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;"