Pelham

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PELHAM’S VISIT TO THE BREAKFAST-TABLE OF THE REV. COMBER-

Preface

TO

THE EDITION OF 1828 *

I believe if we were to question every author upon the subject of his literary grievances, we should find that the most frequent of all complaints, was less that of being unappreciated, than that of being misunderstood. All of us write perhaps with some secret object, for which the world cares not a straw : and while each reader fixes his peculiar moral upon a book, no one, by any chance, hits upon that which the author had in his own heart designed to inculcate. Hence this Edition of “ Pelham” acquires that appendage in the shape of an explanatory preface which the unprescient benevolence of the author did not inflict on his readers when he first confided his work to their candor and discretion. Even so, some Candidate for Parliamentary Honors first braves the hustings ; — relying only on the general congeniality of sentiment between himself and the Electors — but

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* Viz., the Second Edition.

vi

PREFACE TO THE alas ! once chosen, the liberal confidence, which took him upon trust is no more, and when he reappears to commend himself to the popular suffrage, he is required to go into the ill-bred egotisms of detail — and explain all that he has done and all that he has failed to do, to the satisfaction of an enlightened but too inquisitive constituency.

It is a beautiful part in the economy of this world, that nothing is without its use ; every weed in the great thoroughfares of life has a honey, which Observation can easily extract; and we may glean no unimportant wisdom from Folly itself, if we distinguish while we survey, and satirize while we share it. It is in this belief that these volumes have their origin. I have not been willing that even the common-places of society should afford neither a record nor a moral ; and it is therefore from the common-places of society that the materials of this novel have been wrought. By treating trifles naturally, they may be rendered amusing, and that which adherence to Nature renders amusing, the same cause also may render instructive : for Nature is the source of all morals, and the enchanted well, from which not a single drop can be taken, that has not the power of curing some of our diseases.

I have drawn for the hero of my Work ; such a person as seemed to me best fitted to retail the opin-

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vii ions and customs of the class and age to which he belongs; a personal combination of antitheses — a fop and a philosopher, a voluptuary and a moralist — a trifler in appearance, but rather one to whom trifles are instructive, than one to whom trifles are natural — an Aristippus on a limited scale, accustomed to draw sage conclusions from the follies he adopts, and while professing himself a votary of Pleasure, desirous in reality to become a disciple of Wisdom. Such a character I have found it more difficult to portray than to conceive : I have found it more difficult still, because I have with it nothing in common,* except the taste for observation, and some experience in the scenes among which it has been cast ; and it will readily be supposed that it is no easy matter to survey occurrences the most familiar through a vision, as it were, essentially and perpetually different from that through which oneself has been accustomed to view them. This difficulty in execution will perhaps be my excuse in failure ; and

* I regret extremely that by this remark I should be necessitated to relinquish the flattering character I have for so many months borne, and to undeceive not a few of my most indulgent critics, who in reviewing my work have literally considered the Author and the Hero one flesh. “We have only,” said one of them, “to complain of the Author’s egotisms ; he is perpetually talking of himself!” — Poor gentleman! from the first page to the last, the Author never uttprs a syllable. — [The few marginal notes in which the Author himself speaks, were not added till the present Edition.]

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some additional indulgence may be reasonably granted to an author who has rarely found in the egotisms of his hero a vent for his own.

With the generality of those into whose hands a novel upon manners is likely to fall, the lighter and less obvious the method in which reflection is conveyed, the greater is its chance to be received without distaste and remembered without aversion. This will be an excuse, perhaps, for the appearance of frivolities not indulged for the sake of the frivolity ; under that which has most the semblance of levity I have often been the most diligent in my endeavors to inculcate the substances of truth. The shallowest stream, whose bed every passenger imagines he surveys, may deposit some golden grains on the plain through which it flows ; and we may weave flowers not only into an idle garland, but, like the thyrsus of the ancients, over a sacred weapon.

It now only remains for me to add my hope that this edition will present the “adventures of a gentleman ” in a less imperfect shape than the last, and in the words of the erudite and memorable Joshua Barnes,* “ So to begin my intended discourse, if not altogether true, yet not wholly vain, nor perhaps deficient in what may exhilarate a witty fancy, or inform a bad moralist."

THE AUTHOR.

October , 1828.

* In the Preface to his Gerania.

