Chapter XV: Part 15

Mr. Ruskin's devotion to Carlyle has been unfortunate for him, as it has for so many others. For that which is reality in Carlyle is only echo and imitation in Ruskin, and the latter has power enough and a field wide enough of his own to render inexcusable the attempt to follow slavishly another man. Moreover, Carlyle's utterances, right or wrong, have meaning and practical application; but when Ruskin repeats them they become meaningless and inapplicable. Mr. Ruskin endeavoring to apply Carlyle's dogmas to the business of art and social life and politics often reminds one of the humorous Hindoo story of the Gooroo Simple and his followers, who went through life making the most outrageous blunders, because they would insist on the literal application of their traditional maxims of wisdom to every common incident of existence. When a self-conceited man ever consents to make another man his idol, even his very self-conceit only tends to render him more awkwardly and unconditionally devoted and servile. The amount of nonsense that Ruskin has talked and written, under the evident conviction that thus and not otherwise would Thomas Carlyle have dealt with the subject, is something almost inconceivable. I never heard of Ruskin taking up any political question without being on the wrong side of it. I am not merely speaking of what I personally consider the wrong side; I am alluding to questions which history and hard fact and the common voice and feeling of humanity have since decided. Against every movement to give political freedom to his countrymen, against every movement to do common justice to the negro race, against every effort to secure fair play for a democratic cause, Mr. Ruskin has peremptorily arrayed himself. "I am a Kingsman and no Mobsman," he declares; and this declaration seems in his mind to settle the question and to justify his vindication of every despotism of caste or sovereignty. To this has his doctrine of aesthetic moral law, to this has his worship of Carlyle, conducted him.

For myself, I doubt whether Mr. Ruskin has any great qualities but his eloquence, and his true, honest love of Nature. As a man to stand up before a society of which one part was fashionably languid and the other part only too busy and greedy, and preach to it of Nature's immortal beauty and of the true way to do her reverence, I think Ruskin had and has a place almost worthy the dignity of a prophet. I think, too, that he has the capacity to fill the place, to fulfil its every duty. Surely this ought to be enough for the work and for the praise of any man. But the womanish restlessness of Ruskin's temperament, combined with the extraordinary self-sufficiency which contributed so much to his success when he was master of a subject, sent him perpetually intruding into fields where he was unfit to labor, and enterprises which he had no capacity to conduct. No man has ever contradicted himself so often, so recklessly, so complacently, as Mr. Ruskin has done. It is absurd to call him a great critic even in art, for he seldom expresses any opinion one day without flatly contradicting it the next. He is a great writer, as Rousseau was--fresh, eloquent, audacious, writing out of the fulness of the present mood, and heedless how far the impulse of to-day may contravene that of yesterday; but as Rousseau was always faithful to his idea of Truth, so Ruskin is ever faithful to Nature. When all his errors and paradoxes and contradictions shall have been utterly forgotten, this his great praise will remain: No man since Wordsworth's brightest days ever did half so much to teach his countrymen, and those who speak his language, how to appreciate and honor that silent Nature which "never did betray the heart that loved her."

CHARLES READE.

A few days ago I came by chance upon an old number of an illustrated publication which made a rather brilliant start in London four or five years since, but died, I believe, not long after. It sprang up when there was a sudden rage in England for satirical portraits of eminent persons, and it really showed some skill and humor in this not very healthful or dignified department of art. This number of which I speak has a humorous cartoon called "Companions of the Bath," and representing a miscellaneous crowd of the celebrated men and women of the day enjoying a plunge in the waves at Havre, Dieppe, or some other French bathing-place. There are Gladstone and Disraeli; burly Alexandre Dumas and small, fragile Swinburne; Tennyson and Longfellow; Christine Nilsson and Adelina Patti, the two latter looking very pretty in their tunics and _calecons_. Most of the likenesses are good, and the attitudes are often characteristic and droll. Mr. Spurgeon flounders and puffs wildly in the waves; Gladstone cleaves his way sternly and earnestly; Mario floats with easy grace. One group at present attracts very special attention. It represents a big, heavy, gray-headed man, ungainly of appearance, whom a smaller personage, bald and neat, is pushing off a plank into the water. The smaller man is Dion Boucicault; the larger is Mr. Charles Reade. This was the time when Reade and Boucicault were working together in "Foul Play." The insinuation of the artist evidently was that Boucicault, always ready for any plunge into the waves of sensationalism, had to give a push to his hesitating companion in order to impel him to the decisive "header."

