present purpose to discover what they

are.

Every age has its fashions in literature as it has in dress. All the beauti

ful fashions in literature, at least, have been thought worthy of revival and imitation, but there has come to each in turn a moment when it has begun to pall upon the fancy. Every school before its death is fated to inspire satiety and weariness. The more overwhelming its success has been, the more complete and sweeping is the welcomed change. We know how the world thrilled and wept over Pamela and Clarissa, and we know how their particular form of pathos sated the world and died. We know what a turn enchanted castles had, and how their spell withered into nothing. We know what a triumphal progress the Sentimental Sufferer made through the world, and what a bore he came to be. It is success which kills. Success breeds imitation, and the imitators are a weariness. And it is not the genius who dies. It is only the school which arose to mimic him. Richardson is alive for everybody but the dull and stupid. Now that the world of fiction is no longer crowded with enchanted castles, we can go to live in one occasionally for a change, and enjoy ourselves. Werther is our friend again, though the school he founded was probably the most tiresome the world has seen.

Now, with the solitary exception of Sir Walter Scott, it is probable that no man ever inspired such a host of imitators as Charles Dickens. There is not a writer of fiction at this hour, in any land where fiction is a recognised trade or art, who is not, whether he knows it and owns it, or no, largely influenced by Dickens. His method has got into the atmosphere of fiction, as that of all really great writers must do, and we might as well swear to unmix our oxygen and hydrogen as to stand clear of his influences. To stand clear of those influences you must stand apart from all modern thought and sentiment. You must have read nothing that has been written in the last sixty years, and you must have been

bred on a desert island.

Dickens has

a living part in the life of the whole wide world. He is on a hundred thousand magisterial benches every day. There is not a hospital patient in any country who has not at this minute a right thank God that Dickens lived. What his blessed and beautiful hand has done for the poor and oppressed, and them that had no helper, no man knows. He made charity and good feeling a religion. Millions and millions of money have flowed from the coffers of the rich for the benefit of the poor because of his books. A great part of our daily life, and a good deal of the best of it, is of his making.

No single man ever portunities for himself.

made such opNo single man was ever so widely and permanently useful. No single man ever sowed gentleness and mercy with so broad a sweep.

This is all true, and very far from new, but it has not been the fashion to say it lately. It is not the whole of the truth. Noble rivers have their own natural defects of swamp and mudbank. Sometimes his tides ran sluggishly, as in "The Battle of Life," for example, which has always seemed to me, at least, a most mawkish and unreal book. The pure stream of "The Carol," which washes the heart of a man, runs thin in "The Chimes," runs thinner in "The Haunted Man," and in "The Battle of Life" is lees and mud. "Nickleby," again, is a young man's book, and as full of blemishes as of genius. But when all is said and done, it killed the Yorkshire schools.

The chief fault the superficial modern critic has to find with Dickens is a sort of rumbustious boisterousness in the expression of emotion. But let one thing be pointed out, and let me point it out in my own fashion. Tom Hood, who was a true poet, and the best of our English wits, and probably as good a judge of good work as any person now alive, went home after meeting with Dickens, and in a playful enthusiasm told his wife to cut off his hand and bottle it, because it had shaken hands with Boz. Lord Jeffrey, who

was cold as a critic, cried over Little Nell. So did Sydney Smith, who was very far from being a blubbering sentimentalist. To judge rightly of any kind of dish you must bring an appetite to it. Here is the famous Dickens pie, when first served, pronounced inimitable, not by a class or a clique, but by all men in all lands. But you get it served hot, and you get it served cold, it is rehashed in every literary restaurant, you detect its flavour in your morning leader and your weekly review. The pie gravy finds its way into the prose and the verse of a whole young generation. It has a striking flavour, an individual flavour. into everything. We are weary of the ceaseless resurrection of that once so toothsome dish. Take it away.

It gets

The original pie is no worse and no better, but thousands of cooks have had the receipt for it, and have tried to make it. Appetite may have vanished, but the pie was a good pie.

No simile runs on all fours, and this parable in a pie-dish is a poor traveller.

He is still in the hearts of the people, and there he has only one rival.

No attempt at a review of modern fiction can be made without a mention of the men who were greatest when the art was great. When we have done with the giants we will come down to the big fellows, and by that time we shall have an eye for the proportions of the rest. But before we part for the time being, let me offer the uncritical reader one valuable touchstone. Let him recall the stories he has read, say, five years ago. If he can find a live man or woman anywhere amongst his memories, who is still as a friend or an enemy to him, he has, fifty to one, read a sterling book. Dickens's people stand this test with all readers, whether they admire him or no. Even when they are grotesque they are alive. They live in the memory, even of the careless, like real people. And this is the one unfailing trial by which great fiction may be known.

No

The new man says of Dickens that his sentiment rings false. This is a mistake. It rings old-fashioned. false note ever moved a world, and the world combined to love his very name. There were tears in thousands of households when he died, and they were as sincere and as real as if they had arisen at the loss of a personal friend.

We, who in spite of fashion remain. true to our allegiance to the magician of our youth, who can never worship or love another as we loved and worshipped him, are quite contented in the slight inevitable dimming of his fame.

II. CHARLES READE.

OEADE'S position in literature is distinctly strange. The professional critics never came within miles of a just appreciation of his greatness, and the average "cultured reader receives his name with a droll air of allowance and patronage. But there are some, and these are not the least qualified as judges, who regard him as ranking with the great masters. You will find, I think, that the men holding this opinion are, in the main, fellowworkers in the craft he practised. His warmest and most constant admirers are his brother novelists. Trollope, to be sure, spoke of him as "almost a man of genius," but Trollope's mind was a quintessential distillation of the commonplace, and the man who was on fire 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 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 stuff 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 seemed to deal with everything, and with whatever they enclosed he was familiar. This encyclopædic 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 eyes, 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 writ

ten by one who was contemporary with the events described.

Reade was pretty constantly at war with his critics, but he fairly justified himself of the reviewer in his own day, and at this time the people who assailed him have something like a right to sleep in peace. In private life one of the most amiable of men, and distinguished for courtesy and kindness, he was a swash-buckler in controversy. 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 ignorant as dirt." It was quite true, but another kind of man would have found another way of saying it.

are

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. Το 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 mediæval Rome, and wherever the narrative leads you the search-light 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 closing paragraphs of this great work, nor—with some naive 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.

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. 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 wandering 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. 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

He

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."

66

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 fashion, 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 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 font of type, and rigorously to deny him the use (except in their accustomed and orthodox places) of capitals, small capitals, and