Chapter VIII: A Discontented Shade

A House-Boat on the Styx

by John Kendrick Bangs

"It seems to me," said Shakespeare, wearily, one afternoon at the
club--"that this business of being immortal is pretty dull. Didn't
somebody once say he'd rather ride fifty years on a trolley in Europe
than on a bicycle in Cathay?"

"I never heard any such remark by any self-respecting person,"
said Johnson.

"I said something like it," observed Tennyson.

Doctor Johnson looked around to see who it was that spoke.

"You?" he cried. "And who, pray, may you be?"

"My name is Tennyson," replied the poet.

"And a very good name it is," said Shakespeare.

"I am not aware that I ever heard the name before," said Doctor
Johnson. "Did you make it yourself?"

"I did," said the late laureate, proudly.

"In what pursuit?" asked Doctor Johnson.

"Poetry," said Tennyson. "I wrote 'Locksley Hall' and 'Come
into the Garden, Maude.'"

"Humph!" said Doctor Johnson. "I never read 'em."

"Well, why should you have read them?" snarled Carlyle. "They
were written after you moved over here, and they were good stuff.
You needn't think because you quit, the whole world put up its
shutters and went out of business. I did a few things myself which I
fancy you never heard of."

"Oh, as for that," retorted Doctor Johnson, with a smile, "I've
heard of you; you are the man who wrote the life of Frederick the
Great in nine hundred and two volumes--"

"Seven!" snapped Carlyle.

"Well, seven then," returned Johnson. "I never saw the work,
but I heard Frederick speaking of it the other day. Bonaparte asked
him if he had read it, and Frederick said no, he hadn't time.
Bonaparte cried, 'Haven't time? Why, my dear king, you've got all
eternity.' 'I know it,' replied Frederick, 'but that isn't enough.
Read a page or two, my dear Napoleon, and you'll see why.'"

"Frederick will have his joke," said Shakespeare, with a wink at
Tennyson and a smile for the two philosophers, intended, no doubt, to
put them in a more agreeable frame of mind. "Why, he even asked me
the other day why I never wrote a tragedy about him, completely
ignoring the fact that he came along many years after I had departed.
I spoke of that, and he said, 'Oh, I was only joking.' I apologized.
'I didn't know that,' said I. 'And why should you?' said he. 'You're
English.'"

"A very rude remark," said Johnson. "As if we English were
incapable of seeing a joke!"

"Exactly," put in Carlyle. "It strikes me as the absurdest
notion that the Englishman can't see a joke. To the mind that is
accustomed to snap judgments I have no doubt the Englishman appears
to be dull of apprehension, but the philosophy of the whole matter is
apparent to the mind that takes the trouble to investigate. The
Briton weighs everything carefully before he commits himself, and
even though a certain point may strike him as funny, he isn't going
to laugh until he has fully made up his mind that it is funny. I
remember once riding down Piccadilly with Froude in a hansom cab.
Froude had a copy of Punch in his hand, and he began to laugh
immoderately over something. I leaned over his shoulder to see what
he was laughing at. 'That isn't so funny,' said I, as I read the
paragraph on which his eye was resting. 'No,' said Froude. 'I
wasn't laughing at that. I was enjoying the joke that appeared in the
same relative position in last week's issue.' Now that's the
point--the whole point. The Englishman always laughs over last
week's Punch, not this week's, and that is why you will find a file
of that interesting journal in the home of all well-to-do Britons.
It is the back number that amuses him--which merely proves that he is
a deliberative person who weighs even his humor carefully before
giving way to his emotions."

"What is the average weight of a copy of Punch?" drawled Artemas
Ward, who had strolled in during the latter part of the
conversation.

Shakespeare snickered quietly, but Carlyle and Johnson looked
upon the intruder severely.

"We will take that question into consideration," said Carlyle.
"Perhaps to-morrow we shall have a definite answer ready for you."

"Never mind," returned the humorist. "You've proved your point.
Tennyson tells me you find life here dull, Shakespeare."

