Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/138

Rh 122 L Y T T N the selfish epicure, the retiring scholar, the reckless roguo and vagabond, the melodramatic Byronic man of mystery ; and his adventures are so contrived as to bring him in contact with many different types. The novel might have been called The Londoners ; most of the criticisms of life and books in England and the English, published in 1833, may be found in Pelham, delivered through the mouths of various characters. These characters are great talkers ; no subject, from a rare dish or a nicety of costume to a painting or a philosophical treatise, is strange to them. And, curiously enough, the judgments of the youth of twenty-two are as mature, as large, catholic, generous, widely sympathetic, as those of the sage of sixty-six, and his knowledge of men and books hardly less extensive. Pelham displayed in the literal sense of the word extraordinary vivacity of intellect and range of interest. The author was yet to prove that with his wonderful powers of reading, observing, and reflecting was combined a faculty rarely found in union with such gifts, untiring rapidity of production. In the preface to his juvenile &quot; Ismael,&quot; he speaks of a habit of his never to leave any thing unfinished, and during his long life he began and finished many works in many different veins. Pelham was followed in quick succession by The Disowned (1828), Devereux (1829), Paul Clifford (1830), Eugene Aram and Godolphin (1833). Bulvver was deeply impressed with German theories of art ; all these novels were novels with a purpose, moral purpose, psychological purpose, historical purpose. To embody the leading features of a period, of a phase of civilization, to trace the influence of circum stance on character, to show how the criminal may be reformed by the development of his better nature, arid how men of fine nature may be led stage by stage into crime, to explain the secrets of success and failure in life these, apart from the purely dramatic object of exhibiting inward struggles between the first conceptions of desires and their fulfilment, and between triumph and retribution, were his avowed aims as a novelist. He did not leave his purposes to the interpreter; he was a critic as well as a creator, and he criticized his own works frankly, and laboured to admit other critics to a fair point of view. It was perhaps a tribute to the intrinsic interest of his plots, characters, and descriptions that he was under the necessity of begging attention to these higher aims. In The Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834), a work of graceful fantasy, in which some of his most acute observations on human life are incorporated with the sayings and doings of elves and fairies, an ambitious author is made to complain that &quot; the subtle aims that had inspired him were not perceived,&quot; and that he was often approved for what he condemned himself. The Pilgrims, charmingly written in many passages, was too German in its combination of serious thought and mundane personages with fairies to be heartily welcomed by the English public. Bulwer was more successful in another attempt to break new ground in The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Rienzi (1835). No historical romances dealing with times and scenes so remote were ever more widely popular in England, and in aiming at popularity the author laboured hard to secure historical accuracy. In Athens, its Rise and Fall (1836), we re ceived in the form of historical essays what had probably been acquired industriously as materials for romance. Two romances from Spanish history, Leila and Calderon, published in 1838, aimed at a less realistic treatment, and, with all their purely literary excellences, were not so popu lar. In Ernest Maltravers (1837) and its sequel Alice, or The Mysteries (1838), the novelist returned to English ground and psychological and social problems &quot; the affliction of the good, the triumph of the unprincipled.&quot; Critics to whom he failed to make the full purpose of these works apparent in the execution complained of the low tone of their morality, a fair complaint concerning most exhibitions of vice as a warning. To his other literary labours Bulwer superadded for some time the editorship of a magazine. He succeeded Campbell as editor of The New Monthly in 1833. In 1838 he projected a magazine called The Monthly Chronicle, and contributed to it as a serial story the fantastic romance &quot;Zicci.&quot; The magazine expired before the story was com pleted, and it was afterwards developed into Zanoni, a romance of which he was himself especially proud, and which suffered in public estimation from being tried by realistic standards. During the most productive period of his literary life Bulwer was an eminent member of parliament. He was returned for St Ives in 1831, and sat for Lincoln from 1832 to 1841. He spoke in favour of the Reform Bill, and took the leading part in obtaining the reduction, after vainly trying to procure the repeal, of the newspaper stamp duties. His support of the Whigs in parliament, and by a pamphlet on &quot; the crisis &quot; when they were dismissed from office in 1834, was considered GO valuable that Lord Melbourne offered him a place in the administra tion. His intimacy with Radical leaders at this period exposed him to an undeserved charge of tergiversation when later in life he was a member of a Conservative Govern ment. Charles Buller and Charles Villiers were among his friends at Cambridge ; he was an admiring student of Bentham ; Mill s Essay on Government was the text-book on which was founded &quot; Pelham s &quot; instruction by his uncle in the principles of politics ; J. S. Mill contributed the substance of the appendices to England and the English, on Bentham and Mill ; Godwin suggested to him the subject and some part of the plot of Eugene Aram ; he even succeeded in winning the good opinion of Miss Martineau ; but we have only to read his speech in favour of the Reform Bill to see that it was the situation that had changed and not the man when he assailed the repeal of the corn laws, and took office under Lord Derby. Bulwer s leading political aim, like his leading artistic aims, was early formulated, and the formula governed all his political reasoning : it was to &quot; aristocratize the community,&quot; &quot; to elevate the masses in character and feeling to the standard which conservatism works in aristocracy,&quot; a standard not of wealth or pedigree but of &quot; superior education, courte ous manners, and high honour.&quot; Hence it was &quot;social reforms&quot; from first to last that enlisted his interest, and he sought the motive power for these reforms in the public spirit of the classes enfranchised by the Reform Act of 1832. There was a slight break in Bulwer s career as a novelist between 1838 and 1847. During this interval he ap plied himself enthusiastically to play writing,- Macready s management of Covent Garden having inspired men of letters with the hope of reconciling poetry with the stage. In 1836 he had produced The Duchess of La Valliere. It was a failure. But in 1838 and the two following years he produced three plays which have kept the stage ever since The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, and Money. In his plays as in his novels definite theory preceded execution. The principles on which he wrote his plays were laid down in his chapter on the drama in England and the English. For many of the details of stagecraft, all-important to success under any principles, he is said to have been indebted to Macready. No Englishman not himself an actor has written so many permanently successful plays as Bulwer Lytton, and this is another instance of his extraordinary plasticity of mind and practical insight. Thirty years afterwards, in 1869, he turned his thoughts again to writing for the stage, recast an old failure with a