Part 38
The land elevated above sea-level is safe from these irruptions. Its surface, enameled with flowers, adorned with ever fresh verdure, peopled with thousands and thousands of differing species of animals, is a place of repose; an abode of delights, where man, placed to aid nature, dominates all other things, the only one who can know and admire. God has made him spectator of the universe and witness of his marvels. He is animated by a divine spark which renders him a participant in the divine mysteries; and by whose light he thinks and reflects, sees and reads in the book of the world as in a copy of divinity.
Nature is the exterior throne of God's glory. The man who studies and contemplates it rises gradually towards the interior throne of omniscience. Made to adore the Creator, he commands all the creatures. Vassal of heaven, king of earth, which he ennobles and enriches, he establishes order, harmony, and subordination among living beings. He embellishes Nature itself; cultivates, extends, and refines it; suppresses its thistles and brambles, and multiplies its grapes and roses.
Look upon the solitary beaches and sad lands where man has never dwelt: covered--or rather bristling--with thick black woods on all their rising ground, stunted barkless trees, bent, twisted, falling from age; near by, others even more numerous, rotting upon heaps already rotten,--stifling, burying the germs ready to burst forth. Nature, young everywhere else, is here decrepit. The land surmounted by the ruins of these productions offers, instead of flourishing verdure, only an incumbered space pierced by aged trees, loaded with parasitic plants, lichens, agarics--impure fruits of corruption. In the low parts is water, dead and stagnant because undirected; or swampy soil neither solid nor liquid, hence unapproachable and useless to the habitants both of land and of water. Here are swamps covered with rank aquatic plants nourishing only venomous insects and haunted by unclean animals. Between these low infectious marshes and these higher ancient forests extend plains having nothing in common with our meadows, upon which weeds smother useful plants. There is none of that fine turf which seems like down upon the earth, or of that enameled lawn which announces a brilliant fertility; but instead an interlacement of hard and thorny herbs which seem to cling to each other rather than to the soil, and which, successively withering and impeding each other, form a coarse mat several feet thick. There are no roads, no communications, no vestiges of intelligence in these wild places. Man, obliged to follow the paths of savage beasts and to watch constantly lest he become their prey, terrified by their roars, thrilled by the very silence of these profound solitudes, turns back and says:--
Primitive nature is hideous and dying; I, I alone, can make it living and agreeable. Let us dry these swamps; converting into streams and canals, animate these dead waters by setting them in motion. Let us use the active and devouring element once hidden from us, and which we ourselves have discovered; and set fire to this superfluous mat, to these aged forests already half consumed, and finish with iron what fire cannot destroy! Soon, instead of rush and water-lily from which the toad compounds his venom, we shall see buttercups and clover, sweet and salutary herbs. Herds of bounding animals will tread this once impracticable soil and find abundant, constantly renewed pasture. They will multiply, to multiply again. Let us employ the new aid to complete our work; and let the ox, submissive to the yoke, exercise his strength in furrowing the land. Then it will grow young again with cultivation, and a new nature shall spring up under our hands.
How beautiful is cultivated Nature when by the cares of man she is brilliantly and pompously adorned! He himself is the chief ornament, the most noble production; in multiplying himself he multiplies her most precious gem. She seems to multiply herself with him, for his art brings to light all that her bosom conceals. What treasures hitherto ignored! What new riches! Flowers, fruits, perfected grains infinitely multiplied; useful species of animals transported, propagated, endlessly increased; harmful species destroyed, confined, banished; gold, and iron more necessary than gold, drawn from the bowels of the earth; torrents confined; rivers directed and restrained; the sea, submissive and comprehended, crossed from one hemisphere to the other; the earth everywhere accessible, everywhere living and fertile; in the valleys, laughing prairies; in the plains, rich pastures or richer harvests; the hills loaded with vines and fruits, their summits crowned by useful trees and young forests; deserts changed to cities inhabited by a great people, who, ceaselessly circulating, scatter themselves from centres to extremities; frequent open roads and communications established everywhere like so many witnesses of the force and union of society; a thousand other monuments of power and glory: proving that man, master of the world, has transformed it, renewed its whole surface, and that he shares his empire with Nature.
