great original drama 'It is Never Too Late to Mend,' which has gone by a
slower conveyance. When you receive, please take it to Miss Kean" (Laura
Keene), "and with it the enclosed page. You will tell her that, as this
is by far the most important drama I have ever written, and entirely
original, I wish her to have the refusal, and, if she will not do it
herself, I hope she will advise you how to place it. Here in England we
are at the dead-lock. The provincial theatres and the second-class
theatres are pestering me daily for it. But I will not allow it to be
produced except at a first-class theatre. I have wrested it by four
actions in law and equity from the hands of pirates, and now they shall
smart for pirating me. At the present time, therefore, any American
manager who may have the sense and honesty to treat with me will be
quite secure from the competition of English copies. I have licked old
Conquest, and the lawyers are now fighting tooth and nail over the
costs. The judges gave me one hundred and sixty pounds damages, but, as
I lost the demurrer with costs, the balance will doubtless be small.
But, if the pecuniary result is small, the victory over the pirates and
the venal part of the press is great."
He wrote on May 30, 1862, "As for writing a short story on the spur, it
is a thing I never could do in my life. My success in literature is
owing to my throwing my whole soul into the one thing I am doing. And at
present I am over head and ears in the story for Dickens" ("Very Hard
Cash"). "Write to me often. The grand mistake of friends at a distance
is not corresponding frequently enough. Thus the threads of business are
broken, as well as the silken threads of sentiment. Thanks about the
drama" ("It is Never Too Late to Mend"). "I have but faint hopes. It is
the best thing I ever wrote of any kind, and therefore I fear no manager
will ever have brains to take it."
On June 20, 1862, he wrote of his forthcoming story, "Between ourselves,
the story" ("Very Hard Cash") "will be worth as many thousands as I have
asked hundreds. I suppose they think I am an idiot, or else that I have
no idea of the value of my works in the United States. I put 6 Bolton
Row" (the usual address on his letters) "because that is the safest
address for you to write to; but in reality I have been for the last
month, and still am, buried in Oxford, working hard upon the story. My
advice to you is to enter into no literary speculations during this
frightful war. Upon its conclusion, by working in concert, we might do
something considerable together."
On August 5, 1862, he wrote from Magdalen College, where he was to
remain until the 1st of October, "I shall be truly thankful if you
postpone your venture till peace is re-established. I am quite sure that
a new weekly started now would inevitably fail. You could not print the
war as Leslie and Harper do, and who cares for the still small voice of
literature and fiction amongst the braying of trumpets and the roll of
drums? Do the right thing at the right time, my boy: that is how hits
are made. If you will postpone till a convenient season, I will work
with you and will hold myself free of all engagements in order to do so.
I am myself accumulating subjects with a similar view, and we might do
something more than a serial story, though a serial story must always be
the mainspring of success."
He wrote on September 6, 1862, "I am glad you have varied your project
by purchasing an established monthly" ("The Knickerbocker Magazine")
"instead of starting a new weekly. I will form no new engagements nor
promise early sheets without first consulting you. I will look out for
you, and as soon as my large story is completed will try if I cannot do
something for you myself."
On the 29th of June, 1863, he wrote, "I am much pleased with your
'Knickerbocker Magazine,' and cannot too much admire your energy and
versatility. Take notice, I recommended you Miss Braddon's works while
they were to be had for a song. 'Lost and Saved,' by Mrs. Norton, will
make you a good deal of money if you venture boldly on it and publish
it. It is out-and-out the best new thing, and rather American. If you
hear of any scrap-books containing copious extracts from American
papers, I am open to purchase at a fair price, especially if the
extracts are miscellaneous and dated, and, above all, if classified. I
shall, also be grateful if you will tell me whether there is not a
journal that reports trials, and send me a specimen. Command me whenever
you think I can be of an atom of use to you."
Charles Reade's letters were always highly characteristic of him. In
these he mentally photographed himself, for he always wrote with candid
unreserve, whether to friend or foe, and he liked to talk with the pen.
Both by nature and education he was fitted for a quiet, studious,
scholarly life, and with pen and paper and books he was always at home.
