'You're right,' exclaimed Beckett, 'and I must confess I don't know where it occurs. Do you, Harris?'
'Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra,' I replied. 'Enobarbus is the conscience of the play: the high intellectual judgment of Shakespeare called in, this once, to decide between 'great Caesar' and Shakespeare's alter ego, the lover Antony. It's the only time I think that Shakespeare ever used such an abstraction.'
'A remarkable apercu,' said Dowden. 'I had no idea that you were a Shakespeare lover; surely there are not many in the States?'
'Not many anywhere, I imagine,' was my laughing reply.
A moment or two later Mallock began again. 'Shakespeare is always being praised for his wonderful character drawing, but I'm often shocked by the way he disdains character. Fancy a clown talking of 'the primrose path!''
'A clown!' I repeated. 'You mean the porter in Macbeth, don't you?'
'Of course, the porter!' Mallock replied. 'A very clown!'
'Curious,' I went on laughing. 'I asked because the porter, I believe, doesn't say 'primrose path' but 'primrose way'.'
'Are you sure?' exclaimed Mallock. 'I could have sworn 'twas 'primrose path';
I think 'path' better than 'way'.'
'My memory, too, supports you, Mr. Mallock,' Dowden chimed in. 'I feel certain it was the 'primrose path'; 'path' is certainly more poetic.'
'It is,' I replied, 'and that's probably why Shakespeare gives 'primrose way' to the sleeper porter and 'primrose path' to Ophelia; you know she warns her brother of the 'primrose path' of dalliance.'
'I believe you're right!' exclaimed Mallock. 'But what an extraordinary memory you have.'
'The man of 'one book,' you know,' I laughed, 'is always to be dreaded.'
'It seems strange that you should have studied Shakespeare with such particularity,' Dowden remarked pleasantly. 'From some of your writing in the Spectator, which our mutual friend Verschoyle has shown me, I thought you rather a social reformer after the style of Henry George.'
'I'm afraid I am,' I confessed. 'Yet I admit the validity of most of Mr. Mallock's arguments against socialism, though I can't imagine how he can argue against the obvious truth that the land of the people should belong to all the people.'
'Why should we care for the people,' cried Mallock, 'the Great Unwashed.
They propagate their kind and die and fill forgotten graves. It is only the great who count; the hoi polloi don't matter.'
Mallock always put forward the aristocratic creed with even greater ability than Arthur Balfour, yet I thought my view the wiser.
'The physique of the English race is diminishing,' I began, 'through the poverty of the mass of the people. In 1845 only one hundred and five recruits out of a thousand were under five feet six in height, while in 1887 fifty per cent were below that standard. The girth of chest, too, shows a similar shrinkage.'
'That leaves my withers unwrung,' scoffed Mallock. 'Why should we care particularly about the rag, tag and bobtail of the people?'
'Because your geniuses and great men,' I replied, 'come from the common mass; the Newtons, Darwins and Shakespeares don't spring from noble loins.'
'Nor from the lowest class either,' returned Mallock. 'From the well-fed, at least.'
'The more reason,' I retorted, 'to give the mass of the people humane conditions of life.'
'There we must all be agreed,' Beckett broke in. 'If the mass of the people were treated as well as the aristocrat treats his servants, all would be well; but the manufacturer treats his workmen, not as servants, but as serfs. 'Hands': the mere word is his condemnation.'
The conversation continued on these general lines till suddenly Dowden turned to me.
'One thing you must admit,' he said smiling. 'Shakespeare took the aristocratic side, was indeed an aristocrat to his finger-tips. Surely no great genius was ever so completely indifferent to social reforms or indeed to reforms of any sort. His caricature of Jack Cade is convincing on that point.'
'Quite true!' cried Mallock. 'Undeniable, unarguable, indeed.'
