Chapter 9

Dorriforth. Could you, under Falstaff’s pasteboard cheeks and the sad disfigurement of his mates? There was no excess of scenery, Auberon says. Why, Falstaff’s very person was nothing _but_ scenery. A false face, a false figure, false hands, false legs--scarcely a square inch on which the irrepressible humor of the rogue could break into illustrative touches. And he is so human, so expressive, of so rich a physiognomy. One would rather Mr. Beerbohm Tree should have played the part in his own clever, elegant slimness---that would at least have represented life. A Falstaff all “make-up” is an opaque substance. This seems to me an example of what the rest still more suggested, that in dealing with a production like the “Merry Wives” really the main quality to put forward is discretion. You must resolve such a production, as a thing represented, into a tone that the imagination can take an aesthetic pleasure in. Its grossness must be transposed, as it were, to a fictive scale, a scale of fainter tints and generalized signs. A filthy, eruptive, realistic Bardolph and Pistol overlay the romantic with the literal. Relegate them and blur them, to the eye; let their blotches be constructive and their raggedness relative.

Amicia. Ah, it was _so_ ugly!

Dorriforth. What a pity then, after all, there wasn’t more painted canvas to divert you! Ah, decidedly, the theatre of the future must be that.

Florentia. Please remember your theory that our life’s a scramble, and suffer me to go and dress for dinner.

1889.