Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Yes; that’s one of the educated ones.” This voice was the cat-bird twang of so many of our women, and it sometimes made itself heard in the dining-room, where the dress of the speaker was not always of that superior taste which we used to pride ourselves upon in our women. It was difficult to choose one day between the plumage of a lady who wore a single tall ostrich feather, full and blue, curling far aloof from her hat, and the feather of another lady exactly the same in outline, but as to the final curl black and skeletonized. There was in most of these motoring women an effect of not being sure that they had got all they had come for, or of not quite knowing what they had come for, and in their men a savage, suspensive air, as if, having given Europe a fair trial, as a relief from business, or as a pleasure to their wives and daughters, they were going to see about it when they got home. Perhaps all this is unfair; and perhaps it would not be just to judge our national nature from the expression of the average automobile people at home.

  They had been motoring through England and Wales, as they would report when they got back, and were suffering a mental and moral dyspepsia from bolting the beautiful scenery untasted as they could seize it with distorted eyes, much as people seize the events of a three-ring circus. We ourselves became of their class for several runs into the country about, but besides not being able to afford the folly, we really preferred the neat victorias which they have cheap at Stratford, but not so cheap as good. In one of these, apt for our little party of three, we could find ourselves domesticated in the landscape round about. The country was of the same bright openness as the town, and one could as easily love it. I had supposed it leveler than it proved, though it was level enough, and where it waved, it waved with harvests of wheat and rye, golden and glossy green, rippling as the surfaces of the long ground swells at sea do. In the distance, the uplands were of a tender blue, and in the dim air the trees mounted like smoke from the hedges. The Avon and other vague streams idled about, and there were bridges and farm-houses and villages that one passed without much worrying over their identity, though no doubt they each had an identity. They had their bowering orchards of gnarled apples and of wonderful plums, green and blue and red, which were as much an example to American plums as the wheat-fields to our wheat-fields. We praised one of the thickest harvests to a conversible farmwife, but she said, “Oh no, that was not good wheat; you could see between the stems.” The region is not only a good farming country, however, but a good hunting country, and after the pleasures of the Shakespeare month end in Stratford the savage joys of the chase begin for the boyish men and women who ride to hounds through the sweet, insulted scene.

  In England many things change, suddenly, thoroughly, but other things remain unchanged, usages projected from the dead past like the light from planets extinct long before it has reached the earth. They still have kings and queens in that romantic island, and lords and ladies who have no more relation to its real life than gnomes and fairies, but must be indulged with the shows and games invented for them in the days when people believed in them, and not merely made-believe. Now and then a grim smile of derision which is also self-derision breaks over the good-natured visage of the make-believers and is accepted by the universal tolerance as of right and reason. Hard by a fine old stone bridge, where the Avon found us in the country half an hour after we had parted from it in town, stood a pleasant inn, with lawns and potential tea-gardens round it, which called itself The Four Alls, and illustrated its name by a sign-board bearing the effigy of the king who Rules All, of a clergyman who Prays All, of a soldier who Fights All, and of an average man who Pays All. These Four Alls appear to prevail in every civilized country, but they might not everywhere be painted in such smiling irony as here.

  I believe it was on our way home from visiting the home of Shakespeare’s mother at Wilmecote, that we stopped to converse with the amiable landlord of the Four Alls Inn. She was that Mary Arden who was as gently as his father was fiercely named, and whom one is willing to think as gently natured as her name. The Welsh are beginning to boast her of their race, as if, not content with the honor of the greatest living Briton, they must needs claim through her the greatest Briton dead; but if Welsh, she was doubtless of one of the many princely Welsh lines, of no apparent grandeur in its exile. The Arden cottage, at any rate, is a little wayside thing, belted in with a bright-flowered narrow garden, and it leans its timbered wall somewhat wearily, as from its weight of four hundred years, toward the earth. All the world knows, which knows so much too little of her world-famous son, that Mary Arden brought her husband this cottage and its sixty acres, under her father’s will, with other lands and tenements inherited from her two sisters; and if not of princely state, she was of a comfortable yeoman lineage. When she went to live at Stratford it is pleasant to believe that she left her father and mother living at Wilmecote, and keeping up the ancestral farm there in better state than one sees it now. The cottage and the decrepit barns and stables, with their sagging walls and slanting roofs, inclose a sufficient farmyard, with a gate giving into a venerable orchard, which tempted but did not prevail with us to penetrate its grass-grown aisles. One likes to leave such places to their solitude; and besides, the tenant of the cottage, who promptly demanded sixpence each for letting us see it, was not sure that her summer lease included a sight of the orchard. She led us up and down over the homelike cottage, which opened in an unexpected number of comfortable little rooms; these, opening casually from one to another, had been modernized, but not too modernized, with sparing English grates, where once the freer fires must have been of wood. Several staircases led to the upper rooms; the thick walls showed their oaken beams; the narrow sash were leaded; the floors were stone. It was very homelike, very suitable for a grandfather and grandmother, and I was thinking that if Shakespeare used to come out from Stratford to see the old people there he must have had glorious times, when the inaudible voice at my ear from the invisible presence at my shoulder, which I had now come to expect at any thought of it, said: “Yes, far more glorious times than any I ever had in London at the height of what I thought my prosperity. My mother used to bring me here when I was too little to know how homesick she was for it, and then sometimes my father brought me, and by and by I came alone. I dogged my grandfather’s heels all over the farm till I came to know every inch of it, but I seem never to have lost any moment of my grandmother’s cooking. When I went away I was in paunch and pocket full of the gingerbread which she made better than any one else in the world; I missed none of the wild berries in their season or the earlier and later apples in the orchard, or the plums that overhung the house-wall. I knew the dogs and horses and cows; I was not too proud to be friends with the pigs. I robbed the wild birds’ nests, and I didn’t neglect the partridges and pheasants even when I came to understand that they were sacred to the gentry; it was the beginning of my poaching, I dare say. I swam in a famous pool which there was beyond the orchard in summer, and in winter I risked a ducking on its thin ice. I loved Stratford, and my mother, and even my father, but a boy is king in his grandmother’s house, and I bore sovereign rule here. Yes, those were glorious times indeed.”

