MOTHER AND SON.
Those of our readers who have visited Stratford-upon-Avon, and looked
upon the house in Henley Street, that house which has caused so great an
interest in the world, will remember the lattice-windowed room in its
upper floor, that room in which (as their eyes have glanced around its
walls) their feelings have perhaps been excited almost unto the shedding
of tears;--that room in which some portion of the early youth of him
whose idea is enshrined in the hearts of all who speak our English
tongue, was passed.
It is mid-day, and seated in that room are a mother and an elder son.
The mother is employed in some sort of curious work, whilst her baby is
cradled, and asleep at her side. Spinning perhaps, like "the spinsters
and the knitters of the sun,"--
"Weaving her threads with bones,"
lace-making; and as she works, she chants some old ditty,--some song,
"that dallies with the innocence of love, like the old age."
"Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid:
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it--
My part of death no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower, sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strewn;
Not a friend, not a friend, greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown;
A thousand, thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O where
Sad true lover ne'er find my grave,
To weep there."[1]
[Footnote 1: "Twelfth Night."]
And whilst she sings, the youth, her son, seated upon a stool at her
feet, is deeply engaged in perusing the goodly-sized volume he holds
upon his knees.
Such is the picture. The sun streams through the diamond panes of that
ample window, and gives a glowing tint to the red curtains of the old
square-topped bedstead, and other cumbrous articles of furniture; the
high-backed chairs, and the heavy oaken table in the background. What
would the illustrious of the world,--what would the most honoured in the
world's esteem, of our own day, for arts, for arms, or for
learning,--what would they give for _one_ glance into "the dark backward
and abysm of time,"--but _one_ glance, so to see that mother and her
son;--that mother who implanted grace in her child; that child whose
high spirit had been tamed and cultivated by her influence? And what,
indeed, should we all be, saith a great writer, but for the influence of
women in our youth?
They give us life, and they also give us the life of the soul. How many
things do we learn of them as sons, lovers, or friends?
The youthful Shakespeare loved to hold sweet converse with his handsome
mother, and whom he loved so well. From her conversation, in his boyhood
he had taken his first impressions of things: from her legendary
stories, (so sweetly related,) he had gathered many facts of history. In
winter's tedious nights, how oft had she pictured to him all she had
heard from her own parents, of the York and Lancastrian wars, and the
horrors to which England had been reduced--"Discord in every state,
discord in every family!" From her's, and from his father's relations,
over the winter's fire, were gathered the boy's first impressions of
those fierce English, whose characteristics (according to their foes)
were force of pride, and obstinacy--those doggedly resolute, those
invincibly cool islanders, who, in all their splendour of their feudal
pride, had so often walked through the vasty fields of France, as if in
some harnessed masque, eating up the lands on all sides, and still
fighting onwards in their own joyless way: burning, slaying, and
destroying for so many centuries, till they made captive at Agincourt,
not only of the French king, but the very realm.
'Twas thus the boy had learnt his first lesson in the history of his
country, not either exactly as a lesson, but in the homely popular form
of a winter night's tale, as the simple story, or faith of a mother.
And what we thus inbibe with the milk we suck, and with our growing
blood, is a living thing as it were, and what the boy loved to listen to
as a simple story, the youth loved to follow out as a study. He reads of
the events his mother has told him of, and given him a taste for, in the
chronicled history of the wars of the time; whilst the little of life
and splendour he has already seen, in the brilliant era in which he
lives, has given him, even now, an impression of the pride, pomp, and
circumstance of the Norman period.
Yes, the mind of the boy had been moulded by his mother, and a great
deal of his just appreciation of women, and his delineations of the
exquisite females he has drawn, are derived from the impressions she has
given him.
As he reads from the thick volume, in which he learnt more accurately
the facts, and date, of the history of his own country, he occasionally
pauses to listen to his mother's song, to gaze up in her face, and to
question her upon some point he has arrived at, and which he remembers
to have heard her relate before.
Music and singing were much more cultivated (even amongst the humble
classes) than in our own times, in England, and where indeed they are
now scarcely cultivated at all. The sweet old songs "of the old age,"
are for the most part lost to us, they have departed with the quainter
dwellings in which they were warbled.
In those days the strains which floated through the halls of the great,
and the notes which were heard in the low-roofed apartments of the
citizen, were calculated to soothe and quiet the passions of man. In our
own times they are meant to arouse and excite--they are a whirl, a
discordant noise. The lullabys which the mother chanted as she worked,
were scraps of songs, great favourites at the time, and afterwards
adapted from the recollection of the hearer in some of his works:
"Take, oh, take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn,--
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
But my kisses bring again,--bring again,
Seals of love, but seal'd in vain,--seal'd in vain."[2]
[Footnote 2: This song, which, no doubt, was a favourite in its day, is
inserted in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Bloody Brother."]
Not only the history of his own land, and which all ranks at this period
were lamentably ignorant in, did the youthful Shakespeare receive the
rudiments of from his mother; but she loved to amuse him with those
stories of romance she had learned from her own parents, and which had
been handed down from the chivalric ages, when the female of high degree
was the teacher of youth. The great lady--"of exalted rank and
inaccessible,"--who cultivates the mind of the youthful page--a mother,
a sister, a guardian angel, and yet of such high degree, that she seems
(in the austerity of her counsels, and the difficulties to be overcome,
ere her favour can be gained) too great even to receive the adoration of
him whose service costs so many sighs. Till in the end, as the
accomplished knight is produced, the incarnation of merit and grace all
fades away before the powerful god.
The youth achieves greatness, and becomes lord of that beautiful lady,
her dark castle, and her broad domain, "with shadowy forests, and with
champions rich."