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SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY


Interlaken, Switzerland, 1891.

It is a good many years since I was in Switzerland last.  In
that remote time there was only one ladder railway in the
country.  That state of things is all changed.  There isn't a
mountain in Switzerland now that hasn't a ladder railroad or two
up its back like suspenders; indeed, some mountains are latticed
with them, and two years hence all will be.  In that day the
peasant of the high altitudes will have to carry a lantern when
he goes visiting in the night to keep from stumbling over
railroads that have been built since his last round.  And also in
that day, if there shall remain a high-altitude peasant whose
potato-patch hasn't a railroad through it, it would make him as
conspicuous as William Tell.

However, there are only two best ways to travel through
Switzerland.  The first best is afloat.  The second best is by
open two-horse carriage.  One can come from Lucerne to Interlaken
over the Brunig by ladder railroad in an hour or so now, but you
can glide smoothly in a carriage in ten, and have two hours for
luncheon at noon--for luncheon, not for rest.  There is no
fatigue connected with the trip.  One arrives fresh in spirit and
in person in the evening--no fret in his heart, no grime on his
face, no grit in his hair, not a cinder in his eye.  This is the
right condition of mind and body, the right and due preparation
for the solemn event which closed the day--stepping with
metaphorically uncovered head into the presence of the most
impressive mountain mass that the globe can show--the Jungfrau.
The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly confronted by that
towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow, is
breath-taking astonishment.  It is as if heaven's gates had swung
open and exposed the throne.

It is peaceful here and pleasant at Interlaken.  Nothing
going on--at least nothing but brilliant life-giving sunshine.
There are floods and floods of that.  One may properly speak of
it as "going on," for it is full of the suggestion of activity;
the light pours down with energy, with visible enthusiasm.  This
is a good atmosphere to be in, morally as well as physically.
After trying the political atmosphere of the neighboring
monarchies, it is healing and refreshing to breathe air that has
known no taint of slavery for six hundred years, and to come
among a people whose political history is great and fine, and
worthy to be taught in all schools and studied by all races and
peoples.  For the struggle here throughout the centuries has not
been in the interest of any private family, or any church, but in
the interest of the whole body of the nation, and for shelter and
protection of all forms of belief.  This fact is colossal.  If
one would realize how colossal it is, and of what dignity and
majesty, let him contrast it with the purposes and objects of the
Crusades, the siege of York, the War of the Roses, and other
historic comedies of that sort and size.

Last week I was beating around the Lake of Four Cantons, and
I saw Rutli and Altorf.  Rutli is a remote little patch of
meadow, but I do not know how any piece of ground could be holier
or better worth crossing oceans and continents to see, since it
was there that the great trinity of Switzerland joined hands six
centuries ago and swore the oath which set their enslaved and
insulted country forever free; and Altorf is also honorable
ground and worshipful, since it was there that William, surnamed
Tell (which interpreted means "The foolish talker"--that is to
say, the too-daring talker), refused to bow to Gessler's hat.  Of
late years the prying student of history has been delighting
himself beyond measure over a wonderful find which he has made--
to wit, that Tell did not shoot the apple from his son's head.
To hear the students jubilate, one would suppose that the
question of whether Tell shot the apple or didn't was an
important matter; whereas it ranks in importance exactly with the
question of whether Washington chopped down the cherry-tree or
didn't.  The deeds of Washington, the patriot, are the essential
thing; the cherry-tree incident is of no consequence.  To prove
that Tell did shoot the apple from his son's head would merely
prove that he had better nerve than most men and was skillful
with a bow as a million others who preceded and followed him, but
not one whit more so.  But Tell was more and better than a mere
marksman, more and better than a mere cool head; he was a type;
he stands for Swiss patriotism; in his person was represented a
whole people; his spirit was their spirit--the spirit which would
bow to none but God, the spirit which said this in words and
confirmed it with deeds.  There have always been Tells in
Switzerland--people who would not bow.  There was a sufficiency
of them at Rutli; there were plenty of them at Murten; plenty at
Grandson; there are plenty today.  And the first of them all--the
very first, earliest banner-bearer of human freedom in this
world--was not a man, but a woman--Stauffacher's wife.  There she
looms dim and great, through the haze of the centuries,
delivering into her husband's ear that gospel of revolt which was
to bear fruit in the conspiracy of Rutli and the birth of the
first free government the world had ever seen.

From this Victoria Hotel one looks straight across a flat of
trifling width to a lofty mountain barrier, which has a gateway
in it shaped like an inverted pyramid.  Beyond this gateway
arises the vast bulk of the Jungfrau, a spotless mass of gleaming
snow, into the sky.  The gateway, in the dark-colored barrier,
makes a strong frame for the great picture.  The somber frame and
the glowing snow-pile are startlingly contrasted.  It is this
frame which concentrates and emphasizes the glory of the Jungfrau
and makes it the most engaging and beguiling and fascinating
spectacle that exists on the earth.  There are many mountains of
snow that are as lofty as the Jungfrau and as nobly proportioned,
but they lack the fame.  They stand at large; they are intruded
upon and elbowed by neighboring domes and summits, and their
grandeur is diminished and fails of effect.

It is a good name, Jungfrau--Virgin.  Nothing could be
whiter; nothing could be purer; nothing could be saintlier of
aspect.  At six yesterday evening the great intervening barrier
seen through a faint bluish haze seemed made of air and
substanceless, so soft and rich it was, so shimmering where the
wandering lights touched it and so dim where the shadows lay.
Apparently it was a dream stuff, a work of the imagination,
nothing real about it.  The tint was green, slightly varying
shades of it, but mainly very dark.  The sun was down--as far as
that barrier was concerned, but not for the Jungfrau, towering
into the heavens beyond the gateway.  She was a roaring
conflagration of blinding white.


It is said the Fridolin (the old Fridolin), a new saint, but
formerly a missionary, gave the mountain its gracious name.  He
was an Irishman, son of an Irish king--there were thirty thousand
kings reigning in County Cork alone in his time, fifteen hundred
years ago.  It got so that they could not make a living, there
was so much competition and wages got cut so.  Some of them were
out of work months at a time, with wife and little children to
feed, and not a crust in the place.  At last a particularly
severe winter fell upon the country, and hundreds of them were
reduced to mendicancy and were to be seen day after day in the
bitterest weather, standing barefoot in the snow, holding out
their crowns for alms.  Indeed, they would have been obliged to
emigrate or starve but for a fortunate idea of Prince Fridolin's,
who started a labor-union, the first one in history, and got the
great bulk of them to join it.  He thus won the general
gratitude, and they wanted to make him emperor--emperor over them
all--emperor of County Cork, but he said, No, walking delegate
was good enough for him.  For behold! he was modest beyond his
years, and keen as a whip.  To this day in Germany and
Switzerland, where St. Fridolin is revered and honored, the
peasantry speak of him affectionately as the first walking
delegate.

The first walk he took was into France and Germany,
missionarying--for missionarying was a better thing in those days
than it is in ours.  All you had to do was to cure the savage's
sick daughter by a "miracle"--a miracle like the miracle of
Lourdes in our day, for instance--and immediately that head
savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes with a new
convert's enthusiasm.  You could sit down and make yourself easy,
now.  He would take an ax and convert the rest of the nation
himself.  Charlemagne was that kind of a walking delegate.

Yes, there were great missionaries in those days, for the
methods were sure and the rewards great.  We have no such
missionaries now, and no such methods.

But to continue the history of the first walking delegate,
if you are interested.  I am interested myself because I have
seen his relics in Sackingen, and also the very spot where he
worked his great miracle--the one which won him his sainthood in
the papal court a few centuries later.  To have seen these things
makes me feel very near to him, almost like a member of the
family, in fact.  While wandering about the Continent he arrived
at the spot on the Rhine which is now occupied by Sackingen, and
proposed to settle there, but the people warned him off.  He
appealed to the king of the Franks, who made him a present of the
whole region, people and all.  He built a great cloister there
for women and proceeded to teach in it and accumulate more land.
There were two wealthy brothers in the neighborhood, Urso and
Landulph.  Urso died and Fridolin claimed his estates.  Landulph
asked for documents and papers.  Fridolin had none to show.  He
said the bequest had been made to him by word of mouth.  Landulph
suggested that he produce a witness and said it in a way which he
thought was very witty, very sarcastic.  This shows that he did
not know the walking delegate.  Fridolin was not disturbed.
He said:

"Appoint your court.  I will bring a witness."

The court thus created consisted of fifteen counts and
barons.  A day was appointed for the trial of the case.  On that
day the judges took their seats in state, and proclamation was
made that the court was ready for business.  Five minutes, ten
minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and yet no Fridolin appeared.
Landulph rose, and was in the act of claiming judgment by default
when a strange clacking sound was heard coming up the stairs.
In another moment Fridolin entered at the door and came walking
in a deep hush down the middle aisle, with a tall skeleton
stalking in his rear.

Amazement and terror sat upon every countenance, for everybody
suspected that the skeleton was Urso's.  It stopped before the
chief judge and raised its bony arm aloft and began to speak,
while all the assembled shuddered, for they could see the
words leak out between its ribs.  It said:

"Brother, why dost thou disturb my blessed rest and withhold
by robbery the gift which I gave thee for the honor of God?"

It seems a strange thing and most irregular, but the verdict
was actually given against Landulph on the testimony of this
wandering rack-heap of unidentified bones.  In our day a skeleton
would not be allowed to testify at all, for a skeleton has no
moral responsibility, and its word could not be believed on oath,
and this was probably one of them.  However, the incident is
valuable as preserving to us a curious sample of the quaint laws
of evidence of that remote time--a time so remote, so far back
toward the beginning of original idiocy, that the difference
between a bench of judges and a basket of vegetables was as yet
so slight that we may say with all confidence that it didn't
really exist.


During several afternoons I have been engaged in an
interesting, maybe useful, piece of work--that is to say, I have
been trying to make the mighty Jungfrau earn her living--earn it
in a most humble sphere, but on a prodigious scale, on a
prodigious scale of necessity, for she couldn't do anything in a
small way with her size and style.  I have been trying to make
her do service on a stupendous dial and check off the hours as
they glide along her pallid face up there against the sky, and
tell the time of day to the populations lying within fifty miles
of her and to the people in the moon, if they have a good
telescope there.

Until late in the afternoon the Jungfrau's aspect is that of
a spotless desert of snow set upon edge against the sky.  But by
mid-afternoon some elevations which rise out of the western
border of the desert, whose presence you perhaps had not detected
or suspected up to that time, began to cast black shadows
eastward across the gleaming surface.  At first there is only one
shadow; later there are two.  Toward 4 P.M. the other day I was
gazing and worshiping as usual when I chanced to notice that
shadow No. 1 was beginning to take itself something of the shape
of the human profile.  By four the back of the head was good, the
military cap was pretty good, the nose was bold and strong, the
upper lip sharp, but not pretty, and there was a great goatee
that shot straight aggressively forward from the chin.

At four-thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably,
and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made
conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so
located as to answer very well for a shoulder or coat-collar to
this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there
right before everybody to pillow his head on the Virgin's white
breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to her in the sensuous
music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and thunder of the
passing avalanche--music very familiar to his ear, for he had
heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came
courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that
day is far, yes--for he was at this pleasant sport before the
Middle Ages drifted by him in the valley; before the Romans
marched past, and before the antique and recordless barbarians
fished and hunted here and wondered who he might be, and were
probably afraid of him; and before primeval man himself, just
emerged from his four-footed estate, stepped out upon this plain,
first sample of his race, a thousand centuries ago, and cast a
glad eye up there, judging he had found a brother human being and
consequently something to kill; and before the big saurians
wallowed here, still some eons earlier.  Oh yes, a day so far
back that the eternal son was present to see that first visit; a
day so far back that neither tradition nor history was born yet
and a whole weary eternity must come and go before the restless
little creature, of whose face this stupendous Shadow Face was
the prophecy, would arrive in the earth and begin his shabby
career and think of a big thing.  Oh, indeed yes; when you talk
about your poor Roman and Egyptian day-before-yesterday
antiquities, you should choose a time when the hoary Shadow Face
of the Jungfrau is not by.  It antedates all antiquities known or
imaginable; for it was here the world itself created the theater
of future antiquities.  And it is the only witness with a human
face that was there to see the marvel, and remains to us a
memorial of it.

By 4:40 P.M. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is
beautiful.  It is black and is powerfully marked against the
upright canvas of glowing snow, and covers hundreds of acres of
that resplendent surface.

Meantime shadow No. 2 has been creeping out well to the rear
of the face west of it--and at five o'clock has assumed a shape
that has rather a poor and rude semblance of a shoe.

Meantime, also, the great Shadow Face has been gradually changing
for twenty minutes, and now, 5 P.M., it is becoming a quite fair
portrait of Roscoe Conkling.  The likeness is there, and is
unmistakable.  The goatee is shortened, now, and has an end;
formerly it hadn't any, but ran off eastward and arrived nowhere.

By 6 P.M. the face has dissolved and gone, and the goatee
has become what looks like the shadow of a tower with a pointed
roof, and the shoe had turned into what the printers call a
"fist" with a finger pointing.

If I were now imprisoned on a mountain summit a hundred
miles northward of this point, and was denied a timepiece, I
could get along well enough from four till six on clear days, for
I could keep trace of the time by the changing shapes of these
mighty shadows of the Virgin's front, the most stupendous dial I
am acquainted with, the oldest clock in the world by a couple of
million years.

I suppose I should not have noticed the forms of the shadows
if I hadn't the habit of hunting for faces in the clouds and in
mountain crags--a sort of amusement which is very entertaining
even when you don't find any, and brilliantly satisfying when you
do.  I have searched through several bushels of photographs of
the Jungfrau here, but found only one with the Face in it, and in
this case it was not strictly recognizable as a face, which was
evidence that the picture was taken before four o'clock in the
afternoon, and also evidence that all the photographers have
persistently overlooked one of the most fascinating features of
the Jungfrau show.  I say fascinating, because if you once detect
a human face produced on a great plan by unconscious nature, you
never get tired of watching it.  At first you can't make another
person see it at all, but after he has made it out once he can't
see anything else afterward.


The King of Greece is a man who goes around quietly enough
when off duty.  One day this summer he was traveling in an
ordinary first-class compartment, just in his other suit, the one
which he works the realm in when he is at home, and so he was not
looking like anybody in particular, but a good deal like
everybody in general.  By and by a hearty and healthy German-
American got in and opened up a frank and interesting and
sympathetic conversation with him, and asked him a couple of
thousand questions about himself, which the king answered good-
naturedly, but in a more or less indefinite way as to private
particulars.

"Where do you live when you are at home?"

"In Greece."

"Greece!  Well, now, that is just astonishing!  Born there?"

"No."

"Do you speak Greek?"

"Yes."

"Now, ain't that strange!  I never expected to live to see
that.  What is your trade?  I mean how do you get your living?
What is your line of business?"

"Well, I hardly know how to answer.  I am only a kind of
foreman, on a salary; and the business--well, is a very general
kind of business."

"Yes, I understand--general jobbing--little of everything--
anything that there's money in."

"That's about it, yes."

"Are you traveling for the house now?"

"Well, partly; but not entirely.  Of course I do a stroke of
business if it falls in the way--"

"Good!  I like that in you!  That's me every time.  Go on."

"I was only going to say I am off on my vacation now."

"Well that's all right.  No harm in that.  A man works all
the better for a little let-up now and then.  Not that I've been
used to having it myself; for I haven't.  I reckon this is my
first.  I was born in Germany, and when I was a couple of weeks
old shipped to America, and I've been there ever since, and
that's sixty-four years by the watch.  I'm an American in
principle and a German at heart, and it's the boss combination.
Well, how do you get along, as a rule--pretty fair?"

"I've a rather large family--"

"There, that's it--big family and trying to raise them on a
salary.  Now, what did you go to do that for?"

"Well, I thought--"

"Of course you did.  You were young and confident and
thought you could branch out and make things go with a whirl, and
here you are, you see!  But never mind about that.  I'm not
trying to discourage you.  Dear me!  I've been just where you are
myself!  You've got good grit; there's good stuff in you, I can
see that.  You got a wrong start, that's the whole trouble.  But
you hold your grip, and we'll see what can be done.  Your case
ain't half as bad as it might be.  You are going to come out all
right--I'm bail for that.  Boys and girls?"

"My family?  Yes, some of them are boys--"

"And the rest girls.  It's just as I expected.  But that's
all right, and it's better so, anyway.  What are the boys doing--
learning a trade?"

"Well, no--I thought--"

"It's a big mistake.  It's the biggest mistake you ever
made.  You see that in your own case.  A man ought always to have
a trade to fall back on.  Now, I was harness-maker at first.  Did
that prevent me from becoming one of the biggest brewers in
America?  Oh no.  I always had the harness trick to fall back on
in rough weather.  Now, if you had learned how to make harness--
However, it's too late now; too late.  But it's no good plan to
cry over spilt milk.  But as to the boys, you see--what's to
become of them if anything happens to you?"

"It has been my idea to let the eldest one succeed me--"

"Oh, come!  Suppose the firm don't want him?"

"I hadn't thought of that, but--"

"Now, look here; you want to get right down to business and
stop dreaming.  You are capable of immense things--man.  You can
make a perfect success in life.  All you want is somebody to
steady you and boost you along on the right road.  Do you own
anything in the business?"

"No--not exactly; but if I continue to give satisfaction, I
suppose I can keep my--"

"Keep your place--yes.  Well, don't you depend on anything
of the kind.  They'll bounce you the minute you get a little old
and worked out; they'll do it sure.  Can't you manage somehow to
get into the firm?  That's the great thing, you know."

"I think it is doubtful; very doubtful."

"Um--that's bad--yes, and unfair, too.  Do you suppose that
if I should go there and have a talk with your people--  Look
here--do you think you could run a brewery?"

"I have never tried, but I think I could do it after a
little familiarity with the business."

The German was silent for some time.  He did a good deal of
thinking, and the king waited curiously to see what the result
was going to be.  Finally the German said:

"My mind's made up.  You leave that crowd--you'll never
amount to anything there.  In these old countries they never give
a fellow a show.  Yes, you come over to America--come to my place
in Rochester; bring the family along.  You shall have a show in
the business and the foremanship, besides.  George--you said your
name was George?--I'll make a man of you.  I give you my word.
You've never had a chance here, but that's all going to change.
By gracious! I'll give you a lift that'll make your hair curl!"

------------------------------------------------------------------


AT THE SHRINE OF ST. WAGNER


Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891


It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-
mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth.  It had been
long since we had seen such multitudes of excited and struggling
people.  It took a good half-hour to pack them and pair them into
the train--and it was the longest train we have yet seen in
Europe.  Nuremberg had been witnessing this sort of experience a
couple of times a day for about two weeks.  It gives one an
impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial pilgrimage.
For a pilgrimage is what it is.  The devotees come from the very
ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in
his own Mecca.

If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or
anywhere else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May,
that you would like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a
half later, you must use the cable and get about it immediately
or you will get no seats, and you must cable for lodgings, too.
Then if you are lucky you will get seats in the last row and
lodgings in the fringe of the town.  If you stop to write you
will get nothing.  There were plenty of people in Nuremberg when
we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without first
securing seats and lodgings.  They had found neither in Bayreuth;
they had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone
to Nuremberg and found neither beds nor standing room, and had
walked those quaint streets all night, waiting for the hotels to
open and empty their guests into trains, and so make room for
these, their defeated brethren and sisters in the faith.  They
had endured from thirty to forty hours' railroading on the
continent of Europe--with all which that implies of worry,
fatigue, and financial impoverishment--and all they had got and
all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking
themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two
towns when other people were in bed; for back they must go over
that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled.
These humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and
apologetic look of wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with
drowsiness, their bodies were adroop from crown to sole, and all
kind-hearted people refrained from asking them if they had been
to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as knowing they would lie.

We reached here (Bayreuth) about mid-afternoon of a rainy
Saturday.  We were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and
opera seats months in advance.

I am not a musical critic, and did not come here to write
essays about the operas and deliver judgment upon their merits.
The little children of Bayreuth could do that with a finer
sympathy and a broader intelligence than I.  I only care to bring
four or five pilgrims to the operas, pilgrims able to appreciate
them and enjoy them.  What I write about the performance to put
in my odd time would be offered to the public as merely a cat's
view of a king, and not of didactic value.

Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house--
that is to say, the Wagner temple--a little after the middle of
the afternoon.  The great building stands all by itself, grand
and lonely, on a high ground outside the town.  We were warned
that if we arrived after four o'clock we should be obliged to pay
two dollars and a half extra by way of fine.  We saved that; and
it may be remarked here that this is the only opportunity that
Europe offers of saving money.  There was a big crowd in the
grounds about the building, and the ladies' dresses took the sun
with fine effect.  I do not mean to intimate that the ladies were
in full dress, for that was not so.  The dresses were pretty, but
neither sex was in evening dress.

The interior of the building is simple--severely so; but
there is no occasion for color and decoration, since the people
sit in the dark.  The auditorium has the shape of a keystone,
with the stage at the narrow end.  There is an aisle on each
side, but no aisle in the body of the house.  Each row of seats
extends in an unbroken curve from one side of the house to the
other.  There are seven entrance doors on each side of the
theater and four at the butt, eighteen doors to admit and emit
1,650 persons.  The number of the particular door by which you
are to enter the house or leave it is printed on your ticket, and
you can use no door but that one.  Thus, crowding and confusion
are impossible.  Not so many as a hundred people use any one
door.  This is better than having the usual (and useless)
elaborate fireproof arrangements.  It is the model theater of the
world.  It can be emptied while the second hand of a watch makes
its circuit.  It would be entirely safe, even if it were built of
lucifer matches.

If your seat is near the center of a row and you enter late
you must work your way along a rank of about twenty-five ladies
and gentlemen to get to it.  Yet this causes no trouble, for
everybody stands up until all the seats are full, and the filling
is accomplished in a very few minutes.  Then all sit down, and
you have a solid mass of fifteen hundred heads, making a steep
cellar-door slant from the rear of the house down to the stage.

All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation
sat in a deep and solemn gloom.  The funereal rustling of dresses
and the low buzz of conversation began to die swiftly down, and
presently not the ghost of a sound was left.  This profound and
increasingly impressive stillness endured for some time--the best
preparation for music, spectacle, or speech conceivable.  I should
think our show people would have invented or imported that simple
and impressive device for securing and solidifying the attention
of an audience long ago; instead of which there continue to this
day to open a performance against a deadly competition in the
form of noise, confusion, and a scattered interest.

Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich
notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead
magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep
their souls in his enchantments.  There was something strangely
impressive in the fancy which kept intruding itself that the
composer was conscious in his grave of what was going on here,
and that these divine souls were the clothing of thoughts which
were at this moment passing through his brain, and not recognized
and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former time.

The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark
house with the curtain down.  It was exquisite; it was delicious.
But straightway thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it
does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely
perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the
vocal parts.  I wish I could see a Wagner opera done in pantomime
once.  Then one would have the lovely orchestration unvexed to
listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the bewildering beautiful
scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb acting couldn't
mar these pleasures, because there isn't often anything in the
Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as
acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent
people, one of them standing still, the other catching flies.  Of
course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I
only mean that the usual operatic gestures which consist in
reaching first one hand out into the air and then the other might
suggest the sport I speak of if the operator attended strictly to
business and uttered no sound.

This present opera was "Parsifal."  Madame Wagner does not
permit its representation anywhere but in Bayreuth.  The first
act of the three occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite
of the singing.

I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one
of the most entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of
all the vehicles invented by man for the conveying of feeling;
but it seems to me that the chief virtue in song is melody, air,
tune, rhythm, or what you please to call it, and that when this
feature is absent what remains is a picture with the color left
out.  I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of "Parsifal"
anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune or
melody; one person performed at a time--and a long time, too--
often in a noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only
pulled out long notes, then some short ones, then another long
one, then a sharp, quick, peremptory bark or two--and so on and
so on; and when he was done you saw that the information which he
had conveyed had not compensated for the disturbance.  Not
always, but pretty often.  If two of them would but put in a duet
occasionally and blend the voices; but no, they don't do that.
The great master, who knew so well how to make a hundred
instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled
and melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in barren
solos when he puts in the vocal parts.  It may be that he was
deep, and only added the singing to his operas for the sake of
the contrast it would make with the music.  Singing!  It does
seem the wrong name to apply to it.  Strictly described, it is a
practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals, mainly.  An
ignorant person gets tired of listening to gymnastic intervals in
the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be.  In "Parsifal"
there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in one
spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another
character of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires
to die.

During the evening there was an intermission of three-
quarters of an hour after the first act and one an hour long
after the second.  In both instances the theater was totally
emptied.  People who had previously engaged tables in the one
sole eating-house were able to put in their time very
satisfactorily; the other thousand went hungry.  The opera was
concluded at ten in the evening or a little later.  When we
reached home we had been gone more than seven hours.  Seven hours
at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.

