As with story, so it is with sentiment. This he steals out of men’s brains and hearts by wholesale. What smallest poet, whether in print or talk, could have failed to speak of man’s journey to his last home? Shakespeare talks of
“That undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,”
and the sentiment is so imaged, and carries such a trail of agreeing and caressing thoughts, that it supplants all kindred speech.
“This life,” says Shakespeare, “is but a stage;” and the commentators can point you out scores of like similes in older writers—Erasmus among the rest, whose utterance seems almost duplicated; duplicated, indeed, but with a tender music, and a point, and a breadth, that make all previous related similes forgotten. Such utterances grow out of instincts common to us all; but this man, in whom the common instinct is a masterful alembic, fuses all old teachings, and white-hot they run out of the crucible of his soul in such beauteous shapes that they are sought for and gloried in forever after. Many a Hamlet has soliloquized—you and I perhaps; but never a Hamlet in such way as did Shakespeare’s; so crisp—so full—so suggestive—so marrowy—so keen—so poignant—so enthralling.
No, no; this man did not go about in quest of newnesses; only little geniuses do that; but the great genius goes along every commonest road-side, looking on every commonest sight of tree or flower, of bud, of death, of birth, of flight, of labor, of song; leads in old tracks; deals in old truths, but with such illuminating power that they all come home to men’s souls with new penetrative force and new life in them. He catches by intuition your commonest thought, and my commonest thought, and puts them into new and glorified shape.
His Thrift and Closing Years.
Again, this Shakespeare of ours, singing among the stars, is a shrewd, thrifty man; he comes to have an interest in all those shillings and sixpences that go into the till of the Globe Theatre; he makes money. Where he lived in London,[19] we do not definitely know; at one time, it is believed, on the Southwark side, near to the old Bear-garden,[20] but never ostentatiously; very likely sharing chambers with his brother Edmond, who was much time an actor there;[21] he buys a house and haberdasher’s shop somewhere near Blackfriars; and he had previously bought, with his savings—even before Queen Elizabeth was dead—a great house in Stratford. This he afterwards equips by purchase of outlying lands—a hundred acres at one time, and twenty and more at another. He has never forgotten and never forgotten to love, country sights and sounds. These journeyings to and fro along the Oxford and Uxbridge road (on horseback probably), from which he can see sheer over hedges, and note every fieldfare, every lark rising to its morning carol, every gleam of brook, have kept alive his old fondnesses, and he counts surely on a return to these scenes in his great New Place of Stratford. He does break away for that Stratford cover, while the game of life seems still at its best promise; while Hamlet is still comparatively a new man upon the boards; does settle himself in that country home, to gather his pippins, to pet his dogs, to wander at will upon greensward that is his own.
I wish we had record of only one of his days in that retirement. I wish we could find even a two-page letter which he may have written to Ben Jonson, in London, telling how his time passed; but there is nothing—positively nothing. We do not know how, or by what exposure or neglect his last illness came upon him and carried him to his final home, only two years or so after his return to Stratford. Even that Dr. Hall, who had married his favorite daughter, and who attended him, and who published a medical book containing accounts of a thousand and more cases which he thought of consequence for the world to know about, has no word to say concerning this grandest patient that his eye ever fell upon.
He died at the age of fifty-three. No descendant of his daughter Susanna is alive; no descendant of his daughter Judith is alive.[22] The great new home which he had built up in Stratford is torn down; scarce a vestige of it remains. The famous mulberry-tree he planted upon that greensward, where, in after years, Garrick and the rest held high commemorative festival, is gone, root and branch.
Shakespeare—an old county guide-book tells us stolidly—is a name unknown in that region. Unknown! Every leaf of every tree whispers it; every soaring skylark makes a carol of it; and the memory of it flows out thence—as flows the Stratford river—down through all the green valley of the Avon, down through all the green valley of the Severn, and so on, out to farthest seas, whose “multitudinous waves” carry it to every shore.