or the torments of a conventional hell. That wise, keen, cultivated, unloving intelligence, which up to its last moment of mortal breath is visibly as individual, as potent in its self-concentration, as clearsighted and as dauntless as in its prime, what an amazing mystery is its disappear we feel, is not such stuff as either angels or devils are made of -and what then? It is curious in the very first rejoicing outburst of romance to catch this first tone of the wonder which seems to have haunted his life and beguiled him into much study, and perhaps some credulity, in his later days. dint of mere continuance, and grows into something like a moral quality in its perfect seriousness and good faith. Savile's death, which is accomplished with perfect calm and coolness the philosopher being determined to retain his comfort to the last moment, and dying quite undisturbed by any invasions of the emo-ance beyond our ken and vision! This, tional or spiritual—is a curious conception to have occurred to a young man. It has, we believe, a deeper truth to nature than the more amiable dreams with which the imagination of mankind, always pitiful of the last scene in a tragedy, has surrounded the conventional deathbed. That the approach of death must awaken emotions of a profound and penetrating character is one of the delusions which nothing but experience will banish from the general mind and it will always seem incredible that a man should be able to die without thinking of God and of the judgment to come. For this reason the picture of the death-bed of the philosophical man of the world, so strictly in accordance with his life, is not only a very original and striking sketch, but manifests the existence in the young writer, even at this early period, of that profound and searching curiosity (to call it by no higher name) into the last issues and mysteries of life and death which afterwards tempted him into the realms of Magic and Mystery, and seems during his whole life to have existed with unusual strength and persistency within him. When we find him at so early a period tracking the steps of his worldly sage down into the last darkness, we can understand better his fanciful investigations into the mystery of the life elixir in later days; and the strange and weird impersonation of that thirst for mere existence which could buy life even by the sacrifice of soul, with which he astonished and troubled many readers further on in his career. Already, amid all the glow and exuberance of youth, amid the throng of the young heroes, victorious in love, in war, in diplomacy, and in song, with whom the young author sweeps along triumphant, had this wonder seized him. Not the wonder and curiosity, so common to men, as to what must occur when the last boundary line is passed, and we ourselves have entered upon the new existence beyond death with all its incomprehensible changes. Bulwer's curiosity takes a different form. His mind instinctively selects that type of being which it is most difficult to translate in imagination either into the beatitudes of heaven Bulwer, however, always retained a fondness for the character which no other hand has drawn so well, that of the accomplished, polished, able, experienced, clear-sighted, and selfish man of the world; with amiability but without heart; possessing no moral code save that which enjoins upon members of society the necessity of not being found out, and no spiritual consciousness of any kind. He grew more merciful as he grew older, ripening this same impersonation into warmer and kinder and more human shape, replacing the Savile of his remorseless youth with the Alban Morley of mellower days; but it always remained one of his favourite characters, and it seems to us unquestionably one of his best. It is our natural standard, the ideal upon which we fall back when we wish to identify the philosopher of society; just as Pelham has been, for more than one generation, consciously or unconsciously, the model of the brilliant young diplomatist, the splendid neophyte of a school of politicians which we fear is dying out among us a class of men educated not only at school and college, but by constant and much diversified studies in life, and inheriting the worldly wisdom and knowledge of men acquired by their fathers, the training of a race. Something of the moral curiosity which we have attributed to Bulwer in respect to the last mystery of existence, no doubt moved him to the composition of those stories which we have called Romances of Crime. To trace out, through the dismal tragedy of Eugene Aram, how the mind of a scholar could be moved to the meanness of robbery and brutality of murder, is a morbid exercise of this great sentiment, and the effect to ourselves is a most disagreeable one, characterized by all the faults and few of the merits of the author's peculiar genius; but yet it is a to their origin, is not of a kind which could ever gain the sympathy of humanity. We shrink from the investigation of such dread events. We prefer not to know how by one tortuous way after another the murderer is led from blood to blood. It is the least seductive of all kinds of guilt, and we believe may be safely trusted to lead no one into imitation; but perhaps for that very reason it is the least popular. There are readers. enough who love to be stimulated and excited by descriptions of the rise and development of another kind of passion— and much more likely to tempt and lead astray than all the spiritual anatomy of "Lucretia ;" but while we admit the latter to be less pernicious, it is more inhuman. Lord Lytton himself, who seems to have considered this investigation of moral mysteries as one of the rights of his office, was evidently somewhat bewildered and disconcerted by the storm of opposition which rose against this work. Almost sternly, as well as indignantly, he repels the accusation of having lent the 66 searching and anxious investigation into a moral problem. The still earlier romance of "Paul Clifford" is neither so dismal nor so tedious. It is an attempt to show how the evil influences of education could corrupt a young spirit naturally honourable and pure. And no doubt the attempt is thoroughly successful; and no one who reads the narrative of the young highwayman's early days will be at any loss to perceive how and why it was that he came to take up with that perilous profession. It is, however, very much more difficult to find out how a true brother of the school of Pelham and Lin-descriptions really much more dangerous den, a gay, noble, generous, chivalric, and commanding hero, finding his place naturally among gentlemen, and possessed not only of the instincts but the manners of the best society, should have been brought up among the thieves and ribalds of the lowest dens of London, without even the consciousness to elevate him, that he himself was of better blood. This is the great error of the conception; but it is a weakness of a generous kind, and one which naturally belongs to the romantic age and spirit. It is far less easy to account for the much more elaborate effort made by our author in " Lucretia," to trace the full development of crime, out of mere heartlessness and ambitious longing for the possession of an old man's fortune, to the darkest deliberation of guilt, long premeditated and often repeated murder. He himself tells us with indignation that the book in which he embodied this dark history was attacked by the critics as a book of immoral tendency; and it is evident that this reproach struck him to the heart. So deep was the blow that he did what no writer should allow himself to be tempted to do: he published a reply to the remarks of his assailants, and a defence of the attacked novel. Such defences are always futile. It is true, indeed, that the horrible crimes of Lucretia are followed by such tremendous justice, and are throughout presented to us in such a gloomy and revolting light, that even in her softest moments we are never allowed to pity or take part with the guilty woman; and in this point of view the book is infinitely more moral than Maltravers, for instance, in which something very like vice is made On this point, accordingly, the author, to look like a more than ordinarily ethe-carried away by his art and by his inclireal virtue. Nobody can say that crime is recommended or excused in the gloomy pages of "Lucretia;" but the curiosity which investigates the workings of such a mind, and endeavours to trace its crimes weight of his name and authority to the defence and encouragement of crime;" and with very good reason; for, certainly, of all works of fiction ever composed, "Lucretia" is the least adapted to "encourage "crime. But he misses, we think, the real point in the charges against him when he attributes this universal disapprobation to the public dislike of painful impressions. The cause is deeper. Men and women are almost all subject to movements of the passion of love, the passion most discussed in books, and accordingly follow with a certain inevitable interest even its darkest and guiltiest developments. But few of us are moved with homicidal impulses, and, therefore, human sympathy totally fails in their analyzation. The first may do us harm they are distinctly immoral and evil in their tendency; yet even the sternest moralist can scarcely shut his ears entirely to them, unless they stoop to the lowest and coarsest depths. But our interest fails in the other, however finely and tragically drawn. Human nature has no sympathy with the murderer as it has with the lover, however guilty. nation to investigate the secrets which he saw before him, parted company with his audience to his evident astonishment. It is clear that this was not only a surprise, but something of a shock to him; and consequently here his anatomy of crime ended abruptly. a fact which every true admirer of Lord Lytton hailed with pleasure. We do not suppose that in the other still wilder and stranger field of occult investigation to which he more than once recurred there was so complete a separation and failure of sympathy between his readers and himself; yet it is certain that the class to whose interest he appeals in the weird romance of "Zanoni," and in the still more weird adventures of the "Strange Story," is a different class from that which applauded "Pelham," or which gave a new, nobler, and wider reputation than any he had gained in his youth to the author of the "Caxtons." Yet the mysterious unseen world which surrounds us, of which we know so little by our reason, and so much by our fancy, about which every one believes much which his mind rejects, and feels much which his senses are unconscious of, must ever have a charm, not only for the fanciful and visionary, but for all to whom facts and certainty do not sum up the possibilities of existence. We have said that the germ of that spiritual curiosity which led to such conceptions as those of Zanoni, Mejnour, and Margrave, appears to us to show itself in the singular picture of