Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished manuscript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-lappels 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 is 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.