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It was inevitable that in their time the English romanticists should treat, as Senor Valdes says, "the barbarous customs of the Middle Ages, softening and distorting them, as Walter Scott and his kind did;" that they should "devote themselves to falsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifying psychology after their own fancy," like Bulwer and Dickens, as well as like Rousseau and Madame de Stael, not to mention Balzac, the worst of all that sort at his worst.
And when we find them callous to our representations of the truth when we find their hearts almost as unmoved as the firm rocks they tread on, notwithstanding our most faithful exhibitions of human depravity, as is evinced by the slander, the detraction and the calumny which every where prevail, and which many must see, as in a glass, to prevail in their own bosoms, while yet their very blood recoils at the tales of imaginary wo from the pen of Bulwer, or some other novelist of kindred fame is it not proper to remind people of what the evangelist says of hatred, that it is murder?
Bulwer, and the wild men, women, and children slayers of Mr. Cooper; and, truly, between them, I passed my dreams in very bad company. Still I could not stand, nor even sit upright. What was I to read next? A happy thought struck me. And what a world did I enter upon!
Bulwer Lytton has likewise lost ground greatly: but read to-day he has much more to offer. In him, too, may be seen an imperfectly blent mixture of by-gone sentimentality and modern truth: yet whether in the romance of historic setting, "The Last Days of Pompeii," or in the satiric study of realism, like "My Novel," Bulwer is much nearer to us, and holds out vital literature for our appreciation.
Of other contributors to these periodicals much might be said in larger space, as for instance of the poisoner-critic Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the "Janus Weathercock" of the London, the original of certain well-known heroes of Bulwer and Dickens, and the object of a more than once recurrent and distinctly morbid attention from young men of letters since.
When I lived at Nice in that royal Bohemia, where musicians rubbed shoulders with grand-duchesses, and the King of Bavaria exchanged epigrams with Bulwer Lytton, do you know what they called me?" "The Queen of all the Follies!" "You know?" "Did I not love my Brunehild ere we met?" "Yes, and I knew of you.
Though Trollope was a great traveller, he rarely uses his experiences in a novel, whereas Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, George Eliot fill their pages with foreign adventures and scenes of travel. His hard riding as an overgrown heavy-weight, his systematic whist playing, his loud talk, his burly ubiquity and irrepressible energy in everything formed one of the marvels of the last generation.
Yet it has been sometimes complained, sometimes boasted, that "with the critics Bulwer is dead"; and it is not very certain that with the faithful herd of uncritical readers the first Lord Lytton keeps any great place.
You know it is Bulwer who says, and says truly: "There is in calumny a rank poison that, even when the character throws off the slander, the heart remains diseased beneath the effect." The force of this on Maria's thoughts and feelings, surrounded as she was by the vile influences of a Charleston cell, came with strange effect as she contemplated her friendless condition.
Kalergis used her influence so I was afterwards informed as an exceedingly powerful and irresistible female advocate to inspire Bulwer with a definite interest in my fate. In this she so far succeeded, that he unconditionally placed his house at my disposal for nine mouths.
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