Shakespeare's England Part 7

"I have a silent sorrow here, A grief I'll ne'er impart; It breathes no sigh, it sheds no tear, But it consumes my heart."

To hear him speak Oth.e.l.lo's farewell was to hear the perfect music of heart-broken despair. To see him when, as The Stranger, he listened to the song, was to see the genuine, absolute reality of hopeless sorrow.

He could, of course, thrill his hearers in the ferocious outbursts-of Richard and Sir Giles, but it was in tenderness and grief that he was supremely great; and no one will wonder at that who looks upon his n.o.ble face--so eloquent of self-conflict and suffering--even in this cold and colourless mask of death. It is easy to judge and condemn the sins of a weak, pa.s.sionate humanity; but when we think of such creatures of genius as Edmund Kean and Robert Burns, we ought to consider what demons in their own souls those wretched men were forced to fight, and by what agonies they expiated their vices and errors. This little tavern-room tells the whole mournful story, with death to point the moral, and pity to breathe its sigh of unavailing regret.

Many of the present frequenters of the Harp are elderly men, whose conversation is enriched with memories of the stage and with ample knowledge and judicious taste in literature and art. They naturally speak with pride of Kean's a.s.sociation with their favourite resort.

Often in that room the eccentric genius has put himself in p.a.w.n, to exact from the manager of Drury Lane theatre the money needed to relieve the wants of some brother actor. Often his voice has been heard there, in the songs that he sang with so much feeling and sweetness and such homely yet beautiful skill. In the circles of the learned and courtly he never was really at home; but here he filled the throne and ruled the kingdom of the revel, and here no doubt every mood of his mind, from high thought and generous emotion to misanthropical bitterness and vacant levity, found its unfettered expression. They show you a broken panel in the high wainscot, which was struck and smashed by a pewter pot that he hurled at the head of a person who had given him offence; and they tell you at the same time,--as, indeed, is historically true,--that he was the idol of his comrades, the first in love, pity, sympathy, and kindness, and would turn his back, any day, for the least of them, on the n.o.bles who sought his companionship. There is no better place than this in which to study the life of Edmund Kean. Old men have been met with here who saw him on the stage, and even acted with him. The room is the weekly meeting-place and habitual nightly tryst of an ancient club, called the City of Lushington, which has existed since the days of the Regency, and of which these persons are members. The City has its Mayor, Sheriff, insignia, record-book, and system of ceremonials; and much of wit, wisdom, and song may be enjoyed at its civic feasts. The names of its four wards--Lunacy, Suicide, Poverty, and Juniper--are written up in the four corners of the room, and whoever joins must select his ward.

Sheridan was a member of it, and so was the Regent; and the present landlord of the Harp (Mr. M'Pherson) preserves among his relics the chairs in which those gay companions sat, when the author presided over the initiation of the prince. It is thought that this club grew out of the society of The Wolves, which was formed by Kean's adherents, when the elder Booth arose to disturb his supremacy upon the stage. But there is no malice in it now. Its purposes are simply convivial and literary, and its tone is that of thorough good-will.

A coloured print of this room may be found in that eccentric book _The Life of an Actor,_ by Pierce Egan: 1825.

One of the gentlest and most winning traits in the English character is its instinct of companionship as to literature and art. Since the days of the Mermaid the authors and actors of London have dearly loved and deeply enjoyed such odd little fraternities of wit as are typified, not inaptly, by the City of Lushington. There are no rosier hours in my memory than those that were pa.s.sed, between midnight and morning, in the cosy clubs in London. And when dark days come, and foes hara.s.s, and the troubles of life annoy, it will be sweet to think that in still another sacred retreat of friendship, across the sea, the old armour is gleaming in the festal lights, where one of the gentlest spirits that ever wore the laurel of England's love smiles kindly on his comrades and seems to murmur the charm of English hospitality--

"Let no one take beyond this threshold hence Words uttered here in friendship's confidence."

