(ttnilege of Sltberal ArtB ICtbrarg
The Gift of "fafafe. .RuAko*
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BOSTON UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL
Thesis
SCIENCE .AND PS2T7D0- SCIENCE 111
!RBPKE3ENTATIVE HOVELS OF 3TJ LWER- LYT'TO lv. Mabel Wilhelmine Metze
II
(A. 3. Bethany College, 1928) submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 1P32
BOSTON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS LIBRARY
me
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
|
Outline |
page |
• |
|
Chronological Table |
page |
ix |
|
Introduc tion |
page |
1 |
|
Paul Clifford |
page |
9 |
|
relham |
page |
15 |
|
Godolphin |
page |
25 |
|
The Last Days of rompeii |
page |
32 |
|
Rienzi |
page |
44 |
|
Zanoni |
page |
49 |
|
The Haunted and the Haunters |
||
|
page |
/? o |
|
|
A Strange Story |
page |
73 |
|
The Caxtons |
page |
104 |
|
My Novel |
page |
105 |
|
A o leus at Larg |
page |
129 |
|
The Coming Race |
page |
132 |
|
Summary |
page |
157 |
|
Conclusion |
page |
165 |
4
•
CTlrLI..I
I. Introduction
1. Keasons for choice of subject
2. Summary of the scientific movement of the nineteenth century
3. Range covered by paper
4. Aims of paper
a. To find evidence of popular interest in the scientific movement
b. To find what characteristics of Lytton are revealed
c. to see what effect the scientific method had on Lytton' s writing
d. To find the literary value of science in Lytton' s novels
II. Paul Clifford
1. Relation of Lytton' s treatment of crime to the scientific treatment
a. Object of the book
b. Incidents
1
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II. Paul Clifford
1. Relation of Lytton's treatment of cr the scientific treatment
c. Treatment of penal institutions
(1) Prisons
(2) Laws
d. Treatment of the criminal
2. Conclusion
III. Felham
1. A novel of society
2. scientific allusions in conversation
3. Ideas concerning the relation of sci' the novel
a. Type of novel
b. Method of writing
4. Treatment of the insane
5. Conclusion
IV. Godolphir
1. Compared to Pelham
2. Use of occult for colorful scenes
3. Conclusion
V. 7^ : a?t Dci/s of Pompeii
1. Compared to Godolphin
2. The story
3. use of the occult
a. Characters
b. Scenes
4. Use of phrenology
5. Beliefs of Arbaces-- their relation to nineteenth century beliefs
6. Conclusion
VI. Hienzi
1. Compared to The Last Days of Po.Mpei i
2. Lytton's scientific method
a. How applied
(1) Character of Kienzi
(2) Political, social, and personal phases of the period
3. Conclusion
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VII . Zanoni
1. Based on Kosicrueianism
a. History of Rosicrucianism
b. Claims of Rosicrucians
2. The story
a. Its symbolism
3. Claims exemplified in Zanoni
a. General
b. Specific
(1} Elemental spirits
(2) Trance
(3) Alchemy
(4) Medicine
(5 J Attitude toward science
4. Conclusion
VIII. The Haunted an the Haunters
1. A ghost story
a. Agents of the will
b. Features like sympathetic magic
2. Conclusion
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1 . Aim
2. The story
3. Main argument-- the existence of a soul in man
4. References to the sciences
a. Psychology
b. Chemistry and alchemy
c. Biology
d. Astronomy
e. Physics
5. Conclusion
X. The Caxtons
1. Treated in its sequel
XI. My iiovel
1. The story
2. Lytton's attitude toward science
3. Use of science
a. Satire
b. Psychology
c. Homeopathy
V
0
vi
XI. My Novel
3. Use of science
d. Other scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas
4. Conclusion
XI I . ksvrc 3 Lar-^;e
1. Reason for including
2. The story
3. Contrast between Asrnodeus and Th ^ "
XIII. The Coding Race
1. The story
2. The whole based on evolution
a. History of the evolution theory
b. Satire on the controversy over evolution
c. Lytton's position on evolution
d. Heferences to works and laws concerning evolution
3. Paleontology
4. The atomic theory
5. Vril
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XIII. T ! gf ! :' ■ "
6. philology
7. Effect of science on literature 3. Conclusion
XIV. Summary of conclusions reached
1. Pm '1 Jn ' - _• -
2. Pelhajn
3. ^odolpMt
4. The Last Days of Pompeii
5 . Ri erzi
6. Zanoni
7. The Haunted and the Haunters
8. A Strange Story
9. Th Caxtons
10 . I'Tovel
] ] . Ismodeus Large 12. The Coming Race
Conclusion
1. Evidence in the novels of interest in the scientific movement
2. Characteristics of Lytton revealed by his use of science
3. The scientific method in the novel
4. The literary value of the use of science
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
1303 Birth of Edward Bulwer, later Lord Lytton.
1809 rublication of Lamarck »s Philosophic Zoologize.
1816 Whewell became tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge.
1826 Graduation of Lytton from Trinity.
■1828 Publication of Pelham.
1830 Publication of Paul Clifford and Lyell's Elements of Geology; Debate between Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier .
1831-41 Lytton a member-, of Parliament.
1833 Publication of Godolphin.
1834 Publication of Th> Last Daya of Pc pe3 ' .
1835 Publication of ttienzi.
1836 Publication of Asmodeus at Large. Formation of nosicrucian Society of which Lytton was Grand Patron.
1842 Publication of Zanonl . 1849 Publication of The Caxtons . 1852-66 Lytton again in parliament. 1853 publication of L£_ Novel. 1859 The Haunted and the Haunters.
1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species
1862 Publication of A Strange Story.
1866 Lytton raised to the peerage.
1871 Publication of Darwin's Descent Man.
Publication of The Coming Race . 1873 The death of Lytton
SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE IN
REP RESENT ATI VE NOVELS OF BUL'VER- LYTTON
INTRODUCTION
The consideration of the subject Science and Pseudo-Science In nepresentative "Novels
Reasons for
choice of
subject of Bulwer-Ly tton grew out of a desire to trace what effect, if any, science has had on the novel. Emile Zola says: "Le roinan experimental est une consequence de 1T evolution scientif ique , comme la litterature classique et romantique a correspondu a un age de scholastique et de theologie."1 It is in an effort to find whether such correspondence exists that this study is made.
The
period and the
it' an
Since the nineteenth century saw great advances in science, and was also .a fertile period in the field of the novel, some writer of that period was a logical choice. Bulwer-
l.Zola, Roman Experimental, p. 22
Lytton Is unusually well adapted for such a study as this, since he knew the trend of public interest in science, as well as in other fields, and followed closely the new discoveries, especially those which opened a field for poetic conjecture. There were it, any sciences toward which he could turn his thoughts to find ideas of nature which are sublime and grand.
Summary of the scien- tific movement of the nine- teenth centurv
In astronomy, for instance, the nebular hypothesis, reaching back through aeons of time and' out through immeasurable space, attested anew to the immensity and dignity of the universe. The study of paleontology with the discovery of forms of life long extinct and of a hitherto unimagined structure, which gave rise to the modern conceptions of the age of the earth, was on the whole a fascinatingly poetic subject. Its findings were substantiated by those of geology, and together they gave rise to the theory of
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evolution, which is primarily a product of nineteenth century thought, and which created such great controversies that their echoes are still heard. In physics, the discovery that electromagnetic waves, heat, and light, are all the same kind of motion in the same medium, ether, which is itself a field for speculation, gave new confirmation to the fact that law and unity pervade the material world, while it opened the mind to other unforeseen discoveries. The atomic theory promulgated by the chemists gave a new idea of the detailed complexity of the smallest particles of matter, which seem to follow the same laws that govern the planets swinging through space. Psychology was coming into being, and studies of the brain and nervous system were revealing an order in the make-up of the body and a relation between body and mind which were perplexing, to say the least.-'
1. H.S. Williams, The Story of Nineteenth Century Science
Problems All of these discoveries created problems,
created
by the The older religious belief must be harmonized scien- tific with them--or they with it, according to one's movement
temperament. Such emphasis upon the material gave alarming impetus to a materialistic con- ception of all things. But, top, so many valid discoveries, so new and so different, opened the minds of the people in credulity toward many things not of such great value. If the wonders of chemistry are true, why not some of the old beliefs of the alchemists? If mind depends upon the brain, is not phrenology justified? If wireless communication is possible, why not telepathic communication?
So, it was an age when interest in the world we live in was deep and powerful. It is natural that such interest would be reflected in the literature of the period, and it is the purpose of this paper to trace the reflections of both science and pseudo-science in the most representative novels of Bulwer-Lytton.
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Novels The novels chosen for study are typical
chosen
of the various phases of Lytton* s writing. He began with a rather sentimental interest in society and social reform, of which Paul Clifford, a consideration of crime and the criminal, Pelham, and Go dolphin are repre- sentative. The Last Days >f Pompeii , which is an historical novel, though it does not show the method Lytton used in his other novels of this kind, deserves a place because of its popularity. It is considered here chiefly for the occult sciences in it. I have chosen Rienzi as typical of his almost scientific method in the historical novel. These are all early novels, the last having been published in 1835, when Lytton was but thirty- two. In tli em there is comparatively little evidence of the true scientific movement; most of their value for this study is in the occult sciences .
For the later period of his writing,
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Strange Story, are of interest chiefly for the pseudo- science in them, though A Strange Story especially shows his wide reading in the truly scientific fields. The Caxtons and its seouel, My Novel , are typical of Lytton's most realistic writing. And his last novel, The Coming Race, which describes a scientific Utopia, is dis- cussed in connection with Asmodeu s Large , a much earlier story which foreshadows it.
The space given to the consideration of each of these novels is not always proportionate to their literary importance. For instance, The Caxtons is a book so important that it cannot be omitted in a study of the represen- tative novels of Lytton, yet for a discussion of the effect of science and pseudo- science on the novels, it has proved better to consider carefully its sequel, My Novel , and pass cursorily over The Caxtons . Again, A Strange Stor contains so much evidence of Lytton's knowledge
V
Range of
science
and
pseudo- science covered
of science and pseudo- science , that it was necessary to give it space entirely out of proportion to its importance as a novel.
The range covered by these books is unbelievably wide. The term science is broad enough in its ordinary applications, but Lytton made it still broader by using it in the old medieval sense, referring to almost any kind of knowledge as a science. The scope covered by this paper will include psychology and social psychology (the last in a very elementary state); the science of language, philology; the recognized sciences of chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, anatomy, and paleontology; the pseudo- sciences : astrology, alchemy, phrenology, physiognomy, homeopathy, and mesmerism; and such extremely occp.lt pseudo- sciences as magic, charms, and Rosicru- cianism, which last also includes studies of many of the above sciences and pseudo- sciences . Since the scientific method and the scientific attitude are fundamental and powerful in such
8
an age as the nineteenth century, Lytton's comments on and personal ideas about them will be discussed where they appear in these books. Although Lytton has discussed certain matters of political science, these are omitted as being beyond the rather extended limits of this paper.
Aims of
this
paper
In each of the novels studied I shall find (1) What evidence there is of the scientific movement and what interest is revealed in pseudo- science . (2) What characteristics of Lytton are manifested by his references to science and pseudo-science. (3) What effect the scientific method had on Lytton's writing of novels. (4) How, in general, both science and pseudo-science added to or detracted from the literary value of the work.
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PAUL CLIFFORD
Lytton's Paul Clifford is among Lyt ton's errliest works,
treatment
of crime It is a sentimental story of a young man who compared •
to scien- became a criminal because he was unjustly con- tific
treatment demned to prison where he became acquainted
with all sorts of vicious people. The object of this discussion is to see if there is any relation between Lytton's treatment of crime and criminals and the truly scientific way of dealing with them.
Object Hia chief object in this story is expressed
of Paul
Clifford in his preface: "To draw attention to two based on
obser- errors in our penal institutions, viz., a vation
vicious Prison-discipline, and a sanguinary Criminal code-- the habit of corrupting the boy by the very punishment that ought to redeem him, and then hanging the man at the first occasion, as the easiest way of getting rid of our own blunders." Such a statement is necessarily based on observation, which is the ultimate basis of all scientific endeavor. It shows
10
that people were interested in seeing things as they are, which is the first thing to be done if a reform "based on fact is to be brought about.
Some in- cidents in the story based on obser- v at ion
Penal insti- tutions : Pri sons
Lytton exhibited the fact-finding spirit in the novel itself when he referred by foot- notes to actual happenings in the criminal courts and prisons on which he based some of the 'incidents in his story. He did not ex- haustively study the records, and classify and analyze what he found there; that would have been the really scientific method. But he wanted facts. The relation between his and the scientific method is the same as the relation expressed by Huxley when he said,
p
"Science is trained and organized common sense.'
The prison conditions Lytton decried are the same as those discussed in modern works on penology. The one which seemed to have the worst effect on the prisoner and so upon society, was that of herding all prisoners together,
1. For example, p. 81 and p. 361
2. Huxley, Scientific Methods
regardless of their age or the possibility of their reform. That was what made Paul Clifford a criminal in the first place. We need only to open a modern work on prisons to find earnest discussions of the evils of such a system.
Penal In criticizing the laws he was again on
insti- tutions: ground which has received much attention from Laws
crirr inologists . Though his interest in the matter was more humanitarian than scientific, it is true that the scientific study of penal institutions really began in such interest, just as the study of astronomy began in astrology, and the study of chemistry in al- chemy.-^-
In these two phases of his novel, dealing with the prisons and the criminal laws, Lytton was astonishingly near the problems that concern criminologists today. In his study of the criminal himself, however, he was far from scientific. On the whole, he described Clifford sentimentally.
1. De Quiros, Modern Theories of Criminology, p. 2.
The
criminal treated senti-
mentallv of the fact that the tutor was a rogue
Paul Clifford was a poor "boy of fine sensi- bilities, given an education, which, in spite
all the culture that a modern college education is supposed to give. His naturally fine qual- ities made him a prince among thieves; he never did a low or cowardly act. He made such a good appearance that when he entered a drawing room all eyes turned to him and everyone wondered who he could be. His sentiments were the most noble imaginable, and toward the girl he loved he was not only a gentleman, but a paragon.
Scien- In spite of this highlv colored, over-drawn
tific
factors picture, there are statements about Clifford in his
treatment which were in that day and later considered of the
criminal scientific. These concern his physical make-up-- his physiognomy and his stature. They are mentioned as being features which would mark the criminal. Of course, today it is known that this is not true, any more than is phren- ology; that though certain ph^/sical stigmata are often present in criminals, they are likewise
often present in those not criminal, and there- fore are not scientific aids in determining the type. The real determining factors lie far beneath the exterior appearance. But the criminologist Lombroso (1836-1909) believed that certain physical characteristics are always present in the born criminal,^" so that at the time this book was written these were ideas of a scientific nature.
Lytton Lytton was really ahead of his times in
ahead of
his time having any scientific interest at all in crime, for the real study of crime did not begin until the middle of the nineteenth century. The only important work before that time was Beccaria's Crimes and Punishment, which came
o
near the close of the eighteenth century.0 Although about seventy of its eighty suggestions are in use today it was considered so radical then that it had little influence.
Conclu- sion
Paul Clifford was not too radical for its
day, yet it called the attentio:
1. Gillin, Criminology and Penology, pp. 90-91
2. De Quiros, Modern Theories of Criminology, j
to the abuses Lytton recognized, and made its accusations seem valid by reference to actual cases. This made it more valuable as a human- itarian novel than it could have been otherwise Mere, then, a iudicious use of scientific metho and ideas added to the usefulness of the book as a help in reforming the penal system.
A novel of
socletv
In Pelham, that novel of society which the Cambridge History calls the best of all Lytton's works and W,B, Kowells calls the worst,- there is a lively picture of the worldly, shallow type of social life led among certain classes in England. The story is of little consequence in our study. Pelham was a young man of society, living by the popularity which his wits brought him. He was light-minded but not evil. Later he became a solid, dependable member of the British aristocracy. A murder and a case of insanity add interest to the plot.
scien- tific
allusions : in con- versation tering, satirical tone of the author. Of course,
The especially notable feature of the bock the clever, witty conversation and the ban-
the conversation centered around the lighter elements of interest of the time: personality, dress, scandal; but in all this we find frequent evidence of the scientific movement. Kany terms
1. W. D. Howells, "Heroines of Nineteenth Century Fiotion--'N7dia,, . Harper's Bazaar, August 25, 1900
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are used which have a scientific origin, and
"science*' itself is used as d^scrioti v^* of so
many things that we realize the term was in the
air. jror example, the "science of gastronomy"
was discussed by the epicure, Lord Guloseton.^
The "science of using time" was the concern of
a scholar. ^ Again we find reference to Lord
Vincent's "science du monde"^and the "science
de la danse" was one of the accomplishments of -
the ladies.
■rhen there was a Mr. Tr ingle who prided himself on his scientific knowledge and brought it into the conversation every time he could find the least excuse. tie became very enthu- siastic in explaining, scientifically, why people who "make no pretensions to sobriety" act only on the principle of self-preservation. He said: "You will find, in hydrostatics, that the attraction of cohesion is far less powerful in fluids than in solids: viz., that persons who have been converting their 'solid flesh1 into
1. Pelham, p. 244
2. Ibid, p. 282
3. Ibid, p. 101
4. ibid, p. 341
wine-skins, cannot stick so close to one another as when they are sober.""'
