Griffith Gaunt; or Jealousy.  By CHARLES READE.  With Illustrations.  Boston:  Ticknor and Fields.

In discussing the qualities of this remarkable novel before the readers of “The Atlantic Monthly,” we shall have an advantage not always enjoyed by criticism; for we shall speak to an audience perfectly familiar with every detail of the story, and shall not be troubled to resumer its events and characters.  There has been much doubt among many worthy people concerning Mr. Reade’s management of the moralities and the proprieties, but no question at all, we think, as to the wonderful power he has shown, and the interest he has awakened.  Even those who have blamed him have followed him eagerly,—­without doubt to see what crowning insult he would put upon decency, and to be confirmed in their virtuous abhorrence of his work.  It is to be hoped that these have been disappointed, for it must be confessed that, in the denouement of the novel, others who totally differed from them in purpose and opinion have been brought to some confusion.

It is not as a moralist that we have primarily to find fault with Mr. Reade, but as an artist, for his moral would have been good if his art had been true.  The work, up to the conclusion of Catharine Gaunt’s trial, is in all respects too fine and high to provoke any reproach from us; after that, we can only admire it as a piece of literary gallantry and desperate resolution.  “C’est magnifique; mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”  It is courageous, but it is not art.  It is because of the splendid elan in all Mr. Reade writes, that in his failure he does not fall flat upon the compassion of his reader, as Mr. Dickens does with his “Golden Dustman.”  But it is a failure, nevertheless; and it must become a serious question in aesthetics how far the spellbound reader may be tortured with an interest which the power awakening it is not adequate to gratify.  Is it generous, is it just in a novelist, to lift us up to a pitch of tragic frenzy, and then drop us down into the last scene of a comic opera?  We refuse to be comforted by the fact that the novelist does not, perhaps, consciously mock our expectation.

Let us take the moral of “Griffith Gaunt,”—­so poignant and effective for the most part,—­and see how lamentably it suffers from the defective art of the denouement.  In brief:  up to the end of Mrs. Gaunt’s trial we are presented with a terrible image of the evils that jealousy, anger, and lies bring upon their guilty and innocent victims.  Griffith Gaunt is made to suffer—­as men in life suffer—­a dreadful remorse and anguish for the crimes he has committed and the falsehoods to which they have committed him.  A man with a heart at first tender and true becomes a son of perdition, utterly incapable of tenderness and truth,—­consciously held away from them by ever-cumulative force.  The spectacle is not new,—­it is old as sin itself; but it is here revealed with the freshest and most authentic power, and with a repelling efficacy which we have seldom seen equalled in literature.  Mrs. Gaunt justly endures the trouble brought upon her by pride and unbridled bad temper, and unavoidably endures the consequences of another’s wrong.  Mercy Vint is a guiltless and lovely sacrifice to both almost equally.