he expressed all the moods and figures of what was ridiculous,
oddly. In short, as vinegar is not accounted good till the wine be
corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter
with that beast the multitude. They love nothing that is right and
proper. The farther it runs from reason or possibility, with them
the better it is.
In the latter part of this it is evident that Ben is speaking with a
little bitterness. His own comedies are too rigidly constructed
according to Aristotle's dictum, that the moving of laughter was a fault
in comedy. I like the passage as an illustration of a fact undeniably
true, that Shakespeare's humor was altogether a new thing upon the
stage, and also as showing that satirists (for such were also the
writers of comedy) were looked upon rather as censors and moralists than
as movers of laughter. Dante, accordingly, himself in this sense the
greatest of satirists, in putting Horace among the five great poets in
limbo, qualifies him with the title of _satiro_.
But if we exclude the satirists, what are we to do with Aristophanes?
Was he not a satirist, and in some sort also a censor? Yes; but, as it
appears to me, of a different kind, as well as in a different degree,
from any other ancient. I think it is plain that he wrote his comedies
not only to produce certain political, moral, and even literary ends,
but for the fun of the thing. I am so poor a Grecian that I have no
doubt I miss three quarters of what is most characteristic of him. But
even through the fog of the Latin on the opposite page I can make out
more or less of the true lineaments of the man. I can see that he was a
master of language, for it becomes alive under his hands--puts forth
buds and blossoms like the staff of Joseph, as it does always when it
feels the hand and recognizes the touch of its legitimate sovereigns.
Those prodigious combinations of his are like some of the strange polyps
we hear of that seem a single organism; but cut them into as many parts
as you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independent
being. There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seems
too mean or too high. And then his abundance! He puts one in mind of the
definition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the true
flavor of Falstaff in him--"a million a minute and your expenses paid."
As Burns said of himself, "The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file." Now
they are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they come
tumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in the
circus, with a "Here we are!" I can think of nothing like it but
Rabelais, who had the same extraordinary gift of getting all the _go_
out of words. They do not merely play with words; they romp with them,
tickle them, tease them, and somehow the words seem to like it.
I dare say there may be as much fancy and fun in "The Clouds" or "The
Birds," but neither of them seems so rich to me as "The Frogs," nor does
the fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region of
humor as here. Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but he
has nothing like the scene in "The Frogs," where Bacchus is terrified
with the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries,
and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nor
tail. Here is humor of the truest metal, and, so far as we can guess,
the first example of it. Here is the true humorous contrast between the
ideal god and the god with human weaknesses and follies as he had been
degraded in the popular conception. And is it too absurd to be within
the limits even of comic probability? Is it even so absurd as those
hand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabet
saw in Tartary?
Cervantes was born on October 9, 1547, and died on April 23, 1616, on
the same day as Shakespeare. He is, I think, beyond all question, the
greatest of humorists. Whether he intended it or not,--and I am inclined
to believe he did,--he has typified in Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza his
esquire, the two component parts of the human mind and shapers of human
character--the imagination and understanding. There is a great deal more
than this; for what is positive and intentional in a truly great book is
often little in comparison with what is accidental and suggested. The
plot is of the meagrest. A country gentleman of La Mancha, living very
much by himself, and continually feeding his fancy with the romances of
chivalry, becomes at last the victim of a monomania on this one subject,
and resolves to revive the order of chivalry in his own proper person.
He persuades a somewhat prosaic neighbor of his to accompany him as
squire. They sally forth, and meet with various adventures, from which
they reap no benefit but the sad experience of plentiful rib-roasting.
Now if this were all of "Don Quixote," it would be simply broad farce,
as it becomes in Butler's parody of it in Sir Hudibras and Ralpho so far
as mere external characteristics are concerned. The latter knight and
his squire are the most glaring absurdities, without any sufficient
reason for their being at all, or for their adventures, except that they
furnished Butler with mouthpieces for his own wit and wisdom. They
represent nothing, and are intended to represent nothing.
I confess that, in my judgment, Don Quixote is the most perfect
character ever drawn. As Sir John Falstaff is, in a certain sense,
always a gentleman,--that is, as he is guilty of no crime that is
technically held to operate in defeasance of his title to that name as a
man of the world,--so is Don Quixote, in everything that does not
concern his monomania, a perfect gentleman and a good Christian besides.
He is not the merely technical gentleman of three descents--but the
_true_ gentleman, such a gentleman as only purity, disinterestedness,
generosity, and fear of God can make. And with what consummate skill are
the boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment just
so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill
event of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from
his own premises. And this is the reason I object to Cervantes's
treatment of him in the second part--which followed the other after an
interval of nearly eight years. For, except in so far as they delude
themselves, monomaniacs are as sane as other people, and besides
shocking our feelings, the tricks played on the Don at the Duke's castle
are so transparent that he could never have been taken in by them.
Don Quixote is the everlasting type of the disappointment which sooner
or later always overtakes the man who attempts to accomplish ideal good
by material means. Sancho, on the other hand, with his proverbs, is the
type of the man with common sense. He always sees things in the daylight
of reason. He is never taken in by his master's theory of
enchanters,--although superstitious enough to believe such things
possible,--but he _does_ believe, despite all reverses, in his promises
of material prosperity and advancement. The island that has been
promised him always floats before him like the air-drawn dagger before
Macbeth, and beckons him on. The whole character is exquisite. And,
fitly enough, when he at last becomes governor of his imaginary island
of Barataria, he makes an excellent magistrate--because statesmanship
depends for its success so much less on abstract principle than on
precisely that traditional wisdom in which Sancho was rich.