Charles Dickens as a Reader | Page 8

advancing, the wider and keener appreciation
of the writings themselves. In its gyrations the ball then rolling at the
Beader's foot imparted a momentum to one far nobler and more
lasting--that of the Novelist's reputation, one that in its movement gives
no sign of slackening--"labitur et labetur in omne volubilis sevum."
[Illustration: reading-page.jpg]
The long continuance of the remarkable success attendant upon the
Readings all through, is only to be explained by the extraordinary care
and earnestness the Reader lavished continuously upon his task when
once it had been undertaken. In this he was only in another phase of his
career, consistently true to the one simple rule adopted by him as an
artist throughout. What that rule was anyone might see at a glance on
turning over the leaves of one of his books, it matters not which, in the
original manuscript. There, the countless alterations, erasures,
interpolations, transpositions, interlineations, shew plainly enough the
minute and conscientious thought devoted to the perfecting, so far as
might be in any way possible, of the work of composition. What reads
so unaffectedly and so felicitously, it is then seen, is but the result of
exquisite consideration. It is Sheridan's whimsical line which declares
that,--
"Easy writing's cursed hard reading."
And it is Pope who summarizes the method by which not "easy
writing" but "ease in writing" is arrived at, where it is said of those who
have acquired a mastery of the craft,--
"They polish all with so much life and ease, You think 'tis nature and a
knack to please: But ease in writing flows from art, not chance; As
those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."

Precisely the same elaboration of care, which all through his career was
dedicated by Charles Dickens to the most delightful labour of his life,
that of writing, was accorded by him to the lesser but still eminently
intellectual toil of preparing his Readings for representation. It was not
by any means that, having written a story years previously, he had, in
his new capacity as a reciter, merely to select two or three chapters
from it, and read them off with an air of animation. Virtually, the
fragmentary portions thus taken from his larger works were re-written
by him, with countless elisions and eliminations after having been
selected. Reprinted in their new shape, each as "A Reading," they were
then touched and retouched by their author, pen in hand, until, at the
end of a long succession of revisions, the pages came to be cobwebbed
over with a wonderfully intricate network of blots and lines in the way
of correction or of obliteration. Several of the leaves in this way, what
with the black letter-press on the white paper, being scored out or
interwoven with a tracery in red ink and blue ink alternately, present to
view a curiously parti-coloured or tesselated appearance. As a
specimen page, however, will afford a more vivid illustration upon the
instant of what is referred to, than could be conveyed by any mere
verbal description, a fac-simile is here introduced of a single page taken
from the "Reading of Little Dombey."
Whatever thought was lavished thus upon the composition of the
Readings, was lavished quite as unstintingly upon the manner of their
delivery. Thoroughly natural, impulsive, and seemingly artless, though
that manner always appeared at the moment, it is due to the Reader as
an artist to assert that it was throughout the result of a scarcely credible
amount of forethought and preparation. It is thus invariably indeed with
every great proficient in the histrionic art, even with those who are
quite erroneously supposed by the outer public to trust nearly
everything to the momentary impulses of genius, and who are therefore
presumed to disdain anything whatever in the way either of forethought
or of actual preparation by rehearsal.
According to what is, even down to this present day, very generally
conjectured, Edmund Kean, one of the greatest tragedians who ever
trod the stage, is popularly imagined to have always played simply, as

might be said, hap-hazard, trusting himself to the spur of the moment
for throwing himself into a part passionately;--the fact being exactly the
reverse in his regard, according to the earliest and most accurate of his
biographers. Erratic, fitful though the genius of Edmund Kean
unquestionably was--rendering him peerless as Othello, incomparable
as Overreach--we are told in Mr. Procter's life of him, that "he studied
long and anxiously," frequently until many hours after midnight.{*} No
matter what his occupations previously might have been, or how
profound his exhaustion through rehearsing in the forenoon, and
performing in the evening, and sharing in convivialities afterwards,
Barry Cornwall relates of him that he would often begin to study when
his family had retired for the night, practising in