self-conceit, and eager love of controversy plunged him into discussions
from which another man would have shrunk with disgust. He went so far on
one occasion as to write to the editor of a London daily paper,
threatening that if his books were not more fairly dealt with he would
order his publisher to withdraw his advertisements from the offending
journal. One can fancy what terror the threat of a loss of a few
shillings a month would have had upon the proprietors of a flourishing
London paper, and the amount of ridicule to which the bare suggestion of
such a thing exposed the irritable novelist. But Reade was, and probably
is, incurable. He would keep pelting his peppery little notes at the
head of any and everybody against whom he fancied that he had a
grievance. I remember one peculiarly whimsical illustration of this
weakness, which found its way into print some years ago in London, but
which perhaps will be quite new in the United States, and I cannot
resist the temptation to reproduce it. Once upon a time, it would seem
from the correspondence, Mr. Reade wrote a play called "Gold," which was
produced at Drury Lane Theatre. Except from this correspondence I own
that I never heard of the play. Subsequently, Mr. Reade presented
himself one night at the stage-door of Drury Lane Theatre, and was
refused admittance. Mr. Charles Mathews was then performing at the
theatre, and Mr. Reade evidently supposed him to have been the manager
and responsible for all the arrangements. Therefore he addressed his
complaint to the incomparable light comedian, who is as renowned for
easy sparkling humor and wit off the stage as for brilliant acting on
it. Here is the correspondence; and we shall see how much Mr. Reade took
by his motion:
GARRICK CLUB, COVENT GARDEN, November 28.
DEAR SIR: I was stopped the other night at the stage-door of Drury
Lane Theatre by people whom I remember to have seen at the Lyceum
under your reign.
This is the first time such an affront was ever put upon me in any
theatre where I had produced a play, and is without precedent
unless when an affront was intended. As I never forgive an affront,
I am not hasty to suppose one intended. It is very possible that
this was done inadvertently; and the present stage-list may have
been made out without the older claims being examined.
Will you be so kind as to let me know at once whether this is so,
and if the people who stopped me at the stage-door are yours, will
you protect the author of "Gold," etc., from any repetition of such
an annoyance?
I am, dear sir, yours faithfully,
CHARLES READE.
To this imperious demand Mr. Reade received next day the following
genial answer:
T. R., DRURY LANE, November 29.
DEAR SIR: If ignorance is bliss on general occasions, on the
present it certainly would be folly to be wise. I am therefore
happy to be able to inform you that I am ignorant of your having
produced a play at this theatre; ignorant that you are the author
of "Gold"; ignorant of the merits of that play; ignorant that your
name has been erased from the list at the stage-door; ignorant that
it had ever been on it; ignorant that you had presented yourself
for admittance; ignorant that it had been refused; ignorant that
such a refusal was without precedent; ignorant that in the man who
stopped you you recognized one of the persons lately with me at the
Lyceum; ignorant that the doorkeeper was ever in that theatre;
ignorant that you never forgive an affront; ignorant that any had
been offered; ignorant of when, how, or by whom the list was made
out, and equally so by whom it was altered.
Allow me to add that I am quite incapable of offering any
discourtesy to a gentleman I have barely the pleasure of knowing,
and moreover have no power whatever to interfere with Mr. Smith's
arrangements or disarrangements; and, with this wholesale admission
of ignorance, incapacity, and impotence, believe me
Faithfully yours,
C. T. MATHEWS.
CHARLES READE, ESQ.
The correspondence got into print somehow, and created, I need hardly
say, infinite merriment in the literary clubs and circles of London. Not
all disputes with Charles Reade ended so humorously, for the British
novelist is as fond of actions at law as Fenimore Cooper used to be.
