FOOTNOTES:[7]One interpretation of this word gives it a Jewish origin, and makes of it the Dance of the Maccabees, established to commemorate the martyrdom of the seven brothers of the Maccabees, together with Eleazar and their mother, who went out to death in succession. This was imitated by a solemn dance of priests and civil authorities, who went out in turn and disappeared as if to death. Afterwards, in mediæval times, the dance was emphasized by the introduction of the figure of Death as the leader of it. Another interpretation derives the word from the ArabicMakbar, pl.Makabir, place of interment.
FOOTNOTES:
[7]One interpretation of this word gives it a Jewish origin, and makes of it the Dance of the Maccabees, established to commemorate the martyrdom of the seven brothers of the Maccabees, together with Eleazar and their mother, who went out to death in succession. This was imitated by a solemn dance of priests and civil authorities, who went out in turn and disappeared as if to death. Afterwards, in mediæval times, the dance was emphasized by the introduction of the figure of Death as the leader of it. Another interpretation derives the word from the ArabicMakbar, pl.Makabir, place of interment.
[7]One interpretation of this word gives it a Jewish origin, and makes of it the Dance of the Maccabees, established to commemorate the martyrdom of the seven brothers of the Maccabees, together with Eleazar and their mother, who went out to death in succession. This was imitated by a solemn dance of priests and civil authorities, who went out in turn and disappeared as if to death. Afterwards, in mediæval times, the dance was emphasized by the introduction of the figure of Death as the leader of it. Another interpretation derives the word from the ArabicMakbar, pl.Makabir, place of interment.
THE PORTER IN "MACBETH,"THE CLOWN IN "TWELFTH NIGHT,"THE FOOL IN "LEAR."
THE PORTER IN "MACBETH."
Thevulgarity of the Porter's language, in the third scene of the second act, repelled Coleridge, who pronounced it to be an after-thought of some baser hand. "I dare pledge myself to demonstrate," said he, that it was an interpolation of the actors. Other critics have followed with the same feeling of condemnation. But only Shakspeare could have risen above such a conventional estimate, and have put this piece of solid consistency into that part of the tragedy which it strengthens: there it stays in the only place where Nature could have lent to it her justification. We can readily admit that the undisguised lechery of Pandarus in "Troilus and Cressida," and the brothel scenes in "Pericles," were subsequent additions to those plays by a pen that was accustomed to deal in broad effects without regard to the organic exaction of the other characters. Perhaps they were fragments of older plays left over by carelessness, or, what is much more likely, introduced as gags by the play-actors. But we can spare them out of the legacy of Shakspeare because they are not in the manner which he used when broadness served his purpose. When the gross details are hung over and fondled lewdly, recurred to morbidly, laid open with ingenious particularity till we detect the sickening odor of the dissecting-room which rises from slashedand naked subjects, we may determine at once that the scene preserves not one stroke of Shakspeare's pen. The lines seem suffocating in a close and tainted place. What a brisk draught ventilates the honest coarseness of the Porter! what a light, bantering touch hits off the vice which is needful to finish the portrait of Falstaff! Even Parolles, his prototype, only ventures far enough to make a scene coherent with Helena's unspoken thought.[8]
Let us see if Nature was not fortunate in finding the Porter at his post at an hour when he was needed as never before.
The air around the castle of Macbeth "nimbly and sweetly" recommended itself to Duncan's senses; and Banquo noticed that the swallow, most confiding and unsuspicious of birds, approves the place "by his lov'd mansionry." On every frieze, buttress, coigne of vantage, Nature had colonized this domestic wing, as if to hint to the wayfarer "a pleasant seat," peace and unviolated sleep within. But we remember that a raven had croaked the fatal entrance of Duncan into the castle. The swallows twittering in the delicate air cannot drown this omen of insecurity: as we enter with the unconscious Duncan, the weird sisters slip by us fromtheir blasted heath, and the house darkens with a fated purpose.
It was an unruly night, and the owl clamored the livelong hours. Towards morning, after the accomplishment of the murder, Lady Macbeth snatched the bloody daggers from the hand of her husband to carry them back into the chamber. The air that was interrupted at the lips of the gracious Duncan seems breathless as he, appalled at the deed; and our consciousness of it sinks into an awful silence. Just then a knocking at the gate is heard.
De Quincey, in an essay "On the Knocking at the Gate," rightly notices that it reflects "back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and depth of solemnity," and he explains this effect. "When the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard, and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them."
Admirable as this criticism is to justify the profound art of Shakspeare, it does not seem to me entirely to exhaust the effect produced by the knocking. It not only makes known to us that human life recurs, and thus emphasizes our sense of the unhuman world of murder, but it also startles us with the sudden consciousness that the human which thus recurs does it in entire ignorance of the scene at which it knocks. That makes us catch our breath, to feel how thoughtlessly life is about to stumble into the tremendous scene. What a contrast of innocent unconsciousness,—so innocent, so remote from the event, that we should think it was impertinent if our pity for the shock it brings upon itself did not prevail! We wonder who will first discover what has occurred, whether man or woman; somebody is doomed to blunder into the ghastliness of that room where Macbeth murdered sleep. What will be the sensation that thrills from the inhospitable bed around which the angels of honor and loyalty ought to have watched with spotless wings? Some one steps into this pool where all the safeguards and trusts of human life lie drenched. How will he manage to escape from it, and will the tongue be palsied "with the act of fear" to refuse to the lips words adequate to express the villainy? And yet this must be done.
We therefore become aware of this additional feeling, that the life which knocks at the gate, though unconscious, is pregnant with the design of an overruling Power; just for a moment, there seems to be the supernatural arrival of something with a commission to detect the murder. Every knock smites the bare heart of Macbeth, who may well exclaim, "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st!"
Shakspeare makes another world for Macbeth,—a sequestered hell. The knocking announces the existence and reappearance of another life, as De Quinceynotices; but he does not note the fine prolongation of the Hell into the humorous fancy of the Porter who comes to open the gate.
To the old French taste, this Porter was one of the Shakspearean violations of decency and tragic sentiment,—a vulgar fellow who has been waked out of a drunken sleep, and who talks outrageous matter that is the farthest removed from murder, so that solemnity is affronted and abruptly leaves the hearts which it had just monopolized. But the more we dwell upon Shakspeare's characters, "the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement, where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident."
The Porter, as if he had been privy to the transactions of the night, translates each knock into a candidate for admission into his quaint fancy of a hell, of which he keeps the gate. Fleay, in his "Shakspeare's Manual," shows that the Porter makes allusions to contemporaneous circumstances of the year 1606, when "Macbeth" was first produced. "The expectation of plenty:" wheat, barley, and malt were extraordinarily cheap. The "equivocator" is the Jesuit, Garnet, who was tried for gunpowder treason in that year. "Stealing out of a French hose:" the fashion of hose became short in 1606; yet the tailors took the old measure of material and cabbaged the difference. So that the Porter belongs to that year, and could not have been subsequently interpolated.
