Читать книгу Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical - Mrs. (Anna) Jameson - Страница 7

ALDA.

You will not listen to me?

MEDON.

I do, with all the deference which befits a gentleman when a lady holds forth on the virtues of her own sex.

He is a parricide of his mother's name,

And with an impious hand murders her fame,

That wrongs the praise of women; that dares write

Libels on saints, or with foul ink requite

The milk they lent us.

Yours was the nobler birth,

For you from man were made—man but of earth—

The son of dust!

ALDA.

What's this?

MEDON.

"Only a rhyme I learned from one I talked withal;" 'tis a quotation from some old poet that has fixed itself in my memory—from Randolph, I think.

ALDA.

'Tis very justly thought, and very politely quoted, and my best courtesy is due to him and to you:—but now will you listen to me?

MEDON.

With most profound humility.

ALDA.

Nay, then! I have done, unless you will lay aside these mock airs of gallantry, and listen to me for a moment! Is it fair to bring a second-hand accusation against me, and not attend to my defence?

MEDON.

Well, I will be serious.

ALDA.

Do so, and let us talk like reasonable beings.

MEDON.

Then tell me, (as a reasonable woman you will not be affronted with the question,) do you really expect that any one will read this little book of yours?

ALDA.

I might answer, that it has been a great source of amusement and interest to me for several months, and that so far I am content: but no one writes a book without a hope of finding readers, and I shall find a few. Accident first made me an authoress; and not now, nor ever, have I written to flatter any prevailing fashion of the day for the sake of profit, though this is done, I know, by many who have less excuse for thus coining their brains. This little book was undertaken without a thought of fame or money: out of the fulness of my own heart and soul have I written it. In the pleasure it has given me, in the new and various views of human nature it has opened to me, in the beautiful and soothing images it has placed before me, in the exercise and improvement of my own faculties, I have already been repaid: if praise or profit come beside, they come as a surplus. I should be gratified and grateful, but I have not sought for them, nor worked for them. Do you believe this?

MEDON.

I do: in this I cannot suspect you of affectation, for the profession of disinterestedness is uncalled for, and the contrary would be too far countenanced by the custom of the day to be matter of reserve or reproach. But how could you (saving the reverence due to a lady-authoress, and speaking as one reasonable being to another) choose such a threadbare subject?

ALDA.

What do you mean?

MEDON.

I presume you have written a book to maintain the superiority of your sex over ours; for so I judge by the names at the heads of some of your chapters; women fit indeed to inlay heaven with stars, but, pardon me, very unlike those who at present walk upon this earth.

ALDA.

Very unlike the fine ladies of your acquaintance, I grant you; but as to maintaining the superiority, or speculating on the rights of women—nonsense! why should you suspect me of such folly?—it is quite out of date. Why should there be competition or comparison?

MEDON.

Both are ill-judged and odious; but did you ever meet with a woman of the world, who did not abuse most heartily the whole race of men?

ALDA.

Did you ever talk with a man of the world, who did not speak with levity or contempt of the whole human race of women?

MEDON.

Perhaps I might answer like Voltaire—"Hélas ils pourraient bien avoir raison tous deux." But do you thence infer that both are good for nothing?

ALDA.

Thence I infer that the men of the world and the women of the world are neither of them—good for much.

MEDON.

And you have written a book to make them better?

ALDA.

Heaven forbid! else I were only fit for the next lunatic asylum. Vanity run mad never conceived such an impossible idea.

MEDON.

Then, in a few words, what is the subject, and what the object, of your book?

ALDA.

I have endeavoured to illustrate the various modifications of which the female character is susceptible, with their causes and results. My life has been spent in observing and thinking; I have had, as you well know, more opportunities for the first, more leisure for the last, than have fallen to the lot of most people. What I have seen, felt, thought, suffered, has led me to form certain opinions. It appears to me that the condition of women in society, as at present constituted, is false in itself, and injurious to them—that the education of women, as at present conducted, is founded in mistaken principles, and tends to increase fearfully the sum of misery and error in both sexes; but I do not choose presumptuously to fling these opinions in the face of the world, in the form of essays on morality, and treatises on education. I have rather chosen to illustrate certain positions by examples, and leave my readers to deduce the moral themselves, and draw their own inferences.

MEDON.

And why have you not chosen your examples from real life? you might easily have done so. You have not been a mere spectator, or a mere actor, but a lounger behind the scenes of existence—have even assisted in preparing the puppets for the stage: you might have given us an epitome of your experience, instead of dreaming over Shakspeare.

ALDA.

I might so, if I had chosen to become a female satirist, which I will never be.

MEDON.

You would, at least, stand a better chance of being read.

ALDA.

