Lucretia — Complete Read online

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  LUCRETIA

  By Edward Bulwer Lytton

  PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1853.

  "Lucretia; or, The Children of Night," was begun simultaneously with"The Caxtons: a Family Picture." The two fictions were intended aspendants; both serving, amongst other collateral aims and objects, toshow the influence of home education, of early circumstance and example,upon after character and conduct. "Lucretia" was completed and publishedbefore "The Caxtons." The moral design of the first was misunderstoodand assailed; that of the last was generally acknowledged and approved:the moral design in both was nevertheless precisely the same. But inone it was sought through the darker side of human nature; in the otherthrough the more sunny and cheerful: one shows the evil, the other thesalutary influences, of early circumstance and training. Necessarily,therefore, the first resorts to the tragic elements of awe anddistress,--the second to the comic elements of humour and agreeableemotion. These differences serve to explain the different reception thatawaited the two, and may teach us how little the real conception of anauthor is known, and how little it is cared for; we judge, not by thepurpose he conceives, but according as the impressions he effects arepleasurable or painful. But while I cannot acquiesce in much of thehostile criticism this fiction produced at its first appearance, Ireadily allow that as a mere question of art the story might have beenimproved in itself, and rendered more acceptable to the reader, bydiminishing the gloom of the catastrophe. In this edition I haveendeavoured to do so; and the victim whose fate in the former castof the work most revolted the reader, as a violation of the trite butamiable law of Poetical Justice, is saved from the hands of the Childrenof Night. Perhaps, whatever the faults of this work, it equals most ofits companions in the sustainment of interest, and in that coincidencebetween the gradual development of motive or passion, and the sequencesof external events constituting plot, which mainly distinguish thephysical awe of tragedy from the coarse horrors of melodrama. I trust atleast that I shall now find few readers who will not readily acknowledgethat the delineation of crime has only been employed for the graveand impressive purpose which brings it within the due province of thepoet,--as an element of terror and a warning to the heart.

  LONDON, December 7.

  PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

  It is somewhere about four years since I appeared before the public asthe writer of a fiction, which I then intimated would probably be mylast; but bad habits are stronger than good intentions. When Fabricio,in his hospital, resolved upon abjuring the vocation of the Poet, hewas, in truth, recommencing his desperate career by a Farewell to theMuses,--I need not apply the allusion.

  I must own, however, that there had long been a desire in my mind totrace, in some work or other, the strange and secret ways through whichthat Arch-ruler of Civilization, familiarly called "Money," insinuatesitself into our thoughts and motives, our hearts and actions; affectingthose who undervalue as those who overestimate its importance; ruiningvirtues in the spendthrift no less than engendering vices in the miser.But when I half implied my farewell to the character of a novelist,I had imagined that this conception might be best worked out uponthe stage. After some unpublished and imperfect attempts towards sorealizing my design, I found either that the subject was too wide forthe limits of the Drama, or that I wanted that faculty of concentrationwhich alone enables the dramatist to compress multiform varieties intoa very limited compass. With this design, I desired to unite someexhibition of what seems to me a principal vice in the hot and emulouschase for happiness or fame, fortune or knowledge, which is almostsynonymous with the cant phrase of "the March of Intellect," in thatcrisis of society to which we have arrived. The vice I allude to isImpatience. That eager desire to press forward, not so much to conquerobstacles as to elude them; that gambling with the solemn destiniesof life, seeking ever to set success upon the chance of a die; thathastening from the wish conceived to the end accomplished; that thirstafter quick returns to ingenious toil, and breathless spurrings alongshort cuts to the goal, which we see everywhere around us, from theMechanics' Institute to the Stock Market,--beginning in education withthe primers of infancy, deluging us with "Philosophies for the Million"and "Sciences made Easy;" characterizing the books of our writers,the speeches of our statesmen, no less than the dealings of ourspeculators,--seem, I confess, to me to constitute a very diseased andvery general symptom of the times. I hold that the greatest friend toman is labour; that knowledge without toil, if possible, were worthless;that toil in pursuit of knowledge is the best knowledge we can attain;that the continuous effort for fame is nobler than fame itself; that itis not wealth suddenly acquired which is deserving of homage, butthe virtues which a man exercises in the slow pursuit of wealth,--theabilities so called forth, the self-denials so imposed; in a word, thatLabour and Patience are the true schoolmasters on earth. While occupiedwith these ideas and this belief, whether right or wrong, and slowlyconvinced that it was only in that species of composition with which Iwas most familiar that I could work out some portion of the plan thatI began to contemplate, I became acquainted with the histories of twocriminals existing in our own age,--so remarkable, whether from theextent and darkness of the guilt committed, whether from the glitteringaccomplishments and lively temper of the one, the profound knowledge andintellectual capacities of the other, that the examination and analysisof characters so perverted became a study full of intense, if gloomy,interest.