Another such incident concerned the scholar, Mr. Clutterbuck. When he asked for wine, he was informed by his servant that "there are great things, like alligators, in the cellar, which break all the bottles." These "great things" were fou.nd to be little lizards called efts. Mr. Clutterbuck was astonished at their destructi veness , but conjectured that "perchance they have an antipathy for the vinous smell: I will confer with my learned friend, Dr. Dissectall, touching their strength and habits."^ This would not have been v/ritten had dissection not been the order of the day. it is a bow to the interests of the nineteenth century.
There are many examples of such a casual use of scientific terms that it is clear that science had penetrated practically all walks of life. Lord Vincent described a man by saying, "He is the mathematical definition of a straight line--length without breadth."0 The use of a
.1. Pelhain, p. 201
2. Ibid, p. 279
3. Ibid, p. 75
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zoological term expresses scorn: "They were a species of bipeds that I would never recognize as belonging to the human race."1 Pelham described a baronet thus: "An old baronet of antediluvian age — a fossil witness of the wonders of England before the deluge of French manners swept away- ancient - customs, and created, out of the wrecks of what had been, a new order of things, and a new race of mankind."2 This last statement is a distinct product of the nineteenth century and Cuvier's doctrine of cat as trophism: that in ancient times great catastrophes swept away the population of the world and new species were created.
•i'hese are trivial allusions, perhaps, but they go bo show that the very atmosphere was full of science, when in the light conversation of society such casual references were made in a matter-of-fact way, as if everyone was familiar 1 with the ideas involved.
%» relham, p. 1 2. Ibid, p. 259
Science Besides this Inconsequential use of
and the
novel scientific ideas, there was some of a more sig-
nificant nature. While most of the more serious discussion concerned politics or art, there was some consideration of science and the relations of science and literature.
Lord In a discussion of novels,"'' Lord Vincent,
Vincent ' s
idea one of the social set in Pelham, favored what
is known today as the psychological novel, though he used the terms philosophy and meta- physics instead of psychology. I wonder if he was thinking of Scott when he said, "It is not enough- -and I wish a certain novelist who has lately arisen would remember this--it is not enough for a writer to have a good heart, amiable sympathies, and what are termed high feelings, in order to shape out a moral, either true in itself or beneficial in its inculcation. Before he touches on his tale, he should be thoroughly acquainted with the intricate science of morals, and the metaphysical, as well as
1. Pelham, pp. 215-216
o
20
the more open, operations of the mind." In other
words , he must know ethics, and the psychology
of the subconscious mind as well as the conscious.
Taine ? s idea of the place of science in lit- erature
Taine, in his introduction to Th [Tl story of English Literature, developed this idea in its wider implications much more deeply than did Lytton. He said that he who is able to inter- pret good literature will find there the underlying psychology of a soul, of an age, or, in a very few excellent pieces, of a race. That underlying psychology is based ^1^ on the race itself, as the Aryan or the Semitic races keep their identity in spite of the span of ages and regions; \2),on circumstance or the environment in which the people are placed, especially over a long period of time; and ^3), on the momentum acquired by the ac corapli slime nt of earlier ages. The writer who fulfills his mission is the one who understands this and makes clear the fun- damental psychology on which are based the conceptions which bring about the events of the
1. Sections IV- VIII
Method of writing a novel based on science
age of which he is writing. This shows some- thing of the depth of the idea which Lytton has merely touched.
The method of writing a novel based on science, such as Lord Vincent mentioned, corresponds to Zola's method of writing an experimental novel, which he declared to be a product of the scientific age.^ Lord Vincent described the method thus: MI would first make myself an acute, active, and vigilant observer of men and manners. Secondly, I would, after having thus noted effects by action in the world, trace the causes by books, and meditation in my closet .... Nor would I give the rein to invention till 1 was convinced
that it would create neither monsters of
p
men, nor falsities of truth."""
Zola ' s method
Zola prescribed exactly the same thing in his Roman Experimental ; "En somme, toute lf operation consiste a prendre les faits dans la nature, puis a etudier le mecanisme des faits, en agissant sur eux par les modlficatioi
1. See Introduction of this paper, p. 1.
2. Pelham, pp. 215-216
des circonstances et des milieux, sans jamais s'ecarter des lois de la nature. ""^
Rousseau was criticized by the social set in Pelham because, although he knew the general laws of psychology, he was unable to apply them truly in individual cases.
Contem- The state of the public attitude toward the
porary
treatment insane as implied in this story, shows a of the
insane remarkable lack of science. Their fearful treatment was suggested in Sir Reginald Glanville's visit to a private mad house. "From one passage, at right angles with the one through which we proceeded, broke a fierce and thrilling shriek; it sank at once into silence --perhaps beneath the lash!" Then the room in which the victim was confined: "All was utterly dark... A sullen noise told me that he was unbarring the heavy shutter. Slowly the grey cold light of the morning broke in; a dark figure was stretched upon a wretched bed at the far end of the room...1! am verv cold , ' it said, 'but if I complain you will beat me. ,M
1. Zola, Roman Experimental, p. 8.
2. Pelham, p. PP.
Q
The keeper explained, "At times, she raves so violently, that-- that--but I never us force where : ; can 1 > helped. "
Reform Reform in the treatment of the insane
in the
treatment began in America in 1784, but it was much of the
insane slower in Europe, since the inertia of medieval
tradition had to be overcome. In medieval
times, it was supposed that insanity was a
sign of possession by demons, and it was not
until such workers as Dr. Gall, of phrenological
. fame, showed that the mind depends on the
condition of the brain that the former idea
was dispelled. The study of the nervous
system came with this, so that presently the
insane were treated for mental disease, not
2
for demoniacal possession.
This description added the melodramatic note that Lytton was ever using. It gives, likewise, some knowledge of the conditions of the day, an understanding of which is based on the literary products or an age as well as the strictly historical records.
1. Pelham, pp. ."70-371
2. Williams, The Story of Nineteenth Century Science, pp. 395-401
Conclu- In Pelham, then, the influence of science
sion
appears in two ways: (1) it had. entered polite conversation, giving additional opportunities for simile and satire; \2) Knowledge of science was beginning to be considered part of the necessary equipment of the novelist. Its lack i3 evident in the treatment of those afflicted by mental disease.
11
GODOL?TTIN
Compared Godolphin is a story of the same sort of
to Pelham ~
life that is described in Pelham, with this
addition, that many of the most memorable scenes
owe their power to the occult science of
astrology, instead of to the clever conversation
used in Pelham.
The Percy Godolphin was a young englishman who
story
fell in love with Constance Vernon. Their marriage was impossible, however, because Constance had sworn to avenge her father's misfortunes, and to do that must marry some one high in political power. She married Lord Erpingham, and Godolphin went to Italy where he became a close friend of an astrologer, Volktman. After Volktman's death his daughter, Lucilla, went away with Godolphin. Constance and her husband came to Italy and while there Lord Erpingham met death in an accident. Lucilla learned of Godolphin' s and Constance's love and disappeared, whereupon they were married
is
< ♦
26
and wen t to England. Later Lucilla came to England as a fortune-teller, and upon her death-bed sent for Oodolphin, who had not known until then that the popular fortune- teller was she. She prophesied his death, for, she said, their horoscopes were linked. Godolphin lost his life that night.
Use of In the conversation, there are the same
the
occult sort of references to science which were present in Pelham: uses of scientific terms and reference to many things as sciences. More important than this, however, we find the use of the occult. Scenes describing magic and astrological devices can easily be melodrainatic . They avid to this story in the same way that the witch scenes add to the atmosphere of ,'aobeth, or the prophet scenes to The Lad the Lake , except that here they are, perhaps, more obviously used for effect. They seem a device dragged in by design, instead of being an organic part of the story. This must always
(I
27
"be the case with such scenes in a story laid in an age when these beliefs are not prevalent.
The following examples will show what use he has made of the occult to embellish his scenes .
Lucilla's Lucilla used a charm told her by her father
dream
to bring her a prophetic dream. "She looked again and again at the singular image and the portentous figures wrought upon the charm; the very strangeness of the characters inspired her, as was natural, with a belief in their efficacy: and she felt a thrill, an awe, creep over her blood, as the shadows of eve, deepening over the far mountains, brought on the time of trial." Then there is a description of a beau- tiful, serene night, and then the dream: "She thought it was broad noon day, and that she was sitting alone in the house she then inhabited, and weeping bitterly. Of a sudden the voice of fJodolphin called to her; she ran eagerly forth, but no sooner had she passed the threshold, than
< *
the scene so familiar to her vanished, and she was alone in an immense and pathless wilderness; there was no tree and no water in this desert; all was arid, solitary, and inanimate. But what seemed most strange to her was, that in the heavens, although they were clear and bright, there was neither sun nor stars; the light seemed settled and stagnant—there v/as in it no life . . .
"And now there was no longer an utter dumbness and death over the scene. Forth from the sands, as from the bowels of the reluctant earth, there crept, one by one, loathly and reptile shapes ... Shapes of terror thickened and crowded around her... She strove to escape; and ever as she fled, the sounds grew louder, and the persecuting shapes more ghastly .. .There was no spot for refuge, no cave for concealment.
"And now, again, the wilderness was gone; she stood in a strange spot, and opposite, gazing upon her with intent and mournful eyes, stood CjO do lphi n. .. Above them both hung a motionless
and livid cloud; and from the cloud a gigantic hand was stretched forth, pointing with a shadowy and unmoving finger towards a quarter of the earth which was enveloped in a thick gloom. . . She thought Godolphin vanished, and all was suddenly and utterly night- -night, hut not stillness- -for there was a roar as of many winds, and a dashing of angry waters, that seemed close beneath; and she heard the tress groan and bend, and felt the icy and rushing air: the tempests were abroad. But amidst the mingling of the mighty sounds, she heard distinctly the ringing of a horse's hoofs; and presently a wild cry, in which she recognized the voice of Godolphin, rang forth, adding to the wrath of nature the yet more appalling witness of a human despair. The cry was followed by the louder dashing of the waves and the fiercer turmoil of the winds; and then, her anguish and horror freeing her from the Prison of Sleep, she woke."
The dream is used as a dramatic foreshadowing
1. Godolphin, pp. 231-234
30
of sorrows to come. It is a combining of the natural and the supernatural that makes the reader recognize some of his own dreams, yet the charm which made it prox^hetic put more meaning into it than an ordinary dream would have .
Lucilla's Later, Lucilla, whose mind was wandering,
beliefs
described her beliefs to Constance, beliefs which were the property of those who professed occult sciences. These give a weird coloring to the scene: "For, when the night is round us, and there is peace on earth and the world's children sleep, it is a wild joy to sit alone and vigilant, and forget that we live and are wretched. The stars speak to us then with a wondrous and stirring voice; they tell us of the doom of men and the wreck of empires, and prophesy of the far events which they taught to the old Chaldeans. And then the Winds, walking to and fro as they list, bid us go forth with them and hear the songs of the midnight spirits,
31
for you know that this world is given up to two tribes of things that live and have a soul: the one bodily and palpable as we are; the other more glorious, but invisible to our dull sight-- though I have seen thern- -Dread Solemn Shadows, even in their mirth; the night is their season as the day is ours; they march in the moonbeams, and are borne upon the wings of the wind. And with them, and by their thoughts I raise myself from wnat I am and have been.""^
This belief is much like that of the Rosicrucians, which I shall discuss in connection with a later work, Zanoni, and it gives that mysterious, other-worldly touch which can be so effective in literature.
Conclu- The chief relation in Godolphin to science
s i on
or pseudo- science , is, then, as 1 have shown, in the use of the occult to make scenes melo- dramatic and colorful.
1. (iodolphin, pp. 311-312
THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII
Compared The Last Davs of Pompeii, that most to '
tiodolphin popular of all Lytton's works, makes far better use of the occult sciences than was found in go dolphin. It is laid in the first century, just before the eruption of Vesuvius, and these beliefs, which were current at that time, would naturally form a part of its background. They are an organic part of the story, so it will be necessary to understand the plot in order to treat with clarity the pseudo-science there is here.
The Glaucus, a Greek in Pompeii, rescued the
story
blind flower-girl, I^ydia, and took her for his slave. she loved him. He loved lone, a high- born lady who was also loved by the evil Egyptian priest, Arbaces. Pie tried to trick her into marriage, but Glaucus saved her through Nydia's assistance. Thus he incurred the hatred of Arbaces. Julia, who also loved Glaucus, asked Arbaces to help her procure a potion which would
33
make him love her. By resorting to the witch of Vesuvius, Arbaces gave Julia a potion which would avenge him by depriving Glaucus of his senses. wydia filched it and administered it to Glaucus, thinking thus to win his love. In the mad frenzy it caused, Glaucus came upon Arbaces just after he had killed Apaecides, brother to lone. Arbaces put the blame for the murder upon Glaucus and he was condemned to meet the lion in the arena. By Nydia's intervention, the guilt of Arbaces was proved, but just then the eruption of Vesuvius took place. "Nydia, lone, and Glaucus escaped in a ship, but Nydia committed suicide rather than to have to live knowing the love of Glaucus and lone .
Use of Occult sciences in The Last Da^s of Pompeii,
the '
occult as in Godol^hin . give opportunity for weird and
awful characters who appear in some significant scenes. In general, there is almost no compar- ison between their literary effectiveness, for they seem to belong to the age of the last days
of Pompeii, while they do not belong in a novel of nineteenth century society.
Character One of these characters was Arbaces, who,
of
Arbaces as priest of the Egyptian deity Isis, was acquaint- ed with all the learning and magic of the day. This meant that he was able to trick the super- stitious people into doing almost anything he wanted them to. He was, of course, more credulous toward asbrology and cabala than he would have been had he lived in a later day. When he was first introduced to the reader, he was surrounded by mystery, for the people feared him as a possessor of the "fatal gift of the evil eye".1 There were rumors that he was a sorcerer and an astrologer;" he practised the "science that would read our changeful destinies in the stars.'*1" He was known to those initiated into bhe Egyptian
mysteries and magic as Hermes of the Burning 4
Girdle.
Witch of Another character more awful and mysterious
Ve su viu s
was the witch of Vesuvius. When she first appeared,
1. The Last Days of Pomoeii, p. 29
2. Ibid, p. 42
3. Ibid, p. 148
4. Ibid, p. 241
m
it was in the dim light of dawn, when Arbaces saw her from his tower. Ker introduction to the reader, through the words of Arbaces, is as mysterious as that of the priest: "Ho! I have, then, another companion in these unworldly night watches. The witch of Vesuvius is abroad. What! Doth she, too, as the credulous iinagine-- doth she, too, learn the lore of the great stars? Hath she been uttering foul magic to the moon, or culling foul herbs from the venom- ous marsh? At another time Eydia spoke of her with all the horror of the superstitious: "I have heard that a potent witch dwells amongst the scorched caverns of the mountain, and yon cloud may be the dim shadow of the demon she confers with. 1 After such references as these the reader is ready to hear of Julia's going to her for a love-potion, and the description of her cave and her curses is the more effective.
effective All the appurtenances of witch-craft were
scenes
present in the witch's cavern: "A fire burned
1. The Last Da;y s of Pompeii, p. 152
2. Ibid, p. 182
in a far recess of the cave; and over it was a small cauldron; on a tall and thin column of iron stood a rude lamp; over that part of the wall, at the base of which burned the fire, hung in many rows, as if to dry, a profusion of herbs and weeds. A fox, crouched before the fire, gazed upon the stranger with its bright and red eye--its hair bri stling--and a low growl stealing from between its teeth; in the centre of the cave was an earthen statue, which had three heads of a singular and fantastic caste: they were formed by the real skulls of a dog, a horse, and a boar; a low tripod stood before this wild representation of the modern Hecate... Before the fire, with the light shining full upon her features, sat a woman of considerable age.... with stony eyes turned upon them; .... they beheld in that fearful countenance the very image of a corpse!--the same, the glazed and luster less regard, the blue and shrunken lips, the drawn and hollow jaw — the dead, lank hair, of a pale gray--the livid, green, ghastly
37
skin, which seemed all surely tinged and tainted by the gravel More horror is added by her telling Arbaces that her appearance was caused by her watching over the deadly herbs that simmered in her cauldron.
When Arbaces visited the witch they talked of sorcery and divinations, of love-philtres, of potions that can destroy the mind. Their evident malevolence toward people-- those who had crossed them or merely the happy--was rendered the more awful since they possessed' great resources for vengeance.
These two characters are outstanding in The Last Days of pompeii, both for their reliance upon the powerful occult sciences and for the weird scenes in which they figure. They help also to make an atmosphere that is of the first century A.D.
The use The pseudo-science of phrenology, or
of phre- nology detecting one's mental traits from the config- uration of the slrull gave Lytton ideas from which he developed another character. The
The Last Davs of Fc
peii,
belief in phrenology was very popular when Th Last Days >f Pompeii was written, in 1834. At the close of the hook, where Lytton related what had been unearthed by the excavators, he described a skull found in the ruins, "of such striking conformation, so bold]y marked in its intellec- tual, as well as its worse physical developments, that it has excited the constant speculation of every itinerant believer in the theories of Spurzheim who has gazed upon that ruined palace of the mind.""'' Spurzheim, along with Dr. Gall, was one of the chief exponents of the belief that the brain is divided into many portions, each of which is the localization of some "faculty". They believed that by measuring the skull they could tell how large these portions v/ere and therefore how well-de veloped were the faculties that had their seats in them.
