University of Virginia Library

BULWER AND WALTER SCOTT.

This is the age of discoveries—of wonderful and
astounding discoveries. A spirit of fermentation
and free inquiry has got abroad, and put that
restless little animal man into a state of preternatural
disquietude, insomuch that he has adopted
for the sober rule of his conduct Shakspeare's hibernicism,

and he lightly projects schemes and broaches
doctrines that would have made the hair stand
on end upon the heads of his respectable ancestors.
The world never saw such times. Science
and quackery have become so intermixed, that worthy
though obtuse people are puzzled to discover
the difference, and hence spring those two large parties—the
innovators and the anti-innovators—that
keep society fermenting like a barrel of ale at midsummer.
In the eyes of the former, nothing is
good but what is new; they are for turning the
poor old world topsy-turvy, for shaking religion,
poetry, law, learning and common sense out of it,
and governing it hereafter by steam, mathematics,
and a sublime code of morals calculated for use
when the era of human perfectibility commences.
The anti-innovation faction are ridiculous in another
way: they are good fat sort of people, full of
beef, beer, and prejudice, who are continually “perplexed
with fear of change;” who think that time
and custom sanctify all things, and that whatever
has been, ought to be. Their ranks are headed by
grave, solemn old owls, who shut their eyes to the
light in a very owlish manner, while the recruits
of the other are, for the most part, pert, prating
jackdaws, dressed out in the borrowed robes of philosophy
and philanthropy, and their cackle is worse
than the croak of their opponents, inasmuch as it
is more intrusive and presuming, the one being
active ignorance, the other only passive. Thank
heaven, a third party with knowledge of their own,
unite the zeal of one faction with the caution of the
other.

Such being the state of things, the number of
sublime and ridiculous discoveries daily made in
physics, metaphysics, law, government, and literature,

are scarcely to be wondered at. But the most
notable discovery of modern times is, undoubtedly,
the one recently made, that Edward Lytton Bulwer
is a writer equal to Sir Walter Scott! The
author of Pelham, Devereux, and the Disowned,
equal to the author of Waverley! And this is in
strict accordance with the spirit of the age, which
is characterized by nothing so much as mutability
and love of change. The Athenians grew tired of
always hearing Aristides called “the just,” and a
section of the literary world are tired of hearing Sir
Walter styled “the great,” and have therefore set
up this opposition idol, whose claims, they say,
have been weighed in the balance and not found
wanting. It has long been the fashion to estimate
men of genius after the manner of “Plutarch's
Lives,” by their comparative rather than their positive
merits, and some singular, and it is now
confessed, outrageous comparisons, have been instituted.
By many of the writers of his own time
Shakspeare was adjudged to be inferior to Ben
Jonson; but with this solitary exception, the hardihood
of the preceding assertion has perhaps never
been equalled. To be sure, for some time past, Sir
Walter Scott, like the Bay of Naples, has been a
standard for small comparisons; and the several
admirers of all the second and third-rate novelists
have been endeavoring to exalt their particular favorites
by insinuating that “the northern magician
would have to look well to his laurels,” or that “the
great unknown must be content to bear a rival
near his throne,” and such half-way phrases; but
this is the first time a direct claim of equality has
been put in—nay, some have asserted Mr. Bulwer's
superiority, but that appeared to be carrying the
joke a little too far. These valuable and extraordinary
critics have for the most part been content
to make known their opinions to the public, without
stating the grounds and causes on which
they are based. Like persons who have resolved
on committing a rash action, they at once bolt
forth their assertion of equality, and then, as if
aghast at their own temerity, dare not approach the
question a second time, coolly to give their reasons
for what they have advanced.

