The solution, when suddenly it dawned on me, was so simple-stark that I was ashamed of the ingenious-clever ways I had been following. (I learned then—­and perhaps it is the one lesson worth the learning of any man—­that truth may be approached only through the logic of the heart.  For the heart is eye and ear, and all excellent understanding abides there.) On Christmas Day, assuredly, Anne Hathaway was born.

In what year she was born I do not know nor care.  I take it she was not less than thirty-eight when she married Shakespeare.  This, however, is sheer conjecture, and in no way important-apt to our inquiry.  It is not the year, but the day of the year, that matters.  All we need bear in mind is that on Christmas Day that woman was born into the world.

If there be any doubting Thomas among my readers, let him not be afraid to utter himself.  I am (with the possible exception of Shakespeare) the gentlest man that ever breathed, and I do but bid him study the Plays in the light I have given him.  The first thing that will strike him is that Shakespeare’s thoughts turned constantly to the birthdays of all his Fitton-heroines, as a lover’s thoughts always do turn to the moment at which the loved one first saw the light.  “There was a star danced, and under that” was born Beatrice.  Juliet was born “on Lammas Eve.”  Marina tells us she derived her name from the chance of her having been “born at sea.”  And so on, throughout the whole gamut of women in whom Mary Fitton was bodied forth to us.  But mark how carefully Shakespeare says never a word about the birthdays of the various shrews and sluts in whom, again and again, he gave us his wife.  When and were was born Queen Constance, the scold?  And Bianca?  And Doll Tearsheet, and “Greasy Jane” in the song, and all the rest of them?  It is of the last importance that we should know.  Yet never a hint is vouchsafed us in the text.  It is clear that Shakespeare cannot bring himself to write about Anne Hathaway’s birthday—­will not stain his imagination by thinking of it.  That is entirely human-natural.  But why should he loathe Christmas Day itself with precisely the same loathing?  There is but one answer—­and that inevitable-final.  The two days were one.

Some soul-secrets are so terrible that the most hardened realist of us may well shrink from laying them bare.  Such a soul-secret was this of Shakespeare’s.  Think of it!  The gentlest spirit that ever breathed, raging and fuming endlessly in impotent-bitter spleen against the prettiest of festivals!  Here is a spectacle so tragic-piteous that, try as we will, we shall not put it from us.  And it is well that we should not, for in our plenary compassion we shall but learn to love the man the more.

[Mr. Fr*nk H*rr*s is very much a man of genius, and I should be sorry if this adumbration of his manner made any one suppose that I do not rate his writings about Shakespeare higher than those of all “the Professors” together.—­M.B.]

SCRUTS