Shakespeare's England Part 5

Jonson's famous comedy was first acted in 1598, "By the then Lord Chamberlain his servants." Knowell is designated as "an old gentleman."

The Jonson Folio of 1692 names as follows the princ.i.p.al comedians who acted in that piece: "Will. Shakespeare. Aug. Philips. Hen. Condel.

Will. Slye. Will. Kempe. Ric. Burbadge. Joh. Hemings. Tho. Pope. Chr.

Beston. Joh. Duke."

At about forty-eight he seems to have disposed of his interest in the two London theatres with which he had been connected, the Blackfriars and the Globe, and shortly afterwards, his work as we possess it being well-nigh completed, he retired finally to his Stratford home. That he was the comrade of many bright spirits who glittered in "the s.p.a.cious times" of Elizabeth several of them have left personal testimony. That he was the king of them all is shown in his works. The Sonnets seem to disclose that there was a mysterious, almost a tragical, pa.s.sage in his life, and that he was called to bear the burden of a great and perhaps a calamitous personal grief--one of those griefs, which, being caused by sinful love, are endless in the punishment they entail. Happily, however, no antiquarian student of Shakespeare's time has yet succeeded in coming near to the man. While he was in London he used to frequent the Falcon Tavern, in Southwark, and the Mermaid, and he lived at one time in St. Helen's parish, Aldersgate, and at another time in Clink Street, Southwark. As an actor his name has been a.s.sociated with his characters of Adam, Friar Lawrence, and the Ghost of King Hamlet, and a contemporary reference declared him "excellent in the quality he professes." Some of his ma.n.u.scripts, it is possible, perished in the fire that consumed the Globe theatre in 1613. He pa.s.sed his last days in his home at Stratford, and died there, somewhat suddenly, on his fifty-second birthday. That event, it may be worth while to observe, occurred within thirty-three years of the execution of Charles the First, under the Puritan Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. The Puritan spirit, intolerant of the play-house and of all its works, must then have been gaining formidable strength. His daughter Susanna, aged thirty-three at the time of his death, survived him thirty-three years.

His daughter Judith, aged thirty-one at the time of his death, survived him forty-six years. The whisper of tradition says that both were Puritans. If so the strange and seemingly unaccountable disappearance of whatever play-house papers he may have left at Stratford should not be obscure. This suggestion is likely to have been made before; and also it is likely to have been supplemented with a reference to the great fire in London in 1666--(which in consuming St. Paul's cathedral burned an immense quant.i.ty of books and ma.n.u.scripts that had been brought from all the threatened parts of the city and heaped beneath its arches for safety)--as probably the final and effectual holocaust of almost every piece of print or writing that might have served to illuminate the history of Shakespeare. In his personality no less than in the fathomless resources of his genius he baffles scrutiny and stands for ever alone.

"Others abide our question; thou art free: We ask, and ask; thou smilest and art still-- Out-topping knowledge."

