Naturally young Tread well introduced me to the university; I took all his lectures and worked night and day to the limiting of sleep and exercise. In three months I spoke German fluently and correctly and had read Lessing, Schiller, Heine's Lieder, and all the ordinary novels, especially Soil und Haben.
But I had not won much from the university lectures. I had heard one set of lectures on the Greek verb; but after two months the professor was still enmeshed in Sanskrit, and as I did not know a word of Sanskrit or its significance, I found it difficult to follow him. I was indeed continually reminded of Heine's experience. He had been hearing lectures on universal history, he tells us, but after three years' assiduous attendance he gave them up, for the professor had not yet reached the time of Sesostris.
Kuno Fischerff was at this time perhaps the most popular professor in Heidelberg: he had announced a series of lectures on Shakespeare and Goethe and the aula was crammed not only by students, but by ladies and gentlemen from the town. Fischer had a face like a bulldog's and his nose had been split in a duel, which increased the likeness; he began by calling Shakespeare and Goethe the twin flowers of the Germanic race; I was still English enough to think the phrase almost a blasphemy, so I rubbed my feet loudly on the floor as a sign of disapproval or disagreement (ich scharrte).
Fischer paused in utter surprise (it was the first tune, he told me afterwards, that he had ever been so interrupted): then, putting a manifest constraint on himself, he said: 'If the gentleman who disagrees with me so emphatically will wait till I have finished, I will ask him to state the ground of his disapproval.' There was applause throughout the audience at this and the men who were in my neighbourhood glared at me in angry surprise.
Fischer went on to say that 'the very name of Shakespeare showed his Teutonic ancestry; he was as German as Goethe.'
I smiled to myself, but I could not deny that the rest of the lecture was interesting, though the professor hardly attempted to realize either man. At the end he contrasted their schooling and congratulated his hearers on the fact that Goethe had enjoyed far superior educational opportunities and had turned them to brilliant account. The audience applauded enthusiastically as he sat down. Fischer, however, rose again immediately and holding out his hand for silence added: 'If the critic who made his disagreement at the beginning of my lecture so manifest now desires to explain, I'm sure we will hear him willingly.'
I got up and stammered a little, as if embarrassed, while asking the audience and the professor to excuse my faulty German. But as a Welsh Celt, I said,
'What I feel is that the eloquent Professor is over praising the Teutons and especially their superior education. Superior!' I repeated; 'Shakespeare has given us the drama of first love in Romeo and Juliet and of mature passion in Antony and Cleopatra, of jealousy in Othello, the malady of thought in Hamlet and madness in Lear; and against these Goethe has given Faust alone as a proof of his 'superior' advantages!
'But 'Shake' and 'speare' are Teuton, we are told. Now English is an amalgam of low German and of French; but curiously enough, all the higher words are French and only the poor monosyllables are Teuton; for example, mutton is French while 'sheep' or 'schaf' is pure German. I had always imagined,' I added after a pause, 'that 'Shakespeare' was plainly taken from the French and was a manifest corruption of 'Jacques Pierre''-at this the audience began to titter and Fischer, entering into the joke, clapped his hands, smiling.
Naturally, my effect achieved, I sat down at once.
As I was leaving the hall Fischer's servant came and told me the professor would like to see me in his room; of course I followed him at once and Fischer met me laughing. 'Ein genialer Stretch! A genial invention,' he said, 'and no worse than many of our etymologies,' and then seriously, 'You made an admirable defence of Shakespeare, though I think Goethe has a good deal more to his credit than Faust.'
This is what I remember of the beginning of a talk destined to alter my whole life. When I told Fischer of the to me incomprehensible lectures on the Greek verb and other similar difficulties, he asked about my studies and then told me that most of the American students in Germany were not sufficiently well-grounded in Latin and Greek to make the most of the advantages offered them in a German university. Finally, he advised me strongly to shave off my moustache and go for a year into a gymnasium — school again for me, at twenty odd! My whole nature revolted wildly; yet Fischer was insistent and persuasive. He asked me to his house, introduced me to a Professor Ihne, who had been a teacher of the Kaiser's children or something very honourable, and who talked excellent English. He agreed with Fischer and Fischer won the day by remarking: 'Harris has brains; his speech taught us all that, and you'll agree that the more talent he has, the more necessary is a thorough grounding.' The end of it was that I consented, left my boardinghouse, went to live with a family, attended the gymnasium regularly and buried myself in Latin and Greek for eight or ten months, during which I worked on an average twelve hours a day.
