But it was when they charged him with plagiarism that his critics hit him on the raw. About the time when I first knew him somebody started a controversy with respect to his story of The Wandering Heir, and the accusation was made that he had lifted a page or two out of Swift's Polite Conversations. “Of course I did,” said Reade to me, “but the essence of a plagiarism is that it shall have some chance of going undetected; it is the appropriation to one's self of the property of another with the intent to display it as one's own, and to me it was impossible to suppose that a writer like Dean Swift was so obscure that I could play a trick like that with him with impunity. A recognisable quotation is not a plagiarism. They brought the same charge against me because I translated the etchings of Corot into accurate English. The sources I tapped for The Cloister and the Hearth are open to anybody, and any man who chooses may study them and make a romance out of them if he can. It is perfectly true that I milked three hundred cows into that bucket, but the butter I churned was my own.” It seems scarcely fair to have brought such an accusation against a writer who not only made no disguise of his literary methods, but who so openly proclaimed and defended them.
In the last page of The Cloister and the Hearth he acknowledges his debt to the great Erasmus, for example, in these very noble and eloquent phrases:—“Some of the best scenes in this new book are from his mediaeval pen and illumine the pages where they come; for the words of a genius so high as his are not born to die: their immediate work upon mankind fulfilled, they may seem to lie torpid; but at each fresh shower of intelligence Time pours upon her students, they prove their immortal race; they revive, they spring from the dust of great libraries; they bud, they flower, they fruit, they seed from generation to generation, and from age to age.” The professional critics have never been just to Reade, but it is a fact that I have never encountered a workman in the craft of fiction who did not reckon him a master among the masters. It has long seemed to me that The Cloister and the Hearth is, in fiction, the only real revival of a dead age in the whole range of imaginative literature. When Mr Conan Doyle, as he then was, was lecturing in the United States, we met one evening at the Parker House in Boston, and he said one thing about that immortal book which I have ever since thought memorable. “To read The Cloister and the Hearth” he declared, “is like going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern.” And indeed the criticism is true. You travel from old Sevenbergen to mediaeval Rome and every man and woman you encounter on the way is indisputably alive, though there is no he or she amongst them all who has a touch of modernity. They are of their epoch, from Denys of Burgundy to the Princess Clælia, from the mijaurée of the Tête D'Or to the tired and polished old gentleman who for the time being presides over the destinies of the Church of Rome. Here, for once, a prodigious faculty for taking pains is used with genius, and the chances are that the author of this monumental work, despised as he too often was as a mere sensationalist in his own day, will survive a score of his contemporaries who are even at this hour, by common critical consent, placed over him.
He was always fighting against some legal oppression. In the latest case in which I knew him to be engaged, an attempt had been made by a wealthy ground landlord to squeeze an unprotected widow lady out of her rights and to compel her to surrender the house and grounds which had belonged to her deceased husband. With the impetuosity which distinguished him in such matters, Reade flung himself into the conflict. It was enough for him to know that an injustice was being done or attempted to fire him at the centre. He caused to be inscribed on the outer wall of the garden of the mansion in dispute the words, “Naboth's Vineyard,” and he used to relate with great glee how a Jew old clothesman one day translated this into “Naboth's Vinegar,” and after a wondering reading of it, said: “Good Lord! I should have taken it for a gentlemanth houth.” “From which,” said Reade, quaintly, “you may conclude that Houndsditch thumbs not the annals of Samaria!”
That shapeless production Grace Forbeach had one idea in it which I was able to use later on to some advantage. In those days a writer of fiction expended much more care upon the actual mechanism of his plot than seems to be thought necessary nowadays. Even a man of the genius of Charles Dickens did not feel himself at liberty to work untrammelled by the exigencies of some intricate and harassing framework of invention on which he made it his business to hang all his splendours of description and his observation of human character. The power of the plot in English fiction found its culmination in the work of Wilkie Collins, whose Moonstone is probably the finest piece of mere literary cabinet-making in the world. All the younger writers of his time were strongly under his domination and it was quite a necessity for us to have some merely mechanical central idea round which we could evolve a story which, in its serial form, should keep the reader perpetually upon the tenterhooks of expectation. Such an idea I had stumbled on in Grace Forbeach where one of the characters was made feloniously to possess himself of his own property and thereby rendered himself liable to penal servitude. I elaborated this notion in Joseph's Coat and made the development of the whole fable dependent on it.
