Nature seems to have draughted many of her women in the mind of Shakspeare before she embodied them to play their parts. Already there existed Antigone, Medea, Electra, and the ensky'd Beatrice; but these did not exhaust her capacity of womanhood. They seem only sketches of a few single features, portraits of isolated qualities that waited to be combined. Medea was the hate of a mortified and neglected love; Electra was the unsleeping persistency of a daughter's revenge; Antigone, the divine constancy of a daughter's affection; Ismene, the weakness of a common mind; Alcestis,the extravagant submission of a tender wife: they are all single strings of the old Greek lyre, never tuned to sweep into a perfect octave. The note which Alcestis emits is merely her willingness to die. Imogen sounds the same at the command of a husband who suspects her honor. But it wakes the harmony of other strings, and we listen to a chastity that is as spirited and deadly as it is submissive; to a love that is as eager as it is refined; to an honesty that exposes the discord of double dealing by chiming with a simplicity that scarce knows how to suspect; to a purity that is as unconscious as a girl, while it is as haughty as a man. The chords are rich and solid, and support the theme of her character through all its movements.
So women began to exist for the first time in literature. Shakspeare discovered woman, and took note of her generic peculiarity which upholds the specific differences of individual women. They all came forth to him as surely as flowers to the sun. He solicited each jealously interfolded sheath, and drew out of it the heart of its color. All of them are rooted in the common ground of sex; but each one lifts into the blossom her signals of a temper and modulation that are peculiarly her own. So that, although "each woman is a brief of Womankind," she is also a woman who must be designated by some one of Shakspeare's famous names.
In fact, genius was never penetrated with the varieties of woman's temperament till Shakspeare, picking up a few rustic specimens in Stratford, ran away with them to London, taking down there honest, red-fisted Audrey;Phebe, the village coquette, a little above her condition, who reads and quotes tender love-lore, and learns to despise a swain; Mopsa and Dorcas, doting on ballads, watchful after pedlars to chaffer with across the hedge for tapes and ribbons; and Juliet's gossipy, free-spoken, easy-minded Mrs. Gamp. With this humble retinue, his imagination travelled down to the great city, and seemed to have introduced them soon, past all the barriers of etiquette, into Elizabeth's circle of ladies, where they went into the service of high-born qualities, and retailed to him the very heart-secrets of their mistresses. The dames of wealthy citizens sat in full costume for his "Merry Wives;" the noble partners of his friends and patrons yielded each to him a whisper of their chasteness, their high-spirit, their control, their tenderness.
"In the blazon of sweet beauty's bestOf hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,"
he mastered Beauty of the form and soul, and gave to each her portion, from Imogen to Cleopatra,—
"The worser spirit, a woman color'd ill."
One could not, of course, claim for Shakspeare that his pages include all the varieties of women which Nature is capable of producing. He has no daughters of the people, like Egmont's Clara and Faust's Margaret: they are conceptions of a later date. But they are implied in the quality of his women; and we incline to think that Nature will not be able to invent a fresh style of woman, or to modify the standard types, unless she sets out with that essential peculiarity, the Womanliness,which Shakspeare has described. As all the instruments of an orchestra are tuned upon a single pitch, and as all future modifications of the instruments must defer to the same if they mean to take rank in harmony, so all the women who are still possible to Nature must accord with her influential note. Shakspeare is content to strike that. Through all the chords which cluster around his different characters, we detect it: he seems to be making tuning-forks on the same pitch, but of various materials, to emphasize it to the ear. His plays take from it a consonant vibration that extends through scenes and lapses of time during which no woman's face appears. The tonic of her heart is diffused beyond the limits of her person; as when Ophelia's bloom clings to the fate of Hamlet, even while she waits in death for him to reach her funeral-rite. So the beautiful soul of Cordelia, that is little talked of by herself, and is but stingily set forth by circumstance, engrosses our feeling in scenes from whose threshold her filial piety is banished. We know what Lear is so pathetically remembering: the sisters tell us in their cruellest moments; it mingles with the midnight storm, a sigh of the daughterhood that was repulsed. In the pining of the Fool we detect it. Through every wail or gust of this awful symphony of madness, ingratitude, and irony, we feel a woman's breath.
Since Shakspeare's day, new countries have been discovered and peopled; new colonies have carried his mother-tongue around the earth; the language of woman, like the girdle of a goddess, is a zone drawn round allother climates to hold them in the clasp of her charm. The wider culture and the opportunities derived from modern wants have already increased the number of her gifts, and set her person in fresh shadings of character. Perhaps Macaulay's New Zealander, who is expected to meditate in the future over the ruins of London, will turn out to be a woman, of a variety which Shakspeare has nowhere precisely drawn. But, if all his plays should by that time have shared the fate of an extinguished England, there would she sit, the survivor in the direct line of descent from his essential Woman; by virtue of her sex the Sibyl foretelling the women who will be possible to Nature.
"Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo:Jam redit et Virgo."
Woman, as she resembles man, was of less consequence to Shakspeare than woman in herself, apart from what she can do, can earn, or can aspire to. He merely received the feminine side of Nature into his recreating thought, the essential Woman, without respect to the exigencies of any period or style of culture,—the only She, such as woman must remain to the end of time underneath all her activities and requirements. Her sex is the unalterable decree which she can cast no ballot to vote away from her, and assume no profession to raze it from the eternal tablets of her distinction. All the purely modern questions which relate to her career; the efforts to equalize with man's her wages, to multiply her opportunities, to claim her interest in the politics of human rights, to secure her alleviating presence in the rudescenes of republicanism,—successful as these tendencies may be,—cannot transform Woman; and she will not step out of her Shakspearean Self. On the figured coast of his page her Essence stands, as yet without the right of suffrage, limited to household cares, or raised to queenly ones; as learned as Portia can become, but not yet admitted to the profession which she mimicked; provided for by the various dexterities of man, and still undriven by the modern threat of starvation into risking a single quality that is her birthright. There she stands; the modern world, stooping at her feet, will have to yield some of the reputed exclusiveness of men, but only such traits of it as Imogen, Cordelia, Beatrice, Portia, will select. In all this complicated period of over-crowded cities, over-stimulated competition, vices overfed, employers over-purse-proud, and politicians over-careless, there is no strait cruel enough to compel the essential woman to choose a career which would have unsexed one of Shakspeare's plays. I have no fear. Stand aside: cease that frantic bracing of the masculine back against so many doors of prescription. Throw them wide open, and let Shakspeare's stately crowd pass up and down to scan the vista through them. Come, patient, chaste, obedient, high-spirited Imogen, too docile Ophelia, frank Perdita, warm Julia, bright and witty Beatrice, whose tongue is a pen already, or the etcher's tool; come, thou accomplished, grave, acute, and self-possessed Portia; thou unsophisticated Miranda, who would fain share thy lover's toil; thou shifty, prompt Maria, hater of humbug; thou tender Viola,—come, choose how many ofthese men's garments you will continue to wear, preferring to be women. Not one of them, I venture to declare, which your eternal instinct will feel to cramp or to disguise the form. "Dost thou think," says Rosalind, "though I am caparison'd like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?"
