There is a venerable proposition--I never heard who invented it--that
an author is finally judged by his best work. This would be comforting
to authors if true: but is it true? A day or two ago I picked up on a
railway bookstall a copy of Messrs. Chatto & Windus's new sixpenny
edition of _The Cloister and the Hearth_, and a capital edition it is.
I think I must have worn out more copies of this book than of any
other; but somebody robbed me of the pretty "Elzevir edition" as soon
as it came out, and so I have only just read Mr. Walter Besant's
Introduction, which the publishers have considerately reprinted and
thrown in with one of the cheapest sixpennyworths that ever came from
the press. Good wine needs no bush, and the bush which Mr. Besant
hangs out is a very small one. But one sentence at least has
challenged attention.
"I do not say that the whole of life, as it was at the end of the
fourteenth century, may be found in the _Cloister and the
Hearth_; but I do say that there is portrayed so vigorous,
lifelike, and truthful a picture of a time long gone by, and
differing, in almost every particular from our own, that the
world has never seen its like. To me it is a picture of the past
more faithful than anything in the works of Scott."
This last sentence--if I remember rightly--was called a very bold one
when it first appeared in print. To me it seems altogether moderate.
Go steadily through Scott, and which of the novels can you choose to
compare with the _Cloister_ as a "vigorous, lifelike, and truthful
picture of a time long gone by"?
Is it _Ivanhoe_?--a gay and beautiful romance, no doubt; but surely,
as the late Mr. Freeman was at pains to point out, not a "lifelike and
truthful picture" of any age that ever was. Is it _Old Mortality_?
Well, but even if we here get something more like a "vigorous,
lifelike, and truthful picture of a time gone by," we are bound to
consider the scale of the two books. Size counts, as Aristotle pointed
out, and as we usually forget. It is the whole of Western Europe that
Reade reconstructs for the groundwork of his simple story.
Mr. Besant might have said more. He might have pointed out that no
novel of Scott's approaches the _Cloister_ in lofty humanity, in
sublimity of pathos. The last fifty pages of the tale reach an
elevation of feeling that Scott never touched or dreamed of touching.
And the sentiment is sane and honest, too: the author reaches to the
height of his great argument easily and without strain. It seems to me
that, as an appeal to the feelings, the page that tells of Margaret's
death is the finest thing in fiction. It appeals for a score of
reasons, and each reason is a noble one. We have brought together in
that page extreme love, self-sacrifice, resignation, courage,
religious feeling: we have the end of a beautiful love-tale, the end
of a good woman, and the last earthly trial of a good man. And with
all this, there is no vulgarization of sacred ground, no cheap parade
of the heart's secrets; but a deep sobriety relieved with the most
delicate humor. Moreover, the language is Charles Reade's at its
best--which is almost as good as at its worst it is abominable.
That Scott could never reach the emotional height of Margaret's
death-scene, or of the scene in Clement's cave, is certain. Moreover
in the _Cloister_ Reade challenges comparison with Scott on Scott's
own ground--the ground of sustained adventurous narrative--and the
advantage is not with Scott. Once more, take all the Waverley Novels
and search them through for two passages to beat the adventures of
Gerard and Denis the Burgundian (1) with the bear and (2) at "The Fair
Star" Inn, by the Burgundian Frontier. I do not think you will
succeed, even then. Indeed, I will go so far as to say that to match
these adventures of Gerard and Denis you must go again to Charles
Reade, to the homeward voyage of the _Agra_ in _Hard Cash_. For these
and for sundry other reasons which, for lack of space, cannot be
unfolded here, _The Cloister and the Hearth_ seems to me a finer
achievement than the finest novel of Scott's.
And now we come to the proposition that an author must be judged by
his best work. If this proposition be true, then I must hold Reade to
be a greater novelist than Scott. But do I hold this? Does anyone hold
this? Why, the contention would be an absurdity.
Reade wrote some twenty novels beside _The Cloister and the Hearth_,
and not one of the twenty approaches it. One only--_Griffith
Gaunt_--is fit to be named in the same day with it; and _Griffith
Gaunt_ is marred by an insincerity in the plot which vitiates, and is
at once felt to vitiate, the whole work. On everything he wrote before
and after _The Cloister_ Reade's essential vulgarity of mind is
written large. That he shook it off in that great instance is one of
the miracles of literary history. It may be that the sublimity of his
theme kept him throughout in a state of unnatural exaltation. If the
case cannot be explained thus, it cannot be explained at all. Other of
his writings display the same, or at any rate a like, capacity for
sustained narrative. _Hard Cash_ displays it; parts of _It is Never
Too Late to Mend_ display it. But over much of these two novels lies
the trail of that defective taste which makes _A Simpleton_, for
instance, a prodigy of cheap ineptitude.
But if Reade be hopelessly Scott's inferior in manner and taste, what
shall we say of the invention of the two men? Mr. Barrie once affirmed
very wisely in an essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, "Critics have said
enthusiastically--for it is difficult to write of Mr. Stevenson
without enthusiasm--that Alan Breck is as good as anything in Scott.
Alan Breck is certainly a masterpiece, quite worthy of the greatest of
all story-tellers, _who, nevertheless, it should be remembered,
created these rich side characters by the score, another before
dinner-time_." Inventiveness, is, I suppose, one of the first
qualities of a great novelist: and to Scott's invention there was no
end. But set aside _The Cloister_; and Reade's invention will be found
to be extraordinarily barren. Plot after plot turns on the same old
tiresome trick. Two young people are in love: by the villainy of a
third person they are separated for a while, and one of the lovers is
persuaded that the other is dead. The missing one may be kept missing
by various devices; but always he is supposed to be dead, and always
evidence is brought of his death, and always he turns up in the end.
It is the same in _The Cloister_, in _It is Never Too Late to Mend_,
in _Put Yourself in His Place_, in _Griffith Gaunt_, in _A Simpleton_.
Sometimes, as in _Hard Cash_ and _A Terrible Temptation_, he is
wrongfully incarcerated as a madman; but this is obviously a variant
only on the favorite trick. Now the device is good enough in a tale of
the fourteenth century, when news travelled slowly, and when by the
suppression of a letter, or by a piece of false news, two lovers, the
one in Holland, the other in Rome, could easily be kept apart. But in
a tale of modern life no trick could well be stagier. Besides the
incomparable Margaret--of whom it does one good to hear Mr. Besant
say, "No heroine in fiction is more dear to me"--Reade drew some
admirable portraits of women; but his men, to tell the truth--and
especially his priggish young heroes--seem remarkably ill invented.
Again, of course, I except _The Cloister_. Omit that book, and you
would say that such a character as Bailie Nicol Jarvie or Dugald
Dalgetty were altogether beyond Reade's range. Open _The Cloister_ and
you find in Denis the Burgundian a character as good as the Bailie and
Dalgetty rolled into one.
Other authors have been lifted above themselves. But was there ever a
case of one sustained at such an unusual height throughout a long,
intricate and arduous work?