PREFACE

TO

THE EDITION OF 1840.*

The holiday time of life, in which this novel was written, while accounting, perhaps in a certain gaiety of tone, for the popularity it has received, may perhaps also excuse, in some measure, its more evident deficiencies and faults. Although I trust the time has passed when it might seem necessary to protest against those critical assumptions which so long confounded the author with the hero; — although I equally trust that, even were such assumptions true, it would be scarcely necessary to dispute the justice of visiting upon later and more sobered life, the supposed foibles and levities of that thoughtless age of eighteen, in which this fiction was first begun, — yet, perhaps, some short sketch of the origin of a work, however idle, the success of which determined the literary career of the author, may not be considered altogether presumptuous or irrevelant.

While, yet, then a boy in years, but with some experience of the world, which I entered prematurely,

♦Viz., in the first collected edition of the Author’s prose works,

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Preface To The

I had the good fortune to be confined to my room by a severe illness, towards the end of a London season. All my friends were out of town, and I was left to such resources as solitude can suggest to the tedium of sickness. I amused myself by writing with incredible difficulty and labor (for till then prose was a country almost as unknown to myself as to Monsieur Jourdain) some half a dozen tales and sketches. Among them was a story called “ Mortimer, or the Memoirs of a Gentleman.” Its commencement was almost word for word the same as that of “ Pelham ; ” but the design was exactly opposite to that of the latter and later work. “Mortimer” was intended to show the manner in which the world deteriorates its votary, and “Pelham,” on the contrary, conveys the newer, and, I believe, sounder moral, of showing how a man of sense can subject the usages of the world to himself instead of being conquered by them, and gradually grow wise by the very foibles of his youth.

This tale, with the sketches written at the same period, was sent anonymously to a celebrated publisher, who considered the volume of too slight a nature for separate publication, and recommended me to select the best of the papers for a magazine. I was not at that time much inclined to a periodical mode of publishing, and thought no more of what, if* nugce to the reader, had indeed been dificiles to the author. Soon afterwards I went abroad. On my return I sent a collection of letters to Mr. Colburn

* Nugce, trifles; dijficiles, difficult.

EDITION OF 1840.

id

for publication, which, for various reasons, I afterwards worked up into a fiction, and which (greatly altered from their original form) are now known to the public under the name of “ Falkland.”

While correcting the sheets of that tale for the press, I was made aware of many of its faults. But it was not till it had been fairly before the public that I was sensible of its greatest ; namely, a sombre coloring in life, and the indulgence of a vein of sentiment, which, though common enough to all very young minds in their first bitter experience of the disappointments of the world, had certainly ceased to be new in its expression, and had never been true in its philosophy.

The effect which the composition of that work produced upon my mind, was exactly similar to that which (if I may reverently quote so illustrious an example) Goethe informs us the writing of “ Werter ” produced upon his own. I had rid my bosom of its “ perilous stuff,” — I had confessed my sins, and was absolved, — I could return to real life and its wholeso ne objects. Encouraged by the reception which “ Falkland” met with, flattering though not brilliant, I resolved to undertake a new and more important fiction. I had long been impressed with the truth of an observation of Madame de Stael, that a character at once gay and sentimental is always successful on the stage. I resolved to attempt a similar character for a novel, making the sentiment, however, infinitely less prominent than the gaiety. My boyish attempt of the “Memoirs of a Gentleman” occured to me, xii

PREFACE TO THE and I resolved upon this foundation to build my fiction. After a little consideration I determined, however, to enlarge and ennoble the original character : the character itself, of the clever man of the world corrupted by the world, was not new; it had already been represented by Mackenzie, by Moore in “ Zeluco,” and in some measure by the master-genius of Richardson itself, in the incomparable portraiture of Lovelace. The moral to be derived from such a creation seemed to me also equivocal and dubious. It is a moral of a gloomy and hopeless school. We live in the world; the great majority of us, in a state of civilization, must, more or less, be men of the world. It struck me that it would be a new, an useful, and perhaps a happy moral, to show in what manner we might redeem and brighten the common-places of life ; to prove (what is really the fact) that the lessons of society do not necessarily corrupt, and that we may be both men of the world, and even, to a certain degree, men of pleasure, and yet be something wiser — nobler — better. With this idea I formed in my mind the character of Pelham; revolving its qualities long and seriously before I attempted to describe them on paper. For the formation of my story, I studied w ith no slight attention the great works of my predecessors, and attempted to derive from that study certain rules and canons to serve me as a guide ; and, if some of my younger contemporaries whom I could name would only condescend to take the same preliminary pains that I did, I am sure that the result would be much more brilliant. It often happens to

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me to be consulted by persons about to attempt, fiction, and I invariably find that they imagine they have only to sit down and write. They forget that art does not come by inspiration, and that the novelist, dealing constantly with contrast and effect, must, in the widest and deepest sense of the word, study to be an artist. They paint pictures for Posterity without having learned to draw.