  As we drove home to Stratford, the afternoon grew lovelier and lovelier, with a mild sun and a few large white clouds lounging in a high, blue sky. In the hedges the hips of the sweetbriers were reddening and the hawthorn berries were already scarlet. The blackberries were ripe where the canes were broken down by the pickers. The wheat was mostly cut, and in the farmyards where it had been threshed the ricks of bright new straw were neatly thatched. We came from Wilmecote to the Alcester road by a lane that was almost wild, and out through a deep, peaceful valley; when we reached the highway two little girls in pinafores were standing beside it, one with her pretty arm up to shield her eyes from the westering sun; and in all our course we met only two motors, and —

  “Yes, yes! It is peaceful, peaceful, utterly charming!” I said to the presence which had mounted with us for the homeward drive, of course
not incommoding us in the least; but suddenly it had become an absence, in the fashion of such presences as soon as you take your mind off them; they are so delicately fearful of seeming intrusive.

  CHAPTER X

  NEARLY every evening of every week of August we strolled out after dinner from our hotel to the corner of New Place, where Shakespeare died, down Chapel Lane to the theater where he still lived in those plays of his which were given every second night and every third afternoon. They were the most vital experiences of the commemorative month, and the Memorial Theater found in their succession a devotion to its office beyond the explicit intention of its giver. That is what I say now, trying to do justice to the esthetic and civic fact, but to be honest nothing of the kind was in my mind at the time. I only thought how charming it was to be going to a Shakespeare play on terms so quite unlike going to any other play in any other place. The days were shortening in August, but the twilights were still long, and they were scarcely half-way spent when they saw us to the theater with all the Stratford world, gentle and simple. The way across the street at the foot of the lane was guarded by a single policeman who sufficed to save us from the four or five motors glaring with their premature lamps, and panting after their run from Warwick or Leamington. Without his help one could have safely passed between the family carriages bringing the nearer neighbors to rites which the whole region frequented rather more than if they were of religious claim. But by far the greatest number of us came on foot, and when the play was done, we went home by the same means under the moonlight, in the informality of morning dress unless we had bought places in the first row of the balcony. The orchestra implied no such claim, but partook of the informality of the pit behind it, which there as in most English theaters continues the tradition now lost to our theaters. The seats were not reserved there, nor in the upper galleries, which, however sparse the attendance elsewhere might be, were always packed by the undying love of the people for the universal poet.

