Reade’s position in literature is distinctly strange. The professional critics never came within miles of a just appreciation of his greatness, and the average ‘cultured reader’ receives his name with a droll air of allowance and patronage. But there are some, and these are not the least qualified as judges, who regard him as ranking with the great masters. You will find, I think, that the men holding this opinion are, in the main, fellow-workers in the craft he practised. His warmest and most constant admirers are his brother novelists. Trollope, to be sure, spoke of him as ‘almost a man of genius,’ but Trollope’s mind was a quintessential distillation of the commonplace, and the man who was on fire with the romance and passion of his own age was outside the limit of his understanding. But amongst the writers of English fiction whom it has been my privilege to know personally, I have not met with one who has not reckoned Charles Reade a giant.

The critics have never acknowledged him, and, in a measure, he has been neglected by the public. There is a reason for everything, if we could only find it, and sometimes I seem to have a glimmering of light on this perplexing 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 I read, but I know now that it took courage of the rarer sort to express a judgment so unreserved in favour of a writer who never for an hour occupied in the face of the public such a position as is held by three or four men in our day, whom this dead master could have rolled in the hollow of his hand.

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

The very first essential to greatness in any pursuit is that a man should be in earnest in respect to it. You may as well try to kindle your household fire with pump water as to excite laughter by the invention of a story which does not seem laughable to yourself, or to draw real tears by a story conceived whilst your own heart is dry, ‘The wounded is the wounding heart.’ In Charles Reade’s case this essential sympathy amounted to a passion. He derided difficulties, but he derided them after the fashion of the thorough-going enthusiast, and not after that of the sluggard. He made up his mind to write fiction, and he practised for years before he printed a line. He assured himself of methods of selection and of forms of expression. Better equipped by nature than one in a hundred of those who follow the profession he had chosen he laboured with a fiery, unresting patience to complete his armoury, and to perfect himself in the handling of its every weapon. He read omnivorously, and, throughout his literary lifetime, he made it his business to collect and to collate, to classify and to catalogue, innumerable fragments of character, of history, of current news, of evanescent yet vital stuffs of all sorts. In the last year but one of his life he went with me over some of the stupendous volumes he had built in this way. The vast books remain as an illustration of his industry, but only one who has seen him in consultation with their pages can guess the accuracy and intimacy of his knowledge of their contents. They seem to deal with everything, and with whatever they enclosed he was familiar.

This encyclopaedic industry would have left a commonplace man commonplace, and in the estimate of a great man’s genius it takes rank merely as a characteristic. His sympathy for his chosen craft was backed by a sympathy for humanity just as intense and impassioned. He was a glorious lover and hater of lovable and hateful things.

In one respect he was almost unique amongst men, for he united a savage detestation of wrong with a most minute accuracy in his judgment of its extent and quality. He laboured in the investigation of the problems of his own age with the cold diligence of an antiquary. He came to a conclusion with the calm of a great judge. And when his cause was sure he threw himself upon it with an extraordinary and sustained energy. The rage of his advocacy is in surprising contrast with the patience exerted in building up his case.

Reade had a poet’s recognition for the greatness of his own time. He saw the epic nature of the events of his own hour, the epic character of the men who moulded those events. Hundreds of years hence, when federated Australia is thickly sown with great cities, and the island-continent has grown to its fulness of accomplished nationhood, and is grey in honour, Reade’s nervous English, which may by that time have grown quaint, and only legible to learned eves, will preserve; the history of its beginnings. That part of His work, indeed, is purely and wholly epic in sentiment and discernment, however colloquial in form, and it is the sole example of its kind, since it was written by one who was contemporary with the events described.

Reade was pretty constantly at war with his critics, but he fairly justified himself of the reviewer in his own day, and at this time the people who assailed him have something like a right to sleep in peace. In private life one of the most amiable of men, and distinguished for courtesy and kindness, he was a swash-buckler in controversy. He had a trick of being in the right which his opponents found displeasing, and he was sometimes cruel in his impatience of stupidity and wrong-headedness. Scarcely any continuance in folly could have inspired most men to the retorts he occasionally made. He wrote to one unfortunate: ‘Sir,—You have ventured to contradict me on a question with regard to which I am profoundly learned, where you are ignorant as dirt.’ It was quite true, but another kind of man would have found another way of saying it.

