Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

it, probing for the soul in matter, searching for a pattern in the web we call chance, seeking a current in the rhythm of things into which we may float and glide. We look for a design in the movement of the atoms, and hope to derange the eternal system.

Gerard lay at the point of death. Margaret hastened through the chequered night on a wild errand. An impulse drove her from the house. She walked and ran eight miles by road, and four by forest paths and broken crags. It was a gusty night. The wind swept through the rocking pines with the moan of distant breakers; thunder invested the peak from the north and south. Every now and then a sudden deluge broke upon the ridge, and her path became a running watercourse. With one hand she clasped the idol, and with the other she explored the darkness. At first the white palings helped her. When they came to an end she groped her way along the cliff face. Then the full moon arose and flooded the world with light. At one moment Margaret scaled a wall of darkness; at the next she stood in a brightly-illumined bower. The pines were flinging the raindrops from their jewelled tassels; every needle became a quivering point of light; their fluent shadows danced in eddies at her feet, like ripples on the surface of a stream. She saw the immense valleys unfold and the shadows of the clouds race across the hills. Far below the plain took on a velvet sheen. She was wrapped in the splendor of the night, but not comforted. The sublimity of earth and heaven, the brooding intentness of the night, dwarfed the significance of her cares. She might strive and pray, but the spirit that informed the darkness would not hear. The forest and the hills had witnessed agonies like hers, but the rhythm of their music was unchanged.

Margaret hurried on. The moon was

soaring towards a dense wedge of cloud; she must not miss the interval of light. Soon she had left the road, and was in the forest. The spectral trees encompassed her; the gray rocks loomed towards her like living forms. She met a prowling leopard, but she had no fear. Half an hour after midnight she stood by the cairn. The moon rode high over the forest, breasting the scudding clouds. The peak was illuminated. All round a thousand points of light outshone the glowworm's beacon. The wet grass glistened, the mica sparkled at her feet. The plains below shimmered with light vapors that rolled into the interstices of the hill like the waves of the sea. His Obesity reigned again on the cairn. The five saints were united. For Margaret their moonlit countenances were invested with a strange pathos. They symbolized so much of hope and fear, timid questionings, idle propitiation and vain commerce with the unseen. Somehow she felt less aloof from the folk who had raised them. Her sense of sisterhood with earth and living creatures had deepened. She sank down on the stones beside the goblins and wept. For the first time large tears rolled down her cheeks, and she sobbed as if her heart would break. The idols stared placidly from the cairn.

Far away she saw the twinkling lights of Gerkal. One of them shone from the hospital where Gerard still struggled with the unknown. Or was he now part of the spirit which rolls through everything, swelling the orchestra of the pines and breathing in their fragrance? If that were the end of their two souls she could bear it. Were they not both children of the open air?

Her tears soothed her, her grief became less poignant; there was comfort in her exhaustion. Somehow she felt as if the inspiration which had impelled

her to the cairn was stirred by some current of circumstance which was carrying Gerard through the ordeal. As she groped her way through the darkness in the face of the storm, and panted up the hill, she had felt that she was fighting the grim summons side by side with him. The woods aided her. And now that the moon rode high above the clouds, caressing the hills and swathing the world in peace, something whispered to her deep in her inmost being that Gerard would live. But she dared not admit the hope.

When Margaret reached Gerkal the East was suffused with the rose and pearl of dawn; the white moon faded in the West; the sun had not risen above the mountains.

She found herself in the cold halfdark veranda of the hospital, asking how Captain Hayden was.. A nurse she met in the passage did not know. She led Margaret along a covered way to the cholera ward, and entered a room which held the great secret. Presently she appeared with another nurse. Margaret read victory in their faces. She heard one of them say,

[blocks in formation]

just for a few minutes. You had better come again at eleven."

At eleven Gerard woke up and saw Margaret by his side. His haggard eyes caught the reflection of a great joy.

She laid her hand on his head. "You mustn't talk," she said.

They were silent a long time. When Gerard spoke it was of the bogie.

"His Obesity seems to have changed our luck," he said. "Tell Ghazi Khan to put it back on the cairn."

Margaret told him that she had put it back.

He dozed a little. When he opened his eyes he asked her to throw the window open. He wanted to see the peak. It was there calling him. "I've forgotten to arrange about the transport," he said absently.

But Margaret exercised a counterspell. She talked of Scotland until he could smell the bracken and the pines. Then she talked of Kent.

"Do you remember what the woods are like in autumn?" she said. "Beech and bracken-a roof and floor of gold. We'll go to Bedgebury. I know the seasons to a week. It will be just about the time that the pheasant lets you get near enough to see his crimson eye."

