From Leamington to Stratford-on-Avon the distance is eight or nine
miles, over a road that seemed to me most beautiful. Not that I can
recall any memorable peculiarities; for the country, most of the way, is
a succession of the gentlest swells and subsidences, affording wide and
far glimpses of champaign-scenery here and there, and sinking almost to
a dead level as we draw near Stratford. Any landscape in New England,
even the tamest, has a more striking outline, and besides would have its
blue eyes open in those lakelets that we encounter almost from mile to
mile at home, but of which the Old Country is utterly destitute; or it
would smile in our faces through the medium of those way-side brooks
that vanish under a low stone arch on one side of the road, and sparkle
out again on the other. Neither of these pretty features is often to be
found in an English scene. The charm of the latter consists in the rich
verdure of the fields, in the stately way-side trees and carefully
kept plantations of wood, and in the old and high cultivation that has
humanized the very sods by mingling so much of man's toil and care among
them. To an American there is a kind of sanctity even in an English
turnip-field, when he thinks how long that small square of ground has
been known and recognized as a possession, transmitted from father to
son, trodden often by memorable feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery
by old acquaintanceship with civilized eyes. The wildest things in
England are more than half tame. The trees, for instance, whether in
hedgerow, park, or what they call forest, have nothing wild about them.
They are never ragged; there is a certain decorous restraint in the
freest outspread of their branches, though they spread wider than any
self-nurturing tree; they are tall, vigorous, bulky, with a look of
age-long life, and a promise of more years to come, all of which will
bring them into closer kindred with the race of man. Somebody or other
has known them from the sapling upward; and if they endure long enough,
they grow to be traditionally observed and honored, and connected with
the fortunes of old families, till, like Tennyson's Talking Oak, they
babble with a thousand leafy tongues to ears that can understand them.
An American tree, however, if it could grow in fair competition with an
English one of similar species, would probably be the more picturesque
object of the two. The Warwickshire elm has not so beautiful a shape
as those that overhang our village-street; and as for the redoubtable
English oak, there is a certain John-Bullism in its figure, a compact
rotundity of foliage, a lack of irregular and various outline, that make
it look wonderfully like a gigantic cauliflower. Its leaf, too, is much
smaller than that of most varieties of American oak; nor do I mean
to doubt that the latter, with free leave to grow, reverent care and
cultivation, and immunity from the axe, would live out its centuries
as sturdily as its English brother, and prove far the nobler and more
majestic specimen of a tree at the end of them. Still, however one's
Yankee patriotism may struggle against the admission, it must be owned
that the trees and other objects of an English landscape take hold of
the observer by numberless minute tendrils, as it were, which, look as
closely as we choose, we never find in an American scene. The parasitic
growth is so luxuriant, that the trunk of the tree, so gray and dry in
our climate, is better worth observing than the boughs and foliage; a
verdant mossiness coats it all over, so that it looks almost as green as
the leaves; and often, moreover, the stately stem is clustered about,
high upward, with creeping and twining shrubs, the ivy, and sometimes
the mistletoe, close-clinging friends, nurtured by the moisture and
never too fervid sunshine, and supporting themselves by the old tree's
abundant strength. We call it a parasitical vegetation; but, if the
phrase imply any reproach, it is unkind to bestow it on this beautiful
affection and relationship which exist in England between one order of
plants and another: the strong tree being always ready to give support
to the trailing shrub, lift it to the sun, and feed it out of its own
heart, if it crave such food; and the shrub, on its part, repaying its
foster-father with an ample luxuriance of beauty, and adding Corinthian
grace to the tree's lofty strength. No bitter winter nips these tender
little sympathies, no hot sun burns the life out of them; and therefore
they outlast the longevity of the oak, and, if the woodman permitted,
would bury it in a green grave, when all is over.
Should there be nothing else along the road to look at, an English hedge
might well suffice to occupy the eyes, and, to a depth beyond what he
would suppose, the heart of an American. We often set out hedges in our
own soil, but might as well set out figs or pineapples and expect to
gather fruit of them. Something grows, to be sure, which we choose to
call a hedge; but it lacks the dense, luxuriant variety of vegetation
that is accumulated into the English original, in which a botanist would
find a thousand shrubs and gracious herbs that the hedge-maker never
thought of planting there. Among them, growing wild, are many of the
kindred blossoms of the very flowers which our pilgrim fathers brought
from England, for the sake of their simple beauty and home-like
associations, and which we have ever since been cultivating in gardens.
There is not a softer trait to be found in the character of those stern
men than that they should have been sensible of these flower-roots
clinging among the fibres of their rugged hearts, and have felt the
necessity of bringing them over sea and making them hereditary in the
new land, instead of trusting to what rarer beauty the wilderness might
have in store for them.
Or, if the road-side has no hedge, the ugliest stone fence (such as, in
America, would keep itself bare and unsympathizing till the end of time)
is sure to be covered with the small handiwork of Nature; that careful
mother lets nothing go naked there, and, if she cannot provide clothing,
gives at least embroidery. No sooner is the fence built than she adopts
and adorns it as a part of her original plan, treating the hard,
uncomely construction as if it had all along been a favorite idea of her
own. A little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the side of the low
wall and clinging fast with its many feet to the rough surface; a tuft
of grass roots itself between two of the stones, where a pinch or two of
way-side dust has been moistened into nutritious soil for it; a small
bunch of fern grows in another crevice; a deep, soft, verdant moss
spreads itself along the top and over all the available inequalities of
the fence; and where nothing else will grow, lichens stick tenaciously
to the bare stones and variegate the monotonous gray with hues of yellow
and red. Finally, a great deal of shrubbery clusters along the base of
the stone wall, and takes away the hardness of its outline; and in due
time, as the upshot of these apparently aimless or sportive touches, we
recognize that the beneficent Creator of all things, working through His
handmaiden whom we call Nature, has deigned to mingle a charm of divine
gracefulness even with so earthly an institution as a boundary-fence.
The clown who wrought at it little dreamed what fellow-laborer he had.
