“As it is, it’s charming! Isn’t this perspective delightful?” We looked along the friendly street, which, whether it called itself High, or Chapel, or Church, was always the same kind street, to where we saw it closed by a comely brick mansion, ample, many-windowed, and offering a rest to the eyes from the timbered quaintness which I dared no longer blame.
“Yes,” he said, “all our perspectives are fair.” And by an art he had, a sort of control over place, he gave me the cinematographic range of several other avenues, up and down, and then reverted with me to Chapel Street, where we had been standing. “But I think this is best; and don’t you like the courageous fancy expressed in that façade yonder which seems to have burst into blossom ‘from roof-tree to foundation-stone’?”
“Yes, I do like that; and I like your cabmen pointing the house out with their whips to their American fares, and telling them the name of the famous woman who lives in the house and owns it.”
“You Americans are under a peculiar debt to that lady.
You know it was she who heard that the Harvard House was for sale and told a rich Chicagoan of it, and bought it for him, and so for the American nation and the American university which he gave it to. It was a handsome thing all around, but not handsomer for the millionaire than for the novelist; except for her he might not have known of the house, and so might have missed his great chance. It was she who imagined finding the present sixteenth-century house inside of the commonplace nineteenth interior and exterior which it wore when she found it for sale, and afterward realized it as we see it now. By the way, your Americans—”
“Oh, why alienate us by a geographical term? We were all one blood when you lived here in Stratford, and we have never ceased to claim our part in you; why not claim your part in us?”
“What would your Baconians say?”
“Let them say what they like. You are always ours, and so is Stratford. I am proud of our nation, but our name seems to part us!”
“Well, suppose we say Yankees, then?”
“No, no! That’s what our illiterate Indians called us in your time, and your literary Indians call us now.”
“Well, well, call yourselves what you like. Here certainly we are fellow-subjects—”
“Oh no!” I made haste. “Fellow-citizens!”
My companion laughed. “You are difficult. I was going to say merely that here in Stratford we owe a great deal to your countrymen, whatever we call them, especially your countrywomen. You know that two of them have lately bought my son-in-law’s old house, and put it through the same process of restoration, or rather revelation, as the Harvard House?”
“Oh yes, I know that.” And by one of these mystical effects which my companion could operate in virtue of his character of disembodied spirit, we were instantly in the charming grounds of Hall’s Croft. “This is delightful,” I said. “To think of a place and to be there in the same emotion — it transcends all our earthly dreams of rapid transit. Swedenborg mentions it, and I always thought it such a poetical idea, but I never imagined it practicable.”
CHAPTER VII
“CROFT; croft,” I soliloquized, looking about me on the acre or more that spread from its inner boundary to a continuous thicket and wall next the street, with tall trees overhanging them: a space of level greensward with brown walks through it and a blaze of geraniums here and there. In the midst stood a mulberry of Shakespearean lineage, which had dropped its half-ripened fruit on the grass and gravel, as seems the habit of the English mulberry, and under this we stayed for the moment together. “Croft, croft,” I murmured, and I went on with the lines from Tennyson’s Two Voices:
“Through crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew.
Of course, I always knew what crofts were, but you have to see one — and such a one as this — before you can realize that when a croft isn’t a small Westmoreland farm, it is far more delightfully a turfy Midland garden hedged from the world of such a tranquil town as Stratford, and inviting to easy-chairs and afternoon tea and friendly talk, day in and day out, through interminable summers.”
“Yes,” my companion said, “Stratford is rather full of crofts; two or three more along this street, and such a vast one as The Firs where the folk-singers and folk-dancers are sojourning, and that behind the house of the author who found the Harvard House for you, and others opening in lesser limit from many a simple dwelling with a street-front that keeps its croft a secret from the passer.”