Few critics have, hitherto, sufficiently considered, and none, perhaps, have accurately defined, the peculiar characteristics of prose fiction in its distinct schools and multiform varieties : — of the two principal species, the Narrative and Dramatic, I chose for “ Pelham” my models in the former; and when it was objected, at the first appearance of that work," that the plot was not carried on through every incident and every scene, the critics, evidently confounded the two classes of fiction I have referred to, and asked from a work in one what ought only to be the attributes of a work in the other : the dazzling celebrity of Scott, who deals almost solely with the dramatic species of fiction, made them forgetful of the examples, equally illustrious., in the narrative form of romance, to be found in Smollett, in Fielding, and Le Sage. Perhaps, indeed, there is in “ Pelham” more of plot and of continued interest, and less of those inciden ts that do not either bring out the character of the hero, or conduce to the catastrophe, than the narrative order may be said to require, or than is warranted by the great examples I have ventured to name.

After due preparation, I commenced and finished

XIV

PRE FACE TO THE the first volume of “ Pelham.” Various circumstances then suspended my labors, till several months afterwards I found myself quietly buried in the country, and with so much leisure on my hands, that I was driven, almost in self-defence from ennui, to continue and conclude my attempt.

It may serve perhaps to stimulate the courage and sustain the hopes of others to remark, that “the Reader” to whom the MS. was submitted by the publisher, pronounced the most unfavorable and damning opinion upon its chances of success, — an opinion fortunately reversed by Mr. Ollier, the able and ingenious author of “Inesilla,” to whom it was then referred. The book was published, and I may add, that for about two months it appeared in a fair way of perishing prematurely in its cradle. With the exception of two most flattering and generouslyindulgent notices in the “Literary Gazette” and the “ Examiner,” and a very encouraging and friendly criticism in the “Atlas,” it was received by the critics with indifference or abuse. They mistook its purport, and translated its satire literally. But about the third month it rose rapidly into the favor it has since continued to maintain. Whether it answered all the objects it attempted I cannot pretend to say ; one at least I imagine that it did answer : I think, above most works, it contributed to put an end to the Satanic mania, — to turn the thoughts and ambition of young gentlemen without neckcloths, and young clerks who were sallow, from playing the Corsair, and boasting that they were villains. If, mistaking

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the irony of Pelham, they went to the extreme of emulating the foibles which that hero attributes to himself — those were foibles at least more harmless, and even more manly and noble, than the conceit of a general detestation of mankind, or the vanity of storming our pity by lamentations over imaginary sorrows, and sombre hints at the fatal burthen of inexpiable crimes.*

Such was the history of a publication, which if not actually my first, was the one whose fate was always intended to decide me whether to conclude or continue my attempts as an author.

I can repeat, unaffectedly, that I have indulged this egotism, not only as a gratification to that common curiosity which is felt by all relative to the early works of an author, who, whatever be his faults and demerits, has once obtained the popular ear ; — but also as affording, perhaps, the following lessons to younger writers of less experience but of more genius than myself. First, in attempting fiction, it may serve to show the use of a critical study of its rules, for to that study I owe every success in literature I have obtained ; and in the mere art of composition, if I have now obtained to even too rapid a facility, I must own that that facility has been purchased by a most laborious slowness in the first commencement, and a resolute refusal to write a second sentence until

* Sir Reginald Glanville was drawn purposely of the would-be Byron School as a foil to Pelham. For one who would think of imitating the first, ten thousand would be unawares attracted to the last.

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I had expressed my meaning in the best manner I could in the first. And, secondly, it may prove the very little value of those “cheers,” of the want of which Sir Egerton Brydges* so feelingly complains, and which he considers so necessary towards the obtaining for an author, no matter what his talents, his proper share of popularity. I knew not a single critic, and scarcely a single author, when I began to write. I have never received to this day a single " word of encouragement from any of those writers who were considered at one time the dispensers of reputation. Long after my name was not quite unknown in every other country where English literature is received, the great quarterly journals of my own disdained to recognize my existence. Let no man cry out then “ for cheers,” or for literary patronage, and let those aspirants, who are often now pleased to write to me, lamenting their want of interest and their non-acquaintance with critics, learn from the author (insignificant though he be) who addresses them in sympathy and fellowship, — that a man’s labors are his best patrons, — that the public is the only critic that has no interest and no motive in underrating him, — that the world of an author is a mighty circle of which enmity and envy can penetrate but a petty segment, and that the pride of carving with our own hands our own name is worth all the “ cheers” in the world. Long live Sidney’s gallant and lofty motto, “Aut viam inveniam aut faciam /” f

* In the melancholy and painful pages of his autobiography, f I will either find a way or make it.

