Oxford Lectures on Poetry Part 16

[23] x.x.xII, C., x.x.xIV, F.

[24] He contemplates even the study of metaphysics, LI, C., LIV, F.

[25] L, C., LIII, F.

[26] XXIV, C., XXVI, F.

[27] Cf. in addition to the letters already referred to, the obscure letter to Bailey, XXII, C., XXIV, F., which, however, is early, and not quite in agreement with later thoughts. I should observe perhaps that if Keats's position, as formulated above, is accepted, the question still remains whether a truth which is also beauty, or a beauty which is also truth, can be found by man; and, if so, whether it can, in strictness, be called by either of those names.

[28] CLV, C., CCVI, F. See on these sentences the Note at the end of the lecture.

[29] An expression used in reference to Wordsworth, x.x.xIV, C., x.x.xVI, F.

[30] I have not s.p.a.ce to dwell on this distinction, but I must warn the reader that he will probably misunderstand the important pa.s.sage in the revised _Hyperion_, 161 ff., unless he consults Mr. de Selincourt's edition.

[31] XXII, C., XXV, F.

[32] That is, in 'half-knowledge,' 'doubts,' 'mysteries' (see p.

235), while the philosopher is sometimes supposed by Keats to have a reasoned certainty about everything. It is curious to reflect that great metaphysicians, like Spinoza and Hegel, are often accused of the un-moral impartiality which Keats attributes to the poet.

[33] LXXVI, C., Lx.x.x, F.

[34] The ultimate origin of the dream-pa.s.sage in both poems may well be Adam's dream in _Paradise Lost_, Book viii.:

She disappear'd, and left me dark: I waked To find her, or for ever to deplore Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure.

Keats alludes to this in XXII, C., XXIV, F.

[35] It is tempting to conjecture with Mr. Forman that the full-stop before the last sentence is a misprint, and that we should read 'the world,--those who,' etc., so that the last two clauses would be relative clauses co-ordinate with 'who love not their fellow-beings.'

Not to speak of the run of the sentences, this conjecture is tempting because of the comma after 'fellow-beings,' and because the paragraph is followed by the quotation ('those' should be 'they'),

The good die first, And those whose hearts are dry as summer's dust Burn to the socket.

The good who die first correspond with the 'pure and tender-hearted'

who perish and, as we naturally suppose, perish young, like the poet in _Alastor_. But, as the last sentence stands, these, as well as the torpid, live to old age. It is hard to believe that Sh.e.l.ley meant this; but as he was in England when _Alastor_ was printed, he probably revised the proofs, and it is perhaps easier to suppose that he wrote what is printed than that he pa.s.sed un.o.bserved the serious misprint supposed by Mr. Forman.

[36] XVIII, C., XX, F.

THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF

THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF[1]

Of the two persons princ.i.p.ally concerned in the rejection of Falstaff, Henry, both as Prince and as King, has received, on the whole, full justice from readers and critics. Falstaff, on the other hand, has been in one respect the most unfortunate of Shakespeare's famous characters.

All of them, in pa.s.sing from the mind of their creator into other minds, suffer change; they tend to lose their harmony through the disproportionate attention bestowed on some one feature, or to lose their uniqueness by being conventionalised into types already familiar.

But Falstaff was degraded by Shakespeare himself. The original character is to be found alive in the two parts of _Henry IV._, dead in _Henry V._, and nowhere else. But not very long after these plays were composed, Shakespeare wrote, and he afterwards revised, the very entertaining piece called _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. Perhaps his company wanted a new play on a sudden; or perhaps, as one would rather believe, the tradition may be true that Queen Elizabeth, delighted with the Falstaff scenes of _Henry IV._, expressed a wish to see the hero of them again, and to see him in love. Now it was no more possible for Shakespeare to show his own Falstaff in love than to turn twice two into five. But he could write in haste--the tradition says, in a fortnight--a comedy or farce differing from all his other plays in this, that its scene is laid in English middle-cla.s.s life, and that it is prosaic almost to the end. And among the characters he could introduce a disreputable fat old knight with attendants, and could call them Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym. And he could represent this knight a.s.sailing, for financial purposes, the virtue of two matrons, and in the event baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, p.r.i.c.ked, mocked, insulted, and, worst of all, repentant and didactic. It is horrible. It is almost enough to convince one that Shakespeare himself could sanction the parody of Ophelia in the _Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_. But it no more touches the real Falstaff than Ophelia is degraded by that parody. To picture the real Falstaff befooled like the Falstaff of the _Merry Wives_ is like imagining Iago the gull of Roderigo, or Becky Sharp the dupe of Amelia Osborne. Before he had been served the least of these tricks he would have had his brains taken out and b.u.t.tered, and have given them to a dog for a New Year's gift. I quote the words of the impostor, for after all Shakespeare made him and gave to him a few sentences worthy of Falstaff himself. But they are only a few--one side of a sheet of notepaper would contain them. And yet critics have solemnly debated at what period in his life Sir John endured the gibes of Master Ford, and whether we should put this comedy between the two parts of _Henry IV._, or between the second of them and _Henry V._ And the Falstaff of the general reader, it is to be feared, is an impossible conglomerate of two distinct characters, while the Falstaff of the mere play-goer is certainly much more like the impostor than the true man.

