Bulwer-Lytton had tried the House of Commons, and miserably, ludicrously
failed. The young Tory members who vociferously cheered his great
anti-reform speech of 1860, were in their cradles when Bulwer-Lytton
first addressed the House of Commons, and having signally failed
withdrew, as people supposed, altogether from Parliamentary life. His
failure was even more complete than that of his friend Disraeli, and he
took the failure more to heart. Rumor affirms that the first serious
quarrel between Bulwer and his wife arose out of her vexation and
disappointment at his break-down, and the bitter, provoking taunts with
which she gave vent to her anger. I know no other instance of a
rhetorical triumph so long delayed, and at length so completely
effected. Nor can one learn that it was by any intervening practice or
training that Bulwer in his declining years atoned for the failure of
his youth. He was never that I know of a public speaker; he won his
Parliamentary success in defiance of Charles James Fox's famous axiom,
that a speaker can only improve himself at the expense of his audiences.
Between his failure and his triumph Bulwer-Lytton may be said to have
had no political audience.
A statesman Bulwer-Lytton never became, although he held high office in
a Tory Cabinet. He did little or nothing to distinguish himself, unless
there be distinction in writing some high-flown, eloquent despatches,
such as Ernest Maltravers might have penned, to the discontented
islanders of Ionia; and it was he, if I remember rightly, who thought of
sending out "Gladstone the Philhellene" on that mission of futile
conciliation which only misled the Ionians and amused England. It always
seemed to me that in his political career Bulwer acted just as one of
the heroes of his own romances might have done. Having suffered defeat
and humiliation, he vowed a vow to wrest from Fate a victory upon the
very spot which had seen his discomfiture; and he kept his word, won his
victory, and then calmly quitted the field forever. A more prosaic
explanation might perhaps be found in the fact that weak physical health
rendered it impossible for Bulwer to encounter the severe continuous
labor which English political life exacts. But I prefer for myself the
more romantic and less commonplace explanation, and I hope my readers
will do likewise. I prefer to think of the great romancist retrieving
after thirty years of silence his Parliamentary defeat, and then, having
reconciled himself with Destiny, retiring from the scene contented, to
struggle in that arena no more. In all seriousness, there must be some
quality of greatness in the man who, after bearing such a defeat for so
many years, can struggle with Fate again, and accomplish so conspicuous
a success.
Now this is in fact one grand explanation of Bulwer-Lytton's rank in
English literature. He has the self-reliance, the patience, the courage
so rare among literary men, by which one is enabled to extract their
full and utter value from whatsoever intellectual endowments he may
possess. Bulwer-Lytton alone among all famous English authors of our
days has apparently done all that he could possibly do--obtained from
his faculties their entire tribute. Readers of the letters of poor
Charlotte Bronte may remember the impatience with which she occasionally
complained that her idol Thackeray would not put forth his whole
strength. No such fault could possibly be found with Bulwer-Lytton.
Sooner or later he always put forth his whole strength. He had many
failures, but, as in the case of his political discomfiture, he had
always the art of learning from failure the way how to succeed, and
accordingly succeeding. When he wrote his wretched "Sea Captain," the
critics all told him he could not produce a successful drama. Bulwer
thought he could. He thought the very failure of that attempt would show
him how to succeed another time. He was determined not to give in until
he had satisfied himself as to his fitness, one way or the other, and so
he persevered. Now observe the character of the man, and see how much
superior he himself is to his works, and how much of their success the
works owe to the man's peculiar temper. We all know what authors usually
are, and how they receive criticism. In ordinary cases, when the critics
declare some piece of work a failure, the author either is crushed for
the time by the fiat, or he insists that the critics are idiots, hired
assassins, personal enemies, and so forth; he defiantly adheres to his
own notions and his own method--and he probably fails. Bulwer-Lytton
looked at the matter in quite a different light. He said, apparently, to
himself: "The critics only know what I have done; I know what I can do.
From their point of view they are quite right--this thing is a failure.
