of Mr. Swinburne, or such
eulogists as Hazlitt and Knight, we are in a world of abstract aesthetics
or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakspere, who
became an actor for a livelihood in an age when the best actors played
in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little
brutal; then added to his craft of acting the craft of play-patching and
refashioning; who had his partnership share of the pence and sixpences
paid by the mob of noisy London prentices and journeymen and idlers that
filled the booth theatre in which his company performed; who sued his
debtors rigorously when they did not settle-up; worked up old plays or
took a hand in new, according as the needs of his concern and his
fellow-actors dictated; and finally went with his carefully collected
fortune to spend his last years in ease and quiet in the country town in
which he was born. Our sympathetic critics, even when, like Dr.
Furnivall, they know absolutely all the archaeological facts as to
theatrical life in Shakspere's time, do not seem to bring those facts
into vital touch with their aesthetic estimate of his product; they
remain under the spell of Coleridge and Gervinus.[141] Emerson, it is
true, protested at the close of his essay that he "could not marry this
fact," of Shakspere's being a jovial actor and manager, "to his verse;"
but that deliverance has served only as a text for those who have
embraced the fantastic tenet that Shakspere was but the theatrical
agent and representative of Bacon; a delusion of which the vogue may be
partly traced to the lack of psychological solidity in the ordinary
presentment of Shakspere by his admirers. The heresy, of course, merely
leaps over the difficulty, into absolute irrelevance. Emerson was
intellectually to blame in that, seeing as he did the hiatus between the
poet's life and the prevailing conception of his verse, he did not try
to conceive it all anew, but rather resigned himself to the solution
that Shakspere's mind was out of human ken. "A good reader can in a sort
nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence," he said; "but not into
Shakspere's; we are still out of doors." We should indeed remain so for
ever did we not set about patiently picking the locks where the
transcendentalist has dreamily turned away.

It is imperative that we should recommence vigilantly with the concrete
facts, ignoring all the merely aesthetic and metaphysic syntheses. Where
Coler