Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare: Twelve Essays

by John Weiss

Perhaps this is not a style that might be safely cultivated in our female boarding-schools, unless all the Cæsarios were Violas in disguise. But it is Love's ideal sincerity as it lives in Poesy's world to quicken sluggards and scorch prurience to death.

His love is not only unsophisticated: it is as virile, sumptuous, adventurous, intense, as the age which crushed the Armada as if it were a cluster to infuse new blood into England. It shares the intrepidity of all the sea-kings, but declines their ruffling and bluster. It is colored like the costumes of the nobles, who vaunted their rich stuffs and set the dull streets aglow like a parterre of flowers, before we began to exchange doublets and slashed satin for the hypocritic pantaloon. Its manner is free, reliant, full of respect and of a proudness of honor: sometimes it lets the flashing blade be seen at a touch of the ruffled wrist; sometimes it subdues all the grand state into deference, cap in hand, till the plumes sweep the ground clean before the beloved object. It has been reared in Anglo-Saxon bluntness. It is as broad and light-pervaded as a forenoon; but sometimes it is like those forenoons which appear to have saved over afternoon shades from yesterdays, they are so toned with the pearliness of a refraining light. It has risen early, and its elastic steps brush dew, and its freshly opened eyes are dawns. We seem to have returned with these lovers to a long-past epoch of the world, when Love had been just invented and put on trial among men and women of heroic mould and simple manners, who let the new passion flood them to the brim of their brains and turn every sense into its heralds. They report something so antique as to be young; and our jaded nerves respond to the tonic of a feeling that is for the first time tried. So deeply does Shakspeare's genius dip the heart into the old stream that makes invulnerable and immortal.

He sets forth the passion as it defies races, passes frontiers unsearched, and makes all the sects religious. The Catholic maiden, who has overheard that St. Bartholomew would have a bloody eve, puts the white sign of safety round the arm of her Huguenot lover; but the fingers of his sword-arm pull it off, though all the binding love in her face pleads for the dear deceit, and justifies it to all of his heart that is not dedicated to die with comrades. Her religion,—what is it but the sacrament that converts her adored one into the body and the blood of her life? Henceforth High Mass must celebrate for her a double sacrifice.

Shakspeare contrived to rear a race of women whose physical soundness was unimpaired. Before the gymnasium and the health-lift were invented at the peevish persuasion of dyspeptics and invalids, who die by inches of fried food, furnace-air, fricassees of high-school programmes, and ragouts of French novels, his women earned their health on horseback in the broad English fields: they called it down to them out of the sky, where the hawk struck the heron and returned to perch upon the wrist; they came upon its track in the sylvan paths which the startled deer extemporized; they overtook it in long stretches of breezy walks upon the heathery downs and in the hawthorn-bounded lane. The country's Nature was their training-room, and its unsophisticated habits their masters. They saw the sun rise, and could not afford time to outflare the setting crescent with gaslight streaming from overheated rooms; nor did the stately minuet ravage like the German which is sustained into the small hours upon rations of beef-tea and various liquors. They drank small-beer for breakfast, and knew the taste of herrings before the Turks invaded the nerves of Christendom with coffee, and the Chinese began to tan its stomach with the acid of teas. At twelve o'clock, a cup of malmsey, with a wedge of venison-pasty, scared up no megrims in constitutions which had followed the deer through the forest into the larder, and had pulled it down there with dexterous hands into the dish. Imogen was a prime cook, dressed vegetables in various devices to make them dainty to the eye, and flavored broth fit for Juno. She never caught cold on the floor of the cave. The forest was as courteous to her as the court.

Not one of Shakspeare's women utters one line that is inspired by any form of hysteria: the perfect balance of the functions was not yet impaired; so that no nerve-centre could exercise a petty tyranny, nor suggest the morbid fancies and curious superfluities which dedicate so many late romances to St. Vitus, the patron of spasm.

In an admirable book upon "Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls," I found embedded in an excellent vein of common sense the following obscure statement, quoted from another author: "Peripheral influences of an extremely powerful and continuous kind, where they concur with one of those critical periods of life at which the central nervous system is relatively weak and unstable, can occasionally set going a non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may localize itself in those nerves upon whose centres the morbific peripheral influence is perpetually pouring in." Here be words almost as depressing as the ills which the flesh of the modern woman is heiress to; but that legacy cannot be traced as far back as the poetry of that age when the Queen rode along the line of her English soldiers at Tilbury Fort, while Dorcas and Mopsa helped to stack barley to malt the ale for her maids of honor. I doubt if Shakspeare was familiar with many cases, transpiring in the town or the country, of women demolished by "morbific peripheral influence."

So the bodies of his women mature like all the nature out of doors, and become capable of entertaining the great passion with its own strenuous, unconscious innocence, with its honest ardor, with its native directness. Obscure ailments do not warp his verses, nor twang sick pathos out of their nerves. And we seek the society of these unsensational women, just as we seek Shakspeare's verse itself; with the same hope to earn repose for the soul which has been so taxed by the strained rhetoric of later writers. For relief, we recur to the pregnant moderation of Shakspeare's style. Pyrotechnics tire the eye, and send the dazed spectator groping home, as they seem to make more darkness by exploding. One reason for the revival of interest and love for Shakspeare may be found in a natural reaction from artifice and over-wrought expression. The heated mind has discovered an oasis and deep well that wait in this sirocco-stricken age with coolness for our hearts. How eagerly we run toward this shadowed margin where his great power is greatly tempered to our human feeling! His vivacity has been so bred by repose that it never strays beyond the line where stimulus becomes inebriation. He not only despises the abrupt effects which are darlings of the modern pen, but he resolutely refuses to represent abruptness; and his fancy makes its rapid time by even and placid motion; as a great sea-bird, with outstretched wings, in which you scarcely can detect a winnow, will follow the speed of your ship and be seen constantly poised just above the stern. All his figures have the same breadth and floating quality: they take you, as on an expanse of Fortunatus's carpet, upon a great journey silently. They are not apothecary's expedients to raise a blister by sharp surprise, to lash up a jaded taste by some cantharides of metaphor and simile, to rouse a torpid skin by acupuncture, or dull a heavy pain by injected morphia, as our modern practitioners of the ideal do, who have abused tired Nature's sweet restorer and the digestion that should wait on appetite.

And every gesture of Shakspeare, even when he has violence to describe, is not violently made; but the most tremendous deeds are emphasized by having their bluster chidden and their outcry hushed; so the great midnight lifts a finger of silence, but shudders none the less, and sinks to awful depths with the crime which has fastened itself upon her secrecy, as if to drag her dumbly out of the sweet heaven down to a place of horror. While Macbeth goes to Duncan's chamber, and the wife listens to hear death follow, the verse turns over the business of shrieking to the owl: an elemental dread from the unsounded depth of human feeling puts an accent on the scene.

Since Shakspeare's time, our rhetoric has been slowly raising its pitch, just as the musical instruments had been doing it until a congress was called to reduce to a normal note of C, with two hundred and twelve vibrations in a second, the pitch that had become so exaggerated. Handel was content to write a minor third below even that. What a pity that a congress of the best minds could not impose a normal pitch upon the shrieking muse, the new Calliope, who goes by steam!