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HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
AT
STRATFORD-ON-AVON
H ffantasg
BY
W. D. HOWELLS
HARPER <5^ BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1914. BY HARPER ft BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED MAY, 1914
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
AT
STRATFORD-ON-AVON
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
AT
STRATFORD-ON-AVON
CHAPTER I
WE lingered amidst the pleasant avenues and cres
cents of Cheltenham, chiefly taken with the stately old-
fashioned Parade, where, overlooking a Roman foun
tain, we found an American roof -garden. That is, it
called itself a roof-garden, but it was silent about being
American, and was really a canopied tea-room, only one
flight up from the sidewalk instead of twenty stories; the
fountain did not say it was Roman, but it was of a lavish
spilth, and tumbled over marble shelves among mytho
logical men and beasts, and so was Roman enough for us.
A pleasant wind lifted the leaves up and down the Parade,
where we did not mind the repair of the roadway going
on with stone-breakers breaking stone, and a steam
roller steam-rolling the pieces into a tarry bed. We could
go away from the roof-garden tea-room when we liked,
and walk or drive among the lawned and embowered
mansions and lodges and villas, and educational establish
ments for both sexes, and think of our last King, our poor
George the Third, who, though he alienated our affections,
discovered the virtues of the medicinal waters of Chelten
ham, and established the pleasant resort in a favor long
I
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
since faded, but all the fitter for the retired Indian officers
who now mostly dwell there, and apter to their strictly
measured means. We did not personally verify the fact
of their residence, for they were away on their holidays,
as Englishmen always are at the beginning of August;
but there were the large handsome houses of Georgian
architecture, and we easily persuaded ourselves that
they lived in these when they were at home.
In other words, we were so glad of Cheltenham by day
and by night that we doubted very much whether we
should hurry on to Stratford-on-Avon for the Shake
spearean Festivals, held there throughout the month, on
the brink of whose Bank Holiday we trembled. It seemed
to us that we could do much better staying in Cheltenham,
say a fortnight, with that Roman fountain and American
roof-garden for our solace every day, and then go to
Stratford; and the very last night of our stay we almost
thought we should spend our whole August there, running
over to Stratford for certain plays and coming back.
What brought us to this conditional decision was our
pleasure in the open-air performance of "A Midsummer
Night's Dream" in the park under the stars and the stir
of leaves overhead, with the fine shiver of the natural and
artificial bushes which the actors went and came through.
They were very good actors, or at least as good as we
deserved, both men and women; and the children that
danced bare-legged and gauze-winged as fairies were
adorable in that moment when the lovely English children
are hesitating about growing plainer instead of simply
growing older. We spectators were not in multitude,
but we were fairly many, and we seemed to be fairly good
society. We were very willing to be pleased with the
playing, and we clapped handsomely at any chance, and
so almost unanimously that I was a little vexed by the
reticence of two gentlemen who sat directly in front of
2
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
us and whom I was disposed to wish away at first. But
as the time passed I forgot my grievance with them, if it
was a grievance, and began to be interested in their
peculiar interest in the performance, which they did not
hide from me so much as I expected. They were of
fairly good height, but one was much bulkier than the
other and he seemed somehow of a cheerfuler make,
though I imagined this rather from his carriage than
from any expression of his face, which, in fact, I could
not see at once. They both wore, or appeared to wear,
the fashions of a West End tailor; they had on very-well-
cut lounge suits, such as Englishmen almost live in when
they are not on social duty and may indulge themselves
in the excess of informality which the most formal of
nations then likes to abandon itself to. But as the time
passed their dress seemed to change, in a manner I hardly
know how to describe, to something not old-fashioned but
out-fashioned. Broad flat collars grew about their necks
in place of the limp turn-down outing affairs they had
worn; their jackets were replaced by slashed doublets
of velvet; their trousers, slightly pegtop, turned to trunk
hose. But what was more puzzling was an effect of
luminous transparency which their persons now presented.
I found that so far from incommoding me by their inter
position between me and the play, I could see it none the
worse but all the better for their presence, just as I could
hear the actors more clearly, or more intelligently, for the
talk which the two kept up pretty constantly. I cannot
yet quite account for this curious fact (whether it was an
illusion or not, I hope it remains a fact of my experience)
and I give it to the reader for what it is worth. They
sat rather silently through the opening passages of the
play, where the lovers were having their misadventures
contrived for them, but became restive, both of them, in
that long, long scene where Bottom and Snug and Starve-
3
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
ling and their brother mechanicals tediously rehearse
their parts for the interlude which they are to play before
the Duke.
At the end of it the slighter of my neighbors leaned
toward the other and said, "It always seemed to me that
this was one of the places where you fell down."
"I know," the stout gentleman acknowledged. "But,"
he said, "it always got a laugh."
"From the groundlings."
"From her Grace herself."
"The taste of her Grace was not always to be trusted.
In matters of humor, of fun, it was a little gross, no?
A little rank?"
"She certainly had a gust for the high -flavored in
anecdote; but I don't know that this scene is exactly
of that sort. Coom to think of it, Oi — "
11 Coom? Oi?" the other challenged.
"Come and 7, Oi mane" the stout gentleman owned
with a laugh. "I do forget my London accent mostly,
now that I've got permanently back to my Warwickshire;
it's so easy; after a language a dialect is like slippers after
tight shoes. But what I mane — mean — is that I think
these mechanicals are fairly decent; much more than they
would have been in life. Her Grace would have relished
what they would really have said, with the loves of
Pyramus and Thisbe for a theme, if I had let them give
way to their sprightly fancy without restraint; they had
to be held up with a strong hand at times." The com
fortable gentleman laughed with a pleasure his companion
apparently did not share, though, I fancied, less from a
hurt moral sense than from a natural gravity.
"I never liked your bringing such fellows in as you often
were doing. They are beneath the dignity of the drama.
If you had taken my advice you would certainly have left
the Gravedigger out of ' Hamlet'; and your Touchstone
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
and Audrey — I suppose you'll say they always got a
laugh, too. And that fat rascal Falstaff, and that drunken
Bardolph, and that swaggering blackguard Pistol — I
never could suffer them, though I suffered enough from
them." He laughed as at a neat point he had made,
and then lapsed into what appeared a habit of mel
ancholy.
"I won't save myself from you behind Nature's farthin
gale," the other said, gently, "and I'll own that these
fellows here are not so amusing as I once thought them.
The fashion of fun changes. I've heard that Mark Twain
used to say my humor made him want to cry; perhaps in
a century or two I shall have my revenge. But now,
this scene of Hermia and Helena and their lovers in the
forest here, , I call that rather nice — their jealous fury,
I mean; it has its pathos, too, I think."
"I don't deny it," the gloomier gentleman said. "But
I'm not sure I like the passions painted quite so nakedly.
I should have preferred a more veiled presentment of
these ladies' hate as well as love. But it's good, very good,
very good indeed; or, as we used to say, very excellent
good. Ah! That was well done of Hermia!"
"Yes," the stout gentleman sighed, acquiescing, "I
never saw it done quite so well in my timej when we had
boys for the part."
He put a certain stress on the word time, as playing
upon it, and the other returned in like humor: "Yes;
eternity has its compensations, and actresses are of them,
though one wouldn't always think so. They're certainly
better than those beardless boys of your time."
The stout gentleman laughed dutifully, and the two
went on concurrently with the play in their talk.
The play was a good deal cut, as I thought to its ad
vantage, and I began to hope we should escape the scene
of Pyramus and Thisbe: it did seem too much to have
5
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
it after the rehearsal; and the rest was so charming.
But we were not to escape so lightly. Bottom and the
rest came on in due course, and I wondered how I should
live through the joke. Suddenly I started, as if from
sleep, and found that I really had been drowsing.
This will not seem so incredible if I allege that not
very long before I had slept through a seance at the
dentist's in Boston, while he filled a tooth for me with
the delicate skill of American dentists. Any one who can
believe this will not doubt that I was saved from that
tedious scene by Nature's anesthetic, and that I stood
up greatly refreshed, as if the operation had been entirely
successful.
The wind that was still lightly fingering the leaves
seemed to have grown a little chillier, and a thin cloud
had blown over the stars. The people were streaming
away from the seats; the scene looked all the emptier for
the want of a curtain to hide its hollowness.
"Did you notice what became of those two men in
front of us?" I asked. "Or which way they went?"
"What two men in front of us?" it was replied; and
I began to think I had invented them in the swift dream
I must have had during my life-saving nap. I suppose the
reader has guessed at the identity of one of them, and I
could have done so myself if I had not been rigidly prin
cipled against ever guessing in England about anything;
it so unmistakably marks you for an American, and if you
are trying to pass for English it is so defeating.
I said no more about the strange companions, but I
declared that while I appeared to have been sleeping
(as I was now promptly accused of doing) I had been
thinking the whole problem over, and had decided that
we had better not try to do the August rites of Stratford-
on-Avon from Cheltenham, but go at once and settle in
that town, and seize whatever advantages propinquity
6
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
offered for enjoyment. As nobody objected I began to
have some doubts of my decision; but after rather a poor
night, and some very disappointing coffee at breakfast,
I held firmly to it. I was all the firmer in it when I found
that the head porter at our hotel had sent us to the
station to take a train which did not go; I then felt that
we must leave Cheltenham, even if it was not for Stratford.
The railway porter who labeled our baggage for Stratford
said that the first train leaving before five-forty 'was a
motor-train, which left at three-thirty. I tried to make
him tell me what a motor-train was, and he did his best,
but fell back upon a solid ground of fact in assuring me
that I should see.
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
CHAPTER II
WHEN I did see the motor-train I was richly content
with it, and more content as time (a good deal of time)
went on. The train was formed of one long car, with
a smoking and a baggage compartment at the forward
end, the rest opening airily into a saloon with seats
on each side, as in our pleasant day-coaches at home.
We had tried in vain to buy first-class tickets, and now
we had all this delight at third-class rates, which alone are
recognized on motor-trains. We slipped sleekly out of
Cheltenham, which tried to detain us at two suburban
stations (halts, such stops are called on the motor route),
and sleekly ran through the grain-fields and meadow-lands
and broad-bean patches, where the yellowing wheat stood
dense, hanging its blond heads, and the haycocks covered
the ground almost as thickly as the unfallen stems, and the
lentils blackened in innumerable sheaves, and all the
landscape stretched away in dreamy levels to a low hori
zon, where the afternoon hid them in its mellow mists.
There were so few people in the car that we could change
from side to side and seat to seat, and when we had done
with the landscape we could give ourselves to conjecture
of our fellow-passengers. Two of these were ladies, each
reading a copy of The Nation (the London, not the New
York one), and I tried my best to make out from it who
and what they were, but I had arrived at no more than
the conclusion that they were persons of intellectual as
well as social quality, when they rose together from the
8
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
place where they were sitting and left the car at I forget
just what halt. I followed them with famishing curiosity,
but when the train started again I was obliged to try doing
what I could with their vacant places.