But I know that it is a failure only because I went to work the wrong
way. I _can_ do something infinitely better. Their experience and their
comments have given me some valuable hints; I will forthwith go to work
on a better principle." So Bulwer-Lytton wrote "Richelieu," "Money," and
the "Lady of Lyons"--the last probably the most successful acting drama
produced in England since the days of Shakespeare, and the first hardly
below it in stage success. Of course I am not claiming for either of
these plays a high and genuine dramatic value. They probably bear the
same resemblance to the true drama that their author's Parliamentary
speech-making does to true eloquence. But of their popularity and their
transcendent technical success there cannot be the slightest doubt.
Bulwer-Lytton proved to his critics that he could do better than any
other living man the very thing they said he could never do--write a
play that should conquer the public and hold the stage. So to those who
affirmed that, whatever else he might do, he never could be a
Parliamentary speaker, he replied by standing up when approaching the
very brink of old age, and delivering speeches which won the willing and
generous applause of Disraeli, and extorted the reluctant but manly and
frank recognition of such an opponent as John Bright.
Bulwer-Lytton once insisted, in an address delivered to some English
literary institution, that the word "versatile" is generally used
wrongly when we speak of men who do a great many things well; that it is
a comprehensive, not merely a versatile mind, each of these men has; not
a knack of adroitly turning himself to many heterogeneous labors, but a
capacity so wide that it unfolds quite naturally many fields of labor.
In this sense Bulwer-Lytton has undoubtedly a more comprehensive mind
than any of his English contemporaries. He has written the most
successful dramas and some of the most successful novels of his day; and
he has so varied the method of his novel-writing that he may be said to
have at least three distinct and separate principles of construction.
Some of his poetic translations seem to me almost absolutely the best
done in England of late years; many of his essays approach a true
literary value, while all or nearly all of them are attractive reading;
his satire, "The New Timon," is the only thing of the kind which is
likely to outlive his age; and his political speeches are what I have
already described. Now, to estimate the personal value of these
successes, let us not fail to remember that their author never was
placed in a condition to make literary or other labor a necessity, and
that for nearly a whole generation he has been in the enjoyment of
actual wealth; that in England literature adds little or no social
distinction to a man of Bulwer-Lytton's rank; and that during a
considerable portion of his life the author of "The Caxtons" and "My
Novel" has been tortured by almost incessant ill-health. Almost
everything that could tend to make a man shun continuous and patient
labor (opulence and ill-health would be quite enough to make most of us
shun it) combined to render Bulwer-Lytton an idle or at least an
indolent man. Yet almost all the literary success he attained was due to
a patient toil which would have wearied out a penny-a-liner, and a
laborious self-study and self-culture which might have overtaxed the
nerves of a Koenigsberg professor. "Easy writing is cursed hard reading,"
is a maxim which Bulwer-Lytton fully understood, and of which he showed
his appreciation in his personal practice.
Bulwer-Lytton was born on the fringe of the aristocratic region. He can
hardly be said to belong to the genuine aristocracy, although of late,
thanks to his political opinions and his peerage, he has come to be
ranked among aristocrats. He is the brother of a distinguished
diplomatist, Sir Henry Bulwer, and the father of a somewhat promising
diplomatist, not quite unknown to Washington people, Robert Lytton,
"Owen Meredith." Bulwer-Lytton had advanced tolerably far upon his
career when he inherited through his mother a magnificent estate, which
enabled him to set up for an aristocrat. His baronetcy had been
conferred upon him by the Crown, as his peerage lately was. He started
in political life, like Mr. Disraeli, as a Liberal; indeed, it was, if I
am not greatly mistaken, on the introduction of Bulwer-Lytton that
Disraeli obtained the early patronage of Daniel O'Connell, which he so
soon forfeited by the political tergiversation that drew down from the
great Agitator the famous outburst of fierce and savage scorn wherein,
alluding to Disraeli's boasted Jewish origin, he proclaimed him
evidently descended in a right line from the blasphemous thief who died
impenitent on the cross. Disraeli's apostasy was sudden and glaring, and
he kept the field. Bulwer-Lytton soon faded out of politics altogether
for nearly thirty years, and when he reappeared in the House of Commons
and wore the garb of a Tory, his old friend and political patron
O'Connell had long become a mere tradition. Nearly all of those who
listened with curiosity to Bulwer-Lytton's speeches in 1859 and 1860,
were curious only to hear how a great romancist and dramatist would
acquit himself in a part which, so far as they were concerned, was
entirely a new appearance. They had no personal memory of his former
efforts; no recollection of the time when the young author of the
sparkling, piquant, and successful "Pelham" endeavored to take London by
storm as a political orator, and failed in the enterprise.
