Among my letters is one from Dr. E.D. North, desiring me to furnish any
facts within my reach, relating to the scientific character and general
opinions of the late James G. Percival. This information Dr. North
proposed to incorporate into a memoir, to be prefixed to a new edition
of Percival's Poems. The biographer, with his task unfinished, has
followed the subject of his studies to the tomb.
Dr. North's request revived in me many recollections of Percival; and
finally led me to draw out the following sketch of him, as he appeared
to my eyes in those days when I saw him often, and sometimes shared his
pursuits. Vague and shadowy is the delineation, and to myself seems
little better than the reminiscence of a phantom or a dream. Percival's
life had few externalities,—he related himself to society by few points
of contact; and I have been compelled to paint him chiefly by glimpses
of his literary and interior existence.
My acquaintance with him grew out of some conversations on geological
topics, and commenced in 1828, when he was working on his translation of
Malte-Brun's Geography. The impression made on me by his singular person
and manners was vivid and indelible. Slender in form, rather above than
under the middle height, he had a narrow chest, and a peculiar stoop,
which was not in the back, but high up in the shoulders. His head,
without being large, was fine. His eyes were of a dark hazel, and
possessed uncommon expression. His nose, mouth, and chin were
symmetrically, if not elegantly formed, and came short of beauty
only because of that meagreness which marked his whole person. His
complexion, light without redness, inclined to sallow, and suggested a
temperament somewhat bilious. His dark brown hair had become thin above
the forehead, revealing to advantage that most striking feature of his
countenance. Taken all together, his appearance was that of a weak man,
of delicate constitution,—an appearance hardly justified by the fact;
for he endured fatigue and privation with remarkable stanchness.
Percival's face, when he was silent, was full of calm, serious
meditation; when speaking, it lighted up with thought, and became
noticeably expressive. He commonly talked in a mild, unimpassioned
undertone, but just above a whisper, letting his voice sink with rather
a pleasing cadence at the completion of each sentence. Even when most
animated, he used no gesture except a movement of the first and second
fingers of his right hand backward and forward across the palm of the
left, meantime following their monotonous unrest with his eyes, and
rarely meeting the gaze of his interlocutor. He would stand for hours,
when talking, his right elbow on a mantel-piece, if there was one near,
his fingers going through their strange palmistry; and in this manner,
never once stirring from his position, he would not unfrequently
protract his discourse till long past midnight. An inexhaustible,
undemonstrative, noiseless, passionless man, scarcely evident to you by
physical qualities, and impressing you, for the most part, as a creature
of pure intellect.
His wardrobe was remarkably inexpensive, consisting of little more than
a single plain suit, brown or gray, which he wore winter and summer,
until it became threadbare. He never used boots; and his shoes, though
carefully dusted, were never blacked. A most unpretending bow fastened
his cravat of colored cambric. For many years his only outer garment was
a brown camlet cloak, of very scanty proportions, thinly lined, and a
meagre protection against winter. His hat was worn for years before
being laid aside, and put you in mind of the prevailing mode by the law
of contrast only. He was never seen with gloves, and rarely with an
umbrella. The value of his entire wardrobe scarcely exceeded fifty
dollars; yet he was always neat, and appeared unconscious of any
peculiarity in his costume.
An accurate portrait of him at any period of his life can scarcely be
said to exist. His sensitive modesty seems to have made him unwilling to
let his features be exposed to the flaring notoriety of canvas. Once,
indeed, he allowed himself to be painted by Mr. George A. Flagg; but the
picture having been exhibited in the Trumbull Gallery of Yale
College, Percival's susceptibility took alarm, and he expressed
annoyance,—though whether dissatisfied with the portrait or its public
exposure I cannot say. The artist proposed certain alterations, and the
poet listened to him with seeming assent. The picture was taken back to
the studio; objectionable or questionable parts of it painted out; the
likeness destroyed for the purpose of correction; and Percival was to
give another sitting at his convenience. That was the last time he put
himself within painting reach of Mr. Flagg's easel.[A]
[Footnote A: I remember to have seen an excellent portrait of him, by
Alexander, in the studio of that artist, in the year 1825; but in whose
possession it now is, I am unable to say.]
In those days of our early acquaintance, he occupied two small chambers,
one of which fronted on the business part of Chapel Street (New Haven).
His books, already numerous, were piled in double tiers and in heaps
against the walls, covering the floors also, and barely leaving space
for his sleeping-cot, chair, and writing-table. His library was a
sanctum to which the curious visitor hardly ever gained admittance. He
met even his friends at the door, and generally held his interviews
with them in the adjoining passage. Disinclined to borrow books, he
was especially averse to lending. Dr. Guhrauer's assertion respecting
Leibnitz, that "his library was numerous and valuable, and its possessor
had the peculiarity that he liked to worm in it alone, being very
reluctant to let any one see it," applies equally well to Percival.
He was rarely visible abroad except in his walks to and from the
country, whither he often resorted to pass not hours only, but
frequently entire days, in solitary wanderings,—partly for physical
exercise,—still more, perhaps, to study the botany, the geology, and
the minutest geographical features of the environs; for his restless
mind was perpetually observant, and could not be withheld from external
Nature, even by his poetic and philosophic meditation. In these
excursions, he often passed his fellow-mortals without noticing them. A
friend, if observed, he greeted with a slight nod, and possibly stopped
him for conversation. Once started on a subject, Percival rarely quitted
it until it was exhausted; and consequently these interviews sometimes
outlasted the leisure of his listener. You excused yourself, perhaps;
or you were called away by some one else; but you had only put off the
conclusion of the discourse, not escaped it. The next time Percival
encountered you, his first words were, "As I was saying,"—and taking
up the thread of his observations where it had been broken, he went
straight to the end.
The excellent bookstore of the late Hezekiah Howe, one of the best in
New England, and particularly rich in those rare and costly works
which form a bookworm's delight, was one of Percival's best-loved
lounging-places. He bought freely, and, when he could not buy, he was
welcome to peruse: He read with marvellous rapidity, skipping as if by
instinct everything that was unimportant; avoiding the rhetoric, the
commonplaces, the falsities; glancing only at what was new, what was
true, what was suggestive, he had a distinct object in view; but it was
not to amuse himself, nor to compare author with author; it was simply
to increase the sum of his own knowledge. Perhaps it was in these rapid
forays through unbought, uncut volumes, that he acquired his singular
habit of reading books, even his own, without subjecting them to the
paper-knife. People who wanted to see Percival and obtain his views on
special topics were accustomed to look for him at Mr. Howe's, and always
found him willing to pour forth his voluminous information.
His income at this time was derived solely from literary jobs, and was
understood to be very limited. What he earned he spent chiefly for
books, particularly for such as would assist him in perfecting that
striking monument of his varied and profound research, his new
translation and edition of Malte-Brun. For this labor the time had been
estimated, and the publishers had made him an allowance, which, if he
had worked like other men, would have amounted to eight dollars a
day. But Percival would let nothing go out of his hands imperfect; a
typographical error, even, I have heard him say, sometimes depressed
him like actual illness. He translated and revised so carefully, he
corrected so many errors and added so many footnotes, that his industry
actually devoured its own wages; and his eight dollars gradually
diminished to a diurnal fifty cents.
Percival made no merely ceremonial calls, few friendly visits, and
attended no parties. If he dropped in upon a family of his acquaintance,
he rarely addressed himself to a lady. Otherwise there was nothing
peculiar in his deportment; for, if silent, he was not embarrassed,—and
if he talked, it was without any appearance of self-consciousness.
Judging from his isolated habits, some persons supposed him
misanthropic. Let me give one instance of his good-nature. One of the
elder professors of Yale had fallen into a temporary misappreciation
with the students, who received his instructions, to say the least, with
an ill-concealed indifference. They whispered during his lectures,
and in other ways rendered themselves strenuously disagreeable to the
sensitive nerves of the professor. Indignant at such behavior toward
a worthy and learned man, who had been his own instructor, Percival
proposed a plan for stopping the annoyance. It was, that a number of old
graduates, professors, and others, himself being one, should attend
the lectures, listen to them with the respect they merited, and so,
if possible, bring the students to a sense of propriety and of the
advantages they were neglecting.
No, Percival was not a misanthrope. During an acquaintance of
twenty-five years, I never knew him do an act or utter a word which
could countenance this opinion. He indulged in no bitter remarks,
cherished no hatred of individuals, affected no scorn of his race; on
the contrary, he held large views concerning the noble destinies of
mankind, and expressed deep interest in its advancement toward greater
intelligence and virtue. The local affections he certainly had, for he
was gratified at the prosperity of his fellow-townsmen, proud of his
native State, and took a pleasure in defending her name from unjust
aspersions. Patriotic, too,—none more so,—he rejoiced in the welfare
of the whole country, knew its history thoroughly, and bestowed on
its military heroes, in particular, a lively appreciation, which was
singular, perhaps, in a man of such gentle habits and nature. I
cannot forget the excited pleasure with which we visited, when on the
geological survey of Connecticut, Putnam's Stairs at Horseneck, and
Putnam's Wolf-Den in Pomfret. At the latter place, Percival's enthusiasm
for the heroic hunter and warrior led him to carve his initials on a
rock at the entrance of the chasm. It was the only place during the tour
where he left a similar memorial.
American statesmen he admired scarcely less than American soldiers; nor
did he neglect any information within his reach concerning public
men and measures. It was singular to observe with what freedom from
excitement he discussed the most irritating phases of party,—speaking
of the men and events of his own day with as much philosophic calmness
as if they belonged to a previous century; not at all deceived, I
think, by the temporary notoriety and power which frequently attend the
political bustler,—quite positive, indeed, that many of our "great men"
were far inferior to multitudes in private life. Webster he respected
greatly, and used to regret that his fortune was not commensurate with
his tastes. Like a true poet, he believed devoutly in native genius,
considered it something inimitable and incommunicable, and worshipped it
whereever he found it.
Percival was indifferent and even disinclined to female society. There
is a common story that he had conceived an aversion to the whole sex
in consequence of a youthful disappointment in love. I know nothing
concerning this alleged chagrin, but I am confident that he cherished no
such antipathy. He never, in my hearing, said a hard thing of any woman,
or of the sex; and I remember distinctly the flattering and even poetic
appreciation with which he spoke of individual ladies. Of one who has
since become a distinguished authoress of the South, he said, that "her
conversation had as great an intellectual charm for him as that of any
scholar among his male acquaintances." Of a lady still resident in
New Haven, he observed, that "there was a mysterious beauty in her
thoughtful face and dark eyes which reminded him of a deep and limpid
forest-fountain." But although he did not hate women, he certainly was
disinclined to their society,—an oddity, I beg leave to say, in any
man, and a most surprising eccentricity in a poet. Constitutional
timidity may have founded this habit during youth; for, as I have
already observed, his modesty was sensitive and almost morbid. Then came
his multitudinous studies, which absorbed him utterly, and in which,
unfortunately for Percival, if not for the ladies, these last took so
little interest that conversation was not mutually desirable. A remark
he made to a scientific friend, who had just been married, will,
perhaps, throw some light on the subject. "How is this?" said he; "I
thought you were wedded to science." This was all the felicitation he
had to offer; and without asking for the bride, he plunged into the
discussion which was the object of the visit.
In 1835 commenced the geological survey of Connecticut, and I became
Percival's companion in labor. To him was intrusted the geology proper,
and to myself the mineralogy and its economical applications. During the
first season, we prosecuted our investigations together, travelling in
a one-horse wagon, which carried all our necessary implements, and
visiting, before the campaign ended, every parish in the State. Great
was the wonder our strange outfit and occupation excited in some rustic
neighborhoods; and very often were we called upon to enlighten the
popular mind with regard to our object and its uses. This was never a
pleasant task to Percival. He did not relish long confabulations with a
sovereign people somewhat ignorant of geology; and, moreover, his style
of describing our business was so peculiar, that it rarely failed to
transfer the curiosity to himself, and lead to tiresome delays. In New
Milford, an inquisitive farmer requested us, in a somewhat ungracious
manner, to give an account of ourselves. Percival replied, that we were
acting under a commission from the Governor to ascertain the useful
minerals of the State; whereupon our utilitarian friend immediately
demanded to be informed how the citizens at large, including himself,
were to be benefited by the undertaking,—putting question on question
in a fashion which was most pertinacious and almost impertinent.
Percival became impatient, and tried to hurry away. "I demand the
information," exclaimed the New Milfordite; "I demand it as my right.
You are only servants of the people; and you are paid, in part, at
least, out of my pocket." "I'll tell you what we'll do," said Percival;
"we can't stop, but we'll refund. Your portion of the geological
tax,—let me see,—it must be about two cents. We prefer handing you
this to encountering a further delay." Our agricultural friend and
master did not take the money, although he did the hint,—and in sulky
silence withdrew from our company.
Driving through the town of Warren, we stopped a farmer to inquire
the way to certain places in the vicinity. He gave us the information
sought, staring at us meanwhile with a benevolently inquisitive
expression, and, at last, volunteering the remark, that, if we wanted a
job, we had better stop at the factory in the hollow. We thanked him
for his goodness, and thought, perhaps, of Sedgewick geologizing by the
road-side, and getting a charitable half-crown flung at him by a noble
lady who was on her way to dine in his company at the house of a mutual
acquaintance.
Let us grant here one brief parenthesis of respect and astonishment to
the scientific knowledge and philological acumen of a distinguished
graduate of Yale College, and member of Congress, whom we encountered
on our travels. Hearing us speak of mosaic granite, a rock occurring
in Woodbridge, to which we had given this name, from the checker-like
arrangement of its felspathic ingredient, he concluded that we
attributed its formation to the era of Moses, and asked Percival what
evidence he had for such an opinion. Small blame to him, perhaps, for
the blunder, but it seemed a very droll one to geologists.
In Greenwich, the extreme southwestern town of the State, we encountered
an incident to which my companion would sometimes refer with a slight
degree of merriment. In general, he was no joker, no anecdotist, and had
but a feeble appreciation of droll sayings or humorous matters of
any kind. But in Greenwich he heard a memorable phrase. Among the
tavern-loungers was a man who had evidently seen better days, and who,
either for that reason or because of the large amount of rum he had
swallowed, entertained a lofty opinion of himself, and discoursed de
omnibus rebus in a most consequential fashion. He soon made himself a
sort of medium between ourselves and his fellow-loafers. Overhearing us
say that we wished to pass the New York frontier for the sake of tracing
out the strata then under examination, he proceeded with much pomposity
to declare to his deeply curious auditory, that "it was his opinion
that the Governor of the State should confer upon these gentlemen
discretionary powers to pass the limits of Connecticut, whenever and
wherever, in the prosecution of their labors, the interests of science
required them so to do." After this, we rarely crossed the State line
but Percival observed, "We are now taking advantage of our discretionary
powers."
Of the few stories Percival told me, here is one. In one of our
country-places, a plain, shrewd townsman fell into chance conversation
with him, and entertained him with some account of a neighbor who had
been seized with a mania for high Art, and had let loose his frenzy upon
canvas in a deluge of oil-colors. If I mistake not, Percival was invited
to inspect these productions of untaught and perhaps unteachable genius.
They were vast attempts at historical scenes, in which the heads and
legs of heroes were visible, but played a very secondary part in the
interest, compared with a perfect tempest of drapery, which rolled in
ungovernable masses, like the clouds of a thunder-storm.
"What do you think of them?" inquired Percival.
"Well, I don't claim to be a judge of such things," replied his
cicerone; "but the fact is, (and I told the painter so,) that, when I
look at 'em, about the only thing I can think of is a resurrection of
old clothes."
In the town of Lebanon, an incident occurred which affected us rather
more seriously. Turning a corner suddenly, we came upon an old man
digging up cobble-stones by the road-side and breaking them in pieces
with an axe. "A brother-geologist," was our first impression. At that
moment the old man sprang toward us, the axe in one hand and half a
brick in the other, shouting eagerly,—
"I guess Mr. ——" (name indistinguishable) "will be glad to see you,
gentlemen."
"For what?"
"Why, he has got several boxes of jewels; and I gave an advertisement in
the paper."
"Whose are they?"
"King Jerome's."
"And who is he?"
"The king of the world!" shouted the maniac, still advancing with a
menacing air, and so near the wagon by this time that he might almost
have hit Percival with his axe.
Without pausing to hear more about the jewels, a sudden blow to the
horse barely enabled us to escape the reach of our fellow-laborer before
he had time to use his axe on our own formations.
In the following year, when Percival was pursuing the survey by himself,
on horseback, some of the elements of this adventure were repeated,
but reversed after a very odd fashion. The late Dr. Carrington, of
Farmington, who told me the tale, being ten miles from home on a
professional excursion, drove up to a tavern and found himself welcomed
with extraordinary emphasis by the innkeeper. The Doctor was just the
person he wanted to see; the Doctor's opinion was very much needed about
that strange man out there; he wished the Doctor to have a talk with
him, and see whether he was crazy or not. The fellow had been there a
day or two, picking up stones about the lots; and some of the boys had
been sent to watch him, but could get nothing out of him. This morning
he wanted to go away, and ordered his horse; but the neighbors wouldn't
let it be brought up, for they said he was surely some mad chap who
had taken another man's horse. Thus talking, the landlord pointed out
Percival, surrounded by a group of villagers, who, quietly, and under
pretence of conversation, were holding him under a sort of arrest. The
Doctor rushed into the circle, addressed his friend Percival by name,
spoke of the survey, and thus satisfied the bystanders, who, guessing
their mistake, dispersed silently. No open remonstrance was needed,
and perhaps Percival never understood the adventure in which he thus
unconsciously formed the principal character.
While we were in Berlin, the native town of Percival, he related to me
several incidents of his earlier life. His father was discussing some
geographical question with a neighbor; and the future geologist, then
a boy of seven or eight, sat by listening until the ignorance of his
elders tempted him to speak. "Where did you learn that?" they asked,
in astonishment. With timid reluctance, he confessed that he had been
reading clandestinely Morse's large geography, of which there was a copy
in a society-library kept at his father's house. The book, he added, had
an indescribable attraction for him; and even at that almost infantile
age he was familiar with its contents. It was this reading of Morse,
perhaps, which determined his taste for those geographical studies
in which he subsequently became so distinguished. With him, as with
Humboldt and Guyot, geography was a term of wide signification. Far from
confining it to the names and boundaries of countries, seas, and lakes,
to the courses of rivers and the altitudes of mountains, he connected
with it meteorology, natural history, and the leading facts of human
history, ethnology, and archaeology. He knew London as thoroughly as
most Americans know New York or Philadelphia, and yet he had never
crossed the Atlantic.
An instance of the minuteness of his geographical information was
related to me by the Rev. Mr. Adam, a Scottish clergyman, long resident
at Benares, but subsequently settled over the Congregational Church in
Amherst, Massachusetts. On his way to visit me at New Haven, he met in
the stage-coach a countryman of his, who soon opened a controversy with
him respecting the course of a certain river in Scotland. The discussion
had continued for some time, when another passenger offered a suggestion
which opened the eyes of the debaters to the fact (not unfrequently the
case in such controversies) that they were both wrong. "How long since
you were there, Sir?" they asked; and the reply was, "I never was in
Scotland." "Who are you, Sir?" Mr. Adam wanted to ask, but kept the
question until he could put it to me. I did not feel much hesitation in
telling him that the stranger must have been Percival; and Percival it
was, as I afterwards learned by questioning him of the circumstance.