The artist has been evidently unjust to Mr. Reade. Indeed, one can hardly help suspecting that there must have been some little personal grievance which the pencil was employed to pay off, after the fashion threatened more than once by Hogarth. Mr. Reade is not an Adonis, but this attempt at his likeness is cruelly grotesque and extravagant. Charles Reade is a big, heavy, rugged, gray man; a sort of portlier Walt Whitman, but with closer-cut hair and beard; a Walt Whitman, let us say, put into training for the part of a stout British vestryman. He impresses you at once as a man of character, energy, and originality, although he is by no means the sort of person you would pick out as a typical romancist. But the artist who has delineated him in this cartoon, and who has dealt so fairly, albeit humorously, with Tennyson and Swinburne and Longfellow, must surely have had some spite against the author of "Peg Woffington" when he depicted him as a sort of huge human gorilla. It is in fact for this reason only that I have thought it worth while to introduce an allusion to such a caricature. The caricature is in itself illustrative of my subject. It helps to introduce an inevitable allusion to a weakness of Mr. Charles Reade's which makes for him many enemies and satirists among minor authors, critics, and artists in London. To a wonderful energy and virility of genius and temperament Charles Reade adds a more than feminine susceptibility and impatience when criticism attempts to touch him. With a faith in his own capacity and an admiration for his own works such as never were surpassed in literary history, he can yet be rendered almost beside himself by a disparaging remark from the obscurest critic in the corner of the poorest provincial newspaper. There is no pen so feeble anywhere but it can sting Charles Reade into something like delirium. He replies to every attack, and he discovers a personal enemy in every critic. Therefore he is always in quarrels, always assailing this man and being assailed by that, and to the very utmost of his power trying to prevent the public from appreciating or even recognizing the wealth of genuine manhood, truth, and feeling, which is bestowed everywhere in the rugged ore of his strange and paradoxical character. I am not myself one of Mr. Reade's friends, or even acquaintances; but from those who are, and whom I know, I have always heard the one opinion of the sterling integrity, kindness, and trueheartedness of the man who so often runs counter to all principles of social amenity, and whose bursts of impulsive ill-humor have offended many who would fain have admired.

I said once before in the pages of "The Galaxy," when speaking of another English novelist, that Charles Reade seems to me to rank more highly in America than he does in England. It is only of quite recent years that English criticism of the higher class has treated him with anything like fair consideration. There was a long time of Reade's growing popularity during which such criticism declined altogether to regard him _au serieux_. Even now he has not justice done to him. But if I cannot help believing that Mr. Reade rates himself far too highly, and announces his opinion far too frankly, neither can I help thinking that English criticism in general fails to do him justice. For a long time he had to struggle hard to obtain a mere recognition. He had during part of his early career the good sense, or the spirit, or the misfortune, according as people choose to view it, to write in one of the popular weekly journals of London which correspond somewhat with the "New York Ledger." I think Charles Dickens described Reade as the one only man with a genuine literary reputation who at that time had ventured upon such a performance. There are indeed men now of undoubted rank in literature who began their career with work like this; but they did not put their names to it, and the world was never the wiser. Reade worked boldly and worked his best, and put his own name to it; and therefore the London press for some time regarded or affected to regard him as an author of that class whose genius supplies weekly instalments of sensation and tremendously high life, to delight the servant girls of Islington and the errand boys of the City. Long after the issue of some of the finest novels Reade has written, the annual publication called "Men of the Time" contained no notice of the author. The odd thing about this is that Reade is an author of the very class which English criticisms of the kind I allude to ought to have delighted to encourage. In the reaction against literary Bohemianism, which of late years has grown up in England, and which the "Saturday Review" may be said to have inaugurated, it became the whim and fashion to believe that only gentlemen with university degrees, only "blood and culture," as the cant phrase was, could write anything which gentlemanly persons could find it worth their while to read. The "Saturday Review" for a long time affected to treat Dickens as a good-humored and vulgar buffoon, with a gift of genius to delight the lower classes. It usually regarded Thackeray as a person made for better things, who had forfeited his position as a gentleman and a university man by descending to literature and to lectures. Now Charles Reade is what in the phraseology of English _caste_ would be called a gentleman. He is of good English family; he is a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a man of culture and scholarship. His reading, and especially his classical acquirements, I presume to be far wider and deeper than those of Thackeray, who, it need hardly be said, was as Porson or Parr when compared with Dickens. Altogether Reade seems to have been the sort of man whom the "Saturday Review," for example, ought to have taken promptly up and patted on the back and loftily patronized. But nothing of the sort occurred. Reade was treated merely as the clever, audacious concocter of sensational stories. He was hardly dealt with as an artist at all. The reviews only began to come round when they discovered that the public were positively with the new and stirring romancist. What renders this more curious is the fact that the earlier novels were incomparably more highly finished works of art than their successors. "Peg Woffington" and "Christie Johnstone"--the former published so long ago as 1852--seem almost perfect in their symmetry and beauty. "The Cloister and the Hearth" might well-nigh have persuaded a reader that a new Walter Scott was about to arise on the horizon of our literature. All the more recent works seem crude and rough by comparison. They ought to have been the vigorous, uncouth, undisciplined efforts of the author's earlier years. They ought to have led up to the "Cloister and the Hearth" and "Peg Woffington," instead of succeeding them. Yet, if I am not greatly mistaken, it was while he was publishing those earlier and finer products of his fresh intellect that Charles Reade was especially depreciated and even despised by what is called high-class English criticism. He never indeed has had much for which to thank the English critics, and he has never been slow to express his peculiar sense of obligation; but assuredly they treated with greater respect the works which will be soonest forgotten than those on which he may perhaps rest a claim to a more enduring reputation.

