Chapter VII: Part 7

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 night Pursue her: and for this intelligence If 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 is natural, 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 return to 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 round an 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 hour I ever contradicted your desire, Or made it not mine too? Or which of your friends Have I not strove to love, although I knew He 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 against inclination 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 this _auto-da-fé_ is 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 to create 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 effluence is 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 of miles 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 made to 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 to marry 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 observe The 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 innocent From 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 the common 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.

Bertram, in "All's Well that Ends Well," is under the influence of Parolles, "a snipt-taffata fellow," who goes buzzing around like a "red-tailed humble-bee" in a vile yellow suit all stuck over with bows and trimmings. Bertram has been often advised to cast him off: "There can be no kernel in this light nut; the soul of this man is his clothes; trust him not in matter of heavy consequence." Bertram is a raw boy for discernment, and insists that Parolles is very valiant, and has a good knowledge of the world. His friends are obliged to lay a plot, and invite him to be witness to Parolles's cowardice and knavery: not till then will he confess to the crudeness of his judgment.

But Helena, though well disposed to like a man who is Bertram's companion, has read him thoroughly, and, moreover, has the instinct to perceive that the man's knavery is so inbred that it suits him better than honesty. Her observation is full of subtlety:--

"I know him a notorious liar, Think him a great way fool, solely a coward; Yet these fix'd evils sit so fit in him, That they take place, when virtue's steely bones Look bleak in the cold wind."

The "evils" have a congenial place in such a temperament: a bleaker one would discourage the finest virtues. His nature fortunately cannot be reformed, since reform would turn a most satisfactory and harmonious miscreant into a scrubby gentleman. "And that's the humor of it," as Nym would say. Shakspeare puts this rare breadth of judgment into the mouth of a woman.

Imogen's step-mother, the Queen and wife of Cymbeline, is a strong-minded woman, who "bears all down with her brain." She rules the king by force or craft, and has arranged to marry Imogen to her own shallow-pated son Cloten. This ancestress of all the plotting step-mothers carries poison in her heart: her relatives may expect to find it in their food; for she is curious in distilling the essences of noxious herbs, under a scientific pretext to watch their effects in creatures not worth the hanging. But the compound that is ostensibly for rats is intended to dispossess Imogen of all her watchful liegemen, including her husband; and then, after getting her married to Cloten, the "mortal mineral" was meant to waste the King by inches to a grave that should be a royal footstool for her son.

Now the King has no suspicion of the simmering deviltry that he embraced. When all her projects are discovered, he exclaims,--

"O most delicate fiend!
Who is't can read a woman?"

Not he, certainly; for he had been fooled in the time-honored way of crafty women.

"Mine eyes Were not in fault, for she was beautiful; Mine ears, that heard her flattery; nor my heart, That thought her like her seeming."

At the point of death, she confessed to her physician the whole of her unsexed intent. She never loved the King as Lady Macbeth loved her lord, but only affected the greatness got by him: she was wife to his place, but abhorred his person. Who but a woman could play that game with such an air of jaunty probability that invested her blackest kisses! Imogen's husband was a scorpion to her, ranked among the vermin which she meant to kill for pastime. And she purposed to lull the King into security by "watching, weeping, tendance, kissing," while her poison was vacating his throne. At the last, she only repented that the evils she hatched were not effected, "so, despairing, died," a martyr to an unfulfilled ideal. She is really the Lady Macbeth of the popular conception, being fiend-like from ambition. It would not have been Shakspearean if such a woman had been duplicated to furnish a wife to Macbeth. One hated with all her baffled spite, and the other loved with all her heart, her King.

Shakspeare would have us notice that the clear-sighted Imogen has privately read her step-mother, and lives with suspicions for her constant warders. The King, having banished Posthumus who was secretly married to her, has turned her over to the jailership of the Queen, who tries to cajole her:--

"No, be assured, you shall not find me, daughter, After the slander of most step-mothers, Evil-ey'd unto you."

Then she grants the married pair a stolen interview, in order that she may whip out and bring the King in to discover them. She knows the King will be displeased; but she calculates that after his first anger is cooled he will load her with favors to atone for his impetuosity:--

"I never do him wrong, But he does buy my injuries to be friends; Pays dear for my offences."

What a capable woman, with this new patent for depleting a husband's pocket by wringing his heart! What an extraordinary endowment of a husband's heart to connect its spasms with the purse-clasp!

