Shakespeare’s Day has been transformed into Garibaldi’s day. This is one
of the far-fetched coincidences of history, which alone is successful in
achieving such improbabilities.
The people who gathered together on Primrose Hill to plant a tree
in memory of the Shakespeare Tricentenary remained there to talk of
Garibaldi’s sudden departure. The police dispersed the crowd. Fifty
thousand men (according to the police report) obeyed the orders of thirty
policemen and, from profound respect for the law, half-destroyed the
grand right of open-air meeting, or, at any rate, helped to support the
illegal intervention of the authorities.
Truly, something like a Shakespearian fantasy had passed before our
eyes against the grey background of England with a truly Shakespearian
juxtaposition of the grand and the revolting, of the heart-rending and
the jarring: the holy simplicity of the man, the naïve simplicity of the
masses, and the secret conclaves behind the scenes, the intrigues and the
lies. Familiar shades seemed to flit before our eyes in other forms—from
Hamlet to King Lear, from Goneril and Cordelia to _honest_ Iago. The
Iagos are all in miniature, but what a number there are of them, and how
honest they are!
Prologue: Alarums and excursions. The idol of the masses, the one
grand popular figure that has appeared since 1848, enters in all the
brilliance of its glory. Everything bows down before it, everything
celebrates its triumph; this is Carlyle’s hero-worship in real life.
Cannon-shots, bells ringing, streamers on the boats, and no music only
because England’s hero has arrived on a Sunday, and Sunday here is kept
as a day of mortification.... London stands for seven hours on its feet
awaiting its guest; the triumphant ovations increase with every day;
the appearance in the street of the man in the _red shirt_ calls forth
an outburst of enthusiasm, crowds escort him at one o’clock in the night
from the opera. Workmen and clerks, lords and sempstresses, bankers
and High-church clergymen; the feudal wreck, Lord Derby, and the relic
of the February revolution, the republican of 1848; Queen Victoria’s
eldest son and the barefoot swiper born without father or mother, vie
with one another in trying to capture a hand-shake, a glance, a word.
Scotland, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Glasgow, Manchester are tremulous with
expectation—while he vanishes into the impenetrable fog, into the blue of
the ocean.
Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the guest stepped upon some
ministerial trap-door and vanished. Where was he? He was in such a place
a moment since, but now he is not.... All that is left is a point, a sail
just floating out of sight.
The English people were bewildered—‘the great foolish people,’ as the
poet said of them. John Bull is good-natured, powerful, stubborn, but
heavy, slow and unresourceful, and one is sorry for him while one
laughs! A bull with the gestures of a lion, he was just shaking his
mane and preening himself to greet a guest as he had never greeted
any monarch—still on duty or dismissed from service—and his guest was
snatched from him. The lion-bull stamps with his cleft hoof, tears at
the ground in his rage ... but his guards know all the subtle mechanism
of the locks and screws of freedom in which he is confined, babble
some nonsense to him and keep the key in their pocket, while the point
vanishes on the ocean.
Poor lion-bull, go back to your hard labour, follow the plough, wield
the hammer! Have not three ministers and one non-minister, one duke, one
professor of medicine, and one pious lord testified to the public in
the House of Peers and in the Lower House, in the journals and in the
drawing-rooms, that the strong man whom you saw yesterday is sick, and
so sick that he must be sent the length of the Atlantic and across the
Mediterranean...? ‘Whom do you prefer to believe, my ass or myself?’ said
the offended miller in the old fable to his sceptical friend who doubted
whether the ass was out when he heard him braying....
And are they not the friends of the people—more than its friends, its
guardians, its parents?
... The newspapers are full of detailed descriptions of fêtes and
banquets, speeches and swords, addresses and concerts, Chiswick and
Guildhall. Ballets and spectacles, pantomimes and harlequinades,
depicting this ‘Midspring Night’s Dream,’ have been described enough. I
do not intend to enter into competition with them, but simply want to
give a few of the snapshots I have taken with my little camera from the
modest corner from which I looked on. In them, as is always the case in
photographs, much that is accidental is seized and retained, awkward
draperies, awkward poses, over-prominent details, with the lines of
events left untouched and lines of faces unsoftened....
This is my gift to you, my absent children (it is partly for you that it
is written), and once more I deeply, deeply regret that you were not here
with us on April the 17th.
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