It cannot be claimed for Eaton Stannard Barrett that he proved superior to the task which he undertook. There is little or no real character in The Heroine. Perhaps Jerry Sullivan, the faithful Irish servitor, with his ready speech and bold resourcefulness, comes nearest to the life, but even he is drawn, like Lever's comic Irishmen, not intimately. A few touches of verisimilitude are sufficient to portray a servant, whose business is to come when he is called and to help others in their necessities. The heroine herself has no breath in her; she is inconceivably credulous, impossibly ignorant, and even while she talks the author often forgets her very existence and speaks in her stead, so that she seems to be quizzing her own fatuity. Perhaps this incompetent portraiture was to be expected from the author of Woman, a Poem, but it takes some of the edge off the fun of the book. Cherubina is not a girl, with silly, flighty notions in her head, such as romance engenders, but a pedantic female lawyer, determined to order her life, down to the smallest detail, on precedents borrowed from her favourite reading. Miss Austen's girls, in Northanger Abbey, talk like girls; Cherubina talks like a book. Nevertheless, Miss Austen herself read The Heroine, and confessed to the pleasure she had from it. It enjoyed a high and brief reputation. The first edition appeared in 1813; the second followed it in the space of a year; and in 1816 the author, before he was thirty years old, may have read a notice of himself in the Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland concluding with the following eulogy: 'This work (The Heroine) has been pronounced not inferior in wit and humour to Tristram Shandy, and in point of plot and interest infinitely beyond Don Quixote.'

Let us save what remnants we can of this monstrous pronouncement. Of character, as has been said, there is next to none in The Heroine; so that only those who can read Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, careless of the characters portrayed, might possibly be able to return a verdict on the comparison. There are many readers of books who grudge labour spent on character-drawing; the long colloquies between Don Quixote and Sancho or between my Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim they would be glad to see abbreviated, so they might get back to the confusion and bustle of life. Why all this dissection of the heart, while there are crowns to be broke? What the soldier said is not evidence; it is what he did that they desire to hear. For readers of this temper there is abundance of entertainment in The Heroine, if once they can bring themselves to accept the perilously slender illusion. The scenes described are as full of movement as a harlequinade. No Irish fair is richer in incident. And there is such a flow of high spirits; the author carries the whole business through with such unflagging zest, that the farce, though it hardly ever touches on the confines of comedy, is pleasant farce, instinct with good nature and good fellowship. Those who like a book that saves them from the more exacting companionship of their own thoughts might do worse than read The Heroine.

This is lukewarm praise; but the book has a stronger claim than this on the interest of the reader; it marks a crisis in literary history. The author was a well-read man, and all the fashionable literature of his day is reflected in his pages. He was familiar with the essayists and moralists of the eighteenth century; indeed, he often falls into their attitude in his opposition to the extravagances of the Romantic movement. His parody of Johnson's later style is one of the very best of the multitude of Johnsonian imitations. Boswell, writing before 1791, was able to enumerate a distinguished array of disciples and copyists, among them Hugh Blair, Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh, George Colman the elder, Robertson the historian, Gibbon, Miss Burney, Mrs. Barbauld, Henry Mackenzie, Vicesimus Knox, and last, John Young, Professor of Greek at Glasgow, whose Criticism on the Elegy written in a Country Church-yard, being a continuation of Dr. Johnson's Criticism on the Poems of Gray (1783) is rightly praised by Boswell as the most perfect of all professed imitations of Johnson's style. It is only half a parody; Johnson's method in criticism has been so thoroughly assimilated by the author, that some of Johnson's strong sense filters in here and there as if by oversight. Horace Walpole said of it, acutely enough, that the author seemed to wish to be taken by Gray's admirers for a ridiculer of Johnson, and by Johnson's admirers for a censurer of Gray. But if this is the best imitation of Johnson's critical manner, his biographical style and his light occasional verse have never been so happily mimicked as in the Memoirs of James Higginson, by Himself, which occur in Letter X of The Heroine. Johnson continued to be the most influential teacher of English prose until Macaulay, by introducing a more glittering kind of antithesis and a freer use of the weapons of offence in criticism, usurped his supremacy.

