might expect to find impressed on them. He imitated, as every man of
genuine originality imitates while he learns his trade, but his models
were not, as might have been anticipated, Coleridge and Shelley; they
were Byron and Scott. In the poetry of Byron and Scott, Poe found
nothing to transfer to his own nature, and the early imitations,
therefore, left no trace on him. Brief as is the volume of his poems,
half of it might be discarded without much regret. Scattered among his
Byron and Scott imitations, however, we find a few pieces which reveal
to us that, while he was still almost a child, the true direction of his
genius was occasionally revealed to him. The lyric "To Helen," which is
said to have been composed in his fourteenth year, is steeped in the
peculiar purity, richness and vagueness which were to characterise his
mature poems:--
"On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."
This was not published, however, until the author was two-and-twenty,
and it may have been touched up. Here is a fragment of a suppressed
poem, "Visit of the Dead," which Poe certainly printed in his eighteenth
year:--
"The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill,
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token;
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!"
This is not so perfect, but it is even more than "To Helen" symptomatic
of Poe's peculiar relation to the poetic faculty as fostering a state of
indefinite and indeed indefinable delight. And from these faint
breathings how direct is the advance to such incomparable specimens of
symbolic fancy as "The City in the Sea," "The Sleeper," and finally
"Ulalume"!
The determination to celebrate, in a minor key, indefinite and
melancholy symbols of fancy, is a snare than which none more dangerous
can be placed in the path of a feeble foot. But Poe was not feeble, and
he was protected, and permanent value was secured for his poetry, by the
possession of one or two signal gifts to which attention must now be
paid. He cultivated the indefinite, but, happily for us, in language so
definite and pure that when he succeeds it is with a cool fulness, an
absence of all fretting and hissing sound, such as can rarely be
paralleled in English literature. The finest things in Milton's 1645
volume, Wordsworth at his very best, Tennyson occasionally, Collins in
some of his shorter odes, have reached that perfection of syllabic
sweetness, that clear sound of a wave breaking on the twilight sands,
which Poe contrives to render, without an effort, again and again:--
"By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon,[6] nam'd Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule,
From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime.
Out of space, out of time."
The present moment is one in which the reaction against plastic beauty
in poetry has reached such a height that it is almost vain to appeal
against it. There is scarcely a single English poet of consequence in
the younger school who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though
he were preluding with a slate-pencil upon a slate. That this is done
purposely, and in accordance with mysterious harmonic laws entirely
beyond the comprehension of ordinary ears, makes the matter worse. There
is no heresiarch so dangerous as the priest of holy and self-abnegating
life, and it is to a poet no less learned than Mr. Robert Bridges, that
the twentieth century seems to owe the existing rage for cacophony. He
holds something of the same place in relation to Swinburne and Poe, that
Donne did to Spenser three hundred years ago. In this condition of
things it may seem useless to found any claim for Poe on the ground of
the exquisite mellifluousness of his versification. We may hope,
however, some day to regain the use of our ears, and to discover once
more that music and metre are utterly distinct arts. When that
re-discovery has been made, Poe will resume his position as one of the
most uniformly melodious of all those who have used the English
language.
Critics who have admitted the extraordinary perfection of his prosody
have occasionally objected that in the most popular examples of it, "The
Raven" and "The Bells," he obtains his effect by a trick. It might be
objected, with equal force, that Victor Hugo in "Les Djinns" and even
Tennyson in "The Lotus Eaters" made use of "tricks." On the other hand,
if the charge be deserved, it seems odd that in the course of nearly
seventy years no other juggler or conjurer has contrived to repeat the
wonderful experiment. In each poem there are what must be judged
definite errors against taste in detail--Poe's taste was never very
sure--but the skill of the long voluptuous lamentation, broken at equal
intervals by the croak of the raven, and that of the verbal translation,
as if into four tones or languages, of the tintinabulation of the bells,
is so extraordinary, so original, and so closely in keeping with the
personal genius of the writer, that it is surely affectation to deny its
value.
