My Contemporaries In Fiction | Page 4

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, It gets into everything. We are
weary of the ceaseless resurrections of that once so toothsome dish.
Take it away.

The original pie is no worse and no better, but thousands of cooks have
had the recipe 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.
But this principle of judgment applies of necessity to all great work in
art. It does not apply to merely good work, for that is nearly always
imitative, and therefore not much provocative of imitation. It happens
sometimes that an imitator, to the undiscerning reader, may even seem
better than the man he mimics, because he has a modern touch. But
remember, in his time the master also was a modern.
The new man says of Dickens that his sentiment rings false. This is a
mistake. It rings old-fashioned. No 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. 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' 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.

II.--CHARLES READE
Reade'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,
fellow-workers 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