Books: Our Old Home

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I could well conceive it; for Miss Bacon imagined herself to have
received (what is certainly the greatest boon ever assigned to mortals) a
high mission in the world, with adequate powers for its accomplishment;
and lest even these should prove insufficient, she had faith that special
interpositions of Providence were forwarding her human efforts. This
idea was continually coming to the surface, during our interview. She
believed, for example, that she had been providentially led to her
lodging-house and put in relations with the good-natured grocer and his
family; and, to say the truth, considering what a savage and stealthy
tribe the London lodging-house keepers usually are, the honest kindness
of this man and his household appeared to have been little less than
miraculous. Evidently, too, she thought that Providence had brought me
forward--a man somewhat connected with literature--at the critical
juncture when she needed a negotiator with the booksellers; and, on my
part, though little accustomed to regard myself as a divine minister, and
though I might even have preferred that Providence should select some
other instrument, I had no scruple in undertaking to do what I could for
her. Her book, as I could see by turning it over, was a very remarkable
one, and worthy of being offered to the public, which, if wise enough to
appreciate it, would be thankful for what was good in it and merciful to
its faults. It was founded on a prodigious error, but was built up from
that foundation with a good many prodigious truths. And, at all events,
whether I could aid her literary views or no, it would have been both
rash and impertinent in me to attempt drawing poor Miss Bacon out of her
delusions, which were the condition on which she lived in comfort and
joy, and in the exercise of great intellectual power. So I left her to
dream as she pleased about the treasures of Shakespeare's tombstone, and
to form whatever designs might seem good to herself for obtaining
possession of them. I was sensible of a ladylike feeling of propriety in
Miss Bacon, and a New England orderliness in her character, and, in spite
of her bewilderment, a sturdy common-sense, which I trusted would begin
to operate at the right time, and keep her from any actual extravagance.
And as regarded this matter of the tombstone, so it proved.

The interview lasted above an hour, during which she flowed out freely,
as to the sole auditor, capable of any degree of intelligent sympathy,
whom she had met with in a very long while. Her conversation was
remarkably suggestive, alluring forth one's own ideas and fantasies from
the shy places where they usually haunt. She was indeed an admirable
talker, considering how long she had held her tongue for lack of a
listener,--pleasant, sunny and shadowy, often piquant, and giving
glimpses of all a woman's various and readily changeable moods and
humors; and beneath them all there ran a deep and powerful under-current
of earnestness, which did not fail to produce in the listener's mind
something like a temporary faith in what she herself believed so
fervently. But the streets of London are not favorable to enthusiasms of
this kind, nor, in fact, are they likely to flourish anywhere in the
English atmosphere; so that, long before reaching Paternoster Row, I felt
that it would be a difficult and doubtful matter to advocate the
publication of Miss Bacon's book. Nevertheless, it did finally get
published.

Months before that happened, however, Miss Bacon had taken up her
residence at Stratford-on-Avon, drawn thither by the magnetism of those
rich secrets which she supposed to have been hidden by Raleigh, or Bacon,
or I know not whom, in Shakespeare's grave, and protected there by a
curse, as pirates used to bury their gold in the guardianship of a fiend.
She took a humble lodging and began to haunt the church like a ghost.
But she did not condescend to any stratagem or underhand attempt to
violate the grave, which, had she been capable of admitting such an idea,
might possibly have been accomplished by the aid of a resurrection-man.
As her first step, she made acquaintance with the clerk, and began to
sound him as to the feasibility of her enterprise and his own willingness
to engage in it. The clerk apparently listened with not unfavorable
ears; but, as his situation (which the fees of pilgrims, more numerous
than at any Catholic shrine, render lucrative) would have been forfeited
by any malfeasance in office, he stipulated for liberty to consult the
vicar. Miss Bacon requested to tell her own story to the reverend
gentleman, and seems to have been received by him with the utmost
kindness, and even to have succeeded in making a certain impression on
his mind as to the desirability of the search. As their interview had
been under the seal of secrecy, he asked permission to consult a friend,
who, as Miss Bacon either found out or surmised, was a practitioner of
the law. What the legal friend advised she did not learn; but the
negotiation continued, and certainly was never broken off by an absolute
refusal on the vicar's part. He, perhaps, was kindly temporizing with
our poor countrywoman, whom an Englishman of ordinary mould would have
sent to a lunatic asylum at once. I cannot help fancying, however, that
her familiarity with the events of Shakespeare's life, and of his death
and burial (of which she would speak as if she had been present at the
edge of the grave), and all the history, literature, and personalities of
the Elizabethan age, together with the prevailing power of her own
belief, and the eloquence with which she knew how to enforce it, had
really gone some little way toward making a convert of the good
clergyman. If so, I honor him above all the hierarchy of England.

