of humour a man will not steal from a shelf the precious treasure of the
language and put it in his pocket.




PATHOS


A fugitive writer wrote but lately on the fugitive page of a minor
magazine: 'For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is the most
real personage of the piece, and not without some hints of the pathos
that is worked out more fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and
Malvolio.' Has it indeed come to this? Have the Zeitgeist and the
Weltschmerz and the other things compared to which 'le spleen' was gay,
done so much for us? Is there to be no laughter left in literature free
from the preoccupation of a sham real-life? So it would seem. Even what
the great master has not shown us in his work, that your critic convinced
of pathos is resolved to see in it. By the penetration of his intrusive
sympathy he will come at it. It is of little use now to explain Snug the
joiner to the audience: why, it is precisely Snug who stirs their
emotions so painfully. Not the lion; they can see through that: but the
Snug within, the human Snug. And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in
that latent form which is the more appealing; and discouraging questions
arise as to the end of old Double; and Argan in his nightcap is the
tragic figure of Monomania; and human nature shudders at the petrifaction
of the intellect of Mr. F.'s aunt. _Et patati, et patata_.

It may be only too true that the actual world is 'with pathos delicately
edged.' For Malvolio living we should have had living sympathies: so