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 straitwaistcoat, 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 motive 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 Duchess 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-controul, 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 Duchess 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 philo sophers 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. |