Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton

SENTIMENTALITY, under some one of its many forms, is ever ready to fasten on literatures that have become polished, and on social coteries in whose culture the intellectual mode has any part; for there is a fashion in gentlemen’s thoughts as in their cravats and waistcoats, — a ruling theory, a proper temper of mind, an established canon of criticism, assented to like a code of manners as a basis whereon the half-savage but gregarious animal, man, may safely converse. And just as there is on eclique that dresses the body stylishly for the parlor, there is another that clothes the mind conventionally for the dinner table. In London, during the years just before the Reform Bill, this species of the higher etiquette was languishingly romantic, as of late it has been languishingly picturesque ; it was, like a mystery of the illuminated, the peculiar faith, the bon ton, of society, Byron was its high priest, Bulwer its neophyte, and, to carry out the figure, the young Disraeli its fanatic. Then the gilded youth had each outlived a passion, a crime, and an ambition, and as ocular proof thereof wore the cast garments of Lara, the shoon and scallop-shell of Harold ; the maids, old and young, sighed for blighted affections in preference to happy love, and after dinner became lachrymose over the songs of Moore in the drawing-room. Now that Gladstone governs where Melbourne lolled, it seems a worm-eaten, theatrical mask, whose best use in history was to be the butt of Thackeray’s banter. “ What sort of a novel would Lady Caroline Lamb perpetrate today?” one involuntarily asks himself, as he reads of her sickly flirtations with the young-mannish Bulwer who was proud one day to wear Byron’s ring, the public gyve of her lovers and chief sign of her favor, and sullen the next at finding the romance vapor away in a fiasco. In such hothouse society the precocious novelist grew up and tired, and early arrived at the cynicism that tempered his worldly wit, as well as at the knowledge of surfaces that gave vraisemblance and success to Pelham. All this — the artificiality, insincerity, affectation, not of manners, but of feeling, in a word the sentimentality of the fashionable coteries affected by literature — must be kept in mind in order to understand Bulwer’s temptations, his brilliant entrance on his long career, and especially the sterling qualities of his mind and heart.

This autobiography,¹ with its supplementary letters, notes, fragments of novels, etc., begins, as is common since the discovery of the principle of heredity, at the root of the genealogical tree. The author had much of the pride of race, and he has gathered some entertainment out of his trunkful of old papers; but usually the family records are of more interest to himself than to his readers, though all the latter, by a curious lapse of his son’s pen, are styled “ his posterity.” His maternal grandfather, the omnivorous, silent scholar, who in Dr. Parr’s opinion was the first Latinist of the times, and second only to Porson in Greek and to Sir William Jones in Oriental tongues, was really worth description; for there were strong traits and fine humorous contrasts in the old bookworm, who, indeed, once attempted originality by beginning a drama in Hebrew, but abandoned the muse in disgust because he could not find Jews sufficiently versed in their own language to act in it, and at last, wearied with buried lore, “ took the daughter of the vine to spouse ” in the shape of an immense collection of the Spanish romances of chivalry. In the case of other ancestors, and especially in his mother’s love affairs, Bulwer’s own narrative is garrulous and in bad taste. Of himself he says but little, although he has written a good-sized book by the time he reaches his twenty-third year, when the autobiography stops.

One noticeable thing in this early period is that he was brought up by women. His father’s death, when he was still a young child, left him a mother’s boy, and her influence was the greater over him because he was removed from the company of his two brothers, and was never sent to a public school. He felt toward her a deep and grateful affection ; but some part of his displeasing peculiarities were probably due to this early seclusion from the intimate observation of men and the unrestrained criticism of the Etonians. He was a precocious child, but his mother was not a Cornelia. Obedience to parents was, in her creed, the first commandment,— upon it, as on a rock, two lovers and the happiness of her life had gone to pieces ; the second was like unto it, — regard for the world, respectability. Of her mental calibre here is an illustration, and perhaps it is also a straw to show from what quarter the wind blew in the matter of Bulwer’s foppishness : “ The powdered locks; the double-breasted white waistcoat, with the muslin cravat in great bows, rising over a delicate pink silk kerchief, carelessly folded to answer the purpose of our modern undervest; the top-boots, shrunk half-way down the calf; and the broad-brimmed hat, set with easy impertinence on one side the head, — ‘ that,’ said my poor mother, after finishing her description, ’ that is what I call being well dressed ! ’ ” When Bulwer was advanced so far in childhood as to ask this guardian mother, “ Pray, mamma, are you not sometimes overcome by the sense of your own identity ? ” she answered, “ It is high time you should go to school, Teddy ; ” and, consequently, being nine years old, he went to Fulham, and was so shocked and so homesick that he was withdrawn in a fortnight, and after that was sent to other schools, which he left successively, as being too clever, too impetuous, or what not, until at one of these hostelries of learning he had his first, and it seems his last, love affair. The story is very dimly told : a youth of seventeen, a girl slightly older, walks in the green sequestered meadows by the Brent, a passionate parting, and then three years of repulsive marriage for the girl, with death at the end, and for the boy a touch of imaginative melancholy, growing deeper and tenderer as the man found he had missed wedded happiness, — this is all ; but from the frequency and the feeling with which Bulwer introduced the story alike into his earliest and latest novels, it was clearly one of the marked and lasting experiences of his life.