Leaving forgotten Grace Forbeach out of the reckoning, Joseph's Coat was my third novel in the order of writing and the second in order of publication. The second half of A Life's Atonement was written under difficulties which would have been absolutely insurmountable if it had not been for that spirit of camaraderie which distinguished the jolly little Bohemian set amongst whom I had fallen. One chum who lived over an undertaker's shop in Great Russell Street found me house-room, and I had a resource from which, for the space of some ten weeks, I was entitled to draw one pound a week, which came to me in rather an odd fashion. Every morning a half-crown was slipped under the doormat, except on Saturdays, when three were left there, one for the needs of the day and a double allowance for the Sunday. A loaf and a tin of Chicago beef stocked the larder, and that being once attended to, the remnant of my income served for such necessaries of life as beer and tobacco, and pen and ink and paper. The bargain I had made with Messrs Chambers was that I should receive one-half payment for the book—one hundred and twenty-five pounds—on delivery and acceptance, and the other half on the conclusion of the serial publication of the story in their journal. This left an interval of twelve months between the two payments, and the first was all but exhausted when my second commission from the firm reached me. It was then drawing towards the close of the year, and Mr Robert Chambers wrote me to say that the writer with whom he had bargained to follow A Life's Atonement had broken down in health, and asking if I were in a position to supply her place. I went off post-haste to Edinburgh and saw him there, and it was arranged between us that I should deliver to him six chapters of an original novel per week, that I should remain in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh in order to give him opportunity for consultation from time to time, and that whilst the book was being written I should receive a living wage. He recommended me to locate myself in Portobello, and there in the dead season I had no difficulty in finding lodgings.
I had scarcely deposited my portmanteau when I set to work. I began to write without the faintest idea of a plan, and for the first day or two I swam boldly enough along the stream of chance. The first chapters pleased Robert Chambers greatly and he was wise and generous enough to say so. For six tremendous weeks I wrote, beginning punctually every morning at eight o'clock and pretty generally bringing the day's work to a finish in the neighbourhood of midnight. I gave myself two half-hours for exercise and rambled in all sorts of weather about the sands and the deserted promenade. I was approaching the end of the work when a very curious experience befell me. I was sitting towards the end of the day's labour at my table when I felt suddenly that somebody was standing just behind me. The impression was so strong that I turned round hastily and made a survey of the little room. There was nobody there and I went back to work again. The feeling returned so often that I repeatedly found myself turning round in the middle of a sentence, but in an hour at most I was able to dismiss the fancy for the time. I got to bed too excited and too tired to sleep, and whilst I was lying there in the dark, the idea of that fancied presence came back again. It was standing at my bed-head in the darkness, and though I knew that to be a physical impossibility because the bed and the wall were close together, I found myself no longer able to dismiss the image. I went to sleep in spite of it at last, but at the instant at which I sat down at my table to take up the thread of last night's work, it was there again. Little by little it assumed shape and colour in my imagination, until at last it was as clearly present to me as if I had seen it with my bodily eyes. I have it before me at this instant; it was the figure of a man in mediaeval costume, in trunk and hose and doublet, and his clothing was red on one side and yellow on the other. The face, so far as it could be seen, was cadaverous and cruel, but half of it was concealed by a black vizor of velvet, through which lamped a pair of dark, unwinking eyes. The figure was there all day and every minute of the day, but I pegged stolidly on and gave as little heed as I could to it. But that night when I had got to bed, a development occurred. The figure took up that impossible position at my head, and I became aware that it had, balanced over its shoulder, an axe with a broad back and an edge like a razor, with which it stood in act to strike.
I got out of bed and re-lit the lamp, refilled my pipe and sat down to think things over. Wherever I went, the figure was behind me and always in the same threatening attitude. I began to talk to it at last in set phrases: “I know perfectly well what you are,” I said; “you are an inhabitant of the land of Mental Overwork. I'm going to hold you at arm's length, because if I allowed you to take liberties, you might grow dangerous. We will travel together if you will insist upon it until this book is finished and then I will take you into some quiet, rural, restful place and lose you.” I did not lose him when the work was over; he went about with me for a week or two. He travelled with me from Edinburgh to London, then from London by the long sea-route to Antwerp; from Antwerp to tranquil little Roche-fort in the Belgian Ardennes; and it was not until I found myself one day with my easel and my paintbox sketching some quaint bulbous old trees in the Avenue des Tilleuls, that I woke up to the fact that I had lost him. He came back to me once more and once only. I think it was owing to the fact that a fire had occurred at the printing premises of Messrs Grant & Co. in Turnmill Street, in which the manuscript of a work of fiction had been destroyed, that I was asked by my old friend Gowing to put extra pressure upon myself for the completion of a story on which I was engaged for him. It was a question of days and almost of hours, and I remember that at the last, from Friday morning until late on Sunday night, I wrote almost incessantly, snatching an hour or two's sleep in an armchair, only when Nature imperatively demanded it. I delivered the manuscript in person on Monday morning and as I was walking home along Holborn, I suddenly became aware of the presence of my old unpleasant comrade. I gibed at him with a feeling of perfect security, but I was brought to a halt by a sudden horrible discovery—the paving-stone in front of me was not a real paving-stone at all but a mere paper imitation, with an actually measureless gulf below it. The delusion was so real and convincing that I was able to pursue my way only by the most desperate resolution, and all the way to Fitzroy Square, where I was living at the time, the fear clung to me. I took a liberal dose of whisky, went to bed and slept the clock round, and woke to find the whole thing vanished.
