The Sun.
London, England, 1853-03-14 00:00:00

BULTVER LYTTON'S NEW WORK.

!'y Novel ; or, Varieties in English Life: 4 vols.
By. Pisistratus Caxton.. Blackwood.
Remarkable as our expectations were from its
very commencement as to the merits of this extra-
ordinary work on its completion, those • expecta-
tions we must, avow have been, in every respect,
realised. "My Novel" is something more in
regard to its author than another signally success-
ful achievement in literature. It must' for many
reasons, to our thinking, be regarded as his master-
piece. Nevertheless, we would have it especially
understood, that, in declaring this to be our deli,
berate and conscientious conviction,
we are not
disposed to treat the predecessors of ie •new fiction
before us with anything bearing
in e
g,even the semblancewe
of disparagement. We have no inclination what-
rder.that
ever to depreciate the
excellence of Sir Bulwer
Lytton's earlier perform
may pronounce a more studied panegyric upon the
latest fruit of his ever-fructile and ever-ripening
imagination. Among his. former productions we
can enumerate favourites so secure in our affection,
so elevated in our estimation, so fully and cordially
commanding our admiration, that it would require
some almost preternatural display of originality on
the part of our great novelist to loosen their hold
upon our not superficially exercised capacities of
appreciation. Those wonderful creations of his—
the offspring of his prolific and comprehensive in-
tellect—are, in. fact, altogether too diversified in
their nature to clash with each other in their
claims upon our preference : they are too dissimilar
in their character to' necessitate at the hands of
the critic a choice that would assuredly be as idle
as it might in effect appear to be invidious. It is
scarcely so much in reference to the varied aspect
of Sir Bulwer Lytton's reputation in English lite-
rature that we offer, the tribute of this acknOw-
lodgment —although we might discover ;wider
field for arguments of a similar tendency
in the fact of that ample and golden reputa-
tion being derived from eminent. labours in
almost every one of its more removed and
more exalted departments. It is rather • that
we are here writing in allusion to the aston-
ishing contrasts visible in the chequered group
of his prose fictions alone, to the variegated.
dyes (so to speak) colouring into splendour his gor-
geous robe as a romancist, the charms' of an. ever-
changing manner, and of an ever-shifting purpose,
which are among the chief spells of his wizard
fascination. Undoubtedly, the fact is marvellous
enough, that, in Bulwer Lytton, we have a man who
has adventured into nearly every one of the higher
regions of imaginative literature—that in all these
regions, without exception, he has mastered the
difficulties in the way of ambitious enterprise—
that from all he has brought, sooner or later, some
brilliant work at once the result of his daring,and
the reward of his assiduity. Throughout this ap-
parent changefulness, moreover, he has proved
himself faithful to the object of his intellectual
toil, and not less also to the source from which it may
be said to have emanated. Art has ever been the jea-
lous mistress he has served, as Nature has been, in all
his purer and loftier efforts, the source of his inspi-
ration. The one has been, in a manner, the God-
dess, and the other the Priestess of his imagination.
Under such auspices he has been enabled to build
up for himself no common or, we believe, evanes-
cent reputation. Twenty-five years have scarcely
elapsed since the commencement (in earnest) of his
literary endeavours, since the beginning of his
pilgrimage after the, True and the Beautiful—
and, already he has achieved for himself distinction
as a Poet, as a Dramatist, as an Essayist, as an
Historian, as a Reviewer, as a Novelist, as a Bio-
grapher, as a Publicist, as an Orator, as a Pamph-
leteer : taking part in the lowlier as well as in the
loftier rivalries ; soaring at one period into an epic(
atmosphere (the empyrean of Fancy) when chaunt-
ins- the glories of King Arthur, and at another di-
recting his plastic mind to the consideration. of the
homelier interests of agriculture in those matter-
of-fact " Letters to John Bull," signed by
him with such exquisite accuracy and sig-
nificance-7" A Landlord and
.a Labourer." Yes,
in very truth, a labourer ! For never, surely,
did any one less appear to comprehend the luxury
of the dOke far niente—the faith of the lotos-
eaters, the wisdom of the lazzaroni. Never re-
laming in his exertions, or only pausing from them i
for a while with a view to their yet more energetic
renewal immediately afterwards, Sir Edward
Bulwer Lytton has, within this past quarter of a
century, and while only yet in the maturity of his
manhood, inscribed his name unfadingly in three
divisions, at least, of our national Walhalla.
