CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 THIS BOOK IS ONE OF A 
 COLLECTION MADE BY 
 
 BENNO LOEWY 
 1854-1919 
 
 AND BEQUEATHED TO 
 CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
 
Date Due 
 
 PRINTED IN 
 
 NO. 23233 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 PR 2989. W43 
 
 Wit, humor, and Shakspeare.Twelve essays 
 
 ^ 1Q?4 ni3 161 223 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 31 61 223 
 
WIT, HUMOR, AND SHAKSPEARE. 
 
The West - Easterly Divan 
 of Goethe. 
 
 Translated, with an Introduction 
 and Notes, 
 
 By John Weiss. 
 
 [Ready in December.] 
 
Wit, Humor, and 
 Shakspeare. 
 
 Eiatlbt ^^eags. 
 
 By JOHN WEISS. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 1876. 
 
 u 
 
n 
 
 Copyright, 1876, 
 By John Weiss. 
 
 Cambridge: 
 Press of John Wilson cSr' Son. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Cause of Laughter 3 
 
 II. Wit, Irony, Humor 33 
 
 , III. Dogberry, Malvolio, Troilus and Cressida 
 
 (AjAx), Bottom, Touchstone "j-^ 
 
 IV. Falstaff: his Companions; Americanisms . . 119 
 
 V. Hamlet 151 
 
 VI. The Porter in " Macbeth," the Clown in 
 
 "Twelfth Night," the Fool in "Lear" . . 185 
 VII. Women and Men: Maria, Helena, Imogen, 
 
 Constance zii 
 
 VIII. Lord Bacon and the Plays, Shakspeare's 
 
 Women, Love in Shakspeare w^S / 
 
 IX. Portia 3*" 
 
 X. Helena; Ophelia 327 
 
 XI. Macbeth 361 
 
 XII. Blonde Women: Lady Macbeth 397 
 
THE CAUSE OF LAUGHTER, 
 
 " I '"HIS subject is best reached from the peint of re- 
 flecting that, of all the animals, man alone appears 
 to be capable of laughter. If, as so many naturalists 
 now claim, man has ascended by successive evolutions of 
 varieties from a lower animal type, we ought to be able 
 to find some germs of the laughing propensity among 
 our ancestors. The first witness we summon on this 
 question is the anatomist, because the physical expression 
 that accompanies an act of laughter depends upon the 
 connection of the respiratory nerves with the diaphragm 
 below and the orbicular and straight muscles of the 
 mouth above. But these muscles are not perfectly de- 
 veloped in the a^nimals. When dogs are fondly gambol- 
 ling about you, there is " a slight eversion of the lips," 
 which is a rudimentary hint of man's facial expression 
 in an act of mirth. The dog has been the associate of 
 human moods, in all countries, and for thousands of 
 years ; yet, although we are told that " the little dog 
 laughed to see the sport," he has not yet made up his 
 mouth for any thing more emphatic than a simper. 
 
 Some kinds of monkeys have established a facial ex- 
 pression, accompanied with a laughing noise, which is 
 
4 /^FzV, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 so like the human that we might charge them with 
 being- entertained at the practical jokes' which they pass v 
 upon each other, or over some obscurer sense of sylvan 
 incongruity. We can see, at least, that Nature was 
 preparing in them the nervous connections which men 
 employ to transmit their pleasurable emotions ; as the 
 flexible plants which dangle by the streams and chasms 
 of the Andes are woven by his afterthought to span the 
 intervals, and the good cheer of humanity passes to and 
 fro. 
 
 The respiratory nerves radiate from their centre in 
 the medulla oblongata, the place to which the brain must 
 transmit the first shock of the surprise which ends in 
 smiling and laughing. Thence it is transmitted to the 
 heart and diaphragm, quickening the action of the one, 
 and setting the other in motion, at the same instant 
 climbing to engage the facial nerves in sympathy ; then 
 the orbicular muscles retract, forcing the cheek up 
 towards the eye, and tightening the muscles which sur- 
 round the eyelid. 
 
 All our passions appear to claim the respiratory 
 nerves for outward expression. They are a signal 
 corps which communicate by hoisting the blush, the 
 smile ; by letting fall the tear, by the exhalation of a 
 sigh, by the explosions of laughter. The life-breaths 
 of joy and grief tend primitively to the lungs, and they 
 voice the mother- tongue of all emotions. 
 
 I have often wondered how animals can avoid being 
 struck with the differences which exist among them- 
 selves, so much more salient and intrusive than among 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 5 
 
 the races of men, in shape, gestures, tones, and habits. 
 What a wide range of Nature's curious freakery a forest 
 has, or a district of country like those plains artd thickets 
 of Africa, where the natives dig their great pit and 
 organize a monster drive ! Into it falls every thing 
 which cannot escape to either side. The giraffe, ele- 
 phant, gnu, antelope, hartbeest, zebra, jackal, — think of 
 the commingling of strange discrepancies thus suddenly 
 collected! Were it not for the panic which prevails, 
 and the accidents to life and limb, one would suppose 
 that they ought to be aware of Nature's whims in them- 
 selves, and to narrowly escape inventing amusement. 
 But curiosity and aversion probably exhaust the specu- 
 lative possibilities of animals in this direction. 
 
 It is true, we occasionally hear of happy families, like 
 that of the prairie-dog who has an owl and a rattlesnake 
 to share his housekeeping, which they do with zest ; for 
 they have established a taste for the young of the 
 prairie-dog, and they hire his tenement only with an eye 
 to business. 
 
 When a great freshet takes possession of a country, 
 and evicts the tenants of every hole, thicket, and bur- 
 row, there is an indiscriminate stampede of the animals 
 for the driest and safest places : hares, rattlesnakes, 
 mice, cats, and the carnivora cling together to the tops 
 of trees, or wait in terror on the highest hills. So a 
 prairie fire startles all the wild creatures with its sweep 
 into a promiscuous race towards some spot that cannot 
 be tenanted by flame. There they might observe the 
 strange traits which shun each other in ordinary times 
 
6 Wii, Humor, and. Shakspeare. 
 
 or seek each other only when hunger demands its toll. 
 While the fright and the dread of death are beginning 
 to pass off are these creatures insensibly attracted to 
 notice each other? Probably only as a curious deer 
 observes a man. The danger has not established any 
 sympathy between them. And they separate without 
 any better opinion of each other, nor approach to genial- 
 ity. Even men who are strangers, and in general disso- 
 ciated by the distinctions of society, will be thrown to- 
 gether by some stress of the moment, part with a mutual 
 feeling of relief, and resume their predilections. Yet 
 man only is endowed with the magnanimity to welcome 
 the emergencies which abolish superficial differences. 
 They can be invaded by a circumstance which com- 
 prises them under an idea different ,from those which 
 keep them asunder ; and this new congruity can make 
 the forced society congenial. It is Nature's witty ren- 
 dering of the text that declares all men of one blood. 
 The effect is grave, and under some conditions it may 
 reach an heroic stature, but the root of wit is the nour- 
 isher ; and only those creatures who are capable of anni- 
 hilating capricious distinctions by a feeling of common 
 humanness are capable of enjoying the union of hetero- 
 geneous ideas. 
 
 What mutual impression do a dog and a duck make ? 
 He runs around with frolic transpiring in his tail, and 
 barks to announce a wish to fraternize ; or perhaps it is 
 a short and nervous bark, and indicates unsettled views 
 about ducks. Meantime, the duck waddles off with an 
 inane quack, so remote from a bark that it must con- 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 7 
 
 vince any well-informed dog of the hopelessness of pro- 
 posing either business or pleasure to such a doting and 
 toothless pate. He certainly must have overheard the 
 conversation of his betters, when the Shallows, Slenders, 
 and Silences are near. What a prompt retreat human 
 beings make, and what wariness is expended in steering 
 clear of them for the future ! Yet I never feel quite 
 sure that the dunces are not amused at the manoeuvre. 
 Is there a human being permitted to live without wit 
 enough to know when he is avoided .■" Even this duck 
 has a twinkle in that bead of an eye, as it rejoins the 
 other ducks, that seems to convey to us its sense of the 
 absurdness of a creature so caninely exuberant. Or 
 was it a duck which I noticed .' I am sure I have often 
 seen creatures who are hopelessly posed or scandalized 
 waddle away from some superior extravagance. 
 
 What vague auroral Sittings of human perception 
 pass beneath that horrid crest of the gorilla, as he ele- 
 vates it in astonishment at encountering a creature of 
 matchless symmetry like the wild ass, of picturesque- 
 ness like the zebra, of remote rarity like a beautiful 
 woman ! As for cockatoos, parrots, and macaws, I am 
 convinced they are an endless source of amusement to 
 the monkey tribe, who pelt them with nuts to make 
 them scream and scold. Monkeys have a great flow of 
 animal spirits : this, with their imitative talent and quick 
 observation, renders them capable of entertaining ludi- 
 crous impressions. But one must be very closely related 
 to the anthropoid ape, if not quite recently derived from 
 it, to tell what they are. 
 
8 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 There are many well-attested cases of an absolute 
 enjoyment among animals that sometimes rises to the 
 pitch of mirthfulness. One day, Dr. Kane came across 
 a long, icy, inclined shoot, like the artificial coasting- 
 places made by the Russians, down which a long file of 
 white bears went sliding on their hams : at the bottom 
 they jumped up like a crowd of boys, with evident de- 
 light, to carry their sleds back to the top of the hill. 
 He says that the signs of pleasure among them were 
 unmistakable. . . . 
 
 The Canadian fish-otter {Lutra Canadensis) loves to 
 do the same thing. He climbs to the top of a snow- 
 ridge in winter, or of a slippery bank in summer, lies 
 on his belly, with the fore feet bent backward, then, 
 pushing with the hind legs, down he goes. So the 
 Russians, with their ice-slides, are only imitating the 
 sport of their own arctic creatures. I suppose that long 
 ago the pleasure derived from an involuntary and acci- 
 dental slide originated the habit. 
 
 Lieutenant Dall says that the beavers in Alaska en- 
 gage in gymnastics for fun. If they find a smooth, miry 
 bank, they betake themselves to sliding down it. And 
 the Californian gray whale loves to play in the shoals 
 where the surf breaks ; keeping a wary outlook, so that 
 it continually escapes being beached. Its pleasure is 
 enhanced by the peril. Seals do the same thing when 
 they find a heavy surf. They turn from side to side 
 with half-extended fins, moved apparently by the heavy 
 ground-swell ; at times making a playful spring with 
 bended flukes that throws the body clear out of the 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 9 
 
 water, to come down with a heavy splash : then, giving 
 two or three spouts, they settle again under water, to 
 appear perhaps the next moment rolling over in a list- 
 less manner with the heavy swell, plainly full of intense 
 enjoyment. 
 
 If the sea-otter of Siberia escapes into the water from 
 its hunters, it expresses joy and derision by marked ges- 
 tures, one of which is the putting a paw up over the 
 eyes, as if shading them to regard the hunters. It 
 would seem to be a very slight natural variation when 
 the thumb slips to the point of the nose, and the rest of 
 the paw executes that vibratory sarcastic gesture highly 
 approved by boys. 
 
 The same sea-otter will mourn itself to a skeleton 
 over the loss of its young. If animals can be capable 
 of grief,' as innumerable facts testify, mirth ought to 
 endow them with a finite compensation. 
 
 Lady Barker, in her book called " Station Life in New 
 Zealand," describes a favorite cockatoo, whose amuse- 
 ment consisted in imitating a hawk. " He reserves this 
 fine piece of acting until his mistress is feeding the 
 poultry ; then, when all the hens and chickens, turkeys 
 and pigeons are in the quiet enjoyment of their break- 
 fast or supper, the peculiar shrill cry of a hawk is heard 
 overhead, and the bird is seen circling in the air, utter- 
 ing a scream occasionally. The fowls never find out 
 that it is a hoax, but run to shelter, cackling in the 
 greatest alarm ; hens clucking loudly for their chicks, 
 turkeys crouching under the bushes, the pigeons taking 
 refuge in their house. As soon as the ground is quite 
 
lo Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 clear, the bird changes his wild note for peals of laugh- 
 ter from a high, tree, and finally, alighting on the top of 
 a hen-coop filled with trembling chickens, remarks, in a 
 suffocated voice, ' You'll be the death of me.' " 
 
 If we are disposed to think that such accounts of 
 originality are only cases of accidental coincidence, what 
 shall we say to the following story, which comes to us 
 from an authority upon which we may rely : — 
 
 A long-tailed paroquet, which had been a pet of an 
 English barrack in India, where it had picked up all 
 kinds of oaths and slang, passed into the possession of 
 a lady in England, who, one day, receiving a visitor en- 
 dowed with a very decided squint, took her into the 
 room where the bird was kept. No sooner did the bird 
 see this lady than it cried, " Twig her eye ! What a 
 beauty ! " 
 
 How many human beings get immortality discounted 
 for themselves upon a capital of sprightliness hardly 
 more extensive than this parrot's ! 
 
 There is also a well-authenticated story of a parrot 
 belonging to an English carpenter, who undertook to 
 make it say a long word in several syllables, that had no 
 particular meaning. All at once the parrot declined to 
 use any of his usual phrases, and remained entirely mute 
 for a year, at the end of which time he suddenly pro- 
 nounced the word, and then talked as before. The story 
 is parallel to the Roman one, of the parrot which heard 
 for the first time the note of a trumpet, became silent 
 for several months, and then suddenly began to imitate 
 the note. It is remarkable that no rehearsals or prelu- 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 1 1 
 
 sions of the difficulty to be overcome were ever heard in 
 either case. 
 
 The naturalist has lately found a monkey of the Gib- 
 bon family, which has a voice that is divided into distinct 
 notes that correspond to our scale and run an octave or 
 more, clear, musical, and firm. What an invaluable 
 prize this would be for M. Offenbach and his opera 
 bouffe ! for the creature has all the flexibility and brisk- 
 ness, all the parody of human nature, and all the lubric- 
 ity which this style of art requires, with the caudal 
 emphasis appended ; and great economy would be 
 gained in exempting more expensive human performers 
 from moral degradation. We would all pay our money 
 for such an exhibition, rejoiced to see the drama recov- 
 ering from its decay. 
 
 But, as yet, no cosey couples of clever apes have been 
 discovered in paroxysms of laughter over the last sylvan 
 equivoque ; nor have elephants been seen silently shak- 
 ing at a joke too ponderous for their trunks to carry. 
 Everybody has observed, how ducks will gather into a 
 corner of the farm-yard and stand still, and apparently 
 breathless, as if listening to a jocose tale fished out of 
 their Decameron of a gutter, then break into hearty 
 quacking, which reminds one of the wheezing of snips 
 of fellows over their muddy jest. But probably the 
 ducks are only holding a caucus on the question of food, 
 to nominate the next pool to be dredged, and make it 
 unanimous. 
 
 But when we consider that the higher animals can 
 compare objects and make selections, exercise a memory 
 
12 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 and have association of ideas concerning each other and 
 the outer world, we come near to that human quality 
 which is the ground of the function of laughter. These 
 mental traits are the buried roots of the consciousness 
 which blossoms into smiles in the sun of wit and humor. 
 For the power to combine or to contrast two or more 
 objects, to remember one absent object by another pres- 
 ent one, to experience a feeling that two objects are 
 associated, leads to the highest manifestations of wit. 
 In the delicate structures of men and women, which 
 are bequests to them descending through the whole 
 inviolate entail of Nature, refined by it and amplified till 
 they entertain keenly the pathos of life, all mental traits 
 accumulate into the faculty of imagination, upon which 
 every thing that is laughable depends. 
 
 With this faculty man makes shift to relieve the 
 moments when existence, with its incessant toil and 
 merciless persistency of routine, threatens to become 
 insupportable. One day is not exactly like another, if 
 h,earty laughter loosens its handcuffs and lets the pris- 
 oner stretch his frame and have a little run. Every 
 laugh reddens the blood, which goes then more blithely 
 to dissipate the fogs of a moody brain. Multitudes of. 
 our American brains are badly drained in consequence 
 of a settling of the wastage of house-grubbing and 
 street-work into moral morasses which generate many a 
 chimera. So there is something positively heroic in the 
 hilarity which braves, light-armed as it is, our brood of 
 viperous cares, and attacks their den. One flash of a 
 smile shears off Medusa's head with impunity. 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 1 3 
 
 No creature that is not capable of being bored can be 
 capable of laughing at its own incongruous circum- 
 stances. The more simply constructed the brain and 
 nervous system are, the less liability is there to that 
 misfortune of enmii. We cannot imagine that a turtle's 
 head gets tired of lying around, decapitated, for a week 
 or more ; or that a toad imprisoned ,in a rock or tree for 
 one or two thousand years should become jaded by its 
 close confinement. When the miner's pick releases him, 
 his hop is as alert, and his appetite for the next fly as 
 keen, as before his prison stole upon him. The lower 
 animals are as contented as the forests and waters in 
 which they pass an instinctive existence. Continually 
 cheerful we may suppose they are, even when the larder 
 is empty and the springs run low. Their monotonous 
 round of hungering, feeding, and procreating sympa- 
 thizes with the reposeful temper in which the whole of 
 the inanimate nature discharges those functions, as we 
 see the flower absorb, fructify, and exhale. But as the 
 brain becomes more complicated, and capable of breed- 
 ing more positive ideas and feelings, — such as the 
 questing of a greyhound, the tact of setters and retriev- 
 ers, the attachment of dogs for persons, — we may expect 
 to observe a liability to suffer tedium. How plainly a 
 good dog can show his disappointment when he goes out 
 with a green sportsman, or with one who is so abstracted 
 in his mood that he neglects the chances to shoot ! The 
 dog's natural language is that he will not tolerate such 
 an irreligious abuse of providence : he will soon begin 
 to sulk and not put up. any more game. 
 
14 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 If an animal is capable of having a consecutive dream, 
 as Miss Mitford's greyhound was, who regularly every 
 year, just before the coursing season began, used to 
 dream of going out, and quested in his sleep, such an 
 animal can feel the torment of ennui. He is not blindlyj 
 indicating that a, season has come around, — as a wound 
 made by the bite of a lion will gape anew in the same 
 month of the following year, and the juice of the grape 
 is agitated in remembrance of its vintage, — but the 
 animal is conscious that the time has come for him to 
 resume his talent. 
 
 Such dogs become tired of waiting if their masters 
 are absent, and are disquieted if their day's routine be 
 changed. And you will notice in a zoological garden 
 many of the better-educated animals to whom the mo- 
 notony of their life is a positive sorrow, till, like opium, 
 it stupefies their spirits. They have not the resource of 
 man, who is also devoured with ennui, but, furnished- 
 with imagination, can dissipate its most tragic moods by 
 heart-shaking and sky-splitting laughter. His mosti 
 climbing grief is like an Alpine flower that sits close | 
 to the snow-line and takes its color ; but near at hand 
 are hillsides sprinkled with winking wild-flowers, and| 
 the blue succory stands amid the corn. There is but a ' 
 step from one to the other. 
 
 That step is taken, and the gravity of life upset when- 
 ever any of our ideas can suddenly and for a momentl 
 join an object or another idea, and appear to belong to I 
 it, though essentially different in every respect, and only 
 capable of seeming like by the imagination starting a 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 15 
 
 pretence of it. Things that are incongruous are forced 
 to touch at one point, and for one moment to feign con- 
 gruity. The surprise to the mind is a laughable one^ 
 because it is in the habit of regarding ideas and objects 
 as they naturally cohere or differ. Sanity and business 
 depend upon this habit. The janderstanding is at home 
 in the ordinary congruities of things, and is not pre- 
 pared to admit that two things which are absolutely 
 incongruous can be ever made for a single instant to 
 agree. Such a result cannot be soberly contemplated : 
 the order of the world and the mental consistency which 
 pays the butcher for his meat and the milkman for his 
 refreshing dash of the hydrant forbid it. It becomes 
 laughable precisely because this gravity of order is 
 against it. If a thing cannot be done soberly, and yet 
 is done, the result is fatal to sobriety. This is the root 
 of every laugh : two things which never met before, and 
 ought not to'm'&et, hail each other and set up a claim of 
 relationship on this very ground, — namely, that it was 
 always impossible that they could be related. In the 
 farce of "Box and Cox," says one of these doubles to 
 the other eagerly, "Have you the mark of a strawberry 
 between your shoulders 1 " " No," answers the other. 
 " Oh, then you are indeed my long-lost brother ! " It is 
 ^0 in the relations which make laughter. There should 
 be the mark of a strawberry ; but just because there is 
 not, the whim of fraternity is raised, and for a moment 
 it appears as if the two things must have been twins at 
 birth, though separated since. 
 Thus, to begin at the lowest degree of this subject. 
 
1 6 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 the simply ludicrous has its origin in the surprise caused 
 by something which interrupts or modifies an ordinary 
 procedure : the latter is thus joined for a moment to an 
 idea not belonging to it.( Why do we laugh when a per- 
 son tumbles upstairs ? or when some respectable female 
 struggles with an umbrella which has shamelessly turned 
 its bare ribs upon her and sails jauntily with her down 
 the street, or flounders in the gutter, an inebriated wreck 
 of usefulness ? Because an erect position is the normal 
 one for man, and a protecting umbrella the helpmeet for 
 woman. If it were not so, we should laugh to see the 
 most revered person succeed in controlling her gingham 
 dome, and stemming the tide as easily as the whale 
 which furnished it with bones. There is nothing essen- 
 tially ludicrous in seeing a man chase an animal : on the 
 contrary, if you are trying to head off your favorite pig 
 and persuade it to taste again your bounty, it is one of 
 the saddest spectacles in existence. Burwhen a man is 
 in full hue and cry after his own hat we laugh, because 
 a hat is inseparable from a head in idea, but becomes 
 separated in fact. A hatter's shop is full of the larvae 
 of this idea, but they would never hatch there into hats. 
 The conjunction of a head to each is needed to make a 
 perfect notion of a hat. 
 
 If we could be sure of preserving our own scalps, we 
 should like to have been near enough to watch the ex- 
 pression of the first Indian who ever killed a man wear- 
 ing a wig. For the wig is a sudden violation of the 
 logic of scalping, and the astonished Indian would have 
 raised a laugh as he raised the artificial hair. 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 1 7 
 
 - General Sherman's body-servant was a German who 
 went with him through the war, but could never realize 
 the idea that the war at last was over. One day the 
 General, having travelled from the South to Chicago, 
 was on the point of leaving, and ordered this man to 
 pack a valise. The one he selected was so enormous 
 that the General remonstrated, and examined what could 
 be within. It was filled with hotel towels that had been 
 looted from Atlanta clear through, in company with 
 table-spoons of the Milledgeville Hotel ; the German 
 plundering on every route as if we were still marching 
 through Georgia. This incongruous behavior has all 
 the effect of a ludicrous incident. 
 
 Whatever accidental infirmity deposits us in positions 
 incongruous with our ordinary state generates a ludi- 
 crous impression. When the obese lover, encased in 
 corsets and tightly-strapped pantaloons, fell plump upon 
 his knees before a lady to make his declaration, she was 
 embarrassed, and besought him to arise ; but he, fast 
 anchored in the stiffest of costumes, whimpered out, " I 
 can't, madam," and she had to ring for a servant. That 
 is simply ludicrous. But suppose I should say that his 
 suit had been rejected, — it would be an execrable re- 
 mark, but still would modify the ludicrous impression, 
 and raise it into a higher region of the pleasurable by 
 making the first step of a pun towards the peculiar ele- 
 ment of wit. 
 
 If a pun is good, the pleasure is sometimes purely 
 mental and scarcely gets beyond a smile; for it con- 
 strains two different ideas into an accidental relation 
 
1 8 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 with one word, and the clever feat surprises us. We 
 are not looking for it, as our life is plain-spoken, does 
 not twist its intention nor its language, and passes for 
 what it is. A friend, really wanting to know if Foote 
 the comedian had ever been in Cork, in good faith asked 
 him. " No," said he ; " but I have seen a good many- 
 drawings of it." So the new conundrum finds us un- 
 prepared : " Which goes the quicker, — a full minute or 
 a spare moment t " That pleases the mind, but it does 
 not make us laugh as when Abraham Lincoln, in his 
 attack of small-pox, said, " Now I am willing to see the 
 office-seekers, for at last I have something I can give 
 'em all." We laugh because the play upon the word 
 " give " betrays and yet relieves the moral annoyance of 
 that class of beggars. 
 
 Punning can enhance its quality by lurking in the 
 quotation of well-known and esteemed lines ; as when a 
 man who is importuned to subscribe to something, on 
 the score of the virtue there is in giving, should quote 
 the tender George Herbert, — 
 
 "Only a sweet and virtuous soul. 
 Like seasoned timber, never gives." 
 
 In this way Mr. Thackeray made one of his best puns. 
 Some one was talking to him of a man of talent, who 
 was prodigiously addicted to beer ; saying what a pity it 
 was, for they hardly knew his equal. " Yes," said 
 Thackeray, "take him for half-and-half, we ne'er shall 
 look upon his like again.'' 
 
 So Douglas Jerrold, referring in one of his plays to 
 the English habit of scrawling names and lines with 
 
Th& Cause of Laughter. 19 
 
 diamonds upon window-panes, makes one of his charac- 
 ters say: " One man goes to foolscap, another to a pane 
 of glass. They may be very different people ; but, well 
 considered, I doubt if the motive hasn't the same 
 source." "At least, the same effect," is the reply; 
 "for, as my friend Laman Blanchard sings, — 
 
 " ' 'Tis oft the poet's curse 
 To mar his little light with verse.' " 
 
 In the same way a classic line which is quoted in 
 mimicry of a modern situation can raise the surprise of 
 a pun. The very best instance, perhaps, of this felicity 
 was the quotation of Dean Swift when a lady's long 
 train swept down a fine fiddle and broke it. He cried 
 out, — 
 
 " Mantua vae miserse nimium vicina Cremonse ! " * 
 
 Sporting with words blew aside a little the powder- 
 smoke of the battle of Shiloh, and etherized the pain of 
 one of our soldiers, whose cheek and chin had been car- 
 ried away by a shot. " What can we do for you .■" " asked 
 his comrades. " Boys," said he, with what articulation 
 was left to him, " I should like a drink of water mighty 
 well, if I only had the face to ask for it." 
 
 A very good pun can be made unconsciously, as when 
 the schoolmaster asked the class what Shylock meant 
 when he said, " My deeds upon my head." " Well," said 
 one of the boys, " I don't know, unless he carried his 
 papers in his hat." In the same way. Lord Dundreary 
 makes a good pun because he can only comprehend one 
 
 * Ninth Eclogue of Virgil, 28th line. 
 
20 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 uSe for one word at a time ; and, if the most obvious 
 use strikes him first, he is incapable of making any 
 transfer of it. So he says to Lieutenant Vernon, " Of 
 course you czxvpass your examination: what I want to 
 know is, can you go through it ? " 
 
 Every language invites this trick of the pun. The 
 Greeks and Romans relished it, but the instances would 
 involve explanations too tedious for popular reading. 
 Perhaps a few may be ventured from the French, who 
 are as delicate in this as in the manufacture of a Sevres 
 cup or a pattern of tapestry. 
 
 Henry IV., at the surrender of Chartres, received a 
 deputation at the gates. The spokesman said, "Sire, 
 the city submits to your Majesty as much by divine as 
 by Roman law." He replied, " You may as well add, 
 by canon law, too." 
 
 Louis XIV., during a critical aspect of his affairs, 
 said in council, " Nous inaintiendrons la couronne de la 
 France!' His dauphin merely remarked, " Maintenons 
 la" {Madame de Maintenon I'a). 
 
 When complaint was made in Paris that the first 
 Napoleon was too young to assume command of an 
 Italian campaign against Austria, he said, " They may 
 let me alone : in six months j'aurai Milan " {faurai 
 milk ans). 
 
 But the late M. Jules Janin made the cleverest pun. 
 It was at a time when the Parisian authorities were 
 macadamizing some of the streets that he was unsuc- 
 cessfully proposed for membership of the famous Acade- 
 mic. Some one condoling with him for his failure, he 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 2 1 
 
 replied that he meant to throw himself into the streets. 
 " But how so, Monsieur ? " " Parceque, dans ce cos, on 
 tout de suite ni acadamiserait!' 
 
 Punning approaches the character of wit when the 
 identity of sound not only covers two ideas, but also 
 hides an allusion to still another. When Douglass Jer- 
 rold by a quick motion accidentally threw himself back- 
 ward into the water, and was carried into a tavern, he 
 said to the servant, " I suppose these accidents happen 
 frequently off here." " Oh, yes, sir, frequently ; but it's 
 not the season yet." " Ah ! I suppose it's all owing to 
 a backward spring." " That's it, sir." The play recalls 
 the manner of his ducking, and also involves the ser- 
 vant's idea, as if it depended upon the time of the year. 
 This is witty, because it effects a temporary junction of 
 very opposite ideas, apart from the pun which gives the 
 opportunity. 
 
 Let a case in illustration be invented. Suppose a 
 man hears that in the Quissama Tribe of Angola any 
 one who cannot pay his debts is at once killed and 
 eaten. He improves this curious fact to' say, "That 
 would be. a pretty effective way of collecting a debt, if 
 debtors did not always disagree with creditors." This 
 leads us to consider that wit takes place when two or 
 more very distinct objects or perceptions are brought 
 arbitrarily under the sway of one idea which for a mo- 
 ment appears to embrace them. Punning is a constraint 
 of two different ideas to be expressed by one word. Wit 
 is the constraint of different objects to be expressed by 
 one idea. Wit depends for its effect upon ideas alone ; 
 
22 Wit, Htimor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 and it is reached' whenever the mind suddenly forces an 
 idea that is suggested to it to appear, for a moment, like 
 something that belongs to another idea. The latter 
 really resembles the first idea in no point at all : they 
 ought to be kept asunder for want of a natural and 
 organic connection. Yet they are compelled to seem to 
 have this ; and, though the illusion can last but for a 
 moment, that is time enough to surprise and delight us 
 with the mental stratagem. Perhaps the second idea, so 
 far from having any natural relation with the first, is 
 violently opposed to it in every sensible way, so that 
 nobody can pretend a possibility that they should 
 communicate. The mind contrives this momentary 
 rendezvous ; and a lightning-flash betrays these two 
 heterogeneous things apparently in close communion. 
 
 But, although this is the metaphysical basis of all 
 wit, we must notice the distinctions in its quality, ac- 
 cording as it draws upon more or less of the imagina- 
 tion, and is more or less interfused with good-nature. 
 It has a range of effects extending from a bitterness 
 which may be ferocious thrqugh a cold cynicism, a clear, 
 calm light of the understanding, into moods that are 
 colored by fancy and warmed into geniality by a human 
 heart ; and then it becomes a favorite ally of humor to 
 promote its intention of tolerating all our infirmities. 
 Douglas Jerrold gives us examples of the caustic kind ; 
 Tom Hood, of its jollity ; Charles Lamb, of its clear- 
 ness ; Richter, Sydney Smith, Shakspeare, of its broad 
 humanity. 
 
 Some one asked Heine, "Have you read B.'s new 
 
The Cause of Laughter, 23 
 
 pamphlet ? " " No, dear friend ; I only read his great 
 works : the three, four, and five-volumed ones suit me 
 best." "Ah! you jest, and mean something." "Cer- 
 tainly : a great extent of water — a lake, sea, ocean — is 
 a fine thing ; but in a teaspoon I cannot stand it." 
 
 Heine said of one of his acquaintances, " The man is 
 really cracked ; but I will confess that he has lucid in- 
 tervals when he is only foolish." This was the same 
 person whom Heine had in his mind when he said to a 
 caller, " My head to-day is perfectly barren, and you will 
 find me stupid enough ; for a friend has been here, and 
 we exchanged ideas." 
 
 The old age of Lamartine exhibited a painful decline 
 of his truly great qualities, and an exaggeration of his 
 foibles. A French paper concluded his obituary with 
 the remark, " He has ceased to survive himself." 
 
 These are caustic specimens ; but the last one con- 
 tains a high per cent of pleasure, because we are left 
 uncertain whether it was a serious case of wit. But 
 none of them can scald as Douglas Jerrold did, when, 
 meeting a man who was such an abject toady that if his 
 friend Jones had the influenza he would contrive to get 
 up a cold, Jerrold said to him, " Have you heard the 
 rumor that is flying around town .' " " No." " Well, 
 they say that Jones pays the dog-tax for you." 
 
 That is bitter. But when one gentleman during a- 
 supper of sheep's heads throws down his knife and fork 
 in rapture, and exclaims, " Well, sheep's heads for' ever, 
 say I," and Douglas Jerrold remarks, " There's egotism," 
 we have a point tempered in the flame of fun. So, too. 
 
, 24 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 when a member of his club, hearing an air mentioned, 
 said, " That always carries me away when I hear it," 
 Jerrold, merely to seize an opportunity, said, " Then can 
 nobody whistle it ? " This kind of wit easily rankles, if 
 there be a drop or two of suspicion in our veins ; for 
 there is nothing in the tone to announce its discrimina- 
 tion from ill-nature. For instance : Sheridan, soliciting 
 the votes of the shoemakers of Stafford, exclaimed, 
 " May the trade of Stafford be trampled under foot of 
 all the world ! " and mortally offended them. 
 
 We should like to know how the French attach^ felt 
 who, being at a soirde just after the dubious affair of the 
 annexation of Nice and Savoy to France, met Lord 
 Houghton, as he went towards the supper-room, and 
 said, " Je vais prendre quelque chosen " Vous avez 
 raison" was the reply ; " cest V habitude de voire pays!' 
 
 But the French abound in the kind of wit which pene- 
 trates like a colorless North light, and sets a contrast in 
 clearness, so that we admire its outlines, scarcely smiling ; 
 as when Hippolyte Taine said, " An Englishman would 
 be exceedingly mortified if he had no faith in another 
 life." When the Duke de Choiseul, who was a remark- 
 ably lean man, came to London to negotiate a peace, 
 Charles Townsend, being asked whether the French 
 Government had sent the preliminaries of a treaty, an- 
 swered that he did not know, but they had sent the out- 
 Hne of an ambassador. This preserves the French 
 flavor, which we recognize, for instance, in Ninon de 
 I'Enclos, who, being asked one day by a Parisian lady 
 whether she believed that St. Denys walked alt the way 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 25 
 
 to Paris with his head under his arm, replied, " Pourquoi 
 pas. Mademoiselle ? ce n'est que le premier fas qui coHte." 
 
 The best repartee must subsidize the pleasure of wit. 
 When M. Scribe replied to the millionnaire who wanted 
 him to lend the use of his genius for a consideration, 
 that it was contrary to Scripture for a horse and an ass 
 to plough together, the man instantly parried the snub 
 by saying, " By what right do you call me a horse ? " 
 
 Among the announcements in a French paper, we 
 find that " a young man about to marry wants to meet a 
 man of experience who will dissuade hiin." So Abraham 
 Lincoln thought he would not marry, because "I can 
 never be satisfied with any one who would be blockhead 
 enough to have me." 
 
 Perhaps the purest instance of thoroughly French wit 
 is to be credited to Mr. Emerson. An amiable rustic 
 once heard him lecture, but could make nothing of it. 
 Turning to a friend, he said, " Dairn it ! I'd like to know 
 what Emerson thinks about God. I bet I'll ask him." 
 He did, when Mr. Emerson came down the aisle. 
 " God," replied he, " is the x of algebra," — that is, 
 the unknown quantity in every problem. Nothing could 
 be more admirable. 
 
 Mr. Beecher affirms that " it is impossible to discrimi- 
 nate between the wit that produces only pleasure of 
 thought and that which produces pleasure of laughter." 
 It does not seem to me so hopeless a task to discrimi- 
 nate between the two kinds of wit. Where reflection 
 predominates, and the act of wit approaches the state- 
 ment of a truth, so that the surprise does not borrow 
 
26 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 any tinge from any human sentiment, the pleasure will 
 be inaudible ; and, if we produce a smile at all, it will be 
 where the German constructed the idea of a camel, — in 
 the depths of his consciousness ; as when Voltaire said 
 of the priests of his time, " Our credulity makes all 
 their knowledge." But when an American poet, whose 
 Pegasus had stepped upon his foot, said, " What a pity 
 it is ! my grandfather left to me his gout^ and nothing 
 in the cellar to keep it up with," a fellow-feeling makes 
 us wondrous kind ; it is so incongruously human to 
 nurse our own infirmities. 
 
 So when Frederic the Great said spitefully to Minis- 
 ter Elliot, on occasion of the Te Deums over the re- 
 verses .of Hyder Ali in India, "I never knew that 
 Providence was one of your allies," and Elliot replied^ 
 " The only one, sire, whom we do not pay," both the 
 remark and the retort involve the mind in a momentary 
 adjustment of its ideas to the new suggestion ; and the 
 wit is thus restrained from sallying into laughter. We 
 have to reflect that Elliot's repartee is a hit at all subsi- 
 dized powers, including Prussia, and also at his own 
 nation for its trick of futile gratitude and ascription of 
 praise. But if any movement of sympathy prevents the 
 act of wit from settling upon the internal organs, and 
 bids it escape by every pore, we feel the dew of laughter 
 on the face ; as when Falstaff whimsically apologizes for 
 himself, "Thou knowest, in the state of innocency, Adam 
 fell ; and what should poor Jack Falstaff do, in the days 
 of villany .?" — or when, at a meeting in London to hear 
 a report from some missionaries who had been sent to 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 27 
 
 discover the lost tribes of Israel, the chairman opened 
 the business by saying, " I take a great interest in your 
 researches, gentlemen. The fact is, I have borrowed 
 money from all the Jews now known ; and, if you can 
 find a new set, you'll do me a favor." 
 
 It is witty when the author of the " Maid of Sker," 
 describing a dinner, makes the mouth water with smiles 
 when he particularizes "a little pig for roasting, too 
 young to object to it, yet with his character formed 
 enough to make his brains delicious." 
 
 Wit can depend, like punning, upon the felicitous use 
 of some well-known verse or sentiment, which suddenly 
 is made to adapt itself to a new idea ; as when Henry 
 Clapp, speaking of an intolerable bore, inverted the 
 famous sentence which is associated with Shakspeare, 
 and said, " He is not for a time, but for all day." 
 
 In the same vein, on the strength of Laurence 
 Sterne's * assertion that " God tempers the wind to 
 the shorn lamb," a Boston wit, finding himself in the 
 powerful blast which sweeps across the Common and 
 makes a tunnel of Winter Street, remarked that he 
 wished there was a shorn lamb tied at the head of 
 that street. 
 
 Walter Scott tells an anecdote of the same special 
 character. " So deep was the thirst of vengeance im- 
 pressed on the minds of the Highlanders that, when a 
 clergyman informed a dying chief of the unlawfulness 
 
 * Sterne may have picked up this sentiment during his journey in 
 France, when the donkey was bewept. At any rate, it is found in litera- 
 ture as early as 1594, when Henri Estienne wrote his "Pr^mices:" 
 "Dieu mesure lefroidh la brebis tondue." 
 
28 IVii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 of the sentiment, urged the necessity of forgiving an 
 inveterate enemy, and quoted, 'Vengeance is mine, 
 saith the Lord,' the acquiescing penitent said, with a 
 deep sigh, ' To be sure ! it is too sweet a morsel for 
 a mortal.' !' 
 
 Wit can be blundered into as well as a pun. The 
 unmerited praise of it can be earned by mental awk- 
 wardness and want of tact. A widower, who had loved 
 a lady previous to his marriage to another, approached 
 his first love after the death of his wife, and sought to 
 renew the old attachment. After he had made his offer, 
 at a juncture more critical than the turning-point of 
 Waterloo, he was permitted to add, " And I know that 
 all my children will follow you to the grave with the 
 same affection that they showed when their mother 
 died." This is certainly the pallida mors of Horace 
 beating cequo pede at the door. 
 
 Wit can also be enhanced by a droll incompetence 
 of understanding on the part of the listener. Sydney 
 Smith, complaining of the heat, told a lady that he 
 wished he could take off his flesh and sit in his bones. 
 The wit consists in extending the congruity of taking 
 clothes off to the flesh, and there is an electric instant 
 of mental possibility. But it'is enhanced to us when we 
 recollect the shocked and puzzled look of the lady, who 
 saw only an indelicacy in a remark which was really 
 delicate to the pitch of ghastliness, — stripped, in fact, 
 of every rag of that most indelicate of all things, pru- 
 dery. Thus the raillery of Falstaff owes half its excel- 
 lence to Dame Quickly's consistent misinterpretation, 
 
The Cause -of Laughter. 29 
 
 for this reflects back upon it the color of wit. She is a 
 duenna who blunders into being a go-between and mak- 
 ing a capital match. " Go to ! you are a woman : go." 
 " Who, I .' No ! I defy thee. God's light ! I was never 
 called so in mine own house before." " You are a thing 
 to thank God on." " I am no thing to thank God on, I 
 would thou should'st know it." And the grim irony of 
 Hamlet, who, after killing Polonius, replies to the king 
 that the old man is at supper, has grown upon us 
 through the slow perception of the courtiers, who know 
 he is killed as well as we do, and have been sent to 
 find the body, but cannot take the point of Hamlet's 
 answers. 
 
 In a play of Douglas Jerrold, an. old sailor gets a box 
 on the ear while trying to snatch a kiss. "There,"' 
 cries he, " like my luck ! always wrecked on the coral 
 reefs." When the manager heard the play read he 
 could not see the point, and increased the wit for us by 
 making Jerrold strike it out. 
 
 Perhaps the best modern instance of this kind is the 
 colossal stupidity of some foreign critics, who gave such 
 an exquisite flavor to Mark Twain's " Innocents Abroad " 
 by blaming his ignorance and misapprehension of places, 
 pictures, and traditions. 
 
 The Beaufort negroes are unconsciously witty when, 
 perceiving that an idea is dawning upon them, they say 
 they feel their head " growing thinner." A premium for 
 involuntary wit must be conferred upon the old lady in 
 New Bedford, who heard about the cheapness of the 
 manufactured oils and the great increase in the use of 
 
30 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 them, which threatened to drive sperm-oil out of the 
 market : " Dear me, the poor whales ! What will they 
 do ? " 
 
 There must also be complete unconsciousness in the 
 perpetrator of a bull. "The pleasure," says Sydney 
 Smith, " arising from bulls proceeds from our surprise 
 at suddenly discovering two things to be dissimilar in 
 which a resemblance might have been suspected ; " but 
 ordinary wit creates a sudden surprise at a resemblance 
 which could not have been suspected between two 
 things. Perhaps the best bull was practically perpe- 
 trated by the old lady in Middlebury, Wis., who crossed 
 over a bridge that was marked " Dangerous " without 
 seeing the sign. On being informed of the fact on the 
 other side, she instantly turned in great alarm and re- 
 crossed it. 
 
 The wit which produces laughter cannot be analyzed 
 without a mental process : but that is an after-thought 
 and laughter anticipates it ; as when Mark Twain, writ- 
 ing upon Franklin, says, " He was twins, having been 
 born simultaneously in two houses in Boston." There 
 is an unconscious organic assumption that both houses, 
 since people insist upon both, must have been the spots 
 of his birth. If so, the births in two houses must have 
 been simultaneous, but the two Franklins not identical. 
 Of course, then, they must have been twins. At least, 
 this is the best that can be done with the historical 
 material. But I am reminded of a famous wit, who, 
 after viewing the Siamese Twins for a while, quietly 
 remarked, "Brothers, I suppose." 
 
The Cause of Laughter. 3 1 
 
 If wit ever unmasks a moral feeling it performs its 
 noblest function and imparts a complicated pleasure ; 
 as when Abraham Lincoln, in defending a fugitive slave 
 before a court, said, " It is singular that the courts will 
 hold that a man never loses his right to his property 
 that has been stolen from him, but that he instantly lost 
 the right to himself if he was stolen." 
 
 When wit creates a temporary congruity between an 
 idea and an object which are essentially incongruous on 
 all points, the shock dissolves in pleasure, because the 
 oppressiveness of' life results from its ideas ; and yet 
 one of them opens to us an escape from it. We find a 
 way of eluding for a moment a task-master, and it makes 
 us sfnile. It is not a moral revolt, for that would be a 
 deepening of the seriousness till it became too pathetic ; 
 but it is a momentary beguilement, and we are cheated 
 into the presumption that there is no care in the world. 
 We return to the care refreshed by this electric bath 
 of wit, which has a tonic quality and saves us from 
 despair. 
 
WIT, IRONY, HUMOR. 
 
WIT. 
 
 " I ''HE similes of poetry which select natural objects 
 and fit human thoughts and emotions to themi 
 have the movement which belongs to wit. They sud-1 
 denly take things which we have been in the habit of 
 seeing all our lives without after-thought, just as we see 
 a brick or a house ; but, when thus taken, they become 
 involved in sentiments which are also customary, and 
 indulged by us without after-thought. We are surprised 
 and charmed to notice what an apt comradeship springs 
 up between the object and the sentiment. 
 
 " Such tricks hath strong imagination, 
 That, if it would but apprehend some joy. 
 It comprehends some bringer of that joy." 
 
 Constantinople may be seen any day from the Bos- 
 phorus, stretching its length of domes and minarets 
 across the sunset ; but when Mr. Browning observes it 
 he says it runs black and crooked athwart the splendor, 
 " like a Turk verse along a scimitar." There occurs a 
 moment of surprise ; a lively shock is given to the mind, 
 which would liberate itself into the smile of wit if we 
 were not instantly conscious that the sudden aptness is 
 also beautiful. All pure wit is born in the imagination, 
 but only in that capability of it to see one point where 
 two incongruous things may meet. But the poetic 
 simile involves more than that : it is born of the inmost 
 
36 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 vitality which must overflow, spill itself upon Nature, 
 appropriate her, senseless as she may seem and incapa- 
 ble of reflecting our subtilties of mind and heart. 
 Often there is something very noble and tender in this 
 process of imagination, which converts surprise into 
 emotion : as when Coleridge says, — 
 
 " Methinks it should have been impossible 
 Not to love all things in a world so filled ; 
 Where the breeze warbles, and the mute, still air 
 Is music slumbering in her instrument." 
 
 This innate nobleness of the simile checks our smile, 
 and if we feel any hilarity it belongs to that delighted 
 health which mantles all through us when we recognize 
 beauty. Perhaps the mind soared, 
 
 " By means of that mere snatch, to many a hoard 
 Of fancies : as some falling cone bears soft 
 The eye, along the fir-tree spire, aloft 
 To a dove's nest." 
 
 The simile gives us such a new perception of the 
 mysterious relations of mind and Nature that we 
 should not be surprised if the object designated had 
 really, in the great involvement of all things, some 
 secret affinity with the thought ; perhaps the thought 
 has recognized the family mark and claimed kinship. 
 This is an exalted claim because it sets free our per- 
 sonality. We become superior to Nature, and are made 
 aware that we can vivify her as the Creator can ; but, 
 as we also are creatures, we admit her to a tender and 
 refining confidence. "Daffodils, that come before the 
 swallow dares," " take the winds of March with beauty." 
 
Wit. 2,7 
 
 " The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, 
 And the earth changes like a human face." 
 
 " Earth is a wintry clod, 
 But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes 
 Over its breast to waken it." 
 
 "The winds 
 Are henceforth voices, in a wail or shout, 
 A querulous mutter, or a quick, gay laugh, — 
 Never a senseless gust now man is born." 
 
 The imagination thus proclaiming the banns between 
 spirit and matter reminds us of Wordsworth's dear 
 maiden, of whom he says, — 
 
 " She was known to every star in heaven, 
 And every wind that blew." 
 
 The impression of surprise which a perfect simile pro- 
 duces is transferred from the understanding back to the 
 imagination before the former can venture to be amused. 
 But sometimes the surprise lingers there long enough 
 to have a narrow escape from smiling; ^as when Sir 
 Thomas Brown, finding that midnight has overtaken 
 him at his desk, says, ".To keep our eyes open longer, 
 were to act the antipodes." His wakefulness is not 
 only like the antipodal day, but dramatizes it ; and this 
 is a simile that imparts the shock of wit. 
 
 Here is one from Shakspeare that approaches it, but 
 is intercepted by a sense of beauty : — 
 
 "These violent delights have violent ends. 
 And in their triumph die ; like fire and powder. 
 Which, as they kiss, consume." 
 
 And he says that, when the people saw Anne Boleyn at 
 her coronation, such a noise arose "as the shrouds 
 make at sea in a stiff tempest." Mr. Browning makes 
 
38 Wil, Humor, and Shakspeare. ' 
 
 us smile when he paints the "poppy's red effrontery — 
 till autumn spoils their fleering quite with rain," 
 
 " And, turbanless, a coarse, brown, rattling crane 
 Protrudes." 
 
 This reminds me that in the West a bald man's head 
 is spoken of as rising above the timber-line ; which is 
 quite in the style of American similes, as when Rufus 
 Choate, who so frequently appeared to be saying to his 
 jury, "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now," 
 was described to be a man who always bored for water. 
 
 Charles Lamb "commenting upon the following line 
 from Davenport's King John and Matilda, — 
 
 "And thou, Fitzwater, reflect upon thy name, 
 And turn the Son of Tears," — 
 
 says, " Fitzwater : son of water." A striking instance 
 of the compatibility of the serious pun with the expres- 
 sion of the profoundest sorrows. Grief as well as joy 
 finds ease in thus playing with a word. Old John of 
 Gaunt in Shakspeare thus descants on his name : " Gaunt, 
 and gaunt, indeed ; " to a long string of conceits which- 
 no one has ever yet felt to be ridiculous. The poet 
 Wither, thus, in a mournful review of the declining 
 estate of his family, says with deepest nature, — 
 
 "' The very name of Wither shows decay.' " 
 
 But, in the following passage from John Fletcher's 
 " Bonduca," pure poetry checks the laugh, — 
 
 "I have seen these Britons that you magnify 
 Run as they would have outrun time, and roaring. 
 Basely for mercy, roaring ; the light shadows, 
 That in a thought scur o'er the fields of corn. 
 Halted on crutches to them." 
 
Wii. 39 
 
 That is in the finest style of an exaggeration which has 
 been inherited by Americans and is the source of much 
 of their wit and humor. Here is a coarser specimen, but 
 perfectly witty. A person, remarking to a famous crimi- 
 nal lawyer that his client would certainly go to hell, 
 had for a reply, " Go to hell ! he ought to be thankful 
 that there is a hell he can go to." 
 
 This characteristic will recur under the head of Fal- 
 staff. 
 
 Some of the similes which Americans derive from 
 their professions, and apply to persons, have all the 
 character of wit. A farmersays of a meagre and un- 
 equal speech that it was "pretty scattering," alluding 
 to ground crops that grow unevenly. An iron-founder 
 will say of a speech that was all fusion and passion 
 that, notwithstanding, it " didn't make a weld." Miners 
 in the West use the word " color " for the finest gold in 
 the ground. One of them remarked of a man who had 
 been tried and found worthless, " I have panned him 
 out clear down to the bed rock, but I can't even raise 
 the color." Frequenters of the race-course mention a 
 beaten politician as " the longest-eared horse they ever 
 saw," as the ears hang to a jaded horse. And a Nan- 
 tucket captain, when asked his opinion of a very rhe^ 
 torical preacher, said, " He's a good sailor, but a bad 
 carrier." , 
 
 The poetry of Donne, Cowley, Suckling, and others of 
 that epoch, easily furnish examples of similes which stop 
 so far short of beauty that their aptness only serves to 
 raise a smile. Suckling says, — 
 
40 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 "Her feet beneath her petticoat 
 Like little mice stole in and out." 
 
 Cowley begins his Hymn to Night, — 
 
 " First-born of chaos, who so fair didst come 
 From the old negro's darksome womb," 
 
 and we have to deny poetic freedom to this aboriginal 
 contraband. 
 
 How charmingly, however, did the poor woman reply 
 to the gentleman who found her watering her webs of 
 linen cloth. She could not tell him even the text of the 
 last sermon. "And what good can the preaching do 
 you, if you forget it all ? " " Ah, sir, if you will look at 
 this web on the grass, you will see that as fast as ever I 
 put the water oh it the sun dries it all up, and yet, sir, I 
 see it gets whiter and whiter." This is pure wit from 
 the well of imagination, and the smile is as deep in it 
 as truth. 
 
 It would be hazardous to liken a poet to a spider, we 
 might think ; but when ,Mr. Browning undertakes it, 
 this dodger of brooms spins a web all dripping with the 
 splendor of fancy. Mr. Browning speaks of young 
 Sordello, the poet, as he dreams in the old castle and 
 connects the events around him by absorbing surmises 
 of his own : — 
 
 " Thus thrall reached thrall ; 
 He o'erfestooning every interval, 
 As the adventurous spider, making light 
 Of distance, sports her threads from depth to height, 
 From barbican to battlement ; so flung 
 Fantasies forth and in their centre swung 
 Our architect, — the breezy morning fresh 
 Above, and merry, — all his waving mesh 
 
WiL 41 
 
 Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged. 
 This world of ours by tacit pact is pledged 
 To laying such a spangled fabric low, 
 Whether by gradual brush or gallant blow." 
 
 Beauty has spun the poet and the insect into a cocoon 
 out of which the splendid wings emerge ; then wit takes 
 up the thread with the conception of the prosaic old 
 world's hostility to flimsy poesy, and we admire the 
 sudden congruity which is established between two such 
 irreconcilable objects. 
 
 Outside the domain of poetry involuntary wit lurks 
 everywhere, even in passages of history whose passion 
 seems capable of expunging all smiles upon the face. 
 Two contrarious ideas may blend for a moment at one 
 point, as when King Olaf put a pan of coals upon 
 Eyvind's naked flesh until it broiled beneath them, and 
 then asked, without suspecting any thing incongruous, 
 " Dost thou now, O Eyvind, believe in Christ ? " Here 
 is a momentary inclusion of an act of belief under an act 
 of physical pain. When in the course of tinie the deadly 
 earnestness of Olaf fades away for us, we perceive the 
 incongruity, but also perceive that Olaf, in sad simplicity, 
 imagined there was congruity ; or, he reflected, a pan of 
 coals shall compel a congruity. 
 
 This grim practice of unconscious wit is heightened 
 when we recollect that Christ was a person who declined 
 to call down fire upon those who did not receive him ; 
 and such an incident affords us a ready passage from 
 Wit into the domain of Irony. 
 
42 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 • IRONY. 
 
 Nature herself practised irony long before men had 
 suffered from it enough to endow literature with its 
 expressive form. She has always pretended to agree 
 with our penchant for pleasant but noxious habits, and 
 for a long time seems to be of our opinion 'that such 
 ways of living are of a capital kind ; but eventually she 
 is fatigued because we misunderstand her, and exclaims 
 by many a twinge, " You simpletons ! I meant just the 
 reverse." " Why didn't you say so at first ? " we reply, 
 as we smart to find we had been so prosaic when we 
 thought we were so romantic ; but the smart etches the 
 shapes of tragedy upon the soul. 
 
 The mind uses irony when it gravely states an opinion 
 or sentiment which is the opposite of its belief, with the 
 moral purpose of showing its real dissent from the opin- 
 ion. It must therefore be done with this wink from the 
 purpose in it, so that it may not pass for an acquiescence 
 in an opposite sentiment. It may be done so well as 
 to deceive even the elect ; and perhaps the ordinary 
 mind complains of irony as wanting in straightforward- 
 ness. There is a moment of hesitation, when the mind 
 stoops over this single intention with a double appear- 
 ance, and doubts upon which to settle as the real prey. 
 So that only carefully poised minds with the falcon's or 
 the vulture's glance can always discriminate rapidly 
 enough to seize the point. In this moment of action 
 the pleasure of irony is developed, which arises from a' 
 
Irony. , 43 
 
 discovery of the contrast between the thing said and the 
 thing intended. And this pleasure is heightened when 
 we observe the contrast between the fine soul who means, 
 nobly, and his speaking as if he meant to be ignoble. 
 Then the ignoble thing is doubly condemned, first, by 
 having been briefly mistaken to be the real opinion 
 of the speaker, and then by the flash of recognition of 
 the speaker's superiority. Thackeray describes the 
 high-minded intentions of Rebecca Sharp : " It became 
 naturally Rebecca's duty to make herself, as she said, 
 agreeable to her benefactors, and to gain their confidence 
 to the utmost of her power. Who can but admire this 
 quality of gratitude in an unprotected orphan .' ' I am 
 alone in the world,' said the friendless girl : ' well, let us 
 see if my wits cannot provide me with an honorable 
 maintenance.' Thus it was that our little romantic 
 friend formed visions of the future for herself ; nor must 
 we be scandalized that, in all her castles in the air, a 
 husband was the principal inhabitant. Of what else have 
 young ladies to think but husbands .' Of what else do 
 dear mammas think .? ' I must be my own mamma,' said 
 Rebecca." Thus the great author confides to us his 
 abhorrence of Vanity Fair. 
 
 In matters which are morally indifferent, irony is only 
 a jesting which is disguised by gravity; as when we 
 apparently agree with the notions of another person 
 which are averse from our own, so that we puzzle him 
 not only on the point of our own notion, but on the 
 point of his own, and he begins to have a suspicion that 
 he is not sound in the matter. This suspicion is derived 
 
44 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 from the mind's instinctive feeling that irony is a trait of 
 a superior person who can afford to have a stock of 
 original ideas with which it tests opinion, and who holds 
 them so securely that he can never play with them a 
 losing game. The Bastard in King John indicates this 
 superiority when he says, — 
 
 " Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail, 
 And say, — there is no sin but to be rich; 
 And being rich, my virtue then shall be. 
 To say, — there is no vice but beggary." 
 
 A man who pretends to hold the opposite of his own 
 belief is morally a hypocrite, until we detect that slight 
 touch of banter which is the proof of genuine irony. 
 Then we see that he is honest though he equivocates, for 
 he belies himself with sincerity. A man who caii afford 
 this is to that extent superior to the man who, whether 
 right or wrong, is hopelessly didactic, and incapable of 
 commending his own opinions by the bold ease with 
 which he may deplore them. 
 
 It is irony when Lowell, speaking of Dante's inti- 
 macy with the Scriptures, adds, " They do even a scholar 
 no harm." Jaques, in "As You Like It," is ironical 
 when he indicates men by the actions of the wounded 
 deer which augmented with tears the stream that did 
 not need water, as men leave their money to those who 
 have too much already. The herd abandons him : that 
 is right, — misery parts company. Anon, they come 
 sweeping by, and never stay to inquire into his hurt. 
 That is just the proper fashion, too. " Sweep on, you 
 fat and greasy citizens ! " This pretence ef praising the 
 deer is a parable which arraigns mankind. 
 
Irony. • 45 
 
 In the Old Testament there is an instance of irony, 
 where the priests of Baal called on his name but there 
 was no reply, and Elijah suggested that " either he is 
 talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or 
 peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked." But 
 the priests had all the prosaic singleness of an igno- 
 rant mind, and went on scarifying themselves with 
 knives and lancets, as if Elijah had not already let their 
 blood. 
 
 The New Testament furnishes a more delicate speci- 
 men in the parable of the unjust steward, which has 
 difficulties of interpretation, arising from an unwilling- 
 ness, perhaps, to recognize the irony. The steward is 
 expecting to be dismissed for malfeasance in office. In 
 the days of parable, whitewashing committees were un- 
 known. He then expects to ingratiate himself with his 
 lord's debtors by reducing the amount of their bills, 
 hoping that some of them would take him up when dis- 
 carded. It is not clear what commendation to a debtor 
 who might also be a creditor lay in this fraudulent re- 
 duction of his bill ; but a parable serves only the main 
 point, whicb in this case is to show how much more tact 
 a thoroughly worldly man has than a technically spir- 
 itual man. So the lord admires the shiftiness of his 
 steward, because it had an ulterior purpose ; whereas 
 your conventional child of light has no genuine foresight. 
 This is done to introduce the irony of the verse : " And 
 I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mam- 
 mon of unrighteousness ; that, when ye fail, they may 
 receive you into everlasting habitations." The master's 
 
46 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 hint of the superior sagacity of the people of mammon is 
 delightfully qualified by the irony that lurks in his use 
 of the word " everlasting." Then the serious intent of 
 the parable is clearly stated in the three succeeding 
 verses. 
 
 When irony becomes persistently cynical it defeats 
 the moral advantage which it would possess of attracting 
 men to its serious meaning, because it then involves too 
 large a tract of human life in its insinuation. The pre- 
 tences that things are all bad may become so clamorous 
 at the door of our faith in human nature that no good 
 things can gain admission. In literature, an irony that 
 is tinged a little with cynicism is a healthy recoil from 
 sentimentalism : for an affected ideal, if too long and 
 too floridly sustained, piques our knowledge of human 
 nature into making inquiries ; and, as it is in public 
 affairs when people are aroused to investigate, the facts 
 which are discovered receive too great a valuation. 
 They seem to indicate that every thing is rotten ; and 
 while one temper denounces, another temper sneeringly 
 inquires for virtue. In broad day, this lantern of 
 Diogenes goes about hunting up an honest citizen. 
 " There is nothing but roguery to be found in villanous 
 man." 
 
 The straiiied and almost impossible goodness of 
 Dickens's " Battle of Life " is punished by the cool 
 depreciation of Thackeray's pen. When the former 
 insists too strongly that his humble characters shall 
 be examples of all the British beatitudes, the latter 
 depicts too easily sharpers and nonentities for women, 
 
Irony. 47 
 
 and well-bred, high-toned rascals for men. But when a 
 too fluent and prolific imagination, working in the steam 
 of a great modern centre, has its shapes distorted, and 
 the outlines waver into caricature, a tonic breath with 
 the taste of brine in it will always set iif to temper this 
 radiation. Then it is inevitable that we shiver and com- 
 plain that the tone has been reduced too far. When a 
 skilfully distended bubble breaks, and only a thin spat 
 of suds is left, a cynic finger will point ,to it as if to 
 say, " Here's your fine iris all gone to unserviceable 
 soap." But there is a solider ball, the earth itself, upon 
 which human nature paints its zones ; and although life 
 is despicable at the poles, and revolting in many a foul 
 quarter, we know that noble landscapes stocked with 
 graciousness and honor spread on every side. Shak- 
 speare alone seems to have this bubble hanging securely 
 from his pipe, where it sheds the swift glances of myriad 
 eyes. 
 
 Thackeray says, " How can I hold out the hand 
 of friendship, when my first impression is, ' My good 
 sir, I strongly suspect that you were up my pear-tree 
 last night ' } It is a dreadful state of mind. The core is 
 black ; the death-stricken fruit drops on the bough, and 
 a great worm is within, — fattening and feasting and 
 wriggling. Who stole the pears.' I say. Is it you, 
 brother .' Is it you. Madam .? " 
 
 These suspicions cannot conceal their good humor: 
 the one hand drives the railing pen ; the other, behind 
 the chair, holds the glimmer, not of steel, but of a 
 smile. 
 
48 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 But when Swift writes a chapter upon the use and 
 improvement of madness in a Commonwealth, the smile 
 which scantily flickers over the surface of it is the 
 smile of the Spartan boy while the fox was gnawing at 
 his vitals. Swift's pen makes the Iron Madonna's 
 gestures of invitation, — she that stood in mediseval 
 torture-chambers and bade the bewildered prisoner take 
 refuge in her opening arms, where a thousand lancets 
 pricked life, faith, and hope away. 
 
 At one time, the German Heine's irony smacks of 
 good humor ; at another, you would ask for a bumper of 
 gall to sweeten your mouth. He represents two fat 
 Manchester ladies at a particularly exposed ballet, mur- 
 muring to each other, " Shocking ! For shame ! " And 
 he says that they were so benumbed with horror that 
 they could not for an instant take their opera-glasses 
 from their eyes, and consequently remained in that situa- 
 tion to the last moment, when the curtain fell. 
 
 By and by we hear a change of tone. " I always 
 obeyed the one commandment, that we should love our 
 enemies ; for, ah ! those persons whom I have best 
 loved were always, without my knowing it, my worst 
 enemies." And again : " Madame, you can readily form 
 an idea of what life is like in heaven, — the more readily, 
 as you are married." 
 
 This style of innuendo is always more good-natured in 
 Thackeray; as when speaking in the character of a 
 widower, who remembers the late Mrs. Brown, he says : 
 "By a timely removal she was spared from the grief 
 which her widowhood would have doubtless caused her, 
 
Irony. 49 
 
 and I acquiesce in the decrees of Fate in this instance, 
 and have not the least regret at not having preceded 
 her." 
 
 Heine also can be pleasantly mischievous. When he 
 was about to travel from Lyons to Paris in the old days 
 of diligences, a friend commissioned him to carry one of 
 the colossal Lyons sausages to a homoeopathic doctor in 
 the capital. But Heine and his wife were so frequently 
 hungry, and had trespassed so often upon the length of 
 the sausage, that a very small end remained on their 
 arrival. Heine thereupon shaved off a transparent slice 
 with a razor, and enclosed it in the following letter to 
 the doctor : " My dear Sir, — Your researches have 
 helped to establish the fact that millionths produce the 
 greatest effects. Pray receive herewith the millionth 
 part of a Lyons sausage, which your friend consigned to 
 you. In case your theory be true, it will have the effect 
 of the whole sausage upon you." 
 
 Irony employs wit to feather its purport. A French- \ 
 man said of a man who never really did make a witty 
 remark : " How full of wit that man must be ! he never 
 lets any escape." That, when translated, is improved 
 because the English word any can refer at once to no 
 wit and to no person's escaping the effect of wit. Thus 
 the irony is increased. 
 
 One of the most characteristic and important speci- 
 mens of irony is Thackeray's " Philip," a story of a 
 villanous doctor who deceives a woman with a mock 
 marriage, deserts her, and marries a lady with expecta- 
 tions, who has a son Philip and dies. But the traitor is 
 
50 WtY, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 endowed with an impressive amount of deportment, and 
 his starched front and cravat seem to have been secreted 
 by the stiffest of spotless souls, in a rapture of rigidness. 
 This carapace of deportment is gradually worn too thin ; 
 for it has been put to rough service on all occasions to 
 supply the place of virtue and to maRe its absence 
 appear no calamity. The irony consists in accepting 
 this deportment as if it were really put forth by an 
 estimable man. The book is one long strain of grave 
 assumption that Dr. Firmin is a good man* and a 
 killing physician ; but the reader knows better on the 
 first point, and enjoys tasting the man's villany through 
 this pretence. And it is kept up long after the deport- 
 ment becomes like the pantaloons of the stingy lawyer, 
 which hung in his garret labelled thus, "Too old to 
 wear, too good to give away." It is still good enough 
 for Dr. Firmin ; and he reaches a respectable grave in 
 ignorance that we know him so thoroughly, and dis- 
 covers rather late that he was always well known at the 
 head-quarters of genius. 
 
 The story is a wonderfully sustained innuendo of ras- 
 cality, carried on by this ironical pretence of virtue. 
 Thackeray appears in it to be as green as Dr. Fir- 
 min's dupes ; but the mask is lifted a little in every 
 sentence, and the author and the reader peeping in at 
 opposite sides, their eyes meet, and smiles at what they 
 have discovered are exchanged. 
 
 Even the little sister, who becomes a living mother 
 to_ the Philip of the dead lady, cannot flee from this great 
 tide of irony, which catches her and stands up to her 
 
Irony. ■ " 5 1 
 
 heart.. The author is constantly deprecating her love 
 for Philip ; though he knows it is the sweet flower of 
 her life that is fed from the ugly soil of her betrayal. 
 Why will she go on so with that boy, and save up 
 money for him, and extemporize little treats with brandy 
 and water ad libitum, and believe in him when he tries 
 to become a bad magazine writer, and believe in his 
 fortune when he marries a beggar, and, in short, believe 
 that she was sent into the world to be deceived, and 
 then have a great, blundering, brave, pure, splendid 
 Philip, as if by bequest from a legal mother .' Why in 
 Heaven's name does she not blow upon the doctor, and 
 make a good thing out of betraying his contemptible 
 meanness ? Gracious goodness ! why is she so expen- 
 sively magnanimous .' Would you, Madame, be so ex- 
 travagant as to pinch yourself in that way to be faithful 
 and tender to a seducer out of faith and tenderness for 
 his wife's boy ? But, there he is : God set such a pure 
 amen to a hideous deed, and she is the woman to say, 
 Amen, after him ; for God is just and watches the index 
 of the balance. What ! shall she compete with God for 
 retribution ? So her life is a long sacrifice to the purest 
 and most, mute devotion, and our author banters her to 
 keep the tears from obscuring the page at which he 
 writes. 
 
 This charming insinuation of the great observer, who 
 once said of himself that he had no head above his 
 eyes, proves to us that he had a mighty truly-beating 
 heart below them ; and we reverently accept the little 
 mother from his shaping hands, to place her in our Val- 
 
52 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 halla of Women, where Portia, Imogen, and Cordelia 
 have long languished for her company. 
 
 If irony does not forget good nature in its indigna- 
 tion at discovered shams, it can impart the exhilaration 
 of wit. In a late novel, entitled the " Maid of Sker," 
 there is a fishmonger who says that, " when the eyes of 
 a fish begin to fail him through long retirement from 
 the water," he has means of setting up their aspect; 
 "and I called" my patrons "generous gentlemen and 
 Christian-minded ladies every time they wanted to 
 smell my fish, which is not right before payment. 
 What right has another man to disparage the property 
 of another 'i When you have bought him, he is your 
 own ; but, when he is put in the scales, remember 
 'nothing but good of the dead,' if you remember any 
 thing." 
 
 This recalls Hamlet's irony, when he said that he 
 knew Polonius excellent well, — he was a fishmonger ! 
 " Not I, my lord." " Then I would you were so honest 
 a man." Poor, stale Polonius ! He was not as fresh 
 as the fish which Shakspeare used to scent at Billings- 
 gate, and knavery in the wind besides. 
 
 The cynicism of irony can be illustrated by the char- 
 acter of Jaques in " As You Like It," as the character 
 of Apemantus in "Timon of Athens" will serve to 
 show us a cynicism that has grown so ferocious as 
 almost to beat irony from the field. 
 
Irony. 53 
 
 JAQUES. 
 
