FALSTAFF.

The political interest of the reigns of Henry IV. and V. is divided by

the huge bulk of Falstaff, who lightly buffets the tide and emerges

with invincible gayety as often as the tragedy closes around him. His

wake draws after it a number of disreputable or silly fellows, whom

his audacious humor alone prevails upon the tragedy to tolerate. The

job of turning them out would include the dismissal of the unbounded

man in whom they move and have their being; and the gravity of the

political situation is engrossed enough to hold its own ground against

them, to prevent a freshet of comedy from washing off its state.

They seem to have been the traits of Falstaff which were left over

in the making up of his personality; and, this attaining at length

to such a circumference that no more matter could be comprised, the

surplus revolved as satellites. There is Bardolph who says that Sir

John is "out of all compass, out of all reasonable compass;" but he

himself is the inflammation which all the monstrous quantity of sack

could not suffuse Sir John with, who burns by proxy in his nose. He

is the red mark for Falstaff's raillery, but liquor and lodgings

keep him companionable, so that, when at last "the fuel is gone that

maintained that fire," he has a tear or two, not yet evaporated, to

help the obsequies of his master. There is Pistol, a great haunter

of play-houses, where he has picked up phrases of bombast, such as

swarmed in the bad tragedies of the period; when the sack has reached

his head it sets them all afloat, to raffle the company:

"Shall packhorses,

And hollow-pamper'd jades of Asia,

Which cannot go but thirty miles a day,

Compare with Cæsars, and with Cannibals,

And Trojan Greeks? nay, rather damn them with

King Cerberus; and let the welkin roar."

Pistol's love for alliteration puts a _c_ for an _h_ in the third line,

and turns the Carthaginian into a Carib.

Falstaff is cowardly from policy, and reasons himself into the belief

that honor is a paltry motive for the risk of sustaining knocks. What

was left over of this pusillanimity appears unadulterated in Pistol,

who snatches up his sword, calls upon death to rock him asleep and

abridge his doleful days; but he is a tame cheater, "you may stroke

him as gently as a puppy greyhound." If a hen turns back her feathers

he is off, to disappear from history with his mouth full of the

Welshman's leek. There is Mistress Quickly who caters for Falstaff's

vices, endures his swindling till almost all her goods have gone to the

pawnbroker's, and then admires to be cajoled back into more lending,

dismisses the suit which she brought with such strenuous and voluble

feebleness, and hopes he will come to supper. She tells a story as any

Yankee Cousin Sally would, dwelling upon insignificant accessories and

recurring to them to give the memory a fresh start, till the narrative

becomes nothing but mnemonics. "It was no longer ago than Wednesday

last,--Neighbor Quickly, says he,--Master Dumb, our minister, was

by then,--Neighbor Quickly, says he, receive those that are civil;

for, saith he, you are in an ill-name;--now, he said so, I can tell

whereupon."

It is plain that the Down-East style of narrative emigrated with

Popham, and effected the settlement which he failed to do. A trivial

mind is a haunt for petty details, where they are fondled and fed, so

that they become too familiar, and keep tripping up the story-teller

who vainly tries to strike a direct path, and for want of point arrives

nowhere.

"Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my

Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday

in Whitsun-week, when the Prince broke thy head for liking his father

to a singing-man of Windsor: thou didst swear to me then, as I was

washing thy wound, to marry me, and make me my lady thy wife. Canst

thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then,

and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar;

telling us she had a good dish of prawns, whereby thou didst desire to

eat some, whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound." But

she, too, is won into a kind of fidelity by the charms of Sir John's

manner; and, when he falls sick unto his death, she cannot forget some

genial hours. "Ah, poor heart! he is so shaked of a burning quotidian

tertian, that it is most lamentable to behold. Sweet men, come to him."

The brain of Justice Shallow smoulders with the brag of his youth; and,

when he delightedly blows it up, he has the impression that he was

redoubtable for performance. The visit of such a solid, whole-souled

profligate as Falstaff is a rare chance for him to prate of the

wildness of his youth, "and every third word a lie." "Lord, lord, how

subject we old men are to this vice of lying!" He makes paralytic

efforts to fraternize with Falstaff's wickedness, poking sly innuendoes

at his immeasurable superiority in that line. Falstaff remembers that

he "came ever in the rear-ward of the fashion." He has settled down

into comfortable living; and his leanness is smug with all the details

of it,--the pigeons, and the russets, the mutton, "and any pretty

little tiny kickshaws." "Oh, the mad days that I have spent! and to

see how many of my old acquaintance are dead.--How a good yoke of

bullocks? Is old Double dead?--How a score of ewes now?" So earnest

with his petty thrift that death is but a formality. The feeble ripple

of his talk over a bed of commonplaces would soon tire out the livelier

Sir John, if he did not see money to borrow and good fat quarters to

cultivate. So this man, "made after supper of a cheese-paring," has

the flimsiest of butterfly-nets thrown over him, and is caught without

damage.

