John Weiss

“ When a skilfully distended bubble breaks, and only a thin spat of suds is left, a cynic finger will point to it as if to say, "Here's your fine iris all gone to unserviceable soap." But there is a solider ball, the earth itself, upon which human nature paints its zones; and although life is despicable at the poles, and revolting in many a foul quarter, we know that noble landscapes stocked with graciousness and honor spread on every side. Shakspeare alone seems to have this bubble hanging securely from his pipe, where it sheds the swift glances of myriad eyes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But when Swift writes a chapter upon the use and improvement of madness in a Commonwealth, the smile which scantily flickers over the surface of it is the smile of the Spartan boy while the fox was gnawing at his vitals. Swift's pen makes the Iron Madonna's gestures of invitation,—she that stood in mediæval torture-chambers and bade the bewildered prisoner take refuge in her opening arms, where a thousand lancets pricked life, faith, and hope away.
At one time, the German Heine's irony smacks of good humor; at another, you would ask for a bumper of gall to sweeten your mouth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Humor is too deeply implicated with our mortality, too warm a comrade, too judicious a friend in our extremities, to choose such hours of disaster to virtue for any task of reconciliation. Awful and questioning spirits come; and Humor, yielding to them our hand, stands aside to wait, but yields it warm enough to keep warm through any grasp till it may be claimed again.
Shakspeare's instinct divined the precise moment when the bells of the Fool's bauble could not compete with thunder, nor the balls upon his cap draw off the bolt. ”

“ With what a small outlay of dramatic contrivance has Shakspeare drawn the pathos of Ophelia's fate! It begins to infect us as soon as we discover that she loves; for her lover receives the visits of a murdered father. We know, but she does not, the cause of the apparent unsettling of the Prince's wits. We can anticipate into what tragedies that ghost beckons her Lord Hamlet, while she walks unconsciously so close that her garments, perfumed with rare ladyhood, brush the greaves of the grisly visitant. ”

“ Hamlet trifles with them to put off their curiosity; but the scene soon rises to the solemnity of taking an oath, and one that is extorted by the experience of a vision which comes to so few that mankind has only heard of such things. But just as the human voices are about to pledge themselves to a secrecy which they must feel all their lives, and shudder in feeling, to be reflected upon them from the glare and publicity of purgatorial fires, a voice comes, building this terrific chord of a nether world up to their purpose, that it may unalterably stand. ”

“ If he had married a female butcher of the strongest-minded type, there would have been no fees to pay for doctor's attendance, and the bloom of regret would have been rubbed from Macbeth's language. Such a wife's muscle would have been perilous to any stuff that conscience might venture to suggest. A virago who could dash out the brains of her smiling babe as easily as nurse it,—more easily, forsooth, for how could Nature have endowed her person with the founts of maternity?—was not the kind of woman Shakspeare selected for the ruin of Macbeth. ”

“ When you think you have him neatly at bay, the bulky culprit floats over your head in a twinkling of resource and is gone: it is done so cleverly that you have not the heart to pursue him farther, or, if you do, it is only for the sake of enjoying an encore of this trapeze-shifting of his wit.
It is comic when his tone of protestation that he will discharge his debt to Dame Quickly succeeds in taking in her who has been so often deceived before. But one weakness is always too strong for another; so he is constantly betrayed into expense by her, and that is at once her vice and its reward. ”

“ Without this, no tragedy can have its effect of gravity, but rather, to use Falstaff's quip in parrying the Chief Justice, its effect of gravy,—to leave in the palate a taste of a mixture of sauce and drippings. But Shakspeare runs the coulter of unity deeper than the obvious idea which the plot of his tragedy develops; for it passes at once through soils of diverse elements, driven by a sure but vigorous instinct to turn them all up to the fructifying light. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She is very much absorbed in contriving solace for a lonely father. So, when she learns that he has been killed, and that the blow was dealt by Hamlet, by what freak of accident she cannot understand,—but "a young maid's wits" prove to be "as mortal as an old man's life,"—the daughter suddenly empties every thing out of her heart except affection for the cherished, fatuous old father: her love for Hamlet is spilled out through that rent in the arras, as we can notice when all her pretty, distracted singing yields not a tone that might be an echo of the sweet episode in her poor little life. ”

