Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 by Various

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[Transcriber's note: Footnotes moved to end of text]

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XIV.--AUGUST, 1864.--NO. LXXXII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

* * * * *

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 _resume_ 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. When the British were
driven from their island, they took refuge in Wales and Brittany. When
William the Norman conquered that island again, his force was chiefly
composed of the descendants of those very Britons; for so feeble was the
genuine Norse element that it had been long since absorbed, and in the
language of the Norman--used until a late day upon certain records in
England--there is not one single word of Scandinavian origin. Thus it
was neither French nor Norman nor Scandinavian invading the white
cliffs, but the exiled Briton reconquering his native land; and, to make
the fact still stronger, the army of Richmond, Henry VII., was entirely
recruited in Brittany. Perhaps, then, the reason that Brittany is to
many a region of romance and delight is a feeling akin to the pleasure
we take in visiting some ancestral domain from whose soil our fathers
once drew their being.

The Breton novel of Mr. Reade, "White Lies," although somewhat crude,
otherwise ranks with his best. The action is uninterrupted and swift,
the characters sharply defined, if legendary, the dialogue always
sparkling, the plot cleanly executed, the whole full of humor and
seasoned with wit. So well has it caught the spirit of the scene that it
reads like a translation, and, lest we should mistake the _locale_,
everybody in the book lies abominably from beginning to end.

"'A lie is a lump of sin and a piece of folly,' cries Jacintha.

"Edouard notes it down, and then says, in allusion to a previous
remark of hers,--

"'I did not think you were five-and-twenty, though.'

"'I am, then,--don't you believe me?'

"'Why not? Indeed, how could I disbelieve you after your lecture?'

"'It is well,' said Jacintha, with dignity.

"She was twenty-seven by the parish-books."

There is a good deal of picturesque beauty in this volume, and at the
opening of its affairs there occurs a paragraph which we appropriate,
not merely for its merit, nor because it is the only "interior" that we
can recall in all his novels, but because also it contains a
characteristically fearless measuring of swords with a great champion:--

"A spacious saloon panelled: dead, but snowy white picked out
sparingly with gold. Festoons of fruit and flowers finely carved
in wood on some of the panels. These also not smothered with
gilding, but as it were gold speckled here and there like tongues
of flame winding among insoluble snows.... Midway from the candle
to the distant door its twilight deepened, and all became
shapeless and sombre. The prospect ended half-way, sharp and
black, as in those out-o'-door closets imagined and painted by Mr.
Turner, whose Nature (Mr. Turner's) comes to a full stop as soon
as Mr. Turner sees no further occasion for her, instead of melting
by fine expanse and exquisite gradation into genuine distance, as
Nature does in Claude and in Nature. To reverse the picture:
standing at the door, you looked across forty feet of black, and
the little corner seemed on fire, and the fair heads about the
candle shone like the heads of St. Cecilias and Madonnas in an
antique stained-glass window. At last Laure [Laure Aglae Rose de
Beaurepaire,--would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?]
observed the door open, and another candle glowed upon Jacintha's
comely peasant-face in the doorway; she dived into the shadow, and
emerged into light again close to the table, with napkins on her
arm."

The book abounds, as indeed all its companions do, in quaint passages,
comical turns of a word, shrewd sayings,--of which a handful:--

'"Now you know,' said Dard, 'if I am to do this little job to-day,
I must start.'

"'Who keeps you?' was the reply.

"Thus these two loved."

Dard, by the way, being an entirely new addition to the novelists'
_corps dramatique_, and almost a Shakspearian character.

"It was her feelings, her confidence, the little love wanted,--not
her secret: that lay bare already to the shrewd young minx,--I beg
her pardon,--lynx."

Another involves a curious philosophy, summed up in the following
formula:--

"She does not love him quite enough.

"He loves her a little too much. Cure,--marriage."

But there are one or two scenes in this tale of "White Lies" perfectly
matchless for fire and spirit; and to support the assertion, the reader
must allow a citation. And he will pardon the first for the sake of the
others, since Josephine is the betrothed of Camille Dujardin.

