Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “At any rate, in that you come to something real,” the philosopher assented.

  CHAPTER XIV

  UPON the whole I was glad not to have the company of the great poet on the way to Shottery, whither we drove that afternoon. The difficulty of conversing with a disembodied spirit while driving with people still of our earthly minority is considerable; the lightning changes from mortal to immortal is what ladies call nerve-racking; and the anxiety not to lose anything that such a spirit as Shakespeare might say must result in an inattention to the others which would seem impolite to say the least.

  It is an easy walk from Stratford to Shottery, but the drive is still easier, and by a road pleasanter, I think, than the foot-path across the fields which Shakespeare probably took when he went wooing Anne Hathaway. We ought now to have thought of that courtship, but if the truth must be told we were amusing ourselves unworthily enough in counting up the number of perambulators which so abound in Stratford, and which seemed all to be taking their way that afternoon to Shottery, as if they too were going to Anne Hathaway’s cottage. I forget how many there were by the time we reached the curving streets of the hamlet, but before we got out of Stratford there were twenty-one, sometimes with twins in them, all preparing in one way or other to make their living off the memory of their mighty townsman; for I do not suppose there was a baby among them so ungrateful as to believe in the Baconian authorship.

  Shottery streets are curving, and of a rustic prettiness, with sincere Kate Greenway cottages set practicable behind little gardens, after you get away from the suburban trimness of the houses nearest Stratford. Sincere and practicable as the rest, with the largest and brightest of the little gardens, the Anne Hathaway cottage was instantly recognizable by the throngs of sight-seers within and about its gates. The sight-seers were instantly recognizable, in the vast majority as American girls, waiting their turn in faintly sarcastic patience to be admitted to the cottage, and joking or at least smiling together, at other American girls who packed its doorways. Their sarcastic patience was the national mood in which we Americans face most problems of life, and it commended them, somehow, more than the varying expression of the other visitors arriving in huge motor-omnibus loads, and by carriage and automobile and on foot from every part of the world. In a way the spectacle was preposterous; but the afternoon was beautiful, and the cottage stood unconscious amidst its flowery creepers, looking gently from its latticed windows at the multitude and drawing its thatch over its eaves in a sort of tolerant surprise. In its simple memories of the courtship which had so amazingly consecrated it, one could imagine also a dismay at the outcome, such as poor Anne Hathaway herself must have felt if she had been there. It was her home and her people’s home, and they too might well have been bewildered at such a far effect from her marriage with the rather wild young Shakespeare lad whose family was certainly no better than hers, and who had not behaved too well, though as things went in that day and place no worse than many others. One could fancy an irreconcilable feeling in the place, as the dense crowd pushed from room to room, and up-stairs and down, and elbowed and gasped and perspired and tried for some personal significance to each in their presence there. None could have denied that the custodians who led from room to room and delivered the crowd over from one to another did their intelligent best to realize this for them. For myself I felt an appeal in it which I could not well express. The decency of the whole place, with the propriety of the furnishings, mostly typical, of course, rather than original, but to me somehow recalling the simplicities of the new American country where I had seen like things in old pioneer dwellings, was touching. It was much to be shown an illustrative rushlight, and how, when it was crossed, one might burn the candle at both ends, as the proverb says; and it was much to see a rush bed, with the mattress resting on the rope webbing, familiar to me from the many movings of my childhood, when the cords had to be trodden and tightened into a reluctant elasticity by the paternal foot.

  I was expecting throughout the presence which it seemed to me ought to make itself sensible, there, and when we came to that room where there is a rude settle built into the chimney-place, and our cicerone said, “This is where the young people used to do most of their courting,” I felt in the words, few and simple, the thrill of a pathos imperishable as the soul itself, the richness of the race’s experience of youth and love, not alienable by circumstance or effaceable by death itself.