the worldly philosopher's death-bed, above referred to. The idea of that calm and unimpassioned, yet intense love of life which makes the sage of society decline to lose in sleep the hour or two of existence which remained to him, might well develop into the acceptance of any ordeal which would prolong that life, whether it was the mysterious spiritual struggle with the powers of darkness embodied in one romance, or the wild magical concoction of the material Elixir in the other. There is something wildly attractive to the imagination in such a thought, as is evident by its constant reappearance in poetic literature. There is, we suppose, no more widely-spread superstition than that which conjures up the figure of the everlasting wanderer- the Juif errant of Christendom; and it is touchingly characteristic of humanity that this strange figure should be always to the popular imagination the victim of a curse, a creature doomed and miserable, not a superior being, honoured and elevated above men. What an affecting revelation of the humility of human nature and loyal reception of its great law and condition of mortality lies in this widespread and universal myth! Not such, however, was the idea of the mystic philosophers, of the old professors of occult arts, who refused to be bound by mortal conditions, and set all their faculties to work at the inconceivable task of extorting a kind of eternity from nature. To mankind in general any such attempt to interfere with the common fate and constitution of the race has always seemed unhallowed work; but it has undoubtedly exercised a strong fascination over many individual men. It is this idea which Lord Lytton has endeavoured to embody in Zanoni. He has attempted to place before us two human beings who have achieved Immortality-one being the representative of Everlasting Age, beyond passion, beyond personal feeling-calm, benignant, bloodless, an intellect rather than a man; but yet an intellect with all the moral sentiments intensified and strengthened, spotless in integrity and goodness, though dead to human affections. The other possesses an immortality of Youth, full of the capacity to enjoy, and alas! also to love, and as a necessity of that love to sorrow and despair; to be subject to all the penalties which make length of life a punishment ratlfer than a blessing. We need not remind the reader how Zanoni loves, how his everlasting calm is broken, how simple manhood, with all its cares and anxieties, breaks into the perfection of his being; and how finally he gives up the life which had come to hang upon the existence of another, in order to save that other the trembling and wholly human wife, whose love has drawn him out of his lofty solitude and elevation. Zanoni dies, because to outlive love was impossible to him, and all around him, wife and child, were mortal. But Mejnour lives, who loved not; whose sphere was thought and not affection. This is the moral of the wild fable, and yet not all its teaching; the moral itself has been dwelt upon before in many a primitive legend of nymph and fairy, through which humanity has always glorified its own conditions, by insisting upon the misery of immortality without love; but to this familiar lesson Lord Lytton has added an original suggestion. In all ancient fables of the kind the desire for earthly immortality has been a wildly presumptuous and irreligious desire, the art that aimed at it a "black art," and the end generally attained by that immemorial bargain with the devil, the possibility of which has thrilled humankind for centuries. But the bargain which Faust made is totally different from the ordeal by which Mejnour and Zanoni fight their way into immortality. Theirs is not LORD LYTTON. |istence - an expedient possible to an- 66 In the curious impersonation of Margrave, Lord Lytton has developed an idea altogether new to modern art. His leading thought here is to represent the effect of a mere vulgar love of life, as life, upon a corrupt and selfish, yet powerful intelligence. He gives us a glimpse of a fiery, presumptuous spirit, with no moral restraint upon its actions, and with an insatiable desire for existence and enjoyment, which, after wearing out in wild indulgence and passion the single human life alotted to it, finds suddenly within its grasp, by help of crime, treachery, and murder, the means of indefinitely prolonging, or rather resuming, that life a pact with evil, but a struggle against it. The first step of initiation consists in the banishment of all corrupt thoughts, all desire after the pleasures of the flesh. These mystic neophytes are like the virgin-knights of Christian legend watching their consecrated arms all night amid assaults and temptations of every kind, ere they ventured to put on the armour and take their place among proved warriors. This novel rendering of an old dream is one of the most remarkable developments of the author's individuality and Not half-aindependence of thought. dozen, perhaps, of the many readers who have been thrilled by that most wonderful of ghost-stories, "The House and the Brain," afterwards published under the title of "The Haunted and the Haunters," but has felt a certain annoyance and resentment at the latter part of the story the "attempt to explain," as people say, and to bring down the wildly marvellous within the reach of material means and We confess to having ordinary reason. shared the feeling; and yet no feeling - for the could be more unreasonable whole aim and object of the author