Part 5

We notice the same touch of humor in Goethe's Prologue to "Faust." The Lord gives full permission to Mephistopheles to try his hand at Faust:--

MEPHISTOPHELES.

Dust shall he eat for pleasure's sake, Like my old famous aunt, the snake.

THE LORD.

Just freely as you please, do I reply: I never hated people of your kind; Of all the spirits that deny The knave is he best suits my mind. Since man soon tires and thinks that labor's evil, For unconditioned rest he sighs; And so I'm glad to pique his enterprise By a provoking comrade, like the devil.

The Lord has always tolerated this element on a compulsion of his own. But whenever creeping plants that have extorted bitter drops from the world around their roots climb over Shakspeare's sunny exposure, the clusters grow fit for human lips and are crushed into smiles.

The characters of humor in Shakspeare promote the business of the play, but they do it as much by being special studies of the traits of human nature as by necessary complicity with the plot. Sometimes they appear, as they would to a Frenchman like Voltaire, to be absurdities interpolated in the texture of the plot as if merely to raise a laugh and stretch the mouths of the groundlings. The notion is not uncommon, even among cultivated people, that they are drolleries contrived to suspend the strain of the more serious portions of the play; the poet assuming that the average mind cannot bear gravity for a whole evening. And doubtless great numbers of spectators find this relief in the lighter scenes into which they step down the stairs of the blank verse, rather tired and strained. They only notice that they are amused. But the characters of humor flow out of a natural logic that is behind the plot, which cannot be apprehended without them. They are essential to it because they are intrinsically logical, however little they may appear to be woven along with the rest of the texture. But they are in fact, as all human life is, a seamless piece constructed at a single loom.

Why for instance, in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," does Launce enter, leading his dog, just after Proteus and Julia have exchanged rings, and they part, she too much overcome to respond to his tender farewell? What an impertinent soliloquy which describes Launce's parting, too, from his family to follow Proteus, all of them dissolved in tears except Crab the dog! What does this bit of vulgar life in such a connection? It introduces the essential vulgarity of Proteus himself, who, we shall see, has the remembrance of Julia driven out of his heart by Silvia as soon as he has turned his back. To obtain her he plays a mean trick upon his dearest friend who loves her. In the midst of this Launce intrudes again; for he has fallen in love, and gives us what he calls the "cat-log" of his girl's conditions. It is as if the trivial disposition of Proteus was suddenly dumped upon its proper refuse-heap by the fine verse which held it. And we soon perceive why this dog Crab was trotted into the company; for Proteus procures a dog of gentle breed and bids Launce carry it as a present to Silvia. But it is stolen from him, and Launce substitutes his own vicious cur who behaves badly in Silvia's presence, and is whipped out. This is just what Proteus is doing in love. Launce's shift is the shabbiness of Proteus, and Silvia dismisses it as summarily as she disposed of Crab; for she is not "so shallow, so conceitless," as to trust such a born flirt as Proteus. Shakspeare certainly has not left a shred of sentiment hanging to the back of Proteus's meanness; for Launce, who is a kind of choragus of it, is furnished with the most vigorous vulgarity which the vernacular contains. Especially we see what a satirical dog Crab is.

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not: and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues."[3]

With that for our text, let us approach some characters of Shakspeare.

* * * * *

When the requisition of the English government for the surrender of Mason and Slidell in the Trent affair was made through Lord Lyons, Judge Hoar rode out to see an old Concord farmer whom he highly respected, to tell him the news, which he did with considerable excitement. The farmer listened coolly, and said, "Well, if those fellows are really going in for the rebels and slavery, you tell Lord Lyons he may have my copy of Shakspeare."

But I suspect that New England farmers are content to be patriotic without cultivating the poet's page. Shakspeare may be everywhere extensively owned without being mentally possessed. We need a Shakspearian piety. Formerly the Bible and a copy of Josephus or some protracted commentary stood within reach of the household, and the leaves were turned by Religion herself who found her own meaning in every text and the meaning inexhaustible. If the volume of Shakspeare could attract a sympathy so loyal and grave as that, Religion would find in him, too, her counterpart. But we do not read Shakspeare yet in spiritual faith, as Bibles are pondered for their consecrated sense. Literature swarms with books of criticism which exhaust invention for theories of his life, profession, and intent; and the various editions of his works are liberally patronized. But where are the devotees whose morning orison is the wonderful liturgy of his imagination, with responses that are intoned by human nature itself, the acknowledgment that mind and heart are surprised by their own detection, yet with as little fear and as much confidence as we repay to omniscience? This is rare, this persistent recurrence of the soul to his enlightening, this praying before the shrine of every verse in which a thought, a passion, a humor, a delight, a beauty, is the saint. Must we have, then, professorships of Shakspeare to instruct the youth and inculcate this natural piety? Rather let every household accuse its own indifference, and endow its hearts to make him more widely felt and understood. For there are sweetness and light, wisdom and conscience and self-knowledge slumbering unmined below those covers.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: French Gentleman in "All's Well that Ends Well," iv. 3.]

