Читать книгу The Essays of Douglas Jerrold онлайн

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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.

ssss1.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.