The Last Leaf Part 2

He fell wounded at Chancellorsville, and while being carried off the field was struck a second time as he lay on the stretcher, and so he pa.s.sed.

There were fine fellows, too, in those days who stood on the other side: McKim, President of the Hasty Pudding Club, who fell in Virginia; W.H.F. Lee, who was in the Law School and whom I recall as a stalwart athlete rowing on the Charles. It helped me much a few years ago when I visited many Southern battle-fields that I could tell old Confederates "Rooney" Lee and I had in our youth been college mates.

My cla.s.smate J.B. Clark of Mississippi was a graceful magnetic fellow who had small basis of scholars.h.i.+p, perhaps, but a marked power for effective utterance. He fascinated us by his warm Southern fluency, and we gave him at last the highest distinction we could confer, the cla.s.s oration. He left us then and we did not see him for fifty years.

He enlisted in the 21st Mississippi and pa.s.sed through the roughest hards.h.i.+ps and perils. We felt afterwards that he held coldly aloof from us through long years. At our jubilee, however, he came back wrinkled and white-haired, but quite recognisable as the fascinating boy of fifty years before. He had a long and good record behind him as an officer of the University of Texas, and we gave him reason to think that we loved him still. The most cordial meetings I have ever known have been those between men who had fought each other bitterly, each with an honest conviction that he was in the right, but who at last have come out on common ground.

Among the Harvard soldiers three stand out in my thought as especially interesting, William Francis Bartlett, Charles Russell Lowell, and Francis Channing Barlow. Bartlett was younger than I, entering service when scarcely beyond boyhood, losing a leg at Ball's Bluff, and when only twenty-three Colonel of the 49th Ma.s.sachusetts. I remember well a beautiful night, the moon at the full, and the hospital on the river bank just below Port Hudson where hundreds of wounded men were arriving from a disastrous battle-field close at hand.

Bartlett had ridden into battle on horseback, his one leg making it impossible for him to go on foot, and he was a conspicuous mark for the sharpshooters. A ball had pa.s.sed through his remaining foot, and still another through his arm, causing painful wounds to which he was forced to yield. He lay stretched out, a tall, slender figure with a clear-cut patrician face, very pale and still but with every sign of suffering stoically repressed. He was conscious as I stood for a moment at his side. It was not a time to speak even a word, but I hoped he might feel through some occult influence that a Harvard brother was there at hand, full of sympathy for him. He afterwards recovered in part, and, with unconquerable will, though he was only a fragment of a man, went in again and was still again stricken. He survived it all, and to me it was perhaps the most thrilling incident of the Harvard commemoration of 1865 to see Bartlett, too crippled to walk without their support, helped to a place of honour on the stage by reverent friends.

Charles Russell Lowell was in the cla.s.s preceding mine; his father had been my father's cla.s.smate, and had done me many a favour; his mother was Mrs. Anna Jackson Lowell, one of the best and ablest Boston women of her time. In her house I had been a guest. Charles and James, the sons, were youths of the rarest intellectual gifts, each first scholar of his cla.s.s, of whom the utmost was expected. How strange that fate should have made them soldiers! They both perished on the battle-field. As I remember Charlie Lowell, the boy was fitly the father of the man. We were playing football one day on the Delta, the old-fas.h.i.+oned game of those days, at which modern athletes smile, but which we old fellows think was a good tough game for all that. I had secured the ball, and thinking I had time, placed it rather leisurely, promising myself an effective kick. A slight figure bounded with lightning rush from the opposing line, and from under my very foot drove the ball far behind me to a point which secured victory.

How little I knew that I had just witnessed a small exhibition of the quickness and prompt decision which no long time after on critical battle-fields were to be put to splendid use. He proved to be a nearly perfect soldier; Sheridan said of him, that he knew of no virtue that could be added to Lowell. To us he seems one of the manliest of men, thoughtful for others, even for dumb beasts. In Edward Emerson's charming life of him, nothing, perhaps, is sweeter than his affection for his horses, of which it was said that thirteen were killed under him before he came to death himself. He studied their characters as if they had been human beings, and dwells in his letters on the particular lovable traits each one showed--these mute companions who stood so closely by him in life and death.

When our cla.s.s first a.s.sembled in 1851 there was a slight boy of seventeen in the company, Francis Channing Barlow. He was inconspicuous through face or figure, but it early became clear that he was to be our first scholar, and a wayward deportment with an odd sardonic wit soon made him an object of interest. Barlow came admirably fitted, and this good preparation, standing back of great quickness and power of mind, made it easy for him almost without study to take a leading place. As a boy he was well grounded, outside of his special accomplishments, in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. I remember his telling me that his mother read Plutarch to him when he was a child, and that and many another good book he had thoroughly stored away. Such accomplishments were an exasperation to us poor fellows who had come in from the remote outskirts and found we must compete for honours with men so well equipped. We perhaps magnified the gifts and acquirements of the fellows who had been more favourably placed.

