What Is Man? and Other Essays
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 Klinefelter. 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 serpent, 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 doubts”—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 that 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 any 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.