My Contemporaries In Fiction Read online

  II.--CHARLES READE

  Reade's position in literature is distinctly strange. The professionalcritics never came within miles of a just appreciation of his greatness,and the average 'cultured reader' receives his name with a droll air ofallowance and patronage. But there are some, and these are not the leastqualified as judges, who regard him as ranking with the great masters.You will find, I think, that the men holding this opinion are, in themain, fellow-workers in the craft he practised. His warmest and mostconstant admirers are his brother novelists. Trollope, to be sure,spoke of him as 'almost a man of genius,' but Trollope's mind was aquintessential distillation of the commonplace, and the man who was onfire with the romance and passion of his own age was outside the limitof his understanding. But amongst the writers of English fiction whomit has been my privilege to know personally, I have not met with one whohas not reckoned Charles Reade a giant.

  The critics have never acknowledged him, and, in a measure, he has beenneglected by the public. There is a reason for everything, if we couldonly find it, and sometimes I seem to have a glimmering of light on thisperplexing problem. Sir Walter Besant (Mr. Besant then) wrote in the'Gentleman's Magazine' years ago a daring panegyric on Reade's work,giving him frankly a place among the very greatest. My heart glowed as Iread, but I know now that it took courage of the rarer sort to expressa judgment so unreserved in favour of a writer who never for an houroccupied in the face of the public such a position as is held by threeor four men in our day, whom this dead master could have rolled in thehollow of his hand.

  Let me try for a minute or two to show why and how he is so very greata man; and then let me try to point out one or two of the reasons forwhich the true reward of greatness has been denied him.

  The very first essential to greatness in any pursuit is that a manshould be in earnest in respect to it. You may as well try to kindleyour household fire with pump water as to excite laughter by theinvention of a story which does not seem laughable to yourself, or todraw real tears by a story conceived whilst your own heart is dry, 'Thewounded is the wounding heart.' In Charles Reade's case this essentialsympathy amounted to a passion. He derided difficulties, but he deridedthem after the fashion of the thorough-going enthusiast, and not afterthat of the sluggard. He made up his mind to write fiction, and hepractised for years before he printed a line. He assured himself ofmethods of selection and of forms of expression. Better equipped bynature than one in a hundred of those who follow the profession he hadchosen he laboured with a fiery, unresting patience to complete hisarmoury, and to perfect himself in the handling of its every weapon. Heread omnivorously, and, throughout his literary lifetime, he made ithis business to collect and to collate, to classify and to catalogue,innumerable fragments of character, of history, of current news, ofevanescent yet vital stuffs of all sorts. In the last year but one ofhis life he went with me over some of the stupendous volumes he hadbuilt in this way. The vast books remain as an illustration of hisindustry, but only one who has seen him in consultation with their pagescan guess the accuracy and intimacy of his knowledge of their contents.They seem to deal with everything, and with whatever they enclosed hewas familiar.

  This encyclopaedic industry would have left a commonplace mancommonplace, and in the estimate of a great man's genius it takes rankmerely as a characteristic. His sympathy for his chosen craft was backedby a sympathy for humanity just as intense and impassioned. He was aglorious lover and hater of lovable and hateful things.

  In one respect he was almost unique amongst men, for he united a savagedetestation of wrong with a most minute accuracy in his judgment of itsextent and quality. He laboured in the investigation of the problemsof his own age with the cold diligence of an antiquary. He came to aconclusion with the calm of a great judge. And when his cause was surehe threw himself upon it with an extraordinary and sustained energy. Therage of his advocacy is in surprising contrast with the patience exertedin building up his case.

  Reade had a poet's recognition for the greatness of his own time. He sawthe epic nature of the events of his own hour, the epic character of themen who moulded those events. Hundreds of years hence, when federatedAustralia is thickly sown with great cities, and the island-continenthas grown to its fulness of accomplished nationhood, and is grey inhonour, Reade's nervous English, which may by that time have grownquaint, and only legible to learned eves, will preserve; the history ofits beginnings. That part of His work, indeed, is purely and wholly epicin sentiment and discernment, however colloquial in form, and it isthe sole example of its kind, since it was written by one who wascontemporary with the events described.

  Reade was pretty constantly at war with his critics, but he fairlyjustified himself of the reviewer in his own day, and at this time thepeople who assailed him have something like a right to sleep in peace.In private life one of the most amiable of men, and distinguished forcourtesy and kindness, he was a swash-buckler in controversy. He had atrick of being in the right which his opponents found displeasing,and he was sometimes cruel in his impatience of stupidity andwrong-headedness. Scarcely any continuance in folly could haveinspired most men to the retorts he occasionally made. He wrote to oneunfortunate: 'Sir,--You have ventured to contradict me on a questionwith regard to which I am profoundly learned, where you are ignorantas dirt.' It was quite true, but another kind of man would have foundanother way of saying it.

