Читать книгу The Essays of Douglas Jerrold - Douglas William Jerrold - Страница 7

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The immortal weaver of Athens hath a host of descendants. They are scattered throughout every country of the world, their moral likeness to their sage ancestor becoming stronger in the land of wealth and luxury. They are a race marked and distinguished by the characteristics of their first parent—omnivorous selfishness and invulnerable self-complacency. They wear the ass’s head, yet know it not; and heedless of the devotion, have the Titania fortune still to round their temples “with coronets of fresh and fragrant flowers.” They sleep to the watching of an enamoured fairy, and wake only to new experiences of her tenderness and beauty.

“Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;

Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes;

Feed him with apricocks and dewberries;

With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries

The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,

And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs,

And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes,

To have my love to bed and to arise:

And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,

To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes:

Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.”

Have we not here the adjuration of the fairy fortune to all her ministering delights and pleasures of the world, to render service and to do homage to the dull-brained creature of her passion? Extract the poetry, the delicious fancy, from the injunction of the Queen of Fairies, and what is it but the command of worldly luck to her many servitors, to seek all imaginable delights for the sordid lump of earth, the mere animal with an “ass’s head” her diseased and wayward affections have made an idol of? Is not the world thronged with these Bottoms? In shape, in lineament, in every moral feature, are they not the veritable descendants of the swaggering homespun Athenian? They are the very nurslings of fortune, the monstrous and uncouth objects of her blind and fickle passion; yet do they submit to her endearments with no distrust, no passing suspicion of their own worthiness. They receive her blandishments as nothing more than a just and rightful reward for excellence. They cannot conceive how it could have been otherwise. Their imagination, vassal to their self-complacency, will not allow them to change places for an instant with their less prosperous fellow. No; Fortune dotes upon them, and how can she help it? Her extravagant fondness is not excused, but justified, made inevitable by the excelling worthiness of their parts. Hence, with what serenity they issue mandates to the retainers of their fond mistress—with what lordly self-conviction of their own merits they accept their service! How they order Cobweb, Peaseblossom, and Mustardseed to do their fantastic bidding, as though their bondmaster, created with natural and inalienable right to their feudality. Nothing in the way of greatness surprises them—no flattery startles them.

“Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful!” cries Titania to her ass-headed lover, and he by no syllable disclaims the truth, the justice of the eulogy. He swallows the praise as his natural food, takes the sweet sound of his doting goddess as rightful, every-day applause. He is loved by a goddess, for the goddess—we have said it—cannot help it.

The insensibility of the sons of Bottom is one of their grand, their unerring characteristics. It is this profitable faculty that would make them task the daintiest spirits for their own poorest, vilest wants, and dream of nothing monstrous or extravagant in such application.

“I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb: if I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you.”

“Scratch my head, Peaseblossom.”

“Monsieur Cobweb; good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped bumble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag.”

Thus spoke the great progenitor, Bottom; and of a verity his children are not more shame-faced task-masters.

Next, let us contrast the power and beauty of delights placed by Queen Titania at his will, with the mean, the sordid wretchedness of Bottom’s appetite and tastes.

“Tit. What, wilt thou hear some music, my sweet love?

“Bot. I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have the tongs and bones.

“Tit. Or say, sweet love, what thou desir’st to eat.

“Bot. Truly a peck of provender: I could munch your good dry oats. Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay: good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow.

“Tit. I have a venturous fairy that shall seek The squirrel’s hoard, and fetch thee new nuts.

“Bot. I had rather have a handful or two of dried peas. But, I pray you, let none of your people stir me: I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.

“Tit. Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms. Fairies, be gone, and be always away. So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist; the female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. Oh, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!”

Is this a scene of mere fairy-land? No; but a thing of hard, every-day prosaic life. Have we not about us the children, the thick-headed descendants of Bottom, with the Titania fortune tempting them to the enjoyments of the rarest and sweetest delights? and yet the coarse animal craving of

“The shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort,”

make answer to her dainty invitations with the poorest, coarsest desires! A goddess bids them choose music, and they are for nothing but “tongs and bones.” Fortune prays them to the banquet on immortal food, and, with asinine stubbornness, they bray for “a handful or two of dried peas.” They are warbled to by a goddess, and, unconscious of the homage, they make answer with the sense of an ass. We ask it, did Bottom die childless?

