Part 21

This capacity for unconscious learning is not at all uncommon. It is possessed to some extent by everybody; but a very high degree of it is one of the marks of genius. I remember one evening, many years ago, hearing Herbert Spencer in a friendly discussion regarding certain functions of the cerebellum. Abstruse points of comparative anatomy and questions of pathology were involved. Spencer's three antagonists were not violently opposed to him, but were in various degrees unready to adopt his views. The three were: Huxley, one of the greatest of comparative anatomists; Hughlings Jackson, a very eminent authority on the pathology of the nervous system; and George Henry Lewes, who, although more of an amateur in such matters, had nevertheless devoted years of study to neural physiology, and was thoroughly familiar with the history of the subject. Spencer more than held his ground against the others. He met fact with fact, brought up points in anatomy the significance of which Huxley confessed that he had overlooked, and had more experiments and clinical cases at his tongue's end than Jackson could muster. It was quite evident that he knew all they knew on the subject, and more besides. Yet Spencer had never been through a course of "regular training" in the studies concerned; nor had he ever studied at a university, or even at a high school. Where did he learn the wonderful mass of facts which he poured forth that evening? Whence came his tremendous grasp upon the principles involved? Probably he could not have told you. A few days afterward I happened to be talking with Spencer about history, a subject of which he modestly said he knew but little. I told him I had often been struck with the aptness of the historic illustrations cited in many chapters of his "Social Statics," written when he was twenty-nine years old. The references were not only always accurate, but they showed an intelligence and soundness of judgment unattainable, one would think, save by close familiarity with history. Spencer assured me that he had never read extensively in history. Whence, then, this wealth of knowledge,--not smattering, not sciolism, but solid, well-digested knowledge? Really, he did not know, except that when his interest was aroused in any subject he was keenly alive to all facts bearing upon it, and seemed to find them whichever way he turned. When I mentioned this to Lewes, while recalling the discussion on the cerebellum, he exclaimed: "Oh, you can't account for it! It's his genius. Spencer has greater instinctive power of observation and assimilation than any man since Shakespeare, and he is like Shakespeare for hitting the bull's-eye every time he fires. As for Darwin and Huxley, we can follow their intellectual processes, but Spencer is above and beyond all; he is inspired!"

Those were Lewes's exact words, and they made a deep impression upon me. The comparison with Shakespeare struck me as a happy one, and I can understand both Spencer and Shakespeare the better for it. Concerning Spencer one circumstance may be observed. Since his early manhood he has lived in London, and has had for his daily associates men of vast attainments in every department of science. He has thus had rare opportunities for absorbing an immense fund of knowledge unconsciously.

It is evident that the author of Shakespeare's plays possessed an extraordinary "instinctive power of observation and assimilation." There was nothing strange in such a genius growing up in a small Warwickshire town. The difficulty is one which the Delia-Baconians have created for themselves. As it is their chief stock in trade, they magnify it in every way they can think of. Shakespeare's parents, they say, were illiterate, and he did not know how to spell his own name. It appears as Shagspere, Shaxpur, Shaxberd, Chacsper, and so on through some thirty forms, several of which William Shakespeare himself used indifferently. The implication is that such a man must have been shockingly ignorant. The real ignorance, however, is on the part of those who use such an argument. Apparently, they do not know that in Shakespeare's time such laxity in spelling was common in all ranks of society and in all grades of culture. The name of Elizabeth's great Lord Treasurer, Cecil, and his title, Burghley, were both spelled in half a dozen ways. The name of Raleigh occurs in more than forty different forms, and Sir Walter, one of the most accomplished men of his time, wrote it Rauley, Rawleyghe, Ralegh, and in yet other ways. The talk of the Baconizers on this point is simply ludicrous.