From this skull Lytton derived one of the minor priests of Isis, Calenus, whom he described in the earlier part of his story. "His shaven skull was so low and narrow in the front as
1. The Last Days of Fompeii, p. 442
nearly to approach that of an African savage, save only towards the temples, where, in that organ styled acquisiti veness by tie pupils of a science modern in name (phrerolog\3 but best practically known (as their sculpture teaches us) amongst the ancients, two huge and almost preternatural protruberances yet more distorted the unshapely head." Throughout the story Calenus is presented as a character having the characteristics such a skull would indicate according to phrenology. Here, then, is another use of a pseudo-science of a different kind to furnish a basis for a character.
The Arbaces's belief concerning the universe
beliefs
held by sound remarkably like a cold, nineteenth century Arbaces
interpretation of ancient religions. However, the Egyptian religion was contradictory in nature, and was not the same among all the peoples professing it, so that one can hardly be sure that a certain belief did not exist somewhere .
Arbaces thought that the ancients deliberately,
1. The Last Days of Pompeii, p. 52
t
40
after studying the revolutions of the stars and the seasons of the earth, "devised an august allegory; they made it gross and palpable to the vulgar by the signs of gods and goddesses, and that which in reality was government the:/ named religion. As a matter of fact, the knowledge of the Egyptians concerning the "revolutions of the stars" was so slight as to be negligible. They used astronomy only to mark the hours of the night, not caring at all, since they were exceedingly practical, about the size, nature, or positions of the stars. They observed the pole-star, and knew that there was regularity in the heavens, but they knew nothing of the causes of it." The later state- ment then that Arbaces wandered "from the truths of astronomy .... into astrological fallacy loses much of its meaning.
However, his belief as to the nature and power of Isis was just about what seems to have been the vague belief of the Egyptians. Isis was Nature, according to Apuleius, the parent
1. The Last Days of Pompeii, p. 68
2. Encyclopedia Brittanica oil Egyptian Science 5. The Last Days of Pompeii, p. 153
of all the gods and mistress of all the elements The gods were not thought of as having unlimited divinity; in fact, they were but pre-existent , acting intelligences, with powers hardly greater than man might have by magic and witchcraft . ° Arbaces held the goddess to be a myth symbolic cf Nature, which, in turn, is ruled by the incomprehensible force, Necessity. These two forces, Nature and Necessity, were the only supreme beings he recognized. It is only Nature which men can investigate; Necessity is hidden forever from the sages. But he believed the human mind capable of fathoming all the secrets of Nature. Lytton, with his nineteenth century perspective, thought this a good opening in which to inject some of his own ideas, to counteract the materialistic ideas current in his own time, which Arbaces approached so nearly He did it thus: "Arbaces did not know (perhaps no one in that age distinctly did) the limits which Nature imposes upon our discoveries. Seeing that the higher we mount in knowledge the
1. Murray, Manual of Mythology, p. o50
2. Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics
f
more wonders we behold, he imagined that Nature not only worked miracles in her Ordinary course, but that she might, by the cabala of some master soul, be diverted from that course it- self. Thus he pursued science, across her appointed boundaries, into the land of perplexity and shadow.... He who could be sceptical as to the power of the gods, was credulously superstitious as to the power of man.
By this painless method Lytton seemed to hope that he might influence the beliefs of his readers without their realizing it, to keep them from falling into utterly materialistic ideas of Mature, the world, and man.
Conclu- To sum up, I have shown that (1) the occult
sion
sciences of magic and astrology gave Lytton opportunity for awe-inspiring scenes and the weird, fearful characters of Arbaces and the witch of Vesuvius. These helped give "atmosphere" to the story. (P.) The pseudo- science of phrenology, applied to a skull found in the
1. The Last Days of Pompeii, pp. 3 53-154
f
ruins, gave yet another character. (3) The religious beliefs, with their attendant theories of the forces ruling the world, were in some respects adapted by Lytton to give him opportunit to combat the materialistic beliefs resulting from the scientific movement in his own day.
€
RIENZI
Compared Though The Last Days of Pomp el is an
to The
Last Davs historical novel, it is not written according of
P omp e i :i to Lytton's characteristic method of dealing with historical events. It is built around a convulsion of nature, v/hile his other histor- ical novels are developed around some great political or social change. I have chosen Rienzi , the Last of the Roman Tribunes, as typical of his almost scientific method of writing novels of this class.
The First, as I have said, he chose a dramatic
method
epoch in history for his time- setting. He selected an historically important figure for his main character. Then he reviewed the political, social, and personal causes that brought about the rise and fall of this character, and tried to show what motives were behind his acti oris .
This is the method he recommended in
i
•
Pelham , as noted above: to observe what had happened, trace the causes, and take care that the actions and motives were truly aligned with the characters. It is also, as stated in the discussion of Pelham, the method described by Zola for writing an experimental novel.
Fow Let us see how he applied his method in
applied:
the char- the case of Rienzi. The period he chose was acter of
Rienzi the middle of the fourteenth century when Cola di Rienzi overcame the nobles of Rome to set up a government like that of the ancient days, but was himself overthrown not much later. This was an age of conflict and change; certainly a dramatic epoch. Rienzi, as the most important man of the day, was made the leading character, and others, both historical and fictitious, were grouped around him. Lytton developed Rienzi fs character from boyhood through the extravagant creams of youth to the more settled career of mature manhood, showing always how the changes in him came about. It is necessary to understand
both the public and private factors that influ- enced him in order to understand his character. These Lytton attempted to show by picturing him as tribune and senator as well as husband and brother. In this he was trying to use deduction from the observation of known facts.
Method applied : polit- ical , social , and
personal causes
Then the larger causes of the changes, political, social, and personal, were placed so as to show their influence. Here the chief political causes of the rise of Rienzi were the tyranny and ineffectiveness of the contemporary government, added to his deep desire to restore the ancient, glorious Roman republic. One of the large elements contributing to his fall was political in part: the levying of taxes for the support of the army. The chief social causes which Lytton stressed were the great influence of the Church, and the robberies of the mountain brigands which made it unsafe for a traveller to be abroad. Perhaps the most powerful of the causes of Rienzi' s rise and
fall were in the personal phase, and these, since they are fundamentally psychological factors, are most significant to us. Rienzi was inspired to rise against the unjust power of the barons by the assassination of his brother by one of the house of Colonna. The hatred between that house and the Orsini divided the forces of the barons, until they saw that it was necessary to unite against their comr.on enemy, Rienzi, the plebeian. Adrian Colonna loved the sister of Rienzi, so that his influ- ence was with the tribune rather than with his own family. And, last of all, Rienzi was betrayed by one of his lieutenants who thus avenged the execution of Walter de Montreal, whom he had discovered to be his own father. These personal causes help to show the far-reaching power of those feelings which are deeply rooted--f amily pride, and love. Since they are basically emotional, they have tnat driving force which the emotions give. These, combined with the political and social causes mentioned above,
*
were the observable factors in bringing about the changes which came in that period, and these Lytton developed as background for his picture of the character of Rienzi.
Conelu- Lytton has used then, in Rienzi, a v/ell-
sicn:
the sci- defined method of (1) observing the facts, and entific
method (2) drawing his deductions from them according In Rienzi
to the laws of Nature. The criticism we might make is that the method is a little too obvious for the art of the completed work. But, at any rate, by building, as he did, the picture of the age in v/hich Rienzi lived, and showing the social and political background as well as the powerful personal causes, he was pursuing what might be called a scientific method of observation and deduction.
i
49
Zanoni, the first novel we are discussing in Lytton's later work, is based, for its symbol- ism and its power, upon the fanciful and poetic beliefs of the Rosicrucians, that society of which so little is certainly known. Even encyclopedias contradict each other on the subject, in a way that stirs one's curiosity and wonder.
History This is to be expected, say the more
of Rosi-
crucian- credulous writers on the subject, since the ism
members of the society, when it was formed in 1420, swore secrecy for at least one hundred years. ^ The Encyclopedia Brittanica denies not only that the society was founded then, but also that there was any such society even in the seventeenth century, when the idea was in vogue, stating that rather it was a number of individuals who held certain views in common, for there are no records of meetings or officers to be found. However, Heckethorn describes the
1. Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics
ritual and ceremonies of a society of Rosicrucians formed in London in 1646. In 1714 the group was reorganized, seemingly for the pursuit of alchemistic study. By the end of the eighteenth century there was a great deal of fraud per- petrated iri the name of the Rosicrucians so that the name fell into disrepute. It seems that there is some connection between the Free Masons and the Rosicrucians, but how much is a matter of conjecture, since the authorities disagree. It seems that a safe guess would be that expressed by fTeckethorn, that several Rosicruciari ideas came to be used as symbols by the Free Masons.
A society following Rosicrucian tenets was formed in England in 1836 and remodelled about 1867, with aims stated to be merely literary and antiquarian. Lord Lytton was a Grand Patron of this society. Heckethorn says: "But as to Rosicrucian knowledge, the brethren were alto- gether destitute of it, as they themselves admitted . m
1. Eeckethorn, Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries, Vol. 1, pp. 219-241
2. Ibid, p. 241
51
Claims of All sorts of claims were made by Rosicrucian
Ro si cru- cians and those who pretended to be Brethren of the
Rosy Cross. They are said to have laid claim to the ability to transmute baser metals into gold, to know the elixir vitae , to know the passing of events in distant places, and to be able to discover hidden things by cabala. But another authority states that they did not declare the transmutation of metals to be part of their practice, or promise indefinite pro- longation of life, but they spoke in parables "with full and complete knowledge that all things are possible, and that, with the forces of Nature under their control, they could do even these." They were charitable and interested in healing, studying the uses- of vegetable drugs and of hypnotic processes.
They were supposed to be free of desires of the flesh; to feel no hunger or thirst, and to be free of old age and disease. Thev could command spirits, attract pearls and precious
i
stones, and make themselves invisible. They
1. New International Encyclopedia
aimed to restore all sciences, especially medicine, and to secure by occult means treasure to maVe possible social reform.
These are the chief tenets of the Rosicru- cians. Lytton's interest in them is to be expected since he was a patron of the Society. I shall show now how he used their mystic and pseudo- scientific ideas to provide details and symbolism in his story.
The He had made use of these Rosicrucian
story
beliefs earlier in an -unfinished tale called Zicci, and evidently thought them worth finishing later, so he changed the names of the characters and published the entire novel called Lanoni . According to the introduction, the story came from a manuscript in cipher belonging to an old man who knew and revered the Ro si crucian mysteries. The explanation Lytton gave for having published the earlier incomplete story was that he had at first translated several chapters of one copy, and then discovered that
0
the old man had made two copies, the later one much more elaborate and detailed. So he re- translated the part lie had already done and
a
publ i she d the who 1 e .
The story centers, as the title tells us, around the mystic character, Zanoni. He was a Rosicrucian who appeared mysteriously in Naple and took part in the society there. His prese meant everythinc to a young girl, Viola, who was beginning a career in the opera. Zanoni tried to influence Glyndon, a young Englisliinan who loved Viola but who felt himself above her to marry her and take her back to England, for he could see what dangers her youth and beauty would bring her in Naples. Glyndon would not, so Zanoni finally yielded to his love for her and married her himself. This meant that he lost much of his power as a Rosicrucian to foresee events, especially with reference to Viola. Meanwhile Glyndon, who had chosen to seek knowledge rather than to have love, became a pupil of the austere Wejnour, the
1. Zanoni, p.
friend of Zanoni. The two, ft'ejnour and Zanoni, were the only ones of the Rcsicrucian "brother- hood left, and Mejnour, desiring another companion in his researches, was glad to take Glyndon. Glyndon proved to be incapable of enduring the trials necessary to one who would penetrate the awful mysteries of Rosicrucianism. tie progressed only far enough to "become cognizant of the malignant spirit, The Dweller of the Threshold. To escape from the horror it engendered, he plunged into all sorts of revelry and loose living, but he was still unable to throw it off. Meanwhile, Zanoni and Viola had had a child and Zanoni was trying to instill into it some of the, Rosicrucian beliefs. Viola, not under- standing this, was brought to fear and mistrust his power, and finally fled from him to Paris. This was during the time of the French Revolution, and Zanoni found her there condemned to die by the guillotine. He sacrificed his own life to
♦
The whole ptory was intended to be symbolic. Tv'ejnour typifies science or the contemplation of the actual. What science means, and what sort of person the scientist must be will be discussed under the attitude of the Rosicrucians to science as given in this book. Zanoni typifies idealism, which is always sympathetic, going beyond the mere actual. The Dweller of the Threshold is typical of horror or fear. The exact symbolism employed there will be discussed under the Rosi- crucian belief in the elemental spirits, or which group this was one. Grlyndon stands for aspiration not supported by perseverance. All of the other important characters are symbolic^- but they have no significance for this paper.
I shall first deal with Lytton's treatment less important Rosicrucian belief s--chiefly those which are simply attributes of Zanoni; then with the more important specific beliefs he touched: elemental spirits, trance, the use of alchemy, and medicine; and lastly with the general attitude toward science that they held, as shown by the
1. Explanation of symbolism, Zanoni, pp. 436-437
4
*
things required of Glyndon in order to "be initiate into their mysteries. This will also include the discussion of the comparative value of science and art, which is more the idea of Lytton than typical of Rosicrucian belief.
Claims The romantic belief that the Hosicrueian
exempli- fied in Society goes back to the East, to the days of Zanoni :
less sig- the Chaldeans is expressed in Zanoni . The author nificant
of the manuscript which Lytton said was the original for his story, spoke of the "starry truths which shone on the great Shemaia of Chaldean lore, and gleamed dimly through the darkened knowledge of later disciples*/ but though they had become dim through the ages, "yet it is ours to trace the reviving truths, through each new discovery of the philosopher and chemist."^ Zanoni was interested in the sciences of the past and present, as is here claimed that the Rosicrucian must be, but even more Mejnour showed the real Rosicrucian interest in them. Not only were they interested in sciences, but they were supposed to know all
1. Zanoni, pp. 146-147
languages, to have secrets to wh5 oh the phil- osopher's stone was but small, and to be above all others In religious faith and virtue. Zanoni had these characteristics: he spoke all language s,- he had an inexplicable good influence on those v/ith whom he associated,
•7
and he went about healing by use of herbs0 and some unknown influence, the only evidence of which v/as that the patient usually fell into a deep sleep before recovering. This last was to suggest a use of hypnotism, in which the Rosicrucians were adept. In all of these things he was a true Rosicrucian.
Specific The fundamental belief of the Rosicrucians
claims :
Elemental in the elemental spirits, which inhabit all spirits
space, even the sea and the depths of the earth, plays a large part in Zanoni. "There may be forms of matter as invisible and impal- pable to us as the animalculae In the air we breathe--in the water that plays in yonder basin. Such beings may have passions and
1. Zanoni, p. 103
2. Ibid, p. 104
3. Ibid, pp. 127-128
4. Ibid, p. 104
•
powers like our own, --as the animalculae to which I have compared them.""*" And again: "is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that Being is crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space? The microscope shows you the creatures on the leaf; no me- chanical tube is yet invented to discover the nobler and more gifted things that hover in the illimitable air."2
The initiated Kosicrucian had power to call and command these beings. Zanoni commanded the beautiful spirit Adon-Ai, but as he became bound to earth through the ties of love he grad- ually lost that power and became susceptible to the malignant Dweller of the Threshold until he overcame its horror by his own superb courage.
The The Dweller of the Threshold was one of the
Dweller
of t?he first of these ''elemental spirits" to meet the Threshold
hardy adventurer into the unknown. It was a terrible, awe- inspiring, inimical presence: "The object was that of a human head, covered with a dark veil, through which glared with livid and
1. Zanoni, p. 74
2. Ibid, p. 241
demoniac fire, eyes that froze the marrow of his bones. Nothing else of the face was dis- tinguishable—no thing but those intolerable eyes.... Its form was veiled as the face, but the outline was that of a female; yet it moved not as move the ghosts that simulate the living. ±t seemed rather to crawl as some vast misshapen reptile .... All fancies, the most grotesque, ... would have failed to give to the visage of imp or fiend that aspect of deadly malignity which spoke to the shuddering nature in those eyes alone. All else so dark- shrouded-- veiled and larva-like. But that burning glare so intense, so livid, and yet so living, had in it something almost human, in its passion of hate and mockery- something that showed that the shadowy horror was not all a spirit, but partook of matter enough, at least, to make it more deadly and fearful an enemy to material forms. M*
No mortal could endure the agony of fear which the presence of this spectre raised unless he had been gradually prepared for it. The
1. Zanoni, pp. 258-259
t
•
wall which separates the grosser material world from that which these beings inhabit must not be broken down at once. One could not, however, partake of the elixir of life, without becoming sensitive to this other world, so that for the unprepared the elixir would be that of death, not life.
Its sig- It seems that Lytton meant this horror to
nif icance
be symbolic of the doubts and turmoil into which one is thrown as he begins to study matters beyond his previous conceptions. Examples of such doubts are numerous. For instance, many ministers avoid the study of science and biblical criticism because they fear for their faith, and many others who do study them lose all sense of direction in a feeling of confusion and futility. This comes of an inability to see with a large enough view, and a lack of depth in understanding the implications of the matter. Such incomplete knowledge is the dangerous thing, symbolized by the "Dweller of the Threshold."
♦
on
Glyndon, who went just far enough into the mysteries known by Mejnour to meet the Dweller of the Threshold, was ever after haunted by the horror which he could not throw off save by drowning his thoughts in revelry.
