My Contemporaries In Fiction | Page 6

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 are ignorant
as dirt.' It was quite true, but another kind of man would have found
another way of saying it.
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. To 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 mediaeval Rome, and wherever the narrative leads you,
the searchlight 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 the closing paragraphs of this great work, nor--with some
naïve 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.

* It is worth while to record here a phrase used by Charles Reade to me
in reference to this work. He was rebutting the charge of plagiarism
which had been brought against him, and he said laughingly, 'It is true
that I milked three hundred cows into my bucket, but the butter I
churned was my own.'
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.