"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."