Then I found that their places were not really vacant,
but were taken by the companions who had sat together
in front of us at the open-air theater the night before.
I was glad to note that by daylight they seemed more
substantial than they had looked in the glare of the
electric-lamps. It was as if they had chosen to put off
whatever had been apparitional about them, and to be
plain middle-aged Englishmen of comfortable condition. I
observed that the stouter of the two now wore a Norfolk
jacket, with knickerbockers and low tan shoes, as if he
chose to do something more rustic in his dress than the
other, who was dressed as if he had just come down from
the waning season in London, and had not yet got into his
outing things. I fancied that in this effect he was choosing
not to be mixed up in anybody's mind with the Bank-
Holiday makers, who were already swarming over the
country, and were giving every outward token of having
a whole three days off; for it was Saturday afternoon,
and Monday would be the great day of all. There was
something less than kind in his melancholy, and yet I
could not have said that he looked so much unkind as
reserved in the bearing by which each of us declares his
habitual feeling toward others. It was as if he were not
precisely offended by the existence of common men, but
incommoded; they kept him not perhaps from thinking
of himself, but from thinking of things infinitely more
important to him than they were. I was most struck
with this sort of aloofness from his species, this philosophic
abstraction, when at our coming to Broadway his com
panion spoke of the different artists who had first colon
ized the place. I had never been there, but it was dear
9
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
to me because my chief association with it was the memory
of a many-gifted friend who might have been almost any
sort of artist, but chose mainly to be a painter till the sea
engulfed him with the others that went down in the
Titanic. I wondered if I should perhaps see the house
where that dear, sunny-eyed F. M. lived, not mattering
that I should not know it if I did see it; and I fancied a
curious sympathy with my mood in the gayer of the
companions which was absent from the gloomier one.
It was not so much that he did not care, as that he could
not; his thoughts were fixed on those abstractions in
which he was himself the center and the sole concrete. I
thought that if I had told the first about my friendship
with the bright spirit so tragically quenched he would have
understood, and would have said, perhaps, the fittingest
thing that could be said. But as it was I could only catch
a phrase or two of the talk which I tried to eavesdrop, and
heard such words as "one of among the many lovely
Rosalinds," and "beautiful young American actress, "
who had come to England, but soon married off the stage,
and now lived the genius of that place. It did not seem
to interest the other, who remained fallen in a sort of
bitter muse, till we reached the station where we changed
from our pleasant, roomy motor to the crowded express.
The porter ran far forward along the train before he could
find places for us, and he had so much difficulty that we
began to hope he would be obliged to put us into a first-
class compartment with our third-class tickets, when he
got seats of the right grade of our transportation, and we
rode the rest of the way to Stratford in a car so near the
locomotive that it was blind with the smoke and choking
with the coal-gas.
It was a very long ride; but suddenly, before we ex
pected, we had arrived, and those two companions stepped
out of the car just before us. I heard the stout gentleman
10
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
say, cheerily, but with a touch of friendly irony in his
words, "Welcome to Stratford, my lord of St. Albans!"
If I had then any lingering doubt who the pair were I must
have known beyond any misgiving that they were William
Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, but why they should
have come there together on terms of such incredible
reconciliation I shall, perhaps, never be able to make
clear to the impartial reader; as for their respective
partizans I despair of them absolutely. I wished to seize
the friendlier phantasm of the two, and force him to some
explanation, and I suppose I must have made a clutch at
the incorporal air where I had last seen him; but a vigilant
young porter mistook my gesture as an appeal for his help.
He seized our hand baggage, and with the demand,
"Any luggage in the van, sir?" hurried us away through
the Bank-Holiday makers, already arrived in swarms that
Saturday afternoon, and staring about in the distraction
which lasted with them for the next sixty hours at least.
They thronged the roadways as well as the footways of
the old town (which I shall try to keep throughout this
narrative from calling quaint), and they would have had
my cheap commiseration in their air of vague bewilder
ment and apprehension of something worse than they
were already suffering if I had not been anxious in my
doubt whether we should find The Spotted Pard all that
we had hoped a small hotel might be when we wired for
rooms from Cheltenham. The holiday makers stood
about in helpless groups, or streamed, men and maids,
and mothers and fathers with footsore children at their
heels and toes, and mutely made way for the motor we
had found at the station offering itself for the same fare
as a fly, and now carrying us and our piled-up trunks to
The Spotted Pard for the one-and-six which at home
would have translated themselves into two-and-sixty of
our little-buying dollars and cents.
11
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
It was such a quiet, kind-looking, patient crowd, so
Englishly single-minded and good-tempered, that I was
glad to have our chauffeur consider it humanely in his
course; and I did not feel it so very molestful as I might
in my vision of the streets and houses, which, from once
seeing them years before, I now found so familiar. They
did somewhat clutter these charming perspectives which
so many streets in Stratford open from the sort of central
quadrangle before the Town Hall; and an early stroll
before dinner showed them filling the river with their
skiffs, and punts and canoes, and droning and whining
out the tunes of their blatant gramophones. But people
whose holidays are few do not know how to fit themselves
becomingly into the general scene, or to take their joy
without the vulgarity which it comes so easy for us betters
of theirs to avoid. The great thing is for them to have
their holiday, and it is no little thing for us finer folk to
recognize the vast difference between ourselves and them.
The town received them with the hospitality which was
none the less sincere because it was commercial; but
even for money it could not house them all, and it remains
a wonder to me how the most of them got roofs over
their heads for the night. Well toward midnight a police
man was seen going about with a party of Americans,
richly able and eager to pay for lodgings, and knocking at
every promising and unpromising door to demand shelter
for them. I am sorry to leave that party of compatriots
still walking the streets; they were probably only a little
less undeserving than ourselves, who had thought to wire
for rooms at The Spotted Pard.
But even then I did not think ourselves treated in the
measure of our merit as the night wore away after we had
gone to sleep in them. They were pretty rooms, very
fresh of paper and paint, in an ell or extension; but with
the falling damp outside a strong musty smell as of old
12
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
hay began to rise from the floor within. It was so strong
that it roused the sleepers from their first sleep and kept
them from their second till well toward morning. Then
I was haunted in my dream by the noise of a ghostly
thumping, such as horses and even cows make in the
vigils which they seem able to keep, and not suffer the
anguish of insomnia. Without waking or at all ceasing
from my indignation at having been given rooms in what
might once have been a hay-loft, I was aware that the
noise I heard was no stamping of horses or cattle, but the
muffled blows which Shakespeare was dealing on the doors
of inns and lodgings with a demand for shelter, so that his
valued and honored friend Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam
and Viscount of St. Albans, should not be obliged to spend
the night in the street.
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
CHAPTER III
"You see," Shakespeare explained, a few days later,
"I had asked him down for the week-end, and I fancied
he would be my guest at New Place."
"New Place?" I ventured to interrupt.
"Yes, of course; the little property I bought from my
friend Underbill when I came to Stratford in 1597, a few
years before I returned from London for good. It's at
the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane. You must
have seen it — "
"Oh yes, yes!" I assented, from the strong purpose I
had of seeing it.
"The house was in pretty bad shape when it came into
my hands, not much better than a ruin, with two tumble
down old barns, and a weedy, wild-grown, old garden.
But I had an architect look the house over and see what
could be done with it, and he made something very pretty
and comfortable out of it; those fellows have a lot of
taste; and there's where I finally settled when I gave
London up in 1609, and there's where I died seven years
later."
It was rather creepy hearing him speak of his death in
that casual way, but if he did not mind it I did not see
why I should, and so I smiled, and nodded, and said, "I
remember," and he went on.
"I had the garden dug out of the weeds, and the
ground leveled, and sown to grass, and I planted a mul
berry-tree — I was always planting mulberry-trees — "
14
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
"There I am with you!" I broke in. "I've planted
no end of them. It's the most delicious fruit in the
world!"
"Isn't it?" he joyously returned, though I could feel
that he did not quite like having his autobiography in
terrupted.
"When I died I left it to my daughter Susanna, who
married Doctor Hall — Or would you say Doc?"
"No, no; some Americans do, in the friendly do
mesticity of Western country towns; but in New York
we don't say Doc — often."
"Hall was a good fellow, a gentleman born, and he had
a large practice and was well-to-do; so that I expected the
place would remain in the family, but it didn't fall out
so. Susanna's daughter Elizabeth married a man of the
name of Nash, and Susanna settled the place on them. It
turned out that this couldn't stand in law, but they ar
ranged that Elizabeth should keep the property when
she became Lady Barnard in her second marriage. After
her death it was sold to Sir John Walker, and he gave it
to his daughter who married Sir Hugh Clopton, if you
follow me. Oddly enough, it was Sir John Clopton who
built the house I pulled down, and now he pulled my
house down, and put up something very fine in its place."
"That's very interesting," I said, putting my hand over
my mouth.
"Yes," Shakespeare said, absently; and then he sighed,
and said, "Poor Anne!"
"Anne?" I echoed.
"Yes. My widow — my wife. She died in New Place
a good many years after me. I have never felt quite
happy about the way people talk of Anne. I suppose it
began with my leaving her my second-best bed in my will,
but that was because she always slept in it at New Place,
and wanted it especially devised to her. I made no pro-
15
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
vision for her because she was in the affectionate keeping
of her children, and it would have reflected upon them if
I had done so. Young man!" he broke off from his pen
sive strain of reminiscence.
"Not unless you call seventy-six young" I suggested.
"I do," he answered. "I'm three hundred and fifty,
counting both worlds, and I feel as young as ever I did.
But what I was going to say was that I don't want you
to carry away the notion that Anne was unworthy of me,
or socially unequal. She was seven years older than I,
when we were married; I was as ripe as she in experience,
and I was a very forward boy; I don't brag of those days
of mine. The world somehow likes to think meanly of
the wives of what it calls geniuses; but if the wives had
their say, they could say something on their own side that
would stop that talk. Xantippe herself might give a few
cold facts about Socrates that would make the world sit
up; and if Anne told all she knew about me, my biog
raphers would have plenty of the material that they
think they're so lacking in now. She was a good girl,
and her people were well-to-do. For the time and place
their house was handsome, as you will see when you go
to Shottery. Been to Shottery yet?"
"Not this time; but I'm going," I said.
"Do so. And when you're there think kindly and
reverently of my poor Anne. I only wish I had been as
good husband to her as she was wife to me."
His voice broke a little, and in the pause he let follow,
I ventured: "I'm glad to hear you say all this. If I
must be quite honest, the worst grudge I ever had against
you was because of that second-best bed."
"Well, I'm glad to explain it, and I should be obliged
if you would make the case known to your American
friends. It was a rush bed like those you will see at Shot
tery, and such as my poor, dear Anne slept in when she
16
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
was a girl. She clung to it all her life; the children used
to laugh at her about it. We had a good deal of joking
in our family, at New Place. Anne liked the children
laughing at her — especially Susanna."
