It requires but a slight stretch of imagination to see young Shakespeare as a sturdy country lad strolling with his youthful companions by the side of the gentle Avon. Noting the flight of the swallow over its glassy surface, the nodding reeds and grasses on its sedgy banks, and dart of the startled pickerel from its weedy lair, unconsciously absorbing by his yet undeveloped genius of observation the minute knowledge of nature that is so perfectly displayed in “As You Like It” and other silvan plays.
We see him wandering through the meadows listening to the lark rising with its morning song on high; by the little gardens where the primrose, the cowslip and the yellow daffodil grow round the cottage door, and the ivy and the honeysuckle climb the rustic porch; in the green lanes between the quickset hedges where the modest violets lift their purple heads upon the mossy banks. May not the youthful Shakespeare himself have seen in the woods of Charlecote or Shottery “the poor sequestered stag that from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt” augment with his tears the already swollen stream, and himself startled the timid hare and the antlered deer from their leafy coverts, and in those majestic solitudes found “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything?”
Picture young Shakespeare hand in hand with gentle Anne Hathaway, in their walks in the unfrequented paths of Shottery and Stratford, charming her mind with the poetry of his nature, the glow of admiration deepening into love for her youthful suitor; the bridegroom standing at the altar assuming the responsibilities of marriage before nineteen years had passed over his head, and the pride of paternity when his first child was born; and realize the sense of importance of the departure of the youthful husband and father for London. Whether to better his fortunes or to escape from the anger of Sir Thomas Lucy after his unlucky escapade on that worthy gentleman’s estate at Charlecote, matters not.
These I conceive to be some of the factors in the formation of the mind and character of William Shakespeare: a mother’s gentle influence, a fair mental development at school, an early appreciation of the vicissitudes of fortune and the necessities of labor, a love of nature developed by the surroundings of his youth, a remarkable capacity of observation, and an experience of the sacred mystery of love, marriage and paternity ere he had arrived at years of mature manhood; and they do not appear to be at all incompatible with the life, the knowledge, the friendships, the accomplishments and the genius which the world has conceded to this great and glorious man.
THE MASQUERADER.
By Katherine Cecil Thurston.
Grasp and constructive ability are the two attributes of genius or of talent absolutely necessary to a novelist. When Katherine Cecil Thurston grasped the results that bound together those two incidents of January twenty-third, incidents so widely different in character, she created novelistic material. To this material she applied the same constructive ability, but maturer, that she evidenced in “The Circle.” And from the first statement in her book, that these incidents were bound by results, the reader’s interest does not flag till the last phase of the complicated result is clearly given, as it is in the final statement of the final chapter. Nor then, for it is a book to hold after it is closed, while the mind reverts to its scenes and its interest in pleasant retrospect.
Self-accusation may follow analysis of the book, for, after all, nothing is actually acquired in the reading. The aggressive, acquisitive attitude of Russia, which is the one historical episode of the novel, has been made so much clearer and so much more forcible in the last twelve months than a mere statement or even a masterful speech can make it that the book is not worth reading for this episode.
To repeat, it is the situation that grew out of the chance meeting in the fog, the interchanging of identities, that holds the interest so absorbingly. This contrast of similarity, if the paradoxical phrase is pardonable, is dramatic in intensity that grows, and when Eve, the alienated wife of Chilcote tentatively accepts Loder, the substitute, the masquerader, this intensity presents a new aspect that quite absorbs all others—political, social, even practical. From that moment the interest centers in the final outcome when she will discover or be told of the substitution. And because of this interest, which lasts even after the book is read, the inconsistency of the situation is forgiven and the impossible accepted as possible.
Reason rejects the position but charm is a matter of the emotions and the charm of “The Masquerader” is such as to put the emotions in the ascendency. It is sufficient to have carried the book to almost twice the popularity of any other recent book and to have kept it there for two months—quite a period in the life of an ephemeral novel. It is sufficient to have kept men at the library lamp late at night and to force itself in upon business through the next and succeeding days. And it has made women break the silence of bridge and whist, even where it has not kept them from the classes altogether.