"He'll go along o'er the wide world with me:
Leave me alone to woo him."
Where we learn that some remnants, at least, of a manly heart in him
have asserted their force in the shape of unselfish regards, strong as
life, for whatever is purest and loveliest in the characters about
him. He would rather starve or freeze, with Celia near him, than feed
high and lie warm where his eye cannot find her. If, with this fact in
view, our honest esteem does not go out towards him, then we, I think,
are fools in a worse sense than he is.
So much for the substantial manhood of Touchstone, and for the Poet's
human-heartedness in thus putting us in communication with it. As for
the other points of his character, I scarce know how to draw a reader
into them by any turn of analysis. Used to a life cut off from human
sympathies; stripped of the common responsibilities of the social
state; living for no end but to make aristocratic idlers laugh; one
therefore whom nobody heeds enough to resent or be angry at any thing
he says;--of course his habit is to speak all for effect, nothing for
truth: instead of reflecting the natural force and image of things,
his vocation is to wrest and transshape them from their true form and
pressure. Thus a strange wilfulness and whimsicality has wrought
itself into the substance of his mind. He takes nothing for what it is
in itself, but only for the odd quirks of thought he can twist out of
it. Yet his nature is not so "subdued to what it works in" but that,
amidst the scenes and inspirations of the Forest, the Fool quickly
slides into the man; the supervenings of the place so running into and
athwart what he brings with him, that his character comes to be as
dappled and motley as his dress. Even the new passion which there
overtakes him has a touch of his wilfulness in it: when he falls in
love, as he really does, nothing seems to inspire and draw him more
than the unloveliness of the object; thus approving that even so much
of nature as survives in him is not content to run in natural
channels.
* * * * *
Jaques is, I believe, an universal favourite, as indeed he well may
be, for he is certainly one of the Poet's happiest conceptions.
Without being at all unnatural, he has an amazing fund of peculiarity.
Enraptured out of his senses at the voice of a song; thrown into a
paroxysm of laughter at sight of the motley-clad and motley-witted
Fool; and shedding the twilight of his merry-sad spirit over all the
darker spots of human life and character; he represents the abstract
and sum-total of an utterly useless yet perfectly harmless man,
seeking wisdom by abjuring its first principle. An odd choice mixture
of reality and affectation, he does nothing but think, yet avowedly
thinks to no purpose; or rather thinking is with him its own end. On
the whole, if in Touchstone there is much of the philosopher in the
Fool, in Jaques there is not less of the fool in the philosopher; so
that the German critic, Ulrici, is not so wide of the mark in calling
them "two fools."
Jaques is equally wilful, too, with Touchstone, in his turn of thought
and speech, though not so conscious of it; and as he plays his part
more to please himself so he is proportionably less open to the
healing and renovating influences of Nature. We cannot justly affirm,
indeed, that "the soft blue sky did never melt into his heart," as
Wordsworth says of his Peter Bell; but he shows more of resistance
than all the other persons to the poetries and eloquences of the
place. Tears are a great luxury to him: he sips the cup of woe with
all the gust of an epicure. Still his temper is by no means sour: fond
of solitude, he is nevertheless far from being unsocial. The society
of good men, provided they be in adversity, has great charms for him.
He likes to be with those who, though deserving the best, still have
the worst: virtue wronged, buffeted, oppressed, is his special
delight; because such moral discrepancies offer the most salient
points to his cherished meditations. He himself enumerates nearly all
the forms of melancholy except his own, which I take to be the
melancholy of self-love. And its effect in his case is not unlike that
of Touchstone's art; inasmuch as he greatly delights to see things
otherwise than as they really are, and to make them speak out some
meaning that is not in them; that is, their plain and obvious sense is
not to his taste. Nevertheless his melancholy is grateful, because
free from any dash of malignity. His morbid habit of mind seems to
spring from an excess of generative virtue. And how racy and original
is everything that comes from him! as if it bubbled up from the centre
of his being; while his perennial fulness of matter makes his company
always delightful. The Duke loves especially to meet him in his
"sullen fits," because he then overflows with his most idiomatic
humour. After all, the worst that can be said of Jaques is, that the
presence of men who are at once fortunate and deserving corks him up;
which may be only another way of saying that he cannot open out and
run over, save where things are going wrong.
* * * * *
It is something uncertain whether Jaques or Rosalind be the greater
attraction: there is enough in either to make the play a continual
feast; though her charms are less liable to be staled by use, because
they result from health of mind and symmetry of character; so that in
her presence the head and the heart draw together perfectly. I mean
that she never starts any moral or emotional reluctances in our
converse with her: all our sympathies go along with her freely,
because she never jars upon them, or touches them against the grain.