It is not, however, in "The Bells" or in "The Raven," marvellous as are
these _tours de force_, that we see the essential greatness of Poe
revealed. The best of his poems are those in which he deals less
boisterously with the sentiment of mystery. During the latest months of
his unhappy life, he composed three lyrics which, from a technical
point of view, must be regarded not only as the most interesting, which
he wrote, but as those which have had the most permanent effect upon
subsequent literature, not in England merely, but in France. These are
"Ulalume," "Annabel Lee," "For Annie." One of Poe's greatest inventions
was the liquidation of stanzaic form, by which he was able to mould it
to the movements of emotion without losing its essential structure. Many
poets had done this with the line; it was left for Poe to do it with the
stanza. In the three latest lyrics this stanzaic legerdemain is
practised with an enchanting lightness, an ecstasy of sinuous and
elastic grace. Perhaps, had it been subjected to the poet's latest
revision, "For Annie" would have been the most wonderful of all in the
sensitive response of its metre to the delicate fluctuations of
sentiment.
We may, then, briefly summarise that Poe's first claim to commemoration
is that he was the pioneer in restoring to the art of poetry a faculty
which it had almost lost in its attempt to compete with science and
philosophy. It had become the aim of the poets to state facts; it was
given to Poe to perceive that no less splendid a future lay before those
who only hinted feelings. He was the earliest modern poet who
substituted the symbol for the exact description of an object or an
event. That "expression directe," about which the French have been
debating for the last quarter of a century, and over which M. Adolphe
Rette and M. Albert Mockel periodically dispute like Fathers of the
Church, was perceived and was deliberately repudiated by Poe eighty
years ago. He was deeply impregnated with the sense that the harmony of
imagination is not destroyed, but developed, by drawing over a subject
veil after veil of suggestion. His native temperament aided him in his
research after the symbol. He was naturally a cultivator of terror, one
who loved to people the world with strange and indefinable powers. His
dreams were innocent and agitating, occupied with supernatural terrors,
weighed upon by the imminence of shadowy presentments. He trembled at he
knew not what; in this he was related to the earliest poets of the
world, and in his perpetual recurrence to symbol he recalls the action
of their alarms.
The cardinal importance, then, of Poe as a poet is that he restored to
poetry a primitive faculty of which civilisation seemed successfully to
have deprived her. He rejected the doctrinal expression of positive
things, and he insisted upon mystery and symbol. He endeavoured to
clothe unfathomable thoughts and shadowy images in melody that was like
the wind wandering over the strings of an aeolian harp. In other words,
he was the pioneer of a school which has spread its influence to the
confines of the civilised world, and is now revolutionising literature.
He was the discoverer and the founder of Symbolism.
1909.
[Footnote 6: A shocking false quantity; but how little that would matter
to Poe]
THE AUTHOR OF "PELHAM"
One hundred and twenty years have nearly passed since the birth of
Bulwer-Lytton, and he continues to be suspended in a dim and ambiguous
position in the history of our literature. He combined extraordinary
qualities with fatal defects. He aimed at the highest eminence, and
failed to reach it, but he was like an explorer, who is diverted from
the main ascent of a mountain, and yet annexes an important table-land
elsewhere. Bulwer-Lytton never secured the ungrudging praise of the best
judges, but he attained great popularity, and has even now not wholly
lost it. He is never quoted as one of our great writers, and yet he
holds a place of his own from which it is improbable that he will ever
be dislodged. Although he stood out prominently among his fellows, and
although his career was tinged with scandal and even with romance, very
little has been known about him. Curiosity has been foiled by the
discretion of one party and the malignity of another. The public has not
been in a position to know the truth, nor to possess the real portrait
of a politician and a man of letters who has been presented as an angel
and as a gargoyle, but never as a human being. Forty years after his
death the candour and the skill of his grandson reveal him to us at last
in a memoir of unusual excellence.