The admirers of the author of Waverley may
quietly and calmly invite comparison, and they can
afford to do it in a spirit of the utmost candor and
liberality, for there is little occasion to exalt their
favorite (if that were possible) by the depreciation
of any writer whatever. Render unto Mr. Bulwer
all that can reasonably be claimed for him, (and he
has proved that he has many noble qualifications
for an author,) yet what does that all amount to in

comparison with the merits of Scott? Mr. Bulwer
is a man of talent if not of genius, a fine thinker
and a ripe scholar; his mind is rich in classical
lore and philosophic reflection; his style is polished
and nervous, impassioned and harmonious, and he
has produced three works of great and varied merit,
Pelham, the Disowned, and Devereux; but is this
to put him at once on an equality with the man who
has conceived and executed those glorious and imperishable
series of works known by the name of
the “Waverley novels”—a world within themselves,
teeming with living, breathing characters,
stamped with nature's impress—abounding in descriptions
as vivid and magnificent as ever poet
fancied or painter drew, and filled with humor and
pathos that flow from a source as prodigal and inexhaustible
as the widow's cruise;—a “new edition
of human nature,” as it were, in its most picturesque
forms? To place him on a level with one who has
done more for literature, both in quantity and quality,
with the single exception of Shakspeare, than
any man since Noah left the ark? As Othello says,
“'tis monstrous!”

But to come to particulars. Much has been said
of the qualifications Mr. Bulwer possesses, though
but scant mention has been made of those in which
he is deficient. His first great point of inferiority to

Sir Walter is lack of dramatic power—he is a descriptive,
the other a dramatic portrayer of men and
manners. Sir Walter introduces his personages in
some gipsy encampment, old change-house, or ancient
hostelry, hits off their costume and personal
appearance, and then leaves them to make their
acquaintance with the reader in their own way.
Mr. Bulwer describes his characters—their actions
and their motives for those actions, at full length,
before he allows them to open their lips, fearful, it
would seem, that their identity might be mistaken,
like the painter who wrote under his productions
the necessary and significant information, “this is
a horse” and “this is an ass.” Hence it is, that
one creates characters, while the other merely describes
them. In the hands of the one they become
instinct with life and animation; with the other
they are but pictures, which owe their value to
the skill and coloring of the artist. After perusing
Bulwer, who remembers and quotes the language
of his characters as they do those of Meg Merrilies,
Dirk Hatterick, Rob Roy, Helen Macgregor, Effie
Deans, or any of the thousand creations that “live
and move and have their being” in the pages of the
Scotch novelist? The studied denunciations of a
Sir Reginald Glanville, though invested with all
the power and energy of the writer, will, somehow
or other, slip from our minds; but who ever forgets
the threats of old Meg Merrilies to Godfrey Bertram,
or the homely yet wild and picturesque language in
which they are clad? The one does without effort
what the other with all his efforts cannot do; the
sayings and doings of Mr. Bulwer's personages wax
vague and indistinct almost as soon as the volume
is closed, while those of Scott are stamped upon
our memory, and pass not away.

In the pathetic, though strenuous exertions are
made, the powers of Mr. Bulwer are evidently
limited, at least in comparison. He writes page
after page of description, filled with dashes, italics,
adjectives and epithets, but it will not do. There
is nothing to touch the heart in the wrought-up description
of the sufferings of his Gertrude Douglas
compared with the simple history of Effie Deans, and
the affecting picture of the interviews between her
and her sister Jeanie in prison. After reading them
over, we feel that we would not part with the novel
which contains them for all Mr. Bulwer has written,
or is likely to write. That gentleman is very
fond of similes and very skilful in their selection and
application, but when did he ever equal the following
in simple and appropriate beauty, or clothe it
in language so perfectly—but that is not it—when
did he ever write a single passage impregnated with

such a gush of natural feeling as this, where “puir
Effie,” the withered lily of St. Leonard's, thus
speaks of herself?—“And what am I,” said she to
Jeanie, “but a poor wasted wan-thriven tree, dug
up by the roots, and flung out to waste in the highway,
that man and beast may tread it under foot?
I thought o' the bonny bit thorn that our father
rooted out o' the yard last May when it had a' the
flush o' blossoms on it; and then it lay in the court
till the beasts had trod them a' in pieces with their
feet. I little thought when I was wae for the silly
green bush and its flowers, that I was to gang the
same gait mysel!”—Yet this is but one stroke from
a pen that has scattered thousands of similar passages,
like wild flowers, over his works.

