Devereux | Page 2

generally pleased with his work less in proportion as it is good, than in
proportion as it fulfils the idea with which he commenced it. He is

rarely perhaps an accurate judge how far the execution is in itself faulty
or meritorious; but he judges with tolerable success how far it
accomplishes the end and objects of the conception. He is pleased with
his work, in short, according as he can say, "This has expressed what I
meant it to convey." But the reader, who is not in the secret of the
author's original design, usually views the work through a different
medium; and is perhaps in this the wiser critic of the two: for the book
that wanders the most from the idea which originated it may often be
better than that which is rigidly limited to the unfolding and
/denouement/ of a single conception. If we accept this solution, we may
be enabled to understand why an author not unfrequently makes
favourites of some of his productions most condemned by the public.
For my own part, I remember that "Devereux" pleased me better than
"Pelham" or "The Disowned," because the execution more exactly
corresponded with the design. It expressed with tolerable fidelity what I
meant it to express. That was a happy age, my dear Auldjo, when, on
finishing a work, we could feel contented with our labour, and fancy
we had done our best! Now, alas I I have learned enough of the
wonders of the Art to recognize all the deficiencies of the Disciple; and
to know that no author worth the reading can ever in one single work
do half of which he is capable.
What man ever wrote anything really good who did not feel that he had
the ability to write something better? Writing, after all, is a cold and a
coarse interpreter of thought. How much of the imagination, how much
of the intellect, evaporates and is lost while we seek to embody it in
words! Man made language and God the genius. Nothing short of an
eternity could enable men who imagine, think, and feel, to express all
they have imagined, thought, and felt. Immortality, the spiritual desire,
is the intellectual /necessity/.
In "Devereux" I wished to portray a man flourishing in the last century
with the train of mind and sentiment peculiar to the present; describing
a life, and not its dramatic epitome, the historical characters introduced
are not closely woven with the main plot, like those in the fictions of
Sir Walter Scott, but are rather, like the narrative romances of an earlier
school, designed to relieve the predominant interest, and give a greater
air of truth and actuality to the supposed memoir. It is a fiction which
deals less with the Picturesque than the Real. Of the principal character

thus introduced (the celebrated and graceful, but charlatanic,
Bolingbroke) I still think that my sketch, upon the whole, is
substantially just. We must not judge of the politicians of one age by
the lights of another. Happily we now demand in a statesman a desire
for other aims than his own advancement; but at that period ambition
was almost universally selfish--the Statesman was yet a Courtier--a
man whose very destiny it was to intrigue, to plot, to glitter, to deceive.
It is in proportion as politics have ceased to be a secret science, in
proportion as courts are less to be flattered and tools to be managed,
that politicians have become useful and honest men; and the statesman
now directs a people, where once he outwitted an ante-chamber.
Compare Bolingbroke--not with the men and by the rules of this day,
but with the men and by the rules of the last. He will lose nothing in
comparison with a Walpole, with a Marlborough on the one side,--with
an Oxford or a Swift upon the other.
And now, my dear Auldjo, you have had enough of my egotisms. As
our works grow up,--like old parents, we grow garrulous, and love to
recur to the happier days of their childhood; we talk over the pleasant
pain they cost us in their rearing, and memory renews the season of
dreams and hopes; we speak of their faults as of things past, of their
merits as of things enduring: we are proud to see them still living, and,
after many a harsh ordeal and rude assault, keeping a certain station in
the world; we hoped perhaps something better for them in their cradle,
but as it is we have good cause to be contented. You, a fellow-author,
and one whose spirited and charming sketches embody so much of
personal adventure, and therefore so much connect themselves with
associations of real life as well as of the studious closet; /you/ know,
and must feel with me,