is this so-called explanation. For this he weaves his net of wonder before our eyes, for this summons out of the teeming darkness those pale shapes of mystery His object, those luminous shadows. means which it seizes remorselessly. from beginning to end, is to prove — or that human nature But the renewed life thus secured, being to attempt to prove may possess itself of the secrets of the sought from the lowest motives, and by unseen, and that without guilt, or even the most guilty and cruel means, instead presumption that the clue to all that of elevating, debases its possessor. mystic labyrinth of unknown powers and gives him the most brilliant outward apintelligences is in our hands, if we but pearance of youth, and stimulates all his chose to seize and follow it-that this superficial gifts and the meaner and crustrange and awful knowledge may be eller parts of his intellectual nature; but turned to purposes of the highest benev- it takes his manhood from him, and all olence; and, so far from being necessari- the special characteristics of humanity. ly a black art," may be the instrument He becomes a splendid, beautiful, engagof the highest purity and perfection. It ing, and destructive animal, without heart, is this which gives its originality among sympathy, or capacity for affection. In modern works, and in the realm of poetry, short, he is made into the Faun of classic to "Zanoni." We are not in a position to romance-a creature to whom life, air, inform the reader whether Lord Lytton sunshine, mere existence, is everything, really believed in the possibility of such whose universe is concentrated in itself, an attainment; but, whether he had any and who neither knows nor understands personal faith in it or not, here is his the- nor aspires to anything beyond the wild ory and that it was a favourite theory and somewhat foolish whirl of physical with him no reader of his works will enjoyment in which its empty days are doubt. Probably we would state it more spent. In one of the most poetical efforts clearly were we to say that his eager, high- of recent fiction, Mr. Hawthorne set forth toned, and impatient mind, impatient of before us the means by which a native boundary or limit anywhere, had difficulty Faun of the Italian woods was charmed a picture of which most in allowing anything to be supernatural: and stung by the terrible realities of life and as it was impossible for him to escape into manhoodfrom the supernatural by denying its ex-readers have acknowledged the fantastic 66 It works of mystic meaning-works which but genuine power. We do not think that the same justice has been done to Lord Lytton's equally powerful-and let us allow equally fantastic-conception. Yet Lord Lytton's has so far the advantage mind, however, they represent a very imover the other that there is a profound moral involved in the wild story. Many a nameless minstrel, and some of the greatest of poets, have used their powers to show to us the misery of that lofty loneliness of soul in which the man possessed of supernatural power is elevated above his fellows. In the greatest of all the fictions which have been woven about this mysterious theme, it has been the poet's object to mock the contemptible pettiness of that world of coarse magic and debased spirits through which Faust storms in scornful greatness of his humanity. But no one has shown us how humanity itself may be debased by a connection altogether lawless and selfish with the supernatural. The character of Margrave throughout is wonderfully consistent and striking. He is not a man: under the guise of manhood, does not the reader perceive at once the strange earthly being earthly, yet with no real sympathetic relation to the earth, playful, caressing, and cruel as a young tiger, senseless as the merest brute, frivolous, giddy, and volatile, more peevish than a child, more destructive than any fabulous ogre ? We submit that no critic and few readers have done full justice to the weird conception. Most of the comments upon the work have been occupied with the improbability of the machinery, and above all with the unsatisfactoriness of the "explanations." The Cauldron in the last chapter and the gigantic Foot which penetrates into the magic circle, have quite obliterated the real meaning and power of the strange tale. Perhaps now, when we who are Lord Lytton's contemporaries haye suddenly become, by the touch of that Death which has removed him from our midst, that Posterity which is the final judge of all art—justice may be done to the highly wrought and everywhere consistent idea of the "Strange Story." The one passion which remains in the FaunMan, the absorbing and devouring eagerness of his search for the means of preserving life, throws a tragic light upon his last appearance; but even in the tragedy there is nothing which ennobles. It is a wild, strange mixture of Intellect and Animalism at which we gaze and wonder; it is no longer a man. The reader may perhaps think that we give disproportionate importance to these The group of historical novels is one which it is somewhat difficult to discuss except at length — and to discuss them at length would be beyond the possibilities of our space. They are all conscientious and careful performances, founded upon a principle much more thorough than that which is to be found in most historical novels. Lord Lytton informs us more than once in his prefaces that he does not take up a historical period as a help to fiction, but deliberately, and of set pur |