“Yes, there is sense in that,” I said. “And what, if I may ask, has induced you to materialize at this time?”
“Well, I rather like being here in August, for what they call my festivals. I always had a tenderness for the place, you know.”
“I don’t wonder.”
“And I like to realize that I’m remembered here. But they’re painful, too — some of the experiences of coming back. We don’t return without resuming the griefs, the sorrows of our mortal state. As long as we remain in eternity we are quit of our bereavements; if we come back to time our losses are as keen as in our mortal lives. I cannot revisit New Place without losing my dear boy, my Hamnet again, who died when he was eleven; I had so counted on his coming to live with me there, and I had my eyes on it all the more fondly because I thought to have him my heir to it.”
His voice shook, and I said, lamely enough, “But it’s all right now?”
“Oh yes, it’s all right. As he never married, he continues with his mother and me; his sisters continue with their husbands.”
“Why, I should think you would all continue together.”
“No, husbands and wives continue together. Marriage is the only human relation that endures forever. It destroys the old home to create a new one, and this in turn is destroyed that a still newer one may be created.”
“It seems a little hard,” I mused.
“No, no! It’s all right. It’s reason; it’s logic; it’s love. How could it be otherwise, if you will think? We blood-kindred can all be together instantly, by merely willing it; but Anne and I are together, and we have our Hamnet with us always — our little one, our dear boy!”
CHAPTER IV
AT the time Shakespeare repeated the speech of the householder who turned him, because of Bacon, from his door, I did not realize its full import. I had to live almost a whole August in Stratford before I could feel the force of it, or know just how much it meant, not to Shakespeare himself, for he always was and always will be a very modest man, but how much it meant to the man who uttered it. He had, in a manner, to take his life in his hand, and to launch himself in the tremendous risk of something like perdition, for it was little short of blasphemy to say such a thing in Stratford. The place may not have sufficiently prized her inestimable citizen in his earthly lifetime, but she has abundantly made up for any oversight of the kind since those days. She cherishes his memory with a sort of intensive recollection, which leaves no moment of his absence or his presence unremembered. I say absence and presence, but if forever absent he is forever present in these fond records; and one cannot witness them, though a wayfaring man, and err in a sense of their wonderful comprehensiveness.
It is not the names of streets or houses that speak of him; I do not know that there is any street named after him, and the sole objective monuments, architecturally and sculpturally, are so poor and few that one might wish there were none. A sprightlier fancy than Stratford’s might have called every house after some person of his plays; and this had been done in the pleasant hotel which received us when all the good will of The Spotted Pard could not avail against that ancient and barn-like smell which filled our pretty rooms and choked us from our dreams. The rooms in the pleasant hotel I mean are each named for some hero or heroine, mistress or lover, whom the poet left to outlive him here through the whole bounds of human fancy; so that if the lady in Desdemona had decided to stay on another day, the gentleman in Sir Toby Belch might have been going unexpectedly; or the party who had engaged Troilus and Cressida might have decided to take Romeo and Juliet instead. If Prospero had been assigned to some one vaguely wiring from London, the wirer could be put in Macbeth or Othello without knowing the difference, when he came, and the maiden ladies whom the manageress had meant to give the Weird Sisters, could just as well have Hermia and Helena, if the married pair personally applying did not like Katherine and Petruchio. Outside of the pleasant hotel, however, the memory of Shakespeare is wholly subjective, but it is none the less pervasive and exclusive for that. More and more one stands amazed at its absolute possession of the place. In that England of kings and nobles, of priests and prelates, of heroes and martyrs, there is no care for them in Stratford, though I suppose that they must all have more or less masqueraded there in their time.