 There is not a spark of unkindly feeling in Puck 
 when he says to Oberon, concerning the lovers, — 
 
 " Shall we their fond pageant see ? 
 Lord, what fools these mortals be ! " 
 
 But when we overhear Jaques telling Orlando, " By my 
 troth, I was seeking for a fool, when I found you," there 
 is a tang of seedy beer in the speech. We suspect his 
 common-sense of having soured : so that when he says 
 to Orlando, " The worst fault you have is to be in love," 
 we relish the estimate of Orlando's reply, " 'Tis a fault 
 I will not change for your best virtue." 
 
 The melancholy of Jaques is the cynicism of a man 
 who is blasi with the convictions as well as the manners ' 
 of society. He enjoys his vein too well to be melan- 
 choly in the modern sense of that word, for being some- 
 thing more than satirical he is something less than 
 morose, and we feel that he is secretly pleased with his 
 ability to be displeasing. Every vice lends a man a 
 feeling of superiority in being different from other men : 
 he broke through some bounds to acquire it, and this 
 action contains some spice of originality and inde- 
 pendence. He transgresses in a temper of pity for 
 the less audacious and unchartered souls. So the cynic 
 who makes his whole vicinity uncomfortable is pleasant 
 company for himself because he has no mawkishness ; 
 you cannot cheat him with superfine emotions, he hap- 
 pens to have seen the world. 
 
54 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Jaques characterizes the use of the word "melancholy" 
 as applied to himself, when he says : " It is a melancholy 
 of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted 
 from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contempla- 
 tion of my travels, in which' my often rumination wraps 
 me in a most humorous sadness." He has also gained 
 his experience at the expense of having tried various 
 vices of high life, as the Duke hints : " For thou thy- 
 self hast been a libertine." So the arsenic eaters of the 
 Styrian Alps take the natural poison in small successive 
 doses which give them a bloated aspect of florid health, 
 but they so affect the action of the heart that it stops 
 quite suddenly. 
 
 The famous speech beginning with, " All the world's 
 a stage,"' is purely cynical, and assumes the futility of 
 the parts which the necessity of living compels us to 
 play. It might be spoken by one who believes that our 
 little life is rounded by a sleep whose pure oblivion 
 swallows up our striving. 
 
 When Jaques calls for more singing, and is told that 
 it will make him melancholy, he repUes, " I thank it : I 
 can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks 
 eggs." We may infer that he sucks music with the 
 notion of the weasel, who probably regards eggs as 
 being laid on purpose for his sucking. There is noth- 
 ing more ferrety than your cynic, to whom all objects 
 are game for observation. When he hears that Duke 
 Frederic, the usurper, has restored the kingdom and 
 "put on a religious life," he goes to find him for the 
 purpose of critical inspection ; for " out of these con- 
 
Irony. 55 
 
 vertites there is much matter to be heard and learned." 
 So Jaques surmising that every hole leads to a rat does 
 not leave one unexplored. In the matter of music 
 Jaques only cares for his sad reverie, not for the names 
 of the songs. He will thank nobody. " When a man 
 thanks me heartily, methinks I have given him a penny, 
 and he renders me the beggarly thanks." So, sing, if 
 you choose to : the song tracks me to that rat behind 
 the arras. 
 
 Compare his scirrhous habit of assimilating music 
 with that of the Duke in "Twelfth Night." Love has an 
 appetite for music : give me excess of it to kill the love. 
 Enough : it is not so sweet as before ; for love is like 
 the sea, as vast, as real, as domineering. When the 
 brooks of music fall into it, sweet as they are, genuine 
 as love, yet the great sea subdues them to a greater 
 disposition, even in a minute ; and my fancy for Olivia 
 is alone " high-fantastical." Jaques would have sneered 
 at this Duke for not extracting from the music a suspi- 
 cion of the frailty of his love. No matter what a man's 
 gifts may be, this "vicious mole of nature" that pre- 
 tends to spread over all surfaces discolors only the gifts : 
 all virtues, "in the general censure, take corruption 
 from that particular fault," and to its own scandal ; 
 because the world is a flower that nods upon the stock 
 of reality, and the particles of its aroma, though invisi- 
 ble, set in motion the nerves of a corresponding reality, 
 and man does not put his nose to an illusion. But your 
 debauchee, like Jaques, has scorched and tanned his 
 senses with misuse, and his abortive sniffing at the 
 roses sours into a sneer. 
 
56 Wity Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Still, Jaques in defending himself makes disclaimers 
 of ill-nature: as thus, Who is hit by my speech? It 
 means so and so. If the coaft does not fit, who is 
 wronged ? If a man be above my estimate, " why, 
 then, my taxing like a wild goose flies, unclaimed of any 
 man." 
 
 Yes, but he really delights himself with the conviction 
 that every man is a wild goose upon the wing, and that 
 virtue is the last game that ventures to alight and feed 
 on the wild celery of our ponds. 
 
 Jaques reserves his last and crudest thrust for Touch- 
 stone, to whom he predicts a marriage victualled for two 
 months, and wrangling ever after ; which is hard on the 
 wise fool, wjio has taken up with Audrey as if to show 
 the under side of court manners and the comparative 
 cheapness of mere breeding. This ought to have 
 endeared him to the heart of the cynic. 
 
 APEMANTUS. 
 
 Apemantus, in "Timon of Athens," is a cynic of a 
 different breed, and his temper is so acid that, as was 
 once said of Douglas Jerrold, he must have been suckled 
 on a lemon. There is spleen in it when he says : " Would 
 I had a rod in my mouth, that I might answer thee 
 profitably." The cynicism of Apemantus is partly justi- 
 fied by the generous folly of Timon : " Now, Apemantus, 
 if thou wert not sullen, I'd be good to thee." " No, I'll 
 nothing : for if I should be bribed too, there would be 
 none left to rail upon thee, and then thou would'st sin 
 
Irony. 5 7 
 
 the faster." Shakspeare seems to indicate how a virtue, 
 pushed to excess, provokes excessive criticism. We are 
 continually generating these extremes, when our social 
 virtue piques some social fault into parading itself. 
 Money maxims and manners are good things, but they 
 may all be strained to bankruptcy. So when Timon 
 becomes a fanatic of good-nature we see him developing 
 a monstrous Apemantus : his virtue, like an overgrown 
 fruit, becomes stringy and deprived of proper flavor. 
 We taste its coarseness in the colossal spleen of the 
 cynic who says, as Timon turns away from the repulsive 
 tone which was really sired by himself : — 
 
 " Thou wilt not hear me now : thou shalt not then, I'll lock 
 Thy heaven from thee.'' 
 
 So it will always be : if the kingdom of heaven is claimed 
 by one violence, it will be competed for by another. 
 
 Apemantus is specially reared to be this bitter foil 
 to Timon's profuseness. He leads an isolated life, and 
 thus like all solitaries acquires the vice of exaggerating 
 his own opinions. They have never passed between 
 the fine emery of social contact. So he is a caltrop in 
 men's path, with a spike always uppermost to impale the 
 over-hasty feet. Poverty drives Timon directly upon it, 
 to wince at every step he takes on such a bristly virtue, 
 till he matches his smart with curses quite as pointed ; 
 and Shakspeare shows us the two fanatics of two virtues 
 exhausting the vituperations of the English tongue to 
 banish each other into an oblivion, "where the light 
 foam of the sea may beat " their gravestones daily 
 with a bitter lip. 
 
58 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Tim. When there is nothing living but thee, thou shalt be welcome. 
 I had rather be a beggar's dog, than Apemantus. 
 
 Apem. Thou art the cap of all the fools alive. 
 
 Tim. Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon. 
 
 Apem. A plague on thee, thou art too bad to curse. 
 
 Tim. Away, thou issue of a mangy dog I 
 Choler does kill me, that thou art alive ; 
 I swoon to see thee. 
 
 Apem. Beast ! 
 
 Tim. Slave! 
 
 Apem. Toad! 
 
 Tim. Rogue, rogue, rogue ! 
 
 So people who never know " the middle of humanity," 
 but "the extremity of both ends," batter each other's 
 virtue out of shape and capacity to be recognized. 
 
 Julian Hawthorne likens the cynic to a chimney- 
 sweeper, " that eccentric misanthrope who vents his spite 
 against the race by plucking defilement from the very 
 flame which makes bright the household hearth." 
 
 But Jaques was expressly plunged into social estimates 
 and manners that he may be withdrawn from them in a 
 less splenetic temper. The wild crab has sunned itself 
 in orchards, and, nodding among mellower branches, is 
 not all flavored with their rottenness. So far from seclud- 
 ing himself in the conceited fashion of all hermits from 
 the manifold culture of life, he has expended himself 
 upon every phase of it, and withdraws with the pen- 
 siveness of satiety toning the sharpness of experience in 
 his speech. Some men turn cynics when the first serious 
 disappointment of their lives drifts over them. Of a 
 sudden the whole, nature is drenched from the leaden 
 cloud. The revulsion from a sunny day to this pitiless 
 blackening of heaven chills the very marrow of their 
 
Humor. 59 
 
 common-sense. Then they rail at the sky which is but 
 for a while retired, and insist that its old grace and 
 clearness were a subterfuge. So when the accursed 
 plot of lachimo to make the chastity of Imogen a naughty 
 thing has its effect, her husband, Posthumus, sets the key 
 for all the woman-haters since : — 
 
 " Could I find out 
 The woman's part in me ! For there's no motion 
 That tends to vice in man, but I affirm 
 It is the woman's part : Be it lying, note it, ' 
 The woman's ; flattering, hers ; deceiving, hers ; 
 Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers ; revenges, hers ; 
 Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain, 
 Nice longings, slanders, mutability, 
 All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows. 
 Why, hers, in part, or all ; but, rather, all ; 
 For ev'n to vice 
 
 They are not constant, but are changing still 
 One vice, but of a minute old, for one 
 Not half so old as that. /'// write against them" 
 
 HUMOR. 
 
 If we wished to find a passage from Irony to Humor, 
 we should have to look for it in cases where good-nature 
 assumes the positive attribute of impartiality, because 
 humor is a kind of disposition to adopt the whole of 
 human nature, fuse all its distinctions, tolerate all its 
 infirmities, and assemble vice and misery to receive 
 rations of good cheer. 
 
 Two Jews have been elected within a few years to be 
 Lord Mayors of London. They were members of the 
 synagogue in full connection, and might have appointed 
 
6o Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Rabbins for chaplaincies if they had chosen. But they 
 pursued the old custom, which was not however of legal 
 stringency : appointed clergymen of the Church of Eng- 
 land, and f-egularly made all the usual contributions for 
 Christian purposes, including the customary one to the 
 Society for the Conversion of the Jews. In this incident 
 it is the element of Humor which imparts to us the 
 pleasure we feel. 
 
 Hippolyte Taipe acknowledges that the French have 
 ^ not the idea of Humor, nor the word for it. But we 
 I might expect from him at least a definition. He can 
 i only say, however, that humor includes a taste for con- 
 ■ trasts, buffooneries, the mockery of Heine, starts of 
 .' invention, oddities, eruption of a violent joviality that 
 was buried under a heap of sadness, and absurd inde- 
 cency. In another place he says that Enghsh humor 
 " is the product of imaginative drollery, or of concen- 
 trated indignation." 
 
 Sir Henry Bulwer, in his book entitled " France, 
 Social, Literary, and Political," concedes the talent of 
 wit to the French and quotes the following instance of 
 it : "I asked two little village boys, one seven, the other 
 eight years old, what they meant to be when they were 
 men .? Says one, ' I shall be the doctor of the village. ' 
 ' And you, what shall you be .' ' said I to the other. 
 ' Oh ! if brother's a doctor, I shall be curl He shall 
 kill the people, and I'll bury them ; so we shall have 
 the whole village between us.' " 
 
 Bulwer appreciates this, yet Taine denies to the 
 English the sense of wit. In fact, the quality of wit 
 
Humor. 
 
 <b 
 
 exists wherever imagination percolates through the 
 understanding : the sediment is the grain-gold of wit. 
 But the quality of humor, depending upoh various moral 
 traits, exists only wher ever a broad imagination is com- 
 bined with a sweet and tolerant moral sense that is 
 devoid of malice andall uncharitabFeness, and al pLatc 
 wi ffi^all mankind. A petulant egotism may ex ist with 
 wifhnf npvpr with humor . Sarcasm and satire are the 
 brms which best agree with iniperfect moral disposi- 
 tions. A too prolong ed irony has something melan- 
 choly and dyspeptic in it, and passes into the blood of a 
 faulty temper even if there be the tonic of an upright 
 moral sense. This moral sense may exist on every 
 meridian of the earth, but it may not appear at literary 
 epochs in solution with the brightest minds. Rabelais 
 seems to be a French exception co the Gallic trait that 
 was noticed so long ago by the great Roman : Comceda 
 and argute loqui, — belonging to comedy and to the 
 ingenuities of conversation. Humor appears best m 
 conj unction with the temper ot Morthern Europe, whose 
 early races began with deep impressions of the gravity 
 of things and broke thence into alleviating moods. If 
 it be the primitive trait of a nation to enjoy comic 
 gayeties and the subtle surprises of discourse, it does 
 not readily rise to the moral earnestness which a serious 
 world imposes, and therefore it cannot invent the relief) 
 and grave delight of humor. ^ 
 
 Sydney Smith uses this word to cover any thing that 
 is ridiculous and laughable. So the epithet comic is 
 quite indiscriminately applied. But we ought not to 
 
62 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 submit to this loose application,' for there are plenty 
 of other words to make proper distinctions for us amid 
 our pleasurable moods, and permit us to reserve humor 
 for something which is neither punning, wit, satire, nor 
 comedy. Humor may avail itself of all these mental 
 exercises, but only as a manager casts his stock company 
 to set forth the prevailing spirit of a play. Comedy, 
 for instance, represents sorrows, passions, and -annoy- 
 ances, but shows them without the sombre purpose of 
 tragedy to enforce a supreme will at any cost. All our 
 weaknesses threaten in comedy to result in serious 
 embarrassments, but there is such inexhaustible material 
 for laughter in the whims and follies with which we 
 baffle ourselves and others, that the tragic threat is col- 
 lared just in time and shaken into pleasure. All kinds 
 of details of our life are represented, which tragedy 
 could never tolerate in its main drift towards the pathos 
 of defeated human wills and broken hearts. Tricks, 
 vices, fatuities, crotchets, vanities, play their game for a 
 stake no higher than the mirth of outwitting each other ; 
 and they all pay penalties of a light kind which God 
 exacts smiUngly for the sake of keeping our disorders 
 at a minimum. Comedy also funds a great deal of its 
 charm in the unconsciousness of an infirmity. We 
 exhibit ourselves unawares : each one is perfectly under- 
 stood by everybody but himself ; so we plot and vapor 
 through an intrigue with placards on each back, where 
 all but the wearers can indulge their mirth at seeing us 
 parading so innocently with advertisements of our price 
 and quality. 
 
Humor. 6^ 
 
 There is a comic passage in the " Inferno " of Dante, 
 noticed by Lowell (XV. 119), "where Brunetto Latini 
 lingers under the burning shower to recommend his 
 Tesoro to his former pupil," Dante ; " a comical touch 
 of Nature in an author's solicitude for his little work ; 
 not, as in Fielding's case, after its, but his own dam- 
 nation." 
 
 The opening verses of Canto XVI. of the " Para- 
 diso " are also comic, " where Dante tells us how, even 
 in heaven, he could not help glorying in being gently 
 born, — he who had devoted a Canzone and a book of 
 the Convito to proving that nobility consisted wholly in 
 virtue." 
 
 Humor subsidizes every vein like this to supply the 
 great heart-beat which mantles over all human features 
 and visits all the members of great or little honor. 
 I rony i s jesting hidden behind gravity. Humor is 
 gravity concealed behind the jest Our grave and noble 
 tendencies are brought in this world of ours into contact 
 with very ordinary styles of living, which are stubborn ; 
 they neither surrender nor give way. Humor steps in 
 to mediate : it seeks to put in the same light and color 
 11 the parts of this incongruity, the ideal and the vulgar 
 eal; and the constant inference of humor is that all 
 the ideals of right, honor, goodness, manly strength, are 
 serious with a divine purpose. 
 
 Even the coarsest and most revolting things can be 
 adopted by this temper and cheerfully assigned to their 
 places in the great plan. Jamie Alexander, the old 
 Scotch grave-digger, had the habit of carrying home 
 
64 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 fragments of old cofifins, long seasoned in the earth which 
 was turned up by his exploring spade. He used to make 
 clocks and fiddles of them, thus coaxing time and tune 
 out of these repulsive tokens of human infirmity. Our 
 mouldiest accessories can furnish material for humor ; 
 since "a good wit," says Shakspeare, "will make use of 
 any thing ; it will turn diseases to commodity." 
 
 We cannot say that man derives this power to resolve 
 contrariety into delight from the divine mind, though 
 we have the habit of saying that every intellectual act 
 must spring from an original source of intelligence, just 
 as affection must have its root in the infinite love. But 
 Deity can have no consciousness of incongruities in 
 creation, because the whole must at every instant be 
 comprehended in the Creator of the whole, who origi- 
 nates the real relation of all its parts and tiieir mutual 
 interdependence. Human dissatisfaction springs from 
 want of this ability to comprehend the whole within one 
 reconciling idea. This incompetency is felt by us be- 
 cause we have an instinct that all dissonant things ought 
 to be reconciled, and can be in some way, but only can 
 be by the finite becoming the infinite. Humor strives 
 to bridge this gulf. It is man's device to pacify his pain- 
 ful sense that so many things appear wrong and evil to 
 him, and so many circumstances inconsistent with our 
 feeling that Deity must have framed the world in a tem- 
 per of perfect goodness. We get relief by trying to 
 discover the ideas which may effect a temporary recon- 
 cilement, to approach as far as we can to the temper of 
 divine impartiality in which all circumstances must have 
 
Humor. • 65 
 
 been ordained. That temper passing down through our 
 incompleteness is refracted, broken all up into a tremu- 
 lousness of human smiles. Nothing that a Creator has 
 the heart to tolerate can disturb him. But where there 
 is no sense of incongruity there can be no sense of 
 humor. That sense is ma n' s expedient to make his 
 jnortality endurable. The laughter of man is the con- 
 tentment of God. 
 
 Shakspeare was not preoccupied by any theory of 
 the universe which denies the facts or tries to shut them 
 up in a private meaning, as theology does. His creative 
 genuis reflected a Creator's mind. So he accepted all 
 that is permitted to exist, without extenuation, instinc- 
 tively acknowledging the right of God to make men as 
 they are, if so He chose, out of complex motives and 
 passions whose roots are hidden in each man's ancestry, 
 and whose drift the man himself cannot anticipate, as he 
 was not consulted. This admission of all the facts of 
 human nature did not disable his preference for pure 
 and honest things. All that is lovely has a good report 
 made of it in his lives, and all that is odious appears in 
 its habit as it lived. Thus he moralized, as Nature does 
 by letting all her creatures breed and show their traits. 
 She pastes no placards upon things which advertise 
 themselves to every observer. All our infirmities have 
 the freedom of Shakspeare's verse to display themselves 
 at pleasure. He is not standing by with a showman's 
 stick to designate his creatures to us who have eyes of 
 our own, and know what is ugly and pleasant when we 
 see it. No perfume is added to the violet, no gilding to 
 
66 Wzi, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 the rose. " The image of a wicked heinous fault " lives 
 in its eye. 
 
 Now this impartial observation cannot shield the 
 poet's ideal from the hurts which are inflicted by the 
 discrepancies of life : the real seems to be no legitimate 
 child of the ideal, but a changeling with low-born traits. 
 The noble lover of goodness cannot help being pained at 
 the contrast of circumstances with his thought, and there 
 moves over his nature a deep seriousness from this 
 cloud, beneath which his imagination- broods upon the 
 landscape. It raises a suspicion that Deity itself must 
 find omniscience annoying and provocative of gloom ; 
 for all the worlds and the ages keep on inflicting this 
 incongruity upon the divine source of all ideal things. 
 The poet must manage to recover from this mood, to 
 reassure his heart with the faith that the One who cal- 
 culated and devised the aberrations which sustain His 
 system must exist in eternal serenity. 
 
 When many human characters are contemplated by a 
 superior observer, an impartiality kin to that of the mind 
 who created them sets in. But it cannot remain a color- 
 less, judicial attitude, nor can it deteriorate into indiffer- 
 ence. Good nature is an element in the superiority of a 
 good observer. He may make use of wit, comedy, and 
 irony, but his essential mood can only be described by the 
 w6rd " humor ; " that is, the quality of being reconciled 
 with all that is observed. The poet would fain concil- 
 iate, but without complicity ; for he ckn never give up the 
 gravity of his ideal. Now to be perfectly impartial to 
 all would be too great a strain for a finite mind. It 
 
Humor. 67 
 
 would weary of the incessant balancing, of the exigency 
 of moderation. The mind yields from this in uncon- 
 scious self-defence, and passes into a mood that conciV 
 iates itself. The gravity is precipitated by the infusion 
 of a smile. And although this lighter ingredient appears 
 upon the surface, it is the record and announcement of 
 the serious affair below. 
 
 In Burns's " Address to the Deil," he is of opinion that 
 that personage cannot take much pleasure in tormenting 
 poor devils like him. Besides, if any thing is the matter 
 with him, it is all the fault of the devil's own trick which 
 so nearly ruined every thing. Still, he confesses to a 
 fellow-feeling for the devil. Why can't he mend a bit ? 
 Burns hates to think of hell for the devil's sake, as 
 Dr. Channing once said he hoped there was no devil for 
 the devil's own sake. 
 
 But, as Shakspeare says, "the devil knew not what 
 he did when he made man politic ; he crossed himself 
 by it ; and I cannot think, but, in the end, the villanies 
 of man will set him clear." 
 
 The humor here is pervaded with the earnest percep- 
 tion that Nature contains organically the good and the 
 evil. Both are placed in permanent juxtaposition, to 
 result in the interaction which makes life and history ' 
 ppssible. 
 
 We notice the same touch of humor in Goethe's Pro- 
 logue to "Faust." The Lord gives full permission to 
 Mephistopheles to try his hand at Faust: — 
 
68 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 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 com- 
 pulsion 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. 
 
 I The characters o£ 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 con- 
 trived 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 doubt- 
 less great numbers of spectators find this relief in the 
 lighter scenes into which they step down the stairs of 
 
Humor. 69 
 
 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 condi- 
 tions. 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 Pro- 
 teus procures a dog of gentle breed and bids Launce 
 carry it as a present to Silvia. But it is stolen from 
 
yo JVz^, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 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." * 
 
 With that for our text, let us approach some charac- 
 ters 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. 
 
 * French Gentleman in "All's Well that Ends Well," iv. 3. 
 
Humor. 7 1 
 
 Shakspeare may be ever)rwhere extensively owned with- 
 out 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 her- 
 self 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, Re- 
 ligion 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 acknowl- 
 edgment that mind and heart are surprised by their own 
 detection, yet with as little fear aiid as much confidence 
 as we repay to omniscience 1 This is rare, this persis- 
 tent 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 Shak- 
 speare to instruct the youth and inculcate this natural 
 piety .■• Rather let every household accuse its own in- 
 difference, 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. 
 
DOGBERRY, MALVOLIO, 
 
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA (AJAX), 
 
 BOTTOM, TOUCHSTONE. 
 
DOGBERRY. 
 
 nr^HE advocates of the theory that Lord Bacon wrote 
 Shakspeare's plays like to point to the coinci- 
 dences 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 Shaksgeare'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 parody- 
 ing the important phrases and impotent exploits of the 
 suburban constable. But Dogberry's mission extended 
 
•j6 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 farther than that, and is intimately woven with delight- 
 ful 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 communifies in either 
 hemisphere elect their guardians of the peace and clothe 
 them in verbose terrors. If the town is unfortunately 
 short of rascals, the ofiScer 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 ineffi-/! 
 ciency is frequently selected by busy communities, be-| 
 cause so few persons are ^ere clumsy enough to be 
 unemployed. Such a vagrom is easily comprehended. 
 Dogberry has caught up the turns and idioms of saga- 
 cious speech, and seems to be blowing them up as life- 
 belts ; so he goes bobbing helplessly around in the froth 
 of his talk. " I leave an arrant knave with your wor- 
 ship ; 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 poli- 
 tician once say with scorn in town-meeting, " Mr. Mod- 
 erator, I know nothing about your technalities." Dog- 
 berry is the most original of Malaprops, says to the 
 Prince's order that it shall be sufifigance, and tells the 
 
Dogberry. 'jj 
 
 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 conver- 
 sational 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 try- 
 ing 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 spell- 
 ing-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 " beau- 
 tiful vicissitude." I have heard of a stout, cheerful, and 
 polite Dogberry, who had arrived at the discretion of 
 
78 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 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 clergy- 
 man, 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, not- 
 withstanding" 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 1 " The reply 
 
 was, " Oh, full of fight as ever, — a regular Aorse 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 
 
Dogberry. 79 
 
 belong to the race of bulls. At other times they con- 
 tain 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 ^gg'' That is, as he 
 remarked, "a happy combination of ./Esop 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 abo- 
 riginal 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 oppres- 
 sors 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 com- 
 modity ! 
 
 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- 
 
8o Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 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 some- 
 times 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 Shy- 
 lock, 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 incTredulous it may appear." 
 
 Dogberry has a pondering look and a fribbling em- 
 phasis. 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 reflec- 
 tion, 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 ordi- 
 nary mind. He voices the perplexity of the watch, and 
 lends to it the color of concession and sagacious com- 
 
Dogberry. 8 1 
 
 promise. 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 post- 
 pones 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 Dog- 
 berry'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 car- 
 ried 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 dust- 
 pan to gather up his good points with tremulous huf- 
 finess : 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- 
 
 6 
 
82 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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 acci- 
 dent, 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 
 
Malvolio. 83 
 
 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 ParoUes 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 fin- 
 gers, roasted hei^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 advertise- 
 ment 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 out-/ 
 witted 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 ele- 
 ment of humor. It transpires during the impartial 
 
84 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 interplay of the silliness of Aguecheek, the drunken 
 techiness of Sir Toby, the spite of Fabian, the mis- 
 chievousness 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 sub- 
 scription." 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, per- . 
 fectly content to see " foolery walk about the orb like 
 the sun." It is "so difficult to discriminate between fol- 
 lies 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 gener- 
 ally 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 
 
Malvolio. ' 85 
 
 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 cli-//| 
 mate 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 difiSculty 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 pro- 
 foundly respects his own, and carries it upon stilts 
 over the heads of the servants and Sir Toby and Sir 
 Andrew. 
 
 Imagine this saturnine and self-involved man obliged 
 to consort daily with Sir Toby, who brings his hand to 
 the buttery-bar before breakfast, and who hates going 
 to bed "as an unfilled can," unless no more drink is 
 forthcoming; an irascible fellow, too, and all the more 
 tindery because continually dry. He has Sir Andrew 
 Aguecheek for a boon companion, who says of himself 
 that sometimes he has no more wit than a Christian, or 
 than an ordinary man. When he is not in liquor he is 
 
86 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 fuddled with inanity, and chirps and skips about, delud- 
 ing himself with the notion that Olivia will receive his 
 addresses. Sir Toby, to borrow money of him, fosters 
 the notion, and flatters his poor tricks. Then there is 
 that picador of a clown, who plants in Malvolio's thin 
 skin a perfect quickset of barbed quips, and sends him 
 lowering around the mansion which these roisterers 
 have turned into a tavern. The other servant, Fabian, 
 has a grudge against him for interfering with a bear- 
 baiting he was interested in ; for Malvolio was one of 
 those Puritans who frowned upon that sport, as Macau- 
 lay said, not because it worried the bear but because it 
 amused the men. The steward was right when he in- 
 formed this precious set that they were idle, shallow 
 things, and he was not of their element. No doubt he 
 is the best man of the lot. But he interrupts their ca- 
 rousing at midnight in such a sour and lofty way that 
 we are entertained to hear their drunken chaffing, and 
 we call to Maria for another stoup, though they have had 
 too much already ; but a fresh exposition of dryness 
 always sets in when such a virtue as Malvolio's tries to 
 wither us. However, he becomes the object of their 
 animosity, and they work in his distemper to make him 
 ridiculous. 
 
 There is no humor in seeing Malvolio fall so easily a 
 prey to their device. When a man becomes the cause 
 of his own mortification, it .is simply comic. But the 
 \ intrigue becomes humorous when his vice shows disgust 
 at theirs, and theirs becomes indignant at his, and they 
 are delighted to see it well ventilated. For so do we 
 
Malvolio. 87. 
 
 revenge ourselves upon each other, using not our 
 strength which would be tragic, but our weaknesses. 
 Then impartial justice is obliged to smile to see these 
 counterplots of folly further its great plan. What 
 economy it is Jto have individuals so contrived that they 
 can baffle, mortify, and school each other without im- 
 porting the constable! We are self-acting arrange- 
 ments to relieve the universe from tax and keep its 
 hilarity replenished. In this genial manner " the whirli- 
 gig of time brings in his revenges." Even if we do not 
 lie in wait for each other, the knowledge of mutual 
 frailties gives our whole life a sub-taste of humor ; and 
 that leaves respect upon the tongue. 
 
 Seba&tian says to the clown : " I prithee vent thy 
 folly somewhere else." Mankind makes the clown's 
 answer : " Vent my folly ! He has heard that word of 
 some great man, and now applies it to a fool. Vent my 
 folly ! I am afraid this great lubberly world will prove 
 a cockney." No fear of that, my " corrupter of words ; " 
 so long as perfect discretion is unknown upon the earth, 
 we are all cosmopolites of infirmity and speak the great 
 language of smiles. 
 
 But the play does not let Malvolio drop softly on his 
 feet. There is a faint grudge provoked by the ill-tem- 
 pered quality of his concelL, and Shakspeare indicates 
 this trait of our nature. The clown, who remembers 
 how the steward used to twit Olivia's contentment at his 
 sallies, and to deprecate it in a lofty way, now mimics 
 his phrases and manner to sting him with a last flutter- 
 ing dart. Malvolio's pride is already too deeply wounded. 
 
88 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 for he has indeed been " notoriously abused." There is 
 no relenting in such a man on account of the fun, for 
 that is a crime in the eyes of a Puritan, to be punished 
 for God's sake. His temper acquires sombreness from 
 his belief that total depravity is a good doctrine if you 
 can only live up to it. But when this crime of fun is 
 perpetrated against the anointed self-esteem of the Puri- 
 tan himself, it is plain he will be revenged on the whole 
 pack of them unless they proceed to make a sop of 
 deference to touch his hurt with, and a pipe out of his 
 own egotism for sounding a truce. 
 
 Shakspeare delighted to mark the transition of a virtue 
 to a vice ; that elusive moment, as of a point of passage 
 from one species to another, discovered and put into a 
 flash from the light of humor. Malvolio's grave and 
 self-respecting temperament is an excellence. No decent 
 man thinks meanly of himself, and the indecent ones 
 cannot afford the disparagement. The pretence of it is 
 a warning to us to expect mischief, a notice put up, 
 " This is a private way ; dangerous passing." What- 
 ever gift a man has becomes a divine permission for 
 self-consideration. Modesty is the humanity of a great 
 mind, a vapor which the sun instinctively gathers to 
 make itself tolerable. For instance, the profits of the 
 Globe and Curtain Theatres helped Shakspeare to his 
 orchards and house in Stratford, but his poverty in the 
 matter of conceit furnished and made the New Place 
 habitable. The neighbor gossips did not have his 
 " greatness thrust upon them." Precisely because he 
 was virtuous there were cakes and ale, and his jests, no 
 
Malvolio. 89 
 
 doubt, were spicy in the mouth too. This man who 
 travailed in secret with his glorious brood had nothing 
 in his manner to record 
 
 " Those daily, nightly drippings in the dark 
 Of the heart's blood." 
 
 Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear were not known to be in 
 town. These mighty shapes, silently content to wait 
 till a world's worship matched them, forbore to bully the 
 villagers. In time whole nations were mustered in, so 
 that his manifold greatness could be met on an equal 
 'footing. But their gentle peer left posterity to beat the 
 drum for this service. 
 
 But all men pardon that occasional frankness of 
 egotism which is like lifting a window for clear light 
 to pass through, so that we recognize that a commander 
 is in the street. 
 
 Now, Malvolio's sobriety, his contempt for guzzling 
 and roaring of catches, his measured deportment, his 
 nice and cleanly ways are commendable results of his 
 self-opinion, and cannot yield any advantage to low fel- 
 lows for roughing him until the decent pace of his 
 austerity becomes a strut. One of the characters in a 
 late novel says, " When I see people strut enough to be 
 cut up into bantam-cocks, I stand dormant with wonder, 
 and says no more." This tendency of Nature to a pea- 
 cock is discovered in the very act, at the moment of pro- 
 duction, by this lens of a smile with which we arm our 
 eye. Malvolio is like the fanatical England of the Com- 
 monwealth, which was flouted and dishonored by the 
 Aguecheeks and Belches of King Charles II., those 
 
90 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 inevitable conspirers against immoderate and arrogant 
 sobriety. They are sure to come. " Nay, I '11 come," 
 says Fabian, " if I lose a scruple of this sport, let me be 
 boiled to death with melancholy." Yes, the niggard 
 fellow shall " come by sqme notable shame." Says Sir 
 Toby, " To anger him, we'll have the bear again ; " which 
 England did to her heart's content ; but the discredit 
 must be shared by the epoch which strove to strut in the 
 sad conceit that gladness was the sin against the Holy 
 Ghost, 
 
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA (AJAX). 
 
 It is evident that large portions of this play are not 
 by Shakspeare's liand. It was first attributed to him 
 and published in 1608. But there is an entry in Hens- 
 lowe's Diary, April 7, 1599, o^ ^ sum of money lent to 
 " Mr. Dickers and Harey Cheatell, in earneste of their 
 boocke called Troyeles and Creassedaye." This play of 
 Dekker and Chettle was probably the original which 
 Shakspeare adopted in order to improve. Mr. Fleay, 
 however, attributes to Shakspeare a first form of this 
 play as early as 1597. The improvements are as palpa- 
 ble as the original defects. The play did not receive 
 the benefit of a thorough recasting, and was published 
 under Shakspeare's name with large portions of the 
 crude, absurd, and indecent original matter unchanged. 
 
 When Troilus says, — 
 
 " Helen must needs be fair. 
 When with your blood you daily paint her thus ; " 
 
Troilus and Cressida (Ajax). 91 
 
 and when Ulysses replies to the complaint of Achilles 
 that his deeds are forgotten, — 
 
 "Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, 
 Wherein he puts alms for oblivion ; 
 A great-sized monster of ingratitudes : 
 Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd 
 As fast as they are made, forgot as soon 
 As done. Perseverance, dear my lord. 
 Keeps honor bright : to have done, is to hang 
 Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail 
 In monumental mockery. Take the instant way ; 
 For honor travels in a strait so narrow. 
 Where one but goes abreast ; keep then the path, 
 For emulation hath a thousand sons. 
 That one by one pursue. If you give way. 
 Or hedge aside from the direct forthright. 
 Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by, 
 And leave you hindmost. 
 For time is like a fashionable host. 
 That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand. 
 And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly, 
 Grasps in the comer : welcome ever smiles, 
 And farewell goes out sighing," — 
 
 we need no help in recognizing the pen of Shakspeare. 
 This is the speech that holds embedded the world's 
 household line, 
 
 "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." 
 
 But we should need sore helping to discover a touch of 
 nature's style in the lines of Troilus replying to the 
 question, " Why stay we, then .' " — 
 
 " To make a recordation to my soul 
 Of every syllable that here was spoke. 
 But if I tell how these two did co-act, 
 Shall I not lie in publishing a truth ? 
 Sith yet there is a credence in my heart, 
 
92 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 An esperance so obstinately strong, 
 That doth invert th' attest of eyes and ears ; 
 As if those organs had deceptious functions, 
 Created only to calumniate." 
 
 In the same fashion, the Prologue seems written by a 
 pen whose feather was in a constant ruffling. It talks 
 of " princes orgulous," a word nowhere used by Shaks- 
 peare, and one which he would have rallied: the six 
 gates of Troy have 
 
 " Massy staples 
 And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts." 
 
 And Hector well earns the epithet which has sprung 
 from his name when he cries, — 
 
 " Stand, stand, thou Greek ! thou art a goodly mark : — 
 No ! wilt thou not .' — I like thy armor well ; 
 I'll frush it, and unlock the rivets all. 
 But I'll be master of it. Wilt thou not, beast, abide ? 
 Why then, fly on, I'll hunt thee for thy hide." 
 
 Numerous passages like this have the tone which un- 
 mistakably remands them to the original play. 
 
 But who can help feeling the joyous and tender mood 
 of Shakspeare reproduced by the worshipping lines of 
 Troilus to Cressida .'' — 
 
 " Oh that I thought it could be in a woman 
 (As, if it can, I will presume in you). 
 To feed for aye her lamp and flame of love ; 
 To keep her constancy in plight and youth, 
 Outliving beauty's outward, with a mind 
 That doth renew swifter than blood decays ! 
 Or, that persuasion could but thus convince me, 
 That my integrity and truth to you 
 Might be affronted with the match and weight 
 
, Troilus and Cressida {Aj'ax). 93 
 
 Of such a wmnow'd purity in love ! 
 How were I then uplifted ! but, alas I 
 I am as true as truth's simplicity, 
 And simpler than the infancy of truth." 
 
 What a pure flame mounts up from each altar of 
 these consecrated lines to show the detestable unclean- 
 ness of some scenes which are left over from the origi- 
 nal play ! When the wanton Cressida sweeps the chaste 
 fire from those altars and leaves them standing cold in 
 his heart, Shakspeare cries, — 
 
 " O Cressid ! 
 Let all untruths stand by thy stained name. 
 And they'll seem glorious." 
 
 Some of the sentences spoken by Ulysses have be- 
 come fixed in the English consciousness ; the rings of 
 robust reflection have grown around and appropriated 
 them, so that the material is quotable in every market 
 and is applied to modern conveniences. The famous 
 speech that charges the Greek factions to their neglect 
 of " degree, priority, and place," — 
 
 " Oh, when degree is shaked, 
 Which is the ladder to all high designs, 
 The enterprise is sick ! " — 
 
 contains a truth as applicable to a democracy as to that 
 Shakspearian age which reared the defeaters of the 
 Armada, and sent Drake and Hawkins round the 
 world. 
 
 What cause, in want of time or other inconvenience, 
 left this uncultivated play to be ascribed to Shakspeare 
 is past conjecture. In many respects it is like the 
 modern burlesque, and may be regarded as a remote 
 
94 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 ancestor of the rollicking English fun which brings out 
 the latent absurdities in ancient and mediaeval chivalry. 
 There is, for instance, a play called " The Field of the 
 Cloth of Gold," which makes ridiculous the pomp of the 
 courts of Kings Henry VIII. and Francis I., and repre- 
 sents the famous tournament as a tilt upon hobby-horses 
 ending in a milling match with bottle-holders affd all 
 the pugilistic cant. There are plenty of blond women 
 who appear to be out of employment at present on pur- 
 pose to lend a zest to this drollery, and everybody seems 
 to welcome with democratic delight the slur upon obso- 
 lete solemnities, and the insinuation that the surviving 
 ones are no more imposing. With all the devices of the 
 modern theatre, such a play manages to be vastly more 
 ludicrous than Troilus and Cressida, but it does not start 
 with such a cutting motive, and it is in the matter of 
 morality simply neutral. But the play attributed to 
 Shakspeare is one prolonged assault upon the foibles and 
 indecencies of greatness, upon the trivial pretexts that 
 mar and vulgarize an epoch of heroism. The period of 
 the Trojan war is borrowed, and the characters of 
 Homer's Iliad, to throw into a salient light what was 
 after all the real occasion of the famous siege. Paris 
 went to Greece, as Troilus says, — 
 
 "And, for an old aunt, whom the Greeks held captive, 
 He brought a Grecian queen, whose youth and freshness 
 Wrinkles Apollo's, and makes pale the morning. 
 Why keep we her ? The Grecians keep our aunt. 
 Is she worth keeping ? why, she is a pearl. 
 Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships, 
 And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants." 
 
Troilus and Cressida \Ajax). 95 
 
 Several scholars dissatisfied with this reputed motive 
 of the siege, and of Homer's Iliad, take refuge in a 
 theory of light-worship, and of a conflict between the 
 Orient and the Occident, the Dawn and the Dark, such 
 as no doubt underlies many of the ancient myths whose 
 names bear allusion to such phenomena. These com- 
 mentators torture the names and incidents of the Iliad 
 to clear it of the stigma of having no motive-power 
 beyond the stealing of a light wife, and a re-delivery of 
 her to a complacent husband who makes no inquiries. 
 Ten years of siege and battle, of domestic broil and 
 murder, of Odyssean adventures by sea and land, that 
 Helen may be transferred, warm from the arms of Priam, 
 back to the condoning embrace of Menelaus ! Truly, 
 when the ugly thing stands thus stripped of its Homeric 
 mantle, we hurry to demand that it shall be decently 
 clothed in travesty. 
 
 After the Prologue announces that expectation is 
 " tickling skittish spirits on one and other side," the 
 scene soon opens with the indecent Pandarus trifling 
 with the famous epic names, as he taps them lightly 
 with his battledore to keep up his little game, which is 
 to get Troilus thoroughly involved with Cressida : " An 
 her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen's (well, 
 go to), there were no more comparison between the 
 women ; " then the puppy says, " I will not dispraise 
 your sister Cassandra's wit" Think of the jaunty go- 
 between thus estimating the terrible prophetess of the 
 Agamemnon, while he is only whetting Troilus's passion 
 for Cressida, and devising means to bring them together. 
 
96 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 For this is meant to travesty the rape of Helen, which 
 was the motive of the siege. The play begins by mak- 
 ing incontinence a very important business, and thus 
 ridiculous. As Thersites says^ " All the argument is a 
 cuckold, and war and lechery confound all." 
 
 Subsequently Cressida, at a wink from the Greek 
 Diomedes, passes out of the keeping of her Trojan 
 lover, thus making the politics as light as her love. 
 And the scenes where Pandarus lickerishly plans the 
 assignation, and rallies Cressida afterwards, are so pur- 
 posely broad that every pretence of sentiment is emptied 
 out of the play ; the vulgarity becomes so conspicuous 
 that the fighting itself is infected with it and runs into 
 parody. The reader need only turn to the interjectional 
 soliloquies of Thersites, which supply to every mock- 
 heroic incident a very free translation, to perceive that 
 there was an intention in the co-laborers upon this play 
 to make all such famous court-manners and their quar- 
 rels seem ridiculous. 
 
 Thersites is Shakspeare himself in a cynic masquerade, 
 that he may watch the whole game and be privy to the 
 monstrous immorality. Achilles hangs back from fight- 
 ing the Trojans, not in anger at the slight of Agamem- 
 non, but rather because he has a secret understanding 
 with one of Priam's daughters. Instead of maintaining 
 consistent political attitudes, almost everybody is carry- 
 ing on some private transaction of this kind, and the 
 great heroes scramble like boys in a shower of comfits. 
 Pandarus, the disgraceful old uncle of Cressida, who 
 brought her and Troilus together in the same spirit 
 
Troilus and Cressida {Ajax). 97 
 
 which gave Helen to Paris, and back again coolly to her 
 proper husband, is left at the close of the play to bewail 
 the whole bad issue of the Homeric morals : "A goodly 
 medicine for mine aching bones ! O world, world, 
 world ! Thus is the poor agent despised. O traitors 
 and bawds, how earnestly are you set a' work, and how 
 ill requited!"' 
 
 In the second scene, the heroes swagger across the 
 .stage one by one coming from the field, while Pandarus 
 stands by and talks of each in a way to make of them di- 
 minutive patterns of militia colonels. iEneas, Antenor, 
 Hector, Paris : " There's a brave man, niece ; " " It does a 
 man's heart good." That's Antenor, " And he's a man 
 good enough ; " but where is Troilus ? " If he see me, 
 you shall see him nod at me ; " but see Hector, and, oh, 
 " What hacks are on his helmet ! — there be hacks ! " 
 His niece says, " Be those with swords .' " " Swords ? 
 any thing : — an the devil come to him, it's all one, by 
 God's lid ; " but there's Troilus ; look, niece, there's 
 a man, "and his helm more hacked than Hector's." 
 " Had I a sister were a Grace, or a daughter a Goddess, 
 he should take his choice. Paris is dirt to him." Eh, 
 Cressid, don't you take .' So all these scenes pass with 
 a mischievous innuendo pushed forward by the lackey 
 sentences : " I warrant, Helen, to change, would give 
 an eye to boot." Thus it runs on like a nautical melo- 
 drama, or the rattling chaff of " Tom and Jerry," a 
 stream on which the moral disgust of Thetsites swims 
 in full view. 
 
 When Ajax appears, we are made aware in the first 
 
 7 
 
98 Wzi, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 place, that he does not know his letters. He flies into a 
 rage with Thersites because he refuses to read to him 
 the proclamation of Hector's challenge, and they fling 
 the vilest Billingsgate at each other, varied with fisticuffs. 
 They try to outdo each other at a game of epithets. If 
 one says, " Thou mongrel, beef-witted lord," the other 
 says, " Toad-stool." " Porcupine," says one in a way 
 to wither. " Scurvy-valiant ass," retorts the other. So 
 in a later scene these phrases of invective remind us 
 of Shakspeare : " Damnable box of envy ; " " thou full 
 dish of fool ; " " thou idle, immaterial skein of sleeve 
 silk ; " " green sarcenet flap for a sore eye." This, 
 flung at Patroclus, convinces us that the plain of Troy 
 has shrunken to a dog-pit, and we give odds on Ther- 
 sites. "To be a mule, a cat, a lizard, an owl, or a 
 herring without a roe, I would not care ; but to be 
 Menelaus, — I would conspire against destiny. I care 
 not to be the louse of a lazar, so I were not Menelaus." 
 
 There is a long scene in which the prominent Trojans 
 discuss the policy of returning Helen and getting entirely 
 out of the scrape. Hector says, " Let her go, — any ten 
 Trojans' lives are as dear to us as she ; she is not 
 worth what she doth cost the holding." This profit-and- 
 loss view of the case is despised by the rest, especially 
 by Troilus, who is the only consistent person in the 
 play, and who is nobly contrived to keep alive for 
 us the tradition of honor and manhood. Now Cas- 
 sandra enters to bully like a fish-woman, with arms 
 akimbo : 
 
Troilus and Cressida (Ajax). 99 
 
 " Our fire-brand brother, Paris, burns us all. 
 
 Cry, Trojans, cry ! A Helen, and a woe : 
 
 Cry, cry ! Troy burns, or else let Helen go." 
 
 ■ 
 
 Troilus flatly says that she is mad. Finally, Hector, 
 though confessing that by every moral law Helen ought 
 to be restored to her husband, thinks it better to hold 
 on to her because she is a spur to valor, and their repu- 
 tations depend upon preventing the Greeks from carry- 
 ing their point. It is a discussion of shopkeepers who 
 are aspiring to be actors and couch their speech in high- 
 stepping hexameters. 
 
 Pandarus sings to Helen such a bit of frippery that 
 we expect to see them both begin to hop. from one foot 
 to the other in the style of the burlesque, as they deliver 
 the chorus of " Oh ! oh ! ha ! ha ! hey ho ! " 
 
 There never was such deliberate absurdity as the 
 fighting in this play. The original draught of it was 
 certainly left untouched by Shakspeare, probably to 
 keep the laugh sustained. It is all done in the vein 
 of Bombastes. " Now, they are clapper-clawing one 
 another," says Thersites ; " I'll go look on." Diomedes 
 enters, followed by Troilus, who bids him stand ; for, if 
 he took to the river Styx, Troilus would jump in after 
 him. " Stand, forsooth," says Diomedes; "don't flatter 
 yourself I was flying: no, my worthy Trojan, I was 
 only extricating myself from the multitude to get at 
 you, — so come on." They come on, and go off fight- 
 ing. Pretty soon Diomedes enters with the horse of 
 Troilus, under the pantomimic illusion that he has slain 
 its master. He despatches the horse with a note to 
 
lOO Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Cressida, his new mistress, late the mistress of the late 
 Troilus. But Troilus was no more dead than Falstaff 
 was enibowelled ; he enters in a fine fume, looking up 
 his horse. There is Ajax bellowing to come to close 
 quarters with him, and Diomedes in the rear bawling in 
 imitation of Ajax, but ironically, because he thinks that 
 Troilus fell by his hand. It is a very unexpected accom- 
 modation when Troilus appears, and the three go out 
 fighting. Not a drop of blood is spilt as yet, for these 
 are pasteboard warriors with wind for blood. But now 
 comes Hector meeting Achilles, who goes into a perilous 
 bluster as if the Trojan's last moments had arrived in 
 his person. " Have at thee. Hector." " Very well," 
 says Hector, " why don't you begin ? " " Well, no, on 
 the whole, I won't," replies Achilles ; "my arms are out 
 of practice, luckily for you ; you may go unscathed this 
 time." No sooner has Hector gone, than Achilles slips 
 off to collect a party of his Myrmidons whom he engages 
 to waylay Hector and overcome him by force of num- 
 bers. They find him resting with his helmet off, and 
 they butcher him ; Achilles crying, " Here he is, that's 
 your man ! " Then a retreat is sounded on both sides, 
 as if for fear that some one would get hurt. The whole 
 play breaks up abruptly, .g.nd nothing is finished. It 
 seems like a tale ^told by an idiot, " full of sound and 
 fury, signifying nothing." The sincere lover, Troilus, 
 meeting Pandarus somewhere amid these punchinello 
 combats, invokes ignominy and shame upon the pander's 
 life, and invites posterity to use his name as a designa- 
 tion of a vile profession. Thus we return upon the 
 
Troilus and Cressida {Ajax). loi 
 
 track of the play's motive, and feel competent to enjoy, 
 without hindrance, the humor and irony which saturate 
 the scenes. Let us notice the character of Ajax, which 
 is scratched all over by Shakspeare's pen. 
 
 From Malvolio and Dogberry to the famous Ajax 
 may seem a stride fit only for such a blundering giant 
 to contemplate ; but the apparent distance is due to the 
 quantity of Ajax, and not to any distinction in his qual- 
 ity. Malvolio's conceit is Turveydropian and runs to 
 deportment. Even when he grows flighty with the 
 fancy of being Olivia's husband, he still meditates what 
 his great air must be. " I will be point-de-vice the very 
 man : to have the humor of state, and after a demure 
 travel of regard, to ask for my kinsman, Toby. I 
 extend my hand to him thus, quenching my familiair 
 smile with an austere regard of control." Standing thus 
 posed, if he should undertake to bow, Toby might 
 believe he "saw creases come into the whites of his 
 eyes." 
 
 Dogberry's consequence affects inconsequential 
 phrases, and his days on earth are a series of non- 
 sequiturs. Ajax has quite as good an opinion of himself 
 as both these worthies, yet he says he knows not what 
 pride is. " Why should a man be proud \ How doth 
 pride grow ? I do hate a proud man as I hate the 
 engendering of toads." " Yet he loves himself," says 
 Nestor. Ulysses and Nestor avail themselves of his 
 monstrous sense of superiority to flatter him into fight- 
 ing Hector in the place of Achilles. This is to pique 
 Achilles and break up his lethargy. Ajax is " a man 
 
I02 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 into whom Nature hath so crowded humors, that his 
 valor is crushed into folly." He sulks in his tent 
 because he feels as valorous as Achilles, and must 
 therefore sport the Achillean moods. He despises the 
 strategy of Ulysses, calls it closet-war, because his own 
 forte is nothing but giving and taking knocks, and his 
 want of thought feels superior to all thinking. You 
 have to behave very gingerly with such a person ; if 
 your deference once turns its back, the offence is mortal, 
 and you may make your will. And these people are 
 outrageously touchy ; before you have time to make all 
 snug, their conceit has assumed a vortical movement 
 threatening to suck up into its spout every thing in the 
 way. Fire , shots at it if you please, but they will not 
 make it tumble. Your only tact is to tack and give it a 
 wide berth. So we see that when Ajax fails to attract 
 any notice he becomes abusive and violent ; and he is 
 constantly trying to get somebody to concede that he is 
 a man of as pretty parts as any other Greek. Achilles, 
 forsooth ! Who set him up to feel so big, and a better 
 man than I ">. " If I go to him, with my armed fist I'll 
 pash him o'er the face." " Oh, no, you shall not go." 
 " An a' be proud with me, I'll pheeze his pride." Of 
 course, for of all our pretexts for hating each other there 
 is none so apt as our mutual conceits. We can pardon 
 villainy sooner, for that only affronts an abstract con- 
 science. But a man's conceit is the particular cherished 
 bunion for another man's foot to inadvertently outrage. 
 A straight blow in the chest, hit out from the shoulder, 
 is a signal to measure your strength with another man. 
 
Troilus and Cressida {Ajax). 103 
 
 But to measure your weakness with him makes you 
 wince. How adroitly Ulysses " rubs the vein " of Ajax's 
 pride ! As soon as the first ripple of Ulysses's blarney 
 reaches his feet, he begins to float like a bladder <£ rap- 
 ture, and goes bobbing enormously into the net they 
 have spread for him. 
 
 When the plot begins to affect him, Thersites observes 
 that " he goes up and down the field asking for himself." 
 As Douglas Jerrold would say : " He stalks as though' Co- 
 lossus had quitted Rhodes to head a company." " He must 
 fight singly to-morrow with Hector, and is so propheti- 
 cally proud of an heroical cudgelling, that he raves in 
 saying nothing." Then he describes him as a veritable 
 Malvolio in armor. Is he really in Olivia's garden, with 
 Sir Toby and the rest on the watch 1 " Why, he stalks 
 up and down like a peacock ; a stride, and a stand ; 
 ruminates like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but 
 her brain to set down her reckoning ; bites his lip with 
 a politic regard,* as who should say, 'There were wit in 
 this head, an't would out.' The man's undone for ever ; 
 for if Hector break not his neck in the combat, he'll 
 break't himself in vain-glory. He knows not me. I 
 said, ' Good morrow, Ajax ; ' and he replies, ' Thanks, 
 Agamemnon.' What think you of this man that takes 
 me for the general ? He's grown a very land-fish, lan- 
 
 * A dear trace of Shakspeare. Malvolio says, " A demure travel of 
 regard," when he imagines the state-humor he will put on; and when he 
 will send for Toby he expects to quench his familiar smile " with an, 
 austere regard of control." The "Twelfth Night" was first acted in 
 February, 1602. 
 
I04 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare^ , 
 
 •guageless, a monster. A plague of opinion ! a man may 
 wear it on both sides, like a leather jerkin." 
 
 Thersites does not allude to opinions which may be 
 turned as easily as a j acket, but to the opinionative temper ; 
 nothing turns us so neatly inside out as our good opinion 
 of ourselves.. Shakspeare uses the word "opinion" occa- 
 sionally in this sense ; as in i Henry IV. iii. i, where 
 Worcester criticises Hotspur's disposition : — 
 
 " Defect of manners, want of government, 
 Pride, haughtiness, opinion, and disdain." 
 
 So, whether in armor, in a swallow-tail, or in a sur- 
 plice, our peacock vein expands around the world. 
 
 Then Thersites proposes to imitate the austere con- 
 ceit of Ajax : " Let Patroclus make his demands to me, 
 you shall see the pageant of Ajax." This is done, and 
 the freezing brevity of Thersites is exactly like Malvolio's 
 in the height of his fantasy, when Sir Toby and the rest 
 offer to converse with him. 
 
 BOTTpM. 
 
 When Malvolio is trying to break up the midnight 
 revel, the mischievous Maria fleers at him with, " Go 
 shake your ears." That is a performance for which 
 Malvolio is still too distant from his congener. But 
 self-sufficiency succeeds in preserving that structure in 
 Bottom, who is so deep and rich with harmless vanity 
 that he sprouts into the auricular appendages, and he 
 shakes them in the most amiable, frisky way through 
 
Rottom. 105 
 
 t 
 
 the Dream of a Midsummer Night. But there is 
 nothing sour about Bottom ; he has none of the quaUfy 
 which Margaret Fuller was the first to call " aloofness." 
 He is hale-fellow with all his mates who appreciate the 
 small gifts which belong to him, and which he good- 
 naturedly strives to render serviceable. Though he is 
 a better fellow tlian Malvolio, he has all that precisian's 
 ambition ; for as the steward could be Olivia's husband 
 as well as any other man, — forsooth, why not t — so 
 Bottom thinks he can play all the parts, rises to their 
 glittering baijt, and would appropriate the whole inter- 
 lude. He is one of those self-made men who occasion- 
 ally discredit their own bringing up and help us to 
 recover our respect for a liberal education. "Like the 
 man of whom Sydney Smith said that he was ready 
 at any momant to undertake the command pf the 
 Channel Fleet or run a factory, they have elbowed 
 their way into a; conviction that they can fill all 
 the offices from constable to President in a style to 
 astonish men of disciplined intelligence. And they 
 frequently succeed in doing that. Men who unfortu- 
 nately enjoyed early advantages, and whose lives have 
 perhaps been a protracted training in the virtue as 
 well as wit which lifts state-craft above gambling, have 
 the proper kind of admiration for these chevaliers of 
 industry. 
 
 But a highly successful deficiency of education does 
 not make Bottom arrogant. As Athenian dicast, fore- 
 man of an English Jury, republican officer under investi- 
 gation, his suavity would be unimpeachable. He is 
 
io6 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 good-tempered, and the first tap of flattery cracks his 
 whole pretension-j so that the crafty Quince manages 
 to cast him for Pyramus, who was just such, another 
 sweet-faced and destructive lady's man. 
 
 Dogberry's malapropisms are inflations made by his 
 vanity to float him into an appearance of sagacity, don- 
 keys' hides blown up to take him across the stream of 
 intercourse. But Bottom miscalls his words from sheer 
 rusticity, and not from any effort to borrow the language of 
 his superiors. The word " alleviate " which he has some- 
 times heard has been dribbling from brajn-cell to cell, 
 and so struggles unconsciously into " aggravate " at last. 
 He uses genteel words which have stayed out of town so 
 long as to be countrified ; he has not picked them up, 
 but they have blown into his mind and lodged there, like 
 mallow-seeds. So we see that he is in most senses a 
 born natural, proprietor by birth of the crest which at 
 last-he wears. But he is not all fool, for when he wakes 
 out of his exposition of sleep and says he has had a 
 dream, we notice that he is reluctant to .expound it. He 
 begins, " Methought I was," — but a feeling of self-re- 
 spect interrupts him ; he tries it again, to say if he can 
 that he had been wearing asses' ears, but his lips refuse 
 that indignity and he gives it up, much to Shakspeare's 
 credit. 
 
 A student of Shakspe'are often finds himself wander- 
 ing waterless and foodless in the sage-brush of aesthetic 
 criticism. Heraud, in his book entitled " Shakspeare, 
 his Inner Life," suggests that when Bottom " transmog- 
 rified " the text, " The eye of man hath not seen," &c., so 
 
Bottom. wy 
 
 that the new gospel according to Bottom ran thus, 
 " The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath 
 not seen, man's hand is no't able to taste," &c., Shaks- 
 peare intended to imply that the changing and translat- 
 ing of Bottom shadowed forth the manner in which we 
 shall be transformed in the future life ; "but to have 
 done this directly would have been undramatic and 
 otherwise objectionable." This affronts and takes ad- 
 vantage of Bottom's want of intelligence, who might 
 well caution the critic : " JVTonsieur Cobweb ! good Mon- 
 sieur, get your weapons in your hand, and kill me a 
 red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle ; and, 
 good Monsieur, bring me the honey-bag. And, good 
 Monsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not: I 
 would be loath to have you overflown with a honey- 
 bag." But this surfeiting freshet of the modern revival 
 spreads all over Shakspeare's meadows of daisies and 
 forget-me-nots. 
 
 Heraud's notion spoils the humor of Bottom's snarl 
 of words which represents perplexity so profound that 
 it must recur to Scripture for relief in expression. 
 
 I must notice here another pragmatic after-thought, 
 although it has no connection with the character of 
 Bottom. Heraud is so bent upon forcing a conscious 
 Protestant motive upon Shakspeare that he spoils one 
 of the best passages in the play of Cymbeline. When 
 Imogen, in consequence of a note brought to her from 
 her husband, Leonatus Posthumus, goes to Milford 
 Haven with Pisanio, whom the husband has commis- 
 sioned to kill her for supposed adultery, s-he first learns 
 
iq.8 WU, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 the object of the journey: this converts the beguiling 
 note into something false, unlike her husband, inexplica- 
 ble. She has thrust it into her bosom : there it lies. 
 " Come, here's my heart," as she invites Pisanio to per- 
 form his duty. Then her hand comes into contact with 
 the paper which she had put there. It shall not stand 
 in the way : " The scriptures of the loyal Leonatus all 
 turned to heresy 1 " That is, she has put the note in a 
 place where it might divert the stroke which the spirit 
 of the note intended : — 
 
 "Away, away, 
 Corrupters of my faith ! You shall no more 
 Be stomachers to my heart ! " 
 
 The constant and innocent wife disdains even the slight 
 chance that a bit of paper might turn or deaden the 
 stroke despatched by a loyal husband. She is as loyal 
 as he,, but he knows it not : so it is better to die at once 
 than live on thus misconceived. For what is life with- 
 out the confidence of a loyal husband ? The canon 
 against self-slaughter is so divinely engraven in the 
 conscience that it suspends her own hand. Therefore, 
 since life is no longer of value and interest to her, let 
 Pisanio iinish. This is the drift of Imogen's speech. 
 
 But Heraud imputes to Shakspeare a theological 
 motive in the use of the word "scriptures," as if he 
 meant to include, by secondary allusion, the Bible ; and 
 'he adds that Shakspeare, although " a critical reader of 
 the Bible and an extreme Protestant," felt the danger 
 of letting the Reformation lapse, by the abuse of reason, 
 into heresies, • the only preventive of which was the 
 
Bottom. 1 09 
 
 Catholic principle of authority watching over the use of 
 the Bible. 
 
 The German commentators of Shakspeare have done 
 some magnificent work, open occasionally to tjie English 
 charge of over-subtlety. But no German can yet vie 
 with this English straining to impute to the text an 
 unnatural and ponderous motive. Bottom said that he 
 could " see a voice," and went to the chink to spy if he 
 could hear his Thisbe's face. But these modern obser- 
 vations are far more preternatural. 
 
 All the scenes of the " Midsummer Night's Dream," 
 which depend upon the desire of the Athenian mechan- 
 icals to amuse their prince, are merely comical when 
 taken alone. The characters thus constructed, by pass- 
 ing into the serious portions of the play, infect it with 
 the element of humor ; for the simple earnestness of 
 all their clownishness fraternizes in no offensive way 
 with the more poetical moods of high society, and we 
 feel the charm that equalizes all mankind. The pomp 
 of a court is concentrated at a fustian play that is 
 poorly propertied with bush, lantern, and a fellow 
 daubed with lime. Simpleness and duty tender this 
 , contrast, and it comes not amiss. Their crude parody 
 of the fate of Pyramus and Thisbe, done in perfect 
 good faith, is a claim that humble love may have its 
 fortunes too, as well as that of the proud and over-con- 
 scious dames who have been roaming through the woods, 
 sick with fancies. What a delightful raillery it is ! Yes, 
 we take the point : " The best in this kind are but shad- 
 ows ; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend 
 them." 
 
no Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 It is also a suggestion of the subtlest humor when Ti- 
 tania summons her fairies to wait upon Bottom ; for the 
 fact is that the soul's airy and nimble fancies are con- 
 stantly detailed to serve the donkeyism of this world. 
 " Be kind and courteous to this gentleman." Divine gifts 
 stick musk-roses in his sleek, smooth head. The world 
 is a peg that keeps all spiritual being tethered. John 
 Watt agonizes to teach this vis inertice to drag itself by 
 the car-load ; Palissy starves for twenty years to enamel 
 its platter ; Franklin charms its house against thunder ; 
 Raphael contributes hales to glorify its ignorance of 
 divinity ; all the poets gather for its beguilement, hop in 
 its walk and gambol before it, scratch its head, bring 
 honey-bags, and light its farthing dip at glow-worms' 
 eyes. Bottom's want of insight is circled round by 
 fulness of insight, his clumsiness by dexterity. In mat- 
 ter of eating, he really prefers provender : " good hay, 
 sweet hay, hath no fellow." But how shrewdly Bottom 
 manages this holding of genius to his service ! He knows 
 how to send it to be oriented with the blossoms and the 
 sweets, giving it the characteristic counsel not to fret 
 itself too much in the action. 
 
 You see there is nothing sour and cynical about Bot- 
 tom. His daily peck of oats, with plenty of munching- 
 time, travels to the black cell where the drop of gall 
 gets secreted into the ink of starving thinkers, and sings 
 content to it on oaten straw. Bottom, full-ballasted, 
 haltered to a brown-stone-fronted crib, with digestion 
 always waiting upon appetite, tosses a tester to Shak- 
 speare, who might, if the tradition be true, have held his 
 
FALSTAFF: 
 
 HIS COMPANIONS; AMERICANISMS. 
 
k. 
 
 FALSTAFF. 
 
 nPHE political interest of the reigns of Henry IV. 
 and V. is divided by the huge bulk of Falstaff, 
 who lightly buffets the tide and emerges with invincible 
 gayety as often as the tragedy closes around him. His 
 wake draws after it a number of disreputable or silly fel- 
 lows, whom his audacious humor alone prevails upon the 
 tragedy to tolerate. The job of turning them out would 
 include the dismissal of the unbounded man in whom 
 they move and have their being ; and the gravity of the 
 political situation is engrossed enough to hold its own 
 ground against them, to prevent a freshet of comedy from 
 washing off its state. They seem to have been the traits 
 of Falstaff which were left over in the making up of his 
 personality ; and, this attaining at length to such a cir- 
 cumference that no more matter could be comprised, the 
 surplus revolved as satellites. There is Bardolph who says 
 that Sir John is '' out of all compass, out of all reason- 
 able compass ; " but he himself is the inflammation which 
 all the monstrous quantity of sack could not suffuse Sir 
 John with, who burns by proxy in his nose. He is the red 
 mark for Falstaff' s raillery, but liquor and lodgings keep 
 him companionable, so that, when at last " the fuel is gone 
 that maintained that fire," he has a tear or two, not yet 
 evaporated, to help the obsequies of his master. There 
 is Pistol, a great haunter of play-houses, where he has 
 
122 Wi/, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 picked up phrases of bombast, such as swarmed in the 
 bad tragedies of the period ; when the sack has reached 
 his head it sets them all afloat, to rufHe the company : 
 
 " Shall packhorses, 
 And hoUow-pamper'd jades of Asia, 
 Which cannot go but thirty miles a day, 
 Compare with Caesars, and with Cannibals, 
 And Trojan Greeks ? nay, rather damn them with 
 King Cerberus ; and let the welkin roar." 
 
 Pistol's love for alliteration puts a c for an h in the 
 third line, and turns the Carthaginian into a Carib. 
 
 Falstaff is cowardly from policy, and reasons himself 
 into the belief that honor is a paltry motive for the risk 
 of sustaining knocks. What was left over of this pusil- 
 lanimity appears unadulterated in Pistol, who snatches 
 up his sword, calls upon death to rock him asleep and 
 abridge his doleful days ; but he is a tame cheater, 
 " you may stroke him as gently as a puppy greyhound." 
 If a hen turns back her feathers he is off, to disap- 
 pear from history with his mouth full of the Welshman's 
 leek. There is Mistress Quickly who caters for Falstaff's 
 vices, endures his swindling till almost all her goods 
 have gone to the pawnbroker's, and then admires to 
 be cajoled back into more lending, dismisses the suit 
 which she brought with such strenuous and voluble 
 feebleness, and hopes he will come to supper. She 
 tells a story as any Yankee Cousin Sally would, dwelling 
 upon insignificant accessories and recurring to them to 
 give the memory a fresh start, till the narrative becomes 
 nothing but mnemonics. " It was no longer ago than 
 Wednesday last, — Neighbor Quickly, says he, — Mas- 
 
Falstaff. 123 
 
 ter Dumb, our minister, was by then, — Neighbor 
 Quickly, says he, receive those that are civil ; for, saith 
 he, you are in an ill-name ; — now, he said so, I can 
 tell whereupon." 
 
 It is plain that the Down-East style of narrative emi- 
 grated with Popham, and effected the settlement which 
 he failed to do. A trivial mind is a haunt for petty 
 details, where they are fondled and fed, so that they be- 
 come too familiar, and keep tripping up the story-teller ; 
 who vainly tries to strike a direct path, and for want of 
 point arrives nowhere. 
 
 " Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, 
 sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a 
 sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Whitsun-week, when the 
 Prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing- 
 man of Windsor : thou didst swear to me then, as I was 
 washing thy wound, to marry me, and make me my lady 
 thy wife. Canst thou deny it ? Did not goodwife Keech, 
 the butcher's wife, come in then, and call me gossip 
 Quickly .'' coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar ; tell- 
 ing us she had a good dish of prawns, whereby thou 
 didst desire to eat some, whereby I told thee they were 
 ill for a green wound." But she, too, is won into a kind 
 of fidelity by the charms of Sir John's manner ; and, 
 when he falls sick unto his death, she cannot for- 
 get some genial hours. " Ah, poor heart ! he is so 
 shaked of a burning quotidian tertian, that it is most 
 lamentable to behold. Sweet men, come to him." 
 
