IN

CHARLES READE AND HIS

BOOKS.

A RETROSPECT.

N the year of grace 1851 there was in London a hard-working young man of thirty-seven who ardently desired above all things to be a playwright. He was no mere Grub Street hack, but a man of good family and sound education. He came of an old Oxfordshire stock he had had a distinguished career at the premier University of England, and was a fellow of one of its colleges: he had travelled on the Continent and seen a considerable share of the world. Yet here he was in London, with a brain full of grand ideas, and a drawer full of plays that no theatrical manager would accept on any terms, eating his heart out with vexation and ready to give up the struggle.

In his despair he wrote to an actress whom he had often seen and admired on the boards of the Haymarket theatre-wrote her a piteous note, telling her, no doubt, all about his ambitions and the merits of his plays, and asking for leave to read one of them to her. Mrs. Seymour was only an actress, but she had a kind heart, and she asked this unknown Shakespeare to come and see her. Next day he went to her house, armed with an original drama of his own composition, in which the loves and despairs of a noble lord and a noble lady, a struggling artist and a Newhaven fishwife were pulled into a beautiful tangle in the first three or four acts and deftly unravelled in the last. The young man declaimed his beautiful dialogue to the actress and her friends, and waited for her to fall on his neck in astonishment and delight; but Mrs. Seymour did not seem to be a bit impressed, and the poor author slunk away, heartbroken. The following morning, however, he got a note from her telling him that the play had merit, but advising him to turn it into. a story. The letter concluded with a woman's postscript. She told him how sorry she was to see a gentleman of his obvious birth and breeding so low in the world, and she begged to enclose a five-pound note -as a loan. This, to a Reade of Ipsden, and a fellow of Magdalen

College, was a surprise, and the acquaintanceship thus begun ripened into a friendship that was of immense practical use to Reade in after years, and only ended with the death of Laura Seymour twenty-eight years later.

Charles Reade was a born story-teller. No English writer has ever been able to spin a yarn, pure and simple, with the directness and force, the terseness and dramatic vividness of this writer. In every one of his eighteen books he tells a story of fascinating interest, which grips the attention of the reader from the first line and holds it as in a vice until the last enthralling word is read. The man or woman who can read "The Cloister and the Hearth," or "Hard Cash," or "Griffith Gaunt," without having his knowledge of other men and other times vastly extended, his views of life broadened, and his sympathies and feelings stirred to the very quick, has a very thick head and a very cold heart.

But as it was the ambition of Scott and George Eliot to be great poets rather than great novelists, it was Reade's life-long struggle to gain success as a dramatist. It is said that he would willingly have given up all his fame as a novelist to have had one unqualified triumph on the stage-a triumph that never came. The comedy of "Masks and Faces" certainly did take London by storm in 1852, but Reade was not the sole author and could not claim all the credit. However, the best part of that play must be attributed to him. He conceived and elaborated most of the characters: Peg Woffington, the beautiful Irishwoman who could turn the men folk round her little finger, but was melted by the sight of her rival's tears; Triplet, the writer of unacted tragedies, the man who lived in imagination in kings' palaces and who could not fill the mouths of his starving progeny with bread; Mabel Vane, the sweet unsophisticated country girl who came to London town after a weak and erring husband. It was Reade who invented the story and most of the incidents; but Tom Taylor, his collaborateur, threw the whole into dramatic shape and gave the play its most sparkling passages of dialogue. A year later Reade turned his part of the work into a story, calling it "Peg Woffington." This is his first and one of his finest books. It is a model of artistic construction, containing neither a word too much nor a word too little. It tells a charmingly fresh and original story, the reading of which is like setting one's teeth in a juicy pear fresh from the warm sunshine.

It is related that in his early days Reade said: "I am like Goldsmith and others I shall blossom late," and, true enough, he was almost forty years of age before his life-work began. He de

liberately sets out in his diary at this time the plan that he intended to follow in the writing of fiction. He proposed never to guess where he could know; to visit all the places and experience all the sensations he intended to describe; to understand all that was possible of the hearts and brains of the people he intended to portray-in a word, to be a writer of truths instead of a writer of lies. "Now I know exactly what I am worth," he says. "If I can work the above great system, there is enough of me to make one of the writers of the day. Without it—no, no."

His first long novel, "It is never too Late to Mend," gives a lurid picture of prison life in England in the early years of the century, and brought about some important changes in the law with regard to the detention of prisoners. The atrocities practised on Tom Robinson by the brutal governor and his warders are written, as Reade himself said of another book, "in many places with art, in all with red ink and the biceps muscle." While he was writing this book he took the utmost pains to verify every fact and incident that is described. He visited many prisons, he put himself in the convict's place, he did his turn on the treadmill, he turned the crank, he even submitted to incarceration in the dark cell, and suffered while there unspeakable torture. He supplemented the information gained thus by reading libraries of blue books, pamphlets, letters, and volumes dealing with prisons and prison life. In "Hard Cash" he exposed, with the same ruthless pen and the same strength of invective, the villanies and dark deeds practised on the unfortunate inmates of private lunatic asylums; and in "Put Yourself in His Place" he dealt in the same trenchant style with outrages committed› by illegal trade unions. These three stories, if they are not distinguished by any subtle exposition of character nor by any abstruse psychological analysis of motive and conduct, simply reek with human nature and pulsate with life and movement from beginning to end. In the writing of them, Reade may have totally disregarded the canons of art (so called), but he did not mind any such puny limitation on his genius when he had a story to tell. In every one of his books the reader is sucked into the wild current of the narrative on the very first page, and carried with feverish haste from one scene of excitement, daring, terror, or pity to another, until he suddenly finds himself stranded on the last unwelcome word "finis.”

