BOOKS.

LORD LYTTON'S LIFE.*

THESE two goodly octavo volumes bring the late Lord Lytton's life down to the age of twenty-eight. At this rate, the work can hardly be completed in less space than some half-dozen more volumes. Surely this is a mistake, not less in the interest of the subject than from a literary point of view. "The unpublished manuscripts bequeathed to me by my father," says the bio- grapher "(in addition to his private correspondence and note- books), consist of several dramas, completely finished ; an entire volume of his History of Athens, never published ; a few sketches, made for some other historical works ; and an immense number of unfinished novels, plays, poems, and essays." These, or a selection from them, the biographer intends, as we gather from his title-page and preface, to weave into the record of his father's life, as he has done in the volumes before us, a considerable part of which is filled with some of the late Lord Lytton's unfinished novels. The effect on the ordinary reader is to distract his attention, and leave him, at the con- clusion of the biography, with a confused impression of the subject of it. Would it not be much better to separate the " Life " from the " Remains "? We trust that it is not yet too late for Lord Lytton to adopt the plan we recommend. It is probable that he would thereby diminish the number of those who would read the " Remains,"—and so much the better, for the publication of unfinished " Remains " by so prolific a writer as Lord Lytton is a mistake,—but he would find his com- pensation in the largely increased number of the readers of the " Life."

Barring the plan of his work, we have but little fault to find with Lord Lytton's execution of it, so far. Contrary to what might be inferred from some public notices of the book, his treatment of the delicate question of his parents' married life is in excellent taste. Not equally in good-taste, let alone prudence, are political innuendos like the following (of which, however, there are but few). During his undergraduate career at Cambridge the late Lord Lytton drew up a scheme for a History of the British Public, which, for a youth of twenty-one, is certainly remarkable for the breadth and liberality of its views, and the extent of Bulwer's reading. In this scheme Ireland has a place, and young Bulwer's panacea was, in brief, to leave the relations of landlord and tenant alone ; "put poli- tical questions at rest for a while ;" " let the Church sleep ;" but "provide employment that brings profitable returns." Let the Government " purchase lands," " or encourage companies for that purpose on a large scale and in every district." In short, make Ireland a garden of Eden, by covering its soil with pros- perous industries, green fields, golden harvests, and smiling

• The Life, Letters. and Literary Remains of Eduard Bulwer, Lord Lytton. By

ha Bon. London : Began Paul, 'french. and Co. 1888. orchards ; and then "you can tax the Irish people for the main- tenance of their own ecclesiastical establishments. Be firm in putting down crime. Go back to analogous states of society- Divide into districts. Make each district responsible for the- crimes committed in it." Such is Bulwer's synopsis of the Irish question and its solution; and his son's comment is :— " Perhaps some readers may find in these suggestions of a youth of twenty-one more indication of political wisdom than is yet generally perceptible in the latest experiments of septu- agenarian statesmanship upon the government of Ireland." So far as the undergraduate's crude and amiable dream was feasible, it had ample trial. " Pat political questions at rest for a while. Let the Church sleep." This was written in 1824, and the remedy was tried. But political and ecclesiastical questions have an inconvenient habit of awaking out of sleep ; and so. Tory Governments have found when they have attempted to- govern Ireland by the method of coercion, tempered only by lollipops and slumber. Lord Lytton does not explain where the money was to come from that was to do such wonders for Ireland while the Church was to remain established and the relations of landlords and tenants unredressed. Nor does he see that no amount of pecuniary bribes can ever turn injustice into justice. We require no further proof of the present Lord Lytton's incapacity for serious statesmanship than his approval of a policy for Ireland which, to say nothing else, would still, exclude Roman Catholics from the House of Commons..

It was under a Tory Government that the questions of

Catholic Emancipation, of Disestablishment, of the Land. League, came to the front and refused to sleep any longer.

