“I know,” I answered. “I thought that fine in Macaulay. It was only fair, though, to let you have the last word.”
“In my office of judge, in which I confessed and must always confess that I brought the judgment seat to shame, though I only did what the other judges did in my time, it often occurred to me that it was a gross injustice in our procedure to let the prosecution, the state, have the closing appeal to the jury. That should be the sacred right of the defense—”
“Ah, if you could only have expressed that in some axiom, embodied it in some decision!” I exclaimed. “That injustice is always a grief to me whenever I read the report of a criminal trial. That the last word should be for the rigor instead of the mercy of the law, that seems barbarous, atrocious.”
“But as we were saying of the cinema — the movies, as you call it in your wonderful slang — I believe there is indefinite development for that form of the drama in the direction of education. But why am I saying this to you? You who first suggested the notion to me in one of your papers.”
I was inexpressibly flattered. “Is it possible,” I asked, “that so great a man as you, in your exalted sphere, keeps up with our periodical literature? How have you the time for it?”
“We have the eternity for it,” he said, with a sad smile for the word play. “Besides you exaggerate my importance in the world of immortality. I assure you that there the lowliest of our race who has only a record of humble goodness counts before me.”
I stood rebuked. “Oh, excuse me; I didn’t reflect. But now as to the movies: you see a great dramatic future in them?”
“Ah, that you must have out with Shakespeare. You’ll find him in the gardens of the Birthplace; I’ve no doubt he’ll try to persuade you that the Elizabethan drama was the last word in that way.”
“Well, Shakespeare is always Shakespeare, you know!” I said.
“I’m glad he isn’t always Bacon,” the philosopher replied. “I shouldn’t mind having written the sonnets; but the ‘Venus and Adonis,’ the ‘Lucrece,’ and some of the plays — excuse me! Honestly, would you like to have written ‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre’ or ‘A Comedy of Errors’?”
Before I could protest my companion had left me to continue my way to the Birthplace alone. It was only a little walk from the Picture Theater, but I was not surprised to find next morning had come when I reached the house endeared to the world by the universally cherished fiction that Shakespeare was born in it. Thirteen thousand Americans are said to visit it every year, and I had already joined them twice in their tacit atonement there for the Baconian heresy which our nation invented. I had been there in fact only a few days before, and now I passed through the house into the garden without staying to visit the thronged rooms above or below. As I expected I found the shade of Shakespeare in the shelter of a far descendant of his contemporary mulberry-tree, and he courteously dematerialized me for the forbidden passage over the grass to a seat with him at its root.
“Well,” he said, smiling, “so you have shirked even the birth-room in the Birthplace where I was not born?”
“Yes — since you have divined it. I have no grudge against that superstition except that it has thronged the place so with the devout that one can’t breathe there very well. Besides, I have done it twice already.”
“And the Museum and Library, with the Original Legal Documents of the family possessions, and the signatures of my family (they seem to have abounded in autographs so much more than I), and the early editions of my plays, and my signet-ring, and my sixteenth-century school-desk, and all the rest of it? And the Timber-roofed Room overhead, with the portraits and poor old Quiney’s begging letter to me? And the Kitchen and the Living-room, where we used to feed and foregather?”
“Yes; and revered everything with unquestioning faith.”
“Well, why shouldn’t you, if you believe in me? Of course I wasn’t born in my Birthplace, but I lived most of my boyhood in this house — or till I escaped to London, some say from the law, and some from the hopeless dullness of Stratford, though then there was no great outlook for me here with my wife and three children. Do my biographers say I brought Anne home here to live with me in this house? It would have been like my father to let me; he was a kind man and muddled away his money like many another kind man. He once said of me, ‘Will was a good, honest fellow, and he darest have cracked a jest with him at any time,’ which has been a great comfort to the biographers as material and as inferential evidence that I wrote my plays. And my mother, my dear mother, would have been a loving mother-in-law to Anne, as mothers-in-law go. Or do the biographers prefer to conjecture that I went home with Anne to Shottery? Been to Shottery yet?”
“Not this time; but I’m going.”
“Let me go with you. I think I can make some things clearer to you there. So you found his lordship at the Picture Theater?”
“Yes. I was rather surprised of his interest in the movies.”
“But why? He would have told you in his Latin that he counted nothing human alien to him because he was human himself, and he especially likes all manner of new inventions. He would rather have invented your talking-movies, I believe, than written some of my plays, say” — and here Shakespeare smiled knowingly at me—”’Pericles of Tyre’ or ‘A Comedy of Errors.’”
I laughed with guilty consciousness, but I said, hardily, “He couldn’t have written them.”
“Well, I don’t know,” he returned, and then he laughed out. “I didn’t, you know — or not entirely. In my day we took our own whenever the other fellows left it; and those are not the only plays of mine which I didn’t write entirely. Well, it was an understood thing; there was the raw material, and each of us worked it up after his own fancy.”