But we must return to Berlin, in order to hear one more of Percival's
stories. Passing a field, half a mile from his early home, he told an
incident connected with it, and related to his favorite study of natural
history. The field had belonged to his father, who, besides being the
physician of Berlin, indulged a taste for agriculture. Just before the
harvest season, it became palpable that this field, then waving with
wheat, was depredated upon to a wasteful extent by some unknown subjects
of the animal kingdom. Having watched for the pilferers in vain by
day, the proprietor resolved to mount guard by night, and accordingly
ambushed himself in the invaded territory. Near midnight, he saw his own
flock of geese, hitherto considered so trustworthy, approach silently
in single file, make their entry between the rails, and commence
transferring the wheat-crop into their own crops, after a ravenous
fashion. Having eaten their fill, they re-formed their column of march,
with a venerable gander at the head, and trudged silently homeward,
cautiously followed by their owner, who noticed, that, on regaining his
door-yard, they set up a vociferous cackle, such as he had repeatedly
heard from them before at about the same hour. It was a most evident
attempt to establish an alibi; it was as much as to say, "If you miss
any wheat, we didn't take it; we are honest birds, and stay at
home o'nights, Dr. Percival." The next morning, however, a general
decapitation overtook the flock of feathered hypocrites. "It was a
curious instance of the domestic goose reverting to its wild habit of
nocturnal feeding," remarked my narrator, dwelling characteristically
upon the natural-history aspect of the fact.
Percival was almost incapable of an irrelevancy. The survey was the
business in hand, and he rarely discoursed much of things disconnected
with it, except, perhaps, when we were retracing our routes, or when the
labors of the day were over. Of poets and poetry he was not inclined to
speak. I never heard him quote a line, either his own or another's, nor
indulge in a single poetic observation concerning the objects which
met us in our wanderings. Indeed, he confessed that he no longer felt
disposed to write verses, being satisfied that his productions were
not acceptable to the prevailing taste; although he admitted that he
composed a few stanzas occasionally, in order to make trial of some
unusual measure or new language. He told me that he had versified in
thirteen languages; and I have heard from others that he had imitated
all the Greek and German metres.
Of politics, foreign and domestic, he talked frequently, but always
philosophically and dispassionately, much as if he were speaking of
geological stratification. His views of humanity were deduced from a
most extensive survey of the race in all its historical and geographical
relations. He distinctly recognized the fact of its steady advance
from one stage to another, in accordance with a plan of intellectually
organic development, as marked as that detected by the geologist in
the gradual preparation of the earth for the abode of our species. The
slowness and seeming vacillation of man's upward movement could not
stagger his faith; for if it had taken thousands of ages to make earth
habitable, why should it not take thousands more to bring man to his
completeness? Equally free was he from misgiving on account of the
remaining presence of so much misery and wretchedness; for these he
considered as the indispensable stimuli to progress. Even war, he used
to say, is sometimes necessary to the welfare of nations, as sickness
and sorrow plainly are to that of individuals; although, to his moral
sense, the human authors of this scourge were no more admirable than the
devisers of any private calamity. Improvements in knowledge he regarded
as the only elements of real progress; and these he looked upon as true
germinal principles, bound up organically in the constitution of the
human soul. Indeed, that philosophical calmness which was characteristic
of him seemed to flow in some measure from his settled persuasion that
the same matchless wisdom and benevolence he recognized throughout
Nature wrought with a still higher providence and a more earnest love
for man and would make all things finally conduce to his welfare. It was
clear that he drew a profound tranquillity from the thought that he was
a part of the vast and harmonious whole.
Concerning his religious views he was exceedingly taciturn. He had no
taste for metaphysical or theological discussions, although his library
contained a large number of standard works on these subjects. Religion
itself he never alluded to but with the deepest respect. Talking to
me of Christianity, he quoted the observation of Goethe, that "it had
brought into the world a light never to be extinguished." He spoke of
Jesus with poetic, if not with Christian fervor. He contrasted his
teachings and deeds with the prevailing maxims and practice of the
people among whom he appeared, with the dead orthodoxy of its religious
teachers, and with the general ignorance and hypocrisy of the masses.
"Had I lived in such a state of society," he said, "I am certain that it
would have driven me mad."
He expressed an earnest esteem for the doctrines of the Evangelical
clergy, and even approved, though more moderately, the religious
awakenings which occur under their labors. He described to me, with
some particularity, a revival he had witnessed in his native town, when
young; and repeated some of the quaint exhortations of the lay brethren,
all in a manner perfectly serious, but calculated, perhaps, to leave the
impression, that such views of religion were not necessary to himself,
although they might be quite suited to the minds of others.
The rational theology he regarded as anti-poetic in influence, and of
very doubtful efficacy in working upon the masses. He appreciated,
however, the honesty and superior culture of the Unitarian scholars and
clergy of Boston, with many of whom he had been on terms as intimate as
his shyness accorded to any one.
He attended church but once with me while we were engaged in the survey.
We heard a discourse from a Rev. Dr. E——, upon the conduct of the
young ruler who inquired his duty of Christ. The speaker argued from the
sacred narrative a universal obligation to devote our possessions
to religious purposes,—and upheld, as an example to all men, the
self-devotion of a young missionary (then somewhat known) who had
despised a splendid fortune, offered him on condition of his remaining
at home, and had consecrated himself to the Christianization of Africa.
"How did you like the sermon?" I inquired of Percival.
"I consider it an animating and probably useful performance," he
replied; "but it does not accord with comprehensive conceptions of
humanity, inasmuch as its main inference was drawn from the exception,
and not from the rule. There always have been, and probably always
will be, men possessed of the self-immolating or martyr spirit. Such
instances are undoubtedly useful, and have my admiration; but they
cannot become general, and never were meant to be."
During the survey, we were invited to pass an evening in a family
remarkable for its musical talent, and I remember distinctly the evident
pleasure with which Percival listened to the chorus of organ tones and
rich cultivated voices. In general, however, his appreciation of music
was subordinate to his study of syllabic movement in versification; and
it was with reference chiefly to poetic measure, I have been told, that
he acquired what mastery he had over the accordion and guitar.
Percival's favorite topics, when evening came and we rested from our
stony labors, were the modern languages and the philosophy of universal
grammar. They seemed to have filled the niches in his heart, from which
he had banished, or tried to banish, the Muses. The subtile refinements
of Bopp were a perpetual luxury to him; he derived language from
language as easily as word from word; and, once started in the
intricacies of the Russian or the Basque, there was no predicting the
end of the discourse. Thus were thrown away, upon a solitary listener,
midnight lectures which would have done honor to the class-rooms of
Berlin or the Sorbonne. In looking at such an instance of intellectual
pleasure and acumen, as connected in no small degree with the study of
foreign languages, one cannot avoid associating together the unsolved
mystery of that discrepancy of tongues prevailing in different countries
with the disagreeing floras and faunas of the same regions,—each
diversity bearing alike the unmistakable marks of Omnipotent design for
the happiness and improvement of man.
The perfection of his memory was amazing. During the year following
the survey, when we had frequent occasion to compare recollections, I
observed that no circumstance of our labors was shadowy or incomplete
in his memory. He could refer to every trifling incident of the tour,
recall every road and path that we had followed, every field and ledge
that we had examined, particularize the day of the week on which we had
dined or supped at such a tavern, and mention the name of the landlord.
I asked him how he was able to remember such minutiae. He replied, that
it was his custom, on going to bed, to call up, in the darkness and
stillness, all the incidents of the day's experience, in their proper
order, and cause them to move before him like a diorama through a
spiritual morning, noon, and evening. "It has often appeared to me," he
said, "that in this purely mental process I see objects more distinctly
than I behold them in the reality."
But his memory doubtless gained an immense additional advantage from his
habitual seclusion, from his unconcern with the distracting customs of
society, and, most of all, from the imperturbable abstraction under
which he studied and observed. With him there was no blending of
collateral subjects, no permitted intrusion of things irrelevant or
trivial, so that the channels of his thoughts were always single,
deep, and traceable. It was a mental straightforwardness and
conscientiousness, as rare, perhaps, as moral rectitude itself.
In diet, Percival was the most abstemious person I ever knew. His health
was uniformly good,—the specimens of a geologist, when he collects them
himself, being as favorable to digestion and appetite as the pebbles to
a chicken; yet, I am persuaded, my companion in no case violated the
golden rule of leaving the table unsated. No matter how long had been
his fast, he showed no impatience of hunger, made no remark upon the
excellence of any dish, found fault with nothing, or, at most, only
seemed to miss drinkable coffee and good bread, articles seldom to be
met with in the country. He ate slowly, selecting his food with the
discrimination which ought to belong to a chemist or physiologist, and
then thought no more about it. Alcoholic drinks he never tasted, except
an occasional glass of wine, to which his attention perhaps had been
called on account of its age or superior excellence. Even then it
was not the flavor which interested him, so much as the history,
geographical and other.
Peculiar as he was in his own habits of diet, he offered no strictures
upon the practice of others, however different, unless it ran into
hurtful excesses. The maxim of Epictetus in the "Enchiridion," "Never
preach how others ought to eat, but eat you as becomes you," seemed to
be his rule. Indeed, Percival was one of those rare men who withhold
alike censure and praise respecting the minor matters of life. Not that
he was without opinions on such subjects; but, to obtain them, one was
forced to question him. On the whole, I do not think it would be going
too far to apply to him the above-named moralist's description of the
wise man:—"He reproves nobody, praises nobody, blames nobody, nor even
speaks of himself; if any one praises him, in his own mind he contemns
the flatterer; if any one reproves him, he looks with care that he be
not unsettled in the state of tranquillity that he has entered into.
All his desires depend on things within his power; he transfers all
his aversions to those things which Nature commands us to avoid. His
appetites are always moderate. He is indifferent whether he be thought
foolish or ignorant. He observes himself with the nicety of an enemy or
a spy, and looks on his own wishes as betrayers."
Percival's solitary habits, combined with the invariable seriousness
of his manner, led many persons to believe him melancholy, and even
disposed to suicide. He did, indeed, confess to me, that he sometimes
felt giddy on the edge of a precipice. This was his nearest approach, I
am confident, to the idea of self-destruction. While we were examining
the great iron furnaces of Salisbury, he told me that he was afraid of
walking near the throat of a chimney when in blast, and that more than
once he had turned and run from the lurid, murky orifice, lest a sudden
failure of self-control should cause him to reel into the consuming
abyss. No,—Percival neither felt nor expressed disgust with life.
On the contrary, he was strongly attached to it; the acquisition of
knowledge clothed it with inexpressible value; the longest day was ever
too short to fulfil his designs. Like the wise, laborious men of all
ages, he almost repined at the swiftness of the years. "I am amazed at
the flight of time," he said to me, on the arrival of his forty-second
birthday; "it seems only a year since I was thirty-two;—I have lost ten
years of my life."
Before entering upon the survey of Connecticut, he was not specially
devoted to any one branch of physics, although his tastes inclined him
most toward geology. While he could sympathize perfectly, he said, with
those who threw their whole force into a single study, he felt
himself attracted equally by the entire circle of Nature, and thought
omniscience a nobler object of ambition than any one science. He
admitted that the search after all knowledge is incompatible with
eminence in any particular department; but he believed that it affords
higher pleasure to the mind, and confers ability to do signal service
to mankind in pointing out the grand connections, the general laws, of
Nature.
It is not, perhaps, widely known, that Percival was a well-informed
botanist. He studied this branch when a medical student under Professor
Ives, and assisted his instructor in laying out a small botanical
garden, the plants of which were arranged after the natural orders of
Jussieu. Soon after finishing his medical education, he gave a course of
lectures on botany in Charleston, South Carolina, before a very select
audience, composed mostly of Ladies. The only drawback to the lecturer's
success was his excessive timidity. As an evidence of the assiduity with
which he botanized, it may be mentioned that he had seen the Geranium
Robertianum (a plant which nestles in the sunny clefts of our trap
mountains) in bloom, during every month of the year. One year he found
its blossoms in December, another in January, and so on, until the round
of the monthly calendar was completed.
Percival was an earnest advocate of popular education. He manifested
much interest in the first systematic attempt (at the instance of
Mr. James Brewster) to furnish the people of New Haven with popular
instruction in the form of lectures. At a public dinner, given by Mr.
Brewster, on the occasion of opening the building in which rooms had
been fitted up for these lectures, the late Mr. Skinner gave the toast,
"Our mechanics, the right arm of New Haven," and Percival followed with,
"Science, the right eye which directs the right arm of New Haven." He
believed most fully in the superiority of intelligent labor. He pointed
out cases in which a college-training had been connected with signal
eminence in mechanical invention, and said, that, according to his
observations, persons engaged in industrial pursuits usually succeeded
in proportion to the thoroughness of their education.
Percival himself gave a course of lectures, or rather, lessons, in New
Haven,—not in the building above mentioned, for his natural timidity
was too great to encounter a public audience, but in the theological
lecture-room of Yale College. They were on the German language, and
consisted chiefly of translations of prose and poetry into English,
intermingled with philosophical commentaries on the peculiarities of the
original. It was pure grammar; he did not talk German, and claimed no
acquaintance with the niceties of pronunciation; but all his listeners,
most of whom were graduates, were struck with his perfect mastery of the
subject.
Percival held one peculiar opinion concerning a branch of college
education. He objected to the modern practice of teaching the natural
sciences by means of a profusion of drawings, models, showy experiments,
and other expedients addressing the mind so strongly through the eye.
While these might be allowable in popular lectures, before audiences
lacking in early intellectual discipline, where amusement was a
consideration, and where without it the public ear could not be secured,
he thought that the collegian should study differently,—that his
understanding should be taxed severely, and that he should be inured,
from the first, to rigid attention, in order to a lasting remembrance
of the truths offered to him. It would be a useful exercise for the
instructor, he thought, to elucidate obscure phenomena and complicated
structures by words only, assisting himself, perhaps, occasionally, by
extemporaneous drawings. Such a course would inspire the scholar with
deference for his teacher, and confidence in his own ability to acquire
a similar grasp of the subject. While there is certainly some truth in
this opinion, it would not be difficult, perhaps, to invalidate its
general force. Why should the ear be the only admitted means of
acquiring knowledge? Nature, the greatest of teachers, does not judge
thus: she conveys half her wisdom to us by sight, instead of by faith;
she gives her first lessons to the infant through the eye. Would
Percival, in looking for his attentive audiences, have preferred a
congregation of blind men?
Speaking of literary composition, he said that he often took great pains
with his productions, shifting words and phrases in many ways, before
satisfying himself that he had attained the best form of expression; and
he assured me that these slowly elaborated passages were the very ones
in which he afterwards recognized the most ease and nature, and which
others supposed him to have thrown off carelessly. I asked him how it
was that children, in their unpremeditated way, expressed themselves
with so much directness and beauty. They have but a single idea to
present at a time, he said; they seize without hesitation on the first
words that offer for its expression, unperplexed by any such choice of
terms as would surely occur to maturer minds; and most important of
all, perhaps, they are wholly unembarrassed by limiting qualifications
arising from a fuller knowledge of the subject.
His prose style is a rare exemplification of classic severity and
perspicuousness. In each paragraph the ideas arrange themselves in
faultless connection, like the molecules of a crystal around its centre.
The sentences are not long, the construction is simple, the words are
English in its purity, without admixture of foreign phrase or idiom. But
the most striking peculiarity of his diction is the utter absence
of ornament; for Percival evidently held that the chief merits of
composition are clearness and directness. Poetic imagery, brilliant
climaxes and antitheses, fanciful or grotesque turns of expression, he
rejected as unfavorable to that simple truth for which he studied and
wrote. This dry, almost mathematical style, was no necessity with him;
few men, surely, have had at command a richer vocabulary, English and
foreign, than Percival; few could have adorned thought with more or
choicer garlands from the fields of knowledge and imagination.
To letter-writing he had a great aversion. I have never seen a letter
or note from him to which his signature was attached. The
autograph-fanciers, therefore, will find a scanty harvest when they come
to forage after the name of Percival. His handwriting corresponded in
some sense with his character. It was fine; the lines straight and
parallel; the letters completely formed, though without fulness of
curve; no flourishes, and no unnecessary prolongations of stroke, above
or below the general run of the line. There were few erasures, the
punctuation was perfect, and the manuscript was fit for the press as it
left his hand.
Literary criticism he rarely indulged in, being too disinclined to
praise or blame, and too intensely devoted to the acquisition of
positive knowledge. If he commented severely upon anything, it was
usually the slovenly diction of some of our State Surveys, or the
inaccuracies of translations from foreign languages.
His only published criticism, of which I am aware, was discharged at
a phrenological lecturer, whose extraordinary assumptions and
ad-captandum style had excited his disgust. Percival did not reverence
the science of bumps, and believed, in the words of William Von
Humboldt, that "it is one of those discoveries which, when stripped of
all the charlatanerie that surrounds them, will show but a very meagre
portion of truth." Dr. Barber, an Englishman, and a somewhat noted
teacher of elocution, having been converted to the phrenological faith,
delivered certain magniloquent lectures on the same to the citizens of
New Haven, and took pay therefor, after the manner of his sect. Percival
responded with a sharp newspaper pasquinade, entitled "A Lecture on
Nosology." At the head of the article was a wood-cut of a gigantic nose,
mapped out into faculties. "Gentlemen, the nose is the most prominent
feature in this bill," commenced the parody. "The nose is the true seat
of the mind; and therefore, gentlemen, Nosology, or the science of the
nose, is the true phrenology. He, who knows his nose, foreknows; for he
knows that which is before him. Therefore Nosology is the surest guide
to conduct. Whatever progress an individual may make, his nose is always
in advance. But society is only a congeries of individuals; consequently
its nose is always in advance,—therefore its proper guide. The nose,
rightly understood, will assuredly work wonders in the cause of
improvement; for it is always going ahead, always first in every
undertaking, always soonest at the goal. The ancients did not neglect
the nose. Look at their busts and statues! What magnification and
abduction in Jove! What insinuation and elongation in the Apollo!
Then [Greek: nous] (intellect) was surely the nose,—[Greek: gnosis]
(knowledge) noses,—[Greek: Minos] my nose. What intussusception, what
potation, and, as a necessary consequence, alas! what rubification! But
I have seen such noses. Beware of them!—they are bad noses,—very bad
noses, I assure you…. Do not, I pray you, consider me irreverent,
if I say that Nosology will prove highly favorable to the cause of
religion. This is indeed an awful subject, and I would not touch it on
slight grounds; but I sincerely believe that what I say is true.