Equally silly is their talk about the dirty streets of Stratford. They seem to have just discovered that Elizabeth's England was a badly drained country, with heaps of garbage in the streets. Shakespeare's father, they tell us, was a butcher, and evidently from a butcher's son, living in an ill-swept town, and careless about the spelling of his name, not much in the way of intellectual achievement was to be expected! In point of fact, Shakespeare's parents belonged to the middle class. His father owned several houses in Stratford and two or three farms in the neighbourhood. As a farmer in those days, he would naturally have cattle slaughtered on his premises and would sell wool off the backs of his own flocks, whence the later tradition of his having been butcher and wool dealer. That his social position was good is shown by the facts that he was chief alderman and high bailiff of Stratford, and justice of the peace, and was styled "Master John Shakespeare," or (as we should say) "Mr.;" whereas, had he been one of the common folk, his style had been "Goodman Shakespeare." A visit to his home in Henley Street, and to Anne Hathaway's cottage at Shottery, shows that the two families were in eminently respectable circumstances. The son of the high bailiff would see the best people in the neighbourhood. There was in the town a remarkably good free grammar school, where he might have learned the "small Latin and less Greek" which his friend Ben Jonson assures us he possessed. This expression, by the way, is usually misunderstood, because people do not pause to consider it. Coming from Ben Jonson, I should say that "small Latin and less Greek" might fairly describe the amount of those languages ordinarily possessed by a member of the graduating class at Harvard in good standing. It can hardly imply less than the ability to read Terence at sight, and perhaps Euripides less fluently. The author of the plays, with his unerring accuracy of observation, knows Latin enough at least to use the Latin part of English most skilfully; at the same time, when he has occasion to use Greek authors, such as Homer or Plutarch, he usually prefers an English translation. At all events, Jonson's remark informs us that the man whom he addresses as "sweet swan of Avon" knew _some_ Latin and _some_ Greek,--a conclusion which is so distasteful to one of our Baconizers, Mr. Edwin Reed, that he will not admit it. Rather than do so, he has the assurance to ask us to believe that by the epithet "sweet swan of Avon" Jonson really meant Francis Bacon! Dear me, Mr. Reed, do you really mean it? And how about the editor of Beaumont and Fletcher in 1647, when, in his dedication to Shakespeare's friend the Earl of Pembroke, he speaks of "Sweet Swan of Avon Shakespear"? Was he too a participator in the little scheme for fooling posterity? Or was he one of those who were fooled?

Whether Shakespeare had other chances for book-lore than those which the grammar school afforded, whether there was any interesting parson at hand, as often in small towns, to guide and stimulate his unfolding thoughts,--upon such points we have no information. But there were things to be learned in the country town quite outside of books and pedagogues. There, while the poet listened to the "strain of strutting chanticleer," and watched the "sun-burn'd sicklemen, of August weary," putting on their rye-straw hats and making holiday with rustic nymphs, he could rejoice in

"Earth's increase, foison plenty, Barns and garners never empty; Vines with clust'ring bunches growing; Plants with goodly burthen bowing;"

there he could see the "unbacked colts" prick their ears, advance their eyelids, lift up their noses, as if they smelt music; there he knew, doubtless, many a bank where the wild thyme grew and on which the moonlight sweetly slept; there he watched the coming of "violets dim," "pale primroses," flower-de-luce, carnations, with "rosemary and rue" to keep their "savour all the winter long,"

"When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail."

Such lore as this no books or college could impart.

It was this that Milton had in mind when he introduced Shakespeare and Ben Jonson into his poem "L'Allegro." Milton was in his thirtieth year when Jonson, poet laureate, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey; he was only a boy of eight years when Shakespeare died, but the beautiful sonnet written fourteen years later shows how lovingly he studied his works:--

"What needs my Shakespeare, for his honoured bones," etc.

The poem "L'Allegro" and its fellow "Il Penseroso" describe the delights of Milton's life at his father's country house near Windsor Castle. He used often to ride into London to hear music or pass an evening at the theatre, as in the following lines:--

"Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child, Warble his native woodnotes wild."

This accurate and happy contrast exasperates the Baconizers, for it spoils their stock in trade, and accordingly they try their best to assure us that Milton did not know what he was writing about. They asseverate with vehemence that in all the seven-and-thirty plays there is no such thing as a native woodnote wild.

But before leaving the contrast we may pause for a moment to ask, Where did Ben Jonson get his learning? He was, as he himself tells us, "poorly brought up" by his stepfather, a bricklayer. He went to Westminster School, where he was taught by Camden, and he may have spent a short time at Cambridge, though this is doubtful. His schooling was nipped in the bud, for he had to go home and lay brick; and when he found such an existence insupportable he went into the army and fought in the Netherlands. At about the age of twenty we find him back in London, and there lose sight of him for five years, when all at once his great comedy "Every Man in his Humour" is performed, and makes him famous. Now, in such a life, when did Jonson get the time for his immense reading and his finished classical scholarship? Reasoning after the manner of the Delia-Baconians, we may safely say that he could not possibly have accumulated the learning which is shown in his plays: therefore he could not have written those plays; therefore Lord Bacon must have written them! There are daring soarers in the empyrean who do not shrink from this conclusion; a doctor in Michigan, named Owen, has published a pamphlet to prove, among other things, that Bacon was the author of the plays which were performed and printed as Jonson's.