The general public, however, soon began to find him out. "Peg Woffington" was a decided success. Its dramatic adaptation is still one of the favorite pieces of the English stage. "It is Never Too Late to Mend" set everybody talking. Reade began to devote himself to exposing this or that social and legal grievance calling for reform, and people came to understand that a new branch of the art of novel-writing was in process of development, the special gift of which was to convert a Parliamentary blue-book into a work of fiction. The treatment of criminals in prisons and in far-off penal settlements, the manner in which patients are dealt with in private lunatic asylums, became the main subject and backbone of the new style of novel, instead of the misunderstandings of lovers, the trials of honest poverty, or the struggles for ascendancy in the fashionable circles of Belgravia. Mr. Reade undoubtedly stands supreme and indeed alone in work of this kind. No man but he can make a blue-book live and yet be a blue-book still. When Dickens undertook some special and practical question, we all knew that we had to look for lavish outpouring of humor, fancy, and eccentricity, for generous pathos, and for a sentimental misapplication or complete elimination of the actual facts. Miss Martineau made dry little stories about political economy; and Disraeli's "Sibyl" is only a fashionable novel and a string of tracts bound up together and called by one name. But Reade takes the hard and naked facts as he finds them in some newspaper or in the report of some Parliamentary commission, and he so fuses them into the other material whereof his romance is to be made up that it would require a chemical analysis to separate the fiction from the reality. You are not conscious that you are going through the boiled-down contents of a blue-book. You have no aggrieved sense of being entrapped into the dry details of some harassing social question. The reality reads like romance; the romance carries you along like reality. No author ever indulged in a fairer piece of self-glorification than that contained in the last sentence of "Put Yourself in his Place": "I have taken a few undeniable truths out of many, and have labored to make my readers realize those appalling facts of the day which most men know, but not one in a thousand comprehends, and not one in a hundred thousand realizes, until fiction--which, whatever you may have been told to the contrary, is the highest, widest, noblest, and greatest of all the arts--comes to his aid, studies, penetrates, digests the hard facts of chronicles and blue-books, and makes their dry bones live." To this object, to this kind of work, Reade seems to have deliberately purposed to devote himself. It was evidently in accordance with his natural tastes and sympathies. He is a man of exuberant and irrepressible energy. He must be doing something definite always. He did actually bestir himself in the case of a person whom he believed to be unjustly confined in a lunatic asylum, as energetically as he makes Dr. Sampson do in "Hard Cash," and with equal success. Most of the scenes he describes, in England at least, have thus in some way fallen in to be part of his own experience. Whatever he undertakes to do he does with a tremendous earnestness. His method of workmanship is, I believe, something like that of Mr. Wilkie Collins, but of course the object is totally different. Wilkie Collins collects all the remarkable police cases and other judicial narratives he can find, and makes what Jean Paul Richter called "quarry" of them--a vast accumulation of materials in which to go digging for subjects and illustrations at leisure. Charles Reade does the same with blue-books and the reports of official inquiries. The author of the "Dead Secret" is looking for perplexing little mysteries of human crime; the author of "Hard Cash" for stories of legal or social wrong to be redressed. I need hardly say, perhaps, that I rank Charles Reade high above Wilkie Collins. The latter can string his dry bones on wires with remarkable ingenuity; the former can, as he fairly boasts, make the dry bones live.

Meanwhile, let us follow out the progress of Mr. Charles Reade as a literary influence. He grows to have a distinct place and power in England quite independently of the reviewers, and at last the very storm of controversy which his books awaken compels the reviewers themselves to take him into account. "It is Never Too Late to Mend" raised a clamor among prison disciplinarians. Years after its publication it is brought out as a drama in London, and its first appearance creates a sort of riot in the Princess's Theatre. Hostile critics rise in the stalls and denounce it; supporters and admirers vehemently defend it; speeches are made on either side. Mr. Reade plunges into the arena of controversy a day or two after in the newspapers, assails one of the critics by name, and charges him with having denounced the piece in the theatre, and applauded his own denunciation in the journal for which he wrote. Some friend of the critic replies by the assertion that one of Mr. Reade's most enthusiastic literary supporters is Mr. Reade's own nephew. All this sort of thing is dreadfully undignified, but it brings an author at all events into public notice, and it did for Mr. Reade what I am convinced he would have disdained to do consciously--it "puffed" his books. An amusing story is told in connection with the production of this drama. An East End manager thought of bringing it out. (The East End, I need hardly say, is the lower and poorer quarter of London.) This manager came and studied the piece as produced at the West End. One of the strong scenes, the sensation scene, was a realistic exhibition of prison discipline. The West End had been duly impressed and thrilled with this scene. But the East End manager shook his head. "It would never do for _me_," he said despondingly to a friend. "Not like the real thing at all. _My_ gallery would never stand it. Bless you, my fellows know the real thing too well to put up with _that_."

