SHAKESPEARE WAS ENGLISH 139 



latitude and in vital spirit the heart of England, as 

 Michael Drayton knew and said. By a happy coincidence 

 the arrival of spring coincides often with St. George s 

 Day, with Shakespeare s day, or thereabouts. Then it 

 was that the heart of the dragon of winter ceased to beat. 

 Shakespeare, of course, was too wise to describe the 

 scene in any set fashion, as Scott described Scotland. 

 England does not submit to generalities. It is compact 

 of homes that have no general likeness, except that each 

 is cheek by jowl with other homes, cottage near cottage, 

 field next field, spinney sweetly linked to spinney by the 

 slender spinneys that we call hedgerows. Shakespeare 

 was not botanist, like Goethe or Lord de Tabley ; or 

 even as much ornithologist as Tennyson (who lamented 

 that the stuffed birds of South Kensington were unknown 

 to his youth). So he was free to speak through the sense 

 of humble and unlearned humanity. His music falls like 

 the song of a chaffinch or rises like the scent of bluebells, 

 or hangs wavering in the air, though always near the 

 ground like a heath butterfly. 



If you stood on St. George s Day at the door, say, of 

 the brick and timber house from which Shakespeare s 

 uncle farmed, looking across the dimpled fields to the 

 treed knoll beyond, you had the freedom of the scene 

 where his rural and never literary nephew listened to the 

 wandering voices of the cuckoos, just arrived ; and in 

 stead of saying consciously, like Wordsworth, that they 

 could give him intelligent answers, he found the 

 phrase, &quot; the sweet o the year/* rise to his consciousness, 

 to be fitted later to the mouth, not of a sentimentalist, but 

 of a messy scoundrel. On that day the chiff-chaffs talked 

 as continuously as the wind in the trees. You woke to 

 the tap, tap, tap of the woodpeckers. I never heard the 

 missel thrush sing with such gusto a melody as full of 



