Albany. Thou changed and self-covered thing. For shame,
Be-monster not thy feature. Were it my FITNESS'—
for here it is the human, and not the instinctive element—not 'the blood' element that rules—
'Were it my FITNESS
To let these hands obey my blood,
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
Thy flesh and bones,'
Rather tiger-like impulses for so mild a gentleman to own to; but the process which he confesses his hands are already inclined to undertake, is not half so cruel as the one which this woman has practised on herself while she was meditating only wrong to another, and pursuing her 'horrible pleasure' at the expense of madness and death to another; not half so cruel and injurious, for in that act she has trampled down, and torn, and dislocated, she has slaughtered in cold blood, the divine, angelic form of womanhood—that form of worth and celestial aspiration which great nature stamped upon her, and gave to her for her law in nature, her type, her essence, her ORIGINAL. She has desecrated, not that common form of humanity only which the common human sentiment of reason, which the human sentiment of duty is everywhere struggling to fulfil, but that lovelier soul of humanity—that softer, subtler, more gracious, more celestial, more commanding spirit of it, which the form of womanhood in its integrity must carry with it—which the form of womanhood will carry with it, if it be not counterfeit or degenerate, gone down into a lower range, 'be-monstered'—'a changed and self-covered thing.' That is the Poet's reading.
'Howe'er,' the Duke of Albany concludes, after that struggle with his hands he speaks of—chivalrously refusing to let them obey that impulse of 'blood,' as a gentleman in such circumstances, under any amount of provocation, should—true to himself, true to his manliness and to his gentle breeding, though his wife is false to hers, and 'false to her nature'—
'Howe'er thou art a, _fiend,
A woman's shape doth shield thee.
Goneril_. Marry! YOUR MANHOOD NOW.'
This is indeed a discourse in which the reader must have 'the text,' or ever he can begin to catch the meaning of those philosophic points with which this orator, who talks so 'pressly,' studs his lines.
For the passage which Goneril dismisses with such scorn is indeed the text, or it will be, when the word which her commentary on it contains has been added to it: for it is 'the foolishness' of struggling with great Nature, and her LAW of KINDS—it is the folly of ignorance, the stupidity of living without respect to nature and its sequent effects, as well as its preformed decree—
('Perforce must wither, And come to deadly use'—)