My Contemporaries In Fiction | Page 6

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 na?ve 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.
* 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, 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.