Trance Ke began his initiation into these
mysteries by a trance in which he saw Viola and Zanoni in their happy home. As I have said before, the Rosicrucians claimed the ability to know the passing of events in dis- tant places. Zanoni, too, when in a state of trance, saw what was happening to Viola and their child. Since this was a Rosicrucian belief, Lytton made use of it to furnish detail for his story. This is not, however, the only place that there is use of trance, for in Strange Story several pages are given to a description of a trance.
Alchemy Mejnour believed, as did the other Rosi-
crucians, in the possibility of the transmuta- tion of metals. ±t is said that the Kosicrucians spiritualized alchemy by substituting for the
mere desire for wealth the higher goal of the philosopher's stone which would open the spiritual eyes. The author of the manuscript Lytton was translating commended the alchemists for their great discoveries in science. He believed that, could we interpret the "mystic phraseology" used "by them, we might find that they had done even greater work than we now think. Then, in order to show that the author was not too far wrong, Lytton added the following foot-note concerning the alchemistic transmutation of metals which he said was a statement of Disraeli: "Sir Humphrey Davy told me that he did not consider this undiscovered art i possible; but should it ever be discovered, it would certainly be useless."-'- Though I have been unable to find any record of such an assertion from Davy, it is not impossible that he said something of the kind, for his early publications in chemistry were very unscientific, and his early conversations concerning it might well have been credulous toward such things as transmutation of metals.
1 , Zanoni , p. 102
Lytton referred to this again in A Strange Story. From these statements one may infer that Lytton looked upon the ideas of the alchemists with some favor.
Medicine One of the chief studies of the Rosi-
crucians was medicine. It was by this that they could make long life possible for all. '•'All we profess to do is but this-- to find out the secrets of the human frame, to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates and to apply continual Dreventives to the effects of Time. This is not Magic; it is the art of Medicine rightly understood. 1,1 The drugs which performed these miracles were from simple and common plants. Zanoni and Mejnour both knew the marvelous secrets of the vegetable world, but they believed that there were many more to be learned.
Attitude
toward
science
The use of these four specific beliefs of the Rosicrucians gave, as occult ideas did in the other novels discussed in this paper,
1. Zanoni, p. 232
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64
vivid and strange scenes, and afforded oppor- tunity to create characters as thrilling as the witch of Vesuvius in The Last Days ^ Pompeii. Their general attitude toward science as shown below made a way for Lytton to express his own attitude on the matter. Their members were to understand the sciences, and to do that were to have certain characteristics. Meinour's instructions to his pupil (jlyndon will make clear the Rosicrucian position as bo the character of the scientist, as well as the science he professes.
The First, the scientist must "withdraw all
scientist
thought, feeling, sympathy from others. . . . To perfect thy faculties and concentrate thy emotions, is henceforth thy only aim." The pupil "must first reduce himself to a kind of abstract idealism, and be rendered up, in solemn and sweet bondage, to the faculties which CONTEMPLATE and IMAGINE."2 frhe capitals are Lytton' s J Thus he comes into the peculiar
1. Zanoni, p. 211
2. ibid, p. 229
e
state of mind necessary to one who would per- ceive truth; the state of profound serenity.^
When one falls from the "calm height of
2
indifferent science" and feels sympathy with a fellow-creature, he is unable to perceive clearly what is truth in regard to them. How true this is! We know how hard it is to think psychologically of one we love, or to be able to advise such a one wisely, without being blinded by our feeling. Perhaps it is better so; the point here is that such condition can never be scientific.
Those who finally achieve the serenity and abstraction necessary to know the larger truths are cut off from intercourse with other human beings, so that frequently they abandon the pursuit "overawed by the stillness of their solitude. " 3
The foregoing would be the portrait of the ideal scientist, though as always, the ideal is not the real. The more nearly one approaches this ideal, the greater advances he
1. Zanoni, p. 141
2. Ibid, p. 265
3. Ibid, p. 269
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can make in knowledge. Mejnour is typical
of this sort of scientist, while Zanoni typifies
the more human being, who is not content to
live outside the "sweet music of mortal passion."
Science The scientific viewpoint held by the sort
of scientist depicted as ideal by the Rosicru- cians is one in which man figures little, simply as a part of the physical universe. "Man, in his infancy of knowledge, thinks that all creation was formed for him. Kor several ages he saw in the countless worlds that sparkle through space... only the petty candles ... that Providence had been pleased to light for no other purpose but to make the night more agree- able to man. Astronomy has corrected this delusion of human vanity. i . . Bat in the small as in the vast, God is equally profuse of life. ...In each leaf of these boughs the Creator has made a world. "
The person who understands this only in part is the one who is haunted by the terror, the Dweller of the Threshold.
1. Zanoni, p. 47
2. Ibid, p. 112
Science art
Science, however, has its limits. In comparison to art, it is the less high. Art creates, while Science only discovers. "The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the universe; the poet can call a universe from the atom: the chemist may heal w5 th his drugs the infirmities of the human f©rm; the painter, or the sculptor, fixes into everlasting youth forms divine, which no disease can ravage, and no years impair.""
Though this is Zanoni speaking, we feel sure, from the ideas presented in the other works of Lytton, that it is the author express- ing what seems to him the great truth: that though pure science may last as long as the
actual, and human idealism and thought must perish because of human frailty, yet ultimately, in the spiritual sense, the art that creates and the "thoughts that wander through Eternity" are trie greatest of all.
Conclu- sion
In conclusion, I have shown that (1) Lytton ed Rosicrucian beliefs to furnish many of the
1. Zanoni, p. 112
2. Ibid, p. 436
details of his imaginative, symbolic tale. (2) He created the mystic characters of Zanoni and IV'ejnour, and described their Rosicrucian beliefs in the elemental spirits, trance, alchemy, and medicine. (3) He described, from their teachings, the ideal scientist, detached from the world, and he implied both the dangers and the glories of the larger conceptio of science. (4) In comparing science with art, he placed science on the lower plane, as merely discovering what is, and art above, as creating its own world.
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1
THE HAUNTED AND THE HAUKTERS
A ghost The Haunted and the Haunters is one of
storj
the best and most terrifying ghost stories in the English language. A man and his servant went to spend a night in a haunted house. The servant became frightened beyond all endurance, and left his master alone. The orilj thing which saved the man's life among the horrors there was his own will, opposing the power of the will "haunting** the house. He felt sure that some human brain, far distant in space, was causing the fearful manifestations. This is an echo of the ideas of Van Helmont, who, in spite of being one of the leading chemists before Lavoisier, had faith in the powers of evil geni5 and spiritualism. He believed that the human will could act through long distances and cause all sorts of strange effects. Lytton must have been interested in the asser- tions of Van Helmont, for we find many references to his ideas in A Strange Story, to be discussed below .
1* Stillman, The Story or Early Chemistry, p. 385
70
agents of the
For an explanation of the fearful happenings, Lytton said that it was the force of human will working through the agency of crystal, a clear liquid, and a needle like a magnetic needle, surrounded by something like zodiacal characters. These were placed above a curse written in Latin and the whole kept in a drawer lined with hazel wood. All of these are traditionally of an occult character-- the crystal used for crystal gazing, the magnetic force used in mesmerism or animal magnetism, the characters of the zodiac of astrological significance, and every- one is acquainted with the stories of the use of a hazel wand for detecting water and for other occult pur£>oses.
Features like sympa- thetic magic
In a way these are connected with sym- pathetic magic, the idea that sympathy exists between certain objects in the universe, for the curse was written, "On all that it can reach within these walls--sentient or inanimate, living or dead-- as moves the needle, so work
my will!
i tfl
Accordingly, chairs moved without
1. The Haunted and the Haunters, p. 531. (In the same volume with A Strange Story.)
71
human force, doors opened and shut, watches disappeared into thin air, a dog's neck was "broken, and tracks appeared in the snow before the observer's eyes. Here there must have been sympathy between the needle and the articles affected. An example of the use of sympathet- ic magic is given in Thorndike's History cf Magic and Experimental Science."'" A plant was treated in a certain way, and then as it withered, a wart in sympathy with it was to disappear. In some such wa:/ the needle in our story was to influence everything and everybody in the house. As it moved, in sympathy with its motion, the curse was to act upon anyone the re .
Conclu- It is plain that these manifestations are
sion:
why the not clearly explained in the usual way, as story is
so terri- something not at all fearful, but the explana- tions suggested are serious ones, of forces actually beyond one's control, and to be opposed only by a use of the will. That adds
1, Vol. 2, p. 852
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to the impression of terror one receives from tie story, for a reader somewhat resents the other type of explanation, where the elements of terror turn out to be something insignificant. Lytton owes the power of this tale entirely to the occult sciences.
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7?
A STRANGE STORY
Aim According to the preface to A Strange Story ,
the purpose of the book is to show how a purely materialistic scientist, who thought that body and mind are the whole of man, was led by argument and by the events in his life, to a belief in the soul as a third element of being apart from either mind or body.
The The main outlines of the story are as
story
follows: Dr. Fenwicl< came to L as a
scientifSc young doctor, taking the place of his retired friend, Dr. Faber, who, in contrast to Fenwick, went beyond science in his beliefs concerning God, man, and the world. Dr. Lloyd, another physician there, believed in the claims of mesmerism, and Dr. Fenwick opposed his teach- ings as unscientific. As a consequence, Dr. Lloyd lost his patients, and finally died in poverty. At his death, he pronounced a curse on Dr. Fenwick because of his unbelief in anything
higher than the material world. Dr. Fenvvick fell in love with a beautiful girl, Lilian, who came to live in the house in which Dr. Lloyd had died. She was an ethereal, imaginative, mystical girl, just the opposite of the type one would expect a man like Fenwick to care for. A Mr. Margrave had appeared in the city in the meantime and had become a friend of Dr. Fenwick. Margrave was an unusually handsome, strange young man, selfish, without sympathy for others, but full of joyous animal spirits. Then Sir Philip Derval came back from the East, and, having become acquainted with Fenwick, tol him that Margrave was the soulless body of an older, evil magician, Louis Grayle. That night Sir Philip was mysteriously killed, and Fenwick was arrested for the murder. While he *as in jail, a "Luminous Shadow" resembling Margrave appeared to him and demanded his obedience if he wished to be freed. Soon afterward it was discovered that an escaped lunatic had performed the murder, under the
direction of a vision of a beautiful young man. Hot long after this, Lilian wandered away from home, led by a vision of a young man. Fenwick decided that all three of these appearances were caused by the baleful influence of Margrave, who wished to use Dr. Fenwick' s knowledge of chemistry and Lilian's ability as a medium, for his own ends. Fenwick and Lilian were married, and went to Australia, where he thought they would be free from Margrave's influence and where Lilian could recover her mental balance, which had become unsettled in England. Margrave came there later, however, feeble and almost dead, and sought Fenwick to help him prepare an elixir vitae so that he might live. Ee promised some of it to Fenwick for Lilian, who was very ill, if only he would help in its preparation. Fenwick did so, but just as the compound was almost ready, a rush of wild animals fleeing before an immense fire destroyed it and killed Margrave. From that time Lilian improved. These and otber strange events,
r
combined with the influence of Dr. Faber, finally brought Fenwick to believe with his friend that there is something in man beyond mere intellect, which is the human soul.
Proof The arguments Dr. Faber used to prove to
that man
has a Fenwick that the soul exists were chiefly psycho-
s ou 1
logical and quasi- scientific , He started with
the assertion that no animal but man has the
capacity to conceive of God, a soul, or a
hereafter.'' Since man has this capacity, certainly
these things must exist, for no animal is given
capacities, instincts, or impulses which are
not of value to it, and which are not based on
truth. For instance, man has an impulse to pray;
therefore there must be some spirit who hears
and answers prayer. ' Also, man improves from
generation to generation, but beasts do not;
therefore man possesses some quality--soul — which
2
beasts do not have. And lastly, men instinctively love and sympathize with each other, doing things for each other that there would be no
X. A Strange Story, p. 413
2. Ibid, P. 417
3. Ibid, pp. 413-417
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reason for doing if they were never to meet
' 1
again in an afterworld.
Nov/ each of these arguments: (1) that no instincts are found in animals which are not useful; (2) that man improves his surroundings and his mental conceptions while beasts do not; and (3) that every instinctive action has some use, is or has been considered a valid scientific argument. Their application, however, is at fault. Though all instinctive actions are or have been useful, it is a question whether the impulse to prayer is instinctive or acquired, " and the same is true of love and sympathy, other than that which is conducive to self-preservation or perpetuation of the race. That beasts do improve from one age to the next is now a know-n fact, but it came to be known with the advent of the evolution theories of the nineteenth century.
The whole trouble with these arguments for the existence of the soul, from the scientific point of view, is that Lytton started out to
1. A Strange Storv, p. 289
c
prove that man has an eternal soul, instead of starting with an open mind and a question. One would not at all hold literature to the strict methods and attitude of science, but when it pretends to argue scientifically, surely it is not overstepping the bounds to demand that it follow the rules of the game.
Possible
source
for
Lytton1 s wide interest In
science
Asiie from this main discussion of the
existence of a soul in man, there are numerous
references to many sciences. We can trace
some of Lytton' s interest in science to his
college days. Lytton was graduated from Trinity
College, Cambridge, in 1826. While there he
might have had contact with Dr. Whewell, whose
paper in the Bridgewater Treatise he mentioned,
since Dr. Whewell went to Trinity as a tutor in
1816. It seems that he might have had some
influence on Lytton, for Whewell fs chief
ambition was to "grasp, survey, and co-ordinate 2
the sciences". Certainly -Lytton had some such interest, for he was far better acquainted with
1. A Strange Story, p. 378
2. New International Encyclopedia
c
79
a wide range of sciences than most comparatively well-read men would be. He seemed to revel in showing how much he knew about them. Psychology, chemistry (not without its accompanying alchemy ) , biology, astronomy, and physics all have a place in this novel. I shall discuss his main references to each of these sciences in the order named, and find in each what literary value they have, if any.
Psycho- The science of psychology seems peculiarly
logy
fitted to use in the novel, for we are interested there in the characters, what they do, and why they do it. " Psychology gives some insight into it. However, since it is a very young study, it changes rapidly, and many of the ideas thought correct in Lyttonfs day are either disproved or scarcely considered today. Among these are phrenology, telepathy, and mesmerism, or electrobiology .
r
Pseudo- psycbo- logy: Phrenol- ogy
Telep- athy
Phrenology, which is a study of one's mental characteristics by the configuration of the skull, was based on fundamentally unscientific principles. Paber studied Lilian phrenologically and reported on her character from his findings."*" However, Lytton v/ould not have us believe that he was not up to the times in this matter, so he referred very definite!}7" to the fact that Sir William Hamilton had brilliantly and irresist- ibly refuted the teachings of this pseudo- science in his Lectures on Metaphysics , published 1859. As this story was published in 1862, it is plain that he did follow closely the development in the field, for in his earlier books he used phrenology as a scientific fact.
Telepathy, or communication between minds at a. distance, is received with more favor in scientific circles of today than is phrenology. By assuming that perhaps it might be true, Lytton opened a field for a fascinatingly strange story, for marvelous things may happen if mental
1. A Strange Story, p. 283
f
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power is conveyed through space. Without stating definitely that it is true, Lytton allowed such things to happen as could be explained either by a complicated series of subconscious associations, or by the process of telepathy, which at least appears simpler. This was a judicious thing to do, for the credu- lous could read and believe, and the sceptical could as easily accept the more rational expla- nation.
Mesmerism Mesmerism, or hypnotism by use of "animal
magnetism" was another pseudo-psychological subject which was engaging popular attention in Lytton' s time. It is true that every investi- gation of Mesmer's theories showed that magnetism had absolutely nothing to do with it, for the hypnotism took place whether the magnets were used as Mesmer prescribed or not," but the idea had caught the fancy of the people and remained popular. There was enough truth in it-- for hypnotism is possible--to make it not entirely
1. Chambers's Encyclopedia
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82
a product of the imagination, and like telepathy, it offered some opportunities for strange and wonderful events.
Electro- Another term for mesmerism or hypnotism
biology
was electrobiology . The idea that electricity had any effect of the process of hypnotism came from the fact that a small disk of zinc or copper was used for the subject to gaze on, and as he concentrated on it, he gradually came into the hypnotic state. Both zinc and copper are used in the simple *'wet cell", also called a "galvanic" cell, which produces an electric current. Therefore it was supposed that galvanic action, or electricity, was concerned with the result. The absurdity of the claim is apparent, for the two metals have to be immersed in some conducting liquid to produce any electric current at all. But Lytton naively accepted the theory and referred to it, not only her»e, but in many of his other stories, notably the one which predicts the future, The Coming Race. Nevertheless, since in
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electrobiology cr hypnotism the will of the operator was supposed to be imposed on the subject, he made good use of the term in describ- ing the character of a Mr. Vigors, who invited to his home only those "whom he could stare into the abnegation of their senses, willing to say that beef was lamb, or brandy was coffee, according as he willed them to say."^
In spite of these pseudo-psychological
ideas, Lytton made good use of some valid
psychological material. Many pages are devoted
to a discussion of the subconscious factors in
Fenwick's going into a trance and his subsequent
beliefs concerning Margrave's occult ability
p
in telepathy and magic. Several accepted
psychological ideas are used in this explanation,
chiefly association, the power of the subconscious
retention of ideas supposedly forgotten, and
the danger to the personality involved in the
repression of some fundamental characteristic.
