Part 9

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.