ART. IV.-1. Peg Woffington. A Novel. By CHARLES READE. London. 1852. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1855. 12mo. pp. 303.

2. Christie Johnstone. A Novel. By CHARLES READE. BOSton: Ticknor and Fields. 1855. 12mo. pp. 309.

3. Clouds and Sunshine. And Art: a Dramatic Tale. By CHARLES READE. Boston Ticknor and Fields.

1855.

12mo. pp. 288.

WHY does any man write a book? Why has Mr. Charles Reade written three books? When we know exactly what an author aims at, we have a specific standard by which to judge of the excellence of the performance; but when his purpose is so obscurely shadowed forth, as to leave the most painstaking reader in doubt whether he has any definite object, the book can be judged only by the general impressions it produces, its obvious moral tendency, and the skill shown in its construction as a work of art. We may thus misjudge the author's intention, but shall perhaps arrive at a truer valuation of his work, because, not being in his secret, we shall not incur the risk of being misled by any fancied connection between the mark and the precision of the shot. Had it not been for a brief note appended to the second of Mr. Reade's novels, we should have honestly concluded, that, having acquired some facility in pencraft as a playwright, (in which branch of literature we believe he has met with marked success in but one instance,) he had shrewdly determined to abandon the circumscribed honors of the stage, and to direct his talents to the gratification of that larger audience, the reading public, with the simple, but perfectly laudable, design of improving his financial affairs. After giving to his four dramas," novels by courtesy," a more thorough reading than usually falls to works of this class, we arrived at the above as the only adequate answer to the question, Why has Mr. Charles Reade written three books?

Our author is by no means deficient in a certain kind of talent, of the temporarily attractive species. He occasionally exhibits felicitous tableaux, which interest and fix the atten

tion for the moment, in much the same manner as a panoramic or stage scene, but which unfortunately glide from the mind as easily as scenic representations do from the eye. Sometimes also, we may meet with a whole philosophical essay condensed into two or three lines, as thus: "Lord Ipsden started [in life] with nothing to win; and naturally lived for amusement. Now nothing is so sure to cease to please, as pleasure; to amuse, as amusement." But having spent some hours in the company of his dramatis persona, which we could hardly have done had there been no ripples of wit, no happy reminiscences, no well-told incidents, we were on the whole disappointed. Though one of the heroines was piquant in repartee, large-hearted, and a capital dinner-companion; though another was shrewd and strong-handed, and brought with her the muscle-bracing smell of tarred ropes, fish, and sea-breezes; though a third "stood like Ruth amid the golden corn," the living epitome of all the imputed sins, the actual sorrows, and the checkered joys of virtue, pride, and poverty combined; and though their masculine admirers talked of truth in art, of the "earnest men of the past" versus the present, of love and intrigue with their et cætera of folly and dissimulation; yet none were of so rare a beauty, so unique in thought and manner (excepting perhaps Christie), so powerful in argument, so thrilling in passion or in eloquence, as to furnish a reasonable excuse for forcing three new books upon the public.

Why then review them, if they have no special claim on public attention, and no peculiar merit? For two or three reasons. First, because the high character of their American publishers will give them a large circulation, and consequently some influence on the general taste. They have also been very generally noticed with favor by the newspaper press, which will insure for them a still wider circulation. Moreover, though not superior in design or execution to many other books of the same class, they contain hints and suggestions worth our heed, if not new, and some local sketches racy and piquant, drawn with a free and bold hand, and with a truth to nature which gives promise of better things to come, and assures us that Mr. Reade could have done better than he has

done with a little more patience in details, and the cultivation of a little more delicacy of ear and eye, which would give him a power he lacks, or at least has failed to show, nice dis crimination of the finer shades of feeling.

We suspect one reason for the general favor which these books have met with from the newspaper press is, that the tales are short, and easily despatched, the very thing for a man to take up as a gentle mental recreation after the severer labors of his profession.