That loyalty of the English, which we Americans can never understand, had indeed dug up for dramatic use in the Bank Holiday Pageant following our arrival, the fact of Queen Henrietta Maria’s entry into Stratford before the coming of the hapless Charles; and not far away at Edgehill a great victory of the Commonwealth was won; but all such memories sink and fade before that which began to fill the world from this little town, till now the world itself can hardly hold it, and I do not doubt it will be found common fame in Mars when Mars is proven inhabited beyond peradventure, and in Venus if ever she is seen giving her cold cheek to the kisses of the sun. In Stratford, I do not suppose there is any man, woman, or least articulate child who does not know something of Shakespeare, and I have no question that under their feet the passers from the remotest corners of the earth could hear the very stones prate of his whereabouts if they stopped to listen. That was not quite my experience, but I was not surprised, when I issued from the New Place garden with the poet, to hear a gray cat mew intelligent recognition on the sidewalk before the gate. By this time it was entirely natural that the night should be past, and the sun should be warming the English world which it seldom overheats, instead of the moon, which had seemed to be silvering the edges of the old Chapel tower while we talked.
Shakespeare stooped over and scratched the grateful forehead of the cat which pressed plaintively mewing against his ankle and lifted one paw to him as if for pity. “Why it’s lame, poor little chap,” he said. “I hope it’s some honorable wound received in battle, and not a pinch from a passing motor-car. At first,” he added, while he still kept acceptably scratching its head, “I thought it was one of our New Place cats; Susanna was very fond of cats; but then I saw it couldn’t possibly be living now even with its nine mortal lives put end to end; they would be mortal lives of course.”
He laughed softly with a kindly pity in his laugh, which won my heart more than anything he had yet said.
I began to understand, and I understood more and more why his contemporaries called him gentle and sweet.
He stooped again, and again scratched the head of the cat, which now rubbed harder against his ankle, and to my unspeakable astonishment and its own, passed through the limb, and came out on the inner side of it. The creature looked up, and then parading round him with arched back and lifted tail, tried the other leg and came through it as with the first. At this result it looked up as before, and catching a mocking glance from the poet’s eyes, it mewed loudly and limped off as swiftly as its three legs could carry it. He followed it with his laughter, but now boyishly wild and joyous, as at some successful trick. “Poor old Tom!” he called after it. “You didn’t realize that I was shadow, did you? Well, when I come again you may be shadow, too, and then you can rub against my legs without rubbing through them!”
He laughed and laughed, with that soft, kindly laugh of his, which made me understand so many things in his philosophy that I had not understood, and which was so simple-hearted and sincere as well as wise, that it made me ashamed not to own that I had shared the cat’s bewilderment. I said, “Oh yes, matter would pass through spirit, just as spirit would pass through matter.” And then I pretended a recurrent interest in his overnight adventure with Bacon, and I said: “Apropos of life, mortal and immortal, I didn’t exactly understand just where Lord St. Albans did pass the night, after all.”
He smiled. “No, I didn’t tell you. But I will, sometime. I think it will interest you. That’s one of our privileges in the future life — as you call it — and it’s a great privilege.”
“And — and couldn’t you tell me now? I should so greatly like to know. Where is he this morning, for instance?”
“Well, I don’t kn
ow that I could just say.”
“But — but,” I persisted, for I felt that somehow he was slipping from me, and I could not bear to lose him yet, “you didn’t mean to imply that this last man turned you out because of that Baconian hypothesis?”
