Home Life of Great Authors

by Hattie Tyng Griswold

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 noble 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, passionately 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 anticipated, 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 coarser 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.