Characteristics of Women Part 18

DUKE.

How dost thou like this tune?

VIOLA.

It gives a very echo to the seat Where love is thron'd.

And again,

If I did love you in my master's flame, With such a suffering, such a deadly life-- in your denial I would find no sense, I would not understand it.

OLIVIA.

Why, what would you do?

VIOLA.

Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons[35] of contemned love, And sing them loud even in the dead of night.

Holla your name to the reverberate hills, And make babbling gossip of the air Cry out, Olivia! O you should not rest Between the elements of air and earth, But you should pity me.

OLIVIA.

You might do much.

The situation and the character of Viola have been censured for their want of consistency and probability; it is therefore worth while to examine how far this criticism is true. As for her situation in the drama, (of which she is properly the heroine,) it is shortly this. She is s.h.i.+pwrecked on the coast of Illyria: she is alone and without protection in a strange country. She wishes to enter into the service of the Countess Olivia; but she is a.s.sured that this is impossible; "for the lady having recently lost an only and beloved brother, has abjured the sight of men, has shut herself up in her palace, and will admit no kind of suit." In this perplexity Viola remembers to have heard her father speak with praise and admiration of Orsino, the Duke of the country; and having ascertained that he is not married, and that therefore his court is not a proper asylum for her in her feminine character, she attires herself in the disguise of a page, as the best protection against uncivil comments, till she can gain some tidings of her brother.

If we carry our thoughts back to a romantic and chivalrous age, there is surely sufficient probability here for all the purposes of poetry. To pursue the thread of Viola's destiny;--she is engaged in the service of the Duke, whom she finds "fancy-sick" for the love of Olivia. We are left to infer, (for so it is hinted in the first scene,) that this Duke--who with his accomplishments, and his personal attractions, his taste for music, his chivalrous tenderness, and his unrequited love, is really a very fascinating and poetical personage, though a little pa.s.sionate and fantastic--had already made some impression on Viola's imagination; and when she comes to play the confidante, and to be loaded with favors and kindness in her a.s.sumed character, that she should be touched by a pa.s.sion made up of pity, admiration, grat.i.tude, and tenderness, does not, I think, in any way detract from the genuine sweetness and delicacy of her character, for "_she never told her love_."

Now all this, as the critic wisely observes, may not present a very just picture of life; and it may also fail to impart any moral lesson for the especial profit of well-bred young ladies; but is it not in truth and in nature? Did it ever fail to charm or to interest, to seize on the coldest fancy, to touch the most insensible heart?

Viola then is the chosen favorite of the enamoured Duke, and becomes his messenger to Olivia, and the interpreter of his sufferings to that inaccessible beauty. In her character of a youthful page, she attracts the favor of Olivia, and excites the jealousy of her lord. The situation is critical and delicate; but how exquisitely is the character of Viola fitted to her part, carrying her through the ordeal with all the inward and spiritual grace of modesty. What beautiful propriety in the distinction drawn between Rosalind and Viola! The wild sweetness, the frolic humor which sports free and unblamed amid the shades of Ardennes, would ill become Viola, whose playfulness is a.s.sumed as part of her disguise as a court-page, and is guarded by the strictest delicacy. She has not, like Rosalind, a saucy enjoyment in her own incognito; her disguise does not sit so easily upon her; her heart does not beat freely under it. As in the old ballad, where "Sweet William" is detected weeping in secret over her "man's array,"[36] so in Viola, a sweet consciousness of her feminine nature is for ever breaking through her masquerade:--

And on her cheek is ready with a blush Modest as morning, when she coldly eyes The youthful Phoebus.

She plays her part well, but never forgets nor allows us to forget, that she is playing a part.

OLIVIA.

Are you a comedian?

VIOLA.

No, my profound heart! and yet by the very fangs of malice I swear, I am not that I play!

And thus she comments on it:--

Disguise, I see thou art wickedness, Wherein the pregnant enemy does much; How easy is it for the proper false In women's waxen hearts to set their forms!

Alas! our frailty is the cause, not we.

The feminine cowardice of Viola, which will not allow her even to affect a courage becoming her attire,--her horror at the idea of drawing a sword, is very natural and characteristic; and produces a most humorous effect, even at the very moment it charms and interests us.

