The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1891-08-09
GENIUS DOES WHAT 1T MUST.

Pofessor Meredith in his address on
Literature" on Friday was at some
pains to puncture Donnelly's impu-
dent, because ignorant attempt to
prove that Shakespeare did not write
the plays that pass under his
name. There is no mystery about Shake
speare except that he had the exceptional,
mysterious gift of amazing literary genius.
Once grant that the author of Shake
speare's plays was a man of genius and
there is nothing left of the so-called "mys-
assumption that Shakespeare, because he
was not university scholar, could not have
written the plays and that Bacon did
write them. The plays were clearly writ
ten by man of great genius, man of
vast knowledge of the sort that is acquired
fence and profound reelection, but they are
clearly not the work of q man of scholar
ship and precise learning.
Shakespeare left the Stratford grammar
school at about IA, a school that gave him
under the curric ulum of the time as much
secure entry to an Eastern college; light.
superficial smattering of scholarship. Hi.
learning was so small that his plays are
full of historical and geographical an
achronisms. He makes Hector of Troy
quote Aristotle; makes the Greek Theseus
talk the mythology of the Goths; makes a
party take ship from Bohemia to Sicily,
which is like taking steamer at Seattle
for Butte City; he makes Cleopatra pro-
pose billiards, game unknown to an
tiquity. Of course, man like Bacon, of
vast and precise learning, university
scholar, who wrote his great works in the
Latin tongue; who travelled on the con-
tinent three years, who was both an &C.
complished and a learned man in the
same large sense as Milton, could not pos
sibly, man of learning, travel and study,
make such blunders any more than Ten
nyson could violate the dramatic unities
of English history, geography and litera-
ture.
There is nothing in Shakespeare after we
grant the gift of genius, which comes
direct from God, that needs explanation.
He had clearly read Plutarch's Lives and
Chapman's Homer; he had probably read
Rabelais and Montaigne; perhaps Ger
vantes; every intellectual Englishman
who read at all had at least read the great
French humorists named. There is moth
ing in the scraps of French and Latin in
the plays that outruns the schoolboy
learning of the man; the spontaneity of
expression all point to man whose lux
uriant Imagination had never been re-
strained or wing-clipped by severe scho-
lastic training. The internal evidence
furnished by athe plays all points to the
author as the reverse of a scholar or
learned man; to man of vast knO,cledqe,
both spiritual and external, but very small
learning
The writings of Bacon are clearly those
of a man of scholastic training and
habit, and there is not the faintest sug-
gestion in his metallic rhetorical eloquence
Of the surprising poetic imagination dis
played by Shakespeare. A philosopher, a
man of science, a statesman, a lawyer, o
diplomatist is Bacon's quality; the poetic
ever read Hamlet" Macbeth. :" Lear"
"Othello," or Henry Fourth" and then
read Bacon's best work could possibly sus-
pect Bacon of Shakespeare's work. Bacon
undertaking to write Romeo and Juliet"
would be like an elephant attempting to
rise in the air like a skylark. or TO Tit
through the night like bat. Bacon could
= ~ a..
could not rise to the eagles flight, or move
with the dieting grace of fawn through
the forest.
Whoever wrote these great plays it was
certainly not Bacon. and there is no diff
Guilty in reconciling extraordinary liter
airy genius with the comparative absence
of what is termed early advantages
Of scholastic requirements and culture
Shakespeare is no more mystery in this