I ought to ask the reader's patience with what hap
pened just here. The moving-picture show is not yet
established in the general respect which it must enjoy,
and I hesitate to say that there now ensued as from a
succession of rapidly operated films, like those thrown up
at the movies, the apparitions of a young girl and a
young man, she mature-looking at first, but growing
younger and he older, till they fairly matched in con
temporaneity. In the last they stood together, she with
her hand through his arm, and he looking fondly down
into her lifted face. Under this picture ran the legend:
So wear they level with each other's hearts
which seemed the adaptation of a familiar verse claiming
a like effect in marriage from a disparity of ages.
Without saying anything my companion looked at
these apparitions; when the last flashed out he glanced
at me.
"Then it isn't true — I am glad it isn't true — as some
people have fancied, that you didn't live happily with
her?" I said.
"Man!" he cried, sternly, "Anne was with me seven
years at New Place, after I came home to her at Stratford.
She was with me when I died; and do you think — can
you think — "
"No, no, I don't think it, and I'm ashamed of hinting
at what I've heard others hint at thinking." He seemed
unable to go forward from this painful point, and at last
I made bold to prompt him: "But who was that Rev.
Francis Gastrell who cut down your mulberry-tree when
he bought New Place?"
17
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
"That churlish priest? Oh, I don't know. He seemed
to have a spite against the whole place. He hated people
coming so much to see the tree, and he pulled the house
pretty well to pieces for no better reason. To be sure,
the Cloptons had largely made it over by that time.
You'll see some of the old foundations — I don't say the
original. They've made a pleasant garden of it now, and
planted it with trees and flowers. They've got a sort of
typical mulberry on a rise of ground in the lawn; I
believe it was a slip — you can't kill a mulberry — brought
from my old home-place — they call it the Birthplace —
which, of course, you've seen. You must go and sit in
the New Place garden; it's very nice."
He lapsed into a dreamy silence, and seemed to have
forgotten so entirely what we had begun talking about,
that after waiting rather a long time without saying any
thing, I hemmed, and asked, "And Bacon?"
"And Bacon?" he echoed. "Oh, yes! About our ad
venture that first night? I'll own it had slipped my mind.
But you know I brought him quite confidently here,"
and as Shakespeare said this, I perceived we were sitting
in the New Place garden on a bench just opposite the
typical "mulberry -tree; I noted that the berries were
pale red, and I remembered leaving my own mulberries
black-ripe at home a month before. "And really, till I
came quite to the corner here, I didn't see that the place
was as bare as the Rev. Gastrell had made it; while we
came along I had been looking at the moon over the
tower of the lovely old Guild Chapel, there, which it
silvered along the edges. You might have knocked me
down with a feather; I'd been counting so on an eager
welcome from Susanna and my poor, dear old Anne;
and suddenly it went through me how dead and gone we
all were, as well as our pleasant home. I made his lord
ship what excuse I could, and said I must ask him to put
18
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
up with humbler quarters in my Birthplace (as they call
it) off in Henley Street. I could see he didn't like it; but
he was very tired, and he said he should be content with
any sort of shakedown; he added something inculpatory
about his supposing I had not thought of Bank Holiday
when I asked him here. I can scarcely expect you to
believe me when I tell you what happened at the Birth
place; if it hadn't happened to me I don't think I should
believe it myself. We found the premises in the keeping
of a fellow who had been got in to assist the regular
custodians, worn out by the rush of Bank Holiday; and
he pretended not to know me at first, but I soon made
him understand that wouldn't do; even then he demurred
at my having brought a stranger; he said that none of
the chambers had beds in them, now, and he could hardly
make so bold as to offer us the settle where he had been
napping on some rugs. But I said this would do very
well for my friend, and I would make shift with any sort
of large chair. I said my friend was Lord St. Albans, and
he must get a night's rest, and the man said, 'Not Sir
Francis Bacon?' and I said yes, and then he answered
that he could not think of letting Bacon remain under
my roof for a single hour, much less a whole night. He
hinted that the fact of my bringing him with me there
threw a doubt on my own identity; didn't I know that
the authorship of my own plays had been impudently
claimed for this man; and how could I be going about
with him on these friendly terms, and trying to extort
a reluctant hospitality for him from my native place?
I told him that I would be answerable to Stratford for
anything in the case that affected her honor or pleasure;
that neither Bacon nor I cared the least for that silly
superstition, and were, as we always had been, perfectly
good friends. While we were wrangling Bacon drowsed
in the chair he had sunk into and slept heavily; it was the
19
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
only sleep he got that night, poor ghost! Actually the
man turned us out at last, threatening to call the watch
if we didn't go ! Of course we went, poor old Bacon stum
bling along, heavy with sleep, on his sore feet; and I suppose
we must have knocked at every other door in Stratford."
"Yes, I heard you," I said, and I wanted to tell him
how I thought at first it was the stamping of^hoofs under
my room, but of course he could not interrupt himself
for that.
" It was the same story every where : full-up! At some
places they were kind and truly sorry; at others they were
furious at being called to the door, and banged it in our
faces. But we came at last to a house where they said
they had a room with two beds in it; and I pushed in
at once, before Bacon could object to a double-bedded
room; I wasn't sure that he would have objected, but
he's rather crotchety, you know. The man of the house
was such a kindly soul, and took his having been knocked
up at one o'clock in the morning so sweetly that I thought
I would please him by letting him know what a distin
guished guest he had, and I whispered that my friend —
he was drowsing again — was the Viscount of St. Albans.
He started back, and his face darkened; it turned fairly
black with a frown. 'Do you mean Bacon — the Bacon?7
'Well, yes/ I said, 'Sir Francis you know; our late
Lord Chancellor.' 'Then,' says he, 'I'll thank you both
to walk straight out of my house. I would rather burn
it down than let it shelter that cruel wretch for a single
night — a single hour — a single minute! Go!' 'But my
dear man/ I said, 'you surely won't. I'm your fellow-
townsman, and I entreat you not to bring shame upon
the place by this barbarity. I've lived here, man and
boy, body and soul, for three hundred years, and I never
knew the like. When I tell you who I am I think you'll
be willing to let us stay. Why, I'm — '
20
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
"'I don't care who you are,' he roared. 'Out you go,
and go you should if you were Shakespeare himself/"
He laughed in an apparently lasting enjoyment of the
joke, and then, noticing that I did not seem to share his
amusement, he checked himself for such explanation as I
might have to offer.
"Why, but — why, but," I began, "I don't quite under
stand how, being disembodied spirits as you were, you
required lodgings at all. I should have thought that the
' viewless wind' would have been shelter enough — "
I stopped, and he said with a smile of interest in the
psychical fact: "There is something rather curious in all
that. We don't — we're not allowed to — return to your
world without certain conditions. If we materialize, as
you call it — the term is inexact — we must put on some of
the penalties as well as privileges of mortality, of matter.
We get hungry; we feel heat and cold; we want roofs and
walls about us. You see?"
"Yes, I see," I said, but in fact I did not see, or at least
see why. " Then I should think that after being liberated
from those conditions you wouldn't care to resume them
—often."
"We don't. And that accounts for it."
"Accounts?"
"For our coming back so seldom. The incalculable
majority of us never even wish to come back. There
isn't really much meaning in our return. Some of you
here think it would be a good thing if we appeared as a
testimony to our continued existence, but we don't like
being doubted and denounced as impostors when we do
that, as occasionally happens; and it's generally felt that
you who are here now can wait, as we waited before
you."
"Yes, there is sense in that," I said. "And what, if I
may ask, has induced you to materialize at this time?"
21
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
"Well, I rather like being here in August, for what they
call my festivals. I always had a tenderness for the place,
you know."
"I don't wonder/'
"And I like to realize that I'm remembered here. But
they're painful, too — some of the experiences of coming
back. We don't return without resuming the griefs,
the sorrows of our mortal state. As long as we remain in
eternity we are quit of our bereavements; if we come
back to time our losses are as keen as in our mortal lives.
I cannot revisit New Place without losing my dear boy,
my Hamnet again, who died when he was eleven; I had
so counted on his coming to live with me there, and I
had my eyes on it all the more fondly because I thought
to have him my heir to it."
His voice shook, and I said, lamely enough, "But it's
all right now?"
"Oh yes, it's all right. As he never married, he con
tinues with his mother and me; his sisters continue with
their husbands."
"Why, I should think you would all continue together."
"No, husbands and wives continue together. Marriage
is the only human relation that endures forever. It de
stroys the old home to create a new one, and this in turn
is destroyed that a still newer one may be created."
"It seems a little hard," I mused.
"No, no! It's all right. It's reason; it's logic; it's
love. How could it be otherwise, if you will think? We
blood-kindred can all be together instantly, by merely
willing it; but Anne and I are together, and we have
our Hamnet with us always — our little one, our dear boy!"
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
CHAPTER IV
AT the time Shakespeare repeated the speech of the
householder who turned him, because of Bacon, from his
door, I did not realize its full import. I had to live almost
a whole August in Stratford before I could feel the force
of it, or know just how much it meant, not to Shakespeare
himself, for he always was and always will be a very
modest man, but how much it meant to the man who
uttered it. He had, in a manner, to take his life in his
hand, and to launch himself in the tremendous risk of
something like perdition, for it was little short of blas
phemy to say such a thing in Stratford. The place may
not have sufficiently prized her inestimable citizen in his
earthly lifetime, but she has abundantly made up for
any oversight of the kind since those days. She cherishes
his memory with a sort of intensive recollection, which
leaves no moment of his absence or his presence unremem-
bered. I say absence and presence, but if forever absent
he is forever present in these fond records; and one can
not witness them, though a wayfaring man, and err in
a sense of their wonderful comprehensiveness.
It is not the names of streets or houses that speak of
him; I do not know that there is any street named after
him, and the sole objective monuments, architecturally
and sculpturally, are so poor and few that one might
wish there were none. A sprightlier fancy than Strat
ford's might have called every house after some person
of his plays; and this had been done in the pleasant
3 23
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
hotel which received us when all the good will of The
Spotted Pard could not avail against that ancient and
barn-like smell which filled our pretty rooms and choked
us from our dreams. The rooms in the pleasant hotel I
mean are each named for some hero or heroine, mistress
or lover, whom the poet left to outlive him here through
the whole bounds of human fancy; so that if the lady in
Desdemona had decided to stay on another day, the gentle
man in Sir Toby Belch might have been going unexpect
edly; or the party who had engaged Troilus and Cressida
might have decided to take Romeo and Juliet instead.
If Prospero had been assigned to some one vaguely wiring
from London, the wirer could be put in Macbeth or
Othello without knowing the difference, when he came,
and the maiden ladies whom the manageress had meant
to give the Weird Sisters, could just as well have Hermia
and Helena, if the married pair personally applying did not
like Katherine and Petruchio. Outside of the pleasant
hotel, however, the memory of Shakespeare is wholly sub
jective, but it is none the less pervasive and exclusive for
that. More and more one stands amazed at its absolute
possession of the place. In that England of kings and
nobles, of priests and prelates, of heroes and martyrs,
there is no care for them in Stratford, though I suppose
that they must all have more or less masqueraded there
in their time.