Contrasted with the deep, silent, patient love of Viola for the Duke, we have the lady-like wilfulness of Olivia; and her sudden pa.s.sion, or rather fancy, for the disguised page, takes so beautiful a coloring of poetry and sentiment, that we do not think her forward. Olivia is like a princess of romance, and has all the privileges of one; she is, like Portia, high born and high bred, mistress over her servants--but not like Portia, "queen o'er herself." She has never in her life been opposed; the first contradiction, therefore, rouses all the woman in her, and turns a caprice into a headlong pa.s.sion; yet she apologizes for herself.

I have said too much unto a heart of stone, And laid mine honor too unchary out; There's something in me that reproves my fault; But such a headstrong potent fault it is, That it but mocks reproof!

And in the midst of her self-abandonment, never allows us to contemn, even while we pity her:--

What shall you ask of me that I'll deny.

That honor, saved, may upon asking give?

The distance of rank which separates the Countess from the youthful page--the real s.e.x of Viola--the dignified elegance of Olivia's deportment, except where pa.s.sion gets the better of her pride--her consistent coldness towards the Duke--the description of that "smooth, discreet, and stable bearing" with which she rules her household--her generous care for her steward Malvolio, in the midst of her own distress,--all these circ.u.mstances raise Olivia in our fancy, and render her caprice for the page a source of amus.e.m.e.nt and interest, not a subject of reproach. _Twelfth Night_ is a genuine comedy;--a perpetual spring of the gayest and the sweetest fancies. In artificial society men and women are divided into castes and cla.s.ses, and it is rarely that extremes in character or manners can approximate. To blend into one harmonious picture the utmost grace and refinement of sentiment, and the broadest effects of humor; the most poignant wit, and the most indulgent benignity;--in short, to bring before us in the same scene, Viola and Olivia, with Malvolio and Sir Toby, belonged only to Nature and to Shakspeare.

OPHELIA.

A woman's affections, however strong, are sentiments, when they run smooth; and become pa.s.sions only when opposed.

In Juliet and Helena, love is depicted as a pa.s.sion, properly so called; that is, a natural impulse, throbbing in the heart's blood, and mingling with the very sources of life;--a sentiment more or less modified by the imagination; a strong abiding principle and motive, excited by resistance, acting upon the will, animating all the other faculties, and again influenced by them. This is the most complex aspect of love, and in these two characters, it is depicted in colors at once the most various, the most intense, and the most brilliant.

In Viola and Perdita, love, being less complex, appears more refined; more a sentiment than a pa.s.sion--a compound of impulse and fancy, while the reflective powers and moral energies are more faintly developed. The same remark applies also to Julia and Silvia, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and, in a greater degree, to Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night's Dream. In the two latter, though perfectly discriminated, love takes the visionary fanciful cast, which belongs to the whole piece; it is scarcely a pa.s.sion or a sentiment, but a dreamy enchantment, a reverie, which a fairy spell dissolves or fixes at pleasure.

But there was yet another possible modification of the sentiment, as combined with female nature; and this Shakspeare has shown to us. He has portrayed two beings, in whom all intellectual and moral energy is in a manner latent, if existing; in whom love is an unconscious impulse, and imagination lends the external charm and hue, not the internal power; in whom the feminine character appears resolved into its very elementary principles--as modesty, grace,[37] tenderness. _Without_ these a woman is no woman, but a thing which, luckily, wants a name yet; _with_ these, though every other faculty were pa.s.sive or deficient, she might still be herself. These are the inherent qualities with which G.o.d sent us into the world: they may be perverted by a bad education--they may be obscured by harsh and evil destinies--they may be overpowered by the development of some particular mental power, the predominance of some pa.s.sion--but they are never wholly crushed out of the woman's soul, while it retains those faculties which render it responsible to its Creator. Shakspeare then has shown us that these elemental feminine qualities, modesty, grace, tenderness, when expanded under genial influences, suffice to const.i.tute a perfect and happy human creature: such is Miranda. When thrown alone amid harsh and adverse destinies, and amid the trammels and corruptions of society, without energy to resist, or will to act, or strength to endure, the end must needs be desolation.

Ophelia--poor Ophelia! O far too soft, too good, too fair, to be cast among the briers of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life! What shall be said of her? for eloquence is mute before her! Like a strain of sad sweet music which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, and which we rather feel than hear--like the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sense it charms--like the snow-flake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth--like the light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses--such is the character of Ophelia: so exquisitely delicate, it seems as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely dare to consider it too deeply.

The love of Ophelia, which she never once confesses, is like a secret which we have stolen from her, and which ought to die upon our hearts as upon her own. Her sorrows ask not words but tears; and her madness has precisely the same effect that would be produced by the spectacle of real insanity, if brought before us: we feel inclined to turn away, and veil our eyes in reverential pity and too painful sympathy.