Imogen feels the manœuvre of the Queen when she leaves to hurry up the King; and she says to Posthumus,--

"O dissembling courtesy! How fine this tyrant Can tickle where she wounds!"

Why, then, if Shakspeare endowed her with this penetration, does she not at a glance unmask Iachimo when he comes pretending that Posthumus has been false to her in exile, and proffering himself that she may take revenge in kind? Because she has such a heart of trust in her husband that both her ears cannot hastily abuse it. The conflict between Iachimo's counterfeit news and her loyal memory occupies the whole field of her being, and keeps out the base design. She listens to Iachimo with ears attuned by the high praises which her husband sends by letter to introduce a friend "of the noblest note." Iachimo is the creature of her husband's admiration, sent to be admired, suspicion disarmed in advance, not a sentry left on duty before her frankness. His hints of a dishonorable purpose cannot be taken by a mind that is unable to conceive dishonor. So her absolute spotlessness drives him to the plainest speech; for such an artless and unconscious woman never tasked his lips before. When the revelation comes, like a hideous scrawl of flame across her clear firmament in the very high noon of her confiding, the heaven of purity rains down at once, and there he is, swimming for life in the flood of her disdain. Then he saw womanhood in one "awe-inspiring gaze" that might have prompted Shelley to exclaim,--

"Her beams anatomize me, nerve by nerve, And lay me bare, and make me blush to see My hidden thoughts."

What an angelic impossibility of hearing is Imogen's! She has nothing that ever dreamed to itself of the covert meaning of his words. Without a second's interval of parley, not even time enough for natural astonishment, one peremptory instant annihilates his hope.

It is not every woman, even of the irreproachable kind, who wields so prompt a lightning of her chastity. And here Shakspeare has marked the difference between unconsciousness and prudery. I think that Isabella would have understood Iachimo much earlier, for the matter of her virtue was constantly in her thoughts, as a thing to be guarded against an undermining world. Her indignation is voluble; and she undertakes to reason in a priggish fashion with Angelo. But Imogen simply calls her servant that Iachimo may be taken in an instant out of the room. Many a woman whose life has been without a stain is still less intolerant than Isabella, and more complaisant than Imogen. Race and climate are largely implicated in these natural differences.

When Madame de Sévigné heard of her husband's infidelities, it was through the interested malice of her cousin, Bussy-Rabutin, who was in love with her. He proposed that she should seek to be revenged: "I will go halves in your revenge; for, after all, your interests are as dear to me as my own." She quietly replied: "I am not so exasperated as you think."

Iachimo said,--

"Revenge it. I dedicate myself to your sweet pleasure, And will continue fast to your affection."

Imogen's white-heat of honor shrivels up the wit of the French lady. Her mind can make but one motion, to cry out, "What ho, Pisanio!"

"Away!--I do contemn mine ears, that have So long attended thee."

Thou dost solicit a lady

"That disdains
Thee and the devil alike."

Iachimo now pretends that he was only making trial of her by a false report and by a counterfeited overture,--and all for the sake of the love he bore her husband. This is quite enough: her frankness returns as suddenly as it was dismissed. For, as Iachimo well said,--

"The gods made you,
Unlike all others, chaffless."

And that is a statement of the limit placed by Nature to her womanly shrewdness of observation.

In the historical dramas, Shakspeare seldom introduces women in order to make them convey to us impressions of character, traits of mind or heart. They are not so much feminine shapes as persons implicated in the play by the accident of relationship to the men. The parts are not particularized by them. Lady Percy, with one or two light touches of eager inquisitiveness, hints her fond and simple love. Queen Katherine fills out the proportions of a pathetic figure. But in "Henry V." Mrs. Quickly monopolizes all the point and savor: the Queen of France and her daughter are only lay-figures of the plot. In "1, 2 Henry IV.," it is the same. In "Richard II." the Queen seems merely born to this,--

"That my sad look
Should grace the triumph of great Bolingbroke."

And her gardener plants a bank of rue

"In the remembrance of a weeping queen."

But, in "King John" both the grief and the character of Constance are more personally set forth, and we become aware of her distinctive quality. Queen Katherine, in "Henry VIII.," also puts an accent, different from that of Constance, upon her misfortunes; and her grief reveals another mood of the feminine nature; so that she attains to a separate consideration.

None of the women in the historical plays stand by the side of the men so emphasized as the mother of Arthur is: she agitates his claims with an impetuous sincerity that ought to have kept him alive to reign.

