Night and Morning

Night and Morning

Project Gutenberg EBook, Night and Morning by E. B. Lytton,
Complete #195 in our series by Edward Bulwer Lytton
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Title: Night and Morning, Complete
Author: Edward Bulwer Lytton
Release Date: January 2006 [EBook #9755] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on October 9,
2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, NIGHT
AND MORNING ***

This eBook was produced by David Widger [[email protected]]

THE WORKS
OF
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
(LORD LYTTON)
NIGHT AND MORNING

PREFACE
TO THE EDITION OF 1845.
Much has been written by critics, especially by those in Germany (the
native land of criticism), upon the important question, whether to
please or to instruct should be the end of Fiction--whether a moral
purpose is or is not in harmony with the undidactic spirit perceptible in
the higher works of the imagination. And the general result of the
discussion has been in favour of those who have contended that Moral
Design, rigidly so called, should be excluded from the aims of the Poet;
that his Art should regard only the Beautiful, and be contented with the
indirect moral tendencies, which can never fail the creation of the
Beautiful. Certainly, in fiction, to interest, to please, and sportively to
elevate --to take man from the low passions, and the miserable troubles
of life, into a higher region, to beguile weary and selfish pain, to excite
a genuine sorrow at vicissitudes not his own, to raise the passions into
sympathy with heroic struggles--and to admit the soul into that serener
atmosphere from which it rarely returns to ordinary existence, without
some memory or association which ought to enlarge the domain of
thought and exalt the motives of action;--such, without other moral
result or object, may satisfy the Poet,* and constitute the highest and
most universal morality he can effect. But subordinate to this, which is
not the duty, but the necessity, of all Fiction that outlasts the hour, the
writer of imagination may well permit to himself other purposes and
objects, taking care that they be not too sharply defined, and too

obviously meant to contract the Poet into the Lecturer--the Fiction into
the Homily. The delight in Shylock is not less vivid for the Humanity it
latently but profoundly inculcates; the healthful merriment of the
Tartufe is not less enjoyed for the exposure of the Hypocrisy it
denounces. We need not demand from Shakespeare or from Moliere
other morality than that which Genius unconsciously throws around
it--the natural light which it reflects; but if some great principle which
guides us practically in the daily intercourse with men becomes in the
general lustre more clear and more pronounced, we gain doubly, by the
general tendency and the particular result.
*[I use the word Poet in its proper sense, as applicable to any writer,
whether in verse or prose, who invents or creates.]
Long since, in searching for new regions in the Art to which I am a
servant, it seemed to me that they might be found lying far, and rarely
trodden, beyond that range of conventional morality in which Novelist
after Novelist had entrenched himself--amongst those subtle recesses in
the ethics of human life in which Truth and Falsehood dwell
undisturbed and unseparated. The vast and dark Poetry around us--the
Poetry of Modern Civilisation and Daily Existence, is shut out from us
in much, by the shadowy giants of Prejudice and Fear. He who would
arrive at the Fairy Land must face the Phantoms. Betimes, I set myself
to the task of investigating the motley world to which our progress in
humanity--has attained, caring little what misrepresentation I incurred,
what hostility I provoked, in searching through a devious labyrinth for
the foot-tracks of Truth.
In the pursuit of this object, I am, not vainly, conscious that I have had
my influence on my time--that