A few evenings later I saw Miss Teman at the Haymarket Theatre, playing with Buckstone and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews. She seemed rather a small cause for such a serious result–passably pretty, and not much of an actress.
Here in one passage we have an intimation that Mrs. Dickens had a temper that was easily roused, that Dickens himself was interested in an actress, and that Miss Hogarth “had always been in love with him, and was jealous of Miss Teman.”
Some years before this time, however, there had been growing in the mind of Dickens a certain formless discontent–something to which he could not give a name, yet which, cast over him the shadow of disappointment. He expressed the same feeling in David Copperfield, when he spoke of David’s life with Dora. It seemed to come from the fact that he had grown to be a man, while his wife had still remained a child.
A passage or two may be quoted from the novel, so that we may set them beside passages in Dickens’s own life, which we know to have referred to his own wife, and not to any such nebulous person as Mrs. Winter.
The shadow I have mentioned that was not to be between us any more, but was to rest wholly on my heart–how did that fall? The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened, if it were changed at all; but it was as undefined as ever, and addressed me like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night. I loved my wife dearly; but the happiness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, AND THERE WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING WANTING.
What I missed I still regarded as something that had been a dream of my youthful fancy; that was incapable of realization; that I was now discovering to be so, with some natural pain, as all men did. But that it would have been better for me if my wife could have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts in which I had no partner, and that this might have been I knew.
What I am describing slumbered and half awoke and slept again in the innermost recesses of my mind. There was no evidence of it to me; I knew of no influence it had in anything I said or did. I bore the weight of all our little cares and all my projects.
“There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.” These words I remembered. I had endeavored to adapt Dora to myself, and found it impracticable. It remained for me to adapt myself to Dora; to share with her what I could, and be happy; to bear on my own shoulders what I must, and be still happy.
Thus wrote Dickens in his fictitious character, and of his fictitious wife. Let us see how he wrote and how he acted in his own person, and of his real wife.
As early as 1856, he showed a curious and restless activity, as of one who was trying to rid himself of unpleasant thoughts. Mr. Forster says that he began to feel a strain upon his invention, a certain disquietude, and a necessity for jotting down memoranda in note-books, so as to assist his memory and his imagination. He began to long for solitude. He would take long, aimless rambles into the country, returning at no particular time or season. He once wrote to Forster:
I have had dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether by myself. If I could have managed it, I think I might have gone to the Pyrenees for six months. I have visions of living for half a year or so in all sorts of inaccessible places, and of opening a new book therein. A floating idea of going up above the snow-line, and living in some astonishing convent, hovers over me.
What do these cryptic utterances mean? At first, both in his novel and in his letters, they are obscure; but before long, in each, they become very definite. In 1856, we find these sentences among his letters:
The old days–the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of mind back as it used to be then? Something of it, perhaps, but never quite as it used to be.
I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one.
His next letter draws the veil and shows plainly what he means:
Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so, too–and much more so. We are strangely ill-assorted for the bond that exists between us.
Then he goes on to say that she would have been a thousand times happier if she had been married to another man. He speaks of “incompatibility,” and a “difference of temperaments.” In fact, it is the same old story with which we have become so familiar, and which is both as old as the hills and as new as this morning’s newspaper.
Naturally, also, things grow worse, rather than better. Dickens comes to speak half jocularly of “the plunge,” and calculates as to what effect it will have on his public readings. He kept back the announcement of “the plunge” until after he had given several readings; then, on April 29, 1858, Mrs. Dickens left his home. His eldest son went to live with the mother, but the rest of the children remained with their father, while his daughter Mary nominally presided over the house. In the background, however, Georgina Hogarth, who seemed all through her life to have cared for Dickens more than for her sister, remained as a sort of guide and guardian for his children.
This arrangement was a private matter, and should not have been brought to public attention; but it was impossible to suppress all gossip about so prominent a man. Much of the gossip was exaggerated; and when it came to the notice of Dickens it stung him so severely as to lead him into issuing a public justification of his course. He published a statement in Household Words, which led to many other letters in other periodicals, and finally a long one from him, which was printed in the New York Tribune, addressed to his friend Mr. Arthur Smith.
Dickens afterward declared that he had written this letter as a strictly personal and private one, in order to correct false rumors and scandals. Mr. Smith naturally thought that the statement was intended for publication, but Dickens always spoke of it as “the violated letter.”
By his allusions to a difference of temperament and to incompatibility, Dickens no doubt meant that his wife had ceased to be to him the same companion that she had been in days gone by. As in so many cases, she had not changed, while he had. He had grown out of the sphere in which he had been born, “associated with blacking-boys and quilt-printers,” and had become one of the great men of his time, whose genius was universally admired.
Mr. Bigelow saw Mrs. Dickens as she really was–a commonplace woman endowed with the temper of a vixen, and disposed to outbursts of actual violence when her jealousy was roused.