That loyalty of the English, which we Americans can
never understand, had indeed dug up for dramatic use in
the Bank Holiday Pageant following our arrival, the fact
of Queen Henrietta Maria's entry into Stratford before
the coming of the hapless Charles; and not far away at
Edgehill a great victory of the Commonwealth was won;
but all such memories sink and fade before that which
began to fill the world from this little town, till now the
world itself can hardly hold it, and I do not doubt it will
24
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
be found common fame in Mars when Mars is proven in
habited beyond peradventure, and in Venus if ever she
is seen giving her cold cheek to the kisses of the sun. In
Stratford, I do not suppose there is any man, woman, or
least articulate child who does not know something of
Shakespeare, and I have no question that under their
feet the passers from the remotest corners of the earth
could hear the very stones prate of his whereabouts
if they stopped to listen. That was not quite my experi
ence, but I was not surprised, when I issued from the
New Place garden with the poet, to hear a gray cat mew
intelligent recognition on the sidewalk before the gate.
By this time it was entirely natural that the night should
be past, and the sun should be warming the English world
which it seldom overheats, instead of the moon, which
had seemed to be silvering the edges of the old Chapel
tower while we talked.
Shakespeare stooped over and scratched the grateful
forehead of the cat which pressed plaintively mewing
against his ankle and lifted one paw to him as if for pity.
"Why it's lame, poor little chap," he said. "I hope it's
some honorable wound received in battle, and not a pinch
from a passing motor-car. At first," he added, while he
still kept acceptably scratching its head, "I thought it
was one of our New Place cats; Susanna was very fond
of cats; but then I saw it couldn't possibly be living now
even with its nine mortal lives put end to end; they
would be mortal lives of course."
He laughed softly with a kindly pity in his laugh, which
won my heart more than anything he had yet said.
I began to understand, and I understood more and more
why his contemporaries called him gentle and sweet.
He stooped again, and again scratched the head of the
cat, which now rubbed harder against his ankle, and to
my unspeakable astonishment and its own, passed through
25
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
the limb, and came out on the inner side of it. The crea
ture looked up, and then parading round him with arched
back and lifted tail, tried the other leg and came through
it as with the first. At this result it looked up as before,
and catching a mocking glance from the poet's eyes, it
mewed loudly and limped off as swiftly as its three legs
could carry it. He followed it with his laughter, but now
boyishly wild and joyous, as at some successful trick.
"Poor old Tom!" he called after it. "You didn't realize
that I was shadow, did you? Well, when I come again
you may be shadow, too, and then you can rub against
my legs without rubbing through them!"
He laughed and laughed, with that soft, kindly laugh
of his, which made me understand so many things in
his philosophy that I had not understood, and which
was so simple-hearted and sincere as well as wise, that
it made me ashamed not to own that I had shared
the cat's bewilderment. I said, "Oh yes, matter
would pass through spirit, just as spirit would pass
through matter." And then I pretended a recurrent-
interest in his overnight adventure with Bacon, and I
said: "Apropos of life, mortal and immortal, I didn't
exactly understand just where Lord St. Albans did pass
the night, after all."
He smiled. "No, I didn't tell you. But I will, some
time. I think it will interest you. That's one of our
privileges in the future life — as you call it — and it's a
great privilege."
"And — and couldn't you tell me now? I should so great
ly like to know. Where is he this morning, for instance?"
"Well, I don't know that I could just say."
"But — but," I persisted, for I felt that somehow he
was slipping from me, and I could not bear to lose him
yet, "you didn't mean to imply that this last man
turned you out because of that Baconian hypothesis?"
26
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
I scarcely remember how I was going to get him to
answer me; but before I could bring my purpose to bear,
I was alone with the crippled cat which was mewing its
pathetic entreaties to me, and the Bank Holiday sun was
climbing the sky to shine unbrokenly on the Pageant
slated for that Monday. Then I was sensible of there
having been a Sunday between this Monday and the
Saturday of our arrival, and of our having driven out
through its afternoon heat and dust to see an aviator
go up in his biplane from a clover-field, and buzz first loud
and then low while he mounted into the "pits of air," as
Emerson called them in a subtle forecast of the atmos
pheric pockets which the airmen have found in the
welkin. We crossed the fine old bridge over the Avon,
which we left to the aimless joyance of the holiday
makers, marshaled by the trumps of gramophones bray
ing from their punts above the prone shapes of young
men stretched out, as the wont in England is, in the hol
lows of the boats, while girls paddled or poled the dull
craft along. Beyond the river stretched the dusty road,
with pairs wedded and unwedded, and families of fathers
and mothers and children on foot or in perambulators,
thickly trooping toward the clover-field, and patient of
the carriages and motors that pushed through them as
patient as themselves. They seemed not to know how
hot it was, and they took their pleasure without expense
when they reached the clover-field, where it was as easy
to see the flying outside the hedges as inside them.
None of them seemed to feel the Sabbatarian scruple which
had forbidden the Race Track authorities to let the airmen
fly on Sunday from the course where so much money
must be gambled away on week-days. Every nation has
its peculiar virtues, and the English, who are not without
their vices, expect to have their Sabbath-keeping imputed
to them for righteousness when they are playing the
27
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
horses. I who know nothing of horse-racing but as a
spectacle, am not sure that man-flying is more beautiful,
and it is now scarcely more novel. The machine harshly
and then softly buzzed about the sky, and descended and
ascended, and all who strained their necks to see it
were equally content whether they had paid or not
paid.
What left me with no sort of question was the Pageant
next day, for whatever the Pageant is it is joy, void of all
alloy of misgiving. Event for event, I think I liked best
the pleasure of the actors, who were to help the sight so
much, assembling for their floats behind the Theater, in
those masquerade properties they had so easily come by.
The ladies were preoccupied in woman's great business
of looking beautiful, as if they took seriously the burlesque
of the Elizabethan courtier who capered about painting
their cheeks for them. A friendly old gentleman in the
crowd, who made our acquaintance and kept it at every
point throughout the morning, here tried to remember
what part he had once taken in a Pageant long ago, and
was not satisfied with his son's suggestion that it was
Falstaff. When the procession was formed the floats
toiled slowly and shakily through the well-contented
town; floats of fairies great and little, historic floats and
dramatic, and of the chiefest rustic and mechanic and do
mestic arts, all led by Queen Henrietta Maria making
her prolonged and repeated entry into Stratford. A vast
Swan built up of white cotton batting satisfied the heart
jealous for the primacy of the Swan of Avon in a supreme
hour of his native town, and if it came last in the show,
it certainly did not come least. The fairies danced and
sang their way through the streets, and the large chil
dren seemed as single-heartedly glad as the little, and
when they happened to be young girls, as lovely. But I
gave my heart most to the old chair-mender, who in his
28
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
linen smock frock and his aged top-hat repaired a chair-
bottom throughout the morning with unflagging zeal.
The long forenoon ended with a longer afternoon in the
meadows beyond Avon, where all the local sports had their
turn on foot and on horseback, with old and young in the
acts. A hundred little girls skipping with their skipping-
ropes like one, and acrobatic boys in divers circus feats,
represented the schools; fencing, single-stick, wrestling,
running, and leaping by amateurs varied the generously
contributed events of the cavalrymen, who, from some
neighboring station, slashed each other's paper plumes as
rival knights, and wrestled from their horses' backs.
When the spectacle became unbearable without tea, there
was of course a tea-tent where you might have it at the
counter or at tables on the grass; if you ordered it at a
table it was our experience that the tea-maiden who took
the order had it, after a hesitation, on her conscience to
warn you beforehand that it would be a shilling each,
and not sixpence, as at the counter. I thought at home
we might have been left to the greater outlay without the
forewarning; but perhaps not.
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
CHAPTER V
THE Pageant which began the August festival at Strat
ford was only the beginning. It ended at noon; the other
things went on the whole month; and I am not sure that
the pageant had quite got its paint off before the song,
the dance, the masque, the play, and the lecture were in
full tide of joyance. They went on concurrently, like
those streams which meet from different sources and
swim together in one channel to the sea; and as you were
borne with them you became yourself of their effect if
not their origin. You became a part of the general trans
port, and felt, though you might not altogether look it,
the happiness of the town in her greatest son, the greatest
of the sons of men. As the days passed in a golden sequence
scarcely dimmed by a few cloudy hours, it seemed as if
there could never be such another August if ever there
had been its like before, and the Genius of the festival,
whoever he was, must have rejoiced more and more that
he had appointed it for the season which Shakespeare
might have chosen himself for his natal month rather
than the raw April that chillily welcomed him into the
world. Of course the right Shakespeare festivals are and
have been held on and about his accepted birthday, but if
the gradual rise of the August celebrations has been from
a sense of his own imaginable preference, I should feel it
a very graceful compliance. I should not think their
coincidence with the greatest Bank Holiday of the year
would be offensive to his memory; he would not prob-
30
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
ably have objected to sharing them with the middle, and
lower middle, and unqualifiedly lower, classes who then
flood the whole English land and who seem to wash
through his native town in tides that rise yearly higher.
If he seems in his plays to show little specific sympathy
with the groundlings, that is no doubt because he was
himself a groundling, or very near it, and knew, as they
know, that as groundlings they were no better than their
betters. But this is a point which he was to touch upon
later, when I brought it home to him in one of those tacit
colloquies we were often holding in Stratford.
As for his actual, or putative birthday, I have ventured
a conjecture of the English April's chilliness in the six
teenth century because I have found April so cold in the
twentieth, but, for all I can really say, that famous
twenty-third of it may have been one of those rich, soft
days, full of dull sunshine when the flowers make haste
to open themselves to the bees, and the birds do their
best to flatter the trees that they have made no mistake
in budding or even blossoming. In fact, if, as many con
tend, we know very little about Shakespeare, we know
least of all what sort of weather it was the day he was
born. This is one of the strongest proofs of the Baconian
authorship of his plays; for if Bacon had been born on
that 23d of April, we should have known just how the
thermometer stood, and whether the day was wet, or the
spring early or late; he would have noted the facts him
self. But I do not mean to fling this apple of discord
among my readers; it was never gathered in Stratford,
for no such fruit grows there. They have scarcely heard
of Bacon in that devoted town, though indeed I found
at one of the shops a small bronze door-knocker figuring
the Lord Chancellor in the court where he took bribes if
he did not actually sell justice; the point has been made
in his favor. On the other hand, in a shop-window not
31
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
far off, the proprietor had sacrificed his very patronymic
to the poet's fame in the sign of "Bacon's Shakespeare
Restaurant." I was thinking, "How Shakespeare would
enjoy seeing this!" when in one of those cinematographic
apparitions which he was apt to make in my consciousness,
flashing in and out of it as the figures do in the films
changing at the moving-picture show, he joined me and
consented to share my amusement in it. But I observed
that more and more he refused to smile at the cost of a
man who had not himself been very tender of his friends
while he lived among them here.
