The very heart of their mystery beats in the bosom of the weaver. His eagerness to be all things, from an assured conviction of his fitness for everything, is only their daily conceit dramatically developed. In that brief scene, what a picture have we, what a history of the ten thousand incidents of prose life! What an exhibition of the profound busy-bodies who clamorously desire to be Wall, Lion, Moonshine, and Pyramus too, not from an acquired belief, but as it would seem from a natural instinct of their own fitness for the combined charges! How triumphantly does Bottom swagger down his fellows! How small, mean, degenerate—what nobodies are they, before that giant conceit, the thick-skulled weaver![[3]] And in all this there is nothing that is not the severest transcript of human life. We laugh at it; and the next moment we are touched into gravity by a reflection of its serious meaning—its philosophic comments on the vulgar pretence of the every-day world.
[3]. It is impossible, we think, for the reader, if he witnessed A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Covent Garden last season (1840) to banish from his memory the Flute of Keeley in this scene. How meekly, how resignedly he gave place to the burly consequence of Bottom. It was not imbecility, but a mute absorbing sense of homage to the greatness of the weaver, one of those subtle touches that show the sympathy of the actor with the profoundest meanings of the poet.
The finer part of the picture, in which as we receive it, Shakespeare, with immortal tints, has shadowed forth the souls of a herd of men, is Bottom doted upon by the Queen of Fairies. It is here we have the true lineaments of a vulgar nature emblazoned by luck. It is here we recognise the self-sufficient creature of worldly success—the ignorant bashaw of life wearing his bravery as an ordained and necessary part of himself. He has the riches, the sweets of the earth, at his command, and he pauses not in passing wonder at his prosperity. To him there is no such power as a Providence. It is a part of the world’s destiny that he should be precisely what he is; he is the begotten of fate, and owes no obligation to vulgar fortune.
Nor are Bottom’s Babes less like their putative sire, if they have suffered no transformation. There are those who come into the world with the ass’s head, and live and die wound in the arms of doting wealth. The hard task-masters of life are often of these. The foolish, arrogant censors of the faults and backslippings of penury are to be found among them—the full fleshed moralists who shake their shaggy ears at the small delinquencies of struggling men. They eat, drink, sport, and sleep in fairyland; their lightest wish evokes a minister to do their bidding; and in their most fantastic, foolish moods, still Fortune—weak, besotted quean!—cries, with silverest voice:—
“Oh, how I love ye! How I dote on ye!”
Bottom as we opine, considered in his truthfulness, in his reflective powers of worldly semblance, awakens our pensiveness, not our mirth. We think of the thousands of his children, and the smile that would break at the mere words of the weaver, is chequered by the thought of his prosaic offspring. Yes; his offspring. It matters not that you point to—in his carriage, that you run through his accredited genealogy, that you show his armorial bearings. We answer—if he receive the goods of fortune as his right, with no thankfulness for the gifts, no gratitude displayed by constant sympathy with the wants and weaknesses of suffering man, though you call him marquis, we say he is the Babe of Bottom; and for his quarterings, though they date from the Conquest, the eye of our philosophy sees nought on his carriage panels but an ass’s head in a field, proper; and in the motto reads—“A bottle of hay!”
A bottle of hay.