"If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have often turning the key. Who's there?" "An equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven! Oh, come in, equivocator!" Yes, this is the very house for him to come to, where a treason has just been committed which will be unable to equivocate to Heaven. "I'll devil-porter it no farther: I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." If the outer life is to gain admission at all again to this castle, this grotesque hint of the hell within undoes the gate appropriately: by no abrupt transition, and by the bridge of a perilous smile, human life is reached again. The Porter delays by his successive fancies, till we begin to grow impatient, like those emissaries of Heaven who shiver at the gate. This impatience, humorously created for us, introduces another human feeling to qualify our awe; and thus we rejoin our common humanity.
When the Porter lets in Macduff and Lenox, he seems to have admitted also a very garish and vulgar kind of day, that displays loosely some infirmities of men, unconscious of the more awful crime within,—a very broad and unequivocal daylight that lies sharply on all objects without toning them. The Porter's disquisition upon drinking and lechery is apparently superfluous and revolting, but it is really well conceived; for we want something to carry our mood as far as possible away from Duncan's chamber and from all thoughts about discovering the deed, because Macbeth is about to enter. "Our knocking has awaked him." Then ourfeeling, which has gained a temporary relief, is able to take up again the awful clew, and to wait during Macbeth's feigned unconsciousness till Macduff bursts upon us with his horror. Moreover, the carousing which the Porter mentions was the cover to Macbeth's opportunity, and just keeps the night alive in our memory, while we think how innocently drunk the whole household was to provide a human weakness for an act of death. Macbeth enters, whose wife conceived the stratagem of the drinking, and soon the result of it arrives. An after-clap of Hell settles back on the Porter's traces; but he has performed his function by letting life and human nature in upon the sexless and monstrous scene, and may now vacate his post.
Still, the Porter is conventionally vulgar, and cannot be accepted by a taste that is more fastidious than the world itself is. But, if the world chooses to be vulgar, why needed Shakspeare to have imported this base touch of realism into his art? Only by the permission of Humor, and the justification of an exigency to drag our feelings back to life by the handiest strand, however coarse it may be. And after he had invented that thrilling moment of the knocking at the gate, he cannot get along without the house-porter, who is the only one awake enough to let honest Nature in. So we must take him as he is, and admire the poet who did not send the Muse of Tragedy to draw the bolt.
The Agamemnon of Æschylus reaches a breathless moment of suspense, when Clytemnestra has left the scene to plan the murder of her husband, and theChorus, shuddering with its divination of the deed, expresses our expectation. All at once a stifled exclamation struggles out from the interior of the palace: the Chorus whispers, "Hush! who is it that cries out, 'A blow'?" and the play soon closes with the sombre feeling unrelieved. Nothing intervenes to assist the spectators back to life, and to the other persons whose interests implicate them so deeply in the plot. There is but one interest and one action in a Greek Tragedy, and when that is reached the nature of the scene is exhausted; the poet has no more to say, and is not conscious of any craving for variety in his listeners. His play was an artistic embodiment of the current religious ideas, and so far was secluded, as the modern pulpit is, from manifold life. It is not possible to discover a place in these solemn developments of Fate, where a feeling of Humor could intrude. The Chorus, listening to the blow, intervenes instead of a Porter. It is the voice of an audience conscious of the crime. So is a modern audience conscious of Macbeth's crime, but that consciousness is itself the Chorus, whose ancient function is distributed through the silent hearts of the spectators, who are thus permitted to mingle in every awful occurrence, and therefore need to be restored again to the ordinary world of justice and emotion.
Shakspeare exhibits the supreme nature of his genius when he meets this exigency which antique religion did not feel. He admits the free play of life into its real closeness with all our moral and pathetic emotions; but we never find that Humor weakens the religious purposeof the play, as it would if our private anguish were unseasonably interrupted by it, because our personal fortunes are not touched by the tragedy. We are implicated in the scene only by our instinct of observation and sympathy; that needs relief, but, if the blow struck us and became a "fee-grief due to each single breast," we could endure it as we do in real life, as we prefer to do, with a temper that keeps all other strings muted but sorrow. So the Humor which we would not tolerate when the tempest breaks upon our roof-tree, and is sullen within every chamber, is no unwelcome surprise when the heart is so keenly summoned by the mimic scene.
THE CLOWN IN "TWELFTH NIGHT."
The name of the Clown does not appear in thedramatis personæ, and only once in the text, Act ii. 4, where he is called Feste. All the dainty songs of the play are put into his mouth. Feste was the name of a distinguished musician and composer, probably a friend of Shakspeare. We may even surmise that he set to music one or more of his namesake's songs. There is no play which employs the element of music so frequently, or that speaks of it in the tender terms which only a lover of melody can use. It is admitted into the plot as a confidant and adviser, and allowed to sway the moods of the characters.
The Duke calls for Cesario (Viola) to repeat
"That piece of song,That old and antique song we heard last night."
The Duke has forgotten that Feste, and not Cesario, was the singer. Fleay overlooks this touch of nature, and attributes the passage to an older play or first draught, which appears uncorrected in the present play. But the Duke is mooning about in his sentimental fashion, and vaguely recollects that Cesario was presented to him as one that could sing "and speak to him in many sorts of music." He had done so, no doubt, so that the mistake was natural to the distraught mind of the Duke, who seems to allude to it when he says immediately to Cesario,—
"If ever thou shalt love,In the sweet pangs of it remember me;For such as I am all true lovers are,Unstaid and skittish in all motions else,Save in the constant image of the creatureThat is belov'd."
His obliviousness is indeed so profound that he blunders in dismissing Feste when the song is over, saying to him, "Give me now leave to leave thee." This, so far from being an imperfect reading, is a perfect touch of his abstruse mood. It amuses Feste, who says aside, "Now the melancholy god protect thee," &c. Every line and word of this beautiful scene is unalterably well placed.
We see that the Clown adds a good voice to his other gifts; he does every thing "dexteriously," and is in high demand for his companionable spirits. For Sir Andrew and Sir Tobey his songs are blithe and free: all the ballads and ditties that had vogue in Feste's time are athis tongue's end, and he is always humming snatches of them. For the Duke he has cypress sentimentalism, urges death to come away, and forbids a flower sweet to be strown on the black coffin of the Duke's luxurious woe. We can imagine what a face Feste pulled over the minor key which so tickled the Duke, whose love was after all nothing but the spooning of a professor of rhetoric. He can take off his sighing disguise as quickly as Viola can transfer herself into woman's weeds. Olivia is well aware of this, and having just lost her brother is in no mood for a flirtation. She knows he is a noble and gracious person, but she has read the first chapter of his heart, and "it is heresy." The Clown, who is as usual Shakspeare's keenest and most amused observer, knows this well and puts it into the neatest language: "The tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal! I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything and their intent everywhere; for that's it that always makes a good voyage of nothing." And this turns out true enough; for the Duke with all sail set after Olivia, and a spanking breeze on his quarter, tacks nimbly in the teeth of it the moment Olivia is married by mistake, and Cesario becomes a woman. The only serious sentiment in the play is the one so tenderly concealed in the disguise of Viola.