There is little to say of Poins, save that he helps the Prince to play

the fool with the time, while the spirits of the wise mock them. Now

and then he reminds the Prince that his father is lying sick while

he trifles so. Then the Prince gives us glimpses of the temper which

separates at last from Falstaff, when the crown pushes the fool's cap

from his head. "Thou think'st me as far in the devil's book as thou

and Falstaff, for obduracy and persistency: let the end try the man."

He is strong enough to enact this episode of folly without letting it

tamper with the kingship which is the proper quality of his soul. And

Falstaff seems to have transferred to him a portion of his own wit, as

if on purpose to be soundly railed at and stimulated to the top of his

bent. The only advantage which the Prince has over his fat knight is a

commodity of truth-telling; but Falstaff cheapens it by the genius of

his escapes.

Corporal Nym will cut a purse and drain a can without winking, as the

rest will; but he admires to have a pretence of soldierly bluntness,

as when he says, "I dare not fight; but I will wink, and hold out

mine iron." He is a man of few words, and has something of Cromwell's

enigmatic way of speaking to cover his deliberate intention of doing

nothing to end his days. "I cannot tell; things must be as they may.

There must be conclusions. Well, I cannot tell, ... and that's the

humor of it." A silent man, but not of the fighting type which helped

Queen Elizabeth's adventurers to sack the towns of the Spanish main and

defray the expense of her countenance. His rapier is out before his

bluster, because the latter has rusted in its sheath. He has a quarrel

with Pistol about eight shillings,--not the first, by many a tavern

reckoning; and he has an unaffected desire to run him through the body

and let out his vaporing.

"Pay!" cries Pistol: I have not sunk so low as that. "Base is the slave

that pays." Out come the swords, and you expect "flashing fire will

follow." But Pistol has calculated that Bardolph, who is present, will

allow no fighting; so he brandishes up to the very verge of blows, to

make Bardolph say, "He that strikes the first stroke, I'll run him up

to the hilts, as I am a soldier." Pistol manages to have this threat

arrive on the ground just in time to apprehend the parties for a breach

of the peace. Nym shoves his sword back with the feigned grumble of a

disappointed man: "I will cut thy throat, one time or other, in fair

terms; that is the humor of it,"--Mrs. Quickly having plighted her

troth to him, and Pistol having married her in spite of it.

A man with a great flow of animal spirits is sometimes, especially if

he is liable, to sudden bursts of this exuberance, mistaken to be under

the influence of wine. Falstaff's average rate of mirth is so high that

wine refuses to contest it. The blood of his vein can afford to be

handicapped against the blood of the grape. The monstrous quantities of

sack sink through the porosities of his rotundity, and mildly percolate

a subterranean world; so that his abstinence in the article of bread is

a very nice instinct that balancing bulk enough exists already.

Falstaff, by every ordinary law of human nature, should be inebriated.

His exemption is a kind of atheism. But he prefers to have his own

vices over-done in the persons of his companions, all of whom seem to

have anticipated the sanitary argument in favor of the use of liquor

that an American suggested: "If water will rot a cedar-post, what

will it do to the human stomach!" Now Pistol's brain, owing to the

rarefaction produced by rhetoric, is an exhausted receiver into which

all fluids rush and qualify him for inebriety. It is sometimes so

excessive that the fuller Falstaff has to beat him out of the room. But

one can never say that Pistol is disguised in liquor; for when he is

the drunkest his exalted style is most conspicuous. He calls for more

sack; then, unbuckling his sword, he draws out the Bilbao blade before

laying it down, and manglingly spouts off the Spanish motto that is

upon it,--

"_Se fortuna me tormenta, il sperare me contenta_;"

calls the weapon his sweetheart, and, when Bardolph tries to turn him

out, snatches it up, and seems to sharpen it upon horrid threats:

"What! shall we have incision? shall we imbrue?

Why then, let grievous, ghastly, gaping wounds

Untwine the sisters three! Come, Atropos, I say!"

Fate comes in the person of Falstaff, who declares, "An a' do nothing

but speak nothing, a' shall be nothing here;" for Falstaff has the

virtue of a keen appreciation of the appositeness of words.

You have your choice to regard these people as whimsical

disenchantments of Falstaff by a satirical demon, or to consider

Falstaff as an aggregate of these people invested with the illusion of

wit. Pistol is the raw article of poltroonery done in fustian instead

of a gayly slashed doublet. Bardolph is the capaciousness for sherry

without the capacity to make it apprehensive and forgetive: it goes to

his head, but, finding no brain there, is provoked to the nose, where

it lights a cautionary signal. Nym is the brag stripped of resources,

shivering in prosiness. Dame Quickly is the easy virtue in reduced

circumstances, dropped out of its fashionable quarter to keep a bar

and be a procuress,--all the fine phrases pawned clear down to vulgar

gossip.

