Quick to discern
the popular taste of the hour, and eager to gratify it, Lytton,
with the resourceful agility of a lightning impersonator, turns
in his novels from Wertherism to dandyism, from criminal
psychology to fairy folk-lore, from historical romance to
domestic romance, from pseudo-philosophic occultism to
pseudo-scientific fantasy. He ranges at will in the past, the
present or the future, consorting indifferently with impalpable
wraiths, Vrilya or mysterious Sages. It is to his credit that
this unusual gift of adaptability does not result in
incompetency. Though he attempts a variety of manners, it must in
justice be acknowledged that he does most of them well. He
constructs his plots with laborious art, and pays a deliberate,
if sometimes misguided, attention to style. When he fails, it is
less from lack of effort than from over-elaboration and excess of
zeal.
Bulwer Lytton's predilection for the supernatural was neither a
theatrical pose nor a passing folly excited by the fashionable
craze for psychical research, but a genuine and enduring
interest, inherited, it may be, from his ancestor, the learned,
eccentric savant, Dr. Bulwer, who studied the Black Art and
dabbled in astrology and palmistry. He was a member of the
society of Rosicrucians, and, to quote the words of his grandson,
"he certainly did not study magic for the sake of writing about
it, still less did he write about it, without having studied it,
merely for the sake of making his readers' flesh creep.
Pages:
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248