Lord Arthur Savile's Crime; The Portrait of Mr. W.H., and Other Stories

One afternoon I was sitting outside the Café de la Paix, watching the splendour and shabbiness of Parisian life, and wondering over my vermouth at the strange panorama of pride and poverty that was passing before me, when I heard some one call my name.  I turned round, and saw Lord Murchison.  We had not met since we had been at college together, nearly ten years before, so I was delighted to come across him again, and we shook hands warmly.  At Oxford we had been great friends.  I had liked him immensely, he was so handsome, so high-spirited, and so honourable.  We used to say of him that he would be the best of fellows, if he did not always speak the truth, but I think we really admired him all the more for his frankness.  I found him a good deal changed.  He looked anxious and puzzled, and seemed to be in doubt about something.  I felt it could not be modern scepticism, for Murchison was the stoutest of Tories, and believed in the Pentateuch as firmly as he believed in the House of Peers; so I concluded that it was a woman, and asked him if he was married yet.

‘I don’t understand women well enough,’ he answered.

‘My dear Gerald,’ I said, ‘women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.’

‘I cannot love where I cannot trust,’ he replied.

‘I believe you have a mystery in your life, Gerald,’ I exclaimed; ‘tell me about it.’

‘Let us go for a drive,’ he answered, ‘it is too crowded here.  No, not a yellow carriage, any other colour—there, that dark green one will do’; and in a few moments we were trotting down the boulevard in the direction of the Madeleine.

‘Where shall we go to?’ I said.

‘Oh, anywhere you like!’ he answered—‘to the restaurant in the Bois; we will dine there, and you shall tell me all about yourself.’

‘I want to hear about you first,’ I said.  ‘Tell me your mystery.’

He took from his pocket a little silver-clasped morocco case, and handed it to me.  I opened it.  Inside there was the photograph of a woman.  She was tall and slight, and strangely picturesque with her large vague eyes and loosened hair.  She looked like a clairvoyante, and was wrapped in rich furs.

‘What do you think of that face?’ he said; ‘is it truthful?’

I examined it carefully.  It seemed to me the face of some one who had a secret, but whether that secret was good or evil I could not say.  Its beauty was a beauty moulded out of many mysteries—the beauty, in fact, which is psychological, not plastic—and the faint smile that just played across the lips was far too subtle to be really sweet.

‘Well,’ he cried impatiently, ‘what do you say?’

‘She is the Gioconda in sables,’ I answered.  ‘Let me know all about her.’

‘Not now,’ he said; ‘after dinner,’ and began to talk of other things.

When the waiter brought us our coffee and cigarettes I reminded Gerald of his promise.  He rose from his seat, walked two or three times up and down the room, and, sinking into an armchair, told me the following story:—

‘One evening,’ he said, ‘I was walking down Bond Street about five o’clock.  There was a terrific crush of carriages, and the traffic was almost stopped.  Close to the pavement was standing a little yellow brougham, which, for some reason or other, attracted my attention.  As I passed by there looked out from it the face I showed you this afternoon.  It fascinated me immediately.  All that night I kept thinking of it, and all the next day.  I wandered up and down that wretched Row, peering into every carriage, and waiting for the yellow brougham; but I could not find ma belle inconnue, and at last I began to think she was merely a dream.  About a week afterwards I was dining with Madame de Rastail.  Dinner was for eight o’clock; but at half-past eight we were still waiting in the drawing-room.  Finally the servant threw open the door, and announced Lady Alroy.  It was the woman I had been looking for.  She came in very slowly, looking like a moonbeam in grey lace, and, to my intense delight, I was asked to take her in to dinner.  After we had sat down, I remarked quite innocently, “I think I caught sight of you in Bond Street some time ago, Lady Alroy.”  She grew very pale, and said to me in a low voice, “Pray do not talk so loud; you may be overheard.”  I felt miserable at having made such a bad beginning, and plunged recklessly into the subject of the French plays.  She spoke very little, always in the same low musical voice, and seemed as if she was afraid of some one listening.  I fell passionately, stupidly in love, and the indefinable atmosphere of mystery that surrounded her excited my most ardent curiosity.  When she was going away, which she did very soon after dinner, I asked her if I might call and see her.  She hesitated for a moment, glanced round to see if any one was near us, and then said, “Yes; to-morrow at a quarter to five.”  I begged Madame de Rastail to tell me about her; but all that I could learn was that she was a widow with a beautiful house in Park Lane, and as some scientific bore began a dissertation on widows, as exemplifying the survival of the matrimonially fittest, I left and went home.

‘The next day I arrived at Park Lane punctual to the moment, but was told by the butler that Lady Alroy had just gone out.  I went down to the club quite unhappy and very much puzzled, and after long consideration wrote her a letter, asking if I might be allowed to try my chance some other afternoon.  I had no answer for several days, but at last I got a little note saying she would be at home on Sunday at four and with this extraordinary postscript: “Please do not write to me here again; I will explain when I see you.”  On Sunday she received me, and was perfectly charming; but when I was going away she begged of me, if I ever had occasion to write to her again, to address my letter to “Mrs. Knox, care of Whittaker’s Library, Green Street.”  “There are reasons,” she said, “why I cannot receive letters in my own house.”

‘All through the season I saw a great deal of her, and the atmosphere of mystery never left her.  Sometimes I thought that she was in the power of some man, but she looked so unapproachable, that I could not believe it.  It was really very difficult for me to come to any conclusion, for she was like one of those strange crystals that one sees in museums, which are at one moment clear, and at another clouded.  At last I determined to ask her to be my wife: I was sick and tired of the incessant secrecy that she imposed on all my visits, and on the few letters I sent her.  I wrote to her at the library to ask her if she could see me the following Monday at six.  She answered yes, and I was in the seventh heaven of delight.  I was infatuated with her: in spite of the mystery, I thought then—in consequence of it, I see now.  No; it was the woman herself I loved.  The mystery troubled me, maddened me.  Why did chance put me in its track?’

‘You discovered it, then?’ I cried.

‘I fear so,’ he answered.  ‘You can judge for yourself.’