Thus brawling, boasting, tippling, thieving, silly tricks and waggery

come strolling behind Falstaff into the company of kings and nobles, no

chamberlain to announce them, no crossed halberts to repel.

The second part of "King Henry IV." opens nobly with the conflicting

rumors which travel from the lost field of Shrewsbury, where the

flame of rebellion was quenched, towards the castle of the Earl of

Northumberland, who hopes to hear that it has prospered. There is

nothing insignificant in the characters who have ranged themselves on

either side of the great question of their times. Rebellion may be a

blunder, but it levies on manhood a tax as heavy as loyalty. So we

are admitted to the society of great politicians, full of an idea,

who blossom on the top of their epoch whence the sap that feeds them

is derived. They venture life and fortune upon the moment when their

tendency opens and exhales. They are impersonations of that quality

in the soil of their country which has grown up to them, to claim and

put them forth to triumph or suffer with the ideas which are involved.

They risk hereditary honor and estate, send their eldest sons and

heirs of titles into the field which two political tendencies select

to strive for precedence. The whole spirit of the scene is noble and

unselfish: lands, luxuries, and quiet are forsworn; and a preference,

be it only of passion, be it a humor of the times mixed of equal parts

of honor and vanity, be it alloyed with disappointments and galled

ambitions, is yet virile enough to stake its own aggrandizement rather

than let inglorious caution strangle the chance of supremacy. The

style is elevated and sincere. Rumors of a conflicting nature, making

post-horses of the wind, come like cross-tides to dash the feelings to

and fro; now lifting them upon a wave of promise, now letting them drop

into the trough of despondency. The decisive drift is soon announced,

and the father of Hotspur has to accept the tidings of his son's fate.

In vain the sanguine-tempered Lord Bardolph discredits and tries to

explain away the news. But his spirit rises to the tide-mark of the

disaster:

"We all, that are engaged to this loss,

Knew that we ventur'd on such dangerous seas,

That, if we wrought our life, 'twas ten to one:

And yet we ventur'd, for the gain propos'd

Chok'd the respect of likely peril fear'd;

And, since we are o'erset, venture again.

Come; we will all put forth,--body, and goods."

It seems as if these high resolves ought to fill the horizon and

extrude every thing irrelevant. But not so: something quite as

capacious, but fertilized by not one dot of grandeur, comes vaporing on

the scene.

Down to a period quite late in the history of literature, the French

were unable to understand how we could accept the confusion of moods in

Shakspeare's tragedies, and their abrupt introduction into the nobler

sentiment of the scene, as comedy races after gravity to overtake

and strangle it, and the gravity quite as unexpectedly recurs. This

appeared to their æsthetic criticism as an absurd and grotesque

wrong done to the unity of impression which a play ought to make by

developing and depending upon a single idea, and to this end admitting

only the feelings which belong to it.[5] Without this, no tragedy

can have its effect of gravity, but rather, to use Falstaff's quip

in parrying the Chief Justice, its effect of gravy,--to leave in the

palate a taste of a mixture of sauce and drippings. But Shakspeare runs

the coulter of unity deeper than the obvious idea which the plot of

his tragedy develops; for it passes at once through soils of diverse

elements, driven by a sure but vigorous instinct to turn them all up

to the fructifying light. Instead of the unity of a single strand, he

weaves all the threads of human nature into the cable which holds our

hearts at anchor on his spring-tide.

This rotund earth that goes wallowing eastward is an aboriginal

Falstaff, and carries all sorts of humors in its unbounded stomach.

It puts off night and slips into the garments of the day not more

easily than its vein changes from hour to hour, as the tone of its

daylight does, rolling along the whole gamut from gloom to garishness.

The mood must be very solemn and absorbing to be exempt from the

sudden interruption of jollities which may be even ribald in their

bearing. If nothing is too cheap for Nature it is precious enough

for Shakspeare. Whatever a Creator has permitted to take lodgings in

the human breast is not turned out by him; for he lodges there too,

claiming the shelter of the same impartial roof beneath which we have

to learn to tolerate each other. So the first impression which his

plays make is this complaisance towards the most discrepant moods, just

as life has it on the stage of the world; for he is not so concerned

to develop a single motive by nice and consecutive gradations as he

is to show the world's swift alternations of all the motives and

tempers of mankind. The French complained that the result is like a

road built of smooth pavement, corduroy, rutted mud, jarring heaps of

cobble-stones; and that the feeling is transferred without warning

along all the discrepancies of this route, to be jolted and racked

till self-preservation becomes more absorbing than the landscape. But

the structure of the Teutonic mind is well adapted to this journey by

its robust manifoldness, sired by a primitive vigor of Nature, that

propagates her turbulence, her jest and earnest, her nobleness and

indecorum, the infinite variety which age cannot dim nor custom stale,

the instincts of her animals and the intuitions of her men. Above all,

the races which appreciate the deeper unity of Shakspeare, and bear

without discontent its fusion of elements which seem to have only harsh

antipathies, have drawn from Nature the mental quality of humor, and

that is a flux which no substances can withstand. Nothing is uncouth or

recluse enough to stay outside of its reconcilement.