CHAPTER XVII

STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY

It is a cool afternoon in July, and the shadows are falling eastward on fields of waving grain and lawns of emerald velvet. Overhead a few light clouds are drifting, and the green boughs of the great elms are gently stirred by a breeze from the west. Across one of the more distant fields a flock of sable rooks--some of them fluttering and cawing--wings its slow and melancholy flight. There is the sound of the whetting of a scythe, and, near by, the twittering of many birds upon a cottage roof.

On either side of the country road, which runs like a white rivulet through banks of green, the hawthorn hedges are shining and the bright sod is spangled with all the wild-flowers of an English summer. An odour of lime-trees and of new-mown hay sweetens the air for many miles around. Far off, on the horizon's verge, just glimmering through the haze, rises the imperial citadel of Windsor. And close at hand a little child points to a gray spire peering out of a nest of ivy, and tells me that this is Stoke-Pogis church.

In Gray's time there was no spire on the church--nor is the spire an improvement to the tower.

If peace dwells anywhere upon the earth its dwelling-place is here. You come into this little churchyard by a pathway across the park and through a wooden turnstile; and in one moment the whole world is left behind and forgotten. Here are the nodding elms; here is the yew-tree's shade; here "heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap." All these graves seem very old. The long gra.s.s waves over them, and some of the low stones that mark them are entirely shrouded with ivy. Many of the "frail memorials" are made of wood. None of them is neglected or forlorn, but all of them seem to have been scattered here, in that sweet disorder which is the perfection of rural loveliness. There never, of course, could have been any thought of creating this effect; yet here it remains, to win your heart forever. And here, amid this mournful beauty, the little church itself nestles close to the ground, while every tree that waves its branches around it, and every vine that clambers on its surface, seems to clasp it in the arms of love. Nothing breaks the silence but the sighing of the wind in the great yew-tree at the church door,--beneath which was the poet's favourite seat, and where the brown needles, falling, through many an autumn, have made a dense carpet on the turf. Now and then there is a faint rustle in the ivy; a fitful bird-note serves but to deepen the stillness; and from a rose-tree near at hand a few leaves flutter down, in soundless benediction on the dust beneath.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Stoke-Pogis Church."

Gray was laid in the same grave with his mother, "the careful, tender mother of many children, one alone of whom," as he wrote upon her gravestone, "had the misfortune to survive her." Their tomb--a low, oblong, brick structure, covered with a large slab--stands a few feet away from the church wall, upon which is a small tablet to denote its place. The poet's name has not been inscribed above him. There was no need here of "storied urn or animated bust." The place is his monument, and the majestic Elegy--giving to the soul of the place a form of seraphic beauty and a voice of celestial music--is his immortal epitaph.

"There scatter'd oft, the earliest of ye Year, By hands unseen are showers of vi'lets found; The Redbreast loves to build & warble there, And little Footsteps lightly print the ground."

There is a monument to Gray in Stoke Park, about two hundred yards from the church; but it seems commemorative of the builder rather than the poet. They intend to set a memorial window in the church, to honour him, and the visitor finds there a money-box for the reception of contributions in aid of this pious design. Nothing will be done amiss that serves to direct closer attention to his life. It was one of the best lives ever recorded in the history of literature. It was a life singularly pure, n.o.ble, and beautiful. In two qualities, sincerity and reticence, it was exemplary almost beyond a parallel; and those are qualities that literary character in the present day has great need to acquire. Gray was averse to publicity. He did not sway by the censure of other men; neither did he need their admiration as his breath of life.

Poetry, to him, was a great art, and he added nothing to literature until he had first made it as nearly perfect as it could be made by the thoughtful, laborious exertion of his best powers, superadded to the spontaneous impulse and flow of his genius. More voluminous writers, Charles d.i.c.kens among the rest, have sneered at him because he wrote so little. The most colossal form of human complacency is that of the individual who thinks all other creatures inferior who happen to be unlike himself. This reticence on the part of Gray was, in fact, the emblem of his sincerity and the compelling cause of his imperishable renown. There is a better thing than the great man who is always speaking; and that is the great man who only speaks when he has a great word to say. Gray has left only a few poems; but of his princ.i.p.al works each is perfect in its kind, supreme and unapproachable. He did not test merit by reference to ill-formed and capricious public opinion, but he wrought according to the highest standards of art that learning and taste could furnish. His letters form an English cla.s.sic. There is no purer prose in existence; there is not much that is so pure. But the crowning glory of Gray's nature, the element that makes it so impressive, the charm that brings the pilgrim to Stoke-Pogis church to muse upon it, was the self-poised, sincere, and lovely exaltation of its contemplative spirit. He was a man whose conduct of life would, first of all, purify, expand, and adorn the temple of his own soul, out of which should afterward flow, in their own free way, those choral harmonies that soothe, guide, and exalt the human race. He lived before he wrote.