“How English!” I said. “If we had a croft at home we would pull down the wall and pull up the hedge, and pretend to welcome the world to it, and then stay indoors and glare at people who ventured to pass over it. I think of all our fake simplicities and informalities the worst is throwing down our domestic bounds, and pretending we have no barriers because we have no fences. Why, if you found yourself, invisible and impalpable as you are, in our fenceless suburbs you would feel as strictly kept on the outside as an unbidden guest at a dinner. Of course the notion was, when the fences were first disused, that everybody would enjoy the beauty that somebody owned; but I doubt if it ever happened; the sight of it merely mocked the outsider, and until we really own the beauty of nature in common, we had better not pretend that we do. For my part, I believe in crofts, and I’m going to have one as soon as I get home.”
“They take time,” my companion suggested. “I don’t suppose my son-in-law lived to see this croft in anything like its present state. He was at it as long as I lived, and I lived nine years after he married our Susanna. We thought it rather a fine match; he was a physician, and had a large practice throughout Warwickshire, with a social standing far above that of the daughter of an actor-manager and a writer of plays. He was an author himself, and kept a record of his Cures in Latin; and among his grateful patients were ‘Persons Noble, Rich, and Learned.’ There were thousands of such cases, and you remember Dr. Furvivall in his life of me says that if he had cured me in 1616 instead of letting me die we should have had an interesting account of his success.” Shakespeare chuckled his enjoyment of the humor. “But I wasn’t destined to the celebrity his learned pen might have given me; I have had to put up with the name that I ignorantly blundered into making with my plays. John was something of a prig, I’m afraid; and whenever Ben Jonson, with some of the London fellows, came down, they had it hot and heavy in learned disputes that my ‘small Latin and less Greek’ left me out of. But he was a good husband to Susanna, though she never would allow that he was more of a man than her father.” He laughed again for pleasure in his daughter’s loyalty, and said she was her mother all over in that. “Yes, John was a good fellow, and if he fancied coming off here and building himself a house where he could have scholarly quiet about him, I’m sure no one could object. For my part I was used to the rush of London, and I liked better being in the thick of things at New Place.”
Considering how a half-dozen people reading the tablet in the iron fence, and a few others peering through it at the foundations of the demolished mansion, with the passing of a cab or a motor or two, formed the actual turmoil about New Place (except when people were coming from the theater), I was tempted to ask my companion if that was his notion of the thick of things, but I also wanted to put a question of more pressing interest. “And do you suppose you could get me a glimpse of this interior here?”
“You mean of the house?”
“Well, yes.”
“Would you be going to write about it?”
“Well,” I hesitated, “things that I see are liable to get written about, you know. It was the case with yourself, wasn’t it?”
“I think I’ll let you come some day without me,” he said, gently, but firmly. “Sometimes people are sensitive—”
“But anything related to you, no matter how remotely, is of such interest to the public.”
I was trying for some more convincing demur, when I found myself in the street outside the croft, and walking toward the dear and be
autiful old church where my friend’s immortal part lies under that entreating and threatening tablet. The thought of it gave me rather a shiver. “Oh, oh!” I began. “Had you thought of going in?” With a concourse of Cook tourists in motor omnibuses and on foot preceding us, I pretended a preference for some quieter occasion, but Shakespeare regarded them sociably enough, though he said:
“No, only into the churchyard.” And we walked under the avenue of sheltering trees to the church door. The place is so kindly and as it were so homelike that one night I came there in the company of another and we got half up the avenue, moon-dappled through the leaves overhead, before we realized that we were in a churchyard, pacing over outworn tombstones, and so thickly peopled everywhere with the dead of earliest and latest date that we could not have stepped aside without treading on a grave. We turned and fled, but now with my deathless companion, I turned and kept to the riverside, where we sat down on some memorial stone, and looked at the stream with its punts and skiffs and canoes, and the meadows beyond with cows and boys in them, and those evident English lovers strolling together beside the water. Pretty well everywhere in Stratford, if you will listen, you will catch the low, hoarse jawing and jowing of the rooks, and this now fell to us from the tree-tops which were stirred by the breeze drawing cool along the river. The trees were well-girthed elms, all leaning a little from the shore, as if they had been lured by the river when they were tender saplings, and had not been able to draw back. From the farther and nearer expanses came the soft clucking of oars in the rowlocks, with the sound of voices, and a stray note of laughter; from some remotest distance the wiry whine of a gramophone reached us. Suddenly, without warning, the bells in the church tower burst from their silence, and expanded in the air overhead as with a canopy of clangorous and deafening uproar. “Oh, I can’t stand this!” I cried, startled to my feet by the explosion.
