Dogberry's consequence affects inconsequential phrases, and his days on earth are a series of non-sequiturs. Ajax has quite as good an opinion of himself as both these worthies, yet he says he knows not what pride is. "Why should a man be proud? How doth pride grow? I do hate a proud man as I hate the engendering of toads." "Yet he loves himself," says Nestor. Ulysses and Nestor avail themselves of his monstrous sense of superiority to flatter him into fighting Hector in the place of Achilles. This is to pique Achilles and break up his lethargy. Ajax is "a man into whom Nature hath so crowded humors, that his valor is crushed into folly." He sulks in his tent because he feels as valorous as Achilles, and must therefore sport the Achillean moods. He despises the strategy of Ulysses, calls it closet-war, because his own forte is nothing but giving and taking knocks, and his want of thought feels superior to all thinking. You have to behave very gingerly with such a person; if your deference once turns its back, the offence is mortal, and you may make your will. And these people are outrageously touchy; before you have time to make all snug, their conceit has assumed a vortical movement threatening to suck up into its spout every thing in the way. Fire shots at it if you please, but they will not make it tumble. Your only tact is to tack and give it a wide berth. So we see that when Ajax fails to attract any notice he becomes abusive and violent; and he is constantly trying to get somebody to concede that he is a man of as pretty parts as any other Greek. Achilles, forsooth! Who set him up to feel so big, and a better man than I? "If I go to him, with my armed fist I'll pash him o'er the face." "Oh, no, you shall not go." "An a' be proud with me, I'll pheeze his pride." Of course, for of all our pretexts for hating each other there is none so apt as our mutual conceits. We can pardon villainy sooner, for that only affronts an abstract conscience. But a man's conceit is the particular cherished bunion for another man's foot to inadvertently outrage. A straight blow in the chest, hit out from the shoulder, is a signal to measure your strength with another man. But to measure your weakness with him makes you wince. How adroitly Ulysses "rubs the vein" of Ajax's pride! As soon as the first ripple of Ulysses's blarney reaches his feet, he begins to float like a bladder of rapture, and goes bobbing enormously into the net they have spread for him.
When the plot begins to affect him, Thersites observes that "he goes up and down the field asking for himself." As Douglas Jerrold would say: "He stalks as though Colossus had quitted Rhodes to head a company." "He must fight singly to-morrow with Hector, and is so prophetically proud of an heroical cudgelling, that he raves in saying nothing." Then he describes him as a veritable Malvolio in armor. Is he really in Olivia's garden, with Sir Toby and the rest on the watch? "Why, he stalks up and down like a peacock; a stride, and a stand; ruminates like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but her brain to set down her reckoning; bites his lip with a politic regard,[4] as who should say, 'There were wit in this head, an't would out.' The man's undone for ever; for if Hector break not his neck in the combat, he'll break't himself in vain-glory. He knows not me. I said, 'Good morrow, Ajax;' and he replies, 'Thanks, Agamemnon.' What think you of this man that takes me for the general? He's grown a very land-fish, languageless, a monster. A plague of opinion! a man may wear it on both sides, like a leather jerkin."
Thersites does not allude to opinions which may be turned as easily as a jacket, but to the opinionative temper; nothing turns us so neatly inside out as our good opinion of ourselves. Shakspeare uses the word "opinion" occasionally in this sense; as in I Henry IV. iii. I, where Worcester criticises Hotspur's disposition:—
"Defect of manners, want of government,
Pride, haughtiness, opinion, and disdain."
So, whether in armor, in a swallow-tail, or in a surplice, our peacock vein expands around the world.
Then Thersites proposes to imitate the austere conceit of Ajax: "Let Patroclus make his demands to me, you shall see the pageant of Ajax." This is done, and the freezing brevity of Thersites is exactly like Malvolio's in the height of his fantasy, when Sir Toby and the rest offer to converse with him.
BOTTOM.
When Malvolio is trying to break up the midnight revel, the mischievous Maria fleers at him with, "Go shake your ears." That is a performance for which Malvolio is still too distant from his congener. But self-sufficiency succeeds in preserving that structure in Bottom, who is so deep and rich with harmless vanity that he sprouts into the auricular appendages, and he shakes them in the most amiable, frisky way through the Dream of a Midsummer Night. But there is nothing sour about Bottom; he has none of the quality which Margaret Fuller was the first to call "aloofness." He is hale-fellow with all his mates who appreciate the small gifts which belong to him, and which he good-naturedly strives to render serviceable. Though he is a better fellow than Malvolio, he has all that precisian's ambition; for as the steward could be Olivia's husband as well as any other man,—forsooth, why not?—so Bottom thinks he can play all the parts, rises to their glittering bait, and would appropriate the whole interlude. He is one of those self-made men who occasionally discredit their own bringing up and help us to recover our respect for a liberal education. Like the man of whom Sydney Smith said that he was ready at any moment to undertake the command of the Channel Fleet or run a factory, they have elbowed their way into a conviction that they can fill all the offices from constable to President in a style to astonish men of disciplined intelligence. And they frequently succeed in doing that. Men who unfortunately enjoyed early advantages, and whose lives have perhaps been a protracted training in the virtue as well as wit which lifts state-craft above gambling, have the proper kind of admiration for these chevaliers of industry.
But a highly successful deficiency of education does not make Bottom arrogant. As Athenian dicast, foreman of an English jury, republican officer under investigation, his suavity would be unimpeachable. He is good-tempered, and the first tap of flattery cracks his whole pretension; so that the crafty Quince manages to cast him for Pyramus, who was just such another sweet-faced and destructive lady's man.
Dogberry's malapropisms are inflations made by his vanity to float him into an appearance of sagacity, donkeys' hides blown up to take him across the stream of intercourse. But Bottom miscalls his words from sheer rusticity, and not from any effort to borrow the language of his superiors. The word "alleviate" which he has sometimes heard has been dribbling from brain-cell to cell, and so struggles unconsciously into "aggravate" at last. He uses genteel words which have stayed out of town so long as to be countrified; he has not picked them up, but they have blown into his mind and lodged there, like mallow-seeds. So we see that he is in most senses a born natural, proprietor by birth of the crest which at last he wears. But he is not all fool, for when he wakes out of his exposition of sleep and says he has had a dream, we notice that he is reluctant to expound it. He begins, "Methought I was,"—but a feeling of self-respect interrupts him; he tries it again, to say if he can that he had been wearing asses' ears, but his lips refuse that indignity and he gives it up, much to Shakspeare's credit.