The English should send us photographs of portions of the trunks of
trees, the tangled and various products of a hedge, and a square foot of
an old wall.
They can hardly send anything else so characteristic. Their artists,
especially of the later school, sometimes toil to depict such subjects,
but are apt to stiffen the lithe tendrils in the process. The poets
succeed better, with Tennyson at their head, and often produce ravishing
effects by dint of a tender minuteness of touch, to which the genius of
the soil and climate artfully impels them: for, as regards grandeur,
there are loftier scenes in many countries than the best that England
can show; but, for the picturesqueness of the smallest object that
lies under its gentle gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery like it
anywhere.
In the foregoing paragraphs I have strayed away to a long distance from
the road to Stratford-on-Avon; for I remember no such stone fences as I
have been speaking of in Warwickshire, nor elsewhere in England, except
among the Lakes, or in Yorkshire, and the rough and hilly countries to
the north of it. Hedges there were along my road, however, and broad,
level fields, rustic hamlets, and cottages of ancient date,--from the
roof of one of which the occupant was tearing away the thatch, and
showing what an accumulation of dust, dirt, mouldiness, roots of weeds,
families of mice, swallows' nests, and hordes of insects, had been
deposited there since that old straw was new. Estimating its antiquity
from these tokens, Shakspeare himself, in one of his morning rambles out
of his native town, might have seen the thatch laid on; at all events,
the cottage-walls were old enough to have known him as a guest. A few
modern villas were also to be seen, and perhaps there were mansions of
old gentility at no great distance, but hidden among trees; for it is a
point of English pride that such houses seldom allow themselves to be
visible from the high-road. In short, I recollect nothing specially
remarkable along the way, nor in the immediate approach to Stratford;
and yet the picture of that June morning has a glory in my memory, owing
chiefly, I believe, to the charm of the English summer-weather, the
really good days of which are the most delightful that mortal man can
ever hope to be favored with. Such a genial warmth! A little too warm,
it might be, yet only to such a degree as to assure an American (a
certainty to which he seldom attains till attempered to the customary
austerity of an English summer-day) that he was quite warm enough. And
after all, there was an unconquerable freshness in the atmosphere, which
every little movement of a breeze shook over me like a dash of the
ocean-spray. Such days need bring us no other happiness than their
own light and temperature. No doubt, I could not have enjoyed it so
exquisitely, except that there must be still latent in us Western
wanderers (even after an absence of two centuries and more) an
adaptation to the English climate which makes us sensible of a motherly
kindness in its scantiest sunshine, and overflows us with delight at its
more lavish smiles.
The spire of Shakspeare's church--the Church of the Holy Trinity--begins
to show itself among the trees at a little distance from Stratford. Next
we see the shabby old dwellings, intermixed with mean-looking houses
of modern date, and the streets being quite level, you are struck and
surprised by nothing so much as the tameness of the general scene; as
if Shakspeare's genius were vivid enough to have wrought pictorial
splendors in the town where he was born. Here and there, however, a
queer edifice meets your eye, endowed with the individuality that
belongs only to the domestic architecture of times gone by; the house
seems to have grown out of some odd quality in its inhabitant, as a
sea-shell is moulded from within by the character of its inmate; and
having been built in a strange fashion, generations ago, it has ever
since been growing stranger and quainter, as old humorists are apt to
do. Here, too, (as so often impressed me in decayed English towns,)
there appeared to be a greater abundance of aged people wearing
small-clothes and leaning on sticks than you could assemble on our side
of the water by sounding a trumpet and proclaiming a reward for the most
venerable. I tried to account for this phenomenon by several theories:
as, for example, that our new towns are unwholesome for age and kill it
off unseasonably; or that our old men have a subtile sense of fitness,
and die of their own accord rather than live in an unseemly contrast
with youth and novelty: but the secret may be, after all, that
hair-dyes, false teeth, modern arts of dress, and other contrivances of
a skin-deep youthfulness, have not crept into these antiquated English
towns, and so people grow old without the weary necessity of seeming
younger than they are.
After wandering through two or three streets, I found my way to
Shakspeare's birthplace, which is almost a smaller and humbler house
than any description can prepare the visitor to expect; so inevitably
does an august inhabitant make his abode palatial to our imaginations,
receiving his guests, indeed, in a castle in the air, until we unwisely
insist on meeting him among the sordid lanes and alleys of lower earth.
The portion of the edifice with which Shakspeare had anything to do is
hardly large enough, in the basement, to contain the butcher's stall
that one of his descendants kept, and that still remains there,
windowless, with the cleaver-cuts in its hacked counter, which projects
into the street under a little penthouse-roof, as if waiting for a new
occupant. The upper half of the door was open, and, on my rapping at it,
a young person in black made her appearance and admitted me: she was not
a menial, but remarkably genteel (an American characteristic) for an
English girl, and was probably the daughter of the old gentlewoman who
takes care of the house. This lower room has a pavement of gray slabs of
stone, which may have been rudely squared when the house was new, but
are now all cracked, broken, and disarranged in a most unaccountable
way. One does not see how any ordinary usage, for whatever length
of time, should have so smashed these heavy stones; it is as if an
earthquake had burst up through the floor, which afterwards had been
imperfectly trodden down again. The room is whitewashed and very clean,
but wofully shabby and dingy, coarsely built, and such as the most
poetical imagination would find it difficult to idealize. In the rear of
this apartment is the kitchen, a still smaller room, of a similar rude
aspect; it has a great, rough fireplace, with space for a large family
under the blackened opening of the chimney, and an immense passage-way
for the smoke, through which Shakspeare may have seen the blue sky by
day and the stars glimmering down at him by night. It is now a dreary
spot where the long-extinguished embers used to be. A glowing fire, even
if it covered only a quarter part of the hearth, might still do much
towards making the old kitchen cheerful; but we get a depressing idea
of the stifled, poor, sombre kind of life that could have been lived in
such a dwelling, where this room seems to have been the gathering-place
of the family, with no breadth or scope, no good retirement, but old
and young huddling together cheek by jowl. What a hardy plant was
Shakspeare's genius, how fatal its development, since it could not be
blighted in such an atmosphere! It only brought human nature the closer
to him, and put more unctuous earth about his roots.
