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By Root 20674 0

revert to it before the close of this very scene. Even Pistol and Nym can see that what now ails their old master is no such ailment as in his prosperous days was but too liable to “play the rogue with his great toe.” “The king hath run bad humours on the knight”: “his heart is fracted, and corroborate.” And it is not thus merely through the eclipse of that brief mirage, that fair prospect “of Africa, and golden joys,” in view of which he was ready to “take any man’s horses.” This it is that distinguishes Falstaff from Panurge; that lifts him at least to the moral level of Sancho Panza. I cannot but be reluctant to set the verdict of my own judgment against that of Victor Hugo’s; I need none to remind me what and who he is whose judgment I for once oppose, and what and who am I that I should oppose it; that he is he, and I am but myself; yet against his classification of Falstaff, against his definition of Shakespeare’s unapproached and unapproachable masterpiece in the school of comic art and humouristic nature, I must and do with all my soul and strength protest. The admirable phrase of “swine-centaur” (centaure du porc) is as inapplicable to Falstaff as it is appropriate to Panurge. Not the third person but the first in date of that divine and human trinity of humourists whose names make radiant for ever the Century of their new-born glory—not Shakespeare but Rabelais is responsible for the creation or the discovery of such a type as this. “Suum cuique is our Roman justice”; the gradation from Panurge to Falstaff is not downward but upward; though it be Victor Hugo’s very self who asserts the contrary. Singular as may seem the collocation of the epithet “moral” with the name “Falstaff,” I venture to maintain my thesis; that in point of feeling, and therefore of possible moral elevation, Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of Sancho as Sancho is unquestionably the superior of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurge is bounded by the self-same limits as the natural theology of Polyphemus; the love of the one, like the faith of the other, begins and ends alike at one point;

Myself,

And this great belly, first of deities;

(in which line, by the way, we may hear as it were a first faint prelude of the great proclamation to come—the hymn of praise and thanksgiving for the coronation day of King Gaster; whose laureate, we know, was as lovingly familiar with the Polyphemus of Euripides as Shakespeare with his own Pantagruel.) In Sancho we come upon a creature capable of love—but not of such love as kills or helps to kill, such love as may end or even as may seem to end in anything like heartbreak. “And now abideth Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, these three; but the greatest of these is Shakespeare.”

I would fain score yet another point in the fat knight’s favour; “I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff.” Rabelais, evangelist and prophet of the Resurrection of the Flesh (so long entombed, ignored, repudiated, misconstrued, vilified, by so many generations and ages of Galilean preachers and Pharisaic schoolmen)—Rabelais was content to paint the flesh merely, in its honest human reality—human at least, if also bestial; in its frank and rude reaction against the half brainless and wholly bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himself on the one hand, and Luther on the other, arose together to smite severally—to smite them hip and thigh, even till the going down of the sun; the mock sun or marshy meteor that served only to deepen the darkness encompassing on every side the doubly dark ages—the ages of monarchy and theocracy, the ages of death and of faith. To Panurge, therefore, it was unnecessary and it might have seemed inconsequent to attribute other gifts or functions than are proper to such intelligence as may accompany the appetites of an animal. That most irreverend father in God, Friar John, belongs to a higher class in the moral order of being; and he much rather than his fellow-voyager and penitent is properly comparable with Falstaff. It is impossible to connect the notion of rebuke with the sins of