The great motives and impulses of human nature do not find themselves
made obsolete by Shakspeare's genius: we meet the central passion of
Love animating every play, and modified by the various characteristics
of his women. They appear in the plots, as in the world, to discharge
that great function of their being. Steele once said of a woman, "To
have loved her was a liberal education,"--a happy phrase which has
done duty since in other connections. There must have been floating in
Steele's mind the verses of Biron in "Love's Labor Lost;" at least, the
pith of his sentence is there anticipated:--
"For when would you, my lord, or you, or you,
Have found the ground of study's excellence,
Without the beauty of a woman's face?
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They are the ground, the books, the Academes,
From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.
For where is any author in the world
Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?"
"Without love I can fancy no gentleman," says Thackeray.
When Shakspeare shows his characters in love, the passion is as fresh
and uncompromising as if it were still the morning of the world.
His verse "dallies with the innocence of love, like the old age."
The curious considerations of the modern novelist were not then
invented. His lovers trump up no obstacles out of over-nice and subtle
reflection: all that hampers them is circumstance, a family feud, a
transparent jealousy, a disguise of fortune, a father's will, or a
conspiracy. They do not take themselves apart before us, as lecturers
do their manikin, to show how cunningly morbid the organs may become.
There is no mesh of motives woven around and across, so intricately
that if the lover breaks from one of his own threads he can catch
himself by another, and keep worrying the poor fly of his feeling.
Shakspeare's women love without sparing a moment for analysis: the rose
is crushed to the bosom, a glory of stamens, petals, and perfume, whose
names are unknown and unheeded; for the botanizing of emotions was the
æsthetic of a later day when men cull a herbarium from their mothers'
graves. In this regard Shakspeare is as direct as the Greeks, though
far more vital. He puts into his live people the passion which the old
chorus used to hold up like a placard:--
Love, thou invincible battle![17]
Love, thou router of lucre,
To capture the softness of youth
And lodge in the bloom of its cheeks!
'Tis all one to thee if thou farest
By sea, or dost loiter in farm-yards.
It helps not to be an immortal;
Mankind is no refuge from thee
Who art of men the first madness.
Thou dost ravish the just of their judgment,
Dost snatch them to blame;
Thou art the bicker that vexes
The blood in the hearts that are kin.
Vivid the promise of bride-bed
Thou kindlest on eyelids of virgins,
Great prescripts of past time undoing;
So sports Aphrodite, and rules.
Shakspeare has inherited the antique single-mindedness, undisturbed
by all our modern after-thoughts of sentiment. His heroines do not
understand what refinements of torture a cultivated soul can invent
to make itself wretched. They are frank and instantaneous; as when
Miranda puts her heart into Ferdinand's hand, so sweetly unconscious of
all that the action involves. She only knows that she has "no ambition
to see a goodlier man," no arts to use to win him, no starting to
overtake the passion with a pack of doubts.
"Hence, bashful cunning,
And prompt me, plain and holy innocence!
I am your wife, if you will marry me."
The only game she plays with him is chess, but she does better than
stale-mate him.
Beatrice, for all her cleverness, shows that she loves Benedick in the
first words she utters in the play. For she asks if he has returned
from the wars, and gives him a fencing-term for a nickname, to pretend
a profound unconcern; then disparages him in a most lively way, and
asks whom he has now for a companion, seeming to allude to men, but
expecting to know by the answer if his affections have become involved
with any woman. And when he fences her wit with his bachelor banter, it
piques her secret admiration. She has no other subtlety beyond her wit:
she uses it to misprize the wedded state, and to mock indiscriminately
at men,--a very common and transparent stratagem of a heart that is
deeply engaged; and, beneath all the gay and flippant manner, she feels
hurt because she thinks that Benedick is really cool and does not feign.
