reasons why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess
and conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is
worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly
sufficient all by itself–HE HADN’T ANY HISTORY TO RECORD. There
is no way of getting around that deadly fact. And no sane way has
yet been discovered of getting around its formidable significance.
Its quite plain significance–to any but those thugs (I do not use
the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence while he
lived, and none until he had been dead two or three generations.
The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and if he wrote
them it seems a pity the world did not find it out. He ought to
have explained that he was the author, and not merely a nom de
plume for another man to hide behind. If he had been less
intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more solicitous about
his Works, it would have been better for his good name, and a
kindness to us. The bones were not important. They will moulder
away, they will turn to dust, but the Works will endure until the
last sun goes down.
MARK TWAIN.
P.S. March 25. About two months ago I was illuminating this
Autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the Bacon-
Shakespeare controversy, and I then took occasion to air the
opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no public
consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly
obscure and unimportant. And not only in great London, but also in
the little village where he was born, where he lived a quarter of a
century, and where he died and was buried. I argued that if he had
been a person of any note at all, aged villagers would have had
much to tell about him many and many a year after his death,
instead of being unable to furnish inquirers a single fact
connected with him. I believed, and I still believe, that if he
had been famous, his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine
has lasted in my native village out in Missouri. It is a good
argument, a prodigiously strong one, and a most formidable one for
even the most gifted, and ingenious, and plausible Stratfordolater
to get around or explain away. To-day a Hannibal Courier-Post of
recent date has reached me, with an article in it which reinforces
my contention that a really celebrated person cannot be forgotten
in his village in the short space of sixty years. I will make an
extract from it:
Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but
ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she
has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son Mark Twain,
or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the
estimation and regard of the residents of the town he made famous
and the town that made him famous. His name is associated with
every old building that is torn down to make way for the modern
structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and with every hill
or cave over or through which he might by any possibility have
roamed, while the many points of interest which he wove into his
stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson’s Island, or Mark Twain
Cave, are now monuments to his genius. Hannibal is glad of any
opportunity to do him honor as he has honored her.
So it has happened that the “old timers” who went to school with
Mark or were with him on some of his usual escapades have been
honored with large audiences whenever they were in a reminiscent
mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary
boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist and whose every
boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of what was to come.
Like Aunt Beckey and Mrs. Clemens, they can now see that Mark was
hardly appreciated when he lived here and that the things he did as
a boy and was whipped for doing were not all bad after all. So