Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/139

Rh L Y T T O N 123 new title The Rightful Heir, and produced a new comedy, Walpole. Neither was a success. From 1841 to 1852 Bulwer (he assumed his mother s name of Lytton on succeeding to her estates in 1843) had no seat in parliament. But the issue of novels and romances was not so rapid as it had been in the full energy of his youth. Before 1849, when he opened a new vein with The Caxtons, he produced five works in his familiar vein : Night and Morning (1841, in which the influence of Dickens is traceable), Zanoni (1842), The Last of the Barons (1843, the most historically solid, and perhaps the most effective of his romances), Lucretia, or the Children of the Night (1847; moral purpose to exhibit the horrors caused by the worship of money; popular effect disgust at these horrors, and indignation at the author s sentiment as morbid), Harold, The Last of the Saxon Kings (1848). The cause of the comparative infertility of this period in prose fiction probably was that Lytton was now making a determined effort to win high rank as a poet. He published a volume of poems in 1842, a volume of transla tions from Schiller in 1844, The Neiv Timon, a satire, in 1845. 1 Then came the work on which mainly Lytton rested his pretensions, King Arthur, a romantic epic. &quot;I am unalterably convinced,&quot; he said, &quot; that on this founda tion I rest the least perishable monument of those thoughts and those labours which have made the life of my life.&quot; But King Arthur fell flat. The verse, the six-lined stava of elegiac quatrain and couplet, lacks charm and variety; the incidents are monotonous, the personages uninteresting, the plot unexciting, and the allegory obscure. St Stephen s, a gallery of parliamentary portraits from the time of Queen Anne, was a kind of metrical composition that lay more within his powers. In this the satire is keen-edged, the admiration just and generous. It was published in 1860. The Lost Tales of Miletus (1866) and a translation of Horace s Odes (1869) were Lytton s last essays in verse. In the skill with which he sustained a new style in The Caxtons (1848) Lytton gave a more convincing proof of his versatility. This imitation of Sterne (by no means a servile imitation, rather an adaptation of Sterne s style and characters to the circumstances of the 19th century) ap peared anonymously in H lack wood s Magazine, and made a reputation before the authorship was suspected. My Novel (1853) and What mil He Do with It? (1858) continued in the same strain. The sub-title of My Novel, &quot; Varieties of English life,&quot; shows still operative the same purpose that we find in Pelham, but the criticism of the &quot; Varieties &quot; is more polemical in spirit, There is more than a shade of defiance in his praise of the virtues of a territorial aristocracy, and a strong spice of hostility to the vulgarities of the manufacturers who threatened to push them from their stools, There is a blindness to defects in the one case and to merits in the other quite foreign to the broad sympathies of the dandy Pelham; Caxton paints the ideal best of the one class and the ideal worst of the other. In these, as in all Lytton s novels, the characters are placed on the stage and described ; they are not left to reveal themselves gradually in action. Lytton returned to parliament in 1852 as member for Hertfordshire, and sat on the Conservative side. Early in life he had decided in his mind against the reduction of the corn duties, and, unchanged in 1851, he addressed a &quot; Letter to John Bull,&quot; enlarging on the dangers of their repeal. Incapable of failure in any intellectual exercise that he set his mind to, he was an effective speaker ; but the effort was against nature : he could speak only under extreme excitement or after laborious preparation, and he 1 A feeble attack in the last on Mr Tennyson s poetry provoked a brusque but powerful reply from the enraged laureate, aimed at his assailant s person. never took a high place among parliamentary orators. He was colonial secretary in Lord Derby s Government from 1858 to 1859, and threw himself industriously into the duties of his office. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Lytton in 1866. That he had not forgotten his power of moving the sense of melodramatic and romantic mystery when he adopted the more subdued style of The Caxtons, Lytton proved by A Strange Story, contributed to All the Year Round in 1862. A serial story of the kind made a new call on his resources, but he was equal to it, and fairly rivalled the school of Dickens in the art of sustaining thrilling interest to the close. When he died, in January 1873, after a short painful illness, two works of high repute, The Coming Race and The Parisians, were not acknowledged, and were only vaguely suspected to be his. They had freshness enough to be the work of youth, and power enough to shame no veteran. These two books, the fable and the novel, are classed by Lytton s son and successor in the the title with the romance of Kenelm Chillingly, left completed at his death, as forming a trilogy, animated by a common purpose, to exhibit the influence of &quot; modern ideas &quot; upon character and conduct. The moulding force whose operation is traced in The Parisians is the society of imperial arid democratic France, in Chillingly the society of England in relation to its representative institutions. The leading purpose is kept well in view throughout both works, and the tendencies to corruption analysed and presented with admirable skill ; but the theorist has omitted from his problem certain important regenerating and safeguarding factors in the large world outside the pale of society. Problems and theories apart, these last works show no falling off of power ; he is as vivid as ever in description, as fertile as ever in the invention of humorous arid melodramatic situa tion. If he had been content to abandon his purpose in Chillingly, and end with the first volume by some such commonplace contrivance as giving &quot; motive power &quot; to his hero in the love of Cecilia Travers, it would have been the most perfect of his works in unity of humorous senti ment. The veteran author died in harness, two novels all but completed ; another, an historical romance, Pausanias the Spartan, outlined and partly written. The fact that in the fiftieth year of his authorship, after publishing at least fifty separate works, most of them popular, Lord Lytton had still vigour and freshness enough to make a new anonymous reputation with The Coming Race would seem to indicate that critics had not fairly gauged his versatility, and also that an erroneous fixed idea had been formed of his style. The explanation prob ably is that even after the publication of The Caxtons he was thought of in connexion with that school of melodramatic romance of which he was indisputably the leader, if not the founder, and that heavily loaded rhetorical style which was made ridiculous by his imitators. &quot; Every great genius,&quot; one of his characters is made to say, &quot; must deem himself alone in his conceptions. It is not enough for him that these conceptions should be approved as good, unless they are admitted as inventive.&quot; Invention and originality are matters of degree, and, though no one can deny that Lytton possessed great inventive powers, he did not put that individual stamp on his work without which no writer is entitled to a place in the foremost rank. He was not self-centred enough; he was too generally emulous to win the highest individual distinction. But his fresh ness of thought, brilliancy of invention, breadth and variety of portraiture, gave him a just title to his popularity, and, with all allowance for superficial affectations, his generous nobility of sentiment made his influence as wholesome as it was widespread. (w. M.)