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.
But notice the art of Shakspeare in this, that, if the King had broken with his old pal in such a way as not to hurt our feelings, we should not have been so well prepared to sympathize with the manner of his death. When that hour comes, we feel the full effect of Humor in the unwillingness to let our knowledge of his grossness and knavery break the legacy of his geniality. It sets in again, to take him off, "at the turning o' the tide." Dame Quickly, Bardolph, and the rest, cannot prevent reminiscences of his wit from seasoning their tears. Her story of his end, with its delicious inconsequence, cannot blunt the thrust we feel when he plays with flowers and babbles of green fields; and it suddenly occurs to us that the battered old sinner had once listened to the birds in the hedge-rows, and climbed summer trees to explore their nests. This bloated breather of tavern fumes had expanded a boy's glad lungs on the English hillsides, and shared the landscape's innocence. It just saves us from damning him, and we shift elsewhere the responsibility of doing that, though we are not prepared to go as far as Bardolph, who says he would like to be with him "wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." "Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom." Dame Quickly, "clear thy crystals," for at least he was none the worse for being witty; and Bardolph may some day find himself in company that is at once bad and criminally stupid.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] But since Voltaire's time, and notably within the present century, the French mind has amply atoned for previous misconceptions, and its tribute to the genius of Shakspeare is rivalling England itself. Germany was earlier in this field; but, if France means to annex Shakspeare, she can afford to let Alsace and Lorraine go. The younger Hugo's study of Hamlet; the volumes of Alfred Mézières, of Philaréte Chasles; the studies of Guizot; the admirable article upon Cleopatra by Henri Blaze de Bury, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, June 15, 1872; another, later, in the same review, upon "Medical Psychology in the Dramas of Shakspeare," &c.,—show a noble disposition and a thorough sympathy.
[6] Obviously the proper reading. Prince Henry says, "This Doll Tear-street should be some road." First noticed by Coleridge.