wonderful gifts as an intellectual mechanician, Edward Bulwer-Lytton
went on from 1828 to 1860 grinding out of his mill an almost unbroken
succession of novels and romances to suit all changes in public taste. I
do not believe he changed his themes and ways of treating them
purposely, to suit the changes of public taste; but rather that, being a
man of no true original and creative power, his style and his views were
modified by the modifying conditions of successive years. Some new idea,
some new way of looking at this or that question of human life came up,
and it attracted him who was always a close and diligent student of the
world and its fashions; and he made it into a romance. Whatever new
schools of fiction came into existence, Bulwer-Lytton, always directing
the new ideas into the channel where popular and elementary sympathies
flowed freely, succeeded in turning each change to advantage, and
keeping his place. Dickens sprang up and founded a school; and yet
Bulwer-Lytton held his own. Thackeray arose and established a new
school, and Bulwer-Lytton, whom no human being would have thought of
comparing with either as a man of genius, did not lose a reader.
Charlotte Bronte came like a shadow, and so departed; George Eliot gave
a new lift and life to romance; the realistic school was followed by the
sensational school; the Literature of Adultery ran its vulgar
course--and Bulwer-Lytton remained where he always had been, and moulted
no feather.
It is not likely that any true critic ever thought very highly of him,
or indeed took him quite seriously; but for many, many years criticism,
which had so scoffed and girded at him once, had only civil words and
applauding smiles for him. How Thackeray once did make savage fun of
"Bullwig," and more lately how Thackeray praised him! Charles
Dickens--what an enthusiastic admirer of the genius of his friend Lytton
he too became! And Tennyson--what a fierce passage of arms that was long
ago between Bulwer and him; and now what cordial mutual admiration!
Fonblanque and Forster, the "Athenaeum" and "Punch," Tray, Blanche, and
Sweetheart--how they all welcomed in chorus each new effort of genius by
the great romancist who was once the stock butt of all lively satirists.
How did this happy change come about? Nobody ever had harder dealing at
the hands of the critics than Bulwer when his powers were really most
fresh and forcible; nobody ever had more general and genial commendation
than shone of late years around his sunny way. How was this? Did the
critics really find that they had been mistaken and own themselves
conquered by his transcendent merit? Did he "win the wise who frowned
before to smile at last"? To some extent, yes. He showed that he was not
to be written down; that no critical article could snuff him out; that
he really had some stuff in him and plenty of mettle and perseverance;
and he soon became a literary institution, an accomplished fact which
criticism could not help recognizing. But there was much more than this
operating towards Bulwer-Lytton's reconciliation with criticism. He
became a wealthy man, a man of fashion, a sort of aristocrat, with yet a
sincere love for the society of authors and artists, with a taste for
encouraging private theatricals and endowing literary institutions, and
with a splendid country house. He became a genial, golden link between
literature and society. Even Bohemia was enabled by his liberal and
courteous good-will to penetrate sometimes into the regions of
Belgravia. The critics began to fall in love with him. I do not believe
that Lord Lytton made himself thus agreeable to his literary brethren
out of any motive whatever but that of honest goodfellowship and
kindness. I have heard too many instances of his frank and brotherly
friendliness to utterly obscure writers, who could be of no sort of
service to him or to anybody, not to feel satisfied of his unselfish
good-nature and his thorough loyalty to that which ought to be the
_esprit de corps_ of the literary profession. But it is certain that he
thus converted enemies into friends, and stole the gall out of many an
inkstand, and the poison from many a penman's feathered dart. Not that
the critics simply sold their birthright of bitterness for an invitation
to dinner or the kindly smile of a literary Peer. But you cannot, I
suppose, deal very rigidly with the works of a man who is uniformly kind
to you; who brings you into a sort of society which otherwise you would
probably never have a chance of seeing; who, being himself a lord,
treats you, poor critic, as a friend and brother; and whose works,
moreover, are certain to have a great public success, no matter what you
say or leave unsaid. The temptation to look for and discover merit in
such books is strong indeed--perhaps too strong for frail critical
