I
Among many wise sayings left behind him by the late Sir Walter Raleigh—our Sir Walter and Oxford’s of whom his pupils there would say, “But Raleigh is a prince”—there haunts me as I begin to speak of Thackeray, a slow remark dropped as from an afterthought upon those combatants who are for ever extorting details of Shakespeare’s private life out of the Plays and the Sonnets, and those others (Browning, for example, and Matthew Arnold) who in revulsion have preached Shakespeare up for the grand impersonal artist who never unlocked his heart, who smiles down upon all questioning and is still
Out-topping knowledge.
Such a counter-claim may be plausible—is at any rate excusable if only as an oath upon the swarm of pedlars who infest Shakespeare and traffic in obscure hints of scandal. Yet, it will not work. “It would never be entertained,” says Raleigh, “by an artist, and would have had short shrift from any of the company that assembled at the Mermaid Tavern. No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow. No dramatist can create live characters save by bequeathing the best of himself to the children of his art, scattering among them a largess of his own qualities, giving, it may be, to one his wit, to another his philosophic doubt, to another his love of action, to another the simplicity and constancy that he finds deep in his own nature. There is no thrill of feeling communicated from the printed page but has first been alive in the mind of the author: there was nothing alive in his mind that was not intensely and sincerely felt. Plays like Shakespeare’s cannot be written in cold blood; they call forth the man’s whole energies, and take toll of the last farthing of his wealth of sympathy and experience.”