was the man himself adequate to the end. The very means he possessed he was unable to control; and wrong followed as terrible as unavoidable. Vengeance must be left with the Most High; for the administration of punishment, to be just, demands not merely an unselfishness perfect as God's, but an insight and knowledge equal to his. Besides all this, to administer justice a man must have power beyond his own, and must, therefore, largely depend on others, while yet he can with no certainty determine who are fit for his purpose and who are not. In brief, the justest man cannot but fail in executing justice. He may be pure, but his work will not.
One thing I must beg of the reader--not to come to a conclusion before he has come to the end; not to imagine that now or now he may condemn, but to wait until the drama is played out.
It was indeed a bold undertaking when our author chose for his hero a man who could not read or write, who had no special inclination, no personal aptitude for social or public affairs, and would present him attempting the noblest impossibility, from a divine sense of wrong done to others than himself, and duty owed by him to all men and to God--a duty become his because he alone was left to do it.
I have seldom, if ever, read a work of fiction that moved me with so much admiration.
The failures of some will be found eternities beyond the successes of others.
Let the reader's imagination carry him eastward. Let him suppose he were travelling at railway speed between Lemberg and Czernowitz, in a south-easterly direction, towards the sedgy shores of the river Pruth and the beech forests of the Bukowina, and the scenery to his left will appear changeless. His eye for miles will rest on a boundless plain, of which the seasons can influence the colouring only, but never a feature of the landscape. White and dazzling in the winter, it rises to something of a yellow brightness in the summer, wearing a neutral tint both in the autumn and spring. But on his right-hand each turn of the wheel will disclose a new picture to his eyes. He is fast approaching the towering heights of the Carpathians. Mere phantoms at first, they assume shape and substance like gathering clouds on the horizon, the mountain chain with deepening contours advancing through the violet and purple vapours of distance. And if the traveller now were able to fix his gaze a while on the monotonous plain, with its grey cottages, its poverty-stricken fields, and dreary heathlands, his would be a grand surprise in turning once more to the right. The heights have closed in--giants they, proud and solemn in fir-clad majesty. The wind, sweeping along the mountain-sides, is laden with the odours of pinewood; the air is filled with the roar of cataracts dashing through the gullies and foaming along the rocky channel by the side of the railway cutting; and athwart the narrow bands of azure, which seem the bluer for the deep-rent glens beneath, may be seen wheeling the bloodthirsty kite of the Carpathians. The very heart of the mountain chain, silent and beautiful, lies open to view. A moment only, and it will have vanished. The railroad, starting off in a sharp curve to the east, leaves nothing to the beholder but to the right and to the left the self-same monotonous plain. A sudden bend of the lawless Pruth had rendered it necessary for the line to cut the landscape at the very point where mountain and plain stand facing each other--abrupt and unblending--like hatred and love in the heart of man.