THE BLUE BOAR,
STANTON HARDWICK,
April 21, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--I have made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon. I now
feel overwhelmed with shame to reflect that, though my chief
preoccupations apart from my profession have been literary, I have
never visited the sacred place before. For an Englishman who cares for
literature not to have been to Stratford-on-Avon is as gross a neglect
as for an Englishman who has any sense of patriotism not to have
visited Westminster Abbey.
And now that I have been there and returned, and have leisure to think
it all over, I feel that I have been standing on the threshold of a
mystery. Who, when all is said and done, was this extraordinary man?
What were his thoughts, his aims, his views of himself and of the
world? If Shakespeare was Shakespeare, he seems, to speak frankly, to
have had a humanity distinct and apart from his genius. Here we have
the son of a busy, quarrelsome, enterprising tradesman--who eventually
indeed came to grief in trade--of a yeoman stock, and bearing a common
name. His mother could not write her own signature. Of his youth we
hear little that is not disreputable. He married under unpleasant
circumstances, after an entanglement which took place at a very early
age; he was addicted to poaching, or, at all events, to the illegal
pursuit of other people's game. Then he drifts up to London and joins a
theatrical company--then a rascally kind of trade--deserting his wife
and family. His life in London is full of secrets. He is a man of
mysterious passions and dangerous friendships. He writes plays of
incomparable depth and breadth, touching every chord of humour, tragedy
and pathos; certain rather elaborate poems of a precieux type, and
strange sonnets, revealing a singular poignancy of unconventional
feelings. But here, again, it is difficult to conceive that the writer
of the Sonnets, who touched life so intensely at one feverish point,
should have had the amazing detachment and complexity of mind and soul
that the plays reveal. The notices of his talk and character are few
and unenlightening, and testify to a certain easy brilliance of wit,
but no more. Before he is thirty he is spoken of as both "upright" and
"facetious"--a singular combination.
Then he suddenly appears in another aspect; at the age of thirty-two he
is a successful, well-to-do man. And then his ambition, if he had any,
seems to shift its centre, and he appears to be only bent upon
restoring the fortunes of his family, and attaining a solid municipal
position. He buys the biggest house in his native place; from the
proceeds of his writings, his professional income as an actor, and from
his share in the playhouse of which he is part owner, he purchases
lands and houses, he engages in lawsuits, he concerns himself with
grants of arms. Still the flood of stupendous literature flows out; he
seems to be under a contract to produce plays, for which he receives
the magnificent sum of L10 (L100 of our money). He writes easily and
never corrects. He seems to set no store on his writings, which stream
from him like light from the sun. He adapts, collaborates, and has no
idea of what would be called a high vocation.
At forty-seven it all ceases; he writes no more, but lives prosperously
in his native town, with occasional visits to London. At fifty-two his
health fails. He makes business-like arrangements in the event of
death, and faces the darkness of the long sleep like any other good
citizen.
Who can co-ordinate or reconcile these things? Who can conceive the
likeness of the man, who steps in this light-hearted, simple way on to
the very highest platform of literature--so lofty and unattainable a
place he takes without striving, without arrogance, a throne among the
thrones where Homer, Virgil, and Dante sit? And yet his mind is set,
not on these things, but on acres and messuages, tithes and
investments. He seems not only devoid of personal vanity, but even of
that high and solemn pride which made Keats say, with faltering lips,
that he believed he would be among the English poets after his death.
I came through the pleasant water-meadows and entered the streets of
the busy town. Everything, from bank to eating-shop, bears the name of
Shakespeare; and one cannot resist the thought that such local and
homely renown would have been more to our simple hero's taste than the
laurel and the throne. I groaned in spirit over the monstrous
playhouse, with its pretentious Teutonic air; I walked through the
churchyard, vocal with building rooks, and came to the noble church,
full of the evidences of wealth and worship and honour. I do not like
to confess the breathless awe with which I drew near to the chancel and
gazed on the stone that, nameless, with its rude rhyme, covers the
sacred dust. I cannot say what my thoughts were, but I was lost in a
formless, unuttered prayer of true abasement before the venerable
relics of the highest achievements of the human spirit. There beneath
my feet slept the dust of the brain that conceived Hamlet and Macbeth,
and the hand that had traced the Sonnets, and the eye that had plumbed
the depths of life. That was a solemn moment, and I do not think I ever
experienced so deep a thrill of speechless awe. I could not tear myself
away; I could only wonder and desire.