After the publication of "It is never too Late to Mend," Reade's next important work was a story called "Love me Little, Love me Long," a "mild tale," in which our author discusses no social problems and indulges in no red ink. It is entirely a love story,

relating the efforts of a big, simple-minded, fiddle-playing sailor to capture the somewhat elusive affections of Miss Lucy Fountain, a young lady with a complex mind, whose anxiety to displease nobody carried her too often into the neutral zone between truth and falsehood, and sometimes even beyond that territory on the wrong side.

But all these efforts were but the skirmishes before the real engagement. Reade had done good work, but nothing yet that entitled him to immortality. About this time an old Latin legend came under his notice which told "with harsh brevity the strange history of a pair who lived untrumpeted and died unsung four hundred years ago." It was a touching story, with artistic and dramatic possibilities, and Reade determined to breathe into it the spirit of humanity. Accordingly, our author was to be seen, towards the end of the year 1859, in the Bodleian and Magdalen College libraries grubbing amongst the writings and chronicles of Froissart, Erasmus, Gringoire, Luther, and their fellows, and endeavouring to get an insight as to the state of society in Holland, Germany, and Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The pains that he took with this book, called first "A Good Fight" and afterwards "The Cloister and the Hearth," were almost superhuman. letters at this time are full of it. "I am under weigh again,” he writes, "but rather slowly. I think this story will almost wear my mind out." Again, "I can't tell whether it will succeed or not as a whole, but there shall be great and tremendous and tender things in it." It is interesting to trace through these letters the gradual evolution of characters and scenes that have charmed millions of people since. In one of them he says: "Gerard is just now getting to France after many adventures in Germany. The new character I have added— Denys, a Burgundian soldier, a crossbowman-will, I hope and trust, please you." Never was hope better founded. Since those words were written, many and many a reader has lived over again the sayings and doings of this honest, true-hearted adventurer, with his everlasting "Courage, le diable est mort." Denys's "foible," as we are told, was woman. "When he met a peasant girl on the road he took off his cap to her as if she was a queen, the invariable effect of which was that she suddenly drew herself up quite stiff like a soldier on parade, and wore a forbidding aspect."

"They drive me to despair,' sighed poor Denys. 'Is that a just return for a civil bonnetade? They are large, they are fair, but stupid as swans. . . . A little affability adorns even beauty.'"

When "The Cloister and the Hearth was published in 1861, it

was accepted by the critics and the public as a great work, but it created no burst of enthusiasm. However, that year was prolific in great works. A public that was reading "Silas Marner," "Great Expectations," The Adventures of Philip," "The Woman in White," "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," and a new book by Anthony Trollope, had its powers of appreciation fully engaged, and had little attention to devote to a comparatively new author like Reade. Time, however, has stamped "The Cloister and the Hearth" with the seal of immortality. The pitiful story of Gerard and Margaret, "the sweetest, saddest, and most tender love story ever devised by wit of man," can never die. Here is how Reade tells the end of it all :

"Thus after life's fitful fever these true lovers were at peace. The grave, kinder to them than the Church, united them for ever; and now a man of another age and nation, touched with their fate, has laboured to build their tombstone, and rescue them from long and unmerited oblivion. . . . In every age the Master of life and death, who is kinder as well as wiser than we are, has transplanted to heaven, young, earth's sweetest flowers. I ask your sympathy, then for their rare constancy and pure affection, and their cruel separation by a vile heresy in the bosom of the Church; but not your pity for their early but happy end. Beati sunt qui in Domino moriuntur.'"

It is difficult to see how anyone can approach this book in a critical spirit, although one writer has had the temerity to say certain disparaging things about it. It is entitled to nothing but the profoundest admiration, and its author to the most unbounded gratitude. Sir Walter Besant calls it the greatest historical novel in the language, and very few will be found to deny the justice of such praise.

In Reade's next book, "Hard Cash," which was written for Dickens's magazine, the author gives a vivid picture of himself at work, calling himself Mr. Rolfe, "the writer of romances founded on facts." He describes his library as one of note-books and indexes-great volumes, containing a classified collection of facts, ideas, pictures, incidents, characters, scraps of dialogues, and letters. They were arranged and indexed under a multitude of headings, such as curialia, or man as revealed in the law courts; femina vera, or the real woman; humores diei, or the humour of the day; nigri loci, or reports of dark deeds perpetrated in prison and lunatic asylums; "the dirty oligarchy," which included reports of trade outrages and strikes. Such an insatiable thirst had he for facts