I am not sure of that. The vile taste for satire and personal gossip will not be eradicated, I suppose, while the elements of curiosity and malice remain in human nature; but as a fashion of literature, I think it is passing away;—at all events it is not my forte. Long experience of what is called "the world," of the folly, duplicity, shallowness, selfishness, which meet us at every turn, too soon unsettles our youthful creed. If it only led to the knowledge of good and evil, it were well; if it only taught us to despise the illusions and retire from the pleasures of the world, it would be better. But it destroys our belief—it dims our perception of all abstract truth, virtue, and happiness; it turns life into a jest, and a very dull one too. It makes us indifferent to beauty, and incredulous of goodness; it teaches us to consider self as the centre on which all actions turn, and to which all motives are to be referred.

MEDON.

But this being so, we must either revolve with these earthly natures, and round the same centre, or seek a sphere for ourselves, and dwell apart.

ALDA.

I trust it is not necessary to do either. While we are yet young, and the passions, powers, and feelings, in their full activity, create to us a world within, we cannot look fairly on the world without:—all things then are good. When first we throw ourselves forth, and meet burs and briars on every side, which stick in our very hearts;—and fair tempting fruits which turn to bitter ashes in the taste, then we exclaim with impatience, all things are evil. But at length comes the calm hour, when they who look beyond the superficies of things begin to discern their true bearings; when the perception of evil, or sorrow, or sin, brings also the perception of some opposite good, which awakens our indulgence, or the knowledge of the cause which excites our pity. Thus it is with me. I can smile—nay, I can laugh still, to see folly, vanity, absurdity, meanness, exposed by scornful wit, and depicted by others in fictions light and brilliant. But these very things, when I encounter the reality, rather make me sad than merry, and take away all the inclination, if I had the power, to hold them up to derision.

MEDON.

Unless, by doing so, you might correct them.

ALDA.

Correct them! Show me that one human being who has been made essentially better by satire! O no, no! there is something in human nature which hardens itself against the lash—something in satire which excites only the lowest and worst of our propensities. That avowal in Pope—

I must be proud to see

Men not afraid of God, afraid of me!

—has ever filled me with terror and pity—

MEDON.

From its truth perhaps?

ALDA.

From its arrogance—for the truth is, that a vice never corrected a vice. Pope might be proud of the terror he inspired in those who feared no God in whom vanity was stronger than conscience: but that terror made no individual man better; and while he indulged his own besetting sin, he administered to the malignity of others. Your professed satirists always send me to think upon the opposite sentiment in Shakspeare, on "the mischievous foul sin of chiding sin." I remember once hearing a poem of Barry Cornwall's, (he read it to me,) about a strange winged creature that, having the lineaments of a man, yet preyed on a man, and afterwards coming to a stream to drink, and beholding his own face therein, and that he had made his prey of a creature like himself, pined away with repentance. So should those do, who having made themselves mischievous mirth out of the sins and sorrows of others, remembering their own humanity, and seeing within themselves the same lineaments—so should they grieve and pine away, self-punished.

MEDON.

'Tis an old allegory, and a sad one—and but too much to the purpose.

ALDA.

I abhor the spirit of ridicule—I dread it and I despise it. I abhor it because it is in direct contradiction to the mild and serious spirit of Christianity; I fear it, because we find that in every state of society in which it has prevailed as a fashion, and has given the tone to the manners and literature, it marked the moral degradation and approaching destruction of that society; and I despise it, because it is the usual resource of the shallow and the base mind, and, when wielded by the strongest hand with the purest intentions, an inefficient means of good. The spirit of satire reversing the spirit of mercy which is twice blessed, seems to me twice accursed;—evil in those who indulge it—evil to those who are the objects of it.

MEDON.

"Peut-être fallait-il que la punition des imprudens et des faibles fut confiée à la malignité, car la pure vertu n'eût jamais été assez cruelle."

ALDA.

That is a woman's sentiment.

MEDON.

True—it was; and I have pleasure in reminding you that a female satirist by profession is yet an anomaly in the history of our literature, as a female schismatic is yet unknown in the history of our religion. But to what do you attribute the number of satirical women we meet in society?

ALDA.

Not to our nature; but to a state of society in which the levelling spirit of persiflage has been long a fashion; to the perverse education which fosters it; to affections disappointed or unemployed, which embitter the temper; to faculties misdirected or wasted, which oppress and irritate the mind; to an utter ignorance of ourselves, and the common lot of humanity, combined with quick and refined perceptions and much superficial cultivation; to frivolous habits, which make serious thought a burden, and serious feeling a bane if suppressed, if betrayed, a ridicule. Women, generally speaking, are by nature too much subjected to suffering in many forms—have too much of fancy and sensibility, and too much of that faculty which some philosophers call veneration, to be naturally satirical. I have known but one woman eminently gifted in mind and person, who is also distinguished for powers of satire as bold as merciless; and she is such a compound of all that nature can give of good, and all that society can teach of evil—

MEDON.

That she reminds us of the dragon of old, which was generated between the sunbeams from heaven and the slime of earth.

ALDA.

