Nearly every evening of every week of August we strolled out after dinner from our hotel to the comer of New Place, where Shakespeare died, down Chapel Lane to the theater where he still lived in those plays of his which were given every second night and every third afternoon. They were the most vital experiences of the commemorative month, and the Memorial Theater found in their succession a devotion to its office beyond the explicit intention of its giver. That is what I say now, trying to do justice to the esthetic and civic fact, but to be honest nothing of the kind was in my mind at the time. I only thought how charming it was to be going to a Shakespeare play on terms so quite unlike going to any other play in any other place. The days were shortening in August, but the twilights were still long, and they were scarcely half-way spent when they saw us to the theater with all the Stratford world, gentle and simple. The way across the street at the foot of the lane was guarded by a single policeman who sufficed to save us from the four or five motors glaring with their premature lamps, and panting after their run from Warwick or Leamington. Without his help one could have safely passed between the family carriages bringing the nearer neighbors to rites which the whole region frequented rather more than if they were of religious claim. But by far the greatest number of us came on foot, and when the play was done, we went home by the same means under the moonlight, in the informality of morning dress unless we had bought places in the first row of the balcony. The orchestra implied no such claim, but partook of the informality of the pit behind it, which there as in most English theaters continues the tradition now lost to our theaters. The seats were not reserved there, nor in the upper galleries, which, however sparse the attendance elsewhere might be, were always packed by the undying love of the people for the universal poet.

Sometimes when I fancied the poet there, in escape from a heavy evening with Bacon in their riverside cottage, I liked to suppose a generous regret in him for not having anticipatively requited this affection by tenderer treatment of the lower classes in his plays. But then I reflected that the English lower classes have always preferred to have the smooth things given to the upper classes, especially on the stage, and that they probably found their account there in imaging themselves such or such a lord or lady in the scene, and fitting their friends and neighbors to the humbler parts. Once I reminded him of Tolstoy's censure of his want of kindness toward them, and he said he had been too nearly of them, in his own life; he satirized his own faults in them; and what literature was to do was to join political economy in making men so equal in fortune that there could be no deformity, no vulgarity in them which sprang from the pressure of need or the struggle of hiding or escaping its effects. The vanity of poverty was as ridiculous as the vanity of riches, and might be as fairly laughed at. His defense did not quite satisfy me, and I said I would hand him over to Mr. Shaw. But at the Memorial Theater I could not imagine any dramatist but himself, or hardly any moralist. In the wonderfully even performance of the plays throughout, the art of the actors did not slight the nature of the characters studied from low life; it was rendered with a reality that convinced of the dramatist's truth, if that ever needed argument. No part was slighted, whether high or low, but one could have more pleasure of the upper classes because the reality was less tedious than that of the churls and clowns who, if anything, superabound in the Shakespeare plays; he might contend that they superabound in life. This evenness was, of course, the effect of unsparing vigilance in the admirable over-artist whose conscience was felt in every moment and every detail. His whole professional career had been directed to the Shakespeare drama which he imagined giving with an unselfishness unknown save among its most impassioned devotees. The range of the plays was suggestive if not fully illustrative of the poet's largest range. There were "The Merchant of Venice," "As You Like It," "Hamlet," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Twelfth Night," "Richard the Second," "The Taming of the Shrew," "King John," "Romeo and Juliet," and "The Merry Wives of Windsor”; and of these I saw such I had seen seldomest, but now I am sorry I did not see them all. They were all well done, and in censure you could say no worse than that some were done better than others. If I do not name the over-artist it is because I am naming nobody in a record which is keeping itself in a high fantastic air, and as much aloof from every-day matter-of-fact as if it were one of those romantic fictions I have always endeavored to bring into contempt. He took such peculiarly difficult parts as Richard the Second, or Eang John, with an address that made them live so in the imagination as to win your pity where your sympathy was impossible; ha was specially trained, if not natured, for tragedy, but he could for instance abandon himself unselfishly to the comedy of such a part as Doctor Caius in "The Merry Wives of Windsor." His reward was to make it wildly delightful, and delightful a play which I had always imagined a heavy piece of voluntary drolling, but must always think of hereafter as charming, full of the human nature of its day and of all time. I should have liked to make my apologies to Shakespeare if I had found him in the audience as often as I found him on the stage. I should have had to confess that mostly I found his comedies, in the reading, poor stuff, as compared with his tragedies and histories. But he usually came with Bacon, whom I should have to join in blaming those lighter plays. When it was a question of the authorship Bacon was stanchly Shakespearean, but that once granted he was somewhat less Shakespearean than such an ardent fellow-townsman of the poet as I had now become, could desire. There was a supreme moment of King John when I most longed for the author to enjoy it with me. The plajdng was of that beautiful evenness which left no part, and no part of any part unstudied, and which makes us rather sorry, in its steady glow, for the meteoric splendors of our American acting. After all, Shakespeare was an Englishman, and I suppose he spoke with an English voice in his plays, so that if I were an Englishman, too, I might be emboldened to claim that until you had heard the voices of the English actors in the several parts you had not heard his characters speak as Shakespeare heard them. To be sure, Shakespeare himself spoke with a Warwickshire accent, and though he had probably worn it off in his long London sojourn he must have returned to it after he came back to Stratford, as Bacon had noted in our first night with them in Cheltenham. Still, I should say that broad Warwickshire was truer to the accents which his inner ear perceived than those of our Middle West, or Philadelphia, or Broadway, or even Boston accent, or of them all synthetized in the strange blend which passes on our stage for the English voice.

