# Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land/Chapter 15

CHAPTER XV.
STRATFORD-UPON-AVON AND SHAKESPEARE; HIS FAME, PAST AND PROSPECTIVE.
AND this is Stratford-upon-Avon? Is there another town in Christendom to equal human memory? Let him who thinks he can say there is tell us where the like may be found. London is the birth-and-burial place of a large number of distinguished poets, philosophers, statesmen, and heroes. Their lives make for it a nebulous lustre. The orbits of their brilliant careers overlap upon each other, so that their individual paths of light, intersecting in their common illumination, like netted sunbeams, do not make any vivid or distinctive lines over the face or over the history of the great city. But the memory of Shakespeare covers with its disk the whole life and being and history, ancient and modern, of Stratford-upon-Avon. There is nothing seen or felt before or behind it but William Shakespeare. In no quarter of the globe, since he was laid to his last sleep ​by the sunny side of the peaceful river, has the name of the little town been mentioned without suggesting and meaning him. Many a populous city is proud of the smallest segment of a great man's glory. "He was born here." That is a great thing to say, and they say it with exultation, showing this heirloom of honour to strangers as the richest inheritance of the town. But being born in a particular place is more a matter of accident than of personal option. No one chooses his own birthplace, and the sheer fact that he there made his entrée into the world, is, after all, a rather negative distinction to those who boast of it. But quiet little Stratford-upon-Avon can say far more than this. Shakespeare was not only born here, but he spent his last days and died here. Nor did he come back to his native town a broken-down old man to be nursed in the last stages of decrepitude and be buried with his fathers. He returned hither at the zenith of his intellectual manhood, to spend the Indian summer of his life in the midst of the sceneries and companionships of his boyhood. Thus no other human memory ever covered so completely with its speculum the name or history of a town, or filled it with such a vivid, vital image as Shakespeare's has done to Stratford-upon-Avon. Here,
"Like footprints hidden by a brook Bat seen on either side," ​he has left them marks on the sunny banks, and across the soft level meadows basking in the bosom of the little river. The break is not wide between those he made in these favourite walks in his youth and the footprints of his ripe age as a permanent resident and citizen. Perhaps he and his Ann Hathaway, after his London life, delighted to make sunset strolls across the daisied fields to the cottage of her childhood and of their first love and troth. Never before or since did a transcendent genius make so much history for the world and so little for himself as Shakespeare. Here is the quaint little house in which he was born. It has been painted, engraved, photographed, and described ad infinitum. You will find a hundred pictures of it scattered over Christendom where you will find one of Solomon's Temple. Undoubtedly it ranked as a capacious and comfortable dwelling in its day. It is one of the skeleton type so common to the Elizabethan age; that is, the oaken bonework of the frame is even with the brickwork of the outer walls, thus showing the fleshless ribs of the house to the outside world. The rooms are small, and very low between joints; still the one assigned by tradition as the birthplace of the great poet is large enough for the greatest of men to be born in. Its ceiling overhead and side walls, however, afford too scant tablet-space for the registry of the names of ​all who have sought thus to leave their cards in homage of the illustrious memory. Their whole surface, and even the small windows, have been written and re-written over by the pilgrims to this shrine from different countries. Here are names from the extremest ends of the Anglo-Saxon world from Newfoundland and New Zealand, and all the English-speaking countries between. The Americans have contributed a large contingent to these records of the pencil. There is something very interesting and touching, even, in the homage they bring to his name. He was the last great English poet who sung to the unbroken family of the English race. They were then all gathered around England's hearthstone, unconscious of the mighty expansion which the near future was to develop. The population of the whole island hardly equalled that of the State of New York to-day. Just below the point of diffluence, about a quarter of a century before England put forth the first rivulet from the river of her being and history to fill the fountain of a new national existence in the Western World. Shakespeare was at his culm111ation as a poet. We Americans meet him first when we trace back our history to its origin. He of all the old masters stands in the very doorway of "Our Old Home" to welcome us with the radiant smile of his genius. We were Americans and Milton was an Englishman when he began to ​write. We hold our right and title in him by courtesy; but in "Glorious Will," by full and direct inheritance as equal coheirs of all the wealth of his memory. Whoever classifies the signatures on the walls of his birth-chamber, and in the large record book brought in to supplement the exhausted writing-space outside, will have striking proof of this American sentiment. The first locale in all England to our countrymen is Stratford-upon-Avon. Westminster, even, stands second in their estimation to the birth-and-burial place of this one man. At no other historical point in Europe will you find so many American names recorded as over the spot where he was cradled. This is fitting. We have already become numerically the largest constituency of his fame. Already he has more readers on our continent than on all the other continents and islands of the world; and from decade to decade, and from century to century, doubtless this preponderance will increase by the ratio of more rapid progression.