It is impossible to convey an adequate suggestion of the prodigious and overwhelming sense of peace that falls upon the soul of the pilgrim in Stratford church. All the cares and struggles and trials of mortal life, all its failures, and equally all its achievements, seem there to pa.s.s utterly out of remembrance. It is not now an idle reflection that "the paths of glory lead but to the grave." No power of human thought ever rose higher or went further than the thought of Shakespeare. No human being, using the best weapons of intellectual achievement, ever accomplished so much. Yet here he lies--who was once so great! And here also, gathered around him in death, lie his parents, his children, his descendants, and his friends. For him and for them the struggle has long since ended. Let no man fear to tread the dark pathway that Shakespeare has trodden before him. Let no man, standing at this grave, and seeing and feeling that all the vast labours of that celestial genius end here at last in a handful of dust, fret and grieve any more over the puny and evanescent toils of to-day, so soon to be buried in oblivion! In the simple performance of duty and in the life of the affections there may be permanence and solace. The rest is an "insubstantial pageant." It breaks, it changes, it dies, it pa.s.ses away, it is forgotten; and though a great name be now and then for a little while remembered, what can the remembrance of mankind signify to him who once wore it? Shakespeare, there is reason to believe, set precisely the right value alike upon contemporary renown and the homage of posterity. Though he went forth, as the stormy impulses of his nature drove him, into the great world of London, and there laid the firm hand of conquest upon the spoils of wealth and power, he came back at last to the peaceful home of his childhood; he strove to garner up the comforts and everlasting treasures of love at his hearthstone; he sought an enduring monument in the hearts of friends and companions; and so he won for his stately sepulchre the garland not alone of glory but of affection. Through the high eastern window of the chancel of Holy Trinity church the morning suns.h.i.+ne, broken into many-coloured light, streams in upon the grave of Shakespeare and gilds his bust upon the wall above it. He lies close by the altar, and every circ.u.mstance of his place of burial is eloquent of his hold upon the affectionate esteem of his contemporaries. The line of graves beginning at the north wall of the chancel and extending across to the south seems devoted entirely to Shakespeare and his family, with but one exception. The pavement that covers them is of that blue-gray slate or freestone which in England is sometimes called black marble. In the first grave under the north wall rests Shakespeare's wife. The next is that of the poet himself, bearing the world-famed words of blessing and imprecation. Then comes the grave of Thomas Nashe, husband to Elizabeth. Hall, the poet's granddaughter, who died April 4, 1647. Next is that of Dr. John Hall (obiit November 25, 1635), husband to his daughter Susanna, and close beside him rests Susanna herself, who was buried on July 11, 1649. The gravestones are laid east and west, and all but one present inscriptions. That one is under the south wall, and possibly it covers the dust of Judith--Mrs. Thomas Quiney--the youngest daughter of Shakespeare, who, surviving her three children and thus leaving no descendants, died in 1662. Upon the gravestone of Susanna an inscription has been intruded commemorative of Richard Watts, who is not, however, known to have had any relations.h.i.+p with either Shakespeare or his descendants.

"The poet knew," says J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, "that as a t.i.the-owner he would necessarily be buried in the chancel."

Shakespeare's father, who died in 1601, and his mother, Mary Arden, who died in 1608, were buried in or near this church. (The register says, under Burials, "September 9, 1608, Mayry Shaxspere, wydowe.") His infant sisters Joan, Margaret, and Anne, and his brother Richard, who died, aged thirty-nine, in 1613, may also have been laid to rest in this place. Of the death and burial of his brother Gilbert there is no record. His sister Joan, the second--Mrs. Hart--would naturally have been placed with her relatives. His brother Edmund, dying in 1607, aged twenty-seven, is under the pavement of St. Saviour's church in Southwark. The boy Hamnet, dying before his father had risen into local eminence, rests, probably, in an undistinguished grave in the churchyard. (The register records his burial on August 11, 1596.) The family of Shakespeare seems to have been short-lived and it was soon extinguished. He himself died at fifty-two. Judith's children perished young. Susanna bore but one child--Elizabeth--who became successively Mrs. Nashe and Lady Barnard, and she, dying in 1670, was buried at Abingdon, near Oxford. She left no children by either husband, and in her the race of Shakespeare became extinct. That of Anne Hathaway also has nearly disappeared, the last living descendant of the Hathaways being Mrs. Baker, the present occupant of Anne's cottage at Shottery.

Thus, one by one, from the pleasant gardened town of Stratford, they went to take up their long abode in that old church, which was ancient even in their infancy, and which, watching through the centuries in its monastic solitude on the sh.o.r.e of Avon, has seen their lands and houses devastated by flood and fire, the places that knew them changed by the tooth of time, and almost all the a.s.sociations of their lives obliterated by the improving hand of destruction.

One of the oldest and most interesting Shakespearean doc.u.ments in existence is the narrative, by a traveller named Dowdall, of his observations in Warwicks.h.i.+re, and of his visit, on April 10, 1693, to Stratford church. He describes therein the bust and the tombstone of Shakespeare, and he adds these remarkable words: "The clerk that showed me this church is above eighty years old. He says that not one, for fear of the curse above said, dare touch his gravestone, though his wife and daughter did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave with him."

Writers in modern days have been pleased to disparage that inscription and to conjecture that it was the work of a s.e.xton and not of the poet; but no one denies that it has accomplished its purpose in preserving the sanct.i.ty of Shakespeare's rest. Its rugged strength, its simple pathos, its fitness, and its sincerity make it felt as unquestionably the utterance of Shakespeare himself, when it is read upon the slab that covers him. There the musing traveller full well conceives how dearly the poet must have loved the beautiful scenes of his birthplace, and with what intense longing he must have desired to sleep undisturbed in the most sacred spot in their bosom. He doubtless had some premonition of his approaching death. Three months before it came he made his will.

