Home Life of Great Authors Part 14

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EDWARD BULWER LYTTON.

The British aristocracy has given to literature a few names which the world will not willingly let die. But its contribution to the world's genius has not been great in proportion to its numbers, its exceptional opportunities for culture, and the great prominence which has naturally been given to its achievements. From out its ranks have come few of the great names in English literature.

Among these the name of Lord Lytton, or Bulwer, as he is more generally known in literature, holds a prominent place. For the period of a long life he lived in the world's eye, and the world feels a great interest in the character of the man as well as in his writings.

His paternal ancestors had been settled in Norfolk since the Conquest.

The name of Bulwer attests the Scandinavian origin of the Norman soldier. The great-grandfather of Edward Bulwer married the heiress of the Earles of Heydon Hall, which became the family residence. Our hero's father "contracted a romantic, if illicit, attachment to a young person of great beauty, who eloped with him from a boarding-school in which she was a teacher, and, though too haughty a man to marry beneath him, he had at least the justice to say that while she lived he would never marry any one else. And when the hand of a great and n.o.ble heiress was offered him, although a very ambitious man, he refused her upon the ground that he was not quite satisfied with the shape of her ladyship's nose." General Bulwer built for his mistress a villa in the neighborhood of London, and as he was driving into the yard on his return from some military duties which had detained him longer than usual, she ran out to meet him. In this hurried action she received a kick from one of the horses, and died of the injury.

After this, the General, who is described by his son as being of a very powerful, self-willed nature, wholly uncultivated by literature, but with that ability for action which takes lessons from life,--married the mother of our hero, a delicate girl, with intelligent, dark-blue eyes, with shy sensitive temper, pa.s.sionately fond of poetry, and deeply under the influences of religion. Her family was as ancient as that of the Bulwers, the Lyttons having intermarried with many houses famous in history. But family concord was not one of the characteristics of the Lytton family, and Bulwer's grandfather and grandmother had lived stormily together for a few years, and separated by mutual consent. The essential faults are said to have been all on the side of the grandfather. The only daughter of the uncongenial pair was not permitted to dwell permanently with either. She was sent at the age of five to a large school, where she lived a sad life for a long time, without any of the tender care and affection which such a child craves, and must have, for anything like a healthful child-life. After a while she went to live with her father, and still later with her mother, from whose house she was married to General Bulwer. He was not a man who could appreciate the rarer qualities of Miss Lytton. He could have no share in her intellectual life and no sympathy with her religious nature. But the elegance of her manners satisfied his pride, her domestic habits gave him promise of a peaceful home, and, greatest merit of all, her features suited him. He liked an aquiline nose. A nose that turned up the least bit, his son tells us, would have disgusted him with a Venus. The lady's nose in this instance proving satisfactory, a happy marriage was antic.i.p.ated, although the bridegroom had buried his heart in the grave of a mistress, and the bride had but partially recovered from an unhappy attachment for a man beneath herself in rank,--in fact, a merchant's son. But the marriage proved far from a happy one, and was closed after a few years by the sudden death of General Bulwer. Our hero thus writes of him:--

"Peace to thy dust, O my father! Faults thou hadst, but those rather of temper than of heart,--of deficient education and the manlike hardness of imperious will than of ungenerous disposition or epicurean corruption. If thou didst fail to give happiness to the woman whom thou didst love, many a good man is guilty of a similar failure. It had been otherwise, I verily believe, hadst thou chosen a partner of intellectual cultivation more akin to thine own,--of hardier nerve and coa.r.s.er fibre,--one whom thy wrath would less have terrified, whom thy converse would more have charmed; of less moral spirit and more physical courage."

Verily we are tempted to ask when we read of this marriage--as well as of the son's own marriage and the marriages of many other members of the English aristocracy whose domestic lives have latterly seen the light of day--whether less of moral spirit and more of physical courage is not the great need among women who aspire to the peerage. Strong nerves and a martial spirit, if they could not secure peace, would at least place the combatants upon a more equal footing, and the world would be spared the spectacle of the mild-mannered and meek bullied by the overbearing and violent.

