Red as a Rose Is She
By the Author of “Cometh up as a Flower,” “Not Wisely, but too Well,” etc. New York : D. Appleton & Co.
SOME things you do not like to have a woman do well, and these are about the only things which are well done by the authoress of “ Red as a Rose is She.” A sad facility in reproducing the speeches and feelings of loose young men of the world about women, and a keen perception of those thoughts of which men are mostly so much ashamed that they try to hide them from themselves, are the strong points of this popular writer whose mental and moral attitudes somehow vividly remind you of the opéra bouffe and the burlesques. But let women be as immodest and reckless as they will, they have always a fund of indestructible innocence ; and in this novel, where there is apparently neither fear of God nor regard of man, there is artlessly mixed up with the wickedness and worldliness ever so much sentimental millinery of the kind that young girls delight in, when they write, and, we suppose, when they read, and that comes in drolly and pathetically enough along with all the rest.
The women’s characters have a certain bad naturalness, and so have the worse men’s, — if there is any choice in that doubtful company. Such a girl as Esther might very well be, and such a one as Constance ; though a little more modesty and heart would not hurt either likeness. But the plot is entirely preposterous in its staleness and its wildness. You have all that dreary meeting — at — a — country - house, dining and shooting business which makes the English society novel an insupportable burden, and then that sort of love-making (apparently studied from the enamored cats upon the roof) in which the lovers scold and revile each other, and bid one another leave the premises, when they do not happen to thrill and throb and hunger and clutch and have ice and fire in their veins. And so it comes to pass that Esther falls frightfully sick, and, being at the point of death, asks St. John to kiss her, and, miraculously recovering, cannot get over having begged this simple favor, though she has no shame and no remorse for some hundreds of kisses, as seething and charring as any out of Mr. Swinburne’s poetry, which she exchanged with St. John when in health. She will not be consoled till St. John in his vein of airy badinage swears “ by the holy poker ” not to taunt her with it after they are married.
Throughout this romance there is a great and explicit loathing of all persons in sickness, poverty, old age, or calamity of any kind except unhappy love, and of all religious persons especially, and most of the virtues are pul where they belong, amongst the humbugs. You may say that the characters are vulgar in their lives and words, but it is all nothing to the vulgarity which appears when the authoress speaks for herself in a parenthetical passage. There is no denying that she has dash ; but you cannot call it anything better. Her wit would not save a well-meaning book ; but a very little wit goes a great way in a reckless or evil book.