Falkland, Book 1.
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron, 1803-1873
English
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FALKLAND
By Edward Bulwer-Lytton
PREFATORY NOTE TO THE PRESENT EDITION.
"FALKLAND" is the earliest of Lord Lytton's prose fictions. Published
before "Pelham," it was written in the boyhood of its illustrious author.
In the maturity of his manhood and the fulness of his literary popularity
he withdrew it from print. This is one of the first English editions of
his collected works in which the tale reappears. It is because the
morality of it was condemned by his experienced judgment, that the author
of "Falkland" deliberately omitted it from each of the numerous reprints
of his novels and romances which were published in England during his
lifetime.
With the consent of the author's son, "Falkland" is included in the
present edition of his collected works.
In the first place, this work has been for many years, and still is,
accessible to English readers in every country except England. The
continental edition of it, published by Baron Tauchnitz, has a wide
circulation; and since for this reason the book cannot practically be
withheld from the public, it is thought desirable that the publication of
it should at least be accompanied by some record of the abovementioned
fact.
In the next place, the considerations which would naturally guide an
author of established reputation in the selection of early compositions
for subsequent republication, are obviously inapplicable to the
preparation of a posthumous standard edition of his collected works.
Those who read the tale of "Falkland" eight-and-forty years ago' have
long survived the age when character is influenced by the literature of
sentiment. The readers to whom it is now presented are not Lord Lytton's
contemporaries; they are his posterity. To them his works have already
become classical. It is only upon the minds of the young that the works
of sentiment have any appreciable moral influence. But the sentiment of
each age is peculiar to itself; and the purely moral influence of
sentimental fiction seldom survives the age to which it was first
addressed. The youngest and most impressionable reader of such works as
the "Nouvelle Hemise," "Werther," "The Robbers," "Corinne," or "Rene," is
not now likely to be morally influenced, for good or ill, by the
perusal of those masterpieces of genius. Had Byron attained the age at
which great authors most realise the responsibilities of fame and genius,
he might possibly have regretted, and endeavoured to suppress, the
publication of "Don Juan;" but the possession of that immortal poem is an
unmixed benefit to posterity, and the loss of it would have been an
irreparable misfortune.
"Falkland," although the earliest, is one of the most carefully finished
of its author's compositions. All that was once turbid, heating,
unwholesome in the current of sentiment which flows through this history
of a guilty passion, "Death's immortalising winter" has chilled and
purified. The book is now a harmless, and, it may be hoped, a not
uninteresting, evidence of the precocity of its author's genius. As
such, it is here reprinted.
[It was published in 1827]
FALKLAND.
BOOK I.
FROM ERASMUS FALKLAND, ESQ., TO THE HON. FREDERICK MONKTON.
L---, May --, 1822.
You are mistaken, my dear Monkton! Your description of the gaiety of
"the season" gives me no emotion. You speak of pleasure; I remember no
labour so wearisome; you enlarge upon its changes; no sameness appears to
me so monotonous. Keep, then, your pity for those who require it. From
the height of my philosophy I compassionate you. No one is so vain as a
recluse; and your jests at my hermitship and hermitage cannot penetrate
the folds of a self-conceit, which does not envy you in your suppers at
D---- House, nor even in your waltzes with Eleanor.
It is a ruin rather than a house which I inhabit. I have not been at
L----- since my return from abroad, and during those years the place has
gone rapidly to decay; perhaps, for that reason, it suits me better, _tel
maitre telle maison_.
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