This eBook was produced by Pat Castevens
and David Widger
By Edward Bulwer Lytton
(LORD LYTTON)
If it be the good fortune of this work to possess any interest for theNovel reader, that interest, perhaps, will be but little derived fromthe customary elements of fiction. The plot is extremely slight, theincidents are few, and with the exception of those which involve thefate of Vivian, such as may be found in the records of ordinary life.
Regarded as a Novel, this attempt is an experiment somewhat apart fromthe previous works of the author. It is the first of his writings inwhich Humor has been employed, less for the purpose of satire than inillustration of amiable characters; it is the first, too, in which manhas been viewed, less in his active relations with the world, than inhis repose at his own hearth,—in a word, the greater part of the canvashas been devoted to the completion of a simple Family Picture. Andthus, in any appeal to the sympathies of the human heart, the commonhousehold affections occupy the place of those livelier or largerpassions which usually (and not unjustly) arrogate the foreground inRomantic composition.
In the Hero whose autobiography connects the different characters andevents of the work, it has been the Author's intention to imply theinfluences of Home upon the conduct and career of youth; and in theambition which estranges Pisistratus for a time from the sedentaryoccupations in which the man of civilized life must usually serve hisapprenticeship to Fortune or to Fame, it is not designed to describe thefever of Genius conscious of superior powers and aspiring to highdestinies, but the natural tendencies of a fresh and buoyant mind,rather vigorous than contemplative, and in which the desire of action isbut the symptom of health.
Pisistratus in this respect (as he himself feels and implies) becomesthe specimen or type of a class the numbers of which are dailyincreasing in the inevitable progress of modern civilization. He is onetoo many in the midst of the crowd; he is the representative of theexuberant energies of youth, turning, as with the instinct of nature forspace and development, from the Old World to the New. That which may becalled the interior meaning of the whole is sought to be completed bythe inference that, whatever our wanderings, our happiness will alwaysbe found within a narrow compass, and amidst the objects moreimmediately within our reach, but that we are seldom sensible of thistruth (hackneyed though it be in the Schools of all Philosophies) tillour researches have spread over a wider area. To insure the blessing ofrepose, we require a brisker excitement than a few turns up and down ourroom. Content is like that humor in the crystal, on which Claudian haslavished the wonder of a child and the fancies of a Poet,—
"Vivis gemma tumescit aquis."
October, 1849.
"Sir—sir, it is a boy!"
"A boy," said my father, looking up from his book, and evidently muchpuzzled: "what is a boy?"
Now my father did not mean by that interrogatory to challengephilosophical inquiry, nor to demand of the hon