"When he uttered these terrible words, each of which was a blow
with a bludgeon to the Baroness, the old lady, whose courage was
not equal to her spirit, shrank over the side of her arm-chair,
and cried piteously,--'He threatens me! he threatens me! I am
frightened!'--and put up her trembling hands, so suggestive was
the notary's eloquence of physical violence. Then his brutality
received an unexpected check. Imagine that a sparrow-hawk had
seized a trembling pigeon, and that a royal falcon swooped, and
with one lightning-like stroke of body and wing buffeted him away,
and there he was on his back, gaping and glaring and grasping at
nothing with his claws. So swift and irresistible, but far more
terrible and majestic, Josephine de Beaurepaire came from her
chair with one gesture of her body between her mother and the
notary, who was advancing on her with arms folded in a brutal
menacing way,--not the Josephine we have seen her, the calm,
languid beauty, but the Demoiselle de Beaurepaire,--her great
heart on fire, her blood up,--not her own only, but all the blood
of all the De Beaurepaires,--pale as ashes with wrath, her purple
eyes flaring, and her whole panther-like body ready either to
spring or strike.

"'Slave! you dare to insult her, and before me! _Arriere,
miserable!_ or I soil my hand with your face!'

"And her hand was up with the word, up, up,--higher it seemed than
ever a hand was lifted before. And if he had hesitated one moment,
I believe it would have come down; and if it had, he would have
gone to her feet before it: not under its weight,--the lightning
is not heavy,--but under the soul that would have struck with it.
But there was no need: the towering threat and the flaming eye and
the swift rush buffeted the caitiff away: he recoiled three steps,
and nearly fell down. She followed him as he went, strong in that
moment as Hercules, beautiful and terrible as Michael driving
Satan. He dared not, or rather he could not, stand before her: he
writhed and cowered and recoiled down the room while she marched
upon him. Then the driven serpent hissed as it wriggled away.

"'For all this, she too shall be turned out of Beaurepaire,--not
like me, but forever! I swear it, _parole de Perrin!_'

"'She shall never be turned out! I swear it, _foi de De
Beaurepaire!_'

"'You, too, daughter of Sa--'

"'_Tais toi, et sors a l'instant meme! Lache!_'

"The old lady moaning and trembling and all but fainting in her
chair; the young noble like destroying angel, hand in air, and
great eye scorching and withering; and the caitiff wriggling out
at the door, wincing with body and head, his knees knocking, his
heart panting, yet raging, his teeth gnashing, his cheek livid,
his eye gleaming with the fire of hell."

Too much of this sort of thing becomes meretricious; a man is never the
master of his subject, when he suffers himself to be carried away by it.
And though a fault of haste is pardonable, when lost in fine execution,
we must acknowledge that there is certainly something very "Frenchy" in
this scene,--a remark, though, which can hardly be considered as
derogatory, when we remember that altogether the most readable fiction
of the day is French itself. Our author is evidently a great admirer of
Victor Hugo, though he is no such careful artist in language: he seldom
closes with such tremendous subjects as that adventurous writer
attempts; but he has all the sharp antithesis, the pungent epigram of
the other, and in his freest flight, though he peppers us as prodigally
with colons, he never becomes absurd, which the other is constantly on
the edge of being.

The next scene which we adduce is that where the battered figure of a
pale, grisly man walks into the garrison-town of Bayonne, after a
three-years' absence, explained only to his disgrace, mutely overcomes
the guard, and rings the bell of the Governor's house.

"The servant left him in the hall, and went up-stairs to tell his
master. At the name, the Governor reflected, then frowned, then
bade his servant reach him down a certain book. He inspected it.

"'I thought so: any one with him?'

"'No, Monsieur the Governor.'

"'Load my pistols: put them on the table: put that book back: show
him in: and then order a guard to the door.'

"The Governor was a stern veteran, with a powerful brow, a shaggy
eyebrow, and a piercing eye. He never rose, but leaned his chin on
his hand, and his elbow on a table that stood between them, and
eyed the new-comer very fixedly and strangely.

"'We did not expect to see you on this side of the Pyrenees.'

"'Nor I myself, Governor.'

"'What do you come to me for?'

"'A welcome, a suit of regimentals, and money to take me to
Paris.'

"'And suppose, instead of that, I turn out a corporal's guard, and
bid them shoot you in the court-yard?'

"'It would be the drollest thing you ever did, all things
considered,' said the other, coolly; but he looked a little
surprised.

"The Governor went for the book he had lately consulted, found the
page, handed it to the rusty officer, and watched him keenly: the
blood rushed all over his face, and his lip trembled; but his eye
dwelt stern, yet sorrowful, on the Governor.