There is nothing but the mask of night upon Juliet's face to hide, the
blush which her lips acknowledge. "Farewell compliment. Dost thou love
me?" The bud of love becomes a beauteous flower in its first spring
day, for it is too impatient to levy on the lagging warmth of summer;
and the sudden heat sends every drop of Juliet's blood rushing into
the frankest words that maiden ever spoke. She has not even mental
device enough to hush what the most passionate women, of a type less
frigid than our own, are quite content to feel if there's love enough
to justify. So the verses which come fluent from Juliet's lips do not
scald like the insinuations of some modern novels which plot random
passions and ingeniously dally with them. Shakspeare has no pages of
this elaborate suggestion. His mental style was like the archer's bolt
that quivers in the middle of the boss: he never could have learned
this modern practice of the boomerang, which dips, skims, makes
ricochets, lingers, doubles corners, and plays back into the sender's
hand.
"A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon
Than love that would seem hid: love's night is noon."
The finest of his ladies cry out with the sudden smart.
"Cæsario, by the roses of the spring,
By maidhood, honor, truth, and every thing,
I love thee so, that, maugre all my pride,
Nor wit, nor reason, can my passion hide."
Perhaps this is not a style that might be safely cultivated in our
female boarding-schools, unless all the Cæsarios were Violas in
disguise. But it is Love's ideal sincerity as it lives in Poesy's world
to quicken sluggards and scorch prurience to death.
His love is not only unsophisticated: it is as virile, sumptuous,
adventurous, intense, as the age which crushed the Armada as if
it were a cluster to infuse new blood into England. It shares the
intrepidity of all the sea-kings, but declines their ruffling and
bluster. It is colored like the costumes of the nobles, who vaunted
their rich stuffs and set the dull streets aglow like a parterre of
flowers, before we began to exchange doublets and slashed satin for the
hypocritic pantaloon. Its manner is free, reliant, full of respect and
of a proudness of honor: sometimes it lets the flashing blade be seen
at a touch of the ruffled wrist; sometimes it subdues all the grand
state into deference, cap in hand, till the plumes sweep the ground
clean before the beloved object. It has been reared in Anglo-Saxon
bluntness. It is as broad and light-pervaded as a forenoon; but
sometimes it is like those forenoons which appear to have saved over
afternoon shades from yesterdays, they are so toned with the pearliness
of a refraining light. It has risen early, and its elastic steps brush
dew, and its freshly opened eyes are dawns. We seem to have returned
with these lovers to a long-past epoch of the world, when Love had been
just invented and put on trial among men and women of heroic mould and
simple manners, who let the new passion flood them to the brim of their
brains and turn every sense into its heralds. They report something so
antique as to be young; and our jaded nerves respond to the tonic of a
feeling that is for the first time tried. So deeply does Shakspeare's
genius dip the heart into the old stream that makes invulnerable and
immortal.
He sets forth the passion as it defies races, passes frontiers
unsearched, and makes all the sects religious. The Catholic maiden,
who has overheard that St. Bartholomew would have a bloody eve, puts
the white sign of safety round the arm of her Huguenot lover; but the
fingers of his sword-arm pull it off, though all the binding love in
her face pleads for the dear deceit, and justifies it to all of his
heart that is not dedicated to die with comrades. Her religion,--what
is it but the sacrament that converts her adored one into the body and
the blood of her life? Henceforth High Mass must celebrate for her a
double sacrifice.
Shakspeare contrived to rear a race of women whose physical soundness
was unimpaired. Before the gymnasium and the health-lift were invented
at the peevish persuasion of dyspeptics and invalids, who die by inches
of fried food, furnace-air, fricassees of high-school programmes, and
ragouts of French novels, his women earned their health on horseback in
the broad English fields: they called it down to them out of the sky,
where the hawk struck the heron and returned to perch upon the wrist;
they came upon its track in the sylvan paths which the startled deer
extemporized; they overtook it in long stretches of breezy walks upon
the heathery downs and in the hawthorn-bounded lane. The country's
Nature was their training-room, and its unsophisticated habits their
masters. They saw the sun rise, and could not afford time to outflare
the setting crescent with gaslight streaming from overheated rooms;
nor did the stately minuet ravage like the German which is sustained
into the small hours upon rations of beef-tea and various liquors.