Thus more than one critic has had to dread the terrors of an action for
damages when he has ventured in a rash moment to disparage the literary
value of Mr. Reade's teaching. Lately, however, in the case of the
"Times," and its attack on "A Terrible Temptation," Mr. Reade adopted
the unexpected tone of mild and even flattering remonstrance. Whether he
thought it hopeless to alarm the "Times" by any threat of action, or
feared that if he wrote a savage letter the journal would not even give
him the comfort of seeing it in print, I do not know. But he certainly
took a meek tone and endeavored to propitiate, and got rather coarsely
rebuked for his pains. People in London were amused to find that he
could be thus mild and gentle. I do remember, however, that on one
occasion he wrote a letter of remonstrance, which was probably intended
to be a kind of rugged compliment to the "Saturday Review," a paper
which likewise cares nothing about actions for damages. Usually,
however, his tone of argument with his critics is perfervid, and his
estimate of himself is exquisitely candid. In one of his manifestoes he
assured the world that he never allowed a publisher to offer any
suggestions with regard to his story, but simply sold the manuscript in
bulk--"_c'est a prendre ou a laisser_." In another instance he spoke of
one of his novels as "floating" the serial publication in which it was
making its appearance, and which we were therefore given to understand
would have sunk to the bottom but for his cooeperation. In short, it is
well known in London that Mr. Charles Readers character is disfigured by
a self-conceit which amounts to something like mania, and an impatience
of criticism which occasionally makes him all but a laughing-stock to
the public. Rarely, indeed, in literary history have high and genuine
talents been united with such a flatulence of self-conceit.
Probably Reade had reached his highest position just after the
publication of "Hard Cash." This remarkable novel, crammed with
substance enough to make half a dozen novels, appeared in the first
instance in Dickens's "All the Year Round." Dickens himself, if I
remember rightly, felt bound to publish a note disclaiming any
concurrence in or personal responsibility for the attacks on the private
madhouse system, and the whole subject aroused a very lively
controversy, wherein, I think, Reade certainly was not worsted. The
"Griffith Gaunt" controversy we all remember. I confess that I have no
sympathy whatever with the kind of criticism which treats any of Mr.
Reade's works as immoral in tendency, and I think the charge was even
more absurd when urged against "Griffith Gaunt" than when pressed
against the "Terrible Temptation." To me the clear tendency of Reade's
novels seems always healthy, purifying, and bracing, like a fresh,
strong breeze. I cannot understand how any man or woman could be the
worse for reading one of them. They are always novels with a purpose,
and I, at least, never could discern any purpose in them which was not
honest and sound. I feel inclined to excuse all Reade's vehemence of
self-vindication and childish frankness of self-praise when I read some
of the attacks against what people try to paint as the immorality of his
books. But I need not go into that controversy. Enough to say for my own
part that I found "Griffith Gaunt" a grim and dreary book--a tiresome
book, in fact; but I saw nothing in it which could with any justice be
said to have the slightest tendency to demoralize any reader. I have
indeed heard people who are in general fair critics condemn "Adam Bede"
as immoral because Hetty is seduced; and I have even heard poor Maggie
Tulliver rated as unfit for decent society because she ever allowed even
a moment's thought of her cousin's engaged lover to enter her mind. On
this principle, doubtless, "Griffith Gaunt" is immoral. There are people
in the book who commit sin, and yet are not eaten by lions or bodily
carried down below like Don Juan. But if we are to have novels made up
only of good people who always do right and the one stock villain who
always does wrong, I think the novelist's art cannot too soon be
delegated to its only fitting province--the amusement of the nursery.
"Griffith Gaunt," however, I regard as a falling off, because it is a
sour, unpleasant, and therefore inartistic book. "Foul Play" was a
clever _tour de force_, a brilliant thing, made to sell, with hardly
more character in it than would suffice for a Bowery melodrama. "Put
Yourself in his Place" was a wholesome return to the former style, a
marrowy, living blue-book, instinct with power and passion. "A Terrible
Temptation" I do not admire. I do not think it immoral, but it hardly
calls for any deliberate criticism. Since "Hard Cash" Mr. Reade has, in
my opinion, written only one novel which the literary world will care to
preserve, and even that one, "Put Yourself in his Place," can hardly be
said to add one cubit to his stature.
