A STRANGE STORY
by Edward Bulwer Lytton
(Lord Lytton)
PREFACE.
Of the many illustrious thinkers whom the schools of France have
contributed to the intellectual philosophy of our age, Victor Cousin,
the most accomplished, assigns to Maine de Biran the rank of the most
original.
In the successive developments of his own mind, Maine de Biran may,
indeed, be said to represent the change that has been silently at work
throughout the general mind of Europe since the close of the last
century. He begins his career of philosopher with blind faith in
Condillac and Materialism. As an intellect severely conscientious in
the pursuit of truth expands amidst the perplexities it revolves,
phenomena which cannot be accounted for by Condillac's sensuous theories
open to his eye. To the first rudimentary life of man, the animal life,
"characterized by impressions, appetites, movements, organic in their
origin and ruled by the Law of Necessity," [1] he is compelled to add,
"the second, or human life, from which Free-will and Self-consciousness
emerge." He thus arrives at the union of mind and matter; but still a
something is wanted,--some key to the marvels which neither of these
conditions of vital being suffices to explain. And at last the
grand self-completing Thinker attains to the Third Life of Man in Man's
Soul.
"There are not," says this philosopher, towards the close of his last
and loftiest work,--"there are not only two principles opposed to
each other in Man,--there are three. For there are in him three
lives and three orders of faculties. Though all should be in accord
and in harmony between the sensitive and the active faculties
which constitute Man, there would still be a nature superior, a
third life which would not be satisfied; which would make felt
(ferait sentir) the truth that there is another happiness, another
wisdom, another perfection, at once above the greatest human
happiness, above the highest wisdom, or intellectual and moral
perfection of which the human being is susceptible." [2]
Now, as Philosophy and Romance both take their origin in the Principle of
Wonder, so in the "Strange Story" submitted to the Public it will be
seen that Romance, through the freest exercise of its wildest vagaries,
conducts its bewildered hero towards the same goal to which Philosophy
leads its luminous Student, through far grander portents of Nature, far
higher visions of Supernatural Power, than Fable can yield to Fancy.
That goal is defined in these noble words:--
"The relations (rapports) which exist between the elements and the
products of the three lives of Man are the subjects of meditation,
the fairest and finest, but also the most difficult. The Stoic
Philosophy shows us all which can be most elevated in active life;
but it makes abstraction of the animal nature, and absolutely fails
to recognize all which belongs to the life of the spirit.
Its practical morality is beyond the forces of humanity. Christianity
alone embraces the whole Man. It dissimulates none of the sides of
his nature, and avails itself of his miseries and his weakness in
order to conduct him to his end in showing him all the want that he
has of a succor more exalted." [3]
In the passages thus quoted, I imply one of the objects for which
this tale has been written; and I cite them, with a wish to acknowledge
one of those priceless obligations which writings the lightest and most
fantastic often incur to reasoners the most serious and profound.
But I here construct a romance which should have, as a romance,
some interest for the general reader. I do not elaborate a treatise
submitted to the logic of sages. And it is only when "in fairy fiction
drest" that Romance gives admission to "truths severe."
I venture to assume that none will question my privilege to avail
myself of the marvellous agencies which have ever been at the legitimate
command of the fabulist.
To the highest form of romantic narrative, the Epic, critics, indeed,
have declared that a supernatural machinery is indispensable. That the
Drama has availed itself of the same license as the Epic, it would be
unnecessary to say to the countrymen of Shakspeare, or to the generation
that is yet studying the enigmas of Goethe's "Faust." Prose Romance has
immemorially asserted, no less than the Epic or the Drama, its heritage
in the Realm of the Marvellous. The interest which attaches to the
supernatural is sought in the earliest Prose Romance which modern times
take from the ancient, and which, perhaps, had its origin in the lost
Novels of Miletus; [4] and the right to invoke such interest has, ever
since, been maintained by Romance through all varieties of form and
fancy,--from the majestic epopee of "Telemaque" to the graceful fantasies
of "Undine," or the mighty mockeries of "Gulliver's Travels" down to
such comparatively commonplace elements of wonder as yet preserve
from oblivion "The Castle of Otranto" and "The Old English Baron."