No such thing. Rather of the powerful and beautiful fairy Melusina, who had every talent and every charm under heaven but once in so many hours was fated to become a serpent. No, I return to my first position. It is not by exposing folly and scorning fools, that we make other people wiser, or ourselves happier. But to soften the heart by images and examples of the kindly and generous affections—to show how the human soul is disciplined and perfected by suffering—to prove how much of possible good may exist in things evil and perverted—how much hope there is for those who despair—how much comfort for those whom a heartless world has taught to contemn both others and themselves, and so put barriers to the hard, cold, selfish, mocking, and levelling spirit of the day—O would I could do this!

MEDON.

On the same principle, I suppose, that they have changed the treatment of lunatics; and whereas they used to condemn poor distempered wretches to straw and darkness, stripes and a strait waistcoat, they now send them to sunshine and green fields, to wander in gardens among birds and flowers, and soothe them with soft music and kind flattering speech.

ALDA.

You laugh at me! perhaps I deserve it.

MEDON.

No, in truth; I am a little amused, but most honestly attentive: and perhaps wish I could think more like you. But to proceed: I allow that with this view of the case, you could not well have chosen your illustrations from real life; but why not from history?

ALDA.

As far as history could guide me, I have taken her with me in one or two recent publications, which all tend to the same object. Nor have I here lost sight of her; but I have entered on a land where she alone is not to be trusted, and may make a pleasant companion but a most fallacious guide. To drop metaphor: history informs us that such things have been done or have occurred; but when we come to inquire into motives and characters, it is the most false and partial and unsatisfactory authority we can refer to. Women are illustrious in history, not from what they have been in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have done or caused. Those characters best fitted to my purpose are precisely those of which history never heard, or disdains to speak; of those which have been handed down to us by many different authorities under different aspects we cannot judge without prejudice; in others there occur certain chasms which it is difficult to supply; and hence inconsistencies we have no means of reconciling, though doubtless they might be reconciled if we knew the whole, instead of a part.

MEDON.

But instance—instance!

ALDA.

Examples crowd upon me; but take the first that occurs. Do you remember that Duchesse de Longueville, whose beautiful picture we were looking at yesterday?—the heroine of the Fronde?—think of that woman—bold, intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious, factious!—who made men rebels with a smile;—or if that were not enough, the lady was not scrupulous, apparently without principle as without shame, nothing was too much! And then think of the same woman protecting the virtuous philosopher Arnauld, when he was denounced and condemned; and from motives which her worst enemies could not malign, secreting him in her house, unknown even to her own servants—preparing his food herself, watching for his safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence, not only defied danger, (that were little to a woman of her temper,) but endured a lengthened trial, all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her house, continual self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices which, to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been hard to bear. Now if Shakspeare had drawn the character of the Duchesse de Longueville, he would have shown us the same individual woman in both situations:—for the same being, with the same faculties, and passions, and powers, it surely was: whereas in history, we see in one case a fury of discord, a woman without modesty or pity; and in the other an angel of benevolence, and a worshipper of goodness; and nothing to connect the two extremes in our fancy.

MEDON.

But these are contradictions which we meet on every page of history, which make us giddy with doubt, or sick with belief, and are the proper subjects of inquiry for the moralist and the philosopher.

ALDA.

I cannot say that professed moralists and philosophers did much to help me out of the dilemma; but the riddle which history presented I found solved in the pages of Shakspeare. There the crooked appeared straight; the inaccessible, easy; the incomprehensible, plain. All I sought, I found there; his characters combine history and real life; they are complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us: all may behold, and all judge for themselves.

MEDON.

But all will not judge alike.

ALDA.

No; and herein lies a part of their wonderful truth. We hear Shakspeare's men and women discussed, praised and dispraised, liked, disliked, as real human beings; and in forming our opinions of them, we are influenced by our own characters, habits of thought, prejudices, feelings, impulses, just as we are influenced with regard to our acquaintances and associates.

MEDON.

But we are then as likely to misconceive and misjudge them.

ALDA.

Yes, if we had only the same imperfect means of studying them. But we can do with them what we cannot do with real people: we can unfold the whole character before us, stripped of all pretensions of self-love, all disguises of manner. We can take leisure to examine, to analyze, to correct our own impressions, to watch the rise and progress of various passions—we can hate, love, approve, condemn, without offence to others, without pain to ourselves.

MEDON.

In this respect they may be compared to those exquisite anatomical preparations of wax, which those who could not without disgust and horror dissect a real specimen, may study, and learn the mysteries of our frame, and all the internal workings of the wondrous machine of life.

ALDA.

And it is the safer and the better way—for us at least. But look—that brilliant rain-drop trembling there in the sunshine suggests to me another illustration. Passion, when we contemplate it through the medium of imagination, is like a ray of light transmitted through a prism; we can calmly, and with undazzled eye, study its complicate nature, and analyze its variety of tints; but passion brought home to us in its reality, through our own feelings and experience, is like the same ray transmitted through a lens—blinding, burning, consuming where it falls.

MEDON.