"'I have read your book: now read mine.'

"He drew off his coat, and showed his wrists and arms, blue and
waled.

"'Can you read that, Monsieur?'

"'No.'

"'All the better for you! Spanish fetters, General.'

"He showed a white scar on his shoulder.

"'Can you read that, Sir?'

"'Humph?'

"'This is what I cut out of it,'--and he handed the Governor a
little round stone, as big and almost as regular as a musket-ball.

"'Humph! that could hardly have been fired from a French musket.'

"'Can you read this?'--and he showed him a long cicatrix on his
other arm.

"'Knife, I think?' said the Governor.

"'You are right, Monsieur: Spanish knife!--Can you read
this?'--and opening his bosom, he showed a raw and bloody wound on
his breast.

"'Oh, the Devil!' cried the General.

"The wounded man put his coat on again, and stood erect and
haughty and silent.

"The General eyed him, and saw his great spirit shining through
this man. The more he looked, the less could the scarecrow veil
the hero from his practised eye.

"'There has been some mistake, or else I dote--and can't tell a
soldier from a'--

"'Don't say the word, old man, or your heart will bleed!'

"'Humph! I must go into this matter at once. Be seated, Captain,
if you please, and tell me what have you been doing all these
years?'

"'Suffering!'

"'What, all the time?'

"'Without intermission.'

"'But what? suffering what?'

"'Cold, hunger, darkness, wounds, solitude, sickness, despair,
prison,--all that man can suffer.'

"'Impossible! a man would be dead at that rate before this.'

"'I should have died a dozen times, but for one thing.'

"'Ay! what was that?'

"'I had promised to live.'

"There was a pause. Then the old man said, calmly,--

"'To the facts, young man: I listen.'"

And high time, be it said; since it begins to read very much like
one of Artemas Ward's burlesques. The upshot of which listening
was, that the man left for Paris directly in the demanded
regimentals, and wrapt about with the Governor's furred cloak to
boot; that he would not delay in the metropolis one moment, even
to put on the epaulets they gave him, but saved them for his
sweetheart to make him a colonel with, and, though weary and torn
with pain, galloped away to the Chateau de Beaurepaire, to find
that sweetheart another man's wife.

"He turned his back quickly on her. 'To the army!' he cried,
hoarsely. He drew himself haughtily up in marching-attitude. He
took three strides, erect and fiery and bold. At the fourth the
great heart snapped, and the worn body it had held up so long
rolled like a dead log upon the ground, with a tremendous fall."

Which scene must be followed by its pendant, taking place during the
siege of a Prussian town, when, from the enemy's bastion, Long Tom, out
of range of Dujardin's battery, was throwing red-hot shot, sending half
a hundred-weight of iron up into the clouds, and plunging it down into
the French lines a mile off.

"'Volunteers to go out of the trenches!' cried Sergeant La Croix,
in a stentorian voice, standing erect as a poker, and swelling
with importance.

"There were fifty offers in less than as many seconds.

"'Only twelve allowed to go,' said the Sergeant; 'and I am one,'
added he, adroitly inserting himself.

"A gun was taken down, placed on a carriage, and posted near
Death's Alley, but out of the line of fire.

"The Colonel himself superintended the loading of this gun; and to
the surprise of his men had the shot weighed first, and then
weighed out the powder himself.

"He then waited quietly a long time, till the bastion pitched one
of its periodical shots into Death's Alley; but no sooner had the
shot struck, and sent the sand flying past the two lanes of
curious noses, than Colonel Dujardin jumped upon the gun and waved
his cocked hat. At this preconcerted signal, his battery opened
fire on the bastion, and the battery to his right hand opened on
the wall that fronted them; and the Colonel gave the word to run
the gun out of the trenches. They ran it out into the cloud of
smoke their own guns were belching forth, unseen by the enemy; but
they had no sooner twisted it into the line of Long Tom than the
smoke was gone, and there they were, a fair mark.

"'Back into the trenches, all but one!' roared Dujardin.

"And in they ran like rabbits.

"'Quick! the elevation.'

"Colonel Dujardin and La Croix raised the muzzle to the
mark,--hoo! hoo! hoo! ping! ping! ping' came the bullets about
their ears.

"'Away with you!' cried the Colonel, taking the linstock from him.

