WIT, HUMOR, AND SHAKSPEARE.

In Press:

The West-Easterly Divan of Goethe.

Translated, with an Introduction and Notes,

By John Weiss.

[Ready in December.]

Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare.

Twelve Essays.

By JOHN WEISS.

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1876.

Copyright, 1876,

By John Weiss.

Cambridge:

Press of John Wilson & Son.

CONTENTS.

THE CAUSE OF LAUGHTER.

This subject is best reached from the point of reflecting 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 developed in the animals. When dogs are fondly gambolling 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 expression, accompanied with a laughing noise, which is so like the human that we might charge them with being entertained at the practical jokes which they pass 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 after-thought 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 surround 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 themselves, so much more salient and intrusive than among 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 and 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, elephant, 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 themselves, and to narrowly escape inventing amusement. But curiosity and aversion probably exhaust the speculative 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 burrow, 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 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 geniality. Even men who are strangers, and in general dissociated by the distinctions of society, will be thrown together 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 comprises 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 rendering 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 nourisher; and only those creatures who are capable of annihilating capricious distinctions by a feeling of common humanness are capable of enjoying the union of heterogeneous 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 convince any well-informed dog of the hopelessness of proposing 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 manœuvre. 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 flittings of human perception pass beneath that horrid crest of the gorilla, as he elevates it in astonishment at encountering a creature of matchless symmetry like the wild ass, of picturesqueness 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 ludicrous impressions. But one must be very closely related to the anthropoid ape, if not quite recently derived from it, to tell what they are.

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 delight, 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 accidental slide originated the habit.

Lieutenant Dall says that the beavers in Alaska engage 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 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 listless 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 gestures, 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 amusement 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 breakfast or supper, the peculiar shrill cry of a hawk is heard overhead, and the bird is seen circling in the air, uttering 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 clear, the bird changes his wild note for peals of laughter 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 endowed 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 pronounced 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 prelusions of the difficulty to be overcome were ever heard in either case.

The naturalist has lately found a monkey of the Gibbon 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 briskness, all the parody of human nature, and all the lubricity 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 recovering 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 shaking 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 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 present 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 hearty laughter loosens its handcuffs and lets the prisoner 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.

No creature that is not capable of being bored can be capable of laughing at its own incongruous circumstances. The more simply constructed the brain and nervous system are, the less liability is there to that misfortune of ennui. 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 sympathizes 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 breeding more positive ideas and feelings,—such as the questing of a greyhound, the tact of setters and retrievers, 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.

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 blindly 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 zoölogical garden many of the better-educated animals to whom the monotony 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 most 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 whenever any of our ideas can suddenly and for a moment join an object or another idea, and appear to belong to it, though essentially different in every respect, and only capable of seeming like by the imagination starting a pretence of it. Things that are incongruous are forced to touch at one point, and for one moment to feign congruity. 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 understanding is at home in the ordinary congruities of things, and is not prepared 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 meet, 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?" "No," answers the other. "Oh, then you are indeed my long-lost brother!" It is so 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, 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 person 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 essentially 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. But when 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 larvæ 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 expression of the first Indian who ever killed a man wearing 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.

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 ludicrous 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 remark, 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 element of wit.

If a pun is good, the pleasure is sometimes purely mental and scarcely gets beyond a smile; for it constrains two different ideas into an accidental relation 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 unprepared: "Which goes the quicker,—a full minute or a spare moment?" 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 diamonds upon window-panes, makes one of his characters 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 væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremonæ!"[1]

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 carried 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 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 can pass 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 Sèvres 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 maintiendrons la couronne de la France." His dauphin merely remarked, "Maintenons la" (Madame de Maintenon l'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" (j'aurai mille 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 unsuccessfully proposed for membership of the famous Académie. Some one condoling with him for his failure, he replied that he meant to throw himself into the streets. "But how so, Monsieur?" "Parceque, dans ce cas, on tout de suite m'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 Jerrold by a quick motion accidentally threw himself backward 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 servant'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 moment 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; 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, according as it draws upon more or less of the imagination, and is more or less interfused with good-nature. It has a range of effects extending from a bitterness which may be ferocious through 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 clearness; Richter, Sydney Smith, Shakspeare, of its broad humanity.

Some one asked Heine, "Have you read B.'s new 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." "Certainly: 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 intervals 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 contains 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, 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 discrimination 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 attaché felt who, being at a soirée 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 chose!" "Vous avez raison," was the reply; "c'est l'habitude de votre pays."

