F
Preface to the MS. of Osorio.
[Vide ante, p. 519.]
In this sketch of a tragedy, all is imperfect, and much obscure. Among other equally great defects (millstones round the slender neck of its merits) it presupposes a long story; and this long story, which yet is necessary to the complete understanding of the play, is not half told. Albert had sent a letter informing his family that he should arrive about such a time by ship; he was shipwrecked; and wrote a private letter to Osorio, informing him alone of this accident, that he might not shock Maria. Osorio destroyed the letter, and sent assassins to meet Albert. . . Worse than all, the growth of Osorio's character is nowhere explained—and yet I had most clear and psychologically accurate ideas of the whole of it. . . A man, who from constitutional calmness of appetites, is seduced into pride and the love of power, by these into misanthropism, or rather a contempt of mankind, and from thence, by the co-operation of envy, and a curiously modified love for a beautiful female (which is nowhere developed in the play), into a most atrocious guilt. A man who is in truth a weak man, yet always duping himself into the belief that he has a soul of iron. Such were some of my leading ideas.
In short the thing is but an embryo, and whilst it remains in manuscript, which it is destined to do, the critic would judge unjustly who should call it a miscarriage. It furnished me with a most important lesson, namely, that to have conceived strongly, does not always imply the power of successful execution. S. T. C.
[From Early Years and Late Reflections, by Clement Carlyon, M.D., 1856, i. 143-4.]