 The brain of Justice Shallow smoulders with the brag 
 of his youth ; and, when he delightedly blows it up, he 
 
124 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 has the impression that he was redoubtable for perform- 
 ance. The visit of such a solid, whole-souled profligate 
 as Falstaff is a rare chance for him to prate of the wild- 
 ness of his youth, "and every third word a lie." " Lord, 
 lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying ! " 
 He makes paralytic efforts to fraternize with Falstaff's 
 wickedness, poking sly innuendoes at his immeasurable 
 superiority in that line. Falstaff remembers that he 
 " came ever in the rear-ward of the fashion." He has 
 .settled down into comfortable living ; and his leanness is 
 smug with all the details of it, — the pigeons, and the rus- 
 sets, the mutton, " and any pretty little tiny kickshaws." 
 " Oh, the mad days that I have spent ! and to see 
 how many of my old acquaintance are dead. — How a 
 good yoke of bullocks .' Is old Double dead } — How a 
 score of ewes now .^ " So earnest with his petty thrift 
 that death is but a formality. The feeble ripple of his 
 talk over a bed of commonplaces would soon tire out the 
 livelier Sir John, if he did not see^ioney to borrow and 
 good fat quarters to cultivate. So this man, " made after 
 supper of a cheese-paring," has the flimsiest of. butterfly- 
 nets thrown over him, and is caught without damage. 
 
 There is Httle to say of Poins, save that he helps the 
 Prince to play the fool with the time, while the spirits of 
 the wise mock them. Now and then he reminds the 
 Prince that his father is lying sick while he trifles so. 
 Then the Prince gives us glimpses of the temper which 
 separates at last from Falstaff, when the crown pushes 
 Ijie fool's cap from his head. " Thou think'st me as far in 
 the'devil's book as thou and Falstaff, for obduracy and 
 
Falstaff. 1 25 
 
 persistency : let the end try the man." He is strong 
 enough to enact this episode of folly without letting it 
 tamper with the kingship which is the proper quality of 
 his soul. And Falstaff seems to have transferred to him 
 a portion of his own wit, as if on purpose to be soundly 
 railed at and stimulated to the top of his bent. The 
 only advantage which the Prince has over his fat knight 
 is a commodity of truth-telling ; but Falstaff cheapens 
 it by the genius of his escapes. 
 
 Corporal Nym will cut a purse and drain a can with- 
 out winking, as the rest will ; but he admires to have a 
 pretence of soldierly bluntness, as when he says, " I dare 
 not fight ; but I will wink, and hold out mine iron." He 
 is a man of few words, and has something of Cromwell's 
 enigmatic way of speaking to cover his deliberate inten- 
 tion of doing nothing to end his days. " I cannot tell ; 
 things must be as they may. There must be conclu- 
 sions. Well, I cannot tell, . . . and that's the humor of 
 it." A silent man, but not of the fighting type which 
 helped Queen Elizabeth's adventurers to sack the towns 
 of the Spanish main and defray the expense of her coun- 
 tenance. His rapier is out before his bluster, because 
 the latter has rusted in its sheath. He has a quarrel 
 with Pistol about eight shillings, — not the first, by many 
 a tavern reckoning ; and he has an unaffected desire to 
 run him through the body and let out his vaporing. 
 
 " Pay ! " cries Pistol : I have not sunk so low as that. 
 " Base is the slave that pays." Out come the swords, 
 and you expect " flashing fire will follow." But Pistol 
 has calculated that Bardolph, who is present, will allow 
 
126 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 no fighting ; so he brandishes up to the very verge of 
 blows, to make Bardolph say, " He that strikes the 
 first stroke, I'll run him up to the hilts, as I am a sol- 
 dier." Pistol manages to have this threat arrive on the 
 ground just in time to apprehend the parties for a 
 breach of the peace. Nym shoves his sword back 
 with the feigned grumble of a disappointed man: 
 " I will cut thy throat, one time or other, in fair terms ; 
 that is the humor of it," — Mrs. Quickly having plighted 
 her troth to him, and Pistol having married her in spite 
 of it 
 
 A man with a great flow of animal spirits is some- 
 times, especially if he is liable, to sudden bursts of this 
 exuberance, mistaken to be under the influence of wine. 
 Falstaff's average rate of mirth is so high that wine re- 
 fuses to contest it. The blood of his vein can afford to be 
 handicapped against the blood of the grape. The mon- 
 strous quantities of sack sink through the porosities of 
 his rotundity, and mildly percolate a subterranean world ; 
 so that his abstinence in the article of bread is a very 
 nice instinct that balancing bulk enough exists already. 
 
 Falstaff, by every ordinary law of human nature, should 
 be inebriated. His exemption is a kind of atheism. But 
 he prefers to have his own vices overdone in the persons 
 of his companions, all of whom seem to have anticipated 
 the sanitary argument in favor of the use of liquor that 
 an American suggested : " If water will rot a cedar- 
 post, what will it do to the human stomach ! " Now 
 Pistol's brain, owing to the rarefaction produced by t 
 rhetoric, is an exhausted receiver into which all fluids 
 
Falsiaff. 1 2 7 
 
 rush and qualify him for inebriety. It is sometimes so 
 excessive that the fuller Falstaff has to beat him out of 
 the room. But one can never say that Pistol is dis- 
 guised in liquor ; for when he is the drunkest his exalted 
 style is most conspicuous. He calls for more sack ; then, 
 unbuckling his sword, he draws out the Bilbao blade be- 
 fore laying it down, and manglingly spouts off the Span- 
 ish motto that is upon it, — 
 
 " Se fortuna me tormentat it sperare me contenta ; " 
 
 calls the weapon his sweetheart, and, when Bardolph 
 tries to turn him out, snatches it up, and seems to 
 sharpen it upon horrid threats : 
 
 " What ! shall we have incision ? shall we imbrue ? 
 Why then, let grievous, ghastly, gaping wounds 
 Untwine the sisters three ! Come, Atropos, I say! " 
 
 Fate comes in the person of Falstaff, who declares, " An 
 a' do nothing but speak nothing, a' shall be nothing 
 here ; " for Falstaff has the virtue of a keen appreciation 
 of the .appositeness of words. 
 
 You have your choice to regard these people as 
 whimsical disenchantments of Falstaff by a satirical 
 demon, or to consider Falstaff as an aggregate of these 
 people invested with the illusion of wit. Pistol is the 
 raw article of poltroonery done in fustian instead of a 
 gayly slashed doublet. Bardolph is the capaciousness 
 for sherry without the capacity to make it apprehensive 
 and forgetive : it goes to his head, but, finding no brain 
 there, is provoked to the nose, where it lights a caution- 
 ary signal. Nym is the brag stripped of resources, 
 shivering in prosiness. Dame Quickly is the easy vir- 
 
128 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 tue in reduced circumstances, dropped out of its fash- 
 ionable quarter to keep a bar and be a procuress, — all 
 the fine phrases pawned clear down to vulgar gossip. 
 
 Thus brawling, boasting, tippling, thieving, silly tricks 
 and waggery come strolling behind Falstaff into the 
 company of kings and nobles, no chamberlain to an- 
 nounce them, no crossed halberts to repel. 
 
 The second part of " King Henry IV." opens nobly with 
 the conflicting rumors which travel from the lost field of 
 Shrewsbury, where the flame of rebellion was quenched, 
 towards the castle of the Earl of Northumberland, who 
 hopes to hear that it has prospered. There is nothing 
 insignificant in the characters who have ranged them- 
 selves on either side of the great question of their times. 
 Rebellion may be a blunder, but it levies on manhood a 
 tax as heavy as loyalty. So we are admitted to the 
 society of great politicians, full of an idea, who blossom 
 on the top of their epoch whence the sap that feeds 
 them is derived. They venture life and fortune upon 
 the moment when their tendency opens and exhales. 
 They are impersonations of that quality in the soil of 
 their country which has grown up to them, to claim and 
 put them forth to triumph or suffer with the ideas which 
 are involved. They risk hereditary honor and estate, 
 send their eldest sons and heirs of titles into the field 
 which two political tendencies select to strive for pre- 
 cedence. The whole spirit of the scene is noble and 
 unselfish : lands, luxuries, and quiet are forsworn ; and 
 a preference, be it only of passion, be it a humor _ of the 
 times mixed of equal parts of honor and vanity, be it 
 
Falsi off. 129 
 
 alloyed with disappointments and galled ambitions, is 
 yet virile enough to stake its own aggrandizement 
 rather than let inglorious caution strangle the chance of 
 supremacy. The style is elevated and sincere. Rumors 
 of a conflicting nature, making post-horses of the wind, 
 come like cross-tides to dash the feelings to and fro; 
 now lifting them upon a wave of promise, now letting 
 them drop into the trough of despondency. The deci- 
 sive drift is soon announced, and the father of Hotspur 
 has to accept the tidings of his son's fate. In vain the 
 sanguine-tempered Lord Bardolph discredits and tries 
 to explain away the news. But his spirit rises to the 
 tide-mark of the disaster : 
 
 " We all, that are engaged to this loss. 
 Knew that we ventur'd on such dangerous seas. 
 That, if we wrought our life, 'twas ten to one : 
 And yet we ventur'd, for the gain propos'd 
 Chok'd the respect of likely peril fear'd ; 
 And, since we are o'erset, venture again. 
 Come; we will all put forth, — body, and goods." 
 
 It seems as if these high resolves ought to fill the hori- 
 zon and extrude every thing irrelevant. But not so : 
 something quite as capacious, but fertilized by not one 
 dot of grandeur, comes vaporing on the scene. 
 
 Down to a period quite late in the history of litera- 
 ture, the .French were unable to understand how we 
 could accept the confusion of moods in Shakspeare's 
 tragedies, and their abrupt introduction into the nobler 
 sentiment of the scene, as comedy races after gravity to 
 overtake and strangle it, and the gravity quite as un- 
 expectedly recurs. This appeared to their aesthetic crit- 
 
130 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 icism as an absurd and grotesque wrong done to the 
 unity of impression which a play ought to make by 
 developing and depending upon a single idea, and to 
 this end admitting only the feelings which belong to it* 
 Without this, no tragedy can have its effect of gravity, 
 but rather, to use Falstaff's quip in parrying the Chief 
 Justice, its effect of gravy, — to leave in the palate a 
 taste of a mixture of sauce and drippings. But Shak- 
 speare runs the coulter of unity deeper than the obvious 
 idea which the plot of his tragedy develops ; for it 
 passes at once through soils of diverse elements, driven 
 by a sure but vigorous instinct to turn them all up to 
 the fructifying light. Instead of the unity of a single 
 strand, he weaves all the threads of human nature into 
 the cable which holds our hearts at anchor on his 
 spring-tide. 
 
 This rotund earth that goes wallowing eastward is an 
 aboriginal Falstaff, and carries all sorts of humors in its 
 unbounded stomach. It puts off night and slips into 
 the garments of the day not more easily than its vein 
 changes from hour to hour, as the tone of its daylight 
 does, rolling along the whole gamut from gloom to gar- 
 
 * But since Voltaire's time, and notably within the present century, 
 the French mind has amply atoned for previous misconceptions, and 
 its tribute to the genius of Shakspeare is rivalling England itself. Ger- 
 many was earlier in this field ; but, if France means to annex Shak- 
 speare, she can afford to let Alsace and Lorraine go. The younger 
 Hugo's study of Hamlet ; the volumes of Alfred Meziferes, of Philar^te 
 Chasles ; the studies of Guizot ; the admirable article upon Cleopatra 
 by Henri Blaze de Bury, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, June 15, :872 ; 
 another, later, in the same review, upon " Medical Psychology in the 
 Dramas of Shakspeare," &c., — show a noble disposition and a thorough 
 sympathy. 
 
Falstaff. 1 3 1 
 
 ishness. The mood must be very solemn and absorbing 
 to be exempt from the sudden interruption of jollities 
 which may be even ribald in their bearing. If nothing 
 is too cheap for Nature it is precious enough for Shak- 
 speare. Whatever a Creator has permitted to take lodg- 
 ings in the human breast is not turned out by him ; for 
 he lodges there too, claiming the shelter of the same 
 impartial roof beneath which we have to learn to toler- 
 ate each other. So the first impression which his plays 
 make is this complaisance towards the most discrepant 
 moods, just as life has it on the stage of the world ; for 
 he is not so concerned to develop a single motive by 
 nice and consecutive gradations as he is to show the 
 world's swift alternations of all the motives and tempers 
 of mankind. The French complained that the result is 
 like a road built of smooth pavement, corduroy, rutted 
 mud, jarring heaps of cobble-stones ; and that the feel- 
 ing is transferred without warning along all the dis- 
 crepancies of this route, to be jolted and racked till 
 self-preservation becomes more absorbing than the land- 
 scape. But the structure of the Teutonic mind is well 
 adapted to this journey by its robust manifoldness, sired 
 by a primitive vigor of Nature, that propagates her tur- 
 bulence, her jest and earnest, her nobleness and inde- 
 coruni, the infinite variety which age cannot dim nor 
 custom stale, the instincts of her animals and the intui- 
 tions of her men. Above all, the races which appreci- 
 ate the deeper unity of Shakspeare, and bear without 
 discontent its fusion of elements which seem to have 
 only harsh antipathies, have drawn from Nature the 
 
132 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 mental quality of humor, and that is a flux which no 
 substances can withstand. Nothing is uncouth or re- 
 cluse enough to stay outside of its reconcilement. 
 
 So while Northumberland's castle is agitated by the 
 news of disaster, and the slain Percy is expected home 
 by the halls he never shall inherit, Falstaff appears, with 
 that diminutive page who was Christian when the Prince 
 gave him, "and look, if the fat villain have not trans- 
 formed him ape." We were pitying Northumberland, 
 as in grief and anger he threw away his crutch, tore the 
 " sickly quoif " from the head which princes aimed to 
 hit, and called for iron to encase his forehead. What 
 does this fat man here, jeering at his page for being 
 smaller than he, and asking what Master Dumbleton 
 said about the satin for his short cloak and slops } It 
 must have been a mistake of some precipitate scene- 
 shifter. No : there be peers of the realm and peerless 
 blackguards ; one is in revolt against his king, the other 
 against all decency. But the play has a history which 
 includes them both in its epoch, as Nature includes 
 them ; and for her it is but a step from Warkworth, 
 where the old nobleman is weeping, to London, where 
 this tavern-haunter defies fortune with his shifty gibes, 
 and laments nothing but the consumption of hi^ purse. 
 What stimulus can there be for us in his gilded rascality 
 so soon after Harry Percy's spur is cold ">. Shall we put 
 up with him >. We shall have no trouble : Falstaff un- 
 dertakes to vindicate Nature for setting him in this 
 company, and he does it with such resource and admira- 
 ble cheerfulness that earldoms seem to have been cre- 
 ated to be his foil. 
 
Falstaff. 133 
 
 His character belongs to comedy because its vices 
 are of the breed which never contract alliances with 
 great passions. The big frame is so completely inocu- 
 lated with laughter that his faults cannot take the con- 
 tagion of tragedy. His wit is an implenient which his 
 comic nature uses for purposes of self-defence. He is 
 essentially comic before he opens his mouth : for he 
 is built to brag, and is too fat to be brave ; his fleshly 
 propensities are latent with situations for covering him 
 with ridicule ; his talent for lying has the peril that it 
 may be used too often. Yet, on the whole, he is of 
 Swift's opinion, that a lie is too good a thing to be 
 wasted. But let the Prince and Poins plot a little, and 
 the Wives of Windsor beguile his loose vein, and the 
 scene quickly runs to his discomfiture. The mountain- 
 ous knave is caught in a trap which might have been 
 baited for a mouse, so small that we wonder how his wit 
 could have blundered into it. But, being in, his wit 
 behaves so delightfully like virtue that we think he has 
 escaped. " Nothing confutes me but eyes," he says. 
 Only seeing is disbelieving such an embodied strata- 
 gem. " By the Lord, I knew ye ! " said he to the 
 Prince, after the midnight scare the latter gave him, 
 and goes nigh to convince us that he ran away to avoid 
 killing the heir-apparent So large a man does not 
 often wriggle so unctuously through such a narrow 
 place. We should have to make his bail bear some cor- 
 respondence to his bulk, if he lived where swindling was 
 a signal for juries to disagree. 
 
 There is a scene where the Prince comes out of his 
 
134 ^^^' Humor, and Hhakspeare. 
 
 hiding-place after Falstaff has been abusing him to Doll 
 Tear-street * "Didst thou hear me ? " " Yes ; and you 
 knew me, as you did when you ran away by Gad's Hill : 
 you knew I was at your back, and spoke it on purpose 
 to try my patience." How slyly Falstaff avoids putting 
 his foot into this trap ; and the Prince underestimated 
 his resources. " No, no, no, not so ; I did not know thou 
 wast within hearing. No abuse, Hal, on my honor ; no 
 abuse, Ned. I dispraised him before the wicked, that the 
 wicked might not fall in love with him ; and thy father 
 is to give me thanks for it." His mind is supple and 
 adaptive, yet all the more comical because the talent is 
 futile for concealment, and only earns for him a laugh 
 which shakes the arm suspended to chastise. 
 
 He extemporizes deafness, and does not hear the Chief 
 Justice calling to him. When the attendant comes and 
 plucks him by the elbow to bid him note the Justice, 
 he gains time by inventing the pretext that a beggar 
 has him by the sleeve. " What ! a young knave, and 
 beg ! " But this resource was by no means invented 
 by Falstaff. This world is an old hand at it ; and, when- 
 ever the truth of one age summons tTie error of the 
 past to arrest and judgment, the interested parties start 
 a dodge, and stimulate it with voluble pretence of ear- 
 nestness, hoping to make it serve their day, at least. 
 When Galileo discovered the satellites of Jupiter, people 
 expected the sky to fall. Something must be done to 
 prop it up. So they said that, even if the satellites could 
 
 * Obviously the proper reading. Prince Henry says, "This Doll 
 Tear-street should be some road." First noticed by Coleridge. 
 
Falstaff. 135 
 
 be seen through the telescope, the inference that they 
 were really in the sky was not a fair one ; more likely 
 they were something in the telescope itself. 
 
 When Scheiner, the Jesuit, discovered solar spots in 
 161 1, he had to communicate the discovery to his Su- 
 perior. The latter was an Aristotelian. He would not 
 even risk a peep through Scheiner's telescope. He said : 
 " I have read Aristotle's writings from end to end many 
 times, and I have, nowhere found in them any thing sim- 
 ilar to what you mention. Go, therefore, my son, and 
 endeavor to tranquillize yourself. Be convinced that 
 these appearances, which you take for spots, are the 
 faults of your glasses or of your eyes ; if they are not, 
 as I in part suspect, the result of a disordered imagina- 
 tion." Texts and pretexts are still employed to prevent 
 Theology and Science from coming to close quarters. 
 Science impends and threatens with the majestic facts 
 of the divine order. Theology, driven from pretext to 
 pretext, cries at last, " What ! upon compulsion } No : 
 if reasons were as plenty as blackberries," nothing on 
 compulsion ! When Falstaff is hurried, he ~ says, " Do 
 you think me a swallow, an arrow, or a bullet ? have I, 
 in my poor and old motion, the expedition of thought .■• " 
 That is the trouble with the ponderous old past ; so it 
 turns Falstaff's deaf ear to thought, and imitates his 
 strategy. 
 
 He is a good mimic of the style of bluntness and 
 honesty. Pretending to have killed Percy, he cries, 
 " There is Percy : if your father will do me any honor, 
 so ; if not, let him kill the next Percy himself." " Why," 
 
136 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 says the Prince, " Percy I killed myself." " Didst thou ? 
 Lord, lord, how is this world given to lying ! If I may 
 be believed, so ; if not, let them that should reward 
 valor bear the sin upon their own heads." You can 
 hear the same tone to-day wherever shifty impudence 
 pilfers the inventions and exploits of others to furnish 
 with them a house and reputation. This style is comic 
 because it is assumed to cover deceit, but is too scant a 
 pattern after all ; and the cloven foot is amusingly uncon- 
 scious of being in full sight. 
 
 Sir John does not intend to be readily put down. In 
 the matter of arrest -at Dame Quickly's suit for debt, 
 how airily he gives the Chief Justice tap for tap, and 
 urges that the officers are hindering him from going on 
 the king's errand ! He is hard to get fairly cooped in a 
 corner ; most invaluable counsel to defend a ring, big 
 enough to break through the most carefully woven in- 
 dictment. When you think you have him neatly at bay, 
 the bulky culprit floats over your head in a twinkling of 
 resource and is gone : it is done so cleverly that you 
 have not the heart to pursue him farther, or, if you do, 
 it is only for the sake of enjoying an encore of this 
 trapeze-shifting of his wit. 
 
 It is comic when his tone of protestation that he will 
 discharge his debt to Dame Quickly succeeds in taking 
 in her who has been so often deceived before. But one 
 weakness is always too strong for another ; so he is 
 constantly betrayed into expense by her, and that is at 
 once her vice and its reward. " I owe her money ; and 
 whether she be damned for that I know not." 
 
Falstaff. 137 
 
 It is also comic that his vanity prevents him from 
 suspecting himself of cowardice and evasion of duty ; 
 so that he indulges the most inflated self-appreciation, 
 and no misadventure is sharp enough to prick it. " Em- 
 bowelled ! 'Sblood, 'twas time to counterfeit." And his 
 fright inspires him with the adage dear ever since to 
 shirkers, " The better part of valor is discretion ; " and 
 it has a sensible purport which blinds him to his own 
 disgrace. " There is not a dangerous action," complains 
 he to the Chief Justice, " but I am thrust upon it. Well, 
 I cannot last ever. But it was always yet the trick 
 of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to 
 make it too common. I would to God, my name were 
 not so terrible to the enemy as it is." Does he really 
 think his bullying style is a perpetual action of bravery, 
 or is he delighting to be ironical upon himself .■' 
 
 Now Falstaff's mind has many a talent which liber- 
 ates it from the grossness of his body. His wit shows 
 a nimble foot of fancy. His common-sense is an acute 
 ally of his cowardice. The imagination which betrays 
 him into the largeness of his lying goes into the felicity 
 of his wit : both are on an ample scale. He rallies Bar- 
 dolph for his complexion, and overwhelms his ragged 
 company with comparisons, just as his men in buckram 
 grow in number. When his fancy seizes an opportunity 
 he cannot let it go, but unconsciously shifts it into all 
 possible lights, and exhausts invention to make the point 
 emphatic. How many imaginative people there are who 
 unconsciously lie in the same way with their exagger- 
 ated raptures at a landscape, their wholesale contribu- 
 
138 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 tions to an occurrence ! The flavor of stories improves 
 by going to sea upon their bounding fancies. Only give 
 them time enough and a free swing among their friends, 
 and an event of the chimney-corner will become be- 
 witched into a Cinderella at the ball. These people 
 really believe with the imagination instead of with the 
 understanding ; and, if conscience is comparatively weak, 
 common-sefhse is not a sufficient curb to their career. 
 
 Falstaff's ragged soldiers have hearts "no bigger than 
 pins' heads." " A mad fellow met me on the way, and told 
 me that I had unloaded all the gibbets, and pressed the 
 dead bodies. There's but a shirt and a half in all my 
 company ; and the half-shirt is two napkins tacked to- 
 gether." This fanciful destitution reminds us of an 
 ' American improvement upon it, attributed to a man the 
 smallest hole in whose shirt was that for the head, so 
 ragged that it had to be washed by the dozen. 
 
 All of Falstaff's speeches are one crescendo of phra- 
 ses ; each seems to breed the next one, and they swarm 
 in his fancy like gnats in a broad sun. Bardolph's red 
 features are very tropics to yield spicy railing to him. 
 The ginger of it is hot in the mouth. He never sees 
 that face but he thinks upon hell-fire, and Dives in his 
 purple, burning. He imagines he saw it running up 
 Gad's Hill in the pitchy dark, and took it for an ignis- 
 fatuus. It has saved him a good deal of money in links 
 and torches. 
 
 We come upon the same vein in the " Comedy of Er- 
 rors,"-where Dromio says, " Marry, sir, she's the kitchen- 
 wench, and all grease ; and I know not what use to put 
 
Falstaff. 1 39 
 
 her to, but to make a lamp of her, and run from her by 
 her own light. I warrant her rags, and the tallow in 
 them, will burn a Poland winter : if she lives till dooms- 
 day, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world." 
 
 Falstaff might have said of himself that " wherever 
 his shadow falls it leaves a grease-spot." 
 
 Shakspeare evidently relished these unctuous con- 
 ceits, for in the " Merry Wives of Windsor," when Fal- 
 staff's wooing in the forest is suddenly interrupted, he 
 says, " I think the devil will not have me damned, lest 
 the oil that is in me should set hell on fire ; he would 
 never else cross me thus." 
 
 There is sometimes in Shakspeare an exaggeration 
 of this kind which has a Titanic grasp to it that throttles 
 laughter just as it meditates escape. The grotesque and 
 humorous element is stunned by a fierce and passionate 
 feeling, such as Dante might have steeped one of the cir- 
 cles of his Inferno in. A specimen of this may be 
 found in " Henry VIII.," where Lord Abergavenny, talk- 
 ing about Wolsey's low-born greatness, says : 
 
 " But I can see his pride 
 Peep through each part of him : whence has he that ? 
 If not from hell, the devil is a niggard ; 
 Or has given all before, and he begins 
 A new hell in himself." 
 
 All the followers of Falstaff catch his habit of im- 
 proving Bardolph's redness. The Page could not distin- 
 guish his face through a red lattice, but, at last spying 
 his eyes, thought he had made two holes in a new red 
 petticoat to peep through. And, after Falstaff is dead, a 
 
140 Wii, Humor, and ^hakspeare. 
 
 boy recalls his fanciful notion that a flea ' sticking upon 
 Bardolph's nose was a black soul burning in hell. A 
 specimen worthy of Falstaff is found in an ancient 
 Greek epigram which celebrates a nose so long that 
 the owner could never hear himself sneeze. But Fal- 
 staff's imagination is so prolific that we feel as if a 
 great many of these comments on the text of Bardolph's 
 nose had not come down to us. 
 
 But the talent itself has descended ; and Falstaff may 
 be regarded as the mighty progenitor of the American 
 knack at exaggerating, into which imagination must 
 enter either to make it witty or simply ludicrous. We 
 can match the felicities of Falstaff from every State of 
 the Union. Indeed, we are of opinion that emigration, 
 which has impaired the physical fulness of the Anglo- 
 Saxon man, has not depleted the vein of his humor : our 
 romancing talent is as vast as the country which nour- 
 ishes it by all enterprises and ambitions. We have not 
 fallen away vilely ; we do not bate, do not dwindle. Mr. 
 Dickens declares that even the national habit of expec- 
 toration is on the scale of the country's streams. He 
 is a genuine descendant of Falstaff, and he must have 
 always lived at Gad's Hill, where, at some time or other, 
 he helped the Prince and Poins to rob the fat knight, 
 and outwitted all his accomplices by taking imagination 
 for his best share of the booty. So we are not much 
 surprised to hear him describe a high wind with the 
 amplitude of Falstaff's girth : " The air was for some 
 hours darkened with a shower of black hats, which are 
 supposed to have bgen blown off the heads of unwary 
 
Falstaff. 141 
 
 passengers in remote parts of the town, and have been 
 -industriously picked up by the fishermen." When Grip, 
 his raven, falls sick, towards eleven o'clock he was so 
 much worse that " it was found necessary to muffle the 
 stable-knocker." 
 
 But we have made improvements in this style of fic- 
 tion, and almost every newspaper might furnish forth a 
 play. We are told of grass in Colorado that is so short 
 you must lather it before you can mow. We hear of a 
 man who moves about so lazily that when he works in 
 his garden the shade of his hat kills the plants. An- 
 other man wakes up in .the morning, after a day spent in 
 hunting strawberries, with only one eye, the other being 
 engaged in holding the cheek which had marched over 
 it during the night. It was a case of dog-wood poison. 
 The relatives did not find his mouth until near noon, 
 when it was discovered just back of his left ear, enjoy- 
 ing the shade. There was a man who stood on his head 
 under a pile-driver to have a pair of tight boots driven 
 on. He found himself shortly after in China, perfectly 
 naked and without a cent in his pocket. 
 
 There is a man in the West who is so bow-legged that 
 his pantaloons have to be cut out with a circular saw. 
 Apropos of this, a pair of pantaloons which was distrib- 
 uted to one of the sufferers by the forest fires, a few 
 years ago, was found to be ridiculously small. The 
 man's wife wanted to know if there lived and breathed 
 a man who had legs no bigger : if there did, he ought 
 to be taken up for vagrancy as having no visible means 
 of support. It was discussed whether to use them for 
 
142 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 gun-cases, or to keep the tongs in. This reminds us 
 that Falstaff said you might have thrust Shallow, " and 
 all his apparel, into an eel-skin ; the case of a treble 
 hautboy was a mansion for him, a court." 
 
 In the same style of minifying a thing by magnifying 
 its minuteness, he says, " If I were sawed into quanti- 
 ties, I should make four dozen of such bearded hermit's 
 staves as Master Shallow." Then he delights himself 
 with fancying how he will riot over the slim subject and 
 endow it with every imaginable chance for provoking 
 laughter : " I will devise matter enough out of this 
 Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter, the 
 wearing out of six fashions. Oh, it is much that a he 
 with a slight oath, and a jest with a sad brow, will do 
 with a fellow that never had the ache in his shoulders ! 
 Oh, you shall see him laugh, till his face be like a wet 
 cloak ill laid up ! " 
 
 A lie with an oath not always slight, "and a jest with 
 a sad brow," is a prophecy of America which Mr. Sum- 
 ner might have incorporated among his other classic 
 Voices. 
 
 The country also supplies specimens of a wild-cat 
 oratory in whose bombast Shakspeare might have rec- 
 ognized an element of his own imagination. I am not 
 certain whether the following is genuine, or possesses 
 only the truth of verisimilitude : " Build a worm-fence 
 around the winter's supply of summer weather; skim 
 the clouds from the sky with a teaspoon ; catch a 
 thunder-cloud in a bladder; break a hurricane to har- 
 ness ; ground-sluice an earthquake ; lasso an avalanche ; 
 
Falstaff. 143 
 
 pin a napkin on the crater of an active volcano ; but, 
 Mr. Chairman, never expect to see me false to my 
 principles." . On the whole, the stress laid upon the 
 " principles " is quite in favor of its American genu- 
 ineness. 
 
 The quality of imagination which creates the humor- 
 ousness of an exaggeration can also be fine enough to 
 stop it before a laugh is raised. In that case it may be 
 charged with the subtlety of wit. But, if the poetic feel- 
 ing predominates, the sense of wit is merged in that, and 
 requires an after-thought to recall it ; as when Shak- 
 speare describes how the populace rushed to see Cleo- 
 patra coming up the river Cydnus, leaving Antony in 
 the market-place : he 
 
 "Did sit alone. 
 Whistling to the air j which, but for vacancy. 
 Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, 
 And made a gap in Nature." 
 
 "But for vacancy" is a phrase that piques suggestion. 
 It may be that the air dreads leaving a vacuum if it goes 
 to see her. It may be that Antony's whistling vaguely 
 detains it. Or it may be that the air is in a mood so 
 vacuous that it cannot entertain any preference for any 
 thing, even for Cleopatra. And the possibility that the 
 atmosphere could all leave and go elsewhere- is an ex- 
 travagance at once large and subtle. But, just as the 
 smile impends, the ample poetry of the whole passage 
 checks it. 
 
 A passage from " The English Traveller " of Thomas 
 Heywood, published in 1633, is thoroughly American in 
 
144 Wit, Humor, ana ona/ispeare. 
 
 its style of describing a drinking scene, and the ship- 
 wreck of the company by drink. The topers suddenly 
 conceive that the room is a vessel laboring at sea: 
 one climbs the bed-post and reports turbulent weather, 
 whereat all go to work to lighten the vessel by throwing 
 the furniture into the street. One man gets into the 
 bass-viol for a cock-boat. When the constable enters 
 he is taken for Neptune, and his posse for Tritons. In 
 short, the American gift for exaggeration was started 
 under an Elizabethan sun. 
 
 Sometimes the breadth of imagination produces the 
 effect of wit by bringing two incongruous ideas under 
 one statement. During a political procession, a remark- 
 ably dirty man, stopping in front of a small boy who was 
 sitting on a fence, expected to have some fun with him. 
 " Well, boy, how much do you weigh.?" "As much as 
 you would if you were washed." Such a free-soiler as 
 that can be matched with nothing short of a line of 
 Shakspeare : 
 
 " Lord of thy presence, and no land beside.^' 
 
 The American would be quite capable of composing 
 narratives in the Eastern vein, as in that series of fables 
 called the Hitopadesa, which attributed to animals the 
 passions and motives of men. The famous mediaeval 
 poem of " Reynard the Fox " presumes the same intel- 
 ligence. Here is a specimen, whose slight flavor of 
 coarseness is lost and forgotten in the genius of its cli- 
 max. Just as a traveller was writing his name on the 
 register of a Leavenworth hotel, a certain insect took its 
 
Falstaff. 145 
 
 way across the page, taying down the pen, the man 
 remarked, "I've been bled by St. Joe fleas, bitten by 
 Kansas City spiders, and interviewed by Fort Scott 
 gray-backs ; but hang me if I was ever in a place where 
 these critters looked over the register to take the num- 
 ber of your room." 
 
 A Western editor, culminating in his description of a 
 tornado, said, "In short, it was a wind that just sat up 
 on its hind legs and howled." 
 
 Some of the Texan cows have been lately described 
 as so thin that it takes two men to see one of them. 
 The men stand back to back, so that one says, " Here 
 she comes ! " and the other cries, " There she goes ! " 
 Thus between them both the cow is seen. 
 
 All these American instances are conceived in the 
 pure Shakspearian blending of the understanding and 
 the imagination. But one more of them, perhaps the 
 most artistically perfect of all, must suffice. A coach- 
 man, driving up some mountains in Vermont, was asked 
 by an outside passenger if they were as steep on the 
 other side also. " Steep ! Chain lightnin' couldn't go 
 down 'em witheout the breechin' on ! " 
 
 We have seen in what the comedy of Falstaff'^ char- 
 acter consists. Its humor lies in the tolerance which 
 his inexhaustible wile procures for his vices. We are 
 all the time reconciled to his behavior, though in any- 
 body else it would be outrageous, — " most tolerable 
 and not to be borne." But such a Noachian deluge of 
 animal spirits would carry away a bulkier man than he. 
 It is love of fun more than villainous inclination which 
 
146 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 leads him into many of his scrapes. When he is moral- 
 izing upon his course of life, and half-earnestly com- 
 plaining that the Prince had been the ruin of him, the 
 latter has only to interrupt this strain with, "Where 
 shall we take a purse to-morrow. Jack ? " when he drowns 
 his megrims in the j oiliest laugh, and draws his belt an- 
 other hole for an adventure. The midnight frolic, with 
 sack and supper afterwards, attracts him quite as much 
 as the prospect of checking the consumption of his 
 purse. He is quite conscious of a mercurial disposition 
 that keeps the door ajar for every temptation. There 
 are intervals of self-upbraiding — or are they seedy fore- 
 noons before the sherris sets in to wet his coast.' — 
 when he wishes the Prince were not such a rascally, fas- 
 cinating companion. And we ought to put to Falstaff's 
 credit the fact that to be hail-fellow with a prince has 
 unsettled many a sterner virtue ; and he says flatly to 
 him that he wishes they knew " where a commodity of 
 good names were to be bought." 
 
 When the old lord of the council rated him, he was 
 too proud to seem to attend, but quite aware that he 
 had been blown up in a justifiable way. His love of 
 mirth is a better ally than the Prince, far more sumptu- 
 ous and capable ; for it helps us to condone his follies, 
 and so qualifies him to be an object of Humor. 
 
 And reflection pursues the train which Humor starts. 
 We are charmed into admitting that there must un- 
 doubtedly be many good native qualities, still unob- 
 scured, lingering in vicious haunts and courses ; and 
 Humor has no subhmer mission than to make us toler- 
 
Falstaff. 147 
 
 ate that thought. She seizes the coy hand of Philan- 
 thropy, and beguiles it " with nod and beck and wreathed 
 smile " towards its rugged purpose. 
 
 There are some places which we only venture to visit 
 in Shakspeare's company. We have been too well bred 
 to seek our vices in such quarters, but not so well 
 bred as to accommodate no vice. We cannot air our 
 intolerance before the Searcher of hearts ; perhaps we 
 are grateful to him foi> that gift of Shakspeare which 
 bids the tavern and the brothel be tolerable to our con- 
 science by the touches of nature which make the whole 
 world kin. Our respect for mankind is increased if the 
 men who disgrace it can still be made to appear insepa- 
 rable members of it. When we see the common air 
 pressing in to ventilate the most infected places, we 
 admire this brave, elastic quality, and rejoice to feel it 
 fill our lungs. But what policeman or sanitary commis- 
 sioner can we trust in a tour to inspect the cesspools of 
 the world.' Only such an one who has the counter- 
 infection of his own impartial light and air. We fol- 
 low in the wake of his geniality, forget to hold dis- 
 infectants to our nose, find the air still medicinal, 
 since it has retained qualities belonging to ourselves ; 
 and we step from ward to ward with a reconciling 
 smile. 
 
 We do not quite relish the rebuff which Prince Hal, 
 after his accession, administers to Sir John. Our good- 
 nature is wrenched by the abrupt transition from roys- 
 tering fellowship and complicity with all of Falstaff' s 
 infirmities. We acknowledge that the King cannot go 
 
148 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 on countenancing the courses which, as the Prince, he 
 found so amusing ; but we are sorry that he could not 
 let down the tutor and the feeder of his riots more 
 softly. His downfall carries Justice Shallow with him, 
 to be sure, of whom he had borrowed a thousand 
 pounds, fortunately for our sense of poetic justice: and 
 there is some recompense for Falstaff's mortification in 
 hearing Shallow whimper for his money ; for he lent to 
 the knight and to his golden prospects, not to the prodi- 
 gal Sir John. And it is good to see the indomitable wit 
 outflank even this disaster with the advice to Shallow 
 not to grieve ; he will be sent for in private ; the King 
 must appear thus sternly to the world. 
 
 The King has cut the cord of their mutual revelling 
 at one stroke. Down tumbles Falstaff, and it breaks 
 his heart ; as Dame Quickly says, " The King has killed 
 his heart." Nym says bluntly, "The King hath run 
 bad humors on the knight, that's the even of it ; " which 
 Pistol adorns thus : " Nym, thou hast spoke the right ; 
 his heart is fracted and corroborate." There was a 
 human heart, then, involved in his enjoyment of the 
 Prince's condescension. Yes, and no reasons of state 
 can quite reconcile us to the sudden frost which fell 
 upon its flower, flaunting as it was and rank of smell ; 
 since both of the men interchanged it, and wore it on 
 their breast as token of copartnership in folly. Shak- 
 speare himself cannot convince me that there was king- 
 liness in thus snapping up the partner of his revels and 
 sending him to the Fleet. It would have broken the 
 heart of any less bulky comrade. Perhaps it is the nat- 
 
Faktaff. 149 
 
 ure of kings and titled men to be suddenly forgetful of 
 the humanness which generally makes a man ineligible 
 to office ; so that the kingship was a charter from Provi- 
 dence to give Falstaff his first sneap of retribution. 
 None the less do we sympathize with him rather than 
 with the King, because we are all prodigals out of 
 office. 
 
 But notice the art of Shakspeare in this, that, if the 
 King had broken with his old pal in such a way as not 
 to hurt our feelings, we should not have been so well 
 prepared to sympathize with the manner of his death. 
 When that hour comes, we feel the full effect of Humor 
 in the unwillingness to let our knowledge of his gross- 
 ness and knavery break the legacy of his geniality. It 
 sets in again, to take him off, "at the turning o' the 
 tide." Dame Quickly, Bardolph, and the rest, cannot 
 prevent reminiscences of his wit from seasoning their 
 tears. Her story of his end, with its delicious inconse- 
 quence, cannot blunt the thrust we feel when he plays 
 with flowers and babbles of green fields ; and it suddenly 
 occurs to us that the battered old sinner had once hs- 
 tened to the birds in the hedge-rows, and climbed sum- 
 mer trees to explore their nests. This bloated breather 
 of tavern fumes had expanded a boy's glad lungs on the 
 English hillsides, and shared the landscape's innocence. 
 It just saves us from damning him, and we shift else- 
 where the responsibility- of doing that, though we are 
 not prepared to go as far as Bardolph, who says he 
 would like to be with him " wheresome'er he is, either in 
 heaven or in hell." " Nay, sure, he's not in hell : he's 
 
150 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom." 
 Dame Quickly, " clear thy crystals," for at least he was 
 none the worse for being witty ; and Bardolph may 
 some day find himself in company that is at once bad 
 and criminally stupid. 
 
HAMLET. 
 
HAMLET. 
 
 TN this play it is common to look for an exhibition 
 - of humor in the scene of the Grave-diggers ; but 
 those personages are only amusing as a couple of 
 common men whose profession seems to have buried 
 both their feelings and their wits. One of them is ac- 
 cidentally witty when he asks, " Is she to be buried in 
 Christian burial, that wilfully seeks her own salvation ? " 
 But he and his companion do not make good the prom- 
 ise of this opening text: they turn out to be tedious 
 louts who bring ale-house chatter to a church-yard and 
 only rise to the dignity of being ghastly, although we 
 know that the grave they dig is for Ophelia. We do 
 not properly recollect and feel this till they disappear 
 and the music of the funeral train is heard. Their 
 shovelfuls of dirt and bones make coffin-like caesuras in 
 their singing, but the songs are too trivial to be trolled 
 over a pot ; scarce are they a setting to an empty skull. 
 They rattle so dryly you wish they might be dumped in 
 and covered up. The sexton-riddles have little more juice 
 in them, for they are the kind that boozy gossips clink 
 out of their cans, and not the gay pursuivants of wis- 
 dom. We begin to reflect that such triviality does not 
 become interesting because it is well hit off, and that in 
 tone respect it is not well hit off, since it recurs too tire- 
 somely ; and we are on the point of voting the whole 
 
154 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 grave-digging business to be a mouldy impertinence, 
 when there flashes upon us the better thought that 
 Shakspeare was here deepening pathos upon the fair 
 maid who must be the tenant of this grave so fatuously 
 dug. To this complexion must we all come at last, and' 
 beauty cannot repel the loutish hands which take their 
 fee for shovelling dirt upon its clay. 
 
 There is so little comic business in this scene that 
 actors are at their wits' end to make it hold the audi- 
 ence. They used to wear a dozen or two waistcoats, 
 and, pretending to be hot and blown, strip them off, one 
 after another ; wearing all the time an air as if each 
 one was the last, until you doubted whether, instead of 
 a man inside, there were any thing more than a yard- 
 stick to measure vest-patterns with. So Thackeray 
 takes George IV. to pieces by peeling away all the well- 
 known articles of his apparel, — " under-waistcoats, more 
 under-waistcoats, and then nothing." But the waist- 
 coated business always secured the laugh which the 
 clowns' insipid discussion could not raise. 
 
 This scene, as it stands in the Folio of 1623, had no 
 existence in the earlier Hamlets, and was plainly an 
 after-thought of Shakspeare as he moulded the play to 
 its perfection. 
 
 In the vignettes of mediaeval manuscripts and the 
 frescoes of chapels, there were ghastly drawings of 
 the Dance of Death, or the so-called Danse Macabre* 
 
 * One interpretation o£ this word gives it a Jewish origin, and makes 
 of it the Dance of the Maccabees, established to commemorate the mar- 
 tyrdom of the seven brothers of the Maccabees, together with Eleazar 
 
Hamlet. 155 
 
 It was a retort of religious art upon the fleshly man by 
 the spectacle of his own skeleton waltzing down "the 
 primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." But blood 
 runs counter to the violent bad taste of these unfleshed 
 processions ; they contrast with the warm truth of Na- 
 ture too sharply for the work of redemption. Shak- 
 speare was anxious not to point the old moral, but to 
 enhance our pity : he needed this contrast with Ophelia. 
 Perhaps he was recalling those paintings when he set 
 the grave-digger dancing stark naked in his verses. " O 
 rpse of May, dear maid ! " He purposely lifts a hand- 
 ful of mould to our faces, that we may smell the rose 
 above it. 
 
 " A pickaxe, and a spade, a spade, 
 
 For , and a shrouding sheet : 
 
 Oh, a pit of clay for to be made 
 For such a guest is meet." 
 
 Taine mentions with surprise that the English au- 
 diences still laugh when Hamlet traces the noble dust 
 of Alexander to its final bier in a bung-hole. The 
 Frenchman does not relish the broadness of the incon- 
 gruity between the great commander and a cask of ale. 
 But the laugh comes rightly in with the boldness of 
 fancy which suddenly brings together such opposite 
 things. The effect is like that of witnessing any ludi- 
 
 and their mother, who went out to death in succession. This was imi- 
 tated by a solemn dance of priests and civil authorities, who went out 
 in turn and disappeared as if to death. Afterwards, in mediaeval times, 
 the dance was emphasized by the introduction of the figure of Death as 
 the leader of it. Another interpretation derives the word from the 
 Arabic Makbar, pi. Makabir, place of interment. 
 
156 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 crous circumstance which takes no account of dignity. 
 Extremes meet with a shock, as if a great orator's chair 
 should be whipped away just as he sits down from his 
 climax. Hamlet does not think it too curious to con- 
 sider how indifferent Nature is to all our pomp : she is 
 not impressed, and serves it with not one inopportune 
 mischance the less. 
 
 After Hamlet's interviews with the ghost, the " antic 
 disposition " which tints his behavior is ironical ; his 
 remarks keenly cut down to where our laugh lies, but 
 scarcely let its blood. The mood does not throw open 
 the great valves of the heart as the sun-burst of Humor 
 does. We enjoy seeing with what superior insight he 
 baffles all the spies who cannot play upon a pipe, yet 
 expect to play upon him. This gives to the scene the 
 flavor of comedy. In the churchyard we taste the sub- 
 acid of cynicism, so that Yorick's skull is quite emptied 
 of its humor, and is only an ill-savored text to a chop- 
 fallen discourse upon mortality. 
 
 But Hamlet radiates a gleam of geniality at a moment 
 when you are least expecting it, as events transpire 
 which ought to kill, you would think, the very heart of 
 such a feeling : it is, indeed, expiring, — caught as it 
 falls in the arms of the coming Irony. Let us enter, 
 with Horatio and Marcellus, the scene upon the plat- 
 form after Hamlet's dread interview with a murdered 
 father. No wonder that his wonted evenness of manner 
 is shaken ; and we hear him writing truisms in his tab- 
 let, in a flighty style, as, for instance, that a man may 
 smile and be a villain. But let us also make a note of 
 
J, Hamlet. 1 5 7 
 
 that, as he did : it will interpret to us the tone of his 
 subsequent demeanor which everybody thought was 
 madness. In the mean time we are upon this spectre- 
 haunted platform, seeking with his friends to discover 
 what news the ghost brought. Hamlet trifles with 
 them to put off their curiosity ; but the scene soon 
 rises to the solemnity of taking an oath, and one that 
 is extorted by the experience of a vision which comes 
 to so few that mankind has only heard of such things. 
 But just as the human voices are about to pledge them- 
 selves to a secrecy which they must feel all their lives, 
 and shudder in feeling, to be reflected upon them from 
 the glare and publicity of purgatorial fires, a voice 
 comes, building this terrific chord of a nether world 
 up to their purpose, that it may uAalterably stand. 
 "Swear!" The deep craves it of them ; it has joined the 
 company uninvited, but they feel convinced that it is a 
 comrade fated to go with them to their graves. " Swear ! " 
 it reiterates : no change of place can remove them from 
 this importunity. The centre of an unatoned murder 
 is beneath every spot to which they shift their feet. 
 
 Now the two friends of Hamlet possess nerves which 
 have been hitherto tuned only by the vibrations of the 
 sunshine or of the moon's unhaunted silver. Even if 
 they had known of the murder, their interest in it would 
 not have been personal enough to lend fortitude to help 
 them tolerate this unseen visitor, the murdered man 
 himself ! What an encounter ! Whose wits of earthly 
 stoutness can sustain it t They feel, and so do we, that 
 the awe is accumulating into a wave that may o'ertopple 
 every sense. 
 
158 Wi(, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Here mark how superior Shakspeare would have us 
 estimate Hamlet to be, with a capacity of self-possession 
 and a readiness to recur to it. He perceives their 
 friendship to be sorely tried, and on the point of crum- 
 bling ; and as men muster to repair a dyke, so his 
 resource is prompt, drawn from a soul that can make 
 even a ghost companionable, and no match at all for any 
 bantering mood of his. Tush, my friends ! it is no 
 ghost at all : 'tis a " fellow in the cellarage." There's 
 a human phrase for which this wild weather provides a 
 rift ; it touches the awe with a strange smile that re- 
 lieves the men to complete their pact before all the 
 blood of friendship curdles. And we who listen .are 
 also kept within our human kind. 
 
 " You hear this fellow in the cellarage .' " What a 
 sentence to puncture the abyss of the supernatural ! 
 
 Then Hamlet shifts his standing-place for the sake of 
 his friends ; but the unavenged murder is underneath 
 there awaiting them. So the Prince lightly rallies it for 
 its knack of burrowing : he nicknames it an old mole, 
 and the fancy is pleasant ; for it occurs to him that he 
 must work under ground for the future ; so he calls the 
 mole " a worthy pioneer." " Once more remove, good 
 friends." Then, as he instructs them with minute pre- 
 cautions against ever seeming too wise about the sub- 
 terranean disposition he may choose to follow, the awful 
 revenge cries up again to them. But their nerves, by 
 this time wonted to the strangeness, no longer need the 
 relief of his ironical braving ; so Hamlet dismisses that 
 vein, and lets a murdered father claim the scene to close 
 
Hamlet. 159 
 
 it with its proper color subdued to the solemn reassur- 
 ance, " Rest, rest, perturbed spirit ! " Then our own 
 spirits venture forth into calmness and hush of the 
 breaking day. 
 
 Not the faintest streak of Humor appears in this 
 tragedy to reconcile us with the drift of it. Polonius 
 belongs to comedy, because he is an old counsellor who 
 was once valuable, whose wits have grown seedy on pur- 
 pose to delight us with his notion that he fathoms and 
 circumvents the Prince. When a man's feeling of im- 
 portance has outlived his value, so that his common- 
 sense trickles feebly over the lees of maxims, and his 
 policies are absurd attempts to appear as shrewd as 
 ever before persons who are in better preservation, he 
 belongs to the comic side of life. We cannot help smil- 
 ing at his most respectable recommendations ; for they 
 are like hats lingering in fashion, but destitute of nap. 
 He wears one of these, and goes about conceiting that 
 his head mounts a gloss. There is not enough of Polo- 
 nius left to tide him through this tragedy, unless it 
 might have been in dumb show : he must lurk behind 
 an arras to get himself mistaken for a king ; and, as he 
 does this after sending a spy into France to watch his 
 son's habits, we have not a tear to spare. And we only 
 think how delightfully bewildered he will be if his ghost 
 gets out of the body, escaping a politic convocation of 
 worms, in time to help receive the other ghost, and to 
 understand then, if any wit is left over in him, that his 
 king was murdered and Hamlet is harping on some- 
 thing besides his daughter. But his absurdity survives, 
 
i6o Wii, Humor, and Hhakspeare. 
 
 and is voiced by Hamlet in the scenes where the King 
 tries to discover what has become of the body. 
 
 The theories which undertake to explain the nature 
 of the " antic disposition " which Hamlet hinted that he 
 might assume do not satisfy me that the heart of that 
 mystery has been plucked out. But the key to it may 
 be read engrossed upon his tablets. The subsequent 
 behavior of Hamlet is the exact counterpart in Irony of 
 the conviction that was so suddenly thrust upon him, 
 and terribly emphasized by his father, that a man may 
 smile and be a villain. To this point let a few pages of 
 explanation be accorded. 
 
 In the first place, I notice that the behavior of Ham- 
 let, which has the reputation of being feigned, is a genu- 
 ine exercise of Irony, and consequently covers a feeling 
 and purpose that are directly opposite to its tone of 
 lightness ; but it results organically from Hamlet's new 
 experience, and does not require to be premeditated as 
 madness would be. We see his vigorous and subtle 
 mind set open by the revelations of the ghost ; but it is 
 too well hung to be slamming to and fro in gusts of real 
 madness, and its normal movement shuts out the need 
 of feigning. When his father first tells that he has 
 been murdered, we find that Hamlet thinks himself 
 quite capable of decision : there is no infirmity of pur- 
 pose in that early mood to sweep to his revenge " with 
 wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love." 
 What is it that converts this mood into an irresolute- 
 ness which contrives the whole suspense, and in fact 
 gives us the whole tragedy "i First, partly, that his 
 
Hamlet. 1 6 1 
 
 father tells Hamlet he was murdered by his own brother. 
 Then the question of revenge becomes more difficult to 
 settle, especially as it involves widowing his mother; 
 and it is noticeable that the father himself, who after- 
 wards deplored Hamlet's irresolution, had previously 
 made suggestions to him which hampered his action by 
 constraining him to feel how complicated the situation 
 was. The father's caution runs thus : — 
 
 " But, howsoever thou pursu'st this act, 
 Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive 
 Against thy mother aught : leave her to Heaven, 
 And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge. 
 To prick and sting." 
 
 This does not inhibit Hamlet from dealing retribution 
 on the uncle, but clogs a mind so sensitive with the 
 drawback of consideration for the wife : she is evidently 
 no accomplice or confidant of the murder ; that is clear 
 from the uniform respect, and even tenderness, which 
 ' the ghost craves for her. 
 
 But though Hamlet thinks that he is capable of 
 decision, he is so only when the case presented to his 
 meditation is so direct and plain that no chance for a 
 fencing-match of motives is involved. The conviction 
 which justifies his prophetic soul half disarms it. When 
 the uncle is at his prayers, Hamlet might " do it, pat ; " 
 but the opportunity is too favorable : it paralyzes a mind 
 of his consideration. He cannot bear to rush upon a 
 man's back whose face is bent towards an act that has 
 a savor of salvation in it. But when Polonius was con- 
 cealed behind the arras and cried out, Hamlet impul- 
 
1 62 Wii, Uumor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 sively utilized the moment of hatred of the supposed 
 eavesdropper ; but, finding he had killed the wrong man, 
 his swift action passes into that impetuous arraignment 
 of his mother which follows, and thus expends itself 
 upon the nearest object. He took Polonius for his bet- 
 ter, but his resolve is " sicklied o'er" by this mistake ; and 
 an almost blunted purpose proves seasonable armor for 
 the King. People of far less nice reflection than Ham- 
 let had would feel hampered by such an accident. It is 
 in the nature of all of us to find a passion grow cool 
 beneath the drift of an untoward cloud ; so that I can- 
 not conceive that Shakspeare meant to develop the 
 whole tragedy out of an over-scrupulosity of specula- 
 tion. The ghost himself, whose latest visitation is but 
 to whet Hamlet's revenge, again diverts him from that 
 point by bidding him turn and look where amazement 
 sits upon his mother: — 
 
 " Oh, step between her and her fighting soul ! 
 Speak to her, Hamlet." 
 
 And an arrowy current from a long accumulating heart 
 sweeps through the midnight hours. Then, by the light 
 of the succeeding day, we observe that Hamlet's mind 
 has recovered its strain of irony : it passes for the 
 flightiness that gets him despatched to England, where 
 all the people are as mad as he. But Hamlet's nerves, 
 though delicately spun, are spun of some toughness that 
 never snaps nor ravels. His pulse "doth temperately 
 keep time, and makes as healthful music " as any man's. 
 Throughout the play, a refined superiority is the key- 
 note of his character. The " heavy-headed revel " of 
 
Hamlet. 163 
 
 the Danes seems to him a custom " more honored in 
 the breach than the observance," though he is to the 
 manner born and has a head not easily overthrown. He 
 says to his fellow-students, "We'll teach you to drink 
 deep ere you depart." But he keeps himself aloof from 
 contracting a habit. The same speech contains traces 
 of the observation exercised by a soul that is sustained 
 by the sound pith of virtue. It often chances, he says, 
 that one vicious mole of nature is the fly in the oint- 
 ment of the apothecary, and undoes all the noble sub- 
 stance. His tendency to speculate upon suicide be- 
 longs to a mind in which conscience is so supreme and 
 strong that its ideal makes life scarcely tolerable. But 
 there is no feeble whimper in the tone, nor when his 
 friends are trying to dissuade him from following the 
 ghost ; he routs them and all our cowardice at once : 
 
 " Why, what should be the fear? 
 I do not set my life at a pin's fee ; 
 And, for my soul, what can it do to that, 
 Being a thing immortal as itself ? " 
 
 Yes, we — already the ghosts — are a match for any 
 ghost. Self-poised and self-sufficing, his ambition is to 
 occupy the kingdom of a mind. " O God ! I could be 
 bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infi- 
 nite space." And, in the midst of the torrent that 
 bursts from him to overwhelm his mother, there is that 
 smooth, still eddy, " Forgive me this my virtue," and all 
 the stars of his soul look down into it. 
 
 Shakspeare plainly meant us to infer that Hamlet had 
 inherited the traits of a noble father : for who but such 
 
164 Wii, Humor, and UShakspeare. 
 
 a son could describe with impetuous remembrance the 
 kingly qualities which had given birth to him ? In his 
 mind's eye, he could always see this father : — 
 
 " Look here, upon this picture, and on this : 
 See what a grace was seated on this brow ! 
 A combination and a £orm, indeed, 
 Where every god did seem to set his seal, 
 To give the world assurance of a man. 
 This was your husband." 
 
 He is that man's son, and not his mother's. 
 
 " Ha ! have you eyes ? " 
 
 What devil was it that made you seize upon this other 
 man in a game of blindfold 1 
 
 "A slave, that is not twentieth part the tithe 
 Of your precedent lord ; a vice of kings I 
 A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, 
 That from a shelf the precious diadem stole 
 And put it in his pocket." 
 
 Look there ! The dear hallucination of fatherhood ! 
 " What would you, gracious figure .'' " The ghost has 
 come to put this sketch of memory into italics ; as if 
 filial appreciation had projected it upon the midnight, in 
 the intensity of recalling his majestic soul. Only a son 
 who was in all respects worthy to be born of Nature's 
 nobleman could pay this debt of being nobly born, and 
 give Imagination's birth to such a sire. See there, he 
 is born ! the son is father and mother : inbred posterity 
 conceives its ancestor. 
 
 Thus I venture to suppose that, when Hamlet came 
 to his mother, Shakspeare had not deliberated that the 
 
Hamlet. 165 
 
 ghost would join the party. But his brain kindled with 
 the midnight passion, streamed over down into the pen, 
 and the ink exhaled under the heat of Hamlet's reminis- 
 cence into the vaporous outline, which always startles 
 us because it startled Shakspeare, — a sudden whiteness 
 running high along the edge of Hamlet's swelling heart. 
 The scene then shudders with deference to this unex- 
 pected presence, which only the son who conceived it 
 can observe. Afterward the verse seems to become 
 merely a coast to help the great wave fall back and 
 subside. 
 
 It is possible to have Hamlet played in a style so 
 greatly absorbed as to obliterate our knowledge that the 
 father's custom is to take his cue from the climax of his 
 son's speech and to appear. Then we reproduce the 
 thrill that Shakspeare felt when he sat alone with awe 
 and silence, and they suddenly drew him to their ghost. 
 
 I recur now to consider the nature of the oblique and 
 enigmatic style into which Hamlet has fallen. It is not 
 a deliberate effort to sustain the character of a mad- 
 man, because such a person as Hamlet could find no 
 motive in it : he could not need it to mask his desire to 
 avenge the ghost, for he is Prince, an inmate of the 
 palace, and supernaturally elected to be master of 
 the situation. He says he has "cause and will and 
 strength and means to do't." I conceive, then, that 
 his mind, driven from its ordinary gravity, and the chan- 
 nel of his favorite thoughts diverted, instinctively saves 
 itself by this sustained gesture of irony ; and it appears 
 to be madness only to those who do not know that he is 
 
1 66 IVii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 well informed of the event, and is struggling to set free 
 from it a purpose. And why should a man of such a 
 well-conditioned brain, a noticer of nice distinctions, 
 have selected for a simulation of madness a style 
 which, nicely estimated, is not mad ? He could not cal- 
 culate that everybody would interpret this difference 
 from his usual deportment into an unsettling of his 
 wits ; for the style shows unconsciousness and freedom 
 from premeditation. If he wished to feign distraction, 
 he would have taken care to mar the appositeness of his 
 ironical allusions, which are always in place and always 
 logical. And, if he was half unhinged without knowing 
 it, his speech would have betrayed the same inconse- 
 quence. Nowhere is he so abrupt, or delivers matter so 
 remote from an immediate application, that he seems to 
 us to wander, because we too have been admitted to the 
 confidences of the ghost, and share that advantage over 
 the other characters. 
 
 Since this essay was written, I have found, in the 
 highly suggestive " Shakspeare-Studien " of Otto Lud- 
 wig, the following remarks, which are closely related to 
 my own treatment of the subject, and provide some 
 additional reflections : — 
 
 "Hamlet's subjective tendency is so predominant that 
 we are surprised when he alleges no motive for assum- 
 ing madness ; nor is it elsewhere accounted for. It 
 would have served his purpose much better if he had 
 feigned a comfortable and contented, rather than an un- 
 settled, mind. And, on the whole, one cannot at any 
 point detect a reason why he chooses any active dis- 
 
Hamlet. 167 
 
 simulation. For he merely needed to remain undis- 
 covered. 
 
 " We never hear him once reflecting upon his inten- 
 tion, though he runs to reflection on all topics. Just 
 after the apparition, he merely remarks to his friends 
 that, if he should appear to them to do strange things, 
 they need not remark upon it so as to betray his object." 
 Ludwig here alludes to the lines, — 
 
 " As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet 
 To put an antic disposition on." 
 
 Hamlet tells them not to seem too wise about it. The 
 theory of premeditated madness rests upon this pas- 
 sage, and upon one other, which will be noticed. But 
 suppose that Shakspeare did at first entertain a purpose, 
 borrowed from the old chronicle, of disguising Hamlet 
 in some unusual vein, the psychological necessities of 
 his character decided what that vein must be, as they 
 also decided against the old chronicle in the matter of 
 introducing a ghost. And Hamlet's mental quality is 
 really shown by the vein into which it imperatively 
 runs. He was overmastered and completely occupied 
 by .this mood of indignation at all the villainous cants of 
 a smiling world. The temper grew so compactly be- 
 neath Shakspeare's pen that he could not interpolate 
 into it any amateur simulations. The poet would not, 
 if he could, have so diluted the terribly gathering sin- 
 cerity which left that epithet of " antic " beached high 
 up and disqualified for floating on its tide. 
 
 On Elsinore's platform, Hamlet felt that the sudden 
 
1 68 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 complication would put him into strange behavior ; he 
 did not know exactly what, but he perceived it coming 
 on. Such a man estimates himself more shrewdly than 
 the crowd imagines. He was aware of a mind that 
 over-refined and idealized, and of a disposition to avoid 
 too close realities. Any hint of nature or society suf- 
 ficed to sequester him in a monologue. But now he felt 
 some modification passing through him ; it is scarcely 
 yet articulate, but it is inevitable to a man of his qual- 
 ity. Hamlet may call his mood by whatever phrases 
 suit the different emergencies ; but, in the main, it is 
 the breaking-up of his mind's customary exercise into 
 ironical scorn at discovering the rottenness of Den- 
 mark. 
 
 The Greek word dqmida, whence our Irony is derived 
 with its special meaning, had not yet been modernly 
 grafted on the Saxon stem. Ben Jonson says: — 
 
 " Most Socratic lady ! 
 Or, if you will, ironick ! " 
 
 For the words irony, ironick, were at first used in Eng- 
 lish, and quite sparingly, to express the method of Soc- 
 rates in conducting an argument ; that is, by eliciting 
 from an opponent his own refutation by asking him mis- 
 leading questions. The words, in any sense, are not 
 found in Shakspeare. Lord Bacon, in one instance, 
 uses irony nearly in the modern sense ; and that is 
 Socratic only so far as a thing is said with an intent the 
 reverse of its ostensible meaning. 
 
 The other passage upon which the theory of premedi- 
 
Hamlet. 169 
 
 tated madness rests occurs in the great scene with his 
 mother, Act III. 4, during which she becomes convinced 
 that Hamlet is out of his senses by seeing him kill the 
 good Polonius, and hearing him rave as if he. saw a 
 spectre. She was the earliest of the critics and experts 
 who are profoundly convinced of his madness. At the 
 close of the scene, it occurs to him to avail himself of 
 her misapprehension to procure continued immunity 
 from any suspicion of design against the King. How 
 shall he do this, — how contrive to clinch her conviction 
 of his madness, and send her reeking with it to inform 
 the King.' His subtle intelligence does at this point 
 invent the only simulation of madness that the play 
 contains. He is just about to bid the Queen good- 
 night : " So, again, good-night." Then the device occurs 
 to him : " One word more, good lady ; " and the Queen, 
 turning, says, " What shall I do .'' " 
 
 " Not this, by no mean^, that I bid you do ; 
 Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed ; 
 Pinch wanton on your cheek ; call you his mouse ; 
 And let him, for a pair o£ reechy kisses, 
 Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers, 
 Make you to ravel all this matter out. 
 That I essentially am not in madness. 
 But mad in craft. 'Twere good you let him know." 
 
 This is the very craftiness of a madman, to try to con- 
 vince people that, if he ever seems to be insane, it is for 
 a sane motive. Hamlet reckons that the Queen is so 
 deeply imbued with the idea of his insanity as to in- 
 terpret this disclaimer of his into the strongest con- 
 firmation. Hamlet, moreover, not only seems to be 
 
lyo Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 accounting for symptoms of madness, but to be mak- 
 ing a confidant of his. mother; he begs her not to betray 
 the secret object of his strange behavior. This seems 
 to her to be the very quintessence of madness, to con- 
 fess to her that he is feigning it out of craft, and to 
 suppose that she would not apprise her husband, who 
 must be the special object of that craft and most in 
 danger from it. He must be indeed preposterously 
 mad ; so in parting she pretends to receive his con- 
 fidential disclosure : — 
 
 " Be thou assured, if words be made of breath. 
 And breath of life, I have no life to breathe 
 What thou hast said to me.'' 
 
 She may safely promise that, when she means to re- 
 pair to the King with quite a different version of Ham- 
 let's condition, the very one upon which he counts to 
 keep the King deceived. And in the next scene she 
 conveys her strong impression to him : — 
 
 King. What, Gertrude % How does Hamlet ? 
 Queen. Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend 
 Which is the mightier. In his lawless fit, 
 Behind the arras hearing something stir, 
 He whips his rapier out, and cries, " A rat ! " 
 And in his brainish apprehension kills 
 The unseen good old man. 
 
 She is the mother of the physiological criticism which 
 issues from insane asylums to wonder why Hamlet is 
 not an inmate : and Hamlet himself, by deceiving his 
 mother, furnished to psychological criticism the text that 
 he was mad in craft. Between the lines of the genuine 
 Hamlet you can read that Shakspeare belonged to 
 neither school. 
 
Httmlei. 171 
 
 Hamlet gives us unconsciously an opportunity to infer 
 his ability to frame the incoherences which real mad- 
 ness suggests to one who would feign it. It occurs 
 directly upon the Queen's suspicion, who, being unable 
 to see her husband's ghost standing in her chamber, 
 exclaims, — 
 
 " This is the very coinage of your brain : 
 This bodiless creation ecstasy 
 Is yery cunning in." 
 
 Hamlet, repelling the insinuation, says, — 
 
 " It is not madness 
 That I have uttered : bring me to the test, 
 And I the matter will re-word, which madness 
 Would gambol from." 
 
 And herein he implies" that as he can construct the 
 phrases of sanity, beiilg all the time of a sound mind, so 
 the soundness would serve him to invent the non sequi- 
 turs of madness. If, then, he purposed to feign it when 
 he said that perhaps he might hereafter put on an antic 
 disposition, the reader may ask why so subtle a person 
 did not carry out his plan. No doubt, it occurred to 
 him that, as he travelled towards his purpose, his de- 
 meanor must be of the kind that would cover up his 
 traces. But he could bafHe Polonius and the other spies 
 by the natural penetration of a mind that suspicion had 
 sharpened. Those emergencies did not call for any 
 style of feigning. It is enough for him to finger the 
 ventages of a recorder and invite Guildenstern to play 
 upon it ; the latter understands that he knows no touch 
 of Hamlet, and leaves the heart of that mystery to be 
 voiced by the varying breaths of critics. 
 
172 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 When Hamlet explains to Polonius that he is reading 
 slanders, and then describes the old man himself as 
 having a plentiful lack of wit together with most weak 
 hams, yet holds it hardly fair to have it thus set down, — 
 " For yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a 
 crab, you could go backward," — Polonius, who is noth- 
 ing if not satirical upon himself, muses apart, saying, 
 " Though this be madness, yet there's method in 't ; " 
 and there he blundered as patly into Shakspeare's secret 
 as he did into his own death. 
 
 And why do so many actors make Hamlet appear to 
 be conscious of the manoeuvre to throw Ophelia in his 
 way that the King and Polonius may mark his tone from 
 the place where they hide ? Shakspeare has left no loop- 
 hole for this supposition that ITIamlet, observing the 
 trick, assumes a tone of flightiness towards Ophelia, 
 in order to throw off the spies and make them infer that 
 he is mad.. The scene, being over, the King is wrong 
 when he says, — 
 
 " Love ! his affections do not that way tend ; " 
 
 but right when he adds, — 
 
 " Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little, 
 Was not like madness." 
 
 Of course it was not ; and the whole scene with Ophelia 
 is ruined for Shakspeare's purpose by this modern con- 
 trivance of the theatre to deprive Hamlet of his spon- 
 taneous and uncalculating mood. 
 
 Otto Ludwig notices that his madness is "alluded to 
 by Ophelia as having broken out between the first and 
 
Hatnlet. 173 
 
 second acts ; and that is another strange thing in Shak- 
 speare. Then, too, the style, if it was dissimulation, is 
 such as to bring to pass the opposite of what he seems 
 to have intended. So far from being disguised by it he 
 is rather betrayed. And what is the use of any feigning 
 when he does things like that of contriving the mock 
 play .' For that betrays him to the King more than it 
 does the King to him. It makes the situation all awry, 
 because the King must now know on what footing he 
 is with Hamlet. At all events, the courtiers keep tell- 
 ing how danger is threatened to the King from Hamlet : 
 they have no means of fathoming the King's offence. 
 They merely presage some danger to the King, and 
 they manifest no surprise. Hamlet must be conscious 
 that he would be in great peril if the King knew that he 
 knew every thing ; the King would be put on his de- 
 fence, and he was quite capable of contriving another 
 murder to forestall retribution for the first one. Why, 
 then, does he keep on feigning } Yet we do not observe 
 that he hits upon any expedients to meet this possible 
 case ; it does not even occur to him before he concocts 
 the trial-scene." 
 
