March 10, 1894. "The Cloister and the Hearth."
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?
[The end]
Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch's essay: Charles Reade