‘When Monday came round I went to lunch with my uncle, and about four o’clock found myself in the Marylebone Road.  My uncle, you know, lives in Regent’s Park.  I wanted to get to Piccadilly, and took a short cut through a lot of shabby little streets.  Suddenly I saw in front of me Lady Alroy, deeply veiled and walking very fast.  On coming to the last house in the street, she went up the steps, took out a latch-key, and let herself in.  “Here is the mystery,” I said to myself; and I hurried on and examined the house.  It seemed a sort of place for letting lodgings.  On the doorstep lay her handkerchief, which she had dropped.  I picked it up and put it in my pocket.  Then I began to consider what I should do.  I came to the conclusion that I had no right to spy on her, and I drove down to the club.  At six I called to see her.  She was lying on a sofa, in a tea-gown of silver tissue looped up by some strange moonstones that she always wore.  She was looking quite lovely.  “I am so glad to see you,” she said; “I have not been out all day.”  I stared at her in amazement, and pulling the handkerchief out of my pocket, handed it to her.  “You dropped this in Cumnor Street this afternoon, Lady Alroy,”  I said very calmly.  She looked at me in terror but made no attempt to take the handkerchief.  “What were you doing there?” I asked.  “What right have you to question me?” she answered.  “The right of a man who loves you,” I replied; “I came here to ask you to be my wife.”  She hid her face in her hands, and burst into floods of tears.  “You must tell me,” I continued.  She stood up, and, looking me straight in the face, said, “Lord Murchison, there is nothing to tell you.”—“You went to meet some one,” I cried; “this is your mystery.”  She grew dreadfully white, and said, “I went to meet no one.”—“Can’t you tell the truth?” I exclaimed.  “I have told it,” she replied.  I was mad, frantic; I don’t know what I said, but I said terrible things to her.  Finally I rushed out of the house.  She wrote me a letter the next day; I sent it back unopened, and started for Norway with Alan Colville.  After a month I came back, and the first thing I saw in the Morning Post was the death of Lady Alroy.  She had caught a chill at the Opera, and had died in five days of congestion of the lungs.  I shut myself up and saw no one.  I had loved her so much, I had loved her so madly.  Good God! how I had loved that woman!’

‘You went to the street, to the house in it?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘One day I went to Cumnor Street.  I could not help it; I was tortured with doubt.  I knocked at the door, and a respectable-looking woman opened it to me.  I asked her if she had any rooms to let.  “Well, sir,” she replied, “the drawing-rooms are supposed to be let; but I have not seen the lady for three months, and as rent is owing on them, you can have them.”—“Is this the lady?” I said, showing the photograph.  “That’s her, sure enough,” she exclaimed; “and when is she coming back, sir?”—“The lady is dead,” I replied.  “Oh sir, I hope not!” said the woman; “she was my best lodger.  She paid me three guineas a week merely to sit in my drawing-rooms now and then.”  “She met some one here?” I said; but the woman assured me that it was not so, that she always came alone, and saw no one.  “What on earth did she do here?” I cried.  “She simply sat in the drawing-room, sir, reading books, and sometimes had tea,” the woman answered.  I did not know what to say, so I gave her a sovereign and went away.  Now, what do you think it all meant?  You don’t believe the woman was telling the truth?’

‘I do.’

‘Then why did Lady Alroy go there?’

‘My dear Gerald,’ I answered, ‘Lady Alroy was simply a woman with a mania for mystery.  She took these rooms for the pleasure of going there with her veil down, and imagining she was a heroine.  She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘I am sure of it,’ I replied.

He took out the morocco case, opened it, and looked at the photograph.  ‘I wonder?’ he said at last.

Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow.  Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed.  The poor should be practical and prosaic.  It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.  These are the great truths of modern life which Hughie Erskine never realised.  Poor Hughie!  Intellectually, we must admit, he was not of much importance.  He never said a brilliant or even an ill-natured thing in his life.  But then he was wonderfully good-looking, with his crisp brown hair, his clear-cut profile, and his grey eyes.  He was as popular with men as he was with women and he had every accomplishment except that of making money.  His father had bequeathed him his cavalry sword and a History of the Peninsular War in fifteen volumes.  Hughie hung the first over his looking-glass, put the second on a shelf between Ruff’s Guide and Bailey’s Magazine, and lived on two hundred a year that an old aunt allowed him.  He had tried everything.  He had gone on the Stock Exchange for six months; but what was a butterfly to do among bulls and bears?  He had been a tea-merchant for a little longer, but had soon tired of pekoe and souchong.  Then he had tried selling dry sherry.  That did not answer; the sherry was a little too dry.  Ultimately he became nothing, a delightful, ineffectual young man with a perfect profile and no profession.

To make matters worse, he was in love.  The girl he loved was Laura Merton, the daughter of a retired Colonel who had lost his temper and his digestion in India, and had never found either of them again.  Laura adored him, and he was ready to kiss her shoe-strings.  They were the handsomest couple in London, and had not a penny-piece between them.  The Colonel was very fond of Hughie, but would not hear of any engagement.

‘Come to me, my boy, when you have got ten thousand pounds of your own, and we will see about it,’ he used to say; and Hughie looked very glum in those days, and had to go to Laura for consolation.

One morning, as he was on his way to Holland Park, where the Mertons lived, he dropped in to see a great friend of his, Alan Trevor.  Trevor was a painter.  Indeed, few people escape that nowadays.  But he was also an artist, and artists are rather rare.  Personally he was a strange rough fellow, with a freckled face and a red ragged beard.  However, when he took up the brush he was a real master, and his pictures were eagerly sought after.  He had been very much attracted by Hughie at first, it must be acknowledged, entirely on account of his personal charm.  ‘The only people a painter should know,’ he used to say, ‘are people who are bête and beautiful, people who are an artistic pleasure to look at and an intellectual repose to talk to.  Men who are dandies and women who are darlings rule the world, at least they should do so.’  However, after he got to know Hughie better, he liked him quite as much for his bright, buoyant spirits and his generous, reckless nature, and had given him the permanent entrée to his studio.

When Hughie came in he found Trevor putting the finishing touches to a wonderful life-size picture of a beggar-man.  The beggar himself was standing on a raised platform in a corner of the studio.  He was a wizened old man, with a face like wrinkled parchment, and a most piteous expression.  Over his shoulders was flung a coarse brown cloak, all tears and tatters; his thick boots were patched and cobbled, and with one hand he leant on a rough stick, while with the other he held out his battered hat for alms.

‘What an amazing model!’ whispered Hughie, as he shook hands with his friend.

‘An amazing model?’ shouted Trevor at the top of his voice; ‘I should think so!  Such beggars as he are not to be met with every day.  A trouvaille, mon cher; a living Velasquez!  My stars! what an etching Rembrandt would have made of him!’

‘Poor old chap!’ said Hughie, ‘how miserable he looks!  But I suppose, to you painters, his face is his fortune?’

‘Certainly,’ replied Trevor, ‘you don’t want a beggar to look happy, do you?’

‘How much does a model get for sitting?’ asked Hughie, as he found himself a comfortable seat on a divan.

