ll these, which a biographer may suppose to have
conspired to his crime, have never been used by the novelist as
excuses for its enormity, nor indeed, lest they should seem as
excuses, have they ever been clearly presented to the view. The
moral consisted in showing more than the mere legal punishment at
the close. It was to show how the consciousness of the deed was to
exclude whatever humanity of character preceded and belied it from
all active exercise, all social confidence; how the knowledge of the
bar between the minds of others and his own deprived the criminal of
all motive to ambition, and blighted knowledge of all fruit.
Miserable in his affections, barren in his intellect; clinging to
solitude, yet accursed in it; dreading as a danger the fame he had
once coveted; obscure in spite of learning, hopeless in spite of
love, fruitless and joyless in his life, calamitous and shameful in
his end,--surely such is no palliative of crime, no dalliance and
toying with the grimness of evil! And surely to any ordinary
comprehension and candid mind such is the moral conveyed by the
fiction of 'Eugene Aram.'"--[A word to the Public, 1847]

In point of composition "Eugene Aram" is, I think, entitled to
rank amongst the best of my fictions. It somewhat humiliates me to
acknowledge that neither practice nor study has enabled me to surpass
a work written at a very early age, in the skilful construction and
patient development of plot; and though I have since sought to call
forth higher and more subtle passions, I doubt if I have ever excited
the two elementary passions of tragedy,--namely, pity and terror,--to
the same degree. In mere style, too, "Eugene Aram," in spite of certain
verbal oversights, and defects in youthful taste (some of which I have
endeavored to remove from the present edition), appears to me unexcelled
by any of my later writings,--at least in what I have always studied as
the main essential of style in narrative; namely, its harmony with the
subject selected and the passions to be moved,--while it exceeds them
all in the minuteness and fidelity of its descriptions of external
nature. This indeed it ought to do, since the study of external nature
is made a peculiar attribute of the principal character, whose fate
colors the narrative. I do not know whether it has been observed that
the time occupied by the events of the story is conveyed through the
medium o