"The wise man's folly is anatomiz'd
Even by the squandering glances of the fool."
Jaques accosts him in the forest, "Good-morrow, fool." Touchstone replies, "Call me not fool, till Heaven hath sent me fortune." For thus, indeed, like the wise men, he will have a social chance to show, as they do, what his folly is. Jaques relates how he heard Touchstone airing the solemn triviality of well-ordered circles. Taking out his dial,—
"Thus may we see, quoth he, how the world wags;
'Tis but an hour ago, since it was nine;
And, after one hour more, 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale."
What tale? Why, the everlasting tedious one of over-accredited common-place behavior. Only a Touchstone, with his sly appreciation, can lend any liveliness to that. No wonder Jaques exclaims, "Motley's the only wear." He sees that Touchstone "hath strange places crammed with observation," and is a man after his own mind. If the temper of Jaques only could have been invested in that motley, they that would be most galled with his folly, "they most must laugh." He is delighted to find that fools can be "so deep contemplative." The deepness of it rests on Touchstone's appreciation of the average shallowness, but there is nothing in his tone to stir that up to a feeble sputter of resentment. Something in the tone continually appeals to us, as he did to Audrey: "Doth my simple feature content you?" Yes, there is nothing scurrilous in thee, else thou hadst not taken up so comfortably with Audrey, who cannot even wish that the gods had made her poetical. "Who calls?" says Corin. "Your betters, sir," replies Touchstone; for everybody is superior to somebody.
What a fine pretence he makes that good manners are essential to salvation, when he asks Corin, "Wast ever in court, shepherd?" Never at court! "Then thy manners must be wicked; and wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation." See the mock Grundy lift his hands, and cast upward the look of shocked superiority. It is done well enough to serve our social virtuosity for a whole epoch of its disdain.
And mark what good sense the fellow has; for, knowing that Audrey cannot appreciate his parts, he says: "When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical." Audrey replies: "I do not know what poetical is. Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?" Honest and true! We see what has won the heart of this motley disparager of cant and shams.
We see it too in the scene where he brings his wife into the Duke's company, with such an air of self-possession mixed with a pleased sense that she is his best joke at the punctilio of fashionable life. "An ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own; a poor humor of mine, sir, to take that that no man else will." Not so poor a humor; for humor itself does that, and adopts into the human family the outcasts who come between the wind and our nobility. "Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house; as your pearl in your foul oyster." Then he amuses the Duke with a strain that runs into irony, because it has the semblance of being seriously meant, upon some other esteemed punctilios of the code of honor: he rallies the whole nicely graded scale of customs from the retort courteous to the lie direct, and nominates in order the degrees of the lie. But you may avoid even the lie direct with an If. "If you said so, then I said so." How many a quarrel on the platform and in the parlor has been stifled by this bolster of an If, and the parties quietly subside into a profounder dislike.
The kind of marriages which the French call de convenance get a wholesome rebuke from him; and the vulgarity of its terms is not wanton but highly apposite, as it is a part of the intended satire. It strips the matrimonial arrangement of its rhetoric, when he tells the shepherd that it is another simple sin in him to bring the incompatible members of his flock together, "out of all reasonable match. If thou be'st not damned for this, the devil himself will have no shepherds." He really imparts to you the surmise that the mariages de convenance were appropriately derived by natural selection from the animal world.
In fine, the Duke characterizes Touchstone well when he says, "He uses his folly like a stalking-horse; and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit." So hunters, who are seriously concerned to obtain food, work along towards their game behind a mimicry of it. And such a hunter for the soul of goodness, stalking it underneath the obvious beguilement, is the Humor of Shakspeare:—
"In good earnest, and so God mend me."