When we pass from Jaques to Touchstone in "As You Like It," we have
expelled that bitter drop which infused sadness into our vein, and the
pulse resumes its hilarity. Jaques was not so well-tempered as the
female celebrity of our day, who made it a rule, she said, when she
heard any scandal of a friend, to hope for the best and believe the
worst. Touchstone agrees substantially with Jaques in his views about
court-fashions and social conventions, and says things quite as sharp;
but he has the tone of genuine humor, and its good-nature never deserts
him except when his legs do, as he takes that dispiriting journey into
the forest of Arden. We should say that, for a man of his breeding, the
clownish and ill-favored Audrey would overcome the most redoubtable
temper; for we half believe with Jaques that his "loving voyage is
but for two months victualled:" but he has no cynical suspicion. When
he sees the sentimental plight of Rosalind, he merrily parodies it,
and imagines an old flirtation of his with one Jane Smile; pretending
to recollect that he wooed a peascod instead of her in her absence,
from which he "took two cods, and, giving her them again, said with
weeping tears, 'Wear these for my sake.'" Then he sums it all up with
the tolerant reflection, "We, that are true lovers, run into strange
capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal
in folly:" that is, Nature can be foolish in love, but the folly is
mortal as all the things of Nature are, and will pass away leaving
love behind. Therefore he'll have no jibes about it; and Rosalind
justly replies, "Thou speak'st wiser than thou art 'ware of." In his
quick answer to this, we detect the purpose of Shakspeare to keep the
character ignorant of its own _naïveté_: "Nay, I shall ne'er be 'ware
of mine own wit, till I break my shins against it." For humor is not so
studiedly conscious of its own quality as irony and satire are. Jaques,
meeting Orlando over ears deep in love, says ill-natured things to him,
and invites him to a game of railing "against our mistress the world,
and all our misery." The difference between his wit and Touchstone's is
subtly indicated throughout the play, and is one of Shakspeare's most
admirable studies in nature. Jaques marks the moment when the virtue
of complete knowledge of the world passes into the vice of discontent.
Touchstone expresses the gladness of being a member of this inevitable
world, and of tolerating himself with the other fools. Thus all his
strictures upon society have this superiority, that they cannot be
suspected of hypocrisy and ill-will. Nothing is so depressing as the
cynic's perpetual strain of undervaluing. It exhausts the heart like
an air-bell; the feather of his irony no longer floats, but drops like
lead to weigh us down with suspecting ourselves, and so dragging by
that mood all the other people into a pitiful depreciation. We grow
light again and rise buoyantly to the sunshiny surface when Touchstone
implicates us so good-humoredly in unwisdom, counting himself in, not
to miss his taste of the impartiality we all require.
As his name indicates, he tests with a touch the metal of society, and
shows dispassionately the color of spuriousness. His foolishness is his
naturalness. He is a born simpleton in the sense of being unworldly,
a fool "by heavenly compulsion." So he is continually in a state of
organic contrast to conventionality. He hears the wrestling-match
described, in which three men had their ribs broken. "What is the
sport, monsieur, that the ladies have lost?" "Why, this that I speak
of." "Thus men may grow wiser every day! It is the first time that
ever I heard breaking of ribs was sport for ladies." The people in
the fashion are the real wearers of motley, as Celia says: "Since the
little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise
men have makes a great show." Touchstone is
"Wise enough to play the fool;
And, to do that well, craves a kind of wit;
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time;
Not, like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labor as a wise man's art."
In these lines, Shakspeare provides us with the pass-key to the purpose
of his court fools and clowns. In them the world's confidential moments
speak, when it is off its guard or has no motive to dissimulate. And it
is a benefit if men can discover their folly by having it wisely shown
to them.
"The wise man's folly is anatomiz'd
Even by the squandering glances of the fool."
Jaques accosts him in the forest, "Good-morrow, fool." Touchstone
replies, "Call me not fool, till Heaven hath sent me fortune." For
thus, indeed, like the wise men, he will have a social chance to show,
as they do, what his folly is. Jaques relates how he heard Touchstone
airing the solemn triviality of well-ordered circles. Taking out his
dial,--
"Thus may we see, quoth he, how the world wags;
'Tis but an hour ago, since it was nine;
And, after one hour more, 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale."
What tale? Why, the everlasting tedious one of over-accredited
common-place behavior. Only a Touchstone, with his sly appreciation,
can lend any liveliness to that. No wonder Jaques exclaims, "Motley's
the only wear." He sees that Touchstone "hath strange places crammed
with observation," and is a man after his own mind. If the temper of
Jaques only could have been invested in that motley, they that would
be most galled with his folly, "they most must laugh." He is delighted
to find that fools can be "so deep contemplative." The deepness of it
rests on Touchstone's appreciation of the average shallowness, but
there is nothing in his tone to stir that up to a feeble sputter of
resentment. Something in the tone continually appeals to us, as he did
to Audrey: "Doth my simple feature content you?" Yes, there is nothing
scurrilous in thee, else thou hadst not taken up so comfortably with
Audrey, who cannot even wish that the gods had made her poetical.
"Who calls?" says Corin. "Your betters, sir," replies Touchstone; for
everybody is superior to somebody.
What a fine pretence he makes that good manners are essential to
salvation, when he asks Corin, "Wast ever in court, shepherd?" Never at
court! "Then thy manners must be wicked; and wickedness is sin, and sin
is damnation." See the mock Grundy lift his hands, and cast upward the
look of shocked superiority. It is done well enough to serve our social
virtuosity for a whole epoch of its disdain.
And mark what good sense the fellow has; for, knowing that Audrey
cannot appreciate his parts, he says: "When a man's verses cannot be
understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child,
understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a
little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical." Audrey
replies: "I do not know what poetical is. Is it honest in deed and
word? Is it a true thing?" Honest and true! We see what has won the
heart of this motley disparager of cant and shams.
We see it too in the scene where he brings his wife into the Duke's
company, with such an air of self-possession mixed with a pleased sense
that she is his best joke at the punctilio of fashionable life. "An
ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own; a poor humor of mine, sir, to
take that that no man else will." Not so poor a humor; for humor itself
does that, and adopts into the human family the outcasts who come
between the wind and our nobility. "Rich honesty dwells like a miser,
sir, in a poor house; as your pearl in your foul oyster." Then he
amuses the Duke with a strain that runs into irony, because it has the
semblance of being seriously meant, upon some other esteemed punctilios
of the code of honor: he rallies the whole nicely graded scale of
customs from the retort courteous to the lie direct, and nominates in
order the degrees of the lie. But you may avoid even the lie direct
with an _If_. "If you said so, then I said so." How many a quarrel on
the platform and in the parlor has been stifled by this bolster of an
_If_, and the parties quietly subside into a profounder dislike.
The kind of marriages which the French call _de convenance_ get a
wholesome rebuke from him; and the vulgarity of its terms is not wanton
but highly apposite, as it is a part of the intended satire. It strips
the matrimonial arrangement of its rhetoric, when he tells the shepherd
that it is another simple sin in him to bring the incompatible members
of his flock together, "out of all reasonable match. If thou be'st not
damned for this, the devil himself will have no shepherds." He really
imparts to you the surmise that the _mariages de convenance_ were
appropriately derived by natural selection from the animal world.
In fine, the Duke characterizes Touchstone well when he says, "He uses
his folly like a stalking-horse; and under the presentation of that
he shoots his wit." So hunters, who are seriously concerned to obtain
food, work along towards their game behind a mimicry of it. And such
a hunter for the soul of goodness, stalking it underneath the obvious
beguilement, is the Humor of Shakspeare:--
"In good earnest, and so God mend me."