Many years
must pass before vanity could be replaced in him by manly ambi-
tion; a vein of silliness is traceable through his career almost to the
end.
must pass before vanity could be replaced in him by manly ambi-
tion; a vein of silliness is traceable through his career almost to the
end.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v05 - Bro to Cai
2686 (#248) ###########################################
2686
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE
worshiped as heroes. How this appellation originated is uncer-
tain; but it was probably bestowed at first on a single man, and
afterwards on those who resembled him in the character of their
achievements. This mode of extending the use of a single name
is natural to a barbarous people, and would cause little or no
confusion, as long as the tradition of the country remained local
and unconnected. But as soon as these traditions became fixed
by a written language, the collectors of them, deceived by the
similarity of name, assembled the scattered facts, and ascribing to
a single man these accumulated exploits, degraded history to the
level of a miraculous mythology. In the same way, soon after
the use of letters was known in the North of Europe, there was
drawn up by Saxo Grammaticus the life of the celebrated Ragnar
Lodbrok. Either from accident or design, this great warrior of
Scandinavia, who had taught England to tremble, had received
the same name as another Ragnar, who was prince of Jutland
about a hundred years earlier. This coincidence would have
caused no confusion as long as each district preserved a distinct
and independent account of its own Ragnar. But by possessing
the resource of writing, men became able to consolidate the sep-
arate trains of events, and as it were, fuse two truths into one
And this was what actually happened. The credulous Saxo
put together the different exploits of both Ragnars, and ascribing
the whole of them to his favorite hero, has involved in obscurity
one of the most interesting parts of the early history of Europe.
The annals of the North afford another curious instance of
this source of error. A tribe of Finns called Quæns occupied a
considerable part of the eastern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia.
Their country was known as Quænland; and this name gave rise
to a belief that to the north of the Baltic there was a nation
of Amazons. This would easily have been corrected by local
knowledge: but by the use of writing, the flying rumor was at
once fixed; and the existence of such a people is positively
affirmed in some of the earliest European histories. Thus too
Åbo, the ancient capital of Finland, was called Turku, which in
the Swedish language means a market-place. Adam of Bremen,
having occasion to treat of the countries adjoining the Baltic,
was so misled by the word Turku that this celebrated historian
assures his readers that there were Turks in Finland.
To these illustrations many others might be added, showing
how mere names deceived the early historians, and gave rise to
error.
## p. 2687 (#249) ###########################################
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE
2687
relations which were entirely false, and might have been rectified
on the spot; but which, owing to the art of writing, were carried
into distant countries and thus placed beyond the reach of con-
tradiction. Of such cases, one more may be mentioned, as it
concerns the history of England. Richard I. , the most barbarous
of our princes, was known to his contemporaries as the Lion; an
appellation conferred upon him on account of his fearlessness
and the ferocity of his temper. Hence it was said that he had
the heart of a lion; and the title Cæur de Lion not only became
indissolubly connected with his name, but actually gave rise to a
story, repeated by innumerable writers, according to which he
slew a lion in a single combat. The name gave rise to the story;
the story confirmed the name: and another fiction was added to
that long series of falsehoods of which history mainly consisted
during the Middle Ages.
The corruptions of history, thus naturally brought about by
the mere introduction of letters, were in Europe aided by an
additional cause. With the art of writing, there was in most
cases also communicated a knowledge of Christianity; and the
new religion not only destroyed many of the Pagan traditions,
but falsified the remainder by amalgamating them with monas-
tic legends. The extent to which this was carried would form
a curious subject for inquiry; but one or two instances of it will
perhaps be sufficient to satisfy the generality of readers.
Of the earliest state of the great Northern nations we have
little positive evidence; but several of the lays in which the
Scandinavian poets related the feats of their ancestors or of
their contemporaries are still preserved; and notwithstanding
their subsequent corruption, it is admitted by the most compe-
tent judges that they embody real and historical events. But in
the ninth and tenth centuries, Christian missionaries found their
way across the Baltic, and introduced a knowledge of their reli-
gion among the inhabitants of Northern Europe. Scarcely was
this effected when the sources of history began to be poisoned.
At the end of the eleventh century Sæmund Sigfusson, a Christ-
ian priest, gathered the popular and hitherto unwritten histories
of the North into what is called the Elder Edda'; and he was
satisfied with adding to his compilation the corrective of a Christ-
ian hymn.
A hundred years later there was made another
collection of the native histories; but the principle which I have
mentioned, having had a longer time to operate, now displayed
## p. 2688 (#250) ###########################################
2688
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE
its effects still more clearly. In this second collection, which is
known by the name of the Younger Edda,' there is an agree-
able mixture of Greek, Jewish, and Christian fables; and for the
first time in the Scandinavian annals, we meet with the widely
diffused fiction of a Trojan descent.
If by way of further illustration we turn to other parts of the
world, we shall find a series of facts confirming this view.
shall find that in those countries where there has been no change
of religion, history is more trustworthy and connected than in
those countries where such a change has taken place. In India,
Brahmanism, which is still supreme, was established at so early
a period that its origin is lost in the remotest antiquity. The
consequence is that the native annals have never been corrupted
by any new superstition, and the Hindus are possessed of his-
toric traditions more ancient than can be found among any other
Asiatic people. In the same way, the Chinese have for upwards
of two thousand years preserved the religion of Fo, which is a
form of Buddhism. In China, therefore, though the civilization
has never been equal to that of India, there is a history, not
indeed as old as the natives would wish us to believe, but still
stretching back to several centuries before the Christian era, from
whence it has been brought down to our own times in an unin-
terrupted succession. On the other hand, the Persians, whose
intellectual development was certainly superior to that of the
Chinese, are nevertheless without any authentic information
respecting the early transactions of their ancient monarchy. For
this I can no possible reason except the fact that Persia,
soon after the promulgation of the Koran, was conquered by the
Mohammedans, who completely subverted the Parsee religion
and thus interrupted the stream of the national traditions, Hence
it is that, putting aside the myths of the Zendavesta, we have
no native authorities for Persian history of any value, until
the appearance in the eleventh century of the Shah Nameh; in
which, however, Firdusi has mingled the miraculous relations of
those two religions by which his country had been successively
subjected. The result is, that if it were not for the various dis-
coveries which have been made, of monuments, inscriptions, and
coins, we should be compelled to rely on the scanty and inaccu-
rate details in the Greek writers for our knowledge of the history
of one of the most important of the Asiatic monarchies.
see
## p. 2689 (#251) ###########################################
2689
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
(1707-1788)
BY SPENCER TROTTER
SCIENCE becomes part of the general stock of knowledge only
after it has entered into the literature of a people. The
bare skeleton of facts must be clothed with the flesh and
blood of imagination, through the humanizing influence of literary
expression, before it can be assimilated by the average intellectual
being. The scientific investigator is rarely endowed with the gift of
weaving the facts into a story that will charm, and the man of let-
ters is too often devoid of that patience which is the chief virtue of
the scientist. These gifts of the gods are
bestowed upon mankind under the guiding
genius of the division of labor.
The name
of Buffon will always be associated with
natural history, though in the man himself
the spirit of science was conspicuously ab-
sent. In this respect he was in marked
contrast with his contemporary Linnæus,
whose intellect and labor laid the founda-
tions of much of the scientific knowledge
of to-day.
George Louis le Clerc Buffon was born
on the 7th of September, 1707, at Montbar,
BUFFON
in Burgundy. His father, Benjamin le Clerc,
who was possessed of a fortune, appears to have bestowed great
care and liberality on the education of his son. While a youth Buf-
fon made the acquaintance of a young English nobleman, the Duke
of Kingston, whose tutor, a man well versed in the knowledge of
physical science, exerted a profound influence on the future career
of the young Frenchman. At twenty-one Buffon came into his
mother's estate, a fortune yielding an annual income of £12,000.
But this wealth did not change his purpose to gain knowledge. He
traveled through Italy, and after living for a short period in England
returned to France and devoted his time to literary work. His first
efforts were translations of two English works of science — Hale's
(Vegetable Statics) and Newton's (Fluxions'; and he followed these
with various studies in the different branches of physical science.
The determining event in his life, which led him to devote the
rest of his years to the study of natural history, was the death of his
V-169
## p. 2690 (#252) ###########################################
2690
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
cessor.
friend Du Fay, the Intendant of the Jardin du Roi (now the Jardin
des Plantes), who on his death-bed recommended Buffon as his suc-
A man of letters, Buffon saw before him the opportunity to
write a natural history of the earth and its inhabitants; and he set
to work with a zeal that lasted until his death in 1788, at the age of
eighty-one. His great work, L'Histoire Naturelle,' was the outcome
of these years of labor, the first edition being complete in thirty-six
quarto volumes.
The first fifteen volumes of this great work, published between
the years 1749 and 1767, treated of the theory of the earth, the
nature of animals, and the history of man and viviparous quadru-
peds; and was the joint work of Buffon and Daubenton, a physician
of Buffon's native village. The scientific portion of the work was
done by Daubenton, who possessed considerable anatomical knowl-
edge, and who wrote accurate descriptions of the various animals
mentioned. Buffon, however, affected to ignore the work of his co-
laborer and reaped the entire glory, so that Daubenton withdrew
his services. Later appeared the nine volumes on birds, in which
Buffon was aided by the Abbé Sexon. Then followed the 'History of
Minerals) in five volumes, and seven volumes of Supplements,' the
last one of which was published the year after Buffon's death.
One can hardly admire the personal character of Buffon.
He was
vain and superficial, and given to extravagant speculations. He is
reported to have said, “I know but five great geniuses - Newton,
Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and myself. His natural vanity was
undoubtedly fostered by the adulation which he received from those
in authority. He saw his own statue placed in the cabinet of Louis
XVI. , with the inscription Majestati Naturæ par ingenium. ” Louis
XV. bestowed upon him a title of nobility, and crowned heads
« addressed him in language of the most exaggerated compliment. ”
Buffon's conduct and conversation were marked throughout by a cer-
tain coarseness and vulgarity that constantly appear in his writings.
He was foppish and trifling, and affected religion though at heart a
disbeliever.
The chief value of Buffon's work lies in the fact that it first
brought the subject of natural history into popular literature. Prob-
ably no writer of the time, with the exception of Voltaire and Rous-
seau, so widely read and quoted as Buffon. But the gross
"inaccuracy which pervaded his writings, and the visionary theories in
which he constantly indulged, gave the work a less permanent value
than it might otherwise have attained. Buffon detested the scientific
method, preferring literary finish to accuracy of statement. Although
the work was widely translated, and was the only popular natural
history of the time, there is little of it that is worthy of a place in
was
## p. 2691 (#253) ###########################################
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
2691
the world's best literature. It is chiefly as a relic of a past literary
epoch, and as the pioneer work in a new literary field, that Buffon's
writings appeal to us. They awakened for the first time a wide
interest in natural history, though their author was distinctly not a
naturalist.
Arabella Buckley has said of Buffon and his writings that though
<he often made great mistakes and arrived at false conclusions, still
he had so much genius and knowledge that a great part of his work
will always remain true. Cuvier has left us a good memoir of Buf-
fon in the Biographie Universelle. '
Arenei Sorteo,
NATURE
From the Natural History)
S°
O with what magnificence Nature shines upon the earth! A
pure light extending from east to west gilds successively
the hemispheres of the globe. An airy transparent element
surrounds it; a warm and fruitful heat animates and develops all
its germs of life; living and salutary waters tend to their support
and increase; high points scattered over the lands, by arresting
the airy vapors, render these sources inexhaustible and always
fresh; gathered into immense hollows, they divide the continents.