nature. Thus arises the great sin of English criticism. It is certainly
not venal; it is hardly ever malign. Mere ill-nature, or impatience, or
the human delight of showing one's strength, may often induce a London
critic to deal too sharply with some new and nameless author; but
although we who write books are each and all of us delighted to persuade
ourselves that any disparaging criticism must be the result of some
personal hatred, I cannot remember ever having had serious reason to
believe that a London critic had attacked a book because of his personal
ill-will to the author. The sin is quite of another kind--a tendency to
praise the books of certain authors merely because the critic knows the
men so intimately, and likes them so well, that he is at once naturally
prejudiced in their favor, and disinclined to say anything which could
hurt or injure them. Thus of late criticism has had hardly anything to
say of Lord Lytton, except in the way of praise. He is the head, and
patron, and ornament of a great London literary "Ring." I use this word
because none other could so well convey to a reader in New York a clear
idea of the friendly professional unity of the coterie I desire to
describe; but I wish it to be distinctly understood that I do not
attribute anything like venality or hired partisanship of any kind to
the literary Ring of which Lord Lytton is the sparkling gem. Of course
it has become, as such cliques always must become, somewhat of a Mutual
Admiration Society; and it is certain that a place in that brotherhood
secures a man against much disparaging criticism. There are indeed
literary cliques in London, of a somewhat lower range than this, where
the influence of personal friendships does operate in a manner that
closely borders upon a sort of literary corruption. But Lord Lytton and
his friends and admirers are not of that sort. They are friends
together, and they do admire each other, and I suppose everybody (save
one person) likes Lord Lytton now; and so it is only in the rare case of
a fresh, independent outsider, like the critic who wrote in the
"Westminster Review" some two years ago, that a really impartial, keen,
artistic survey is taken of the works of him that was "Bullwig." When
Lytton published his "Caxtons," the reviewer of the "Examiner," even up
to that time a journal of great influence and prestige, having nearly
exhausted all possible modes of panegyric, bethought himself that some
unappreciative and cynical persons might possibly think there was a lack
of originality in a work so obviously constructed after the model of
"Tristram Shandy." So he hastened to confute or convince all such
persons by pointing out that in this very fact consisted the special
claim of "The Caxtons" to absolute originality. The original genius of
Lytton was proved by his producing so excellent a copy. Don't you see?
You don't, perhaps. But then if you were intimate with Lord Lytton, and
were liked by him, and were a performer in the private theatricals at
Knebworth, his country seat, you would probably see it quite clearly,
and agree with it, every word.
There was one person indeed who had no toleration for Lord Lytton, or
for his friendly critics. That was Lord Lytton's wife. There really is
no scandal in alluding to a conjugal quarrel which was brought so
persistently under public notice by one of the parties as that between
Bulwer-Lytton and his wife. I do not know whether I ought to call it a
quarrel. Can that be called a fight, piteously asks the man in Juvenal,
where my enemy only beats and I am merely beaten? Can that be called a
quarrel in which, so far as the public could judge, the wife did all the
denunciation, and the husband made no reply? Lady Lytton wrote novels
for the purpose of satirizing her husband and his friends--his
parasites, she called them. Bulwer-Lytton she gracefully described as
having "the head of a goat on the body of a grasshopper"--a description
which has just enough of comical truthfulness in its savage ferocity to
make it specially cruel to the victim of the satire, and amusing to the
unconcerned public. Lady Lytton attributed to her husband the most
odious meannesses, vices, and cruelties; but the public, with all its
love of scandal, seems to have steadfastly refused to take her
ladyship's word for these accusations. Dickens she denounced and
vilified as a mere parasite and sycophant of her husband. At one time
she poured out a gush of fulsome eulogy on Thackeray because he
apparently was not one of Lytton's friends; afterwards, when the
relationship between "Pelham" and "Pendennis" became friendly, she
changed her tune and tried to bite the file, to satirize the great
satirist. Disraeli she caricatured under the title of "Jericho Jabber."