In four or five months I was among the best in the gymnasium: indeed, only one boy was indisputably above me. When a Latin theme was set, he used to write 'Livy' or 'Tacitus' or 'Caesar' at the head and never used an idiom or a word that he could not show in the special author he was imitating. Twice a week at least the professor used to read out his essay to us, emphasizing the most characteristic sentences. Of course I became friends with the youth, Carl Schurz; I was resolved to find out how he had gained such mastery. He said, ''Twas easy'; he had begun with Caesar, and after reading a page tried to turn it back into Caesar's language; his Latin, he soon found, was all wrong, a mere mishmash, so he began to learn all the peculiar phrases in his daily lesson in Caesar; gradually he discovered that every writer had his own peculiar way of speaking, and even his own vocabulary.
That gave me the cue. I went home and took up my Shakespeare. I had already noticed similarities between Hamlet and Macbeth; now I began to read for them and incidentally learned all the poetic passages by heart. Soon I began to catch the accent of Shakespeare's voice, hear when he spoke from the heart, and when from the lips; glimpses of his personality grew upon me, and one day I sat down to rewrite Hamlet, using my memory and thought.
When I came to the scene in which Hamlet reproaches his guilty mother, I became aware of a Shakespeare I had dimly suspected. Visualizing the scene I saw at once how impossible it would be to write it. No man could possibly reproach his mother in that way. Hamlet was using the language of sexjealousy: my mother's infidelity would never have maddened me. I could not judge her temptation or my father's faults towards her. His goodness would make her sinning the more incomprehensible, and Hamlet's mother does not attempt to justify herself or explain. The ray of light came, inevitable, soulrevealing:
Shakespeare was painting his own jealousy, and was raging not at his mother's sin, but at his love's betrayal; 'twas clear, every outburst reeked with sex. Who was it that had deceived Shakespeare and crazed him with jealousy? Who? The riddle began to intrigue me.
In the long vacation which I spent in Fluelen on the Lake of Lucerne, I read and reread Shakespeare. It was his Richard the Second that revealed him to me unmistakably; Richard was so plainly a younger, more unstable Hamlet, just as Posthumus and Prospero were older, staider Hamlets. I hugged myself for the discovery; why hadn't everyone seen the truth? Time and again I read him and all manner of sidelights fell on the page, till the very fashion of his soul became familiar to me.
Long before Tyler's book appeared and discovered Queen Elizabeth's maid of honour, Mary Fitton, as Shakespeare's mistress, I knew that in 1596 he had fallen in love with a dark gipsy, with fair skin, who treated him with disdain and was both witty and loose. Why else should he let Rosaline be thus minutely described in Romeo and Juliet, though she never appears on the stage, while there's not a word of bodily description about Juliet, the heroine?
In the same year, too, he revised Love's Labour's Lost at Christmas to be played at Court, and the heroine was Rosaline again, and every character in the piece describes her physically; and Shakespeare himself as Byron rages against his love for 'a whitely wanton with two pitch balls in her face for eyes!' I could not but see, too, that she was the Dark Lady of the Sonnets- probably some lady of the court, I used to say, who looked down on Shakespeare from the height of aristocratic birth and breeding.
Strange to say, I did not at that time go on to identify her with 'false Cressid' or with Cleopatra. I did not get as far as this till I fell across Tyler's book years later and saw that he had confined Shakespeare's passion to the 'three years' spoken of in the sonnets. I knew then that Shakespeare had loved his gipsy, Mary Fitton, from the end of 1596 on; and I soon came to see that the story told in the sonnets was told also in his plays of that period; and finally I was forced to realize that 'false Cressid' and the gipsy Cleopatra were also portraits of Mary Fitton, whom he loved for twelve years down to 1608, when she married and left London for good.
I shall always remember those great months spent in Fluelen, when I climbed all the mountains about the lake and twice walked over the St. Gothard and lived with 'gentle Shakespeare's' sweet spirit and noble fairness of mind.
