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.

Taiming 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 doubts 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.