AT WORK. HE year in which Falkland and O'Neill were published, Bulwer Ireland, grandson (through his mother, nee the Hon. Margaret Massy) of Hugh, the first Lord Massey, of Duntryleague. The army was abandoned for a quiet, beech-embowered home at Woodcote, in Oxfordshire; and here the student fell to the great labour of his life, with his whole soul and strength. In 1829 he published The Disowned; and immediately afterwards (1830) Devereux.* In these works, we see the man of the noblest aspirations, as well as the insatiable student. His biographer dwells on the elevating character of Algernon Mordaunt in The Disowned; and on the delicate and refined labyrinths of motive, "thridded with masterly adroitness in the complex mazes of Devereux." Silken threads of thought, subtle analyses of motive, humour at once delicate and searching, a chivalrous spirit, never making truce with the base or mean, are characteristics of all the vast sum of literary labour with which Lord Lytton has enriched his country. His painstaking conscientiousness and his reverence for art-for finish and thoroughness in his slightest work—are manifested in the brilliant series of Prefaces that accompany the collected editions of his works. He is a believer in work, and at the same time a splendid example of its fruit. In his Dedication of Devereux, we find the best account of his studies at Woodcote; and of the deep, serious purpose that underlies every page of his hundred volumes : "Permit me, as a memento of the pleasant hours we passed together, and the intimacy we formed by the winding shores and the rosy seas of the old Parthenope, to dedicate to you this romance. It was written in, * "It affords conclusive evidence, this last production, of its writer's intense devotion about this period to the study of the abstract science of Metaphysics, studies conducted by him with a serious view from conflicting or jarring theories, of some original system, at once novel, reliable, and comprehensive."-MARK ROCHESTER. perhaps, the happiest period of my literary life—when success began to brighten upon my labours, and it seemed to me a fine thing to make a name. Reputation, like all possessions, fairer in the hope than in the reality, shone before me in the gloss of novelty, and I had never felt the envy it excites, the weariness it occasions, nor (worse than all) that coarse and painful notoriety, that something between the gossip and the slander which attends every man whose writings become known-surrendering the grateful privacies of life to 'The gaudy, babbling, and remorseless day.' In short, yet almost a boy (for, in years at least, I was little more, at the date of the publication of Pelham and The Disowned), and full of the sanguine arrogance of hope, I pictured to myself far greater triumphs than it will ever be mine to achieve; and never did architect of dreams build up his pyramid upon (alas !) a narrower base, or a more crumbling soil! . . . Time cures us effectually of these self-conceits, and brings us, somewhat harshly, from the gay extravagance of confounding the much that we design with the little that we can accomplish. "The Disowned and Devereux were both written in retirement, and in the midst of metaphysical studies and investigations, varied and miscellaneous enough, if not very deeply conned. At that time I was indeed engaged in preparing for the press a philosophical work, which I had afterwards the good sense to postpone to a riper age and a more sobered mind. But the effect of these studies is somewhat prejudicially visible in both the romances I have referred to; and the external and dramatic colourings which belong to fiction are too often forsaken for the inward and subtle analysis of motives, characters, and actions. The workman was not sufficiently master of his art to forbear the vanity of parading the wheels of the mechanism, and was too fond of calling attention to the minute and tedious operations by which the movements were to be performed, and the result obtained. I believe that an author is generally pleased with his work, less in proportion as it is good, than in proportion as it fulfils the idea with which he commenced it. He is rarely, perhaps, an accurate judge how far the execution is in itself faulty or meritorious --but he judges with tolerable success how far it accomplishes the end and object of the conception. He is pleased with his work, in short, according as he can say, 'This has expressed what I meant it to convey.' But the reader, who is not in the secret of the author's original design, usually views the work through a different medium-and is, perhaps, in this, the wiser critic of the two for the book that wanders most from the idea which originated it, may often be better than that which is rigidly limited to the unfolding and denouement of a single conception. If we accept this solution, we may be enabled to understand why an author not