“I look at it in this way,” replied Harrington. “Set aside the evidence we might collect from his writings, and consider only what must inevitably have followed from the nature of his intellect. The complex catholicity—the massive breadth—in a word, the universality of his mind, inevitably involves a corresponding vastness of interest and participation in the public affairs of his time, and all the varieties of its thought and life. Isolation from public life may coexist, and be perfectly compatible, with intensity of genius—with universality, never. Moreover, to be worldly wise, as the plays show their author to have been, a man must follow the rule Bacon insists upon as indispensable—namely, to ally contemplation with action. Deny such a man experience, and you cannot get from him the lessons of experience, as you get them from this author. Isolate such a man from affairs, and his genius spreads aloft into the vast air of the abstract, and you never get in his writings the voices of the street, the camp, the court, the cabinet—in a word, the voices of concrete practical life, as you do in the Shakspeare Drama. Take for example, the man nearest Shakspeare, the many-sided Goethe: the corollary to his many-sidedness is the fact that he was a man of the world, a scientifician, courtier, statesman. So with the author of the Drama. He must have been immersed in public life. He must have held office. He must have administered the affairs of State. It was the inevitable result of his genius, and it was the condition on which the manifestations of that genius depended. Denied public life, and either his development would have been arrested, or he would have become a vast dreamer or abstractionist.” “Upon my word, Harrington,” said Wentworth, “that’s an astonishing thing for you to say!” “It’s the truth, nevertheless,” replied Harrington, smiling. “But the facts of Shakspeare’s life are against you,” rejoined Wentworth. “Well, you must reconcile them as you can,” said Harrington. “Meanwhile, there is the indestructible truth. All history, all facts, all reason testify to it. It is so.” “But look here, Harrington,” said the amazed Wentworth. “On the one hand, you infer that a man of Shakspeare’s genius must have been a statesman. On the other hand, is the plain fact that Shakspeare was nothing of the sort. Now, therefore, we must at once conclude that your inference is wrong.” “Not necessarily,” replied Harrington. “Not necessarily?” Wentworth laughed, and fixed his eyes with a puzzled look upon the floor. “Well, I don’t see how you can escape from so obvious a conclusion. Now, let me state it again. In the first place, who wrote the plays?”