Perdita, I think, if she were not discovered to be a king's daughter, might take to floriculture, and earn a living by it. She would no longer keep her dainty pique against the gilly-flower, but learn to marry
"A gentler scion to the wildest stock,"
and thus mend Nature. She would prefer to be "Flora peering in April's front," along meadows which Proserpine might have roved through, far from the university and the din of scholarships. And pray restrain Ophelia from the commission of suicide by joining a nunnery; but do not save her life to put her to a trade that turns upon any other knack than simple beauty. A woman who can enthrall a Hamlet will esteem it no derogation to pluck from his memory a rooted sorrow. It is a profession quite as sanative as Helena's, whose father had taught her the use of curious drugs, and bequeathed to her "prescriptions of rare and prov'd effects." But let Ophelia be simply beautiful, be surprising like the first May-flowers, be winning like unobtrusive violets; let her exhale, like slopes that are brown with needles of the pine. Preserve the maid who held Hamlet's princely heart in the hollow of a moist and rosy hand: let her survive among us to hold others, to unwrinkle brows ofspeculation with a finger-tip, to unknot the snarls of business and ferocious care with kisses which the street will not overhear. Out of all her craze may she gather up again and redistribute the flowers of her shy disposition, "for remembrance; pray you, love, remember;" and some for herself too, "we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays."
Do not tempt Ophelia to drown herself again
"With annoyance of charity schools or of districts."
Turn over all such business to that pragmatic and correct Isabella: she will do better in it than in making a whole nunnery miserable with posted notices of the dangers to virtue and of rules for being severely let alone. But Ophelia,
"Live, be lovely, forget them, be beautiful even to proudness,Even for their poor sakes whose happiness is to behold you;Live, be uncaring, be joyous, be sumptuous; only be lovely,—Sumptuous, not for display, and joyous, not for enjoyment;Not for enjoyment, truly; for Beauty and God's great glory.Built by that only law, that Use be suggester of Beauty,Nought be concealed that is done, but all things done to adornment,Meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and embellish."
LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE.
The great motives and impulses of human nature do not find themselves made obsolete by Shakspeare's genius: we meet the central passion of Love animating every play, and modified by the various characteristicsof his women. They appear in the plots, as in the world, to discharge that great function of their being. Steele once said of a woman, "To have loved her was a liberal education,"—a happy phrase which has done duty since in other connections. There must have been floating in Steele's mind the verses of Biron in "Love's Labor Lost;" at least, the pith of his sentence is there anticipated:—
"For when would you, my lord, or you, or you,Have found the ground of study's excellence,Without the beauty of a woman's face?From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:They are the ground, the books, the Academes,From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.For where is any author in the worldTeaches such beauty as a woman's eye?"
"Without love I can fancy no gentleman," says Thackeray.
When Shakspeare shows his characters in love, the passion is as fresh and uncompromising as if it were still the morning of the world. His verse "dallies with the innocence of love, like the old age." The curious considerations of the modern novelist were not then invented. His lovers trump up no obstacles out of over-nice and subtle reflection: all that hampers them is circumstance, a family feud, a transparent jealousy, a disguise of fortune, a father's will, or a conspiracy. They do not take themselves apart before us, as lecturers do their manikin, to show how cunningly morbid the organs may become. There is no mesh of motives woven around and across, so intricately that if the loverbreaks from one of his own threads he can catch himself by another, and keep worrying the poor fly of his feeling. Shakspeare's women love without sparing a moment for analysis: the rose is crushed to the bosom, a glory of stamens, petals, and perfume, whose names are unknown and unheeded; for the botanizing of emotions was the æsthetic of a later day when men cull a herbarium from their mothers' graves. In this regard Shakspeare is as direct as the Greeks, though far more vital. He puts into his live people the passion which the old chorus used to hold up like a placard:—
Love, thou invincible battle![17]Love, thou router of lucre,To capture the softness of youthAnd lodge in the bloom of its cheeks!'Tis all one to thee if thou farestBy sea, or dost loiter in farm-yards.It helps not to be an immortal;Mankind is no refuge from theeWho art of men the first madness.Thou dost ravish the just of their judgment,Dost snatch them to blame;Thou art the bicker that vexesThe blood in the hearts that are kin.Vivid the promise of bride-bedThou kindlest on eyelids of virgins,Great prescripts of past time undoing;So sports Aphrodite, and rules.
Shakspeare has inherited the antique single-mindedness, undisturbed by all our modern after-thoughts of sentiment. His heroines do not understand what refinements of torture a cultivated soul can invent to make itself wretched. They are frank and instantaneous; as when Miranda puts her heart into Ferdinand's hand, so sweetly unconscious of all that the action involves. She only knows that she has "no ambition to see a goodlier man," no arts to use to win him, no starting to overtake the passion with a pack of doubts.
"Hence, bashful cunning,And prompt me, plain and holy innocence!I am your wife, if you will marry me."
The only game she plays with him is chess, but she does better than stale-mate him.
Beatrice, for all her cleverness, shows that she loves Benedick in the first words she utters in the play. For she asks if he has returned from the wars, and gives him a fencing-term for a nickname, to pretend a profound unconcern; then disparages him in a most lively way, and asks whom he has now for a companion, seeming to allude to men, but expecting to know by the answer if his affections have become involved with any woman. And when he fences her wit with his bachelor banter, it piques her secret admiration. She has no other subtlety beyond her wit: she uses it to misprize the wedded state, and to mock indiscriminately at men,—a very common and transparent stratagem of a heart that is deeply engaged; and, beneath all the gay and flippant manner, she feels hurt because she thinks that Benedick is really cool and does not feign.
There is nothing but the mask of night upon Juliet's face to hide, the blush which her lips acknowledge. "Farewell compliment. Dost thou love me?" The bud of love becomes a beauteous flower in its firstspring day, for it is too impatient to levy on the lagging warmth of summer; and the sudden heat sends every drop of Juliet's blood rushing into the frankest words that maiden ever spoke. She has not even mental device enough to hush what the most passionate women, of a type less frigid than our own, are quite content to feel if there's love enough to justify. So the verses which come fluent from Juliet's lips do not scald like the insinuations of some modern novels which plot random passions and ingeniously dally with them. Shakspeare has no pages of this elaborate suggestion. His mental style was like the archer's bolt that quivers in the middle of the boss: he never could have learned this modern practice of the boomerang, which dips, skims, makes ricochets, lingers, doubles corners, and plays back into the sender's hand.
"A murderous guilt shows not itself more soonThan love that would seem hid: love's night is noon."
The finest of his ladies cry out with the sudden smart.
