CHARLES READE'S NOVELS OF Charles Reade's novels we may say, as Abraham Lincoln said of the Panorama: 'For people who like that sort of thing, that's just about the sort of thing they like.' Charles Reade wrote two good acting plays, Masks and Faces and Nance Oldfield, and one great novel-of which more anon-the rest is Panorama. He died in the year 1884 at the age of seventy, having lived a full, interesting, and occasionally pugnacious life; during nearly forty years of which he enjoyed the pleasures, whatever they may be, of celebrity. ness; He began life as a brilliant young man, a scholar, and D.C.L. of Oxford. He also took a dilettante interest in the Bar; and that is as much as is to be said for Charles Reade when he entered on his dazzling career. In the course of that career he wrote very well indeed about Australia without having been there; he wrote in great detail about banking without having been in business; he wrote of strikes and 'rattening' as if he had been a picketed operative; he described accidents and incidents in coal-mines much better than most men who pass their lives in that kind of work, and even now we are only at the beginning of his astonishing volume of information. His handling of the technicalities of trade is bewildering in its minuteMr. Rudyard Kipling might envy it. His knowledge of prison life makes one marvel how it could have been acquired except as a warder or an amateur convict. Lunatic asylums had a special attraction for him; they were fruitful (in his hands) of blood-curdling melodrama, where almost every page contains not only a judicious thrill, but a valuable piece of information (laboriously acquired by the author) and a handsome moral. It is inconceivable that any man could write the sea-fight in Hard Cash without having himself commanded, and fought, a merchant vessel. There is not a move in that battle that we do not watch with breathless attention, however often we read it. His descriptions of country life are quite good-more than good perhaps; while on board ship he is convincing and even enthralling. He is equally at home with respectability and with crime; and when he tells us of a forgery it is our own have to take place in the condition of that unhappy land engineering works on a large scale could possibly be begun th In any case, if Babylonian civilisation is to be revived land of its origin, the past, the present, and the future n taken into consideration together. I am giving expression earnest conviction, and not advocating any Utopia, when I it would be perfectly possible to carry out the excavation discovery of the old civilisation and the plans for the ina of a new civilisation hand in hand. fault if we cannot go away and do likewise; for he writes as one whose only trade was forgery and who earned a handsome income by practising it. Now the days of man are threescore years and ten, from the cradle to the grave; and his days as a writer of books are but a poor two-score. Consequently, if he is to annex and develop this mountain of miscellaneous information his limitations will declare themselves early and definitely. What is gained in one direction will be lost in another. Moreover, Charles Reade was no slipshod hack. He brought to the work of his life the studious habits of the man of learning. Although we may well open our eyes when we read (in Foul Play) that 'Our Universities cure men of doing things by halves,' there is no doubt that Charles Reade himself laboured with the energy and conscientiousness of a Strafford. So that if, or rather since, he laboured over detail to an extent that far out-distances any other writer of his time, we must prepare ourselves for what we, in fact, find; namely, somewhat colourless people moving amid accurate and elaborate staging-in short, Panorama. 'I rarely write a novel,' he has recorded, ' without milking about two hundred heterogeneous cows into my pail.' Or again: 'In all my tales I use a vast deal of heterogeneous material, which in a life of study I have gathered from men, journals, Blue-books, histories, biographies, law-reports, &c.' This is very interesting; and tells us much more (perhaps) than Charles Reade intended to tell us. The process which he thus describes, and probably describes without the slightest exaggeration, implies an amount of courage, conscientiousness, and industry that is surely without a parallel. A similar case, however, is that of the illustrious author of Daniel Deronda, who told Charles Leland that before writing that novel she had studied 140 volumes dealing with Hebrew lore, Hebrew traditions, and Hebrew aspirations. I did not tell her,' wrote Leland, 'that she had far better have talked with 140 Jews and Jewesses; till she had learned to tell (as I can) Señorita Dolores of the Sephardim from Fräulein Lilienthal of the Ashkenazim by the corners of their eyes.' The world knows that, whether Leland's advice was right or not, George Eliot's admirable efforts were ineffective; for if any part of her giant work can be said to be blurred it is precisely that over which she took such scholarly pains. The Cohens, Lapidoths, and Pashes, even Deronda himself and his mother the Princess Halm-Eberstein, what tiresome people they all are, even when we realise them; and for the most part, what phantoms! A method which fails in the hands of a giant may well produce different results in the hands of smaller folk; so we need not of necessity say that Charles Reade's process of 'milking two hundred heterogeneous cows into one pail' was destined to fail, because George Eliot christened her great work after Daniel the Shadow instead of after Henleigh Grandcourt that astonishing creation. But, in point of fact, what is the effect produced by Charles Reade's work? It is that the mustard is good, but the pancakes are naught. The mustard is not only good but of superlative excellence; one actually dines off it, in so far as one can dine off mustard. To quit metaphor, while we read the story, we revel in incident and detail. We positively enjoy the minutiae; and we study strange and sometimes uncongenial occupations with attention and absorption. The plot is equally exciting. There is no mistaking the villains, horns and tail are clearly visible from the commencement of the story, lights are turned down at their appearance, the orchestra executes a tremolo on the violins; green lights flare. Equally emphasised is virtue. Flowers, and summer morns, and sweet manners and white muslin introduce Injured Innocence in white only that Charles Reade will not allow his heroines to be brainless. That sine qua non of German romance (according to Bret Harte) is not a sine qua non for Charles Reade. Moreover, his innocents are as often in broadcloth and corduroys as in muslin ; and one lays down his books with a sigh of regret that the world bears so little resemblance to the scenes of these enchanting works, where vice is always vanquished and virtue victorious. One closes the book; and half an hour after reading the last page one would be puzzled to give the name of one single character in the story. This is very strange: and one inquires, and marvels, why the people in these exciting tales are really of no more interest than the actors in the play-bill of a Drury Lane melodrama. One gets from the novel, as from the play, much interest, much profit, and many moments of excitement—and one has hardly the curiosity to remember, or even to ask, who the people may be. There was another novelist of the nineteenth century who, like Charles Reade, revelled in detail-Anthony Trollope. It may well be asked why Anthony Trollope's minor characters are more easily remembered than the heroes of Charles Reade. Often as I have read the fight of the East Indiaman (in Hard Cash) with the pirates, I cannot remember the name of the indomitable captain or even the name of the victorious ship. For some reason the names of two quite unimportant Trollopian characters-Montgomerie Dobbs and Fowler Pratt-seem impossible to forget; and what is true of two is true of two hundred such. How is this? If it is a mere freak of memory it is not worth spending two minutes over; or two seconds. But it may be more than that. When Charles Reade tells us that he milks two hundred heterogeneous cows into one pail before he writes a novel he gives us our answer. To change the VOL. LIV-No. 318 U |