Charles Reade And Mrs. Oliphant

( Originally Published 1912 )

AN author has no longer any occasion to blow his own trumpet. For a consideration any literary agent will sound it for him in blasts loud enough to bring down anything, old or new, the walls of Jericho itself or an American "skyscraper." He may be naturally shy and modest, a humble creature unpractised in affairs, dubious of his merits, ignorant of prices cur-rent, incredulous that his novel or poem can have any pecuniary value. He may be diffidence itself in private, but when he puts himself into the hands of a literary agent he is sure to be introduced to the editor by that exigent delegate as a paragon of the special merit that "sells," and his commercial value is extolled and emphasized more than all else.

"Probably you are aware that Mr. Jones commands better terms than any other living author," the agent writes to the editor, forgetting that he has used precisely the same formula in regard to Smith and Robinson a little earlier, and that editors are not always fools, or without memories, and a knowledge of their own trade. "I propose," the agent continues, when he calls, "that, the serial rights and the rights of dramatization being reserved by my client, you shall pay him one shilling and sixpence royalty for every copy of the book sold at six shillings, and that you shall at once advance him several hundred pounds on account of royalties that may become due in the future."

As he listens, the editor droops in his chair, while the agent smiles and produces ingenious figures to prove that the demands are not extortionate, but leave a possible though remote profit to him, the party of the second part. Then, if the manuscript is what he feels he must have because it is really good, or because it will serve for advertisement, he submits, after a struggle for abatement, biting his lips, perhaps, as he does so, and reviling what he feels to be in the language of the Wild West, a "hold-up."

It is not to be inferred that every author, or the average author, is as simple as Jones, personally, or needs an agent to proclaim him. Some of them — I do not say all — are as astute in driving a bargain as any literary agent can be, and come into the market on the same level and in the same spirit as a seller of so much merchandise. "I write," said one not long ago, "as if there was no such thing as money in the world, and when I sell I sell as if money were the only thing in the world" — an attitude not indefensible and not uncommon. The publisher complains, often in a strain of sentiment and pathos, and I have known even a literary agent to say that the author expects everything and objects to every-thing. "The only thing that satisfies him is being paid, and, if possible, being paid twice over." Undoubtedly he has become more sordid, or it may be fairer to say, more business-like, under the influence and instruction of the agent, who occasionally finds a once tractable and complaisant client transformed into a Frankenstein. I like, however, to see the author having his turn, for until recent years he has been the under dog in the struggle for an equitable division of the money his work has produced. The publisher has often had the cream though not always.

Tennyson, especially, and Thackeray and Dickens knew how to take care of themselves. We smile as we recall Thackeray in his early days making a desperate effort to dissemble his rejoicing at an offer much larger than he expected, and before him was Gibbon who instructed Lord Sheffield as to how that nobleman should negotiate with Nichols, the publisher, in his behalf. His lordship was to speak of the prospective book as if the idea came from himself, "as it is most essential that I be solicited, and do not solicit." "Then," wrote Gibbon, "if he (Nichols) kindles at the thought and eagerly claims my alliance, you (Lord Sheffield) will begin to hesitate. 'I am afraid, Mr. Nichols,' you say, `that we can hardly persuade my friend to engage in so great a work. Gibbon is old, and rich, and lazy. However, you may make the trial.'

Was the trick ever played more cannily? Could any salt for a bird's tail have more efficacy? Still I think that among authors in their business affairs there are and have been more geese than such foxes as Gibbon was in this instance. Why should we wonder if, at the end of a long period of ignorance or of indifference to commercial values, they strain them out of due proportion when they discover them, and lose sight of all else? The corollary is inevitable, and equity in suspense.

All this is a roundabout approach to saying that in a varied editorial experience of more years than I can acknowledge with equanimity, I met only one author who thought that what we offered him for some of his work was too much; and, strange to relate, that was Charles Reade.

He had then lost his pretty house in Knightsbridge, that "Naboth's Vineyard," as he called it, against the loss of which he had fought with characteristic energy through long years in both the courts and parliament, and had moved to Shepherd 's Bush, a choice that seemed to me to be unaccountable and incredible. Of all places in the world, one wondered, why Shepherd's Bush? And why Blomfield Villas of all places there? As I sought the house I thought that I must have made some mistake, and that none of those rows of stucco-fronted, small, vulgar, utterly undistinguished domiciles, detached and semi-detached, in stony, pocket handkerchief gardens, could possibly contain the great man I was looking for. The neighbourhood spoke of city clerks, shop-men, and retired people — not "nice" retired people, half-pay officers and such, but retired plumbers, green grocers, buttermen, and publicans, or, as they like to be called, "licensed victuallers." Here and there one of them could be seen pottering, shirt-sleeved, in his crowded and heterogeneous garden, with an air of stolid satisfaction, his old briar fondly held between his pursy lips, and the fat of plethoric nourishment shining on his face, a solid, documentary proof that I was astray. When I came to the number given to me I hesitated before I rang the bell, I was so confident of the futility of my inquiry, and the reply of the maid who answered the bell "Yes, this is Mr. Reade's" had to be repeated before it penetrated me.