  That trick of being right came out with marked effect in the discussionwhich accompanied the issue of 'Hard Cash' in 'All the Year Round,' Apractitioner in lunacy condemned one of the author's statements as abald impossibility. Reade answered that the impossibility in questiondisguised itself as fact, and went through the hollow form of takingplace on such and such a date in such and such a public court, and wasrecorded in such and such contemporary journals. Whenever he made acrusade against a public evil, as when he assailed the prison system,or the madhouse system, or the system of rattening in trades unions, hiscase was supported by huge collections of indexed fact, and in the fightwhich commonly followed he could appeal to unimpeachable records; butagain and again the angry fervour of the advocate led people to forgetor to distrust the judicial accuracy on which his case invariablyrested.

  When all is said and done, his claim to immortality lies less in thebooks which deal with the splendours and the scandals of his ownage than in that monument of learning, of humour, of pathos, and ofnarrative skill, 'The Cloister and the Hearth.'* It is not too much tosay of this book that, on its own lines, it is without a rival. To thereader it seems to be not less than the revival of a dead age. To assertdogmatically that the bygone people with whom it deals could not havebeen other than it paints them would be to pretend to a knowledgegreater than the writer's own. But they are not the men and women withwhom we are familiar in real life, and they are not the men and womenwith whom other writers of fiction have made us acquainted. Yet they areindubitably human and alive, and we doubt them no more than the peoplewith whom we rub shoulders in the street. Dr. Conan Doyle once saidto me what I thought a memorable thing about this book; To read it, hesaid, was 'like going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern,' Itis so, indeed. You pass along the devious route from old Sevenbergen tomediaeval Rome, and wherever the narrative leads you, the searchlightflashes on everything, and out of the darkness and the dust and death ofcenturies life leaps at you. And I know nothing in English prose whichfor a noble and simple eloquence surpasses the opening and the closingparagraphs of this great work, nor--with some naive and almost childishpassages of humour omitted--a richer, terser, purer, or more perfectstyle than that of the whole narrative. Nowadays, the fashion incriticism has changed, and the feeblest duffer amongst us receiveswelcome ten times more enthusiastic and praise less measured than wasbestowed upon 'The Cloister and the Hearth' when it first saw the light.Think only for a moment--think what would happen if such a book shouldsuddenly be launched upon us. Honestly, there _could_ be no reviewingit. Our superlatives have been used so often to describe, at the best,good
, plain, sound work, and, at the worst, frank rubbish, that we haveno vocabulary for excellence of such a cast.

  * It is worth while to record here a phrase used by Charles Reade to me in reference to this work. He was rebutting the charge of plagiarism which had been brought against him, and he said laughingly, 'It is true that I milked three hundred cows into my bucket, but the butter I churned was my own.'

  And now, how comes it that with genius, scholarship, and style, withlaughter and terror and tears at his order, this great writer halts inhis stride towards the place which should be his by right? It seems tome at times as if I had a partial answer to that question. I believethat a judicious editor, without a solitary act of impiety, could giveCharles Reade undisputed and indisputable rank. One-half the wholebusiness is a question of printing. This great and admirable writer hadone constant fault, which is so vulgar and trivial that it remainsas much of a wonder as it is of an offence. He seeks emphasis by theexpedient of big type and small type, of capitals and small capitals,of italics and black letter, and of tawdry little illustrations. Longbefore the reader arrives at the point at which it is intended that hisemotions shall be stirred, his eye warns him that the shock is coming.He knows beforehand that the rhetorical bolt is to fall just there, andwhen it comes it is ten to one that he finds the effect disappointing.Or the change from the uniformity of the page draws his eye to the'displayed' passages, and he is tantalised into reading them out oftheir proper place and order. Take, for instance, an example which justoccurs to me. In 'It is Never Too Late to Mend,' Fielding and Robinsonare lost in an Australian forest--'bushed,' as the local phrase goes. Atthat hour they are being hunted for their lives. They fall into a sortof devil's circle, and, as lost men have often done, they come in thecourse of their wanderings upon their own trail. For awhile they followit in the hope that it will lead them to some camp or settlement.Suddenly Fielding becomes aware that they are following the track oftheir own earlier footprints, and almost in the same breath he discoversthat these are joined by the traces of other feet. He reads a fatal andtrue meaning into this sign, looks to his weapons, and starts off at amended pace. 'What are you doing?' asks Robinson, and Fielding answers(in capital letters): 'I am hunting the hunters!' The situation isadmirably dramatic. Chance has so ordered it that the pursued areactually behind the pursuers, and the presence of the intended murderersis proclaimed by a device which is at once simple, natural, novel, andsurprising. All the elements for success in thrilling narrative arehere, and the style never lulls for a second, or for a second allowsthe strain of the position to relax. But those capital letters havelong since called the eye of the reader to themselves, and the point thewriter tries to emphasise is doubly lost. It has been forestalled, andhas become an irritation. You come on it twice; you have been robbed ofanticipation and suspense, which, just here, are the life and soul ofart. You know before you ought to be allowed to guess; and, worst ofall, perhaps, you feel that your own intelligence has been affronted.Surely you had imagination enough to feel the significance of the linewithout this meretricious trick to aid you. It is not the business ofa great master in fiction to jog the elbow of the unimaginative, andto say, 'Wake up at this,' or 'Here it is your duty to the narrative toexperience a thrill.'