To return to Shakespeare. Somewhere about 1585, when he was one-and-twenty, he went to London, leaving his wife and three young children at Stratford. His father had lost money, and the fortunes of the family were at the lowest ebb. In London we lose sight of Shakespeare for a while, just as we lose sight of Jonson, until literary works appear. The work first published is "Venus and Adonis," one of the most exquisite pieces of diction in the English language. It was dedicated to Henry, Earl of Southampton, by William Shakespeare, whose authorship of the poem is asserted as distinctly as the title-page of "David Copperfield" proclaims that novel to be by Charles Dickens, yet some precious critics assure us that Shakespeare "could not" have written the poem, and never knew the Earl of Southampton. Some years ago, Mr. Appleton Morgan, who does not wish to be regarded as a Baconizer, published an essay on the Warwickshire dialect, in which he maintained that since no traces of that kind of speech occur in "Venus and Adonis," therefore it could not have been written by a young man fresh from a small Warwickshire town. This is a specimen of the loose kind of criticism which prepares soil for Delia-Baconian weeds to grow in. The poem was published in 1593, seven or eight years after Shakespeare's coming to London; and we are asked to believe that the world's greatest genius, one of the most consummate masters of speech that ever lived, could tarry seven years in the city without learning how to write what Hosea Biglow calls "citified English"! One can only exclaim with Gloster, "O monstrous fault, to harbour such a thought!"

In those years Shakespeare surely learned much else. It seems clear that he had a good reading acquaintance with French and Italian, though he often uses translations, as for instance Florio's version of Montaigne. In estimating what Shakespeare "must have" known or "could not have" known, one needs to use more caution than some of our critics display. For example, in "The Winter's Tale" the statue of Hermione is called "a piece ... now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano." Now, since Romano is known as a great painter, but not as a sculptor, this has been cited as a blunder on Shakespeare's part. It appears, however, that the first edition of Vasari's "Lives of the Painters," published in 1550 and never translated from its original Italian, informs us that Romano did work in sculpture. In Vasari's second edition, published in 1568 and translated into several languages, this information is not given. From these facts, the erudite German critic Dr. Karl Elze, who is not a bit of a Delia-Baconian, but only an occasional sufferer from _vesania commentatorum_, introduces us to a solemn dilemma: either the author of "The Winter's Tale" must have consulted the first edition of Vasari in the original Italian, or else he must have travelled in Italy and gazed upon statues by Romano. Ah! prithee not so fast, worthy doctor; be not so lavish with these "musts." It is, I think, improbable that Shakespeare ever saw Italy except with the eyes of his imperial fancy. On the other hand, there are many indications that he could read Italian, but among them we cannot attach much importance to this one. Why should he not have learned from _hearsay_ that Romano had made statues? In the name of common sense, are there no sources of knowledge save books? Or, since it was no unusual thing for Italian painters in the sixteenth century to excel in sculpture and architecture, why should not Shakespeare have assumed without verification that it was so in Romano's case? It was a tolerably safe assumption to make, especially in an age utterly careless of historical accuracy, and in a comedy which provides Bohemia with a sea-coast, and mixes up times and customs with as scant heed of probability as a fairy tale.

In arguing about what Shakespeare "must have" or "could not have" known, we must not forget that at no time or place since history began has human thought fermented more briskly than in London while he was living there. The age of Drake and Raleigh was an age of efflorescence in dramatic poetry, such as had not been seen in the twenty centuries since Euripides died. Among Shakespeare's fellow craftsmen were writers of such great and varied endowments as Chapman, Marlowe, Greene, Nash, Peele, Marston, Dekker, Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. During his earlier years in London, Richard Hooker was master of the Middle Temple, and there a little later Ford and Beaumont were studying. The erudite Camden was master of Westminster School; among the lights of the age for legal learning were Edward Coke and Francis Bacon; at the same time, one might have met in London the learned architect Inigo Jones and the learned poet John Donne, both of them excellent classical scholars; there one would have found the divine poet Edmund Spenser, just come over from Ireland to see to the publication of his "Faerie Queene;" not long afterward came John Fletcher from Cambridge, and the acute philosopher Edward Herbert from Oxford and one and all might listen to the incomparable table-talk of that giant of scholarship, John Selden. The delights of the Mermaid Tavern, where these rare wits were wont to assemble, still live in tradition. As Keats says:--

"Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?"

It has always been believed that this place was one of Shakespeare's favourite haunts. By common consent of scholars, it has been accepted as the scene of those contests of wit between Shakespeare and Jonson of which Fuller tells us when he compares Jonson to a Spanish galleon, built high with learning, but slow in movement, while he likens Shakespeare to an English cruiser, less heavily weighted, but apt for victory because of its nimbleness,--the same kind of contrast, by the way, as that which occurred to Milton.

