Harold, Complete - Edward Bulwer Lytton
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HAROLD
by Edward Bulwer Lytton
DEDICATORY EPISTLE
TO THE RIGHT HON. C. T. D'EYNCOURT, M.P.
I dedicate to you, my dear friend, a work, principally composed under
your hospitable roof; and to the materials of which your library, rich in
the authorities I most needed, largely contributed.
The idea of founding an historical romance on an event so important and
so national as the Norman Invasion, I had long entertained, and the
chronicles of that time had long been familiar to me. But it is an old
habit of mine, to linger over the plan and subject of a work, for years,
perhaps, before the work has, in truth, advanced a sentence; "busying
myself," as old Burton saith, "with this playing labour--otiosaque
diligentia ut vitarem torporen feriendi."
The main consideration which long withheld me from the task, was in my
sense of the unfamiliarity of the ordinary reader with the characters,
events, and, so to speak, with the very physiognomy of a period ante
Agamemnona; before the brilliant age of matured chivalry, which has given
to song and romance the deeds of the later knighthood, and the glorious
frenzy of the Crusades. The Norman Conquest was our Trojan War; an epoch
beyond which our learning seldom induces our imagination to ascend.
In venturing on ground so new to fiction, I saw before me the option of
apparent pedantry, in the obtrusion of such research as might carry the
reader along with the Author, fairly and truly into the real records of
the time; or of throwing aside pretensions to accuracy altogether;--and
so rest contented to turn history into flagrant romance, rather than
pursue my own conception of extracting its natural romance from the
actual history. Finally, not without some encouragement from you,
(whereof take your due share of blame!) I decided to hazard the attempt,
and to adopt that mode of treatment which, if making larger demand on the
attention of the reader, seemed the more complimentary to his judgment.
The age itself, once duly examined, is full of those elements which
should awaken interest, and appeal to the imagination. Not untruly has
Sismondi said, that the "Eleventh Century has a right to be considered a
great age. It was a period of life and of creation; all that there was
of noble, heroic, and vigorous in the Middle Ages commenced at that
epoch." [1] But to us Englishmen in especial, besides the more animated
interest in that spirit of adventure, enterprise, and improvement, of
which the Norman chivalry was the noblest type, there is an interest more
touching and deep in those last glimpses of the old Saxon monarchy, which
open upon us in the mournful pages of our chroniclers.
I have sought in this work, less to portray mere manners, which modern
researches have rendered familiar to ordinary students in our history,
than to bring forward the great characters, so carelessly dismissed in
the long and loose record of centuries; to show more clearly the motives
and policy of the agents in an event the most memorable in Europe; and to
convey a definite, if general, notion of the human beings, whose brains
schemed, and whose hearts beat, in that realm of shadows which lies
behind the Norman Conquest;
"Spes hominum caecos, morbos, votumque, labores,
Et passim toto volitantes aethere curas." [2]
I have thus been faithful to the leading historical incidents in the
grand tragedy of Harold, and as careful as contradictory evidences will
permit, both as to accuracy in the delineation of character, and
correctness in that chronological chain of dates without which there can
be no historical philosophy; that is, no tangible link between the cause
and the effect. The fictitious part of my narrative is, as in "Rienzi,"
and the "Last of the Barons," confined chiefly to the private life, with
its domain of incident and passion, which is the legitimate appanage of
novelist or poet. The love story of Harold and Edith is told differently
from the well-known legend, which implies a less pure connection. But
the whole legend respecting the Edeva faira (Edith the fair) whose name
meets us in the "Domesday" roll, rests upon very slight authority
considering its popular acceptance [3]; and the reasons for my
alterations will be sufficiently obvious in a work intended not only for
general perusal, but which on many accounts, I hope, may be entrusted
fearlessly to the young; while those alterations are in strict accordance
with the spirit of the time, and tend to illustrate one of its most
marked peculiarities.
More apology is perhaps due for the liberal use to which I have applied
the superstitions of the age. But with the age itself those
superstitions are so interwoven--they meet us so constantly, whether in
the pages of our own chroniclers, or the records of the kindred
Scandinavians--they are so intruded into the very laws, so blended with
the very life, of our Saxon forefathers, that without employing them, in
somewhat of the same credulous spirit with which they were originally
conceived, no vivid impression of the People they influenced can be
conveyed. Not without truth has an Italian writer remarked, "that he who
would depict philosophically an unphilosophical age, should remember
that, to be familiar with children, one must sometimes think and feel as
a child."
