GEORGE BARNWELL

The Examiner.

December 31, 1815.

George Barnwell has been acted as usual at both Theatres during the Christmas week. Whether this is ‘a custom more honoured in the breach or the observance,’ we shall not undertake to decide. But there is one error on this subject which we wish to correct; which is, that its defects arise from its being too natural. It is one of the most improbable and purely arbitrary fictions we have ever seen. Lillo is by some people considered as a kind of natural Shakespear, and Shakespear as a poetical Lillo. We look upon Shakespear to have been a greater man than the Ordinary of Newgate; and weat the same time conceive that there is not any one of the stories in the Newgate Calendar so badly told as this tragedy of Lillo’s. Lillo seems to have proceeded on the old Scotch proverb,

‘The kirk is gude, and the gallows is gude.’

He comes with his moral lessons and his terrible examples; a sermon in the morning and an execution at night; the tolling of the bell for Tyburn follows hard upon the bell that knolls to church. Nothing can be more virtuous or prudent than George Barnwell at the end of the first act, or a more consummate rogue and fool than he is at the beginning of the second. This play is a piece of wretched cant; it is an insult on the virtues and the vices of human nature; it supposes that the former are relinquished and the others adopted without common sense or reason, for the sake of a Christmas catastrophe, of a methodistical moral. The account of a young unsuspecting man being seduced by the allurements of an artful prostitute is natural enough, and something might have been built on this foundation, but all the rest is absurd, and equally senseless as poetry or prose. It is a caricature on the imbecility of goodness, and of the unprovoked and gratuitous depravity of vice. Shakespear made ‘these odds more even;’ that is, he drew from nature, and did not drag the theatre into the service of the conventicle. George Barnwell first robs his master at Milwood’s instigation: (this lady has the merit of being what Dr. Johnson would have called ‘a good hater’). He then, being in want of money, proceeds to rob and murder somebody; and in the way of deliberation and selection fixes upon his uncle, his greatest friend and benefactor, as if he were the only man in the world who carried a purse. He therefore goes to seek him in his solitary walks, where, good man, he is reading a book on the shortness and uncertainty of human life, bursting out, as he reads, into suitable comments, which, as his ungracious nephew, who watches behind him in crape, says, shews that ‘he is the fitter for heaven.’ Well, he turns round, and sees that he is way-laid by some one; but his nephew, at the sight of his benign and well-known aspect, drops the pistol, but presently after stabs him to the heart. This is no sooner effected without remorse or pity, but the instant it is over, he loses all thought of the purpose which had instigated him to the act, the securing his property (not that it appears he had any about him), and this raw, desperate convert to vice returns to his mistress, to say that he had committed the murder, and omitted the robbery. On being questioned as to theproceedsof so nefarious a business, our retrospective enthusiast asks, ‘Could he lay sacrilegious hands on the body he had just murdered?’ to which his cooler and more rationalaccomplice replies, ‘That as he had robbed him of his life, which was no doubt precious to him, she did not see why he should not rifle his pockets of that which, being dead, could be of no farther use to him.’ However, Barnwell makes such a noise with his virtue and his penitence, that she is alarmed for the consequences; and anticipating a discovery of the whole, calls in the constable, and gives up her companion as a measure of precaution. Her maid, however, who is her confidante, has been before-hand with her, and she is also taken into custody, and both are hanged. Such is the morality of this piece.

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