OUR LITERARY CORNER.

Press, Volume L, Issue 14987, 6 June 1914, Page 9

OUR LITERARY CORNER.

CHARLES READE.

DRAMATIST, NOVELIST. AND JOURNALIST.

(1314—1884.)

(grXCIALr.V WKITTEN FOR "TOE TRESS.")

(Br W. Douglass Andrews.)

Ge que nova fatsons, mon gars Mais dam '-OCors Thassvasons. "I slew him; he fell by the Wurra - Gurra river".—who that has had tho luck to make bis acquaintance can ever forget tho inimitable "Jacky," styled more sonorously "Kalingalunga" when ho was "painted war," tho one Australian blackfellow who bids fair to hold a permanent place in English fiction? But "It is Never too Late to Mend" is more than ono of tho two or three great mid-Victorian novels that keep alive the romance, the struggle, and the passion of the primitive old convict, and pastoral, and mining days which laid broad and deep the foundations of modern Australia. It is the first of Reade's novels with a purpose, the first in which his famous method, of which more anon, was applied in its full extent, It cost him, he says himself, four years of unremitting toil, and every incident in it rested on personal experience, the testimony of experts, or documentary evidence. But the four years were well spent, for the book marked the turning-point of its writer's 'career, brought him fame and fortune, and won him, almost in despite of tho critics, a leading place among the bril-

liant writers of a day when Thackeray and Dickens were still at the height of their powers., The year of publication was 1857, and when this, his first "attempt at a solid fiction," was dedicated to "the President, Fellows, and Demies of St. Mary Magdalen College, Oxford, by a grateful son of that ancient, learned, and most charitable House," Reade was a man of forty r three, and had already lived nearly two-thirds of his allotted 70 years. Born on 1 June Bth, 1814, two

years after Charles Dickons, whom he always acknowledged as his master, and One year before Anthony Trollops, who professed for him no excessive admiration, and of whom ho remarked epigrammatically that "Trollopo wrote a good deal that was interesting, and a good deal thatj was—not interesting," Charles was one of the numerous children of John Reade, squire of Ipsden . Bassett, Oxfordshire. His mother was the elder daughter of John ScottiWaring, tho agent in England of Warren Hastings, to whose "officious, and injudicious zeal," if w© may believe. Miss Burney's Diary, that great statesman largely owed his impeachment. A notable lady in her day, Mrs Read© was the friend of- Lord Chancellor Thurlow, of ' Grote, and of Wilberfbrce, the aunt of , Fabor, the hymnist and Oratoriahy.who and Newman went "over - to Rome in the critical movement of the forties, and, what was-more' to the purpose, in the good old days before university reform became a deadihg^gpre ■". - world, reckoning among her mtimates the senior Dons of Magdalen. "I,owe the larger part of what i am, to my mother," wrote Reade, referring to his „ intellectual gifts and eager teroperament, and he certainly owed her his start in life. For it was largely due to her, discreetly-exercised influence that, after nine years of preliminary training under clerical tutors, and at home, ho found, himself in his ; ©ight- ■ eenth year, elected a Demy, or scholar., of Magdalen. . For a- time Se read with vie brilliant "Bobby" 1 Lowe, who after a career in New South Wales, .'played such a leading part in English ; politics, and in due course took a Third r fit.Classics, and was elected a FeUow oT -his College, with a stipend of some ' £250 ■' a year rising by ( increments to £600, and tenable as long as he re-' raained unmarried. His mother had ' destined him for Holy Ordors, and hoped to see him a bishop before she died, but ' his first tutor, no amiable character, liad'put him out of conceit with the .Church,' and he had other views. For a moment he thought of medicine, but the operating theatre at Edinburgh /proved, more than he could stand, ariuj entering at Lincoln's Inn, he began fits studies foT the Bar, at first as if" ptTfTM of: Samuel Warren, the creator of that imniortal firm "Quirk, Gammon, and Snap." But the Bar attracted him as little as medicine or the Qhurch, though he was eventually "called," and oven proceeded D.C.L. at Oxford.

Art, music, literature, the stage, all •drew him strongly. In later years he was a well-known connoisseur, had an admirable collection of good pictures, and in "Christie Johnstone" showed an easy familiarity with art criticism. Music he practised at firs- hand, was as good a .fiddler as his own "David Dodd," as familiar with the "viol da gambo" as his jealous hero, "Griffith Gaunt." whose skill on that quaintlynamed instrument charmed both his wives, and no mean authority on violins in general, as ho showed in "A Lost Art ' Revived Cremona Violins and Varnish,"" published as late as 1873. Ho even combined his occasional"early residence in tho beautiful suito &f rooms at Magdalen he held to tho end of his life, with a mercantile venture in tho violin trade which took him to PailsTn 1848 to secure a trove of somo thirtyancient fiddles, just in time to see the "Revolution, and be an unwdling witness of the horrors enacted at tho barricade on tho Rue St. Honore. But this was more or less episodical. For during thes»f* years he became in succession Vicerian Scholar, Vinerian Fellow, Bursar, and Dean of Art* in the order of his course (when his green coat and brass buttons caused much academic scandal) and remained so far in touch with college life that, in spite of not unnatural opposition, he attained the Vice-Presidency- of Magdaler in 1851.

