Part 4

He knew that place and power do not give happiness--that the crowned are subject as the lowest to fate and chance.

"For within the hollow crown, That rounds the mortal temples of a king, Keeps death his court; and there the antick sits, Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp; Allowing him a breath, a little scene To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks; Infusing him with self and vain conceit.-- As if this flesh, which walls about our life, Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus; Comes at the last, and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and--farewell king!"

So, too, he knew that gold could not bring joy--that death and misfortune come alike to rich and poor, because:

"If thou art rich thou art poor; For like an ass whose back with ingots bows Thou bearest thy heavy riches but a journey, And death unloads thee."

In some of his philosophy there was a kind of scorn--a hidden meaning that could not in his day and time have safely been expressed. You will remember that Laertes was about to kill the king, and this king was the murderer of his own brother, and sat upon the throne by reason of his crime--and in the mouth of such a king Shakespeare puts these words:

"There's such divinity doth hedge a king."

So, in Macbeth:

"How he solicits Heaven himself best knows; but strangely visited people All swollen and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, The mere despairs of surgery, he cures; Hanging a golden stamp about their necks, Put on with holy prayers; and 'tis spoken To the succeeding royalty--he leaves The healing benediction.

With this strange virtue He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy, And sundry blessings hang about his throne, That speak him full of grace."

Shakespeare was the master of the human heart--knew all the hopes, fears, ambitions and passions that sway the mind of man; and thus knowing, he declared that

"Love is not love that alters When it alteration finds."

This is the sublimest declaration in the literature of the world.

Shakespeare seems to give the generalization--the result--without the process of thought. He seems always to be at the conclusion--standing where all truths meet.

In one of the Sonnets is this fragment of a line that contains the highest possible truth:

"Conscience is born of love."

If man were incapable of suffering, the words right and wrong never could have been spoken. If man were destitute of imagination, the flower of pity never could have blossomed in his heart.

We suffer--we cause others to suffer--those that we love--and of this fact conscience is born.

Love is the many-colored flame that makes the fireside of the heart. It is the mingled spring and autumn--the perfect climate of the soul.

XIII.

IN the realm of comparison Shakespeare seems to have exhausted the relations, parallels and similitudes of things, He only could have said:

"Tedious as a twice-told tale Vexing the ears of a drowsy man." "Duller than a great thaw. Dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage."

In the words of Ulysses, spoken to Achilles, we find the most wonderful collection of pictures and comparisons ever compressed within the same number of lines:

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,-- A great-sized monster of ingratitudes-- Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devoured As fast as they are made, forgot as soon As done; perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honor bright: to have done is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery. Take the instant way; For honor travels in a strait so narrow Where one but goes abreast; keep then the path; For emulation hath a thousand sons That one by one pursue; if you give way, Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, Like to an entered tide, they all rush by And leave you hindmost: Or, like a gallant horse fallen in first rank, Lie there for pavement to the abject rear, O'errun and trampled on: then what they do in present, Tho' less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours; For time is like a fashionable host That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arms outstretched as he would fly, Grasps in the comer: Welcome ever smiles, And Farewell goes out sighing."

So the words of Cleopatra, when Charmain speaks:

"Peace, peace: Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep?"

XIV.

NOTHING is more difficult than a definition--a crystallization of thought so perfect that it emits light. Shakespeare says of suicide:

"It is great to do that thing That ends all other deeds, Which shackles accident, and bolts up change."

He defines drama to be:

"Turning the accomplishments of many years Into an hour glass."

Of death:

"This sensible warm motion to become a kneaded clod, To lie in cold obstruction and to rot."

Of memory:

"The warder of the brain."

Of the body:

"This muddy vesture of decay."

And he declares that

"Our little life is rounded with a sleep."

He speaks of Echo as:

"The babbling gossip of the air"--

Romeo, addressing the poison that he is about to take, says:

"Come, bitter conduct, come unsavory guide, Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on The dashing rocks thy sea-sick, weary bark."

He describes the world as

"This bank and shoal of time."

He says of rumor--

"That it doubles, like the voice and echo."

It would take days to call attention to the perfect definitions, comparisons and generalizations of Shakespeare. He gave us the deeper meanings of our words--taught us the art of speech. He was the lord of language--master of expression and compression.

He put the greatest thoughts into the shortest words--made the poor rich and the common royal.

Production enriched his brain. Nothing exhausted him. The moment his attention was called to any subject--comparisons, definitions, metaphors and generalizations filled his mind and begged for utterance. His thoughts like bees robbed every blossom in the world, and then with "merry march" brought the rich booty home "to the tent royal of their emperor."

Shakespeare was the confidant of Nature. To him she opened her "infinite book of secrecy," and in his brain were "the hatch and brood of time."

XV.

