I
SCATTERED here and there through the stacks of unpublished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 starlike 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 near
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 to-day 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 that 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 it like that? Hyrcan tiger; take any shape but that and my
firm nerves she'll be in the
woods the first you know! stop the
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 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, the
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 reserve and moderation of a
subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot-house that
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 above 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
compliment, 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—than 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 to-day, 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 a while 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 knew 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 works,
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.
Oh, 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 breast-board.
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 scalding 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.