'Don't say such things,' I broke out. 'I can't hear them without protest: what age was Shakespeare when he wrote Jack Cade? Think of him fresh from the narrow, brainless life of village Stratford, transplanted into that pulsing many-coloured life of London with young aristocrats all about him on the stage. No wonder he sneered at Jack Cade; but ask him twenty years later what he thought of the aristocrats and the harsh misery of ordinary life and you would have got a very different answer! The main truth about Shakespeare, and it's an utterly neglected truth, is that he grew from being an almost ordinary youth into one who stood on the forehead of the time to come, a sacred leader and guide for a thousand years.'
'Very interesting,' retorted Mallock, 'and new, but I want proofs, I'm free to confess, proofs! Where's the Jack Cade in his latest works, or rather, where shall we find Essex and Southampton disdained and Cade treated as a great reformer and martyr to a cause?'
'He's got you there, Harris,' exclaimed Dowden.
'Has he? First of all, Mr. Mallock, you'll have to admit that Shakespeare quickly came to see the English aristocrat as he really was. No better or more bitter portrait of the aristocrat exists in any literature than Portia gives of her English suitor in The Merchant of Venice: 'a proper man's picture' but 'a poor dumb show.' He knows no foreign language and his manners, like his clothes, lack all distinction. So much for 'the poor pennyworth!' 'But no Jack Cade on a pedestal, you say. Well, Posthumus was Shakespeare's alter ego, as plainly as Prospero, and what does Posthumus say in prison when he cries to the Gods:
I know you are more clement than vile men, Who of their broken debtors, take a third, A sixth, a tenth, letting them thrive again On their abatement: that's not my desire…
'What would Shakespeare have said to Chamberlain's Bankruptcy Act, which is the law of England today and for many a year to come? You now take everything from the broken debtor and do not then discharge him, but keep his failure hung over him for years in order to force him to the prison, which the beggared seldom escape. In this we are infinitely viler than Shakespeare's 'vile men.' Shakespeare not a social reformer! If your laws were conceived in the spirit of his maturity, the millennium would be realized. I always put him with Jesus as a thinker.' Mallock laughed as at an enormity and I didn't pursue the theme. I had given them pause, which was enough.
We adjourned to the drawing-room for coffee, which was excellent, as the whole meal had been. Beckett ate with the keenest enjoyment, but in strict moderation, and all of us cultivated a similar control. While drinking the coffee Dowden said he hoped I'd write on Shakespeare. 'You've certainly given me food for thought,' he added courteously.
'And me too,' cried Mallock.
When they went away, Beckett kept me and for the life of me I could not understand why, till he suddenly blurted out, 'Tant pis if you think worse of me, but I think I owe it to you to tell you the truth. I was talking to Mallock the other day about you, praising your extraordinary scholarship and knowledge of Shakespeare and your genius. He said that genius was difficult to measure, but knowledge was easy; why not let him test your knowledge of Shakespeare; and so I arranged this dinner. If you had come to grief I'd have said nothing, but you came through so brilliantly that I think you ought to know. I hope you're not angry with me?'
'No, no,' I replied. 'How could I be?'
'I want to be friends,' rejoined Beckett warmly. 'I want you to regard me as a friend and as a sign of it I wish you'd call me Ernest and let me call you Frank.'
'That's dear of you,' I responded, and gave him my hand. From that day on Ernest Beckett was a true friend of mine and my affection for him grew till he passed-alas! all too soon, into the eternal silence.
One word more on the freedom of speech used in good society in London in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century. It was not so outspoken as the best French or German society, but its rule was very much like the rule of the best Italian or Spanish society: anything was permitted if it was sufficiently funny or witty. In the Prince of Wales' set in especial, it was possible to tell the most risque story, provided always that it was really humorous. And the Pink 'Un, or chief sporting paper of the day, edited by John Corlett and printed on pink paper once a week, certainly set a broad example. One instance will prove this. Just before I returned to London the Baroness Burdett Coutts, a great favorite of the Prince and the Queen for her goodness of heart and many benefactions, though well over sixty years of age, married young Mr. Bartlett, an American, a good-looking man of