"Cæsario, by the roses of the spring,By maidhood, honor, truth, and every thing,I love thee so, that, maugre all my pride,Nor wit, nor reason, can my passion hide."
Perhaps this is not a style that might be safely cultivated in our female boarding-schools, unless all the Cæsarios were Violas in disguise. But it is Love's ideal sincerity as it lives in Poesy's world to quicken sluggards and scorch prurience to death.
His love is not only unsophisticated: it is as virile, sumptuous, adventurous, intense, as the age whichcrushed the Armada as if it were a cluster to infuse new blood into England. It shares the intrepidity of all the sea-kings, but declines their ruffling and bluster. It is colored like the costumes of the nobles, who vaunted their rich stuffs and set the dull streets aglow like a parterre of flowers, before we began to exchange doublets and slashed satin for the hypocritic pantaloon. Its manner is free, reliant, full of respect and of a proudness of honor: sometimes it lets the flashing blade be seen at a touch of the ruffled wrist; sometimes it subdues all the grand state into deference, cap in hand, till the plumes sweep the ground clean before the beloved object. It has been reared in Anglo-Saxon bluntness. It is as broad and light-pervaded as a forenoon; but sometimes it is like those forenoons which appear to have saved over afternoon shades from yesterdays, they are so toned with the pearliness of a refraining light. It has risen early, and its elastic steps brush dew, and its freshly opened eyes are dawns. We seem to have returned with these lovers to a long-past epoch of the world, when Love had been just invented and put on trial among men and women of heroic mould and simple manners, who let the new passion flood them to the brim of their brains and turn every sense into its heralds. They report something so antique as to be young; and our jaded nerves respond to the tonic of a feeling that is for the first time tried. So deeply does Shakspeare's genius dip the heart into the old stream that makes invulnerable and immortal.
He sets forth the passion as it defies races, passesfrontiers unsearched, and makes all the sects religious. The Catholic maiden, who has overheard that St. Bartholomew would have a bloody eve, puts the white sign of safety round the arm of her Huguenot lover; but the fingers of his sword-arm pull it off, though all the binding love in her face pleads for the dear deceit, and justifies it to all of his heart that is not dedicated to die with comrades. Her religion,—what is it but the sacrament that converts her adored one into the body and the blood of her life? Henceforth High Mass must celebrate for her a double sacrifice.
Shakspeare contrived to rear a race of women whose physical soundness was unimpaired. Before the gymnasium and the health-lift were invented at the peevish persuasion of dyspeptics and invalids, who die by inches of fried food, furnace-air, fricassees of high-school programmes, and ragouts of French novels, his women earned their health on horseback in the broad English fields: they called it down to them out of the sky, where the hawk struck the heron and returned to perch upon the wrist; they came upon its track in the sylvan paths which the startled deer extemporized; they overtook it in long stretches of breezy walks upon the heathery downs and in the hawthorn-bounded lane. The country's Nature was their training-room, and its unsophisticated habits their masters. They saw the sun rise, and could not afford time to outflare the setting crescent with gaslight streaming from overheated rooms; nor did the stately minuet ravage like the German which is sustained into the small hours upon rations of beef-tea and various liquors. They drank small-beer for breakfast, and knew the taste of herrings before the Turks invaded the nerves of Christendom with coffee, and the Chinese began to tan its stomach with the acid of teas. At twelve o'clock, a cup of malmsey, with a wedge of venison-pasty, scared up no megrims in constitutions which had followed the deer through the forest into the larder, and had pulled it down there with dexterous hands into the dish. Imogen was a prime cook, dressed vegetables in various devices to make them dainty to the eye, and flavored broth fit for Juno. She never caught cold on the floor of the cave. The forest was as courteous to her as the court.
Not one of Shakspeare's women utters one line that is inspired by any form of hysteria: the perfect balance of the functions was not yet impaired; so that no nerve-centre could exercise a petty tyranny, nor suggest the morbid fancies and curious superfluities which dedicate so many late romances to St. Vitus, the patron of spasm.
In an admirable book upon "Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls," I found embedded in an excellent vein of common sense the following obscure statement, quoted from another author: "Peripheral influences of an extremely powerful and continuous kind, where they concur with one of those critical periods of life at which the central nervous system is relatively weak and unstable, can occasionally set going a non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may localize itself in those nerves upon whose centres the morbific peripheral influence is perpetually pouring in." Herebe words almost as depressing as the ills which the flesh of the modern woman is heiress to; but that legacy cannot be traced as far back as the poetry of that age when the Queen rode along the line of her English soldiers at Tilbury Fort, while Dorcas and Mopsa helped to stack barley to malt the ale for her maids of honor. I doubt if Shakspeare was familiar with many cases, transpiring in the town or the country, of women demolished by "morbific peripheral influence."
So the bodies of his women mature like all the nature out of doors, and become capable of entertaining the great passion with its own strenuous, unconscious innocence, with its honest ardor, with its native directness. Obscure ailments do not warp his verses, nor twang sick pathos out of their nerves. And we seek the society of these unsensational women, just as we seek Shakspeare's verse itself; with the same hope to earn repose for the soul which has been so taxed by the strained rhetoric of later writers. For relief, we recur to the pregnant moderation of Shakspeare's style. Pyrotechnics tire the eye, and send the dazed spectator groping home, as they seem to make more darkness by exploding. One reason for the revival of interest and love for Shakspeare may be found in a natural reaction from artifice and over-wrought expression. The heated mind has discovered an oasis and deep well that wait in this sirocco-stricken age with coolness for our hearts. How eagerly we run toward this shadowed margin where his great power is greatly tempered to our human feeling! His vivacity has been so bred by repose that it never strays beyond the linewhere stimulus becomes inebriation. He not only despises the abrupt effects which are darlings of the modern pen, but he resolutely refuses to represent abruptness; and his fancy makes its rapid time by even and placid motion; as a great sea-bird, with outstretched wings, in which you scarcely can detect a winnow, will follow the speed of your ship and be seen constantly poised just above the stern. All his figures have the same breadth and floating quality: they take you, as on an expanse of Fortunatus's carpet, upon a great journey silently. They are not apothecary's expedients to raise a blister by sharp surprise, to lash up a jaded taste by some cantharides of metaphor and simile, to rouse a torpid skin by acupuncture, or dull a heavy pain by injected morphia, as our modern practitioners of the ideal do, who have abused tired Nature's sweet restorer and the digestion that should wait on appetite.
And every gesture of Shakspeare, even when he has violence to describe, is not violently made; but the most tremendous deeds are emphasized by having their bluster chidden and their outcry hushed; so the great midnight lifts a finger of silence, but shudders none the less, and sinks to awful depths with the crime which has fastened itself upon her secrecy, as if to drag her dumbly out of the sweet heaven down to a place of horror. While Macbeth goes to Duncan's chamber, and the wife listens to hear death follow, the verse turns over the business of shrieking to the owl: an elemental dread from the unsounded depth of human feeling puts an accent on the scene.
