master of the situation by giving it a clever turn in the idea or by playing over it with an arabesque of arch waggery. . . . . Jaques in his own way supposes that he can dispense with realities. The world, not as it is, but as it mirrors itself in his own mind, which gives to each object a humourous distortion,-this is what alone interests Jaques. Shakspere would say to us: This egoistic, contemplative, unreal manner of treating life is only a delicate kind of foolery. Real knowledge of life can never be acquired by the curious seeker for experiences.' But this Shakspere says in his non-hortatory, undogmatic way. .... FURNIVALL (Introduction to The Leopold Shakspere, p. lviii): Jaques, 'compact of jars,' is always getting out of bed on the wrong side every morning and taking the world the wrong way. . . . . He has been a libertine, is soured, and like the rascal Don John in Much Ado, he hides his bad nature under the cloak of seeming honesty of plain-speaking. His mission is to set everything to rights; but God forbid he should take the trouble to act. He wants liberty only to blow on whom he pleases; he abuses everybody, moralises, weeps sentimentally, and is a kind of mixture of Carlyle in his bad Latter-day-Pamphlets mood, and water, with none of the grand positiveness of our Victorian biographer, historian, and moralist. Look at his philosophy of man's life, and what poor stuff it is! Macbeth, the murderer, repeats it; to them both, men and women are but players. A. O. KELLOGG (Shakespeare's Delineations of Insanity, &c. 1866, p. 87): Those who have carefully observed the phenomena of mind as warped by the more delicate shades of disease,—shades so delicate perhaps as to be scarcely recognised by the ordinary observer,-must have remarked that in certain cases there are mental conditions which appear at first sight almost incompatible and contradictory. This is most frequently illustrated in those mild, but nevertheless marked, cases of incipient melancholia, underlying which may frequently be found a vein or substratum of genuine humour; so that the expression 'wrapped in a most humorous sadness' is neither contradictory nor by any means paradoxical. . . . . Shakespeare, who observed everything, has furnished us some notable examples, none more so, if we except Hamlet, than Jaques. In the character of Jaques it is very evident that Shakespeare intended to represent a certain delicate shade of incipient melancholia. . . . . The melancholy of Jaques is not so much a fixed condition of disease as the gradual ingravescence of the melancholic state..... After a careful examination of him, we confess our inability to discover anything more really morbid in his mental or moral organization than what is glanced at above as belonging to the initiatory stage of the disease..... His character contrasts most favourably with that of the Duke, who indulges in the grossest personalities toward him, and thereby shows that if the one is the nobleman, the other is, in this respect, much more the gentleman. When Jaques asks, 'What, for a counter, would I do but good?' the Duke replies in a tirade of most ungentlemanly personalities, and the way these are received and replied to by Jaques is characteristic of him and highly creditable to his temper and disposition. How charmingly he eschews all personalities, and a disposition to injure the feelings of individuals in his innocent railings, in his reply to the coarse railings and gross personalities of the Duke! HUDSON (Introduction, p. 18, 1880): Jaques the Juicy. Jaques is, I believe, an universal favourite, as, indeed, he well may be, for he is certainly one of the Poet's happiest conceptions. Without being at all unnatural, he has an amazing fund of peculiarity. Enraptured out of his senses at the voice of a song; thrown into a paroxysm of laughter at the sight of the motley-clad and motley-witted Fool; and shedding the twilight of his merry-sad spirit over all the darker spots of human life and character, he represents the abstract and sum-total of an utterly useless, yet perfectly harmless, man, seeking wisdom by abjuring its first principle. An odd choice mixture of reality and affectation, he does nothing but think, yet avowedly thinks to no purpose; or rather thinking is with him its own end. On the whole, if in Touchstone there is much of the philosopher in the Fool, in Jaques there is not less of the fool in the philosopher; so that Ulrici is not so wide of the mark in calling them 'two fools.' Jaques is equally wilful, too, with Touchstone, in his turn of thought and speech, though not so conscious of it; and as he plays his part more to please himself, so he is proportionably less open to the healing and renovating influences of Nature. We cannot justly affirm, indeed, that the soft blue sky did never melt into his heart,' as Wordsworth says of his Peter Bell; but he shows more of resistance than all the other persons to the poetries and eloquences of the place. Tears are a great luxury to him; he sips the cup of woe with all the gust of an epicure. Still, his temper is by no means sour; fond of solitude, he is, nevertheless, far from being unsocial. The society of good men, provided they be in adversity, has great charms for him. He likes to be with those who, though deserving the best, still have the worst ; virtue wronged, buffeted, oppressed, is his special delight, because such moral discrepancies offer the most salient points to his cherished meditations. He himself enumerates nearly all the forms of melancholy except his own, which I take to be the melancholy of self-love. And its effect in his case is not unlike that of Touchstone's art; inasmuch as he greatly delights to see things otherwise than as they really are, and to make them speak out some meaning that is not in them; that is, their plain and obvious sense is not to his taste. Nevertheless, his melancholy is grateful, because free from any dash of malignity. His morbid habit of mind seems to spring from an excess of generative virtue. And how racy and original is everything that comes from him! as if it bubbled up from the centre of his being; while his perennial fulness