In Act iii. 7, Viola enters, meeting Feste, who is playing the pipe and tabor. Her simplest remark he makes the pivot of a jest, and is never tired of tossing words. He plays with them as a juggler with balls;they all seem to be in the air at once. There never was such a jaunty and irrepressible quipster. Yet when Viola says to him, "I warrant thou art a merry fellow, and carest for nothing," his reply, "Not so, sir, I do care for something," betrays the serious temper which lies under all his fooling to furnish the appositeness of his remarks:—
"For folly, that he wisely shows, is fit;But wise men, folly-fallen, quite taint their wit."
Viola, who says this, might adapt a text of Paul, and apply it to Shakspeare's people,—"For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise."
Of all Shakspeare's clowns, he is the best endowed with a many-sided mirth, as indeed he should be to pass lightly through the mingled romance and roystering of the play and favor all its moods. The sentiment of the Duke is as inebriated as the revelling which Malvolio rebukes. Olivia's protracted grief for her brother is carefully cosseted by her, as if on purpose to give the Clown an opportunity.
Clo.Good madonna, why mournest thou?Oliv.Good fool, for my brother's death.Clo.I think his soul is in hell, madonna.Oliv.I know his soul is in heaven, fool.Clo.The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven.—Take away the fool, gentlemen.
Clo.Good madonna, why mournest thou?
Oliv.Good fool, for my brother's death.
Clo.I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
Oliv.I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
Clo.The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven.—Take away the fool, gentlemen.
All the characters, noble and common, have some weakness which he intuitively rallies. The charm of the comedy lies in these unsubstantial moods of the chief personages which consort with the more substantialwhims and appetites of the others. The only sobriety is vested in the Clown; for all his freaks have a consistent disposition. So the lovely poetry of the mock mourners alternates with the tipsy prose of the genuine fleshly fellows. Their hearty caterwauling penetrates to Olivia's fond seclusion, and breaks up her brooding. Feste is everywhere at home. When he plays the curate's part, Malvolio beseechingly cries, "Sir Topas, Sir Topas!" The Clown says aside, "Nay, I am for all waters,"—that is, for topaz, diamond, gems of the first water, all many-colored facets I'll reflect. And he does so in this conversation which he holds with Malvolio, who says, "I am no more mad than you are: make the trial of it in any constant question." Then Feste airs his learning: "What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?" and makes his question lead up to a sharp retort, when Malvolio answers, "That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird;" for then Feste says, "Thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam." For it was a country notion that the woodcock was the foolishest of birds; so he translates Malvolio's grandam into one, and leaves him to inherit her absence of wits. And Malvolio was so devoured by mortification and anxiety that he does not notice when Feste cannot restrain his burlesquing knack, but makes the pretended curate say that Malvolio's cell "hath bay-windows, transparent as barricadoes, and the clearstores toward the south-north are as lustrous as ebony."
The Clown is not only quaint, droll, full of banter, sly with sense, like clowns in the other plays, but he is the most ebullient with spirits of them all, ready for the next freak, to dissemble himself in the curate's gown and carry on two voices with Malvolio in the prison, keeping him on the rack the while, or to carouse with the two knights till daybreak, and delight them with manufacturing burlesques. "Thou wast in very gracious fooling last night, when thou spokest of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus: 'twas very good, i' faith. I sent thee sixpence for thy leman: hadst it?" Feste resumes the burlesquing humor: "I did impeticos thy gratillity; for Malvolio's nose is no whipstock: my lady has a white hand, and the Myrmidons are no bottle-ale houses." As for "bottle-ale," the phrase occurs once more in Shakspeare, 2 "Henry IV.," ii. 4, to express contempt,—"Away, you bottle-ale rascal!" So Feste does not think small-beer of the Myrmidons, or retainers of Olivia, who might scent out his sixpence as quickly as Malvolio. Was the bottling of ale just coming in, to the immense disgust of the loyal Briton, who thought nobly of the ancient brew and would not have it save mightily on tap? The words, "Pigrogromitus," "Vapians," "Queubus," sound like the names which Rabelais manufactured to cover his sly allusions to public personages; but they cannot be traced. It is just possible that Shakspeare invented them to burlesque the words and style which mariners and travellers brought home to vapor with to eager listeners in the taverns: marvels of the East that would not stay in Damascus,but came by caravan,—of Virginia, Guiana, and the "still-vex'd Bermoothes," the "Anthropophaginian,"[9]men "whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," not positively discredited by Sir Walter Raleigh; one-leg and one-foot savages, seen by early sailors to the coast of Maine,—all the misunderstanding and exaggeration of a new period of adventure and discovery of new lands were bountifully nourished upon sack and canary in the London taverns. What legends were fabricated at the Mitre in Cheapside, the Swan at Dowgate, the Boar's Head near London Stone, the Ship at the Exchange, the Red Lion in the Strand! These were haunts of Frobisher's and Drake's men; of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's, fresh from Newfoundland in the only ship that was saved; of Barbour's expedition to Roanoake in 1584; of Gosnold's, in 1602, to Cape Cod and the islands in Buzzard's Bay. The sack grew apprehensive and forgetive, and justified Falstaff's eulogy. Bermoothes was not the only region vexed by devils and spirits, but every tavern from Plymouth to London. A trace of Shakspeare's interest in these London entertainments is found in the "Tempest," where Trinculo wishes that he had Caliban in England for a show. "There would this monster make a man: any strange beast there makes a man; when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." Captain Weymouth was sent by Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Chief Justice Popham, in 1605, to found acolony upon the coast of Maine. He kidnapped five Abenaki Indians near the mouth of the Sagadahoc, and carried them home. Three of these were kept by Gorges at Plymouth, and the other two were sent up to London to the care of the Chief Justice. One of these died there. The passage in the "Tempest" is strong confirmation that Shakspeare went with the other cockneys to see him.
Though Shakspeare empties all his own love for pure fun into this clown, he makes of him the only cool and consistent character in the play, and thus conveys to us his conviction of the superiority of an observer who has wit, humor, repartee, burlesquing, and buffoonery at command; for none but wise men can make such fools of themselves. Such a fine composition is apt to be misunderstood by the single-gifted and prosaic people; but this only piques the bells to their happiest jingle; and a man is never more convinced of the divine origin of his buffooning talent than when the didactic souls reject it as heresy. All Shakspeare's clowns brandish this fine bauble: their bells swing in a Sabbath air and summon us to a service of wisdom. Feste has no passion to fondle, and no chances to lie in wait for except those which can help his foolery to walk over everybody like the sun. Even when he seems to be wheedling money out of the Duke and Viola, he is only in sport with the weakness which purse-holders have to fee, to conciliate, to enjoy an aspect of grandeur. His perfectly dispassionate temper is sagacity itself. It discerns the solemn fickleness of the principal personages. They are alltreated with amusing impartiality; and it is in the spirit of the Kosmos itself which does not stand in awe of anybody. It seems, indeed, as if the function of fool, and the striking toleration which has always invested it, was developed by Nature for protection of those of her creatures who are exposed to flattery and liable to be damaged by it. Not for shallow amusement have rich and titled persons harbored jesters, who always play the part of the slave of Pyrrhus, at proper intervals to remind them that they are mortal. All men secretly prefer to know the truth; but the pampered people cannot bear to sit in the full draught of it. Its benefit must, however, be in some way conveyed to them. Bluff Kent is banished for saying to Lear, in the plainest Saxon, what the fool kept insinuating with impunity. Therefore, no genuine court has been complete without its fool. The most truculent sceptre has only playfully tapped his liberty. Timur the Terrible had a court-fool, named Ahmed Kermani. One day, in the bath with a crowd of wits, the conversation fell upon the individual worth of men, and Timur asked Ahmed, "What price wouldst thou put on me if I were for sale?" "About five-and-twenty aspers," rejoined Ahmed. "Why," said Timur, "that is about the price of the sheet I have on." "Well, of course, I meant the sheet." When the business of kingship becomes decayed, the office of fool is obsolete.