  “Now, surely,” I thought, “he will act upon the hint,” but then instantly I felt the vulgarity of my expectation. It was not of Anne Hathaway, his sweetheart, that Shakespeare would have spoken there as he had once spoken of Anne his aging wife; or make this the occasion of defending her fame against his own. Doubtless this was his tacit way of fulfilling his half promise to be with me at Shottery; he was making me divine the case for myself. I joined the mass of humanity descending the stairs in bulk, and separating its crumpled particles in a recovered severalty where those American girls sat smiling ironically but resolutely waiting to appropriate our experience.

  In Shottery there is a tea-garden prettily called after Portia, and to this we went thirsting for her promptest brew, which was served us in one of her pleached bowers of plum-trees weighed down by their purple burden of victorias. We found ourselves very hungry as well as thirsty, and ordered jam with the bread and butter which comes by nature with tea in England; but the jam was a mistake. Almost as soon as it came a swarm of yellow-jackets came and proposed sharing it with us. This is what the English yellow-jackets always do; but it seemed as if the Portia kept swarms of them, to let loose upon ignorant strangers and frighten them into surrendering the jam which they have ordered and must pay for. The plan, if it was a plan, succeeded perfectly in our case. The yellow-jackets swooped upon us, and we instantly called to have the jam taken away, but even with the removal of the jam the yellow-jackets did not go; they remained humming and buzzing, and demanding explanations which we were not able to give. Then they possessed themselves of our bread and butter, and even threatened our tea, which we had to gulp hastily and as it were by stealth. We feared they might follow us to our fly, but our rout seemed to bewilder them; and we left them darkly murmuring in the air above our table after we paid and fled.

  “A little more of this,” I said, as we drove out of Shottery, while the over-laden motorbusses passed earthquakingly by us, “a little more, and I shall begin to believe in the Bacon authorship.”

  CHAPTER XV

  THERE was a delicate touch of autumn in the air that revived my drooping faith; and the color of the haws and reddening leaves in the untrimmed hedges consoled; so that after a night’s sleep we were ready for the evidence of the school where Shakespeare got his “small Latin and less Greek.” The row of old timbered buildings, low, red-tiled, with the second-story overhang, stretches away from the Guild Chapel with not much distinction between the Grammar School and the endearing almshouses in which one could well desire to be a pauper such as often stood at the doorways and looked so willing to have us come in. We rashly put off doing that till another time, and so never did it, but we felt that the place where it is so vigorously imagined by his biographers that Shakespeare laid the foundations of his versatility could not wait, and we lost no time at last in visiting the school-room opening out of the Guild Hall on the upper floor. In the Guild Hall the heart of faith affirms that the boy sometime came with his father to see the passing shows, which made Stratford a one-night stand in those days, and that he studied or idled in the school-room under a certain window at a desk now devoutly removed to the Birthplace; but there was not much to do with the conviction after we were possessed of it. Dr. Furnivall, in whom it is very strong, ekes it out in his life of Shakespeare with the picturesque portrayal of such a school-boy as Shakespeare would have been if he had been one; and this may be taken as one of the strongest proofs of the Shakespearean authorship.

  Our visit was tardily paid on one of our very last days in Stratford, and then we sa
id we must go again to Holy Trinity Church, which we had not yet satisfyingly seen because of the crowds of mere sight-seers infesting the place. With such people I felt that we had nothing in common, and it seemed as if Providence recognized our difference in timing our arrival at the churchyard gate just as one large company should be coming out and no other yet going in. It was a little bewildering to find this departing company Germans, and personally conducted by an English-speaking Japanese.

  “Oh, stranger things than that happen here,” the gracious Shade, who greeted me at the church-door, said, when I noted the quaint fact to him; he was always so delightfully modern in his acceptance of circumstance. He lingered outside a moment in the sweet, bright air as if his genial spirit could sense the morning’s loveliness like one still in the body. “I’m particularly glad to meet you to-day because I’m thinking of leaving Stratford for a while.”

  “Leaving Stratford!” I marveled.