Yet it has not been my main endeavour to make these ghostly agencies
conducive to the ordinary poetical purposes of terror, and if that effect
be at all created by them, it will be, I apprehend, rather subsidiary to
the more historical sources of interest than, in itself, a leading or
popular characteristic of the work. My object, indeed, in the
introduction of the Danish Vala especially, has been perhaps as much
addressed to the reason as to the fancy, in showing what large, if dim,
remains of the ancient "heathenesse" still kept their ground on the Saxon
soil, contending with and contrasting the monkish superstitions, by which
they were ultimately replaced. Hilda is not in history; but without the
romantic impersonation of that which Hilda represents, the history of the
time would be imperfectly understood.
In the character of Harold--while I have carefully examined and weighed
the scanty evidences of its distinguishing attributes which are yet
preserved to us--and, in spite of no unnatural partiality, have not
concealed what appear to me its deficiencies, and still less the great
error of the life it illustrates,--I have attempted, somewhat and
slightly, to shadow out the ideal of the pure Saxon character, such as it
was then, with its large qualities undeveloped, but marked already by
patient endurance, love of justice, and freedom--the manly sense of duty
rather than the chivalric sentiment of honour--and that indestructible
element of practical purpose and courageous will, which, defying all
conquest, and steadfast in all peril, was ordained to achieve so vast an
influence over the destinies of the world.
To the Norman Duke, I believe, I have been as lenient as justice will
permit, though it is as impossible to deny his craft as to dispute his
genius; and so far as the scope of my work would allow, I trust that I
have indicated fairly the grand characteristics of his countrymen, more
truly chivalric than their lord. It has happened, unfortunately for that
illustrious race of men, that they have seemed to us, in England,
represented by the Anglo-Norman kings. The fierce and plotting William,
the vain and worthless Rufus, the cold-blooded and relentless Henry, are
no adequate representatives of the far nobler Norman vavasours, whom even
the English Chronicler admits to have been "kind masters," and to whom,
in spite of their kings, the after liberties of England were so largely
indebted. But this work closes on the Field of Hastings; and in that
noble struggle for national independence, the sympathies of every true
son of the land, even if tracing his lineage back to the Norman victor,
must be on the side of the patriot Harold.
In the notes, which I have thought necessary aids to the better
comprehension of these volumes, my only wish has been to convey to the
general reader such illustrative information as may familiarise him more
easily with the subject-matter of the book, or refresh his memory on
incidental details not without a national interest. In the mere
references to authorities I do not pretend to arrogate to a fiction the
proper character of a history; the references are chiefly used either
where wishing pointedly to distinguish from invention what was borrowed
from a chronicle, or when differing from some popular historian to whom
the reader might be likely to refer, it seemed well to state the
authority upon which the difference was founded. [4]
In fact, my main object has been one that compelled me to admit graver
matter than is common in romance, but which I would fain hope may be
saved from the charge of dulness by some national sympathy between author
and reader; my object is attained, and attained only, if, in closing the
last page of this work, the reader shall find that, in spite of the
fictitious materials admitted, he has formed a clearer and more intimate
acquaintance with a time, heroic though remote, and characters which
ought to have a household interest to Englishmen, than the succinct
accounts of the mere historian could possibly afford him.
Thus, my dear D'Eyncourt, under cover of an address to yourself, have I
made to the Public those explanations which authors in general (and I not
the least so) are often overanxious to render.
This task done, my thoughts naturally fly back to the associations I
connected with your name when I placed it at the head of this epistle.
Again I seem to find myself under your friendly roof; again to greet my
provident host entering that gothic chamber in which I had been permitted
to establish my unsocial study, heralding the advent of majestic folios,
and heaping libraries round the unworthy work. Again, pausing from my
labour, I look through that castle casement, and beyond that feudal moat,
over the broad landscapes which, if I err not, took their name from the
proud brother of the Conqueror himself; or when, in those winter nights,
the grim old tapestry waved in the dim recesses, I hear again the Saxon
thegn winding his horn at the turret door, and demanding admittance to
the halls from which the prelate of Bayeux had so unrighteously expelled
him [5]--what marvel, that I lived in the times of which I wrote, Saxon
with the Saxon, Norman with the Norman--that I entered into no gossip
less venerable than that current at the Court of the Confessor, or
startled my fellow-guests (when I deigned to meet them) with the last
news which Harold's spies had brought over from the Camp at St. Valery?