Barlow seemed like a paragon of scholars.h.i.+p, and the nonchalance with which he always won in the cla.s.srooms was a constant marvel. He had a queer way of turning serious things into fun. With a freshman desire for self-improvement, a thing apt to evaporate in the college atmosphere, we had formed a society for grave writing and debate and hired for our meetings the lodge-room of the "Glorious Apollers" or some such organisation. At an early meeting of the society, while we were solemnly struggling through a dignified programme, Barlow suddenly appeared from a side-door rigged out most fantastically in plumes and draperies. He had somehow got hold of the regalia of the order and drawlingly announced himself as the great panjandrum who had come to take part. He danced and paraded before the conclave and had no difficulty in turning the session into a wild revel of extravagant guffaws and antics, and after that time the occasions were many when Barlow gave a comic turn to things serious. It was said that Barlow, going back and forth on the train between Concord and Boston as he did at one time, got hold of an impressionable brake-man, and by exhortation brought about in him a change of heart, after the most approved evangelical manner, counterfeiting perfectly the methods of a revivalist, which he did for the fun of the thing. The story, of course, was an invention, but quite in character.

He was no respecter of conventions and sometimes trod ruthlessly upon proprieties. "What will Barlow do next?" was always the question. In the cla.s.s-room he was never rattled in any emergency, his really sound scholars.h.i.+p was always perfectly in hand and in a strait no one could bluff it with such _sang-froid_ and audacity. He kept his place at the head of the cla.s.s to the very end, but there Robert Treat Paine came out precisely his equal. Among the many thousand marks acc.u.mulating through four years the total for both men was exactly alike--a thing which I believe has never happened before or since.

Before the a.r.s.enal in Cambridge stood an innocent old cannon that had not been fired since the War of 1812, perhaps not since the Revolution. The gra.s.s and flowers grew about its silent muzzle, and lambs might have fed there as in the pretty picture of Landseer.

Any thought that the old cannon could go off had long ceased to be entertained. One quiet night a tremendous explosion took place; the cannon had waked up from its long sleep, arousing the babies over a wide region and many a pane of gla.s.s was s.h.i.+vered. What had got into the old cannon that night was long a mystery. Many years after Barlow was discovered at the bottom of it--it was the first shot he ever fired.

Dr. James Walker, the college president, said to a friend of mine at the beginning of the war, speculating on the probable futures of the boys who had been under his care, "There's Barlow, now he'll go in and come out at the top." Barlow had been a sad puzzle to the faculty, good men, often perplexed to know what to do with him or what would become of him. Dr. Walker's astuteness divined well the outcome. As I review those early years I can see now that Barlow then gave plain signs of the qualities which he was later to display. I remember sleeping with him once in a room in the top story of Stoughton in our soph.o.m.ore year and he talked for a great part of the night about Napoleon. The Corsican was the hero who beyond all others had fascinated him, whose career he would especially love to emulate.

We were a pair of boys in a peaceful college, living in a time which apparently would afford no opportunity for a soldier's career. I have often thought of that talk. Barlow was really not unlike the youthful Napoleon, in frame he was slender and delicate, his complexion verged toward the olive, his face was always beardless. I never saw him thrown off his poise in any emergency. The straits of course are not great in which a college boy is placed, but such as they were, Barlow was always cool, with his mind working at its best in the midst of them. He was never abashed, but had a resource and an apt one in every emergency. He was absolutely intrepid before the thrusts of our sharpest examiners and as I have said could bluff it boldly and dexterously where his knowledge failed; then the odd cynicism with which he turned down great pretentions and sometimes matters of serious import, had a Napoleonic cast. In '61 he enlisted as a private but rose swiftly through the grades to the command of a regiment. At Antietam he had part of a brigade and coralled in a meteoric way on Longstreet's front line some hundreds of prisoners. His losses were great but he was in the thick of it himself, his poise unruffled until he was borne desperately wounded from the field. The surgeon who attended him told me, if I remember right, that a ball pa.s.sed entirely through his body carrying with it portions of his clothing, if such a thing were possible; but, with his usual nonchalance he laughed at wounds and while still weak and emaciated went back to his place again in the following spring at the head of a brigade. He underwent Chancellorsville, and for the Union cause it was a great misfortune that his fine brigade was taken from its place on Hooker's right before Stonewall Jackson made his charge. Had Barlow been there he might have done something to stay the disaster. At Gettysburg, however, he was in the front in command of a division. An old soldier, a lieutenant that day under Barlow, told me that he had charge of the ambulances of the division and on the march near Emmitsburg Barlow put into the lieutenant's especial charge the ambulance of his wife who, with a premonition of calamity, insisted on being near at hand to help. When the battle joined and Gordon swept overwhelmingly upon Barlow's division, the lieutenant had difficulty in restraining Mrs.

Barlow from rus.h.i.+ng at once upon the field among the fighting men. He held her back almost by force but she remained close at hand.

