"No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed, with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it, both."
When his short interview, which was to have been a final one, was over, that had happened which made a speedy marriage necessary, whatever the consequences might be.
The new conditions were clearly stated to old Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, but that formidable lady belonged to an earlier generation, and saw no reason for Quixotic behaviour. Her conscience had been trained in the eighteenth century, and all her blame was for Rosina Wheeler. Torn between his duty and his filial affection, Bulwer-Lytton now passed through a period of moral agony. He wrote to his mother: "I am far too wretched, and have had too severe a contest with myself, not to look to the future rather with despondency than pleasure, and the view you take of the matter is quite enough to embitter my peace of mind." Miss Wheeler, not unnaturally stung to anger, used disrespectful expressions regarding Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, and these bickerings filled the lover and son with indignation. His life, between these ladies, grew to be hardly worth living, and in the midst of one such crisis this brilliant young dandy of four-and-twenty wrote:—"I feel more broken-hearted, despondent, and sated than any old valetudinarian who has seen all his old hopes and friends drop off one by one, and finds himself left for the rest of his existence to the solitary possession of gloom and gout." Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton fought fiercely to the last, and Edward determined to close the matter; on August 29th, 1827, he married Rosina.
At first, in spite of, and even because of, the wild hostility of his mother, the marriage seemed successful. The rage of the mother drove the husband to the wife. Lord Lytton has noted that in later years all that his grandfather and his grandmother said about one another was unconsciously biassed by their memory of later complications. Neither Bulwer-Lytton nor Rosina could give an accurate history of their relations at the beginning, because the mind of each was prejudiced by their knowledge of the end. Each sought to justify the hatred which both had lived to feel, by representing the other as hateful from the first. But the letters survive, and the recollections of friends, to prove that this was entirely untrue. It must be admitted that their union was never based upon esteem, but wholly upon passion, and that from the first they lacked that coherency of relation, in moral respects, which was needed to fix their affections. But those who have dimly heard how bitterly these two unfortunate people hated one another in later life will be astonished to learn that they spent the two first years together like infatuated turtle-doves.
Their existence was romantic and absurd. Cut off from all support by the implacable anger of old Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, they depended on a combined income of £380 a year and whatever the husband could make to increase it. Accordingly they took a huge country house, Woodcot in Oxon, and lived at the rate of several thousands a year. There they basked in an affluent splendour of bad taste which reminds us of nothing in the world so much as of those portions of The Lady Flabella which Mrs. Wititterly was presently to find so soft and so voluptuous. The following extract from one of Rosina's lively letters-and she was a very sprightly correspondent—gives an example of her style, of her husband's Pelhamish extravagance, and of the gaudy recklessness of their manner of life. They had now been married nearly two years:—
"How do you think my audacious husband has spent his time since he has been in town? Why, he must needs send me down what he termed a little Christmas box, which was a huge box from Howel and James's, containing only eight Gros de Naples dresses of different colours not made up, four Gros des Indes, two merino ones, four satin ones, an amber, a black, a white and a blue, eight pocket handkerchiefs that look as if they had been spun out of lilies and air and brodée by the fairies, they are so exquisitely fine and so beautifully worked. Four pieces (16 yards in each) of beautiful white blonde, two broad pieces and two less broad, a beautiful and very large blue real cashmere shawl, a Chantilly veil that would reach from this to Dublin, and six French long pellerines very richly embroidered on the finest India muslin, three dozen pair of white silk stockings, one dozen of black, a most beautiful black satin cloak with very pretty odd sort of capes and trimmed round and up the sides with a very broad band of a new kind of figured plush—I forget what they call it (it came from Paris), and a hat of the same—such a hat as can only be made in the Rue Vivienne. You would think that this 'little Christmas box' would have been enough to have lasted for some time. However, he thought differently, for on New Year's morning before I was out of bed, there came a parcel by the mail, which on opening proved to be a large red Morocco case containing a bright gold chain, a yard and a half long, with the most beautiful and curious cross to it that I ever saw—the chain is as thick as my dead gold necklace, and you may guess what sort of a thing it is when I tell you that I took it to a jeweller here to have it weighed, and it weighed a pound all but an ounce. The man said it never was made for less than fifty guineas, but that he should think it had cost more."
Rosina, who has only £80 a year of her own, will not be outdone, and cannot "resist ordering" Edward "a gold toilette, which he has long wished for.... Round the rim of the basin and the handle of the ewer I have ordered a wreath of narcissus in dead gold, which, for Mr. Pelham, you'll own, is not a bad idea."
It would be expected that all this crazy display would lead the young couple rapidly and deeply into debt. That it did not do so is the most curious phase of the story. Bulwer-Lytton immediately, and apparently without the slightest difficulty, developed a literary industry the sober record of which approaches the fabulous. Walter Scott alone may be held to have equalled it. The giants of popular fiction did, indeed, enjoy larger single successes than Bulwer-Lytton did, but none of them, not Dickens himself, was so uniformly successful. Everything he wrote sold as though it were bread displayed to a hungry crowd. Even his poetry, so laboriously and lifelessly second-hand, always sold. He did not know what failure was; he made money by Devereux; even The New Timon went into many editions. To earn what was required, however—and in these early years he seems to have made £3000 his minimum of needful return—to live in the insane style which his wife and he demanded, an enormous nervous strain was required. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's temper had always been warm and eager; it now grew irritable to the highest degree. His mother continued to exasperate him; his wife suddenly failed to please him; his health waned; and he became the most miserable of men; yet without ceasing for a moment to be the most indefatigable of authors. The reader will follow the evolution of the tragedy, which is of poignant interest, in Lord Lytton's pages. The whole story is one of the most extraordinary in the history of literature.
It has been a feature of Bulwer-Lytton's curious posthumous fortune that he has seemed solitary in his intellectual if not in his political and social action. We think of him as one of those morose and lonely bees that are too busy gathering pollen to join the senate of the hive, and are dwellers in the holes of the rocks. It is quite true that, with a painful craving for affection, he had not the genius of friendship. The general impression given by his biography is one of isolation; in "the sea of life" he was one of those who are most hopelessly "enisled." Nothing is sadder than this severance of a delicate and sensitive temperament from those who surround it closely and to whom it stretches out its arms in vain. But a careful reading of these interesting volumes leaves us in no doubt of the cause of this loneliness. Bulwer-Lytton, with all his ardour and his generosity, was devoid of the gift of sympathy. In characters of a simpler mould a natural kindliness may take the place of comprehension. But Bulwer-Lytton had a lively and protean fancy which perpetually deceived him. In human relations he was always moving, but always on the wrong track.
The letters to his mother, to his wife, to his son, exemplify this unfortunate tendency. They are eloquent, they are even too eloquent, for Bulwer-Lytton intoxicated himself with his own verbosity; they are meant to be kind, they are meant to be just, they are meant to be wise and dignified and tender; but we see, in Lord Lytton's impartial narrative, that they scarcely ever failed to exasperate the receiver. His dealings with his son, of whom he was exquisitely proud and sensitively fond, are of the saddest character, because of the father's want of comprehension, haste of speech and intolerance of temper. The very fact that a son, a wife, or a mother could with impunity be addressed in terms of exaggerated sensibility, because there could be no appeal, was a snare to the too-ready pen of Bulwer-Lytton, which, poured out its oceans of ink without reflection and without apprehension. If violent offence were given, the post went out again later in the day, and equally violent self-humiliation would restore the emotional balance. But what could not be restored was the sense of confidence and domestic security.