Once more posting through Shottery and Stratford-on-Avon, on the road to
Kenilworth and Warwick, I felt a pleasure in becoming an _habitué_ in
Shakspere’s town—it being recognized by the Stratford post-boys, known
at the Stratford inn, and remembered at the toll-gates. It is pleasant
to be welcomed by name anywhere; but at Stratford-on-Avon, it is a
recognition by those whose fathers or predecessors were the companions
of Shakspere’s frolics. Every fellow in a slouched hat—every idler on a
tavern bench—every saunterer with a dog at his heels on the
highway—should be a deer-stealer from Charlecote. You would almost ask
him, “Was Will Shakspere with you last night?”
The Lucys still live at Charlecote, immortalized by a varlet poacher who
was tried before old Sir Thomas for stealing a buck. They have drawn an
apology from Walter Savage Landor for making too free with the family
history, under cover of an imaginary account of the trial. I thought, as
we drove along in sight of the fine old hall, with its broad park and
majestic trees—very much as it stood in the days of Sir Thomas, I
believe—that most probably the descendants of the old justice look even
now upon Shakspere more as an offender against the game-laws than as a
writer of immortal plays. I venture to say, it would be bad tact in a
visiter to Charlecote to felicitate the family on the _honor_ of
possessing a park in which Shakspere had stolen deer—to show more
interest in seeing the hall in which he was tried than in the family
portraits.
On the road which I was travelling (from Stratford to Charlecote)
Shakspere had been dragged as a culprit. What were his feelings before
Sir Thomas? He felt, doubtless, as every possessor of the divine fire of
genius must feel, when brought rudely in contact with his fellow-men,
that he was too much their superior to be angry. The humor in which he
has drawn Justice Shallow proves abundantly that he was more amused than
displeased with his own trial. But was there no vexation at the moment?
A reflection, it might be, from the estimate of his position in the
minds of those who were about him—who looked on him simply as a stealer
of so much venison. Did he care for Anne Hathaway’s opinion then?
How little did Sir Thomas Lucy understand the relation between Judge and
culprit on that trial! How little did he dream he was sitting for his
picture to the pestilent varlet at the bar; that the deer-stealer could
better afford to forgive _him_ than he the deer-stealer! Genius
forgives, or rather forgets, all wrongs done in ignorance of its
immortal presence. Had Ben Jonson made a wilful jest on a line in his
new play, it would have rankled longer than fine and imprisonment for
deer-stealing. Those who crowd back and trample upon men of genius in
the common walk of life; who cheat them, misrepresent them, take
advantage of their inattention or their generosity in worldly matters,
are sometimes surprised how their injuries, if not themselves, are
forgotten. Old Adam Woodcock might as well have held malice against
Roland Græme for the stab in the stuffed doublet of the Abbot of
Misrule.
Yet, as I might have remarked in the paragraph gone before, it is
probably not easy to put conscious and secret superiority entirely
between the mind and the opinions of those around who think differently.
It is one reason why men of genius love more than the common share of
solitude—_to recover self-respect_. In the midst of the amusing
travesty he was drawing in his own mind of the grave scene about him,
Shakspere possibly felt at moments as like a detected culprit as he
seemed to the gamekeeper and the justice. It is a small penalty to pay
for the after worship of the world! The ragged and proverbially
ill-dressed peasants who are selected from the whole campagna, as models
to the sculptors of Rome, care little what is thought of their good
looks in the Corso. The disguised proportions beneath their rags will be
admired in deathless marble, when the noble who scarce deigns their
possessor a look will lie in forgotten dust under his stone scutcheon.