‘A shilling an hour.’

‘And how much do you get for your picture, Alan?’

‘Oh, for this I get two thousand!’

‘Pounds?’

‘Guineas.  Painters, poets, and physicians always get guineas.’

‘Well, I think the model should have a percentage,’ cried Hughie, laughing; ‘they work quite as hard as you do.’

‘Nonsense, nonsense!  Why, look at the trouble of laying on the paint alone, and standing all day long at one’s easel!  It’s all very well, Hughie, for you to talk, but I assure you that there are moments when Art almost attains to the dignity of manual labour.  But you mustn’t chatter; I’m very busy.  Smoke a cigarette, and keep quiet.’

After some time the servant came in, and told Trevor that the framemaker wanted to speak to him.

‘Don’t run away, Hughie,’ he said, as he went out, ‘I will be back in a moment.’

The old beggar-man took advantage of Trevor’s absence to rest for a moment on a wooden bench that was behind him.  He looked so forlorn and wretched that Hughie could not help pitying him, and felt in his pockets to see what money he had.  All he could find was a sovereign and some coppers.  ‘Poor old fellow,’ he thought to himself, ‘he wants it more than I do, but it means no hansoms for a fortnight’; and he walked across the studio and slipped the sovereign into the beggar’s hand.

The old man started, and a faint smile flitted across his withered lips.  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, ‘thank you.’

Then Trevor arrived, and Hughie took his leave, blushing a little at what he had done.  He spent the day with Laura, got a charming scolding for his extravagance, and had to walk home.

That night he strolled into the Palette Club about eleven o’clock, and found Trevor sitting by himself in the smoking-room drinking hock and seltzer.

‘Well, Alan, did you get the picture finished all right?’ he said, as he lit his cigarette.

‘Finished and framed, my boy!’ answered Trevor; ‘and, by the bye, you have made a conquest.  That old model you saw is quite devoted to you.  I had to tell him all about you—who you are, where you live, what your income is, what prospects you have—’

‘My dear Alan,’ cried Hughie, ‘I shall probably find him waiting for me when I go home.  But of course you are only joking.  Poor old wretch!  I wish I could do something for him.  I think it is dreadful that any one should be so miserable.  I have got heaps of old clothes at home—do you think he would care for any of them?  Why, his rags were falling to bits.’

‘But he looks splendid in them,’ said Trevor.  ‘I wouldn’t paint him in a frock coat for anything.  What you call rags I call romance.  What seems poverty to you is picturesqueness to me.  However, I’ll tell him of your offer.’

‘Alan,’ said Hughie seriously, ‘you painters are a heartless lot.’

‘An artist’s heart is his head,’ replied Trevor; ‘and besides, our business is to realise the world as we see it, not to reform it as we know it.  À chacun son métier.  And now tell me how Laura is.  The old model was quite interested in her.’

‘You don’t mean to say you talked to him about her?’ said Hughie.

‘Certainly I did.  He knows all about the relentless colonel, the lovely Laura, and the £10,000.’

‘You told that old beggar all my private affairs?’ cried Hughie, looking very red and angry.

‘My dear boy,’ said Trevor, smiling, ‘that old beggar, as you call him, is one of the richest men in Europe.  He could buy all London to-morrow without overdrawing his account.  He has a house in every capital, dines off gold plate, and can prevent Russia going to war when he chooses.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ exclaimed Hughie.

‘What I say,’ said Trevor.  ‘The old man you saw to-day in the studio was Baron Hausberg.  He is a great friend of mine, buys all my pictures and that sort of thing, and gave me a commission a month ago to paint him as a beggar.  Que voulez-vous?  La fantaisie d’un millionnaire!  And I must say he made a magnificent figure in his rags, or perhaps I should say in my rags; they are an old suit I got in Spain.’

‘Baron Hausberg!’ cried Hughie.  ‘Good heavens!  I gave him a sovereign!’ and he sank into an armchair the picture of dismay.

‘Gave him a sovereign!’ shouted Trevor, and he burst into a roar of laughter.  ‘My dear boy, you’ll never see it again.  Son affaire c’est l’argent des autres.’

‘I think you might have told me, Alan,’ said Hughie sulkily, ‘and not have let me make such a fool of myself.’

‘Well, to begin with, Hughie,’ said Trevor, ‘it never entered my mind that you went about distributing alms in that reckless way.  I can understand your kissing a pretty model, but your giving a sovereign to an ugly one—by Jove, no!  Besides, the fact is that I really was not at home to-day to any one; and when you came in I didn’t know whether Hausberg would like his name mentioned.  You know he wasn’t in full dress.’

‘What a duffer he must think me!’ said Hughie.

‘Not at all.  He was in the highest spirits after you left; kept chuckling to himself and rubbing his old wrinkled hands together.  I couldn’t make out why he was so interested to know all about you; but I see it all now.  He’ll invest your sovereign for you, Hughie, pay you the interest every six months, and have a capital story to tell after dinner.’

‘I am an unlucky devil,’ growled Hughie.  ‘The best thing I can do is to go to bed; and, my dear Alan, you mustn’t tell any one.  I shouldn’t dare show my face in the Row.’

‘Nonsense!  It reflects the highest credit on your philanthropic spirit, Hughie.  And don’t run away.  Have another cigarette, and you can talk about Laura as much as you like.’

However, Hughie wouldn’t stop, but walked home, feeling very unhappy, and leaving Alan Trevor in fits of laughter.

The next morning, as he was at breakfast, the servant brought him up a card on which was written, ‘Monsieur Gustave Naudin, de la part de M. le Baron Hausberg.’  ‘I suppose he has come for an apology,’ said Hughie to himself; and he told the servant to show the visitor up.

An old gentleman with gold spectacles and grey hair came into the room, and said, in a slight French accent, ‘Have I the honour of addressing Monsieur Erskine?’

Hughie bowed.

‘I have come from Baron Hausberg,’ he continued.  ‘The Baron—’

‘I beg, sir, that you will offer him my sincerest apologies,’ stammered Hughie.

‘The Baron,’ said the old gentleman with a smile, ‘has commissioned me to bring you this letter’; and he extended a sealed envelope.

On the outside was written, ‘A wedding present to Hugh Erskine and Laura Merton, from an old beggar,’ and inside was a cheque for £10,000.

When they were married Alan Trevor was the best man, and the Baron made a speech at the wedding breakfast.

‘Millionaire models,’ remarked Alan, ‘are rare enough; but, by Jove, model millionaires are rarer still!’