The affair certainly looked very hopeful. However erroneously, Miss
Bacon had understood from the vicar that no obstacles would be interposed
to the investigation, and that he himself would sanction it with his
presence. It was to take place after nightfall; and all preliminary
arrangements being made, the vicar and clerk professed to wait only her
word in order to set about lifting the awful stone from the sepulchre.
So, at least, Miss Bacon believed; and as her bewilderment was entirely
in her own thoughts, and never disturbed her perception or accurate
remembrance of external things, I see no reason to doubt it, except it be
the tinge of absurdity in the fact. But, in this apparently prosperous
state of things, her own convictions began to falter. A doubt stole into
her mind whether she might not have mistaken the depository and mode of
concealment of those historic treasures; and after once admitting the
doubt, she was afraid to hazard the shock of uplifting the stone and
finding nothing. She examined the surface of the gravestone, and
endeavored, without stirring it, to estimate whether it were of such
thickness as to be capable of containing the archives of the Elizabethan
club. She went over anew the proofs, the clews, the enigmas, the
pregnant sentences, which she had discovered in Bacon's letters and
elsewhere, and now was frightened to perceive that they did not point so
definitely to Shakespeare's tomb as she had heretofore supposed. There
was an unmistakably distinct reference to a tomb, but it might be
Bacon's, or Raleigh's, or Spenser's; and instead of the "Old Player," as
she profanely called him, it might be either of those three illustrious
dead, poet, warrior, or statesman, whose ashes, in Westminster Abbey, or
the Tower burial-ground, or wherever they sleep, it was her mission to
disturb. It is very possible, moreover, that her acute mind may always
have had a lurking and deeply latent distrust of its own fantasies, and
that this now became strong enough to restrain her from a decisive step.

But she continued to hover around the church, and seems to have had full
freedom of entrance in the daytime, and special license, on one occasion
at least, at a late hour of the night. She went thither with a
dark-lantern, which could but twinkle like a glow-worm through the volume
of obscurity that filled the great dusky edifice. Groping her way up the
aisle and towards the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of the
pavement above Shakespeare's grave. If the divine poet really wrote the
inscription there, and cared as much about the quiet of his bones as its
deprecatory earnestness would imply, it was time for those crumbling
relics to bestir themselves under her sacrilegious feet. But they were
safe. She made no attempt to disturb them; though, I believe, she looked
narrowly into the crevices between Shakespeare's and the two adjacent
stones, and in some way satisfied herself that her single strength would
suffice to lift the former, in case of need. She threw the feeble ray of
her lantern up towards the bust, but could not make it visible beneath
the darkness of the vaulted roof. Had she been subject to superstitious
terrors, it is impossible to conceive of a situation that could better
entitle her to feel them, for, if Shakespeare's ghost would rise at any
provocation, it must have shown itself then; but it is my sincere belief,
that, if his figure had appeared within the scope of her dark-lantern, in
his slashed doublet and gown, and with his eyes bent on her beneath the
high, bald forehead, just as we see him in the bust, she would have met
him fearlessly and controverted his claims to the authorship of the
plays, to his very face. She had taught herself to contemn "Lord
Leicester's groom" (it was one of her disdainful epithets for the world's
incomparable poet) so thoroughly, that even his disembodied spirit would
hardly have found civil treatment at Miss Bacon's hands.