That trick of being right came out with marked effect in the discussion which accompanied the issue of ‘Hard Cash’ in ‘All the Year Round,’ A practitioner in lunacy condemned one of the author’s statements as a bald impossibility. Reade answered that the impossibility in question disguised itself as fact, and went through the hollow form of taking place on such and such a date in such and such a public court, and was recorded in such and such contemporary journals. Whenever he made a crusade against a public evil, as when he assailed the prison system, or the madhouse system, or the system of rattening in trades unions, his case was supported by huge collections of indexed fact, and in the fight which commonly followed he could appeal to unimpeachable records; but again and again the angry fervour of the advocate led people to forget or to distrust the judicial accuracy on which his case invariably rested.

When all is said and done, his claim to immortality lies less in the books which deal with the splendours and the scandals of his own age than in that monument of learning, of humour, of pathos, and of narrative skill, ‘The Cloister and the Hearth.‘* It is not too much to say of this book that, on its own lines, it is without a rival. To the reader it seems to be not less than the revival of a dead age. To assert dogmatically that the bygone people with whom it deals could not have been other than it paints them would be to pretend to a knowledge greater than the writer’s own. But they are not the men and women with whom we are familiar in real life, and they are not the men and women with whom other writers of fiction have made us acquainted. Yet they are indubitably human and alive, and we doubt them no more than the people with whom we rub shoulders in the street. Dr. Conan Doyle once said to me what I thought a memorable thing about this book; To read it, he said, was ‘like going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern,’ It is so, indeed. You pass along the devious route from old Sevenbergen to mediaeval Rome, and wherever the narrative leads you, the searchlight flashes on everything, and out of the darkness and the dust and death of centuries life leaps at you. And I know nothing in English prose which for a noble and simple eloquence surpasses the opening and the closing paragraphs of this great work, nor—with some naÏve and almost childish passages of humour omitted—a richer, terser, purer, or more perfect style than that of the whole narrative. Nowadays, the fashion in criticism has changed, and the feeblest duffer amongst us receives welcome ten times more enthusiastic and praise less measured than was bestowed 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 should suddenly be launched upon us. Honestly, there could be no reviewing it. Our superlatives have been used so often to describe, at the best, good, plain, sound work, and, at the worst, frank rubbish, that we have no vocabulary for excellence of such a cast.

And now, how comes it that with genius, scholarship, and style, with laughter and terror and tears at his order, this great writer halts in his stride towards the place which should be his by right? It seems to me at times as if I had a partial answer to that question. I believe that a judicious editor, without a solitary act of impiety, could give Charles Reade undisputed and indisputable rank. One-half the whole business is a question of printing. This great and admirable writer had one constant fault, which is so vulgar and trivial that it remains as much of a wonder as it is of an offence. He seeks emphasis by the expedient of big type and small type, of capitals and small capitals, of italics and black letter, and of tawdry little illustrations. Long before the reader arrives at the point at which it is intended that his emotions shall be stirred, his eye warns him that the shock is coming. He knows beforehand that the rhetorical bolt is to fall just there, and when 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 of their proper place and order. Take, for instance, an example which just occurs to me. In ‘It is Never Too Late to Mend,’ Fielding and Robinson are lost in an Australian forest—‘bushed,’ as the local phrase goes. At that hour they are being hunted for their lives. They fall into a sort of devil’s circle, and, as lost men have often done, they come in the course of their wanderings upon their own trail. For awhile they follow it in the hope that it will lead them to some camp or settlement. Suddenly Fielding becomes aware that they are following the track of their own earlier footprints, and almost in the same breath he discovers that these are joined by the traces of other feet. He reads a fatal and true meaning into this sign, looks to his weapons, and starts off at a mended pace. ‘What are you doing?’ asks Robinson, and Fielding answers (in capital letters): ‘I am hunting the hunters!’ The situation is admirably dramatic. Chance has so ordered it that the pursued are actually behind the pursuers, and the presence of the intended murderers is proclaimed by a device which is at once simple, natural, novel, and surprising. All the elements for success in thrilling narrative are here, and the style never lulls for a second, or for a second allows the strain of the position to relax. But those capital letters have long since called the eye of the reader to themselves, and the point the writer tries to emphasise is doubly lost. It has been forestalled, and has become an irritation. You come on it twice; you have been robbed of anticipation and suspense, which, just here, are the life and soul of art. You know before you ought to be allowed to guess; and, worst of all, perhaps, you feel that your own intelligence has been affronted. Surely you had imagination enough to feel the significance of the line without this meretricious trick to aid you. It is not the business of a great master in fiction to jog the elbow of the unimaginative, and to say, ‘Wake up at this,’ or ‘Here it is your duty to the narrative to experience a thrill.’