As we turned from the window and he led on down
the street, he said, kindly, " We must always remember
that he is one of the greatest benefactors of the race, and
that he suffered greatly."
"And, his atonement, as far as his plea of guilty went,
was magnificent. It was one of those supreme things."
"Magnificent, supreme! Yes, but what a tragedy!"
"You could have written it; Tie couldn't."
"Well, perhaps that one he could."
The incident by no means followed close upon our
meeting in New Place gardens, but he had offered no
facts yet as to where or how he had disposed of a guest
who made even the poet unwelcome in his mother-town.
I ventured to fancy, however, that he might have taken
for their common shelter one of those pleasant houses
which their owners are willing to let furnished in Strat
ford, together with their servants and the general good
will of the place, while they are themselves off on their
holidays, at the seaside, or in Brittany or Switzerland.
In our own vain search for quarters, we viewed several
such houses, as alternatives of the lodgings which were al
ways full-up; and I have finally decided that Shakespeare
took a certain pretty cottage which was proposed to us
with a garden sloping to the Avon and a punt belonging
32
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
to it lying at the foot of the lawn. I am rather sorry now
that we did not take it ourselves, not only because it had
a populous wasps' nest in the center of a flower bed, and
a temporary gardener with a carbuncle on his neck and
three more coming, but because I should like having lived
in a cottage haunted by the greatest poet and the greatest
philosopher of all time. We should not have known they
were there by day, and by night we should have been so
tired with each day's pleasuring, and so drowsy from being
up every night at the theater for the Shakespeare plays,
that we should not have objected to the ghostly presences
that exchanged criticisms of each other's lives and works
in our dreams.
It would not be easy to give a true notion of the full
ness 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 some
how 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 chil
dren 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 impas
sioned devotion to them. One of the ballads was so mod
ern 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 some
how got beaten. It had a derisive refrain of "Yankee
Doodle Dandy O," and whether or not the lecturer di
vined our presence, and imagined our pain from this gibe,
33
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 teach
ers 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 accom
paniment 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 mid
dle 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
34
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
less reason to be merry than now. At last the sense of
human brotherhood seems to have penetrated with con
science 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, whole-
somer 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 govern
ment 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 con
scientiously 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; some
times the dress was so little ballet that it needed no cloak
ing, and such a dress we once saw worn late in the after
noon 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
35
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
bird-life and flower-life, and thrilled the heart of the be
holders 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 in
stantly 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.
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 play
wright in London, and apparently could ask nothing bet
ter 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 cot
tages 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 im
aginable, and he amiably consented to rambles through
37
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 omni
bus motors for Leamington and Warwick standing mid
way 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 pic
turesque, 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 abun
dant 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 look
ing 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 Shakespeareans then. At this he laughed out
right, and taking me by the shoulder pushed me toward the
38
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 confi
dently 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
4 39
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 re
lated 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 Har
vard'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 com-
40
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
mended 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 physical
ly; 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 deli
cate and very pretty. Who were the Harvards, ara/way?"
"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 be
longed 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 con
sidered 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 Harvards7 reluctance about me."
"And over there," I pursued, helpless against the curi
osity 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 slug
gish and unwilling memory as to deeds done in the body,
41
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
if we can dramatize the facts to the doer — Yes, we are
rather useful, and nothing is respected so much as useful
ness, there."
He stopped, and I took the word. "I see; and I sup
pose 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 Eng
lish 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
42
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 Eng
lish 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 Cor
dova reminded you of a colored 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
43
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 — "
"As it is, it's charming! Isn't this perspective delight
ful?" 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
fagade 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
44
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
was for sale and told a rich Chicagoan of it, and bought
it for him, and so for the American nation and the Ameri
can 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 nine
teenth 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 cer
tainly 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, es
pecially 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
45
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
the charming grounds of Hall's Croft. "This is delight
ful/' 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."
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 mul
berry, 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."
47
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
"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
i 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
48
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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
1 small Latin and less Greek ' left me out of. But he was
a good husband to Susanna, though she never would al
low 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 tur
moil 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 in
terior 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 your
self, wasn't it?"
"I think I'll let you come some day without me," he
said, gently, but firmly. "Sometimes people are sensi
tive—"
"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
49
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
found myself in the street outside the croft, and walking
toward the dear and beautiful 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 prefer
ence 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 river
side, 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 j ow
ing 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 ex
panses 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 gramo-
50
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
phone 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 river
side cottage."
"You mean his lordship? Well, I don't know. He's
not always in spirits; he has his ups and downs; especial
ly his downs."
51
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
" 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 con
solation 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, in
visibly 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 up
setting 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
of the first Englishmen to form the tobacco habit. He
blew fitful clouds from it as he walked, and he was so ab
sorbed 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 biog-
52
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
raphers, 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," Shake
speare 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 biog
raphers wouldn't mention them even to refute them, but
perhaps it's because of the paucity of biographical ma
terial—"
"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
53
THE SEET* AND UNSEEN
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 the 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 de
voted 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 Caesar 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,
54
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 pub
lished 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 Georgics,
which he read to Augustus; and he spent the rest of his
life in polishing the Mneid, 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 re
garded with religious veneration and visited as a temple.
1 That veneration . . . was greater than what we find at
taching to the actual memory of any ancient poet, though
the mystery connected with the personality of Homer ex
cited a greater curiosity/ This is all," Bacon ended, closing
and dropping the volume, which instantly resumed its pon
derability 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 $neid, 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
5 55
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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."
"The things had served their turn in the theater which
they were made for; in those days when we literally made
our plays, and we scarcely supposed people would care
to read them." As he said this, Shakespeare sat down on
one of the garden seats, and watched with a scarcely con
scious smile the antics of the much-carbuncled gardener
who had been pouring hot water down the wasps' nest in
his flower bed and was stiffly capering about with the ket
tle in his hand to avoid the pursuit of the exasperated
insects. As he finally disappeared in the direction of the
kitchen, Shakespeare burst into a shout of laughter in
audible except to us who were sharing his invisibility.
"May I ask," Bacon demanded, severely, "what is so
very diverting in the suggestion I have made? We will
not pursue it if you prefer not."
"Oh, it isn't that," Shakespeare choked out, "it's the
ga-ga-gardener and the wa-wa-wasps!"
"I hadn't noticed," Bacon returned, with dry offence.
"You must excuse my inadvertance," and he moved
toward the house.
"Oh, come, come!" Shakespeare called to him. "Don't
go! What you have been telling us is something I
hadn't the least notion of. I beg your pardon. Do
go on!"
"There is no more," Bacon hesitated, "at least about
Virgil, but I had thought of making a parallel of your own
case with his — "
"Well, if it won't tire our American cousin — or nephew
— or brother — or uncle — or fellow-subject — or fellow-
citizen, here?"
"Not at all. I shall be delighted. I think it's ex-
56
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
tremely interesting," I made haste to offer in placation
of our friend, who was still loath to forego his offense.
"It's this recurrent, this almost essential light-minded
ness of yours which spoils so much of your noblest tragedy!
You let your motley come clowning in at the highest mo
ments, and to get a laugh from the pit you turn your
Macbeth, your Hamlet, your Romeo and Juliet into farce.
If you had taken my advice, or would take it now — but
you wouldn't, you won't!" Shakespeare waited patient
ly, and Bacon, after he had fretted his grudge away,
resumed. "What struck me was the poverty of the
known events in Virgil's life. Of these there are scarce a
baker's dozen of the most elementary; the rest is supposi
tion and inference. There is nothing to show the char
acter or nature of the man in the events; nothing that
might not have happened to any other poet. It was a
good deal so with Ben Jonson himself, who was one of
the most self-advertised poets of our time. We know
that he was a quick-tempered, violent-natured, warm
hearted, censorious, generous, pedantic, humorous, wrong-
headed, delightful old fellow — "
"He Was, he was!" Shakespeare assented, with enjoy
ment. "And he is much the same still. Of course, he
has learnt rather more self-control, but he's 'rare Ben'
yet, and will be to all eternity, I hope."
"Yes," Bacon continued, "but what do we know of the
intimate facts of his life, the facts that shape and nature
a man, the personal facts? We know that he was a post
humous child, and that his mother, who married a second
time, is supposed to have loved him in a passionate way
of her own, insomuch that when he was sentenced to have
his nose and ears slit for ' insulting the Scotch ' in a play,
she prepared a poison which she meant to drink with him
before the sentence could be carried out. His stepfather
is 'saicj' to have forced him to lay a few bricks after Ben
57
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
left school, to remind him of their trade of bricklayer;
and Ben is 'supposed' to have lived unhappily with his
wife, whom he mentions coldly, and parted from after
five years, though he remembers her tenderly in the verses
commemorating the two children they lost. It is certain
that he was sent to Westminster school, but 'it is stated'
only on ' unsatisfactory evidence' that he went afterward
to Cambridge. He killed a fellow-actor in a duel and
barely escaped hanging; in prison he was visited by a
Roman Catholic priest and was converted to his faith,
which twelve years later he renounced because of the
Papist complicity with the Gunpowder Plot. He went
soldiering in the Netherlands, and came back to the
bricklaying of his youth; later he traveled governor to
Sir Walter Raleigh's son in France. For the rest, he
lived and wrote and drank in London; but the encyclo
pedist doubts whether in the last of his visits to Stratford
he was the cause of our friend here overdrinking himself
and taking the fever he died of. These are all the inti
mate facts which his biographer can lay his hands on, and
a fair half of them he doubts, or supposes. Merely in num
ber — not to speak of significance — they do not compare
with the well-known and generally accepted facts of the life
of our friend here, who is imagined to have left little or no
material for the biographer — "
"I wish," Shakespeare said, starting restively to his
feet, "that my biographers would agree to forget some of
the most intimate facts of my life. / have willingly done
so, and I remember them only when I find them recurring
in print. Then I feel like denying them."
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
CHAPTER VIII
THE philosopher glared at the poet from under brows
which met in a frown such as he used perhaps to bend
upon suitors in court while his pockets bulged with their
offerings to justice. His pipe had now gone out, and he
went about lighting it with the effect of having quite
finished what he had to say.
"Well!" the poet prompted.
"There is nothing more," the philosopher answered, in
cold resentment, and began pulling at his pipe.
"But that parallel?"
"I thought you preferred your trifling."
"My joke is dear to me, but not so precious as your
interest in my biography. "
"And I, if I may venture to entreat your lordship," I
put in, "should think myself greatly the loser if I failed
of your parallel. I don't think anything like it has been
offered, yet, in proof of our friend's authorship of his
plays."