In one peculiarity, at least, Bulwer-Lytton the novelist surpassed all
his rivals and contemporaries. His range was so wide as to take in all
circles and classes of English readers. He wrote fashionable novels,
historical novels, political novels, metaphysical novels, psychological
novels, moral-purpose novels, immoral purpose novels. "Wilhelm Meister"
was not too heavy nor "Tristram Shandy" too light for him. He tried to
rival Scott in the historical romance; he strove hard to be another
Goethe in his "Ernest Maltravers"; he quite surpassed Ainsworth's "Jack
Sheppard," and the general run of what we in England call "thieves'
literature," in his "Paul Clifford"; he became a sort of pinchbeck
Sterne in "The Caxtons," and was severely classical in "The Last Days of
Pompeii." One might divide his novels into at least half a dozen
classes, each class quite distinct and different from all the rest, and
yet the one author, the one Bulwer-Lytton, showing and shining through
them all. Bulwer is always there. He is masquerading now in the garb of
a mediaeval baron, and now in that of an old Roman dandy; anon he is
disguised as a thief from St. Giles's, and again as a full-blooded
aristocrat from the region of St. James's. But he is the same man
always, and you can hardly fail to recognize him even in his cleverest
disguise. It may be questioned whether there is one spark of true and
original genius in Bulwer. Certain ideas commonly floating about in this
or that year he collects and brings to a focus, and by their aid he
burns a distinct impression into the public mind. Just as he expressed
the thin and spurious classicism of one period in his Pompeian romance,
so he made copy out of the pseudoscience and bastard psychology of a
later day in his "Strange Story." Never was there in literature a more
masterly and wonderful mechanic. Many-sided he never was, although
probably the fame of many-sidedness (if one may use so ungraceful an
expression) is the renown which he specially coveted and most
strenuously strove to win. Only genius can be many-sided, and
Bulwer-Lytton's marvellous capability never can be confounded with
genius. The nearest approach to genius in all his works may be found in
their occasional outbursts and flashes of audacious, preposterous
absurdity. The power which could palm off such outrageous nonsense as in
some instances he has done on two or three generations of novel-readers,
which could compel the public to swallow it and delight in it, despite
all that the satire of a Thackeray or a Jerrold could do, must surely,
one would almost say, have had something in it savoring of a sort of
genius. For there are in some even of the very best and purest of
Bulwer's novels whole scenes and characters which it seems almost
utterly impossible that any reader whatever could follow without
laughter. I protest that I think the author of "Ernest Maltravers" owed
much of his success to the daring which assumed that anything might be
imposed on the public, and to the absence of that sense of the ludicrous
which might have made a man of a different stamp laugh at his own
nonsense. I assume that Bulwer wrote in perfect faith and seriousness,
honestly believing them to be fine, the most ridiculous, bombastic,
fantastic passages in all his novels. I take it for granted that Mr.
Morris's sad hero, "The Man who never Laughed Again," must have been
frivolity itself when compared with Bulwer-Lytton at work upon a novel.