 Ophelia thinks that she sees 
 
 " That noble and most sovereign reason, 
 Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh," 
 
 because she cannot understand his unflattering talk that 
 appears to be disclaiming any regard for her and any 
 desire to marry her. In all those sentences that make 
 such a coarse rupture with love and soil the previous 
 sentiment of their intercourse, there is no trace of a dis- 
 
174 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 tracted mind. How could we expect this maid to be 
 prepared to entertain such monstrous irony ? It was as 
 much Shakspeare's intention to have him misunderstood 
 as to represent him so occupied by the sweeping scepti- 
 cism that follows the disclosure of villainy. This irony 
 of the most sombre kind, the mental mood that corre- 
 sponds to such a harsh awakening, was not customary 
 with Hamlet, who was by nature mirthful before this 
 murder happened. 
 
 And notice how this ironical tone is kept up by him 
 all through Ophelia's misconception, into which she 
 falls because Hamlet's mood is too overpowering, and 
 she thinks he has a wrecked brain from which she can 
 rescue nothing to enable her to claim the salvage of 
 loving him. When he meets her after many days of 
 unaccountable neglect, she returns the few remem- 
 brances which were messengers of the happier hours of 
 his affection, but he casts discredit upon these sacred 
 tokens. He never meant them, in fact he never gave 
 her any thing. But she says, " Yes," 
 
 " And with them words of so sweet breath compos'd, 
 As made the things more rich.'' 
 
 Has the bloom been rubbed from them, and their per- 
 fume lost .' Then, says the self-respecting maid, tearing 
 the presents by bleeding roots out of the heart where 
 they had lodged to fructify, take them again, 
 
 " For to the noble mind 
 Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind." 
 
 " I did love you once," he says. " Indeed, my lord, 
 
Hamlet. 175 
 
 you made me believe so." Hamlet is enraged at his 
 own love, and appears to have discarded it, for that too 
 may smile and be a villain, or hers may. " You should 
 not have believed me : for virtue cannot so inoculate our 
 old stock,- but we shall relish of it." That is to say, if 
 I had felt true love grafted on my stem I should have 
 received and imparted its flavor of sincerity. But noth- 
 ing is sincere : " I loved you not." 
 
 Hamlet's observation of human nature had furnished 
 him with elements which only needed provocation to 
 develop into this uncompromising irony. His mother, 
 married to that satyr of an uncle, 
 
 " Or ere those shoes were old, 
 With which she foUow'd my poor father's body," 
 
 might well cast a slur upon the sex in his opinion, and 
 prompt the text which cynics use, " Frailty, thy name 
 is woman," — all but Ophelia : it does not include her 
 until all life's illusions vanished with the ghost. Then 
 she would do well not to walk in the sun, and would be 
 safest in a nunnery. 
 
 Previous to that, he had dispatched a missive to her, 
 which is commonly supposed to have been written on 
 purpose to foster the notion that he was mad. But its 
 tone does not seem to me to have been rightly inter- 
 preted. It begins in the style of Pistol : " To the celes- 
 tial, and my soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia." 
 Then comes a verse fit for a valentine, — 
 
 " Doubt thou the stars are fire. 
 Doubt that the sun doth move ; 
 Doubt truth to be a liar. 
 But never doubt I love." 
 
176 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 So far the mocking spirit of his irony does not fail him. 
 But the mood changes, for this was written just after the 
 scene in Ophelia's chamber when he seemed to bid her 
 an eternal farewell. Remembering this, he breaks the 
 tone and adds, " O dear Ophelia ! I am ill at these 
 numbers : I have not art to reckon my groans ; but that 
 I love thee best, oh ! most best, believe it." So with 
 impetuous emphasis he confessed afterward upon Ophe- 
 lia's grave. Nothing could more precisely convey to us 
 his mental condition than this mixture of moods. 
 
 In the churchyard scene, we observe that Hamlet 
 recurs unconsciously to his ordinary mental disposition, 
 because he is alone there with Horatio, whose grave and 
 silent friendship is congenial. It is the foil to Hamlet's 
 restless speculation ; it calls a truce to the civil war 
 between his temper and his purpose. He is pacified 
 in the society of Horatio, who gives him a chance to 
 recur to his native mental habit. As he naively pours 
 out his thoughts, how little does Horatio answer ! as 
 little as the ground beneath their feet, less laconic than 
 the lawyer's skull. He is a continent upon which Ham- 
 let finds that he can securely walk, the only domain in 
 Denmark that is not honeycombed with pitfalls. Turn- 
 ing toward Horatio's loyal affection, he feels a response 
 that is articulated without words. As little need the 
 forest reply to her lover save in dumb show and in ob- 
 scure reflex of feeling. 
 
 The artless nature solicits confidence: its still air 
 disarms and dissipates the unrelenting irony. Then we 
 see that Hamlet was naturally more inclined to that use 
 
Hamlet. 177 
 
 of satire which indicates an ideal far lifted above the 
 methods by which men live. He puts that fine sense 
 into the skulls of the politician, the courtier, and the 
 lawyer, and we acknowledge the satirical tone of an ex- 
 alted mind. And this lends to that scene a feeling that 
 in it Hamlet recurs to himself, and resumes the usual 
 tone which always advertised him to his friends. To 
 them his long maintenance of ironical behavior, broken 
 by so few sallies of his healthy satire, was additional con- 
 firmation of his madness because it was so unusual with 
 him. Old friends remembered nothing of the kind ; they 
 were first puzzled, then convinced, and we saw that 
 Polonius hurried to show his insapiency by attributing 
 the craze to love for his daughter. 'Tis very likely, 
 they all thought, for they could refer to no other prob- 
 able cause for it. 
 
 It is by unconsciously remanding Hamlet to Irony 
 that Shakspeare has expressed the effect of an appari- 
 tion, and of the disenchanting news it brought, upon a 
 mind of that firm yet subtle temper. Lear's noble mind 
 tottered with age before grief struck it into the abyss of 
 madness. Constance stands before us, like Niobe, all 
 tears, or sits with sorrow ; but she was a too finely tem- 
 pered woman to drip into craziness, till health, hope, and 
 life broke up. Shakspeare has not represented any of 
 his mature and well-constructed natures as capable of 
 being overthrown by passion the most exigent or events 
 the most heart-rending. They preserve their sanity to 
 suffer, as all great souls must do to make us worship 
 them with tears. So Hamlet, being incapable of mad- 
 
178 Wi^, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 ness and lifted above the necessity of feigning it, gives 
 to every thing the complexion of the news which has 
 revolted his moral sense, — that is, the King, his uncle, 
 is not what he seems ; his own mother's husband does 
 not appear to be a murderer. The State of Denmark is 
 rotten with this irony. No wonder that his brain took 
 on the color of the leaf on which it fed. Oh, every 
 thing is not what it appears to be, but only an indication 
 of its opposite, and must be phrased by contradiction ! 
 He is really in love with Ophelia, but this irony conceals 
 it. With the mood into which he has been plunged, his 
 own love is no more worth being seriously treated than 
 is old Polonius, whom he knows excellent well, — he is 
 a fishmonger ; that is, not that he is a person sent to 
 fish out his secrets, as Coleridge would explain it, but 
 that he is a dealer in staleness, and yet not so honest as 
 those who only vend stale fish. 
 
 If we return to a period in the play which follows 
 closely upon the scene of the taking of the oath, Ophe- 
 lia herself will discover for us the turning mood in 
 Hamlet's character. The time and action of the piece 
 allow us to suppose that he soon went from the oath- 
 taking to visit Ophelia. Naturally, he turned from that 
 bloodless and freezing visitation to see life heaving in a 
 dear bosom and reddening in lips which he had love's 
 liberty to touch. The disclosures of the ghost had 
 worked upon him like a turbid freshet which comes 
 down from the hills to choke the running of sweet 
 streams, deface with stains of mud all natural beauties, 
 and bury with the washings of sunless defiles the mead- 
 
Hamlet. 179 
 
 ows spangled with forget-me-nots. His love for Ophelia 
 was the most mastering impulse of his life : it stretched 
 like a broad, rich domain, down to which he came from 
 the shadowy places of his private thought to fling him- 
 self in the unchecked sunshine, and revel in the limpid 
 bath, of feeling. How often, in hours which only over- 
 curious brooding upon the problems of life had hitherto 
 disquieted, had he gone to let her smile strip off the 
 shadow of his thought, and expose him to untroubled 
 nature ! The moisture of her eyes refreshed his ques- 
 tioning ; her phrases answered it beyond philosophy ; a 
 maidenly submission of her hand renewed his confi- 
 dence ; an unspoken sympathy of her reserve, that 
 flowed into the slight hints and permissions of her 
 body, nominated him as lover and disfranchised him as 
 thinker ; and a sun-shower seemed to pelt through him 
 to drift his vapors off. But this open gladness has dis- 
 appeared underneath the avalanche of murder which 
 a ghostly hand had loosened. He ventures down to 
 the place where he remembers that it used to expect 
 him ; but we know that it has disappeared. His air and 
 behavior announce it to us. The catastrophe seems to 
 have swept even over his person, to dishevel the apparel 
 upon that " mould of form." In this ruin of his life 
 Ophelia is the first one buried ; for she was always 
 more resident in his soul than maintained within a pal- 
 ace, and his soul is no longer habitable. 
 
 Polonius has just been giving those scandalous in- 
 structions to his pimp to waylay the Danes in Paris, 
 and, by insinuations of ill-conduct in Laertes, worm out 
 
i8o Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 of them possible admissions of its truth. He wants to 
 know how his son is spending money in the gay capital, 
 how many times he gamed, was overtaken in drink, or 
 visited " a house of sale." The pimp is to draw on his 
 fellow-countrymen by pretending that Laertes is given 
 to all these things : he knows the man ; 'tis the com- 
 mon talk about him at home ; you cannot surprise him 
 by any thing you say. Says the old manoeuvrer : 
 
 **See you now ; 
 Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth : 
 And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, 
 With windlasses, and with assays of bias. 
 By indirections find directions out." 
 
 No wonder that Hamlet in the churchyard, kicking the 
 pate of a politician, called it something " that would cir- 
 cumvent God." The state-craft of old Polonius has 
 lived so long without a change that its garments are 
 dropping from its limbs. Now see what an indecent 
 forked radish it is. But the scene is eminently in its 
 place, and has nothing incongruous with what transpires 
 before or after ; for the incident is cunningly contrived 
 to prepare us to find him applying his principle of the 
 windlass and indirect purchase to the relation of Ham- 
 let with his daughter ; and it breeds in us a contempt 
 for the notion that the Prince has been made mad by 
 love. 
 
 Ophelia enters to her father : 
 
 " Oh, my lord, my lord ! I have been so affrighted ! " 
 
 Then she describes Lord Hamlet entering with gar- 
 ments all disordered, 
 
Hamlet. 1 8 1 
 
 " And with a look so piteous in purport, 
 As if he had been loosed out of hell, 
 To speak of horrors. , . . 
 He took me by the wrist, and held me hard ; 
 Then goes he to the length of all his arm ; 
 And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow, 
 He falls to such perusal of my face, 
 As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so ; 
 At last, — a little shaking of mine arm, 
 And thrice his head thus waving up and down, — 
 He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound, 
 That it did seem to shatter all his bulk, 
 And end his being. That done, he lets me go : 
 And, with his head over his shoulder turu'd. 
 He seem'd to find his way without his eyes ; 
 For out of doors he went without their help, 
 And, to the last, bended their«light on me." 
 
 Polonius decides that it is the very ecstasy of love. 
 Yes, it is, but ecstasy that has made an assignation 
 with despair. The two feelings meet at the rendezvous 
 of Ophelia's description, where they display to us the 
 yearning scrutiny that a man throws into the eyes of an 
 expiring love : it is too passionately dear to be surren- 
 dered into the inane ; it is too selfishly personal to be 
 consistent with his future purpose. For he had mar- 
 ried a bride at midnight who is still expecting him. It 
 is the consummation of one murder by another. For 
 such a bridal as that, to leave her cheeks on which the 
 color comes and goes between her love and his renunci- 
 ation, " like heralds 'twixt two dreadful battles set," 
 seems to shatter and end his being. But let him fall to 
 such perusal of her face as he may, he sees the com- 
 plexion of the ghost through each warm feature ; and 
 its pallor stands even there to wave him apart to an 
 
1 82 tVif, Humor, and ^hakspeare. 
 
 interview in which all seeming becomes debatable, for 
 rascally things may smile. He shades his brow, and his 
 eyes are two magnets which he detaches from her heart, 
 as he surrenders his last confidence in a. stale and un- 
 profitable world. 
 
 The irony reaches its most powerful exercise in the 
 second scene of the third act, where Hamlet avails him- 
 self of the arrival of play-actors to test the King with 
 his mouse-trap of an interlude. The Athenian mechan- 
 ics played Pyramus and Thisbe with the simple in- 
 tention of contributing their duty and homage to the 
 nuptials. We see the humor of its juxtaposition with 
 courtly scenes and weddings. But Hamlet, in his inter- 
 lude, pretends amusement and mimics a murder to con- 
 ceal his knowledge of the real one. " No, no, they do 
 but jest, poison in jest ; no offence in the world." His 
 light talk with Ophelia is nothing but the audacity of 
 excitement and expectation. His baffling of Guilden- 
 stern with the pipe ; his making Polonius see a camel, a 
 weasel, and a whale in a cloud, — covers the dreadful 
 necessity which drives him, in the witching time of 
 night, to that upbraiding of a mother, and that second 
 meeting with a dead father, which will make men's 
 breath bate and their veins creep while English is 
 spoken in this world. 
 
 What other mood than Irony could a soul with such 
 a secret for its guest spread for entertainment.? Too 
 strongly built and level to be cracked with the earth- 
 quake of madness ; too awfully overclouded to sparkle 
 with imaginings of wit ; too daunted and saddened with 
 
Hamlet. 183 
 
 the thought of a dear father in purgatorial flames to 
 break into the geniality of Humor, — all his mirth lost 
 of late, there is no resource, no method of relief to the 
 mind that is strained to live with dissemblers and swear 
 vengeance to a ghost, but to dissemble too with an irony 
 as ruthless and sweeping as the crime. He saves his 
 wits which might otherwise justify suspicion and go all 
 distraught, by unconsciously assuming that love, mar- 
 riage, chastity, all honorable things, and friendship too, 
 are crazes, and he that banters them alone is sane. 
 
 But when he knows that the grave, near which he 
 stood and satirized the careers which men pursue, was 
 another piece of irony, since Nature by keeping Ophelia 
 alive and beautiful really meant death by her, it destroys 
 his own tendency to be ironical, and he breaks forth 
 with an intense sincerity ; then we take the point of his 
 previous behavior. 
 
 " I loved Ophelia : forty thousand brothers 
 Could not, with all their quantity of love, 
 Make up my sum." 
 
 And as his soul was thus ample in its love, so was it in 
 all serious and ennobling things, — too much so to grow 
 deranged, enough so to create the concealment and de- 
 fence of all his innuendo. 
 
 The tone recurs when Osrick is introduced, and 
 makes a speech full of pompous platitudes about La- 
 ertes, — " an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent 
 differences, the card or calendar of gentry," and so on. 
 Hamlet mimics the style ; and you would think he was 
 just such another natty phrase-monger as Osrick, whose 
 
184 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 macaronic manner he assumes to indicate his aversion 
 from it. "Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in 
 you ; though, I know, to divide him inventorially would 
 dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, 
 in respect of his quick sail. But, in the verity of extol- 
 ment, I take him to be a soul of great article ; and his 
 infusion of such dearth and rareness, as, to make true 
 diction of him, his semblable is his mirror; and who 
 else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more." 
 
 I wonder that the psychologists have not greedily 
 picked up this obscure and fantastic passage as a speci- 
 men of his craft in feigning. 
 
 But Osrick belonged to the prosaic sort of minds 
 which took up so readily with the theory of Hamlet's 
 madness ; all of them incapable of irony, therefore not 
 competent to fly into his meaning ; limited, like the 
 dodo and other wingless birds, to running along the 
 plain appearance. " Your lordship speaks most infalli- 
 bly of him," says Osrick. 
 
 So Hamlet could sport, who went towards his death 
 with a presentiment which his soul was great enough to 
 put aside, and also give him breath to say how great it 
 was : " We defy augury : there is a special providence 
 in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come ; 
 if it be not to come, it will be now ; if it be not now, 
 yet it will come : the readiness is all." No crotchet of 
 real or assumed madness could lurk in the repose of 
 such a man. 
 
THE PORTER IN "MACBETH," 
 
 THE CLOWN IN "TWELFTH NIGHT," 
 
 THE FOOL IN "LEAR." 
 
THE PORTER IN "MACBETH." 
 
 ' I ^HE vulgarity of the Porter's language, in the third 
 scene of the second act, repelled Coleridge, who 
 pronounced it to be an after-thought of some baser 
 hand. " I dare pledge • myself to demonstrate," said he, 
 that it was an interpolation of the actors. Other critics 
 have followed with the same feeling of condemnation. 
 But only Shakspeare could have risen above such a 
 conventional estimate, and have put this piece of solid 
 consistency into that part of the tragedy which it 
 strengthens : there it stays in the only place where 
 Nature could have lent to it her justification. We can 
 readily admit that the undisguised lechery of Pandarus 
 in "Troilus and Cressida," and the brothel scenes in 
 " Pericles," were subsequent additions to those plays by 
 a pen that was accustomed to deal in broad effects with- 
 out regard to the organic exaction of the other charac- 
 ters. Perhaps they were fragments of older plays left 
 over by carelessness, or, what is much more likely, intro- 
 duced as gags by the play-actors. But we can spare 
 them out of the legacy of Shakspeare because they are 
 not in the manner which he used when broadness 
 served his purpose. When the gross details are hung 
 over and fondled lewdly, recurred to morbidly, laid open 
 with ingenious particularity till we detect the sickening 
 odor of the dissecting-room which rises from slashed 
 
1 88 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 and naked subjects, we may determine at once that the 
 scene preserves not one stroke of Shakspeare's pen. 
 The lines seem suffocating in a close and tainted place. 
 What a brisk draught ventilates the honest coarseness 
 of the Porter ! what" a light, bantering touch hits off the 
 vice which is needful to finish the portrait of Falstaff ! 
 Even Parolles, his prototype, only ventures far enough 
 to make a scene coherent with Helena's unspoken 
 thought.* 
 
 Let us see if Nature was not fortunate in finding the 
 Porter at his post at an hour when he was needed as 
 never before. 
 
 The air around the castle of Macbeth "nimbly and 
 sweetly " recommended itself to Duncan's senses ; 
 and Banquo noticed that the swallow, most confiding 
 and unsuspicious of birds, approves the place " by his 
 lov'd mansionry." On every frieze, buttress, coigne of 
 vantage, Nature had colonized this domestic wing, as if 
 to hint to the wayfarer " a pleasant seat," peace and un- 
 violated sleep within. But we remember that a raven 
 had croaked the fatal entrance of Duncan into the cas- 
 tle. The swallows twittering in the delicate air cannot 
 drown this omen of insecurity : as we enter with the 
 unconscious Duncan, the weird sisters slip by us from 
 
 * All's Well that Ends Well, Act i. 7. Though I suspect here 
 either a fragment of an early form of the play that kept its place in the 
 stage copy and passed into print unchastened, or some phrases interpo- 
 lated by actors. Something has been dropped out between ParoUes's 
 " Will you do any thing with it .'' " and Helena's recurrence to Bertram's 
 leaving for the court, " There shall your master have a thousand 
 loves;" so that the scene is in an imperfect condition. 
 
The Porter in ''Macbethr 189 
 
 their blasted heath, and the house darkens with a fated 
 purpose. 
 
 It was an unruly night, and the owl clamored the 
 livelong hours. Towards morning, after the accom- 
 plishment of the murder. Lady Macbeth snatched the 
 bloody daggers from the hand of her husband to carry 
 them back into the chamber. The air that was inter- 
 rupted at the lips of the gracious Duncan seems breath- 
 less as he, appalled at the deed ; and our consciousness 
 of it sinks into an awful silence. ' Just then a knocking 
 at the gate is heard. 
 
 De Quincey, in an essay " On the Knocking at 
 the Gate," rightly notices that it reflects "back upon 
 the murder a 'peculiar awfulness and depth of solem- 
 nity," and he explains this effect. " When the deed is 
 done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the 
 world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the 
 clouds : the knocking at the gate is heard, and it makes 
 known audibly that the reaction has commenced ; the 
 human has made its reflux upon the fiendish ; the pulses 
 of life are beginning to beat again ; and the re-establish- 
 ment of the goings-on of the world in which we live 
 first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful paren- 
 thesis that had suspended them." 
 
 Admirable as this criticism is to justify the profound 
 art of Shalkspeare, it does not seem to me entirely to 
 exhaust the effect produced by the knocking. It not 
 only makes known to us that human life recurs, and 
 thus emphasizes our sense of the unhuman world of 
 murder, but it also startles us with the sudden coh- 
 
I go Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 sdousness that the human which thus recurs does it in 
 entire ignorance of the scene at which it knocks. That 
 makes us catch our breath, to feel how thoughtlessly 
 life is about to stumble into the tremendous scene. 
 What a contrast of innocent unconsciousness, — so in- 
 nocent, so remote from the event, that we should think 
 it was impertinent if our pity for the shock it brings 
 upon itself did not prevail ! We wonder who will first 
 discover what has occurred, whether man or woman ; 
 somebody is doomed to blunder into the ghastliness of 
 that room where Macbeth murdered sleep. What will 
 be the sensation that thrills from the inhospitable bed 
 around which the angels of honor and loyalty ought to 
 have watched with spotless wings ? Some one steps 
 into this pool where all the safeguards and trusts of 
 human life lie drenched. How will he manage to es- 
 cape from it, and will the tongue be palsied " with the 
 act of fear" to refuse to the lips words adequate to 
 express the villainy t And yet this must be done. 
 
 We therefore become aware of this additional feeling, 
 that the life which knocks at the gate, though uncon- 
 scious, is pregnant with the design of an overruling 
 Power ; just for a moment, Ihere seems to be the super- 
 natural arrival of something with a commission to detect 
 the murder. Every knock smites the bare heart of 
 Macbeth, who may well exclaim, "Wake Duncan with 
 thy knocking ! I would thou could'st ! " 
 
 Shakspeare makes another world for Macbeth, — a 
 sequestered hell. The knocking announces the exist- 
 ence and reappearance of another life, as De Quincey 
 
The Porter in ^^ Macbeth." 191 
 
 notices ; but he does not note the fine prolongation of 
 the Hell into the humorous fancy of the Porter who 
 comes to open the gate. 
 
 To the old French taste, this Porter was one of the 
 Shakspearean violations of decency and tragic senti- 
 ment, — a vulgar fellow who has been waked out of a 
 drunken sleep, and who talks outrageous matter that is 
 the farthest removed from murder, so that solemnity is 
 affronted and abruptly leaves the hearts which it had 
 just monopolized. But the more we dwell upon Shak- 
 speare's characters, " the more we shall see proofs of 
 design and self-supporting arrangement, where the care- 
 less eye had seen nothing but accident." 
 
 The Porter, as if he had been privy to the transac- 
 tions of the night, translates each knock into a candi- 
 date for admission into his quaint fancy of a hell, of 
 which he keeps the gate. Fleay, in his " Shakspeare's 
 Manual," shows that the Porter makes allusions to con- 
 temporaneous circumstances of the year 1606, when 
 " Macbeth " was first produced. " The expectation of 
 plenty : " wheat, barley, and malt were extraordinarily 
 cheap. The " equivocator " is the Jesuit, Garnet, who 
 was tried for gunpowder treason in that year. " Steal- 
 ing out of a French hose : " the fashion of hose became 
 short in 1606 ; yet the tailors took the old measure of 
 material and cabbaged the difference. So that the Por- 
 ter belongs to that year, and could not have been subse- 
 quently interpolated. 
 
 " If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have 
 often turning the key. Who's there.'" "An equivo- 
 
192 ' Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 cator, that could swear in both the scales against either 
 scale ; who committed treason enough for God's sake, 
 yet could not equivocate to Heaven! Oh, come in, 
 equivocator ! " Yes, this is the very house for him to 
 come to, where a treason has just been committed 
 which will be unable to equivocate to Heaven. " I'll 
 devil-porter it no farther : I had thought to have let in 
 some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the 
 everlasting bonfire." If the outer life is to gain admis- 
 sion at all again to this castle, this grotesque hint of the 
 hell within undoes the gate appropriately : by no abrupt 
 transition, and by the bridge of a perilous smile, human 
 life is reached again. The Porter delays by his succes- 
 sive fancies, till we begin to grow impatient, like those 
 emissaries of Heaven who shiver at the gate. This 
 impatience, humorously created for us, introduces an- 
 other human feeling to qualify our awe ; and thus we 
 rejoin our common humanity. 
 
 When the Porter lets in Macduff and Lenox, he 
 seems to have admitted also a very garish and vulgar 
 kind of day, that displays loosely some infirmities of 
 men, unconscious of the more awful crime within, — a 
 very broad and unequivocal daylight that lies sharply 
 on all objects without toning them. The Porter's dis- 
 quisition upon drinking and lechery is apparently super- 
 fluous and revolting, but it is really well conceived ; for 
 we want something to carry our mood as far as possible 
 away from Duncan's chamber and from all thoughts 
 about discovering the deed, because Macbeth is about 
 to enter. " Our knocking has awaked him." Then our 
 
The Porter in "Macbeih!' 193 
 
 feeling, which has gained a temporary relief, is able to 
 take up again the awful clew, and to wait during Mac- 
 beth's feigned unconsciousness till Macduff bursts upon 
 us with his horror. Moreover, the carousing which the 
 Porter mentions was the cover to Macbeth's opportu- 
 nity, and just keeps the night alive in our memory, 
 while we think how innocently drunk the whole house- 
 hold was to provide a human weakness for an act of 
 death. Macbeth enters, whose wife conceived the strat- 
 agem of the drinking, and soon the result of it arrives. 
 An after-clap of Hell settles back on the Porter's 
 traces ; but he has performed his function by letting 
 life and human nature in upon the sexless and mon- 
 strous scene, and may now vacate his post. 
 
 Still, the Porter is conventionally vulgar, and cannot 
 be accepted by a taste that is more fastidious than the 
 world itself is. But, if the world chooses to be vulgar, 
 why needed Shakspeare to have imported this base 
 touch of realism into his art .■' Only by the permission 
 of Humor, and the justification of an exigency to drag 
 our feelings back to life by the handiest strand, however 
 coarse it may be. And after he had invented that thrill- 
 ing moment of the knocking at the gate, he cannot get 
 along without the house-porter, who is the only one 
 awake enough to let honest Nature in. So we must 
 take him as he is, and admire the poet who did not send 
 the Muse of Tragedy to draw the bolt. 
 
 The Agamemnon of ./Eschylus reaches a breathless 
 moment of suspense, when Clytemnestra has left the 
 scene to plan the murder of her husband, and the 
 
 13 
 
194 Wil, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Chorus, shuddering with its divination of the deed, ex- 
 presses our expectation. All at once a stifled exclama- 
 tion struggles out from the interior of the palace : the 
 Chorus whispers, " Hush ! who is it that cries out, ' A 
 blow ' ? " and the play soon closes with the sombre feel- 
 ing unrelieved. Nothing intervenes to assist the specta- 
 tors back to life, and to the other persons whose interests 
 implicate them so deeply in the plot. There is but one 
 interest and one action in a Greek Tragedy, and when 
 that is reached the nature of the scene is exhausted ; 
 the poet has no more to say, and is not conscious of any 
 craving for variety in his listeners. His play was an 
 artistic embodiment of the current religious ideas, and 
 so far was secluded, as the modern pulpit is, from mani- 
 fold life. It is not possible to discover a place in these 
 solemn developments of Fate, where a feeling of Humor 
 could intrude. The Chorus, listening to the blow, inter- 
 venes instead of a Porter. It is the voice of an audience 
 conscious of the crime. So is a modern audience con- 
 scious of Macbeth's crime, but that consciousness is 
 itself the Chorus, whose ancient function is distributed 
 through the silent hearts of the spectators, who are thus 
 permitted to mingle in every awful occurrence, and there- 
 fore need to be restored again to the ordinary world of 
 justice and emotion. 
 
 Shakspeare exhibits the supreme nature of his genius 
 when he meets this exigency which antique religion did 
 not feel. He admits the free play of life into its real 
 closeness with all our moral and pathetic emotions ; but 
 we never find that Humor weakens the religious purpose 
 
The Cloivn in '•' Twelfth Nighf.' 195 
 
 of the play, as it would if our private anguish were un- 
 seasonably interrupted by it, because our personal for- 
 tunes are not touched by the tragedy. We are implicated 
 in the scene only by our instinct of observation and sym- 
 pathy ; that needs relief, but, if the blow struck us and 
 became a " fee-grief due to each single breast," we could 
 endure it as we do in real life, as we prefer to do, with a 
 temper that keeps all other strings muted but sorrow. 
 So- the Humor which we would not tolerate when the 
 tempest breaks upon our roof-tree, and is sullen within 
 every chamber, is no unwelcome surprise when the heart 
 is so keenly summoned by the mimic scene. 
 
 THE CLOWN IN "TWELFTH NIGHT." 
 
 The name of the Clown does not appear in the drama- 
 tis personce, and only once in the text. Act ii. 4, where he 
 is called Feste. All, the dainty songs of the play are put 
 into his mouth. Feste was the name_of_a^b tinguished 
 musician and composer, probably a friend pJ[_Shakspear^ 
 We may even surmise that he set to music one or more 
 of his namesake's songs. There is no play which em- 
 ploys the element of music so frequently, or that speaks 
 of it in the tender terms which only a lover of melody 
 can use. It is admitted into the plot as a confidant 
 and adviser, and allowed to sway the moods of the 
 characters. 
 
 The Duke calls for Cesario (Viola) to repeat 
 
ig6 Wi(, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 " That piece of song, 
 That old and antique song we heard last night." 
 
 The Duke has forgotten that Feste, and not Cesario, 
 was the singer. Fleay overlooks this touch of nature, 
 and attributes the passage to an older play or first 
 draught, which appears uncorrected in the present play. 
 But the Duke is mooning about in his sentimental fash- 
 ion, and vaguely recollects that Cesario was presented to 
 him as one that could sing " and speak to him in many 
 sorts of music." He had done so, no doubt, so that the 
 mistake was natural to the distraught mind of the Duke, 
 who seems to allude to it when he says immediately to 
 Cesario, — 
 
 " If ever thou shalt love. 
 In the sweet pangs of it remember me ; 
 For such as I am all true lovers are, 
 Unstaid and skittish in all motions else, 
 Save in the constant image of the creature 
 That is belov'd." 
 
 His obliviousness is indeed so profound that he blun- 
 ders in dismissing Feste when the song is over, saying 
 to him, " Give me now leave to leave thee." This, so far 
 from being an imperfect reading, is a perfect touch of his 
 abstruse mood. It amuses, Feste, who says aside, "Now 
 the melancholy god protect thee," &c. Every line and 
 word of this beautiful scene is unalterably well placed. 
 
 We see that the Clown adds a good voice to his other 
 gifts ; he does every thing " dexteriously," and is in high 
 demand for his companionable spirits. For Sir Andrew 
 and Sir Tobey his songs are blithe and free : all the bal- 
 lads and ditties that had vogue in Feste's time are at 
 
The Clown in "-Twelfth Night" 197 
 
 his tongue's end, and he is always humming snatches of 
 them. For the Duke he has cypress sentimentalism, 
 urges death to come away, and forbids a flower sweet to 
 be strown on the black coffin of the Duke's luxurious 
 woe. We can imagine what a face Feste pulled over 
 the minor key which so tipkled the Duke, whose love 
 was after all nothing but the spooning of a professor of 
 rhetoric. He can take off his sighing disguise as quickly 
 as Viola can transfer herself into woman's weeds. Olivia 
 is well aware of this, and having just lost her brother is 
 in no mood for a flirtation. She knows he is a noble and 
 gracious person, but she has read the first chapter of his 
 heart, and " it is heresy." The Clown, who is as usual 
 Shakspeare's keenest and most am used observer , knows 
 this well and puts it into the neatest language : " The 
 tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy 
 mind is a very opal ! I would have men of such con- 
 stancy put to sea, that their business might be every- 
 thing and their intent everywhere ; for that's it that 
 always makes a good voyage of nothing." And this 
 turns out true enough ; for the Duke with all sail set 
 after Olivia, and a spanking breeze on his quarter, tacks 
 nimbly in the teeth of it the moment Olivia is married 
 by mistake, and Cesario becomes a woman. The only 
 serious sentiment in the play is the one so tenderly con- 
 cealed in the disguise of Viola. 
 
 In Act iii. 7, Viola enters, meeting Feste, who is 
 playing the pipe and tabor. Her simplest remark he 
 makes the pivot of a jest, and is never tired of tossing 
 words. He plays with them as a juggler with balls ; 
 
198 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 they all seem to be in the air at once. There never 
 was such a jaunty and irrepressible quipster. Yet when 
 Viola says to him, " I warrant thou art a merry fellow, 
 and carest for nothing," his reply, "Not so, sir, I do 
 care for something," betrays the serious temper which 
 lies under all his fooling to furnish the appositeness of 
 his remarks : — 
 
 " For folly, that he wisely shows, is fit ; 
 But wise men, folly-fallen, quite taint their wit." 
 
 Viola, who says this, might adapt a text of Paul, and 
 apply it to Shakspeare's people, — "For ye suffer fools 
 gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise." 
 
 Of all Shakspeare's clowns, he is the best endowed 
 with a many-sided mirth, as indeed he should be to 
 pass lightly through the mingled romance and royster- 
 ing of the play and favor all its moods. The sentiment 
 of the Duke is as inebriated as the revelling which 
 Malvolio rebukes. Olivia's protracted grief for her 
 brother is carefully cosseted by her, as if on purpose 
 to give the Clown an opportunity. 
 
 Clo. Good madonna, why mournest thou ? 
 Oliv. Good fool, for my brother's death. 
 Clo. I think his soul is in hell, madonna. 
 Oliv. I know his soul is in heaven, fool. 
 
 Clo. The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul 
 being in heaven. — Take away the fool, gentlemen. 
 
 All the characters, noble and common, have some 
 weakness which he intuitively rallies. The charm of the 
 comedy lies in these unsubstantial moods of the chief 
 personages which consort with the more substantial 
 
The Clown in " Twelfth Nights igg 
 
 whims and appetites of the others. The only sobriety 
 is vested in the Clown ; fo r all his freak s have a con- 
 sistent disposition. So the lovely poetry of the mock 
 mourners alternates with the tipsy prose of the genuine 
 fleshly fellows. Their hearty caterwauling penetrates 
 to Olivia's fond seclusion, ^nd breaks up her brooding. 
 Feste is everywhere at home. When he plays the 
 curate's part, Malvolio beseechingly cries, " Sir Topas, 
 Sir Topas!" The Clown says aside, "Nay, I am for 
 all waters," — that is, for topaz, diamond, gems oTthe" 
 Tirst water, all many-colored facets I'll reflect. And he 
 does so in this conversation which he holds with Mal- 
 volio, who says, " I am no more mad than you are : make 
 the trial of it in any constant question." Then Feste 
 airs his learning : " What is the opinion of Pythagoras 
 concerning wild-fowl .? " and makes his question lead up 
 to a sharp retort, when Malvolio answers, " That the 
 soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird ; " for 
 then Feste says, "Thou shalt hold the opinion of Py- 
 thagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a 
 woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam." 
 For it was a country notion that the woodcock was the 
 foolishest of birds ; so he translates Malvolio's grandam 
 into one, and leaves him to inherit her absence of wits. 
 And Malvolio was so devoured by mortification and 
 anxiety that he does not notice when Feste cannot re- 
 strain 'his burlesquing knack, but makes the pretended 
 curate say that Malvolio's cell " hath bay-windows, trans- 
 parent as barricadoes, and the clearstores toward the 
 south-north are as lustrous as ebony." 
 
200 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 The Clown is not only quaint, droll, full of banter, sly 
 with sense, like clowns in the other plays, but he is the 
 most ebullient with spirits of them all, ready for the next 
 freak, to dissemble himself in the curate's gown and carry 
 on two voices with Malvolio in the prison, keeping him 
 on the rack the while, or to carouse with the two knights 
 till daybreak, and delight them with manufacturing bur- 
 lesques. " Thou wast in very gracious fooling last 
 night, when thou spokest of Pigrogromitus, of the Va- 
 pians passing the equinoctial of Queubus : 'twas very 
 good, i' faith. I sent thee sixpence for thy leman : 
 hadst it .' " Feste resumes the burlesquing humor : " I 
 did impeticos thy gratillity ; for Malvolio's nose is no 
 whipstock : my lady has a white hand, and the Myrmi- 
 dons are no bottle-ale houses." As for " bottle-ale," the 
 phrase occurs once more in Shakspeare, 2 " Henry 
 IV.," ii. 4, to express contempt, — " Away, you bottle-ale 
 rascal ! " So Feste does not think small-beer of the 
 Myrmidons, or retainers of Olivia, who might scent out 
 his sixpence as quickly as Malvolio. Was the bottling 
 of ale just coming in, to the immense disgust of the loyal 
 Briton, who thought nobly of the ancient brew and would 
 not have it save mightily on tap .' The words, " Pigro- 
 gromitus," " Vapians," " Queubus," sound like the names 
 which Rabelais manufactured to cover his sly allusions 
 to public personages ; but they cannot be traced. It is 
 just possible that Shakspeare invented them to burlesque 
 the words and style which mariners and travellers brought 
 home to vapor with to eager listeners in the taverns : 
 marvels of the East that would not stay in Damascus, 
 
The Clown in '■'Twelfth Night" 201 
 
 but came by caravan, — of Virginia, Guiana, and the 
 " still-yex'd Bermoothes," the " Arithropophaginian," * 
 men " whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," 
 not positively discredited by Sir Walter Raleigh ; one-leg 
 and one-foot savages, seen by early sailors to the coast 
 of • Maine, — all the misunderstanding and exaggeration 
 of a new period of adventure and discovery of new 
 lands were bountifully nourished upon sack and canary 
 in the London taverns. What legends were fabricated 
 at the Mitre in Cheapside, the Swan at Dowgate, the 
 Boar's Head near London Stone, the Ship at the Ex- 
 change, the Red Lion in the Strand ! These were 
 haunts of Frobisher's and Drake's men ; of Sir Hum- 
 phrey Gilbert's, fresh from Newfoundland in the only 
 ship that was saved ; of Barbour's expedition to Roan- 
 oake in 1584; of Gosnold's, in 1602, to Cape Cod and 
 the islands in Buzzard's Bay. The sack grew apprehen- 
 sive and forgetive, and justified Falstaff's eulogy. Ber- 
 moothes was not the only region vexed by devils and 
 spirits, but every tavern from Plymouth to London. A 
 trace of Shakspeare's interest in these London entertain- 
 ments is found in the " Tempest," where Trinculo wishes 
 that he had Caliban in England for a show. " There 
 would this monster make a man : any strange beast 
 there makes a man ; when they will not give a doit to re- 
 lieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead 
 Indian." Captain Weymouth was sent by Sir Ferdinando 
 Gorges and Chief Justice Popham, in 1605, to found a 
 
 * Reproduction of anthropophagi as heard from some guest by the host 
 of the Garter Inn, in "Merry Wives of Windsor," iv. 5. 
 
202 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 colony upon the coast of Maine. He kidnapped five 
 Abenaki Indians near the mouth of the Sagadahoc, and 
 carried them home. Three of these were kept by Gorges 
 at Plymouth, and the other two were sent up to London 
 to the care of the Chief Justice. One of these died there. 
 The passage in the " Tempest " is strong confirmation 
 that Shakspeare went with the other cockneys to see 
 him. 
 
 Though Shakspeare empties all his own love for pure 
 fun into this clown, he inakes_ofJmn__Uie_only_cooL3J^ 
 con sistent character in the play,'^nd_thus^onveys_ to 
 us his conviction of the s^Liperiority_rf an observer wjip 
 has" wit, humor, repartee, b urlesqui ng, and buffoo nery at_ 
 command ; for none but wise men can make such Jools 
 of themselves. Such a fine composition is apt to be 
 misunderstood by the single-gifted and prosaic people ; 
 but this only piques the bells to their happiest jingle ; 
 and a man is never more convinced of the divine origin 
 of his buffooning talent than when the didactic souls 
 reject it as heresy. All Shakspeare's clowns brandish 
 this fine bauble : their bells swing in a Sabbath air and 
 summon us to a service of wisdom. Festejiasjio^^ssion 
 to fondle, and no chances to lie in wait for jxce£ t those 
 which can help his foolery to walk over everybody like 
 the sun. Even when he seems to be wheedling money 
 out of the Duke and Viola, he is only in sport with the 
 weakness which purse-holders have to fee, to conciliate, 
 to enjoy an aspect of grandeur. Jiis_perfectly_dispas- 
 s^iQQate.^temper^is sagacity itself.. It_discerns Jhe,soleiiui 
 fickleness of the principal personages. They are all 
 
The Clown in ''Twelfth Nigki." 203 
 
 treated with amusing impartiality ; and it is in the spirit 
 of the Kosmos itself which does not. stand in awe of any- 
 body. It seems, indeed, as if the function of fool, and 
 the striking toleration which has always invested it, was 
 developed by Nature for protection of those of her creat- 
 ures who are exposed to flattery and liable to be dam- 
 aged by it. Not for shallow amusement have rich and 
 titled persons harbored jesters, who always play the part 
 of the slave of Pyrrhus, at. proper intervals to remind 
 them that they are mortal. All men secretly prefer to 
 know the truth ; but the pampered people cannot bear to 
 sit in the full draught of it. Its benefit must, however, 
 be in some way conveyed to them. Bluff Kent is ban- 
 ished for saying to Lear, in the plainest Saxon, what 
 the fool kept insinuating with impunity. Therefore, no 
 genuine court has been complete without its fool. The 
 most truculent sceptre has only playfully tapped his 
 liberty. Timur the Terrible had a court-fool, named 
 Ahmed Kermani. One day, in the bath with a crowd of 
 wits, the conversation fell upon the individu9.1 worth of 
 men, and Timur asked Ahmed, "What price wouldst 
 thou put on me if I were for sale .■" " " About five-and- 
 twenty aspers," rejoined Ahmed. " Why," said Timur, 
 " that is about the price of the sheet I have on." " Well, 
 of course, I meant the sheet." When the business of 
 kingship becomes decayed, the office of fool is obsolete. . 
 Feste bandies words with Viola, and makes her submit 
 to delicate insolences : her distinguished air cannot abate 
 him. He pretends to wish to be convinced by Malvolio 
 that the latter is sane, but concludes that he will never 
 
204 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 believe a madman till he can see his Brains._ Peste keeps- 
 his ownjiead on a level keel as the_&parkling.jriEEles of 
 his^rolleries" go by. Shakspeare's intention is conspic- 
 uousTn him to make all the clowns the critics of all the 
 other personages, and kept in the pay of their creator. 
 
 When the play is over, the Duke plighted to his page, 
 Olivia rightly married to the wrong man, and the whole 
 romantic jra.veLof s^timent begins .to be attached to -the 
 serious conditions_of_life, Feste is left alone upon th€ 
 stage! Then he sings a song which conveys to usjiis__ 
 feeling_ofj:heworld's im partiality : all things proceed ac- 
 cording tO'law ; nobody is humored ; people must abide 
 the consequences of their actions, " fortheram it raineth 
 ^eVer-y-dayr^— T^ir"Tittle tiny boy " may have his toy ; but 
 a man must guard against knavery and thieving : mar- 
 riage itself cannot be sweetened by swaggering ; whoso 
 drinks with "toss-pots" will get a "drunken head:" it is 
 a very old world, and began so long ago that no change 
 in its habits can be looked for. The grave insinuation 
 of this song is touched with the vague, soft bloom of the 
 play. As the noises of the land come over sea well- 
 tempered to the ears of islanders, so the world's fierce, 
 implacable roar reaches us in the song, sifted through 
 an air that hangs full of the Duke's dreams, of Viola's 
 pensive love, of the hours which music flattered. The 
 note is hardly more presageful than the cricket's stir in 
 the late silence of a summer. How gracious has Shak- 
 speare been to mankind in this play ! He coTild not do 
 otherwise than leave Feste all alone to pronounce its 
 benediction ; for his heart was a nest of songs whence 
 
The Fool in "King Lear." 205 
 
 they rose to whistle with the air of wisdom. Alas for 
 the poor fool in " Lear " who sang to drown the cries 
 from a violated nest ! 
 
 THE FOOL IN "KING LEAR." 
 
 The bauble of the Fool in " King Lear " rings us into 
 a horizon that, before we reach it, mutters with the pre- 
 monition of madness ; and we wonder if any humor can 
 find shelter with us underneath that blackening sky. 
 When the Fool joins our company, we search his features 
 in vain for a trace of Feste's and Touchstone's temper. 
 That spring of geniality has been stirred by the king's 
 misfortunes till it is roiled into irony ; and we recog- 
 nize the only tone that can take lodgings in this tragedy. 
 It makes rifts in the gathering tempest, not of clear sky 
 but of lighter cloud-racks, around whose edges the first 
 lightnings run. We have ceased to smile and begin to 
 forebode. All cheeriness and whim are getting blotted 
 out so fast that we share the Fool's longing for the shel- 
 ter of the hut when heaven began to pelt that old gray 
 head, " crowned with rank fumiter," upon the heath. 
 
 His irony is tart ; but commiseration for his master 
 saves it from ill-temper. Just as it threatens to become 
 cynical, a song occurs to him, which is a low call draw- 
 ing him back, as the mother's voice lures her child from 
 the edge of a cliff ere it falls over : — 
 
 "Then they for sudden joy did weep, 
 And I for sorrow sung." 
 
2o6 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 '• When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah ? " 
 It was not his wont, then ? By no means. This court- 
 jester stood by when the latent disease of the King's brain 
 was suddenly unmasked by the sincerity of Cordelia, 
 whose love was more ponderous than her tongue. He 
 saw her transformed, in an instant of the King's first 
 lesion, from a daughter into an outcast. First, wonder 
 at a blow which no one could anticipate, and then pity at 
 seeing that love's vessel thus pushed over and its rare- 
 ness spilled, has destroyed his appetite for mirth. He 
 unconsciously resorts to the Fool's alternative between 
 jesting and gravity, which is a fusion of both these 
 qualities in irony ; and he catches at the ragged edges 
 of old songs when he feels himself tumbling into bitter 
 aspersion of the King. He has, too, been affrighted 
 by the sudden and groundless vehemence which hurls 
 the faithful old Kent into exile as soon as he dared 
 speak a word for Cordelia. What ! Daughterhood 
 stamped out like a spider, life-long loyalty sent to the 
 dogs ! This palace can dispense with jesting for the 
 future ; and our wits must yield a different grain. 
 Touchstone is the wise fool of life's comedy. But Lear 
 snatches at his fool's bauble, invests him with the pathos 
 of a broken sceptre and a crumbling reason, and may 
 well inquire when he learned to sing. " I have used 
 it, Nuncle, e'er since thou madest thy daughters thy 
 mother." His songs insinuate so much unpalatable 
 truth that he tells the King to keep a schoolmaster that 
 can teach his fool to lie, and pretends that under the 
 circumstances, with the King undertaking to be the 
 house-fool, lying might be an accomplishment. 
 
The Fool in ''King Lear^ 207 
 
 No person — not even the shrewd, observing Fool — 
 had detected in these early inconstancies of the King 
 the tokens of impending insanity. But Shakspeare 
 meant, no doubt, that the whim of abdication, the divi- 
 sion of the kingdom, and the absurd project to travel 
 with a hundred knights from one daughter's house to 
 another, should hint to us that the royal brain was 
 breaking down. An expert in the phenomena of insan- 
 ity would have predicted what occurred so suddenly. 
 But it shocked these unprepared beholders, and curdled 
 every smile on the Fool's face into lines of mockery that 
 ran full with tears. No king's misfortune was ever so 
 bantered by its own pathos, as love and loyalty, con- 
 trasting with ingratitude, subsidized a Fool for the 
 service of pity. 
 
 But he cannot long employ his Irony upon our hearts, 
 for events develop a dread earnest temper. There is 
 no longer place for insinuation in the scene. The for- 
 tune of Lear seems to challenge all the elements to 
 match it. As the reason topples, it appears to be 
 clutching at the sky to save itself, and brings it down 
 in the winds and lightnings of midnight to sympathize 
 with its own eclipse. The Fool is cowed by the madness 
 and the storm as they intermingle ; his brave innuen- 
 does die away ; and he supplicates Lear, in plain lan- 
 guage of human discomfort, to seek some shelter, even 
 under such a blessing as one of his daughters can be- 
 stow, for that seems less inclement than the night. His 
 vein runs very thin during Lear's delusion that he has 
 his daughters in cou^t and is trying them ; and it soon 
 
2o8 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 disappears, swallowed in the quicksand of the king's 
 lunacy. Kingdom, friends, reason, family, are all crum- 
 bled into this wreck of an old father, who pretends at 
 last to hear the soft and gentle voice which used to 
 temper the pride of his state and keep him human : he 
 comes in to us hugging the hanged Cordelia to his 
 cracking heart, to feel that she will come no more ; she, 
 whom he drove from his palace gate with violent misap- 
 prehension, will come no more, — never, never, never ! 
 Oh, it has grown too piteous for the wisest Fool : he 
 can never share these scenes ; his humor cannot lace 
 these thundrous lines. Do they swell to the measure of 
 the firmament itself, or is it our heart which is swelling 
 to occupy that space .? Yes : " Pray ye, undo this but- 
 ton." It is the heart, too big for any thing that ever 
 made it smile. The lightnings of fate rend it into the 
 drops of pity, and they wash all tolerating smiles away. 
 
 Humor is too deeply implicated with our mortality, 
 too warm a comrade, too judicious a friend in our ex- 
 tremities, to choose such hours of disaster to virtue 
 for any task of reconciliation. Awful and questioning 
 spirits come; and Humor, yielding to them our hand, 
 stands a^ide to wait, but yields it warm enough to keep 
 warm through any grasp till it may be claimed again. 
 
 Shakspeare's instinct divined the precise moment 
 when the bells of the Fool's bauble could not compete 
 with thunder, nor the balls upon his cap draw off the 
 bolt. But, while the muttering comes up from the hori- 
 zon and begins to be heard between the lines, the bells 
 still shake, as in the last scene of the first act, where 
 
The Fool in "'King Lear." 209 
 
 they render more sombre the expectation of what must 
 finally come down upon our heads. The recollection of 
 Cordelia gives the King a lucid interval : it breaks like 
 a breadth of heaven into his brain, and into ours through 
 that little sentence, " I did her wrong." 
 
 " Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell ? " " No." 
 " Nor I neither ; but I can tell why a snail has a house." 
 " Why } " " Why, to put his head in ; not to give it 
 away to, his daughters, and leave his horns without a 
 case." Lear listens absently to the quaint chatter ; for 
 he detects the threat which has been approaching from 
 the distance, and is now quite near. 
 
 " Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet Heaven ! 
 Keep me in temper : I would not be mad." 
 
 After helping Kent and Gloster bear off the King 
 just before old Gloster's eyes are plucked from his head, 
 the Fool disappears from the tragedy, as if all light were 
 to be quenched with such an act, and all moods but ter- 
 ror to be stamped with those jellies under Cornwall's 
 feet. 
 
 " Make no noise, make no noise ; draw the curtains ! " 
 
 14 
 
WOMEN AND MEN: 
 
 MARIA, HELENA, IMOGEN, CONSTANCE. 
 
WOMEN AND MEN. 
 
 ly/TAN draws near to woman with the fly-net of his 
 analysis, thinking to steal up and capture the 
 secrets of her disposition. He finds a distance drawn 
 across his way which he never entirely passes. It is the 
 distance of sex. The greatest intimacy of marriage it- 
 self, which blends two beings into one fate, and compels 
 them to set up housekeeping on the principle of mutual- 
 ism, is still evaded by motives and moods which the 
 woman holds in reserve, not by calculation, but through 
 the instinct of a difference which the husband cannot 
 entirely penetrate. It is not that man reaches results 
 chiefly by the processes of judgment, and woman chiefly 
 by a method which is not thinking so much as it is a 
 taste or touch of the objects she observes. But she is 
 removed from his scrutiny because the complexity of 
 sex constructs her soul, becomes the essence of her mo- 
 tives, decides her virtues and her vices, and modifies the 
 intellect itself. She contains all qualities, but not in the 
 masculine proportion. Sex also irrevocably decides for 
 the average man, as for the average woman, the plus 
 and minus of each attribute. Woman's mode of life 
 must so defer to the tendency of her sex, that a variety 
 of objects are prevented from pressing into her experi- 
 ence. She is less actively in motion from place to place 
 than man, who mingles with many crowds and learns to 
 
214 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 reflect upon their actions. Her brain is not so multi- 
 fariously stored with facts and relations, because there 
 are some scenes from which she must always be remote. 
 If, apart from sex, a considerable portion of a person's 
 training has been by hearsay, that person's judgments 
 will be sentiments rather than reflections ; but sex de- 
 cides that hearsay shall enter largely into woman's train- 
 ing. The rude, fierce, cunning competition of naked 
 men in the palaestra, without blush or apology, gave 
 girth to the breasts which were bucklers before the 
 glory and the arts of Greece. Many a situation that is 
 as coarse as a pugiHst puts us in prudent trim. Women 
 derive from our education a benefit which their muscle 
 is too delicately draughted to procure. Events that do 
 not mince their speech give us a thorough knowledge 
 of our mother-tongue. We overhear the other people, 
 weigh their words, enrich ourselves with facts, or pro- 
 tect ourselves against omens. She is more likely to be 
 well-behaved than man, but less likely to be tolerant of 
 ill-behavior. When she feels particularly virtuous, she 
 is apt to condemn swiftly and fatally where man would 
 suspend his judgment till all the qualifying facts were 
 put into the case. Human development has in this re- 
 spect conferred upon man a great advantage that dates 
 from the barbaric rule of the stronger, and has been 
 re-enforced by the varied experience of every generation. 
 Just as woman is entering upon a more independent 
 career, she betrays a deficiency in the quality of humor. 
 Man was turned loose in the pasture to feed at random 
 upon all the plants that drew nutritious and poison- 
 
Women and Men. 215 
 
 ous saps : stramonium and clover were indiscriminately 
 cropped ; but Heaven gave to its wild creatures tough 
 stomachs to begin with. They effect a compromise with 
 such complacency that literature is charmed to celebrate 
 it ; and the dew of humor condenses beneath a long-' 
 suffering sky. A powerful and happy digestion does not 
 prefer the noxious weeds ; but it has learned how to ac- 
 count for them, and to measure their effects. 
 
 Women are not good readers of any kind of plays. 
 The movement and lapse of events in a novel are more 
 congenial to their secluded life. And I venture to im- 
 pute to the average woman a thinly running vein of 
 humor as the reason why she finds such difficulty in 
 admiring Shakspeare. Many of the finest women can 
 never conquer their repugnance. There seems to be in 
 it something of impatience at the dramatic intervals and 
 the movement by incessant colloquy, something of an 
 equanimity of passion, something of fright at the broad 
 and powerful statement, which flinches at nothing ; blabs 
 dreadfully of Juliet's clandestine feeling ; keeps Helena 
 in contented ear-shot of ParoUes, and lets her devise an 
 indelicate solution of the plot ; shows the sweet Marianna 
 of the moated grange ready to help on another play with 
 the same alacrity, and leaves Nature everywhere, in the 
 most passionate or vulgar phases, to her absolute sin- 
 cerity, and concedes to her the freedom of the dictionary. 
 Women do not like to be charmed along through scenes 
 of tender and lofty feeling to stumble over the sentences 
 of porters, carriers, camp-followers, fellows on a frolic ; 
 phrases that hiccough a decided waft of sack ; clauses 
 
2i6 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 that throw a leer in passing. Even the high passionate- 
 ness of kings and lovers, when it is the purest, seems to 
 the average woman to blaze with extravagance. To her 
 it is the overstatement that kidnaps true sentiment and 
 brings it up for the stage. She does not recall a moment 
 of her life that could have recognized such feeling, or 
 have framed for her secretest thought ~a corresponding 
 whisper. Do her brothers and acquaintances smoulder 
 with these wraths and fervors inside of their demure suits 
 of gray-mixed and black ? Are all the men who circu- 
 late in society, and enframe her waist at balls, liable to 
 attacks of this erysipelatous condition t Does she sit at 
 divine service with such neat packages of rend-rock in 
 the pew ? So the Shakspearean ideal of the great pas- 
 sions of mankind has to be watered for her through the 
 modern novel, trickle by trickle of protracted rheto- 
 ric, drop by drop of overflavored style. She turns with 
 resentful cheeks from Juliet's expectant mood, and man- 
 ages to read pages that are too sickly to kindle a blush. 
 And yet perhaps they are equivocal enough to have puz- 
 zled Dame Quickly and frightened Falstaff. Certainly 
 the equivoque has not lost its voice " with hollaing and 
 singing of anthems." 
 
 Some offences, chiefly those which concern propriety 
 and chasteness, are so repugnant to a woman's disposi- 
 tion that they excite a fanaticism which sometimes is 
 slow, and sometimes eager, to condemn the reputed of- 
 fender. That is to say, the same disposition is compe- 
 tent to give credence to an accusation slowly, or to give 
 it impetuously and with loathing. If there be a case 
 
Women and Men. 217 
 
 involving testimony, it is not deliberately weighed, its 
 intricacies patiently pursued, its implications as well as 
 its statements justly rated, and all the parts of it fitted 
 to an opinion of innocence or guilt ; but there results 
 instead a state of feeling from previous opinions and 
 assumptions, which no testimony, however strong, can 
 do much to reverse. Women, indeed, naturally shrink 
 from familiarity with the testimony, and do not wish to 
 reach an opinion by probing it. The defendant may 
 enjoy the immunity of a woman's assumption that the 
 charge is in his case incredible, and refuted by all her 
 previous associations with his life ; or he may suffer from 
 her want of any feeling derived from previous knowledge 
 of his life, or from considerations dependent upon per- 
 sonal sentiment. 
 
 Woman's instinct of purity is specially intolerant 
 towards the unfortunate members of her own sex. She 
 will not hear a word : she is deprived of the power to 
 weigh circumstance, environment, the complicity of 
 others, the wile and treachery of life. The outcast does 
 not even have the benefit of a trial. No court is held in 
 which mercy seasons justice, like one that was long ago 
 extemporized over the woman who knelt on the pave- 
 ment of the Temple. The men in that crowd were 
 chiefly interested to convict the Master, and not the 
 sinner. If women were present, as is quite probable, 
 they composed a jury that was adverse to the ruling of 
 the court, unless they fell into sympathy from pique at 
 the mock chastity of the men. 
 
 In the first scene of the " Midsummer Night's Dream," 
 
2i8 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Hermia and Lysander are in love with each other. 
 Demetrius, who was once deep in love for Helena, has 
 transferred his midsummer inclination to this Hermia, 
 leaving Helena as deep in love with him as ever, but 
 finding Hermia full of disdain. Now Hermia's father 
 would have her marry Demetrius ; so she and Lysander, 
 to escape from this paternal preference, agree to meet at 
 night, and fly together from Athens to a darling old aunt 
 who lived at some Hellenic Gretna Green. At this 
 point, Helena enters, who loves Demetrius as much as 
 he now dislikes her. The lovers confide to her their 
 purpose of flight ; and Hermia, for comfort, says that 
 she will soon be beyond the reach of Demetrius. Then 
 Helena is left alone to her reflections, during which she 
 says, — 
 
 " For ere Demetrius look'd on Hermia's eyne, 
 He hail'd down oaths that he was only mine ; 
 And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt, 
 So he dissolv'd, and showers of oaths did melt. 
 I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight : 
 Then to the wood will he to-morrow night 
 Pursue her : and for this intelligence 
 If I have thanks, it is a dear expense : 
 But herein mean I to enrich my pain, 
 To have his sight thither and back again." 
 
 Coleridge frames, in a criticism upon this passage, a 
 sweeping indictment of the feminine disposition. Start- 
 ing with a misconception of the text, he appends to it a 
 statement that does not seem to me accordant with the 
 facts. 
 
 He attributes to Helena a "broad determination of 
 ungrateful treachery," and then adds : " The act itself is 
 
Women and Men. 219 
 
 natural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise too 
 true a picture of the lax hold which principles have on a 
 woman's heart when opposed to, or even separated from, 
 passion and inclination. For women are less hypocrites 
 to their own minds than men are, because, in general, 
 they feel less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in 
 and for itself, and more of its outward consequences, as 
 detection and loss of character, than men, — their nat- 
 ures being almost wholly extr'oitive." * 
 
 Now there is no treachery in the act of Helena, be- 
 cause there is no damage in it to the runaways. If she 
 supposed that Demetrius could prevent the flight or 
 prevail over Hermia's repugnance, she would never have 
 given the information to him. Her motive is entirely 
 distinct from treachery, and is rooted in a truly feminine 
 hope of disgusting Demetrius by showing the woman he 
 loves running away with another man. This may cure 
 his passion, and possibly revive it for herself. But she 
 modestly says that even thanking her would be too great 
 a strain upon him. Still, so far from fancying that Deme- 
 trius can detach Hermia from Lysander, she means to 
 "enrich her pain," — that is, deepen it, by following to 
 witness his despair at her rival's flight, then have him 
 back again. For then, perhaps, his feeling may return 
 
 * This word was issued from Coleridge's private mint, but never got 
 into circulation. He invented some words, not to avoid circumlocution, 
 of which there is quite enough in his style, but to save trouble by extem- 
 porizing tallies for his thought, as surveyors use the nearest sticks on 
 their line. The ecclesiastical word, " introit,'' — a passing from within to 
 enter the church, — hinted to him "extroit," — a starting from without. 
 He means that women proceed from social convention, and not from 
 interior thought. 
 
2 20 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 to her from the point of appreciating her act which dis- 
 enchants him. All this we have to put down tediously 
 to rescue Shakspeare's compactness from Coleridge's 
 misrepresentation. 
 
 But it gives me an opportunity to suggest that women 
 are less hypocritical to their own minds than men are, 
 not because they feel less proportionate abhorrence of 
 moral evil in and for itself, and more of its outward con- 
 sequences, but because they have an organic instinct, 
 that is due to difference of sex, to be swayed first by 
 passions and inclinations that are entirely frank and un- 
 conventional, and afterwards by motives arising out of 
 abstract principles. Therefore they are natively uncon- 
 scious of something which men smile at or deplore, as 
 they call it insincerity. In the description of one of his 
 characters, Bulwer says, " That strange faculty in women 
 which we men call dissimulation, and which in them is 
 truthfulness to their own nature, enabled her to carry 
 off the sharpest anguish she had ever experienced by a 
 sudden burst of levity of spirit." 
 
 Thackeray shows how this native trait can run to 
 viciousness : " When I say I know women, I mean I 
 know that I don't know them. Every woman I ever 
 knew is »■ puzzle to me, as, I have no doubt, she is 
 to herself. Say they are not clever .' Benighted idiot ! 
 She has long ago taken your measure and your friends'. 
 She knows your weaknesses, and ministers to them in a 
 thousand artful ways. She knows your obstinate points, 
 and marches round them with the most curious art and 
 patience, as you will see an ant on a journey turn round 
 
Women and Men. 221 
 
 an obstacle. Every woman manages her husband : every 
 person who manages another is a hypocrite. Her smiles, 
 her submission, her good humor, for all which we value 
 her, — what are they but admirable duplicity .■' We ex- 
 pect falseness from her, and order and educate her to be 
 dishonest. Should he upbraid, I'll own that he prevail ; 
 say that he frown, I'll answer with a smile : what are 
 these but lies, that we exact from our slaves ? — lies, the 
 dexterous performance of which we announce to be the 
 female virtues." 
 
 But, if a noble woman would defend her art of com- 
 plaisance, she might justly borrow the words of Queen 
 Katherine, in that fourth scene of tlje second act of 
 " Henry VIII.," which is manifestly a portion contrib- 
 uted by Shakspeare : — 
 
 " Heaven witness, 
 I have been to you a true and humble wife, 
 At all times to your will conformable : 
 Ever in fear to kindle your dislike, 
 Yea, subject to your countenance, — glad or sorry, 
 As I saw it inclined. When was the hour 
 I ever contradicted your desire. 
 
 Or made it not mine too ? Or which of your friends 
 Have I not strove to love, although I knew 
 He were mine enemy ? " 
 
 In cases that are not involved with passion, inclina- 
 tion, or some personal and social coil, the moral judg- 
 ment of woman is natively far better than fear of 
 detection. And, if a man prides himself upon some 
 superiority in this respect, he has something to conceal. 
 What social circle in the world is not made eminent by 
 cases of a sense of duty that sustains itself against 
 
2 22 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 inclination and personal respects! Suffering heroism 
 holds up ill-fated alliances and conceals them nobly 
 from the common eye ; there is protracted sacrifice 
 which puts the finger of silence to quivering lips. 
 There are not a few women whom youthful sentiment, 
 like a paid emissary, has decoyed into cruel disenchant- 
 ments, and there betrayed them to the stake : the fagots 
 are piled, the years contribute fresh fuel, but the flames 
 extort no cry. For the highest considerations of con- 
 science, the tenderest maternity, lights a counter-fire 
 that shrivels the complaint. The world never discovers 
 that this auto-da-f^ is going on of a woman who is too 
 delicate and noUe to dash the sparks of it among her 
 neighbors for the brewing of tea-table gossip, and the 
 kindling of little bonfires of sympathy. 
 
 But, in social and public transactions, the average 
 woman can be the bitterest partisan and the most reck- 
 less defyer of justice : it is when her sentiment is in- 
 volved, her pride is hurt, a specific interest of house 
 or person threatened, her egotism irritated. With men, 
 partisanship is the result of complex motives ; with 
 woman, it is an unmixed, aboriginal passion. Bosom 
 friends never know two sides to a quarrel : the woman 
 who is implicated is sure, when she makes her state- 
 ment to female intimates, of an absolute and abject 
 belief in her truthfulness. They will not take the 
 trouble to learn, or even care to inquire after, the posi- 
 tion of the other party. If it be a man, he will be per- 
 fectly conscious of this manoeuvre of nature without 
 taking much pains to set up a counter-movement, or to 
 
Women and Men. 223 
 
 create a party of his own. Manifold occupations supply 
 a salutary rebuke of pettiness, and help to drive the 
 matter from his mind. If it be a woman, much time 
 and feminine resource will be lavished in self -exonera- 
 tion. She will go to and fro in a vigorous canvass of 
 society, to create a clan and clothe it in the plaid of her 
 sprightly confidences. Its bucklers coldly gleam in 
 every assembly. 
 
 There are some vices which circulate through the 
 world without invading the seclusion of woman. She 
 cannot imagine what they are ; consequently they re- 
 main so vague that she has no more blame for them 
 than for the nebulae in Orion. Financial operations, for 
 instance, are so intricate that she shrinks from follow- 
 ing, and so foreign to the course of her life that they 
 secure a languid attention. Her lover or husband can 
 easily make it appear to her that his violations of trust 
 are either the knavery and carelessness of others, or 
 admissible procedures ; and, if she is as deeply in love 
 as he is in offence, she will resort to connivance rather 
 than divorce. Jessica plunders her father, and then 
 calls out to her lover, — 
 
 " Here, catch this casket ; it is worth the pains." 
 
 But, not being quite sure if she has taken enough, she 
 jeturns to gild herself "with some more ducats." It 
 was a highly profitable "irregularity:" — 
 
 " Two sealed bags of ducats, 
 Of double ducats, stol'n from me by my daughter ! 
 And jewels, — two stones, two rich and precious stones, 
 Stol'n by my daughter ! " 
 
224 ^^^y Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 One of the stones was a diamond worth two thousand 
 ducats, and another was a turquoise which her mother 
 gave to Shylock before marriage. That she exchanged 
 in Genoa for a monkey. A critic says of these trans- 
 actions, " We recognize a certain equity in their furtively 
 taking what we think he ought to have voluntarily be- 
 stowed." This anxiety to prbtect Shakspeare from 
 moral blame disregards some feminine possibilities. 
 Jessica's offence was the very one, the only one, of 
 which she was capable ; and, like all such lapses, her 
 act was due to circumstances conspiring with latent 
 tendency. We are not reconciled to her behavior by 
 recalling the pound of flesh ; for the theft of the jewels 
 is as contrary to mercy as the stipulation in Antonio's 
 bond. But love and sex prevail : she behaves like any 
 full-blooded nature who has been defrauded of her 
 rights, immured in a house with the " vapor of a dun- 
 geon," cut off from amusements and sympathies, from 
 gondolas and serenades. She spends money foolishly 
 after she gets it, thanks to the father who scrimped her. 
 It depends upon how deeply we mean to hate Shylock 
 whether his howls over the transaction of the monkey 
 delight our ears. 
 
