The British aristocracy has given to literature a few names which the
world will not willingly let die. But its contribution to the world's
genius has not been great in proportion to its numbers, its exceptional
opportunities for culture, and the great prominence which has naturally
been given to its achievements. From out its ranks have come few of the
great names in English literature.
Among these the name of Lord Lytton, or Bulwer, as he is more generally
known in literature, holds a prominent place. For the period of a long
life he lived in the world's eye, and the world feels a great interest
in the character of the man as well as in his writings.
His paternal ancestors had been settled in Norfolk since the Conquest.
The name of Bulwer attests the Scandinavian origin of the Norman
soldier. The great-grandfather of Edward Bulwer married the heiress of
the Earles of Heydon Hall, which became the family residence. Our hero's
father "contracted a romantic, if illicit, attachment to a young person
of great beauty, who eloped with him from a boarding-school in which she
was a teacher, and, though too haughty a man to marry beneath him, he
had at least the justice to say that while she lived he would never
marry any one else. And when the hand of a great and noble heiress was
offered him, although a very ambitious man, he refused her upon the
ground that he was not quite satisfied with the shape of her ladyship's
nose." General Bulwer built for his mistress a villa in the neighborhood
of London, and as he was driving into the yard on his return from some
military duties which had detained him longer than usual, she ran out to
meet him. In this hurried action she received a kick from one of the
horses, and died of the injury.
After this, the General, who is described by his son as being of a very
powerful, self-willed nature, wholly uncultivated by literature, but
with that ability for action which takes lessons from life,--married the
mother of our hero, a delicate girl, with intelligent, dark-blue eyes,
with shy sensitive temper, passionately fond of poetry, and deeply under
the influences of religion. Her family was as ancient as that of the
Bulwers, the Lyttons having intermarried with many houses famous in
history. But family concord was not one of the characteristics of the
Lytton family, and Bulwer's grandfather and grandmother had lived
stormily together for a few years, and separated by mutual consent. The
essential faults are said to have been all on the side of the
grandfather. The only daughter of the uncongenial pair was not permitted
to dwell permanently with either. She was sent at the age of five to a
large school, where she lived a sad life for a long time, without any of
the tender care and affection which such a child craves, and must have,
for anything like a healthful child-life. After a while she went to live
with her father, and still later with her mother, from whose house she
was married to General Bulwer. He was not a man who could appreciate the
rarer qualities of Miss Lytton. He could have no share in her
intellectual life and no sympathy with her religious nature. But the
elegance of her manners satisfied his pride, her domestic habits gave
him promise of a peaceful home, and, greatest merit of all, her features
suited him. He liked an aquiline nose. A nose that turned up the least
bit, his son tells us, would have disgusted him with a Venus. The lady's
nose in this instance proving satisfactory, a happy marriage was
anticipated, although the bridegroom had buried his heart in the grave
of a mistress, and the bride had but partially recovered from an unhappy
attachment for a man beneath herself in rank,--in fact, a merchant's
son. But the marriage proved far from a happy one, and was closed after
a few years by the sudden death of General Bulwer. Our hero thus writes
of him:--
"Peace to thy dust, O my father! Faults thou hadst, but those
rather of temper than of heart,--of deficient education and the
manlike hardness of imperious will than of ungenerous disposition
or epicurean corruption. If thou didst fail to give happiness to
the woman whom thou didst love, many a good man is guilty of a
similar failure. It had been otherwise, I verily believe, hadst
thou chosen a partner of intellectual cultivation more akin to
thine own,--of hardier nerve and coarser fibre,--one whom thy wrath
would less have terrified, whom thy converse would more have
charmed; of less moral spirit and more physical courage."
Verily we are tempted to ask when we read of this marriage--as well as
of the son's own marriage and the marriages of many other members of the
English aristocracy whose domestic lives have latterly seen the light of
day--whether less of moral spirit and more of physical courage is not
the great need among women who aspire to the peerage. Strong nerves and
a martial spirit, if they could not secure peace, would at least place
the combatants upon a more equal footing, and the world would be spared
the spectacle of the mild-mannered and meek bullied by the overbearing
and violent.
As for Bulwer himself, he had the hot blood, imperious temper, and
remorseless will of the combined Bulwers and Lyttons; and, it must be
added, a vanity and egotism so boundless as to be peculiarly his own,
and an arrogance and superciliousness which throughout life were a
constant drawback, and which interfered materially with the
acknowledgment by the world of his really great powers.
At the early age of seventeen this precocious young man, who had already
been several years in society, felt his first sensations of love; and he
talked of it to the end of his days as being the one genuine passion of
his life. He tells the pretty story very feelingly, and no doubt it was
a genuine boyish romance. Hear him:--
"Ah, God! how palpably, even in hours the least friendly to
remembrance, there rises before me when I close my eyes that
singularly dwarfed tree which overshadowed the little stream,
throwing its boughs half-way to the opposite margin. I dare not
revisit that spot, for there we were wont to meet (poor children
that we were!), thinking not of the world we had scarce entered,
dreaming not of fate and chance, full only of our first-born, our
ineffable love. It was so unlike the love of grown-up people; so
pure that not one wrong thought ever crossed it, and yet so
passionate that never again have I felt any emotion comparable to
the intensity of its tumultuous tenderness."
When the meetings so feelingly described became known to the lady's
father, she was sent away at once, and Bulwer never saw her again. Very
soon after, she was forced into a marriage against which her heart
protested. For three years she strove to smother the love which consumed
her; and when she sunk under the conflict, and death was about to
relieve her, she wrote to Bulwer informing him of the sufferings she had
undergone, affirming her deathless love, and begging him to visit her
grave.