With all those folios, giants of the gone world, rising around me daily,
more and more, higher and higher--Ossa upon Pelion--on chair and table,
hearth and floor; invasive as Normans, indomitable as Saxons, and tall as
the tallest Danes (ruthless host, I behold them still!)--with all those
disburied spectres rampant in the chamber, all the armour rusting in thy
galleries, all those mutilated statues of early English kings (including
St. Edward himself)--niched into thy grey, ivied walls--say in thy
conscience, O host, (if indeed that conscience be not wholly callous!)
shall I ever return to the nineteenth century again?
But far beyond these recent associations of a single winter (for which
heaven assoil thee!) goes the memory of a friendship of many winters, and
proof to the storms of all. Often have I come for advice to your wisdom,
and sympathy to your heart, bearing back with me, in all such seasons,
new increase to that pleasurable gratitude which is, perhaps, the rarest,
nor the least happy sentiment, that experience leaves to man. Some
differences, it may be,--whether on those public questions which we see,
every day, alienating friendships that should have been beyond the reach
of laws and kings;--or on the more scholastic controversies which as
keenly interest the minds of educated men,--may at times deny to us the
idem velle, atque idem nolle; but the firma amicitia needs not those
common links; the sunshine does not leave the wave for the slight ripple
which the casual stone brings a moment to the surface.
Accept, in this dedication of a work which has lain so long on my mind,
and been endeared to me from many causes, the token of an affection for
you and yours, strong as the ties of kindred, and lasting as the belief
in truth. E. B. L.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
The author of an able and learned article on MABILLON [6] in the
"Edinburgh Review," has accurately described my aim in this work;
although, with that generous courtesy which characterises the true
scholar, in referring to the labours of a contemporary, he has overrated
my success. It was indeed my aim "to solve the problem how to produce
the greatest amount of dramatic effect at the least expense of historical
truth"--I borrow the words of the Reviewer, since none other could so
tersely express my design, or so clearly account for the leading
characteristics in its conduct and completion.
There are two ways of employing the materials of History in the service
of Romance: the one consists in lending to ideal personages, and to an
imaginary fable, the additional interest to be derived from historical
groupings: the other, in extracting the main interest of romantic
narrative from History itself. Those who adopt the former mode are at
liberty to exclude all that does not contribute to theatrical effect or
picturesque composition; their fidelity to the period they select is
towards the manners and costume, not towards the precise order of events,
the moral causes from which the events proceeded, and the physical
agencies by which they were influenced and controlled. The plan thus
adopted is unquestionably the more popular and attractive, and, being
favoured by the most illustrious writers of historical romance, there is
presumptive reason for supposing it to be also that which is the more
agreeable to the art of fiction.
But he who wishes to avoid the ground pre-occupied by others, and claim
in the world of literature some spot, however humble, which he may
"plough with his own heifer," will seek to establish himself not where
the land is the most fertile, but where it is the least enclosed. So,
when I first turned my attention to Historical Romance, my main aim was
to avoid as much as possible those fairer portions of the soil that had
been appropriated by the first discoverers. The great author of Ivanhoe,
and those amongst whom, abroad and at home, his mantle was divided, had
employed History to aid Romance; I contented myself with the humbler task
to employ Romance in the aid of History,--to extract from authentic but
neglected chronicles, and the unfrequented storehouse of Archaeology, the
incidents and details that enliven the dry narrative of facts to which
the general historian is confined,--construct my plot from the actual
events themselves, and place the staple of such interest as I could
create in reciting the struggles, and delineating the characters, of
those who had been the living actors in the real drama. For the main
materials of the three Historical Romances I have composed, I consulted
the original authorities of the time with a care as scrupulous, as if
intending to write, not a fiction but a history. And having formed the
best judgment I could of the events and characters of the age, I adhered
faithfully to what, as an Historian, I should have held to be the true
course and true causes of the great political events, and the essential
attributes of the principal agents. Solely in that inward life which,
not only as apart from the more public and historical, but which, as
almost wholly unknown, becomes the fair domain of the poet, did I claim
the legitimate privileges of fiction, and even here I employed the agency
of the passions only so far as they served to illustrate what I believed
to be the genuine natures of the beings who had actually lived, and to
restore the warmth of the human heart to the images recalled from the
grave.