It was impossible that the two could have remained together, when in intellect and sympathy they were so far apart. There is nothing strange about their separation, except the exceedingly bad taste with which Dickens made it a public affair. It is safe to assume that he felt the need of a different mate; and that he found one is evident enough from the hints and bits of innuendo that are found in the writings of his contemporaries.
He became a pleasure-lover; but more than that, he needed one who could understand his moods and match them, one who could please his tastes, and one who could give him that admiration which he felt to be his due; for he was always anxious to be praised, and his letters are full of anecdotes relating to his love of praise.
One does not wish to follow out these clues too closely. It is certain that neither Miss Beadnell as a girl nor Mrs. Winter as a matron made any serious appeal to him. The actresses who have been often mentioned in connection with his name were, for the most part, mere passing favorites. The woman who in life was Dora made him feel the same incompleteness that he has described in his best-known book. The companion to whom he clung in his later years was neither a light-minded creature like Miss Beadnell, nor an undeveloped, high-tempered woman like the one he married, nor a mere domestic, friendly creature like Georgina Hogarth.
Ought we to venture upon a quest which shall solve this mystery in the life of Charles Dickens! In his last will and testament, drawn up and signed by him about a year before his death, the first paragraph reads as follows:
I, Charles Dickens, of Gadshill Place, Higham, in the county of Kent, hereby revoke all my former wills and codicils and declare this to be my last will and testament. I give the sum of one thousand pounds, free of legacy duty, to Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, in the county of Middlesex.
In connection with this, read Mr. John Bigelow’s careless jottings made some fifteen years before. Remember the Miss “Teman,” about whose name he was not quite certain; the Hogarth sisters’ dislike of her; and the mysterious figure in the background of the novelist’s later life. Then consider the first bequest in his will, which leaves a substantial sum to one who was neither a relative nor a subordinate, but–may we assume–more than an ordinary friend?
HONORE DE BALZAC AND EVELINA HANSKA
I remember once, when editing an elaborate work on literature, that the publisher called me into his private office. After the door was closed, he spoke in tones of suppressed emotion.
“Why is it,” said he, “that you have such a lack of proportion? In the selection you have made I find that only two pages are given to George P. Morris, while you haven’t given E. P. Roe any space at all! Yet, look here–you’ve blocked out fifty pages for Balzac, who was nothing but an immoral Frenchman!”
I adjusted this difficulty, somehow or other–I do not just remember how–and began to think that, after all, this publisher’s view of things was probably that of the English and American public. It is strange that so many biographies and so many appreciations of the greatest novelist who ever lived should still have left him, in the eyes of the reading public, little more than “an immoral Frenchman.”
“In Balzac,” said Taine, “there was a money-broker, an archeologist, an architect, an upholsterer, a tailor, an old- clothes dealer, a journeyman apprentice, a physician, and a notary.” Balzac was also a mystic, a supernaturalist, and, above all, a consummate artist. No one who is all these things in high measure, and who has raised himself by his genius above his countrymen, deserves the censure of my former publisher.
Still less is Balzac to be dismissed as “immoral,” for his life was one of singular self-sacrifice in spite of much temptation. His face was strongly sensual, his look and bearing denoted almost savage power; he led a free life in a country which allowed much freedom; and yet his story is almost mystic in its fineness of thought, and in its detachment, which was often that of another world.
Balzac was born in 1799, at Tours, with all the traits of the people of his native province–fond of eating and drinking, and with plenty of humor. His father was fairly well off. Of four children, our Balzac was the eldest. The third was his sister Laure, who throughout his life was the most intimate friend he had, and to whom we owe his rescue from much scandalous and untrue gossip. From her we learn that their father was a combination of Montaigne, Rabelais, and “Uncle Toby.”
Young Balzac went to a clerical school at seven, and stayed there for seven years. Then he was brought home, apparently much prostrated, although the good fathers could find nothing physically amiss with him, and nothing in his studies to account for his agitation. No one ever did discover just what was the matter, for he seemed well enough in the next few years, basking on the riverside, watching the activities of his native town, and thoroughly studying the rustic types that he was afterward to make familiar to the world. In fact, in Louis Lambert he has set before us a picture of his own boyish life, very much as Dickens did of his in David Copperfield.
For some reason, when these years were over, the boy began to have what is so often known as “a call”–a sort of instinct that he was to attain renown. Unfortunately it happened that about this time (1814) he and his parents removed to Paris, which was his home by choice, until his death in 1850. He studied here under famous teachers, and gave three years to the pursuit of law, of which he was very fond as literary material, though he refused to practise.
This was the more grievous, since a great part of the family property had been lost. The Balzacs were afflicted by actual poverty, and Honore endeavored, with his pen, to beat the wolf back from the door. He earned a little money with pamphlets and occasional stories, but his thirst for fame was far from satisfied. He was sure that he was called to literature, and yet he was not sure that he had the power to succeed. In one of his letters to his sister, he wrote:
I am young and hungry, and there is nothing on my plate. Oh, Laure, Laure, my two boundless desires, my only ones–to be famous, and to be loved–they ever be satisfied?
