n. His face, blank with surprise at first, would presently have
glowed and widened, and his whole bulk have begun to quiver. Lest he
should miss one word, he would have mastered himself. But the final
words would have been the signal for release of all the roars pent up in
him; the welkin would have rung; the roars, belike, would have gradually
subsided in dreadful rumblings of more than utterable or conquerable
mirth. Thus and thus only might his life have been rounded off with
dramatic fitness, secundum ipsius naturam. He never should have been
left to babble of green fields and die 'an it had been any christom
child.'

Falstaff is a triumph of comedic creation because we are kept laughing
equally at and with him. Nevertheless, if I had the choice of sitting
with him at the Boar's Head or with Johnson at the Turk's, I shouldn't
hesitate for an instant. The agility of Falstaff's mind gains much of
its effect by contrast with the massiveness of his body; but in contrast
with Johnson's equal agility is Johnson's moral as well as physical
bulk. His sallies 'tell' the more startlingly because of the noble
weight of character behind them: they are the better because he makes
them. In Falstaff there isn't this final incongruity and element of
surprise. Falstaff is but a sublimated sample of 'the funny man.' We
cannot, therefore, laugh so greatly with him as with Johnson. (Nor
even at him; because we are not tickled so much by the weak points of
a character whose points are all weak ones; also because we have no
reverence trying to impose restraint upon us.) Still, Falstaff has
indubitably the power to convulse us. I don't mean we ever are convulsed
in reading Henry the Fourth. No printed page, alas, can thrill us to
extremities of laughter. These are ours only if the mirthmaker be a
living man whose jests we hear as they come fresh from his own lips. All
I claim for Falstaff is that he would be able to convulse us if he were
alive and accessible. Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can
induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of
being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by
no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme
only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery.
Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be
able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and
that, and making it yiel