As for Bulwer himself, he had the hot blood, imperious temper, and remorseless will of the combined Bulwers and Lyttons; and, it must be added, a vanity and egotism so boundless as to be peculiarly his own, and an arrogance and superciliousness which throughout life were a constant drawback, and which interfered materially with the acknowledgment by the world of his really great powers.

At the early age of seventeen this precocious young man, who had already been several years in society, felt his first sensations of love; and he talked of it to the end of his days as being the one genuine pa.s.sion of his life. He tells the pretty story very feelingly, and no doubt it was a genuine boyish romance. Hear him:--

"Ah, G.o.d! how palpably, even in hours the least friendly to remembrance, there rises before me when I close my eyes that singularly dwarfed tree which overshadowed the little stream, throwing its boughs half-way to the opposite margin. I dare not revisit that spot, for there we were wont to meet (poor children that we were!), thinking not of the world we had scarce entered, dreaming not of fate and chance, full only of our first-born, our ineffable love. It was so unlike the love of grown-up people; so pure that not one wrong thought ever crossed it, and yet so pa.s.sionate that never again have I felt any emotion comparable to the intensity of its tumultuous tenderness."

When the meetings so feelingly described became known to the lady's father, she was sent away at once, and Bulwer never saw her again. Very soon after, she was forced into a marriage against which her heart protested. For three years she strove to smother the love which consumed her; and when she sunk under the conflict, and death was about to relieve her, she wrote to Bulwer informing him of the sufferings she had undergone, affirming her deathless love, and begging him to visit her grave.

His son says:--

"The impressions left on my father by this early phantom of delight were indelible and colored the whole of his afterlife. He believed that far beyond all other influences they shaped his character, and they never ceased to haunt his memory. Allusions to it are constantly recurring in all his published works, and in none of them more than in the last of all. He was much affected by them, and not knowing to what they referred, we wondered that the creations of his fancy should exercise such power over him. They were not creations of fancy, but the memories of fifty years past."

After the abrupt end of his first romance he conceived a sort of friendship for Lady Caroline Lamb, which came very near the verge of love. Lady Caroline was between thirty and forty years old at this time, it being subsequent to her intrigue with Lord Byron. She looked much younger than her age,--thanks, perhaps, to a slight rounded figure and a child-like mode of wearing her pale golden hair in loose curls. She had large hazel eyes, good teeth, and a pleasant laugh. She had to a surpa.s.sing degree the qualities that charm, and never failed to please.

Her conversation was remarkable, and she was the only woman, Byron said, who never bored him. She was a creature of caprice, and impulse, and whim, and had been known to send a page around to all her guests at Brocket at three o'clock in the morning to say that she was playing the great organ on the staircase, and requested the pleasure of their company. And it is added that the invitation was never refused, and that daylight would find them listening, spellbound and without a thought of bed. Here is Bulwer's own account of the close of this little episode with Lady Caroline. He was staying at her house, and had become very jealous of a Mr. Russell.

"I went downstairs. Russell sat opposite me. He wore a ring. It was one which Lord Byron had given Lady Caroline: one which was to be worn only by those she loved. I had often worn it myself. She had wanted me to accept it, but I would not, because it was so costly.

And now _he_ wore it. Can you conceive my resentment, my wretchedness? After dinner I threw myself upon a sofa. Music was playing. Lady Caroline came to me. 'Are you mad?' said she. I looked up. The tears stood in my eyes. I could not have spoken a word for the world. What do you think she said aloud? 'Don't play this melancholy air,--it affects Mr. Bulwer so that he is actually weeping.' My tears, my softness, my love were over in a moment.

When we broke up in the evening I said to her, 'Farewell forever.

It is over. Now I see you in your true light. Instead of jealousy I only feel contempt. Farewell. Go and be happy.'"

This account reads very much like a page from "Pelham" or "Devereux,"

and the whole account of his affairs of the heart is written in a similar manner.

All this had pa.s.sed before he was twenty-two. At that age he first met Rosina Wheeler, at an evening party. He was talking busily to his mother when she suddenly exclaimed: "O Edward, what a singularly beautiful face! Do look. Who can she be?"

An elderly gentleman was leading through the room in which they sat a young lady of remarkable beauty, who, from the simplicity of her costume, seemed to be unmarried. He turned his head languidly, as he says, with a strangely troubled sensation, and beheld his fate before him,--in other words, his future wife.