 There are many things which we have not allowed 
 woman to understand : she has been stinted in her edu- 
 cation and secluded in her pursuits beyond the organic 
 requisition of her sex. Public affairs of the highest 
 importance pass through her mind like the blurred im- 
 pression made upon her 'by the multifariousness of a 
 daily newspaper ; and we know what candid awkward- 
 
Women and Men. 225 
 
 ness balks the attempt to seize and unsnarl the vital 
 points of the morning sheet. The marriages and deaths, 
 being in large type and a conventional place, compete 
 with the advertisements of low-priced cottons and flan- 
 nels, and are only forgotten when the column that flat- 
 ters with the latest fashions storms the well-dressed 
 heart. Perhaps the same sheet announces the last pa- 
 thetic moment of the Crimean campaign, which men 
 follow with the eager interest of participants, as they 
 are pledged to the cause of either party because they 
 estimate the weal or woe of human races. Perhaps the 
 Franco-Prussian war is creating an historic epoch in 
 the politics and religion of Europe, involving new ad- 
 justments of the social and democratic life, making 
 Luther's half battles whole ones, and leading all the 
 bitter experiences of France into the solution of a re- 
 public. It is safe to say that the majority of women 
 are indifferent to the closely printed columns which 
 men follow with almost the literal precision of the com- 
 positors who set them up. Perhaps the statement may 
 be hazarded- that the emancipation of woman depends 
 considerably upon her rivalry with man at the news- 
 stands, and. her patient sifting. of the contents of her 
 purchase. The proposition is not so fantastic as it may 
 appear. I have been astonished at the repugnance of 
 sprightly and intelligent women for the labor that the 
 genuine news of the day from every nation requires, as 
 it deserves, to be extracted from papers of value and 
 dignity ; for each throb of honest news carries for- 
 ward the second-hand that marks the hours of mankind. 
 
 "5 
 
226 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Woman prefers to know the interests of the planet by 
 hearsay, to sit over her fine task and listen to some 
 man who has sopped up each crisis : he distils the day 
 into a few drops of her luxury. It evaporates like the 
 scent upon her handkerchief. She will hardly derive 
 the benefit of discussing it. Her native sense ought to 
 be furnished with a just appreciation of public affairs, 
 enlightened observation of them, well-balanced abhor- 
 rence of all the iniquities, sustained and practical reflec- 
 tion upon the great proceedings of the world. If the 
 claims of the household can never afford her time for 
 this, she must decline the peril of increasing masculine 
 ignorance by the weight of a single ballot. 
 
 But, in private and domestic life, what Aladdin's lamp 
 she rubs in secret to enrich her day ! When a woman 
 has a good deal of common-sense, she never uses it to 
 ponder with. It is a daylight that pervades all at once 
 without arriving by degrees. It is wonderful to see her 
 swiftness in unknotting man's perplexed forehead with 
 her talent that is used to snarls. It was not the result 
 of a process of inferring and considering : she is the 
 most considerate when she taxes herself the least to be 
 so. And, if you ask her how she reasons upon any sub- 
 ject, she might reply as Julia did when pressed to give 
 her reason for thinking Proteus the best man : — 
 
 " I have no other but a woman's reason : 
 I think him so because I think him so." 
 
 A woman will tell you that probably she drops out 
 stages, and does not have to pass through all the terms 
 which detain a man ; so that the process is like evapo- 
 
Women and Men. 227 
 
 ration, — a broad and insensible deduction. This is a 
 constant surprise to man, who supposes that his logical 
 ability must be superior in all exigencies, because it is 
 so essential in science and the classification of the 
 world, and wherever he trains facts to observe their 
 proper sequence. But woman's brain vaporizes syllo- 
 gism, and a subtle aether vibrates. Her limitation is a 
 great superiority on its appropriate field. 
 
 Hermia tells Theseus that Lysander is a worthy gen- 
 tleman. The Prince replies : — 
 
 " In himself he is ; 
 
 But, in this kind, wanting your father's voice. 
 
 The other must be held the worthier. 
 Her. 1 would my father look'd but with my eyes ! 
 The. Rather your eyes must with his judgment look.'' 
 
 But that is past expecting or desiring, for there is often 
 a better judgment in her tact. 
 
 It is also a reason for the inability of man to thor- 
 oughly fathom all her moods and motives, for it is the 
 advantage which sex procures for her. We sometimes 
 understand her secret convictions as little as we do the 
 minds of children, who are as removed from us by time 
 as she is by sex. It is a distance equally difficult to 
 surmount ; for though we too have been children, and 
 suffered or rejoiced in secret, we have entirely forgotten 
 how it was all done, or with what sequences of moods 
 and partial reasonings our experience was gained. If, 
 therefore, there be always something of audacity in the 
 attempt to analyze the natures of women, in life itself 
 or in Shakspeare's living characters, the confession must 
 soften the offence, and, if there be failure, pardon it. 
 
2 28 Wi^, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Those gestures of the female intelHgence which we 
 may call intuitive afford her an advantage in her inter- 
 course with the other sex. Notice how Shakspeare's 
 women read the men and understand them better than 
 the other men do. Those who are most interested to 
 know the disposition of their associates are not the first 
 as a matter of course to discover it ; but it is frequently, 
 and in grave junctures, revealed by the swift instinct of 
 some woman. Men are not conscious when they are ob- 
 served by women, because the survey is made so silently. 
 We are as little, conscious of the unobtrusive forenoon 
 which envelops every act and feature and sets them in 
 plainness. The glance of an observing woman does not 
 pierce a man at any spot : it surrounds the whole of him 
 at once impalpably. Or sometimes it is one swift flit of 
 her face across your own, like the shadow of a bird's 
 wing. It is gone before you can declare that she looked 
 at you. But the glance was an estimate : it cost her 
 scarce a second to peruse every cubic inch of you, and 
 audit a hundred years of ancestry. The glance is with- 
 drawn, and goes into obscurity, like an instantaneous 
 sun-picture, there to deepen into distinctness. Almost 
 every woman has set up a gallery of these impressions, 
 which she shows rarely, and to her trusted intimates 
 alone. But there you are preserved, — a simpleton, a 
 rowdy, a gallant, a rogue, or a gentleman ; one who 
 respects, who honors, or who thinks lightly of her ; one 
 who is capable of valuing or of depreciating ; one whose 
 hand is clean enough to touch or nettlesome to roughen 
 her delicacy ; one whose secret and unspoken effluence 
 
Women and Men. 229 
 
 is salubrious, or somewhat doubtful, to be kept at bay, 
 to be considered while you are the most profuse of 
 honorable sentences. In the long run, you will gene- 
 rally succeed in justifying all her silent estimates. She 
 took you unawares, in a moment when your lip did not 
 move with your tongue, or the eye motioned to her some- 
 thing dubious, or the whole face was a daybreak of clarity 
 and honor. Ponder well, and lend it second-thoughts, 
 when a woman bids you, upon the motion of her instinct, 
 be cautious or be confiding, be profuse or chary, be still 
 over-ears in love or cured of that distemper. To a young 
 man the freedom of a good woman's estimate of other 
 men supplements the university ; for he is a pupil who 
 is fathomed previous to being taught. 
 
 Are our steps dogged then, and all our proceedings 
 watched by non-commissioned detectives, who enjoy the 
 immense advantage of being born in every house, and fur- 
 nished with a passport into every other 1 Is a badge con- 
 cealed in every reticule, to be displayed when the occasion 
 comes to arrest us, which may be at the moments of our 
 critical feelings, when confidence, and not exposure, is 
 vital to us .' A fine woman has not the consciousness 
 that belongs to spies : she is guiltless of the act and the 
 intent to watch us. Men deliberately set themselves to 
 the work of scrutiny, and pay out all the line they have to 
 fathom an associate, and bring up his mud or gold -sand 
 sticking to the sinker. It does not always reach the 
 grounds of his being. But clear-headed women en- 
 velop other natures as the air which simply exists to 
 drench all objects through their pores, by the stress of 
 
230 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 miles of heaven's blue piled on it. As every unconscious 
 breath we draw compels the air to enter and circulate 
 through us, so all our involuntary moods and actions 
 invite the woman's perception. Who is not willing to 
 exist immersed in this frank element that is without a 
 motive .' 
 
 But if some obscure caprice in a woman is always 
 ready to steal out and nibble at her judgment, or if some 
 obliquity faults her intrinsic nature, she can mistake you 
 as rapidly as otherwise she might correctly hit. Nothing 
 can be more unjust and cruel, more bitterly fostered, 
 more viciously proclaimed, or virtuously insinuated, than 
 the impromptu misinterpretations of a shallow or preju- 
 diced woman. She may not be deep enough to be danger- 
 ous ; but her prejudice saturates the mind, and there is 
 no margin of a woman left. She plies her pea-blower in 
 all companies : the little projectiles carry breath enough 
 to tingle. They hit the people who ought to be your 
 friends with a blow aimed by something that is unlike 
 yourself, and which you are not capable of becoming. 
 It is yourself soured in her spleen, poisoned by her spite. 
 Some unsatisfied emotion degenerates into a damaged 
 judgment. 
 
 If the instinct of womanhood be vitiated in a person 
 of strong character, who insists upon being admired, and 
 sweeps into her net all the adoration that is afloat, or if 
 she is unsexed by any kind of mean ambition, her touch 
 for man will be blunted. She will probably report his 
 cutaneous defect, and overlook his spiritual substance. 
 In treasuries and mints, the selection of women is made 
 
Women and Men. 231 
 
 to count the coin, because by the mere liandUng they can 
 detect and throw aside the light weights and the spurious 
 metal. In the test to which women subject men, the 
 hands must be unsophisticated, and the blood of a born 
 lady, high gr low, must feed the subtle finger-ends. 
 
 When Sir Toby Belch says that Sir Andrew hath all 
 the good gifts of nature, Maria's quick taste answers, " He 
 hath, indeed, — all most natural." A great many men 
 are boozily unconscious of the traits of their companions ; 
 but all women know each other thoroughly ; and they 
 tacitly allow for each defect, unless some spiteful moment 
 aggravates them. To say that they know each other like 
 a book is to overestimate the great majority of books. 
 The more delightedly they greet each other, the more 
 keenly are they remembering mutual frailties. Perhaps 
 those of the charming morning-caller will transpire when 
 her call is over. To your surprise, you learn that she is 
 intriguing ; that, indeed, she will not stick at a falsehood, 
 — well, an indirection ; that she is a very pushing 
 woman, and quite capable of fawning if any social thrift 
 will follow. And this absent friend atones for the con- 
 straint of her call by unbosoming her hostess to some 
 other listener, who is pleased to learn that the fabric of 
 the world will not crumble so long as both of them have 
 daughters and sisters, who must get into society where 
 marriage benedictions are pronounced, or where style, at 
 least, is piety. 
 
 How nicely Maria decants the essence of Malvolio, 
 without spilling or clouding, when Sir Toby asks her, 
 " Tell us something of him " ! Now Maria wants to 
 
232 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 marry Sir Toby, so she bends to every breeze, of his 
 humor, but is never overset : she could not misrepresent 
 Malvolio even to please Sir Toby who has been so rated 
 for overdrinking. She tells the simple truth of her ob- 
 servation : the steward is " the best persuaded of him- 
 self ; so crammed, as he thinks, with excellences, that 
 it is his ground of faith, that all that look on him love 
 him." Sir Toby first sees Malvolio in his true aspect, 
 and exclaims with admiration, " She's a beagle, true 
 bred ! " So is every sound woman who is not called off 
 the track by the small game of feminine crotchets and 
 conceits. 
 
 Queen Margaret, the wife of Henry VI., has a mind so 
 distempered by a hankering for political distinction that 
 she misreads the grief of the good Duke Humphrey, the 
 king's uncle, when she succeeds in degrading and ban- 
 ishing the Duchess. And she asks the King, — 
 
 " Can you not see ? or will you not observe 
 The strangeness of his alter'd countenance ? " 
 
 She interprets the sombre mien, the fixed look, and the 
 stiff gait of the sorrowing Duke into evidence of a ran- 
 corous and treasonable purpose. But the King knows 
 better. 
 
 " Our kinsman Gloster is as innocent 
 From meaning treason to our royal person, 
 As is the sucking lamb or harmless dove." 
 
 He sees in Humphrey's face "the map of honor, truth, 
 and loyalty." The Queen's ambitious discontent with the 
 popularity of Humphrey discolors all his actions, so that 
 she half believes he is at work to win the heart of the 
 
Women and Men. 233 
 
 common people, that he may supplant the King. This 
 half belief is flung by her upon the face of Humphrey, 
 into the very eyes of his loyalty, and embosses it with 
 the leprosy of her slander. 
 
 The English people were scandalized by the inter- 
 ference of Alice Perers with the politics of the reign 
 of Edward III. She was a "fair piece of sin," for 
 whose sake Edward anticipated his dotage. When Par- 
 liament interfered to break up a scandal that astonished 
 even the court of France, Alice was perfectly ready to 
 take an oath never again to see the King ; for she 
 knew that he valued her counsels because he drivelled 
 over her person. So she returned from exile in time 
 to misrepresent the most honest and outspoken man 
 in Parliament, Peter de la Marr, who was well acquainted 
 with the back-stairs policy which she would fain im- 
 port into the government of England. As history bids 
 her shift across its light in the various outlines of her 
 domineering temper, to show her to us seated on the 
 bench with the judges, suggesting to them what their 
 ruling must be, or as she drives a trade between the 
 court and foreign envoys, and mistranslates to the King 
 the bias of popular opinion, we perceive a woman whose 
 facile sex is merely a sop to drug a king in order to con- 
 trol his policy. The pages of royal and republican annals 
 are mildewed with these old spots of decayed woman- 
 hood. Like dead flowers put to be pressed against some 
 sweet or lofty rhyme, their musty petals mark the place 
 where a single vice enlisted all the fine perception of the 
 sex against honest manhood and the spirit of the age. 
 
234 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Bertram, in "All's Well that Ends Well," is under 
 the influence of Parolles, " a snipt-taffata fellow, " who 
 goes buzzing around like a " red-tailed humble-bee " in a 
 vile yellow suit all stuck over with bows and trimmings. 
 Bertram has been often advised to cast him off : " There 
 can be no kernel in this light nut ; the soul of this man 
 is his clothes ; trust him not in matter of heavy conse- 
 quence." Bertram is a raw boy for discernment, and 
 insists that Parolles is very valiant, and has a good 
 knowledge of the world. His friends are obliged to lay 
 a plot, and invite him to be witness to Parolles's coward- 
 ice and knavery : not till then will he confess to the • 
 crudeness of his judgment. 
 
 But Helena, though well disposed to like a man who 
 is Bertram's companion, has read him thoroughly, and, 
 moreover, has the instinct to perceive that the man's 
 knavery is so inbred that it suits him better than honesty. 
 Her observation is full of subtlety : — 
 
 " I know him a notorious liar. 
 Think him a great way fool, solely a coward ; 
 Vet these fix'd evils sit so fit in him, 
 That they take place, when virtue's steely bones 
 Look bleak in the cold wind." 
 
 The " evils " have a congenial place in such a tempera- 
 ment : a bleaker one would discourage the finest virtues. 
 His nature fortunately cannot be reformed, since reform 
 would turn a most satisfactory and harmonious mis- 
 creant into a scrubby gentleman. " And that's the 
 humor of it," as Nym would say. Shakspeare puts 
 this rare breadth of judgment into the mouth of a 
 woman. 
 
Women and Men. ^35 
 
 Imogen's step-mother, the Queen and wife of Cym- 
 beline, is a strong-minded woman, who "bears all down 
 with her brain." She rules the king by force or craft, 
 and has arranged to marry Imogen to her own shallow- 
 pated son Cloten. This ancestress of all the plotting 
 step-mothers carries poison in her heart: her relatives 
 may expect to find it in their food ; for she is curious in 
 distilling the essences of noxious herbs, under a scientific 
 pretext to watch their effects in creatures not worth the 
 hanging. But the compound that is ostensibly for rats 
 is intended to dispossess Imogen of all her watchful 
 liegemen, including her husband ; and then, after getting 
 her married to Cloten, the " mortal mineral " was meant 
 to waste the King by inches to a grave that should be a 
 royal footstool for her son. 
 
 Now the King has no suspicion of the simmering 
 deviltry that he embraced. When all her projects are 
 discovered, he exclaims, — 
 
 " O most delicate fiend ! 
 Who is't can read a woman ? " 
 
 Not he, certainly ; for he had been fooled in the time- 
 honored way of crafty women. 
 
 " Mine eyes 
 Were not in fault, for she was beautiful ; 
 Mine ears, that heard her flattery ; nor my heart, 
 That thought her like her seeming." 
 
 At the point of death, she confessed to her physician the 
 whole of her unsexed intent. She never loved the King 
 as Lady Macbeth loved her lord, but only affected the 
 greatness got by him : she was wife to his place, but 
 
236 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 abhorred his person. Who but a woman could play that 
 game with such an air of jaunty probability that invested 
 her blackest kisses ! Imogen's husband was a scorpion 
 to her, ranked among the vermin which she meant to 
 kill for pastime. And she purposed to lull the King 
 into security by " watching, weeping, tendance, kissing," 
 while her poison was vacating his throne. At the last, 
 she only repented that the evils she hatched were not 
 effected, " so, despairing, died," a martyr to an unfulfilled 
 ideal. She is really the Lady Macbeth of the popular 
 conception, being fiendlike from ambition. It would not 
 have been Shakspearean if such a woman had been 
 duplicated to furnish a wife to Macbeth. One hated 
 with all her baflfled spite, and the other loved with all 
 her heart, her King. 
 
 Shakspeare would have us notice that the clear-sighted 
 Imogen has privately read her step-mother, and lives with 
 suspicions for her constant warders. The King, having 
 banished Posthumus who was secretly married to her, 
 has turned her over to the*jailership of the Queen, who 
 tries to cajole her : — 
 
 " No, be assured, you shall not find me, daughter, 
 After the slander of most stepmothers, 
 Evil-ey'd unto you." 
 
 Then she grants the married pair a stolen interview, in 
 order that she may whip out and bring the King in to 
 discover them, She knows the King will lae displeased ; 
 but she calculates that after his first anger is cooled 
 he will load her with favors to atone for his impetu- 
 osity : — 
 
Women and Men. 237 
 
 " I never do him wrong, 
 But he does buy my injuries to be friends ; 
 Pays dear for my offences." 
 
 What a capable woman, with this new patent for deplet- 
 ing a husband's pocket by wringing his heart ! What 
 an extraordinary endowment of a husband's heart to 
 connect its spasms with the purse-clasp ! 
 
 Imogen feels the manoeuvre of the Queen when she 
 leaves to hurry up the King ; and she says to Posthu- 
 mus, — 
 
 " O dissembling courtesy ! How fine this tyrant 
 Can ticUe where she wounds ! " 
 
 Why, then, if Shakspeare endowed her with this pene- 
 tration, does she not at a glance unmask lachimo when 
 he comes pretending that Posthumus has been false to 
 her in exile, and proffering himself that she may take 
 revenge in kind ? Because she has such a heart of trust 
 in her husband that both her ears cannot hastily abuse 
 it. The conflict between lachimo's counterfeit news and 
 her loyal memory occupies the whole field of her being, 
 and keeps out the base design. She listens to lachimo 
 with ears attuned by the high praises which her husband 
 sends by letter to introduce a friend "of the noblest 
 note." lachimo is the creature of her husband's admira- 
 tion, sent to be admired, suspicion disarmed in advance, 
 not a sentry left on duty before her frankness. His 
 hints of a dishonorable purpose cannot be taken by a 
 mind that is unable to conceive dishonor. So her abso- 
 lute spotlessness drives him to the plainest speech ; for 
 such an artless and unconscious woman never tasked his 
 
238 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 lips before. When the revelation comes, like a hideous 
 scrawl of flame, across her clear firmament in the very 
 high noon of her confiding, the heaven of purity rains 
 down at once, and there he is, swimming for life in the 
 flood of her disdain. Then he saw womanhood in one 
 " awe-inspiring gaze " that might have prompted Shelley 
 to exclaim, — 
 
 " Her beams anatomize me, nerve by nerve, 
 And lay me bare, and make me blush to see 
 My hidden thoughts." 
 
 What an angelic impossibility of hearing is Imogen's ! 
 She has nothing that ever dreamed to itself of the 
 covert meaning of his words. Without a second's 
 interval of parley, not even time enough for natural 
 astonishment, one peremptory instant annihilates his 
 hope. 
 
 It is not every woman, even of the irreproachable 
 kind, who wields so prompt a lightning of her chastity. 
 And here Shakspeare has marked the difference between 
 unconsciousness and prudery. I think that Isabella 
 would have understood lachimo much earlier, for the 
 matter of her virtue was constantly in her thoughts, as 
 a. thing to be guarded against an undermining world. 
 Her indignation is voluble ; and she undertakes to 
 reason in a priggish fashion with Angelo. But Imogen 
 simply calls her servant that lachimo may be taken in 
 an instant out of the room. Many a woman whose life 
 has been without a stain is still less intolerant than 
 Isabella, and more complaisant than Imogen. Race 
 and climate are largely implicated in these natural 
 differences. 
 
Women and Men. 239 
 
 When Madame de S^vignd heard of her husband's 
 infidelities, it was through the interested malice of her 
 cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, who was in love with her. He 
 proposed that she should seek to be revenged : " I will 
 go halves in your revenge ; for, after all, your interests 
 are as dear to me as my own." She quietly replied : 
 " I am not so exasperated as you think." 
 lachimo said, — 
 
 " Revenge it. 
 I dedicate myself to your sweet pleasure, 
 And will continue fast to your affection." ' 
 
 Imogen's white-heat of honor shrivels up the wit of the 
 French lady. Her mind can make but one motion, to 
 cry out, " What ho, Pisanio ! " 
 
 " Away ! — I do contemn mine ears, that have 
 So long attended thee." 
 
 Thou dost solicit a lady 
 
 " That disdains 
 Thee and the devil alike." 
 
 lachimo now pretends that he was only making trial of 
 her by a false report and by a counterfeited overture, — 
 and all for the sake of the love he bore her husband. 
 This is quite enough : her frankness returns as suddenly 
 as it was dismissed. For, as lachimo well said, — 
 
 " The gods made you. 
 Unlike all others, chaffless." 
 
 And that is a statement of the limit placed by Nature to 
 her womanly shrewdness of observation. 
 
 In the historical dramas, Shakspeare seldom intro- 
 
240 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 duces women in order to make them convey to us 
 impressions of character, traits of mind or heart. They 
 are not so much feminine shapes as persons implicated 
 in the play by the accident of relationship to the men. 
 The parts are not particularized by them. Lady Percy, 
 with one or two light touches of eager inquisitiveness, 
 hints her fond and simple love. Queen Katherine fills 
 out the proportions of a pathetic figure. But in " Henry 
 V." Mrs. Quickly monopolizes all the point and savor : 
 the Queen of France and her daughter are only lay- 
 figures of the plot. In " i, 2 Henry IV.," it is the 
 same. In " Richard II." the Queen seems merely born 
 to this, — 
 
 " That my sad look 
 Should grace the triumph of great Bolingbroke." 
 
 And her gardener plants a bank of rue 
 
 " In the remembrance of a weeping queen." 
 
 But, in " King John " both the grief and the character 
 of Constance are more personally set forth, and we be- 
 come aware of her distinctive quality. Queen Kath- 
 erine, in " Henry VIII.," also puts an accent, different 
 from that of Constance, upon her misfortunes ; and 
 her grief reveals another mood of the feminine nature ; 
 so that she attains to a separate consideration. 
 
 None of the women in the historical plays stand by the 
 side of the men so emphasized as the mother of Arthur 
 is : she agitates his claims with an impetuous sincerity 
 that ought to have kept him alive to reign. 
 
 A high-minded man who claims his rights, and a high- 
 
Wovten and Men, 241 
 
 minded woman who does the same, express themselves 
 in different styles. The feminine style is shown in 
 Constance with great discrimination. Both sexes can 
 hate injustice, and may be opposed to compromises. 
 Both can have indignation for a crime. But see how 
 Constance puts into these moral feelings a scorn and a 
 swiftness of dissent, urged by a volubility more native 
 to a woman than to a man. Woman is apt, indeed, to 
 be too voluble : each minute of her phrases breeds new 
 ones ; so she does not stop to notice that her indictment 
 is shorter than her breath. Therefore men are apt to 
 notice and to complain that her indictment does not 
 reach up to the tide-mark of her breath. But the invec- 
 tive of Constance is the swift weapon-play of maternity : 
 it flashes through every guard, touches rapidly to and 
 fro, and draws blood at every unexpected touch. 
 
 A man's moral disposition has not been nourished 
 and toned by the additional organs which impose wife- 
 hood and motherhood upon a woman. In her, more nerve 
 centres are involved, with an exquisite sensibility for pain 
 and pleasure which the average man's life seldom reaches. 
 His bosom is not ample enough to contain such throbs 
 of acquiescence or revolt. Every fount of feeling is 
 twinned in woman, and sweet as the milk is, mingled 
 by love, so sharp and bitter is its flavor made by hate. 
 Her nerves revenge the violence of acts which she sup- 
 poses dishonorable : she can fight with glances more 
 searching and words more unequivocal than the cooler 
 man will furnish. No doubt that his disdains, too, can 
 summon all his blood to blush and lower magnificently 
 
 16 
 
242 Wti(, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 on the cheek. But her blood seems richer in the red 
 corpuscles : it wins, therefore, and is more visited by, the 
 air of heaven. There is no blush so daunting, no look 
 so penetrating to dissolve, no silence of a surprised 
 conscience so unanswerable. And when she grieves, 
 it seems as if the eyes were re-enforced, for all the 
 founts of motherhood are weeping. 
 
 This ability to vindicate the right and to repudiate 
 the wrong can easily become absurd to the spectators 
 when it is charged with some excess of temper. Litera- 
 ture does ample justice to the termagant vein, and shows 
 that it is ludicrous because it devotes a high degree of 
 choler to a low measure of affront. In pantomimes, an 
 enormous gun is pointed toward the audience, with ex- 
 travagant anticipation of its exploit on the faces of the 
 perforniers. For a moment we are cowed, but laughter 
 fills the vast space between the fa,int puff and the noise 
 we expected. 
 
 I presume that Xantippe felt justified in making the 
 home of Socrates so unpleasant that he preferred the 
 market, the forum, and the leather-dresser's shop, be- 
 cause she thought he neglected her for all those places, 
 and wasted time, and kept her drudging, while he ran to 
 find, men and make their coarse grain revolve to sharpen 
 his soul's edge against it. Perhaps, as Socrates was 
 famed for falling into brown studies, which sometimes 
 lasted all day, with contempt for food, it was a case of 
 chronic absence of mind on the subject of dinner ; for 
 that is as vital as to ■n-peirov koI kuXov, the ethically 
 proper and the beautifully true ; and no household can 
 
Women and Men. 243 
 
 dispense with it, — in fact, children cry for it. Perhaps 
 he supped many a time upon the hemlock of her tongue, 
 and became so acclimated to the draught that the last 
 cup in prison tasted sweetly. 
 
 Shakspeare shows the exaggeration of the protesting 
 temper in woman by means of the little spat between 
 Queen Eleanor and Constance, in ii. 7. 
 
 A woman's language becomes exacerbated because 
 she is so inadequate to protest by actions. The weak- 
 ness rolls itself into a bristling defence of words. Men 
 do not drip so profusely into words because they are 
 reservoirs of force and competency. They know that 
 by fair means or foul they can effect purposes from 
 which women are debarred by seclusion, strangeness of 
 habit, and innate reserve. Among women there is a 
 certain resentment at this civic and social disability 
 which does not stint expression. 
 
 When, however, a noble woman with a level counte- 
 nance repudiates an unjust charge, she transfers herself 
 from the bar to the bench, and unseats her summoners. 
 Their purpose quails before this innocence that is so 
 weak, yet grows so overpowering, as in the beauty of 
 Madame Roland and the prison-blanched majesty of 
 Marie Antoinette. The rebuke pulls down the accuser's 
 eyes from their threat, and they seem to go wandering 
 into corners furtively for refuge. Joan of Arc burns in 
 court before the deluded men who claim her as an imp 
 of witchcraft have time to pile their fagots : the pas- 
 sionless chastity gives out blinding sparks when thus 
 enforced ; the cheeks of by-standers arc reached by 
 
244 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 them and set aglow. No man who has been unjustly- 
 dealt with, and selected for foul practice, can reach such 
 palsying dignity of behavior that turns the axe's edge 
 or holds the arm suspended in mid-resolve. There is 
 a high manly scorn which is beyond refuting : it can 
 kindle admiration in unwilling minds, and compel base- 
 ness to pause and to confer. But woman's beauty, 
 planted in the breastplate of an untainted heart, becomes 
 a petrifying image ; and whoso meets the ruthless look 
 will remember it even in the moment of a consummated 
 revenge. Nothing helps bad men at such a sight but 
 the poor subterfuge of flying into a rage, as if to muster 
 in that way momentum enough to huddle her off, to get 
 her where the condemning head shall fall before its eyes 
 or lips can utter another protest. They shear it at the 
 neck, never reflecting that they thus untether it to range 
 in other skies, to unkennel heaven sleuth-hounds at last 
 and drag them down. 
 
 " I will instruct my sorrows to be proud : 
 For grief is proud, and makes his owner stoop. 
 To me, and to the state of my great grief, 
 Let kings assemble : for my grief's so great 
 That no supporter but the huge firm earth 
 Can hold it up : here I and sorrow sit ; 
 Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it." 
 
LORD BACON AND THE PLAYS; 
 
 SHAKSPEARE'S WOMEN: 
 
 LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE. 
 
LORD BACON AND THE PLAYS. 
 
 A CONSIDERATION of the theory that Lord 
 Bacon wrote the plays which are attributed to 
 Shakspeare comes in here more conveniently, because 
 it will appear that Bacon's knowledge of women and his 
 experience of the passion of Love, as expressed in his 
 works, are so meagre and so colorless when contrasted 
 with the plays that the fact might stand alone, with 
 scarce a comment, to refute the theory which is so elab- 
 orately defended. In its proper place this will appear. 
 In the mean time, some notice may be taken of a few 
 points of the theory which seem to have gained a recog- 
 nition so far as to produce scepticism in many intelli- 
 gent minds. 
 
 Books enough are published in various languages 
 filled with preternaturally far-fetched conjectures con- 
 cerning Shakspeare. Many of them are devoted to 
 proving that he must have been brought up to this or 
 that profession. Lord Campbell has shown the extent 
 of the poet's knowledge of legal terms, and his aptness 
 in placing them. A surgeon claims him on the ground 
 of his knowledge of the technical terms used in medical 
 art. Bucknill and others,' on the same ground of techni- 
 cal knowledge, prove that he must have been trained as 
 a mad-doctor. A musician refers to his love of music, 
 botanists to his accuracy in grouping flowers according 
 
248 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 to their seasons, and Hastings is convinced that he was 
 bred a bird-fancier. Each investigator discovers his 
 own specialty in the teeming pages, and insists upon 
 apprenticing the poet. The doctor points to the line in 
 " Hamlet," — 
 
 "And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee," — 
 
 ar^d asks, with an air of conviction, how any one at that 
 period, who had not been bred to the profession, could 
 have understood the ginglymoid structure of the knee ! 
 The Worshipful Master of the Bard-of-Avon Lodge 
 claims masonic fraternity with him, thinking that al- 
 lusions to masonic terms and customs are scattered 
 through the plays, but chiefly on the strength of Hu- 
 bert's words in " King John," — 
 
 " They shake their heads, 
 And whisper one another in the ear, 
 And he that speaks doth grip the hearer's wrist ; " 
 
 for that action is the symbol of the sublime degree ! 
 Dr. Farmer anchored his theory that Shakspeare was in 
 his youth, and during the unaccounted-for years after he 
 left Stratford, a sharpener and dealer in skewers, upon 
 these lines from "Hamlet:" — 
 
 "There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, 
 Rough-hew them how we will." 
 
 These skewers were of the kind then used to fasten 
 bales of wool. But Hugh Miller, who began life as a 
 stone-cutter, finds in those lifies a clear indication that 
 the poet was bred to be a stone-mason ! And at last a 
 practical printer by the name of Blades pro.ves that he 
 worked at the printer's trade ; for he speaks about 
 
Lord Bacon and the Plays. 249 
 
 " printing kisses " and the print of hoofs. In " Love's 
 Labor Lost " is the clause, " I will do it, sir, in print ; " 
 and in the " Winter's Tale," " I love a ballad in print." 
 Blades even apprentices him to the printer Vantrollier, 
 who at the time enjoyed the monopoly of printing a 
 certain class of books. Up to the present date, the 
 number of professions and employments to which Shak- 
 speare was trained amounts to twenty-four. No doubt 
 some one is preparing to show that he must have been 
 a fishmonger, and the lines which invite his attempt are 
 quite as apposite as any of the above : " A fish : he 
 smells like a fish ; " " The luce is a fresh fish, the salt- 
 fish is an old coat ; " " They are both as whole as a 
 fish ; " and, more decisive than all, " The fish lives in 
 the sea." By all means, let us have the sixty-eight allu- 
 sions to fish and fishing in Shakspeare elaborated into 
 one final theory, that he spent four years on a herring- 
 smack ; for how otherwise could the Clown in " Twelfth 
 Night " have told Viola that a pilchard was a big her- 
 ring .' 
 
 There is another kind of criticism to which the plays 
 have been subjected that imputes to them all the after- 
 thoughts of later times. Ulrici derives from them an 
 evangelical scheme of Christian ethics ; a Roman Cath- 
 olic claims the poet as an ardent adherent of the Pope ; 
 another commentator attributes to Shakspeare a delib- 
 erate purpose to write up the Protestant Reformation 
 and write down the Pope, and finds a trace of Shak- 
 speare's contempt for Romanism in " i Henry IV.," iv. i, 
 where the troops of the Prince of Wales are described 
 as — 
 
250 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 " Glittering in golden coats, like images." 
 
 Sievers * thinks that the main thread of all Shak- 
 speare's poetry was the " reproduction out of the nature 
 of man of the Protestant scheme of Christianity" ! It is 
 shown particularly in the " Merchant of Venice " and 
 " Hamlet." Tschischwitz's f book is as deterrent as his 
 name. It is an attempt to develop Shakspeare's views 
 upon the relation between ruler and people, — to show 
 that he considered the state and kingdom to rest upon 
 reciprocity of duties and upon the principle of piety. 
 This is only another specimen of the terrific after- 
 thoughts which the Germans force hack upon Shak- 
 speare. Gervinus calls him the perfect representative 
 of modern Protestantism ; Vischer concluded that he 
 was a Pantheist ; Bernays will not 'allow to him any re- 
 ligion at all ; while Dr. Reichensperger, of the German 
 Parliament, gives reasons in his book J for believing 
 that he was an Ultramontanist ! And Thomas Tyler, 
 of the University of London, considers that Hamlet 
 was a forerunner of Schopenhauer, and thoroughly pes- 
 simistic, because the calamity in the play does not re- 
 spect personal character, and the future retributions and 
 compensations are not clearly made out ! § 
 
 * W. Shakspeare, Sein Leben und Dichten dargestellt, 1866, xvi. 534. 
 
 t Shakspeare's Staat und Konigthum, nachgewiesen aus der Lancas- 
 ter Tetralogie. 1866. 
 
 X Shakspeare in Verhaltnisz zum Mittelalter und der Gegenwart. 
 
 § We do not forget nor undervalue the labors of Schlegel and Tieck ; 
 the dissertation upon " Hamlet " in " Wilhelm Meister ; " the admirable 
 contributions through several years to the " Jahrbuch der Shakspeare- 
 Gesellschaft ; " the articles in the " Shakspear-Museum " and other Ger- 
 
Lord Bacon and the Plays. 251 
 
 It would be a dreary business to construct a catalogue 
 of all these modern slights to the memory of Shak- 
 speare. They turn his plays into a system of theology. 
 Some critics declare that his object was to make celi- 
 bacy ridiculous and marriage honorable ; some labor to 
 prove that the plays are treatises upon the Christian 
 doctrines of justification by faith and the salvation of 
 man ; some point to his Baconian method of induction ; 
 and others reject the whole over-done business of inter- 
 pretation, because they simply claim for Bacon himself, 
 the authorship of all the plays : as if Shakspeare were 
 turned inside out, wrung dry, macerated and dispersed, 
 by two centuries of vigorous comment, and it became 
 necessary to begin operations upon a fresh person. 
 These operations have enriched litera,ture with its most 
 grandiose specimens of futility. 
 
 With respect to this last effort of modern criticism, it 
 might suffice with many to repeat an observation made 
 by Lowell, who said that, if any person was disposed to 
 believe that Bacon wrote the plays, he could set himself 
 
 man periodicals; the edition of Shakspeare translated by such men as 
 Bodenstedt, Delius, Gildemeister, Herwegh, Heysej &c., many of them 
 distinguished for poetic talent. The attack by Benedix upon the " Shak- 
 speare mania " has brought out excellent comment from Noire and Dr. 
 Wagner. Wagner's editions of the plays, with notes and commentary, 
 are good : so is Dr. Jacob Heussi's " Hamlet." The essays of Karl 
 Elze, of E. Hermann, Kreyssig, V. Friesen, Otto Ludwig, and several 
 other contributors to the Jahrbuch, cannot be neglected by scholars of 
 Shakspeare : they are sharply distinguished from the dilettante work of 
 Fulda and others, and from the subjective excess of the writers named 
 above in the text. The English lover of Shakspeare cannot afEord to 
 indulge an indiscriminate dislike of the German revival. The Shak- 
 speare-Lexicon of Dr. Schmidt is a magnificent piece of work. 
 
252 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 right by reading Bacon's paraphrase of the Psalms. One 
 dose of that would settle the supremacy of Shakspeare 
 back upon the seat of reason. 
 
 The following verse is a specimen of the average 
 workmanship expended on this paraphrase: — 
 
 " So shall he not lift up his head 
 
 In the assembly of the just. 
 For why ? The Lord hath special eye 
 
 To be the godly's stay at call ; 
 And hath given over righteously 
 
 The wicked man to take his fall." 
 
 Half a score of lines may be found of a better quality 
 than those above exhibit ; but the bad ones have been 
 purposely selected as yielding the only sensible and 
 conclusive test. The writer of the plays could not have 
 been guilty of them. Some things we know to be im- 
 possible, — that Sidney should display the white feather ; 
 that a gentleman should ever once practise a scurvy 
 trick ; that a woman all compact of grace, animate with 
 the instinct of fitness, should ever make a vulgar ges- 
 ture ; that the genius which interfused the plays should 
 ever have gone to rot on the Lethean wharf of those 
 prosaic lines. Nay, the question whether Bacon com- 
 posed the plays grows pale before a greater one, — If he 
 did compose them, what debility suggested to him this 
 undertaking of the Psalms .' There they already stood, 
 in their tender, majestic English, simple as Hamlet's 
 soliloquy and Macbeth's regrets, — a mother-tongue that 
 resents the adulterate touch. We have a right to call 
 upon those who espouse the Baconian theory of the 
 plays to account for the existence of the paraphrase. 
 
Lord Bacon and the Plays. 253 
 
 Lord Bacon wrote some lines eommending the natu- 
 ral defence of an upright conscience. So did Shak- 
 speare. Let us compare them : — 
 
 " The man of life upright, whose guileless heart is free 
 From all dishonest deeds and thoughts of vanity ; 
 The man whose silent days in harmless joys are spent, 
 Whom hopes cannot delude nor fortune discontent, — 
 That man needs neither towers nor armor for defence. 
 Nor secret vaults to fly from thunder's violence." 
 
 In the second part of " Henry VI. " are found the lines 
 which are memorable to all English-speaking people : — 
 
 " What stronger breast-plate than a heart untainted ? 
 Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just ; 
 And he but naked, though lock'd up in steel. 
 Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted." 
 
 We have plainly another case of paraphrase to be ac- 
 counted for ; and we can understand why Bacon, who 
 used to send sonnets to Elizabeth to soften her heart 
 towards Essex, should lament, " But I could never pre- 
 vail with her." 
 
 The badness of Bacon's efforts at poetry has sug- 
 gested to me the possibility that some of the didactic 
 passages in the plays which Shakspeare altered and 
 amended for the theatre, were left as they came from 
 his pen ; just as other passages from the playwrights of 
 that day may be found streaking the rich Shakspearean 
 lode, recognized by their inferiority or difference of 
 style, but no longer imputable to the culprits by name. 
 Pages of this un-Shakspearean matter may have drifted 
 from Bacon's pen into the original crudeness of some of 
 the plays, particularly into those which set forth periods 
 of history. 
 
254 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 One is tempted to make this surmise serve to explain, 
 a famous argument which the Baconians derive from a 
 letter written by a friend to Bacon in acknowledgment 
 of the present of a volume which he had lately pub- 
 lished. This friend was Tobie Matthew, a devoted 
 adherent of Bacon, who had done him important ser- 
 vice from time to time, and who consequently was fre- 
 quently saluted with the little pots of incense which 
 Tobie swung adoringly before his patron. Now Bacon 
 wrote him a letter dated the 9th of April, the year not 
 given ; but it must have been after January, 1621, 
 because Matthew's reply addresses the Viscount St. 
 Albans, and Bacon did not receive that title previously 
 to the above date. Bacon's letter accompanied a copy 
 of a volume. Matthew's reply acknowledges this "great 
 and noble token" of his "lordship's favor." And the 
 Baconians claim that this token was the Folio of the 
 Plays, published in 1623 ; and they point triumphantly 
 to the postscript to Matthew's letter, which runs thus : 
 " The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my na- 
 tion, and of this side of the sea, is of your lordship's 
 name, though he be known by another ; " that is to say, 
 a few intimate friends, like Matthew, knew perfectly 
 well that Bacon wrote the plays, but suffered them, for 
 prudential reasons, to appear under the name of Shak- 
 speare, who doubtless had some hand in them. The 
 temptation is, I say, to account for that postscript by 
 supposing that Matthew was acquainted with those in- 
 ferior passages which may have strayed into the plays 
 from the pen of Bacon, that he appraised them with the 
 
Lord Bacon and the Plays. 255 
 
 judgment of a toady, and exaggerated their quantity as 
 well as quality. This method for breaking the force of 
 Matthew's postscript I reject, for the simple reason that 
 it is not only strained, but superfluous ; for Bacon pub- 
 lished his "History of Henry VH. " in March, 1622, 
 the " De Augmentis " in October, 1623, and the " Apo- 
 thegms" in December, 1624. One of these books, 
 prpbably the first of them, and the first which Matthew 
 had received from Bacon since he was made Viscount 
 St. Albans, was sent ; and Matthew took the first oppor- 
 tunity to flatter Bacon with his title in connection with 
 his genius, saying in the postscript, "A most prodigious 
 wit is my friend Bacon, though he now passes by the 
 other designation as Viscount St. Albans." 
 
 It is alleged that Bacon did not wish to be reputed a 
 poet, lest his preferment and prospects at the Court 
 should be impaired. It seems to me that he needed not 
 to dread the imputation of having written poems. Veins 
 of a lively fancy run through the prose of his great 
 treatises, and he was largely endowed with the scientific 
 imagination ; but his verses are dry as a remainder 
 biscuit. The divine art was not in those days imputed 
 to any man on such pretences. 
 
 One advocate of the Baconian theory thinks that the 
 poems of " Lucrece " and " Adonis " were dedicated to 
 Southampton, under the name of Shakspeare, as an 
 arranged and designed cover, for the real author. But 
 why, supposing this, was Shakspeare selected as the 
 cover 1 A man selected for such a purpose must have 
 been deemed by contemporaries competent to have 
 
256 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 written the poems, else there could have been no 
 cover in using his name. 
 
 Did Ben Jonson, who was intimate with Bacon, know 
 the secret of the authorship of the plays, and thus know 
 that the manuscripts in use among the players must have 
 been copies, and yet say, in praise of Shakspeare, "I 
 remember the players have often mentioned it as an 
 honor to Shakspeare, that in writing (whatever he 
 penned) he never blotted out a line " ? Jonson could 
 never have written so in the secret conviction that Shak- 
 speare did not compose the lin'es, some of which Jonson 
 wished he had blotted. 
 
 With respect to the saying which was common among 
 the players, the following points deserve consideration : 
 First, it may have been a generalization carelessly made 
 by admiring friends and comrades ; second, what did 
 they really know about it ? They only saw the acting 
 copies made for the theatre whose property they were. 
 They knew nothing about Shakspeare's preliminary 
 sketches and studies, the first drafts, the tentative out- 
 lines and passages. Third, the total absence of suspi- 
 cion among them that he did not write the plays, but 
 only copied them from some unknown author's manu- 
 script, is unaccountable. Every probability would be 
 against it. Among the players who knew Shakspeare, 
 saw his daily life, computed how and where he spent his 
 time, gauged him as a companion and a wit, such a secret 
 would soonest leak out and spread all over London, or his 
 reputed authorship would be soonest exploded and treated 
 as a joke. For they and Jonson b^est knew the man. 
 
Lord Bacon and the Plays. 257 
 
 And this probability was not rebutted by Lord Palmers- 
 ton; when, alluding to Jonson's remarks, he jauntily 
 said, " Oh, these fellows will always stand up for each 
 other!" for what reasons existed for protecting Shak- 
 speare by reticence or by elaborate lying ? 
 
 In the discussion, which has lately been renewed, 
 upon the authorship of the plays, the points which are 
 chiefly relied on by the Baconians are these : i. The 
 plays are too great, and out of all proportion to the 
 obscurity which rests upon Shakspeare's life, and to the 
 insignificance of his contemporary fame. 2. They are 
 filled with all kinds of classical allusion, professional 
 information, legal, medical, horticultural, scientific, to an 
 extent which an obscure play actor could not possibly 
 comprise within the limits of his ragged and scanty 
 education. 3. The plays contain remarkable parallel- 
 isms with passages in Bacon's works, and coincidences 
 of thought and expression. 
 
 These are the points of chief consequence which claim 
 the plays for Bacon. To the critics who make this claim 
 it is wonderful that one man from Stratford, so little 
 known and prized, of whom no account of education and 
 career survives, should have sent down to posterity, side 
 by side with tha great works of Bacon, compositions 
 which are parallel in greatness and abreast of them in 
 fame. They are too great for any one man of that 
 epoch, unless that man be the greatest and wisest of 
 his day. But how much more wonderful is the prob- 
 lem which, by implication, these critics set before us, — 
 namely, to account for the fact that Bacon should have 
 
258 Wt^, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 produced not only Shakspeare, a miracle for one mind, 
 but himself besides ! It taxes the resource of miracle 
 less sharply to refer the plays back again to Shak- 
 speare. 
 
 For which shall we prefer ? To accredit Bacon with 
 the authorship because he knew all the law and science 
 which the plays include ; or to accredit Shakspeare with 
 it because he possessed all the poetic flow, imagery, 
 and. plastic art, all the passion and humor, which the 
 plays include ? Of the two sets of endowments, which 
 could have resulted in the plays ? Not the first without 
 the second. But the second, then, being absolutely 
 essential, must make the first to be also an essential 
 accessory, whether we can or cannot account for the 
 possessorship of it by Shakspeare. Because we can, 
 from the published writings of Bacon, derive the fact 
 that, however poetic his prose may sometimes be, and 
 fertile in apposite wit and fancy, it does not supply the 
 peculiar imagination, and, least of all, the genial sense 
 of humor, which reigns through all the plays. If the 
 more important qualities be impossible to Bacon, a suffi- 
 cient accessory acquaintance with terms of law, facts of 
 science, and scraps of classic learning may not be im- 
 possible to Shakspeare. 
 
 Let us ask, too, would Bacon have taken the risk of 
 writing for the theatre .' His relations with the Queen, 
 his desires for office and persistent struggles to attain 
 it, his exigency to keep a clean record with the Cecils 
 and his other jealous rivals, are supposed to have been 
 the motives for concealing his authorship. The opinion 
 
Lord Bacon and the Plays. 259 
 
 of public circles would have tainted him with the " vul- 
 gar scandal " of being a playwright. No doubt it would, 
 and have effectually barred advancement. For he was 
 known, watched, dreaded, appraised, opposed by too 
 many people. His secret would not have waited two 
 centuries for another Bacon to discover. How much 
 worse for the aspiring statesman would have been an 
 exposed concealment. The more exacting the motive 
 for concealment appears, the more exacting appears the 
 motive for doing nothing that required concealment. 
 
 All which Bacon did for the Court, from a politic dis- 
 position, in getting up masques and entertainments, was 
 openly done. The labored and jejune speeches, and 
 other matters, which he prepared for masques, have 
 come down to us. He could be tolerated in this, and 
 not in writing for the theatre, because a writer of plays 
 could not wrest from public opinion the grave and stately 
 responsibilities which he was eager to assume. Other 
 lawyers of the day wrote for the stage ; but they were 
 not born in the line of England's chancellors. 
 
 And in those days the emoluments of a playwright 
 were too trifling to attract a man like Bacon, who 
 managed to keep himself so deeply in debt that once, at 
 least, he breathed the air of a spunging-house. Nothing 
 but place, retainers, royal donations of rented estates, 
 and official fees, could save him from the money- 
 lenders. 
 
 As it is supposed that Shakspeare was not well 
 acquainted with the Latin writers, we are asked to 
 account for the appearance of classical quotations in 
 
26o Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 the plays from writers who had not yet been trans- 
 lat-ed. In the " Taming of the Shrew," iii. 7, there is 
 one from Ovid's Epistles. If Bacon wrote the play, 
 we may suppose that he quoted directly from Ovid. 
 Then why, in Act i. I of the same play, did he not 
 quote a Latin line directly from Terence, instead of 
 taking it from Lily's Grammar where the quotation is 
 not correct 1 And suppose Shakspeare never did nor 
 could read Ovid : it was easy enough for him to pick 
 up those two lines for the fun in iii. i, even if we reject 
 the opinion that attributes large portions of an earlier 
 form of the play to Marlowe. If Shakspeare only knew 
 Latin through Lily's Grammar, he might have taken 
 Terence from it ; but Bacon's scholarship was above 
 that. 
 
 A large part of the plot of the " Comedy of Errors " 
 was drawn from the MencBchmi of Plautus, a play 
 which Bacon frequently quotes. On the supposition 
 that Shakspeare was unacquainted with it, we easily 
 account for his knowledge of the plot. A previous 
 play, called the "Historic of Error," acted in 1577, was 
 derived from the same comedy of Plautus ; and William 
 Warner's translation of it was freely handed about in 
 manuscript for some time before the appearance of the 
 " Comedy of Errors," though it was not entered at 
 Stationers Hall till June, 1594.* 
 
 There is a curious parallelism between the fourth 
 scene of Act iv. of the " Winter's Tale," where Perdita 
 shows her tender knowledge of flowers, and Bacon's 
 
 * Fleay's "Shakspeare Manual," p. 25, a most serviceable book. 
 
Lord Bacon and the Plays. 261 
 
 Essay on Gardens which was not printed till 1625. 
 So it appears that both men were acquainted with the 
 same facts concerning the succession of flowers through 
 the months of the year. And there is nothing strange in 
 that ; for the flowers took their same times to bloom for 
 Shakspeare in Stratford as they did for Bacon near Lon- 
 don, or in the retreats of Gorhambury. But it is only 
 enough to contrast the exquisite lines of Perdita with 
 Bacon's cataloguing prose, in which not one epithet 
 save " pale '' and " yellow " appears, to feel quite sure 
 that the flowers breathed no charm into Bacon's fancy. 
 
 " O Proserpina, 
 For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall 
 From Dis's wagon ! daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty ; violets, dim. 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 
 Or Cytherea's breath ; pale primroses. 
 That die unmarried, ere they can behold 
 Bright Phoebus in his strength." 
 
 If precious articles at public vendue — Gobelins, rare 
 Palissys, Majolicas, and Sevres ware — happen* to tally 
 with an auctioneer's list of the sale, does it seem quite 
 credible that they were all the production of the auc- 
 tioneer .'' " Merciful, wonder-making Heaven ! " What 
 a myriad-minded auctioneer ! 
 
 Indeed, does any one dare to say that Shakspeare and 
 Bacon did not compare notes upon many subjects .■' 
 Many of the reputed parallelisms are indirect traces of 
 such an intercourse ; and it is not a sufficient objec- 
 tion that Shakspeare is nowhere mentioned by Bacon. 
 Neither are Spenser and Marlowe ; and we know that he 
 
262 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 was acquainted with Ben Jonson. Did Ben Jonson and 
 Shakspeare never go to Gray's Inn togetlier? Shak- 
 speare helped Johnson to write his tragedy of " Sejanus ; " 
 and the latter was frequently with Bacon during the 
 period of composition ? I love to think, as it cannot be 
 disproved, that Shakspeare met high themes of specula- 
 tion, Nature's curious secrets, and choice allusions of 
 learning, amid the books and apparatus of the philo- 
 sopher, where problems dear to both these men were 
 discussed. Such an intercourse as this, which varied 
 his close companionship with Essex and Southampton, 
 would be quite sufficient to account for the coincidences 
 which support the Baconian theory: there is, for in- 
 stance, the passage in " Troilus and Cressida " that puts 
 into Hector's mouth a queer bit of didactic anachronism. 
 Reproving Paris and Troilus, he says, — 
 
 " You have both said well ; 
 And on the cause and question now in hand 
 Have gloz'd, — but superficially ; not much 
 Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought 
 * Unfit to hear moral philosophy." 
 
 Aristotle really alluded to " political philosophy ; " and 
 when we find that Bacon made the same mistake in his 
 "Advancement of Learning," printed before the play, 
 we think we can see that book in Shakspeare's hand, or 
 overhear with him the error lapsing in the flow of con- 
 versation. But perhaps the passage which includes it 
 was one of the parts of " Troilus and Cressida " which 
 did not proceed from Shakspeare's pen. Certainly there 
 was not poetic license enough in Bacon's mind to plant 
 a seaport in Bohemia, and make Aristotle a contem- 
 
Lord Bacon and the Plays. 263 
 
 porary of the Trojans. Neither would he have affronted 
 
 his historical sense and hurt his reputation as a scholar 
 
 by importing into " Henry VI.," and attributing to Jack 
 
 Cade and his followers, the socialistic doctrine and mad 
 
 behavior which Holingshed shows to have belonged to 
 
 Wat Tyler in the reign of Richard II. It is also strange 
 
 that the scholar. Bacon, should have put into the mouth 
 
 of a person in " Coriolanus," i. 4, line 57, that allusion 
 
 to Cato, — 
 
 " Thou wast a soldier 
 Even to Cato's wish." 
 
 M. Porcius Cato was born b.c. 234 : the play belongs to 
 B.C. 490. And if anybody knew when Galen was born, 
 A.D. 1 30, it was Bacon ; yet Menenius, in the same play, 
 ii. I, line 128, says, "The most sovereign prescription in 
 Galen is but empiricutic." But Shakspeare's main ob- 
 ject was to write a play, and co-ordinate his groups. So 
 he paired off his characteristics with each other to grat- 
 ify the poetic exigency of the play, and not always to 
 render strict tribute to the Muse of History. 
 
 Can anybody positively deny that Shakspeare stole 
 away from the Mermaid more often then his fellow- 
 actors and poets relished, to spend the evening with 
 Essex at Gray's Inn, perhaps while Bacon was busy 
 upon his " Characters of Julius and Augustus Caesar " 
 in 1607-8, — for not long after that the famous tragedy 
 appeared ; perhaps to urge him with the happy sug- 
 gestions of friendship to write his Defence of Shak- 
 speare's own dear Essex .' There was, indeed, that 
 " semblable coherence " between the spirits of the phi- 
 
264 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 losopher and the poet which qualified them to be mutual 
 instructors; and the mobile and apprehensive intellect 
 of the poet could absorb without books the thoughts 
 that filled the air round Bacon's head. The structure 
 of Shakspeare, open at every pore to every influence, 
 was pervaded with the conversations of his age : the 
 interchange made a thoroughfare of him ; and, as it 
 passed, he detained all the nutriment that his imagina- 
 tion craved, and let the rest escape. He lived amid 
 this impromptu wit and knowledge of illustrious friends, 
 saturated with their atmosphere, passing it through the 
 deep-breathing lungs to redden, and transmitting it by 
 magnificent pulses to the hearts of his spectators, purged 
 of superfluity, sweetened by gentleness, drenched in 
 grace. By every sense, with the nerves of every touch, 
 he appropriated character, love, theory, and life. Lon- 
 don was library and university ; and poetic intuition 
 was the tutor of his soul. So — whether jesting at the 
 Mermaid, and growing forgetive upon the sack ; visiting 
 the haunts of travellers and mariners to pick up strange 
 tales ; listening to the multifarious comment of a Bacon, 
 ' and turning over his rarities of books ; or lounging by 
 the river-side with Southampton, the centre of a group 
 of the most advanced, curious, brilliant men of the Eliza- 
 bethan age — he became, in person, the coincidence 
 which pervades the dramas ; and all inquisitions upon 
 the amount of literary culture which he achieved, or 
 surmises about his earlier employments, become imper- 
 tinent, if they are not made ridiculous, as his great, 
 receptive, broad-domed soul covered over London's 
 world and drew up its variety. 
 
Lord Bacon and the Plays. 265 
 
 There is a kindred gift in Robert Browning, which 
 makes its confession thus : — 
 
 " If we have souls, know how to see and use. 
 One place performs, like any other place. 
 The proper service every place on earth 
 Was framed to furnish man with ; serves alike 
 To give him note that, through the place he sees, ' 
 
 A place is signified he never saw, 
 But, if he lack not soul, may learn to know." 
 
 The soul of the true artist being cosmopolitan, any 
 place can become the centre of his circumference ; for 
 he is already outside of the world which his neighbor- 
 hood is too little to embrace. Perhaps his neighbors 
 are penurious step-dames who make scanty provision for 
 emotion, and detest passionate experiences of every kind. 
 But his imagination cannot starve. It implies all " the 
 pomp and circumstance of glorious" life, just as the 
 genius of creation involved and anticipated ourselves, 
 who dress fof it a perpetual banquet though no man 
 Sees it feeding, and none offer it their alms. The artist's 
 soul transmutes the refuse of factories, the sweepings of 
 coal, bone-parings, and street-scraps into the brilliant 
 colors which, like clarions, precede Beauty's procession 
 and summon the spectators. 
 
 If Lord Bacon wrote the plays, he must have con- 
 ceived the female characters which invest them with 
 such dignity and graciousne^s. To have done that 
 required a comprehension of the varieties of the female 
 disposition, such as could be derived only from personal 
 contact and experience. To have seized some broad 
 features of the plays, Bacon must have been acquainted 
 
266 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 with many degrees of social state beneath his own. We 
 can trust Shakspeare in the tavern and its purlieus as 
 frankly as we would the Persian poets, Saadi and Omer 
 Khayam, who saw in the full cup a symbol of the divine 
 afflatus. But we cannot imagine that Bacon was a fre- 
 quenter of those London haunts where Dick the Butcher 
 took his ale before Jack Cade decreed that the three- 
 hooped pot should have ten hoops, and made it felony 
 to drink small-beer ; where Falstaff leered and tossed 
 his ballast over in a sea of sack ; where Parolles vapored, 
 and Bardolph blushed, and Pistol's English grew tipsy ; 
 where 5ir Andrew and Sir Toby roared catches, and 
 Feste and the other clowns made excellent fooling into 
 the small hours ; where Bottom mildly exhaled at the 
 head of the table at which Flute, Snout, and Starveling 
 took their pots after the shop-shuttfers were up ; where 
 Dame Quickly maundered, and Mistress Overdone and 
 Doll Tearstreet made largess of their brassy smiles. A 
 poet may convert the tavern-bench into a wool-sack: 
 " This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, 
 and this cushion my crown." But a Queen's Solicitor 
 and future Lord Chancellor could not risk pawning the 
 wool-sack for a tavern-bench. Even the gift of poetry 
 would not have so badly endangered his prospects. 
 
 Bacon knew the wives and daughters of his friends 
 and associates. He was at home in the families of the 
 Pakingtons and Barnhams and Hattons. He doubtless 
 noted the peculiarities of Lady Rich, Mistress Vernon, 
 Elizabeth Throckmorton, and the other women of that 
 crowd upon the steps of the throne. So many of 
 
Lord Bacon and the Plays. 267 
 
 these were cast in the same mould, that he would have 
 been meagrely provided with female types, leaving us 
 unable to account for the great range of character which 
 fills the scene, from awkward Audrey to queenly Her- 
 mione, from Mistress Overdone to Imogen, from the 
 Pander's wife to Marina, from Phebe to Perdita. 
 
 Moreover, search Bacon's writings upon this matter of 
 knowledge of woman to find, if you can, hints and pas- 
 sages which are parallel with the plays in temper or 
 language. Look for traces of that fervor which devotes 
 the plays to the great central passion, and consecrates 
 them with so many moods and styles of womanhood. 
 Ransack his letters in vain for any deep consciousness 
 of sex like that which makes every play personal and 
 vital with something that cannot be put aside. Read 
 his Essay on Love, and contrast its dry, pragmatic 
 tone with the pages which palpitate with Juliet, or those 
 over which Viola tenderly broods and Helena frankly 
 shines. Can we imagine that essay to have been a 
 treasured favorite of Desdemona, or to have beguiled 
 Ophelia during the absence of her prince, or to havp 
 served Cleopatra except to hang on Antony's hook for 
 a sinker, as for jest she hung the salted cod 1 Isabella 
 might have safely furnished a copy of it to every nun in 
 her convent ; but Imogen, for all her " pudency so rosy," 
 would not have taken it to bed with her, to read three 
 hours and fold down the leaf where she left off. The 
 warmest expression which Bacon was ever overheard to 
 make is preserved in a speech in praise of love, written 
 probably for a masque. The speaker says : " In the 
 
268 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 melting of a horse-shoe, can a mighty dead fire do as 
 much as a small fire blown ? In shaping metals, can a 
 mighty huge weight do as much as a blow ? It is mo- 
 tion, therefore, that animateth all things : it is vain to 
 think that any strength of Nature can countervail a 
 violent motion. Now, affections are the motions of the 
 soul. Let no man fear the yoke of fortune that's in 
 the yoke of love." 
 
 But the details which defend the Baconian theory are 
 too numerous to be met and properly treated unless one 
 had a volume's space at disposal. Each one is trivial ; 
 and the total effect of the theory depends upon a nice 
 aVid patient construction of a cumulative argument, such 
 as lawyers know how to use. Probably the majority of 
 adherents to the theory will come from the legal profes- 
 sion, or from the class of minds that is trained to appre- 
 ciate the importance of all the little points of some 
 routine. But so long as the court before which this case 
 is argued must have for judge a quick perception of the 
 exigencies of the imagination, which include the deli- 
 cacy that tests differences of intellectual structure and 
 the broadness that adopts all vices, passions, whims, 
 and humors, the details need not be separately pursued : 
 their refutation, if still possible, is anticipated and made 
 useless by the comprehensive verdict of an imagination 
 that is kindred to the plays. 
 
 It is not entirely just to say that the contributions of 
 men who favor the theory are specimens of literary 
 futility. They are frequently valuable to the scholar of 
 Shakspeare by throwing unexpected side-lights upon 
 
Shakspeare' s Women. 269 
 
 the plays: they also furnish suggestions to the inter^ 
 preter. They have amassed a quantity of collateral in- 
 formation of Shakspeare's epoch which the critic will 
 thankfully acknowledge as he. uses it. The minute and 
 laborious research which Judge Holmes has expended 
 upon his volume, the literary, historical, and social par- 
 allelisms which he discloses, the philosophy and style 
 of thinking of Elizabeth's age, put the lover of Shak- 
 speare under obligation. 
 
 SHAKSPEARE'S WOMEN. 
 
 For many years before the time of Shakspeare, it had 
 been customary upon the continent to assign to women 
 the female characters of plays. But we do not find any 
 trace of the employment of women upon the English 
 stage till 1632. It is a mistake of CoUey Cibber that 
 no actresses had been seen on the stage previous to the 
 Restoration. A French company that included women 
 appeared in a play at Blackfriars in 1629, and were 
 soundly hissed for this innovation upon British preju- 
 dice. In 1 64 1, during the Puritan interdiction of plays, 
 the actors drew up their " Stage-players' Complaint," — 
 " Our boys, ere we shall have liberty to act again, will 
 be grown out of use, like cracked organ-pipes, and have 
 faces as old as our plays." In 1660, a play was acted 
 entirely by men. In 1661, the same play was acted 
 with the help of female actors. After women had ef- 
 fected a lodgement upon the English stage, they still 
 
270 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 divided for a while with men the female characters. 
 But, during the life of Shakspeare, squeaking tongues 
 and downy cheeks used to " boy " the greatness of his 
 female parts. 
 
 We can understand how this custom must have 
 helped both the audience and the actors through the 
 frequently broad dialogue of the coarsest plays of that 
 period, where things and situations are mentioned with 
 a frankness and precision which cannot now possibly be 
 reproduced, except in the sugar-coated fashion of the 
 Offenbachian revival. Women wore masks when they 
 attended the theatre, and needed not to be at the ex- 
 pense of blushing. The slight disguise lent to them 
 the illusion of being neuters in the crowd. The 
 world was then unsqueamish and forced no scruples 
 on the playwrights, whose coarseness differed from 
 Shakspeare's in being lugged in for its own sake. His 
 plots always countenance his freedom and adopt it. 
 There is Shakspearean motive for every wanton page, 
 as there is, too, genius in it, which other writers could 
 not ape nor rival. Each feeling is so essential to the 
 intercourse of his characters that he cannot disguise it : 
 it is a state of nature that gambols like a child among 
 its elders, more likely to be smiled at than reproved. 
 The texts of the poet's frankness survive, but not as 
 deUberate outrages to the modern womanhood which 
 would fain not speak nor hear them ; and they do not 
 justify the expurgated editions which unfix them from 
 their natural connections with the chastity and married 
 honor involved on every page and in the drift of every 
 play. 
 
Shak^peares Women. 271 
 
 When his plots disguise female characters in the 
 dress of boys and pages, it was more effectively done 
 because his actors, thus resuming their natural mien, 
 could so easily sustain the dramatic contrivance with 
 the advantages of sex. And this is something which 
 our modern female actors cannot imitate. At least, 
 they do not appear to be interested to make the at- 
 tempt, because they are misled by vanity to set off their 
 little rounded waists and the feminine charm of figure 
 and movements. Perhaps it is not vanity, but an in- 
 stinct of womanhood, which lays this embargo on her 
 mimic power. 
 
 An exception must be made of Mrs. Kean ; for a play 
 was always the thing to catch her conscience, and en- 
 gage it to lend the utmost reality to the scene. As 
 Wilford, in the "Iron Chest," she never forgot to as- 
 sume the perfect stride and motion of a man ; and as 
 the disguised Viola, when the thought hit her that 
 OUvia had fallen in love with her, she slapped her cap, 
 and threw out her right leg with all the jauntiness of a 
 boy,- as she exclaimed, " I am the man ! " 
 
 But, in general, the figure, gait, and instinctive ihove- 
 ments of the actress continually betray the Imogen, the 
 Viola, the Jessica, the Julia, the Rosalind, who may well 
 say, "I could find in my heart to disgrace my man's 
 apparel, and to cry like a woman." Portia says to 
 Nerissa, — 
 
 " I'll hold thee any wager. 
 When we are both accoutred like young men, 
 I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two, 
 And wear-my dagger with the braver grace ; 
 
272 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 And speak, between the change of man and boy. 
 With a reed voice ; and turn two mincing steps 
 Into a manly stride." 
 
 But, when Shakspeare's smooth youngsters reassumed 
 their characters as women, how the great poet must 
 have been inwardly fretted with the incongruous pre- 
 sentation of the tone of masculinity in each passion, of 
 the boy's smutch on the bloom of each emotion, the 
 elbows wearing ragged holes through delicate sentiment, 
 the scraggy shoulders and strong collar-bones working 
 out of every tender phrase! He was forced to see a 
 Cleopatra without " the entire and sinuous wealth of 
 the shining shape" that held 
 
 " A soul's predominahce 
 I' the head so high and haught, except one thievish glance, 
 From back of oblong eye, intent to count the slain." 
 
 It was Antony's Egypt without the fine malice and in- 
 sinuation, stripped of the abjectness of her love which, 
 grovelling for pardon at having wrecked her lord, makes 
 him arrest her heart again to indemnify him for all his 
 fortunes that had gone to pieces ; as he answers to her 
 cry for pardon, — 
 
 " Fall not a tear, I say ; one of them rates 
 All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss ; 
 Even this repays me." 
 
 Could all Shakspeare's training have infected a boy's 
 imagination with Juliet's ardent frankness, which tipped 
 those lines with the sparkle of first love, and launched 
 it from the balcony into the night, to be one star the 
 more ? And what boy or man could have returned to 
 
Shakspeares Women. 273 
 
 Shakspeare that motherhood of scorn which whitened 
 the lip of Constance, — could have picked up and handed 
 back to him the gauntletted verses of her defiance ? His 
 imagination must have wilted in that dryness of the act- 
 ors ; it was a limbo for the infants of his soul, out of 
 which they never graduated : the tender grace of Per- 
 dita, doting over flowers as if they had natural instincts 
 like her own, which ought not to be dismissed but rather 
 claimed ; the moan of distracted Ophelia, using flowers 
 for tokens ; the airy coquetries of Beatrice and Rosa- 
 lind ; the concealment preying on the bud of Viola's 
 cheek ; the gathering madness discharged in showers of 
 pity on Cordelia's ; the fell chastity of eye which made 
 lachimo's looks peruse the ground. All the distinctive 
 temperament in the gestures, tones, allusions, of Shak- 
 speare's women ; all the difference of sex to' which the 
 verses strive to connect each emotion as it rises, to hold 
 it a moment on the face, to detain it in the eyes, to send 
 it scifrrying by ; that struggle of shyness with desire, 
 the tremor of a heart that has a secret threatening to 
 climb into sight, the anxious reticence that reaches to 
 pull it down ; the love that whets itself upon ambition's 
 stone to the point of murder, and makes its hands of 
 one color with the husband's ; the swaying, queenly 
 gait, the sinuous arms that would embrace when words 
 were done, as Hermione descends slowly from the pedes- 
 tal ; the impromptu charm of Miranda's modesty when 
 she would not wish any companion in the world but 
 Ferdinand ; the reverie of Desdemona, as she unpinned 
 her dress to the tune of "Willow, willow, willow," and 
 
 18 
 
2 74 ^^A Humor., and Shakspeare. 
 
 started at the wind, thinking it was Othello's knock, 
 expectant but bodeful, — all the generic traits which dif- 
 ferentiate Shakspeare's women from all the other women 
 of literature, according as women themselves naturally 
 furnish those traits, could never have been personated 
 by any man. 
 