This sort of thing she kept always going on. Sometimes she issued
pamphlets addressed to the women of England, calling on them to take up
her quarrel--which somehow they did not seem inclined to do. Once when
Lord Lytton, then only Sir Edward, was on the hustings, addressing his
constituents at a county election, her ladyship suddenly mounted the
platform and "went for" him. Sir Edward and his friends prudently and
quietly withdrew. I do not know anything of the merits of the quarrel,
and have always been disposed to think that something like insanity must
have been the explanation of much of Lady Lytton's conduct. But it is
beyond doubt that her husband's demeanor was remarkable for its quiet,
indomitable patience and dignity. Lately the public has happily heard
little of Lady Lytton's complaints. I did not even know whether she was
still living, until I saw a little book announced the other day by some
publisher, which bore her name. Let her pass--with the one remark that
her long succession of bitter attacks upon her husband does not seem to
have done him any damage in the estimation of the world.
It is not likely that posterity will preserve much of Lord Lytton's
writings. They do not, I think, add to literature one original
character. Even the glorified murderer or robber, the Eugene Aram or
Paul Clifford sort of person, had been done and done much better by
Schiller, by Godwin, and by others, before Bulwer-Lytton tried him at
second hand. As pictures of English society, those of them which profess
to deal with modern English life have no value whatever. The historical
novels, the classical novels, are glaringly false in their color and
tone. Some of the personages in "The Last Days of Pompeii" are a good
deal more like modern English dandies than most of the people who are
given out as such in "Pelham." The attempts at political satire in "Paul
Clifford," at broad humor in "Eugene Aram" (the Corporal and his cat for
example), are feeble and miserable. There is hardly one touch of refined
and genuine pathos--of pathos drawn from other than the old stock
conventional sources--in the whole of the romances, plays, and poems.
The one great faculty which the author possessed was the capacity to
burnish up and display the absolutely commonplace, the merely
conventional, the utterly unreal, so that it looked new, original, and
real in the eyes of the ordinary public, and sometimes even succeeded,
for the hour, in deceiving the expert. Bulwer-Lytton's romance is only
the romance of the London "Family Herald" or the "New York Ledger," plus
high intellectual culture and an intimate acquaintance with the best
spheres of letters, art, and fashion. I own that I have considerable
admiration for the man who, with so small an original outfit,
accomplished so much. So successful a romancist; occasionally almost a
sort of poet; a perfect master of the art of writing plays to catch
audiences; so skilful an imitator of oratory that, despite almost
unparalleled physical defects, he once nearly persuaded the world that
his was genuine eloquence--who shall say that the capacity which can do
all this is not something to be admired? It is a clever thing to be able
to make ornaments of paste which shall pass with the world for diamonds;
mock-turtle soup which shall taste like real; wax figures which look at
first as if they were alive. Of the literary art which is akin to this,
our common literature has probably never had so great a master as Lord
Lytton. Such a man is especially the one to stand up as the appropriate
representative of literature in such an assembly as the English House of
Lords. I should be sorry to see a Browning, a Thackeray, a Carlyle, a
Tennyson, a Dickens there; but I think Lord Lytton is in his right
place--a splendid sham author in a splendid sham legislative assembly.
"PAR NOBILE FRATRUM--THE TWO NEWMANS."
"The truth, friend," exclaims Mr. Arthur Pendennis, debating some
question with his comrade Warrington; "where is the truth? Show it me. I
see it on both sides. I see it in this man who worships by act of
Parliament, and is rewarded with a silk apron and five thousand a year;
in that man who, driven fatally by the remorseless logic of his creed,
gives up everything, friends, fame, dearest ties, closest vanities, the
respect of an army of churchmen, the recognized position of a leader,
and passes over, truth-impelled, to the enemy in whose ranks he is ready
to serve henceforth as a nameless private soldier; I see the truth in
that man as I do in his brother, whose logic drives him to quite a
different conclusion, and who, after having passed a life in vain
endeavors to reconcile an irreconcilable book, flings it at last down in
despair, and declares, with tearful eyes and hands up to heaven, his
revolt and recantation."
