Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/44

 and were imitations of other poets or simple variations of commonplace themes, the necessity for believing in any romance at all vanishes. Thus there are not two histories, literary and personal, which explain each other, but two histories, both of which rest upon conjecture. Even if the conjecture be accepted in either case, the one thing that is clear is that the results were transitory. I can therefore accept Mr. Lee's opinion that the story may be put out of account altogether when we are trying to understand the man in his works.

The more modest inference, however, remains. If we can infer from his poetry that Shakespeare could be in love, we can surely infer with equal confidence that he could feel the emotions which embody themselves in pessimism. He had, one cannot doubt, satisfied the familiar condition of acquaintance with the heavenly powers. He knew what it was to eat his bread with sorrow and pass his nights in weeping. No one, I suppose, ever read the famous catalogue of the evils which made him pine for restful death, or the reference to the degrading influences of his profession, without feeling that a real man is speaking to us from his own experience. The poetical 'intuition,' as I must again hold, does not supersede the necessity