I spent five happy years at Rochefort, and although when I first went there I had no idea of staying for more than three or four weeks' rest and quiet, it was actually eighteen months before I left the place at all.
In dealing with my experiences in the Press gallery of the House of Commons, I had occasion to speak of the curious premonition which assailed me at the instant at which the unfortunate Dr Kenealy made use of the rhetorical symbol of the dewdrops and the lion's mane. I do not know that I have any right to claim the possession of any psychic faculty which goes beyond the ordinary, but I do know that that sort of premonition of a coming circumstance has not been at all rare in my experience. Something very like it befell me whilst I was living at Rochefort, and in that instance it proved of signal service to me, I wrote the final scene of Joseph's Coat on a certain wintry day and was within a page or two of the conclusion of the story when I was called to luncheon. In the ardour of work I had allowed the fire to die out in my bedroom stove, and encountering on the stairs a certain lout, whose name was Victor, who did duty about the stables of the hotel, I gave him instructions to see to it. Ten minutes later a dreadful inspiration occurred to me, and I dashed upstairs. The man was kneeling before the stove and was in the very act of striking a lucifer match when I arrived. A glance at my writing-table showed me that the impulse on which I had acted was only too well-founded. The man had taken a dozen pages of my manuscript, and an instant later he would have set them blazing. In those days I wrote on an unruled large quarto, and since it was my habit to crowd sixteen hundred words into a page, the loss of time and labour would have been, at least, considerable. I recovered my MS. all crumpled and dirty, and I applied to that ostler pretty nearly all the opprobrious names in his language with which I was acquainted. “Mais, monsieur,” the criminal responded, “le papier était déjà gâté; vous avez écrit là-dessus.” If this had been intended as a literary criticism, it might possibly have been justified, but seeing that it was offered by a man who could not read, there was something in the frank imbecility of it which disarmed me, and I daresay that the shout of laughter with which I received it was just as incomprehensible to the man as the rage with which I had fallen upon him only a moment earlier.
When I first took up my residence in that little Belgian village, I mistook it for an Arcadia, but a more intimate knowledge of it and the acquaintanceship I formed with the village doctor and the doyen of the little local cathedral served to undeceive me. It was full of poverty and of all the more sordid forms of vice which everywhere seem inseparable from physical distress and overcrowding. I taught both the medico and the cleric to appreciate the flavour of Scotch whisky, and on many a score of winter nights I used to sit and listen to them whilst they engaged in long discussions on the Christian faith. The venerable doyen laboured hard to convince the doctor, who was an Agnostic of the aggressive type. “La religion,” said the latter, on one occasion, “est une bonne et belle chose pour les femmes, les enfants et les imbeciles,” but in spite of their antagonism in this respect, they worked together with a devotion which was beyond praise amongst their poor. The priest used to tell the doctor that he would have been the best of Christians if he had only known it, and the doctor used to assure him in return that he would have been the best of men if only his mind had never been distorted by the fables of the Church. They met on the common ground of benevolence and scholarship and I think they were a pair of the most lovable old fossils I have ever known. The doctor was a man of prodigious attainment and I often used to wonder what had induced such a man to bury himself in such a place, until I learned that the genial old bachelor bookworm had known a day of romance long before, and that the lady of his choice had, on the very eve of marriage, resigned herself, like Carlyle's Blumine, to wed someone richer. The romance spoiled his career, but it was a godsend for his native village, where he laboured till the day of his death, expending the whole of his professional income in works of charity. He has no place in this simple record apart from my affectionate remembrance of him and these remembrances may be taken simply as a flower laid in passing on the burial mound of an old friend.