ideal rather than to the general style of his own period. Sometimes the greatness of a concept can show through the hollow and pompous forms of the product; but this happens rarely. What happens often is that the artificiality of the product is a fair expression of the concept.
This is true of the work of Scott's greatest follower and disciple, James Fenimore Cooper. It would be pleasant to believe that he was of his own initiative, but it would not be true; and though Cooper was so far original through his patriotism as to prefer American scenes and themes in his fiction, he most distinctly was because Scott had been. His literature was both better and worse than Scott's. It was more compact and more dramatic, no doubt from his more strenuous temperament; but it lacked that depth of humanity which one always feels under Scott's turbid surfaces, and it is wholly without the sweet play of his humor, the sudden flashes of his inspiration. So far as I know it, his romance has never the grace that Scott wins now and again for his from the presence of a genuine heroine. But on this point I was willing to own myself not very well fitted to judge, since my knowledge of Cooper was at best vague and of remote date; and in my misgiving I turned to a literary friend who had made rather a special study of him, and entreated him to help me out with a heroine from him. He answered in effect that the heroines of Cooper did not exist even in the imagination of his readers; there were certain figures in his pages, always introduced as "females," and of such an extremely conventional and ladylike deportment in all circumstances that you wished to kill them. But he added, in a magnanimous despair, that if I would I might read "The Last of the Mohicans," and possibly come away with a heroine. I have just finished the book, with a true regret that I was not a boy of fourteen, or else a man in the second quarter of the century, when I read it; but I have not come away with a heroine. This is not because I have killed either Cora Munro or her sister Alice; but since I am guiltless of their death I am glad they are dead.
Long ago I read several romances of Charles Brockden Brown, but of those dreams nothing more remains to me now than of some that I dreamed myself about the year 1875. Certainly, no shadow of a heroine remains from them, and I am sure that if there had been the shadow of a heroine in them she would have remained. In fact, the heroine of a romantic novel seldom does, or can, remain with the reader, for the plain reason that she seldom exists. Apparently the ever-womanly refuses herself to the novelist who proposes anything but truth to nature; apparently she cannot trust him. She may not always be so very sincere herself, but she requires sincerity in the artist who would take her likeness, and it is only in the fiction of one who faithfully reports his knowledge of things seen that she will deign to show her face, to let her divine presence be felt. That is the highest and best fiction, and her presence is the supreme evidence of its truth to the whole of life.
A HEROINE OF BULWER'S
MANY proofs of the fact that a novel is great or not, as its women are important or unimportant, might be alleged. There are exceptions to the rule, but they are among novels of ages and countries different from ours. As we approach our own time, women in fiction become more and more interesting, and are of greater consequence than the men in fiction, and the skill with which they are portrayed is more and more a test of mastery. By this test the romantic novel shows its inferiority, if by no other; we have only to compare the work of Richardson, Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. George Moore, Mr. Henry James, Harold Frederic, Mr. George W. Cable, Miss Mary E. Wilkins, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the other realistic or realescent novelists with that of the romanticists, in order to see how vast this inferiority is. If we go outside of our own language, we must note the supremacy of women in the fiction of Goethe, Manzoni, Balzac, Turgenev, Zola, Maupassant, Bjornsen, Valdes, Galdos, Verga, and Sudermann. These masters have presented women livingly, winningly, convincingly as no master of romance has. The greatest exception that occurs to me is, of course, Hawthorne; but even he created his most lifelike woman character, Zenobia, in his most realistic story, "The Blithedale Romance." Women, above all others, should love the fiction which is faithful to life, for no other fiction has paid the homage and done the justice due to women, or recognized their paramount interest.
I
Mrs. Radcliffe inspired our Charles Brockden Brown, just as Scott inspired our James Fenimore Cooper. Scott, of course, influenced all Europe, as Richardson and Goldsmith had done in their time; and until the rise of Balzac a whole generation wrote little else but historical novels, though in Germany the romantic movement eventuated in something that was more purely romance, like the "Undine" of De la Motte Fouqué. To a certain extent among the English the romantic impulse resulted in a yet more psychological type, of which Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" is a superlative example. But in that thin air woman, who is far more of " this sensible warm motion " than man, gasped for breath; and scarcely a palpable heroine remains to us from all that generation of romancers. Such diaphanous embodiments as they could give her traits, waned more and more into symbols; the art of presenting her with her vital charm, distinct, individual, actual as the early realists had known her, seemed lost; and when a realescent talent like Balzac arrived, and began to cast about him in every-day life for the bizarre contrasts and eccentricities, the surprising accidents and tremendous catastrophes which the romancers had sought afar in remote times and under strange skies, he did little to give woman her old importance in fiction. The pathetic and beautiful vision of his Eugenie Grandet rises to reproach me for saying this, and I hasten to acknowledge in her a heroine worthy of the best age of fiction. But still I think that what I say holds true, and that again, as with Hawthorne, the exception proves the rule.
As for the nautical romance which Cooper popularized, and which Captain Marryat carried forward upon the impulse Cooper had given him, it was, still less than the historical or psychological romance, the habitat of the true heroine. In my time I read every one of Marryat's novels, but no gleam of a woman's eye, or drift of a woman's drapery haunts my remembrance of them. Cooper could occasionally find use for a " female " as a captive among his Indians; and no doubt there were figures which passed for heroines in Marryat's land-going stories. Until Mr. Clark Russell's time, however, the marine novel was unfavorable to the heroine. He alone seems to have had the secret of divining lovely girls on water-logged wrecks, or of having his heroes marooned with them on palmy islands of the Spanish Main; though it is due to the many-sidedness of Charles Reade to recall that in "Foul Play," which is so largely a sea story, there is a heroine of such charm, so sweetly and truly a woman, that any man would be willing to be cast away with her on a desert coast, and very loath to be rescued, except in her company.
II
We may explain the absence of genuine women in romantic fiction less charitably than I have already explained it, and suppose that it was a revulsion from their extreme prevalence in the early realistic fiction. Or, we may allow that in all the more active adventures and more tremendous exigencies, a heroine was so difficult to manage that she had to be left out as much as the hero's functional requirement of someone to love would permit. In a representation of every-day life she could always very credibly give a good account of herself, but in what may be called every-other-day life she apparently did not know what to do. Her simple and single device of a "falling lifeless',' as in the case of "females" of "sensibility," was soon exhausted, and, even when in a dead faint, she was apt to be a burden on the action; the hero had to lug her off, either in his arms or on his saddle-bow, or else leave her to the villain, who could seldom be trusted with the care of a lady.
The possibilities of the swoon, indeed, had been pretty well exhausted, when the novel began slowly to return to the study of human nature under the ordinary social conditions. Heroines were confronted with situations to which they were more equal as women, and they fainted less as time went on, until now a lady "falls lifeless " in fiction almost as rarely as in life. The effect in these matters is largely reciprocal, and no doubt the evanescence of the swoon in life is due in turn to its disappearance in fiction. At any rate, fainting is as obsolete as " bursting a blood-vessel," which used to be so common in novels;
