PREFACE
Theterm novel has been made to cover books of such diverse character, now-a-days, that the reader is almost entitled to demand of a novelist that he shall affix some distinct label to the book he is putting forth, and make it clear beforehand whether his work is a dialogue on religion, a satire on morals, a political tract, a study in slum life, or a mere romance. This consideration must serve as my excuse for saying a few words about the ideas which have guided me in writing the present work; although I shall incur the danger of a comparison between the moon at which I have aimed, and the humble tree which I have hit.
In this story, then, as in some others which I have written, or am writing, I have sought to embody the romance of contemporary history. It cannot be true that one age or country is in reality more poetical than any other; the difference, if any, must be that it requires a little more imaginationto perceive the romance which lies around us, than that which is ready gathered for us in the pages of the historian. If it be said that some of the greatest masters have gone to past times for their inspiration, their disciple may perhaps allege that as a reason for not venturing into the well-trodden ground. But in fact many of the books which have been most admired in the class of what are called historical novels have owed a part of their charm to the flavour of antiquity which their accomplished writers have contrived to impart to them by mannerisms of style and by the copious use of historical allusion. However great the attraction of such writing may be, it must not be forgotten that the greatest, perhaps the first, of historical romancers—I mean Shakespeare—relied upon no such artifices, but on the intrinsic interest of his themes and his dramatic presentation of them. Neither is it the antiquarian taste which is appealed to by such a book as the “Three Musketeers.” It may even be affirmed, on the other hand, that the interest with which stories are thus invested is essentially false, and foreign to the story-teller’s art.
The keen pleasure with which the historical scholar reads the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” is the accidental result of time, and certainly neverentered into the aims of the composer or compiler of those works. The novels of Emile Zola may similarly fascinate the student in years to come, because he will feel that the manners they record are genuine. But with what confidence can he regard the Wardour Street properties which bulk so largely in the novels of some modern writers? Unless these books tell stories whose interest is independent of adventitious attraction, assuredly they will not continue to be read.
The true aim of the artist in fiction must always be to describe an interesting action,—the Greeks would have said, a great action. The characters which still live for us in fiction are those which their creators have revealed to us through their actions. The analytical novel of character, as it is termed, bears the same relation to true romance as the surgeon’s anatomical model bears to a portrait of Velasquez. It is the business of the story-teller to produce, not a photograph of one who sits in a chair, but a kinetoscope, with every limb in motion. The analytical novelist, when he has written his analytical novel, should regard it as merely a preparatory study, and should tear it up and then write a real novel in which the characters so carefully analysed will by their movements discloseall those traits of which their creator has laboured to convince himself.
This is why the play is greater than the novel. The playwright—robbed of his Chorus—cannot inflict upon us these tedious dissertations, he cannot leave his persons standing about idly on the stage, while he lectures to us on their inner nature as revealed to his Röntgen vision. The story told in these pages was conceived by the author as the subject of a play. The only reason it appears in the guise of a novel is because, when it was written, the author had no acquaintance with theatrical managers, and a play written merely to be read in a book has always appeared to him a monstrosity. He therefore reconstructed his romance, making such alterations as seemed needful when the characters were no longer visible of themselves, and when, moreover, he was debarred from that crowding of circumstance, that rush and climax of events, which the stage demands and justifies, but which on the written page would seem abrupt and harsh.
Most readers will trace in the hero of this book a resemblance to a certain king whose fate attracted attention not so very many years ago. I would ask that the comparison shall be carried no farther. This book is in no sense takenfrom history. All that I have intended to do has been to conceive a romantic interpretation for a tragical event, and to set forth that interpretation as a story to be read for its own sake, if at all.
A. U.