Since Shakspeare's time, our rhetoric has been slowly raising its pitch, just as the musical instruments had been doing it until a congress was called to reduce to a normal note ofC, with two hundred and twelve vibrations in a second, the pitch that had become so exaggerated. Handel was content to write a minor third below even that. What a pity that a congress of the best minds could not impose a normal pitch upon the shrieking muse, the new Calliope, who goes by steam!
Observe the level, unobtrusive nature of Shakspeare's Sonnets and of the songs in the plays. The difference between them and our later scaling of the falsetto is like the difference between the moderately strung violins of Salo and Amati and the violin of the present day. Those antique violins were made to accompany soprano voices which had no ambition to reach highC, as all men's ears were then content with the medium register. "Their gently veiled, yet satisfactorily clear, silver tone, of virgin character," describes the songs of Shakspeare, and the sentiment for music which is scattered through the plays. In the middle notes almost every thing that is worth having in music is to be found. Behind those bars the melodies which can be domesticated under man's roof and by his hearthside are patiently waiting to be led forth and be installed. Shakspeare used to listen lovingly to the cheerful, healthy madrigal of Elizabeth's age, so wholesome in effect, so downright sincere in expression, so full of the robust, sensuous life of those brave English days, when human habits and emotions dwelt in the middle register of life, and therefound Nature's own fulness and harmony, the finely blended color of passion and thought. But nowadays the daffodils that used to
"TakeThe winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,Or Cytherea's breath;...... bold oxlips, andThe crown-imperial,"
have been plied with guano, dosed with new-fangled liquid manures, till their cosmetic and perfume announce a kind of harlotry: we ogle, sigh, languishingly sniff, and die of a rose in a rheumatic pain.
The gamut of feeling among Shakspeare's women is the clear and perfect octave which built the English glee and madrigal, whose untutored music was "the food of love." And love was entirely welcome, like the daylight; not put off and played with as if by the effeminacies of some Asiatic musical scale, whose eighth and quarter tones cannot be distinguished by a well modulated ear.
"What is Love? 'tis not hereafter;Present mirth hath present laughter;What's to come is still unsure;In delay there lies no plenty:Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,Youth's a stuff will not endure."
Does this have a crude ring of the bivouac to any ear which has been accustomed to the macaronic variations of modern artists, who torture the great theme and force its simple blitheness through the brass crooks of a keyed cornet? 'Tis an honest love whose month is ever May,when the pipe of Pan is breathed upon by the clear west wind through the budding willows. Nothing competes with it but the throstle and song-sparrow: they seem to be weaving sacred nests out of the tones, to gather them into domestic privacy. Climb, count with delight the jealously guarded eggs, and do not blow them for your cabinet.
Nature was so prodigal of health to Shakspeare's women that it overflowed the clay banks of their bodies, and spread in a freshet of gayety. Beatrice and Rosalind never tire of keeping in the air the light shuttlecock of their wit. It floats in an æther of animal spirits; and, if it now and then touches earth, Nature promptly lends it a rebound. They engage in a masked revel to conceal their emotions. Will Orlando and Benedick penetrate the disguise and claim the lips that mockingly escape thus? If these women suspect their hearts to be distilling a sigh, laughter sparkles into the recess and exposes the illicit business. It is just like the men to roam about in disordered attire, with blue, inclement features, shaking with the "quotidian-tertian" of their love-turn. If they do not go about thus, it is all the same: then they are rallied for not being in Cupid's fashion. "Your hose should be ungarter'd, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and every thing about you demonstrating a careless desolation." The gladness of these women would be cautioned at the lorn sight to defend themselves from infection.
Orlando sticks his rhymes up in the forest, like a bill-poster of Radway's Ready Relief, deforming the sturdieroaks. Rosalind goes about pulling them down, and is in the best of spirits when Touchstone declares that he could "rhyme you so, eight years together; dinners, and suppers, and sleeping-hours excepted:" his verses have the regular butter-woman's jog-trot. She was never so nearly berhymed to death since she was an Irish rat in the time of Pythagoras. But, for all that, she is full of bliss to discover that this fancy-monger of rhymes is Orlando; and she is dying to know "what did he? What said he? How look'd he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see him again? Answer me in one word." To be sure, she wears a double disguise of wit and male attire; so when Orlando says to her, "Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love," it is easy for her to reply, "Me believe it? You may as soon make her that you love believe it; which, I warrant, she is apter to do than to confess she does; that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences." But when, pretending to ridicule his emotion, she tells him that "men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love," he protests that Rosalind's frown might kill him. "By this hand," she says, "it will not kill a fly." So all the exuberant frolic of these fine women is the sparkle of healthy brains: the heart's-blood of love does not trickle through hepatic sentiment, but is briskly pumped through the lungs up into the head, flashes from the eye, and becomes a ruddy zest upon the tongue.
Benedick complains that the Lady Beatrice said he was the prince's jester, that he was "duller than a great thaw; huddling jest upon jest, with such impossible conveyance, upon me, that I stood like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at me. While she is here, a man may live as quiet in hell as in a sanctuary; and people sin upon purpose, because they would go thither."
When, however, she overhears Hero giving her wit a bad character for scorn and inhumanity, her woman's heart revolts at the suggestion, and her self-communion runs thus tenderly:—
"What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?Stand I condemn'd for pride and scorn so much?Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!No glory lives behind the back of such.And, Benedick, love on, I will requite thee;Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand."
So the keen, swooping falcon settles at last composedly upon his wrist: love draws a hood over the bright, fearless eye, and claps the jesses upon her spirits. But at the very moment of capture, her strong wings fillip him: "I yield upon great persuasion; and, partly, to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption." That tone has in it the promise of lively times for Benedick. He will never be able to train the delight of liberty out of this falcon, who will slip her jesses still, and circle overhead, but not forget to return. He told her once that, as long as she had no mind to love, "some gentleman or other shall 'scape a predestinate scratched face." But, though love has pared her talons, Benedick will not find matrimony to be dull.
Portia's whole temperament is joyous, even when she pretends that her little body is aweary of the world. Not one of Shakspeare's women shows such a perfect balance of the senses and the soul. Not a muscle of the body ever owned to being tired; not a function ever behaved ill enough to clog her gayety. It flows with mild and even sparkle through all the varied scenes, like a sunlit runnel that carries gilded dimples into woods and through them without lingering to have them catch a damp from shadows. Even the judicial fitness of her great language in the scene with Shylock does not sprinkle chancellor's wig-powder over her cheek. The style has the bloom of health, as it always is with her, "rosy, clear-ringing. How warm with joy are her words! How beautiful all her images, which are for the most part borrowed from mythology!" And we notice that her fancy always selects the classic allusions which are most vital with thought, freshness, sentiment. "If I live to be as old as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtained by the manner of my father's will." And when she watches Bassanio, as he is on the point of choosing among the caskets, what is he like? she thinks; and the mighty youth of Greece supplies her thought:—
"Now he goes,With no less presence, but with much more love,Than young Alcides, when he did redeemThe virgin tribute paid by howling TroyTo the sea-monster; I stand for sacrifice,The rest aloof are the Dardanian wives,With bleared visages, come forth to viewThe issue of th' exploit. Go, Hercules!Live thou, I live."