On this ground the shadow of equality cannot
be claimed. But take any other—take that on
which Mr. Bulwer has been thought to excel.—
There are few things he appears to have bestowed
more pains upon than the history of Sir Reginald
Glanville; he has striven to impart to it all the
effect of which he was capable, and the sufferer, in
language energetic and profuse, pours forth the detail
of his wrongs, his blighted hopes and withered
feelings. But does this make an equal impression
on the reader with the reckless, careless account
given of himself by Nanty Ewart, the smuggling

captain of the Jumping Jenny? Yet all the advantages
are on the side of the former; he is a
gentleman, and undebased by low and vulgar associations,
while the other is a drunkard, an outcast,
and a vagabond; yet, strange to say, Nanty Ewart
with his low-life confessions is a much more interesting
personage than the baronet with his elegant
distresses. And why is this, but because of the
reality of the picture? The one tells you of his
woes, and that enjoyment and hope have passed
away, but you do not realize that such is the fact;
the other asks no sympathy, but his snatches of old
songs, his reckless levity and desperate jocularity,
make you feel that a ruined and broken-hearted
man is before you. It may be added, that the one
has been frequently quoted as a choice specimen of
Mr. Bulwer's powers, while the other has never
been noted as marked with more than the ordinary
talent of Scott.

But if the author of Pelham is deficient in the
pathetic, his attempts at humor are melancholy in
the extreme.[1] In the worst passages of the worst
novelists can any thing more meagre or miserable
be picked out than his Mr. Morris Brown or Dr.

Bossleton? The humor of the former consists in
being clad in garments the color of his name, and
talking about a Mrs. Minden; the latter in repeating
the termination of every sentence twice, only reversing
the order of the words; yet notwithstanding
this slender stock in trade, the author seems to take
an absolute pleasure in the introduction of Mr.
Brown, and spins him through many a tedious
page. When the reader does meet with a paragraph
provocative of a smile, it is the descriptive
talent of Mr. Bulwer in sketching an absurd character,
and not the humor belonging to the character
itself. For instance, the description in Pelham
of Monsieur Margot's person is very good; but when
he brings him to act in what he intends for a laughable
situation, as in the affair of the basket and
Mrs. Green, it is lame and labored in the highest
degree, and the end of the chapter becomes a “consummation
devoutly to be wished.”

From these abortive attempts turn to the pages
of the author of Waverley, and what a mine of
humon is to be found in every volume! How rich
is the vein, how varied, and how inexhaustible!
You have it in every shape—the humor of description,
of situation, and of the words and actions of
the characters in the scene. And how spontaneous,
how perfectly natural and appropriate is the kind

with which each character is imbued. It is no
patch-work business—no continued iteration of a
quaint phrase, that might be put into the mouth of
one person as well as another—not a habit, a trick
of custom, that can be got rid of, like a cold, by a
little care—but real, genuine, hearty humor, as
much a part of the personages in whom it is invested,
as their appetites and animal affections.
Nothing can be more distinct than the humor of
Cuddie Headrigge the ploughman and Ratcliffe the
thief and thieftaker, of Edie Ochiltree and Jonathan
Oldbuck, of Captain Dalgetty and Dominie Sampson,
of Caleb Balderstone and Bartoline Saddletree,
or of Baillie Nichol Jarvie and the Laird of Dumbedikes.
And this quality is made to bear compound
interest when two of these worthies are
brought into collision, and their peculiarities exhibited
in the strongest light by their different ways
of viewing and expressing themselves on a particular
subject, like the antiquary Oldbuck and the
old gaberlunzie Edie Ochiltree holding discourse
about the Roman fortifications. Some of the scenes
in which these and other characters figure, are as
rich as any thing in English literature—as natural
and marked with the same profound insight into
character and attention to minutiæ as those of Fielding,
but more highly colored, and as broad and ludicrous
as Smollett's, but without their coarseness.
There is the fine scene in Old Mortality where the
soldiers come to the miser Milnwood's house and
seize Henry Morton. What a group is there—
what a glorious subject for a painter! The spare,
pinched form and features of the old miser Milnwood,
his gallant and handsome nephew (worth
all Mr. Bulwer's speech-making, compliment-making,
diplomatic heroes,) the fine old housekeeper
Alison Wilson, the prim, scraggy, puritanical Mause,
groaning in spirit, and “nursing her wrath to keep
it warm,” the solid-looking and apparently stupid
Cuddie, and the bold, profligate Bothwell. What
interest in the action and contrast in the faces, and
expression of the faces! It would make the fortune
of any artist who could do this scene justice.
And then the dialogue: old Mause testifying against
the proceedings of Bothwell and his dragoons, and
uplifting her voice in order that “by her means
Master Henry might be delivered like a bird from
the net of the fowler!” and Cuddie's expostulations
with his mother “anent” her testifications, and the
fine contrast between her spiritual aspirations and
his longing after homely temporalities; then the
account of Mause and the Rev. Gabriel Kettledrummle's
being carried into captivity by the men
of Belial; and again, Dominie Sampson and all
the transactions in which he is concerned, particularly
his manœuvre to recover Lucy Bertram from
her fainting fit by the application of scalding water;
and Caleb Balderstone's contrivances; and the matrimonial
dialogues between Mr. and Mrs. Saddletree,
and so on, ad infinitum. It is dangerous to
commence quoting from those novels, for there is
no knowing where to stop. Perhaps the best way
to make manifest Sir Walter Scott's superiority over
every other novelist, would be to merely give the
titles of his works and enumerate the characters
contained in them; the appeal of so many old acquaintances
to the recollections of the public would
be irresistible.