CHAPTER I

I had been dining with Erskine in his pretty little house in Birdcage Walk, and we were sitting in the library over our coffee and cigarettes, when the question of literary forgeries happened to turn up in conversation.  I cannot at present remember how it was that we struck upon this somewhat curious topic, as it was at that time, but I know that we had a long discussion about Macpherson, Ireland, and Chatterton, and that with regard to the last I insisted that his so-called forgeries were merely the result of an artistic desire for perfect representation; that we had no right to quarrel with an artist for the conditions under which he chooses to present his work; and that all Art being to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life, to censure an artist for a forgery was to confuse an ethical with an æsthetical problem.

Erskine, who was a good deal older than I was, and had been listening to me with the amused deference of a man of forty, suddenly put his hand upon my shoulder and said to me, ‘What would you say about a young man who had a strange theory about a certain work of art, believed in his theory, and committed a forgery in order to prove it?’

‘Ah! that is quite a different matter,’ I answered.

Erskine remained silent for a few moments, looking at the thin grey threads of smoke that were rising from his cigarette.  ‘Yes,’ he said, after a pause, ‘quite different.’

There was something in the tone of his voice, a slight touch of bitterness perhaps, that excited my curiosity.  ‘Did you ever know anybody who did that?’ I cried.

‘Yes,’ he answered, throwing his cigarette into the fire,—‘a great friend of mine, Cyril Graham.  He was very fascinating, and very foolish, and very heartless.  However, he left me the only legacy I ever received in my life.’

‘What was that?’ I exclaimed.  Erskine rose from his seat, and going over to a tall inlaid cabinet that stood between the two windows, unlocked it, and came back to where I was sitting, holding in his hand a small panel picture set in an old and somewhat tarnished Elizabethan frame.

It was a full-length portrait of a young man in late sixteenth-century costume, standing by a table, with his right hand resting on an open book.  He seemed about seventeen years of age, and was of quite extraordinary personal beauty, though evidently somewhat effeminate.  Indeed, had it not been for the dress and the closely cropped hair, one would have said that the face with its dreamy wistful eyes, and its delicate scarlet lips, was the face of a girl.  In manner, and especially in the treatment of the hands, the picture reminded one of François Clouet’s later work.  The black velvet doublet with its fantastically gilded points, and the peacock-blue background against which it showed up so pleasantly, and from which it gained such luminous value of colour, were quite in Clouet’s style; and the two masks of Tragedy and Comedy that hung somewhat formally from the marble pedestal had that hard severity of touch—so different from the facile grace of the Italians—which even at the Court of France the great Flemish master never completely lost, and which in itself has always been a characteristic of the northern temper.

‘It is a charming thing,’ I cried, ‘but who is this wonderful young man, whose beauty Art has so happily preserved for us?’

‘This is the portrait of Mr. W. H.,’ said Erskine, with a sad smile.  It might have been a chance effect of light, but it seemed to me that his eyes were quite bright with tears.

‘Mr. W. H.!’ I exclaimed; ‘who was Mr. W. H.?’

‘Don’t you remember?’ he answered; ‘look at the book on which his hand is resting.’

‘I see there is some writing there, but I cannot make it out,’ I replied.

‘Take this magnifying-glass and try,’ said Erskine, with the same sad smile still playing about his mouth.

I took the glass, and moving the lamp a little nearer, I began to spell out the crabbed sixteenth-century handwriting.  ‘To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets.’ . . . ‘Good heavens!’ I cried, ‘is this Shakespeare’s Mr. W. H.?’

‘Cyril Graham used to say so,’ muttered Erskine.

‘But it is not a bit like Lord Pembroke,’ I answered.  ‘I know the Penshurst portraits very well.  I was staying near there a few weeks ago.’

‘Do you really believe then that the sonnets are addressed to Lord Pembroke?’ he asked.

‘I am sure of it,’ I answered.  ‘Pembroke, Shakespeare, and Mrs. Mary Fitton are the three personages of the Sonnets; there is no doubt at all about it.’

‘Well, I agree with you,’ said Erskine, ‘but I did not always think so.  I used to believe—well, I suppose I used to believe in Cyril Graham and his theory.’

‘And what was that?’ I asked, looking at the wonderful portrait, which had already begun to have a strange fascination for me.

‘It is a long story,’ said Erskine, taking the picture away from me—rather abruptly I thought at the time—‘a very long story; but if you care to hear it, I will tell it to you.’

‘I love theories about the Sonnets,’ I cried; ‘but I don’t think I am likely to be converted to any new idea.  The matter has ceased to be a mystery to any one.  Indeed, I wonder that it ever was a mystery.’

‘As I don’t believe in the theory, I am not likely to convert you to it,’ said Erskine, laughing; ‘but it may interest you.’

‘Tell it to me, of course,’ I answered.  ‘If it is half as delightful as the picture, I shall be more than satisfied.’

‘Well,’ said Erskine, lighting a cigarette, ‘I must begin by telling you about Cyril Graham himself.  He and I were at the same house at Eton.  I was a year or two older than he was, but we were immense friends, and did all our work and all our play together.  There was, of course, a good deal more play than work, but I cannot say that I am sorry for that.  It is always an advantage not to have received a sound commercial education, and what I learned in the playing fields at Eton has been quite as useful to me as anything I was taught at Cambridge.  I should tell you that Cyril’s father and mother were both dead.  They had been drowned in a horrible yachting accident off the Isle of Wight.  His father had been in the diplomatic service, and had married a daughter, the only daughter, in fact, of old Lord Crediton, who became Cyril’s guardian after the death of his parents.  I don’t think that Lord Crediton cared very much for Cyril.  He had never really forgiven his daughter for marrying a man who had not a title.  He was an extraordinary old aristocrat, who swore like a costermonger, and had the manners of a farmer.  I remember seeing him once on Speech-day.  He growled at me, gave me a sovereign, and told me not to grow up “a damned Radical” like my father.  Cyril had very little affection for him, and was only too glad to spend most of his holidays with us in Scotland.  They never really got on together at all.  Cyril thought him a bear, and he thought Cyril effeminate.  He was effeminate, I suppose, in some things, though he was a very good rider and a capital fencer.  In fact he got the foils before he left Eton.  But he was very languid in his manner, and not a little vain of his good looks, and had a strong objection to football.  The two things that really gave him pleasure were poetry and acting.  At Eton he was always dressing up and reciting Shakespeare, and when we went up to Trinity he became a member of the A.D.C. his first term.  I remember I was always very jealous of his acting.  I was absurdly devoted to him; I suppose because we were so different in some things.  I was a rather awkward, weakly lad, with huge feet, and horribly freckled.  Freckles run in Scotch families just as gout does in English families.  Cyril used to say that of the two he preferred the gout; but he always set an absurdly high value on personal appearance, and once read a paper before our debating society to prove that it was better to be good-looking than to be good.  He certainly was wonderfully handsome.  People who did not like him, Philistines and college tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used to say that he was merely pretty; but there was a great deal more in his face than mere prettiness.  I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, and nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner.  He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many people who were not.  He was often wilful and petulant, and I used to think him dreadfully insincere.  It was due, I think, chiefly to his inordinate desire to please.  Poor Cyril!  I told him once that he was contented with very cheap triumphs, but he only laughed.  He was horribly spoiled.  All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled.  It is the secret of their attraction.