FOOTNOTES:[11]W. Shakspeare, Sein Leben und Dichten dargestellt, 1866, xvi. 534.[12]Shakspeare's Staat und Königthum, nachgewiesen aus der Lancaster Tetralogie. 1866.[13]Shakspeare in Verhältnisz zum Mittelalter und der Gegenwart.[14]We do not forget nor undervalue the labors of Schlegel and Tieck; the dissertation upon "Hamlet" in "Wilhelm Meister;" the admirable contributions through several years to the "Jahrbuch der Shakspeare-Gesellschaft;" the articles in the "Shakspear-Museum" and other German periodicals; the edition of Shakspeare translated by such men as Bodenstedt, Delius, Gildemeister, Herwegh, Heyse, &c., many of them distinguished for poetic talent. The attack by Benedix upon the "Shakspeare mania" has brought out excellent comment from Noiré and Dr. Wagner. Wagner's editions of the plays, with notes and commentary, are good: so is Dr. Jacob Heussi's "Hamlet." The essays of Karl Elze, of E. Hermann, Kreyssig, V. Friesen, Otto Ludwig, and several other contributors to theJahrbuch, cannot be neglected by scholars of Shakspeare: they are sharply distinguished from the dilettante work of Fulda and others, and from the subjective excess of the writers named above in the text. The English lover of Shakspeare cannot afford to indulge an indiscriminate dislike of the German revival. The Shakspeare-Lexicon of Dr. Schmidt is a magnificent piece of work.[15]Fleay's "Shakspeare Manual," p. 25, a most serviceable book.[16]In a volume entitled "Woman and her Era."[17]Antigone, 792, Ἑρωϛ ἁνἱκατε μἁχαν.
FOOTNOTES:
[11]W. Shakspeare, Sein Leben und Dichten dargestellt, 1866, xvi. 534.
[11]W. Shakspeare, Sein Leben und Dichten dargestellt, 1866, xvi. 534.
[12]Shakspeare's Staat und Königthum, nachgewiesen aus der Lancaster Tetralogie. 1866.
[12]Shakspeare's Staat und Königthum, nachgewiesen aus der Lancaster Tetralogie. 1866.
[13]Shakspeare in Verhältnisz zum Mittelalter und der Gegenwart.
[13]Shakspeare in Verhältnisz zum Mittelalter und der Gegenwart.
[14]We do not forget nor undervalue the labors of Schlegel and Tieck; the dissertation upon "Hamlet" in "Wilhelm Meister;" the admirable contributions through several years to the "Jahrbuch der Shakspeare-Gesellschaft;" the articles in the "Shakspear-Museum" and other German periodicals; the edition of Shakspeare translated by such men as Bodenstedt, Delius, Gildemeister, Herwegh, Heyse, &c., many of them distinguished for poetic talent. The attack by Benedix upon the "Shakspeare mania" has brought out excellent comment from Noiré and Dr. Wagner. Wagner's editions of the plays, with notes and commentary, are good: so is Dr. Jacob Heussi's "Hamlet." The essays of Karl Elze, of E. Hermann, Kreyssig, V. Friesen, Otto Ludwig, and several other contributors to theJahrbuch, cannot be neglected by scholars of Shakspeare: they are sharply distinguished from the dilettante work of Fulda and others, and from the subjective excess of the writers named above in the text. The English lover of Shakspeare cannot afford to indulge an indiscriminate dislike of the German revival. The Shakspeare-Lexicon of Dr. Schmidt is a magnificent piece of work.
[14]We do not forget nor undervalue the labors of Schlegel and Tieck; the dissertation upon "Hamlet" in "Wilhelm Meister;" the admirable contributions through several years to the "Jahrbuch der Shakspeare-Gesellschaft;" the articles in the "Shakspear-Museum" and other German periodicals; the edition of Shakspeare translated by such men as Bodenstedt, Delius, Gildemeister, Herwegh, Heyse, &c., many of them distinguished for poetic talent. The attack by Benedix upon the "Shakspeare mania" has brought out excellent comment from Noiré and Dr. Wagner. Wagner's editions of the plays, with notes and commentary, are good: so is Dr. Jacob Heussi's "Hamlet." The essays of Karl Elze, of E. Hermann, Kreyssig, V. Friesen, Otto Ludwig, and several other contributors to theJahrbuch, cannot be neglected by scholars of Shakspeare: they are sharply distinguished from the dilettante work of Fulda and others, and from the subjective excess of the writers named above in the text. The English lover of Shakspeare cannot afford to indulge an indiscriminate dislike of the German revival. The Shakspeare-Lexicon of Dr. Schmidt is a magnificent piece of work.
[15]Fleay's "Shakspeare Manual," p. 25, a most serviceable book.
[15]Fleay's "Shakspeare Manual," p. 25, a most serviceable book.
[16]In a volume entitled "Woman and her Era."
[16]In a volume entitled "Woman and her Era."
[17]Antigone, 792, Ἑρωϛ ἁνἱκατε μἁχαν.
[17]Antigone, 792, Ἑρωϛ ἁνἱκατε μἁχαν.
PORTIA.
PORTIA.
Inthe elements which compose the character of Portia, Shakspeare anticipated, but without intention, the intellect of those modern women who can wield so gracefully many of the tools which have been hitherto monopolized by men. But the same genius which endowed her with a large and keen intelligence derived it from her sex, and, for the sake of it, he did not sacrifice one trait of her essential womanliness. This commands our attention very strongly; for it is the clew which we must start with.
She is still a woman to the core of her beauty-loving heart. Coming home from the great scene in Venice, where she baffles Shylock, and swamps with sudden justice the scales that were so eager for the bonded flesh, she loiters in the moonlight, marks the music which is floating from her palace to be caressed by the night and made sweeter than by day. Her listening ear is modulated by all the tenderness she feels and the love she expects; so she gives the music the color of a soul that has come home to wife and motherhood, till her thoughts put such a strain upon the vibrating strings that they grow too tense, and threaten to divulge her delicate secret. So she cries,—
"Peace! Now the moon sleeps with Endymion,And would not be awak'd."
Her graceful passion takes shelter in the old myth whose names personify her thought. And her style of speaking reminds us of the more polished ladies of Shakspeare's time, who delighted in the masques and revels in which the persons of the old mythology were charged to utter gallant sentiments. She is a woman of Juliet's clime, and not without her frankness; but she has been brought up in England, and her feeling and her judgment are English through and through.