“Yes?” my companion said. “I suppose I’m so used to it; but it is rather dreadful.”
“In New York,” I said, proudly, “we don’t allow it; we class it with the detonations of the insane and unsafe Fourth, which are now forbidden.” I did not say that bell-ringing was almost the only unnecessary noise which we forbade at other times.
But probably Shakespeare knew; he said: “Yes, I suppose it belongs, with the noise of drums and trumpets, and cymbals and pianofortes, to the boyhood of the race; and sometime the church-bells will be silenced along with the guns and cannon-crackers and steam-calliopes as an expression of feeling. Perhaps,” he added, “they can be so tempered as to have the effect of bells at a distance, the squillo lontano that melts the heart of the mariner when he hears it in the dying day.”
“Beautiful!” I breathed. “Do you read Dante much?”
“Well, you know I picked up some Italian from my friends in London, when,” he laughed amiably, “I was supposed to be idling away my time in writing plays and playing them. Italian was very much the fashion at court.”
“Yes, I know; and, of course, you were always picking up the beautiful wherever you found it. You must feel it a great comfort,” I suggested, “having a cultivated contemporary with you, now you’re settled in your riverside cottage.”
“You mean his lordship? Well, I don’t know. He’s not always in spirits; he has his ups and downs; especially his downs.”
“Really? He isn’t still worrying over those old things?”
“Not all of them.”
“Because I can assure you that since he’s come up as the author of your plays a great people have quite ceased to think of him as a false friend and a venal judge.”
“Oh yes; I understand that; but it isn’t always a consolation to him. By the way, why don’t you come and talk to him? You haven’t looked in on us yet. Come!”
In a moment we found ourselves in a passing punt, invisibly and unpalpably seated at the stern behind the head of the white-flanneled youth who lay stretched in the bottom of the boat dreamily admiring the awkward grace of the girl who was paddling her way among the different river craft. Besides the skiffs and canoes and the other punts there were steam and naphtha launches plying back and forth; but she got through them all, thanks less to her skill than the build of the punt, which is framed on the lines of the puddle-duck so far as upsetting is concerned. When we came abreast of the cottage we lightly quitted our unconscious hosts who kept along the willowy shore, while we mounted to the level of the rose-walled lawn, where we found Bacon walking excitedly to and fro with a large volume open between his hands. He wore the dignified and handsome Elizabethan gentleman’s dress, and I admired that he seemed to be smoking a long-stemmed pipe, as if he had been one of the first Englishmen to form the tobacco habit. He blew fitful clouds from it as he walked, and he was so absorbed in his book that he did not look up at our approach. Yet he seemed to know of our being there, for he said: “Of all the follies alleged in proof of my authorship of your plays, there is none quite so maddening as the notion that you couldn’t have written them because if you had there would be more facts about you. The contention is, and it’s accepted even by most of your friendly biographers, that there is little or nothing known of your life. I maintain that there is far more known of your life than there is of most authors’ lives.”
“There’s more known, in some particulars,” Shakespeare answered, merrily, as his day would have phrased it, “than I would have allowed if I could have helped it.”
“You mean about the poaching, and the deer-stealing and the cudgeling by Sir Thomas Lucy’s people, and your lighting out to London to escape jail?” I suggested.
“I was a wild enough boy,” Shakespeare began.
Bacon took the word from him: “But I can tell you, my friend,” he said, lifting his eyes and bending them severely on me, “that those things are the inventions of vulgar romance. Will, here, probably played his wild pranks, as he would own, but the man who ended as he did never went far in that way.”
