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PARTISAN REVIEW
describe that face, nor was I as concerned about it, when I learned
who it might be, as much as I was concerned to find out why it
had so overcome me. And when I reflected on my feelings as I first
saw the picture, I realized that I had taken it to be the face of an
Elizabethan adventurer. There was, even through the impositions
of the original canvas and the later photograph, a sort of dark and
nervous energy shown in the features that convinced me I was looking
at the face of a young man who not only thought violently, but
who behaved violently also. I do not know whether this hypothetical
portrait of Shakespeare has since been verified or discredited: I only
know that if it is not a portrait of him, then it ought to be. And
I do not discuss the thing out of sentimentality or a taste for souve–
nirs. I speak of it because it brings to my mind the enigma of the
poet as a poet in relation to the poet as a man.
It
has always been
extremely hard for the run of literary people to resign themselves
to the possibility that their greatest heroes, those from whose works
they derive their sense of moral grandeur, may nevertheless have been
anything but pillars of society.
The Wordsworth whom the world knew for a hundred years,
an effigy of plaster generously disgu ised in whitewash, provides me
with an abject example. And, partly because the face of the young
Elizabethan I saw on Fifth Avenue was passionate enough to com–
mit anything, I shall continue to believe, as I always have, that
Shakespeare lived a biography of which few literalY persons would
approve.
Even on the strength of the evidence we possess you cannot
find very much to admire in his life without calling upon natural
prejudice. He seems to have been the sort of man who would have
got into the pages of
The Daily News
at least once in his life. It is
not a coincidence, to my mind, that so many poets, in their personal
lives, have transgressed the ethics of society. The god Dionysus exacts
his tributes.
If
you practice acrobatics on a flying horse it should not
surprise people if you occasionally fall. I believe this to be, at heart,
the great Shakespearean canon, demonstrated as thoroughly in his
life, perhaps, as it is unquestionably shown in his poems. This is the
law of excess: it is absolutely essential for the poet to bite off more
than he can chew. By this method he may enlarge the human appe–
tite for all things. But if he bites off no more than he can masticate,
he proves little more than we already know: he is merely a man
