The Sun.
London, England, 1866-02-12 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Sir Buiwer Lytton's New Work.

The Lost Tales of Miletus. By the Right Hon. Sir
Edward Bulwer Lytton, M.P., Bart. John
Murray.

Our English Boccaccio has never given a more
signal attestation of his genius than by the produc-
tion of this exquisite volume. It is doubtless true
that whatever may be the intrinsic value of the
other sources of his reputation—and they are suffi-
ciently numerous--the paramount and distinctive
fame of Sir Edward Lytton is the one long since
acquired by him as a Novelist. In that character
essentially, in defiance henceforth of all the fluctua-
tions and mutations of popular taste, he must ever
hold his own as the BULWER of English Literature.
And yet, quite apart from his repute as a Novelist,
he has won distinction for himself of various
kinds and in hardly any one instance of what
can be called a secondary importance. As the
Poet of " King Arthur" (of itself a title of glory)
—as the Dramatist of " Richelieu," of " Money,'
and of " The Lady of Lyons"—as the Essayist of
"The Student," and of " Caxtoniana"—as theLyrist
of the "Poems" (published like these " Lost Tales of
Miletus," by Murray)--as the administrative crea-
tor and organiser of British Columbia—Sir Bulwer
Lytton occupies, in each of those widely contrast-
ing departments of intellectual enterprise, as
high ground, as recognisably conspicuous a distino-
tion—in his several capacities as Minister, that
is, as Lyrist, as Essayist, as Dramatist, as Poet—as
in that other and earlier eminence attained by him in
his more frequently assumed, and for that one reason
alone, we believe, his more widely appreciated capacity
as a Prose-Romancist, or in one word as a Novelist.
It is in this last-mentioned character, however, that
he has achieved for himself, we must repeat, his para-
mount or distinctive -reputation in literature. As
the raconteur, as the fabulist, as the prose story-
teller, he has, for one thing, entered the lists of
letters the most frequently. It was there and as
such—with that device of Novelist upon his shield—
that he may be said to have won his spurs in the
lists of literature, and to have received the knightly
accolade. More than once since then, it might be
asserted without anything like extravagance, he has
achieved those distinctions, again and yet again,
by entering into the old familiar arena, so to
speak, with his vizor closed, now, par exemple,
as the author of " Godolphin," now again as
the author of " The Caxtons." It is, however, to
our thinking, among the distinctive peculiarities of
his genius, at once as Poet and as Novelist, that he is
never more unquestionably or more recognisably the
Poet than in the manifestation of his capacity as
Novelist, than when he takes pen in hand as a
Prose-Romancist. Insomuch is this the case with
him, that occasionally although writing in prose,
his prose is as rhythmical as though it were de-
signedly versification. Instance, many portions,
sometimes nearly a whole book together, of his
noble historical romance of " Harold"—a work the
composition of which, indeed, in the mere rapidity,
or rush of it—being written (the whole three
volumes) within the compass of no more than
three weeks—seems to breathe appreciably of the
influence of what the scholiasts called the poetic
Gestrum or afflatus. Take as one momentary ex-
emplar of the rhythmical flow and pulsation of the
poetic prose of " Harold," those closing words of ch.
