Project Gutenberg's Night and Morning, Complete, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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Title: Night and Morning, Complete

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Release Date: March 17, 2009 [EBook #9755]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHT AND MORNING, COMPLETE ***

Produced by David Widger

NIGHT AND MORNING

By Edward Bulwer Lytton

PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1845.

Much has been written by critics, especially by those in Germany (the
native land of criticism), upon the important question, whether to
please or to instruct should be the end of Fiction--whether a moral
purpose is or is not in harmony with the undidactic spirit perceptible
in the higher works of the imagination. And the general result of the
discussion has been in favour of those who have contended that Moral
Design, rigidly so called, should be excluded from the aims of the Poet;
that his Art should regard only the Beautiful, and be contented with
the indirect moral tendencies, which can never fail the creation of the
Beautiful. Certainly, in fiction, to interest, to please, and sportively
to elevate--to take man from the low passions, and the miserable
troubles of life, into a higher region, to beguile weary and selfish
pain, to excite a genuine sorrow at vicissitudes not his own, to raise
the passions into sympathy with heroic struggles--and to admit the soul
into that serener atmosphere from which it rarely returns to ordinary
existence, without some memory or association which ought to enlarge the
domain of thought and exalt the motives of action;--such, without
other moral result or object, may satisfy the Poet,* and constitute the
highest and most universal morality he can effect. But subordinate to
this, which is not the duty, but the necessity, of all Fiction that
outlasts the hour, the writer of imagination may well permit to himself
other purposes and objects, taking care that they be not too sharply
defined, and too obviously meant to contract the Poet into the
Lecturer--the Fiction into the Homily. The delight in Shylock is not
less vivid for the Humanity it latently but profoundly inculcates; the
healthful merrim