Your illustration is the most poetical, I allow; but not the most just. But tell me, is the ground you have taken sufficiently large?—is the foundation you have chosen strong enough to bear the moral superstructure you raise upon it? You know the prevalent idea is, that Shakspeare's women are inferior to his men. This assertion is constantly repeated, and has been but tamely refuted.

ALDA.

Professor Richardson?—

MEDON.

He is as dry as a stick, and his refutation not successful even as a piece of logic. Then it is not sufficient for critics to assert this inferiority and want of variety: they first assume the fallacy, then argue upon it. Cibber accounts for it from the circumstance that all the female parts in Shakspeare's time were acted by boys—there were no women on the stage; and Mackenzie, who ought to have known better, says that he was not so happy in his delineations of love and tenderness, as of the other passions; because, forsooth, the majesty of his genius could not stoop to the refinements of delicacy;—preposterous!

ALDA.

Stay! before we waste epithets of indignation, let us consider. If these people mean that Shakspeare's women are inferior in power to his men, I grant it at once; for in Shakspeare the male and female characters bear precisely the same relation to each other that they do in nature and in society—they are not equal in prominence or in power—they are subordinate throughout. Richardson remarks, that "if situation influences the mind, and if uniformity of conduct be frequently occasioned by uniformity of condition, there must be a greater diversity of male than of female characters,"—which is true; add to this our limited sphere of action, consequently of experience—the habits of self-control rendering the outward distinctions of character and passion less striking and less strong—all this we see in Shakspeare as in nature: for instance, Juliet is the most impassioned of the female characters, but what are her passions compared to those which shake the soul of Othello?

"Even as the dew-drop on the myrtle-leaf

To the vex'd sea."

Look at Constance, frantic for the loss of her son—then look at Lear, maddened by the ingratitude of his daughters: why it is the west wind bowing those aspen tops that wave before our window, compared to the tropic hurricane, when forests crash and burn, and mountains tremble to their bases!

MEDON.

True; and Lady Macbeth, with all her soaring ambition, her vigor of intellect, her subtlety, her courage, and her cruelty—what is she, compared to Richard III.?

ALDA.

I will tell you what she is—she is a woman. Place Lady Macbeth in comparison with Richard III., and you see at once the essential distinction between masculine and feminine ambition—though both in extreme, and overleaping all restraints of conscience or mercy. Richard says of himself, that he has "neither pity, love, nor fear:" Lady Macbeth is susceptible of all three. You smile! but that remains to be proved. The reason that Shakspeare's wicked women have such a singular hold upon our fancy, is from the consistent preservation of the feminine character, which renders them more terrible, because more credible and intelligible—not like those monstrous caricatures we meet with in history—

MEDON.

In history?—this is new!

ALDA.

Yes! I repeat, in history, where certain isolated facts and actions are recorded, without any relation to causes, or motives, or connecting feelings and pictures exhibited, from which the considerate mind turns in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive, and I may add, reasonable incredulity. I have lately seen one of Correggio's finest pictures, in which the three Furies are represented, not as ghastly deformed hags, with talons and torches, and snaky hair, but as young women, with fine luxuriant forms and regular features, and a single serpent wreathing the tresses like a bandeau—but such countenances!—such a hideous expression of malice, cunning, and cruelty!—and the effect is beyond conception appalling. Leonardo da Vinci worked upon the same grand principle of art in his Medusa—

Where it is less the horror than the grace

Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone—

* * * *

'Tis the melodious tints of beauty thrown

Athwart the hue of guilt and glare of pain,

That humanize and harmonize the strain.

And Shakspeare, who understood all truth, worked out his conceptions on the same principle, having said himself, that "proper deformity shows not in the fiend so horrid as in women." Hence it is that whether he portrayed the wickedness founded in perverted power, as in Lady Macbeth; or the wickedness founded in weakness, as in Gertrude, Lady Anne, or Cressida, he is the more fearfully impressive, because we cannot claim for ourselves an exemption from the same nature, before which, in its corrupted state, we tremble with horror or shrink with disgust.

MEDON.

Do you remember that some of the commentators of Shakspeare have thought it incumbent on their gallantry to express their utter contempt for the scene between Richard and Lady Anne, as a monstrous and incredible libel on your sex?

ALDA.