A more voluminous and easier literature had enthralled the popular taste for some thirty or forty years before the author of The Heroine delivered his attack. Only a few are now remembered even by name of that horde of romances which issued from the cheap presses, in the train of Mrs. Radcliffe. It is reasonable to suppose that many of them, which had not the help of that great preservative of a bad book, good binding, have perished from off the face of the earth. They are not yet old enough to be precious, as Elizabethan trash is precious, and doubtless the surviving copies of some of them are even now being cast out from lumber-rooms and remote country libraries, to suffer their fate by fire. Their names are scattered plentifully up and down the Bibliotheca Britannica and other monumental compilations, where books that go under in their fight against time have Christian burial and a little headstone reserved for them. In The Heroine only the chief of them are referred to by name. The romances of Mrs. Radcliffe—The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, and The Bravo of Venice—are praised as being 'often captivating and seldom detrimental'. The rivals of Mrs. Radcliffe who wrote those enormously popular works, The Children of the Abbey and Caroline of Lichtfield, receive a less respectful treatment. At the close of his book the author of The Heroine summarizes his indictment against these and their kind: 'They present us with incidents and characters which we can never meet in the world; and act upon the mind like intoxicating stimulants; first elevate, and then enervate it. They teach us to revel in ideal scenes of transport and distraction; and harden our hearts against living misery, by making us so refined as to feel disgust at its unpoetical accompaniments.' Throughout the book he keeps up a running fire of criticism. When Cherubina visits Westminster Abbey, 'It is the first,' she says, 'that I have ever seen, though I had read of thousands.' She apologizes for using the vulgar word 'home'—'you know that a mere home is my horror'. She confesses that she is very inadequately armed with religion—'I knew nothing of religion except from novels; and in these, though the devotion of heroines is sentimental and graceful to a degree, it never influences their acts, or appears connected with their moral duties. It is so speculative and generalized, that it would answer the Greek or the Persian church, as well as the Christian; and none but the picturesque and enthusiastic part is presented; such as kissing a cross, chanting a vesper with elevated eyes, or composing a well-worded prayer.'

The notable thing is that this attack on the novels of the day was not an isolated protest; it expressed the general mind and echoed the current opinion. Miss Austen, with more suavity and art, had long before said the same thing. The romance was declining; it had become a cheap mechanical thing; and the mind of the nation was turning away from it to reinstate those teachers of moral prudence whose influence had been impaired by the flood, but not destroyed. If any one had been rash enough, in the year 1814, to prophesy the future of literature, he would have been justified in saying that, to all appearances, the prose romance was dead. It had fallen into its dotage, and the hand of Eaton Stannard Barrett had killed it. The Heroine seemed to mark the end of an age of romance, and the beginning of a new era of sententious prose.

Such a prophet would have been approved by The Edinburgh Review and all the best judges of the time. He would have been wrong, for he could not foresee the accident of genius. Walter Scott, like Cherubina (whose adventures he read and applauded), had fallen a victim to the fascinations of the writers of romance, yet, unlike her, had not allowed them to deprive him of all acquaintance with 'a more useful class of composition' and the toils of active life. Romance was what he cared for, and he brought the sobriety and learning of a judge to the task of vindicating his affection. He proved that the old romantic stories are convincing enough if only the blood of life flows through them. His great panoramas of history are exhibited in the frame-work of a love-plot. In place of the feeble comic interest of the earlier romances he supplied a rich and various tissue of national character and manners. Ancient legend and song, fable and superstition, live again in his work. And, as if Cherubina's unhappy experiences had all been in vain, there is always a heroine. The readers who had been laughed into scepticism by the wit of the enemy were within a few years won back to poetry and romance; Cherubina was deposed, and in her place there reigned the Bride of Lammermoor.

WALTER RALEIGH.

Oxford,
Christmas, 1908.

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