A high-minded man who claims his rights, and a high-minded woman who does the same, express themselves in different styles. The feminine style is shown in Constance with great discrimination. Both sexes can hate injustice, and may be opposed to compromises. Both can have indignation for a crime. But see how Constance puts into these moral feelings a scorn and a swiftness of dissent, urged by a volubility more native to a woman than to a man. Woman is apt, indeed, to be too voluble: each minute of her phrases breeds new ones; so she does not stop to notice that her indictment is shorter than her breath. Therefore men are apt to notice and to complain that her indictment does not reach up to the tide-mark of her breath. But the invective of Constance is the swift weapon-play of maternity: it flashes through every guard, touches rapidly to and fro, and draws blood at every unexpected touch.

A man's moral disposition has not been nourished and toned by the additional organs which impose wifehood and motherhood upon a woman. In her, more nerve centres are involved, with an exquisite sensibility for pain and pleasure which the average man's life seldom reaches. His bosom is not ample enough to contain such throbs of acquiescence or revolt. Every fount of feeling is twinned in woman, and sweet as the milk is, mingled by love, so sharp and bitter is its flavor made by hate. Her nerves revenge the violence of acts which she supposes dishonorable: she can fight with glances more searching and words more unequivocal than the cooler man will furnish. No doubt that his disdains, too, can summon all his blood to blush and lower magnificently on the cheek. But her blood seems richer in the red corpuscles: it wins, therefore, and is more visited by, the air of heaven. There is no blush so daunting, no look so penetrating to dissolve, no silence of a surprised conscience so unanswerable. And when she grieves, it seems as if the eyes were re-enforced, for all the founts of motherhood are weeping.

This ability to vindicate the right and to repudiate the wrong can easily become absurd to the spectators when it is charged with some excess of temper. Literature does ample justice to the termagant vein, and shows that it is ludicrous because it devotes a high degree of choler to a low measure of affront. In pantomimes, an enormous gun is pointed toward the audience, with extravagant anticipation of its exploit on the faces of the performers. For a moment we are cowed, but laughter fills the vast space between the faint puff and the noise we expected.

I presume that Xantippe felt justified in making the home of Socrates so unpleasant that he preferred the market, the forum, and the leather-dresser's shop, because she thought he neglected her for all those places, and wasted time, and kept her drudging, while he ran to find men and make their coarse grain revolve to sharpen his soul's edge against it. Perhaps, as Socrates was famed for falling into brown studies, which sometimes lasted all day, with contempt for food, it was a case of chronic absence of mind on the subject of dinner; for that is as vital as τὁ πρεπὁν καἱ καλὁν, the ethically proper and the beautifully true; and no household can dispense with it,--in fact, children cry for it. Perhaps he supped many a time upon the hemlock of her tongue, and became so acclimated to the draught that the last cup in prison tasted sweetly.

Shakspeare shows the exaggeration of the protesting temper in woman by means of the little spat between Queen Eleanor and Constance, in ii. 7.

A woman's language becomes exacerbated because she is so inadequate to protest by actions. The weakness rolls itself into a bristling defence of words. Men do not drip so profusely into words because they are reservoirs of force and competency. They know that by fair means or foul they can effect purposes from which women are debarred by seclusion, strangeness of habit, and innate reserve. Among women there is a certain resentment at this civic and social disability which does not stint expression.

When, however, a noble woman with a level countenance repudiates an unjust charge, she transfers herself from the bar to the bench, and unseats her summoners. Their purpose quails before this innocence that is so weak, yet grows so overpowering, as in the beauty of Madame Roland and the prison-blanched majesty of Marie Antoinette. The rebuke pulls down the accuser's eyes from their threat, and they seem to go wandering into corners furtively for refuge. Joan of Arc burns in court before the deluded men who claim her as an imp of witchcraft have time to pile their fagots: the passionless chastity gives out blinding sparks when thus enforced; the cheeks of bystanders are reached by them and set aglow. No man who has been unjustly dealt with, and selected for foul practice, can reach such palsying dignity of behavior that turns the axe's edge or holds the arm suspended in mid-resolve. There is a high manly scorn which is beyond refuting: it can kindle admiration in unwilling minds, and compel baseness to pause and to confer. But woman's beauty, planted in the breastplate of an untainted heart, becomes a petrifying image; and whoso meets the ruthless look will remember it even in the moment of a consummated revenge. Nothing helps bad men at such a sight but the poor subterfuge of flying into a rage, as if to muster in that way momentum enough to huddle her off, to get her where the condemning head shall fall before its eyes or lips can utter another protest. They shear it at the neck, never reflecting that they thus untether it to range in other skies, to unkennel heaven sleuth-hounds at last and drag them down.