He liked, too, at intervals the cloister-like life he led at Magdalen
College. With nothing to disturb him in his studies and his work, with
glimpses of bright green turf and umbrageous recesses and gray old
buildings with oriel windows that were there before England saw the Wars
of the Roses, his environment was picturesque, and his bursar's cap and
gown became him well, yet seemed to remove him still further from the
busy world and suggest some ecclesiastical figure of the fifteenth
century. He was a D.C.L., and known as Dr. Reade in the college, just as
if he had never written a novel or a play and had been untrumpeted by
fame.
There, in his rooms on "Staircase No. 2," with "Dr. Reade" over the
door, he labored _con amore_. Indeed, he was amid more congenial
surroundings and more truly in his element in the atmosphere of the
ancient university than in London or anywhere else. By both nature and
habit he was more fitted to enjoy the cloister than the hearth, although
he by no means undervalued the pleasures of society and domestic life.
The children of his brain--his own works--seemed to be the only ones he
cared for; and, loving and feeling proud of his literary family, he was
mentally satisfied. Yet no man was a keener observer of home-life, and
his portraiture of women and analysis of female character, although
unvarying as to types, were singularly true and penetrating. His
Fellowship was the principal cause of his never marrying, the next most
important one being that he was always wedded to his pen; and
literature, like law, is a jealous mistress. He had some idea of this
kind when he said, "An author married is an author marred,"--an
adaptation from Shakespeare, who was ungallant enough to say, "A young
man married is a man that's marred." But a good and suitable wife would
have given _éclat_ to his social life.
His splendid courage and the manliness of his character always commanded
admiration, and his hatred of injustice and wrong, cant and hypocrisy,
was in harmony with the nobility and passionate earnestness of his
nature. He was the friend of the workingman, the poor, and the
oppressed; and he exposed the abuses of jails and lunatic-asylums and
trades-unions, and much besides, in the interest of humanity and as a
disinterested philanthropist. He fought, too, the battles of his
fellow-authors on the copyright questions with the same tremendous
energy that he displayed in his struggles for practical reform in other
directions; and as a practical reformer through his novels he, like
Dickens, accomplished a great deal of good. When moved by strong
impulses in this direction, he seemed indeed to write with a quivering
pen, dipped not in ink, but in fire and gall and blood, and to imbue
what he wrote with his own vital force and magnetic spirit.
Measuring his literary stature at a glance, it must, however, be
admitted that, notwithstanding his high average of excellence, he was a
very uneven writer, and hence between his worst and his best work there
is a wide distance in point of merit. But the best of his writings as
well deserves immortality as anything ever penned in fiction. Although
inferior to them in some respects, he was superior in epigrammatic
descriptive power to the most famous of his English and French
contemporaries, and particularly in his descriptions of what he had
never seen or experienced, but only read about. Take, for instance, his
Australian scenes in "It is Never Too Late to Mend," where the effect of
the song of the English skylark in the gold-diggings is told with
touching brevity and pathos. Yet all his information concerning
Australia had been gained by reading newspaper correspondence and books
on that country. He made no secret of this, and said in substance, as
frankly as he spoke of his scrap-books, "I read these to save me from
the usual trick of describing a bit of England and calling it the
antipodes." He could infuse life into the dry figures of a blue-book;
but in the mere portraiture of ordinary conventional society manners,
free from the sway of strong passions and emotions, he did not greatly
excel writers of far inferior ability. He had the graphic simplicity and
realism of De Foe in describing places he had never seen; and as the
historian of a country or a period in which he felt interested he would
have been unusually brilliant, for he was an adept in picturesque
condensation, and knew how to improve upon his originals and use them
without copying a word. He was a master of vigorous English.
KINAHAN CORNWALLIS.
IN A SUPPRESSED TUSCAN MONASTERY.