"Then Colonel Dujardin, fifteen yards from the trenches, in full
blazing uniform, showed two armies what one intrepid soldier can
do. He kneeled down and adjusted his gun, just as he would have
done in a practising-ground. He had a pot-shot to take, and a
pot-shot he would take. He ignored three hundred muskets that were
levelled at him. He looked along his gun, adjusted it and
readjusted to a hair's-breadth. The enemy's bullets pattered over
it; still he adjusted and readjusted. His men were groaning and
tearing their hair inside at his danger.

"At last it was levelled to his mind, and then his movements were
as quick as they had hitherto been slow. In a moment he stood
erect in the half-fencing attitude of a gunner, and his linstock
at the touch-hole: a huge tongue of flame, a volume of smoke, a
roar, and the iron thunderbolt was on its way, and the Colonel
walked haughtily, but rapidly, back to the trenches: for in all
this no bravado. He was there to make a shot,--not to throw a
chance of life away, watching the effect.

"Ten thousand eyes did that for him.

"Both French and Prussians risked their own lives, craning out to
see what a colonel in full uniform was doing under fire from a
whole line of forts, and what would be his fate: but when he fired
the gun, their curiosity left the man and followed the iron
thunderbolt.

"For two seconds all was uncertain: the ball was travelling.

"Tom gave a rear like a wild horse, his protruding muzzle went up
sky-high, then was seen no more, and a ring of old iron and a
clatter of fragments were heard on the top of the bastion. Long
Tom was dismounted. Oh, the roar of laughter and triumph from one
end to another of the trenches, and the clapping of forty thousand
hands, that went on for full five minutes! then the Prussians,
either through a burst of generous praise for an act so chivalrous
and so brilliant, or because they would not be crowed over,
clapped their ten thousand hands as loudly, and thundering
heart-thrilling salvo of applause answered salvo on both sides
that terrible arena."

If all this was melodramatic, it should be remembered that the time was
melodramatic itself; it is, however, saved from such accusation by the
truthfulness of the handling; and the homeliness of a portion of it
recalls the ballad of "Up at the villa, down in the city," with its
speeches of drum and fife. Nevertheless, here are combined the true
elements of modern sensational writing: there are the broad canvas, the
vivid colors, the abrupt contrast, all the dramatic and startling
effects that weekly fiction affords, the supernatural heroine, the more
than mortal hero. What, then, rescues it? It would be hard to reply.
Perhaps the reckless, rollicking wit: we cannot censure one who makes us
laugh with him. Perhaps nothing but the writer's exuberant and
superabundant vitality, which through such warp shoots a golden woof
till it is filled and interwoven with the true glance and gleam of
genius. The difference between these pages and that of the previously
mentioned style is the same as exists between any coarse scene-curtain
and some glorious painting, be it Church, with his tropical lushness, or
Gifford, with his shaking, shining mists,--

"mist
Like a vaporous amethyst,
Or an air-dissolved star
Mingling light and fragrance far
As the curved horizon's bound,"--

some canvas that seems to palpitate and live and tremble with the
breathing being confided to it by the painter. Indeed, Charles Reade has
a great deal of this pictorial power. A single sentence will sometimes
give not only the sketch, but all its tints. Take, for instance, the
paragraph in which, speaking of the Newhaven fish-wives, he says, "It is
a race of women that the Northern sun peachifies instead of
rosewoodizing"; and it is as good as that picture of the "Two
Grandmothers," where the rosy woman with her rosy troop is confronted by
the tawny sunburnt gypsy and her swarthy group of dancing-girl and
tambourine-tosser.

When "Peg Woffington" first fell upon us, a dozen years ago or so,
Humdrum opened his eyes: it was like setting one's teeth in a juicy pear
fresh from the warm sunshine. Then came "Christie Johnstone," a perfect
pearl of its kind, in which we recognize an important contribution to
one class of romance. If ever the literature of the fishing-coast shall
be compiled, it will be found to be scanty, but superlative; let us
suggest that it shall open with Lucy Larcom's "Poor Lone Hannah," the
most touching and tearful of the songs of New-England life,--followed by
Christie Johnstone's night at sea among the blue-lights and the nets
with their silver and lightning mixed, where the fishers struggle with
that immense sheet varnished in red-hot silver,--and at the end let not
the "Pilot's Pretty Daughter" of William Allingham's be forgotten:--

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