(from _My Autobiography_)
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Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished manuscript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 star-like 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
nearly 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 today 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 with 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, and 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 complement, 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 today,
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 awhile
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.
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.