LORD LYTTON'S ESSAYS.* WE learn from these three portly volumes
what, indeed, we knew already, that Lord Lytton is a voluminous writer. In many other respects also the impressions which we have formed of hint from his novels are confirmed. His artificial style, his affectations of cynicism and of knowledge of the world, his strained allusions to Horace, his fine phrases which impose upon no one but himself, and his superfine contempt for those who happen to differ from him, are found in some of his slightest as well as in his more elabo- rate writings. In his novels we may have overlooked these charac- teristics, or smiled at them as mere passing follies. They might be momentary aberrations of a mind which could conceive, and a hand which could sketch from the life. But some of the essays contain little else than these mannerisms, and in them, at least, the mannerisms are serious. Fancies which the novelist might safely put into the mouths of his imagi- nary beings, and which might be maintained by those who had no practical responsibilities, seem far beneath the dignity of a literary peer. Platitudes about care, and fate, and fortune, could be agreeably, if sparingly, introduced into the world of fiction. But when Lord Lytton speaks gravely of shunning the dog star by the side of a little English pond, and spreading the turf with such light refection of fresh fruits and cooling wines as suit time and place, we are painfully conscious that the whole Bulwerian theory of life and things is a sham. Our belief in its sincerity is more rudely shaken than was Lord Lytton's own belief in the ideal life of Lord Byron by the sight of the walnut-tree bureau, with "Letters of Lady B—" written over some of the compartments. It is a pity that the lesson learnt from that sight has not been more fully taken to heart. The writer of works of the imagination may for a time persuade himself that he is living up to his poetical standard. But when he comes down to sober prose he should be more consistent. We do not mean that he should follow the absurd advice given by Lord Lytton himself :—" Poet, before you sit down to surpass Paradise Lost, be sure that you know the market price of mutton ; you may not surpass Paradise Lost, but you will certainly have to pay for your mutton!" That is a matter which may be left to the wife or the housekeeper. But even a poet need not talk of mutton as the festive offering of sheep that had listened to his Teian lyre under the shade when they were protected from the fiery summer by the agile Faunus. Our complaint is not that Lord Lytton is unpractical. It is rather that both when he deals in advice, and when he gives the reins to romance, we cannot believe in him.
The first volume of these miscellaneous works must be excepted from our criticism. It is composed of Quarterly essays, marked by none of Lord Lytton's peculiarities of style or thought. He has written gravely and soberly for publications which would be accused of madness if they let hint have his fling. The result is that the articles on Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Gray, and Pitt and Fox, are essays such as we are accustomed to associate with the Quarterly Review. They are able essays of their kind, but are not exceptionally good. No one who read them in the place where they appeared would attribute theta to any writer of distinction, or talk of them as forming an era in periodical literature. We should have been surprised if this could be said of them. Yet it might be thought that such an author as Lord Lytton would not be content to produce articles which did not rise above the average. The fact of having contributed to the Quarterly Review could not add to his reputation. The sum paid for such an article could be earned more easily. The views conveyed in it were not of a kind that needed such an organ. Can there be any other object than one of these three for undertaking the labours of
* Miscellaneous Prose Works., By Edward Ealwer, Lord Lytton. 3 vols. London: Bentley.
a long and more or less tedious essay, especially when its resulta are small in comparison? Lathe "Life of Schiller," which ends the first volume, Lord Lytton was free from restraint, and was able to talk grandly of the Titan moving beneath the mountain. But even this licence was denied him in the Quarterly Review. As for the enthusiasm with which he exclaims, in one of his youthful writings, "Oh, nymphs, oh, fairies, oh, poetry, I am yours again !" we should like to see the face of an old member of the Carlton if he came across this sentence in a " safe " publication. His first impulse would be to look at the cover. His second to abjure such -a dangerous practice as reading. We can hardly counsel such persons to venture on Lord Lytton's second volume. They may .do as they will with his first, and his third, if full of strange fancies, is based on Conservative principles. But the papers in the second volume are those of a young man who fancies himself a profound thinker, and who, having picked up certain half-truths in reading 'or observation, is tempted to moralize upon them. The essays in the guise of stories are more significant than the professed essays, as they are often more pretentious. The man who was too handsome to do anything, the man who could not escape from his Reputa- tion, the pair of lovers which resolved to take poison sooner than be separated, and quarrelled on coming to live together, the good -children who provided for their parents by swindling other people, are incarnations of those paradoxes which serve to sharpen an -epigram. By means of such stories Lord Lytton tells us to take the world as it is, not to think too much of love and constancy, not to envy fame or beauty. Every satirist has said the same before, but few have managed to refute themselves so completely. There may be something in the moral which Lord Lytton wishes to illustrate, but the effect of illustrating it by an impossible story is a reductio ad absurdum. We see that it is not a mere youthful error on the author's part, if we turn to the story of the scientific .gardener in the third volume. It is a mere truism to say that anany men know what is right, and do not practise it. But when Lord Lytton tells us of a peer's head gardener, "a gentleman of the highest repute for science, and who never spoke of a cowslip except by its name in Latin," knowing very well that charcoal dressing was good for vines and flowers, yet never applying it, he forgets that no complaint was made of the inferiority of the vines and flowers till the peer saw those of his neighbour. It is well to be just even to a man of learning. Lord Lytton's story starts from the hypothesis that the peer was proud of the beauty of his .own grounds, and that the neighbour's vines were in a very bad way. Under such circumstances it was natural that the peer's gardener should be content with what he had already produced, and that the neighbour's gardener should look out for drastic remedies. But if the peer had been as logical as he was senten- tious he would have given the " man of learning" a chance before le robbed his neighbour of the "man of genius." And if Lord Lytton was not so fond of conveying arguments under the form of -stories, he would have scrutinized the present one more closely -before loading it with so extensive a moral.