In this, as in other cases, Mr. Reade's hot temper, immense self-conceit, and eager love of controversy plunged him into discussions from which another man would have shrunk with disgust. He went so far on one occasion as to write to the editor of a London daily paper, threatening that if his books were not more fairly dealt with he would order his publisher to withdraw his advertisements from the offending journal. One can fancy what terror the threat of a loss of a few shillings a month would have had upon the proprietors of a flourishing London paper, and the amount of ridicule to which the bare suggestion of such a thing exposed the irritable novelist. But Reade was, and probably is, incurable. He would keep pelting his peppery little notes at the head of any and everybody against whom he fancied that he had a grievance. I remember one peculiarly whimsical illustration of this weakness, which found its way into print some years ago in London, but which perhaps will be quite new in the United States, and I cannot resist the temptation to reproduce it. Once upon a time, it would seem from the correspondence, Mr. Reade wrote a play called "Gold," which was produced at Drury Lane Theatre. Except from this correspondence I own that I never heard of the play. Subsequently, Mr. Reade presented himself one night at the stage-door of Drury Lane Theatre, and was refused admittance. Mr. Charles Mathews was then performing at the theatre, and Mr. Reade evidently supposed him to have been the manager and responsible for all the arrangements. Therefore he addressed his complaint to the incomparable light comedian, who is as renowned for easy sparkling humor and wit off the stage as for brilliant acting on it. Here is the correspondence; and we shall see how much Mr. Reade took by his motion:

GARRICK CLUB, COVENT GARDEN, November 28.

DEAR SIR: I was stopped the other night at the stage-door of Drury
Lane Theatre by people whom I remember to have seen at the Lyceum
under your reign.

This is the first time such an affront was ever put upon me in any
theatre where I had produced a play, and is without precedent
unless when an affront was intended. As I never forgive an affront,
I am not hasty to suppose one intended. It is very possible that
this was done inadvertently; and the present stage-list may have
been made out without the older claims being examined.

Will you be so kind as to let me know at once whether this is so,
and if the people who stopped me at the stage-door are yours, will
you protect the author of "Gold," etc., from any repetition of such
an annoyance?

I am, dear sir, yours faithfully,
CHARLES READE.

To this imperious demand Mr. Reade received next day the following genial answer:

T. R., DRURY LANE, November 29.

DEAR SIR: If ignorance is bliss on general occasions, on the
present it certainly would be folly to be wise. I am therefore
happy to be able to inform you that I am ignorant of your having
produced a play at this theatre; ignorant that you are the author
of "Gold"; ignorant of the merits of that play; ignorant that your
name has been erased from the list at the stage-door; ignorant that
it had ever been on it; ignorant that you had presented yourself
for admittance; ignorant that it had been refused; ignorant that
such a refusal was without precedent; ignorant that in the man who
stopped you you recognized one of the persons lately with me at the
Lyceum; ignorant that the doorkeeper was ever in that theatre;
ignorant that you never forgive an affront; ignorant that any had
been offered; ignorant of when, how, or by whom the list was made
out, and equally so by whom it was altered.

Allow me to add that I am quite incapable of offering any
discourtesy to a gentleman I have barely the pleasure of knowing,
and moreover have no power whatever to interfere with Mr. Smith's
arrangements or disarrangements; and, with this wholesale admission
of ignorance, incapacity, and impotence, believe me

Faithfully yours,
C. T. MATHEWS.

CHARLES READE, ESQ.

The correspondence got into print somehow, and created, I need hardly say, infinite merriment in the literary clubs and circles of London. Not all disputes with Charles Reade ended so humorously, for the British novelist is as fond of actions at law as Fenimore Cooper used to be. Thus more than one critic has had to dread the terrors of an action for damages when he has ventured in a rash moment to disparage the literary value of Mr. Reade's teaching. Lately, however, in the case of the "Times," and its attack on "A Terrible Temptation," Mr. Reade adopted the unexpected tone of mild and even flattering remonstrance. Whether he thought it hopeless to alarm the "Times" by any threat of action, or feared that if he wrote a savage letter the journal would not even give him the comfort of seeing it in print, I do not know. But he certainly took a meek tone and endeavored to propitiate, and got rather coarsely rebuked for his pains. People in London were amused to find that he could be thus mild and gentle. I do remember, however, that on one occasion he wrote a letter of remonstrance, which was probably intended to be a kind of rugged compliment to the "Saturday Review," a paper which likewise cares nothing about actions for damages. Usually, however, his tone of argument with his critics is perfervid, and his estimate of himself is exquisitely candid. In one of his manifestoes he assured the world that he never allowed a publisher to offer any suggestions with regard to his story, but simply sold the manuscript in bulk--"_c'est a prendre ou a laisser_." In another instance he spoke of one of his novels as "floating" the serial publication in which it was making its appearance, and which we were therefore given to understand would have sunk to the bottom but for his cooeperation. In short, it is well known in London that Mr. Charles Readers character is disfigured by a self-conceit which amounts to something like mania, and an impatience of criticism which occasionally makes him all but a laughing-stock to the public. Rarely, indeed, in literary history have high and genuine talents been united with such a flatulence of self-conceit.