  “Yes; August is almost gone, and it will be a little dull here after the theater is closed, and the folk-dancing and singing is over, and the lectures are all finished. Bacon is gone already.”

  “Bacon gone!” I stupidly repeated.

  “Yes; he couldn’t stand it; he felt that I was becoming spoiled by the sickening adulation, as he called it.”

  “But you’re not!” I protested.

  “No; and I don’t suppose he really believed it. The fact is he can’t be away from London for a great while when once we return to Time. He finds a greater concourse of spirits there, the new arrivals as well as the old, and of course more variety. We can’t wonder at his preferring it.”

  “No,” I faltered.

  “Besides, it’s one of the conditions, you know, that he must visit Tower Hill where he brought Essex to his death, and Westminster Hall, where he used to sit and judge the suitors from whom he had taken bribes.”

  “Why, but I thought that old notion of eternal punishment — Then, after all, there is a—”

  “Do you call three hundred years eternal? Well, yes, there is a sort of hell. But there is no punishment; there is only consequence, and there is the relief of doing penance.”

  “And does it last forever — the consequence?”

  “How do I know, with my little three centuries’ experience? I only know that when I meet Bacon after one of these seasons of expiation he is a great deal lighter and cheerfuler, better company; he isn’t so censorious, so critical; not that I ever minded criticism much, or do now; especially as it’s quite impossible to revise my work at this late day.”

  “Your editors are always doing it,” I said, thoughtfully.

  “They’re not nearly drastic enough for Bacon. He would out-Ben Ben Jonson in blotting. Sometimes I could wish he had written the plays,” and the amiable Shade laughed out his enjoyment of the notion. “But come! I’m keeping you; you want to see the church.”

  “There’s no hurry,” I began, but suddenly the Shade became a part of the bright air, and I turned to my companions. “Well, let us go in,” I said.

  “No; we’ve seen it once already. We’ll go and walk in the meadows along the Avon till you come out.”

  I was glad they had not apparently noticed anything out of the common; and I considered that perhaps the incident just closed had not had more than a dream’s space in its occurrence.

  Within, the light of the church, strained through its colored windows, was of a brightness softer than that of the light outside, but still of a very unwonted brightness in an English church. There was a sort of cheer in it such as ought always to lift the heart in a church, above other places; it was like the almost gaiety of an Italian church. A few people were going about with their guidebooks in their hands, and staring round to identify the monuments. But I went directly up to the chancel where the Shakespeare tombs are, and where there was now a kind-looking verger dusting and brushing. I tried to satisfy the desire I had for a better acquaintance with the painted bust above the poet’s tablet, which overlooks the famous stone with its conditional malediction in the floor; but after craning my neck this side and that in vain, I ventured to ask the verger if they ever let people inside the chancel rail. Why, he argued, if they let many inside, the inscriptions on the stones would be quite worn away; but, he relented, they sometimes made exceptions of those especially interested. Was I especially interested? I tried to look archaeological; and he lifted the barrier, and I stood among the monuments of the Shakespeare family, which fill the whole space of the chancel pavement in front of the altar, with the bust of the poet looking over them from its Jacobean setting in the northern wall. In their presence one does not escape the sense of a family party, and of a middle-class satisfied desire of respectability in their reunion. I realized there as never before that the Shakespeares were strictly bourgeois in the whole keeping of their lives, and in their death there seems the sort of triumph I have intimated. If there wanted anything to this it was supplied by the presence of the good Doctor John Hall, whom they doubtless prized above the poet, once a stroller and at best only a successful actor-manager. He came back indeed to Stratford and set up gentleman among his town folks, who could value him at least for his thrift and state. He sued and was sued, he pleaded and was impleaded in lawsuits for the collection of their debts to him; as nearly as such a world-wide spirit could, he led their narrow village life, with an occasional burst from it in the revels which celebrated the visits of his fellow-players and fellow-playwrights when they came down from London in their love of him; it was no light proof of their affection to make the two or three days’ journey over such roads as they had then, with footpads and cut-purses along the way. He was then no doubt a scandal to the townsfolk, though they too loved him as every one who ever knew him did, but they must have prized him most for his connection with that honored physician. No doubt when the doctor was laid away with the Shakespeares in that venerable place, the neighbors felt that the family had now risen to be a lasting credit to the town.