Barlow was again desperately wounded, so hurt that his death seemed inevitable, and when the faithful wife, at last making her way, presented herself even in the rebel lines with a pet.i.tion for her husband, supposed to be dying, Gordon chivalrously gave him up. It was magnanimous, but for him ill-timed. Again Barlow laughed at his wounds. In May, 1864, he was in the field at the head of the first division of Hanc.o.c.k's corps and on the 12th of May performed the memorable exploit, breaking fairly the centre of Lee's army and bringing it nearer to defeat than it ever came until the catastrophe at Appomattox. He captured the Spottsylvania salient together with the best division of the army of northern Virginia, Stonewall Jackson's old command, two generals, thirty colours, cannon, and small arms to correspond. John Noyes, a soldier of a cla.s.s after us, told me that in the salient he and Barlow worked like privates in the confusion of the capture, turning with their own hands against the enemy a cannon that had just been taken. Barlow was as cool as when he fired off the old cannon in Cambridge ten years before. This stroke proved futile, but from no shortcoming of Barlow's. A few weeks later at Cold Harbor he effected a lodgment within the Confederate works when all others failed. That too proved futile, but his reputation was confirmed as one of the most brilliant of division commanders. There is a photograph in existence portraying Hanc.o.c.k and his division generals as they appeared during that terrible campaign. It was taken in the woods in the utmost stress of service. Barlow stands in the group just as he looked in college, the face thin and beardless, almost that of a boy, and marked with the nonchalance which always characterised him. There are no military trappings, a rough checked s.h.i.+rt, trousers, slouching from the waist to campaign boots, hang loosely about the attenuated limbs. Soon after that he was carried from the field, not wounded, but in utter exhaustion after exposures which no power of will could surmount. A few months' respite and he was at his post again, intercepting by a swift march Lee's retreating column, almost the last warlike act of the Army of the Potomac before Appomattox.

In this "Last Leaf" I do not deal with "might-have-beens." I only remember, but we old cla.s.smates of Barlow have a feeling that had the war continued, if only the bullets to which he was always so hospitable had spared him, he would have gone on to the command of a corps, and perhaps even to greater distinctions. The photograph of Barlow, published after his death in the _Harvard Graduates'

Magazine_, presents him as he was soon after the war was over. He had recovered from the hards.h.i.+ps, the face is fairly well rounded but still rather that of a beardless, laughing boy than of a man. A stranger studying the face would hear with incredulity the story of the responsibilities and dangers which that face had confronted. He laughed it all off lightly, and that was his way when occasionally in his later years he came to our meetings.

I recall a reunion in 1865, ten years after our graduation. We sat in full numbers about a sumptuous banquet at the Parker House in Boston, and naturally in that year the returned soldiers were in the foreground. In our cla.s.s were two major-generals, four colonels, a distinguished surgeon, and many more of lower rank. Barlow was the central figure. Theodore Lyman, who presided, introduced him with a glowing tribute, recounting his achievements, a long list from the time he had entered as a private to his culmination as a full Major-General. He called at last for nine cheers for the man who had captured the Spottsylvania salient, and we gave them with a roar that shook the building. Barlow was the only man in the room who showed not the slightest emotion. He stood impa.s.sive, his face wearing his queer smile. Other men might have been abashed at the tumultuous warmth of such a reception from his old mates; a natural utterance at such a time would have been an expression of joy that the war was over and that the country had been saved, coupled with modest satisfaction that he had borne some part in the great vindication, but that was not Barlow's way. He laughed it off lightly, as if it had been a huge joke. My cla.s.smate, the late Joseph Willard of Boston, told me of a reunion of the cla.s.s at a time much later. The men were discussing the stained-gla.s.s window which it had been decided should be put in Memorial Hall. Since the cla.s.s had a distinguished military record it was felt that there should be martial suggestion in the window and the question was what cla.s.sic warrior should be portrayed. The face, it was thought, should have the lineaments of our most famous soldier.

Barlow, who was present, pooh-poohed the whole idea, especially the suggestion that his face should appear, but someone present having suggested Alcibiades, probably not seriously as a proper type, that seemed to strike Barlow's sense of humour. That reckless cla.s.sic scapegrace to his cynical fancy perhaps might pa.s.s, he might be Alcibiades, but who should be the dog? Alcibiades had a dog whose misfortune in losing his tail has been transmitted through centuries by the pen of Plutarch. "Who will be the dog?" said Barlow and called upon someone to furnish a face for the hero's canine companion. The scheme for the window came near to going to wreck amid the outbursts of laughter. It was carried through later, however, but Alcibiades and the dog do not appear, although Barlow does. No other Harvard soldier reached Barlow's eminence, and probably in the whole Army of the Potomac there were few abler champions. He was a strange, gifted, most picturesque personality, no doubt a better man under his cynical exterior than he would ever suffer it to be thought. His service was great, and the memory of him is an interesting and precious possession to those who knew him in boyhood and were in touch with him to the end.