The sensitive distrust of one's own capacity, the high-minded doubt of
the value of one's own works, which is probably the companion, the
Mentor, the tormentor often, and not unfrequently the conqueror and
destroyer of true genius, never seems to have vexed the author of
"Eugene Aram" and "Godolphin." Bulwer-Lytton won a great name partly
because he was not a man of genius. The kind of thing he tried to do
could not have been done truly and successfully, in the high artistic
sense, by any one with a capacity below that of a Shakespeare, or at
least a Goethe. A man of genius, but inferior genius, would have made a
wretched failure of it. Between the two stools of popularity and art, of
time and eternity, he must have fallen to the ground. But where genius
might fail to achieve a splendid success, talent and audacity might turn
out a magnificent sham. This is the sort of success, this and none
other, which I believe Bulwer-Lytton to have achieved. He is the finest
_faiseur_ in the literature of to-day. His wax-work gallery surpasses
Madame Tussaud's; or rather his sham art is as much superior to that of
a James or an Ainsworth as Madame Tussaud's gallery is to Mrs. Jarley's
show. That sort of sentiment which lies somewhere down in the heart of
every one, however commonplace, or busy, or cynical--the sentiment which
is represented by the applause of the galleries in a popular theatre,
and which cultivated audiences are usually ashamed to acknowledge--was
the feeling which Bulwer-Lytton could always reach and draw forth. He
had so much at least of the true artistic instinct as to recognize that
the strongest element of popularity is the sentimental; and he knew that
out of ten persons who openly laugh at such a thing, nine are secretly
touched by it. Bulwer-Lytton found much of his stock and capital in the
human emotions which sympathize with youthful ambition and youthful
love, just as Dickens makes perpetual play with the feelings which are
touched by the death of children. When Claude Melnotte, transfigured
into the splendid Colonel Morier, rushes forward just at the critical
moment, outbids yon sordid huckster for his priceless jewel Pauline,
flings down the purse containing double the needful sum, declares that
he has bought every coin of it in the cause of nations with a
Frenchman's blood, and sweeps away his ransomed bride amid the thunder
of the galleries, of course we all know that sort of thing is not
poetry, or high art, or anything but splendiferous rubbish. Yet it does
touch most of us somehow. I know I always feel divided between laughter
and enthusiastic sympathy even still, when I see it for the hundred and
fiftieth time or so. In the same way, when Paul Clifford charges on
society the crimes of his outlaw career; when Rienzi vows vengeance for
his brother's blood; when Zanoni resigns his immortal youth that "the
flower at his feet may a little longer drink the dew"; when Ernest
Maltravers silently laments amid all his splendor of success the obscure
Arcadia of his boyish love, we can all see at a glance how bombastic,
gaudy, melodramatic, is the style in which the author works out his
ideas; how utterly unlike the simple, strong majesty of true art the
whole thing is; but yet we must acknowledge that the author understands
thoroughly how to touch a certain vein of what may be called elementary
emotion, common almost to all minds, which it is the object of society
to repress or suppress, and the object of the popular artist to stir up
into activity. Preach, advise, remonstrate, demonstrate as you will, the
majority of us will always feel inclined to give alms to beggar-women
and whining little children in the snowy streets. We know we are doing
unwisely, and perhaps even wrongly; we know that the misery which
touches us is probably a trumped-up and sham misery; we know that
whatever we give to the undeserving and the insincere is practically
withdrawn from the deserving and the sincere; we are ashamed to be seen
giving the money, and yet we do give it whenever we can. Because, after
all, our common emotion of sympathy with the more obvious, intelligible,
and I would almost say vulgar forms of human suffering, are far too
strong for our moderating maxims and our more refined mental conditions.
So of the sympathies which heroes and heroines, aspirations and agonies
of the style of Bulwer-Lytton awaken in us. Virtue cannot so inoculate
our old stock but we shall relish it; and is not he something of an
artist who recognizes this great fact in human nature, and plays upon
that vibrating, imperishable chord, and compels it to give him back such
an applauding echo? After all, I think there is just as much of sham and
of Madame Tussaud, and of the beggar-child in the snow, about Paul
Dombey's deathbed and Little Dorrit's filial devotion, as about the mock
heroics of Claude Melnotte or the domestic virtues of the Caxtons. Of
course I am not comparing Bulwer-Lytton with Dickens. The latter was a
man of genius, and one of the greatest humorists known at least to
modern literature. But nearly all the pathetic side of Dickens seems to
me of much the same origin as the heroic side of Bulwer-Lytton, and I
question whether the greater part of the popularity won by the author of
"Bleak House" has not been gained by a mastery of the very same kind of
art as that which sets galleries applauding for Claude Melnotte, and
young women in tears for Eugene Aram.
