On the other side, genius may fairly be regarded as faculty, only higher in degree, and not at all different in kind, from the everyday intellect which, for example, pens this page.
Thus as soon as we begin to speak of “genius,” we are involved in speculations, psychological, psychical, physical, and metaphysical; in difficulties of all sorts not at present to be solved either by physiological science or experimental psychology, or by psychical research, or by the study of heredity. When I speak of “the genius of Shakespeare,” of Jeanne d’Arc, of Bacon, even of Wellington, I possibly have a meaning which is not in all respects the meaning of Mr. Greenwood, when he uses the term “genius”; so we are apt to misunderstand each other. Yet we all glibly use the term “genius,” without definition and without discussion.
At once, too, in this quest, we jostle against “that fool of a word,” as Napoleon said, “impossible.” At once, on either side, we assume that we know what is possible and what is impossible,—and so pretend to omniscience.
Thus some “Stratfordians,” or defenders of the actor’s authorship, profess to know—from all the signed work of Bacon, and from all that has reached us about Bacon’s occupations and preoccupations, from 1590 to 1605—that the theory of Bacon’s authorship of the plays is “impossible.” I, however, do not profess this omniscience.
On the other side the Baconian, arguing from all that he knows, or thinks he knows, or can imagine, of the actor’s education, conditions of life, and opportunities, argues that the authorship of the actor is “impossible.”
Both sides assume to be omniscient, but we incontestably know much more about Bacon, in his works, his aims, his inclinations, and in his life, than we know about the actor; while about “the potentialities of genius,” we know—very little.
Thus, with all Bacon’s occupations and preoccupations, he had, the Baconians will allow, genius. By the miracle of genius he may have found time and developed inclination, to begin by furbishing up older plays for a company of actors: he did it extremely well, but what a quaint taste for a courtier and scholar! The eccentricities of genius may account for his choice of a “nom de plume,” which, if he desired concealment, was the last that was likely to serve his turn. He may also have divined all the Doll Tearsheets and Mrs. Quicklys and Pistols, whom, conceivably, he did not much frequent.
I am not one of those who deny that Bacon might have written Hamlet “if he had the mind,” as Charles Lamb said of Wordsworth. Not at all; I am the last to limit the potentialities of genius.
But suppose, merely for the sake of argument, that Will Shakspere too had genius in that amazing degree which, in Henry V, the Bishop of Ely and the Archbishop of Canterbury describe and discuss in the case of the young king. In this passage we perceive that the poet had brooded over and been puzzled by the “miracle” (he uses the word) of genius. Says Canterbury speaking of the Prince’s wild youth,
“Never was such a sudden scholar made.”