It was a siren's song in his ears. "Ter-res-sit-ta mia," he said, “you have made all things good. Just now I'd like a breath of clean home air." Edmund Candler.

THE SHAKESPEARE DISCOVERIES.

Dr. Charles William Wallace, the American scholar who about two years ago made the Shakespearean discoveries which have just been published in the Times, has earned the congratulations, not only of every Shakespearean student, but of every layman who is concerned to know a few more facts

about the life of him who bears the greatest name in English literature. At first sight, it may be thought that the new facts are not comparable with those discovered in the eighteenth century; but on reflection it will be admitted that they not merely give us a very accurate view of Shakespeare's

circumstances, but reinforce the deductions of those who argued from the older evidence that Shakespeare was recognized during his life as a man of substantial importance. In fact, Shakespeare, about whom it is so of ten and so loosely said that hardly anything is known, becomes more than ever a reality. To that extent the discovery pushes the preposterous Baconian theory, which, if one may put it so, magnifies the unimportance of Shakespeare the man, a little further into the background. Of course there is a tendency for a discoverer to overrate the value of his discovery; but when every allowance has been made, we think that Dr. Wallace's researches have yielded what is in every sense a first-rate find. We hardly venture to guess at what conclusion some of the more determined Shakespearean interpreters will arrive when they have brought the new facts to bear upon the text of the plays and sonnets. Shakespearean criticism has a wild luxuriance in that kind of unwarrantable speculation

which, paradoxically, imagines too much chiefly owing to a want of imagination,-through the failure to sympathize with the creative faculty. According to this most industrious but arid method, a writer is held to have been in real life in nearly all the situations which he happens to describe in his works. If this method be reapplied in the light of the new facts, we shall, no doubt, hear before long of allusions in the plays and sonnets to the legal documents found by Dr. Wallace.

mous

found in a sack in the Record Office. As he himself says, they "change the state of knowledge concerning the origin and nature of shares in the Globe and Blackfriars and particularly concerning Shakespeare's financial interest in those theatres." They relate to a lawsuit which arose out of some cu-, rious family differences. Briefly, the plaintiff was Thomasina Osteler, who was the daughter of John Hemyngs, the close friend of Shakespeare, and the co-editor with Condell of the faFirst Folio of Shakespeare's works. At the age of sixteen (in 1611) Thomasina Hemyngs was married to William Osteler, the actor, whose death is now shown to have occurred on December 16th, 1614. Incidentally it must be remarked that the fact is very useful in determining the date of some of Webster's and Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. Osteler, for instance, acted in Webster's Duchess of Malfi, but hitherto it has been supposed that this play was not published till some time after 1614. When Thomasina became a widow she behaved in a which earned her father's disapproval. Apparently he cut off her supply of money, and she in retaliation charged him in the legal document which Dr. Wallace has found with the misappropriation of funds held in trust. Now these funds were nothing less than shares in the famous Blackfriars and Globe Theatres.

manner

In order to lay her case clearly before the Court, her attorney drew up a detailed statement of the constitution of the company which owned and managed the theatres, and even set forth the exact position of the buildings. The interest of documents of this kind needs no emphasis. At the same time, the character of Thomasina undoubtedly introduces a slight weakness into the evidence, because the case for the plaintiff is generally an ex

Dr. Wallace, we understand, made his discovery in just such a way as one likes and respects. When he is free from his lecturing in America he comes to England every year with his wife, and they spend their holiday in searching through unclassified documents which probably have not been looked at for generations. The papers which he has just published were parte statement, and here we have only

[blocks in formation]

the case for the plaintiff. There is no reason to suppose that John Hemyngs was the dishonest man his daughter made him out to be. On the contrary, the introduction to the First Folio, written in collaboration with Condell, is, one would say, the product of a singularly honest, considerate, and simple mind, whereas Thomasina appears to have been not only a very irregular, but a very litigious, young person. In the same year (1621) in which she brought this action against her father she charged young Walter Raleigh, a son of the famous Sir Walter, with insult and slander. As Mr. Sidney Lee has remarked in a letter to the Times, one must not take the plaintiff's case as absolute truth. It would have to be corrected, perhaps vitally corrected, by the judgment in the suit, or at least by the defendant's case, neither of which do we know. Caution exacts such an admission; but when it has been made, a great many of the new facts remain of their nature unassailable.

