Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/283

Rh howling, so that at last a commissary of police in uniform came upon the stage and explained that it was not allowed that anything should be given in the theatre except what was in the playbill. Upon this a voice cried: "Et vous, Monsieur, êtes-vous aussi sur l'affiche?" – a hit which was received with universal laughter. For here the subsumption of what is heterogeneous is at once distinct and unforced. The epigramme:

"Bav is the true shepherd of whom the Bible spake: Though his flock be all asleep, he alone remains awake:"

subsumes, under the conception of a sleeping flock and a waking shepherd, the tedious preacher who still bellows on unheard when he has sent all the people to sleep. Analogous to this is the epitaph on a doctor: "Here lies he like a hero, and those he has slain lie around him;" it subsumes under the conception, honourable to the hero, of "lying surrounded by dead bodies," the doctor, who is supposed to preserve life. Very commonly the witticism consists in a single expression, through which only the conception is given, under which the case presented can be subsumed, though it is very different from everything else that is thought under it. So is it in "Romeo" when the vivacious Mercutio answers his friends who promise to visit him on the morrow: "Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man." Under this conception a dead man is here subsumed; but in English there is also a play upon the words, for "a grave man" means both a serious man and a man of the grave. Of this kind is also the well-known anecdote of the actor Unzelmann. In the Berlin theatre he was strictly forbidden to improvise. Soon afterwards he had to appear on the stage on horseback, and just as he came on the stage the horse dunged, at which the audience began to laugh, but laughed much more when Unzelmann said to the horse: "What are you doing? Don't you know we are forbidden to improvise?" Here the subsumption of the heterogeneous