But the French abound in the kind of wit which penetrates 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 remarkably lean man, came to London to negotiate a peace, Charles Townsend, being asked whether the French Government had sent the preliminaries of a treaty, answered that he did not know, but they had sent the outline of an ambassador. This preserves the French flavor, which we recognize, for instance, in Ninon de l'Enclos, who, being asked one day by a Parisian lady whether she believed that St. Denys walked all the way to Paris with his head under his arm, replied, "Pourquoi pas, Mademoiselle? ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte."

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 him." 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, "Darn 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 discriminate 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 discriminate between the two kinds of wit. Where reflection predominates, and the act of wit approaches the statement of a truth, so that the surprise does not borrow 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 Minister Elliot, on occasion of the Te Deums over the reverses 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 subsidized 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 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[2] 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 impressed on the minds of the Highlanders that, when a clergyman informed a dying chief of the unlawfulness 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 awkwardness 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 æquo 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, prudery. Thus the raillery of Falstaff owes half its excellence to Dame Quickly's consistent misinterpretation, for this reflects back upon it the color of wit. She is a duenna who blunders into being a go-between and making 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 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 perpetrated 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, writing 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."

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 smile. 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Ninth Eclogue of Virgil, 28th line.

[2] Sterne may have picked up this sentiment during his journey in France, when the donkey was bewept. At any rate, it is found in literature as early as 1594, when Henri Estienne wrote his "Prémices:" "Dieu mesure le froid à la brebis tondue."

WIT, IRONY, HUMOR.

WIT.

The similes of poetry which select natural objects and fit human thoughts and emotions to them have the movement which belongs to wit. They suddenly 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 Bosphorus, 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 vitality which must overflow, spill itself upon Nature, appropriate her, senseless as she may seem and incapable 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 personality. 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."

"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 produces 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 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 expression 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."

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 criminal 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 Falstaff.

Some of the similes which Americans derive from their professions, and apply to persons, have all the character of wit. A farmer says of a meagre and unequal 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 Nantucket captain, when asked his opinion of a very rhetorical 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,—

"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 on 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
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 time 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.

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 opinion. 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 straightforwardness. There is a moment of hesitation, when the mind stoops over this single intention with a double appearance, 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 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 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 can 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 intimacy 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 of praising the deer is a parable which arraigns mankind.

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 ignorant 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 specimen in the parable of the unjust steward, which has difficulties of interpretation, arising from an unwillingness, perhaps, to recognize the irony. The steward is expecting to be dismissed for malfeasance in office. In the days of parable, whitewashing committees were unknown. 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 discarded. It is not clear what commendation to a debtor who might also be a creditor lay in this fraudulent reduction of his bill; but a parable serves only the main point, which in this case is to show how much more tact a thoroughly worldly man has than a technically spiritual 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 mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations." The master's 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 pretences 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 strained 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, 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 in to temper this radiation. Then it is inevitable that we shiver and complain 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. Shakspeare 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.

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 mediæval 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, murmuring 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 situation 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, 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 homœopathic 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 Frenchman 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 specimens 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 expectations, who has a son Philip and dies. But the traitor is 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 make 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 deportment 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 discovers rather late that he was always well known at the head-quarters of genius.

The story is a wonderfully sustained innuendo of rascality, carried on by this ironical pretence of virtue. Thackeray appears in it to be as green as Dr. Firmin'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 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 expensively magnanimous? Would you, Madame, be so extravagant 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 Valhalla of Women, where Portia, Imogen, and Cordelia have long languished for her company.

If irony does not forget good nature in its indignation 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? 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 Billingsgate, and knavery in the wind besides.

The cynicism of irony can be illustrated by the character 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.

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 blasé with the convictions as well as the manners of society. He enjoys his vein too well to be melancholy in the modern sense of that word, for being something 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 independence. 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 happens to have seen the world.

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 contemplation 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 thyself 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 replies, "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 nothing 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 convertites 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 suspicion of the frailty of his love. No matter what a man's gifts may be, this "vicious mole of nature" that pretends 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 invisible, 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.

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 coat 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 cruelest thrust for Touchstone, to whom he predicts a marriage victualled for two months, and wrangling ever after; which is hard on the wise fool, who 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 justified 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 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.

