That is the cry of your jester all the world over, and that was the feeling which existed in Harry’s mind when he depicted “Touchstone” as a rather sardonic, melancholy person, with a great brain, the only use for which he can find is to make people laugh.
I will take only two instances to justify his idea of “Touchstone”. The first: Are the words
“The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly”
those of a “clown” or “a fool” in the ordinary sense?
Take also “Corin’s” words:
“You have too courtly a wit for me, I’ll rest.”
He is frankly puzzled by the Jester’s humour. Yet “Corin” is a typical shepherd of the times, and an English shepherd (for all we meet him in the Forest of Arden): as such, he was used to the jokes and witticisms of the ordinary clown; he had “roared his ribs out” at them at the village fairs. This “Touchstone” is no ordinary clown, and “Corin” finds his humour makes a demand upon the head; he is more than “funny”, he is the Court wit. Read the conversation which has gone before, and you will find that this is indeed “The Court Jester”, and a courtier before he was a jester—a man accustomed to sharpen his wits upon those of the men he met at Courts. And so Harry gave him—a wise man, a disappointed, cynical man, but a man who could afford to value the wit of those around him at its proper worth—less than his own.
When Sir Herbert Tree revived The School for Scandal, Harry played “Sir Benjamin Backbite”. Harry, Who loved sincerity, and truth, and simplicity, played the affected fop of the period, with his cane, his lace handkerchief, his fur muff, his bouquet, and his general air of affectation, and played him so that to watch and listen to it was a sheer delight.
These are but a few of his parts—the parts which, when he played them, were both praised and blamed. I want to touch on his method of playing, and call to your memory some of the features which characterised it. He was always sincere; he might, and did (as in Eliza), get bored with a part, but he was too good an actor, too proud of his work, ever to let it appear to an audience.
His voice was wonderful; he could put more tenderness, without the least touch of sentimentality, into his words than anyone I ever heard. To hear Harry say “My dear”, as he did in The Dangerous Age and again in The Law Divine, was to hear all the essence of love-making, with all the love in the world behind it, put into two words.