While browsing about the front yard among the crowd between
the acts I encountered twelve or fifteen friends from different
parts of America, and those of them who were most familiar with
Wagner said that "Parsifal" seldom pleased at first, but that
after one had heard it several times it was almost sure to become
a favorite.  It seemed impossible, but it was true, for the
statement came from people whose word was not to be doubted.

And I gathered some further information.  On the ground I
found part of a German musical magazine, and in it a letter
written by Uhlic thirty-three years ago, in which he defends the
scorned and abused Wagner against people like me, who found fault
with the comprehensive absence of what our kind regards as
singing.  Uhlic says Wagner despised "JENE PLAPPERUDE MUSIC," and
therefore "runs, trills, and SCHNORKEL are discarded by him."  I
don't know what a SCHNORKEL is, but now that I know it has been
left out of these operas I never have missed so much in my life.
And Uhlic further says that Wagner's song is true:  that it is
"simply emphasized intoned speech."  That certainly describes it
--in "Parsifal" and some of the operas; and if I understand
Uhlic's elaborate German he apologizes for the beautiful airs in
"Tannh:auser."  Very well; now that Wagner and I understand each
other, perhaps we shall get along better, and I shall stop
calling Waggner, on the American plan, and thereafter call him
Waggner as per German custom, for I feel entirely friendly now.
The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to
throw aside little needless puctilios and pronounce his name
right!

Of course I came home wondering why people should come from
all corners of America to hear these operas, when we have lately
had a season or two of them in New York with these same singers
in the several parts, and possibly this same orchestra.  I
resolved to think that out at all hazards.

TUESDAY.--Yesterday they played the only operatic favorite I
have ever had--an opera which has always driven me mad with
ignorant delight whenever I have heard it--"Tannh:auser."  I
heard it first when I was a youth; I heard it last in the last
German season in New York.  I was busy yesterday and I did not
intend to go, knowing I should have another "Tannh:auser"
opportunity in a few days; but after five o'clock I found myself
free and walked out to the opera-house and arrived about the
beginning of the second act.  My opera ticket admitted me to the
grounds in front, past the policeman and the chain, and I thought
I would take a rest on a bench for an hour and two and wait for
the third act.

In a moment or so the first bugles blew, and the multitude
began to crumble apart and melt into the theater.  I will explain
that this bugle-call is one of the pretty features here.  You
see, the theater is empty, and hundreds of the audience are a
good way off in the feeding-house; the first bugle-call is blown
about a quarter of an hour before time for the curtain to rise.
This company of buglers, in uniform, march out with military step
and send out over the landscape a few bars of the theme of the
approaching act, piercing the distances with the gracious notes;
then they march to the other entrance and repeat.  Presently they
do this over again.  Yesterday only about two hundred people were
still left in front of the house when the second call was blown;
in another half-minute they would have been in the house, but
then a thing happened which delayed them--the only solitary thing
in this world which could be relied on with certainty to
accomplish it, I suppose--an imperial princess appeared in the
balcony above them.  They stopped dead in their tracks and began
to gaze in a stupor of gratitude and satisfaction.  The lady
presently saw that she must disappear or the doors would be
closed upon these worshipers, so she returned to her box.  This
daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty; she had a kind face;
she was without airs; she is known to be full of common human
sympathies.  There are many kinds of princesses, but this kind is
the most harmful of all, for wherever they go they reconcile
people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress.  The
valuable princes, the desirable princes, are the czars and their
sort.  By their mere dumb presence in the world they cover with
derision every argument that can be invented in favor of royalty
by the most ingenious casuist.  In his time the husband of this
princess was valuable.  He led a degraded life, he ended it with
his own hand in circumstances and surroundings of a hideous sort,
and was buried like a god.

In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the
audience, a kind of open gallery, in which princes are displayed.
It is sacred to them; it is the holy of holies.  As soon as the
filling of the house is about complete the standing multitude
turn and fix their eyes upon the princely layout and gaze mutely
and longingly and adoringly and regretfully like sinners looking
into heaven.  They become rapt, unconscious, steeped in worship.
There is no spectacle anywhere that is more pathetic than this.
It is worth crossing many oceans to see.  It is somehow not the
same gaze that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or Niagara, or
the bones of the mastodon, or the guillotine of the Revolution,
or the great pyramid, or distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky, or
any man long celebrated to you by his genius and achievements, or
thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and
pictures--no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense curiosity,
interest, wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts
that taste good all the way down and appease and satisfy the
thirst of a lifetime.  Satisfy it--that is the word.  Hugo and
the mastodon will still have a degree of intense interest
thereafter when encountered, but never anything approaching the
ecstasy of that first view.  The interest of a prince is
different.  It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless it is a
mixture of both--and it does not satisfy its thirst with one
view, or even noticeably diminish it.  Perhaps the essence of the
thing is the value which men attach to a valuable something which
has come by luck and not been earned.  A dollar picked up in the
road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which
you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stocks snuggles
into your heart in the same way.  A prince picks up grandeur,
power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support by a pure
accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before the
grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental representative
of luck.  And then--supremest value of all-his is the only high
fortune on the earth which is secure.  The commercial millionaire
may become a beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital
mistake and be dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can
lose a decisive battle and with it the consideration of men; but
once a prince always a prince--that is to say, an imitation god,
and neither hard fortune nor an infamous character nor an addled
brain nor the speech of an ass can undeify him.  By common
consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable
thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or
undeserved.  It follows without doubt or question, then, that the
most desirable position possible is that of a prince.  And I
think it also follows that the so-called usurpations with which
history is littered are the most excusable misdemeanors which men
have committed.  To usurp a usurpation--that is all it amounts
to, isn't it?

A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course.
We have not been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good
look at him is likely to so nearly appease our curiosity as to
make him an object of no greater interest the next time.  We want
a fresh one.  But it is not so with the European.  I am quite
sure of it.  The same old one will answer; he never stales.
Eighteen years ago I was in London and I called at an
Englishman's house on a bleak and foggy and dismal December
afternoon to visit his wife and married daughter by appointment.
I waited half an hour and then they arrived, frozen.  They
explained that they had been delayed by an unlooked-for
circumstance:  while passing in the neighborhood of Marlborough
House they saw a crowd gathering and were told that the Prince of
Wales was about to drive out, so they stopped to get a sight of
him.  They had waited half an hour on the sidewalk, freezing with
the crowd, but were disappointed at last--the Prince had changed
his mind.  I said, with a good deal of surprise, "Is it possible
that you two have lived in London all your lives and have never
seen the Prince of Wales?"

Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they
exclaimed:  "What an idea!  Why, we have seen him hundreds of
times."

They had seem him hundreds of times, yet they had waited
half an hour in the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a
jam of patients from the same asylum, on the chance of seeing him
again.  It was a stupefying statement, but one is obliged to
believe the English, even when they say a thing like that.  I
fumbled around for a remark, and got out this one:

"I can't understand it at all.  If I had never seen General
Grant I doubt if I would do that even to get a sight of him."
With a slight emphasis on the last word.

Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the
parallel came in.  Then they said, blankly:  "Of course not.  He
is only a President."

It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent
interest, an interest not subject to deterioration.  The general
who was never defeated, the general who never held a council of
war, the only general who ever commanded a connected battle-front
twelve hundred miles long, the smith who welded together the
broken parts of a great republic and re-established it where it
is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies present and to
come, was really a person of no serious consequence to these
people.  To them, with their training, my General was only a man,
after all, while their Prince was clearly much more than that--a
being of a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, and
being of no more blood and kinship with men than are the serene
eternal lights of the firmament with the poor dull tallow candles
of commerce that sputter and die and leave nothing behind but a
pinch of ashes and a stink.

I saw the last act of "Tannh:auser."  I sat in the gloom and
the deep stillness, waiting--one minute, two minutes, I do not
know exactly how long--then the soft music of the hidden
orchestra began to breathe its rich, long sighs out from under
the distant stage, and by and by the drop-curtain parted in the
middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing the twilighted wood
and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying and a man
standing near.  Presently that noble chorus of men's voices was
heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the
curtain it was music, just music--music to make one drunk with
pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way
round the globe to hear it.

To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season
next year I wish to say, bring your dinner-pail with you.  If you
do, you will never cease to be thankful.  If you do not, you will
find it a hard fight to save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth.
Bayreuth is merely a large village, and has no very large hotels
or eating-houses.  The principal inns are the Golden Anchor and
the Sun.  At either of these places you can get an excellent
meal--no, I mean you can go there and see other people get it.
There is no charge for this.  The town is littered with
restaurants, but they are small and bad, and they are overdriven
with custom.  You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often
when you arrive you will find somebody occupying it.  We have had
this experience.  We have had a daily scramble for life; and when
I say we, I include shoals of people.  I have the impression that
the only people who do not have to scramble are the veterans--the
disciples who have been here before and know the ropes.  I think
they arrive about a week before the first opera, and engage all
the tables for the season.  My tribe had tried all kinds of
places--some outside of the town, a mile or two--and have
captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any instance
a complete and satisfying meal.  Digestible?  No, the reverse.
These odds and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth,
and in that regard their value is not to be overestimated.
Photographs fade, bric-a-brac gets lost, busts of Wagner get
broken, but once you absorb a Bayreuth-restaurant meal it is your
possession and your property until the time comes to embalm the
rest of you.  Some of these pilgrims here become, in effect,
cabinets; cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth.  It is believed
among scientists that you could examine the crop of a dead
Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came
from.  But I like this ballast.  I think a "Hermitage" scrap-up
at eight in the evening, when all the famine-breeders have been
there and laid in their mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing
you can lay on your keelson except gravel.

THURSDAY.--They keep two teams of singers in stock for the
chief roles, and one of these is composed of the most renowned
artists in the world, with Materna and Alvary in the lead.  I
suppose a double team is necessary; doubtless a single team would
die of exhaustion in a week, for all the plays last from four in
the afternoon till ten at night.  Nearly all the labor falls upon
the half-dozen head singers, and apparently they are required to
furnish all the noise they can for the money.  If they feel a
soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are required to open out
and let the public know it.  Operas are given only on Sundays,
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of ostensible
rest per week, and two teams to do the four operas; but the
ostensible rest is devoted largely to rehearsing.  It is said
that the off days are devoted to rehearsing from some time in the
morning till ten at night.  Are there two orchestras also?  It is
quite likely, since there are one hundred and ten names in the
orchestra list.

Yesterday the opera was "Tristan and Isolde."  I have seen
all sorts of audiences--at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures,
sermons, funerals--but none which was twin to the Wagner audience
of Bayreuth for fixed and reverential attention.  Absolute
attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the
attitude assumed at the beginning of it.  You detect no movement
in the solid mass of heads and shoulders.  You seem to sit with
the dead in the gloom of a tomb.  You know that they are being
stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when
they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their
approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces,
and it would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or
screams; yet you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings
together and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died;
then the dead rise with one impulse and shake the building with
their applause.  Every seat is full in the first act; there is
not a vacant one in the last.  If a man would be conspicuous, let
him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act.
It would make him celebrated.

This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of
nothing I have read about except the city in the Arabian tale
where all the inhabitants have been turned to brass and the
traveler finds them after centuries mute, motionless, and still
retaining the attitudes which they last knew in life.  Here the
Wagner audience dress as they please, and sit in the dark and
worship in silence.  At the Metropolitan in New York they sit in
a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum airs, they
squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time.  In some
of the boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to
divide the attention of the house with the stage.  In large
measure the Metropolitan is a show-case for rich fashionables who
are not trained in Wagnerian music and have no reverence for it,
but who like to promote art and show their clothes.

Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this
music produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator
is a very deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and
hands consecrated things, and the partaking of them with eye and
ear a sacred solemnity?  Manifestly, no.  Then, perhaps the
temporary expatriation, the tedious traversing of seas and
continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands explained.  These
devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion.  It is only
here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any
worldly pollution.  In this remote village there are no sights to
see, there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant
world, there is nothing going on, it is always Sunday.  The
pilgrim wends to his temple out of town, sits out his moving
service, returns to his bed with his heart and soul and his body
exhausted by long hours of tremendous emotion, and he is in no
fit condition to do anything but to lie torpid and slowly gather
back life and strength for the next service.  This opera of
"Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all witnesses
who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many
who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away.  I feel
strongly out of place here.  Sometimes I feel like the sane
person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one
blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the
college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a
heretic in heaven.

But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that
this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.  I
have never seen anything like this before.  I have never seen
anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.

FRIDAY.--Yesterday's opera was "Parsifal" again.  The others
went and they show marked advance in appreciation; but I went
hunting for relics and reminders of the Margravine Wilhelmina,
she of the imperishable "Memoirs."  I am properly grateful to her
for her (unconscious) satire upon monarchy and nobility, and
therefore nothing which her hand touched or her eye looked upon
is indifferent to me.  I am her pilgrim; the rest of this
multitude here are Wagner's.

TUESDAY.--I have seen my last two operas; my season is
ended, and we cross over into Bohemia this afternoon.  I was
supposing that my musical regeneration was accomplished and
perfected, because I enjoyed both of these operas, singing and
all, and, moreover, one of them was "Parsifal," but the experts
have disenchanted me.  They say:

"Singing!  That wasn't singing; that was the wailing,
screeching of third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the
interest of economy."

Well, I ought to have recognized the sign--the old, sure
sign that has never failed me in matters of art.  Whenever I
enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor.  The
private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces
with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo.  However, my
base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was the only man
out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on those two operas.


WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS



Is it true that the sun of a man's mentality touches noon at
forty and then begins to wane toward setting?  Doctor Osler is
charged with saying so.  Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't; I
don't know which it is.  But if he said it, I can point him to a
case which proves his rule.  Proves it by being an exception to
it.  To this place I nominate Mr. Howells.

I read his VENETIAN DAYS about forty years ago.  I compare
it with his paper on Machiavelli in a late number of HARPER, and
I cannot find that his English has suffered any impairment.  For
forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and
astonishment.  In the sustained exhibition of certain great
qualities--clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced
and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing--he is, in my
belief, without his peer in the English-writing world.  SUSTAINED.
I entrench myself behind that protecting word.  There are others
who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only
by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of
veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails
cloudless skies all night and all the nights.

In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior,
I suppose.  He seems to be almost always able to find that
elusive and shifty grain of gold, the RIGHT WORD.  Others have
to put up with approximations, more or less frequently; he
has better luck.  To me, the others are miners working with the
gold-pan--of necessity some of the gold washes over and escapes;
whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a riffle--no
grain of the metal stands much chance of eluding him.  A powerful
agent is the right word:  it lights the reader's way and makes it
plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much
traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do
not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE
right one blazes out on us.  Whenever we come upon one of those
intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting
effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt:
it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and
tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that
creams the sumac-berry.  One has no time to examine the word and
vote upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its
supremacy is so immediate.  There is a plenty of acceptable
literature which deals largely in approximations, but it may be
likened to a fine landscape seen through the rain; the right word
would dismiss the rain, then you would see it better.  It doesn't
rain when Howells is at work.

And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his
speech? and its cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its
architectural felicities of construction, its graces of
expression, its pemmican quality of compression, and all that?
Born to him, no doubt.  All in shining good order in the
beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just as
extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear
and use.  He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I
think his English of today--his perfect English, I wish to say --
can throw down the glove before his English of that antique time
and not be afraid.

I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the
reader to examine this passage from it which I append.  I do not
mean examine it in a bird's-eye way; I mean search it, study it.
And, of course, read it aloud.  I may be wrong, still it is my
conviction that one cannot get out of finely wrought literature
all that is in it by reading it mutely:


Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously
suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must
not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would
be judged.  He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest, as none
but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an
idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily transmutes the
events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of
reverie.  The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be
politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds
up an atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers.
What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder
in which there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt
without patriotism.  When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon
the scene and reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent
quiescence, he might very well seem to such a dreamer the savior
of society whom a certain sort of dreamers are always looking
for.  Machiavelli was no less honest when he honored the
diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times he
extolled the strong man who destroys liberty in creating order.
But Carlyle has only just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer,
while it is still Machiavelli's hard fate to be so trammeled in
his material that his name stands for whatever is most malevolent
and perfidious in human nature.


You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,
clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and--so far as you or I
can make out--unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable,
how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly
unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley;
and how compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal
hung out anywhere to call attention to it.

There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage.  After reading
it several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter
is crowded into that small space.  I think it is a model
of compactness.  When I take its materials apart and work them
over and put them together in my way, I find I cannot crowd the
result back into the same hole, there not being room enough.  I
find it a case of a woman packing a man's trunk:  he can get the
things out, but he can't ever get them back again.

The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest
of the article is as compact as it is; there are no waste words.
The sample is just in other ways:  limpid, fluent, graceful, and
rhythmical as it is, it holds no superiority in these respects
over the rest of the essay.  Also, the choice phrasing noticeable
in the sample is not lonely; there is a plenty of its kin
distributed through the other paragraphs.  This is claiming much
when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like the one in
the middle sentence:  "an idealist immersed in realities who
involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something
like the visionary issues of reverie."  With a hundred words to
do it with, the literary artisan could catch that airy thought
and tie it down and reduce it to a concrete condition, visible,
substantial, understandable and all right, like a cabbage; but
the artist does it with twenty, and the result is a flower.

The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come
from the same source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse
which take hold of us and stay in our memories, we do not
understand why, at first:  all the words being the right words,
none of them is conspicuous, and so they all seem inconspicuous,
therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes their
message take hold.


The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.


It is like a dreamy strain of moving music, with no sharp
notes in it.  The words are all "right" words, and all the same
size.  We do not notice it at first.  We get the effect, it goes
straight home to us, but we do not know why.  It is when the
right words are conspicuous that they thunder:


The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!


When I got back from Howells old to Howells young I find him
arranging and clustering English words well, but not any better
than now.  He is not more felicitous in concreting abstractions
now than he was in translating, then, the visions of the eyes of
flesh into words that reproduced their forms and colors:


In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest.  It
is at once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked
FACCHINI; and now in St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable
shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of
poverty as it engaged the elements in a struggle for the
possession of the Piazza.  But the snow continued to fall, and
through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and
encountered looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when
the most determined industry seems only to renew the task.  The
lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling
snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit.
But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St.
Mark's Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting
threads of the snowfall were woven into a spell of novel
enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me too
exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the
creation of magic.  The tender snow had compassionated the
beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the
stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the
hand of the builder--or, better said, just from the brain of the
architect.  There was marvelous freshness in the colors of the
mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that gracious
harmony into which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy
exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a
hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the
drifting flakes.  The snow lay lightly on the golden gloves that
tremble like peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed
them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it
danced over all its works, as if exulting in its beauty--beauty
which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such
evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole
life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless
shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.

Through the wavering snowfall, the Saint Theodore upon one
of the granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as
his wont is, and the winged lion on the other might have been a
winged lamb, so gentle and mild he looked by the tender light of
the storm.  The towers of the island churches loomed faint and
far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships
that lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds;
the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque distance more
noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost
palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world.


The spirit of Venice is there:  of a city where Age and
Decay, fagged with distributing damage and repulsiveness among
the other cities of the planet in accordance with the policy and
business of their profession, come for rest and play between
seasons, and treat themselves to the luxury and relaxation of
sinking the shop and inventing and squandering charms all about,
instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their habit when
not on vacation.

In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes,
and a character in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY takes accurate note
of pathetic effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street
of once dignified and elegant homes whose occupants have moved
away and left them a prey to neglect and gradual ruin and
progressive degradation; a descent which reaches bottom at last,
when the street becomes a roost for humble professionals of the
faith-cure and fortune-telling sort.


What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy
street!  I don't think I was ever in a street before when quite
so many professional ladies, with English surnames, preferred
Madam to Mrs. on their door-plates.  And the poor old place has
such a desperately conscious air of going to the deuce.  Every
house seems to wince as you go by, and button itself up to the
chin for fear you should find out it had no shirt on--so to
speak.  I don't know what's the reason, but these material tokens
of a social decay afflict me terribly; a tipsy woman isn't
dreadfuler than a haggard old house, that's once been a home, in
a street like this.


Mr. Howells's pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate
photographs; they are photographs with feeling in them, and
sentiment, photographs taken in a dream, one might say.

As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I
would try, if I had the words that might approximately reach up
to its high place.  I do not think any one else can play with
humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and deliciously as
he does, nor has so many to play with, nor can come so near
making them look as if they were doing the playing themselves and
he was not aware that they were at it.  For they are unobtrusive,
and quiet in their ways, and well conducted.  His is a humor
which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh
of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no
more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the
blood.

There is another thing which is contentingly noticeable in
Mr. Howells's books.  That is his "stage directions"--those
artifices which authors employ to throw a kind of human
naturalness around a scene and a conversation, and help the
reader to see the one and get at meanings in the other which
might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the bare words
of the talk.  Some authors overdo the stage directions, they
elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time
and take up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing
and how he looked and acted when he said it that we get tired and
vexed and wish he hadn't said it all.  Other authors' directions
are brief enough, but it is seldom that the brevity contains
either wit or information.  Writers of this school go in rags, in
the matter of state directions; the majority of them having
nothing in stock but a cigar, a laugh, a blush, and a bursting
into tears.  In their poverty they work these sorry things to the
bone.  They say:

". . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar."
(This explains nothing; it only wastes space.)

". . . responded Richard, with a laugh."  (There was nothing
to laugh about; there never is.  The writer puts it in from
habit--automatically; he is paying no attention to his work; or
he would see that there is nothing to laugh at; often, when a
remark is unusually and poignantly flat and silly, he tries to
deceive the reader by enlarging the stage direction and making
Richard break into "frenzies of uncontrollable laughter."  This
makes the reader sad.)

". . . murmured Gladys, blushing."  (This poor old shop-worn
blush is a tiresome thing.  We get so we would rather Gladys
would fall out of the book and break her neck than do it again.
She is always doing it, and usually irrelevantly.  Whenever it is
her turn to murmur she hangs out her blush; it is the only thing
she's got.  In a little while we hate her, just as we do
Richard.)

". . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears."  (This kind
keep a book damp all the time.  They can't say a thing without
crying.  They cry so much about nothing that by and by when they
have something to cry ABOUT they have gone dry; they sob, and
fetch nothing; we are not moved.  We are only glad.)

They gavel me, these stale and overworked stage directions,
these carbon films that got burnt out long ago and cannot now
carry any faintest thread of light.  It would be well if they
could be relieved from duty and flung out in the literary back
yard to rot and disappear along with the discarded and forgotten
"steeds" and "halidomes" and similar stage-properties once so
dear to our grandfathers.  But I am friendly to Mr. Howells's
stage directions; more friendly to them than to any one else's, I
think.  They are done with a competent and discriminating art,
and are faithful to the requirements of a state direction's
proper and lawful office, which is to inform.  Sometimes they
convey a scene and its conditions so well that I believe I could
see the scene and get the spirit and meaning of the accompanying
dialogue if some one would read merely the stage directions to me
and leave out the talk.  For instance, a scene like this, from
THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY:

". . . and she laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on
her father's shoulder."

". . . she answered, following his gesture with a glance."

". . . she said, laughing nervously."

". . . she asked, turning swiftly upon him that strange, searching glance."

". . . she answered, vaguely."

". . . she reluctantly admitted."

". . . but her voice died wearily away, and she stood looking
into his face with puzzled entreaty."

Mr. Howells does not repeat his forms, and does not need to;
he can invent fresh ones without limit.  It is mainly the
repetition over and over again, by the third-rates, of worn and
commonplace and juiceless forms that makes their novels such a
weariness and vexation to us, I think.  We do not mind one or two
deliveries of their wares, but as we turn the pages over and keep
on meeting them we presently get tired of them and wish they
would do other things for a change.

". . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded Richard, with a laugh."

". . . murmured Gladys, blushing."

". . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears."

". . . replied the Earl, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded the undertaker, with a laugh."

". . . murmured the chambermaid, blushing."

". . . repeated the burglar, bursting into tears."

". . . replied the conductor, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded Arkwright, with a laugh."

". . . murmured the chief of police, blushing."

". . . repeated the house-cat, bursting into tears."

And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite.  I
always notice stage directions, because they fret me and keep me
trying to get out of their way, just as the automobiles do.  At
first; then by and by they become monotonous and I get run over.

Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as
beautiful as the make of it.  I have held him in admiration and
affection so many years that I know by the number of those years
that he is old now; but his heart isn't, nor his pen; and years
do not count.  Let him have plenty of them; there is profit in
them for us.

-------------------------------------------------------------------


ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT

In the appendix to Croker's Boswell's Johnson one finds this anecdote:


CATO'S SOLILOQUY.--One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to
repeat to him [Dr. Samuel Johnson] Cato's Soliloquy, which she
went through very correctly.  The Doctor, after a pause, asked
the child:

"What was to bring Cato to an end?"