His lordship continued silent for a little longer; then
he severely resumed. "I had thought of enforcing the
parallel with other examples, but it is not necessary, and
I will only suggest in refutation of the argument that
Shakespeare could not have written Shakespeare because
he has left no handwriting of his behind except two or three
autographs differently spelled from each other, that we
have no signature of Chaucer's, though he was an eminent
diplomat and went upon many embassies to the con-
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
tinent, requiring signatures. It is not certainly known
who his father was, or precisely his wife. None of his
poems survive in his own manuscript, and it isn't known
which were irrefutably his; just as some of our friend's
plays here are of doubted origin, and none were printed
from his own handwriting. Your two poets are alike,
moreover, in certain alleged violations of the law : Shake
speare is said to have stolen deer, and Chaucer to have
taken part in the abduction of a young girl; probably
neither did either; but the interesting fact is that uncer
tainties cloud the history of the courtier as well as the
life of the player. Seven years of Chaucer's time left
no record, just as nine of Shakespeare's left none. But
when you come to speak of the paucity of biographical
material in the case of our friend here, I would have you
contrast its abundance with the want of facts concerning
most of his eminent contemporaries and predecessors.
It is perfectly known who his father and mother were and
their origin. The year and almost the day of his birth
are known, but not so clearly the place; though it was
certainly Stratford and certainly not the Birthplace. The
day of his baptism is ascertained, and when and where he
went to school — almost. There is no doubt whom he
married, and if not where, then when, and reasonably why.
At fixed dates his three children are baptized. In a cer
tain year and month he goes to London, where he becomes
not so much personally a holder of gentlemen's horses at
the theater, as a sort of horseholding syndicate or Trust,
and an employer of skilled labor in the boys trained by
himself for the purpose. From this business eminence he
sinks to be a poet, a playwright, and even a player by dis
tinctly dated gradations, and is enviously attacked for
his success in the drama by a brother dramatist. The
dates of his successive plays are fairly approximated in
their production at the theater and their reproduction
60
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
from the press, and the time of his buying New Place is
fixed. His unbroken relation to Stratford during his Lon
don years can be traced by the dates of his various pur
chases and lawsuits and participation in local affairs.
His devotion to his family expressed itself in all filial,
paternal and fraternal sorts; he marries his daughters
to his liking; he stands godfather to his friends7 chil
dren; when his mother dies he yields to the homesickness
always in his heart, and comes back to end his days in
Stratford. He wishes to be a principal citizen and a man
of social standing; he buys tithes and joins in fencing
the people's commons; he rejoices in a coat-of-arms, and
likes to be known as William Shakespeare, Esquire, trust
ing that his low-class career as actor-manager in London
will not be remembered against him. But he likes to be
remembered by his old dramatic friends, and he welcomes
Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson to New Place, where he
lives till his death in peace, if not affection, with his wife.
He even engages to excess in their jolly riot, for, as a
Vicar of Stratford recalls some fifty years later, ' Shake
speare, I?en Jonson, and Drayton had a merie meeting,
and itt seems drank too hard, and Shakespeare died of a
fevour there contracted.' Others, however, hold that his
fever was a filth disease contracted from the pigsties that
then ran the length of New Place in Chapel Lane. But it
is enough," his lordship ended, with a dignified gesture
of his pipe-stem, "that he died full of glory and honor."
Shakespeare, who had been listening more and more
restively, wincing from time to time at facts which I
thought his guest might better have spared him, rose and
stretched himself, saying: "I didn't realize before that I
was such an unquestionable celebrity." Then, as I rose
too and thanked his lordship for his convincing state
ment, but said I must really be going, Shakespeare, as if
be would escape some merited reproach, said he would go
61
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
a little way with me, if I didn't mind, and we hurried off
together. We had not got as far as the bridge when he
answered the tacit question in my mind, as the custom
is among disembodied spirits.
"Yes, he is often very tiresome company, especially
when he gets to harping on my record and its sufficiency
for all the practical purposes of the biographer. But I
haven't the heart to stop him, for I know it forms his
escape from grievous thoughts about himself which other
wise he could not bear."
"You mean his conviction of bribery, and his dishonor
before the world; that heavy fine, which was the least of
his burdens, and his deposition from the high office which
he had held with such pride and splendor?"
"No, no; not chiefly that. He settled with that when
he owned it, saying, 'I do plainly and ingenuously con
fess that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all
defense/"
"But why not supremely that immeasurable fall?" I
insisted. "Above all other great men — for he was one
of the very greatest — he 'loved the world and the world's
law' of luxury and state and flattery. He crawled and
truckled to those who could forward him, and he took their
snubs and insults almost with thanks, as for so much
condescension. He knew himself the sublimest intellect
in the realm; why should he show himself the basest
lickspittle in it to that old harridan Elizabeth and that
slobbering pedant James, and his own ungracious kins
men, their ministers?"
"Ah, it's a strange anomaly," my companion answered.
"He is a riddle that I don't often attempt to read. But
what I say is that he has long ago ceased to feel shame for
his dishonor, but when he returns to earth the ingratitude
and treachery he used toward those who trusted him are
again an unquenched fire in his memory. He still writhes
62
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
in pity of the poor man Aubrey, whose bribe he took and
then pronounced 'a killing decree' against him. And his
friend Essex, who enriched him with gifts and never
tired of showing him good will and doing him good deeds,
and whom he repaid by hunting him to his death and
stopping every chance of mercy which the law might have
left him — in the remembrance of Essex he suffers as if
Essex would be living yet but for his pitiless pursuit. I
don't know how he bears it; and since he finds some little
respite from his remembrance of the wrong he did by
righting the little wrong which he thinks has been done
me, I can't deny it him."
"No, of course not," I agreed, "but I could have wished
that his argument had been a little less in the nature of
special pleading."
"You mean in regard to that famous old saying of
Hallam's that 'no letter of Shakespeare's writing, no
record of his conversation has been preserved?' Why, I
thought he met that fairly. People used not to keep their
correspondents' letters, and I was never a great corre
spondent: But the encyclopedist, whom he mainly fol
lowed in his argument, cites as to my conversation the
interview my kinsman Thomas Greene had with me in
London concerning the inclosure of the common lands,
at Stratford and Welcombe; and there were other meet
ings with the friends of the scheme, when I told them dis
tinctly that I 'was not able to favor the inclosing of Wel
combe.' This is not only proof that I could and did talk
with people and that they remembered it; but it ought
to be remembered by those who imagine I cared nothing
for the poor, that in these meetings I defended their in
terests and not mine, in opposing the fencing of the com
mon lands."
There was more warmth of feeling in Shakespeare's
voice than he usually allowed to be felt in it ; for the most
63
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
part it was expressive of a kindly, if ironical humor, as
though the matter in hand were not worth very serious
consideration, though he liked playing with it. I was
about to say that I was glad to have him express himself
so decidedly, in this connection, when I was aware of
being alone, and I pursued my way across the bridge and
kept on in one of those rambles through the town which
were mostly as aimless as they were eventless.
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
CHAPTER IX
IT was more than a week after we were placed in our
pleasant hotel in Stratford before we began to look about
us in the lovely country round. The town was enough,
with its openness, its brightness, its smiling kindness; for
the time we could not wish for anything more, and we
never found anything better, though we found abundant
beauty in the farms and villages of the Midland slopes and
levels. Everything in Stratford was homelike, and noth
ing more so than the Cochin-China Tea Rooms, where we
took our luncheon, with their blaze of a small flower
garden behind and the little arbor at the kitchen door
where you might have a table if you liked. The coffee
was very "good there, for a wonder in England, and the
buttered brown-bread toast was an example to the scorched
and refrigerated slices of cottage-loaf prevailing else
where on the island; and after ordering these it was pleas
ant to keep along Church Street past the low-roofed and
timbered almshouses to the shop where first green gages
and, after their season was past, large red Victoria plums
were to be had. Such a crooked little shop, with half its
stock in two unrelated windows, and the rest in baskets
behind and under the counter that began elbowing you
our of doors as soon as you got in, and ceased treading on
breathless small boys with pennies in their hands, could
have been rightly served only by two such scrupulous
sisters, or at the worst sisters-in-law, who would not de
fraud us of a single plum in the half-pound. The fruit
65
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
was grown, they said, in their own orchards just out of
town, but which way we never understood, and it was in
no wise related to the fruit of their next-door neighbor,
as he, equally with themselves, assured us. We always
hurried back to the Cochin-China with it lest the toast
or the coffee should be cold ; but it never was, for at noon
day the little tables were all full, and the service, though
reliable and smiling, was not eager. We had a table in
the back room looking out on the kitchen arbor, and
though we were but three we kept it against all comers
till one overcrowded day a young German priest came in
with three nuns, and looked so hopelessly at a three-chair
table that we could not do less than offer him ours, which
was for four chairs. They took it with such bows and
thanks as ought to have made us ashamed, but only made
us proud of our simple civility, and anxious to found a
claim to acquaintance on it. We did not push, though I
tried hard to believe that it was my duty to tell them I
knew a little of the German they were speaking, and I
only eavesdropped as hard as I could till a decent chance
of warning them offered. I suppose that there are some
times gayer parties of young people, but I have seldom
heard more joyous and innocent laughter than that of
those gentle sisters in their angelic flirtation with that
handsome young priest. He could speak English, it
seemed, from his constantly saying, "All right, all right, "
and presently it seemed that the sisters could. All three
of them were lovely and two were beautiful, and all three
again were as glad as children; and none of the fashionable
ladies we had left in London seemed so perfectly ladies as
these dear sisters in their starched white coifs under their
black veils and in their broadcloth robes falling round them
in sculpturesque folds. When some offered courtesy broke
what ice was left between us, the young priest was proud
to tell us that the sisters were from a Catholic college in
66
AJ1 STRATFORD-ON-AVON
England, and he went further and said that the least young
of the three was "a very learned sister." This brought
us somehow to the question, always rife at Stratford, of
the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare's plays, and the
sister was of such a decided mind upon it that she was not
surprised so much as grieved to learn that the poor lady
who first mooted it had died in a lunatic asylum.
I could have wished that Shakespeare, and even Bacon,
had been there to enjoy the learned sister's rejection of
the theory, but I saw neither of them for some time after
that day at their riverside villa. In the mean time we
saw a great many fellow-Americans, not indeed at the
Cochin-China Tea Rooms, where they came very sparing
ly, but at our hotel, where they abounded, mostly in motors
with the dust of hurried travel upon them. I suppose
that the motor-face, of whatever nationality, is not en
gaging; but when its composite expression was added
to the effect of something intense and almost fierce that
seems to characterize our native physiognomy abroad, one
could wish that it was not always so self -evidently Ameri
can in those who wore it. If the automobile conditions
are everywhere such as to rob the motorist's presence of
charm, to these compatriots' hardness of face was added
that peculiar stoniness of voice which is so often noticeable
in us, and which made them as wounding to the ear as to
the eye. They overwhelmingly outnumbered the English,
who lurked apart in the hotel parlor while the Americans
prevailed in the hallway. It must have been difficult
for the English to bear this, and I heard two of them re
venging themselves one day : " It seems to me I have heard
that .voice before." "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 al
ways of that superior taste which we used to pride our-
67
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
selves 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 pleas
ure 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 suffer
ing 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 land
scape 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 dis
tance, 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
68
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
bridges and farm-houses and villages that one passed with
out 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 hunt
ing 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 be
fore 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 po
tential 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 av
erage man who Pays All. These Four Alls appear to
prevail in every civilized country, but they might
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 yeo
man 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 de
manded 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
70
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 home
like, 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 over
hung 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 par
tridges and pheasants even when I came to understand
that they were sacred to the gentry; it was the begin
ning 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
6 71
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 swestbriers 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 in
trusive.
