The Dynasts | Page 4

blown
for wars."

PREFACE
The Spectacle here presented in the likeness of a Drama is concerned
with the Great Historical Calamity, or Clash of Peoples, artificially
brought about some hundred years ago.
The choice of such a subject was mainly due to three accidents of
locality. It chanced that the writer was familiar with a part of England
that lay within hail of the watering-place in which King George the
Third had his favourite summer residence during the war with the first
Napoleon, and where he was visited by ministers and others who bore
the weight of English affairs on their more or less competent shoulders
at that stressful time. Secondly, this district, being also near the coast
which had echoed with rumours of invasion in their intensest form
while the descent threatened, was formerly animated by memories and
traditions of the desperate military preparations for that contingency.
Thirdly, the same countryside happened to include the village which
was the birthplace of Nelson's flag-captain at Trafalgar.
When, as the first published result of these accidents, The Trumpet
Major was printed, more than twenty years ago, I found myself in the
tantalizing position of having touched the fringe of a vast international
tragedy without being able, through limits of plan, knowledge, and
opportunity, to enter further into its events; a restriction that prevailed
for many years. But the slight regard paid to English influence and
action throughout the struggle by those Continental writers who had
dealt imaginatively with Napoleon's career, seemed always to leave
room for a new handling of the theme which should re-embody the
features of this influence in their true proportion; and accordingly, on a
belated day about six years back, the following drama was outlined, to
be taken up now and then at wide intervals ever since.
It may, I think, claim at least a tolerable fidelity to the facts of its date
as they are give in ordinary records. Whenever any evidence of the
words really spoken or written by the characters in their various
situations was attainable, as close a paraphrase has been aimed at as
was compatible with the form chosen. And in all cases outside the oral
tradition, accessible scenery, and existing relics, my indebtedness for

detail to the abundant pages of the historian, the biographer, and the
journalist, English and Foreign, has been, of course, continuous.
It was thought proper to introduce, as supernatural spectators of the
terrestrial action, certain impersonated abstractions, or Intelligences,
called Spirits. They are intended to be taken by the reader for what they
may be worth as contrivances of the fancy merely. Their doctrines are
but tentative, and are advanced with little eye to a systematized
philosophy warranted to lift "the burthen of the mystery" of this
unintelligible world. The chief thing hoped for them is that they and
their utterances may have dramatic plausibility enough to procure for
them, in the words of Coleridge, "that willing suspension of disbelief
for the moment which constitutes poetic faith." The wide prevalence of
the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade, in this twentieth century,
the importation of Divine personages from any antique Mythology as
ready-made sources or channels of Causation, even in verse, and
excluded the celestial machinery of, say, Paradise Lost, as
peremptorily as that of the Iliad or the Eddas. And the abandonment of
the masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy
seemed a necessary and logical consequence of the long abandonment
by thinkers of the anthropomorphic conception of the same.
These phantasmal Intelligences are divided into groups, of which one
only, that of the Pities, approximates to "the Universal Sympathy of
human nature--the spectator idealized"(1) of the Greek Chorus; it is
impressionable and inconsistent in its views, which sway hither and
thither as wrought on by events. Another group approximates to the
passionless Insight of the Ages. The remainder are eclectically chosen
auxiliaries whose signification may be readily discerned. In point of
literary form, the scheme of contrasted Choruses and other conventions
of this external feature was shaped with a single view to the modern
expression of a modern outlook, and in frank divergence from classical
and other dramatic precedent which ruled the ancient voicings of
ancient themes.
It may hardly be necessary to inform readers that in devising this
chronicle-piece no attempt has been made to create that completely
organic structure of action, and closely-webbed development of
character and motive, which are demanded in a drama strictly self-
contained. A panoramic show like the present is a series of historical

"ordinates" (to use a term in geometry): the subject is familiar to all;
and foreknowledge is assumed to fill in the junctions required to
combine the scenes into an artistic unity. Should the mental spectator
be unwilling or unable to do this, a