Thus, even had I the gifts of my most illustrious predecessors, I should
be precluded the use of many of the more brilliant. I shut myself out
from the wider scope permitted to their fancy, and denied myself the
license to choose or select materials, alter dates, vary causes and
effects according to the convenience of that more imperial fiction which
invents the Probable where it discards the Real. The mode I have adopted
has perhaps only this merit, that it is my own--mine by discovery and
mine by labour. And if I can raise not the spirits that obeyed the great
master of romance, nor gain the key to the fairyland that opened to his
spell,--at least I have not rifled the tomb of the wizard to steal my art
from the book that lies clasped on his breast.
In treating of an age with which the general reader is so unfamiliar as
that preceding the Norman Conquest, it is impossible to avoid (especially
in the earlier portions of my tale) those explanations of the very
character of the time which would have been unnecessary if I had only
sought in History the picturesque accompaniments to Romance. I have to do
more than present an amusing picture of national manners--detail the
dress, and describe the banquet. According to the plan I adopt, I have
to make the reader acquainted with the imperfect fusion of races in Saxon
England, familiarise him with the contests of parties and the ambition of
chiefs, show him the strength and the weakness of a kindly but ignorant
church; of a brave but turbulent aristocracy; of a people partially free,
and naturally energetic, but disunited by successive immigrations, and
having lost much of the proud jealousies of national liberty by
submission to the preceding conquests of the Dane; acquiescent in the
sway of foreign kings, and with that bulwark against invasion which an
hereditary order of aristocracy usually erects, loosened to its very
foundations by the copious admixture of foreign nobles. I have to
present to the reader, here, the imbecile priestcraft of the illiterate
monk, there, the dark superstition that still consulted the deities of
the North by runes on the elm bark and adjurations of the dead. And in
contrast to those pictures of a decrepit monarchy and a fated race, I
have to bring forcibly before the reader the vigorous attributes of the
coming conquerors,--the stern will and deep guile of the Norman
chief--the comparative knowledge of the rising Norman Church--the nascent
spirit of chivalry in the Norman vavasours; a spirit destined to
emancipate the very people it contributed to enslave, associated, as it
imperfectly was, with the sense of freedom: disdainful, it is true, of
the villein, but proudly curbing, though into feudal limits, the
domination of the liege. In a word, I must place fully before the
reader, if I would be faithful to the plan of my work, the political and
moral features of the age, as well as its lighter and livelier
attributes, and so lead him to perceive, when he has closed the book, why
England was conquered, and how England survived the Conquest.
In accomplishing this task, I inevitably incur the objections which the
task itself raises up,--objections to the labour it has cost; to the
information which the labour was undertaken in order to bestow;
objections to passages which seem to interrupt the narrative, but which
in reality prepare for the incidents it embraces, or explain the position
of the persons whose characters it illustrates,--whose fate it involves;
objections to the reference to authorities, where a fact might be
disputed, or mistaken for fiction; objections to the use of Saxon words,
for which no accurate synonyms could be exchanged; objections, in short,
to the colouring, conduct, and composition of the whole work; objections
to all that separate it from the common crowd of Romances, and stamp on
it, for good or for bad, a character peculiarly its own. Objections of
this kind I cannot remove, though I have carefully weighed them all. And
with regard to the objection most important to story-teller and novel
reader--viz., the dryness of some of the earlier portions, though I have
thrice gone over those passages, with the stern determination to inflict
summary justice upon every unnecessary line, I must own to my regret that
I have found but little which it was possible to omit without rendering
the after narrative obscure, and without injuring whatever of more
stirring interest the story, as it opens, may afford to the general
reader of Romance.
As to the Saxon words used, an explanation of all those that can be
presumed unintelligible to a person of ordinary education, is given
either in the text or a foot-note. Such archaisms are much less numerous
than certain critics would fain represent them to be: and they have
rarely indeed been admitted where other words could have been employed
without a glaring anachronism, or a tedious periphrase. Would it indeed
be possible, for instance, to convey a notion of the customs and manners
of our Saxon forefathers without employing words so mixed up with their
daily usages and modes of thinking as "weregeld" and "niddering"? Would
any words from the modern vocabulary suggest the same idea, or embody the
same meaning?