She said it was a knife.

"No, my dear, it was not so."

"My aunt Polly said it was a knife."

"Why, Aunt Polly's knife MAY DO, but it was a DAGGER, my dear."

He then asked her the meaning of "bane and antidote," which
she was unable to give.  Mrs. Gastrel said:

"You cannot expect so young a child to know the meaning of such words."

He then said:

"My dear, how many pence are there in SIXPENCE?"

"I cannot tell, sir," was the half-terrified reply.

On this, addressing himself to Mrs. Gastrel, he said:

"Now, my dear lady, can anything be more ridiculous than to
teach a child Cato's Soliloquy, who does not know how many pence
there are in a sixpence?"


In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society Professor
Ravenstein quoted the following list of frantic questions, and
said that they had been asked in an examination:


Mention all names of places in the world derived from Julius
Caesar or Augustus Caesar.

Where are the following rivers:  Pisuerga, Sakaria,
Guadalete, Jalon, Mulde?

All you know of the following:  Machacha, Pilmo, Schebulos,
Crivoscia, Basces, Mancikert, Taxhem, Citeaux, Meloria, Zutphen.

The highest peaks of the Karakorum range.

The number of universities in Prussia.

Why are the tops of mountains continually covered with snow [sic]?

Name the length and breadth of the streams of lava which
issued from the Skaptar Jokul in the eruption of 1783.


That list would oversize nearly anybody's geographical
knowledge.  Isn't it reasonably possible that in our schools many
of the questions in all studies are several miles ahead of where
the pupil is?--that he is set to struggle with things that are
ludicrously beyond his present reach, hopelessly beyond his
present strength?  This remark in passing, and by way of text;
now I come to what I was going to say.

I have just now fallen upon a darling literary curiosity.
It is a little book, a manuscript compilation, and the compiler
sent it to me with the request that I say whether I think it
ought to be published or not.  I said, Yes; but as I slowly grow
wise I briskly grow cautious; and so, now that the publication is
imminent, it has seemed to me that I should feel more comfortable
if I could divide up this responsibility with the public by
adding them to the court.  Therefore I will print some extracts
from the book, in the hope that they may make converts to my
judgment that the volume has merit which entitles it to publication.

As to its character.  Every one has sampled "English as She
is Spoke" and "English as She is Wrote"; this little volume
furnishes us an instructive array of examples of "English as She
is Taught"--in the public schools of--well, this country.  The
collection is made by a teacher in those schools, and all the
examples in it are genuine; none of them have been tampered with,
or doctored in any way.  From time to time, during several years,
whenever a pupil has delivered himself of anything peculiarly
quaint or toothsome in the course of his recitations, this
teacher and her associates have privately set that thing down in
a memorandum-book; strictly following the original, as to
grammar, construction, spelling, and all; and the result is this
literary curiosity.

The contents of the book consist mainly of answers given by
the boys and girls to questions, said answers being given
sometimes verbally, sometimes in writing.  The subjects touched
upon are fifteen in number:  I. Etymology; II. Grammar; III.
Mathematics; IV. Geography; V. "Original"; VI. Analysis; VII.
History; VIII. "Intellectual"; IX. Philosophy; X. Physiology; XI.
Astronomy; XII. Politics; XIII. Music; XIV. Oratory; XV.
Metaphysics.

You perceive that the poor little young idea has taken a
shot at a good many kinds of game in the course of the book.  Now
as to results.  Here are some quaint definitions of words.  It
will be noticed that in all of these instances the sound of the
word, or the look of it on paper, has misled the child:


ABORIGINES, a system of mountains.

ALIAS, a good man in the Bible.

AMENABLE, anything that is mean.

AMMONIA, the food of the gods.

ASSIDUITY, state of being an acid.

AURIFEROUS, pertaining to an orifice.

CAPILLARY, a little caterpillar.

CORNIFEROUS, rocks in which fossil corn is found.

EMOLUMENT, a headstone to a grave.

EQUESTRIAN, one who asks questions.

EUCHARIST, one who plays euchre.

FRANCHISE, anything belonging to the French.

IDOLATER, a very idle person.

IPECAC, a man who likes a good dinner.

IRRIGATE, to make fun of.

MENDACIOUS, what can be mended.

MERCENARY, one who feels for another.

PARASITE, a kind of umbrella.

PARASITE, the murder of an infant.

PUBLICAN, a man who does his prayers in public.

TENACIOUS, ten acres of land.


Here is one where the phrase "publicans and sinners" has got
mixed up in the child's mind with politics, and the result is a
definition which takes one in a sudden and unexpected way:


REPUBLICAN, a sinner mentioned in the Bible.


Also in Democratic newspapers now and then.  Here are two where
the mistake has resulted from sound assisted by remote fact:


PLAGIARIST, a writer of plays.

DEMAGOGUE, a vessel containing beer and other liquids.


I cannot quite make out what it was that misled the pupil in
the following instances; it would not seem to have been the sound
of the word, nor the look of it in print:


ASPHYXIA, a grumbling, fussy temper.

QUARTERNIONS, a bird with a flat beak and no bill, living in
New Zealand.

QUARTERNIONS, the name given to a style of art practiced by
the Phoenicians.

QUARTERNIONS, a religious convention held every hundred
years.

SIBILANT, the state of being idiotic.

CROSIER, a staff carried by the Deity.


In the following sentences the pupil's ear has been
deceiving him again:


The marriage was illegible.

He was totally dismasted with the whole performance.

He enjoys riding on a philosopher.

She was very quick at repertoire.

He prayed for the waters to subsidize.

The leopard is watching his sheep.

They had a strawberry vestibule.


Here is one which--well, now, how often we do slam right
into the truth without ever suspecting it:


The men employed by the Gas Company go around and
speculate the meter.


Indeed they do, dear; and when you grow up, many and many's
the time you will notice it in the gas bill.  In the following
sentences the little people have some information to convey,
every time; but in my case they fail to connect:  the light
always went out on the keystone word:


The coercion of some things is remarkable; as bread and molasses.

Her hat is contiguous because she wears it on one side.

He preached to an egregious congregation.

The captain eliminated a bullet through the man's heart.

You should take caution and be precarious.

The supercilious girl acted with vicissitude when the
perennial time came.


The last is a curiously plausible sentence; one seems to
know what it means, and yet he knows all the time that he
doesn't.  Here is an odd (but entirely proper) use of a word, and
a most sudden descent from a lofty philosophical altitude to a
very practical and homely illustration:


We should endeavor to avoid extremes--like those of wasps and bees.


And here--with "zoological" and "geological" in his mind,
but not ready to his tongue--the small scholar has innocently
gone and let out a couple of secrets which ought never to have
been divulged in any circumstances:


There are a good many donkeys in theological gardens.

Some of the best fossils are found in theological gardens.


Under the head of "Grammar" the little scholars furnish the
following information:


Gender is the distinguishing nouns without regard to sex.

A verb is something to eat.

Adverbs should always be used as adjectives and adjectives as adverbs.

Every sentence and name of God must begin with a caterpillar.


"Caterpillar" is well enough, but capital letter would have
been stricter.  The following is a brave attempt at a solution,
but it failed to liquify:


When they are going to say some prose or poetry before they
say the poetry or prose they must put a semicolon just after the
introduction of the prose or poetry.


The chapter on "Mathematics" is full of fruit.  From it I
take a few samples--mainly in an unripe state:


A straight line is any distance between two places.

Parallel lines are lines that can never meet until they run together.

A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.

Things which are equal to each other are equal to anything else.

To find the number of square feet in a room you multiply the
room by the number of the feet.  The product is the result.


Right you are.  In the matter of geography this little book
is unspeakably rich.  The questions do not appear to have applied
the microscope to the subject, as did those quoted by Professor
Ravenstein; still, they proved plenty difficult enough without
that.  These pupils did not hunt with a microscope, they hunted
with a shot-gun; this is shown by the crippled condition of the
game they brought in:


America is divided into the Passiffic slope and the Mississippi valey.

North America is separated by Spain.

America consists from north to south about five hundred miles.

The United States is quite a small country compared with
some other countrys, but it about as industrious.

The capital of the United States is Long Island.

The five seaports of the U.S. are Newfunlan and Sanfrancisco.

The principal products of the U.S. is earthquakes and volcanoes.

The Alaginnies are mountains in Philadelphia.

The Rocky Mountains are on the western side of Philadelphia.

Cape Hateras is a vast body of water surrounded by land and
flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Mason and Dixon's line is the Equator.

One of the leading industries of the United States is
mollasses, book-covers, numbers, gas, teaching, lumber,
manufacturers, paper-making, publishers, coal.

In Austria the principal occupation is gathering Austrich feathers.

Gibraltar is an island built on a rock.

Russia is very cold and tyrannical.

Sicily is one of the Sandwich Islands.

Hindoostan flows through the Ganges and empties into the
Mediterranean Sea.

Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so
beautiful and green.

The width of the different zones Europe lies in depend upon
the surrounding country.

The imports of a country are the things that are paid for,
the exports are the things that are not.

Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.

The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.


The chapter headed "Analysis" shows us that the pupils in
our public schools are not merely loaded up with those showy
facts about geography, mathematics, and so on, and left in that
incomplete state; no, there's machinery for clarifying and
expanding their minds.  They are required to take poems and
analyze them, dig out their common sense, reduce them to
statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous prose translation
which shall tell you at a glance what the poet was trying to get
at.  One sample will do.  Here is a stanza from "The Lady of the
Lake," followed by the pupil's impressive explanation of it:


Alone, but with unbated zeal,
The horseman plied with scourge and steel;
For jaded now and spent with toil,
Embossed with foam and dark with soil,
While every gasp with sobs he drew,
The laboring stag strained full in view.


The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an
instrument made of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing,
for, being tired from the time passed with hard labor overworked
with anger and ignorant with weariness, while every breath for
labor he drew with cries full or sorrow, the young deer made
imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight.


I see, now, that I never understood that poem before.  I
have had glimpses of its meaning, it moments when I was not as
ignorant with weariness as usual, but this is the first time the
whole spacious idea of it ever filtered in sight.  If I were a
public-school pupil I would put those other studies aside and
stick to analysis; for, after all, it is the thing to spread your
mind.

We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one
might say.  As one turns the pages he is impressed with the depth
to which one date has been driven into the American child's head
--1492.  The date is there, and it is there to stay.  And it is
always at hand, always deliverable at a moment's notice.  But the
Fact that belongs with it?  That is quite another matter.  Only
the date itself is familiar and sure:  its vast Fact has failed
of lodgment.  It would appear that whenever you ask a public-
school pupil when a thing--anything, no matter what--happened,
and he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492.  He applies it
to everything, from the landing of the ark to the introduction of
the horse-car.  Well, after all, it is our first date, and so it
is right enough to honor it, and pay the public schools to teach
our children to honor it:


George Washington was born in 1492.

Washington wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1492.

St. Bartholemew was massacred in 1492.

The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492
under Julius Caesar.

The earth is 1492 miles in circumference.



To proceed with "History"


Christopher Columbus was called the Father of his Country.

Queen Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other
millinery so that Columbus could discover America.

The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.

The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes
and then scalping them.

Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country.
His life was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.

The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.

The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so
they should be null and void.

Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted.  His remains
were taken to the cathedral in Havana.

Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.

John Brown was a very good insane man who tried to get
fugitives slaves into Virginia.  He captured all the inhabitants,
but was finally conquered and condemned to his death.  The
confederasy was formed by the fugitive slaves.

Alfred the Great reigned 872 years.  He was distinguished
for letting some buckwheat cakes burn, and the lady scolded him.

Henry Eight was famous for being a great widower haveing
lost several wives.

Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded
after a few days.

John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.

Lord James Gordon Bennet instigated the Gordon Riots.

The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.

Luther introduced Christianity into England a good many
thousand years ago.  His birthday was November 1883.  He was once
a Pope.  He lived at the time of the Rebellion of Worms.

Julius Caesar is noted for his famous telegram dispatch I
came I saw I conquered.

Julius Caesar was really a very great man.  He was a very
great soldier and wrote a book for beginners in the Latin.

Cleopatra was caused by the death of an asp which she
dissolved in a wine cup.

The only form of government in Greece was a limited monkey.

The Persian war lasted about 500 years.

Greece had only 7 wise men.

Socrates . . . destroyed some statues and had to drink Shamrock.


Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with
such ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon to convey
misinformation every time it is uncarefully unread:


By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could
occupy the throne.


To show how far a child can travel in history with judicious
and diligent boosting in the public school, we select the
following mosaic:


Abraham Lincoln was born in Wales in 1599.


In the chapter headed "Intellectual" I find a great number of most
interesting statements.  A sample or two may be found not amiss:

Bracebridge Hall was written by Henry Irving.

Show Bound was written by Peter Cooper.

The House of the Seven Gables was written by Lord Bryant.

Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.

Cotton Mather was a writer who invented the cotten gin and
wrote histories.

Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.

Ben Johnson survived Shakspeare in some respects.

In the Canterbury Tale it gives account of King Alfred on
his way to the shrine of Thomas Bucket.

Chaucer was the father of English pottery.

Chaucer was a bland verse writer of the third century.

Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow an American
Writer.  His writings were chiefly prose and nearly one hundred
years elapsed.

Shakspere translated the Scriptures and it was called St.
James because he did it.


In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of
information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and
those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson,
Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns,
Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott,
Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning,
Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli--a fact which shows that
into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is
shoveled every year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic
literature, and the same is there digested and disposed of in a
most successful and characteristic and gratifying public-school
way.  I have space for but a trifling few of the results:


Lord Byron was the son of an heiress and a drunken man.

Wm. Wordsworth wrote the Barefoot Boy and Imitations on Immortality.

Gibbon wrote a history of his travels in Italy.  This was original.

George Eliot left a wife and children who mourned greatly for his genius.

George Eliot Miss Mary Evans Mrs. Cross Mrs. Lewis was the greatest
female poet unless George Sands is made an exception of.

Bulwell is considered a good writer.

Sir Walter Scott Charles Bronte Alfred the Great and Johnson
were the first great novelists.

Thomas Babington Makorlay graduated at Harvard and then studied law,
he was raised to the peerage as baron in 1557 and died in 1776.


Here are two or three miscellaneous facts that may be of value,
if taken in moderation:


Homer's writings are Homer's Essays Virgil the Aenid and
Paradise lost some people say that these poems were not written
by Homer but by another man of the same name.

A sort of sadness kind of shone in Bryant's poems.

Holmes is a very profligate and amusing writer.


When the public-school pupil wrestles with the political
features of the Great Republic, they throw him sometimes:


A bill becomes a law when the President vetoes it.

The three departments of the government is the President rules
the world, the governor rules the State, the mayor rules the city.

The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia.

The Constitution of the United States was established to
ensure domestic hostility.


Truth crushed to earth will rise again.  As follows:


The Constitution of the United States is that part of the
book at the end which nobody reads.


And here she rises once more and untimely.  There should be
a limit to public-school instruction; it cannot be wise or well
to let the young find out everything:


Congress is divided into civilized half civilized and savage.


Here are some results of study in music and oratory:


An interval in music is the distance on the keyboard from
one piano to the next.

A rest means you are not to sing it.

Emphasis is putting more distress on one word than another.


The chapter on "Physiology" contains much that ought not to
be lost to science:

Physillogigy is to study about your bones stummick and vertebry.

Occupations which are injurious to health are cabolic acid
gas which is impure blood.

We have an upper and lower skin.  The lower skin moves all
the time and the upper skin moves when we do.

The body is mostly composed of water and about one half is
avaricious tissue.

The stomach is a small pear-shaped bone situated in the body.

The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.

The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches
the heart where it meets the oxygen and is purified.

The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.

In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane
sugar to sugar cane.

The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is
developed into the special sense of hearing.

The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and
extends to the stomach.

If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train
would deafen our ears so that we couldn't see to get off the track.


If, up to this point, none of my quotations have added
flavor to the Johnsonian anecdote at the head of this article,
let us make another attempt:


The theory that intuitive truths are discovered by the light
of nature originated from St. John's interpretation of a passage
in the Gospel of Plato.

The weight of the earth is found by comparing a mass of
known lead with that of a mass of unknown lead.

To find the weight of the earth take the length of a degree
on a meridian and multiply by 6 1/2 pounds.

The spheres are to each other as the squares of their
homologous sides.

A body will go just as far in the first second as the body
will go plus the force of gravity and that's equal to twice what
the body will go.

Specific gravity is the weight to be compared weight of an
equal volume of or that is the weight of a body compared with the
weight of an equal volume.

The law of fluid pressure divide the different forms of
organized bodies by the form of attraction and the number
increased will be the form.

Inertia is that property of bodies by virtue of which it
cannot change its own condition of rest or motion.  In other
words it is the negative quality of passiveness either in
recoverable latency or insipient latescence.


If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, nor the
unintelligent teacher--or rather the unintelligent Boards,
Committees, and Trustees--are the proper target for it.  All
through this little book one detects the signs of a certain
probable fact--that a large part of the pupil's "instruction"
consists in cramming him with obscure and wordy "rules" which he
does not understand and has no time to understand.  It would be
as useful to cram him with brickbats; they would at least stay.
In a town in the interior of New York, a few years ago, a
gentleman set forth a mathematical problem and proposed to give a
prize to every public-school pupil who should furnish the correct
solution of it.  Twenty-two of the brightest boys in the public
schools entered the contest.  The problem was not a very
difficult one for pupils of their mathematical rank and standing,
yet they all failed--by a hair--through one trifling mistake or
another.  Some searching questions were asked, when it turned out
that these lads were as glib as parrots with the "rules," but
could not reason out a single rule or explain the principle
underlying it.  Their memories had been stocked, but not their
understandings.  It was a case of brickbat culture, pure and
simple.

There are several curious "compositions" in the little book,
and we must make room for one.  It is full of naivete, brutal
truth, and unembarrassed directness, and is the funniest
(genuine) boy's composition I think I have ever seen:



ON GIRLS

Girls are very stuck up and dignefied in their maner and be
have your.  They think more of dress than anything and like to
play with dowls and rags.  They cry if they see a cow in a far
distance and are afraid of guns.  They stay at home all the time
and go to church on Sunday.  They are al-ways sick.  They are al-
ways funy and making fun of boy's hands and they say how dirty.
They cant play marbels.  I pity them poor things.  They make fun
of boys and then turn round and love them.  I dont beleave they
ever kiled a cat or anything.  They look out every nite and say
oh ant the moon lovely.  Thir is one thing I have not told and
that is they al-ways now their lessons bettern boys.


From Mr. Edward Channing's recent article in SCIENCE:


The marked difference between the books now being produced
by French, English, and American travelers, on the one hand, and
German explorers, on the other, is too great to escape attention.
That difference is due entirely to the fact that in school and
university the German is taught, in the first place to see, and
in the second place to understand what he does see.

------------------------------------------------------------------



A SIMPLIFIED ALPHABET


(This article, written during the autumn of 1899, was about
the last writing done by Mark Twain on any impersonal subject.)


I have had a kindly feeling, a friendly feeling, a cousinly
feeling toward Simplified Spelling, from the beginning of the
movement three years ago, but nothing more inflamed than that.
It seemed to me to merely propose to substitute one inadequacy
for another; a sort of patching and plugging poor old dental
relics with cement and gold and porcelain paste; what was really
needed was a new set of teeth.  That is to say, a new ALPHABET.

The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet.  It
doesn't know how to spell, and can't be taught.  In this it is
like all other alphabets except one--the phonographic.  This is
the only competent alphabet in the world.  It can spell and
correctly pronounce any word in our language.

That admirable alphabet, that brilliant alphabet, that
inspired alphabet, can be learned in an hour or two.  In a week
the student can learn to write it with some little facility, and
to read it with considerable ease.  I know, for I saw it tried in
a public school in Nevada forty-five years ago, and was so
impressed by the incident that it has remained in my memory ever
since.

I wish we could adopt it in place of our present written
(and printed) character.  I mean SIMPLY the alphabet; simply the
consonants and the vowels--I don't mean any REDUCTIONS or
abbreviations of them, such as the shorthand writer uses in order
to get compression and speed.  No, I would SPELL EVERY WORD OUT.

I will insert the alphabet here as I find it in Burnz's
PHONIC SHORTHAND.  [Figure 1]  It is arranged on the basis of
Isaac Pitman's PHONOGRAPHY.  Isaac Pitman was the originator and
father of scientific phonography.  It is used throughout the
globe.  It was a memorable invention.  He made it public seventy-
three years ago.  The firm of Isaac Pitman & Sons, New York,
still exists, and they continue the master's work.

What should we gain?

First of all, we could spell DEFINITELY--and correctly--any
word you please, just by the SOUND of it.  We can't do that with
our present alphabet.  For instance, take a simple, every-day
word PHTHISIS.  If we tried to spell it by the sound of it, we
should make it TYSIS, and be laughed at by every educated person.

Secondly, we should gain in REDUCTION OF LABOR in writing.

Simplified Spelling makes valuable reductions in the case of
several hundred words, but the new spelling must be LEARNED.  You
can't spell them by the sound; you must get them out of the book.

But even if we knew the simplified form for every word in
the language, the phonographic alphabet would still beat the
Simplified Speller "hands down" in the important matter of
economy of labor.  I will illustrate:

PRESENT FORM:  through, laugh, highland.

SIMPLIFIED FORM:  thru, laff, hyland.

PHONOGRAPHIC FORM:  [Figure 2]

To write the word "through," the pen has to make twenty-one strokes.

To write the word "thru," then pen has to make twelve strokes--
a good saving.

To write that same word with the phonographic alphabet, the
pen has to make only THREE strokes.

To write the word "laugh," the pen has to make FOURTEEN
strokes.

To write "laff," the pen has to make the SAME NUMBER of
strokes--no labor is saved to the penman.

To write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, the
pen has to make only THREE strokes.

To write the word "highland," the pen has to make twenty-two
strokes.

To write "hyland," the pen has to make eighteen strokes.

To write that word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen
has to make only FIVE strokes.  [Figure 3]

To write the words "phonographic alphabet," the pen has to
make fifty-three strokes.

To write "fonografic alfabet," the pen has to make fifty strokes.
To the penman, the saving in labor is insignificant.

To write that word (with vowels) with the phonographic
alphabet, the pen has to make only SEVENTEEN strokes.

Without the vowels, only THIRTEEN strokes. [Figure 4]  The
vowels are hardly necessary, this time.

We make five pen-strokes in writing an m.  Thus:  [Figure 5]
a stroke down; a stroke up; a second stroke down; a second stroke
up; a final stroke down.  Total, five.  The phonographic alphabet
accomplishes the m with a single stroke--a curve, like a
parenthesis that has come home drunk and has fallen face down
right at the front door where everybody that goes along will see
him and say, Alas!

When our written m is not the end of a word, but is
otherwise located, it has to be connected with the next letter,
and that requires another pen-stroke, making six in all, before
you get rid of that m.  But never mind about the connecting
strokes--let them go.  Without counting them, the twenty-six
letters of our alphabet consumed about eighty pen-strokes for
their construction--about three pen-strokes per letter.

It is THREE TIMES THE NUMBER required by the phonographic
alphabet.  It requires but ONE stroke for each letter.

My writing-gait is--well, I don't know what it is, but I
will time myself and see.  Result:  it is twenty-four words per
minute.  I don't mean composing; I mean COPYING.  There isn't any
definite composing-gait.

Very well, my copying-gait is 1,440 words per hour--say
1,500.  If I could use the phonographic character with facility I
could do the 1,500 in twenty minutes.  I could do nine hours'
copying in three hours; I could do three years' copying in one
year.  Also, if I had a typewriting machine with the phonographic
alphabet on it--oh, the miracles I could do!

I am not pretending to write that character well.  I have
never had a lesson, and I am copying the letters from the book.
But I can accomplish my desire, at any rate, which is, to make
the reader get a good and clear idea of the advantage it would be
to us if we could discard our present alphabet and put this
better one in its place--using it in books, newspapers, with the
typewriter, and with the pen.

[Figure 6] --MAN DOG HORSE.  I think it is graceful and
would look comely in print.  And consider--once more, I beg--what
a labor-saver it is!  Ten pen-strokes with the one system to
convey those three words above, and thirty-three by the other!
[Figure 6]  I mean, in SOME ways, not in all.  I suppose I might
go so far as to say in most ways, and be within the facts, but
never mind; let it go at SOME.  One of the ways in which it
exercises this birthright is--as I think--continuing to use our
laughable alphabet these seventy-three years while there was a
rational one at hand, to be had for the taking.

It has taken five hundred years to simplify some of
Chaucer's rotten spelling--if I may be allowed to use to frank a
term as that--and it will take five hundred years more to get our
exasperating new Simplified Corruptions accepted and running
smoothly. And we sha'n't be any better off then than we are now;
for in that day we shall still have the privilege the Simplifiers
are exercising now:  ANYBODY can change the spelling that wants
to.

BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PHONOGRAPHIC SPELLING; THERE ISN'T
ANY WAY.  It will always follow the SOUND.  If you want to change
the spelling, you have to change the sound first.

Mind, I myself am a Simplified Speller; I belong to that
unhappy guild that is patiently and hopefully trying to reform
our drunken old alphabet by reducing his whiskey.  Well, it will
improve him.  When they get through and have reformed him all
they can by their system he will be only HALF drunk.  Above that
condition their system can never lift him.  There is no
competent, and lasting, and real reform for him but to take away
his whiskey entirely, and fill up his jug with Pitman's wholesome
and undiseased alphabet.

One great drawback to Simplified Spelling is, that in print
a simplified word looks so like the very nation! and when you
bunch a whole squadron of the Simplified together the spectacle
is very nearly unendurable.

The da ma ov koars kum when the publik ma be expektd to get
rekonsyled to the bezair asspekt of the Simplified Kombynashuns,
but--if I may be allowed the expression--is it worth the wasted
time? [Figure 7]

To see our letters put together in ways to which we are not accustomed
offends the eye, and also takes the EXPRESSION out of the words.

La on, Makduf, and damd be he hoo furst krys hold, enuf!

It doesn't thrill you as it used to do.  The simplifications
have sucked the thrill all out of it.

But a written character with which we are NOT ACQUAINTED
does not offend us--Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, and the
others--they have an interesting look, and we see beauty in them,
too.  And this is true of hieroglyphics, as well.  There is
something pleasant and engaging about the mathematical signs when
we do not understand them.  The mystery hidden in these things
has a fascination for us: we can't come across a printed page of
shorthand without being impressed by it and wishing we could read
it.

Very well, what I am offering for acceptance and adopting is
not shorthand, but longhand, written with the SHORTHAND ALPHABET
UNREACHED.  You can write three times as many words in a minute
with it as you can write with our alphabet.  And so, in a way, it
IS properly a shorthand.  It has a pleasant look, too; a
beguiling look, an inviting look.  I will write something in it,
in my rude and untaught way:  [Figure 8]

Even when _I_ do it it comes out prettier than it does in
Simplified Spelling.  Yes, and in the Simplified it costs one
hundred and twenty-three pen-strokes to write it, whereas in the
phonographic it costs only twenty-nine.

[Figure 9] is probably [Figure 10].

Let us hope so, anyway.


AS CONCERNS INTERPRETING THE DEITY


I

This line of hieroglyphics was for fourteen years the
despair of all the scholars who labored over the mysteries of the
Rosetta stone:  [Figure 1]


After five years of study Champollion translated it thus:


Therefore let the worship of Epiphanes be maintained in all
the temples, this upon pain of death.


That was the twenty-forth translation that had been
furnished by scholars.  For a time it stood.  But only for a
time.  Then doubts began to assail it and undermine it, and the
scholars resumed their labors.  Three years of patient work
produced eleven new translations; among them, this, by
Gr:unfeldt, was received with considerable favor:


The horse of Epiphanes shall be maintained at the public expense;
this upon pain of death.


But the following rendering, by Gospodin, was received by
the learned world with yet greater favor:


The priest shall explain the wisdom of Epiphanes to all these people,
and these shall listen with reverence, upon pain of death.


Seven years followed, in which twenty-one fresh and widely
varying renderings were scored--none of them quite convincing.
But now, at last, came Rawlinson, the youngest of all the
scholars, with a translation which was immediately and
universally recognized as being the correct version, and his name
became famous in a day.  So famous, indeed, that even the
children were familiar with it; and such a noise did the
achievement itself make that not even the noise of the monumental
political event of that same year--the flight from Elba--was able
to smother it to silence.  Rawlinson's version reads as follows:


Therefore, walk not away from the wisdom of Epiphanes, but
turn and follow it; so shall it conduct thee to the temple's
peace, and soften for thee the sorrows of life and the pains of
death.


Here is another difficult text:  [Figure 2]


It is demotic--a style of Egyptian writing and a phase of
the language which has perished from the knowledge of all men
twenty-five hundred years before the Christian era.

Our red Indians have left many records, in the form of
pictures, upon our crags and boulders.  It has taken our most
gifted and painstaking students two centuries to get at the
meanings hidden in these pictures; yet there are still two little
lines of hieroglyphics among the figures grouped upon the Dighton
Rocks which they have not succeeds in interpreting to their
satisfaction.  These:  [Figure 3]


The suggested solutions are practically innumerable; they
would fill a book.

Thus we have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries;
it is only when we set out to discover the secret of God that our
difficulties disappear.  It was always so.  In antique Roman
times it was the custom of the Deity to try to conceal His
intentions in the entrails of birds, and this was patiently and
hopefully continued century after century, although the attempted
concealment never succeeded, in a single recorded instance.  The
augurs could read entrails as easily as a modern child can read
coarse print.  Roman history is full of the marvels of
interpretation which these extraordinary men performed.  These
strange and wonderful achievements move our awe and compel our
admiration.  Those men could pierce to the marrow of a mystery
instantly.  If the Rosetta-stone idea had been introduced it
would have defeated them, but entrails had no embarrassments for
them.  Entrails have gone out, now--entrails and dreams.  It was
at last found out that as hiding-places for the divine intentions
they were inadequate.


A part of the wall of Valletri in former times been struck
with thunder, the response of the soothsayers was, that a native
of that town would some time or other arrive at supreme power.--
BOHN'S SUETONIUS, p. 138.


"Some time or other."  It looks indefinite, but no matter,
it happened, all the same; one needed only to wait, and be
patient, and keep watch, then he would find out that the thunder-
stroke had Caesar Augustus in mind, and had come to give notice.

There were other advance-advertisements.  One of them
appeared just before Caesar Augustus was born, and was most
poetic and touching and romantic in its feelings and aspects.
It was a dream.  It was dreamed by Caesar Augustus's mother,
and interpreted at the usual rates:


Atia, before her delivery, dreamed that her bowels stretched
to the stars and expanded through the whole circuit of heaven
and earth.--SUETONIUS, p. 139.


That was in the augur's line, and furnished him no
difficulties, but it would have taken Rawlinson and Champollion
fourteen years to make sure of what it meant, because they would
have been surprised and dizzy.  It would have been too late to be
valuable, then, and the bill for service would have been barred
by the statute of limitation.

In those old Roman days a gentleman's education was not
complete until he had taken a theological course at the seminary
and learned how to translate entrails.  Caesar Augustus's
education received this final polish.  All through his life,
whenever he had poultry on the menu he saved the interiors and
kept himself informed of the Deity's plans by exercising upon
those interiors the arts of augury.


In his first consulship, while he was observing the
auguries, twelve vultures presented themselves, as they had done
to Romulus.  And when he offered sacrifice, the livers of all
the victims were folded inward in the lower part; a circumstance
which was regarded by those present who had skill in things of
that nature, as an indubitable prognostic of great and wonderful
fortune.--SUETONIUS, p. 141.


"Indubitable" is a strong word, but no doubt it was
justified, if the livers were really turned that way.  In those
days chicken livers were strangely and delicately sensitive to
coming events, no matter how far off they might be; and they
could never keep still, but would curl and squirm like that,
particularly when vultures came and showed interest in that
approaching great event and in breakfast.


II

We may now skip eleven hundred and thirty or forty years,
which brings us down to enlightened Christian times and the
troubled days of King Stephen of England.  The augur has had his
day and has been long ago forgotten; the priest had fallen heir
to his trade.

King Henry is dead; Stephen, that bold and outrageous
person, comes flying over from Normandy to steal the throne from
Henry's daughter.  He accomplished his crime, and Henry of
Huntington, a priest of high degree, mourns over it in his
Chronicle.  The Archbishop of Canterbury consecrated Stephen:
"wherefore the Lord visited the Archbishop with the same judgment
which he had inflicted upon him who struck Jeremiah the great
priest:  he died with a year."

Stephen's was the greater offense, but Stephen could wait;
not so the Archbishop, apparently.


The kingdom was a prey to intestine wars; slaughter, fire,
and rapine spread ruin throughout the land; cries of distress,
horror, and woe rose in every quarter.


That was the result of Stephen's crime.  These unspeakable
conditions continued during nineteen years.  Then Stephen died as
comfortably as any man ever did, and was honorably buried.  It
makes one pity the poor Archbishop, and with that he, too, could
have been let off as leniently.  How did Henry of Huntington know
that the Archbishop was sent to his grave by judgment of God for
consecrating Stephen?  He does not explain.  Neither does he
explain why Stephen was awarded a pleasanter death than he was
entitled to, while the aged King Henry, his predecessor, who had
ruled England thirty-five years to the people's strongly worded
satisfaction, was condemned to close his life in circumstances
most distinctly unpleasant, inconvenient, and disagreeable.  His
was probably the most uninspiring funeral that is set down in
history.  There is not a detail about it that is attractive.  It
seems to have been just the funeral for Stephen, and even at this
far-distant day it is matter of just regret that by an
indiscretion the wrong man got it.

Whenever God punishes a man, Henry of Huntington knows why
it was done, and tells us; and his pen is eloquent with
admiration; but when a man has earned punishment, and escapes, he
does not explain.  He is evidently puzzled, but he does not say
anything.  I think it is often apparent that he is pained by
these discrepancies, but loyally tries his best not to show it.
When he cannot praise, he delivers himself of a silence so marked
that a suspicious person could mistake it for suppressed
criticism.  However, he has plenty of opportunities to feel
contented with the way things go--his book is full of them.


King David of Scotland . . . under color of religion caused
his followers to deal most barbarously with the English.  They
ripped open women, tossed children on the points of spears,
butchered priests at the altars, and, cutting off the heads from
the images on crucifixes, placed them on the bodies of the slain,
while in exchange they fixed on the crucifixes the heads of their
victims.  Wherever the Scots came, there was the same scene of
horror and cruelty:  women shrieking, old men lamenting, amid the
groans of the dying and the despair of the living.


But the English got the victory.


Then the chief of the men of Lothian fell, pierced by an arrow,
and all his followers were put to flight.  For the Almighty was
offended at them and their strength was rent like a cobweb.


Offended at them for what?  For committing those fearful
butcheries?  No, for that was the common custom on both sides,
and not open to criticism.  Then was it for doing the butcheries
"under cover of religion"?  No, that was not it; religious
feeling was often expressed in that fervent way all through those
old centuries.  The truth is, He was not offended at "them" at all;
He was only offended at their king, who had been false to an oath.
Then why did not He put the punishment upon the king instead of
upon "them"?  It is a difficult question.  One can see by the
Chronicle that the "judgments" fell rather customarily upon
the wrong person, but Henry of Huntington does not explain why.
Here is one that went true; the chronicler's satisfaction
in it is not hidden:


In the month of August, Providence displayed its justice in
a remarkable manner; for two of the nobles who had converted
monasteries into fortifications, expelling the monks, their sin
being the same, met with a similar punishment.  Robert Marmion
was one, Godfrey de Mandeville the other.  Robert Marmion,
issuing forth against the enemy, was slain under the walls of the
monastery, being the only one who fell, though he was surrounded
by his troops.  Dying excommunicated, he became subject to death
everlasting.  In like manner Earl Godfrey was singled out among
his followers, and shot with an arrow by a common foot-soldier.
He made light of the wound, but he died of it in a few days,
under excommunication.  See here the like judgment of God,
memorable through all ages!


The exaltation jars upon me; not because of the death of the
men, for they deserved that, but because it is death eternal, in
white-hot fire and flame.  It makes my flesh crawl.  I have not
known more than three men, or perhaps four, in my whole lifetime,
*whom I would rejoice to see writhing in those fires for even a
year, let alone forever.  I believe I would relent before the
year was up, and get them out if I could.  I think that in
the long run, if a man's wife and babies, who had not harmed me,
should come crying and pleading, I couldn't stand it; I know I
should forgive him and let him go, even if he had violated a
monastery.  Henry of Huntington has been watching Godfrey and
Marmion for nearly seven hundred and fifty years, now, but I
couldn't do it, I know I couldn't.  I am soft and gentle in my
nature, and I should have forgiven them seventy-and-seven times,
long ago.  And I think God has; but this is only an opinion,
and not authoritative, like Henry of Huntington's interpretations.
I could learn to interpret, but I have never tried; I get so
little time.

All through his book Henry exhibits his familiarity with the
intentions of God, and with the reasons for his intentions.
Sometimes--very often, in fact--the act follows the intention
after such a wide interval of time that one wonders how Henry
could fit one act out of a hundred to one intention out of a
hundred and get the thing right every time when there was such
abundant choice among acts and intentions.  Sometimes a man
offends the Deity with a crime, and is punished for it thirty
years later; meantime he was committed a million other crimes:
no matter, Henry can pick out the one that brought the worms.
Worms were generally used in those days for the slaying of
particularly wicked people.  This has gone out, now, but in old
times it was a favorite.  It always indicated a case of "wrath."
For instance:


. . . the just God avenging Robert Fitzhilderbrand's
perfidy, a worm grew in his vitals, which gradually gnawing its
way through his intestines fattened on the abandoned man till,
tortured with excruciating sufferings and venting himself in
bitter moans, he was by a fitting punishment brought to his end.
--(P. 400.)


It was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only
know it was a particular breed, and only used to convey wrath.
Some authorities think it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is
much doubt.

However, one thing we do know; and that is that that worm had been
due years and years.  Robert F. had violated a monastery once;
he had committed unprintable crimes since, and they had been
permitted--under disapproval--but the ravishment of the monastery
had not been forgotten nor forgiven, and the worm came at last.

Why were these reforms put off in this strange way?  What was to
be gained by it?  Did Henry of Huntington really know his facts,
or was he only guessing?  Sometimes I am half persuaded that
he is only a guesser, and not a good one.  The divine wisdom
must surely be of the better quality than he makes it out to be.

Five hundred years before Henry's time some forecasts of the
Lord's purposes were furnished by a pope, who perceived, by
certain perfectly trustworthy signs furnished by the Deity for
the information of His familiars, that the end of the world was


. . . about to come.  But as this end of the world draws
near many things are at hand which have not before happened, as
changes in the air, terrible signs in the heavens, tempests out
of the common order of the seasons, wars, famines, pestilences,
earthquakes in various places; all which will not happen in our
days, but after our days all will come to pass.


Still, the end was so near that these signs were "sent before
that we may be careful for our souls and be found prepared
to meet the impending judgment."

That was thirteen hundred years ago.  This is really no
improvement on the work of the Roman augurs.

-------------------------------------------------------------------


CONCERNING TOBACCO

As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions.  And the
chiefest is this--that there is a STANDARD governing the matter,
whereas there is nothing of the kind.  Each man's own preference
is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept,
the only one which can command him.  A congress of all the
tobacco-lovers in the world could not elect a standard which
would be binding upon you or me, or would even much influence us.

The next superstition is that a man has a standard of his own.
He hasn't.  He thinks he has, but he hasn't.  He thinks he can
tell what he regards as a good cigar from what he regards as a
bad one--but he can't.  He goes by the brand, yet imagines he goes
by the flavor.  One may palm off the worst counterfeit upon him;
if it bears his brand he will smoke it contentedly and never suspect.

Children of twenty-five, who have seven years experience,
try to tell me what is a good cigar and what isn't.
Me, who never learned to smoke, but always smoked;
me, who came into the world asking for a light.

No one can tell me what is a good cigar--for me.  I am the
only judge.  People who claim to know say that I smoke the worst
cigars in the world.  They bring their own cigars when they come
to my house.  They betray an unmanly terror when I offer them
a cigar; they tell lies and hurry away to meet engagements
which they have not made when they are threatened with the
hospitalities of my box.  Now then, observe what superstition,
assisted by a man's reputation, can do.  I was to have twelve
personal friends to supper one night.  One of them was as
notorious for costly and elegant cigars as I was for cheap and
devilish ones.  I called at his house and when no one was looking
borrowed a double handful of his very choicest; cigars which cost
him forty cents apiece and bore red-and-gold labels in sign of
their nobility.  I removed the labels and put the cigars into a
box with my favorite brand on it--a brand which those people all
knew, and which cowed them as men are cowed by an epidemic.  They
took these cigars when offered at the end of the supper, and lit
them and sternly struggled with them--in dreary silence, for
hilarity died when the fell brand came into view and started
around--but their fortitude held for a short time only; then they
made excuses and filed out, treading on one another's heels with
indecent eagerness; and in the morning when I went out to observe
results the cigars lay all between the front door and the gate.
All except one--that one lay in the plate of the man from whom I
had cabbaged the lot.  One or two whiffs was all he could stand.
He told me afterward that some day I would get shot for giving
people that kind of cigars to smoke.

Am I certain of my own standard?  Perfectly; yes, absolutely
--unless somebody fools me by putting my brand on some other kind
of cigar; for no doubt I am like the rest, and know my cigar by
the brand instead of by the flavor.  However, my standard is a
pretty wide one and covers a good deal of territory.  To me,
almost any cigar is good that nobody else will smoke, and to me
almost all cigars are bad that other people consider good.
Nearly any cigar will do me, except a Havana.  People think they
hurt my feelings when then come to my house with their life
preservers on--I mean, with their own cigars in their pockets.
It is an error; I take care of myself in a similar way.  When I
go into danger--that is, into rich people's houses, where, in the
nature of things, they will have high-tariff cigars, red-and-gilt
girded and nested in a rosewood box along with a damp sponge,
cigars which develop a dismal black ash and burn down the side
and smell, and will grow hot to the fingers, and will go on
growing hotter and hotter, and go on smelling more and more
infamously and unendurably the deeper the fire tunnels down
inside below the thimbleful of honest tobacco that is in the
front end, the furnisher of it praising it all the time and
telling you how much the deadly thing cost--yes, when I go into
that sort of peril I carry my own defense along; I carry my own
brand--twenty-seven cents a barrel--and I live to see my family
again.  I may seem to light his red-gartered cigar, but that is
only for courtesy's sake; I smuggle it into my pocket for the
poor, of whom I know many, and light one of my own; and while he
praises it I join in, but when he says it cost forty-five cents I
say nothing, for I know better.

However, to say true, my tastes are so catholic that I have
never seen any cigars that I really could not smoke, except those
that cost a dollar apiece.  I have examined those and know that
they are made of dog-hair, and not good dog-hair at that.

I have a thoroughly satisfactory time in Europe, for all
over the Continent one finds cigars which not even the most
hardened newsboys in New York would smoke.  I brought cigars with
me, the last time; I will not do that any more.  In Italy, as in
France, the Government is the only cigar-peddler.  Italy has
three or four domestic brands:  the Minghetti, the Trabuco, the
Virginia, and a very coarse one which is a modification of the
Virginia.  The Minghettis are large and comely, and cost three
dollars and sixty cents a hundred; I can smoke a hundred in seven
days and enjoy every one of them.  The Trabucos suit me, too; I
don't remember the price.  But one has to learn to like the
Virginia, nobody is born friendly to it.  It looks like a rat-
tail file, but smokes better, some think.  It has a straw through
it; you pull this out, and it leaves a flue, otherwise there
would be no draught, not even as much as there is to a nail.
Some prefer a nail at first.  However, I like all the French,
Swiss, German, and Italian domestic cigars, and have never cared
to inquire what they are made of; and nobody would know, anyhow,
perhaps.  There is even a brand of European smoking-tobacco that
I like.  It is a brand used by the Italian peasants.  It is loose
and dry and black, and looks like tea-grounds.  When the fire is
applied it expands, and climbs up and towers above the pipe, and
presently tumbles off inside of one's vest.  The tobacco itself
is cheap, but it raises the insurance.  It is as I remarked in
the beginning--the taste for tobacco is a matter of superstition.
There are no standards--no real standards.  Each man's preference
is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept,
the only one which can command him.

------------------------------------------------------------------


THE BEE

It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee.  I mean, in
the psychical and in the poetical way.  I had had a business
introduction earlier.  It was when I was a boy.  It is strange
that I should remember a formality like that so long; it must be
nearly sixty years.

Bee scientists always speak of the bee as she.  It is
because all the important bees are of that sex.  In the hive
there is one married bee, called the queen; she has fifty
thousand children; of these, about one hundred are sons; the rest
are daughters.  Some of the daughters are young maids, some are
old maids, and all are virgins and remain so.

Every spring the queen comes out of the hive and flies away
with one of her sons and marries him.  The honeymoon lasts only
an hour or two; then the queen divorces her husband and returns
home competent to lay two million eggs.  This will be enough to
last the year, but not more than enough, because hundreds of bees
are drowned every day, and other hundreds are eaten by birds, and
it is the queen's business to keep the population up to standard
--say, fifty thousand.  She must always have that many children
on hand and efficient during the busy season, which is summer, or
winter would catch the community short of food.  She lays from
two thousand to three thousand eggs a day, according to the
demand; and she must exercise judgment, and not lay more than are
needed in a slim flower-harvest, nor fewer than are required in a
prodigal one, or the board of directors will dethrone her and
elect a queen that has more sense.

There are always a few royal heirs in stock and ready to
take her place--ready and more than anxious to do it, although
she is their own mother.  These girls are kept by themselves, and
are regally fed and tended from birth.  No other bees get such
fine food as they get, or live such a high and luxurious life.
By consequence they are larger and longer and sleeker than their
working sisters.  And they have a curved sting, shaped like a
scimitar, while the others have a straight one.

A common bee will sting any one or anybody, but a royalty
stings royalties only.  A common bee will sting and kill another
common bee, for cause, but when it is necessary to kill the queen
other ways are employed.  When a queen has grown old and slack
and does not lay eggs enough one of her royal daughters is
allowed to come to attack her, the rest of the bees looking on at
the duel and seeing fair play.  It is a duel with the curved
stings.  If one of the fighters gets hard pressed and gives it up
and runs, she is brought back and must try again--once, maybe
twice; then, if she runs yet once more for her life, judicial
death is her portion; her children pack themselves into a ball
around her person and hold her in that compact grip two or three
days, until she starves to death or is suffocated.  Meantime the
victor bee is receiving royal honors and performing the one royal
function--laying eggs.

As regards the ethics of the judicial assassination of the
queen, that is a matter of politics, and will be discussed later,
in its proper place.

During substantially the whole of her short life of five or
six years the queen lives in Egyptian darkness and stately
seclusion of the royal apartments, with none about her but
plebeian servants, who give her empty lip-affection in place of
the love which her heart hungers for; who spy upon her in the
interest of her waiting heirs, and report and exaggerate her
defects and deficiencies to them; who fawn upon her and flatter
her to her face and slander her behind her back; who grovel
before her in the day of her power and forsake her in her age and
weakness.  There she sits, friendless, upon her throne through
the long night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies
and sweet companionship and loving endearments which she craves,
by the gilded barriers of her awful rank; a forlorn exile in her
own house and home, weary object of formal ceremonies and
machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the free
air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the
splendid accident of her birth to trade this priceless heritage
for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life,
with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death--and condemned
by the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable!

Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck--in fact, all the great
authorities--are agreed in denying that the bee is a member of
the human family.  I do not know why they have done this, but I
think it is from dishonest motives.  Why, the innumerable facts
brought to light by their own painstaking and exhaustive
experiments prove that if there is a master fool in the world, it
is the bee.  That seems to settle it.

But that is the way of the scientist.  He will spend thirty
years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to
prove a certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievement
that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all--that his
accumulation proves an entirely different thing.  When you point
out this miscarriage to him he does not answer your letters; when
you call to convince him, the servant prevaricates and you do not
get in.  Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up
their theory; then you can borrow money of them.

To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one of
them will answer your letter, but when they do they avoid the
issue--you cannot pin them down.  When I discovered that the bee
was human I wrote about it to all those scientists whom I have
just mentioned.  For evasions, I have seen nothing to equal the
answers I got.

After the queen, the personage next in importance in the
hive is the virgin.  The virgins are fifty thousand or one
hundred thousand in number, and they are the workers, the
laborers.  No work is done, in the hive or out of it, save by
them.  The males do not work, the queen does no work, unless
laying eggs is work, but it does not seem so to me.  There are
only two million of them, anyway, and all of five months to
finish the contract in.  The distribution of work in a hive is as
cleverly and elaborately specialized as it is in a vast American
machine-shop or factory.  A bee that has been trained to one of
the many and various industries of the concern doesn't know how
to exercise any other, and would be offended if asked to take a
hand in anything outside of her profession.  She is as human as a
cook; and if you should ask the cook to wait on the table, you
know what will happen.  Cooks will play the piano if you like,
but they draw the line there.  In my time I have asked a cook to
chop wood, and I know about these things.  Even the hired girl
has her frontiers; true, they are vague, they are ill-defined,
even flexible, but they are there.  This is not conjecture; it is
founded on the absolute.  And then the butler.  You ask the
butler to wash the dog.  It is just as I say; there is much to be
learned in these ways, without going to books.  Books are very well,
but books do not cover the whole domain of esthetic human culture.
Pride of profession is one of the boniest bones in existence,
if not the boniest.  Without doubt it is so in the hive.



TAMING THE BICYCLE

In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the
old high-wheel bicycles of that period.  He wrote an account of
his experience, but did not offer it for publication.  The form
of bicycle he rode long ago became antiquated, but in the humor
of his pleasantry is a quality which does not grow old.


A. B. P.



I

I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it.  So
I went down a bought a barrel of Pond's Extract and a bicycle.
The Expert came home with me to instruct me.  We chose the
back yard, for the sake of privacy, and went to work.

Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt--a
fifty-inch, with the pedals shortened up to forty-eight--and
skittish, like any other colt.  The Expert explained the thing's
points briefly, then he got on its back and rode around a little,
to show me how easy it was to do.  He said that the dismounting
was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave
that to the last.  But he was in error there.  He found, to his
surprise and joy, that all that he needed to do was to get me on
to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself.
Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best
time on record.  He was on that side, shoving up the machine;
we all came down with a crash, he at the bottom, I next,
and the machine on top.

We examined the machine, but it was not in the least
injured.  This was hardly believable.  Yet the Expert assured me
that it was true; in fact, the examination proved it.  I was
partly to realize, then, how admirably these things are
constructed.  We applied some Pond's Extract, and resumed.  The
Expert got on the OTHER side to shove up this time, but I
dismounted on that side; so the result was as before.

The machine was not hurt.  We oiled ourselves again, and resumed.
This time the Expert took up a sheltered position behind,
but somehow or other we landed on him again.

He was full of admiration; said it was abnormal.  She was
all right, not a scratch on her, not a timber started anywhere.
I said it was wonderful, while we were greasing up, but he said
that when I came to know these steel spider-webs I would realize
that nothing but dynamite could cripple them.  Then he limped out
to position, and we resumed once more.  This time the Expert took
up the position of short-stop, and got a man to shove up behind.
We got up a handsome speed, and presently traversed a brick, and
I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on
the instructor's back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air
between me and the sun.  It was well it came down on us, for that
broke the fall, and it was not injured.

Five days later I got out and was carried down to the
hospital, and found the Expert doing pretty fairly.  In a few
more days I was quite sound.  I attribute this to my prudence in
always dismounting on something soft.  Some recommend a feather
bed, but I think an Expert is better.

The Expert got out at last, brought four assistants with
him.  It was a good idea.  These four held the graceful cobweb
upright while I climbed into the saddle; then they formed in
column and marched on either side of me while the Expert pushed
behind; all hands assisted at the dismount.

The bicycle had what is called the "wabbles," and had them
very badly.  In order to keep my position, a good many things
were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was
against nature.  That is to say, that whatever the needed thing
might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it
in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected law of physics
required that it be done in just the other way.  I perceived by
this how radically and grotesquely wrong had been the life-long
education of my body and members.  They were steeped in
ignorance; they knew nothing--nothing which it could profit them
to know.  For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I
put the tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural
impulse, and so violated a law, and kept on going down.  The law
required the opposite thing--the big wheel must be turned in the
direction in which you are falling.  It is hard to believe this,
when you are told it.  And not merely hard to believe it, but
impossible; it is opposed to all your notions.  And it is just as
hard to do it, after you do come to believe it.  Believing it,
and knowing by the most convincing proof that it is true, does
not help it:  you can't any more DO it than you could before; you
can neither force nor persuade yourself to do it at first.  The
intellect has to come to the front, now.  It has to teach the
limbs to discard their old education and adopt the new.

The steps of one's progress are distinctly marked.  At the
end of each lesson he knows he has acquired something, and he
also knows what that something is, and likewise that it will stay
with him.  It is not like studying German, where you mull along,
in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just
as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you,
and there you are.  No--and I see now, plainly enough, that the
great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off
it and hurt yourself.  There is nothing like that feature to make
you attend strictly to business.  But I also see, by what I have
learned of bicycling, that the right and only sure way to learn
German is by the bicycling method.  That is to say, take a grip
on one villainy of it at a time, leaving that one half learned.

When you have reached the point in bicycling where you can
balance the machine tolerably fairly and propel it and steer it,
then comes your next task--how to mount it.  You do it in this
way:  you hop along behind it on your right foot, resting the
other on the mounting-peg, and grasping the tiller with your
hands.  At the word, you rise on the peg, stiffen your left leg,
hang your other one around in the air in a general in indefinite
way, lean your stomach against the rear of the saddle, and then
fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other; but you fall off.
You get up and do it again; and once more; and then several times.

By this time you have learned to keep your balance; and also
to steer without wrenching the tiller out by the roots (I say
tiller because it IS a tiller; "handle-bar" is a lamely
descriptive phrase).  So you steer along, straight ahead, a little
while, then you rise forward, with a steady strain, bringing your
right leg, and then your body, into the saddle, catch your
breath, fetch a violent hitch this way and then that, and down
you go again.

But you have ceased to mind the going down by this time; you
are getting to light on one foot or the other with considerable
certainty.  Six more attempts and six more falls make you
perfect.  You land in the saddle comfortably, next time, and stay
there--that is, if you can be content to let your legs dangle,
and leave the pedals alone a while; but if you grab at once for
the pedals, you are gone again.  You soon learn to wait a little
and perfect your balance before reaching for the pedals; then the
mounting-art is acquired, is complete, and a little practice will
make it simple and easy to you, though spectators ought to keep
off a rod or two to one side, along at first, if you have nothing
against them.

And now you come to the voluntary dismount; you learned the
other kind first of all.  It is quite easy to tell one how to do
the voluntary dismount; the words are few, the requirement
simple, and apparently undifficult; let your left pedal go down
till your left leg is nearly straight, turn your wheel to the
left, and get off as you would from a horse.  It certainly does
sound exceedingly easy; but it isn't.  I don't know why it isn't
but it isn't.  Try as you may, you don't get down as you would
from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire.  You
make a spectacle of yourself every time.


II

During the eight days I took a daily lesson an hour and a
half.  At the end of this twelve working-hours' appreticeship I
was graduated--in the rough.  I was pronounced competent to
paddle my own bicycle without outside help.  It seems incredible,
this celerity of acquirement.  It takes considerably longer than
that to learn horseback-riding in the rough.

Now it is true that I could have learned without a teacher,
but it would have been risky for me, because of my natural
clumsiness.  The self-taught man seldom knows anything
accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have
known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags,
and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going
and doing as he himself has done.  There are those who imagine
that the unlucky accidents of life--life's "experiences"--are in
some way useful to us.  I wish I could find out how.  I never
knew one of them to happen twice.  They always change off and
swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side.  If
personal experience can be worth anything as an education, it
wouldn't seem likely that you could trip Methuselah; and yet if
that old person could come back here it is more that likely that
one of the first things he would do would be to take hold of one
of these electric wires and tie himself all up in a knot.  Now
the surer thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask
somebody whether it was a good thing to take hold of.  But that
would not suit him; he would be one of the self-taught kind that
go by experience; he would want to examine for himself.  And he
would find, for his instruction, that the coiled patriarch shuns
the electric wire; and it would be useful to him, too, and would
leave his education in quite a complete and rounded-out
condition, till he should come again, some day, and go to
bouncing a dynamite-can around to find out what was in it.

But we wander from the point.  However, get a teacher; it
saves much time and Pond's Extract.

Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired
concerning my physical strength, and I was able to inform him
that I hadn't any.  He said that that was a defect which would
make up-hill wheeling pretty difficult for me at first; but he
also said the bicycle would soon remove it.  The contrast between
his muscles and mine was quite marked.  He wanted to test mine,
so I offered my biceps--which was my best.  It almost made him
smile.  He said, "It is pulpy, and soft, and yielding, and
rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers;
in the dark a body might think it was an oyster in a rag."
Perhaps this made me look grieved, for he added, briskly:  "Oh,
that's all right, you needn't worry about that; in a little while
you can't tell it from a petrified kidney.  Just go right along
with your practice; you're all right."

Then he left me, and I started out alone to seek adventures.
You don't really have to seek them--that is nothing but a phrase
--they come to you.

I chose a reposeful Sabbath-day sort of a back street which
was about thirty yards wide between the curbstones.  I knew it
was not wide enough; still, I thought that by keeping strict
watch and wasting no space unnecessarily I could crowd through.

Of course I had trouble mounting the machine, entirely on my
own responsibility, with no encouraging moral support from the
outside, no sympathetic instructor to say, "Good! now you're
doing well--good again--don't hurry--there, now, you're all right
--brace up, go ahead."  In place of this I had some other
support.  This was a boy, who was perched on a gate-post munching
a hunk of maple sugar.

He was full of interest and comment.  The first time I
failed and went down he said that if he was me he would dress up
in pillows, that's what he would do.  The next time I went down
he advised me to go and learn to ride a tricycle first.  The
third time I collapsed he said he didn't believe I could stay on
a horse-car.  But the next time I succeeded, and got clumsily
under way in a weaving, tottering, uncertain fashion, and
occupying pretty much all of the street.  My slow and lumbering
gait filled the boy to the chin with scorn, and he sung out, "My,
but don't he rip along!"  Then he got down from his post and
loafed along the sidewalk, still observing and occasionally
commenting.  Presently he dropped into my wake and followed along
behind.  A little girl passed by, balancing a wash-board on her
head, and giggled, and seemed about to make a remark, but the boy
said, rebukingly, "Let him alone, he's going to a funeral."

I have been familiar with that street for years, and had
always supposed it was a dead level; but it was not, as the
bicycle now informed me, to my surprise.  The bicycle, in the
hands of a novice, is as alert and acute as a spirit-level in the
detecting the delicate and vanishing shades of difference in
these matters.  It notices a rise where your untrained eye would
not observe that one existed; it notices any decline which water
will run down.  I was toiling up a slight rise, but was not aware
of it.  It made me tug and pant and perspire; and still, labor as
I might, the machine came almost to a standstill every little while.
At such times the boy would say:  "That's it! take a rest--
there ain't no hurry.  They can't hold the funeral without YOU."

Stones were a bother to me.  Even the smallest ones gave me a
panic when I went over them.  I could hit any kind of a stone,
no matter how small, if I tried to miss it; and of course at
first I couldn't help trying to do that.  It is but natural.
It is part of the ass that is put in us all, for some
inscrutable reason.

It was at the end of my course, at last, and it was necessary
for me to round to.  This is not a pleasant thing, when you
undertake it for the first time on your own responsibility,
and neither is it likely to succeed.  Your confidence oozes away,
you fill steadily up with nameless apprehensions, every fiber of
you is tense with a watchful strain, you start a cautious and
gradual curve, but your squirmy nerves are all full of electric
anxieties, so the curve is quickly demoralized into a jerky and
perilous zigzag; then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the
bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, defying all
prayers and all your powers to change its mind--your heart stands
still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight
on you go, and there are but a couple of feet between you and the
curb now.  And now is the desperate moment, the last chance to
save yourself; of course all your instructions fly out of your
head, and you whirl your wheel AWAY from the curb instead of
TOWARD it, and so you go sprawling on that granite-bound
inhospitable shore.  That was my luck; that was my experience.  I
dragged myself out from under the indestructible bicycle and sat
down on the curb to examine.

I started on the return trip.  It was now that I saw a
farmer's wagon poking along down toward me, loaded with cabbages.
If I needed anything to perfect the precariousness of my steering,
it was just that.  The farmer was occupying the middle of the road
with his wagon, leaving barely fourteen or fifteen yards of space
on either side.  I couldn't shout at him--a beginner can't shout;
if he opens his mouth he is gone; he must keep all his attention
on his business.  But in this grisly emergency, the boy came
to the rescue, and for once I had to be grateful to him.
He kept a sharp lookout on the swiftly varying impulses and
inspirations of my bicycle, and shouted to the man accordingly:

"To the left!  Turn to the left, or this jackass 'll run over you!"
The man started to do it.  "No, to the right, to the right!
Hold on! THAT won't do!--to the left!--to the right!--to the
LEFT--right! left--ri--  Stay where you ARE, or you're a goner!"

And just then I caught the off horse in the starboard and went
down in a pile.  I said, "Hang it!  Couldn't you SEE I was coming?"

"Yes, I see you was coming, but I couldn't tell which WAY you
was coming.  Nobody could--now, COULD they?  You couldn't
yourself--now, COULD you?  So what could _I_ do?

There was something in that, and so I had the magnanimity to
say so.  I said I was no doubt as much to blame as he was.

Within the next five days I achieved so much progress that
the boy couldn't keep up with me.  He had to go back to his gate-
post, and content himself with watching me fall at long range.

There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the
street, a measured yard apart.  Even after I got so I could steer
pretty fairly I was so afraid of those stones that I always hit
them.  They gave me the worst falls I ever got in that street,
except those which I got from dogs.  I have seen it stated that
no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always
able to skip out of his way.  I think that that may be true:  but
I think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog was because
he was trying to.  I did not try to run over any dog.  But I ran
over every dog that came along.  I think it makes a great deal of
difference.  If you try to run over the dog he knows how to
calculate, but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how
to calculate, and is liable to jump the wrong way every time.  It
was always so in my experience.  Even when I could not hit a
wagon I could hit a dog that came to see me practice.  They all
liked to see me practice, and they all came, for there was very
little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a dog.  It took
time to learn to miss a dog, but I achieved even that.

I can steer as well as I want to, now, and I will catch that
boy one of these days and run over HIM if he doesn't reform.

Get a bicycle.  You will not regret it, if you live.



IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

(from My Autobiography)


Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished
manuscript which constitute this formidable Autobiography and
Diary of mine, certain chapters will in some distant future be
found which deal with "Claimants"--claimants historically
notorious:  Satan, Claimant; the Golden Calf, Claimant; the
Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, Claimant; Louis XVII., Claimant;
William Shakespeare, Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant; Mary Baker
G. Eddy, Claimant--and the rest of them.  Eminent Claimants,
successful Claimants, defeated Claimants, royal Claimants, pleb
Claimants, showy Claimants, shabby Claimants, revered Claimants,
despised Claimants, twinkle star-like here and there and yonder
through the mists of history and legend and tradition--and, oh,
all the darling tribe are clothed in mystery and romance, and we
read about them with deep interest and discuss them with loving
sympathy or with rancorous resentment, according to which side we
hitch ourselves to.  It has always been so with the human race.
There was never a Claimant that couldn't get a hearing, nor one
that couldn't accumulate a rapturous following, no matter how
flimsy and apparently unauthentic his claim might be.  Arthur
Orton's claim that he was the lost Tichborne baronet come to life
again was as flimsy as Mrs. Eddy's that she wrote SCIENCE AND
HEALTH from the direct dictation of the Deity; yet in England
nearly forty years ago Orton had a huge army of devotees and
incorrigible adherents, many of whom remained stubbornly
unconvinced after their fat god had been proven an impostor and
jailed as a perjurer, and today Mrs. Eddy's following is not only
immense, but is daily augmenting in numbers and enthusiasm.
Orton had many fine and educated minds among his adherents, Mrs.
Eddy has had the like among hers from the beginning.  Her Church
is as well equipped in those particulars as is any other Church.
Claimants can always count upon a following, it doesn't matter
who they are, nor what they claim, nor whether they come with
documents or without.  It was always so.  Down out of the long-
vanished past, across the abyss of the ages, if you listen, you
can still hear the believing multitudes shouting for Perkin
Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.

A friend has sent me a new book, from England--THE
SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED--well restated and closely reasoned;
and my fifty years' interest in that matter--asleep for the last
three years--is excited once more.  It is an interest which was
born of Delia Bacon's book--away back in the ancient day--1857,
or maybe 1856.  About a year later my pilot-master, Bixby,
transferred me from his own steamboat to the PENNSYLVANIA, and
placed me under the orders and instructions of George Ealer--dead
now, these many, many years.  I steered for him a good many
months--as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice:  stood a
daylight watch and spun the wheel under the severe
superintendence and correction of the master.  He was a prime
chess-player and an idolater of Shakespeare.  He would play chess
with anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity
something to do that.  Also--quite uninvited--he would read
Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it
was his watch and I was steering.  He read well, but not
profitably for me, because he constantly injected commands into
the text.  That broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all
up--to that degree, in fact, that if we were in a risky and
difficult piece of river an ignorant person couldn't have told,
sometimes, which observations were Shakespeare's and which were
Ealer's.  For instance:


What man dare, _I_ dare!

Approach thou WHAT are you laying in the leads for? what a
hell of an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her
off! rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the THERE she
goes! meet her, meet her! didn't you KNOW she'd smell the reef if
you crowded in like that?  Hyrcan tiger; take any ship but that
and my firm nerves she'll be in the WOODS the first you know!
stop he starboard! come ahead strong on the larboard! back the
starboard! . . . NOW then, you're all right; come ahead on the
starboard; straighten up and go 'long, never tremble:  or be
alive again, and dare me to the desert DAMNATION can't you keep
away from that greasy water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch
her baldheaded! with thy sword; if trembling I inhabit then, lay
in the leads!--no, only with the starboard one, leave the other
alone, protest me the baby of a girl.  Hence horrible shadow!
eight bells--that watchman's asleep again, I reckon, go down and
call Brown yourself, unreal mockery, hence!


He certainly was a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and
stormy and tragic, but it was a damage to me, because I have
never since been able to read Shakespeare in a calm and sane way.
I cannot rid it of his explosive interlardings, they break in
everywhere with their irrelevant, "What in hell are you up to
NOW! pull her down! more! MORE!--there now, steady as you go,"
and the other disorganizing interruptions that were always
leaping from his mouth.  When I read Shakespeare now I can hear
them as plainly as I did in that long-departed time--fifty-one
years ago.  I never regarded Ealer's readings as educational.
Indeed, they were a detriment to me.

His contributions to the text seldom improved it, but
barring that detail he was a good reader; I can say that much for
him.  He did not use the book, and did not need to; he knew his
Shakespeare as well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication table.

Did he have something to say--this Shakespeare-adoring
Mississippi pilot--anent Delia Bacon's book?

Yes.  And he said it; said it all the time, for months--in
the morning watch, the middle watch, and dog watch; and probably
kept it going in his sleep.  He bought the literature of the
dispute as fast as it appeared, and we discussed it all through
thirteen hundred miles of river four times traversed in every
thirty-five days--the time required by that swift boat to achieve
two round trips.  We discussed, and discussed, and discussed, and
disputed and disputed and disputed; at any rate, HE did, and I
got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog and there was a
vacancy.  He did his arguing with heat, with energy, with
violence; and I did mine with the reverse and moderation of a
subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot-house
and is perched forty feet above the water.  He was fiercely loyal
to Shakespeare and cordially scornful of Bacon and of all the
pretensions of the Baconians.  So was I--at first.  And at first
he was glad that that was my attitude.  There were even
indications that he admired it; indications dimmed, it is true,
by the distance that lay between the lofty boss-pilotical
altitude and my lowly one, yet perceptible to me; perceptible,
and translatable into a compliment--compliment coming down from
about the snow-line and not well thawed in the transit, and not
likely to set anything afire, not even a cub-pilot's self-
conceit; still a detectable complement, and precious.

Naturally it flattered me into being more loyal to Shakespeare--
if possible--than I was before, and more prejudiced against
Bacon--if possible--that I was before.  And so we discussed
and discussed, both on the same side, and were happy.
For a while.  Only for a while.  Only for a very little while,
a very, very, very little while.  Then the atmosphere began
to change; began to cool off.

A brighter person would have seen what the trouble was,
earlier than I did, perhaps, but I saw it early enough for all
practical purposes.  You see, he was of an argumentative
disposition.  Therefore it took him but a little time to get
tired of arguing with a person who agreed with everything he said
and consequently never furnished him a provocative to flare up
and show what he could do when it came to clear, cold, hard,
rose-cut, hundred-faceted, diamond-flashing REASONING.  That was
his name for it.  It has been applied since, with complacency, as
many as several times, in the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle.  On the
Shakespeare side.

Then the thing happened which has happened to more persons
than to me when principle and personal interest found themselves
in opposition to each other and a choice had to be made:  I let
principle go, and went over to the other side.  Not the entire
way, but far enough to answer the requirements of the case.  That
is to say, I took this attitude--to wit, I only BELIEVED Bacon
wrote Shakespeare, whereas I KNEW Shakespeare didn't.  Ealer was
satisfied with that, and the war broke loose.  Study, practice,
experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me
to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later,
utterly seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully,
devotedly; finally:  fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly.  After
that I was welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die
for it, and I looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn
upon everybody else's faith that didn't tally with mine.  That
faith, imposed upon me by self-interest in that ancient day,
remains my faith today, and in it I find comfort, solace, peace,
and never-failing joy.  You see how curiously theological it is.
The "rice Christian" of the Orient goes through the very same
steps, when he is after rice and the missionary is after HIM; he
goes for rice, and remains to worship.

Ealer did a lot of our "reasoning"--not to say substantially
all of it.  The slaves of his cult have a passion for calling it
by that large name.  We others do not call our inductions and
deductions and reductions by any name at all.  They show for
themselves what they are, and we can with tranquil confidence
leave the world to ennoble them with a title of its own choosing.

Now and then when Ealer had to stop to cough, I pulled my
induction-talents together and hove the controversial lead
myself:  always getting eight feet, eight and a half, often nine,
sometimes even quarter-less-twain--as _I_ believed; but always
"no bottom," as HE said.

I got the best of him only once.  I prepared myself.  I
wrote out a passage from Shakespeare--it may have been the very
one I quoted awhile ago, I don't remember--and riddled it with
his wild steamboatful interlardings.  When an unrisky opportunity
offered, one lovely summer day, when we had sounded and buoyed a
tangled patch of crossings known as Hell's Half Acre, and were
aboard again and he had sneaked the PENNSYLVANIA triumphantly
through it without once scraping sand, and the A. T. LACEY had
followed in our wake and got stuck, and he was feeling good, I
showed it to him.  It amused him.  I asked him to fire it off--
READ it; read it, I diplomatically added, as only HE could read
dramatic poetry.  The compliment touched him where he lived.  He
did read it; read it with surpassing fire and spirit; read it as
it will never be read again; for HE know how to put the right
music into those thunderous interlardings and make them seem a
part of the text, make them sound as if they were bursting from
Shakespeare's own soul, each one of them a golden inspiration and
not to be left out without damage to the massed and magnificent
whole.

I waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer;
waited until he brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet
position, my pet argument, the one which I was fondest of, the
one which I prized far above all others in my ammunition-wagon--
to wit, that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's
words, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly
familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings,
and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways--and if Shakespeare was
possessed of the infinitely divided star-dust that constituted
this vast wealth, HOW did he get it, and WHERE and WHEN?

"From books."

From books!  That was always the idea.  I answered as my
readings of the champions of my side of the great controversy had
taught me to answer:  that a man can't handle glibly and easily
and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he
has not personally served.  He will make mistakes; he will not,
and cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right;
and the moment he departs, by even a shade, from a common trade-
form, the reader who has served that trade will know the writer
HASN'T.  Ealer would not be convinced; he said a man could learn
how to correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and free-
masonries of ANY trade by careful reading and studying.  But when
I got him to read again the passage from Shakespeare with the
interlardings, he perceived, himself, that books couldn't teach a
student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly
and perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or
conversation and make no mistake that a pilot would not
immediately discover.  It was a triumph for me.  He was silent
awhile, and I knew what was happening--he was losing his temper.
And I knew he would presently close the session with the same old
argument that was always his stay and his support in time of
need; the same old argument, the one I couldn't answer, because I
dasn't--the argument that I was an ass, and better shut up.  He
delivered it, and I obeyed.

O dear, how long ago it was--how pathetically long ago!  And
here am I, old, forsaken, forlorn, and alone, arranging to get
that argument out of somebody again.

When a man has a passion for Shakespeare, it goes without
saying that he keeps company with other standard authors.  Ealer
always had several high-class books in the pilot-house, and he
read the same ones over and over again, and did not care to
change to newer and fresher ones.  He played well on the flute,
and greatly enjoyed hearing himself play.  So did I.  He had a
notion that a flute would keep its health better if you took it
apart when it was not standing a watch; and so, when it was not
on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the compass-shelf under
the breastboard.  When the PENNSYLVANIA blew up and became a
drifting rack-heap freighted with wounded and dying poor souls
(my young brother Henry among them), pilot Brown had the watch
below, and was probably asleep and never knew what killed him;
but Ealer escaped unhurt.  He and his pilot-house were shot up
into the air; then they fell, and Ealer sank through the ragged
cavern where the hurricane-deck and the boiler-deck had been, and
landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on top of one of the
unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of scald and
deadly steam.  But not for long.  He did not lose his head--long
familiarity with danger had taught him to keep it, in any and all
emergencies.  He held his coat-lapels to his nose with one hand,
to keep out the steam, and scrabbled around with the other till
he found the joints of his flute, then he took measures to save
himself alive, and was successful.  I was not on board.  I had
been put ashore in New Orleans by Captain Klinenfelter.  The
reason--however, I have told all about it in the book called OLD
TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI, and it isn't important, anyway, it is
so long ago.


