Mr. De Quincy's proposition to drink twice instead of once ought to forever secure his popularity among Englishmen; but it remains, nevertheless, remarkable that a ponderous encyclopaedia should admit this sort of work among its articles on sugar, snakes, Sardinia, soap, Savonarola, and its other references in S! Like his fellow Shakespeareans, Mr. De Quincy makes no use of Aubrey, or the old clerk, or the Rev. Richard Davies, or any one else who, having lived at dates inconveniently contiguous to the real William Shakespeare, were awkward customers about whom it was best to say nothing. He cannot claim never to have heard of Aubrey, because he quotes him as saying that William Shakespeare was "a handsome, well-shaped man." But this is the only allusion he makes to Aubrey or to any body else who lived within eyesight or ear-shot of the William Shakespeare who (we admit), if a well-conducted person, ought reasonably to have been the man Mr. De Quincy and his ilk turn him out, and not the man his neighbors, or any body who happened to be born within a hundred years of him, knew him. As to the difficulties Coleridge, Goethe, Schlegel, Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, Gervinius, Hallam, Holmes, William Henry Smith, Furness, and Delia Bacon find so insurmountable—namely, as to where the material of the plays came from—Mr. De Quincy skips over these with his airy two terms at the little grammar-school on Stratford High Street! (The identical desk which William occupied during this period of attendance at that institution of learning was promptly supplied by the Stratford guides, upon hearing Mr. De Quincy's discovery.) "Old Aubrey," two hundred years nearer his subject, was careful to give his school-master's story "for what it was worth," admitting that his authority for the statement that William Shakespeare was a school-master was only a rumor, founded on the statement of one "Beeston;" but who was "Beeston?" Some of our modern commentators have conjectured that possibly William, being a sort of model or head boy, was trusted to hear some of the little boys' lessons, which gave rise to the "school-master" story. But Mr. De Quincy allows no demurrer nor doubt to his assertions in the Encyclopædia Britannica. And for these "two terms" (of course), no further authority than himself being necessary, he vouchsafes none. Such dry things as references are gracefully compensated for by favoring the reader in search for Shakespearean data with two dissertations upon the loveliness of female virtue, one of which covers fourteen pages octavo. * His cue has had prolific following.
* Of Sheppard & Gill's reprint (pp. 41, 69-83). But if Mr.
De Quincy could have lived until November, 1879, even he
might have been taught something. The Rev. John Bayley, in
an article on "The Religion of Shakespeare," in the "Sunday
Magazine" (New York: Frank Leslie, November, 1879, p. 518),
says of William Shakespeare,"
"During the last years of his life it is stated that he and
his family attended the parish church where the Rev. Richard
Byfield, an eminent Puritan minister, and father of the
distinguished commentator on the Epistle to the Colossians,
commenced his ministry, a. d. 1606." Of course, the reverend
contributor to the "Sunday Magazine" does not in-form us
where this fact "is stated," but concludes from the fact (he
is sure it is a fact) that Shakespeare was "during the last
years of his life the constant hearer of this eminent and
energetic preacher of the gospel," and that "we may
reasonably hope for the best of consequences." So simple a
process has Shakespeare-making become!
Now-a-days our "biographies" of William Shakespeare are huge tomes of Elizabethan and other antiquarian lore, commentary, conjecture, argumentation; that stupefy us, as it were, by mere bulk and show of research, into accepting the whole rather than plunge into so vast and shoreless a sea of apparent labor, and, therefore, alleged learning. For such is the indolence of man, that the bulkier the book the less likely is it to be read or refuted. And so, in view of the great eye-filling books labeled "biographies" of William Shakespeare—volumes commensurate with the idea of a life which might, in time at least, have compassed the mighty works—one need not doubt that "William Shakespeare" was the name of the marvelous man who wrote the plays.
But, when one left the fiction of Mr. De Quincy and his ilk, and was forced to confront the William Shakespeare who wrote the Lucy lampoon and the epitaph on Elias James, who stuck calves and stole deer, the difficulty only recurred with redoubled emphasis.