So while Northumberland's castle is agitated by the news of disaster,

and the slain Percy is expected home by the halls he never shall

inherit, Falstaff appears, with that diminutive page who was Christian

when the Prince gave him, "and look, if the fat villain have not

transformed him ape." We were pitying Northumberland, as in grief

and anger he threw away his crutch, tore the "sickly quoif" from the

head which princes aimed to hit, and called for iron to encase his

forehead. What does this fat man here, jeering at his page for being

smaller than he, and asking what Master Dumbleton said about the satin

for his short cloak and slops? It must have been a mistake of some

precipitate scene-shifter. No: there be peers of the realm and peerless

blackguards; one is in revolt against his king, the other against all

decency. But the play has a history which includes them both in its

epoch, as Nature includes them; and for her it is but a step from

Warkworth, where the old nobleman is weeping, to London, where this

tavern-haunter defies fortune with his shifty gibes, and laments

nothing but the consumption of his purse. What stimulus can there be

for us in his gilded rascality so soon after Harry Percy's spur is

cold? Shall we put up with him? We shall have no trouble: Falstaff

undertakes to vindicate Nature for setting him in this company, and he

does it with such resource and admirable cheerfulness that earldoms

seem to have been created to be his foil.

His character belongs to comedy because its vices are of the breed

which never contract alliances with great passions. The big frame is

so completely inoculated with laughter that his faults cannot take the

contagion of tragedy. His wit is an implement which his comic nature

uses for purposes of self-defence. He is essentially comic before he

opens his mouth: for he is built to brag, and is too fat to be brave;

his fleshly propensities are latent with situations for covering him

with ridicule; his talent for lying has the peril that it may be used

too often. Yet, on the whole, he is of Swift's opinion, that a lie is

too good a thing to be wasted. But let the Prince and Poins plot a

little, and the Wives of Windsor beguile his loose vein, and the scene

quickly runs to his discomfiture. The mountainous knave is caught in

a trap which might have been baited for a mouse, so small that we

wonder how his wit could have blundered into it. But, being in, his

wit behaves so delightfully like virtue that we think he has escaped.

"Nothing confutes me but eyes," he says. Only seeing is disbelieving

such an embodied stratagem. "By the Lord, I knew ye!" said he to the

Prince, after the midnight scare the latter gave him, and goes nigh to

convince us that he ran away to avoid killing the heir-apparent. So

large a man does not often wriggle so unctuously through such a narrow

place. We should have to make his bail bear some correspondence to his

bulk, if he lived where swindling was a signal for juries to disagree.

There is a scene where the Prince comes out of his hiding-place after

Falstaff has been abusing him to Doll Tear-street.[6] "Didst thou hear

me?" "Yes; and you knew me, as you did when you ran away by Gad's

Hill: you knew I was at your back, and spoke it on purpose to try my

patience." How slyly Falstaff avoids putting his foot into this trap;

and the Prince underestimated his resources. "No, no, no, not so; I

did not know thou wast within hearing. No abuse, Hal, on my honor; no

abuse, Ned. I dispraised him before the wicked, that the wicked might

not fall in love with him; and thy father is to give me thanks for it."

His mind is supple and adaptive, yet all the more comical because the

talent is futile for concealment, and only earns for him a laugh which

shakes the arm suspended to chastise.

He extemporizes deafness, and does not hear the Chief Justice calling

to him. When the attendant comes and plucks him by the elbow to bid

him note the Justice, he gains time by inventing the pretext that a

beggar has him by the sleeve. "What! a young knave, and beg!" But this

resource was by no means invented by Falstaff. This world is an old

hand at it; and, whenever the truth of one age summons the error of

the past to arrest and judgment, the interested parties start a dodge,

and stimulate it with voluble pretence of earnestness, hoping to make

it serve their day, at least. When Galileo discovered the satellites

of Jupiter, people expected the sky to fall. Something must be done to

prop it up. So they said that, even if the satellites could be seen

through the telescope, the inference that they were really in the sky

was not a fair one; more likely they were something in the telescope

itself.

When Scheiner, the Jesuit, discovered solar spots in 1611, he had

to communicate the discovery to his Superior. The latter was an

Aristotelian. He would not even risk a peep through Scheiner's

telescope. He said: "I have read Aristotle's writings from end to end

many times, and I have, nowhere found in them any thing similar to

what you mention. Go, therefore, my son, and endeavor to tranquillize

yourself. Be convinced that these appearances, which you take for

spots, are the faults of your glasses or of your eyes; if they are

not, as I in part suspect, the result of a disordered imagination."