"Somewhat," said Shakespeare. "I don't know about the rest of
you fellows, but I was not cut out for an eternity of ease. I must
have occupation, and the stage isn't popular here. The trouble about
putting on a play here is that our managers are afraid of libel
suits. The chances are that if I should write a play with Cassius as
the hero, Cassius would go to the first night's performance with a
dagger concealed in his toga, with which to punctuate his objections
to the lines put in his mouth. There is nothing I'd like better than
to manage a theatre in this place, but think of the riots we'd have!
Suppose, for an instant, that I wrote a play about Bonaparte! He'd
have a box, and when the rest of you spooks called for the author at
the end of the third act, if he didn't happen to like the play he'd
greet me with a salvo of artillery instead of applause."

"He wouldn't if you made him out a great conqueror from start to
finish," said Tennyson.

"No doubt," returned Shakespeare, sadly; "but in that event
Wellington would be in the other stage-box, and I'd get the greeting
from him."

"Why come out at all?" asked Johnson.

"Why come out at all?" echoed Shakespeare. "What fun is there
in writing a play if you can't come out and show yourself at the
first night? That's the author's reward. If it wasn't for the
first-night business, though, all would be plain sailing."

"Then why don't you begin it the second night?" drawled Ward.

"How the deuce could you?" put in Carlyle.

"A most extraordinary proposition," sneered Johnson.

"Yes," said Ward; "but wait a week--you'll see the point
then."

"There isn't any doubt in my mind," said Shakespeare, reverting
to his original proposition, "that the only perfectly satisfactory
life is under a system not yet adopted in either world--the one we
have quitted or this. There we had hard work in which our mortal
limitations hampered us grievously; here we have the freedom of the
immortal with no hard work; in other words, now that we feel like
fighting-cocks, there isn't any fighting to be done. The great life
in my estimation, would be to return to earth and battle with mortal
problems, but equipped mentally and physically with immortal
weapons."

"Some people don't know when they are well off," said Beau
Brummel. "This strikes me as being an ideal life. There are no
tailors bills to pay--we are ourselves nothing but memories, and a
memory can clothe himself in the shadow of his former grandeur--I
clothe myself in the remembrance of my departed clothes, and as my
memory is good I flatter myself I'm the best-dressed man here. The
fact that there are ghosts of departed unpaid bills haunting my
bedside at night doesn't bother me in the least, because the bailiffs
that in the old life lent terror to an overdue account, thanks to our
beneficent system here, are kept in the less agreeable sections of
Hades. I used to regret that bailiffs were such low people, but now
I rejoice at it. If they had been of a different order they might
have proven unpleasant here."

"You are right, my dear Brummel," interposed Munchausen. "This
life is far preferable to that in the other sphere. Any of you
gentlemen who happen to have had the pleasure of reading my memoirs
must have been struck with the tremendous difficulties that
encumbered my progress. If I wished for a rare liqueur for my
luncheon, a liqueur served only at the table of an Oriental
potentate, more jealous of it than of his one thousand queens, I had
to raise armies, charter ships, and wage warfare in which feats of
incredible valor had to be performed by myself alone and unaided to
secure the desired thimbleful. I have destroyed empires for a
bon-bon at great expense of nervous energy."

"That's very likely true," said Carlyle. "I should think your
feats of strength would have wrecked your imagination in time."

"Not so," said Munchausen. "On the contrary, continuous
exercise served only to make it stronger. But, as I was going to
say, in this life we have none of these fearful obstacles--it is a
life of leisure; and if I want a bird and a cold bottle at any time,
instead of placing my life in peril and jeopardizing the peace of all
mankind to get it, I have only to summon before me the memory of some
previous bird and cold bottle, dine thereon like a well-ordered
citizen, and smoke the spirit of the best cigar my imagination can
conjure up."

"You miss my point," said Shakespeare. "I don't say this life
is worse or better than the other we used to live. What I do say is
that a combination of both would suit me. In short, I'd like to live
here and go to the other world every day to business, like a suburban
resident who sleeps in the country and makes his living in the city.
For instance, why shouldn't I dwell here and go to London every day,
hire an office there, and put out a sign something like this:

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
DRAMATIST
Plays written while you
wait

I guess I'd find plenty to do."