Her vigil, though it appears to have had no definite object, continued
far into the night. Several times she heard a low movement in the
aisles: a stealthy, dubious footfall prowling about in the darkness, now
here, now there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if some restless
inhabitant of the latter had crept forth to peep at the intruder. By and
by the clerk made his appearance, and confessed that he had been watching
her ever since she entered the church.

About this time it was that a strange sort of weariness seems to have
fallen upon her: her toil was all but done, her great purpose, as she
believed, on the very point of accomplishment, when she began to regret
that so stupendous a mission had been imposed on the fragility of a
woman. Her faith in the new philosophy was as mighty as ever, and so was
her confidence in her own adequate development of it, now about to be
given to the world; yet she wished, or fancied so, that it might never
have been her duty to achieve this unparalleled task, and to stagger
feebly forward under her immense burden of responsibility and renown. So
far as her personal concern in the matter went, she would gladly have
forfeited the reward of her patient study and labor for so many years,
her exile from her country and estrangement from her family and friends,
her sacrifice of health and all other interests to this one pursuit, if
she could only find herself free to dwell in Stratford and be forgotten.
She liked the old slumberous town, and awarded the only praise that ever
I knew her to bestow on Shakespeare, the individual man, by acknowledging
that his taste in a residence was good, and that he knew how to choose a
suitable retirement for a person of shy, but genial temperament. And at
this point, I cease to possess the means of tracing her vicissitudes of
feeling any further. In consequence of some advice which I fancied it my
duty to tender, as being the only confidant whom she now had in the
world, I fell under Miss Bacon's most severe and passionate displeasure,
and was cast off by her in the twinkling of an eye. It was a misfortune
to which her friends were always particularly liable; but I think that
none of them ever loved, or even respected, her most ingenuous and noble,
but likewise most sensitive and tumultuous, character the less for it.

At that time her book was passing through the press. Without prejudice
to her literary ability, it must be allowed that Miss Bacon was wholly
unfit to prepare her own work for publication, because, among many other
reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest to know what to leave out.
Every leaf and line was sacred, for all had been written under so deep a
conviction of truth as to assume, in her eyes, the aspect of inspiration.
A practised book-maker, with entire control of her materials, would have
shaped out a duodecimo volume full of eloquent and ingenious
dissertation,--criticisms which quite take the color and pungency out of
other people's critical remarks on Shakespeare,--philosophic truths which
she imagined herself to have found at the roots of his conceptions, and
which certainly come from no inconsiderable depth somewhere. There was a
great amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would have shovelled
out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust the whole bulk of inspiration and
nonsense into the press in a lump, and there tumbled out a ponderous
octavo volume, which fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public,
and has never been picked up. A few persons turned over one or two of
the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper into
the mud; for they were the hack critics of the minor periodical press in
London, than whom, I suppose, though excellent fellows in their way,
there are no gentlemen in the world less sensible of any sanctity in a
book, or less likely to recognize an author's heart in it, or more
utterly careless about bruising, if they do recognize it. It is their
trade. They could not do otherwise. I never thought of blaming them.
It was not for such an Englishman as one of these to get beyond the idea
that an assault was meditated on England's greatest poet. From the
scholars and critics of her own country, indeed, Miss Bacon might have
looked for a worthier appreciation, because many of the best of them have
higher cultivation, and finer and deeper literary sensibilities than all
but the very profoundest and brightest of Englishmen. But they are not a
courageous body of men; they dare not think a truth that has an odor of
absurdity, lest they should feel themselves bound to speak it out. If
any American ever wrote a word in her behalf, Miss Bacon never knew it,
nor did I. Our journalists at once republished some of the most brutal
vituperations of the English press, thus pelting their poor countrywoman
with stolen mud, without even waiting to know whether the ignominy was
deserved. And they never have known it, to this day, nor ever will.

