Evans (b. 1819). It would be difficult to find three persons more
different in temperament; impossible to find more striking instances of
the way in which the new blend of romance and novel lent itself to the
most various uses and developments. Reade--who thought himself a
dramatist and wasted upon drama a great deal of energy and an almost
ideal position as a possessor of an unusually rich fellowship at
Magdalen College, Oxford, with no duties--came rather closer to Dickens
than to any novelist previously named, not merely in a sort of
non-poetic but powerful imagination, but also in the mania for attacking
what seemed to him abuses--in lunatic asylums (on which point he was
very nearly a monomaniac himself), prisons, and many other things. But
he is almost more noteworthy, from our point of view, because of his
use--it also must, one fears, be called an abuse--of a process obviously
invited by the new demand for truth to life, and profitable up to a
certain point. This was the collection, in enormous scrapbooks, of
newspaper cuttings on a vast variety of subjects, to be worked up into
fiction when the opportunity served. Reade had so much genius--he had
perhaps the most, in a curious rather incalculable fashion, of the whole
group--that he very nearly succeeded in digesting these "marine stores"
of detail and document into real books. But he did not always, and
could not always, quite do it: and he remains, with Zola, the chief
example of the danger of working at your subject too much as if you were
getting up a brief, or preparing an article for an encyclopedia. Still,
his greatest books, which are probably _It is Never too Late to Mend_
(1856) and _The Cloister and the Hearth_ (1861), have immense vigour
and, in the second case, an almost poetic attraction which Dickens never
reaches, while over all sparks and veins of genius are scattered.
Moreover, he is interesting because, until his own time, he would have
been quite impossible; and, even at that time, without the general
movement which we are describing, very unlikely.