ADVEKTISEMENT

TO

THE PRESENT EDITION.

No ! — you cannot guess, my dear reader, how long my pen has rested over the virgin surface of this paper, before even that “ No,” which now stands out so bluffly and manfully, took heart and stept forth. If, peradventure, thou shouldst, 0 reader, be that rarity in these days — a reader who has never been an author — thou canst form no conception of the strange aspect which the first page of a premeditated composition will often present to the curious investigator into the initials of things. There is a sad mania now-a-days for collecting autographs — would that some such collector would devote his researches to the first pages of auctorial manuscripts ! He would then form some idea of the felicitous significance of that idiomatic phrase, 11 to cudgel the brains ! ” — Out nf what grotesque zigzags, and fantastic arabesques,

2 * b ( xvii )

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— out of wliat irrelevant, dreamy illustrations from the sister art, — houses, and trees, and profile sketches of men, nightmares, and chimeras — out of what massacres of whole lines, prematurely and timidly ventured forth as forlorn hopes, — would he see the first intelligible words creep into actual life — shy streaks of light, emerging from the chaos ! For that rash promise of mine, that each work ir this edition of works so numerous, shall have its own new and special Preface, seems to me hard, in this instance, to fulfil. Another Preface ! what for? Two Prefaces to “ Pelham” already exist, wherein all that I would say is said ! And in going back through that long and crowded interval of twenty years, since the first appearance of this work, — what shadows rise to beckon me away through the glades and alleys in that dim labyrinth of the Past ! Infant Hopes, scarce born ere fated, poor innocents, to die — gazing upon me with reproachful eyes, as if I myself had been their unfeeling butcher ; — audacious Enterprises boldly begun, to cease in abrupt whim, or chilling doubt — looking now through the mists, zoophital or amphibious, like those borderers on the animal and vegetable life, which flash on us with the seeming flutter of a wing, to subside away into rooted stems and withering leaves. How can I escape the phantom throng ? How return to the starting-post, and recall the ardent emotions with which youth sprung forth to the goal ? To write fitting Preface to this work, which, if not my first, was the first which won an t

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audience and secured a reader, I must myself become a phantom, with the phantom crowd. It is the ghost of my youth that I must call up. What we are , alone hath flesh and blood — what we have been, like the what we shall be, is an idea ; and no more ! An idea how dim and impalpable ! This our sense of identity, this “I” of ours, which is the single thread that continues from first to last — single thread that binds flowers changed every day, and withered every night — how thin and meagre is it of itself — how difficult to lay hold of ! When we say “ I remember ” how vague a sentiment we utter ! how different it is to say “ I feel !" And when in this effort of memory we travel back all the shadow-land of years — when we say “ I remember,” what is it we retain, but some poor solitary fibre in the airy mesh of that old gossamer, which floated between earth and heaven — moist with the dews and sparkling in the dawn? — Some one incident, some one affection we recall, but not all the associations that surrounded it, all the companions of the brain or the heart, with which it formed one of the harmonious contemporaneous ring. Scarcely even have we traced and seized one fine filament in the broken web, ere it is lost again. In the inextricable confusion of old ideas, many that seem of the time we seek to grasp again, but were not so, seize and distract us. From the clear effort we sink into the vague reverie ; the Present hastens to recall and dash us onward, and few, leaving the actual world around them when they say “ I remember ” do not

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wake as from a dream, with a baffled sigh, and murmur “ No, I forget.” And therefore, if a new Preface to a work written twenty years ago, should contain some elucidation of the aims and objects with which it was composed, or convey some idea of the writer's mind at that time, my pen might well rest long over the blank page ; — and houses and trees, and profile sketches of men, nightmares and chimeras, and whole passages scrawled and erased, might well illustrate the barren travail of one who sits down to say “ I remember ! ”

What changes in the outer world since this book was written ! What changes of thrones and dynasties ! Through what cycles of hope and fear has a generation gone ! And in that inner world of Thought what old ideas have returned to claim the royalty of new ones ! What new ones (new ones then) have receded out of sight, in the ebb and flow of the human mind, which, whatever the cant phrase may imply, advances in no direct steadfast progress, but gains here to lose there ; — a tide, not a march. So, too, in that slight surface of either world, “ the manners,” superficies alike of the action and the thought of an age, the ploughshares of twenty years have turned up a new soil.