They drank small-beer for breakfast, and knew the taste of herrings
before the Turks invaded the nerves of Christendom with coffee, and
the Chinese began to tan its stomach with the acid of teas. At twelve
o'clock, a cup of malmsey, with a wedge of venison-pasty, scared up no
megrims in constitutions which had followed the deer through the forest
into the larder, and had pulled it down there with dexterous hands
into the dish. Imogen was a prime cook, dressed vegetables in various
devices to make them dainty to the eye, and flavored broth fit for
Juno. She never caught cold on the floor of the cave. The forest was as
courteous to her as the court.
Not one of Shakspeare's women utters one line that is inspired by any
form of hysteria: the perfect balance of the functions was not yet
impaired; so that no nerve-centre could exercise a petty tyranny, nor
suggest the morbid fancies and curious superfluities which dedicate so
many late romances to St. Vitus, the patron of spasm.
In an admirable book upon "Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the
Girls," I found embedded in an excellent vein of common sense the
following obscure statement, quoted from another author: "Peripheral
influences of an extremely powerful and continuous kind, where they
concur with one of those critical periods of life at which the central
nervous system is relatively weak and unstable, can occasionally set
going a non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may localize itself
in those nerves upon whose centres the morbific peripheral influence
is perpetually pouring in." Here be words almost as depressing as
the ills which the flesh of the modern woman is heiress to; but that
legacy cannot be traced as far back as the poetry of that age when
the Queen rode along the line of her English soldiers at Tilbury
Fort, while Dorcas and Mopsa helped to stack barley to malt the ale
for her maids of honor. I doubt if Shakspeare was familiar with many
cases, transpiring in the town or the country, of women demolished by
"morbific peripheral influence."
So the bodies of his women mature like all the nature out of doors,
and become capable of entertaining the great passion with its own
strenuous, unconscious innocence, with its honest ardor, with its
native directness. Obscure ailments do not warp his verses, nor twang
sick pathos out of their nerves. And we seek the society of these
unsensational women, just as we seek Shakspeare's verse itself; with
the same hope to earn repose for the soul which has been so taxed by
the strained rhetoric of later writers. For relief, we recur to the
pregnant moderation of Shakspeare's style. Pyrotechnics tire the eye,
and send the dazed spectator groping home, as they seem to make more
darkness by exploding. One reason for the revival of interest and love
for Shakspeare may be found in a natural reaction from artifice and
over-wrought expression. The heated mind has discovered an oasis and
deep well that wait in this sirocco-stricken age with coolness for our
hearts. How eagerly we run toward this shadowed margin where his great
power is greatly tempered to our human feeling! His vivacity has been
so bred by repose that it never strays beyond the line where stimulus
becomes inebriation. He not only despises the abrupt effects which are
darlings of the modern pen, but he resolutely refuses to represent
abruptness; and his fancy makes its rapid time by even and placid
motion; as a great sea-bird, with outstretched wings, in which you
scarcely can detect a winnow, will follow the speed of your ship and
be seen constantly poised just above the stern. All his figures have
the same breadth and floating quality: they take you, as on an expanse
of Fortunatus's carpet, upon a great journey silently. They are not
apothecary's expedients to raise a blister by sharp surprise, to lash
up a jaded taste by some cantharides of metaphor and simile, to rouse a
torpid skin by acupuncture, or dull a heavy pain by injected morphia,
as our modern practitioners of the ideal do, who have abused tired
Nature's sweet restorer and the digestion that should wait on appetite.
