No More Learning

Sterling's, published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has
reprinted in the Prolegomenae to his edition of the Essays. I heard
with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William
Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is
the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's
library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the
British Museum purchased, with a view of protecting the Shakspeare
autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the
autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord
Byron, that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he
read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be
mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new and immortal
for me.

In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight years
old, retired from the practice of law, at Bordeaux, and settled himself
on his estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure, and sometimes a
courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he loved the compass,
staidness, and independence of the country gentleman's life. He took
up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most.
Downright and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to
deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense and probity. In
the civil wars of the League, which converted every house into a fort,
Montaigne kept his gates open, and his house without defense. All
parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally
esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers
to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but
two men of liberality in France,--Henry IV. and Montaigne.

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French
freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censures by
the bounty of his own confessions. In his times, books were written
to one sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so that, in a
humorist, a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our
manners, of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow.
But, though a biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical
levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence
is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it; nobody can
think or say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the
vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, it got in by
stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hanging
five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf.
"Five or six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, "can be told of me,
as of any man living. " But, with all this really superfluous frankness,
the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every reader's mind.

"When I the most strictly and religiously confess myself, I find that
the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid
that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and perfect a
lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had
listened, and laid his ear close to himself, would have heard some
jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and remote, and only to be
perceived by himself. "

Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretense of any
kind. He has been in courts so long as to have conceived a furious
disgust at appearances; he will indulge himself with a little cursing
and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gypsies, use flash and
street ballads; he has stayed indoors till he is deadly sick; he will
to the open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of
gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals; and is so
nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks, the more barbarous man
is, the better he is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, and
grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here, shall smack
of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes
no hesitation to entertain you with the records of his disease; and
his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took and kept
this position of equilibrium. Over his name, he drew an emblematic
pair of scales, and wrote, _Que sais-je? _ under it. As I look at
his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to hear him say, "You may
play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate,--I stand here
for truth, and will not, for all the states, and churches, and revenues,
and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see
it; I will rather mumble and prose about what I certainly know,--my
house and barns; my father, my wife, and my tenants; my old lean bald
pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat, and what drinks I prefer;
and a hundred straws just as ridiculous,--than I will write, with a
fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and
winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, and think an undress,
and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old friends who do not
constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself
and pump my brains, the most suitable. Our condition as men is risky
and ticklish enough. One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an
hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.
Why should I vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballasting,
the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within
compass, keep myself ready for action, and can shoot the gulf, at last,
with decency. If there be anything farcical in such a life, the blame
is not mine; let it lie at fate's and nature's door. "

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random
topic that comes into his head; treating everything without ceremony,
yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight;
but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts; he
is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader
care for all that he cares for.

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know
not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of
conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would
bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it
that we have in listening to the necessary speech of men about their
work, when any unusual circumstance give momentary importance to the
dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech;
it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves,
and begin again at every half-sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and
refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne
talks with shrewdness, knows the world, and books, and himself, and
uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays; no
weakness, no convulsion, no superlative; does not wish to jump out of
his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time; but is stout
and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain, because it makes
him feel himself, and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know
that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes
to feel solid ground, and the stones underneath. His writing has no
enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping
the middle of the road. There is but one exception,--in his love for
Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes, and his style
rises to passion.

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he came
to die, he caused the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age
of thirty-three, he had been married. "But," he says, "might I have
had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would
have had me; but 'tis to much purpose to evade it, the common custom
and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions are guided by
example, not choice. " In the hour of death he gave the same weight to
custom. _Que sais-je? _ What do I know.

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed, by translating it into
all tongues, and printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and
that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, namely, among courtiers,
soldiers, princes, men of the world, and men of wit and generosity.

Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and
permanent expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?

We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and
effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through
all things; all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events,
and life, come to us, only because of that thread; they pass and repass,
only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line. A
book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random
and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of
it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero,--dispirits us. Seen
or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties;
genius finds the real ones. We hearken to the man of science, because
we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We
love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters
or pulls down. One man appears whose nature is to all men's eyes
conserving and constructive; his presence supposes a well-ordered
society, agriculture, trade, large institutions, and empire. If these
did not exist, they would begin to exist through his endeavors.
Therefore, he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this in him very
readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable
things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no
plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town, and
state, and way of living, which our counselor contemplated, might be
a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for him, and
reject the reformer, so long as he comes only with axe and crowbar.