CHAPTER III

HORACE MANN AND ANTIOCH COLLEGE

The cataclysm of the Civil War, in which as the preceding pages show I had been involved, had shaken me in my old moorings. I found myself not content in a quiet parish in the Connecticut Valley, and as I fared forth was fortunate enough to meet a leader in a remarkable personage. Horace Mann was indeed dead, but remained, as he still remains, a power. His brilliant gifts and self-consecration made him, first, a great educational path-breaker. From that he pa.s.sed into politics, exhibiting in Congress abilities of the highest. Like an inconstant lover, however, he harked back to his old attachment, and putting aside a fine preferment, the governors.h.i.+p of Ma.s.sachusetts, it was said, forsook his old home for the heads.h.i.+p of Antioch College in south-western Ohio. I shall not dispute here whether or not he chose wisely; much less, how far a lame outcome at Antioch was due to his human limitations, and how far to the inevitable conditions. He was a potent and unselfish striver for the betterment of men, and his words and example still remain an inspiration.

My father in these years was a trustee of Antioch College, and this brought our household into touch with the ill.u.s.trious figure of whom all men spoke. My memory holds more than a film of him, rather a vivid picture, his stately height dominating my boyish inches, as I stood in his presence. He was spare to the point of being gaunt, every fibre charged with a magnetism which caused a throb in the by-stander. Over penetrating eyes hung a beetling brow, and his aggressive, resonant voice commanded even in slight utterances. I recall him in a public address. The newspapers were full of the Stra.s.sburg geese, which, nails being driven through their web feet to hold them motionless, were fed to develop exaggerated livers,--these for the epicures of Paris. "For health and wholesome appet.i.te," he exclaimed, "I counsel you to eschew _les pates de foie gras_, but climb a mountain or swing an axe." No great sentence in an exhortation to vigorous, manful living. But the scornful staccato with which he rolled out the French, and the ringing voice and gesture with which he accompanied his exhortation, stamped it indelibly. From that day to this, if I have felt a beguilement toward the flesh-pots, I still hear the stern tones of Horace Mann. In general his eloquence was extraordinary, and I suppose few Americans have possessed a power more marked for cutting, bitter speech. His invective was masterly, and too often perhaps merciless, and it was a weapon he was not slow to wield on occasions large and small. In Congress he lashed deservedly low-minded policies and misguided blatherskites, but his wrathful outpourings upon pupils for some trivial offence were sometimes over-copious. There are Boston schoolmasters, still living perhaps, who yet feel a smart from his scourge. His personality was so incisive that probably few were in any close or long contact with him without a good rasping now and then. My father was the most amiable of men, yet even he did not escape. As an Antioch trustee he was in charge of funds which were not to be applied unless certain conditions were satisfied. Horace Mann demanded the money, and it was withheld on occasions and a deluge of ire was poured upon my poor father's head. It did not cause him to falter in his conviction of Horace Mann's greatness and goodness. Nor has this over-ready impetuosity ever caused the world to falter in its reverence. He came bringing not peace but a sword, in all the spheres in which he moved, and in Horace Mann's world it was a time for the sword. He was a path-breaker in regions obstructed by mischievous acc.u.mulations. There was need of his virile champions.h.i.+p, and none will say that there was ever in him undue thought of self or indifference to the best humanity.

My father held fast to the sharp-cornered saint and prophet, though somewhat excoriated in the a.s.sociation. He held fast to his trustees.h.i.+p of Antioch; and in 1866, Horace Mann having some years before been laid in his untimely grave, he stood in his place as president of the college. Through the agency of my dear friends of those years, Dr. Henry W. Bellows and Dr. Edward Everett Hale, I was to go with him as, so to speak, his under-study, discharging the work of English professor and sometimes the duties of preacher. I went gladly. The spirit of the dead leader haunted pervasively the shades where he had laboured and died. The tradition of Horace Mann was paramount among the students, the graduates, and the whole environment. I had felt as a boy the spell of his voice and presence and knew no hero whom I could follow more cordially. It was a joy to become domiciled in the house which had been built for him and where he had breathed his last, and to labour day by day along the n.o.ble lines which he had laid down. This was my post for six years, one of which, however, was spent in Europe, in the hope of gaining an added fitness for my place.

I have no mind to set down here a record of those Antioch years.

One experiment we tried in a field then very novel and looked upon askance. To-day in our schools and universities the pageant and the drama play a large part. Forty years ago they were unknown or in hiding, and it may be claimed that our little fresh-water college bore a part in initiating a development that has become memorable and widely salutary. In 1872 I wrote out the story of our attempt for Mr. Howells, in the _Atlantic Monthly_, a film which may appropriately be staged among my pictures.

_The New Wrinkle at Sweetbrier; or, The Drama in Colleges_

I have been distressed, dear Fastidiosus, by your remonstrance concerning the performance at our college at Sweetbrier of a "stage play." You have heard the facts rightly; that it was given under the superintendence of the English professor, the evening before Commencement, "with many of the accessories of a theatre." You urge that it is unprecedented to have at a dignified inst.i.tution, which aims at a high standard, under the superintendence of a professor, such a performance; that it excites the prejudices of some people against us; and you quote the sharp remarks of _David's Harp_, the organ of the Dunkers. You urge that such things can be nothing more than the play of boys and girls, and are something worse than mere waste of time, for they set young people to thinking of the theatre, which is irretrievably sunk and only harmful. In your character of trustee, you are sorry it has been done, and beg that it may not be done again.

