life; it is, so to speak, his sole business and occupation. Falstaff is a perfect epicure, a complete Eudæmonist, in the shape of a cavalier of Shakspeare's time. He is without great passions, for such afford by their gratification, no doubt, a great yet at best but a transitory pleasure; while the torture with which such ungratified desires scourge and hurt the soul is far greater and more lasting. Neither has he any love for wickedness, properly speaking he is without gross vices or crimes, for they are enemies to the real enjoyment of life, since the troubled conscience cannot rest, and their fruits are rotten from the very first. Besides, great crimes would require pains and trouble for their execution, and are immediately followed by the fear of punishment, and great vices invariably blunt and deaden the sense of enjoyment. Neither is he envious or jealous-for envy is its own tormentor-but he is ready to rejoice at the pleasure of others, and even to assist others in procuring it, so long, at least, as it does not cost him any very irksome trouble. As to lesser faults, lying, cheating, lechery, and chambering, he is not over particular; even to a little thieving without violence he has no objection, when he thinks he can rely upon high protection, and especially if he can mix up with it a good joke. He trusts to his wit to screen him from all unpleasant consequences; such peccadilloes he thinks both natural and inevitable, since without them he must go without pleasure, and without the means of procuring it. Were it possible he would not wish to commit a single fault except in fun, and even if he could not be absolutely good and virtuous, he certainly would never be a monster of vice. For if he does not absolutely love virtue, it is only because it demands more firmness and thoughtfulness, and a greater command and renunciation of self, than he possesses. If he believes not in virtue, it is because it seems to him a monstrous thing, a mere piece of sophistry and pretension, to expect man to go against the impulses of his nature, and to give up present pleasure and ease for the prospect of future joy and happiness. Virtue, therefore, and its pretended pleasures, are in his sight a mere word like honour; it has no skill in surgery, nor in aught else; it has no good for the living, and does at most but honour the dead, who are insensible to it: it is a mere escutcheon, and he'll none of it. At

the same time he knows right well that he must seem to possess certain virtues, such as courage, goodness of heart, honesty, and especially honour and repute, for without these he would find it hard to live. Here also his wit and shrewdness must be brought to the aid of his imperturbable effrontery. His ready and inexhaustible invention rescues him from all difficulties, wheedles honest and simple folk out of their money, and stays off all unseasonable demands; and the way in which he imposes upon shallow blockheads and conceited simpletons is incomparable. As he made flesh and blood the immediate end of his existence, and keeps it steadily in view, in spite of all obstacles, he is almost invariably successful in the object of his pursuits.

Such are the principal features of Falstaff's individuality. But such descriptions are not sufficient to render a character, who is the principal hero of an entire dramatic work, understood in his full artistic significance. It requires therefore a further elucidation. The character of Falstaff evidently borders close on caricature, without, however, overstepping the boundary line of reality. Both in his internal peculiarities and in his outward appearance he is evidently an ideal personality, and yet he possesses so much of living freshness and of portrait-like reality, that we feel almost sure of having somewhere or other met with his original; he keeps himself so nicely on the fine line of demarcation between the general and the individual, as to appear the true mean between both, where the two extremes are fused together into organic unity. This alone constitutes him a true artistic picture -a perfect work of art. No doubt all other dramatic figures are likewise ideal personages, in whom the general and individual are combined; but what distinguishes Falstaff from all others is, that whereas each one of them depends on the common action of, and a combination with, the other characters of the piece, for the development of its full personal peculiarities, Falstaff independently accomplishes this in and by himself. He appears the very personification of human weakness and infirmity, sensualism and lust; he is sunk in the lowest depths of moral perversity, and yet he is not absolutely evil; for the evil that he does is not for his own sake, but merely as a means of attaining what he calls life and pleasure, and which, in his belief, every one not

only does but ought to pursue. Happiness, to which man certainly may and even ought to aspire, even because his destination is to union with God, is in his case, through the prov fevdos, through lying and self-delusion, corrupted into mere gratification of the flesh. He is so far a mere natural man, and we shall not fail to observe occasionally, if not often, the sparklings of a certain naïveté, harmless good-nature, and of a laughing light-hearted joyousness; but a child of nature, who not only is placed in the midst of a high state of civilization, but who, as the exquisite luxury and variety of his pleasure, and the artifices which he employs for their gratification prove, has imbibed much of this high-wrought and artificial refinement. And this constitutes the first inconsistency-the first comic ingredient in his character.