There are, moreover, two points of superiority in artistic purpose which
may be claimed for Bulwer-Lytton over either Dickens or Thackeray. They
do not, perhaps, "amount to much" in any case; but they are worth
mentioning. Bulwer-Lytton has more than once drawn to the best of his
power a gentleman, and he has often drawn, or tried to draw, a man
possessed by some great, impersonal, unselfish object in life. The
former of these personages Dickens never seemed to have known or
believed in; the latter, Thackeray never even attempted to paint. Why
has Dickens never drawn a gentleman? I am not using the word in the
artificial, conventional, snobbish sense. I mean by a gentleman a
creature with intellect as well as heart, with refined and cultivated
tastes, with something of personal dignity about him. I do not care from
what origin he may have sprung, or to what class he may have belonged:
there is no reason, even in England, why a man born in a garret might
not acquire all the ways, and thoughts, and refinements of a gentleman.
Among the class to which most of Dickens's heroes are represented as
belonging, have we not all in England known gentlemen of intellect and
culture? Yet Dickens has never painted such a being. Nicholas Nickleby
is a plucky, honest, good-hearted blockhead; Tom Pinch is a benevolent
idiot; Eugene Wrayburn is a low-bred, impertinent snob--a mere "cad," as
Londoners would say. I have had no sympathy with the "Saturday Review"
in its perpetual accusations of vulgarity against Dickens; and I think a
recent English critic was pleasantly and purposely extravagant when he
charged the author of the "Christmas Carol" with having no loftier idea
of human happiness than the eating of plum pudding and kissing girls
under the mistletoe. But I do say that Dickens never drew a cultivated
English gentleman or lady--a cultivated and refined English man or
woman, if you will; and yet I know that there are such personages to be
found without troublesome quest among the very classes of society which
he was always describing.
Now Thackeray could draw and has drawn English gentlemen and
gentlewomen; but has he ever drawn a high-minded, self-forgetting man or
woman devoted to some, to any, great object, or cause, or purpose of
any kind in life--absorbed by it and faithful to it? Is it true that
even in London society men are wholly given up to dining, and paying
visits, and making and spending money? Is it true that all men, even in
London society, pass their lives in a purposeless, drifting way, making
good resolves and not carrying them out; doing good things now and then
out of easy, generous impulse; loving lightly, and recovering from love
quickly? Are there in London society, on the one hand, no passions; on
the other hand, no simple, strong, consistent, unselfish, high-minded
lives? Assuredly there are; but Thackeray, the greatest painter of
English society England has ever had, chose, for some reason or another,
to ignore them. Only when he comes to speak of artists, more especially
of painters, does he ever hint that he is aware of the existence of men
whose lives are consistent, steadfast, and unselfish. Surely this is a
great omission. One does not care to drag into this discussion the names
of living illustrations; but I should like to have pointed Thackeray's
attention to this and that and the other man whom, to my certain
knowledge, he knew and warmly, fully appreciated, and asked him, "Why,
when you were painting with such incomparable fidelity such
illustrations of English life as you chose to select, did you not think
fit to picture such a simple, strong, consistent, magnanimous,
self-forgetting, self-devoting nature as that, or that, or that?"--and
so on, through many examples which I or anybody could have named. I
suppose the honest answer would have been, "I cannot draw that kind of
character; I cannot quite enter into its experiences and make it look
life-like as I see it; it is not in my line, and I prefer not to attempt
it." Now, I think it to the credit of Bulwer-Lytton, as a mere artist,
that he did include such figures even in his wax-work gallery. He could
not make them look like life; but he showed at least that he was aware
of their existence, and that he did his best to teach the world to
recognize them.