PORTIA.

In the elements which compose the character of Portia, Shakspeare

anticipated, but without intention, the intellect of those modern women

who can wield so gracefully many of the tools which have been hitherto

monopolized by men. But the same genius which endowed her with a large

and keen intelligence derived it from her sex, and, for the sake of

it, he did not sacrifice one trait of her essential womanliness. This

commands our attention very strongly; for it is the clew which we must

start with.

She is still a woman to the core of her beauty-loving heart. Coming

home from the great scene in Venice, where she baffles Shylock, and

swamps with sudden justice the scales that were so eager for the bonded

flesh, she loiters in the moonlight, marks the music which is floating

from her palace to be caressed by the night and made sweeter than by

day. Her listening ear is modulated by all the tenderness she feels

and the love she expects; so she gives the music the color of a soul

that has come home to wife and motherhood, till her thoughts put such

a strain upon the vibrating strings that they grow too tense, and

threaten to divulge her delicate secret. So she cries,--

"Peace! Now the moon sleeps with Endymion,

And would not be awak'd."

Her graceful passion takes shelter in the old myth whose names

personify her thought. And her style of speaking reminds us of the more

polished ladies of Shakspeare's time, who delighted in the masques and

revels in which the persons of the old mythology were charged to utter

gallant sentiments. She is a woman of Juliet's clime, and not without

her frankness; but she has been brought up in England, and her feeling

and her judgment are English through and through.

She has been forbidden by her father's testament to make free choice

of the man whom she will love. But she could as soon be divested

of her intellect as of her power and wish to love. There is not a

single drop running through all her fairness that has caught a chill

from the quarter of her brain where wit and wisdom ponder in their

clear north light. Her mind is strong, but not the mind of a man, and

with no traits more masculine than her frame itself, which is love's

solicitor:--

"Here are sever'd lips,

Parted with sugar breath."

And even in her strict speech to Shylock we can feel the light draught

of it, tempering the inclemency of her superb and unexpected threat:

the Jew quails under the sentences which rain on him, golden, grave,

serene. And they compel us to observe that pure sex has given the pitch

to her strong, fatal wisdom. We cannot detect any thin and stridulous

quality, like that of the well-gristled Duchess of Gloster, who repaid

a box of the ear with these two lines:--

"Could I come near your beauty with my nails,

I'd set my ten commandments in your face."

If among the points of a well-nurtured woman there be those that are

feline, they are generally retracted into velvet sheaths, and scarce

surmised to be there till a scratch is made so silently that you have

no evidence of it but your blood. But if Old Probabilities should

overhear a woman blustering in a fashion as follows,--

"Though in this place most master wear no breeches,

She shall not strike Dame Eleanor unreveng'd,"--

he would at once order cautionary signals. When a man scolds in the

pulpit or a woman on the platform, the planets shudder, shrink, and

grow more crusty.

Bassanio had caught a throb from the soft breath of Portia which seemed

to be a herald of the beauty he describes afterwards when the lucky lid

is lifted,--

"Here in her hairs

The painter plays the spider, and hath woven

A golden mesh t' entrap the hearts of men,

Faster than gnats in cobwebs; but her eyes!

How could he see to do them? Having made one,

Methinks, it should have power to steal both his,

And leave itself unfurnish'd."

She knows that this portrait of herself lies in the leaden casket; so

that whenever a suitor comes to speculate upon the chance of finding

it, how that sweet breath must break into flurries of dread which call

into the eyes a distant alarm! For, before her father died, she had

seen Bassanio, and secretly preferred him; and we hear him tell Antonio

in confidence that

"Sometimes from her eyes

I did receive fair speechless messages."

No doubt he did; but they escaped to him just like prisoners' glances

that are in vague quest of some confederate instinct, and slip through

a grating; for she was double-locked in durance of shyness and enforced

seclusion, and, "in terms of choice," could not be

"Solely led

By nice direction of a maiden's eyes:"

kept aloof and sacred by an oath to a dying father, yet so perfectly a

woman that too little rather than too much betrayed her; for, as she

says, "a maiden hath no tongue but thought."

The princely suitors file before the caskets, pondering how to match

her picture with herself. She has all the captivating glamour of a pure

blonde.

"Her sunny locks

Hang on her temples like a golden fleece;

Which makes her seat of Belmont, Colchos' strand,

And many Jasons come in quest of her."

While these Jasons agitate her heart by deliberating over the metals

of the caskets, the real suitor lies hidden underneath the lead of her

manner, and seems to stretch forth a forbidding hand. To the Prince of

Arragon, while the cornets relieve her by executing all the flourish,

she coldly says,--

"Behold, there stand the caskets, noble prince:

If you choose that wherein I am contain'd,

Straight shall our nuptial rites be solemniz'd;

But if you fail, without more speech, my lord,

You must be gone from hence immediately."

This is much more curt than the style of her address to the Emperor of

Morocco, who, although wearing "the shadow'd livery of the burnish'd

sun," had something too of its warmth and openness in the manner of his

wooing.

"I would not change this hue,

Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen."

That went straight to her woman's heart. "I am black, but fair," it

said; and, like Desdemona, she could see "Othello's visage in his

mind." But Desdemona's heart was fancy-free. Portia not only had a mind

that could not be fancy-led, but her heart was lying in Bassanio's

hand, where its life woke, like the gem whose color kindles better at

the touch of warmth. Still, the recognition of the Emperor's frank

passion came forth, toned at once by respect and courtesy:--

"If my father had not scanted me,

And hedg'd me by his wit, to yield myself

His wife, who wins me by that means I told you,

Yourself, renowned prince, then stood as fair

As any comer I have look'd on yet."

She may safely say as much as that. And, when he fails, she smooths her

exit from his mind by the kind phrase, "A gentle riddance." Then she

marks the difference between the women whose hearts can reflect and the

Desdemonas of mere sentiment. The former have a firm partition that

prevents the mingling of venous and arterial blood: this in the latter

has never been quite closed, or is too thin, and liable to be ruptured

by emotion. So Desdemona,

"A maiden never bold,

Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion

Blush'd at herself,"

broke, as she said, into "downright violence and scorn of fortunes."

She "did love the Moor to live with him." Portia, on the contrary,

says, "Let all of his complexion choose me so,"--it is a hint of the

natural aversion of all natures who are representatives of one distinct

type from mixing their love with those of another. But I cannot agree

with a criticism of John Quincy Adams to the effect that Shakspeare

wrote the tragedy of "Othello" on purpose to show the disastrous

consequences of miscegenation. Desdemona's weak point is the only

fatality in the play. She began by deceiving her father, and secretly

made a match which broke his heart. But if she had not recurred to

deceit again, and lied to her husband about the handkerchief, his

smouldering jealousy would have never blazed. Want of frankness was her

contribution to Iago's plot, the element that made it a success. Portia

stood to her oath, and ran all risks.

Portia has the strong sense to expect that the majority of her noble

admirers will be taken by appearance. She is not quite sure, but has

an instinct, that these gentlemen who are after her are also after her

pretty property of Belmont, and will be likely to choose the metals

responsive to this temper. Bassanio frankly acknowledges to a friend

that he would like to repair his broken fortunes; but Shakspeare

shows him to be a lover before he gives this mercenary hint; and he

has reason to surmise that Portia loves him. This unspoken mutuality

dignifies his quest; as if Shakspeare himself would not admit the

charge that he is a fortune-hunter. And it is noticeable how little

consequence we attach to Bassanio's character. We do not care to see

him in any action, or to have him show a worthiness to be Portia's

lover. He is but the lay-figure of her love: there is so much of her

that there must be a great deal of him, and he may be spared the

trouble of appearing at full length. And we never suspect her of

belonging to that tribe of bright women who, either from instinct or

calculation, marry good-natured, well-mannered numskulls, and never

have reason to sue for a divorce. Shakspeare ennobles Bassanio when the

divining soul sees through the leaden lid.