However, he rules only by right of conquest, and enjoys rather than possesses. He can only retain by ever-renewed efforts. If these cease, everything languishes, changes, grows disordered, enters again into the hands of Nature. She retakes her rights; effaces man's work; covers his most sumptuous monuments with dust and moss; destroys them in time, leaving him only the regret that he has lost by his own fault the conquests of his ancestors. These periods during which man loses his domain, ages of barbarism when everything perishes, are always prepared by wars and arrive with famine and depopulation. Man, who can do nothing except in numbers, and is only strong in union, only happy in peace, has the madness to arm himself for his unhappiness and to fight for his own ruin. Incited by insatiable greed, blinded by still more insatiable ambition, he renounces the sentiments of humanity, turns all his forces against himself, and seeking to destroy his fellow, does indeed destroy himself. And after these days of blood and carnage, when the smoke of glory has passed away, he sees with sadness that the earth is devastated, the arts buried, the nations dispersed, the races enfeebled, his own happiness ruined, and his power annihilated.
THE HUMMING-BIRD
From the 'Natural History'
Of all animated beings this is the most elegant in form and the most brilliant in colors. The stones and metals polished by our arts are not comparable to this jewel of Nature. She has placed it least in size of the order of birds, _maxime miranda in minimis_. Her masterpiece is the little humming-bird, and upon it she has heaped all the gifts which the other birds may only share. Lightness, rapidity, nimbleness, grace, and rich apparel all belong to this little favorite. The emerald, the ruby, and the topaz gleam upon its dress. It never soils them with the dust of earth, and in its aërial life scarcely touches the turf an instant. Always in the air, flying from flower to flower, it has their freshness as well as their brightness. It lives upon their nectar, and dwells only in the climates where they perennially bloom.
All kinds of humming-birds are found in the hottest countries of the New World. They are quite numerous and seem to be confined between the two tropics, for those which penetrate the temperate zones in summer only stay there a short time. They seem to follow the sun in its advance and retreat; and to fly on the wing of zephyrs after an eternal spring.
The smaller species of the humming-birds are less in size than the great fly wasp, and more slender than the drone. Their beak is a fine needle and their tongue a slender thread. Their little black eyes are like two shining points, and the feathers of their wings so delicate that they seem transparent. Their short feet, which they use very little, are so tiny one can scarcely see them. They alight only at night, resting in the air during the day. They have a swift continual humming flight. The movement of their wings is so rapid that when pausing in the air, the bird seems quite motionless. One sees him stop before a blossom, then dart like a flash to another, visiting all, plunging his tongue into their hearts, flattening them with his wings, never settling anywhere, but neglecting none. He hastens his inconstancies only to pursue his loves more eagerly and to multiply his innocent joys. For this light lover of flowers lives at their expense without ever blighting them. He only pumps their honey, and to this alone his tongue seems destined.
The vivacity of these small birds is only equaled by their courage, or rather their audacity. Sometimes they may be seen chasing furiously birds twenty times their size, fastening upon their bodies, letting themselves be carried along in their flight, while they peck them fiercely until their tiny rage is satisfied. Sometimes they fight each other vigorously. Impatience seems their very essence. If they approach a blossom and find it faded, they mark their spite by hasty rending of the petals. Their only voice is a weak cry, "_screp, screp_," frequent and repeated, which they utter in the woods from dawn, until at the first rays of the sun they all take flight and scatter over the country.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
(1803-1873)
BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE
The patrician in literature is always an interesting spectacle. We are prone to regard his performance as a test of the worth of long descent and high breeding. If he does well, he vindicates the claims of his caste; if ill, we infer that inherited estates and blue blood are but surface advantages, leaving the effective brain unimproved, or even causing deterioration. But the argument is still open; and whether genius be the creature of circumstance or divinely independent, is a question which prejudice rather than evidence commonly decides.
Certainly literature tries men's souls. The charlatan must betray himself. Genius shines through all cerements. On the other hand, genius may be nourished, and the charlatan permeates all classes. The truth probably is that an aristocrat is quite as apt as a plebeian to be a good writer. Only since there are fewer of the former than of the latter, and since, unlike the last, the first are seldom forced to live by their brains, there are more plebeian than aristocratic names on the literary roll of honor. Admitting this, the instance of the writer known as "Bulwer" proves nothing one way or the other. At all events, not, Was he a genius because he was a, patrician? but, Was he a genius at all? is the inquiry most germane to our present purpose.
An aristocrat of aristocrats undoubtedly he was, though it concerns us not to determine whether the blood of Plantagenet kings and Norman conquerors really flowed in his veins. On both father's and mother's side he was thoroughly well connected. Heydon Hall in Norfolk was the hereditary home of the Norman Bulwers; the Saxon Lyttons had since the Conquest lived at Knebworth in Derbyshire. The historic background of each family was honorable, and when the marriage of William Earle Bulwer with Elizabeth Barbara Lytton united them, it might be said that in their offspring England found her type.