DOGBERRY, MALVOLIO,

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA (AJAX),

BOTTOM, TOUCHSTONE.

DOGBERRY.

The advocates of the theory that Lord Bacon wrote Shakspeare's plays like to point to the coincidences of phrase between Dogberry's Charge to the Watch in "Much Ado about Nothing," and Bacon's "Office of Constables." They may be found in Judge Holmes's "Authorship of Shakspeare," 2d ed. pp. 324, 326, and are plainly Dogberry's misapplications of terms used in some municipal code or usage for constables which was common in Shakspeare's time. They may have been only transmitted in the form of oral instructions before being codified by Bacon, but at any rate they were well known and highly relished by Shakspeare as specimens of rural pomp in language. So that although the play was first acted in the autumn of 1599, and Bacon did not publish his manual until 1608, the force of referring the coincidences to Bacon is lost by considering that every village youth between Stratford and London must have often heard the petty constables, which were elected by the people, instructed in the phrases so comically misapplied by Dogberry.

And at first it seems as if Shakspeare intended by the introduction of Dogberry and his ineffective watch merely to interpolate a bit of comic business, by parodying the important phrases and impotent exploits of the suburban constable. But Dogberry's mission extended farther than that, and is intimately woven with delightful unconsciousness on his part into the fortunes of Hero.

Dogberry is not only immortal for that, but his name will never die so long as village communities in either hemisphere elect their guardians of the peace and clothe them in verbose terrors. If the town is unfortunately short of rascals, the officer will fear one in each bush, or extemporize one out of some unbelligerent starveling to show that the majestic instructions of his townsmen have not been wasted on him. This elaborate inefficiency is frequently selected by busy communities, because so few persons are there clumsy enough to be unemployed. Such a vagrom is easily comprehended. Dogberry has caught up the turns and idioms of sagacious speech, and seems to be blowing them up as lifebelts; so he goes bobbing helplessly around in the froth of his talk. "I leave an arrant knave with your worship; which, I beseech your worship, to correct yourself, for the example of others. I humbly give you leave to depart; and if a merry meeting may be wished, God prohibit it." He ties his conversation in hopeless knots of absurdity; when pomp takes possession of a vacuous mind, it rattles like the jester's bladder of dried pease. Have not his fellow-citizens invested him? He will then lavish the selectest phrases. I heard a village politician once say with scorn in town-meeting, "Mr. Moderator, I know nothing about your technalities." Dogberry is the most original of Malaprops, says to the Prince's order that it shall be suffigance, and tells the watch that salvation were a punishment too good for them, if they should have any allegiance in them. He has furnished mankind with that adroit phrase of conversational escape from compromise, "Comparisons are odorous." Where common men would suspect a person, Dogberry says the person is auspicious. His brain seems to be web-footed, and tumbles over itself in trying to reach swimming water; as when he says, "Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false knaves, and it will go near to be thought so shortly." This is the precipitancy of a child's reasoning.

His own set do not discover by his malapropisms how futile he is, for their ears are accustomed to this misplacing of terms; which, indeed, is not uncommon among people of stronger native sense. Even the spelling-book and primer are not prophylactic against this failing, which seems to be owing to cerebral inability to keep words from gadding about with each other after they have once entered the mind: a laxness between notions and memory which results in verbal hybridity, as when a man, who was well informed enough, used to say, when the castors were passed, that he never took condignments with his food; and the Western lawyer said of a man that he could not tell a story without embezzlements. A suburban resident informed a friend that he lived in the vicissitude of General ----. We can only hope that Dr. Watts would have found it a "beautiful vicissitude." I have heard of a stout, cheerful, and polite Dogberry, who had arrived at the discretion of fifty years when his parents died. Then, in reply to a friend who was practising condolence upon him, he said, "Yes, I'm a poor orphanless man!" The same person remarked of his nephew, that he hadn't decided on his profession yet, but was preponderating; and arguing against non-resistance with somebody, he said, "Why, sir, if a man should draw a pistol on me, do you think I'd put my life in his jeopardy?" A venerable clergyman, finding an inebriated person in the gutter, said, "My friend, how did you get there?" The man, with a twinkle of jest yet alive in him, replied, "I'm here, _notwithstanding_." This amused the clergyman, who tried to impart it to his family. "And what do you think the man replied to me?" Nobody could guess. "Well, said he to me, Nevertheless!" And there was a worthy old deacon, who, repeating Watts's hymn line for line after his clergyman, said, "Return, ye rancid sinners!" a condition for which Dogberry would say they ought to be condemned into everlasting redemption.