A little later he saw the marriage of his younger daughter. Within less than a month of his death he executed the will, and thus set his affairs in order. His handwriting in the three signatures to that paper conspicuously exhibits the uncertainty and la.s.situde of shattered nerves. He was probably quite worn out. Within the s.p.a.ce, at the utmost, of twenty-five years, he had written thirty-seven plays, one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, and two or more long poems; had pa.s.sed through much and painful toil and through bitter sorrow; had made his fortune as author and actor; and had superintended, to excellent advantage, his property in London and his large interests in Stratford and its neighbourhood. The proclamation of health with which the will begins was doubtless a formality of legal custom. The story that he died of drinking too hard at a merry meeting with Drayton and Ben Jonson is idle gossip. If in those last days of fatigue and presentiment he wrote the epitaph that has ever since marked his grave, it would naturally have taken the plainest fas.h.i.+on of speech. Such is its character; and no pilgrim to the poet's shrine could wish to see it changed:--

"Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, To digg the dvst encloased heare; Blese be ye man yt spares thes stones And cvrst be he yt moves my bones."

It was once surmised that the poet's solicitude lest his bones might be disturbed in death grew out of his intention to take with him into the grave a confession that the works which now follow him were written by another hand. Persons have been found who actually believe that a man who was great enough to write _Hamlet _could be little enough to feel ashamed of it, and, accordingly, that Shakespeare was only hired to play at authors.h.i.+p, as a screen for the actual author. It might not, perhaps, be strange that a desire for singularity, which is one of the worst literary crazes of this capricious age, should prompt to the rejection of the conclusive and overwhelming testimony to Shakespeare's genius that has been left by Shakespeare's contemporaries, and that s.h.i.+nes forth in all that is known of his life. It is strange that a doctrine should get itself a.s.serted which is subversive of common reason and contradictory to every known law of the human mind. This conjectural confession of poetic imposture has never been exhumed. The grave is known to have been disturbed, in 1796, when alterations were made in the church, and there came a time in the present century when, as they were making repairs in the chancel pavement (the chancel was renovated in 1835), a rift was accidently made in the Shakespeare vault. Through this, though not without misgiving, the s.e.xton peeped in upon the poet's remains. He saw nothing but dust.

It was the opinion--not conclusive but interesting--of the late J. O.

Halliwell-Phillipps that at one or other of these "restorations" the original tombstone of Shakespeare was removed and another one, from the yard of a modern stone-mason, put in its place. Dr. Ingleby, in his book on _Shakespeare's Bones, _1883, a.s.serts that the original stone was removed. I have compared Shakespeare's tombstone with that of his wife, and with others in the chancel, but I have not found the discrepancy observed by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, and I think there is no reason to believe that the original tombstone has ever been disturbed. The letters upon it were, probably, cut deeper in 1835.

The antique font from which the infant Shakespeare may have received the water of Christian baptism is still preserved in this church. It was thrown aside and replaced by a new one about the middle of the seventeenth century. Many years afterward it was found in the charnel-house. When that was destroyed, in 1800, it was cast into the churchyard. In later times the parish clerk used it as a trough to his pump. It pa.s.sed then through the hands of several successive owners, till at last, in days that had learned to value the past and the a.s.sociations connected with its ill.u.s.trious names, it found its way back again to the sanctuary from which it had suffered such a rude expulsion.

It is still a handsome stone, though broken, soiled, and marred.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Remains of the Old Font at which, probably, Shakespeare was christened, now in the Nave of Stratford Church."