Mr. Reade has, I believe, rather a passion for dramatic enterprise, and
a characteristic faith in his power to turn out a good drama. A season
or two back he hired, I am told, a London theatre, in order to have the
complete superintendence of the production of one of his novels turned
into a drama. I have been assured that the dramatic version was
accomplished entirely by himself. If so, I am sure no enemy could have
more cruelly damaged the original work. All the character was completely
sponged out of it. The one really effective and original personage in
the novel did not appear in the play. A number of the most antique and
conventional melodramatic situations and surprises were crammed into the
piece. All the silly old stage business about mysterious conspiracies
carried on under the very ear of the identical personage who never ought
to have been allowed to hear them are called in to form an essential
feature of the drama. The play, of course, was not successful, although
the novel had in it naturally all the elements of a stirring and
powerful drama. If Charles Reade really with his own hand converted a
vigorous and thrilling story into that limp, languid, and vapid play,
it was surely the most awful warning against amateur dramatic enterprise
that ever self-conceit could receive undismayed.
Of course we won't rank Mr. Reade as one of the most popular novelists
now in England. But his popularity is something very different indeed
from that of Dickens, or even from that of Thackeray. In Forster's "Life
of Dickens" there is a letter of the great novelist's in which he
complains of having been treated (by Bentley, I think) no better than
any author who had sold but fifteen hundred copies. I should think the
occasions were very rare when Mr. Reade's circulation in England went
much beyond fifteen hundred copies. The whole system of publishing is so
different in England from that which prevails in America, our fictitious
prices and the controlling monopoly of our great libraries so restrict
and limit the sale, that a New York reader would perhaps hardly believe
how small a number constitute a good circulation for an English
novelist. I assume that, speaking roughly, Reade, Wilkie Collins, and
Trollope may be said to have about the same kind of circulation--almost
immeasurably below Dickens, and below some such abnormal sale as that of
"Lothair" or "Lady Audley's Secret," but much above even the best of the
younger novelists. I venture to think that not one of these three
popular and successful authors may be counted on to reach a circulation
of two thousand copies. Probably about eighteen hundred copies would be
a decidedly good thing for one of Charles Reade's novels. Of the three,
I should say that Wilkie Collins has the most eager readers; that
Trollope's novels take the highest place in what is called "society";
and that Reade's rank the best among men of brains. But there is so wide
a difference between the popularity of Dickens and that of Reade that it
seems almost absurd to employ the same word to describe two things so
utterly unlike. It is, indeed, a remarkable proof of Reade's power and
success that, setting out as he always does to tell a story which shall
convey information and a purpose of some practical kind, he can get any
sort of large circulation at all. For one great charm and excellence of
our library system is that it creates a huge class of regular, I might
almost say professional, novel-readers, who subscribe to Mudie's by the
year, want to get all the reading they can out of it, and instinctively
shudder at the thought of any novel that is weighted by solid
information and overtaxing thought. This is the class for whom and by
whom the circulating libraries exist, and Mr. Reade deserves the full
credit of having utterly disregarded them, or rather boldly encountered
them, and at least to some extent compelled them to read him.
Mr. Reade's position as a novelist may be adjudged now as safely as ever
a novelist's place can be fixed by a contemporary generation. He is
nearly sixty years old, and he has written about a dozen novels. It is
not likely that he will ever write anything which could greatly enhance
the estimate the public have already formed of him; and no future
failures could affect his past success. I think his career is,
therefore, fairly and fully before us. We know how singularly limited
his _dramatis personae_ are. He marches them on and off the stage boldly
ever so often, and by a change of dresses every now and then he for a
while almost succeeds in making us believe that he has a very full
company at his command. But we soon get to know every one by sight, and
can swear to him or her, no matter by what name or garb disguised. We
know the sweet, impulsive, incoherent heroine, who is always
contradicting herself and saying what she ought not to say and does not
mean to say; who now denounces the hero, and then falls upon his neck
and vows that she loves him more than life. This young woman is
sometimes Julia and sometimes Helen and sometimes Grace; she now is
exiled for a while on a lonely island, and even she is carried away by a
flood; but in every case she is just the same girl rescued by the same
hero. That hero is always a being of wonderful mechanical and scientific
knowledge of some kind or other, whether as Captain Dodd he makes love
to Lucy Fountain, or as Henry Little he captivates Grace Carden, or as
the gentleman in "Foul Play" he cures the heroine of consumption and
builds island huts better than Robinson Crusoe. Then we have the rough,
clever, eccentric personage, Dr. Sampson or Dr. Amboyne, whose business
principally is to act a part like that of Herr Mittler in Goethe's
novel, and help the characters of the book through every difficulty.
