Falkland, Complete - Edward Bulwer Lytton
FALKLAND
By Edward Bulwer-Lytton
PREFATORY NOTE TO THE PRESENT EDITION.
"FALKLAND" is the earliest of Lord Lytton's prose fictions. Published
before "Pelham," it was written in the boyhood of its illustrious author.
In the maturity of his manhood and the fulness of his literary popularity
he withdrew it from print. This is one of the first English editions of
his collected works in which the tale reappears. It is because the
morality of it was condemned by his experienced judgment, that the author
of "Falkland" deliberately omitted it from each of the numerous reprints
of his novels and romances which were published in England during his
lifetime.
With the consent of the author's son, "Falkland" is included in the
present edition of his collected works.
In the first place, this work has been for many years, and still is,
accessible to English readers in every country except England. The
continental edition of it, published by Baron Tauchnitz, has a wide
circulation; and since for this reason the book cannot practically be
withheld from the public, it is thought desirable that the publication of
it should at least be accompanied by some record of the abovementioned
fact.
In the next place, the considerations which would naturally guide an
author of established reputation in the selection of early compositions
for subsequent republication, are obviously inapplicable to the
preparation of a posthumous standard edition of his collected works.
Those who read the tale of "Falkland" eight-and-forty years ago' have
long survived the age when character is influenced by the literature of
sentiment. The readers to whom it is now presented are not Lord Lytton's
contemporaries; they are his posterity. To them his works have already
become classical. It is only upon the minds of the young that the works
of sentiment have any appreciable moral influence. But the sentiment of
each age is peculiar to itself; and the purely moral influence of
sentimental fiction seldom survives the age to which it was first
addressed. The youngest and most impressionable reader of such works as
the "Nouvelle Hemise," "Werther," "The Robbers," "Corinne," or "Rene," is
not now likely to be morally influenced, for good or ill, by the
perusal of those masterpieces of genius. Had Byron attained the age at
which great authors most realise the responsibilities of fame and genius,
he might possibly have regretted, and endeavoured to suppress, the
publication of "Don Juan;" but the possession of that immortal poem is an
unmixed benefit to posterity, and the loss of it would have been an
irreparable misfortune.
"Falkland," although the earliest, is one of the most carefully finished
of its author's compositions. All that was once turbid, heating,
unwholesome in the current of sentiment which flows through this history
of a guilty passion, "Death's immortalising winter" has chilled and
purified. The book is now a harmless, and, it may be hoped, a not
uninteresting, evidence of the precocity of its author's genius. As
such, it is here reprinted.
[It was published in 1827]
FALKLAND.
BOOK I.
FROM ERASMUS FALKLAND, ESQ., TO THE HON. FREDERICK MONKTON.
L---, May --, 1822.
You are mistaken, my dear Monkton! Your description of the gaiety of
"the season" gives me no emotion. You speak of pleasure; I remember no
labour so wearisome; you enlarge upon its changes; no sameness appears to
me so monotonous. Keep, then, your pity for those who require it. From
the height of my philosophy I compassionate you. No one is so vain as a
recluse; and your jests at my hermitship and hermitage cannot penetrate
the folds of a self-conceit, which does not envy you in your suppers at
D---- House, nor even in your waltzes with Eleanor.
It is a ruin rather than a house which I inhabit. I have not been at
L----- since my return from abroad, and during those years the place has
gone rapidly to decay; perhaps, for that reason, it suits me better, _tel
maitre telle maison_.
Of all my possessions this is the least valuable in itself, and derives
the least interest from the associations of childhood, for it was not at
L----- that any part of that period was spent. I have, however, chosen
it from my present retreat, because here only I am personally unknown,
and therefore little likely to be disturbed. I do not, indeed, wish for
the interruptions designed as civilities; I rather gather around myself,
link after link, the chains that connected me with the world; I find
among my own thoughts that variety and occupation which you only
experience in your intercourse with others; and I make, like the Chinese,
my map of the universe consist of a circle in a square--the circle is my
own empire and of thought and self; and it is to the scanty corners which
it leaves without, that I banish whatever belongs to the remainder of
mankind.