Rosina Wheeler was at this time twenty-three, and in the full blossom of a very remarkable beauty. Her father was an Irish squire, who at the age of seventeen had married a very beautiful girl two years younger than himself. The natural result of this marriage was a separation, after the birth of two children, one of them the future Lady Lytton. Domestic infelicity seems to have been the heritage of every one connected with the Bulwer family even in the remotest manner.

And now it appears again in the family of the woman to whom the latest scion of the old house is to be united. Bulwer's mother opposed the match strenuously from the first. Her pride, her prudence, her forebodings, and her motherly susceptibilities all rose up against it.

And she never gave her consent to it, or became really reconciled to it after it had taken place. Although very unwilling to displease his mother in so vital a matter, Bulwer seems to have gone steadily on to such a consummation; not borne away certainly by strong pa.s.sion, but rather influenced, it would seem, by a tender regard for the feelings of Miss Wheeler, who had grown much attached to him. Not without many a struggle with himself, however, did he yield. He was tenderly attached to his mother, and it was a great grief to him to do so important a thing without her approval; and, moreover, his income and all his worldly prospects depended upon her. He does not seem to have been particularly happy over his own prospects, for in one of the last letters he wrote before marriage he says:--

"My intended is very beautiful, very clever, very good; but, alas!

the human heart is inscrutable. I love and am loved. My heart is satisfied, my judgment, too. And still I am wretched."

There have been published within a few years a great number of the love-letters written by Bulwer to Miss Wheeler about this time. His son publishes none of them in the late biography, and it is safe to say that in all the range of literature there are no other letters filled with such drivelling idiocy as these. Had they been written by some c.o.c.kney coachman to some sentimental housemaid, they should stand as the finest specimens of that grade of literature extant; but that they should have been written by one of the foremost literary men of his time is a marvel, and seems to show to what extremes of imbecility love may reduce even wise men. As for Lady Lytton herself, one cares to know little more than that she could have married a man who habitually addressed her as his "sugar-plum," his "tootsy-wootsy," and his "sweety-weety." A woman clothed and in her right mind, who could deliberately accept such a personage for a life-long companion, calls for small sympathy from a matter-of-fact world, unless, indeed, it be that we bestow our sympathy simply upon the grounds of her feeble-mindedness.

In less than three years began the vulgar quarrels which finally ended the marriage. Bulwer is described by a visitor to the house about this time as appearing "like a man who has been flayed and is sore all over."

His temperament was by nature extremely sensitive and irritable. And the combined Bulwer and Lytton blood was hot, turbulent, and at times quite uncontrollable. There are records of scenes of absolute personal violence against his wife, and one instance is given where at dinner, during the momentary absence of the servant, he bit her cheek till the blood flowed freely. After marriage, his income being cut off by his mother, he for a time wrote for his bread; and the work, close and confining as it was, told very much upon his health.

"His feelings became morbidly acute, and all the petty household worries were to his exasperated brain what frictions and jostlings are to highly inflamed flesh. His wife had little of his society.

He was nearly always writing or making preparation for writing, and when they were together his nervous irritability vented itself at every unwelcome circ.u.mstance in complaints, or taunts, or fits of anger. To harsh words and unjust reproaches his wife returned meek replies. Any distress his conduct occasioned her she concealed from him. She was studious to please him, and endeavored to antic.i.p.ate every want and wish. Her gentleness and forbearance increased his grat.i.tude and devotion to her, and whenever he perceived that she was wounded he was full of remorse."

So says her son, and continues:--

"The mischief was aggravated by the unfortunate occurrence that my mother being unable to suckle her first-born child, it had been nursed out of the house. Her maternal instinct, thus thwarted in its origin, never revived. The care of children was ever after distasteful to her. Losing this satisfaction to her affections, unless she had company in the house she was lonely. As it was, neither of them saw the issue to which the divided life was tending."

