: The Atlantic Monthly Volume 14 No. 82 August 1864 A Magazine of Literature Art and Politics by Various - American periodicals The Atlantic Monthly

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ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

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 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."

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

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