“ There are some places which we only venture to visit in Shakspeare's company. We have been too well bred to seek our vices in such quarters, but not so well bred as to accommodate no vice. We cannot air our intolerance before the Searcher of hearts; perhaps we are grateful to him for that gift of Shakspeare which bids the tavern and the brothel be tolerable to our conscience by the touches of nature which make the whole world kin. Our respect for mankind is increased if the men who disgrace it can still be made to appear inseparable members of it. ”

“ The bauble of the Fool in "King Lear" rings us into a horizon that, before we reach it, mutters with the premonition of madness; and we wonder if any humor can find shelter with us underneath that blackening sky. When the Fool joins our company, we search his features in vain for a trace of Feste's and Touchstone's temper. That spring of geniality has been stirred by the king's misfortunes till it is roiled into irony; and we recognize the only tone that can take lodgings in this tragedy. ”

“ Constance stands before us, like Niobe, all tears, or sits with sorrow; but she was a too finely tempered woman to drip into craziness, till health, hope, and life broke up. Shakspeare has not represented any of his mature and well-constructed natures as capable of being overthrown by passion the most exigent or events the most heart-rending. They preserve their sanity to suffer, as all great souls must do to make us worship them with tears. ”

“ Touchstone expresses the gladness of being a member of this inevitable world, and of tolerating himself with the other fools. Thus all his strictures upon society have this superiority, that they cannot be suspected of hypocrisy and ill-will. Nothing is so depressing as the cynic's perpetual strain of undervaluing. It exhausts the heart like an air-bell; the feather of his irony no longer floats, but drops like lead to weigh us down with suspecting ourselves, and so dragging by that mood all the other people into a pitiful depreciation. ”

“ His plays take from it a consonant vibration that extends through scenes and lapses of time during which no woman's face appears. The tonic of her heart is diffused beyond the limits of her person; as when Ophelia's bloom clings to the fate of Hamlet, even while she waits in death for him to reach her funeral-rite. So the beautiful soul of Cordelia, that is little talked of by herself, and is but stingily set forth by circumstance, engrosses our feeling in scenes from whose threshold her filial piety is banished. ”

“ But Jaques was expressly plunged into social estimates and manners that he may be withdrawn from them in a less splenetic temper. The wild crab has sunned itself in orchards, and, nodding among mellower branches, is not all flavored with their rottenness. So far from secluding himself in the conceited fashion of all hermits from the manifold culture of life, he has expended himself upon every phase of it, and withdraws with the pensiveness of satiety toning the sharpness of experience in his speech. Some men turn cynics when the first serious disappointment of their lives drifts over them. ”

“ What a contrast of innocent unconsciousness,—so innocent, so remote from the event, that we should think it was impertinent if our pity for the shock it brings upon itself did not prevail! We wonder who will first discover what has occurred, whether man or woman; somebody is doomed to blunder into the ghastliness of that room where Macbeth murdered sleep. What will be the sensation that thrills from the inhospitable bed around which the angels of honor and loyalty ought to have watched with spotless wings? ”

“ In Shakspeare's mind the hidden precedent of the tragedy's action accumulated. The first scratch of his pen let it loose to flood the scenes. There was no preliminary warning. The psychological filtration through his brain from the sources of his plot bursted in like a freshet that explains itself without recalling separate rills.
Nor was the swift and unheralded action inspired solely by Lady Macbeth's impatience to be the wife of a king. All women run after their thoughts more eagerly than do the men. ”