Nosology will prove highly favorable to the cause of religion! Does
not the nose stand forth like a watchman on the walls of Zion, on the
look-out for all assailants? and when our faces are directed upwards in
devotion, does not the nose ascend the highest and most especially tend
heavenward?… Nosology is a manly science. It stands out in the open
light. It does not conceal itself behind scratches and periwigs,—nor
does it, like certain false teachers mentioned by St. Paul, go about
from house to house, leading astray silly women……Finally, gentlemen,
you may rest assured that Nosology will not gently submit to insult.
Noli me tangere! Who ever endured a tweak of the nose? It will know
how to take vengeance. As Jupiter metamorphosed the inhospitable Lycians
into frogs, so its contemners will suddenly find themselves [Greek:
Barbarophonoi]!"
Percival has been thought over-tenacious of his opinions. He was
certainly very circumspect in changing them. I have witnessed, however,
several instances in which he yielded to the force of evidence in
the modification of his views. He seemed to recognize geology, in
particular, as a progressive science, in which new facts are constantly
accruing, and therefore compelling re-adaptations of our views. He felt,
indeed, in respect to all knowledge, the mathematics excepted, that
modifications of belief, in well-regulated minds, are unavoidable, as
the result of new information. Approach to higher truth through the
sciences he seemed to regard under the aspect of that of besiegers to a
beleaguered fortress. Principles and deductions, which were a boon and a
triumph for us yesterday, lose their value to-day, when a new parallel
of approach has been attained. He lost his interest in what was
abandoned, necessary as it had been to the present position, only in the
advantage of which, and its sure promise of what was still higher, he
allowed himself to rejoice.
But where evidence was wanting, he was never to be moved to a change by
any amount of importunity or temptation. This trait of character made
him somewhat impracticable as a collaborator, in the philological task
he was employed to perform under Dr. Noah Webster. Disagreements were to
have been anticipated from the striking contrasts in their minds.
They agreed in industry; but Webster was decided, practical, strongly
self-reliant, and always satisfied with doing the best that could
be done with the time and means at command. Percival was timid and
cautious, and, from the very breadth of his linguistic attainments,
undecided. He often craved more time for arriving at conclusions. When
he happened to differ from the great lexicographer, he would never yield
an iota of his ground. These differences led to an early rupture in
the engagement, almost before two letters of the alphabet had been
completed. He much preferred to relinquish a profitable undertaking to
going forward with it under circumstances not agreeable to his elevated
standard of literary accuracy and completeness. He felt that he could
live on bread and water, or even give up these, if necessary; but he
could not violate his convictions of what was true and right. He was a
perfect martyr to his literary and scientific conscientiousness.
He evinced the same spirit in respect to the geological survey. As his
mind was not satisfied, he would not make known his results to the
Legislature. They demanded the report, and he asked for an extension of
time. Thus he continued his labors from year to year, upon a stipend
scarcely adequate to cover his expenses. Instead, however, of nearing
the goal, he only receded from it. New difficulties met him in the work;
fresh questions arose, in the progress of geology itself, that called
for reëxaminations. His notes swelled to volumes, and his specimens
increased to thousands. He was in danger of being crushed under the
weight of his doubts and his materials. At last, the people clamored
for the end of the work. The Legislature became peremptory, and forced
Percival to acquiesce.
In 1842 (seven years from the commencement of the survey) he rendered an
octavo report of four hundred and ninety-five pages, in the introduction
to which he observes,—"I regret to say, I have not had the means
allowed me for additional investigations, nor even for a proper use of
my materials, either notes or specimens. The number of localities from
which I have collected specimens I have estimated at nearly eight
thousand; the records of dips and bearings are still more numerous.
The report which follows is but a hasty outline, written mainly from
recollection, with only occasional reference to my materials, and under
circumstances little calculated for cool consideration. It was written,
however, with an intention to state nothing of the truth or probability
of which I did not feel satisfied. None can regret more than I do its
imperfection; still I cannot but hope that it will contribute something
towards the solution of the problem of the highest practical as well as
scientific importance, the exact determination of the geological system
of the State."
Of this remarkable production it may very briefly be said, that it will
ever remain a monument to the scientific and literary powers of its
author. It describes every shade of variation in the different rocks,
and their exact distribution over the surface of the State. This it
accomplishes with a minuteness never before essayed in any similar work.
The closeness and brevity of his descriptions make it one of the dryest
productions ever issued on geological science, scarcely omitting the
work of Humboldt, in which he sought to represent the whole of geology
by algebraic symbols. Percival's work actually demands, and would richly
repay, a translation into the vernacular of descriptive geology,—the
language and mode of illustration employed by Murchison and Hitchcock.
In its present form, it is safe to say, it has never found a single
reader among the persons for whose benefit it was written.
It is no part of my plan to speak of his poetical reputation. This I
leave to others better able to do him justice. Indeed, he had nearly
abandoned poetical composition before our acquaintance began. But it is
safe, perhaps, to say here, that his writings have placed him among
the first of our national poets; and had he resumed this species of
composition, he could scarcely have failed of maintaining, in the
fullest manner, his poetic fame. He possessed all the qualities reckoned
essential to poetical excellence. We have already spoken of his
astonishing memory, a trait regarded of such importance to the poet by
the ancients as to have led them to call the Muses the daughters of this
mental faculty. His powers of abstraction and imagination were no less
remarkable,—while for extreme sensitiveness he was unsurpassed. His
judgment was clear, and his appreciation of language refined to the last
degree. His musical feeling, too, as well of time as of harmony, was
intense; while he had at command the universal stores of literature and
science.
In closing these reminiscences, I cannot avoid noticing some of the
useful impressions exerted by Percival upon the literary community
amidst which he passed so large a portion of his life. To some the
influence of such a recluse will doubtless seem insignificant. The
reverse, however, I am persuaded, was the fact. Few students came to New
Haven without bringing with them, imprinted on their youthful memories,
some beautiful line of his poetry. Few had not heard of his universal
scholarship and profound learning. Next to an acquaintance with the
teachers from whom they expected to derive their educational training,
their curiosity led them to inquire for Percival. The sight of this
modest, shrinking individual, as the possessor of such mines of
intellectual wealth, it may well be understood, produced the deepest
interest. In him they recognized a man superior to the clamor of vulgar
gratification; his indifference to gain, to luxury, and every form of
display, his constant preference of the spiritual over the sensual, was
always an impressive example to them. The indigent student took fresh
courage as he saw in him to what a narrow compass exterior wants might
be reduced; the man of fashion and the fop stood abashed before the
simplicity of his dress and daily life. And wherever the spirit of
classic literature had been imbibed, and the capacity acquired of
perceiving the severe worth of the true philosopher, the inspection of
such a character, compared with the mere description of it in history,
was like the difference between a statue and a living, breathing man. As
at early dawn or in the gray twilight his slender form glided by, the
thoughtful and poetic scholar could scarce refrain from uttering to
himself,—"There goes Diogenes or Chrysippus! There goes one, by the
side of whom many a bustler in letters is only a worthless drone, many
an idolized celebrity a weak and pitiful sham!" Such a character as
Percival's, in the presence of a scholastic community, was a perpetual
incentive to industry and manliness; and although he rarely spoke in its
hearing, and has left us fewer published works than many others, still
I believe that thousands yet live to thank him for lessons derived from
the simple survey of his daily life.
Though there is little likelihood that his example of self-abnegation
and devotion to study will be followed by many of our youth,
nevertheless, the occurrence of such a model now and then in the
republic of letters constitutes a pleasing as well as useful
phenomenon,—if for no other reason, because it breaks in upon the
monotony of literary biography, and communicates a portion of that
picturesqueness to scholastic life which belongs to Nature in everything
else. That his course was fraught with happiness to himself cannot be
doubted; that it was beneficial also to his fellow-men is equally
true; and though he may be judged less leniently by minds incapable of
pronouncing that to be a character honorable in the sight of God or
man, which deviates from their own standard or creed,—to others, who
recognize the highest possible cultivation of the mental faculties and
unsullied purity of life as the noblest ends of our being, he will ever
occupy a position shared by few of mortal race.
* * * * *
IN TWO PARTS.
Who does not remember his first play?—the proudly concealed impatience
which seemed seething in the very blood,—the provoking coolness of old
play-goers,—the music that rather excited than soothed the fever
of expectation,—the mystery of mimic life that throbbed behind the
curtain,—the welcome tinkle of the prompter's bell,—the capricious
swaying to and fro of that mighty painted scroll,—its slow uplift,
revealing for an instant, perhaps, the twinkle of flying dancers' feet
and the shuffle of belated buskins? And then, the unveiled wonders
of that strange, new world of canvas and pasteboard and
trap-doors,—people, Nature, Art, and architecture, never before beheld,
and but faintly conceived of,—the magic of shifting scenes,—the
suddenness and awfulness of subterranean and aerial descents and
ascents,—the solemn stage-walk of the heroine,—the majestic strut
of the hero,—the princely sweep of velvet,—the illusive sparkle of
paste,—the rattle of Brobdignagian pearls,—the saucy tossing of pages'
plumes,—the smiles, the wiles, the astonishing bounds and bewildering
pirouettes of the dancing Houries,—the great sobs and small shrieks
of persecuted beauty,—the blighting smile of the villain,—the lofty
indifference of supernumeraries!
It was the first play of our heroine, Zelma Burleigh, and of her Cousin
Bessie. The morning before, a fragrant May morning, scores of summers
ago, Roger Burleigh, a stout Northumbrian Squire, had rolled himself,
in his ponderous way, into the snug family-parlor at the Grange, and
addressed his worthy dame with a bluff—
"Well, good wife, wouldn't like to go see the players to-night?"
Ere the good lady could collect herself to reply with the decorous
deliberateness becoming her years and station, an embroidery-frame at
her side was overturned, and there sprang eagerly forward a comely
young damsel of the pure Saxon stock, with eyes like England's
violets,—clear, dewy, and wide-awake,—cheeks and lips like its
rose-bloom, and hair which held tangled in close, golden folds its
fickle and flying sunshine.
"Ay, father!" she cried, "that we would! Zelma and I have never seen any
players, save the tumblers over at the Hall, on Sir Harry's birthday,
and we are in sad need of a little pleasuring."
"Who spoke to you, or of you, Mistress Bessie?" replied the Squire,
playfully. "And what is all your useless, chattering life but
pleasuring? The playhouse is but a perilous place for giddy-brained
lasses like you; but for once, harkee, for once, we'll venture on
taking you, if you'll promise to keep your silly head safe under the
mother-hen's wing."
"Not so close but that I can get a peep at the players now and then,"
said Bessie, archly. "They say there are some handsome young men and a
pretty woman or two among them. Eh, Zelma?"
"Handsome young men!—pretty women!" exclaimed the Squire, with an
explosive snort of contempt. "An arrant set of vagabonds and tramps,—of
ranting, strutting, apish creatures, with neither local habitations nor
names of their own. And what does Zelma know about them? Out with it,
girl!"
The person thus addressed, without lifting the folds of a heavy
window-curtain which concealed her, replied in a quiet, though somewhat
haughty tone,—
"I saw them all, yesterday afternoon, on their way to Arden. I found
them near the entrance to our avenue. One of their carts had broken
down, and somebody was hurt. I dismounted to see if I could be of any
assistance. My pony pulled away from me and ran up the road. One of the
young men caught her for me. I told Cousin Bessie I thought him handsome
and proud enough for a lord. I think so still. That is all I know of the
players."
"And, gad, that's enough! Take you to the play, indeed! Why, we shall
have you strolling next, like your"—Here the Squire, for some reason
known to himself, suddenly paused and grew very red in the face. Dame
Margery took the word, and, in a tone meant to be severe, but which was
only dry, remarked,—
"Zelma is quite too young to go to the play."
"Just one week younger than my Cousin Bessie. So, please you, aunt, I
will wait a few days," was the quiet reply from the invisible.
"Right cleverly answered, lass!" said the Squire, with a good-humored
chuckle. "Well, we will try you, too, for once; but mind, if I find you
making eyes at any of the villains, I'll cut you off with a shilling."
"That is more than I look for from you, Uncle Roger," replied the
hitherto hidden speaker, emerging from the window-seat, holding in her
hand the fashionable and interminable novel of "Sir Charles Grandison."
As she spoke, she laughed lightly, but her voice was somewhat cold and
bitter, and there was in her laugh more of defiance than merriment.
"Oh, don't, Zella!" exclaimed the Squire, with a look of comic
deprecation,—"don't speak in that way to your old uncle! He's
blunt and rough-spoken, but he means kindly, and does kindly, in his
way,—don't he?"
"Yes, that he does!" said the young girl, frankly; "and I beg his pardon
for my pettishness."
Zelma Burleigh, as she stood thus, a faint, regretful smile softening
the habitual hauteur of her face, was beautiful, and something more;
yet nobody in the country round about the Grange had ever dreamed of
calling her "a beauty." She was a tall, gracefully-formed girl, with
that strong, untamable character of figure and feature, and that
peculiar, sun-tinted, forest-shadowed hue of the skin, which betray the
slightest admixture of gypsy blood. In fact, Zelma Burleigh was the
fruit of a strange mésalliance between the younger brother of the
Squire, a reckless, dissipated soldier of fortune, and a beautiful
Spanish Zineala, whom he met in a foreign campaign, and whom he could
not bind to himself by any tie less honorable than marriage. She was
said to be of Rommany blood-royal, and was actually disowned by her
tribe for her mésalliance. She followed the camp for a few years, the
willing, though sad and fast-fading slave of her Ishmaelitish lord,
himself the slave of lawless passions, yet not wholly depraved,
—fitfully tender and tyrannic,—and when, at last, he fell in some
inglorious skirmish, she buried him with her own hands, and wept and
fasted over his shallow grave till she died. There was a child, but she
had no look of the father to charm that poor, broken heart back to life;
she was left in the camp and became a little "Daughter of the Regiment."
At last, however, she was taken to England by a faithful comrade of the
dead soldier, who sought out her uncle and left her in his care, taking
leave of the frightened, clinging little creature with a grim, unspoken
tenderness, and a strange quiver of his gray moustache.
Roger Burleigh, after having made himself sure of the legitimacy of
the child, adopted the poor, wild thing, made her the companion of his
daughter, and honestly strove to treat her, at all times, with parental
care and affection.
Here, in the hospitable circle of an English home, the orphan alien
had grown up with her kinsfolk, but not of them,—proud, reticent,
ambitious, secretly hating the monotonous duties and pursuits, the
decorous forms and prescribed pleasures of the social and domestic life
around her. Nomadic and lawless instincts stirred in her blood; vague
longings for freedom and change, though in wandering, peril, and want,
sometimes filled her soul with the spirit of revolt and unrest.
In her bluff uncle's house all were kind, and one, at least, was fond.
Her Cousin Bessie, gay and tender heart, had found the southern exposure
of her nature, and had crept up it, and clambered over it, and clasped
it, and bloomed against it, and ripened on it, till nothing cold, hard,
or defiant could be seen on that side. And Zelma seemed well content to
be the sombre background and strong support of so much bloom, sweetness,
and graceful dependence.
Nothing could be more unlike than the two cousins. Bessie was small,
her form inclining to fulness, her face childlike in dimpled smiles and
innocent blushes,—betraying no lack of intellect, but most expressive
of a quiet, almost indolent amiability. Zelma was large, but lithe,
supple, and vigorous, with a pard-like freedom and elasticity of
movement,—dark, with a subdued and changing color,—the fluttering
signal of sudden emotion, not the stationary sign of robust health. She
had hair of a glistening blackness, which she wore turned back from a
strong, compact forehead, in the somewhat severe style which imperial
beauty has rendered classic in our time. Her eyes were of the Oriental
type,—full, heavy-lidded, ambushed in thick, black lashes,—themselves
dark and unfathomable as the long night of mystery which hangs over the
history of her wild and wandering race, those unsubduable, unseducible
children of Nature,—the voluntary Pariahs of the world. Sad were those
eyes always, but with a vague, uncommunicable sadness; soft they were in
times of quiet; beautiful and terrible they could be, with live gleams
of suddenly awakened passion.
With but one affection not poisoned by a sense of obligation and
condescension, and that a sentiment in which her intellect had little
share, a gentle, protective, household love, which quickened no daring
fancy, inspired no dream of freedom or power, Zelma's mind was driven
in upon itself, and out of the seclusion and triteness of her life
fashioned a fairy world of romance and beauty. With the high-wrought,
sentimental fictions of the day for her mental aliment, she grew more
and more distinct and apart from the actual, prosaic existences around
her; the smouldering fires of genius and ambition glowed out almost
fiercely at times, through the dark dream of her eyes, startling the
dullest apprehension, as she moved amid a narrow circle of country
gentry, the fox-hunting guests of her uncle, the prim gossips of her
aunt, the gay lovers and companions of her cousin, an unrecognized
heroine, an uncrowned tragedy-queen.
The small provincial town of Arden possessed no playhouse proper, but,
after a good deal of hesitation and discussion, the venerable Hall
of St. George, the glory of all Ardenites, had been accorded to the
players, "for a few nights only."
On the night of the first performance, Squire Burleigh and his family
arrived betimes, and took their places with some bustle and ceremony.
The master of Burleigh Grange appeared in the almost forgotten glory of
his court suit,—a coat of crimson velvet, a flowered waistcoat, satin
knee-breeches, and a sword at his side. The mistress wore an equally
memorable brocade, enormous bouquets thrown upon a silvery ground, so
stiff and shiny that it seemed a texture of ice and frozen flowers. Her
hair was cushioned and powdered; she looked comely and stately, and
wore her lustres well. The pretty Bessie was attired in maidenly
white muslin, an India fabric of marvellous fineness, with a sash and
streamers of blue, and the light fleecy curls of her hair unadorned save
by a slight pendent spray of jasmines. Her cousin's dress, though in
reality less costly, was more striking, being composed of materials and
colors which admirably harmonized with the darkness and richness of her
beauty. Her lustrous black hair was arranged as usual; but a wreath,
formed of some delicate vine hung thick with drooping scarlet blossoms,
ran like flowering flame around her head. Like the sumptuous exotic of
Zenobia, it was an ornament which seemed to bloom out of the character
of the woman.
Bessie cast about her bright, innocent looks of girlish curiosity, which
yet shrank from any chance encounter with the furtive glance or cool
stare of admiration. Zelma sat motionless and impassive. Her eyes
wandered naturally, but coldly, over the audience, seeming to take no
cognizance of any face, strange or familiar; but when they were lifted
above the crowd, to the old carved ceiling of the hall, or dropped upon
the beautiful hands which lay listlessly folded in her lap, the cold,
blank look she had set against the world went out of them. Then, in
their mystic depths of brooding, introverted thought, new spheres of
life, rarer, brighter, fairer, seemed rounding into form and dawning
like stars.
Mrs. Margery Burleigh sat with her face turned from the stage, to
dissemble the secret impatience with which she awaited the uprolling of
the curtain, and slowly waved to and fro a huge, flowered fan, which
charged the air with a heavy Indian perfume.
