novelists themselves began to find hysterics funny, and some employed them to move the mirth of their readers, while the heroines of others were still swooning seriously. To this day they still "burst into tears," and "choke with sobs "; but so do women in life, and so did men once. In the novels of Richardson men weep quite as copiously as women, and upon as little provocation; and possibly one of the few good effects of the novel of adventure was to steel the nerves of the hero, at least, against the melting mood. It may be supposed that in the stress of saving his own life or taking the life of someone else, he could not find the moment for bursting into tears, or choking with sobs; and that he behaved something more like a man from mere pressure of business.
One may go further than this, and imagine that the two schools profited by 7 each other both in the way of warning and the way of example. Certainly the realescents, like Balzac and Hugo, and like Bulwer and Dickens, who followed the romancers, copied some of their virtues as well as their faults; and if they did not copy all the virtues of the early realists, they eschewed most of their faults.
Bulwer and Dickens both brought fiction back to the study of life upon terms as novel as their respective points of view were different. Bulwer was some ten years before Dickens in imparting the surprise they each had for his contemporaries; and the surprise that Bulwer operated in "Pelham" must have been much greater than we can imagine now when we look back and find the story so vulgarly and viciously commonplace under the glare of its worldly splendor. He called it "The Adventures of a Gentleman," and so it might have been, as gentlemen went in those days; but now it would rather be called "The Adventures of a Blackguard," so much have gentlemen or blackguards since improved. In abandoning the fanciful realm of the romancers, and returning to the world of actualities, Bulwer did not return to the unsparing ideal of the first realists, and seek the good of his reader by pointing the moral of his tale; still less did he conceive of the principle which has vitalized the later realists, and leave a faithful study of life, in cause and effect, to enforce its own lesson. In his early fiction we move in a region where the moral law is apparently suspended, as it often seems to be in this unhappy world of ours, and where good does not follow from good or evil from evil, as it finally does to our experience. Cynical conventions, and not the mysterious statutes written in all hearts, govern the world in which Henry Pelham adventures; and in this malarial, this mephitic air, the womanly gasps and perishes.
The literary technique is so much better than Scott's; the story is so much shapelier, the style so much clearer and quicker, the diction so much more accurate, that one at first feels a certain joy in escaping to it. But this soon fades, and you find yourself longing for the foolishest page of romance, for the worst of Scott, of Cooper, of Brockden Brown, of Mrs. Radcliffe, as something truer and better, after all; for these authors, at their worst, were untrue only to the manifestations of human nature, and Bulwer, at his best, misrepresents the surface of life, and he is untrue to its essence.
In the long stretch of his novels, from "Pelham," which was not the first, to "My Novel," which was not the last, but which respectively mark the extremes of his ill-doing and well-doing, there is an apparent effort to retrieve the primal error, the original sin of "Pelham." But one does not feel that Bulwer ever quite works out his redemption. Womanhood, at least, does not forgive him; or it does not countenance his work by its presence so far as to suffer him any memorable heroine. I read all his books at that most impressionable time of life when but to name a woman's name is to conjure up a phantom of delight in the young fancy; but nothing remains to me now from the multitude of his inventions in the figure of women but the vague image of the blind girl Nydia in "The Last Days of Pompeii." I think this sort of general remembrance or oblivion no bad test in such matters, and I feel pretty sure that if Bulwer had imagined any other heroine of equal authenticity. I should find some trace of her charm in my memory. But I find none from the books of an author whom once thought so brilliant and profound, and whom I now think so solemnly empty, so imposingly unimportant. He was a clever artificer, and he is to be credited with doing much to stay the decadence of British prose in fiction, and to rebuild the British novel upon shapely lines. But in all he has written there is an air of meditated purpose, a lack of impulse, an absence of spontaneity. He meant extremely well by literature; he had ideals so tall that he enjoyed something like a moral elevation from them; he respected the novelist so highly that he wished to call him the Poet, and did call him so in his prefaces; he was a man of polite learning, or at least, of scholarly reading; he wished always to do better than he did; in the lack of artistic instincts he had artistic principles, which if mistaken were sincere; and with all he was thoroughly mediocre. He did not grow as an artist, and his "Last Days of Pompeii," winch was one of his early novels, is one of his best.
III
As I have said, the blind girl Nydia remains to me from " The Last Days of Pompeii " not only chief but almost sole among Bulwer's heroines, in the sort that heroines outlive the definite recollection of their environment, their individuality, and sometimes of their very names. She is not without rivalry in her native pages: there are the Greek lone whom the hero Glaucus loves, and the Roman Julia who loves him, and who, in the make-up of a Pompeian grande dame, relumes her baleful fires more distinctly under the old eyes reviewing the scenes of the story. On the other hand, however, the slave girl has to contend in this later impression with the disadvantage of being a flower girl, now after flower girls have been done so much. But in her day flower girls in fiction were not yet so faded, and she came with such a freshness of appeal to a much simpler-hearted age than this, that youth in all ranks of life were touched and won by her. The romance, in fact, had an acceptance as great in its time as we have since given "Quo Vadis," which it is not saying much to say it surpassed in most essentials, and certainly preceded in such interest as the contrasts of late paganism and early Christianity always awaken.
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