A very impracticable and contentious person was chosen to be a member of a committee. Somebody asked one of the other members, "Well, how did you find Mr. ----, when it came to business?" The reply was, "Oh, full of fight as ever,--a regular _horse de combat_."

When the Boston fire was stopped at the new post-office, a man standing near was heard to say, "I'm glad they've got that fire under headway at last." In all such cases there is a moment supplied during which some sense is pretended, so that many malapropisms belong to the race of bulls. At other times they contain the effect of a pun. A man who had lately moved into the country, and was planning some new buildings, informed a friend that he had already got a barn in imbroglio.

A friend called my attention to an article in a Bengal (E.I.) newspaper, which advised its readers "not to kill the calf that lays the golden egg." That is, as he remarked, "a happy combination of Æsop and the Prodigal Son."

So that Mrs. Malaprop's "allegory" basks beside all rivers, and is not the "pretty worm of Nilus" alone. Climate and race do not seem to set up distinctions in the universal breed. It skips in all pastures, with aboriginal characters unchanged. One would suppose that the Irish might be content with that happy cross between wit and witlessness which engenders bulls. But they, too, revenge themselves upon English oppressors of Home Rule by miscalling the language which they hate to use. I heard of an Irish domestic, who, descanting upon the manufacture of soft-soap, tried to describe the virtue of potash, saying with the solemnity of a sacrament, "It's con-se-cra-ted lie." What a pity that potash should not be the sole instance of that commodity!

The magistrate asked the tramp what his occupation was. "Plaze y're honor, I am a sort of pedlar, picking up iron and junk in this and the previous towns." This reminds me of an obfuscated person who was feeling around in vain to recover his carpet-bag in the horse-car, a search which finally enriched our literature when he mumbled, "It's damned seldom where my bag is."

The malapropisms of Shakspeare have a quality that is not strained. They would be so likely to occur that they seem to verify all prosody and syntax, and we sometimes prefer them to the correct word, especially when the mistake brings a faint flavor of wit. Launcelot Gobbo is tempted to run away from his service to Shylock, and says that "the most contagious fiend" bids him pack. When he meets his father, he says, "I will try confusions with him," which is made witty by the scene that follows, in which old Gobbo does not recognize his son. I once heard a fine lady of society generously revive Launcelot's vein when she said, _apropos_ of some event, "however incredulous it may appear."

Dogberry has a pondering look and a fribbling emphasis. He rolls the plump phrases over and over like a quid, but ejects them with a kind of strenuous drivel. He makes pauses, as if discriminating the juiciest reflection, but really settles at random, like a pigeon whose brain has been vivisected; so he concludes that, if a man will not stand when he is bid to, he may go; and that, though a thief ought to be arrested, they that touch pitch will be defiled; and that, on the whole, it is better to let him show himself what he is, and steal out of your company.

Thus he attains to the merit of genius when it chips the egg and lets loose the struggling chick of the ordinary mind. He voices the perplexity of the watch, and lends to it the color of concession and sagacious compromise. It is exactly what old Verges thought but did not know how to incubate into definite expression. So all the people who sit upon political fences, and find the edge growing inconvenient, welcome the pad which postpones the necessity for a jump to either side.

Dogberry admires and cossets his own authority, but is too timid to enforce it save with poor old Verges, whose mental feebleness is an exact shadow of Dogberry's; and the latter manages to step upon himself in amusing unconsciousness. "An old man, sir, and his wits are not so blunt, as, God help, I would desire they were." A good old man, sir; but he will gabble. All men are not alike, alas! So he goes on, dismissing himself, and slamming to the door without observing it.

But when the watch blunders by reason of idiocy into arresting Borachio, who was the agent in the plot against Hero, the innocent Conrade is found in his company, listening to his disclosures. He, too, is carried off and confronted with Dogberry before the whole "dissembly" of constables. Then and there Conrade calls him in set terms an ass.

