Shakespeare Part 7

XV.

THERE is in Shakespeare the mingling of laughter and tears, humor and pathos. Humor is the rose, wit the thorn. Wit is a crystallization, humor an efflorescence. Wit comes from the brain, humor from the heart.

Wit is the lightning of the soul.

In Shakespeare's nature was the climate of humor. He saw and felt the sunny side even of the saddest things. "You have seen sunshine and rain at once." So Shakespeare's tears fell oft upon his smiles. In moments of peril--on the very darkness of death--there comes a touch of humor that falls like a fleck of sunshine.

Gonzalo, when the ship is about to sink, having seen the boatswain, exclaims:

"I have great comfort from this fellow; Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; His complexion is perfect gallows."

Shakespeare is filled with the strange contrasts of grief and laughter.

While poor Hero is supposed to be dead--wrapped in the shroud of dishonor--Dogberry and Verges unconsciously put again the wedding wreath upon her pure brow.

The soliloquy of Launcelot--great as Hamlet's--offsets the bitter and burning words of Shylock.

There is only time to speak of Maria in "Twelfth Night," of Autolycus in the "Winter's Tale," of the parallel drawn by Fluellen between Alexander of Macedon and Harry of Monmouth, or of the marvellous humor of Falstaff, who never had the faintest thought of right or wrong--or of Mercutio, that embodiment of wit and humor--for of the grave-diggers who lamented that "great folk should have countenance in this world to drown and hang themselves, more than their even Christian," and who reached the generalization that

"the gallows does well because it does well to those who do ill."

There is also an example of grim humor--an example without a parallel in literature, so far as I know. Hamlet having killed Polonius is asked:

"Where's Polonais?"

"At supper."

"At supper! where?"

"Not where he eats, but where he is eaten."

Above all others, Shakespeare appreciated the pathos of situation.

Nothing is more pathetic than the last scene in "Lear." No one has ever bent above his dead who did not feel the words uttered by the mad king,--words born of a despair deeper than tears:

"Oh, that a horse, a dog, a rat hath life And thou no breath!"

So Iago, after he has been wounded, says:

"I bleed, sir; but not killed."

And Oth.e.l.lo answers from the wreck and shattered remnant of his life:

"I would have thee live; For in my sense it is happiness to die."

When Troilus finds Cressida has been false, he cries:

"Let it not be believed for womanhood; Think! we had mothers."

Ophelia, in her madness, "the sweet bells jangled out o' tune," says softly:

"I would give you some violets; But they withered all when my father died."

When Macbeth has reaped the harvest, the seeds of which were sown by his murderous hand, he exclaims,--and what could be more pitiful?

"I 'gin to be aweary of the sun."

Richard the Second feels how small a thing it is to be, or to have been, a king, or to receive honors before or after power is lost; and so, of those who stood uncovered before him, he asks this piteous question:

"I live with bread, like you; feel want, Taste grief, need friends; subjected thus, How can you say to me I am a king?"

Think of the salutation of Antony to the dead Caesar:

"Pardon me, thou piece of bleeding earth."

When Pisanio informs Imogen that he had been ordered by Posthumus to murder her, she bares her neck and cries:

"The lamb entreats the butcher: Where is thy knife?

Thou art too slow To do thy master's bidding when I desire it."

Antony, as the last drops are falling from his self-inflicted wound, utters with his dying breath to Cleopatra, this:

"I here importune death awhile, until Of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips."

To me, the last words of Hamlet are full of pathos:

"I die, Horatio.

The potent poison quite o'er crows my spirit * * *

The rest is silence."

XVI.

SOME have insisted that Shakespeare must have been a physician, for the reason that he shows such knowledge of medicine--of the symptoms of disease and death--was so familiar with the brain, and with insanity in all its forms.

I do not think he was a physician. He knew too much--his generalizations were too splendid. He had none of the prejudices of that profession in his time. We might as well say that he was a musician, a composer, because we find in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" nearly every musical term known in Shakespeare's time.

Others maintain that he was a lawyer, perfectly acquainted with the forms, with the expressions familiar to that profession--yet there is nothing to show that he was a lawyer, or that he knew more about law than any intelligent man should know.

He was not a lawyer. His sense of justice was never dulled by reading English law.

Some think that he was a botanist, because he named nearly all known plants. Others, that he was an astronomer, a naturalist, because he gave hints and suggestions of nearly all discoveries.

Some have thought that he must have been a sailor, for the reason that the orders given in the opening of "The Tempest" were the best that could, under the circ.u.mstances, have been given to save the ship.

For my part, I think there is nothing in the plays to show that he was a lawyer, doctor, botanist or scientist. He had the observant eyes that really see, the ears that really hear, the brain that retains all pictures, all thoughts, logic as unerring as light, the imagination that supplies defects and builds the perfect from a fragment. And these faculties, these apt.i.tudes, working together, account for what he did.

He exceeded all the sons of men in the splendor of his imagination. To him the whole world paid tribute, and nature poured her treasures at his feet. In him all races lived again, and even those to be were pictured in his brain.