Thence I was ushered up-stairs to the room in which Shakspeare is
supposed to have been born; though, if you peep too curiously into the
matter, you may find the shadow of an ugly doubt on this, as well as
most other points of his mysterious life. It is the chamber over the
butcher's shop, and is lighted by one broad window containing a great
many small, irregular panes of glass. The floor is made of planks, very
rudely hewn, and fitting together with little neatness; the naked beams
and rafters, at the sides of the room and overhead, bear the original
marks of the builder's broad-axe, with no evidence of an attempt
to smooth off the job. Again we have to reconcile ourselves to the
smallness of the space inclosed by these illustrious walls,--a
circumstance more difficult to accept, as regards places that we
have heard, read, thought, and dreamed much about, than any other
disenchanting particular of a mistaken ideal. A few paces--perhaps seven
or eight--take us from end to end of it. So low it is, that I
could easily touch the ceiling, and might have done so without a
tiptoe-stretch, had it been a good deal higher; and this humility of
the chamber has tempted a vast multitude of people to write their
names overhead in pencil. Every inch of the side-walls, even into the
obscurest nooks and corners, is covered with a similar record; all the
window-panes, moreover, are scrawled with diamond-signatures, among
which is said to be that of Walter Scott; but so many persons have
sought to immortalize themselves in close vicinity to his name that I
really could not trace him out. Methinks it is strange that people
do not strive to forget their forlorn little identities, in such
situations, instead of thrusting them forward into the dazzle of a great
renown, where, if noticed, they cannot but be deemed impertinent.
This room, and the entire house, so far as I saw it, are whitewashed and
exceedingly clean; nor is there the aged, musty smell with which old
Chester first made me acquainted, and which goes far to cure an American
of his excessive predilection for antique residences. An old lady,
who took charge of me up-stairs, had the manners and aspect of a
gentlewoman, and talked with somewhat formidable knowledge and
appreciative intelligence about Shakspeare. Arranged on a table and in
chairs were various prints, views of houses and scenes connected with
Shakspeare's memory, together with editions of his works and local
publications about his home and haunts, from the sale of which this
respectable lady perhaps realizes a handsome profit. At any rate, I
bought a good many of them, conceiving that it might be the civillest
way of requiting her for her instructive conversation and the trouble
she took in showing me the house. It cost me a pang (not a curmudgeonly,
but a gentlemanly one) to offer a downright fee to the lady-like girl
who had admitted me; but I swallowed my delicate scruples with some
little difficulty, and she digested hers, so far as I could observe,
with no difficulty at all. In fact, nobody need fear to hold out half
a crown to any person with whom he has occasion to speak a word in
England.
I should consider it unfair to quit Shakspeare's house without the frank
acknowledgment that I was conscious of not the slightest emotion while
viewing it, nor any quickening of the imagination. This has often
happened to me in my visits to memorable places. Whatever pretty and
apposite reflections I may have made upon the subject had either
occurred to me before I ever saw Stratford, or have been elaborated
since. It is pleasant, nevertheless, to think that I have seen the
place; and I believe that I can form a more sensible and vivid idea of
Shakspeare as a flesh-and-blood individual now that I have stood on the
kitchen-hearth and in the birth-chamber; but I am not quite certain that
this power of realization is altogether desirable in reference to a
great poet. The Shakspeare whom I met there took various guises, but had
not his laurel on. He was successively the roguish boy,--the youthful
deer-stealer,--the comrade of players,--the too familiar friend of
Davenant's mother,--the careful, thrifty, thriven man of property, who
came back from London to lend money on bond, and occupy the best house
in Stratford,--the mellow, red-nosed, autumnal boon-companion of John a'
Combe, who (or else the Stratford gossips belied him) met his death by
tumbling into a ditch on his way home from a drinking-bout, and left his
second-best bed to his poor wife. I feel, as sensibly as the reader can,
what horrible impiety it is to remember these things, be they true or
false. In either case, they ought to vanish out of sight on the distant
ocean-line of the past, leaving a pure, white memory, even as a sail,
though perhaps darkened with many stains, looks snowy white on the far
horizon. But I draw a moral from these unworthy reminiscences and this
embodiment of the poet, as suggested by some of the grimy actualities of
his life. It is for the high interests of the world not to insist upon
finding out that its greatest men are, in a certain lower sense, very
much the same kind of men as the rest of us, and often a little worse;
because a common mind cannot properly digest such a discovery, nor ever
know the true proportion of the great man's good and evil, nor how small
a part of him it was that touched our muddy or dusty earth. Thence comes
moral bewilderment, and even intellectual loss, in regard to what is
best of him. When Shakspeare invoked a curse on the man who should stir
his bones, he perhaps meant the larger share of it for him or them who
should pry into his perishing earthliness, the defects or even the
merits of the character that he wore in Stratford, when he had left
mankind so much to muse upon that was imperishable and divine. Heaven
keep me from incurring any part of the anathema in requital for the
irreverent sentences above written!
From Shakspeare's house, the nest step, of course, is to visit his
burial-place. The appearance of the church is most venerable and
beautiful, standing amid a great green shadow of lime-trees, above which
rises the spire, while the Gothic battlements and buttresses and vast
arched windows are obscurely seen through the boughs. The Avon loiters
past the church-yard, an exceedingly sluggish river, which might seem
to have been considering which way it should flow ever since Shakspeare
left off paddling in it and gathering the large forget-me-nots that grow
among its flags and water-weeds.
An old man in small-clothes was waiting at the gate; and inquiring
whether I wished to go in, he preceded me to the church-porch, and
rapped. I could have done it quite as effectually for myself; but, it
seems, the old people of the neighborhood haunt about the church-yard,
in spite of the frowns and remonstrances of the sexton, who grudges them
the half-eleemosynary sixpence which they sometimes get from visitors.
