 | |  |
Charles Reade.
In his column titled "Boston Letter," the miscellaneous writer William Henry Rideing quoted some letters of Reade (12 [Feb. 11, 1888], 68). Reade had gone to Cannes in early September 1883 and returned to London late in February, 1884, where he died on Good Friday, April 11. Rideing thought that presentation of the letters was timely because they mention a posthumous work on "Biblical Character" announced for publication in London.
'The subject is old,' he writes in one letter,
The subject is old, but it is as good as new and better; because up to
this date the treatment of such subjects by French, German and English
writers has been all a mistake and a truly wonderful one. I cannot in the
compass of a single letter explain 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. I have already written a short
preliminary discourse, and described two Bible characters who pass for
small Bible characters only because the divines who have handled them
have literally no insight into character whatever.
In the same letter he complains of the Canadian publishers.
The Canadian publishers are a thorn in the side of American
publishers: they do you harm in all manner of ways; they are ungrateful
knaves. . . . In spite of bronchitis and some strange disorder in the
intestines, I am fulfilling an engagement to write a serial story in
Harper's Weekly and I hope to publish 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 nto diffuseness.
In another letter he maintained the impossibility of writing a good
story without making love the foundation of it.
The truth is that Fiction is a more severe mistress than people think.
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.
These letters were written from Cannes, and each complained of his
sufferings. A week or two after the date of the last he returned to London
and died in the little house at Shepherd's Bush, which he took after leaving
'Naboth's Vineyard' in Knights-bridge.
| | |