Year: 1873




Reade's implcton"-Fargeon's elem


don's Heart.''


That therapeutics should be introduced into
fiction ought, perhaps, to surprise no one in
this scientific age. Mr.. Charles Reade has set
the pleasing example, having few years ago
gently made obstetrics subservient to romance.
He has now improved upon his first idea and
compelled medicine and chirurgy to work his
win. There are novelists who defend this
course. They declare that Mr.. Darwin has
enlisted imagination on the side of science,
and that the theories which proclaim mans
relationship to the ape are nothing more than
the carrying out of that eagerness for sensa-
ton which is assumed to be the handspring
of the novelist's motives. Whatever truth
there may be in this retort we do not care
now to consider. Mr. Reade deserves all the
credit that is due for extracting human
interest from the medicine chest and making
us fall in love with heroine who wears
corsets on the sly and uses violet powder
surreptitiously in spite Of the disapproval of
her husband, who is first class physician,
and in face of a solemn promise to give them
up. 1t is not every writer who could manu-
facture pair of stays and powder puff into
two interesting episodes. Mr.. Reade has done
so in his strong, slashing manner-a manner
that hacks right and left and is Indifferent
whether it makes the reader blush or turn
pale. Mr.. Reade is no mere pruner or
polisher of sentences If he were poet he
would be Walt Whitman, never an Alexander
Pope. He is not the rhetorician to die of
verb in idiomatio pain. He never loiters and
fingers, like an English twilight nor senti-
mentalzes with Bulwerian grace. Instead of
pairing with silver fruit knife he chops with
hatchet or abscinds like q scalpeL His
paragraphs are as brief as personals In "a
Simpleton," his latest work, he interests us,
not because he presents new types of charac-
ter, but because he reproduces the old types
with all the freshness and vitality which
made them irresistible years ago. That
they can remain charming after so
long lapse of time is perhaps the best thing
to be said in their praise. He uses all the
same old tricks and artifces by which he has
long been known, makes his heroines speak
would show us their impulsiveness, puts
whole-souled and healthy-bodied young wo-
man in love with heartless rake, and cannot
resist the opportunity Of letting us see how
much he has read by raining upon us hetero-
geneous bits of information gathered from q
score of books. The difference between a
first class literary artist and one not belonging
to the first class has seldom been better illus
trated than in the manner in which a char
acter who is physician is handled by George
Eliot in s'Niddlemarch" and that in which
character representative of the same profess
! sion is made use of in this latest work
| of Mr.. Reade's The one writer has
mastered her knowledge; the other could
not prevent it's mastering him. George
Eliot has assimilated; Mr. Reade has
merely crammed. In the first mentioned
writer the knowledge previously acquired has
percolated through her intellect, has modified
its fibre and tinctured its character. In the
other it has lain merely on the surface, an
swering temporary purpose and ready to





use shall have passed. And yet it is impossi-
BILE not to feel that there is earnest and low
ing work in ga Simpleton." You know that
the wrist which propelled the pen in the COM
position of that work beat with a warm and
strong and rapid pulse, whose throbs were
regulated by heart big with human tender
ness and sympathies. There is healthy but
not vulgar animalism in some of his illusions
to tight lacing, and we shall be glad if the
relation he establishes between corsets and
consciences produces its due effect in abolish
ing the one and enlightening the other.


Very different is "London's Heart" just
completed by Mr. Fargeon, and one of the
shabbiest' and most meretricious novels by an
author of good repute which we remember to
have read for many day. MIR. Fargeon
showed SO much power and sweetness in
'Joshua Marvel" such yearning over
undeserved human misery in 'Blade O
Grass, that we were entitled to look forward
to something yet more strong and touching
from his hand. The present work contradicts
all such expectations. Written in many parts
in style which may be characterized as
very weak imitation of Dickens when not at
his best it us commonplace and frivolous in
its plot, morbid in its sympathies, faint and
vague in its characterizatons and slovenly in
its rhetoric 1t is so great failure in every
particular which marks the work of art that
we fear Mr.. Fargeon has yielded to the temp
tation presented to every young writer who
makes one signal success. The magazines
have got hold of him, and he cannot withstand
the lure to write hurriedly and in flashy in
stalments to provide sickly monthly supply


It is the yielding to a temptation like this
which has irremediaby ruined Miss Braddon
and turned into tho channel of fimsy volumi-
| nousness talent which might have otherwise