In that supreme moment scene, costume, action, expression, were all so proper, so exquisitely harmonized. that though it was by no means the most important scene, or one of the most important scenes, I thought that if the poet could have witnessed it his heart must have swelled almost to bursting for joy in the perfection of it. I tried to compel his presence by that longing which I had several times found effective with him, but he would not respond, and I was thrown back upon the question how much or little a great dramatist of the past might really care for the modem perfection of the upholstering which so stays and comforts the imagination of the average theater-goer, say the tired business man or the over-intellectualized club woman. Shakespeare, if he had come at my call, might have said that the action and expression were richly enough for him, and these were what so chiefly satisfied him in the highest moments; that the costuming and the setting were for others and not for him; that for him these were like the dress of a gentleman which if fit was the last thing you noticed in his presence. Then I might have come back at him with the argument that if be had been imagining a theater nowadays he would not have been content with less than the perfection of that entourage. At this he must have allowed that as a dramatist he owed more than his answer implied to the arts which the Shakespeare scholarship of such a manager as this had summoned to his help. As himself an actor-manager, and used to dealing with the work of others and adapting it to the needs of his theater, he would have approved of this actor-manager's cutting of his plays, which I liked so much that when I recurred to the printed text I found little cause to desire it in its entirety, though I do not make so bold as to say that the cuts were unerringly those which Shakespeare would have made himself. I only say something like this; and that in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," for instance, there was no line which I would have had restored for the stage.

It was the personal companionableness of Shakespeare, his modest, his humorous capacity of self-forgetfulness which made him so delightful. I am sure that in his visits to the Memorial Theater (which perhaps he did not visit oftener because of a natural diffidence) he would have liked as much as I did its quality of home, the charming sense of hospitality and domesticity, in which people met each other, and nodded and smiled from orchestra and balcony, and went about between the acts shaking hands, like neighbors akin in their common love of the Supreme Poet whom we so felt there the brother of us all. It was not my happy fortune to be there the last night of the happy season, but I have heard that the genial audience then for farewell took hands all round the theater and sang "Auld Lang Syne" together.

That must have been beautiful, but what event, what moment of the joyous season was not beautiful? When we came out of the theater at the modest hours which the theater keeps in Stratford we continued, as it were, a part of the cast in whatever play we had been seeing, and under the stars of the dim English heaven, or its mild moon, we took our way up the footpath of Chapel Lane, or confided ourselves fearlessly to the roadway, where a few large-eyed motors purred harmlessly among us. I may not claim that they paused to let us look about for the lame cat of New Place gardens, or deny that they sometimes urged us on with those porcine gutturals peculiar to motors. But we heard in them only the ghostly echoes from the styes which fenced New Place along Chapel Street and Chapel Lane in Shakespeare's time. There was no ghostliest taint from these in our twentieth-century air, but the honeyed odor of the sweet alyssum from the beds beside the gates of New Place gardens stole through the grating and haunted us to our dreams.