The extent of the sea is as great as that of the land. It
is not a cold and sterile element, but another empire as rich
and populated as the first. The finger of God has marked the
boundaries. When the waters encroach upon the beaches of the
west, they leave bare those of the east. This enormous mass of
water, itself inert, follows the guidance of heavenly movements.
Balanced by the regular oscillations of ebb and flow, it rises and
falls with the planet of night; rising still higher when concur-
rent with the planet of day, the two uniting their forces during
the equinoxes cause the great tides. Our connection with the
heavens is nowhere more clearly indicated. From these constant
and general movements result others variable and particular:
removals of earth, deposits at the bottom of water forming ele-
vations like those upon the earth's surface, currents which, fol-
lowing the direction of these mountain ranges, shape them to
## p. 2692 (#254) ###########################################
2692
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
corresponding angles; and rolling in the midst of the waves, as
waters upon the earth, are in truth the rivers of the sea.
The air, too, lighter and more fluid than water, obeys many
forces: the distant action of sun and moon, the immediate action
of the sea, that of rarefying heat and of condensing cold, pro-
duce in it continual agitations. The winds are its currents,
driving before them and collecting the clouds. They produce
meteors; transport the humid vapors of maritime beaches to the
land surfaces of the continents; determine the storms; distrib-
ute the fruitful rains and kindly dews; stir the sea; agitate the
mobile waters, arrest or hasten the currents; raise floods; excite
tempests. The angry sea rises toward heaven and breaks roar-
ing against immovable dikes, which it can neither destroy nor
surmount.
The land elevated above sea-level is safe from these irrup-
tions. Its surface, enameled with flowers, adorned with ever
fresh verdure, peopled with thousands and thousands of differing
species of animals, is a place of repose; an abode of delights,
where man, placed to aid nature, dominates all other things, the
only one who can know and admire. God has made him specta-
tor of the universe and witness of his marvels. He is animated
by a divine spark which renders him a participant in the divine
mysteries; and by whose light he thinks and reflects, sees and
reads in the book of the world as in a copy of divinity.
Nature is the exterior throne of God's glory. The man who
studies and contemplates it rises gradually towards the interior
throne of omniscience. Made to adore the Creator, he com-
mands all the creatures. Vassal of heaven, king of earth, which
he ennobles and enriches, he establishes order, harmony, and
subordination among living beings. He embellishes Nature
itself; cultivates, extends, and refines it; suppresses its thistles
and brambles, and multiplies its grapes and roses.
Look upon the solitary beaches and sad lands where man has
never dwelt: covered rather bristling — with thick black
woods on all their rising ground, stunted barkless trees, bent,
twisted, falling from age; near by, others even more numerous,
rotting upon heaps already rotten,- stifling, burying the germs
ready to burst forth. Nature, young everywhere else, is here
decrepit. The land surmounted by the ruins of these produc-
tions offers, instead of flourishing verdure, only an incumbered
space pierced by aged trees, loaded with parasitic plants, lichens,
- or
## p. 2693 (#255) ###########################################
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
2693
agarics — impure fruits of corruption. In the low parts is water,
dead and stagnant because undirected; or swampy soil neither
solid nor liquid, hence unapproachable and useless to the habit-
ants both of land and of water. Here are swamps covered with
rank aquatic plants nourishing only venomous insects and haunted
by unclean animals. Between these low infectious marshes and
these higher ancient forests extend plains having nothing in com-
mon with our meadows, upon which weeds smother useful plants.
There is none of that fine turf which seems like down upon the
earth, or of that enameled lawn which announces a brilliant fer-
tility; but instead an interlacement of hard and thorny herbs
which seem to cling to each other rather than to the soil, and
which, successively withering and impeding each other, form a
coarse mat several feet thick. There are no roads, no communi-
cations, no vestiges of intelligence in these wild places. Man,
obliged to follow the paths of savage beasts and to watch con-
stantly lest he become their prey, terrified by their roars, thrilled
by the very silence of these profound solitudes, turns back and
says:
Primitive nature is hideous and dying; I, I alone, can make
it living and agreeable. Let us dry these swamps; converting
into streams and canals, animate these dead waters by setting
them in motion. Let us use the active and devouring element
once hidden from us, and which we ourselves have discovered;
and set fire to this superfluous mat, to these aged forests already
half consumed, and finish with iron what fire cannot destroy!
Soon, instead of rush and water-lily from which the toad com-
pounds his venom, we shall see buttercups and clover, sweet and
salutary herbs. Herds of bounding animals will tread this once
impracticable soil and find abundant, constantly renewed pasture.
They will multiply, to multiply again. Let us employ the new
aid to complete our work; and let the ox, submissive to the yoke,
exercise his strength in furrowing the land. Then it will grow
young again with cultivation, and a new nature shall spring up
under our hands.
How beautiful is cultivated Nature when by the cares of man
she is brilliantly and pompously adorned! He himself is the
chief ornament, the most noble production; in multiplying him-
self he multiplies her most precious gem. She seems to multiply
herself with him, for his art brings to light all that her bosom
conceals. What treasures hitherto ignored! What new riches!
## p. 2694 (#256) ###########################################
2694
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
Flowers, fruits, perfected grains infinitely multiplied; useful
species of animals transported, propagated, endlessly increased;
harmful species destroyed, confined, banished; gold, and iron
more necessary than gold, drawn from the bowels of the earth;
torrents confined; rivers directed and restrained; the sea, submis-
sive and comprehended, crossed from one hemisphere to the other;
the earth everywhere accessible, everywhere living and fertile; in
the valleys, laughing prairies; in the plains, rich pastures or
richer harvests; the hills loaded with vines and fruits, their sum-
mits crowned by useful trees and young forests; deserts changed
to cities inhabited by a great people, who, ceaselessly circulating,
scatter themselves from centres to extremities; frequent open
roads and communications established everywhere like so many
witnesses of the force and union of society; a thousand other
monuments of power and glory: proving that man, master of the
world, has transformed it, renewed its whole surface, and that
he shares his empire with Nature.
However, he rules only by right of conquest, and enjoys
rather than possesses. He can only retain by ever-renewed efforts.
If these cease, everything languishes, changes, grows disordered,
enters again into the hands of Nature. She retakes her rights;
effaces man's work; covers his most sumptuous monuments with
dust and moss; destroys them in time, leaving him only the
regret that he has lost by his own fault the conquests of his
ancestors. These periods during which man loses his domain, ages
of barbarism when everything perishes, are always prepared by
wars and arrive with famine and depopulation. Man, who can do
nothing except in numbers, and is only strong in union, only
happy in peace, has the madness to arm himself for his unhap-
piness and to fight for his own ruin. Incited by insatiable greed,
blinded by still more insatiable ambition, he renounces the senti-
ments of humanity, turns all his forces against himself, and seek-
ing to destroy his fellow, does indeed destroy himself. And after
these days of blood and carnage, when the smoke of glory has
passed away, he sees with sadness that the earth is devastated,
the arts buried, the nations dispersed, the races enfeebled, his
own happiness ruined, and his power annihilated.
## p. 2695 (#257) ###########################################
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
2695
THE HUMMING-BIRD
From the Natural History)
O"
F All animated beings this is the most elegant in form and
the most brilliant in colors. The stones and metals pol-
ished by our arts are not comparable to this jewel of
Nature. She has placed it least in size of the order of birds,
marime miranda in minimis. Her masterpiece is the little
humming-bird, and upon it she has heaped all the gifts which
the other birds may only share. Lightness, rapidity, nimbleness,
grace, and rich apparel all belong to this little favorite. The
emerald, the ruby, and the topaz gleam upon its dress.
It never
soils them with the dust of earth, and in its aërial life scarcely
touches the turf an instant. Always in the air, flying from
flower to flower, it has their freshness as well as their brightness.
It lives upon their nectar, and dwells only in the climates where
they perennially bloom.
All kinds of humming-birds are found in the hottest coun-
tries of the New World. They are quite numerous and seem to be
confined between the two tropics, for those which penetrate the
temperate zones in summer only stay there a short time. They
seem to follow the sun in its advance and retreat; and to fly on
the wing of zephyrs after an eternal spring.
The smaller species of the humming-birds are less in size
than the great fly wasp, and more slender than the drone. Their
beak is a fine needle and their tongue a slender thread. Their
little black eyes are like two shining points, and the feathers of
their wings so delicate that they seem transparent. Their short
feet, which they use very little, are so tiny one can scarcely see
them. They alight only at night, resting in the air during the
day. They have a swift continual humming flight. The move-
ment of their wings is so rapid that when pausing in the air, the
bird seems quite motionless. One sees him stop before a blossom,
then dart like a flash to another, visiting all, plunging his tongue
into their hearts, flattening them with his wings, never settling
anywhere, but neglecting none. He hastens his inconstancies only
to pursue his loves more eagerly and to multiply his innocent
joys. For this light lover of flowers lives at their expense without
ever blighting them. He only pumps their honey, and to this
alone his tongue seems destined.
## p. 2696 (#258) ###########################################
2696
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
The vivacity of these small birds is only equaled by their
courage, or rather their audacity. Sometimes they may be seen
chasing furiously birds twenty times their size, fastening upon
their bodies, letting themselves be carried along in their flight,
while they peck them fiercely until their tiny rage is satisfied.
Sometimes they fight each other vigorously. Impatience seems
their very essence.
If they approach a blossom and find it faded,
they mark their spite by hasty rending of the petals. Their only
voice is a weak cry,"scrop, screp,” frequent and repeated, which
they utter in the woods from dawn, until at the first rays of the
sun they all take flight and scatter over the country.
## p. 2696 (#259) ###########################################
## p. 2696 (#260) ###########################################
o cresch
៨
BULWER-LYTTON.
## p. 2697 (#261) ###########################################
2697
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
(1803-1873)
BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE
He patrician in literature is always an interesting spectacle.
We are prone to regard his performance as a test of the
worth of long descent and high breeding. If he does well,
he vindicates the claims of his caste; if ill, we infer that inherited
estates and blue blood but surface advantages, leaving the
effective brain unimproved, or even causing deterioration. But the
argument is still open; and whether genius be the creature of cir-
cumstance or divinely independent, is a question which prejudice
rather than evidence commonly decides.
Certainly literature tries men's souls. The charlatan must betray
himself. Genius shines through all cerements. On the other hand,
genius may be nourished, and the charlatan permeates all classes.
The truth probably is that an aristocrat is quite as apt as a plebeian
to be a good writer. Only since there are fewer of the former than
of the latter, and since, unlike the last, the first are seldom forced to
live by their brains, there are more plebeian than aristocratic names
on the literary roll of honor. Admitting this, the instance of the
writer known as “Bulwer) proves nothing one way or the other.
At all events, not, Was he a genius because he was a patrician ?
but, Was he a genius at all? is the inquiry most germane to our
present purpose.
An aristocrat of aristocrats undoubtedly he was, though it con-
cerns us not to determine whether the blood of Plantagenet kings
and Norman conquerors really flowed in his veins. On both father's
and mother's side he was thoroughly well connected. Heydon Hall
in Norfolk was the hereditary home of the Norman Bulwers; the
Saxon Lyttons had since the Conquest lived at Knebworth in Derby,
shire. The historic background of each family was honorable, and
when the marriage of William Earle Bulwer with Elizabeth Barbara
Lytton united them, it might be said that in their offspring England
found her type.
