Devereux | Page 4

a man who is not constructing a romance, but narrating a life.
He gives to Love, its joy and its sorrow, its due share in an eventful and
passionate existence; but it is the share of biography, not of fiction. He
selects from the crowd of personages with whom he is brought into
contact, not only those who directly influence his personal destinies,
but those of whom a sketch or an anecdote would appear to a
biographer likely to have interest for posterity. Louis XIV., the Regent
Orleans, Peter the Great, Lord Bolingbroke, and others less eminent,
but still of mark in their own day, if growing obscure to ours, are
introduced not for the purposes and agencies of fiction, but as an
autobiographer's natural illustrations of the men and manners of his
time.
And here be it pardoned if I add that so minute an attention has been
paid to accuracy that even in petty details, and in relation to historical

characters but slightly known to the ordinary reader, a critic deeply
acquainted with the memoirs of the age will allow that the novelist is
always merged in the narrator.
Unless the Author has failed more in his design than, on revising the
work of his early youth with the comparatively impartial eye of maturer
judgment, he is disposed to concede, Morton Devereux will also be
found with that marked individuality of character which distinguishes
the man who has lived and laboured from the hero of romance. He
admits into his life but few passions; those are tenacious and intense:
conscious that none who are around him will sympathize with his
deeper feelings, he veils them under the sneer of an irony which is
often affected and never mirthful. Wherever we find him, after
surviving the brief episode of love, we feel--though he does not tell us
so--that he is alone in the world. He is represented as a keen observer
and a successful actor in the busy theatre of mankind, precisely in
proportion as no cloud from the heart obscures the cold clearness of the
mind. In the scenes of pleasure there is no joy in his smile; in the
contests of ambition there is no quicker beat of the pulse. Attaining in
the prime of manhood such position and honour as would first content
and then sate a man of this mould, he has nothing left but to discover
the vanities of this world and to ponder on the hopes of the next; and,
his last passion dying out in the retribution that falls on his foe, he
finally sits down in retirement to rebuild the ruined home of his
youth,--unconscious that to that solitude the Destinies have led him to
repair the waste and ravages of his own melancholy soul.
But while outward Dramatic harmonies between cause and effect, and
the proportionate agencies which characters introduced in the Drama
bring to bear upon event and catastrophe, are carefully shunned,--as
real life does for the most part shun them,--yet there is a latent
coherence in all that, by influencing the mind, do, though indirectly,
shape out the fate and guide the actions.
Dialogue and adventures which, considered dramatically, would be
episodical,--considered biographically, will be found essential to the
formation, change, and development of the narrator's character. The
grave conversations with Bolingbroke and Richard Cromwell, the light
scenes in London and at Paris, the favour obtained with the Czar of
Russia, are all essential to the creation of that mixture of wearied

satiety and mournful thought which conducts the Probationer to the
lonely spot in which he is destined to learn at once the mystery of his
past life and to clear his reason from the doubts that had obscured the
future world.
Viewing the work in this more subtile and contemplative light, the
reader will find not only the true test by which to judge of its design
and nature, but he may also recognize sources of interest in the story
which might otherwise have been lost to him; and if so, the Author will
not be without excuse for this criticism upon the scope and intention of
his own work. For it is not only the privilege of an artist, but it is also
sometimes his duty to the principles of Art, to place the spectator in
that point of view wherein the light best falls upon the canvas. "Do not
place yourself there," says the painter; "to judge of my composition you
must stand where I place you."

CONTENTS.

Book I.

CHAPTER I.
Of the Hero's Birth and Parentage.--Nothing can differ more from the
End of Things than their Beginning

CHAPTER II.
A Family Consultation.--A Priest, and an Era in Life

CHAPTER III.
A Change in Conduct and in Character: our evil