Feste bandies words with Viola, and makes her submit to delicate insolences: her distinguished air cannot abate him. He pretends to wish to be convinced by Malvolio that the latter is sane, but concludes that he will neverbelieve a madman till he can see his brains. Feste keeps his own head on a level keel as the sparkling ripples of his drolleries go by. Shakspeare's intention is conspicuous in him to make all the clowns the critics of all the other personages, and kept in the pay of their creator.
When the play is over, the Duke plighted to his page, Olivia rightly married to the wrong man, and the whole romantic ravel of sentiment begins to be attached to the serious conditions of life, Feste is left alone upon the stage. Then he sings a song which conveys to us his feeling of the world's impartiality: all things proceed according to law; nobody is humored; people must abide the consequences of their actions, "for the rain it raineth every day." A "little tiny boy" may have his toy; but a man must guard against knavery and thieving: marriage itself cannot be sweetened by swaggering; whoso drinks with "toss-pots" will get a "drunken head:" it is a very old world, and began so long ago that no change in its habits can be looked for. The grave insinuation of this song is touched with the vague, soft bloom of the play. As the noises of the land come over sea well-tempered to the ears of islanders, so the world's fierce, implacable roar reaches us in the song, sifted through an air that hangs full of the Duke's dreams, of Viola's pensive love, of the hours which music flattered. The note is hardly more presageful than the cricket's stir in the late silence of a summer. How gracious has Shakspeare been to mankind in this play! He could not do otherwise than leave Feste all alone to pronounce its benediction; for his heart was a nest of songs whencethey rose to whistle with the air of wisdom. Alas for the poor fool in "Lear" who sang to drown the cries from a violated nest!
THE FOOL IN "KING LEAR."
The bauble of the Fool in "King Lear" rings us into a horizon that, before we reach it, mutters with the premonition of madness; and we wonder if any humor can find shelter with us underneath that blackening sky. When the Fool joins our company, we search his features in vain for a trace of Feste's and Touchstone's temper. That spring of geniality has been stirred by the king's misfortunes till it is roiled into irony; and we recognize the only tone that can take lodgings in this tragedy. It makes rifts in the gathering tempest, not of clear sky but of lighter cloud-racks, around whose edges the first lightnings run. We have ceased to smile and begin to forebode. All cheeriness and whim are getting blotted out so fast that we share the Fool's longing for the shelter of the hut when heaven began to pelt that old gray head, "crowned with rank fumiter," upon the heath.
His irony is tart; but commiseration for his master saves it from ill-temper. Just as it threatens to become cynical, a song occurs to him, which is a low call drawing him back, as the mother's voice lures her child from the edge of a cliff ere it falls over:—
"Then they for sudden joy did weep,And I for sorrow sung."
"When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?" It was not his wont, then? By no means. This court-jester stood by when the latent disease of the King's brain was suddenly unmasked by the sincerity of Cordelia, whose love was more ponderous than her tongue. He saw her transformed, in an instant of the King's first lesion, from a daughter into an outcast. First, wonder at a blow which no one could anticipate, and then pity at seeing that love's vessel thus pushed over and its rareness spilled, has destroyed his appetite for mirth. He unconsciously resorts to the Fool's alternative between jesting and gravity, which is a fusion of both these qualities in irony; and he catches at the ragged edges of old songs when he feels himself tumbling into bitter aspersion of the King. He has, too, been affrighted by the sudden and groundless vehemence which hurls the faithful old Kent into exile as soon as he dared speak a word for Cordelia. What! Daughterhood stamped out like a spider, life-long loyalty sent to the dogs! This palace can dispense with jesting for the future; and our wits must yield a different grain. Touchstone is the wise fool of life's comedy. But Lear snatches at his fool's bauble, invests him with the pathos of a broken sceptre and a crumbling reason, and may well inquire when he learned to sing. "I have used it, Nuncle, e'er since thou madest thy daughters thy mother." His songs insinuate so much unpalatable truth that he tells the King to keep a schoolmaster that can teach his fool to lie, and pretends that under the circumstances, with the King undertaking to be the house-fool, lying might be an accomplishment.
No person—not even the shrewd, observing Fool—had detected in these early inconstancies of the King the tokens of impending insanity. But Shakspeare meant, no doubt, that the whim of abdication, the division of the kingdom, and the absurd project to travel with a hundred knights from one daughter's house to another, should hint to us that the royal brain was breaking down. An expert in the phenomena of insanity would have predicted what occurred so suddenly. But it shocked these unprepared beholders, and curdled every smile on the Fool's face into lines of mockery that ran full with tears. No king's misfortune was ever so bantered by its own pathos, as love and loyalty, contrasting with ingratitude, subsidized a Fool for the service of pity.
But he cannot long employ his Irony upon our hearts, for events develop a dread earnest temper. There is no longer place for insinuation in the scene. The fortune of Lear seems to challenge all the elements to match it. As the reason topples, it appears to be clutching at the sky to save itself, and brings it down in the winds and lightnings of midnight to sympathize with its own eclipse. The Fool is cowed by the madness and the storm as they intermingle; his brave innuendoes die away; and he supplicates Lear, in plain language of human discomfort, to seek some shelter, even under such a blessing as one of his daughters can bestow, for that seems less inclement than the night. His vein runs very thin during Lear's delusion that he has his daughters in court and is trying them; and it soondisappears, swallowed in the quicksand of the king's lunacy. Kingdom, friends, reason, family, are all crumbled into this wreck of an old father, who pretends at last to hear the soft and gentle voice which used to temper the pride of his state and keep him human: he comes in to us hugging the hanged Cordelia to his cracking heart, to feel that she will come no more; she, whom he drove from his palace gate with violent misapprehension, will come no more,—never, never, never! Oh, it has grown too piteous for the wisest Fool: he can never share these scenes; his humor cannot lace these thundrous lines. Do they swell to the measure of the firmament itself, or is it our heart which is swelling to occupy that space? Yes: "Pray ye, undo this button." It is the heart, too big for any thing that ever made it smile. The lightnings of fate rend it into the drops of pity, and they wash all tolerating smiles away.
Humor is too deeply implicated with our mortality, too warm a comrade, too judicious a friend in our extremities, to choose such hours of disaster to virtue for any task of reconciliation. Awful and questioning spirits come; and Humor, yielding to them our hand, stands aside to wait, but yields it warm enough to keep warm through any grasp till it may be claimed again.
