Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 by Various

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Such, then, is the estimate here given of Mr. Buckle's laborious and
powerful work. Meantime, with every secondary merit which such a work
_could_ possess this is replete; while its faults are only such as were
inseparable from the conjunction of such ambitions with such powers. He
may whet and wield his blade; but he puts no poison on its edge. He may
disparage reverence; but he is not himself irreverent. He may impugn the
convictions that most men love; but, while withholding no syllable of
dissent and reprehension, he utters not a syllable that can insult or
sting. And all the while his pages teem with observations full of point,
and half full of admirable sense and suggestion.

After all, we owe him thanks,--thanks, it may be, even for his errors.
The popular notions of moral liberty are probably not profound, and
require deepening. The grand fact that we name Personality _is_ grand
and of an unsounded depth only because in it Destiny and Freedom meet
and become one. But the play into this of Destiny and Eternal Necessity
is, in general, dimly discerned. The will is popularly pronounced free,
but is thought to originate, as it were, "between one's hat and his
boots"; and so man loses all largeness of relation, and personality all
grandeur. Now blisters, though ill for health, may be wholesome for
disease; and doctrines of Fate, that empty every man of his soul, may
be good as against notions of moral liberty that make one's soul of a
pin's-head dimension. It may be well, also, that the doctrine of Social
Fate should be preached until all are made to see that Society is a
fact,--that it is generative,--that personal development cannot go on
but by its mediation,--that the chain of spiritual interdependence
cannot be broken, and that in proportion as it is weakened every bosom
becomes barren. In this case also Mr. Buckle may be medicinal. We
owe him thanks also for refreshing our expectation of a science of
civilization,--for affirming the venerableness of intellect, which
recent teachers have undervalued,--for vindicating the uses of
doubt,--and, finally, for a specimen of intellectual intrepidity of
which one could wish there were less need. And withal how royally he
presumes upon a welcome for candid confession of his thought! Such a
presumption could be created in his soul only by a great magnanimity;
and the evidence of this on his pages sheds a beauty about all his
words.

But he is not an Oedipus. He has guessed; and the riddle awaits another
comer. A science of history he has not established; the direction in
which it lies he has not pointed out; and if Hegel and his precursors
have failed to indicate such a science, the first clear step toward it
remains yet to be taken. And should some majestic genius--for no other
will be sufficient for the task--at length arise to lay hold upon the
facts of man's history, and exercise over them a Newtonian sway, he will
be the last man on the planet to take his initial hint from Auguste
Comte and the "Positive Philosophy." This mud-mountain is indeed
considerably heaped up, but it is a very poor Pisgah nevertheless; for
it is a mountain in a pit, whose top does not rise to an equality with
the broad common levels, far less with the high table-lands and skyward
peaks and summits of intelligence.

RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN.

From Leamington to Stratford-on-Avon the distance is eight or nine
miles, over a road that seemed to me most beautiful. Not that I can
recall any memorable peculiarities; for the country, most of the way, is
a succession of the gentlest swells and subsidences, affording wide and
far glimpses of champaign-scenery here and there, and sinking almost to
a dead level as we draw near Stratford. Any landscape in New England,
even the tamest, has a more striking outline, and besides would have its
blue eyes open in those lakelets that we encounter almost from mile to
mile at home, but of which the Old Country is utterly destitute; or it
would smile in our faces through the medium of those way-side brooks
that vanish under a low stone arch on one side of the road, and sparkle
out again on the other. Neither of these pretty features is often to be
found in an English scene. The charm of the latter consists in the rich
verdure of the fields, in the stately way-side trees and carefully
kept plantations of wood, and in the old and high cultivation that has
humanized the very sods by mingling so much of man's toil and care among
them. To an American there is a kind of sanctity even in an English
turnip-field, when he thinks how long that small square of ground has
been known and recognized as a possession, transmitted from father to
son, trodden often by memorable feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery
by old acquaintanceship with civilized eyes. The wildest things in
England are more than half tame. The trees, for instance, whether in
hedgerow, park, or what they call forest, have nothing wild about them.
They are never ragged; there is a certain decorous restraint in the
freest outspread of their branches, though they spread wider than any
self-nurturing tree; they are tall, vigorous, bulky, with a look of
age-long life, and a promise of more years to come, all of which will
bring them into closer kindred with the race of man. Somebody or other
has known them from the sapling upward; and if they endure long enough,
they grow to be traditionally observed and honored, and connected with
the fortunes of old families, till, like Tennyson's Talking Oak, they
babble with a thousand leafy tongues to ears that can understand them.

