“In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin’.”
The shorter Wordsworth pieces he had read at grammar school. “My heart leaps up,” “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” and “Behold her, single in the field,” he had known for years; but Margaret read him the sonnets and made him commit “The world is too much with us” to memory. Her voice trembled and grew low with passion when she read it.
He knew all the songs in Shakespeare’s plays, but the two that moved him most were: “O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” which blew a far horn in his heart, and the great song from Cymbeline: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” He had tried to read all the sonnets, and failed, because their woven density was too much for his experience, but he had read, and forgotten, perhaps half of them, and remembered a few which burned up from the page, strangely, immediately, like lamps for him.
Those that he knew were: “When, in the chronicle of wasted time,” “To me, fair friend, you never can be old,” “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” “From you have I been absent in the spring,” and “That time of year thou mayest in me behold,” the greatest of all, which Margaret brought him to, and which shot through him with such electric ecstasy when he came to “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” that he could hardly hold his course unbroken through the rest of it.
He read all the plays save Timon, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, and King John, but the only play that held his interest from first to last was King Lear. With most of the famous declamatory passages he had been familiar, for years, by Gant’s recitation, and now they wearied him. And all the wordy pinwheels of the clowns, which Margaret laughed at dutifully, and exhibited as specimens of the master’s swingeing wit, he felt vaguely were very dull. He never had any confidence in Shakespeare’s humor — his Touchstones were not only windy fools, but dull ones.
“For my part I had rather bear with you than bear you; yet I should bear no cross if I did bear you, for I think you have no money in your purse.”
This sort of thing reminded him unpleasantly of the Pentlands. The Fool in “Lear” alone he thought admirable — a sad, tragic, mysterious fool. For the rest, he went about and composed parodies, which, with a devil’s grin, he told himself would split the sides of posterity. Such as: “Aye, nuncle, an if Shrove Tuesday come last Wednesday, I’ll do the capon to thy cock, as Tom O’Ludgate told the shepherd when he found the cowslips gone. Dost bay with two throats, Cerberus? Down, boy, down!”
The admired beauties he was often tired of, perhaps because he had heard them so often, and it seemed to him, moreover, that Shakespeare often spoke absurdly and pompously when he might better have spoken simply, as in the scene where, being informed by the Queen of the death of his sister by drowning, Laertes says:
“Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears.”
You really can’t beat that (he thought). Aye, Ben! Would he had blotted a hundred! A thousand!
But he was deep in other passages which the elocutionist misses, such as the terrible and epic invocation of Edmund, in King Lear, drenched in evil, which begins:
“Thou, Nature, art my goddess,”
and ends,
“Now, gods, stand up for bastards.”
It was as dark as night, as evil as Niggertown, as vast as the elemental winds that howled down across the hills: he chanted it in the black hours of his labor, into the dark and the wind. He understood; he exulted in its evil — which was the evil of earth, of illicit nature. It was a call to the unclassed; it was a cry for those beyond the fence, for rebel angels, and for all of the men who are too tall.
He knew nothing of the Elizabethan drama beyond Shakespeare’s plays. But he very early came to know a little of the poetry of Ben Jonson, whom Margaret looked on as a literary Falstaff, condoning, with the familiar weakness of the schoolmarm, his Gargantuan excess as a pardonable whimsy of genius.
She was somewhat academically mirthful over the literary bacchanalia, as a professor in a Baptist college smacks his lips appetizingly and beams ruddily at his classes when he reads of sack and porter and tankards foaming with the musty ale. All this is part of the liberal tradition. Men of the world are broadminded. Witness Professor Albert Thorndyke Firkins, of the University of Chicago, at the Falcon in Soho. Smiling bravely, he sits over a half-pint of bitter beer, in the company of a racing tout, a sway-backed barmaid, broad in the stern, with adjustable teeth, and three companionable tarts from Lisle street, who are making the best of two pints of Guinness. With eager impatience he awaits the arrival of G. K. Chesterton and E. V. Lucas.
“O rare Ben Jonson!” Margaret Leonard sighed with gentle laughter. “Ah, Lord!”
“My God, boy!” Sheba roared, snatching the suggested motif of conversation out of the air, and licking her buttered fingers noisily as she stormed into action. “God bless him!” Her hairy red face burned like clover, her veinous eyes were tearful bright. “God bless him, ‘Gene! He was as English as roast beef and a tankard of musty ale!”
“Ah, Lord!” sighed Margaret. “He was a genius if ever there was one.” With misty eyes she gazed far off, a thread of laughter on her mouth. “Whee!” she laughed gently. “Old Ben!”
“And say, ‘Gene!” Sheba continued, bending forward with a fat hand gripped upon her knee. “Do you know that the greatest tribute to Shakespeare’s genius is from his hand?”
“Ah, I tell you, boy!” said Margaret, with darkened eyes. Her voice was husky. He was afraid she was going to weep.
“And yet the fools!” Sheba yelled. “The mean little two-by-two pusillanimous swill-drinking fools —”
“Whee!” gently Margaret moaned. John Dorsey turned his chalk-white face to the boy and whined with vacant appreciation, winking his head pertly. Ah absently!
“— for that’s all they are, have had the effrontery to suggest that he was jealous.”
“Pshaw!” said Margaret impatiently. “There’s nothing in that.”
“Why, they don’t know what they’re talking about!” Sheba turned a sudden grinning face upon him. “The little upstarts! It takes us to tell ’em, ‘Gene,” she said.
He began to slide floorwards out of the wicker chair. John Dorsey slapped his meaty thigh, and bent forward whining inchoately, drooling slightly at the mouth.
“The Lord a’ mercy!” he wheezed, gasping.
“I was talking to a feller the other day,” said Sheba, “a lawyer that you’d think might know a LITTLE something, and I used a quotation out of The Merchant of Venice that every schoolboy knows — ‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ The man looked at me as if he thought I was crazy!”
“Great heavens!” said Margaret in a still voice.
“I said, ‘Look here, Mr. So-and-so, you may be a smart lawyer, you may have your million dollars that they say you have, but there are a lot of things you don’t know yet. There are a lot of things money can’t buy, my sonny, and one of them is the society of cult-shered men and women.’"
“Why, pshaw!” said Mr. Leonard. “What do these little whipper-snappers know about the things of the mind? You might as well expect some ignorant darky out in the fields to construe a passage in Homer.” He grasped a glass half full of clabber, on the table, and tilting it intently in his chalky fingers, spooned out a lumpy spilth of curds which he slid, quivering, into his mouth. “No, sir!” he laughed. “They may be Big Men on the tax collector’s books, but when they try to associate with educated men and women, as the feller says, ‘they — they —’” he began to whine, “‘why, they just ain’t nothin’.’”
“What