PREFACE.
The following passages are extracts from the
prefaces to the English editions of the two works
included in this book—“Inklings of Adventure”
and “Loiterings of Travel:”—
It will be seen, by many marks in the narratives
which follow, that they are not the work of imagination.
The dramas of real life are seldom well
wound up, and the imperfectness of plot which
might be objected to them as tales, will prove to
the observant reader that they are drawn more
from memory than fancy. It is because they are
thus imperfect in dramatic accomplishment, that I
have called them by the name under which they
have been introduced. They are rather intimations
of what seemed to lead to a romantic termination
than complete romances—in short, they are
Inklings of Adventure. The adventures were jotted
down—the events recorded—the poems indited,
and the letters despatched, while the thought was
freshly born, or the incident freshly heard or remembered—at
the first place which afforded the
leisure—in short, during Loiterings of Travel.
For the living portraitures of the book I have a
word to say. That sketches of the whim of the
hour, its manners, fashions, and those ephemeral
trifles, which, slight as they are, constitute in a
great measure its “form and pressure”—that these,
and familiar traits of persons distinguished in our
time, are popular and amusing, I have the most
weighty reasons certainly to know. They sell.
“Are they innocent?” is the next question. And
to this I know no more discreet answer than that
mine have offended nobody but the critics. It has
been said that sketches of contemporary society
require little talent, and belong to an inferior order
of literature. Perhaps. Yet they must be well
done to attract notice at all; and if true and graphic,
they are not only excellent material for future
biographers, but to all who live out of the magic
circles of fashion and genius, they are more than
amusing—they are instructive. To such persons,
living authors, orators, and statesmen, are as much
characters of history, and society in cities is as
much a subject of philosophic curiosity, as if a
century had intervened. The critic who finds
these matters “stale and unprofitable,” lives in the
circles described, and the pictures drawn at his
elbow lack to his eye the effect of distance; but
the same critic would delight in a familiar sketch
of a supper with “my lord of Leicester” in Elizabeth's
time, of an evening with Raleigh and
Spenser, or perhaps he would be amused with a
description by an eye-witness of Mary Queen of
Scots, riding home to Holyrood with her train of
admiring nobles. I have not named in the same
sentence the ever-deplored blank in our knowledge
of Shakspere's person and manners. What
would not a trait by the most unskilful hand be
worth now—if it were nothing but how he gave
the good-morrow to Ben Jonson in Eastcheap?
How far sketches of the living are a breach of
courtesy committed by the author toward the persons
described, depends, of course, on the temper
in which they are done. To select a subject for
complimentary description is to pay the most undoubted
tribute to celebrity, and, as far as I have
observed, most distinguished persons sympathize
with the public interest in them and their belongings,
and are willing to have their portraits drawn,
either with pen or pencil, by as many as offer
them the compliment. It would be ungracious to
the admiring world if they were not.
The outer man is a debtor for the homage paid
to the soul which inhabits him, and he is bound,
like a porter at the gate, to satisfy all reasonable
curiosity as to the habits of the nobler and invisible
tenant. He owes his peculiarities to the
world.
For myself, I am free to confess that no age
interests me like the present; that no pictures of
society since the world began, are half so entertaining
to me as those of English society in our
day; and that, whatever comparison the living
great men of England may sustain with those of
other days, there is no doubt in my mind that English
social life, at the present moment, is at a higher
pitch of refinement and cultivation than it was
ever here or elsewhere since the world began—
consequently it, and all who form and figure in it,
are dignified and legitimate subjects of curiosity
and speculation. The Count Mirabel and Lady
Bellair of D'Israeli's last romance, are, to my
mind, the cleverest portraits, as well as the most
entertaining characters, of modern novel-writing;
and D'Israeli, by the way, is the only English author
who seems to have the power of enlarging
his horizon, and getting a perspective view of the
times he lives in. His novels are far more popular
in America than in England, because the Atlantic
is to us a century. We picture to ourselves
England and Victoria as we picture to ourselves
England and Elizabeth. We relish an anecdote
of Sheridan Knowles as we should one of Ford
or Marlowe. This immense ocean between us is
like the distance of time; and while all that is
minute and bewildering is lost to us, the greater
lights of the age and the prominent features of society
stand out apart, and we judge of them like
posterity. Much as I have myself lived in England,
I have never been able to remove this long
perspective from between my eye and the great men
of whom I read and thought on the other side of
the Atlantic. When I find myself in the same
room with the hero of Waterloo, my blood creeps
as if I had seen Cromwell or Marlborough; and
I sit down afterward to describe how he looked,
with the eagerness with which I should communicate
to my friends some disinterred description
of these renowned heroes by a contemporary
writer. If Cornelius Agrippa were redivivus, in
short, and would show me his magic mirror, I
should as soon call up Moore as Dryden—Wordsworth
or Wilson as soon as Pope or Crichton.