What a race of kings, princes, knights, ladies, and heroes was created by Shakespeare! If the truth could be sifted out and known, more than half the homage the regal courts of to-day get from the spontaneous sentiment of the public heart arises from the dignity with which he haloed the royal brows of his monarchs. They never knew how to talk and walk and act with the majesty ​that befitted a king until he taught them. Yet, how little personal history he made for himself! Not half as many footprints of his personality can be found as his father's made at Stratford. This is a mystery that can have but one reasonable explanation. It is of no use to say that his social nature was cold or cramped; that he had not a rather large circle of personal friends, whom he first met and made in London, and who came from different parts of the country. Doubtless he wrote to these and others letters by the score. Where are they? Where is one of them? We have volumes of letters centuries older than the first le wrote brought out quite recently; but not a scrap of his handwriting turns up to reward the searching hunt of his relic-explorers. It is said that only one letter written to him has been preserved, and this is a begging one from a Richard Quincy, who wants to borrow a sum of money of the poet to keep his head above water in London. I cannot conceive to what else this dense obscurity enveloping his personal entity can be ascribed than to the fact, that the morning twilight of his fame did not dawn upon the world until he had lain in his grave a full century. In this long interval all the letters he wrote and received doubtless shared the fate of Cæsar's clay. The greengrocers and haberdashers of that period probably bought and used them for making up their parcels of butter ​and mustard and articles of less dignity. All this may be well for the great reputation the world accords to him. It may be well that he left no handwriting in familiar lines, no unravelled threads of his common human nature which captious critics might follow up into the inner recesses of his daily life, and fleck the disk of his fair fame with the specks and motes they found in the search after moral discrepancies. It is a wonder that a man of such genius could have died less than two centuries and a half ago, and have left a character so completely shut in and barred against "the peering littlenesses" of speering, yellow-eyed curiosity. A soft, still blue, of a hundred years deep, surrounds his personal being. Through this mild cerulean haze it shows itself fair and round. Well is it for him, perhaps, that we of to-day cannot get nearer to him than the gentle horizon of this intervening century. It is a seamless mantle that Providence has wrapped around the stature of his life, in which no envious Casca can ever make a rent to get at the frailties or small actions of a great master. No man ever lived more hermetically in his writings than Shakespeare. His personal being is as completely shut up and embodied in them as Homer's is in his grand epics. Will the life that breathes in them prove immortal? Three centuries are not immortality. Will the sexcentenary anniversary of his birth be celebrated after ​the fashion of 1864? Through all the changes in taste and moral and intellectual perception that may arise in that or a shorter interval, will his genius and his works be held at our estimate? Was he as a poet just what Rubens was as a painter, and will the pen of the one and the pencil of the other be put on the same footing and have the same chance for the admiration of future generations? No one can reason out the extreme ends of these parallels, or predict the verdict of another century with regard to these men. But the fact we have already cited will serve as the basis of a reasonable belief in this matter. It must have been a full hundred years after Shakespeare was laid down to his last sleep in the chancel of the church in which he was baptized, before he began to have a popular reputation, or a reading by even the educated classes in England. At the end of the second century that reputation had spread itself over the whole civilized world. From 1623 to 1823 no writers had arisen to eclipse or supersede his genius. In this wide interval hundreds of authors, widely read in their day, went down to oblivion, some to obloquy. They could not live on the sea of public opinion. Now we are in the middle of the third century of his fame. How does it rank at this moment in the estimation of the world? With all the new and brilliant literature that has flooded Christendom within the ​last fifty years, has the brightness of his paled in the contrast? Has it already gone down into the gorgeous tombs of the Capulets, or to live only in monumental bookbindery with the bygone English classics; to make a show of elegant gilt-backed volumes in fashionable bookcases as "standard works," or works for ever to stand on their lower ends in serried and even ranks, to be seen and not read? Further from it than ever before. No such lame and impotent conclusion can be predicted from the present appreciation of his writings. The opening years of this very decade mark a new era in their estimation. Virtually for the first time he is being introduced to a new world of readers, to the labouring masses of the people. Publishers are taking him into the cottages of the million, and bespeaking a hearty and pleasant welcome to his "Hamlet," "Othello," and all the other creations of his genius. Popular editions of Shakespeare are the order of the day. For the first time the common people begin to know him. Such is the promise of 1867. What is being done in England and America to familiarize the masses with his writings is repeated on a smaller scale on the Continent of Europe. Cheap editions in German and French have been put recently in circulation. Doubtless within a half century lie will be read in every other language in Christendom. His works never ​had more vitality than at the present moment, nor such a wide breathing space among men. While looking at the dark and dense network of names written upon the walls and windows of the room in which Shakespeare was born, there was one I would have walked a hundred miles to see. It was not Lucien Bonaparte's, nor Sir Walter Scott's, nor Burns's, nor Washington Irving's. It was the name of the man who first pencilled one upon the virgin plaster over the cradle-place of the poet. It would be exceedingly interesting to know who he was, when he did it, and what moved him to this act of homage. What a procession of names his headed! The whole space is covered with layers of them, several deep. If they could all be brought to light, every square inch would reveal fifty at least. The house and garden are in good repair. The latter is beautifully laid out and kept, and is marked by this interesting characteristic: all the flowers that Shakespeare has celebrated in his plays are here planted, watched, and tended with the nicest care. As a reward for the dew and light his genius shed over them two centuries and a half ago, their sweet eyes keep vigils over his birthplace and perfume it with their morning breath.