3, b. vii., where the deadly shafts of war, hurtling
through the air, hiss into the froth and turmoil of the
blood-stained water in quest of the life of Gyffyth
the Welsh monarch, when the voice of the
future sovereign of the Saxon race, the last of the
Saxon Kings of the hereafter, is heard resound-
ing above the clang of battle—" 'Hold !' cried
Harold the Earl—raising his hand on high—' No
dastard dart at the brave!'" Or take again almost
any portion of what might strictly be called the
"Romance" pur et simple, intensely and essentially
the Romance among all the romances, historical or
otherwise, coming to us from the hand of the same
author, his Romance of "Zanoni 1" And it really
matters nothing whether attention be directed to
this end—for the proving of our case—to the be-
ginning of that work, to the middle of it, or to its
conclusion. Whether we turn to those opening pas-
sages of " Zanoni," where in poetic prose, in prose
it might almost be said lyrical in its character, the
love of Gaetone Pisani for his violin, his alter ego,
his creature, his barbiton, is sung, so to speak,
as in alternate strophes and antistrophes
Whether we turn again to one of the central
incidents of the same story, where, to the
rattle of the castanets, Glyndon dances with
Fillide in the bandit's lair—Tara-rara-ra 1 Tara-
rara-ra !—by the sheen of the moonlight. Or,
whether, last not least of all—as proving the truth
of what we are here insisting upon—we turn to those
closing chapters of the same exquisite fiction [a
work of art, by the way, that—it is interesting to re-
member now immediately upon the morrow of the
great sculptor's death at Rome—was dedicated, at the
time of its original publication, in fitting terms, by
Bulwer, " Artist in Words," to Gibson, " Artist
whose ideas speak in Marble"] to those concluding
chapters, to that crowning book of " Zanoni," in
which the blood-stained Demons of the Great Revo-
lution in France, the formidable. Leaders of the
lieign of Terror, live and breathe once more in a
lurid atmosphere all their own : appearing and dis-
appearing in ghastly succession until the final clank
of the guillotine becomes audible--when a shriek is
heard " and the crowd laugh amidst the shout of
the countless thousands—and the axe descends and
blackness rushes on thy soul, Maximilien Robes-
pierre 1" Numerous other instances quite as
notable in their way as those already given,
might be adduced from others among the famous
prose fictions of Sir Bulwer Lytton, demonstrating
quite as clearly as the foregoing excerpts from his
" Harold" and his "Zanoni," that he is, in the
manifestation of his genius, never more intensely or
more essentially a Poet than in his character as a
Novelist, than in his capacity as a Prose-Romancist.
Who that is in any wiy familiar with his historical
romance of " The Last of the Barons"— a work
that we have reason to know was regarded by
that naturally most fastidious critic of his-
torical romances, the late Mr. Hallam, with the
highest admiration Mr. Hallam viewing it
as the very archetype of what a historical
romance ought to be—as realistic of a whole
epoch—who that has once read that great
work, " The Last of the Barons," can possibly have
forgotten the ominous, the almost eltrich song of the
" Tymbesteres," recurring again and yet again, like
a haunting refrain amidst the harmonious flow
of the stately and impassioned narrative ? And, who
is there that, so remembering it, can fall to recognise
in the author of the work, the Poet, no less than
the Romancist ? As for the whole structure of the
Tale of Murder that more than thirty years ago
helped to win for Bulwer his early repu-
tation—it is as poetically conceived, as a tragic
work of art—with the vague and awful shadow
as of an inevitable Nemesis, perpetually ad-
vancing nearer and nearer upon the hero of the
story—as any one, even the noblest amongst
the dramatic masterpieces of the old classic Demi-
gods of Tragedy, as the Eumenides of /Eschylus, let
us say, or, as the CEdipus of Sophocles. As poetically
conceived, we maintain, as a tragic work of art, as
either the Eumenides or the CEdipus, what though
the principal figure brought before us in this later
Tale of Murder wore neither sock nor buskin, spoke
not from behind the hollow screen of the tragic
mask, but appeared, on the contrary, under the
simple guise, and clad in the homely broadcloth of a
Schoolmaster of Lynn. Again, as to the entire
conception of " The Last Days of Pompeii," is not
the mind, is not the heart, is not the intensely
sympathetic nature of the Poet quite as distinctly
recognisable in that —in the whole dream of the story,
in the loves of Glaucus and lone, in the creation
of Arbaces the Egyptian, in the exquisite ima-
gining of Nydia the Flower Girl, the blind
guide through the bewildering darkness of the last
awful incident of the catastrophe—quite as dis-
tinctly recognisable, we repeat, as the Fictionist, as
the Prose-Romancist? Enough, however, if while
thus expatiating upon what appears to us to be
the inextricable blending together in the genius cf
Sir Bulwer Lytton, of the Poet and the Romancist,
of the Poetic-Fabulist and of the Prose-Fabulist,
we have in any way realised more vividly to the

readers' perception, the fact we are here deskous:of
their so realising as a means of affording
them a clearer and juster appreciation of the
exceptionally appropriate character of the
present work as a product of the ripened powers
of Sir Bulwer Lytton at once as Poet awl,
as Novelist. " Time has spared no remains,''
he reminds U 3 in the very first sentence of
his Preface to the Eight Poems making UP
the contents of this new volume—" Time has spared
no remains, in their original form, of those famous
' Tales of Miletus,' which are generally considered
to be the remote progenitors of the modern Novel."
