Certainly, the concluding sentence shows that the writer is unacquainted with the Fifth-Avenue Fragilla. And, moreover, we were unaware that she had ever entered herself as competitor with Dr. Windship in the lifting of three-thousand-pound weights. But this is poor stuff for a man of talent to busy himself with,as if the Creator intended rivalry between beings complementary to each other, and of too diverse physical organization to allow the idea. Yet a fair friend of ours would meet him on his own ungallant ground. If Mr. Reade will trouble himself, says Una and the Lion, to turn over a work of Frances Power Cobbe's on Intuitive Morals, he will see that the first two impossibilities in his catalogue are lessened so far as to allow hope; as for Handella, there is reason to believe in her advent,many women have written faultless tunes,all that is wanted is mathematical harmony,and Mary Somerville, Maria Mitchell, and the sister of the Herschels forbid despair on that point; and God forbid the Victoria Huga! the male of the species is more than enough. We must look upon any wide departure from the prevailing pattern either as a monstrosity or as a development of the great plan; therefore, if one of these women is a monstrosity, Laplace and Aristotle are to be considered equally so. And then, also, Mr. Reade, masculine as he is, finds eclipse in the shade of either Mrs. Lewes, (Marion Evans,) or Charlotte Brontè, or Madame Dudevant. As for men, they are themselves just emerging from barbarism; a race rises only with its women, as all history shows. The whole sex has produced no operas? they are modern things; when men have advanced a little, when our audience is ready, we shall write operas. Epics? how many has the entire opposite sex produced? well, four: terrible disparity, when we count by billions! These are not in Nature? Whose assertion for that? till he can prove it, the word of "some American ladies" is as good as the word of Mr. Charles Reade. For myself, continued the outraged Una, I know a beautiful woman who left lovers, society, pleasures,absorbed in her moulding and modelling, day by day and year by year, with no positive result except in her own convictions and consciousness,who spent the long summer hours alone in the little building with her white ideas, and who, winter night after night, rose to cross street and garden and snowy fields to tend the fire and wet the clay, and who, on more than one morning finding the weary labor of months wasted where the frozen substance had peeled from the framework and lay in fragments on the floor, without a murmur began the patient work again. That was during the trial; afterwards attainment. Was there no long strain and steady struggle there?
Una's enthusiasm infects us; and very apropos to all this do we hear Mr. Reade's Jacintha remark,
"We are good creatures, but we don't trouble our heads with justice; it is a word you shall never hear a woman use, unless she happens to be doing some monstrous injustice at the very moment."
And with the best-natured contempt in the world, Dr. Sampson exclaims,
"What! go t' a wumman for the truth, when I can go t' infallible inference?"
Even Lucy Fountain saw many young ladies healed of many young enthusiasms by a wedding-ring,but a wittier woman has said it better, Una declares, in asserting that a married woman's name is her epitaph. If, however, Mr. Reade's opinion of womankind is at any time justifiable, we must bring Una to witness that it is so in the following instance:
"Realize the situation, and the strange incongruity between the senses and the mind in these poor fellows! The day had ripened its beauty; beneath a purple heaven shone, sparkled, and laughed a blue sea, in whose waves the tropical sun seemed to have fused his beams; and beneath that fair, sinless, peaceful sky, wafted by a balmy breeze over those smiling, transparent, golden waves, a bloodthirsty pirate bore down on them with a crew of human tigers; and a lady babble babble babble babble babble babbled in their quivering ears!"
We have heard numberless inquiries as to Mr. Reade's private life, with which, whether they have the right or not, the public will concern itself. So at home is he on every subject that each appears to be his specialty. One asserts that he follows Galen: witness his mania on medicine. Certainly not, another replies; are not his principles erroneous, and second-hand at that? Does he not dredge the science with ridicule? No practitioner would gravely assert the feasibility of transfusion, an operation never yet performed with success, since the red globules of his own blood seem to be as proper to each individual as his identity, and allow no admixture from alien veins; in surgery he has but one foe,phlebotomy; in pharmacy, but one friend,chloroform; he asserts of Dr. Sampson, (Dr. Dickson, the writer of "Fallacies of the Faculty"?) that "he was strong, but not strong enough to make the populace suspend an opinion; yet it might be done: by chloroforming them." (Which leads one parenthetically to remark that it is great pity, then, that, in the prevalent headlong precipitancy of public judgment, anæsthetics have not been more generally employed on this side of the water of late.) Certainly he is no physician, they say. But, on the other hand, a conjecture that he has been before the mast is as plausible a one as that ever Herman Melville was; there is the true sailor's-roll about him; nobody less skilful than the captain of a three-decker could have run the Agra through such a gantlet of broadsides and hurricanes; the manœuvring of the ship, when her master puts her before the wind that he may rake one schooner's deck and hurl the majestic monster bodily upon the other, is unequalled by anything in nautical literature, and approached by nothing in verity, except it may be Admiral Dupont's waltz of fire around the two forts of Hilton Head. Another, who laughs at both of these amateur statements, has a Grub-Street one; but, except to a favored few, to everybody in this country he is only an impersonal existence. In this general dearth of useful information, there are, however, one or two biographical sketches afloat,possibly hints of those waiting their chance in the pigeon-holes of the Thunderer,of which we are tempted to give the reader a sample, brought to us by Una in substantiation of her hostilities.
