The Sun.
London, England, 1858-03-01 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

BULWER LYTTON'S NEW ROMANCE.

Trial 'trill he do with it! By Pisistratus Caxton.

Parts I. to X. Blackwood.
Although weencourage ourselves in the belief that
we are still happily far removed from the conclusion
of Sir E. Bulwer Lytton'e new serial story, now
publishing from month to month in the pogo of
Blackwood's liagaziee, we conceive ourselves to
be in some degree empowered already to pronounce
an opinion upon its merits, now that ton con-
siderable instalments of the work have actually
made their appearance. Several new characters
whose names have nut yet been mentioned, even
incidentally, in the course of the narrative—yet
remain probably to be introduced to our acquain-
tance. Nevertheless the chief personages of the
tale, we are disposed to believe, are already num-
bered among those intimate imaginary friends with
whose forms and faces we have lung sinus, been
perfectly familiarised, and in the fluctuation of
whose fortunes we are becoming more and more
profoundly interested. The plot of the story, pro-
misee or threatens—accordingly as the reader loves
or dreads the threading of a maze—to be more in-
tricately labyrinthine than that of "My Novel."
The canvass is seemingly larger. The crowd of per-
I sonages revealed to us there grouped together
in artistic contrast, yet more numerous ; the
" vanishing point" far more remote. Pisistratus
has allowed his imagination to soar to a greater alti-
tude—his survey is wider in consequence. And for
the skilful play of this master-pencil in the delinea-
tion of all the radiant and populous panorama of
human life, have we not the art won to it by that
most potent talisman of Romancist, the taus fre-
quens qui (minium magistrorurn proecepta auperaret
It is the adroitness attained by a refined and ex-
quisite practice of his high art that has at length,
indeed, become our author's most attractive, if it
be nor, at the same time, his most conspicuous
characteristic. His perfect mastery of his art, more-
over, appears to us hardly less strikingly evidenced
in the facile graces of his style, in the adroit turn
of a sentence, in the choice of an epithet, in the
variable flow of the dialogue, or in the marvellous
probability of what the French would call the
situations"—than in the dexterous interweaving
of the threads of so many chequered destinies in
the weft and woof of this pictured tapestry of
romance : or than even, be it said, in the profound
analysis of human character, discernible upon a
closer scrutiny of the more remarkable natures
(whether of man or woman) here pourtrayed. As
to the mere rhetorical charms of the style, these,
with the author of the " Cantons," have in a man-
ner become inevitable. They create no new sur-
prise for the reader ; they are taken for granted ;
they are looked for, and are not found wanting ;
they are rather, it should be said, scattered through-
out the narrative abundantly. The same might be
said, likewise, in regard to the inimitable " play,"
whether of incident or of conversation. Excellencies
such as these have been maturing and ripening ap-
preciably throughout the whole of this notable
career. They were excellencies which were very
far indeed from being crudely manifested in the
sparkling, and, at intervals, the absolutely enthral-
ling, pages of "Pelham." But while they gave
the rarest promise even then of the more mellowed
perfection perceptible at a glance upon almost any
page of " What will he do with it t" they have
been continuously, and, we repeat, appreciably
ripening throughout the whole range of the splen-
did series of fictions permed between that first and
this last of his imaginative productions, by Sir E.
Bulwer Lytton. Those who list may trace the gi a-
dations of this advancement no less in the sylvan
tragedy of " Eugene Aram," or in the social and
political satire of " Paul Clifford," or in the dra-
matic and historical splendour of the " Last of the
Barons"—than in the weird " Zanoni," or the ye
more weird " Lucretia," in the classic " Last of
the Tribunes," or the yet more classic "Last Days
of Pompeii." The same progression though less
superficially discernible is not less distinctly to be
discovered on a closer scrutiny, in the homelier
pages of the " Disowned," in the romantic vicissi-
tudes of "Deeereux," in the exquisite prose poem
of "Harold," and in all thefascisating chapters of
the ever fresh and ever delightful "Night and
Morning." Throughout the composition of which
famous works of the imagination,
vigilantly watch
ful during all this score of years has been this keen
observer of Nature and of Humankind. Uncon-
sciously it may be, yet rigidly and persistently he
appears to have acted in obedience to that arch-
precept of Cicero it enim ex reruan cognittiong
efflorescat et redundet oportet @ratio : and so in-
creasingly with the amplitude of his owl know-
ledge have come forth utterances at once more
copious and more ornate. A remark moreover
not in any way restricted here to his labours as a
n o-velirt, but applying equally to his other