"I will instruct my sorrows to be proud; For grief is proud, and makes his owner stoop. To me, and to the state of my great grief, Let kings assemble: for my grief's so great That no supporter but the huge firm earth Can hold it up: here I and sorrow sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: This word was issued from Coleridge's private mint, but never got into circulation. He invented some words, not to avoid circumlocution, of which there is quite enough in his style, but to save trouble by extemporizing tallies for his thought, as surveyors use the nearest sticks on their line. The ecclesiastical word, "introit,"--a passing from within to enter the church,--hinted to him "extroit,"--a starting from without. He means that women proceed from social convention, and not from interior thought.]

LORD BACON AND THE PLAYS:

SHAKSPEARE'S WOMEN:

LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE.

LORD BACON AND THE PLAYS.

A consideration of the theory that Lord Bacon wrote the plays which are attributed to Shakspeare comes in here more conveniently, because it will appear that Bacon's knowledge of women and his experience of the passion of Love, as expressed in his works, are so meagre and so colorless when contrasted with the plays that the fact might stand alone, with scarce a comment, to refute the theory which is so elaborately defended. In its proper place this will appear. In the mean time, some notice may be taken of a few points of the theory which seem to have gained a recognition so far as to produce scepticism in many intelligent minds.

Books enough are published in various languages filled with preternaturally far-fetched conjectures concerning Shakspeare. Many of them are devoted to proving that he must have been brought up to this or that profession. Lord Campbell has shown the extent of the poet's knowledge of legal terms, and his aptness in placing them. A surgeon claims him on the ground of his knowledge of the technical terms used in medical art. Bucknill and others, on the same ground of technical knowledge, prove that he must have been trained as a mad-doctor. A musician refers to his love of music, botanists to his accuracy in grouping flowers according to their seasons, and Hastings is convinced that he was bred a bird-fancier. Each investigator discovers his own specialty in the teeming pages, and insists upon apprenticing the poet. The doctor points to the line in "Hamlet,"--

"And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,"--

and asks, with an air of conviction, how any one at that period, who had not been bred to the profession, could have understood the ginglymoid structure of the knee! The Worshipful Master of the Bard-of-Avon Lodge claims masonic fraternity with him, thinking that allusions to masonic terms and customs are scattered through the plays, but chiefly on the strength of Hubert's words in "King John,"--

"They shake their heads, And whisper one another in the ear, And he that speaks doth grip the hearer's wrist;"

for that action is the symbol of the sublime degree! Dr. Farmer anchored his theory that Shakspeare was in his youth, and during the unaccounted-for years after he left Stratford, a sharpener and dealer in skewers, upon these lines from "Hamlet:"--

"There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will."

These skewers were of the kind then used to fasten bales of wool. But Hugh Miller, who began life as a stone-cutter, finds in those lines a clear indication that the poet was bred to be a stone-mason! And at last a practical printer by the name of Blades proves that he worked at the printer's trade; for he speaks about "printing kisses" and the print of hoofs. In "Love's Labor Lost" is the clause, "I will do it, sir, in print;" and in the "Winter's Tale," "I love a ballad in print." Blades even apprentices him to the printer Vantrollier, who at the time enjoyed the monopoly of printing a certain class of books. Up to the present date, the number of professions and employments to which Shakspeare was trained amounts to twenty-four. No doubt some one is preparing to show that he must have been a fishmonger, and the lines which invite his attempt are quite as apposite as any of the above: "A fish: he smells like a fish;" "The luce is a fresh fish, the salt-fish is an old coat;" "They are both as whole as a fish;" and, more decisive than all, "The fish lives in the sea." By all means, let us have the sixty-eight allusions to fish and fishing in Shakspeare elaborated into one final theory, that he spent four years on a herring-smack; for how otherwise could the Clown in "Twelfth Night" have told Viola that a pilchard was a big herring?

There is another kind of criticism to which the plays have been subjected that imputes to them all the after-thoughts of later times. Ulrici derives from them an evangelical scheme of Christian ethics; a Roman Catholic claims the poet as an ardent adherent of the Pope; another commentator attributes to Shakspeare a deliberate purpose to write up the Protestant Reformation and write down the Pope, and finds a trace of Shakspeare's contempt for Romanism in "I Henry IV.," iv. I, where the troops of the Prince of Wales are described as--

"Glittering in golden coats, like images."