To “copy nature,” is a general and indiscriminate
piece of advice more applicable to a painter
than an author, though addressed to either it is
looked upon as a pithy and profound injunction.
Now to copy nature in her every-day forms, is neither
difficult nor desirable. To report the slip-slop
conversation of a tea-table is to copy nature, and
the more literal the copy the less the skill required;
but to be true to nature—to anticipate her, and
make human beings in extraordinary situations
and agitated by strong and conflicting passions, act
and speak as she would make them act and speak
in such situations—to make them do and say that

which the reader has no conception of beforehand,
but which, the moment he has read it, flashes upon
him as the only thing they ought or could have
done and said, is a power that few mortals are
gifted with, and it remains to be shown that Mr.
Bulwer is one of them. His characters have none
of the flippant prittle-prattle of common conversation
put into their mouths; on the contrary, they
are in the opposite extreme, and many times talk
and act as men and women never talk and acted
before. They harangue, first one a speech, and
then the other a speech, by the page together, and
are by far too didactic and declamatory. The following
is one instance of this author's infelicitous
adaptation of the language and actions of his personages
to time, place, and circumstances. The
scene is a midnight assassination, where Algernon
Mordaunt falls by the hand of the conspirator
Wolfe. Clarence Linden catches him as he falls,
and with his murdered friend in his arms, and the
murderer standing beside him, gives vent to his feelings
in the following pertinent and appropriate interrogation:—“Oh
where—where—when this man
—the wise, the kind, the innocent, almost the perfect,
falls thus in the prime of existence, by a sudden
blow from an obscure hand—unblest in life, inglorious
in death—oh! where—where is this boasted
triumph of virtue, or where is its reward?”

Would nature or Sir Walter Scott have made
any man prate after this fashion under such circumstances?
True, the author endeavors to soften
down the absurdity by saying that Linden was unconscious
of the presence of the assassin, but it is
easier for the reader to be told so, than for him to
believe it. A maiden in such a situation with her
lover, or a mother with her child, might be unconscious
of any thing save the object they were
hanging over—but men and politicians—common
friends, and the surviving friend cool and collected
enough to question the decrees of fate “in good set
terms”—for such a one to forget the murderer at his
elbow, is one of those remarkable instances of abstraction
that very seldom occur, except in a French
tragedy; and it may be very good French-tragedy
nature, but that is about all. If Linden had seized
the assassin and called the watch, it would have
been a more natural sort of proceeding, and much
more in accordance with Mr. Bulwer's utilitarian
principles.

The forte of this writer appears to be eloquent
declamation—melancholy, fervid, or despairing, but
still declamation. (The terms “melancholy” and
“despairing” declamation may sound strange, but
perhaps they are not inapplicable to some passages
in Mr. B.'s works.) In Mordaunt it is calm, me

lancholy, and philosophic; fervid and impassioned
in the republican Wolfe; desperate and despairing
in the villain Crauford; and by turns bitter and
enthusiastic in the painter Warner[2] This is an
imposing but not very difficult kind of writing, and
the real talent employed in it generally passes for
more than it is worth. This author's is of the best
description, and though certainly the “passion
sleeps,” it cannot be added that the “declamation
roars;” it often softens down into moralizing reflection,
in which the similes and images employed
are frequently beautiful, and the language in which
they are clothed flowing and melodious, and, when
occasion demands, nervous and vigorous; but it is
not all this—no, nor judiciously introduced classical
allusions and quotations—nor ingenious refutations
of common-place maxims and opinions—nor brilliant
and antithetical aphorisms, that is to elevate a
man to an equality with the author of the Scotch
novels, to say nothing of the English ones. But it
in no way detracts from Mr. Bulwer's reputation as
a fine writer, to say that Walter Scott is immensely
superior to him; after that wonderful man he is
undoubtedly the most popular novelist of the day.
He may, in the novelty and excitement attending
his debut be both over and under-rated, but
and he will doubtless find his proper level, which
we think will be far above the mass of his contemporaries—a
little higher than the writer of the
O'Hara tales, and some degrees below the author
of Anastasius.

But for thee, good Sir Walter! the time is yet to
come when thou wilt receive the fulness of thy fame.
The present generation admire and applaud thee,
the future will feel a deeper and holier reverence for
thee; and the language in which thou hast immortalized
thyself is one that is fast spreading in every
quarter of this habitable globe. Over the illimitable
regions of this continent wilt thou be read and worshipped;
in distant India and the yet untrodden
wildernesses of Australasia will thy name be known;
and the time may come when the British Isles will
be but as specks of earth to the boundless countries
that will speak their language and treasure up their
glorious literature. Then will the halls of Abbotsford
become “pilgrim shrines,” and every decayed
memorial that speaks of thee a relic. And when
the tide of population shall have poured over the

mountain barrier, filling every highland glen with
cotton factories—and “weavers, spinners and such
mechanical persons” erect their looms in the very
country of Rob Roy, the wild warriors and plaided
chieftains that once trod those rugged glens and
heathery hills will still live in thy undying page,
and thou wilt be the connecting link between a
present and a past age—the chronicler of the
“tales of the times of old, and deeds of the days of
other years.” What strange and savage customs—
what deadly feuds—what wild legends—what furious
passions and fierce fidelity lay concealed behind
those mountains that gird the highlands, and
which, but for thee, would have passed unrecorded
to oblivion; but as the prophet of old smote the
rock and the waters gushed forth, so didst thou,
with thy magic wand, touch those highland hills,
and the whole billowy scene lay disclosed to view!
Then the bloody lowland and English wars, what
an historian would they have missed; and though
upon the border side,
and the “gallant Gordons” and thieving Armstrongs
and Elliotts keep honest snuff and tobacconist
shops in Kelso and Jedburgh, yet shall not
the bitter feuds and midnight forays of their lawless,
fearless ancestors be forgotten. And when time
shall have made a brick and mortar land of England
—when some future Manchester or Birmingham
perchance stands reeking and smoking where the
merry forest of Sherwood stood, still will its verdant
glades once “clad in England's fadeless green,”
and its strong and towering oaks look fresh and
unwithered in thy pages. How will the future
dwell upon the courtly pageantries of Kenilworth
and the knightly chivalry of Ivanhoe—and the
ridings and onslaughts of the border barons—and
the gatherings of the clans in the seventy-six; and
thy native humor will brighten many an eye, and
thy touches of homely natural feeling thrill in many
a bosom yet unborn. Thousands will laugh and
weep with thee in thy works when the kind heart
and capacious head that conceived them are clods
of the valley; and
will thy memory be worshipped and thy name
treasured up in the hearts of posterity.