The popular changes in the Constitution have brought the several classes more intimately into connection with each other ; most of the old affectations of fashion and exclusiveness are out of date. We have not talked of equality, like our neighbors the

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French, but insensibly and naturally, the tone of manners has admitted much of the frankness of the principle, without the unnecessary rudeness of the pretence. I am not old enough yet to he among the indiscriminate praisers of the past, and therefore I recognize cheerfully an extraordinary improvement in the intellectual and moral features of the English world, since I first entered it as an observer. There is a far greater earnestness of purpose, a higher culture, more generous and genial views, amongst the young men of the rising generation than were common in the last. The old divisions of party politics remain ; but among all divisions there is greater desire of identification with the people. Rank is more sensible of its responsibilities, Property of its duties. Amongst the clergy of all sects, the improvement in zeal, in education, in active care for their flocks, is strikingly noticeable; the middle class have become more instructed and refined, and yet, (while fused with the highest in their intellectual tendencies, reading the same books, cultivating the same accomplishments) — • they have extended their sympathies more largely amongst the humblest. And, in our towns especially, what advances have been made amongst the operative population ! I do not here refer to that branch of cultivation which comprises the questions that belong to political inquiry, but to the general growth of more refined and less polemical knowledge. Cheap books have come in vogue as a fashion during the last twenty years — books addressed, not as cheap books

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were once, to tlie passions, but to the understanding and the taste — books not written down to the supposed level of uninformed and humble readers, but such books as refine the gentleman and instruct the scholar. The arts of design have been more appreciated — the Beautiful has been admitted into the pursuits of labor as a principle — Religion has been regaining the ground it lost in the latter half of the last century. What is technically called education (education of the school and the schoolmaster), has made less progress than it might. But that inexpressible diffusion of oral information which is the onty culture the old Athenians knew, and which in the ready transmission of ideas, travels like light from lip to lip, has been insensibly educating the adult generation. In spite of all the dangers that menace the advance of the present century, I am convinced that classes amongst us are far more united than thev were in the latter years of George the Fourth. A vast mass of discontent exists amongst the operatives, it is true, and Chartism is but one of its symptoms ; yet that that discontent is more obvious than formerly, is a proof that men’s eyes and men’s ears are more open to acknowledge its existence — to examine and listen to its causes. Thinking persons now occupy themselves with that great reality — the People; and questions concerning their social welfare, their health, their education, their interests, their rights, which philosophers alone entertained twmnty years ago, are now on the lips of practical men, and in the heavts

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of all. It is tills greater earnestness — this profounder gravity of purpose and of view, which forms the most cheering characteristic of the present time ; and though that time has its peculiar faults and vices, this is not the place to enlarge on them. I have done, f nd may yet do so, elsewhere. This work is the picture of manners in certain classes of society twenty years ago, and in that respect I believe it to be true and faithful. Nor the less so, that under the frivolities of the hero, it is easy to recognize the substance of those more serious and solid qualities which Time has educed from the generation and the class he represents. Mr. Pelham studying Mills on Government and the Political Economists, was thought by some an incongruity in character at the day in which Mr. Pelham first appeared — the truth of that conception is apparent now, at least to the observant. The fine gentlemen of that day were preparing themselves for the after things, which were already foreshadowed ; and some of those, then best known in clubs and drawing-rooms, have been since foremost and boldest, nor least instructed, in the great struggles of public life.

I trust that this work may now be read without prejudice from the silly error that long sought to identify the author with the hero.

Parely indeed, if ever, can we detect the real likeness of an author of fiction in any single one of his creations. He may live in each of them, but only for the time. He migrates into a new form with

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e very new character he creates. He may have in himself a quality, here and there, in common with each, hut others so widely onposite, as to destroy all the resemblance you fancy for a moment you have “ discovered. However this be, the author has the advantage over his work — that the last remains stationary, with its faults or merits, and the former has the power to improve. The one remains the index of its day — the other advances with the century. That in a book written in extreme youth, there may be much that I would not write now in mature manhood, is obvious; that in spite of its defects, the work should have retained to this day the popularity it enjoyed in the first six months of its birth, is the best apology that can be made for its defects.