It seems as if these high resolves ought to fill the horizon and extrude every thing irrelevant. But not so: something quite as capacious, but fertilized by not one dot of grandeur, comes vaporing on the scene.
Down to a period quite late in the history of literature, the French were unable to understand how we could accept the confusion of moods in Shakspeare's tragedies, and their abrupt introduction into the nobler sentiment of the scene, as comedy races after gravity to overtake and strangle it, and the gravity quite as unexpectedly recurs. This appeared to their æsthetic criticism as an absurd and grotesque wrong done to the unity of impression which a play ought to make by developing and depending upon a single idea, and to this end admitting only the feelings which belong to it.[5] Without this, no tragedy can have its effect of gravity, but rather, to use Falstaff's quip in parrying the Chief Justice, its effect of gravy,--to leave in the palate a taste of a mixture of sauce and drippings. But Shakspeare runs the coulter of unity deeper than the obvious idea which the plot of his tragedy develops; for it passes at once through soils of diverse elements, driven by a sure but vigorous instinct to turn them all up to the fructifying light. Instead of the unity of a single strand, he weaves all the threads of human nature into the cable which holds our hearts at anchor on his spring-tide.
This rotund earth that goes wallowing eastward is an aboriginal Falstaff, and carries all sorts of humors in its unbounded stomach. It puts off night and slips into the garments of the day not more easily than its vein changes from hour to hour, as the tone of its daylight does, rolling along the whole gamut from gloom to garishness. 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 mental quality of humor, and that is a flux which no substances can withstand. Nothing is uncouth or recluse enough to stay outside of its reconcilement.