"Guess again," said Tennyson. "My dear boy, you forget one
thing. You are out of date. People don't go to the theatres to hear
you, they go to see the people who do you."

"That is true," said Ward. "And they do do you, my beloved
William. It's a wonder to me you are not dizzy turning over in your
grave the way they do you."

"Can it be that I can ever be out of date?" asked Shakespeare.
"I know, of course, that I have to be adapted at times; but to be
wholly out of date strikes me as a hard fate."

"You're not out of date," interposed Carlyle; "the date is out
of you. There is a great demand for Shakespeare in these days, but
there isn't any stuff."

"Then I should succeed," said Shakespeare.

"No, I don't think so," returned Carlyle. "You couldn't stand
the pace. The world revolves faster to-day than it did in your
time--men write three or four plays at once. This is what you might
call a Type-writer Age, and to keep up with the procession you'd have
to work as you never worked before."

"That is true," observed Tennyson. "You'd have to learn to be
ambidextrous, so that you could keep two type-writing machines going
at once; and, to be perfectly frank with you, I cannot even conjure
up in my fancy a picture of you knocking out a tragedy with the right
hand on one machine, while your left hand is fashioning a farce-
comedy on another."

"He might do as a great many modern writers do," said Ward; "go
in for the Paper-doll Drama. Cut the whole thing out with a pair of
scissors. As the poet might have said if he'd been clever enough:

Oh, bring me the scissors,
And bring me the glue,
And a
couple of dozen old plays.
I'll cut out and paste
A drama for
you
That'll run for quite sixty-two days.

Oh, bring me a dress
Made of satin and lace,
And a
book--say Joe Miller's--of wit;
And I'll make the old
dramatists
Blue in the face
With the play that I'll turn out
for it.

So bring me the scissors,
And bring me the paste,
And a
dozen fine old comedies;
A fine line of dresses,
And popular
taste
I'll make a strong effort to please.

"You draw a very blue picture, it seems to me," said
Shakespeare, sadly.

"Well, it's true," said Carlyle. "The world isn't at all what
it used to be in any one respect, and you fellows who made great
reputations centuries ago wouldn't have even the ghost of a show now.
I don't believe Homer could get a poem accepted by a modern magazine,
and while the comic papers are still printing Diogenes' jokes the old
gentleman couldn't make enough out of them in these days to pay taxes
on his tub, let alone earning his bread."

"That is exactly so," said Tennyson. "I'd be willing to wager
too that, in the line of personal prowess, even D'Artagnan and Athos
and Porthos and Aramis couldn't stand London for one day."

"Or New York either," said Mr. Barnum, who had been an
interested listener. "A New York policeman could have managed that
quartet with one hand."

"Then," said Shakespeare, "in the opinion of you gentlemen, we
old- time lions would appear to modern eyes to be more or less
stuffed?"

"That's about the size of it," said Carlyle.

"But you'd draw," said Barnum, his face lighting up with
pleasure. "You'd drive a five-legged calf to suicide from envy. If I
could take you and Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte and Nero over for
one circus season we'd drive the mint out of business."

"There's your chance, William," said Ward. "You write a play
for Bonaparte and Caesar, and let Nero take his fiddle and be the
orchestra. Under Barnum's management you'd get enough activity in
one season to last you through all eternity."

"You can count on me," said Barnum, rising. "Let me know when
you've got your plan laid out. I'd stay and make a contract with you
now, but Adam has promised to give me points on the management of
wild animals without cages, so I can't wait. By-by."

"Humph!" said Shakespeare, as the eminent showman passed out.
"That's a gay proposition. When monkeys move in polite society
William Shakespeare will make a side-show of himself for a
circus."

"They do now," said Thackeray, quietly.

Which merely proved that Shakespeare did not mean what he said;
for in spite of Thackeray's insinuation as to the monkeys and polite
society, he has not yet accepted the Barnum proposition, though there
can be no doubt of its value from the point of view of a circus
manager.