Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings [antikvár]

English history, a great begetter of románcé, never gave the romancer a finer opening than that seized upon by Lord Lytton in his Harold. He seized on it too with a full perception of the epic events and heroic men associated with it: King Edward the Confessor, Earl Godwin, Tostig, Sweyn, Harold Hardrada, Harold of England and William of Normandy. He revived these and their surrounding figures, and their old fashions with a spirit and novelty that made them fairly pass for modern; and the result is a book which must have opened the doors of history to thousands who usually avoid it as a literary museum of the dead. Lytton's prefaces to the story show how clearly he recognised the value of the work he was doing, and of the way it should be done. He spealcs there of his master in románcé, Sir Walter Scott, and compares their two methods. " The great author of Ivanhoe," he said, " and those amongst whom, at home and abroad, his mantle was divided, had employed History to aid Románcé; I contented myself with the humbler task to employ Románcé in the aid of History." He goes on to teli us exactly what this implied. It meant to extract from old, neglected chronicles and " the unfrequented storehouse of archaeology," the incidents and details that enliven the dry narrative of facts in which the histórián must keep. " I consulted," he says, " the originál authorities of the time with a care as scrupulous as if intending to write not a fiction but a history." And for his plot, it was to be constructed írom the actual events themselves; "the staple of such interest as I could create," he adds, "in reciting the struggles, and delineating the characters, of those who had been the living actors in the real drama." And so, " having förmed the best judgment I could of the events and characters of the age, I adhered faithfully to what, as an histórián, I should have held to be the true course and true causes of the great political events, and the essential attributes of the principal agents." Only in the inward life of his characters, their motives and emotions, did he allow himself a novelist's licence; and even there, he sought to make them accord with the spirit of the age they lived in; or as he puts it: " Even here, I employ ed