We have left the golden hills and laughing valleys of Tuscany behind us
as we approach that desert part of it where the gray chalk cliffs
stretch out into the Maremma in long narrow tongues of rock, not far
from Siena. A frightful convulsion of nature in prehistoric times rent
the solid rock, seaming it with chasms so wide and deep that the region
is almost depopulated, not only because man can with difficulty find
room for the sole of his foot, but because the gases which lie over the
Maremma in vapors thick enough to destroy life in a single night rise up
to the top of these cliffs and reduce the dwellers there to fever-worn
shadows. Even the scattered olive-trees that have taken root in the thin
layer of soil are of the same hue, and the few clumps of cypresses add
to the pallor of the scene with their dark funereal shafts. The only bit
of color is where a cluster of low red-washed houses have found room for
their scanty foundations on a knot of rock where several chasms
converge. Where the sides of the chasms slope gently enough to admit of
being terraced, vineyards are planted, which yield famous wines, the red
Aleatico and the white Vino Santo, rivalling in quality the Monte
Pulciano, which grows only a short distance away. Farther down in the
depths thickets of scrub oak and wild vines form oases that are
invisible unless one is standing on the brink.
The epithet "God-forsaken," so often applied to regions like this,
would, however, be inappropriate here, for in God's name the locality is
famous. On a promontory whose sides fall down in sheer precipices all
about, except where a narrow neck of rock connects it with the net-work
of cliffs, is a vast monastery, the Mother Abbey of the Olivetani. In
1313 a noble of Siena, Bernardo Tolomei, in the midst of a life of
literary distinctions and pleasures, received, it is said, the grace of
God. He was struck blind, and in his prayers vowed if he recovered his
sight to embrace a life of penitence. It was the divine will that his
vows should be fulfilled, and his sight was immediately restored. Two
friends of the noblest Italian families, the Patrizzi and Piccolomini,
joined him in leaving the world to become hermits in the desert. The
chalky cliffs overhanging the Maremma on Bernardo's estates were
selected as a fitting retreat: here they dug grottoes in the sides of a
precipice and lived on roots and water. They were soon followed by so
many penitents as to form a community requiring a government, and, the
necessity of this being made plain to them through a vision, in which
Bernardo saw a silver ladder suspended between heaven and earth, on
which white-robed monks were ascending accompanied by angels, he was
urged to go to Avignon and obtain an audience of the Pope, who gave to
the community the rule of St. Benedict.
For a century the friars labored in building their convent to
accommodate the needs of their ever-increasing numbers: the one vast
cloister was not enough, and another was added; the primitive chapel was
enlarged into a stately church, and the abbey walls were extended until,
enclosing the garden, they covered the entire promontory. Then they
ceased from their labors, and began to establish other monasteries and
send out swarms from the mother-hive to fill them, until the executive
and administrative ability to govern a small kingdom had to be supplied
from their numbers, and manual work had to give way to mental.
Another century found the abbey governed by men of culture and lovers of
the fine arts; and the celebrated painted cloister, the intarsia-work,
and the wooden sculptures, which now attract so many visitors, date from
that time. Nearly all the movable works of art, the pictures,
illuminated missals, and precious manuscripts, were confiscated at the
time of the first suppression under Napoleon, in 1810; and whatever else
could be carried off went in 1866, when the religious orders were
suppressed by the Italian government, to embellish the museums. Still,
the empty cloister, with Signorelli's and Sodoma's frescos on the walls,
Fra Giovanni of Verona's intarsia-work in the church, and the solitary
monastery itself, so silent after centuries of activity, have an
inexpressible charm, and travellers who undertake a pilgrimage hither
can never forget their impressions.
On a sunny autumn afternoon three ladies left Siena in a light wagon,
and drove over the gray upland, which was shrouded in a pale blue mist,
through the picturesque hamlet of Buonconvento. Here they changed their
horse and left the Roman highway for the road cut in the rocks five
centuries ago by the monks of Monte Oliveto. These pious men understood
little of engineering, of the art of throwing bridges across ravines.
Their road simply followed the course pointed out by nature, winding in
serpentine folds through the labyrinth of chasms which begin at
Buonconvento.
It was toward evening when the party drove over a narrow bridge across a
half-filled moat, and under the arch of a massive crenellated tower
whose unguarded gates stood wide open. A hundred years ago they would
have found the portcullis drawn, and, being women, if they had attempted
to force an entrance would have been excommunicated, for until the
suppression no woman's foot was allowed across this threshold. The tower
was built as a protection against bandits, and the grated windows which
give it a sinister look to-day lighted the cells of refractory brothers,
placed here to catch the eye of novices as they entered the outer portal
and serve as a silent warning.
