Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  It would not be easy to give a true notion of the fullness of each day’s pleasuring without seeming to give a false one, and I shall not try to do more than touch here and there on a fact of it. I should not be able to say indeed just how or why we found our favored way, one of the first mornings, to the Parish Parlor where we somehow knew that there was to be folk-singing and folk-dancing, and a lecture about both. Two years earlier we had formed the taste for these joys at a whole day of them in the Memorial Theater, and had vowed ourselves never to miss a chance at them. The songs then were sung and the dances danced by young people and children from the neighboring factories and farms, but now the intending teachers of those gay sciences were being taught by one deeply learned in them and of an impassioned devotion to them. One of the ballads was so modern as to be in celebration of the Shannon’s victory over the Chesapeake in the War of 1812, when the American ship went out from Boston to fight the British, and somehow got beaten. It had a derisive refrain of “Yankee Doodle Dandy O,” and whether or not the lecturer divined our presence, and imagined our pain from this gibe, it is certain that the next time he gave the ballad to be sung, he adventurously excused it on the ground that it possibly celebrated the only British victory of the war. Nothing could have been handsomer than that, and it was in the true Shakespearean spirit of Stratford where fourteen thousand Americans come every year to claim our half of Shakespeare’s glory.

  Three days of the week the lecturer taught the teachers by precept and example; he talked a little, very simply and unaffectedly, from full knowledge of his theme, and then he called upon the students to sing and dance. He was not above giving them the pitch from his pipe, and then playing the tune on the piano with the accompaniment of a girl violinist; and we could not choose whether we liked the singing or the dancing better. They sang old country ballads and they danced old country ballets, telling stories, and reverting to the primitive earth-worship in the lilting and the stamping and the bell-clashing of the morris dances. The pictures which the learners made in illustration of the lecturer’s theme were our unfailing joy, but the first morning we had our soul’s content absolute beyond any other fortune when the whole glad school issued from the place, and formed in the middle of the street, where, men and maids together, they took the light of the open day with the witchery of their art, as they wove its patterns with their intercircling shapes and their flying feet and their kerchiefs tossing in the air above their heads. This wild joyance was called a Processional, and it was likewise called Tideswell, after the village where it was first imagined. One morning the lecturer joined in it, and became a part of its warp and woof.

  It was a vision of Merry England which the heart could give itself to more trustingly than to any dream of the olden time when, with whatever will, England had far less reason to be merry than now. At last the sense of human brotherhood seems to have penetrated with conscience the legislature long so cold to the double duty law owes the common life. The English lawgiver has perceived that to keep people fairly good it must make them decently happy. Better wages, evener taxes, wholesomer housing, fitter clothing, are very well, but before these comes the right to a fairer part of the general cheer. It was told us that the young people who came to learn these glad tidings at Stratford were all teachers in the national schools, and that they were paid by the government for their pleasure in learning them. Perhaps I have not got it quite right, but it ought to be as I have got it, and at any rate I will leave it so. It is certain that these young men and maids were working as conscientiously at their gay sciences as if they were gloomy ones; the young men in tennis flannels and the maids in the gymnasium wear which left them free to foot it illustratively in the morris and the country dances. Most of the young ladies were housed for the month in a girls’ school, with its dormitories and its lawns and groves; others dwelt in tents along the levels of the Avon, where through its willows you could see them from your punt making their afternoon tea, or kindling their fires for the evening meal, all sweetly sylvan, and taking the heart with joy in their workday so like a holiday. They went about the streets of the town in the waterproofs which cloaked the informality of their ballet dress; sometimes the dress was so little ballet that it needed no cloaking, and such a dress we once saw worn late in the afternoon when the wearer had to fly up the street toward the Parish Parlor so as not to be late for the song-and-dance lecture. The dress was blue, and it fluttered about the young ankles as the wearer ran along the wall under some overhanging bushes which claimed her part of their bird-life and flower-life, and thrilled the heart of the beholders with a sense of beauty escaped from some

  Attic shape, fair attitude, with brede

  Of marble men and maidens overwrought.

  Then one of those who saw the lovely vision thought, “What a pity Shakespeare could not see that!” and instantly to his inner hearing came the response, “I never miss seeing such things as that,” and there at my shoulder the friendly phantom was, or was not, it mattered so little whether or no.

