"_It does not appear that the age thought his works worthy of
posterity, nor that this great poet himself levied any ideal tribute on
future times, or had any further prospect than of present popularity
and present profit. So careless was he, indeed, of fame, that, when he
retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little declined into the
vale of years, and before he could be disgusted with fatigue or
disabled by infirmity, he desired only that in this rural quiet he who
had so long mazed his imagination by following phantoms might at last
be cured of his delirious ecstasies, and as a hermit might estimate the
transactions of the world._"
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's my own,
Which is most faint.
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.--_Epilogue to The Tempest_.
He was hoping, while his fingers drummed in unison with the beat of his
verse, that this last play at least would rouse enthusiasm in the pit.
The welcome given its immediate predecessors had undeniably been tepid.
A memorandum at his elbow of the receipts at the Globe for the last
quarter showed this with disastrous bluntness; and, after all, in 1609
a shareholder in a theater, when writing dramas for production there,
was ordinarily subject to more claims than those of his ideals.
He sat in a neglected garden whose growth was in reversion to primal
habits. The season was September, the sky a uniform and temperate
blue. A peachtree, laden past its strength with fruitage, made about
him with its boughs a sort of tent. The grass around his writing-table
was largely hidden by long, crinkled peach leaves--some brown and
others gray as yet--and was dotted with a host of brightly-colored
peaches. Fidgeting bees and flies were excavating the decayed spots in
this wasting fruit, from which emanated a vinous odor. The bees hummed
drowsily, their industry facilitating idleness in others. It was
curious--he meditated, his thoughts straying from "an uninhabited
island"--how these insects alternated in color between brown velvet and
silver, as they blundered about a flickering tessellation of amber and
dark green . . . in search of rottenness. . . .
He frowned. Here was an arid forenoon as imagination went. A seasoned
plagiarist by this, he opened a book which lay upon the table among
several others and duly found the chapter entitled _Of the Cannibals_.
"So, so!" he said aloud. "'It is a nation,' would I answer Plato,
'that has no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters----'" And with
that he sat about reshaping Montaigne's conceptions of Utopia into
verse. He wrote--while his left hand held the book flat--as orderly as
any county-clerk might do in the recordance of a deed of sale.
Midcourse in larceny, he looked up from writing. He saw a tall, dark
lady who was regarding him half-sorrowfully and half as in the grasp of
some occult amusement. He said nothing. He released the telltale
book. His eyebrows lifted, banteringly. He rose.
He found it characteristic of her that she went silently to the table
and compared the printed page with what he had just written. "So
nowadays you have turned pickpocket? My poet, you have altered."
He said: "Why, yes. When you broke off our friendship, I paid you the
expensive compliment of falling very ill. They thought that I would
die. They tell me even to-day I did not die. I almost question it."
He shrugged. "And to-day I must continue to write plays, because I
never learned any other trade. And so, at need, I pilfer." The topic
did not seem much to concern him.
"Eh, and such plays!" the woman cried. "My poet, there was a time when
you created men and women as glibly as Heaven does. Now you make
sugar-candy dolls."
"The last comedies were not all I could have wished," he assented. "In
fact, I got only some L30 clear profit."
"There speaks the little tradesman I most hated of all persons living!"
the woman sighed. Now, as in impatience, she thrust back her
traveling-hood and stood bare-headed.
Then she stayed silent,--tall, extraordinarily pallid, and with dark,
steady eyes. Their gaze by ordinary troubled you, as seeming to hint
some knowledge to your belittlement. The playmaker remembered that.
Now he, a reputable householder, was wondering what would be the upshot
of this intrusion. His visitor, as he was perfectly aware, had little
patience with such moments of life as could not be made dramatic. . . .
He was recollecting many trifles, now his mind ran upon old
times. . . . No, no, reflection assured him, to call her beautiful
would be, and must always have been, an exaggeration; but to deny the
exotic and somewhat sinister charm of her, even to-day, would be an
absurdity.
She said, abruptly: "I do not think I ever loved you as women love
men. You were too anxious to associate with fine folk, too eager to
secure a patron--yes, and to get your profit of him--and you were
always ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long past, and we two are
so altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings now without
any bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at your
incessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so much
more than a gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me--how long ago it was!--to
see you cringing to the Court blockheads, and running their errands,
and smirkingly pocketing their money, and wheedling them into helping
the new play to success. You complained I treated you like a lackey;
it was not unnatural when of your own freewill you played the lackey so
assiduously."
He laughed. He had anatomized himself too frequently and with too much
dispassion to overlook whatever tang of snobbishness might be in him;
and, moreover, the charge thus tendered became in reality the speaker's
apology, and hurt nobody's self-esteem.
"Faith, I do not say you are altogether in the wrong," he assented.
"They could be very useful to me--Pembroke, and Southampton, and those
others--and so I endeavored to render my intimacy acceptable. It was
my business as a poet to make my play as near perfect as I could; and
this attended to, common-sense demanded of the theater-manager that he
derive as much money as was possible from its representation. What
would you have? The man of letters, like the carpenter or the
blacksmith, must live by the vending of his productions, not by the
eating of them." The woman waved this aside.
She paced the grass in meditation, the peach leaves brushing her proud
head--caressingly, it seemed to him. Later she came nearer in a
brand-new mood. She smiled now, and her voice was musical and thrilled
with wonder. "But what a poet Heaven had locked inside this little
parasite! It used to puzzle me." She laughed, and ever so lightly.