At length, soft, mournful music arose from the orchestra, and every
heart stirred to the premonitory waver and lift of the curtain. Slowly
it rose, and discovered a mourning apartment, with a lady in mourning,
sitting in a mourning chair, and attended by a mourning maid. The play
was Congreve's tragedy of "The Mourning Bride," one of the best of a
class of sentimental and stiltified dramatic productions which the
public of our great-grandfathers meekly accepted,—quaffing the frothy
small-beer of rant and affectation, in lieu of deep draughts of Nature
and passion, the rich, red wine of human life, poured generously
forth by the dramatists of a better era. The excesses of fashion then
prevailing, hoops, high heels, powder, and patches, were not more
essentially absurd and artificial than such representations of high-life
and high-tragedy.
"The Mourning Bride" contains a few situations in which real passion can
have play, some fine points and poetic passages, and its moral tone is
at least respectable,—not great things to say of a famous tragedy,
certainly, but they give it an honorable distinction over many plays of
its time. There figure in it one or two characters which can be made
interesting, and even impressive, by uncommon power in the actor; though
they were usually given, at the period of which I write, in a manner
sufficiently tame to suit the dullest of courts,—likely to disturb
neither my lord in his napping nor my lady in her prim flirting.
Zara, the Captive Queen, is beyond comparison the strong character of
this play. There is a spice and fire even in her wickedness, which
make her terribly attractive, and give her a more powerful hold on the
sympathies than the decorous and dolorous Almeria, for all her virtuous
sorrows and perplexities. Zara's passion is of the true Oriental type,
leaping from the extremes of love and hate with the fierceness and
rapidity of lightning.
It is a character in which several great actresses have distinguished
themselves,—chief among them Siddons. On the memorable night at Arden,
however, it was but wretchedly rendered by a tall, small-voiced,
flaxen-haired young woman, who stalked about the stage in high-heeled
shoes and prodigious hoops, and declaimed the most fiery passages with
an execrable drawl. The remainder of the company were barely passable as
strolling players, with the exception of the actor who personated Osmyn.
This was a young man named Bury, of respectable parentage and education,
it was said, and considerable reputation, though his aspiring buskin had
never yet trod the London boards. He was a handsome, shapely person,
with an assured, dashing manner, and a great amount of spirit and fire,
which usually passed with his audience, and always with himself, for
genius.
His voice was powerful and resonant, his elocution effective, if not
faultless, and his physical energy inexhaustible. Understanding and
managing perfectly his own resources, he produced upon most provincial
critics the impression of extraordinary power and promise, few
perceiving that he had already come into full possession of his dramatic
gifts.
Only finely-trained ears could discover in this sounding, shining metal
the lack of the sharp, musical ring of the genuine coin. Young men grew
frantic in applause of his bold action, his stormy declamation,
his startling tours de force; while young women wondered, wept,
languished, and swooned. It was said, that, whenever he died in Romeo,
Pierre, or Zanga, numbers of his fair slain were borne out of the
playhouse, to be revived with difficulty by the application of salts and
the severing of stay-lacings.
But his effects, though so positive, were superficial and
evanescent,—audible, visible, and, as it were, physical. There was
always wanting that fine shock of genuine passion, striking home to
kindred passions in the breasts of his auditors, and sending through
every nerve a magnetic shiver of delight,—that subtile, mysterious
element of genius, playing like quick flame along the dullest lines of
the poet and charging them with its own life and fire.
In the virtuous, but negative character of Osmyn there was little room
for effective declamation; our actor was fain to content himself with
being interesting, through the misfortunes of the Prince of Valentia,
his woful lawful love, and the besettings of an unreturned passion. In
this he succeeded so well, that the feminine portion of his audience
grew tender with Almeria, and despairing with Zara.
In the first scene with Almeria, who was a shade worse than the Zara of
the night, the young actor indulged himself in a cool, comprehensive
glance at the house, over her fair shoulders. As his keen gaze swept
round the small aristocratic circle, it encountered and seemed
to recognize the face of Zelma Burleigh, now kindling with a new
enthusiasm, which was never wholly to die out of her breast. There was
something in the watchful, absorbed gaze of her great dark eyes so
unlike the wondering or languishing looks usually bent by women upon
the rising actor, that on the instant he was struck, pierced, by those
subtile shafts of light, to the heart he had believed till then vowed
alone to the love of his art and the schemes of a sleepless ambition.
Reluctantly he withdrew his regard from a face which bespoke a character
of singular originality and force, not wanting either in womanly pride
or tenderness,—a face in which beauty itself was so subordinate to
something higher, more ineffable, that one could scarcely define feature
or color through the illuminated and changeful atmosphere of soul which
hung about it,—the shadows of great thoughts, the light mists of dreamy
and evanescent fancy.
It was toward the close of the second act, when Sir Harry Willerton, of
Willerton Hall, entered his box, accompanied by three or four dashing
companions, who, it was soon whispered about, were titled young bloods
from London.
Sir Harry Willerton was a fresh, frank-looking young gallant,—fast,
from the fiery impulses of youth and a high spirit,—not pricked on by
vanity, nor goaded by low passions,—not heartless, not blasé,—the
only kind of a rake for whom reformation is possible or reclamation
worth the while.
Sir Harry was not fond of tragedy; and after five minutes' strained
attention to the players, he turned his eyes from the stage, and began
casting easy, good-humored glances of curiosity or recognition over
the audience. He bowed to all his neighbors with a kindly familiarity,
untainted by condescension, but most courteously, perhaps, to the party
from the Grange. He liked the bluff Squire heartily,—as who did not?
Then his eye—a laughing blue eye it was—rested and lingered, not on
the dark, dramatic face of Zelma, but on the pretty, girlish head of her
cousin.
Bessie sat with her face partly averted from the baronet's gay party,
and her gaze fixed intently upon the stage. Sir Harry could only see
half the rose of one cheek, and the soft sweep of golden hair which
lightly shaded it; and feasting his fancy on that bit of fluctuating
color, entangled in the meshes of a tremulous screen of curls, he
settled himself to await the close of the act.
It was with a child's eager interest and pliant imagination that Bessie
looked and listened,—susceptible, credulous, unfastidious. To her,
the Osmyn of the night was radiant with all heroic qualities and manly
graces, the weakly simulated sorrow of Almeria brought real tears to her
eyes, and she drew her white shoulders forward with a shudder when
the wooden Zara kindled into cursing and jealous rage. Illusions most
transparent to others hoodwinked her senses; her willing fancy supplied
feeling, and even made up for deficiencies of art in the players, till
the mimic world before her became more real than reality.
Not so with Zelma. She was satisfied, even charmed, with the personation
of Osmyn; but, from the first, she could not abide either of the
heroines, who, each in her part, strove to outdo the other in mincing,
mouthing, attitudinizing, and all imaginable small sins against Nature
and Art. She saw at once, by the sure intuitions of genius, how
everything they did could be done better, and burned to do it. The part
of Almeria she soon dismissed from her thoughts, as mere milk-and-water;
but she saw that in that of Zara there was a stream of lava, though
dulled and crusted over by the coldness of the actress, which might
be made to sweep all before it. Her critical dissatisfaction with the
personation became, at last, little short of torture; there was an
involuntary lowering of her dark brows, a scornful quiver of her
spirited nostril, she bit her lip with angry impatience, and shrugged
her shoulders with irrepressible contempt.
In the great scene where Zara surprises Almeria in the cell of Osmyn,
it was astonishing how the flaxen-haired representative of the Captive
Queen managed to turn her fiery rain of curses into a little pattering
shower of womanish reproaches. It was really a masterly performance, in
its way.
At this point Zelma threw herself back in utter weariness and disgust,
exclaiming, audibly,—"Miserable!—most miserable." When, looking round,
she saw the traces of her cousin's innocent emotion, the flush and
tearfulness which bespoke her uncritical sympathy with passions so
unskilfully represented, she could not suppress a smile at such childish
simplicity. And yet this was also her first play.
The tragedy was succeeded by a farce, at which Bessie laughed as
heartily as she had wept a little while before, but which was utterly
distasteful to Zelma; and at an alarmingly late hour, for that quiet
community, the green curtain came heavily plunging down on the final
scene of all, and the audience dispersed to their homes.
On the day following, Sir Harry Willerton's guests returned to town,
but, to their surprise, unaccompanied by their host, who seemed to have
suddenly discovered that his presence was needed on his estate. So he
remained. Soon it was remarked that a singular intimacy had sprung
up between him and Squire Burleigh, with whom, at length, the larger
portion of his time was passed, either in following the hounds or dining
at the Grange. There were rumors and surmises that the attractions which
drew the young baronet to his bluff neighbor's hospitable hall were not
the Squire's hearty cheer, old wine, and older stories, but a pair of
shy, yet tender eyes,—red lips, that smiled a wordless welcome, and
sometimes pouted at a late coming,—cheeks whose blushes daily grew
warmer in love's ripening glow,—a voice whose tones daily grew deeper,
and seemed freighted with more delicious meanings.
There was little discussion as to which of the young ladies of the
Grange was the enchantress and the elect Lady Willerton.
"Surely," said the gossips, "it cannot be that gypsy niece of the
Squire, that odd, black-browed girl, who scours over the country in all
weathers, on that elfish black pony, with her hair flying,—for all the
world as though in search of her wild relations. No, the blood of the
Willertons would never run so low as that;—it must be sweet Miss
Bessie, and she is a match for a lord."
For once the gossips were right. But it is with the poor "Rommany girl,"
not with the heiress of Burleigh Grange, that we have to do.
On the morning succeeding the play, Zelma Burleigh, taking in her hand
an odd volume of Shakspeare, one of the few specimens of dramatic
literature which her uncle's scant library afforded, strolled down a
lonely lane, running back from the house, toward the high pasture-lands,
on which grazed and basked the wealthy Squire's goodly flocks and
herds. This was her favorite walk, as it was the most quiet, shaded,
out-of-the-way by-path on the estate. She now directed her steps to a
little rustic seat, almost hidden from view by the pendent branches
of an old willow-tree, and close under a hawthorn-hedge, now in full,
fragrant bloom. Here she seated herself, or rather flung herself down,
half languidly, half petulantly, an expression of ennui and unrest
darkening her face,—the dusky traces of a sleepless night hanging
heavily about her eyes. She opened her book at the play of "Romeo and
Juliet," and began to read, not silently, nor yet aloud, but in a low,
dreamy tone, in which the sounds of Nature about her, the gurgle of a
brook behind the hedge, the sighing of the winds among the pendulous
branches of the willow, the silver shiver of the lance-like leaves, the
murmurous coming and going of bees, the loving duets of nest-building
birds, all seemed to mingle and merge. As she read, a new light seemed
to illumine the page, caught from her recent experience of dramatic
personation and scenic effects, limited and unsatisfactory though that
experience had been. In fancy, she floated over the stage, as the gay
young Juliet at the masquerade; then she caught sight of young Romeo,
and, lo! his face was that of the sentimental hero of the last night's
tragedy, but ennobled by the glow and dignity of genuine passion. In
fancy, she sat on the balcony, communing with night and the stars,—the
newly-risen star of love silvering all life for her. Then, leaning her
cheek upon her hand, she poured forth Juliet's impassioned apostrophe.
When she came to the passage,—
"O Romeo, Romeo!—wherefore art thou Romeo?"
she was startled by a rustling of the leaves behind her. She paused and
looked round fearfully. A blackbird darted out of the hedge and away
over the fields. Zelma smiled at her own alarm, and read on, till she
reached the tender adjuration,—
"Romeo, doff thy name;
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself!"
when,—suddenly, a fragrant shower of hawthorn-blossoms fell upon the
page before her, and the next instant there lightly vaulted over the
hedge at her side the hero of her secret thoughts, the young player,
Lawrence Bury! He stood before her, flushed and smiling, with his head
uncovered, and in an attitude of respectful homage; yet, with a look and
tone of tender, unmistakable meaning, took up the words of the play,—
"I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love, and I'll be new-baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo."
Poor Zelma did not have the presence of mind to greet this sudden
apparition of a lover in the apt words of her part,—
"What man art thou, that, thus bescreened in night,
So stumblest on my counsel?"
She had no words at all for the intruder, but, frightened and
bewildered, sprang from her seat and turned her face toward home, with a
startled bird's first impulse to flight. As she rose, her book slid from
her lap and fell among the daisies at her feet. The actor caught it up
and presented it to her, with the grace of a courtly knight restoring
the dropped glove of a princess, but, as he did so, exclaimed, in a
half-playful tone, looking at the volume rather than the lady,—
"I thank thee, O my master, for affording me so fair an excuse for mine
audacity!"
Then, assuming a more earnest manner, he proceeded to make excuses and
entreat pardon for the suddenness, informality, and presumption of his
appearance before her:—
"You know, Madam," he said,—"if, indeed, you are so unfortunate as
to know anything about us,—that we players are an impulsive,
unconventional class of beings, lawless and irresponsible, the Gypsies
of Art."
Here Zelma flushed and drew herself up, while a suspicious glance shot
from her eyes;—but the stranger seemed not to understand or perceive
it, for he went on quite innocently, and with increasing earnestness of
tone and manner:—
"I know I have been presuming, impertinent, audacious, in thus intruding
myself upon you, and acknowledge that you would be but severely just in
banishing me instantly from your bright presence, and in withdrawing
from me forever the light of your adorable eyes. Oh, those eyes!" he
continued, clasping his hands in an ecstasy of lover-like enthusiasm,
—"those wild, sweet orbs!—bewildering lights of love, dear as life,
but cruel as death!—can they not quicken, even as they slay? Oh, gentle
lady, be like her of Verona!—be gracious, be kind, or, at least, be
merciful, and do not banish me!—
'For exile hath more terror in his look,
Much more, than death; do not say banishment!'"
He paused, but did not remove his passionate looks from the young girl's
face,—looks which, though cast down, for he was much the taller of the
two, had the effect of most lowly and deprecating entreaty;—and then
there happened an event,—a very slight, common, natural event,—the
result more of girlish embarrassment than of any conscious emotion or
purpose, yet of incalculable importance at that moment, and, perhaps,
decisive of the fate of two human hearts,—Zelma smiled. It was a
quick, involuntary smile, which seemed to escape from the firm lips
and half-averted eyes, flashed over the face, touched the cold features
with strange radiance, and then was gone,—and, in its place, the old
shadow of reserve and distrust, for the moment, darker than ever.
But to the adventurous lover that brief light had revealed his doubtful
way clear before him. He saw, with a thrill of exultation, that
henceforth he had really nothing to fear from such womanly defences as
he had counted on,—coldness, prejudice, disdain,—that all he had taken
for these were but unsubstantial shadows. Still he showed no premature
triumph in word or look, but remained silent and humble, waiting the
reply to his passionate appeal, as though life or death, in very truth,
were depending upon it. And Zelma spoke at last,—briefly and coldly,
but in a manner neither suspicious nor unfriendly. She herself, she
said, was unconventional, in her instincts, at least,—so could afford
to pardon somewhat of lawlessness in another,—especially, she added,
with a shy smile, in one whom Melpomene, rather than Cupid, had made
mad. Still she was not a Juliet, though he, for all she knew, might be
a Romeo; and only in lands verging on the tropics, or in the soul of a
poet, could a passion like that of the gentle Veronese spring up, bud,
and blossom, in a single night. As for her, the fogs of England, the
heavy chill of its social atmosphere, had obstructed the ripening
sunshine of romance and repressed the flowering of the heart—
"And kept your beautiful nature all the more pure and fresh!" exclaimed
Mr. Lawrence Bury, with real or well-assumed enthusiasm; but Zelma,
replying to his interruption only by a slight blush, went on to say,
that she had been taught that poetry, art, and romances were all idle
pastimes and perilous lures, unbecoming and unwholesome to a young
English gentlewoman, whose manifest destiny it was to tread the dull,
beaten track of domestic duty, with spirit chastened and conformed.
She had had, she would acknowledge, some aspirations and rebellious
repinings, some wild day-dreams of life of another sort; but it was best
that she should put these down,—yes, doubtless, best that she should
fall into her place in the ranks of duty and staid respectability,
and be a mere gentlewoman, like the rest.—Here a slight shrug of the
shoulders and curl of the lip contradicted her words,—yet, with a tone
of rigid determination, she added, that it was also best she should
cherish no tastes and form no associations which might distract her
imagination and further turn her heart from this virtuous resolution;
and therefore must she say farewell, firmly and finally, to the, she
doubted not, most worthy gentleman who had done her the honor to
entertain for her sentiments of such high consideration and romantic
devotion. She would not deny that his intrusion on her privacy had, at
first, startled and displeased her,—but she already accepted it as an
eccentricity of dramatic genius, a thoughtless offence, and, being, as
she trusted, at once the first and the last, pardonable. She wished him
happiness, fame, fortune,—and a very good morning! Then, with a wave
of the hand which would have done honor to Oldfield herself, she turned
and walked proudly up the lane.
Mr. Bury saw her depart silently, standing in a submissive, dejected
attitude, but with a quiet, supercilious smile lightly curling his
finely-cut lips; for did he not know that she would return to her haunt
the next day, and that he would be there to see?
And Zelma did return the next day,—persuading herself that she was
only acting naturally, and with proper dignity and independence. She
argued with herself that to abandon her favorite walk or avoid her usual
resting-place would be to confess, if not a fear of the stranger's
presuming and persistent suit, at least, a disturbing consciousness of
his proximity, and of the possibility of his braving her displeasure
by a second and unpardonable intrusion. No, she would live as she had
lived, freely, carelessly; she would go and come, ride and walk, just as
though nothing had happened,—for, indeed, nothing had happened that
a woman of sense and pride should take cognizance of. So, after a
half-hour's strange hesitation, she took her book and went to the old
place. Longer than usual she sat there, idly and abstractedly turning
over the leaves of her Shakspeare, starting and flushing with every
chance sound that broke on the still, sweet air; yet no presumptuous
intruder disturbed her maiden meditations, and she rose wearily at last,
and walked slowly homeward, saying to herself, "It is well. I have
conquered," but feeling that nothing was well in life, or her own heart,
and that she was miserably defeated. Ah, little did she suspect that her
clouded, dissatisfied face had been keenly scanned by the very eyes she
dreaded, yet secretly longed to meet,—that her most unconscious sigh
of disappointment had been heard by her Romeo of the previous day, now
lying just behind the hedge, buried in the long brook-side grass, and
laughing to himself a very pleasant laugh of gratulation and triumph.
That night, the good Squire of Burleigh Grange relented from his
virtuous resolve, and took his wife, daughter, and niece to the play.
The piece was Howe's tragedy of "Tamerlane." Mr. Bury personated the
imperial Tartar, a noble rôle, which so well became him, costumes
and all, and brought him so much applause, that Zelma's heart was
effectually softened, and she even felt a regretful pride in having
received and rejected the homage of a man of such parts.