Then we have the white-livered sneak, the villain of the book when he is
bad enough for such a part; the Coventry of "Put Yourself in his Place";
I forget what his name is in "Foul Play." These are the puppets which
principally make up the show. Very vigorously and cleverly do they
dance, and capitally do they imitate life; but there are so very few of
them that we grow a little tired of seeing them over and over again.
Indeed, Charles Reade's array of characters sometimes reminds us of the
simple system of Plautus, in which we have for every play the same types
of people--the rather stingy father, the embarrassed lover, the clever
comic slave, and so forth. It cannot be said that Reade has added a
single character to fiction. He understands human nature, or at least
such types of it as he habitually selects, very well, and he draws
vigorously his figures and groups; but he has discovered nothing fresh,
he has rescued no existence from the commonplace and evanescent
realistics of life, to be preserved immortal in a work of art. Not one
of his characters is cited in ordinary conversation or in the writings
of journalists. Nobody quotes from him unless in reference to some one
of the stirring social topics which he has illustrated, and even then
only as one would quote from a correspondent of the "Times." Every
educated man and woman in England is assumed, as a matter of course, to
be familiar with the works of George Eliot; but nobody is necessarily
assumed to have read Charles Reade. That educated people do read him and
do admire him is certain; but it is quite a matter of option with them
to read him or let him alone so far as society and public opinion are
concerned. There are certain tests and evidences of a novelist's having
attained a front-rank place in England which are unmistakable. They are
purely social, may be only superficial, and will neither one way nor the
other affect the views of foreign critics or of posterity; but they are
decisive as far as England is concerned. Among them I shall mention two
or three. One is the fact that writers in the press allude to some of
his characters without feeling bound to explain in whose novel and what
novel the characters appear. Another is the fact that artists
voluntarily select from his works subjects for paintings to be sent to
the Royal Academy's annual exhibition or elsewhere. A third is the fact
that articles about him, not formal reviews of a work just published,
appear pretty often in the magazines. Now, whatever may be the genius
and merits of an author, I think he cannot be said to have attained the
front rank in English public opinion unless he can show these evidences
of success; and, so far as I know, Mr. Reade cannot show any of them.
For myself, I do not believe that Mr. Reade ever could under any
circumstances have become a really great novelist. All the higher gifts
of imagination and all the richer veins of humor have been denied to
him. Not one gleam of poetic fancy ever seems to have floated across the
nervous Saxon of his style. He is a powerful story-teller, who has a
manly purpose in every tale he tells, and that is all. That surely is a
great deal. No one tells a story more thrillingly. Once you begin to
listen, you cannot release yourself from the spell of the _raconteur_
until all be done. A strong, healthy air of honest and high purpose
breathes through nearly all the stories. An utter absence of cant,
affectation, and sham distinguishes them. A surprising variety of
descriptive power, at once bold, broad, and realistic, is one of their
great merits. Mr. Reade can describe a sea-fight, a storm, the forging
of a horseshoe, the ravages of an inundation, the trimming of a lady's
dress, the tuning of a piano, with equal accuracy and apparent zest. I
once heard an animated discussion in a literary club as to whether the
scrap of minute description was artistic and effective or absurd and
ludicrous which makes us acquainted with the fact that when Henry Little
dragged Grace Carden out of the raging flood, the force of the water
washed away the heroine's stockings and garters and left her barefoot.
