Characteristics of Women Part 21

MIRANDA.

I am a fool, To weep at what I am glad of.

FERDINAND.

Wherefore weep you

MIRANDA.

At mine unworthiness, that dare not offer What I desire to give; and much less take, What I shall die to want--But this is trifling: And all the more it seeks to hide itself, The bigger bulk it shows. Hence, bashful cunning; And prompt me, plain and holy innocence!

I am your wife, if you will marry me; If not I'll die your maid: to be your fellow You may deny me; but I'll be your servant Whether you will or no!

FERDINAND.

My mistress, dearest!

And I thus humble ever.

MIRANDA.

My husband, then?

FERDINAND.

Ay, with a heart as willing, As bondage e'er of freedom. Here's my hand.

MIRANDA.

And mine with my heart in it. And now farewell Till half an hour hence.

As Miranda, being what she is, could only have had a Ferdinand for a lover, and an Ariel for her attendant, so she could have had with propriety no other father than the majestic and gifted being, who fondly claims her as "a thread of his own life--nay, that for which he lives."

Prospero, with his magical powers, his superhuman wisdom, his moral worth and grandeur, and his kingly dignity, is one of the most sublime visions that ever swept with ample robes, pale brow, and sceptred hand, before the eye of fancy. He controls the invisible world, and works through the agency of spirits: not by any evil and forbidden compact, but solely by superior might of intellect--by potent spells gathered from the lore of ages, and abjured when he mingles again as a man with his fellow men. He is as distinct a being from the necromancers and astrologers celebrated in Shakspeare's age, as can well be imagined:[46]

and all the wizards of poetry and fiction, even Faust and St. Leon, sink into common-places before the princely, the philosophic, the benevolent Prospero.

The Bermuda Isles, in which Shakspeare has placed the scene of the Tempest, were discovered in his time: Sir George Somers and his companions having been wrecked there in a terrible storm,[47] brought back a most fearful account of those unknown islands, which they described as "a land of devils--a most prodigious and enchanted place, subject to continual tempests and supernatural visitings." Such was the idea entertained of the "still-vext Bermoothes" in Shakspeare's age; but later travellers describe them as perfect regions of enchantment in a far different sense; as so many fairy Edens, cl.u.s.tered like a knot of gems upon the bosom of the Atlantic, decked out in all the lavish luxuriance of nature, with shades of myrtle and cedar, fringed round with groves of coral; in short, each island a tiny paradise, rich with perpetual blossoms, in which Ariel might have slumbered, and ever-verdant bowers, in which Ferdinand and Miranda might have strayed: so that Shakspeare, in blending the wild relations of the s.h.i.+pwrecked mariners with his own inspired fancies, has produced nothing, however lovely in nature and sublime in magical power, which does not harmonize with the beautiful and wondrous reality.

There is another circ.u.mstance connected with the Tempest, which is rather interesting. It was produced and acted for the first time upon the occasion of the nuptials of the Princess Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of James I. with Frederic, the elector palatine. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader of the fate of this amiable but most unhappy woman, whose life, almost from the period of her marriage, was one long tempestuous scene of trouble and adversity.

The characters which I have here cla.s.sed together, as princ.i.p.ally distinguished by the predominance of pa.s.sion and fancy, appear to me to rise, in the scale of ideality and simplicity, from Juliet to Miranda; the last being in comparison so refined, so elevated above all stain of earth, that we can only acknowledge her in connection with it through the emotions of sympathy she feels and inspires.

I remember, when I was in Italy, standing "at evening on the top of Fiesole," and at my feet I beheld the city of Florence and the Val d'Arno, with its villas, its luxuriant gardens, groves, and olive grounds, all bathed in crimson light. A transparent vapor or exhalation, which in its tint was almost as rich as the pomegranate flower, moving with soft undulation, rolled through the valley, and the very earth seemed to pant with warm life beneath its rosy veil. A dark purple shade, the forerunner of night, was already stealing over the east; in the western sky still lingered the blaze of the sunset, while the faint perfume of trees, and flowers, and now and then a strain of music wafted upwards, completed the intoxication of the senses. But I looked from the earth to the sky, and immediately above this scene hung the soft crescent moon--alone, with all the bright heaven to herself; and as that sweet moon to the glowing landscape beneath it, such is the character of Miranda compared to that of Juliet.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Lord Byron remarked of the Italian women, (and he could speak _avec connaissance de fait_,) that they are the only women in the world capable of impressions, at once very sudden and very durable; which, he adds, is to be found in no other nation. Mr. Moore observes afterwards, how completely an Italian woman, either from nature or her social position, is led to invert the usual course of frailty among ourselves, and, weak in resisting the first impulses of pa.s.sion, to reserve the whole strength of her character for a display of constancy and devotedness afterwards.--Both these traits of national character are exemplified in Juliet--_Moore's Life of Byron_, vol. ii. pp. 303, 338.

4to edit.

[18] _La seve de la vie_, is an expression used somewhere by Madame de Stael.

[19] Characters of Shakspeare's Plays.

