There is no trace of the stale, flat, and unprofitable here; the
books are fairly alive, and that gesture tells their author best with
which a great actress once portrayed to us the poet Browning, rolling
her hands rapidly over one another, while she threw them up in the air,
as if she would describe a bubbling, boiling fountain.
Charles Reade is the prose for Browning. The temperament of the two in
their works is almost identical, having first allowed for the delicate
femineity proper to every poet; and the richness that Browning lavishes
till it strikes the world no more than the lavish gold of the sun, the
lavish blue of the sky, Reade, taking warning, hoards, and lets out only
by glimpses. Yet such glimpses! for beauty and brilliancy and strength,
when they do occur, unrivalled. Yet never does he desert his narrative
for them one moment; on the contrary, we might complain that he almost
ignores the effect of Nature on various moods and minds: in a volume of
six hundred pages, the sole bit of so-called fine writing is the
following, justified by the prominence of its subject in the incidents,
and showing in spite of itself a certain masculine contempt for the
finicalities of language:--
"The leaves were many shades deeper and richer than any other tree could
show for a hundred miles round,--a deep green, fiery, yet soft; and then
their multitude,--the staircases of foliage, as you looked up the tree,
and could scarce catch a glimpse of the sky,--an inverted abyss of
color, a mound, a dome, of flake-emeralds that quivered in the golden
air.
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