with

Mr. Reade is eminently dramatic in his style. His forte is action, not narration. He groups his characters in a succession of amusing, pathetic, or semi-tragical scenes, which would require but little alteration or pruning to fit them for the stage. But from these artistic pictures the reader must draw his own deductions, and learn what lessons he may, but with little aid from the author; who gives us the results of correct observation, so far as they can be derived from externals, but indulges in no abstract speculation or metaphysical analysis. We find here none of that exquisite mental anatomy which we shudderingly admire in writers like Hawthorne, who cut at once, boldly and deeply, into the very vitals of their subject, and then, successively taking up the nicest skill each separate and sensitive nerve, trace its rami fications through the system, keep it exposed to view, while with merciless sang froid, these masters of their art dilate upon its natural or morbid diagnosis, show its intimate con nection with distant and scarce distinguishable fibres of sensation, point out their origin in heart or brain, and then follow them on in a spirit of equal intensity and truth to their necessary terminus, a terminus of passional or intellectual action. Mr. Reade has none of that freezing precision, that unerring accuracy of delineation, which leaves the impression that the writer has actually been present at the dissection of a human soul, has looked into the interior machinery of exist ence, and which makes us fear, while the fancy lasts, that the power of the word-artist may have been bestowed upon the living creatures that surround us, so that they may read us, as we have read his victims.

Mr. Reade's scenes are too limited to make us at home in

them; his characters are too sketchy for us to feel familiarly conversant with them. His men and women do not seem to us as life-companions, but rather as passing acquaintances, whom we have met at a dinner-party, in a rail-car, or at a watering-place; with whom we have passed a pleasant hour or two, but of whom we do not know enough to put them upon our list of assured friends; nor have they that innate power of fascination which enables them, as a transient acquaintance sometimes will, to cling to the memory nolens volens. Instead of this, we perceive that they will soon yield place to successive visitors of nearly the same calibre, and we think no more about them. Even Christie Johnstone, the freshest and least hackneyed character, appears, after the interval of a week, not as a whole and well-defined woman; but we see in the retrospect only a strong arm, linked to a voice with a singular local patois, with now and then a whiff of not over-fresh herrings; while brilliant Peg Woffington, sweet Mabel Vane, and sorrow-bleached Rachael, have all become airy phantoms, undistinguishable amid the numerous successors to public favor that have appeared since their advent, from the English and American press.

Was such temporary effect as this the narrow ambition of the author? And if he fails to imprint his characters deeply upon the minds of his readers, is it his fault, in being too sketchy and sententious, or his misfortune, in being compelled to appear with his little troupe among a crowd of jealous. competitors? Perhaps both. The day has gone by when the announcement of a new novel can create any unwonted excitement. Expectation palls at the heaps of fictitious works which load the shelves of booksellers, and the public, like gourmands, have become fastidious through repletion, so that what would have been hailed as a miracle of art, standing at the distance of six months or a year from any rival production, is now snubbed and thrown aside as a mere daub; its merits being judged, wholly or partially, from the tinge it has acquired, through too close a proximity, perhaps, to those of more brilliant coloring, and especially from that confusing effect which results from an indiscriminate blending of objects, when a greater number are presented to the eye than that

organ can clearly define and individualize. It becomes an author to bear this fact in mind, and not to content himself with positive merits merely; he must be prepared to submit to the various degrees of comparison with which an overstocked market has furnished readers and critics. Happy he who reaches the superlative in the ascending scale!

Had Mr. Reade written only to amuse, he would neither have disappointed his readers nor stultified himself; but in one of his books, "Christie Johnstone," he gives us to understand that he has a "great error to destroy, and a great truth to establish." The error to be demolished is, so far as we can infer from the story, that of admiring and regretting the past, to the detraction of the present; the truth to be established, that Nature's moods are to be learned only from herself, and that they may in no wise be studied through artificial mediums, or trusted to the imagination or memory, be the one never so active, the other never so retentive, or be the imitation never so rarely executed. This is the professed purpose; but the reasoning in behalf of these propositions, and the incidents which go to sustain them, bearing about as much proportion to the story as the epilogue to a five-act play, the meritorious design will, of a surety, escape the perception of the great majority of readers, who need more than a quiet incidental suggestion, and are not likely to be converted by a succinct logical syllogism. To knock away their preconceived, and probably crude, notions of past centuries, neither a piquant epigram, nor a practical joke, will suffice; much less will these agencies prove potent in rearing the fabric of a juster formula of belief. The mass of readers, especially of novelreaders, will more readily fall beneath a succession of small shot, than by a single round of heavy artillery. In other words, they must be made to absorb ideas without being put to the trouble of deciding between antagonists, or even of thinking. Here Mr. Reade errs. He demolishes Carlyle and the Middle Ages in little more than a single page, and establishes truth in art in about twice as many paragraphs. Would he successfully teach truth through fiction, he must be less reliant on the sagacity of his readers. Sideway hints will answer only for the few; the mass will never learn, from a brief