STRATFORD-ON-AVON

To read the works of a great master of letters, or to study the art of a great painter, without some first-hand knowledge of the country in which each lived and from which each gathered his earliest inspiration, is to court an incomplete impression. It is in the light of a life story and its setting, however slight our knowledge, that creative work tends to assume proper proportions. It is in the surroundings of the author that we find the key to the creation. For, as Gray has pointed out in his “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard,” there are many in the dust and silence whose hands “the rod of Empire might have swayed, or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.”

We know that it is not enough to have the creative force dormant in the mind; environment must be favourable to its development, or it will sleep too long. We see in the briefest survey of the lives of the poet, the statesman, the soldier and the artist, that there are many great ones who would have been greater still were it not that then, as now, “man is one and the fates are three.”

To study the life history of a man and to consider its setting is to understand why he succeeded and how he came to fail, and our wonder at his success will not be lessened when we find that some simple event, favourable or untoward, was the deciding factor in a great life. The hour brings the man, but circumstances mould him and chance leads him to the fore, unless it be true that “there’s a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.” In our own time we have seen how the greatest empire-builder of Victorian history, Cecil John Rhodes, came into prominence because he was sent to South Africa for the cure of weak lungs. And, looking back to the life and times of William Shakespeare, who has summed up for so many of his fellow-countrymen, and still more strangers, the whole philosophy of life, we shall see that he became articulate through what he may have reasonably regarded as mischance.

Out in the autumn fields, the pigeon and the squirrel, to say nothing of other birds and beasts, hunt for acorns to eat or store. On the road to roost or storehouse many are dropped. Of these no small number fall on waste ground; a few take root, only to be overgrown or destroyed before they reach the beginnings of strength. But here and there an acorn drops on favourable soil; the rich earth nourishes it; the germ, when it has lived on all the store within the shell, can gather its future needs from the ground. Little roots and fibres pierce the soil; a green twig rises to seek the sun; there are long years of silent precarious growth, and then the sapling stage is passed and a young tree sends countless leaves to draw nourishment from air and sky. Following this comes the time when no storm can uproot the tree that a hungry rabbit might have destroyed in days past something has come to complete maturity and has developed all the possibilities that were equally latent in so many million acorns to which growth was denied. As it is with plants, so it is with men, and thus it becomes permissible to compare literature with a forest wherein are so many trees, so many saplings, and so much dense undergrowth, from which trees of worth and beauty may one day spring. In our national forest there is an oak that first saw life in the year 1564. There are many older trees of splendid worth, but this is the one which stands alone. What manner of soil nourished it? Whence came its strength? This little work is a brief attempt to set the well-known answer down again in a form that may offer a certain convenience in point of size and selection to lovers of a great poet.

When we read Shakespeare’s plays for the first time, it is at once apparent that the poet was a countryman. He has the knowledge, founded upon close observation, that we associate with the highly intelligent dweller in the countryside, the man or woman from whom the poet differs merely in his supreme capacity for expression. We turn again to his scenes of city life to find he is no less at home there. It is quite another world, but he has fathomed it; quite another company of men, but he has gauged their strength and weakness, the pathos and humour of their lives. He deals with rulers and courts, and his touch is as sure and faithful as before; his genius has taught him that kings and queens are men and women like the rest of us, that environment cannot alter fundamental characteristics, that royalty is swayed by the same forces that rule the lives of lesser men.

Only when he deals with foreigners the poet of Avon is often an unconscious humorist, for his store of geography is inadequate to meet the small demands upon it, and some of his simple errors, such as “the seashore of Bohemia,” excite our kindly laughter now. But it is easy to see that the poet’s habit of accurate observation was established in the country and that he applied to the larger life of London the self-taught methods he had acquired in the little town of his birth.

It is on this account that the minds of his admirers turn to Stratford-on-Avon, and the footsteps of enthusiasts are directed, year in, year out, to the pleasant county of Warwickshire. In and around Stratford we can keep company with the poet in his earliest and latest days; nor can the bustling crowds of tourists from all parts, the clamour of innkeepers and coach-drivers, the ever-present determination to turn a national genius to profitable account, stir our deep content. Men and public places have changed, but the country is as it was when William Shakespeare, poor and little known, was gathering the stores of knowledge and habit of thought that were to lift him to heights no following Englishman has scaled.

The wayfarer coming into Stratford for the first time to pay his mute tribute to the poet who seems destined to live as long as our civilisation, will enjoy a pleasant impression if he chance to have chosen a fine day and to have reached the town by the road. Stratford lies on the right bank of the river Avon, a beautiful river whose waters flow peacefully over the level land on their way from Naseby to the Severn. The town was happily planned of old time, and owed its inception to the establishment of a monastery shortly after the Anglo-Saxon began to take an interest in Christianity. It is clear that Stratford enjoyed three centuries of comparative peace, if not of substantial progress, before Norman William and Saxon Harold met at Senlac; echoes of that fray could not have pierced to the little town on Avon’s banks. Nor have the subsequent centuries done much to disturb its natural seclusion.

The hand of the builder has raised streets of prosperous shops and new-built villas; small hotels abound; there is a bustling railway and a sleepy canal. A Memorial Theatre overlooks the river, and cyclists pass, not singly but in battalions, along peaceful roads leading to Birmingham or Warwick. Throughout the summer season Stratford-on-Avon becomes a metropolis “whereunto the tribes of men assemble.” To “do Stratford” is an article of faith with American visitors, even if they have no more than a week in which to master the wonders of Great Britain and Ireland. Germany sends many admirers, for nowhere is Shakespeare’s genius more widely recognised, more highly esteemed, than in that country. London and the big midland towns of England send visitors daily.

Let it be suggested, with all due respect to those who think otherwise, that there is no reward for those who seek to discover Shakespeare’s land in the course of a few hours’ hurried travel. They will see Shakespeare’s alleged birthplace, and the room in which he is said, without much authority, to have been born. They will pass through the Museum, Library, and Picture Gallery; they may even admire the rather poor monument in Holy Trinity Church, and perhaps a few other sights that the town affords; and then, with a welter of confused impressions, will return whence they came. There is no reward for this frenzied exercise; it is impossible to gather any impression of the scenes in which the poet passed his early and later days, from a hurried scamper through the town and a frank acceptance of local traditions, concerning which some of our leading Shakespearian scholars have much destructive critical comment to offer. He who wishes to establish some manner of association with the poet must enter Stratford as the poet left it by the road. He should leave the railway and walk in from Warwick, find quiet lodgings, of which there is no lack, in the town, and visit in turn the highways and by-ways of Stratford, Snitterfield, Wilmcote, Aston Clinton, Shottery, Wotten Wawens, Charlecote, and a dozen other points of interest, of which he will learn when he has definitely left the ranks of excursionists and has made friends among the people of Shakespeare’s countryside. He will not add a jot to our knowledge of country or people a hundred pens have said all there is to say but he will come away with a measure of appreciation and recognition that will make the significance of the poet, as an interpreter of a life that never changes, far more vital and true. Here is no small reward for a truly delightful holiday in country full of the best traditions of rural England. And the intelligent visitor will be one with the great lovers of Shakespeare, living and dead, from Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, and Milton down to Matthew Arnold and our own contemporaries, even though his contribution to the poet’s praise be no more than a little note in a private diary. His journey will open a fresh field of literary research, if he be not already a student of Elizabethan literature. He will be enrolled on the long and unexhausted list of pilgrims to the shrine of the country’s greatest poet, the man whose thoughts have lost nothing of their depth and beauty in the slow passage of three eventful centuries.