For the next ten years he was learning his trade, and the artistic use of the fiction writer’s tools. What is more to the point, is the fact that he began to dream of a series of great novels, which should give a true and panoramic picture of the whole of human life. This was the first intimation of his “Human Comedy,” which was so daringly undertaken and so nearly completed in his after years. In his early days of obscurity, he said to his readers:
Note well the characters that I introduce, since you will have to follow their fortunes through thirty novels that are to come.
Here we see how little he had been daunted by ill success, and how his prodigious imagination had not been overcome by sorrow and evil fortune. Meantime, writing almost savagely, and with a feeling combined of ambition and despair, he had begun, very slowly indeed, to create a public. These ten years, however, had loaded him with debts; and his struggle to keep himself afloat only plunged him deeper in the mire. His thirty unsigned novels began to pay him a few hundred francs, not in cash, but in promissory notes; so that he had to go still deeper into debt.
In 1827 he was toiling on his first successful novel, and indeed one of the best historic novels in French literature–The Chouans. He speaks of his labor as “done with a tired brain and an anxious mind,” and of the eight or ten business letters that he had to write each day before he could begin his literary work.
“Postage and an omnibus are extravagances that I cannot allow myself,” he writes. “I stay at home so as not to wear out my clothes. Is that clear to you?”
At the end of the next year, though he was already popular as a novelist, and much sought out by people of distinction, he was at the very climax of his poverty. He had written thirty-five books, and was in debt to the amount of a hundred and twenty-four thousand francs. He was saved from bankruptcy only by the aid of Mme. de Berny, a woman of high character, and one whose moral influence was very strong with Balzac until her early death.
The relation between these two has a sweetness and a purity which are seldom found. Mme. de Berny gave Balzac money as she would have given it to a son, and thereby she saved a great soul for literature. But there was no sickly sentiment between them, and Balzac regarded her with a noble love which he has expressed in the character of Mme. Firmiani.
It was immediately after she had lightened his burdens that the real Balzac comes before us in certain stories which have no equal, and which are among the most famous that he ever wrote. What could be more wonderful than his El Verdugo, which gives us a brief horror while compelling our admiration? What, outside of Balzac himself, could be more terrible than Gobseck, a frightful study of avarice, containing a deathbed scene which surpasses in dreadfulness almost anything in literature? Add to these A Passion in the Desert, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, The Droll Stories, The Red Inn, and The Magic Skin, and you have a cluster of masterpieces not to be surpassed.
In the year 1829, when he was just beginning to attain a slight success, Balzac received a long letter written in a woman’s hand. As he read it, there came to him something very like an inspiration, so full of understanding were the written words, so full of appreciation and of sympathy with the best that he had done. This anonymous note pointed out here and there such defects as are apt to become chronic with a young author. Balzac was greatly stirred by its keen and sympathetic criticism. No one before had read his soul so clearly. No one–not even his devoted sister, Laure de Surville–had judged his work so wisely, had come so closely to his deepest feeling.
He read the letter over and over, and presently another came, full of critical appreciation, and of wholesome, tonic, frank, friendly words of cheer. It was very largely the effect of these letters that roused Balzac’s full powers and made him sure of winning the two great objects of his first ambition–love and fame–the ideals of the chivalrous, romantic Frenchman from Caesar’s time down to the present day.
Other letters followed, and after a while their authorship was made known to Balzac. He learned that they had been written by a young Polish lady, Mme. Evelina Hanska, the wife of a Polish count, whose health was feeble, and who spent much time in Switzerland because the climate there agreed with him.
He met her first at Neuchatel, and found her all that he had imagined. It is said that she had no sooner raised her face, and looked him fully in the eyes, than she fell fainting to the floor, overcome by her emotion. Balzac himself was deeply moved. From that day until their final meeting he wrote to her daily.
The woman who had become his second soul was not beautiful. Nevertheless, her face was intensely spiritual, and there was a mystic quality about it which made a strong appeal to Balzac’s innermost nature. Those who saw him in Paris knocking about the streets at night with his boon companions, hobnobbing with the elder Dumas, or rejecting the frank advances of George Sand, would never have dreamed of this mysticism.
Balzac was heavy and broad of figure. His face was suggestive only of what was sensuous and sensual. At the same time, those few who looked into his heart and mind found there many a sign of the fine inner strain which purified the grosser elements of his nature. He who wrote the roaring Rabelaisian Contes Drolatiques was likewise the author of Seraphita.
This mysticism showed itself in many things that Balzac did. One little incident will perhaps be sufficiently characteristic of many others. He had a belief that names had a sort of esoteric appropriateness. So, in selecting them for his novels, he gathered them with infinite pains from many sources, and then weighed them anxiously in the balance. A writer on the subject of names and their significance has given the following account of this trait:
The great novelist once spent an entire day tramping about in the remotest quarters of Paris in search of a fitting name for a character just conceived by him. Every sign-board, every door- plate, every affiche upon the walls, was scrutinized. Thousands of names were considered and rejected, and it was only after his companion, utterly worn out by fatigue, had flatly refused to drag his weary limbs through more than one additional street, that Balzac suddenly saw upon a sign the name “Marcas,” and gave a shout of joy at having finally secured what he was seeking.
