The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864

Excerpt

CHARLES READE.

Some one lately took occasion, in passing, to class Charles Reade with the clever writers of the day, sandwiching him between Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins,—for no other reason, apparently, than that he never, with Chinese accuracy, gives us gossiping drivel that reduces life to the dregs of the commonplace, or snarls us in any inextricable tangle of plots.

Charles Reade is not a clever writer merely, but a great one,—how great, only a careful résumé of his productions can tell us. We know too well that no one can take the place of him who has just left us, and who touched so truly the chords of every passion; but out of the ranks some one must step now to the leadership so deserted,—for Dickens reigns in another region,—and whether or not it shall be Charles Reade depends solely upon his own election: no one else is so competent, and nothing but wilfulness or vanity need prevent him,—the wilfulness of persisting in certain errors, or the vanity of assuming that he has no farther to go. He needs to learn the calmness of a less variable temperature and a truer equilibrium, less positive sharpness and more philosophy; he will be a thorough master, when the subject glows in his forge and he himself remains unheated.

He is about the only writer we have who gives us anything of himself. Quite unconsciously, every sentence he writes is saturated with his own identity; he is, then, a man of courage, and—the postulate assumed that we are not speaking of fools—courage in such case springs only from two sources, carelessness of opinion and possession of power. Now no one, of course, can be entirely indifferent to the audience he strives to please; and it would seem, then, that that daring which is the first element of success arises here from innate capacity. Unconsciously, as we have said, is it that our author is self-betrayed, for he is by nature so peculiarly a raconteur that he forgets himself entirely in seizing the prominent points of his story; and it is to this that his chief fault is attributable,—the want of elaboration,—a fault, however, which he has greatly overcome in his later books, where, leaving sketchy outlines, he has given us one or two complete and perfect pictures. His style, too, owes some slight debt to this fact; it has been saved thereby from offensive mannerism, and yet given traits of its own insusceptible of imitation,—for by mannerism we mean affectations of language, not absurdities of type.

There is a racy verve and vigor in Charles Reade's style, which, after the current inanities, is as inspiriting as a fine breeze on the upland; it tingles with vitality; he seems to bring to his work a superb physical strength, which he employs impartially in the statement of a trifle or the storming of a city; and if on this page he handles a ship in a sea-fight with the skill and force of a Viking, on the other he picks up a pin cleaner of the adjacent dust than weaker fingers would do it. There is no trace of the stale, flat, and unprofitable here; the books are fairly alive, and that gesture tells their author best with which a great actress once portrayed to us the poet Browning, rolling her hands rapidly over one another, while she threw them up in the air, as if she would describe a bubbling, boiling fountain.

Charles Reade is the prose for Browning. The temperament of the two in their works is almost identical, having first allowed for the delicate femineity proper to every poet; and the richness that Browning lavishes till it strikes the world no more than the lavish gold of the sun, the lavish blue of the sky, Reade, taking warning, hoards, and lets out only by glimpses. Yet such glimpses! for beauty and brilliancy and strength, when they do occur, unrivalled. Yet never does he desert his narrative for them one moment; on the contrary, we might complain that he almost ignores the effect of Nature on various moods and minds: in a volume of six hundred pages, the sole bit of so-called fine writing is the following, justified by the prominence of its subject in the incidents, and showing in spite of itself a certain masculine contempt for the finicalities of language:—

"The leaves were many shades deeper and richer than any other tree could show for a hundred miles round,—a deep green, fiery, yet soft; and then their multitude,—the staircases of foliage, as you looked up the tree, and could scarce catch a glimpse of the sky,—an inverted abyss of color, a mound, a dome, of flake-emeralds that quivered in the golden air.

"And now the sun sets,—the green leaves are black,—the moon rises,—her cold light shoots across one-half that giant stem.

"How solemn and calm stands the great round tower of living wood, half ebony, half silver, with its mighty cloud above of flake-jet leaves tinged with frosty fire at one edge!"

This oak was in Brittany,—the very one, perhaps, before which,

"So hollow, huge, and old,
It looked a tower of ruined mason-work,
At Merlin's feet the wileful Vivien lay."

Indeed, Brittany seems a kind of fairy-land to many writers. Tennyson, Spenser, Matthew Arnold, Reade, all locate some one of their choicest scenes there. The reason is not, perhaps, very remote. We prate about the Anglo-Saxon blood; yet, in reality, there is very little of it to prate about, especially in the educated classes....