and played, and its author's name is held in veneration. That is perhaps a humiliating reflection for the worshippers of divine average, who be lieve that labour and talent transcend

genius. We venture to prophesy that it will be a long day before a Magdalen brain shall conceive another Triplet, or create such a climax as the picture scene. Unless mankind changes fundamentally, this glorious literary achievement must be rated higher than prize poems, prize essays, scholarships, and all the first-class degrees that ever have gilded talented mediocrity. On the contrary, our conviction remains that with the spread of education, the whole world of thought and reading will command the more successful plodders to take off their hats in the presence of genius."

This passage suggests the expressive comment of Mr Burchell, "Fudge!" To speak of "the picture scene,' as one might speak

tracts 66

of the scene of the Caskets in the "Merchant of Venice," is simple nonsense; and yet the present writer will yield to no one in sincere admiration for the genius of Charles Reade. It is a wonderful relief from this bombast, when our manly friend steps forth in his own person and begins to discuss the difficulties of his work, and the system upon which he intends to carry it out. These exmay strike the reader as being a little hysterical," the biographers say. They will strike the reader, if we know him at all, as the sole passages of interest in the book. He is in the midst of 'Peg Woffington' when the diary begins. In this piece of work he had inverted the usual order of proceeding, and developed the story out of the play-in which, later, Mr Tom Taylor had been his (often provoked and impatient) collaborateur. It is needless to enter into the little controversy, happily without bitterness, which took place on this subject. There

is no controversy except with himself about the book. He bemoans himself for finding no sympathy in his pursuits. "I am a most unhappy artist to have no public and Praise and no domestic circle. sympathy are the breath of our nostrils. It is not all vanity. My friends have good understandings, and are great readers, yet no one of them has ever expressed the least curiosity as to what I write." This plaint, in which there is a certain whimsical, delightfully childish quiver of self-pity, comes to still more whimsical petulance further on.

"I have finished my novel 'Peg Woffington'-I don't know whether it is good or not. I wish to heaven I had a housekeeper like Molière ! No man can judge his own work. I hope now to work out my forte, criticism. But how purposeless, hopeless, and languid I feel! On the other hand, I know that if I don't do something soon, some still more ignorant ape will fly the subjects before the public and take the bread out of my mouth. It is horrible how an idea never occurs to a single person, always to three! It is a feature of the day."

He had indeed, it is evident, but little confidence in himself in this beginning. We have had from other hands wonderful accounts of the novelist's vanity, but he does not show it in these early records. He is as doubtful about 'Christie Johnston' as about 'Peg Woffington-fears "there is an excess of dialogue in it—is told that there is too much criticism in it," and acquiesces with despondent resignation. "I have no doubt there is." "These are defects," he adds humbly, "which judgment cannot correct. I lack the true oil of fiction, and I fear she (his critic) will have to inspire me as well as reform me. The drowned fisherman scene was admired by Kinglake and by Tennyson; but I feel how much

more a thorough-bred narrator would have made of it." After

these dejected utterances comes his description of the plan upon which he intends henceforward to work, which is an admirable one, though perhaps not so original as he seemed to suppose, for, after all, successful novels are seldom written on subjects of which their writers are ignorant.

"The plan I propose to myself in writing stories will, I see, cost me undeniable labour. I propose never to guess where I can know. For instance, Tom Robinson is in jail. I have

therefore been to Oxford Jail and visited every inch, and shall do the same at Reading. Having also collected material in Durham Jail, whatever I write about Tom Robinson will therefore carry (I hope) a physical exterior of truth. George Fielding is going in a ship to Australia. know next to nothing about a ship, but my brother Bill is a sailor. I have commissioned him to describe, as he would to an intelligent child, a ship sailing with the wind on her beam-then a lull- -a change of wind to dead aft, and the process of making all sail upon a ship under that favourable circumstance. Simple as this is, it has never been done in human writing so as to be intelligible to landsMy story must cross the water to Australia, and plunge after that into a gold-mine. To be consistent with myself, I ought to crossexamine at the very least a dozen men that have farmed, dug, or robbed in that land. If I can get hold of two or three that have really been in it, I think I could win the public ear by these means. Failing these, I must read books and letters, and do the best I can. Such is the mechanism of a novel by Charles Reade. I know my system is right; but unfortunately there are few men so little fitted as myself to work this system. A great capacity for labour is the first essential. Now I have a singularly small capacity for acquisitive labour. patient indomitable spirit the second; here I fail miserably. A stout heart the third; my heart is womanish.