of matter makes his company always delightful. The Duke loves especially to meet him in his 'sullen fits,' because then he overflows with his most idiomatic humour. After all, the worst that can be said of Jaques is, that the presence of men who are at once fortunate and deserving corks him up; which may be only another way of saying that he cannot open out and run over save where things are going wrong. MACDONALD (The Imagination, 1883, p. 109): But what do we know about the character of Shakespeare? How can we tell the inner life of a man who has uttered himself in dramas, in which of course it is impossible that he should ever speak in his own person? No doubt he may speak his own sentiments through the mouths of many of his persons; but how are we to know in what cases he does so? At least we may assert, as a self-evident negative, that a passage treating of a wide question put into the mouth of a person despised and rebuked by the best characters in the play is not likely to contain any cautiously formed and cherished opinion of the dramatist. At first sight this may seem almost a truism; but we have only to remind our readers that one of the passages oftenest quoted with admiration is 'The Seven Ages of Man,' a passage full of inhuman contempt for humanity and unbelief in its destiny, in which not one of the seven ages is allowed to pass over its poor sad stage without a sneer; and that this passage is given by Shakespeare to the blasé sensualist Jaques, a man who, the good and wise Duke says, has been as vile as it is possible for man to be, so vile that it would be an additional sin in him to rebuke sin; a man who never was capable of seeing what is good in any man, and hates men's vices because he hates themselves, seeing in them only the reflex of his own disgust. Shakespeare knew better than to say that all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. He had been a player himself, but only on the stage; Jaques had been a player where he ought to have been a true man. The whole of his account of human life is contradicted and exposed at once by the entrance, the very moment when he had finished his wicked burlesque, of Orlando, the young master, carrying Adam, the old servant, upon his back. The song that immediately follows, sings true: Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.' between the all of Jaques and the most of the song, there is just the difference between earth and hell.-Of course, both from a literary and dramatic point of view, The Seven Ages is perfect. CELIA But CHARLES COWden-Clarke (p. 51): The whole of this love at first sight' on Celia's part is managed with Shakespeare's masterly skill. I have always felt those three little speeches to be profoundly true to individual nature, where the ladies are questioning Oliver respecting the incident of the lioness and the snake in the forest, and of Orlando's timely succour. Celia exclaims, in amazement, 'Are you his brother?' Rosalind says, 'Was it you he rescued?' And Celia rejoins, 'Was 't you that did so oft contrive to kill him?' Celia's first exclamation is surprised concern to find that this stranger, who interests her, is that unnatural brother of whom she had heard. Rosalind's thought is of her lover,-Orlando's generosity in rescuing one who has behaved so unnaturally towards himself; while Celia recurs to the difficulty she has in reconciling the image of one who has acted basely and cruelly with him she sees before her-who is speedily becoming to her the impersonation of all that is attractive, estimable, and lovable in man. Her affectionate nature cannot persuade itself to believe this villainy of him; she, therefore, incredulously reiterates, ' Was 't You that did so oft contrive to kill him?' And his reply is a beautiful evidence of the sweetness which beams transparent in her; since it already influences him, by effecting a confirmation of the virtuous resolves to which his brother's generosity has previously given rise, and by causing him to fall as suddenly in love with her as she with him. He says: 'Twas I; but 'tis not I;-I do not shame It is one of the refined beauties that distinguish Shakespeare's metaphysical philosophy, to show us how a fine nature acting upon an inferior one through the subtle agency of love, operates beneficially to elevate and purify. At one process it proclaims its own excellence, and works amelioration in another. Celia's charm of goodness wins the unkind brother of Orlando (Oliver) to a passionate admiration of herself, at the same time that it excites his emulation to become worthy of her. It begins by teaching him the bravery of a candid avowal of his crime,-the first step towards reformation. Celia's loving-kindness, like all true loving-kindness, hath this twofold virtue and grace: it no less benefits her friends than adorns herself. TOUCHSTONE HAZLITT (p. 308, 1817): Touchstone is not in love, but he will have a mistress as a subject for the exercise of his grotesque humour and to show his contempt for the passion by his indifference about the person. He is a rare fellow. He is a mixture of the ancient cynic philosopher with the modern buffoon, and turns folly into wit, and wit into folly, just as the fit takes him. His courtship of Audrey not only throws a degree of ridicule on the state of wedlock itself, but he is equally an enemy to the prejudices of opinion in other respects. The lofty tone of enthusiasm which the Duke and his companions in exile spread over the stillness and solitude of a country life receives a pleasant shock from Touchstone's sceptical determination of the question in his reply to Corin, III, ii, 14-22. Zimmerman's celebrated work on Solitude discovers only half the sense of this passage. GERMAN CRITICISMS A. W. SCHLEGEL (Lectures on Dramatic Literature, trans. by Black, 1815, vol. ii, p. 172): It would be difficult to bring the contents of As You Like It within the compass of an ordinary relation: nothing takes place, or rather what does take place is not so essential as what is said; even what may be called the dénouement is brought about in a pretty arbitrary manner. Whoever perceives nothing but what is capable