But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a
sour, dumpish unbelief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne represents,
have reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. Every superior
mind will pass through this domain of equilibration,--I should rather
say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and balances in
nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of
bigots and blockheads.

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the
particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverent
only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the skeptic
is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to have any
breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation
of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every
superior mind, and is the evidence of its perception of the flowing
power which remains itself in all changes.

The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of
society, and with the projects that are offered to relieve them. The
wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness
of property, and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit
to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties
wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism.
His politics are those of the "Soul's Errand" of Sir Walter Raleigh;
or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat, "There is none who is worthy of my
love or hatred;" while he sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce,
and custom. He is a reformer: yet he is no better member of the
philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion
of the operative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in
his mind, that our life in this world is not of quite so easy
interpretation as churches and school-books say. He does not wish to
take ground against these benevolences, to play the part of devil's
attorney, and blazon every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for
him. But he says, There are doubts.

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendar-day of our Saint
Michel de Montaigne, by counting and describing these doubts or
negations. I wish to ferret them out of their holes, and sun them a
little. We must do with them as the police do with old rogues, who are
shown up to the public at the marshal's office. They will never be so
formidable, when once they have been identified and registered. But
I mean honestly by them--that justice shall be done to their terrors.
I shall not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to be put down.
I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can dispose of them, or
they of me.

I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the quadruped
opinion will not prevail. 'Tis of no importance what bats and oxen
think. The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity of intellect;
as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the
knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light
mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect
kills it. Nay, San Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the
most penetrating of men, finds that all direct ascension, even of lofty
piety, leads to this ghastly insight, and sends back the votary
orphaned. My astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and saints
infected. They found the ark empty; saw, and would not tell; and tried
to choke off their approaching followers, by saying, "Action, action,
my dear fellows, is for you! " Bad as was to me this detection by San
Carlo, this frost in July, this blow from a brick, there was still a
worse, namely, the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of
vision, ere they have yet risen from their knees, they say, "We discover
that this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed; we must
fly for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to the
Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of latent. "

This is hobgoblin the first; and, though it has been the subject of
much elegy, in our nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe, and other
poets of less fame, not to mention many distinguished private
observers,--I confess it is not very affecting to my imagination; for
it seems to concern the shattering of baby-houses and crockery-shops.
What flutters the church of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of
Boston, may yet be very far from touching any principle of faith. I
think that the intellect and moral sentiment are unanimous; and that,
though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the natural
checks of vice, and polarity to the soul. I think that the wiser a man
is, the more stupendous he finds the natural and moral economy, and
lifts himself to a more absolute reliance.

There is the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its own
tissue of facts and beliefs. There is the power of complexions,
obviously modifying the dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs and
unbeliefs appear to be structural; and, as soon as each man attains
the poise and vivacity which allow the whole machinery to play, he
will not need extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions
in his own life. Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one
hour. We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links of
Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life; but a book,
or a bust, or only the sound of a name, shoots a spark through the
nerves, and we suddenly believe in will: my finger-ring shall be the
seal of Solomon: fate is for imbeciles: all is possible to the resolved
mind. Presently, a new experience gives a new turn to our thoughts:
common sense resumes its tyranny: we say, "Well, the army, after all,
is the gate to fame, manners, and poetry: and, look you,--on the whole,
selfishness plants best, prunes best, makes the best commerce, and the
best citizen. " Are the opinions of a man on right and wrong, on fate
and causation, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion? Is
his belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence? And what
guaranty for the permanence of his opinions? I like not the French
celerity,--a new church and state once a week. --This is the second
negation; and I shall let it pass for what it will. As far as it asserts
rotation of states of mind, I suppose it suggests its own remedy,
namely, in the record of larger periods. What is the mean of many
states; of all the states? Does the general voice of ages affirm any
principle, or is no community of sentiment discoverable in distant
times and places? And when it shows the power of self-interest, I
accept that as a part of the divine law, and must reconcile it with
aspiration the best I can.

