John S Moore

Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton, once the most successful novelist in the English speaking world, now unfairly neglected and even derided, was also the central figure in the underground culture of magic and the occult. With his esoteric studies he built a reputation for deep learning in the history and philosophy of this alternative tradition, as well as passing for an adept in his own right. His creative influence, especially through his occult fiction, was surprisingly far reaching.

The book sets the achievement of this nineteenth century magus into a large historical context, exploring the intellectual and other influences on him as well as movements he inspired. Some chapters discuss aspects of Bulwer’s life, while some explore people and ideas that influenced him and others those he influenced. His seminal role in several cultural movements has been largely forgotten, not least in his home country. This book offers an often unfamiliar perspective on the Victorian era and hopefully succeeds in provoking some questions about our own times.

With Bulwer as its focus, and employing a wealth of illustrations, it manages to provide a whirlwind tour of much occult and esoteric culture, from Iamblichus to Symbolist art and literature, Theosophy and modern psychedelia.

Published by Mandrake of Oxford, 2018
Purchase direct from Mandrake here
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This paper was presented as part of Bulwer’s bicentennial celebration at Knebworth House on 23rd May 2003

Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold

(Everything is will)

by John S Moore

From Harold (1848)

Hilda gazed on the hideous form before her; and so had her soul fallen from its arrogant pride of place, that instead of the scorn with which so foul a pretender to the Great Art had before inspired the King-born Prophetess, her veins tingled with credulous awe.

“Art thou a mortal like myself,” she said after a pause, “or one of those beings often seen by the shepherd in mist and rain, driving before them their shadowy flocks? one of those of whom no man knoweth whether they are of earth or of Helheim ? whether they have ever known the lot and conditions of flesh, or are but some dismal race between body and spirit, hateful alike to gods and to men ?”

The dreadful hag shook her head, as if refusing to answer the question, and said,

“Sit we down, sit we down by the dead dull pool, and if thou wouldst be wise as I am, wake up all thy wrongs, fill thyself with hate, and let thy thoughts be curses. Nothing is strong on earth but the Will; and hate to the will is as the iron in the hands of the war-man.”

“Ha!” answered Hilda, “then thou art indeed one of the loathsome brood whose magic is born, not of the aspiring soul, but of the fiendlike heart. And between us there is no union. I am of the race of those of whom priests and kings reverenced and honoured as the oracles of Heaven; and rather let my lore be dimmed and weakened, in admitting the humanities of hope and love, than be lightened by the glare of the wrath that Lok and Rana bear the children of men.”

“What, art thou so base and so doting,” said the hag, with fierce contempt”, as to know that another has supplanted thine Edith, that all the schemes of thy life are undone, and yet feel no hate for the man who bath wronged her and thee? -the man who had never been king if thou hadst not breathed into him the ambition of rule ? Think, and curse! ”

“My curse would wither the heart that is entwined within his,” answered Hilda; “and,” she added abruptly, as if eager to escape from her own impulses, “didst thou not tell- me, even now, that the wrong would be redressed, and his betrothed yet be his bride on the appointed day?”

” Ha ! home, then!-home! and weave the charmed woof of the banner, broider it with zimmes and with gold worthy the standard of a king; for I tell thee, that where that banner is planted, shall Edith clasp with bridal arms her adored. And the hwata thou hast read by the bautastein, and in the temple of the Briton’s revengeful gods, shall be fulfilled.”

” Dark daughter of Hela,” said the Prophetess, “whether demon or god hath inspired thee, I hear in my spirit a voice, that tells me thou hast pierced to a truth that my lore could not reach. Thou art houseless and poor; I will give wealth “to thine age if thou wilt stand with me by the altar of Thor, .and let thy galdra unriddle the secrets that have baffled mine Own. All foreshown to me hath ever come to pass, but in a sense other than that in which my soul read the rune and the dream, the leaf and the fount, the star and the Scin-laeca. My husband slain in his youth; my daughter maddened with woe; .;her lord murdered on his hearthstone; Sweyn, whom I loved . as my child,” -the Vala paused, contending against her own emotions,-” I loved them all,” she faltered, clasping her hands, ” for them I tasked the future. The future promised fair; I lured them to their doom, and when the doom came, !the promise was kept ! but how? -and now, Edith, the last of my race; Harold, the pride of my pride !-speak, thing of Horror and Night, canst thou disentangle the web in which my soul struggles, weak as the fly in the spider’s mesh ? ”

. “On the third night from this, will I stand with thee by the altar of Thor, and unriddle the rede of my-masters, unknown and unguest, whom thou hadst duteously served. And ere the sun rise, the greatest mystery earth knows shall be bare to thy soul ! ”

– As the witch spoke, a cloud passed over the moon; and before the light broke forth again, the hag had vanished. There was only seen in the dull pool, the water-rat swimming through the rank sedges ; only in the forest, the grey wings of owl, fluttering heavily across the glades ; only in the grass, red eyes of the bloated toad.

Harold is far from Lytton’s best historical novel. I have to qualify that statement by saying that is only my own opinion, because there are some who disagree. To my taste it is nowhere near as good as Rienzi, or The Last of the Barons. As one critic has said Bulwer rationalises away much of the wonder and strangeness of the period. The above eve of battle passage reminds all too obviously of Shakespeare’s weird sisters. Nevertheless, it is worth a closer look..

A modern reader might not see much beyond the worn cliché of the wicked witch, with an evil philosophy of hatred . “Nothing is strong on earth but will” suggests comic strip Nazis and of a loveless un-christian creed of black magic. Triumph of the Will was the famous Nazi film. However, Bulwer’s attitude is very far from a straightforward condemnation of such a view of the will, or mere Christian abhorrence. The witches’ statement does not represent an unreservedly villainous attitude to be condemned. Bulwer was himself very interested in magic of a most ambitious kind. His association with the famous French magician Eliphas Levi is well known. Levi praised Bulwer in the highest terms, and his own ‘astral light’ is thought to have influenced the idea of the vril force in The Coming Race. Bulwer’s was no Sunday School piety. The ugly old hag has a valid point, against Hilda, the noble Dane.