  Sometimes when I fancied the poet there, in escape from a heavy evening with Bacon in their riverside cottage, I liked to suppose a generous regret in him for not having anticipatively requited this affection by tenderer treatment of the lower classes in his plays. But then I reflected that the English lower classes have always preferred to have the smooth things given to the upper classes, especially on the stage, and that they probably found their account there in imagining themselves such or such a lord or lady in the scene, and fitting their friends and neighbors to the humbler parts. Once I reminded him of Tolstoy’s censure of his want of kindness toward them, and he said he had been too nearly of them, in his own life; he satirized his own faults in them; and what literature was to do was to join political economy in making men so equal in fortune that there could be no deformity, no vulgarity in them which sprang from the pressure of need or the struggle of hiding or escaping its effects. The vanity of poverty was as ridiculous as the vanity of riches, and might be as fairly laughed at. His defense did not quite satisfy me, and I said I would hand him over to Mr. Shaw. But at the Memorial Theater I could not imagine any dramatist but himself, or hardly any moralist. In the wonderfully even performance of the plays throughout, the art of the actors did not slight the nature of the characters studied from low life; it was rendered with a reality that convinced of the dramatist’s truth, if that ever needed argument. No part was slighted, whether high or low, but one could have more pleasure of the upper classes because their reality was less tedious than that of the churls and clowns who, if anything, superabound in the Shakespeare plays; he might contend that they superabound in life. This evenness was, of course, the effect of unsparing vigilance in the admirable over-artist whose conscience was felt in every moment and every detail. His whole professional career had been directed to the Shakespeare drama which he imagined giving with an unselfishness unknown save among its most impassioned devotees. The range of the plays was suggestive if not fully illustrative of the poet’s largest range. There were “The Merchant of Venice,” “As You Like It,” “Hamlet,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Twelfth Night,” “Richard the Second,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “King John,” “Romeo, and Juliet,” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor”; and of these I saw such I had seen seldomest, but now I am sorry I did not see them all. They were all well done, and in censure you could say no worse than that some were done better than others. If I do not name the over-artist it is because I am naming nobody in a record which is keeping itself in a high fantastic air, and as much aloof from every-day matter-of-fact as if it were one of those romantic fictions I have always endeavored to bring into contempt. He took such peculiarly difficult parts as Richard the Second, or King John, with an address that made them live so in the imagination as to win your pity where your sympathy was impossible; he was specially trained, if not natured, for tragedy, but he could for instance abandon himself unselfishly to the comedy of such a part as Doctor Caius in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” His reward was to make it wildly delightful, and delightful a play which I had always imagined a heavy piece of voluntary drolling, but must always think of hereafter as charming, full of the human nature of its day and of all time. I should have liked to make my apologies to Shakespeare if I had found him in the audience as often as I found him on the stage. I should have had to confess that mostly I found his comedies, in the reading, poor stuff, as compared with his tragedies and histories. But he usually came with Bacon, whom I should have to join in blaming those lighter plays. When it was a question of the authorship Bacon was stanchly Shakespearean, but that once granted he was somewhat less Shakespearean than such an ardent fellow-townsman of the poet as I had now become, could desire. There was a supreme moment of King John when I most longed for the author to enjoy it with me. The playing was of that beautiful evenness which left no part, and no part of any part unstudied, and which makes us rather sorry, in its steady glow, for the meteoric splendors of our American acting. After all, Shakespeare was an Englishman, and I suppose he spoke with an English voice in his plays, so that if I were an Englishman, too, I might be emboldened to claim that until you had heard the voices of the English actors in the several parts you had not heard his characters speak as Shakespeare heard them. To be sure, Shakespeare himself spoke with a Warwickshire accent, and though he had probably worn it off in his long London sojourn he must have returned to it after he came back to Stratford, as Bacon had noted in our first night with them in Cheltenham. Still, I should say that broad Warwickshire was truer to the accents which his inner ear perceived than those of our Middle West, or Philadelphia, or Broadway, or even Boston accent, or of them all synthetized in the strange blend which passes on our stage for the English voice.

  In that supreme moment scene, costume, action, expression, were all so proper, so exquisitely harmonized that though it was by no means the most important scene, or one of the most important scenes, I thought that if the poet could have witnessed it his heart must have swelled almost to bursting for joy in the perfection of it. I tried to compel his presence by that longing which I had several times found effective with him, but he would not respond, and I was thrown back upon the question how much or little a great dramatist of the past might really care for the modern perfection of the upholstering which so stays and comforts the imagination of the average theater-goer, say the tired business man or the over-intellectualized club woman. Shakespeare, if he had come at my call, might have said that the action and expression were richly enough for him, and these were what so chiefly satisfied him in the highest moments; that the costuming and the setting were for others and not for him; that for him these were like the dress of a gentleman which if fit was the last thing you noticed in his presence. Then I might have come back at him with the argument that if he had been imagining a theater nowadays he would not have been content with less than the perfection of that entourage. At this he must have allowed that as a dramatist he owed more than his answer implied to the arts which the Shakespeare scholarship of such a
manager as this had summoned to his help. As himself an actor-manager, and used to dealing with the work of others and adapting it to the needs of his theater, he would have approved of this actor-manager’s cutting of his plays, which I liked so much that when I recurred to the printed text I found little cause to desire it in its entirety, though I do not make so bold as to say that the cuts were unerringly those which Shakespeare would have made himself. I only say something like this; and that in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” for instance, there was no line which I would have had restored for the stage. It was the personal companionableness of Shakespeare, his modest, his humorous capacity of self-forgetfulness which made him so delightful. I am sure that in his visits to the Memorial Theater (which perhaps he did not visit oftener because of a natural diffidence) he would have liked as much as I did its quality of home, the charming sense of hospitality and domesticity, in which people met each other, and nodded and smiled from orchestra and balcony, and went about between the acts shaking hands, like neighbors akin in their common love of the Supreme Poet whom we so felt there the brother of us all. It was not my happy fortune to be there the last night of the happy season, but I have heard that the genial audience then for farewell took hands all round the theater and sang “Auld Lang Syne” together.