It is appropriate, therefore, that the great Mas-
ter of the Modern Novel should of all men livinghoe
been the one to celebrate thus after so many genera-
tions those all but forgotten Tales of Miletus, from
which the Novel in its later form may thus be said to
have remotely emanated. But it is especially appro-
priate that the celebration of them, that the revivifi-
cation, almost it might be said there-creation, of them
should have been undertaken by him as a labour of
love, necessitating as it is does for its just and ade-
quate fufilment the combination in the man of letters
so undertaking the task, not only the skill of the
practised romancist or raconteur, but with that also
the acquired capacity of the Scholar, and the inborn
genius of the Poet. What are here, in truth,
three obvious essentials in the author of any such
volume as this, are sound scholarship, poetic sym-
pathy, and constructive skill. And they are here--
those essentials—not alone discoverable when sought
for like the kernel of a peach—they are, rather,
discernible at a glance like the bloom upon its
surface. Yet the task thus accomplished was
manifestly in its very nature one of exceeding difla-
culty. It was not, strictly speaking, that of ad-
venturing into " fresh fields and pastures new "—for
new these pastures are not assuredly, while the
fields here penetrated, can only be regarded as so far
fresh, for inasmuch as they have been lying fallow
during so many centuries ! It is rather than that
the creating a soul under the very ribs of death"---
or, more accurately still, to indicate the extraordinary
difficulty of the achievement here ambitioned by the
author of these " Lost Tales of Miletus," it has been
one in some measure comparable to that accomplished
some few years since by Professor Owen, when from
the hint furnished •by the transmission to him of
single bone from Australia he imagined to himself
and in fact minutely described the whole ana-
tomical structure of a gigantic bird hitherto nu'
dreamt of—a theoretical outline of an extinct crea-
ture, the philosophical accuracy of which the His-
tory of Science afterwards relates to have been mar-
vellously justified and verified by the discovery later
on in Australia of a complete skeleton of that gigantic
creature, that Roc of our Antipodes I Yet it is often
thus in effect in regard to these " Lost Tales of
Miletus," that out of the merest fragment, out of
one solitary incident, out of some purely casual sug"
gestion, now in Ovid, now in Parthenius, the whole
fabric of a legendary tale is elaborately real.'
