Morning journal and courier., 1884-11-15
Dickens, TrOlope and Reade.


 Dickens, 50 often accused of extravagance and repetition, was far more temperate and reserved, had finer instinct for selection and suppression, than Reade. Here again, as in his apparent unconsciousness that fact done into fiction may easily or may ever be- come disgusting and insufferable, he reminds us of the too conscientious s'and two assidu- ous author of 'sNana.'' What has been so absurdly-not to say imprudently-at tempted in the cases of Samuel Richardson and Walter Scott would be less an outrage than a service to the genius and the memory of Charles Reade. Their masterpieces may be destroyed by evisceration; they cannot be condensed by compression. More than one or two of Reade's, if taken duly in hand by some less incapable restorer than the mutila- tors ofs''Guy Mannering" and ''Clarissa liar lowe" could only gain by the sweeping re moval of much undigested rubbish. The authors own principle of selection may not have been as capricious as it appears; but when he struck out of his longest novel that admirable Autobiography of Thief, " which is one of his finest and most thoughtful pieces of work, it is difficult to understand why he should have retained much else which smacks alternately of sensational play
 bills and nauseating police reports. This lit tie record is nothing less than a masterpiece of tragicomedy; the fellows style is perhaps the very finest evidence of his creators dra- matic faculty which could be adduced from the whole collection of Charles Reade's TO- mances. That faculty, however, brilliant and versatile as it is, is never thoroughly or so strikingly displayed in the full completion or consummation of the work undertaken as in the vivid energy of single scenes, the viv- i'd relief of single characters The same, we must confess, may be said of all his contem- poraries-even of the great masters who gave us ''Esmond" and ''David CopperheEd.' Mr Trollope, in his singularly candid and ln- teresting as we'll as amusing, estimate of his own and other mems work, does not pretend to anticipate a survival of remembrance for more than two or three among the well nigh innumerable figures of his industrious and pertinacious invention. 1 should be disposed to assign fully equal chance Of survival to several others of their kindred, but when he foretells oblivion or neglect for MT. Reade on the ground that he has left no such living and enduring figures-not "a character that will remain''-in any part of his work, the judgment seems to me as rash and foolish as his remarks on the rashness and foolishness of MT. Reads own bearing and behavior on various matters of controversy are sensible and sound. Reade's unhappy and ludicrous habit of sputtering at any objection taken Wo any part or feature of his work, of yelling and foaming at any reflection cast on anyone who had the fortune or misfortune of his friendship or acquaintance, was less 1nJur1- ous to his fame than what his friendly rival has justly stigmatized as his amazing mis- conception of the duty-nay, the very nature and essence-of literary honesty. It must be allowed that he was rich enough to have dispensed with borrowed or stolen goods; that the assailant who should attribute his offerings to the necessity of conscious in competence, to the compulsion of intellectu- al penury, would stand self-confuted and self-convicted of stupidity as perverse as MT. Reade's own fancy that he could honestly buy the produce of another mans brain and honorably pass it off as the produce of his