Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/78

 MEPHISTOPHELES.

Dust shall he eat for pleasure's sake, Like my old famous aunt, the snake.

THE LORD.

Just freely as you please, do I reply: I never hated people of your kind; Of all the spirits that deny The knave is he best suits my mind. Since man soon tires and thinks that labor's evil, For unconditioned rest he sighs; And so I'm glad to pique his enterprise By a provoking comrade, like the devil.

The Lord has always tolerated this element on a compulsion of his own. But whenever creeping plants that have extorted bitter drops from the world around their roots climb over Shakspeare's sunny exposure, the clusters grow fit for human lips and are crushed into smiles.

The characters of humor in Shakspeare promote the business of the play, but they do it as much by being special studies of the traits of human nature as by necessary complicity with the plot. Sometimes they appear, as they would to a Frenchman like Voltaire, to be absurdities interpolated in the texture of the plot as if merely to raise a laugh and stretch the mouths of the groundlings. The notion is not uncommon, even among cultivated people, that they are drolleries contrived to suspend the strain of the more serious portions of the play; the poet assuming that the average mind cannot bear gravity for a whole evening. And doubtless great numbers of spectators find this relief in the lighter scenes into which they step down the stairs of