11. CHAPTER XI.
CHARLECOTE.
Once more posting through Shottery and Stratford-on-Avon,
on the road to Kenilworth and Warwick, I
felt a pleasure in becoming an habitué in Shakspere's
town — in being recognised by the Stratford post-boys,
known at the Stratford inn, and remembered at the
toll-gates. It is pleasant to be welcomed by name
anywhere; but at Stratford-on-Avon, it is a recognition
by those whose fathers or predecessors were the
companions of Shakspere's frolics. Every fellow in
a slouched hat — every idler on a tavern bench — every
saunterer with a dog at his heels on the highway —
should be a deer-stealer from Charlecote. You would
almost ask him, “Was Will Shakspere with you last
night?”
The Lucys still live at Charlecote, immortalized
by a varlet poacher who was tried before old Sir
Thomas for stealing a buck. They have drawn an
apology from Walter Savage Landor for making too
free with the family history, under cover of an imaginary
account of the trial. I thought, as we drove
along in sight of the fine old hall, with its broad park
and majestic trees — very much as it stood in the
days of Sir Thomas, I believe — that most probably
the descendants of the old justice look even now upon
Shakspere more as an offender against the game-laws
than as a writer of immortal plays. I venture to say,
it would be had tact in a visiter to Charlecote to felicitate
the family on the honor of possessing a park in
which Shakspere had stolen deer — to show more interest
in seeing the hall in which he was tried than in
the family portraits.
On the road which I was travelling (from Stratford
to Charlecote) Shakspere had been dragged as a culprit.
What were his feelings before Sir Thomas!
He felt, doubtless, as every possessor of the divine fire
of genius must feel, when brought rudely in contact
with his fellow-men, that he was too much their superior
to be angry. The humor in which he has drawn
Justice Shallow proves abundantly that he was more
amused then displeased with his own trial. But was
there no vexation at the moment? A reflection, it
might be, from the estimate of his position in the
minds of those who were about him — who looked on
him simply as a stealer of so much venison. Did he
care for Anne Hathaway's opinion then?
How little did Sir Thomas Lucy understand the
relation between judge and culprit on that trial! How
little did he dream he was sitting for his picture to the
pestilent varlet at the bar; that the deer-stealer could
better afford to forgive him than he the deer-stealer!
Genius forgives, or rather forgets, all wrongs done in
ignorance of its immortal presence. Had Ben Jonson
made a wilful jest on a line in his new play, it would
have rankled longer than fine and imprisonment for
deer-stealing. Those who crowd back and trample
upon men of genius in the common walk of life; who
cheat them, misrepresent them, take advantage of their
inattention or their generosity in worldly matters, are
sometimes surprised how their injuries, if not themselves,
are forgotten. Old Adam Woodcock might
as well have held malice against Roland Græme for
the stab in the stuffed doublet of the Abbot of Misrule.
Yet, as I might have remarked in the paragraph
gone before, it is probably not easy to put conscious
and secret superiority entirely between the mind and
the opinions of those around who think differently.
It is one reason why men of genius love more than
the common share of solitude — to recover self-respect.
In the midst of the amusing travesty he was drawing
in his own mind of the grave scene about him, Shakspere
possibly felt at moments as like a detected culprit
as he seemed to the gamekeeper and the justice. It
is a small penalty to pay for the after worship of the
world! The ragged and proverbially ill-dressed
peasants who are selected from the whole campagna,
as models to the sculptors of Rome, care little what
is thought of their good looks in the Corso. The
disguised proportions beneath their rags will be admired
in deathless marble, when the noble who scarce
deigns their possessor a look will lie in forgotten dust
under his stone scutcheon.