An American tree, however, if it could grow in fair competition with an
English one of similar species, would probably be the more picturesque
object of the two. The Warwickshire elm has not so beautiful a shape
as those that overhang our village-street; and as for the redoubtable
English oak, there is a certain John-Bullism in its figure, a compact
rotundity of foliage, a lack of irregular and various outline, that make
it look wonderfully like a gigantic cauliflower. Its leaf, too, is much
smaller than that of most varieties of American oak; nor do I mean
to doubt that the latter, with free leave to grow, reverent care and
cultivation, and immunity from the axe, would live out its centuries
as sturdily as its English brother, and prove far the nobler and more
majestic specimen of a tree at the end of them. Still, however one's
Yankee patriotism may struggle against the admission, it must be owned
that the trees and other objects of an English landscape take hold of
the observer by numberless minute tendrils, as it were, which, look as
closely as we choose, we never find in an American scene. The parasitic
growth is so luxuriant, that the trunk of the tree, so gray and dry in
our climate, is better worth observing than the boughs and foliage; a
verdant mossiness coats it all over, so that it looks almost as green as
the leaves; and often, moreover, the stately stem is clustered about,
high upward, with creeping and twining shrubs, the ivy, and sometimes
the mistletoe, close-clinging friends, nurtured by the moisture and
never too fervid sunshine, and supporting themselves by the old tree's
abundant strength. We call it a parasitical vegetation; but, if the
phrase imply any reproach, it is unkind to bestow it on this beautiful
affection and relationship which exist in England between one order of
plants and another: the strong tree being always ready to give support
to the trailing shrub, lift it to the sun, and feed it out of its own
heart, if it crave such food; and the shrub, on its part, repaying its
foster-father with an ample luxuriance of beauty, and adding Corinthian
grace to the tree's lofty strength. No bitter winter nips these tender
little sympathies, no hot sun burns the life out of them; and therefore
they outlast the longevity of the oak, and, if the woodman permitted,
would bury it in a green grave, when all is over.

Should there be nothing else along the road to look at, an English hedge
might well suffice to occupy the eyes, and, to a depth beyond what he
would suppose, the heart of an American. We often set out hedges in our
own soil, but might as well set out figs or pineapples and expect to
gather fruit of them. Something grows, to be sure, which we choose to
call a hedge; but it lacks the dense, luxuriant variety of vegetation
that is accumulated into the English original, in which a botanist would
find a thousand shrubs and gracious herbs that the hedge-maker never
thought of planting there. Among them, growing wild, are many of the
kindred blossoms of the very flowers which our pilgrim fathers brought
from England, for the sake of their simple beauty and home-like
associations, and which we have ever since been cultivating in gardens.
There is not a softer trait to be found in the character of those stern
men than that they should have been sensible of these flower-roots
clinging among the fibres of their rugged hearts, and have felt the
necessity of bringing them over sea and making them hereditary in the
new land, instead of trusting to what rarer beauty the wilderness might
have in store for them.

Or, if the road-side has no hedge, the ugliest stone fence (such as, in
America, would keep itself bare and unsympathizing till the end of time)
is sure to be covered with the small handiwork of Nature; that careful
mother lets nothing go naked there, and, if she cannot provide clothing,
gives at least embroidery. No sooner is the fence built than she adopts
and adorns it as a part of her original plan, treating the hard,
uncomely construction as if it had all along been a favorite idea of her
own. A little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the side of the low
wall and clinging fast with its many feet to the rough surface; a tuft
of grass roots itself between two of the stones, where a pinch or two of
way-side dust has been moistened into nutritious soil for it; a small
bunch of fern grows in another crevice; a deep, soft, verdant moss
spreads itself along the top and over all the available inequalities of
the fence; and where nothing else will grow, lichens stick tenaciously
to the bare stones and variegate the monotonous gray with hues of yellow
and red. Finally, a great deal of shrubbery clusters along the base of
the stone wall, and takes away the hardness of its outline; and in due
time, as the upshot of these apparently aimless or sportive touches, we
recognize that the beneficent Creator of all things, working through His
handmaiden whom we call Nature, has deigned to mingle a charm of divine
gracefulness even with so earthly an institution as a boundary-fence.
The clown who wrought at it little dreamed what fellow-laborer he had.