In no case would Lord Lytton's task have been an easy one, but it must
have been made peculiarly difficult by the work of those who had
preceded him. Of these, the only one who deserves serious attention is
Robert Lytton, who published certain fragments in 1883. That the son
wished to support the memory of his father is unquestionable. But it is
difficult to believe that he intended his contribution to be more than
an aid to some future biographer's labour. He scattered his material
about him in rough heaps. Apart from the "Literary Remains," which
destroyed the continuity of even such brief biography as he gave, Robert
Lytton introduced a number of chapters which are more or less of the
nature of essays, and are often quite foreign to his theme. Moreover, he
dedicated several chapters to literary criticism of his father's works.
It is, in fact, obvious to any one who examines the two volumes of 1883
which Robert Lytton contrived to fill, that he was careful to contribute
as little as he possibly could to the story which he had started out to
relate. Although there is much that is interesting in the memoirs of
1883, the reader is continually losing the thread of the narrative. The
reason is, no doubt, that Robert Lytton stood too close to his parents,
had seen too much of their disputes, was too much torn by the agonies of
his own stormy youth, and was too sensitively conscious of the scandal,
to tell the story at all. We have the impression that, in order to
forestall any other biography, he pretended himself to write a book
which he was subtle enough to make unintelligible.
This baffling discretion, this feverish race from hiding-place to
hiding-place, has not only not been repeated by Lord Lytton in the new
_Life_, but the example of his father seems to have positively
emphasised his own determination to be straightforward and lucid. I know
no modern biography in which the writer has kept more rigidly to the
business of his narrative, or has less successfully been decoyed aside
by the sirens of family vanity. It must have been a great difficulty to
the biographer to find his pathway cumbered by the volumes of 1883, set
by his father as a plausible man-trap for future intruders. Lord
Lytton, however, is the one person who is not an intruder, and he was
the only possessor of the key which his father had so diplomatically
hidden. His task, however, was further complicated by the circumstance
that Bulwer-Lytton himself left in MS. an autobiography, dealing very
fully with his own career and character up to the age of twenty-two. The
redundancy of all the Lyttons is amazing. Bulwer-Lytton would not have
been himself if he had not overflowed into reflections which swelled his
valuable account of his childhood into monstrous proportions. Lord
Lytton, who has a pretty humour, tells an anecdote which will be read
with pleasure:--
"An old woman, who had once been one of Bulwer-Lytton's trusted
domestic servants, is still living in a cottage at Knebworth. One
day she was talking to me about my grandfather, and inadvertently
used an expression which summed him up more perfectly than any
elaborate description could have done. She was describing his house
at Copped Hall, where she had been employed as caretaker, and
added: 'In one of his attacks of _fluency_, I nursed him there for
many weeks.' 'Pleurisy,' I believe, was what she meant."
The bacillus of "_fluency_" interpenetrates the Autobiography, the
letters, the documents of every kind, and at any moment this disease
will darken Bulwer-Lytton's brightest hours. But curtailed by his
grandson, and with its floral and heraldic ornaments well pared away,
the Autobiography is a document of considerable value. It is written
with deliberate candour, and recalls the manner of Cobbett, a writer
with whom we should not expect to find Bulwer-Lytton in sympathy. It is
probable that the author of it never saw himself nor those who
surrounded him in precisely their true relation. There was something
radically twisted in his image of life, which always seems to have
passed through a refracting surface on its way to his vision. No doubt
this is more or less true of all experience; no power has given us the
gift "to see ourselves as others see us." But in the case of
Bulwer-Lytton this refractive habit of his imagination produced a
greater swerving aside from positive truth than is usual. The result is
that an air of the fabulous, of the incredible, is given to his
narratives, and often most unfairly.