But our Baconizing friends will not allow that Shakespeare ever went to the Mermaid, or knew the people who met there; at least, none but a few fellow dramatists. We have no documentary proof that he ever met with Raleigh, or Bacon, or Selden. Let us observe that, while these sapient critics are in some cases ready to welcome the slightest circumstantial evidence, there are others in which they will accept nothing short of absolute demonstration. Did Shakespeare ever see a maypole? The word occurs just once in his plays, namely, in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," where little Hermia, quarrelling with tall Helena, calls her a "painted maypole;" but that proves nothing. I am not aware that there is any absolute documentary proof that Shakespeare ever set eyes on a maypole. It is nevertheless certain that in England, at that time, no boy could grow to manhood without seeing many a maypole. Common sense has some rights which we are bound to respect.

Now, Shakespeare's London was a small city of from 150,000 to 200,000 souls, or about the size of Providence or Minneapolis at the present time. In cities of such size, everybody of the slightest eminence is known all over town, and such persons are sure to be more or less acquainted with one another; it is a very rare exception when it is not so. Before his thirtieth year, Shakespeare was well known in London as an actor, a writer of plays, and the manager of a prominent theatre. It was in that year that Spenser, in his "Colin Clout's Come Home Again," alluding to Shakespeare under the name of Aëtion, or "eagle-like," paid him this compliment:--

"And there, though last, not least, is Aëtion; A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found; Whose muse, full of high thought's invention, Doth, like himself, heroically sound."

Four years after this, in 1598, Francis Meres published his book entitled "Palladis Tamia," a very interesting contribution to literary history. The author, who had been an instructor in rhetoric in the University of Oxford, was then living in London, near the Globe Theatre. In this book Meres tells his readers that "the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his 'Venus and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugared sonnets among his private friends, etc.... As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage: for comedy, witness his 'Gentlemen of Verona,' his 'Errors,' his 'Love's Labour's Lost,' his 'Love's Labour's Wonne,'[38] his 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' and his 'Merchant of Venice;' for tragedy, his 'Richard II.,' 'Richard III.,' 'Henry IV.,' 'King John,' 'Titus Andronicus,' and his 'Romeo and Juliet.' As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speak with Plautus's tongue if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase if they would speak English." In other passages Meres mentions Shakespeare's lyrical quality, for which he likens him to Pindar and Catullus; and the glory of his style, for which he places him along with Virgil and Homer. It thus appears that, at the age of thirty-four, this poet from Stratford was already ranked by critical scholars by the side of the greatest names of antiquity. Let me add that the popularity of his plays was making him a somewhat wealthy man, so that he had relieved his father from pecuniary troubles, and had just bought for himself the Great House at Stratford where the last years of his life were spent. His income seems already to have been equivalent to $10,000 a year in our modern money. His position had come to be such that he could extend patronage to others. It was in 1598 that through his influence Ben Jonson obtained, after many rebuffs, his first hearing before a London audience, when "Every Man in his Humour" was brought out at Blackfriars Theatre, with Shakespeare acting one of the parts.

To suppose that such a man as this, in a town the size of Minneapolis, connected with a principal theatre, writer of the most popular plays of the day, a poet whom men were already coupling with Homer and Pindar,--to suppose that such a man was not known to all the educated people in the town is simply absurd. There were probably very few men, women, or children in London, between 1595 and 1610, who did not know who Shakespeare was when he passed them in the street; and as for such wits as drank ale and sack at the Mermaid, as for Raleigh and Bacon and Selden and the rest, to suppose that Shakespeare did not know them well--nay, to suppose that he was not the leading spirit and brightest wit of those ambrosial nights--is about as sensible as to suppose that he never saw a maypole.

The facts thus far contemplated point to one conclusion. The son of a well-to-do magistrate in a small country town is born with a genius which the world has never seen surpassed. Coming to London at the age of twenty-one, he achieves such swift success that within thirteen years he is recognized as one of the chief glories of English literature. During this time he is living in the midst of such a period of intellectual ferment as the world has seldom seen, and in a position which necessarily brings him into frequent contact with all the most cultivated men. Under such circumstances, there is nothing in the smallest degree strange or surprising in his acquiring the varied knowledge which his plays exhibit. The major premise of the Delia-Baconians has, therefore, nothing in it whatever. It is a mere bubble, an empty vagary,--only this, and nothing more.