The Fool in Fiction

— If the course of literary evolution be followed out, it will be found to take its rise in the ballad. That is the form of recital which lends itself best to repetition. The metrical limitations tend to keep the flow of the story within its own banks, as well as to give emphasis to the sharp turns, the rapids, and the waterfalls which distinguish a rivulet from a canal. Recitation leads to acting, and acting expands into dialogue. The Nut-Brown Maid and others which will occur to the lover of ballads are examples of this incipient tendency. Thus the drama is only a ballad in a developed stage.

The novel is the play put into print, with description substituted for action and scenery. This relation is evident, since a ballad may be the theme on which a play is founded, and a play may be converted into a novel. A contributor to The Atlantic in days gone by so treated the farce of Lend Me Five Shillings, and Maga was kind enough to accept, publish, and pay for the same. There is a retrograding process possible, by which a novel may be dramatized, a drama made into a ballad; but, as a rule, it is not to the benefit of the work. The reader turned hearer resents the playwright’s conception. The development on the lines of a true evolution is ever in the search for increase of power. The play has its limitations in the conventionalities of the stage, the capacities of actors, and the necessity of condensation and swift action. There is a division of interest between the drama in itself and the skill used in presenting it. Garrick and Kean are applauded the more the deeper their emphasis of the villainy of lago and Sir Giles Overreach.

In both the drama and the novel the appeal is to the imagination to produce a temporary illusion. The spectator knows that the stage sword does not pierce or the theatrical goblet intoxicate, and that the spectre vanishes behind the wings o. p., and not into thin air. The reader knows that what he reads is fiction, and that the author has (presumably) the power to shape the catastrophe as he will, to reward virtue and to punish vice, even in utter disregard of the inscrutable laws of real life. The art of the actor and the dramatist, like the art of the novelist and his illustrator, consists in suppressing for the moment the cooler judgment, and giving one over to the spell of the imagination. The power is gained by the combination of two opposing forces, — realism and exaggeration. The artist in a dramatic situation strikes a true chord, and then intensifies it to shut out any other perception. The novelist has the far larger freedom of leading gradually up to the subject, and of describing secret thoughts without the halting aid of soliloquy and the transparent hypocrisy of stage asides.

The true novel, therefore, is a developed and improved drama, and this preface is to lead up to a curious corroboration to be found in the study of literary evolution. Dismissing many of the more recent novels, which have passed on into a state of gelatinous coagulation, or even of fluid decomposition, as the modern stage has declined into mere farce and superficial melodrama, I wish to take two distinctive and first-class representatives of the two phases of development, the plays of Shakespeare and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. In these there are many points of resemblance, showing this continuity of development, but there is one in particular on which I rest my ease. It is that in each is felt the necessity, in order to reach the proper balance of the action, of using the foil of the comic element.

There is required the fool in fiction. This need may be met by the use either of the jester, the clown, the professional merrymaker, or of the butt, the gull, the knave who is to fill the rôle of Sancho Panza to the Don Quixote of tragedy. There is hardly a play of Shakespeare in which this foil is not to be found. Trinculo and Caliban in The Tempest ; Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona ; the clown in I welfth Night, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek ; Falstaff and Justice Shallow, Doctor Caius and Sir Hugh the Welsh parson, in The Merry Wives of Windsor ; the clown and Lucio in Measure for Measure; Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing ; Puck and Bottom the weaver in Midsummer Night’s Dream; Armado and Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost; Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale ; Touchstone in As You Like It; Christopher Sly and Gremio in The Taming of the Shrew; the two Dromios in The Comedy of Errors ; Pandarns in Troilus and Cressida; Apemantus in Timon of Athens; Cloten in Cymbeline; the fool and Edgar in King Lear; the porter in Macbeth; Polonius, Osric, and the gravediggers in Hamlet; Roderigo in Othello, — these all come to my pen without the necessity of opening the books, and I dare say the reader can fill out the list with others, which space forbids to enumerate.