“But I rather wonder,” I said, “at Bacon’s interest in those mechanical inventions, which are a good deal in the nature of mechanical toys. Now the discovery of a general principle, or the application of it to some useful end—”
“I suppose he thinks harmless amusement and painless instruction are useful ends to be reached by the movies. And as he never could write plays he may hope to supplant the written and acted drama with them. You know that in Italy they’ve already supplanted the Marionette drama.”
“No!” I cried, and I felt a pang of the keenest regret. “Not the wriggling plays of the time-honored masks, operated by strings overhead and vocalized by many voices in one, squeaked and growled from behind — not Arleechino, and Pantalone, and Brighella, and Facanapa and Il Dottore, and Policinella, and the rest—”
“Swept by the board, all gone, before the devastating film. I was down in Venice, last night, at the little theater where you used to see them, and they were doing a Wild West movie piece just such as you saw to-day; and it’s the same everywhere in Italy.”
I was dumb with grief, and he hastened to turn the subject a little. “But it’s not only your application of mechanics to the drama which interests our friend. He’s much more interested in your Pure Food movement. He doesn’t at all sympathize, though, with the Anti-Cold Storage Crusade, which seems rather to have fallen through, by the by. He believes he discovered the principles of cold storage. You know he brought on his mortal sickness by leaving his coach on a very cold day and stopping at a farm-house to get a dressed hen which he stuffed with snow.”
I said I thought I remembered.
“The experiment was perfectly successful. The hen was preserved till the snow thawed; but Bacon took cold from the exposure and died. He maintains that his experiment was the first embryonic stirring of your gigantic system of Cold Storage.”
CHAPTER XIII
THE great poet began to walk up and down and round about over the grass with the impunity of disembodied spirits, and being dematerialized and devisibilized for our more convenient association in the place, I joined him without attracting the notice of the gardener, who was busy watching that predatory visitors did not pillage the beds of their late summer flowers, as they passed
down the walk from the house, and round and out by the garden gate. There was a constant stream of visitors, and I said to my companion: “How does all this affect you, this influx and efflux of people, who after three hundred years have read you, or heard of you, or would like to have read you, or to whom you’re at least such an object of interest that no traveler ought to miss seeing your Birthplace?”
“How do you mean?”
“Does their devotion bless you or ban you? Is it a joy or a bore? To me it looks like a perpetual afternoon tea where people are asked ‘To have the honor of meeting the memory of William Shakespeare,’ and expect somehow to feel that they’re with you.”
“Well, I don’t know,” he answered, thoughtfully. “It isn’t so bad as to have to stand tangibly in the middle of the Museum and shake hands with them all. They don’t know that I’m personally present, and in fact I’m not here, for the most part.”
“Yes, I understand that. But I suppose what I am trying to get at is whether the sense of their admiration is still as sweet as ever? Do you care for it as much as one does for a favorable notice of his new book with suggestive extracts? Something like that.”
“No, I shouldn’t say I did; though not because it’s rather an old story now. The fact is that their admiration rather searches out the seamy side of my work, where I’ve put it together and patched it out with that material of the older playwrights which we Elizabethans used to draw from. It isn’t pleasant to have people thinking it’s all mine, you know.”
“I understand. But I don’t understand how they ever mistake the work you helped yourself to for your own work. It seems to me that I can tell the borrowed from the created down to the last syllable. I make out that you helped yourself most in the comedies; at least I have to skip the most in them. You don’t mind my skipping?”
“Oh, I skip a good deal myself; and yes, I used the paste and scissors most in the comedies; scarcely at all in the tragedies, even those dramatized from the old Italian stories. But at the time I was doing my things, I didn’t distinguish much in the result. When I had got it on the stage all right, it seemed entirely mine, you know. It was when it came to printing the things that I began to feel the force of Polonius’s injunction: ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender he.’ I saw then that I had borrowed more than I should ever lend. But I didn’t worry much. You know I was rather lazy about the printed plays; I never read the proofs; and of course I never ‘blotted a line’ in the printed text any more than the written. After I came back to Stratford I left the whole affair to the compositors and the actors. I was pretty thoroughly tired.”
“I can imagine that. And this ever-gathering volume, this constantly increasing reverberation of men’s praise, how does that affect you?”
“Well, you know, not so unpleasantly as you might think. I suppose I’m rather simple about it. My London success didn’t make me very conscious, I believe. At the time I didn’t always feel it was me they were praising. One loses identity in those experiences. I didn’t always feel as if I had done the things, and they have gone on ever since becoming more and more impersonal to me. I don’t know whether I make myself quite clear. But that’s the way I manage to stand it.”
“Yes, I see,” I said.
“What I had done well seemed to become part of the great mass of good work done that belonged to nobody in particular.”
“I don’t know that I should altogether like that,” I demurred.
Shakespeare laughed genially. “Well, you would if you had done much good work. Now you want to keep your little own all your own.”
I was wondering what to say when a dreadful inaudible voice struck upon my inner ear in no-tones of inexpressible tragedy, “And the evil done, the sin, the wrong?”
It was Bacon who had joined us, speaking to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare, nothing surprised at his presence, unanswered: “Why, even more the evil than the good. Haven’t you said, somewhere” — he turned to me in asking, and I perceived a delicate intention of soothing the hurt to my self-love which his snub had given— “haven’t you said, somewhere, that when we own a sin, whether to others or to our consciences, we disown it, and it becomes a part of the general evil in the world?”
