component qualities in each as they expand before us in the course of
the action, but we seem to have known them previously, and mingle a
consciousness of their past, with the interest of their present and
their future. Thus, in the dialogue between Juliet and her parents, and
in the scenes with the Nurse, we seem to have before us the whole of her
previous education and habits: we see her, on the one hand, kept in
severe subjection by her austere parents; and on the other, fondled and
spoiled by a foolish old nurse--a situation perfectly accordant with the
manners of the time. Then Lady Capulet comes sweeping by with her train
of velvet, her black hood, her fan, and her rosary--the very
_beau-ideal_ of a proud Italian matron of the fifteenth century, whose
offer to poison Romeo in revenge for the death of Tybalt, stamps her
with one very characteristic trait of the age and country. Yet she loves
her daughter; and there is a touch of remorseful tenderness in her
lamentation over her, which adds to our impression of the timid softness
of Juliet, and the harsh subjection in which she has been kept:--
But one, poor one!--one poor and loving child,
But one thing to rejoice and solace in,
And cruel death hath catched it from my sight!
Capulet, as the jovial, testy old man, the self willed, violent,
tyrannical father,--to whom his daughter is but a property, the appanage
of his house, and the object of his pride,--is equal as a portrait: but
both must yield to the Nurse, who is drawn with the most wonderful power
and discrimination. In the prosaic homeliness of the outline, and the
magical illusion of the coloring, she reminds us of some of the
marvellous Dutch paintings, from which, with all their coarseness, we
start back as from a reality. Her low humor, her shallow garrulity,
mixed with the dotage and petulance of age--her subserviency, her
secrecy, and her total want of elevated principle, or even common
honesty--are brought before us like a living and palpable truth.
Among these harsh and inferior spirits is Juliet placed; her haughty
parents, and her plebeian nurse, not only throw into beautiful relief
her own native softness and elegance, but are at once the cause and the
excuse of her subsequent conduct. She trembles before her stern mother
and her violent father: but, like a petted child, alternately cajoles
and commands her nurse. It is her old foster-mother who is the
confidante of her love. It is the woman who cherished her infancy, who
aids and abets her in her clandestine marriage. Do we not perceive how
immediately our impression of Juliet's character would have been
lowered, if Shakspeare had placed her in connection with any
common-place dramatic waiting-woman?--even with Portia's adroit Nerissa,
or Desdemona's Emilia? By giving her the Nurse for her confidante, the
sweetness and dignity of Juliet's character are preserved inviolate to
the fancy, even in the midst of all the romance and wilfulness of
passion.
The natural result of these extremes of subjection and independence, is
exhibited in the character of Juliet, as it gradually opens upon us. We
behold it in the mixture of self-will and timidity, of strength and
weakness, of confidence and reserve, which are developed as the action
of the play proceeds. We see it in the fond eagerness of the indulged
girl, for whose impatience the "nimblest of the lightning-winged loves"
had been too slow a messenger; in her petulance with her nurse; in those
bursts of vehement feeling, which prepare us for the climax of passion
at the catastrophe; in her invectives against Romeo, when she hears of
the death of Tybalt; in her indignation when the nurse echoes those
reproaches, and the rising of her temper against unwonted
contradiction:--
NURSE.
Shame come to Romeo!
JULIET.
Blistered be thy tongue,
For such a wish! he was not born to shame.
Then comes that revulsion of strong feeling, that burst of magnificent
exultation in the virtue and honor of her lover:--
Upon _his_ brow Shame is ashamed to sit,
For 'tis a throne where Honor may be crown'd
Sole monarch of the universal earth!
And this, by one of those quick transitions of feeling which belong to
the character, is immediately succeeded by a gush of tenderness and
self-reproach--
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name,
When I, thy three-hours' wife, have mangled it?
With the same admirable truth of nature, Juliet is represented as at
first bewildered by the fearful destiny that closes round her; reverse
is new and terrible to one nursed in the lap of luxury, and whose
energies are yet untried.
Alack, alack, that heaven should practise stratagems
Upon so soft a subject as myself.
While a stay remains to her amid the evils that encompass her, she
clings to it. She appeals to her father--to her mother--
Good father, I beseech you on my knees,
Hear me with patience but to speak one word!
* * * *
Ah, sweet my mother, cast me not away!
Delay this marriage for a month,--a week!
And, rejected by both, she throws herself upon her nurse in all the
helplessness of anguish, of confiding affection, of habitual
dependence--
O God! O nurse! how shall this be prevented?
Some comfort, nurse!
The old woman, true to her vocation, and fearful lest her share in these
events should be discovered, counsels her to forget Romeo and marry
Paris; and the moment which unveils to Juliet the weakness and baseness
of her confidante, is the moment which reveals her to herself. She does
not break into upbraidings; it is no moment for anger; it is incredulous
amazement, succeeded by the extremity of scorn and abhorrence, which
take possession of her mind. She assumes at once and asserts all her own
superiority, and rises to majesty in the strength of her despair.
JULIET.
Speakest thou from thy heart?
NURSE.
Aye, and from my soul too;--or else
Beshrew them both!
JULIET.
Amen!
This final severing of all the old familiar ties of her childhood--
Go, counsellor!
Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain!
and the calm, concentrated force of her resolve,
If all else fail,--myself have power to die;
have a sublime pathos. It appears to me also an admirable touch of
nature, considering the master-passion which, at this moment, rules in
Juliet's soul, that she is as much shocked by the nurse's dispraise of
her lover, as by her wicked, time-serving advice.
This scene is the crisis in the character; and henceforth we see Juliet
assume a new aspect. The fond, impatient, timid girl, puts on the wife
and the woman: she has learned heroism from suffering, and subtlety from
oppression. It is idle to criticize her dissembling submission to her
father and mother; a higher duty has taken place of that which she owed
to them; a more sacred tie has severed all others. Her parents are
pictured as they are, that no feeling for them may interfere in the
slightest degree with our sympathy for the lovers. In the mind of Juliet
there is no struggle between her filial and her conjugal duties, and
there ought to be none. The Friar, her spiritual director, dismisses her
with these instructions:--
Go home,--be merry,--give consent
To marry Paris;
and she obeys him. Death and suffering in every horrid form she is ready
to brave, without fear or doubt, "to live an unstained wife:" and the
artifice to which she has recourse, which she is even instructed to use,
in no respect impairs the beauty of the character; we regard it with
pain and pity; but excuse it, as the natural and inevitable consequence
of the situation in which she is placed. Nor should we forget, that the
dissimulation, as well as the courage of Juliet, though they spring from
passion, are justified by principle:--
My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven;
How shall my faith return again to earth,
Unless that husband send it me from heaven?
In her successive appeals to her father, her mother, her nurse, and the
Friar, she seeks those remedies which would first suggest themselves to
a gentle and virtuous nature, and grasps her dagger only as the last
resource against dishonor and violated faith;--
God join'd my heart with Romeo's,--thou our hands.
And ere this hand, by thee to Romeo seal'd,
Shall be the label to another deed,
Or my true heart with treacherous revolt
Turn to another,--_this_ shall slay them both!
Thus, in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion and terror,
preserving, to a certain degree, that moral and feminine dignity which
harmonizes with our best feelings, and commands our unreproved sympathy.
I reserve my remarks on the catastrophe, which demands separate
consideration; and return to trace from the opening, another and
distinguishing trait in Juliet's character.
In the extreme vivacity of her imagination, and its influence upon the
action, the language, the sentiments of the drama, Juliet resembles
Portia; but with this striking difference. In Portia, the imaginative
power, though developed in a high degree, is so equally blended with the
other intellectual and moral faculties, that it does not give us the
idea of excess. It is subject to her nobler reason; it adorns and
heightens all her feelings; it does not overwhelm or mislead them. In
Juliet, it is rather a part of her southern temperament, controlling and
modifying the rest of her character; springing from her sensibility,
hurried along by her passions, animating her joys, darkening her
sorrows, exaggerating her terrors, and, in the end, overpowering her
reason. With Juliet, imagination is, in the first instance, if not the
source, the medium of passion; and passion again kindles her
imagination. It is through the power of imagination that the eloquence
of Juliet is so vividly poetical; that every feeling, every sentiment
comes to her, clothed in the richest imagery, and is thus reflected from
her mind to ours. The poetry is not here the mere adornment, the outward
garnishing of the character; but its result, or rather blended with its
essence. It is indivisible from it, and interfused through it like
moonlight through the summer air. To particularize is almost impossible,
since the whole of the dialogue appropriated to Juliet is one rich
stream of imagery: she speaks in pictures and sometimes they are crowded
one upon another--thus in the balcony scene--
I have no joy of this contract to-night:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
Too like the lightning which doth cease to be
Ere one can say it lightens.
This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.
Again,
O for a falconer's voice
To lure this tassel-gentle back again!
Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud,
Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies,
And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine
With repetition of my Romeo's name.
Here there are three images in the course of six lines. In the same
scene, the speech of twenty-two lines, beginning,
Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face,
contains but one figurative expression, _the mask of night_; and every
one reading this speech with the context, must have felt the peculiar
propriety of its simplicity, though perhaps without examining the cause
of an omission which certainly is not fortuitous. The reason lies in the
situation and in the feeling of the moment; where confusion, and
anxiety, and earnest self-defence predominate, the excitability and play
of the imagination would be checked and subdued for the time.
In the soliloquy of the second act, where she is chiding at the nurse's
delay:--
O she is lame! Love's heralds should be thoughts,
That ten times faster glide than the sun's beams,
Driving back shadows over low'ring hills:
Therefore do nimble-pinioned doves draw Love,
And therefore hath the wind-swift Cupid wings!
How beautiful! how the lines mount and float responsive to the sense!
She goes on--
Had she affections, and warm youthful blood,
She'd be as swift in motion as a ball;
My words should bandy her to my sweet love,
And his to me!
The famous soliloquy, "Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds," teems with
luxuriant imagery. The fond adjuration, "Come night! come Romeo! _come
thou day in night_!" expresses that fulness of enthusiastic admiration
for her lover, which possesses her whole soul; but expresses it as only
Juliet could or would have expressed it,--in a bold and beautiful
metaphor. Let it be remembered, that, in this speech, Juliet is not
supposed to be addressing an audience, nor even a confidante; and I
confess I have been shocked at the utter want of taste and refinement in
those who, with coarse derision, or in a spirit of prudery, yet more
gross and perverse, have dared to comment on this beautiful "Hymn to the
Night," breathed out by Juliet in the silence and solitude of her
chamber. She is thinking aloud; it is the young heart "triumphing to
itself in words." In the midst of all the vehemence with which she calls
upon the night to bring Romeo to her arms, there is something so almost
infantine in her perfect simplicity, so playful and fantastic in the
imagery and language, that the charm of sentiment and innocence is
thrown over the whole; and her impatience, to use her own expression, is
truly that of "a child before a festival, that hath new robes and may
not wear them." It is at the very moment too that her whole heart and
fancy are abandoned to blissful anticipation, that the nurse enters with
the news of Romeo's banishment; and the immediate transition from
rapture to despair has a most powerful effect.
It is the same shaping spirit of imagination which, in the scene with
the Friar, heaps together all images of horror that ever hung upon a
troubled dream.
O bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower,
Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk
Where serpents are--chain me with roaring bears,
Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house
O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones;
Or bid me go into a new made grave;
Or hide me with a dead man in his shroud;--
Things that to hear them told have made me tremble
But she immediately adds,--
And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstained wife to my sweet love!
In the scene where she drinks the sleeping potion, although her spirit
does not quail, nor her determination falter for an instant, her vivid
fancy conjures up one terrible apprehension after another, till
gradually, and most naturally in such a mind once thrown off its poise,
the horror rises to frenzy--her imagination realizes its own hideous
creations, and she _sees_ her cousin Tybalt's ghost.[26]
In particular passages this luxuriance of fancy may seem to wander into
excess. For instance,--
O serpent heart, hid with a flowery face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather'd raven! wolfish ravening lamb, &c.
Yet this highly figurative and antithetical exuberance of language is
defended by Schlegel on strong and just grounds; and to me also it
appears natural, however critics may argue against its taste or
propriety.[27] The warmth and vivacity of Juliet's fancy, which plays
like a light over every part of her character--which animates every line
she utters--which kindles every thought into a picture, and clothes her
emotions in visible images, would naturally, under strong and unusual
excitement, and in the conflict of opposing sentiments, run into some
extravagance of diction.[28]
With regard to the termination of the play, which has been a subject of
much critical argument, it is well known that Shakspeare, following the
old English versions, has departed from the original story of Da
Porta;[29] and I am inclined to believe that Da Porta, in making Juliet
waken from her trance while Romeo yet lives, and in his terrible final
scene between the lovers, has himself departed from the old tradition,
and, as a romance, has certainly improved it; but that which is
effective in a narrative, is not always calculated for the drama, and I
cannot but agree with Schlegel, that Shakspeare has done well and wisely
in adhering to the old story. Can we doubt for a moment that he who has
given us the catastrophe of Othello, and the tempest scene in Lear,
might also have adopted these additional circumstances of horror in the
fate of the lovers, and have so treated them as to harrow up our very
soul--had it been his object to do so? But apparently it was _not_. The
tale is one,
Such as, once heard, in gentle heart destroys
All pain but pity.
It is in truth a tale of love and sorrow, not of anguish and terror. We
behold the catastrophe afar off with scarcely a wish to avert it. Romeo
and Juliet _must_ die; their destiny is fulfilled; they have quaffed off
the cup of life, with all its infinite of joys and agonies, in one
intoxicating draught. What have they to do more upon this earth? Young,
innocent, loving and beloved, they descend together into the tomb: but
Shakspeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted affection
consecrated for the worship of all hearts,--not a dark charnel vault,
haunted by spectres of pain, rage, and desperation. Romeo and Juliet are
pictured lovely in death as in life; the sympathy they inspire does not
oppress us with that suffocating sense of horror, which in the altered
tragedy makes the fall of the curtain a relief; but all pain is lost in
the tenderness and poetic beauty of the picture. Romeo's last speech
over his bride is not like the raving of a disappointed boy: in its deep
pathos, its rapturous despair, its glowing imagery, there is the very
luxury of life and love. Juliet, who had drunk off the sleeping potion
in a fit of frenzy, wakes calm and collected--
I do remember well where I should be,
And there I am--Where is my Romeo?
The profound slumber in which her senses have been steeped for so many
hours has tranquillized her nerves, and stilled the fever in her blood;
she wakes "like a sweet child who has been dreaming of something
promised to it by its mother," and opens her eyes to ask for it--
... Where is my Romeo?
she is answered at once,--
Thy husband in thy bosom here lies dead.
This is enough: she sees at once the whole horror of her situation--she
sees it with a quiet and resolved despair--she utters no reproach
against the Friar--makes no inquiries, no complaints, except that
affecting remonstrance--
O churl--drink all, and leave no friendly drop
To help me after!
All that is left to her is to die, and she dies. The poem, which opened
with the enmity of the two families, closes with their reconciliation
over the breathless remains of their children; and no violent,
frightful, or discordant feeling is suffered to mingle with that soft
impression of melancholy left within the heart, and which Schlegel
compares to one long, endless sigh.
"A youthful passion," says Goethe, (alluding to one of his own early
attachments,) "which is conceived and cherished without any certain
object, may be compared to a shell thrown from a mortar by night: it
rises calmly in a brilliant track, and seems to mix, and even to dwell
for a moment, with the stars of heaven; but at length it falls--it
bursts--consuming and destroying all around, even as itself expires."
* * * * *
To conclude: love, considered under its poetical aspect, is the union of
passion and imagination and accordingly, to one of these, or to both,
all the qualities of Juliet's mind and heart (unfolding and varying as
the action of the drama proceeds) may be finally traced; the former
concentrating all those natural impulses, fervent affections and high
energies, which lend the character its internal charm, its moral power
and individual interest: the latter diverging from all those splendid
and luxuriant accompaniments which invest it with its external glow, its
beauty, its vigor, its freshness, and its truth.
With all this immense capacity of affection and imagination, there is a
deficiency of reflection and of moral energy arising from previous habit
and education: and the action of the drama, while it serves to develope
the character, appears but its natural and necessary result. "Le mystere
de l'existence," said Madame de Stael to her daughter, "c'est le rapport
de nos erreurs avec nos peines."
HELENA.
In the character of Juliet we have seen the passionate and the
imaginative blended in an equal degree, and in the highest conceivable
degree as combined with delicate female nature. In Helena we have a
modification of character altogether distinct; allied, indeed, to Juliet
as a picture of fervent, enthusiastic, self-forgetting love, but
differing wholly from her in other respects; for Helen is the union of
strength of passion with strength of character.
"To be tremblingly alive to gentle impressions, and yet be able to
preserve, when the prosecution of a design requires it, an immovable
heart amidst even the most imperious causes of subduing emotion, is
perhaps not an impossible constitution of mind, but it is the utmost and
rarest endowment of humanity."[30] Such a character, almost as difficult
to delineate in fiction as to find in real life, has Shakspeare given us
in Helena; touched with the most soul-subduing pathos, and developed
with the most consummate skill.
Helena, as a woman, is more passionate than imaginative; and, as a
character, she bears the same relation to Juliet that Isabel bears to
Portia. There is equal unity of purpose and effect, with much less of
the glow of imagery and the external coloring of poetry in the
sentiments, language, and details. It is passion developed under its
most profound and serious aspect; as in Isabella, we have the serious
and the thoughtful, not the brilliant side of intellect. Both Helena and
Isabel are distinguished by high mental powers, tinged with a melancholy
sweetness; but in Isabella the serious and energetic part of the
character is founded in religious principle; in Helena it is founded in
deep passion.
There never was, perhaps, a more beautiful picture of a woman's love,
cherished in secret, not self-consuming in silent languishment--not
pining in thought--not passive and "desponding over its idol"--but
patient and hopeful, strong in its own intensity, and sustained by its
own fond faith. The passion here reposes upon itself for all its
interest; it derives nothing from art or ornament or circumstance; it
has nothing of the picturesque charm or glowing romance of Juliet;
nothing of the poetical splendor of Portia, or the vestal grandeur of
Isabel. The situation of Helena is the most painful and degrading in
which a woman can be placed. She is poor and lowly; she loves a man who
is far her superior in rank, who repays her love with indifference, and
rejects her hand with scorn. She marries him against his will; he leaves
her with contumely on the day of their marriage, and makes his return to
her arms depend on conditions apparently impossible.[31] All the
circumstances and details with which Helena is surrounded, are shocking
to our feelings and wounding to our delicacy: and yet the beauty of the
character is made to triumph over all: and Shakspeare, resting for all
his effect on its internal resources and its genuine truth and
sweetness, has not even availed himself of some extraneous advantages
with which Helen is represented in the original story. She is the
Giletta di Narbonna of Boccaccio. In the Italian tale, Giletta is the
daughter of a celebrated physician attached to the court of Roussillon;
she is represented as a rich heiress, who rejects many suitors of worth
and rank, in consequence of her secret attachment to the young Bertram
de Roussillon. She cures the King of France of a grievous distemper, by
one of her fathers prescriptions; and she asks and receives as her
reward the young Count of Roussillon as her wedded husband. He forsakes
her on their wedding day, and she retires, by his order, to his
territory of Roussillon. There she is received with honor, takes state
upon her in her husband's absence as the "lady of the land," administers
justice, and rules her lord's dominions so wisely and so well, that she
is universally loved and reverenced by his subjects. In the mean time,
the Count, instead of rejoining her, flies to Tuscany, and the rest of
the story is closely followed in the drama. The beauty, wisdom, and
royal demeanor of Giletta are charmingly described, as well as her
fervent love for Bertram. But Helena, in the play, derives no dignity or
interest from place or circumstance, and rests for all our sympathy and
respect solely upon the truth and intensity of her affections. She is
indeed represented to us as one
Whose beauty did astonish the survey
Of richest eyes: whose words all ears took captive;
Whose dear perfection, hearts that scorn'd to serve.
Humbly called mistress.