One critic good-humouredly exclaims, "We have a full attendance of thegns
and cnehts, but we should have liked much better our old friends and
approved good masters thanes and knights." Nothing could be more
apposite for my justification than the instances here quoted in censure;
nothing could more plainly vindicate the necessity of employing the Saxon
words. For I should sadly indeed have misled the reader if I had used
the word knight in an age when knights were wholly unknown to the
Anglo-Saxon and cneht no more means what we understand by knight, than a
templar in modern phrase means a man in chain mail vowed to celibacy, and
the redemption of the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the Mussulman.
While, since thegn and thane are both archaisms, I prefer the former; not
only for the same reason that induces Sir Francis Palgrave to prefer it,
viz., because it is the more etymologically correct; but because we take
from our neighbours the Scotch, not only the word thane, but the sense in
which we apply it; and that sense is not the same that we ought to attach
to the various and complicated notions of nobility which the Anglo-Saxon
comprehended in the title of thegn. It has been peremptorily said by
more than one writer in periodicals, that I have overrated the erudition
of William, in permitting him to know Latin; nay, to have read the
Comments of Caesar at the age of eight.--Where these gentlemen find the
authorities to confute my statement I know not; all I know is, that in
the statement I have followed the original authorities usually deemed the
best. And I content myself with referring the disputants to a work not
so difficult to procure as (and certainly more pleasant to read than) the
old Chronicles. In Miss Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England,"
(Matilda of Flanders,) the same statement is made, and no doubt upon the
same authorities.
More surprised should I be (if modern criticism had not taught me in all
matter's of assumption the nil admirari), to find it alleged that I have
overstated not only the learning of the Norman duke, but that which
flourished in Normandy under his reign; for I should have thought that
the fact of the learning which sprung up in the most thriving period of
that principality; the rapidity of its growth; the benefits it derived
from Lanfranc; the encouragement it received from William, had been
phenomena too remarkable in the annals of the age, and in the history of
literature, to have met with an incredulity which the most moderate
amount of information would have sufficed to dispel. Not to refer such
sceptics to graver authorities, historical and ecclesiastical, in order
to justify my representations of that learning which, under William the
Bastard, made the schools of Normandy the popular academies of Europe, a
page or two in a book so accessible as Villemain's "Tableau du Moyen
Age," will perhaps suffice to convince them of the hastiness of their
censure, and the error of their impressions.
It is stated in the Athenaeum, and, I believe, by a writer whose
authority on the merits of opera singers I am far from contesting but of
whose competence to instruct the world in any other department of human
industry or knowledge I am less persuaded, "that I am much mistaken when
I represent not merely the clergy but the young soldiers and courtiers of
the reign of the Confessor, as well acquainted with the literature of
Greece and Rome."
The remark, to say the least of it, is disingenuous. I have done no such
thing. This general animadversion is only justified by a reference to
the pedantry of the Norman Mallet de Graville--and it is expressly stated
in the text that Mallet de Graville was originally intended for the
Church, and that it was the peculiarity of his literary information, rare
in a soldier (but for which his earlier studies for the ecclesiastical
calling readily account, at a time when the Norman convent of Bec was
already so famous for the erudition of its teachers, and the number of
its scholars,) that attracted towards him the notice of Lanfranc, and
founded his fortunes. Pedantry is made one of his characteristics (as it
generally was the characteristic of any man with some pretensions to
scholarship, in the earlier ages;) and if he indulges in a classical
allusion, whether in taunting a courtier or conversing with a "Saxon from
the wealds of Kent," it is no more out of keeping with the pedantry
ascribed to him, than it is unnatural in Dominie Sampson to rail at Meg
Merrilies in Latin, or James the First to examine a young courtier in the
same unfamiliar language. Nor should the critic in question, when
inviting his readers to condemn me for making Mallet de Graville quote
Horace, have omitted to state that de Graville expressly laments that he
had never read, nor could even procure, a copy of the Roman poet--judging
only of the merits of Horace by an extract in some monkish author, who
was equally likely to have picked up his quotation second-hand.