A close examination, in fact, of the Autobiography results in confirming
the historic truth of it. What is surprising is not, when we come to
consider them, the incidents themselves, but Bulwer-Lytton's odd way of
narrating them. Lord Lytton, without any comment, provides us with
curious material for the verification of his grandfather's narrative. He
prints, here and there, letters from entirely prosaic persons which
tally, often to a surprising degree, with the extravagant statements of
Bulwer-Lytton. To quote a single instance, of a very remarkable
character, Bulwer-Lytton describes the effect his scholarship produced,
at the age of seventeen, upon sober, elderly people, who were dazzled
with his accomplishments and regarded him as a youthful prodigy. It is
the sort of confession, rather full-blooded and lyrical, which we might
easily set down to that phenomenon of refraction. But Lord Lytton prints
a letter from Dr. Samuel Parr (whom, by the way, he calls "a man of
sixty-four," but Parr, born in 1747, was seventy-four in 1821), which
confirms the autobiographer's account in every particular. The aged Whig
churchman, who boasted a wider knowledge of Greek literature than any
other scholar of his day, and whose peremptory temper was matter of
legend, could write to this Tory boy a long letter of enthusiastic
criticism, and while assuring Bulwer-Lytton that he kept "all the
letters with which you have honoured me," could add: "I am proud of
such a correspondent; and, if we lived nearer to each other, I should
expect to be very happy indeed in such a friend." Letters of this kind,
judiciously printed by Lord Lytton in his notes, serve to call us back
from the nebulous witchcraft in which Bulwer-Lytton was so fond of
wrapping up the truth, and to remind us that, in spite of the
necromancer, the truth is there.
From the point where the fragment of autobiography closes, although for
some time much the same material is used and some of the same letters
are quoted, as were quoted and used by Robert Lytton, the presentation
of these is so different that the whole effect is practically one of
novelty. But with the year 1826, when Edward Bulwer-Lytton, at the age
of three-and-twenty, became engaged to Rosina Doyle Wheeler, all is
positively new. The story of the marriage, separation, and subsequent
relations has never before been presented to the world with any approach
to accuracy or fulness. No biographical notices of Bulwer-Lytton even
touch on this subject, which has been hitherto abandoned to the gossip
of irresponsible contemporaries. It is true that a Miss Devey composed a
"Life of Rosina, Lady Lytton," in which the tale was told. This work was
immediately suppressed, and is inaccessible to the public; but the only
person who is known to be familiar with its contents reports that it
"contains fragments of the narrative, obviously biassed, wholly
inaccurate, and evidently misleading." So far as the general public is
concerned, Lord Lytton's impartial history of the relations between his
grandfather and his grandmother is doubtless that portion of his book
which will be regarded as the most important. I may, therefore, dwell
briefly upon his treatment of it.
The biographer, in dealing with a subject of this incalculable
difficulty, could but lay himself open to the censure of those who
dislike the revelation of the truth on any disagreeable subject. This
lion, however, stood in the middle of his path, and he had either to
wrestle with it or to turn back. Lord Lytton says in his preface that it
was necessary to tell all or nothing of the matrimonial adventures of
his grandparents, but, in reality, this was not quite the alternative,
which was to tell the truth or to withdraw from the task of writing a
Life of Bulwer-Lytton. The marriage and its results were so predominant
in the career of the man, and poisoned it so deeply to the latest hour
of his consciousness, that to attempt a biography of him without clear
reference to them would have been like telling the story of Nessus the
Centaur without mentioning the poisoned arrow of Heracles. But Lord
Lytton shall give his own apology:--
"As it was impossible to give a true picture of my grandfather
without referring to events which overshadowed his whole life, and
which were already partially known to the public, I decided to tell
the whole story as fully and as accurately as possible, in the firm
belief that the truth can damage neither the dead nor the living.
The steps which led to the final separation between my
grandparents, and the forces which brought about so disastrous a
conclusion of a marriage of love, apart from their biographical
interest, afford a study of human nature of the utmost value; and
so great are the moral lessons which this story contains, that I
venture to hope that the public may find in much that is tragic and
pitiful much also that is redeeming, and that the ultimate verdict
of posterity may be that these two unfortunate people did not
suffer entirely in vain."
His story, therefore, is not written with any partiality, and it seems
to be as full and as truthful as the ample materials at the author's
disposal permitted. The reader will conjecture that Lord Lytton could
have given many more details, but apart from the fact that they would
often have been wholly unfit for publication, it is difficult to see
that they would in any degree have altered the balance of the story, or
modified our judgment, which is quite sufficiently enlightened by the
copious letters on both sides which are now for the first time printed.