The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind, in all
ages,--that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often
hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or nature, grows over
us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe; Love and Fortune, blind;
and Destiny, deaf. We have too little power of resistance against this
ferocity which champs us up. What front can we make against these
unavoidable, victorious, maleficent forces? What can I do against the
influence of Race, in my history? What can I do against hereditary and
constitutional habits, against scrofula, lymph, impotence? against
climate, against barbarism, in my country? I can reason down or deny
everything, except this perpetual Belly; feed he must and will, and
I cannot make him respectable.

But the main resistance which the affirmative impulse finds, and one
including all others, is in the doctrine of the Illusionists. There
is a painful rumor in circulation, that we have been practiced upon
in all the principal performances of life, and free agency is the
emptiest name. We have been sopped and drugged with the air, with food,
with woman, with children, with sciences, with events which leave us
exactly where they found us. The mathematics, 'tis complained, leave
the mind where they find it: so do all sciences; and so do all events
and actions. I find a man who has passed through all the sciences, the
churl he was; and, through all the offices, learned, civil, and social,
can detect the child. We are not the less necessitated to dedicate
life to them. In fact, we may come to accept it as the fixed rule and
theory of our state of education, that God is a substance, and his
method is illusion. The eastern sages owned the goddess Yoganidra, the
great illusory energy of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the whole
world is beguiled.

Or, shall I state it thus? --The astonishment of life, is, the absence
of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice
of life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and
then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares and
works which have no direct bearing on it;--is then lost, for months
or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we
compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable
hours. But what are these cares and works the better? A method in the
world we do not see, but this parallelism of great and little, which
never react on each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to
converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, readings, writings are
nothing to the purpose; as when a man comes into the room, it does not
appear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo,--he has contrived
to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of rice or out of snow.
So vast is the disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire
of performance under it, that, whether he is a man of worth or a sot,
is not so great a matter as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this
enchantment, the stunning non-intercourse law which makes cooperation
impossible? The young spirit pants to enter society. But all the ways
of culture and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He has been
often baulked. He did not expect a sympathy with his thought from the
village, but he went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and found
no entertainment for it, but mere misapprehension, distaste, and
scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and misapplied; and the excellence
of each is an inflamed individualism which separates him more.

There are these, and more than these diseases of thought, which our
ordinary teachers do not attempt to remove. Now shall we, because a
good nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, There are no doubts,--and
lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or in a cowardly manner?
and is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness?
Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue? Can you
not believe that a man of earnest and burly habit may find small good
in tea, essays, and catechism, and want a rougher instruction, want
men, labor, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt,
and terror, to make things plain to him; and has he not a right to
insist on being convinced in his own way? When he is convinced, he
will be worth the pains.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief
in denying them. Some minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts
they profess to entertain are rather a civility or accommodation to
the common discourse of their company. They may well give themselves
leave to speculate, for they are secure of a return. Once admitted to
the heaven of thought, they see no relapse into night, but infinite
invitation on the other side. Heaven is within heaven, and sky over
sky, and they are encompassed with divinities. Others there are, to
whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the
earth. It is a question of temperament, or of more or less immersion
in nature. The last class must needs have a reflex or parasite faith;
not a sight of realities, but an instinctive reliance on the seers and
believers of realities. The manners and thoughts of believers astonish
them, and convince them that these have seen something which is hid
from themselves. But their sensual habit would fix the believer to his
last position, whilst he as inevitably advances; and presently the
unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the believer.

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic,
atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself
driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. Charitable
souls come with their projects, and ask his cooperation. How can he
hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and courtesy to agree where
you can, and to turn your sentence with something auspicious, and not
freezing and sinister. But he is forced to say, "O, these things will
be as they must be: what can you do? These particular griefs and crimes
are the foliage and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It is vain
to complain of the leaf or the berry: cut it off; it will bear another
just as bad. You must begin your cure lower down. " The generosities
of the day prove an intractable element for him. The people's questions
are not his; their methods are not his; and, against all the dictates
of good nature, he is driven to say, he has no pleasure in them.