of demonstration will hardly be disposed to allow that it has any plan at all. Banishment and flight have assembled together in the Forest of Arden a singular society: a Duke dethroned by his brother, and, with his faithful companions in misfortune, living in the wilds on the produce of the chase; two disguised princesses, who love each other with a sisterly affection; a witty court fool; lastly, the native inhabitants of the forest, ideal and natural shepherds and shepherdesses. These lightly-sketched figures pass along in the most diversified succession; we see always the shady dark-green landscape in the background, and breathe in imagination the fresh air of the forest. The hours are here measured by no clocks, no regulated recurrence of duty or toil; they flow on unnumbered in voluntary occupation or fanciful idleness, to which every one addicts himself according to his humour or disposition; and this unlimited freedom compensates all of them for the lost conveniences of life. One throws himself down solitarily under a tree, and indulges in melancholy reflections on the changes of fortune, the falsehood of the world, and the self-created torments of social life; others make the woods resound with social and festive songs to the accompaniment of their horns. Selfishness, envy, and ambition have been left in the city behind them; of all the human passions, love alone has found an entrance into this wilderness, where it dictates the same language to the simple shepherd and the chivalrous youth, who hangs his love-ditty to a tree. A prudish shepherdess falls instantaneously in love with Rosalind, disguised in man's apparel; the latter sharply reproaches her with her severity to her poor lover, and the pain of refusal, which she at length feels from her own experience, disposes her to compassion and requital. The fool carries his philosophical contempt of external show and his raillery of the illusion of love so far, that he purposely seeks out the ugliest and simplest country wench for a mistress. Throughout the whole picture it seems to have been the intention of the poet to show that nothing is wanted to call forth the poetry which has its dwelling in nature and the human mind, but to throw off all artificial constraint and GERMAN CRITICISMS-GERVINUS. ULRICI 419 restore both to their native liberty. In the progress of the piece itself the visionary carelessness of such an existence is expressed; it has even been alluded to by Shakespeare in the title. Whoever affects to be displeased that in this romantic forest the ceremonial of dramatic art is not duly observed, ought in justice to be delivered over to the wise fool, for the purpose of being kindly conducted out of it to some prosaical region. GERVINUS (Shakespeare, 4th ed., Leipzig, 1872, i, 494): The sweetest salve in misery, so runs 'the golden legacy' of the Novel, is patience, and the only medicine for want is contentment. Misfortune is to be defied with equanimity, and our lot be met with resignation. Hence, both the women and Orlando mock at Fortune and disregard her power. All the three principal figures (or, including Oliver, four) have this fate in common, that to all their external misfortunes, to banishment and to poverty, there is added, as a new evil (for so it is regarded): love. Even this they strive to encounter with the same weapons, with control and with moderation, not yielding too much, not seeking too much, with more regard to virtue and nature than to wealth and position, just as Rosalind chooses the inferior (nachgeborenen) Orlando, and just as Oliver chooses the shepherdess Celia. It is in reference to this that the pair of pastoral lovers are brought into contrast: Silvius loves too ardently, while Phebe loves too prudishly. If this moral reflection be expressed in a word, it is Self-control, Equanimity, Serenity in outward sorrow and inward suffering, whereof we here may learn the price. That this thought lies at the core of Shakespeare's comedy is scarcely at the first glance conceivable. So wholly is every reflection eliminated, so completely is there, in the lightest and freest play of the action and of the dialogue, merely a picture sketched out before us. ULRICI (Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, ii, 14, translated by L. Dora Schmitz, London, 1876): The general comic view of life is reflected throughout the whole play, and forms the foundation and platform upon which the action moves..... The motives which set the whole in motion are merely chance, the unintentional encounter of persons and incidents, and the freaks, caprices, and humours, the sentiments, feelings, and emotions, to which the various personages recklessly give way in what they do and leave undone. Nowhere does the representation treat of conscious plans, definite resolves, decided aims and objects; nowhere do we find preconsidered or, in fact, deeper, motives proceeding from the inmost nature of the characters. The characters themselves, even though clearly and correctly delineated, are generally drawn in light, hurried outlines, but are full of life, gay and bold in action, and quick in decision; they appear, as already said, either inconstant, variable, going from one extreme to the other, or possess such a vast amount of imagination, sensitiveness, and love for what is romantic and adventurous that their conduct, to a prosaic mind, can only appear thoughtless, capricious, and arbitrary; and such a mind would be inclined to call them all fools, oddities, and fantastic creatures (in the same way as Sir Oliver Martext, in the play itself, calls the whole company in the forest 'fantastical knaves.' [A doubtful interpretation.-ED.]) And, in fact, all do exactly what and as they please; each gives him or herself up, in unbridled wilfulness, to good or evil, according to his or her own whims, moods, or impulses, whatever the consequences may prove to be. Each looks upon and turns and shapes life as it pleases him or herself. The Forest of Arden is their stage; with its fresh and free atmosphere, its mysterious chiaroscuro, its idyllic scenery for huntsmen and shepherds, it is, at the same time, the fitting scene |