On the north wall of the chancel, above his grave and near to "the American window," is placed Shakespeare's monument. It is known to have been erected there within seven years after his death. It consists of a half-length effigy, placed beneath a fretted arch, with entablature and pedestal, between two Corinthian columns of black marble, gilded at base and top. Above the entablature appear the armorial bearings of Shakespeare--a pointed spear on a bend sable and a silver falcon on a ta.s.selled helmet supporting a spear. Over this heraldic emblem is a death's-head, and on each side of it sits a carved cherub, one holding a spade, the other an inverted torch. In front of the effigy is a cus.h.i.+on, upon which both hands rest, holding a scroll and a pen. Beneath is an inscription in Latin and English, supposed to have been furnished by the poet's son-in-law, Dr. Hall. The bust was cut by Gerard Jonson, a native of Amsterdam and by occupation a "tomb-maker," who lived in Southwark and possibly had seen the poet. The material is a soft stone, and the work, when first set up, was painted in the colours of life. Its peculiarities indicate that it was copied from a mask of the features taken after death. Some persons believe (upon slender and dubious testimony) that this mask has since been found, and busts of Shakespeare have been based upon it, by W. R. O'Donovan and by William Page. In September, 1764, John Ward, grandfather of Mrs. Siddons, having come to Stratford with a theatrical company, gave a performance of _Oth.e.l.lo, _in the Guildhall, and devoted its proceeds to reparation of the Gerard Jonson effigy, then somewhat damaged by time.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Shakespeare's Monument."

The original colours were then carefully restored and freshened. In 1793, under the direction of Malone, this bust, together with the image of John-a-Combe--a rec.u.mbent statue upon a tomb close to the east wall of the chancel--was coated with white paint. From that plight it was extricated, in 1861, by the a.s.siduous skill of Simon Collins, who immersed it in a bath which took off the white paint and restored the colours. The eyes are painted light hazel, the hair and pointed beard auburn, the face and hands flesh-tint. The dress consists of a scarlet doublet, with a rolling collar, closely b.u.t.toned down the front, worn under a loose black gown without sleeves. The upper part of the cus.h.i.+on is green, the lower part crimson, and this object is ornamented with gilt ta.s.sels. The stone pen that used to be in the right hand of the bust was taken from it, toward the end of the last century, by a young Oxford student, and, being dropped by him upon the pavement, was broken.

A quill pen has been put in its place. This is the inscription beneath the bust:--

Ivdicio Pylivm, genio Socratem, arte Maronem, Terra tegit, popvlvs maeret, Olympvs habet.

Stay, pa.s.senger, why goest thov by so fast?

Read, if thov canst, whom enviovs Death hath plast Within this monvment: SHAKSPEARE: with whome Qvick Natvre dide; whose name doth deck ys tombe Far more than cost; sieth all yt he hath writt Leaves living art bvt page to serve his witt.

Obiit Ano. Doi. 1616. aetatis 53. Die. 23. Ap.

The erection of the old castles, cathedrals, monasteries, and churches of England was accomplished, little by little, with laborious toil protracted through many years. Stratford church, probably more than seven centuries old, presents a mixture of architectural styles, in which Saxon simplicity and Norman grace are beautifully mingled.

Different parts of the structure were built at different times. It is fas.h.i.+oned in the customary crucial form, with a square tower, an octagon stone spire, (erected in 1764, to replace a more ancient one, made of oak and covered with lead), and a fretted battlement all around its roof. Its windows are diversified, but mostly Gothic. The approach to it is across a churchyard thickly sown with graves, through a lovely green avenue of lime-trees, leading to a porch on its north side. This avenue of foliage is said to be the copy of one that existed there in Shakespeare's day, through which he must often have walked, and through which at last he was carried to his grave. Time itself has fallen asleep in that ancient place. The low sob of the organ only deepens the awful sense of its silence and its dreamless repose. Yews and elms grow in the churchyard, and many a low tomb and many a leaning stone are there, in the shadow, gray with moss and mouldering with age. Birds have built their nests in many crevices in the timeworn tower, round which at sunset you may see them circle, with chirp of greeting or with call of anxious discontent. Near by flows the peaceful river, reflecting the gray spire in its dark, silent, s.h.i.+ning waters. In the long and lonesome meadows beyond it the primroses stand in their golden ranks among the clover, and the frilled and fluted bell of the cowslip, hiding its single drop of blood in its bosom, closes its petals as the night comes down.

Northward, at a little distance from the Church of the Holy Trinity, stands, on the west bank of the Avon, the building that will always be famous as the Shakespeare Memorial. The idea of the Memorial was suggested in 1864, incidentally to the ceremonies which then commemorated the three-hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth. Ten years later the site for this structure was presented to the town by Charles Edward Flower, one of its most honoured inhabitants.