Voltaire has remarked of love that it is "de toutes les passions la plus
forte, parce qu'elle attaque, a la fois, la tete, le coeur, le corps."
It is a commonplace to say that Edward Bulwer's whole career might have
been altered if he had never met Rosina Wheeler, because this is true in
measure of every strong juvenile attachment: but it is rarely indeed so
copiously or so fatally true as it was in his case. His existence was
overwhelmed by this event; it was turned topsy-turvey, and it never
regained its equilibrium. In this adventure all was exaggerated; there
was excess of desire, excess of gratification, an intense weariness, a
consuming hatred.
On the first evening when the lovers met, in April 1826, an observer,
watching them as they talked, reflected that Bulwer's "bearing had that
aristocratic something bordering on _hauteur_" which reminded the
onlooker "of the passage, 'Stand back; I am holier than thou!'" The same
observer, dazzled, like the rest of the world, by the loveliness of Miss
Wheeler, judged that it would be best "to regard her as we do some
beautiful caged wild creature of the woods--at a safe and secure
distance." It would have preserved a chance of happiness for
Bulwer-Lytton to possess something of this stranger's clairvoyance. It
was not strange perhaps, but unfortunate, that he did not notice--or
rather that he was not repelled by, for he did notice--the absence of
moral delicacy in the beautiful creature, the radiant and seductive
Lamia, who responded so instantly to his emotion. He, the most
fastidious of men, was not offended by the vivacity of a young lady who
called attention to the vulgarity of her father's worsted stockings and
had none but words of abuse for her mother. These things, indeed,
disconcerted the young aristocrat, but he put them down to a lack of
training; he persuaded himself that these were superficial blemishes and
could be remedied; and he resigned his senses to the intoxication of
Rosina's beauty.
At first--and indeed to the last--she stimulated his energy and his
intellect. His love and his hatred alike spurred him to action. In
August 1826, in spite of the violent opposition of his mother, he and
Rosina were betrothed. By October Mrs. Bulwer had so far prevailed that
the engagement was broken off, and Edward tossed in a whirlpool of
anger, love, and despair. It took the form of such an attack of
"fluency" as was never seen before or after. Up to that time he had been
an elegant although feverish idler. Now he plunged into a strenuous life
of public and private engagements. He prepared to enter the House of
Commons; he finished _Falkland_, his first novel; he started the
composition of _Pelham_ and of another "light prose work," which may
have disappeared; he achieved a long narrative in verse, _O'Neill, or
the Rebel_; and he involved himself in literary projects without bound
and without end. The aim of all this energy was money. It is true that
he had broken off his betrothal; but it was at first only a pretence at
estrangement, to hoodwink his mother. He was convinced that he could not
live without possessing Rosina, and as his mother held the strings of
the common purse, he would earn his own income and support a wife.
Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, who had a Roman firmness, was absolutely determined
that her son should not marry "a penniless girl whose education had been
so flagrantly neglected, who was vain and flighty, with a mocking humour
and a conspicuous lack of principle." At this point the story becomes
exceedingly interesting. A Balzac would strip it of its romantic
trappings, and would penetrate into its physiology. Out of Rosina's
sight, and diverted by the excess of his literary labours, Edward's
infatuation began to decline. His mother, whose power of character would
have been really formidable if it had been enforced by sympathy or even
by tact, relaxed her opposition; and instantly her son, himself, no
longer attacked, became calmer and more clear-sighted. Rosina's faults
were patent to his memory; the magic of her beauty less invincible.
Within a month all was changed again. Rosina fretted herself into what
she contrived to have reported to Bulwer-Lytton as an illness. She
begged for an interview, and he went with reluctance to bid her farewell
for ever. It was Bulwer-Lytton's habit to take with him a masterpiece of
literature upon every journey. It seems unfortunate that on this
occasion _The Tempest_ was not his companion, for it might have warned
him, as Prospero warned Ferdinand, against the fever in the blood:--
"No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed, with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it, both."
When his short interview, which was to have been a final one, was over,
that had happened which made a speedy marriage necessary, whatever the
consequences might be.