“Why, it seems to me that I did say that,” I answered, gratified to my inmost soul. “But how did you know—”
“Never mind, never mind,” he said, laying his hand caressingly on my shoulder. “Haven’t I told you that we read everything? We have no end of leisure.”
The somber shade of Bacon remained silently ignoring this exchange of civilities. At last he said to me, “And from what experience of yours did you learn that truth?”
“Oh, come!” Shakespeare answered, lightly. “Isn’t this asking?”
I stood recalling my many sins and hesitating which I should credit with the suggestion of my dark wisdom. “Well, I don’t know,” I parleyed; but I saw that Bacon really cared nothing for my sins, and was only thinking of his own.
“If I could believe that!” he passionately declared. “No sinner ever made opener or ampler avowal of his guilt than I did.”
“You couldn’t help it, my dear friend,” Shakespeare put in, with a smile which if mocking was tenderly mocking. “You had been tried and convicted by your peers before you owned up. Your sin had found you out, and I fancy that our brave moralist here means that we must own the sins which haven’t found us out if we wish to disown them. I have come to much the same effect by not denying mine, till now I haven’t any wish to deny them. But why should you continue to bother about yours? You were guilty of bribery and corruption, but, as you said, all the other judges were. It was a vice of our epoch, like my vices, which I was not ashamed of then, I’m now ashamed to say. My comedies abound in the filth of them, though not so much as some other people’s comedies; and I dare say there were judges more venal than you. But perhaps it’s the sin which you didn’t own; perhaps it was the case of—”
“Essex?” the unhappy ghost demanded. “Haven’t I owned it to him a thousand times? Haven’t I pursued him through all the timeless and spaceless reaches of eternity with my unavailing remorse? Hasn’t he forgiven me, entreated me to forgive myself, with that goodness of his which abounded to me in my unfriended need with every generous office of praise and purse, and which I repaid by hunting him to his death? Don’t tell me that in a few years he must have died even if I had not slain him! Don’t tell me that so open a rebel as he must have suffered death, even if I had not shut the gates of mercy on him. I, who owed him far dearer and truer allegiance than I owed that wretched old woman whom I called my sovereign, and whom I thought to serve to my own glory and profit by persecuting my friend!”
Shakespeare looked at him with a curious kind of pity. “What a tragedy you could have written! How you could have out-Hamleted and out-Macbethed me!”
“Why not do it yet?” I appealed to them both. “I am sure that any of our editors would be glad to print it, and it would be only a step from the magazine to the stage. With our improved psychical facilities it would be easy to find some adequate medium—”
The abject spirit’s mood changed, and he demanded, scornfully: “And prove that I wrote ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth,’ too? No, thanks. I couldn’t do anything to re-open that chapter. And if I must say it, I don’t envy the author of those plays the gross and palpable renown which he enjoys from them. I can bear what I must bear till somehow I am released from my burden; people don’t know how bad I am; many never heard of me as a recreant friend or a corrupt magistrate; they only know me as the author of the inductive method, which they don’t understand, or as the putative author of Shakespeare’s plays, which they haven’t read, not even the fatuous thirteen thousand Americans who annually visit his Birthplace — the Birthplace where he first came to live after he was a well-grown boy! Of all the hollow unrealities, of all the juiceless husks which human vanity feeds on, literary glory seems to me the emptiest and dryest. If among those thirteen thousand Americans, or the
hundred thousand other pilgrims who troop annually to this supposititous shrine, there were one utterly sincere and modest soul; if in this whole town of Stratford there were one simple lower-class person who loved Shakespeare for himself, or cared for him, or even knew of him, I would grant him some joy of his swollen celebrity, his Falstaffian bulk of fame stuffed out with straw.”
“I have thought of that,” I put in, while Shakespeare remained placidly smiling. “It’s a point that I’ve wanted to test. We all knew how the comfortable and cultivated people feel about our great and good friend, but I’ve been curious, ever since I came to Stratford, to know how people who are not particularly comfortable and not at all cultivated feel about him. I believe I have in mind just the person to apply to,” and at my volition there came a sort of tremor such as when the pictures change at the movies, and we were standing in the little cluttered shop of the kind woman who sold me the plums for my lunches.
While she was doing up the pound, half of green gages and half of victorias, which I ordered, I said: “Oh, by the way, my friends and I here” — she stared, and I explained— “here in Stratford, have been wondering how much the townspeople, the tradespeople, the workpeople really know or care about Shakespeare. What do you think?”
“What do I — no, it’s only sevenpence, sir; a penny less than for all green gages — what do I think?”
“Yes. Do you honestly care anything about Shakespeare?”
She looked up a little bewildered. Then she said, “Why, how could we live without him, sir?”
The ghostly presence of the poet laughed inaudibly out. “There you have it! I am my townsmen’s stock in trade, their livelihood, their job! They couldn’t live without me! Well, I’m not sorry if that’s what I come to with them.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1000