Contributions of money were then asked, and were given. Americans as well as Englishmen contributed. On April 23, 1877, the first stone of the Memorial was laid. On April 23, 1880, the building was dedicated.

The fabric comprises a theatre, a library, and a picture-gallery. In the theatre the plays of Shakespeare are annually represented, in a manner as nearly perfect as possible. In the library and picture-gallery are to be a.s.sembled all the books upon Shakespeare that have been published, and all the choice paintings that can be obtained to ill.u.s.trate his life and his works. As the years pa.s.s this will naturally become a princ.i.p.al depository of Shakespearean objects. A dramatic college may grow up, in a.s.sociation with the Shakespeare theatre. The gardens that surround the Memorial will augment their loveliness in added expanse of foliage and in greater wealth of floral luxuriance. The mellow tinge of age will soften the bright tints of the red brick that mainly composes the building. On its cone-shaped turrets ivy will clamber and moss will nestle. When a few generations have pa.s.sed, the old town of Stratford will have adopted this now youthful stranger into the race of her venerated antiquities. The same air of poetic mystery that rests now upon his cottage and his grave will diffuse itself around his Memorial; and a remote posterity, looking back to the men and the ideas of to-day, will remember with grateful pride that English-speaking people of the nineteenth century, although they could confer no honour upon the great name of Shakespeare, yet honoured themselves in consecrating this votive temple to his memory.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Gable Window"

CHAPTER XIII

UP TO LONDON 1882

About the middle of the night the great s.h.i.+p comes to a pause, off the coast of Ireland, and, looking forth across the black waves and through the rifts in the rising mist, we see the low and lonesome verge of that land of trouble and misery. A beautiful white light flashes now and then from the sh.o.r.e, and at intervals the mournful booming of a solemn bell floats over the sea. Soon is heard the rolling click of oars, and then two or three dusky boats glide past the s.h.i.+p, and hoa.r.s.e voices hail and answer. A few stars are visible in the hazy sky, and the breeze from the land brings off, in fitful puffs, the fragrant balm of gra.s.s and clover, mingled with the salt odours of sea-weed and slimy rocks. There is a sense of mystery over the whole wild scene; but we realise now that human companions.h.i.+p is near, and that the long and lonely ocean voyage is ended.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Peveril Peak."

Travellers who make the run from Liverpool to London by the Midland Railway pa.s.s through the vale of Derby and skirt around the stately Peak that Scott has commemorated in his novel of Peveril. It is a more rugged country than is seen in the transit by the Northwestern road, but not more beautiful. You see the storied mountain, in its delicacy of outline and its airy magnificence of poise, soaring into the sky--its summit almost lost in the smoky haze--and you wind through hillside pastures and meadow-lands that are curiously intersected with low, zigzag stone walls; and constantly, as the scene changes, you catch glimpses of green lane and s.h.i.+ning river; of dense copses that cast their cool shadow on the moist and gleaming emerald sod; of long white roads that stretch away like cathedral aisles and are lost beneath the leafy arches of elm and oak; of little church towers embowered in ivy; of thatched cottages draped with roses; of dark ravines, luxuriant with a wild profusion of rocks and trees; and of golden grain that softly waves and whispers in the summer wind; while, all around, the gra.s.sy banks and glimmering meadows are radiant with yellow daisies, and with that wonderful scarlet of the poppy that gives an almost human glow of life and loveliness to the whole face of England. After some hours of such a pageant--so novel, so fascinating, so fleeting, so stimulative of eager curiosity and poetic desire--it is a relief at last to stand in the populous streets and among the grim houses of London, with its surging tides of life, and its turmoil of effort, conflict, exultation, and misery. How strange it seems--yet, at the same time, how homelike and familiar! There soars aloft the great dome of St. Paul's cathedral, with its golden cross that flashes in the sunset! There stands the Victoria tower--fit emblem of the true royalty of the sovereign whose name it bears. And there, more lowly but more august, rise the sacred turrets of the Abbey. It is the same old London--the great heart of the modern world--the great city of our reverence and love. As the wanderer writes these words he hears the plas.h.i.+ng of the fountains in Trafalgar Square and the evening chimes that peal out from the spire of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and he knows himself once more at the shrine of his youthful dreams.