In this case, PenwicV had repressed his imagination
1. A Strange Story, p. 2S
2. Ibid, pp. 273-282
r
and it worked all sorts of havoc with his mind and his well-being. References are made within these pages to several scientific works of the time to bear out the truth of Dr. Faber's state m-ents. The progress of the story is halted while this explanation is being made, but since the modern reader is interested in why the characters do as they do, there is some justification for it. However, if the expla- nation would have been broupht in a little less obviously, it would have been better art, as well as more convincing.
A still more inartistic use of psychology is in the introduction of a maniac into the story to perform the murder of Sir Philip Derval. Insane characters always generate a horrified, rather morbid, interest in a reader- that is another way of making a story strange. Tt provided an easy way to get Fenwick free of the charge of murder, and also a chance for Lytton to display his own knowledge of the states of insanity. He had Dr. Faber make
some very learned and very sweep In sr statements about the characteristics of the insane, which, however, are now known to be entirely inaccurate.
Insanity played its part again in Lilian1 s
temporary loss of reason. I'his added a tragic
note to. the story which is very well used. It
is interesting to note in passing that in
making her fall ill of a fever which seemed to
bring about her recovery, Lytton accidentally
hit upon what has come to be an authentic cure
for a certain type of insanity today. Of
course there is no direct connection, but only
recently it has been discovered that malaria
lever, on account of the high body temperature
o
it induces, serves as a cure for paresis. Occasionally an imaginative writer does mention something of that kind which proves later to be vaguely the same as some real discovery.
Another science which made great strides during the nineteenth century was chemistry, which was just developing from the pseudo- scientific
L A Strange Story, p. 248
2. Dr. Wagner von Jauregg of Vienna discovered had malaria. At St. Elizal^eth' s Hospital, where
alchem; y in
is descriptive of the method. Margrave pursued to obtain one of the alchemistic goals, the elixir of life. First he sought ground where gold abounded, for it was there that the materials for the elixir could be procured. The process of preparing the potion made use of trie signs of the zodiac and the pentacle of Solomon's seal, both of which have a magical significance. The whole scene impresses one as a scene from Faust, for legions of awful eyes and the tramp of numberless feet terrified the beholder until they were driven away by a spell. A forest fire and a stampede of wild beasts are used to prevent the successful completion of the experi- ment. In contrast to Lytton's earlier works, the only character in A Strange Story who is interested in alchemy is Liar grave. There is good use made of his interest, however, in creating such scenes as the one above.
Lytton's growing interest in the real
1. A Strange Story, pp. 480-490
sciences Is shown in the fact that Dr. Fenwick had chemistry as a hobby, and wrote a book on human chemistry. In this book he followed the ideas "which Liebig has applied to the replenish- ment of the exhausted soil"; that is, to supply any bodily essential that time or age had taken av/ay, or in which the organism was constitution- ally deficient, and to neutralize those in which it v;as over-siipplied. ^ This is significant in two ways: (1) It showed that Lytton knew something of Liebig fs work; and (2) the idea expressed here has become a basic one in medicine, notably in the treatment of gland disorders. For instance, a patient with a deficiency in secretion from the thyroid gland is given thyroid extract to make up the necesssry amount. Also, the study of the chemistry of the nervous system, which has been followed for some time, has advocated somewhat the same idea. It was found that the brain cells were especially rich in phosphorus, so that the saying, MMo thought without phosphorus" came into vogue. Probably
1. A Strange Story, p. 97
2. Bluingarten, Materia Medica for Nurses, p. 543
3. Ladd and Woodworth, Elements of Physiological P sychology , ch ap t e r 5 .
the popular belief that eel erv and fish are "brain food" is based on some such idea. But even this has a fundamental, though far-fetched, relation to scientific fact. Here again, then, Lytton has touched on an idea that has later proved useful in some of its phases.
Reference Lytton v/as also acquainted with Lavoisier's
important discover;y near the close of the eighteenth chemical >>
discovery century, of the chemical likeness between char- coal and the diamond, for he put this statement into the mouth of Sir Philip Derval: "When the chemist has found that the diamond affords no other substance by its combustion than pure carbonic acid gas, and that the only chemical difference between the costliest diamond and a lump of pure charcoal is a proportion of hydrogen less than one fi fty- thousandth part of the weight of the sub stance- -can the chemist make you a diamond?"^" It may not be out of place to mention here that twenty years after Lytton1 s death, Moissan, by the use of an electric furnace,
1. A Strange Story, p. 183
€
did obtain traces of diamond.
Inaccu- These two quotations show that Lyt'ton was
racies
in acquainted with the legitimate field of chemistry,
chemistry
He did not, however, study it deeply, as I shall
prove by his reference to Davy's work on phos-
oxygen. Margrave referred to Davy's demonstrating
that phosoxygen is not caloric, but light, com-
2
bined with oxygen, and Lytton gave as authority for that, Davy's essay on Heat , Light , and Combinations i *. Light. This essay was published in 17S9, when Davy was a youth of nineteen, and was not, as one can easily believe, a paper of scientific importance. When he prepared it, about the only work on chemistry that he had read was Lavoisier's Traite Element aire on oxygen. His "proof;j that oxygen is associated with light instead of heat is futile and unscientific. The fact that Davy not long afterward saw the scientific weaknesses of this early work seems to have escaped Lytton. The essay showed almost no real conception of
1. New International Encyclopedia
2. A Strange Story, p. 155
science or the value of scientific evidence, but
it was written in a good literary style, and the
ideas expressed in it are poetic and beautiful."*"
Those ideas were the kind that appealed to
Lytton, so here, probably, we find the reason
for his using them.
Another mistaken conception which our
author expressed was that Van Helmont was the
discoverer of "those invisible bodies called .,2
gases. ' Gases were known before the time of Van Helmont, but were referred to as "spiritus" or "airs". Van Helmont *s contribution was the name gas which he coined, and which has proved so convenient as to be universally adopted.
These two references show that though Lytton was interested in chemistry, and had read widely on the subject, his interest was rather that of the man of the street instead of the scientist. Hence he fell into some errors while he was trying to show himself acquainted with all the developments in the
1. T.E. Thorpe, Humphrey Davy, Poet and Philosophe pp. 30-37
2. A Strange Story, p. 121
3. Stlllman, Story of Early Chemistry, p. 383
91
field.
Belief That Lytton was credulous toward marvelous
in un- founded claims is shown by his footnote on the stone claims
of Corfu., which was said to have the power to heal a serpent's bite: "Might it not be worth while to ascertain the chemical properties of these stones, and, if they be efficacious in the extraction of venom conveyed by a bite, might they not be as successful if applied to the bite of a mad dog as to that of a cobra- capella? n
Prom these references to chemistry and alchemy, I have shown that, as in earlier books, alchemistic beliefs furnish a strangeness which is interesting; while the valid chemical ideas show that Lytton was widely read in the field and made use' of his knowledge wherever he could. Sometimes he developed a significant idea, but in some cases his statements were inaccurate and showed unscientific credulity.
1. A Strange Story, p.
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92
Biology In the field of "biology, Lytton was acquaint-
ed with some authoritative books of the time. He had read Bichat, who was considered the founder of general anatomy. The paragraphs in which he referred to Bichat fs work are evidence of a poetic mind dealing with scientific conceptions: "Bichat, in his famous book upon Life and Death, divides life into two classes: animal, and organic. Man's intellect, with the brain for its center, belongs to life animal; his passions to life organic, centered in the heart, in the viscera. Alas! if the noblest passions through which alone we lift ourselves into the moral realm of the sublime and beautiful really have their center in the life which the very vegetable, which lives organically, shares with us. And alas! if it be that life which we share with the vegetable, that can cloud, obstruct, suspend, annul that life centered in the brain, which we share with every being howsoever angelic, in every star howsoever remote, on whom the Creator bestows the faculty of thought."^ This passage
1. A. Strange Story, p. 60
G
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shows that if Lytton did read many scientific treatises superficially, he also read some of them creatively, and saw the poetry in the conceptions he found there.
Bennett's Gatherings of a Naturalist : Australasia is another book which Lytton knew. He seemed to be very much interested in Aus- tralia, for in others of his novels there are references to works on that continent, and scenes which take place there. This particular work is written in a popular style and is fascinating to read, but has careful scientific observations characterizing most of its pages.
Lytton knew the theories of evolution, as is shown by a reference to the "modifications of cellular tissue in the gradual lapse of agQS»l through which were developed all forms of life. This, with Lytton* s attitude toward it, will be discussed under astronomy, since it includes a mention of the nebular hypothesis, prom the discussion above it is plain that Lytton knew good authorities in biology, and
1. A Strange Story, p. 400
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>7
that he saw the poetic possibilities in their wo rk .
Astron- The nebular hypothesis is the theory that
omy : the
nebular at one time the universe consisted of a nebulosi- hypo th- esis ty, or matter diffused through space. This
rotated and cooled, and as it cooled it contracted,
following the laws of heat, until the sun came
to be of its present size, with the planets
revolving in the same direction about it.
Scientists admit that the theory can never be
proved, though many facts about the universe
point to its truth. Lytton's attitude toward
it, as well as toward the theory of evolution,
is shown by this quotation: "If some old cos-
mogonist asked you to believe that the
primitive cause of the solar system was not to
be traced to a Divine Intelligence, but to a
nebulosity, originally so diffused that its
existence can with difficulty be conceived, and
that the origin of the present system of
organized beings equally dispensed with the
agency of a creative mind, and could be referred
c
95
to molecules formed in the water by the power of attraction, till with modifications of cellular tissue in the gradual lapse of ages, one monad became an oyster and another a Man-- would you not say this cosmogony could scarce have misled the human understanding even in the earliest dawn of speculative inquiry?""*" Of course, the nebular theory makes no assertions as to the "primitive cause" of the nebulosity from which the universe is supposed to have been formed. But this is another example of Lytton's opposition to the materialistic specu- lations of the day. He felt these were simply quibbles over something that could never be known and did not matter, that the explanations were no better than, nor, for that matter, so good as a literal interpretation of the Bible.
The Yet his disapproval of these radical views
of the did not prevent his using to good advantage another idea of the astronomers, namely, the origin of the moon. n.ere again there is the
1. A Strange Story, p. 400
poetic use of a scientific idea: "...the sweet simple Lady of the Stars, on whose gentle face lovers have gazed ever since (if that guess of the astronomers prove true ) she was parted from the earth to rule the tides of its deeps from afar, even as love, from love divided, rules the heart, that yearns toward it, with mysterious law. *
According to these statements, though Lytton could not subscribe to what were then radical beliefs concerning the origin of the universe, he could see the poetry in some of the ideas of the astronomers.
Physics: One of the most interesting references to
elec- matters in the field of physics is Lytton1 s
tricity
description of a machine which registered "organic electricity". This is a current sup- posed to be generated by muscle contraction. The idea is hardly known at all now, but Dubois Reymond worked out a machine for studying the electric currents generated in frog nerves and
1. A Strange Story, p. 58
muscles, as well as one such as Lytton described which gave evidence of a current in human muscles Lytton Ts descriptions will make clear the sorb of apparatus used. "It is a wooden cylinder fixed against the edge of a table; on the table two vessels filled with salt and water are so placed that, as you close your hands on the cylinder, the forefinger of each hand can drop into the water: each of the vessels has a metallic plate and communicates by wires v/ith a galvanometer with its needle.'^ By contracting the muscles in one hand a current was to be made to flow in one direction; by using the other, the direction of the current was supposed to change, as shown by the movement of the galvano- meter needle. These are exactly the results that would follow from Dubois- Re ymond ' s discovery However, the effect of a wouiiq as mentioned by the experimenter is just the opposite of Its effect as given by Lytton. Since Dubois-Reymond
current than otherwise, he conjectured that the
skin partially closed the circuit and allowed, only a little of it to go through the register- ing galvanometer. The effect that he expected a wound to h«ve was to strengthen the current, since it would act in the same way as removing the skin from the frog, and he found this to be true. Evidently Lytton did not follow this part of the experiment very carefully, for he described the result of a scratch on the hand as making the current weak and erratic by chemical action. This is not the conclusion reached by Duboi s-Reymond, whose work he said he was following. It is another of Lytton' s inaccuracies.
Fore- Another interesting statement concerning
■
of the electricity seems almost prophetic of the electron
theory present-day electron theory. It is a statement that makes mention of "the more recent doctrine that electricity is more or less in all, or nearly all, known matter.1' According to the electron theory, all atoms of matter are ultimately made up of electrons, or particles of negative electricity, revolving around a nucleus called
1. Duboi s-Reymond, Animal Ble
2. A Strange" Story, p. 385
*
a proton, of positive electricity. In other words, this theory would state not only that electricity is in all matter, hut that all matter is made up of electricity. This is another example of an imaginative writer's hitting upon some idea which later proves useful or true .
Illus- There are several illustrations "based on
based more commonly known ideas in physics. These
on heat
show not only that Lytton was acquainted with them, but that people in general must have known something about them, for, in order that they be successful illustrations, they must be understood. In one of them, Dr. Faber compare^ the three states of matter, solid, liquid, and gaseous, to three states of man's existence: the physical, the mental, and the spiritual.'1' Heat is the agency which determines in which state matter shall be, and he said that heat is the "occult agency", too, which determines in which state man exists. This is a rather
1. A Strange Story, p. 167
strange statement even when taken symbolically .
In another such illustration, the variations of conviction which are caused by changes In the heart are compared to the variations in the length of iron girders which are caused by changes of temperature. These changes of con- viction must be foreseen and allowed for just as the contraction and expansion of the metals is allowed for by the engineer. This Is a very well worked out analogy, but as if mistrusting the reader's understanding, or perhaps to display a little more erudition, Lytton appended a footnote which makes clear that such allowance is necessary.
These tv/o illustrations show that the
mystery behind the action of heat was appreciated
by Lytton. Even though Davy, Rumford, and
Young had discovered that heat is a form of
2
energy, manifested as molecular motion, it * certainly was and is still incomprehensible, for no one can yet explain what energy is. Of course, even so, a physicist would hesitate to call it
1. A Strange Story, p. 284
P. Williams. TTisfcftT»v Of .qMorif.ft . Vol. 7> . rm L POfU
€
an "occult apencv" as Lytton did.
Poetic descrip- tion of
ical devices
There is a beautifully poetic reference to some of the mechanical devices which science had made possible. I sha]l quote it verbatim: "It is but yesterday that the forces of vapour have become to men genii more powerful than those conjured up by Aladdin; that light, at a touch, springs forth from invisible air; that thought finds a messenger swifter than the fabled Afrite. This is a reference to the powers of the steam engine, to the then new arc-lamp (the ordinary incandescent bulb had not yet been invented), and to the tele- graph.
uCdic force'
There is one force mentioned by Lytton the place of which I hardly know, since it is not recognized today. It is called "odic force", supposedly intermediate between elec- tricity, magnetism, heat, and light. This was "discovered" by Karl Baron von Reichenbach , and was supposed to have something to do with mesmerism, since mesmerism, as explained above,
A Strange Story, p. 341
r
was thought to be connected with magnetism., This force was brought in as a possible expla- nation of the action of Margrave's wand, which had some sort of hypnotic effect. The "force" existed only in the mind of its discoverer, but it caused a great deal of discussion and speculation at the time.
From Lytton' s references to the sciences which are found in A Strange Story, the follow- ing conclusions are evident: (1) Lytton was very vain about his wide acquaintance with science, not seeming to realize that his credulit and inaccurac;/ often led him into glaring errors. He had the attitude of the poet rather than the scientist, which, while it gave him a basis for some of his most beautiful prose and made him seem almost prophetic at times, it also caused him to be unscientifically prejudiced in regard to certain poetic preconceptions he had held. (2) The age in which Lytton wrote was imbued with scientific ideas, or people would not have
cared for such a novel as A Strange Story . (?) Science in this book gave, as in Lytton's other stories, opportunities for certain important characters, scenes, and incidents. Its chief literary value here is, however, in the poetic breadth that it gave to certain passages in the novel.
THE CAXTONS
The Caxtons is a realistic novel of ordinary English life; that is, as realistic as Lytton was capable of making it. It resembles Tristra Shandy in many ways, both in content and style.
Mr. Caxton, a scholar, married .his ward and a son was born, whom they named Pisistratus. The son grew to be a young man of fine, upstanding character who gallantly gave up the girl- he loved because marriage with her was not according to her parent's wishes. He proved, throughout the story, to be the ideal young man—he had a fine character, noble sentiments, yet was not effeminate. He found happiness finally in marriage .
As practically all the effect of science in this novel is the same as in its sequel, K3 Novel, which was supposed to have been written by Pisistratus Caxton and is conceded to be a . better book, I shall pass over The Caxtons with no further mention.
J. UD
MY HOVEL
The The sequel to The C ax tons, Novel , is
story
divided into books, each having an introductory chapter in which the Gaxton family figure. The story itself is a long one, comprising two volumes, and narrating the development of the genius, Lenny Fairfield, from an impossible country boy to a finished, truly cultured gentleman. Parson Dale and Dr. Riccabocca, a political exile from Italy, helped him, but there were also some very melodramatic villains in the story, of whom Randal Leslie was one. He directed his schemes chiefly toward Frank Hazeldean, who is reminiscent of Tom Jones in character, and he alnost achieved the estrange- ment of Frank and his father, Squire Hazeldean. The Squire is in many ways like Squire Western in Tom Jones. The two threads of the story, the one concerning Frank and the other Leonard, are connected only casually, chiefly by the fact that the two boys came from the same town and-
r
r
thus knew the same people. The whole is com- plicated by national and political intrigues, personal grudges, and unholy ambition. There are numerous characters which I have not mentioned here, but for the purposes of this paper the above outline is sufficient.