About a mile from L----- is Mr. Mandeville's beautiful villa of E-----,
in the midst of grounds which form a delightful contrast to the savage
and wild scenery by which they are surrounded. As the house is at
present quite deserted, I have obtained, through the gardener, a free
admittance into his domains, and I pass there whole hours, indulging,
like the hero of the _Lutrin, "une sainte oisivete,"_ listening to a
little noisy brook, and letting my thoughts be almost as vague and idle
as the birds which wander among the trees that surround me. I could
wish, indeed, that this simile were in all things correct--that those
thoughts, if as free, were also as happy as the objects of my comparison,
and could, like them, after the rovings of the day, turn at evening to a
resting-place, and be still. We are the dupes and the victims of our
senses: while we use them to gather from external things the hoards that
we store within, we cannot foresee the punishments we prepare for
ourselves; the remembrance which stings, and the hope which deceives, the
passions which promise us rapture, which reward us with despair, and the
thoughts which, if they constitute the healthful action, make also the
feverish excitement of our minds. What sick man has not dreamt in his
delirium everything that our philosophers have said?* But I am growing
into my old habit of gloomy reflection, and it is time that I should
conclude. I meant to have written you a letter as light as your own; if
I have failed, it is no wonder.--"Notre coeur est un instrument
incomplet--une lyre ou il manque des cordes, et ou nous sommes forces de
rendre les accens de la joie, sur le ton consacre aux soupirs."
* Quid aegrotus unquam somniavit quod philosophorum aliquis non
dixerit?--LACTANTIUS.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
You ask me to give you some sketch of my life, and of that _bel mondo_
which wearied me so soon. Men seldom reject an opportunity to talk of
themselves; and I am not unwilling to re-examine the past, to re-connect
it with the present, and to gather from a consideration of each what
hopes and expectations are still left to me for the future.
But my detail must be rather of thought than of action; most of those
whose fate has been connected with mine are now living, and I would not,
even to you, break that tacit confidence which much of my history would
require. After all, you will have no loss. The actions of another may
interest--but, for the most part, it is only his reflections which come
home to us; for few have acted, nearly all of us have thought.
My own vanity too would be unwilling to enter upon incidents which had
their origin either in folly or in error. It is true that those follies
and errors have ceased, but their effects remain. With years our faults
diminish, but our vices increase.
You know that my mother was Spanish, and that my father was one of that
old race of which so few scions remain, who, living in a distant country,
have been little influenced by the changes of fashion, and, priding
themselves on the antiquity of their names, have looked with contempt
upon the modern distinctions and the mushroom nobles which have sprung up
to discountenance and eclipse the plainness of more venerable and solid
respectability. In his youth my father had served in the army. He had
known much of men and more of books; but his knowledge, instead of
rooting out, had rather been engrafted on his prejudices. He was one of
that class (and I say it with a private reverence, though a public
regret), who, with the best intentions, have made the worst citizens, and
who think it a duty to perpetuate whatever is pernicious by having learnt
to consider it as sacred. He was a great country gentleman, a great
sportsman, and a great Tory; perhaps the three worst enemies which a
country can have. Though beneficent to the poor, he gave but a cold
reception to the rich; for he was too refined to associate with his
inferiors, and too proud to like the competition of his equals. One ball
and two dinners a-year constituted all the aristocratic portion of our
hospitality, and at the age of twelve, the noblest and youngest
companions that I possessed were a large Danish dog and a wild mountain
pony, as unbroken and as lawless as myself. It is only in later years
that we can perceive the immeasurable importance of the early scenes and
circumstances which surrounded us. It was in the loneliness of my
unchecked wanderings that my early affection for my own thoughts was
conceived. In the seclusion of nature--in whatever court she
presided--the education of my mind was begun; and, even at that early
age, I rejoiced (like the wild heart the Grecian poet [Eurip. Bambae,
1. 874.] has described) in the stillness of the great woods, and the
solitudes unbroken by human footstep.
The first change in my life was under melancholy auspices; my father fell
suddenly ill, and died; and my mother, whose very existence seemed only
held in his presence, followed him in three months. I remember that, a
few hours before her death, she called me to her: she reminded me that,
through her, I was of Spanish extraction; that in her country, I received
my birth, and that, not the less for its degradation and distress, I
might hereafter find in the relations which I held to it a remembrance to
value, or even a duty to fulfil. On her tenderness to me at that hour,
on the impression it made upon my mind, and on the keen and enduring
sorrow which I felt for months after her death, it would be useless to
dwell.
