Chapter IV: Part 4

All the scenes of the "Midsummer Night's Dream," which depend upon the desire of the Athenian mechanicals to amuse their prince, are merely comical when taken alone. The characters thus constructed, by passing into the serious portions of the play, infect it with the element of humor; for the simple earnestness of all their clownishness fraternizes in no offensive way with the more poetical moods of high society, and we feel the charm that equalizes all mankind. The pomp of a court is concentrated at a fustian play that is poorly propertied with bush, lantern, and a fellow daubed with lime. Simpleness and duty tender this contrast, and it comes not amiss. Their crude parody of the fate of Pyramus and Thisbe, done in perfect good faith, is a claim that humble love may have its fortunes too, as well as that of the proud and over-conscious dames who have been roaming through the woods, sick with fancies. What a delightful raillery it is! Yes, we take the point: "The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them."

It is also a suggestion of the subtlest humor when Titania summons her fairies to wait upon Bottom; for the fact is that the soul's airy and nimble fancies are constantly detailed to serve the donkeyism of this world. "Be kind and courteous to this gentleman." Divine gifts stick musk-roses in his sleek, smooth head. The world is a peg that keeps all spiritual being tethered. John Watt agonizes to teach this _vis inertiæ_ to drag itself by the car-load; Palissy starves for twenty years to enamel its platter; Franklin charms its house against thunder; Raphael contributes halos to glorify its ignorance of divinity; all the poets gather for its beguilement, hop in its walk and gambol before it, scratch its head, bring honey-bags, and light its farthing dip at glow-worms' eyes. Bottom's want of insight is circled round by fulness of insight, his clumsiness by dexterity. In matter of eating, he really prefers provender: "good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow." But how shrewdly Bottom manages this holding of genius to his service! He knows how to send it to be oriented with the blossoms and the sweets, giving it the characteristic counsel not to fret itself too much in the action.

You see there is nothing sour and cynical about Bottom. His daily peck of oats, with plenty of munching-time, travels to the black cell where the drop of gall gets secreted into the ink of starving thinkers, and sings content to it on oaten straw. Bottom, full-ballasted, haltered to a brown-stone-fronted crib, with digestion always waiting upon appetite, tosses a tester to Shakspeare, who might, if the tradition be true, have held his horse in the purlieus of the Curtain or Rose Theatre: perhaps he sublet the holding while he slipped in to show Bottom how he is a deadly earnest fool; and the boxes crow and clap their unconsciousness of being put into the poet's celestial stocks. All this time Shakspeare is divinely restrained from bitterness by the serenity which overlooks a scene. If, like the ostrich, he had been only the largest of the birds which do not fly, he might have wrangled for his rations of ten-penny nails and leather, established perennial indigestion in literature, and furnished plumes to jackdaws. But he flew closest to the sun, and competed with the dawn for a first taste of its sweet and fresh impartiality.

The humor in this play meddles even with love; for that, too, must be the sport of circumstance and superior power, yet always continue to be the deepest motive of mankind. The juice of love's flower dropped on the eyelids of these distempered lovers makes the caprices of passion show and shift; love in idleness becomes love in earnest, as Puck distils the drops of marriage or of mischief. Titania herself is possessed with that common illusion which marries gracious qualities to absurd companionship. Says Puck,--

"Those things do best please me
That befall preposterously."

But this is fleeting. Shakspeare soon breaks the spell in which some of his most delicate and sprightly verses have revelled. The whole play expresses humor on a revel, and brings into one human feeling the supernature, the caprice and gross mischance, the serious drift of life.

TOUCHSTONE.

