I have mentioned my first meeting at the elder Boucicault's with Charles Reade, author of The Cloister and the Hearth. As a man of letters, his name is entitled to be enrolled among the giants of his day. Friendship with him began at the Garrick Club, where I have seen him at a whist table with Anthony Trollope and Charles Lever, playing in the same rubber. It ripened rapidly when we produced Masks and Faces, over which my wife and I had many a fight in getting him to agree to some important changes we wished to make. We won the day, and the old book was done with for all time. I will quote from a superb description, written with the insight of a gifted woman, Ellen Terry: "Dear, kind, unjust, generous, cautious, impulsive, passionate, gentle Charles Reade! who combined so many qualities, far asunder as the poles. He was placid and turbulent, yet always majestic. He was inexplicable and entirely lovable—a stupid old dear, and as wise as Solomon! He seemed guileless, and yet had moments of suspicion and craftiness worthy of the serpent."
Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins was another Victorian novelist of high repute, whose books would give great pleasure to modern readers if they sampled The Woman in White, Armadale, or The Moonstone, and left themselves in debt to such creations as Count Fosco, Margaret Vanstone, Mercy Merrick, and many more. We knew him well, and sided with his view of the well-known unfortunate episode in the early history of the Garrick Club which resulted in the expulsion of Edmund Yates, through his youthful indiscretion in writing of Thackeray in a way that so great a giant could have afforded to ignore.
At the most, he might have called for an apology—which was offered but declined. "Wilkie" stood by Dickens in the defence of Yates, and they resigned their membership together.
For years Collins was a confirmed opium taker and a slave to the drug. He once left the Engadine, in its primitive days, and found himself, to his horror, without any. He and an intimate friend, who happily spoke German like a native, were travelling together: they represented themselves to be doctors and so obtained from chemists at Coire, and afterwards at Basle, the maximum supply the Swiss law allowed, and so reached Paris without the catastrophe Collins described in alarming words.
At my table, Wilkie Collins, George Critchett, who had left general practice and become an eye specialist, and Sir William Fergusson, the eminent Victorian surgeon, were present together. Critchett told Sir William that Collins had confided to him what was the dose of laudanum he then took every night, and had his permission to ask Sir William if it was not more than enough to prevent any ordinary person from awaking. Fergusson replied that the dose of opium named would suffice to kill the twelve men who sat round the table.
T. W. Robertson
It is impossible for me not to recall, however briefly, from the shadowy past the name of T. W. Robertson, whose empty chair was left vacant more than fifty years ago. He was the first of my friends to speak and write to me as "B." There are few to whom the once-famous name of Tom Robertson now has full meaning, although his comedies made so deep a mark in their day and so largely influenced the future of the stage. Time has not lessened my remembrance of the charm with which he read his comedies; a melody sung sweetly in the long-ago. My wife was always very proud that he dedicated to her the best of them, his masterpiece, Caste.
I look back with sorrow at the small reward he received from them, and the brief time he enjoyed their fame. The fees paid to dramatic authors were miserably poor in those days, although we advanced them materially, added to which, there was no copyright for foreign authors in America. Expert shorthand writers were cunningly scattered in different parts of our theatre on successive nights, until the text of Robertson's principal comedies was completely taken down, and they were played throughout the United States without a dollar being sent to the author. No wonder that Robertson was sarcastic and bitter.
The unusual compliment of closing our theatre when he died was, I fear, but a small set-off against the pain he must have endured before he once said to me: "My dear B, I have often dined on my pipe."