They might have spared themselves the trouble. Lady Anne is just one of those women whom we see walking in crowds through the drawing-rooms of the world—the puppets of habit, the fools of fortune, without any particular inclination for vice, or any steady principle of virtue; whose actions are inspired by vanity, not affection, and regulated by opinion, not by conscience: who are good while there is no temptation to be otherwise, and ready victims of the first soliciting to evil. In the case of Lady Anne, we are startled by the situation: not three months a widow, and following to the sepulchre the remains of a husband and a father, she is met and wooed and won by the very man who murdered them. In such a case it required perhaps either Richard or the arch-fiend himself to tempt her successfully; but in a less critical moment, a far less subtle and audacious seducer would have sufficed. Cressida is another modification of vanity, weakness, and falsehood, drawn in stronger colors. The world contains many Lady Annes and Cressidas, polished and refined externally, whom chance and vanity keep right, whom chance and vanity lead wrong, just as it may happen. When we read in history of the enormities of certain women, perfect scarecrows and ogresses, we can safely, like the Pharisee in Scripture, hug ourselves in our secure virtue, and thank God that we are not as others are—but the wicked women in Shakspeare are portrayed with such perfect consistency and truth, that they leave us no such resource—they frighten us into reflection—they make us believe and tremble. On the other hand, his amiable women are touched with such exquisite simplicity—they have so little external pretensions—and are so unlike the usual heroines of tragedy and romance, that they delight us more "than all the nonsense of the beau-ideal!" We are flattered by the perception of our own nature in the midst of so many charms and virtues: not only are they what we could wish to be, or ought to be, but what we persuade ourselves we might be, or would be, under a different and a happier state of things, and, perhaps, some time or other may be. They are not stuck up, like the cardinal virtues, all in a row, for us to admire and wonder at—they are not mere poetical abstractions—nor (as they have been termed) mere abstractions of the affections—

But common clay ta'en from the common earth.

Moulded by God, and tempered by the tears

Of angels, to the perfect form of—woman.

MEDON.

Beautiful lines!—Where are they?

ALDA.

I quote from memory, and I am afraid inaccurately, from a poem of Alfred Tennyson's.

MEDON.

Well, between argument, and sentiment, and logic, and poetry, you are making out a very plausible case. I think with you that, in the instances you have mentioned, (as Lady Macbeth and Richard, Juliet, and Othello, and others,) the want of comparative power is only an additional excellence; but to go to an opposite extreme of delineation, we must allow that there is not one of Shakspeare's women that, as a dramatic character, can be compared to Falstaff.

ALDA.

No; because any thing like Falstaff in the form of woman—any such compound of wit, sensuality, and selfishness, unchecked by the moral sentiments and the affections, and touched with the same vigorous painting, would be a gross and monstrous caricature. If it could exist in nature, we might find it in Shakspeare; but a moment's reflection shows us that it would be essentially an impossible combination of faculties in a female.

MEDON.

It strikes me, however, that his humorous women are feebly drawn, in comparison with some of the female wits of other writers.

ALDA.

Because his women of wit and humor are not introduced for the sole purpose of saying brilliant things, and displaying the wit of the author; they are, as I will show you, real, natural women, in whom wit is only a particular and occasional modification of intellect. They are all, in the first place, affectionate, thinking beings, and moral agents; and then witty, as if by accident, or as the Duchesse de Chaulnes said of herself, "par la grâce de Dieu." As to humor, it is carried as far as possible in Mrs. Quickly; in the termagant Catherine; in Maria, in "Twelfth Night;" in Juliet's nurse; in Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page. What can exceed in humorous naïveté, Mrs. Quickly's upbraiding Falstaff, and her concluding appeal—"Didst thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings?" Is it not exquisite—irresistible? Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page are both "merry wives," but how perfectly discriminated! Mrs. Ford has the most good nature—Mrs. Page is the cleverer of the two, and has more sharpness in her tongue, more mischief in her mirth. In all these instances I allow that the humor is more or less vulgar; but a humorous woman, whether in high or low life has always a tinge of vulgarity.

MEDON.

I should like to see that word vulgar properly defined, and its meaning limited—at present it is the most arbitrary word in the language.

ALDA.

Yes, like the word romantic, it is a convenient "exploding word," and in its general application signifies nothing more than "see how much finer I am than other people!"[1] but in literature and character I shall adhere to the definition of Madame de Staël, who uses the word vulgar as the reverse of poetical. Vulgarity (as I wish to apply the word) is the negative in all things. In literature, it is the total absence of elevation and depth in the ideas, and of elegance and delicacy in the expression of them. In character, it is the absence of truth, sensibility, and reflection. The vulgar in manner, is the result of vulgarity of character; it is grossness, hardness, or affectation.—If you would see how Shakspeare has discriminated, not only different degrees, but different kinds of plebeian vulgarity in women, you have only to compare the nurse in Romeo and Juliet with Mrs. Quickly. On the whole, if there are people who, taking the strong and essential distinction of sex into consideration, still maintain that Shakspeare's female characters are not, in truth, in variety, in power, equal to his men, I think I shall prove the contrary.

MEDON.

I observe that you have divided your illustrations into classes; but shades of character so melt into each other, and the various faculties and powers are so blended and balanced, that all classification must be arbitrary. I am at a loss to conceive where you have drawn the line; here, at the head of your first chapter, I find "Characters of Intellect"—do you call Portia intellectual, and Hermione and Constance not so?

ALDA.