‘However, I must tell you about Cyril’s acting.  You know that no actresses are allowed to play at the A.D.C.  At least they were not in my time.  I don’t know how it is now.  Well, of course, Cyril was always cast for the girls’ parts, and when As You Like It was produced he played Rosalind.  It was a marvellous performance.  In fact, Cyril Graham was the only perfect Rosalind I have ever seen.  It would be impossible to describe to you the beauty, the delicacy, the refinement of the whole thing.  It made an immense sensation, and the horrid little theatre, as it was then, was crowded every night.  Even when I read the play now I can’t help thinking of Cyril.  It might have been written for him.  The next term he took his degree, and came to London to read for the diplomatic.  But he never did any work.  He spent his days in reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and his evenings at the theatre.  He was, of course, wild to go on the stage.  It was all that I and Lord Crediton could do to prevent him.  Perhaps if he had gone on the stage he would be alive now.  It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.  I hope you will never fall into that error.  If you do, you will be sorry for it.

‘Well, to come to the real point of the story, one day I got a letter from Cyril asking me to come round to his rooms that evening.  He had charming chambers in Piccadilly overlooking the Green Park, and as I used to go to see him every day, I was rather surprised at his taking the trouble to write.  Of course I went, and when I arrived I found him in a state of great excitement.  He told me that he had at last discovered the true secret of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; that all the scholars and critics had been entirely on the wrong tack; and that he was the first who, working purely by internal evidence, had found out who Mr. W. H. really was.  He was perfectly wild with delight, and for a long time would not tell me his theory.  Finally, he produced a bundle of notes, took his copy of the Sonnets off the mantelpiece, and sat down and gave me a long lecture on the whole subject.

‘He began by pointing out that the young man to whom Shakespeare addressed these strangely passionate poems must have been somebody who was a really vital factor in the development of his dramatic art, and that this could not be said either of Lord Pembroke or Lord Southampton.  Indeed, whoever he was, he could not have been anybody of high birth, as was shown very clearly by the 25th Sonnet, in which Shakespeare contrasting himself with those who are “great princes’ favourites,” says quite frankly—

Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.

And ends the sonnet by congratulating himself on the mean state of him he so adored.

Then happy I, that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove nor be removed.

This sonnet Cyril declared would be quite unintelligible if we fancied that it was addressed to either the Earl of Pembroke or the Earl of Southampton, both of whom were men of the highest position in England and fully entitled to be called “great princes”; and he in corroboration of his view read me Sonnets CXXIV. and CXXV., in which Shakespeare tells us that his love is not “the child of state,” that it “suffers not in smiling pomp,” but is “builded far from accident.”  I listened with a good deal of interest, for I don’t think the point had ever been made before; but what followed was still more curious, and seemed to me at the time to dispose entirely of Pembroke’s claim.  We know from Meres that the Sonnets had been written before 1598, and Sonnet CIV. informs us that Shakespeare’s friendship for Mr. W. H. had been already in existence for three years.  Now Lord Pembroke, who was born in 1580, did not come to London till he was eighteen years of age, that is to say till 1598, and Shakespeare’s acquaintance with Mr. W. H. must have begun in 1594, or at the latest in 1595.  Shakespeare, accordingly, could not have known Lord Pembroke till after the Sonnets had been written.

‘Cyril pointed out also that Pembroke’s father did not die till 1601; whereas it was evident from the line,

You had a father; let your son say so,

that the father of Mr. W. H. was dead in 1598.  Besides, it was absurd to imagine that any publisher of the time, and the preface is from the publisher’s hand, would have ventured to address William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, as Mr. W. H.; the case of Lord Buckhurst being spoken of as Mr. Sackville being not really a parallel instance, as Lord Buckhurst was not a peer, but merely the younger son of a peer, with a courtesy title, and the passage in England’s Parnassus, where he is so spoken of, is not a formal and stately dedication, but simply a casual allusion.  So far for Lord Pembroke, whose supposed claims Cyril easily demolished while I sat by in wonder.  With Lord Southampton Cyril had even less difficulty.  Southampton became at a very early age the lover of Elizabeth Vernon, so he needed no entreaties to marry; he was not beautiful; he did not resemble his mother, as Mr. W. H. did—

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

and, above all, his Christian name was Henry, whereas the punning sonnets (CXXXV. and CXLIII.) show that the Christian name of Shakespeare’s friend was the same as his own—Will.

‘As for the other suggestions of unfortunate commentators, that Mr. W. H. is a misprint for Mr. W. S., meaning Mr. William Shakespeare; that “Mr. W. H. all” should be read “Mr. W. Hall”; that Mr. W. H. is Mr. William Hathaway; and that a full stop should be placed after “wisheth,” making Mr. W. H. the writer and not the subject of the dedication,—Cyril got rid of them in a very short time; and it is not worth while to mention his reasons, though I remember he sent me off into a fit of laughter by reading to me, I am glad to say not in the original, some extracts from a German commentator called Barnstorff, who insisted that Mr. W. H. was no less a person than “Mr. William Himself.”  Nor would he allow for a moment that the Sonnets are mere satires on the work of Drayton and John Davies of Hereford.  To him, as indeed to me, they were poems of serious and tragic import, wrung out of the bitterness of Shakespeare’s heart, and made sweet by the honey of his lips.  Still less would he admit that they were merely a philosophical allegory, and that in them Shakespeare is addressing his Ideal Self, or Ideal Manhood, or the Spirit of Beauty, or the Reason, or the Divine Logos, or the Catholic Church.  He felt, as indeed I think we all must feel, that the Sonnets are addressed to an individual,—to a particular young man whose personality for some reason seems to have filled the soul of Shakespeare with terrible joy and no less terrible despair.