The soul of the Elegy is the soul of the man. It was his thought--which he has somewhere expressed in better words than these--that human beings are only at their best while such feelings endure as are engendered when death has just taken from us the objects of our love. That was the point of view from which he habitually looked upon the world; and no man who has learned the lessons of experience can doubt that he was right.

Gray was twenty-six years old when he wrote the first draft of the Elegy. He began that poem in 1742, at Stoke-Pogis, and he finished and published it in 1751. No visitor to this churchyard can miss either its inspiration or its imagery. The poet has been dead more than a hundred years, but the scene of his rambles and reveries has suffered no material change. One of his yew-trees, indeed, much weakened with age, was some time since blown down, in a storm, and its fragments have been carried away. The picturesque manor house not far distant was once the home of Admiral Penn, father of William Penn the famous Quaker.

William Penn and his children are buried in the little Jordans graveyard, not many miles away. The visitor to Stoke-Pogis should not omit a visit to Upton church, Burnham village, and Binfield. Pope lived at Binfield when he wrote his poem on Windsor Forest. Upton claims to have had a share in the inspiration of the Elegy, but Stoke-Pogis was unquestionably his place of residence when he wrote it. Langley Marish ought to be visited also, and Horton--where Milton wrote "L'Allegro,"

"II Penseroso," and "Comus." Chalfont St. Peter is accessible, where still is standing the house in which Milton finished _Paradise Lost_ and began _Paradise Regained;_ and from there a short drive will take you to Beaconsfield, where you may see Edmund Burke's tablet, in the church, and the monument to Waller, in the churchyard.

All the trees of the region have, of course, waxed and expanded,--not forgetting the neighbouring beeches of Burnham, among which he loved to wander, and where he might often have been found, sitting with his book, at some gnarled wreath of "old fantastic roots." But in its general characteristics, its rustic homeliness and peaceful beauty, this "glimmering landscape," immortalised in his verse, is the same on which his living eyes have looked. There was no need to seek for him in any special spot. The house in which he once lived might, no doubt, be discovered; but every nook and vista, every green lane and upland lawn and ivy-mantled tower of this delicious solitude is haunted with his presence.

The night is coming on and the picture will soon be dark; but never while memory lasts can it fade out of the heart. What a blessing would be ours, if only we could hold forever that exaltation of the spirit, that sweet, resigned serenity, that pure freedom from all the pa.s.sions of nature and all the cares of life, which comes upon us in such a place as this! Alas, and again alas! Even with the thought this golden mood begins to melt away; even with the thought comes our dismissal from its influence. Nor will it avail us anything now to linger at the shrine.

Fortunate is he, though in bereavement and regret, who parts from beauty while yet her kiss is warm upon his lips,--waiting not for the last farewell word, hearing not the last notes of the music, seeing not the last gleams of sunset as the light dies from the sky. It was a sad parting, but the memory of the place can never now be despoiled of its loveliness. As I write these words I stand again in the cool and dusky silence of the poet's church, with its air of stately age and its fragrance of cleanliness, while the light of the western sun, broken into rays of gold and ruby, streams through the painted windows and softly falls upon the quaint little galleries and decorous pews; and, looking forth through the low, arched door, I see the dark and melancholy boughs of the dreaming yew-tree, and, nearer, a shadow of rippling leaves in the clear sunshine of the churchway path. And all the time a gentle voice is whispering, in the chambers of thought--

"No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode: (There they alike in trembling hope repose), The bosom of his Father and his G.o.d."

Ill.u.s.tration: "Old Church."

