In truth, Kingsley, viewed in all his literary work, stands out as an athlete of the intellect and the emotions, doing much and doing it remarkably well—­a power for righteousness in his day and generation, but for this very reason less a professional novelist of assured standing.  His gifted, erratic brother Henry, in the striking series of stories dealing prevailingly with the Australian life he so well knew, makes a stronger impression of singleness of power and may last longer, one suspects, than the better-known, more successful Charles, whose significance for the later generation is, as we have hinted, in his sensitiveness to the new spirit of social revolt,—­an isolated voice where there is now full chorus.

IV

An even more virile figure and one to whom the attribution of genius need not be grudged, is the strong, pugnacious, eminently picturesque Charles Reade.  It is a temptation to say that but for his use of a method and a technique hopelessly old-fashioned, he might claim close fellowship for gift and influence with Dickens.  But he lacked art as it is now understood:  balance, restraint, the impersonal view were not his.  He is a glorious but imperfect phenomenon, back there in the middle century.  He worked in a way deserving of the descriptive phrase once applied to Macaulay—­“a steam engine in breeches;” he put enough belief and heart into his fiction to float any literary vessel upon the treacherous waters of fame.  He had, of the more specific qualities of a novelist, racy idiom, power in creating character and a remarkable gift for plot and dramatic scene.  His frankly melodramatic novels like “A Terrible Temptation” are among the best of their kind, and in “The Cloister and the Hearth” he performed the major literary feat of reconstructing, with the large imagination and humanity which obliterate any effect of archeology and worked-up background, a period long past.  And what reader of English fiction does not harbor more than kindly sentiments for those very different yet equally lovable women, Christie Johnstone and Peg Woffington?  To run over his contributions thus is to feel the heart grow warm towards the sturdy story-teller.  Reade also played a part, as did Kingsley, in the movement for recognition of the socially unfit and those unfairly treated.  “Put Yourself in His Place,” with its early word on the readjustment of labor troubles, is typical of much that he strove to do.  Superb partisan that he was, it is probable that had he cared less for polemics and more for his art, he would have secured a safer position in the annals of fiction.  He can always be taken up and enjoyed for his earnest conviction or his story for the story’s sake, even if on more critical evaluations he comes out not so well as men of lesser caliber.

V