The will theme pervades much nineteenth century literature and philosophy. For Bulwer, the will is especially interesting when it takes a maleficent form, for it is precisely this energy that yields the highest results when sublimated. The fascination with the daemonic will is a vital thread through tales like Zanoni, The Haunted and the Haunters, A Strange Story, and The Coming Race.

As Bertrand Russell wrote in The History of Western Philosophy, it was Schopenhauer who ‘began the emphasis on Will which is characteristic of much nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy’. Schopenhauer identified the will as the Kantian thing-in-itself, so it may truly be said that for him everything is will. Schopenhauer’s influence on the art and literature of the later nineteenth century was immense, and so it has been suggested that perhaps Bulwer, familiar as he was with contemporary German literature, may have read his work. He is known to have read Hegel, and that might be thought to show in the dialectical nature of his historical novels.

However there is apparently no convincing evidence that he had read Schopenhauer. Another suggested source for the will theme is Balzac, who also wrote mystical and occult novels. Louis Lambert, otherworldly hero of the novel of the same name, wrote at the age of 15 A Treatise on the Will, which was discovered and destroyed by his teachers. This passage was said to be autobiographical, a truthful account of something that had happened to Balzac himself. In this book Balzac preaches a strange mystical doctrine of the omnipotence of will and thought, intended as the crowning philosophy of the comedie humaine. Will is so important that facts are a secondary consideration. Doctrines of will go back far into esoteric tradition. Balzac immersed himself in esoteric and magical literature but then so did Bulwer himself. As he wrote to his friend Forster. “I know by experience that those wizard old books are full of holes and pitfalls. I myself once fell into one and remained there 45 days and 3 hours without food, crying for help as loud as I could, but nobody came. You may believe that or not just as you please, but its true”.

Evelyn Underhill in her book on Mysticism first published in 1911, writes in a chapter on magic, which she opposes to mysticism:-

‘According to its modern teachers, magic is in essence simply an extension of the theory and practice of volition beyond the usual limits . The will, says the occultist, is king, not only of the house of Life but of the universes outside the gates of sense. It is the key to man limitless, the true ring of Gyges which can control the forces of nature known and unknown.

Bulwer was such an occultist, and was said to have been the main channel by which occult ideas reached the English. Such ideas have long encountered resistance and disapproval. Underhill goes on to write of Eliphas Levi’s system:-

“the doctrine of magic which has here been described shows us the Secret Wisdom at its best and sanest. But even on these levels it is dogged by the defects which so decisively separate the occultist from the mystic. The chief of these is the peculiar temper of mind, the cold intellectual arrogance, the intensely individual point of view which occult studies seem to induce by their conscious quest of exclusive power and knowledge and their implicit neglect of love.”

“Magic even at its best extends rather than escapes the boundaries of the phenomenal world. It stands, where genuine, for that form of transcendentalism which does abnormal things but does not lead anywhere, and we are likely to fall victims to our kind of magic the moment that the declaration ‘I want to Know’ ousts the declaration ‘I want to be’ from the chief place in our consciousness”.

This was not Bulwer’s view of the matter. In a passage in the Haunted and the Haunters, speaking presumably as himself, he disclaims belief in the supernatural. “Now, my theory is that the Supernatural is the Impossible, and that what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant.” But as he wrote to Forster:-” I do believe in the substance of what used to be called Magic, that is I believe that there are persons of a peculiar temperament who can effect very extraordinary things not accounted for satisfactorily by any existent philosophy”. The modern habit is to dismiss any talk of magic as tiresome mumbo jumbo. But even without the superstition and supernaturalism, there remains quite an interesting viewpoint.

An artist’s personal beliefs may be sometimes be seen as irrelevant to his work. On the other hand he may well be the proponent of some kind of philosophy. Where an artist is inspired by a doctrine of the omnipresence and supremacy of will, it can be expected to have an effect on his attitude towards his art. A work of art can serve to express a zeitgeist, that can be its significance, and Schopenhauerian aesthetics have been employed to this end. But it can alternatively be used in an effort to create or control the zeitgeist. Such an artist is a form of shaman. Seeing himself thus, he may think of himself as purveying wisdom to his audience. Such was Bulwer , who hinted at Rosicrucian initiation.

Though he often writes about a malevolent form of will, this represents energy which may be turned to the good. Bulwer gave a far more positive valuation of the will than did Schopenhauer. In this he was in harmony with other exponents of the occult tradition. Aleister Crowley the twentieth century magus, whose word was Thelema, the Greek for will, and whose motto the Rabelaisian “Do what Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law”, recommended two of Lytton’s novels in the comprehensive reading list he provided in his Magick in Theory and Practice, Zanoni and A Strange Story.

For Schopenhauer, as for a Schopenhauerian like Thomas Hardy, the will itself was intrinsically evil, and the highest aim of life was ascetic renunciation. Such thoughts pervaded late romanticism, and all the art of the decadent movement, though they could easily slide over into their opposite. The most famous reversal of the negative valuation was of course the life affirmation of Nietzsche. When Nietzsche began to be discovered in England people looked for precursors in English literature, and one of those hit upon was Bulwer. One who pointed out the similarities was Alfred Orage, Nietzschean editor of the influential periodical The New Age. I quote from David Thatcher’s Nietzsche in England.

