Feste bandies words with Viola, and makes her submit to delicate insolences: her distinguished air cannot abate him. He pretends to wish to be convinced by Malvolio that the latter is sane, but concludes that he will never believe a madman till he can see his brains. Feste keeps his own head on a level keel as the sparkling ripples of his drolleries go by. Shakspeare's intention is conspicuous in him to make all the clowns the critics of all the other personages, and kept in the pay of their creator.
When the play is over, the Duke plighted to his page, Olivia rightly married to the wrong man, and the whole romantic ravel of sentiment begins to be attached to the serious conditions of life, Feste is left alone upon the stage. Then he sings a song which conveys to us his feeling of the world's impartiality: all things proceed according to law; nobody is humored; people must abide the consequences of their actions, "for the rain it raineth every day." A "little tiny boy" may have his toy; but a man must guard against knavery and thieving: marriage itself cannot be sweetened by swaggering; whoso drinks with "toss-pots" will get a "drunken head:" it is a very old world, and began so long ago that no change in its habits can be looked for. The grave insinuation of this song is touched with the vague, soft bloom of the play. As the noises of the land come over sea well-tempered to the ears of islanders, so the world's fierce, implacable roar reaches us in the song, sifted through an air that hangs full of the Duke's dreams, of Viola's pensive love, of the hours which music flattered. The note is hardly more presageful than the cricket's stir in the late silence of a summer. How gracious has Shakspeare been to mankind in this play! He could not do otherwise than leave Feste all alone to pronounce its benediction; for his heart was a nest of songs whence they rose to whistle with the air of wisdom. Alas for the poor fool in "Lear" who sang to drown the cries from a violated nest!
The bauble of the Fool in "King Lear" rings us into a horizon that, before we reach it, mutters with the premonition of madness; and we wonder if any humor can find shelter with us underneath that blackening sky. When the Fool joins our company, we search his features in vain for a trace of Feste's and Touchstone's temper. That spring of geniality has been stirred by the king's misfortunes till it is roiled into irony; and we recognize the only tone that can take lodgings in this tragedy. It makes rifts in the gathering tempest, not of clear sky but of lighter cloud-racks, around whose edges the first lightnings run. We have ceased to smile and begin to forebode. All cheeriness and whim are getting blotted out so fast that we share the Fool's longing for the shelter of the hut when heaven began to pelt that old gray head, "crowned with rank fumiter," upon the heath.