Di tal superbia qui si paga il fio:
meaning thereby that he was now undergoing punishment for his unworthy jealousy on earth.
Even those to whom an Inferno or Purgatorio is a sheer fiction may be reminded that Time’s final court of appeal, when it readjusts balances falsely weighted in days gone by, will not fail to stigmatise those who once belittled what, had they been more candid, they would have better appreciated.
A CONVERSATION WITH SHAKESPEARE IN THE ELYSIAN FIELDS
I am aware that, in these days, when realism is all the rage and true imagination at a discount, people will ask how, not being either an Æneas or a Dante, I came to be admitted to an actual sight of the Elysian Fields, and will not be fobbed off by any fanciful explanation such as used to satisfy the more unsophisticated reader of former times. I therefore hasten to satisfy their exacting curiosity by saying that I happen to have done a good turn of late to the Pagan gods—not forgetting the goddesses, whom one should always have on one’s side, since they hold the keys of the position equally on earth, in the air, and underground—and they made their acknowledgments to me by letting me know that I might have my choice of an interview with any one, but only one, of the personages among those who are now disporting themselves in the other world. At first, I was rather tempted to name Eve, in order that I might get an intelligible account from the most trustworthy source of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Good and Evil. But I thought she perhaps would know as little about them as myself; so I thought I would ask for an interview, with either Helen of Troy or with Cleopatra, when it suddenly struck me that I should probably find both one and the other not very unlike women I had already come across here in this upper world. So, anxious to know whether or not there ever was a real flesh-and-blood Shakespeare, and explaining that, if there was not, I had not the smallest desire to have a talk with my Lord Verulam, I said, “Let me have a colloquy with Shakespeare, the wisest, sweetest, wittiest, largest-hearted, biggest-brained of human beings”; and, almost before I had finished the sentence, I found myself in the Elysian Fields.
At first, I forgot what I was there for at all, in my amazement at the place itself. Though I am a tolerably close observer of external Nature, I could not for the life of me surmise what season of the year I was in, and finally perceived that I was in all the four seasons at one and the same time. Primroses and bluebells were to be seen side by side with roses and irises, with meadowsweet and traveller’s joy, grass ready for the scythe not far from swaying wheat and heavily-burred hop-garden; while, well within view, I could see slopes of virgin snow, and folks making ready to go tobogganing on them. It was just the same with bird-life. Stormcock, nightingale, cuckoo, corncrake, woodpecker, robin redbreast, were all singing together, yet there was no discord in the concert.
“You want to see me, I am told,” I heard some one say behind me, and, turning, I at once perceived that it was Shakespeare, not from the striking resemblance to any of the portraits or busts, Droeshout, Chandos, Stratford-on-Avon, or other effigy, but by his seeming to be compounded of them all, with something superadded that I could recall in none of them. Similarly, he did not seem to be of any particular age, either of youth, early manhood, middle life, or yet elderly, but compounded of all the years, at once young and engaging, in the grand climacteric, and withal full of mellow wisdom. His eye glowed with fine frenzy, withal was tender and melting as that of a boy-lover. I could not fail to observe this extraordinary combination of ages and qualities; yet they did not strike me as in any way incongruous, any more than I had found incongruity in all the seasons being contemporaneous, and blossom and fruit subsisting together. I had expected to be rather embarrassed and somewhat overawed on first coming across this king of men; but his manner was so simple, so frank and friendly, that he put me at my ease at once, and I ventured to inquire if, in the Elysian Fields, they had any knowledge of what was going on in the world they had once inhabited.
“Ample knowledge,” he replied, “though we are not troubled with newspapers, nor yet tormented by telegrams or telephones, but confine our regard to what interests us.”