  CHAPTER VI

  AT Stratford I felt as I had not before that one of the most charming things in Shakespeare, a man so variously charming that his contemporaries each might love him for a different thing, was his fondness for his native town. Every one knows how affectionately he came back to Stratford from his brilliant success as player and playwright in London, and apparently could ask nothing better than to end his earthly days where he began them. During our wonderful August of uninterrupted golden weather he seemed to like dropping round to my hotel in the afternoon, when I had got my nap, and taking me a walk about the town, where he appeared to be as much at home with the modern aspects as with the older phases. He had the good citizen’s pride in its growth, and noted how pleasantly it had pushed out beyond his birthplace to the northward uplands in streets of nice little, new-brick villas, each with its grassy dooryard and flowery garden. He liked all the newer streets, even those where the close-set, story-and-a-half rows of small brick cottages were like the monotonously ordered play-blocks of children. He professed a pleasure in their bright red, which he said expressed simple cheerfulness and cleanly comfort, and he could not understand at first how they should interest me so little, I being from a new world full of new dwellings. But when I explained that this was the very reason, he laughed and said it was quite imaginable, and he amiably consented to rambles through the fields beyond, where Nature was neither new nor old, but was what she always had been and always would be. Or from the northward uplands he would turn back across the Avon canal, and come down William or Tyler Street to the gardens beyond the Birthplace and veer off through the irregular square at the head of Bridge Street, into Chapel. We never failed to join in tender enjoyment of the sentiment of the Police Station, with its lace-curtained bow-windows, and its beds of flowers beneath them. He seemed particularly fond also of that rather blank square where High Street began, with the slope of Bridge Street to the river and the little afternoon show of hucksters’ booths at the top, and the huge omnibus motors for Leamington and Warwick standing midway of its incline before the Red Horse and the Golden Lion inns. He made me confess that the effect of the bridge across the river was very pleasant if not too picturesque, and now and then he walked me down to the holiday life of the stream, and the sheds of the cattle-market beyond.

  I had not the ordinary traveler’s zeal for the timbered houses so characteristic of Stratford, and so rather abundant in High Street and Chapel Street; but one day I fancied going with him into the Harvard House, which I confessed was very charming and perhaps the best example of the style. Apparently the American flag flying at the peak of the gable without the rivalry of the British colors anywhere in the town amused him, for he smiled in looking up at it, and said in his time we were all English, or if I liked, all Americans. I said he would probably find some Americans to prefer that formulation among the many thousand that visited his Birthplace every year; but as for me I should be content with saying that we were all Sh
akespeareans then. At this he laughed outright, and taking me by the shoulder pushed me toward the door. He put his hand on the carved panel and we passed through its substance without attracting the notice of the kind woman who shows people about the place. There were a number of Americans following her and listening to her comment on the house which, girl and woman, she had known while it was still business offices, brutally modernized with plaster and paper that hid the rich, old black timbers and the wattle-and-dab of the homely walls. She was saying that she still lived in it, and kept house in the top story, while Shakespeare, who was making me invisible and inaudible with himself, laughed and said: “Before we took that cottage of ours on the river, I brought our friend Bacon here with me in the hope that this good soul, or perhaps even Mistress Harvard, might find us quarters after we had been turned from every other door in Stratford. You may imagine what a piece of luck I thought it when instead we were received by the Rev. John Harvard himself, who had come down to Stratford for the Bank Holiday, and had kept staying on with his mother for pure pleasure in the town. John is a good fellow, and I counted so confidently on his welcome that I made my friend known to him at once. ‘You’ll be glad to meet Lord St. Albans,’ I said, ‘because a law professor of yours over there in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of the most strenuous and zealous upholders of the theory that he wrote my plays. It’s something that neither his lordship nor I believe in ourselves, but we respect the earnest convictions of others, and he has always rather liked having the theory dignified by a law professor’s acceptance; he has a fellow-feeling for a jurist, you know.’ I saw Harvard was a little bemazed by my palaver, and evidently groping for my friend’s identity. ‘St. Albans — St. Albans,’ he said, and I said, ‘Yes; Sir Francis Bacon, you know,’ and then he said, ‘Oh! Oh yes!’ and shook hands, but not very cordially, I thought, and he asked, ‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ which I always feel equivalent to ‘How little can I do?’ I told him he could save our souls alive by giving us the shelter of his roof for the night, and I related our misadventures. He laughed rather meagerly, and said he should be only too glad, but ‘It’s my mother’s house, you know; I’m only here as a sort of guest myself. I’d ask her; but she’s rather a stiff old Puritan, and I don’t know just what she would say to having a stage-player under her roof.’ ‘Oh, that’s all right!’ I reassured him. ‘I don’t mind walking the night, myself, but his lordship is rather worn out, and I don’t think he’ll much mind my leaving him.’ In fact, I saw by his anxious face that he wouldn’t mind it at all; he was always ready to throw a friend over; Essex, you know. I added, to humor the joke, that though he might have written my plays, it was certainly I who played them, and Mistress Harvard’s objection ought to rest on me alone. The Reverend John’s eye glimmered cold; he hemmed and hawed, but said nothing about Bacon’s staying the night under his mother’s roof without me, and Bacon pulled himself up out of the chair he had dropped into, and we went out again under the stars, more hospitable than John Harvard’s eyes.”

  I was rather blankly silent. Then I managed to ask: “And is this your notion of something amusing? Or merry, as you would call it?”

  “Why, if it doesn’t appear so to you! But at the time I thought that after my being turned out of one house on Bacon’s account he was having his revenge in being turned out of another on my account.”