Edward, being the youngest son, had little money, but he hap-
pened to have brains. He began existence delicate and precocious.
Culture, with him, set in almost with what he would have termed
the "consciousness of his own identity, and the process never inter-
mitted: in fact, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, his
## p. 2698 (#262) ###########################################
2698
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
spiritual and intellectual emancipation was hindered by many ob-
stacles; for, an ailing child, he was petted by his mother, and such
germs of intelligence (verses at seven years old, and the like) as he
betrayed were trumpeted as prodigies. He was spoilt so long before
he was ripe that it is a marvel he ever ripened at all.
Many years
must pass before vanity could be replaced in him by manly ambi-
tion; a vein of silliness is traceable through his career almost to the
end. He expatiated in the falsetto key; almost never do we hear in
his voice that hearty bass note so dear to plain humanity. In his pil-
grimage toward freedom he had to wrestle not only with flesh-and-
blood mothers, uncles, and wives, et id genus omne, but with the more
subtle and vital ideas, superstitions, and prejudices appertaining to
his social station. His worst foes were not those of his household
merely, but of his heart. The more arduous achievement of such a
man is to see his real self and believe in it. There are so many
misleading purple-velvet waistcoats, gold chains, superfine sentiments,
and blue-blooded affiliations in the way, that the true nucleus of so
much decoration becomes less accessible than the needle in the hay-
stack. It is greatly to Bulwer's credit that he stuck valiantly to his
quest, and nearly, if not quite, ran down his game at last. His
intellectual record is one of constant progress, from childhood to age.
Whether his advance in other respects was as uniform does not
much concern us. He was unhappy with his wife, and perhaps they
even threw things at each other at table, the servants looking on.
Nothing in his matrimonial relations so much became him as his
conduct after their severance: he held his tongue like a man, in spite
of the poor lady's shrieks and clapper-clawings. His whimsical, hair-
splitting conscientiousness is less admirable. A healthy conscience
does not whine - it creates. No one
cares to know what a man
thinks of his own actions. No one is interested to learn that Bulwer
meant Paul Clifford to be an edifying work, or that he married his
wife from the highest motives. We do not take him so seriously: we
are satisfied that he wrote the story first and discovered its morality
afterwards; and that lofty motives would not have united him to
Miss Rosina Doyle Wheeler had she not been pretty and clever. His
hectic letters to his mamma; his Byronic struttings and mouthings
over the grave of his schoolgirl lady-love; his eighteenth-century
comedy-scene with Caroline Lamb; his starched-frill participation.
in the Fred Villiers duel at Boulogne, - how silly and artificial is
all this! There is no genuine feeling in it: he attires himself in
tawdry sentiment as in a flowered waistcoat. What a difference
between him, at this period, and his contemporary Benjamin Dis-
raeli, who indeed committed similar inanities, but with a saturnine
sense of humor cropping out at every turn which altered the whole
## p. 2699 (#263) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2699
was
a
man
complexion of the performance. We laugh at the one, but with the
other.
Of course, however, there
hidden somewhere in
Edward Bulwer's perfumed clothes and mincing attitudes, else the
world had long since forgotten him. Amidst his dandyism, he learned
how to speak well in debate and how to use his hands to guard his
head; he paid his debts by honest hard work, and would not be dis-
honorably beholden to his mother or any one else. He posed as a
blighted being, and invented black evening-dress; but he lived down
the scorn of such men as Tennyson and Thackeray, and won their
respect and friendship at last. He aimed high, according to his
lights, meant well, and in the long run did well too.
The main activities of his life — and from start to finish his energy
was great — were in politics and in literature. His political career
covers about forty years, from the time he took his degree at Cam-
bridge till Lord Derby made him a peer in 1866. He accomplished
nothing of serious importance, but his course was always creditable:
he began as a sentimental Radical and ended as a liberal Conserva-
tive; he advocated the Crimean War; the Corn Laws found him in a
compromising humor; his record as Colonial Secretary offers nothing
memorable in statesmanship. The extraordinary brilliancy of his
brother Henry's diplomatic life throws Edward's achievements into
the shade. There is nothing to be ashamed of, but had he done
nothing else he would have been unknown. But literature, first
seriously cultivated as a means of livelihood, outlasted his political
ambitions, and his books are to-day his only claim to remembrance.
They made a strong impression at the time they were written, and
many are still read as much as ever, by a generation born after his
death. Their popularity is not of the catchpenny sort; thoughtful
people read them, as well as the great drove of the undiscriminating.
For they are the product of thought: they show workmanship; they
have quality; they are carefully made. If the literary critic never
finds occasion to put off the shoes from his feet as in the sacred
presence of genius, he is constantly moved to recognize with a
friendly nod the presence of sterling talent. He is even inclined to
think that nobody else ever had so much talent as this little red-
haired, blue-eyed, high-nosed, dandified Edward Bulwer; the mere
mass of it lifts him at times to the levels where genius dwells, though
he never quite shares their nectar and ambrosia. He as it were
catches echoes of the talk of the Immortals, the turn of their
phrase, the intonation of their utterance, — and straightway repro-
duces it with the fidelity of the phonograph. But, as in the phono-
graph, we find something lacking: our mind accepts the report as
genuine, but our ear affirms an unreality; this is reproduction, indeed,
## p. 2700 (#264) ###########################################
2700
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
but not creation. Bulwer himself, when his fit is past, and his criti-
cal faculty re-awakens, probably knows as well as another that these
labored and meritorious pages of his are not graven on the eternal
adamant. But they are the best he can do, and perhaps there is
none better of their kind. They have a right to be; for while
genius may do harm as well as good, Bulwer never does harm,
and in spite of sickly sentiment and sham philosophy, is uniformly
instructive, amusing, and edifying.
« To love her,” wrote Dick Steele of a certain great dame, «is a
liberal education;" and we might almost say the same of the reading
of Bulwer's romances. He was learned, and he put into his books
all his learning, as well as all else that was his. They represent
artistically grouped, ingeniously lighted, with suitable acompani-
ments of music and illusion — the acquisitions of his intellect, the
sympathies of his nature, and the achievements of his character.
He wrote in various styles, making deliberate experiments in one
after another, and often hiding himself completely in anonymity.
He was versatile, not deep. Robert Louis Stevenson also employs
various styles; but with him the changes are intuitive — they are the
subtle variations in touch and timbre which genius makes, in har-
mony with the subject treated. Stevenson could not have written
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) in the same tune and key as “Treasure
Island); and the music of Marxheim' differs from both. The reason
is organic: the writer is inspired by his theme, and it passes through
his mind with a lilt and measure of its own. It makes its own
style, just as a human spirit makes its own features and gait; and
we know Stevenson through all his transformations only by dint of
the exquisite distinction and felicity of word and phrase that always
characterize him. Now, with Bulwer there is none of this lovely
inevitable spontaneity. He costumes his tale arbitrarily, like a stage-
haberdasher, and invents a voice to deliver it withal. (The Last
Days of Pompeii? shall be mouthed out grandiloquently; the incredi-
bilities of (The Coming Race shall wear the guise of naïve and
artless narrative; the humors of “The Caxtons) and What Will
He Do with It ? ) shall reflect the mood of the sagacious, affable man
of the world, gossiping over the nuts and wine; the marvels of
(Zanoni? and A Strange Story' must be portrayed with a resonance
and exaltation of diction fitted to their transcendental claims. But
between the stark mechanism of the Englishman and the lithe,
inspired felicity of the Scot, what a difference!
Bulwer's work may be classified according to subject, though not
chronologically. He wrote novels of society, of history, of mystery,
and of romance. In all he was successful, and perhaps felt as much
interest in one as in another. In his own life the study of the
## p. 2701 (#265) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2701
a name.
occult played a part; he was familiar with the contemporary fads
in mystery and acquainted with their professors. «Ancient” history
also attracted him, and he even wrote a couple of volumes of a
(History of Athens. ' In all his writing there is a tendency to lapse
into a discussion of the “Ideal and the Real,” aiming always at the
conclusion that the only true Real is the Ideal. It was this tendency
which chiefly aroused the ridicule of his critics, and from the (Sred-
wardlyttonbulwig' of Thackeray to the Condensed Novels burlesque
of Bret Harte, they harp upon that facile string. The thing satir-
ized is after all not cheaper than the satire. The ideal is the true
real; the only absurdity lies in the pomp and circumstance where-
with that simple truth is introduced. There is a Dweller on the
Threshold, but it, or he, is nothing more than that doubt concerning
the truth of spiritual things which assails all beginners in higher
speculation, and there was no need to call it or him by so formidable
A sense of humor would have saved Bulwer from almost all
his faults, and have endowed him with several valuable virtues into
the bargain; but it was not born in him, and with all his diligence
he never could beget it.
The domestic series, of which «The Caxtons) is the type, are the
most generally popular of his works, and are likely to be so longest.
The romantic vein ('Ernest Maltravers,' (Alice, or the Mysteries,'
etc. ) are in his worst style, and are now only in existence as books
because they are members of “the edition. ” It is doubtful if any
human being has read one of them through in twenty years. Such
historical books as “The Last Days of Pompeii? are not only well
constructed dramatically, but are painfully accurate in details, and
may still be read for information as well as for pleasure. The
(Zanoni species is undeniably interesting. The weird traditions of
the Philosopher's Stone) and the Elixir of Life) can
to fascinate human souls, and all the paraphernalia of magic are
charming to minds weary of the matter-of-factitude of current
existence. The stories are put together with Bulwer's unfailing
cleverness, and in all external respects neither Dumas nor Balzac
has done anything better in this kind: the trouble is that these
authors compel our belief, while Bulwer does not. For, once more, he
lacks the magic of genius and the spirit of style which are immortally
and incommunicably theirs, without which no other magic can be
made literarily effective.
Pelham, written at twenty-five years of age, is a creditable
boy's book; it aims to portray character as well as to develop
incidents, and in spite of the dreadful silliness of its melodramatic
passages it has merit.
Conventionally it is more nearly a work of
art than that other famous boy's book, Disraeli's Vivian Grey,'
(
never cease
## p. 2702 (#266) ###########################################
2702
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
though the latter is alive and blooming with the original literary
charm which is denied to the other. Other characteristic novels of
his are (The Last Days of Pompeii, Ernest Maltravers,' Zanoni,
( The Caxtons,' My Novel, What Will He Do with It? ) A Strange
Story, The Coming Race, and Kenelm Chillingly,' the last of
which appeared in the year of the author's death, 1873. The student
who has read these books will know all that is worth knowing of
Bulwer's work. He wrote upwards of fifty substantial volumes, and
left a mass of posthumous material besides. Of all that he did, the
most nearly satisfactory thing is one of the last, Kenelm Chill-
ingly. In style, persons, and incidents it is alike charming: it
subsides somewhat into the inevitable Bulwer sentimentality towards
the end -a silk purse cannot be made out of a sow's ear; but the
miracle was never nearer being accomplished than in this instance.
Here we see the thoroughly equipped man of letters doing with
apparent ease what scarce five of his contemporaries could have
done at all. The book is lightsome and graceful, yet it touches
serious thoughts: most remarkable of all, it shows a suppleness of
mind and freshness of feeling more to be expected in a youth of
thirty than in a veteran of threescore and ten. Bulwer never
ceased to grow; and what is better still, to grow away from his
faults and towards improvement.