And every gesture of Shakspeare, even when he has violence to describe,
is not violently made; but the most tremendous deeds are emphasized
by having their bluster chidden and their outcry hushed; so the great
midnight lifts a finger of silence, but shudders none the less, and
sinks to awful depths with the crime which has fastened itself upon her
secrecy, as if to drag her dumbly out of the sweet heaven down to a
place of horror. While Macbeth goes to Duncan's chamber, and the wife
listens to hear death follow, the verse turns over the business of
shrieking to the owl: an elemental dread from the unsounded depth of
human feeling puts an accent on the scene.
Since Shakspeare's time, our rhetoric has been slowly raising its
pitch, just as the musical instruments had been doing it until a
congress was called to reduce to a normal note of _C_, with two hundred
and twelve vibrations in a second, the pitch that had become so
exaggerated. Handel was content to write a minor third below even that.
What a pity that a congress of the best minds could not impose a normal
pitch upon the shrieking muse, the new Calliope, who goes by steam!
Observe the level, unobtrusive nature of Shakspeare's Sonnets and of
the songs in the plays. The difference between them and our later
scaling of the falsetto is like the difference between the moderately
strung violins of Salo and Amati and the violin of the present day.
Those antique violins were made to accompany soprano voices which had
no ambition to reach high _C_, as all men's ears were then content with
the medium register. "Their gently veiled, yet satisfactorily clear,
silver tone, of virgin character," describes the songs of Shakspeare,
and the sentiment for music which is scattered through the plays. In
the middle notes almost every thing that is worth having in music is
to be found. Behind those bars the melodies which can be domesticated
under man's roof and by his hearthside are patiently waiting to be
led forth and be installed. Shakspeare used to listen lovingly to the
cheerful, healthy madrigal of Elizabeth's age, so wholesome in effect,
so downright sincere in expression, so full of the robust, sensuous
life of those brave English days, when human habits and emotions dwelt
in the middle register of life, and there found Nature's own fulness
and harmony, the finely blended color of passion and thought. But
nowadays the daffodils that used to
"Take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath;...
... bold oxlips, and
The crown-imperial,"
have been plied with guano, dosed with new-fangled liquid manures, till
their cosmetic and perfume announce a kind of harlotry: we ogle, sigh,
languishingly sniff, and die of a rose in a rheumatic pain.
The gamut of feeling among Shakspeare's women is the clear and perfect
octave which built the English glee and madrigal, whose untutored
music was "the food of love." And love was entirely welcome, like the
daylight; not put off and played with as if by the effeminacies of
some Asiatic musical scale, whose eighth and quarter tones cannot be
distinguished by a well modulated ear.
"What is Love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure;
In delay there lies no plenty:
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure."
Does this have a crude ring of the bivouac to any ear which has been
accustomed to the macaronic variations of modern artists, who torture
the great theme and force its simple blitheness through the brass
crooks of a keyed cornet? 'Tis an honest love whose month is ever May,
when the pipe of Pan is breathed upon by the clear west wind through
the budding willows. Nothing competes with it but the throstle and
song-sparrow: they seem to be weaving sacred nests out of the tones,
to gather them into domestic privacy. Climb, count with delight the
jealously guarded eggs, and do not blow them for your cabinet.
Nature was so prodigal of health to Shakspeare's women that it
overflowed the clay banks of their bodies, and spread in a freshet
of gayety. Beatrice and Rosalind never tire of keeping in the air
the light shuttlecock of their wit. It floats in an æther of animal
spirits; and, if it now and then touches earth, Nature promptly
lends it a rebound. They engage in a masked revel to conceal their
emotions. Will Orlando and Benedick penetrate the disguise and claim
the lips that mockingly escape thus? If these women suspect their
hearts to be distilling a sigh, laughter sparkles into the recess and
exposes the illicit business. It is just like the men to roam about
in disordered attire, with blue, inclement features, shaking with the
"quotidian-tertian" of their love-turn. If they do not go about thus,
it is all the same: then they are rallied for not being in Cupid's
fashion. "Your hose should be ungarter'd, your bonnet unbanded,
your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and every thing about you
demonstrating a careless desolation." The gladness of these women would
be cautioned at the lorn sight to defend themselves from infection.