II

When I was a Sunday-school scholar, something more than
sixty years ago, I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find
out all I could about him.  I began to ask questions, but my
class-teacher, Mr. Barclay, the stone-mason, was reluctant about
answering them, it seemed to me.  I was anxious to be praised for
turning my thoughts to serious subjects when there wasn't another
boy in the village who could be hired to do such a thing.  I was
greatly interested in the incident of Eve and the serpent, and
thought Eve's calmness was perfectly noble.  I asked Mr. Barclay
if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a
serpeant, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest
timber.  He did not answer my question, but rebuked me for
inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension.  I will
say for Mr. Barclay that he was willing to tell me the facts of
Satan's history, but he stopped there:  he wouldn't allow any
discussion of them.

In the course of time we exhausted the facts.  There were
only five or six of them; you could set them all down on a
visiting-card.  I was disappointed.  I had been meditating a
biography, and was grieved to find that there were no materials.
I said as much, with the tears running down.  Mr. Barclay's
sympathy and compassion were aroused, for he was a most kind and
gentle-spirited man, and he patted me on the head and cheered me
up by saying there was a whole vast ocean of materials!  I can
still feel the happy thrill which these blessed words shot
through me.

Then he began to bail out that ocean's riches for my
encouragement  and joy.  Like this:  it was "conjectured"--though
not established--that Satan was originally an angel in Heaven;
that he fell; that he rebelled, and brought on a war; that he was
defeated, and banished to perdition.  Also, "we have reason to
believe" that later he did so and so; that "we are warranted in
supposing" that at a subsequent time he traveled extensively,
seeking whom he might devour; that a couple of centuries
afterward, "as tradition instructs us," he took up the cruel
trade of tempting people to their ruin, with vast and fearful
results; that by and by, "as the probabilities seem to indicate,"
he may have done certain things, he might have done certain other
things, he must have done still other things.

And so on and so on.  We set down the five known facts by
themselves on a piece of paper, and numbered it "page 1"; then on
fifteen hundred other pieces of paper we set down the
"conjectures," and "suppositions," and "maybes," and "perhapses,"
and "doubtlesses," and "rumors," and guesses," and
"probabilities," and "likelihoods," and "we are permitted to
thinks," and "we are warranted in believings," and "might have
beens," and "could have beens," and "must have beens," and
"unquestionablys," and "without a shadow of doubt"--and behold!

MATERIALS?  Why, we had enough to build a biography of Shakespeare!

Yet he made me put away my pen; he would not let me write
the history of Satan.  Why?  Because, as he said, he had
suspicions--suspicions that my attitude in the matter was not
reverent, and that a person must be reverent when writing about
the sacred characters.  He said any one who spoke flippantly of
Satan would be frowned upon by the religious world and also be
brought to account.

I assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had
wholly misconceived my attitude; that I had the highest respect
for Satan, and that my reverence for him equaled, and possibly
even exceeded, that of any member of the church.  I said it
wounded me deeply to perceive by his words that he thought I
would make fun of Satan, and deride him, laugh at him, scoff at
him; whereas in truth I had never thought of such a thing, but
had only a warm desire to make fun of those others and laugh at
THEM.  "What others?  "Why, the Supposers, the Perhapsers, the
Might-Have-Beeners, the Could-Have-Beeners, the Must-Have-Beeners,
the Without-a-Shadow-of-Doubters, the We-Are-Warranted-in-Believingers,
and all that funny crop of solemn architects who have taken a
good solid foundation of five indisputable and unimportant facts
and built upon it a Conjectural Satan thirty miles high."

What did Mr. Barclay do then?  Was he disarmed?  Was he
silenced?  No.  He was shocked.  He was so shocked that he
visibly shuddered.  He said the Satanic Traditioners and
Perhapsers and Conjecturers were THEMSELVES sacred!  As sacred as
their work.  So sacred that whoso ventured to mock them or make
fun of their work, could not afterward enter any respectable
house, even by the back door.

How true were his words, and how wise!  How fortunate it
would have been for me if I had heeded them.  But I was young, I
was but seven years of age, and vain, foolish, and anxious to
attract attention.  I wrote the biography, and have never been in
a respectable house since.


III

How curious and interesting is the parallel--as far as
poverty of biographical details is concerned--between Satan and
Shakespeare.  It is wonderful, it is unique, it stands quite
alone, there is nothing resembling it in history, nothing
resembling it in romance, nothing approaching it even in
tradition.  How sublime is their position, and how over-topping,
how sky-reaching, how supreme--the two Great Unknowns, the two
Illustrious Conjecturabilities!  They are the best-known unknown
persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet.

For the instruction of the ignorant I will make a list, now,
of those details of Shakespeare's history which are FACTS--
verified facts, established facts, undisputed facts.



Facts

He was born on the 23d of April, 1564.

Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not
write, could not sign their names.

At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was
shabby and unclean, and densely illiterate.  Of the nineteen
important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen
had to "make their mark" in attesting important documents,
because they could not write their names.

Of the first eighteen years of his life NOTHING is known.
They are a blank.

On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out
a license to marry Anne Whateley.

Next day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry
Anne Hathaway.  She was eight years his senior.

William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway.  In a hurry.  By
grace of a reluctantly granted dispensation there was but one
publication of the banns.

Within six months the first child was born.

About two (blank) years followed, during which period
NOTHING AT ALL HAPPENED TO SHAKESPEARE, so far as anybody knows.

Then came twins--1585.  February.

Two blank years follow.

Then--1587--he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family behind.

Five blank years follow.  During this period NOTHING
HAPPENED TO HIM, as far as anybody actually knows.

Then--1592--there is mention of him as an actor.

Next year--1593--his name appears in the official list of players.

Next year--1594--he played before the queen.  A detail of no
consequence:  other obscurities did it every year of the forty-
five of her reign.  And remained obscure.

Three pretty full years follow.  Full of play-acting.  Then*

In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford.

Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he
accumulated money, and also reputation as actor and manager.

 Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had
become associated with a number of great plays and poems, as
(ostensibly) author of the same.

Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but
he made no protest.

Then--1610-11--he returned to Stratford and settled down for
good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in
tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one
shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his
family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued
himself for shillings and coppers; and acting as confederate to a
neighbor who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain
common, and did not succeed.

He lived five or six years--till 1616--in the joy of these
elevated pursuits.  Then he made a will, and signed each of its
three pages with his name.

A thoroughgoing business man's will.  It named in minute
detail every item of property he owned in the world--houses,
lands, sword, silver-gilt bowl, and so on--all the way down to
his "second-best bed" and its furniture.

It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among
the members of his family, overlooking no individual of it.  Not
even his wife:  the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry
by urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen;
the wife whom he had left husbandless so many years; the wife who
had had to borrow forty-one shillings in her need, and which the
lender was never able to collect of the prosperous husband, but
died at last with the money still lacking.  No, even this wife
was remembered in Shakespeare's will.

He left her that "second-best bed."

And NOT ANOTHER THING; not even a penny to bless her lucky
widowhood with.

It was eminently and conspicuously a business man's will,
not a poet's.

It mentioned NOT A SINGLE BOOK.

Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt
bowls and second-best beds in those days, and when a departing
person owned one he gave it a high place in his will.

The will mentioned NOT A PLAY, NOT A POEM, NOT AN UNFINISHED
LITERARY WORK, NOT A SCRAP OF MANUSCRIPT OF ANY KIND.

Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in
history that has died THIS poor; the others all left literary
remains behind.  Also a book.  Maybe two.

If Shakespeare had owned a dog--but we not go into that:  we
know he would have mentioned it in his will.  If a good dog,
Susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have
got a downer interest in it.  I wish he had had a dog, just so we
could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among
the family, in his careful business way.

He signed the will in three places.

In earlier years he signed two other official documents.

These five signatures still exist.

There are NO OTHER SPECIMENS OF HIS PENMANSHIP IN EXISTENCE.
Not a line.

Was he prejudiced against the art?  His granddaughter, whom
he loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no
teaching, he left no provision for her education, although he was
rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't
tell her husband's manuscript from anybody else's--she thought it
was Shakespeare's.

When Shakespeare died in Stratford, IT WAS NOT AN EVENT.  It
made no more stir in England than the death of any other
forgotten theater-actor would have made.  Nobody came down from
London; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national
tears--there was merely silence, and nothing more.  A striking
contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon,
and Spenser, and Raleigh, and the other distinguished literary
folk of Shakespeare's time passed from life!  No praiseful voice
was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited
seven years before he lifted his.

SO FAR AS ANYBODY ACTUALLY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare
of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.


SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS, HE RECEIVED ONLY ONE LETTER
DURING HIS LIFE.

So far as any one KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of
Stratford wrote only one poem during his life.  This one is
authentic.  He did write that one--a fact which stands
undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote the whole of it
out of his own head.  He commanded that this work of art be
engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed.  There it abides to
this day.  This is it:


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.


In the list as above set down will be found EVERY POSITIVELY
KNOWN fact of Shakespeare's life, lean and meager as the invoice
is.  Beyond these details we know NOT A THING about him.  All the
rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is
built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories,
conjectures--an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high
from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential
facts.


IV

Conjectures

The historians "suppose" that Shakespeare attended the Free
School in Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he
was thirteen.  There is no EVIDENCE in existence that he ever
went to school at all.

The historians "infer" that he got his Latin in that school
--the school which they "suppose" he attended.

They "suppose" his father's declining fortunes made it
necessary for him to leave the school they supposed he attended,
and get to work and help support his parents and their ten
children.  But there is no evidence that he ever entered or
returned from the school they suppose he attended.

They "suppose" he assisted his father in the butchering
business; and that, being only a boy, he didn't have to do full-
grown butchering, but only slaughtering calves.  Also, that
whenever he killed a calf he made a high-flown speech over it.
This supposition rests upon the testimony of a man who wasn't
there at the time; a man who got it from a man who could have
been there, but did not say whether he was nor not; and neither
of them thought to mention it for decades, and decades, and
decades, and two more decades after Shakespeare's death (until
old age and mental decay had refreshed and vivified their
memories).  They hadn't two facts in stock about the long-dead
distinguished citizen, but only just the one:  he slaughtered
calves and broke into oratory while he was at it.  Curious.  They
had only one fact, yet the distinguished citizen had spent
twenty-six years in that little town--just half his lifetime.
However, rightly viewed, it was the most important fact, indeed
almost the only important fact, of Shakespeare's life in
Stratford.  Rightly viewed.  For experience is an author's most
valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and
the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.  Rightly
viewed, calf-butchering accounts for "Titus Andronicus," the only
play--ain't it?--that the Stratford Shakespeare ever wrote; and
yet it is the only one everybody tried to chouse him out of, the
Baconians included.

The historians find themselves "justified in believing" that
the young Shakespeare poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy's deer preserves
and got haled before that magistrate for it.  But there is no shred
of respectworthy evidence that anything of the kind happened.

The historians, having argued the thing that MIGHT have
happened into the thing that DID happen, found no trouble in
turning Sir Thomas Lucy into Mr. Justice Shallow.  They have long
ago convinced the world--on surmise and without trustworthy
evidence--that Shallow IS Sir Thomas.

The next addition to the young Shakespeare's Stratford
history comes easy.  The historian builds it out of the surmised
deer-steeling, and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and
the surmised vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the
play:  result, the young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh,
SUCH a wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is
established for all time!  It is the very way Professor Osborn
and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-
seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural History
Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest
skeleton that exists on the planet.  We had nine bones, and we
built the rest of him out of plaster of Paris.  We ran short of
plaster of Paris, or we'd have built a brontosaur that could sit
down beside the Stratford Shakespeare and none but an expert
could tell which was biggest or contained the most plaster.

Shakespeare pronounced "Venus and Adonis" "the first heir of
his invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort
at literary composition.  He should not have said it.  It has
been an embarrassment to his historians these many, many years.
They have to make him write that graceful and polished and
flawless and beautiful poem before he escaped from Stratford and
his family--1586 or '87--age, twenty-two, or along there; because
within the next five years he wrote five great plays, and could
not have found time to write another line.

It is sorely embarrassing.  If he began to slaughter calves,
and poach deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the
earliest likely moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably
wretched from that school where he was supposably storing up
Latin for future literary use--he had his youthful hands full,
and much more than full.  He must have had to put aside his
Warwickshire dialect, which wouldn't be understood in London, and
study English very hard.  Very hard indeed; incredibly hard,
almost, if the result of that labor was to be the smooth and
rounded and flexible and letter-perfect English of the "Venus and
Adonis" in the space of ten years; and at the same time learn
great and fine and unsurpassable literary FORM.

However, it is "conjectured" that he accomplished all this
and more, much more:  learned law and its intricacies; and the
complex procedure of the law-courts; and all about soldiering,
and sailoring, and the manners and customs and ways of royal
courts and aristocratic society; and likewise accumulated in his
one head every kind of knowledge the learned then possessed, and
every kind of humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the
ignorant; and added thereto a wider and more intimate knowledge
of the world's great literatures, ancient and modern, than was
possessed by any other man of his time--for he was going to make
brilliant and easy and admiration-compelling use of these
splendid treasures the moment he got to London.  And according to
the surmisers, that is what he did.  Yes, although there was no
one in Stratford able to teach him these things, and no library in
the little village to dig them out of.  His father could not read,
and even the surmisers surmise that he did not keep a library.

It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare
got his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate
acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of
lawyers through being for a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT;
just as a bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of
the Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Bering
Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercises
of that adventure-bristling trade through catching catfish with a
"trot-line" Sundays.  But the surmise is damaged by the fact that
there is no evidence--and not even tradition--that the young
Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law-court.

It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare
accumulated his law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn
in London, through "amusing himself" by learning book-law in his
garret and by picking up lawyer-talk and the rest of it through
loitering about the law-courts and listening.  But it is only
surmise; there is no EVIDENCE that he ever did either of those
things.  They are merely a couple of chunks of plaster of Paris.

There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by
holding horses in front of the London theaters, mornings and
afternoons.  Maybe he did.  If he did, it seriously shortened his
law-study hours and his recreation-time in the courts.  In those
very days he was writing great plays, and needed all the time he
could get.  The horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it
too formidably increases the historian's difficulty in accounting
for the young Shakespeare's erudition--an erudition which he was
acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk, every day in those
strenuous times, and emptying each day's catch into next day's
imperishable drama.

He had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a
knowledge of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and
talk; also a knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages:
for he was daily emptying fluent streams of these various knowledges,
too, into his dramas.  How did he acquire these rich assets?

In the usual way:  by surmise.  It is SURMISED that he
traveled in Italy and Germany and around, and qualified himself
to put their scenic and social aspects upon paper; that he
perfected himself in French, Italian, and Spanish on the road;
that he went in Leicester's expedition to the Low Countries, as
soldier or sutler or something, for several months or years--or
whatever length of time a surmiser needs in his business--and
thus became familiar with soldiership and soldier-ways and
soldier-talk and generalship and general-ways and general-talk,
and seamanship and sailor-ways and sailor-talk.

Maybe he did all these things, but I would like to know who
held the horses in the mean time; and who studied the books in
the garret; and who frolicked in the law-courts for recreation.
Also, who did the call-boying and the play-acting.

For he became a call-boy; and as early as '93 he became a
"vagabond"--the law's ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in
'94 a "regular" and properly and officially listed member of that
(in those days) lightly valued and not much respected profession.

Right soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two
theaters, and manager of them.  Thenceforward he was a busy and
flourishing business man, and was raking in money with both hands
for twenty years.  Then in a noble frenzy of poetic inspiration
he wrote his one poem--his only poem, his darling--and laid him
down and died:


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.


He was probably dead when he wrote it.  Still, this is only
conjecture.  We have only circumstantial evidence.  Internal
evidence.

Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which
constitute the giant Biography of William Shakespeare?  It would
strain the Unabridged Dictionary to hold them.  He is a
brontosaur:  nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of
Paris.



 V

"We May Assume"

In the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults
are transacting business.  Two of these cults are known as the
Shakespearites and the Baconians, and I am the other one--the
Brontosaurian.

The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's
Works; the Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the
Brontosaurian doesn't really know which of them did it, but is
quite composedly and contentedly sure that Shakespeare DIDN'T,
and strongly suspects that Bacon DID.  We all have to do a good
deal of assuming, but I am fairly certain that in every case I
can call to mind the Baconian assumers have come out ahead of the
Shakespearites.  Both parties handle the same materials, but the
Baconians seem to me to get much more reasonable and rational and
persuasive results out of them than is the case with the
Shakespearites.  The Shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a
definite principle, an unchanging and immutable law:  which is:
2 and 8 and 7 and 14, added together, make 165.  I believe this
to be an error.  No matter, you cannot get a habit-sodden
Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials upon any other basis.
With the Baconian it is different.  If you place before him the
above figures and set him to adding them up, he will never in any
case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine cases out of ten
he will get just the proper 31.

Let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and
homely way calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the
ignorant and unintelligent.  We will suppose a case:  take a lap-
bred, house-fed, uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged
old Tom that's scarred from stem to rudder-post with the
memorials of strenuous experience, and is so cultured, so
educated, so limitlessly erudite that one may say of him "all
cat-knowledge is his province"; also, take a mouse.  Lock the
three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless prison-cell.  Wait
half an hour, then open the cell, introduce a Shakespearite and a
Baconian, and let them cipher and assume.  The mouse is missing:
the question to be decided is, where is it?  You can guess both
verdicts beforehand.  One verdict will say the kitten contains
the mouse; the other will as certainly say the mouse is in the
tom-cat.

The Shakespearite will Reason like this--(that is not my
word, it is his).  He will say the kitten MAY HAVE BEEN attending
school when nobody was noticing; therefore WE ARE WARRANTED IN
ASSUMING that it did so; also, it COULD HAVE BEEN training in a
court-clerk's office when no one was noticing; since that could
have happened, WE ARE JUSTIFIED IN ASSUMING that it did happen;
it COULD HAVE STUDIED CATOLOGY IN A GARRET when no one was
noticing--therefore it DID; it COULD HAVE attended cat-assizes on
the shed-roof nights, for recreation, when no one was noticing,
and have harvested a knowledge of cat court-forms and cat lawyer-
talk in that way:  it COULD have done it, therefore without a
doubt it DID; it COULD HAVE gone soldiering with a war-tribe when
no one was noticing, and learned soldier-wiles and soldier-ways,
and what to do with a mouse when opportunity offers; the plain
inference, therefore, is that that is what it DID.  Since all
these manifold things COULD have occurred, we have EVERY RIGHT TO
BELIEVE they did occur.  These patiently and painstakingly
accumulated vast acquirements and competences needed but one
thing more--opportunity--to convert themselves into triumphal
action.  The opportunity came, we have the result; BEYOND SHADOW
OF QUESTION the mouse is in the kitten.

It is proper to remark that when we of the three cults plant
a "WE THINK WE MAY ASSUME," we expect it, under careful watering
and fertilizing and tending, to grow up into a strong and hardy
and weather-defying "THERE ISN'T A SHADOW OF A DOUBT" at last--
and it usually happens.

We know what the Baconian's verdict would be:  "THERE IS NOT
A RAG OF EVIDENCE THAT THE KITTEN HAS HAD ANY TRAINING, ANY
EDUCATION, ANY EXPERIENCE QUALIFYING IT FOR THE PRESENT OCCASION,
OR IS INDEED EQUIPPED FOR ANY ACHIEVEMENT ABOVE LIFTING SUCH
UNCLAIMED MILK AS COMES ITS WAY; BUT THERE IS ABUNDANT EVIDENCE--
UNASSAILABLE PROOF, IN FACT--THAT THE OTHER ANIMAL IS EQUIPPED,
TO THE LAST DETAIL, WITH EVERY QUALIFICATION NECESSARY FOR THE
EVENT.  WITHOUT SHADOW OF DOUBT THE TOM-CAT CONTAINS THE MOUSE."


VI

When Shakespeare died, in 1616, great literary productions
attributed to him as author had been before the London world and
in high favor for twenty-four years.  Yet his death was not an
event.  It made no stir, it attracted no attention.  Apparently
his eminent literary contemporaries did not realize that a
celebrated poet had passed from their midst.  Perhaps they knew a
play-actor of minor rank had disappeared, but did not regard him
as the author of his Works.  "We are justified in assuming" this.

His death was not even an event in the little town of
Stratford.  Does this mean that in Stratford he was not regarded
as a celebrity of ANY kind?

"We are privileged to assume"--no, we are indeed OBLIGED to
assume--that such was the case.  He had spent the first twenty-
two or twenty-three years of his life there, and of course knew
everybody and was known by everybody of that day in the town,
including the dogs and the cats and the horses.  He had spent the
last five or six years of his life there, diligently trading in
every big and little thing that had money in it; so we are
compelled to assume that many of the folk there in those said
latter days knew him personally, and the rest by sight and
hearsay.  But not as a CELEBRITY?  Apparently not.  For everybody
soon forgot to remember any contact with him or any incident
connected with him.  The dozens of townspeople, still alive, who
had known of him or known about him in the first twenty-three
years of his life were in the same unremembering condition:  if
they knew of any incident connected with that period of his life
they didn't tell about it.  Would the if they had been asked?  It
is most likely.  Were they asked?  It is pretty apparent that
they were not.  Why weren't they?  It is a very plausible guess
that nobody there or elsewhere was interested to know.

For seven years after Shakespeare's death nobody seems to have been
interested in him.  Then the quarto was published, and Ben Jonson
awoke out of his long indifference and sang a song of praise and
put it in the front of the book.  Then silence fell AGAIN.

For sixty years.  Then inquiries into Shakespeare's Stratford
life began to be made, of Stratfordians.  Of Stratfordians
who had known Shakespeare or had seen him?  No.  Then of
Stratfordians who had seen people who had known or seen
people who had seen Shakespeare?  No.  Apparently the inquires
were only made of Stratfordians who were not Stratfordians of
Shakespeare's day, but later comers; and what they had learned
had come to them from persons who had not seen Shakespeare; and
what they had learned was not claimed as FACT, but only as legend--
dim and fading and indefinite legend; legend of the calf-slaughtering
rank, and not worth remembering either as history or fiction.

Has it ever happened before--or since--that a celebrated
person who had spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the
village where he was born and reared, was able to slip out of
this world and leave that village voiceless and gossipless behind
him--utterly voiceless., utterly gossipless?  And permanently so?
I don't believe it has happened in any case except Shakespeare's.
And couldn't and wouldn't have happened in his case if he had
been regarded as a celebrity at the time of his death.

When I examine my own case--but let us do that, and see if
it will not be recognizable as exhibiting a condition of things
quite likely to result, most likely to result, indeed
substantially SURE to result in the case of a celebrated person,
a benefactor of the human race.  Like me.

My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri,
on the banks of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years
old.  I entered school at five years of age, and drifted from one
school to another in the village during nine and a half years.
Then my father died, leaving his family in exceedingly straitened
circumstances; wherefore my book-education came to a standstill
forever, and I became a printer's apprentice, on board and
clothes, and when the clothes failed I got a hymn-book in place
of them.  This for summer wear, probably.  I lived in Hannibal
fifteen and a half years, altogether, then ran away, according to
the custom of persons who are intending to become celebrated.  I
never lived there afterward.  Four years later I became a "cub"
on a Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans
trade, and after a year and a half of hard study and hard work
the U.S. inspectors rigorously examined me through a couple of
long sittings and decided that I knew every inch of the
Mississippi--thirteen hundred miles--in the dark and in the day--
as well as a baby knows the way to its mother's paps day or
night.  So they licensed me as a pilot--knighted me, so to speak
--and I rose up clothed with authority, a responsible servant of
the United States Government.

Now then.  Shakespeare died young--he was only fifty-two.
He had lived in his native village twenty-six years, or about
that.  He died celebrated (if you believe everything you read in
the books).  Yet when he died nobody there or elsewhere took any
notice of it; and for sixty years afterward no townsman
remembered to say anything about him or about his life in
Stratford.  When the inquirer came at last he got but one fact--
no, LEGEND--and got that one at second hand, from a person who
had only heard it as a rumor and didn't claim copyright in it as
a production of his own.  He couldn't, very well, for its date
antedated his own birth-date.  But necessarily a number of
persons were still alive in Stratford who, in the days of their
youth, had seen Shakespeare nearly every day in the last five
years of his life, and they would have been able to tell that
inquirer some first-hand things about him if he had in those last
days been a celebrity and therefore a person of interest to the
villagers.  Why did not the inquirer hunt them up and interview
them?  Wasn't it worth while?  Wasn't the matter of sufficient
consequence?  Had the inquirer an engagement to see a dog-fight
and couldn't spare the time?

It all seems to mean that he never had any literary celebrity,
there or elsewhere, and no considerable repute as actor and manager.