unfrequently makes favourites of some of his productions most condemned by the public. For my own part, I remember, Devereux pleased me better than Pelham or The Disowned, because the execution more exactly corresponded with the design. It expressed with tolerable fidelity what I meant it to express. That was a happy age, my dear Auldjo, when, on finishing a work, we could feel contented with our labour, and fancy we had done our best. Now, alas! I have learnt enough of the wonders of the art to recognise all the deficiencies of the disciple, and to know that no author worth the reading can ever in one single work do all of which he is capable. "No man, I believe, ever wrote anything really good, who did not feel he had the ability to write something better. Writing, after all, is a cold and coarse interpreter of thought. How much of the imagination, how much of the intellect, evaporates, and is lost while we seek to embody it in words! Man made language, and God the genius. Nothing short of an eternity could enable men who imagine, think, and feel, to express all they have imagined, thought, and felt. Immortality, the spiritual desire, is the intellectual necessity. "In Devereux I wished to portray a man flourishing in the last century, with the train of mind and sentiment peculiar to the present; describing a life, and not its dramatic epitome. The historical characters introduced are not closely woven with the main plot, like those in the fictions of Sir Walter Scott, but are rather like the narrative romances of an earlier school, designed to relieve the predominant interest, and give a greater air of truth and actuality to the supposed memoir. It is a fiction which deals less with the picturesque than with the real. Of the principal character thus introduced (the celebrated and graceful, but charlatanic Bolingbroke) I still think that my sketch, upon the whole, is substantially just. We must not judge of the politicians of one age by the lights of another. Happily, we now demand in a statesman a desire for other aims than his own advancement; but, at that period, ambition was almost universally selfish—the statesman was yet a courtier--a man whose very destiny it was to intrigue, to plot, to glitter, to deceive. It is in proportion as politics have ceased to be a secret science-in proportion as courts are less to be flattered, and tools to be managed, that politicians have become useful and honest men ; and the statesman now directs a people, where once he outwitted an antechamber. Compare Bolingbroke -not with the men and by the rules of this day-but with the men, and by the rules of the last. He will lose nothing in comparison with a Walpole-with a Marlborough, on the one side-with an Oxford or a Swift, upon the other. "And now, my dear Auldjo, you have had enough of my egotisms. As our works grow up-like old parents, we grow garrulous, and love to recur to the happier days of their childhood; we talk over the pleasant pain they cost us in their rearing—and memory renews the season of dreams and hopes; we speak of their faults as of things past—of their merits as of things enduring. We are proud to see them still living, and, after many a harsh ordeal and rude assault, keeping a certain station in the world; we hoped, perhaps, something better for them in their cradle -but, as it is, we have good cause to be contented. You, a fellow author, and one whose spirited and charming sketches embody so much of per sonal adventure, and therefore so much connect themselves with associations of real life as well as of the closet; you know, and must feel, with me, that these, our books, are a part of us, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh." The author's fondness for his later works is expressed in this appeal to the public : "But this, at least, O sagacious Public!-let me advise and implore, all ye who have purchased, at six shillings each, Pelham, or Eugene Aram, Paul Clifford, or The Disowned;-lose not the opportunity now to purchase on the same easy terms Rienzi, and Ernest Maltravers; Alice, or the Mysteries; Godolphin, The Pilgrims of the Rhine," &c.; and so unite under your kindly roof a now scattered family, whose members, in return, will be ever at hand to cheer, it may be, an hour of lassitude or sickness; or talk to you of life as it is, and has been, as you sit by the writer's hearth, weary of your own thoughts, and willing to be amused." In 1830 Bulwer Lytton left the beeches of Woodcote for Mayfair-here he almost at once produced Paul Clifford in prose, and the Siamese Twins in verse. This semi-satirical poem has shared the fate of Falkland: it is severely excluded from the "collected works." I remember my father replying to a young litterateur who had attacked him in some forgotten Pasquin, and was expressing his sorrow and repentance, with this "Few young men have not spilt a little ink they had better have left in the horn." And a shake of the hand finished the subject. The Siamese Twins had better have remained in the ink-horn; and we will say no more about them. Of Paul Clifford, however, much might be said; and, indeed, very much has been said. Lord Lytton has himself taken up the subject, and dealt effectually with it in his Preface to the 1845 edition of Night and Morning. 