“ Nature was so prodigal of health to Shakspeare's women that it overflowed the clay banks of their bodies, and spread in a freshet of gayety. Beatrice and Rosalind never tire of keeping in the air the light shuttlecock of their wit. It floats in an æther of animal spirits; and, if it now and then touches earth, Nature promptly lends it a rebound. They engage in a masked revel to conceal their emotions. Will Orlando and Benedick penetrate the disguise and claim the lips that mockingly escape thus? ”

“ She broods in spiritless reaction, and tells Macbeth that "what's done is done." He broods in dangerous recklessness, feeling that it is not yet done:—
"Thou know'st that Banquo and his Fleance live."
She does not perceive what he is darkly hinting, and merely replies that they cannot live for ever. He judges hastily that they must die at once; and "there's comfort yet." But he does not venture to be explicit with her, because, if she cannot detect the murder in his words,—
"There shall be done
A deed of dreadful note,"—
it is because there is murder no longer in her heart. ”

“ Many a woman is capable of regarding all the consequences of an act, but she must not love too deeply: if she does, she will stick at nothing. If there be motive enough, she can turn a lover into a criminal, and then, with perjury, deceit, unblushing cheek, will screen him: they twain are one, for better, for worse. They are too deeply compromised to haggle about salvation. The very intercourse of sex devotes a woman: she has become flesh and blood of another. This complicity of nature engages the most imperious nerve-centres of her life. ”

“ Comedy, for instance, represents sorrows, passions, and annoyances, but shows them without the sombre purpose of tragedy to enforce a supreme will at any cost. All our weaknesses threaten in comedy to result in serious embarrassments, but there is such inexhaustible material for laughter in the whims and follies with which we baffle ourselves and others, that the tragic threat is collared just in time and shaken into pleasure. All kinds of details of our life are represented, which tragedy could never tolerate in its main drift towards the pathos of defeated human wills and broken hearts. ”

“ But, if Atalanta secretly prefers a suitor, she will chase his golden apple. For whenever personal preferences divert a woman from her course, it is because they, too, grow in the Hesperides of her imagination. Men deliberate, study the ground, observe the obstacles, cluster round preponderating judgment and wait for its direction. Women are not heedless: they also can deliberate until the heart has become too deeply involved; but, when the heart is set upon something, they are the swift-footed couriers of the Ideal, and their only turnpike is as the bird flies. ”

“ A woman inspired through and through with love for him, discontented with the slowness of his fortune, longing to touch the top and finish of her own; a helpmeet, whose unextinguished bridal ardor kept burning up all scruples as fast as her lover could rake them together. He, the still perfect object of her pride and passion, must become great: he must be lifted to a place whence all his qualities shall shine beyond cramped horizons with their petty crowds. ”

“ And I venture to impute to the average woman a thinly running vein of humor as the reason why she finds such difficulty in admiring Shakspeare. Many of the finest women can never conquer their repugnance. There seems to be in it something of impatience at the dramatic intervals and the movement by incessant colloquy, something of an equanimity of passion, something of fright at the broad and powerful statement, which flinches at nothing; blabs dreadfully of Juliet's clandestine feeling; keeps Helena in contented ear-shot of Parolles, and lets her devise an indelicate solution of the plot ”

“ Shakspeare makes us aware that Macbeth, after killing Duncan, must pass along a passage and descend some stairs to the next story. What a walk of a few moments, protracted into endless awe, with Duncan disembodied close at his heels! The brave soldier's feet weaken at the distance which his own soul creates. Will he ever annihilate a space that is made by a crime and reach his wife again? ”

“ Woman, as she resembles man, was of less consequence to Shakspeare than woman in herself, apart from what she can do, can earn, or can aspire to. He merely received the feminine side of Nature into his recreating thought, the essential Woman, without respect to the exigencies of any period or style of culture,—the only She, such as woman must remain to the end of time underneath all her activities and requirements. Her sex is the unalterable decree which she can cast no ballot to vote away from her, and assume no profession to raze it from the eternal tablets of her distinction. ”