The English should send us photographs of portions of the trunks of
trees, the tangled and various products of a hedge, and a square foot of
an old wall.

They can hardly send anything else so characteristic. Their artists,
especially of the later school, sometimes toil to depict such subjects,
but are apt to stiffen the lithe tendrils in the process. The poets
succeed better, with Tennyson at their head, and often produce ravishing
effects by dint of a tender minuteness of touch, to which the genius of
the soil and climate artfully impels them: for, as regards grandeur,
there are loftier scenes in many countries than the best that England
can show; but, for the picturesqueness of the smallest object that
lies under its gentle gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery like it
anywhere.

In the foregoing paragraphs I have strayed away to a long distance from
the road to Stratford-on-Avon; for I remember no such stone fences as I
have been speaking of in Warwickshire, nor elsewhere in England, except
among the Lakes, or in Yorkshire, and the rough and hilly countries to
the north of it. Hedges there were along my road, however, and broad,
level fields, rustic hamlets, and cottages of ancient date,--from the
roof of one of which the occupant was tearing away the thatch, and
showing what an accumulation of dust, dirt, mouldiness, roots of weeds,
families of mice, swallows' nests, and hordes of insects, had been
deposited there since that old straw was new. Estimating its antiquity
from these tokens, Shakspeare himself, in one of his morning rambles out
of his native town, might have seen the thatch laid on; at all events,
the cottage-walls were old enough to have known him as a guest. A few
modern villas were also to be seen, and perhaps there were mansions of
old gentility at no great distance, but hidden among trees; for it is a
point of English pride that such houses seldom allow themselves to be
visible from the high-road. In short, I recollect nothing specially
remarkable along the way, nor in the immediate approach to Stratford;
and yet the picture of that June morning has a glory in my memory, owing
chiefly, I believe, to the charm of the English summer-weather, the
really good days of which are the most delightful that mortal man can
ever hope to be favored with. Such a genial warmth! A little too warm,
it might be, yet only to such a degree as to assure an American (a
certainty to which he seldom attains till attempered to the customary
austerity of an English summer-day) that he was quite warm enough. And
after all, there was an unconquerable freshness in the atmosphere, which
every little movement of a breeze shook over me like a dash of the
ocean-spray. Such days need bring us no other happiness than their
own light and temperature. No doubt, I could not have enjoyed it so
exquisitely, except that there must be still latent in us Western
wanderers (even after an absence of two centuries and more) an
adaptation to the English climate which makes us sensible of a motherly
kindness in its scantiest sunshine, and overflows us with delight at its
more lavish smiles.

The spire of Shakspeare's church--the Church of the Holy Trinity--begins
to show itself among the trees at a little distance from Stratford. Next
we see the shabby old dwellings, intermixed with mean-looking houses
of modern date, and the streets being quite level, you are struck and
surprised by nothing so much as the tameness of the general scene; as
if Shakspeare's genius were vivid enough to have wrought pictorial
splendors in the town where he was born. Here and there, however, a
queer edifice meets your eye, endowed with the individuality that
belongs only to the domestic architecture of times gone by; the house
seems to have grown out of some odd quality in its inhabitant, as a
sea-shell is moulded from within by the character of its inmate; and
having been built in a strange fashion, generations ago, it has ever
since been growing stranger and quainter, as old humorists are apt to
do. Here, too, (as so often impressed me in decayed English towns,)
there appeared to be a greater abundance of aged people wearing
small-clothes and leaning on sticks than you could assemble on our side
of the water by sounding a trumpet and proclaiming a reward for the most
venerable. I tried to account for this phenomenon by several theories:
as, for example, that our new towns are unwholesome for age and kill it
off unseasonably; or that our old men have a subtile sense of fitness,
and die of their own accord rather than live in an unseemly contrast
with youth and novelty: but the secret may be, after all, that
hair-dyes, false teeth, modern arts of dress, and other contrivances of
a skin-deep youthfulness, have not crept into these antiquated English
towns, and so people grow old without the weary necessity of seeming
younger than they are.