And as to "the latest experiments of septuagenarian states-

manship," it certainly has had as large a measure of success as could reasonably have been expected under the circumstances.

There can, of course, be no objection to Lord Lytton's expressing his opinion on any political question that comes naturally into his way in his account of his father's life, provided he does it in

a becoming manner. But to make the life of his father a vehicle for irrelevant sneers against living statesmen is a. blunder not only in taste but in tactics.

The perusal of Lord Lytton's Life, a considerable and by far the most interesting part of which is autobiographical, to the point at which these volumes have left it gives us a far higher opinion of him as a man than we had before. His son seems to us to have faithfully fulfilled his promise neither "to reduce a single feature nor suppress a single incident that seems to me- less admirable than the rest." The biography strikes us as an exceedingly fair one, and it says much for the character of Bulwer (as he was called till he succeeded to his mother's property), that it gains more than it loses by the frankness of the biographer. The circumstances connected with his marriage and with the• first years of his married life do him the highest honour, and show him to have been, then at least, a man of rare inde- pendence and generosity of character. At the age of seventeen. he had a romantic attachment, which he cherished for life. While at school at Ealing he met and fell in love with a young lady somewhat his senior. The feeling was mutual- But the young lovers knew nothing of each other's families,. nor, indeed, of each other, beyond love-rambles in the fields. The young lady suddenly ceased to meet her lover, and he found out that she had been forced by her father into an uncongenial marriage, from which death, after a few years,. released her,—a victim, as Bulwer believed, of disappointed love. To the last day of his life he glorified this gild as a kind of Beatrice, whose image haunted him per- petually, and whom he loved with a devotion which could, never be given to another. Yet, in spite of this life-long attach- ment, Bulwer had several other love-affairs before he married,. The heroine of one of these love-affairs was a beautiful young gipsy, who so captivated the forlorn lover at first sight that he there and then went off with her to the gipsy camp, where he lived for some days, till he was expelled, much against his will,. through the jealousy of some of the gipsy beaux. It may be difficult to reconcile these transient amours with the " early sorrow " at the loss of his first love, a sorrow so acute and enduring "that the traces of it were never wholly effaced." But Bulwer himself, in an essay on Constancy (to which his son does not refer), written in after-years, maintains the thesis that. a man may have one overmastering, life-long attachment, yet be capable at the same time of subordinate attachments, without detriment to the purity and depth of the first love. The truth probably is that " his nature," as his son has said, "was soon- stituted that affection, in some shape or other, was the para- mount condition of its happiness." Accordingly, he flitted about from one object of affection to another till he was finally caught, at the age of twenty-four, by the beautiful Irish girl who became his wife. Nothing can come out in the further development of Bulwer's character that can efface the true generosity of his conduct in the very trying circum- stances connected with that marriage. His mother, who had an austere standard of parental obedience, and acted it out in her own life, doated on him. Somewhat unhappily married herself, she had but little to do with the bringing-up of her two eldest sons. So that her love was concentrated on her youngest, the subject of this biography. To him she intended to leave her own ancestral property of Knebworth, and she made bim meanwhile a hand- some allowance. She resented therefore his falling in love without consulting her with the beautiful Miss Wheeler, and imperatively forbade the further prosecution of a snit to which she could never give her consent. Bulwer's devotion to his mother is very beautiful. He gave her a solemn promise that he would never marry Miss Wheeler without his mother's con- sent, and went abroad in the hope of conquering his passion. But various circumstances kept it alive, not the least in- fluential being his mother's harsh and unjust treatment of Miss Wheeler, whose home was an unhappy one. The end of it was that Bulwer engaged himself to Miss Wheeler, and had consequently to bear the full brunt of his mother's bitter anger. She held him to his promise ; and the series of letters in which he endeavoured to obtain her consent to his marriage are models of filial devotion, dignity, and chivalrous honour. He broke his promise at last, married without his mother's consent, resigned the allowance which he had hitherto enjoyed from her bounty, and betook himself with his beautiful bride to a house in the country, where he slaved with his pen to provide an income for his house- hold suitable to the position which he was ambitious to occupy. He wrote not only novels, but worked hard as a writer on the Press, turning even his experiences in the difficulties of making both ends meet into pecuniary profit. His son says that he made at this time an income of about £3,000 a year. He made various efforts to be reconciled to his mother, but without success ; and the estrangement lasted for some years. A reconciliation at last took place between son and mother; but Bulwer's wife was not included in the amnesty. This consummation, however, was at last achieved, but only to be interrupted almost immediately. Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton fancied that her daughter-in-law had not met her first advance with a sufficient demonstration of grateful affection, and she wrote to Bnlwer to complain that his wife, whom she " maintained," had not shown herself sufficiently dutiful. Bulwer resented keenly the taunt of his wife being " maintained " by his mother, and replied in a letter full of pathetic pride and wounded affection. He returned to his mother the first instal- ment of the renewed allowance, and declined to receive any more favours of the kind from her. His son says, probably with truth, that to Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton's injudicious treatment of him was probably due, in no small degree, the eventual wreck of Bulwer's domestic happiness. It is clear that for the first few years of his married life the relations between himself and his wife were of the most affectionate character. But the incessant drudgery of daily work both kept him away from the society of his wife, and affected him with " an irritability which sometimes made him absolutely unapproachable." " I fear there is no chance of