Shakspeare's instinct divined the precise moment when the bells of the Fool's bauble could not compete with thunder, nor the balls upon his cap draw off the bolt. But, while the muttering comes up from the horizon and begins to be heard between the lines, the bells still shake, as in the last scene of the first act, wherethey render more sombre the expectation of what must finally come down upon our heads. The recollection of Cordelia gives the King a lucid interval: it breaks like a breadth of heaven into his brain, and into ours through that little sentence, "I did her wrong."
"Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?" "No." "Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house." "Why?" "Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case." Lear listens absently to the quaint chatter; for he detects the threat which has been approaching from the distance, and is now quite near.
"Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet Heaven!Keep me in temper: I would not be mad."
After helping Kent and Gloster bear off the King just before old Gloster's eyes are plucked from his head, the Fool disappears from the tragedy, as if all light were to be quenched with such an act, and all moods but terror to be stamped with those jellies under Cornwall's feet.
"Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains!"
FOOTNOTES:[8]All's Well that Ends Well, Act i. 7. Though I suspect here either a fragment of an early form of the play that kept its place in the stage copy and passed into print unchastened, or some phrases interpolated by actors. Something has been dropped out between Parolles's "Will you do any thing with it?" and Helena's recurrence to Bertram's leaving for the court, "There shall your master have a thousand loves;" so that the scene is in an imperfect condition.[9]Reproduction ofanthropophagias heard from some guest by the host of the Garter Inn, in "Merry Wives of Windsor," iv. 5.
FOOTNOTES:
[8]All's Well that Ends Well, Act i. 7. Though I suspect here either a fragment of an early form of the play that kept its place in the stage copy and passed into print unchastened, or some phrases interpolated by actors. Something has been dropped out between Parolles's "Will you do any thing with it?" and Helena's recurrence to Bertram's leaving for the court, "There shall your master have a thousand loves;" so that the scene is in an imperfect condition.
[8]All's Well that Ends Well, Act i. 7. Though I suspect here either a fragment of an early form of the play that kept its place in the stage copy and passed into print unchastened, or some phrases interpolated by actors. Something has been dropped out between Parolles's "Will you do any thing with it?" and Helena's recurrence to Bertram's leaving for the court, "There shall your master have a thousand loves;" so that the scene is in an imperfect condition.
[9]Reproduction ofanthropophagias heard from some guest by the host of the Garter Inn, in "Merry Wives of Windsor," iv. 5.
[9]Reproduction ofanthropophagias heard from some guest by the host of the Garter Inn, in "Merry Wives of Windsor," iv. 5.
WOMEN AND MEN:MARIA, HELENA, IMOGEN, CONSTANCE.
WOMEN AND MEN.
Mandraws near to woman with the fly-net of his analysis, thinking to steal up and capture the secrets of her disposition. He finds a distance drawn across his way which he never entirely passes. It is the distance of sex. The greatest intimacy of marriage itself, which blends two beings into one fate, and compels them to set up housekeeping on the principle of mutualism, is still evaded by motives and moods which the woman holds in reserve, not by calculation, but through the instinct of a difference which the husband cannot entirely penetrate. It is not that man reaches results chiefly by the processes of judgment, and woman chiefly by a method which is not thinking so much as it is a taste or touch of the objects she observes. But she is removed from his scrutiny because the complexity of sex constructs her soul, becomes the essence of her motives, decides her virtues and her vices, and modifies the intellect itself. She contains all qualities, but not in the masculine proportion. Sex also irrevocably decides for the average man, as for the average woman, the plus and minus of each attribute. Woman's mode of life must so defer to the tendency of her sex, that a variety of objects are prevented from pressing into her experience. She is less actively in motion from place to place than man, who mingles with many crowds and learns toreflect upon their actions. Her brain is not so multifariously stored with facts and relations, because there are some scenes from which she must always be remote. If, apart from sex, a considerable portion of a person's training has been by hearsay, that person's judgments will be sentiments rather than reflections; but sex decides that hearsay shall enter largely into woman's training. The rude, fierce, cunning competition of naked men in the palæstra, without blush or apology, gave girth to the breasts which were bucklers before the glory and the arts of Greece. Many a situation that is as coarse as a pugilist puts us in prudent trim. Women derive from our education a benefit which their muscle is too delicately draughted to procure. Events that do not mince their speech give us a thorough knowledge of our mother-tongue. We overhear the other people, weigh their words, enrich ourselves with facts, or protect ourselves against omens. She is more likely to be well-behaved than man, but less likely to be tolerant of ill-behavior. When she feels particularly virtuous, she is apt to condemn swiftly and fatally where man would suspend his judgment till all the qualifying facts were put into the case. Human development has in this respect conferred upon man a great advantage that dates from the barbaric rule of the stronger, and has been re-enforced by the varied experience of every generation. Just as woman is entering upon a more independent career, she betrays a deficiency in the quality of humor. Man was turned loose in the pasture to feed at random upon all the plants that drew nutritious and poisonous saps: stramonium and clover were indiscriminately cropped; but Heaven gave to its wild creatures tough stomachs to begin with. They effect a compromise with such complacency that literature is charmed to celebrate it; and the dew of humor condenses beneath a long-suffering sky. A powerful and happy digestion does not prefer the noxious weeds; but it has learned how to account for them, and to measure their effects.
Women are not good readers of any kind of plays. The movement and lapse of events in a novel are more congenial to their secluded life. And I venture to impute to the average woman a thinly running vein of humor as the reason why she finds such difficulty in admiring Shakspeare. Many of the finest women can never conquer their repugnance. There seems to be in it something of impatience at the dramatic intervals and the movement by incessant colloquy, something of an equanimity of passion, something of fright at the broad and powerful statement, which flinches at nothing; blabs dreadfully of Juliet's clandestine feeling; keeps Helena in contented ear-shot of Parolles, and lets her devise an indelicate solution of the plot; shows the sweet Marianna of the moated grange ready to help on another play with the same alacrity, and leaves Nature everywhere, in the most passionate or vulgar phases, to her absolute sincerity, and concedes to her the freedom of the dictionary. Women do not like to be charmed along through scenes of tender and lofty feeling to stumble over the sentences of porters, carriers, camp-followers, fellows on a frolic; phrases that hiccough a decided waft of sack; clausesthat throw a leer in passing. Even the high passionateness of kings and lovers, when it is the purest, seems to the average woman to blaze with extravagance. To her it is the overstatement that kidnaps true sentiment and brings it up for the stage. She does not recall a moment of her life that could have recognized such feeling, or have framed for her secretest thought a corresponding whisper. Do her brothers and acquaintances smoulder with these wraths and fervors inside of their demure suits of gray-mixed and black? Are all the men who circulate in society, and enframe her waist at balls, liable to attacks of this erysipelatous condition? Does she sit at divine service with such neat packages of rend-rock in the pew? So the Shakspearean ideal of the great passions of mankind has to be watered for her through the modern novel, trickle by trickle of protracted rhetoric, drop by drop of overflavored style. She turns with resentful cheeks from Juliet's expectant mood, and manages to read pages that are too sickly to kindle a blush. And yet perhaps they are equivocal enough to have puzzled Dame Quickly and frightened Falstaff. Certainly the equivoque has not lost its voice "with hollaing and singing of anthems."