Although the suit is directed against John Hemyngs, it is necessarily brought also against the Burbages and Shakespeare and all the shareholders on whose behalf Hemyngs acted as manager. The period embraced by the new document is that of Shakespeare's maturity and his highest powers,-from 1609 to 1616. What do we learn from the discovery? We learn who held the shares in the Blackfriars and Globe Theatres and to what extent, and we learn what the profits of the company were. We learn that Shakespeare had a seventh share in the Blackfriars Theatre and a fourteenth in the Globe, and that out of the two together he enjoyed an income of about £600 a year. As a pound in those days had nearly five times its present value, we conclude that Shakespeare, though not rich, was a very well-to-do man. And to his dividends from his theatrical investments we must add, we suppose,

the money he made by writing plays, and perhaps also his salary as an actor. A vast number of people who have hammered away at the eternal enigma of Shakespeare's genius have tried, from one motive or another (whether to make that genius seem more wonderful, or to make the idea that a theatrical person named Shakespeare should possess it at all utterly incredible), to represent Shakespeare as a sort of business manager under the Burbages. They have imagined him as a second-rate, even a third-rate. actor, who amused himself by writing wonderful plays which were produced but did not pay, but who was known chiefly to his contemporaries as a very competent man of business. We behold him now as a playwright who was not afraid to have a very large stake in the theatre in which his plays were performed and who suffered nothing from the transaction.

We have already alluded to another matter of interest, though it is not of course by any means the most interesting fact in the documents; we mean the statement as to the exact position of the Globe Theatre. It has long been supposed that the site was in Park Street, Southwark (Maiden's Lane in Shakespeare's time), where Barclay and Perkins's brewery now stands. Certain old London maps undoubtedly place it there, but Dr. Wallace's documents definitely place it on the other side of the road. There is thus a conflict of evidence; either the attorney's clerk or the draughtsman of the maps made a mistake. The rise of a conIflict in the evidence on this point is rather inopportune, as on Friday Sir Herbert Tree unveiled a memorial tablet on the traditional site at the brewery. The newspapers have been busying themselves with this dispute, but we hope it will not be imagined that the real importance of Dr. Wallace's find is indicated by it. What matters,

as we have already said, is that Shakespeare becomes more than ever a real and substantial figure,-large enough in the eye of the law and of commerce to be mentioned next in importance after the Burbages in the list of the shareholders of the two theatres.

The Spectator.

If

the discovery has not quite the significance of Shakespeare's will, which was unearthed by the Rev. Joseph Green in 1747, it is, in our judgment, on a higher plane than the Halliwell-Phillips discoveries of some forty years ago.

PRESIDENT TAFT.

The last eight months have given both his own countrymen and the world ample means of judging President Taft. It is one of the American President's first duties to furnish such means abundantly and continuously. The last thing Americans expect of their Chief Executive is that he shall be a tongue-tied recluse. He pleases them best when he is most in the centre of the stage, scattering "Special Messages," delivering addresses, sweeping through the country on a thirteen-thousand mile tour of speeches and receptions. President Taft, if less voluble than his predecessor, has been by no means backward in meeting the popular demand. He has weathered a session of Congress; he has composed the regulation number of messages and addresses; and he is now concluding a prodigious journey which has taken him to the four corners of the United States and provided him with endless opportunities for speech-making and hand-shaking. With all this material to assist them, what is the verdict of the American people upon their new President? What has Mr. Taft accomplished and how does his régime, so far as it has gone, promise to compare with the memorable Presidency which preceded it? It is not too early to formulate some sort of an answer to these questions, though the answer cannot of course be final. We think it may fairly be said that the Americans are satisfied, and more than satisfied,

with Mr. Taft. He has shown himself very much the sort of a President they had expected and hoped for. That is to say, while subscribing to the Roosevelt policies, he is determined to carry them out in alliance with, instead of in opposition to, the leaders of his party in Congress, and with a minimum, instead of a maximum, of disturbance to business security. Mr. Taft has pretty well demonstrated that while there will be no halt in the campaign for the extension of Governmental control over the railways and the Trusts, and for the conservation of the natural resources of the country, it will be prosecuted with less noise, in a more reconciling spirit, and perhaps more effectively than heretofore. There will be fewer harangues against "the corrupt and criminal rich," fewer inflammatory messages to Congress, fewer half-cock prosecutions of the big corporations, fewer breaches of the spirit of the Constitution for the sake of scoring some immediate point, fewer collisions with those who fail to see eye to eye with the President. Action and not talk is clearly to be the motto of the Taft régime.

This, we think, was conclusively established by the President's conduct during the prolonged discussion of the Tariff. Though pledged to reduce the schedules of the Dingley Act, the Republicans in Congress raised them, and though pledged to a "Tariff for revenue only" the Democrats assisted them in

« AnteriorContinuar »