The next intelligence that I had of Miss Bacon was by a letter from the
mayor of Stratford-on-Avon. He was a medical man, and wrote both in his
official and professional character, telling me that an American lady,
who had recently published what the mayor called a "Shakespeare book,"
was afflicted with insanity. In a lucid interval she had referred to me,
as a person who had some knowledge of her family and affairs. What she
may have suffered before her intellect gave way, we had better not try to
imagine. No author had ever hoped so confidently as she; none ever
failed more utterly. A superstitious fancy might suggest that the
anathema on Shakespeare's tombstone had fallen heavily on her head in
requital of even the unaccomplished purpose of disturbing the dust
beneath, and that the "Old Player" had kept so quietly in his grave, on
the night of her vigil, because he foresaw how soon and terribly he would
be avenged. But if that benign spirit takes any care or cognizance of
such things now, he has surely requited the injustice that she sought to
do him--the high justice that she really did--by a tenderness of love and
pity of which only he could be capable. What matters it though she
called him by some other name? He had wrought a greater miracle on her
than on all the world besides. This bewildered enthusiast had recognized
a depth in the man whom she decried, which scholars, critics, and learned
societies, devoted to the elucidation of his unrivalled scenes, had never
imagined to exist there. She had paid him the loftiest honor that all
these ages of renown have been able to accumulate upon his memory. And
when, not many months after the outward failure of her lifelong object,
she passed into the better world, I know not why we should hesitate to
believe that the immortal poet may have met her on the threshold and led
her in, reassuring her with friendly and comfortable words, and thanking
her (yet with a smile of gentle humor in his eyes at the thought of
certain mistaken speculations) for having interpreted him to mankind so
well.

I believe that it has been the fate of this remarkable book never to have
had more than a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it only in
insulated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. But, since my
return to America, a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured me
that he has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is
completely a convert to its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, and
not to me, whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her, she
declared unworthy to meddle with her work,--it belongs surely to this one
individual, who has done her so much justice as to know what she wrote,
to place Miss Bacon in her due position before the public and posterity.

This has been too sad a story. To lighten the recollection of it, I will
think of my stroll homeward past Charlecote Park, where I beheld the most
stately elms, singly, in clumps, and in groves, scattered all about in
the sunniest, shadiest, sleepiest fashion; so that I could not but
believe in a lengthened, loitering, drowsy enjoyment which these trees
must have in their existence. Diffused over slow-paced centuries, it
need not be keen nor bubble into thrills and ecstasies, like the
momentary delights of short-lived human beings. They were civilized
trees, known to man and befriended by him for ages past. There is an
indescribable difference--as I believe I have heretofore endeavored to
express--between the tamed, but by no means effete (on the contrary, the
richer and more luxuriant) nature of England, and the rude, shaggy,
barbarous nature which offers as its racier companionship in America. No
less a change has been wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit
what the English call their forests. By and by, among those refined and
venerable trees, I saw a large herd of deer, mostly reclining, but some
standing in picturesque groups, while the stags threw their large antlers
aloft, as if they had been taught to make themselves tributary to the
scenic effect. Some were running fleetly about, vanishing from light
into shadow and glancing forth again, with here and there a little fawn
careering at its mother's heels. These deer are almost in the same
relation to the wild, natural state of their kind that the trees of an
English park hold to the rugged growth of an American forest. They have
held a certain intercourse with man for immemorial years; and, most
probably, the stag that Shakespeare killed was one of the progenitors of
this very herd, and may himself have been a partly civilized and
humanized deer, though in a less degree than these remote posterity.
They are a little wilder than sheep, but they do not snuff the air at the
approach of human beings, nor evince much alarm at their pretty close
proximity; although if you continue to advance, they toss their heads and
take to their heels in a kind of mimic terror, or something akin to
feminine skittishness, with a dim remembrance or tradition, as it were,
of their having come of a wild stock. They have so long been fed and
protected by man, that they must have lost many of their native
instincts, and, I suppose, could not live comfortably through, even an
English winter without human help. One is sensible of a gentle scorn at
them for such dependency, but feels none the less kindly disposed towards
the half-domesticated race; and it may have been his observation of these
tamer characteristics in the Charlecote herd that suggested to
Shakespeare the tender and pitiful description of a wounded stag, in "As
You Like It."

