In his native air, I imagine, his health gradually improved; but he was never strong enough to venture back to residence in London. He probably returned once or twice for a short visit, and during his absence his pious daughter, Mrs. Hall, entertained the wandering preacher in New Place.
As Shakespeare grew stronger he no doubt talked with Combe, the usurer, for want of any one better.
It is probable, too, that on one of his visits to London he took up Fletcher's “Henry VIII.” and wrote in some scenes for him and touched up others, or Fletcher may have visited him in Stratford and there have begged his help.
His youngest daughter, Judith, was married early in 1616; it seems probable to me that this was the occasion of the visit of Jonson and Drayton to Stratford. No doubt Shakespeare was delighted to meet them, talked as few men ever talked before or since, and probably drank too much with those “poor unhappy brains for drinking” which his Cassius deplored. Thus fanned, the weak flame of his life wasted quickly and guttered out. It is all comprehensible enough, and more than likely, that the greatest man in the world, after the boredom of solitary years spent in Stratford, died through a merry meeting with his friends; in his joy and excitement he drank a glass or so of wine, which brought on a fever. It is all true, true to character, and pitiful beyond words.
Shakespeare to me is the perfect type of the artist, and the artist is gradually coming to his proper place in the world's esteem. In the introduction to one of his “Lives,” Plutarch apologizes for writing about a painter, a mere artist, instead of about some statesman or general, who would be a worthy object of ambition for a well-born youth. But since Plutarch's time our view of the relative merits of men has changed and developed: to-day we put the artist higher even than the saint. Indeed, it seems to us that the hero or statesman, or saint, only ranks in proportion to the artist-faculty he may possess. The winning of a battle is not enough to engage all our admiration; it must be won by an artist. In every department of life this faculty is beginning to be appreciated as the finest possession of humanity, and Shakespeare was an almost perfect example of the self-conscious artist.
People talk as if his masterpieces were produced at haphazard or by unconscious fruition; but masterpieces are not brought forth in this happy-go-lucky fashion. They are of the sort that only come to flower with perfect tendance. Even if we did not know that Shakespeare corrected his finest verses again and again with critical care, we should have to assume it. But we know that he spared no pains to better his finer inspirations, and he has told us in a sonnet how anxiously he thought about his art and the art of his rivals:
“Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope
With what I most enjoy contented least.”
He has all the qualities and all the shortcomings of the reflective, humane, sensuous artist temperament, intensified by the fact that he had not had the advantage of a middle-class training.
In a dozen ways our Puritan discipline and the rubs and buffets one gets in this work-a-day world where money is more highly esteemed than birth or sainthood or genius, have brought us beyond Shakespeare in knowledge of men and things. The courage of the Puritan, his self-denial and self-control, have taught us invaluable lessons; Puritanism tempered character as steel is tempered with fire and ice, and the necessity of getting one's bread not as a parasite, but as a fighter, has had just as important results on character. Shakespeare is no longer an ideal to us; no single man can now fill our mental horizon; we can see around and above the greatest of the past: the overman of to-day is only on the next round of the ladder, and our children will smile at the fatuity of his conceit.
But if we can no longer worship Shakespeare, it is impossible not to honour him, impossible not to love him. All men—Spenser as well as Jonson—found him gentle and witty, gay and generous. He was always willing to touch up this man's play or write in an act for that one. He never said a bitter or cruel word about any man. Compare him with Dante or even with Goethe, and you shall find him vastly superior to either of them in loving kindness. He was more contemptuously treated in life than even Dante, and yet he never fell away to bitterness as Dante did: he complained, it is true; but he never allowed his fairness to be warped; he was of the noblest intellectual temper.