She has been forbidden by her father's testament to make free choice of the man whom she will love. But she could as soon be divested of her intellect as of her power and wish to love. There is not a single drop running through all her fairness that has caught a chill from the quarter of her brain where wit and wisdom ponder in their clear north light. Her mind is strong, but not the mind of a man, and with no traits more masculine than her frame itself, which is love's solicitor:—
"Here are sever'd lips,Parted with sugar breath."
And even in her strict speech to Shylock we can feel the light draught of it, tempering the inclemency of her superb and unexpected threat: the Jew quails under the sentences which rain on him, golden, grave, serene. And they compel us to observe that pure sex has given the pitch to her strong, fatal wisdom. We cannot detect any thin and stridulous quality, like that of the well-gristled Duchess of Gloster, who repaid a box of the ear with these two lines:—
"Could I come near your beauty with my nails,I'd set my ten commandments in your face."
If among the points of a well-nurtured woman there be those that are feline, they are generally retracted into velvet sheaths, and scarce surmised to be there till a scratch is made so silently that you have no evidence of it but your blood. But if Old Probabilities should overhear a woman blustering in a fashion as follows,—
"Though in this place most master wear no breeches,She shall not strike Dame Eleanor unreveng'd,"—
he would at once order cautionary signals. When a man scolds in the pulpit or a woman on the platform, the planets shudder, shrink, and grow more crusty.
Bassanio had caught a throb from the soft breath of Portia which seemed to be a herald of the beauty he describes afterwards when the lucky lid is lifted,—
"Here in her hairsThe painter plays the spider, and hath wovenA golden mesh t' entrap the hearts of men,Faster than gnats in cobwebs; but her eyes!How could he see to do them? Having made one,Methinks, it should have power to steal both his,And leave itself unfurnish'd."
She knows that this portrait of herself lies in the leaden casket; so that whenever a suitor comes to speculate upon the chance of finding it, how that sweet breath must break into flurries of dread which call into the eyes a distant alarm! For, before her father died, she had seen Bassanio, and secretly preferred him; and we hear him tell Antonio in confidence that
"Sometimes from her eyesI did receive fair speechless messages."
No doubt he did; but they escaped to him just like prisoners' glances that are in vague quest of some confederate instinct, and slip through a grating; for she was double-locked in durance of shyness and enforced seclusion, and, "in terms of choice," could not be
"Solely ledBy nice direction of a maiden's eyes:"
kept aloof and sacred by an oath to a dying father, yet so perfectly a woman that too little rather than too much betrayed her; for, as she says, "a maiden hath no tongue but thought."
The princely suitors file before the caskets, pondering how to match her picture with herself. She has all the captivating glamour of a pure blonde.
"Her sunny locksHang on her temples like a golden fleece;Which makes her seat of Belmont, Colchos' strand,And many Jasons come in quest of her."
While these Jasons agitate her heart by deliberating over the metals of the caskets, the real suitor lies hidden underneath the lead of her manner, and seems to stretch forth a forbidding hand. To the Prince of Arragon, while the cornets relieve her by executing all the flourish, she coldly says,—
"Behold, there stand the caskets, noble prince:If you choose that wherein I am contain'd,Straight shall our nuptial rites be solemniz'd;But if you fail, without more speech, my lord,You must be gone from hence immediately."
This is much more curt than the style of her address to the Emperor of Morocco, who, although wearing "theshadow'd livery of the burnish'd sun," had something too of its warmth and openness in the manner of his wooing.
"I would not change this hue,Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen."
That went straight to her woman's heart. "I am black, but fair," it said; and, like Desdemona, she could see "Othello's visage in his mind." But Desdemona's heart was fancy-free. Portia not only had a mind that could not be fancy-led, but her heart was lying in Bassanio's hand, where its life woke, like the gem whose color kindles better at the touch of warmth. Still, the recognition of the Emperor's frank passion came forth, toned at once by respect and courtesy:—
"If my father had not scanted me,And hedg'd me by his wit, to yield myselfHis wife, who wins me by that means I told you,Yourself, renowned prince, then stood as fairAs any comer I have look'd on yet."
She may safely say as much as that. And, when he fails, she smooths her exit from his mind by the kind phrase, "A gentle riddance." Then she marks the difference between the women whose hearts can reflect and the Desdemonas of mere sentiment. The former have a firm partition that prevents the mingling of venous and arterial blood: this in the latter has never been quite closed, or is too thin, and liable to be ruptured by emotion. So Desdemona,
"A maiden never bold,Of spirit so still and quiet that her motionBlush'd at herself,"
broke, as she said, into "downright violence and scorn of fortunes." She "did love the Moor to live with him." Portia, on the contrary, says, "Let all of his complexion choose me so,"—it is a hint of the natural aversion of all natures who are representatives of one distinct type from mixing their love with those of another. But I cannot agree with a criticism of John Quincy Adams to the effect that Shakspeare wrote the tragedy of "Othello" on purpose to show the disastrous consequences of miscegenation. Desdemona's weak point is the only fatality in the play. She began by deceiving her father, and secretly made a match which broke his heart. But if she had not recurred to deceit again, and lied to her husband about the handkerchief, his smouldering jealousy would have never blazed. Want of frankness was her contribution to Iago's plot, the element that made it a success. Portia stood to her oath, and ran all risks.
Portia has the strong sense to expect that the majority of her noble admirers will be taken by appearance. She is not quite sure, but has an instinct, that these gentlemen who are after her are also after her pretty property of Belmont, and will be likely to choose the metals responsive to this temper. Bassanio frankly acknowledges to a friend that he would like to repair his broken fortunes; but Shakspeare shows him to be a lover before he gives this mercenary hint; and he has reason to surmise that Portia loves him. This unspoken mutuality dignifies his quest; as if Shakspeare himself would not admit the charge that he is a fortune-hunter. And it is noticeable how little consequence we attach to Bassanio's character.We do not care to see him in any action, or to have him show a worthiness to be Portia's lover. He is but the lay-figure of her love: there is so much of her that there must be a great deal of him, and he may be spared the trouble of appearing at full length. And we never suspect her of belonging to that tribe of bright women who, either from instinct or calculation, marry good-natured, well-mannered numskulls, and never have reason to sue for a divorce. Shakspeare ennobles Bassanio when the divining soul sees through the leaden lid.
But what if one of the other suitors should also have a noble heart whose pulses feed discernment, one as fine and unconventional as herself! There is just hazard enough to affront her cherishing of the absent Bassanio. She does not relish the moment when her heart, richer than the princes know of, goes into the lottery. However, when her father made his will, it doubtless occurred to her that his choice of metals came from a life's experience of the calibre of the average man, and was meant affectionately to protect her till the true gentleman should come. As Nerissa says, "Your father was ever virtuous; and holy men, at their death, have good inspirations; therefore, the lottery that he hath devised in these three chests, of gold, silver, and lead (whereofwho chooses his meaningchooses you) will, no doubt, never be chosen by any rightly but one whom you shall rightly love." Fortunate is the man who wins a wife because he chooses Heaven's meaning in a woman! Luckless the wife who is not chosen by some implied Heaven in a man!