Beyond every character that Shakspeare has drawn, (Hamlet alone excepted,) that of Ophelia makes us forget the poet in his own creation.

Whenever we bring her to mind, it is with the same exclusive sense of her real existence, without reference to the wondrous power which called her into life. The effect (and what an effect!) is produced by means so simple, by strokes so few, and so un.o.btrusive, that we take no thought of them. It is so purely natural and unsophisticated, yet so profound in its pathos, that, as Hazlitt observes, it takes us back to the old ballads; we forget that, in its perfect artlessness, it is the supreme and consummate triumph of art.

The situation of Ophelia in the story,[38] is that of a young girl who, at an early age, is brought from a life of privacy into the circle of a court--a court such as we read of in those early times, at once rude, magnificent, and corrupted. She is placed immediately about the person of the queen, and is apparently her favorite attendant. The affection of the wicked queen for this gentle and innocent creature, is one of those beautiful redeeming touches, one of those penetrating glances into the secret springs of natural and feminine feeling which we find only in Shakspeare. Gertrude, who is not so wholly abandoned but that there remains within her heart some sense of the virtue she has forfeited, seems to look with a kind yet melancholy complacency on the lovely being she has destined for the bride of her son; and the scene in which she is introduced as scattering flowers on the grave of Ophelia, is one of those effects of contrast in poetry, in character and in feeling, at once natural and unexpected; which fill the eye, and make the heart swell and tremble within itself--like the nightingales singing in the grove of the Furies in Sophocles.[39]

Again, in the father of Ophelia, the Lord Chamberlain Polonius--the shrewd, wary, subtle, pompous, garrulous old courtier--have we not the very man who would send his son into the world to see all, learn all it could teach of good and evil, but keep his only daughter as far as possible from every taint of that world he knew so well? So that when she is brought to the court, she seems in her loveliness and perfect purity, like a seraph that had wandered out of bounds, and yet breathed on earth the air of paradise. When her father and her brother find it necessary to warn her simplicity, give her lessons of worldly wisdom, and instruct her "to be scanter of her maiden presence," for that Hamlet's vows of love "but breathe like sanctified and pious bonds, the better to beguile," we feel at once that it comes too late; for from the moment she appears on the scene amid the dark conflict of crime and vengeance, and supernatural terrors, we know what must be her destiny.

Once, at Murano, I saw a dove caught in a tempest; perhaps it was young, and either lacked strength of wing to reach its home, or the instinct which teaches to shun the brooding storm; but so it was--and I watched it, pitying, as it flitted, poor bird hither and thither, with its silver pinions s.h.i.+ning against the black thunder-cloud, till, after a few giddy whirls, it fell blinded, affrighted, and bewildered, into the turbid wave beneath, and was swallowed up forever. It reminded me then of the fate of Ophelia; and now when I think of her, I see again before me that poor dove, beating with weary wing, bewildered amid the storm.

It is the helplessness of Ophelia, arising merely from her innocence, and pictured without any indication of weakness, which melts us with such profound pity. She is so young, that neither her mind nor her person have attained maturity; she is not aware of the nature of her own feelings; they are prematurely developed in their full force before she has strength to bear them; and love and grief together rend and shatter the frail texture of her existence, like the burning fluid poured into a crystal vase. She says very little, and what she does say seems rather intended to hide than to reveal the emotions of her heart; yet in those few words we are made as perfectly acquainted with her character, and with what is pa.s.sing in her mind, as if she had thrown forth her soul with all the glowing eloquence of Juliet. Pa.s.sion with Juliet seems innate, a part of her being, "as dwells the gathered lightning in the cloud;" and we never fancy her but with the dark splendid eyes and t.i.tian-like complexion of the south. While in Ophelia we recognize as distinctly the pensive, fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the north, whose heart seems to vibrate to the pa.s.sion she has inspired, more conscious of being loved than of loving; and yet, alas! loving in the silent depths of her young heart far more than she is loved.

When her brother warns her against Hamlet's importunities--

For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favor, Hold it a fas.h.i.+on, and a toy of blood, A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting, The perfume and the suppliance of a minute-- No more!

she replies with a kind of half consciousness--

No more but so?

LAERTES.

Think it no more.

He concludes his admonition with that most beautiful pa.s.sage, in which the soundest sense, the most excellent advice, is conveyed in a strain of the most exquisite poetry.