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence,
and of the immortality of the soul, his neighbors cannot put the
statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith,
and not less. He denies out of honesty. He had rather stand charged
with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he
says, in the moral design of the universe; it exists hospitably for
the weal of the souls; but your dogmas seem to me caricatures; why
should I make believe them?
Will any say, this is cold and infidel?
The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his
far-sighted good-will, that can abandon to the adversary all the ground
of tradition and common belief, without losing a jot of strength. It
sees to the end of all transgression. George Fox saw "that there was
an ocean of darkness and death; but withal, an infinite ocean of light
and love which flowed over that of darkness. "

The final solution in which skepticism is lost is in the moral
sentiment, which never forfeits its supremacy. All moods may be safely
tried, and their weight allowed to all objections: the moral sentiment
as easily outweighs them all, as any one. This is the drop which
balances the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, and take those
superficial views which we call skepticism; but I know that they will
presently appear to me in that order which makes skepticism impossible.
A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe,
that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. The world
is saturated with deity and with law. He is content with just and
unjust, with sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and fraud. He
can behold with serenity the yawning gulf between the ambition of man
and his power of performance, between the demand and supply of power,
which makes the tragedy of all souls.

Charles Fourier announced that "the attractions of man are proportioned
to his destinies;" in other words, that every desire predicts its own
satisfaction. Yet, all experience exhibits the reverse of this; the
incompetency of power is the universal grief of young and ardent minds.
They accuse the divine Providence of a certain parsimony. It has shown
the heaven and earth to every child, and filled him with a desire for
the whole; a desire raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be
filled with planets; a cry of famine, as of devils for souls. Then for
the satisfaction,--to each man is administered a single drop, a bead
of dew of vital power per day,--a cup as large as space, and one drop
of the water of life in it. Each man woke in the morning, with an
appetite that could eat the solar system like a cake; a spirit for
action and passion without bounds; he could lay his hand on the morning
star; he could try conclusions with gravitation or chemistry; but, on
the first motion to prove his strength--hands, feet, senses, gave way,
and would not serve him. He was an emperor deserted by his states, and
left to whistle by himself, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all
whistling: and still the sirens sang, "The attractions are proportioned
to the destinies. " In every house, in the heart of each maiden, and
of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,--
between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.

The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be
surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson
of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and
the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of
particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say
one thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result
is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to
promote rogues, to defeat the just; and, by knaves, as by martyrs, the
just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political
struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands
of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals,
as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization
is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered. We
see, now, events forced on, which seem to retard or retrograde the
civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms
and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws; and so,
throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through
the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and
atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting;
let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to
reverence, without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here,
not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under
abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the
Eternal cause. --

"If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea. "




V. SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.


Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
making bricks and building the house, no great men are original. Nor
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight
and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is the
most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing
whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest,
freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most
determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have
any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice
to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say,
"I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent:
to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new
food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new
mechanic power;" no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts
and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his
contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and
their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The
church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the
advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her
chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him by
trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in
his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets,
artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their
labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of
the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for
himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great
genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at
all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and
suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans,
a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,
were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted
this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,--no,
not by the strongest party,--neither then could king, prelate, or
puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was ballad, epic,
newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the same time.
Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found their own account in it.
It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by no means
conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating
it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable, because
it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof
of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this
field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood,
Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he left
Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of
all dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced
on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear
hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other
stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of
English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the
royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful
tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the
London 'prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or
less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and
tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote
them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and
so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a
speech, or a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer
claim copyright on this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to.
They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many
spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.

Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had
the _prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing
could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England
circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he
wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in
popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain
his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies
a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to
his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities
of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture
owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in
subordination to architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall:
at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became
bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the wall, the groups being
still arrayed with reference to the building, which serves also as a
frame to hold the figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of
style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture
still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As
soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the
temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and
exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability
of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which
the people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence
which no single genius, however extraordinary, could hope to create.

In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all
directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in
regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI. , in which,
"out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
and 1899 were entirely his own. " And the preceding investigation hardly
leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's sentence is
an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII. , I think I see
plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer
stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful
man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their
cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell,
where,--instead of the metre of Shakspeare, whose secret is, that the
thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best
bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are constructed on a given tune,
and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play
contains, through all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's
hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, are like
autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the
bad rhythm.

Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable that any
invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
resources; and, at that day our petulant demand for originality was
not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who
appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower
of sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he
comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore
little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through
translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant
countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are
equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near
home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good
many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He
knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever
he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of Chaucer,
of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians
and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and
dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world,--

"Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line
And the tale of Troy divine. "

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to
him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer,
it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di
Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation
from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and
the Provencal poets, are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is
only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meun:
Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox,
from the _Lais_ of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or
Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or
stone-quarry out of which to build his house. He steals by this
apology,--that what he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the
greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of
rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of
original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings
of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can
entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain
awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we
have learned what to do with them, they become our own.

Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The
learned member of the legislature, at Westminster, or at Washington,
speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now
invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes,
the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or
conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates,
and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of
their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke
and Rousseau think for thousands; and so there were fountains all
around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends,
lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished,--which, if seen,
would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did
he feel himself, overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the
consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delhi
whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily
so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debt
which such a man could contract to other wit, would never disturb his
consciousness of originality: for the ministrations of books, and of
other minds, are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with
which he has conversed.

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the
world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand
wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a
wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language.
But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and
churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there
was not some translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy
and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a
translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church,--these
collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of
every saint and sacred writer, all over the world. Grotius makes the
like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses
of which it is composed were already in use, in the time of Christ,
in the rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous
language of the Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts, and
the precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the
contribution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived
in the countries where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch
gets its excellence by being translation on translation. There never
was a time when there was none. All the truly diomatic and national
phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out and thrown
away. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with
the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with
world-books. Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad,
Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In
the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the
mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for
us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal
law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic
genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the
originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and
embodiment of his own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare
Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the
Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final
detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from
Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession
of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled,
and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued by the growing
interest of the problem, they have left no book-stall unsearched, no
chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose
in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy
Shakspeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theater door,
whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best
bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age
mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are
turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and
Buckinghams; and let pass without a single valuable note the founder
of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be
remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the
inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people
of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive
this and not another bias. A popular player,--nobody suspected he was
the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from
poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and frivolous people.
Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times,
never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few
words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame
whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the
praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of
all question, the better poet of the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's
time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born
four years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after him;
and I find among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following
persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of
Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,
Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton,
John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
Ariminius; with all of whom exist some token of his having communicated,
without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he saw,--Shakspeare,
Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman,
and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in
Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society;--yet
their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe.
Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near.
It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries
had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate
begin to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare
till now; for he is the father of German literature: it was on the
introduction of Shakspeare into German by Lessing, and the translation
of his works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German
literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the
nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet,
that the tragedy of Hamlet should find such wondering readers. Now,
literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakspearized. His mind is the
horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated
to music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who
have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity: but there
is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative
power and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.

The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the
missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead to
proof; and with what results? Beside some important illustration of
the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have
gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to
property, of the poet. It appears that, from year to year, he owned
a larger share in the Blackfriars' Theater: its wardrobe and other
appurtenances were his: that he bought an estate in his native village,
with his earnings, as writer and shareholder; that he lived in the
best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors with their
commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that he
was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing Macbeth,
he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for
thirty-five shillings ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different
times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband, with no
reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort of
man, an actor and shareholder in the theater, not in any striking
manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the
importance of this information. It was well worth the pains that have
been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We
are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage,
birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage,
publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an
end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the
goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the
"Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would have fitted
the poems as well, It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the
rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past,
and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have
wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the
Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble,
Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives to this genius; him they
crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The
recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this
painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own
inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a
famed performer, the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard,
and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the
tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet's question to the ghost,--

"What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon? "

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes into the world's
dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces
the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his
magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography
shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream
admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish recorder,
sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate
creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the
moonlight of Portia's villa, "the antres vast and desarts idle," of
Othello's captivity,--where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the
chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one
word of those transcendent secrets. In fine, in this drama, as in all
great works of art,--in the Cyclopaean architecture of Egypt and India;
in the Phidian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the Italian painting;
the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,--the Genius draws up the ladder
after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to
a new, who see the works, and ask in vain for a history.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell
nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most
apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod,
and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents
extricated, analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and Collier;
and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which seem to
have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man
within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they
match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or, which
gives the most historical insight into the man.

Hence, though our external history is so meager, yet, with Shakspeare
for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the
information which is material, that which describes character and
fortune; that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with
him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions
on those questions which knock for answer at every heart,--on life and
death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the
ways whereby we may come at them; on the characters of men, and the
influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes: and on those
mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet
interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours.