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Page 39
Tr�bner, I may mention, published for him on commission, and under this
arrangement he manufactured his own books and assumed all risks.
In the sense of humor and quick perception of the ludicrous he was
somewhat deficient, and he was too passionately in earnest and too
matter-of-fact about everything ever to attempt a joke, practical or
otherwise. Life to him was always a serious drama, calling for tireless
vigilance; and he watched all the details of its gradual unfolding with
constant anxiety and care, in so far as it concerned himself.
His love for the glamour of the stage led him often to the theatre; but
whenever he saw anything "murdered" there, especially one of his own
plays, it incensed him, and sometimes almost to fury. He loved
music,--not, as he said, the bray of trumpets and the squeak of fiddles,
but melody; and occasionally, seated at a piano, he sang, in a voice
sweet and low and full of pathos, some tender English ditty.
Charles Reade had a real talent for hard work, not that occasional
exclusive devotion to it during the throes of composition to which
Balzac gave himself up night and day to an extent that utterly isolated
him from the world for the time being, but steady, systematic, willing
labor,--a labor, I might say, of love, for he never begrudged it,--which
began every morning, when nothing special interfered with it, after a
nine-o'clock breakfast and continued until late in the afternoon. He was
too practical and methodical to work by fits and starts. Generally he
laid down his pen soon after four P.M.; but often he continued writing
till it was time to dress for dinner, which he took either at home or at
the Garrick Club, as the spirit moved him, except when he dined out,
which was not very often,--for, although he was most genial and social
in a quiet way among his intimates, he had no fondness for general
society or large dinner-parties. Yet his town residence, at No. 6 Bolton
Row, was not only at the West End, but in Mayfair, the best part of it;
and, although a bachelor to the end of his days, he kept house. He
afterwards resided at No. 6 Curzon Street, also in Mayfair, and then
took a house at No. 2 Albert Terrace, Knightsbridge, but gave it up not
long before his death, which occurred in Blomfield Terrace, Shepherd's
Bush, a London suburb.
"This capacity, this zest of yours for steady work," I once remarked to
him, "almost equals Sir Walter Scott's. With your encyclop�dic,
classified, and indexed note-books and scrap-books, you are one of the
wonders of literature."
"Well," he replied, "these are the tools of my trade, and the time and
labor I spend on them are well invested." Then he went on to say of
literary composition, "Genius without labor, we all know, will not keep
the pot boiling. But I doubt whether one may not put too much labor into
his work as well as too little, and spend too much time in polishing.
Rough vigor often hits the nail better than the most studied and
polished sentences. It doesn't do to write above the heads or the tastes
of the people. I make it a rule to put a little good and a little bad
into every page I write, and in that way I am likely to suit the taste
of the average reader. The average reader is no fool, neither is he an
embodiment of all the knowledge, wit, and wisdom in the world."
He valued success as a dramatic author more highly than as a novelist,
and was always yearning for some great triumph on the stage. In this
respect he was like Bulwer Lytton, who once said to me, "I think more of
my poems and 'The Lady of Lyons' and 'Richelieu' than of all my novels,
from 'Pelham' to 'What will he do with it?'" (which was the last he had
then written). "A poet's fame is lasting, a novelist's is comparatively
ephemeral." Moved by a similar sentiment, Reade once said, "The most
famous name in English literature and all literature is a dramatist's;
and what pygmies Fielding and Smollett, and all the modern novelists,
from Dickens, the head and front of them, down to that milk-and-water
specimen of mediocrity, Anthony Trollope, seem beside him!"[1]
He had little taste for poetry, because of his strong preference for
prose as a vehicle of thought and expression. He, however, greatly
admired Byron, Shelley, and Scott, and paid a passing compliment to
Swinburne, except as to the too fiery amatory ardor of his first poems;
but he considered Tennyson, with all his polish, little better than a
versifier, and said his plays of "Dora" and "The Cup" would have been
"nice enough as spectacles without words." For those great masters of
prose fiction and dramatic art, Victor Hugo and Dumas _p�re_, he had
unbounded admiration, and of the former in particular he always spoke
with enthusiasm as the literary giant of his age, and to him,
notwithstanding his extravagances, assigned the first place among
literary Frenchmen. Dumas he ranked second, except as a dramatist; and
here he believed him to be without a superior among his contemporaries.
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