Zanoni/Vol. 1/Book 1/Preface to the edition of 1853
PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1853.
As a work of imagination, Zanoni ranks, perhaps, amongst the highest of my prose fictions. In the Poem of King Arthur, published many years afterwards, I have taken up an analogous design, in the contemplation of our positive life through a spiritual medium: and I have enforced, through a far wider development, and, I believe, with more complete and enduring success, that harmony between the external events which are all that the superficial behold on the surface of human affairs, and the subtle and intellectual agencies which in reality influence the conduct of individuals, and shape out the destinies of the World. As Man has two lives — that of action and that of thought — so I conceive that work to be the truest representation of Humanity which faithfully delineates both, and opens some elevating glimpse into the sublimest mysteries of our being, by establishing the inevitable union that exists between the plain things of the day, in which our earthly bodies perform their allotted part, and the latent, often uncultivated, often invisible, affinities of the soul with all the powers that eternally breathe and move throughout the Universe of Spirit.
I refer those who do me the honour to read Zanoni with more attention than is given to ordinary romance, to the Poem of King Arthur, for suggestive conjecture into most of the regions of speculative research, affecting the higher and more important condition of our ultimate being, which have engaged the students of immaterial philosophy in my own age.
Affixed to the "Note" with which this work concludes, and which treats of the distinctions between type and allegory, the reader will find, from the pen of one of our most eminent living writers, an ingenious attempt to explain the interior or typical meanings of the work now before him.