The next day, as the hour for her stroll arrived, she said to herself,
"I can surely take my walks in safety now,—he will never come near me
more." So she went,—but, to her unspeakable confusion, she found
him, quietly seated in her little rustic bower, his head bared to
the sunshine, and his "Hyperion curls" tossed and tumbled about by
a frolicsome wind. He rose when the lady appeared, stammered out an
apology, bowed respectfully, and would have retired, but that Zelma,
feeling that she was the intruder this time, begged him to remain. She
thought herself, simple child! merely courteous and duly hospitable, in
giving this invitation; but the quick, eager ear of the actor and lover
heard, quivering through the assumed indifference and cold politeness
of her tones, the genuine impulse and ardent wish of her heart. So
he yielded and lingered, proffering apologies and exchanging polite
commonplaces.
After a little time, Zelma, to prove her freedom from embarrassment or
suspicion, quietly seated herself on the rustic bench, giving, as she
did so, a regal spread to her ample skirts, that there might be no
vacant place beside her. The actor stood for a while before her, just
going, but never gone, talking gayly, but respectfully, on indifferent
topics,—till, at last, touching on some theme of deeper interest, and
apparently forgetting everything but it and the fair lady, who neither
expressed nor looked a desire to shorten the interview, he flung
himself, with what seemed a boy's natural impulse, upon the soft,
inviting turf, under the shade of the willow. There, reclining in the
attitude of Hamlet at the feet of Ophelia, he rambled on from subject
to subject, in a careless, graceful way, plucking up grass and picking
daisies to pieces, as he talked, giving every now and then, from beneath
the languid sweep of his heavy eyelashes, quick flashes of tender
meaning, as fitful and beautiful as the "heat-lightnings" of summer
twilights, and apparently as harmless.
There was something so magnetic and contagious in this frank,
confiding manner, that Zelma, ere she was aware, grew unrestrained and
communicative in turn. One by one, the icicles of pride and reserve,
which a strange and ungenial atmosphere had hung around her affluent and
spontaneous nature, melted in the unwanted sunshine, dropped away from
her, and the quick bloom of a Southern heart revealed itself in
smiles and blushes. The divine poet whose volume she now held clasped
caressingly in both hands had prepared the way for this, by sending
through every vein and fibre of her being the sweet, subtile essence of
passionate thought,—the spring-tide of youth and love, which makes the
story of Romeo and Juliet glow and throb with immortal freshness and
vitality.
So, at length, those two talked freely and pleasantly together. They
discussed the quiet rural scenery around them, the deep green valley of
Arden, shut in by an almost unbroken circle of hills, and Zelma told of
a peculiar silvery mist which sometimes floated over it, like the ghost
of the lake which, it was said, once filled it; they spoke of wood,
stream, moor, and waterfall, sunsets and moonlight and stars, poetry
and—love; floating slowly, and almost unconsciously, down the smooth
current of summer talk and youthful fancies, toward the ocean of all
their thoughts, whose mysterious murmurs already filled one heart at
least with a tender awe and a vague longing, which was yet half fear.
The next day, and the next, and every day while the players remained at
Arden, the two friends met by tacit agreement in the lane of Burleigh
Grange, and, gradually, Lawrence Bury became less the actor and more
the man, in the presence of a genuine woman, without affectation or
artifice, stage-rant or art-cant,—one from whose face the glare of the
foot-lights had not stricken the natural bloom, whose heart had never
burned with the feverish excitement of the stage, its insatiable
ambition, its animosities and exceeding fierce jealousies. For Zelma,
she grew more humble and simple and less exacting, the more she bestowed
from a "bounty boundless as the sea."
It was but a brief while, scarcely the lifetime of a rose,—the fragrant
snow of the hawthorn blossoms had not melted from the hedges since they
met,—and yet, in that little season, the deepest, divinest mystery of
human life had grown clear and familiar to their hearts, and was conned
as the simplest lesson of Nature.
To Zelma the romance and secrecy of this love had an inexpressible
charm. The Zincala in her nature revelled in its wildness and adventure,
in its crime against the respectable conventionalities she despised. She
had a keen pleasure in the very management and concealment to which she
was compelled;—her imagination, even more than her heart, was engaged
in hiding and guarding this charming mystery.
On the day succeeding her first interview with the young actor in the
lane, she had tried to beguile her ennui, while lingering in her
lonely bower, by curiously peering into the nest of a blackbird, deeply
hidden in the long grass at the foot of the hedge, and which she had
before discovered by the prophetic murmurs of the mother-bird. She found
five eggs in the nest. She took the little blue wonders in her hand,
and thought what lives of sinless joy, what raptures and loves, what
exultations of song and soaring slept in those tiny shells! Suddenly,
there was an alarmed cry and an anxious flutter of wings in the hedge
above her! She turned, and saw the mother-bird eyeing her askance. From
that day the lowly nest with its profaned treasures was forsaken, and
the world was the poorer in gladness and melody by five bird-lives of
joy and song that might have been.
So, had any luckless intruder chanced to discover Zelma's
trysting-place, thrown open to the world the hidden romance in which
she took such shy and secret delight, and handled in idle gossip the
delicate joys and fragile hopes of young love, it is more than likely
that she would have been frightened away from bower and lane, shocked
and disenchanted. But the preoccupation of her cousin and her own
eccentric and solitary habits prevented suspicion and inquiry,—no
unfriendly spy, no rude, untoward event, disturbed the quiet and
seclusion of this charmed scene of her wooing, where Nature, Romance,
and Poetry were in league with Love.
The players played out their engagement at Arden, with the usual
supplement, "A few nights only by special request," and were off to a
neighboring town. On their last night, after the play, Zelma met her
lover by moonlight, at the trysting-place in the lane, for a parting
interview.
It was there that the actor, doffing the jaunty hat which usually
crowned his "comely head," and, flinging himself on his knees before
his fair mistress, entreated her to rule his wayward heart, share his
precarious fortunes, and bear his humble name.
Poor Zelma, when in imagination she had rehearsed her betrothal scene,
had made her part something like this:—"And then will I extend my hand
with stately grace, and say to my kneeling knight, 'Arise!'—and after,
in such brief, gracious words as queens may use, (for is not every woman
beloved a queen?) pronounce his happy doom."
But when that scene in her life-drama came on, it was the woman, not the
tragedy-queen, that acted. Naturally and tenderly, like any simple girl,
she bent over her lover, laid her hand upon his head, and caressingly
smoothed back from his brow the straggling curls, damp with night-dew.
As she did so, every lock seemed to thrill to her touch, and to wake in
her soft, timorous fingers a thousand exquisite nerves that had never
stirred before. And then, with broken words and tears, and probing
questions and solemn adjurations, she plighted her vows, and sought to
bind to her heart forever a faith to which she trusted herself, alas!
too tremblingly.
The melodramatic lover was not content with a simple promise, though
wrung from the heart with sobs. "Swear it to me!" he said, in a hoarse
stage-whisper; and Zelma, again laying her hand upon his head, and
looking starward, swore to be his, to command, to call, to hold,—in
life, in death, here, hereafter, evermore.
[To be continued.]
* * * * *
ATTORNEY AT LAW AND SOLICITOR IN CHANCERY.
Somewhat more than three-quarters of a century ago, George Steevens, the
acutest, and, perhaps, the most accomplished, but certainly the most
perverse and unreliable of Shakespeare's commentators and critics, wrote
thus of Shakespeare's life: "All that is known, with any degree
of certainty, concerning Shakespeare, is, that he was born at
Stratford-upon-Avon; married and had children there; went to London,
where he commenced actor,[A] and wrote poems and plays; returned to
Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." From 1780, when this
was written, to the present day, the search after well-authenticated
particulars of Shakespeare's life has been kept up with a faithfulness
equal to that of Sir Palomides after the beast glatisaunt, and by as
many devotees and with as much hope of glory as in the quest for the
Sangreal. But the fortune of the paynim, rather than the virgin knight,
has fallen to all the members of the self-devoted band, and we
know little more of the man Shakespeare than was known by our
great-grandfathers. For, although there have been issued to us of the
present generation pamphlets professing to give new particulars of the
life of Shakespeare, and tomes with even more pretentious titles, from
all these there has been small satisfaction, save to those who can
persuade themselves, that, by knowing what Shakespeare might have done,
they know what he did, or that the reflex of his daily life is to
be found in documents inscribed on parchment, and beginning, "This
indenture made," etc., or "Noverint universi per presentes." It is
with no disrespect for the enthusiasm of Mr. Knight, and as little
disposition to underrate the laborious researches of Mr. Collier and Mr.
Halliwell, that we thus reiterate the assertion of the world's ignorance
of Shakespeare's life: nay, it is with a mingled thankfulness and
sorrowful sympathy that we contemplate them wasting the light of the
blessed sun (when it shines in England) and wearing out good eyes (or
better barnacles) in poring over sentences as musty as the parchments
on which they are written and as dry as the dust that covers them.
But although we gladly concede that these labors have resulted in the
diffusion of a knowledge of the times and the circumstances in
which Shakespeare lived, and in the unearthing of much interesting
illustration of his works from the mould of antiquity, we cannot accept
the documents which have been so plentifully produced and so pitilessly
printed,—the extracts from parish-registers and old account-books,—not
Shakespeare's,—the inventories, the last wills and testaments, the
leases, the deeds, the bonds, the declarations, pleas, replications,
rejoinders, surrejoinders, rebutters, and surrebutters,—as having aught
to do with the life of such a man as William Shakespeare. We hunger,
and we receive these husks; we open our months for bread, and break our
teeth against these stones. As to the law-pleadings, what have their
discords, in linked harshness long drawn out, to do with the life of
him whom his friends delighted to call Sweet Will? We wish that they at
least had been allowed to rest. Those who were parties to them have been
more than two centuries in their graves,—
"Secure from worldly chances and mishaps.
There lurks no treason, there no envy swells,
There grow no damned grudges; there no storms,
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep."
Why awaken the slumbering echoes of their living strife?
[Footnote A: Commenced actor, commenced author, commenced tinker,
commenced tailor, commenced candlestick-maker:—Elegant phraseology,
though we venture to think, hardly idiomatic or logical, which came into
vogue in England in the early part of the last century, and which,
as it is never uttered here by cultivated people, it may be proper to
remark, is there used by the best writers. Akin to it is another mode of
expression as commonly met with in English books and periodicals, e.g.,
"immediately he arrived at London he went upon the stage," meaning, as
soon as he arrived, etc., or, when he arrived at London, he immediately
went upon the stage. As far as our observation extends, Lord Macaulay,
alone of all Great-Britons, has neglected to add the latter lucid
construction to the graces of his style.]
Yet these very law-papers, in the reduplicated folds of which dead
quarrels lie embalmed in hideous and grotesque semblance of their living
shapes, their lifeblood dried that lent them all their little dignity,
their action and their glow, and exhaling only a faint, sickening
odor of the venom that has kept them from crumbling into
forgetfulness,—these law-papers are now held by some to have special
interest Shakespeare-ward, as having to do with a profession for which
he made preparatory studies, even if he did not enter upon its practice.
Yes, in spite of our alleged ignorance of Shakespeare's life, and
especially of the utter darkness which has been thought to rest upon the
years which intervened between his marriage in Stratford and his joining
the Lord Chamberlain's company of players in London, the question is,
now, whether the next historical novel may not begin in this wise:—
THE FUGITIVE.
At the close of a lovely summer's day, two horsemen might have been seen
slowly pacing through the main street of Stratford-on-Avon. Attracting
no little attention from the group of loiterers around the market-cross,
they passed the White-Lion Inn, and, turning into Henley Street, soon
drew their bridles before a goodly cottage built of heavy timbers and
standing with one of its peaked gables to the street. On the door was a
shingle upon which was painted,
Willm. Shakspere,
Attornei at Lawe and Solicitor
in Chancere.
One of the travellers—a grave man, whose head was sprinkled with the
snows of fifty winters—dismounted, and, approaching the door, knocked
at it with the steel hilt of his sword. He received no answer; but
presently the lattice opened above his head, and a sharp voice sharply
asked,—
"Who knocks?"
"'Tis I, good wife!" replied the horseman. "Where is thy husband? I
would see him!"
"Oh, Master John a Combe, is it you? I knew you not. Neither know I
where that unthrift William is these two days. It was but three nights
gone that he went with Will Squele and Dick Burbage, one of the player
folk, to take a deer out of Sir Thomas Lucy's park, and, as Will's
ill-luck would have it, they were taken, as well as the deer, and there
was great ado. But Will—that's my Will—and Dick Burbage, brake from
the keepers in Sir Thomas' very hall, and got off; and that's the last
that has been heard of them; and here be I left a lone woman with these
three children, and——Be quiet, Hamnet! Would ye pour my supper ale
upon the hat of the worshipful Master John a Combe?"
"What! deer-stealing?" exclaimed John a Combe. "Is it thus that he apes
the follies of his betters? I had more hope of the lad, for he hath a
good heart and a quick engine; and I trusted that ere now he had
drawn the lease of my Wilmecote farm to Master Tilney here. But
deer-stealing!—like a lord's son, or a knight's at the least. Could not
the rifling of a rabbit-warren serve his turn? Deer-stealing! I fear me
he will come to nought!"
The speaker remounted, and soon the two horsemen might again have been
seen wending their way back through the deepening twilight.
* * * * *
There are several points that would be novel in such a passage. Among
others, we would modestly indicate the incident of the two horsemen
as evincing some ingenuity, and as likely to charm the reader by its
freshness and originality. But one point, we must confess, is not
new, and that is the representation of Shakespeare as a lawyer. The
supposition, that the author of "Macbeth," "Hamlet," and "King Lear,"
was a bustling young attorney, is of respectable age, and has years
enough upon its beard, if not discretion. It has been brought forward
afresh by two members of the profession for which is claimed the honor
of having Shakespeare's name upon its roll,—William L. Rushton,
Esquire, a London Barrister, and John Campbell, Lord Chief Justice of
the Queen's Bench.[B] Lord Campbell, indeed, addressing himself to
Mr. John Payne Collier, says, (p. 21,) that this is a notion "first
suggested by Chalmers, and since countenanced by Malone, yourself, and
others." An assertion this which savors little of legal accuracy. For
Chalmers, so far from being the first to suggest that Shakespeare passed
his adolescent years in an attorney's office, was the first to sneer at
Malone for bringing forward that conjecture.[C] Malone, in his first
edition of Shakespeare's works, published in 1790, has this passage, in
the course of a discussion of the period when "Hamlet" was produced:—
"The comprehensive mind of our poet embraced almost every object of
Nature, every trade, every art, the manners of every description of men,
and the general language of almost every profession: but his knowledge
of legal terms is not such as might be acquired by the casual
observation of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of
technical skill; and he is so fond of displaying it, on all occasions,
that I suspect he was early initiated in at least the forms of law, and
was employed, while he remained at Stratford, in the office of some
country attorney, who was at the same time a petty conveyancer, and
perhaps, also, the seneschal of some manor court."—Vol. I. Part I. p.
307.
[Footnote B: Shakespeare a Lawyer. By William L. Rushton. 16mo. pp.
50. London: 1858.
Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements Considered. By John Lord Campbell,
LL.D., F.R.S.E. 12mo. pp. 117. London: 1859.]
[Footnote C: Into the trap so innocently set the London Athenaeum thus
plunges headlong:—"Chalmers, we believe, first put Shakespeare in an
attorney's office. Malone accepted the hint."]
To this, Chalmers, some years after, (1797,) in his "Apology for the
Believers in the Shakespeare Papers which were exhibited in Norfolk
Street," (some contemptible forgeries, by a young scapegrace named
William Ireland, which should not have deceived an English scholar of
six months' standing,) made the following reply:—
"Mr. Malone places the aspiring poet 'in the office of some country
attorney, or the seneschal of some manor court'; and for this violation
of probability he produces many passages from his dramas to evince
Shakespeare's technical skill in the forms of law. …But was it not
the practice of the times, for other makers, like the bees tolling from
every flower the virtuous sweets, to gather from the thistles of the
law the sweetest honey? Does not Spenser gather many a metaphor from
these weeds, that are most apt to grow in fattest soil? Has not
Spenser his law-terms: his capias, defeasance, and duresse; his
emparlance; his enure, essoyn, and escheat; his folkmote,
forestall and gage; his livery and seasin, wage and waif? It
will be said, however, that, whatever the learning of Spenser may have
gleaned, the law-books of that age were impervious to the illiterature
of Shakespeare. No: such an intellect, when employed on the drudgery of
a wool-stapler, who had been high-bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon, might
have derived all that was necessary from a very few books; from Totell's
'Presidents,' 1572; from Pulton's 'Statutes,' 1578; and from the
'Lawier's Logike,' 1588. It is one of the axioms of the 'Flores Regii,'
that, To answer an improbable imagination is to fight against a
vanishing shadow."—p. 553.
And again, in his "Supplemental Apology," etc., 1799, Chalmers
remarks,—
"The biographers, without adequate proofs, have bound Shakespeare an
apprentice to some country attorney; as Mr. Malone has sent him without
sufficient warrant to the desk of some seneschal of a county court: but
these are obscurities that require other lights than conjecture and
assertion, which, by proving nothing, only establish disbelief."—p.
226.
So much for Chalmers's having "first suggested" the theory, of which
Lord Campbell has undertaken the support. Surely his Lordship must have
been verifying Rosalind's assertion, that lawyers sleep between term and
term, or else he is guilty of having loosely made a direct assertion in
regard to a subject upon which he had not taken the trouble to inform
himself; although he professes (p. 10) to have "read nearly all that has
been written on Shakespeare's ante-Londinensian life, and carefully
examined his writings with a view to obtain internal evidence as to his
education and breeding."
One exhibition of his Lordship's inaccuracy is surprising. Commenting
upon Falstaff's threat, "Woe to my Lord Chief Justice!" (2d Henry IV.,
Act V., Sc. 4,) he remarks, (p. 73,) "Sir W. Gascoigne was continued
as Lord Chief Justice in the new reign; but, according to law and
custom, he was removable, and he no doubt expected to be removed, from
his office." Lord Campbell has yet to rival the fifth wife of the
missionary who wrote the lives of "her predecessors"; but surely he
should have known that the expectations which he attributes to Sir
William Gascoigne were not disappointed, and that (although the contrary
is generally believed) the object of Falstaff's menace was superseded
(by Sir William Hankford) March 29th, 1413, just eight days after the
prince whom he committed to prison came to the throne,—a removal the
promptness of which would satisfy the strictest disciplinarian in the
Democratic party. The Records show this; but his Lordship need not have
gone to them; he would have found it mentioned, and the authority cited,
by Tyler in his "Memoirs of Henry the Fifth."
And while we are considering the disparity between his Lordship's
performances and his pretensions, we may as well examine his fitness to
bring about a "fusion of Law and Literature," which he says, with some
reason, have, like Law and Equity, been too long kept apart in England.
We fear, that, whatever may be the excellence of his Lordship's
intentions, he must set himself seriously to the task of acquiring more
skill in the use of the English tongue, and a nicer discrimination
between processes of thought, before his writings will prove to be the
flux that promotes that fusion.