THERE is in Shakespeare the mingling of laughter and tears, humor and pathos. Humor is the rose, wit the thorn. Wit is a crystallization, humor an efflorescence. Wit comes from the brain, humor from the heart. Wit is the lightning of the soul.

In Shakespeare's nature was the climate of humor. He saw and felt the sunny side even of the saddest things. You have seen sunshine and rain at once. So Shakespeare's tears fell oft upon his smiles. In moments of peril--on the very darkness of death--there comes a touch of humor that falls like a fleck of sunshine.

Gonzalo, when the ship is about to sink, having seen the boatswain, exclaims:

"I have great comfort from this fellow; Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; His complexion is perfect gallows."

Shakespeare is filled with the strange contrasts of grief and laughter. While poor Hero is supposed to be dead--wrapped in the shroud of dishonor--Dogberry and Verges unconsciously put again the wedding wreath upon her pure brow.

The soliloquy of Launcelot--great as Hamlet's--offsets the bitter and burning words of Shylock.

There is only time to speak of Maria in "Twelfth Night," of Autolycus in the "Winter's Tale," of the parallel drawn by Fluellen between Alexander of Macedon and Harry of Monmouth, or of the marvelous humor of Falstaff, who never had the faintest thought of right or wrong--or of Mercutio, that embodiment of wit and humor--or of the gravediggers who lamented that "great folk should have countenance in this world to drown and hang themselves, more than their even Christian," and who reached the generalization that "the gallows does well because it does well to those who do ill."

There is also an example of grim humor--an example without a parallel in literature, so far as I know. Hamlet having killed Polonius is asked:

"Where's Polonius?"

"At supper."

"At supper! where?"

"Not where he eats, but where he is eaten."

Above all others, Shakespeare appreciated the pathos of situation.

Nothing is more pathetic than the last scene in "Lear." No one has ever bent above his dead who did not feel the words uttered by the mad king,--words born of a despair deeper than tears:

"Oh, that a horse, a dog, a rat hath life And thou no breath!"

So Iago, after he has been wounded, says:

"I bleed, sir; but not killed."

And Othello answers from the wreck and shattered remnant of his life:

"I would have thee live; For in my sense it is happiness to die."

When Troilus finds Cressida has been false, he cries:

"Let it not be believed for womanhood; Think! we had mothers."

Ophelia, in her madness, "_the sweet bells jangled out o' tune,_" says softly:

"I would give you some violets; But they withered all when my father died."

When Macbeth has reaped the harvest, the seeds of which were sown by his murderous hand, he exclaims,--and what could be more pitiful?

"I 'gin to be aweary of the sun."

Richard the Second feels how small a thing it is to be, or to have been, a king, or to receive honors before or after power is lost; and so, of those who stood uncovered before him, he asks this piteous question:

"I live with bread, like you; feel want, Taste grief, need friends; subjected thus, How can you say to me I am a king?"

Think of the salutation of Antony to the dead Cæsar:

"Pardon me, thou piece of bleeding earth."

When Pisanio informs Imogen that he had been ordered by Posthumus to murder her, she bares her neck and cries:

"The lamb entreats the butcher: Where is thy knife? Thou art too slow To do thy master's bidding when I desire it."

Antony, as the last drops are falling from his self-inflicted wound, utters with his dying breath to Cleopatra, this:

"I here importune death awhile, until Of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips."

To me, the last words of Hamlet are full of pathos:

"I die, Horatio. The potent poison quite o' er crows my spirit... The rest is silence."

XVI.

SOME have insisted that Shakespeare must have been a physician, for the reason that he shows such knowledge of medicine--of the symptoms of disease and death--was so familiar with the brain, and with insanity in all its forms.

I do not think he was a physician. He knew too much--his generalizations were too splendid. He had none of the prejudices of that profession in his time. We might as well say that he was a musician, a composer, because we find in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" nearly every musical term known in Shakespeare's time.

Others maintain that he was a lawyer, perfectly acquainted with the forms, with the expressions familiar to that profession--yet there is nothing to show that he was a lawyer, or that he knew more about law than any intelligent man should know.

He was not a lawyer. His sense of justice was never dulled by reading English law.

Some think that he was a botanist, because he named nearly all known plants. Others, that he was an astronomer, a naturalist, because he gave hints and suggestions of nearly all discoveries.

Some have thought that he must have been a sailor, for the reason that the orders given in the opening of "The Tempest" were the best that could, under the circumstances, have been given to save the ship.

For my part, I think there is nothing in the plays to show that he was a lawyer, doctor, botanist or scientist. He had the observant eyes that really see, the ears that really hear, the brain that retains all pictures, all thoughts, logic as unerring as light,-the imagination that supplies defects and builds the perfect from a fragment. And these faculties, these aptitudes, working together, account for what he did.