CHAPTER XVIII

AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE

Among the deeply meditative, melodious, and eloquent poems of Wordsworth there is one---about the burial of Ossian--that glances at the question of fitness in a place of sepulchre. Not always, for the ill.u.s.trious dead, has the final couch of rest been rightly chosen. We think with resignation, and with a kind of pride, of Keats and Sh.e.l.ley in the little Protestant burial-ground at Rome. Every heart is touched at the spectacle of Garrick and Johnson sleeping side by side in Westminster Abbey. It was right that the dust of Dean Stanley should mingle with the dust of poets and of kings; and to see--as the present writer did, only a little while ago--fresh flowers on the stone that covers him, in the chapel of Henry the Seventh, was to feel a tender gladness and solemn content. Shakespeare's grave, in the chancel of Stratford church, awakens the same enn.o.bling awe and melancholy pleasure; and it is with kindred feeling that you linger at the tomb of Gray. But who can be content that poor Let.i.tia Landon should sleep beneath the pavement of a barrack, with soldiers trampling over her dust? One might almost think, sometimes, that the spirit of calamity, which follows certain persons throughout the whole of life, had pursued them even in death, to haunt about their repose and to mar all the gentleness of a.s.sociation that ought to hallow it. Chatterton, a pauper and a suicide, was huddled into a workhouse graveyard, the very place of which--in Shoe Lane, covered now by Farringdon Market--has disappeared. Otway, miserable in his love for Elizabeth Barry, the actress, and said to have starved to death in the Minories, near the Tower of London, was laid in a vault of St.

Clement Danes, in the middle of the Strand, where never the green leaves rustle, but where the roar of the mighty city pours on in continual tumult. That church holds also the remains of William Mountfort, the actor, slain in a brawl by Lord Mohun; of Nat Lee, "the mad poet"; of George Powell, the tragedian, of brilliant and deplorable memory; and of the handsome Hildebrand Horden, cut off by a violent death in the springtime of his youth. Hildebrand Horden was the son of a clergyman of Twickenham and lived in the reign of William and Mary. Dramatic chronicles say that he was possessed of great talent as an actor, and of remarkable personal beauty. He was stabbed, in a quarrel, at the Rose Tavern; and after he had been laid out for the grave, such was the lively feminine interest in his handsome person, many ladies came, some masked and others openly, to view him in his shroud. This is mentioned in Colley Cibber's _Apology._ Charles Coffey, the dramatist, author of _The Devil upon Two Sticks,_ and other plays, lies in the vaults of St.

Clement; as likewise does Thomas Rymer, historiographer for William III., successor to Shadwell, and author of Foedera, in seventeen volumes. In the church of St. Clement you may see the pew in which Dr.

Johnson habitually sat when he attended divine service there. It was his favourite church. The pew is in the gallery; and to those who honour the pa.s.sionate integrity and fervent, devout zeal of the stalwart old champion of letters, it is indeed a sacred shrine. Henry Mossop, one of the stateliest of stately actors, perishing, by slow degrees, of penury and grief,--which he bore in proud silence,--found a refuge, at last, in the barren gloom of Chelsea churchyard. Theodore Hook, the cheeriest spirit of his time, the man who filled every hour of life with the sunshine of his wit and was wasted and degraded by his own brilliancy, rests, close by Bishop Sherlock, in Fulham churchyard,--one of the dreariest spots in the suburbs of London. Perhaps it does not much signify, when once the play is over, in what oblivion our crumbling relics are hidden away. Yet to most human creatures these are sacred things, and many a loving heart, for all time to come, will choose a consecrated spot for the repose of the dead, and will echo the tender words of Longfellow,--so truly expressive of a universal and reverent sentiment--

"Take them, O Grave, and let them lie Folded upon thy narrow shelves, As garments by the soul laid by And precious only to ourselves."

One of the most impressive of the many literary pilgrimages that I have made was that which brought me to the house in which Coleridge died, and the place where he was buried. The student needs not to be told that this poet, born in 1772, the year after Gray's death, bore the white lilies of pure literature till 1834, when he too entered into his rest.