I was admitted into the church by a respectable-looking and intelligent
man in black, the parish-clerk, I suppose, and probably holding a richer
incumbency than his vicar, if all the fees which he handles remain in
his own pocket. He was already exhibiting the Shakspeare monuments to
two or three visitors, and several other parties came in while I was
there.
The poet and his family are in possession of what may be considered the
very best burial-places that the church affords. They lie in a row,
right across the breadth of the chancel, the foot of each gravestone
being close to the elevated floor on which the altar stands. Nearest
to the side-wall, beneath Shakspeare's bust, is a slab bearing a Latin
inscription addressed to his wife, and covering her remains; then his
own slab, with the old anathematizing stanza upon it; then that of
Thomas Nash, who married his grand-daughter; then that of Dr. Hall,
the husband of his daughter Susannah; and, lastly, Susannah's own.
Shakspeare's is the commonest-looking slab of all, being just such a
flag-stone as Essex Street in Salem used to be paved with, when I was
a boy. Moreover, unless my eyes or recollection deceive me, there is a
crack across it, as if it had already undergone some such violence as
the inscription deprecates. Unlike the other monuments of the family,
it bears no name, nor am I acquainted with the grounds or authority on
which it is absolutely determined to be Shakspeare's; although, being
in a range with those of his wife and children, it might naturally be
attributed to him. But, then, why does his wife, who died afterwards,
take precedence of him and occupy the place next his bust? And where are
the graves of another daughter and a son, who have a better right in the
family-row than Thomas Nash, his grandson-in-law? Might not one or both
of them have been laid under the nameless stone? But it is dangerous
trifling with Shakspeare's dust; so I forbear to meddle further with
the grave, (though the prohibition makes it tempting,) and shall let
whatever bones be in it rest in peace. Yet I must needs add that the
inscription on the bust seems to imply that Shakspeare's grave was
directly underneath it.
The poet's bust is affixed to the northern wall of the church, the base
of it being about a man's height, or rather more, above the floor of the
chancel. The features of this piece of sculpture are entirely unlike any
portrait of Shakspeare that I have ever seen, and compel me to take down
the beautiful, lofty-browed, and noble picture of him which has hitherto
hung in my mental portrait-gallery. The bust cannot be said to represent
a beautiful face or an eminently noble head; but it clutches firmly hold
of one's sense of reality and insists upon your accepting it, if not as
Shakspeare the poet, yet as the wealthy burgher of Stratford, the friend
of John a' Combe, who lies yonder in the corner. I know not what the
phrenologists say to the bust. The forehead is but moderately developed,
and retreats somewhat, the upper part of the skull rising pyramidally;
the eyes are prominent almost beyond the penthouse of the brow; the
upper lip is so long that it must have been almost a deformity, unless
the sculptor artistically exaggerated its length, in consideration,
that, on the pedestal, it must be foreshortened by being looked at from
below. On the whole, Shakspeare must have had a singular rather than a
prepossessing face; and it is wonderful how, with this bust before its
eyes, the world has persisted in maintaining an erroneous notion of his
appearance, allowing painters and sculptors to foist their idealized
nonsense on us all, instead of the genuine man. For my part, the
Shakspeare of my mind's eye is henceforth to be a personage of a ruddy
English complexion, with a reasonably capacious brow, intelligent and
quickly observant eyes, a nose curved slightly outward, a long, queer
upper-lip, with the mouth a little unclosed beneath it, and cheeks
considerably developed in the lower part and beneath the chin. But when
Shakspeare was himself, (for nine-tenths of the time, according to all
appearances, he was but the burgher of Stratford,) he doubtless shone
through this dull mask and transfigured it into the face of an angel.
Fifteen or twenty feet behind the row of Shakspeare gravestones is the
great east-window of the church, now brilliant with stained glass of
recent manufacture. On one side of this window, under a sculptured arch
of marble, lies a full-length marble figure of John a' Combe, clad in
what I take to be a robe of municipal dignity, and holding its hands
devoutly clasped. It is a sturdy English figure, with coarse features,
a type of ordinary man whom we smile to see immortalized in the
sculpturesque material of poets and heroes; but the prayerful attitude
encourages us to believe that the old usurer may not, after all, have
had that grim reception in the other world which Shakspeare's squib
foreboded for him. By-the-by, till I grew somewhat familiar with
Warwickshire pronunciation, I never understood that the point of those
ill-natured lines was a pun. "'Oho!' quoth the Devil, ''tis my John a'
Combe!'"--that is, "my John has come!"
Close to the poet's bust is a nameless, oblong, cubic tomb, supposed to
be that of a clerical dignitary of the fourteenth century. The church
has other mural monuments and altar-tombs, one or two of the latter
upholding the recumbent figures of knights in armor and their dames,
very eminent and worshipful personages in their day, no doubt, but
doomed to appear forever intrusive and impertinent within the precincts
which Shakspeare has made his own. His renown is tyrannous, and suffers
nothing else to be recognized within the scope of its material presence,
unless illuminated by some side-ray from himself. The clerk informed me
that interments no longer take place in any part of the church. And it
is better so; for methinks a person of delicate individuality, curious
about his burial-place, and desirous of six feet of earth for himself
alone, could never endure to lie buried near Shakspeare, but would rise
up at midnight and grope his way out of the church-door, rather than
sleep in the shadow of so stupendous a memory.
I should hardly have dared to add another to the innumerable
descriptions of Stratford-on-Avon, if it had not seemed to me that
this would form a fitting framework to some reminiscences of a very
remarkable woman. Her labor, while she lived, was of a nature and
purpose outwardly irreverent to the name of Shakspeare, yet, by its
actual tendency, entitling her to the distinction of being that one of
all his worshippers who sought, though she knew it not, to place the
richest and stateliest diadem upon his brow. We Americans, at least, in
the scanty annals of our literature, cannot afford to forget her high
and conscientious exercise of noble faculties, which, indeed, if you
look at the matter in one way, evolved only a miserable error, but, more
fairly considered, produced a result worth almost what it cost her. Her
faith in her own ideas was so genuine, that, erroneous as they were,
it transmuted them to gold, or, at all events, interfused a large
proportion of that precious and indestructible substance among the waste
material from which it can readily be sifted.