“for Alfred Richard Orage Nietzsche was above all a mystic whose affinities with the mystical tradition were beyond all question. Nietzsche’s superman, he believed, had a forebear in M-Mejnour, the occult superman of Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (!842): ‘Mejnour is justifying his sacrifice of thousands of aspirants for the sake of a single success. He is inspired in this, he says, by “the hope to form a mighty and numerous race… that may proceed in their deathless destinies from stage to stage of celestial glory, and rank at last among the nearest ministrants and angels gathered round the Throne of Thrones.”.. such an ideal can be paralleled perhaps in the work of a real man, singularly like Mejnour in his apparent chilly isolation, and singularly like him too in his passionate devotion to humanity – Frederic [sic] Nietzsche and the parallel is almost complete when one finds Mejnour saying of himself “my art is to make man above mankind”

Orage was to end his career as a follower of Gurdjieff.

Here is another Nietzschean thought from Zanoni:-

“A nation that aspires to equality is unfit for freedom. Throughout all creation, from the archangel to the worm, from Olympus to the pebble from the radiant and completed planet to the nebula that hardens through ages of mist and slime into the habitable world, the first law of nature is inequality.”

Though Bulwer’s philosophy of will was not exactly Schopenhauerian, there were parallels and connections. One of those influenced by Schopenhauer was Richard Wagner, who was also, as we know, inspired by Bulwer himself. Wagner, too, took will philosophy in the direction of magic, while following Schopenhauer closely. In his Autobiography Wagner writes of enthusiastically reading Bulwer-Lytton’s novels while living in Riga in the late 1830s. Apparently these were a significant influence upon him. Arguably he would try to do in his own way the same kind of thing Bulwer did in novels like Harold.

In Harold Bulwer is engaged in the sort of mythmaking that Wagner practised, like others after him. He exercises his own will upon the material of history. Harold himself is presented as the embodiment of nationality, of the English race.

The novel, has considerable interest, whatever its shortcomings as literature. As with all Bulwer’s works it is rich in intellectual ideas. Presented as a romance, it may appear to transcend the genre. Macaulay actually described it as closer to history than romance. (This comment may say a lot about Macaulay’s own attitude to his subject). Taken as history Harold reveals clearly the selective nature of historical interpretation. The subject matter is so vast that much has to be forgotten. But Bulwer does more than omit. He modifies his sources to give King Harold an altogether more heroic character. For the historian Sir Francis Palgrave, for example, Harold was a perjurer and sinner, virtually a usurper, in a decadent and fragmented country. Bulwer’s themes of freedom, nationality and race were very powerful ones at the time. In exploring and developing them he enters a field in which epic poetry may be as effective as history proper, if not more so. Harold is in some respects like an epic poem. Indeed Bulwer says in the introduction that the Norman Conquest was our own Trojan War.

Writing epic to create national identity was a common enough activity at a time when some nations were in still in the process of being invented. Harold was published in 1848, the year of nationalist revolutions. Whatever there is to be said for enjoying a secure sense of national identity, for the magician there is something more exciting about exercising the power to invent one. His object is not to embrace a myth, but to control and direct it.

In Harold Bulwer discusses English ideas of freedom. He writes of  Hildebrand’s campaign to reform Christendom, and the papal sanctioning of the Norman invasion which made it a proto-crusade. We are told that this gave rise to a lasting sense of resentment against the papacy. Bulwer’s view of history is clearly Protestant. He finds the roots of English ideas of freedom in anti-French feeling, and the constant need to resist France. He maintains that it was only the liberty among the Norman barons that permitted its eventual restoration among the English. ‘Nothing is strong of earth but will’ may also be taken as an allusion to the eventual consequences of the invasion.

Three years after the publication of Harold, appeared Sir Edward Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World 1851. Here is his judgment on the effects of the Battle of Hastings:-

“It may sound paradoxical, but it is in reality no exaggeration to say, with
Guizot, that England owes her liberties to her having been conquered by the Normans. It is true that the Saxon institutions were the primitive cradle of English liberty, but by their own intrinsic force they could never have founded the enduring free English constitution. It was the Conquest that infused into them a new virtue; and the political liberties of England arose from the situation in which the Anglo-Saxon and the Anglo-Norman populations and laws found themselves placed relatively to each other in this island.
The state of England under her last Anglo- Saxon kings closely resembled the state
of France under the last Carlovingian, and the first Capetian princes. The crown
was feeble, the great nobles were strong and turbulent. And although there was
more national unity in Saxon England than in France; although the English local free
institutions had more reality and energy than was the case with anything analogous
to them on the Continent in the eleventh century, still the probability is that the
Saxon system of polity, if left to itself, would have fallen into utter confusion, out of
which would have arisen first an aristocratic hierarchy like that which arose in
France, next an absolute monarchy, and finally a series of anarchical revolutions,
such as we now behold around, but not among us. [See Guizot, UT SUPRA.]

The latest conquerors of this island were also the bravest and the best. I do
not except even the Romans. And, in spite of our sympathies with Harold and
Hereward, and our abhorrence of the founder of the New Forest, and the desolator
of Yorkshire, we must confess the superiority of the Normans to the Anglo-Saxons
and Anglo-Danes, whom they met here in 1066, as well as to the degenerate Frank
noblesse and the crushed and servile Romanesque provincials, from whom, in 912,
they had wrested the district in the north of Gaul which still bears the name of
Normandy.

It was not merely by extreme valour and ready subordination or military
discipline, that the Normans were pre-eminent among all the conquering races of the
Gothic stock, but also by their instinctive faculty of appreciating and adopting the
superior civilizations which they encountered. Thus Duke Rollo and his
Scandinavian warriors readily embraced the creed, the language, the laws, and the
arts which France, in those troubled and evil times with which the Capetian dynasty
commenced, still inherited from imperial Rome and imperial Charlemagne. They
adopted the customs, the duties, the obedience that the capitularies of emperors and
kings had established; but that which they brought to the application of those laws,
was the spirit of life, the spirit of liberty–the habits also of military subordination,
and the aptness for a state politic, which could reconcile the security of all with the
independence of each. [Sismondi, Histoire des Francais, vol. iii. p. 174.] So also in
all chivalric feelings, in enthusiastic religious zeal, in almost idolatrous respect to
females of gentle birth, in generous fondness for the nascent poetry of the time, in a
keen intellectual relish for subtle thought and disputation, in a taste for architectural
magnificence, and all courtly refinement and pageantry, the Normans were the
Paladins of the world. Their brilliant qualities were sullied by many darker traits of
pride, of merciless cruelty, and of brutal contempt for the industry, the rights, and
the feelings of all whom they considered the lower classes of mankind.

Their gradual blending with the Saxons softened these harsh and evil points of
their national character, and in return they fired the duller Saxon mass with a new
spirit of animation and power. As Campbell boldly expressed it, “THEY
HIGH-METTLED THE BLOOD OF OUR VEINS.” Small had been the figure
which England made in the world before the coming over of the Normans; and
without them she never would have emerged from insignificance. The authority of
Gibbon may be taken as decisive when he pronounces that, “Assuredly England
was a gainer by the Conquest.” and we may proudly adopt the comment of the
Frenchman Rapin, who, writing of the battle of Hastings more than a century ago,
speaks of the revolution effected by it, as “the first step by which England has
arrived to that height of grandeur and glory we behold it in at present.” [Rapin, Hist.
England, p. 164. See also Sharon Turner, vol. iv. p. 72; and, above all, Palgrave’s
Normandy and England.]

This seems not far from Bulwer’s own view.

As well as the theme of the conquered conquering the conquerors, the survival of Norse paganism among the Danish part of the population gave scope for something like a Gotterdamerung theme, the Twilight of the gods, the Ragnarok, the tragic spirit from the Norse sagas. Bulwer could not resist inventing the figure of Hilda the Danish Vala, the pagan prophetess. This offers another parallel with Wagner. It dovetails nicely with another, more Christian sub-plot, the tragedy of the unconsummated love between Harold and Edith Swan-neck, Hilda’s ward. Bulwer purified the original legend of Harold and his mistress in an effort of conscious and deliberate mythmaking. He sanitises it and brings the lovers to a spiritual consummation in a manner that was, he claims, more appropriate to the eleventh century than it would have been to the nineteenth.

Here he was wielding the blue pencil. Harold was intended as book that could safely fall into the hands of children. In this respect Bulwer was a man of his time, in full accord with the spirit of Thomas Bowdler. However there was another very different side to his character, which perhaps shows in some of the recently restored architectural features of Knebworth. We see that he was very far from a prude  when we look more closely into the nature of his  esoteric beliefs.

Allegedly the word vril derives from virile, the Latin for male virility. In this connection see Schopenhauer:- World as Will and Idea §60

“The genitals are the real focus of will and are therefore the opposite pole to the brain, the representative of knowledge….  The genitals are the life-preserving principle assuring to time endless life. In this capacity they were worshipped by the Greeks as the phallus and by the Hindus as the lingam, which are therefore the symbol of the affirmation of the will”.

Similar thoughts circulated among some English scholars, where they took on an unmistakably blasphemous character. There exists a letter from Bulwer to Hargrave Jennings dated 1870 acknowledging receipt of a copy of Jennings’ book on the Rosicrucians. He praises it highly, telling  him that “…no better book upon such a theme has been written, or indeed could be written unless a member of the Fraternity were to break the vow which enjoins him to secrecy…”

It is most revealing that Bulwer should endorse such a work. Jennings’ book on esoteric religion, art and literature, was attacked by contemporary, and some modern, critics,  for what one called its ‘unwholesome current’ of indecent innuendo. It gives a view of religion that is quite remote from orthodox Christianity, however attuned to certain aspects of Hinduism. Christian tradition is interpreted in a most subversive way, as full of sexual symbolism. This is taken so far as to give the cross itself an essentially phallic significance, corresponding to the lingam of the Indian Saivites. Nineteenth century English Rosicrucianism was, from a respectable point of view, quite scandalously heterodox.

Madame Blavatsky wrote a pamphlet against phallicism, which she saw as an attempt to undermine theosophy. She herself was said to owe her inspiration first to The Last Days of Pompeii, and later Zanoni. In turn she was to inspire some of the greatest modern artists. Gauguin, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Klee, Pollock, and Max Beckmann, were all at various times disciples of her theosophy. .

In all this talk of will and creativity, it should not be overlooked that a book like Harold might perform a very different, more melancholy, function, that of consolation in defeat. The mystically inclined Emperor Napoleon III was to get to know both Bulwer and Hargrave Jennings while living in exile in England following the catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian war. He told Bulwer that he had read Harold on the night before surrendering his sword to William, King of Prussia, on 2nd September 1870, and that he kept it on his bedside table for several days afterwards. One year later William was to be proclaimed Kaiser of the new German Empire at Versailles.

Bulwer-Lytton
by
John S MooreVisit Knebworth, ancestral home of the Lytton family, and before the first Baron’s writing desk the guide informs you that although he was a very famous novelist in his day nobody reads him any more. This is not much of an exaggeration. The last of his books to be popular was The Last Days of Pompeii, a cruder work than his best historical novels, though credited with inspiring Madame Blavatsky to her adventurous career as mystical hierophant and founder of the theosophical society. But it would be wrong to conclude from the fact that he is not read to the judgement that he is not worth reading. Why has this idea taken hold?