I beg you to listen to a patient stating of the case. It is not without precedent. When you were at Worms, in Germany, do you remember in the Luther Memorial the superb figure of Reuchlin, on one of the outer corners? One or two of the statues may be somewhat grander, but no other seemed to me so handsome, as it stood colossal on its pillar, the scholar's gown falling from the stately shoulders, and the face so fine there in the bronze, under the abundant hair and cap. Reuchlin is said to be the proper founder of the German drama. Before his time there had been, to be sure, some performing of miracle-plays, and perhaps things of a different sort. The German literary historians, however, make it an era when Reuchlin came as professor to Heidelberg, and, in 1497, set up a stage, with students for actors, at the house of Johann, Kammerer von Dalberg. He wrote his plays in Latin. If you wish, I can send you their t.i.tles. Each act, probably, was prefaced by a synopsis in German, and soon translations came into vogue, and were performed as well. On that little strip of level which the crags and the Neckar make so narrow, collected then, as now, a fair concourse of bounding youth. One can easily fancy how, when the prototypes of the trim Burschen of to-day stepped out in their representation, the applause sounded across to the vineyards about the Heiligenberg and Hirschga.s.se, and how now and then a knight and a dame from the court of the Kurfurst came down the Schlossberg to see it all. What Reuchlin began, came by no means to a speedy end. In the Jesuit seminaries in Germany, in Italy too, and elsewhere, as the Reformation came on, I find the boys were acting plays. This feature in the school was held out as an attraction to win students; and in Prague the Fathers themselves wrote dramas to satirise the Protestants, introducing Luther as the comic figure. But what occurred in the Protestant world was more noteworthy. As the choral singing of the schoolboys affected in an important way the development of music, so the school-plays had much to do with the development of the drama. Read Gervinus to see how for a century or two it was the schools and universities that remained true to a tolerably high standard, while in the world at large all n.o.bler ideals were under eclipse. It was jocund Luther himself who took it under his especial sanction, as he did the fiddle and the dance, in his sweet large-heartedness finding Scriptural precedents for it, and encouraging the youths who came trooping to Wittenberg to relieve their wrestling with Aristotle and the dreary controversy with an occasional play. Melancthon, too, gave the practice encouragement, until not only Wittenberg, but the schools of Saxony in general, and Thuringia, whose hills were in sight, surpa.s.sed all the countries of Germany in their attention to plays. In Leipsic, Erfurt, and Magdeburg comedies were regularly represented before the schoolmasters. But it was at the University of Stra.s.sburg, even at the time when the unsmiling Calvin was seeking asylum there, that the dramatic life of the German seminaries found a splendid culmination. Yearly, in the academic theatre, took place a series of representations, by students, of marvellous pomp and elaboration. The school and college plays were of various characters. Sometimes they were from Terence, Plautus, or Aristophanes; sometimes modifications of the ancient mysteries, meant to enforce the Evangelical theology; sometimes comedies full of the contemporary life. There are several men that have earned mention in the history of German literature by writing plays for students.

The representations became a princ.i.p.al means for celebrating great occasions. If special honour was to be done to a festival, or a princely visit was expected, the market-place, the Rathhaus, or the church was prepared, and it was the professor's or the schoolmaster's duty to direct the boys in their performance of a play. We get glimpses, in the chronicles, of the circ.u.mstances under which the representations took place. The magistrates, even the courts, lent brilliant dresses. One old writer laments that the ignorant people have so little sense for arts of this kind. "Often tumult and mocking are heard, for it is the greatest joy to the rabble if the spectators fall down through broken benches." The old three-storied stage of the mysteries was often retained, with heaven above, earth in the middle s.p.a.ce, and h.e.l.l below; where, according to the stage direction of the _Golden Legend_, "the devils walked about and made a great noise." Lazarus is described as represented in the sixteenth century before a hotel, before which sat the rich man carousing, while Abraham, in a parson's coat, looked out of an upper window. This rudeness, however, belongs rather to the _Volks-comodie_ than the _Schul-comodie_, whose adjuncts were generally far more rational, and sometimes even brilliant, as in the Stra.s.sburg representations.

It was only in the seminaries that art was preserved from utter decay. One may trace the _Schul-comodie_ until far down in the eighteenth century, and in the last mention of it I find appears an interesting figure. In 1780, at the military school in Stuttgart the birthday of the Duke of Wurtemberg was celebrated by a performance of Goethe's _Clavigo_. The leading part was taken by a youth of twenty-one, with high cheek-bones, a broad, low, Greek brow above straight eyebrows, a prominent nose, and lips nervous with an extraordinary energy. The German narrator says he played the part "abominably, shrieking, roaring, unmannerly to a laughable degree." It was the young Schiller, wild as a pythoness upon her tripod, with the _Robbers_, which became famous in the following year.

