In a former Book-Talk we have agreed (writers always have the pleasant privilege of assuming that their readers agree with them) that Goethe was wise in asserting that Nature reveals her secrets in her monsters, or, as the mot might be paraphrased, she proves her rules by her exceptions. It is of the greatest importance to the race that those rules should be established. The proper study of mankind is man. Now, geniuses are the exceptions which prove the rule. The abstract fact that a man beats his wife is of no value; but taken in connection with the further fact that the same man can write beautifully about the domestic affections in the intervals of wife-beating, it at once suggests a problem worthy the consideration of the profoundest sociologists. Were it not for the public avidity to hear these details, the public willingness to buy the books that supply them, there would be little chance of their ever becoming known. As the Midlers and Karl Blinds of the present spend laborious yet fruitful days over the nursery-tales which seemed too trivial and childish for even the leisure moments of our grandfathers, so we may foresee the Herbert Spencers and Virchows of the future making exhaustive studies in the literature of scandal and gossip which offends the taste of the judicious among our contemporaries.
No scientist of the future, however, will find much to occupy him in the "Life of Charles Reade," by his nephew, Charles L. Reade, and the Rev. Compton Reade (Harpers). This book suffers from the fact that there is so little in it to gratify vulgar curiosity. We get a few dates and statistics, and some hitherto unpublished letters and manuscripts, but we learn nothing new about Charles Reade. We indirectly learn a good deal about the Rev. Compton, to be sure (he expressly assumes all responsibility "for whatever opinions are here hazarded on men and things"), and he is an amusing personality enough, but this hardly compensates for our disappointment when we are seeking for information about his sturdy, big-hearted, wrong-headed, irascible, and eccentric uncle. Yet there does not seem to be any studied reticence on the part of the biographer. He does not shrink from exposing all the little infirmities of the mother to whom Charles Reade was so tenderly devoted; he does not hesitate to call her a domestic tyrant. Occasionally, and in the most inadvertent way, he allows a glimpse at some delightful peculiarity of the biographee. He agrees, for instance, in Charles Reade's high estimate of his own critical powers, and then he tells us that Reade rated Wilkie Collins far above George Eliot. But there is very little of this sort of thing. The biographer, in fact, is himself too much of a Reade to be able to assume the position of an outsider, or to paint his uncle as he would have appeared to the world at large.
"The World as we Saw it," by Mrs. Amos R. Little (Cupples, Upham & Co.), is a handsome octavo volume, and as a collection of photographic views is interesting enough. But every reader will know how to classify the book itself when he reads in the preface that it has been published "at the argent solicitation of many friends." He will probably place it on the same shelf as "Six Weeks in Old France," by L. M. A. (American Bureau of Foreign Travel), which is published in the hope of aiding a children's hospital.
The Rev. John Miller's recent books "Theology" and "Commentary on Romans" (Evangelical Reform Publication Co., Princeton, New Jersey) are just the sort of books which appear valuable, and indeed indispensable, to the people