But what if one of the other suitors should also have a noble heart

whose pulses feed discernment, one as fine and unconventional as

herself! There is just hazard enough to affront her cherishing of the

absent Bassanio. She does not relish the moment when her heart, richer

than the princes know of, goes into the lottery. However, when her

father made his will, it doubtless occurred to her that his choice of

metals came from a life's experience of the calibre of the average man,

and was meant affectionately to protect her till the true gentleman

should come. As Nerissa says, "Your father was ever virtuous; and holy

men, at their death, have good inspirations; therefore, the lottery

that he hath devised in these three chests, of gold, silver, and

lead (whereof _who chooses his meaning_ chooses you) will, no doubt,

never be chosen by any rightly but one whom you shall rightly love."

Fortunate is the man who wins a wife because he chooses Heaven's

meaning in a woman! Luckless the wife who is not chosen by some implied

Heaven in a man!

The written scrolls which are enclosed in the caskets show that her

father anticipated acutely the ordinary motives of mankind. The suitors

imagine that they are reflecting in a superior style as they give their

reasons for taking to the gold or the silver; but they are realty

biased by the common sentiment, as Portia sees:--

"Oh, these deliberate fools! When they do choose,

They have the wisdom by their wit to lose."

So one by one they slaughter themselves and clear the way.

How Shakspeare's verse celebrates Bassanio's approach to Belmont? It is

like a gracious prelude conceived by her secret preference, escaping to

guide him to her where she lies under a spell which he must break.

There enters a messenger, sumptuous in blank verse, like the tabard of

a herald whose message is desired.

"Madam, there is alighted at your gate

A young Venetian, one that comes before

To signify the approaching of his lord.

... I have not seen

So likely an ambassador of love:

A day in April never came so sweet,

To show how costly summer was at hand,

As this fore-spurrer comes before his lord."

The lover has reached the enchanted palace, and is in haste to liberate

its inmate. Portia might have said, with the antique grace that always

clothes her speech, that he came to attack, like a new Perseus, those

menacing metals which rivet her in reach of danger, to lift her

passionately out of fetters. How she struggles not to show her love,

and thus she shows it!--

"There's something tells me (but it is not love)

I would not lose you; and you know yourself,

Hate counsels not in such a quality."

An ordinary woman might have enmeshed him in a cocoon of delicate

coquetries: any woman dead in love, and a little less than strict to an

oath, would have managed in some way to provoke that lead casket into

twinkling a hint to him. But she is too honest for either. A woman with

a soul as tender as it is firm, here she stands dismayed as Destiny

is about to rattle its dice upon her heart: happiness, and a future

worthy of her, all at stake. For though her mental resources might

compete with any fate, she is all woman, made to be a wife, and without

wifehood to feel herself at one essential point impaired,--all the more

defrauded because so well endowed. How she clings for support to the

few moments that yet stand before his choice! She wishes there were

more of them to stay her.

"I pray you tarry; ...

... for, in choosing wrong,

I lose your company; therefore, forebear awhile."

She has no courage now: love, when it stole her heart, found that trait

too, and added it to the booty.

"Lest you should not understand me well

(And yet a maiden hath no tongue but thought),

I would detain you here some month or two,

Before you venture for me."

The noble lady's plea fills us with admiring pity: we admire to see the

strong, beautiful woman so downcast with this new emotion which Heaven

has quartered upon her life; but we pity, because perhaps it will be

doomed to dwell alone. And then the more spacious the lodging, the more

dreary the echoes of these few sweet hours.

Has she said too much? She has a chase after this frankness to make a

struggle to detain it, but it overcomes and gets away:--

"Beshrew your eyes,

They have o'erlooked me, and divided me:

One half of me is yours, the other half yours,--

Mine own, I would say; but, if mine, then yours,

And so all yours!"

This freshet of disclosure does not carry away maidenly reserve, for

that is transferred from her person and locked up in the coyness of

the caskets: in them there lurks a threat, a possible disaster, which

lends some pathos to her frankness, and prevents it from forfeiting our

respect.

Now Bassanio, who lives upon the rack, denies her plea for delay:

"Let me to my fortune and the caskets." How profoundly she surmises

that music might lull the watching Fate, so that he could pass to his

Eurydice! She bids the music play:--

"As are those dulcet sounds in break of day,

That creep into the dreaming bridegroom's ear,

And summon him to marriage."