But I do not mean, Fastidiosus, to cite only German precedents, nor to uphold the college drama with the names of Reuchlin, Melancthon, and Luther alone, majestic though they are. In the University of Paris the custom of acting plays was one of high antiquity. In 1392 the schoolboys of Angiers performed _Robin and Marian_, "as was their annual custom"; and in 1477 the scholars of Pontoise represented "a certain moralitie or farce, as is their custom." In 1558 the comedies of Jacques Grevin were acted at the College of Beauvais at Paris; but it is in the next century that we come upon the most interesting case. In the days of Louis XIV. the girls' school at St. Cyr, of which Madame de Maintenon was patroness, was, in one way and another, the object of much public attention. Mademoiselle de Caylus, niece of Madame de Maintenon, who became famous among the women of charming wit and grace who distinguished the time, was a pupil at St. Cyr, and in her memoirs gives a pleasant sketch of her school life. With the rest, "Madame de Brinon," she says,

first superior of St. Cyr, loved verse and the drama; and in default of the pieces of Corneille and Racine, which she did not dare to have represented, she composed plays herself. It is to her, and her taste for the stage, that the world owes _Esther_ and _Athalie_, which Racine wrote for the girls of St.

Cyr. Madame de Maintenon wished to see one of Madame de Brinon's pieces. She found it such as it was, that is to say, so bad that she begged to have no more such played, and that instead some beautiful piece of Corneille or Racine should be selected, choosing such as contained least about love. These young girls, therefore, undertook the rendering of _Cinna_, quite pa.s.sably for children who had been trained for the stage only by an old nun.

They then played _Andromaque_; and, whether it was that the actresses were better chosen, or gained in grace through experience, it was only too well represented for Madame de Maintenon, causing her to fear that this amus.e.m.e.nt would fill them with sentiments the reverse of those which she wished to inspire.

However, as she was persuaded that amus.e.m.e.nts of this sort were good for youth, she wrote to Racine, begging him to compose for her, in his moments of leisure, some sort of moral or historic poem, from which love should be entirely banished, and in which he need not believe that his reputation was concerned, since it would remain buried at St.

Cyr. The letter threw Racine into great agitation.

He wished to please Madame de Maintenon. To refuse was impossible for a courtier, and the commission was delicate for a man who, like him, had a great reputation to sustain. At last he found in the subject of Esther all that was necessary to please the Court.

So far Mademoiselle de Caylus. A French historian of literature draws a pleasing picture of the old Racine superintending the preparation of _Esther_,

giving advice full of sense and taste on the manner of reciting his verses, never breaking their harmony by a vulgar diction, nor hurting the sense by a wrong emphasis. What a charm must the verses where Esther recounts the history of her triumph over her rivals have had in the mouth of Mademoiselle de Veillanne, the prettiest and most graceful of the pupils of St. Cyr! How grand he must have been, when, with that n.o.ble figure which Louis XIV. admired, he taught Mademoiselle de Glapion, whose voice went to the heart, to declaim the beautiful verses of the part of Mordecai!

The genius of Racine glows finely in _Esther._ In the choruses, the inspirations of the Hebrew prophets, framed as it were in a Greek mould, give impressive relief to the dialogue, as in Sophocles and Aeschylus. It was played several times, and no favour was more envied at the Court than an invitation to the representations. The literature of the time has many allusions to them. The splendid world, in all its lace and powder, crowded to the quiet convent. The great soldiers, the wits, the beautiful women were all there. The king and Madame de Maintenon sat in stiff dignity in the foreground. The appliances were worthy of the magnificent Court. In Oriental attire of silk sweeping to their feet, set off with pearl and gold, the loveliest girls of France declaimed and sang the sonorous verse. It is really one of the most innocent and charming pictures that has come down to us of this age, when so much was hollow, pompous, and cruel.

Hamlet says to Polonius, "My lord, you played once in the university, you say." To which Polonius replies, "That I did, my lord, and was accounted a good actor. I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol." Do not suppose, Fastidiosus, that the playing of Polonius was any such light affair as you and I used to be concerned in up in the fourth story of "Stoughton," when we were members of the Hasty Pudding. In the Middle Ages, in convents and churches, flourished the mysteries; but, says Warton, in the _History of English Poetry_, as learning increased, the practice of acting plays went over to the schools and universities. Before the sixteenth century we may find traces of dramatic vitality among the great English seminaries; but if the supposition of Huber, in his account of English universities, is correct, the real founder of the college drama in England was a character no less dignified than its founder in Germany. Erasmus, as he sits enthroned in a scholar's chair in the market-place at Rotterdam, the buildings about leaning on their insecure foundations out of the perpendicular, and the market-women, with their apple-bloom complexions, crowding around him, shows a somewhat withered face and figure, less genial than the handsome Heidelberg professor as he stands at Worms. But it was Erasmus, probably, who, among many other things he did while in England, lent an important impulse to the acting of plays by students. He, no doubt, was no further interested than to have masterpieces of Greek and Latin drama represented, that the students might have exercise in those languages; but before the reign of Henry VIII. was finished, the practice was becoming pursued for other ends, and growing in importance. _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, long supposed to be the first English comedy, was first acted by students at Cambridge. That our more rollicking boys had their counterparts then, we may know from its rousing drinking-song, which the fellows rang out at the opening of the second act, way back there in 1551. The chorus is not yet forgotten:

"Backe and side go bare, go bare, Booth foot and hand go colde; But, belly, G.o.d send thee good ale inoughe, Whether it be new or olde!"

For the most part, probably, the performances were of a more dignified character than this. Among the statutes of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1546, there is one ent.i.tled _de praefectu ludorum qui imperator dicitur_, under whose direction and authority Latin comedies are to be exhibited in the hall at Christmas. This "imperator" must be a master of arts, and the society was to be governed by a set of laws framed in Latin verse. The authority of this potentate lasted from Christmas to Candlemas, during which time six spectacles were to be represented. Dr. John Dee, a prodigy of that century, who might have been ill.u.s.trious like Bacon almost, but who wasted his later years in astrological dreams, in his younger life, while Greek lecturer at Cambridge, superintended in the refectory of the college the representation of the [Greek: _Eirhene_]; of Aristophanes, with no mean stage adjuncts, if we may trust his own account. He speaks particularly of the performance of a "Scarabeus, his flying up to Jupiter's palace with a man and his basket of victuals on his back; whereat was great wondering and many vain reports spread abroad of the means how that was effected." The great Roger Ascham, too, has left an indirect testimony to the splendour with which the Cambridge performances at this time were attended. In a journey on the Continent, wis.h.i.+ng to express in the highest terms his sense of the beauty of Antwerp, he can say nothing stronger than that it as far surpa.s.ses other cities as the refectory of St. John's College at Cambridge, when adorned for the Christmas plays, surpa.s.ses its ordinary appearance. On these occasions, the most dignified personages of the University were invited, and at length, as was the German fas.h.i.+on, the representation of plays was adopted as part of the entertainment of visitors. In 1564, Queen Elizabeth visited Cambridge, and the picture transmitted to us of the festivities is full of brilliant lights. With the rest, five doctors of the University selected from all the colleges the youths of best appearance and address, who acted before the queen a series of plays of varied character, sometimes grave, sometimes gay, in part of cla.s.sic, in part of contemporary authors.h.i.+p. The theatre for the time was no other place than the beautiful King's College chapel, across the entire width of which the stage was built. For light, the yeomen of the royal guard, their fine figures in brilliant uniform, stood in line from end to end of the chapel, each holding a torch. It was a superb scene, no doubt; the torches throwing their wavering glare against the tracery and the low, pointed arch of window and portal, so beautiful in this chapel, in the ruins of Kenilworth, or wherever it appears; the great s.p.a.ce filled with the splendour that Roger Ascham thought so wonderful; and, among the glitter, the troop of handsome youths doing their best to please the sovereign. Froude gives a story from De Silva, the Spanish amba.s.sador, which reflects so well the character of the time, and shows up boyish human nature with such amusing faithfulness, that I cannot omit it. When all was over, the students would not let well enough alone, but begged the tired queen to see one more play of their own devising, which they felt sure would give her special pleasure. The queen, however, departed, going ten miles on her journey to the seat of one of her n.o.bility. The persistent boys followed her, and she granted them permission to perform before her in the evening. What should the unconscionable dogs do but drag in the bitter trouble of the time, and heedlessly trample on the queen's prejudices. The actors entered dressed like the bishops of Queen Mary, who were then in prison. Bonner carried a lamb, at which he rolled his eyes and gnashed his teeth. A dog brought up the rear, carrying the Host in his mouth. What further was to follow no one can say. The queen, who was never more than half a Protestant, and clung to the ma.s.s all the more devoutly because she was obliged to resign so much, filled the air with her indignation. She swore good round oaths, we may be sure, and left the room in a rage. The lights were put out, and the students made off in the dark as they could.

The history of the drama at Oxford has episodes of equal interest. The visitor who goes through the lovely Christ Church meadows to the Isis to see the boats, returning, will be sure to visit the refectory of Christ Church. The room is very fine in its proportions and decoration, and hung with the portraits of the mult.i.tude of brilliant men who in their young days were Christ Church men. During all the centuries that the rich dark stain has been gathering upon the carved oak in the ceiling and wainscot, it has been the scene of banquets and pageants without number, at which the most ill.u.s.trious characters of English history have figured. I doubt, however, if any of its a.s.sociations are finer than those connected with the student plays that have been performed here. Pa.s.sing over occasions of this kind of less interest of which I find mention, in 1566 Elizabeth visited Oxford, to do honour to whom in this great hall of Christ Church plays were given. Oxford was determined not to be outdone by what had happened at Cambridge two years before. From the accounts, the delight of the hearty queen must have been intense; and as she was never afraid to testify most frankly her genuine feelings, we may be sure the Oxford authorities and their pupils must have presented their entertainments with extraordinary pomp. The plays, as at Cambridge, were of various character, but the one that gave especial pleasure was an English piece having the same subject as the _Knighte's Tale of Chaucer_, and called _Palamon and Arcite_. It would be pleasant to know that the poet followed as far as possible the words of Chaucer. There is a fine incident narrated connected with the performance. In the scene of the chase, when