  “If you will step this way,” the verger said, leading me to a spot beyond the poet’s bust, “you will see that the nose is aquiline,” and so it was, and the whole face was redeemed from commonness by that arch. In fact I do not understand why people should be so severe on this bust; I have just called it common, but it would have been impossible for Shakespeare to look Shakespeare if Michelangelo himself had modeled him, and it seems to me that this painted death-mask serves as well as anything could to represent him.

  It looks over, not down on, the silly slab which entreats and threatens the spectator concerning the dust below, and across the somewhat complacent epitaph of Mistress Hall, lying beside her husband, and the meeker monument of the poet’s youngest daughter Judith, and last of all the tomb of Anne Hathaway, his wife. There, after a moment of indignation, I was aware of the immortal Shade rising as from its knees at the foot of this farthest stone. “Oh no, oh no,” it read my mind, as always, with that gentleness which seems never to have failed the poet on earth. “Susanna was a bright girl, and a woman tender to all, and the doctor was very well, and Judith was dear to me, too; but they should have put Anne nearest me, though I put her so far away in life so many years. It doesn’t matter to us now, of course, where we have each other forever, but here our parting seems to cast blame on her. They should change my bust and epitaph to this southern wall.”

  “I’m glad you feel so,” I expressed, “and I like your implying here, above all places, that you had not the feeling which they read into your words about the wife older than her husband in ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘The Tempest,’ and—”

  “Drama, abstract truth!” he interrupted.

  “And about the jealous wife in the ‘Comedy of Errors’—”

  “Ah, I gave her cause, I gave her cause!” What would have been a sigh from the shadowy lips if they had had breath was wafted from them. “But come, come!” he encouraged himself. “We mustn’t part so; I disowned my evil by owning it to her, and she forgave it before I died, and
lived in love of me as long as I lived. How strange it all seems — like things of childhood!”

  He appeared to be following beside me from the church. “I should like to say good-by in the open air, in the sun,” he said; and out there it was as if his wise, kind face shone in it. “We sha’n’t meet again, I’m afraid.”

  “Why, are you—”

  “Yes, I’m going up to London, too. I don’t like to leave Bacon alone there a great while. He gets so very abjectly miserable; I can always help him pick himself up; seeing me restores him to his critical mood, to some sense of his superiority, and I want to take him back with me.”

  “Back?” I echoed.

  “Yes. To Eternity, you know.”

  “Oh!” I murmured. Then I hastened to say: “There is one thing I would like a little more light on. You so id a while ago that there is still consequence — suffering — expiation.”

  “When we revisit to Time, that is. But in Eternity not. It is something very difficult to explain. As I said, there is consequence — consequence of every sort, and, if you can understand, there is Correction, though there is no Punishment. Eternity is like a long, impersonal dream, painless because selfless. But after an immeasurable lapse in it we sometimes drift nearer and nearer to consciousness, or the wish to reindividualize. It is then, in these awakenings, that we can return to the borders of Mortality, of Time. We begin to know ourselves apart from the Pardon, from the vast forgiven Unity of souls in which we have been lost. How can I explain? We return to ourselves through such pain and shame — No! I can’t make you understand. But as has been said, we are then ‘let into our evils’ — the evils of our separate wills and desires, which birth gave us and death purged us of. When one of us spiritual molecules, if I may so express it, comes to the painful desire for separation, for return to something like mortal consciousness, it is not suffered to leave the common Ecstasy alone; some other molecule must go with it, but this going is by choice, not by appointment.”