Shakespeare’s day, but later comers; and what they had learned
had come to them from persons who had not seen Shakespeare; and
what they had learned was not claimed as FACT, but only as legend–
dim and fading and indefinite legend; legend of the calf-slaughtering
rank, and not worth remembering either as history or fiction.
Has it ever happened before–or since–that a celebrated
person who had spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the
village where he was born and reared, was able to slip out of
this world and leave that village voiceless and gossipless behind
him–utterly voiceless., utterly gossipless? And permanently so?
I don’t believe it has happened in any case except Shakespeare’s.
And couldn’t and wouldn’t have happened in his case if he had
been regarded as a celebrity at the time of his death.
When I examine my own case–but let us do that, and see if
it will not be recognizable as exhibiting a condition of things
quite likely to result, most likely to result, indeed
substantially SURE to result in the case of a celebrated person,
a benefactor of the human race. Like me.
My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri,
on the banks of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years
old. I entered school at five years of age, and drifted from one
school to another in the village during nine and a half years.
Then my father died, leaving his family in exceedingly straitened
circumstances; wherefore my book-education came to a standstill
forever, and I became a printer’s apprentice, on board and
clothes, and when the clothes failed I got a hymn-book in place
of them. This for summer wear, probably. I lived in Hannibal
fifteen and a half years, altogether, then ran away, according to
the custom of persons who are intending to become celebrated. I
never lived there afterward. Four years later I became a “cub”
on a Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans
trade, and after a year and a half of hard study and hard work
the U.S. inspectors rigorously examined me through a couple of
long sittings and decided that I knew every inch of the
Mississippi–thirteen hundred miles–in the dark and in the day–
as well as a baby knows the way to its mother’s paps day or
night. So they licensed me as a pilot–knighted me, so to speak
–and I rose up clothed with authority, a responsible servant of
the United States Government.
Now then. Shakespeare died young–he was only fifty-two.
He had lived in his native village twenty-six years, or about
that. He died celebrated (if you believe everything you read in
the books). Yet when he died nobody there or elsewhere took any
notice of it; and for sixty years afterward no townsman
remembered to say anything about him or about his life in
Stratford. When the inquirer came at last he got but one fact–
no, LEGEND–and got that one at second hand, from a person who
had only heard it as a rumor and didn’t claim copyright in it as
a production of his own. He couldn’t, very well, for its date
antedated his own birth-date. But necessarily a number of
persons were still alive in Stratford who, in the days of their
youth, had seen Shakespeare nearly every day in the last five
years of his life, and they would have been able to tell that
inquirer some first-hand things about him if he had in those last
days been a celebrity and therefore a person of interest to the
villagers. Why did not the inquirer hunt them up and interview
them? Wasn’t it worth while? Wasn’t the matter of sufficient
consequence? Had the inquirer an engagement to see a dog-fight
and couldn’t spare the time?
It all seems to mean that he never had any literary celebrity,
there or elsewhere, and no considerable repute as actor and manager.
Now then, I am away along in life–my seventy-third year
being already well behind me–yet SIXTEEN of my Hannibal
schoolmates are still alive today, and can tell–and do tell–
inquirers dozens and dozens of incidents of their young lives and