BOOKS.
A STRANGE STORY.*
SIR E. B. Lrrron's peculiar literary carmine. is still vivid and still
effective, but the false ring of his stilted and cunning intellect was never more distinctly audible than in this book. The story hinges on the phenomena of mesmerism or animal magnetism, and by far its most effective portion is centred in that feeling of downward awe—if we may coin a strange phrase to distinguish the sentiment roused in us by the iltexplicableness of animal life lower than human from the reverence stirred.in our hearts by the superhuman—which man enter- tains for the triumphs of an instinct at once beneath and beyond him. On this chord, Sir E. B. Lytton harps with great skill, and the scenes in which he limits himself to the delineation of this one mood of mind. are marked not only by the picturesqueness of his highly rhe- torical imagination, but by a real fidelity to this vein of subtle expe- rience. But here the deeper merit of the novel begins and ends. The earlier details of the story are, indeed, linked, together with all the scenic talent that almost uniformly marks the author's plots, until we reach the middle of the second volume, where the dreariest of all old physicians desolates the remainder of the work by entirely un- reaffahle expositions of all Sir E. B. Lytton's scrappy theories on body mind and soul and their connexion. Through this Sahara of arid morality and philosophic twaddle the weary reader plods his way to the blaze of red and blue lights which he foresees is destined to usher in the final euthanasia of the Marvellous in the Supernatural, and the fall of the curtain over the converted sceptic and the humiliated mystic : but the narrative interest of the tale is really over after the first denouement of the mesmeric or magnetic plot,—while such boyar' fide intellectual interest as there is—the real germ of niindin the book— is exhausted much earlier, the body of the tale being padded out by that exceedingly trashy kind of magniloquent abstractions with which all the readers of " Zanoni" are familiar.
* A Strange Story. By the Author of " Rienzi," " My Novel," &e. TWO volumes. Third edition. Sampson Low.
The idea of Sir E. B. Lytton's stories when he' insists upon. having one, as he does in this book, is apt to be confused ; or as he himself makes that very tedious old savant, to whom we have before alluded, say : "The Obvious is lost to the eye that plunges its gaze into the Obscure." Not being content with a tale which he might have made into an effectively varnished picture, he grasps at the illustration of deeper truth, and only destroys the }rench sharpness of his colouring with the uncertain and flickering sha- dows cast by what we might call, in his own style of stilted ab- straction, the hundred cross-lights of the 'Vague. He has got, as we hinted, a clear glimpse of one class of experiences connected with the region of marvels which he enters upon—the painful aspect of the mystery of inferior animal life, especially in connexion with the startling fascination it is capable of exerting over the higher but less rounded and completed life of man. Sir E. B. Lytton evidently regards, and probably with truth, all the established phenomena of mesmerism as properly designated by the term Anima/ magnetism. In this tale at least he centres the powers of the mesmerist in the animal side of man's nature, and represents the being of high spiritual nature and small animal force as a mere passive instrument in the hands of the animal man who has scarce any vestige of a soul. There is a glimpse of real genius in the picturesque and eerie introduction of the story,—the wintry moonlight lighting up the collection of stuffed animals in the house of the dying naturalist whose wrath the hero has justly provoked, and who threatens him with a fate about to be enveloped in all the thrilling perplexities of the painful riddle which he has rielicaled and defied.
"A February night, sharp and bitter. An iron-grey frost below—a spectral melancholy moon above. I had to ascend the Abbey Hill by a steep, blind lane between high walls. I passed through stately gates, which stood wide open, into the garden ground that surrounded the old Abbots' House. At the end of a short carriage-drive, the dark and gloomy building cleared itself from leafless skeleton trees ; the moon resting keen and cold on its abrupt gables and lofty chimney-stacks. An old woman- servant received me at the door, and, without saying a word, led me through a long low hall, and up dreary oak stairs, to a broad landing, at which she paused for a moment, listening. Round and about hall, staircase, and landing were ranged the dead specimens of the savage world which it had been the pride of the naturalist's life to collect. Close where I stood yawned the open jaws of the fell anaconda—its lower coils hidden, as they rested on the floor below, by the winding of the massive stairs. Against the dull wainscot walls were pendent cases stored with grotesque unfamiliar mum.. mies, seen imperfectly by the moon that shot through the window-panes, and the candle in the old woman's hand. And as now she turned towards me, nodding her signal to follow, and went on up the shadowy passage, rows of gigantic birds—ibis and vulture, and huge sea glaucus—glared at me in the false life of their hungry eyes. So I entered the sick-room, and the first glance told me that my art was powerless there. . . .
