Speaking of publishers, he said, "They want all the fat, and they all lie about their sales. Unless you have somebody in the press-room to watch, it is almost impossible to find out how many copies of a book they print. Then there is a detestable fashion about publishers. I had to fight a very hard battle to get the public to take a novel published by Trübner, simply because he was not known as a novel-publisher; but I was determined not to let Bentley or any of his kidney have all the fat any longer."
Trübner, 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 encyclopædic, 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 père, 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.
For several years after I came to New York Charles Reade and I kept up a close friendly correspondence, and he sent me proof-sheets of "The Cloister and the Hearth" in advance of its publication in England, so that the American reprint of the work might appear simultaneously therewith, which it did through my arrangements with Rudd & Carleton. He also sent me two of his own plays,—"Nobs and Snobs" and "It is Never Too Late to Mend," drawn from his novel of that name,—in the hope that the managers of some of the American theatres would produce them; but, notwithstanding their author's fame, their own superior merit, and my personal efforts, the expectation was disappointed, owing, as Mr. Reade said, to their preferring to steal rather than to buy plays,—a charge only too well sustained by the facts. Another play, written by a friend of his, that he sent me, met with a like reception.