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 ex
plicit 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 Leaming
ton. Without his help one could have safely passed
between the family carriages bringing the nearer neigh
bors 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
73
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
orchestra implied no such claim, but partook of the in
formality 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 else
where 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 cot
tage, I liked to suppose a generous regret in him for
not having anticipatively requited this affection by ten
derer 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 slight-
74
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
ed, whether high or low, but one could have more pleas
ure of the upper classes because their reality was less
tedious than that of the churls and clowns who, if any
thing, 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 ad
mirable 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 Noth
ing," "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 keep
ing itself in a high fantastic air, and as much aloof from
every-day matter-of-fact as if it were one of those ro
mantic 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
75
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 Ameri
can 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 embold
ened 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 ac
cent, 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 syn-
thetized in the strange blend which passes on our stage
for the English voice.
In that supreme moment scene, costume, action, ex
pression, were all so proper, so exquisitely harmonized
76
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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-in-
tellectualized 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 cos
tuming 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 drama
tist 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 ap
proved 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.
77
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 bal
cony, 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.
That must have been beautiful, but what event, what
moment of the joyous season was not beautiful? When
we came out of the theater at the modest hours which the
theater keeps in Stratford we continued, as it were, a
part of the cast in whatever play we had been seeing, and
under the stars of the dim English heaven, or its mild
moon, we took our way up the footpath of Chapel Lane,
or confided ourselves fearlessly to the roadway, where a
few large-eyed motors purred harmlessly among us. I
may not claim that they paused to let us look about for
the lame cat of New Place gardens, or deny that they
sometimes urged us on with those porcine gutturals
peculiar to motors. But we heard in them only the
ghostly echoes from the styes which fenced New Place
along Chapel Street and Chapel Lane in Shakespeare's
time. There was no ghostliest taint from these in our
twentieth-century air, but the honeyed odor of the sweet
alyssum from the beds beside the gates of New Place
gardens stole through the grating and haunted us to
our dreams.
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
CHAPTER XI
TWICE a week, in the gardens of the theater, there were
Morris Dances and Country Dances by the pupil-teachers,
whom we could see every morning at the lectures in the
Parish Parlor. These joyous events were called by the
severe and self-reproachful name of Demonstrations, but
by any name they would have been enchanting, as in fact
their subtitles were. What could be more quaintly dear
than Beaux of London City, by the young men, or Brighton
Camp by the girls, or The Rose, or Confess by both youths
and maidens? There was a sword dance, and there were
Morris Dances, when the dancers beat the sward with
their feet to make the bells on their legs help rouse the
mother earth to their adoration. For a contrast to the
lusty blonde English girls, there were two lithe Greek
maidens come from their far shores to fly like Monads
on a Grecian urn in the wild figures of those northern
dances; but best of all there was a veteran Morris Dancer
now getting in years, who had been famous in his day,
and who gave the dance with a sort of dying vigor and a
stiff grace of gesture very pathetic and appealing.
The sun blazed down on the place, but there was life
in the air, and by the Avon's banks the feathery reeds
swayed and tilted in the light wind and waved us to the
stream. The water was alive with the punts and skiffs
and canoes which are coming and going on it the whole
summer; my muse must not be too fastidious to sing also
the steam and motor barges which all too swiftly but very
79
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
cheaply bear the poorer pleasurer to the head of naviga
tion a few miles up. But we were not so poor as that,
and we took a boat, ample but not beyond the strength
of a half -grown boy who at times let his head hang heavily
on his breast as if overwearied with rowing. Perhaps it
was only a mute entreaty for our larger largesse in the end,
and if so I must allow that it was successful; but it was
not practised so much going as coming, and we mingled
even gaily with the other boats and punts. In England
when a youth and maiden go on a water excursion it is,
as I have already noted, the convention for the youth to
lie flat in the bottom of the punt and for the maiden to
stand or sit at his head and push the craft along. If it
is two girls who man the boat, then the weaker does the
work, and the stronger does the rest; or if they are both
very strong, then they both lie idling over books, and
there is no telling how they get to a given point. We
easily passed these brave or dear crews, and contrived
not to be run down by the populous launches that
passed us.
At first as you ascend the Avon after you have cleared
the two bridges arching the stream, there are pretty villas
on the right, and on the left there are pleasant meadows
where on the afternoon of our voyage we saw some of
the folk-dancers, who were encamped there, going about
their light housekeeping among the tents, in the short
skirts and the long stockings of their folk-dancing costume.
On the other shore the villa gardens came down to the
water, and when we were past the gardens both shores
were overhung with willows which twisted their roots
together and kept the banks firm against the freshets
seasonably overflowing them. Under the braided roots
the water-rats had their holes, but kept acceptably within
them, for water-rats when visible are a very loathsome
sight, and I should be sorry to associate them with the
80
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
river which Shakespeare was the Swan of. Other swans
are not conspicuous in my remembrance, though there
must have been swans, unless they had all merged their
dying notes in the exultant strains of the surviving gramo
phones. Of the gramophones there is no manner of
doubt; but we were chiefly bent in ascending the river
on arriving at a certain tea-garden which we had heard
was to be found midway of our course. We found it, but
found it shut, and then there was nothing for us but to
row, or make our boy row, a mile further to Teddington,
where he was sure of a tea-house which was open.
While he remained with his boat at the landing there we
took the path which led past picturesque thatched cottages
and beside green meadows, ushered onward by sign
boards to the inn where we were to find tea, as we hoped
in the moment of its "first sprightly running." But
when we got to the inn it appeared that the gas-fixtures
had suffered some disaster, and were undergoing repairs,
with the tea-room in the possession of several plumber-
like men whose presence boded no refection in it. Instead
we were offered a small dining-room, so dismal in dark-
red paper and so haunted with the memories of bad din
ners, that we implored the kind, incapable-looking host
to let us have our tea in the garden. We then found our
selves under a tree in the yard behind the house at a table
which had known so much rustic jollity that it bore traces
of the riot ineffaceable by the wet cloth smeared over it
by the slattern maid. She tried to hide them with the
table-cloth, but the table-cloth was in league with them,
and showed worse stains, which in turn would not be
hidden by the plates and cups dispersed among them.
There we sat and waited, realizing more and more that
the garden was an innyard and the innyard was a farm
yard with evidence of every variety of poultry in it.
Feathers, with straw and chips, such as chickens delight
81
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
in, seemed to grow up out of the gravel under our feet.
There had been a dog which went and a cat which came
and went, and then there began to be more and more
cocks and hens which remained from the beginning.
While we waited and waited long, the chickens were rein
forced in closing upon us by troops of ducks and geese
from some reserve of poultry beyond the stables. A man
opened a gate from the adjacent field, and entered with a
flock of sheep; in the pasture beyond we heard the lowing
of cows and the neighing of horses, which put their heads
over the bars as if to urge a passage to our table; we heard
the note of remoter swine in unseen pens; and we began to
ask each other when we were, if ever, going to have tea.
Secretly we had each begun to hope we were never going
to have it, and inquiry at the kitchen developed the fact
that the range had sympathized with the gas-fixtures,
and the fire was in doubt whether it would burn or not.
We decided we could not wait the result of its misgiving,
and began some polite pour parlers with the landlord, we
insisting that we would pay for our tea and go without
waiting for it, and he insisting that we should not pay for
it without having it. In the end we paid and escaped
triumphing without our tea, but feeling rather sorry that
we had got the better of that poor man; though now,
upon reflection, I am not sure that we had got the better
of him.
It was an afternoon of anomalies, which in that neat,
well-ordered England, where custom and tradition prevail
as with the authority of holy writ, were startling past all
former experience. When once your mind is set on tea
in England, you are, though an alien, as inflexible as any
born to the manner; and when we had got back to our
boat we made our boy make all haste down the Avon to
the pretty tea-garden we had noted lurking with its tables
among leaves and flowers. But as we came in full sight
82
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
of that pretty tea-garden we suffered a moment's dismay
at the sight of a punt lolling full-length at the landing,
and apparently not proposing to move away for us. A
youth of the usual years and an unusually elderly maiden,
or say matron, occupied themselves with tea and cake
in it; and when it reluctantly got from the landing, and
we mounted to the garden, we were almost held from
ordering tea for ourselves by the unprecedented spectacle
of an elderly gentleman standing by a tea-laden table,
and serving from it the youth and the maiden, or matron,
in the punt with tea and bread-and-butter and ultimately
cake, quite as if he had himself been in the punt and they
serving him. Whether to attribute the strange fact to
the all-pervading balefulness of Mr. Lloyd George or not
we did not know. Perhaps with his equal taxes and old-
age pensions he was really bringing the landed gentry to
things like this; for this gentleman looked landed gentry
and county family, if ever a gentleman did. I must not
push the matter too far; I must not say he looked a title,
even so low as baronet; but under that he might have
been anything but a knight recognized for some service
to civilization He was perfectly dressed in the well-
studied propriety of an English gentleman out for an
afternoon's pleasure, down to his gaiters; he stood at
his quiet ease beside that table, pouring the tea and cut
ting the cake, with a rather dreamy air, unconscious of
the curiosity to know how he happened, which tormented,
and has never ceased to torment us since, concerning him.
From time to time he carried a cup or a plate to the people
in the punt, which had come back to its moorings, and
leaned over to bestow it on one or other of them, who
took it with equal calm, and let him go on serving them.
But it was no servile service which he offered and they
accepted; it was rather the courtesy of host and guests
of the tacit, unflourishing fashion of English society where
83
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
to make the thing done seem not to have been done is the
fine ideal. No word passed between them; the youth
did not look an invalid, the matron not quite the mother
of so old a youth. But in any case why was not she serv
ing the two men? Why was that elder serving her, if
for any reason he was serving the youth?
The tea-maiden ran across the street and fetched our
refection from the inn there, and spread our table beside
the barrier opposite this strange gentleman's, equally
overhung with plum-trees and dividing him as ours divided
us from borders of gay marigolds and phlox and patches
of cabbage and cauliflower in the gardens beyond. The
yellow-jackets, which the English call wasps, came in
stinctively at the call of our jam, and we saw them hover
ing about his fearless head as he stooped over his table
or moved from it to feed or slake the famine of the people
in the punt; and when we had escaped unstung from our
own refreshment, we left him with his gentle riddle un
read, and let our droop-headed boy pull us back to the
boat-house where we had taken him. The tea at Tedding-
ton had been disappointing if it could be said to have
been at all; and that last tea, which had certainly been,
had left us with a thirst which I do not know how we shall
ever quench. Yet that excursion up and down the Avon
had been so surpassing an ideal of an excursion on the
Avon, that we said, "Now we should certainly do it
every day." The surprising part is that we never did
it again.