Bassanio must be attempered to his choice; the song's key must have

an instinct for the proper casket's key. Unconsciously she breaks her

oath; for what benign influence selected the song that is now sung?

Some star, whose tenant was her father? Or was it Nerissa's doing, who

determined to convey a hint to the lover? Or did Gratiano hit upon it,

who had got from Nerissa a promise of her love if the choice went to

suit her? A hint, indeed! It is the very breadth of broadness, and a

lover is not dull.

"Tell me, where is fancy bred,--

Or in the heart, or in the head?

How begot, how nourishèd

Reply, reply.

It is engender'd in the eyes,

With gazing fed; and fancy dies

In the cradle where it lies.

Let us all ring fancy's knell:

I'll begin it,--Ding, dong, bell,

Ding, dong, bell."

A song that did good sexton-service, for fancy's knell is rung indeed.

The strain reminds Bassanio of notices in his experience: that error

hides its grossness in ornament; vice assumes some mark of virtue;

beauty is for sale by the weight, and is a show which cunning puts on

to entrap wise men: in short, as the song says, fancies[18] come by

gazing, have no life deeper than the eyes, and die where they are born.

The strain wakes up his mind into its nobler attitude. "So may the

outward shows be least themselves." This fortune-hunter, after all, is

Portia's counterpart. The melody woven out of air glides into his hand

and becomes a clew to bliss. Oh, the woman thrills! in touching the

lead his hand has clutched her heart, and forces from her words that

are outbreaks of that which is everlastingly the Woman. They assail,

they challenge man to say what is so great as love. This polished,

clear, sagacious, gifted, balanced woman dares man to say love is not

greatest of all.

"How all the other passions fleet to air,

As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embrac'd despair,

And shudd'ring fear, and green-ey'd jealousy!

O love,

Be moderate, allay thy ecstasy;

In measure rein thy joy, scant this excess.

I feel too much thy blessing; make it less,

For fear I surfeit."

Thus the lips which an oath had sealed melt apart in the first kiss,

and her heart, like a fluid ruby, rushes through.

Shakspeare's women never trickle into tepid acceptances: their _Yes_

to love is not puckered in a mouth shaped by "prisms and propriety;"

it is not a whisper through a closet key-hole, which the lover,

overhearing, doubts may possibly be _No_. The Duke, in "Twelfth Night,"

steals rhetoric to utter Shakspeare's feeling about great-hearted and

full-blooded women:--

"How will she love, when the rich, golden shaft

Hath kill'd the flock of all affections else

That live in her! when liver, brain, and heart,

These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill'd

(Her sweet perfections) with one self king!"

Yet Portia, whom Nature made capable of this rapture, had wit enough to

invent comedies of life and character, judgment enough to devise the

best ways, acumen that astonished Venetian subtlety, as it baffled

Shylock so neatly that the surprise of wit is imparted to us. No

modern parson could speak with such sweet gravity of persuasion upon

the quality of mercy; no bright schemer of novels could spice her

conversations with such raillery, or construct them upon such instinct

for character, as we notice in the scene where she amuses Nerissa with

those sketches of her various lovers' foibles. What does such a woman

want for tools,--pencil, brush, goose-quill, or tribune? She is made

to have her choice of occupations. Does she have a call to utter the

great truths of morals and religion? Undoubtedly, Nature has ordained

her. Therefore, thou Reverend D.D., with all respect for dulness which

is miraculous, that pulpit where you labor like a vessel water-logged

is wanted: we people in the pews are faint with emptiness on board

your craft, and despair of making any harbor. Persuade him, O Portia,

to cede that domain to you: we would fain have the droppings of the

sanctuary like the gentle dew from heaven upon the earth beneath.