Orlando sticks his rhymes up in the forest, like a bill-poster of
Radway's Ready Relief, deforming the sturdier oaks. Rosalind goes
about pulling them down, and is in the best of spirits when Touchstone
declares that he could "rhyme you so, eight years together; dinners,
and suppers, and sleeping-hours excepted:" his verses have the regular
butter-woman's jog-trot. She was never so nearly berhymed to death
since she was an Irish rat in the time of Pythagoras. But, for all
that, she is full of bliss to discover that this fancy-monger of rhymes
is Orlando; and she is dying to know "what did he? What said he? How
look'd he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me?
Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see
him again? Answer me in one word." To be sure, she wears a double
disguise of wit and male attire; so when Orlando says to her, "Fair
youth, I would I could make thee believe I love," it is easy for her to
reply, "Me believe it? You may as soon make her that you love believe
it; which, I warrant, she is apter to do than to confess she does;
that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to
their consciences." But when, pretending to ridicule his emotion, she
tells him that "men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten
them, but not for love," he protests that Rosalind's frown might kill
him. "By this hand," she says, "it will not kill a fly." So all the
exuberant frolic of these fine women is the sparkle of healthy brains:
the heart's-blood of love does not trickle through hepatic sentiment,
but is briskly pumped through the lungs up into the head, flashes from
the eye, and becomes a ruddy zest upon the tongue.
Benedick complains that the Lady Beatrice said he was the prince's
jester, that he was "duller than a great thaw; huddling jest upon jest,
with such impossible conveyance, upon me, that I stood like a man at a
mark, with a whole army shooting at me. While she is here, a man may
live as quiet in hell as in a sanctuary; and people sin upon purpose,
because they would go thither."
When, however, she overhears Hero giving her wit a bad character for
scorn and inhumanity, her woman's heart revolts at the suggestion, and
her self-communion runs thus tenderly:--
"What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemn'd for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And, Benedick, love on, I will requite thee;
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand."
So the keen, swooping falcon settles at last composedly upon his wrist:
love draws a hood over the bright, fearless eye, and claps the jesses
upon her spirits. But at the very moment of capture, her strong wings
fillip him: "I yield upon great persuasion; and, partly, to save your
life, for I was told you were in a consumption." That tone has in it
the promise of lively times for Benedick. He will never be able to
train the delight of liberty out of this falcon, who will slip her
jesses still, and circle overhead, but not forget to return. He told
her once that, as long as she had no mind to love, "some gentleman or
other shall 'scape a predestinate scratched face." But, though love has
pared her talons, Benedick will not find matrimony to be dull.
Portia's whole temperament is joyous, even when she pretends that her
little body is aweary of the world. Not one of Shakspeare's women shows
such a perfect balance of the senses and the soul. Not a muscle of the
body ever owned to being tired; not a function ever behaved ill enough
to clog her gayety. It flows with mild and even sparkle through all the
varied scenes, like a sunlit runnel that carries gilded dimples into
woods and through them without lingering to have them catch a damp from
shadows. Even the judicial fitness of her great language in the scene
with Shylock does not sprinkle chancellor's wig-powder over her cheek.
The style has the bloom of health, as it always is with her, "rosy,
clear-ringing. How warm with joy are her words! How beautiful all her
images, which are for the most part borrowed from mythology!" And we
notice that her fancy always selects the classic allusions which are
most vital with thought, freshness, sentiment. "If I live to be as old
as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtained by the
manner of my father's will." And when she watches Bassanio, as he is on
the point of choosing among the caskets, what is he like? she thinks;
and the mighty youth of Greece supplies her thought:--
"Now he goes,
With no less presence, but with much more love,
Than young Alcides, when he did redeem
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy
To the sea-monster; I stand for sacrifice,
The rest aloof are the Dardanian wives,
With bleared visages, come forth to view
The issue of th' exploit. Go, Hercules!
Live thou, I live."