In this book Lytton has given the deepest and most satisfying expression of his concep- tion of science as a whole, and here too he is at his best in his use of scientific Ideas for the creation of characters. He has followed, as always, the particular phases of science in which people were interested, for he was adept at gauging the public mind. Since this is, like The C&xtons , a realistic novel, there is less mention of the occult or pseudo- sciences and more of the practical, laboratory type. This fact points toward the conclusion also that although Lytton always had a tendency to believe more than could be proved, he became more practical and less credulous as he grew older.
I shall take up his references to science and pseudo- science in 'the following order: First, as most important and indicative of Lytton's own ideas, his attitude toward science in general; next, the use of psychological terms and ideas; then homeopathy; and lastly, some incidental references to several unrelated scientific ideas which show how these may furnish figures and how society must have been imbued with them.
General Although Lytton honored, at least with
attitude
toward lip-service, those who were seeking the truth, science :
Knowledge he felt that those who pursued mere knowledge alone not
enough were foolishly missing something far greater.
This was evident in his treatment of Dr. Fenwick
in A Strange Story. In My Novel he made it
plain that he believed that knowledge was
2
necessary, but was not everything . ~ By describing
the hero, Lenny Fairfield, as a boy burning
with the desire to know, he made it possible
to have some learned discussions on the value
of knov/ledge alone. Parson Dale and Dr. Ficcabocca
1. My Novel, vol. 1, p. 505
2. Ibid, vol. ], p. 264
spent houes showing Leonard that the good or evil use to which knowledge is put is the really important thing. , Lytton made Randal Leslie typical of knowledge without morals, and showed in him how destructive it could be. In this he was recognizing one of the big problems which the scientific age has forced upon our attention. We are developing power over material forces so fast that our moral power cannot keep up with it, and thus we are making trouble for ourselves. It is trite to say, for example, that warfare is far more terrible now than it was in the past. True, the advances of science have on the one hand helped relieve the suffering caused, but on the other hand, they have increased the amount suffering. Moral development commensurate with the material advances we have made would do away with war entirely, but as it is, we are simply in greater danger on account of our greater knowledge.
1. My Novel, vol. 1, pp. 307-318
4
Let ters higher than science
Beauty revealed by sci- ence
Evidently Lytton considered the pursuit of letters of higher value than that of sci- ence. In Zanoni, art was placed above science. Lytton pictured in My Novel the boy, Leonard Fairfield, vitally interested in the mechanical sciences (which Lytton, by the way, referred to as "these mystic sciences"!), but later he found that to his growing mind these things v/ere dull. However, he made use of his talents in that direction to perfect some sort of invention for a steam engine, the proceeds from which afforded him enough money to spend his time v/riting without worry over financial matters. ^ Thus applied science is given its place but is subordinated to letters.
It seems though, that Lytton realized that science can make the world more beautiful to us, for he spoke of the world, "whose wondrous beauty beams on us more and more, in proportion as our science would take it from poetry to
law .
The beauty of the universe is not
1. My Novel, vol. 1, p. 263
2. Ibid, vol. 1, p. 458
destroyed by discovering that law rules it; that would indeed be a weak and useless kind of beauty. Science does reveal hidden beauties by seeking to understand how everything comes to be as it is. It "lifts veil after veil" , revealing in each case something which is lovely, a harmony that pervades all.
After all, can we say with clearness of meaning that science takes the beauty of the world "from poetry to law"? Poetry is not without law; that would be chaos, and chaos in itself is not poetic. It is when the human mind conceives the greater law that is beyond seeming chaos that true poetry is made. That is the poetry which has the gravitas sententiae, or weight of meaning, of which Dante spoke. ' It is beyond the little conception of a person- ified element which becomes angry over some petty slight and wreaks its vengeance upon the offender. Certainly the recognition of law does not remove any elements of poetry from
1. George Sarton, "Science and Stvle", Scribner's June, 1921
2. Dante limits this weight of meaning to onlv three fields; safety, love, and virtue. But virt includes philosophy, under which the consideratio of law in the universe would be placed, and relig De Vulgari Eloguio, Bk. ii, chap, ii, in Saint sbu Loci Gritici, p. BO
George Meredith's Lucifer in Starlight when
S 3. \ S I
"Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable lav;."
Neutral- The aim of science is, as Lytton implied,
ity of
science to find out what are the laws governing the nature universe. The fact that the discovery of some law upsets a preconceived notion, or, indeed, that its application upsets a state of society, proves no deterrent for its further study. I^tton recognized this spirit in the words: "So is it ever with your abstract science ! --not a jot cares its passionless logic for the weal or woe of a generation or two. The stream, once emerged from its source, passes on into the great intellectual sea, smiling over the wretch that it droit ns or under the keel of the ship which it serves as a slave." In using the figure that he did, he also recognized the neutrality of all natural forces, following law regardless of the purposes of man, aloof, and to be conquered only by submitting to the
1. My Novel, vol. ?, p. 151
#
limitations-- the laws--which govern them. Huxley, one of the most important scientific writers of the nineteenth century, expressed the same conception beautifully in his Science and Education. Ee compared life to a game of chess in which the opposing player is hidden-- always fair just, and patient, hut overlooking no mistake and excusing no ignorance of the rules; the laws of Nature."'"
In all of this discussion some of Lytton's deepest convictions on science have been expres (1) He could understand the spirit that seeks to penetrate the secrets of the natural world, but he pointed out that above such knowledge stand the everlasting values of character and the creative beauties of art. (2) He realized that science reveals a beauty in the universe that was unknown before the laws of nature were discovered, but that those same laws govern a relentless, neutral force. To combine these two conclusions, Lytton was asking Tor a scient with the vision of a poet, one who can see
1 .T.H.Huxley , Science and Ed
on, pp. 81-36
0
0
TIT
"beyond the cold facts of law to their real significance.
Use of An amusing use of scientific terms is
terms made in one place. It would satirize modern
a satir- advertising methods if it had been written today. ]
Parson Dale questioned Lenny Fairfield about his age-- questions which Lenny answered with an almost imbecilic s5.jriolicit^r, that was glori- fied by the parson into "INDUCTIVE RATIOCINATION". {The capitals are Lyt ton's] Reading the passage a second time makes us realize that Lytton did not mean it to be merely cynical and amusing, but rather that he seriously intended to make it show that Lenny had great, if undeveloped, powers. He made Lenny the hero of the story and used two large volumes to trace his develop- ment into a successful author, so that Parson Dale here serv3 as a sort of Grecian chorus, to. show how the readers are to regard the boy. I shall quote the whole passage:
"Parson: f . . .You must be nearly a man. How old are you? ♦
"Lenny looks up inquiringly at hi3 mother.
"Parson: 'You ought to know, Lenny: speak for yourself. Hold your tongue, Mrs. Fairfield.*
"Lenny (twirling his hat, and in great perplexity) : 'Well, and there is Flop, neighbor Button's old sheep-dog. He be very old now.'
"Parson: !I am not asking Flop's age, but your own. *
"Lenny: ' 'Deed-, sir, I have heard say as how Flop and I were pups together. That is
"For the Parson is laughing, and so is Mrs. Fairfield, and the haymakers, who have stood still to listen, are laughing too. And poor Lenny has quite lost his head, and looks as if he would like to cry.
"Par-son (patting the curly locks encouraging ly) : 'Never mind; it is not so badly answered after all. And how old is Flop?'
"Lenny: 'Why, he must be fifteen year and more . 1
"Parson: 'How old, then, are you?'
"Lenny (looking up, with a beam of intellige
♦Fifteen year and more.'
"W3 dovf sighs and nods her head.
"'That!s what we call putting two and two together,1 said the Parson. 'Or, in other words and here he raised his eyes majestically towards the haymakers-- 1 in other words-- thanks to his love for his book-- simple as he stands here, Lenny Fairfield has shown himself capable of INDUCTIVE RATIOCINATION. »
"At these words, delivered ore rotundo , the haymakers ceased laughing. For even ih lay matters they held the Parson to be an oracle, and v/ords so long must have a great deal in them
Certainly this is the attitude held by the public today in that it is so well impressed by the frequently meaningless scientific terms in modern advertising. Though the above passage is written in a satirical mood, it is evident from the course of the story that it is intend- ed to be a f oregli-^pse , a revealing touch to make manifest the character of the hero, Leonard Fairfield.
1. My Novel, vol.1, pp. 23-24
ft
Psycho- This passage certainly is a revealing
losy :
Lytton's touch- -but what it reveals is the total ig- knowledge
of chil- norance of Lytton concerning child psychology,
3
either from the scientific or the common popular point of view. The boy was supposed to have been reared in the country, living only with his mother and coming to be the pattern boy of the village. But who can imagine a fifteen- year old boy talking in this way, and then, in only a few years, writing a book which set the world talking about its anonymous author!
His attitude toward children is made clear in his referring to the little girls in his story as "female children", so that he made them act as small ladies, never as little girls would act. This is occasioned probably by his own young life, for he never was a boy, only a little man.^
Use of In this book, phrenology is used to give
phrenol- ogy individuality to the character of Mr. Squills.
No references are made to it in the vein of the
Blackwoods Magazine, May, 1903
earlier works of Lytton, which treat it as a
recognized fact. It appears here merely as a
tag for Mr. Squills. His pride in his knowledge
and his interest in the tenets of phrenology
make him a most convincing character, though
he appears only in the introductory chapters
to the twelve books which make up the novel.
He "communicated articles to the Phrenological
Journal upon the skulls of Bushmen and wombats."
He wanted a post-mortem cast of Randal Leslie's
, head, for he said "it would make an instructive
study"." And then he delivered a lecture on
the bumps there must have been on the heads of
the various characters, and named almost half
of the faculties into which the phrenologists
3
divided the brain. Though one may question the scientific value of his remarks, it must be admitted that they made him stand out as a char- acter.
TJse of it is not to be expected that certain words
"in- stinct" having both a common usage and a technical,
scientific meaning should be used generally in
1. Ky Novel, vol. 1. d. 264
2. Ibid, vol. 2, p. 401
3. Ibid, vol. 2, p. 401
a scientific sense, but in the case of an "instinct which comes with practice" objections are valid. The word instinct, even in its popular meaning, has to do with unreasoning, inborn tendencies, so that by no stretch of the imagination can one know a subject as Captain Hazeldean did, by an "instinct which comes with practice " .
The term is used with a better meaning, though with as little scientific truth in the statement: "As the deer recoils by instinct from the tiger, as the very look of the- scorpion deters you from handling it, though you never saw a scorpion before, so the very first line in some ribald profanity on which the Tinker put his black finger made Lenny's blood run cold."^ Here instinct is treated as the inborn tendency which it is conceded to be. Of cqurse, it is not scientifically proved that a deer would thus recoil from a tiger, and it certainljr has been disproved that, any human being has an instinctive fear of any tiling, unless of loud
1. My Novel, vol. 1, p. 52
2. Ibid, vol. 1, p. 263
\9
/
lis
noises or falling.
The rest are fears- -not
instincts--which "come with practice
11
Subli- mation
The modern psychological concept of subli-
mation is well described as taking place in
was discontented. He might have
become a radical fire-brand, or he might have become cynical, but instead his discontent vented itself in song. Sublimation, in fact, is simply a new term for this old, old process of substituting something else for the thing we wanted.
ganglion in this book makes one realize that it must have been receiving a great deal of public attention at the time* Research then seemed to point toward the conclusion that the ganglion is the center of nervous activity. Mr. Squills, who was interested in this subject too, remarked, "It is only, as you observe, when, like Shakespeare's lover, he has given up making love as a bad job, and has received that severe hit on the ganglions
"I. Woodworth, Psychology: "Fear we do not learn,
but we learn what to fear.'4 p. 144
2. 7/illiams, History of Science, vol. 4, p. 280
Ganglions
The loose but frequent use of the term
which the cruelty of a mistress inflicts, that he neglects his personal appearance: he neglects it, not because he is in love, but because his nervous system is depressed." This shows something of the importance ascribed to the ganglia. The term seems to be used here to refer in general to what we speak of as "nerves" in colloquial speech.
Again, "111, believe me, would this work- a-day world get on if all within it v/ere hard- reading, studious animals, playing the deuce with the ganglionic apparatus."-' Then, describing Richard Avenel, "the man with strong ganglions-- of pushing, lively temperament, who, though practical, x s ye t speculative-- the man who is emulous and active, and ever trying to rise in life--sanguine, alert, bold--walks with a spring."' Here "ganglion" seems almost equivalent to temperament. This term must have been one of those in scientific use that struck the popular fancy and came into common parlance, much as people today use the term "complex".
1. My Novel, vol. 1, p. 246
2. Ibid, vol. 1, o. 306
3. Ibid, vol. 2, p. 109
v
121
Rep res- The character of Miss Jemima is drawn to
sion
represent a woman who has repressed her natural desires for home and family. She exhibited the usual defense reaction of believing all men to be thoroughly wicked, but her other character- istic is more individual and of a more comic character: she believed that the world was rapidly approaching its end. These two crotchets made her a most memorable character, and illus- trated the sort of thing modern psychologists mean when they discuss repressions. If a strong natural tendency is not given satisfaction, either directly or by sublimation; if it is instead pushed out of the region of consciousness, it works havoc in the person by making him eccentric or upsetting his mental health in some way."'" This is just what had happened to Miss Jemima, but when Dr. Riccabocca offered her marriage she became a loving, faithful, commonplace wife, and those elements of sweet- ness which had made her love to help her young friends in their marriages, were directed toward
l.Note the case of Dr. Fenwick in A Strange Story
0
V
her step-daughter, Violante.
Home op- Homeopathy is a science which was much
athy
discussed at the time this book was written and therefore has its place in the story. Its founder, Samuel Hahnemann, lived from 1755-184.3, pursuing his beliefs in the study of medicine even though he was banished from his home, Leipzig. Some of the tenets of the school of medicine which he established are based on the ideas, first, that drugs which produce certain symptoms on the healthy body will cure diseases exhibiting the same symptoms, and second, that the doses must be inf initesimally small. Lytton used those ideas to provide one of his characters with peculiarities enough to make him stand out. Dr. Morgan was a homeopathist who used tiny globules of drugs for every variation from the normal. Aconite for grief, caustic for tears, agaricus muscarius for poetic inspira- tion, ignatia, rhododendron, and arsenic for sympathy,0 --these were his prescriptions for what he must'have considered diseases.
1. My Novel, vol. 1, p. 384
2. Ibid, vol. 1, p. 461
3. My Novel, vol. 1, p. 462
A great joke was made by the opponents of homeopathy, led chiefly by the apothecaries, about the size of the dose administered by homeopathists , since Hahnemann advocated in some cases even a smell of the medicine for a remedy in a sensitive patient."*" Even for others, the dose was diluted to an unbelievably small amount. Of course the consequent popular inter- est in this phase of medicine made it a good
thing for an author to use who followed the
2
"cult of the Jumping Cat".
L3rtton{s attitude toward it is stated in a footnote.'" One Dr. Luther, a homeopathis t , criticized him rather harshly as doing wrong to the noble practice of homeopathy in making Dr. Morgan a comic character, administering such remedies as have been noted above. Lytton replied by quoting Jahr, who was, he said, the "Blackstone of Homeopathy". He must have read Jahr carefully, for he gave volume and page numbers in references to the remedies Dr. Morgan prescribed for such mental disturbances as
1. Organon of Medicine, Phila. , 1836, p. 207. Quoted by T!ew International Encyclopedia
2. Francis Cribble, "Novels of Bulwer-Lvt ton" , Critic, July, 1C03
3. My Novel, vol. 1, p. 4S3
sympathy or a propensity for verse-making. He expressed his own attitude thus; "If I do not think homeopathy capable of all the wonders ascribed to it by some of its professors, or the only scientific mode of dealing with human infirmities, 1 sincerely believe that it is often resorted to with very great benefit... and if it had done nothing else than to introduce many notable reforms in allopathical practice, It would be entitled to the profound gratitude of all, with stomachs no longer over-irrigated by the apothecary and veins no longer under- drained by the phlebotomist . "
Other These are the chief references to important
scien- tific and theories of the day, but there are others, not I
scien- so consciously used perhaps, which tell us tific
ideas of Lytton's scientific ideas and of the popular
interest at this time. since these are just casual references, the only order observed in mentioning them here is from pseu do- science to
Sponta- The idea that no life appears except from
genera- previous lire; that Is, that spontaneous Fener- ation does not take place, had evidently not reached Lytton, or at least not Mr. Caxton, wi'uifi xie jriaue oo ^aj . v J-iie Qar , wii-Lcii , exposeu to the sun, breeds small serpents, or at best
1
slimy eels, not comestible, once was wine... This is on a level with the belief expressed even today in some places, that dropping horse-hairs into water makes them turn into hair snakes.
Astrology Use of astrology makes the following
statement very effective, especially as it treats that pseudo- science rather lightly so that one does not feel supercilious toward it: "Had all the stars in the astrological horoscope conjoined together to give Hiss Jemima assurance of a husband, they could not have served her with the Squire as that conjunction between the altar and the stocks which the Parson had e f f ec ted . "
1. My Novel, vol. 2, p. 656
2. Ibid, vol. 1, p. 227
Scientifically, a fig
?peeel
the brain as a camera obscura, is
ra is simp
black on the Snside, which admits light through only one small hole, so that an inverted image of the scene outside appears on a screen inside the box. This is precisely what happens in the brain when one "sees", except that instead of only a hole for the light to enter, there is the lens of the eye. From the point of view of writing, however, the figures were somewhat mixed when Lytton wrote: " . , . as these admonitions shaped themselves in the camera obscura of the brain. Only images could be formed by a camera: admonitions are somewhat beyond its power .
