Preface - Page 2

Ibsenist even at second hand; for Lever,
though he may have read Henri Beyle, alias Stendhal, certainly
never read Ibsen. Of the books that made Lever popular, such as
Charles O'Malley and Harry Lorrequer, I know nothing but the
names and some of the illustrations. But the story of the day's
ride and life's romance of Potts (claiming alliance with Pozzo di
Borgo) caught me and fascinated me as something strange and
significant, though I already knew all about Alnaschar and Don
Quixote and Simon Tappertit and many another romantic hero mocked
by reality. From the plays of Aristophanes to the tales of
Stevenson that mockery has been made familiar to all who are
properly saturated with letters.

Where, then, was the novelty in Lever's tale? Partly, I think, in
a new seriousness in dealing with Potts's disease. Formerly, the
contrast between madness and sanity was deemed comic: Hogarth
shows us how fashionable people went in parties to Bedlam to
laugh at the lunatics. I myself have had a village idiot
exhibited to me as some thing irresistibly funny. On the stage
the madman was once a regular comic figure; that was how Hamlet
got his opportunity before Shakespear touched him. The
originality of Shakespear's version lay in his taking the lunatic
sympathetically and seriously, and thereby making an advance
towards the eastern consciousness of the fact that lunacy may be
inspiration in disguise, since a man who has more brains than his
fellows necessarily appears as mad to them as one who has less.
But Shakespear did not do for Pistol and Parolles what he did for
Hamlet. The particular sort of madman they represented, the
romantic makebeliever, lay outside the pale of sympathy in
literature: he was pitilessly despised and ridiculed here as he
was in the east under the name of Alnaschar, and was doomed to
be, centuries later, under the name of Simon Tappertit. When
Cervantes relented over Don Quixote, and Dickens relented over
Pickwick, they did not become impartial: they simply changed
sides, and became friends and apologists where they had formerly
been mockers.

In Lever's story there is a real change of attitude. There is no
relenting towards Potts: he never gains our affections like Don
Quixote and Pickwick: he has not even the infatuate courage of
Tappertit. But we dare not laugh at him, because, somehow, we
recognize ourselves in Potts. We may, some of us, have enough
nerve, enough muscle, enough luck, enough tact or skill or
address or knowledge to carry things off better than he did; to
impose on the people who saw through him; to fascinate Katinka
(who cut Potts so ruthlessly at the end of the story); but for
all that, we know that Potts plays an enormous part in ourselves