Now then, I am away along in life--my seventy-third year
being already well behind me--yet SIXTEEN of my Hannibal
schoolmates are still alive today, and can tell--and do tell--
inquirers dozens and dozens of incidents of their young lives and
mine together; things that happened to us in the morning of life,
in the blossom of our youth, in the good days, the dear days,
"the days when we went gipsying, a long time ago."  Most of them
creditable to me, too.  One child to whom I paid court when she
was five years old and I eight still lives in Hannibal, and she
visited me last summer, traversing the necessary ten or twelve
hundred miles of railroad without damage to her patience or to
her old-young vigor.  Another little lassie to whom I paid
attention in Hannibal when she was nine years old and I the same,
is still alive--in London--and hale and hearty, just as I am.
And on the few surviving steamboats--those lingering ghosts and
remembrancers of great fleets that plied the big river in the
beginning of my water-career--which is exactly as long ago as the
whole invoice of the life-years of Shakespeare numbers--there are
still findable two or three river-pilots who saw me do creditable
things in those ancient days; and several white-headed engineers;
and several roustabouts and mates; and several deck-hands who
used to heave the lead for me and send up on the still night the
"Six--feet--SCANT!" that made me shudder, and the "M-a-r-k--
TWAIN!" that took the shudder away, and presently the darling "By
the d-e-e-p--FOUR!" that lifted me to heaven for joy. [1]  They
know about me, and can tell.  And so do printers, from St. Louis
to New York; and so do newspaper reporters, from Nevada to San
Francisco.  And so do the police.  If Shakespeare had really been
celebrated, like me, Stratford could have told things about him;
and if my experience goes for anything, they'd have done it.

------
1.  Four fathoms--twenty-four feet.


VII

If I had under my superintendence a controversy appointed to
decide whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or not, I believe
I would place before the debaters only the one question,
WAS SHAKESPEARE EVER A PRACTICING LAWYER? and leave everything
else out.

It is maintained that the man who wrote the plays was not
merely myriad-minded, but also myriad-accomplished:  that he not
only knew some thousands of things about human life in all its
shades and grades, and about the hundred arts and trades and
crafts and professions which men busy themselves in, but that he
could TALK about the men and their grades and trades accurately,
making no mistakes.  Maybe it is so, but have the experts spoken,
or is it only Tom, Dick, and Harry?  Does the exhibit stand upon
wide, and loose, and eloquent generalizing--which is not
evidence, and not proof--or upon details, particulars,
statistics, illustrations, demonstrations?

Experts of unchallengeable authority have testified
definitely as to only one of Shakespeare's multifarious craft-
equipments, so far as my recollections of Shakespeare-Bacon talk
abide with me--his law-equipment.  I do not remember that
Wellington or Napoleon ever examined Shakespeare's battles and
sieges and strategies, and then decided and established for good
and all that they were militarily flawless; I do not remember
that any Nelson, or Drake, or Cook ever examined his seamanship
and said it showed profound and accurate familiarity with that
art; I don't remember that any king or prince or duke has ever
testified that Shakespeare was letter-perfect in his handling of
royal court-manners and the talk and manners of aristocracies; I
don't remember that any illustrious Latinist or Grecian or
Frenchman or Spaniard or Italian has proclaimed him a past-master
in those languages; I don't remember--well, I don't remember that
there is TESTIMONY--great testimony--imposing testimony--
unanswerable and unattackable testimony as to any of
Shakespeare's hundred specialties, except one--the law.

Other things change, with time, and the student cannot trace
back with certainty the changes that various trades and their
processes and technicalities have undergone in the long stretch
of a century or two and find out what their processes and
technicalities were in those early days, but with the law it is
different:  it is mile-stoned and documented all the way back,
and the master of that wonderful trade, that complex and
intricate trade, that awe-compelling trade, has competent ways of
knowing whether Shakespeare-law is good law or not; and whether
his law-court procedure is correct or not, and whether his legal
shop-talk is the shop-talk of a veteran practitioner or only a
machine-made counterfeit of it gathered from books and from
occasional loiterings in Westminster.

Richard H. Dana served two years before the mast, and had
every experience that falls to the lot of the sailor before the
mast of our day.  His sailor-talk flows from his pen with the
sure touch and the ease and confidence of a person who has LIVED
what he is talking about, not gathered it from books and random
listenings.  Hear him:


Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt
of each sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the
word the whole canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the
greatest rapidity possible everything was sheeted home and
hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under
headway.


Again:


The royal yards were all crossed at once, and royals and
sky-sails set, and, as we had the wind free, the booms were run
out, and all were aloft, active as cats, laying out on the yards
and booms, reeving the studding-sail gear; and sail after sail
the captain piled upon her, until she was covered with canvas,
her sails looking like a great white cloud resting upon a black
speck.


Once more.  A race in the Pacific:


Our antagonist was in her best trim.  Being clear of the
point, the breeze became stiff, and the royal-masts bent under
our sails, but we would not take them in until we saw three boys
spring into the rigging of the CALIFORNIA; then they were all
furled at once, but with orders to our boys to stay aloft at the
top-gallant mast-heads and loose them again at the word.  It was
my duty to furl the fore-royal; and while standing by to loose it
again, I had a fine view of the scene.  From where I stood, the
two vessels seemed nothing but spars and sails, while their
narrow decks, far below, slanting over by the force of the wind
aloft, appeared hardly capable of supporting the great fabrics
raised upon them.  The CALIFORNIA was to windward of us, and had
every advantage; yet, while the breeze was stiff we held our own.
As soon as it began to slacken she ranged a little ahead, and the
order was given to loose the royals.  In an instant the gaskets
were off and the bunt dropped.  "Sheet home the fore-royal!"--
"Weather sheet's home!"--"Lee sheet's home!"--"Hoist away, sir!"
is bawled from aloft.  "Overhaul your clew-lines!" shouts the
mate.  "Aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"Taut leech! belay!  Well the
lee brace; haul taut to windward!" and the royals are set.


What would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say
to that?  He would say, "The man that wrote that didn't learn his
trade out of a book, he has BEEN there!"  But would this same
captain be competent to sit in judgment upon Shakespeare's
seamanship--considering the changes in ships and ship-talk that
have necessarily taken place, unrecorded, unremembered, and lost
to history in the last three hundred years?  It is my conviction
that Shakespeare's sailor-talk would be Choctaw to him.  For
instance--from "The Tempest":


MASTER.  Boatswain!

BOATSWAIN.  Here, master; what cheer?

MASTER.  Good, speak to the mariners:  fall to 't, yarely,
or we run ourselves to ground; bestir, bestir!
(ENTER MARINERS.)

BOATSWAIN.  Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts!
yare, yare!  Take in the topsail.  Tend to the master's whistle.
. . .  Down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower!  Bring her to
try wi' the main course. . . .  Lay her a-hold, a-hold!  Set her
two courses.  Off to sea again; lay her off.

That will do, for the present; let us yare a little, now,
for a change.


If a man should write a book and in it make one of his
characters say, "Here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing
galley and the imposing-stone into the hell-box; assemble the
comps around the frisket and let them jeff for takes and be quick
about it," I should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing,
and would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically,
not practically.

I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty
hard life; I know all the palaver of that business:  I know all
about discovery claims and the subordinate claims; I know all
about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts,
drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay
casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries;
arastras, and how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of
copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting
amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs;
and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt
for something less robust to do, and find it.  I know the argot
and the quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly; and so
whenever Bret Harte introduces that industry into a story, the
first time one of his miners opens his mouth I recognize from his
phrasing that Harte got the phrasing by listening--like
Shakespeare--I mean the Stratford one--not by experience.  No one
can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with
pick and shovel and drill and fuse.

I have been a surface miner--gold--and I know all its
mysteries, and the dialects that belongs with them; and whenever
Harte introduces that industry into a story I know by the
phrasing of his characters that neither he nor they have ever
served that trade.

I have been a "pocket" miner--a sort of gold mining not
findable in any but one little spot in the world, so far as I
know.  I know how, with horn and water, to find the trail of a
pocket and trace it step by step and stage by stage up the
mountain to its source, and find the compact little nest of
yellow metal reposing in its secret home under the ground.  I
know the language of that trade, that capricious trade, that
fascinating buried-treasure trade, and can catch any writer who
tries to use it without having learned it by the sweat of his
brow and the labor of his hands.

I know several other trades and the argot that goes with
them; and whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to
any of them without having learned it at its source I can trap
him always before he gets far on his road.

And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to
superintend a Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the
matter down to a single question--the only one, so far as the
previous controversies have informed me, concerning which
illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified:
WAS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS A LAWYER?--a lawyer deeply
read and of limitless experience?  I would put aside the guesses
and surmises, and perhapes, and might-have-beens, and could-have-
beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are-justified-in-presumings,
and the rest of those vague specters and shadows and
indefintenesses, and stand or fall, win or lose, by the verdict
rendered by the jury upon that single question.  If the verdict
was Yes, I should feel quite convinced that the Stratford
Shakespeare, the actor, manager, and trader who died so obscure,
so forgotten, so destitute of even village consequence, that
sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen and friend of his later
days remembered to tell anything about him, did not write the Works.

Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED bears the
heading "Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages
of expert testimony, with comments thereon, and I will copy the
first nine, as being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to
me, to settle the question which I have conceived to be the
master-key to the Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.



VIII

Shakespeare as a Lawyer [1]


The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply ample evidence
that their author not only had a very extensive and accurate
knowledge of law, but that he was well acquainted with the
manners and customs of members of the Inns of Court and with
legal life generally.

"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making
mistakes as to the laws of marriage, of wills, of inheritance, to
Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither
be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error."  Such
was the testimony borne by one of the most distinguished lawyers
of the nineteenth century who was raised to the high office of
Lord Chief Justice in 1850, and subsequently became Lord
Chancellor.  Its weight will, doubtless, be more appreciated by
lawyers than by laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it
is for those who have not served an apprenticeship to the law to
avoid displaying their ignorance if they venture to employ legal
terms and to discuss legal doctrines.  "There is nothing so
dangerous," wrote Lord Campbell, "as for one not of the craft to
tamper with our freemasonry."  A layman is certain to betray
himself by using some expression which a lawyer would never
employ.  Mr. Sidney Lee himself supplies us with an example of
this.  He writes (p. 164):  "On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare .
. . obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the
payment of No. 6, and No. 1, 5s. 0d. costs."  Now a lawyer would
never have spoken of obtaining "judgment from a jury," for it is
the function of a jury not to deliver judgment (which is the
prerogative of the court), but to find a verdict on the facts.
The error is, indeed, a venial one, but it is just one of those
little things which at once enable a lawyer to know if the writer
is a layman or "one of the craft."

But when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal
subjects, he is naturally apt to make an exhibition of his
incompetence.  "Let a non-professional man, however acute,"
writes Lord Campbell again, "presume to talk law, or to draw
illustrations from legal science in discussing other subjects,
and he will speedily fall into laughable absurdity."

And what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare?
He had "a deep technical knowledge of the law," and an easy
familiarity with "some of the most abstruse proceedings in
English jurisprudence."  And again:  "Whenever he indulges this
propensity he uniformly lays down good law."  Of "Henry IV.,"
Part 2, he says: "If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written
the play, I do not see how he could be chargeable with having
forgotten any of his law while writing it."  Charles and Mary
Cowden Clarke speak of "the marvelous intimacy which he displays
with legal terms, his frequent adoption of them in illustration,
and his curiously technical knowledge of their form and force."
Malone, himself a lawyer, wrote:  "His knowledge of legal terms
is not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation
of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of
technical skill."  Another lawyer and well-known Shakespearean,
Richard Grant White, says:  "No dramatist of the time, not even
Beaumont, who was the younger son of a judge of the Common Pleas,
and who after studying in the Inns of Court abandoned law for the
drama, used legal phrases with Shakespeare's readiness and
exactness.  And the significance of this fact is heightened by
another, that is only to the language of the law that he exhibits
this inclination.  The phrases peculiar to other occupations
serve him on rare occasions by way of description, comparison, or
illustration, generally when something in the scene suggests
them, but legal phrases flow from his pen as part of his
vocabulary and parcel of his thought.  Take the word 'purchase'
for instance, which, in ordinary use, means to acquire by giving
value, but applies in law to all legal modes of obtaining
property except by inheritance or descent, and in this peculiar
sense the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-four
plays, and only in one single instance in the fifty-four plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher.  It has been suggested that it was in
attendance upon the courts in London that he picked up his legal
vocabulary.  But this supposition not only fails to account for
Shakespeare's peculiar freedom and exactness in the use of that
phraseology, it does not even place him in the way of learning
those terms his use of which is most remarkable, which are not
such as he would have heard at ordinary proceedings at NISI
PRIUS, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real
property, 'fine and recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,'
'indenture,' 'tenure,' 'double voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fee
farm,' 'remainder,' 'reversion,' 'forfeiture,' etc. This
conveyancer's jargon could not have been picked up by hanging
round the courts of law in London two hundred and fifty years
ago, when suits as to the title of real property were
comparatively rare.  And besides, Shakespeare uses his law just
as freely in his first plays, written in his first London years,
as in those produced at a later period.  Just as exactly, too;
for the correctness and propriety with which these terms are
introduced have compelled the admiration of a Chief Justice and a
Lord Chancellor."

Senator Davis wrote:  "We seem to have something more than a
sciolist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar
art.  No legal solecisms will be found.  The abstrusest elements
of the common law are impressed into a disciplined service.  Over
and over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers
unlearned in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession
of it.  In the law of real property, its rules of tenure and
descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries, their vouchers
and double vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the method
of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules
of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in the
principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the
distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the
law of attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites of a valid
marriage, in the presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of
the law of prerogative, in the inalienable character of the
Crown, this mastership appears with surprising authority."

To all this testimony (and there is much more which I have
not cited) may now be added that of a great lawyer of our own
times, VIZ.:  Sir James Plaisted Wilde, Q.C. 1855, created a
Baron of the Exchequer in 1860, promoted to the post of Judge-
Ordinary and Judge of the Courts of Probate and Divorce in 1863,
and better known to the world as Lord Penzance, to which dignity
he was raised in 1869.  Lord Penzance, as all lawyers know, and
as the late Mr. Inderwick, K.C., has testified, was one of the
first legal authorities of his day, famous for his "remarkable
grasp of legal principles," and "endowed by nature with a
remarkable facility for marshaling facts, and for a clear
expression of his views."

Lord Penzance speaks of Shakespeare's "perfect familiarity
with not only the principles, axioms, and maxims, but the
technicalities of English law, a knowledge so perfect and
intimate that he was never incorrect and never at fault. . . .
The mode in which this knowledge was pressed into service on all
occasions to express his meaning and illustrate his thoughts was
quite unexampled.  He seems to have had a special pleasure in his
complete and ready mastership of it in all its branches.  As
manifested in the plays, this legal knowledge and learning had
therefore a special character which places it on a wholly
different footing from the rest of the multifarious knowledge
which is exhibited in page after page of the plays.  At every
turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile,
or illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law.  He seems
almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases, the commonest of legal
expressions were ever at the end of his pen in description or
illustration.  That he should have descanted in lawyer language
when he had a forensic subject in hand, such as Shylock's bond,
was to be expected, but the knowledge of law in 'Shakespeare' was
exhibited in a far different manner:  it protruded itself on all
occasions, appropriate or inappropriate, and mingled itself with
strains of thought widely divergent from forensic subjects."
Again:  "To acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles,
and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms and phrases
not only of the conveyancer's office, but of the pleader's
chambers and the Courts at Westminster, nothing short of
employment in some career involving constant contact with legal
questions and general legal work would be requisite.  But a
continuous employment involves the element of time, and time was
just what the manager of two theaters had not at his disposal.
In what portion of Shakespeare's (i.e., Shakspere's) career would
it be possible to point out that time could be found for the
interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of
practicing lawyers?"

Stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some
possible explanation of Shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of
law, have made the suggestion that Shakespeare might,
conceivably, have been a clerk in an attorney's office before he
came to London.  Mr. Collier wrote to Lord Campbell to ask his
opinion as to the probability of this being true.  His answer was
as follows:  "You require us to believe implicitly a fact, of
which, if true, positive and irrefragable evidence in his own
handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it.  Not
having been actually enrolled as an attorney, neither the records
of the local court at Stratford nor of the superior Court at
Westminster would present his name as being concerned in any suit
as an attorney, but it might reasonably have been expected that
there would be deeds or wills witnessed by him still extant, and
after a very diligent search none such can be discovered."

Upon this Lord Penzance commends:  "It cannot be doubted
that Lord Campbell was right in this.  No young man could have
been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon
continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving
traces of his work and name."  There is not a single fact or
incident in all that is known of Shakespeare, even by rumor or
tradition, which supports this notion of a clerkship.  And after
much argument and surmise which has been indulged in on this subject,
we may, I think, safely put the notion on one side, for no less
an authority than Mr. Grant White says finally that the idea of
his having been clerk to an attorney has been "blown to pieces."

It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that
he, nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth.  "That Shakespeare
was in early life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office may
be correct.  At Stratford there was by royal charter a Court of
Record sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys, besides the
town clerk, belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining
probability to suppose that the young Shakespeare may have had
employment in one of them.  There is, it is true, no tradition to
this effect, but such traditions as we have about Shakespeare's
occupation between the time of leaving school and going to London
are so loose and baseless that no confidence can be placed in
them.  It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an
attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a
high style,' and making speeches over them."

This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument.  There
is, as we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a
butcher's apprentice.  John Dowdall, who made a tour of
Warwickshire in 1693, testifies to it as coming from the old
clerk who showed him over the church, and it is unhesitatingly
accepted as true by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps.  (Vol. I, p. 11, and
Vol. II, pp. 71, 72.)  Mr. Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in
it, and it is supported by Aubrey, who must have written his
account some time before 1680, when his manuscript was completed.
Of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on the other hand, there is
not the faintest vestige of a tradition.  It has been evolved out
of the fertile imaginations of embarrassed Stratfordians, seeking
for some explanation of the Stratford rustic's marvelous
acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life.  But Mr.
Churton Collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the
tradition which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in
its stead this ridiculous invention, for which not only is there
no shred of positive evidence, but which, as Lord Campbell and
Lord Penzance pointed out, is really put out of court by the
negative evidence, since "no young man could have been at work in
an attorney's office without being called upon continually to act
as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work
and name."  And as Mr. Edwards further points out, since the day
when Lord Campbell's book was published (between forty and fifty
years ago), "every old deed or will, to say nothing of other
legal papers, dated during the period of William Shakespeare's
youth, has been scrutinized over half a dozen shires, and not one
signature of the young man has been found."

Moreover, if Shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's
office it is clear that he must have served for a considerable
period in order to have gained (if, indeed, it is credible that
he could have so gained) his remarkable knowledge of the law.
Can we then for a moment believe that, if this had been so,
tradition would have been absolutely silent on the matter?
That Dowdall's old clerk, over eighty years of age,
should have never heard of it (though he was sure enough
about the butcher's apprentice) and that all the other
ancient witnesses should be in similar ignorance!

But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy.
Tradition is to be scouted when it is found inconvenient, but
cited as irrefragable truth when it suits the case.  Shakespeare
of Stratford was the author of the Plays and Poems, but the
author of the Plays and Poems could not have been a butcher's
apprentice.  Anyway, therefore, with tradition.  But the author
of the Plays and Poems MUST have had a very large and a very
accurate knowledge of the law.  Therefore, Shakespeare of
Stratford must have been an attorney's clerk!  The method is
simplicity itself.  By similar reasoning Shakespeare has been
made a country schoolmaster, a soldier, a physician, a printer,
and a good many other things besides, according to the
inclination and the exigencies of the commentator.  It would not
be in the least surprising to find that he was studying Latin as
a schoolmaster and law in an attorney's office at the same time.

However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that
he has fully recognized, what is indeed tolerable obvious, that
Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training.  "It may, of
course, be urged," he writes, "that Shakespeare's knowledge of
medicine, and particularly that branch of it which related to
morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that no one has
ever contended that he was a physician.  (Here Mr. Collins is
wrong; that contention also has been put forward.)  It may be
urged that his acquaintance with the technicalities of other
crafts and callings, notably of marine and military affairs, was
also extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of being a
sailor or a soldier.  (Wrong again.  Why, even Messrs. Garnett
and Gosse "suspect" that he was a soldier!)  This may be
conceded, but the concession hardly furnishes an analogy.  To
these and all other subjects he recurs occasionally, and in
season, but with reminiscences of the law his memory, as is
abundantly clear, was simply saturated.  In season and out of
season now in manifest, now in recondite application, he presses
it into the service of expression and illustration.  At least a
third of his myriad metaphors are derived from it.  It would
indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas,
nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of
which are not colored by it.  Much of his law may have been
acquired from three books easily accessible to him--namely,
Tottell's PRECEDENTS (1572), Pulton's STATUTES (1578), and
Fraunce's LAWIER'S LOGIKE (1588), works with which he certainly
seems to have been familiar; but much of it could only have come
from one who had an intimate acquaintance with legal proceedings.
We quite agree with Mr. Castle that Shakespeare's legal knowledge
is not what could have been picked up in an attorney's office,
but could only have been learned by an actual attendance at the
Courts, at a Pleader's Chambers, and on circuit, or by
associating intimately with members of the Bench and Bar."

This is excellent.  But what is Mr. Collins's explanation?
"Perhaps the simplest solution of the problem is to accept the
hypothesis that in early life he was in an attorney's office (!),
that he there contracted a love for the law which never left him,
that as a young man in London he continued to study or dabble in
it for his amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the Courts,
and to frequent the society of lawyers.  On no other supposition
is it possible to explain the attraction which the law evidently
had for him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in a subject
where no layman who has indulged in such copious and ostentatious
display of legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in keeping
himself from tripping."

A lame conclusion.  "No other supposition" indeed! Yes,
there is another, and a very obvious supposition--namely, that
Shakespeare was himself a lawyer, well versed in his trade,
versed in all the ways of the courts, and living in close
intimacy with judges and members of the Inns of Court.

One is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated
the fact that Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training,
but I may be forgiven if I do not attach quite so much importance
to his pronouncements on this branch of the subject as to those
of Malone, Lord Campbell, Judge Holmes, Mr. Castle, K.C., Lord
Penzance, Mr. Grant White, and other lawyers, who have expressed
their opinion on the matter of Shakespeare's legal acquirements.
. . .

Here it may, perhaps, be worth while to quote again from
Lord Penzance's book as to the suggestion that Shakespeare had
somehow or other managed "to acquire a perfect familiarity with
legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical
terms and phrases, not only of the conveyancer's office, but of
the pleader's chambers and the Courts at Westminster."  This, as
Lord Penzance points out, "would require nothing short of
employment in some career involving CONSTANT CONTACT with legal
questions and general legal work."  But "in what portion of
Shakespeare's career would it be possible to point out that time
could be found for the interposition of a legal employment in the
chambers or offices of practicing lawyers? . . .  It is beyond
doubt that at an early period he was called upon to abandon his
attendance at school and assist his father, and was soon after,
at the age of sixteen, bound apprentice to a trade.  While under
the obligation of this bond he could not have pursued any other
employment.  Then he leaves Stratford and comes to London.  He
has to provide himself with the means of a livelihood, and this
he did in some capacity at the theater.  No one doubt that.  The
holding of horses is scouted by many, and perhaps with justice,
as being unlikely and certainly unproved; but whatever the nature
of his employment was at the theater, there is hardly room for
the belief that it could have been other than continuous, for his
progress there was so rapid.  Ere long he had been taken into the
company as an actor, and was soon spoken of as a "Johannes
Factotum.'  His rapid accumulation of wealth speaks volumes for
the constancy and activity of his services.  One fails to see
when there could be a break in the current of his life at this
period of it, giving room or opportunity for legal or indeed any
other employment.  'In 1589,' says Knight, 'we have undeniable
evidence that he had not only a casual engagement, was not only a
salaried servant, as may players were, but was a shareholder in
the company of the Queen's players with other shareholders below
him on the list.'  This (1589) would be within two years after
his arrival in London, which is placed by White and Halliwell-
Phillipps about the year 1587.  The difficulty in supposing that,
starting with a state of ignorance in 1587, when he is supposed
to have come to London, he was induced to enter upon a course of
most extended study and mental culture, is almost insuperable.
Still it was physically possible, provided always that he could
have had access to the needful books.  But this legal training
seems to me to stand on a different footing.  It is not only
unaccountable and incredible, but it is actually negatived by the
known facts of his career."  Lord Penzance then refers to the
fact that "by 1592 (according to the best authority, Mr. Grant
White) several of the plays had been written.  'The Comedy of
Errors' in 1589, 'Love's Labour's Lost' in 1589, 'Two Gentlemen
of Verona' in 1589 or 1590," and so forth, and then asks, "with
this catalogue of dramatic work on hand . . . was it possible
that he could have taken a leading part in the management and
conduct of two theaters, and if Mr. Phillipps is to be relied
upon, taken his share in the performances of the provincial tours
of his company--and at the same time devoted himself to the study
of the law in all its branches so efficiently as to make himself
complete master of its principles and practice, and saturate his
mind with all its most technical terms?"