Born Edward Bulwer in 1803, he was educated at Trinity Hall Cambridge. He began writing to finance an extravagant lifestyle as man of fashion. He was Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1858. For his achievements as novelist, playwright and statesman, he was elevated to the peerage in 1866. For forty years he was known as Bulwer, for twenty-two, having added his mother’s surname on inheriting Knebworth, Bulwer-Lytton, and the last seven as Lord Lytton. He died in 1873.

Lytton’s work expresses some of the most significant intellectual currents of the nineteenth century, several of which are far from are exhausted. He treated intelligently and interestingly perennial themes of good and evil, of freedom and despotism, egoism and altruism, life affirmation and the power of will. His treatment can seem all the fresher partly because he is no longer familiar. His influence was world-wide. It was notable in Germany, whose deep and thoughtful culture he both affected and was affected by. He was influenced by Schiller (whom he translated), and by Goethe, sharing something of the latter’s eclectic liveliness, and exploring subjects that strongly suggest his speculations about the daemonic. His novel of thirteenth century Italy, Rienzi, inspired Wagner’s third opera.

Britain and Germany have often seemed far apart culturally, looking to different types of philosophy, and separated by a degree of mutual contempt. British writers deplore Germany’s tendency to obscurity and dangerously misguided enthusiasm, Germans British pedestrianism of ideas and arrogant insularity. To some continental critics, the stranglehold of the old universities has adversely affected the whole of English cultural life. Such criticism was by no means unechoed in Britain.. Some of Bulwer’s thoughts upon power and charisma suggest a discontent that a complacent English culture has often felt able to dismiss as typical of an alien tradition.

Coleridge and Carlyle are examples of that enthusiasm for Germany that was a significant strand in nineteenth century British culture. Many in Victorian times had ideas of Germany as a kind of alternative England, a place of new possibilities, romantically rich, a new country to be constructed. We may think of the creation of an original German culture as an international project, with a not altogether happy outcome. Viewing Bulwer as part of this is to guard against thinking solely in terms of English literature. For the German connection see ZIPSER Richard A., Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Germany,: Berne & Frankfurt/M.: Herbert Lang, 1974.

Allan Conrad Christensen, author of one modern study (Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the fiction of new regions, Athens, GA University of Georgia Press 1976), asserts that Lytton was ‘not one of the very great novelists’ and that he is interesting for his ideals and aspirations more than for the perfection of his work. He says that he throws valuable light on the thought of the Victorians, on their view of the world. Though he also argues for his intrinsic interest, many might think that Bulwer is mostly of concern to historians, and students of the Victorian age, and that for literature we should read other novelists. That he was original and influential no one would deny. Others have surpassed him in some, perhaps most, of the genres in which he worked. Vanity Fair has been called the masterpiece of the fashionable, Oliver Twist of the Newgate school. Some conclude that his influence has passed on, into other and greater writers, with the implicit suggestion that he has nothing to say to us. This is very disputable, certainly in view of much of the nineteenth literature that still continues to be read. Many of the ideas expressed are as lively and relevant today as they were when he wrote.

As for Bulwer’s deficiency in purely literary qualities, that is less decisive than some critics have held. Understanding something of what his ideas are, we no longer judge him by some simplistic canon of what is or is not ‘great literature’. Supposed weaknesses of style like his unfashionable archaism, need not obstruct appreciation. Admittedly he has acquired an unfortunate reputation for corniness. The opening lines of his Paul Clifford (1830) have inspired a number of childish jokes, largely through the influence of Schultz’s Peanuts strip cartoon. The sentence runs: – “It was a dark and stormy night and the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” This is supposed to be so laughable that someone is offering an annual ‘Bulwer-Lytton prize’ for bad writing.

Another obvious obstacle is the sheer diversity and range of his work. No one is likely to be drawn to all of it. I only feel qualified to argue for the interest of some of it, and to indicate a few of his more notable themes. Far from being superseded, his best work is unique in English literature, of permanent interest, and quite unfairly ignored. It would be surprising if someone who made so many successful hits never attained to lasting originality Admittedly the idea of having to plough through his whole oeuvre would be dismaying. I am prepared to concede that a work like Ernest Maltravers (1837)* may well be dead for the rest of time, though I would not want to pontificate on the subject. Who could say where a Lytton revival might lead?

We can certainly see him as a representative Victorian, with his roots appropriately in an earlier era. He was a survivor from the days of George IV. His first poetry was published in 1820, his first novel in 1827. All his life he cultivated a dandy image which came to seem worse than old fashioned. It inspired counter accusations of effeminacy from Tennyson, whom he had himself accused of girlishness. This inspired a lifelong feud.

The young Bulwer, who began as an admirer of Byron, found a new hero in Bentham, entering parliament in the reform interest in 1831. At this period he wrote of the need to balance the urge to self fulfilment with more social concerns. His Pelham (1828) allegedly changed the fashion from Byronism to the moral earnestness of the Victorian social reformers. For amoral individualism, the Byronism of the 1820s had prefigured the Nietzscheanism of the end of the century. After the 1820s people tired of egoistic assertion for a season, much as, following a similar reaction, was to happen with Nietzsche. Bulwer found fertile material in the dialectic of egoism and idealism. The tension between the two suggests what Aleister Crowley, the prophet of Magick and thelema, and admirer of Lytton’s work, said of the conflict between his own Beast personality and his utopian, Shelleyan side, though in his case it might all reduce to egoism. He remarks on Zanoni’s sacrifice in language that time has not softened into respectability.

“We have a sentimental idea of self sacrifice, the kind which is most esteemed by the vulgar and is the essence of popular Christianity. It is the sacrifice of the strong to the weak. This is wholly against the principles of evolution. Any nation which does this systematically on a sufficiently large scale destroys itself. The sacrifice is vain, the weak are not even saved. Consider the action of Zanoni in going to the scaffold in order to save his silly wife. The gesture was magnificent; it was evidence of his own supreme courage and moral strength; but if every one acted on that principle the race would deteriorate and disappear”.

With the reaction against rationalism and a new cultural climate, Bulwer’s lifelong occult interests gained a new relevance. He was a living link between the original Romantic Movement, and the belief in the power of the imagination that characterised the aesthetic revolt. His conception of the ideal world and the soul prefigured the principles of the symbolists and decadents who made up romanticism’s second wind. The symbolist movement was largely underpinned by occult philosophy. Mystery was intrinsic to the reaction against the supposed rationality of the high Victorians. Bulwer had a rich and genuine occult learning that earned him the respect of all the leading figures of the occult revival. He had made an intensive study of magical writers like Iamblichus, Psellus, and Cornelius Agrippa, and was not above claiming secret knowledge and initiation into the Rosicrucian brotherhood.

The concern with egoism led to a preoccupation with villainy. In defence of the subject matter of his Newgate novels, Bulwer argued that crime reveals deep truth about human nature. This was another of his seminal ideas. Arbaces the magician in The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), last descendant of the Egyptian royal line, is a gloomy, sensual aristocratic criminal. The theme was more deeply explored in his occult stories. In The Haunted and the Haunters† (1857), he presents a malevolent character who transcends the Byronic to create a fascinating image of daemonic will. In the full version of the story, he is encountered in his contemporary embodiment as Richards, the mysterious long-lived being responsible for the hauntings. Sometimes described as the best ghost story ever written, this is arguably his masterpiece. He cut it short in later editions, because he wanted to develop the theme into a full-length novel. It became A Strange Story (1862), where the same malignant will is personified as Margrave, an evil character who wants to live forever. This desire comes across as a powerful image of life affirmation, though in the form of black magic.

White magic is portrayed in the earlier Zanoni (1842). Zanoni stands for the virtuous version of daemonic will. He has lived for many centuries as a member of a wise circle of initiates who have discovered the secret of eternal life. Taking another’s place on the scaffold, during the Reign of Terror, he offered the pattern for Sidney Carton’s sacrifice in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Lytton stated that this novel represents the fullest expression of his thought. We can think of it as a Rosicrucian novel of ideas. It brought to a nineteenth century audience the timelessly fascinating Rosicrucian alchemical tradition. The character of Zanoni represents his synthesis of these ideals. For its treatment of these, it belongs with his historical novels.

Late in his career, Bulwer turned against the pretensions of scientific rationalism, expressing hostility towards Marxism, Darwinism and socialist utopias. Other of his contemporaries expressed comparable reservations, not least Tennyson, whose Locksley Hall Sixty Years After shows his discontent with the ideals of progress he had done so much to hymn.The Coming Race (1873) has sometimes been interpreted as one of the earliest blasts in a dystopic tradition that was to culminate in Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, books which for a few decades offered powerful prophylactics against some disturbing modern tendencies.

How much his thoughts on will derived from philosophical sources like Schopenhauer, if at all, and how much from humbler sources like Balzac, has been a subject of argument.

Whatever his inspiration there are fertile possibilities in the subject. The Coming Race explores some of them in the form of science fiction. Vril is will power made into the direct energy source of society. (The word survives on the supermarket shelf as Bovril). Like Huxley’s Brave New World, the novel included speculations about interesting technological developments, but set in the framework of an inhuman and unacceptable future. The scientific perfection of this society is that of another species, and really intolerable to the human being.

High claims have been made for this book, and even for the idea of vril, which has been described as anticipating nuclear energy. As science fiction it long predated Wells who was impressed by it,

His idea of historical romance is outlined in his introduction to Harold, or the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848), serious history mixed with romance. This offers a natural framework for such themes as the perils of a political career, and the meaning of aristocracy, subjects unfortunately prone to easy trivialisation. The historical novel itself is a genre that has sometimes been degraded to the level of feminine emotional pornography. With the debased romanticism of ‘romantic fiction’ the aristocratic ideal becomes little more than a form of titillation for female readers. So the seriousness and originality of Bulwer’s treatment may be overlooked. The eras he writes about he chooses not just for their dramatic interest. At his best he was writing historical novels of ideas. The Last Days of Pompeii, for all its merits, has presumably had its day. Brilliant entertainment for its time, its concessions to popular sentiment give an inadequate image of his powers. Modern readers who want that sort of thing seem to prefer Robert Graves’s evocations of the Roman Empire in his Claudius series. Pompeii gives some intriguing insights into the Victorian imagination. But the interest of Rienzi (1835), and The Last of the Barons (1843) goes much further. In these novels, important universal issues are treated, unresolved arguments aired.

Bulwer teaches a history that deserves to be better known, bringing it imaginatively alive, and revealing a lot about nineteenth century British attitudes towards it. Rienzi expresses something of his social radicalism. It anticipates the intellectual atmosphere that generated fascism in its engrossing concern with charisma, the nature of political leadership, nationalism and ambition. He says that the Roman people rejected Rienzi’s leadership because they were not worthy of him. He holds that it was the same with the English who rejected Cromwell’s republic. His description of Charles II, as “the lewd pensioner of Louis”, reveals something of his political position. The aristocratic families of the Orsini and the Colonna come across as negative and destructive forces, though their point of view is by no means presented without sympathy.