Here is another Daniel come to judgment! We would say, let another

judge's seat be placed for her, if we did not observe that it was

love which enlisted her wit to screen the friend of her lover. Here

again Shakspeare has derived her public attitude from the emotions

which her sex involves: the triumph of the court-room is a stratagem

inspired by inclination. In a panel of jurors, how many women we

should have to challenge on the ground of unfitness by reason of the

element which makes up every verdict of our life! She is disqualified

by that exquisite superiority. Her private feeling is liable to be so

profoundly interested that sometimes she acquits or condemns, not as a

judge, but as a person. Her element, which attains to equilibrium in

the world's broad atmosphere, might, if condensed into the Leyden jar

of a court-room, explode with singular effects. Upon the bench it might

happen that she would make our bail too light, or refuse it altogether.

By common consent, Justice has always been a woman; but it was found

necessary to blindfold her, that she may not see into which scale to

throw a heart.

But this heart of woman, so liable to hurried action, is the centre

of her bravest and least calculated gestures. Her profession is that

of heroine. Wherever it be natural to recoil, she flouts Nature and

declines the job of shrinking. Portia and Helena might be two sisters

of the healing art, gratefully welcomed by their own sex's modesty,

but self-possessed and prompt wherever suffering tears down the pales

of convention; sisters of mercy, hunting after wounds in the rear of

battle, dressing maimed soldiers down the sighing wards of hospitals,

appalled at no hurt the most hideous, repelled by no festering squalor;

the mates of man in courage and dexterity. Let a university be founded

for their training.

What shall a Portia undertake to do? That which is level to Portia's

capacity. _Must_ she do it? That is as she herself may decide. But we

let our women do the dirty drudgery of kitchens, expose themselves to

the publicity of saloons, grow sallow and stooping over spindles, and

spend all day dodging poverty behind a counter. We pay our money to see

them exercise their various talents on the stage, where no exigency

of the plot surprises us, no shifts of costume seem inappropriate, no

want of it amazing. Oh, we gentlemen are such sticklers for propriety,

so interested to keep our women well sequestered! She must not speak

in public, but she may sing: Jenny Lind's open mouth does not look

indecent, but Lucretia Mott's is an outrage of our modesty! Where will

you draw a line through the crowd of competent intelligences? I would

draw it very quickly by putting cleverness in the place of dulness,

though many a preacher and schoolmaster, many a vapid lecturer, would

have to budge. Why should inferiority in a swallow-tail be so valued

and protected against superiority in skirts? Napoleon said, "Careers

are open to talents;" but he dreaded lively and gifted women, and got

them out of the country, wisely suspecting that their insight would

fathom his weakness. But no country can flourish till the talents and

morals of women mix with its affairs. I cannot see why dulness is more

respectable in a man than in a woman. Does it hurt our feelings more

to see a woman fail in any public attitude than to see a man do it?

No doubt it does; for we cannot entirely disenchant those youthful

reveries in which woman, though so close to us, seemed to hover upon an

unapproachable horizon, a shape that commanded loyalty from our sense

of harmony and proportion,--nothing in excess, nothing in defect; an

embodiment of a perfect tone's vibration that thrilled in our ideal of

life and promised it a future. We could not tolerate any discrepancy

with the allurement of this mystery. Our own sexual distinction

enhanced it to the pitch of astonishment and reverence. We could not

bear to see her clothed and adorned in a way to jar the taste which

she first woke in us. We cannot bear it now. No pretext of convenience

in locomotion, whether by horseback, rail, steamer, velocipede, or

mangle, can rub out of our preference the lines which trace the reserve

that protects our youthful dream. And how can this being, only half

suggested yet clearly not ourselves, put a scrawl of crudity in place

of those fluent curves that describe something less angular than we

are? The gestures of her mind, when they are publicly displayed to

throw a glove into the mob of us from the edge of a platform, must

always indorse our preconception. Any thing harsh, some acidity of

tone, sentences that stride or bandy with arms akimbo, will pique the

unconverted world into taking up her glove to crush and not to kiss. So

we cannot bear to see a woman pushed forward into premature expression

which the gift will not confirm. A man's stupidity does not inflict so

great a hurt on our imagination. Distance doth breed divinity; and we

shrink to find a woman capable of dulness, and yet able to show it.

All this may be conceded to be a natural instinct which men will not

abandon. But its root is in regard for woman; so that men should be

the first to sound a trumpet before the lists to champion her genius,

whatever it may be, and to see that fair play is enforced in the

tournament. Shall the gifted woman enter the lists? Let her poverty,

if not her preference, consent and decide.

