“_Her._ O cross! too high to be enthrall’d to low—
_Lys._ Or else misgrafted in respect of years;
_Her._ O spite! too old to be engaged to young—
_Lys._ Or else it stood upon the choice of friends;
_Her._ O hell! to chuse love by another’s eye!”
There is no authority for any alteration;—but I never can help feeling how
great an improvement it would be, if the two former of Hermia’s
exclamations were omitted;—the third and only appropriate one would then
become a beauty, and most natural.
_Ib._ Helena’s speech:—
“I will go tell him of fair Hermia’s flight,” &c.
I am convinced that Shakespeare availed himself of the title of this play
in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout, but especially,
and perhaps unpleasingly, in this broad determination of ungrateful
treachery in Helena, so undisguisedly avowed to herself, and this, too,
after the witty cool philosophising that precedes. The act itself is
natural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise too true a picture
of the lax hold which principles have on a woman’s heart, when opposed to,
or even separated from, passion and inclination. For women are less
hypocrites to their own minds than men are, because in general they feel
less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more of
its outward consequences, as detection and loss of character, than
men,—their natures being almost wholly extroitive. Still, however just in
itself, the representation of this is not poetical; we shrink from it, and
cannot harmonise it with the ideal.