The subject of the present notice was picked up at sea, a child, and, under the provisions of maritime law concerning flotsam, jetsam, and lagan, was appropriated by the crew. He then followed their fortunes for several years, with various adventures, among which is the one wherein he is said to have accompanied Arthur Gordon Pym (disguised in the published account of that voyage under the name and appearance of one Peters) upon his fearful South-Sea sail towards that vapory cataract at the world's end which was seen "rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart of the heaven," from the horrors of which he escaped in the same miraculous manner that Mr. Pym did. He must still have been young at the time, as this occurred in 1838. Unable to find any credence to these extraordinary statements upon his return, he found an asylum from the unbelieving world, where, in order not to become a permanent resident, and being capable of impartial judgment thereon, he employed himself in a profound study of finance. Emerging from this seclusion, lest he should defraud his natural element entirely, he plunged into the hot water of the revolutions then ravaging Europe. Receiving wounds, he was laid up in hospital; and being of an active turn of mind and debarred from other pursuits, he fell (like Dr. Marie Zakrzewski) to studying the cards renewed every day above the patients' beds with the disease written thereon, its symptoms, and its treatment; in this manner he acquired quite a knowledge of medicine. He was, however, mercifully prevented from practising by the fact, that, upon repeating his story to an acquaintance, he met, as before, with such total disbelief, that, most fortunately for many readers, he determined at once to devote the remainder of his days to fiction.
How much faith such a narrative deserves we leave others to decide. It, however, has the virtue, as Una declares again, of plausibly explaining Mr. Reade's entire misapprehension of the feminine portion of humanity,since, during the whole course of such a career, it would have been impossible that he should have made intimate acquaintance with a single specimen of the sex. It is true that in "Christie Johnstone" he speaks of the musical performances of certain female relatives of his own; but of course that is to be taken only as a part of the fiction. One thing, however, is evident,that, if this sketch is not true, the converse of it must be, and where the reader has paid his money he may take his choice.
Mr. Reade's latest novel, "Very Hard Cash," is a continuation of a previous one, "Love me Little, Love me Long." A great charm of Thackeray's books was, that in every fresh one we heard a little news of the dear old friends of former ones; and "Very Hard Cash" has all the advantage of prepossession in its favor. Its forerunner was a startling thing to the circulating-library, for the hero was an entirely new character, dashing among the elegancies of the habitual hero like a shaggy dog in a drawing-room; and though the author admires him to the core of his heart, he never once hesitates to put him in ridiculous plight, and sets at last this diamond-in-the-rough in his purest and most polished gold. It is a delightful book, with one scene in it, the memorable night at sea, worth scores of customary novels, and, apart from the noble and beautiful delineation of David Dodd, would be invaluable for nothing else but its faultless portraiture of that millinery devotee, Mrs. Bazalgette.
From two such natures as David and his wife nothing less noble should spring; and therefore, through necessity, their daughter Julia, the heroine of "Very Hard Cash," is that ideal of vehemence and sweetness which we find her, not by any choice or fancy of the writer, but on account of fate, natural deduction, and a priori logic. She is, however, for all that, to some extent a creation; one may imagine her, long for her, look for her,one will not immediately find her. Youth never was painted so well as here; both Julia and Alfred are aureoled in its beauty; they are not reasonable mortals with the accumulated perfections of three-score and ten, but young creatures just brimmed, as young creatures are, with the blissfulness of being. Nobody ever appreciated youth as this writer does, nobody has so entered into it; he never fails, to be sure, to make you laugh at it a little, but all the time he confesses a kind of loving worship of that buoyant time when the effervescence of the animal spirits fills the brain with its happy fumes, of that fearless, confident period that
"Is not, like Atlas, curled
Stooping 'neath the gray old world,
But which takes it, lithe and bland,
Easily in its small hand."