Edward, being the youngest son, had little money, but he happened to have brains. He began existence delicate and precocious. Culture, with him, set in almost with what he would have termed the "consciousness of his own identity," and the process never intermitted: in fact, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, his spiritual and intellectual emancipation was hindered by many obstacles; for, an ailing child, he was petted by his mother, and such germs of intelligence (verses at seven years old, and the like) as he betrayed were trumpeted as prodigies. He was spoilt so long before he was ripe that it is a marvel he ever ripened at all. Many years must pass before vanity could be replaced in him by manly ambition; a vein of silliness is traceable through his career almost to the end. He expatiated in the falsetto key; almost never do we hear in his voice that hearty bass note so dear to plain humanity. In his pilgrimage toward freedom he had to wrestle not only with flesh-and-blood mothers, uncles, and wives, _et id genus omne_, but with the more subtle and vital ideas, superstitions, and prejudices appertaining to his social station. His worst foes were not those of his household merely, but of his heart. The more arduous achievement of such a man is to see his real self and believe in it. There are so many misleading purple-velvet waistcoats, gold chains, superfine sentiments, and blue-blooded affiliations in the way, that the true nucleus of so much decoration becomes less accessible than the needle in the hay-stack. It is greatly to Bulwer's credit that he stuck valiantly to his quest, and nearly, if not quite, ran down his game at last. His intellectual record is one of constant progress, from childhood to age.
Whether his advance in other respects was as uniform does not much concern us. He was unhappy with his wife, and perhaps they even threw things at each other at table, the servants looking on. Nothing in his matrimonial relations so much became him as his conduct after their severance: he held his tongue like a man, in spite of the poor lady's shrieks and clapper-clawings. His whimsical, hair-splitting conscientiousness is less admirable. A healthy conscience does not whine--it creates. No one cares to know what a man thinks of his own
## actions. No one is interested to learn that Bulwer meant 'Paul Clifford'
to be an edifying work, or that he married his wife from the highest motives. We do not take him so seriously: we are satisfied that he wrote the story first and discovered its morality afterwards; and that lofty motives would not have united him to Miss Rosina Doyle Wheeler had she not been pretty and clever. His hectic letters to his mamma; his Byronic struttings and mouthings over the grave of his schoolgirl lady-love; his eighteenth-century comedy-scene with Caroline Lamb; his starched-frill
## participation in the Fred Villiers duel at Boulogne,--how silly and
artificial is all this! There is no genuine feeling in it: he attires himself in tawdry sentiment as in a flowered waistcoat. What a difference between him, at this period, and his contemporary Benjamin Disraeli, who indeed committed similar inanities, but with a saturnine sense of humor cropping out at every turn which altered the whole complexion of the performance. We laugh at the one, but with the other.
[Illustration: BULWER-LYTTON.]
Of course, however, there was a man hidden somewhere in Edward Bulwer's perfumed clothes and mincing attitudes, else the world had long since forgotten him. Amidst his dandyism, he learned how to speak well in debate and how to use his hands to guard his head; he paid his debts by honest hard work, and would not be dishonorably beholden to his mother or any one else. He posed as a blighted being, and invented black evening-dress; but he lived down the scorn of such men as Tennyson and Thackeray, and won their respect and friendship at last. He aimed high, according to his lights, meant well, and in the long run did well too.
The main activities of his life--and from start to finish his energy was great--were in politics and in literature. His political career covers about forty years, from the time he took his degree at Cambridge till Lord Derby made him a peer in 1866. He accomplished nothing of serious importance, but his course was always creditable: he began as a sentimental Radical and ended as a liberal Conservative; he advocated the Crimean War; the Corn Laws found him in a compromising humor; his record as Colonial Secretary offers nothing memorable in statesmanship. The extraordinary brilliancy of his brother Henry's diplomatic life throws Edward's achievements into the shade. There is nothing to be ashamed of, but had he done nothing else he would have been unknown. But literature, first seriously cultivated as a means of livelihood, outlasted his political ambitions, and his books are to-day his only claim to remembrance. They made a strong impression at the time they were written, and many are still read as much as ever, by a generation born after his death. Their popularity is not of the catchpenny sort; thoughtful people read them, as well as the great drove of the undiscriminating. For they are the product of thought: they show workmanship; they have quality; they are carefully made. If the literary critic never finds occasion to put off the shoes from his feet as in the sacred presence of genius, he is constantly moved to recognize with a friendly nod the presence of sterling talent. He is even inclined to think that nobody else ever had so much talent as this little red-haired, blue-eyed, high-nosed, dandified Edward Bulwer; the mere mass of it lifts him at times to the levels where genius dwells, though he never quite shares their nectar and ambrosia. He as it were catches echoes of the talk of the Immortals,--the turn of their phrase, the intonation of their utterance,--and straightway reproduces it with the fidelity of the phonograph. But, as in the phonograph, we find something lacking; our mind accepts the report as genuine, but our ear affirms an unreality; this is reproduction, indeed, but not creation. Bulwer himself, when his fit is past, and his critical faculty re-awakens, probably knows as well as another that these labored and meritorious pages of his are not graven on the eternal adamant. But they are the best he can do, and perhaps there is none better of their kind. They have a right to be; for while genius may do harm as well as good, Bulwer never does harm, and in spite of sickly sentiment and sham philosophy, is uniformly instructive, amusing, and edifying.