For, in the third paragraph of his letter, he says to Mr. Collier, "I
cannot refuse to communicate to you my sentiments upon the subject,"
and in the following sentence adds, that this communication of his
"sentiments" will drive from his mind "the recollection of the
wranglings of Westminster Hall." His Lordship probably meant to refer to
the communication of his opinions, for which word "sentiments" is
not usually substituted, except by gentlemen who remark with emphasis,
"Them's my sentiments"; and he also probably intended to allude to
the memory of the wranglings of which he is professionally a
witness,—having forgotten, for a moment, that recollection is a purely
voluntary act, and not either a condition or a faculty of the mind.
Again, when his Lordship says, (p. 18,) "That during this interval (A.D.
1579 to 1586) he [Shakespeare] was merely an operative, earning his
bread by manual labor, in stitching gloves, sorting wool, or killing
calves, no sensible man can possibly imagine" we applaud the decision;
but can hardly do as much for the language in which it is expressed.
Lord Campbell quite surely meant to say that no man could possibly
believe, or suppose, or assent to the proposition which he sets
forth; and when (on p. 26) he again says, "I do not imagine that when
he [Shakespeare] went up to London, he carried a tragedy in his pocket,"
there can be no doubt that his Lordship meant to say, "I do not think
that when," etc. He should again have gathered from his Shakespearean
studies a lesson in the exact use of language, and have learned from the
lips of "that duke hight Theseus" that imagination has nothing to do
with assent to or dissent from a proposition, but that
"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
* * * * *
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V. Sc. 1.
We would not protract this finding of faults, and will only add, that,
when his Lordship says, (p. 116,) that Henry V. "astonished the world
with his universal wisdom" he entirely overlooks the fact, that wisdom
is a faculty of the mind, or, rather, a mode of intellectual action,
of which universality can no more be predicated than of folly, or of
honesty, or of muscular strength; and that it is not knowledge, or
at all like knowledge; which, indeed, is often acquired in a very
remarkable degree by persons eminent for unwisdom. Lord Campbell might
as well have said that Henry V. astonished the world with his universal
prowess in the battle-field.
The censure to which Mr. Rushton's pamphlet is occasionally open in
regard to style may properly be averted by the modesty of its tone and
its unpretending character.
But to pass from the manner to the matter of the learned gentlemen who
appear on behalf of Malone's theory. Lord Campbell, after stating, in
the introductory part of his letter, that in "The Two Gentlemen of
Verona," "Twelfth Night," "Julius Caesar," "Cymbeline," "Timon of
Athens," "The Tempest," "King Richard II.," "King Henry V.," "King Henry
VI., Part I.," "King Henry VI., Part III.," "King Richard III.," "King
Henry VIII.," "Pericles," and "Titus Andronicus,"—fourteen of the
thirty-seven dramas generally attributed to Shakespeare,—he finds
"nothing that fairly bears upon this controversy," goes on to produce
from the remaining plays, seriatim, such passages as in his judgment
do bear upon the question, and to remark upon them, thus isolated and
disconnected from each other. Mr. Rushton is more methodic and logical.
He does not merely quote or cite all the passages which he has noticed
in which legal terms occur, but brings together all such as contain the
same terms or refer to kindred proceedings or instruments; and he thus
presents his case with much more compactness and consequent strength
than results from Lord Campbell's loose and unmethodical mode of
treating the subject. We can arrive at the merits of the case on either
presentation only by an examination of some of the more important of the
passages cited.
Lord Campbell, as we have just seen, mentions "Henry VIII." as one of
the fourteen plays in which he has found nothing which relates to the
question in hand; but Mr. Rushton opens his batteries with the following
passage from the very play just named; and to most readers it will seem
a bomb of the largest dimensions, sent right into the citadel of his
opponents:—
"Suff. Lord Cardinal, the king's further pleasure is,—
Because all those things you have done of late
By your power legatine within this kingdom
Fall into compass of a premunire,—
That therefore such a writ be sued against you,
To forfeit, all your goods, lands, tenements,
Chattels, and whatsoever, and to be
Out of the king's protection:—this is my
charge."
King Henry VIII. Act iii. Sc. 2.
We shall first remark, that, in spite of his declaration as to "Henry
VIII.," Lord Campbell does cite and quote this very passage (p. 42);
and, indeed, he must have been as unappreciative as he seems to have
been inaccurate, had he failed to do so; for, upon its face, it is, with
one or two exceptions, the most important passage of the kind to be
found in Shakespeare's works. Premunire is thus defined in an old
law-book which was accessible to Shakespeare:—
"Premunire is a writ, and it lieth where any man sueth any other in the
spirituall court for anything that is determinable in the King's
Court, and that is ordeined by certaine statutes, and great punishment
therefore ordeined, as it appeareth by the same statutes, viz., that
he shall be out of the King's protection, and that he be put in prison
without baile or mainprise till that he have made fine at the King's
will, and that his landes and goods shal be forfait, if he come not
within ij. moneths."—Termes de la Ley, 1595, fol. 144.
The object of the writ was to prevent the abuse of spiritual power. Now,
here is a law-term quite out of the common, which is used by Shakespeare
with a well-deployed knowledge of the power of the writ of which it is
the name. Must we, therefore, suppose that Shakespeare had obtained his
knowledge of the purpose and the power of this writ in the course
of professional reading or practice? If we looked no farther than
Shakespeare's page, such a supposition might seem to be warranted.
But if we turn to Michael Drayton's "Legend of Great Cromwell," first
published, we believe, in 1607, but certainly some years before "Henry
VIII." was written, and the subject of which figures in that play, we
find these lines,—
"This Me to urge the Premunire wonne,
Ordain'd in matters dangerous and hie;
In t' which the heedlesse Prelacie were runne
That back into the Papacie did fie."
Ed. 1619, p. 382.
Here is the very phrase in question, used with a knowledge of its
meaning and of the functions of the writ hardly less remarkable than
that evinced in the passage from "Henry VIII.," though expressed in
a different manner, owing chiefly to the fact that Drayton wrote a
didactic poem and Shakespeare a drama. But Drayton is not known to have
been an attorney's clerk, nor has he been suspected, from his writings,
or any other cause, to have had any knowledge of the law. Both he and
Shakespeare, however, read the Chronicles. Reading men perused Hall's
and Holinshed's huge black-letter folios in Queen Elizabeth's time with
as much interest as they do Macaulay's or Prescott's elegant octavos in
the reign of her successor, Victoria. Shakespeare drew again and again
upon the former for the material of his historical plays; and in writing
"Henry VIII.," he adopted often the very language of the Chronicler. The
well-known description of Wolsey, which he puts into the mouth of Queen
Katherine,—
"He was a man
Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes; one that by suggestion
Tith'd all the kingdom: Simony was fair play:
His own opinion was his law: I' the presence
He would say untruths; and be ever double,
Both in his words and meaning; He was never,
But where he meant to ruin, pitiful:
His promises were, as he then was, mighty;
But his performance, as he is now, nothing:
Of his own body he was ill, and gave
The clergy ill example,"—
is little more than the following paragraph from Holinshed put into
verse:—
"This cardinal! (as you may perceive in this storie) was of a great
stomach, for he compted himselfe equall with princes, and by craftie
suggestion gat into his hands innumerable treasure: he forced little
on simonie, [i.e., regarded it as of little consequence,] and was not
pittifull, and stood affectionate in his owne opinion: in open presence
he would lie and saie untruth, and was double both in speach and
meaning: he would promise much and performe little: he was vicious of
his bodie, and gave the clergie evill example."—Ed. 1587, vol. iii. p.
622.
Turning back from the page on which the Chronicler comments upon the
life of the dead prime-minister, to that on which he records his fall,
we find these passages:—
"In the meane time, the king, being informed that all those things that
the cardinall had doone by his power legatine within this realme were
in the case of the premunire and provision, caused his attornie,
Christopher Hales, to sue out a writ of premunire against him. …After
this in the king's bench his matter for the premunire being called upon,
two atturneis which he had authorised by his warrant, signed with his
owne hand, confessed the action, and so had judgement to forfeit all
his lands, tenements, goods, and cattels, and to be out of the king's
protection."—Ib. p. 909.
If the reader will look back at the passage touching the premunire,
quoted above, he will see that these few lines from Raphael Holinshed
are somewhat fatal to an argument in favor of Shakespeare's "legal
acquirements," in so far as it rests in any degree upon the use of terms
or the knowledge displayed in that passage. Shakespeare and Drayton are
here in the same boat, though "not with the same sculls."
Before we shelve Holinshed,—for the good Raphael's folios are like
Falstaff in size, if not in wit, and, when once laid flat-long, require
levers to set them up on end again,—let us see if he cannot help us to
account for more of the "legalisms" that our Lord Chief Justice and
our barrister have "smelt out" in Shakespeare's historical plays. Mr.
Rushton quotes the following passages from "Richard II.":—
"York. Is not Gaunt dead? and doth not
Hereford live?
* * * * *
Take Hereford's rights away, and take from time
His charters and his customary rights;
Let not to-morrow, then, ensue to-day:
Be not thyself; for how art thou a king,
But by fair sequence and succession?
Now, afore God, (God forbid I say true!)
If you do wrongfully seize Hereford's rights,
Call in the letters patents that he hath
By his attorneys-general to sue
His livery, and deny his offer'd homage,
You pluck a thousand dangers on your head."
Act ii. Sc. I.
"Bol. I am denied to sue my livery here,
And yet my letters patents give me leave:
My father's goods are all distrain'd and sold;
And these, and all, are all amiss employed.
What would you have me do? I am a subject,
And challenge law: Attorneys are denied me;
And therefore personally I lay my claim
To my inheritance of free descent."—Ib. Sc. 3.
And Lord Campbell, although he passes by these passages in "Richard
II.," quotes, as important, from a speech of Hotspur's in the "First
Part of Henry IV.," the following lines, which, it will be seen, refer
to the same act of oppression on the part of Richard II. towards
Bolingbroke:—
"He came but to be Duke of Lancaster,
To sue his livery and beg his bread."
Act iv. Sc. 3.
But, here again, Shakespeare, although he may have known more law than
Holinshed, or even Hall, who was a barrister, only used the law-terms
that he found in the paragraph which furnished him with the incident
that he dramatized. For, after recording the death of Gaunt, the
Chronicle goes on:—
"The death of this duke gave occasion of increasing more hatred in the
people of this realme toward the king; for he seized into his hands all
the rents and reuenues of his lands which ought to have descended vnto
the duke of Hereford by lawfull inheritance, in reuoking his letters
patents which he had granted to him before, by virtue whereof he might
make his attorneis generall to sue liverie for him of any manner of
inheritances or possessions that might from thencefoorth fall unto
him, and that his homage might be respited with making reasonable
fine," etc.—HOLINSHED, Ed. 1587, p. 496.
The only legal phrase, however, in these passages of "Richard II," which
seems to imply very extraordinary legal knowledge, is the one repeated
in "Henry IV.,"—"sue his livery,"—which was the term applied to the
process by which, in the old feudal tenures, wards, whether of the king
or other guardian, on arriving at legal age, could compel a delivery
of their estates to them from their guardians. But hence it became a
metaphorical expression to mean merely the attainment of majority, and
in this sense seems to have been very generally understood and not
uncommonly used. See the following from an author who was no attorney or
attorney's clerk:—
"If Cupid
Shoot arrows of that weight, I'll swear devoutly
H'as sued his livery and is no more a boy."
FLETCHER'S Woman's Prize, Act ii. Sc. 1.
And this, from the works of a divine:—
"Our little Cupid hath sued livery
And is no more in his minority."
DONNE'S Eclogues, 1613.
Spenser, too, uses the phrase figuratively in another sense, in the
following passage,—which may be one of those which Chalmers had in
his eye, when, according to Lord Campbell, he "first suggested" that
Shakespeare was once an attorney's clerk:—
"She gladly did of that same Babe accept,
As of her owne by liverey and seisin;
And having over it a litle wept,
She bore it thence, and ever as her owne it kept."
Faërie Queene, B. VI. C. iv. st. 37.
So, for an instance of the phrase "fee," which Lord Campbell notices as
one of those expressions and allusions which "crop out" in "Hamlet,"
"showing the substratum of law in the author's mind,"—
"We go to gain a little patch of ground,
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee,"—
Act iv. Sc. 2.
and of which Mr. Rushton quotes several instances in its fuller form,
"fee simple,"—we have but to turn back a few stanzas in this same
canto of the "Faërie Queene," to find one in which the term is used with
the completest apprehension of its meaning:—
"So is my lord now seiz'd of all the land,
As in his fee, with peaceable estate,
And quietly doth hold it in his hand,
Ne any dares with him for it debate."
Ib. st. 30.
And in the next canto:—
"Of which the greatest part is due to me,
And heaven itself, by heritage in fee."
Ib. C. vii. st. 15.
And in the first of these two passages from the "Faërie Queene," we have
two words, "seized" and "estate," intelligently and correctly used
in their purely legal sense, as Shakespeare himself uses them in the
following passages, which our Chief Justice and our barrister have both
passed by, as, indeed, they have passed many others equally worthy of
notice:—
"Did forfeit with his life all those his lands
Which he stood seiz'd of to the conqueror."
Hamlet, Act i. Sc. 1.
"The terms of our estate may not endure
Hazard so near us," etc.—Ib. Act iii. Sc. 3.
Among the most important passages cited by both our authors is one that
every reader of Shakespeare will recollect, when it is mentioned to
him,—Hamlet's speech over the skull in the grave-digging scene. But
although this speech is remarkable for the number of law-terms used in
it, only one of them seems to evince any recondite knowledge of the law.
This is the word "statutes," in the following sentence:—
"This fellow might be in's time a buyer of
land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his
fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries."
Act v. Sc. 1.
The general reader supposes, we believe, and very naturally, that here
"statutes" means laws, Acts of Parliament concerning real estate. But,
as Mr. Rushton remarks, (Malone having explained the term before him,)
"The statutes referred to by Hamlet are, doubtless, statutes merchant
and statutes staple." And "a statute merchant (so called from the 13th
Edward I., De mercatoribus) was a bond acknowledged before one of
the clerks of the statutes merchant, and the mayor, etc., etc. A statute
staple, properly so called, was a bond of record, acknowledged before
the mayor of the staple," etc., etc.
Here we again have a law-term apparently so out of the ken of an
unprofessional writer, that it would seem to favor the Attorney and
Solicitor theory. But let us see if the knowledge which its use implies
was confined to Shakespeare among the dramatists of his time.
In Fletcher's "Noble Gentleman," a comedy, first performed in 1625, we
find a lady, sorely pushed for ready cash, crying out,—
"Take up at any use: give bond, or land,
Or mighty statutes, able by their strength
To tie up my Samson, were he now alive."
Act i. Sc. 1.
And in Middleton's "Family of Love," (where, by the way, the Free-Love
folk of our own day may find their peculiar notions set forth and made
the basis of the action, though the play was printed two hundred
and fifty years ago,) we find a female free-loveyer thus teaching a
mercantile brother of the family, that, although she has a sisterly
disregard for some worldly restraints, she yet keeps an eye on the main
chance:—
"Tut, you are master Dryfab, the merchant; your skill is greater in
cony-skins and woolpacks than in gentlemen. His lands be in statutes:
you merchants were wont to be merchant staplers; but now gentlemen have
gotten up the trade; for there is not one gentleman amongst twenty but
his lands be engaged in twenty statutes staple."
Act i. Sc. 3.
And in the very first speech of the first scene of the same play, the
husband of this virtuous and careful dame says of the same "Gerardine,"
(who, as he is poor and a gentleman, it need hardly be said, is about
the only honest man in the piece,)—"His lands be in statutes." And
that poor debauchee, Robert Greene, who knew no more of law than he
might have derived from such limited, though authentic information as to
its powers over gentlemen who made debts without the intention of paying
them, as he may have received at frequent unsolicited interviews with a
sergeant or a bum-bailiff, has this passage in his "Quip for an Upstart
Courtier," 1592:—
"The mercer he followeth the young upstart gentleman that hath no
government of himself and feedeth his humour to go brave; he shall not
want silks, sattins, velvets to pranke abroad in his pompe; but with
this proviso, that he must bind over his land in a statute merchant or
staple; and so at last forfeit all unto the merciless mercer, and leave
himself never a foot of land in England."
Very profound legal studies, therefore, cannot be predicated of
Shakespeare on the ground of the knowledge which he has shown of this
peculiar kind of statute.
It is not surprising that both our legal Shakespearean commentators cite
the following passage from "As You Like It" in support of their theory;
for in it the word "extent" is used in a sense so purely technical, that
not one in a thousand of Shakespeare's lay readers now-a-days would
understand it without a note:—
Duke F. Well, push him out of doors,
And let my officers of such a nature
Make an extent upon his house and lands."
Act iii. Sc. 1.
"Extent," as Mr. Rushton remarks, is directed to the sheriff to seize
and value lands and goods to the utmost extent; "an extendi facias" as
Lord Campbell authoritatively says, "applying to the house and lands
as a fieri facias would apply to goods and chattels, or a capias ad
satisfaciendum to the person." But that John Fletcher knew, as well
as my Lord Chief Justice, or Mr. Barrister Rushton, or even, perhaps,
William Shakespeare, all the woes that followed an extent, the elder
Mr. Weller at least would not have doubted, had he in the course of
his literary leisure fallen upon the following passage in "Wit Without
Money" (1630):—
"Val Mark me, widows
Are long extents in law upon men's livings,
Upon their bodies' winding-sheets; they that enjoy 'em
Lie but with dead men's monuments, and beget
Only their own ill epitaphs."
Act ii. Sc. 2.
George Wilkins, too, the obscure author of "The Miseries of Enforced
Marriage," uses the term with as full an understanding, though not with
so feeling an expression or so scandalous an illustration of it, in the
following passage from the fifth act of that play, which was produced
about 1605 or 1606:—
"They are usurers; they come yawning for money; and the sheriff with
them is come to serve an extent upon your land, and then seize your
body by force of execution."
Another seemingly recondite law-phrase used by Shakespeare, which Lord
Campbell passes entirely by, though Mr. Rushton quotes three instances
of it, is "taken with the manner." This has nothing to do with good
manners or ill manners; but, in the words of the old law-book before
cited,—
—"is when a theefe hath stollen and is followed with hue and crie and
taken, having that found about him which he stole;—that is called ye
maynour. And so we commonly use to saye, when wee finde one doing of an
unlawful act, that we tooke him with the maynour or manner."
Termes de la Ley, 1595, fol. 126, b.
Shakespeare, therefore, uses the phrase with perfect understanding, when
he makes Prince Hal say to Bardolph,—
"O villain, thou stolest a cup of sack eighteen
years ago, and wert taken with the manner,
and ever since thou hast blush'd extempore."
1 Henry IV.Act ii, Sc. 4.
But so Fletcher uses the same phrase, and as correctly, when he makes
Perez say to Estefania, in "Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,"—
"How like a sheep-biting rogue, taken i' the manner,
And ready for the halter, dost thou look
now!"—Act v. Sc. 4.