Perhaps many American readers, meeting with this passage, may have
supposed that the two brothers here described were merely typical
figures, invented almost at random by Thackeray to enable Pendennis to
point his moral. But in England people know that the two brothers are
real personages, and still live. I saw one of them a few nights ago, the
one last mentioned by Arthur Pendennis. I saw him, as he is indeed often
to be seen, the centre and leader of a little group or knot, a hopeless
minority, vainly striving by force of argument and logic, of almost
unlimited erudition, and a keen bright intellect, to obtain public
attention for something which the public persisted in regarding as an
idle crotchet, an impotent craze. The other brother, the elder, is a man
whose secession from the Church of England has lately been described by
Disraeli, in the preface to the collected edition of his works, as
having "dealt a blow to the Church under which it still reels." "That
extraordinary event," says Disraeli, "has been 'apologized for' but has
never been explained. It was a mistake and a misfortune." Probably no
reader of "The Galaxy" will now need to be told that the typical
brothers alluded to by Pendennis are John Henry and Francis W. Newman.
The Atlantic deals curiously and capriciously with reputations. Both
these brothers Newman seem to me to be less known in America than they
deserve to be. John Henry in especial I found to be thus comparatively
ignored in the United States. He is beyond doubt one of the greatest,
certainly one of the most influential Englishmen of our time. He has
engraved his name deeply on the history of his age. He has led perhaps
the most remarkable religious movement known to England for generations.
He is one of the very few men whose lofty and commanding intellect has
been acknowledged and admired by all sects and parties. Gather together
any company of eminent Englishmen, however select in its composition,
however splendid in its members, and John Henry Newman will be among the
few especially conspicuous.
Perhaps most of my readers will be of opinion that Newman's intellect
has been sadly misused; that his influence has been for the most part
disastrous. But no one who knows anything of the subject can deny the
greatness alike of the intellect and of the influence. Let me add, too,
that no enemy ever yet called into question the simple sincerity, the
blameless purity of John Henry Newman's purposes and character. Of later
years he has been rarely seen in London, for his duties keep him in
Birmingham, where he is at the head of a religious and educational
institution. I have heard that years are telling heavily on him, and
that when he now preaches he is listened to with the kind of
half-melancholy reverence which hangs on the words of a great man who is
already beginning to be a portion of the past. But his influence was a
power almost unequalled in its day, and that day has not yet wholly
faded.
The Newman brothers are Londoners by birth, sons of a wealthy banker of
Lombard street--the British Wall street. Both were educated at Ealing
school, and both went to the University of Oxford. John Henry is by some
four years the senior of Francis, who was born in 1805, and who now
looks at least a dozen or fifteen years younger than his distinguished
brother. Both men were endowed with remarkable gifts; both had a
splendid faculty of acquiring knowledge. John Henry Newman became a
clergyman of the Established Church. He was a close and intimate friend
of Keble, of Pusey, and of Manning. He grew to be regarded as one of the
rising stars of Protestantism. No name, soon, stood higher than his. His
friends loved him, and Protestant England began to revere him. Now
observe the change that came on these two brothers, alike so gifted and
earnest, alike so wooed by the promise of brilliant worldly career. Two
movements of thought, having perhaps a common origin in the
dissatisfaction with the existing intellectual stagnation of the Church,
but tending in widely different directions, carried the brothers along
with them--"seized," to use the words of Richter, "their bleeding hearts
and flung them different ways." The younger brother found himself drawn
toward rationalism. He could not subscribe the Thirty-Nine Articles for
his degree as a Master; he left Oxford. He wandered for years in the
East, endeavoring, not very successfully, to teach Christianity on its
broadest basis to the Mohammedans; and he finally returned to England to
take his place among the leaders of that school of free thought which
the ignorant, the careless, or the malignant set down as infidelity. In
the mean time his brother became one of the pioneers of a still more
unexpected movement. In the English Church for a long time every thing
had seemed to be settled and at rest. The old controversy with Rome
appeared out of date, unnecessary, and perhaps vulgar. Everything was
just as it should be--stable and respectable. But it suddenly occurred
to some earnest, unresting souls, like that of Keble--souls "without
haste and without rest," like Goethe's star--to insist that the Church
of England had higher claims and nobler duties than those of preaching
harmless sermons and enriching bishops. Keble could not bear to think of
the Church taking pleasure since all is well. He urged on some of the
more vigorous and thoughtful minds around him that they should reclaim
for the Church the place which ought to be hers as the true successor of
the Apostles. He claimed for her that she, and she alone, was the real
Catholic Church, authorized to teach all nations, and that Rome had
wandered away from the right path, foregone the glorious mission which
she might have maintained. One of Keble's closest and dearest friends
was John Henry Newman, and Keble regarded Newman as a man qualified
beyond all others to become the teacher and leader of the new movement.