Ill.u.s.tration: "St. Paul's from Maiden Lane."

To the observant stranger in London few sights can be more impressive than those that ill.u.s.trate the singular manner in which the life of the present encroaches upon the memorials of the past. Old Temple Bar has gone,--a sculptured griffin, at the junction of Fleet Street and the Strand, denoting where once it stood. (It has been removed to Theobald's Park, near Waltham, and is now the lodge gate of the grounds of Sir Henry Meux.) The Midland Railway trains dash over what was once St.

Pancras churchyard--the burial-place of Mary Wollstonecraft and William G.o.dwin, and of many other British worthies--and pa.s.sengers looking from the carriages may see the children of the neighbourhood sporting among the few tombs that yet remain in that despoiled cemetery. Dolly's Chop-House, intimately a.s.sociated with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne, has been destroyed. The ancient tavern of The c.o.c.k, immortalised by Tennyson, in his poem of Will Waterproof's Monologue, is soon to disappear,--with its singular wooden vestibule that existed before the time of the Plague and that escaped the great fire of 1666. On the site of Northumberland House stands the Grand Hotel. The gravestones that formerly paved the precinct of Westminster Abbey have been removed, to make way for gra.s.sy lawns intersected with pathways. In Southwark, across the Thames, the engine-room of the brewery of Messrs. Barclay & Perkins occupies the site of the Globe Theatre, in which most of Shakespeare's plays were first produced. One of the most venerable and beautiful churches in London, that of St. Bartholomew the Great,--a gray, mouldering temple, of the twelfth century, hidden away in a corner of Smithfield,--is desecrated by the irruption of an adjacent shop, the staircase hall of which breaks cruelly into the sacred edifice and impends above the altar. On July 12, 1882, the present writer, walking in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden,--the sepulchre of William Wycherley, Robert Wilks, Charles Macklin, Joseph Haines, Thomas King, Samuel Butler, Thomas Southerne, Edward Shuter, Dr. Arne, Thomas Davies, Edward Kynaston, Richard Estcourt, William Havard, and many other renowned votaries of literature and the stage,--found workmen building a new wall to sustain the enclosure, and almost every stone in the cemetery uprooted and leaning against the adjacent houses. Those monuments, it was said, would be replaced; but it was impossible not to consider the chances of error in a new mortuary deal--and the grim witticism of Rufus Choate, about dilating with the wrong emotion, came then into remembrance, and did not come amiss.

Ill.u.s.tration: "The Charter House."

Facts such as these, however, bid us remember that even the relics of the past are pa.s.sing away, and that cities, unlike human creatures, may grow to be so old that at last they will become new. It is not wonderful that London should change its aspect from one decade to another, as the living surmount and obliterate the dead. Thomas Sutton's Charter-House School, founded in 1611, when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were still writing, was reared upon ground in which several thousand corses were buried, during the time of the Indian pestilence of 1348; and it still stands and nourishes--though not as vigorously now as might be wished.

Nine thousand new houses, it is said, are built in the great capital every year, and twenty-eight miles of new street are thus added to it.

On a Sunday I drove for three hours through the eastern part of London without coming upon a single trace of the open fields. On the west, all the region from Kensington to Richmond is settled for most part of the way; while northward the city is stretching its arms toward Hampstead, Highgate, and tranquil and blooming Finchley. Truly the spirit of this age is in strong contrast with that of the time of Henry the Eighth when (1530), to prevent the increasing size of London, all new buildings were forbidden to be erected "where no former hath been known to have been."

The march of improvement nowadays carries everything before it: even British conservatism is at some points giving way: and, noting the changes that have occurred here within only five years, I am persuaded that those who would see what remains of the London of which they have read and dreamed--the London of Dryden and Pope, of Addison, Sheridan, and Byron, of Betterton, Garrick, and Edmund Kean--will, as time pa.s.ses, find more and more difficulty both in tracing the footsteps of fame, and in finding that sympathetic, reverent spirit which hallows the relics of genius and renown.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Church Steeple Centered on Moon"

CHAPTER XIV

OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON

Sight-seeing, merely for its own sake, is not to be commended. Hundreds of persons roam through the storied places of England, carrying nothing away but the bare sense of travel. It is not the spectacle that benefits, but the meaning of the spectacle. In the great temples of religion, in those wonderful cathedrals that are the glory of the old world, we ought to feel, not merely the physical beauty but the perfect, illimitable faith, the pa.s.sionate, incessant devotion, which alone made them possible. The cold intellect of a sceptical age, like the present, could never create such a majestic cathedral as that of Canterbury. Not till the pilgrim feels this truth has he really learned the lesson of such places,--to keep alive in his heart the capacity of self-sacrifice, of toil and of tears, for the grandeur and beauty of the spiritual life.