I know that Schlegel has said that it is impossible to arrange Shakspeare's characters in classes: yet some classification was necessary for my purpose. I have therefore divided them into characters in which intellect and wit predominate; characters in which fancy and passion predominate; and characters in which the moral sentiments and affections predominate. The historical characters I have considered apart, as requiring a different mode of illustration. Portia I regard as a perfect model of an intellectual woman, in whom wit is tempered by sensibility, and fancy regulated by strong reflection. It is objected to her, to Beatrice, and others of Shakspeare's women, that the display of intellect is tinged with a coarseness of manner belonging to the age in which he wrote. To remark that the conversation and letters of high-bred and virtuous women of that time were more bold and frank in expression than any part of the dialogue appropriated to Beatrice and Rosalind, may excuse it to our judgment, but does not reconcile it to our taste. Much has been said, and more might be said on this subject—but I would rather not discuss it. It is a mere difference of manner which is to be regretted, but has nothing to do with the essence of the character.

MEDON.

I think you have done well in avoiding the topic altogether; but between ourselves, do you really think that the refinement of manner, the censorious, hypocritical, verbal scrupulosity, which is carried so far in this "picked age" of ours, is a true sign of superior refinement of taste, and purity of morals? Is it not rather a whiting of the sepulchre? I will not even allude to individual instances whom we both know, but does it not remind you, on the whole, of the tone of French manners previous to the revolution—that "décence," which Horace Walpole so admired,[2] veiling the moral degradation, the inconceivable profligacy of the higher classes?—Stay—I have not yet done—not to you, but for you, I will add thus much;—our modern idea of delicacy apparently attaches more importance to words than to things—to manners than to morals. You will hear people inveigh against the improprieties of Shakspeare, with Don Juan, or one of those infernal French novels—I beg your pardon—lying on their toilet table. Lady Florence is shocked at the sallies of Beatrice, and Beatrice would certainly stand aghast to see Lady Florence dressed for Almack's; so you see that in both cases the fashion makes the indecorum. Let her ladyship new model her gowns!

ALDA.

Well, well, leave Lady Florence—I would rather hear you defend Shakspeare.

MEDON.

I think it is Coleridge who so finely observes that Shakspeare ever kept the high road of human life, whereon all travel, that he did not pick out by-paths of feeling and sentiment; in him we have no moral highwaymen, and sentimental thieves and rat-catchers, and interesting villains, and amiable, elegant adulteresses—à-la-mode Germanorum—no delicate entanglements of situation, in which the grossest images are presented to the mind disguised under the superficial attraction of style and sentiment. He flattered no bad passion, disguised no vice in the garb of virtue, trifled with with no just and generous principle. He can make us laugh at folly, and shudder at crime, yet still preserve our love for our fellow-beings, and our reverence for ourselves. He has a lofty and a fearless trust in his own powers, and in the beauty and excellence of virtue; and with his eye fixed on the lode-star of truth, steers us triumphantly among shoals and quicksands, where with any other pilot we had been wrecked:—for instance, who but himself would have dared to bring into close contact two such characters as Iago and Desdemona? Had the colors in which he has arrayed Desdemona been one atom less transparently bright and pure, the charm had been lost; she could not have borne the approximation: some shadow from the overpowering blackness of his character must have passed over the sun-bright purity of hers. For observe that Iago's disbelief in the virtue of Desdemona is not pretended, it is real. It arises from his total want of faith in all virtue; he is no more capable of conceiving goodness than she is capable of conceiving evil. To the brutish coarseness and fiendish malignity of this man, her gentleness appears only a contemptible weakness; her purity of affection, which saw "Othello's visage in his mind," only a perversion of taste; her bashful modesty, only a cloak for evil propensities; so he represents them with all the force of language and self-conviction, and we are obliged to listen to him. He rips her to pieces before us—he would have bedeviled an angel! yet such is the unrivalled, though passive delicacy of the delineation, that it can stand it unhurt, untouched! It is wonderful!—yet natural as it is wonderful! After all, there are people in the world, whose opinions and feelings are tainted by an habitual acquaintance with the evil side of society, though in action and intention they remain right; and who, without the real depravity of heart and malignity of intention of Iago, judge as he does of the character and productions of others.

ALDA.

Heaven bless me from such critics! yet if genius, youth, and innocence could not escape unslurred, can I hope to do so? I pity from my soul the persons you allude to—for to such minds there can exist few uncontaminated sources of pleasure either in nature or in art.

MEDON.

Ay—"the perfumes of Paradise were poison to the Dives, and made them melancholy."[3] You pity them, and they will sneer at you. But what have we here?—"Characters of Imagination—Juliet—Viola;" are these romantic young ladies the pillars which are to sustain your moral edifice? Are they to serve as examples or as warnings for the youth of this enlightened age?

ALDA.

As warnings, of course—what else?

MEDON.

Against the dangers of romance?—but where are they? "Vraiment," as B. Constant says, "je ne vois pas qu'en fait d'enthousiasme, le feu soit à la maison." Where are they—these disciples of poetry and romance, these victims of disinterested devotion and believing truth, these unblown roses—all conscience and tenderness—whom it is so necessary to guard against too much confidence in others, and too little in themselves—where are they?