After wandering through two or three streets, I found my way to
Shakspeare's birthplace, which is almost a smaller and humbler house
than any description can prepare the visitor to expect; so inevitably
does an august inhabitant make his abode palatial to our imaginations,
receiving his guests, indeed, in a castle in the air, until we unwisely
insist on meeting him among the sordid lanes and alleys of lower earth.
The portion of the edifice with which Shakspeare had anything to do is
hardly large enough, in the basement, to contain the butcher's stall
that one of his descendants kept, and that still remains there,
windowless, with the cleaver-cuts in its hacked counter, which projects
into the street under a little penthouse-roof, as if waiting for a new
occupant. The upper half of the door was open, and, on my rapping at it,
a young person in black made her appearance and admitted me: she was not
a menial, but remarkably genteel (an American characteristic) for an
English girl, and was probably the daughter of the old gentlewoman who
takes care of the house. This lower room has a pavement of gray slabs of
stone, which may have been rudely squared when the house was new, but
are now all cracked, broken, and disarranged in a most unaccountable
way. One does not see how any ordinary usage, for whatever length
of time, should have so smashed these heavy stones; it is as if an
earthquake had burst up through the floor, which afterwards had been
imperfectly trodden down again. The room is whitewashed and very clean,
but wofully shabby and dingy, coarsely built, and such as the most
poetical imagination would find it difficult to idealize. In the rear of
this apartment is the kitchen, a still smaller room, of a similar rude
aspect; it has a great, rough fireplace, with space for a large family
under the blackened opening of the chimney, and an immense passage-way
for the smoke, through which Shakspeare may have seen the blue sky by
day and the stars glimmering down at him by night. It is now a dreary
spot where the long-extinguished embers used to be. A glowing fire, even
if it covered only a quarter part of the hearth, might still do much
towards making the old kitchen cheerful; but we get a depressing idea
of the stifled, poor, sombre kind of life that could have been lived in
such a dwelling, where this room seems to have been the gathering-place
of the family, with no breadth or scope, no good retirement, but old
and young huddling together cheek by jowl. What a hardy plant was
Shakspeare's genius, how fatal its development, since it could not be
blighted in such an atmosphere! It only brought human nature the closer
to him, and put more unctuous earth about his roots.

Thence I was ushered up-stairs to the room in which Shakspeare is
supposed to have been born; though, if you peep too curiously into the
matter, you may find the shadow of an ugly doubt on this, as well as
most other points of his mysterious life. It is the chamber over the
butcher's shop, and is lighted by one broad window containing a great
many small, irregular panes of glass. The floor is made of planks, very
rudely hewn, and fitting together with little neatness; the naked beams
and rafters, at the sides of the room and overhead, bear the original
marks of the builder's broad-axe, with no evidence of an attempt
to smooth off the job. Again we have to reconcile ourselves to the
smallness of the space inclosed by these illustrious walls,--a
circumstance more difficult to accept, as regards places that we
have heard, read, thought, and dreamed much about, than any other
disenchanting particular of a mistaken ideal. A few paces--perhaps seven
or eight--take us from end to end of it. So low it is, that I
could easily touch the ceiling, and might have done so without a
tiptoe-stretch, had it been a good deal higher; and this humility of
the chamber has tempted a vast multitude of people to write their
names overhead in pencil. Every inch of the side-walls, even into the
obscurest nooks and corners, is covered with a similar record; all the
window-panes, moreover, are scrawled with diamond-signatures, among
which is said to be that of Walter Scott; but so many persons have
sought to immortalize themselves in close vicinity to his name that I
really could not trace him out. Methinks it is strange that people
do not strive to forget their forlorn little identities, in such
situations, instead of thrusting them forward into the dazzle of a great
renown, where, if noticed, they cannot but be deemed impertinent.