written. 0., .poken—as a poet, as an
orator, or as a dramatist. Eminently beau-
tiful, for example, though his brief memo-
rial poem upon "Milton" indubitably is—it
ill surely not to be compared in excellence either to
the tersely epigrammatic satire of the "New Timon"
or to the stately national epic of "King Arthur."
Again—the admirable speeches upon the copyright
question, delivered in the House of Commons,
when Mr. Bulwer sat there as M.P. for the city
of Lincoln, though vieing in their various merit
with the speeches delivered in the same house upon
the same question by the late Judge Talfourd, are
assuredly in no way comparable as effusions of
oratory—as let us say, for instance, the oration de-
livered by Sir Edward Lytton a very few years back
in the city of Edinburgh. Precisely in the same
way would it be idle to institute any comparison
between the graceful drama of the "Duchess ds
la Talliere," charmingly written though it is in
very many passages, with that most brilliane
dramatic success of modern times " rhe Lady of
Lyons," any more than with the comic genius dis-
played in "Money," or the tragic genies revealed
through the pathetic eloquence of " Richelieu."
The plane of this great literary career—as
was said of the military career of Wellington—
hag been one continuous ascent. The fact of
its being more conspicuously so manifested
by Sir E. Bulwor Lytton in his character as a ro-
tnancist, arises simply from the circumstance of his
labours in that capacity having been more repeated
and more lengthened. Although " The Cantons"
still to the last remains with us our own especial
favourite, we frankly admit and cordially recoguis'
the artistic pre-eminence of place which ought t'
be accorded without doubt to " My Novel ; or the
Varieties of English Lite," facile princeps among
all the prose fictions from the same waster-hand.
A. companion niche in the Walhalla of romance
will be accorded, er we are much mistaken in our
anticipations, to " What will he do with it ?" A
companion niche, if indeed one be not required yet
more elevated in position and yet ampler in its
Ilineeneions. In the opening scene we are plunged
at once into the very midst of Vanity Fair—" a
summer fair in one of the prettiest villages in
Surrey"—as bewildered at first by the distracting
sights and sounds, the hubbub, racket, and confu-
sion as ever was our dear friend Christiaa, the hero
of the great allegorical pilgrimage. From that in-
trodurtory spectacle to the latest instalment in the
current number of Blacktoood's Magazine, the ani-
mation, the vivacity, the life, the nerve, the sparkle
of the narrative know scarcely one momentary
abatement. A humourous vein runs through the
whole, glittering out here and there as (to use an
old simile) a gold thread might do in a parti-col-
oured embroidery—a humour sometimes as subtle as
that of La Bruyere, sometimes as broad, and hilari-
ous, and unconstrained as that of Rabelleis. The
first comical "wink aside "—putting author and
reader at once into good humour with each
other—startles us into laughter in the very
first 4 of these quaint and most original headings
to the chapters—some of them little chapters
of wit and wisdom in themselves. It is
where our novelist, with an air of fantastic, but
irresistible extravagance, foreshadows the earliest
conversation in his new story as "an arthets dialogue,
after the manner of Elerodotus, Father of History
(Mother unknown)." From that most bizirre ot
parentheses we
pass on together, In among the flut-
tering leaves of this green pleasauuce of fiction, de-
lightedly. dud from that moment the same sly
drollery peeps out upon us continually. Now, it
perches upon yonder thicket, .in the form of three
magpies, with their heads askew, " pricking their
ears" as they listen amazed to the spluttering
voice of poor George Morley, as he mumbles the
pebbles after the fashion of Demosthenes. Now,
it emerges from among the legs c.r. a crowd, in the
grotesque disguise of Sir Isaac, no longer radiant
with snowy curls and shaven loins, as best befits a
poodle of gentlemanly birth and education, but
metamorphosed into a sort of canine monstrosity,
its pronged ears and lugubrious visage of a goblin
' gray, the rest of its form a rusty reddish blrAck—a
dog "hideous enough to have been exhibited as a
lusua naturce"—" it might have come from Ache-
ron, sire by Cerberus, so portentous, so infernal
Was its aspect, with that grey face, those antlered
ears, and that ineffably weird demeanour." These
ludicrous touches from our author's pen are not,
however, applied exclusively to such humbler
members of the animated race of creatures about
us, as mere poodles and magpies. They are la-
vished, moreover, with an affluent hand in the
delineation of the human beings, peopling the bye-
ways hardly less curiously than the broader avenues
of the earrativo. Instance this, that preposterous
lamentation of poor bilious Dolly Poole, about his
calves having gone to increase his liver. Delightfully
exhilarating, however, though the humour of the
tale, its conspicuous merit, to our think-
ing, is diAcofrAlM in its profound axe