Edward getting better," said his wife, in a letter to her mother- in-law, " forhe undertakes a degree of labour that positively, with- out exaggeration, no three persons could have the health and time to achieve. So incessantly is he occupied, that I seldom or never see him till about two or three in the morning, for five minutes.

And it is no use for me to tell him that he will only defeat all the objects of his life, by attempting more than he can compass. Poor fellow ! my remonstrances only irritate him." Mrs.

Bulwer, we learn on the authority of her son, endured those outbursts of temper with a silent gentleness which filled her husband with remorse when the fit was over; and he tried to make up for his violence by costly presents, which he could ill afford. An extract from one of Mrs. Bulwer's own letters corroborates this. " The little rift within the lute " gradually widened, till the music became wholly and for ever mute, though

we see only the premonitory symptoms of the catastrophe in these volumes. It is sad to think that if his mother's harsh and unwise conduct had not compelled Bnlwer to shatter his nerves by too hard work, he and his wife might have lived together in tolerable happiness to the end of the chapter.

It is always interesting to learn the methods of work adopted by,successful literary men. Mr. Anthony Trollope has let us into the secret of his method. He got through so much work by composing regularly three hours every day before breakfast. Bulwer appears to have set himself a somewhat similar rule. In addressing a boys' school in the year 1854, he said

A man, to get through work well, must not overwork himself ; or if he do too much to-day, the reaction of fatigue will come, and ho will be obliged to do too little to-morrow. Now, since I began really and earnestly to study, which was not till after I had left college, and was actually in the world, I may, perhaps, say that I have gone through as large a course of general reading as most men of my time. I have travelled much, I have mixed up in politics and in the various business of life, and in addition to this, I have published somewhere about sixty volumes, some upon subjects requiring mach special re- search. And what time do you think, as a general rule, I have devoted to study,—to reading and writing ? Not more than three hours a day, and when Parliament is sitting not always that. But then, during those hours, I have given my whole attention to what I was about. Thus, you see, it does not require so very much time at a stretch to get through a considerable amount of brain-work; but it requires application regularly and daily continued."

His son, however, tells us that "this account demands copious qualification. The historical romance of Harold was com- pleted in less than a month, and it is no exaggeration to say that my father was engaged upon it nearly day and night for more than three weeks. His work was no less continuous during the composition of Lucretia and the Caxton, Senelnt Chillingly and the Parisians." We have already quoted Mrs. Bulwer's

account of her husband's incessant toil. These, however, were "spurts " in a more equable routine of literary work. Bulwer probably meant that the whole of his composition and special preparation would, if spread over his literary life, occupy about three hours a day.