Probably Reade had reached his highest position just after the publication of "Hard Cash." This remarkable novel, crammed with substance enough to make half a dozen novels, appeared in the first instance in Dickens's "All the Year Round." Dickens himself, if I remember rightly, felt bound to publish a note disclaiming any concurrence in or personal responsibility for the attacks on the private madhouse system, and the whole subject aroused a very lively controversy, wherein, I think, Reade certainly was not worsted. The "Griffith Gaunt" controversy we all remember. I confess that I have no sympathy whatever with the kind of criticism which treats any of Mr. Reade's works as immoral in tendency, and I think the charge was even more absurd when urged against "Griffith Gaunt" than when pressed against the "Terrible Temptation." To me the clear tendency of Reade's novels seems always healthy, purifying, and bracing, like a fresh, strong breeze. I cannot understand how any man or woman could be the worse for reading one of them. They are always novels with a purpose, and I, at least, never could discern any purpose in them which was not honest and sound. I feel inclined to excuse all Reade's vehemence of self-vindication and childish frankness of self-praise when I read some of the attacks against what people try to paint as the immorality of his books. But I need not go into that controversy. Enough to say for my own part that I found "Griffith Gaunt" a grim and dreary book--a tiresome book, in fact; but I saw nothing in it which could with any justice be said to have the slightest tendency to demoralize any reader. I have indeed heard people who are in general fair critics condemn "Adam Bede" as immoral because Hetty is seduced; and I have even heard poor Maggie Tulliver rated as unfit for decent society because she ever allowed even a moment's thought of her cousin's engaged lover to enter her mind. On this principle, doubtless, "Griffith Gaunt" is immoral. There are people in the book who commit sin, and yet are not eaten by lions or bodily carried down below like Don Juan. But if we are to have novels made up only of good people who always do right and the one stock villain who always does wrong, I think the novelist's art cannot too soon be delegated to its only fitting province--the amusement of the nursery. "Griffith Gaunt," however, I regard as a falling off, because it is a sour, unpleasant, and therefore inartistic book. "Foul Play" was a clever _tour de force_, a brilliant thing, made to sell, with hardly more character in it than would suffice for a Bowery melodrama. "Put Yourself in his Place" was a wholesome return to the former style, a marrowy, living blue-book, instinct with power and passion. "A Terrible Temptation" I do not admire. I do not think it immoral, but it hardly calls for any deliberate criticism. Since "Hard Cash" Mr. Reade has, in my opinion, written only one novel which the literary world will care to preserve, and even that one, "Put Yourself in his Place," can hardly be said to add one cubit to his stature.

Mr. Reade has, I believe, rather a passion for dramatic enterprise, and a characteristic faith in his power to turn out a good drama. A season or two back he hired, I am told, a London theatre, in order to have the complete superintendence of the production of one of his novels turned into a drama. I have been assured that the dramatic version was accomplished entirely by himself. If so, I am sure no enemy could have more cruelly damaged the original work. All the character was completely sponged out of it. The one really effective and original personage in the novel did not appear in the play. A number of the most antique and conventional melodramatic situations and surprises were crammed into the piece. All the silly old stage business about mysterious conspiracies carried on under the very ear of the identical personage who never ought to have been allowed to hear them are called in to form an essential feature of the drama. The play, of course, was not successful, although the novel had in it naturally all the elements of a stirring and powerful drama. If Charles Reade really with his own hand converted a vigorous and thrilling story into that limp, languid, and vapid play, it was surely the most awful warning against amateur dramatic enterprise that ever self-conceit could receive undismayed.

Of course we won't rank Mr. Reade as one of the most popular novelists now in England. But his popularity is something very different indeed from that of Dickens, or even from that of Thackeray. In Forster's "Life of Dickens" there is a letter of the great novelist's in which he complains of having been treated (by Bentley, I think) no better than any author who had sold but fifteen hundred copies. I should think the occasions were very rare when Mr. Reade's circulation in England went much beyond fifteen hundred copies. The whole system of publishing is so different in England from that which prevails in America, our fictitious prices and the controlling monopoly of our great libraries so restrict and limit the sale, that a New York reader would perhaps hardly believe how small a number constitute a good circulation for an English novelist. I assume that, speaking roughly, Reade, Wilkie Collins, and Trollope may be said to have about the same kind of circulation--almost immeasurably below Dickens, and below some such abnormal sale as that of "Lothair" or "Lady Audley's Secret," but much above even the best of the younger novelists. I venture to think that not one of these three popular and successful authors may be counted on to reach a circulation of two thousand copies. Probably about eighteen hundred copies would be a decidedly good thing for one of Charles Reade's novels. Of the three, I should say that Wilkie Collins has the most eager readers; that Trollope's novels take the highest place in what is called "society"; and that Reade's rank the best among men of brains. But there is so wide a difference between the popularity of Dickens and that of Reade that it seems almost absurd to employ the same word to describe two things so utterly unlike. It is, indeed, a remarkable proof of Reade's power and success that, setting out as he always does to tell a story which shall convey information and a purpose of some practical kind, he can get any sort of large circulation at all. For one great charm and excellence of our library system is that it creates a huge class of regular, I might almost say professional, novel-readers, who subscribe to Mudie's by the year, want to get all the reading they can out of it, and instinctively shudder at the thought of any novel that is weighted by solid information and overtaxing thought. This is the class for whom and by whom the circulating libraries exist, and Mr. Reade deserves the full credit of having utterly disregarded them, or rather boldly encountered them, and at least to some extent compelled them to read him.