 How fortunate it is for a grateful posterity that it has 
 been enabled to repay to Shakspeare a portion of its 
 heavy debt to him, by committing his female characters 
 to women of various talents and temperaments, some of 
 whom are the brightest offspring of their age ! Could he 
 have foreseen, when the women of his fancy were con- 
 signed to the beardless tenors of London, that the true 
 woman would eventually route these wretched eunuchs, 
 claim the scene, appropriate her own verse, and infuse 
 the whole unsuspected genius of her sex into his concep- 
 tions, to give them new births in the travailing of her 
 bright endowments ? That was a perfect forecast of the 
 imagination which, with only youths for actors, whose 
 chief advantage was the callowness upon the cheek, 
 could have written the parts which have laid an attach- 
 ment upon the finest women of the last two hundred 
 years, and taxed all their passion, wile, and infinite 
 variety. He must have written in a divining sense that 
 Nature, piqued by the revelations of her deepest mys- 
 tery, would have to summon at length its representatives 
 to mediate, and, taking these things of heaven, show 
 them unto men. 
 
 In some respects, the conceptions of Shakspeare have 
 not found the later actors and actresses to be profitable 
 
Shakspeares Women. 275 
 
 allies, in so far as they have put a private stamp upon 
 their favorite characters, and have levied duty upon his 
 fancy that prefers free-trade even to direct dealing clear 
 of middlemen with every heart. So does every sect hang 
 over the great stream of the Bible, see its own face re- 
 flected there, and languish for it. Shakspeare's pages 
 surprise actors with their own temperament, and make 
 them long to embody it. So that our Shakspearean im- 
 pressions are decided for us, and descend to our children 
 through the style or school of great histrionic families, 
 in the same way that congenital traits travel out of the 
 past into the future : the traditional studies of great 
 theatrical performers propagate themselves. Their ex- 
 cellences cannot be ignored, and they quite plausibly 
 vindicate themselves as pure Shakspearean intentions. 
 We accept these renderings, and soon become disturbed 
 to have them challenged and displaced. It is a great 
 but willing tribute which we pay to the genius of the 
 artist when we confide the imagination of Shakspeare 
 to his interpretations ; just as we despatch our diamond 
 to be ground and set. He sends it back to us flashing 
 from facets which describe his individual skill. 
 
 But, in consequence of this genial submission of the 
 spectator to the impressive portraiture, there arises a 
 prejudice that Shakspeare could not have conceived 
 otherwise, and that the character cannot and ought not 
 to be repealed. In this way, for instance, some famous 
 women have accustomed us to a Lady Macbeth who is 
 full of grandeur, in whose solid and sombre person a 
 suppressed cruelty smoulders. The verses protrude like 
 
276 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 claws of tigers ; they clutch and rend : you may expect 
 to overhear the lapping. The lower jaw of this concep- 
 tion is too square : the teeth of it are too relentlessly 
 closed upon a victim. There is not an unoccupied space 
 on cheek or brow where love can colonize ; for all the 
 space is pre-empted by a ravin to glut a lust for power. 
 The woman's husband is only a lackey who must be 
 whipped with scorpion phrases up to the deed that 
 makes a queen of her. She detects a flavor of the milk 
 of human kindness in him ; and it makes her scowl till 
 she shrieks to have the ministers of darkness turn her 
 own milk to gall. She is the woman to carry back the 
 daggers with the bluff composure of a butcher, and hop- 
 ing to find that Duncan still bleeds, so that she may gild 
 the faces of the grooms. You would not come upon her 
 rampaging at midnight with a candle, rubbing at im- 
 aginary stains, and conning her secrets with fixed glassy 
 eyes ; for she is firmly constructed to know the blessed- 
 ness of a bed and the balm of being conscienceless. Of 
 such a wife Macbeth might well have said, " She should 
 have died hereafter ; " but she would not have found 
 any time at all for such a weakness. I cannot discover 
 the Lady Macbeth of Shakspeare in this too robust 
 delineation. 
 
 Another kind of misrepresentation has issued from 
 another quarter whence it should have been least ex- 
 pected. Some of the noblest women of modern times 
 have filed a complaint against Shakspeare's women, and 
 brought them into the court of the latest ideas, charged 
 with the crime of being characterless, mere puppets of 
 
Shakspeares Women. 277 
 
 the will of the dominant sex ; not the tutors, indeed, but 
 the feeders of his riot, complaisant creatures who accept 
 the purpose of the universe to keep men supplied with 
 love, and whose most prominent traits are those which 
 protect and confirm the union of the sexes. It is alleged 
 that Shakspeare "never foretold a better woman than 
 he saw," because " he lacked an ideal of humanity and 
 life : " he withheld from her the personal consequence 
 which belongs to strong individualities who detach them- 
 selves from their age to view, scrutinize, and remodel it. 
 It is astonishing to read what Mrs. Farnham,* whose 
 life was most unselfish and heroic, has said about Shak- 
 speare' s ideas of women, that "he authorized in his 
 sentiments all manner of passional, sensual, and drunken 
 usurpation of man over woman, every kind of force to 
 degrade her which the law did not punish ; and only felt 
 bound to satirize and speak coarsely of her after it had 
 been exercised ; men, who repeated such experiences 
 never so often or basely, being no less heroes for his 
 dramas, fit to lead in council, rule in honorable war, and 
 receive the homage of society. The leading characteris- 
 tics of woman, as he portrayed her, are sensuality, and 
 fickleness, its uniform attendant in either sex; capri- 
 ciousness, vanity, desire to be loved, more for the power 
 than the pure happiness of it ; a disposition to exercise 
 that fleeting, petty power tyrannically, — so far, to play 
 the man on the child's scale ; weakness, helplessness 
 indeed, against temptation, and a paramount selfish- 
 ness which is only modified, or very rarely turned into 
 
 * In a volume entitled " Woman and her Era." 
 
278 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 generosity, towards the man whose love permits her to 
 love in return ; for which, and chiefly, in its narrowest, 
 most material sense, she seems in his estimation to have 
 been created." 
 
 It is not possible to misread the plays of Shakspeare 
 more profoundly than this. They have been viewed in 
 the color of some exclusive ideas concerning the nature 
 and the mission of woman, in whose advocacy the writer 
 spent a noble life. Not finding in any of the plays pre- 
 cise statements that reflect the most advanced senti- 
 ments upon the Woman Question, and discovering that 
 Shakspeare was neither morally nor politically a partisan, 
 and that neither position nor reflection impelled him to 
 anticipate modern ideas on social subjects, the writer de- 
 clares that he was not the poet of woman because he was 
 not her prophet. A criticism more destructive than this 
 of the Shakspearean delineations cannot be made. In 
 fact, no doctrinaire of ethics, politics, theology, can suit- 
 ably approach Shakspeare with a critical purpose. 
 
 Nature seems to have draughted many of her women 
 in the mind of Shakspeare before she embodied them to 
 play their parts. Already there existed Antigone, Me- 
 dea, Electra, and the ensky'd Beatrice ; but these did not 
 exhaust her capacity of womanhood. They seem only 
 sketches of a few single features, portraits of isolated 
 qualities that waited to be combined. Medea was the 
 hate of a mortified and neglected love ; Electra was 
 the unsleeping persistency of a daughter's revenge ; An- 
 tigone, the divine constancy of a daughter's affection ; 
 Ismene, the weakness of a common mind; Alcestis, 
 
V Shakspearis Women. 279 
 
 the extravagant submission of a tender wife : they are 
 all single strings of the old Greek lyre, never tuned to 
 sweep into a perfect octave. The note which Alcestis 
 emits is merely her willingness to die. Imogen sounds 
 the same at the command of a husband who suspects her 
 honor. But it wakes the harmony of other strings, and 
 we listen to a chastity that is as spirited and deadly as it 
 is submissive ; to a love that is as eager as it is refined ; 
 to an honesty that exposes the discord of double dealing 
 by chiming with a simplicity that scarce knows how to 
 suspect ; to a purity that is as unconscious as a girl, 
 while it is as haughty as a man. The chords are rich 
 and solid, and support the theme of her character 
 through all its movements. 
 
 So women began to exist for the first time in litera- 
 ture. Shakspeare discovered woman, and took note of 
 her generic peculiarity which upholds the specific dif- 
 ferences of individual women. They all came forth to 
 him as surely as flowers to the sun. He solicited 
 each jealously interfolded sheath, and drew out of it the 
 heart of its color. All of them are rooted in the com- 
 mon ground of sex ; but each one lifts into the blossom 
 her signals of a temper and modulation that are peculi- 
 arly her own. So that, although " each woman is a brief 
 of Womankind," she is also a woman who must be desig- 
 nated by some one of Shakspeare's famous names. 
 
 In fact, genius was never penetrated with the varieties 
 of woman's temperament till Shakspeare, picking up a 
 few rustic specimens in Stratford, ran away with them 
 to Lo;ndon, taking down there honest, red-fisted Audrey ; 
 
28o Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Phebe, the village coquette, a little above her condition, 
 who reads and quotes tender love-lore, and learns to 
 despise a swain ; Mopsa and Dorcas, doting on ballads, 
 watchful after pedlars to chaffer with across the hedge 
 for tapes and ribbons ; and Juliet's gossipy, free-spoken, 
 easy-minded Mrs. Gamp. With this humble retinue, his 
 imagination travelled down to the great city, and seemed 
 to have introduced them soon, past all the barriers of 
 etiquette,, into Elizabeth's circle of ladies, where they 
 went into the service of high-born qualities, and retailed 
 to him the very heart-secrets of their mistresses. The 
 dames of wealthy citizens sat in full costume for his 
 " Merry Wives ; " the noble partners of his friends and 
 patrons yielded each to him a whisper of their chasteness, 
 their high-spirit, their control, their tenderness. 
 
 " In the blazon of sweet beauty's best 
 Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow," 
 
 he mastered Beauty of the form and soul, and gave to 
 each her portion, from Imogen to Cleopatra, — 
 
 " The worser spirit, a woman color'd ill." 
 
 One could not, of course, claim for Shakspeare that 
 his pages include all the varieties of women which Nat- 
 ure is capable of producing. He has no daughters of 
 the people, like Egmont's Clara and Faust's Margaret : 
 they are conceptions of a later date. But they are im- 
 plied in the quality of his women ; and we incline to 
 think that Nature will not be able to invent a fresh style 
 of woman, or to modify the standard types, unless she 
 sets out with that essential peculiarity, the Womanliness, 
 
Shakspearis Women. 281 
 
 which Shakspeare has described. As all the instruments 
 of an orchestra are tuned upon a single pitch, and as all 
 future modifications of the instruments must defer to the 
 same if they mean to take rank in harmony, so all the 
 women who are still possible to Nature must accord 
 with her influential note. Shakspeare is content to 
 strike that. Through all the chords which cluster 
 around his different characters, we detect it : he seems 
 to be making tuning-forks on the same pitch, but of 
 various materials, to emphasize it to the ear. His plays 
 take from it a consonant vibration that extends through 
 scenes and lapses of time during which no woman's face 
 appears. The tonic of her heart is diffused beyond the 
 limits of her person ; as when Ophelia's bloom clings to 
 the fate of Hamlet, even while she waits in death for him 
 to reach her funeral-rite. So the beautiful soul of Cor- 
 delia, that is little talked of by herself, and is but stingily 
 set forth by circumstance, engrosses our feeling in scenes 
 from whose threshold her filial piety is banished. We 
 know what Lear is so pathetically remembering : the 
 sisters tell us in their cruellest moments ; it mingles 
 with the midnight storm, a sigh of the daughterhood that 
 was repulsed. In the pining of the Fool we detect it. 
 Through every wail or gust of this awful symphony of 
 madness, ingratitude, and irony, we feel a woman's 
 breath. 
 
 Since Shakspeare's day, new countries have been dis- 
 covered and peopled ; new colonies have carried his 
 mother-tongue around the earth ; the language of woman, 
 like the girdle of a goddess, is a zone drawn round all 
 
282 Wit, Humor, and Skakspeare. 
 
 other climates to hold them in the .clasp of her charm. 
 The wider culture and the opportunities derived from 
 modern wants have already increased the number of 
 her gifts, and set her person in fresh shadings of 
 character. Perhaps Macaulay's New Zealander, who is 
 expected to meditate in the future over the ruins of 
 London, will turn out to be a woman, of a variety which 
 Shakspeare has nowhere precisely drawn. But, if all his 
 plays should by that time have shared the fate of an ex- 
 tinguished England, there would she sit, the survivor in 
 the direct line of descent from his essential Woman ; 
 by virtue of her sex the Sibyl foretelling the women who 
 will be possible to Nature. 
 
 " Magnus ab integro sseclorum nascitur ordo : 
 Jam redit et Virgo." 
 
 Woman, as she resembles man, was of less consequence 
 to Shakspeare than woman in herself, apart from what 
 she can do, can earn, or can aspire to. He merely re- 
 ceived the feminine side of Nature into his recreating 
 thought, the essential Woman, without respect to the 
 exigencies of any period or style of culture, — the only 
 She, such as woman must remain to the end of time 
 underneath all her activities and requirements. Her sex 
 is the unalterable decree which she can cast no ballot to 
 vote away from her, and assume no profession to raze it 
 from the eternal tablets of her distinction. All the purely 
 modern questions which relate to her career ; the efEorts 
 to equalize with man's her wages, to multiply her oppor- 
 tunities, to claim her interest in the politics of human 
 rights, to secure her alleviating presence in the rude 
 
Shakspeares Women. 283 
 
 scenes of republicanism, — successful as these tenden- 
 cies may be, — cannot transform Woman ; and she will 
 not step out of her Shakspearean Self. On the figured 
 coast of his page her Essence stands, as yet without the 
 right of suffrage, limited to household cares, or raised 
 to queenly ones ; as learned as Portia can become, but 
 not yet admitted to the profession which she mimicked ; 
 provided for by the various dexterities of man, and still 
 undriven by the modern threat of starvation into risking 
 a single quality that is her birthright. There she stands; 
 the modern world, stooping at her feet, will have to 
 yield some of the reputed exclusiveness of men, but only 
 such traits of it as Imogen, Cordelia, Beatrice, Portia, 
 will select. In all this complicated period of over-crowded 
 cities, over-stimulated competition, vices overfed, employ- 
 ers over-purse-proud, and politicians over-careless, there 
 is no strait cruel enough to compel the essential woman 
 to choose a career which would have unsexed one of 
 Shakspeares plays. I have no fear. Stand aside : cease 
 that frantic bracing of the masculine back against so 
 many doors of prescription. Throw them wide open, 
 and let Shakspeare's stately crowd pass up and down to 
 scan the vista through them. Come, patient, chaste, 
 obedient, high-spirited Imogen, too docile Ophelia, frank 
 Perdita, warm Julia, bright and witty Beatrice, whose 
 tongue is a pen already, or the etcher's tool ; come, thou 
 accomplished, grave, acute, and self-possessed Portia; 
 thou unsophisticated Miranda, who would fain share thy 
 lover's toil ; thou shifty, prompt Maria, hater of hum- 
 bug ; thou tender Viola, — come, choose how many of 
 
284 Wii, Humor, and ^/lakspeare. 
 
 these men's garments you will continue to wear, pre- 
 ferring to be women. Not one of them, I venture to 
 declare, which your eternal instinct will feel to cramp or 
 to disguise the form. "Dost thou think," says Rosa- 
 lind, "though I am caparison'd like a man, I have a 
 doublet and hose in my disposition .? " 
 
 Perdita, I think, if she were not discovered to be a 
 king's daughter, might take to floriculture, and earn a 
 living by it. She would no longer keep her dainty pique 
 against the gilly-flower, but learn to marry 
 
 " A gentler scion to the wildest stock," 
 
 and thus mend Nature. She would prefer to be " Flora 
 peering in April's front," along meadows which Proser- 
 pine might have roved through, far from the university 
 and the din of scholarships. And pray restrain Ophelia 
 from the commission of suicide by joining a nunnery ; 
 but do not save her life to put her to a trade that turns 
 upon any other knack than simple beauty. A woman 
 who can enthrall a Hamlet will esteem it no derogation 
 to pluck from his memory a rooted sorrow. It is a pro- 
 fession quite as sanative as Helena's, whose father had 
 taught her the use of curious drugs, and bequeathed to 
 her "prescriptions of rare and prov'd effects." But let 
 Ophelia be simply beautiful, be surprising like th.e 
 first May-flowers, be winning like unobtrusive violets ; 
 let her exhale, like slopes that are brown with needles of 
 the pine. Preserve the maid who held Hamlet's princely 
 heart in the hollow of a moist and rosy hand : let her 
 survive among us to hold others, to unwrinkle brows of 
 
Love in Shakspeare. 285 
 
 speculation with a finger-tip, to unknot the snarls of 
 business and ferocious care with kisses which the street 
 will not overhear. Out of all her craze may she gather 
 up again and redistribute the flowers of her shy disposi- 
 tion, " for remembrance ; pray you, love, remember ; " 
 and some for herself too, " we may call it herb of grace 
 o' Sundays." 
 
 Do not tempt Ophelia to drown herself again 
 
 " With annoyance of charity schools or of districts." 
 
 Turn over all such business to that pragmatic and cor- 
 rect Isabella : she will do better in it than in making a 
 whole nunnery miserable with posted notices of the dan- 
 gers to virtue and of rules for being severely let alone. 
 But Ophelia, 
 
 " Live, be lovely, forget them, be beautiful even to proudness. 
 Even for their poor sakes whose happiness is to behold you ; 
 Live, be uncaring, be joyous, be sumptuous ; only be lovely, — 
 Sumptuous, not for display, and joyous, not for enj"oyment ; 
 Not for enjoyment, truly ; for Beauty and God's gl-eat glory. 
 Built by that only law, that Use be suggester of Beauty, 
 Nought be concealed that is done, but all things done to adornment, 
 Meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and embellish.'' 
 
 LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 The great motives and impulses of human nature 
 do not find themselves made obsolete by Shakspeare's 
 genius : we meet the central passion of Love animating 
 every play, and modified by the various characteristics 
 
286 Wt^, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 of his women. They appear in the plots, as in the 
 world, to discharge that great function of their being. 
 Steele once said of a woman, " To have loved her was 
 a liberal education," — a happy phrase which has done 
 duty since in other connections. There must have been 
 floating in Steele's mind the verses of Biron in " Love's 
 Labor Lost ; " at least, the pith of his sentence is there 
 anticipated : — 
 
 "For when would you, my lord, or you, or you, 
 Have found the ground of study's excellence. 
 Without the beauty of a woman's face .'' 
 From women's eyes this doctrine I derive : 
 They are the ground, the books, the Academes, 
 From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. 
 For where is any author in the world 
 Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye ? " 
 
 "Without love I can fancy no gentleman," says 
 Thackeray. 
 
 When Shakspeare shows his characters in love, the 
 passion is as fresh and uncompromising as if it were 
 still the morning of the world. His verse " dallies with 
 the innocence of love, like the old age." The curious 
 considerations of the modern novelist were not then 
 invented. His lovers trump up no obstacles out of 
 over-nice and subtle reflection : all that hampers them 
 is circumstance, a family feud, a transparent jealousy, 
 a disguise of fortune, a father's will, or a conspiracy. 
 They do not take themselves apart before us, as lectur- 
 ers do their manikin, to show how cunningly morbid the 
 organs may become. There is no mesh of motives 
 woven around and across, so intricately that if the lover 
 
Love in Shakspeare. 287 
 
 breaks from one of his own threads he can catch him- 
 self by another, and keep worrying the poor fly of his 
 feeling. Shakspeare's women love without sparing a 
 moment for analysis : the rose is crushed to the bosom, 
 a glory of stamens, petals, and perfume, whose names 
 are unknown and unheeded ; for the botanizing of emo- 
 tions was the aesthetic of a later day when men cull a 
 herbarium from their mothers' graves. In this regard 
 Shakspeare is as direct as the Greeks, though far more 
 vital. He puts into his live people the passion which 
 the old chorus used to hold up like a placard : — 
 
 L.ove, thou invincible battle ! * 
 
 Love, thou router of lucre. 
 
 To capture the softness of youth 
 
 And lodge in the bloom of its cheeks ! 
 
 'Tis all one to thee if thou farest 
 
 By sea, or dost loiter in farm-yards. 
 
 It helps not to be an immortal ; 
 
 Mankind is no refuge from thee 
 
 Who art of men the first madness. 
 
 Thou dost ravish the just of their judgment. 
 
 Dost snatch them to blame ; 
 
 Thou art the bicker that vexes 
 
 The blood in the hearts that are kin. 
 
 Vivid the promise of bride-bed 
 
 Thou kindlest on eyelids of virgins. 
 
 Great prescripts of past time undoing: 
 
 So sports Aphrodite, and rules. , 
 
 Shakspeare has inherited the antique single-minde^- 
 ness, undisturbed by all our modern after-thoughts of 
 sentiment. His heroines do not understand what re- 
 finements of torture a cultivated soul can invent tO- 
 make itself wretched. They are frank and instantane- 
 
 * Antigone, 792, "Epas, kvlKure fiix""- 
 
288 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 ous ; as when Miranda puts her heart into Ferdinand's 
 hand, so sweetly unconscious of all that the action in- 
 volves. She only knows that she has " no ambition to 
 see a goodlier man," no arts to use to win him, no start- 
 ing to overtake the passion with a pack of doubts. 
 
 " Hence, bashful cunning, 
 And prompt me, plain and holy innocence 1 
 I am your wife, if you will marry me.'' 
 
 The only game she plays with him is chess, but she 
 does better than stale-mate him. 
 
 Beatrice, for all her cleverness, shows that she loves 
 Benedick in the first words she utters in the play. For 
 she asks if he has returned from the wars, and gives 
 him a fencing-term for a nickname, to pretend a pro- 
 found unconcern ; then disparages him in a most lively 
 way, and asks whom he has now for a companion, seeming 
 to allude to men, but expecting to know by the answer 
 if his affections have become involved with any woman. 
 And when he fences her wit with his bachelor banter, it 
 piques her secret admiration. She has no other subtlety 
 beyond her wit : she uses it. to misprize the wedded 
 state, and to mock indiscriminately at men, — a very 
 common and transparent stratagem of a heart that is 
 deeply engaged ; and, beneath all the gay^and flippant 
 manner, she feels hurt because she thinks that Benedick 
 is really cool and does not feign. 
 
 There is nothing but the mask of night upon Juliet's 
 face to hide, the blush which her lips acknowledge. 
 " Farewell compliment. Dost thou love me ? " The 
 bud of love becomes a beauteous flower in its first 
 
Love in Shakspeare. 289 
 
 spring day, for it is too impatient to levy on the lagging 
 warmth of summer ; and the sudden heat sends every 
 drop of Juliet's blood rushing into the fran-kest words 
 that maiden ever spoke. She has not even mental de- 
 vice enough to hush what the most passionate women, 
 of a type less frigid than our own, are quite content to 
 feel if there's love enough to justify. So the verses 
 which come fluent from Juliet's lips do not scald like 
 the insinuations of some modern novels which plot ran- 
 dom passions and ingeniously dally with them. Shak- 
 speare has no pages of this elaborate suggestion. His 
 mental style was like the archer's bolt that quivers in 
 the middle of the boss : he never could have learned 
 this modern practice of the boomerang, which dips, 
 skims, makes ricochets, lingers, doubles corners, and 
 plays back into the sender's hand. 
 
 " A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon 
 Than love that would seem hid : love's night is noon." 
 
 The finest of his ladies cry out with the sudden smart. 
 
 " Caesario, by the roses of the spring, 
 By maidhood, honor, truth, and every thing, 
 I love thee so, that, maugre all my pride. 
 Nor wit, nor reason, can my passion hide." 
 
 Perhaps this is not a style that might be safely culti- 
 vated in our female boarding-schools, unless all the 
 Csesarios were Violas in disguise. But it is Love's 
 ideal sincerity as it lives in Poesy's world to quicken 
 sluggards and scorch prurience to death. 
 
 His love is not only unsophisticated : it is as virile, 
 sumptuous, adventurous, intense, as the age which 
 
 19 
 
290 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 crushed the Armada as if it were a cluster to infuse 
 new blood into England. It shares the intrepidity of 
 all the sea-kings, but declines their ruffling and bluster. 
 It is colored like the costumes of the nobles, who 
 vaunted their rich stuffs and set the dull streets aglow 
 like a parterre of flowers, before we began to exchange 
 doublets and slashed satin for the hypocritic pantaloon. 
 Its manner is free, reliant, full of respect and of a proud- 
 ness of honor: sometimes it lets the flashing blade be 
 seen at a touch of the ruiiSed wrist ; sometimes it sub- 
 dues all the grand state into deference, cap in hand, till 
 the plumes sweep the ground clean before the beloved 
 object. It has been reared in Anglo-Saxon bluntness. 
 It is as broad and light-pervaded as a forenoon ; but 
 sometimes it is like those forenoons which appear to 
 have saved over afternoon shades from yesterdays, they 
 are so toned with the pearliness of a refraining light. 
 It has risen early, and its elastic steps brush dew, and 
 its freshly opened eyes are dawns. We seem to have 
 returned with these lovers to a long-past epoch of the 
 world, when Love had been just invented and put on 
 trial among men and women of heroic mould and simple 
 manners, who let the new passion flood them to the brim 
 of their brains and turn every sense into its heralds. 
 They report something so antique as to be young ; and 
 our jaded nerves respond to the tonic of a feeling that is 
 for the first time tried. So deeply does Shakspeare's 
 genius dip the heart into the old stream that makes 
 invulnerable and immortal. 
 
 He sets forth the passion as it defies races, passes 
 
Love in Shakspeare. 291 
 
 frontiers unsearched, and makes all the sects religious. 
 The Catholic maiden, who has overheard that St. Bar- 
 tholomew would have a bloody eve, puts the white sign 
 of safety round the arm of her Huguenot lover ; but the 
 fingers of his sword-arm pull it off, though all the bind- 
 ing love in her face pleads for the dear deceit, and justi- 
 fies it to all of his heart that is not dedicated to die with 
 comrades. Her religion, — what is it but the sacrament 
 that converts her adored one into the body and the blood 
 of her life ? Henceforth High Mass must celebrate for 
 her a double sacrifice. 
 
 Shakspeare contrived to rear a, race of women whose 
 physical soundness was unimpaired. Before the gym- 
 nasium and the health-lift were invented at the peevish 
 persuasion of dyspeptics and invalids, who die by inches 
 of fried food, furnace-air, fricassees of high-school pro- 
 grammes, and ragouts of French novels, his women 
 earned their health on horseback in the broad English 
 fields : they called it down to them out of the sky, 
 where the hawk struck the heron and returned to perch 
 upon the wrist ; they came upon its track in the sylvan 
 paths which the startled deer extemporized ; they over- 
 took it in long stretches of breezy walks upon the 
 heathery downs and in the hawthorn-bounded lane. 
 The country's Nature was their training-room, and its 
 unsophisticated habits their masters. They saw the sun 
 rise, and could not afford time to outflare the setting 
 crescent with gaslight streaming from overheated rooms ; 
 nor did the stately minuet ravage like the German which 
 is sustained into the small hours upon rations of beef- 
 
292 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 tea and various liquors. They drank small-beer for break- 
 fast, and knew the taste of herrings before the Turks 
 invaded the nerves of Christendom with coffee, and the 
 Chinese began to tan its stomach with the acid of teas. 
 At twelve o'clock, a cup of malmsey, with a wedge of veni- 
 son-pasty, scared up no megrims in constitutions which 
 had followed the deer through the forest into the larder, 
 and had pulled it down there with dexterous hands into 
 the dish. Imogen was a prime cook, dressed vegetables 
 in various devices to make them dainty to the eye, and 
 flavored broth fit for Juno. She never caught cold on 
 the floor of the cave. The forest was as courteous to 
 her as the court. 
 
 Not one of Shakspeare's women utters one line that is 
 inspired by any form of hysteria : the perfect balance of 
 the functions was not yet impaired ; so that no nerve- 
 centre could exercise a petty tyranny, nor suggest the 
 morbid fancies and curious superfluities which dedicate 
 so many late romances to St. Vitus, the patron of spasm. 
 
 In an admirable book upon " Sex in Education, or a 
 Fair Chance for the Girls," I found embedded in an 
 excellent vein of common sense the following obscure 
 statement, quoted from another author: "Peripheral 
 influences of an extremely powerful and continuous 
 kind, where they concur with one of those critical 
 periods of life at which the central nervous system is 
 relatively weak and unstable, can occasionally set going 
 a non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may localize 
 itself in those nerves upon whose centres the morbific 
 peripheral influence is perpetually pouring in." Here 
 
Love in Shakspeare. 293 
 
 be words almost as depressing as the ills which the flesh 
 of the modern woman is heiress to ; but that legacy can- 
 not be traced as far back as the poetry of that age when 
 the Queen rode along the line of her English soldiers at 
 Tilbury Fort, while Dorcas and Mopsa helped to stack 
 barley to malt the ale for her maids of honor. I doubt 
 if Shakspeare was familiar with many cases, transpiring 
 in the town or the country, of women demolished by 
 "morbific peripheral influence.'' 
 
 So the bodies of his women mature like all the nature 
 out of doors, and become capable of entertaining the 
 great passion with its own strenuous, unconscious inno- 
 cence, with its honest ardor, with its native directness. 
 Obscure ailments do not warp his verses, nor twang sick 
 pathos out of their nerves. And we seek the society of 
 these unsensational women, just as we seek Shakspeare's 
 verse itself ; with the same hope to earn repose for the 
 soul which has been so taxed by the strained rhetoric of 
 later writers. For relief, we recur to the pregnant mod- 
 eration of Shakspeare's style. Pyrotechnics tire the eye, 
 and send the dazed spectator groping home, as they seem 
 to make more darkness by exploding. One reason for 
 the revival of interest and love for Shakspeare may be 
 found in a natural reaction from artifice and overwrought 
 expression. The heated mind has discovered an oasis 
 and deep well that wait in this sirocco-stricken age with 
 coolness for our hearts. How eagerly we run toward 
 this shadowed margin where his great power is greatly 
 tempered to our human feeling ! His vivacity has been 
 so bred by repose that it never strays beyond the line 
 
2 94 ^*A Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 where stimulus becomes inebriation. He not only de- 
 spises the abrupt effects which are darlings of the mod- 
 ern pen, but he resolutely refuses to represent abruptness ; 
 and his fancy makes its rapid time by even and placid 
 motion ; as a great sea-bird, with outstretched wings, in 
 which you scarcely can detect a winnow, will follow the 
 speed of your ship and be seen constantly poised just 
 above the stern. All his figures have the same breadth 
 and floating quality : they take you, as on an expanse 
 of Fortunatus's carpet, upon a great journey silently. 
 They are not apothecary's expedients to raise a blister 
 by sharp surprise, to lash up a jaded taste by some 
 cantharides of metaphor and simile, to rouse a torpid 
 skin by acupuncture, or dull a heavy pain by injected 
 morphia, as our modern practitioners of the ideal do, 
 who have abused tired Nature's sweet restorer and the 
 digestion that should wait on appetite. 
 
 And every gesture of Shakspeare, even when he has 
 violence to describe, is not violently made ; but the most 
 tremendous deeds are emphasized by having their bluster 
 chidden and their outcry hushed ; so the great midnight 
 lifts a finger of silence, but shudders none the less, and 
 sinks to awful depths with the crime which has fastened 
 itself upon her secrecy, as if to drag her dumbly out of 
 the sweet heaven down to a place of horror. While Mac- 
 beth goes to Duncan's chamber, and the wife listens to 
 hear death follow, the verse turns over the business of 
 shrieking to the owl : an elemental dread from the un- 
 sounded depth of human feeling puts an accent on the 
 scene. 
 
Love in Shakspeare. 295 
 
 Since Shakspeare's time, our rhetoric has been slowly 
 raising its pitch, just as the musical instruments had been 
 doing it until a congress was called to reduce to a nor- 
 mal note of C, with two hundred and twelve vibrations 
 in a second, the pitch that had become so exaggerated. 
 Handel was content to write a minor third below even 
 that. What a pity that a congress of .the best minds 
 could not impose a normal pitch upon the shrieking 
 muse, the new Calliope, who goes by steam ! 
 
 Observe the level, unobtrusive nature of Shakspeare's 
 Sonnets and of the songs in the plays. The difference 
 between them and our later scaling of the falsetto is like 
 the difference between the moderately strung violins of 
 Salo and Amati and the violin of the present day. 
 Those antique violins were made to accompany soprano 
 voices which had no ambition to reach high C, as all 
 men's ears were then content with the medium register. 
 "Their gently veiled, yet satisfactorily clear, silver tone, 
 of virgin character," describes the songs of Shakspeare, 
 and the sentiment for music which is scattered through 
 the plays. In the middle notes almost every thing 
 that is worth having in music is to be found. Behind 
 those bars the melodies which can be domesticated 
 under man's roof and by his hearthside are patiently 
 waiting to be led forth and be installed. Shakspeare 
 used to listen lovingly to the cheerful, healthy madrigal 
 of Elizabeth's age, so wholesome in effect, so downright 
 sincere in expression, so full of the robust, sensuous life 
 of those brave English days, when human habits and 
 emotions dwelt in the middle register of life, and there 
 
296 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 found Nature's own fulness and harmony, the finely 
 
 blended color of passion and thought. But nowadays 
 
 the daffodils that used to 
 
 "Take 
 The winds of March with beauty ; violets, dim, 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, 
 Or Cytherea's breath ; . . . 
 
 bold oxlips, and 
 The crown-imperial," 
 
 have been plied with guano, dosed with new-fangled 
 liquid manures, till their cosmetic and perfume announce 
 a kind of harlotry : we ogle, sigh, languishingly sniff, and 
 die of a rose in a rheumatic pain. 
 
 The gamut of feeling among Shakspeare's women is 
 the clear and perfect octave which built the English glee 
 and madrigal, whose untutored music was " the food of 
 love." And love was entirely welcome, like the day- 
 light ; not put off and played with as if by the effemi- 
 nacies of some Asiatic musical scale, whose eighth and 
 quarter tones cannot be distinguished by a well modu- 
 lated ear. 
 
 " What is Love ? 'tis not hereafter ; 
 Present mirth hath present laughter ; 
 
 What's to come is still unsure ; 
 In delay there lies no plenty : 
 Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, 
 
 Youth's a stuff will not endure." 
 
 Does this have a crude ring of the bivouac to any ear 
 which has been accustomed to the macaronic variations 
 of modern artists, who torture the great theme and force 
 its simple blitheness through the brass crooks of a keyed 
 cornet ? 'Tis an honest love whose month is ever May, 
 
Love in Shakspeare. 297 
 
 when the pipe of Pan is breathed upon by the clear west 
 wind through the budding willows. Nothing competes 
 with it but the throstle and song-sparrow : they seem to 
 be weaving sacred nests out of the iones, to gather them 
 into domestic privacy. Climb, count with delight the 
 jealously guarded eggs, and do not blow them for your 
 cabinet. 
 
 Nature was so prodigal of health to Shakspeare's 
 women that it overflowed the clay banks of their bodies, 
 and spread in a freshet of gayety. Beatrice and Rosalind 
 never tire of keeping in the air the light shuttlecock of 
 their wit. It floats in an aether of animal spirits ; and, 
 if it now and then touches earth, Nature promptly lends 
 it a rebound. They engage in a masked revel to con- 
 ceal their emotions. Will Orlando and Benedick pene- 
 trate the disguise and claim the lips that mockingly 
 escape thus .' If these women suspect their hearts to 
 be distilling a sigh, laughter sparkles into the recess 
 and exposes the illicit business. It is just like the men 
 to roam about in disordered attire, with blue, inclement 
 features, shaking with the " quotidian-tertian " of their 
 love-turn. If they do not go about thus, it is all the 
 same : then they are rallied for not being in Cupid's 
 fashion. "Your hose should be ungarter'd, your bonnet 
 unhanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and 
 every thing about you demonstrating a careless desola- 
 tion." The gladness of these women would be cautioned 
 at the lorn sight to defend themselves from infection. 
 
 Orlando sticks his rhymes up in the forest, like a bill- 
 ppster of Radway's Ready Relief, deforming the sturdier 
 
298 Wif, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 oaks. Rosalind goes about pulling them down, and is 
 in the best of spirits when Touchstone declares that he 
 could " rhyme you so, eight years together ; dinners, and 
 suppers, and sleeping-hours excepted : " his verses have 
 the regular butter-woman's jog-trot. She was never so 
 nearly berhymed to death since she was an Irish rat in 
 the time of Pythagoras. But, for all that, she is full of 
 bliss to discover that this fancy-monger of rhymes is 
 Orlando ; and she is dying to know " what did he ? 
 What said he .' How look'd he t Wherein went he .' 
 What makes he here ? Did he ask for me .'' Where re- 
 mains he } How parted he with thee ? And when shalt 
 thou see him again t Answer me in one word." To be 
 sure, she wears a double disguise of wit and male attire ; 
 so when Orlando says to her, " Fair youth, I would I 
 could make thee believe I love," it is easy for her to 
 reply, " Me believe it 1 You may as soon make her that 
 you love believe it ; which, I warrant, she is apter to do 
 than to confess she does ; that is one of the points in 
 the which women still give the lie to their consciences." 
 But when, pretending to ridicule his emotion, she tells 
 him that " men have died from time to time, and worms 
 have eaten them, but not for love," he protests that 
 Rosalind's frown might kill him. " By this hand," she 
 says, " it will not kill a fly." So all the exuberant frolic 
 of these fine women is the sparkle of healthy brains : 
 ^'the,heart's-bloodof love does not trickle through hepatic 
 sentiment, but is briskly pumped through the lungs 
 up into the head, flashes from the eye, and becomes a 
 ruddy zest upon the tongue. 
 
Love in Shakspeare. 299 
 
 Benedick complains that the Lady Beatrice said he 
 was the prince's jester, that he was " duller than a great 
 thaw ; huddling jest upon jest, with such impossible 
 conveyance, upon me, that I stood like a man at a mark, 
 with a whole army shooting at me. While she is here, 
 a man may live as quiet in hell as in a sanctuary ; and 
 people sin upon purpose, because they would go thither." 
 
 When, however, she overhears Hero giving her wit 
 a bad character for scorn and inhumanity, her woman's 
 heart revolts at the suggestion, and her self-communion 
 runs thus tenderly : — 
 
 " What fire is in mine ears ? Can this be true ? 
 
 Stand I condemn'd for pride and scorn so much ? 
 Contempt, farewell ! and maiden pride, adieu ! 
 
 No glory lives behind the back of such. 
 And, Benedick, love on, I will requite thee ; 
 
 Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand." 
 
 So the keen, swooping falcon settles at last composedly 
 upon his wrist : love draws a hood over the bright, fear- 
 less eye, and claps the jesses upon her spirits. But at 
 the very moment of capture, her strong wings fillip him : 
 " I yield upon great persuasion ; and, partly, to save your 
 life, for I was told you were in a consumption." That 
 tone has in it the promise of lively times for Benedick. 
 He will never be able to train the delight of liberty out 
 of this falcon, who will slip her jesses still, and circle 
 overhead, but not forget to return. He told her once 
 that, as long as she had no mind to love, " some gentle- 
 man or other shall 'scape a predestinate scratched face." 
 But, though love has pared her talons. Benedick will not 
 find matrimony to be dull. 
 
300 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Portia's whole temperament is joyous, even when she 
 pretends that her Uttle body is aweary of the world. 
 Not one of Shakspeare's women sKows such a perfect 
 balance of the senses and the soul. Not a muscle of the 
 body ever owned to being tired ; not a function ever be- 
 haved ill enough to clog her gayety. It flows with mild 
 and even sparkle through all the varied scenes, like a 
 sunlit runnel that carries gilded dimples into woods and 
 through them without lingering to have them catch a 
 damp from shadows. Even the judicial fitness of her 
 great language in the scene with Shylock does not 
 sprinkle chancellor's wig-powder over her cheek. The 
 style has the bloom of health, as it always is with her, 
 "rosy, clear-ringing. How warm with joy are her 
 words ! How beautiful all her images, which are for 
 the most part borrowed from mythology ! " And we 
 notice that her fancy always selects the classic allusions 
 which are most vital with thoiight, freshness, sentiment. 
 " If I live to be as old as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as 
 Diana, unless I be obtained by the manner of my father's 
 will." And when she watches Bassanio, as he is on the 
 point of choosing among the caskets, what is he like ? 
 she thinks ; and the mighty youth of Greece supplies her 
 
 thought : — 
 
 " Now he goes, 
 With no less presence, but with much more love, 
 Than young Alcides, when he did redeem 
 The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy 
 To the sea-monster ; I stand for sacrifice, 
 The rest aloof are the Dardanian wives, 
 With bleared visages, come forth to view 
 The issue of th' exploit. Go, Hercules ! 
 Live thou, I live." 
 
PORTIA. 
 
PORTIA. 
 
 TN the elements which compose the character of Portia, 
 Shakspeare anticipated, but without intention, the 
 intellect of those modern women who can wield so grace- 
 fully many of the tools which have been hitherto mo- 
 nopolized by men. But the same genius which endowed 
 her with a large and keen intelligence derived it from 
 her sex, and, for the sake of it, he did not sacrifice one 
 trait of her essential womanliness. This commands our 
 attention very strongly ; for it is the clew which we 
 must start with. 
 
 She is still a woman to the core of her beauty-loving 
 heart. Coming home from the great scene in Venice, 
 where she baffles Shylock, and swamps with sudden jus- 
 tice the scales that were so eager for the bonded flesh, 
 she loiters in the moonlight, marks the music which is 
 floating from her palace to be caressed by the night and 
 made sweeter than by day. Her listening ear is modu- 
 lated by all the tenderness she feels and the love she 
 expects ; so she gives the music the color of a soul that 
 has come home to wife and motherhood, till her thoughts 
 put such a strain upon the vibrating strings that they 
 grow too tense, and threaten to divulge her delicate 
 secret. So she cries, — 
 
 " Peace ! Now the moon sleeps with Endymion, 
 And would not be awak'd." 
 
304 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Her graceful, passion takes shelter in the old myth 
 whose names personify her thought. And her style of 
 speaking reminds us of the more polished ladies of 
 Shakspeare's time, who delighted in the masques and 
 revels in which the persons of the old mythology were 
 charged to utter gallant sentiments. She is a woman of 
 Juliet's clime, and not without her frankness ; but she 
 has been brought up in England, and her feeling and 
 her judgment are English through and through. 
 
 She has been forbidden by her father's testament to 
 make free choice of the man whom she will love. But 
 she could as soon be divested of her intellect as of her 
 power and wish to love. There is not a single drop run- 
 ning through all her fairness that has caught a chill from 
 the quarter of her brain where wit and wisdom ponder 
 in their clear north light. Her mind is strong, but not 
 the mind of a man, and with no traits more masculine 
 than her frame itself, which is love's solicitor : — 
 
 " Here are sever'd lips, 
 Parted with sugar breath." 
 
 And even in her strict speech to Shylock we can feel 
 the light draught of it, tempering the inclemency of her 
 superb and unexpected threat : the . Jew quails under 
 the sentences which rain on him, golden, grave, serene. 
 And they compel us to observe that pure sex has given 
 the pitch to her strong, fatal wisdom. We cannot de- 
 tect any thin and stridulous quality, like that of the well- 
 gristled Duchess of Gloster, who repaid a box of the ear 
 with these two lines : — 
 
 " Could I come near your beauty with my nails, 
 I'd set my ten commandments in your face." 
 
Portia. 305 
 
 If among the points of a well-nurtured woman there be 
 those that are feline, they are generally retracted into 
 velvet sheaths, and scarce surmised to be there till a 
 scratch is made so silently that you have no evidence of 
 it but your blood. But if Old Probabilities should over- 
 hear a woman blustering in a fashion as follows, — 
 
 " Though in this place most master wear no breeches. 
 She shall not strike Dame Eleanor unreveng'd," — 
 
 he would at once order cautionary signals. When a 
 man scolds in the pulpit or a woman on the platform, 
 the planets shudder, shrink, and grow more crusty. 
 
 Bassanio had caught a throb from the soft breath of 
 Portia which seemed to be a herald of the beauty he 
 describes afterwards when the lucky lid is lifted, — 
 
 " Here in her hairs 
 The painter plays the spider, and hath woven 
 A golden mesh t' entrap the hearts of men, 
 Faster than gnats in cobwebs ; but her eyes ! 
 How could he see to do them ? Having made one, 
 Methinks, it should have power to steal both his. 
 And leave itself unfurnish'd." 
 
 She knows that this portrait of herself lies in the leaden 
 casket ; so that whenever a suitor comes to speculate 
 upon the chance of finding it, how that sweet breath 
 must break itito flurries of dread which call into the 
 eyes a distant alarm ! For, before her father died, she 
 had seen Bassanio, and secretly preferred him ; and we 
 hear him tell Antonio in confidence that 
 
 " Sometimes from her eyes 
 I did receive fair speechless messages." 
 20 
 
3o6 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 No doubt he did ; but they escaped to him just like 
 prisoners' glances that are in vague quest of some con- 
 federate instinct, and slip through a grating ; for she 
 was double-locked in durance of shyness and enforced 
 seclusion, and, "in terms of choice," could not be 
 
 " Solely led 
 By nice direction of a maiden's eyes : " 
 
 kept aloof and sacred by an oath to a dying father, yet so 
 perfectly a woman that too little rather than too much 
 betrayed her; for, as she says, "a maiden hath no 
 tongue but thought." 
 
 The princely suitors file before the caskets, pondering 
 how to match her picture wifh herself. She has all the 
 captivating glamour of a pure blonde. 
 
 " Her sunny locks 
 ■ Hang on her temples like a golden fleece ; 
 Which makes her seat of Belmont, Colchos' strand, 
 And many Jasons come in quest of her." 
 
 While these Jasons agitate her heart by deliberating 
 over the metals of the caskets, the real suitor lies hidden 
 underneath the lead of her manner, and seems to stretch 
 forth a forbidding hand. To the Prince of Arragon, 
 while the cornets relieve her by executing all the flourish, 
 she coldly says, — 
 
 " Behold, there stand the caskets, noble prince : 
 If you choose that wherein I am contain'd, 
 Straight shall our nuptial rites be solemniz'd ; 
 But if you fail, without more speech, my lord. 
 You must be gone from hence immediately." 
 
 ' This is much more curt than the style of her address 
 to the Emperor of Morocco, who, although wearing " the 
 
Portia. 307 
 
 shadow'd livery of the burnish'd sun," had something too 
 of its warmth and openness in the manner of his wooing. 
 
 " I would not change this hue, 
 Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen." 
 
 That went straight to her woman's heart. " I am black, 
 but fair," it said ; and, like Desdemona, she could see 
 " Othello's visage in his mind." But Desdemona's heart 
 was fancy-free. Portia not only had a mind that could 
 not be fancy-led, but her heart was lying in Bassanio's 
 hand, where its life woke, like the gem whose color 
 kindles better at the touch of warmth. Still, the recog- 
 nition of the Emperor's frank passion came forth, toned 
 at once by respect and courtesy : — 
 
 " If my father had not scanted me, 
 And hedg'd me by his wit, to~yield myself 
 His wife, who wins me by that means I told you. 
 Yourself, renowned prince, then stood as fair 
 As any comer I have look'd on yet." 
 
 She may safely say as much as that. And, when he 
 fails, she smooths her exit from his mind by the kind 
 phrase, " A gentle riddance." Then she marks the dif- 
 ference between the women whose hearts can reflect 
 and the Desdemonas of mere sentiment. The former 
 have a firm partition that prevents the mingling of 
 venous and arterial blood : this in the latter has never 
 been quite closed, or is too thin, and liable to be rup- 
 tured by emotion. So Desdemona, 
 
 " A maiden never bold. 
 Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion 
 Blush'd at herself," 
 
3o8 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 broke, as she said, into " downright violence and scorn 
 of fortunes." She " did love the Moor to live with him." 
 Portia, on the contrary, says, " Let all of his complexion 
 choose me so," — it is a hint of the natural aversion of 
 all natures who are representatives of one distinct type 
 from mixing their love with those of another. But I 
 cannot agree with a criticism of John Quincy Adams to 
 the effect that Shakspeare wrote the tragedy of " Othello" 
 on purpose to show the disastrous consequences of mis- 
 cegenation. Desdemona's weak point is the only fatality 
 in the play. She began* by deceiving her father, and 
 secretly made a match which broke his heart. But if 
 she had not recurred to deceit again, and lied to her hus- 
 band about the handkerchief, his smouldering jealousy 
 would have never blazed. Want of frankness was her 
 contribution to lago's plot, the element that made it a 
 success. Portia stood to her oath, and ran all risks. 
 
 Portia has the strong sense to expect that the majority 
 of her noble admirers will be taken by appearance. She 
 is not q.uite sure, but has an instinct, that these gentle- 
 men who are after her are also after her pretty property of 
 Belmont, and will be likely to choose the metals respon- 
 sive to this temper. Bassanio frankly acknowledges to 
 a friend that he would like to repair his broken fortunes ; 
 but Shakspeare shows him to be a lover before he gives 
 this mercenary hint ; and he has reason to surmise that 
 Portia loves him. This unspoken mutuality dignifies 
 his quest ; as if Shakspeare himself would not admit the 
 charge that he is a fortune-hunter. And it is noticeable 
 how little consequence we attach to Bassanio's character. 
 
Portia. 309 
 
 We do not care to see him in. any action, or to. have him 
 show a worthiness to be Portia's lover. He is but the 
 lay-figure of her love : there is so much of her that there 
 must be a great deal of him, and he may be spared the 
 trouble of appearing at full length. And we never sus- 
 pect her of belonging to that tribe of bright women who, 
 either from instinct or calculation, marry good-natured, 
 well-mannered numskulls, and never have reason to sue 
 for a divorce. Shakspeare ennobles Bassanio when the 
 divining soul sees through the leaden lid. 
 
 But what if one of the other suitors should also have 
 a noble heart whose pulses feed discernment, one as fine 
 and unconventional as herself ! There is just hazard 
 enough to affront her cherishing of the absent Bassanio. 
 She does not relish the moment when her heart, richer 
 than the princes know of, goes into the lottery. How- 
 ever, when her father made his.will, it doubtless occurred 
 to her that his choice of metals came from a life's 
 experience of the calibre of the average man, and was 
 meant affectionately to protect her till the true gentle- 
 man should come. As Nerissa says, " Your father was 
 ever virtuous ; and holy men, at their death, have good 
 inspirations ; therefore, the lottery that he hath devised 
 in these three chests, of gold, silver, and lead (whereof 
 who chooses his meaning chooses you) will, no doubt, 
 never be chosen by any rightly but one whom you shall 
 rightly love." Fortunate is the man who wins a wife 
 because he chooses Heaven's meaning in a woman ! 
 Luckless the wife who is not chosen by some implied 
 Heaven in a man ! 
 
3IO Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 The written scrolls which are enclosed in the caskets 
 show that her father anticipated acutely the ordinary 
 motives of mankind. The suitors imagine that they are 
 reflecting in a superior style as they give their reasons 
 for taking to the gold or the silver ; but they are realty 
 biased by the common sentiment, as Portia sees : — 
 
 " Oh, these deliberate fools ! When they do choose, 
 They have the wisdom by their wit to lose." 
 
 So one by one they slaughter themselves and clear the 
 way. 
 
 How Shakspeare's verse celebrates Bassanio's ap- 
 proach to Belmont t It is like a gracious prelude con- 
 ceived by her secret preference, escaping to guide him to 
 her where she lies under a spell which he must break. 
 
 There enters a messenger, sumptuous in blank verse, 
 like the tabard of a herald whose message is desired. 
 
 " Madam, there is alighted at your gate 
 A young Venetian, one that comes before 
 To signify the approaching of his lord. 
 
 I have not seen 
 So likely an ambassador of love : 
 A day in April never cartie so sweet. 
 To show how costly summer was at hand. 
 As this fore-spurrer comes before his lord." 
 
 The lover has reached the enchanted palace^ and is 
 in haste to liberate its inmate. Portia might have said, 
 with the antique grace that always clothes her speech, 
 that he came to attack, like a new Perseus, those mena- 
 cing metals which rivet her in reach of danger, to lift her 
 passionately out of fetters. How she struggles not to 
 show her love, and thus she shows it ! — 
 
Portia. 311 
 
 " There's something tells me (but it is not love) 
 I would not lose you ; and you know yourself, 
 Hate counsels not in such a quality." 
 
 An ordinary woman might have enmeshed him in a 
 cocoon of delicate coquetries : any woman dead in love, 
 and a little less than strict to an oath, would have 
 managed in some way to provoke that lead casket into 
 twinkling a hint to him. But she is too honest for either. 
 A woman with a soul as tender as it is firm, here she 
 stands dismayed as Destiny is about to rattle its dice 
 upon her heart : happiness, and a future worthy of her, 
 all at stake. For though her mental resources might 
 compete with any fate, she is all woman, made to be a 
 wife, and without wifehood to feel herself at one essen- 
 tial point impaired, — all the more defrauded because so 
 well endowed. How she clings for support to the few 
 moments that yet stand before his choice ! She wishes 
 there were more of them to stay her. 
 
 " I pray you tarry ; 
 
 . ' . , for, in choosing wrong, 
 
 I lose your company ; therefore, forebear awhile." 
 
 She has no courage now : love, when it stole her heart, 
 found that trait too, and added it to the booty. 
 
 " I-est you should not understand me well 
 (And yet a maiden hath no tongue but thought), 
 I would detain you here some month or two. 
 Before you venture for me." 
 
 The noble lady's plea fills us with admiring pity : we 
 admire to see the strong, beautiful woman so downcast 
 with this new emotion which Heaven has quartered 
 
312 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 upon her life ; but we pity, because perhaps it will be 
 doomed to dwell alone. And then the more spacious 
 the lodging, the more dreary the echoes of these few 
 sweet hours. 
 
 Has she said too much ">. She has a chase after this 
 frankness to make a struggle to detain it, but it over- 
 comes and gets away : — , 
 
 " Beshrew your eyes, 
 They have o'erlooked me, and divided me : 
 One half of me is yours, the other half yours, — 
 Mine own, I would say ; but, if mine, then yours, 
 And so all yours ! " 
 
 This freshet of disclosure does not carry away maidenly 
 reserve, for that is transferred from her person and 
 locked up in the coyness of the caskets : in them there 
 lurks a threat, a possible disaster, which lends some 
 pathos to her frankness, and prevents it from forfeiting 
 our respect. 
 
 Now Bassanio, who lives upon the rack, denies her 
 plea for delay : " Let me to my fortune and the cas- 
 kets." How profoundly she surmises that music might 
 lull the watching Fate, so that he could pass to his 
 Eurydice ! She bids the music play : — 
 
 " As are those dulcet sounds in break of day, 
 That creep into tlie dreaming bridegroom's ear. 
 And summon him to marriage." 
 
 Bassanio must be attempered to his choice ; the song's 
 key must have an instinct for the proper casket's key. 
 Unconsciously she breaks her oath ; for what benign 
 influence selected the song that is now sung .' Some 
 
Portia. 3 1 3 
 
 star, whose tenant was her father ? Or was it Nerissa's 
 doing, who determined to convey a hint to the lover ? 
 Or did Gratiano hit upon it, who had got from Nerissa 
 a promise of her love if the choice went to suit her ? A 
 hint, indeed ! It is the very breadth of broadness, and 
 a lover is not dull. 
 
 " Tell me, where is fancy bred, — 
 Or in the heart, or in the head ? 
 How begot, how nourished ? 
 
 Reply, reply. 
 It is engender'd in the eyes. 
 With gazing fed ; and fancy dies 
 In the cradle where it lies. 
 
 Let us all ring fancy's knell : 
 I'll begin it, — Ding, dong, bell. 
 
 Ding, dong, bell." 
 
 A song that did good sexton-service, for fancy's knell is 
 rung indeed. The strain reminds Bassanio of notices 
 in his experience : that error hides its grossness in orna- 
 ment ; vice assumes some mark of virtue ; beauty is for 
 sale by the weight, and is a show which cunning puts 
 on to entrap wise men : in short, as the song says, 
 fancies * come by gazing, have no life deeper than the 
 eyes, and die where they are born. The strain wakes 
 up his mind into its nobler attitude. " So may the out- 
 ward shows be least themselves." This fortune-hunter, 
 after all, is Portia's counterpart. The melody woven 
 out of air glides into his hand and becomes a clew to 
 bliss. Oh, the woman thrills ! in touching the lead his 
 hand has clutched her heart, and forces from her words 
 
 * Sometimes in Shakspeare the word _/a«<y means a genuine passion ; 
 here it hints only at a passing sentiment. 
 
314 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 that are outbreaks of that which is everlastingly the 
 Woman. They assail, they challenge man to say what 
 is so great as love. This polished, clear, sagacious, 
 gifted, balanced woman dares man to say love is not 
 greatest of all. 
 
 "How all tlie other passions fleet to air, 
 As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embrac'd despair, 
 And shudd'ring fear, and green-ey'd jealousy ! 
 
 love, 
 
 Be moderate, allay thy ecstasy ; 
 In measure rein thy joy, scant this excess. 
 
 1 feel too much thy blessing ; make it less. 
 For fear I surfeit." 
 
 Thus the lips which an oath had sealed melt apart in 
 the first kiss, and her heart, like a fluid ruby, rushes 
 through. 
 
 Shakspeare's women never trickle into tepid accept- 
 ances : their Yes to love is not puckered in a mouth 
 shaped by " prisms and propriety ; " it is not a whisper 
 through a closet key-hole, which the lover, overhearing, 
 doubts may possibly be No. The Duke, in "Twelfth 
 Night," steals rhetoric to utter Shakspeare's feeling 
 about great-hearted and full-blooded women: — 
 
 " How will she love, when the rich, golden shaft 
 Hath kill'd the flock of all affections else 
 That live in her ! when liver, brain, and heart, 
 These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill'd 
 (Her sweet perfections) with one self king ! " 
 
 Yet Portia, whom Nature made capable of this rap- 
 ture, had wit enough to invent comedies of life and 
 character, judgment enough to devise the best ways, 
 acumen that astonished Venetian subtlety, as it baffled 
 
Portia. 3 1 5 
 
 Shylock so neatly that the surprise of wit is imparted 
 to us. No modern parson could speak with such sweet 
 gravity of persuasion upon the quality of mercy ; no 
 bright schemer of novels could spice her conversations 
 with such raillery, or construct them upon such instinct 
 for character, as we notice in the scene where she 
 amuses Nerissa with those sketches of her various lov- 
 ers' foibles. What does such a woman want for tools, 
 — pencil, brush, goose-quill, or tribune .' She is made 
 to have her choice of occupations. Does she have a 
 call to utter the great truths of morals and religion "i 
 Undoubtedly, Nature has ordained her. Therefore, thou 
 Reverend D.D., with all respect for dulness which is 
 miraculous, that pulpit where you labor like a vessel 
 water-logged is wanted : we people in the pews are faint 
 with emptiness on board your craft, and despair of mak- 
 ing any harbor. Persuade him, O Portia, to cede that 
 domain to you: we would fain have the droppings of 
 the sanctuary like the gentle dew from heaven upon the 
 earth beneath. 
 
 Here is another Daniel come to judgment! We would 
 say, let another judge's seat be placed for her, if we did 
 not observe that it was love which enlisted her wit to 
 screen the friend of her lover. Here again Shakspeare 
 has derived her public attitude from the emotions which 
 her sex involves : the triumph of the court-room is a 
 stratagem inspired by inclination. In a panel of jurors, 
 how many women we should have to challenge on the 
 ground of unfitness by reason of the element which 
 makes up every verdict of our life ! She is disqualified 
 
3i6 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 by that exquisite superiority. Her private feeling is 
 liable to be so profoundly interested that sometimes she 
 acquits or condemns, not as a judge, but as a person. 
 Her element, which attains to equilibrium in the world's 
 broad atmosphere, might, if condensed into the Leyden 
 jar of a court-room, explode with singular effects. Upon 
 the bench it might happen that she would make our bail 
 too light, or refuse it altogether. By common consent, 
 Justice has always been a woman ; but it was found 
 necessary to blindfold her, that she may not see into 
 which scale to throw a heart. 
 
 But this heart of woman, so liable to hurried action, 
 is the centre of her bravest and least calculated ges- 
 tures. Her profession is that of heroine. Wherever it 
 be natural to recoil, she flouts Nature and declines the 
 job of shrinking. Portia and Helena might be two sis- 
 ters of the healing art, gratefully welcomed by their 
 own sex's modesty, but self-possessed and prompt wher- 
 ever suffering tears down the pales of convention ; sis- 
 ters of mercy, hunting after wounds in the rear of 
 battle, dressing maimed soldiers down the sighing wards 
 of hospitals, appalled at no hurt the most hideous, re- 
 pelled by no festering squalor ; the mates of man in 
 courage and dexterity. Let a university be founded 
 for their training. 
 
 What shall a Portia undertake to do .' That which is 
 level to Portia's capacity. Must she do it "i That is as 
 she herself may decide. But we let our women do the 
 dirty drudgery of kitchens, expose themselves to the 
 publicity of saloons, grow sallow and stooping over spin- 
 
Portia. 3 1 7 
 
 dies, and spend all day dodging poverty behind a coun- 
 ter. We pay our money to see them exercise their 
 various talents on the stage, where no exigency of the 
 plot surprises us, no shifts of costume seem inappropri- 
 ate, no want of it amazing. Oh, we gentlemen are such 
 sticklers for propriety, so interested to keep our women 
 well sequestered ! She must not speak in public, but 
 she may sing : Jenny Lind's open mouth does not look 
 indecent, but Lucretia Mott's is an outrage of our mod- 
 esty ! Where will you draw a line through the crowd of 
 competent intelligences ? I would draw it very quickly 
 by putting cleverness in the place of dulness, though 
 many a preacher and schoolmaster, many a vapid lec- 
 turer, would have to budge. Why should inferiority in 
 a swallow-tail be so valued and protected against superi- 
 ority in skirts .? Napoleon said, " Careers are open to 
 talents ; " but he dreaded lively and gifted women, and 
 got them out of the country, wisely suspecting that their 
 insight would fathom his weakness. But no country can 
 flourish till the talents and morals of women mix with 
 its affairs. I cannot see why dulness is more respecta- 
 ble in a man than in a woman. Does it hurt our feel- 
 ings more to see a woman fail in any public attitude 
 than to see a man do it } No doubt it does ; for we 
 cannot entirely disenchant those youthful reveries in 
 which woman, though so close to us, seemed to hover 
 upon an unapproachable horizon, a shape that com- 
 manded loyalty from our sense of harmony and pro- 
 portion, — nothing in excess, nothing in defect ; an 
 embodiment of a perfect tone's vibration that thrilled in 
 
3i8 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 our ideal of life and promised it a future. We could not 
 tolerate any discrepancy with the allurement of this 
 mystery. Our own sexual distinction enhanced it to 
 the pitch of astonishment and reverence. We could not 
 bear to see her clothed and adorned in a way to jar the 
 taste which she first woke in us. We cannot bear it 
 now. No pretext of convenience in locomotion, whether 
 by horseback, rail, steamer, velocipede, or mangle, can 
 rub out of our preference the lines which trace the re- 
 serve that protects our youthful dream. And how can 
 this being, only half suggested yet clearly not ourselves, 
 put a scrawl of crudity in place of those fluent curves 
 that describe something less angular than we are .'' The 
 gestures of her mind, when they are publicly displayed 
 to throw a glove into the mob of us from the edge of a 
 platform, must always indorse our preconception. Any 
 thing harsh, some acidity of tone, sentences that stride 
 or bandy with arms akimbo, will pique the unconverted 
 world into taking up her glove to crush. and not to kiss. 
 So we cannot bear to see a woman pushed forward into 
 premature expression which the gift will not confirm. 
 A man's stupidity does not inflict so great a hurt on our 
 imagination. Distance doth breed divinity ; and we 
 shrink to find a woman capable of dulness, and yet able^ 
 to sjiow it. All this may be conceded to be a natural 
 instinct which men will not abandon. But its root is in 
 regard for woman ; so that men should be the first to 
 sound a trumpet before the lists to champion her genius, 
 whatever it may be, and to see that fair play is enforced 
 in the tournament. Shall the gifted woman enter the 
 
Portia. 319 
 
 lists ? Let her poverty, if not her preference, consent 
 and decide. 
 
 But a woman, however poor she may he, and burdened 
 with claims upon her relationship, cannot try to do what 
 Portia did not need to do unless her talent can justify 
 the attempt. If she presumes upon the deference which 
 man spontaneously pays to her sex, or calculates that 
 curiosity will be piqued to see her exhibition, she cannot, 
 even with the help of her natural allies, flowers, costume, 
 and manner, long conceal some inadequacy for the part 
 she aspires to play. Then she will wreak discredit upon 
 the independence of woman ; and, if that be the special 
 cause which she advocates, her presence on the platform 
 will be an advertisement of its failure. For mankind, 
 which has invented the motto for woman which styles her 
 the weaker sex, does not like to be taken at its word, and 
 will not sit patiently where this weakness bores it. It 
 withdraws into the retreats where this accredited weak- 
 ness is a delight and power. Of course, wherever mas- 
 culine ineffectiveness appears, men are put out by it, 
 except in a meeting-house ; and there it is tolerated 
 in deference to numerous tea-drinkings, marriages and 
 funerals, and hours of pastoral gentleness ; and the immi- 
 nent inadequacy of speech is arrested by the organ. But 
 the platform has neither tradition nor liturgy : the gaze 
 of the audience is a mitrailleuse that sweeps it. There 
 is no rose-window to throw a tint on bloodless speech. 
 Men compromise no truth of their own, and damage no 
 cause when they refrain from listening ; for man is 
 already the proprietor of all that he desires, and more 
 
320 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 than he deserves. This is not the case with woman, — 
 not, at least, in the regions where there are too many- 
 mouths and too scanty subsistence ; nor in those where 
 cultivated women cherish an interest in equality of op- 
 portunities ; nor in those where the public law discrim- 
 inates against them ; nor in those where woman dislikes 
 the liberty to be taxed without the right to vote upon the 
 taxing. It is all the more incumbent upon women to be 
 jealously careful that their self-respect, at least, should 
 be adequately represented. They defeat their own 
 thought when they applaud the thin speech which some- 
 times lends its want of voice to it. It is a " childish 
 treble " that " pipes and whistles in its sound." There 
 is no reason, because its piping and whistling were never 
 tolerated before, that the new chance should confer im- 
 munity upon it. The liberty of later times must not be, 
 for either sex, an unchartered libertine. Truth, eternal 
 nature, the laws of mind and the moods of feeling, com- 
 bine to take a mortgage upon it, whose interest must be 
 paid in coin that is accepted as legal tender by the gifts 
 that hold it. Recognizing this, perhaps the time will 
 come when a superior womanhood shall remand mascu- 
 line incapacity swiftly to the oblivion it deserves, when- 
 ever it mars blocks of marble, squanders paint, debauches 
 music, or drones an absurd bass about God, Religion, 
 and the awful morals. Pray Heaven to have woman 
 restrained from the dilettantism of modern times ! 
 
 When Portia's heart unties the spasm of joy that 
 tightened round it at Bassanio's choice, it beats again 
 with the grave and sweet dignity that is as native to her 
 
Portia. 321 
 
 as her playful wit. Her mind recognizes the serious 
 change that must befall her fortune : in the first moment 
 of it there comes a deep humility that makes her speech 
 kneel at the feet of the man whom she will marry. 
 For her great superiority is free from the taint of 
 conceit, save " a noble and a true conceit of godlike 
 amity." 
 
 We sometimes discover that gifted women are over- 
 consciously aware of the effect which they produce. ■ 
 While we admire the iris on the peacock's neck, a bri- 
 dling runs through it as if to set the colors in a better 
 light, and our attention is divided by the motion. The 
 orator's greatest gift is self-absorption. It strips his 
 person to clothe his thought. His morals seem to gather 
 luminosity out of the air, to become visible to men. 
 The moment that the speaker listens to his own words, 
 and snatches time between them to make the audience 
 captive to his little private ovation, the people are less 
 absorbed, begin to study the cut of his garments, and 
 nod to each other how well they fit. Then the thought 
 that was beginning to condense goes back like Ariel to 
 the elements. When a woman's excellence reads on our 
 faces that it is delightful, and begins also to be delighted, 
 it throws a shadow : as we stand in it she seems less 
 chaste than we thought her. All of Portia's talents 
 share the inviolable reserve of her person, which seems 
 to convey its modesty into the unspoken thought. How 
 adorable is her humility ! — 
 
 " You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, 
 ... an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd : 
 21 
 
322 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Happy in this, she is not yet so old 
 But she may learn ; and happier than this, 
 She is not bred so dull but she can learn ; 
 Happiest of all, in that her gentle spirit 
 Commits itself to yours to be directed, 
 As from her lord, her governor, her king." 
 
 Does this language seem to you slavish and old- 
 fashioned ? And do you, madam, declare that you never 
 saw the man yet for whom you would so demean your- 
 self ? Then I shall know that just at present you are 
 not in love. Perhaps you never have been ; for it is the 
 perfect language of a woman's first hours which follow 
 love's declaration, when she feels that her life and soul 
 are to be made complete by marriage. She storms her- 
 self with questions never before suggested. What could 
 he see in her .'' What has she got with which to repay 
 this exquisite flattery, this shuddering delight at being 
 summoned out of millions of her sex } The first impulse 
 is to spill the soul in a libation to the deity of the hour : 
 let the whole of it drench my lover ; let me not dare to 
 reserve a portion to teach me a first selfish lesson. All, 
 all is yours, my king ! Come, drain it at the chalice of 
 my lips ! 
 
