XIII
ISN'T it odd, when you think of it: that you may list all the
celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern
times, clear back to the first Tudors—a list containing five hundred
names, shall we say?—and you can go to the histories, biographies
and encyclopedias and learn the particulars of the lives of every one
of them. Every one of them except one—the most famous, the most
renowned—by far the most illustrious of them all—Shakespeare!
You can get the details of the lives of all the celebrated ecclesiastics
in the list; the celebrated tragedians, comedians singers, dancers,
orators, judges, lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers,
editors, inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals,
discoverers, prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys,
bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by
land and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists,
Claimants, impostors, chemists, biologists, geologists, philologists,
college presidents and professors, architects, engineers, painters,
sculptors, politicians, agitators, rebels, revolutionists, patriots,
demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks, philosophers, burglars,
highwaymen, journalists, physicians, surgeons—you can get the life-histories
of all of them but
one. Just
one—the most extraordinary
and the most celebrated of them all—Shakespeare!
You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons
furnished by the rest of Christendom in the past four centuries,
and you can find out the life-histories of
all those people, too. You
will then have listed 1500 celebrities, and you can trace the
authentic life-histories of the whole of them. Save one—far and
away the most colossal prodigy of the entire
accumulation—Shakespeare! About him you can find out
nothing.
Nothing of even the slightest importance. Nothing worth the
trouble of stowing away in your memory. Nothing that even
remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly
common-place person—a manager, an actor of inferior grade, a small
trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of any
consequence, and had forgotten all about him before he was fairly
cold in his grave. We can go to the records and find out the life-history
of every renowned
race-horse of modern times—but not
Shakespeare's! There are many reasons why, and they have
been furnished in cartloads (of guess and conjecture) by those
troglodytes; but there is one that is worth all the rest of the reasons
put together, and is abundantly sufficient all by itself—
he hadn't
any history to record. There is no way of getting around that deadly
fact. And no sane way has yet been discovered of getting around
its formidable significance.
Its quite plain significance—to any but those thugs (I do not
use the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence
while he lived, and none until he had been dead two or three
generations. The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and
if he wrote them it seems a pity the world did not find it out. He
ought to have explained that he was the author, and not merely a
nom de plume for another man to hide behind. If he had been less
intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more solicitous
about his Works, it would have been better for his good name, and a
kindness to us. The bones were not important. They will moulder
away, they will turn to dust, but the Works will endure until the
last sun goes down.
P.S. March 25. About two months ago I was illuminating
this Autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, and I then took occasion to air the
opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no public
consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly
obscure and unimportant. And not only in great London, but also
in the little village where he was born, where he lived a quarter of
a century, and where he died and was buried. I argued that if he
had been a person of any note at
all, aged villagers would have had
much to tell about him many and many a year after his death,
instead of being unable to furnish inquirers a single fact connected
with him. I believed, and I still believe, that if he had been famous,
his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my
native village out in Missouri. It is a good argument, a prodigiously
strong one, and a most formidable one for even the most gifted,
and ingenious, and plausible Stratfordolater to get around or
explain away. To-day a Hannibal
Courier-Post of recent date has
reached me, with an article in it which reinforces my contention
that a really celebrated person cannot be forgotten in his village in
the short space of sixty years. I will make an extract from it:
Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer
for, but ingratitude is not one of
them, or reverence for the
great men she has produced, and as the years go by her
greatest son Mark Twain, or S. L. Clemens as a few of the
unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard of
the residents of the town he made famous and the town
that made him famous. His name is associated with every
old building that is torn down to make way for the modern
structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and with
every hill or cave over or through which he might by any
possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest
which he wove into his stories, such as Holiday Hill,
Jackson's Island, or Mark Twain Cave, are now monuments
to his genius. Hannibal is glad of any opportunity to do
him honor as he has honored her.
So it has happened that the "old timers" who went
to school with Mark or were with him on some of his usual
escapades have been honored with large audiences whenever
they were in a reminiscent mood and condescended to tell
of their intimacy with the ordinary boy who came to be a
very extraordinary
humorist and whose every boyish act is
now seen to have been indicative of what was to come. Like
Aunt Beckey and Mrs. Clemens, they can now see that
Mark was hardly appreciated when he lived here and that
the things he did as a boy and was whipped for doing were
not all bad after all. So they have been in no hesitancy
about drawing out the bad things he did as well as the good
in their efforts to get a "Mark Twain story," all incidents
being viewed in the light of his present fame, until the
volume of "Twainiana" is already considerable and growing
in proportion as the "old timers" drop away and the stories
are retold second and third hand by their descendants. With
some seventy-three years young and living in a villa instead
of a house he is a fair target, and let him incorporate,
copyright, or patent himself as he will, there are some of
his "works" that will go swooping up Hannibal chimneys
as long as graybeards gather about the fires and begin with
"I've heard father tell" or possibly "Once when I."
The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother—was my
mother.
And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper. Of date
twenty days ago:
Miss Becca Blankenship died at the home of William
Dickason, 408 Rock Street, at 2:30 o'clock yesterday
afternoon, aged 72 years. The deceased was a sister of
"Huckleberry Finn," one of the famous characters in Mark
Twain's Tom Sawyer. She had been a member of the
Dickason family—the housekeeper—for nearly forty-five
years, and was a highly respected lady. For the past eight
years she had been an invalid, but was as well cared for by
Mr. Dickason and his family as if she had been a near
relative. She was a member of the Park Methodist Church
and a Christian woman.
I remember her well. I have a picture of her in my mind
which was graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three
years ago, She was at that time nine years old, and I was about eleven.
I remember where she stood, and how she looked; and I can still
see her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and her short
tow-linen frock. She was crying. What it was about, I have long ago
forgotten. But it was the tears that preserved the picture for me, no
doubt. She was a good child, I can say that for her. She knew me
nearly seventy years ago. Did she forget me, in the course of time?
I think not. If she had lived in Stratford in Shakespeare's time,
would she have forgotten him? Yes. For he was never famous
during his lifetime, he was utterly obscure in Stratford, and there
wouldn't be any occasion to remember him after he had been dead
a week.
"Injun Joe," "Jimmy Finn," and "General Gaines" were
prominent and
very intemperate ne'er-do-weels in Hannibal two
generations ago. Plenty of grayheads there remember them to this
day, and can tell you about them. Isn't it curious that two "town-drunkards"
and one half-breed loafer should leave behind them, in
a remote Missourian village, a fame a hundred times greater and
several hundred times more particularized in the matter of definite
facts than Shakespeare left behind him in the village where he had
lived the half of his lifetime?