These colliding facts perplexed us. They suggested the ridiculous, and offer food for reflection on the comedy of human manners. Here, on the one hand, is a portrait we draw of ourselves, and there opposite hangs on the wall a portrait other people draw of us. Place these two sketches side by side and consider, do they represent the same person? Is there resemblance between them enough to establish identity in a British court of law? How can there be? We do not see ourselves as others see us. We each observe the interesting object that engages our attention from different points of the compass. We see our good points of character and make the best of them; our neighbours detect our little sins and make the worst of them. So we clothe ourselves in sunlight and paint our neighbours drab. Mrs. Alinson, fortunate woman, had no glimmering idea what other people thought of her; it was not given her to see herself as others see her. She lives stolidly; eats, drinks, dresses, talks, surrounded by a shining halo of self-complacency through which her mentality cannot penetrate. She is good-natured, thinks excellently of herself, and believes other people's feelings towards her are equally well disposed. You and I, happily, are unconscious of the quaint esteem in which our neighbours hold us, and wisely there we ring the curtain down. If the truth were told, half our acquaintances are our enemies--behind our backs.
Soon after the split in the Liberal party on the first Home Rule Bill, which sundered so many political friendships, Frank Holl was painting the portrait of John Bright. He mentioned to his sitter that he was about to paint the portrait of Mr. Gladstone. "It must be a very painful thing to you, Mr. Bright," he hazarded, "that after all these years of comradeship you two should sever your connection?" "Indeed it is," replied Bright with a sigh; "to think that after we have so long worked together we should be forced apart in the evening of our lives! And by what? A bogy that has risen up within him, beckoning him away from duty and sense. Do you know, Mr. Holl, I seriously fear that my dear old friend's mind is giving way."
When the artist was at Hawarden painting Mr. Gladstone, the subject of Mr. Bright's portrait cropped up. "Ah!" said Mr. Gladstone, "and how did you find him?" "Fairly well; and he spoke very affectionately of you, Mr. Gladstone." "Did he indeed?" replied the sitter sorrowfully. "It was a cruel blow that parted us--and on so clear a question, too! Tell me, Mr. Holl"--and here his lips quivered, for he was evidently moved with strong emotion--"tell me, did you notice anything in the manner of my old friend which would lead you to suppose that his reason was becoming unhinged?"
We cannot see another man's personality in full rounded vision. We get peeps at him; broken lights and flickering shadows of his character dance before us. We chase the shadow, and think we can capture the man and rifle him of his every locked-up thought and uncover his soul's nakedness.
The popular writer analyzes, probes, dissects human character on paper, and we marvel at his subtlety in reading so far into people. He plucks the gay plumage off the poor bird he has trapped, and leaves the stripped and quivering body an unpleasant spectacle for the public to contemplate through the glass case of a six-shilling novel. The novelist is a crude, fumbling workman at his trade. His hand is too clumsy for his tools. He dissects his paper dolls as they pass before him in a paper world, but the tangled, unbalanced, erratic human being pulsing with mystic life, even his next-door neighbour, baffles him on the doorstep. The novelist is a cunning artist, but an unskilful philosopher. He works like Conan Doyle's great detective Sherlock Holmes, who can unravel any mystery he himself concocts in the pages of the Strand Magazine, but is no use to Scotland Yard in tracking a real murderer or laying bare an elusive crime.
If some famous men who in their day and generation lived in cheap houses and mixed with common people, and died unparagraphed in daily papers, could see themselves now, as we see them, promoted to illustrious companionship with the mighty dead, their heads would spin with amazement at themselves for having arrived in splendour; they would stagger at the worship paid them by reverent posterity.
During life they were great artists in mufti. They were regarded as unimportant persons by their own contemporaries, and to-day they are posted amongst the demi-gods of history. They knew themselves to be good workmen who did a good day's work for a fair day's pay, and then, like other honest day-labourers, at nightfall, with clean consciences, they laid down their tools, and their life-story ended there. They little knew that they had the bud of immortality swelling in their veins, soon to break and flower into endless renown.
Human nature is a conundrum to itself hard to crack, as it is to other people, even its friends and neighbours who eat and drink with it at table. We do not know that heaps of posthumous fame may presently cover our strange next-door neighbour. To us he is only a negligible quantity in the affairs of the day, with a little gift of the pen or some queer scientific hobby that absorbs him. In this swift age of ours Time and Space are being brought to heel in masterly control, but our neighbours remain mysterious to us as Adam was to Eve until the affair of the apple found the man out. Even Shakespeare to his contemporaries did not appear a towering genius, but only one of themselves--a common literary hack with an uncommon gift of turning a sentence and making it tell. It was a trick they all tried to catch from him, but he just went one better than they.
Shakespeare's fellow-craftsmen were unconscious that they were entertaining an archangel unawares. Nothing he said or did outside his scribbling for the playhouse is on record. He had no trusty Boswell at his elbow to note his pothouse wit and succulent wisdom, sparks from the fire of his genius, flung off impromptu in merry moments at the Mermaid Tavern over a flagon of malmsey. His pals thought him a jovial fellow well met, and when he died no crumbs of biography were swept up by loving hands to keep his memory green.
But strangest of all, did Shakespeare think much of himself? He was utterly careless of the fate of his own literary labours. He never published one of his own plays. After his death the stage copies of his plays were carefully collected together by two prudent men, Heming and Condell, with an eye to business. Seven years later the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays appeared in print. The first edition is full of glaring blunders, compiled as it was from the stage versions--the manuscripts that the players used in the theatres. Those well-thumbed dog-eared copies of the plays, very interesting documents to own if one could be placed on the market to-day: worn and torn, scored with erasures, interlined with emendations, stained with spilt wine and small beer, greasy with handling of midnight study, and crumpled after pouching in the players' pockets cheek by jowl with incongruous trifles--could you expect literary finish to adorn these fugitive children of the playhouse? Ever since that day learned commentators have laboured assiduously correcting the text of the plays and combing out the tangle, quarrelling fraternally amongst themselves over the correct word for the place and the correct place for a word. The quarrel of the commentators still flourishes, for the muddle of the text has yet to be tidied up.