That issue, as all the world knows, was a separation of the husband and wife, and a life-long quarrel of almost unimagined bitterness. No wonder that Bulwer's hand faltered when be tried to write of it, and that, having brought his autobiography up to this point, he laid it by, not daring to go on. He always cherished the intention of resuming it, but could never bring himself to the point of doing so. He could not tell the story; but Lady Lytton could, and did, continuing to do so till her dying day. The picture of her which her son has given does not seem like that of a woman who would do all the things which she notoriously did.

But doubtless she had her amiable and engaging side, and was half maddened by her wrongs. Justin McCarthy says:--

"I do not know whether I ought to call it a quarrel. Can that be called a quarrel, piteously asks the man in 'Juvenal,' where my enemy only beats and I am beaten? Can that be called a quarrel in which, so far as the public could judge, the wife did all the denunciation, and the husband made no reply? Lady Lytton wrote novels for the purpose of satirizing her husband and his friends,--his parasites, she called them. Lady Lytton attributed to her husband the most odious meannesses, vices, and cruelties; but the public, with all its love of scandal, seems to have steadfastly refused to take her ladyship's word for these accusations. d.i.c.kens she denounced and vilified as a mere parasite and sycophant of her husband. Disraeli she caricatured under the t.i.tle of Jericho Jabber. This sort of thing she kept always going on. Sometimes she issued pamphlets to the women of England, calling on them to take up her quarrel, which, somehow, they never did. Once, when Sir Edward was on the hustings addressing his const.i.tuents at a county election, her ladyship suddenly appeared, mounted the platform, and 'went' for him. I do not know anything of the merits of the quarrel, but have always thought that something like insanity must have been the explanation of much of her conduct. But it is beyond doubt that her husband's conduct was remarkable for its quiet, indomitable patience and dignity."

Let the veil drop over the blighted lives, knowing as we do that the human heart is so dark and intricate a labyrinth that we cannot claim to understand it by half knowledge, and that however we might judge these two with any light which we can possibly have in our day, we should be in danger of doing each a grievous wrong.

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ALFRED TENNYSON.

It is related by Miss Thackeray that the grandfather of Alfred Tennyson, when that poet was young, asked him to write an elegy on his grandmother, who had recently died, and when it was written gave him ten shillings, with the remark, "There, that is the first money you have ever earned by your poetry, and, take my word for it, it will be the last." How little he foresaw at that time the fame and fortune which the youth's poetry was to bring him, and the lasting honor he was to bestow upon the family name! That name was already an honorable one, for the Tennysons were an old family, and had good blood in their veins. The home was the old rectory of Somersby, where George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., held sway in the old-time priestly fashion for a lifetime. He is described as a man of strong character and high principle, full of accomplishments, and gifted withal; a strikingly handsome man, with impressive manners. Twelve children were given to his hands, of whom Alfred was the third. The eldest, Frederick, and the second, Charles, were both poets, and not without merit,--especially Charles, who published a volume of sonnets, which gave great pleasure to so good a judge as Coleridge; and the Laureate is himself very fond of his brother's work.

The children led a very free and unconstrained life in that beautiful part of Lincolnshire, and had a few friends to whom they attached themselves for life. Arthur Hallam was Alfred's intimate, and later on he became engaged to one of his sisters. Young Hallam's early death was the first shadow upon their lives. But who would not willingly die at twenty-three to be immortalized in such a poem as "In Memoriam"?

Of Arthur Hallam's own quality as a poet we get a pleasant glimpse in the sonnet addressed to his betrothed when he began to teach her Italian:--

"Lady, I bid thee to a sunny dome, Ringing with echoes of Italian song; Henceforth to thee these magic halls belong, And all the pleasant place is like a home.

Hark, on the right, with full piano tone, Old Dante's voice encircles all the air; Hark yet again, like flute-tones mingling rare Comes the keen sweetness of Petrarca's moan.

Pa.s.s thou the lintel freely; without fear Feast on the music. I do better know thee Than to suspect this pleasure thou dost owe me Will wrong thy gentle spirit, or make less dear."

After Tennyson had made his first literary successes, and after the family life at Somersby was broken up, we next hear of him through a warm and life-long friend. Away back in 1844 Carlyle in one of his letters to Emerson gives the following description of the then young and rising poet. It is an authentic glimpse of the real man, as he then appeared to one of the shrewdest and most critical of the men of that day.