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.
One important result this discovery of Shakespeare had upon me; it strengthened my self-esteem enormously. I picked up Coleridge's essays on Shakespeare and saw that his Puritanism had blinded him to the truth and I began to think that in time I might write something memorable. When the time came to go back to work I returned to Heidelberg, entered again at the university and resolved to read no more Latin except Tacitus and Catullus. I knew there were beautiful descriptions in Virgil, but I didn't like the language and saw no reason for prolonging my study of it in seminar if I could get out of it.
My next lesson in German life was peculiar. I was walking in one of the side streets with an English boy of fourteen or so who was living with Professor Ihne, when we met a tall young corps-student who pushed me roughly off the sidewalk into the street. "What a rude brute," I said to my companion.
"No, no!" the boy cried in wild excitement, "All he did was to rempeln you!"
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It's his way of asking you, will you fight?"
"All right," I cried, and ran back after my rude gentleman. As I came up he stopped.
"Did you push me on purpose?" I asked.
"I believe I did," he replied haughtily.
"Then guard yourself," I said, and next moment I had thrown my stick into the gutter and hit him as hard as I could on the jaw. He went down like a log and lay where he fell. Just as I bent over him to see whether he was really hurt, there poured out from all the near-by shops a crowd of excited Germans.
One, I remember, was a stout butcher who ran across the street and caught hold of my left arm: "Run and fetch the police," he cried to his assistant; "I'll hold him."