Delphi complete works of.., p.992
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 992
Among the fanaticisms or enthusiasms which flourished among our people, none was more striking than that which moved the Woman’s Temperance Crusade in Hillsborough, Highland County, in 1873. Under the influence of a fervent speaker, who told how the women of his native village in New England had joined in beseeching the liquor sellers of the place to give up their traffic, a hundred and fifty ladies of Hillsborough banded together and went about to the different saloons, entreating their owners not to sell strong drink any more. By day and by night, in wet and in cold, through menace and insult, they kept up their effort the whole winter long. Where the dealer was very obstinate, they knelt down at his door, and prayed and sang till he yielded. After the crusade ended, the liquor selling began again, but though it seemed to have done little good, yet it is said that there has been far less drunkenness in the region than before, and public opinion was roused to enforce the laws against liquor selling. Among the crusaders were some of the first ladies of the neighborhood, and good women emulated their efforts in several other places.
I am willing to leave the reader with the impression that the people of Ohio are that sort of idealists who have the courage of their dreams. By this courage they have made the best of them come true, and it is well for them in their mainly matter-of-fact and practical character that they show themselves at times enthusiasts and even fanatics. It is not ill for them that they should now and then have been mistaken. This has helped to keep them modest in the midst of their prosperity, and their eminence in saving and governing the union of these states. Such as they are, they seem to me, historically, the first of the Americans. The whole country on the eastward characterized them, and they, more than the people of any other state, have perpetuated and imparted their character to the whole country on the westward.
SEEN AND UNSEEN AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON
A FANTASY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
SEEN AND UNSEEN AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON
CHAPTER I
WE lingered amidst the pleasant avenues and crescents of Cheltenham, chiefly taken with the stately old-fashioned Parade, where, overlooking a Roman fountain, we found an American roof-garden. That is, it called itself a roof-garden, but it was silent about being American, and was really a canopied tea-room, only one flight up from the sidewalk instead of twenty stories; the fountain did not say it was Roman, but it was of a lavish spilth, and tumbled over marble shelves among mythological men and beasts, and so was Roman enough for us. A pleasant wind lifted the leaves up and down the Parade, where we did not mind the repair of the roadway going on with stone-breakers breaking stone, and a steamroller steam-rolling the pieces into a tarry bed. We could go away from the roof-garden tea-room when we liked, and walk or drive among the lawned and embowered mansions and lodges and villas, and educational establishments for both sexes, and think of our last King, our poor George the Third, who, though he alienated our affections, discovered the virtues of the medicinal waters of Cheltenham, and established the pleasant resort in a favor long since faded, but all the fitter for the retired Indian officers who now mostly dwell there, and apter to their strictly measured means. We did not personally verify the fact of their residence, for they were away on their holidays, as Englishmen always are at the beginning of August; but there were the large handsome houses of Georgian architecture, and we easily persuaded ourselves that they lived in these when they were at home.
In other words, we were so glad of Cheltenham by day and by night that we doubted very much whether we should hurry on to Stratford-on-Avon for the Shakespearean Festivals, held there throughout the month, on the brink of whose Bank Holiday we trembled. It seemed to us that we could do much better staying in Cheltenham, say a fortnight, with that Roman fountain and American roof-garden for our solace every day, and then go to Stratford; and the very last night of our stay we almost thought we should spend our whole August there, running over to Stratford for certain plays and coming back. What brought us to this conditional decision was our pleasure in the open-air performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the park under the stars and the stir of leaves overhead, with the fine shiver of the natural and artificial bushes which the actors went and came through. They were very good actors, or at least as good as we deserved, both men and women; and the children that danced bare-legged and gauze-winged as fairies were adorable in that moment when the lovely English children are hesitating about growing plainer instead of simply growing older. We spectators were not in multitude, but we were fairly many, and we seemed to be fairly good society. We were very willing to be pleased with the playing, and we clapped handsomely at any chance, and so almost unanimously that I was a little vexed by the reticence of two gentlemen who sat directly in front of us and whom I was disposed to wish away at first. But as the time passed I forgot my grievance with them, if it was a grievance, and began to be interested in their peculiar interest in the performance, which they did not hide from me so much as I expected. They were of fairly good height, but one was much bulkier than the other and he seemed somehow of a cheerfuler make, though I imagined this rather from his carriage than from any expression of his face, which, in fact, I could not see at once. They both wore, or appeared to wear, the fashions of a West End tailor; they had on very-well-cut lounge suits, such as Englishmen almost live in when they are not on social duty and may indulge themselves in the excess of informality which the most formal of nations then likes to abandon itself to. But as the time passed their dress seemed to change, in a manner I hardly know how to describe, to something not old-fashioned but out-fashioned. Broad flat collars grew about their necks in place of the limp turn-down outing affairs they had worn; their jackets were replaced by slashed doublets of velvet; their trousers, slightly pegtop, turned to trunk hose. But what was more puzzling was an effect of luminous transparency which their persons now presented. I found that so far from incommoding me by their interposition between me and the play, I could see it none the worse but all the better for their presence, just as I could hear the actors more clearly, or more intelligently, for the talk which the two kept up pretty constantly. I cannot yet quite account for this curious fact (whether it was an illusion or not, I hope it remains a fact of my experience) and I give it to the reader for what it is worth. They sat rather silently through the opening passages of the play, where the lovers were having their misadventures contrived for them, but became restive, both of them, in that long, long scene where Bottom and Snug and Starveling and their brother mechanicals tediously rehearse their parts for the interlude which they are to play before the Duke.
