I hold that these are virtues and services which ought to outweigh even very grave personal and artistic errors. We often hear that this or that great poet or romancist has painted men as they are; this other as they ought to be. I think George Sand paints men as they are, and also not merely as they ought to be, but as they can be. The sum of the lesson taught by her books is one of confidence in man's possibilities, and hope in his steady progress. At the same time she is entirely practical in her faith and her aspirations. She never expects that the trees are to grow up into the heavens, that men and women are to be other than men and women. She does not want them to be other; she finds the springs and sources of their social regeneration in the fact that they are just what they are, to begin with. I am afraid some of the ladies who seem to base their scheme of woman's emancipation and equality on the assumption that, by some development of time or process of schooling, a condition of things is to be brought about where difference of sex is no longer to be a disturbing power, will find small comfort or encouragement in the writings of George Sand. She deals in realities altogether; the realities of life, even when they are such as to shallow minds may seem mere sentiments and ecstasies; the realities of society, of suffering, of passion, of inanimate nature. There is in her nothing unmeaning, nothing untrue; there is in her much error, doubtless, but no sham.
I believe George Sand is growing into a quiet and beautiful old age. After a life of storm and stress, a life which, metaphorically at least, was "worn by war and passion," her closing years seem likely to be gilded with the calm glory of an autumnal sunset. One is glad to think of her thus happy and peaceful, accepting so tranquilly the reality of old age, still laboring with her unwearied pen, still delighting in books, and landscapes, and friends, and work. The world can well afford to forget as soon as possible her literary and other errors. Of the vast mass of romances, stories, plays, sketches, criticisms, pamphlets, political articles, even, it is said, ministerial manifestoes of republican days, which she poured out, only a few comparatively will perhaps be always treasured by posterity; but these will be enough to secure her a classic place. And she will not be remembered by her writings alone. Hers is probably the most powerful individuality displayed by any modern Frenchwoman. The influence of Madame Roland was but a glittering unreality, that of Madame de Staël only a boudoir and coterie success, when compared with the power exercised over literature, human feeling, and social law, by the energy, the courage, the genius, even the very errors and extravagances of George Sand.
EDWARD BULWER, LORD LYTTON.
Ten years ago an important political question was agitating the English House of Commons and the English public. It was the old question of Parliamentary Reform in a new shape. Thirty years before Lord John Russell had pleaded the right of the middle classes to have a voice in the election of their Parliamentary representatives; this time he was asserting a similar right for the working population. Then he had to contend against the opposition of the aristocracy only; this time he had to fight against the combined antagonism of the aristocracy and the middle classes, the latter having made common cause with their old enemies to preserve a monopoly of their new privileges. The debate in the House of Commons on the proposed Reform Bill of 1860 was long and bitter. When it was reaching its height, a speaker arose on the Tory side of the House whose appearance on the scene of the debate lent a new and piquant interest to the night's discussion. He sat on the front bench of the Opposition, quite near to Disraeli himself. The moment he rose, every head craned forward to see him; the moment he began to speak, every ear was strained with keen curiosity to hear him. The ears were for a while sorely tried and perplexed. What was he saying—nay, what language was he speaking? What extraordinary, indescribable sounds were those which were heard issuing from his lips? Were they articulate sounds at all? For some minutes certainly those who like myself had never heard the speaker before were utterly bewildered. We could only hear what seemed to us an incoherent, inarticulate guttural jabber, like the efforts at speech of somebody with a mutilated tongue or excided palate. Anything like it I never heard before or since; for no subsequent listening to the same speaker ever produced nearly the same impression: either he had greatly improved in elocution, or his listener had grown used to him. But the night of this famous speech, nothing could have exceeded the extraordinary nature of the sensations produced on those who heard the orator for the first time. After a while we began to detect articulate sounds; then we guessed at and recognized words; then whole sentences began to shape themselves out of the guttural fag; and at last we grew to understand that, with an elocution the most defective and abominable ever possessed by mortal orator, this Tory speaker was really delivering a speech of astonishing brilliancy, ingenuity, and power. The sentences had a magnificent, almost majestic rotundity, energy, and power; they reminded one of something cut out of solid and glittering marble, at once so dazzling and so impressive. The speech was from first to last an aristocratic argument against the fitness of the working man to be anything but a political serf. In the true fashion of the aristocrat, the speaker was for patronizing the working man in every possible way; behaving to him as a kind and friendly master; seeing that he had a decent home to live in and coals and blankets in winter; but all the time insisting that the ruin of England must follow any successful attempt to place political power in the hands of "poverty and passion." The speech overflowed with illustration, ingenious analogy, felicitous quotation, brilliant epigram, and political paradoxes that were made to sound wondrously like maxims of wisdom. Despite all its hideous defects of delivery, this speech was, beyond the most distant comparison, the finest delivered on the Tory side during the whole of that long and memorable debate. For a time one was almost cheated into the belief that that elaborate and splendid diction, now so stately and now so sparkling, was genuine eloquence. Yet to the last the listener was frequently baffled by some uncouth, semi-articulate, hardly intelligible sound. "What on earth does he mean," asked a puzzled and indeed agonized reporter of some laboring brother, "by talking so often about the political authority of Joe Miller?" Careful inquiry elicited the fact that the name of the political authority to which the orator had been alluding was John Mill. Fortunately for his readers and his fame, the speaker had taken good care to write out his oration and send the manuscript to the newspapers.