Some offences, chiefly those which concern propriety and chasteness, are so repugnant to a woman's disposition that they excite a fanaticism which sometimes is slow, and sometimes eager, to condemn the reputed offender. That is to say, the same disposition is competent to give credence to an accusation slowly, or to give it impetuously and with loathing. If there be a caseinvolving testimony, it is not deliberately weighed, its intricacies patiently pursued, its implications as well as its statements justly rated, and all the parts of it fitted to an opinion of innocence or guilt; but there results instead a state of feeling from previous opinions and assumptions, which no testimony, however strong, can do much to reverse. Women, indeed, naturally shrink from familiarity with the testimony, and do not wish to reach an opinion by probing it. The defendant may enjoy the immunity of a woman's assumption that the charge is in his case incredible, and refuted by all her previous associations with his life; or he may suffer from her want of any feeling derived from previous knowledge of his life, or from considerations dependent upon personal sentiment.
Woman's instinct of purity is specially intolerant towards the unfortunate members of her own sex. She will not hear a word: she is deprived of the power to weigh circumstance, environment, the complicity of others, the wile and treachery of life. The outcast does not even have the benefit of a trial. No court is held in which mercy seasons justice, like one that was long ago extemporized over the woman who knelt on the pavement of the Temple. The men in that crowd were chiefly interested to convict the Master, and not the sinner. If women were present, as is quite probable, they composed a jury that was adverse to the ruling of the court, unless they fell into sympathy from pique at the mock chastity of the men.
In the first scene of the "Midsummer Night's Dream,"Hermia and Lysander are in love with each other. Demetrius, who was once deep in love for Helena, has transferred his midsummer inclination to this Hermia, leaving Helena as deep in love with him as ever, but finding Hermia full of disdain. Now Hermia's father would have her marry Demetrius; so she and Lysander, to escape from this paternal preference, agree to meet at night, and fly together from Athens to a darling old aunt who lived at some Hellenic Gretna Green. At this point, Helena enters, who loves Demetrius as much as he now dislikes her. The lovers confide to her their purpose of flight; and Hermia, for comfort, says that she will soon be beyond the reach of Demetrius. Then Helena is left alone to her reflections, during which she says,—
"For ere Demetrius look'd on Hermia's eyne,He hail'd down oaths that he was only mine;And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt,So he dissolv'd, and showers of oaths did melt.I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight:Then to the wood will he to-morrow nightPursue her: and for this intelligenceIf I have thanks, it is a dear expense:But herein mean I to enrich my pain,To have his sight thither and back again."
Coleridge frames, in a criticism upon this passage, a sweeping indictment of the feminine disposition. Starting with a misconception of the text, he appends to it a statement that does not seem to me accordant with the facts.
He attributes to Helena a "broad determination of ungrateful treachery," and then adds: "The act itself isnatural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise too true a picture of the lax hold which principles have on a woman's heart when opposed to, or even separated from, passion and inclination. For women are less hypocrites to their own minds than men are, because, in general, they feel less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more of its outward consequences, as detection and loss of character, than men,—their natures being almost wholly extroitive."[10]
Now there is no treachery in the act of Helena, because there is no damage in it to the runaways. If she supposed that Demetrius could prevent the flight or prevail over Hermia's repugnance, she would never have given the information to him. Her motive is entirely distinct from treachery, and is rooted in a truly feminine hope of disgusting Demetrius by showing the woman he loves running away with another man. This may cure his passion, and possibly revive it for herself. But she modestly says that even thanking her would be too great a strain upon him. Still, so far from fancying that Demetrius can detach Hermia from Lysander, she means to "enrich her pain,"—that is, deepen it, by following to witness his despair at her rival's flight, then have him back again. For then, perhaps, his feeling may returnto her from the point of appreciating her act which disenchants him. All this we have to put down tediously to rescue Shakspeare's compactness from Coleridge's misrepresentation.
But it gives me an opportunity to suggest that women are less hypocritical to their own minds than men are, not because they feel less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more of its outward consequences, but because they have an organic instinct, that is due to difference of sex, to be swayed first by passions and inclinations that are entirely frank and unconventional, and afterwards by motives arising out of abstract principles. Therefore they are natively unconscious of something which men smile at or deplore, as they call it insincerity. In the description of one of his characters, Bulwer says, "That strange faculty in women which we men call dissimulation, and which in them is truthfulness to their own nature, enabled her to carry off the sharpest anguish she had ever experienced by a sudden burst of levity of spirit."
Thackeray shows how this native trait can run to viciousness: "When I say I know women, I mean I know that I don't know them. Every woman I ever knew is a puzzle to me, as, I have no doubt, she is to herself. Say they are not clever? Benighted idiot! She has long ago taken your measure and your friends'. She knows your weaknesses, and ministers to them in a thousand artful ways. She knows your obstinate points, and marches round them with the most curious art and patience, as you will see an ant on a journey turn roundan obstacle. Every woman manages her husband: every person who manages another is a hypocrite. Her smiles, her submission, her good humor, for all which we value her,—what are they but admirable duplicity? We expect falseness from her, and order and educate her to be dishonest. Should he upbraid, I'll own that he prevail; say that he frown, I'll answer with a smile: what are these but lies, that we exact from our slaves?—lies, the dexterous performance of which we announce to be the female virtues."
But, if a noble woman would defend her art of complaisance, she might justly borrow the words of Queen Katherine, in that fourth scene of the second act of "Henry VIII.," which is manifestly a portion contributed by Shakspeare:—
"Heaven witness,I have been to you a true and humble wife,At all times to your will conformable:Ever in fear to kindle your dislike,Yea, subject to your countenance,—glad or sorry,As I saw it inclined. When was the hourI ever contradicted your desire,Or made it not mine too? Or which of your friendsHave I not strove to love, although I knewHe were mine enemy?"
In cases that are not involved with passion, inclination, or some personal and social coil, the moral judgment of woman is natively far better than fear of detection. And, if a man prides himself upon some superiority in this respect, he has something to conceal. What social circle in the world is not made eminent by cases of a sense of duty that sustains itself againstinclination and personal respects! Suffering heroism holds up ill-fated alliances and conceals them nobly from the common eye; there is protracted sacrifice which puts the finger of silence to quivering lips. There are not a few women whom youthful sentiment, like a paid emissary, has decoyed into cruel disenchantments, and there betrayed them to the stake: the fagots are piled, the years contribute fresh fuel, but the flames extort no cry. For the highest considerations of conscience, the tenderest maternity, lights a counter-fire that shrivels the complaint. The world never discovers that thisauto-da-féis going on of a woman who is too delicate and noble to dash the sparks of it among her neighbors for the brewing of tea-table gossip, and the kindling of little bonfires of sympathy.