Neither the wit of Sydney Smith, nor the subtle.
genius of Pascal, could secure a very extended
popularity to the labours of even the most suc-
cessful pamphleteer. As an orator, Sir Bulwer
Lytton has yet to develope those great resources
which upon more than ono notable occasion, in
the House of Commons, he. has revealed that 'ho
really possesses in his capacity as a rhetorician.
A generous and discriminating critic he has
frequently shown himself to be through the pages
of the New Monthly, as he has before now
proved himself a vigorous and masterly Reviewer
through his contributions to the Edinburgh. Yet
in neither capacity has he gained, because in neither
has he apparently aimed at pre-eminence among his
contemporaries. Charming though his graceful
memorial of Laman Blanchard, he cannot be said,
even by his admirers, to have mastered the diffi-
culties encountered in the pathway of the biogra-
pher—and this simply, we, take it, by reason of his
never having attempted in that particular school
any elaborated composition. His fragment of a
history of Athens, ornate and eloquent though it
is unquestionably, is still simply a' fragment, ,so
that he may be declared to have merely entered his
claim to the dignity of an annalist, without follow-
ing up that claim by any adequate justification.
His " Student" must always place him among
the most delightful of our essayists, even while it
fails to elevate him above the writers of " Elia ",
and the " Spectator." Whatever may be thought
of it by, cavillers like the ingenious Secretary to
to the Admiralty, the carefully-considered and
closely-reasoned chapters of " England and
the English " will continue to obtain for its
author a high degree of consideration, in
spite of the supreme and overshadowing' renown
of such men. as Delolme and Montesquieu.
But, as a poet, as a novelist, and as a dramatist,
the reputation. of Sir Bulwer Lytton may surely
now be regarded as 'established. In each of those re-
markable characters he has long since vindicated
his right to our admiration 2 • and he has done this,
let us observe, by a diversity of rare and very ad-
mirable achievements. Vis frequent and vari
ous successes have been the consequence, seem-
ingly, of his implicit reliance on the oOq TO rav—
that confidence which was the talisman of good
fortune to Napoleon the Great, and Which consti-
tutes in reality the secret of victory as well to
bookmen as to conquerors. It has so operated in
his instance, that 'the lurid promise of " Falkland"
has, been almost forgotten ever since the sparkling
vivacity of ".Pelham". first awakened the pub-
lie mind to the birth of a new and creative
genius among our master-novelists. It has so deve-
loped its influence in his regard, that the immature
graces of the " Duchess de la Valliere" have been
lost sight of now, that its worth has been
wholly eclipsed by the sterling value of plays
like the brilliant " Money," and the exquisite
" Lady of Lyons," and the impassioned' " Riehe-:
lieu." It has, in fine, so revealed the fervour of
its inborn energy as a source of incitement, that
the youthful effusions of his muse (the very titles'
of which we shrink- from enumerating, because of
their now obvious and scarcely accountable inferi-
ority) have been cast aside by himself as Only merit-
ing oblivion, dwarfed as they are by contrast with
his later and more majestic composition's—poetry
throbbing with the warm blood of his childhood,,
and yet mellowed with the sunny ripeness of the
judgment of his maturity. Conspicuous though it
is most indisputably in each of the different depart-
ments already particularised, the indomitable per-
severance of our author appears to be, perhaps, the
most conspicuous in that' true faeryland from the
purple mists of which he has summoned the loveli-
ness of lEgle, and.' the mirth of Gawaine, and the
gentleness of Caradoc, and the wisdom of Merlin,
and the pomp of Carduel, and the pride and the
glOry of Pendragon. There were auguries, no
doubt, of nobler achievements , for the future inf
those pensive verses on " Constance," ending, as
they did, with a gush of natural emotion, and
more clearly still in those, touching and so-
lemn lines on " Milton," in which the Dreamer
rose at times into the rapture of tho Cele-
brant, but their promise we Cannot but con-
Ceive to have been altogether surpassed by tlAt
satire and that epic which have, within the last
few years, been their successors. Questioned for a
long while, Bulwer Lytton's capabilities as a poet
have come at last to'be recognised ; insomuch that
he has been enabled, twice, to test the value 'of
their power under the disguise or shadow of the
anonymous. Therefore, now, at least, he may
exult at the tardy fulfilment, in this respect, of
what wo doubt not had long continued among his
most cherished aspirations—rejoicing, as . Horace
rejoiced, in his tender and almost plaintive ode to
Melpomene.
ROMEO principle urbium,
Dignitatur soboles lifter amabiles •
Vatum ponere me chords ;
Et jam dents minus mordeor invido.
