Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14.djvu/154

144 And could anything express the state of young Reginald's mind so ineffably as the primer type of his letter to Lucy?

A much less venial fault than any typographical trifle is a tendency belonging to this author to repeat both incident and colloquy. This of course is merely the result of negligence,—and negligence no one likes to forgive; only Shakspeare can afford to be careless of his fame, and the rags that his commentators make of him are a warning to all pettier people. We have seen the manuscript of a man already immortal, so interlined, erased, and corrected as to be undecipherable by any but himself and the printer who has been for twenty years condemned to such hard labor; surely others can condescend to the same pains;—yet we doubt if Mr. Reade so much as looks his over a second time.

Many persons have a trick of writing their names, not on the fly-leaf of the books they possess, but on the hundredth or the fiftieth page. Perhaps it is according to some such brand of the warehouse that we find in "Very Hard Cash," or in "White Lies," indifferently, such brief dialogues as this:—

No.'

Are you sure?'

Positive.

Then, Reade's characters are perpetually doing the same thing. Josephine and Margaret both seize their throats not to cry out; Josephine and Margaret both kiss their babies alike,—a very pretty description of the act, though:—

"The young mother sprang silently upon her child,—you would have thought she was going to kill it,—her head reared itself again and again, like a crested snake's, and again and again, and again and again plunged down upon the child, and she kissed his little body from head to foot with soft violence, and murmured through her starting tears."

But not content with that, Margaret must reënact it. Then Gerard and Alfred, returning from long absences, both find their only sister dead; and the plot of three of the novels turns on the fact of long and inexplicable absences on the part of the heroes. The Baroness de Beaurepaire, who is flavored with what her maker calls the "congealed essence of grandmamma," shares her horror of the jargon-vocabulary equally with Mrs. Dodd, (the captain's wife, who "reared her children in a suburban villa with the manners which adorn a palace,—when they happen to be there"). There is a singular habit in the several works of putting up marble inscriptions for folks before actual demise requires it,—Hardie showing Lucy Fountain hers, Camille erecting one to Raynal. All his heroines, as soon as they are crossed in love, invariably lose their tempers, and invariably by the same process; all, without exception, have violet eyes and velvet lips, (and sometimes the heroes also have the latter!) and all of them should wear key-holes at their ear-rings. Indeed, here is our quarrel with Mr. Reade. The conception of an artless woman is impossible with him. Plenty of beautiful ideals he creates, but with the actual woman he is almost unacquainted: Lucy Fountain, of all his feminine characters, is the only one whose counterpart we have ever met; Julia, the most perfect type of his fancy, impetuous, sparkling, and sweet, has this to say for herself, on occasion of a boat-race:—We have won at last,' cried Julia, all on fire, 'and fairly; only think of that! Through every sentence that he jots down runs a vein of gentle satire on the sex. Every specimen that he has drawn from it possesses feline characteristics: if provoked, they scratch; if happy, they purr; when they move, it is with the bodies of panthers; when they caress their children, it is like snakes; and in every single one of his books the women listen, behind the door, behind the hedge, behind the boat.

He would make an intolerable woman,' says the Baroness. 'A fine life, if one had a parcel of women about one,