H«» had, of course, a country gentleman's knowledge of horse and .dog— George Feilding's "Carlo" is one of the <i«ai uogs of fiction—shot, fished, rowed, played cricket, and so laid up .unconsciously good store of material for his real work in life. He bad early fallen a victim to the attraction of the, stage, been fired with the ambition which never deserted him to write plays of his own, was widely read in French and English dramatic literature, and was on terms of easy intimacy with liis

ORIGINAL AND SELECTED MATTER.

NOTES ON BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Greek and Latin classics, as became a Don. He had even begun that'laborious accumulation of material from newspapers, books, and reports of Royal Commissions, which, classified and arranged in ledgers with an elaborate system of indexes and cross-references, has made him tho envy and despair, of less methodical writers. And he had contrived to learn his London, and by occasional excursions into Scotland had acquired the mastery of dialect he shows in "Christie Johnstone," and found timo to get a first-hand knowledge of the fishing trade, and by actual experience ensure the accuracy of tho Kip:•resoue descriptions he gives of the redoubtable "Flacker" and of the Newhaven fisher folk by land and sea. In short, the man was a genius, and when ho seemed to be merely at random and wasting his life ? was ail r.he timo undergoing the varied training essential to his success. Tantaa molid I erat Readianam condere artem. Between 1851 and 1853 he wrote and contrived to get accepted several plays, son>c adapted from tho French; one, "Gold," a melodramatic anticipation of his great Australian noyel and play; and one-, the greatest success of all, his "Masks and Faces," written in collaboration with Tom Taylor, the wellknown dramatist and editor of "Punch," which still holds its place in tho theatre*.' It was "Masks and Faces" which brought him into touch with Laura Seymour, an actress whom he had admired many years earlier on tha Edinburgh stage, and with whom ho was to form the closest and most inspiring friendship of his life. By ncr ad vie; he reversed the usual process, and turned his play into the story of "Peg Woffington." A more perfect story of its class, the comedy of manners', it would be difficult to .fird. avd no less an authority than tae late Air Andrew Lang was inclined to regard it as his most finished work. "Christie Johnstone," an idyll of Nature, witn a touch of burlesque, as "Peg Woffington" is an idyll of art with a hint of tragedy.' followed, and miblished hv. Bentley, the two books won immediate success, and brought their fortunate author tho sum of £60! Litigation followed, which absorbed upwards ot £200 in costs, and it looked as if nnancial success was not yet in sight. In fact, as Reado tells us himself, at tho ago of 39, after eighteen years devoted to tho study of the dramatic art, ho had earned by tho pen "in all one hundred and five pounds. That is to say, about half-a-crown a week—not enough to pay for pens, ink, and paper, leaving copying and shoe-leather out of the question." There is consolation in this for unsuccessful authors, especially ft", like Reade, they happen to possess an independent income, and a generous and wealthy mother to see them through! More plays, a venture in joint-man-agement, no change of luck, and,then urged on by the sound advice of Laura Seymour, into whoso husband's Bohemian household he had now entered as a .permanent membor, and inspired by "a noble passage in 'The Times' of September 7th or Bth, 1853," he plunged heartland 6oulinto his four years' our oh "It is Never too..Late to Mend."-On that book and its brilliant success we have already touched. It is a painful book to read, for exquisite as are many of *its episodes, the core of the book is the almost brutally realistic presentment of the "abuses towhicb! lack of imagination", andVthe numbing influence of cut-and-dried opinions repeated parrot-wise—"formulas," R«ade calls th"em—had led in . contemporary prison life. "Charles Reade had a kind of cold 'coarseness about: him j nofc-mor? ally, but artistically, which 1 keeps him out of the best literature as such, bat ho is of importance to the Victorian development iii another way: because he has the harsher and more tragic note that has come layer ih the study of our social problems;. He is-the first of the angry ''reahsts.,'/. Bating the "cold coarseness," an unhappy .phrase into the use-of which, Mr Chesterton was probably led by his lust for alliterar tion, and allowing.-. for the fact that KinjifiJe.y's,--"Alton k Locke" antedated Reade's book -,by." eight- years, that !s sound criticism. Road© was an angry realist, because he was a man of sensitive mind, large-hearted, generous, impulsive, intensely resentful of -oowardico, cruelty, and that gross stupidity which is too often a cloak of maliciousness;, and always ready to take tip tho. cudgels for the weak and helpless. The convict brutalised by black-hole, crank, and treadmill, and the evil, silent system which, harshly enforced, must overthrow men's reason; the unhappy vietem of the private lunatic asylum: the sailor sent to drown in unseaworthy ships.; the inventor penalised by patent laws which drained his pockets, wasted his -time, and harassed him into despair; the working man terrorised by- unions; the employer victimised by "rattening," or compelled to submit to the dictation of secret societies working underground; tho girl eager.for University training, and debarred by traditional convention and male jealousy—each and all found in him a fearless and outspoken champion. In "Hard Cash" (18G3) and "A Terrible Temptation" (1871), he ruthlessly attacks the abuses of private asylums, 'and heaps scorn upon those ' medical men - who lent themselves to bolstering up a system so iniquitous as then obtained. In "Foul Play" (1868), written in collaboration *with his friend Dion Boucicault. the ship-knackers come under tho lash. In "Put Yourself in His Place" (1870), the cowardly methods of the earlier Unionism, harsher to'individuals but less inimical to society at large, than the Syndicalism of to-day. are dragged into the light. In "A Woman-Hater" (1877)— a hook which cost John Blackwood, who published it, some uneasy moments, as his daughter relates in her charming contribution to the "Annals of a Publishing House — he ridicules the attitude of the medical schools to female aspirants, and the exclusion of women from the Botany lectures for fear "the mild lustre of science should be cast over the natural disposition of young women towards Folyandria niouogynia," . . , No doubt there is occasional over statement, a satire now and then overstepping bounds, an accumulation of images of horror, too melodramatic for a critical tasto. a tendency to break the interest of a story in the desperate effort, to drive home its moral, bucn things are inevitable. But the average man, and woman, too, for that matter, has a way of drifting through .life careless of others, so his own skin be safe. And Reade brought all his great dramatic power to'boar to break through that selfish indifference, and force even tho most apathetic into some partial realisation of the needless suffering their apathy permitted to exist. Fiction to him was a means rather than an end. and by compelling attention to what went on behind walls and under tho surface; he did yeoman s service in "the cause of reform. His purse was always open to tho unfortunate, and he was as lavish of his tithe as of his- money. Any man in-' need had a claim on him. set apart a regular time every afternoon 'to, go into their cases, and offer such consolation, assistance or advice as. lay in his power.* For'life, he heldj was. a greater thing-than art, ha measure and decree he acted in the spirit of -Vlilton's noble words that "he who would not be frustrate of his hope to writejvell in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem." But these things aro written at

largo in every account of Reade's life, ana you can find his own portrait of himself in.his habit as he lived in the impetuous "Dr. fc&mpson," the amiable egoist of "Hard Cash/ or at fuller length in "Mr Rolie," author, philanthropist, and educational theorist, in "A Terrible-Temptation." 'Viere are other points whicu must be dealt with. His friend, John Coleman, tho actormanager, has told, with a painful lack of compression or coherent method, the story of his dealings with tho theatre, the plays that he wrote, the success that he won, his frequent failures, disappointments, irrational grievances, resentment of criticism, quarrels and Jawsuits. On that side which brings him into contact with the English stage for more than a quarter of a- century, it is impossible to do more than touch in passing. His work as man of letters demands further treatment. In that work there were qualities which should win him an enduring place. He has the slaving grace of a humour, sometimes grim enough, and a scholar's delicate tact in using words. His children arc real children, and the ingenuous writer of tho "pleasing composition" on' the inevitable fate of '-.Mr Dod" in "Love Mc Little, Love Mc Long"—a title truly horrible —is almost worthy of a piace beside Henry Kingsley's matchless trio in "Ravenshoe." No male writer has shown clearer insight, or niore deiicate and chivalrous sympathy, in delineating girls and women, and the best of his men are,as virile as his women are womanly. Few surpass him in power of scenic description, or in the rendering of the great everyday processes of Nature with that magical heightening which reveals the mystery in the commonplace. Very few even approach him in narrative skill. Swinburne, who wrote in "The Nineteenth Century" a few months after > his death what still remains the classical study of his literary work, did not scruple to call him "by far tho greatest master oP narrative whom our country lias produced since the death of Scott. These superb chapters in "Hard Cash" , which tell how "David Dodd" brought the Indiaman "Agra" safe through a thousand perils, only to sco her thrown away on tho French coast by the incompetent bully who superseded him, stand almost unrivalled in the romance of the sea. And the man who could write "The Cloister and tho Hearth" lias surely good grounds for claiming a place among the masters. For that book is a veritable triumph of unwearied industry and masterly skill. In it the fifteenth century, as has often been said, lives again in cross section, and what is perhaps better, in it lives again in the vivid scenes in the inns of France and Germany, in the petty or squalid details of cloister life, in the breathless story of the shipwreck, those wonderful dramatic colloquies of Desidorius Erasmus which are worth the pains of learning Latin only to read. Yet when all is ?aid, with the possible exception of "Peg Woffington" and "The Autobiography of a Thief"— writings as far asunder as the Poles in method and "intentiou—there is no single book of all that he has written which would not bear the pruningknife. The dramatist and the Journalist have too often overpowered the novelist. For to the end of hi<? life, he who so loved his classics, and had their pregnant phrases so often on his pen. never thoroughly mastered the spirit of that wise Greek saw. "How much tho half is greater than the whole."