He exceeded all the sons of men in the splendor of his imagination. To him the whole world paid tribute, and nature poured her treasures at his feet. In him all races lived again, and even those to be were pictured in his brain.

He was a man of imagination--that is to say, of genius, and having seen a leaf, and a drop of water, he could construct the forests, the rivers, and the seas--and in his presence all the cataracts would fall and foam, the mists rise, the clouds form and float.

If Shakespeare knew one fact, he knew its kindred and its neighbors. Looking at a coat of mail, he instantly imagined the society, the conditions, that produced it and what it, in turn, produced. He saw the castle, the moat, the draw-bridge, the lady in the tower, and the knightly lover spurring across the plain. He saw the bold baron and the rude retainer, the trampled serf, and all the glory and the grief of feudal life.

He lived the life of all.

He was a citizen of Athens in the days of Pericles. He listened to the eager eloquence of the great orators, and sat upon the cliffs, and with the tragic poet heard "the multitudinous laughter of the sea." He saw Socrates thrust the spear of question through the shield and heart of falsehood. He was present when the great man drank hemlock, and met the night of death, tranquil as a star meets morning. He listened to the peripatetic philosophers, and was unpuzzled by the sophists. He watched Phidias as he chiseled shapeless stone to forms of love and awe.

He lived by the mysterious Nile, amid the vast and monstrous. He knew the very thought that wrought the form and features of the Sphinx. He heard great Memnon's morning song when marble lips were smitten by the sun. He laid him down with the embalmed and waiting dead, and felt within their dust the expectation of another life, mingled with cold and suffocating doubts--the children born of long delay.

He walked the ways of mighty Rome, and saw great Cæsar with his legions in the field. He stood with vast and motley throngs and watched the triumphs given to victorious men, followed by uncrowned kings, the captured hosts, and all the spoils of ruthless war. He heard the shout that shook the Coliseum's roofless walls, when from the reeling gladiator's hand the short sword fell, while from his bosom gushed the stream of wasted life.

He lived the life of savage men. He trod the forests' silent depths, and in the desperate game of life or death he matched his thought against the instinct of the beast.

He knew all crimes and all regrets, all virtues and their rich rewards. He was victim and victor, pursuer and pursued, outcast and king. He heard the applause and curses of the world, and on his heart had fallen all the nights and noons of failure and success.

He knew the unspoken thoughts, the dumb desires, the wants and ways of beasts. He felt the crouching tiger's thrill, the terror of the ambushed prey, and with the eagles he had shared the ecstasy of flight and poise and swoop, and he had lain with sluggish serpents on the barren rocks uncoiling slowly in the heat of noon.

He sat beneath the bo-tree's contemplative shade, wrapped in Buddha's mighty thought, and dreamed all dreams that light, the alchemist, has wrought from dust and dew, and stored within the slumbrous poppy's subtle blood.

He knelt with awe and dread at every shrine--he offered every sacrifice, and every prayer--felt the consolation and the shuddering fear--mocked and worshiped all the gods--enjoyed all heavens, and felt the pangs of every hell.

He lived all lives, and through his blood and brain there crept the shadow and the chill of every death, and his soul, like Mazeppa, was lashed naked to the wild horse of every fear and love and hate.

The Imagination had a stage in. Shakespeare's brain, whereon were set all scenes that lie between the morn of laughter and the night of tears, and where his players bodied forth the false and true, the joys and griefs, the careless shallows and the tragic deeps of universal life.

From Shakespeare's brain there poured a Niagara of gems spanned by Fancy's seven-hued arch. He was as many-sided as clouds are many-formed. To him giving was hoarding--sowing was harvest--and waste itself the source of wealth. Within his marvelous mind were the fruits of all thought past, the seeds of all to be. As a drop of dew contains the image of the earth and sky, so all there is of life was mirrored forth in Shakespeare's brain.

Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the shores of thought; within which were all the tides and waves of destiny and will; over which swept all the storms of fate, ambition and revenge; upon which fell the gloom and darkness of despair and death and all the sunlight of content and love, and within which was the inverted sky lit with the eternal stars--an intellectual ocean--towards which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles and continents of thought receive their dew and rain.

ROBERT BURNS.*

* This lecture is printed from notes found among Colonel Ingersoll's papers, but was not revised by him for publication.

A facsimile of the original manuscript as written by Colonel Ingersoll in the Burns' cottage at Ayr, August 19, 1878.

We have met to-night to honor the memory of a poet—possibly the next to the greatest that has ever written in our language. I would place one above him, and only one--Shakespeare.

It may be well enough at the beginning to inquire, What is a poet? What is poetry?

Every one has some idea of the poetic, and this idea is born of his experience--of his education--of his surroundings.