For wit, this strange, queer, lovely being is fully equal to Beatrice,
yet nowise resembling her. A soft, subtile, nimble essence, consisting
in one knows not what, and springing up one can hardly tell how, her
wit neither stings nor burns, but plays briskly and airily over all
things within its reach, enriching and adorning them; insomuch that
one could ask no greater pleasure than to be the continual theme of
it. In its irrepressible vivacity it waits not for occasion, but runs
on for ever, and we wish it to run on for ever: we have a sort of
faith that her dreams are made up of cunning, quirkish, graceful
fancies; her wits being in a frolic even when she is asleep. And her
heart seems a perennial spring of affectionate cheerfulness: no trial
can break, no sorrow chill, her flow of spirits; even her sighs are
breathed forth in a wrappage of innocent mirth; an arch, roguish smile
irradiates her saddest tears. No sort of unhappiness can live in her
company: it is a joy even to stand her chiding; for, "faster than her
tongue doth make offence, her eye doth heal it up."
So much for her choice idiom of wit. But I must not pass from this
part of the theme without noting also how aptly she illustrates the
Poet's peculiar use of humour. For I suppose the difference of wit and
humour is too well understood to need any special exposition. But the
two often go together; though there is a form of wit, much more
common, that burns and dries the juices all out of the mind, and turns
it into a kind of sharp, stinging wire. Now Rosalind's sweet
establishment is thoroughly saturated with humour, and this too of the
freshest and wholesomest quality. And the effect of her humour is, as
it were, to _lubricate_ all her faculties, and make her thoughts run
brisk and glib even when grief has possession of her heart. Through
this interfusive power, her organs of play are held in perfect concert
with her springs of serious thought. Hence she is outwardly merry and
inwardly sad at the same time. We may justly say that she laughs out
her sadness, or plays out her seriousness: the sorrow that is swelling
her breast puts her wits and spirits into a frolic; and in the mirth
that overflows through her tongue we have a relish of the grief with
which her heart is charged. And our sympathy with her inward state is
the more divinely moved, forasmuch as she thus, with indescribable
delicacy, touches it through a masquerade of playfulness. Yet, beneath
all her frolicsomeness, we feel that there is a firm basis of thought
and womanly dignity; so that she never laughs away our respect.
It is quite remarkable how, in respect of her disguise, Rosalind just
reverses the conduct of Viola, yet with much the same effect. For,
though she seems as much at home in her male attire as if she had
always worn it, this never strikes us otherwise than as an exercise of
skill for the perfecting of her masquerade. And on the same principle
her occasional freedoms of speech serve to deepen our sense of her
innate delicacy; they being manifestly intended as a part of her
disguise, and springing from the feeling that it is far less
indelicate to go a little out of her character, in order to prevent
any suspicion of her sex, than it would be to hazard such a suspicion
by keeping strictly within her character. In other words, her free
talk bears much the same relation to her character as her dress does
to her person, and is therefore becoming to her even on the score of
feminine modesty.--Celia appears well worthy of a place beside her
whose love she shares and repays. Instinct with the soul of moral
beauty and female tenderness, the friendship of these more-than-sisters
"mounts to the seat of grace within the mind."
"We still have slept together;
Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together;
And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable."
The general drift and temper, or, as some of the German critics would
say, the ground-idea of this play, is aptly hinted by the title. As
for the beginnings of what is here represented, these do not greatly
concern us; most of them lie back out of our view, and the rest are
soon lost sight of in what grows out of them; but the issues, of which
there are many, are all exactly to our mind; we feel them to be just
about right, and would not have them otherwise. For example, touching
Frederick and Oliver, our wish is that they should repent, and repair
the wrong they have done, in brief, that they should become good;
which is precisely what takes place; and as soon as they do this, they
naturally love those who were good before. Jaques, too, is so fitted
to moralize the discrepancies of human life, so happy and at home, and
withal so agreeable, in that exercise, that we would not he should
follow the good Duke when in his case those discrepancies are
composed. The same might easily be shown in respect of the other
issues. Indeed I dare ask any genial, considerate reader, Does not
every thing turn out just _as you like it_? Moreover there is an
indefinable something about the play that puts us in a receptive frame
of mind; that opens the heart, soothes away all querulousness and
fault-finding, and makes us easy and apt to be pleased. Thus the Poet
here disposes us to like things as they come, and at the same time
takes care that they shall come as we like. The whole play indeed is
_as you like it_.
Much has been said by one critic and another about the improbabilities
in this play. I confess they have never troubled me; and, as I have
had no trouble here to get out of, I do not well know how to help
others out. Wherefore, if any one be still annoyed by these things, I
will turn him over to the elegant criticism of the poet Campbell:
"Before I say more of this dramatic treasure, I must absolve myself by
a confession as to some of its improbabilities. Rosalind asks her
cousin Celia, 'Whither shall we go?' and Celia answers, 'To seek my
uncle in the Forest of Arden.' But, arrived there, and having
purchased a cottage and sheep-farm, neither the daughter nor niece of
the banished Duke seem to trouble themselves much to inquire about
either father or uncle. The lively and natural-hearted Rosalind
discovers no impatience to embrace her sire, until she has finished
her masked courtship with Orlando. But Rosalind was in love, as I have
been with the comedy these forty years; and love is blind; for until a
late period my eyes were never couched so as to see this objection.