Keble preached a famous sermon in 1833, and inaugurated the publication
of a series of tracts designed to vindicate the real mission of the
Church of England. This was the Tractarian movement, which had early,
various, and memorable results. John Henry Newman wrote the most
celebrated of all the tracts, the famous "No. 90," which drew down the
censure of the University authorities on the ground that it actually
tended to abolish all difference between the Church of England and the
Church of Rome. Yet a little, and the gradual workings of Newman's mind
became evident to all the world. The brightest and most penetrating
intellect in the English Protestant Church was publicly and deliberately
withdrawn from her service, and John Henry Newman became a priest of the
Church of Rome. To this had the inquiry conducted him which led his
friend Dr. Pusey merely to endeavor to incorporate some of the mysticism
and the symbols of Rome with the practice and the progress of the
English Church; which had led Dr. Keble only to a more liberal and truly
Christianlike temper of Protestant faith; which had sent Francis Newman
into radical rationalism. The two brothers were intellectually divided
forever. Each renounced a career rich in promise for mere conscience'
sake; and the one went this way, the other that.
Disraeli has in no wise exaggerated the depth and painfulness of the
sensation produced among English Protestants by the secession of John
Henry Newman. It was of course received upon the opposite side with
corresponding exultation. No man, indeed, could be less qualified than
Mr. Disraeli to understand the tremendous, the irresistible force of
conviction in a nature like that of Newman. The brilliant master of
political tactics has made it evident that he did not understand the
motive of Newman's secession any more than he did the meaning of the
title of Newman's celebrated book, "Apologia pro Vita sua." "That
extraordinary event," says Disraeli, speaking of the secession, "has
been apologized for, but has never been explained." Evidently Disraeli
believed that the English word "apology" is the correct translation of
the Latinized Greek word "apologia," which it most certainly is not.
Nothing could have been further from Newman's mind or from the purpose,
or indeed from the title of his book, than to apologize for his
secession. On the contrary, the book is sharply and pertinaciously
aggressive. It was called forth by an attack made on Dr. Newman by the
Rev. Charles Kingsley. I think Kingsley was in the main right in his
views, but he was rough and blundering in his expression of them, and he
is about as well qualified to carry on a controversy with John Henry
Newman as Governor Hoffman would be to undertake a rhetorical
competition with Mr. Wendell Phillips. Kingsley's bluff, rude, illogical
way of fighting, his "wild and skipping spirit," were placed at
ludicrous and fearful disadvantage. Newman "went for him" unsparingly,
and literally tore him with the beak and claws of logic, satire, and
invective. One was reminded of Pascal's attacks on the Jesuits--only
that this time the wit and power were on the side which might fairly be
called Jesuitical. Out of this merciless onslaught on Kingsley came the
"Apologia pro Vita sua," in which Newman endeavored to vindicate and
glorify, not excuse or apologize for, his strange secession. The book is
well worth reading, if only as a curious illustration of the utter
inadequacy of human intellect and human logic to secure a soul from the
strangest wandering, the saddest possible illusion. You cannot read a
page of it without admiration for the intellect of the author, and
without pity for the poverty even of the richest intellectual gifts
where guidance is sought in a faith and in things which transcend the
limits of human logic.