The Linrean system of nomenclature is amusingly employed in describing the ways one uses the term "dear". The idea of the Linnean system is to place first the general name o± a species, then a distinguishing adjective, as in the well-known term "homo sapiens" for man.
Lytton described the various kinds of dear's rather cleverly thus: "the dear hum ills or the dear superba; the dear pallida, rubra, or nl^rf. ; the dear suavis or the dear horrida."*^
Sanita- Sanitation, which was becoming a matter
of some importance, wss recognized by Lytton in his description of some of the back streets in London. Mud, slush, sewers, open drains— until "while one hand clasps the grimy paw of the voter, the other instinctively guards from typhus and cholera your abhorrent nose. Hot in those days had mankind ever heard of sanitary reform! and, to judge of the slow progress which that reform seems to make, sewer and drain would have been much the same if they had.rt This is a pointed comment on the progress better living conditions were making.
These uses of scientific and pseudo-scien- tific terms and ideas, give, as in Pelham , some idea of the thoroughness with which these con- ceptions had permeated the whole of society.
1. My Novel, vol. 1, p. <->6
2. Ibid, vol. 2, p. 514
Conclu- From this disci; ssion it is clear that (1)
Lytton thought of science as the poet would, with a consideration of its far-reaching impli- cationp as well as its immediate "use. ' (2) He made excellent use of scientific ideas in creat- ing memorable figures, just as, earlier, he had used occult ideas for the same purpose. (3) He was again somewhat inaccurate in his use of terms. All in all, Lytton showed in Lly Novel a greater depth and clarity of thinking, as well as more skill in writing, than is found in any of his other books.
ASLOD73US AT LARGE
The rea- son for includ- ing this novel
The story
There is only one reason for including a consideration of Asmodeu s Large in this paper. It is not a representative novel of Lytton. It is merely a group of papers which he published from month to month during his earlier career, and which discussed current topics of all kinds; politics, literature, the theater, or, if not enough was happening, it included a somewhat disconnected stor}' of Asmodeus. It is considered here because one feature of the story seems to be a forerunner of Tv: Coming Race, a novel which is represent tive of one phase of Lytton' s v/ork.
Asmodeus v/as a devil, but a very pleasant and up-to-date gentleman devil. He amused and entertained our author by showing him what was happening beneath the roofs of London and Paris, and then by taking him to a conference of witches which was held in a ruined abbey,
a place such as we are told witches always choos for their convocations. There he met a potent wizard called Kosem Kesamirn who took hirn to his dread and stately halls at the center of the earth, where he saw the nameless being men call Chance, moving the strings of the external world. Then, "because the weird secrets of that majestic place were too much for a mortal to grasp at once, the obliging Kosem Kesamim conveyed him to a city which had been buried for four thousand years, and was known only by the witches. Everything there spoke of a sophisticated, complex civilization, where the fashionable color for hair was light green and where the young men curled and primped and painted as much as any lady of Lytton's day. After that the visitor came back to the surface of the earth, where he had a melodramatically unhappy love affair which closed the book.
Contrast
between
Asmodeus
Coming
The idea of a civilization buried and unknown to man^ seemed to find favor in Lytton's mind , for in The Cominp Race he develooed the
idea, describing a living civilization of a race which had "been driven from the surface of the earth by an early catas trophe' and had taken refuge in the subterranean passes of a mountain. There they built up an advanced type of life, in which science, rather than occultism, was the ruling genius. It is this which shows the difference, more than any other one thing, between Lytton's early in.agir ative creations and his latest one. In ftsmo&eu at Large all at the center of the earth was occult, as was its chief inhabitant, the shadowy Kosem Kesamim, who had penetrated the mystery of the Living Principle of the World. In The Coming Race, all was based on science, developed to a far higher degree than that which engrosses the attention of the world at present.
THE COMING RAGS
In The Coming Race, Lytton pictured a civilization where tilings are as 'they shoul bhe
for aeons. This civilization v/as discovere accidentallv far down in the earth by a man exploring a mine, who then stayed there for some time as a guest in the home of Aph-Lin The explorer became a friend of Tae the so of Aph-Lin, and the daughter of his host, Z fell in love with him. This presented diff ties that nearly resulted In the annihilati
Zee
to his own people on the surface of the ear
Up described in detail tb<* custom*? nf -
pu1
- _ T]
to show a different attitude toward science
praised the civilization of the Vril-ya, while their parallel development in character had done
Based on The idea of development, both physical and
]
tion mental and spiritual — of evolution, to use the
scientific term-- is basic for this book. There- fore I shall first discuss all the references to evolution, including a satire on the contro- .
paleontologr . As the next most important scienc' dealt with, I shall discuss the science of language; then the atomic theory; and vril, the marvelous force by which the Vril-ya con- quered nature. Their mechanical devices, of which there were many, chiefly based on the power of vril, will follow. Then their use
Ly1
capable of great achievements, will be explained and last of all will be discussed their general attitude toward science and the arts.
The c onl r s;
tion had raged for some time before The Coming Race appeared (1371), and had held not only the attention of scientists, but that of the people in general. In the early nineteenth century, much had been said about it, Lamarck having issued his Philosophie Zoologique in 1809, in which he declared that all species had descended from one original parent stock, and that the variations that had appeared were trie result of law, not miracle. The law, he thought, that had had most effect in bringing about changes was that of use and disuse: that a wading bird, for example, tried to go farther and farther into the water in search of food, and in so doing, through the ages, developed the long legs adapted to that sort of lif e . This idea is in Lytton's treatment of the race
Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire had suspected as early as 1795 that "what we call species are various degenerations of the same type". This
1. H.S. Williams, Story of Nineteenth Century
* - ■ -
jjarwm, urigin oi one opeoj.es, r.is^rzcai Introduction, vi-vii
was published in 1828 and is possibly a basis for Lytton's idea of the quarrel over the quest of whether man is a higher development or a degeneration of a frog. In 1830 Saint-Hilaire held a debate with Cuvier on the problem of evolution which lasted six months and attracted wide attention. The length of this debate probably suggested to Lytton the idea of a thousand-year conflict. In the opinion of the public, Cuvier, who favored special creation and immutability of the species, won a telling victory, and for nineteen years nothing more was heard of the doctrine of evolution.
It is true that in 1830 Lye 11 1 a Elements of Geolog appeared, in which he advocated the doctrine of unif ormitarianism, as opposed to Cuvier fs belief in catastrophism; that is, that changes had taken place gradually in the past just as they do In the present, not coming about suddenly by great, wide-spread catastroph and the creation of a new series of species. This is a stroke for evolution, though Lyell
f
I!.
did not follow out its implications at the time Lytton was acouainted with Lvell's work for he referred to it in discussing the type of skull exhibited by the race he visited.^"
Between the time of the publication of Lyell's work and 1859, the year of the publica- tion of Darwin's Origin of the Species , no recognition of brie evolution theory, even as a fallacious idea, was given in college classes It was as if it were non-existent. Then came the bomb of Darwin's and Wallace's work, and the whole world was set talking of the impli- cations of this new statement of the theory. Church people were, as some still are, incensed at the idea that the Creator might not have originated each species from earth, fitted exclusively to its own mode of living, Many scientists were convinced by Darwin's arguments and imposing array of factual evidence, but many others were not. The controversy raged for many years, and even yet there are those who think that a belief in the validity of the
1. The Coming Race, p. 61
theory of evolution marks the loss of a man's
Into such a world Lytton launched his book. He made his ideal race, the Vril-ya, to be de- veloped far beyond the human race on the sur- face of the earth, and to have left such ques- tions as the origin of mankind to the former Wrangling Period of History. We must not omit his delicious satire of the controversy over the question.
Satire In the room devoted to an ancient collec-
contro- tion of portraits were tTiree belonging to the versy
over pre-historic age, portraits of a great philos-
evolu-
tion opher, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather.
Lytton* s description of them cannot be improved:
"The philosopher is attired in a long tunic which seems to form a loose suit of scaly armor, borrowed, perhaps, from some fish or reptile, but the hands and feet are exposed: the digits In both are wonderfully long, and webbed. He has little or no perceptible throat,
and a low receding forehead, not at ail one ideal of a safe's. He has bright brown prom- inent eyes, a very wide mouth and high cheek- bones, and a muddy complexion. The portrait of the grandfather had the features and asrject of the philosopher , only much more exaggerated: he was not dressed, antf the color of his body was singular; the. breast and stomach yellow, the shoulders and legs of a dull bronze hue: the great-grandfather was a magnificent spec- imen of the Batrachian genus, a Giant Frog, 1
; simple.
Then Aph-Lln, who was showing the portraits, explained how, in the Wrangling Period a "very distinguished naturalist" had proved that the structure of the An (man) and the frog had such similarities that it must be seen that one had developed from the other. Of course, the distinguished naturalist is Charles Darwin.
1. The Coming Race, p. 71
Satire on the debate
During that period, said Aph-Lin,
"whatever
one sage asserted another sage was sure to con-
Saint-
Hilaire and
tradic t .
So a g
reat dispute arose between
Cuvier
thosp who said that man is a higher development
of a frog and those who asserted that the frog is an improved development of man. . The moral- ists sided with the latter school because no one could accuse a frog of deviating from the moral lav/ recognized by their race, as men dis- regard their morals. "Unhappily these disputes became involved with the religious notions of that age; and as society was then administered under the government of the Koom-Posh |a republican form of government] , who, being the most ignorant were of course the most inflammable class-- the multitude took the whole question out of the hands of the philosophers; political chiefs saw that the Prog dispute, so taken up by the populace, could become a most valuable instrument of their ambition; and for not less than one thousand years war and massacre prevailed, during which period
1. The Coming Race, p. 73
the philosophers on "both sides were butchered, and the government of the Koom-Posh itself was happily brought to an end by the ascend- ancy of a family that clearly established its descent from the aboriginal tadpole." This was particularly timely for a public that remembered the six-months debate of 3aint- Hilaire and Cuvier and heard discussions on all sides of the theory of evolution.
Lytton's Lytton's own position on the subject is
position
on evo- made clear by the conclusion at which both
Aph-Lin and the visitor to the Vril-ya arrived. "The An [man] in reality commenced to exist as An with the donation of that capacity to receive the idea of the All-Wise, and, with that capacity, the sense to acknowledge that, however through the countless ages his race may improve in wisdom, it can never combine the elements at his command into the form of a tadpole. The matter was well summed up in Lytton's mind in a proverb which the ancient philosopher was said to have used: "Humble yourselves, my
1. The Coming Race, p. 74
2. The Coming Race, p. 75
descendants, the father of your race was a tadpole
exalt yourselves, my descendants, for it was
the same Divine Thought which created your father
that develops itself in exalting you."-*- This
is the poetic conclusion that such a mind as
Lytton's would be expected to reach.
Refer- Throughout The Coming Rao ideas of evo-
ences to
the Pes- lution are used. Lytton must have been ent of
Man especially well acquainted with Darwin's
Descent of Man. The reasons given for believing that man is a descendant of a frog parallel exactly those given in the first chapter of Darwin's book: that the An has certain dis- eases in common with the frog; that both have the same parasitical worms in the intestines: and that the An has a rudimentary swimirn ng bladder, no longer of any use to him, which proves his descent from the frog. An ex- . . .. planation of the elimination of hair by the
law of sexual selection is clearly a reference to chapter twenty of The Descent of Man, which
The Coming Race, p. 71 Ibid, p. 72
discusses exactly the same thing. Again we find a description of a scholarly work which Zee had published, comprising tv/o volumes, on "the parasite insect that dwells amid the hairs of a tiger's paw."^- In a footnote Lytton explaine that though the tiger referred to here is different from our well-known kind, "it clearly belongs to the tiger species, since the parasite animalcule found in its paw, like that found in the Asiatic tiger's, is a miniature image of itself. :' Although no such parasite exists, and this is simply another example of Lytton1 s avidity in seizing upon a new idea and using it, whether with accuracy or not, yet his identifying a member of the tiger species in this way is another reference to the first chapter of Th Descent of Man. Darwin had worked on his book from February 4, 1868 to February 24, 1871, so that it is not impossible that Lytton had become acquainted with some of the ideas in it by the time Th Gomir Race was published.
1. The Coming Race, p. 37
143
Law of Lamarck Ts law of use and disuse appears
u s e and
disuse in this story at least twice. Lytton mentioned that the women of Vril-ya had gradually lost certain faculties "just as in the inferior animals above the earth many peculiarities in their original formation, intended by nature for their protection, gradually fade or become inoperative when not needed under altered cir- cumstances . _ There is no apparent reason for the insertion of this comparison either for clarity or effect, except to show Lytton' s acquaintance with the law.
The fact that the race of Vril-ya developed certain physical characteristics that enabled them to cope with their environment is tacit assumption of the validity of the law of use and disuse. One character said that a certain ability whad gone on increasing, like other pro- perties of the race, in proportion as it had been uniformly transmitted from parent to child, so that, at last, it had become an instinct." This whole idea was upset by Weismann's work
1. The Coming Race, p. 63
2. Ibid, p. 96
#
#
which denied that acquired characteristics can be transmitted."'" However, it is generally con- ceded today that there is some truth in it.
Natural In accounting for the high development of
selection
the race, Lytton made the statement that "since in the competition a vast number must perish, nature selects for preservation only the strong- est specimens.*1 This is the doctrine of nat- ural selection or survival of the fittest which Darwin popularized in his Origin of the Species.
What this These references to evolution show three
SI lOWS
about things about Lytton: (1) he knew the develop-
Lvtton
ments in the field and wanted his readers to realize that he knew them; (2) he was not blind to the larger implications of the theory; and 1 3) he saw the shallowness of the popular contro versv over the theory of evolution and made use of the opportunity it gave for satire.
raleon- That Lytton was not unacquainted with at
least some of the development in paleontology Is shown bv his rpfpypnnfi tr> an animal whlnh
1. Williams, Story of Nineteenth Century Science p. 318
2. The Coming Kace, p. 63
0
"brought instantly to my recollection a plaster cast I had seen in some museum of a variety of the elk stag, said to have existed before the Deluge.""1' He also referred definitely to cine Brachycephalic type of skull mentioned in Lyell' Elements >f Geology, comparing it to the Doli- chocephalic type of the later Age of Iron. He described it, however, in terms of phrenology,
explaining in some detail the development of
o
the phrenological faculties. ~ This gives a pseudo-scientific flavor to his observations, comparable to the modern stories of trips to Mars which we sometimes read.
Another theory of the time, but one which did not attract such wide- spread popular atten- tion as the theory of evolution, is the atomic theory; that is, the theory that matter is made up of atoms which are always in motion. Zee based the ability of the Vril-ya to use automata (much like our robots) upon the atomic constitution of matter: * ... No form of matter
1. The Coming Race, p. 13
2. Ibid, p. 61
is motionless and inert; everv particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted upon by agencies, of which heat is the most apparent and rapid, but vril is the most subtle, and, when skilfully wielded, the most powerful . . . Without this we could not make our automata supply the place of servants.1' This suggests mystery, not cold scientific theory. But the mystery of the natural world is not absent even today. Ill that one needs do to find that it still exists is to read about the ether, which has never yet been explained. Dr. Dolbear has stated that
a material substance,2 and he suggests that it may possibly be the medium through which mind and matter re- act. Certainly this is a state- ment as mysterious as any Lytton made. Professor Michelson, who was one of the leading figures in the field of light until his death in 1931, cautiously said concerning the ether, nA number of independent courses of reasoning lead to the conclusion that the medium which propagates
1. The Coming Race, p. 69
2. Dolbear, Matter, Ether, and Motion, p. 35
3. Ibid, preface
light waves is not an ordinary form of matter. Little as we know about it, we may say that our ignorance of ordinary matter is still greater. ' These statements attest to the mystery which sur rounds this phase of scientific investigation. Lytton, then, cannot be called foolishlj' unscientific when he invests science with a sort of poetic wonder, if these men, who are known in the purely scientifjc field, regard it
Vril v/as the strange force which was basic to the high civilization of the Vril-ya. It was thought by them to be the "unity of nat- ural energetic agencies" ; that is, the one great force which manifests itself in all sorts of energv as magnetism, electricity, etc. In connection with this, Lytton mentioned that Faraday had conceived the idea that all forms of energy have a common origin or are convertibl into each other.'' The experiment by which
1. A. A. Michelson, Light Waves and their Uses, p
2. The Coming Race, p. 28 Ibid, p. 69
•
Faraday was led to this conclusion was performed in 1845, when he found that there is a certain relation between two specific forms of energy:
his,
tentative conclusion that perhaps all forms of energy are inter-related. Now the idea is commonly accepted that electromagnetic waves, x-rays, ultra-violet rays, heat, light, and several other more recently discovered forces all rise from one cause: disturbances in the ether or ether waves, the only difference being in the length of the wave. This grand conception was foreshadowed by the force vril, a product of the imagination of Bulwer-Lytton.