"Suddenly I felt my arm grasped : with his left hand (the right aide was already lifeless) the dying man drew me towards him nearer and nearer, till his lips almost touched my ear. . . .
"I sought to draw back and pluck my arm from the dying man's grasp. I could not de so without using a force that would have been inhuman. His lips drew nearer still to my ear. Vain pretender, do not boast that you brought a genius for epigram to the service of science. Science is lenient to all who offer experiment as the test of conjecture. You are of the stuff of which inquisitors are made. You cry that truth is profaned when your dogmas are questioned. In your shallow presumption you have
meted the dominions of nature, and where your eye halts its vision, you say, "There, nature must close ;" in the bigotry which adds crime to pre-
sumption, you would stone the discoverer who, in annexing new realms to her chart, unsettles your arbitrary landmarks. Verily, retribution shall await you. In those spaces which your sight has disdained to explore you shall yourself be a lost and bewildered straggler. Hiatt I see them already! The gibbering phantoms are gathering round you!'
"The man's voice stopped abruptly ; his eye fixed in a glazing stare : his hand relaxed its hold: he fell back on his pillow. I stole from the room : on the landing-place I met the nurse and the old woman-servant. Happily the children were not there. But I heard the wail of the female child from some room not far distant.
"I whispered hurriedly to the nurse, All is over !'—passed again under the jaws of the vast anaconda—and, on through the blind lane between the dead walls—on through the ghastly streets, under theghastly moon—went back to my solitary home."
This is by far the best and truest touch of art in the book—the connexion between the Animal world and the subject of the story being in fact impressed on the reader, not by a superficial and pedantic philosophy, but m a living and natural picture. And so far as the same thread of feeling- is followed throughout the narrative, so far as that shuddering which higher natures feel before the mysterious power of lower natures is delineated, it is delineated with the same effect. Unfortunately, however, Sir E. B. Lytton's ambitious intel- lect had, as usual, set itself a task far beyond its powers. He had determined to illustrate, in a tale of which the principal chord is mesmeric marvel, the threefold nature of man—the soulless nature whose understanding is the mere instrument of animal and self-pre- serving instincts—the predominantly intellectual nature which trio to explain the soul away though unconsciously penetrated by its in- fluence—and the predominantly spiritual nature which neglects both natural reason and selfish instinct. Of course the theme is vastly too large for the narrative by which it is to be illustrated, and of course, also, Sir E. B. Lytton does not really wish to illustrate, but to rhap- sodize upon, the theme. The result is very painful. HOW exceedingly empty and loose our author's notion of a philosophical epic—as he regards this book—is, the following characteristic sentence in the preface may indicate: "Now, as Philosophy and Romance both take their origin in the Principle of einder, so in the Strange Story sub- mitted to the Public, it will be seen that Romance, throng's the freest exercise of its wildest vagaries, conducts its bewildered hero towards the same goal, to which Philosophy leads its luminous Student through far grander portents of Nature, far higher visions of Supernatural Power, than Fable can yield to Fancy." This is an admirable specimen of the "deep no-meaning" which characterizes Sir E. B. Lytton's book whenever he attempts anything beyond a pic- turesque situation pervaded by an appropriate sentiment. Philosophy, no doubt, is a result of intellectual Wonder—it is that search after a cause or a reason which Wonder sets on foot. Romance is a stimulus, not to intellectual Wonder, which inquires after the cause and reason of the unknown, but to that imaginative thrill of surprise or awe which is removed by the exhibition of the cause or reason. "Ro- mance," therefore, as such, can "conduct" no one to any definite "goal ;" for Romance, in the abstract, has no definite course or goal at all; and it would have been about as sensible to say that as "Curiosity and Surprise both take their origin in the same principle of Ignorance, it will be seen that Surprise conducts its bewildered