The only time I ever saw Miss Bacon was in London, where she had
lodgings in Spring Street, Sussex Gardens, at the house of a grocer, a
portly, middle-aged, civil, and friendly man, who, as well as his wife,
appeared to feel a personal kindness towards their lodger. I was ushered
up two (and I rather believe three) pair of stairs into a parlor
somewhat humbly furnished, and told that Miss Bacon would come soon.
There were a number of books on the table, and, looking into them, I
found that every one had some reference, more or less immediate, to her
Shakspearian theory,--a volume of Raleigh's "History of the World,"
a volume of Montaigne, a volume of Lord Bacon's letters, a volume of
Shakspeare's plays; and on another table lay a large roll of manuscript,
which I presume to have been a portion of her work. To be sure, there
was a pocket-Bible among the books, but everything else referred to the
one despotic idea that had got possession of her mind; and as it had
engrossed her whole soul as well as her intellect, I have no doubt
that she had established subtile connections between it and the Bible
likewise. As is apt to be the case with solitary students, Miss Bacon
probably read late and rose late; for I took up Montaigne (it was
Hazlitt's translation) and had been reading his journey to Italy a good
while before she appeared.
I had expected (the more shame for me, having no other ground of such
expectation than that she was a literary woman) to see a very homely,
uncouth, elderly personage, and was quite agreeably disappointed by
her aspect. She was rather uncommonly tall, and had a striking and
expressive face, dark hair, dark eyes, which shone with an inward light
as soon as she began to speak, and by-and-by a color came into her
cheeks and made her look almost young. Not that she really was so; she
must have been beyond middle-age: and there was no unkindness in coming
to that conclusion, because, making allowance for years and ill-health,
I could suppose her to have been handsome and exceedingly attractive
once. Though wholly estranged from society, there was little or no
restraint or embarrassment in her manner: lonely people are generally
glad to give utterance to their pent-up ideas, and often bubble over
with them as freely as children with their new-found syllables. I cannot
tell how it came about, but we immediately found ourselves taking a
friendly and familiar tone together, and began to talk as if we had
known one another a very long while. A little preliminary correspondence
had indeed smoothed the way, and we had a definite topic in the
contemplated publication of her book.
She was very communicative about her theory, and would have been much
more so, had I desired it; but, being conscious within myself of a
sturdy unbelief, I deemed it fair and honest rather to repress than draw
her out upon the subject. Unquestionably, she was a monomaniac; these
overmastering ideas about the authorship of Shakspeare's plays, and the
deep political philosophy concealed beneath the surface of them, had
completely thrown her off her balance; but at the same time they had
wonderfully developed her intellect, and made her what she could not
otherwise have become. It was a very singular phenomenon: a system
of philosophy growing up in this woman's mind without her
volition,--contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her
volition,--and substituting itself in the place of everything that
originally grew there. To have based such a system on fancy, and
unconsciously elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as
really to have found it in the plays. But, in a certain sense, she did
actually find it there. Shakspeare has surface beneath surface, to an
immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his
works present many faces of truth, each with scope enough to fill a
contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely
discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various
interpretation of his symbols; and a thousand years hence, a world of
new readers will possess a whole library of new books, as we ourselves
do, in these volumes old already. I had half a mind to suggest to Miss
Bacon this explanation of her theory, but forbore, because (as I could
readily perceive) she had as princely a spirit as Queen Elizabeth
herself, and would at once have motioned me from the room.
I had heard, long ago, that she believed that the material evidences
of her dogma as to the authorship, together with the key of the new
philosophy, would be found buried in Shakspeare's grave. Recently, as
I understood her, this notion had been somewhat modified, and was now
accurately defined and fully developed in her mind, with a result of
perfect certainty. In Lord Bacon's letters, on which she laid her finger
as she spoke, she had discovered the key and clue to the whole mystery.
There were definite and minute instructions how to find a will and other
documents relating to the conclave of Elizabethan philosophers, which
were concealed (when and by whom she did not inform me) in a hollow
space in the under surface of Shakspeare's gravestone. Thus the terrible
prohibition to remove the stone was accounted for. The directions, she
intimated, went completely and precisely to the point, obviating all
difficulties in the way of coming at the treasure, and even, if I
remember right, were so contrived as to ward off any troublesome
consequences likely to ensue from the interference of the
parish-officers. All that Miss Bacon now remained in England
for--indeed, the object for which she had come hither, and which had
kept her here for three years past--was to obtain possession of these
material and unquestionable proofs of the authenticity of her theory.
She communicated all this strange matter in a low, quiet tone; while, on
my part, I listened as quietly, and without any expression of dissent.
Controversy against a faith so settled would have shut her up at
once, and that, too, without in the least weakening her belief in the
existence of those treasures of the tomb; and had it been possible to
convince her of their intangible nature, I apprehend that there would
have been nothing left for the poor enthusiast save to collapse and die.
She frankly confessed that she could no longer bear the society of those
who did not at least lend a certain sympathy to her views, if not fully
share in them; and meeting little sympathy or none, she had now entirely
secluded herself from the world. In all these years, she had seen Mrs.
F. a few times, but had long ago given her up,--Carlyle once or twice,
but not of late, although he had received her kindly; Mr. Buchanan,
while minister in England, had once called on her, and General Campbell,
our consul in London, had met her two or three times on business.
With these exceptions, which she marked so scrupulously that it was
perceptible what epochs they were in the monotonous passage of her days,
she had lived in the profoundest solitude. She never walked out;
she suffered much from ill-health; and yet, she assured me, she was
perfectly happy.