The Last of the Barons was his next novel after Zanoni. Most critics acknowledge it to be one of his best. Perhaps we can trace a link with the heroic theme of its predecessor. Much as Zanoni is a hero held up for our admiration, it could be argued that Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known as the Kingmaker, represents his ideal in a more earthly form. This is nobility benevolent and not simply Byronic. He based his writing on a thorough study of contemporary sources, including the chroniclers like Hall that Shakespeare read for his tetralogy on the Wars of the Roses. This epoch was England at its most self absorbed, the time when English literature retreated north of the border and perpendicular architecture developed in virtual isolation from continental influences. Perhaps such history is not of world-wide interest; its concerns reflect deep into the essence of English nationhood. Bulwer has an intriguing thesis that Warwick the Kingmaker had a better vision of England than did Edward IV and his Tudor successors. It cannot be said that the thesis obtrudes. We are hardly aware of it till the end of the book. Viewpoints of other, often opposed, characters are treated very sympathetically. The novel may even at first seem to be about the rise of the new middle classes, with heroes like Nicholas Alwyn, the ambitious goldsmith, and Master Warner, the inventor, who looks back to Friar Bacon and forward to the industrial revolution. Warwick is far from a mere apologist for the power of exploiters. Far more than the old order, he represents England in all its contradictions. Considerations of policy are always tempered by a deep sense of traditional liberties. The value of aristocracy becomes apparent where liberty is overridden in the name of reform.

In this feudal vision is a wonderful lost cause to compare with Jacobitism. As a lost cause it could even have more appeal than that of the Stuarts, who might be perceived as primarily a Scottish dynasty. Bulwer links it with his own pride of ancestry; one of his own ancestors is periodically mentioned throughout the book as fighting on the Lancastrian side. The value of lost causes has often been understood as far more than that of doomed classes or misfit individuals. Even in their failure they are somehow liberating, a challenge to the idea that justice lies with the victors. The eighteenth Whig settlement with its all embracing claim to represent freedom and reason was confronted by an alternative. The defeated cause, especially after 1745, inspired the most romantic emotions, as captured in Lady Nairne’s beautiful songs. This book does something the same for the equally well known Tudor settlement.

In the very notion of the lost cause there is a world of emotional possibilities to enrich the present. A settlement that is found oppressive may be countered by this spirit. We live in a world in which a number of cultures and countries have recently experienced defeat. In a demoralised culture, it is important to find some compensation for defeat. Factors such as material wealth and erotic enjoyment generally offer consolation. What is most oppressive is that we are told that what we experience as defeat is not defeat, that it is really a triumph we are simply too backward to understand. We are under pressure to think what the dominant group in society means us to think, confounding power with wisdom. Despite the occasional encouragement when dissenting points of view find their way into the newspapers, it is hard for such attitudes to sustain themselves. Bombarded with orthodox propaganda, it is hard to reject what we feel we ought to reject. How can we resist the idea that we live among reasonable people worthy of respect?

That other values than those in authority live and flourish within our society goes without saying, but typically their official status is low, and they are derided as outmoded, or unenlightened. Those who live by them are under pressure to change. Theirs is denied to be a perspective from which much develops. Against this tyranny art can operate as a subversive force. As a way of memory and of crystallisation, it opens the gate to enjoyment that is otherwise barred. Artists and writers create separate worlds where it is possible to ignore the pressure of outside opinion. The Last of the Barons is such a work. As a novel of a lost cause, preserving as literature Warwick’s vision of aristocracy based on popular affection, lies much of its aesthetic value. In this sense we can see the book as successful and satisfying, the creation of a self contained other world where ideas and values do not keep changing into one another.

Even as a historical novelist Bulwer-Lytton is universally held to be inferior to such masters as Hugo, Dickens and Scott, presumably as regards character, psychological drama, and other pure literary qualities. But he has a different sort of interest. He participates in the intellectual climate in a different way. He was writing a different sort of novel, whose interest is largely in its ideas. I strongly deny that his books have lost their relevance. They maintain interesting historical theses. It is recognised that the Last of the Barons is more historically accurate than Scott’s novels, certainly than his English ones. Bulwer’s historical research was deep and thorough. But even Scott is little read now.

One thesis is that the mediaeval barons were the foundation of English liberty. Even by Warwick’s day, as Bulwer points out, they were still half Norman. He puts forward an argument for the value of feudalism, contending that English liberty grew out of the feudal past, the Norman freedom of the barons, their history and traditions. These values were to lay dormant for 150 years to re-emerge in the Cromwellian republic. This view is an alternative to the Saxonism that is emphasised in Harold, and sits more easily with the cosmopolitanism of the post war era. Feudalism involves voluntary commitment to rightful authority. Against this was the new monarchical absolutism with its basis in Machiavelli, appealing to the thrusting new middle class, and promoted by Edward IV, Richard III and the Tudors. Bulwer presents the young Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III, as a serious student of these new ideas. Not only is he intelligent, ruthless and brave, as Shakespeare portrays him, but also a more sympathetic character, in his own way an idealist rather than a mere villain.

Machiavelli represents rationalisation. We may think of him as a revolutionary, the Marx or Lenin of his day. One dispenses with morality for the duration of the revolution; after that it is presumably to return. Machiavellianism means cynicism about power and about the immovable beliefs of the people, to which hypocrisy has to be paid as tribute. Some basic questions of political philosophy present themselves. How much can a society be based upon true beliefs? There is a dialogue with Shakespeare, especially on the character of Gloucester, the significance of Machiavelli and the merits of the Tudor despotism. We see how much Shakespeare was writing Tudor propaganda.

There are various sub themes that might have some contemporary resonance. The descriptions of the court of Edward IV in the Tower of London reveal much about nineteenth century ideas of effeminacy. Despite Edward’s military prowess and somewhat brutal courage when called upon, he presides over a frivolous feminine culture, preoccupied with fashion, entertainment and display. Another theme is the political use made of hypocritical piety. Another is that of the newly created aristocrats, represented by Hastings, relatives of the Queen, pitted against the old baronage in the effort to undermine its power. And it is instructive to see Warwick as putting Edward IV in power then regretting what he had done.

