Novels of Sir E. Bulwer Lytton [pp. 159-172]

NOVELS OF SIR E. BULWER LYTTON.
certainly cannot be set down against him; and whatever may be
urged as excuse for Mr. Whipple, it certainly cannot be said that he
was not stupid. Dean Swift once wrote an ironical pamphlet, in
which he proposed that the over-numerous children of Ireland should
be put to use by eating them. A dull-witted Frenchman, taking the
thing in dead earnest, brought it forward as an evidence of barbarism
in England. Whipple's misinterpretation of Pelham is almost as
bad, and against such stupidity it has been well said, the gods themselves are powerless.
Another critic finds fault with Pelham because it has no plot; it
has none, for the very good reason that it was intended to have none.
It is an Epic novel, narrating the adventures of a gentleman, and
there is no more reason that it should have a plot than that Gordon
Cummning should have one in his book of adventures with lions ill
Africa. The objection might be urged with equal propriety against
Fielding, Fenelonl and Le Sage; but this is not the fault of their
novels, but only the quality of their class. If the critic could apply
such arbitrary rules as this, that commonwealth called the "Republic of Letters" would at once degenerate into the most desperate
despotism-an unlimited monarchy, with a miserable monarch on
the throne.
We can best sum up our opinion of Pelham by comparison. Of
Byron's characters, we should say they are absolute poison, never to
be taken unless followed immediately by an antidote in the shape of
two or three days' fasting and prayer. Unless the reader has made
up his mind to this penance he had better not touch at all. In the
Caxtons we have good, wholesome died, the very milk, and bread,
and meat of good morality, upon which, it will fatten and grow
strong. In Rienzi, the master-piece of Bulwer, we have a tonic, a
stimulant that diffuses a glow throughout thq system. Like a good
dose of French brandy, it invigorates all the organs, and, if the patient be weak, is the very thing to give him new life and courage.
Of Pelham we would say, that it is neither poison, nor meat, nor
tonic, but a literary confection, a " bon bon" that would do no harm
to strong digestions, but had better be let alone by weak ones. The
best novels are just as much superior to Pelham as the firmer and
the physician are to the confectioner.
We have tarried with Pelham from an impulse, in which the
generous reader must agree, to defend one who has been most unjustly injured. Bulwer, when he wrote it, was young and inexperienced, and deserved encouraging smiles rather than rebuking
frowns; and although we cannot be blind to its defects, we can but
feel kindly for the author who so fully redeemed the "atrocious
crimne," of being once a young man by the graceful excellence with
which he grew to be an old one. Assez de Pelham.
Paul Clifford and Ernest Maltravers have been duly cut up into
rags, and made into a patchwork of villainy by rigid moralists (so
called), and if there is any phase of vituperation that has not been
applied to them, it is not in the common vocabularies. The con
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