But Falstaff not only does not love what is properly base and wicked, but he has also within him a germ of good, a small and faint ray of that true nobility which invests all Shakspeare's characters, and Falstaff among them; for all proceed from the likeness of God. We see this in his superiority to other weaklings and fools comparatively more virtuous, and still more so when we compare him with his usual companions, Bardolph, Nym, Pistol, &c., but chiefly in the significant description of his last moments, in "Henry the Fifth." (Act II. Scene 3.) On the bed of mortal sickness he invokes woe on the whole race of woman, and turns his thoughts to God; he smiles upon his finger-ends, plays with flowers and babbles of green fields; and even though Mistress Quickly's words, that he "went away an it had been any christom child," be somewhat an exaggeration, we yet see that the little germ of good was not wholly eradicated; it shot up again in his last moments. During life it had drooped to the earth under the weight of sensuality and lust; it was like a solitary little star faintly glimmering in the wide thick darkness in which it is all but lost. This again is another significant element in his perfectly comic nature. It would have been utterly impossible to feel any interest in or sympathy with such an unleavened lump of carnal appetites and sensual pleasures, notwithstanding all its wit and humour, but for the vague feeling which keeps continually reminding us of this nobler germ, and of this transitory

and unconscious struggle of his better self with his infirmities. What we can only despise, mere unmitigated brutishness, could never interest or amuse us. Besides, a thoroughly despicable and absolutely evil man is a perfect monster, a mere poetic lie. So long as man is man he possesses the capability of improvement, and consequently a substratum of good within him; without this he were no man, but a devil.

It is even upon this better basis of his nature that Falstaff's clear consciousness of his own moral weakness and depravity is founded, which never leaves him entirely, and occasionally breaks out into the most amusing irony and persiflage of himself. It is the source of the best part of his wit. While his fleshly lusts are at continual war with his better spirit, which they are ever taxing for the means of their gratification, and spite of their momentary victory, are ever being broken by the power of objective goodness, they are reflected at the same time in his own better consciousness, which sees and derides their nakedness even when he is continually overcome by them. The double-tongued sophistic conversation which Falstaff is continually holding with himself, the dialectic with which he designedly brings his real character to light, the irony with which he dissects both himself and the whole world, as well as, on the other hand, the unceasing paralysis which moral weakness and perversity bring upon themselves both subjectively and objectively, not only afford a lively picture of the moral infirmity of man, but are also at the same time a lively exhibition of the idea of Comedy. Falstaff's individuality becomes, in short, the immediate expression of the comic view of life.

Thus alone does he appear entitled to be the subject of a poetic work of art. We are delighted with him, because we see in his case that weakness and perversity, in spite of all the aids of talent and shrewdness, invariably come to misery, and that goodness and righteousness prevail; and because we feel, that even such an extreme of sensuality is unable to eradicate entirely every germ of a nobler and better conscience. We are especially amused with the evident want of harmony and the disproportion between his nimble mind and his colossal unwieldy body, which, the effect of his immoderate indulgence and luxury, checks and embitters all his enjoyment. We are delighted with the endless flow of his wit

and humour, both as springing either from the sense of this disproportion, or from an unfailing consciousness of his own true nature, and as betokening the superiority of mind over the carnal and the material.

But it is obvious that such a character could never be, as his royal admirer wished to see him-in love. The very wish is a satire, since it supposes as real what his very nature renders radically impossible. It reveals at once the hollowness of his whole being. Deep affection of any kind soever must in Falstaff's sight have been a mere mockery, and consequently the satirical element is by no means put aside, if, as is actually the case, the love of the old sinner be merely put on, and a mere pretext to cover his designs on the flesh-pots of the worthy citizens, whose wives he is courting. For it is impossible to suppose for a moment, that Falstaff, so conscious as he is of his own figure and personality, could ever hope to awaken reciprocal affection, or to succeed with any woman. He was no longer Falstaff if he could entertain such an idea for an instant; his wit and acuteness must have left him, and he was a changed character from what he appeared in Henry the Fourth. As, then, the poet has taken for the ground-work of his drama this arbitrary and impossible hypothesis, he has abandoned the objectivity of perception and representation, and has adopted a purely subjective tendency, which, in so far as ridicule is its object, terminates in satire.

To portray a comic character-the pure creation of the poet's fancy-without sacrificing aught of its ideal personality and general significance, and yet with such vitality and perfect verisimilitude that it should be fitted to become the subject of a satirical comedy, is an achievement in which no genius less than Shakspeare could ever have succeeded. For poetry, when it exhibits its own artistic creations, and not real characters, in the mirror of satire, necessarily sinks into mere travestie whenever these poetical personages are unable to put in any claim to the truth of reality. To pass, too, from the objectivity of the original representation into the subjective tendency of satire, must inevitably disturb the poetic effect wherever the satire is not skilfully concealed. All turns upon this; and this Shakspeare has fully effected. For the ridicule is derived from the reflection, that