A

A vast memory the fourth; my memory is not worth a dump. Now I know exactly what I am worth. If I can work the above great system, the writers of the day; without it, there is enough in me to make one of No, No."

He carried his system to the length of absurdity, collecting in prodigious and innumerable volumes every scrap of information that seemed ever likely to be useful in illustrating a tale or pointing a moral, and leaving a huge but worthless collection of giant tomes behind him, the result of endless labour, which might, one cannot but feel, have been much better bestowed; and he did beeome one of the most distinguished writers of the day. But whether these two facts were to be regarded as cause and result is more than doubtful.

His collections, however, were the cause of a great deal of harmless and innocent brag on Reade's part. He was proud to think that no one had ever collected so many newspaper scraps bearing on the life of his time, so many anecdotes and stories-much more proud of them than of his great faculty, as Scott is said (as a matter of reproach) to have been more proud of Abbotsford than of his genius. And with the best of reasons! A little twopenny-halfpenny Gothic castle, an absurd gigantic collection of contemporary scraps, may be things to be proud of-not the genius which makes a true man humble, which is to him like the air he breathes, a gift of God.

"I made myself cry to-day writing a bit of my story 'Never too Late to Mend.' Is that a good sign? Louisa Seymour says I have pathos. I suspect I shall be the only one to snivel," he says, in the same mood of self-doubt, then repeats his resolutions. "I will hunt

One wonders whether these naïve determinations were carried out, especially the last, which is a matter about which people 66 resolve and re-resolve, yet die the same," more emphatically than graver faults. Such glimpses of the eager, impulsive, natural mind, by no means sure of its powers, half ashamed of having made itself cry, wondering whether the emotion will gain any one else, unassured, tentative, eager to do something, but a little puzzled about magnitudes, feeling the necessity of "being out of bed at eight" to be as difficult, and worthy of almost as great an effort, as improving upon Christie Johnston,' or writing plays with Tom Taylorare very attractive and ingratiating. Charles Reade was not one of the writers who rise into solemnity and write platitudes in their private journals. He is always himself. Here is one other scene, which might have come out of 'Never too Late to Mend':

"Went to-day to the chapel of Reading Jail. There I heard and saw a parson drone the liturgy, and hum a commonplace, dry-as-dust discourse to two hundred great culprits and beginners. Most of these men's lives have been full of stirring and thrilling adventures. They are now, by the mighty force of a system, arrested in their course, and for two whole hours today were chained under a pump, which ought to pump

words of fire into their souls; but this pump of a parson could not do his small share so easy compared to what the police and others had done in tracking and nabbing these two hundred foxes, one at a time. No; the clerical pump could not pump, or would not. He droned away as if he had been in a parish church. He attacked the difficult souls with a that have come down from book of buzz of conventional commonplaces,

sermons to book of sermons for the

last century, but never in that century knocked at the door of a man in passing-nor ever will. The beetle's drowsy hum!'

"Well, I'm not a parson; but I'll write one, and say a few words, in my quiet temperate way, about this sort of thing. But la! it doesn't become me to complain of others. Look at myself. Can't write 'Never too Late to Mend,' which is my business."

The romance of Reade's life was a curious one. He admired Mrs Seymour on the stage, conceived an exaggerated idea of her talents, and asked leave to read to her one of the plays which he had not been able to get accepted. The biographers tell us that she was at this period a middle-aged woman. She listened amiably, but does not seem to have been impressed by the reading, and disappointed the author, whose dejection so touched her, that believing his low spirits to proceed from poverty, the kindhearted woman next day sent him a five-pound note with a sympathetic letter. A gift of five pounds to a Fellow of Magdalen, the son of the squire of Ipsden! It was, however, a memorable gift, since it brought into intimate knowledge of each other two people whose lives henceforward ran gether in an indissoluble yet unauthenticated bond. The gentlemen who write Mr Reade's life assure us that it was friendship alone which united the pair, as Reade himself at all times maintained.

on to

In such matters the world is always sceptical, and people who form a tie so unusual must make up their minds to misconception; but there seems no reason to doubt that the account given was perfectly true. Mrs Seymour seems to have been the truest of friends and the most helpful of companions, a real aid in his theatrical work, and in everything else his best critic and sympathiser. "She was his literary and dramatic partner, and with her he discussed his plots, situations, and characters. To her criticism he submitted his dialogues. She possessed the faculty of perceiving at a glance how the lines would play, and how each chapter would read. To term her part author would be to exaggerate; to underrate the aid she afforded him would be injustice." This is a great deal to say, and probably more than the truth, for Charles Reade was too original and strongly marked to make it possible that he could have actually shared his work with any one; but the criticisms of a fearless and bright intelligence in such a position, never to be misconstrued or taken unkindly, is such an aid as cannot be overestimated. The wives of men of genius too often become mere singers of litanies, to the infinite loss and frequent deterioration of the complacent hero of their applauses. Mrs Seymour preserved her independence, as perhaps it is more difficult for a wife to do, and was evidently consulted on every point, and informed of every step of progress. "When "The Good Fight' (which was the original title of The Cloister and the Hearth') gets into my hands," he says to her on one occasion, "and you and I can see it all in one view, we can make an immortal story of it by the requisite improvements."

At the same time, it is quite evident to those who want such testimony, that her part was that of critic and adviser alone-an invaluable part, and worthy of all appreciation.

Mrs Seymour was Charles Reade's companion, critic, and housekeeper for more than a quarter of a century. It is a pity that the world cannot be persuaded to permit the possibility of such faithful and familiar friendships; for they would, we cannot but think, be sometimes more dignified and honourable both to man and woman than the inappropriate and unbecoming marriages, of which there have been some recent instances, in which fear of public misunderstanding has made husband and wife of a pair of friends, to the amusement and scorn of the very public which that proceeding was intended to disarm. The lady's profession, perhaps, helped to make the unusual character of the position less alarming to her, and it does not seem to have at all compromised her with her friends. Her death in 1879 was a deathblow to her companion; he survived her for five years, but never recovered that disruption of his entire being. "We do not exaggerate when we affirm that the gravest anxiety weighed on all at the moment as to whether he would survive the bitter ordeal of the funeral," say the biographers. He fell back upon the sympathy and companionship of his own family, who seem to have always stood by him affectionately, and upon the spiritual help of a sympathetic clergyman, who was his chief consolation at this sad conjuncture of affairs. "My only true intermissions of misery,' Reade himself says, "have been whilst doing a little act of good or communing with my friend the

Rev. Charles Graham, who is an Apostle." His sorrow led him back to that fountain of consolation, the only effectual comfort of the mourner, which is to be found in religion. He had been brought up in the austere seriousness of a family of Evangelical principles; and contrary to the wont of so many, who have been repelled and revolted by that form of faith, it was to something of the same atmosphere that he returned in the sorrowful evening of his days. The world heard no more of the great novelist, the ever combative writer, the Quixote of his time. But the poor knew of him, to whom he distributed with pious care the "sacred money" which his friend had left him, with much of his own added.

His health had been impaired for years, and though for a time he seemed to recover, there was no second spring for the worn-out and impoverished heart. At last on Good Friday 1884 (we grope for dates, but believe this to be the correct one), after much suffering, he died. He had accomplished, or nearly so, the allotted years of man-and his life had been full of enjoyments and good things, success and fame, if not to the extent of his wishes, yet in a far greater measure than falls to many. He was overshadowed, indeed, by the special wealth of his generation in those gifts in which he was most great. Had not Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot existed, he might have been the greatest novelist of his timeand this was a spite of fate which there seems evidence to show that he resented unconsciously. He shows a little temper, indeed, in his remarks upon George Eliot for instance, whom he thought overapplauded an opinion in which, it must be allowed, a great number of their literary contemporaries

agreed; and he undervalued Thackeray and Trollope, his biographer tells us. On the other hand, he gave a sort of culte to Dickens, calling him "my master," and attributed a very high place to another name which will probably surprise the reader. "Next to Dickens," say his biographers, "he ranked qualis inter viburna cupressus his very dear friend Mr Wilkie Collins. 'An artist of the pen there are terribly few among writers,' was his terse eulogium; the plain fact being that this past-master in the art of construction excels all competitors just where most English authors fail." The latter assertion is that of the Messrs Reade, and may be taken for what it is worth. But it is very curious that Charles Reade, with all his genius, should have ranked Mr Wilkie Collins above the authors of 'Vanity Fair' and 'Adam Bede' curious as to be almost incredible.

SO

Some estimate of his literary excellence has been lately attempted in these pages, so that it is scarcely necessary to recur to that subject. His wonderful power and grasp of a story, the sweep and energy of his style, the fine enthusiasm for goodness and burning indignation against wrong which inspired him, combined to give extraordinary effect to his greater books. The two or three feeble ones in which his great powers are subdued by a less noble purpose and characters less worthy of him have dropped, and are not of enough importance in his literary history to detract from his fame. His productions on the whole were few, and running over with life and power. His preference for incident and story does not blind his perception of the finest shades of human feeling; and he has the true humourist's gift of affectionate playfulness, and