ALDA.

Wandering in the Elysian fields, I presume, with the romantic young gentlemen who are too generous, too zealous in defence of innocence, too enthusiastic in their admiration of virtue, too violent in their hatred of vice, too sincere in friendship, too faithful in love, too active and disinterested in the cause of truth—

MEDON.

Very fair! But seriously, do you think it necessary to guard young people, in this selfish and calculating age, against an excess of sentiment and imagination? Do you allow no distinction between the romance of exaggerated sentiment, and the romance of elevated thought? Do you bring cold water to quench the smouldering ashes of enthusiasm? Methinks it is rather superfluous; and that another doctrine is needed to withstand the heartless system of expediency which is the favorite philosophy of the day. The warning you speak of may be gently hinted to the few who are in danger of being misled by an excess of the generous impulses of fancy and feeling; but need hardly, I think, be proclaimed by sound of trumpet amid the mocks of the world. No, no; there are young women in these days, but there is no such thing as youth—the bloom of existence is sacrificed to a fashionable education, and where we should find the rose-buds of the spring, we see only the fullblown, flaunting, precocious roses of the hot-bed.

ALDA.

Blame then that forcing system of education, the most pernicious, the most mistaken, the most far-reaching in its miserable and mischievous effects, that ever prevailed in this world. The custom which shut up women in convents till they were married, and then launched them innocent and ignorant on society, was bad enough; but not worse than a system of education which inundates us with hard, clever, sophisticated girls, trained by knowing mothers, and all-accomplished governesses, with whom vanity and expediency take place of conscience and affection—(in other words, of romance)—"frutto senile in sul giovenil fiore;" with feelings and passions suppressed or contracted, not governed by higher faculties and purer principles; with whom opinion—the same false honor which sends men out to fight duels—stands instead of the strength and the light of virtue within their own souls. Hence the strange anomalies of artificial society—girls of sixteen who are models of manner miracles of prudence, marvels of learning, who sneer at sentiment, and laugh at the Juliets and the Imogens; and matrons of forty, who, when the passions should be tame and wait upon the judgment, amaze the world and put us to confusion with their doings.

MEDON.

Or turn politicians to vary the excitement—How I hate political women!

ALDA.

Why do you hate them?

MEDON.

Because they are mischievous.

ALDA.

But why are they mischievous?

MEDON.

Why!—why are they mischievous? Nay, ask them, or ask the father of all mischief, who has not a more efficient instrument to further his designs in this world, than a woman run mad with politics. The number of political intriguing women of this time, whose boudoirs and drawing-rooms are the foyers of party-spirit, is another trait of resemblance between the state of society now, and that which existed at Paris before the revolution.

ALDA.

And do you think, like some interesting young lady in Miss Edgeworth's tales, that "women have nothing to do with politics?" Do you mean to say that women are not capable of comprehending the principles of legislation, or of feeling an interest in the government and welfare of their country, or of perceiving and sympathizing in the progress of great events?—That they cannot feel patriotism? Believe me, when we do feel it, our patriotism, like our courage and our love, has a purer source than with you; for a man's patriotism has always some tinge of egotism, while a woman's patriotism is generally a sentiment, and of the noblest kind.

MEDON.

I agree in all this; and all this does not mitigate my horror of political women in general, who are, I repeat it, both mischievous and absurd. If you could but hear the reasoning in these feminine coteries!—but you never talk politics.

ALDA.

Indeed I do, when I can get any one to listen to me; but I prefer listening. As for the evil you complain of, impute it to that imperfect education which at once cultivates and enslaves the intellect, and loads the memory, while it fetters the judgment. Women, however well read in history, never generalize in politics; never argue on any broad or general principle; never reason from a consideration of past events, their causes and consequences. But they are always political through their affections, their prejudices, their personal liaisons, their hopes, their fears.

MEDON.

If it were no worse, I could stand it; for that is at least feminine.

ALDA.

But most mischievous. For hence it is that we make such blind partisans, such violent party women, and such wretched politicians. I never heard a woman talk politics, as it is termed, that I could not discern at once the motive, the affection, the secret bias which swayed her opinions and inspired her arguments. If it appeared to the Grecian sage so "difficult for a man not to love himself, nor the things that belong to him, but justice only?"—how much more for woman!

MEDON.

Then you think that a better education, based on truer moral principles, would render women more reasonable politicians, or at least give them some right to meddle with politics?

ALDA.

It would cease in that case to be meddling, as you term it, for it would be legitimized. It is easy to sneer at political and mathematical ladies, and quote Lord Byron—but O leave those angry common-places to others!—they do not come well from you. Do not force me to remind you, that women have achieved enough to silence them forever,[4] and how often must that truism be repeated, that it is not a woman's attainments which make her amiable or unamiable, estimable or the contrary, but her qualities? A time is coming, perhaps, when the education of women will be considered, with a view to their future destination as the mothers and nurses of legislators and statesmen, and the cultivation of their powers of reflection and moral feelings supersede the exciting drudgery by which they are now crammed with knowledge and accomplishments.

