The Sun.
London, England, 1866-11-28 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Mr. Charles Reade's New Novel.

Griffith Gaunt; or, Jealousy. By Charles Rea&
Three Volumes. Chapman and Hall.

There are several circumstances connected with
the publication of this romance, which impart to
it a particular interest and attraction. To
begin with—it is the last production of one of
the most remarkable among living Novelists. Added
to this—it is, avowedly, in his own opinion, his
masterpiece. But —more than all— even now
(while the paper compacted together in these three
volumes is yet damp from the printing press from
which it has but so very recently issued) the book
itself has not only become the subject of a stormy
controversy between the author of it and we won't
say his critics, we will rather call them honestly at
once (what they most certainly are, in our own
dispassionate estimate of them) his malignant
traducers—but it is already giving rise to one or
two law-suits upon either side of the Atlantic—law-
suits that must almost immediately come on for
trial simultaneously in the courts of justice of the
United States and of the United Kingdom. Into
the merits of the discussions in which these actions
at law on the part of our author—first of all against
his American libellers, and afterwards, and it can
hardly be said under lesser provocation, against
those amongst his own fellow-countrymen who have
not disdained to traduce him vicariously—into the
merits of these discussions, we say, in which all
such immediately pending actions for libel have
originated, we care not here to enter with anything
at all like particularity. For one thing—merits
(in the literal sense of the word) they have
none—so far, that is to say, of course, as relates
to the aggressors, to those who have aspersed
the author of " Griffith Gaunt," as we at any
rate conceive them to have done, so very flag-
rantly and gratuitously. Tracing back the libels
complained of by Mr. Charles Reade complained
of by him not very surprisingly it may be :divvy ea,
and, certainly, thanks to his own ample voca-
bulary, in about the strongest and most vigorous
terms of which the English language is in any way
capable—it may be as well to remark at once that
they appeared originally in a New York weekly
periodical, called The Round Table, and that
they have since then been echoed, more
or less distinctly, by piece-meal quotation, in
one or two of our own immediate con-
temporaries. Indecency, Immorality, Impurity,
Immodesty, and we know not what all—are the
charges directed—not in sprinkles, as it were, but as
if with a scavenger's shovel—against Mr. Reade, as
the narrator of this imaginative history of " Griffith
Gaunt." Adultery and Bigamy, together with
Nameless Social Crimes, were said by these trans-
cendental transatlantic purists to have been, here, in
this flagitious production of Mr. Reade's, not merely
described as with a hectic bloom upon them, but
shamelessly inculcated, or it might rather be
said audaciously championed by the novelist for
some inconceivable reason prompting him to
that most demoralising course. The wonder;
ful circumstance all the while, being this, in
regard to " Griffith Gaunt"—that, month after
month, during the lapse of one whole year, in
fact ever since the December of 1865, the story
thus declared by these American Moralists to be
most noxious because thus revoltingly indecent, had
been appearing in instalments in a popular Eng-
lish periodical entitled The Argosy, besides being
regularly reprinted on the other side of the ocean in
another periodical equally well known in the Ame-
rican market as The Atlantic Monthly! The readers
both of that publication and of The Argosy being all
the while utterly unconscious that there was any-
thing at all wrong about it, much less recognising
anything whatever of that coarse and brutal de-
pravity at once of influence and of incident de-
nounced in set round terms by The Round
7 able after so long an interval, or it ought
rather to be said, after so long a series of
intervals, in fact only when the tale was at length
just drawing towards its close. Happily for his
readers in both hemispheres—for those readers of
his, both male and female, who had been innocently
revelling in descriptions thus odiously denounced
happily, we say, for their own sense of satisfaction,
for the vindication, so to speak, of the chastity of
their imaginations, no less than of that of their
author—Mr. Charles Reade was not precisely the
man by nature likely to sit down meekly under any
such disgusting imputations. He has shown more
than once that he can wield a scourge of words at
pleasure—and, to judge from the very intensity of
each blow directed by him against the victims of his
lash with pleasure, no less than at pleasure—a
scourge of words more lacerating in the thud of its
descent than either Russian knout or British cat-o'-
nine tails. Conscious to himself—no doubt agree-
ably conscious—of this same natural capacity or
aptitude of his for the inflicting of what may be
described as intellectual flagellation, our author
appears to have summarily taken his aspersers in
hand flagrante delicto, and to have laid on the
lash with a will, having all the while an arriere
pensee for the securing of swinging satisfaction after-
wards, by aid of the strong arm of the law—any
previous punishment inflicted by himself with the
knotted scourge of irony just now alluded to, to the
contrary nevertheless notwithstanding ! " The
Prurient Prude" was the title of the retaliation with
which he thus indulged himself (and his readers) in
answer to those by whom he had been at once reviled
and vituperated. And whilst it was, as we have
said, the title of his retaliation, it was such simply
as the name applied by him to those who had been
endeavouring to defile with the taint of their own
evil fancies this last vigorous product of his
thoroughly original and creative imagination. In
saying which, however, we must not be supposed, of
course, to affect anything whatever so extremely ab-
surd as an inclination to assume towards the author
of " Griffith Gaunt" the position of one champion-
ing or vindicating, however indirectly, the purity of
his reputation as a man of letters. Single-handed
he is himself perfectly well qualified to hold his own
against all corners. Buckler, vizor, defensive armour,
indeed, of any kind, one would say, he disdains
utterly and with a sort of scorn. Nay, one might
go so far as to assert that if—apart from his pen—
he were called upon to select some weapon of at-
tack, to judge from the very manner of his rhetoric,
his choice would for certain fall by instant prefer-
ence upon a good stout cudgel—upon just such ,
another cudgel, par exemple, as that memorable
one handled by old Martin Chuzzlewit in his
Temple chambers—the stick that Mr. Pecksniff had
reason to believe had knobs upon it I Already
the correspondence which has suddenly sprung up
in re " Griffith Gaunt" between the author of that
book and its assailants—those Prurient Prudes, as
he has pitilessly dubbed them, whether of America
or of England—might furnish another supplemen-
tary chapter to the next new edition that may per-
chance be forthcoming of the Amenities of Literature.
Passing it by, however—that correspondence or
discussion between Mr. Reade and his Ataligilers--
passing it by merely with a look askance, and
henceforth restricting our attention in this notice
of " Griffith Gaunt" to the work itself rather than
to its malignant traducers, to the author of it rather
than to his preposterous calumniators, -we would
here simply deprecate, en passant, anything like
over-blame being attached to Mr. Charles Reade
for whatever heat of temper he has displayed in
the repulsion of his assailants. It was only the
other day that public opinion was very pain-
fully outraged by the dismissal from her Vajesty's
service of a gallant officer and gentleman ► (Cap-
tain Jervis) whose sole crime was this—. that he
had repelled with a flame of indignation charges of
the most disgraceful kind—charges shan lefully
directed against him, but from which he was after-
wards cleared, utterly and absolutely cleared, as
the result of a long and searching investigation of
the facts of the case, when that case came t o be
scrutinized, under court-martial ! Yet, having been
cleared thus absolutely and completely by co, 'Art-
martial from those same most unjust and shame. ful
charges—for having, when they were first directt
against him, repelled them with an outburst o f
surely comprehensible indignation, that gallant
officer and honourable gentleman—Captain Jervis
—4WiteAd Of being convenoated for tho indignities