‘Having in this manner cleared the way as it were, Cyril asked me to dismiss from my mind any preconceived ideas I might have formed on the subject, and to give a fair and unbiassed hearing to his own theory.  The problem he pointed out was this: Who was that young man of Shakespeare’s day who, without being of noble birth or even of noble nature, was addressed by him in terms of such passionate adoration that we can but wonder at the strange worship, and are almost afraid to turn the key that unlocks the mystery of the poet’s heart?  Who was he whose physical beauty was such that it became the very corner-stone of Shakespeare’s art; the very source of Shakespeare’s inspiration; the very incarnation of Shakespeare’s dreams?  To look upon him as simply the object of certain love-poems is to miss the whole meaning of the poems: for the art of which Shakespeare talks in the Sonnets is not the art of the Sonnets themselves, which indeed were to him but slight and secret things—it is the art of the dramatist to which he is always alluding; and he to whom Shakespeare said—

      Thou art all my art, and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance,

he to whom he promised immortality,

Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men,—

was surely none other than the boy-actor for whom he created Viola and Imogen, Juliet and Rosalind, Portia and Desdemona, and Cleopatra herself.  This was Cyril Graham’s theory, evolved as you see purely from the Sonnets themselves, and depending for its acceptance not so much on demonstrable proof or formal evidence, but on a kind of spiritual and artistic sense, by which alone he claimed could the true meaning of the poems be discerned.  I remember his reading to me that fine sonnet—

How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O, give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date—

and pointing out how completely it corroborated his theory; and indeed he went through all the Sonnets carefully, and showed, or fancied that he showed, that, according to his new explanation of their meaning, things that had seemed obscure, or evil, or exaggerated, became clear and rational, and of high artistic import, illustrating Shakespeare’s conception of the true relations between the art of the actor and the art of the dramatist.

‘It is of course evident that there must have been in Shakespeare’s company some wonderful boy-actor of great beauty, to whom he intrusted the presentation of his noble heroines; for Shakespeare was a practical theatrical manager as well as an imaginative poet, and Cyril Graham had actually discovered the boy-actor’s name.  He was Will, or, as he preferred to call him, Willie Hughes.  The Christian name he found of course in the punning sonnets, CXXXV. and CXLIII.; the surname was, according to him, hidden in the seventh line of the 20th Sonnet, where Mr. W. H. is described as—

A man in hew, all Hews in his controwling.

‘In the original edition of the Sonnets “Hews” is printed with a capital letter and in italics, and this, he claimed, showed clearly that a play on words was intended, his view receiving a good deal of corroboration from those sonnets in which curious puns are made on the words “use” and “usury.”  Of course I was converted at once, and Willie Hughes became to me as real a person as Shakespeare.  The only objection I made to the theory was that the name of Willie Hughes does not occur in the list of the actors of Shakespeare’s company as it is printed in the first folio.  Cyril, however, pointed out that the absence of Willie Hughes’s name from this list really corroborated the theory, as it was evident from Sonnet LXXXVI. that Willie Hughes had abandoned Shakespeare’s company to play at a rival theatre, probably in some of Chapman’s plays.  It is in reference to this that in the great sonnet on Chapman, Shakespeare said to Willie Hughes—

But when your countenance fill’d up his line,
Then lack’d I matter; that enfeebled mine—

the expression “when your countenance filled up his line” referring obviously to the beauty of the young actor giving life and reality and added charm to Chapman’s verse, the same idea being also put forward in the 79th Sonnet—

Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid,
My verse alone had all thy gentle grace;
But now my gracious numbers are decay’d,
And my sick Muse doth give another place;

and in the immediately preceding sonnet, where Shakespeare says—

      Every alien pen has got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse,

the play upon words (use=Hughes) being of course obvious, and the phrase “under thee their poesy disperse,” meaning “by your assistance as an actor bring their plays before the people.”

‘It was a wonderful evening, and we sat up almost till dawn reading and re-reading the Sonnets.  After some time, however, I began to see that before the theory could be placed before the world in a really perfected form, it was necessary to get some independent evidence about the existence of this young actor, Willie Hughes.  If this could be once established, there could be no possible doubt about his identity with Mr. W. H.; but otherwise the theory would fall to the ground.  I put this forward very strongly to Cyril, who was a good deal annoyed at what he called my Philistine tone of mind, and indeed was rather bitter upon the subject.  However, I made him promise that in his own interest he would not publish his discovery till he had put the whole matter beyond the reach of doubt; and for weeks and weeks we searched the registers of City churches, the Alleyn MSS. at Dulwich, the Record Office, the papers of the Lord Chamberlain—everything, in fact, that we thought might contain some allusion to Willie Hughes.  We discovered nothing, of course, and every day the existence of Willie Hughes seemed to me to become more problematical.  Cyril was in a dreadful state, and used to go over the whole question day after day, entreating me to believe; but I saw the one flaw in the theory, and I refused to be convinced till the actual existence of Willie Hughes, a boy-actor of Elizabethan days, had been placed beyond the reach of doubt or cavil.

‘One day Cyril left town to stay with his grandfather, I thought at the time, but I afterwards heard from Lord Crediton that this was not the case; and about a fortnight afterwards I received a telegram from him, handed in at Warwick, asking me to be sure to come and dine with him that evening at eight o’clock.  When I arrived, he said to me, “The only apostle who did not deserve proof was St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was the only apostle who got it.”  I asked him what he meant.  He answered that he had not merely been able to establish the existence in the sixteenth century of a boy-actor of the name of Willie Hughes, but to prove by the most conclusive evidence that he was the Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets.  He would not tell me anything more at the time; but after dinner he solemnly produced the picture I showed you, and told me that he had discovered it by the merest chance nailed to the side of an old chest that he had bought at a farmhouse in Warwickshire.  The chest itself, which was a very fine example of Elizabethan work, he had, of course, brought with him, and in the centre of the front panel the initials W. H. were undoubtedly carved.  It was this monogram that had attracted his attention, and he told me that it was not till he had had the chest in his possession for several days that he had thought of making any careful examination of the inside.  One morning, however, he saw that one of the sides of the chest was much thicker than the other, and looking more closely, he discovered that a framed panel picture was clamped against it.  On taking it out, he found it was the picture that is now lying on the sofa.  It was very dirty, and covered with mould; but he managed to clean it, and, to his great joy, saw that he had fallen by mere chance on the one thing for which he had been looking.  Here was an authentic portrait of Mr. W. H., with his hand resting on the dedicatory page of the Sonnets, and on the frame itself could be faintly seen the name of the young man written in black uncial letters on a faded gold ground, “Master Will. Hews.”

‘Well, what was I to say?  It never occurred to me for a moment that Cyril Graham was playing a trick on me, or that he was trying to prove his theory by means of a forgery.’

