Charles Dickens as a Reader | Page 3

and irresistible, this was the very man who could at
any moment, by an inflection of his voice or by the syncope of a
chuckle, move his audience at pleasure to tears or to laughter. He could
haunt their memories for years afterwards with the infinite tenderness
of his ejaculation as Hamlet, of "The fair Ophelia!" He could convulse
them with merriment by his hesitating utterance as Falstaff of "A
shirt--and a half!" Incidentally it is remarked by the biographer of
Henderson that the qualifications requisite to constitute a reader of
especial excellence seem to be these, "a good ear, a voice capable of
inflexion, an understanding of, and taste for, the beauties of the author."
Added to this, there must be, of course, a feeling, an ardour, an
enthusiasm sufficient at all times to ensure their rapid and vivid
manifestation. Richly endowed in this way, however, though
Henderson was, his gifts were weighted, as we have seen were those
also of Betterton, by a variety of physical defects, some of which were
almost painfully conspicuous. Insomuch was this the case, in the latter
instance, that Tony Aston has oddly observed, in regard to the all but
peerless tragedian, "He was better to meet than to follow; for his aspect
[the writer evidently means, here, when met] was serious, venerable,
and majestic; in his latter time a little paralytic." Accepting at once as
reasonable and as accurate what has thus been asserted by those who
have made the art of elocution their especial and chosen study for
analysis, it is surely impossible not to recognise at a glance how
enormously a reader must, by necessity, be advantaged, who, in
addition to the intellectual and emotional gifts already enumerated,
possesses those personal attributes and physical endowments in which
a reader, otherwise of surpassing excellence, like Henderson, and an
actor, in other respects of incomparable ability, like Betterton, was each
in turn so glaringly deficient.
Whatever is here said in regard to Charles Dickens, it should be borne
in mind, is written and published during the lifetime of his own
immediate contemporaries. He himself, his readings, the sound of his
voice, the ring of his footstep, the glance of his eye, are all still vividly

within the recollection of the majority of those who will examine the
pages of this memorial. Everything, consequently, which is set forth in
them is penned with a knowledge of its inevitable revision or
endorsement by the reader's own personal remembrance. It is in the full
glare of that public remembrance that the present writer refers to the
great novelist as an impersonator of his more remarkable creations.
Everybody who has seen him, who has heard him, who has carefully
watched him, though it may be but at a single one of these memorable
readings, will recognise at a glance the accuracy or the inaccuracy of
the delineation.
It is observable, in the first instance, in regard to Charles Dickens, that
he had in an extraordinary degree the dramatic element in his character.
It was an integral part of his individuality. It coloured his whole
temperament or idiosyncracy. Unconsciously he described himself, to a
T, in Nicholas Nickleby. "There's genteel comedy in your walk and
manner, juvenile tragedy in your eye, and touch-and-go farce in your
la'ugh," might have been applied to himself in his buoyant youth quite
as readily and directly as to Nicholas. The author, rather than the hero
of Nickleby, seems, in that happy utterance of the theatrical manager,
to have been photographed. It cannot but now be apparent that, as an
unpremeditated preliminary to Dickens's then undreamt-of career as a
reader of his own works in public and professionally, the Private
Theatricals over which he presided during several years in his own
home circle as manager, prepared the way no less directly than his
occasional Readings, later on, at some expense to himself (in travelling
and otherwise) for purely charitable purposes. His proclivity
stagewards, in effect, the natural trending of his line of life, so to speak,
in the histrionic or theatrical direction, was, in another way, indicated at
a yet earlier date, and not one jot less pointedly. It was so, we mean, at
the very opening of his career in authorship, when having just sprung
into precocious celebrity as the writer of the Sketches and of the earlier
numbers of Pickwick, he contributed an opera and a couple of farces
with brilliant success to the boards of the St. James's Theatre. Braham
and Parry and Hullah winged with melody the words of "The Village
Coquettes;" while the quaint humour of Harley excited roars of laughter
through the whimsicalities of "Is She His Wife?" and "The Strange

Gentleman." Trifles light as air though these effusions might be, the
radiant bubbles showed even then, as