The last nineteen years of the life of Coleridge were spent in a house at Highgate; and there, within a few steps of each other, the visitor may behold his dwelling and his tomb. The house is one in a block of dwellings, situated in what is called the Grove--a broad, embowered street, a little way from the centre of the village. There are gardens attached to these houses, both in the front and the rear, and the smooth and peaceful roadside walks in the Grove itself are pleasantly shaded by elms of n.o.ble size and abundant foliage. These were young trees when Coleridge saw them, and all this neighbourhood, in his day, was but thinly settled. Looking from his chamber window he could see the dusky outlines of sombre London, crowned with the dome of St. Paul's on the southern horizon, while, more near, across a fertile and smiling valley, the gray spire of Hampstead church would bound his prospect, rising above the verdant woodland of Caen. In front were beds of flowers, and all around he might hear the songs of birds that filled the fragrant air with their happy, careless music. Not far away stood the old church of Highgate, long since destroyed, in which he used to worship, and close by was the Gate House inn, primitive, quaint, and cosy, which still is standing, to comfort the weary traveller with its wholesome hospitality.

"Come in the first stage, so as either to walk, or to be driven in Mr. Gilman's gig, to Caen wood and its delicious groves and alleys, the finest in England, a grand cathedral aisle of giant lime-trees, Pope's favourite composition walk, when with the old Earl."--_Coleridge to Crabb Robinson. Highgate, June_ 1817

Ill.u.s.tration: "The White Hart."

Highgate, with all its rural peace, must have been a bustling place in the old times, for all the travel went through it that pa.s.sed either into or out of London by the great north road,--that road in which Whittington heard the prophetic summons of the bells, and where may still be seen, suitably and rightly marked, the site of the stone on which he sat to rest. Here, indeed, the coaches used to halt, either to feed or to change horses, and here the many neglected little taverns still remaining, with their odd names and their swinging signs, testify to the discarded customs of a bygone age. Some years ago a new road was cut, so that travellers might wind around the hill, and avoid climbing the steep ascent to the village; and since then the gra.s.s has begun to grow in the streets. But such bustle as once enlivened the solitude of Highgate could never have been otherwise than agreeable diversion to its inhabitants; while for Coleridge himself, as we can well imagine, the London coach was welcome indeed, that brought to his door such well-loved friends as Charles Lamb, Joseph Henry Green, Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth, or Talfourd.

To this retreat the author of _The Ancient Mariner_ withdrew in 1815, to live with his friend James Gilman, a surgeon, who had undertaken to rescue him from the demon of opium, but who, as De Quincey intimates, was lured by the poet into the service of the very fiend whom both had striven to subdue. It was his last refuge, and he never left it till he was released from life. As you ramble in that quiet neighbourhood your fancy will not fail to conjure up his placid figure,--the silver hair, the pale face, the great, luminous, changeful blue eyes, the somewhat portly form clothed in black raiment, the slow, feeble walk, the sweet, benignant manner, the voice that was perfect melody, and the inexhaustible talk that was the flow of a golden sea of eloquence and wisdom. Coleridge was often seen walking there, with a book in his hand; and the children of the village knew him and loved him. His presence is impressed forever upon the place, to haunt and to hallow it. He was a very great man. The wings of his imagination wave easily in the opal air of the highest heaven. The power and majesty of his thought are such as establish forever in the human mind the conviction of personal immortality. Yet how forlorn the ending that this stately soul was enforced to make! For more than thirty years he was the slave of opium.

It blighted his home; it alienated his wife; it ruined his health; it made him utterly wretched. "I have been, through a large portion of my later life," he wrote, in 1834, "a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languor, and manifold infirmities." But behind all this,--more dreadful still and harder to bear,--was he not the slave of some ingrained perversity of the mind itself, some helpless and hopeless irresolution of character, some enervating spell of that sublime yet pitiable dejection of Hamlet, which kept him forever at war with himself, and, last of all, cast him out upon the homeless ocean of despair, to drift away into ruin and death? There are shapes more awful than his, in the records of literary history,--the ravaged, agonising form of Swift, for instance, and the wonderful, desolate face of Byron; but there is no figure more forlorn and pathetic.