My uncle became my guardian. He is, you know, a member of parliament of
some reputation; very sensible and very dull; very much respected by men,
very much disliked by women; and inspiring all children, of either sex,
with the same unmitigated aversion which he feels for them himself.
I did not remain long under his immediate care. I was soon sent to
school--that preparatory world, where the great primal principles of
human nature, in the aggression of the strong and the meanness of the
weak, constitute the earliest lesson of importance that we are taught;
and where the forced _primitiae_ of that less universal knowledge which
is useless to the many who in after life, neglect, and bitter to the few
who improve it, are the first motives for which our minds are to be
broken to terror, and our hearts initiated into tears.
Bold and resolute by temper, I soon carved myself a sort of career among
my associates. A hatred to all oppression, and a haughty and unyielding
character, made me at once the fear and aversion of the greater powers
and principalities of the school; while my agility at all boyish games,
and my ready assistance or protection to every one who required it, made
me proportionally popular with, and courted by, the humbler multitude of
the subordinate classes. I was constantly surrounded by the most lawless
and mischievous followers whom the school could afford; all eager for my
commands, and all pledged to their execution.
In good truth, I was a worthy Rowland of such a gang; though I excelled
in, I cared little for the ordinary amusements of the school: I was
fonder of engaging in marauding expeditions contrary to our legislative
restrictions, and I valued myself equally upon my boldness in planning
our exploits, and my dexterity in eluding their discovery. But exactly
in proportion as our school terms connected me with those of my own
years, did our vacations unfit me for any intimate companionship but that
which I already began to discover in myself.
Twice in the year, when I went home, it was to that wild and romantic
part of the country where my former childhood had been spent. There,
alone and unchecked, I was thrown utterly upon my own resources. I
wandered by day over the rude scenes which surrounded us; and at evening
I pored, with an unwearied delight, over the ancient legends which made
those scenes sacred to my imagination. I grew by degrees of a more
thoughtful and visionary nature. My temper imbibed the romance of my
studies; and whether, in winter, basking by the large hearth of our old
hall, or stretched, in the indolent voluptuousness of summer, by the
rushing streams which formed the chief characteristic of the country
around us, my hours were equally wasted in those dim and luxurious
dreams, which constituted, perhaps, the essence of that poetry I had not
the genius to embody. It was then, by that alternate restlessness of
action and idleness of reflection, into which my young years were
divided, that the impress of my character was stamped: that fitfulness of
temper, that affection for extremes, has accompanied me through life.
Hence, not only all intermediums of emotion appear to me as tame, but
even the most overwrought excitation can bring neither novelty nor zest.
I have, as it were, feasted upon the passions; I have made that my daily
food, which, in its strength and excess, would have been poison to
others; I have rendered my mind unable to enjoy the ordinary aliments of
nature; and I have wasted, by a premature indulgence, my resources and my
powers, till I have left my heart, without a remedy or a hope, to
whatever disorders its own intemperance has engendered.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
When I left Dr. -----'s, I was sent to a private tutor in D-----e. Here
I continued for about two years. It was during that time that--but what
then befell me is for no living ear! The characters of that history are
engraven on my heart in letters of fire; but it is a language that none
but myself have the authority to read. It is enough for the purpose of
my confessions that the events of that period were connected with the
first awakening of the most powerful of human passions, and that,
whatever their commencement, their end was despair! and she--the object
of that love--the only being in the world who ever possessed the secret
and the spell of my nature--her life was the bitterness and the fever of
a troubled heart,--her rest is the grave--
Non la conobbe il mondo mentre l'ebbe
Con ibill'io, ch'a pianger qui rimasi.
