Bastardy

“ The anguish which was now pent up in my bosom, seemed to open a new world to me: I began to extend my thoughts beyond myself, and grieve for human misery, till I discovered, with horror—ah! what horror!—that I was with child. I know not why I felt a mixed sensation of despair and tenderness, excepting that, ever called a bastard, a bastard appeared to me an object of the greatest compassion in creation. ”

“ If they do not think it worth while to defend a fortress, that is to be demolished in a few days, let them reflect, that it will be a melancholy thing nine months hence to be brought to bed of a bastard; a posthumous bastard, as it were, to which the quondam father can be no more than a dry nurse.
This wonderful transformation is the instrument of nature to balance matters between the sexes. The cruelty of scornful mistresses shall be returned; the slighted maid shall grow into an imperious gallant, and reward her undoer with a big belly, and a bastard. ”

“ When you sneer in my ears, "Thou bastard born?"
Am I not as the rest of you,
With a hope to reach, and a dream to live?
With a soul to suffer, a heart to know
The pangs that the thrusts of the heartless give?" ”

“ Shall I live on to see this bastard kneel
And call me father? better burn it now
Than curse it then. But be it; let it live.
It shall not neither. [To Antigonus.] You, sir, come you hither,
You that have been so tenderly officious
With Lady Margery, your midwife, there,
To save this bastard’s life—for ’tis a bastard,
So sure as this beard’s grey. What will you adventure
To save this brat’s life?
ANTIGONUS.
Anything, my lord,
That my ability may undergo,
And nobleness impose: at least thus much:
I’ll pawn the little blood which I have left
To save the innocent. Anything possible. ”

“ Yet now you would divorce all that goodnesse; and why? for a little letchery of revenge? it's a lye: the Burre that stickes in your throat is a throane: let him out of his messe of Kingdomes cut out but one, and lay Sicilia, Arragon, Naples or any else upon your trencher, and you'll prayse Bastard [196] for the sweetest wine in the world and call for another quart of it. 'Tis not because the man has left you but because you are not the woman you would be, that mads you: a shee-cuckold is an untameable monster. ”

“ Amb. 'Sfoot, brother, hold.
Sup. Woult let the bastard shame us?
Amb. Hold, hold, brother! there's fitter time than now.
Sup. Now, when I see it!
Amb. 'Tis too much seen already.
Sup. Seen and known;
The nobler she's, the baser is she grown.
Amb. If she were bent lasciviously (the fault
Of mighty women, that sleep soft) —O death!
Must she needs choose such an unequal sinner,
To make all worse?—
[Pg 84]
Sup. A bastard! the duke's bastard! shame heap'd on shame!
Amb. O our disgrace!
Most women have small waists the world throughout ”

“ Eventually, perhaps, he might have forgiven the lowness of his birth, and risen superior to this contingency; but he could not forget its illegitimacy. What had a bastard to do among men! What had he to do with the love of highborn maidens? What was to him the luxuries, the pleasures, the social joys of life? Nothing. The honours of earth were not for him; "a bastard shall not enter even into the kingdom of heaven." Who, then, shall condemn the resolution of a proud youth like Lester, without due cultivation of the moral sense ”

“ Lord Kames, writing in the last half of the eighteenth century, says: “In Wales, even at present, and in the Highlands of Scotland, it is scarce a disgrace for a young woman to have a bastard. In the country last mentioned, the first instance known of a bastard child being destroyed by its mother through shame is a late one. The virtue of chastity appears to be thus gaining ground, as the only temptation a woman can have to destroy her child is to conceal her frailty.”—Sketches of the History of Man—On the Progress of the Female Sex. ”

“ Mercutio again, like Philip, is a good friend and gallant swordsman, quick-witted and hot-blooded, of a fiery and faithful temper, loyal and light and swift alike of speech and swordstroke; and this is all. But the character of the Bastard, clear and simple as broad sunlight though it be, has in it other features than this single and beautiful likeness of frank young manhood ”