structed. " Out of such indications of the charac-
ter and genius of the lost Milesian Fables, and from
the remnants of myth and tale once in PoPular
favour, which may be found, not only in such re-
pertories of ancient legend as those of Apollodorllo
and Conon, but scattered throughout the
Scholiasts or in the pages of Pausanias and Ath,ei
nmus"—Sir Bulwer Lytton himself observes--
have endeavoured to weave together a few stories
that may serve as feeble specimens of the various
kinds of subject in which these ancestral tale"
tellers may have exercised their faculties of in-
n
vention. I have selected from Hellenic myths,
he then adds, " those in which the ground is not
pre-occupied, by the great poets of antiquity, In
works yet extant ; and which, therefore, may not
be without the attraction of novelty to the general
reader. In this selection," he goes on to silt
as it appears to us quite unnecessarily, " I hale
avoided, of course, any of the more licentious
themes, to which, it is to be feared, the Boccaccieli
of Miletus sometimes stooped their genius ; while
I have endeavoured to take subjects which de-
pended for the popularity they once enjoyed on
elements congenial to art in every land and age;
subjects readily lending themselves to narrative,
construction or dramatic situation, and capable 0'
that degree of human interest which is esential to
the successful employment of all the more fanciful
agencies of wonder." It is not only in the selection
of his themes, however, that his book possesses the
~
charm of novelty for the English reader; it islet
more, if we may so speak, in the manner in
which he has thereupon (after that selection) worked
up those materials that his volume as a work
art assumes to itself an especial air of attractiveness'
The audience, it should be observed, whose attention
apparently he alone aspires to gain while recount
ing these "Lost Tales of Miletus"—an audience;
by the way, that he is quite certain of winning
—is an audience of scholars, an audience capable'
in fact, of appreciating the taste and the scholar';
15
ship lavished upon these pages. If there
th'e
one, however out of the Eight Poems in .der
volume which is destined to win for itself a wider
popularity, it is assuredly that to which (possibly
the
,
for this very reason) the author has accorded ,
on
first place in the collection. " The Secret Way,'
on
truth, is a story appealing directly to the comp
heartof humanity, for though it relates to the far
Medea and Scythians, to the King Omartes and n,
Prince Zaraidres (here for the sake of euPli,ePtJo
softened, by the dropping of a consonant/ 1110 0
Zaraides) —it relates also to the love-dreams and A
eventual recognition of two all but living sof
breathing creatures of the human race, the lov,fesor
Argiope and of the Median Prince Zaraides. Ja. ,
that tale of love is told, let the following exquisite
passage, descriptive of the character and appearaildi,,
of Omartes' daughter, the Princess Argiope, d
cate here upon the instant, as by a prelude warble
upon dulcimers and flagiolets :
Men blest her when she moved before their eyes
Shame faced, as blushing to be born so fair,
Mild as the child of gods
Violet-crowned Athens hallowing named " Pity."
Now, of a sudden, over that bright face
There fell the shadow of some troubled thought,
As cloud, from purest dews
Updrawn, makes sorrowful a star in heaven:
And as a nightingale that having heard
A perfect music from some master's lyre,
Steals into coverts lone,
With her own melodies no more contented,
But haunted by the strain, till then unknown,
Seeks to re-sing it back, herself to charm,
Seeks still and ever fails,
Missing the key-note which unlocks the musio,--
So, from her former pastimes in the choir
Of comrade virgins, stole Argiope,

Lone amid summer leavea trouble
Brooding that thought which was her joy and
The King discerned the change in his fair child,
And questioned oft, yet could not loam the cause ;

The sunny bridge between OP.
The lip and heart which childhood builds was pro
Not more Aurora stealing into heaven
Conceals the mystic treasures of the deep

Whence with chaste blush she comes,
Than
virgin bosoms guard their earliest secret. the
From which one isolated fragment selected from
the
P
earliest poem in the book, the peculiarity of
Lyttead
ex erimental manner in which Sir Bulvrer
has employed the classic materials here gatileren,
together by him for the fabrication of these ss"
sttif
called " Lost Tales of Miletus," will be
recognised and appreciated. It is the realisaanttou
by him of a design, he tells us in his Preface, I°ll
cherished, but upon which he has only just
adventured—namely, the production of new
bnations of blank or rhymeless metre compose
in lines
—,- f
lines of arbitrary length and modulation k.°_
which," he takes occasion to remark in par but
"we haVe a few illustrious examples), but ~
the regularity and exactness of uniform stanza.
The design is Horatian in its character
and, we may say at once, that it 1,12:
been most successfully accomplished. It n;ci,
been accomplished with a success that we shot_
scarcely have conceived to have been possible.undre
the circumstances, bearing in mind, that la, the
varied and subtle difficulties lying, as it were, 1
ambush at every step (one is tempted to say literally'
at every foot) against its accomplishment.
mere fragmentary passage already extracted froT,
the earliest poem in the volume, nevertheless, wt'S
have clearly enough indicated the easy grace all
elastic tread, so to speak, with which the perinea!
pathway has been traversed. But as au add