When we pass from Jaques to Touchstone in "As You Like It," we have expelled that bitter drop which infused sadness into our vein, and the pulse resumes its hilarity. Jaques was not so well-tempered as the female celebrity of our day, who made it a rule, she said, when she heard any scandal of a friend, to hope for the best and believe the worst. Touchstone agrees substantially with Jaques in his views about court-fashions and social conventions, and says things quite as sharp; but he has the tone of genuine humor, and its good-nature never deserts him except when his legs do, as he takes that dispiriting journey into the forest of Arden. We should say that, for a man of his breeding, the clownish and ill-favored Audrey would overcome the most redoubtable temper; for we half believe with Jaques that his "loving voyage is but for two months victualled:" but he has no cynical suspicion. When he sees the sentimental plight of Rosalind, he merrily parodies it, and imagines an old flirtation of his with one Jane Smile; pretending to recollect that he wooed a peascod instead of her in her absence, from which he "took two cods, and, giving her them again, said with weeping tears, 'Wear these for my sake.'" Then he sums it all up with the tolerant reflection, "We, that are true lovers, run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly:" that is, Nature can be foolish in love, but the folly is mortal as all the things of Nature are, and will pass away leaving love behind. Therefore he'll have no jibes about it; and Rosalind justly replies, "Thou speak'st wiser than thou art 'ware of." In his quick answer to this, we detect the purpose of Shakspeare to keep the character ignorant of its own _naïveté_: "Nay, I shall ne'er be 'ware of mine own wit, till I break my shins against it." For humor is not so studiedly conscious of its own quality as irony and satire are. Jaques, meeting Orlando over ears deep in love, says ill-natured things to him, and invites him to a game of railing "against our mistress the world, and all our misery." The difference between his wit and Touchstone's is subtly indicated throughout the play, and is one of Shakspeare's most admirable studies in nature. Jaques marks the moment when the virtue of complete knowledge of the world passes into the vice of discontent. Touchstone expresses the gladness of being a member of this inevitable world, and of tolerating himself with the other fools. Thus all his strictures upon society have this superiority, that they cannot be suspected of hypocrisy and ill-will. Nothing is so depressing as the cynic's perpetual strain of undervaluing. It exhausts the heart like an air-bell; the feather of his irony no longer floats, but drops like lead to weigh us down with suspecting ourselves, and so dragging by that mood all the other people into a pitiful depreciation. We grow light again and rise buoyantly to the sunshiny surface when Touchstone implicates us so good-humoredly in unwisdom, counting himself in, not to miss his taste of the impartiality we all require.

As his name indicates, he tests with a touch the metal of society, and shows dispassionately the color of spuriousness. His foolishness is his naturalness. He is a born simpleton in the sense of being unworldly, a fool "by heavenly compulsion." So he is continually in a state of organic contrast to conventionality. He hears the wrestling-match described, in which three men had their ribs broken. "What is the sport, monsieur, that the ladies have lost?" "Why, this that I speak of." "Thus men may grow wiser every day! It is the first time that ever I heard breaking of ribs was sport for ladies." The people in the fashion are the real wearers of motley, as Celia says: "Since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show." Touchstone is

"Wise enough to play the fool; And, to do that well, craves a kind of wit; He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time; Not, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. This is a practice As full of labor as a wise man's art."

In these lines, Shakspeare provides us with the pass-key to the purpose of his court fools and clowns. In them the world's confidential moments speak, when it is off its guard or has no motive to dissimulate. And it is a benefit if men can discover their folly by having it wisely shown to them.

"The wise man's folly is anatomiz'd Even by the squandering glances of the fool."

Jaques accosts him in the forest, "Good-morrow, fool." Touchstone replies, "Call me not fool, till Heaven hath sent me fortune." For thus, indeed, like the wise men, he will have a social chance to show, as they do, what his folly is. Jaques relates how he heard Touchstone airing the solemn triviality of well-ordered circles. Taking out his dial,--

"Thus may we see, quoth he, how the world wags; 'Tis but an hour ago, since it was nine; And, after one hour more, 'twill be eleven; And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot, And thereby hangs a tale."

What tale? Why, the everlasting tedious one of over-accredited common-place behavior. Only a Touchstone, with his sly appreciation, can lend any liveliness to that. No wonder Jaques exclaims, "Motley's the only wear." He sees that Touchstone "hath strange places crammed with observation," and is a man after his own mind. If the temper of Jaques only could have been invested in that motley, they that would be most galled with his folly, "they most must laugh." He is delighted to find that fools can be "so deep contemplative." The deepness of it rests on Touchstone's appreciation of the average shallowness, but there is nothing in his tone to stir that up to a feeble sputter of resentment. Something in the tone continually appeals to us, as he did to Audrey: "Doth my simple feature content you?" Yes, there is nothing scurrilous in thee, else thou hadst not taken up so comfortably with Audrey, who cannot even wish that the gods had made her poetical. "Who calls?" says Corin. "Your betters, sir," replies Touchstone; for everybody is superior to somebody.

What a fine pretence he makes that good manners are essential to salvation, when he asks Corin, "Wast ever in court, shepherd?" Never at court! "Then thy manners must be wicked; and wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation." See the mock Grundy lift his hands, and cast upward the look of shocked superiority. It is done well enough to serve our social virtuosity for a whole epoch of its disdain.

And mark what good sense the fellow has; for, knowing that Audrey cannot appreciate his parts, he says: "When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical." Audrey replies: "I do not know what poetical is. Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?" Honest and true! We see what has won the heart of this motley disparager of cant and shams.

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.

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_."