broke out to which its leaders chose to give the title of
pre-Raphaelite. The principal founder of the movement has since been
almost forgotten as an artist, but has come into a sort of celebrity as
a poet--Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With him were allied, it is almost
needless to say, the two now famous and successful painters, Holman Hunt
and Millais. Decidedly that was the most thriving controversy in the
world of art and letters during our time. It was the only battle of
schools which could tell us what the war for and against the
Sturm-und-Drang school in Germany, the Byron epoch in England, the
struggle of the Classicists and Romanticists in France, must have been
like. The pre-Raphaelite dispute has long ceased to be heard. Years ago
Mr. Ruskin himself, the prophet and apostle of the new sect, described
the defection of its greatest pupil as "not a fall, but a catastrophe."
Rossetti's sonnets are criticised, but not his paintings. "Are not you
still a pre-Raphaelite?" asked an inquisitive person lately of the
sonneteer. "I am not an 'ite' of any kind," was the answer; "I am an
artist." John Everett Millais is among the most fortunate and
fashionable painters of the day. Those who saw his wonderful
"Somnambulist" in last season's exhibition of the London Royal Academy
would have found in it little of the harsh and "crawling realism" which
distinguished the "Beauty in Bricks Brotherhood," as somebody called the
rebellious school of twenty years ago. A London comic paper lately
published a capital likeness of Mr. Millais, handsome, respectable,
tending to stoutness and baldness, and described the portrait as that of
the converted pre-Raphaelite. The progress of things was exactly similar
to that which goes on in the English political world so often. A fiery
young Radical member of Parliament begins by denouncing the Government
and the constitution. He wins first notoriety, and then, if he has any
real stuff in him, reputation; and then he is invited to office, and he
takes it and becomes respectable, wealthy, and fashionable; and his
rebellion is all over, and the world goes on just as before. Such was,
so far as individuals are concerned, the course of the pre-Raphaelite
rebellion; undoubtedly the movement did some good; most rebellions do.
It was a protest against the vague and feeble generalizations and the
vapid classicism which were growing too common in art. Ruskin himself
has happily described the generalized and conventional way of painting
trees and shrubs which was growing to be common and tolerated, and which
he says was no less absurd than if a painter were to depict some
anomalous animal, and defend it as a generalization of pig and pony.
Anything which teaches a careful and rigid study of nature must do good.
The pre-Raphaelite school was excellent discipline for its young
scholars. Probably even those of Millais's paintings which bear on the
face of them least evident traces of that early school, might have been
far inferior to what they are, were it not for the slow and severe study
which the original principles of the movement demanded. The present
interest which the secession has for me is less on its own account than
because of the vigorous, ingenious, and eloquent pages which Ruskin
poured forth in its vindication. He gave it meanings which it never had;
found out truth and beauty in its most prosaic details such as its
working scholars never meant to symbolize; he explained and expounded it
as Johnson did the meaning of the word "slow" in the opening line of the
"Traveller," and in fact well-nigh persuaded himself and the world that
a new priesthood had arisen to teach the divinity of art. But even he
could not write pre-Raphaelitism into popularity and vitality. The
common instinct of human nature, which looks to art as the
representative of beauty, pathos, humor, and passion, could not be
talked into an acceptance of ignoble and ugly realisms. It may be an
error to depict a Judean fisherman like a stately Greek philosopher; but
error for error, it is far less gross and grievous than to paint the
exquisite heroine of Keats's lovely poem as a lank and scraggy spinster,
with high cheek bones like one of Walter Scott's fishwives, undressing
herself in a green moonlight, and displaying a neck and shoulders worthy
of Miss Miggs, and stays and petticoat that bring to mind Tilly Slowboy.
The pre-Raphaelite mania faded away, but Ruskin's vindication endures;
just as the letters of Pascal are still read by every one, although
nobody cares "two copper spangles" about the controversy which provoked
them. Mr. Ruskin's mental energy did not long lie fallow. Turning the
bull's-eye of his central theory upon other subjects, he dragged
political economy up for judgment. Who can forget the whimsical
sensation produced by the appearance in the "Cornhill Magazine" of the
letters entitled "Unto this Last"? I need not say much about them. They
were a series of fantastic sermons, sometimes eloquent and instructive,
sometimes turgid and absurd, on the moral duty of man. They had
literally nothing to do with the subject of political economy. The
political economists were talking of one thing, and Mr. Ruskin was
talking of another and a totally different thing. The value of an
article is what it will bring in the market, say the economists. "For
shame!" cries Mr. Ruskin; "is the value of her rudder to a ship at sea
in a tempest only what it would be bought for at home in Wapping?" So on
through the whole, the two disputants talking on quite different
subjects. Mr. Ruskin might just as reasonably have interrupted a medical
professor lecturing to his class on the effects and uses of castor oil,
by telling him in eloquent verbiage that castor oil will not make men
virtuous and nations great. Nobody ever said it would; but it is
important to explain the properties of castor oil for all that. It would
be a grand thing of course if, as Mr. Ruskin prayed, England would "cast
all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among
whom they first arose," and leave "the sands of the Indus and the
adamant of Golconda" to "stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash
from the turban of the slave." This would be ever so much finer than
opening banks, making railways (which Mr. Ruskin specially detests), and
dealing in stocks. But it has nothing to do, good or bad, with the
practical exposition of the economic laws of banking and exchange. It is
about as effective a refutation of the political economist's doctrines
as a tract from the Peace Society denouncing all war would be to a
lecture from Von Moltke on the practical science of campaigning. But Mr.
Ruskin never saw this, and never was disconcerted. He turned to other
missions with the firm conviction that he had finished off political
economy, as a clever free-thinking London lady calmly announced a few
years back to her friends that she had abolished Christianity. Then Mr.
Ruskin condemned mines and factories, railways and engines. With all the
same strenuous and ornate eloquence he passed sentence on London
pantomimes and "cascades of girls," and the too liberal exposure of
"lower limbs" by the young ladies composing those cascades. Nothing is
too trivial for the omniscient philosopher, and nothing is too great.
The moral government of a nation is decreed by the same voice and on the
same principles as those which have prescribed the length of a lady's
waist-ribbon and the shape of a door-scraper. The first Napoleon never
claimed for himself the divine right of intermeddling with and arranging
everything more complacently than does the mild and fragile philosopher
of Denmark Hill. Be it observed that his absolute ignorance of a subject
never deters Mr. Ruskin from pronouncing prompt judgment upon it. It may
be some complicated question of foreign, say of American politics, on
which men of good ability, who have mastered all the facts and studied
the arguments on both sides, are slow to pronounce. Mr. Ruskin, boldly
acknowledging that until this morning he never heard of the subject,
settles it out of hand and delivers final judgment. Sometimes his
restless impulses and his extravagant way of plunging at conclusions and
conjecturing facts lead him into unpleasant predicaments. He delivered a
manifesto some years ago upon the brutality of the lower orders of
Englishmen, founded on certain extraordinary persecutions inflicted on
his friend Thomas Carlyle. Behold Carlyle himself coming out with a
letter in which he declares that all these stories of persecution were
not only untrue, but were "curiously the reverse of truth." Of course
every one knew that Ruskin believed them to be true; that he half heard
something, conjectured something else, jumped at a conclusion, and as
usual regarded himself as an inspired prophet, compelled by his mission
to come forward and deliver judgment on a sinful people.
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_."