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SIR E. B. LYTTON, NOVELIST, PHILOSOPHER, AND POET.*

[April 1859.]

What will he do with it? and My Novel are Sir Bulwer Lytton's last and best works. This is no small distinction. It is a remarkable thing for a man to write some twenty books of imaginative fiction, and yet to retain a vigour of mind and a freshness of imagination capable of making new efforts which not only equal but surpass the first fruits of his genius. It is true that these works and The Caxtons are not so much his own as some of his previous writings; but perhaps they are not altogether the worse for that. Grafted on a stock of Sterne or Dickens, they flourish with a new energy, and bloom with a fairness and completeness which the scion on its own roots had never attained to. Pelham alone of his earlier works enters into rivalry with his last two novels; while it contrasts with them in being preeminently his own. A first work-for Falkland was but an abortive attempt—is almost always more characteristic than any later one of the mind of the writer. There he does not spare himself; he brings into play all his energies, is lavish of all his resources, and gives a glimpse of every facet of his mind. His powers may afterwards develope in particular directions, and the proportions originally indicated no longer be preserved; but the man himself and the cha

*The Novels and Romances of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. 20 vols. London: Routledge and Co. 1858.

The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. 5 vols, London: Chapman and Hall.

racteristics of his genius will generally be more compendiously illustrated in the first work which really has called out his full powers than in any subsequent one. And since Pelham first startled and pleased the world of novel-readers with its brisk witticisms, its sharp sarcasms and lively caricatures, its clever descriptions and skilful narrative, and annoyed them by its hardness, its affectations, and its pseudo-sentiment, every subsequent work has reflected the same merits and the same defects. But the circle of merits has widened, if that of defects has not contracted. What a world of patient industry, what an indefatigable striving to make the most of his vocation, what an up-hill energy all these novels display! Never was man more true to his calling of artist than Bulwer has been. No hasty slipshod productions have ever disgraced his powers. The love of fame is his darling passion; but no success has ever deluded him into believing that the wreath was safely grasped, and that he might sink into indolent security.

Much of this zeal is due, no doubt, to the high estimate which the author has formed to himself of the influence and position of a novel-writer. He seems really to have persuaded himself that to write good romances is the highest achievement of the human intellect; possibly inferior to that of producing a great epic poem, but certainly by no other effort to be rivalled in its beneficial influence, or in its claims upon the gratitude of mankind. It is natural for a man somewhat to overrate the importance of his own sphere of activity; but it is obvious enough that Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton's judgment has been led further astray than it should have been by the fact that he has been successful in light literature, and attempted at least to write an epic poem. He exaggerates preposterously the influence of a novel-writer. He makes the wide diffusion which naturally belongs to entertaining writing, and the permanence which is inherent in printer's ink, too much the measure of the merit

of a writer. An artist in written words owes much to the materials in which he works; and this is to be taken into account when we judge of different classes of minds by the results of their labours. It requires a far higher mind and nature altogether, faculties better balanced, wider reasoning powers, broader energies, more exact and extended knowledge, and a more capacious and active intellect, to be a great statesman than to hold any but the very highest places in the hierarchy of literature: but the name and the thoughts of even a moderately good novel-writer will be, and long remain, familiar to a large number of minds; while the renown of the statesman is merged in new claims to attention as soon as he ceases to have a personal control over affairs. His name, indeed, may survive, but his labours perish from remembrance, as one wave yields to another, and its force is only seen in the gradual advance of the whole tide. Modern experience has proved that the power of expressing feelings and reproducing character with a truthfulness and skill greater than Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton has attained to, is any thing but a rare gift, and it is the fashion to accord it a place much higher than that to which either its rareness or its intrinsic value entitles it. And not only the artist but his work is apt to be overestimated, at least in one direction. It is the high function of art to refine and elevate the mind; to raise us above base pleasures and low-thoughted cares; to make Beauty familiar, Beauty, whose gracious privilege it is that something of herself shall pass into those who habitually contemplate her. But the moving power of life— the will-art has little power to influence, and the artist mistakes his aim and arrogates too high a function when he assumes for his arbitrary creations the power to mould the heart and guide the actions of men. Realities alone have this power; and art only so far as it reproduces actual existences, past or present, or at least is believed to do so. The life of a great man, the experiences of a

living spirit, have a powerful influence on other minds; they excite sympathy, admiration, emulation; the records of other men's actions control our own, the sight of their activity stimulates ours; their patience makes patience easier to us; their fortitude strengthens our power to bear. Is it so of the creations of the poet? We doubt it. Sometimes, indeed, consummate genius seems to introduce us to actual lives; but even then it has a less power over us for practical consequences than when some dauber heightens the colouring of facts. Has Hamlet or Jack Sheppard produced the greater number of actions?

We approach every work of art in two ways—either in sympathy with the artist, or in sympathy with the subject of his art; the two feelings mingle, and it is with a mixed admiration of the skill of the master, of the beautiful whole he has evolved, and of pity for the imploring mother, that we gaze on the statue of Niobe. But the mode in which we indulge our emotions under the influence of a work of art has, and always ought to have, in it something different from that stir of the feelings which acts immediately and powerfully upon the will. We do not say it cannot influence the will, or that it never does; but that in most men, and most in those who are capable of the highest pleasure in art, it is a sort of movement in subordination to the aesthetic faculty, a sort of voluntary submission to emotion with an undefined consciousness that it is not pure and simple feeling we experience, but feeling excited for the sake of the pleasure there is in the movement of the feelings. We know it is not real, we know it does not demand action, that with all its vividness the poet's creation is a fantasy. When, in that scene which for appalling suspense is the masterpiece of the master-poet,-when Macbeth" towards his design creeps like a ghost," and his wife stands in his absence whispering her strained anticipations of the event, our hearts, it is true, swell in our breasts, our blood stands still, we cease to breathe; but our instinct

is not to rush forward and prevent; our excitement, however great, is one which permits us quietly to abide the issue. It is only the ignorant man who thinks Garrick in Richard the Third is a villain; and in proportion as we lose the sense of the presence of the controlling art, does the sculptor, the painter, or the poet exercise a lower influence upon us. It may be even said that the simple excitement of the feelings, unaccompanied by the sort of intellectual contemplation which mingles with their movement in every legitimate enjoyment of a work of art, is rather hurtful than beneficial. For the true end of emotion is action, and to raise emotions and let them sink undirected to their purposes is weakening to the will and exhausting to the feelings themselves. Pruriency is a degraded word; but some analogous word, applicable to the whole range of moral sentiments, would express the temper which takes pleasure in what we describe. Sentimentalism is a part of it. But art, as we have said, interposes a sort of intellectual screen between the passion and the will; and this is the true sense in which art chastens the passions. It is not that sympathy with fictitious emotions refines their general exercise in the man who has happened to read Othello; it is that the passion which has been raised in him while he reads is a chastened passion, one detached from its natural alliance with action, and experienced with the consciousness that it is so detached. When we consider, however, how much of our light literature seeks its hold upon the reader, not in the poetic presentment of feeling, but in the attempt to raise the actual feeling, and how vast a number of readers there are who find their pleasure in the mere emotion,-in a sort of titillation of the heart at once objectless and untransmuted by the influence of art, —we must make some deduction from the ennobling influence which the enthusiasm of Sir Bulwer Lytton somewhat too largely ascribes to the study of novels.

There are doubtless other resources within the

scope