A fugitive writer wrote but lately on the fugitive page of a minor
magazine: 'For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is the most
real personage of the piece, and not without some hints of the pathos
that is worked out more fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and
Malvolio.' Has it indeed come to this? Have the Zeitgeist and the
Weltschmerz and the other things compared to which 'le spleen' was gay,
done so much for us? Is there to be no laughter left in literature free
from the preoccupation of a sham real-life? So it would seem. Even what
the great master has not shown us in his work, that your critic convinced
of pathos is resolved to see in it. By the penetration of his intrusive
sympathy he will come at it. It is of little use now to explain Snug the
joiner to the audience: why, it is precisely Snug who stirs their
emotions so painfully. Not the lion; they can see through that: but the
Snug within, the human Snug. And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in
that latent form which is the more appealing; and discouraging questions
arise as to the end of old Double; and Argan in his nightcap is the
tragic figure of Monomania; and human nature shudders at the petrifaction
of the intellect of Mr. F.'s aunt. _Et patati, et patata_.
It may be only too true that the actual world is 'with pathos delicately
edged.' For Malvolio living we should have had living sympathies: so
much aspiration, so ill-educated a love of refinement; so unarmed a
credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughter of a
chambermaid. By an actual Bottom the Weaver our pity might be reached
for the sake of his single self-reliance, his fancy and resource
condemned to burlesque and ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance.
But is not life one thing and is not art another? Is it not the
privilege of literature to make selection and to treat things singly,
without the after-thoughts of life, without the troublous completeness of
the many-sided world? Is not Shakespeare, for this reason, our refuge?
Fortunately unreal is his world when he will have it so; and there we may
laugh with open heart at a grotesque man: without misgiving, without
remorse, without reluctance. If great creating Nature has not assumed
for herself she has assuredly secured to the great creating poet the
right of partiality, of limitation, of setting aside and leaving out, of
taking one impression and one emotion as sufficient for the day. Art and
Nature are separate, complementary; in relation, not in confusion, with
one another. And all this officious cleverness in seeing round the
corner, as it were, of a thing presented by literary art in the flat--(the
borrowing of similes from other arts is of evil tendency; but let this
pass, as it is apt)--is but another sign of the general lack of a sense
of the separation between Nature and the sentient mirror in the mind. In
some of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature herself,
all-inclusive; but in others--and chiefly in comedy--he is partial, he is
impressionary, he refuses to know what is not to his purpose, he is an
artist. And in that gay, wilful world it is that he gives us--or used to
give us, for even the world is obsolete--the pleasure of _oubliance_.
Now this fugitive writer has not been so swift but that I have caught him
a clout as he went. Yet he will do it again; and those like-minded will
assuredly also continue to show how much more completely human, how much
more sensitive, how much more responsible, is the art of the critic than
the world has ever dreamt till now. And, superior in so much, they will
still count their superior weeping as the choicest of their gifts. And
Lepidus, who loves to wonder, can have no better subject for his
admiration than the pathos of the time. It is bred now of your mud by
the operation of your sun. 'Tis a strange serpent; and the tears of it
are wet.