hero towards the same goal towards which Curiosity leads the lumi- nous Student," &c. We analyze this amongst many equally foolish and unmeaning bits of_pseudo-philosophy, only to show how exceed- ingly inadequate Sir E. B. Lytton is to any really philosophical theme. And, in fact, it will be found that the process by which the hard intellectual man of science is educated into abandoning he Marvellous for the truly Supernatural is one of the most extraordinary that can be conceived. It is not till natural magic fails that he stumbles, all of a sudden, into prayer and faith. Perhaps the reason is that he has to be led into this result by "Romance ;" and Romance being only able to use those capricious agents, whatever they maybe, which Fable can yield to Fancy"—though we do not at all see why it might not equally advantageously use those which Fancy could yield to Fable, if they were of any use—hit, we suppose, upon the right method only just at the last moment when the dinouement is wanted. In point of fact, nothing can be more empty and aimless than the machinery which is introduced to produce a moral effect. The machinery itself is not badly managed ; the moral effect intended to be produced—that of inspiring an undevout man of science with spiritual insight,—is one within the reach of a literary artist; but the two have no more proper connexion with each other than the scaffolding of the Houses of Par- liament with the new church at Bow. Sir E. B. Lytton lets his ro- mance conduct him wherever is most convenient; he invents such a philosophical goal as seems to him most convenient ; and then, by a dexterous juggling trick of words, he makes us believe that the one leads to the other.
We need not criticize the characters in this book. There is but one attempt at a character, Mrs. Colonel Poyntz, the woman of the world, and she is certainly a clever sketch, though too much empha- sized, after Mr. Dickens's fashion, with a phrase of ever-recurring words. Sir Bulwer Lytton has a quick eye for the manners of the world, and what he has seen he can paint; but in character he never goes beyond the merest visible surface—never gives you the impres- sion that he can conceive more than he has seen. The other cha- racters in this book are either allegories or names without any dis- tinct outlines or colour. It is in story, not in character, still less in that jargon of abstract phrases which he seems to regard as a ra- tionale or philosophy of character, that he excels. The mesmeric assumption, or axiom, on which the whole narrative turns, is, that a man of unusual force of animal will, or rather impulse, can not only magnetize at a distance, but unconsciously create at any given spot where he is mentally operating, a "luminous shadow," or film of himself, which Sir Bulwer Lytton calls by the Scandinavian term, the Scin-Lieca. This "luminous shadow," or offshoot of the magnetizer's personality, acts in every way for him, and appears to be the organ through which his thoughts or volitions are conveyed, —the latter being described as sounds coming from a vast distance. Throughout the book we have been struck with the analogy between this fancy or phantasm and Sir Bulwer Lytton's own literary cunning, which seems rather to resemble the "luminous shadow" and ventri- loquism of genius, than the living spirit of genius itself. For it fascinates, so far as it does fascinate, by its picturesque unreality, by the hollow depth of the mysterious voices proceeding out of that vague and shining ether which simulates the thought and imagination of true genius. When you come to try its essence by those many tests of truth and power which all real creative thought can stand., you find that the vision can only repeat some single inspiration, false or true, with which it has been specially charged,—and vanishes when that is uttered. For the most part, too, these oracular voices are false and not true. We concur heartily enough, indeed, with the not very original thesis of this book, that there is a soul in man as well as a mind and animal nature; but when we come to examine all the details of the philosophy by winch this is enforced, we find it a mé- lange of incongruities, ventriloquised by is dozen inconsistent system- mongers. In short, the Oneiros, which s commissioned in this ro- mance to shadow forth to the world Sir E. B. Lytton's philosophy, seems to us to have come through the gate of ivory, not through the gate of horn.
Previous page