Texts and pretexts are still employed to prevent Theology and Science

from coming to close quarters. Science impends and threatens with the

majestic facts of the divine order. Theology, driven from pretext to

pretext, cries at last, "What! upon compulsion? No: if reasons were

as plenty as blackberries," nothing on compulsion! When Falstaff is

hurried, he says, "Do you think me a swallow, an arrow, or a bullet?

have I, in my poor and old motion, the expedition of thought?" That is

the trouble with the ponderous old past; so it turns Falstaff's deaf

ear to thought, and imitates his strategy.

He is a good mimic of the style of bluntness and honesty. Pretending to

have killed Percy, he cries, "There is Percy: if your father will do me

any honor, so; if not, let him kill the next Percy himself." "Why,"

says the Prince, "Percy I killed myself." "Didst thou? Lord, lord, how

is this world given to lying! If I may be believed, so; if not, let

them that should reward valor bear the sin upon their own heads." You

can hear the same tone to-day wherever shifty impudence pilfers the

inventions and exploits of others to furnish with them a house and

reputation. This style is comic because it is assumed to cover deceit,

but is too scant a pattern after all; and the cloven foot is amusingly

unconscious of being in full sight.

Sir John does not intend to be readily put down. In the matter of

arrest at Dame Quickly's suit for debt, how airily he gives the Chief

Justice tap for tap, and urges that the officers are hindering him

from going on the king's errand! He is hard to get fairly cooped in

a corner; most invaluable counsel to defend a ring, big enough to

break through the most carefully woven indictment. When you think you

have him neatly at bay, the bulky culprit floats over your head in a

twinkling of resource and is gone: it is done so cleverly that you have

not the heart to pursue him farther, or, if you do, it is only for the

sake of enjoying an encore of this trapeze-shifting of his wit.

It is comic when his tone of protestation that he will discharge his

debt to Dame Quickly succeeds in taking in her who has been so often

deceived before. But one weakness is always too strong for another; so

he is constantly betrayed into expense by her, and that is at once her

vice and its reward. "I owe her money; and whether she be damned for

that I know not."

It is also comic that his vanity prevents him from suspecting himself

of cowardice and evasion of duty; so that he indulges the most inflated

self-appreciation, and no misadventure is sharp enough to prick it.

"Embowelled! 'Sblood, 'twas time to counterfeit." And his fright

inspires him with the adage dear ever since to shirkers, "The better

part of valor is discretion;" and it has a sensible purport which

blinds him to his own disgrace. "There is not a dangerous action,"

complains he to the Chief Justice, "but I am thrust upon it. Well,

I cannot last ever. But it was always yet the trick of our English

nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common. I would to

God, my name were not so terrible to the enemy as it is." Does he

really think his bullying style is a perpetual action of bravery, or is

he delighting to be ironical upon himself?

Now Falstaff's mind has many a talent which liberates it from the

grossness of his body. His wit shows a nimble foot of fancy. His

common-sense is an acute ally of his cowardice. The imagination which

betrays him into the largeness of his lying goes into the felicity

of his wit: both are on an ample scale. He rallies Bardolph for his

complexion, and overwhelms his ragged company with comparisons,

just as his men in buckram grow in number. When his fancy seizes an

opportunity he cannot let it go, but unconsciously shifts it into all

possible lights, and exhausts invention to make the point emphatic.

How many imaginative people there are who unconsciously lie in the

same way with their exaggerated raptures at a landscape, their

wholesale contributions to an occurrence! The flavor of stories

improves by going to sea upon their bounding fancies. Only give them

time enough and a free swing among their friends, and an event of the

chimney-corner will become bewitched into a Cinderella at the ball.

These people really believe with the imagination instead of with the

understanding; and, if conscience is comparatively weak, common-sense

is not a sufficient curb to their career.

Falstaff's ragged soldiers have hearts "no bigger than pins' heads." "A

mad fellow met me on the way, and told me that I had unloaded all the

gibbets, and pressed the dead bodies. There's but a shirt and a half

in all my company; and the half-shirt is two napkins tacked together."

This fanciful destitution reminds us of an American improvement upon

it, attributed to a man the smallest hole in whose shirt was that for

the head, so ragged that it had to be washed by the dozen.

All of Falstaff's speeches are one crescendo of phrases; each seems to

breed the next one, and they swarm in his fancy like gnats in a broad

sun. Bardolph's red features are very tropics to yield spicy railing to

him. The ginger of it is hot in the mouth. He never sees that face but

he thinks upon hell-fire, and Dives in his purple, burning. He imagines

he saw it running up Gad's Hill in the pitchy dark, and took it for

an ignis-fatuus. It has saved him a good deal of money in links and

torches.

