My Contemporaries In Fiction | Page 7

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 p��re--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