MEDON.

Well—till that blessed period arrives, I wish you would leave us the province of politics to ourselves. I see here you have treated of a very different class of beings, "women in whom the affections and the moral sentiments predominate." Are there many such, think you, in the world?

ALDA.

Yes, many such; the development of affection and sentiment is more quiet and unobtrusive than that of passion and intellect, and less observed; it is more common, too, therefore less remarked; but in women it generally gives the prevailing tone to the character, except where vanity has been made the ruling motive.

MEDON.

Except! I admire your exception! You make in this case the rule the exception. Look round the world.

ALDA.

You are not one of those with whom that common phrase "the world" signifies the circle, whatever and wherever that may be, which limits our individual experience—as a child considers the visible horizon as the bounds which shut in the mighty universe. Believe me, it is a sorry, vulgar kind of wisdom, if it be wisdom—a shallow and confined philosophy, if it be philosophy—which resolves all human motives and impulses into egotism in one sex, and vanity in the other. Such may be the way of the world, as it is called—the result of a very artificial and corrupt state of society, but such is not general nature, nor female nature. Would you see the kindly, self-sacrificing affections developed under their most honest but least poetical guise—displayed without any mixture of vanity, and unchecked in the display by any fear of being thought vain?—you will see it, not among the prosperous, the high-born, the educated, "far, far removed from want, and grief, and fear," but among the poor, the miserable, the perverted—among those habitually exposed to all influences that harden and deprave.

MEDON.

I believe it—nay, I know it; but how should you know it, or anything of the strange places of refuge which truth and nature have found in the two extremes of society?

ALDA.

It is no matter what I have seen or known; and for the two extremes of society, I leave them to the author of Paul Clifford, and that most exquisite painter of living manners, Mrs. Gore. St. Giles's is no more nature than St. James's. I wanted character in its essential truth, not mortified by particular customs, by fashion, by situation. I wished to illustrate the manner in which the affections would naturally display themselves in women—whether combined with high intellect, regulated by reflection, and elevated by imagination, or existing with perverted dispositions, or purified by the moral sentiments. I found all these in Shakspeare; his delineations of women, in whom the virtuous and calm affections predominate, and triumph over shame, fear, pride, resentment, vanity, jealousy—are particularly worthy of consideration, and perfect in their kind, because so quiet in their effect.

MEDON.

Several critics have remarked in general terms on those beautiful pictures of female friendship, and of the generous affection of women for each other, which we find in Shakspeare. Other writers, especially dramatic writers, have found ample food for wit and satiric delineation in the littleness of feminine spite and rivalry, in the mean spirit of competition, the petty jealousy of superior charms, the mutual slander and mistrust, the transient leagues of folly or selfishness miscalled friendship—the result of an education which makes vanity the ruling principle, and of a false position in society. Shakspeare, who looked upon women with the spirit of humanity, wisdom, and deep love, has done justice to their natural good tendencies and kindly sympathies. In the friendship of Beatrice and Hero, of Rosalind and Celia; in the description of the girlish attachment of Helena and Hermia, he has represented truth and generous affection rising superior to all the usual sources of female rivalry and jealousy; and with such force and simplicity, and obvious self-conviction, that he absolutely forces the same conviction on us.

ALDA.

Add to these the generous feeling of Viola for her rival Olivia; of Julia for her rival Sylvia; of Helena for Diana; of the old Countess for Helena, in the same play; and even the affection of the wicked queen in Hamlet for the gentle Ophelia, which prove that Shakspeare thought—(and when did he ever think other than the truth?)—that women have by nature "virtues that are merciful," and can be just, tender, and true to their sister women, whatever wits and worldlings, and satirists and fashionable poets, may say or sing of us to the contrary. There is another thing which he has most deeply felt and beautifully represented—the distinction between masculine and feminine courage. A man's courage is often a mere animal quality, and in its most elevated form a point of honor. But a woman's courage is always a virtue, because it is not required of us, it is not one of the means through which we seek admiration and applause; on the contrary, we are courageous through our affections and mental energies, not through our vanity or our strength. A woman's heroism is always the excess of sensibility. Do you remember Lady Fanshawe putting on a sailor's jacket, and his "blue thrum cap," and standing at her husband's side, unknown to him during a sea-fight? There she stood, all bathed in tears, but fixed to that spot. Her husband's exclamation when he turned and discovered her—"Good God, that love should make such a change as this!" is applicable to all the acts of courage which we read or hear of in women. This is the courage of Juliet, when, after summing up all the possible consequences of her own act, till she almost maddens herself with terror, she drinks the sleeping potion; and for that passive fortitude which is founded in piety and pure strength of affection, such as the heroism of Lady Russel and Gertrude de Wart, he has given us some of the noblest modifications of it in Hermione, in Cordelia, in Imogen, in Katherine of Arragon.

MEDON.

And what do you call the courage of Lady Macbeth?—