We find little that calls for remark in the essays of the earlier period. Those which were published as Caxtoniana are more -entertaining, but they are not old enough to be discussed at any length. The points on which they challenge criticism are indeed in some respects peculiar to themselves. In the earlier works, as we have said, Lord Lytton indulges in the fallacies natural to a -satirist. His later and more mature writings have no such excuse for their failings. The following passage, for example, which aims -at something more than mere paradox, is singularly bad in its reasoning :—
"But does it not occur to such discriminating observers that Shake- .speare's knowledge is no less accurate when applied to forms of life and periods of the world into which his personal experience could not possibly have given him an insight, than it -was when applied to the description of Dover Cliff, or couched in a metaphor borrowed from the Law Courts ? Possibly he might have seen with his own bodily eyes the samphire-gatherer hanging between earth and sky ; but with his -own bodily eyes had he seen Brutus in his tent on the fatal eve of Philippi? Possibly he might have scrawled out a deed of conveyance to John Doe; but had he any hand in Cxsar's will, or was he consulted by Mark Antony as to the forensic use to which that will could be applied in obtaining from a Roman jury a verdict against the liberties -of Rome ? To account for Shakespeare's lucidity in things done on 'earth before Dover Cliff had been seen by the earliest Saxon immigrant, there is but one supposition agreeable to the theory that Shakespeare must have seen Dover Cliff with his own bodily eyes because he -describes it so well ; Shakespeare must have been, not Lord Bacon, but Pythagoras, who had lived as Euphorbus in the times of the Trojan war, and who, under some name or other (why not in that of Shake- speare ?) might therefore have been living in the reign of Elizabeth, linking in one individual memory the annals of perished states and extinguished races."
This must be supplemented by a few more lines on the next page but one, and the page after that, and then the theory is com- plete :—
" I have had sometimes to describe minutely scones which, at the time of describing, I had never witnessed. I visited those scenes later. I then examined them, with a natural apprehension that I must have committed some notable mistake, to be carefully corrected in any subse- quent edition of the work in which such desoriptions had been tame- ritriously adventured. In no single instance could I ever find, after the most rigid scrutiny, that the clairvoyance of imagination had deceived me. I found nothing in the scenery I witnessed to induce me to retouch an outline or a colouring in the scenery I had imagined Kant startled an Englishman with a description of Westminster Bridge so minutely detailed, that his listener in amazement asked him how many years he had lived in London ? Kant had never been out of Prussia— scarcely out of Kiinig,sberg."
What the whole argument comes to is this,—that some men have described so minutely and so faithfully what they have not seen as to impress us with a belief in an imaginative power answering to clairvoyance. With regard to Kant and to Lord Lytton himself, we want au important link in the evidence. Had Kant read no minute description of Westminster Bridge, or are we really to understand that he had been on it in the spirit ?' Were the scenes described by Lord Lytton wholly strange to him, or had he seen them through the eyes of travellers ? When we talk of clair- voyance, we assume that the mesmeric sleeper is transported to a place totally new to the mind. There would be nothing to wonder at in the reproduction by sleep of a place which had been read of when waking. lu the case of Shakespeare this, of course, does not apply. Yet here we find a stronger objection. We are able to test the accuracy of legal phrases and of an account of Dover Cliff, but how can we tell if Brutus and Mark Antony really thought, and spoke, and acted as Shakespeare has represented them ? Shakespeare himself is the only wirrant. His knowledge of human nature convinces us that he knew human nature. Ile felt that such a man as Brutus in such a situation must have thought and spoken in such a way, and the result of this feeling in Shakespeare
is that every one believes in the truth of the portraiture. Does Lord Lytton want to persuade us that any amount of inspiration would have taught Shakespeare the existence of fines and recoveries ? We are not dealing with the theory that Shakespeare was a clerk in an attorney's office. All that we have before us is Lord Lytton's counter-theory. And in that we say Lord Lytton confuses creative power and the power of assimila- tion, knowledge of the human mind and the mastery of small prac- tical details. These may often go together, in the sense that he who possesses the greater gift may add the smaller one to it. But they are not the less independent of each other.
To sum up all in one sentence, many of Lord Lytton's essays are agreeable to read, but they would be pretentious if they came from another man, and they do not add to his reputation. They show that he has always been consistent in one thing—in writing too much—and while they faithfully reflect the recklessness of youth, the business sobriety of manhood, and the garrulity of "the beginning of age," they are not worthy companions of the novels of either period,—of Pelham, Harold, or My Novel.
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