The Upton Letters

by Arthur Christopher Benson

DEAR HERBERT,—I have made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon. I now feel overwhelmed with shame to reflect that, though my chief preoccupations apart from my profession have been literary, I have never visited the sacred place before. For an Englishman who cares for literature not to have been to Stratford-on-Avon is as gross a neglect as for an Englishman who has any sense of patriotism not to have visited Westminster Abbey.

And now that I have been there and returned, and have leisure to think it all over, I feel that I have been standing on the threshold of a mystery. Who, when all is said and done, was this extraordinary man? What were his thoughts, his aims, his views of himself and of the world? If Shakespeare was Shakespeare, he seems, to speak frankly, to have had a humanity distinct and apart from his genius. Here we have the son of a busy, quarrelsome, enterprising tradesman—who eventually indeed came to grief in trade—of a yeoman stock, and bearing a common name. His mother could not write her own signature. Of his youth we hear little that is not disreputable. He married under unpleasant circumstances, after an entanglement which took place at a very early age; he was addicted to poaching, or, at all events, to the illegal pursuit of other people's game. Then he drifts up to London and joins a theatrical company—then a rascally kind of trade—deserting his wife and family. His life in London is full of secrets. He is a man of mysterious passions and dangerous friendships. He writes plays of incomparable depth and breadth, touching every chord of humour, tragedy and pathos; certain rather elaborate poems of a precieux type, and strange sonnets, revealing a singular poignancy of unconventional feelings. But here, again, it is difficult to conceive that the writer of the Sonnets, who touched life so intensely at one feverish point, should have had the amazing detachment and complexity of mind and soul that the plays reveal. The notices of his talk and character are few and unenlightening, and testify to a certain easy brilliance of wit, but no more. Before he is thirty he is spoken of as both "upright" and "facetious"—a singular combination.

Then he suddenly appears in another aspect; at the age of thirty-two he is a successful, well-to-do man. And then his ambition, if he had any, seems to shift its centre, and he appears to be only bent upon restoring the fortunes of his family, and attaining a solid municipal position. He buys the biggest house in his native place; from the proceeds of his writings, his professional income as an actor, and from his share in the playhouse of which he is part owner, he purchases lands and houses, he engages in lawsuits, he concerns himself with grants of arms. Still the flood of stupendous literature flows out; he seems to be under a contract to produce plays, for which he receives the magnificent sum of L10 (L100 of our money). He writes easily and never corrects. He seems to set no store on his writings, which stream from him like light from the sun. He adapts, collaborates, and has no idea of what would be called a high vocation.

At forty-seven it all ceases; he writes no more, but lives prosperously in his native town, with occasional visits to London. At fifty-two his health fails. He makes business-like arrangements in the event of death, and faces the darkness of the long sleep like any other good citizen.

Who can co-ordinate or reconcile these things? Who can conceive the likeness of the man, who steps in this light-hearted, simple way on to the very highest platform of literature—so lofty and unattainable a place he takes without striving, without arrogance, a throne among the thrones where Homer, Virgil, and Dante sit? And yet his mind is set, not on these things, but on acres and messuages, tithes and investments. He seems not only devoid of personal vanity, but even of that high and solemn pride which made Keats say, with faltering lips, that he believed he would be among the English poets after his death.

I came through the pleasant water-meadows and entered the streets of the busy town. Everything, from bank to eating-shop, bears the name of Shakespeare; and one cannot resist the thought that such local and homely renown would have been more to our simple hero's taste than the laurel and the throne. I groaned in spirit over the monstrous playhouse, with its pretentious Teutonic air; I walked through the churchyard, vocal with building rooks, and came to the noble church, full of the evidences of wealth and worship and honour. I do not like to confess the breathless awe with which I drew near to the chancel and gazed on the stone that, nameless, with its rude rhyme, covers the sacred dust. I cannot say what my thoughts were, but I was lost in a formless, unuttered prayer of true abasement before the venerable relics of the highest achievements of the human spirit. There beneath my feet slept the dust of the brain that conceived Hamlet and Macbeth, and the hand that had traced the Sonnets, and the eye that had plumbed the depths of life. That was a solemn moment, and I do not think I ever experienced so deep a thrill of speechless awe. I could not tear myself away; I could only wonder and desire.

Presently, by the kind offices of a pleasant simple verger, I did more. I mounted on some steps he brought, and looked face to face at the bust in the monument.

I cannot share in the feelings of those who would consider it formal or perfunctory. There was the high-domed forehead, like that of Pericles and Walter Scott; there were the steady eyes, the clear-cut nose; and as for the lips—I never for an instant doubted the truth of what I saw—I am as certain as I can be that they are the lips of a corpse, drawn up in the stiff tension of death, showing the teeth below. I am absolutely convinced that here we get as near to the man as we can get, and that the head is taken from a death-mask. What injures the dignity and beauty of the face is the plumpness of the chin that testifies to the burgher prosperity, the comfortable life, the unexercised brain of the later days. I saw afterwards the various portraits; I suppose it is a matter of evidence, but nothing convinced me of truth, not even the bilious, dilapidated, dyspeptic, white face of the folio engraving, with the horrible hydrocephalous development of skull. That is a caricature only. The others seem mere fancies.

Then I saw patiently the other relics, the foundations of New Place, the schoolhouse—but all without emotion, except a deep sense of shame that the only records allowed to stand in the long, low-latticed room in which the boy Shakespeare probably saw a play first acted, are boards recording the names of school football and cricket teams. The ineptitude of such a proceeding, the hideous insistence of the athletic craze of England, drew from me a despairing smile; but I think that Shakespeare himself would have viewed it with tolerance and even amusement.

But most of these relics, like Anne Hathaway's Cottage, are restored out of all interest, and only testify to the silly and frivolous demands of trippers.