We come upon the same vein in the "Comedy of Errors," where Dromio

says, "Marry, sir, she's the kitchen-wench, and all grease; and I know

not what use to put her to, but to make a lamp of her, and run from

her by her own light. I warrant her rags, and the tallow in them, will

burn a Poland winter: if she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week

longer than the whole world."

Falstaff might have said of himself that "wherever his shadow falls it

leaves a grease-spot."

Shakspeare evidently relished these unctuous conceits, for in the

"Merry Wives of Windsor," when Falstaff's wooing in the forest is

suddenly interrupted, he says, "I think the devil will not have me

damned, lest the oil that is in me should set hell on fire; he would

never else cross me thus."

There is sometimes in Shakspeare an exaggeration of this kind which

has a Titanic grasp to it that throttles laughter just as it meditates

escape. The grotesque and humorous element is stunned by a fierce and

passionate feeling, such as Dante might have steeped one of the circles

of his Inferno in. A specimen of this may be found in "Henry VIII.,"

where Lord Abergavenny, talking about Wolsey's low-born greatness, says:

"But I can see his pride

Peep through each part of him: whence has he that?

If not from hell, the devil is a niggard;

Or has given all before, and he begins

A new hell in himself."

All the followers of Falstaff catch his habit of improving Bardolph's

redness. The Page could not distinguish his face through a red lattice,

but, at last spying his eyes, thought he had made two holes in a new

red petticoat to peep through. And, after Falstaff is dead, a boy

recalls his fanciful notion that a flea sticking upon Bardolph's nose

was a black soul burning in hell. A specimen worthy of Falstaff is

found in an ancient Greek epigram which celebrates a nose so long that

the owner could never hear himself sneeze. But Falstaff's imagination

is so prolific that we feel as if a great many of these comments on the

text of Bardolph's nose had not come down to us.

But the talent itself has descended; and Falstaff may be regarded as

the mighty progenitor of the American knack at exaggerating, into which

imagination must enter either to make it witty or simply ludicrous. We

can match the felicities of Falstaff from every State of the Union.

Indeed, we are of opinion that emigration, which has impaired the

physical fulness of the Anglo-Saxon man, has not depleted the vein

of his humor: our romancing talent is as vast as the country which

nourishes it by all enterprises and ambitions. We have not fallen away

vilely; we do not bate, do not dwindle. Mr. Dickens declares that even

the national habit of expectoration is on the scale of the country's

streams. He is a genuine descendant of Falstaff, and he must have

always lived at Gad's Hill, where, at some time or other, he helped

the Prince and Poins to rob the fat knight, and outwitted all his

accomplices by taking imagination for his best share of the booty. So

we are not much surprised to hear him describe a high wind with the

amplitude of Falstaff's girth: "The air was for some hours darkened

with a shower of black hats, which are supposed to have been blown off

the heads of unwary passengers in remote parts of the town, and have

been industriously picked up by the fishermen." When Grip, his raven,

falls sick, towards eleven o'clock he was so much worse that "it was

found necessary to muffle the stable-knocker."

But we have made improvements in this style of fiction, and almost

every newspaper might furnish forth a play. We are told of grass in

Colorado that is so short you must lather it before you can mow.

We hear of a man who moves about so lazily that when he works in

his garden the shade of his hat kills the plants. Another man wakes

up in the morning, after a day spent in hunting strawberries, with

only one eye, the other being engaged in holding the cheek which had

marched over it during the night. It was a case of dog-wood poison.

The relatives did not find his mouth until near noon, when it was

discovered just back of his left ear, enjoying the shade. There was a

man who stood on his head under a pile-driver to have a pair of tight

boots driven on. He found himself shortly after in China, perfectly

naked and without a cent in his pocket.

There is a man in the West who is so bow-legged that his pantaloons

have to be cut out with a circular saw. Apropos of this, a pair of

pantaloons which was distributed to one of the sufferers by the forest

fires, a few years ago, was found to be ridiculously small. The man's

wife wanted to know if there lived and breathed a man who had legs no

bigger: if there did, he ought to be taken up for vagrancy as having

no visible means of support. It was discussed whether to use them for

gun-cases, or to keep the tongs in. This reminds us that Falstaff said

you might have thrust Shallow, "and all his apparel, into an eel-skin;

the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court."

In the same style of minifying a thing by magnifying its minuteness,

he says, "If I were sawed into quantities, I should make four dozen

of such bearded hermit's staves as Master Shallow." Then he delights

himself with fancying how he will riot over the slim subject and endow

it with every imaginable chance for provoking laughter: "I will devise

matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual

laughter, the wearing out of six fashions. Oh, it is much that a lie

with a slight oath, and a jest with a sad brow, will do with a fellow

that never had the ache in his shoulders! Oh, you shall see him laugh,

till his face be like a wet cloak ill laid up!"

A lie with an oath not always slight, "and a jest with a sad brow," is

a prophecy of America which Mr. Sumner might have incorporated among

his other classic Voices.