But in comparing him with others, we must admit that he had
better opportunities than most. His social station brought him in
contact with the best people and most pregnant events of his time;
and the driving poverty of youth having established him in the
novel-writing habit, he thereafter had leisure to polish and expand
his faculty to the utmost. No talent of his was folded up in a
napkin: he did his best and utmost with all he had. Whereas the
path of genius is commonly tortuous and hard-beset: and while we
are always saying of Shakespeare, or Thackeray, or Shelley, or Keats,
or Poe, “What wonders they would have done had life been longer
or fate kinder to them! » — of Bulwer we say, “No help was wanting
to him, and he profited by all; he got out of the egg more than we
had believed was in it! » Instead of a great faculty hobbled by
circumstance, we have a small faculty magnified by occasion and
enriched by time.
Certainly, as men of letters go, Bulwer must be accounted fortu-
nate. The long inflamed row of his domestic life apart, all things
went his way. He received large sums for his books; at the age of
forty, his mother dying, he succeeded to the Knebworth estate ;
three-and-twenty years later his old age (if such a man could be
called old) was consoled by the title of Lord Lytton. His health
was never robust, and occasionally failed; but he seems to have been
## p. 2703 (#267) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2703
able to accomplish after a fashion everything that he undertook; he
was “thorough,” as the English say. He lived in the midst of
events; he was a friend of the men who made the age, and saw
them make itlending a hand himself too when and where he
could. He lived long enough to see the hostility which had op-
posed him in youth die away, and honor and kindness take its place.
Let it be repeated, his aims were good. He would have been can-
did and un-selfconscious had that been possible for him; and perhaps
the failure was one of manner rather than of heart. Yes, he was
a fortunate man.
His most conspicuous success was as a play-writer. In view of
his essentially dramatic and historic temperament, it is surprising
that he did not altogether devote himself to this branch of art; but
all his dramas were produced between his thirty-third and his thirty-
eighth years. The first —La Duchesse de la Vallière). was not to
the public liking; but “The Lady of Lyons,' written in two weeks,
is in undiminished favor after near sixty years; and so are Riche-
lieu' and 'Money. There is no apparent reason why Bulwer should
not have been as prolific a stage-author as Molière or even Lope de
Vega. But we often value our best faculties least.
(The Coming Race,' published anonymously and never acknowl-
edged during his life, was an unexpected product of his mind, but is
useful to mark his limitations. It is a forecast of the future, and
proves, as nothing else could so well do, the utter absence in Bulwer
of the creative imagination. It is an invention, cleverly conceived,
mechanically and rather tediously worked out, and written in a style
astonishingly commonplace. The man who wrote that book (one
would say) had no heaven in his soul, nor any pinions whereon to
soar heavenward. Yet it is full of thought and ingenuity, and the
central conception of “vril has been much commended. But the
whole concoction is tainted with the deadness of stark materialism,
and we should be unjust, after all, to deny Bulwer something loftier
and broader than is discoverable here. In inventing the narrative
he depended upon the weakest element in his mental make-up, and
the result could not but be dismal. We like to believe that there
was better stuff in him than he himself ever found; and that when
he left this world for the next, he had sloughed off more dross than
most men have time to accumulate.
durian Haultone
## p. 2704 (#268) ###########################################
2704
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
THE AMPHITHEATRE
From "The Last Days of Pompeii)
ON
IN THE upper tier (but apart from the male spectators) sat the
women, their gay dresses resembling some gaudy flower-
bed; it is needless to add that they were the most talka-
tive part of the assembly; and many were the looks directed up
to them, especially from the benches appropriated to the young
and the unmarried men. On the lower seats round the arena
sat the more high-born and wealthy visitors — the magistrates
and those of senatorial or equestrian dignity: the passages
which, by corridors at the right and left, gave access to these
seats, at either end of the oval arena, were also the entrances
for the combatants. Strong palings at these passages prevented
any unwelcome eccentricity in the movements of the beasts, and
confined them to their appointed prey.
Around the parapet
which was raised above the arena, and from which the seats
gradually rose, were gladiatorial inscriptions, and paintings
wrought in fresco, typical of the entertainments for which the
place was designed. Throughout the whole building wound in-
visible pipes, from which, as the day advanced, cooling and fra.
grant showers were to be sprinkled over the spectators. The
officers of the amphitheatre were still employed in the task of
fixing the vast awning (or velaria) which covered the whole, and
which luxurious invention the Campanians arrogated to them-
selves: it was woven of the whitest Apulian wool, and variegated
with broad stripes of crimson. Owing either to
some inex-
perience on the part of the workmen or to some defect in the
machinery, the awning, however, was not arranged that day so
happily as usual; indeed, from the immense space of the circum-
ference, the task was always one of great difficulty and art -- so
much so that it could seldom be adventured in rough or windy
weather. But the present day was so remarkably still that there
seemed to the spectators no excuse for the awkwardness of the
artificers; and when a large gap in the back of the awning was
still visible, from the obstinate refusal of one part of the velaria
to ally itself with the rest, the murmurs of discontent were loud
and general.
The ædile Pansa, at whose expense the exhibition was given,
looked particularly annoyed at the defect, and vowed bitter
1
## p. 2705 (#269) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2705
vengeance on the head of the chief officer of the show, who,
fretting, puffing, perspiring, busied himself in idle orders and
unavailing threats.
The hubbub ceased suddenly — the operators desisted -- the
crowd were stilled the gap was forgotten – for now, with a
loud and warlike flourish of trumpets, the gladiators, marshaled
in ceremonious procession, entered the arena. They swept round
the oval space very slowly and deliberately, in order to give the
spectators full leisure to admire their stern serenity of feature -
their brawny limbs and various arms, as well as to form such
wagers as the excitement of the moment might suggest.
“Oh! cried the widow Fulvia to the wife of Pansa, as they
leaned down from their lofty bench, do you see that gigantic
gladiator ? how drolly he is dressed! »
“Yes,” said the ædile's wife with complacent importance, for
she knew all the names and qualities of each combatant: "he is
a retiarius or netter; he is armed only, you see, with a three-
pronged spear like a trident, and a net; he wears no armor, only
the fillet and the tunic. He is a mighty man, and is to fight
with Sporus, yon thick-set gladiator, with the round shield and
drawn sword but without body armor; he has not his helmet on
now, in order that you may see his face — how fearless it is!
By-and-by he will fight with his visor down. ”
“But surely a net and a spear are poor arms against a shield
and sword ? »
“That shows how innocent you are, my dear Fulvia: the
retiarius has generally the best of it. ”
"But who is yon handsome gladiator, nearly naked - is it
not quite improper ? By Venus! but his limbs are beautifully
shaped! »
"It is Lydon, a young untried man! he has the rashness to
fight yon other gladiator similarly dressed, or rather undressed -
Tetraides. They fight first in the Greek fashion, with the cestus;
afterward they put on armor, and try sword and shield. ”
“He is a proper man, this Lydon; and the women, I am
sure, are on his side. »
"So are not the experienced bettors: Clodius offers three to
one against him. ”
“Oh, Jove! how beautiful! » exclaimed the widow, as two
gladiators, armed cap-à-pie, rode round the arena on light and
prancing steeds. Resembling much the combatants in the tilts
V-170
## p. 2706 (#270) ###########################################
2706
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
of the middle age, they bore lances and round shields beautifully
inlaid; their armor was woven intricately with bands of iron, but
it covered only the thighs and the right arms; short cloaks ex-
tending to the seat gave a picturesque and graceful air to their
costume; their legs were naked with the exception of sandals,
which were fastened a little above the ankle. “Oh, beautiful!
Who are these ? » asked the widow.
"The one is named Berbix: he has conquered twelve times.
The other assumes the arrogant Nobilior. They are both Gauls. ”
While thus conversing, the first formalities of the show were
over. To these succeeded a feigned combat with wooden swords
between the various gladiators matched against each other.
Among these the skill of two Roman gladiators, hired for the
occasion, was the most admired; and next to them the most
graceful combatant was Lydon. This sham contest did not last
above an hour, nor did it attract any very lively interest except
among those connoisseurs of the arena to whom art was prefer-
able to more coarse excitement; the body of the spectators were
rejoiced when it was over, and when the sympathy rose to terror.
The combatants were now arranged in pairs, as agreed before-
hand; their weapons examined; and the grave sports of the day
commenced amid the deepest silence— broken only by an excit-
ing and preliminary blast of warlike music,
It was often customary to begin the sports by the most cruel
of all; and some bestiarius, or gladiator appointed to the beasts,
was slain first as an initiatory sacrifice. But in the present in-
stance the experienced Pansa thought better that the sanguinary
drama should advance, not decrease, in interest; and accord-
ingly the execution of Olinthus and Glaucus was reserved for
the last. It was arranged that the two horsemen should first
occupy the arena; that the foot gladiators, paired off, should then
be loosed indiscriminately on the stage; that Glaucus and the
lion should next perform their part in the bloody spectacle; and
the tiger and the Nazarene be the grand finale. And in the
spectacles of Pompeii, the reader of Roman history must limit
his imagination, nor expect to find those vast and wholesale
exhibitions of magnificent slaughter with which a Nero or a
Caligula regaled the inhabitants of the Imperial City. The
Roman shows, which absorbed the more celebrated gladiators
and the chief proportion of foreign beasts, were indeed the very
reason why in the lesser towns of the empire the sports of the
## p. 2707 (#271) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2707
amphitheatre were comparatively humane and rare; and in this
as in other respects, Pompeii was the miniature, the microcosm
of Rome. Still, it was an awful and imposing spectacle, with
which modern times have, happily, nothing to compare; a vast
theatre, rising row upon row, and swarming with human beings,
from fifteen to eighteen thousand in number, intent upon no
fictitious representation - no tragedy of the stage — but the actual
victory or defeat, the exultant life or the bloody death, of each
and all who entered the arena!
The two horsemen were now at either extremity of the lists
(if so they might be called), and at a given signal from Pansa
the combatants started simultaneously as in full collision, each
advancing his round buckler, each poising on high his sturdy
javelin; but just when within three paces of his opponent, the
steed of Berbix suddenly halted, wheeled round, and, as Nobilior
was borne rapidly by, his antagonist spurred upon him. The
buckler of Nobilior, quickly and skillfully extended, received a
blow which otherwise would have been fatal.
“Well done, Nobilior! ” cried the prætor, giving the first vent
to the popular excitement.
"Bravely struck, my Berbix! » answered Clodius from his
seat.
And the wild murmur, swelled by many a shout, echoed from
side to side.
The visors of both the horsemen were completely closed (like
those of the knights in after times), but the head was neverthe-
less the great point of assault; and Nobilior, now wheeling his
charger with no less adroitness than his opponent, directed his
spear full on the helmet of his foe. Berbix raised his buckler to
shield himself, and his quick-eyed antagonist, suddenly lowering
his weapon, pierced him through the breast. Berbix reeled and
fell.
"Nobilior! Nobilior! shouted the populace.
"I have lost ten sestertia,” said Clodius, between his teeth.
“Habet! ” (He has it) said Pansa deliberately.
The populace, not yet hardened into cruelty, made the signal
of mercy: but as the attendants of the arena approached, they
found the kindness came too late; the heart of the Gaul had
been pierced, and his eyes were set in death. It was his life's
blood that flowed so darkly over the sand and sawdust of the
arena.
## p. 2708 (#272) ###########################################
2708
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
"It is a pity it was so soon over — there was little enough for
one's trouble,” said the widow Fulvia.
“Yes, I have no compassion for Berbix. Any one might
have seen that Nobilior did but feint. Mark, they fix the fatal
hook to the body — they drag him away to the spoliarium - they
scatter new sand over the stage! Pansa regrets nothing more
than that he is not rich enough to strew the arena with borax
and cinnabar, as Nero used to do.