From school to Cambridge was only a matter of routine ; and from Cambridge, where he had made a mark as a debater and poet beside Praed (who was then to the university what Byron was to the world), he naturally went to Paris and authorship, with an adventure in gypsy life, a flirtation with Lady Caroline, and much perfumed correspondence, half gallant, half literary, for incidents by the way. He had already published very early some volumes of imitative verse, and thereby had occasioned a flattering exchange of letters with Dr. Parr, in one of which that learned man indites thus wondrously to the versifier of eighteen : “Although in our politics we differ widely, yet I feel a pure, and I had almost said a holy, satisfaction in contemplating the moral properties of your mind.” One queries whether or not the good old man felt the same “ holy satisfaction ” when he read Falkland, the first result of these “ moral properties ” in literature. Pelham followed, and laid the foundation of Bulwer’s fame. He married, published three more novels, became editor of the New Monthly, and returned to the Reform Parliament. At this point, in May, 1831, when he was twenty-eight years old, the present installment of the work eloses.

Before the reader has advanced far, he perceives that the Earl of Lytton has invented a new scheme for writing biography, and, if it can be kept up to a certain level of accomplishment, a highly entertaining one. In his lifetime Bulwer was thought to be his own hero, and with this assumption his son so far agrees as to assert that he used his own experiences very patently in his fictions ; but Bulwer probably did not foresee the ease with which the process could be reversed, and his novels turned into a biography by a copious use of his fragmentary manuscripts. This seems to be the purpose of his son. Bulwer is set before the world in the midst of the society in which he lived, the manners and characters of it being painted by his own hand, while his own part of hero, — Lionel Hastings, De Lindsay, Glenallan, Greville, — when not sufficiently defined by itself, is elucidated by letters or other ordinary biographical material. In this way the work gains merely as a story through Bulwer’s really fine literary faculty ; and he himself gains as a man through the judicious and timely disclosures and comments of his son. He remains the witty and brilliant man of the world, as he expressed himself in his characters, and he becomes in addition a more estimable man than he has been hitherto regarded. His conduct toward his mother, who violently opposed his marriage, and entirely broke with him on account of it, thereby depriving him of her pecuniary resources, on which he was practically dependent., was highly honorable. He engaged himself because lie thought his future wife’s affections too deeply interested to be rejected, and he married with a full knowledge of the distressing circumstances of alienation from his mother and of limited means in his household which would supervene; after he had thus done what he thought was his duty, — for his passions were apparently riot strongly aroused, — he left no manly means.untried to obtain reconciliation ; and when that was at last arranged, he refused for a long time the money which his mother would have allowed him, because he felt that such an obligation was subject to misconception. Throughout the affair the consideration of loss or gain of property seems not to have weighed in his mind. He gains, too, by the mere revelation of the industry with which, as his biographer puts it, he fed the waters of oblivion through many obscure channels. Incessant labor, downright hard work, was involved in composing the hundreds of anonymous articles, by means of which he made enough money to pay his way, while still much under thirty, and living at such a high rate that the income of the four thousand pounds he owned was but a slight help. He had always been diligent ; his boyish note books show an active and wide curiosity about institutions, politics, and history, as well as society. Something of his grandfather’s polyglot spirit had descended on him, for what his son says is quite true " Certainly no other novelist of my father’s own age and country has bestowed upon the enrichment and elevation of his art anything like the same opulence of literary knowledge.” The novels themselves are not better than those of his contemporaries on this account, but the man himself is more highly accredited. One is glad that Thackeray withdrew with frank apology his satire in Fraser’s, as being written under an erroneous idea of the author’s character.

Unfortunately, Bulwer’s defects were those most easily perceived and most exposed to the ridicule of sensible men ; and, besides, his youthful judgment was not always good. He himself, in later days, suppressed Falkland as liable to have an immoral tendency, while still disavowing any immoral motive in its composition. Paul Clifford, it seems, was meant to help on reform in the penal code and in prison discipline. Pelham was mainly satirical, and intended to work against the Byronic ideal. Such assertions will surprise some readers, for certainly it is not any ethic purpose that gives life to his novels; but (to confine our remarks to Pelham) the precocious knowledge of the world, the wit, the cynicism of the first disillusionment, — this is the secret of their attraction. It is, perhaps, more pleasing to learn of the moral aim of an author when it would not be easily discovered except by himself, Bulwer plainly considered that he did something of consequence in rendering antiquated the sentimental fashion then prevalent, of which we have said he was the neophyte. As sometimes happens, the neophyte apostatized. He could not, however, quite free himself from the taint of the school in which he was bred, as easily recognizable in these fresh, youthful manuscripts as in the novels of his first period. One of these fragments, De Lindsay, was printed years ago, in 1832, in The Ambitious Student, a fact of which the Earl of Lytton seems ignorant ; at least, he publishes it as if for the first time. In themselves these literary remains add nothing, of course, to Bulwer’s accomplishment; the libraries will have more of the same old piece, that is all. Nor, however much more highly Bulwer’s character is rated for sense, manliness, intellectual vigor, and moral purpose, can it be granted as yet that his early novels are substantially excellent. Even by their satire, by their very repulsion from the people they criticise, they are still essentially bound up with that society, and share in the affectation, hollowness, morbid and forced feeling, that characterized the literary age which Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot have made so remote from the present. Bulwer was in some respects of a finer strain than his companions, but he could not escape from among them.

It is to be hoped that the remaining volumes of this work will raise Bulwer’s reputation for manliness as much as these initial ones; but some one should suggest to the Earl of Lytton that footnotes in such pages do not afford a proper platform for political sneers at Gladstone and the liberals.