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.