The convent was still invisible, and our three visitors were speculating
on what they would find at the end of the grass-grown _allée_ bordered
with cypresses, when they saw, in a ravine below, a white-robed figure
hastening toward them.
"That must be the Padre Abbate," one of them exclaimed. "I hope he has
received our padre's letter telling of our coming, for it would be worse
than an attack of the bandits of old, our falling upon him at this hour
on a Saturday evening without any warning."
They had alighted in front of the church when the padre arrived quite
out of breath,--a tall, stately old man, with white hair flowing over
the turned-back cowl of his spotless white robe. If they had known
nothing of him before, his courtly manner and easy reception would have
revealed his noble lineage.
"Be welcome, be welcome, my daughters, to the lonely Thebaid. I have
received the padre's letter, and am happy to receive his friends as my
honored guests for a month, if you can support the solitude so long," he
added, smiling. "And, now, which is the signora, and which the Signorina
Giulia and the Signorina Margherita?"
"I am the signora," said one of the three, laughing, the last one would
have suspected of being a matron. She had lost her husband at twenty,
and her four years of European travel had been a seeking after
forgetfulness, until she had grown to be satisfied with the
companionship of two gentle women artists, who, absorbed in their
vocation, walked in God's ways and were blessed with peace and
happiness.
After each had found her place and name in the padre's pure, soft Tuscan
accent, he led the way to the convent door, apologizing for the meagre
hospitality he could offer them. "Would the signore like some bread and
wine before supper?" What could they know of the hours in an abbey,
where it was an almost unheard-of distinction to be received as personal
guests, tourists in general having their own refectory set apart for
them during their stay? and so they declined. They had by this time
reached a low, arched side-door, which grated on its hinges after the
padre had turned the huge key in the rusty lock and opened it. They
entered a wide stone vestibule, and found themselves opposite another
arched door set in arabesque stone carvings: the flags echoed under
their feet as they turned to the right and traversed a low, vaulted
passage that ended in an open cloister. An arched gallery ran round the
four sides, held up by slender, dark stone pillars, above which was a
row of small arched cell windows. The court was paved with flags, and in
the centre was a well, divested of pulley and rope. An impression of
melancholy began to weigh upon the guests, when a great shaggy dog came
springing toward them, barking. The padre quieted him with, "Down, Piro!
down!" adding, "He is very good, though his manner is a little rough: he
is not used to ladies. But he will not be so impolite again, I am sure."
"Oh, I hope he will," said Julia: "it is delightful to see him bound
about here, where it is so strange and quiet."
They traversed one side of the gallery, another low, vaulted corridor,
and came to another cloister, with painted walls, more arches, more
columns, lighter and more graceful, above which, around the three sides,
were two rows this time of cell windows; a beautiful open vaulted
gallery filled the third side, and was carried up through the second
story. Here was another well, out of which ivy-branches had grown and
twined until the curb was one mass of dark-green, shining vines lying on
a bed of moss. Presently they came to a broad stone staircase, at the
head of which "_Silenzio_" was written over an archway that led into a
corridor so long and wide as to seem a world of empty space; on either
side was an unending row of doors, all of them closed.
On many of the doors were inscriptions in Latin: eight, one after the
other, were marked, "_Visitator primus, secundus_," etc.
"These are our quarters, then," said Julia. "But are only eight visitors
allowed at a time?"
The padre laughed at the question. "These rooms were intended for the
visitors appointed to attend our general convocations, at which eight
hundred of our order met here every three years to elect a new general
and discuss our welfare; but the necessity for such visitors has passed
away with our existence. I can remember when all these cells were
filled; and there are three hundred on this floor, and as many more
above. You are surprised, I see, at the number of doors: there are so
many because each cell has its anteroom, where we studied and meditated
and prayed."
They stopped at length before a door marked "_Rev. Pater Vicar.
Generalis_," which was at the end of the corridor. Unlocking the door,
the padre invited them in.
"One of you will be lodged here, and, if you are not too tired, we will
look at your other quarters before you sit down to rest."
So saying, he led the way through five rooms, unlocked a door at the
farther end, conducted them across another corridor of the same
dimensions as the firsthand unlocked another door; when, suddenly
recollecting himself, he said, "You will not be afraid to be separated?