That attachment was not so much a single event, as the first link in a
long chain which was coiled around my heart. It were a tedious and
bitter history, even were it permitted, to tell you of all the sins and
misfortunes to which in afterlife that passion was connected. I will
only speak of the more hidden but general effect it had upon my mind;
though, indeed, naturally inclined to a morbid and melancholy philosophy,
it is more than probable, but for that occurrence, that it would never
have found matter for excitement. Thrown early among mankind, I should
early have imbibed their feelings, and grown like them by the influence
of custom. I should not have carried within the one unceasing
remembrance, which was to teach me, like Faustus, to find nothing in
knowledge but its inutility, or in hope but its deceit; and to bear like
him, through the blessings of youth and the allurements of pleasure, the
curse and the presence of a fiend.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
It was after the first violent grief produced by that train of
circumstances to which I must necessarily so darkly allude, that I began
to apply with earnestness to books. Night and day I devoted myself
unceasingly to study, and from this fit I was only recovered by the long
and dangerous illness it produced. Alas! there is no fool like him who
wishes for knowledge! It is only through woe that we are taught to
reflect, and we gather the honey of worldly wisdom, not from flowers, but
thorns.
"Une grande passion malheureuse est un grand moyen de sagesse." From the
moment in which the buoyancy of my spirit was first broken by real
anguish, the losses of the heart were repaired by the experience of the
mind. I passed at once, like Melmoth, from youth to age. What were any
longer to me the ordinary avocations of my contemporaries? I had
exhausted years in moments--I had wasted, like the Eastern Queen, my
richest jewel in a draught. I ceased to hope, to feel, to act, to burn;
such are the impulses of the young! I learned to doubt, to reason, to
analyse: such are the habits of the old! From that time, if I have not
avoided the pleasures of life, I have not enjoyed them. Women, wine, the
society of the gay, the commune of the wise, the lonely pursuit of
knowledge, the daring visions of ambition, all have occupied me in turn,
and all alike have deceived me; but, like the Widow in the story of
Voltaire, I have built at last a temple to "Time, the Comforter:" I have
grown calm and unrepining with years; and, if I am now shrinking from
men, I have derived at least this advantage from the loneliness first
made habitual by regret; that while I feel increased benevolence to
others, I have learned to look for happiness only in myself.
They alone are independent of Fortune who have made themselves a separate
existence from the world.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
I went to the University with a great fund of general reading, and habits
of constant application. My uncle, who, having no children of his own,
began to be ambitious for me, formed great expectations of my career at
Oxford. I staid there three years, and did nothing! I did not gain a
single prize, nor did I attempt anything above the ordinary degree. The
fact is, that nothing seemed to me worth the labour of success. I
conversed with those who had obtained the highest academical reputation,
and I smiled with a consciousness of superiority at the boundlessness of
their vanity, and the narrowness of their views. The limits of the
distinction they had gained seemed to them as wide as the most extended
renown; and the little knowledge their youth had acquired only appeared
to them an excuse for the ignorance and the indolence of maturer years.
Was it to equal these that I was to labour? I felt that I already
surpassed them! Was it to gain their good opinion, or, still worse, that
of their admirers? Alas! I had too long learned to live for myself to
find any happiness in the respect of the idlers I despised.
I left Oxford at the age of twenty-one. I succeeded to the large estates
of my inheritance, and for the first time I felt the vanity so natural to
youth when I went up to London to enjoy the resources of the Capital, and
to display the powers I possessed to revel in whatever those resources
could yield. I found society like the Jewish temple: any one is admitted
into its threshold; none but the chiefs of the institution into its
recesses.
Young, rich, of an ancient and honourable name, pursuing pleasure rather
as a necessary excitement than an occasional occupation, and agreeable to
the associates I drew around me because my profusion contributed to their
enjoyment, and my temper to their amusement--I found myself courted by
many, and avoided by none. I soon discovered that all civility is but
the mask of design. I smiled at the kindness of the fathers who, hearing
that I was talented, and knowing that I was rich, looked to my support in
whatever political side they had espoused. I saw in the notes of the
mothers their anxiety for the establishment of their daughters, and their
respect for my acres; and in the cordiality of the sons who had horses to
sell and rouge-et-noir debts to pay, I detected all that veneration for
my money which implied such contempt for its possessor. By nature
observant, and by misfortune sarcastic, I looked upon the various
colourings of society with a searching and philosophic eye: I unravelled
the intricacies which knit servility with arrogance and meanness with
ostentation; and I traced to its sources that universal vulgarity of
inward sentiment and external manner, which, in all classes, appears to
me to constitute the only unvarying characteristic of our countrymen. In
proportion as I increased my knowledge of others, I shrunk with a deeper
disappointment and dejection into my own resources. The first moment of
real happiness which I experienced for a whole year was when I found
myself about to seek, beneath the influence of other skies, that more
extended acquaintance with my species which might either draw me to them
with a closer connection, or at last reconcile me to the ties which
already existed.