  Another and an equally characteristic fault, though of far less frequentoccurrence, is Reade's fashion of intruding himself upon his reader.He stands, in a curiously irritating way, between the picture he haspainted and the man he has invited to look at it. In one instance hedrags the eye down to a footnote in order that you may read: 'I, C. R.,say this'--which is very little more or less than an impertinence. Thesense of humour which probably twinkled in the writer's mind is faint atthe best. We know that he, C. R., said that. We are giving of our timeand intelligence to C. R., and we are rather sorry than otherwise tofind him indulging in this small buffoonery.

  It should, I think, be an instruction to future publishers of CharlesReade to give him Christian printing--to confine him in the body ofhis narrative to one fount of type, and rigorously to deny him the use(except in their accustomed and orthodox places) of capitals, smallcapitals, and italics. And I cannot think that any irreverence could becharged against an editor who had the courage to put a moist pen throughthose expressions of egotism and naive self-satisfaction and vanitywhich do occasionally disfigure his pages.

  I ask myself if these trifles--for in comparison with the sum of Reade'sgenius they are small things indeed--can in any reasonable measureaccount for the neglect which undoubtedly besets him. In narrativevigour he has but one rival--Dumas _pere_--and he is far and away themaster of that rival in everything but energy. No male writer surpasseshim in the knowledge of feminine human nature. There is no love-makingin literature to beat the story of the courtship of Julia Dodd andAlfred Hardy in 'Hard Cash.' In mere descriptive power he ranks with thegiants. Witness the mill on fire in 'The Cloister and the Hearth'; thelark in exile in 'Never too Late to Mend'; the boat-race in 'Hard Cash';the scene of Kate Peyton at the firelit window, and Griffith in thesnow, in 'Griffith Gaunt.' There are a thousand bursts of laughter inhis pages, not mere sniggers, but lung-shaking laughters, and the manwho can go by any one of a hundred pathetic passages without tears isa man to be pitied. Let it be admitted that at times he wrenches hisEnglish rather fiercely, and yet let it be said that for delicacy,strength, sincerity, clarity, and all great graces of style, he is sideby side with the noblest of our prose writers. Can it be that a fewscattered drops of vulgarity in emphasis dim such a fire as this?Does so small a dead fly taint so big a pot of ointment? I will not befoolish enough to dogmatise on such a point, and yet I can find no otherreasons than those I have already given why a master-craftsman shouldnot hold a master-craftsman's place. Solomon has told us what 'a littlefolly' can do for him who is in reputation for wisdom.' The great massof the public can always tell what pleases it, but it cannot always tellwhy it is pleased.

  And the man who writes for wide and lasting fame has to depend, not uponthe verdict of the expert and the cultured, but on the love of those whoonly know they love, and who have no power to give the critical why andwherefore. The public--'the stupid and ignorant pig of a public,' as'Pococurante' called it years ago--is always being abused, and yet it isonly the public which, in the end, can tell us if we have done well orill. We have all to consent to be measured by it, and, in the long run,it estimates our stature with a perfect accuracy.

  I hope I may not be thought impertinent in intruding here a reminiscenceof Reade which seems characteristic of his sweeter side. In reading overthese pages for the press I have been moved to a mournful and tenderremembrance of the only one of the three great Vanished Masters whom itwas my happy chance to meet in the flesh. I dedicated to him the secondnovel which left my pen--the third to reach the public--and in sendinghim the volumes on the day of issue I wrote what I remember as a ratherboyish letter, in which I was at no pains to disguise my admiration forhis genius. That admiration was not then tempered by the considerationswhich are expressed above, for they touched me only after many years ofpractice in the art he adorned so richly. He answered with a gentle andsad courtesy, and concluded with these words: 'It is no discredit in ayoung man to esteem a senior beyond his merits.' I have always thoughtthat very graceful and felicitous, and now that I am myself grown to bea senior I am more persuaded of its charm than ever.