From: The Dial, Vol. III, No. IV (April 1843)
Author:
Published: E. P. Peabody 1843 Boston
IN a very different temper from the Swedish novel is this new volume from Bulwer, even more melodramatic than his last. It has his usual merits of lively conception, and flexibility of talent; there is no better scene painter than Bulwer; no writer weaves his plot more skilfully. The incidents do not indeed grow necessarily out of the characters; only in the works of highest genius, only in Shakspeare, Cervantes, Goethe, do we find this merit; but they fit the characters very well, they allow free play to its gestures. We are sure to read the book through once, as sure ne,·er to touch it again.—It is sad to see this man, with such desire for a deeper, simpler life, and not without glimpses at its nature, yet never taking a path that could lead him one step nearer to it. Always he is beating the bushes for game that has fled, always is on the outskirts of truth. He began at the wrong end, and has never, with all his defiance of cant, clearly seen that “the misery of our age is that we must get rid of the false, to arrive at the true.” The apprenticeship of Zanoni, the “large, fatherly heart” of Warwick are seen with an eye to the bystander, never simply for his own sake. How tedious the man of talent becomes when he would philosophize, would moralize, when he would enforce by a thousand repetitions what he supposes some great leading thought about “humanity,” “democracy,” the “Man of the Age.” O fashionable writer, burn your books, burn off’ the ambitious crust from your life; be still and lonely in yourself a little while, be a child, then, perhaps you may grow to be a man, and know how to write about “humanity.” But you will never pierce that secret, from without, as you hope. At present, all your talents, your industry, your quick perceptions, and your pains, for these, it must be confessed, are real, only serve to make you a more striking illustration of the falsities of your time.
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