I scarcely remember how I was going to get him to answer me; but before I could bring my purpose to bear, I was alone with the crippled eat which was mewing its pathetic entreaties to me, and the Bank Holiday sun was climbing the sky to shine unbrokenly on the Pageant slated for that Monday. Then I was sensible of there having been a Sunday between this Monday and the Saturday of our arrival, and of our having driven out through its afternoon heat and dust to see an aviator go up in his biplane from a clover-field, and buzz first loud and then low while he mounted into the “pits of air,” as Emerson called them in a subtle forecast of the atmospheric pockets which the airmen have found in the welkin. We crossed the fine old bridge over the Avon, which we left to the aimless joyance of the holiday makers, marshaled by the trumps of gramophones braying from their punts above the prone shapes of young men stretched out, as the wont in England is, in the hollows of the boats, while girls paddled or poled the dull craft along. Beyond the river stretched the dusty road, with pairs wedded and unwedded, and families of fathers and mothers and children on foot or in perambulators, thickly trooping toward the clover-field, and patient of the carriages and motors that pushed through them as patient as themselves. They seemed not to know how hot it was, and they took their pleasure without expense when they reached the clover-field, where it was as easy to see the flying outside the hedges as inside them. None of them seemed to feel the Sabbatarian scruple which had forbidden the Race Track authorities to let the airmen fly on Sunday from the course where so much money must be gambled away on week-days. Every nation has its peculiar virtues, and the English, who are not without their vices, expect to have their Sabbath-keeping imputed to them for righteousness when they are playing the horses. I who know nothing of horse-racing but as a spectacle, am not sure that man-flying is more beautiful, and it is now scarcely more novel. The machine harshly and then softly buzzed about the sky, and descended and ascended, and all who strained their necks to see it were equally content whether they had paid or not paid.
What left me with no sort of question was the Pageant next day, for whatever the Pageant is it is joy, void of all alloy of misgiving. Event for event, I think I liked best the pleasure of the actors, who were to help the sight so much, assembling for their floats behind the Theater, in those masquerade properties they had so easily come by. The ladies were preoccupied in woman’s great business of looking beautiful, as if they took seriously the burlesque of the Elizabethan courtier who capered about painting their cheeks for them. A friendly old gentleman in the crowd, who made our acquaintance and kept it at every point throughout the morning, here tried to remember what part he had once taken in a Pageant long ago, and was not satisfied with his son’s suggestion that it was Falstaff. When the procession was formed the floats toiled slowly and shakily through the well-contented town; floats of fairies great and little, historic floats and dramatic, and of the chiefest rustic and mechanic and domestic arts, all led by Queen Henrietta Maria making her prolonged and repeated entry into Stratford. A vast Swan built up of white cotton batting satisfied the heart jealous for the primacy of the Swan of Avon in a supreme hour of his native town, and if it came last in the show, it certainly did not come least. The fairies danced and sang their way through the streets, and the large children seemed as single-heartedly glad as the little, and when they happened to be young girls, as lovely. But I gave my heart most to the old chair-mender, who in his linen smock frock and his aged top-hat repaired a chair-bottom throughout the morning with unflagging zeal.
The long forenoon ended with a longer afternoon in the meadows beyond Avon, where all the local sports had their turn on foot and on horseback, with old and young in the acts. A hundred little girls skipping with their skipping-ropes like one, and acrobatic boys in divers circus feats, represented the schools; fencing, single-stick, wrestling, running, and leaping by amateurs varied the generously contributed events of the cavalrymen, who, from some neighboring station, slashed each other’s paper plumes as rival knights, and wrestled from their horses’ backs. When the spectacle became unbearable without tea, there was of course a tea-tent where you might have it at the counter or at tables on the grass; if you ordered it at a table it was our experience that the tea-maiden who took the order had it, after a hesitation, on her conscience to warn you beforehand that it would be a shilling each, and not sixpence, as at the counter. I thought at home we might have been left to the greater outlay without the forewarning; but perhaps not.