It is not, of course, because William stuck the calves and stole the deer, because he wrote the lampoon or the epitaph, nor because he was son (or apprentice, as some lay), to a butcher or a glover, a tallow-chandler or a seedsman, that he is conceived to have been unequal to the Shakespearean authorship. There never yet was cradle too lowly to be the cradle of genius, or line too ignoble for its genesis. George Stephenson was a colliery-stoker, Turner was the son of a barber, and Faraday the son of a horseshoer. Coleridge was a charity-lad, and the number of tanners' and tallow-chandlers' offspring, without whose names history could not be written, is something amazing. We may trace the genius of Turner from the first impulse of his pencil to its latest masterpiece, but we can not find that he discovered the solar spectrum or described the Edison phonograph. He knew and practiced what he was taught (albeit he taught himself), and died quite contented to leave his own works behind him. Robert Burns was fully as unlettered and as rustic a plowboy as could be desired to prove the mighty miracle of genius. His history, up to a certain point, is the very duplicate of the history of William Shakespeare, the butcher's boy and prodigy of Stratford village. Both were obscure, schoolless, and grammarless. But, in the case of Robert Burns, this heaven-born genius did not set him straightway on so lofty a pinnacle that he could circumspect the past, and forecast the future, or guide his untaught pen to write of Troy and Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus, or to reproduce the very counterfeit civilizations and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten, the very names of which were not dreamed of anywhere in the neighborhood of his philosophy; of the most unusual and hidden details of forgotten polities and commercial customs, such as, for instance, the exceptional usage of a certain trade in Mitylene, the anomalous status of a Moorish mercenary in command of a Venetian army, of a savage queen of Britain led captive by Rome, or a thane of Scotland under one of its primitive kings—matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treatises or statutes, rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach! In the case of Robert Burns we are content not to ask too much, even of genius. Let us be content if the genius of Bobert Burns could glorify the goodwives' fables of his wonted firesides and set in aureole the homeliest cipher in his vicinage, until a field-mouse became a poem or a milkmaid a Venus! It were unreasonable to demand that this genius, this fire from heaven, at once and on the instant invest a letterless peasant-lad with all the lore and law which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten—with all the learning that the past had gathered into great tomes and piled away in libraries. And yet, if Bobert Burns had sung of the Punic wars or the return of the Heraclides, some Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight would doubtless—with history staring him in the face—have arisen to put his index-finger upon the sources of his authority. Judging by the record in the case of William Shakespeare, history is able to oppose no difficulty over which a Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight can not easily clamber.
If William Shakespeare was a born genius, a true son of nature, his soul overflowing with a sense of the beauty of life and of love, Land of all around him, we might expect to find his poems brimful of the sweet, downcast eyes of his Anne, of sunny Stratford fields, of Shottery and the lordly oaks of Charlecote—to find him, "Fancy's child," warbling "his native Wood-notes wild," indeed! But of Troy, Tyre, and Epidamnium, of Priam and Cressid and Cleopatra, of the propulsion of blood from the vital heart, and of the eternal mysteries of physics, who dreams that "sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child" could sing in the very speech and idiom of those forgotten towns and times, or within the mathematical exactitude of sciences that had not yet been treated of in books? Or, again, John Bunyan is a case in point. John Bunyan was as squalid and irredeemable a tinker as ever flourished in the days when "a tinker was rogue by statute." * And yet he, according to Macaulay, produced the second of the two books of which England should be proudest. ** What was the miracle in the case of John Bunyan? He produced a book which, "while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.... This is the highest miracle of art, that things whichare not should be as though they were; that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another. And this miracle the tinker has wrought."
* Cockayne vs. Hopkins, 2 Lev., 214.
** "Though there were many clever men in England during the
latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two
minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very
eminent degree. One of these minds produced the 'Paradise
Lost,' and the other the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'"
But this great praise was not abstracted from Macaulay by wealth of antique learning, universal accuracy of information, or vivid portraiture of forgotten civilizations. There was no trace of Bun-yan's perfect familiarity with Plato and Euripides, with Galen, Paracelsus, Plautus, Seneca, and the long line of authors down to Boccaccio, Rabelais, Saxo-Grammaticus, and the rest! The critic did not find in Bunyan's pages the careful diction of a scholar, the sonorous speech of the ancients, or the elegant and punctilious Norman of the court. "The Bunyan vocabulary," says Macaulay, "is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical theological terms, which would puzzle the rudest peasant." In short, we need not pause, marvelous as are the pages of the "Pilgrim's Progress," to ask of John Bunyan, as indeed we must ask of William Shakespeare, the question, "how knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" Peerless as the result all is, there is nothing in the writings of John Bunyan which can not be accounted for by natural (that is to say, by what we have been obliged by the course of human experience to accept as not impossible) causes. "The years of Bunyan's boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit was in the highest vigor over all England.... It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair, and bis sleep disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him.... He enters the Parliamentary army, and, to the last, he loves to draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, guns, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under its own banner.... His 'Greatheart,' his 'Captain Boanerges,5 and his 'Captain Credence' are evidently portraits of which the originals were among those martial saints* who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.... He had been five years a preacher when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavaliers... to oppress the Dissenters.... he was flung into Bedford jail, with pen and paper for company, etc., etc. Here are the school and the experience, and the result is writings which show a keen mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual experience." ** Moreover, here is a scholar like Macaulay striving to account for the extraordinary phenomenon of a "Pilgrim's Progress" written by a village tinker. But in the case of the at least equally extraordinary phenomenon of the Shakespearean drama, the creation of a village butcher, the scholar has not yet been born to the Shakespeareans who deems it necessary or profitable to try his hand at any such investigation. "Where did he get his material?"
"Oh, he picked it up around Stratford, somehow!"
"But his learning?"