“ A reader feels that in the figure of the Bastard he set down what he found most significant in the common English character. With the exceptions of Sir Toby Belch and Justice Shallow, the Bastard is the most English figure in the plays. He is the Englishman neither at his best nor at his worst, but at his commonest. ”

“ The Bastard makes the most of his grace; his prayer is very long. He sees that a fight is going on below, and knocks the hangman dead from the tree with his fist, then comes down from the tree and joins in the fray. ”

“ Thief, coward, blackguard, they are stamped upon his face, but under the face, under the evil outside? Is there no remnant of manhood—nothing tender, nothing, true? A woman has crept to the cross to kiss him: no evidence in his favour, my Lord? Love is blind-aye, to our faults. ”

“ And, again, in respect of temperance, courage, magnificence, and every other virtue, should we not carefully distinguish between the true son and the bastard? for where there is no discernment of such qualities states and individuals unconsciously err; and the state makes a ruler, and the individual a friend, of one who, being defective in some part of virtue, is in a figure lame or a bastard. ”

“ When she goes out among children, in the streets or at school, they will no doubt tell her she is a bastard! She may come to me crying, and ask me what it means. Sometimes I think I would rather she should die than grow up to find her mother—— Oh! ”

“ That make it pain to live: all precious gifts,
Honour, observance, virtue, flung away
For one o'ermastering passion. Why are we
Above the brute so far, if we keep still
The weakness of the brute? Go from my sight,
Thou vile, degraded wretch. For him whose craft
And wickedness has wronged thee, this I swear—
I will kill him, if I can, or he shall me.
I will call on him to draw, and make my sword
Red with a villain's blood.
Ire. (eagerly) .
Nay, nay, my brother,
That would proclaim my shame; and shouldst thou slay him,
Thou wouldst break thy lady's heart.
Theo.
Doth she so love him?
65
Ire. ”

“ You may not give a daughter or sister to a bastard as wife, so the commentaries enjoin us--but only that and nothing further is declared by the Talmud--that is a command, like many others, a command of the Lord's, obscure and inexplicable to man's mind.... but a bastard may be noble, great, a shining light to his people. Are you not acquainted with the article 'a bastard profoundly versed in scripture is superior in dignity to a high priest who is less deserving.' Is it not true," Michoel turned to Mordechai, "that it is so. ”

“ A furious hatred filled him, a feral thirst for the blood of that nameless one who had brought this shame upon him, and an almost equal hatred for the creature who had revealed the matter to him, and who was cowering now in a corner of the tent, appalled by the sight of the devil he had raised. ”

“ And the Divine Goodness, which is perfect charity and true love, took pity upon her grief and long suffering, in such wise that a few days afterwards the Bastard died while occupied in seeking after another woman. ”

“ For thousands upon thousands of these poor wretches are, as Bishop South truly said, "not so much born into this world as damned into it." The bastard of a harlot, born in a brothel, suckled on gin, and familiar from earliest infancy with all the bestialities of debauch, violated before she is twelve, and driven out into the streets by her mother a year or two later, what chance is there for such a girl in this world—I say nothing about the next? ”

“ If man's flesh and woman's flesh are merchandise or carrion; if the defiled and trampled souls of innocent children are no more to us than are the trodden blossoms under the feet of swine; if love lies to us and pity is a cheat; if whips and chains and contumely and the gibbet are meet for our sisters and our brothers and if dishonourable ease and beggarly pride and the flatteries of fools are worthy of ourselves, then we have the Yellow Press and the painted altar and the Parliamentary speeches and a selfish heaven and a hell where the worm never dies ”

“ If only the brute should spring on that more blood-stained and terrible beast of prey who could kill not only with claws and teeth but with a word from his lips, a wave of his hand!—the world would be rid of the ferocious curse. Ay, his eye, which had yesterday scorned to look at the multitudes who had hailed his advent, was that of a cruel tyrant. ”

