[!-- H2 anchor --] MR. E. LYTTON BULWER.
In looking over, not very long since, a long—neglected, thin portfolio of my twin-brother, the late Willis Gaylord Clark of Philadelphia, I came across a sealed parcel endorsed "London Correspondence." It contained letters to him from many literary persons of more or less eminence at that time in the British metropolis; among others, two from Miss Landon ("L.E.L."); two from Mrs. S. C. Hall, the versatile and clever author of Tales and Sketches of the Irish Peasantry, cordial, closely—written and recrossed to the remotest margin; one from her husband, Mr. S.C. Hall; three or four from Mr. Chorley; and lastly, five or six elaborate letters from Mr. E. Lytton Bulwer, sent through his American publishers, the Brothers Harper, by Washington Irving, then secretary of legation to the American embassy "near the court of St. James." Enclosed with these last-mentioned letters was a communication from Miss Fanny Kemble, to whom they had been sent for perusal, and who, in returning them, did not hesitate to say that she did Not share his young American correspondent's admiration for the author of Pelham. She had met him frequently in London society, and regarded his manners as affected and himself as a reflex of his own conceited model of a gentleman—a style which Thackeray perhaps did not too grossly caricature when he made Chawls Yellowplush announce, from his own lips, his sounding name and title to a distinguished London drawing-room as "Sa-wa-Edou-wah'd-à-Lyttod-à-Bulwig!"
The poems which my brother had written for two London journals at the time of their first appearance and sudden popularity, the London Literary Gazette and, I believe, the Athenæum, led to the correspondence I have mentioned; and from the letters of Mr. Bulwer I have extracted a few passages, as somewhat personal in their nature, besides being characteristic of his tone of thought and manner of expression at that period of his career:
"An author who has a just confidence in his attainments and powers, who knows that his mind is imperishable and capable of making daily additions to its own strength, is always more desirous of seeing the censures (if not mere abuse) than the praises of those who aspire to judge him; and any suggestions or admonitions thus bestowed are seldom disregarded. But if he is to profit by criticism, the motive must be known to him. It is by no means natural to take the advice of an enemy. When the critic enters his department of literature in the false guise of urbanity and candor merely to conceal an incapable and huckstering soul, he only awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under such circumstances, invariably rises above its detractor, and leaves him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the object of his fear or envy."
"Seldom indeed is it that injustice fails to be seen through, or that the policy of interested condemnation escapes undetected. They first produce the excitements, then furnish the triumphs, of genius."
"There is a charm in writing for the pure and intelligent young worth all the plaudits of sinister or hypocritical wisdom. At a certain age, and while the writings that please have a gloss of novelty about them, hiding the blemishes that may afterward be discovered as their characteristics,—then it is that the young convert their approbation into enthusiasm. An author benefits in a wide and most pleasing range of public opinion by this natural and common disposition in the young; and the only cloud thrown athwart the rays of pleasure thus saluting his spirit is flung from the thought that they who are thus moved by the movings of his own mind may come in a few years to look upon his pages with hearts less ardent in their sympathies, and with altered eyes, which have acquired additional keenness by looking longer upon the world."
"The competent American littérateur has a glorious career before him. So much is there in your magnificent country, hitherto undescribed and unexpressed, in scenery, manners, morals, that all may be wells from which he may be the first to drink. Yet it cannot be expected—for it has passed to a proverb that escape from persecution and detraction can never and nowhere be the lot of literature—that there will not be many instances, even in America, where every attempt on the part of gifted writers (and young writers especially, who are commonly regarded with eyes of invidious jaundice by the elders, whose waning reputations they may through industry either supplant or explode) will be rendered an uneasy struggle, and sometimes almost a curse, by the envy of those who deny approval while blind to success, and the affected disdain of those who exaggerate demerit. Yet these obstacles warm the spirit of honest ambition, and enhance its inevitable conquests."
"It is a sight of gratification and pride to behold a laborer in the vineyard of letters escaping from the envy, the jealousy, the rivalry, the leaven of all uncharitableness, with which literary intercourse is so often polluted. The writers of England have been tardy in their justice, not only to the progress, circumstances and customs of America, but to her intellectual offspring; and the time is not remote—nay, has already dawned—when, in this regard, the spirit of Change wields his wand and finds obedience to his prerogatives."
"'No hostility between nations affects the arts:' so said the old maxim, but it has rarely been found a truism. They who feel it, feel also the virtue which dictated the aphorism. Men whose object is to enlighten the nations or exalt the judgment or (the least ambition) to refine the tastes of others—men who feel that this object is dearer to them than a petty and vain ambition—feel also that all who labor in the same cause are united with them in a friendship which exists in one climate as in another—in a I republic or in a despotism: these are the best cosmopolites, the truest citizens of the world."
The foregoing extracts will make it obvious that Mr. Bulwer was at that time sore at the treatment he had received at the hands of certain of his critics, who were by no means unanimous in their estimation of his genius. He was very sensitive at all times of adverse comment upon his writings. Thackeray wounded him woefully when he made "Chawls Yellowplush" review him characteristically in Punch. These most amusing papers ought to have been included in Thackeray's published miscellaneous writings, but they were not, although Bulwer is humorously travestied in Punch's "Prize Novelists," together with Lover, Ainsworth, and Disraeli. The subjoined will show the style of the "littery" footman, who, as a critic, "sumtimes gave kissis, sumtimes kix":