Charles Reade
(1814-1884).
There remains one man of genius, Charles Reade, who towers over all these men of talent. Reade was mature in years before he began his literary career with a group of dramas, of which Gold, acted with moderate success in 1853, was the best. His easy circumstances as the son of an Oxfordshire squire, and fellow of Magdalen College, exempted him from the necessity of pushing his way in the world. In literature he had one great ambition and one great gift, and unfortunately the two diverged. His talent lay in prose fiction, while his ambition drew him towards the stage. It was the advice of an actress that caused him to turn Masks and Faces, a drama written in collaboration with Tom Taylor, into the prose story of Peg Woffington (1853), and so to find his true vocation. But he remained unsatisfied, and through his whole career he continued to make experiments in the drama, never with much success except in the case of Drink (1879), founded on Zola’s L’Assommoir. So strong was his predilection, that he desired that in the inscription on his tombstone the word ‘dramatist’ should be put first in the specification of his pursuits.
Those who study Reade can have no difficulty in detecting the cause of his failure in the drama. He is fertile of incident, but he has not the art of selecting a few striking scenes rising out of one another and leading rapidly up to a catastrophe. His copiousness finds room in the freer field of prose fiction, and his want of skill in selection is less noticeable there. Accordingly he soon won as a novelist the popularity he never secured as a playwright. Christie Johnstone (1853), one of his best stories, was the successor of Peg Woffington, and after It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) he took his place as one of the first writers of fiction of the time.
Charles Reade was a man of strong individuality, intense in all his opinions, and bent on making them known. Hence he gives us perhaps the best examples of the novel with a purpose. Dickens had done much work of this description, but Reade went beyond him. Many of his novels are devoted to special questions. Thus It is Never Too Late to Mend deals with prison administration, Hard Cash with lunatic asylums, and Put Yourself in his Place with trade-unions. Moreover, Reade was by no means the man to approach these questions with a few a priori impressions only in his head. He was thorough, and he made an elaborate study of each before he wrote about it. Every incident reported in the newspapers, every trial in the courts of law, every fact wherever recorded, he made it his business to master. He cared less for theories, at least for the theories of other people: he made his own, and loved them. But his survey of the evidence was as nearly exhaustive as it could be. No other writer of fiction ever left such an apparatus of note-books, newspaper cuttings, etc., all digested and systematically arranged. It has been commonly held that Reade’s work was injured by this laborious method; and no doubt the opinion is in part sound. Yet his merits as well as his defects are closely related to his method. His variety and his inexhaustible resource are due to the enormous accumulation of his facts. He loved to illustrate the saying that truth is stranger than fiction, and he held that no man’s invention could supply incidents equal to those which patient investigation would reveal. There is no novelist with respect to whom it is so dangerous to say, ‘this is unnatural or impossible.’ Probably the seeming impossibility is a hard fact, disclosed by some forgotten trial or recorded in some old newspaper.
While however this backbone of reality gives strength to Reade’s novels, his devotion to fact sometimes leads him to forget unity and proportion. The violence of his convictions was apt to overbalance his judgment. He is at his best in his calmer and less didactic moods. For this reason The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) is his masterpiece. In a historical novel, of which the scene is laid in the fifteenth century and the hero is the father of Erasmus, there is ample scope for Reade’s love of investigation, and he has with great skill woven into the narrative the results of wide reading and patient study. The works of Erasmus are appropriately laid under contribution. But Reade has here no thesis to defend, no abuse to attack. The book is consequently better balanced than the novels of the class already mentioned; and the adventures are diversified with touches of pathos and with scenes of domestic life in the Dutch home, such as are hardly to be found elsewhere in Reade’s works. The delineation of character also is subtler. In many of Reade’s novels the characters are wholly subordinate to the purpose of the story. It is not Mr. Eden who interests us in It is Never Too Late to Mend, but rather his theories and methods.
There is no rival among Reade’s novels to The Cloister and the Hearth; but several of them nevertheless are of high quality. Christie Johnstone, a remarkably clever and successful study of the fisher population of the east of Scotland, is perhaps the freshest and least laboured of all his works; and Griffith Gaunt, an analysis of the workings of the passion of jealousy, is the subtlest as a psychological study; while It is Never Too Late to Mend stands pretty near the head of its own class, the novel of purpose. Except the greatest of the writers already dealt with, and one other, Mr. George Meredith, who belongs rather to the next period, there was no contemporary writer who could do work equal to any one of them.
We have now traced the course of literature through a period of forty years, distinguished for their fertility and for the variety of the talent displayed in them. In the prominence given to history, in the drift of philosophic speculation, in the prevalence of the novel of purpose, and in the spirit of the later poetry, we see the influence of social problems clamouring for solution. The Age of Tennyson has been essentially an age of reconstruction. It inherited from the preceding generation a gigantic task, which it has earnestly and laboriously striven to accomplish. What measure of success has been won is still doubtful; how long the literary expression of the effort will remain satisfying may be doubtful too. It is said to-day that we no longer read Carlyle; it may be said to-morrow that we no longer read Tennyson or Browning either. But there is substance in the work of all these men, and of all the leaders of the period. If they are no longer read it is because their thought has penetrated the life of the time; and we may be sure that they will revive and have a second vogue when they are old enough to be partly forgotten.