But a woman, however poor she may be, and burdened with claims upon

her relationship, cannot try to do what Portia did not need to do

unless her talent can justify the attempt. If she presumes upon the

deference which man spontaneously pays to her sex, or calculates that

curiosity will be piqued to see her exhibition, she cannot, even with

the help of her natural allies, flowers, costume, and manner, long

conceal some inadequacy for the part she aspires to play. Then she will

wreak discredit upon the independence of woman; and, if that be the

special cause which she advocates, her presence on the platform will

be an advertisement of its failure. For mankind, which has invented

the motto for woman which styles her the weaker sex, does not like to

be taken at its word, and will not sit patiently where this weakness

bores it. It withdraws into the retreats where this accredited weakness

is a delight and power. Of course, wherever masculine ineffectiveness

appears, men are put out by it, except in a meeting-house; and there

it is tolerated in deference to numerous tea-drinkings, marriages and

funerals, and hours of pastoral gentleness; and the imminent inadequacy

of speech is arrested by the organ. But the platform has neither

tradition nor liturgy: the gaze of the audience is a _mitrailleuse_

that sweeps it. There is no rose-window to throw a tint on bloodless

speech. Men compromise no truth of their own, and damage no cause when

they refrain from listening; for man is already the proprietor of all

that he desires, and more than he deserves. This is not the case with

woman,--not, at least, in the regions where there are too many mouths

and too scanty subsistence; nor in those where cultivated women cherish

an interest in equality of opportunities; nor in those where the public

law discriminates against them; nor in those where woman dislikes the

liberty to be taxed without the right to vote upon the taxing. It is

all the more incumbent upon women to be jealously careful that their

self-respect, at least, should be adequately represented. They defeat

their own thought when they applaud the thin speech which sometimes

lends its want of voice to it. It is a "childish treble" that "pipes

and whistles in its sound." There is no reason, because its piping

and whistling were never tolerated before, that the new chance should

confer immunity upon it. The liberty of later times must not be, for

either sex, an unchartered libertine. Truth, eternal nature, the laws

of mind and the moods of feeling, combine to take a mortgage upon it,

whose interest must be paid in coin that is accepted as legal tender by

the gifts that hold it. Recognizing this, perhaps the time will come

when a superior womanhood shall remand masculine incapacity swiftly to

the oblivion it deserves, whenever it mars blocks of marble, squanders

paint, debauches music, or drones an absurd bass about God, Religion,

and the awful morals. Pray Heaven to have woman restrained from the

dilettantism of modern times!

When Portia's heart unties the spasm of joy that tightened round it

at Bassanio's choice, it beats again with the grave and sweet dignity

that is as native to her as her playful wit. Her mind recognizes the

serious change that must befall her fortune: in the first moment of it

there comes a deep humility that makes her speech kneel at the feet of

the man whom she will marry. For her great superiority is free from the

taint of conceit, save "a noble and a true conceit of godlike amity."

We sometimes discover that gifted women are over-consciously aware

of the effect which they produce. While we admire the iris on the

peacock's neck, a bridling runs through it as if to set the colors in a

better light, and our attention is divided by the motion. The orator's

greatest gift is self-absorption. It strips his person to clothe his

thought. His morals seem to gather luminosity out of the air, to become

visible to men. The moment that the speaker listens to his own words,

and snatches time between them to make the audience captive to his

little private ovation, the people are less absorbed, begin to study

the cut of his garments, and nod to each other how well they fit. Then

the thought that was beginning to condense goes back like Ariel to

the elements. When a woman's excellence reads on our faces that it is

delightful, and begins also to be delighted, it throws a shadow: as we

stand in it she seems less chaste than we thought her. All of Portia's

talents share the inviolable reserve of her person, which seems to

convey its modesty into the unspoken thought. How adorable is her

humility!--

"You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand,

... an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd:

Happy in this, she is not yet so old

But she may learn; and happier than this,

She is not bred so dull but she can learn;

Happiest of all, in that her gentle spirit

Commits itself to yours to be directed,

As from her lord, her governor, her king."

