The Sun.
London, England, 1846-12-08 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

raw., iii•e•.w,

LUr_,'RETIA; or THE CHILDREN OF NIGHT.
3 Vols. By Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.
On the publication of his romance entitled " The
last of the Barons," Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton
announced his intention of therewith terminating his
career as a novelist. That determination he has now
relinquished ; he has yielded again to the dominant
influence of his imagination ; as he himself humour-
ously observes in his apologetic preface, " bad habits
l
are stronger than good intentions. ' Never, we will
undertake to say, has a half-promise been broken in
a manner more to the satisfaction of the lovers of
IPaerature. We should, indeed, have had sufficient
cause to grieve in the event of such a man proving
obdurate in such a resolution. We should have
grieved that a mind so eminently distinguished for its
capacities, a mind so peculiarly creative and sympa-
thetic, a mind so essentially assthetical in its character,
so prone to the adoration of the beautiful and good,
could have lapsed into a mute and inglorious indo-
lence. We should have grieved that that imagination
remained idle, or incommunicative, which had so
vividly revived to our imaginations the domestic in-
terests and civic pomps of Herculaneum, the strug-
gles of the last Tribune for Roman liberty, the solemn
and pathetic mysteries of the Rosecrutians, the brilliant
but ominous youth of our third Richard. It was not
conceivable to us, however, that an intellect which
had hitherto evinced such an inexhaustible fertility,
sad such an assiduous inventiveness, could remain
altogether unoccupied. We felt assured that from
its germination of thought (a germination which was
as spontaneous as it was prodigal, and as mobile as it
was spontaneous), that mind would continue to re-
quire some medium for its effusion ; that if the old
channel were dammed up, a new one would be
opened ; that there would be an increase of im-
petuosity in consequence of that temporary retention.
Sir Edward Bulwer almost acknowledges so much in
the observations prefixed to bis present production.
He confesses that in resigning the costume of the
romancist, he aspired to the wand of the dramatist.
He was sated with the triumphs of a Boccaccio, and
yearned for the popularity of a Terence. After
various " unpublished and imperfect attempts," Sir
Edward abandoned his new ambition. I found, he
says, that my conceptions were too wide, or that I
wanted the faculty of concentration. These candid
avowals remind us somewhat of that pleasant intro-
duction written by Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, either to
his tragedy of lon or of the Athenian Captive, where
that master-poet shrives himself to the public on the
score of his futile attempts as a school-boy rhymster,
With Sir Edward Bulwer, however, the failure must
have arisen more from fastidiousness than incapacity.
Of this his admirable contributions to our national
drama are a sufficient testimony. Nevertheless, he
avouches his dissatisfaction with his recent labours as
a playwright, and his final determination to embody
his ideas in " that species of composition to which he
was familiar." When we remember the eloquent and
impassioned poetry of his Richelieu, we should: be
almost inclined to regret this ultimate resolution, but
for our remembrance of the more eloquent and more
impassioned prose of his " Last Days of Pompeii," and
" Rienzi." We should regret his relinquishment of
the stage for the publishing-office, if, while we re-
membered the grace and tenderness of The Lady of
Lyons, we did not remember likewise the pathos of
"Night and Morning ;" the melancholy of " Maitre-
vers," and the charming discursiveness of the " Dis-
owned." We should scarcely feel compensated for
the loss of another play like Money, but that we
have not forgotten the wit of " Pelham," the solemn
energy of " Eugene Ailm," and the less dismal vil-
lanies of "Paul Clifford." 'We could give to the flames
a million dramas; like; the Sea Captain, instead of
one volume of such a work as " Zanoni"—the most
exquisite romance of modern times. Altogether,
therefore, we are rejoiced at the final decision of Sir
Bulwer Lytton, and we gladly receive the present
fiction as a guarantee of his sincerity. " Lucretia "
is a most loathsome and repulsive story—it is perhaps
the most loathsome and repulsive story we ever met
with; but it is inculcative of the holiest truth, it is
illustrative of the angelic whiteness of virtue, it is
dictated by a love of the purest morality and the most
genial benevolence. We are not among those who
conceive that the portrayal of vice mad infamy are
wholly prejudicial, and who regard the most straight-
laced heroes and heroines, Lord Orvilles and Clarissa
Harlowes, as the only fit subject for our contempla-
tion. We cannot induce ourselves to think that
virtue requires to be puffed like a quack pill or a
charlatanical ointment. It is, if we remember rightly,
Mr. Dickens who, in his preface to the third edition
of " Oliver Twist," impugns these cavillers against
the representation of criminals as hypocrites and Phari-
sees. NV by—not to speak it irreverently—if the mention
of sin and depravity were to be regarded as reprehen-
sible, the holiest book would be discarded! If the
narration of enormities were to render a work exe-
crable, all history, ancient and modern, would be
comprised in the " expurgatory index." If the fail-
ings and atrocities of mankind were never to be de-
picted,
our views of life would be partial and one-
sided, we should be liable to endless disappointment,
there would he no salutary warnings against tempta-
tion. It can never be repeated too frequently that
the danger of such productions exists—in the manner
nut in the matter, in the deductions not in the data,
in the clothing of the vice, not in the vice itself. As
Sir Edward has beautifully said, paraphrasing a
couplet of Fletoher's, " Every human act, good or ill,
is an angel to guide or to warn ; and the deeds of the
worst have messages from heaven to the listening hearts
of the best." It is because they have clothed sin with
an aspect of fascination, and painted ruffianism as
heroical, that the French novelists have perverted
their high capacity, and rendered their writings more
d:angeroua than panders and procuresses. It is the levity
of Charles Paul de Kock which invests his brilliant and
inventive genius with an air so peculiarly pernicious. It
is because profligacy is rouged and padded with such
0o :summate art by George Sand, that its cadaverous
and distorted hideousness is forgotten by her readers.