Another and an equally characteristic fault, though of far less frequent occurrence, is Reade’s fashion of intruding himself upon his reader. He stands, in a curiously irritating way, between the picture he has painted and the man he has invited to look at it. In one instance he drags 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. The sense of humour which probably twinkled in the writer’s mind is faint at the best. We know that he, C. R., said that. We are giving of our time and intelligence to C. R., and we are rather sorry than otherwise to find him indulging in this small buffoonery.

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

I ask myself if these trifles—for in comparison with the sum of Reade’s genius they are small things indeed—can in any reasonable measure account for the neglect which undoubtedly besets him. In narrative vigour he has but one rival—Dumas pÈre—and he is far and away the master of that rival in everything but energy. No male writer surpasses him in the knowledge of feminine human nature. There is no love-making in literature to beat the story of the courtship of Julia Dodd and Alfred Hardy in ‘Hard Cash.’ In mere descriptive power he ranks with the giants. Witness the mill on fire in ‘The Cloister and the Hearth’; the lark 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 the snow, in ‘Griffith Gaunt.’ There are a thousand bursts of laughter in his pages, not mere sniggers, but lung-shaking laughters, and the man who can go by any one of a hundred pathetic passages without tears is a man to be pitied. Let it be admitted that at times he wrenches his English rather fiercely, and yet let it be said that for delicacy, strength, sincerity, clarity, and all great graces of style, he is side by side with the noblest of our prose writers. Can it be that a few scattered 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 be foolish enough to dogmatise on such a point, and yet I can find no other reasons than those I have already given why a master-craftsman should not hold a master-craftsman’s place. Solomon has told us what ‘a little folly’ can do for him who is in reputation for wisdom.’ The great mass of the public can always tell what pleases it, but it cannot always tell why it is pleased.

And the man who writes for wide and lasting fame has to depend, not upon the verdict of the expert and the cultured, but on the love of those who only know they love, and who have no power to give the critical why and wherefore. The public—‘the stupid and ignorant pig of a public,’ as ‘Pococurante’ called it years ago—is always being abused, and yet it is only the public which, in the end, can tell us if we have done well or ill. 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 reminiscence of Reade which seems characteristic of his sweeter side. In reading over these pages for the press I have been moved to a mournful and tender remembrance of the only one of the three great Vanished Masters whom it was my happy chance to meet in the flesh. I dedicated to him the second novel which left my pen—the third to reach the public—and in sending him the volumes on the day of issue I wrote what I remember as a rather boyish letter, in which I was at no pains to disguise my admiration for his genius. That admiration was not then tempered by the considerations which are expressed above, for they touched me only after many years of practice in the art he adorned so richly. He answered with a gentle and sad courtesy, and concluded with these words: ‘It is no discredit in a young man to esteem a senior beyond his merits.’ I have always thought that very graceful and felicitous, and now that I am myself grown to be a senior I am more persuaded of its charm than ever.