I do not inscribe to you this book because it contains anything that is worthy of the beloved and honoured name with which I thus seek to associate it : nor yet, because I would avail myself of a vulgar pretext to display in public an affection that is best honoured by the silence which it renders sacred.

Feelings only such as those with which, in days when there existed for me no critic less gentle than yourself, I brought to you my childish manuscripts; feelings only such as those which have, in later years, associated with your heart all that has moved or occupied my own-lead me once more to seek assurance from the grasp of that hand which has hitherto been my guide and comfort through the life I owe to you.

And as in childhood, when existence had no toil beyond the day's simple lesson, no ambition beyond the neighbouring approval of the night, I brought to you the morning's task for the evening's sanction, so now I bring to you this self-appointed task-work of maturer years; less confident indeed of your approval, but not less confident of your love; and anxious only to realize your presence between myself and the public, and to mingle with those severer voices to whose final sentence I submit my work, the beloved and gracious accents of your own.

VIENNA, March, 1860.

OWEN MEREDITH.

PREFACE

ΤΟ

THE COLLECTED EDITION.

(LUCILE, THIRD EDITION.)

THIS book represents the result of an experiment so alien to my present appreciation of the nature and conditions of verse that I could now, on this ground, have wished to withdraw it from print, if my so doing were not liable to be interpreted as an acquiescence in the propriety of certain charges, for reference to which the most fitting occasion is furnished by the reappearance of the book in the present collection of early What I have here to say is rendered necessary by exceptional circumstances, and is explanatory, not of the contents of the book, but of the conduct of its author. Explanations of this kind need no apology, if they are brief. Mine shall be so.

verse.

A portion of the narrative material of Lucile is taken from a prose romance,* by Madame George Sand; a writer, whose works are familiar to the entire novel-reading public of Europe, and whose wide and well-merited celebrity is, I conceive, sufficient to refute, and should have been sufficient to prevent, the imputa

* Lavinia.

tion of any desire upon my part to conceal an obligation, the legitimacy of which appears to me indisputable. In a preface, which was written for publication with the first edition of Lucile, the full extent of that obligation was minutely stated, in connection with the reasons which had induced the author to borrow as much of his narrative material as could be made compatible with the special purpose of his poem: reasons which I still believe to be sound, and for which, I think, high authority exists. That preface, I regret to say, was suppressed, partly in consequence of a belief that the great popularity of the beautiful little prose tale from which some of the incidents in Lucile are borrowed was such as to render uncalled for any prefatory reference thereto, and partly, also, in consequence of an apprehension, which I yet entertain, that, as a general rule, explanatory prefaces and notes to poems. are out of place. In this case, however, I cannot too greatly deplore an error of judgment which has placed me under the necessity of saying now what might, with greater propriety, have been said then, and replying, in the present edition of this book, to accusations which a very few words, prefixed to the first edition of it, would, I trust, have sufficed to prevent.

I now desire to assure, first of all, that great writer to whose genius I am a humble but not ungrateful debtor, and, secondly, those critics by whom Lucile has been described as a mere translation, that I exceedingly regret,—not having borrowed so much—but having only been able to borrow so little of the narrative material of this poem from "Lavinia.” If, compatibly with the purpose of the poem, I could

"La

have taken the entire narrative of it, either from vinia," or from any other prose story, I would gladly have done so. That purpose, whether good or bad, is my own, and worked out in my own way. The whole amount of narrative material adopted from the prose story is confined to the opening portion of a poem consisting of twelve Cantos. Every character in Lucile is fundamentally different from any character in "Lavinia : and, in consequence of this essential difference, it has been necessary to alter materially even those situations and incidents in which the narrative of the poem most closely follows that of the prose

romance.

I state this as a matter of fact, not as a matter of principle. The more or less of my obligation to the prose of Madame Sand in no wise affects the legitimacy of it. The immemorial privilege of the poet (or writer in verse) to take his narrative material, in whole or in part, from the work of any prose writer, whether contemporary or antecedent, cannot, I think, be seriously questioned. Chaucer made narrative poems, and Shakespeare plays, out of contemporary novels. Nor did those great writers disdain the utmost fidelity, compatible with the purpose of their own works, in the reproduction of materials borrowed by them from contemporary fiction. It may be said, however, that what was lawful to Shakespeare and Chaucer is not lawful to a modern poet; because the state of literature, as well as of public culture, is now very different from what it was in the days of those poets. I need not discuss this opinion because, whether it be right or wrong in a general way, it is inapplicable to Lucile. The

French novel is now as noticeable and characteristic a feature of the current literature of Europe, as the Italian novel was in the days of Chaucer and in the days of Shakespeare. The attempt to embody in verse the sentiment and character of these contemporary fictions in other words, to poeticise the French novel, is as new now as the attempt to poeticise the Italian novel was new then. What was necessary, and therefore lawful, to the execution of any such attempt in those days, is equally necessary, and therefore equally lawful, to the execution of any similar attempt in these days. The advisableness, or propriety, of the attempt made in Lucile to poeticise the French novel, and the success of that attempt, are open to question. The legitimacy of the only means available for the attempt is not.

As regards the charge of plagiarism brought against Lucile, I apprehend, therefore, that, neither in the fact of my obligation for narrative material to the prose of Madame Sand, nor in the fidelity with which I have endeavoured to follow so much of the prose story as was compatible with the purpose and character of the poem, any grounds exist for such a charge. I might, indeed, with far greater propriety and justice, have been accused of plagiarising from Alfred de Muset; some of whose best verses were closely though clumsily imitated by some of the worst verses in the first edition of Lucile. Of these thefts, into which I was betrayed by the recollection of some lines recited to me by a French friend at a time when his visits were pleasant interruptions to the solitude of a sick bed, I was not conscious until it was, unfortunately, too late either to