I could well conceive it; for Miss Bacon imagined herself to have
received (what is certainly the greatest boon ever assigned to
mortals) a high mission in the world, with adequate powers for its
accomplishment; and lest even these should prove insufficient, she had
faith that special interpositions of Providence were forwarding her
human efforts. This idea was continually coming to the surface,
during our interview. She believed, for example, that she had been
providentially led to her lodging-house and put in relations with the
good-natured grocer and his family; and, to say the truth, considering
what a savage and stealthy tribe the London lodging-house keepers
actually are, the honest kindness of this man and his household appeared
to have been little less than miraculous. Evidently, too, she thought
that Providence had brought me forward----a man somewhat connected with
literature--at the critical juncture when she needed a negotiator with
the booksellers; and, on my part, though little accustomed to regard
myself as a divine minister, and though I might even have preferred that
Providence should select some other instrument, I had no scruple in
undertaking to do what I could for her. Her book, as I could see by
turning it over, was a very remarkable one, and worthy of being offered
to the public, which, if wise enough to appreciate it, would be thankful
for what was good in it and merciful to its faults. It was founded on a
prodigious error, but was built up from that foundation with a good many
prodigious truths. And, at all events, whether I could aid her literary
views or no, it would have been both rash and impertinent in me to
attempt drawing poor Miss Bacon out of her delusions, which were the
condition on which she lived in comfort and joy, and in the exercise of
great intellectual power. So I left her to dream as she pleased about
the treasures of Shakspeare's tombstone, and to form whatever designs
might seem good to herself for obtaining possession of them. I was
sensible of a lady-like feeling of propriety in Miss Bacon, and
a New-England orderliness in her character, and, in spite of her
bewilderment, a sturdy common-sense, which I trusted would begin to
operate at the right time, and keep her from any actual extravagance.
And as regarded this matter of the tombstone, so it proved.
The interview lasted above an hour, during which she flowed out freely,
as to the sole auditor, capable of any degree of intelligent sympathy,
whom she had met with in a very long while. Her conversation was
remarkably suggestive, alluring forth one's own ideas and fantasies from
the shy places where they usually haunt. She was indeed an admirable
talker, considering how long she had held her tongue for lack of a
listener,--pleasant, sunny and shadowy, often piquant, and giving
glimpses of all a woman's various and readily changeable moods and
humors; and beneath them all there ran a deep and powerful under-current
of earnestness, which did not fail to produce in the listener's mind
something like a temporary faith in what she herself believed so
fervently. But the streets of London are not favorable to enthusiasms
of this kind, nor, in fact, are they likely to flourish anywhere in the
English atmosphere; so that, long before reaching Paternoster Row, I
felt that it would be a difficult and doubtful matter to advocate the
publication of Miss Bacon's book. Nevertheless, it did finally get
published.
Months before that happened, however, Miss Bacon had taken up her
residence at Stratford-on-Avon, drawn thither by the magnetism of those
rich secrets which she supposed to have been hidden by Raleigh, or
Bacon, or I know not whom, in Shakspeare's grave, and protected there
by a curse, as pirates used to bury their gold in the guardianship of a
fiend. She took a humble lodging and began to haunt the church like a
ghost. But she did not condescend to any stratagem or underhand attempt
to violate the grave, which, had she been capable of admitting such
an idea, might possibly have been accomplished by the aid of a
resurrection-man. As her first step, she made acquaintance with the
clerk, and began to sound him as to the feasibility of her enterprise
and his own willingness to engage in it. The clerk apparently listened
with not unfavorable ears; but, as his situation (which the fees of
pilgrims, more numerous than at any Catholic shrine, render lucrative)
would have been forfeited by any malfeasance in office, he stipulated
for liberty to consult the vicar. Miss Bacon requested to tell her own
story to the reverend gentleman, and seems to have been received by him
with the utmost kindness, and even to have succeeded in making a certain
impression on his mind as to the desirability of the search. As their
interview had been under the seal of secrecy, he asked permission to
consult a friend, who, as Miss Bacon either found out or surmised, was
a practitioner of the law. What the legal friend advised she did not
learn; but the negotiation continued, and certainly was never broken
off by an absolute refusal on the vicar's part. He, perhaps, was kindly
temporizing with our poor countrywoman, whom an Englishman of ordinary
mould would have sent to a lunatic-asylum at once. I cannot help
fancying, however, that her familiarity with the events of Shakspeare's
life, and of his death and burial, (of which she would speak as if
she had been present at the edge of the grave,) and all the history,
literature, and personalities of the Elizabethan age, together with the
prevailing power of her own belief, and the eloquence with which she
knew how to enforce it, had really gone some little way towards making
a convert of the good clergyman. If so, I honor him above all the
hierarchy of England.
The affair certainly looked very hopeful. However erroneously, Miss
Bacon had understood from the vicar that no obstacles would be
interposed to the investigation, and that he himself would sanction
it with his presence. It was to take place after nightfall; and all
preliminary arrangements being made, the vicar and clerk professed to
wait only her word in order to set about lifting the awful stone
from the sepulchre. So, at least, Miss Bacon believed; and as her
bewilderment was entirely in her own thoughts, and never disturbed her
perception or accurate remembrance of external things, I see no reason
to doubt it, except it be the tinge of absurdity in the fact. But, in
this apparently prosperous state of things, her own convictions began to
falter. A doubt stole into her mind whether she might not have mistaken
the depository and mode of concealment of those historic treasures; and
after once admitting the doubt, she was afraid to hazard the shock of
uplifting the stone and finding nothing. She examined the surface of the
gravestone, and endeavored, without stirring it, to estimate whether it
were of such thickness as to be capable of containing the archives of
the Elizabethan club. She went over anew the proofs, the clues, the
enigmas, the pregnant sentences, which she had discovered in Bacon's
letters and elsewhere, and now was frightened to perceive that they
did not point so definitely to Shakspeare's tomb as she had heretofore
supposed. There was an unmistakably distinct reference to a tomb, but it
might be Bacon's, or Raleigh's, or Spenser's; and instead of the "Old
Player," as she profanely called him, it might be either of those
three illustrious dead, poet, warrior, or statesman, whose ashes, in
Westminster Abbey, or the Tower burial-ground, or wherever they sleep,
it was her mission to disturb.