The truth however is, that love is _wilfully_ blind; and now that my
eyes are opened, I shut them against the fault. Away with your
best-proved improbabilities, when the heart has been touched and the
fancy fascinated."
As a fitting pendent to this, I may further observe that the bringing
of lions, serpents, palm-trees, rustic shepherds, and banished
noblemen together in the Forest of Arden, is a strange piece of
geographical license, which certain critics have not failed to make
merry withal. Perhaps they did not see that the very grossness of the
thing proves it to have been designed. The Poet keeps his geography
true enough whenever he has cause to do so. He knew, at all events,
that lions did not roam at large in France. By this irregular
combination of actual things, he informs the whole with ideal effect,
giving to this charming issue of his brain "a local habitation and a
name," that it may link-in with our flesh-and-blood sympathies, and at
the same time turning it into a wild, wonderful, remote, fairy-land
region, where all sorts of poetical things may take place without the
slightest difficulty. Of course Shakespeare would not have done thus,
but that he saw quite through the grand critical humbug which makes
the proper effect of a work of art depend upon our belief in the
actual occurrence of the thing represented. But your "critic grave and
cool," I suppose, is one who, like Wordsworth's "model of a child,"
"Can string you names of districts, cities, towns,
The whole world over, tight as beads of dew
Upon a gossamer thread: he sifts, he weighs;
All things are put to question; he must live
Knowing that he grows wiser every day,
Or else not live at all, and seeing too
Each little drop of wisdom as it falls
Into the dimpling cistern of his heart,
O, give us once again the wishing-cap
Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat
Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,
And Sabra in the forest with Saint George!
The child, whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself."
As far as I can determine the matter, _As You Like It_ is, upon the
whole, my favourite of Shakespeare's comedies. Yet I should be puzzled
to tell why; for my preference springs not so much from any
particular points or features, wherein it is surpassed by several
others, as from the general toning and effect. The whole is replete
with a beauty so delicate yet so intense, that we feel it everywhere,
but can never tell especially where it is, or in what it consists. For
instance, the descriptions of forest scenery come along so unsought,
and in such easy, quiet, natural touches, that we take in the
impression without once noticing what it is that impresses us. Thus
there is a certain woodland freshness, a glad, free naturalness, that
creeps and steals into the heart before we know it. And the spirit of
the place is upon its inhabitants, its genius within them: we almost
breathe with them the fragrance of the Forest, and listen to "the
melodies of woods and winds and waters," and feel
"The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,
That have their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring."
Even the Court Fool, notwithstanding all the crystallizing process
that has passed upon him, undergoes, as we have seen, a sort of
rejuvenescence of his inner man, so that his wit catches at every turn
the fresh hues and odours of his new whereabout. I am persuaded indeed
that Milton had a special eye to this play in the lines,--
"And sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warbles his native wood-notes wild."
To all which add, that the kindlier sentiments here seem playing out
in a sort of jubilee. Untied from set purposes and definite aims, the
persons come forth with their hearts already tuned, and so have but to
let off their redundant music. Envy, jealousy, avarice, revenge, all
the passions that afflict and degrade society, they have left in the
city behind them. And they have brought the intelligence and
refinement of the Court without its vanities and vexations; so that
the graces of art and the simplicities of nature meet together in
joyous, loving sisterhood. A serene and mellow atmosphere of thought
encircles and pervades the actors in this drama; as if on purpose to
illustrate how
"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil, and of good,
Than all the sages can."
Nature throws her protecting arms around them; Beauty pitches her
tents before them; Heaven rains its riches upon them: with "no enemy
but Winter and rough weather," Peace hath taken up her abode with
them; and they have nothing to do but to "fleet the time carelessly,
as they did in the golden world."
But no words of mine, I fear, will justify to others my own sense of
this delectable workmanship. I can hardly think of any thing else in
the whole domain of Poetry so inspiring of the faith that "every
flower enjoys the air it breathes." The play, indeed, abounds in wild,
frolicsome graces which cannot be described; which can only be seen
and felt; and which the hoarse voice of Criticism seems to scare away,
as the crowing of the cocks is said to have scared away the fairy
spirits from their nocturnal pastimes. I know not how I can better
dismiss the theme than with some lines from Wordsworth, which these
scenes have often recalled to my thoughts:
"Nature never did betray
The heart that lov'd her; 'tis her privilege
Through all the years of this our life to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings."