intellect which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains
of science–all the past, the present and the future, all the
errors of two thousand years, all the encouraging signs of the
passing times, all the bright hopes of the coming age.
He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and
rendering it portable.
His eloquence would alone have entitled him to a high rank
in literature.
It is evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts
and each and every one of the acquirements that are so prodigally
displayed in the Plays and Poems, and in much higher and richer
degree than any other man of his time or of any previous time.
He was a genius without a mate, a prodigy not matable. There was
only one of him; the planet could not produce two of him at
one birth, nor in one age. He could have written anything that
is in the Plays and Poems. He could have written this:
The cloud-cap’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Also, he could have written this, but he refrained:
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
When a person reads the noble verses about the cloud-cap’d
towers, he ought not to follow it immediately with Good friend
for Iesus sake forbeare, because he will find the transition from
great poetry to poor prose too violent for comfort. It will give
him a shock. You never notice how commonplace and unpoetic
gravel is until you bite into a layer of it in a pie.
XI
Am I trying to convince anybody that Shakespeare did not
write Shakespeare’s Works? Ah, now, what do you take me for?
Would I be so soft as that, after having known the human race
familiarly for nearly seventy-four years? It would grieve me to
know that any one could think so injuriously of me, so
uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me. No, no, I am aware
that when even the brightest mind in our world has been trained
up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be
possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely,
dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any
circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity
of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself. We
always get at second hand our notions about systems of
government; and high tariff and low tariff; and prohibition and
anti-prohibition; and the holiness of peace and the glories of
war; and codes of honor and codes of morals; and approval of the
duel and disapproval of it; and our beliefs concerning the nature
of cats; and our ideas as to whether the murder of helpless wild
animals is base or is heroic; and our preferences in the matter
of religious and political parties; and our acceptance or
rejection of the Shakespeares and the Author Ortons and the Mrs.
Eddys. We get them all at second hand, we reason none of them
out for ourselves. It is the way we are made. It is the way we
are all made, and we can’t help it, we can’t change it. And
whenever we have been furnished a fetish, and have been taught to
believe in it, and love it and worship it, and refrain from
examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong,
that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty and our
devotion. In morals, conduct, and beliefs we take the color of
our environment and associations, and it is a color that can
safely be warranted to wash. Whenever we have been furnished
with a tar baby ostensibly stuffed with jewels, and warned that
it will be dishonorable and irreverent to disembowel it and test
the jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off it. We submit,