2686
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE
worshiped as heroes. How this appellation originated is uncer-
tain; but it was probably bestowed at first on a single man, and
afterwards on those who resembled him in the character of their
achievements. This mode of extending the use of a single name
is natural to a barbarous people, and would cause little or no
confusion, as long as the tradition of the country remained local
and unconnected. But as soon as these traditions became fixed
by a written language, the collectors of them, deceived by the
similarity of name, assembled the scattered facts, and ascribing to
a single man these accumulated exploits, degraded history to the
level of a miraculous mythology. In the same way, soon after
the use of letters was known in the North of Europe, there was
drawn up by Saxo Grammaticus the life of the celebrated Ragnar
Lodbrok. Either from accident or design, this great warrior of
Scandinavia, who had taught England to tremble, had received
the same name as another Ragnar, who was prince of Jutland
about a hundred years earlier. This coincidence would have
caused no confusion as long as each district preserved a distinct
and independent account of its own Ragnar. But by possessing
the resource of writing, men became able to consolidate the sep-
arate trains of events, and as it were, fuse two truths into one
And this was what actually happened. The credulous Saxo
put together the different exploits of both Ragnars, and ascribing
the whole of them to his favorite hero, has involved in obscurity
one of the most interesting parts of the early history of Europe.
The annals of the North afford another curious instance of
this source of error. A tribe of Finns called Quæns occupied a
considerable part of the eastern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia.
Their country was known as Quænland; and this name gave rise
to a belief that to the north of the Baltic there was a nation
of Amazons. This would easily have been corrected by local
knowledge: but by the use of writing, the flying rumor was at
once fixed; and the existence of such a people is positively
affirmed in some of the earliest European histories. Thus too
Åbo, the ancient capital of Finland, was called Turku, which in
the Swedish language means a market-place. Adam of Bremen,
having occasion to treat of the countries adjoining the Baltic,
was so misled by the word Turku that this celebrated historian
assures his readers that there were Turks in Finland.
To these illustrations many others might be added, showing
how mere names deceived the early historians, and gave rise to
error.
## p. 2687 (#249) ###########################################
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE
2687
relations which were entirely false, and might have been rectified
on the spot; but which, owing to the art of writing, were carried
into distant countries and thus placed beyond the reach of con-
tradiction. Of such cases, one more may be mentioned, as it
concerns the history of England. Richard I. , the most barbarous
of our princes, was known to his contemporaries as the Lion; an
appellation conferred upon him on account of his fearlessness
and the ferocity of his temper. Hence it was said that he had
the heart of a lion; and the title Cæur de Lion not only became
indissolubly connected with his name, but actually gave rise to a
story, repeated by innumerable writers, according to which he
slew a lion in a single combat. The name gave rise to the story;
the story confirmed the name: and another fiction was added to
that long series of falsehoods of which history mainly consisted
during the Middle Ages.
The corruptions of history, thus naturally brought about by
the mere introduction of letters, were in Europe aided by an
additional cause. With the art of writing, there was in most
cases also communicated a knowledge of Christianity; and the
new religion not only destroyed many of the Pagan traditions,
but falsified the remainder by amalgamating them with monas-
tic legends. The extent to which this was carried would form
a curious subject for inquiry; but one or two instances of it will
perhaps be sufficient to satisfy the generality of readers.
Of the earliest state of the great Northern nations we have
little positive evidence; but several of the lays in which the
Scandinavian poets related the feats of their ancestors or of
their contemporaries are still preserved; and notwithstanding
their subsequent corruption, it is admitted by the most compe-
tent judges that they embody real and historical events. But in
the ninth and tenth centuries, Christian missionaries found their
way across the Baltic, and introduced a knowledge of their reli-
gion among the inhabitants of Northern Europe. Scarcely was
this effected when the sources of history began to be poisoned.
At the end of the eleventh century Sæmund Sigfusson, a Christ-
ian priest, gathered the popular and hitherto unwritten histories
of the North into what is called the Elder Edda'; and he was
satisfied with adding to his compilation the corrective of a Christ-
ian hymn.
A hundred years later there was made another
collection of the native histories; but the principle which I have
mentioned, having had a longer time to operate, now displayed
## p. 2688 (#250) ###########################################
2688
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE
its effects still more clearly. In this second collection, which is
known by the name of the Younger Edda,' there is an agree-
able mixture of Greek, Jewish, and Christian fables; and for the
first time in the Scandinavian annals, we meet with the widely
diffused fiction of a Trojan descent.
If by way of further illustration we turn to other parts of the
world, we shall find a series of facts confirming this view.
shall find that in those countries where there has been no change
of religion, history is more trustworthy and connected than in
those countries where such a change has taken place. In India,
Brahmanism, which is still supreme, was established at so early
a period that its origin is lost in the remotest antiquity. The
consequence is that the native annals have never been corrupted
by any new superstition, and the Hindus are possessed of his-
toric traditions more ancient than can be found among any other
Asiatic people. In the same way, the Chinese have for upwards
of two thousand years preserved the religion of Fo, which is a
form of Buddhism. In China, therefore, though the civilization
has never been equal to that of India, there is a history, not
indeed as old as the natives would wish us to believe, but still
stretching back to several centuries before the Christian era, from
whence it has been brought down to our own times in an unin-
terrupted succession. On the other hand, the Persians, whose
intellectual development was certainly superior to that of the
Chinese, are nevertheless without any authentic information
respecting the early transactions of their ancient monarchy. For
this I can no possible reason except the fact that Persia,
soon after the promulgation of the Koran, was conquered by the
Mohammedans, who completely subverted the Parsee religion
and thus interrupted the stream of the national traditions, Hence
it is that, putting aside the myths of the Zendavesta, we have
no native authorities for Persian history of any value, until
the appearance in the eleventh century of the Shah Nameh; in
which, however, Firdusi has mingled the miraculous relations of
those two religions by which his country had been successively
subjected. The result is, that if it were not for the various dis-
coveries which have been made, of monuments, inscriptions, and
coins, we should be compelled to rely on the scanty and inaccu-
rate details in the Greek writers for our knowledge of the history
of one of the most important of the Asiatic monarchies.
see
## p. 2689 (#251) ###########################################
2689
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
(1707-1788)
BY SPENCER TROTTER
SCIENCE becomes part of the general stock of knowledge only
after it has entered into the literature of a people. The
bare skeleton of facts must be clothed with the flesh and
blood of imagination, through the humanizing influence of literary
expression, before it can be assimilated by the average intellectual
being. The scientific investigator is rarely endowed with the gift of
weaving the facts into a story that will charm, and the man of let-
ters is too often devoid of that patience which is the chief virtue of
the scientist. These gifts of the gods are
bestowed upon mankind under the guiding
genius of the division of labor.
The name
of Buffon will always be associated with
natural history, though in the man himself
the spirit of science was conspicuously ab-
sent. In this respect he was in marked
contrast with his contemporary Linnæus,
whose intellect and labor laid the founda-
tions of much of the scientific knowledge
of to-day.
George Louis le Clerc Buffon was born
on the 7th of September, 1707, at Montbar,
BUFFON
in Burgundy. His father, Benjamin le Clerc,
who was possessed of a fortune, appears to have bestowed great
care and liberality on the education of his son. While a youth Buf-
fon made the acquaintance of a young English nobleman, the Duke
of Kingston, whose tutor, a man well versed in the knowledge of
physical science, exerted a profound influence on the future career
of the young Frenchman. At twenty-one Buffon came into his
mother's estate, a fortune yielding an annual income of £12,000.
But this wealth did not change his purpose to gain knowledge. He
traveled through Italy, and after living for a short period in England
returned to France and devoted his time to literary work. His first
efforts were translations of two English works of science — Hale's
(Vegetable Statics) and Newton's (Fluxions'; and he followed these
with various studies in the different branches of physical science.
The determining event in his life, which led him to devote the
rest of his years to the study of natural history, was the death of his
V-169
## p. 2690 (#252) ###########################################
2690
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
cessor.
friend Du Fay, the Intendant of the Jardin du Roi (now the Jardin
des Plantes), who on his death-bed recommended Buffon as his suc-
A man of letters, Buffon saw before him the opportunity to
write a natural history of the earth and its inhabitants; and he set
to work with a zeal that lasted until his death in 1788, at the age of
eighty-one. His great work, L'Histoire Naturelle,' was the outcome
of these years of labor, the first edition being complete in thirty-six
quarto volumes.
The first fifteen volumes of this great work, published between
the years 1749 and 1767, treated of the theory of the earth, the
nature of animals, and the history of man and viviparous quadru-
peds; and was the joint work of Buffon and Daubenton, a physician
of Buffon's native village. The scientific portion of the work was
done by Daubenton, who possessed considerable anatomical knowl-
edge, and who wrote accurate descriptions of the various animals
mentioned. Buffon, however, affected to ignore the work of his co-
laborer and reaped the entire glory, so that Daubenton withdrew
his services. Later appeared the nine volumes on birds, in which
Buffon was aided by the Abbé Sexon. Then followed the 'History of
Minerals) in five volumes, and seven volumes of Supplements,' the
last one of which was published the year after Buffon's death.
One can hardly admire the personal character of Buffon.
He was
vain and superficial, and given to extravagant speculations. He is
reported to have said, “I know but five great geniuses - Newton,
Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and myself. His natural vanity was
undoubtedly fostered by the adulation which he received from those
in authority. He saw his own statue placed in the cabinet of Louis
XVI. , with the inscription Majestati Naturæ par ingenium. ” Louis
XV. bestowed upon him a title of nobility, and crowned heads
« addressed him in language of the most exaggerated compliment. ”
Buffon's conduct and conversation were marked throughout by a cer-
tain coarseness and vulgarity that constantly appear in his writings.
He was foppish and trifling, and affected religion though at heart a
disbeliever.
The chief value of Buffon's work lies in the fact that it first
brought the subject of natural history into popular literature. Prob-
ably no writer of the time, with the exception of Voltaire and Rous-
seau, so widely read and quoted as Buffon. But the gross
"inaccuracy which pervaded his writings, and the visionary theories in
which he constantly indulged, gave the work a less permanent value
than it might otherwise have attained. Buffon detested the scientific
method, preferring literary finish to accuracy of statement. Although
the work was widely translated, and was the only popular natural
history of the time, there is little of it that is worthy of a place in
was
## p. 2691 (#253) ###########################################
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
2691
the world's best literature. It is chiefly as a relic of a past literary
epoch, and as the pioneer work in a new literary field, that Buffon's
writings appeal to us. They awakened for the first time a wide
interest in natural history, though their author was distinctly not a
naturalist.
Arabella Buckley has said of Buffon and his writings that though
<he often made great mistakes and arrived at false conclusions, still
he had so much genius and knowledge that a great part of his work
will always remain true. Cuvier has left us a good memoir of Buf-
fon in the Biographie Universelle. '
Arenei Sorteo,
NATURE
From the Natural History)
S°
O with what magnificence Nature shines upon the earth! A
pure light extending from east to west gilds successively
the hemispheres of the globe. An airy transparent element
surrounds it; a warm and fruitful heat animates and develops all
its germs of life; living and salutary waters tend to their support
and increase; high points scattered over the lands, by arresting
the airy vapors, render these sources inexhaustible and always
fresh; gathered into immense hollows, they divide the continents.