This room, and the entire house, so far as I saw it, are whitewashed and
exceedingly clean; nor is there the aged, musty smell with which old
Chester first made me acquainted, and which goes far to cure an American
of his excessive predilection for antique residences. An old lady,
who took charge of me up-stairs, had the manners and aspect of a
gentlewoman, and talked with somewhat formidable knowledge and
appreciative intelligence about Shakspeare. Arranged on a table and in
chairs were various prints, views of houses and scenes connected with
Shakspeare's memory, together with editions of his works and local
publications about his home and haunts, from the sale of which this
respectable lady perhaps realizes a handsome profit. At any rate, I
bought a good many of them, conceiving that it might be the civillest
way of requiting her for her instructive conversation and the trouble
she took in showing me the house. It cost me a pang (not a curmudgeonly,
but a gentlemanly one) to offer a downright fee to the lady-like girl
who had admitted me; but I swallowed my delicate scruples with some
little difficulty, and she digested hers, so far as I could observe,
with no difficulty at all. In fact, nobody need fear to hold out half
a crown to any person with whom he has occasion to speak a word in
England.

I should consider it unfair to quit Shakspeare's house without the frank
acknowledgment that I was conscious of not the slightest emotion while
viewing it, nor any quickening of the imagination. This has often
happened to me in my visits to memorable places. Whatever pretty and
apposite reflections I may have made upon the subject had either
occurred to me before I ever saw Stratford, or have been elaborated
since. It is pleasant, nevertheless, to think that I have seen the
place; and I believe that I can form a more sensible and vivid idea of
Shakspeare as a flesh-and-blood individual now that I have stood on the
kitchen-hearth and in the birth-chamber; but I am not quite certain that
this power of realization is altogether desirable in reference to a
great poet. The Shakspeare whom I met there took various guises, but had
not his laurel on. He was successively the roguish boy,--the youthful
deer-stealer,--the comrade of players,--the too familiar friend of
Davenant's mother,--the careful, thrifty, thriven man of property, who
came back from London to lend money on bond, and occupy the best house
in Stratford,--the mellow, red-nosed, autumnal boon-companion of John a'
Combe, who (or else the Stratford gossips belied him) met his death by
tumbling into a ditch on his way home from a drinking-bout, and left his
second-best bed to his poor wife. I feel, as sensibly as the reader can,
what horrible impiety it is to remember these things, be they true or
false. In either case, they ought to vanish out of sight on the distant
ocean-line of the past, leaving a pure, white memory, even as a sail,
though perhaps darkened with many stains, looks snowy white on the far
horizon. But I draw a moral from these unworthy reminiscences and this
embodiment of the poet, as suggested by some of the grimy actualities of
his life. It is for the high interests of the world not to insist upon
finding out that its greatest men are, in a certain lower sense, very
much the same kind of men as the rest of us, and often a little worse;
because a common mind cannot properly digest such a discovery, nor ever
know the true proportion of the great man's good and evil, nor how small
a part of him it was that touched our muddy or dusty earth. Thence comes
moral bewilderment, and even intellectual loss, in regard to what is
best of him. When Shakspeare invoked a curse on the man who should stir
his bones, he perhaps meant the larger share of it for him or them who
should pry into his perishing earthliness, the defects or even the
merits of the character that he wore in Stratford, when he had left
mankind so much to muse upon that was imperishable and divine. Heaven
keep me from incurring any part of the anathema in requital for the
irreverent sentences above written!

From Shakspeare's house, the nest step, of course, is to visit his
burial-place. The appearance of the church is most venerable and
beautiful, standing amid a great green shadow of lime-trees, above which
rises the spire, while the Gothic battlements and buttresses and vast
arched windows are obscurely seen through the boughs. The Avon loiters
past the church-yard, an exceedingly sluggish river, which might seem
to have been considering which way it should flow ever since Shakspeare
left off paddling in it and gathering the large forget-me-nots that grow
among its flags and water-weeds.

An old man in small-clothes was waiting at the gate; and inquiring
whether I wished to go in, he preceded me to the church-porch, and
rapped. I could have done it quite as effectually for myself; but, it
seems, the old people of the neighborhood haunt about the church-yard,
in spite of the frowns and remonstrances of the sexton, who grudges them
the half-eleemosynary sixpence which they sometimes get from visitors.
I was admitted into the church by a respectable-looking and intelligent
man in black, the parish-clerk, I suppose, and probably holding a richer
incumbency than his vicar, if all the fees which he handles remain in
his own pocket. He was already exhibiting the Shakspeare monuments to
two or three visitors, and several other parties came in while I was
there.

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