Lucretia | Page 2

worked out
upon the stage. After some unpublished and imperfect attempts towards
so realizing my design, I found either that the subject was too wide for
the limits of the Drama, or that I wanted that faculty of concentration
which alone enables the dramatist to compress multiform varieties into
a very limited compass. With this design, I desired to unite some
exhibition of what seems to me a principal vice in the hot and emulous
chase for happiness or fame, fortune or knowledge, which is almost
synonymous with the cant phrase of "the March of Intellect," in that
crisis of society to which we have arrived. The vice I allude to is
Impatience. That eager desire to press forward, not so much to conquer
obstacles as to elude them; that gambling with the solemn destinies of
life, seeking ever to set success upon the chance of a die; that hastening
from the wish conceived to the end accomplished; that thirst after quick
returns to ingenious toil, and breathless spurrings along short cuts to the
goal, which we see everywhere around us, from the Mechanics'
Institute to the Stock Market,- -beginning in education with the primers
of infancy, deluging us with "Philosophies for the Million" and
"Sciences made Easy;" characterizing the books of our writers, the
speeches of our statesmen, no less than the dealings of our
speculators,--seem, I confess, to me to constitute a very diseased and
very general symptom of the times. I hold that the greatest friend to
man is labour; that knowledge without toil, if possible, were worthless;
that toil in pursuit of knowledge is the best knowledge we can attain;
that the continuous effort for fame is nobler than fame itself; that it is
not wealth suddenly acquired which is deserving of homage, but the
virtues which a man exercises in the slow pursuit of wealth,--the
abilities so called forth, the self-denials so imposed; in a word, that
Labour and Patience are the true schoolmasters on earth. While
occupied with these ideas and this belief, whether right or wrong, and
slowly convinced that it was only in that species of composition with
which I was most familiar that I could work out some portion of the
plan that I began to contemplate, I became acquainted with the histories
of two criminals existing in our own age,--so remarkable, whether from
the extent and darkness of the guilt committed, whether from the

glittering accomplishments and lively temper of the one, the profound
knowledge and intellectual capacities of the other, that the examination
and analysis of characters so perverted became a study full of intense, if
gloomy, interest.
In these persons there appear to have been as few redeemable points as
can be found in Human Nature, so far as such points may be traced in
the kindly instincts and generous passions which do sometimes
accompany the perpetration of great crimes, and, without excusing the
individual, vindicate the species. Yet, on the other hand, their
sanguinary wickedness was not the dull ferocity of brutes; it was
accompanied with instruction and culture,--nay, it seemed to me, on
studying their lives and pondering over their own letters, that through
their cultivation itself we could arrive at the secret of the ruthless and
atrocious pre- eminence in evil these Children of Night had attained;
that here the monster vanished into the mortal, and the phenomena that
seemed aberrations from Nature were explained.
I could not resist the temptation of reducing to a tale the materials
which had so engrossed my interest and tasked my inquiries. And in
this attempt, various incidental opportunities have occurred, if not of
completely carrying out, still of incidentally illustrating, my earlier
design,--of showing the influence of Mammon upon our most secret
selves, of reproving the impatience which is engendered by a
civilization that, with much of the good, brings all the evils of
competition, and of tracing throughout, all the influences of early
household life upon our subsequent conduct and career. In such
incidental bearings the moral may doubtless be more obvious than in
the delineation of the darker and rarer crime which forms the staple of
my narrative. For in extraordinary guilt we are slow to recognize
ordinary warnings,--we say to the peaceful conscience, "This concerns
thee not!" whereas at each instance of familiar fault and commonplace
error we own a direct and sensible admonition. Yet in the portraiture of
gigantic crime, poets have rightly found their sphere and fulfilled their
destiny of teachers. Those terrible truths which appall us in the guilt of
Macbeth or the villany of Iago, have their moral uses not less than the
popular infirmities of Tom Jones, or the every-day hypocrisy of Blifil.

Incredible as it may seem, the crimes herein related took place within
the last seventeen years. There has been