But she continued to hover around the church, and seems to have had full
freedom of entrance in the daytime, and special license, on one
occasion at least, at a late hour of the night. She went thither with
a dark-lantern, which could but twinkle like a glow-worm through the
volume of obscurity that filled the great dusky edifice. Groping her way
up the aisle and towards the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part
of the pavement above Shakspeare's grave. If the divine poet really
wrote the inscription there, and cared as much about the quiet of his
bones as its deprecatory earnestness would imply, it was time for those
crumbling relics to bestir themselves under her sacrilegious feet. But
they were safe. She made no attempt to disturb them; though, I believe,
she looked narrowly into the crevices between Shakspeare's and the two
adjacent stones, and in some way satisfied herself that her single
strength would suffice to lift the former, in case of need. She threw
the feeble ray of her lantern up towards the bust, but could not make it
visible beneath the darkness of the vaulted roof. Had she been subject
to superstitious terrors, it is impossible to conceive of a situation
that could better entitle her to feel them, for, if Shakspeare's ghost
would rise at any provocation, it must have shown itself then; but it is
my sincere belief, that, if his figure had appeared within the scope of
her dark-lantern, in his slashed doublet and gown, and with his eyes
bent on her beneath the high, bald forehead, just as we see him in the
bust, she would have met him fearlessly, and controverted his claims to
the authorship of the plays, to his very face. She had taught herself to
contemn "Lord Leicester's groom" (it was one of her disdainful epithets
for the world's incomparable poet) so thoroughly, that even his
disembodied spirit would hardly have found civil treatment at Miss
Bacon's hands.
Her vigil, though it appears to have had no definite object, continued
far into the night. Several times she heard a low movement in the
aisles: a stealthy, dubious foot-fall prowling about in the darkness,
now here, now there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if some
restless inhabitant of the latter had crept forth to peep at the
intruder. By-and-by the clerk made his appearance, and confessed that he
had been watching her ever since she entered the church.
About this time it was that a strange sort of weariness seems to have
fallen upon her: her toil was all but done, her great purpose, as she
believed, on the very point of accomplishment, when she began to regret
that so stupendous a mission had been imposed on the fragility of a
woman. Her faith in the new philosophy was as mighty as ever, and so was
her confidence in her own adequate development of it, now about to be
given to the world; yet she wished, or fancied so, that it might never
have been her duty to achieve this unparalleled task, and to stagger
feebly forward under her immense burden of responsibility and renown. So
far as her personal concern in the matter went, she would gladly have
forfeited the reward of her patient study and labor for so many years,
her exile from her country and estrangement from her family and friends,
her sacrifice of health and all other interests to this one pursuit, if
she could only find herself free to dwell in Stratford and be forgotten.
She liked the old slumberous town, and awarded the only praise that ever
I knew her to bestow on Shakspeare, the individual man, by acknowledging
that his taste in a residence was good, and that he knew how to choose a
suitable retirement for a person of shy, but genial temperament. And at
this point, I cease to possess the means of tracing her vicissitudes of
feeling any farther. In consequence of some advice which I fancied it
my duty to tender, as being the only confidant whom she now had in the
world, I fell under Miss Bacon's most severe and passionate displeasure,
and was cast off by her in the twinkling of an eye. It was a misfortune
to which her friends were always particularly liable; but I think that
none of them ever loved, or even respected, her most ingenuous and
noble, but likewise most sensitive and tumultuous character, the less
for it.
At that time her book was passing through the press. Without prejudice
to her literary ability, it must be allowed that Miss Bacon was wholly
unfit to prepare her own work for publication, because, among many other
reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest to know what to leave out.
Every leaf and line was sacred, for all had been written under so deep
a conviction of truth as to assume, in her eyes, the aspect of
inspiration. A practised book-maker, with entire control of her
materials, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume full of eloquent
and ingenious dissertation,--criticisms which quite take the
color and pungency out of other people's critical remarks on
Shakspeare,--philosophic truths which she imagined herself to have
found at the roots of his conceptions, and which certainly come from no
inconsiderable depth somewhere. There was a great amount of rubbish,
which any competent editor would have shovelled out of the way. But Miss
Bacon thrust the whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press
in a lump, and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which fell
with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been picked
up. A few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, as it lay there,
and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the mud; for they were the
hack critics of the minor periodical press in London, than whom, I
suppose, though excellent fellows in their way, there are no gentlemen
in the world less sensible of any sanctity in a book, or less likely
to recognize an author's heart in it, or more utterly careless about
bruising, if they do recognize it. It is their trade. They could not
do otherwise. I never thought of blaming them. From the scholars and
critics of her own country, indeed, Miss Bacon might have looked for
a worthier appreciation, because many of the best of them have higher
cultivation and finer and deeper literary sensibilities than all but
the very profoundest and brightest of Englishmen. But they are not a
courageous body of men; they dare not think a truth that has an odor of
absurdity, lest they should feel themselves bound to speak it out. If
any American ever wrote a word in her behalf, Miss Bacon never knew it,
nor did I. Our journalists at once republished some of the most brutal
vituperations of the English press, thus pelting their poor countrywoman
with stolen mud, without even waiting to know whether the ignominy was
deserved. And they never have known it, to this day, nor ever will.