There is nothing here to disturb you,--nothing but these cats; and I
will see that they do not annoy you."
Then the ladies noticed for the first time in the growing darkness four
cats, which turned out to be the padre's bodyguard, attending him
wherever he went. Of course they were not afraid: they were only sorry
to put their kind host to so much trouble. And so they proceeded to
inspect a small cell with a bed and praying-stool and tripod with a
basin for all the furniture. The anteroom had a table and chair, and an
engraving or two on the walls. Next to this cell was another just like
it, for which they agreed to draw lots, and then went to the padre's
anteroom for a book which he said would tell all about the history of
the abbey.
Such masses of keys as were everywhere in this room made it a perfect
curiosity,--keys for every one of the cells on this floor and above, for
the refectories, church, offices, etc., below, for rooms enough to
accommodate the emperor Charles V. and his suite of two thousand men
for a night, festooned in bunches around the walls,--so that in the dusk
the room seemed lined with curious bas-reliefs in steel. Piles of books
were heaped on the table with surgical instruments, medicine-bottles,
and bags of dried seeds.
After this inspection in the twilight, they went back to the padre
vicar's _salon_ to rest, when their host took leave of them to give
orders to Beppo about the rooms and to send a light. Then they sank into
what seats they could find, and tried to collect themselves.
Presently a low knock was heard, the door was pushed open, and a tall,
dark youth in sandals and white apron came in, with "_Buona sera,
signore_," and left a lucerna--the graceful brass Tuscan lamp, with
three branches for oil and wick--on the table. A large room with two
windows now became visible, with a sofa, chairs, a table, and
white-tiled stove, and many engravings on the white walls.
At nine o'clock the prospect of supper was almost too faint to be
entertained, and the signora was just opening her mouth to say, "Of
course the padre has forgotten all about us," when they heard in the
distance a faint footstep approaching, and the padre appeared with a
taper in one hand and a magnificent red silk coverlet in the other. "For
the signora's bed," he explained, and went to leave it in the bedroom.
Then he came and sat down, apologizing for having left them so long, and
commenced what would have been for his listeners a most interesting
conversation if it had been after supper. He told how he had been there
thirty years,--first as student, then as frate, and finally as abbot.
Since 1866 he had been alone with two monks. To-morrow he would show
them the cell just above their heads, which he had occupied seventeen
years in silence, except when he had permission to speak. Suddenly,
looking at his watch, he said, "It is half-past nine o'clock, and no
doubt you are now hungry." And, no one gainsaying the supposition, he
relighted his taper and led the way to the refectory. The shadows all
about were black and mysterious enough, but they were too tired to be
troubled about them, and were already half-way down a staircase, when
the signora looked back, and, if she had not seized the balustrade,
would have fallen; for standing at the head of the staircase was a white
figure, holding a taper above a cowled head, out of which a pair of dark
eyes was looking at her steadfastly. The padre's voice, calling out,
"Signora, you are left in the dark," reassured her and gave her courage
to turn and run down to join the others, who were disappearing through a
low door. This led into what seemed an immense hall, judging from the
echoes. They passed by heavy stone columns supporting a ceiling in round
Romanesque arches on their way toward the one spot of light which came
from a lucerna that stood on one end of a very long table spread for
supper. They were looking around bewildered for their places, when they
were not a little startled to hear the padre say, "Signore, this is Fra
Lorenzo, my son in the Lord." The signora was of course the least
surprised, for she recognized her apparition. They received a silent
salutation from a young spiritual-looking monk, with the handsomest
face, they afterward agreed, they had ever seen. The four cats, Piro,
and another shaggy monster of a dog completed the company and shared the
visitors' supper, preferring their soup and chicken to the
Saturday-evening fare of the monks of boiled beans and olive oil. The
strangely-mixed party found much to interest each other, and, as the
signora laughed once or twice merrily over the division of the
chicken-bones between the dogs and the cats, she found Fra Lorenzo's
eyes fixed upon her with a look of wonder; at other times he kept his
eyes on his plate and uttered not a word. The chicken was followed by
figs and peaches, cheese and Vino Santo, which the signora drank out of
a tall glass with the arms of the order engraved on it.