opposition to each other and a choice had to be made: I let
principle go, and went over to the other side. Not the entire way,
but far enough to answer the requirements of the case. That is to
say, I took this attitude, to wit: I only BELIEVED Bacon wrote
Shakespeare, whereas I KNEW Shakespeare didn’t. Ealer was
satisfied with that, and the war broke loose. Study, practice,
experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to
take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly
seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly;
finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly. After that, I was
welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I
looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody
else’s faith that didn’t tally with mine. That faith, imposed upon
me by self-interest in that ancient day, remains my faith to-day,
and in it I find comfort, solace, peace, and never-failing joy.
You see how curiously theological it is. The “rice Christian” of
the Orient goes through the very same steps, when he is after rice
and the missionary is after HIM; he goes for rice, and remains to
worship.
Ealer did a lot of our “reasoning”–not to say substantially all of
it. The slaves of his cult have a passion for calling it by that
large name. We others do not call our inductions and deductions
and reductions by any name at all. They show for themselves, what
they are, and we can with tranquil confidence leave the world to
ennoble them with a title of its own choosing.
Now and then when Ealer had to stop to cough, I pulled my
induction-talents together and hove the controversial lead myself:
always getting eight feet, eight-and-a-half, often nine, sometimes
even quarter-less-twain–as _I_ believed; but always “no bottom,”
as HE said.
I got the best of him only once. I prepared myself. I wrote out a
passage from Shakespeare–it may have been the very one I quoted a
while ago, I don’t remember–and riddled it with his wild
steamboatful interlardings. When an unrisky opportunity offered,
one lovely summer day, when we had sounded and buoyed a tangled
patch of crossings known as Hell’s Half Acre, and were aboard again
and he had sneaked the Pennsylvania triumphantly through it without
once scraping sand, and the A. T. Lacey had followed in our wake
and got stuck, and he was feeling good, I showed it to him. It
amused him. I asked him to fire it off: read it; read it, I
diplomatically added, as only he could read dramatic poetry. The
compliment touched him where he lived. He did read it; read it
with surpassing fire and spirit; read it as it will never be read
again; for HE knew how to put the right music into those thunderous
interlardings and make them seem a part of the text, make them
sound as if they were bursting from Shakespeare’s own soul, each
one of them a golden inspiration and not to be left out without
damage to the massed and magnificent whole.
I waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer; waited
until he brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet
position, my pet argument, the one which I was fondest of, the one
which I prized far above all others in my ammunition-wagon, to wit:
that Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare’s works, for the
reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with
the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk,
and lawyer-ways–and if Shakespeare was possessed of the
infinitely-divided star-dust that constituted this vast wealth, how
did he get it, and WHERE, and WHEN?
“From books.”
From books! That was always the idea. I answered as my readings
of the champions of my side of the great controversy had taught me
to answer: that a man can’t handle glibly and easily and
comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he has
not personally served. He will make mistakes; he will not, and
cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right; and
the moment he departs, by even a shade, from a common trade-form,