Now, to my mind, the true reason why a supernatural agency is
indispensable to the conception of the Epic, is that the Epic is the
highest and the completest form in which Art can express either Man or
Nature, and that without some gleams of the supernatural, Man is not
man nor Nature, nature.
It is said, by a writer to whom an eminent philosophical
critic justly applies the epithets of "pious and profound:" [5]
"Is it unreasonable to confess that we believe in God, not by reason
of the Nature which conceals Him, but by reason of the Supernatural
in Man which alone reveals and proves Him to exist?... Man reveals
God: for Man, by his intelligence, rises above Nature; and in virtue
of this intelligence is conscious of himself as a power not only
independent of, but opposed to, Nature, and capable of resisting,
conquering, and controlling her."[6]
If the meaning involved in the argument, of which I have here made
but scanty extracts, be carefully studied, I think that we shall find
deeper reasons than the critics who dictated canons of taste to the last
century discovered,--why the supernatural is indispensable to the Epic,
and why it is allowable to all works of imagination, in which Art looks
on Nature with Man's inner sense of a something beyond and above her.
But the Writer who, whether in verse or prose, would avail himself
of such sources of pity or terror as flow from the Marvellous, can
only attain his object in proportion as the wonders he narrates are of a
kind to excite the curiosity of the age he addresses.
In the brains of our time, the faculty of Causation is very markedly
developed. People nowadays do not delight in the Marvellous according
to the old childlike spirit. They say in one breath, "Very extraordinary!"
and in the next breath ask, "How do you account for it?" If the Author of
this work has presumed to borrow from science some elements of interest for
Romance, he ventures to hope that no thoughtful reader--and certainly no
true son of science--will be disposed to reproach him. In fact, such
illustrations from the masters of Thought were essential to the
completion of the purpose which pervades the work.
That purpose, I trust, will develop itself in proportion as the story
approaches the close; and whatever may appear violent or melodramatic in
the catastrophe, will, perhaps, be found, by a reader capable
of perceiving the various symbolical meanings conveyed in the story,
essential to the end in which those meanings converge, and towards
which the incidents that give them the character and interest of
of fiction, have been planned and directed from the commencement.
Of course, according to the most obvious principles of art, the
narrator of a fiction must be as thoroughly in earnest as if he were
the narrator of facts. One could not tell the most extravagant
fairy-tale so as to rouse and sustain the attention of the most
infantine listener, if the tale were told as if the taleteller did not
believe in it. But when the reader lays down this "Strange Story,"
perhaps he will detect, through all the haze of romance, the outlines of
these images suggested to his reason: Firstly, the image of sensuous,
soulless Nature, such as the Materialist had conceived it; secondly, the
image of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries from
the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all
kinds of perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation
before it settles at last into the simple faith which unites the
philosopher and the infant; and thirdly, the image of the erring but
pure-thoughted visionary, seeking over-much on this earth to separate
soul from mind, till innocence itself is led astray by a phantom, and
reason is lost in the space between earth and the stars. Whether in
these pictures there be any truth worth the implying, every reader
must judge for himself; and if he doubt or deny that there be any
such truth, still, in the process of thought which the doubt or
denial enforces, he may chance on a truth which it pleases himself
to discover.
"Most of the Fables of AEsop,"--thus says Montaigne in his
charming essay "Of Books"[7]--"have several senses and meanings, of
which the Mythologists choose some one that tallies with the fable.
But for the most part 't is only what presents itself at the first
view, and is superficial; there being others more lively, essential,
and internal, into which they had not been able to penetrate;
and"--adds Montaigne--"the case is the very same with me."
[1] OEuvres inedites de Maine de Biran, vol. i. See introduction.
[2] OEuvres inedites de Maine de Biran, vol. iii. p. 546 (Anthropologie).
[3] OEuvres inedites de Maine de Biran, vol. iii. p. 524.
[4] "The Golden Ass" of Apuleius.
[5] Sir William Hamilton: Lectures on Metaphysics, p. 40.
[6] Jacobi: Von der Gottlichen Dingen; Werke, p. 424-426.
[7] Translation, 1776, Yol. ii. p. 103.
