Harold | Page 4

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