The next intelligence that I had of Miss Bacon was by a letter from the
mayor of Stratford-on-Avon. He was a medical man, and wrote both in his
official and professional character, telling me that an American lady,
who had recently published what the mayor called a "Shakspeare book,"
was afflicted with insanity. In a lucid interval she had referred to me,
as a person who had some knowledge of her family and affairs. What she
may have suffered before her intellect gave way, we had better not try
to imagine. No author had ever hoped so confidently as she; none ever
failed more utterly. A superstitious fancy might suggest that the
anathema on Shakspeare's tombstone had fallen heavily on her head in
requital of even the unaccomplished purpose of disturbing the dust
beneath, and that the "Old Player" had kept so quietly in his grave,
on the night of her vigil, because he foresaw how soon and terribly he
would be avenged. But if that benign spirit takes any care or cognizance
of such things now, he has surely requited the injustice that she sought
to do him--the high justice that she really did--by a tenderness of love
and pity of which only he could be capable. What matters it, though she
called him by some other name? He had wrought a greater miracle on her
than on all the world besides. This bewildered enthusiast had recognized
a depth in the man whom she decried, which scholars, critics, and
learned societies, devoted to the elucidation of his unrivalled scenes,
had never imagined to exist there. She had paid him the loftiest honor
that all these ages of renown have been able to accumulate upon his
memory. And when, not many months after the outward failure of her
life-long object, she passed into the better world, I know not why we
should hesitate to believe that the immortal poet may have met her
on the threshold and led her in, reassuring her with friendly and
comfortable words, and thanking her (yet with a smile of gentle humor
in his eyes at the thought of certain mistaken speculations) for having
interpreted him to mankind so well.
I believe that it has been the fate of this remarkable book never to
have had more than a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it only
in insulated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. But, since my
return to America, a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured
me that he has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is
completely a convert to its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, and
not to me,--whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her,
she declared unworthy to meddle with her work,--it belongs surely to
this one individual, who has done her so much justice as to know what
she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in her due position before the public and
posterity.
This has been too sad a story. To lighten the recollection of it, I will
think of my stroll homeward past Charlecote Park, where I beheld the
most stately elms, singly, in clumps, and in groves, scattered all about
in the sunniest, shadiest, sleepiest fashion; so that I could not but
believe in a lengthened, loitering, drowsy enjoyment which these trees
must have in their existence. Diffused over slow-paced centuries,
it need not be keen nor bubble into thrills and ecstasies, like the
momentary delights of short-lived human beings. They were civilized
trees, known to man and befriended by him for ages past. There is an
indescribable difference--as I believe I have heretofore endeavored to
express--between the tamed, but by no means effete (on the contrary,
the richer and more luxuriant) Nature of England, and the rude, shaggy,
barbarous Nature which offers us its racier companionship in America. No
less a change has been wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit
what the English call their forests. By-and-by, among those refined and
venerable trees, I saw a large herd of deer, mostly reclining, but
some standing in picturesque groups, while the stags threw their large
antlers aloft, as if they had been taught to make themselves tributary
to the scenic effect. Some were running fleetly about, vanishing from
light into shadow and glancing forth again, with here and there a little
fawn careering at its mother's heels. These deer are almost in the same
relation to the wild, natural state of their kind that the trees of an
English park hold to the rugged growth of an American forest. They have
held a certain intercourse with man for immemorial years; and, most
probably, the stag that Shakspeare killed was one of the progenitors
of this very herd, and may himself have been a partly civilized and
humanized deer, though in a less degree than these remote posterity.
They are a little wilder than sheep, but they do not snuff the air at
the approach of human beings, nor evince much alarm at their pretty
close proximity; although, if you continue to advance, they toss their
heads and take to their heels in a kind of mimic terror, or something
akin to feminine skittishness, with a dim remembrance or tradition, as
it were, of their having come of a wild stock. They have so long been
fed and protected by man, that they must have lost many of their native
instincts, and, I suppose, could not live comfortably through even an
English winter without human help. One is sensible of a gentle scorn
at them for such dependency, but feels none the less kindly disposed
towards the half-domesticated race; and it may have been his observation
of these tamer characteristics in the Charlecote herd that suggested to
Shakspeare the tender and pitiful description of a wounded stag, in "As
You Like It."
At a distance of some hundreds of yards from Charlecote Hall, and almost
hidden by the trees between it and the road-side, is an old brick
archway and porter's lodge. In connection with this entrance there
appears to have been a wall and an ancient moat, the latter of which is
still visible, a shallow, grassy scoop along the base of an embankment
of the lawn. About fifty yards within the gate-way stands the house,
forming three sides of a square, with three gables in a row on the front
and on each of the two wings; and there are several towers and turrets
at the angles, together with projecting windows, antique balconies, and
other quaint ornaments suitable to the half-Gothic taste in which
the edifice was built. Over the gate-way is the Lucy coat-of-arms,
emblazoned in its proper colors. The mansion dates from the early
days of Elizabeth, and probably looked very much the same as now when
Shakspeare was brought before Sir Thomas Lucy for outrages among his
deer. The impression is not that of gray antiquity, but of stable and
time-honored gentility, still as vital as ever.
It is a most delightful place. All about the house and domain there is a
perfection of comfort and domestic taste, an amplitude of convenience,
which could have been brought about only by the slow ingenuity and
labor of many successive generations, intent upon adding all possible
improvement to the home where years gone by and years to come give a
sort of permanence to the intangible present. An American is sometimes
tempted to fancy that only by this long process can real homes be
produced. One man's lifetime is not enough for the accomplishment of
such a work of Art and Nature, almost the greatest merely temporary one
that is confided to him; too little, at any rate,--yet perhaps too long,
when he is discouraged by the idea that he must make his house warm and
delightful for a miscellaneous race of successors, of whom the one thing
certain is, that his own grandchildren will not be among them. Such
repinings as are here suggested, however, come only from the fact, that,
bred in English habits of thought, as most of us are, we have not yet
modified our instincts to the necessities of our new forms of life. A
lodging in a wigwam or under a tent has really as many advantages, when
we come to know them, as a home beneath the roof-tree of Charlecote
Hall. But, alas! our philosophers have not yet taught us to see what is
best, nor have our poets sung us what is beautifullest, in the kind of
life that we must lead; and therefore we still read the old English
wisdom, and harp upon the ancient strings. And thence it happens, that,
when we look at a time-honored hall, it seems more possible for men who
inherit such a home, than for ourselves, to lead noble and graceful
lives, quietly doing good and lovely things as their daily work, and
achieving deeds of simple greatness when circumstances require them. I
sometimes apprehend that our institutions may perish before we shall
have discovered the most precious of the possibilities which they
involve.
* * * * *