My Contemporaries In Fiction | Page 7

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 wanderings 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. He 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 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.'
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 way, 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 of 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 fount of type, and rigorously to deny him the use
(except in their accustomed and orthodox places) of capitals, small
capitals, and italics. And I cannot think that any irreverence could be
charged against an editor who had the courage to put a moist pen
through those expressions of egotism and naive self-satisfaction and
vanity which do occasionally disfigure his pages.
I ask myself if these trifles--for in comparison with the sum of Reade's
genius they are small things indeed--can in any reasonable measure

account for the neglect which undoubtedly besets him. In narrative
vigour he has but one rival--Dumas père--and he is far and away the
master of that rival in everything