Part 20

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: Sometimes in Shakspeare the word _fancy_ means a genuine passion: here it hints only at a passing sentiment.]

HELENA; OPHELIA.

HELENA.

The character of Helena, in "All's Well that Ends Well," furnishes a striking contrast to Ophelia, and tempts the student of Shakspeare to bring both types of womanhood into one field of view. Ophelia loves the Lord Hamlet, who is her "expectancy and rose of the fair state,"--one to be proud of, cling to, and adore. But, when her father's interference begins to draw her into the contrary current which sweeps her life away, she develops no power of resistance. Even her love is not strong enough to stem the stream that rushes suddenly from subterranean caves to cover her feet and climb to her heart. She has no will for withstanding her father's resolution: her passion has not yet ventured out of its girlish stage, to gather strength and be a threat to her docility. She submissively returns the Prince's cherished words and presents, lets the old father rule her, and goes crazed.

But Helena, though also loving one above her rank, being only a physician's daughter, cannot bear the idea of giving up Count Bertram. Her love is not at first returned; but she contains love enough to furnish both hearts, and she actually follows him to court, to make a captive of him, hoping to light a mutual flame. Such a procedure as that stood not within the capacity of Ophelia. No doubt it offends our conventional feeling; so that Helena must not only succeed, but manifest pure and noble qualities on the strange road she takes toward success, if she would gain our sympathy. The play begins quite early to canvass for our favor by showing that she is a noble woman who proceeds thus, and it is in the interest of a love that intends to be pure and legal. It is death to be without Bertram; and love will dare all things, risk life itself, to save the life of love. Why not in a woman as well as in a man? Nay, more likely in her case, for that special reason of womanhood, that positive instinct to be dependent, and to find life at once swallowed up and blessed by something or some person outside of Self. A modern woman, who desires to be independent, is eager to find something upon which she may depend. The Self of the average woman does not really subsist and reach perfect consciousness until the lover makes the claim of another Self upon it. For that which at first appears to be a threat of absorption, annihilation of the individual, turns out to be the bliss of being rendered back. It is only by the loss of mere individuality that an immortal person is established.