‘But is it a forgery?’ I asked.

‘Of course it is,’ said Erskine.  ‘It is a very good forgery; but it is a forgery none the less.  I thought at the time that Cyril was rather calm about the whole matter; but I remember he more than once told me that he himself required no proof of the kind, and that he thought the theory complete without it.  I laughed at him, and told him that without it the theory would fall to the ground, and I warmly congratulated him on the marvellous discovery.  We then arranged that the picture should be etched or facsimiled, and placed as the frontispiece to Cyril’s edition of the Sonnets; and for three months we did nothing but go over each poem line by line, till we had settled every difficulty of text or meaning.  One unlucky day I was in a print-shop in Holborn, when I saw upon the counter some extremely beautiful drawings in silver-point.  I was so attracted by them that I bought them; and the proprietor of the place, a man called Rawlings, told me that they were done by a young painter of the name of Edward Merton, who was very clever, but as poor as a church mouse.  I went to see Merton some days afterwards, having got his address from the printseller, and found a pale, interesting young man, with a rather common-looking wife—his model, as I subsequently learned.  I told him how much I admired his drawings, at which he seemed very pleased, and I asked him if he would show me some of his other work.  As we were looking over a portfolio, full of really very lovely things,—for Merton had a most delicate and delightful touch,—I suddenly caught sight of a drawing of the picture of Mr. W. H.  There was no doubt whatever about it.  It was almost a facsimile—the only difference being that the two masks of Tragedy and Comedy were not suspended from the marble table as they are in the picture, but were lying on the floor at the young man’s feet.  “Where on earth did you get that?” I said.  He grew rather confused, and said—“Oh, that is nothing.  I did not know it was in this portfolio.  It is not a thing of any value.”  “It is what you did for Mr. Cyril Graham,” exclaimed his wife; “and if this gentleman wishes to buy it, let him have it.”  “For Mr. Cyril Graham?” I repeated.  “Did you paint the picture of Mr. W. H.?”  “I don’t understand what you mean,” he answered, growing very red.  Well, the whole thing was quite dreadful.  The wife let it all out.  I gave her five pounds when I was going away.  I can’t bear to think of it now; but of course I was furious.  I went off at once to Cyril’s chambers, waited there for three hours before he came in, with that horrid lie staring me in the face, and told him I had discovered his forgery.  He grew very pale and said—“I did it purely for your sake.  You would not be convinced in any other way.  It does not affect the truth of the theory.”  “The truth of the theory!” I exclaimed; “the less we talk about that the better.  You never even believed in it yourself.  If you had, you would not have committed a forgery to prove it.”  High words passed between us; we had a fearful quarrel.  I dare say I was unjust.  The next morning he was dead.’

‘Dead!’ I cried,

‘Yes; he shot himself with a revolver.  Some of the blood splashed upon the frame of the picture, just where the name had been painted.  By the time I arrived—his servant had sent for me at once—the police were already there.  He had left a letter for me, evidently written in the greatest agitation and distress of mind.’

‘What was in it?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that he believed absolutely in Willie Hughes; that the forgery of the picture had been done simply as a concession to me, and did not in the slightest degree invalidate the truth of the theory; and, that in order to show me how firm and flawless his faith in the whole thing was, he was going to offer his life as a sacrifice to the secret of the Sonnets.  It was a foolish, mad letter.  I remember he ended by saying that he intrusted to me the Willie Hughes theory, and that it was for me to present it to the world, and to unlock the secret of Shakespeare’s heart.’

‘It is a most tragic story,’ I cried; ‘but why have you not carried out his wishes?’

Erskine shrugged his shoulders.  ‘Because it is a perfectly unsound theory from beginning to end,’ he answered.

‘My dear Erskine,’ I said, getting up from my seat, ‘you are entirely wrong about the whole matter.  It is the only perfect key to Shakespeare’s Sonnets that has ever been made.  It is complete in every detail.  I believe in Willie Hughes.’

‘Don’t say that,’ said Erskine gravely; ‘I believe there is something fatal about the idea, and intellectually there is nothing to be said for it.  I have gone into the whole matter, and I assure you the theory is entirely fallacious.  It is plausible up to a certain point.  Then it stops.  For heaven’s sake, my dear boy, don’t take up the subject of Willie Hughes.  You will break your heart over it.’

‘Erskine,’ I answered, ‘it is your duty to give this theory to the world.  If you will not do it, I will.  By keeping it back you wrong the memory of Cyril Graham, the youngest and the most splendid of all the martyrs of literature.  I entreat you to do him justice.  He died for this thing,—don’t let his death be in vain.’

Erskine looked at me in amazement.  ‘You are carried away by the sentiment of the whole story,’ he said.  ‘You forget that a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.  I was devoted to Cyril Graham.  His death was a horrible blow to me.  I did not recover it for years.  I don’t think I have ever recovered it.  But Willie Hughes?  There is nothing in the idea of Willie Hughes.  No such person ever existed.  As for bringing the whole thing before the world—the world thinks that Cyril Graham shot himself by accident.  The only proof of his suicide was contained in the letter to me, and of this letter the public never heard anything.  To the present day Lord Crediton thinks that the whole thing was accidental.’

‘Cyril Graham sacrificed his life to a great Idea,’ I answered; ‘and if you will not tell of his martyrdom, tell at least of his faith.’

‘His faith,’ said Erskine, ‘was fixed in a thing that was false, in a thing that was unsound, in a thing that no Shakespearean scholar would accept for a moment.  The theory would be laughed at.  Don’t make a fool of yourself, and don’t follow a trail that leads nowhere.  You start by assuming the existence of the very person whose existence is the thing to be proved.  Besides, everybody knows that the Sonnets were addressed to Lord Pembroke.  The matter is settled once for all.’

‘The matter is not settled!’ I exclaimed.  ‘I will take up the theory where Cyril Graham left it, and I will prove to the world that he was right.’

‘Silly boy!’ said Erskine.  ‘Go home: it is after two, and don’t think about Willie Hughes any more.  I am sorry I told you anything about it, and very sorry indeed that I should have converted you to a thing in which I don’t believe.’

‘You have given me the key to the greatest mystery of modern literature,’ I answered; ‘and I shall not rest till I have made you recognise, till I have made everybody recognise, that Cyril Graham was the most subtle Shakespearean critic of our day.’

As I walked home through St. James’s Park the dawn was just breaking over London.  The white swans were lying asleep on the polished lake, and the gaunt Palace looked purple against the pale-green sky.  I thought of Cyril Graham, and my eyes filled with tears.