We have often wondered that no one ever before grappled with the material of this last volume. The easy ability of one person to incarcerate another in a mad-house is as often abused in America as in England, and circumstances in this drama which might strike a casual reader as preposterous we can match with kindred and more hopeless cases within our own knowledge. Perhaps one of the ablest portions of the treatment which this book affords the theme is in the singular collocation of characters,the hero being wrongfully imprisoned as insane, the heroine's father really made so by medical malpractice, the hero's sister dying of injuries received from another maniac, his uncle being imbecile, and his father and one of his physicians becoming monomaniac. Nicer shades than these allow could not be drawn, and the subject stands in bold relief as a monument of dauntless courage and enthusiasm.
No one can hesitate to declare this novel, as it is the latest, to be also the finest of all that Charles Reade has given us. In saying this we do not forget the "Cloister and Hearth," which, however tender and touching and true to its century, is rather a rambling narrative than an elucidated plot. "Very Hard Cash" is wrought out with the finest finish, yet nowhere overdone; it so abounds in scenes of dramatic climax that we fancy the stage has lost immensely by the romance-reader's gain; yet there is never a single situation thrown away, every word tends in the main direction, and after that the prolific mind of the writer overflows in marginalia. There are one or two striking improbabilities, which Mr. Reade himself excuses by asserting that the commonplace is neither dramatic nor evangelical,and therefore we confess, that, so long as Reginald Bazalgette had a ship, Captain Dodd was as likely to turn up on that as on any other, the purser as likely to make his communication at that moment as later, and the fly as likely to resuscitate the patient as the surgeon. But the characterization in this book is wonderful; every name becomes an acquaintance, from Mrs. Beresford, dividing Ajax's emotion and declining to be drowned in the dark, with her servant Ramgolam and his matchless Orientalisms, up to the loftier models, one of whom he endows with this exquisite bit of description:
"A head overflowed by ripples of dark-brown hair sat with heroic grace upon his solid white throat, like some glossy falcon new-lighted on a Parian column."
We must, however, object to Fullalove, who is quite unworthy of the author, though perhaps complacently regarded by him as a success, being merely the traditional Yankee compound of patents and conjectures, a little smarter than usual, as of course a passage through Mr. Reade's pen must make him;he never touched his brain. Vespasian, also, is not so good as he might be, although one enjoys his contempt for the pirate's crew of Papuans, Sooloos, and Portuguese, as a "mixellaneous bilin' of darkies," and finds something inimitable in his injured dignity over the anomalous sobriquet afforded him, whose changes he rings through analogy and anatomy till he declares himself to be only a "darned anemone." The real charm of the book, however, lies in the beautiful relation which it pictures between mother and children, and in the nature of the daughter herself, so exuberant, so dancing, yet the foam subsiding into such a luminous body of clearness, which so lights up the page with its loveliness, that, seeing how an artless woman is foreign to Mr. Reade's ideas, we are forced to believe that Nature was too strong for him and he wrote against the grain. Nevertheless, there is enough of his own prejudice retained for piquancy,and since the poor things must be insignificantly wicked, see how charming they can be! There are many scenes between these covers that would well bear repetition, were they not too fresh in the reader's mind to require it; we will content ourselves with a single one, which contains the only pretentious writing of the whole novel, done at a touch, with a light, loose pen, but showing beyond compare the soul of the poet through the flesh of the novelist.
"At six twenty-five, the grand orb set calm and red, and the sea was gorgeous with miles and miles of great ruby dimples: it was the first glowing smile of southern latitude. The night stole on so soft, so clear, so balmy, all were loath to close their eyes on it; the passengers lingered long on deck, watching the Great Bear dip, and the Southern Cross rise, and overhead a whole heaven of glorious stars most of us have never seen and never shall see in this world. No belching smoke obscured, no plunging paddles deepened; all was musical; the soft air sighing among the sails; the phosphorescent water bubbling from the ship's bows; the murmurs from little knots of men on deck subdued by the great calm: home seemed near, all danger far; Peace ruled the sea, the sky, the heart: the ship, making a track of white fire on the deep, glided gently, yet swiftly, homeward, urged by snowy sails piled up like alabaster towers against a violet sky, out of which looked a thousand eyes of holy, tranquil fire. So melted the sweet night away.