But, in social and public transactions, the average woman can be the bitterest partisan and the most reckless defyer of justice: it is when her sentiment is involved, her pride is hurt, a specific interest of house or person threatened, her egotism irritated. With men, partisanship is the result of complex motives; with woman, it is an unmixed, aboriginal passion. Bosom friends never know two sides to a quarrel: the woman who is implicated is sure, when she makes her statement to female intimates, of an absolute and abject belief in her truthfulness. They will not take the trouble to learn, or even care to inquire after, the position of the other party. If it be a man, he will be perfectly conscious of this manɶuvre of nature without taking much pains to set up a counter-movement, or tocreate a party of his own. Manifold occupations supply a salutary rebuke of pettiness, and help to drive the matter from his mind. If it be a woman, much time and feminine resource will be lavished in self-exoneration. She will go to and fro in a vigorous canvass of society, to create a clan and clothe it in the plaid of her sprightly confidences. Its bucklers coldly gleam in every assembly.
There are some vices which circulate through the world without invading the seclusion of woman. She cannot imagine what they are; consequently they remain so vague that she has no more blame for them than for the nebulæ in Orion. Financial operations, for instance, are so intricate that she shrinks from following, and so foreign to the course of her life that they secure a languid attention. Her lover or husband can easily make it appear to her that his violations of trust are either the knavery and carelessness of others, or admissible procedures; and, if she is as deeply in love as he is in offence, she will resort to connivance rather than divorce. Jessica plunders her father, and then calls out to her lover,—
"Here, catch this casket; it is worth the pains."
But, not being quite sure if she has taken enough, she returns to gild herself "with some more ducats." It was a highly profitable "irregularity:"—
"Two sealed bags of ducats,Of double ducats, stol'n from me by my daughter!And jewels,—two stones, two rich and precious stones,Stol'n by my daughter!"
One of the stones was a diamond worth two thousand ducats, and another was a turquoise which her mother gave to Shylock before marriage. That she exchanged in Genoa for a monkey. A critic says of these transactions, "We recognize a certain equity in their furtively taking what we think he ought to have voluntarily bestowed." This anxiety to protect Shakspeare from moral blame disregards some feminine possibilities. Jessica's offence was the very one, the only one, of which she was capable; and, like all such lapses, her act was due to circumstances conspiring with latent tendency. We are not reconciled to her behavior by recalling the pound of flesh; for the theft of the jewels is as contrary to mercy as the stipulation in Antonio's bond. But love and sex prevail: she behaves like any full-blooded nature who has been defrauded of her rights, immured in a house with the "vapor of a dungeon," cut off from amusements and sympathies, from gondolas and serenades. She spends money foolishly after she gets it, thanks to the father who scrimped her. It depends upon how deeply we mean to hate Shylock whether his howls over the transaction of the monkey delight our ears.
There are many things which we have not allowed woman to understand: she has been stinted in her education and secluded in her pursuits beyond the organic requisition of her sex. Public affairs of the highest importance pass through her mind like the blurred impression made upon her by the multifariousness of a daily newspaper; and we know what candid awkwardness balks the attempt to seize and unsnarl the vital points of the morning sheet. The marriages and deaths, being in large type and a conventional place, compete with the advertisements of low-priced cottons and flannels, and are only forgotten when the column that flatters with the latest fashions storms the well-dressed heart. Perhaps the same sheet announces the last pathetic moment of the Crimean campaign, which men follow with the eager interest of participants, as they are pledged to the cause of either party because they estimate the weal or woe of human races. Perhaps the Franco-Prussian war is creating an historic epoch in the politics and religion of Europe, involving new adjustments of the social and democratic life, making Luther's half battles whole ones, and leading all the bitter experiences of France into the solution of a republic. It is safe to say that the majority of women are indifferent to the closely printed columns which men follow with almost the literal precision of the compositors who set them up. Perhaps the statement may be hazarded that the emancipation of woman depends considerably upon her rivalry with man at the newsstands, and her patient sifting of the contents of her purchase. The proposition is not so fantastic as it may appear. I have been astonished at the repugnance of sprightly and intelligent women for the labor that the genuine news of the day from every nation requires, as it deserves, to be extracted from papers of value and dignity; for each throb of honest news carries forward the second-hand that marks the hours of mankind.Woman prefers to know the interests of the planet by hearsay, to sit over her fine task and listen to some man who has sopped up each crisis: he distils the day into a few drops of her luxury. It evaporates like the scent upon her handkerchief. She will hardly derive the benefit of discussing it. Her native sense ought to be furnished with a just appreciation of public affairs, enlightened observation of them, well-balanced abhorrence of all the iniquities, sustained and practical reflection upon the great proceedings of the world. If the claims of the household can never afford her time for this, she must decline the peril of increasing masculine ignorance by the weight of a single ballot.
But, in private and domestic life, what Aladdin's lamp she rubs in secret to enrich her day! When a woman has a good deal of common-sense, she never uses it to ponder with. It is a daylight that pervades all at once without arriving by degrees. It is wonderful to see her swiftness in unknotting man's perplexed forehead with her talent that is used to snarls. It was not the result of a process of inferring and considering: she is the most considerate when she taxes herself the least to be so. And, if you ask her how she reasons upon any subject, she might reply as Julia did when pressed to give her reason for thinking Proteus the best man:—
"I have no other but a woman's reason:I think him so because I think him so."
A woman will tell you that probably she drops out stages, and does not have to pass through all the terms which detain a man; so that the process is like evaporation,—a broad and insensible deduction. This is a constant surprise to man, who supposes that his logical ability must be superior in all exigencies, because it is so essential in science and the classification of the world, and wherever he trains facts to observe their proper sequence. But woman's brain vaporizes syllogism, and a subtle æther vibrates. Her limitation is a great superiority on its appropriate field.
Hermia tells Theseus that Lysander is a worthy gentleman. The Prince replies:—
"In himself he is;But, in this kind, wanting your father's voice,The other must be held the worthier.Her.I would my father look'd but with my eyes!The.Rather your eyes must with his judgment look."
But that is past expecting or desiring, for there is often a better judgment in her tact.
It is also a reason for the inability of man to thoroughly fathom all her moods and motives, for it is the advantage which sex procures for her. We sometimes understand her secret convictions as little as we do the minds of children, who are as removed from us by time as she is by sex. It is a distance equally difficult to surmount; for though we too have been children, and suffered or rejoiced in secret, we have entirely forgotten how it was all done, or with what sequences of moods and partial reasonings our experience was gained. If, therefore, there be always something of audacity in the attempt to analyze the natures of women, in life itself or in Shakspeare's living characters, the confession must soften the offence, and, if there be failure, pardon it.