CHAPTER II

It was past twelve o’clock when I awoke, and the sun was streaming in through the curtains of my room in long slanting beams of dusty gold.  I told my servant that I would be at home to no one; and after I had had a cup of chocolate and a petit-pain, I took down from the book-shelf my copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and began to go carefully through them.  Every poem seemed to me to corroborate Cyril Graham’s theory.  I felt as if I had my hand upon Shakespeare’s heart, and was counting each separate throb and pulse of passion.  I thought of the wonderful boy-actor, and saw his face in every line.

Two sonnets, I remember, struck me particularly: they were the 53rd and the 67th.  In the first of these, Shakespeare, complimenting Willie Hughes on the versatility of his acting, on his wide range of parts, a range extending from Rosalind to Juliet, and from Beatrice to Ophelia, says to him—

What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend—

lines that would be unintelligible if they were not addressed to an actor, for the word ‘shadow’ had in Shakespeare’s day a technical meaning connected with the stage.  ‘The best in this kind are but shadows,’ says Theseus of the actors in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and there are many similar allusions in the literature of the day.  These sonnets evidently belonged to the series in which Shakespeare discusses the nature of the actor’s art, and of the strange and rare temperament that is essential to the perfect stage-player.  ‘How is it,’ says Shakespeare to Willie Hughes, ‘that you have so many personalities?’ and then he goes on to point out that his beauty is such that it seems to realise every form and phase of fancy, to embody each dream of the creative imagination—an idea that is still further expanded in the sonnet that immediately follows, where, beginning with the fine thought,

O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

Shakespeare invites us to notice how the truth of acting, the truth of visible presentation on the stage, adds to the wonder of poetry, giving life to its loveliness, and actual reality to its ideal form.  And yet, in the 67th Sonnet, Shakespeare calls upon Willie Hughes to abandon the stage with its artificiality, its false mimic life of painted face and unreal costume, its immoral influences and suggestions, its remoteness from the true world of noble action and sincere utterance.

Ah, wherefore with infection should he live
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?
Why should false painting imitate his cheek,
And steal dead seeming of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?

It may seem strange that so great a dramatist as Shakespeare, who realised his own perfection as an artist and his humanity as a man on the ideal plane of stage-writing and stage-playing, should have written in these terms about the theatre; but we must remember that in Sonnets CX. and CXI. Shakespeare shows us that he too was wearied of the world of puppets, and full of shame at having made himself ‘a motley to the view.’  The 111th Sonnet is especially bitter:—

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renew’d—

and there are many signs elsewhere of the same feeling, signs familiar to all real students of Shakespeare.

One point puzzled me immensely as I read the Sonnets, and it was days before I struck on the true interpretation, which indeed Cyril Graham himself seems to have missed.  I could not understand how it was that Shakespeare set so high a value on his young friend marrying.  He himself had married young, and the result had been unhappiness, and it was not likely that he would have asked Willie Hughes to commit the same error.  The boy-player of Rosalind had nothing to gain from marriage, or from the passions of real life.  The early sonnets, with their strange entreaties to have children, seemed to me a jarring note.  The explanation of the mystery came on me quite suddenly, and I found it in the curious dedication.  It will be remembered that the dedication runs as follows:—

TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF
THESE INSUING SONNETS
MR. W. H. ALL HAPPINESSE
AND THAT ETERNITIE
PROMISED
BY
OUR EVER-LIVING POET
WISHETH
THE WELL-WISHING
ADVENTURER IN
SETTING
FORTH.

T. T.

Some scholars have supposed that the word ‘begetter’ in this dedication means simply the procurer of the Sonnets for Thomas Thorpe the publisher; but this view is now generally abandoned, and the highest authorities are quite agreed that it is to be taken in the sense of inspirer, the metaphor being drawn from the analogy of physical life.  Now I saw that the same metaphor was used by Shakespeare himself all through the poems, and this set me on the right track.  Finally I made my great discovery.  The marriage that Shakespeare proposes for Willie Hughes is the marriage with his Muse, an expression which is definitely put forward in the 82nd Sonnet, where, in the bitterness of his heart at the defection of the boy-actor for whom he had written his greatest parts, and whose beauty had indeed suggested them, he opens his complaint by saying—

I grant thou wert not married to my Muse.

The children he begs him to beget are no children of flesh and blood, but more immortal children of undying fame.  The whole cycle of the early sonnets is simply Shakespeare’s invitation to Willie Hughes to go upon the stage and become a player.  How barren and profitless a thing, he says, is this beauty of yours if it be not used:—

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

You must create something in art: my verse ‘is thine, and born of thee’; only listen to me, and I will ‘bring forth eternal numbers to outlive long date,’ and you shall people with forms of your own image the imaginary world of the stage.  These children that you beget, he continues, will not wither away, as mortal children do, but you shall live in them and in my plays: do but—

Make thee another self, for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

I collected all the passages that seemed to me to corroborate this view, and they produced a strong impression on me, and showed me how complete Cyril Graham’s theory really was.  I also saw that it was quite easy to separate those lines in which he speaks of the Sonnets themselves from those in which he speaks of his great dramatic work.  This was a point that had been entirely overlooked by all critics up to Cyril Graham’s day.  And yet it was one of the most important points in the whole series of poems.  To the Sonnets Shakespeare was more or less indifferent.  He did not wish to rest his fame on them.  They were to him his ‘slight Muse,’ as he calls them, and intended, as Meres tells us, for private circulation only among a few, a very few, friends.  Upon the other hand he was extremely conscious of the high artistic value of his plays, and shows a noble self-reliance upon his dramatic genius.  When he says to Willie Hughes:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee;—

the expression ‘eternal lines’ clearly alludes to one of his plays that he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet points to his confidence in the probability of his plays being always acted.  In his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C. and CI.), we find the same feeling.

Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?

he cries, and he then proceeds to reproach the Mistress of Tragedy and Comedy for her ‘neglect of Truth in Beauty dyed,’ and says—

Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for ‘t lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
To make him seem long hence as he shows now.

It is, however, perhaps in the 55th Sonnet that Shakespeare gives to this idea its fullest expression.  To imagine that the ‘powerful rhyme’ of the second line refers to the sonnet itself, is to mistake Shakespeare’s meaning entirely.  It seemed to me that it was extremely likely, from the general character of the sonnet, that a particular play was meant, and that the play was none other but Romeo and Juliet.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful wars shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

It was also extremely suggestive to note how here as elsewhere Shakespeare promised Willie Hughes immortality in a form that appealed to men’s eyes—that is to say, in a spectacular form, in a play that is to be looked at.