Turn now to the Waverley series, and take them in their order. Davie Gellatley in Waverley holds the position of the household jester, — “ the innocent ” who uses the shrewd license of his order, covered by the infirmity behind which he takes refuge. The Baron of Bradwardine belongs to the class of eccentrics whose peculiarities are food for mirth. In Guy Mannering, Dominie Sampson, with his misplaced erudition, absence of mind, and real simplicity, is as marked a comic character and as complete a factor in the story as any of the Shakespearean personages of like position. The Antiquary himself is a creature of the finest comedy; but, putting him aside, in Edie Ochiltree one finds the combination of the best points of Touchstone and Autolycus with a Scotch shrewdness entirely his own, Rob Roy develops a new type in Andrew Fairservice, to say nothing of Wilfred Osbaldistone and Bailie Nicol Jarvie; for Andrew is a fine specimen of the serving-man of comedy. In The Black Dwarf, which is a failure in almost every particular, there is no one who exactly fills the place; but Old Mortality makes up for it in Cuddie Headrigg, who is, perhaps, the most delightful because the most lovable of all his class. The Heart of Mid-Lothian displays the same combination of mental infirmity and wit which belongs to the class, but transfers it to a female in the person of Madge Wildfire. The Bride of Lammermoor gives in Caleb Balderstone a character in every way worthy of the old comedy, and unsurpassed by any we can recall in Shakespeare. The Legend of Montrose has in Allan M’Aulay another instance of the disordered intellect, with gleams of great acuteness breaking through its habitual gloom. But its great and distinguishing character is Dugald Dalgettv, a compound of Falstaff and Faleonhridge, yet unlike either. The likeness to both is moral rather than intellectual. In The Monastery, the White Lady seems intended to fill the rôles of Ariel and Puck, but the real comic personage is Piercie Shafton. In The Abbot, Adam Woodcock, the falconer, supplies the comic element, slightly but effectively. Ivanhoe, again, has in Wamba the almost perfect type of the clown proper, the jester par excellence of the feudal age, who in wit and shrewdness hardly falls behind Touchstone. Wayland Smith and Flibbertigibbet in partnership form the comic element, the clown, so to speak, of the drama of Kenilworth, in some respects one of the most dramatic of Scott’s novels. In The Pirate one has a choice between Claud Halcro, Triptolemus Yellowley, and Jack Bunce, the fantastic follower of Cleveland; while Peveril of the Peak can furnish nothing better than the little dwarf, Sir Geoffrey Hudson, who is a sort of Falstaff seen through an inverted telescope. To make up for this, The Fortunes of Nigel has not only Richie Moniplies, but King James himself, who is not less the fool in history than here the fool in fiction. Quentin Durward offers Le Balafré as well as Le Glorieux, the jester of the Burgundian count. St. Ronan’s Well is rather meagre, unless one takes both Captain MacTurk and the old oddity Touchwood. But Redgauntlet, which, in spite of the critics, has always been a favorite of mine, has the masterly picture of Peter Peebles and also of Wandering Willie, to say nothing of Nanty Ewart. In The Betrothed, Wilkin Flammock is the broad-comedy character, while in the far superior story of The Talisman there is hardly any touch of jest, save in the few sayings of Jonas Schwanker, the court fool of the Archduke of Austria. Woodstock, again, furnishes a capital example in Roger Wildrake, and The Fair Maid of Perth has a truly Shakespearean character in Oliver Proudfute. Anne of Geierstein has a specimen of the dullard in Sigismund; and in Count Robert of Paris, which belongs to the failing period of Sir Walter’s power, Sylvan, the ape of Agelastes, marks the fading out of the type.

If the critic of this brief paper will kindly consider the passing mention given above, and recall the characters barely named in it, it may be seen that, broadly classified, the several types which go to form the underplay of the dramas of Shakespeare and of the Elizabethan age are constantly repeated in Scott. They help to carry on the story by their weaknesses, foibles, and eccentricities, and though in many instances not fools, they play the part of the conventional and traditional stage-fool. They make the rollers on which the weightier action of the plot moves. They serve as foils to the loftier and more heroic actors. They are indispensable to the right development of the theme. They are not mere stop-gaps to divert one in the shifting of scenes, or reliefs to the sombre pathos of set speeches and impassioned dialogue. They cannot be cut out and dropped as superfluous. In this the dramatic sympathy of Scott marks the principle of evolution which is here insisted on, and I therefore hold that the true novel is only a further development of the true Stage-play. It is a drama addressed to the mind rather than to the eye and ear of the reader.