The country also supplies specimens of a wild-cat oratory in whose

bombast Shakspeare might have recognized an element of his own

imagination. I am not certain whether the following is genuine, or

possesses only the truth of verisimilitude: "Build a worm-fence around

the winter's supply of summer weather; skim the clouds from the sky

with a teaspoon; catch a thunder-cloud in a bladder; break a hurricane

to harness; ground-sluice an earthquake; lasso an avalanche; pin a

napkin on the crater of an active volcano; but, Mr. Chairman, never

expect to see me false to my principles." On the whole, the stress laid

upon the "principles" is quite in favor of its American genuineness.

The quality of imagination which creates the humorousness of an

exaggeration can also be fine enough to stop it before a laugh is

raised. In that case it may be charged with the subtlety of wit. But,

if the poetic feeling predominates, the sense of wit is merged in

that, and requires an after-thought to recall it; as when Shakspeare

describes how the populace rushed to see Cleopatra coming up the river

Cydnus, leaving Antony in the market-place: he

"Did sit alone,

Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,

Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,

And made a gap in Nature."

"But for vacancy" is a phrase that piques suggestion. It may be that

the air dreads leaving a vacuum if it goes to see her. It may be that

Antony's whistling vaguely detains it. Or it may be that the air is

in a mood so vacuous that it cannot entertain any preference for any

thing, even for Cleopatra. And the possibility that the atmosphere

could all leave and go elsewhere is an extravagance at once large and

subtle. But, just as the smile impends, the ample poetry of the whole

passage checks it.

A passage from "The English Traveller" of Thomas Heywood, published in

1633, is thoroughly American in its style of describing a drinking

scene, and the shipwreck of the company by drink. The topers suddenly

conceive that the room is a vessel laboring at sea: one climbs the

bed-post and reports turbulent weather, whereat all go to work to

lighten the vessel by throwing the furniture into the street. One man

gets into the bass-viol for a cock-boat. When the constable enters he

is taken for Neptune, and his posse for Tritons. In short, the American

gift for exaggeration was started under an Elizabethan sun.

Sometimes the breadth of imagination produces the effect of wit by

bringing two incongruous ideas under one statement. During a political

procession, a remarkably dirty man, stopping in front of a small boy

who was sitting on a fence, expected to have some fun with him. "Well,

boy, how much do you weigh?" "As much as you would if you were washed."

Such a free-soiler as that can be matched with nothing short of a line

of Shakspeare:

"Lord of thy presence, _and no land beside_."

The American would be quite capable of composing narratives in the

Eastern vein, as in that series of fables called the Hitopadesa, which

attributed to animals the passions and motives of men. The famous

mediæval poem of "Reynard the Fox" presumes the same intelligence. Here

is a specimen, whose slight flavor of coarseness is lost and forgotten

in the genius of its climax. Just as a traveller was writing his name

on the register of a Leavenworth hotel, a certain insect took its way

across the page. Laying down the pen, the man remarked, "I've been bled

by St. Joe fleas, bitten by Kansas City spiders, and interviewed by

Fort Scott gray-backs; but hang me if I was ever in a place where these

critters looked over the register to take the number of your room."

A Western editor, culminating in his description of a tornado, said,

"In short, it was a wind that just sat up on its hind legs and howled."

Some of the Texan cows have been lately described as so thin that it

takes two men to see one of them. The men stand back to back, so that

one says, "Here she comes!" and the other cries, "There she goes!" Thus

between them both the cow is seen.

All these American instances are conceived in the pure Shakspearian

blending of the understanding and the imagination. But one more of

them, perhaps the most artistically perfect of all, must suffice. A

coachman, driving up some mountains in Vermont, was asked by an outside

passenger if they were as steep on the other side also. "Steep! Chain

lightnin' couldn't go down 'em witheout the breechin' on!"

We have seen in what the comedy of Falstaff's character consists. Its

humor lies in the tolerance which his inexhaustible wile procures for

his vices. We are all the time reconciled to his behavior, though in

anybody else it would be outrageous,--"most tolerable and not to be

borne." But such a Noachian deluge of animal spirits would carry away a

bulkier man than he. It is love of fun more than villainous inclination

which leads him into many of his scrapes. When he is moralizing upon

his course of life, and half-earnestly complaining that the Prince had

been the ruin of him, the latter has only to interrupt this strain

with, "Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack?" when he drowns

his megrims in the jolliest laugh, and draws his belt another hole for

an adventure. The midnight frolic, with sack and supper afterwards,

attracts him quite as much as the prospect of checking the consumption

of his purse. He is quite conscious of a mercurial disposition that

keeps the door ajar for every temptation. There are intervals of

self-upbraiding--or are they seedy forenoons before the sherris sets in

to wet his coast?--when he wishes the Prince were not such a rascally,

fascinating companion. And we ought to put to Falstaff's credit the

fact that to be hail-fellow with a prince has unsettled many a sterner

virtue; and he says flatly to him that he wishes they knew "where a

commodity of good names were to be bought."

When the old lord of the council rated him, he was too proud to seem to

attend, but quite aware that he had been blown up in a justifiable way.

His love of mirth is a better ally than the Prince, far more sumptuous

and capable; for it helps us to condone his follies, and so qualifies

him to be an object of Humor.

And reflection pursues the train which Humor starts. We are charmed

into admitting that there must undoubtedly be many good native

qualities, still unobscured, lingering in vicious haunts and courses;

and Humor has no sublimer mission than to make us tolerate that

thought. She seizes the coy hand of Philanthropy, and beguiles it "with

nod and beck and wreathed smile" towards its rugged purpose.

There are some places which we only venture to visit in Shakspeare's

company. We have been too well bred to seek our vices in such quarters,

but not so well bred as to accommodate no vice. We cannot air our

intolerance before the Searcher of hearts; perhaps we are grateful to

him for that gift of Shakspeare which bids the tavern and the brothel

be tolerable to our conscience by the touches of nature which make

_the whole_ world kin. Our respect for mankind is increased if the men

who disgrace it can still be made to appear inseparable members of it.

When we see the common air pressing in to ventilate the most infected

places, we admire this brave, elastic quality, and rejoice to feel it

fill our lungs. But what policeman or sanitary commissioner can we

trust in a tour to inspect the cesspools of the world? Only such an

one who has the counterinfection of his own impartial light and air.

We follow in the wake of his geniality, forget to hold disinfectants

to our nose, find the air still medicinal, since it has retained

qualities belonging to ourselves; and we step from ward to ward with a

reconciling smile.

We do not quite relish the rebuff which Prince Hal, after his

accession, administers to Sir John. Our good-nature is wrenched by the

abrupt transition from roystering fellowship and complicity with all

of Falstaff's infirmities. We acknowledge that the King cannot go on

countenancing the courses which, as the Prince, he found so amusing;

but we are sorry that he could not let down the tutor and the feeder

of his riots more softly. His downfall carries Justice Shallow with

him, to be sure, of whom he had borrowed a thousand pounds, fortunately

for our sense of poetic justice: and there is some recompense for

Falstaff's mortification in hearing Shallow whimper for his money; for

he lent to the knight and to his golden prospects, not to the prodigal

Sir John. And it is good to see the indomitable wit outflank even this

disaster with the advice to Shallow not to grieve; he will be sent for

in private; the King must appear thus sternly to the world.

The King has cut the cord of their mutual revelling at one stroke.

Down tumbles Falstaff, and it breaks his heart; as Dame Quickly says,

"The King has killed his heart." Nym says bluntly, "The King hath

run bad humors on the knight, that's the even of it;" which Pistol

adorns thus: "Nym, thou hast spoke the right; his heart is fracted and

corroborate." There was a human heart, then, involved in his enjoyment

of the Prince's condescension. Yes, and no reasons of state can quite

reconcile us to the sudden frost which fell upon its flower, flaunting

as it was and rank of smell; since both of the men interchanged it,

and wore it on their breast as token of copartnership in folly.

Shakspeare himself cannot convince me that there was kingliness in thus

snapping up the partner of his revels and sending him to the Fleet. It

would have broken the heart of any less bulky comrade. Perhaps it is

the nature of kings and titled men to be suddenly forgetful of the

humanness which generally makes a man ineligible to office; so that the

kingship was a charter from Providence to give Falstaff his first sneap

of retribution. None the less do we sympathize with him rather than

with the King, because we are all prodigals out of office.

But notice the art of Shakspeare in this, that, if the King had broken

with his old pal in such a way as not to hurt our feelings, we should

not have been so well prepared to sympathize with the manner of his

death. When that hour comes, we feel the full effect of Humor in the

unwillingness to let our knowledge of his grossness and knavery break

the legacy of his geniality. It sets in again, to take him off, "at

the turning o' the tide." Dame Quickly, Bardolph, and the rest, cannot

prevent reminiscences of his wit from seasoning their tears. Her story

of his end, with its delicious inconsequence, cannot blunt the thrust

we feel when he plays with flowers and babbles of green fields; and it

suddenly occurs to us that the battered old sinner had once listened

to the birds in the hedge-rows, and climbed summer trees to explore

their nests. This bloated breather of tavern fumes had expanded a

boy's glad lungs on the English hillsides, and shared the landscape's

innocence. It just saves us from damning him, and we shift elsewhere

the responsibility of doing that, though we are not prepared to go as

far as Bardolph, who says he would like to be with him "wheresome'er he

is, either in heaven or in hell." "Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's

in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom." Dame Quickly,

"clear thy crystals," for at least he was none the worse for being

witty; and Bardolph may some day find himself in company that is at

once bad and criminally stupid.