The extent of the sea is as great as that of the land. It
is not a cold and sterile element, but another empire as rich
and populated as the first. The finger of God has marked the
boundaries. When the waters encroach upon the beaches of the
west, they leave bare those of the east. This enormous mass of
water, itself inert, follows the guidance of heavenly movements.
Balanced by the regular oscillations of ebb and flow, it rises and
falls with the planet of night; rising still higher when concur-
rent with the planet of day, the two uniting their forces during
the equinoxes cause the great tides. Our connection with the
heavens is nowhere more clearly indicated. From these constant
and general movements result others variable and particular:
removals of earth, deposits at the bottom of water forming ele-
vations like those upon the earth's surface, currents which, fol-
lowing the direction of these mountain ranges, shape them to
## p. 2692 (#254) ###########################################
2692
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
corresponding angles; and rolling in the midst of the waves, as
waters upon the earth, are in truth the rivers of the sea.
The air, too, lighter and more fluid than water, obeys many
forces: the distant action of sun and moon, the immediate action
of the sea, that of rarefying heat and of condensing cold, pro-
duce in it continual agitations. The winds are its currents,
driving before them and collecting the clouds. They produce
meteors; transport the humid vapors of maritime beaches to the
land surfaces of the continents; determine the storms; distrib-
ute the fruitful rains and kindly dews; stir the sea; agitate the
mobile waters, arrest or hasten the currents; raise floods; excite
tempests. The angry sea rises toward heaven and breaks roar-
ing against immovable dikes, which it can neither destroy nor
surmount.
The land elevated above sea-level is safe from these irrup-
tions. Its surface, enameled with flowers, adorned with ever
fresh verdure, peopled with thousands and thousands of differing
species of animals, is a place of repose; an abode of delights,
where man, placed to aid nature, dominates all other things, the
only one who can know and admire. God has made him specta-
tor of the universe and witness of his marvels. He is animated
by a divine spark which renders him a participant in the divine
mysteries; and by whose light he thinks and reflects, sees and
reads in the book of the world as in a copy of divinity.
Nature is the exterior throne of God's glory. The man who
studies and contemplates it rises gradually towards the interior
throne of omniscience. Made to adore the Creator, he com-
mands all the creatures. Vassal of heaven, king of earth, which
he ennobles and enriches, he establishes order, harmony, and
subordination among living beings. He embellishes Nature
itself; cultivates, extends, and refines it; suppresses its thistles
and brambles, and multiplies its grapes and roses.
Look upon the solitary beaches and sad lands where man has
never dwelt: covered rather bristling — with thick black
woods on all their rising ground, stunted barkless trees, bent,
twisted, falling from age; near by, others even more numerous,
rotting upon heaps already rotten,- stifling, burying the germs
ready to burst forth. Nature, young everywhere else, is here
decrepit. The land surmounted by the ruins of these produc-
tions offers, instead of flourishing verdure, only an incumbered
space pierced by aged trees, loaded with parasitic plants, lichens,
- or
## p. 2693 (#255) ###########################################
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
2693
agarics — impure fruits of corruption. In the low parts is water,
dead and stagnant because undirected; or swampy soil neither
solid nor liquid, hence unapproachable and useless to the habit-
ants both of land and of water. Here are swamps covered with
rank aquatic plants nourishing only venomous insects and haunted
by unclean animals. Between these low infectious marshes and
these higher ancient forests extend plains having nothing in com-
mon with our meadows, upon which weeds smother useful plants.
There is none of that fine turf which seems like down upon the
earth, or of that enameled lawn which announces a brilliant fer-
tility; but instead an interlacement of hard and thorny herbs
which seem to cling to each other rather than to the soil, and
which, successively withering and impeding each other, form a
coarse mat several feet thick. There are no roads, no communi-
cations, no vestiges of intelligence in these wild places. Man,
obliged to follow the paths of savage beasts and to watch con-
stantly lest he become their prey, terrified by their roars, thrilled
by the very silence of these profound solitudes, turns back and
says:
Primitive nature is hideous and dying; I, I alone, can make
it living and agreeable. Let us dry these swamps; converting
into streams and canals, animate these dead waters by setting
them in motion. Let us use the active and devouring element
once hidden from us, and which we ourselves have discovered;
and set fire to this superfluous mat, to these aged forests already
half consumed, and finish with iron what fire cannot destroy!
Soon, instead of rush and water-lily from which the toad com-
pounds his venom, we shall see buttercups and clover, sweet and
salutary herbs. Herds of bounding animals will tread this once
impracticable soil and find abundant, constantly renewed pasture.
They will multiply, to multiply again. Let us employ the new
aid to complete our work; and let the ox, submissive to the yoke,
exercise his strength in furrowing the land. Then it will grow
young again with cultivation, and a new nature shall spring up
under our hands.
How beautiful is cultivated Nature when by the cares of man
she is brilliantly and pompously adorned! He himself is the
chief ornament, the most noble production; in multiplying him-
self he multiplies her most precious gem. She seems to multiply
herself with him, for his art brings to light all that her bosom
conceals. What treasures hitherto ignored! What new riches!
## p. 2694 (#256) ###########################################
2694
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
Flowers, fruits, perfected grains infinitely multiplied; useful
species of animals transported, propagated, endlessly increased;
harmful species destroyed, confined, banished; gold, and iron
more necessary than gold, drawn from the bowels of the earth;
torrents confined; rivers directed and restrained; the sea, submis-
sive and comprehended, crossed from one hemisphere to the other;
the earth everywhere accessible, everywhere living and fertile; in
the valleys, laughing prairies; in the plains, rich pastures or
richer harvests; the hills loaded with vines and fruits, their sum-
mits crowned by useful trees and young forests; deserts changed
to cities inhabited by a great people, who, ceaselessly circulating,
scatter themselves from centres to extremities; frequent open
roads and communications established everywhere like so many
witnesses of the force and union of society; a thousand other
monuments of power and glory: proving that man, master of the
world, has transformed it, renewed its whole surface, and that
he shares his empire with Nature.
However, he rules only by right of conquest, and enjoys
rather than possesses. He can only retain by ever-renewed efforts.
If these cease, everything languishes, changes, grows disordered,
enters again into the hands of Nature. She retakes her rights;
effaces man's work; covers his most sumptuous monuments with
dust and moss; destroys them in time, leaving him only the
regret that he has lost by his own fault the conquests of his
ancestors. These periods during which man loses his domain, ages
of barbarism when everything perishes, are always prepared by
wars and arrive with famine and depopulation. Man, who can do
nothing except in numbers, and is only strong in union, only
happy in peace, has the madness to arm himself for his unhap-
piness and to fight for his own ruin. Incited by insatiable greed,
blinded by still more insatiable ambition, he renounces the senti-
ments of humanity, turns all his forces against himself, and seek-
ing to destroy his fellow, does indeed destroy himself. And after
these days of blood and carnage, when the smoke of glory has
passed away, he sees with sadness that the earth is devastated,
the arts buried, the nations dispersed, the races enfeebled, his
own happiness ruined, and his power annihilated.
## p. 2695 (#257) ###########################################
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
2695
THE HUMMING-BIRD
From the Natural History)
O"
F All animated beings this is the most elegant in form and
the most brilliant in colors. The stones and metals pol-
ished by our arts are not comparable to this jewel of
Nature. She has placed it least in size of the order of birds,
marime miranda in minimis. Her masterpiece is the little
humming-bird, and upon it she has heaped all the gifts which
the other birds may only share. Lightness, rapidity, nimbleness,
grace, and rich apparel all belong to this little favorite. The
emerald, the ruby, and the topaz gleam upon its dress.
It never
soils them with the dust of earth, and in its aërial life scarcely
touches the turf an instant. Always in the air, flying from
flower to flower, it has their freshness as well as their brightness.
It lives upon their nectar, and dwells only in the climates where
they perennially bloom.
All kinds of humming-birds are found in the hottest coun-
tries of the New World. They are quite numerous and seem to be
confined between the two tropics, for those which penetrate the
temperate zones in summer only stay there a short time. They
seem to follow the sun in its advance and retreat; and to fly on
the wing of zephyrs after an eternal spring.
The smaller species of the humming-birds are less in size
than the great fly wasp, and more slender than the drone. Their
beak is a fine needle and their tongue a slender thread. Their
little black eyes are like two shining points, and the feathers of
their wings so delicate that they seem transparent. Their short
feet, which they use very little, are so tiny one can scarcely see
them. They alight only at night, resting in the air during the
day. They have a swift continual humming flight. The move-
ment of their wings is so rapid that when pausing in the air, the
bird seems quite motionless. One sees him stop before a blossom,
then dart like a flash to another, visiting all, plunging his tongue
into their hearts, flattening them with his wings, never settling
anywhere, but neglecting none. He hastens his inconstancies only
to pursue his loves more eagerly and to multiply his innocent
joys. For this light lover of flowers lives at their expense without
ever blighting them. He only pumps their honey, and to this
alone his tongue seems destined.
## p. 2696 (#258) ###########################################
2696
GEORGE LOUIS LE CLERC BUFFON
The vivacity of these small birds is only equaled by their
courage, or rather their audacity. Sometimes they may be seen
chasing furiously birds twenty times their size, fastening upon
their bodies, letting themselves be carried along in their flight,
while they peck them fiercely until their tiny rage is satisfied.
Sometimes they fight each other vigorously. Impatience seems
their very essence.
If they approach a blossom and find it faded,
they mark their spite by hasty rending of the petals. Their only
voice is a weak cry,"scrop, screp,” frequent and repeated, which
they utter in the woods from dawn, until at the first rays of the
sun they all take flight and scatter over the country.
## p. 2696 (#259) ###########################################
## p. 2696 (#260) ###########################################
o cresch
៨
BULWER-LYTTON.
## p. 2697 (#261) ###########################################
2697
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
(1803-1873)
BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE
He patrician in literature is always an interesting spectacle.
We are prone to regard his performance as a test of the
worth of long descent and high breeding. If he does well,
he vindicates the claims of his caste; if ill, we infer that inherited
estates and blue blood but surface advantages, leaving the
effective brain unimproved, or even causing deterioration. But the
argument is still open; and whether genius be the creature of cir-
cumstance or divinely independent, is a question which prejudice
rather than evidence commonly decides.
Certainly literature tries men's souls. The charlatan must betray
himself. Genius shines through all cerements. On the other hand,
genius may be nourished, and the charlatan permeates all classes.
The truth probably is that an aristocrat is quite as apt as a plebeian
to be a good writer. Only since there are fewer of the former than
of the latter, and since, unlike the last, the first are seldom forced to
live by their brains, there are more plebeian than aristocratic names
on the literary roll of honor. Admitting this, the instance of the
writer known as “Bulwer) proves nothing one way or the other.
At all events, not, Was he a genius because he was a patrician ?
but, Was he a genius at all? is the inquiry most germane to our
present purpose.
An aristocrat of aristocrats undoubtedly he was, though it con-
cerns us not to determine whether the blood of Plantagenet kings
and Norman conquerors really flowed in his veins. On both father's
and mother's side he was thoroughly well connected. Heydon Hall
in Norfolk was the hereditary home of the Norman Bulwers; the
Saxon Lyttons had since the Conquest lived at Knebworth in Derby,
shire. The historic background of each family was honorable, and
when the marriage of William Earle Bulwer with Elizabeth Barbara
Lytton united them, it might be said that in their offspring England
found her type.
Edward, being the youngest son, had little money, but he hap-
pened to have brains. He began existence delicate and precocious.