Mr. Reade's position as a novelist may be adjudged now as safely as ever a novelist's place can be fixed by a contemporary generation. He is nearly sixty years old, and he has written about a dozen novels. It is not likely that he will ever write anything which could greatly enhance the estimate the public have already formed of him; and no future failures could affect his past success. I think his career is, therefore, fairly and fully before us. We know how singularly limited his _dramatis personae_ are. He marches them on and off the stage boldly ever so often, and by a change of dresses every now and then he for a while almost succeeds in making us believe that he has a very full company at his command. But we soon get to know every one by sight, and can swear to him or her, no matter by what name or garb disguised. We know the sweet, impulsive, incoherent heroine, who is always contradicting herself and saying what she ought not to say and does not mean to say; who now denounces the hero, and then falls upon his neck and vows that she loves him more than life. This young woman is sometimes Julia and sometimes Helen and sometimes Grace; she now is exiled for a while on a lonely island, and even she is carried away by a flood; but in every case she is just the same girl rescued by the same hero. That hero is always a being of wonderful mechanical and scientific knowledge of some kind or other, whether as Captain Dodd he makes love to Lucy Fountain, or as Henry Little he captivates Grace Carden, or as the gentleman in "Foul Play" he cures the heroine of consumption and builds island huts better than Robinson Crusoe. Then we have the rough, clever, eccentric personage, Dr. Sampson or Dr. Amboyne, whose business principally is to act a part like that of Herr Mittler in Goethe's novel, and help the characters of the book through every difficulty. Then we have the white-livered sneak, the villain of the book when he is bad enough for such a part; the Coventry of "Put Yourself in his Place"; I forget what his name is in "Foul Play." These are the puppets which principally make up the show. Very vigorously and cleverly do they dance, and capitally do they imitate life; but there are so very few of them that we grow a little tired of seeing them over and over again. Indeed, Charles Reade's array of characters sometimes reminds us of the simple system of Plautus, in which we have for every play the same types of people--the rather stingy father, the embarrassed lover, the clever comic slave, and so forth. It cannot be said that Reade has added a single character to fiction. He understands human nature, or at least such types of it as he habitually selects, very well, and he draws vigorously his figures and groups; but he has discovered nothing fresh, he has rescued no existence from the commonplace and evanescent realistics of life, to be preserved immortal in a work of art. Not one of his characters is cited in ordinary conversation or in the writings of journalists. Nobody quotes from him unless in reference to some one of the stirring social topics which he has illustrated, and even then only as one would quote from a correspondent of the "Times." Every educated man and woman in England is assumed, as a matter of course, to be familiar with the works of George Eliot; but nobody is necessarily assumed to have read Charles Reade. That educated people do read him and do admire him is certain; but it is quite a matter of option with them to read him or let him alone so far as society and public opinion are concerned. There are certain tests and evidences of a novelist's having attained a front-rank place in England which are unmistakable. They are purely social, may be only superficial, and will neither one way nor the other affect the views of foreign critics or of posterity; but they are decisive as far as England is concerned. Among them I shall mention two or three. One is the fact that writers in the press allude to some of his characters without feeling bound to explain in whose novel and what novel the characters appear. Another is the fact that artists voluntarily select from his works subjects for paintings to be sent to the Royal Academy's annual exhibition or elsewhere. A third is the fact that articles about him, not formal reviews of a work just published, appear pretty often in the magazines. Now, whatever may be the genius and merits of an author, I think he cannot be said to have attained the front rank in English public opinion unless he can show these evidences of success; and, so far as I know, Mr. Reade cannot show any of them. For myself, I do not believe that Mr. Reade ever could under any circumstances have become a really great novelist. All the higher gifts of imagination and all the richer veins of humor have been denied to him. Not one gleam of poetic fancy ever seems to have floated across the nervous Saxon of his style. He is a powerful story-teller, who has a manly purpose in every tale he tells, and that is all. That surely is a great deal. No one tells a story more thrillingly. Once you begin to listen, you cannot release yourself from the spell of the _raconteur_ until all be done. A strong, healthy air of honest and high purpose breathes through nearly all the stories. An utter absence of cant, affectation, and sham distinguishes them. A surprising variety of descriptive power, at once bold, broad, and realistic, is one of their great merits. Mr. Reade can describe a sea-fight, a storm, the forging of a horseshoe, the ravages of an inundation, the trimming of a lady's dress, the tuning of a piano, with equal accuracy and apparent zest. I once heard an animated discussion in a literary club as to whether the scrap of minute description was artistic and effective or absurd and ludicrous which makes us acquainted with the fact that when Henry Little dragged Grace Carden out of the raging flood, the force of the water washed away the heroine's stockings and garters and left her barefoot. Some irreverent critics would only laugh at the gravity with which the author detailed this important circumstance. Others, however, insisted that this little touch, so homely, and to the profane mind so exceedingly ridiculous, was necessary and artistic; that it heightened the effect of the great word-picture previously shown by the force of its practical and circumstantial reality. However this momentous controversy may settle itself in the estimation of readers, it cannot be denied that some at least of Reade's success is due to the courage and self-reliance which will brave the risk of being ridiculous for the sake of being real and effective. Indeed, Mr. Reade wants no quality which is necessary to make a powerful story-teller, while he is distinguished from all mere story-tellers by the fact that he has some great social object to serve in nearly everything he undertakes to detail. More than this I do not believe he is, nor, despite the evidences of something yet higher which were given in "Christie Johnstone" and "The Cloister and the Hearth," do I think he ever could have been. He is a magnificent specimen of the modern special correspondent, endowed with the additional and unique gift of a faculty for throwing his report into the form of a thrilling story. But it requires something more than this, something higher than this, to make a great novelist whom the world will always remember. Mr. Reade is unsurpassed in the second class of English novelists, but he does not belong to the front rank. His success has been great in its way, but it is for an age and not for time.