Yes, this was Mr. Reade's, and I was shown into a littered and cramped study, corresponding to the drawing-room of the other houses, its shelves loaded by a series of scrap-books bursting with clippings on every subject from newspaper articles. Occasionally, perhaps, he found inspiration and suggestions in them, for he always insisted that truth was stranger than fiction — and in that I might concur, taking Blomfield Villas, as an example but my impression is that those time stained and bulging archives had their chief use in confounding the critics who ventured to challenge what seemed to be impossibilities in his works. Was it in "Foul Play," or another story, that a white whale appeared? And did some scribe say that a white whale could not have been in the latitude and longitude given? Down came one of the scrap-books, and down its weight on the head of that critic, leaving him not a breath for rebuttal, or a leg to stand on. Within it was a faded extract from the log of a ship that had reported the phenomenon in the very spot Reade had placed it. And I believe that in such an achievement as this he took as much pride as in one of the best chapters of "The Cloister and the Hearth." If he could not demolish them he loved to confuse those who "called him down," and the scrap-books were his arsenal.

I thought, in the timidity of my inexperience at that period, he meant to assault me as he burst into the room, seeming to bring with him a gale that rattled the house and all its doors and windows. There was a lot of what Mr. H. G. Wells calls "projectile violence" about him. I had written a little article of badinage in the Atlantic Monthly pointing out some amusing errors of his in the American scenes of "The Wandering Heir," or "Single heart and Doubleface," and for a moment I feared forgetting that it was unsigned my sins were to over-take me there and then. But the tornado was of sound only, the breath of an impulsive and impetuous temperament, which at heart was essentially fine and gentle. Passing, it left in its place a presence which, though dogmatic, was far from disagreeable.

Following that visit to Blomfield Villas, I had a long letter from him which seems to me to be an epitome of the complex variety of his qualities, and in printing it I should explain in reference to one of its passages that I had asked him to write a serial story for the Youth's Companion, whose editors then thought an amorous interest unwise in view of the precocity of some of their readers :

Hotel Splendide, Cannes, 28 Jan'y, '84.

DEAR SIR:

I beg to thank you for the munificent sum you sent me through Mr. Liston; it was too much for a mere dictated article of which you had not the monopoly; and shall be reconsidered if we do business together.

I must now tell you the real reason of my delaying so long to write to you: Your often repeated wish to have something from my pen, and your liberality had made me desirous to let you have something good; now I have observed that it is extremely difficult for any author to increase the circulation of an established periodical, and, when it is done, fiction is very seldom the happy instrument. However, I have by me, in manuscript, certain true narratives called "Bible Characters," which I think will do a magazine more good than any number of fictions. The subject, of course, is old, but it is as good as new and better; because, up to this date, the treatment of such subjects by bench, German, and English writers has been all a mistake, and a truly wonderful one. I cannot in the compass of a letter explain to you the many vital blunders in their treatment: I must confine myself to saying that it is so; and that everybody will see it when my manuscripts are printed.

Well, I must now tell you, under the seal of the most strict and honourable confidence, that I sent to a short preliminary discourse and two Bible characters that pass for small characters only because the divines who have handled them have literally no insight into character what-ever. The editor received this instalment of the subject with open arms, but he has been shelving my fictitious stories, and editing me, making unjustifiable and very silly alterations, so that my text and my English copyrights seem neither of them to be safe in that magazine. I therefore requested him to send me back all my copy without exception, and I intended to do you a good turn with the Bible characters, both in your periodical and in book form; and I thought long before this my manuscripts would have come home; but probably my old friends Messrs. , the publishers, took alarm, and objected to part with them; at all events, the manuscripts were retained, most charming excuses made, and I was requested to reconsider the matter. I was not, on my part, the least disposed to quarrel, it would have been ungrateful; I therefore gave them the alternative under very stringent conditions — no editing, no interruption — when once I begin — and, in short no nonsense of any kind. Now, if they accept these terms they will have the works, and if they do not they will lose them and find their mistake.