Culture, with him, set in almost with what he would have termed
the "consciousness of his own identity, and the process never inter-
mitted: in fact, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, his
## p. 2698 (#262) ###########################################
2698
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
spiritual and intellectual emancipation was hindered by many ob-
stacles; for, an ailing child, he was petted by his mother, and such
germs of intelligence (verses at seven years old, and the like) as he
betrayed were trumpeted as prodigies. He was spoilt so long before
he was ripe that it is a marvel he ever ripened at all.
Many years
must pass before vanity could be replaced in him by manly ambi-
tion; a vein of silliness is traceable through his career almost to the
end. He expatiated in the falsetto key; almost never do we hear in
his voice that hearty bass note so dear to plain humanity. In his pil-
grimage toward freedom he had to wrestle not only with flesh-and-
blood mothers, uncles, and wives, et id genus omne, but with the more
subtle and vital ideas, superstitions, and prejudices appertaining to
his social station. His worst foes were not those of his household
merely, but of his heart. The more arduous achievement of such a
man is to see his real self and believe in it. There are so many
misleading purple-velvet waistcoats, gold chains, superfine sentiments,
and blue-blooded affiliations in the way, that the true nucleus of so
much decoration becomes less accessible than the needle in the hay-
stack. It is greatly to Bulwer's credit that he stuck valiantly to his
quest, and nearly, if not quite, ran down his game at last. His
intellectual record is one of constant progress, from childhood to age.
Whether his advance in other respects was as uniform does not
much concern us. He was unhappy with his wife, and perhaps they
even threw things at each other at table, the servants looking on.
Nothing in his matrimonial relations so much became him as his
conduct after their severance: he held his tongue like a man, in spite
of the poor lady's shrieks and clapper-clawings. His whimsical, hair-
splitting conscientiousness is less admirable. A healthy conscience
does not whine - it creates. No one
cares to know what a man
thinks of his own actions. No one is interested to learn that Bulwer
meant Paul Clifford to be an edifying work, or that he married his
wife from the highest motives. We do not take him so seriously: we
are satisfied that he wrote the story first and discovered its morality
afterwards; and that lofty motives would not have united him to
Miss Rosina Doyle Wheeler had she not been pretty and clever. His
hectic letters to his mamma; his Byronic struttings and mouthings
over the grave of his schoolgirl lady-love; his eighteenth-century
comedy-scene with Caroline Lamb; his starched-frill participation.
in the Fred Villiers duel at Boulogne, - how silly and artificial is
all this! There is no genuine feeling in it: he attires himself in
tawdry sentiment as in a flowered waistcoat. What a difference
between him, at this period, and his contemporary Benjamin Dis-
raeli, who indeed committed similar inanities, but with a saturnine
sense of humor cropping out at every turn which altered the whole
## p. 2699 (#263) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2699
was
a
man
complexion of the performance. We laugh at the one, but with the
other.
Of course, however, there
hidden somewhere in
Edward Bulwer's perfumed clothes and mincing attitudes, else the
world had long since forgotten him. Amidst his dandyism, he learned
how to speak well in debate and how to use his hands to guard his
head; he paid his debts by honest hard work, and would not be dis-
honorably beholden to his mother or any one else. He posed as a
blighted being, and invented black evening-dress; but he lived down
the scorn of such men as Tennyson and Thackeray, and won their
respect and friendship at last. He aimed high, according to his
lights, meant well, and in the long run did well too.
The main activities of his life — and from start to finish his energy
was great — were in politics and in literature. His political career
covers about forty years, from the time he took his degree at Cam-
bridge till Lord Derby made him a peer in 1866. He accomplished
nothing of serious importance, but his course was always creditable:
he began as a sentimental Radical and ended as a liberal Conserva-
tive; he advocated the Crimean War; the Corn Laws found him in a
compromising humor; his record as Colonial Secretary offers nothing
memorable in statesmanship. The extraordinary brilliancy of his
brother Henry's diplomatic life throws Edward's achievements into
the shade. There is nothing to be ashamed of, but had he done
nothing else he would have been unknown. But literature, first
seriously cultivated as a means of livelihood, outlasted his political
ambitions, and his books are to-day his only claim to remembrance.
They made a strong impression at the time they were written, and
many are still read as much as ever, by a generation born after his
death. Their popularity is not of the catchpenny sort; thoughtful
people read them, as well as the great drove of the undiscriminating.
For they are the product of thought: they show workmanship; they
have quality; they are carefully made. If the literary critic never
finds occasion to put off the shoes from his feet as in the sacred
presence of genius, he is constantly moved to recognize with a
friendly nod the presence of sterling talent. He is even inclined to
think that nobody else ever had so much talent as this little red-
haired, blue-eyed, high-nosed, dandified Edward Bulwer; the mere
mass of it lifts him at times to the levels where genius dwells, though
he never quite shares their nectar and ambrosia. He as it were
catches echoes of the talk of the Immortals, the turn of their
phrase, the intonation of their utterance, — and straightway repro-
duces it with the fidelity of the phonograph. But, as in the phono-
graph, we find something lacking: our mind accepts the report as
genuine, but our ear affirms an unreality; this is reproduction, indeed,
## p. 2700 (#264) ###########################################
2700
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
but not creation. Bulwer himself, when his fit is past, and his criti-
cal faculty re-awakens, probably knows as well as another that these
labored and meritorious pages of his are not graven on the eternal
adamant. But they are the best he can do, and perhaps there is
none better of their kind. They have a right to be; for while
genius may do harm as well as good, Bulwer never does harm,
and in spite of sickly sentiment and sham philosophy, is uniformly
instructive, amusing, and edifying.
« To love her,” wrote Dick Steele of a certain great dame, «is a
liberal education;" and we might almost say the same of the reading
of Bulwer's romances. He was learned, and he put into his books
all his learning, as well as all else that was his. They represent
artistically grouped, ingeniously lighted, with suitable acompani-
ments of music and illusion — the acquisitions of his intellect, the
sympathies of his nature, and the achievements of his character.
He wrote in various styles, making deliberate experiments in one
after another, and often hiding himself completely in anonymity.
He was versatile, not deep. Robert Louis Stevenson also employs
various styles; but with him the changes are intuitive — they are the
subtle variations in touch and timbre which genius makes, in har-
mony with the subject treated. Stevenson could not have written
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) in the same tune and key as “Treasure
Island); and the music of Marxheim' differs from both. The reason
is organic: the writer is inspired by his theme, and it passes through
his mind with a lilt and measure of its own. It makes its own
style, just as a human spirit makes its own features and gait; and
we know Stevenson through all his transformations only by dint of
the exquisite distinction and felicity of word and phrase that always
characterize him. Now, with Bulwer there is none of this lovely
inevitable spontaneity. He costumes his tale arbitrarily, like a stage-
haberdasher, and invents a voice to deliver it withal. (The Last
Days of Pompeii? shall be mouthed out grandiloquently; the incredi-
bilities of (The Coming Race shall wear the guise of naïve and
artless narrative; the humors of “The Caxtons) and What Will
He Do with It ? ) shall reflect the mood of the sagacious, affable man
of the world, gossiping over the nuts and wine; the marvels of
(Zanoni? and A Strange Story' must be portrayed with a resonance
and exaltation of diction fitted to their transcendental claims. But
between the stark mechanism of the Englishman and the lithe,
inspired felicity of the Scot, what a difference!
Bulwer's work may be classified according to subject, though not
chronologically. He wrote novels of society, of history, of mystery,
and of romance. In all he was successful, and perhaps felt as much
interest in one as in another. In his own life the study of the
## p. 2701 (#265) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2701
a name.
occult played a part; he was familiar with the contemporary fads
in mystery and acquainted with their professors. «Ancient” history
also attracted him, and he even wrote a couple of volumes of a
(History of Athens. ' In all his writing there is a tendency to lapse
into a discussion of the “Ideal and the Real,” aiming always at the
conclusion that the only true Real is the Ideal. It was this tendency
which chiefly aroused the ridicule of his critics, and from the (Sred-
wardlyttonbulwig' of Thackeray to the Condensed Novels burlesque
of Bret Harte, they harp upon that facile string. The thing satir-
ized is after all not cheaper than the satire. The ideal is the true
real; the only absurdity lies in the pomp and circumstance where-
with that simple truth is introduced. There is a Dweller on the
Threshold, but it, or he, is nothing more than that doubt concerning
the truth of spiritual things which assails all beginners in higher
speculation, and there was no need to call it or him by so formidable
A sense of humor would have saved Bulwer from almost all
his faults, and have endowed him with several valuable virtues into
the bargain; but it was not born in him, and with all his diligence
he never could beget it.
The domestic series, of which «The Caxtons) is the type, are the
most generally popular of his works, and are likely to be so longest.
The romantic vein ('Ernest Maltravers,' (Alice, or the Mysteries,'
etc. ) are in his worst style, and are now only in existence as books
because they are members of “the edition. ” It is doubtful if any
human being has read one of them through in twenty years. Such
historical books as “The Last Days of Pompeii? are not only well
constructed dramatically, but are painfully accurate in details, and
may still be read for information as well as for pleasure. The
(Zanoni species is undeniably interesting. The weird traditions of
the Philosopher's Stone) and the Elixir of Life) can
to fascinate human souls, and all the paraphernalia of magic are
charming to minds weary of the matter-of-factitude of current
existence. The stories are put together with Bulwer's unfailing
cleverness, and in all external respects neither Dumas nor Balzac
has done anything better in this kind: the trouble is that these
authors compel our belief, while Bulwer does not. For, once more, he
lacks the magic of genius and the spirit of style which are immortally
and incommunicably theirs, without which no other magic can be
made literarily effective.
Pelham, written at twenty-five years of age, is a creditable
boy's book; it aims to portray character as well as to develop
incidents, and in spite of the dreadful silliness of its melodramatic
passages it has merit.
Conventionally it is more nearly a work of
art than that other famous boy's book, Disraeli's Vivian Grey,'
(
never cease
## p. 2702 (#266) ###########################################
2702
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
though the latter is alive and blooming with the original literary
charm which is denied to the other. Other characteristic novels of
his are (The Last Days of Pompeii, Ernest Maltravers,' Zanoni,
( The Caxtons,' My Novel, What Will He Do with It? ) A Strange
Story, The Coming Race, and Kenelm Chillingly,' the last of
which appeared in the year of the author's death, 1873. The student
who has read these books will know all that is worth knowing of
Bulwer's work. He wrote upwards of fifty substantial volumes, and
left a mass of posthumous material besides. Of all that he did, the
most nearly satisfactory thing is one of the last, Kenelm Chill-
ingly. In style, persons, and incidents it is alike charming: it
subsides somewhat into the inevitable Bulwer sentimentality towards
the end -a silk purse cannot be made out of a sow's ear; but the
miracle was never nearer being accomplished than in this instance.
Here we see the thoroughly equipped man of letters doing with
apparent ease what scarce five of his contemporaries could have
done at all. The book is lightsome and graceful, yet it touches
serious thoughts: most remarkable of all, it shows a suppleness of
mind and freshness of feeling more to be expected in a youth of
thirty than in a veteran of threescore and ten. Bulwer never
ceased to grow; and what is better still, to grow away from his
faults and towards improvement.
But in comparing him with others, we must admit that he had
better opportunities than most. His social station brought him in
contact with the best people and most pregnant events of his time;
and the driving poverty of youth having established him in the
novel-writing habit, he thereafter had leisure to polish and expand
his faculty to the utmost. No talent of his was folded up in a
napkin: he did his best and utmost with all he had. Whereas the
path of genius is commonly tortuous and hard-beset: and while we
are always saying of Shakespeare, or Thackeray, or Shelley, or Keats,
or Poe, “What wonders they would have done had life been longer
or fate kinder to them! » — of Bulwer we say, “No help was wanting
to him, and he profited by all; he got out of the egg more than we
had believed was in it! » Instead of a great faculty hobbled by
circumstance, we have a small faculty magnified by occasion and
enriched by time.
Certainly, as men of letters go, Bulwer must be accounted fortu-
nate. The long inflamed row of his domestic life apart, all things
went his way. He received large sums for his books; at the age of
forty, his mother dying, he succeeded to the Knebworth estate ;
three-and-twenty years later his old age (if such a man could be
called old) was consoled by the title of Lord Lytton. His health
was never robust, and occasionally failed; but he seems to have been
## p. 2703 (#267) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2703
able to accomplish after a fashion everything that he undertook; he
was “thorough,” as the English say. He lived in the midst of
events; he was a friend of the men who made the age, and saw
them make itlending a hand himself too when and where he
could. He lived long enough to see the hostility which had op-
posed him in youth die away, and honor and kindness take its place.
Let it be repeated, his aims were good. He would have been can-
did and un-selfconscious had that been possible for him; and perhaps
the failure was one of manner rather than of heart. Yes, he was
a fortunate man.
His most conspicuous success was as a play-writer. In view of
his essentially dramatic and historic temperament, it is surprising
that he did not altogether devote himself to this branch of art; but
all his dramas were produced between his thirty-third and his thirty-
eighth years. The first —La Duchesse de la Vallière). was not to
the public liking; but “The Lady of Lyons,' written in two weeks,
is in undiminished favor after near sixty years; and so are Riche-
lieu' and 'Money. There is no apparent reason why Bulwer should
not have been as prolific a stage-author as Molière or even Lope de
Vega. But we often value our best faculties least.
(The Coming Race,' published anonymously and never acknowl-
edged during his life, was an unexpected product of his mind, but is
useful to mark his limitations. It is a forecast of the future, and
proves, as nothing else could so well do, the utter absence in Bulwer
of the creative imagination. It is an invention, cleverly conceived,
mechanically and rather tediously worked out, and written in a style
astonishingly commonplace. The man who wrote that book (one
would say) had no heaven in his soul, nor any pinions whereon to
soar heavenward. Yet it is full of thought and ingenuity, and the
central conception of “vril has been much commended. But the
whole concoction is tainted with the deadness of stark materialism,
and we should be unjust, after all, to deny Bulwer something loftier
and broader than is discoverable here. In inventing the narrative
he depended upon the weakest element in his mental make-up, and
the result could not but be dismal. We like to believe that there
was better stuff in him than he himself ever found; and that when
he left this world for the next, he had sloughed off more dross than
most men have time to accumulate.
durian Haultone
## p. 2704 (#268) ###########################################
2704
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
THE AMPHITHEATRE
From "The Last Days of Pompeii)
ON
IN THE upper tier (but apart from the male spectators) sat the
women, their gay dresses resembling some gaudy flower-
bed; it is needless to add that they were the most talka-
tive part of the assembly; and many were the looks directed up
to them, especially from the benches appropriated to the young
and the unmarried men. On the lower seats round the arena
sat the more high-born and wealthy visitors — the magistrates
and those of senatorial or equestrian dignity: the passages
which, by corridors at the right and left, gave access to these
seats, at either end of the oval arena, were also the entrances
for the combatants. Strong palings at these passages prevented
any unwelcome eccentricity in the movements of the beasts, and
confined them to their appointed prey.
Around the parapet
which was raised above the arena, and from which the seats
gradually rose, were gladiatorial inscriptions, and paintings
wrought in fresco, typical of the entertainments for which the
place was designed. Throughout the whole building wound in-
visible pipes, from which, as the day advanced, cooling and fra.
grant showers were to be sprinkled over the spectators. The
officers of the amphitheatre were still employed in the task of
fixing the vast awning (or velaria) which covered the whole, and
which luxurious invention the Campanians arrogated to them-
selves: it was woven of the whitest Apulian wool, and variegated
with broad stripes of crimson. Owing either to
some inex-
perience on the part of the workmen or to some defect in the
machinery, the awning, however, was not arranged that day so
happily as usual; indeed, from the immense space of the circum-
ference, the task was always one of great difficulty and art -- so
much so that it could seldom be adventured in rough or windy
weather. But the present day was so remarkably still that there
seemed to the spectators no excuse for the awkwardness of the
artificers; and when a large gap in the back of the awning was
still visible, from the obstinate refusal of one part of the velaria
to ally itself with the rest, the murmurs of discontent were loud
and general.
The ædile Pansa, at whose expense the exhibition was given,
looked particularly annoyed at the defect, and vowed bitter
1
## p. 2705 (#269) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2705
vengeance on the head of the chief officer of the show, who,
fretting, puffing, perspiring, busied himself in idle orders and
unavailing threats.
The hubbub ceased suddenly — the operators desisted -- the
crowd were stilled the gap was forgotten – for now, with a
loud and warlike flourish of trumpets, the gladiators, marshaled
in ceremonious procession, entered the arena. They swept round
the oval space very slowly and deliberately, in order to give the
spectators full leisure to admire their stern serenity of feature -
their brawny limbs and various arms, as well as to form such
wagers as the excitement of the moment might suggest.
“Oh! cried the widow Fulvia to the wife of Pansa, as they
leaned down from their lofty bench, do you see that gigantic
gladiator ? how drolly he is dressed! »
“Yes,” said the ædile's wife with complacent importance, for
she knew all the names and qualities of each combatant: "he is
a retiarius or netter; he is armed only, you see, with a three-
pronged spear like a trident, and a net; he wears no armor, only
the fillet and the tunic. He is a mighty man, and is to fight
with Sporus, yon thick-set gladiator, with the round shield and
drawn sword but without body armor; he has not his helmet on
now, in order that you may see his face — how fearless it is!
By-and-by he will fight with his visor down. ”
“But surely a net and a spear are poor arms against a shield
and sword ? »
“That shows how innocent you are, my dear Fulvia: the
retiarius has generally the best of it. ”
"But who is yon handsome gladiator, nearly naked - is it
not quite improper ? By Venus! but his limbs are beautifully
shaped! »
"It is Lydon, a young untried man! he has the rashness to
fight yon other gladiator similarly dressed, or rather undressed -
Tetraides. They fight first in the Greek fashion, with the cestus;
afterward they put on armor, and try sword and shield. ”
“He is a proper man, this Lydon; and the women, I am
sure, are on his side. »
"So are not the experienced bettors: Clodius offers three to
one against him. ”
“Oh, Jove! how beautiful! » exclaimed the widow, as two
gladiators, armed cap-à-pie, rode round the arena on light and
prancing steeds. Resembling much the combatants in the tilts
V-170
## p. 2706 (#270) ###########################################
2706
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
of the middle age, they bore lances and round shields beautifully
inlaid; their armor was woven intricately with bands of iron, but
it covered only the thighs and the right arms; short cloaks ex-
tending to the seat gave a picturesque and graceful air to their
costume; their legs were naked with the exception of sandals,
which were fastened a little above the ankle. “Oh, beautiful!
Who are these ? » asked the widow.
"The one is named Berbix: he has conquered twelve times.
The other assumes the arrogant Nobilior. They are both Gauls. ”
While thus conversing, the first formalities of the show were
over. To these succeeded a feigned combat with wooden swords
between the various gladiators matched against each other.
Among these the skill of two Roman gladiators, hired for the
occasion, was the most admired; and next to them the most
graceful combatant was Lydon. This sham contest did not last
above an hour, nor did it attract any very lively interest except
among those connoisseurs of the arena to whom art was prefer-
able to more coarse excitement; the body of the spectators were
rejoiced when it was over, and when the sympathy rose to terror.
The combatants were now arranged in pairs, as agreed before-
hand; their weapons examined; and the grave sports of the day
commenced amid the deepest silence— broken only by an excit-
ing and preliminary blast of warlike music,
It was often customary to begin the sports by the most cruel
of all; and some bestiarius, or gladiator appointed to the beasts,
was slain first as an initiatory sacrifice. But in the present in-
stance the experienced Pansa thought better that the sanguinary
drama should advance, not decrease, in interest; and accord-
ingly the execution of Olinthus and Glaucus was reserved for
the last. It was arranged that the two horsemen should first
occupy the arena; that the foot gladiators, paired off, should then
be loosed indiscriminately on the stage; that Glaucus and the
lion should next perform their part in the bloody spectacle; and
the tiger and the Nazarene be the grand finale. And in the
spectacles of Pompeii, the reader of Roman history must limit
his imagination, nor expect to find those vast and wholesale
exhibitions of magnificent slaughter with which a Nero or a
Caligula regaled the inhabitants of the Imperial City. The
Roman shows, which absorbed the more celebrated gladiators
and the chief proportion of foreign beasts, were indeed the very
reason why in the lesser towns of the empire the sports of the
## p. 2707 (#271) ###########################################
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
2707
amphitheatre were comparatively humane and rare; and in this
as in other respects, Pompeii was the miniature, the microcosm
of Rome. Still, it was an awful and imposing spectacle, with
which modern times have, happily, nothing to compare; a vast
theatre, rising row upon row, and swarming with human beings,
from fifteen to eighteen thousand in number, intent upon no
fictitious representation - no tragedy of the stage — but the actual
victory or defeat, the exultant life or the bloody death, of each
and all who entered the arena!
The two horsemen were now at either extremity of the lists
(if so they might be called), and at a given signal from Pansa
the combatants started simultaneously as in full collision, each
advancing his round buckler, each poising on high his sturdy
javelin; but just when within three paces of his opponent, the
steed of Berbix suddenly halted, wheeled round, and, as Nobilior
was borne rapidly by, his antagonist spurred upon him. The
buckler of Nobilior, quickly and skillfully extended, received a
blow which otherwise would have been fatal.
“Well done, Nobilior! ” cried the prætor, giving the first vent
to the popular excitement.
"Bravely struck, my Berbix! » answered Clodius from his
seat.
And the wild murmur, swelled by many a shout, echoed from
side to side.
The visors of both the horsemen were completely closed (like
those of the knights in after times), but the head was neverthe-
less the great point of assault; and Nobilior, now wheeling his
charger with no less adroitness than his opponent, directed his
spear full on the helmet of his foe. Berbix raised his buckler to
shield himself, and his quick-eyed antagonist, suddenly lowering
his weapon, pierced him through the breast. Berbix reeled and
fell.
"Nobilior! Nobilior! shouted the populace.
"I have lost ten sestertia,” said Clodius, between his teeth.
“Habet! ” (He has it) said Pansa deliberately.
The populace, not yet hardened into cruelty, made the signal
of mercy: but as the attendants of the arena approached, they
found the kindness came too late; the heart of the Gaul had
been pierced, and his eyes were set in death. It was his life's
blood that flowed so darkly over the sand and sawdust of the
arena.
## p. 2708 (#272) ###########################################
2708
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
"It is a pity it was so soon over — there was little enough for
one's trouble,” said the widow Fulvia.
“Yes, I have no compassion for Berbix. Any one might
have seen that Nobilior did but feint. Mark, they fix the fatal
hook to the body — they drag him away to the spoliarium - they
scatter new sand over the stage! Pansa regrets nothing more
than that he is not rich enough to strew the arena with borax
and cinnabar, as Nero used to do.