At the tombs of great men we ought to feel something more than a consciousness of the crumbling clay that moulders within,--something more even than knowledge of their memorable words and deeds: we ought, as we ponder on the certainty of death and the evanescence of earthly things, to realise that art at least is permanent, and that no creature can be better employed than in n.o.ble effort to make the soul worthy of immortality. The relics of the past, contemplated merely because they are relics, are nothing. You tire, in this old land, of the endless array of ruined castles and of wasting graves; you sicken at the thought of the mortality of a thousand years, decaying at your feet, and you long to look again on roses and the face of childhood, the ocean and the stars. But not if the meaning of the past is truly within your sympathy; not if you perceive its a.s.sociations as feeling equally with knowledge; not if you truly know that its lessons are not of death but of life!

To-day builds over the ruins of yesterday, as well in the soul of man as on the vanis.h.i.+ng cities that mark his course. There need be no regret that the present should, in this sense, obliterate the past.

Much, however, as London has changed, and constantly as it continues to change, many objects still remain, and long will continue to remain, that startle and impress the sensitive mind. Through all its wide compa.s.s, by night and day, flows and beats a turbulent, resounding tide of activity, and hundreds of trivial and vacuous persons, sordid, ignorant, and commonplace tramp to and fro amid its storied antiquities, heedless of their existence. Through such surroundings, but finding here and there a sympathetic guide or a friendly suggestion, the explorer must make his way,--lonely in the crowd, and walking like one who lives in a dream. Yet he never will drift in vain through a city like this. I went one night into the cloisters of Westminster Abbey--that part, the South Walk, which is still accessible after the gates have been closed.

The stars shone down upon the blackening walls and glimmering windows of the great cathedral; the grim, mysterious arches were dimly lighted; the stony pathways, stretching away beneath the venerable building, seemed to lose themselves in caverns of darkness; not a sound was heard but the faint rustling of the gra.s.s upon the cloister green. Every stone there is the mark of a sepulchre; every breath of the night wind seemed the whisper of a gliding ghost. There, among the crowded graves, rest Anne Oldfield and Anne Bracegirdle,--in Queen Anne's reign such brilliant luminaries of the stage,--and there was buried the dust of Aaron Hill, poet and dramatist, once manager of Drury Lane, who wrote _The Fair Inconstant_ for Barton Booth, and some notably felicitous love-songs.

There, too, are the relics of Susanna Maria Arne (Mrs. Theo. Cibber), Mrs. Dancer, Thomas Betterton, and Spranger Barry. Sitting upon the narrow ledge that was the monks' rest, I could touch, close at hand, the tomb of a mitred abbot, while at my feet was the great stone that covers twenty-six monks of Westminster who perished by the Plague nearly six hundred years ago. It would scarcely be believed that the doors of dwellings open upon that gloomy spot; that ladies may sometimes be seen tending flowers upon the ledges that roof those cloister walks. Yet so it is; and in such a place, at such a time, you comprehend better than before the self-centred, serious, ruminant, romantic character of the English mind,--which loves, more than anything else in the world, the privacy of august surroundings and a sombre and stately solitude. It hardly need be said that you likewise obtain here a striking sense of the power of contrast. I was again aware of this, a little later, when, seeing a dim light in St. Margaret's church near by, I entered that old temple and found the men of the choir at their rehearsal, and presently observed on the wall a bra.s.s plate which announces that Sir Walter Raleigh was buried here, in the chancel,--after being decapitated for high treason in the Palace Yard outside. Such things are the surprises of this historic capital. This inscription begs the reader to remember Raleigh's virtues as well as his faults,--a plea, surely, that every man might well wish should be made for himself at last. I thought of the verses that the old warrior-poet is said to have left in his Bible, when they led him out to die--