CHARLES READE

HARLES READE was born a hundred years ago,

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on the 8th of June 1814; he died on Good Friday, April 11, 1884. Then, or about then, Walter Besant could write as follows of

the position occupied by this writer, which is—and has been, since the death of Thackeray and Dickens-alone in the first rank. That is to say, alone because he resembles no other writer living or dead-not alone because there has been no other writer in line with him. His merits are his own, and they are those of the first order of writers. He cannot be classified or compared; in order to be classified, a man must be either a leader or one of a following. Reade certainly cannot be accused of following. One can only say that he stands in the front rank and he stands alone. One can only say that this great writer -there is no greater praise-paints women as they are, men as they are, things as they are...

all of which is skimble-skamble thought in slipshod language; a confusion of platitude, falsity, and nonsense stark but inarticulate. (Also George Eliot survived Thackeray and Dickens by some years.) Still it is obviously trying, under a spell of admiration, to say something about Charles Reade; and the mischief—for those of us who admire Reade, albeit differently-lurks in a little devil of a doubt that anyone, a hundred years hence, will care either for the something Besant wanted to say or for the reservations we think worth while.

Reade as a novelist had merits we can hardly believe

to be perishable. To take the most eminent: when he 'got going' upon high, straight epic narrative-Gerard's odyssey, the last voyage of the Agra, the bursting of Ousely dam, the storming of the Bastion St André-no one of his contemporaries could touch him; no English writer, at any rate, could get near him. Nor were these efforts mere spurts of invention; but long, strong, masterly running, sustained right to the goal over scores of pages. Could one but pluck these chapters out of his books, blot the residue out of existence, and holding them out to posterity (they would make no mean handful either) challenge it to refuse Reade a place in the very first rank, there could be no answer. He had other great merits too; but with them a fatal talent for murdering his own reputation, for capping every triumph with an instant folly, either in the books themselves or in his public behaviour; and these follies were none the less disastrous for being prompted by a nature at once large, manly, generous, tender, incapable of self-control, constitutionally passionate, and in passion as blind as a bat.

He started in life as the youngest of eleven children; son of a high Tory squire (of tall and noble presence) and a lady who had descended upon Ipsden in Oxfordshire out of the inner social circle of Buckingham Palace and the Regency. To quote the official Memoir into which Reade's luck followed him (it fills two volumes worthy to survive for brilliance of fatuity even when their subject shall be forgotten), 'Charles Reade was born into a refined family circle, for his mother had the bel air of the Court, and his father was a gentleman of the old school.' Further, the mother 'was no common woman. Born under the torrid sun of Madras, immersed while yet a girl in the life of politics, society, and the Court, she was before all things

a lady [!]. Haydn taught her music, and Sheridan epigram and repartee. Her manner was perfect, and her conversational powers so extraordinary as to have fascinated so superior a master of rhetoric as Samuel Wilberforce.' In the country she imbibed religion (Calvinism) from a divine who, though a splendid preacher and a Hebrew scholar, never attained to the semblance of a gentleman. In his old age a long pipe and a spittoon were his inseparable companions.' Environed by this Arcadian simplicity, Mrs Reade lived and did her work industriously and happily. She was at once domestic and social, with an aptitude for cultivating the great of the earth.

Lord Thurlow was godfather to her eldest son; Barrington, the Prince-Bishop of Durham, who resided at Mongwell Park, three miles off, became sponsor for her fourth; and Warren Hastings for her youngest daughter. 'My dearest Lady Effingham' was the friend of her life-time until that lady in her eighth decade ran away with a Scripture-Reader, when the note changed and she was styled 'That horrid old woman.'

She was a daughter of Major John Scott (afterwards ScottWaring), M.P. for the old borough of Stockbridge, Hants -a figure in the polite and the party memoirs of his age; and, like most women trained in its high politics, she had a sharp eye for 'openings.' 'Her influence with the Board of Directors of the Old East India Company was virtually paramount. She obtained no less than three writerships [i.e., appointments in the Civil Service], together with two cavalry cadetships, for her sons, and an infantry cadetship for a connection by marriage.' The elder sons had been sent to public schools-Rugby, Haileybury, Charterhouse; but she had a whim to subject Charles, her youngest and her darling, to private tuition.

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This was the child's first misfortune, and no slight one. Though the public schools of this land have pretty steadily evolved some four-fifths of its admitted genius, their reputation for discouraging genius is saecular and shall not be disputed here; but at all events they discourage those abnormalities of temper and conduct to which genius is prone, as by their stern correction it is not infrequently bettered. Reade was committed to a flagellating minister at Iffley, who taught him the Latin irregular verbs; if of a hundred he could repeat all correctly, he escaped; if but nine-and-ninety, he was caned and-being all unlike an elder brother who in the midst of a furious whacking observed pleasantly, 'I say, if you keep on at this much longer you'll hurt'-Charles was not cured of a sensitive skin by this method of grafting-on the classics. After five years of penal servitude his parents removed him to a far humaner school at Staines; a change which, in the words of the Memoir, 'can only be compared to one from a diet of gall to one of champagne.' Even that (one conjectures) would not suit all stomachs; and the boy, though happier at Staines, missed the right regimen of health for his character. Next came Oxford. His father the squire, who had been at Rugby and Oriel, could not see that Oxford fitted a man for life. (He kept a pack of harriers.) But Mrs Reade insisted, and Charles went up to stand for a demyship at Magdalen: which he won in the teeth of all probability, not because he sent in a good essay (which he did), nor through parental wire-pulling, but because one of the eight nominee candidates whom the Fellows proposed to job in failed so conspicuously that old Dr Routh refused to have him and preferred to admit the outsider who came of good

family and could write sound English. Luck and ability combined again, four years later, to win him his fellowship. A demy of Magdalen in those days could only succeed to a fellowship on his particular county, and then only if he had taken his degree before the day of St Mary Magdalen next ensuing after the vacancy. Reade, though privately tutored by no less a man than Robert Lowe (afterwards Lord Sherbrooke), may have been indolent; at any rate in the early summer of 1835 he was unprepared for 'Greats' when quite unexpectedly a vacancy occurred in Oxfordshire, his own county. The month was June, and he had twenty-four hours in which to decide between entering his name for a pass or for honours. For the pass he would have to sit at once; and, though the examination was light as compared with the other, a total ignorance of the books offered would hardly be covered by autoschediastic brilliancy. He therefore entered his name for honours, and in the three weeks' respite read furiously. Thirty-six hours before the examination he began upon the Thirty-nine Articles, which all candidates had to commit to memory -rejection on this test invalidating success in all the others. He had a bad memory (ruined, as he always maintained, by ferocious overtaxing at his first school). Lo! when he started upon this task, which he had left to the last, his memory collapsed. To make matters worse, the three weeks' strain had brought on a racking neuralgia. He walked up to the examination table knowing just three Articles by rote; his mind, for the remaining thirty-six, a blank. The Article chosen by the examiner chanced to be one of the magic three. Reade repeated it pat, won his degree, and inherited his fellowship.

Later, and having in the meantime entered at Lincoln's Inn and begun to study law, he achieved the Vinerian