"To love her," wrote Dick Steele of a certain great dame, "is a liberal education;" and we might almost say the same of the reading of Bulwer's romances. He was learned, and he put into his books all his learning, as well as all else that was his. They represent artistically grouped, ingeniously lighted, with suitable acompaniments of music and illusion--the acquisitions of his intellect, the sympathies of his nature, and the achievements of his character.
He wrote in various styles, making deliberate experiments in one after another, and often hiding himself completely in anonymity. He was versatile, not deep. Robert Louis Stevenson also employs various styles; but with him the changes are intuitive--they are the subtle variations in touch and timbre which genius makes, in harmony with the subject treated. Stevenson could not have written 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' in the same tune and key as 'Treasure Island'; and the music of 'Marxheim' differs from both. The reason is organic: the writer is inspired by his theme, and it passes through his mind with a lilt and measure of its own. It makes its own style, just as a human spirit makes its own features and gait; and we know Stevenson through all his transformations only by dint of the exquisite distinction and felicity of word and phrase that always characterize him. Now, with Bulwer there is none of this lovely inevitable spontaneity. He costumes his tale arbitrarily, like a stage-haberdasher, and invents a voice to deliver it withal. 'The Last Days of Pompeii' shall be mouthed out grandiloquently; the incredibilities of 'The Coming Race' shall wear the guise of naïve and artless narrative; the humors of 'The Caxtons' and 'What Will He Do with It?' shall reflect the mood of the sagacious, affable man of the world, gossiping over the nuts and wine; the marvels of 'Zanoni' and 'A Strange Story' must be portrayed with a resonance and exaltation of diction fitted to their transcendental claims. But between the stark mechanism of the Englishman and the lithe, inspired felicity of the Scot, what a difference!
Bulwer's work may be classified according to subject, though not chronologically. He wrote novels of society, of history, of mystery, and of romance. In all he was successful, and perhaps felt as much interest in one as in another. In his own life the study of the occult played a part; he was familiar with the contemporary fads in mystery and acquainted with their professors. "Ancient" history also attracted him, and he even wrote a couple of volumes of a 'History of Athens.' In all his writing there is a tendency to lapse into a discussion of the "Ideal and the Real," aiming always at the conclusion that the only true Real is the Ideal. It was this tendency which chiefly aroused the ridicule of his critics, and from the 'Sredwardlyttonbulwig' of Thackeray to the 'Condensed Novels' burlesque of Bret Harte, they harp upon that facile string, The thing satirized is after all not cheaper than the satire. The ideal _is_ the true real; the only absurdity lies in the pomp and circumstance wherewith that simple truth is introduced. There _is_ a 'Dweller on the Threshold,' but it, or he, is nothing more than that doubt concerning the truth of spiritual things which assails all beginners in higher speculation, and there was no need to call it or him by so formidable a name. A sense of humor would have saved Bulwer from almost all his faults, and have endowed him with several valuable virtues into the bargain; but it was not born in him, and with all his diligence he never could beget it.
The domestic series, of which 'The Caxtons' is the type, are the most generally popular of his works, and are likely to be so longest. The romantic vein ('Ernest Maltravers,' 'Alice, or the Mysteries,' etc.) are in his worst style, and are now only in existence as books because they are members of "the edition," It is doubtful if any human being has read one of them through in twenty years. Such historical books as 'The Last Days of Pompeii' are not only well constructed dramatically, but are painfully accurate in details, and may still be read for information as well as for pleasure. The 'Zanoni' species is undeniably interesting. The weird traditions of the 'Philosopher's Stone' and the 'Elixir of Life' can never cease to fascinate human souls, and all the paraphernalia of magic are charming to minds weary of the matter-of-factitude of current existence. The stories are put together with Bulwer's unfailing cleverness, and in all external respects neither Dumas nor Balzac has done anything better in this kind: the trouble is that these authors compel our belief, while Bulwer does not. For, once more, he lacks the magic of genius and the spirit of style which are immortally and incommunicably theirs, without which no other magic can be made literarily effective.