CHAPTER V
THE Pageant which began the August festival at Stratford was only the beginning. It ended at noon; the other things went on the whole month; and I am not sure that the pageant had quite got its paint off before the song, the dance, the masque, the play, and the lecture were in full tide of joyance. They went on concurrently, like those streams which meet from different sources and swim together in one channel to the sea; and as you were borne with them you became yourself of their effect if not their origin. You became a part of the general transport, and felt, though you might not altogether look it, the happiness of the town in her greatest son, the greatest of the sons of men. As the days passed in a golden sequence scarcely dimmed by a few cloudy hours, it seemed as if there could never be such another August if ever there had been its like before, and the Genius of the festival, whoever he was, must have rejoiced more and more that he had appointed it for the season which Shakespeare might have chosen himself for his natal month rather than the raw April that chillily welcomed him into the world. Of course the right Shakespeare festivals are and have been held on and about his accepted birthday, but if the gradual rise of the August celebrations has been from a sense of his own imaginable preference, I should feel it a very graceful compliance. I should not think their coincidence with the greatest Bank Holiday of the year would be offensive to his memory; he would not probably have objected to sharing them with the middle, and lower middle, and unqualifiedly lower, classes who then flood the whole English land and who seem to wash through his native town in tides that rise yearly higher. If he seems in his plays to show little specific sympathy with the groundlings, that is no doubt because he was himself a groundling, or very near it, and knew, as they know, that as groundlings they were no better than their betters. But this is a point which he was to touch upon later, when I brought it home to him in one of those tacit colloquies we were often holding in Stratford.
As for his actual, or putative birthday, I have ventured a conjecture of the English April’s chilliness in the sixteenth century because I have found April so cold in the twentieth, but, for all I can really say, that famous twenty-third of it may have been one of those rich, soft days, full of dull sunshine when the flowers make haste to open themselves to the bees, and the birds do their best to flatter the trees that they have made no mistake in budding or even blossoming. In fact, if, as many contend, we know very little about Shakespeare, we know least of all what sort of weather it was the day he was born. This is one of the strongest proofs of the Baconian authorship of his plays; for if Bacon had been born on that 23d of April, we should have known just how the thermometer stood, and whether the day was wet, or the spring early or late; he would have noted the facts himself. But I do not mean to fling this apple of discord among my readers; it was never gathered in Stratford, for no such fruit grows there. They have scarcely heard of Bacon in that devoted town, though indeed I found at one of the shops a small bronze door-knocker figuring the Lord Chancellor in the court where he took bribes if he did not actually sell justice; the point has been made in his favor. On the other hand, in a shop-window not far off, the proprietor had sacrificed his very patronymic to the poet’s fame in the sign of “Bacon’s Shakespeare Restaurant.” I was thinking, “How Shakespeare would enjoy se
eing this!” when in one of those cinematographic apparitions which he was apt to make in my consciousness, flashing in and out of it as the figures do in the films changing at the moving-picture show, he joined me and consented to share my amusement in it. But I observed that more and more he refused to smile at the cost of a man who had not himself been very tender of his friends while he lived among them here.
As we turned from the window and he led on down the street, he said, kindly, “We must always remember that he is one of the greatest benefactors of the race, and that he suffered greatly.”
“And, his atonement, as far as his plea of guilty went, was magnificent. It was one of those supreme things.”
“Magnificent, supreme! Yes, but what a tragedy!”
“You could have written it; he couldn’t.”
“Well, perhaps that one he could.”
The incident by no means followed close upon our meeting in New Place gardens, but he had offered no facts yet as to where or how he had disposed of a guest who made even the poet unwelcome in his mother-town. I ventured to fancy, however, that he might have taken for their common shelter one of those pleasant houses which their owners are willing to let furnished in Stratford, together with their servants and the general good will of the place, while they are themselves off on their holidays, at the seaside, or in Brittany or Switzerland. In our own vain search for quarters, we viewed several such houses, as alternatives of the lodgings which were always full-up; and I have finally decided that Shakespeare took a certain pretty cottage which was proposed to us with a garden sloping to the Avon and a punt belonging to it lying at the foot of the lawn. I am rather sorry now that we did not take it ourselves, not only because it had a populous wasps’ nest in the center of a flower bed, and a temporary gardener with a carbuncle on his neck and three more coming, but because I should like having lived in a cottage haunted by the greatest poet and the greatest philosopher of all time. We should not have known they were there by day, and by night we should have been so tired with each day’s pleasuring, and so drowsy from being up every night at the theater for the Shakespeare plays, that we should not have objected to the ghostly presences that exchanged criticisms of each other’s lives and works in our dreams.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 994