But both Fletcher and Shakespeare, in their use of this phrase, unusual
as it now seems to us, have only exemplified the custom referred to by
our contemporary legal authority,—"And so we commonly use to saye,
when wee finde one doing of an unlawfull act, that we tooke him with the
maynour"; though this must doubtless be understood to refer to persons
of a certain degree of education and knowledge of the world.
It seems, then, that the application of legal phraseology to the
ordinary affairs of life was more common two hundred and fifty years ago
than now; though even now-a-days it is much more generally used in the
rural districts than persons who have not lived in them would suppose.
There law shares with agriculture the function of providing those
phrases of common conversation which, used figuratively at first, and
often with poetic feeling, soon pass into mere thought-saving formulas
of speech, and which in large cities are chiefly drawn from trade
and politics. And if in the use of the law-terms upon which we have
remarked, which are the more especially technical and remote from
the language of unprofessional life among all those which occur in
Shakespeare's works, he was not singular, but, as we have seen,
availed himself only of a knowledge which other contemporary poets and
playwrights possessed, how much more easily might we show that those
commoner legal words and phrases, to remarks upon Shakespeare's use of
which both the books before us (and especially Lord Campbell's) are
mainly devoted, "judgment," "fine," "these presents," "testament,"
"attorney," "arbitrator," "fees," "bond," "lease," "pleading," "arrest,"
"session," "mortgage," "vouchers," "indentures," "assault," "battery,"
"dower," "covenant," "distrain," "bail," "non-suit," etc., etc.,
etc.,—words which everybody understands,—are scattered through all the
literature of Shakespeare's time, and, indeed, of all time since there
were courts and suits at law!
Many of the passages which Lord Campbell cites as evidence of
Shakespeare's "legal acquirements" excite only a smile at the
self-delusion of the critic who could regard them for a moment in that
light. For instance, these lines in that most exquisite song in "Measure
for Measure;"—"Take, oh, take those lips away,"—
"But my kisses bring again
Seals of love, but seal'd in vain";—
and these from "Venus and Adonis,"—
"Pure lips, sweet seals in my soft lips imprinted,
What bargains may I make, still to be sealing!"—
to which Mr. Rushton adds from "Hamlet,"—
"A combination and a form, indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal."
Act iii. Sc. 4.
"Now must your conscience my acquittance
seal."—Act iv. Sc. 7.
And because indentures and deeds and covenants are sealed, these
passages must be accepted as part of the evidence that Shakespeare
narrowly escaped being made Lord High Chancellor of England! It requires
all the learning and the logic of a Lord Chief Justice and a London
barrister to establish a connection between such premises and such a
conclusion. And if Shakespeare's lines smell of law, how strong is the
odor of parchment and red tape in these, from Drayton's Fourth Eclogue
(1605):
"Kindnesse againe with kindnesse was repay'd,
And with sweet kisses covenants were sealed."
We ask pardon of the reader for the production of contemporary evidence,
that, in Shakespeare's day, a knowledge of the significance and binding
nature of a seal was not confined to him among poets; for surely a man
must be both a lawyer and a Shakespearean commentator to forget that the
use of seals is as old as the art of writing, and, perhaps, older, and
that the practice has furnished a figure of speech to poets from the
time when it was written, that out of the whirlwind Job heard, "It is
turned as clay to the seal," and probably from a period yet more
remote.
And is Lord Campbell really in earnest in the following grave and
precisely expressed opinion?
"In the next scene, [of "Othello,"] Shakespeare gives us a very
distinct proof that he was acquainted with Admiralty law, as well as
with the procedure of Westminster Hall. Describing the feat of the Moor
in carrying off Desdemona against her father's consent, which might
either make or mar his fortune, according as the act might be sanctioned
or nullified, Iago observes,—
"'Faith, he to-night hath hoarded a land carack:
If it prove a lawful prize, he's made forever';
the trope indicating that there would be a suit in the High Court of
Admiralty to determine the validity of the capture"!—p. 91.
"Why did not his Lordship go farther, and decide, that, in the
figurative use of the term, "land carack," Shakespeare gave us very
distinct proof that he was acquainted with maritime life, and especially
with the carrying-trade between Spain and the West Indies? We
respectfully submit to the court the following passage from Middleton
and Rowley's "Changeling,"—first published in 1653, but written many
years before. Jasperino, seeing a lady, calls out,—
"Yonder's another vessel: Ile board her:
if she be lawfall prize, down goes her topsail."
Act i. Sig. B. 2.
And with it we submit the following points, and ask a decision in our
favor. First, That they, the said Middleton and Rowley, have furnished,
in the use of the phrase "lawful prize," in this passage, very distinct
proof that they were acquainted with Admiralty law. Second, That, in
the use of the other phrases, "board," and especially "down goes her
topsail," they have furnished yet stronger evidence that they had been
sailors on board armed vessels, and that the trope indicates, that, had
not the vessel or lady in question lowered her topsail or top-knot, she
would then and there have been put mercilessly to the sword.
But what shall we think of the acumen and the judgment of a Chief
Justice, a man of letters, and a man of the world, who brings forward
such passages as the following as part of the evidence bearing upon the
question of Shakespeare's legal acquirements?—
"Come; fear not you; good counsellors lack
no clients."
Measure for Measure. Act i. Sc. 2.
"One that before the judgement carries poor
souls to hell."
Comedy of Errors. Act iv. Sc. 2.
"Well, Time is the old Justice that examines
all such offenders,—and let Time try."
As You Like It. Act iv. Sc. 1.
"And that old common arbitrator, Time."
Troilus and Cressida. Act iv. Sc. 5.
"No cock of mine; you crow too like a craven."
Taming of the Shrew. Act ii. Sc. 1.
"Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple."
Hamlet. Act iv. Sc. 4.
By which last line, according to Lord Campbell, (p. 55,) "Shakespeare
shows that he was acquainted with the law for regulating 'trials by
battle'"!
But to proceed with the passages quoted in evidence:—
"Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the
skin of an innocent lamb should be made
parchment? that parchment, being scribbled
o'er, should undo a man? Some say, the bee
stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did
but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine
own man since."—2 Henry VI. Act vi. Sc. 2.
Upon citing which, his Lordship exclaims,—
"Surely Shakespeare must have been employed to write deeds on
parchment in courthand, and to apply the wax to them in the form
of seals. One does not understand how he should, on any other theory
of his bringing-up, have been acquainted with these details"!
One does not; but we submit to the court, that, if two were to lay their
heads together after the manner of Sydney Smith's vestrymen, they might
bring it about.
In aid of his Lordship's further studies, we make the following
suggestion. He doubtless knows that one of the earliest among our small
stock of traditions about Shakespeare is that recorded by Aubrey as
being derived from Stratford authority, that his father was a butcher,
and that "when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he
kill'd a calfe, he wold do it in a high style, and make a speech."
When his Lordship considers this old tradition in connection with the
following passage in one of Shakespeare's earliest plays,—
"Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh,
And sees fast by a butcher with an axe,
But will suspect 'twas he that made the
slaughter,"—
2 Henry VI. Act iii. Sc. 2.
how can he resist the conclusion, that, although the divine Williams may
not have run with "Forty," it is highly probable that he did kill
for Keyser? Let his Lordship also remember that other old tradition,
mentioned by Rowe, that John Shakespeare was "a considerable dealer
in wool," and that William, upon leaving school, "seems to have given
entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him"; and
remember, also, this passage from another of Shakespeare's earliest
plays:—
"He is too picked, too spruce, too affected,
too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may
call it…He draweth out the thread of
his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument."
—Love's Labor's Lost. Act v. Sc. 1.
Is there not a goodly part of the wool-stapler's craft, as well as of
the art of rhetoric, compressed into that one sentence by the hydraulic
power of Shakespeare's genius? Does it not show that he was initiated in
the mysteries of long and short staple before he wrote this, perhaps,
his earliest play? But look again at the following passage, also written
when his memory of his boyish days was freshest, and see the evidence
that both these traditions were well founded:—
"So, first, the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece;
And, next, his throat unto the butcher's knife."
Could these lines have been written by a man who had not been both a
considerable dealer in wool, and a butcher who killed a calf in high
style and made a speech? Who can have a doubt about this matter, when he
appreciates rightly the following passage in "Hamlet," (Act v. Sc. 2,)
and is penetrated with the wisdom of two wise commentators upon it?—
'Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.'
Dr. Farmer informs me that these words are merely technical. A wool-man,
butcher, and dealer in skewers lately observed to him that his nephew
(an idle lad) could only assist him in making them;—he could rough
hew them, but I was obliged to shape their ends! To shape the ends of
wool-skewers, i.e., to point them, requires a degree of skill; any one
can rough-hew them. Whoever recollects the profession of Shakespeare's
father will admit that his son might be no stranger to such terms. "I have
frequently seen packages of wool pinn'd up with skewers."—STEEVENS.
Lucky wool-man, butcher, and dealer in skewers! to furnish at once a
comment upon the great philosophical tragedy and a proof that its author
and you were both of a trade! Fortunate Farmer, to have heard the story!
and most sagacious Steevens, to have penetrated its hidden meaning,
recollecting felicitously that you had seen packages of wool pinn'd up
with skewers! But, O wisest, highest-and-deepest-minded Shakespeare, to
have remembered, as you were propounding, Hamlet-wise, one of the great
unsolvable mysteries of life, the skewers that you, being an idle lad,
could but rough-hew, leaving to your careful father the skill-requiring
task to shape their ends!—ends without which they could not have bound
together the packages of wool with which you loaded the carts that
backed up to the door in Henley Street, or have penetrated the veal
of the calves that you killed in such a high style and with so much
eloquence, and which loaded the tray that you daily bore on your
shoulder to the kitchen-door of New Place, yet unsuspecting that you
were to become its master!
Yet we would not too strongly insist upon this evidence, that
Shakespeare in his boyhood served both as a butcher's and a
wool-stapler's apprentice; for we venture to think that we have
discovered evidence in his works that their author was a tailor. For, in
the first place, the word "tailor" occurs no less than thirty-five times
in his plays. [The reader is to suppose that we are able to record this
fact by an intimate acquaintance with every line that Shakespeare wrote,
and by a prodigious effort of memory, and not by reference to Mrs.
Clark's Concordance.] "Measures" occurs nearly thrice as often; "shears"
is found no less than six times; "thimble," three times; "goose," no
less than twenty-seven times!—and when we find, that, in all his
thirty-seven plays, the word "cabbage" occurs but once, and then with
the deliberate explanation that it means "worts" and is "good cabbage,"
may we not regard such reticence upon this tender point as a touching
confirmation of the truth of our theory? See, too, the comparison which
Shakespeare uses, when he desires to express the service to which
his favorite hero, Prince Hal, will put the manners of his wild
companions:—
"So, like gross terms,
The Prince will, in the perfectness of time,
Cast off his followers; and their memory
Shall as a pattern or a measure live
By which his Grace must mete the lives of
others."
2 Henry IV., Act iv. Sc. 4.
And in writing one of his earliest plays, Shakespeare's mind seems to
have been still so impressed with memories of his former vocation, that
he made the outraged Valentine, as his severest censure of Proteus,
reproach him with being badly dressed:—
"Ruffian, let go that rude, uncivil touch!
Thou friend of an ill fashion!"
Act v. Sc. 4.
Cleopatra, too, who, we may be sure from her conduct, was addicted to
very "low necks," after Antony's death becomes serious, and declares her
intention to have something "after the high Roman fashion." And what but
a reminiscence of the disgust which a tailor of talent has for mending
is it that breaks out in the Barons' defiant message to King John?—
"The King hath dispossess'd himself of us;
We will not line his thin bestained cloak."
King John, Act iv. Sc. 3.
A memory, too, of the profuse adornment with which he had been called
upon to decorate some very tender youth's or miss's fashionable suit
intrudes itself even in his most thoughtful tragedy:—
"The canker galls the infants of the Spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclos'd."
Hamlet, Act i. Sc. 3.
In "Macbeth," desiring to pay the highest compliment to Macduff's
judgment and knowledge, he makes Lennox say,—
"He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
The fits of the season."—Act iv. Sc. 2.
Not the last fall or last spring style, be it observed, but that of the
season, which it is most necessary for the fashionable tailor to know.
In writing the first scene of the "Second Part of Henry IV.," his mind
was evidently crossed by the shade of some over-particular dandy,
whose fastidious nicety as to the set of his garments he had failed to
satisfy; for he makes Northumberland compare himself to a man who,
"Impatient of his fit, breaks like a fire
Out of his keeper's arms."
And yet we must not rely too much even upon evidence so strong and so
cumulative as this. For it would seem as if Shakespeare must have been
a publisher, and have known the anxiety attendant upon the delay of an
author not in high health to complete a work the first part of which has
been put into the printer's hands. Else, how are we to account for his
feeling use of this beautiful metaphor in "Twelfth Night"?
"Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive,
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy."
Act i. Sc. 5.
But this part of our subject expands before us, and we must stay our
hand. We merely offer these hints as our modest contribution to the
attempts to decide from phrases used in Shakespeare's works what were
his avocations before he became a playwright, and return to Lord
Campbell and Mr. Rushton.
When Malone, in 1790, broached his theory, that Shakespeare had been an
attorney's clerk, he cited in support of it twenty-four passages. Mr.
Rushton's pamphlet brings forward ninety-five, more or less; Lord
Campbell's book, one hundred and sixty. But, from what he has seen of
it, the reader will not be surprised at learning that a large number of
the passages cited by his Lordship must be thrown aside, as having no
bearing whatever on the question of Shakespeare's legal acquirements.
They evince no more legal knowledge, no greater familiarity with
legal phraseology, than is apparent in the ordinary conversation of
intelligent people generally, even at this day. Mr. Rushton, more
systematic than his Lordship, has been also more careful; and from the
pages of both we suppose that there might be selected a round hundred
of phrases which could be fairly considered as having been used by
Shakespeare with a consciousness of their original technicality and of
their legal purport. This is not quite in the proportion of three to
each of his thirty-seven plays; and if we reckon his sonnets and poems
according to their lines, (and both Mr. Rushton and Lord Campbell cite
from them,) the proportion falls to considerably less than three. But
Malone's twenty-four instances are of nearly as much value in the
consideration of the question as Lord Campbell's and Mr. Rushton's
hundred; for the latter gentlemen have added little to the strength,
though considerably to the number, of the array on the affirmative side
of the point in dispute; and we have seen, that, of the law-phrases
cited by them from Shakespeare's pages, the most recondite, as well
as the most common and simple, are to be found in the works of the
Chroniclers, whose very language Shakespeare used, and in those of the
playwrights his contemporaries.
Our new advocates of the old cause, however, quote two passages which,
from the freedom with which law-phrases are scattered through them, it
is worth while to reproduce here. The first is the well-known speech in
the grave-digging scene of "Hamlet":—
"Ham. There's another: Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?
Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and
his tricks? why does he suffer this rude knave, now, to knock him about
the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of
battery? Humph! This fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land,
with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double
vouchers, his recoveries: Is this the fine of his fines, and the
recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?
will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double
ones, too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The
very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must
the inheritor himself have no more? ha?"—Act v. Sc. 1.
The second is the following Sonnet, (No. 46,) not only the language,
but the very fundamental conceit of which, it will be seen, is purely
legal:—
"Mine Eye and Heart are at a mortal war
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine Eye my Heart thy picture's sight would bar,
My Heart mine Eye the freedom of that right.
My Heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie
(A closet never pierc'd with crystal eyes);
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To 'cide this title is impanelled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the Heart,
And by their verdict is determined
The clear Eye's moiety, and the dear Heart's part;
As thus: Mine Eye's due is thine outward part,
And my Heart's right, thine inward love of heart."
It would seem, indeed, as if passages like these must be received as
evidence that Shakespeare had more familiarity with legal phraseology,
if not a greater knowledge of it, than could have been acquired except
by habitual use in the course of professional occupation. But let us see
if he is peculiar even in this crowding of many law-terms into a single
brief passage. We turn to the very play open at our hand, from which
we have quoted before, (and which, by the way, we have not selected as
exceptional in this regard,) "The Miseries of Enforced Marriage," and
find the following passage in Act V.:—
"Doctor. Now, Sir, from this your oath and bond,
Faith's pledge and seal of conscience, you have run,
Broken all contracts, and forfeiture
Justice hath now in suit against your soul:
Angels are made the jurors, who are witnesses
Unto the oath you took; and God himself,
Maker of marriage, He that hath seal'd the deed,
As a firm lease unto you during life,
Sits now as Judge of your transgression:
The world informs against you with this voice.—
If such sins reign, what mortals can rejoice?
Scarborow. What then ensues to me?
Doctor. A heavy doom, whose execution's
Now served upon your conscience," etc.
p. 91, D.O.P., Ed. 1825.
Indeed, the hunting of a metaphor or a conceit into the ground is a
fault characteristic of Elizabethan literature, and one from which
Shakespeare's boldness, no less than his genius, was required to save
him; and we have seen already how common was the figurative use of
law-phrases among the poets and dramatists of his period. Hamlet's
speech and the Forty-sixth Sonnet cannot, therefore, be accepted as
evidence of his attorneyship, except in so far as they and like passages
may be regarded as giving some support to the opinion that Shakespeare
was but one of many in his time who abandoned law for letters.
For we object not so much to the conclusion at which Lord Campbell
arrives as to his mode of arriving at it. His method of investigation,
which is no method at all, but the mere noting of passages in the order
in which he found them in looking through Shakespeare's works, is the
rudest and least intelligent that could have been adopted; and his
inference, that, because Shakespeare makes Jack Cade lament that the
skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment, and affirm that it is
not the bee, but the bee's wax, that stings, therefore he must have been
employed to write deeds on parchment and append wax to them in the form
of seals, is a fair specimen both of the acuteness and the logic which
his Lordship displays in this his latest effort to unite Law and
Literature.
There are, however, very considerable grounds for the opinion that
Shakespeare had more than a layman's acquaintance with the technical
language of the law. For it must be admitted, in the first place, that
he exhibits a remarkable acquaintance with it. That other playwrights
and poets of his day manifest a like familiarity (as we have seen
they do) precludes us, indeed, from regarding the mere occurrence of
law-terms in his works as indications of early training proper to him
alone. But they who, on the strength of the not unfrequent occurrence
of legal phrases in many of the plays and much of the poetry of the
Elizabethan period, would maintain that Shakespeare's use of them
furnishes no basis for the opinion that he acquired his knowledge of
them professionally, must also assume and support the position, that, in
the case of contemporary dramatists and poets, this use of the technical
language of conveyancing and pleading also indicates no more than an
ordinary acquaintance with it, and that, in comparing his works with
theirs in this regard, we may assume the latter to have been produced by
men who had no professional acquaintance with the law; because, if
they had such professional acquaintance with legal phraseology, its
appearance in their works as well as in Shakespeare's would manifestly
strengthen rather than invalidate the conclusion, that his familiarity
with it was acquired as they acquired theirs. This position is, to
say the least, a very difficult one to maintain, and one which any
considerate student of Elizabethan literature would be very unwilling
to assume. For our ignorance of the personal life of Shakespeare is
remarkable only because he was Shakespeare; and we know little, if any,
more about the greater number of his literary contemporaries than we do
about him. It cannot even be safely presumed, for instance, that George
Wilkins, the author of the law-besprinkled passage just above quoted
from the "Miseries of Enforced Marriage," was not a practising attorney
or barrister before or even at the time when he wrote that play. On the
contrary, it is extremely probable, nay, quite certain, that he and many
other dramatic authors of the period when he flourished, (1600-1620,)
and of the whole Elizabethan period, (1575-1625,) were nestling
attorneys or barristers before they became full-fledged dramatists.
