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Pausanias, the Spartan The Haunted and the Haunters, an Unfinished Historical Romance By: Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) |
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THE HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTERS. An Unfinished Historical Romance BY THE LATE LORD LYTTON EDITED BY HIS SON
Dedication
TO THE REV. BENJAMIN HALL KENNEDY, D.D. CANON OF ELY, AND REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. MY DEAR DR. KENNEDY, Revised by your helpful hand, and corrected by your accurate
scholarship, to whom may these pages be so fitly inscribed as to that
one of their author's earliest and most honoured friends,[1] whose
generous assistance has enabled me to place them before the public in
their present form? It is fully fifteen, if not twenty, years since my father commenced
the composition of an historical romance on the subject of Pausanias,
the Spartan Regent. Circumstances, which need not here be recorded,
compelled him to lay aside the work thus begun. But the subject
continued to haunt his imagination and occupy his thoughts. He detected
in it singular opportunities for effective exercise of the gifts most
peculiar to his genius; and repeatedly, in the intervals of other
literary labour, he returned to the task which, though again and again
interrupted, was never abandoned. To that rare combination of the
imaginative and practical faculties which characterized my father's
intellect, and received from his life such varied illustration, the
story of Pausanias, indeed, briefly as it is told by Thucydides and
Plutarch, addressed itself with singular force. The vast conspiracy of
the Spartan Regent, had it been successful, would have changed the
whole course of Grecian history. To any student of political phenomena,
but more especially to one who, during the greater part of his life,
had been personally engaged in active politics, the story of such a
conspiracy could not fail to be attractive. To the student of human
nature the character of Pausanias himself offers sources of the
deepest interest; and, in the strange career and tragic fate of the
great conspirator, an imagination fascinated by the supernatural must
have recognized remarkable elements of awe and terror. A few months
previous to his death, I asked my father whether he had abandoned all
intention of finishing his romance of "Pausanias." He replied, "On the
contrary, I am finishing it now," and entered, with great animation,
into a discussion of the subject and its capabilities. This reply to my
inquiry surprised and impressed me: for, as you are aware, my father was
then engaged in the simultaneous composition of two other and very
different works, "Kenelm Chillingly" and the "Parisians." It was the
last time he ever spoke to me about Pausanias; but from what he then
said of it I derived an impression that the book was all but completed,
and needing only a few finishing touches to be ready for publication at
no distant date. This impression was confirmed, subsequent to my father's death, by a
letter of instructions about his posthumous papers which accompanied
his will. In that letter, dated 1856, special allusion is made to
Pausanias as a work already far advanced towards its conclusion. You, to whom, in your kind and careful revision of it, this unfinished
work has suggested many questions which, alas, I cannot answer, as
to the probable conduct and fate of its fictitious characters, will
readily understand my reluctance to surrender an impression seemingly
so well justified. I did not indeed cease to cherish it, until
reiterated and exhaustive search had failed to recover from the
"wallet" wherein Time "puts alms for oblivion," more than those few
imperfect fragments which, by your valued help, are here arranged in
such order as to carry on the narrative of Pausanias, with no solution
of continuity, to the middle of the second volume. There the manuscript breaks off. Was it ever continued further? I know
not. Many circumstances induce me to believe that the conception had
long been carefully completed in the mind of its author; but he has
left behind him only a very meagre and imperfect indication of the
course which, beyond the point where it is broken, his narrative was
intended to follow... Continue reading book >>
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