The written scrolls which are enclosed in the caskets show that her father anticipated acutely the ordinary motives of mankind. The suitors imagine that they are reflecting in a superior style as they give their reasons for taking to the gold or the silver; but they are realty biased by the common sentiment, as Portia sees:—
"Oh, these deliberate fools! When they do choose,They have the wisdom by their wit to lose."
So one by one they slaughter themselves and clear the way.
How Shakspeare's verse celebrates Bassanio's approach to Belmont? It is like a gracious prelude conceived by her secret preference, escaping to guide him to her where she lies under a spell which he must break.
There enters a messenger, sumptuous in blank verse, like the tabard of a herald whose message is desired.
"Madam, there is alighted at your gateA young Venetian, one that comes beforeTo signify the approaching of his lord.... I have not seenSo likely an ambassador of love:A day in April never came so sweet,To show how costly summer was at hand,As this fore-spurrer comes before his lord."
The lover has reached the enchanted palace, and is in haste to liberate its inmate. Portia might have said, with the antique grace that always clothes her speech, that he came to attack, like a new Perseus, those menacing metals which rivet her in reach of danger, to lift her passionately out of fetters. How she struggles not to show her love, and thus she shows it!—
"There's something tells me (but it is not love)I would not lose you; and you know yourself,Hate counsels not in such a quality."
An ordinary woman might have enmeshed him in a cocoon of delicate coquetries: any woman dead in love, and a little less than strict to an oath, would have managed in some way to provoke that lead casket into twinkling a hint to him. But she is too honest for either. A woman with a soul as tender as it is firm, here she stands dismayed as Destiny is about to rattle its dice upon her heart: happiness, and a future worthy of her, all at stake. For though her mental resources might compete with any fate, she is all woman, made to be a wife, and without wifehood to feel herself at one essential point impaired,—all the more defrauded because so well endowed. How she clings for support to the few moments that yet stand before his choice! She wishes there were more of them to stay her.
"I pray you tarry; ...... for, in choosing wrong,I lose your company; therefore, forebear awhile."
She has no courage now: love, when it stole her heart, found that trait too, and added it to the booty.
"Lest you should not understand me well(And yet a maiden hath no tongue but thought),I would detain you here some month or two,Before you venture for me."
The noble lady's plea fills us with admiring pity: we admire to see the strong, beautiful woman so downcast with this new emotion which Heaven has quarteredupon her life; but we pity, because perhaps it will be doomed to dwell alone. And then the more spacious the lodging, the more dreary the echoes of these few sweet hours.
Has she said too much? She has a chase after this frankness to make a struggle to detain it, but it overcomes and gets away:—
"Beshrew your eyes,They have o'erlooked me, and divided me:One half of me is yours, the other half yours,—Mine own, I would say; but, if mine, then yours,And so all yours!"
This freshet of disclosure does not carry away maidenly reserve, for that is transferred from her person and locked up in the coyness of the caskets: in them there lurks a threat, a possible disaster, which lends some pathos to her frankness, and prevents it from forfeiting our respect.
Now Bassanio, who lives upon the rack, denies her plea for delay: "Let me to my fortune and the caskets." How profoundly she surmises that music might lull the watching Fate, so that he could pass to his Eurydice! She bids the music play:—
"As are those dulcet sounds in break of day,That creep into the dreaming bridegroom's ear,And summon him to marriage."
Bassanio must be attempered to his choice; the song's key must have an instinct for the proper casket's key. Unconsciously she breaks her oath; for what benign influence selected the song that is now sung? Somestar, whose tenant was her father? Or was it Nerissa's doing, who determined to convey a hint to the lover? Or did Gratiano hit upon it, who had got from Nerissa a promise of her love if the choice went to suit her? A hint, indeed! It is the very breadth of broadness, and a lover is not dull.
"Tell me, where is fancy bred,—Or in the heart, or in the head?How begot, how nourishèdReply, reply.It is engender'd in the eyes,With gazing fed; and fancy diesIn the cradle where it lies.Let us all ring fancy's knell:I'll begin it,—Ding, dong, bell,Ding, dong, bell."
A song that did good sexton-service, for fancy's knell is rung indeed. The strain reminds Bassanio of notices in his experience: that error hides its grossness in ornament; vice assumes some mark of virtue; beauty is for sale by the weight, and is a show which cunning puts on to entrap wise men: in short, as the song says, fancies[18]come by gazing, have no life deeper than the eyes, and die where they are born. The strain wakes up his mind into its nobler attitude. "So may the outward shows be least themselves." This fortune-hunter, after all, is Portia's counterpart. The melody woven out of air glides into his hand and becomes a clew to bliss. Oh, the woman thrills! in touching the lead his hand has clutched her heart, and forces from her wordsthat are outbreaks of that which is everlastingly the Woman. They assail, they challenge man to say what is so great as love. This polished, clear, sagacious, gifted, balanced woman dares man to say love is not greatest of all.
"How all the other passions fleet to air,As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embrac'd despair,And shudd'ring fear, and green-ey'd jealousy!O love,Be moderate, allay thy ecstasy;In measure rein thy joy, scant this excess.I feel too much thy blessing; make it less,For fear I surfeit."
Thus the lips which an oath had sealed melt apart in the first kiss, and her heart, like a fluid ruby, rushes through.
Shakspeare's women never trickle into tepid acceptances: theirYesto love is not puckered in a mouth shaped by "prisms and propriety;" it is not a whisper through a closet key-hole, which the lover, overhearing, doubts may possibly beNo. The Duke, in "Twelfth Night," steals rhetoric to utter Shakspeare's feeling about great-hearted and full-blooded women:—
"How will she love, when the rich, golden shaftHath kill'd the flock of all affections elseThat live in her! when liver, brain, and heart,These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill'd(Her sweet perfections) with one self king!"
Yet Portia, whom Nature made capable of this rapture, had wit enough to invent comedies of life and character, judgment enough to devise the best ways, acumen that astonished Venetian subtlety, as it baffledShylock so neatly that the surprise of wit is imparted to us. No modern parson could speak with such sweet gravity of persuasion upon the quality of mercy; no bright schemer of novels could spice her conversations with such raillery, or construct them upon such instinct for character, as we notice in the scene where she amuses Nerissa with those sketches of her various lovers' foibles. What does such a woman want for tools,—pencil, brush, goose-quill, or tribune? She is made to have her choice of occupations. Does she have a call to utter the great truths of morals and religion? Undoubtedly, Nature has ordained her. Therefore, thou Reverend D.D., with all respect for dulness which is miraculous, that pulpit where you labor like a vessel water-logged is wanted: we people in the pews are faint with emptiness on board your craft, and despair of making any harbor. Persuade him, O Portia, to cede that domain to you: we would fain have the droppings of the sanctuary like the gentle dew from heaven upon the earth beneath.
