Charles OMalley, vol 1 | Page 2

a note-book of
absurd and laughable incidents,--led me to believe that I could draw on
this vein of composition without any limit whatever. I felt, or thought I
felt, an inexhaustible store of fun and buoyancy within me, and I began
to have a misty, half-confused impression that Englishmen generally
labored under a sad-colored temperament, took depressing views of life,
and were proportionately grateful to any one who would rally them

even passingly out of their despondency, and give them a laugh without
much trouble for going in search of it.
When I set to work to write Charles O'Malley I was, as I have ever
been, very low with fortune, and the success of a new venture was
pretty much as eventful to me as the turn of the right color at
rouge-et-noir. At the same time I had then an amount of spring in my
temperament, and a power of enjoying life which I can honestly say I
never found surpassed. The world had for me all the interest of an
admirable comedy, in which the part allotted myself, if not a high or a
foreground one, was eminently suited to my taste, and brought me,
besides, sufficiently often on the stage to enable me to follow all the
fortunes of the piece. Brussels, where I was then living, was adorned at
the period by a most agreeable English society. Some leaders of the
fashionable world of London had come there to refit and recruit, both in
body and estate. There were several pleasant and a great number of
pretty people among them; and so far as I could judge, the fashionable
dramas of Belgrave Square and its vicinity were being performed in the
Rue Royale and the Boulevard de Waterloo with very considerable
success. There were dinners, balls, déjeûners, and picnics in the Bois de
Cambre, excursions to Waterloo, and select little parties to Bois-fort,--a
charming little resort in the forest whose intense cockneyism became
perfectly inoffensive as being in a foreign land, and remote from the
invasion of home-bred vulgarity. I mention all these things to show the
adjuncts by which I was aided, and the rattle of gayety by which I was,
as it were, "accompanied," when I next tried my voice.
The soldier element tinctured strongly our society, and I will say most
agreeably. Among those whom I remember best were several old
Peninsulars. Lord Combermere was of this number, and another of our
set was an officer who accompanied, if indeed he did not command, the
first boat party who crossed the Douro. It is needless to say how I
cultivated a society so full of all the storied details I was eager to obtain,
and how generously disposed were they to give me all the information I
needed. On topography especially were they valuable to me, and with
such good result that I have been more than once complimented on the
accuracy of my descriptions of places which I have never seen and

whose features I have derived entirely from the narratives of my
friends.
When, therefore, my publishers asked me could I write a story in the
Lorrequer vein, in which active service and military adventure could
figure more prominently than mere civilian life, and where the
achievements of a British army might form the staple of the
narrative,--when this question was propounded me, I was ready to reply:
Not one, but fifty. Do not mistake me, and suppose that any
overweening confidence in my literary powers would have emboldened
me to make this reply; my whole strength lay in the fact that I could not
recognize anything like literary effort in the matter. If the world would
only condescend to read that which I wrote precisely as I was in the
habit of talking, nothing could be easier than for me to occupy them.
Not alone was it very easy to me, but it was intensely interesting and
amusing to myself, to be so engaged.
The success of Harry Lorrequer had been freely wafted across the
German ocean, but even in its mildest accents it was very intoxicating
incense to me; and I set to work on my second book with a thrill of
hope as regards the world's favor which--and it is no small thing to say
it--I can yet recall.
I can recall, too, and I am afraid more vividly still, some of the
difficulties of my task when I endeavored to form anything like an
accurate or precise idea of some campaigning incident or some passage
of arms from the narratives of two distinct and separate
"eye-witnesses." What mistrust I conceived for all eye-witnesses from
my own brief experience of their testimonies! What an impulse did it
lend me to study the nature and the temperament of narrator, as