Those gestures of the female intelligence which we may call intuitive afford her an advantage in her intercourse with the other sex. Notice how Shakspeare's women read the men and understand them better than the other men do. Those who are most interested to know the disposition of their associates are not the first as a matter of course to discover it; but it is frequently, and in grave junctures, revealed by the swift instinct of some woman. Men are not conscious when they are observed by women, because the survey is made so silently. We are as little conscious of the unobtrusive forenoon which envelops every act and feature and sets them in plainness. The glance of an observing woman does not pierce a man at any spot: it surrounds the whole of him at once impalpably. Or sometimes it is one swift flit of her face across your own, like the shadow of a bird's wing. It is gone before you can declare that she looked at you. But the glance was an estimate: it cost her scarce a second to peruse every cubic inch of you, and audit a hundred years of ancestry. The glance is withdrawn, and goes into obscurity, like an instantaneous sun-picture, there to deepen into distinctness. Almost every woman has set up a gallery of these impressions, which she shows rarely, and to her trusted intimates alone. But there you are preserved,—a simpleton, a rowdy, a gallant, a rogue, or a gentleman; one who respects, who honors, or who thinks lightly of her; one who is capable of valuing or of depreciating; one whose hand is clean enough to touch or nettlesome to roughen her delicacy; one whose secret and unspoken effluenceis salubrious, or somewhat doubtful, to be kept at bay, to be considered while you are the most profuse of honorable sentences. In the long run, you will generally succeed in justifying all her silent estimates. She took you unawares, in a moment when your lip did not move with your tongue, or the eye motioned to her something dubious, or the whole face was a daybreak of clarity and honor. Ponder well, and lend it second-thoughts, when a woman bids you, upon the motion of her instinct, be cautious—or be confiding, be profuse or chary, be still over-ears in love or cured of that distemper. To a young man the freedom of a good woman's estimate of other men supplements the university; for he is a pupil who is fathomed previous to being taught.
Are our steps dogged then, and all our proceedings watched by non-commissioned detectives, who enjoy the immense advantage of being born in every house, and furnished with a passport into every other? Is a badge concealed in every reticule, to be displayed when the occasion comes to arrest us, which may be at the moments of our critical feelings, when confidence, and not exposure, is vital to us? A fine woman has not the consciousness that belongs to spies: she is guiltless of the act and the intent to watch us. Men deliberately set themselves to the work of scrutiny, and pay out all the line they have to fathom an associate, and bring up his mud or gold-sand sticking to the sinker. It does not always reach the grounds of his being. But clear-headed women envelop other natures as the air which simply exists to drench all objects through their pores, by the stress ofmiles of heaven's blue piled on it. As every unconscious breath we draw compels the air to enter and circulate through us, so all our involuntary moods and actions invite the woman's perception. Who is not willing to exist immersed in this frank element that is without a motive?
But if some obscure caprice in a woman is always ready to steal out and nibble at her judgment, or if some obliquity faults her intrinsic nature, she can mistake you as rapidly as otherwise she might correctly hit. Nothing can be more unjust and cruel, more bitterly fostered, more viciously proclaimed, or virtuously insinuated, than the impromptu misinterpretations of a shallow or prejudiced woman. She may not be deep enough to be dangerous; but her prejudice saturates the mind, and there is no margin of a woman left. She plies her pea-blower in all companies: the little projectiles carry breath enough to tingle. They hit the people who ought to be your friends with a blow aimed by something that is unlike yourself, and which you are not capable of becoming. It is yourself soured in her spleen, poisoned by her spite. Some unsatisfied emotion degenerates into a damaged judgment.
If the instinct of womanhood be vitiated in a person of strong character, who insists upon being admired, and sweeps into her net all the adoration that is afloat, or if she is unsexed by any kind of mean ambition, her touch for man will be blunted. She will probably report his cutaneous defect, and overlook his spiritual substance. In treasuries and mints, the selection of women is madeto count the coin, because by the mere handling they can detect and throw aside the light weights and the spurious metal. In the test to which women subject men, the hands must be unsophisticated, and the blood of a born lady, high or low, must feed the subtle finger-ends.
When Sir Toby Belch says that Sir Andrew hath all the good gifts of nature, Maria's quick taste answers, "He hath, indeed,—all most natural." A great many men are boozily unconscious of the traits of their companions; but all women know each other thoroughly; and they tacitly allow for each defect, unless some spiteful moment aggravates them. To say that they know each other like a book is to overestimate the great majority of books. The more delightedly they greet each other, the more keenly are they remembering mutual frailties. Perhaps those of the charming morning-caller will transpire when her call is over. To your surprise, you learn that she is intriguing; that, indeed, she will not stick at a falsehood,—well, an indirection; that she is a very pushing woman, and quite capable of fawning if any social thrift will follow. And this absent friend atones for the constraint of her call by unbosoming her hostess to some other listener, who is pleased to learn that the fabric of the world will not crumble so long as both of them have daughters and sisters, who must get into society where marriage benedictions are pronounced, or where style, at least, is piety.
How nicely Maria decants the essence of Malvolio, without spilling or clouding, when Sir Toby asks her, "Tell us something of him"! Now Maria wants tomarry Sir Toby, so she bends to every breeze of his humor, but is never overset: she could not misrepresent Malvolio even to please Sir Toby who has been so rated for overdrinking. She tells the simple truth of her observation: the steward is "the best persuaded of himself; so crammed, as he thinks, with excellences, that it is his ground of faith, that all that look on him love him." Sir Toby first sees Malvolio in his true aspect, and exclaims with admiration, "She's a beagle, true bred!" So is every sound woman who is not called off the track by the small game of feminine crotchets and conceits.
Queen Margaret, the wife of Henry VI., has a mind so distempered by a hankering for political distinction that she misreads the grief of the good Duke Humphrey, the king's uncle, when she succeeds in degrading and banishing the Duchess. And she asks the King,—
"Can you not see? or will you not observeThe strangeness of his alter'd countenance?"
She interprets the sombre mien, the fixed look, and the stiff gait of the sorrowing Duke into evidence of a rancorous and treasonable purpose. But the King knows better.
"Our kinsman Gloster is as innocentFrom meaning treason to our royal person,As is the sucking lamb or harmless dove."
He sees in Humphrey's face "the map of honor, truth, and loyalty." The Queen's ambitious discontent with the popularity of Humphrey discolors all his actions, so that she half believes he is at work to win the heart of thecommon people, that he may supplant the King. This half belief is flung by her upon the face of Humphrey, into the very eyes of his loyalty, and embosses it with the leprosy of her slander.
The English people were scandalized by the interference of Alice Perers with the politics of the reign of Edward III. She was a "fair piece of sin," for whose sake Edward anticipated his dotage. When Parliament interfered to break up a scandal that astonished even the court of France, Alice was perfectly ready to take an oath never again to see the King; for she knew that he valued her counsels because he drivelled over her person. So she returned from exile in time to misrepresent the most honest and outspoken man in Parliament, Peter de la Marr, who was well acquainted with the back-stairs policy which she would fain import into the government of England. As history bids her shift across its light in the various outlines of her domineering temper, to show her to us seated on the bench with the judges, suggesting to them what their ruling must be, or as she drives a trade between the court and foreign envoys, and mistranslates to the King the bias of popular opinion, we perceive a woman whose facile sex is merely a sop to drug a king in order to control his policy. The pages of royal and republican annals are mildewed with these old spots of decayed womanhood. Like dead flowers put to be pressed against some sweet or lofty rhyme, their musty petals mark the place where a single vice enlisted all the fine perception of the sex against honest manhood and the spirit of the age.