Unlike that loitering voluptuary, however, the
bard of "King Arthur". has indicated by, his public
life--and this not merely in reference to the city of
Lincoln, or the shire of Hertford—that ,he does
not regitrd the_ indulgence of .:pootic ,reverie as
altogether incompatible with participation in

the ruder struggles 'of .the .commonwealth.*
Hence, we have found hini, at intervals, - taking
part in the . discussions .of Parliament ; and
while, in this manner contributing his modicum
to the records of Hansard, assiduously striving, as
we have seen, after that distinction- which he has-
,. commanded in. such extraordinary abundance from
so many and such opposite departments of imagina-
tive literature. . Marvellous, we have already said,
has been the intellectual plasticity with which he
lias equally shown himself a proficient now in one,
and now in another .of these. departments : but
_still
More marvellous, to our thinking, has been the
variety .of manner, or, more strictly speaking, of
style displayed.by.him in his one and paramount
character as a novelist.
Altogether, Bulwer Lytton has written about -
twenty novels,'and between-no two of them, we may
safely assert, is there traceable any kind of resem-'
'blance whatsoever. Several of them, indeed; are
'of a totally distinct species from each other--con-
eeived in a different school—written after a fashion
wholly dissimilar. Compare, for example, Pelham,
that Iliad of the Artificial, in which the hero was,
according to the happy phrase of his historian,
"a prsonal combination of antitheses," at once a
disciple of wisdom and a votary of pleasure, a
moralist and a voluptuary, a fop and a philosopher—
compare it with Zanotti, that Odyssey of the Mys-
tical, in which, under certain typical . forms were
unravelled some of the tangled mazes in the
great problem of human existence—the hero
being, so to speak; the incarnation of Idealism
(to adopt the ingenious explanation put forth
by ,some unknown writer in the appendix to,
the cheap edition just published) enforcing, through
the medium of his fictitious career, the sublime .
truth, that "the universal lot is, after all, that of
the highest privilege." What. two stories could
possibly present a more startling contrast to each
other ?—here the Adventures of a Gentleman=

there a Romance of the Rosicrucians ! Compare,
again, the delicate and beautiful figment of The
Pilgrtms of the Rhine, called. by its writer so grace-
'fully and modestly " an episode out of ' the graver
epic of human destinies"—compare it with the lofty
and majestic narrative of Rienzi, in which the last
of the Roman Tribunes, " the hope of Italy," and
the "friend of Petrarch," was so touchingly and
fervidly celebrated. Here, not less, was an asto-
nishing contrast—the memorial of a heroic patriot
sinking under the weight of popular ingratitude,
and the memento of a young girl slowly dying of
consumption ! Then, there was Paul Clifford,
a story designed to illustrate " a vicious pri-
son-discipline and a sanguinary criminal code,"
and by so' doing, to direct attention in a
particular manner to .those enormous flaws in
our penal institutions—and there was Godolphin,
in which the vices of the " intellectual trifler,"
were embodied—and there was the lovely classic
tale of The Last Days of Pompeii, which was com-
posed when " a stranger from that remote and
barbarian isle which the imperial Roman shivered
when he named, paused amid the delights of the
soft Campania," and created a soul under the ribs
of the dead Heathendom. What attractive diver-
sity. of theme—and Protean changefulness in the
very style of the different compositions ! Con-
tinuing the catalogue of these remarkable works,
there were the meditative history of Ernest Mal-
travers, and the turbulent and agitated current of
events marking the cares'. of Alice, and that story
of The Disowned, in which was adroitly typified
in the person of Algernon Mordaunt, the " Heroism
of Chiistian Philosophy :" and there were the
melancholy memorials of Eugene Aram, convey-
ing, as their writer intended, unde7 the veil of an
alluring Romance, the grim and awful significance
of a Tragedy—and that noble historical narrative
recounting the rise and fall of Warwick, The
Last of the Barons, from among the real
personages in which the author could evoke
imaginary men, and things like poor Adam
Warner and his Eureka—and Devereux, wherein
the people and manners of the last century were
depicted through the aid of a fictitious autobio-
graphy--and Harold, a poem in prose, relating the
downfall of the last of the Saxon sovereigns—and
Leila, depicting the fate of Grenada and of Boabdil,
the last of the Abencerrages—and _Aright and
Morning, a tale purely English and domestic, one
of the best among the best, a favourite among our
favourites—and Lucretia, the wierd annals of crime
and infamy—and the Caxtons, abounding through-
out with a most tender pathos and a most sweet
philosophy. After all these amazingly varied pro-
ducdons comes the latest of Bulwer Lytton's lite-
rary achievements—and an achievement it assuredly
. .