[20] I must allude, but with reluctance, to another character, which I have heard likened to Juliet, and often quoted as the heroine _par excellence_ of amatory fiction--I mean the Julie of Rousseau's Nouvelle Helose; I protest against her altogether. As a creation of fancy the portrait is a compound of the most gross and glaring inconsistencies; as false and impossible to the reflecting and philosophical mind, as the fabled Syrens, Hamatryads and Centaurs to the eye of the anatomist. As a woman, Julie belongs neither to nature nor to artificial society; and if the pages of melting and dazzling eloquence in which Rousseau has garnished out his idol did not blind and intoxicate us, as the incense and the garlands did the votaries of Isis, we should be disgusted.

Rousseau, having composed his Julie of the commonest clay of the earth, does not animate her with fire from heaven, but breathes his own spirit into her, and then calls the "impetticoated" paradox a _woman_. He makes her a peg on which to hang his own visions and sentiments--and what sentiments! but that I fear to soil my pages, I would pick out a few of them, and show the difference between this strange combination of youth and innocence, philosophy and pedantry, sophistical prudery, and detestable _grossierete_, and our own Juliet. No! if we seek a French Juliet, we must go far--far back to the real Helose, to her eloquence, her sensibility, her fervor of pa.s.sion, her devotedness of truth. She, at least, married the man she loved, and loved the man she married, and more than died for him; but enough of both.

[21] Constant describes her beautifully--"Sa voix si douce au travers le bruit des armes, sa forme delicate au milieu de cet hommes tous couverts de fer, la purete de son ame opposee leurs calculs avides, son calme celeste qui contraste avec leurs agitations, remplissent le spectateur d'une emotion constante et melancolique, telle que ne la fait ressentir nulle tragedie ordinaire."

[22] Coleridge--preface to Wallenstein.

[23] In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona."

[24] There is an allusion to this court language of love in "All Well that Ends Well," where Helena says,--

There shall your master have a thousand loves-- A guide, a G.o.ddess, and a sovereign; A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear, His humble ambition, proud humility, His jarring concord, and his discord dulcut, His faith, his sweet disaster, with a world Of pretty fond adoptious Christendoms That blinking Cupid gossips.--ACT I SCENE 1

The courtly poets of Elizabeth's time, who copied the Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, are full of these quaint conceits.

[25] Since this was written, I have met with some remarks of a similar tendency in that most interesting book, "The Life of Lord E.

Fitzgerald."

[26] Juliet, courageously drinking off the potion, after she has placed before herself in the most fearful colors all its possible consequences, is compared by Schlegel to the famous story of Alexander and his physician.

[27]

Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm!

Perhaps 'tis tender, too, and pretty, At each wild word to feel within A sweet recoil of love and pity.

And what if in a world of sin (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Such giddiness of heart and brain Comes seldom save from rage and pain, So talks as it's most used to do?

COLERIDGE.

These lines seem to me to form the truest comment on Juliet's wild exclamations against Romeo.

[28] "The censure," observes Schlegel, "originates in a fanciless way of thinking, to which every thing appears unnatural that does not suit its tame insipidity. Hence an idea has been formed of simple and natural pathos which consists in exclamations dest.i.tute of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life; but energetic pa.s.sions electrify the whole mental powers and will, consequently, in highly-favored natures, express themselves in an ingenious and figurative manner."

[29] The "Giulietta" of Luigi da Porta was written about 1520. In a popular little book published in 1565, thirty years before Shakspeare wrote his tragedy, the name of Juliet occurs as an example of faithful love, and is thus explained by a note in the margin. "Juliet, a n.o.ble maiden of the citie of Verona, which loved Romeo, eldest son of the Lord Monteschi; and being privily married together, he at last poisoned himself for love of her: she, for sorrow of his death, slew herself with his dagger." This note, which furnishes, in brief, the whole argument of Shakspeare's play, might possibly have made the first impression on his fancy. In the novel of Da Porta the catastrophe is altogether different.

After the death of Romeo, the Friar Lorenzo endeavors to persuade Juliet to leave the fatal monument. She refuses; and throwing herself back on the dead body of her husband, she resolutely holds her breath and dies.--"E voltatasi al giacente corpo di Romeo, il cui capo sopra un origliere, che con lei uell' arca era stato lasciato, posto aveva; gli occhi meglio rinchiusi avendogli, e di lagrime il freddo volto bagnandogli, disse;" Che debbo senza di te in vita piu fare, signor mio?

e che altro mi resta verso te se non colla mia morte seguirti? "E detto questo, la sua gran sciagura nell' animo recatasi, e la perdita del caro amante ricordandosi, deliberando di piu non vivere, raccolto a se il fiato, e per buono spazio tenutolo, e poscia con un gran grido fuori mandandolo, sopra il morto corpo, morta ricadde."

There is nothing so improbable in the story of Romeo and Juliet as to make us doubt the tradition that it is a real fact. "The Veronese," says Lord Byron, in one of his letters from Verona, "are tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden--once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its Paladian structures, lies level with the earth, the very spot on which it stood will be consecrated by the memory of Juliet.

When in Italy, I met a gentleman, who being then "_dans le genre romantique_," wore a fragment of Juliet's tomb set in a ring.

[30] Foster's Essays

[31] I have read somewhere that the play of which Helena is the heroine, (All's Well that Ends Well,) was at first ent.i.tled by Shakspeare "Love's Labor Won." Why the t.i.tle was altered or by whom I cannot discover.

[32] i. e. I care as much for as I do for heaven.

[33] New Monthly Magazine, vol. iv.