“Well,” I ventured, “I didn’t invent them and nobody could like better to believe them lies. I wish his biographers wouldn’t mention them even to refute them, but perhaps it’s because of the paucity of biographical material—”
“Paucity of biographical material!” The ex-lord chancellor violently struck the open page of the book in his hand. “Let me tell you that there is comparatively a superabundance of material, as Andrew Lang shows in his excellent book on Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown. Far more is known of his life than of the lives of most other famous poets.” Shakespeare smiled at me with a shrug of helpless protest, as if he would say, “He will do it,” and Bacon went on: “Take, for instance, the case of Virgil, which I have just happened to look at in the encyclopedia here.”
“The India paper copy?” I asked, seeing how lightly he held it.
“No; it’s an old edition; but I’ve imponderabled it for my convenience just as Shakespeare makes you invisible when it suits him to have you pass with him unseen.” He handed the massive volume to me; it almost floated on my hand; and he continued, in taking it back, “Here is the most famous poet of antiquity, after Homer—”
“Then you don’t believe that Homer was a syndicate?” I put in.
“No more than I believe that I wrote Shakespeare. And what does our encyclopedist know of Virgil, who lived when Rome was at the zenith of her glory, and was one of the central figures defined by the fierce light that beat upon the throne of the great Augustus? Why, he knows that Virgil was born in the country on his father’s farm near Mantua; that he was of the yeoman class, and glad of it, as he suggests by his praise of rustic life in his Eclogues and Georgics. His father, though ‘probably’ a plain man, discovered his son’s talent and put him to school at Cremona, and, ‘it may be inferred,’ went with him there. At sixteen the boy assumed the toga virilis, and ‘shortly after’ went to Milan, where he kept at his studies till he went to Rome two years later. ‘A powerful stimulus must have been given to his genius’ when he found himself there in the dawn of th
e Augustan age, ‘as may be inferred’ from certain lines in the first Eclogue. He studied under a rhetorician who was ‘probably’ the teacher of the future emperor, and became personally devoted to the Epicurean philosophy under Siron; but, if we may believe his verse, preferred poetry. The Eclogues allude to his circumstances and feelings nine years later, but ‘of what happened to him in the interval during which the first civil war took place and Julius Cæsar was assassinated, we have no indication from ancient history or his own writings’; but, ‘we may conjecture’ that he ‘was cultivating the woodland muse’ in his native region north of the Po. In his first poem there is full record, however, of what he felt at being expelled from his ancestral farm, which was confiscated to provide land for the soldiers of the Triumvirs. Augustus officially reinstated him, but when Virgil offered to resume possession the soldier whom the place had been allotted to, chased the poet across the river, and Virgil thought it best to take his father with him to the villa of his old teacher Siron. Then he went to live at Rome, where he was welcomed in the highest literary circles, and his Eclogues were published in 37 b c. He left Rome, however, and after longer or shorter sojourn near Naples and in Sicily, ‘it seems not unlikely’ that he made a voyage to Athens. He spent the years from 37 to 30 b c in writing the Georgies, which he read to Augustus; and he spent the rest of his life in polishing the Æneid, which he did not survive to give the finishing touches, though he read three books of the epic as it stood to the emperor and his family. In Athens he met Augustus, who persuaded him to go back to Italy with him, and on the way he was seized with sickness from the excessive heat, and died at Brindisi. He was buried at Naples, where his tomb was long regarded with religious veneration and visited as a temple. ‘That veneration... was greater than what we find attaching to the actual memory of any ancient poet, though the mystery connected with the personality of Homer excited a greater-curiosity.’ This is all,” Bacon ended, closing and dropping the volume, which instantly resumed its ponderability and fell to the ground with a heavy thud, “this is all the careful encyclopedist has to tell of the life of the most famous and beloved poet of antiquity, except the fact that he was so much dissatisfied with the Æneid, which he had to leave uncorrected, that he instructed his literary executors to suppress it, and it would have been lost to the world if Augustus had not interfered and commanded its preservation. In fact, Virgil’s wish for the destruction of his immortal epic may be compared to the indifference of our friend here to the fate of his dramas, which he left to the ignorance of the printer and the ravage of any editor who chose to collect and publish them.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 996