My Contemporaries In Fiction | Page 5

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