both in form and method an emasculated and degraded school of art. Wagner was a giant a hundred years in advance of his age, and his theory was sublime; but, alas! after all, he lacked melody. It was very trying to one's temper to sit beside Reade in a theatre, especially if we happened to be in the stalls. He would writhe under a bad performance, and not hesitate to express his opinion openly and freely about it. "High art" in music he didn't believe in. "What!" he would exclaim; "call that braying with brass and torturing of cat-gut music! Ah, give me music with melody."
Painting and sculpture were either his delight or his abomination; a great work he reverenced,—nay, adored; small things tortured him. His appreciation of the "younger art" was but too frequently affected by the public estimate: hence the idol of to-day was the idiot of to-morrow, or vice versa. A lady would be a "goddess" in one part, in the other "a soulless lump of clay." An actor in one part was eulogized as a genius, in the next he was stigmatized as a "duffer."
A few years ago he went with me to see a comedy acted at a West-End theatre. At the end of the fourth act he rushed out in disgust. Next day he was rampant about "this disreputable exhibition." He was especially furious in his diatribes against a gentleman who formerly had been his beau-idéal of all that was gallant and chivalrous. I took exception to this wholesale slaughtering, and reminded him of his former eulogies upon the man whom he now "slated" so unmercifully. "I know, I know!" he exclaimed; "I was ass enough to admit he was an actor during a temporary aberration, but then I hadn't seen the beast in ———. Call that epicene creature, with the parrot's nose and the peacock's voice, that feather bed tied in the middle, supported in a perpendicular position by two bolsters, masses of wool and wadding, that he calls legs,—call that Punch-like thing the genial, jovial, manly ———? No, no;
These things must not be thought
After these ways: so, it will make us mad."
I don't think he was quite just to the present generation of actors, and I should only scatter heartburnings if I were to quote his opinions, which indeed varied from day to day, from hour to hour. He was himself too apt, in connection with this subject, to "wreathe dead men's bones about living men's necks." The two great artists whom he incessantly cited as being "the choice and master spirits of the age" were Macready and Farren the elder. In his estimation, no living actors were fit to be named in the same century with them. After them came Mrs. Glover, who was comedy incarnate. Mrs. Kean, however, was only a "matronly and respectable actress;" Mrs. Warner, "a passable" Lady Macbeth. Charles Kean was a "magnificent stage-manager, but a mediocre actor." Phelps was "a great comedian, but a bad tragedian;" Charles Mathews, un petit maître; Sothern, "an intellectual absurdity." "Bucky" was "funny," Keeley was "sleepy," Compton was "funereal," Webster was "artistically spasmodic and perpetually imperfect;" and so on to the end. Among our neighbors he admittted that Rachel and Lemaître were geniuses; but he could not endure Fechter. One night, during the latter's management of the Lyceum, we went to see "The Master of Ravenswood." During the contract-scene, Edgar became very angry with Lucy, and, in approaching her, gesticulated so violently that for a moment it seemed as if he were about to strike her. Reade growled, "He'll hit her in a minute. Ah, it's always the way with those Frenchmen where women are concerned,—when they are not sneaks, they are bullies."
The teacup-and-saucer comedy, with the semi-chambermaid heroine and the petit crevé hero thereof, he despised utterly. "Give me," he would exclaim, "a man,—one of Queen Elizabeth's men; a woman,—none of your skin-and-bone abominations, but a real woman; let them have heads on their shoulders, hearts in their bodies, limbs they know how to use, and 'hair of what color it shall please heaven;' voices that I can