THE EXILE-WORLD OF LONDON.

Leicester Square and the region that lies around it are conventionally regarded as the exile quarter of London. The name of Leicester square suggests the idea of an exile, as surely and readily, even to the mind of one who has never looked on the mournful and decaying enclosure, as the name of Billingsgate does that of fish-woman, or the name of the Temple that of a law-student. Yet, if a stranger visiting London thinks he is likely to see any exile of celebrity, while pacing the streets which branch off Leicester square, he will be almost as much mistaken as if he were to range Eastcheap in the hope of meeting the wild Prince and Poins.

Many a conspiracy has had its followers and understrappers in the Leicester square region; but the great conspirators do not live there any more. The place is falling, falling; the foreign and distinctive character of the population remains as marked as ever, but the foreigners whom London people would care to see are not to be found there any longer. The exiles who have made part of history, whose names are on record, do not care for Leicester square. They are to be found in Kensington, in Brompton, in Hampstead and Highgate; in the Regent's Park district; a few in Bloomsbury, a few in Mayfair. A marble slab and an inscription now mark the house in King street, St. James's, where Louis Napoleon lodged; and there is a house in Belgrave square dear to all true Legitimists, where the Count de Chambord ("Henri Cinq") received Berryer and his brother pilgrims. Only poor exiles herd together now in London. Only poverty, I suppose, ever causes nationalities to herd together anywhere. The men who group around Leicester square are the exiles without a fame; the subterranean workers in politics; the men who come like shadows, and so depart; the men whose names are writ in water, even though their life-paths may have been marked in blood.

Living in London, I had of late years many opportunities of meeting with the exiles of each class. I know few men more to be pitied than the great majority of those who make up the latter or Leicester square section. On the other hand, I should say that few men, indeed, are more to be envied by any of their fellow-creatures who love to be courted and "lionized," than the political exiles of great name who come to London and do not stay too long there.

Far away as the days of Thaddeus of Warsaw and the conventional and romantic type of exile now seem, there is still a fervent yearning in British society toward the representative of any Continental nationality which happens to be oppressed. No man had ever before received such a welcome in London as Kossuth did; but Kossuth stayed too long, became domesticized and familiarized, and society in London likes its lions to be always new and fresh. Moreover, the late Lord Palmerston, a warm patron of exiles when the patronage went no further than an invitation to a dinner or an evening party, set his face against Kossuth from the first; and polite society soon took the hint.

The man who most completely conquered all society, even the very highest, in London, during my recollection, was the man who probably cared least about it, and who certainly never sought to win the favor of fashion--I mean, of course, Garibaldi. To this day I am perfectly unable to understand the demeanor of the British peerage toward Garibaldi, when he visited London for a few days some years ago. The thing was utterly unprecedented and inexplicable. The Peerage literally rushed at him. He was beset by dukes, mobbed by countesses. He could not by any human possibility have so divided his day as to find time for breakfasting and dining with one-fifth of the noble hosts who fought and scrambled for him. It was a perpetual torture to his secretaries and private friends to decide between the rival claims of a Prime Minister and a Prince of the blood; an Archbishop and a Duchess; the Lord Chancellor and the leader of the Opposition. The Tories positively outdid the Whigs in the struggle for the society of the simple seaman, the gallant guerilla. The oddest thing about the business was, that three out of every four of these noble personages had always previously spoken of Garibaldi--when they did speak of him at all--with contempt and dislike, as a buccaneer and a filibuster.

What did it mean? Was it a little comedy? Was it their fun? Was it a political _coup de theatre_, to dodge the Radicals and the workingmen out of their favorite hero? Certainly some of Garibaldi's friends suspected something of the kind, and were utterly bewildered and confounded by the unexpected rush of aristocratic admirers, who beset the hero from the moment he touched the shore of England.

It was a strange sight, not easily to be forgotten, to see the manner in which Garibaldi sat among the dukes and marchionesses--simple, sweet, arrayed in the calm, serene dignity of a manly, noble heart. There was something of Oriental stateliness in the unruffled, imperturbable, bland composure, with which he bore himself amid the throng of demonstrative and titled adulators. I do not think he believed in the sincerity of half of it, any more than I did, but he showed no more sign of distrust or impatience than he did of gratified vanity.

