When a person reads the noble verses about the cloud-cap’d
towers, he ought not to follow it immediately with
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare, because he will
find the transition from great poetry to poor prose
too violent for comfort. It will give him a shock.
You never notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel
is until you bite into a layer of it in a pie.
XI
Am I trying to convince anybody that Shakespeare did
not write Shakespeare’s Works? Ah, now,
what do you take me for? Would I be so soft as
that, after having known the human race familiarly
for nearly seventy-four years? It would grieve
me to know that any one could think so injuriously
of me, so uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me.
No, no, I am aware that when even the brightest mind
in our world has been trained up from childhood in
a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible
for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely,
dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or
any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt
upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt
if I could do it myself. We always get at second
hand our notions about systems of government; and
high tariff and low tariff; and prohibition and anti-prohibition;
and the holiness of peace and the glories of war;
and codes of honor and codes of morals; and approval
of the duel and disapproval of it; and our beliefs
concerning the nature of cats; and our ideas as to
whether the murder of helpless wild animals is base
or is heroic; and our preferences in the matter of
religious and political parties; and our acceptance
or rejection of the Shakespeares and the Author Ortons
and the Mrs.
Eddys. We get them all at second
hand, we reason none of them out for ourselves.
It is the way we are made. It is the way we
are all made, and we can’t help it, we can’t
change it. And whenever we have been furnished
a fetish, and have been taught to believe in it, and
love it and worship it, and refrain from examining
it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong,
that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty
and our devotion. In morals, conduct, and beliefs
we take the color of our environment and associations,
and it is a color that can safely be warranted to wash.
Whenever we have been furnished with a tar baby ostensibly
stuffed with jewels, and warned that it will be dishonorable
and irreverent to disembowel it and test the jewels,
we keep our sacrilegious hands off it. We submit,
not reluctantly, but rather gladly, for we are privately
afraid we should find, upon examination that the jewels
are of the sort that are manufactured at North Adams,
Mass.
Copyrights
What Is Man? and Other Essays from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