Marcas it was, from that moment; and Balzac gradually evolved a Christian name for him. First he considered what initial was most appropriate; and then, having decided upon Z, he went on to expand this into Zepherin, explaining minutely just why the whole name Zepherin Marcas, was the only possible one for the character in the novel.
In many ways Balzac and Evelina Hanska were mated by nature. Whether they were fully mated the facts of their lives must demonstrate. For the present, the novelist plunged into a whirl of literary labor, toiling as few ever toiled–constructing several novels at the same time, visiting all the haunts of the French capital, so that he might observe and understand every type of human being, and then hurling himself like a giant at his work.
He had a curious practise of reading proofs. These would come to him in enormous sheets, printed on special paper, and with wide margins for his corrections. An immense table stood in the midst of his study, and upon the top he would spread out the proofs as if they were vast maps. Then, removing most of his outer garments, he would lie, face down, upon the proof-sheets, with a gigantic pencil, such as Bismarck subsequently used to wield. Thus disposed, he would go over the proofs.
Hardly anything that he had written seemed to suit him when he saw it in print. He changed and kept changing, obliterating what he disliked, writing in new sentences, revising others, and adding whole pages in the margins, until perhaps he had practically made a new book. This process was repeated several times; and how expensive it was may be judged from the fact that his bill for “author’s proof corrections” was sometimes more than the publishers had agreed to pay him for the completed volume.
Sometimes, again, he would begin writing in the afternoon, and continue until dawn. Then, weary, aching in every bone, and with throbbing head, he would rise and turn to fall upon his couch after his eighteen hours of steady toil. But the memory of Evelina Hanska always came to him; and with half-numbed fingers he would seize his pen, and forget his weariness in the pleasure of writing to the dark-eyed woman who drew him to her like a magnet.
These are very curious letters that Balzac wrote to Mme. Hanska. He literally told her everything about himself. Not only were there long passages instinct with tenderness, and with his love for her; but he also gave her the most minute account of everything that occurred, and that might interest her. Thus he detailed at length his mode of living, the clothes he wore, the people whom he met, his trouble with his creditors, the accounts of his income and outgo. One might think that this was egotism on his part; but it was more than that. It was a strong belief that everything which concerned him must concern her; and he begged her in turn to write as freely and as fully.
Mme. Hanska was not the only woman who became his friend and comrade, and to whom he often wrote. He made many acquaintances in the fashionable world through the good offices of the Duchesse de Castries. By her favor, he studied with his microscopic gaze the beau monde of Louis Philippe’s rather unimpressive court.
In a dozen books he scourged the court of the citizen king–its pretensions, its commonness, and its assemblage of nouveaux riches. Yet in it he found many friends–Victor Hugo, the Girardins–and among them women who were of the world. George Sand he knew very well, and she made ardent love to him; but he laughed her off very much as the elder Dumas did.
Then there was the pretty, dainty Mme. Carraud, who read and revised his manuscripts, and who perhaps took a more intimate interest in him than did the other ladies whom he came to know so well. Besides Mme. Hanska, he had another correspondent who signed herself “Louise,” but who never let him know her name, though she wrote him many piquant, sunny letters, which he so sadly needed.
For though Honore de Balzac was now one of the most famous writers of his time, his home was still a den of suffering. His debts kept pressing on him, loading him down, and almost quenching hope. He acted toward his creditors like a man of honor, and his physical strength was still that of a giant. To Mme. Carraud he once wrote the half pathetic, half humorous plaint:
Poor pen! It must be diamond, not because one would wish to wear it, but because it has had so much use!
And again:
Here I am, owing a hundred thousand francs. And I am forty!
Balzac and Mme. Hanska met many times after that first eventful episode at Neuchatel. It was at this time that he gave utterance to the poignant cry:
Love for me is life, and to-day I feel it more than ever!
In like manner he wrote, on leaving her, that famous epigram:
It is only the last love of a woman that can satisfy the first love of a man.
In 1842 Mme. Hanska’s husband died. Balzac naturally expected that an immediate marriage with the countess would take place; but the woman who had loved him mystically for twelve years, and with a touch of the physical for nine, suddenly draws back. She will not promise anything. She talks of delays, owing to the legal arrangements for her children. She seems almost a prude. An American critic has contrasted her attitude with his:
Every one knows how utterly and absolutely Balzac devoted to this one woman all his genius, his aspiration, the thought of his every moment; how every day, after he had labored like a slave for eighteen hours, he would take his pen and pour out to her the most intimate details of his daily life; how at her call he would leave everything and rush across the continent to Poland or to Italy, being radiantly happy if he could but see her face and be for a few days by her side. The very thought of meeting her thrilled him to the very depths of his nature, and made him, for weeks and even months beforehand, restless, uneasy, and agitated, with an almost painful happiness.