There have been more nations than poets.

Many people suppose that poetry is a kind of art depending upon certain rules, and that it is only necessary to find out these rules to be a poet. But these rules have never been found. The great poet follows them unconsciously. The great poet seems as unconscious as Nature, and the product of the highest art seems to have been felt instead of thought.

The finest definition perhaps that has been given is this:

"As nature unconsciously produces that which appears to be the result of consciousness, so the greatest artist consciously produces that which appears the unconscious result."

Poetry must rest on the experience of men--the history of heart and brain. It must sit by the fireside of the heart. It must have to do with this world, with the place in which we live, with the men and women we know, with their loves, their hopes, their fears and their joys.

After all, we care nothing about gods and goddesses, or folks with wings.

The cloud-compelling Jupiters, the ox-eyed Junos, the feather-heeled Mercurys, or the Minervas that leaped full-armed from the thick skull of some imaginary god, are nothing to us. We know nothing of their fears or loves, and for that reason, the poetry that deals with them, no matter how ingenious it may be, can never touch the human heart.

I was taught that Milton was a wonderful poet, and above all others sublime. I have read Milton once. Few have read him twice.

With splendid words, with magnificent mythological imagery, he musters the heavenly militia--puts epaulets on the shoulders of God, and describes the Devil as an artillery officer of the highest rank.

Then he describes the battles in which immortals undertake the impossible task of killing each other.

Take this line:

"Flying with indefatigable wings over the vast abrupt."

This is called sublime, but what does it mean?

We have been taught that Dante was a wonderful poet.

He described with infinite minuteness the pangs and agonies endured by the damned in the torture--dungeons of God.

The vicious twins of superstition--malignity and solemnity--struggle for the mastery in his revengeful lines.

But there was one good thing about Dante: he had the courage, and what might be called the religious democracy, to see a pope in hell.

That is something to be thankful for.

So, the sonnets of Petrarch are as unmeaning as the promises of candidates. They are filled not with genuine passion, but with the feelings that lovers are supposed to have.

Poetry cannot be written by rule; it is nota trade, or a profession. Let the critics lay down the laws, and the true poet will violate them all.

By rule you can make skeletons, but you cannot clothe them with flesh, put blood in their veins, thoughts in their eyes, and passions in their hearts.

This can be done only by following the impulses of the heart, the winged fancies of the brain--by wandering from paths and roads, keeping step with the rhythmic ebb and flow of the throbbing blood.

In the olden time in Scotland, most of the so-called poetry was written by pedagogues and parsons--gentlemen who found out what little they knew of the living world by reading the dead languages--by studying epitaphs in the cemeteries of literature.

They knew nothing of any life that they thought poetic. They kept as far from the common people as they could. They wrote countless verses, but no poems. They tried to put metaphysics, that is to say, Calvinism, in poetry.

As a matter of fact, a Calvinist cannot be a poet. Calvinism takes all the poetry out of the world.

If the existence of the Calvinistic, the Christian, hell could be demonstrated, another poem never could be written. .

In those days they made poetry about geography, and the beauties of the Scotch Kirk, and even about law.

The critics have always been looking for mistakes, not beauties--not for the perfection of expression and feeling. They would object to the lark and nightingale because they do not sing by note--to the clouds because they are not square.

At one time it was thought that scenery, the grand in nature, made the poet. We now know that the poet makes the scenery. Holland has produced far more genius than the Alps. Where nature is prodigal--where the crags tower above the clouds--man is overcome, or overawed. In England and Scotland the hills are low, and there is nothing in the scenery calculated to rouse poetic blood, and yet these countries have produced the greatest literature of all time.

The truth is that poets and heroes make the scenery. The place where man has died for man is grander than all the snow-crowned summits of the world.

A poem is something like a mountain stream that flashes in light, then lost in shadow, leaps with a kind of wild joy into the abyss, emerges victorious, and winding runs amid meadows, lingers in quiet places, holding within its breast the hills and vales and clouds--then running by the cottage door, babbling of joy, and murmuring delight, then sweeping on to join its old mother, the sea.

Thousands, millions of men live poems, but do not write them; but every great poem has been lived.

I say to-night that every good and self-denying man, every one who lives and labors for those he loves, for wife and child, is living a poem. The loving mother rocking a cradle, singing the slumber song, lives a poem pure and tender as the dawn; the man who bares his breast to shot and shell lives a poem, and all the great men of the world, and all the brave and loving women have been poets in action, whether they have written one word or not. The poor woman of the tenement, sewing, blinded by tears, lives a poem holier, it may be, than the fortunate can know. The pioneers--the home builders, the heroes of toil, are all poets, and their deeds are filled with the pathos and perfection of the highest art.