Presently, by the kind offices of a pleasant simple verger, I did more.
I mounted on some steps he brought, and looked face to face at the bust
in the monument.
I cannot share in the feelings of those who would consider it formal or
perfunctory. There was the high-domed forehead, like that of Pericles
and Walter Scott; there were the steady eyes, the clear-cut nose; and
as for the lips--I never for an instant doubted the truth of what I
saw--I am as certain as I can be that they are the lips of a corpse,
drawn up in the stiff tension of death, showing the teeth below. I am
absolutely convinced that here we get as near to the man as we can get,
and that the head is taken from a death-mask. What injures the dignity
and beauty of the face is the plumpness of the chin that testifies to
the burgher prosperity, the comfortable life, the unexercised brain of
the later days. I saw afterwards the various portraits; I suppose it is
a matter of evidence, but nothing convinced me of truth, not even the
bilious, dilapidated, dyspeptic, white face of the folio engraving,
with the horrible hydrocephalous development of skull. That is a
caricature only. The others seem mere fancies.
Then I saw patiently the other relics, the foundations of New Place,
the schoolhouse--but all without emotion, except a deep sense of shame
that the only records allowed to stand in the long, low-latticed room
in which the boy Shakespeare probably saw a play first acted, are
boards recording the names of school football and cricket teams. The
ineptitude of such a proceeding, the hideous insistence of the athletic
craze of England, drew from me a despairing smile; but I think that
Shakespeare himself would have viewed it with tolerance and even
amusement.
But most of these relics, like Anne Hathaway's Cottage, are restored
out of all interest, and only testify to the silly and frivolous
demands of trippers.
But, my dear Herbert, the treasure is mine. Feeble as the confession
is, I do not think I ever realised before the humanity of Shakespeare.
He seemed to me before to sit remote, enshrined aloof, the man who
could tell all the secrets of humanity that could be told, and whose
veriest hints still seem to open doors into mysteries both high and
sweet and terrible. But now I feel as if I had been near him, had been
able to love what I had only admired.
I feel somehow that it extends the kingdom of humanity to have realised
Shakespeare; and yet I am baffled. But I seem to trace in the later and
what some would call the commonplace features of the man's life, a
desire to live and be; to taste life itself, not merely to write of
what life seemed to be, and of what lay behind it. I am sure that some
such allegory was in his mind when he wrote of Prospero, who so
willingly gave up the isle full of noises, the power over the dreaming,
sexless spirits of air and wood, to go back to his tiresome dukedom,
and his petty court, and all the dull chatter and business of life. I
am sure that Shakespeare thought of his art as an Ariel--that dainty,
delicate spirit, out of the reach of love and desire, that slept in
cowslip-bells and chased the flying summer on the bat's back, and that
yet had such power to delude and bemuse the human spirit. After all,
Ariel could not come near the more divine inheritance of the human
heart, sorrow and crying, love and hate. Ariel was but a merry child,
lost in passionless delights, yearning to be free, to escape; and
Prospero felt, and Shakespeare felt, that life, with all its stains and
dreariness and disease and darkness, was something better and truer
than the fragrant dusk of the copse, and the soulless laughter of the
summer sea. Ariel could sing the heartless, exquisite song of the
sea-change that could clothe the bones and eyes of the doomed king; but
Prospero could see a fairer change in the eyes and heart of his lonely
darling.
And I am glad that even so Shakespeare could be silent, and buy and
sell, and go in and out among his fellow-townsmen, and make merry. That
is better than to sit arid and prosperous, when the brain stiffens with
stupor, and the hand has lost its cunning, and to read old
newspaper-cuttings, and long for adequate recognition. God give me and
all uneasy natures grace to know when to hold our tongues; and to take
the days that remain with patience and wonder and tenderness; not
making haste to depart, but yet not fearing the shadow out of which we
come and into which we must go; to live wisely and bravely and sweetly,
and to close our eyes in faith, with a happy sigh, like a child after a
long summer day of life and delight.--Ever yours,