“ As for the rest of him, he was a brute-beast, wholly unmoral, and with all the passion and turgid violence of the brute-beast. What saved him, what made him possible for me, were those corners of his eyes--the humor and laughter and kindliness of the beast when unaroused. ”

“ Until this happen, let the poor victim be accursed, and evil work with the posterity of her betrayer!' The miserable murderer invoked the infernal powers to assist in the fulfilment of his curse, and then, as if beside himself, ran to the turf-pits. ”

“ Then, there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman, not old but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair, like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you at once recognize as worn to death by a brute—probably a drunken brute—of a husband, and at least nine children. ”

“ The courage of despair made me formidable; but I was hated, and thus had no protection against treachery. One evening as I left school I was struck in the back by a handful of small stones tied in a handkerchief. When the valet, who punished the perpetrator, told this to my mother she exclaimed: “That dreadful child! he will always be a torment to us.”
Finding that I inspired in my schoolmates the same repulsion that was felt for me by my family, I sank into a horrible distrust of myself. ”

“ Now, in this struggle of life and death, the husband finding himself hindered by his lieutenant, who clutched him tightly with his fingers of iron, and bitten by his wife, who tore away at him with a will, gnawing him as a dog gnaws a bone, he thought instantly of a better way to gratify his rage. Then the devil, newly horned, maliciously ordered, in his patois, the servants to tie the lovers with the silken cords of the trap, and throwing the poniard away, he helped the duenna to make them fast. ”

“ These are to the wicked their incessant and domestic furies which night and day exact from wicked sons punishment for the crimes committed against their parents. 68This enormity of the crime is the cause why, unless a parricide is proved in a manner almost visible, it is not credible, unless a man's youth has been base, unless his life has been stained with every sort of wickedness, unless his extravagance has been prodigal and accompanied with shame and disgrace, unless his audacity has been violent, unless his rashness has been such as to be not far removed from insanity. ”

“ And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast—whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed—a brute beast to work out for me—for me, a man, fashioned in the image of the High God—so much of insufferable woe! ”

“ As a thief, that sits merrily spending the money in an alehouse which he hath stolen, when men are riding in post-haste to apprehend him, so it is with you. While you are drowned in cares or fleshly pleasures, and making merry with your own shame, death is coming in post-haste to seize upon you, and carry your souls to such a place and state as now you little know or think of. Suppose, when you were bold and busy in your sin, that a messenger were but coming post from London to apprehend you and take away your lives ”

“ Similarly in Bastar, a province of India, "if a man is adjudged guilty of witchcraft, he is beaten by the crowd, his hair is shaved, the hair being supposed to constitute his power of mischief, his front teeth are knocked out, in order, it is said, to prevent him from muttering incantations. ”

“ The wicked might prosper for a time, but by and by the fates were at work on them, there in the little shop, and then every one smiled as the sinner passed, with the decoration of his rank upon him. And the sinner smiled also, seeing not the badge on his own back but only that on the back of his brother, and was highly pleased, for, if he had sin deeper than his brother's he had some discretion. ”

“ To master you I do not hesitate to strike at your nephews with the lethal weapons that are mine. When you shall have seen them hang you will understand the things that argument could not make clear to you. In the vileness of my act you will see a reflection of the vileness of your own, and perhaps your heart will be touched, your monstrous pride abated. ”

“ Vane started, as if the tender grasp upon his arm had stung into his flesh.
“I—I can’t come home to-night, Eleanor. At least, not for an hour. There—there are social laws, my dear, which must be observed; and when—when a gentleman is asked to give another his revenge, he—he can’t refuse. I’ll put you into a carriage, my darling, if you think you can’t find your way.” ”

“ But whatever she thought, this is what I think; the poor harlot, the wretched sinner who is yet above the righteous, who is weighed down by the sins of the world, the poor outcast and her terrible accusation shall never die in my soul! ”