I have cited this passage from Lord Penzance's book, because
it lay before me, and I had already quoted from it on the matter
of Shakespeare's legal knowledge; but other writers have still
better set forth the insuperable difficulties, as they seem to
me, which beset the idea that Shakespeare might have found them
in some unknown period of early life, amid multifarious other
occupations, for the study of classics, literature, and law, to
say nothing of languages and a few other matters.  Lord Penzance
further asks his readers:  "Did you ever meet with or hear of an
instance in which a young man in this country gave himself up to
legal studies and engaged in legal employments, which is the only
way of becoming familiar with the technicalities of practice, unless
with the view of practicing in that profession?  I do not believe
that it would be easy, or indeed possible, to produce an instance
in which the law has been seriously studied in all its branches,
except as a qualification for practice in the legal profession."


This testimony is so strong, so direct, so authoritative;
and so uncheapened, unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and
maybe-so's, and might-have-beens, and could-have-beens, and must-
have-beens, and the rest of that ton of plaster of Paris out of
which the biographers have built the colossal brontosaur which
goes by the Stratford actor's name, that it quite convinces me
that the man who wrote Shakespeare's Works knew all about law and
lawyers.  Also, that that man could not have been the Stratford
Shakespeare--and WASN'T.

Who did write these Works, then?

I wish I knew.

-----
1.  From Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED.
By George G. Greenwood, M.P.  John Lane Company, publishers.


IX

Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Works?  Nobody knows.

We cannot say we KNOW a thing when that thing has not been
proved.  KNOW is too strong a word to use when the evidence is
not final and absolutely conclusive.  We can infer, if we want
to, like those slaves. . . .  No, I will not write that word,
it is not kind, it is not courteous.  The upholders of the
Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call US the hardest names they
can think of, and they keep doing it all the time; very well,
if they like to descend to that level, let them do it, but I
will not so undignify myself as to follow them.  I cannot call
them harsh names; the most I can do is to indicate them by terms
reflecting my disapproval; and this without malice, without venom.

To resume.  What I was about to say was, those thugs have built
their entire superstition upon INFERENCES, not upon known and
established facts.  It is a weak method, and poor, and I am
glad to be able to say our side never resorts to it while there
is anything else to resort to.

But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a
place of that sort. . . .  Since the Stratford Shakespeare
couldn't have written the Works, we infer that somebody did.
Who was it, then?  This requires some more inferring.

Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent
like a tidal wave whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of
admiration, delight, and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up
and claim the authorship.  Why a dozen, instead of only one or
two?  One reason is, because there are a dozen that are
recognizably competent to do that poem.  Do you remember
"Beautiful Snow"?  Do you remember "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,
Rock Me to Sleep"?  Do you remember "Backward, turn, backward, O
Time, in thy flight!  Make me a child again just for tonight"?  I
remember them very well.  Their authorship was claimed by most of
the grown-up people who were alive at the time, and every
claimant had one plausible argument in his favor, at least--to
wit, he could have done the authoring; he was competent.

Have the Works been claimed by a dozen?  They haven't.
There was good reason.  The world knows there was but one man on
the planet at the time who was competent--not a dozen, and not
two.  A long time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and
then to find a procession of prodigious footprints stretching
across the plain--footprints that were three miles apart, each
footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong deep, and with
forests and villages mashed to mush in it.  Was there any doubt
as to who made that mighty trail?  Were there a dozen claimants?
Where there two?  No--the people knew who it was that had been
along there:  there was only one Hercules.

There has been only one Shakespeare.  There couldn't be two;
certainly there couldn't be two at the same time.  It takes ages
to bring forth a Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him.
This one was not matched before his time; nor during his time;
and hasn't been matched since.  The prospect of matching him in
our time is not bright.

The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not
qualified to write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was.
They claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment--both
natural and acquired--for the miracle; and that no other
Englishman of his day possessed the like; or, indeed,
anything closely approaching it.

Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor
and horizonless magnitude of that equipment.  Also, he has
synopsized Bacon's history--a thing which cannot be done for the
Stratford Shakespeare, for he hasn't any history to synopsize.
Bacon's history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his
death in old age--a history consisting of known facts, displayed
in minute and multitudinous detail; FACTS, not guesses and
conjectures and might-have-beens.

Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen,
and had a Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was
"distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian:  she
corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated his
APOLOGIA from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor
Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration."  It is the
atmosphere we are reared in that determines how our inclinations
and aspirations shall tend.  The atmosphere furnished by the
parents to the son in this present case was an atmosphere
saturated with learning; with thinkings and ponderings upon deep
subjects; and with polite culture.  It had its natural effect.
Shakespeare of Stratford was reared in a house which had no use
for books, since its owners, his parents, were without education.
This may have had an effect upon the son, but we do not know,
because we have no history of him of an informing sort.  There
were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do
and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to
the dead languages.  "All the valuable books then extant in all
the vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a
single shelf"--imagine it!  The few existing books were in the
Latin tongue mainly.  "A person who was ignorant of it was shut
out from all acquaintance--not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but
with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of
his own time"--a literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for
his fictitious reputation's sake, since the writer of his Works
would begin to use it wholesale and in a most masterly way before
the lad was hardly more than out of his teens and into his
twenties.

At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent
three years there.  Thence he went to Paris in the train of the
English Ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the
cultured, the great, and the aristocracy of fashion, during
another three years.  A total of six years spent at the sources
of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of men.  The three
spent at the university were coeval with the second and last
three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school
supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with
nothing to infer from.  The second three of the Baconian six were
"presumably" spent by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a
butcher.  That is, the thugs presume it--on no evidence of any
kind.  Which is their way, when they want a historical fact.
Fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the same to
them.  They know the difference, but they also know how to blink
it.  They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is
better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to
bloom into a fact when THEY have the handling of it.  They know
by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-
tadpole he is not going to STAY tadpole in their history-tank;
no, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged
bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on his hams, and puff out
his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; and
assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a thundering
bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud.
The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where
reasoning convinces but one.  I wouldn't be a thug, not even if--
but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the argument,
and it is not noble in spirit besides.  If I am better than a thug,
is the merit mine?  No, it is His.  Then to Him be the praise.
That is the right spirit.

They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection
with the Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher.
They also "presume" that the butcher was his father.  They don't
know.  There is no written record of it, nor any other actual
evidence.  If it would have helped their case any, they would
have apprenticed him to thirty butchers, to fifty butchers, to a
wilderness of butchers--all by their patented method "presumption."
If it will help their case they will do it yet; and if it will
further help it, they will "presume" that all those butchers
were his father.  And the week after, they will SAY it.
Why, it is just like being the past tense of the compound
reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic irregular
accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the expression
which the grammarians call Verb.  It is like a whole ancestry,
with only one posterity.

To resume.  Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law,
and mastered that abstruse science.  From that day to the end of
his life he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges;
not as a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in
front of a theater, but as a practicing lawyer--a great and
successful one, a renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most
formidable lance in the high brotherhood of the legal Table
Round; he lived in the law's atmosphere thenceforth, all his
years, and by sheer ability forced his way up its difficult
steeps to its supremest summit, the Lord-Chancellorship, leaving
behind him no fellow-craftsman qualified to challenge his divine
right to that majestic place.

When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the
other illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal
aptnesses, brilliances, profundities, and felicities so
prodigally displayed in the Plays, and try to fit them to the
historyless Stratford stage-manager, they sound wild, strange,
incredible, ludicrous; but when we put them in the mouth of Bacon
they do not sound strange, they seem in their natural and
rightful place, they seem at home there.  Please turn back and
read them again.  Attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford they are
meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies--intemperate
admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak; attributed
to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of the
moon's front side, the moon at the full--and not intemperate, not
overwrought, but sane and right, and justified.  "At ever turn
and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile, or
illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law; he seems
almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases; the commonest legal
phrases, the commonest of legal expressions, were ever at the end
of his pen."  That could happen to no one but a person whose
TRADE was the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it.
Veteran mariners fill their conversation with sailor-phrases and
draw all their similes from the ship and the sea and the storm,
but no mere PASSENGER ever does it, be he of Stratford or
elsewhere; or could do it with anything resembling accuracy, if
he were hardy enough to try.  Please read again what Lord
Campbell and the other great authorities have said about Bacon
when they thought they were saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford.



X

The Rest of the Equipment


The author of the Plays was equipped, beyond every other man
of his time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness
of mind, grace, and majesty of expression.  Everyone one had said
it, no one doubts it.  Also, he had humor, humor in rich
abundance, and always wanting to break out.  We have no evidence
of any kind that Shakespeare of Stratford possessed any of these
gifts or any of these acquirements.  The only lines he ever
wrote, so far as we know, are substantially barren of them--
barren of all of them.


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.
Ben Jonson says of Bacon, as orator:


His language, WHERE HE COULD SPARE AND PASS BY A JEST, was
nobly censorious.  No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly,
more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in
what he uttered.  No member of his speech but consisted of his
(its) own graces. . . .  The fear of every man that heard him was
lest he should make an end.


From Macaulay:


He continued to distinguish himself in Parliament,
particularly by his exertions in favor of one excellent measure
on which the King's heart was set--the union of England and
Scotland.  It was not difficult for such an intellect to discover
many irresistible arguments in favor of such a scheme.  He
conducted the great case of the POST NATI in the Exchequer
Chamber; and the decision of the judges--a decision the legality
of which may be questioned, but the beneficial effect of which
must be acknowledged--was in a great measure attributed to his
dexterous management.


Again:


While actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts
of law, he still found leisure for letters and philosophy.
The noble treatise on the ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, which at a
later period was expanded into the DE AUGMENTIS, appeared in 1605.

The WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS, a work which, if it had
proceeded from any other writer, would have been considered as a
masterpiece of wit and learning, was printed in 1609.

In the mean time the NOVUM ORGANUM was slowly proceeding.
Several distinguished men of learning had been permitted to see
portions of that extraordinary book, and they spoke with the
greatest admiration of his genius.

Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusing the COGITATA ET VISA,
one of the most precious of those scattered leaves out of which
the great oracular volume was afterward made up, acknowledged
that "in all proposals and plots in that book, Bacon showed
himself a master workman"; and that "it could not be gainsaid but
all the treatise over did abound with choice conceits of the
present state of learning, and with worthy contemplations of the
means to procure it."

In 1612 a new edition of the ESSAYS appeared, with additions
surpassing the original collection both in bulk and quality.

Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon's attention from a
work the most arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful
that even his mighty powers could have achieved, "the reducing
and recompiling," to use his own phrase, "of the laws of England."


To serve the exacting and laborious offices of Attorney-General
and Solicitor-General would have satisfied the appetite of any
other man for hard work, but Bacon had to add the vast literary
industries just described, to satisfy his.  He was a born worker.


The service which he rendered to letters during the last
five years of his life, amid ten thousand distractions and
vexations, increase the regret with which we think on the many
years which he had wasted, to use the words of Sir Thomas Bodley,
"on such study as was not worthy such a student."

He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a History of
England under the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of
National History, a Philosophical Romance.  He made extensive and
valuable additions to his Essays.  He published the inestimable
TREATISE DE AUGMENTIS SCIENTIARUM.


Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment,
and quiet his appetite for work?  Not entirely:


The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor
bore the mark of his mind.  THE BEST JEST-BOOK IN THE WORLD is that
which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book,
on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.


Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw
light upon Bacon, and seem to indicate--and maybe demonstrate--
that he was competent to write the Plays and Poems:


With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of comprehension
such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other human being.


The ESSAYS contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of
character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden,
or a court-masque, could escape the notice of one whose mind was
capable of taking in the whole world of knowledge.


His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy
Paribanou gave to Prince Ahmed:  fold it, and it seemed a toy for
the hand of a lady; spread it, and the armies of the powerful
Sultans might repose beneath its shade.


The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge
of the mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.


In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle,
Lord Burleigh, he said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province."


Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic,
he adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric.


The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like
his wit, so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his
reason and to tyrannize over the whole man.


There are too many places in the Plays where this happens.
Poor old dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his
own name, is a pathetic instance of it.  "We may assume" that it is
Bacon's fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.


No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly
subjugated.  It stopped at the first check from good sense.


In truth, much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world--
amid things as strange as any that are described in the ARABIAN TALES
. . . amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin,
fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade,
conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more
formidable than the lance of Astolfo, remedies more effacious
than the balsam of Fierabras.  Yet in his magnificent day-dreams
there was nothing wild--nothing but what sober reason sanctioned.


Bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the NOVUM
ORGANUM. . . .  Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit
which is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth.  No book
ever made so great a revolution in the mode of thinking,
overthrew so may prejudices, introduced so many new opinions.


But what we most admire is the vast capacity of that
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,
not reluctantly, but rather gladly, for we are privately afraid
we should find, upon examination that the jewels are of the sort
that are manufactured at North Adams, Mass.

I haven't any idea that Shakespeare will have to vacate his
pedestal this side of the year 2209.  Disbelief in him cannot
come swiftly, disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby
has never been known to disintegrate swiftly; it is a very slow
process.  It took several thousand years to convince our fine
race--including every splendid intellect in it--that there is no
such thing as a witch; it has taken several thousand years to
convince the same fine race--including every splendid intellect
in it--that there is no such person as Satan; it has taken
several centuries to remove perdition from the Protestant
Church's program of post-mortem entertainments; it has taken a
weary long time to persuade American Presbyterians to give up
infant damnation and try to bear it the best they can; and it
looks as if their Scotch brethren will still be burning babies in
the everlasting fires when Shakespeare comes down from his perch.

We are The Reasoning Race.  We can't prove it by the above
examples, and we can't prove it by the miraculous "histories"
built by those Stratfordolaters out of a hatful of rags and a
barrel of sawdust, but there is a plenty of other things we can
prove it by, if I could think of them.  We are The Reasoning
Race, and when we find a vague file of chipmunk-tracks stringing
through the dust of Stratford village, we know by our reasoning
bowers that Hercules has been along there.  I feel that our
fetish is safe for three centuries yet.  The bust, too--there in
the Stratford Church.  The precious bust, the priceless bust, the
calm bust, the serene bust, the emotionless bust, with the dandy
mustache, and the putty face, unseamed of care--that face which
has looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred
and fifty years and will still look down upon the awed pilgrim
three hundred more, with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle,
subtle expression of a bladder.




XII


Irreverence

One of the most trying defects which I find in these--these
--what shall I call them? for I will not apply injurious epithets
to them, the way they do to us, such violations of courtesy being
repugnant to my nature and my dignity.  The farthest I can go in
that direction is to call them by names of limited reverence--
names merely descriptive, never unkind, never offensive, never
tainted by harsh feeling.  If THEY would do like this, they would
feel better in their hearts.  Very well, then--to proceed.  One
of the most trying defects which I find in these
Stratfordolaters, these Shakesperiods, these thugs, these
bangalores, these troglodytes, these herumfrodites, these
blatherskites, these buccaneers, these bandoleers, is their
spirit of irreverence.  It is detectable in every utterance of
theirs when they are talking about us.  I am thankful that in me
there is nothing of that spirit.  When a thing is sacred to me it
is impossible for me to be irreverent toward it.  I cannot call
to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent,
except towards the things which were sacred to other people.  Am
I in the right?  I think so.  But I ask no one to take my
unsupported word; no, look at the dictionary; let the dictionary
decide.  Here is the definition:


IRREVERENCE.  The quality or condition of irreverence toward
God and sacred things.


What does the Hindu say?  He says it is correct.  He says
irreverence is lack of respect for Vishnu, and Brahma, and
Chrishna, and his other gods, and for his sacred cattle, and for
his temples and the things within them.  He endorses the
definition, you see; and there are 300,000,000 Hindus or their
equivalents back of him.

The dictionary had the acute idea that by using the capital
G it could restrict irreverence to lack of reverence for OUR
Deity and our sacred things, but that ingenious and rather sly
idea miscarried:  for by the simple process of spelling HIS
deities with capitals the Hindu confiscates the definition and
restricts it to his own sects, thus making it clearly compulsory
upon us to revere HIS gods and HIS sacred things, and nobody's
else.  We can't say a word, for he had our own dictionary at his
back, and its decision is final.

This law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this:
1. Whatever is sacred to the Christian must be held in reverence by
everybody else; 2.  whatever is sacred to the Hindu must be held
in reverence by everybody else; 3.  therefore, by consequence,
logically, and indisputably, whatever is sacred to ME must be
held in reverence by everybody else.

Now then, what aggravates me is that these troglodytes and
muscovites and bandoleers and buccaneers are ALSO trying to crowd
in and share the benefit of the law, and compel everybody to
revere their Shakespeare and hold him sacred.  We can't have
that:  there's enough of us already.  If you go on widening and
spreading and inflating the privilege, it will presently come to
be conceded that each man's sacred things are the ONLY ones, and
the rest of the human race will have to be humbly reverent toward
them or suffer for it.  That can surely happen, and when it
happens, the word Irreverence will be regarded as the most
meaningless, and foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and
impudent, and dictatorial word in the language.  And people will
say, "Whose business is it what gods I worship and what things
hold sacred?  Who has the right to dictate to my conscience, and
where did he get that right?"

We cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us.  We must
save the word from this destruction.  There is but one way to do
it, and that is to stop the spread of the privilege and strictly
confine it to its present limits--that is, to all the Christian
sects, to all the Hindu sects, and me.  We do not need any more,
the stock is watered enough, just as it is.

It would be better if the privilege were limited to me
alone.  I think so because I am the only sect that knows how to
employ it gently, kindly, charitably, dispassionately.  The other
sects lack the quality of self-restraint.  The Catholic Church
says the most irreverent things about matters which are sacred to
the Protestants, and the Protestant Church retorts in kind about
the confessional and other matters which Catholics hold sacred;
then both of these irreverencers turn upon Thomas Paine and
charge HIM with irreverence.  This is all unfortunate, because it
makes it difficult for students equipped with only a low grade of
mentality to find out what Irreverence really IS.

It will surely be much better all around if the privilege of
regulating the irreverent and keeping them in order shall
eventually be withdrawn from all the sects but me.  Then there
will be no more quarreling, no more bandying of disrespectful
epithets, no more heartburnings.

There will then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-
Shakespeare controversy except what is sacred to me.  That will
simplify the whole matter, and trouble will cease.  There will be
irreverence no longer, because I will not allow it.  The first
time those criminals charge me with irreverence for calling their
Stratford myth an Arthur-Orton-Mary-Baker-Thompson-Eddy-Louis-
the-Seventeenth-Veiled-Prophet-of-Khorassan will be the last.
Taught by the methods found effective in extinguishing earlier
offenders by the Inquisition, of holy memory, I shall know how to
quiet them.



XIII


Isn't it odd, when you think of it, that you may list all
the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern
times, clear back to the first Tudors--a list containing five
hundred names, shall we say?--and you can go to the histories,
biographies, and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the
lives of every one of them.  Every one of them except one--the
most famous, the most renowned--by far the most illustrious of
them all--Shakespeare!  You can get the details of the lives of
all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated
tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges,
lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors,
inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers,
prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys,
bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land
and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists,
claimants, impostors, chemists, biologists, geologists,
philologists, college presidents and professors, architects,
engineers, painters, sculptors, politicians, agitators, rebels,
revolutionists, patriots, demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks,
philosophers, burglars, highwaymen, journalists, physicians,
surgeons--you can get the life-histories of all of them but ONE.
Just ONE--the most extraordinary and the most celebrated of them all--
Shakespeare!

You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons
furnished by the rest of Christendom in the past four centuries,
and you can find out the life-histories of all those people, too.
You will then have listed fifteen hundred celebrities, and you
can trace the authentic life-histories of the whole of them.
Save one--far and away the most colossal prodigy of the entire
accumulation--Shakespeare!  About him you can find out NOTHING.
Nothing of even the slightest importance.  Nothing worth the
trouble of stowing away in your memory.  Nothing that even
remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a
distinctly commonplace person--a manager, an actor of inferior
grade, a small trader in a small village that did not regard him
as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten all about him
before he was fairly cold in his grave.  We can go to the records
and find out the life-history of every renowned RACE-HORSE of
modern times--but not Shakespeare's!  There are many reasons why,
and they have been furnished in cart-loads (of guess and
conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth
all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly
sufficient all by itself--HE HADN'T ANY HISTORY TO RECORD.  There
is no way of getting around that deadly fact.  And no sane way
has yet been discovered of getting around its formidable
significance.

Its quite plain significance--to any but those thugs (I do
not use the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence
while he lived, and none until he had been dead two or three
generations.  The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and
if he wrote them it seems a pity the world did not find it out.
He ought to have explained that he was the author, and not merely
a NOM DE PLUME for another man to hide behind.  If he had been
less intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more
solicitous about his Works, it would have been better for his
good name, and a kindness to us.  The bones were not important.
They will moulder away, they will turn to dust, but the Works
will endure until the last sun goes down.



Mark Twain.


P.S.  MARCH 25.  About two months ago I was illuminating
this Autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, and I then took occasion to air
the opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no
public consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was
utterly obscure and unimportant.  And not only in great London,
but also in the little village where he was born, where he lived
a quarter of a century, and where he died and was buried.  I
argued that if he had been a person of any note at all, aged
villagers would have had much to tell about him many and many a
year after his death, instead of being unable to furnish
inquirers a single fact connected with him.  I believed, and I
still believe, that if he had been famous, his notoriety would
have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my native village out
in Missouri.  It is a good argument, a prodigiously strong one,
and most formidable one for even the most gifted and ingenious
and plausible Stratfordolator to get around or explain away.
Today a Hannibal COURIER-POST of recent date has reached me, with
an article in it which reinforces my contention that a really
celebrated person cannot be forgotten in his village in the short
space of sixty years.  I will make an extract from it:


Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but
ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men
she has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son, Mark
Twain, or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him,
grows in the estimation and regard of the residents of the town
he made famous and the town that made him famous.  His name is
associated with every old building that is torn down to make way
for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and
with every hill or cave over or through which he might by any
possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest which
he wove into his stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson's Island,
or Mark Twain Cave, are now monuments to his genius.  Hannibal is
glad of any opportunity to do him honor as he had honored her.

So it has happened that the "old timers" who went to school
with Mark or were with him on some of his usual escapades have
been honored with large audiences whenever they were in a
reminiscent mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with
the ordinary boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist and
whose every boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of
what was to come.  Like Aunt Becky and Mrs. Clemens, they can now
see that Mark was hardly appreciated when he lived here and that
the things he did as a boy and was whipped for doing were not all
bad, after all.  So they have been in no hesitancy about drawing
out the bad things he did as well as the good in their efforts to
get a "Mark Twain" story, all incidents being viewed in the light
of his present fame, until the volume of "Twainiana" is already
considerable and growing in proportion as the "old timers" drop
away and the stories are retold second and third hand by their
descendants.  With some seventy-three years and living in a villa
instead of a house, he is a fair target, and let him incorporate,
copyright, or patent himself as he will, there are some of his
"works" that will go swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as
graybeards gather about the fires and begin with, "I've heard
father tell," or possibly, "Once when I."
The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother--WAS my mother.

And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper, of date
twenty days ago:

Miss Becca Blankenship died at the home of William Dickason,
408 Rock Street, at 2.30 o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72
years.  The deceased was a sister of "Huckleberry Finn," one of
the famous characters in Mark Twain's TOM SAWYER.  She had been a
member of the Dickason family--the housekeeper--for nearly forty-
five years, and was a highly respected lady.  For the past eight
years she had been an invalid, but was as well cared for by
Mr. Dickason and his family as if she had been a near relative.
She was a member of the Park Methodist Church and a Christian woman.


I remember her well.  I have a picture of her in my mind
which was graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three
years ago.  She was at that time nine years old, and I was about
eleven.  I remember where she stood, and how she looked; and I
can still see her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and
her short tow-linen frock.  She was crying.  What it was about I
have long ago forgotten.  But it was the tears that preserved the
picture for me, no doubt.  She was a good child, I can say that
for her.  She knew me nearly seventy years ago.  Did she forget
me, in the course of time?  I think not.  If she had lived in
Stratford in Shakespeare's time, would she have forgotten him?
Yes.  For he was never famous during his lifetime, he was utterly
obscure in Stratford, and there wouldn't be any occasion to
remember him after he had been dead a week.

"Injun Joe," "Jimmy Finn," and "General Gaines" were
prominent and very intemperate ne'er-do-weels in Hannibal two
generations ago.  Plenty of grayheads there remember them to this
day, and can tell you about them.  Isn't it curious that two
"town drunkards" and one half-breed loafer should leave behind
them, in a remote Missourian village, a fame a hundred times
greater and several hundred times more particularized in the
matter of definite facts than Shakespeare left behind him in the
village where he had lived the half of his lifetime?


Mark Twain.