It is the most startling proof of his immense vitality, both physical and mental, that so tremendous an emotional strain could be endured by him for years without exhausting his fecundity or blighting his creativeness.
With Balzac, however, it was the period of his most brilliant work; and this was true in spite of the anguish of long separations, and the complaints excited by what appears to be caprice or boldness or a faint indifference. Even in Balzac one notices toward the last a certain sense of strain underlying what he wrote, a certain lack of elasticity and facility, if of nothing more; yet on the whole it is likely that without this friendship Balzac would have been less great than he actually became, as it is certain that had it been broken off he would have ceased to write or to care for anything whatever in the world.
And yet, when they were free to marry, Mme. Hanska shrank away. Not until 1846, four years after her husband’s death, did she finally give her promise to the eager Balzac. Then, in the overflow of his happiness, his creative genius blazed up into a most wonderful flame; but he soon discovered that the promise was not to be at once fulfilled. The shock impaired that marvelous vitality which had carried him through debt, and want, and endless labor.
It was at this moment, by the irony of fate, that his country hailed him as one of the greatest of its men of genius. A golden stream poured into his lap. His debts were not all extinguished, but his income was so large that they burdened him no longer.
But his one long dream was the only thing for which he cared; and though in an exoteric sense this dream came true, its truth was but a mockery. Evelina Hanska summoned him to Poland, and Balzac went to her at once. There was another long delay, and for more than a year he lived as a guest in the countess’s mansion at Wierzchownia; but finally, in March, 1850, the two were married. A few weeks later they came back to France together, and occupied the little country house, Les Jardies, in which, some decades later, occurred Gambetta’s mysterious death.
What is the secret of this strange love, which in the woman seems to be not precisely love, but something else? Balzac was always eager for her presence. She, on the other hand, seems to have been mentally more at ease when he was absent. Perhaps the explanation, if we may venture upon one, is based upon a well-known physiological fact.
Love in its completeness is made up of two great elements–first, the element that is wholly spiritual, that is capable of sympathy, and tenderness, and deep emotion. The other element is the physical, the source of passion, of creative energy, and of the truly virile qualities, whether it be in man or woman. Now, let either of these elements be lacking, and love itself cannot fully and utterly exist. The spiritual nature in one may find its mate in the spiritual nature of another; and the physical nature of one may find its mate in the physical nature of another. But into unions such as these, love does not enter in its completeness. If there is any element lacking in either of those who think that they can mate, their mating will be a sad and pitiful failure.
It is evident enough that Mme. Hanska was almost wholly spiritual, and her long years of waiting had made her understand the difference between Balzac and herself. Therefore, she shrank from his proximity, and from his physical contact, and it was perhaps better for them both that their union was so quickly broken off by death; for the great novelist died of heart disease only five months after the marriage.
If we wish to understand the mystery of Balzac’s life–or, more truly, the mystery of the life of the woman whom he married–take up and read once more the pages of Seraphita, one of his poorest novels and yet a singularly illuminating story, shedding light upon a secret of the soul.
CHARLES READE AND LAURA SEYMOUR
The instances of distinguished men, or of notable women, who have broken through convention in order to find a fitting mate, are very numerous. A few of these instances may, perhaps, represent what is usually called a Platonic union. But the evidence is always doubtful. The world is not possessed of abundant charity, nor does human experience lead one to believe that intimate relations between a man and a woman are compatible with Platonic friendship.
Perhaps no case is more puzzling than that which is found in the life-history of Charles Reade and Laura Seymour.
Charles Reade belongs to that brilliant group of English writers and artists which included Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Tom Taylor, George Eliot, Swinburne, Sir Walter Besant, Maclise, and Goldwin Smith. In my opinion, he ranks next to Dickens in originality and power. His books are little read to-day; yet he gave to the English stage the comedy “Masks and Faces,” which is now as much a classic as Goldsmith’s “She Stoops to Conquer” or Sheridan’s “School for Scandal.” His power as a novelist was marvelous. Who can forget the madhouse episodes in Hard Cash, or the great trial scene in Griffith Gaunt, or that wonderful picture, in The Cloister and the Hearth, of Germany and Rome at the end of the Middle Ages? Here genius has touched the dead past and made it glow again with an intense reality.
He was the son of a country gentleman, the lord of a manor which had been held by his family before the Wars of the Boses. His ancestors had been noted for their services in warfare, in Parliament, and upon the bench. Reade, therefore, was in feeling very much of an aristocrat. Sometimes he pushed his ancestral pride to a whimsical excess, very much as did his own creation, Squire Raby, in Put Yourself in His Place.
At the same time he might very well have been called a Tory democrat. His grandfather had married the daughter of a village blacksmith, and Reade was quite as proud of this as he was of the fact that another ancestor had been lord chief justice of England. From the sturdy strain which came to him from the blacksmith he, perhaps, derived that sledge-hammer power with which he wrote many of his most famous chapters, and which he used in newspaper controversies with his critics. From his legal ancestors there may have come to him the love of litigation, which kept him often in hot water. From those who had figured in the life of royal courts, he inherited a romantic nature, a love of art, and a very delicate perception of the niceties of cultivated usage. Such was Charles Reade–keen observer, scholar, Bohemian–a man who could be both rough and tender, and whose boisterous ways never concealed his warm heart.