At the end of it the slighter of my neighbors leaned toward the other and said, “It always seemed to me that this was one of the places where you fell down.”
“I know,” the stout gentleman acknowledged. “But,” he said, “it always got a laugh.”
“From the groundlings.”
“From her Grace herself.”
“The taste of her Grace was not always to be trusted. In matters of humor, of fun, it was a little gross, no? A little rank?”
“She certainly had a gust for the high-flavored in anecdote; but I don’t know that this scene is exactly of that sort. Coom to think of it, Oi—”
“Coom? Oi?” the other challenged.
“Come and I, Oi mane,” the stout gentleman owned with a laugh. “I do forget my London accent mostly, now that I’ve got permanently back to my Warwickshire; it’s so easy; after a language a dialect is like slippers after tight shoes. But what I mane — mean — is that I think these mechanicals are fairly decent; much more than they would have been in life. Her Grace would have relished what they would really have said, with the loves of Pyramus and Thisbe for a theme, if I had let them give way to their sprightly fancy without restraint; they had to be held up with a strong hand at times.” The comfortable gentleman laughed with a pleasure his companion apparently did not share, though, I fancied, less from a hurt moral sense than from a natural gravity.
“I never liked your bringing such fellows in as you often were doing. They are beneath the dignity of the drama. If you had taken my advice you would certainly have left the Gravedigger out of ‘Hamlet’; and your Touchstone and Audrey — I suppose you’ll say they always got a laugh, too. And that fat rascal Falstaff, and that drunken Bardolph, and that swaggering blackguard Pistol — I never could suffer them, though I suffered enough from them.” He laughed as at a neat point he had made, and then lapsed into what appeared a habit of melancholy.
“I won’t save myself from you behind Nature’s farthingale,” the other said, gently, “and I’ll own that these fellows here are not so amusing as I once thought them. The fashion of fun changes. I’ve heard that Mark Twain used to say my humor made him want to cry; perhaps in a century or two I shall have my revenge. But now, this scene of Hermia and Helena and their lovers in the forest here, I call that rather nice — their jealous fury, I mean; it has its pathos, too, I think.”
“I don’t deny it,” the gloomier gentleman said. “But I’m not sure I like the passions painted quite so nakedly. I should have preferred a more veiled presentment of these ladies’ hate as well as love. But it’s good, very good, very good indeed; or, as we used to say, very excellent good. Ah! That was well done of Hermia!”
“Yes,” the stout gentleman sighed, acquiescing, “I never saw it done quite so well in my time, when we had boys for the part.”
He put a certain stress on the word time, as playing upon it, and the other returned in like humor: “Yes; eternity has its compensations, and actresses are of them, though one wouldn’t always think so. They’re certainly better than those beardless boys of your time.”
The stout gentleman laughed dutifully, and the two went on concurrently with the play in their talk.
The play was a good deal cut, as I thought to its advantage, and I began to hope we should escape the scene of Pyramus and Thisbe: it did seem too much to have it after the rehearsal; and the rest was so charming. But we were not to escape so lightly. Bottom and the rest came on in due course, and I wondered how I should live through the joke. Suddenly I started, as if from sleep, and found that I really had been drowsing.
This will not seem so incredible if I allege that not very long before I had slept through a séance at the dentist’s in Boston, while he filled a tooth for me with the delicate skill of American dentists. Any one who can believe this will not doubt that I was saved from that tedious scene by Nature’s anesthetic, and that I stood up greatly refreshed, as if the operation had been entirely successful.
The wind that was still lightly fingering the leaves seemed to have grown a little chillier, and a thin cloud had blown over the stars. The people were streaming away from the seats; the scene looked all the emptier for the want of a curtain to hide its hollowness.
“Did you notice what became of those two men in front of us?” I asked. “Or which way they went?”
“What two men in front of us?” it was replied; and I began to think I had invented them in the swift dream I must have had during my life-saving nap. I suppose the reader has guessed at the identity of one of them, and I could have done so myself if I had not been rigidly principled against ever guessing in England about anything; it so unmistakably marks you for an American, and if you are trying to pass for English it is so defeating.