Dogberry flickers up into a kind of lukewarmness, and does his little to resent it. "Dost thou not suspect my ears?" "Thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be proved." Then his speech seems to be handling a dustpan to gather up his good points with tremulous huffiness: I am a pretty piece of flesh, and know the law, go to; and a rich fellow, with leases, and two gowns, and every thing handsome about me. He was never called ass before; for Conrade was probably the first free-spoken prisoner entirely innocent of malapropisms that he had ever faced. He cannot compose his shallow fluster; for it is as deep as he is, and it even comes splashing into the pathos of the moment when the wrong done to Hero is discovered, who is not yet known to be still living. He wants the man punished who called him ass, not the man who was the slanderer of Hero. Standing round him are noble natures touched with sorrow and remorse; but for him Conrade is "the plaintiff, the offender," who did call him ass. Dead, shamed, ruined Hero, distracted lover, and tender father, retreat into a background upon which he scrawls himself an ass. For the ocean cannot be accommodated in a saucer, and some men should beware lest the spatter of a tear swamp and drown them. Here the comedy of Dogberry's character acquires a touch of humor; for so are we obliged to tolerate in our profoundest moments the trivialities of those who do not know or cannot contain our serious mood.

There is underlying humor in the fact that all this ignorance and inconsequence, this burlesquing of the detective's business, effects what the age and wisdom of Leonato, and the instinct of the lover Claudio, could not; namely, the discovery of Hero's innocence and of the plot to besmirch her chastity in the eyes of her lover. The wise men are taken in and the accident of folly undeceives them. Then it becomes no longer an accident, but the regimen of the world adopts and puts it to a use. Here comedy becomes humorous, because it is shown how the fortunes of the good and prudent are involved with all the vulgarities of the world, and justice itself, which is nothing if not critical, cannot make up its case without _non sequiturs_.

When a stratagem compels the braggart Parolles in "All's Well that Ends Well" to show the white feather, he says adroitly, "Who cannot be crushed by a plot?" But absence of plot is quite as hostile to our luck, and goodness and beauty provide no immunity against it. Two soldiers, who had been sent to arrest the Duchess de Berri, rigorously searched for her a whole house over to no purpose; then, lighting a fire to warm their fingers, roasted her out from a hiding place behind the chimney. A Jacobite climbing into the hollow of an oak leaves his garter on a twig to make a silly advertisement of him. Major Andre meets two men who are not looking for him, and convinces them that he is the very man they ought to seek. Dogberry and his men are as apposite as the female toggery which trips up an escaping rebel; and through them Shakspeare delights to apprise us of a world in which knavery may be outwitted by fatuity.

MALVOLIO.

The humor in the play of "Twelfth Night" resides in the contriving to make one vice ridiculous by other vices which are also absurd. Not one of the comic characters, taken separately, provides the peculiar element of humor. It transpires during the impartial interplay of the silliness of Aguecheek, the drunken techiness of Sir Toby, the spite of Fabian, the mischievousness of Maria, and the immeasurable conceit of Malvolio, who appeared not like a human being, but "as if he were his own statue erected by national subscription." All these vices betray themselves with such an infantile simplicity, and help each other to construct so delightful a plot, that we feel, with the clown, perfectly content to see "foolery walk about the orb like the sun." It is so difficult to discriminate between follies when they protect themselves by being so amusing, that we say with Viola,--

"I hate ingratitude more in a man, Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, Or any taint of vice, whose strong corruption Inhabits our frail blood."

We always have, as she did, some vice which we hate worse than others. The one that is damned is generally the only one which would put us to discomfort to practise. But humor can make for a time only those vices companionable which turn a man into his own worst enemy and raise no tragic threat against the State.

Malvolio, the steward of Olivia's household, is prized by that lady for his grave and punctilious disposition. He discharges his office carefully and in a tone of some superiority, for his mind is above his estate. At some time in his life he has read cultivated books, knows the theory of Pythagoras concerning the transmigration of the soul, but thinks more nobly of the soul and no way approves that opinion. His gentility, though a little rusted and obsolete, is like a Sunday suit which nobody thinks of rallying. He wears it well, and his mistress cannot afford to treat him exactly as a servant; in fact, she has occasionally dropped good-natured phrases which he has interpreted into a special partiality: for Quixotic conceits can riot about inside of his stiff demeanor. This proneness to fantasy increases the touchiness of a man of reserve. He can never take a joke, and his climate is too inclement to shelter humor. Souls must be at blood-heat, and brains must expand with it like a blossom, before humor will fructify. He wonders how Olivia can tolerate the clown. "I protest," he says, "I take these wise men, that crow so at these set kind of fools, to be no better than the fools' zanies." Olivia hits the difficulty when she replies, "Oh, you are sick of self-love, and taste with a distempered appetite." Perhaps he thinks nobly of the soul because he so profoundly respects his own, and carries it upon stilts over the heads of the servants and Sir Toby and Sir Andrew.