"Eh, and did you never understand why by preference I talked with you
at evening from my balcony? It was because I could forget you then
entirely. There was only a voice in the dark. There was a sorcerer at
whose bidding words trooped like a conclave of emperors, and now sang
like a bevy of linnets. And wit and fancy and high aspirations and my
love--because I knew then that your love for me was splendid and
divine--these also were my sorcerer's potent allies. I understood then
how glad and awed were those fabulous Greekish queens when a god wooed
them. Yes, then I understood. How long ago it seems!"
"Yes, yes," he sighed. "In that full-blooded season was Guenevere a
lass, I think, and Charlemagne was not yet in breeches."
"And when there was a new play enacted I was glad. For it was our play
that you and I had polished the last line of yesterday, and all these
people wept and laughed because of what we had done. And I was
proud----" The lady shrugged impatiently. "Proud, did I say? and
glad? That attests how woefully I fall short of you, my poet. You
would have found some magic phrase to make that ancient glory
articulate, I know. Yet,--did I ever love you? I do not know that. I
only know I sometimes fear you robbed me of the power of loving any
other man."
He raised one hand in deprecation. "I must remind you," he cried,
whimsically, "that a burnt child dreads even to talk of fire."
Her response was a friendly nod. She came yet nearer. "What," she
demanded, and her smile was elfish, "what if I had lied to you? What
if I were hideously tired of my husband, that bluff, stolid captain?
What if I wanted you to plead with me as in the old time?"
He said: "Until now you were only a woman. Oh, and now, my dear, you
are again that resistless gipsy who so merrily beguiled me to the very
heart of loss. You are Love. You are Youth. You are Comprehension.
You are all that I have had, and lost, and vainly hunger for. Here in
this abominable village, there is no one who understands--not even
those who are more dear to me than you are. I know. I only spoil good
paper which might otherwise be profitably used to wrap herrings in,
they think. They give me ink and a pen just as they would give toys to
a child who squalled for them too obstinately. And Poesy is a thrifty
oracle with no words to waste upon the deaf, however loudly her
interpreter cry out to her. Oh, I have hungered for you, my proud,
dark lady!" the playmaker said.
Afterward they stood quite silent. She was not unmoved by his outcry;
and for this very reason was obscurely vexed by the reflection that it
would be the essay of a braver man to remedy, rather than to lament,
his circumstances. And then the moment's rapture failed him.
"I am a sorry fool," he said; and lightly he ran on: "You are a
skilful witch. Yet you have raised the ghost of an old madness to no
purpose. You seek a master-poet? You will find none here. Perhaps I
was one once. But most of us are poets of one sort or another when we
love. Do you not understand? To-day I do not love you any more than I
do Hecuba. Is it not strange that I should tell you this and not be
moved at all? Is it not laughable that we should stand here at the
last, two feet apart as things physical go, and be as profoundly
severed as if an ocean tumbled between us?"
He fell to walking to and fro, his hands behind his back. She waited,
used as she was to his unstable temperament, a trifle puzzled.
Presently he spoke:
"There was a time when a master-poet was needed. He was
found--nay,--rather made. Fate hastily caught up a man not very
different from the run of men--one with a taste for stringing phrases
and with a comedy or so to his discredit. Fate merely bid him love a
headstrong child newly released from the nursery."
"We know her well enough," she said. "The girl was faithless, and
tyrannous, and proud, and coquettish, and unworthy, and false, and
inconstant. She was black as hell and dark as night in both her person
and her living. You were not niggardly of vituperation."
And he grimaced. "Faith," he replied, "but sonnets are a more natural
form of expression than affidavits, and they are made effective by
compliance with different rules. I find no flagrant fault with you
to-day. You were a child of seventeen, the darling of a noble house,
and an actor--yes, and not even a pre-eminent actor--a gross, poor
posturing vagabond, just twice your age, presumed to love you. What
child would not amuse herself with such engaging toys? Vivacity and
prettiness and cruelty are the ordinary attributes of kittenhood. So
you amused yourself. And I submitted with clear eyes, because I could
not help it. Yes, I who am by nature not disposed to underestimate my
personal importance--I submitted, because your mockery was more
desirable than the adoration of any other woman. And all this helped
to make a master-poet of me. Eh, why not, when such monstrous passions
spoke through me--as if some implacable god elected to play godlike
music on a mountebank's lute? And I made admirable plays. Why not,
when there was no tragedy more poignant than mine?--and where in any
comedy was any figure one-half so ludicrous as mine? Ah, yes, Fate
gained her ends, as always."
He was a paunchy, inconsiderable little man. By ordinary his elongated
features and high, bald forehead loaned him an aspect of serene and
axiom-based wisdom, much as we see him in his portraits; but now his
countenance was flushed and mobile. Odd passions played about it, as
when on a sullen night in August summer lightnings flicker and merge.
His voice had found another cadence. "But Fate was not entirely
ruthless. Fate bade the child become a woman, and so grow tired of all
her childhood's playthings. This was after a long while, as we
estimate happenings. . . . I suffered then. Yes, I went down to the
doors of death, as people say, in my long illness. But that crude,
corporal fever had a providential thievishness; and not content with
stripping me of health and strength,--not satisfied with pilfering
inventiveness and any strong hunger to create--why, that insatiable
fever even robbed me of my insanity. I lived. I was only a broken
instrument flung by because the god had wearied of playing. I would
give forth no more heart-wringing music, for the musician had departed.
And I still lived--I, the stout little tradesman whom you loathed.
Yes, that tradesman scrambled through these evils, somehow, and came
out still able to word adequately all such imaginings as could be
devised by his natural abilities. But he transmitted no more
heart-wringing music."