"Theseus, with alle joye and blys, With his Ypolite, the faire queene, And Emelye, clothed al in greene, On hontyng be they riden ryally,"

a "cry of hounds" was counterfeited under the windows in the quadrangle. The students present thought it was a real chase, and were seized with a sudden transport to join the hunters. At this, the delighted queen, sitting in stiff ruff and farthingale among her maids of honour, burst out above all the tumult with "Oh, excellent! These boys, in very truth, are ready to leap out of the windows to follow the hounds!" When the play was over, the queen called up the poet, who was present, and the actors, and loaded them with thanks and compliments.

When, forty years after, in 1605, the dull James came to Oxford, the poor boys had a harder time. A thing very noteworthy happened when the king entered the city in his progress from Woodstock. If Warton's notion is correct, scarcely the iron cross in the pavement that marks the spot where the bishops were burned, or the solemn chamber in which they were tried, yea, scarcely Guy Fawkes's lantern, which they show you at the Bodleian, or the Brazen Nose itself, are memorials as interesting as the archway leading into the quadrangle of St. John's College, under whose carving, quaint and graceful, one now gets the lovely glimpse into the green and bloom of the gardens at the back. At this gate, three youths dressed like witches met the king, declaring they were the same that once met Macbeth and Banquo, prophesying a kingdom to one and to the other a generation of monarchs, that they now appeared to show the confirmation of the prediction. Warton's conjecture is that Shakespeare heard of this, or perhaps was himself in the crowd that watched the boys as they came whirling out in their weird dance, and that then and there was conceived what was to become so mighty a product of the human brain,--Macbeth.

King James, however, received it all coldly. The University, kindled by the traditions of Elizabeth's visit, did its best. Leland gives a glimpse of the stage arrangements in Christ Church Hall. Towards the end "was a scene like a wall, painted and adorned by stately pillars, which pillars would turn about, by reason whereof, with the help of other painted cloths, their stage did vary three times." But the king liked the scholastic hair-splitting with which he was elsewhere entertained better than the plays. In Christ Church Hall he yawned and even went to sleep, saying it was all mere childish amus.e.m.e.nt. In fact, the poor boys had to put up with even a worse rebuff; the king spoke many words of dislike, and when, in one of the plays, a pastoral, certain characters came in somewhat scantily attired, the queen and maids of honour took great offence, in which the king, who was not ordinarily over-delicate, concurred.

The practice of acting plays prevailed in the schools as well. The visitor to Windsor will remember in what peace, as seen from the great tower, beyond the smooth, dark Thames, the buildings of Eton lie among the trees. Crossing into the old town and entering the school precincts, where the stone stairways are worn by so many generations of young feet, and where on the play-ground the old elms shadow turf where so many soldiers and statesmen have been trained to struggle in larger fields, there is nothing after all finer than the great hall.

In every age since the wars of the Roses, it has buzzed with the boisterous life of the privileged boys of England, who have come up afterward by the hundred to be historic men. There are still the fireplaces with the monogram of Henry VI., the old stained gla.s.s, the superb wood carving, the dais at the end. If there were no other memory connected with the magnificent hall, it would be enough that here, about 1550, was performed by the Eton boys, _Ralph Roister Bolster_, the first proper English comedy, written by Nicholas Udal, then head-master, for the Christmas holidays. He had the name of being a stern master, because old Tusser has left it on record that Udal whipped him,--

"for fault but small, or none at all."

But the student of our old literature, reading the jolly play, will feel that, though he could handle the birch upon occasion, there was in him a fine genial vein. This was the first English comedy. The first English tragedy, too, _Gorboduc_, was acted first by students,--this time students of law of the Inner Temple,--and the place of performance was close at hand to what one still goes to see in the black centre of the heart of London, those blossoming gardens of the Temple, verdant to-day as when the red-cross knights walked in them, or the fateful red and white roses were plucked there, or the voices of the young declaimers were heard from them, rolling out the turgid lines of Sackville's piece, the somewhat unpromising day-spring which a glorious sun-burst was to succeed. From Lincoln's Inn, in 1613, when the Princess Elizabeth married the elector-palatine and went off to Heidelberg Castle, the students came to the palace with a piece written by Chapman, and the performance cost a thousand pounds.

A famed contemporary of Udal was Richard Mulcaster, head-master of St.

Paul's school, and afterward of Merchant Taylors', concerning whom we have, from delightful old Fuller, this quaint and naive description:

In a morning he would exactly and plainly construe and pa.r.s.e the lesson to his scholars, which done, he slept his hour (custom made him critical to proportion it) in his desk in the school; but woe be to the scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them accurately; and Atropos might be persuaded to pity as soon as he to pardon where he found just fault. The prayers of c.o.c.kering mothers prevailed with him just as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children.