No more striking extimple of the extent to which this
vile deception may be carried can be adduced than
the vicious but eloquent description of the death of
Adrien Cardoville and Prince Djalma in the "Juif
Errant." In that scene Eugene Sue has exalted sin
into a shape of infinite and seductive beauty ; just as
St. Jerome is said to have been tempted by demons
in the form of beautiful women. While, however, we
maintain that it is well for us to contemplate ourselves
as surrounded, not only by goodness and virtue, but
also by evil and crime, we cannot but acknowledge
that there are deeds of such enormous and almost in-
conceivable atrocity, that the mere possibility of their
perpetration should never be even hinted at. Such a
deed is the incestuous act mentioned towards the
conclusion of " Tom Jones," and the utter-
ance of which is a lasting disgrace to the
immortal memory of Fielding. Upon the
verge of such another enormity did the imagination
of Sir Edward B. Lytton hover when, to the best of
our recollection, he hinted at a similar occurrence in
" Alice." By avoiding such pitfalls, and by faith-
fully depicting society as variously composed of saints
and criminals through all the intermediate gradations,
the novelist may best fulfil his mission ; he may then
hope to add his own adornments to that light litera-
ture which our eminent author has apostrophised in
this work as—" that grace and flower of human cul-
ture, that best philosophy of all, humanising us with
gentle art, making us wise through the
humorus, elevated through the passions, ten-
der in the affections of our kind !" (Vol. ii. 29.) By
acting thus, morever, they are merely transcribing
faithfully from the book of Nature, for be that ex-
quisite saying never forgotten (vol. iii. 284), " Evil
is the shadow of good !" In " Lucretia" the author
has endeavoured to exemplify the infamy of crime,
the divine excellence of virtue, and the folly of what
he has designated " the principal vice" of our own
generation—lmpatience. " I hold," he says, " that
the greatest friend to man is labour ; that
knowledge without toil, if posrible, were
worthless ; that toil in pursuit of knowledge
is the best knowledge we can attain ; that the con-
tinuous effort for fame is nobler than fame itself;
that it is not wealth suddenly acquired which is de-
serving of homage, but the virtues which a man
exercises in the slow pursuit of wealth—the abilities
so called forth, the self-denials so imposed : in a
word, that Labour and Patience are the true school-
masters on earth." There is a profound wisdom in
those sentences, and it is well that in this ambitious
age there is one mind adventurous enough to avouch
those unwelcome truths. The necessity which really
exists for toil and patience is most forcibly evidenced
in this fiction, but it is evidenced through materials
more repulsive and more monstrous than the most
morbid imagination could well conceive. Mrs. Rad-
cliff never delineated characters so extravagantly vil-
lainous, Mc nk Lewis never described deeds of a more
odious darkness, than the characters and deeds which
are contained in "Lucretia." We should have dis-
carded the hook as a detestable caricature of humanity
but that Sir Edward solemnly assures us in the
preface that the crimes therein related " took place
within the last seventeen years." So vast is the
infamy of the chief personages in the story that we
conclude its perusal with a shudder for our species.
In tracking the hideous careers of these Children of
Night we are baffled at the total and unredeemed
blackness of their natures ; we cannot discern, as
their historian himself remarks, where " the
monster vanished into the mortal, and the
phenomena that seemed aberrations from nature
were explained;'
b:ircumstances, which
are narrated in this romancee founded upon reality
—and we have the author's guarantee that such is
comprehend that re-
actually the case-- we can
mark which he has elsewhere utteriutshaetv';
yTwr ah
go re de
never quits the world—it surrounds
The heroine, herself, Lucretia Claverin
hik
a demon in the form of a woman thangainisyrnre less
hell-horn. Lady Macbeth has the purity of agsallrisst
and the gentleness of a seraph, in comparison. A
ghoule at its repast could not be a more develish