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
CHAPTER XII
THE days at Stratford were so full of breakfasting,
lunching, and dining, with lectures on folk dancing and
folk singing, and debates on ethical and esthetical matters
between, and drives into the country, and afternoon teas
and calls, that it was with difficulty I could squeeze in or
out an hour for so favorite diversion of mine as the
Moving Picture Show. But at last the hour lent itself
to the desire, and I went to that Picture Theater which
does not feel itself too presumptuous in almost fronting
the Shakespeare Monument. Perhaps it is kept in counte
nance by the badness of the monument in one art and its
own excellence in another, but if I ventured into the
Picture Theater without knowing its grounds for self-
confidence my own trust in it was rewarded by the prev
alence, so flattering to my patriotism, the almost ex
clusive prevalence, of American films in its events. The
events were of that romantic character so easily attrib
utable to the life of our Far West, and especially that life
as it was touched, by the only a little more distinctively
romantic life of our aborigines, still supposed to linger in
a tribal condition before merging in our body politic as
landholders in severalty and prospective citizens. In this
condition they were provisionally making war on the
white men, galloping round on their ponies along the brows
and summits of hills which threw them into strong relief,
and permitted them a splendor of action equally glorious
in advance and retreat. Their forays were connected with
85
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
the love-interest embodied in the reciprocal passion of a
young lieutenant and the daughter of the commanding
general, who conspired with an elderly colonel to frustrate
their affection by throwing the lieutenant into the power
of the savages, and securing his betrothed for his ranking
officer. The betrayal and the rescue were effected with
the incessant discharge of firearms, sensible to the eye
only, between Indians and cowboys and cavalrymen,
which eventuated in the triumph of the American forces
with much waving of star-spangled banners.
The audience was composed almost wholly of school
children; I was the only spectator distinctly in the decline
of life; and among the children there was one of years so
few and sensibilities so tender, that in spite of his sym
pathy with the American forces, he damped the general
joy by bursting into a cry of alarm at the moment of
their triumph, and having to be led howling up the aisle
into the safety of the outer air. His grief touched me so
that I could not take the pride I might have wished in
the fact that of the six dramas presented that afternoon
four were shown from American films, and two from
French ones, with not a single English film among them,
not even of those municipal receptions of royalty which
the English fondness commonly wreaks itself in reproduc
ing on the cinematographic screen, with little variety of
costume for the king and an inflexible devotion to one
walking - dress and one austere, reproving hat in the
queen.
I could not remain after this tragic incident, and I fol
lowed the emotional sufferer out, hoping to supply the
reassurance which seemed to fail from his more immediate
friends. But before I reached the door I was aware of
one of these mystical presences at my shoulder which I
was now grown used to, and which I supposed of course
was Shakespeare. On the contrary, as I looked round, I
86
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
saw that it was Bacon, and I said with surprise: "Oh!
You here?"
"Yes," he said, with some resentment of my tone, "I
am here a good deal, first and last."
"Yes?" I queried, to gain time, without committing
myself further.
"Why don't these stupid people say something to com
fort that little boy?" he demanded, without noting my
query, and I perceived that his shadowy shape was in a
quiver of compassion for the sensitive youngster. This
ought not to have surprised me, and upon reflection I
perceived that it was the logic of a man who had often
been so pitiless in this life that he should be all pity in
another life ; that would be not only his eager atonement,
his expiation; it would be his privilege, his highest happi
ness. To go through eternity compassionating every form
of suffering here would be a refuge from vain regrets, and
such solace as comes to us whenever we disown some mis
deed by doing the opposite. I wished to speak with him
on this point, but I saw he was not concerned with me;
he was somehow addressing himself to the terrified child,
who suddenly stopped his roaring and looked round smil
ing as if he expected to see a kind face at his shoulder.
I knew he would see none, and Bacon instantly ceased to
occupy himself with him.
"Yes," he resumed with me, "I think there is a great
deal to-be hoped from this sort of show, and I am inter
ested in every advance made in its art. If I were in au
thority here I would not permit these spectacles of battle,
or any terrifying circumstance. There is an infinite
range of subjects which could be shown for the instruction
as well as the delight of those little ones; all 'the fairy
tales of science,' all the works of nature, all the beautiful
and cheering events of history."
"I'm afraid the Shakespeareans would say," I answered,
7 87
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
"that you don't show the author-actor's instinct in that
notion, and that such a notion alone was enough to dis
prove your friends' claim to your authorship of the plays.
You know how bloody his scene is — and advisedly so.
We like a noble terror — all but our young friend here."
He did not reply, but said : " I believe that in the United
States you now have the characters in the films speaking:
talking-movies, I think you call them. You are very
graphic, you Americans!"
"Oh, thank you! They're not quite satisfactory, yet.
There is speech, but it doesn't seem somehow to come
from the speakers, though their lips move."
"You must trust your Mr. Edison to bring the affair
to perfection. A most ingenious man; a sort of up-to-
date version of your great Franklin. I don't wonder
your people value him and have voted him one of your
supreme benefactors."
"Your lordship must excuse me," I said, "if I'm still
a little surprised that a philosopher like yourself, who
changed the whole course, if not the nature, of philosophy,
should be so much interested in people who are after all
merely inventors, however beneficent."
"Have you read your Macaulay to so little purpose,"
he rejoined, "as not to have seen how he distinguishes
between the new and the old philosophies in his essay on
me by pointing out that my philosophy dedicated itself
to use, while that of the Greeks disdained the practical as
something beneath the notice of the idealist?"
"Yes, yes," I said, "I certainly remember that; and
here I hesitated from an embarrassing recollection of the
severity of Macaulay's essay on the facts of Bacon's
career.
"I know he was terribly hard upon me in the first
half of his essay," Bacon returned, as if I had spoken.
"But he let me have the last word, as it were. The whole
88
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
second half of his essay is devoted to the recognition of
my claim upon the forgiveness — I won't say gratitude —
of mankind because of my wish to serve them in any
humblest fashion, of my will always to hitch a star to my
wagon, if I may transpose the saying of your Emerson : a
very different sort of idealist, by the way, from Plato."
"I know/' I answered. "I thought that fine in Ma-
caulay. 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 impor
tance in the world of immortality. I assure you that there
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 re
plied. "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 sur
prised 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 descend
ant of his contemporary mulberry-tree, and he courteous
ly 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?"
90
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
"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 over
head, 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 dull
ness of Stratford, though then there was no great outlook
for me here with my wife and three children. Do my bi
ographers 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 con
jecture 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
91
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 talk
ing-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. "/ 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 use
ful end—"
"I suppose he thinks harmless amusement and pain
less 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
92
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
Arlecchino, and Pantalone, and Brighella, and Facanapa
and II 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 prin
ciples of cold storage. You know he brought on his mor
tal 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 ex
periment was the first embryonic stirring of your gigantic
system of Cold Storage."
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 some
how 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
94
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 sug
gestive 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 admira
tion 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 skip
ping?"
"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 bor
rowed 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
1 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,
95
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 Lon
don 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 Shake
speare, 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 ask
ing, 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 be
comes 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
96
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 deny
ing 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 come
dies; 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
97
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
eternity with my unavailing remorse? Hasn't he for
given me, entreated me to forgive myself, with that good
ness 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
98
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
unrealities, of all the juiceless husks which human vanity
feeds on, literary glory seems to me the emptiest and dry-
est. 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 Fve 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 peo
ple 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 ex
plained — "here in Stratford, have been wondering how
much the townspeople, the tradespeople, the work
people 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 Shake
speare?"
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
99
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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."
"At any rate, in that you come to something real"
the philosopher assented.
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 dis
embodied 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 un
worthily enough in counting up the number of peram
bulators 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,
101
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
with sincere Kate Greenway cottages set practicable be
hind 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 in
stantly recognizable by the throngs of sight-seers within
and about its gates. The sight-seers were instantly recog
nizable, 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 amaz
ingly 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 be
wildered at such a far effect from her marriage with the
rather wild young Shakespeare lad whose family was cer
tainly 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
102
' .
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
that the custodians who led from room to room and de
livered the crowd over from one to another did their in
telligent best to realize this for them. For myself I felt
an appeal in it which I could not well express. The de
cency of the whole place, with the propriety of the fur
nishings, 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 court
ing," 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 cir
cumstance 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 Shake
speare would have spoken there as he had once spoken of
Anne his aging wife; or make this the occasion of defend
ing 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
8 103
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
severally 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 explana
tions which we were not able to give. Then they pos
sessed themselves of our bread and butter, and even threat
ened 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 Shot
tery, while the over -laden motorbusses passed earth-
quakingly by us, "a little more, and I shall begin to be
lieve in the Bacon authorship."
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 Shake
speare 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 some
time 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 win
dow 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
105
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
taken as one of the strongest proofs of the Shake
spearean authorship.
Our visit was tardily paid on one of our very last days
in Stratford, and then we said 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 con
ducted by an English-speaking Japanese.
"Oh, stranger things than that happen here," the gra
cious 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 con
course of spirits there, the new arrivals as well as the old,
106
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
and of course more variety. We can't wonder at his pre
ferring 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 pun
ishment — 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' ex
perience? 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 T 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, thought
fully.
"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 com
panions. "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
107
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
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 guide
books 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 over
looks 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 es
pecially 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 es
cape the sense of a family party, and of a middle-class
satisfied desire of respectability in their reunion. I real
ized 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 sup
plied by the presence of the good Doctor John Hall,
108
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 phy
sician. 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 any
thing 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 monu-
109
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
ment 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 im
mortal 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 Er
rors'—"
"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 dis
owned 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
110
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
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 said
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 immeasur
able 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 ap
pointment."
"And you chose to leave that Bliss and return to our
sorrowful earth with that poor soul!"
"Eternity is merciful; it forgives; it helps us forget;
111
THE SEEN AND UNSEEN
it forgets for us; but Time cannot; it is conditioned in
remembrance; it must be cruel to be kind."
" Ah, now you are speaking as I have always hoped you
would — Shakespeareanly . ' '
" Would you have liked me to quote myself?"
"No, not quote yourself exactly, but express yourself
rather more in the diction of the supreme poet. Instead
of that you have preferred the commonest sort of every
day prose. The other sort, if I could have reported our
conversations in it, would have been more convincing.
It would have proved — "
" That I wrote Shakespeare? No! It would have proved
that you did."
He laughed with that gentle gaiety of his, but began
now to be a little sad.
I was going to say something more in protest, but in
that instant the generous Shade became part of the dim,
religious light of the place, and I went out of the church
yard by the side gate, and down past the old mill, musing
and murmuring beside its dam, and so into the sunny
meadows along the Avon.
THE END
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