I said no more about the strange companions, but I declared that while I appeared to have been sleeping (as I was now promptly accused of doing) I had been thinking the whole problem over, and had decided that we had better not try to do the August rites of Stratford-on-Avon from Cheltenham, but go at once and settle in that town, and seize whatever advantages propinquity offered for enjoyment. As nobody objected I began to have some doubts of my decision; but after rather a poor night, and some very disappointing coffee at breakfast, I held firmly to it. I was all the firmer in it when I found that the head porter at our hotel had sent us to the station to take a train which did not go; I then felt that we must leave Cheltenham, even if it was not for Stratford. The railway porter who labeled our baggage for Stratford said that the first train leaving before five-forty was a motor-train, which left at three-thirty. I tried to make him tell me what a motor-train was, and he did his best, but fell back upon a solid ground of fact in assuring me that I should see.
CHAPTER II
WHEN I did see the motor-train I was richly content with it, and more content as time (a good deal of time) went on. The train was formed of one long car, with a smoking and a baggage compartment at the forward end, the rest opening airily into a saloon with seats on each side, as in our pleasant day-coaches at home. We had tried in vain to buy first-class tickets, and now we had all this delight at third-class rates, which alone are recognized on motor-trains. We slipped sleekly out of Cheltenham, which tried to detain us at two suburban stations (halts, such stops are called on the motor route), and sleekly ran through the grain-fields and meadow-lands and broad-bean patches, where the yellowing wheat stood dense, hanging its blond heads, and the haycocks covered the ground almost as thickly as the unfallen stems, and the lentils blackened in innumerable sheaves, and all the landscape stretched away in dreamy levels to a low horizon, where the afternoon hid them in its mellow mists. There were so few people in the car that we could change from side to side and seat to seat, and when we had done with the landscape we could give ourselves to conjecture of our fellow-passengers. Two of these were ladies, each reading a copy of The Nation (the London, not the New York one), and I tried my best to make out from it who and what they were, but I had arrived at no more than the conclusion that they were persons of intellectual as well as social quality, when they rose together from the place where they were sitting and left the car at I forget just what halt. I followed them with famishing curiosity, but when the train started again I was obliged to try doing what I could with their vacant places.
Then I found that their places were not really vacant, but were taken by the companions who had sat together in front of us at the open-air theater the night before. I was glad to note that by daylight they seemed more substantial than they had looked in the glare of the electric-lamps. It was as if they had chosen to put off whatever had been apparitional about them, and to be plain middle-aged Englishmen of comfortable condition. I observed that the stouter of the two now wore a Norfolk jacket, with knickerbockers and low tan shoes, as if he chose to do something more rustic in his dress than the other, who was dressed as if he had just come down from the waning season in London, and had not yet got into his outing things. I fancied that in this effect he was choosing not to be mixed up in anybody’s mind with the Bank-Holiday makers, who were already swarming over the country, and were giving every outward token of having a whole three days off; for it was Saturday afternoon, and Monday would be the great day of all. There was something less than kind in his melancholy, and yet I could not have said that he looked so much unkind as reserved in the bearing by which each of us declares his habitual feeling toward others. It was as if he were not precisely offended by the existence of common men, but incommoded; they kept him not perhaps from thinking of himself, but from thinking of things infinitely more important to him than they were. I was most struck with this sort of aloofness from his species, this philosophic abstraction, when at our coming to Broadway his companion spoke of the different artists who had first colonized the place. I had never been there, but it was dear to me because my chief association with it was the memory of a many-gifted friend who might have been almost any sort of artist, but chose mainly to be a painter till the sea engulfed him with the others that went down in the Titanic. I wondered if I should perhaps see the house where that dear, sunny-eyed F. M. lived, not mattering that I should not know it if I did see it; and I fancied a curious sympathy with my mood in the gayer of the companions which was absent from the gloomier one. It was not so much that he did not care, as that he could not; his thoughts were fixed on those abstractions in which he was himself the center and the sole concrete. I thought that if I had told the first about my friendship with the bright spirit so tragically quenched he would have understood, and would have said, perhaps, the fittingest thing that could be said. But as it was I could only catch a phrase or two of the talk which I tried to eavesdrop, and heard such words as “one of among the many lovely Rosalinds,” and “beautiful young American actress,” who had come to England, but soon married off the stage, and now lived the genius of that place. It did not seem to interest the other, who remained fallen in a sort of bitter muse, till we reached the station where we changed from our pleasant, roomy motor to the crowded express. The porter ran far forward along the train before he could find places for us, and he had so much difficulty that we began to hope he would be obliged to put us into a first-class compartment with our third-class tickets, when he got seats of the right grade of our transportation, and we rode the rest of the way to Stratford in a car so near the locomotive that it was blind with the smoke and choking with the coal-gas.
