"ARMADO.--Comfort me, boy. What great men have been in love?
"MOTH.--Hercules, Master.
"ARM.--Most sweet Hercules! More authority dear boy, name more; and
sweet my child, let them be men of good repute and carriage.
"MOTH.--Samson, Master; he was a man of good carriage, for he raised
the town gates on his back like a porter; and he was in love."
He tries to joke in clumsy riddles: "Out of the eater came forth meat, out
of the strong came forth sweetness." But his jokes were usually of a more
practical and even more disastrous kind. L'Estrange, in his _History of
Humor_, says: "The first character in the records of antiquity that seems
to have had anything quaint or droll about it is that of Samson. Standing
out amid the confusion of legendary times, he gives us good specimens of
the fierce, wild kind of merriment relished in ancient days; and was very
fond of making very sanguinary sport for the Philistines. He was an
exaggeration of a not very uncommon type of man in which brute strength is
joined to loose morals and whimsical fancy. People were more inclined to
laugh at sufferings formerly than now, because they were not keenly
sensitive to pain, and also had less feeling and consideration for others.
That Samson found some malicious kind of pleasure and diversion in his
reprisals on his enemies and made his misfortunes minister to his
amusement, is evident from the strange character of his exploits. 'He
caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail,
and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails, and when he had set
the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the
Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and also the standing corn of
the Philistines, with the vineyards and olives.' On another occasion, he
allowed himself to be bound with cords and thus apparently delivered
powerless into the hands of his enemies; he then broke his bonds 'like
flax that was burnt with fire,' and taking the jawbone of an ass which he
found, slew a thousand men with it. His account of this massacre shows
that he regarded it in a humorous light: 'With the jawbone of an ass,
heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of an ass, I have slain a thousand
men.' We might also refer to his carrying away the gates of Gaza to the
top of a hill that is before Hebron, and to his duping Delilah about the
seven green withes. * * * Samson was evidently regarded as a droll fellow
in his day."
What a touch of human nature there is in the scene between Samson and his
wife, when she asks for the solution of that wretched riddle! "Thou dost
but hate me," is her reproach, "and lovest me not; thou hast put forth a
riddle unto the children of my people, and hast not told it to me." What!
is there a domestic storm already brewing? There is something of a
thunderclap in the angry retort of the husband: "Behold, I have not told
it to my father and my mother," (as if that would make any difference to
her!) "and shall I tell it to thee?" Comparisons of this sort are but
little noted for their conciliatory tendencies, and so we are fully
prepared for what follows: "_And she wept before him_ the seven days while
the feast lasted." Poor Samson is not proof against woman's tears. He
could rend the lion as a kid, and carry off the gates of Gaza as easily as
a shepherd could bear a lamb upon his shoulders, but his superhuman
strength is of no avail against "women's weapons, water-drops." We are not
surprised to find that "it came to pass on the seventh day _he told her_."
Thus did conjugal quarrels end in the time of the Judges.
But if Samson was worsted in the encounter with his wife, he scored a
victory against the Philistines who had frightened her into telling them
the answer to the riddle. When they came with an air of insolent triumph
and said: "What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?"
he rather impolitely retorted,--traces of gall and wormwood at his recent
humiliation by his wife still rankling in his mind,--"If ye had not
ploughed with my heifer, ye had not found out my riddle." But he paid the
debt of honor he owed them, the wager he had lost. "He went down to
Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil and gave
changes of raiment unto them which expounded the riddle." Thersites would
have said of him as he did of Achilles, "His wit was his sinew." Samson
had wonderful muscular power of repartee.
On another occasion Samson amused himself by telling monstrous lies about
the secret of his strength: "If they bind me with seven green withes that
were never dried, then shall I be weak and be as another man;" "if they
bind me fast with new ropes;" "if thou weavest the seven locks of my head
with the web;" and so on. As Prince Hal said of the stories of his boon
companion, "These lies are like the father that begets them; gross as a
mountain, open, palpable." Delilah, wearied with these practical jokes,
exclaims at last, "How canst thou say 'I love thee,' when thine heart is
not with me? Thou hast mocked me these three times, and hast not told me
wherein thy great strength lieth." Then she began a course of teasing and
entreaty that finally proved successful. "It came to pass when she pressed
him daily with her words, _so that his soul was vexed unto death_, that he
told her all his heart." Samson was great physically, but so weak mentally
and morally that he is continually reducing himself to an absurd
spectacle. He could not resist Delilah's persistent importunities, nor had
he sufficient resolution to betake himself from the presence of
temptation. He had, no doubt, laughed loud and long at the victims of his
huge falsehoods, but he is finally harassed by a woman whose reproaches
and entreaties are like "a continual dropping on a rainy day," into
telling the fatal truth. Upon the whole, as we look upon the portrait of
Samson, we find it impossible to respect him. We can only smile at his
folly. The one flash of genuine nobility comes at the last. "Nothing in
his life became him like the leaving it." After all, that heroic death
more than half redeems the vacillating career it closes.