Reade’s school-days were Spartan in their severity. A teacher with the appropriate name of Slatter set him hard tasks and caned him unmercifully for every shortcoming. A weaker nature would have been crushed. Reade’s was toughened, and he learned to resist pain and to resent wrong, so that hatred of injustice has been called his dominating trait.
In preparing himself for college he was singularly fortunate in his tutors. One of them was Samuel Wilberforce, afterward Bishop of Oxford, nicknamed, from his suavity of manner, “Soapy Sam”; and afterward, when Reade was studying law, his instructor was Samuel Warren, the author of that once famous novel, Ten Thousand a Year, and the creator of “Tittlebat Titmouse.”
For his college at Oxford, Reade selected one of the most beautiful and ancient–Magdalen–which he entered, securing what is known as a demyship. Reade won his demyship by an extraordinary accident. Always an original youth, his reading was varied and valuable; but in his studies he had never tried to be minutely accurate in small matters. At that time every candidate was supposed to be able to repeat, by heart, the “Thirty-Nine Articles.” Reade had no taste for memorizing; and out of the whole thirty-nine he had learned but three. His general examination was good, though not brilliant. When he came to be questioned orally, the examiner, by a chance that would not occur once in a million times, asked the candidate to repeat these very articles. Reade rattled them off with the greatest glibness, and produced so favorable an impression that he was let go without any further questioning.
It must be added that his English essay was original, and this also helped him; but had it not been for the other great piece of luck he would, in Oxford phrase, have been “completely gulfed.” As it was, however, he was placed as highly as the young men who were afterward known as Cardinal Newman and Sir Robert Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke).
At the age of twenty-one, Reade obtained a fellowship, which entitled him to an income so long as he remained unmarried. It is necessary to consider the significance of this when we look at his subsequent career. The fellowship at Magdalen was worth, at the outset, about twelve hundred dollars annually, and it gave him possession of a suite of rooms free of any charge. He likewise secured a Vinerian fellowship in law, to which was attached an income of four hundred dollars. As time went on, the value of the first fellowship increased until it was worth twenty-five hundred dollars. Therefore, as with many Oxford men of his time, Charles Reade, who had no other fortune, was placed in this position–if he refrained from marrying, he had a home and a moderate income for life, without any duties whatsoever. If he married, he must give up his income and his comfortable apartments, and go out into the world and struggle for existence.
There was the further temptation that the possession of his fellowship did not even necessitate his living at Oxford. He might spend his time in London, or even outside of England, knowing that his chambers at Magdalen were kept in order for him, as a resting- place to which he might return whenever he chose.
Reade remained a while at Oxford, studying books and men– especially the latter. He was a great favorite with the undergraduates, though less so with the dons. He loved the boat- races on the river; he was a prodigious cricket-player, and one of the best bowlers of his time. He utterly refused to put on any of the academic dignity which his associates affected. He wore loud clothes. His flaring scarfs were viewed as being almost scandalous, very much as Longfellow’s parti-colored waistcoats were regarded when he first came to Harvard as a professor.
Charles Reade pushed originality to eccentricity. He had a passion for violins, and ran himself into debt because he bought so many and such good ones. Once, when visiting his father’s house at Ipsden, he shocked the punctilious old gentleman by dancing on the dining-table to the accompaniment of a fiddle, which he scraped delightedly. Dancing, indeed, was another of his diversions, and, in spite of the fact that he was a fellow of Magdalen and a D.C.L. of Oxford, he was always ready to caper and to display the new steps.
In the course of time, he went up to London; and at once plunged into the seething tide of the metropolis. He made friends far and wide, and in every class and station–among authors and politicians, bishops and bargees, artists and musicians. Charles Reade learned much from all of them, and all of them were fond of him.
But it was the theater that interested him most. Nothing else seemed to him quite so fine as to be a successful writer for the stage. He viewed the drama with all the reverence of an ancient Greek. On his tombstone he caused himself to be described as “Dramatist, novelist, journalist.”
“Dramatist” he put first of all, even after long experience had shown him that his greatest power lay in writing novels. But in this early period he still hoped for fame upon the stage.
It was not a fortunate moment for dramatic writers. Plays were bought outright by the managers, who were afraid to risk any considerable sum, and were very shy about risking anything at all. The system had not yet been established according to which an author receives a share of the money taken at the box-office. Consequently, Reade had little or no financial success. He adapted several pieces from the French, for which he was paid a few bank- notes. “Masks and Faces” got a hearing, and drew large audiences, but Reade had sold it for a paltry sum; and he shared the honors of its authorship with Tom Taylor, who was then much better known.
Such was the situation. Reade was personally liked, but his plays were almost all rejected. He lived somewhat extravagantly and ran into debt, though not very deeply. He had a play entitled “Christie Johnstone,” which he believed to be a great one, though no manager would venture to produce it. Reade, brooding, grew thin and melancholy. Finally, he decided that he would go to a leading actress at one of the principal theaters and try to interest her in his rejected play. The actress he had in mind was Laura Seymour, then appearing at the Haymarket under the management of Buckstone; and this visit proved to be the turning-point in Reade’s whole life.
Laura Seymour was the daughter of a surgeon at Bath–a man in large practise and with a good income, every penny of which he spent. His family lived in lavish style; but one morning, after he had sat up all night playing cards, his little daughter found him in the dining-room, stone dead. After his funeral it appeared that he had left no provision for his family. A friend of his–a Jewish gentleman of Portuguese extraction–showed much kindness to the children, settling their affairs and leaving them with some money in the bank; but, of course, something must be done.
The two daughters removed to London, and at a very early age Laura had made for herself a place in the dramatic world, taking small parts at first, but rising so rapidly that in her fifteenth year she was cast for the part of Juliet. As an actress she led a life of strange vicissitudes. At one time she would be pinched by poverty, and at another time she would be well supplied with money, which slipped through her fingers like water. She was a true Bohemian, a happy-go-lucky type of the actors of her time.
From all accounts, she was never very beautiful; but she had an instinct for strange, yet effective, costumes, which attracted much attention. She has been described as “a fluttering, buoyant, gorgeous little butterfly.” Many were drawn to her. She was careless of what she did, and her name was not untouched with scandal. But she lived through it all, and emerged a clever, sympathetic woman of wide experience, both on the stage and off it.
One of her admirers–an elderly gentleman named Seymour–came to her one day when she was in much need of money, and told her that he had just deposited a thousand pounds to her credit at the bank. Having said this, he left the room precipitately. It was the beginning of a sort of courtship; and after a while she married him. Her feeling toward him was one of gratitude. There was no sentiment about it; but she made him a good wife, and gave no further cause for gossip.
Such was the woman whom Charles Reade now approached with the request that she would let him read to her a portion of his play. He had seen her act, and he honestly believed her to be a dramatic genius of the first order. Few others shared this belief; but she was generally thought of as a competent, though by no means brilliant, actress. Reade admired her extremely, so that at the very thought of speaking with her his emotions almost choked him.
In answer to a note, she sent word that he might call at her house. He was at this time (1849) in his thirty-eighth year. The lady was a little older, and had lost something of her youthful charm; yet, when Reade was ushered into her drawing-room, she seemed to him the most graceful and accomplished woman whom he had ever met.
She took his measure, or she thought she took it, at a glance. Here was one of those would-be playwrights who live only to torment managers and actresses. His face was thin, from which she inferred that he was probably half starved. His bashfulness led her to suppose that he was an inexperienced youth. Little did she imagine that he was the son of a landed proprietor, a fellow of one of Oxford’s noblest colleges, and one with friends far higher in the world than herself. Though she thought so little of him, and quite expected to be bored, she settled herself in a soft armchair to listen. The unsuccessful playwright read to her a scene or two from his still unfinished drama. She heard him patiently, noting the cultivated accent of his voice, which proved to her that he was at least a gentleman. When he had finished, she said:
“Yes, that’s good! The plot is excellent.” Then she laughed a sort of stage laugh, and remarked lightly: “Why don’t you turn it into a novel?”
Reade was stung to the quick. Nothing that she could have said would have hurt him more. Novels he despised; and here was this woman, the queen of the English stage, as he regarded her, laughing at his drama and telling him to make a novel of it. He rose and bowed.
“I am trespassing on your time,” he said; and, after barely touching the fingers of her outstretched hand, he left the room abruptly.
The woman knew men very well, though she scarcely knew Charles Reade. Something in his melancholy and something in his manner stirred her heart. It was not a heart that responded to emotions readily, but it was a very good-natured heart. Her explanation of Reade’s appearance led her to think that he was very poor. If she had not much tact, she had an abundant store of sympathy; and so she sat down and wrote a very blundering but kindly letter, in which she enclosed a five-pound note.
Reade subsequently described his feelings on receiving this letter with its bank-note. He said:
“I, who had been vice-president of Magdalen–I, who flattered myself I was coming to the fore as a dramatist–to have a five- pound note flung at my head, like a ticket for soup to a pauper, or a bone to a dog, and by an actress, too! Yet she said my reading was admirable; and, after all, there is much virtue in a five-pound note. Anyhow, it showed the writer had a good heart.”
The more he thought of her and of the incident, the more comforted he was. He called on her the next day without making an appointment; and when she received him, he had the five-pound note fluttering in his hand.
She started to speak, but he interrupted her.
“No,” he said, “that is not what I wanted from you. I wanted sympathy, and you have unintentionally supplied it.”
Then this man, whom she had regarded as half starved, presented her with an enormous bunch of hothouse grapes, and the two sat down and ate them together, thus beginning a friendship which ended only with Laura Seymour’s death.