We are not without contemporary evidence upon this point. Thomas Nash,
friend to Robert Greene, a playwright, poet, and novelist, whose works
were in vogue just before Shakespeare wrote, in an "Epistle to the
Gentlemen Students of the Two Universities," with which, according to
the fashion of the time, he introduced Greene's "Menaphon" (1587)[D] to
the reader, has the following paragraph:—
[Footnote D: Lord Campbell gives the date 1589; but see Mr. Dyce's
indisputable authority. Greene's Works. Vol. I., pp. xxxvii. and ciii.]
"I will turn my back to my first text of studies of delight, and talk
a little in friendship with a few of our trivial translators. It is a
common practice, now-a-days, amongst a sort of shifting companions
that run through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of
Noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves with the endeavors
of art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck-verse, if they should
have need; yet English Seneca, read by candlelight, yields many good
sentences, as, Blood is a beggar, and so forth; and if you intreat
him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets,—I
should say, handfuls of tragical speeches. But, oh grief! Tempus edax
rerum,—what is that will last always? The sea, exhaled by drops,
will, in continuance, be dry; and Seneca, let blood line by line and
page by page, at length must needs die to our stage."
It has most unaccountably been assumed that this passage refers to
Shakespeare;[E] and it is even so cited by Lord Campbell himself,—to
our surprise, when we remember his professional training and experience
as a sifter of evidence. But, as far as regards its reference to a
leaving of law for literature, it is clearly of general application.
Nash says, "It is a common practice, now-a-days, amongst a sort of
shifting companions, etc., to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto
they were born, and busy themselves," etc. By the trade of
Noverint he meant that of an attorney. The term was not uncommonly
applied to members of that profession, because of the phrase, Noverint
universi per presentes, (Know all men by these presents,) with which
deeds, bonds, and many other legal instruments then began. And Nash's
testimony accords with what we know of the social and literary history
of the age. There was no regular army in Elizabeth's time; and the
younger sons of gentlemen and well-to-do yeomen, who received from their
fathers little more than an education and a very small allowance, and
who did not become either military or maritime adventurers, opening
their oyster with a sword, entered the Church or the profession of the
law in its higher or lower grade; and as at that period there was much
more demand for lawyers and much less for clergymen than there is now,
and the Church had ceased to be a stepping-stone to political power and
patronage, while the law had become more than ever before an avenue to
fame, to fortune, and to rank, by far the greater number of these young
gentlemen aspired to the woolsack. But then, as now, the early years of
professional life were seasons of sharp trial and bitter disappointment.
Necessity pressed sorely or pleasure wooed resistlessly, and the slender
purse wasted rapidly away while the young attorney or barrister awaited
the employment that did not come. He knew then, as now he knows, "the
rich man's scorn, the proud man's contumely"; nay, he felt, as now he
sometimes feels, the tooth of hunger gnawing through the principles and
firm resolves that partition a life of honor and self-respect from one
darkened by conscious loss of rectitude, if not by open shame. Happy,—
yet, perhaps, oh, unhappy,—he who now in such a strait can wield the
pen of a ready writer!—for the press, perchance, may afford him a
support which, though temporary and precarious, will hold him up until
he can stand upon more stable ground. But in the reigns of Good Queen
Bess and Gentle Jamie there was no press. There was, however, an
incessant demand for new plays. Play-going was the chief intellectual
recreation of that day for all classes, high and low. It filled the
place of our newspapers, our books, our lectures, our concerts, our
picture-seeing, and, in a great measure, of our social gatherings and
amusements, of whatever nature. It is hardly extravagant to say, that
there were then more new plays produced in London in a month than
there are now in Great Britain and the United States in a year. To
play-writing, then, the needy young attorney or barrister possessed
of literary talent turned his eyes at that day, as he does now to
journalism; and it is almost beyond a doubt, that, of the multitudinous
plays of that period which have survived and the thousands which have
perished, a large proportion were produced by the younger sons of
country gentlemen, who, after taking their degrees at Oxford or
Cambridge, or breaking away from those classic bounds ungraduated,
entered the Inns of Court, according to the custom of their day and
their condition. They wrote plays in Latin, and even in English, for
themselves to act; and they got the professional players to act popular
plays for them on festal days. What more natural, then, than that those
who had the ability and the need should seek to recruit their slender
means by supplying the constant demand for new plays? and how inevitable
that some of them, having been successful in their dramatic efforts,
should give themselves up to play-writing! As do the great, so will the
small. What the Inns-of-Court man did, the attorney would try to do. The
players, though they loved the patronage of a lord, were very democratic
in the matter of play-making. If a play filled the house, they did not
trouble themselves about the social or professional rank of him who
wrote it; and thus came about that "common practice" for "shifting
companions" to "leave the trade of Noverint" and "busy themselves with
the endeavors of art"; and hence it is that the plays of the period of
which we are writing have, in many passages, so strong a tinge of law.
[Footnote E: It seems clear, on the contrary, that Nash's object was to
sneer at Jasper Heywood, Alexander Nevil, John Studley, Thomas Nuce, and
Thomas Newton,—one or more of them,—whose Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies
translated into Englysh, was published in 1581. It is a very
grievous performance; and Shakespeare, who had read it thoroughly, made
sport of it in A Midsummer Night's Dream.]
One reason for the regarding of Nash's sneer as especially directed
against Shakespeare is the occurrence in it of the phrase, "whole
Hamlets,—I should say, handfuls of tragical speeches," which has
been looked upon as an allusion to Shakespeare's great tragedy. But the
earliest edition of "Hamlet" known was published in 1603, and even this
is an imperfect and surreptitiously obtained copy of an early sketch of
the play. That Shakespeare had written this tragedy in 1586, when he was
but twenty-two years old, is improbable to the verge of impossibility;
and Nash's allusion, if, indeed, he meant a punning sneer at a play,
(which is not certain.) was, doubtless, to an old lost version of the
Danish tragedy upon which Shakespeare built his "Hamlet."
We have, then, direct contemporary testimony, that, at the period of
Shakespeare's entrance upon London life, it was a common practice for
those lawyers whom want of success or an unstable disposition impelled
to a change in their avocation to devote themselves to writing or
translating plays; and this statement is not only sustained by all that
we know of the customs of the time to which it refers, but is strongly
confirmed by the notably frequent occurrence of legal phrases in the
dramatic literature of that age.
But the question, then, arises,—and it is one which, under the
circumstances, must be answered,—To what must we attribute the fact,
that, of all the plays that have come down to us, written between 1580
and 1620, Shakespeare's are most noteworthy in this respect? For it is
true, that, among all the dramatic writers of that period, whose
works have survived, not one uses the phraseology of the law with the
frequency, the freedom, and the correctness of Shakespeare. Beaumont,
for instance, was a younger son of a Judge of the Common Pleas, and,
following the common routine that we have noticed, after leaving the
University, became an Inns-of-Court man, but soon abandoned law for
literature; his friend and associate, Fletcher, was the son of a bishop,
but had an uncle who was a lawyer and a diplomatist, and is himself
believed to have been of the Inns of Court. Rich gleanings of law-terms
might, therefore, be expected from the plays written by these
dramatists; yet it may safely be asserted, that from Shakespeare's
thirty-seven plays at least twice as many passages marked by legal
phraseology might be produced, as from the fifty-four written by
Beaumont and Fletcher, together or alone! a fact the great significance
of which is heightened by another,—that it is only the vocabulary of
the law to the use of which Shakespeare exhibits this proclivity. He
avails himself, it is true, of the peculiar language of the physician,
the divine, the husbandman, the soldier, and the sailor; but he uses
these only on very rare occasions, by way of description, comparison,
or illustration, when something in the scene or the subject in hand
suggests them. But the technical language of the law runs from his
pen as part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought. The word
"purchase," for instance, which in ordinary use means to acquire by
giving value, in law applies to all legal modes of obtaining property,
except inheritance of descent. And the word in this peculiar and most
technical sense occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays,
but only in a single passage (if our memory and Mr. Dyce's notes serve
us) in the fifty-four plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Equal, or greater,
is the comparative frequency with which Shakespeare uses other legal
phrases; and much wider is the disparity, in this regard, between him
and the other dramatic writers of his whole period,—Marlowe, Greene,
Peele, Kyd, Lilly, Chapman, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Ford, Webster,
Massinger, and the undistinguished crowd.
These facts dispose in great measure of the plausible suggestion,
which has been made,—that, as the courts of law in Shakespeare's time
occupied public attention much more than they do at present, they having
then regulated "the season," as the sittings of Parliament (not then
frequent or stated) do now,[F] they would naturally be frequented by the
restless, inquiring spirits of the time, Shakespeare among them, and
that there he and his fellow-dramatists picked up the law-phrases which
they wove into their plays and poems. But if this view of the case were
the correct one, we should not find that disparity in the use of legal
phrases which we have just remarked. Shakespeare's genius would manifest
itself in the superior effect with which he used knowledge acquired in
this manner; but his genius would not have led him to choose the
dry and affected phraseology of the law as the vehicle of his flowing
thought, and to use it so much oftener than any other of the numerous
dramatists of his time, to all of whom the courts were as open as to
him. And the suggestion which we are now considering fails in two other
most important respects. For we do not find either that Shakespeare's
use of legal phrases increased with his opportunities of frequenting
the courts of law, or that the law-phrases, his use of which is most
noteworthy and of most importance in the consideration of the question
before us, are those which he would have heard oftenest in the course of
the ordinary business of the courts in his day. To look at the latter
point first,—the law-terms used by Shakespeare are generally not those
which he would have heard in ordinary trials at nisi prius or before
the King's Bench, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real
property, "fine and recovery," "statutes," "purchase," "indenture,"
"tenure," "double voucher," "fee simple," "fee farm," "remainder,"
"reversion," "dower," "forfeiture," etc., etc.; and it is important to
remember that suits about the title to real estate are very much rarer
in England than they are with us, and in England were very much rarer in
Shakespeare's time than they are now. Here we buy and sell houses and
lands almost as we trade in corn and cotton; but in England the transfer
of the title of a piece of real estate of any consequence is a serious
and comparatively rare occurrence, that makes great work for attorneys
and conveyancing counsel; and two hundred and fifty years ago the
facilities in this respect were very much less than they are now.
Shakespeare could hardly have picked up his conveyancer's jargon by
hanging round the courts of law; and we find,—to return to the first
objection,—that, in his early plays, written just after he arrived in
London, he uses this peculiar phraseology just as freely and with
as exact a knowledge as he displayed in after years, when (on the
supposition in question) he must have become much more familiar with it.
Shakespeare's earliest work that has reached us is, doubtless, to be
found in "King Henry the Sixth," "The Comedy of Errors," and "Love's
Labor's Lost." In the very earliest form of Part II. of the first-named
play, ("The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Houses of York
and Lancaster," to which Shakespeare was doubtless a contributor, the
part of Cade being among his contributions,) we find him making Cade
declare, (Act iv. Sc. 7,) "Men shall hold of me in capite; and we
charge and command that wives be as free as heart can wish or tongue
can tell." Both the phrases that we have Italicized express tenures,
and very uncommon tenures of land. In the "Comedy of Errors," when
Dromio of Syracuse says, "There's no time for a man to recover his hair
that grows bald by nature," [Hear, O Rowland! and give ear, O Phalon!]
his master replies, "May he not do it by fine and recovery?" Fine and
recovery was a process by which, through a fictitious suit, a transfer
was made of the title in an entailed estate. In "Love's Labor's Lost,"
almost without a doubt the first comedy that Shakespeare wrote, on
Boyet's offering to kiss Maria, (Act ii. Sc. 1,) she declines the
salute, and says, "My lips are no common, though several they be." This
passage—an important one for his purpose—Lord Campbell has passed by,
as he has some others of nearly equal consequence. Maria's allusion is
plainly to tenancy in common by several (i.e., divided, distinct) title.
(See Coke upon Littleton, Lib. iii. Cap. iv. Sec. 292.) She means, that
her lips are several as being two, and (as she says in the next line)
as belonging in common to her fortunes and herself,—yet they were no
common pasture.
[Footnote F: Falstaff, for instance, speaks of "the wearing out of six
fashions, which is four terms or two actions."]
Here, then, is Shakespeare using the technical language of conveyancers
in his earliest works, and before he had had much opportunity to
haunt the courts of law in London, even could he have made such legal
acquirements in those schools. We find, too, that he uses law-terms in
general with frequency notably greater—in an excess of three or four
to one—than any of the other playwrights of his day, when so many
playwrights were or had been Noverints or of the Inns of Court; that
this excess is not observable with regard to his use of the vocabulary
peculiar to any other occupation or profession, even that of the actor,
which we know that he practised for many years; but that, on the
contrary, although he uses other technical language correctly, he avails
himself of that of any single art of occupation with great rarity,
and only upon special occasions. Lord Campbell remarks, as to the
correctness with which Shakespeare uses legal phrases,—and this is a
point upon which his Lordship speaks with authority,—that he is amazed
"by the accuracy and propriety with which they are introduced," and in
another place adds, that Shakespeare "uniformly lays down good law"; and
it is not necessary to be a Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench to know
that his Lordship is fully justified in assuring us that "there is
nothing [of the kind (?)] so dangerous as for one not of the craft to
tamper with our free-masonry." Remembering, then, that genius, though
it reveals general and even particular truths, and facilitates all
acquirement, does not impart facts or the knowledge of technical terms,
in what manner can we answer or set aside the question that we have
partly stated before,—How did it happen, that, in an age when it was
a common practice for young attorneys and barristers to leave their
profession and take to writing plays and poems, one playwright left upon
his works a stronger, clearer, sharper legal stamp than we can detect
upon those of any other, and that he used the very peculiar and, to a
layman, incomprehensible language of the law of real property, as it
then existed, in his very earliest plays, written soon after he, a raw,
rustic youth, bred in a retired village, arrived in London? How did
it happen that this playwright fell into the use of that technical
phraseology, the proper employment of which, more than any other,
demands special training, and that he availed himself of it with
apparent unconsciousness, not only so much oftener than any of his
contemporaries, but with such exact knowledge, that one who has passed
a long life in the professional employment of it, speaking as it
were officially from the eminent position which he has won,—Lord
Campbell,—declares, that,
"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the
law of marriage, of wills, and of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law,
lavishly as he propounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of
exceptions, nor writ of error"?
Must we believe, that the man, who, among all the lawyer-playwrights of
his day, showed,—not, be it noticed, (as we are at present regarding
his works,) the profoundest knowledge of the great principles of law and
equity, although he did that too,—but the most complete mastery of
the technical phrases, the jargon, of the law and of its most abstruse
branch,—that relating to real estate,—and who used it very much the
oftenest of them all, and with an air of as entire unconsciousness as
if it were a part of the language of his daily life, making no mistakes
that can be detected by a learned professional critic,—must we believe
that this man was distinguished among those play-writing lawyers, not
only by his genius, but his lack of particular acquaintance with the
law? Or shall we rather believe that the son of the High Bailiff of
Stratford, whose father was well-to-do in the world, and who was a
somewhat clever lad and ambitious withal, was allowed to commence his
studies for a profession for which his cleverness fitted him and by
which he might reasonably hope to rise at least to moderate wealth and
distinction, and that he continued these studies until his father's
loss of property, aided, perhaps, by some of those acts of youthful
indiscretion which clever lads as well as dull ones sometimes will
commit, threw him upon his own resources,—and that then, having
townsmen, perhaps fellow-students and playfellows, among the actors in
London, and having used his pen, as we may be sure he had, for other
purposes than engrossing and drawing precedents, he, like so many others
of his time, left his trade of Noverint and went up to the metropolis to
busy himself with endeavors of art? One of these conclusions is in the
face of reason, probability, and fact; the other in accordance with them
all.
* * * * *
But of how little real importance is it to establish the bare fact, that
Shakespeare was an attorney's clerk before he was an actor! Suppose
it proved, beyond a doubt,—what have we learned? Nothing peculiar to
Shakespeare; but merely what was equally true of thousands of other
young men, his contemporaries, and hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of those of antecedent and succeeding generations. It has a
naked material relation to the other fact, that he uses legal phrases
oftener than any other dramatist or poet; but with his plastic power
over those grotesque and rugged modes of speech it has nought to do
whatever. That was his inborn mastery. Legal phrases did nothing for
him; but he much for them. Chance cast their uncouth forms around him,
and the golden overflow from the furnace of his glowing thought fell
upon them, glorifying and enshielding them forever. It would have been
the same with the lumber of any other craft; it was the same with that
of many others,—the difference being only of quantity, and not of kind.
How, then, would the certainty that he had been bred to the law help
us to the knowledge of Shakespeare's life, of what he did for himself,
thought for himself, how he joyed, how he suffered, what he was? Would
it help us to know what the Stratford boys thought of him and felt
toward him who was to write "Lear" and "Hamlet," or how the men of
London regarded him who was a-writing them? Not a whit. To prove the
fact would merely satisfy sheer aimless, fruitless curiosity; and it is
a source of some reasonable satisfaction to know that the very
people who would be most interested in the perusal of a biography of
Shakespeare made up of the relation of such facts are they who have
least right to know anything about him. Of the hundreds of thousands
of people who giggled through their senseless hour at the "American
Cousin,"—a play which, in language, in action, in character, presents
no semblance to human life or human creatures, as they are found on any
spot under the canopy, and which seems to have been written on the model
of the Interlude of "Pyramus and Thisbe," "for, in all the play, there
is not one word apt, one player fitted,"—of the people to whom this
play owed its monstrous success, and who, for that very reason, it is
safe to say, think Shakespeare a bore on the stage and off it, a goodly
number would eagerly buy and read a book that told them when he went to
bed and what he had for breakfast, and would pay a ready five-cent
piece for a picture of him as he appeared in the attorney's office, to
preserve as a companion to the equally veritable "portrait of the Hon.
Daniel E. Sickles, as he appeared in prison." Nay, it must be confessed,
that there are some Shakespearean enthusiasts ever dabbling and gabbling
about what they call Shakespeariana, who would give more for the pen
with which he engrossed a deed or wrote "Hamlet," than for the ability
to understand, better than they do or ever can, what he meant by that
mysterious tragedy. Biography has its charms and its uses; but it is not
by what we know of their bare external facts that
"Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time."
What the readers of Shakespeare, who are worthy to know aught of him,
long to know, would have been the same, had he been bred lawyer,
physician, soldier, or sailor. It is of his real life, not of its mere
accidents, that they crave a knowledge; and of that life, it is to be
feared, they will remain forever ignorant, unless he himself has written
it.