 An emotion far shallower than this is quite enough in 
 any age to trump up a marriage with ; but it is a funeral 
 bak'd meat growing colder still at the wedding-breakfast. 
 It is often frozen stiff before it gets there. Half-ripened 
 girls fancy that their simmering preference will have the 
 sunburst of love ; but the blossom is still in its sheath : 
 when it matures, that first greenness is pushed off. But, 
 if it was rubbed off, the blossom, exposed to unseason- 
 
Portia. 323 
 
 able air, grows rusty, and lifts up a vapid invitation to 
 some splendor to nod and mingle sweets. Shakspeare 
 has no language of conventional avowal : no acceptances 
 that are inspired by respect, calculation, immaturity, ac- 
 quaintanceship, water his page with insipidity. His pen 
 is love's shaft, and always has somebody's blood upon 
 the tip. 
 
 So do not include Portia's sublime deference in your 
 modern programme of reform. Man would grow less 
 worthy of woman, less obedient to her inspirations, if 
 that fell into disrepute. It is the first unstudied strata- 
 gem of love, — one that so humbles man into a greater 
 deference that she can no longer call him .lord. She 
 listens in turn to his emotion : every line lifts her into 
 equality, with the gesture that kings make when they 
 acknowledge : — 
 
 " Madam, you have bereft me of all words, 
 Only my blood speaks to you in my veins ; 
 And there is such confusion in my powers, 
 As after some oration, fairly spoke 
 By a beloved prince, there doth appear 
 Among the buzzing pleased multitude ; 
 Where every something, being blent together, 
 Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy, 
 Express'd, and not express'd." 
 
 This is the quality in Shakspeare's courtships which 
 convinces us that all his marriages will turn out happily. 
 And he makes it plain in all his plays that he is a devo- 
 tee of marriage. Portia is quite competent to lead a 
 single life, and might earn a brilliant living if fate 
 stripped her of wealth. Being without a particle of 
 ambition, she would have to be driven by poverty into 
 
324 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 setting up housekeeping with her gifts. But no woman 
 is fine enough to persuade Nature to grant her exemption 
 from the pain of love. There will always be exceptions, 
 — an Olympia Morata, a Cassandra F6d^l4 Florence 
 Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, Maria Mitchell, Clara 
 Barton, — natures of great constancy, who are absorbed 
 in scholarship, poesy, or good works, with a temperament 
 that has an even graciousness toward all men, and just 
 pauses short of honoring one exclusively. Or, perhaps, 
 the genius of such women was the gradual rally of time 
 around an early disappointment, whose story never will 
 be told, when something bafHed a first love, — as the 
 pearl-oyster, stimulated by some foreign substance that 
 has intruded into its retreat, slowly coats it all over with 
 nacre, till beauty incorporates the secret ill. Man 
 covets it, but can never fix the date when the trouble 
 of a fine soul began to revenge itself so nobly. 
 
 Still, it gives us pleasure when the best gifts are sur- 
 prised, captured, seized away to consecrate privacy and 
 become a fount of noble inheritance. Their publicity 
 shall thrill and elevate a later age. 
 
 " When virtue leaps high in the public fountain, you 
 seek for the lofty spring of nobleness, and find it far off 
 in the dear breast of some mother, who melted the 
 snows of winter, and condensed the summer's dew into 
 fair, sweet humanity, which now gladdens the face of 
 man in all the city streets." 
 
 Or if, in middle life, some truth, some moral, claims 
 a woman's hand, and offers second marriage, men will 
 gladly listen to a tone whose grave, sweet temper. 
 
Portia. 325 
 
 pitched by first love and married happiness, pervades 
 all her experience. ' 
 
 So Portia, who cottld, when it was needed, " turn two 
 mincing steps into a manly stride," doffs the lawyer's 
 robe, and, returning, is met by music and conducted to 
 a palace that was not till then a home. 
 
HELENA; QPHELIA. 
 
HELENA. 
 
 'T^HE character of Helena, in "All's Well that Ends 
 Well," furnishes a striking contrast to Ophelia, 
 and tempts the student of Shakspeare to bring both 
 types of womanhood into one field of view. Ophelia 
 loves the Lord Hamlet, who is her " expectancy and 
 rose of the fair state," — one to be proud of, cling to, 
 and adore. But, when her father's interference begins 
 to draw her into the contrary current which sweeps her 
 life away, she develops no power of resistance. Even 
 her love is not strong enough to stem the stream that 
 rushes suddenly from subterranean caves to cover her 
 feet and climb to her heart. She has no will for with- 
 standing her father's resolution: her passion has not 
 yet ventured out of its girlish stage, to gather strength 
 and be a threat to her docility. She submissively re- 
 turns the Prince's cherished words and presents, lets 
 the old father rule her, and goes crazed. 
 
 But Helena, though also loving one above her rank, 
 being only a physician's daughter, cannot bear the idea 
 of giving up Count Bertram. Her love is not at first 
 returned ; but she contains love enough to furnish both 
 hearts, and she actually follows him to court, to make a 
 captive of him, hoping to light a mutual flame. Such 
 a procedure as that stood not within the capacity of 
 Ophelia. No doubt it offends our conventional feeling ; 
 
330 Wil, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 so that Helena must not only succeed, but manifest pure 
 and noble qualities on the strange road she takes toward 
 success, if she would gain our sympathy. The play 
 begins quite early to canvass for our favor by showing 
 that she is a noble woman who proceeds thus, and it is 
 in the interest of a love that intends to be pure and 
 legal. It is death to be without Bertram ; and love will 
 dare all things, risk life itself, to save the Ufe of love. 
 Why not in a woman as well as in a man .■' Nay, more 
 likely in her case, for that special reason of womanhood, 
 that positive instinct to be dependent, and to find life at 
 once swallowed up and blessed by something or some 
 person outside of Self. A modern woman, who desires 
 to be independent, is eager to find something upon 
 which she may depend. The Self of the average 
 woman does not really subsist and reach perfect con- 
 sciousness until the lover makes the claim of another 
 Self upon it. For that which at first appears to be a 
 threat of absorption, annihilation of the individual, turns 
 out to be the bliss of being rendered back. It is only 
 by the loss of mere individuality that an immortal per- 
 son is established. 
 
 What kind of a woman is this one who sallies forth to 
 turn a man into a husband .' Shakspeare endows her 
 with natural traits so positive that they claim no re- 
 pose, are contented with -no proficiency, and continually 
 project improvement. " Her dispositions she inherits, 
 which make fair gifts fairer ; for where an unclean mind 
 carries virtuous qualities, there commendations go with 
 pity, they are virtues and traitors too ; in her they are 
 
Helena. 331 
 
 the better for their simpleness ; she derives her honesty, 
 and achieves her goodness." That is to say, not con- 
 tent with being well-born into an amiable disposition, 
 she meditates the career of character. Such a mind 
 allied with purity justifies itself, and can venture behav- 
 ior which a weak person would be wrecked upon ; in 
 whom, therefore, the attempt would be culpable. Con- 
 ventional manners are the haven within whose break- 
 water the weak ride at safety, where nothing tests and 
 strains their shallow build. When Helena goes to court 
 on the pretext that the King's malady can be cured by a 
 prescription that her dying father confided to her, the 
 King, who prefers male doctors, puts her off and under- 
 values her capacity ; but she persists with a sincerity so 
 sparkling, a tone so prompt and clear, a will so hard to 
 repulse, that the King perceives no ordinary woman : — 
 
 " Methinks, in thee some blessed spirit doth speak 
 His powerful sound within an organ weak : 
 And what impossibility would slay 
 In common sense, sense saves another way. 
 Thy life is dear ; for all that life can rate 
 Worth name of life, in thee hath estimate, 
 Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage, honor, all 
 That happiness and prime can happy call." 
 
 So this ennobled daughter of a doctor aspires to wed' 
 the noble son of a countess. Shakspeare attacks the , 
 social etiquette of his own age and of all secluded cir- 
 cles. Helena should be filled with grief for the father 
 latdy dead ; but her " imagination carries no favor in it, 
 but only Bertram's." 
 
 " I am undone : there is no living, none. 
 If Bertram be away. It were all one, 
 
332 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 That I should love a bright, particular star, 
 And think to wed it, he is so above me : 
 In his bright radiance and collateral light 
 Must I be comforted, not in his sphere." 
 
 Then she gives a touch of woman's petulance at being 
 so ensnared : — 
 
 " 'Twas pretty, though a plague, 
 To see him every hour ;. to sit and draw 
 His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls. 
 In my heart's table, — heart too capable 
 Of every line and trick of his sweet favor." 
 
 How frank and strong is the expression of her love ! 
 The lines are chiselled by a delicate distinctness : they 
 suggest her profile. The verse has the high instep of a 
 woman who can be haughty enough to crush the blos- 
 soms of this new, surprising sentiment. 
 
 She does not half listen to the gossip of Parolles. It 
 is the absent Bertram who is drawing her thoughts to 
 wander in the distance, to be in imagination for him 
 
 "A thousand loves. 
 His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet, 
 ' His faith, his sweet disaster." 
 
 It is a pity " that wishing well had not a body in 't." 
 
 Now as Parolles departs, saying, " Get thee a good hus- 
 band, and use him as he uses thee,'' Helena shows us 
 the originality of her character by compelling love, that 
 is usually of a habit so timid and retiring, to put it off 
 and become adventurous. She chides the weakness of 
 sitting still to mope and be macerated by passion. 
 Something must be done to justify and consecrate it, 
 to vindicate Nature's scope : she already claims Bertram 
 
Helena. 333 
 
 by divine sanction of her feeling. No matter whetlier 
 he knows it or not, she knows he is that other part of 
 her which her clear soul misses ; and Fate shall not be 
 pardoned if it leaves her less whole and rounded than 
 she ought to be. Hitherto she is but half a person, and 
 that half is disabled at the discovery. Love fills her 
 with this rebuke of incompleteness, till she cannot tol- 
 erate thus being half-born into the world. When love 
 takes hold of such determined minds, who are capable of 
 willing and well endowed to confirm the will in action, 
 the feminine traits acquire a bravery which inspires 
 an invention not inconsistent with womanhood. She 
 must find some way to reach the court, and put love's 
 halo round his person : perhaps it will be absorbed and 
 mingle with his blood. When the heart pronounces 
 strongly, its meaning is sure to gather on the counte- 
 nance and lend to conduct the purple of victory. So 
 Helena will not have a secret, to prey like a worm upon 
 the damask buds of all her youth. " Fortune," she said, 
 " was no goddess, that had put such difference betwixt 
 their two estates ; love, no god, that would not extend 
 his might only where qualities were level." She will 
 not risk leaving the business to Heaven, and sit half 
 made up till Providence may by chance observe her 
 
 plight. 
 
 "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie 
 Which we ascribe to Heaven : the fated sky 
 Gives us free scope ; only, doth backward pull 
 Our slow design.s, when we ourselves are dull. 
 Impossible be strange attempts to those 
 That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose 
 What hath been cannot be." 
 
334 ^i'^' Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Still, with all this venturesome disposition to help the 
 piecing-out of destiny, she is a true woman, who must 
 relapse from the boldest project into the secret humility 
 of loving, and of looking up to the orb around which 
 the heart revolves. And how honest she is! for she 
 had a father whose "skill was almost as great as his 
 honesty." So she acknowledges her passion to Ber- 
 tram's mother, as if to let us see that her action is not 
 a plot, and her motive nothing short of womanly. 
 
 " I follow him not 
 By any token of presumptuous suit ; 
 Nor would I have him, till I do deserve him ; 
 Yet never know how that desert should be. 
 
 Thus, Indian-like, 
 Religious in mine error, I adore 
 The sun, that looks upon his worshipper, 
 But knows of him no more." 
 
 In this admirable scene, the Countess does not repel, 
 but rather seems to undertake the part of Nature's 
 good-will for any love that is real enough and full 
 enough for two. 
 
 " Even so it was with me when I was young : 
 
 If we are Nature's, these are ours ; this thorn 
 Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong : 
 
 Our blood to us, this to our blood is born ; 
 It is the show and seal of Nature's truth. 
 Where love's strong passion is impress'd in youth.'' 
 
 Nature is not a member of society, and pays small heed 
 to the prescriptions of a set. She does not ponder 
 dowries and settlements, nor hunt up the title-deeds of 
 clothes and houses ; and does not snuff up the wedding- 
 breakfast across the sacrament that mixes the blood of 
 two hearts. 
 
Helena. 335 
 
 " Strange is it, that our bloods 
 Of color, weight, and heat, pour'd all together. 
 Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off 
 In differences so mighty : 
 
 Good alone 
 Is good without a name." 
 
 It has not yet occurred to Bertram that Helena enter- 
 tains for him an affection which he might dupUcate. 
 When he departs for the court, he only says to her, 
 " The best wishes that can be forged in your thoughts 
 be servants to you," little conscious how implicitly they 
 would serve her. His soul is preoccupied with the 
 image of Maud, the fair daughter of Lafeu. 
 
 " I stuck my choice upon her, ere my heart 
 Durst make too bold a herald of my tongue." 
 
 Beyond her beauty there stretched a long perspective of 
 
 contempt for all other women. Maud was too near to 
 
 him, and blocked up the outlets of each eye, that no 
 
 glances might get forth to scour the region which was 
 
 so fruitful with Helena, to forage for her heart and 
 
 gather it, — ■ , 
 
 " Thence it came. 
 That she, whom all men prais'd, and whom myself, 
 Since I have lost, have lov'd, was in mine eye 
 The dust that did offend it." 
 
 He is at first superior in rank and inferior in nature, 
 his blood and virtue contending for empire in him. She 
 is still- the woman whom Nature has elected for him, 
 notwithstanding his surprise and contempt when she 
 summons him out of the crowd of courtiers in pursuance 
 of the boon she had craved of the King, if he recovered 
 by the use of her prescriptions. In her the voice of 
 
336 Wt^, Humor, and Shakspcdre. 
 
 Nature spoke more truly than Bertram's passing in- 
 clination. As she claims the precious fee, the blushes 
 in her cheeks whisper, — 
 
 " We blush that thou shouldst choose : but, be repuls'd, 
 Let the white death sit on thy cheek for ever ; 
 We'll irie'er come there again." 
 
 Bertram feigns compliance with the wishes of the 
 King ; but, determining to get rid of her, he hurries 
 from the marriage rite to the Florentine wars. There 
 was a technical marriage of two persons who are not 
 yet wedded, for he does not yet deserve her. The 
 shadow of her plebeian origin is large enough to ob- 
 scure her merit ; so that poetic justice requires that he 
 must wait till she is appreciated, when he will find that 
 he has gained every thing in yielding every thing to the 
 supremacy of pure womanhood. He flings himself away 
 to the wars, exclaiming, " Till I have no wife, I have noth- 
 ing in France." 
 
 When she perceives that she is the cause of his ex- 
 patriation, her decision is made to leave France, so that 
 he may be free to enter it again. She becomes a pil- 
 grim, with bared feet, to do penance for ambitious love, 
 wandering here and there, keeping out of the way that 
 he may be recalled from the dangers of war : — 
 
 " He is too good and fair for death and me ; 
 Whom I myself embrace, to set him free." 
 
 By and by, Bertram, believing that she is dead, is 
 overwhelmed with an access of love for her. His 
 awakened conviction " cries to see what's done." Sup- 
 
Helena. 337 
 
 posing that she is departed, he finds that she is for the 
 first time present. Although he has been full of faults, 
 and does not hesitate to screen himself by the most 
 ungentlemanly prevarications, there is a strain of his 
 nature that sounded when he thought that death had 
 snapped her string. The vibration woke the tone of 
 Helena, and married him to her without a priest save 
 death. "Sweet Helen's knell" became the joy-peals of 
 her marriage morn. Then he receives his true patent 
 of nobility ; for her soul converts him to a man. 
 
 In this play, Shakspeare has followed the incidents of 
 an old story ; but, in doing so, Helena grew upon his 
 hands to be so fine that we dislike to see her submit to 
 a certain one of the circumstances of that borrowed plot. 
 And we wonder that Shakspeare should not have shielded 
 her by a better invention. 
 
 We are not satisfied to know that such incidents were 
 very qommon in the novels of that day, whence Shak- 
 speare derived many of his plots ; for the greatest 
 moments of his genius have taught us reverently to 
 demand of him more than that he should be content to 
 take the old threads and weave the old strand over. 
 We expect to follow them as clews that lead through 
 subtle labyrinths of Nature where the heart has stored 
 its secrets. Whenever we venture with him on that 
 raft of some light tale of Boccaccio, we are not surprised 
 if we drop into deep water whose cresting waves admon- 
 ish . Shakspeare to brace and fortify the slim float he 
 started on. We do not relish the idea that Shakspeare 
 is mainly interested to work out a plot into a good act- 
 
338 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 ing play, and so takes the nearest coarse things that 
 may suit such a purpose. It is true they have been 
 immersed till they are encrusted all over with his imagi- 
 nation, and their cheapness is concealed. The Chinese 
 drop a shot into the shell of a pearl oyster, and by and 
 by reclaim it all cased in an iris. It seems to be a 
 drop distilled from many sunsets ; but the kernel is still 
 a shot. Shakspeare dips the coarse narratives of the 
 Italian writers into his many-colored verse ; and they 
 are turned into necklaces to heave on the breath of fair 
 women, and signet-rings to stamp the sense and sover- 
 eignty of manhood. But we expect of Shakspeare 
 something more than cunning ornament. The splendor 
 of his poetry does not dazzle us so that we cannot look 
 for hidden meanings and transcendent allusions to the 
 soul of things, as we so often find in him. 
 
 But in her character Shakspeare clearly rose to a con- 
 viction that love may put such emphasis upon a woman 
 that she must declare herself, notwithstanding the tra- 
 dition of the sex, that the man's love must have the open- 
 ing word. Yet, upon reflection, have not women always 
 spoken before men ask them .■• The shyest and most 
 timorous heart that scuds to covert at every rustle of 
 discovery has already put man upon its track. Some 
 conniving hour has dropped a softer tone into the 
 voice which she never heard from her own tongue be- 
 fore. It surprises her into a faint blush, and surprises 
 him into a suddeii observation ; as when a new planet 
 steps into the field of view, and startles the watcher 
 with one more world. It was but a blush's shadow. 
 
Ophelia. 339 
 
 such as a bubble drops on the bed of a clear brook ; but 
 it goes athwart his eyes. As they look whence it came, 
 he sees it has already pulled down the lids of hers and 
 set them for a snare. She has spoken : she has made 
 a declaration. With all the enterprise of Helena, she 
 could not have advertised herself more fully. 
 
 There are many dialects and methods of expression ; 
 and every woman will instinctively pronounce her 
 mother-tongue. From Viola to Helena stretches a 
 whole chromatic scale of tones which do not transcend 
 the holding bars. Helena was not a type anticipating 
 some future of an inverted relation of the sexes, when, 
 perhaps, even seven women might have Scripture for laying 
 hold of one man. But she bravely testifies of woman the 
 faculty of a love so sacred, and improvised by a heart so 
 firm and true, so inspired with its own destiny, that she 
 perceives through a man's indifference what a man so 
 often perceives through hers, through a firmament barred 
 by sullen cloud-racks, the clear heaven that will be cor- 
 responsive to the heart. Helena cannot be daunted by 
 the weather. While the storm lasts, the upper blue is 
 confided to her keeping against the next fine day. But 
 we shall see Ophelia cower beneath the broken roof of 
 reason, while the heart is too weak to shore it up against 
 the wild pother that is breaking round her. 
 
 OPHELIA. 
 
 Looking across the intervale of our prosaic concerns, 
 we descry the outlines of Hamlet, as they build on the 
 
340 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 horizon a symmetry, enticing depth, weird masses, and 
 a lonely top. We try to recognize the distinctions of 
 this grand object which has been lifted there for ever 
 to attract the curiosity of men. It is too remote to be 
 minutely pictured : the shadows that apprise us of its 
 deep seclusion veil the openings of paths by which it is 
 to be explored. . Stretches of a livelier color report to us 
 the verdure and perfume of youth : the clouds that fling 
 their pensive intervals upon it pass off pursued by glad- 
 ness. But we perceive whole tracts that slope inwardly 
 to sombreness where the fancy is interrupted by awe 
 and vague surmise. Whither will those rifts lead us ? 
 Into what places visited by nothing human, whence we 
 hurriedly return, looking back with a sense of some 
 invisible pursuit, as if the forest shuddered with an ad- 
 juration which overtook, beneath the ground, our feet .' 
 What various latitudes are repeated along that height, 
 with a zone for every season ! It is shaped by all the 
 weathers of the year : it groups within itself the smiles, 
 the terrors, the fitful moods of Nature, and puts them 
 into a distance of sublime effect. 
 
 While we are observing it, there grows thither, as if 
 deposited out of the day, a softening tint ; one hardly 
 knows if it be light, or color, or a vapor, or how it be 
 compounded of them all. But it envelops the whole 
 outline, and spills over into every opening, a gracious 
 refinement, an investiture not easily described, a hght 
 touch of gentle qualities which decline to be quoted in 
 the dry list of the appraiser. It is the tender lady, the 
 maiden with the delicate bloom of love and the remote- 
 
Ophelia. 34 1 
 
 ness of it, — the impalpable Ophelia. To detain and 
 handle is impossible, not because, like some rare sphinx- 
 moth, the downy wings flutter into hiding; for she is 
 motionless as a stain of color, restful as a summer after- 
 noon when all the noises sleep : she is a sentiment that 
 broods without a stir upon the lofty Hamlet ; she gives 
 no sound to challenge your attention, and is unable 
 to goad her exquisite reserve into any marked behavior. 
 But this shyness is broad enough to cover Hamlet's 
 variety all over, and does not let one of his features 
 straggle beyond its subduing purple. She is the tone of 
 the whole wide landscape that stretches between your 
 soul and his. What need has she to multiply words, to 
 intensify her shape upon the background of the action .' 
 Small need has she to borrow the saucy wit of Beatrice, 
 to make up her lips with the pertness of Rosalind, or 
 compress them with the firmness of Heleiia. They just 
 suit the touch of Hamlet's lips when his unbend from 
 gathering the speech of solemn thoughts. She offers 
 them, and his cloud empties of its density. She draws 
 off the accumulated sparks of reason, makes him safe 
 and domestic, steals into him with content that even he 
 cannot measure, up to the time when a father's death 
 untuned his prophetic soul. She will learn to prattle 
 about flowers, but, alas ! not steeped like Perdita, in glad 
 midsummer ; not to beguile her lord, but to deck the 
 bride-bed of her fate. She wears her rue " with a dif- 
 ference." But, in the mean time, she may neglect Lord 
 Hamlet's books, and keep her mind guiltless of enter- 
 taining views. She would have no fancy for going to 
 
342 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 school of Portia, perhaps no taste to learn the "neat 
 cookery " of Imogen. Her hands are well fashioned to 
 soothe the hours when " the pale cast of thought " wishes 
 to escape from itself into some fair, open nature, and to 
 feel its flattery. Because she is not a character, she 
 is a tune : she is 
 
 " That old and antique song we heard last night." 
 
 The waters will soon pull "the poor wretch from her 
 melodious lay to muddy death." So, for a while, let her 
 be the mood she is, the sentiment that Heaven made 
 her, to glint through palace-windows across the marble 
 floors and gild Hamlet's high-strung nerves. That 
 noble mind, — 
 
 " The expectancy and rose of the fair state, 
 The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, 
 The observ'd of all observers," — 
 
 is not playing at the feet of a fatuous woman, with silly, 
 pretty face, and bird-like chatter of a soulless brain, to 
 marry that misery at last. Many a superior man ties 
 such a bunch of plumage, with the minutest mouthful of 
 a body inside of it, into his buttonhole ; when it falls 
 out, the tie drags it, feebly fluttering, across the ground. 
 But Ophelia has an instinct deep enough to fathom 
 " the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword ; " 
 and he as instinctively surrenders his depths to that 
 survey, which is none the less sufficing because it is so 
 artless. No : it is all the more competent to correspond 
 to his wide temper ; the only ladyhood in the land for 
 its only prince. 
 
Ophelia. 343 
 
 Fair flower, half-drooping, half-springing from a cleft 
 in Elsinore's grim platform, where wafts of ghostly air 
 shudder out of the midnight of the frosty ocean, and the 
 fate-sisters who take the breath of heroes are at hand. 
 At length the dreadful secret mingles with her fra- 
 grance, which then comes to us distempered. She does 
 not know what has happened ; but in the sudden death 
 and private burial of her father, slain by her own lover, 
 she, sitting amid the relics of a rejected love, listening 
 across the " sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh " 
 of her old lover's soul-chime, intuitively feels 'that there 
 are 
 
 " Tricks i' the world ; and hems, and beats her heart ; 
 Spurns enviously at straws ; speaks things in doubt. 
 That carry but half sense." 
 
 With what a small outlay of dramatic contrivance has 
 Shakspeare drawn the pathos of Ophelia's fate ! It be- 
 gins to infect us as soon as we discover that she loves ; 
 for her lover receives the visits of a murdered father. 
 We know, but she does not, the cause of the apparent 
 unsettling of the Prince's wits. We can anticipate into 
 what tragedies that ghost beckons her Lord Hamlet, 
 while she walks unconsciously so close that her gar- 
 ments, perfumed with rare ladyhood, brush the greaves 
 of the grisly visitant. Her helplessness is not cast in 
 a faint, outline against the background of these palace 
 treacheries and lusts ; but it appears in startling vivid- 
 ness, because she is so pure, so remote from all the 
 wicked world, so slenderly fitted out to contend with it. 
 Tears are summoned when we see how simple she is, 
 
344 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 and fashioned solely for dependence : a disposition, not 
 a wiil ; a wife for Hamlet's will, but poor to husband 
 one of her own. 
 
 What will become of her ? What becomes of the vine 
 when lightning splits its oak? The clipping tendrils 
 and soft green have lost their reason for existing when 
 the wood which centuries have grained is blasted in an 
 hour. She will shrink into herself, will sicken, grow 
 sere, rustle to and fro. Her leaves will blab loose songs 
 to every wanton wind. To wither is all that is left to 
 do, since all that she could do was to love, to climb, to 
 cling, to cloak ruggedness with grace, to make strength 
 and stature serve to lift and develop all her beauteous 
 quality. 
 
 She is free to love, yet bound by old-fashioned duty 
 toward her father ; and he belongs to the old fashion of 
 supposing that a prince can only amuse himself, no mat- 
 ter what sweet protestations flow into her ear. She 
 cannot believe it ; nor, when her flighty brother serves 
 her with long-winded cautions on the same subject, does 
 she hardly seem to listen. Her answers are so short 
 that she plainly does not share his solicitude. In fact, 
 she is highly amused to see him play the prig with 
 the consequential air which only a brother can assume. 
 Between the lines there are peals of girlish laughter, 
 not printed, as she turns upon him with the advice 
 to take himself into custody. This amusement ripples 
 through her retort : — 
 
 " Good my brother. 
 Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, 
 Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven ; 
 
Ophelia. 345 
 
 Whilst, like a puff' d and reckless libertine, 
 Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, 
 And recks not his own rede." 
 
 The old songs which Ophelia had picked up by no 
 means decide that she was passionate enough to justify- 
 so much advice on the point. Some nurse who crooned 
 over her, some book of old ballads, such as Autolycus 
 might leave at the door, was responsible for the scraps 
 which floated into her unconscious girlhood. It fre- 
 quently happens to an unwary, half developed youth that 
 things not excessive in decorum get established in the 
 memory. They are kept strenuously secret, unless some- 
 thing demoralizes the brain. When madness tears her 
 modesty all to tatters, they escape, and wander without 
 a rag of clothing through her talk. They do not betray 
 that she was 'ever less than a true lady. She rebukes 
 Hamlet during the mock play, when the expectation of 
 unmasking the king ferments in him with the flightiest 
 remarks, and his tongue rides a steeple-chase over the 
 bounds of courtesy. She will not listen, and says to 
 him, " You are naught, you are naught : I'll mark the 
 play." However, she knows her lord to be a gentleman ; 
 for she has often silently felt the effluence of an honest 
 man whose manners and morals were noble. She pays 
 no consideration to the family caution. 
 
 It is noteworthy how Shakspeare defends Ophelia 
 from our censure while she is chanting those free ditties 
 of an olden time. We listen to them in company with 
 the pitying King and Queen : the air seems to gather 
 pity to tone the rude surprise. She was naturally full 
 
346 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 of sensibility ; so, when she enters in the first mad 
 scene, entirely insensible to her misfortune, it both in- 
 creases our sadness and calls upon us to create what 
 should be her sane feeling. When that is done, the 
 songs borrow all the chasteness of misfortune. We are 
 absorbed in sorrow to see how distraction could violate 
 her sacred privacy : thinking more of that than of the 
 words, the coarseness eludes us. We are all bound up 
 in the brother's feeling at this sight, who cries, — 
 
 " O rose of May ! 
 Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia ! " 
 
 And the King says, " How do you, pretty lady .' " Yes, 
 that she is, through it all. If she had her wits, and 
 were using them to persuade us to revenge her, it could 
 not move like these piteous, tender improprieties. 
 
 " Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself. 
 She turns to favor and to prettiness." 
 
 For she sings without smirching a single petal of the 
 daisies and pansies, which she so softly distributes, with 
 such an appeal of forlornness, to bid their fragrance dis- 
 infect her language, or to speak for her in the natural 
 key of her wonted maidenhood. So every heart exhales 
 in the pity that plays the magic of distance and softens 
 the unsightliness of her ruin. 
 
 Shakspeare has given most touchingly rational appli- 
 cations to her distribution of the flowers. The flowers 
 themselves are culled in fancy : she holds no actual nose- 
 gay in her hand. She recalls, together with the long- 
 unheeded songs, all that she learned in girlhood about 
 
Ophelia. 347 
 
 the symbolic meanings of flowers ; and a light irony- 
 invests some of them. It is plain that the rosemary, for 
 remembrance, is ideally bestowed upon Laertes, with 
 pansies too : " A document in madness ; thoughts and 
 remembrance fitted." Rosemary was supposed to have 
 the quality of strengthening the memory. The volatile 
 Laertes will have need of it, and of as many thoughts as 
 he can muster. The .fennel ought to be handed to I^o- 
 ratio, and the columbines should be intended for the 
 king : the one is a symbol of flattery and is exchanged 
 among courtiers, but Horatio never learned the useful 
 trade ; the others are expressive of ingratitude and 
 cuckoldom. Was Hamlet's father slain because of that .' 
 The columbines were earned betimes ! There's rue for 
 the queen ; for she has great need of repentance. There's 
 rue for herself too. Both need it ; but the queen with a 
 difference, as her moral condition differed from Ophelia's. 
 We may call it an herb that leads to grace. There's a 
 daisy. She recognizes it, but ought not to keep it for 
 herself. And there is no other maiden present. It 
 represents frivolous and light-thoughted girls. She 
 would give Laertes some violets, if they had not all 
 withered when his father died. These delicate allusions 
 make us think that before the distraction set in Ophelia 
 had inklings of the foul concerns around her. All the 
 more hopeless, then, became the overthrow of reason. 
 
 Hamlet is too finely endowed to sport with her inclin- 
 ing maidenhood. She has no more calculation than a 
 flower. She lets her beauty bend towards him without 
 timidity; for she likes that he should sip the chalice 
 
348 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 which he will not rudely shatter. After every visit he 
 used to leave behind him a sense of honor which occu- 
 pied her heart when his lips had ceased protesting. Yet 
 she will defer to the father, with the instinct, perhaps, 
 that more favorable dispositions will transpire. Poio- 
 nius, the old stickler for the conventions of royalty, is 
 thoroughly possessed with the idea that the Prince, from 
 that point of view, cannot be intending marriage. Some 
 over-subtle critics will have it that the old schemer is 
 secretly chuckling over the idea that a match may be 
 made, but that he dreads the king. If Hamlet can only 
 be brought to the decisive point, and held there, the 
 temper of the court will be of little consequence. But 
 what method shall be employed with a prince who so 
 loves to push off upon his moods of feeling to let them 
 get unhitched and float him from corresponding facts } 
 A double contrivance occurs to Polonius, — to protect 
 his daughter from the possible waywardness of a prince, 
 and to pique him into making a declaration of alliance. 
 This is a delicate operation ; for the king will jealously - 
 scrutinize his movements. It seems as if he was merely 
 protecting his daughter, and keeping faith with his 
 king, when he urges her not to receive the letters 
 which besiege her door, nor to admit him any longer to 
 her presence. Then the sly old rat, not yet gone to bur- 
 row behind the arras, hopes to gnaw into the King by 
 attributing Hamlet's strange behavior to love for Ophelia. 
 And he has so nicely arranged matters, by prohibiting 
 letters and visits, that when the King, bending severe 
 brows upon him, asks, " How hath she received his 
 
Ophelia. 349 
 
 love ? " he can reply, with a flush of honor, " What do 
 you think of me ? " 
 
 I cannot find that the context will justify this theory. 
 It is contradicted by the evident alarm and sorrow which 
 the old man displays when Ophelia describes the piteous 
 plight of Hamlet after his repulse ; for what does Polo- 
 nius know about a " father's spirit in arms " laying waste 
 the Prince's soul ? No : he must be deep in love ; and 
 Polonius must hasten to report it to the King. 
 
 We recur to the plain theory that Polonius supposes 
 that a king's son is out of the star of her unaspiring 
 thought, and that such a match would be against the 
 stomach of the Court. He will cling to his lord cham- 
 berlain's staff and totter with it to the end. The daugh- 
 ter, respecting his fears, inflicts this harsh repulse upon 
 Hamlet. How we pity the Prince, who is turned away 
 from her dear house whither he would have longed to 
 repair, weighed down with his awful secret, to place his 
 heart upon her restfulness, and let its rhythm soothe the , 
 cracking nerves ! Yet she " did return his letters, and 
 denied his access," perhaps the very morning after he 
 had sworn the platform oath. There's nothing to de- 
 pend on left in Denmark. Who next is false } What 
 truth or feeling escapes the monstrous irony ">. 
 
 But mark how quickly Ophelia's love jumps at the 
 father's plan to bring them again together, as if by acci- 
 dent, in order that the King and he may observe, by the 
 nature of the interview, whether he is mad from love of 
 her. And when he thrusts a book into her hand, that 
 she may have the pretence of reading when Hamlet 
 
35° Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 enters, she gladly adopts the whole device ; for has she 
 not just heard the Queen confess that she hopes Ham- 
 let loves her ? 
 
 " For your part, Ophelia, I do wish 
 That your good beauties be the happy cause 
 Of Hamlet's wildness ; so shall I hope your virtues 
 Will bring him to his wonted way again, 
 To both your honors." 
 
 Can she believe her ears ? Hamlet's own mother hopes, 
 as she afterwards confessed directly above Ophelia's 
 grave, that she may become the wife of Hamlet. Then 
 all the scruples of Laertes and her father are ground- 
 less. However indisposed the King may feel to such a 
 match, she has a suitor in the heart of the mother. 
 Welcome the opportunity, welcome any stratagem, even 
 that of taking his remembrances from her bosom, to 
 have them returned to her, — a woman's wile to receive 
 them back more rich than ever with smiles of a recov- 
 ered love. 
 
 The more common theory is that Ophelia does not 
 suspect the mother's inclination for such a marriage. 
 The Queen's language is guarded, and capable of two 
 interpretations ; but she spoke in the presence of the 
 King. Measure the extent of her meaning by the depth 
 of Ophelia's grave. Still, it is commonly thought that 
 Ophelia understands the Queen to expect of her to 
 make Hamlet realize the hopelessness of his passion, 
 trusting to have his disorder dismissed with his love. 
 In that case, she is merely yielding to the father's sug- 
 gestion that these remembrances of his shall be re- 
 
Ophelia. 351 
 
 turned ; and the old plotter has arranged this for the 
 King to witness. Filial deference cannot stoop lower 
 than this sad enforcement ; but her whole life has been 
 the non-assertion of a will. She, 
 
 " Of ladies most deject and wretched, 
 That suck'd the honey of his music vows," 
 
 and who longed to 
 
 "Bring him to his wonted way again," 
 
 is Still SO docile, so subject to the pervading influence of 
 
 her father's house, that she declares to Hamlet she has 
 
 wished for a long time to redeliver his gifts and letters, 
 
 "of so sweet breath composed." And when we hear 
 
 her say, 
 
 "To the noble mind. 
 Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unlcind," 
 
 we have a glimpse of the interview that was brought on 
 by him when, as she was sewing in her chamber, he 
 forced himself into her presence, in disordered dress, 
 and with a manner as if he would dismiss her from his 
 heart. It wounded and distressed her : — 
 
 " Oh, woe is me ! 
 To have seen what I have seen, see what I see ! " 
 
 It need not seem unnatural that the fair girl is so 
 obsequious to the father's will. We find no mother in 
 the house : she is gone, and the only daughter and only 
 son transfer their love of a mother to the bereaved 
 father, and cling to him with a devotion that includes a 
 special submissiveness. They live very much withdrawn 
 into themselves, and mutually dependent. The gentle 
 
352 Wtt, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 daughter consults in her solitude the wishes and hu- 
 mors, even the whims, of the father, whose capacity for 
 giving sound advice she perceives to have greatly aged. 
 She loves to be retired within the old mansion, whose 
 still life suits a maiden shyness. We come upon her 
 sewing in her chamber, thinking of Hamlet. 
 
 " As patient as the female dove, 
 When that her golden couplets are disclos'd," 
 
 she sits drooping in silence, remembering her lord, but 
 remembering too that, when her father pooh-poohed her 
 talk about the Prince's affection for her, and bade her 
 look out for herself, she sighed and said, " I shall obey, 
 my lord." She is very much absorbed in contriving sol- 
 ace for a lonely father. So, when she learns that he has 
 been killed, and that the blow was dealt by Hamlet, by 
 what freak of accident she cannot understand, — but " a 
 young maid's wits" prove to be "as mortal as an old 
 man's life," — the daughter suddenly empties every 
 thing out of her heart except affection for the cher- 
 ished, fatuous old father : her love for Hamlet is spilled 
 out through that rent in the arras, as we can notice 
 when all her pretty, distracted singing, yields not a tone 
 that might be an echo of the sweet episode in her poor 
 little life. For otherwise, when madness broke up her 
 maidenly reserve, and permitted us to pry into the dis- 
 positions of her soul, we ought to have found there a 
 love for Hamlet as deeply seated, as devotion to a father ; 
 but it never was so deep, and never had time enough 
 to surmount all other considerations. Therefore the sad 
 wanderings bury the father over and over again, finding 
 a fresh grave for him each time : — 
 
Ophelia, 353 
 
 "He is dead and gone, lady, 
 
 He is dead and gone ; 
 At his head a grass-green turf, 
 
 At his heels a stone. 
 White his shroud as the mountain snow, 
 
 Larded with sweet flowers ; 
 Which bewept to the grave did go, 
 
 With true-love showers." 
 
 " We must be patient ; but I cannot choose but weep 
 to think they should lay him in the cold ground. My 
 brother shall know of it ; " and on the strength of that " 
 she culls out rosemary for him. 
 
 "They bore him bare-fac'd on the bier,. 
 And in his grave rain'd many a tear ; 
 
 - Fare you well, my dove ! " says this loyal daughter. We 
 echo it, but with a difference : she is this dove to whom 
 we bid farewell. For already " in the distance one white 
 arm is seen above the tide," clutching at the branches of 
 a willow growing askant a brook ; and our pulse pre- 
 meditates the funeral strain that goes graveward while 
 her Prince is looking " at the skull as though Death had 
 written on it the history of man." 
 
 Poor maiden, to be churlishly suspected of making an 
 end of herself, when we know that "an envious sliver 
 broke " and let her into that coffin strewn with flowers, 
 — the tributes, not to womanhood in its capacity to 
 resolve, to outlive destiny, to outdo circumstance with 
 patience, to contrive escapes from disaster, but simply 
 " sweets to the sweet," turned as they were to immortal 
 amaranths when Hamlet's breath endowed them : — 
 
 " I loved Ophelia : forty thousand brothers 
 Could not, with all their quantity of love. 
 Make up mv sum." 
 
354 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Then, too late for her, but not for us, to atone for her 
 chariness of language and action, all her gifted sim- 
 plicity is revealed to justify the silent past and to 
 ennoble Hamlet for his heart's choice of such an un- 
 ambitious soul. What freighted her might have kept 
 Hamlet riding on a steady keel upon any ocean that 
 was not phantom-haunted. Death casts up her freight 
 underneath the cliffs of this stern tragedy, and we are 
 wreckers all along the shore to recover strays from the 
 sail that love had chartered. 
 
 When the procession enters the churchyard, Hamlet 
 steps aside to be unperceived. There is not a trait in 
 this scene which does not illustrate Ophelia's character, 
 and reflect a tender worth upon it. Hamlet wonders 
 who it is, what person of estate whom they follow, " and 
 with such maimed rites." When Laertes steps forward, 
 Hamlet praises him to Horatio. This deepens our feel- 
 ing of his unconsciousness that it is a brother who is 
 burying that beloved sister. 'Tis our common fashion 
 of noting, with slightly raised sympathy, the mourners 
 in a train that bears away nothing particularly dear to 
 us. " What ceremony else .' " Nothing more : the stub- 
 born old priest will not venture his own salvation on an- 
 other word for her whose " death was doubtful." Where 
 he got that notion does not appear in the play. It is 
 like Malcolm's crotchet that Lady Macbeth took her- 
 self off " by self and violent hands." But notions are 
 the sheet-anchors of formalists. The priest drops his, 
 swings round, and becomes immovable. He complains, 
 with the whine of a man who has been imposed upon, 
 
Ophelia. 355 
 
 that " here she is allow'd her virgin crants, her maiden 
 strewments," and even a bell ! If the sour old ritualist 
 could have had his way, he would have pitched " shards, 
 flints, and pebbles " over her. It is not only pity which 
 increases, but respept, with e^ery line : it takes her part, 
 and niagnifies her nature. There must have been more 
 of her than we used to think. So, when the requiem is 
 denied, Laertes pronounces it for all when he says, — 
 
 " A minist'ring angel shall my sister be," 
 
 as she always had been. And our sentiment recalls the 
 dominant excellence of her character. If ever the priest 
 himself should come to grief, and lie howling in that 
 place which is paved with good intentions and bad prac- 
 tices, she would be the first to toss him a sprig of " herb 
 o' grace o' Sundays." 
 
 When Laertes lets fall the word " sister," Hamlet ap- 
 pears to utter nothing but ordinary surprise, — " What ! 
 the fair Ophelia .' " — and his action goes no further. 
 Some critics have inferred, from this absence of mani- 
 fested emotion, that Hamlet never really loved Ophelia, 
 and that his subsequent passionate outbreak was only 
 inspired by pique at seeing Laertes take on so with 
 leaping into the grave as if to fill it with hyperboles of 
 language. It is said that, at the very instant of hearing 
 her name, a lover would have exclaimed bitterly, would 
 hav£ rushed forward into the funeral group to agitate its 
 grief afresh with his own, would have sunk into some 
 gesture of abandonment. Romeo might have impro- 
 vised such a scene, but Hamlet was a different style of 
 
356 Wit, Humor, and :siiakspeare. 
 
 lover : he was always " ill at such numbers." His emo- 
 tion smouldered underneath all the refinements of intel- 
 lect and conscience, and rarely gleamed through the 
 scruples of his will. When it did gain a moment's mas- 
 tery, as in that scene of surrendering love, — 
 
 " He raised a sigh so piteous and profound, 
 That it did seem to shatter all his bulk. 
 And end his being," 
 
 it palsied the tongue, and only advertised itself in the 
 pathetic eyes which fell to such perusal of Ophelia's 
 face, "and to the last bended their light" on her. 
 
 Let us try to conceive the situation at the grave. 
 Hamlet has been absent in England during Ophelia's 
 distraction. Returning, he strolls into a churchyard, 
 amuses himself with the old grave-digger, withdraws 
 aside when the train approaches, so as not to be recog- 
 nized by the King. Then comes the discovery that 
 Ophelia is dead. There was always in Hamlet's brain 
 that time allowed for the transit of a message between 
 his feeling and his deed. The line connected with a 
 great many intermediate tracts, in each of which there 
 was delay. Nothing but an unsyllabled fluid of con- 
 jecture passed all along the way. Dead .'' How .' Was 
 that glad girl the one to take her own life 1 Why .? 
 There was just time enough for him to hear that con- 
 fession of his mother, — 
 
 "I hop'd thou shouldst have" been my Hamlet's wife.'" 
 
 What a remembrance, extorted from death, of the old 
 love that he never could conceal from the mother's 
 
Ophelia. 357 
 
 instinct which was so fond and clear ! He listens thus 
 to despair reclaiming former hopes, and it draws his 
 spirit backward, so that the body cannot move and the 
 tongue dare not break this sacred silence of his retro- 
 spection. Therefore, Laertes has plenty of time to rant 
 like Pistol in a tavern. His exaggerated action plunges 
 into the grave of Hamlet's reverie and breaks it up. 
 The Prince is forced into disgust at hearing a man vaunt 
 love against his own. All scruples are shrivelled up in 
 anger ; and he instinctively assumes the tone he hears. 
 The old ironical disgust for sham makes the imitation 
 perfect. Afterward, to Horatio, he acknowledges that 
 he forgot himself : — 
 
 " But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put me 
 Into a towering passion." 
 
 And this passion broke open his respect and prudence, 
 and let loose the first cry of his love that had ever 
 reached the ears of others. Else it would have lain 
 buried with Ophelia in the silence of her lover's 
 breast. 
 
 It was too much, — to discover at such a moment what 
 used to be his mother's expectations ; to see the sprin- 
 kling of those flowers that should have been for mar- 
 riage ; to have the old conviction return, that marriage 
 was impossible for him, — a man whose bed, watched 
 by a ghost, could have no other tenant ; to recall how 
 he ousted love, that revenge might occupy. It was too 
 much for this heart of sensitive and noble strain to see 
 the dead girl, and catch through the rant of Laertes that 
 her prince had indirectly caused her death. His solid 
 
358 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 flesh could not melt : the coffin chilled it. But how 
 long could he listen to this man, whose affected furor 
 showed him to be a person incapable of deep passion ? 
 It fans all that smoulders in him into smoke and flame. 
 In the rage of a temperament whose trick it always was 
 to baffle itself, and in the bitterness of being reminded 
 by her cold beauty that he had had to surrender it while 
 it was too young to die, — it is too masterful. He 
 bursts into Laertes's vein with its own style, — 
 
 " Nay, an thou'lt mouth, 
 I'll rant as well as thou," 
 
 but soon checks himself with a half apology, and sub- 
 sides. 
 
 How mobile and impressible he was, notwithstanding 
 his large capacity of reason ! The latter aided him to 
 dissimulate and to keep his projects waiting ; but the 
 other traits nourished a fancy that easily turned to 
 mimicry of whatever was transpiring ; as when he as- 
 sumed, half-consciously, the dandified phrasing of Osric, 
 and played with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This 
 plastic fancy jumped to the high stilts of Laertes, and it 
 stalked to " make Ossa like a wart." 
 
 But his bosom secret has escaped. He turns away, 
 is followed by Horatio, to whom, before the next scene 
 opens, we hear him (though no folio nor quarto ever 
 lisped a syllable of it) pouring out the confidences of a 
 fruitless passion to the only honest man of all the crowd, 
 the still and trusty comrade. This Shakspeare would 
 have us understand, I think, by giving Hamlet to say to 
 Horatio, as they enter the next scene together, "So 
 
Ophelia. 359 
 
 much for this, sir." So much for what ? we think. 
 Then it dawns upon us that the only other interest of 
 the moment must have been Opheha's death. 
 
 And we recollect that Horatio was absent at the time 
 of her death, having gone to meet Hamlet near the sea- 
 coast. So both of them were ignorant of the occurrence. 
 But now Horatio has been making inquiries during the 
 time that elapses between the burial and the next scene. 
 He picks up all the particulars, and has been detailing 
 to the eager Hamlet all that we know. And Hamlet's 
 entry upon the next scene is timed exactly when Horatio 
 has ceased narrating. There is nothing more to tell. 
 Hamlet enters, saying, " So much for this, sir. Now 
 you shall see the other." That is, I will relate what has 
 happened to me also, and how a divinity has shaped my 
 ends to this return. And his brief life is claimed again 
 by the native land on which a ghost has left the tracks 
 of a murder ; for great Heaven has not yet hunted it 
 down. So 
 
 " Lay her i' the earth ; 
 And from her fair and unpolluted flesh 
 May violets spring," 
 
 to renew the breed which withered with the death of 
 her father. 
 
MACBETH. 
 
MACBETH. 
 
 TT is the opinion of Fleay that " ' Macbeth,' in its 
 -*■ present state, is an altered copy of the original 
 drama, and the alterations were made by Middleton." 
 Thomas Middleton wrote twenty-three plays* Among 
 them was "The Witch," written, perhaps, in 1613, and 
 published in 1617. Shakspeare's " Macbeth " was first 
 played in 1606. It appears in the Folio of 1623 for the 
 first time in print, as a more finished acting copy than 
 the other plays. The divisions of acts and scenes and 
 the stage directions are carefully marked. The death of 
 Shakspeare occurred in 16 16. It is possible that Mid- 
 dleton was the person who prepared the Folio copy 
 of "Macbeth." Scarce a trace, however, of his own 
 style can be suspected ; for there is only occasionally a 
 verbal similarity of the charms and incantations em- 
 ployed in " Macbeth " and " The Witch " of later date. 
 In Act iii. S, the burden of the song, " Come away, come 
 away," and, in Act iv. i, the song, " Black spirits,." &c., 
 are to be found in " The Witch : " the latter is merely 
 indicated as a stage direction in " Macbeth." In Act 
 i. I, we are reminded of Middleton in " I come, GrSy- 
 malkin ! " * and " Paddock calls." He may have shoved 
 his " Malkin " into that first chant of the witches, and 
 
 * Grau Mariechm: Malkin is endearing diminutive for Mary: the 
 cat is Little Gray Mary. 
 
364 Wii, Humor, and ^hakspeare. 
 
 spoiled its metre. But although the introduction of 
 Hecate, in Act iii. 5, is said to be not Shakspearean 
 enough in relevancy to the play, it is altogether too 
 Shakspearean in style for Middleton, who never could 
 have written, — 
 
 " Great business must be wrought ere noon ; 
 Upon the corner of the moon 
 There hangs a vaporous drop prof ound ; 
 I'll catch it ere it come to ground : 
 And that, distill'd by magic sleights, 
 Shall raise such artificial sprites 
 As by the strength of their illusion 
 Shall draw hira on to his confusion." 
 
 And we must notice that Hecate thus introduces and 
 accounts for the " artificial sprites," — the apparitions 
 which deceive Macbeth in Act iv. i, and entice him to 
 " be bloody, bold, and resolute." This scene is certainly 
 Shakspeare's. It is therefore probable that he would 
 have preceded it by some inkling of the deceptive nat- 
 ure of the armed head, the bloody child, and the child 
 crowned. 
 
 On the ground of an apparently un-Shakspearean style 
 of metre in Act i. 2, which introduces the wounded ser- 
 geant, several commentators credit that scene also to 
 Middleton. It is said to be too slovenly and bombastic 
 for Shakspeare. 
 
 It is unsafe to limit the critical treatment of Shak- 
 speare's verse to metrical or verbal tests. Esthetic 
 emergencies will sometimes overrule the decisions of 
 the sharpest critics who construct Shakspeare out of 
 reputed peculiarities of his style. He escapes from them 
 to be raggeder than we think is personal to him, broader 
 
Macbeth. 365 
 
 than our taste can tolerate, more thin or more fulsome 
 than his grandest tone, whenever occasion summons 
 traits which fit into a deeper consistency than that of 
 style. Then, if the critic of metrical and verbal niceties 
 is not also a human observer, or is too much preoccu- 
 pied with his theory of the Shakspearean method, he 
 will be apt to disparage some prescriptions of Nature. 
 
 It is also a very common procedure to illustrate the 
 excellences of Shakspeare by comparing them with the 
 inferior worjc of the contemporary dramatists. Either 
 Shakspeare at his best ought to be matched with the 
 other playwrights at their best, or else we ougbt to con- 
 cede that his occasional weaknesses, which are like theirs, 
 are not theirs, but his own. It is absurd to keep Shak- 
 speare posturing incessantly in the finest attitude of 
 the several periods of his style. During the Elizabethan 
 age, England's soil stood thick with true poets whose 
 fragrance often makes us suspect that Shakspeare is 
 near. It is dangerous to be too positive upon the mat- 
 ter of sentiment as well as style. Take for an instance 
 this : — 
 
 " I am so light 
 At any mischief, there's no villainy 
 But is a tune methinks." 
 
 That lightness of heart is Middleton's. It is stray pollen 
 from the garden of Shakspeare. But nothing is fructi- 
 fied : there is no tune in the villainous stuff which pre- 
 cedes and follows. 
 
 The wounded sergeant easily justifies his mangled 
 metre and ragged pomposity of style. We should sus- 
 
366 Wit, HumoVy and Shakspeare. 
 
 pect a more polished messenger of shamming faintness 
 from loss of blood. He talks exactly as a common sol- 
 dier should who is fresh from the great fight, puffed up 
 with " valor's ihinion," and steadying himself upon reek- 
 ing lines to deliver his message of victory. Middleton 
 could not have so caught the color of the moment. 
 
 It is also supposed that Middleton wrote the scene, 
 because when Ross enters he tells the King that 
 
 " Norway himself, with terrible numbers, 
 Assisted by that most disloyal traitor , 
 
 The thane of Cawdor, 'gan a dismal conflict." 
 
 A discrepancy is charged between this and the report of 
 Angus, in Scene 3 (acknowledged to be Shakspeare's), 
 who enters with Ross, and says, concerning the thane of 
 Cawdor, — 
 
 ' " Whether he was combin'd 
 
 With those of Norway ; or did line the rebel 
 With hidden help and vantage ; or that with both 
 He labour'd in his country's wreck, I know not." 
 
 Perhaps Ross did not either. But he knew that Cawdor 
 "assisted." He did not say that he was personally en- 
 gaged in the fight. 
 
 The opening chant of the witches is denied to Shak- 
 speare by one critic, because it seems to occupy the 
 opening scene merely to inform us that they are to 
 meet somewhere again ; and by another it is attributed 
 to Middleton because it does not flow in the usual 
 trochaic manner of Shakspeare, and contains imperfect 
 lines. Middleton may have Paddock and Graymalkin for 
 his share in the attempt to spoil this grand chant, whose 
 
Macbeth. 367 
 
 accent ought to have sung Shakspeare's feeling into the 
 critic's ear ; for so the foot of Fate would fall in order 
 to pitch the key of the tragedy, and lead its crime into 
 our presence. Its measured step seems to issue out of 
 some foreboding by Macbeth of his ambition's purpose. 
 The weird sisters are not merely enjoying a thunder- 
 storm, and wondering when they shall meet again in 
 similar favorable weather. Their lips put a stress of 
 destiny upon every syllable. The poet's pen uncon- 
 sciously follows in their traces. 
 
 The same metre is employed in the " Tempest " and 
 "Midsummer-Night's Dream," by Ariel, Oberon, and 
 Puck, when they are on sublunary business. But they 
 
 ' ' Foot it featly here and thsre : " 
 
 ■ 
 
 the lines skim or flutter, and do not tread. The accent 
 is not so persistent : it does not sound like -the hinge on 
 which a pause swings open to admit the foot of a thing 
 that is burdened with a solemn message. On the 
 blasted heath of Macbeth, the verses of Ariel would 
 be like a strayed butterfly : — 
 
 " Where the bee sucks, there suck I." 
 
 He spurs the omen out of owls and bats, and rides 
 them away from the chill of the evening, " after sum- 
 mer, merrily." Prospero, hearing him sing, says, " That's 
 my dainty Ariel." Puck likewise, too mercurial for chant- 
 ing, carols with a broom on his shoulder to make a clean 
 sweep of mischief : — 
 
 " And we fairies, that do run 
 By the triple Hecate's team, 
 
368 Wii, humor, ana ^/za/cspeare. 
 
 From the presence of the sun, 
 
 Following darkness like a dream, 
 Now are frolic." 
 
 The lines go lilting like a little boat over the accent 
 which can hardly raise a ripple. It is a supernature in 
 the best of humor, beguiling or blessing men and women 
 in a dulcet style. 
 
 But the witches chant holding torches of the light- 
 ning while the thunder slowly scans their verse : — 
 
 1 Witch. When shall we three meet again. 
 
 In thunder, lightning, or in rain ? 
 
 2 Witch. When the hurlyburly's done, 
 
 When the battle's lost and won. 
 
 3 Witch. That will be ere set of sun." 
 
 It will be on the same day, then, to intercept Macbeth 
 as homeward his ambitious mood hurries. The battle, 
 which the rebels against Duncan's rule have just lost, 
 Macbeth has won. What else has he won ? His 
 thoughts, out-travelling his body's utmost speed, will 
 change into witches by the way and inform him. Hith- 
 erto his fateful Self has remained vague and disembod- 
 ied. Now it will meet itself, and hear it utter a threefold 
 " Hail ! " 
 
 For thus I conceive that when Macbeth's crime had 
 fully infected Shakspeare's imagination, and was urging 
 it into the appalling swiftness of the first scenes of this 
 tragedy, he endowed Macbeth with its own shaping qual- 
 ity. The witches were not decoys of another world to 
 lure him into acquaintanceship with crime. They were 
 his own intention grown to be so ravenous that it framed 
 a prelude to his deed, as the condition of starving sets a 
 
Macbeth. 369 
 
 phantoiji banquet before a person's eyes. Shakspeare 
 had no need of them to start the business of his play or 
 to keep alive his plot. Macbeth and his wife did their 
 own tempting so thoroughly that spirits might applaud 
 and refrain from interfering. But these witches were 
 characters of the second-sight which Shakspeare im- 
 puted to Macbeth, a distinguishing trait born into Mac- 
 beth's mind from the conception of this tragedy. The 
 prosaic supernature of the old chronicle, on which the 
 play is based, is transformed into a psychological pecu- 
 liarity. 
 
 So we observe that these weird sisters were no post-, 
 ers of vulgar ill, horsed on nursery broomsticks, to 
 dehver murrain in the fold and rheumatism at the 
 hearth, in gratification of a vicious whim. But they 
 became vulgarized into this whenever Macbeth was ab- 
 sent from the scene. Then they shrank from Fates to 
 hags, such as Banquo's undistempered eyes saw them, 
 withered, hairy-faced, laying chappy fingers upon skinny 
 lips, — old women dreaded by the common people for 
 reputed powers of bewitching. All such Celtic super- 
 stitions breed nobly in Macbeth's fancy : he knows all 
 about the village gossip. The eldritch women are the 
 nearest hint of supernature which he had ; but his 
 kingly anticipations tolerate no common pranks from 
 them. When Macbeth is absent, Shakspeare shows 
 what stale witcheries they traffic in. The critics blame 
 the incongruity, or attribute it to some interpolating 
 pen. But Shakspeare rightly intended to place in con- 
 trast with Macbeth's fantasy the popular material of his 
 
370 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 age in which it worked. So we hear the witches relat- 
 ing their trumpery exploits. This one has been killing 
 poor people's swine. Another threatens to water-log a 
 shipmaster because his wife refused to give her chest- 
 nuts. They put their spiteful heads together, and gloat 
 over a drowned pilot's thumb. When Macbeth enters, 
 this ghastly twaddle is hushed by a domineering thought 
 which meets in these crones his " all-hail hereafter." 
 
 In the scene which follows the banquet, Shakspeare 
 brings the witches and their mistress Hecate together. 
 The stage direction, " Enter Hecate to the other three 
 witches," simply includes her as one witch more. She 
 has a Greek name that was representative of the Moon 
 in her baleful and haunting phase. But on this North- 
 ern heath she displays a genuine Celtic temper, and 
 scolds the witches for having unbidden dealings with 
 Macbeth ; while she, " the close contriver of all harms,'' 
 was never called to bear her part. Of course not, as 
 Macbeth's imagination had no personal rapport with 
 her ; and all that Shakspeare wants of her is to keep 
 the popular witch-element upon the stage, and set it to 
 creating " artiiicial sprites " in collusion with the greater 
 incantation in Macbeth's heart. The witches provide 
 him nothing but the cave and the cauldron. The scene 
 never rises into dignity until he arrives. Three old 
 women, hovering around a kettle, throw in a number of 
 nauseous curiosities which they have got by foi'aging in 
 disreputable quarters : they stir the slab gruel to verses 
 which are as realistic as a wooden spoon ; yet neither 
 Middleton nor any other of Shakspeare's contempora- 
 
Macbeth. 371 
 
 ries, save Marlowe perhaps, could have written them. 
 But mark how the tone -alters when Macbeth comes to 
 conjure with them. What is it they do? "A deed 
 without a name." Then there is only one more culi- 
 nary interruption ; but we shudder and cannot sneer, 
 for it uses an ingredient furnished by a man who has 
 committed crimes against nature : the spell catches the 
 drippings of a murderer's gibbet. Macbeth's secret 
 divinings of the future fill the scene : the visions incor- 
 porate his own anxiety. Out of his perturbed soul rise 
 the armed head, the bloody child. He reassures himself 
 with the phantom of a child crowned, with a tree in his 
 hand, and misinterprets it into a " sweet bodement " of 
 safety, so long as trees do not take to travelling. But 
 the recollection of Banquo is the great disturber : that 
 spirit sits at every feast of solace which the King par- 
 takes. His heart "throbs to know one thing:" Will 
 Banquo's issue ever reign ? The King's flaming soul 
 throws shadows on the screen of his dread, — a show of 
 kings, Banquo first and last, eight of them between 
 Banquo blood-bolter'd and Banquo crowned. But the 
 Banquo that smiles is bathed in blood. Blood let it be, 
 then. 
 
 " From this moment, 
 The very firstlings of my heart shall be 
 The firstlings of my hand." 
 
 But no critical theory can hold a work of imagination 
 to a strict account. You may clap John Locke into the 
 witness-box and riddle him with cross-questions : the 
 same court has no authority to put a poet on oath to 
 justify himself in every line ; he is satisfied to let the 
 
372 Wii, Humor, and Shaksp'eare. 
 
 drift of his thought be traced through the material in 
 which he works. Quartz that is found in certain locali- 
 ties is as good as gold, and rewards us for suspecting it. 
 We need not strain Shakspeare's page into too minute 
 an adaptation to our views in order to avoid rejecting it. 
 If he convinces us that Macbeth and his wife have com- 
 posed the tragedy before his pen touches the paper, the 
 witches may appear just what we and Macbeth choose 
 to have them, — at one moment concocters of country 
 spells to give him a drench of murder, at another mo- 
 ment concocted themselves by a spell which his soul has 
 brewed. 
 
 This spiritual gift is the main cause of all his practical 
 hesitations. His strongest passion discharges and ex- 
 hausts itself in a pulse of fantasy ; as the electric fish 
 lies awhile torpid after the transmission of a shock. In 
 his case, there is imperfect connection of the motor 
 nerves that run between imagining and doing ; so that 
 his milk of human kindness has time to mingle with his 
 mood. When his wife has grown sick and incompetent 
 to stimulate, dire necessity alone can do it for him ; as 
 we see after he has had the vision of Banquo's line of 
 kings, when somebody informs him that Macduff, his 
 most, formidable enemy, has fled. This is his self- 
 chiding : — 
 
 " Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits : 
 The flighty purpose never is o'ertook, 
 Unless the deed go with it. 
 But no more sights." 
 
 Macduff's " wife, children, servants, all that could be 
 found," are slaughtered by him. It is a deed that, mak- 
 
Macbeth. 373 
 
 ing his fortunes more impaired than ever, betrays to us 
 how feverish and impoHtic his course becomes. Far 
 better for him if he had not let the desperate crisis of 
 his fate drive him out of the land of dreams. Shak- 
 ppeare lets us hear Macbeth chiding the brag of his 
 imagination when he says, " But no more sights." He 
 has had enough of them, — too. much time wasted in 
 those presentiments which never have the element of 
 prevention. On the contrary, it is a common experience 
 that something is so sure to happen that it can impart 
 to us a fruitless forefeeling of itself, as Henry IV. felt 
 the blade of Ravaillac in his side a week before it struck 
 him. Macbeth will humor no more sights. That is the 
 key to Shakspeare's conception of the character. We 
 are to understand that henceforth Macbeth is cured of 
 his hallucinations. 
 
 Now let us return to the first scene provided with this 
 pass-key. It unlocks that and all the subsequent super- 
 nature which had a relish for his society. We feel that 
 the witches express the moral condition of Macbeth's 
 mind, its tumultuous hesitation that is on the point of 
 settling into the definiteness of crime, — " Fair is foul, 
 and foul is fair." All moral discriminations are huddled 
 together and dislocated by the upheaval of his subter- 
 ranean motive. 
 
 He really sends these witches forth to a blasted heath, 
 the avant-couriers of his own visit thither, and of a long- 
 ing that gains substance and direction the more he 
 entertains it. It is strong enough to be an object be- 
 hind his retina ; and it throws out shapes to limn them- 
 
374 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 selves upon the air into which they make themselves 
 and vanish. And they can appear only at that period of 
 his evil brooding when it gathers and swells, too big for 
 his brain, bursting its barriers to become external. After 
 the actual murder of Duncan has occurred, the brain of 
 Macbeth is depleted for a while : the ominous forms wait 
 till Banquo's ghost can recruit them. 
 
 Macbeth has an imagination so keen and unbridled 
 that it outruns the limits of thinking, to become pro- 
 jected outside of his bodily eye in shapes and objects 
 that occupy the focus of his criminal intent. His 
 crimes become ocular deceptions, because they are so 
 palpably real to his mental vision, sharpened as it is by 
 the ambitious sympathy of a wife whose temperament 
 outraces action. Murder is Macbeth's owner before he 
 is conscious that he has made himself the chattel of his 
 wife's suggestions. That same creative fancy built forth 
 into the air the handle of the instrument which he has 
 fated himself to use : he marshalled it the way that he 
 intended to go. No supernatural smith has forged the 
 fatal weapon : it is tempered in the current of his own 
 plastic mind. 
 
 But although Macbeth has this mobile imagination, 
 like that which 
 
 " If it would but apprehend sorne joy, 
 It comprehends some bringer of that joy ; " 
 
 and though he has become one of those madrnen who 
 
 " Have such seething brains, 
 Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend 
 More than cool reason ever comprehends," 
 
Macbeth. 375 
 
 he is still capable of reverting to this cool reason, at least 
 so far as to appreciate that his desperate dreams are the 
 poetry of desperate consequences which will tax all his 
 waking powers. When the apparitions vanish, in Act 
 iv. t, one of the witches gives a voice to Macbeth's 
 perturbation ; but why 
 
 " Stands Macbeth thus amazedly ? " 
 
 It was but the voice of revulsion from amazement, to 
 " cheer up his sprites " and summon resolution. 
 
 When Macbeth originates any thing out of himself, 
 that Self is not daunted, for it is too deeply compromised 
 in fact and fancy. But when some phenomenon threatens 
 him from a quarter that is outside the limit of his own 
 creative power, as when Birnam Wood is descried com- 
 ing toward Dunsinane, he is puzzled, and says : — 
 
 " I pull in resolution ; and begin 
 To doubt th' equivocation of the fiend. 
 That lies like truth. 
 I 'gin to be a-weary of the sun." 
 
 Nothing has disturbed him till he appreciates that some 
 agency which he does not control can transplant a forest 
 at his castle gate. The apparition of the witches scarcely 
 lifts his eyebrows. " Speak, if you can," is the calm greet- 
 ing. When he starts, and seems to fear " things that do 
 sound so fair," it is because the shapes he conjures be- 
 come suddenly endowed with tongues, and he hears his 
 own ambition syllabled. For a man is not prpof against 
 shrinking at the first moment that lends to the " airy 
 nothing" of his desire a distinct name and purpose. 
 
376 IVii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 He is astonished at the audacious phrasing of his hopes, 
 and he resents at first what seems definite enough to be 
 an impeachment from something not himself ; yet not 
 until that moment was it really his Self. What phan- 
 toms have thus leaped out of vacuity into the mid- 
 night chambers of desire ! What voices have drawn 
 the startled answers of a crime that did not suspect 
 this overlooking ! But when the man's Self has under- 
 gone this real birth, and the secret parturition becomes 
 a breathing child of consciousness, he soon accepts his 
 own new self, and forgets that it was irritated into a cry 
 by the first salutes of the atmosphere. Casting away 
 all repugnance, Macbeth exclaims to his wicked wishes, 
 before they have a chance to vanish, — 
 
 " Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more ! 
 Speak, I charge you ! " 
 
 So the dagger that wavers in the heated air of his 
 soul does not surprise him, — " Come, let me clutch 
 thee! " Really, he expected to grasp it ; for it was pre- 
 cisely the kind of instrument he thought of using, the 
 very shape and workmanship thereof. There's nothing 
 to perturb until he draws from his belt its counterpart, 
 yet sees the other still solid in the air. That sets him 
 to pondering: his 
 
 " Eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, 
 Or else worth all the rest." 
 
 But, in spite of that, the murder in his brain reddens, 
 sprinkles the blade ^nd dudgeon with drops of blood, 
 "which was not so before." Now when the illusion 
 
Macbeth. 377 
 
 becomes the most intense, it is dispersed, as if the 
 brain's own cHmax swelled to breaking. The collapse 
 reminds him that the deed still waits to be accomplished : 
 his dagger is yet clean. But its form is the bloody busi- 
 ness which he has on hand to get through with before 
 sweet morning. It seemed so clearly cut in his mind, 
 and stayed so long before he could tiu-n it out, that he 
 thought it worth describing to his wife, as she indicates 
 to us when at the banquet she calls his vision of Banquo 
 
 " Proper stuff ! 
 This is the very painting of your fear ; 
 This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said, 
 Led you to Duncan." 
 
 Now when the ghost of Banquo enters to occupy 
 Macbeth's chair, the actor of the king's part need not 
 strain himself to put on the highest degree of an ap- 
 palled feeling. " Are you a man ">. " whispers his wife ; 
 and Macbeth gives the true tone to his share of the 
 scene when he answers, — 
 
 " Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that 
 Which might appal the devil." 
 