Now this inarticulate orator, this Demosthenes without the pebble-training, was, as my readers have already guessed, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, then a baronet and a member of the House of Commons, now a peer. Undoubtedly he succeeded, by this and one or two other speeches, in securing for himself a place among the few great Parliamentary debaters of the day. Despite of physical defects which would have discouraged almost any other man from entering into public life at all, he had succeeded in winning a reputation as a great speaker in a debate where Palmerston, Gladstone, Bright, and Disraeli were champions. So deaf that he could not hear the arguments of his opponents, so defective in utterance as to become often almost unintelligible, he actually made the House of Commons doubt for a while whether a new great orator had not come among them. It was not great oratory after all; it was not true oratory of any kind; but it was a splendid imitation of the real thing—the finest electroplate anywhere to be found. "If it is not Bran, it is Bran's brother," says a Scottish proverb. If this speech of Bulwer-Lytton's was not true oratory, it was oratory's illegitimate brother.
Nearly a whole generation before the winning of that late success, Bulwer-Lytton had tried the House of Commons, and miserably, ludicrously failed. The young Tory members who vociferously cheered his great anti-reform speech of 1860, were in their cradles when Bulwer-Lytton first addressed the House of Commons, and having signally failed withdrew, as people supposed, altogether from Parliamentary life. His failure was even more complete than that of his friend Disraeli, and he took the failure more to heart. Rumor affirms that the first serious quarrel between Bulwer and his wife arose out of her vexation and disappointment at his break-down, and the bitter, provoking taunts with which she gave vent to her anger. I know no other instance of a rhetorical triumph so long delayed, and at length so completely effected. Nor can one learn that it was by any intervening practice or training that Bulwer in his declining years atoned for the failure of his youth. He was never that I know of a public speaker; he won his Parliamentary success in defiance of Charles James Fox's famous axiom, that a speaker can only improve himself at the expense of his audiences. Between his failure and his triumph Bulwer-Lytton may be said to have had no political audience.
A statesman Bulwer-Lytton never became, although he held high office in a Tory Cabinet. He did little or nothing to distinguish himself, unless there be distinction in writing some high-flown, eloquent despatches, such as Ernest Maltravers might have penned, to the discontented islanders of Ionia; and it was he, if I remember rightly, who thought of sending out "Gladstone the Philhellene" on that mission of futile conciliation which only misled the Ionians and amused England. It always seemed to me that in his political career Bulwer acted just as one of the heroes of his own romances might have done. Having suffered defeat and humiliation, he vowed a vow to wrest from Fate a victory upon the very spot which had seen his discomfiture; and he kept his word, won his victory, and then calmly quitted the field forever. A more prosaic explanation might perhaps be found in the fact that weak physical health rendered it impossible for Bulwer to encounter the severe continuous labor which English political life exacts. But I prefer for myself the more romantic and less commonplace explanation, and I hope my readers will do likewise. I prefer to think of the great romancist retrieving after thirty years of silence his Parliamentary defeat, and then, having reconciled himself with Destiny, retiring from the scene contented, to struggle in that arena no more. In all seriousness, there must be some quality of greatness in the man who, after bearing such a defeat for so many years, can struggle with Fate again, and accomplish so conspicuous a success.