66 Long since," he observes," in searching for new regions in the art to which I am a servant, it seemed to me that they might be found lying far, and rarely trodden beyond that range of conventional morality in which novelist after novelist had intrenched himself—amongst those subtle recesses in the ethics of human life in which Truth and Falsehood dwell undisturbed and unseparated. The vast and dark poetry around usthe poetry of modern civilization and daily existence-is shut out from us in much, by the shadowy giants of prejudice and fear. He who would arrive at the fairy land must face the phantoms. Betimes, I set mysel to the task of investigating the motley world to which our progress humanity has attained, caring little what misrepresentation I incurred what hostility I provoked, in searching through a devious labyrinth for the foot-tracks of Truth. "In the pursuit of this object, I am, not vainly, conscious that I have had my influence on my time-that I have contributed, though humbly and indirectly, to the benefits which public opinion has extorted from Government and Laws. While (to content myself with a single example) the ignorant or malicious were decrying the moral of Paul Clifford, I consoled myself with perceiving that its truths had stricken deep-that many, whom formal essays might not reach, were enlisted by the picture and the popular force of fiction into the service of that large and catholic humanity which frankly examines into the causes of crime, which ameliorates the ills of society by seeking to amend the circumstances by which they are occasioned; and commences the great work of justice to mankind by proportioning the punishment to the offence. That work, I know, had its share in the wise and great relaxation of our criminal code,— it has had its share in results yet more valuable, because leading to more comprehensive reforms-viz., in the courageous facing of the ills which the mock decorum of timidity would shun to contemplate, but which, till fairly fronted in the spirit of practical Christianity, sap daily, more and more, the walls in which blind Indolence would protect itself from restless Misery and rampant Hunger. For it is not till art has told the unthinking that nothing (rightly treated) is too low for its breath to vivify, and its wings to raise, that the herd awaken from their chronic lethargy of contempt, and the lawgiver is compelled to redress what the poet has lifted into esteem. In thus enlarging the boundaries of the novelist from trite and conventional to untrodden ends, I have seen, not with the jealousy of an author, but with the pride of an originator, that I have served as a guide to later and abler writers, both in England and abroad. If at times, while imitating, they have mistaken me, I am not answerable for their errors; or if, more often, they have improved where they borrowed, I am not envious of their laurels. They owe me at least this, that I prepared the way for their reception, and that they would have been less popular and more misrepresented if the outcry which bursts upon the first researches into new directions had not exhausted its noisy vehemence upon me. "In this novel of Night and Morning I have had various ends in view -subordinate, I grant, to the higher and more durable morality which belongs to the ideal, and instructs us playfully while it interests in the passions, and through the heart. First-to deal fearlessly with that universal unsoundness in social justice which makes distinctions so marked and iniquitous between Vice and Crime-viz., between the corrupting habits and the violent act—which scarce touches the former with the lightest twig, in the fasces-which lifts against the latter the edge of the Lictor's axe. Let a child steal an apple in sport, let a starveling steal a roll in despair, and law conducts them to the prison, for evil commune to mellow them for the gibbet. But let a man spend one apprenticeship from youth to old age in vice-let him devote a fortune, perhaps colossal, to the wholesale demoralization of his kind,—and he may be surrounded with the adulation of the so-called virtuous, and be served upon its knee by that lackey—the Modern World! I say not that law can, or that law should reach vice as it does crime; but I say that opinion may be more than the servile shadow of law. I impress not here, as in Paul Clifford, a material moral to work its effect on the journals, at the hustings, through constituents, and on legislation;-I direct myself to a channel less active, more tardy, but as sure—to the conscience that reigns, |