Dogberry has a pondering look and a fribbling emphasis. He rolls the plump phrases over and over like a quid, but ejects them with a kind of strenuous drivel. He makes pauses, as if discriminating the juiciest reflection, but really settles at random, like a pigeon whose brain has been vivisected; so he concludes that, if a man will not stand when he is bid to, he may go; and that, though a thief ought to be arrested, they that touch pitch will be defiled; and that, on the whole, it is better to let him show himself what he is, and steal out of your company.
Thus he attains to the merit of genius when it chips the egg and lets loose the struggling chick of the ordinary mind. He voices the perplexity of the watch, and lends to it the color of concession and sagacious compromise. It is exactly what old Verges thought but did not know how to incubate into definite expression. So all the people who sit upon political fences, and find the edge growing inconvenient, welcome the pad which postpones the necessity for a jump to either side.
Dogberry admires and cossets his own authority, but is too timid to enforce it save with poor old Verges, whose mental feebleness is an exact shadow of Dogberry's; and the latter manages to step upon himself in amusing unconsciousness. "An old man, sir, and his wits are not so blunt, as, God help, I would desire they were." A good old man, sir; but he will gabble. All men are not alike, alas! So he goes on, dismissing himself, and slamming to the door without observing it.
But when the watch blunders by reason of idiocy into arresting Borachio, who was the agent in the plot against Hero, the innocent Conrade is found in his company, listening to his disclosures. He, too, is carried off and confronted with Dogberry before the whole "dissembly" of constables. Then and there Conrade calls him in set terms an ass.
Dogberry flickers up into a kind of lukewarmness, and does his little to resent it. "Dost thou not suspect my ears?" "Thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be proved." Then his speech seems to be handling a dustpan to gather up his good points with tremulous huffiness: I am a pretty piece of flesh, and know the law, go to; and a rich fellow, with leases, and two gowns, and every thing handsome about me. He was never called ass before; for Conrade was probably the first free-spoken prisoner entirely innocent of malapropisms that he had ever faced. He cannot compose his shallow fluster; for it is as deep as he is, and it even comes splashing into the pathos of the moment when the wrong done to Hero is discovered, who is not yet known to be still living. He wants the man punished who called him ass, not the man who was the slanderer of Hero. Standing round him are noble natures touched with sorrow and remorse; but for him Conrade is "the plaintiff, the offender," who did call him ass. Dead, shamed, ruined Hero, distracted lover, and tender father, retreat into a background upon which he scrawls himself an ass. For the ocean cannot be accommodated in a saucer, and some men should beware lest the spatter of a tear swamp and drown them. Here the comedy of Dogberry's character acquires a touch of humor; for so are we obliged to tolerate in our profoundest moments the trivialities of those who do not know or cannot contain our serious mood.
There is underlying humor in the fact that all this ignorance and inconsequence, this burlesquing of the detective's business, effects what the age and wisdom of Leonato, and the instinct of the lover Claudio, could not; namely, the discovery of Hero's innocence and of the plot to besmirch her chastity in the eyes of her lover. The wise men are taken in and the accident of folly undeceives them. Then it becomes no longer an accident, but the regimen of the world adopts and puts it to a use. Here comedy becomes humorous, because it is shown how the fortunes of the good and prudent are involved with all the vulgarities of the world, and justice itself, which is nothing if not critical, cannot make up its case without non sequiturs.
When a stratagem compels the braggart Parolles in "All's Well that Ends Well" to show the white feather, he says adroitly, "Who cannot be crushed by a plot?" But absence of plot is quite as hostile to our luck, and goodness and beauty provide no immunity against it. Two soldiers, who had been sent to arrest the Duchess de Berri, rigorously searched for her a whole house over to no purpose; then, lighting a fire to warm their fingers, roasted her out from a hiding place behind the chimney. A Jacobite climbing into the hollow of an oak leaves his garter on a twig to make a silly advertisement of him. Major Andre meets two men who are not looking for him, and convinces them that he is the very man they ought to seek. Dogberry and his men are as apposite as the female toggery which trips up an escaping rebel; and through them Shakspeare delights to apprise us of a world in which knavery may be outwitted by fatuity.
MALVOLIO.
The humor in the play of "Twelfth Night" resides in the contriving to make one vice ridiculous by other vices which are also absurd. Not one of the comic characters, taken separately, provides the peculiar element of humor. It transpires during the impartial interplay of the silliness of Aguecheek, the drunken techiness of Sir Toby, the spite of Fabian, the mischievousness of Maria, and the immeasurable conceit of Malvolio, who appeared not like a human being, but "as if he were his own statue erected by national subscription." All these vices betray themselves with such an infantile simplicity, and help each other to construct so delightful a plot, that we feel, with the clown, perfectly content to see "foolery walk about the orb like the sun." It is so difficult to discriminate between follies when they protect themselves by being so amusing, that we say with Viola,—
"I hate ingratitude more in a man,
Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness,
Or any taint of vice, whose strong corruption
Inhabits our frail blood."