If they let them slip, you can have them if you like; if they retain them, I see my way to write you a strong story, but there must be love in it: not illicit love, nor passionate love, but that true affection between the sexes without which it is impossible to interest readers for more than a few pages. Pray consider the subject, thus confined; it cannot be long hidden from the young that there is an innocent and natural love between the sexes, and, in plain truth, successful fiction is somewhat narrow; love is its turn-pike road; you may go off that road into highways, into by-ways, and woods, and gather here and there choice flowers of imagination that do not grow at the side of that road; but you must be quick and get back again to your turnpike pretty soon, or you will miss the heart of the reader.

When I return to England and have my books about me, I could write you one good article about men and animals, their friendships, and how the lives of men have been sometimes taken and saved by quadrupeds, fishes, birds, and even reptiles, and could wind up with an exquisite story of how a man's life was once saved by a ladybird; but one such article, with my habits of condensation, would exhaust the whole vein, whereas fiction and biography are unlimited.

Then, as to the remuneration you were kind enough to offer, I do not see how you can afford $ per page. Publishers will pay for their whistle, like other people, and will buy a name for more than it is worth unless it is connected with work that would be valuable without a name. In my view of things, nothing is good that is not durable, and no literary business can be durable if the author takes all the profit.

In spite of bronchitis, and some strange disorder in the intestines, am fulfilling an engagement to write a serial story in — , and I hope to finish it in a month, but I do not think I shall ever again undertake to write a story of that length. After all, condensation is a fine thing, and perhaps a story long enough to excite an interest, and paint characters vividly, a story in which there is no conversation, but only dialogue which rapidly advances the progress of the action, is more likely to be immortal than those more expanded themes which betray us into diffuseness.

Please make allowances in this letter for any defects arising from dictation. I am not yet a good hand at that practice.

Yours faithfully,

CHARLES READE.

In that letter we have the man as he was, as he saw himself, and as he revealed himself : Knowing better what a periodical wanted than its editors, and more of the Bible than the theologian : level-headed in such axioms as " nothing is good that is not durable " ; arrogant as to conditions and fair-minded as to rewards; broad and liberal here, narrow and prejudiced there; sound in business; direct in method; all, and above all, imperious and confidently omniscient, a nineteenth century Don Quixote.

"The truth is that fiction is a more severe mistress than people think," he wrote to me later. "An imaginative writer often begins his career with subjects independent of sexual love, but his readers, and especially his female readers, soon show him that they won't stand it, and so they drag him out of the by-paths of invention and force him into the turnpike road, until at last their habit becomes his, and I suppose his mind accepts the groove."

James Payn had his little joke at the exclusion of sexual love from a story he attempted for the same periodical. "Never," he wrote, "since the Israelite was requested to make bricks without straw by his Egyptian master, was employé so put to it. I am bound to say that, though amply remunerated, that story" (his own) "did not turn out a success. Think of Hamlet with not only the prince left out, but also the ghost! My position seems to me to be similar to that of woman in conversation. Almost everything that is really interesting is tabooed to her."

I may add that our women contributors never found any difficulty in or objection to the restriction, nor did the interest of their work suffer from it. Mrs. Macquoid, the author of "Patty," whom I used to see at her old house in the King's Road, Chelsea, where she lived for many years; Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a girl at eighty; Louisa M. Alcott, retired at Concord; and Mrs. Oliphant in her lodgings in Ebury Street or at Windsor or Wimbledon — they never murmured against Moses, or complained that they were asked to make bricks without straw, because passion and superstition were eschewed.

Mrs. Oliphant gave us some of her best work, and that, as I appraise it, came very near to the best of any woman novelist in English literature. The little it lacked in the measure of perfection could be charged to the harassing conditions of pressure and distraction under which it was produced. Her characters were never wraiths or puppets, or like the stamped patterns on wall-papers : they lived for us; we saw them back and front, within and without, through their bodies to their souls; and when they died they filled us with such a sense of desolation and of echoing void in the house of mourning as we received from that vivid scene of death in her "Country Gentleman." The wolf howled at her door, while her children clung to her skirts like the daughters of the horse-leech, crying, "Give, give." Much of her writing was done late at night. She told me that this had become a habit with her since her children's infancy, when it was necessary to have them in bed before she took up her pen, and it persisted after they grew up. A glass of sherry sustained her in it.

"Yes," she complained, "it has been my fate to be credited with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality excellent in morals, but alas ! so little satisfactory in art."

She sustained herself under what she vividly called a "cheerful despair." Nothing in her stories, vibrant with the understanding of anguish as they are, is more pathetic than her own account of her situation after her husband's death. The Blackwoods referred to are, of course, those of the famous Edinburgh house: