Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/14

 6 glacier over a writer's style and individuality. Textual criticism saps men. There is a certain form of stupidity never found except in 'notes.'

Nothing saves a man from this but personality. The first great tonic is humor. Dr. Furness, man and work together, brim with it. Who else would have made a merry mark of the one word in Shakspere—in The Tempest, 'young scamels from the rock'—for which no one has ever suggested a convincing or even plausible meaning? The humor needed to salt these barrels and barrels of Shaksperian pemmican is much more than the capacity to see a joke. This is to humor what a pocket-dictionary is to an encylopedia. What is needed for adequate comment on Shakspere, the most English of all figures in the world of letters, is that numberless capacity to see the broad laugh in all things which lies so near to tears that when the coin of fate is flipped no man knows which is to be uppermost. This gives sanity. It enables the editor of a Variorum to know from time to time what a fool a German scholar can make of himself and his author. I suppose no man could see Horace Howard Furness, that solid figure, that sturdy step, that firm face of roomy planes and liberal modeling, those twinkling eyes, that air of benignant wisdom and general good-nature, without