Sievers[11] thinks that the main thread of all Shakspeare's poetry was the "reproduction out of the nature of man of the Protestant scheme of Christianity"! It is shown particularly in the "Merchant of Venice" and "Hamlet." Tschischwitz's[12] book is as deterrent as his name. It is an attempt to develop Shakspeare's views upon the relation between ruler and people,--to show that he considered the state and kingdom to rest upon reciprocity of duties and upon the principle of piety. This is only another specimen of the terrific after-thoughts which the Germans force back upon Shakspeare. Gervinus calls him the perfect representative of modern Protestantism; Vischer concluded that he was a Pantheist; Bernays will not allow to him any religion at all; while Dr. Reichensperger, of the German Parliament, gives reasons in his book[13] for believing that he was an Ultramontanist! And Thomas Tyler, of the University of London, considers that Hamlet was a forerunner of Schopenhauer, and thoroughly pessimistic, because the calamity in the play does not respect personal character, and the future retributions and compensations are not clearly made out![14]

It would be a dreary business to construct a catalogue of all these modern slights to the memory of Shakspeare. They turn his plays into a system of theology. Some critics declare that his object was to make celibacy ridiculous and marriage honorable; some labor to prove that the plays are treatises upon the Christian doctrines of justification by faith and the salvation of man; some point to his Baconian method of induction; and others reject the whole over-done business of interpretation, because they simply claim for Bacon himself, the authorship of all the plays: as if Shakspeare were turned inside out, wrung dry, macerated and dispersed, by two centuries of vigorous comment, and it became necessary to begin operations upon a fresh person. These operations have enriched literature with its most grandiose specimens of futility.

With respect to this last effort of modern criticism, it might suffice with many to repeat an observation made by Lowell, who said that, if any person was disposed to believe that Bacon wrote the plays, he could set himself right by reading Bacon's paraphrase of the Psalms. One dose of that would settle the supremacy of Shakspeare back upon the seat of reason.

The following verse is a specimen of the average workmanship expended on this paraphrase:--

"So shall he not lift up his head
In the assembly of the just.
For why? The Lord hath special eye
To be the godly's stay at call;
And hath given over righteously
The wicked man to take his fall."

Half a score of lines may be found of a better quality than those above exhibit; but the bad ones have been purposely selected as yielding the only sensible and conclusive test. The writer of the plays could not have been guilty of them. Some things we know to be impossible,--that Sidney should display the white feather; that a gentleman should ever once practise a scurvy trick; that a woman all compact of grace, animate with the instinct of fitness, should ever make a vulgar gesture; that the genius which interfused the plays should ever have gone to rot on the Lethean wharf of those prosaic lines. Nay, the question whether Bacon composed the plays grows pale before a greater one,--If he did compose them, what debility suggested to him this undertaking of the Psalms? There they already stood, in their tender, majestic English, simple as Hamlet's soliloquy and Macbeth's regrets,--a mother-tongue that resents the adulterate touch. We have a right to call upon those who espouse the Baconian theory of the plays to account for the existence of the paraphrase.

Lord Bacon wrote some lines commending the natural defence of an upright conscience. So did Shakspeare. Let us compare them:--

"The man of life upright, whose guileless heart is free From all dishonest deeds and thoughts of vanity; The man whose silent days in harmless joys are spent, Whom hopes cannot delude nor fortune discontent,-- That man needs neither towers nor armor for defence, Nor secret vaults to fly from thunder's violence."

In the second part of "Henry VI." are found the lines which are memorable to all English-speaking people:--

"What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted? Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just; And he but naked, though lock'd up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted."

We have plainly another case of paraphrase to be accounted for; and we can understand why Bacon, who used to send sonnets to Elizabeth to soften her heart towards Essex, should lament, "But I could never prevail with her."

The badness of Bacon's efforts at poetry has suggested to me the possibility that some of the didactic passages in the plays which Shakspeare altered and amended for the theatre, were left as they came from his pen; just as other passages from the playwrights of that day may be found streaking the rich Shakspearean lode, recognized by their inferiority or difference of style, but no longer imputable to the culprits by name. Pages of this un-Shakspearean matter may have drifted from Bacon's pen into the original crudeness of some of the plays, particularly into those which set forth periods of history.