I will not dwell upon my adventures abroad: there is little to interest
others in a recital which awakens no interest in one's self. I sought
for wisdom, and I acquired but knowledge. I thirsted for the truth, the
tenderness of love, and I found but its fever and its falsehood. Like
the two Florimels of Spenser, I mistook, in my delirium, the delusive
fabrication of the senses for the divine reality of the heart; and I only
awoke from my deceit when the phantom I had worshipped melted into snow.
Whatever I pursued partook of the energy, yet fitfulness of my nature;
mingling to-day in the tumults of the city, and to-morrow alone with my
own heart in the solitude of unpeopled nature; now revelling in the
wildest excesses, and now tracing, with a painful and unwearied search,
the intricacies of science; alternately governing others, and subdued by
the tyranny which my own passions imposed--I passed through the ordeal
unshrinking yet unscathed. "The education of life," says De Stael,
"perfects the thinking mind, but depraves the frivolous." I do not
inquire, Monkton, to which of these classes I belong; but I feel too
well, that though my mind has not been depraved, it has found no
perfection but in misfortune; and that whatever be the acquirements of
later years, they have nothing which can compensate for the losses of our
youth.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
I returned to England. I entered again upon the theatre of its world;
but I mixed now more in its greater than its lesser pursuits. I looked
rather at the mass than the leaven of mankind; and while I felt aversion
for the few whom I knew, I glowed with philanthropy for the crowd which I
knew not.
It is in contemplating men at a distance that we become benevolent. When
we mix with them, we suffer by the contact, and grow, if not malicious
from the injury, at least selfish from the circumspection which our
safety imposes but when, while we feel our relationship, we are not
galled by the tie; when neither jealousy, nor envy, nor resentment are
excited, we have nothing to interfere with those more complacent and
kindliest sentiments which our earliest impressions have rendered natural
to our hearts. We may fly men in hatred because they have galled us, but
the feeling ceases with the cause: none will willingly feed long upon
bitter thoughts. It is thus that, while in the narrow circle in which we
move we suffer daily from those who approach us, we can, in spite of our
resentment to them, glow with a general benevolence to the wider
relations from which we are remote; that while smarting beneath the
treachery of friendship, the stinging of ingratitude, the faithfulness of
love, we would almost sacrifice our lives to realise some idolised theory
of legislation; and that, distrustful, calculating, selfish in private,
there are thousands who would, with a credulous fanaticism, fling
themselves as victims before that unrecompensing Moloch which they term
the Public.
Living, then, much by myself, but reflecting much upon the world, I
learned to love mankind. Philanthropy brought ambition; for I was
ambitious, not for my own aggrandisement, but for the service of
others--for the poor--the toiling--the degraded; these constituted that
part of my fellow-beings which I the most loved, for these were bound to
me by the most engaging of all human ties--misfortune! I began to enter
into the intrigues of the state; I extended my observation and inquiry
from individuals to nations; I examined into the mysteries of the science
which has arisen in these later days to give the lie to the wisdom of the
past, to reduce into the simplicity of problems the intricacies of
political knowledge, to teach us the fallacy of the system which had
governed by restriction, and imagined that the happiness of nations
depended upon the perpetual interference of its rulers, and to prove to
us that the only unerring policy of art is to leave a free and
unobstructed progress to the hidden energies and province of Nature. But
it was not only the theoretical investigation of the state which employed
me. I mixed, though in secret, with the agents of its springs. While I
seemed only intent upon pleasure, I locked in my heart the consciousness
and vanity of power. In the levity of the lip I disguised the workings
and the knowledge of the brain; and I looked, as with a gifted eye, upon
the mysteries of the hidden depths, while I seemed to float an idler,
with the herd, only on the surface of the stream.