The separation of these two has long ago been effected by criticism, and is insisted on in almost all competent estimates of the character of Falstaff. I do not propose to attempt a full account either of this character or of that of Prince Henry, but shall connect the remarks I have to make on them with a question which does not appear to have been satisfactorily discussed--the question of the rejection of Falstaff by the Prince on his accession to the throne. What do we feel, and what are we meant to feel, as we witness this rejection? And what does our feeling imply as to the characters of Falstaff and the new King?

1.

Sir John, you remember, is in Gloucestershire, engaged in borrowing a thousand pounds from Justice Shallow; and here Pistol, riding helter-skelter from London, brings him the great news that the old King is as dead as nail in door, and that Harry the Fifth is the man. Sir John, in wild excitement, taking any man's horses, rushes to London; and he carries Shallow with him, for he longs to reward all his friends. We find him standing with his companions just outside Westminster Abbey, in the crowd that is waiting for the King to come out after his coronation.

He himself is stained with travel, and has had no time to spend any of the thousand pounds in buying new liveries for his men. But what of that? This poor show only proves his earnestness of affection, his devotion, how he could not deliberate or remember or have patience to shift himself, but rode day and night, thought of nothing else but to see Henry, and put all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him. And now he stands sweating with desire to see him, and repeating and repeating this one desire of his heart--'to see him.' The moment comes. There is a shout within the Abbey like the roaring of the sea, and a clangour of trumpets, and the doors open and the procession streams out.

FAL. G.o.d save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!

PIST. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!

FAL. G.o.d save thee, my sweet boy!

KING. My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.

CH. JUST. Have you your wits? Know you what 'tis you speak?

FAL. My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!

KING. I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

I have long dream'd of such a kind of man, So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane; But being awaked I do despise my dream.

Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace; Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men.

Reply not to me with a fool-born jest: Presume not that I am the thing I was; For G.o.d doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn'd away my former self; So will I those that kept me company.

When thou dost hear I am as I have been, Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast, The tutor and the feeder of my riots: Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death, As I have done the rest of my misleaders, Not to come near our person by ten mile.

For competence of life I will allow you, That lack of means enforce you not to evil: And, as we hear you do reform yourselves, We will, according to your strengths and qualities, Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord, To see perform'd the tenour of our word.

Set on.

The procession pa.s.ses out of sight, but Falstaff and his friends remain.

He shows no resentment. He comforts himself, or tries to comfort himself--first, with the thought that he has Shallow's thousand pounds, and then, more seriously, I believe, with another thought. The King, he sees, must look thus to the world; but he will be sent for in private when night comes, and will yet make the fortunes of his friends. But even as he speaks, the Chief Justice, accompanied by Prince John, returns, and gives the order to his officers:

Go, carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet; Take all his company along with him.

Falstaff breaks out, 'My lord, my lord,' but he is cut short and hurried away; and after a few words between the Prince and the Chief Justice the scene closes, and with it the drama.

What are our feelings during this scene? They will depend on our feelings about Falstaff. If we have not keenly enjoyed the Falstaff scenes of the two plays, if we regard Sir John chiefly as an old reprobate, not only a sensualist, a liar, and a coward, but a cruel and dangerous ruffian, I suppose we enjoy his discomfiture and consider that the King has behaved magnificently. But if we _have_ keenly enjoyed the Falstaff scenes, if we have enjoyed them as Shakespeare surely meant them to be enjoyed, and if, accordingly, Falstaff is not to us solely or even chiefly a reprobate and ruffian, we feel, I think, during the King's speech, a good deal of pain and some resentment; and when, without any further offence on Sir John's part, the Chief Justice returns and sends him to prison, we stare in astonishment. These, I believe, are, in greater or less degree, the feelings of most of those who really enjoy the Falstaff scenes (as many readers do not). Nor are these feelings diminished when we remember the end of the whole story, as we find it in _Henry V._, where we learn that Falstaff quickly died, and, according to the testimony of persons not very sentimental, died of a broken heart.[2] Suppose this merely to mean that he sank under the shame of his public disgrace, and it is pitiful enough: but the words of Mrs. Quickly, 'The king has killed his heart'; of Nym, 'The king hath run bad humours on the knight; that's the even of it'; of Pistol,

