"I hate ingratitude more in a man, Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, Or any taint of vice, whose strong corruption Inhabits our frail blood."
We always have, as she did, some vice which we hate worse than others. The one that is damned is generally the only one which would put us to discomfort to practise. But humor can make for a time only those vices companionable which turn a man into his own worst enemy and raise no tragic threat against the State.
Malvolio, the steward of Olivia's household, is prized by that lady for his grave and punctilious disposition. He discharges his office carefully and in a tone of some superiority, for his mind is above his estate. At some time in his life he has read cultivated books, knows the theory of Pythagoras concerning the transmigration of the soul, but thinks more nobly of the soul and no way approves that opinion. His gentility, though a little rusted and obsolete, is like a Sunday suit which nobody thinks of rallying. He wears it well, and his mistress cannot afford to treat him exactly as a servant; in fact, she has occasionally dropped good-natured phrases which he has interpreted into a special partiality: for Quixotic conceits can riot about inside of his stiff demeanor. This proneness to fantasy increases the touchiness of a man of reserve. He can never take a joke, and his climate is too inclement to shelter humor. Souls must be at blood-heat, and brains must expand with it like a blossom, before humor will fructify. He wonders how Olivia can tolerate the clown. "I protest," he says, "I take these wise men, that crow so at these set kind of fools, to be no better than the fools' zanies." Olivia hits the difficulty when she replies, "Oh, you are sick of self-love, and taste with a distempered appetite." Perhaps he thinks nobly of the soul because he so profoundly respects his own, and carries it upon stilts over the heads of the servants and Sir Toby and Sir Andrew.
Imagine this saturnine and self-involved man obliged to consort daily with Sir Toby, who brings his hand to the buttery-bar before breakfast, and who hates going to bed "as an unfilled can," unless no more drink is forthcoming; an irascible fellow, too, and all the more tindery because continually dry. He has Sir Andrew Aguecheek for a boon companion, who says of himself that sometimes he has no more wit than a Christian, or than an ordinary man. When he is not in liquor he is fuddled with inanity, and chirps and skips about, deluding himself with the notion that Olivia will receive his addresses. Sir Toby, to borrow money of him, fosters the notion, and flatters his poor tricks. Then there is that picador of a clown, who plants in Malvolio's thin skin a perfect quickset of barbed quips, and sends him lowering around the mansion which these roisterers have turned into a tavern. The other servant, Fabian, has a grudge against him for interfering with a bear-baiting he was interested in; for Malvolio was one of those Puritans who frowned upon that sport, as Macaulay said, not because it worried the bear but because it amused the men. The steward was right when he informed this precious set that they were idle, shallow things, and he was not of their element. No doubt he is the best man of the lot. But he interrupts their carousing at midnight in such a sour and lofty way that we are entertained to hear their drunken chaffing, and we call to Maria for another stoup, though they have had too much already; but a fresh exposition of dryness always sets in when such a virtue as Malvolio's tries to wither us. However, he becomes the object of their animosity, and they work in his distemper to make him ridiculous.