hich great fiction may be known.

II.--CHARLES READE

Reade's position in literature is distinctly strange. The professional
critics never came within miles of a just appreciation of his greatness,
and the average 'cultured reader' receives his name with a droll air of
allowance and patronage. But there are some, and these are not the least
qualified as judges, who regard him as ranking with the great masters.
You will find, I think, that the men holding this opinion are, in the
main, fellow-workers in the craft he practised. His warmest and most
constant admirers are his brother novelists. Trollope, to be sure,
spoke of him as 'almost a man of genius,' but Trollope's mind was a
quintessential distillation of the commonplace, and the man who was on
fire with the romance and passion of his own age was outside the limit
of his understanding. But amongst the writers of English fiction whom
it has been my privilege to know personally, I have not met with one who
has not reckoned Charles Reade a giant.

The critics have never acknowledged him, and, in a measure, he has been
neglected by the public. There is a reason for everything, if we could
only find it, and sometimes I seem to have a glimmering of light on this
perplexing problem. Sir Walter Besant (Mr. Besant then) wrote in the
'Gentleman's Magazine' years ago a daring panegyric on Reade's work,
giving him frankly a place among the very greatest. My heart glowed as I
read, but I know now that it took courage of the rarer sort to express
a judgment so unreserved in favour of a writer who never for an hour
occupied in the face of the public such a position as is held by three
or four men in our day, whom this dead master could have rolled in the
hollow of his hand.

Let me try for a minute or two to show why and how he is so very great
a man; and then let me try to point out one or two of the reasons for
which the true reward of greatness has been denied him.

The very first essential to greatness in any pursuit is that a man
should be in earnest in respect to it. You may as well try to kindle
your household fire with pump water as to excite laughter by the
invention of a story which does not seem laughable to yourself, or to
draw real tears by a story conceived whilst your own heart is dry, 'The
wounded is the wounding heart.' In Charles Reade's case this essential
sympathy amounted to a passion. He derided difficulties, but he derided
them after the fashion o