Bottom’s babes flourish in twenty paths of life. We meet his children in the stock-market; we see them sleek and smug behind the counter; we catch their faces through carriage windows; we hear their tuneful voices from the county-bench, the city-court, yea, in nobler convocations still. Sometimes, too, like their Athenian father, they are “translated.” No matter for the difference of calling, the influence of education, there is the family face—the family voice; the expression of self-blessed insensibility, the note of self-complacent gratulation. Throughout the life-teeming page of Shakespeare there is not a finer poetic rendering of a commonplace, vulgar class than Bottom.

The very heart of their mystery beats in the bosom of the weaver. His eagerness to be all things, from an assured conviction of his fitness for everything, is only their daily conceit dramatically developed. In that brief scene, what a picture have we, what a history of the ten thousand incidents of prose life! What an exhibition of the profound busy-bodies who clamorously desire to be Wall, Lion, Moonshine, and Pyramus too, not from an acquired belief, but as it would seem from a natural instinct of their own fitness for the combined charges! How triumphantly does Bottom swagger down his fellows! How small, mean, degenerate—what nobodies are they, before that giant conceit, the thick-skulled weaver!^[3] And in all this there is nothing that is not the severest transcript of human life. We laugh at it; and the next moment we are touched into gravity by a reflection of its serious meaning—its philosophic comments on the vulgar pretence of the every-day world.

3.It is impossible, we think, for the reader, if he witnessed A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Covent Garden last season (1840) to banish from his memory the Flute of Keeley in this scene. How meekly, how resignedly he gave place to the burly consequence of Bottom. It was not imbecility, but a mute absorbing sense of homage to the greatness of the weaver, one of those subtle touches that show the sympathy of the actor with the profoundest meanings of the poet.

The finer part of the picture, in which as we receive it, Shakespeare, with immortal tints, has shadowed forth the souls of a herd of men, is Bottom doted upon by the Queen of Fairies. It is here we have the true lineaments of a vulgar nature emblazoned by luck. It is here we recognise the self-sufficient creature of worldly success—the ignorant bashaw of life wearing his bravery as an ordained and necessary part of himself. He has the riches, the sweets of the earth, at his command, and he pauses not in passing wonder at his prosperity. To him there is no such power as a Providence. It is a part of the world’s destiny that he should be precisely what he is; he is the begotten of fate, and owes no obligation to vulgar fortune.

Nor are Bottom’s Babes less like their putative sire, if they have suffered no transformation. There are those who come into the world with the ass’s head, and live and die wound in the arms of doting wealth. The hard task-masters of life are often of these. The foolish, arrogant censors of the faults and backslippings of penury are to be found among them—the full fleshed moralists who shake their shaggy ears at the small delinquencies of struggling men. They eat, drink, sport, and sleep in fairyland; their lightest wish evokes a minister to do their bidding; and in their most fantastic, foolish moods, still Fortune—weak, besotted quean!—cries, with silverest voice:—

“Oh, how I love ye! How I dote on ye!”

Bottom as we opine, considered in his truthfulness, in his reflective powers of worldly semblance, awakens our pensiveness, not our mirth. We think of the thousands of his children, and the smile that would break at the mere words of the weaver, is chequered by the thought of his prosaic offspring. Yes; his offspring. It matters not that you point to—in his carriage, that you run through his accredited genealogy, that you show his armorial bearings. We answer—if he receive the goods of fortune as his right, with no thankfulness for the gifts, no gratitude displayed by constant sympathy with the wants and weaknesses of suffering man, though you call him marquis, we say he is the Babe of Bottom; and for his quarterings, though they date from the Conquest, the eye of our philosophy sees nought on his carriage panels but an ass’s head in a field, proper; and in the motto reads—“A bottle of hay!”

A bottle of hay.