The Bridling of Pegasus Part 18

"And Sh.e.l.ley? Where is Sh.e.l.ley?"

"Where the bee sucks, I suspect; for he is the very Ariel of our company; ever, even here, in search of the unattainable! But he is a great favourite with all of us, he is so lovable."

"And the poet who has delighted my own generation," I inquired. "Surely he is among you."

"Not yet," he replied; "though I have not the least doubt he will be, in due course. No one is admitted here until he has been dead for fifty years; Time, the door-keeper and guardian of Eternity, being more deliberate than the janitors of Westminster Abbey, who, you must allow, make some rather ludicrous blunders in admitting, on the very morrow of their decease, at the importunity of friends and a.s.sociates, persons for whom, half a century later, no one will dream of claiming any special posthumous distinction."

"I fear that is so," I confessed. "We have been rather fussy and feverish of late, and attribute to notoriety an enduring power it does not possess."

"Just so. Notoriety is one thing, Fame quite another. Will not the result be that men who may without presumption entertain a humble hope that, as our lofty friend Milton puts it, Posterity will not willingly let die all that they may have done or written, will feel a distaste for these precipitate distinctions, and even take precautions against them. We notice that something of the same kind is taking place among you in regard to what you call t.i.tular honours, since they have become so common, and are lavished on such undistinguished persons, as to be no longer valued by the truly distinguished."

"That is so," I said; "but it is inevitable in these days, and probably useful to the State, satisfying a number of small ambitions."

"I understand," he replied; and I thought to myself, of course he does, he who understood everything. "In these days it is more important to satisfy the many," he went on, "than to content the few, and persons of real distinction must always be few; and, after all, if these are wise as well as distinguished, they must be content with anything that ministers to the welfare of the community at large."

It was so interesting to me to hear this great dramatist and supreme poet talking wisdom in this familiar manner, like any ordinary being, that I made the most of my opportunity, and asked him if he thought what he had just said served to explain the magnificent manner in which his plays are presented to modern audiences, and if he approved of such presentation.

"I should approve," he replied, "if there were no danger of the mounting of the piece diverting the attention of the audience from the play itself, and if it did not appear necessary to modern stage-managers to cut out whatever does not easily lend itself to spectacular devices. I quite understand their motive; for, having been in my time not only an actor, but part proprietor, and part stage-manager of theatres, I do not forget that they must take into consideration the material results of their enterprise. But my colleagues and I contrived to make a fair livelihood out of our theatres without any large outlay on the scenery or the dresses. Apparently, your modern audiences would yawn at, and not understand, speeches that not only the courtiers of Elizabeth, but the citizens of Blackfriars and the Chepe, listened to with rapt and straining ears. We observe that you pique yourselves upon what you call the progress you have made during the last three hundred years, and some of us are rather amused at the self-complacent claim; and, though you travel much faster, live much more luxuriously, and blow each other to pieces more successfully than we did, it may be doubted if men's minds have made much advance, or if their intellectual qualities are not, notwithstanding the increase of what you deem education, poorer and more stinted than when the bulk of the nation read less, but reflected more."

"In one respect," I ventured to say, "you can hardly withhold your sympathy from the claim of our having made progress. We no longer regard actors as vagabonds."

"I am not quite so sure of that," he said, with a significant smile.

"Myself an actor as well as an author, my utterances in the second capacity respecting the former are not particularly flattering; and the fuss you have of late made over actors and actresses, as over millionaires and transatlantic heiresses, is perhaps evidence less of admiration than of self-interest, and an appet.i.te for diversion."

"But," I observed, "an actor was recently buried, with the customary honours, in Westminster Abbey."

"But did everybody approve of it? Milton took care to inform me that many did not; but my withers remained unwrung, and I playfully replied that I was rather disposed to think that special form of posthumous acknowledgment might not unsuitably be reserved for actors and politicians--the author of _Paradise Lost_ was, every now and then, an active politician, was he not?--since the two have much in common, both appealing to their audiences by voice, intonation, gesticulation, and pursuit of popularity, and enjoying a wide but ephemeral notoriety."

I remembered the pa.s.sage in _Henry the Sixth_ where he says that he hates "the loud applause and _aves_ vehement" of the many, and of his little esteem for those who "affect" such, and I followed up that silent recollection by saying:

"And, after all, Milton, Pope, Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, lie far away from that edifice; also, I might add, one greater than any of them--yourself."

"Dear old Stratford-on-Avon!" he said, as though he were musing rather than addressing himself to me. "I am well content to be sepulchred there.

How I loved it! How I love it still! And how much I owed to it! My works, such as they are, have in your ingenious age been attributed to one much more n.o.bly born, more highly educated, more deeply read, more erudite, than I. They who started, and those who have accepted, that theory, little understand that no such man could have written them. Whatever may be their merit or demerit, their author could only be one who, born in a modest condition, began by having the closest touch with frank unaffected human nature, and for whom life and society expanded by degrees, until, though still preferring the life removed, he could tell sad stories of the death of kings, find books in the running brooks, and good in everything."

As he slowly uttered these familiar majestic words, he faded from my sight; and all that was left was an enduring recollection of that privileged interview.

Footnotes:

[1] In estimating Byron, people too often forget that the same poet wrote _Manfred_ and _Beppo_, _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_. It is the variety, in other words the extent, of Byron's genius, that const.i.tutes his greatness.

[2] The renderings into English verse from Dante are by the author of the paper.