  In these persons there appear to have been as few redeemable points ascan be found in Human Nature, so far as such points may be traced in thekindly instincts and generous passions which do sometimes accompanythe perpetration of great crimes, and, without excusing the individual,vindicate the species. Yet, on the other hand, their sanguinarywickedness was not the dull ferocity of brutes; it was accompanied withinstruction and culture,--nay, it seemed to me, on studying their livesand pondering over their own letters, that through their cultivationitself we could arrive at the secret of the ruthless and atrociouspre-eminence in evil these Children of Night had attained; that herethe monster vanished into the mortal, and the phenomena that seemedaberrations from Nature were explained.

  I could not resist the temptation of reducing to a tale the materialswhich had so engrossed my interest and tasked my inquiries. And inthis attempt, various incidental opportunities have occurred, if not ofcompletely carrying out, still of incidentally illustrating, my earlierdesign,--of showing the influence of Mammon upon our most secret selves,of reproving the impatience which is engendered by a civilization that,with much of the good, brings all the evils of competition, and oftracing throughout, all the influences of early household life upon oursubsequent conduct and career. In such incidental bearings the moralmay doubtless be more obvious than in the delineation of the darker andrarer crime which forms the staple of my narrative. For in extraordinaryguilt we are slow to recognize ordinary warnings,--we say to thepeaceful conscience, "This concerns thee not!" whereas at each instanceof familiar fault and commonplace error we own a direct and sensibleadmonition. Yet in the portraiture of gigantic crime, poets have rightlyfound their sphere and fulfilled their destiny of teachers. Thoseterrible truths which appall us in the guilt of Macbeth or the villanyof Iago, have their moral uses not less than the popular infirmities ofTom Jones, or the every-day hypocrisy of Blifil. Incredible as it mayseem, the crimes herein related took place within the last seventeenyears. There has been no exaggeration as to their extent, no greatdeparture from their details; the means employed, even that which seemsmost far-fetched,--the instrument of the poisoned ring,--have theirfoundation in literal facts. Nor have I much altered the social positionof the criminals, nor in the least overrated their attainments andinte
lligence. In those more salient essentials which will most, perhaps,provoke the Reader's incredulous wonder, I narrate a history, not inventa fiction [These criminals were not, however, in actual life, as inthe novel, intimates and accomplices. Their crimes were of similarcharacter, effected by similar agencies, and committed at dates whichembrace their several careers of guilt within the same period; but Ihave no authority to suppose that the one was known to the other.]. Allthat Romance which our own time affords is not more the romance than thephilosophy of the time. Tragedy never quits the world,--it surrounds useverywhere. We have but to look, wakeful and vigilant, abroad, andfrom the age of Pelops to that of Borgia, the same crimes, though underdifferent garbs, will stalk on our paths. Each age comprehends in itselfspecimens of every virtue and every vice which has ever inspired ourlove or moved our horror.

  LONDON, November 1, 1846.