Does this language seem to you slavish and old-fashioned? And do you,

madam, declare that you never saw the man yet for whom you would so

demean yourself? Then I shall know that just at present you are not in

love. Perhaps you never have been; for it is the perfect language of

a woman's first hours which follow love's declaration, when she feels

that her life and soul are to be made complete by marriage. She storms

herself with questions never before suggested. What could he see in

her? What has she got with which to repay this exquisite flattery, this

shuddering delight at being summoned out of millions of her sex? The

first impulse is to spill the soul in a libation to the deity of the

hour: let the whole of it drench my lover; let me not dare to reserve a

portion to teach me a first selfish lesson. All, all is yours, my king!

Come, drain it at the chalice of my lips!

An emotion far shallower than this is quite enough in any age to trump

up a marriage with; but it is a funeral bak'd meat growing colder still

at the wedding-breakfast. It is often frozen stiff before it gets

there. Half-ripened girls fancy that their simmering preference will

have the sun-burst of love; but the blossom is still in its sheath:

when it matures, that first greenness is pushed off. But, if it was

rubbed off, the blossom, exposed to unseasonable air, grows rusty, and

lifts up a vapid invitation to some splendor to nod and mingle sweets.

Shakspeare has no language of conventional avowal: no acceptances that

are inspired by respect, calculation, immaturity, acquaintanceship,

water his page with insipidity. His pen is love's shaft, and always has

somebody's blood upon the tip.

So do not include Portia's sublime deference in your modern programme

of reform. Man would grow less worthy of woman, less obedient to her

inspirations, if that fell into disrepute. It is the first unstudied

stratagem of love,--one that so humbles man into a greater deference

that she can no longer call him lord. She listens in turn to his

emotion: every line lifts her into equality, with the gesture that

kings make when they acknowledge:--

"Madam, you have bereft me of all words,

Only my blood speaks to you in my veins;

And there is such confusion in my powers,

As after some oration, fairly spoke

By a beloved prince, there doth appear

Among the buzzing pleased multitude;

Where every something, being blent together,

Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy,

Express'd, and not express'd."

This is the quality in Shakspeare's courtships which convinces us

that all his marriages will turn out happily. And he makes it plain

in all his plays that he is a devotee of marriage. Portia is quite

competent to lead a single life, and might earn a brilliant living if

fate stripped her of wealth. Being without a particle of ambition,

she would have to be driven by poverty into setting up housekeeping

with her gifts. But no woman is fine enough to persuade Nature

to grant her exemption from the pain of love. There will always

be exceptions,--an Olympia Morata, a Cassandra Fédélé, Florence

Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, Maria Mitchell, Clara Barton,--natures

of great constancy, who are absorbed in scholarship, poesy, or good

works, with a temperament that has an even graciousness toward all

men, and just pauses short of honoring one exclusively. Or, perhaps,

the genius of such women was the gradual rally of time around an

early disappointment, whose story never will be told, when something

baffled a first love,--as the pearl-oyster, stimulated by some foreign

substance that has intruded into its retreat, slowly coats it all over

with nacre, till beauty incorporates the secret ill. Man covets it, but

can never fix the date when the trouble of a fine soul began to revenge

itself so nobly.

Still, it gives us pleasure when the best gifts are surprised,

captured, seized away to consecrate privacy and become a fount of noble

inheritance. Their publicity shall thrill and elevate a later age.

"When virtue leaps high in the public fountain, you seek for the lofty

spring of nobleness, and find it far off in the dear breast of some

mother, who melted the snows of winter, and condensed the summer's dew

into fair, sweet humanity, which now gladdens the face of man in all

the city streets."

Or if, in middle life, some truth, some moral, claims a woman's hand,

and offers second marriage, men will gladly listen to a tone whose

grave, sweet temper, pitched by first love and married happiness,

pervades all her experience.

So Portia, who could, when it was needed, "turn two mincing steps into

a manly stride," doffs the lawyer's robe, and, returning, is met by

music and conducted to a palace that was not till then a home.