Oddly enough, Mrs. Seymour’s suggestion that Reade should make a story of his play was a suggestion which he actually followed. It was to her guidance and sympathy that the world owes the great novels which he afterward composed. If he succeeded on the stage at all, it was not merely in “Masks and Faces,” but in his powerful dramatization of Zola’s novel, L’Assommoir, under the title “Drink,” in which the late Charles Warner thrilled and horrified great audiences all over the English-speaking world. Had Reade never known Laura Seymour, he might never have written so strong a drama.
The mystery of Reade’s relations with this woman can never be definitely cleared up. Her husband, Mr. Seymour, died not long after she and Reade became acquainted. Then Reade and several friends, both men and women, took a house together; and Laura Seymour, now a clever manager and amiable hostess, looked after all the practical affairs of the establishment. One by one, the others fell away, through death or by removal, until at last these two were left alone. Then Reade, unable to give up the companionship which meant so much to him, vowed that she must still remain and care for him. He leased a house in Sloane Street, which he has himself described in his novel A Terrible Temptation. It is the chapter wherein Reade also draws his own portrait in the character of Francis Bolfe:
The room was rather long, low, and nondescript; scarlet flock paper; curtains and sofas, green Utrecht velvet; woodwork and pillars, white and gold; two windows looking on the street; at the other end folding-doors, with scarcely any woodwork, all plate glass, but partly hidden by heavy curtains of the same color and material as the others.
At last a bell rang; the maid came in and invited Lady Bassett to follow her. She opened the glass folding-doors and took them into a small conservatory, walled like a grotto, with ferns sprouting out of rocky fissures, and spars sparkling, water dripping. Then she opened two more glass folding-doors, and ushered them into an empty room, the like of which Lady Bassett had never seen; it was large in itself, and multiplied tenfold by great mirrors from floor to ceiling, with no frames but a narrow oak beading; opposite her, on entering, was a bay window, all plate glass, the central panes of which opened, like doors, upon a pretty little garden that glowed with color, and was backed by fine trees belonging to the nation; for this garden ran up to the wall of Hyde Park.
The numerous and large mirrors all down to the ground laid hold of the garden and the flowers, and by double and treble reflection filled the room with delightful nooks of verdure and color.
Here are the words in which Reade describes himself as he looked when between fifty and sixty years of age:
He looked neither like a poet nor a drudge, but a great fat country farmer. He was rather tall, very portly, smallish head, commonplace features, mild brown eye not very bright, short beard, and wore a suit of tweed all one color.
Such was the house and such was the man over both of which Laura Seymour held sway until her death in 1879. What must be thought of their relations? She herself once said to Mr. John Coleman:
“As for our positions–his and mine–we are partners, nothing more. He has his bank-account, and I have mine. He is master of his fellowship and his rooms at Oxford, and I am mistress of this house, but not his mistress! Oh, dear, no!”
At another time, long after Mr. Seymour’s death, she said to an intimate friend:
“I hope Mr. Reade will never ask me to marry him, for I should certainly refuse the offer.”
There was no reason why he should not have made this offer, because his Oxford fellowship ceased to be important to him after he had won fame as a novelist. Publishers paid him large sums for everything he wrote. His debts were all paid off, and his income was assured. Yet he never spoke of marriage, and he always introduced his friend as “the lady who keeps my house for me.”
As such, he invited his friends to meet her, and as such, she even accompanied him to Oxford. There was no concealment, and apparently there was nothing to conceal. Their manner toward each other was that of congenial friends. Mrs. Seymour, in fact, might well have been described as “a good fellow.” Sometimes she referred to him as “the doctor,” and sometimes by the nickname “Charlie.” He, on his side, often spoke of her by her last name as “Seymour,” precisely as if she had been a man. One of his relatives rather acutely remarked about her that she was not a woman of sentiment at all, but had a genius for friendship; and that she probably could not have really loved any man at all.
This is, perhaps, the explanation of their intimacy. If so, it is a very remarkable instance of Platonic friendship. It is certain that, after she met Reade, Mrs. Seymour never cared for any other man. It is no less certain that he never cared for any other woman. When she died, five years before his death, his life became a burden to him. It was then that he used to speak of her as “my lost darling” and “my dove.” He directed that they should be buried side by side in Willesden churchyard. Over the monument which commemorates them both, he caused to be inscribed, in addition to an epitaph for himself, the following tribute to his friend. One should read it and accept the touching words as answering every question that may be asked:
Here lies the great heart of Laura Seymour, a brilliant artist, a humble Christian, a charitable woman, a loving daughter, sister, and friend, who lived for others from her childhood. Tenderly pitiful to all God’s creatures–even to some that are frequently destroyed or neglected–she wiped away the tears from many faces, helping the poor with her savings and the sorrowful with her earnest pity. When the eye saw her it blessed her, for her face was sunshine, her voice was melody, and her heart was sympathy.
This grave was made for her and for himself by Charles Reade, whose wise counselor, loyal ally, and bosom friend she was for twenty-four years, and who mourns her all his days.
THE END