Nym, thou hast spoke the right, His heart is fracted and corroborate,

a.s.suredly point to something more than wounded pride; they point to wounded affection, and remind us of Falstaff's own answer to Prince Hal's question, 'Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound?' 'A thousand pound, Hal? a million: thy love is worth a million: thou owest me thy love.'

Now why did Shakespeare end his drama with a scene which, though undoubtedly striking, leaves an impression so unpleasant? I will venture to put aside without discussion the idea that he meant us throughout the two plays to regard Falstaff with disgust or indignation, so that we naturally feel nothing but pleasure at his fall; for this idea implies that kind of inability to understand Shakespeare with which it is idle to argue. And there is another and a much more ingenious suggestion which must equally be rejected as impossible. According to it, Falstaff, having listened to the King's speech, did not seriously hope to be sent for by him in private; he fully realised the situation at once, and was only making game of Shallow; and in his immediate turn upon Shallow when the King goes out, 'Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,' we are meant to see his humorous superiority to any rebuff, so that we end the play with the delightful feeling that, while Henry has done the right thing, Falstaff, in his outward overthrow, has still proved himself inwardly invincible. This suggestion comes from a critic who understands Falstaff, and in the suggestion itself shows that he understands him.[3]

But it provides no solution, because it wholly ignores, and could not account for, that which follows the short conversation with Shallow.

Falstaff's dismissal to the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove beyond doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare to be taken as a catastrophe which not even his humour could enable him to surmount.

Moreover, these interpretations, even if otherwise admissible, would still leave our problem only partly solved. For what troubles us is not only the disappointment of Falstaff, it is the conduct of Henry. It was inevitable that on his accession he should separate himself from Sir John, and we wish nothing else. It is satisfactory that Sir John should have a competence, with the hope of promotion in the highly improbable case of his reforming himself. And if Henry could not trust himself within ten miles of so fascinating a companion, by all means let him be banished that distance: we do not complain. These arrangements would not have prevented a satisfactory ending: the King could have communicated his decision, and Falstaff could have accepted it, in a private interview rich in humour and merely touched with pathos. But Shakespeare has so contrived matters that Henry could not send a private warning to Falstaff even if he wished to, and in their public meeting Falstaff is made to behave in so infatuated and outrageous a manner that great sternness on the King's part was unavoidable. And the curious thing is that Shakespeare did not stop here. If this had been all we should have felt pain for Falstaff, but not, perhaps, resentment against Henry. But two things we do resent. Why, when this painful incident seems to be over, should the Chief Justice return and send Falstaff to prison? Can this possibly be meant for an act of private vengeance on the part of the Chief Justice, unknown to the King? No; for in that case Shakespeare would have shown at once that the King disapproved and cancelled it. It must have been the King's own act. This is one thing we resent; the other is the King's sermon. He had a right to turn away his former self, and his old companions with it, but he had no right to talk all of a sudden like a clergyman; and surely it was both ungenerous and insincere to speak of them as his 'misleaders,' as though in the days of Eastcheap and Gadshill he had been a weak and silly lad. We have seen his former self, and we know that it was nothing of the kind. He had shown himself, for all his follies, a very strong and independent young man, deliberately amusing himself among men over whom he had just as much ascendency as he chose to exert. Nay, he amused himself not only among them, but at their expense. In his first soliloquy--and first soliloquies are usually significant--he declares that he a.s.sociates with them in order that, when at some future time he shows his true character, he may be the more wondered at for his previous aberrations.

You may think he deceives himself here; you may believe that he frequented Sir John's company out of delight in it and not merely with this cold-blooded design; but at any rate he _thought_ the design was his one motive. And, that being so, two results follow. He ought in honour long ago to have given Sir John clearly to understand that they must say good-bye on the day of his accession. And, having neglected to do this, he ought not to have lectured him as his misleader. It was not only ungenerous, it was dishonest. It looks disagreeably like an attempt to buy the praise of the respectable at the cost of honour and truth.