Today, when England is looking for a new identity, it is worth looking at earlier settlements. For this reason alone The Last of Barons would be worth rereading. Even for making modern points, it can be useful to focus on something from history. There is much in national life that is only tolerable once we have risen to a vision, one might call it illusion, of mutual agreement. Where there are few we can agree with completely, politics becomes a matter of alliances. To be against something can give a feeling of unity, though our individual voices are unheard. The unifying cause here is regret at the triumph of a modernising despotism. Here is a vision of England in one of its most formative eras, as engaging and thought provoking as much of Shakespeare.

New Labour’s reforms seem likely to create a nostalgia for the things it is setting out to destroy. Most obvious of these is the vestigial political power of the old hereditary nobility. Encouraged by this attack, new voices are raised against the monarchy. Soon the nation itself may be called upon to give up its sovereignty to join a new European federation. Also some people are talking about the crisis of English identity as Scotland and Wales make moves away from the union, and the Union Jack is decried as a racist symbol. There is potential solace in the England before the Tudors, and a lament for freedoms and values that went into eclipse. This is not jingoism. There is little imperialism in The Last of the Barons, unless against the French who are still regarded as fair game. And it is a perfectly readable book, certainly as much so as much of what is still published in popular paperback editions and expected to be taken seriously as great literature. Much of its merit is its intellectual content. It is meaty enough in this respect. Also it evokes a believable picture of a unique, complex and little known era, and compelling psychological portraits of interesting historical characters. There are riches for which there is no space in this introduction. It is hard to think of any significant feature of the period that has been altogether omitted.

Until recently the motive for this journey into the roots of English national feeling and identity would have been generally obvious. The former is increasingly marginalised to the frivolity of football and out of the way places like Northern Ireland. In some quarters it is so unfashionable as to have become almost incomprehensible. In others it is identified with a narrow party line. Historical understanding is obscured by the moralistic prejudices of right and left. The Last of the Barons is good enough to bear a new interpretation. This well constructed book with its far from happy ending can speak a new message as much of the mere background becomes a source of illumination to a generation that is forgetting what once was common currency. It relates to a traditional image and interpretation of England that has played a large role in history and if only for this reason would be worth remembering.

Enthusiasts for reform may be tempted to dismiss the whole idea of such an artistic value as mere right wing tosh. In one sense, of course, romanticising the lost cause is inevitably a reactionary idea. But that is not exactly the point that is being made. The object is not directly political, it speaks more to frustration of the will, disillusion and disgust with politics. For aesthetic purposes the lost cause is often far more valuable than the live political option. With the revolt against a one-sided, often philistine, rationalism, comes restoration of imaginative balance. A vision, even a fantasy, of historical rootedness offers an antidote to the rootless metropolitanism of an obnoxious zeitgeist. Such a counteragent is not necessarily rightist, unless as conflicting with certain current loyalties, self righteously assured of their unimpeachable rationality.
© SRP Publications 1998
* With respect to Ernest Maltravers, I have been put right by Frank O’Donoghue, who unlike me has read the book and tells me it is excellent. Visit his home page here:-
 http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/yiz84/
Fri, 27 Nov 1998 20:33:44 -0000

From: “Frank” <yiz84@dial.pipex.com>

To: <jsm@mith.demon.co.uk>

Dear John

I was interested to read your Bulwer-Lytton piece on your website but I must take issue
with your opinion of Earnest Maltravers. Do you include Alice, or the Mysteries in the same category? As you
may have gathered these are two (one?) of my favourite works and I am hoping you are not basing your opinion on
a thorough reading.

I hope I don’t sound over-critical; apologies, if I do because the piece was generally good.

Can you recommend any other sources of information on EGBL and his works?

Thank you for your time.

Frank O’Donoghue

Subject: Re: EGBL

Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 23:30:02 +0000

From: John S Moore <jsm@mith.demon.co.uk>

To: Frank <yiz84@dial.pipex.com>

Mea culpa. I have not read Ernest Maltravers. I should remedy this. My remark about it is
mostly based on a negative report from one of my friends. I do not mean to disparage any of
Lytton’s work, only to argue for the merits of what I enjoy, which is most of what I have read of him, and
to understand why he has fallen into such oblivion. I confess to a possibly irrational
prejudice against reading the whole oeuvre. Your own opinion is a fact of which I must take account. As for
material on Bulwer-Lytton, the Internet you can explore as well as I can. I searched the British Library
catalogues, and read a few books and articles there, including Christensen and Zipser, an interesting
monograph by Liljegren, Bulwer-Lytton and Isis Unveiled, & dipped into the multi volume biographies
by his son and his grandson. I would like to bring our a new edition of The Last of the Barons. I
spoke to the editor of Penguin Classics about this, and though he seemed to think it might be a good
idea, he was discouraging as people like that usually are.
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 20:44:06 -0000

From: “Frank” <yiz84@dial.pipex.com>

To: “John S Moore” <jsm@mith.demon.co.uk>

John

Thank you for your recent e-mail regarding Earnest Maltravers.

I am pleased that I was right about you not having read the book. I don’t have a TV
myself but it would make (together with Alice) a marvellous costume drama; I cannot praise the books too highly.

If you do get around to reading them, I’d be very interested in your opinions.

Regards

Frank

PS. My interest in EGBL was sparked by Wagner’s mentions of his works in Mein Leben.

† Download The Haunted and the Haunters from http://www.knebworthhousegiftshop.com
update 8.7.2000. Since attending the Bulwer-Lytton conference 5-7th July 2000, at the Institute of  English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, I have learnt so much more about Bulwer-Lytton that I would modify some of my judgements.
I may have been wrong that The Haunted and Haunters was  downloadable.