Part 8

We see it too in the scene where he brings his wife into the Duke's company, with such an air of self-possession mixed with a pleased sense that she is his best joke at the punctilio of fashionable life. "An ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own; a poor humor of mine, sir, to take that that no man else will." Not so poor a humor; for humor itself does that, and adopts into the human family the outcasts who come between the wind and our nobility. "Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house; as your pearl in your foul oyster." Then he amuses the Duke with a strain that runs into irony, because it has the semblance of being seriously meant, upon some other esteemed punctilios of the code of honor: he rallies the whole nicely graded scale of customs from the retort courteous to the lie direct, and nominates in order the degrees of the lie. But you may avoid even the lie direct with an _If_. "If you said so, then I said so." How many a quarrel on the platform and in the parlor has been stifled by this bolster of an _If_, and the parties quietly subside into a profounder dislike.

The kind of marriages which the French call _de convenance_ get a wholesome rebuke from him; and the vulgarity of its terms is not wanton but highly apposite, as it is a part of the intended satire. It strips the matrimonial arrangement of its rhetoric, when he tells the shepherd that it is another simple sin in him to bring the incompatible members of his flock together, "out of all reasonable match. If thou be'st not damned for this, the devil himself will have no shepherds." He really imparts to you the surmise that the _mariages de convenance_ were appropriately derived by natural selection from the animal world.

In fine, the Duke characterizes Touchstone well when he says, "He uses his folly like a stalking-horse; and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit." So hunters, who are seriously concerned to obtain food, work along towards their game behind a mimicry of it. And such a hunter for the soul of goodness, stalking it underneath the obvious beguilement, is the Humor of Shakspeare:--

"In good earnest, and so God mend me."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 4: A clear trace of Shakspeare. Malvolio says, "A demure travel of regard," when he imagines the state-humor he will put on; and when he will send for Toby he expects to quench his familiar smile "with an austere regard of control." The "Twelfth Night" was first acted in February, 1602.]

FALSTAFF:

HIS COMPANIONS; AMERICANISMS.

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.