Here is another Daniel come to judgment! We would say, let another judge's seat be placed for her, if we did not observe that it was love which enlisted her wit to screen the friend of her lover. Here again Shakspeare has derived her public attitude from the emotions which her sex involves: the triumph of the court-room is a stratagem inspired by inclination. In a panel of jurors, how many women we should have to challenge on the ground of unfitness by reason of the element which makes up every verdict of our life! She is disqualifiedby that exquisite superiority. Her private feeling is liable to be so profoundly interested that sometimes she acquits or condemns, not as a judge, but as a person. Her element, which attains to equilibrium in the world's broad atmosphere, might, if condensed into the Leyden jar of a court-room, explode with singular effects. Upon the bench it might happen that she would make our bail too light, or refuse it altogether. By common consent, Justice has always been a woman; but it was found necessary to blindfold her, that she may not see into which scale to throw a heart.
But this heart of woman, so liable to hurried action, is the centre of her bravest and least calculated gestures. Her profession is that of heroine. Wherever it be natural to recoil, she flouts Nature and declines the job of shrinking. Portia and Helena might be two sisters of the healing art, gratefully welcomed by their own sex's modesty, but self-possessed and prompt wherever suffering tears down the pales of convention; sisters of mercy, hunting after wounds in the rear of battle, dressing maimed soldiers down the sighing wards of hospitals, appalled at no hurt the most hideous, repelled by no festering squalor; the mates of man in courage and dexterity. Let a university be founded for their training.
What shall a Portia undertake to do? That which is level to Portia's capacity.Mustshe do it? That is as she herself may decide. But we let our women do the dirty drudgery of kitchens, expose themselves to the publicity of saloons, grow sallow and stooping over spindles, and spend all day dodging poverty behind a counter. We pay our money to see them exercise their various talents on the stage, where no exigency of the plot surprises us, no shifts of costume seem inappropriate, no want of it amazing. Oh, we gentlemen are such sticklers for propriety, so interested to keep our women well sequestered! She must not speak in public, but she may sing: Jenny Lind's open mouth does not look indecent, but Lucretia Mott's is an outrage of our modesty! Where will you draw a line through the crowd of competent intelligences? I would draw it very quickly by putting cleverness in the place of dulness, though many a preacher and schoolmaster, many a vapid lecturer, would have to budge. Why should inferiority in a swallow-tail be so valued and protected against superiority in skirts? Napoleon said, "Careers are open to talents;" but he dreaded lively and gifted women, and got them out of the country, wisely suspecting that their insight would fathom his weakness. But no country can flourish till the talents and morals of women mix with its affairs. I cannot see why dulness is more respectable in a man than in a woman. Does it hurt our feelings more to see a woman fail in any public attitude than to see a man do it? No doubt it does; for we cannot entirely disenchant those youthful reveries in which woman, though so close to us, seemed to hover upon an unapproachable horizon, a shape that commanded loyalty from our sense of harmony and proportion,—nothing in excess, nothing in defect; an embodiment of a perfect tone's vibration that thrilled inour ideal of life and promised it a future. We could not tolerate any discrepancy with the allurement of this mystery. Our own sexual distinction enhanced it to the pitch of astonishment and reverence. We could not bear to see her clothed and adorned in a way to jar the taste which she first woke in us. We cannot bear it now. No pretext of convenience in locomotion, whether by horseback, rail, steamer, velocipede, or mangle, can rub out of our preference the lines which trace the reserve that protects our youthful dream. And how can this being, only half suggested yet clearly not ourselves, put a scrawl of crudity in place of those fluent curves that describe something less angular than we are? The gestures of her mind, when they are publicly displayed to throw a glove into the mob of us from the edge of a platform, must always indorse our preconception. Any thing harsh, some acidity of tone, sentences that stride or bandy with arms akimbo, will pique the unconverted world into taking up her glove to crush and not to kiss. So we cannot bear to see a woman pushed forward into premature expression which the gift will not confirm. A man's stupidity does not inflict so great a hurt on our imagination. Distance doth breed divinity; and we shrink to find a woman capable of dulness, and yet able to show it. All this may be conceded to be a natural instinct which men will not abandon. But its root is in regard for woman; so that men should be the first to sound a trumpet before the lists to champion her genius, whatever it may be, and to see that fair play is enforced in the tournament. Shall the gifted woman enter thelists? Let her poverty, if not her preference, consent and decide.
But a woman, however poor she may be, and burdened with claims upon her relationship, cannot try to do what Portia did not need to do unless her talent can justify the attempt. If she presumes upon the deference which man spontaneously pays to her sex, or calculates that curiosity will be piqued to see her exhibition, she cannot, even with the help of her natural allies, flowers, costume, and manner, long conceal some inadequacy for the part she aspires to play. Then she will wreak discredit upon the independence of woman; and, if that be the special cause which she advocates, her presence on the platform will be an advertisement of its failure. For mankind, which has invented the motto for woman which styles her the weaker sex, does not like to be taken at its word, and will not sit patiently where this weakness bores it. It withdraws into the retreats where this accredited weakness is a delight and power. Of course, wherever masculine ineffectiveness appears, men are put out by it, except in a meeting-house; and there it is tolerated in deference to numerous tea-drinkings, marriages and funerals, and hours of pastoral gentleness; and the imminent inadequacy of speech is arrested by the organ. But the platform has neither tradition nor liturgy: the gaze of the audience is amitrailleusethat sweeps it. There is no rose-window to throw a tint on bloodless speech. Men compromise no truth of their own, and damage no cause when they refrain from listening; for man is already the proprietor of all that he desires, and morethan he deserves. This is not the case with woman,—not, at least, in the regions where there are too many mouths and too scanty subsistence; nor in those where cultivated women cherish an interest in equality of opportunities; nor in those where the public law discriminates against them; nor in those where woman dislikes the liberty to be taxed without the right to vote upon the taxing. It is all the more incumbent upon women to be jealously careful that their self-respect, at least, should be adequately represented. They defeat their own thought when they applaud the thin speech which sometimes lends its want of voice to it. It is a "childish treble" that "pipes and whistles in its sound." There is no reason, because its piping and whistling were never tolerated before, that the new chance should confer immunity upon it. The liberty of later times must not be, for either sex, an unchartered libertine. Truth, eternal nature, the laws of mind and the moods of feeling, combine to take a mortgage upon it, whose interest must be paid in coin that is accepted as legal tender by the gifts that hold it. Recognizing this, perhaps the time will come when a superior womanhood shall remand masculine incapacity swiftly to the oblivion it deserves, whenever it mars blocks of marble, squanders paint, debauches music, or drones an absurd bass about God, Religion, and the awful morals. Pray Heaven to have woman restrained from the dilettantism of modern times!