At a distance of some hundreds of yards from Charlecote Hall, and almost
hidden by the trees between it and the roadside, is an old brick archway
and porter's lodge. In connection with this entrance there appears to
have been a wall and an ancient moat, the latter of which is still
visible, a shallow, grassy scoop along the base of an embankment of the
lawn. About fifty yards within the gateway stands the house, forming
three sides of a square, with three gables in a row on the front, and on
each of the two wings; and there are several towers and turrets at the
angles, together with projecting windows, antique balconies, and other
quaint ornaments suitable to the half-Gothic taste in which the edifice
was built. Over the gateway is the Lucy coat-of-arms, emblazoned in its
proper colors. The mansion dates from the early days of Elizabeth, and
probably looked very much the same as now when Shakespeare was brought
before Sir Thomas Lucy for outrages among his deer. The impression is
not that of gray antiquity, but of stable and time-honored gentility,
still as vital as ever.

It is a most delightful place. All about the house and domain there is a
perfection of comfort and domestic taste, an amplitude of convenience,
which could have been brought about only by the slow ingenuity and labor
of many successive generations, intent upon adding all possible
improvement to the home where years gone by and years to come give a sort
of permanence to the intangible present. An American is sometimes
tempted to fancy that only by this long process can real homes be
produced. One man's lifetime is not enough for the accomplishment of
such a work of art and nature, almost the greatest merely temporary one
that is confided to him; too little, at any rate,--yet perhaps too long
when he is discouraged by the idea that he must make his house warm and
delightful for a miscellaneous race of successors, of whom the one thing
certain is, that his own grandchildren will not be among them. Such
repinings as are here suggested, however, come only from the fact, that,
bred in English habits of thought, as most of us are, we have not yet
modified our instincts to the necessities of our new forms of life. A
lodging in a wigwam or under a tent has really as many advantages, when
we come to know them, as a home beneath the roof-tree of Charlecote Hall.
But, alas! our philosophers have not yet taught us what is best, nor have
our poets sung us what is beautifulest, in the kind of life that we must
lead; and therefore we still read the old English wisdom, and harp upon
the ancient strings. And thence it happens, that, when we look at a
time-honored hall, it seems more possible for men who inherit such a
home, than for ourselves, to lead noble and graceful lives, quietly doing
good and lovely things as their daily work, and achieving deeds of simple
greatness when circumstances require them. I sometimes apprehend that
our institutions may perish before we shall have discovered the most
precious of the possibilities which they involve.

LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER.

After my first visit to Leamington Spa, I went by an indirect route to
Lichfield, and put up at the Black Swan. Had I known where to find it, I
would much rather have established myself at the inn formerly kept by the
worthy Mr. Boniface, so famous for his ale in Farquhar's time. The Black
Swan is an old-fashioned hotel, its street-front being penetrated by an
arched passage, in either side of which is an entrance door to the
different parts of the house, and through which, and over the large
stones of its pavement, all vehicles and horsemen rumble and clatter into
an enclosed courtyard, with a thunderous uproar among the contiguous
rooms and chambers. I appeared to be the only guest of the spacious
establishment, but may have had a few fellow-lodgers hidden in their
separate parlors, and utterly eschewing that community of interests which
is the characteristic feature of life in an American hotel. At any rate,
I had the great, dull, dingy, and dreary coffee-room, with its heavy old
mahogany chairs and tables, all to myself, and not a soul to exchange a
word with, except the waiter, who, like most of his class in England, had
evidently left his conversational abilities uncultivated. No former
practice of solitary living, nor habits of reticence, nor well-tested
self-dependence for occupation of mind and amusement, can quite avail, as
I now proved, to dissipate the ponderous gloom of an English coffee-room
under such circumstances as these, with no book at hand save the
county-directory, nor any newspaper but a torn local journal of five days
ago. So I buried myself, betimes, in a huge heap of ancient feathers
(there is no other kind of bed in these old inns), let my head sink into
an unsubstantial pillow, and slept a stifled sleep, infested with such a
fragmentary confusion of dreams that I took them to be a medley,
compounded of the night-troubles of all my predecessors in that same
unrestful couch. And when I awoke, the musty odor of a bygone century
was in my nostrils,--a faint, elusive smell, of which I never had any
conception before crossing the Atlantic.

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