  “Oh, I see. That was rather merry,” I said, but I hastened to leave the point. “By the way, this strikes me as being one of the nicest of your old timbered houses; it’s a style of architecture that can’t very well be commended for beauty; but I suppose it has charm, and it’s endearingly simple-hearted. I like their opening a bit of the wall here to show the wattle-and-dab construction, the interwoven wooden slats filled in with mortar; we’re mostly wattle-and-dab ourselves, morally, if not physically; and the old house has its stateliness. Looking from the back toward the street this main room is of noble size and proportions, and that nicely carpentered frieze is delicate and very pretty. Who were the Harvards, anyway?”

  “Not Harvards, even, when this house was built. It was built by your John’s grandfather and grandmother, and very probably his mother, who was their daughter Katherine, was married from it to John’s father; he belonged in Southwark, where I had one of my theaters, and his father was a butcher. My own father was a butcher, you know, after he failed in the wool business, and I handled the meat myself.”

  “Yes, yes,” I hastened to interrupt; he was running to autobiography too much. “I hope you didn’t obtrude the horrid carnage on the public as your English butchers do nowadays. I suppose,” I ventured, “that it was considered rather a drop from the butchering business when you took up play-acting.”

  “You mean by my townfolk here? Well, they didn’t regard my London life with pride exactly, as you may have inferred from the Harvards’ reluctance about me.”

  “And over there,” I pursued, helpless against the curiosity I had, “over there — where you are now, I mean — do they look upon it quite as the good people of that day did?”

  “The dramatic vocation? Why, we are rather useful occasionally. Eternity gets a bit long, now and then, and a vivid representation of some sort helps make it go again. And in the case of a reluctant conscience, a sluggish and unwilling memory as to deeds done in the body, if we can dramatize the facts to the doer — Yes, we are rather useful, and nothing is respected so much as usefulness, there.”

  He stopped, and I took the word. “I see; and I suppose you were away in London at the time this house was built in 1596?”

  “I was back and forth a good deal, for I always meant to retire to Stratford and I was buying real estate here—”

  “And Tithes, and supposititious Gentility, so as to qualify you to set up a coat of arms?”

  “I gave way to that folly, yes. It is a part of the English illusion. You are fortunate in having had your eyes opened in America, where you care nothing for such things.”

  “Well, well,” I parleyed. “I don’t know.”

  “Really?” he returned, ironically. He was silent, and when he spoke again he said, pathetically: “I remember the year this house was built chiefly because 1596 was the year my poor boy Hamnet died. It would have broken my heart if his mother hadn’t given me hers to keep it whole. That was when we were first truly married. I thought I was parting with him forever, but Anne knew better; we’ve often talked it over together, she and I, and the girls. It was then that I fixed the time when I should come to Stratford. We were in the old Henley Street house still, but I had my eye on New Place.”

  As he spoke I found myself in the street with him, and began taking account of the many timbered houses which I had already noticed in the different streets. We had the Tudor House directly at hand (rather overdone, after the quiet Harvard House), and as I glanced along Chapel Street at the stretches of the same sort of buildings, I said: “Why, if you took them all out of Henley Street, and Wood and Ely and Sheep and Chapel Streets, and put them together they would reach nearly half a mile, but with their white masonry and black timbers, don’t you think they would look a little too striking? Rather too like half a mile of zebras?”

  “Why, you might say zebras; but they are not all so too striking as this Tudor House, which you’re mostly carrying in your mind, and which is not strictly Tudor, though it is decidedly timbered. And do you think that any middle-class or lower middle-class dwelling in any country was then so good, or was in such good taste? I believe I’ve read in one of your own books that we English never had known so much comfort before or since as in the period of these houses.”

  “Yes, yes; certainly. And if I said it I must have been right, and come to think of it, I was right as to the inside of these houses. It’s the outside that rather troubles me when I imagine an indefinite stretch of it; then it turns into that half-mile of zebras. You don’t mind my saying it?”

  “Oh, not at all. I believe the great mosque at Cordova reminded you of a colore
d circus tent—”

  “Why, you do keep round after me! I didn’t suppose you followed us moderns so closely. I’m sure it’s very gratifying. But I suppose you have a great deal of time on your hands?”

  “We have a great deal of eternity; excess leisure is one of our little penalties; if we’ve wasted our time on earth we have a sense of too much eternity. Of course it isn’t rubbed in, or not indefinitely, though naturally there are extreme cases when it is rather rubbed in, or seems to be. Then a spirit is glad to turn to almost anything for relief, and in that way all your popular literature, all your best-selling fiction, for instance, gets read among us. I can’t say that it’s read by our best public, but perhaps the public’s as good as the fiction.”

  I gave an unwilling laugh. “I hope your acquaintance with my travels was not punitive. I don’t understand that you wasted a great deal of time when you had the time.”

  “I gave myself vacant spaces. But your Spanish travels were not one of my penalties.”

  “Oh, thank you!”

  “I’m not saying, though, that I agreed with you about the mosque at Cordova. I don’t agree with you altogether about the outside of Stratford. In my time when it was all timbered houses it was a very dignified old town;’ it’s only in my eternity that it seems to have gone off, now when many of the buildings along High Street and Chapel here are said to be timbered fronts stuccoed or bricked over. But as it is—”