Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/133

 *ishness. The mood must be very solemn and absorbing to be exempt from the sudden interruption of jollities which may be even ribald in their bearing. If nothing is too cheap for Nature it is precious enough for Shakspeare. Whatever a Creator has permitted to take lodgings in the human breast is not turned out by him; for he lodges there too, claiming the shelter of the same impartial roof beneath which we have to learn to tolerate each other. So the first impression which his plays make is this complaisance towards the most discrepant moods, just as life has it on the stage of the world; for he is not so concerned to develop a single motive by nice and consecutive gradations as he is to show the world's swift alternations of all the motives and tempers of mankind. The French complained that the result is like a road built of smooth pavement, corduroy, rutted mud, jarring heaps of cobble-stones; and that the feeling is transferred without warning along all the discrepancies of this route, to be jolted and racked till self-preservation becomes more absorbing than the landscape. But the structure of the Teutonic mind is well adapted to this journey by its robust manifoldness, sired by a primitive vigor of Nature, that propagates her turbulence, her jest and earnest, her nobleness and indecorum, the infinite variety which age cannot dim nor custom stale, the instincts of her animals and the intuitions of her men. Above all, the races which appreciate the deeper unity of Shakspeare, and bear without discontent its fusion of elements which seem to have only harsh antipathies, have drawn from Nature the