 He Starts, to be sure ; but he simply remarks, " The 
 table's full." " Here is a place reserved, sir." " Where ? " 
 he exclaims, so little annihilated by the painting of his 
 own consciousness. It has dazed him, as when a mirror 
 shifts distant sunlight full into the eyes : they blink, and 
 judgment cannot readjust the sight. So he dimly asks, 
 "Which of you have done this .' " He is not "distilled 
 to jelly with the act of fear," but simply amazed at this 
 
378 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 reproduction, so quick and palpable, of the deed just 
 described to him by the hired murderer who, by doing 
 that, put those " twenty trenched gashes " into his mind, 
 whence they dripped over the chair of state. His talent 
 for this spectral extemporizing has been indulged too 
 often to overtake him with a special wonder. This un- 
 expected Banquo may be dared, and even threatened : — 
 
 " Thou canst not say I did it : never shake 
 Thy gory locks at me." 
 
 His wife blames his " flaws and starts " at such a mo- 
 ment of festivity when ceremony ought to be the sauce 
 to meat ; but they are not the ague-fits of a man who is 
 dropping to pieces at a dreadful sight. The image of 
 his guilt absorbs and diverts his behavior from the 
 guests in a way that suggests to them a sudden flighti- 
 ness : — 
 
 " Prythee, see there ! behold ! look ! lo ! how say you ? 
 Why, what care I ? If thou canst nod, speak too." 
 
 This is not bravado trying to steady itself in a breeze of 
 horror. 
 
 In order to break Macbeth down, and fully identify 
 him with the deed of which Banquo was the horrible 
 shadow, his temperament required that the ghost should 
 vanish and reappear at the' moment when he recovers 
 composure. Shakspeare has marked, by Macbeth's sud- 
 den change of demeanor, that he was usually familiar 
 with these coinages of his brain. To whatever ecstasy 
 his feeling rose, with or without his wife's complicity, 
 Shakspeare would have us understand that Macbeth was 
 
Macbeth. 379 
 
 so fluent with these bodiless creations that he had nat- 
 uralized the night-side of his mind. Therefore, Banquo 
 must re-enter precisely when Macbeth drinks to the 
 general joy, and to the dead man in particular. Shak- 
 speare knew the moment when to spill Macbeth's wine 
 and all his hardihood by putting out a disembodied hand 
 to strike the goblet from his grasp. It was the very 
 nick of time, but it was in the man's own temper. 
 
 Let us see how it was. The alteration of demeanor 
 from astonishment to the abjectness of a guilty terror 
 slips out of Macbeth's conviviality into the company, as 
 he calls for wine and drinks -"love and health to all." 
 At the rim of his goblet he can even banter with his 
 consciousness pf murder : he is in a frame to enjoy 
 proposing the health of 
 
 " Our dear friend, Banquo, whom we miss ; 
 Would he were here ! " 
 
 Now this pretence of desiring Banquo's presence uses 
 up what resistance Macbeth has to spare. No sooner 
 are the words out of his mouth than he imagines how 
 they might be answered : the imagining it is the vivid 
 answer. When you try jauntily to job off suspicion 
 before other persons, the cheek grows pale with dread 
 of being contradicted. A door is thrown ajar by this 
 wind of pretending that nothing has been committed. 
 Come on, there ! the villain cries. Has any thing hap- 
 pened .' Is anybody outside .■" Let him enter and take a 
 look around ! Sure enough, 'tis there : his mind's eye 
 sees it enter. Even when the small faults of social life 
 are denied or disclaimed by us, a ghost is raised upon 
 
380 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 the face, a dubious semblance of your guilt in the evasive 
 eye, or just a flicker in the corner of the mouth. Most 
 people overestimate their strength to make a flat denial 
 of misdeeds when their soul is reflected in the polished 
 mirrors of watchful eyes. There is a non-committal 
 look which collars a man, puts him in the dock, and 
 sends him to jail before he knows that he has been ap- 
 prehended. 
 
 Prosaic men with no imagination to defy can preserve 
 a smug complacency after the commission of a crime, 
 because they cannot vibrate to it. Give a stroke to 
 their thick temper, and it only answers with a thud. 
 Their face is an emotionless Sahara, over which no 
 shpwery gusts or smiles of April linger. But Macbeth 
 was delicately strung : the slightest stir of the in- 
 visible air was registered by a vibration. When the 
 ghost slips out of his own phrase, 'twas too pat, — this 
 coming at the toast, "to the general joy of the whole 
 table," at this pretence of thirst to drink a dead man's 
 welfare ; too nicely timed for flesh and blood to bear ; 
 too suggestive of continual liability to see the eyes 
 glaring across the brim of any moment. Observing how 
 easily the awful figure can thicken out of invisibility, 
 he cries, " Take any shape but that ! " And his mind is 
 desperate to exorcise it into an "unreal mockery," and 
 vainly struggles with his own personifying power. 
 
 "It will have blood ; they say, blood will have blood." 
 
 It is a cold, calculating vengeance, marrowless, blood- 
 less, but alert in a shape against which Macbeth's nerves 
 
Macbeth. 381 
 
 at any time may stumble, on the midnight staircase, in 
 the gallery's pale shimmer, in sleep between his wife and 
 his embrace, and always at his own suggestion of a 
 phrase, a dream. His fancy never yet inflicted such a 
 frightful recoil of an offencied Heaven. It comes at his 
 own invitation ; for he had said in the forenoon of that 
 day,— 
 
 " To-night we hold a solemn supper, sir. 
 And I'll request your presence ; " 
 
 to which Banquo acquiesced, — 
 
 " Lay your highness' 
 Command upon me." 
 
 " Fail not our feast." 
 "My lord, I will not." 
 
 On the way to it he was a little delayed by being mur- 
 dered ; jaut, though late, he does not fail. 
 
 This tragedy was slowly conceived during the married 
 life of Macbeth and his Lady. Their ambitious desires 
 spent years in collusion before an heir of opportunity 
 was born to them. The rapid and breathless action of 
 the earlier scenes makes clear to us that it does not flow 
 from any sudden resolution. The past years topple in 
 the wave that combs to break into this sweeping surge. 
 The movement of the play is unnatural, unless we admit 
 that the married couple have grown familiar with many 
 projects, all of which make them languish for occasion. 
 Macbeth has revelled in the idea that if the chance 
 offered he possesses every other quality to supplant 
 Duncan, — ambition, audacity, swiftness, all good for- 
 tune, except a turn of circumstance. He discovers at 
 
382 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 the juncture that his wife is the only* aptitude he can 
 contribute to it. She remembers his profuse sugges- 
 tions with a touch of scorn. Is he a man ? 
 
 "What beast was it, then, 
 That made you break this enterprise to me ? 
 When you durst do it, then you were a man ; 
 
 Nor time, nor place, 
 Did then adhere, and yet you would make both ; 
 They have made themselves, and that their fitness now 
 Does unmake you." 
 
 Strenuous in fantasy, " infirm of purpose." The sudden 
 crisis betrays the secret pinings of past years for such 
 an hour. The whispered conferences swell into a din : 
 it shouts to tell us how their pillows touched, when 
 darkness brooded in vain upon eyelids that were set 
 wide open with a stare at a gleam of greatness far out- 
 side their chamber. We overhear, without ever having 
 played eavesdropper, the anxious interchange of feeling 
 beneath the garden aspens, which might catch their 
 tremor from these two beings who passed hankering to 
 and fro ; he encouraging a reverie, she trying to chas- 
 tise it into action with the valor of her tongue. Thus 
 the years passed, while he alternated between the grand 
 loyalty of many a fight and the treachery which grew 
 warm upon the bosom of his wife. Much given to pon- 
 dering and pleased with vivid day-dreams, he sought no 
 way to realize them. Well as she knew this musing 
 vein of his, and much as it displeased her spirit of 
 action, she will have to be re-enforced by opportunity. 
 Then the deed, now rusting in its sheath of speculation, 
 may possibly leap forth. His mind did not have the 
 
Macbeth. 383 
 
 coupling which makes up wishing and doing into one 
 train ; so the doing stands some distance off idle on the 
 track. The track which emerged frorri Hamlet's reso- 
 lution met so many diverging lines at the controlling 
 switch that he was in doubt upon which to run : at 
 length, impatient chance unlocked the switch, and set 
 the rail for a disaster. When Macbeth's wishing be- 
 came linked to acting, he was not over-nice about his 
 route. The subtle Hamlet considered till he could not 
 start. The inconsiderate Macbeth, when he ceased to 
 vapor and began to move, blundered with a full head of 
 fantasy into ruin. 
 
 When a man's brain is well charged with blood, his 
 powers are unified ; but Macbeth's current was addicted 
 to the lobes of figment to some defrauding of the rest. 
 His wife's brain blushed all at once, and expanded- to 
 give the measure of her structure ; so that her hope, im- 
 plicating the whole of her, had all the substantiality of a 
 deed. She was already the deed from which Macbeth's 
 ambition swerved. He spawned spectres : she gave 
 birth to men-children only. A woman inspired through 
 and through with love for him, discontented with the 
 slowness of his fortune, longing to touch the top and 
 finish of her own ; a helpmeet, whose unextinguished 
 bridal ardor kept burning up all scruples as fast as her 
 lover could rake them together. He, the still perfect 
 object of her pride and passion, must become great : 
 he must be lifted to a place whence all his qualities 
 shall shine beyond cramped horizons with their petty 
 crowds. She would kiss him into the compass of a 
 
384 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 throne, if lips could waft her soldier so far. Her whole 
 soul, imagining him in statelier guises, grows so impa- 
 tient to speak out its action, that love itself becomes for 
 a moment inarticulate, though it is all the time the life- 
 blood of her hope ; as when he returns to her after the 
 perils of the campaign which overthrew rebellion, her 
 embrace is grave, as if her arms enclosed the coming 
 state : they do not radiate the touch of love. He is not 
 her darling husband, but 
 
 " Great Glamis ! worthy Cawdor ! 
 Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter ! " 
 
 His letters transported her not only beyond the " igno- 
 rant present," but beyond him, away beyond the familiar 
 circle of his arms, to which she had so often committed - 
 soul and body, — away so far that she does not feel him. 
 " The future in the instant " is embracing her ; and it is 
 against that splendor that her heart-beats break. 
 
 The first exclamation which follows the reading of his 
 letter betrays this passionate attachment : " and shalt be 
 what thou art promis'd." There runs through the tone 
 a vibration from her own desire, no doubt ; but it is domi- 
 nated by exulting love, and bursts into a chord. The time 
 has come : he shall, he must be, what he has always 
 longed to be. The weird sisters are in luck when they 
 promised so fairly to a man who is so profoundly loved. 
 'Tis the good will of Nature that I love him. 
 
 Yet she knows him thoroughly. So close is her ap- 
 praisement of him that she instinctively postpones love 
 to the immediate exigency, — that is, to pour her spirits 
 in his ear, to beat down every thing that might inter- 
 
Macbeth. 385 
 
 cept him when putting forth that one decisive hand- 
 grasp toward, the crown. She fears his nature, because 
 scruples hamper his unscrupulous ambition. They are 
 not entirely, as she conceives them, the results of inborn 
 mildness. He has a politic disposition which grows 
 all the more considerate as he sees the widening of his 
 popularity. He will proceed no farther against Duncan, 
 because 
 
 " He hath honored me of late ; and I have bought 
 Golden opinions from all sorts of people, 
 Which would be'worn now in their newest gloss. 
 Not cast aside so soon." 
 
 He discusses the project of murdering Banquo in the 
 same way : — 
 
 " Though I could 
 With bare-fac'd power sweep him from my sight, 
 And bid my will avouch it, yet I must not. 
 For certain friends that ajre both his and mine. 
 Whose loves I may not drop, but wail his fall. 
 Whom I myself struck down." 
 
 His wife must needs have sore dealings with such a 
 non-committal spirit : — 
 
 " Thou'd'st have, great Glamis, 
 That which cries, • Thus thou must do, if thou have it ; 
 And that which rather thou dost fear to do, 
 Thou wishest should be undone.' " 
 
 He wants to win a game to which his hand does not 
 entitle him ; and the desire to win is as great as the 
 dread of cheating. 
 
 This tainted mood of her beloved husband makes her 
 almost frantic. Dreams satisfy her thirst as the mirage 
 
 25 
 
386 Wii, Humor, aitd Shakspmre. 
 
 quenches the craving of a caravan. Here comes my 
 Macbeth and— "thou'rt mad to say it" — Duncan with 
 him, — a lifetime's opportunity: 'twill never come again. 
 Heaven drives Dujican " under my battlements," — yes, 
 mine, for this night only ; Macbeth's at every other time, 
 but mine this once, to hold out with against my hus- 
 band's mood. The raven himself is hoarse with chiding 
 his delay. What need the tone of my language be, when 
 the bird croaics Duncan's fatal entrance t Let it be un- 
 sexed. Here I tear every rag of woman's garments 
 from it, in this my frenzy of dread lest Macbeth elude 
 Fate's purpose : — 
 
 " Come to my woman's breasts 
 And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers, 
 Wherever in your sightless substances 
 Yqu wait on Nature's mischief." 
 
 For love's sake her tongue becomes unlovely; and the 
 delicate woman, with blue eyes sparkling like an electric 
 firmament, and that little hand, snatched out of its old 
 dalliance and clenched as if to drive a weapon, is trans- 
 formed by the spirit of some ruthless Medea who has 
 lent herself to contrive and enjoy another murder. 
 
 It has been said that Lady Macbeth did not reflect 
 upon consequences as Macbeth did, because that is not 
 the way of her sex. But the sex varies in this respect. 
 The average woman is less selfish than we are, not from 
 a feebler gift for calculation, but from a stronger capac- 
 ity of love ; for sex was invented before arithmetic. 
 Macbeth reflected, not merely because he was male, but 
 a selfish male, eager to be great, yet admiring to be 
 
Macbeth. 387 
 
 popular : he would drive the sharpest bargain with Des- 
 tiny. His wife's impetuous movement of love oversets 
 and spills out her calculation. Many a woman is capa- 
 ble of regarding all the consequences of an act, but she 
 must not love too deeply : if she does, she will stick at 
 nothing. If there be motive enough, she can turn a 
 lover into a criminal, and then, with perjury, deceit, un- 
 blushing cheek, will screen him : they twain are one, for 
 better, for worse. They are too deeply compromised to 
 haggle about salvation. The very intercourse of sex 
 devotes a woman : she has become flesh and , blood of 
 another. This complicity of nature engages the most 
 imperious nerve-centres of her life. Were she aware of 
 this beforehand, as she is not, it would not be evaded 
 nor entitled bondage. If her lover has been always 
 above her suspicion, the discovery on his part of some 
 ill-doing is seldom violent enough to tear this bond : her 
 revulsion is against a prying world that is no better than 
 it should be ; and she will help to secrete what she is 
 too proud to have attributed to him. It is one article in 
 the creed of a detective that a man's wife is more baf- 
 fling than circumstance, more loyal than conscience. 
 She is chaste clear through and single-hearted. Only 
 when love itself is wounded and disgraced will she 
 resign the culprit lover to the scorn of men ; but not 
 always even then, for it is her concern, and earth and 
 heaven may keep out of it But let him forge, she will 
 secrete him, smuggle him out of the country, join him 
 afterward to comfort him. Let him counterfeit any 
 thing but love, and she will help to put the spurious 
 
388 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 values on the town. Let him come home with murder 
 on his cheek and blood upon his garments, she, fainting, 
 will cleanse the stain that falls athwart her vision like a 
 lurid sunset of her peace. Selfishness would turn in- 
 former, but perfect love casts out the fear of becoming 
 that ! Do you say this, too, is criminal .'' I say nothing, 
 because it is my concern only to refer you to the facts. 
 She is a partner, for better, for worse, — married and 
 interpenetrated by the husband's fate. For love is 
 charity : it rejoiceth not in iniquity, and yet it " beareth 
 all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endur- 
 eth all things." 
 
 Thackeray imagines the officers calling upon Mrs. 
 Dodd, wife of that clerical scoundrel of the reign of 
 George II. : "is my wife, Mrs. Dodd, to show them into 
 the dining-room, and say, ' Pray step in, gentlemen ! 
 My husband has just come home from church. That 
 bill with my Lord Chesterfield's acceptance, I am bound 
 to own, was never written by his lordship ; and the sig- 
 nature is in the doctor's handwriting ' .' I say, would 
 any man of sense or honor or fine feeling praise his 
 wife for telling the truth under such circumstances .'' 
 Suppose she made a fine grimace and said, ' Most pain- 
 ful as my position is, most deeply as I feel for my Wil- 
 liam, yet truth must prevail ; and I deeply lament to 
 state that the beloved partner of my life did commit 
 the flagitious act with which he is charged, and is at 
 this present moment located in the two-pair back, up 
 the chimney, whither it is my duty to lead you.' Why, 
 even Dodd himself, who was one of the greatest hum- 
 
Macbeth. 389 
 
 bugs who ever lived, would not have had the face to say 
 that he approved of his wife telling the truth in such a 
 case. If ever I steal a teapot, and my women don't 
 stand up for me, pass the article under their shawls, 
 whisk down the street with it, outbluster the policeman, 
 and utter any amount of fibs before Mr. Beak, those 
 beings are not what I take them to be." 
 
 A bronze lioness was dedicated to Leaena, a girl of 
 humble birth, beloved by Aristogiton, who, with Harmo- 
 dius, conspired to kill the tyrant Hippias. She "was 
 sentenced to the torture, and, that the pain might not 
 wring from her any confession of the secrets of the con- 
 spiracy, she bit out her tongue." Some scoffer will say. 
 What greater sacrifice could a woman make .' 
 
 But she earned, and ought to have had, a verse in the 
 poem of Kallistratus,* to wreathe around her name the 
 myrtle-bough of the two patriots. 
 
 In " Far from the Madding Crowd, " a novel written 
 by Thomas Hardy, Bathsheba has hotly denied being 
 in love ; but she resents being taken in earnest by her 
 confidant. " O God, what a lie it was ! Heaven and my 
 love forgive me ! And don't you know that a woman 
 who loves at all thinks nothing of perjury when it is 
 balanced against her love ? " 
 
 Lady Macbeth has the kind of wifehood which devotes 
 itself. Hurried by her husband's hopes, she throws her- 
 self without reserve into the abyss- they dig at her feet. 
 All her character is lavished to consolidate his state. 
 
 * 'Ei' fiioTou K\aSl rb J^<()oy tpop-ficra, — In myf tie will I wear my 
 blade. 
 
390 Wii, Humor, and Shdkspeare. 
 
 She is not a vulgar murderess, because her soul is with- 
 out a flaw of egotism. She is not a perfect woman ; 
 but she is most perfectly and irrevocably married. The 
 imperfect wives are egotistical, from various motives. 
 They have some knack or talent which craves airing, 
 and earns the superficial admiration which is the discord 
 of a household. Harlots are not the only women who 
 live upon the street. Lady Macbeth's mind has no 
 specialty, no gift that itches to be noticed, no facility 
 save that of aggrandizing at any expense the man she 
 loves and is absorbed in. 
 
 To be perfectly married, and perfectly bound up in a 
 husband for weal or woe, does not imply loss of person- 
 ality. Lady Macbeth is still immensely personal, even 
 in the devotion of her love. For love alone preserves 
 the person such as she intrinsically is. A feebler love, 
 a more imperfect attachment, may favor idiosyncrasy, 
 and permit the wonian to assert some traits in isolation 
 instead of letting them be merged in the total influence 
 of her attachment. Greater love hath no man — and no 
 woman — than this, that an individuality lays down its 
 life to sustain a personality. 
 
 So when Macbeth tells her that he cannot proceed 
 any farther in the business, for Duncan is in the castle, 
 "in double trust," as king and guest, — and, besides, he 
 does not like to risk the golden opinions he has lately 
 won, — her language is an affront to the womanly senti- 
 ments which always charmed Macbeth and drew from him 
 such phrases of fondneSs : all the horrors of this tragedy 
 cannot frighten them from his lips. She is " my dearest 
 
Macbeth. 39 1 
 
 love," the " dear wife," and " dearest chuck." After the 
 murderer has told him that Banquo is slain, he falls into 
 musing which she strives to dispel : her words recall to 
 him what a " sweet remembrancer " she is. 
 
 Therefore she hammers stern sentences out of the 
 " undaunted mettle " of her love. They are iron levers 
 to swing him out of the slough of his moods : disdainful 
 smitings on the lover's cheek, they are, to bring them up 
 to regal purple : — 
 
 "Shame itself! 
 Why do you make such faces .' " 
 
 " Fie ! for shame ! " 
 
 She could never be capable of risking this style if she 
 had not been wont to soothe his ear with words selected 
 by choice moments of inclination. She would fain recur 
 to them, but there must be a coronation first. When 
 the day comes, there will be bystanders and observers, 
 else she would bend over him with the old-time prattle 
 and remarry him as king. 
 
 But, " if we should fail," he suggests, revolving possi- 
 bilities. What deliberate forethought of contempt her 
 answer yields, if it be properly emphasized, — " We fail ! " 
 That is, I'll parrot your phrase, and say "we^,' but out 
 of disdain. Of us two, the one who fails will not be 
 myself. We, indeed ! there's one too much of us for 
 that. Only screw your courage to the point, and we, as 
 you say, will not fail. 
 
 If this fortitude which pulls Macbeth through a mur- 
 der leaves her in our imagination unsexed and brutalized, 
 we deprive ourselves of reasons why he should have 
 
392 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 loved and married her ; for, the clouds of moral disaster 
 which whirl around him cannot conceal from us a fine 
 and noble disposition. It breaks through the gathering 
 obscurity in the delicate considerations which urge him 
 'to be a loyal host to Duncan ; in the imagination so sen- 
 sitive to life's fitful fever, so shaken nightly by terrible 
 dreams, as she was too ; so quick to mark the objects of 
 Nature, and clothe them in poetic feeling ; so melted by 
 tender recollections, and capable of noble regrets that 
 call a pause to ruin just as it breaks, a lull that lasts long 
 enough for us to see how much will be ruined : — 
 
 " My way of life 
 Is fall'n into the sear, tlie yellow leaf : 
 And that which should accompany old age. 
 As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, 
 I must not look to have ; but, in their stead. 
 Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honor, breath. 
 Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not." 
 
 What sort of a woman was she, in whose behalf tender- 
 ness struggled with despair at last, when he was remem- 
 bering what a soul had gone delirious, who was too nice 
 for her own fortitude, eminent to be shattered, worse 
 than sick, " as she is troubled with thick-coming 
 fancies " ! 
 
 I " Cure her of that," he replies to the Doctor, but in a 
 tone that repels rather than invites his skill ; for those 
 "thick-coming fancies" started from Duncan's room, 
 where he lay looking like her father. Fatal first mo- 
 ment, beyond the reach of medicine ! The Doctor has 
 dark misgivings as to the cause of her sleeplessness, 
 though he never heard that midnight cry, "Sleep no 
 
Macbeth. 393 
 
 more," which the parting soul of Duncan gave as it 
 awoke and fled through the inhospitable palace. Mac- 
 beth murdered then the innocent sleep which might 
 have been Nature's resource, but which no doctor can 
 restore. Cure her of that .' Cure me first of the infec- 
 tion that was caught at Duncan's bedside, and which 
 spread to the partner of my night-horrors : we are both 
 far gone beyond a doctor's art. 
 
 Still he pleads — " Canst thou not minister .? " — in 
 piteous forlornness against the better judgment which, 
 when it recurs, prompts him to " throw physic to the . 
 dogs." It is a plea which seems to visit the chamber of 
 the wife who ruined herself for love. It is the visit of a 
 yearning that her heart might be cleansed in the oblivion 
 of innocence. 
 
 " Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, 
 Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
 Raze out the written troubles of the brain. 
 And with some sweet oblivious antidote 
 Cleanse the stufE'd bosom of that perilous stuff, 
 Which weighs upon the heart ? " 
 
 If he had married a female butcher of the strongest- 
 minded type, there would have been no fees to pay for 
 doctor's attendance, and the bloom of regret would have 
 been rubbed from Macbeth's language. Such a wife's 
 muscle would have been perilous to any stuff that con- 
 science might venture to suggest. A virago who could 
 dash out the brains of her smiling babe as easily as 
 nurse it, — more easily, forsooth, for how could Nature 
 have endowed her person with the founts of maternity ? 
 — was not the kind of woman Shakspeare selected for 
 the ruin of Macbeth. 
 
394 ^^A Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 If the poet had intended Lady Macbeth to be a fury, 
 a person of abnormal wildness and cruelty, who had ex- 
 hausted love and craved the fire-water of ambition, he 
 would have prepared us to throw such a conception 
 over her, by hinting some motive or circumstance for 
 this divergence from the normal feminine nature. On 
 the contrary, he purposely neglected the opportunity 
 which the old story furnished toward the warping and 
 poisoning of a woman's mind. The historical Lady 
 Macbeth was the grand-daughter of Kenneth IV., who 
 fell in the fight against Malcolm II., Duncan's father. 
 Shakspeare has carefully suppressed any allusion which 
 might recall the bitter family feud to unsex her and 
 make revenge an element of her ambition. 
 
 Her shape, complexion, tone of voice, and style of 
 feeling cannot be constructed for us out of the brawn of 
 those lines which she throws out from the shoulder to 
 hit Macbeth's irresolution. They do not provide us 
 with the essence of her material. If we build a woman 
 out of that literal clay, she would be square-shouldered, 
 big-limbed, stout-bodied, sharp-boned, and pachyderma- 
 tous, with a skin of bronzed leather tightened over 
 knobs of cheek-bones, hairs woven in a wire-mill, and 
 eyebrows like two heavy "dashes from the circus char- 
 coal. Prometheus would connive with Billingsgate to 
 o'er-inform that clay. We confess that such a female 
 lingers among the traditional properties of theatres ; but 
 she' is too shop-worn to dare again the blaze of foot- 
 lights. We would not so defame a Jason, and blast his 
 life by constructing the mother of his children out of 
 
Macbeth. 395 
 
 the language which the jealous, frenzied moment drove 
 by heart-spasms from her lips. Still less can we subject 
 Macbeth to the matrimonial luck of such a ferocious con- 
 trast. How truculently married would numerous hus- 
 bands be if their wives' temper corresponded to the 
 abandoned use of language which" domestic virtue some- 
 times will employ, when every hair upon the head, both 
 native and naturalized, seems twisted into the coils of 
 a fell purpose to turn a thing of beauty into a fury for 
 ever ! The gust passes, the familiar features of the 
 landscape reappear, and the lips transpire with mellower 
 salutes ; as when Lady Macbeth, who has been regretting 
 that her husband should stay so much apart, greets him 
 with the blandishing rhythm of those two lines : — 
 
 " How now, my lord ? why do you keep alone, 
 Of sorriest fancies your companions making ? " 
 
 There the old feeling strays out beyond the flaming 
 swords which forbid paradise to follow in the track of 
 this tragedy. The mutual crime closes a double gate, 
 and posts inexorable sentinels against the endearments 
 of the past. 
 
BLONDE WOMEN. 
 LADY MACBETH. 
 
BLONDE WOMEN. 
 
 *" I "HOSE colors of complexion and of hair which 
 mark a feminine type that is distinct from the 
 hnmette announce also a different style of temper and 
 action. Virtue and vice, in these two types of women, 
 differ in quality and in mode of manifestation. If we 
 construct too strict a theory upon this difference, it will 
 savor of affectation : a great many exceptions might 
 spring up to discredit it, and to threaten its advocate 
 with being called fantastic. He would spend all his 
 time in lame refutations, and lose the benefit of a mod- 
 erate statement. We must be content to observe in 
 general that there are distinctions of behavior between 
 the blonde and the brunette, which are by no means 
 cutaneous, but reside deep within th$ temperament. 
 The superficial color and the physical structure an- 
 nounce what methods and gestures we may expect, but 
 do not guarantee that our expectation shall be invariably 
 fulfilled. Shares of- goodness and of faultiness are im- 
 partially distributed to both kinds-of women ; but subtle 
 differences of color and movement describe the transac- 
 tions of their conscience and their passion. 
 
 The poets instinctively build fair-haired and fair- 
 colored women around deeds which have the flavor of 
 risk and daring ; as Tennyson, who describes Godiva 
 when she is disrobed to ride through Coventry that she 
 
400 Wii, numor, ana ^naK^tj/num. 
 
 may strip a burdensome tax from her husband's sub- 
 jects : — 
 
 " She shook her head, 
 
 And showered the rippled ringlets to her knee ; 
 
 Unclad herself in haste ; adown the stair 
 
 Stole on, and, like a creeping sunbeam, slid 
 
 From pillar unto pillar." 
 
 So the brave and constant Imogen has eyes which are 
 the " blue of heaven's own tinct ; " and the flpwer that is 
 like her face is the " pale primrose : " through her com- 
 plexion the veins show like " the azur'd harebell." 
 
 Dante's forerunner, who is celebrated in Browning's 
 " Sordello," is beloved by Palma, whose influence con- 
 tinually resists his poetic day-dreams. He, speculating 
 too finely upon his relation to the politics of the epoch, 
 and always wondering what way were best for him 
 to take to benefit men, — through what party, Guelf 
 or Ghibeline, he might approach his aspirations, — is 
 obliged to turn for manhood and consistent purpose 
 to Palma : — 
 
 " Conspicuous in his world 
 Of dreams sat Palma. How the tresses curled 
 Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound 
 About her like a glory ! Even the ground v 
 
 Was bright as with spilt sunbeams." 
 
 Julia, in "Two Gentlemen of Verona," iv. 4, hangs 
 jealously over the picture of Sylvia, her unconscious 
 i;ival : — 
 
 " And yet the painter flatter'd her a little, 
 Unless I flatter with myself too much. 
 Her hair is auburn, mine is perfect yellow : 
 If that be all the difference in his love, 
 I'll get me such a color'd periwig. 
 Her eyes are gray as glass ; and so are mine : 
 Ay, but her forehead's low, and mine's as high." 
 
Blonde Women. 401 
 
 All the light-complexioned women may be classed as 
 blondes, whether the pure red and white that strive for 
 ascendency be pacified by golden hair, or whether a 
 more even tint of the cheek find its correspondence in 
 hair of chestnut hue. There are also women of high vi- 
 tality, with gifts never too forthputting because blended 
 into a harmonious disposition, who contribute still a 
 fresh tone to this chromatic scale ; for their heads wear 
 the crisp aureole of another shade that seems to invite 
 you, as William Blake, the painter, invited his city 
 friend, to a "thatched roof of rusted gold." Beneath 
 these roofs we can take shelter, fearing no catastrophe, 
 unless the rich and winning manners bring one on. In 
 Bellini's portrait of Cassandra Fedeli,* the famous im- 
 provisatrice, whom the Venetians crowned early in the 
 sixteenth century, this gracious style of woman is pre- 
 served. 
 
 There is a kind of brunette whose eyes are black as 
 the sloe-berry, with the pupil and the iris melted to- 
 gether: they are couched underneath sombre hedges 
 of eyebrows, and silently keep a good look-out. " The 
 Prince of Darkness is a gentleman : " so can the prin- 
 cesses of the same color be ladies, but their style may 
 ambush wickedness enough to task the most adventur- 
 ous resources of a criminal lawyer. You will notice, 
 however, that their scheming minds are endowed with 
 little sprightliness. Intrigue does not put forth a spark- 
 ling surface that is swept by the light thrills of various 
 
 * Brought from Italy by Mr. Jarves, and now in the possession of 
 J. W. Bigelow, Esq., New York. 
 
 26 
 
402 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 moods that blow : the social prattle lacks the tone of 
 charming simplicity and ease. The face is subject to 
 lowering weather when one of these women meditates a 
 poisoning : there is one clinch of the teeth as the limbs 
 collect to make a fatal spring, one glance askant at 
 the person whom she is diplomatically entertaining with 
 arrangements for his ruin. They cannot so readily 
 nurse a fell purpose with a melting air of maternity 
 which transpires in every line of the face and limbs, as 
 the victim is held cosingly to the fatal breast. He is 
 clutched a little too menacingly, and has time for a sus- 
 picion concerning the nutriment he is about to draw. 
 
 But when blonde women have a talent for mischief, 
 they delicately distinguish themselves from the bru- 
 nettes in the style of it. For downright, unadulterated 
 mischief, let us be commended to the blonde women of 
 the Indo-Germanic races. And frequently it is merely 
 organic, with no more premeditation or sense of con- 
 sciousness than a stinging-nettle has. They know how 
 to be unaffectedly unscrupulous, as Miss Rosamond 
 Vincy was in " Middlemarch," with a gay versatility 
 that is rare in women of a differently-tempered color. 
 Your riant blonde can drop a bolt from a clear sky, and 
 scatter your long-projected picnic with sudden misery. 
 As you look up, it is hardly credible : how or when did 
 the weather change .' You almost doubt the evidence 
 of sense. Darnley must have been blown up by acci- 
 dent. There will always be two parties relative to any 
 transaction which implicates a blonde woman, because 
 her resources of demeanor are so ample, she can recur 
 
Blonde Women. 403 
 
 to them so nimbly, she can meet gathering suspicions 
 with such angelic refutation in her smile, and the sluice- 
 gates of emotion are so nicely hung that a touch of 
 taper fingers can let into the scene a freshet of dis- 
 claimer that sweeps your rubbishy doubts away. Not 
 a smut escapes from the internal simmering to settle 
 upon the snow-white guarantee of appearance. She 
 reminds us of that adaptation to machines which exer- 
 cise a driving-power, by which they are enabled to con- 
 sume their own smoke and cinders. Her transparency 
 of skin, and the freshness of color that spreads up to 
 the temple's whiteness like an after-glow upon the gla- 
 cier, lend the proper blush to all her actions. She 
 enjoys the constant advantage of a face that has the 
 traditional tint of innocency : when delicate culture 
 and mobile gifts are behind, sportive moods come out to 
 make a charming din that just drowns the blab of mis- 
 chief. 
 
 If the poets have assigned good and noble actions to 
 the blonde women of the imagination, the same function 
 working in legendary lore has attributed from the most 
 ancient times, and with striking persistency, mankind's 
 woes to golden beauties. " Lilith, the first wife of 
 Adam, was a cold, passionless, splendid woman, with 
 wondrous golden hair. She was created Adam's equal 
 in every respect, therefore properly enough refused to 
 obey him. For this she was driven from the Garden of 
 Eden ; and Eve was made to order out of one of Adam's 
 ribs. Then the Golden-haired Lilith, jealous, enraged, 
 pining for her lost home in Paradise, took the form of a 
 
404 Wii, Humor, and cafia^speare. 
 
 serpent, crept into the garden, and tempted Adam and 
 Eve to their destruction. And from that day to this, 
 Lilith, the cold, passionless beauty with golden hair, 
 has roamed up and down the earth, snaring the sons of 
 Adam and destroying them. You may always know her 
 dead victims ; for, whenever a man has been destroyed 
 by the hands of Lilith, you will always find a single 
 golden hair wrapped tight around his lifeless heart." * 
 
 A late poet unwinds into v^rse the fatal hair around 
 his heart : — 
 
 " Seeing thy face, with all thy fluctuant hair 
 Falling in dull gold opulence from thy brow, 
 Watching thy light blue eyes, now fired, or now 
 Laughterful, or now dim as with despair, 
 I wonder, friend, that it should be God's care ■ 
 
 To have made at all (what matter when or how ? ) 
 A being so sadly, desolately rare. 
 So beautifully incomplete as thou ! 
 
 " O rank, black pool, with one star's imaged form ! 
 
 O deep, rich-hearted rose, with rot at core ! 
 O summer heaven, half-purpled with stern storm ! 
 
 O lily, with one white leaf dipt in gore ! 
 O angel shape, whom over curves and clings 
 The awful imminence of a devil's wings ! " 
 
 Greek genius understood of course that when Pandora 
 was endowed with gifts, Aphrodite took a double hand- 
 ful of the golden foam off Cyprus, whence her own 
 blondness rose, and gilded Pandora's clay. What a 
 pity that the mischievous Hermes put a thieving flattery 
 into that gracious form ! It ran into the fingers with an 
 
 * Report of M. D. Conway's striking lecture upon the History of 
 the Devil. 
 
Blonde Women. 405 
 
 instinct to baffle man's profoundest forethought. In one 
 of her Greek aspects she was called '^vi^o-t'Stugo?, be- 
 stower of presents, like those of Ceres, colored like the 
 golden-bearded rye and corn. 
 
 I Lydgate married Miss Rosamond, that piece of unex- 
 ceptionable blondness, whose temper during matrimonial 
 crises was so cool and even as to amount to the highest 
 provocation. A perfectly well-regulated bit of Nature's 
 chasteness was this wife, who went about the town 
 prevaricating and misrepresenting when her husband's 
 affairs had become involved, telling fresh fibs to cover 
 the flanks of her first ones ; thus building a track that 
 shunted him off into ever new embarrassments. Infan- 
 tile bloominess of flesh and even-tempered eyes were 
 nothing but the skim of tortuous pride; and a lie 
 dropped from her lips the prettiest product in the 
 world. 
 
 Shakspeare fancied that Caliban's mother, Sycorax, 
 was a "blue-eyed hag." Bianca Capello, a woman of 
 solid and whole-souled powers of mischief, was the 
 "golden-Baired" sorceress of Venice. 
 
 The women of the Huzules, a Sclavonic tribe that has 
 settled in the Carpathian range, are vastly superior to 
 the men. The blonde type predominates. They ride 
 horses astride, and in morals are perfect Messalinas, fill- 
 ing the villages with intrigues which frequently have 
 most tragic terminations. 
 
 So was Helen Jegado a pure blonde. She lived in 
 the time of Louis Philippe ; and a great many persons 
 fell victims to her genius for murder. No less than 
 
4o6 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 twenty-five are positively known to have been taken off 
 by her. She managed wonderfully to use two innocent 
 women to cover these crimes and to be suspected in- 
 stead of herself. At the place of execution she exoner- 
 ated them. 
 
 Charlotte Corday's hair " seemed black when fastened 
 in a large mass around her head : it seemed gold-colored 
 at the points of the tresses, like the ear of corn, — 
 deeper and more lustrous than the wheat-stalk in the 
 sunlight." Her variable eyes were " blue when she re- 
 flected, almost black when called into animated play." 
 Her skin had the wholesome and marbled whiteness of 
 perfect health. 
 
 Rebecca Sharp had " a knack of adopting a demure 
 ingenue air, under which she was most dangerous. She 
 said the wickedest things with the most simple, unaf- 
 fected air when in this mood, and would take care art- 
 lessly to apologize for her blunders, so that all the world 
 should know that she had made them." 
 
 Ninon de I'Enclos, and Madame de Chevreuse, the 
 famous conspirator who baffled two cardinals with an 
 admirable mixture of pluck and cunning, were pure 
 blondes. Such women court their objects and pursue 
 their schemes in a manifold and sprightly fashion : their 
 magnetic power flits to and fro, many-colored, subtle, 
 silent, swift as an aurora. They have complicated the 
 policy of courts and sown dissension in cabinets. They 
 misrepresent a statesman's secrets, set one clique against 
 another, stir about in society till it becomes one stupen- 
 dous snarl ; and perhaps you cannot point to a spot 
 
Blonde Women, '407 
 
 upon their reputation. They give slander itself no op- 
 portunity to lie as they can do, while they immaculately 
 defy truth to brand as counterfeit the phrases of their 
 charming insincerity. Look at the smooth brow that 
 sheds your scrutiny : there's not a crease nor wrinkle on 
 it where suspicion may lodge to fester. The eyes em- 
 brace you with the frankness of Joab, who took Abner 
 aside to speak with him, quietly, asking, " Art thou in 
 health, my brother .' " and smote him there under the 
 fifth rib, and' left him far from well. 
 
 Among blonde women we can easily observe two 
 kinds, which may be called, for brevity, the lunar and 
 the solar. The one kind seems as if blanched by sun- 
 light that has been reflected : it wilts from defect rather 
 than excess of warming power. The passions are low- 
 toned, like the body : a sort of scrofulous habit seems 
 indicated by a too delicate and thin complexion ; it lurks 
 in the lifeless yellow or chestnut of the hair, in the un- 
 sound teeth and the languid speech. There is little 
 valor for mischief in them, as there is little ambition for 
 achievement. Their virtue seems only a temper that is 
 kept faint as if by constant exudation of the blood. 
 
 But the Mary Stuart of history and the Lady Mac- 
 beth of Shakspeare belong to a different type. We 
 know that the former had a delicate exterior, auburn 
 hair, and beaming blue eyes : her tone of speaking was 
 gentle and sweet, excellently soft and low. Mrs. Sid- 
 dons, whose style and color wefe altogether different, 
 became so saturated with Lady Macbeth as to be con- 
 vinced she must have been a blonde. We think that 
 
4o8 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Shakspeare implies and justifies this delicate perception, 
 and turns it into history. Both the queens of Scotland 
 represented the kind of blonde women who are fired by 
 sunlight : it crisps the golden or the chestnut hair, be- 
 comes quicksilver in the veins, hits every brain-cell with 
 its actinic ray, and chases over the yielding hair in rip- 
 ples like a blown wheat-field. The voice is low, but ever 
 clear and even, — a fabric closely woven throughout, 
 capable of sustaining the strongest moments of the soul, 
 and of vibrating with them : the whole gamut of passion 
 may be swept by it, from the enticing whisper to the 
 peal of defiance. It is a trumpet, made of silver, and 
 not one note of it is brassy ; but it pierces the dis- 
 tance none the less directly, and summons Macbeth by 
 sonorous phrases out of the mist and pointlessness of 
 dreams. 
 
 But Nature drew the character of Mary Stuart from 
 elements less simple than were used by Shakspeare in 
 constructing Lady Macbeth. Mary, to all the culture of 
 her times, added various tastes and a delicate suscepti- 
 bility for art : she loved music, plays, minstrels, games, 
 and was passionately devoted to the chase. Her great 
 pace in hunting, her fiery dash through the underbrush, 
 was observed and has been long remembered. Once, 
 having been thrown from her horse, the attendants 
 found her on the ground, gayly laughing as she put up 
 the dishevelled hair. 
 
 In the cold autumn of 1562, she went in person upon 
 an expedition to .punish a Highland clan. She jested 
 with fatigues and hardships, " and was as much at her 
 
Blonde Women. 409 
 
 ease," says Froude, "galloping a half-broken stallion 
 over the heather as when languishing in her boudoir 
 over a love-sonnet." She said " she wished she was a 
 man, to know what life it was to lie all night in the field, 
 or to walk on the causey with a Glasgow buckler and a 
 broadsword." 
 
 She reminds us of BathlSheba in the novel which has 
 been already quoted. Talking with her maid Liddy, she 
 said, " I hope I am not a bold sort of maid, — man- 
 nish 1 " she continued, with some anxiety. To which 
 Liddy replied, " Oh, no, not mannish ; but so almighty 
 womanish that 'tis getting on that way sometimes." 
 
 At the age of nineteen, the delicately nurtured woman 
 set sail from France for Scotland, to begin that long, 
 indomitable struggle to succeed Elizabeth, and to break 
 the Reformation in England. The wiliest and most in- 
 flexible of Queen Elizabeth's counsellors shivered their 
 weapons against the guard of her swift tact, until im.- 
 prisonment, which was twice escaped from, and death, — 
 
 " That fell arrest. 
 Without all bail," — 
 
 became England's last resource against this dangerous, 
 lovable, bewildering, fateful woman. Her bronze effigy 
 in St. Mary's Church at Warwick lifts features whose 
 clearly cut delicacy implies her resolution, and the mag- 
 netic power of all her loves and plots. 
 
 Her attachments were sometimes inspired by politics, 
 sometimes by sentiment. All her mental and emotional 
 ability was pledged to honor drafts which came in the 
 interest of the Pope, of^ France, of hatred of Protestant- 
 
4IO Wii, Humor, ana Cbhanspeare, 
 
 ism, of desire to govern England. She was in a frame 
 of constant pique at the influence and reputation of 
 Elizabeth. The Scottish reformers kept her skirmish- 
 ing talent well employed. Defending her amusements 
 or her mass against John Knox, she braved him till his 
 bitter speech gathered into brine in her eyes. But, as 
 it flowed, the lines of resoliftion upon her face were 
 etched more clearly. She could lend her person to 
 Bothwell with the hope of consolidating a party. With 
 power and beauty at command, she lavished every wile 
 to control the transitional epoch into which she was 
 born. Her life was a series of shifts and dramatic sur- 
 prises. But no dark recollections ever disturbed her 
 sleep ; nor did she carry a candle through the midnight 
 of a shattered mind, to throw light upon suspected 
 murders. 
 
 In love she was less constant than Macbeth's wife, 
 who felt but one great passion, and had no art nor cult- 
 ure to lavish in retaining its object. She might have 
 said, — 
 
 " I am as true as truth's simplicity, 
 And simpler than the infancy of truth." 
 
 We shall find this sun-lighted heart less capable of 
 endurance than the other blondes of history. 
 
 LADY MACBETH. 
 
 To make and share a husband's fortune was her only 
 motive, and the only driving-power she could supply to 
 that was love : her character was most inartificially con- 
 
Lady Macbeth. 4 1 1 
 
 trived out of one or two broad elements of woman- 
 kind ; a Semele to invite the solar ray that consumed 
 her. To be a woman was her sole resource. 
 
 Let us notice, therefore, how prompt was her first in- 
 spiration, and how quickly it recoiled exhausted from its 
 terrible victory. 
 
 A full-blooded virago who has murder in her heart, 
 but supposes that any chance to commit it is a long way 
 off, would not betray emotion if Fate suddenly tossed a 
 chance into her lap. Lady Macbeth's nerves are not 
 well padded against such a shock. The husband's letter 
 astonishes and exalts her soul ; but the old desires, 
 never before so animated, seem fruitless as ever, since 
 neither time nor place concur. In the height- of this 
 turmoil, an attendant enters to say, " The King comes 
 here to-night." The tidings appal her : has Providence 
 -gone mad, to trust Duncan with her in this temper? 
 The man is mad to say it. Coming! To-night ! "And 
 when goes hence t " Her looks and speech recoil from 
 the coincidence. Then she breaks into that soliloquy 
 which is not the ranting of a mannish murderess who 
 is in a "frenzy to get at her victim. The lines quiver 
 with the excitement of a delicate nature that is over- 
 strained and dreads to fail. Vexed and chagrined at 
 womanly proclivities which will be apt to follow their 
 bent against her purpose, she invokes spirits to unsex 
 her, to make thick the blood that runs too limpidly and 
 warm, and clot "the access and passage to remorse." 
 It fills us with dismay to see how far a susceptible 
 womanhood can be transported by a vehement passion ; 
 
412 Wii, Jrlumor, and ,:i/ta/espeare. 
 
 as when, toward nightfall, the dweller upon a soft inland 
 stream sees the freshet's discolored water come down, 
 thick with the fruits of gentle husbandry and the 
 quenched hearths of homesteads, with piteous wrecks 
 of innocence clinging round them. 
 
 Soon after those shrill cries, as of a string too tightly 
 drawn, have escaped from her, the King arrives at the 
 castle. Contrast the dry color of her language when, as 
 hostess, she welcomes him : we are surprised at its con- 
 strained and measured politeness. Her soul seems to 
 have collapsed into the dullest prose : — 
 
 " Your servants ever 
 Have theirs, themselves, and what is theirs, in compt. 
 To make their audit at your highness' pleasure, 
 Still to return your Own." 
 
 It is the talk of a book-keeper to his employer. Has 
 something bereft the fine woman of her tact .■• No, the 
 fineness of the woman fell instinctively into a protective 
 tone. Her consciousness has been so acutely set to the 
 key of crime that she knows the least touch will sound 
 it. The secret is torture to the mind, but must be 
 borne ; as a guilty man, who overhears the pursuit draw- 
 ing close to his cramped and insupportable place of con- 
 cealment, turns rigid with stifled groans. So, when 
 Duncan says, — 
 
 " See, see ! our honor'd hostess ! 
 The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, 
 Which still we thank as love." 
 
 " Fair and noble hostess, 
 We are your guest to-night," — 
 
 the courtesy, so mild and royal, is a threat that comes 
 
Lady Macbeth. 413 
 
 too near the pent-up feeling : she grows preternaturally 
 still and cold. 
 
 The Amazonian female would have failed in tact 
 through absence of anxiety, as her language effervesced 
 with the congenial occasion. Such a largess of blank 
 verse would be scattered as certainly to raise suspicion 
 in the observant Banquo, who has heard the witches' 
 promise. The awkward parsimony of Lady Macbeth's 
 words might be credited to the suddenness of the 
 visit, to a stately dread of seeming over-pleased at the 
 " late dignities " and over-covetous of more, or to 
 the constraint of feeling unprepared to entertain so 
 many people. 
 
 But the other style of woman, as the victim ap- 
 proached, would cram him with fulsomeness to make 
 him fat for slaying, somewhat in this fashion : — 
 
 Most gracious highness ! the poor wife am I 
 0£ thy good soldier, now the Thane o£ Cawdor, 
 But ever less the more thou raisest him. 
 He should be here : he'd say the castle's thine, 
 And wring its service to some decent welcome. 
 Alas, I can but kneel, and droop my lips. 
 And let them flutter ere they light upon 
 My perch, thy hand ; this violence to plot, 
 Scarce this, against thy person venturing here ; 
 But see, my knees invoke great Heaven's rest 
 Upon thy stay and slumber ; all good angels 
 Hie hither to encamp around his bed. 
 Enter, my lord ; treason has bled to death, 
 And roofs are sacreder than oaths.* 
 
 The impetuous language and action which hurry 
 along the following scenes, and sweep reflection from 
 every holding-ground, are not the result of an excision 
 
414 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 of psychological leading-matter by Middleton, or any 
 one else who worked for the theatre and reduced the 
 length of the play to bring it into acting limits. A 
 miner strikes his pick through a thin partition behind 
 which subterranean waters have been slowly gathering : 
 they deluge his tunnel and sweep him away. In Shak- 
 speare's mind the hidden precedent of the tragedy's 
 action accumulated. The first scratch of his pen let it 
 loose to flood the scenes. There was no preliminary 
 warning. The psychological filtration through his brain 
 from the sources of his plot bursted in like a freshet that 
 explains itself without recalling separate rills. 
 
 Nor was the swift and unheralded actign inspired 
 solely by Lady Macbeth's impatience to be the wife of 
 a king. All women run after their thoughts more 
 eagerly than do the men. They are Atalantas without 
 a weakness for the golden apples which are sent across 
 the path to break up their desire for winning. But, if 
 Atalanta secretly prefers a suitor, she will chase his 
 golden apple. For whenever personal preferences di- 
 vert a woman from her course, it is because they, too, 
 grow in the Hesperides of her imagination. Men delib- 
 erate, study the ground, observe the obstacles, cluster 
 round preponderating judgment and wait for its direc- 
 tion. Women are not heedless : they also can deliberate 
 until the heart has become too deeply involved ; but, 
 when the heart is set upon something, they are the 
 swift-footed couriers of the Ideal, and their only turn- 
 pike is as the bird flies. If there be any virtuous ad- 
 vantage to be gained, any scheme to carry out, any 
 
Lady Macbeth 415 
 
 enthusiasm that beautifies the distance, they go across- 
 lots for it, not minding that they may stumble upon 
 
 i| brooks unprovided with a stepping-stone or fallen tree. 
 They fret at obstacles, and instigate the neighborhood 
 against them. They advocate with ardor, consult no 
 selfishness, want to override every thing with the moral 
 feeling that what is worth doing at all ought to be done 
 
 _ quickly. Macbeth seizes this trait by his reflection that 
 it would be all very fine if it were done when 'tis done : 
 her quickness would then justify itself to his considera- 
 tion. For good or evil all women who can be inspired 
 with purposes speak in her ideal tone : — 
 
 " Art thou afeard 
 To be the same in thine o-.vn act and valor 
 As thou art in desire ? Would'st thou have that 
 Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life, 
 And live a coward in thine own esteem ; 
 Letting ' I dare not ' wait upon ' I would,' 
 Like the poor cat i' the adage ? " 
 
 Women can shame a partner into valor by venturing the 
 worst affront when they cry, — 
 
 " From this time. 
 Such I account thy love ; " 
 
 that is, I account it like thy drunken hope which wakes 
 up penitent and pale. When a husband hears himself 
 scorned in this style, he does not believe his own ears, 
 but instinctively translates the phrases to mean, " From 
 this time, count upon my love." For the ideal, in the 
 moment of its greatest rage and dread, betrays the im- 
 mortal attachment which is a man's breath, his superi- 
 ority, his sole success. 
 
4i6 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 She does not give Macbeth time to observe that to 
 murder Duncan will exact of him the murder of Mal- 
 colm also, who is designated by the King to succeed 
 him. She is in no temper to reflect that the taking-off 
 of Duncan will plunge the husband into ever-renewing 
 complications : her transport carries him away to fruit- 
 less crime. But the first blow spends her terrible ardor 
 and disenchants her of murder. She can force it upon 
 her husband, but is not endowed with the complexly 
 woven tissue of talents and motives that can sustain 
 reaction. His muscle drags him through successive 
 scenes of feigning, inures him to the contemplation of 
 fresh murders, and keeps his foot well planted to thrust 
 and parry the foes of his own making. She is all made 
 for love, and for the uttermost that love can suggest : 
 there is no masculine fibre in her heart ; it is packed 
 with the invisible, fine-strung nerves of a feminine dis- 
 position. And they have been stretched to such a ten- 
 sion that, since no solider flesh sheathes and protects 
 them as they relax, we see them ravelled : they no 
 longer sustain the firm heart- beat and regulate the 
 blood. There are symptoms, even before the murder 
 is committed, that her strength threatens to be inade- 
 quate. She must have recourse to wine, to borrow 
 courage from it that may last till morning; and her 
 mood is so intense that the light body can absorb large 
 draughts of it : — 
 
 " That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold." 
 
 It does not, however, cancel a susceptibility, which 
 
Lady Macbeth. 417 
 
 was unusual with her, to the weird influences of night 
 and loneliness. It was unusual ; for I think it to be no 
 fancy, but a well-attested experience, that the blonde 
 women are the least affected by the physical influences 
 of darkness : they have a certain clarity to repel this 
 infection that penetr"ates so many darker-looking people, 
 — a certain nonchalance that is manifested even in girl- 
 hood's nursery, and prevents spooks from being rocked 
 in the same cradle. Being free from the frailness which 
 is latent in a tendency to project startled feelings into 
 . ghostly phenomena, they do, as a general rule, find it 
 easy to translate the queer noises and conspiracies of 
 the darkness into their plain prose. They keep the ob- 
 scurest entry free from the litter which gathers from 
 tales of superstition : from garret to cellar there's not a 
 nook where creepiness can make a goblin-nest. Up 
 and down lonesome staircases they can go without a 
 light, prowl unperturbed into the uncanniest corners, 
 hurry to investigate the cause of a low moan with a 
 warm heart for a candle, enter the room of the dead 
 without laying a reluctant hand upon the lock or paus- 
 ing to summon fortitude. 
 
 One of these women was Lady Macbeth, who' never 
 before experienced, what her husband always had in lia- 
 bility, those paintings of his fear, those flaws and starts, 
 that objefctivity of over-wrought imagination. But now 
 this scene, which treads upon the threshold of the mur- 
 der, shudders with the proximity of something bodiless ; 
 on the corridors and stairs a spectral gleam is congeal- 
 ing into shapes not known to this world ; the wild 
 
 27 
 
41 8 Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 weather of the " sore night " has hunted the moon 
 and stars out of the heaven ; the rain rushes at the 
 panes to get vindictive entrance ; the wind utters per- 
 sonal threats at these violators of " the Lord's anointed 
 temple ; " — 
 
 "The obscure bird 
 Clamor'd the livelong night." 
 
 How finely seated in its place is that word " obscure " ! 
 Substitute for it the various reading, " obscene," and you 
 destroy the sense which Shakspeare would convey of a 
 creature heard but seldom seen at any time, sitting so 
 moveless in the dark : not a leaf prates of its where- 
 about ; the mysterious hooting seems to be one of the 
 unexplained things of Nature. 
 
 Lady Macbeth's breath itself is intent to listen, — 
 " Hark ! " Then, as her novel tremor passes off, she 
 interprets it : — 
 
 " It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman, 
 Which gives the stern'st good-night.'' 
 
 Far away, through innocent hamlets, human watchmen 
 go their rounds, and let their "All's well ! " mix with the 
 dreams of inviolate chambers. Here is a different bell- 
 man to invite an eternal hour to murder sleep. She lis- 
 tens again, and her nerves are tightened by the hand of 
 silence. " He is about it." How awfully dftes Mac- 
 beth's voice come struggling back into this stillness, 
 where the wife begins to feel something personal in the 
 air ! So does he. " Who's there 1 What, ho ! " And 
 she expects to see something that was not invited : — 
 
Lady Macbeth. 419 
 
 'Alack ! I am afraid they have awak'd, 
 And 'tis not done : the attempt, and not the deed, 
 Confounds us." 
 
 Shakspeare makes us aware that Macbeth, after kill- 
 ing Duncan, must pass along a passage and descend 
 some stairs to the next story. What a walk of a few 
 moments, protracted into endless awe, with Duncan dis- 
 embodied close at his heels ! The brave soldier's feet 
 weaken at the distance which his own soul creates. 
 Will he ever annihilate a space that is made by a crime 
 and reach his wife again t 
 
 " I have done the deed ! Did'st thou not hear a noise ? " 
 
 They listen, looking sidelong at each other : — 
 
 " I heard the owl scream, and the crickets cry. 
 Did not you speak ? 
 
 When? 
 
 Now. 
 
 As I descended ? 
 Ay. 
 Hark ! Who lies i' the second chamber ? " 
 
 The scene is full of pauses of startled listening: it 
 waits with a husband absent upstairs upon an errand, 
 retreats with him through a haunted corridor, thence- 
 forth for ever haunted, and shudders in us as midnight 
 never shuddered before ; and the crickets, those carol- 
 lers of a sacred hearth, cry, as blood drips through it 
 and quenches their content. 
 
 When Macbeth relates to her his sensations while he 
 was upstairs, the amen that stuck in his throat, the 
 voice that threatened him with nights devoid of sleep 
 
420 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 and that still cried, "Macbeth shall sleep no more," 
 Lady Macbeth, intuitively feeling that she could dare 
 no more, and could not risk another thought with her 
 imagination, said, — 
 
 " These deeds must not be thought 
 After these ways : so, it will make us mad." 
 
 The deed is done, but to her surprise it will not do for 
 her too curiously to consider it. But no, the deed is not 
 yet neatly finished. Macbeth, in his hurry to elude the 
 dead man, has brought the bloody daggers with him. 
 She must carry them back for him : not for his newly 
 bought kingdom would he return along that entry and 
 through that ghastly door. The exigency recalls the 
 fair woman to her native temper. To put the needed 
 finish to her night's business, she resumes her wonted 
 contempt for darkness and the sight of the dead: — 
 
 "The sleeping and the dead 
 Are but as pictures." 
 
 While she is absent, there comes that knocking at the 
 gate which appals Macbeth ; and we quake with him in 
 that moment which lets into the tragedy a human world 
 again. 
 
 This world, unconscious of the hell which husband 
 and wife have inaugurated within the castle, has been 
 travelling all night to reach it. What morning redness 
 salutes Lenox's and Macduff's eyes ! 
 
 " Ring the alarum-bell ! 
 
 Malcolm ! awake ! 
 Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit, 
 And look on death itself ! Up, up, and see 
 
Lady Macbeth. 421 
 
 The great doom's image ! Malcolm ! Banquo ! 
 As from your graves rise up, and walk like sprites, 
 To countenance this horror. Ring the bell I " 
 
 Thereupon Lady Macbeth enters : she has had time to 
 see what color Duncan's blood imparts to water, in the 
 little act of washing the hands which became memorable 
 to her, and seared into the brain as if with a brand 
 heated in nether fires. No constraint of alarm caused 
 her to enter, but she is driven in by the terrible affinity 
 of her feeling : she belongs to the scene, — a part of it 
 which cannot be left out. She must hear what is said, 
 observe what occurs, keep her appointment with the 
 death which she solicited. This fascination of spilt 
 blood, this woman's instinct to see her husband through 
 the first surprise, this dread of some defect in his be- 
 havior, this solicitude to repair it by some spirit of her 
 own, takes her into a scene which deals one stroke too 
 much upon her emotion. For the morn broke rapidly, 
 as if to resent the criminal advantage which the mid- 
 night took. She has had no chance to calculate what 
 effect this murder will have upon human sensibilities 
 when they are taken by it unawares. She sees the aw- 
 fulness of it suddenly reflected from the faces and ges- 
 tures of Macduff, Banquo, and the rest. It beats at the 
 gate, across which she has braced a woman's arm, and 
 breaks it in ; and a mob of reproaches rush over her. 
 What have those delicate hands been doing .? What is 
 this hideous issue of her slender body, just born, stark 
 naked, in the horror of these men .' Nature, in making 
 her, was so little in the male mood, so intently following 
 
42 2 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 the woman's model, that it left out the element which 
 carries Macbeth through this scene. To hear her 
 husband describe his simulated rage in butchering 
 the grooms, and draw that painting of Duncan in his 
 blood, — 
 
 " And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature 
 For ruin's wasteful entrance," — 
 
 it is too much, and 'tis plain she is not needed. " Help 
 me hence, ho ! " her sex cries. It is the revulsion of 
 nature in a feminine soul. Love has exhaled all its har- 
 dihood into the deed which is just now discovered. She, 
 too, has only now really discovered it. The nerves part 
 at the overstrain of seeing what the deed is like, and 
 drop her helpless into a swoon. 
 
 She recovers, but her mind wakes to the necessity of 
 playing a part, to the harassing assumption of royal 
 demeanor to hide a slavish dread, to the cruel demands 
 of courtesy, to the effort to sustain her husband's state, 
 to the counterfeit composure of the banquet : — 
 
 " Better be with the dead, 
 Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace, 
 Than on the torture of the mind to lie 
 In restless ecstasy.'' 
 
 She does not say this ; but Macbeth avows it for her, 
 since they are partners 
 
 " In the affliction of these terrible dreams 
 That shake us nightly." 
 
 Banquo would have been safe enough from her ; for 
 the scheming love has been too rudely handled. But 
 he is not safe from Macbeth, who does not reflect that, 
 
Lady Macbeth. 423 
 
 while Malcolm is out of his reach, 'tis a superfluity of 
 naughtiness to slay Banquo and Fleance. His wife 
 might have counselled better, but he did not dare to 
 confide his temper of murder to her. Henceforth, mur- 
 der is become a necessary of their daily life. But her 
 feeling that nought is had and all is spent does not in- 
 volve a threat of Banquo's person. She broods in spirit- 
 less reaction, and tells Macbeth that "what's done is 
 done." He broods in dangerous recklessness, feeling 
 that it is not yet done : — 
 
 " Thou know'st that Banquo and his Fleance live." 
 
 She does not perceive what he is darkly hinting, and 
 merely replies that they cannot live for ever. He judges 
 hastily that they must die at once ; and " there's comfort 
 yet." But he does not venture to be explicit with 
 her, because, if she cannot detect the murder in his 
 words, — 
 
 " There shall be done 
 A deed of dreadful note," — 
 
 it is because there is murder no longer in her heart. 
 He does not dare to risk his resolutions openly with her 
 returning womanhood. So, when she unconsciously' 
 asks, " What's to be done ">. " he cannot muster courage 
 to expose his thought : — 
 
 " Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, 
 Till thou applaud the deed." 
 
 Then his imagination, excited by the dire policy which 
 he premeditates, shudders into language that recalls to 
 us her own when she unsexed herself to make a man of 
 
424 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 him: it is his turn to be demonized, and she simply 
 marvels at his words. 
 
 So she goes to the feast where Ban quo is expected, 
 without *his ghost in her heart : not a hint reaches her 
 of what has happened. It is plain that she miscon- 
 strues the distracted behavior of Macbeth ; and when 
 he says, " If I stand here, I saw him," she could only 
 suppose that it was the ghost of Duncan which was the 
 painting of his fear : so that she bravely carries Mac- 
 beth through the brunt of the guests' wonder, and passes 
 to that night's tormented sleep without a fresh spectre 
 in its train. For Macbeth was either too dispirited or 
 too considerate to tell her ; so he lets the news wait till 
 another day divulges it. 
 
 When the guests have departed, Macbeth is still ab- 
 sorbed by the terrifying possibilities of disclosure that 
 were suggested by the apparition. Banquo, who can so 
 easily become visible, may hint the manner of his death 
 to somebody, to any thing, making the dumbest object 
 voluble with it, — may even make a stone move to hit 
 the murderer, or a tree's branch point speakingly to 
 him, " the secretest man of blood." But his wife says 
 nothing either to refute the fear or to make him 
 ashamed of it. What palsy has been laid upon that 
 ruffling tongue ? It is not silent, as some critics fancy, 
 Ibecause her love sets in to pity and to spare him ; nor 
 silent because the exigency has passed away, nor be- 
 cause Middleton struck out some speech of hers, — but 
 silent simply from exhaustion. See, between the lines 
 of Macbeth's mood, how the overtaxed woman droops, 
 
Lady Macbeth. 425 
 
 utterly frayed away, although the guests relieve her 'by 
 departure. Exhaustion so preoccupies her that love 
 Itself is too faint to pity or to, cheer, and her only 
 thought is to get to bed. She has begun to feel the 
 drift of a hopeless future, against which she has no 
 • strength, by contending, to regain the old mooring- 
 grpund where they cut loose and allowed an unseen 
 current to clutch the slim bark. Neither curiosity nor 
 self-interest can rouse her when Macbeth mentions that 
 he has strange things in head which he means to carry 
 to performance. 
 
 " You lack the season of all natures, sleep," 
 
 is all that her tired nature has left to say. 
 
 Her fortitude just eked her out to reach the gracious 
 action that dismissed the guests, as she wished "A 
 kind good-night to all ! " Yes, good-night to all, — 
 to us also. She gains the shelter of her chamber : then 
 she entirely disappears from the action of the tragedy, 
 to sicken in seclusion with the consciousness that her 
 fatal love has purveyed successive murders for her 
 household. She can be of no further use to Shak- 
 speare now : such a terrible requisition of genius has 
 exhausted her ; she is removed from our view and con- 
 signed to the offices of women. For the courage that 
 was screwed to the sticking-place was screwed by love's 
 wrest one turn too far. But another kind of woman — 
 massive, cruel, prompted by unmixed ambition, guided 
 by pure hatefulness — would have had no trouble in 
 assuming the dogged resolution with which Macbeth 
 
426 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 began henceforth to outface Fate. Not so this soul, 
 who has known " how tender 'tis to love the babe " that 
 milks her. 
 
 " The tackle of her heart is crack'd and burned ; 
 And all the shrouds wherewith her life should sail 
 Are turned to one thread, one little hair." 
 
 She will soon be "a clod and module of confounded 
 royalty." 
 
 For she has been the cause of all ; she has thus 
 changed and compromised the man whom she hoped 
 to help to majesty and safety ; she, the determined 
 guider of the first blow, must see that wound become a 
 widening crack in the walls of love and honor, to bury 
 what she hoped to shelter ; and she has grown power- 
 less to shore them up, or to let them fall upon herself 
 and not upon him. The breaking heart pulls down her 
 wits into its ruin. 
 
 Her undaunted mettle was but the over-bracing tonic 
 of a moment, which punishes the structure it exalted. 
 
 "A little water clears us of this deed : 
 How easy is it, then ! " 
 
 So she and Heaven differed ; and the husband found it 
 was not easy. A piteous self-arraignment of love is 
 quite as potent to destroy her as a conscience that can 
 sleep no more. 
 
 Night after night, her gentlewomen attend the repe- 
 tition of scenes which she enacts, like a shadowy pa- 
 geant in Hades of bygone life. Sleep's hammer tolls 
 the castle-bell : " One, two ! why, then 'tis time to do't." 
 How JDuncan bleeds ! Who would have thought it of 
 
Lady Macbeth. 427 
 
 so old a man? And "here's the smell of the blood 
 still:" how the fastidious woman, who loved the "per- 
 fumes of Arabia," sickens at it ! The little hands fum- 
 ble in the spectral water : they are not sweetened ; the 
 damned spot still clings. What ! are these hands never 
 to be clean again ? But there's no time for washing out 
 this deed ; for, hark ! there's Innocency knocking at the- 
 gate. Here no porter will be needed to usher dread 
 disclosure into this sighing heart. " What's done can- 
 not be undone." And what a reminiscence of her sense 
 of wifehood and of the sacredness of pure domestic ties 
 she wakens when she says, " The thane of Fife had a 
 wife : where is she now .' " Sent by her first impetuous 
 push into Duncan's grave. 
 
 In the " slumbery agitation " of the last night which 
 shuts her from our view, she stretches a winsome hand 
 toward the air-drawn husband of her dream : " Come, 
 come ! come, come ! give me your hand ! to bed, to bed, 
 to bed ! " 
 
 So, not long after, a cry of women struggles through 
 the castle, and bids Macbeth's desperate engrossment 
 know that the "brief candle" of her night-walking sor- 
 row has gone out. He has no time to permit his queen 
 to die, but she has slipped from his arms. Alas ! 
 another shape of Nature's womanhood by Nature de- 
 stroyed. Malcolm may suspect that she destroyed her- 
 self, but Shakspeare furnished no pretext for that palace 
 rumor. And it so disconcerts the pathos which he 
 intended should accumulate around the temper of her 
 crime that many commentators suspect the scene, upon 
 
428 Wii, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 this and other considerations, of having been tampered 
 with. Malcolm may call her " fiend-like," if he will. 'Tis 
 pardonably honest English from a son who slept one 
 night so near to a murdered father. What was to Mal- 
 colm a righteous phrasing of the deed does not cover 
 Shakspeare's implication of the mood which led to it. 
 The great poet delivers to us a sprig of rosemary, for 
 remembrance of Nature in a woman, but enjoins us to 
 tie it up with rue. 
 
 Cambridge : Press of John Wilson & Son, 
 
t iv