is in the strictest sense of the word—this fiction-,
which he has himself distinguished above its prede-
ceisors by designating it MY NOVEL, par excellence.
If we were required to attempt a careful analysis
of the plot, or a minute exposition of the incidents
described in the course of its development, we must
fairly acknowledge at once that we should feel
ourselves to be in a position of no inconsiderable em-
barrassment. Honestly, we would about as lief un-
dertake to define minutely the contents of the En-
cyclopmdia Britannica. We would as soon be con-
ducted into the great hall (when completed) 'of that
wonder of wonders, now being erected at Saltaire,
and after viewing all that complicated whirl of
wheels, and pulleys, and pistons, and mules, and
throstles, and devils, and scutchers, making up the
din and madness of ts machinery, be asked—coolly
—to describe that. Fancy, for an instant, the
task' of thridding the labyrinth of all its intricate
and interwoven involutions ! And then discover
the cui Bono ! Besides, supposing the explanation
to be actually-, accomplished, we have a rather
shrewd suspicion that it would be something tanta-
mount in lucidity to Johnson's definition of net-
work—" reticulations or decussations with inter-
stices between the intersections"— the elucidation
being, in fact, more difficult of comprehension
than the thing elucidated. No : the work•
itself is here tempting ' all men to read it
for themselves and not to search after a
scanty inkling of the drift of the story, by
obtaining it second-hand from the dry epitome of
a reviewer. Adventuring upon any such epitome
appears to ourselves at least, in reference to a
really remarkable work like "My Novel," about
as rational a proceeding as it might be on ex-
amining some masterpiece from the looms of the
Gobelins, (or, as the Cockney called it, the Tapestry
of the Goblins,) 'instead of pausing before it to
admire the ,delicacy, and adroitness, and elabora-
tion apparent in every portion of it as a miracle of
art, to go prying curiously at the back of it, in-
quisitive after every thread and tag knotted there
in the process of fabrication, eager to see where
the damson-colour commenced and the apple-green
ended, or where the peach-blosSom ended and the
ruby-red commenced. Taxidermy is a very pretty
science no doubt, and some lions may not lose their
tawny gloss during the course of the preparation.
Entomology again. is, without question, a study.
eminently worthy of every reasonable encourage-
ment ; though in the handling of them some of the
bloom is apt at times to be rubbed off the wings
of your rarer prizes, your dragon-moths and your
tiger-butterflies. Let no disparagement be under-
stood as implied by the comparison. , Rather
otherwise. There is a bloom on a thought or on a
sentiment, no less than on the wings of a, butterfly.
We confess to having no sympathy whatever with
those who would for ever be reducing the beautiful
to the matter-of-fact—any more than we should .
derive pleasure from seeing every clown that passed'
through our garden fingering the petals of our
choicest anemonies and picotees. Briefly, we can-
not understand the advantage, much less the satis-
faction of reducing the plot of some masterly,
work of imagination to a dry syllabus or abridg-
ment. Scarcely less idle we conceive it to be,
seeking as some solvers of such riddles perpetually
are for the hidden' meaning of every fanciful
composition. Sir Bulwer Lytton has himself
expressed this elsewere (" Pilgrims of the
Rhine," ch. xviii.), where he complains that some
critics in their over-subtlety have turned Hamlet
into an allegory, not even Allowing Shakspiel:e
to paint mankind, but insisting on his einhoayi
qualities. " They turn poetry into metaphysics,.'.'
says he, "and truth seems to them shallow, unless.
ait allegory, which is false, can be seen at the
bottom. -The remark, in the original, is applied
to' the German, but it is unhappily no less appli-
cable to a certain portion of our own literature.
Against the danger of this over-subtlety, as against
that of the reduction of his plot to a bald epitome,'
our author is fortunately guarded in his present
work by, the circumstance of its magnitude--and
not merely by the circumstance of its magnitude,
but by that also of its infinite' elaboration.
The diversity of the characters introduced to the
readers of "My Novel," is only equalled as a dis-
play of invention by the variety of the incidents
linking those characters together, associating them
in one common interest through all the mazes of

•the chequered narrative, and weaving the unbroken
thread of the story through a countless number of
complicated, and yet distinctly traceable, involu-
tions. Everywhere throughout the fiction there is
discernible, on a careful scrutiny, the application
of the subtlest art to the grateful toil of its de-
velopment. Only, • however, upon a careful
scrutiny, for otherwise the art remains in-
visible under tho garb of a facile and all-
embracing ease, an ease imparting to the language