This way the memory of Coleridge came upon me, standing at his grave. He should have been laid in some wild, free place, where the gra.s.s could grow above him and the trees could wave their branches over his head.

They placed him in a ponderous tomb, of gray stone, in Highgate churchyard, and in later times they have reared a new building above it,--the grammar-school of the village,--so that now the tomb, fenced round with iron, is in a cold, barren, gloomy crypt, accessible indeed from the churchyard, through several arches, but grim and doleful in all its surroundings; as if the evil and cruel fate that marred his life were still triumphant over his ashes.

CHAPTER XIX

ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD

In England, as elsewhere, every historic spot is occupied; and of course it sometimes happens, at such a spot, that its a.s.sociation is marred and its sentiment almost destroyed by the presence of the persons and the interests of to-day. The visitor to such places must carry with him not only knowledge and sensibility but imagination and patience. He will not find the way strewn with roses nor the atmosphere of poetry ready-made for his enjoyment. That atmosphere, indeed, for the most part--especially in the cities--he must himself supply. Relics do not robe themselves for exhibition. The Past is utterly indifferent to its worshippers. All manner of little obstacles, too, will arise before the pilgrim, to thwart him in his search. The mental strain and bewilderment, the inevitable physical weariness, the soporific influence of the climate, the tumult of the streets, the frequent and disheartening spectacle of poverty, squalor, and vice, the capricious and untimely rain, the inconvenience of long distances, the ill-timed arrival and consequent disappointment, the occasional nervous sense of loneliness and insecurity, the inappropriate boor, the ignorant, garrulous porter, the extortionate cabman, and the jeering bystander--all these must be regarded with resolute indifference by him who would ramble, pleasantly and profitably, in the footprints of English history. Everything depends, in other words, upon the eyes with which you observe and the spirit which you impart. Never was a keener truth uttered than in the couplet of Wordsworth--

"Minds that have nothing to confer Find little to perceive."

To the philosophic stranger, however, even this prosaic occupancy of historic places is not without its pleasurable, because humorous, significance. Such an observer in England will sometimes be amused as well as impressed by a sudden sense of the singular incidental position into which--partly through the lapse of years, and partly through a peculiarity of national character--the scenes of famous events, not to say the events themselves, have gradually drifted. I thought of this one night, when, in Whitehall Gardens, I was looking at the statue of James the Second, and a courteous policeman came up and silently turned the light of his bull's-eye upon the inscription. A scene of more incongruous elements, or one suggestive of a more serio-comic contrast, could not be imagined. I thought of it again when standing on the village green near Barnet, and viewing, amid surroundings both pastoral and ludicrous, the column which there commemorates the defeat and death of the great Earl of Warwick, and, consequently, the final triumph of the Grown over the last of the Barons of England.

It was toward the close of a cool summer day, and of a long drive through the beautiful hedgerows of sweet and verdurous Middles.e.x, that I came to the villages of Barnet and Hadley, and went over the field of King Edward's victory,--that fatal glorious field, on which Gloster showed such resolute valour, and where Neville, supreme and magnificent in disaster, fought on foot, to make sure that himself might go down in the stormy death of all his hopes. More than four hundred years have drifted by since that misty April morning when the star of Warwick was quenched in blood, and ten thousand men were slaughtered to end the strife between the Barons and the Crown; yet the results of that conflict are living facts in the government of England now, and in the fortunes of her inhabitants. If you were unaware of the solid simplicity and proud reticence of the English character,--leading it to merge all its shining deeds in one continuous fabric of achievement, like jewels set in a cloth of gold,--you might expect to find this spot adorned with a structure of more than common splendour. What you actually do find there is a plain monument, standing in the middle of a common, at the junction of several roads,--the chief of which are those leading to Hatfield and St. Albans, in Hertfordshire,--and on one side of this column you may read, in letters of faded black, the comprehensive statement that "Here was fought the famous battle between Edward the Fourth and the Earl of Warwick, April 14th, anno 1471, in which the Earl was defeated and slain."

The words "stick no bills" have been intrusively added, just below this inscription.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Column on Barnet Battle-Field."