“ No matter what a man's gifts may be, this "vicious mole of nature" that pretends to spread over all surfaces discolors only the gifts: all virtues, "in the general censure, take corruption from that particular fault," and to its own scandal; because the world is a flower that nods upon the stock of reality, and the particles of its aroma, though invisible, set in motion the nerves of a corresponding reality, and man does not put his nose to an illusion. But your debauchee, like Jaques, has scorched and tanned his senses with misuse, and his abortive sniffing at the roses sours into a sneer. ”

“ And when he fences her wit with his bachelor banter, it piques her secret admiration. She has no other subtlety beyond her wit: she uses it to misprize the wedded state, and to mock indiscriminately at men,—a very common and transparent stratagem of a heart that is deeply engaged; and, beneath all the gay and flippant manner, she feels hurt because she thinks that Benedick is really cool and does not feign.
There is nothing but the mask of night upon Juliet's face to hide, the blush which her lips acknowledge. ”

“ 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 unseason [Pg 323] able 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. ”

“ Woman is apt, indeed, to be too voluble: each minute of her phrases breeds new ones; so she does not stop to notice that her indictment is shorter than her breath. Therefore men are apt to notice and to complain that her indictment does not reach up to the tide-mark of her breath. But the invective of Constance is the swift weapon-play of maternity: it flashes through every guard, touches rapidly to and fro, and draws blood at every unexpected touch.
A man's moral disposition has not been nourished and toned by the additional organs which impose wifehood and motherhood upon a woman. ”

“ If an animal is capable of having a consecutive dream, as Miss Mitford's greyhound was, who regularly every year, just before the coursing season began, used to dream of going out, and quested in his sleep, such an animal can feel the torment of ennui. He is not blindly indicating that a season has come around,—as a wound made by the bite of a lion will gape anew in the same month of the following year, and the juice of the grape is agitated in remembrance of its vintage,—but the animal is conscious that the time has come for him to resume his talent. ”

“ It is the tender lady, the maiden with the delicate bloom of love and the remote [Pg 341] ness of it,—the impalpable Ophelia. To detain and handle is impossible, not because, like some rare sphinx-moth, the downy wings flutter into hiding; for she is motionless as a stain of color, restful as a summer afternoon when all the noises sleep: she is a sentiment that broods without a stir upon the lofty Hamlet; she gives no sound to challenge your attention, and is unable to goad her exquisite reserve into any marked behavior. ”

“ Shakspeare delighted to mark the transition of a virtue to a vice; that elusive moment, as of a point of passage from one species to another, discovered and put into a flash from the light of humor. Malvolio's grave and self-respecting temperament is an excellence. No decent man thinks meanly of himself, and the indecent ones cannot afford the disparagement. The pretence of it is a warning to us to expect mischief, a notice put up, "This is a private way; dangerous passing." Whatever gift a man has becomes a divine permission for self-consideration. ”

“ Not one of Shakspeare's women shows such a perfect balance of the senses and the soul. Not a muscle of the body ever owned to being tired; not a function ever behaved ill enough to clog her gayety. It flows with mild and even sparkle through all the varied scenes, like a sunlit runnel that carries gilded dimples into woods and through them without lingering to have them catch a damp from shadows. Even the judicial fitness of her great language in the scene with Shylock does not sprinkle chancellor's wig-powder over her cheek. ”

“ Human dissatisfaction springs from want of this ability to comprehend the whole within one reconciling idea. This incompetency is felt by us because we have an instinct that all dissonant things ought to be reconciled, and can be in some way, but only can be by the finite becoming the infinite. Humor strives to bridge this gulf. It is man's device to pacify his painful sense that so many things appear wrong and evil to him, and so many circumstances inconsistent with our feeling that Deity must have framed the world in a temper of perfect goodness. ”

“ The humor in this play meddles even with love; for that, too, must be the sport of circumstance and superior power, yet always continue to be the deepest motive of mankind. The juice of love's flower dropped on the eyelids of these distempered lovers makes the caprices of passion show and shift; love in idleness becomes love in earnest, as Puck distils the drops of marriage or of mischief. ”