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.