Some irreverent critics would only laugh at the gravity with which the
author detailed this important circumstance. Others, however, insisted
that this little touch, so homely, and to the profane mind so
exceedingly ridiculous, was necessary and artistic; that it heightened
the effect of the great word-picture previously shown by the force of
its practical and circumstantial reality. However this momentous
controversy may settle itself in the estimation of readers, it cannot be
denied that some at least of Reade's success is due to the courage and
self-reliance which will brave the risk of being ridiculous for the sake
of being real and effective. Indeed, Mr. Reade wants no quality which is
necessary to make a powerful story-teller, while he is distinguished
from all mere story-tellers by the fact that he has some great social
object to serve in nearly everything he undertakes to detail. More than
this I do not believe he is, nor, despite the evidences of something yet
higher which were given in "Christie Johnstone" and "The Cloister and
the Hearth," do I think he ever could have been. He is a magnificent
specimen of the modern special correspondent, endowed with the
additional and unique gift of a faculty for throwing his report into the
form of a thrilling story. But it requires something more than this,
something higher than this, to make a great novelist whom the world will
always remember. Mr. Reade is unsurpassed in the second class of English
novelists, but he does not belong to the front rank. His success has
been great in its way, but it is for an age and not for time.
THE EXILE-WORLD OF LONDON.
Leicester Square and the region that lies around it are conventionally
regarded as the exile quarter of London. The name of Leicester square
suggests the idea of an exile, as surely and readily, even to the mind
of one who has never looked on the mournful and decaying enclosure, as
the name of Billingsgate does that of fish-woman, or the name of the
Temple that of a law-student. Yet, if a stranger visiting London thinks
he is likely to see any exile of celebrity, while pacing the streets
which branch off Leicester square, he will be almost as much mistaken as
if he were to range Eastcheap in the hope of meeting the wild Prince and
Poins.
Many a conspiracy has had its followers and understrappers in the
Leicester square region; but the great conspirators do not live there
any more. The place is falling, falling; the foreign and distinctive
character of the population remains as marked as ever, but the
foreigners whom London people would care to see are not to be found
there any longer. The exiles who have made part of history, whose names
are on record, do not care for Leicester square. They are to be found in
Kensington, in Brompton, in Hampstead and Highgate; in the Regent's Park
district; a few in Bloomsbury, a few in Mayfair. A marble slab and an
inscription now mark the house in King street, St. James's, where Louis
Napoleon lodged; and there is a house in Belgrave square dear to all
true Legitimists, where the Count de Chambord ("Henri Cinq") received
Berryer and his brother pilgrims. Only poor exiles herd together now in
London. Only poverty, I suppose, ever causes nationalities to herd
together anywhere. The men who group around Leicester square are the
exiles without a fame; the subterranean workers in politics; the men who
come like shadows, and so depart; the men whose names are writ in water,
even though their life-paths may have been marked in blood.
Living in London, I had of late years many opportunities of meeting with
the exiles of each class. I know few men more to be pitied than the
great majority of those who make up the latter or Leicester square
section. On the other hand, I should say that few men, indeed, are more
to be envied by any of their fellow-creatures who love to be courted and
"lionized," than the political exiles of great name who come to London
and do not stay too long there.
Far away as the days of Thaddeus of Warsaw and the conventional and
romantic type of exile now seem, there is still a fervent yearning in
British society toward the representative of any Continental nationality
which happens to be oppressed. No man had ever before received such a
welcome in London as Kossuth did; but Kossuth stayed too long, became
domesticized and familiarized, and society in London likes its lions to
be always new and fresh. Moreover, the late Lord Palmerston, a warm
patron of exiles when the patronage went no further than an invitation
to a dinner or an evening party, set his face against Kossuth from the
first; and polite society soon took the hint.