The thing ended in a quarrel between the Aristocracy and the Democracy, between Belgravia and Clerkenwell, for the custody of the hero, and Garibaldi escaped somehow back to his island during the squabble. But I think Lady Palmerston let the mask fall for a moment, when, growing angry at the assurance of Garibaldi's humbler friends, and perhaps a little tired of the whole business, she told some gentlemen of my acquaintance, that quite too much work had been made about a person who, after all, was only a respectable brigand. This was said (and it _was_ said) at the very meridian of the day of noble homage to the Emancipator of Sicily.

Garibaldi has never since returned to England. Should he ever do so, he will find himself unembarrassed by the attentions of the Windsor uniform and Order of the Garter. The play, however it was got up, or whatever its object, was played out long ago. But the West End is, as a rule, very fond of distinguished exiles, when they come and go quickly; and Lord Palmerston's drawing-room was seldom without a representative of the class. No man ever did less for any great cause than Lord Palmerston did; but he liked brilliant exiles, and, perhaps, more particularly the soldierly than the scholarly class. Such a man as the martial, dashing, adventurous General Tuerr, for example, was the kind of refugee that Lord and Lady Palmerston especially favored.

Many English peers have, indeed, quite a _specialite_ in the way of patronizing exiles; but, of course, in all such cases the exile must have a name which brings some gratifying distinction to his host. He must be somebody worth pointing out to the other guests. I know that many Continental refugees have chafed at all this, and some have steadily held aloof from it, and declined to be shown off for the admiration of a novelty-hunting crowd. Many, too, have been deceived by it; have mistaken such idle attention for profound and practical sympathy, and have thought that two or three peers and half a dozen aristocratic petticoats could direct the foreign policy of England. They have swelled with hope and confidence; have built their plans and based their organizations on the faith that Park Lane meant the British government, and that the politeness of a Cabinet Minister was as good as the assistance of a British fleet; and have found out what idiots they were in such a belief, and have gone nigh to breaking their hearts accordingly. Indeed, the readiness of all classes in England to rush at any distinguished exile, and become effusive about himself and his cause is very often--or, at least, used to be--a cruel kindness, sure to be misunderstood and to betray--a love that killed.

Nothing could, in its way, have been more unfortunate and calamitous than the outburst of popular enthusiasm in England about the Polish insurrection four years ago. Some of the Polish leaders living in London were completely deceived by it, and finally believed that England was about to take up arms in their cause. An agitation was got up, outside the House of Commons, by an earnest, well-meaning gentleman, who really believed what he said; and inside the House by a bustling, quickwitted, political adventurer, who certainly ought not to have believed what he said. This latter gentleman actually went out to Cracow, in Austrian Poland, and was received there with wild demonstrations of welcome as a representative of the national will of England and the precursor of English intervention. The Polish insurrection went on; and England wrote a diplomatic note, which Russia resented as a piece of impertinence; and there England's sympathy ended. "I think," said a great English Liberal to me, "that every Englishman who helped to encourage these poor Poles and give them hope of English help, has Polish blood on his hands." I think so, too.

I have always thought that Felice Orsini was in some sort a victim to the kind of delusion which English popularity so easily fosters. I met Orsini when he came to England, not very long before the unfortunate and criminal attempt of the Rue Lepelletier; and I was much taken, as most people who met him were, by the simplicity, sweetness, and soldierly frankness of his demeanor. He delivered some lectures in London, Manchester, Liverpool, and other large towns, on his own personal adventures--principally his escape from prison--and though he had but a moderate success as a lecturer, he was surrounded everywhere by well-meaning and sympathizing groups, the extent of whose influence and the practical value of whose sympathy he probably did not at first quite understand. He certainly had, at one time, some vague hopes of obtaining for the cause of Italian independence a substantial assistance from England. A short experience cured him of that dream; and I fancy it was then that he formed the resolution which he afterward attempted so desperately to carry out. I think, from something I heard him say once, that Mazzini had endeavored to enlighten him as to the true state of affairs in England, and the real value of the sort of sympathy which London so readily offers to any interesting exile. But I do not believe Mazzini's advice had much influence over Orsini. Indeed, the latter, at the time I saw him, had but little respect for Mazzini. He spoke with something like contempt of the great conspirator. It would have been well for Orsini if he had, in one thing at least, followed the counsels of Mazzini. People used to say, some years ago, that odious and desperate as Orsini's attempt was, it at least had the merit of frightening Louis Napoleon into active efforts on behalf of Italy. There was so much about Orsini that was worthy and noble that one would be glad to regard him as even in his crime the instrument of good to the country he loved so well. But documentary and other evidence has made it clear since Orsini's death that the negotiations which ended in Solferino and Villafranca were begun before Orsini had ever planned his murderous enterprise. The fact is, that, during the Crimean war, Cavour first tried England on the subject, through easy-going and heedless Lord Clarendon--who hardly took the trouble to listen to the audacious projects of his friend--and then turned to France, where quicker and shrewder ears listened to what he had to say.