Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/45

 for assuming the intense sensibility of which it is surely a product. When Thackeray, in the little poem 'Vanitas Vanitatum,' almost repeats Shakespeare's catalogue as a comment upon the saying of the 'Weary King Ecclesiast,' I know from his biography that he had gone through corresponding trials. I infer that Shakespeare had felt the emotions which he infused with unequalled intensity. When we recall the main facts of his career, the society in which he had lived, the events of which he had been a close spectator, and admit, to put it gently, that he was a man of more than average powers of mind and feeling, the a priori probability that he had gone through trying experiences is pretty strong; and though we know none of the details we can hardly suppose that he got through life without abundant opportunities for putting Hamlet's question as to the value of life. This, indeed, suggests that the argument may be inverted. The life, so far from explaining the genius, makes it, as some people have thought, a puzzle. 'I cannot,' says Emerson, 'marry this fact' (the fact that Shakespeare was a jovial actor and manager) 'to his verse.' The best of the world's poets led an 'obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public