Vril and An interesting article appeared in the
March, 1904, Critic, entitled Did ulwer-Lyt tor Foretell the Discovery of Radium? In it Arthur Hornblow drew several interesting comparisons between radium and vril. Vril, like radium, could destroy life; in fact, it was so destruc- tive that peace reigned because no one dared
s, Survey of Ph
nd pp. 583-584
3
incur the enmity of another. Used in other ways it could cure disease, and likewise, radium cures skin diseases and various other disorders. Both have the property Lytton at- tributed to vril: "It enables the physical organization to reestablish the equilibrium of
i
us nar,urai powers ana. uxiereuy uo neai itseii .
Vril Lytton also mentioned the ''vril bath"
which acted much as a bath in mineral waters." In a footnote he explained that "it was very similar in its invigorating powers to the effect of the baths at Gastein, the virtues of which are ascribed by many physicians to electricity." Such a statement as this was to be expected in a day when the varied powers of electricity arid magnetism were being investigated and when elec t robi ology and animal magnetism were in vogue. As a matter of fact, the salutary effects of mineral waters seem to depend on their chem- ical composition and their temperature, and not a little on the regular daily habits of the
1. The Coming Race, p. 34
2. Ibid, p. 60
patients at such a place. - In supposing that electricity played a part in the effect of such a bath, however, Lytton was in line with the ideas of his day.
Vril and Vril also could be used to influence the
mind, where it had a far greater influence than
either mesmerism,^ electrobiology,^ or odic 4
force. The Vril-ya made extensive use of it for its hypnotic effect. They even made a dic- tionary of their visitor's language during his hypnotic sleep. They said that knowledge could be interchanged much more rapidly in the state of trance or hypnotism than in the waking state, so they taught hirn the fundamentals of their language in that way. This reference to hypnotism is another evidence of Lytton' s inter- est in it, and the way he spoke of mesmerism, electrobiolcgy , and odic force, shows that even at the late date of this book he was unaware that these were fallacious ideas.
1. New International Encyclopedia
2. See p. 81 of this paper
3. Ibid, p. 82
4. Ibid, p. 101
5. The Coming Race, p. 29
6. Morton Prince's The Unconscious , gives many exampl of the wonderful things done by patients while in the state of hypnotism.
Vril and Most of the mechanical devices that the
the civi- lization Vril-va had were governed in some mysterious of the
Vril-ya way by vril. Many of them are duplicated by the appliances we have today: automata which were like our robots, elevators, telegraphs, air boats, gas lights, devices superseding the horse (vril even took the place of the dog), a machine for melodious sounds which somewhat resembled our radio, were all a part of their civilization as well as ours. Some of these existed in Lytton's day, as the telegraph and primitive air boats, but many of them are product of a later period. They also had mechanical wings as well as the air boats, but in this case Lytton's imagination has not been supported by facts.
This marvelous force, vril, then, became prophetic of many actual accomplishments of a later date, both in the purely scientific field of the study of energy, and in the applied phase of mechanical devices.
r
Philology occupied so much of Lytton' s attention in The Coming Race that it is necessary to include some discussion of it here. It was a science just then coming into being. In fact, The Com is Race is inscribed to Max Muller, the eminent philologist who did so much to make the study of language popular. He wrote in a pleasing style, which made even dry facts fas- cinating material, so we can easily understand Lytton' s interest in his ideas.
Lytton quoted from one of Muller' s lectures^
concerning the development of language from the
isolating stage, through the agglutinative, to
the Inflectional form. He based his description
of the language of the Vril-ya on Muller' s work*
even the examples he gave are couched in the
same style as Muller' s. The abbreviation used
by the Vril-ya for poetry seems to have been
taken almost directly from a similar abbreviation
2
given by Muller.
After describing the language, its inflec- tional forms and the make-up of words, Lytton
1. On the Stratification of Language, given at Cambridge in 1S68
2. Muller, Chips from a German Workshop, vol.4,
said, "The philologist will have seen from the above how much the language of the Vril-ya is akin to the Aryan or Indo- Germanic ; hut, like all languages, it contains forms and words in which transfers from very opposite sources of speech have been taken. The very title of Tur, which they give to their supreme magistrate, indicates theft from a tongue akin to the Turanian. ". "Turanian" was considered an inexact or confused term not long after Lytton's day. In the dictionary, there is the following quotation concerning the term, taken from A.H. Sayce's Principle >f Comparative Philclc^ published 1874: "We have even had a ♦Turanian1 family invented, into which everything that is not Aryan or Semitic has been" thrust, from Turkish and Tamulian to Chinese or Red Indian."
It seems that the language of the Vril-ya was to Lytton's mind a more nearly perfect one than ours, for he took great pains to show how simple it was, how compact and expressive.
1. The Coming Race, p. 47
Altogether, reference to the science of x.>hilology
Kave him an oonortunitv ho show hi vv1 Ho T>carii
-
and his knowledge of the newest developments of the time, more perhaps than any older science would have done.
The in general, the civilization which Litton
effect of
science descrihed In The Coming Race was one based on ori the
liter- science. Lytton seemed to recognize by this ature of
the Vri]- that the greatest advances of the last hundred
ya
years had been scientific advances, and that it is to science that one must look, whether he would or not, for* the progress of the future.
The Vril-ya had progressed so far that they had no literature! there was no incentive for any. Fame had no allure for them since perfect equality prevailed, and need for money could not cause anyone to write, for the poor were well cared for, and anyway, almost any occupation would pay better than writing. Again, there was nothing to write about. They had developed beyond the indulgence of passions, and though
they read of them in ancient literature, they could not write about them for no one felt them or would find any sympathy from his readers if he did. There was nothing left but descriptive writing and what we call "manners", which was declared to be an "insipid kind of composition. Science, on the other hand, flourished, because "the motive to science is the love of truth apart from all consideration of farne."^
„1
Modern opinion of the effect of sc3-
litera- ture
It would seem that Lyttcn meant this for a prophecy of what the scientific age will do eventually to letters. He is not alone in this opinion, for we find it in our century.'" However, there are many writers who feel that literature and science are complementary in nature. Albert G. Eeller says concerning this: "Small souls have bedeviled the whole situation by proclaiming the antithetic nature of two complements . "^ Literature reflects on all knowledge as a whole, while science observes its details; but on the other hand, the two are inter-related, for science
1. The Coming Race, p. 80
2. Ibid, p. 82
3. For instance, Joi n Burro\ighs , "Science and Literature", North America Review, March, 1914: "As science improves, literature must grow less."
4. A.G. Keller, "The Ant and the Butterfly", Saturday Review of Literature, April 6, 1929
-
must reflect, and likewise, literature must observe. The literary man must "be somewhat of a scientist, and the scientist must have some of the interests of the literary man. Writers should have enough knowledge of the greatness and mystery of the scientific underst anding of the universe to re- ceive inspiration directly from that." Lytton was, superficially at least, this sort of writer; at any rate, he knew a great deal about the great findings of science which admit of a poetic interpretation. In so far as he meant the condition of the Vril-ya as a prophecy of what science would bring, he did not reach the depth which he displayed in Ky Novel concerning the wider implications of science and the rela- tion between science and the arts.
Conclu- From Lytton' s description of the civiliza-
sion
tion of the race of the Vril-ya, the following conclusions may be drawn: (1) He was acquainted with many of the phases of the sciences. (2) He looked beyond the bare facts of discoveries to
1. Sidney Gunn, "Science and Literature", Science U.S., October, 1911
2. George Sarton, "Science and Style',' Scribner's, June, 1921
lo 1
the poetry and mystery which are associated with them. (3) He made good use of the opportu- nity for satire which the controversy over evolution offered. (4) He prophesied, as many imaginative writers do, several actual achievements of later times. (5) He believed that eventually science would cause the dis- appearance of great literature.
f
o' ... J ,
The following summary of the conclusions reached in the examination of each of the twelve novels will bring together the most important findings of this paper.
Paul Clifford called attention to the abuses in the criminal code which Lytton rec- ognized, and made its accusations seem valid by reference to actual cases. This made it more valuable as a humanitarian novel than it could have been otherwise. Here, then, a judicious use of scientific methods and ideas added to the usefulness of the book as a help in reforming the penal system.
In Pelham, the influence of science appears in two ways: (1) it had entered polite conver- sation, giving additional opportunities for simile and satire; (2) knowledge of science was beginning to be considered part of the necessary equipment of the novelist. Its lack
la evident in the treatment o by mental disease.
Godolphir The cl ief relation in Godolphin to science
is in the use of the occult to make scenes melodramatic and colorful.
_^ "_ In Th Last Da:; >f Pompeii , I have shown
Pci^peTT that (X) the occult sciences of magic and astrology gave Lytton opportunity for awe- inspiring scenes and the weird, fearful charac- ters of Arbaces and the witch of Vesuvius. These helped give "atmosphere" to the story. (2) The pseudo- science of phrenology, applied to a skull found in the ruins, gave yet another character. (3) The religious beliefs, with their attendant theories of the forces ruling the world, were in some respects adapted by Lytton to give him opportunity to combat the materialistic beliefs resulting from the scientific movement in his own day.
H ' * • • " Lytton has used in Rienzi a well-defined
method of (1) observing the facts, and (2)
drawing his deductions from them according to the laws of Nature. By "building the picture of the age in which Rienzi lived, and showing the social and political background as well as the powerful personal causes, he was pursuing what might be called a scientific method of observation and deduction.
^C: - i in Zanoni, (1) Lytton used Rosicrucian
beliefs to furnish many of the details of his imaginative, symbolic tale. (2) He created the mystic characters of Zanoni and iviejnour, and described their Rosicrucian beliefs in the elemental spirits, trance, alchemy, and medicine. (3) He described, from their teach- ings, the ideal scientist, detached from the world, and he implied both the dangers and the glories of the larger conception of science. (4) In comparing science with art, he placed science on the lower plane, as merely discovering what is, and art above, as creating its own world.
t
-J The Haunted and the Haunters ov/es its
power as a terrifying ghost story entirely to
•- ! ■
Haunters
the occult sciences.
A From Lytton's references to the sciences
~Z
Story which are found in A Strange Story, the follow- ing conclusions are evident; (1) Lytton was verv vain about his wide acouaintance with science, not seeming to realize that his credulity and inaccuracy often led him into glaring errors. He had the attitude of the poet rather than the . scientist, which, while it gave him a "basis for some of his most beautiful prose and made him seem almost prophetic at times, it also caused him to be unscientifically prejudiced in regard to certain poetic preconceptions he had held. (2) The age in which Lytton wrote was imbued with scientific ideas, or people would not have cared for such a novel as A Strang Story. (3) Science in this book gave, as in Lytton's other stories, opportunities for certain important characters, scenes, and incidents. Its chief
literary value here is, however, in the poetic "breadth that it gave to certain passages in th novel .
Tlie Since practically all the effect of science
C ■ - ' ons
in The Caxtons is the same as in Its sequel, Novel, only the latter is considered in detail.
My Novel In Novel it is clear that (1) Lytton
thought of science as the poet would, with a consideration of its far-reaching implications as well as its immediate use. (2) He made excellent use of scientific ideas in creating memorable figures, just as, earlier, he had used occult ideas for the same purpose. (3) He was again somewhat inaccurate in his use of terms. All in all, Lytton showed in My Novel a greater depth and clarity of thinking, as well as more skill in writing, than is found in any of his other books.
Asmodeus Asmodeu s at Large, an early worV: of Lytton,
is in direct contrast to his last novel, The Coming Race, in that in the first, everything
1G
is occult, while in the last, all is scientific.
The From Lytton's description of the future in
C' '
R ' i o ~ The Comir Race , the following conclusions may
be drawn: (1) Lytton was acquainted in detail with many phases of the sciences. (2) He looked beyond the bare facts of discoveries to the poetry and mystery which are associated with them. (3) Ke made good use of the opportunity for satire which the controversy over evolution offered. (4) He prophesied, as many imaginative writers do, several actual achievements of later times. (5) He believed that eventually science would cause the disappearance of great- literature.
Many of the results obtained from this study have been found in more than one of the novels discussed. They will be grouped, as was stated in the introduction, under the following headings in the conclusion to this paper: (1) Evidence of the scientific movement and interest in pseudo- science. (2) Characteristics of Lytton. (3) The
*
effect of the scientific method on Lytton's writing of novels. (4) How science and pseudo- science affected the literary value of the work.
Evidence ]
of the tific
CONCLUSION
Since Lytton's interests were wide, the foregoing discussion of science and pseudo-science in his novels, has, of necessity, covered many and varied fields. From all the science and pseudo- science that appears in the twelve novels examined, however, certain definite conclusions may he drawn.
In all the novels covered, I have found much that is characteristic of the period in which they were written. During Lytton's ear lv writing", thpre was less indication or interest In real science on his part than later, hut all of his novels are stamped with the
In Paul Cli f ford and Godolphin that the genera- tion in which they were written was taking faltering steps toward an understanding of social psychology. The society pictured in Pelham furthered polite conversation by a use of scientific terms and ideas that were pre vale
in the nineteenth century. Even The Last Days of Pompeii, a novel whose setting is the first century A. D. , shows the influence of nineteenth century materialism, moreover,' Riengi illustrate the scientific method in writing the experimental novel as it was advocated by Zola. As for Lytton's later novels, even those like Zancni . which were chiefly occult, bear impress of the scientific and pseudo- scientific beliefs of the nineteenth century, and two of them, A Strange Story and Th Coming Race , depend almost entirely upon nineteenth centurv science and pseudo- scienc for the'r interest. Such books as these would 1
it not been that people were interested in science in Lytton?s day. In short, Lytton's
L s t akab] in: teenth centurv interest in science
One sid
Lf i
i
10]
case of a person with such knowledge, his master
his wide knowledge of science; consequently, he often inserted footnotes and explanations entire
i
In spi Ls pose, he
vision concerning many of the sublime conceptior
ly natural
in his novels. As to the relation of the scienc and the arts, moreover, he believed that the literary .man, especially the novelist, should be acquainted with the laws of nature; that - - hi, plane t!
, enough
diUomf n el Itt on-? nn^rt will oiiYVrtl or»f 1 -t f" a r» « i 4* n vi /^v
He opposed the materialistic ideas that
i
...... .
this purpose prejudiced him in such a manner a; to cause his arguments to be unscientific.
With the wide interests and knowledge tha' Lytton had, it is to be regretted that he sho'u! allow affectation and pose to ruin most of his work. Had he been more sincere and had he had less of the manner of the "grand seigneur", he would have been able to go much farther in
The Not only did the ideas of science influenc
tific Lytton' s novels, but the method which science
follows was an important factor in his v/riting. In Paul Clifford, for instance, there is a fain trace of the fact-finding spirit, but it is in Rienzi and in his other historical novels that the scientific method comes to the front. By following a precise method of observation of
r ■
achieved what he called an "intellectual"
i
i
historical novel.
From the literary point of view, one o tlie chief values, of science in Lytton's nov is the opportunity it offered for poetic im tion and expression. The idea of the whole universe governed by uniform law is one tha can be fully grasped only by a large mind w can see beyond the practical value of the discoveries made.-
Wore specifically, the use of both re a
tunity for developing characters that have individuality and scenes that stand out for their mystery ana power.
The essential results reached in this study of science and pseudo- science in some representative novels of Bulwer-Lytton are: ^ x j liiaX/ \s~±q no ve ±s rsi iso i b.ie xiiti-d i t> l, ojl the nineteenth century in science and pseud science. (2) That Lytton had a wide intere in science and saw it from the viewpoint of
•
poet, though the effect of his attitude I
touched in the mid- nineteenth century e the writing of novels. (4) That certain value in literature, that
but may eve of the universe to books in which and may serve in the novel as at scene and character in such a waj
e n.
ic colors
round for
>nhance
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF NOVELS
arge. (Philadelphia:
axtons. (London: George Roi
Joining Race. (London: George Kout
Modolohin. (London:
The Haunted and the Haunters.
Jons), 1878
Th Lj D , of Pompeii . (London:
My Novel. (London: George Routle
377
♦
Pelham. (London: Georp-e Rcjtledi
Kienzi. (London: George Routl
A Strange Story. (London: George Routledga and Sons), 1878
Zanonl . (London: George Routledge and Sons), 1878
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Hastings, James, assisted by Selbie, John A., and others, editors, Encyclopedia >f Religic i and Ethics . (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons), 1908
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r
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t
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Muller, Frjedrich Max, Chips f ror ^ German Workshop. (New York: G. Scribner and Co.), 1871
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Dolhear, A.E., Matter, Ether, and Motion . (Boston: Lee and Shepard), 1892
Dubois- Redmond , Emil Heinrich, Animal Electricity Abstract by Mueller, Johann. Edited by Jones, H. Bene (London: Churchill), 1852
Mnchelscn, A. A. , Light Waves and their Uses . (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1903
Saunders, Frederick A. , Survey of Physics . (New York: Henry Kolt and Go.), 1930
XI. Psychology
Ladd, George Trumbull, and Woodworth, Robert Sessions, Elements Physiological Psychology. (New York: Charles Scribner' s Sons), 1911
•
•
Pillabury, tf.P., History of T. „ hole „ . (New W.W. Norton and Co., Inc.), 1929
Fr3r.ce, Morton, The Unconscious . (Kev/ York: The Macmillan Co.), 1914
Woodworth, Robert Sessions, Psychology . (New Yor1/: Henry Holt and Co.), 1921
6
MAGAZINE .iP-TCL^
John Burroughs, "science and Literature*. It or A ^ica R '. lew , March, 1914
Francis cribble, "Novels of Bulwer- Lytton"
... i
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a . G . Keller, "The Ant and the Butterfly". Sat' R Le ' T 1'- rature, April 6, 1929
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