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!
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 secluding 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 pensiveness 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 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 Iachimo 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. I'll 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 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 England, and regularly 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 Taine acknowledges that the French have not the idea of Humor, nor the word for it. But we might expect from him at least a definition. He can only say, however, that humor includes a taste for contrasts, buffooneries, the mockery of Heine, starts of invention, oddities, eruption of a violent joviality that was buried under a heap of sadness, and absurd indecency. In another place he says that English humor "is the product of imaginative drollery, or of concentrated 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 curé. 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 exists wherever imagination percolates through the understanding: the sediment is the grain-gold of wit. But the quality of humor, depending upon various moral traits, exists only wherever a broad imagination is combined with a sweet and tolerant moral sense that is devoid of malice and all uncharitableness, and at peace with all mankind. A petulant egotism may exist with wit, but never with humor. Sarcasm and satire are the forms which best agree with imperfect moral dispositions. A too prolonged irony has something melancholy 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 to the Gallic trait that was noticed so long ago by the great Roman: Comɶda and argute loqui,—belonging to comedy and to the ingenuities of conversation. Humor appears best in conjunction with the temper of Northern 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 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 annoyances, 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 collared 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 smilingly 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 understood 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.

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 damnation."

The opening verses of Canto XVI. of the "Paradiso" 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. Irony is 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 all the parts of this incongruity, the ideal and the vulgar real; 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 fragments of old coffins, 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 originates the real relation of all its parts and their mutual interdependence. Human dissatisfaction springs from want of this ability to comprehend the whole within one reconciling idea. This incompetency is felt by us because 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 painful 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 temper of perfect goodness. We get relief by trying to discover the ideas which may effect a temporary reconcilement, to approach as far as we can to the temper of divine impartiality in which all circumstances must have been ordained. That temper passing down through our incompleteness is refracted, broken all up into a tremulousness 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 man's expedient to make his mortality endurable. The laughter of man is the contentment 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 genius reflected a Creator's mind. So he accepted all that is permitted to exist, without extenuation, instinctively 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 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 calculated 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 colorless, judicial attitude, nor can it deteriorate into indifference. 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 word "humor;" that is, the quality of being reconciled with all that is observed. The poet would fain conciliate, but without complicity; for he can 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 would weary of the incessant balancing, of the exigency of moderation. The mind yields from this in unconscious self-defence, and passes into a mood that conciliates 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 Devil," 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 perception 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 possible.

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

MEPHISTOPHELES.

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

THE LORD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

DOGBERRY, MALVOLIO,
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA (AJAX),
BOTTOM, TOUCHSTONE.

DOGBERRY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MALVOLIO.

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

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

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

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

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 fuddled with inanity, and chirps and skips about, deluding 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 Macaulay said, not because it worried the bear but because it amused the men. The steward was right when he informed 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 carousing 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 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 to have individuals so contrived that they can baffle, mortify, and school each other without importing the constable! We are self-acting arrangements to relieve the universe from tax and keep its hilarity replenished. In this genial manner "the whirligig 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.

Sebastian 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-tempered quality of his conceit, 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 fluttering dart. Malvolio's pride is already too deeply wounded, 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 Puritan 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." Whatever 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 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 fellows 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 peacock is discovered in the very act, at the moment of production, by this lens of a smile with which we arm our eye. Malvolio is like the fanatical England of the Commonwealth, which was flouted and dishonored by the Aguecheeks and Belches of King Charles II., those inevitable conspirers against immoderate and arrogant sobriety. They are sure to come. "Nay, I'll 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 some 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 hand. It was first attributed to him and published in 1608. But there is an entry in Henslowe's Diary, April 7, 1599, of a sum 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 palpable 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;"

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,
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 Shakspeare, 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 unmistakably 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
Of such a winnow'd purity in love!
How were I then uplifted! but, alas!
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 uncleanness of some scenes which are left over from the original 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 become 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 ancestor of the rollicking English fun which brings out the latent absurdities in ancient and mediæval 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 represents the famous tournament as a tilt upon hobby-horses ending in a milling match with bottle-holders and all the pugilistic cant. There are plenty of blond women who appear to be out of employment at present on purpose to lend a zest to this drollery, and everybody seems to welcome with democratic delight the slur upon obsolete 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."

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 commentators 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. For this is meant to travesty the rape of Helen, which was the motive of the siege. The play begins by making 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 purposely 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 quarrels seem ridiculous.