BULWER LYTTON, THE NOVELIST.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 21, 21 May 1892, Page 515

BULWER LYTTON, THE NOVELIST.

It is a pity that the late Lord Lytton should have seen fit to recall in his will, just proved, that painful chapter in literary history, the domestic squabbles of his father, Bulwer Lytton, the novelist. He would have been well advised to have let it alone. He is anxious with regard to the custody of certain letters to protect his father’s memory, although to do that he is obliged to blacken the character of his mother. Such a step is all the more regrettable because, to the impartial observer, it is unjust, and the outcome of much the same sort of wrong-headedness in the son as rendered the father so undesirable a partner. Rosina, Lady Lytton, was a shrew and a nagger. So much is evident. But what was Bulwer Lytton ? From his son’s life of him it appears that at times his irritability was such as to render him • absolutely unapproachable.’ A nervous pain in the ear caused him great suffering all his life, and long before he was thirty his nervousness had become so ‘ morbidly acute ’ that he seemed ‘ like a man who had been flayed and was sore all over,’ the result being that ordinary worries to his exasperated brain acted ‘ like friction to highly inflamed flesh.’ This, I repeat, is Lord Lytton’s own account of his father. It means no more than that Bulwer Lytton was a genius of the irritable sort, ‘ gey sair to live wi’,’ as the old Scotch lady remarked. He happened to marry a nagger, and then there was the devil to pay in the Bulwer Lytton household. No doubt a patient and self sacrificing woman like Mrs Carlyle would have enabled Bulwer sometimes to keep his temper within bounds, but the true moral of the case is—first, that genius is fieqently ill-adapted to domestic life ; and secondly, that too little attention is given in match making to the evil of coupling together for life people with incompatible tempers. The mistake of Bulwer Lytton’s marriage is daily being repeated on a smaller scale.