As I began this chapter with the story of General Dickson's jovial courtesy and excellent dinner, so I must in justice to London end it with the account of a still more memorable feast enjoyed in Ernest Beckett's (afterwards Lord Grimthorpe's) house in Piccadilly, because it, too, throws light on the consummate savoir faire and kindness which enriches English life and distinguishes it above life in any other country.
I had got to know Beckett pretty well towards the end of 1887. He had heard me tell some of the stories I afterwards published and encouraged me by warm praise. He was always pressing me too to go into the House of Commons. "You may write wonderfully," he used to say, "but you'll never write as well as you talk, for you're at least as good an actor as a story teller."
One evening Beckett asked me to dinner; Mallock and Professor Dow-den of Dublin University were the only other guests. I knew both men slightly and had read a good deal of both and especially of Mallock, not only his New Republic but all his attacks on socialism in defence of an unrestrained individualism. In spite of his reserved manners and rather slow way of speaking, I had come to feel a genuine esteem for his very considerable abilities. I was glad too to meet Dowden again. His book on Shakespeare I thought piffle; it was all taken from what I had begun to call the Ragbag, the receptacle where the English store all the current ideas about Shakespeare, ideas for the most part completely false and not seldom ridiculously absurd.
Nine out of ten English mediocrities are afflicted with the desire to make this God Shakespeare in their own image, and this inexplicable idolatry of themselves has led them into all manner of incongruous misconceptions.
Naturally I had no idea when we sat down to dine that Beckett had arranged the whole affair just to find out whether my knowledge of Shakespeare was really extraordinary or not. Still less did I imagine that Mallock had offered himself as chief inquisitor, so to speak. Towards the end of dinner Beckett turned the conversation deftly enough to Shakespeare and Mallock remarked that though he had only read him casually, carelessly, "like all the world, he had yet noticed that some of Shakespeare's finest expressions- 'gems of thought'-were never quoted, indeed, were not even known to most of the professional students." I nodded my agreement.
"Give us an instance!" cried Beckett.
"Well," replied Mallock, "take the phrase, 'frightened out of fear'; could, a truth be more splendidly expressed? An epigram unforgettable!"
"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: