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 The glance is withdrawn, and goes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."