Bulwer gives a vivid account of his school life and of his life at Cambridge, where he had Macaulay, Praed, and other brilliant men for contemporaries. He was successful in competition for a prize poem, and was among the leading speakers at the Union, but did not otherwise distinguish himself at the University.

Lord Lytton has given us some interesting letters between his father and Mr. Disraeli when they were both young authors, and Bulwer's share of the correspondence is certainly the more creditable. His literary standing was at that time, and indeed always, higher than Disraeli's ; and he gives some excellent

advice, with great kindness and tact, to his more youthful aspirant to fame. "I would have you writs a book," he says,

"not only to succeed, but to have that form of success which will hereafter be agreeable to yourself." " You do not seem to me to do justice to your own powers, when you are so indulgent to flippancies ! Put yourself some morning in a bad humour with antithesis and Voltaire." " The flippancies I allude to are

an ornate and showy effeminacy." And he gives as examples, —" He looked like a Messiah, and took wine," " He looked up,

not to the sky, but the ceiling." There is a characteristic letter from Mr. Disraeli, dated from Constantinople, in December, 1830, from which it appears that his Turkish sympathies originated in his boyhood, and really belonged to the Oriental cast of his imagination and character

"I confess to you," he says," that my Turkish prejudices are very much confirmed by my residence in Turkey. The life of this people greatly accords with my taste, which is naturally somewhat indolent and melancholy To repose on voluptuous ottomans, and smoke superb pipes, daily to indulge in the luxuries of a bath which requires half-a-dozen attendants for its perfection ; to court the air- in a carved caique, by shores which are a perpetual scene; and to find no exertion greater than a canter on a barb ; this is, I think, a, far more sensible life than all the bustle of clubs, all the boring of drawing-rooms, and all the coarse vulgarity of our political contro- versies. And this, I assure you, is, without colouring or exaggeration, the life which may be here commanded. A life accompanied by a thousand sources of calm enjoyment, and a thousand modes of mellowed pleasure, which it would weary you to relate, and which I leave to your own lively imagination."

Circumstances and the promptings of his own ambition made Mr. Disraeli's own life a very different one from his ideal ; but it was to the ideal that he clung to the very last as most desirable mode of existence,—a life of calm, in-

dolent sybaritism, environed by pomp and glitter. For him, the Turkish tobacco would have lost half its aroma had its smoke been inhaled. from other than " superb pipes," and the bath would have been robbed of ita chief luxury, but for the showy crowd of attendants. That this genuine Oriental should have become the leader of the aristocracy and squirearchy of England is one of the marvels of history. A leader of the English democracy be never was, and never could

become; and the Tories have never made a greater tactical blander than in imagining that Lord Beaconsfield's is a name to conjure with under a household franchise. Bulwer's mind was of a much manlier type, and his generosity towards assail- ants presents a further striking contrast to Mr. Disraeli's character. With true Oriental implacability, Mr. Disraeli treasured and nursed his wrongs till he found an opportunity of revenging himself on his assailant. And his revenge often took a form in which it was impossible to confront it. Witness his virulent attack on Mr. Goldwin Smith, in Lothair, and on Thackeray (long after his death), in Endymion. Bulwer was assailed by Thackeray and others somewhat bitterly. He winced with keen sensitiveness under the infliction, and retali- ated occasionally, in a manly way, with his face to his foes. But he never made his novels the vehicles of his revenge ; and in later life he relieved the distress of several of his assailants, both out of his private purse and by his patronage as a Minister of the Crown. It is due to his memory also to say that larger experience of life convinced him that the tendency of his earlier works of fiction was unwholesome. He suppressed one of them ; and his later novels, with all their faults and low standard of morals, diffuse a much healthier atmosphere.