Thackeray imagines the officers calling upon Mrs. Dodd, wife of that clerical scoundrel of the reign of George II.: "is my wife, Mrs. Dodd, to show them into the dining-room, and say, 'Pray step in, gentlemen! My husband has just come home from church. That bill with my Lord Chesterfield's acceptance, I am bound to own, was never written by his lordship; and the signature is in the doctor's handwriting'? I say, would any man of sense or honor or fine feeling praise his wife for telling the truth under such circumstances? Suppose she made a fine grimace and said, 'Most painful as my position is, most deeply as I feel for my William, yet truth must prevail; and I deeply lament to state that the beloved partner of my life did commit the flagitious act with which he is charged, and is at this present moment located in the two-pair back, up the chimney, whither it is my duty to lead you.' Why, even Dodd himself, who was one of the greatest humbugs who ever lived, would not have had the face to say that he approved of his wife telling the truth in such a case. If ever I steal a teapot, and my women don't stand up for me, pass the article under their shawls, whisk down the street with it, outbluster the policeman, and utter any amount of fibs before Mr. Beak, those beings are not what I take them to be."
A bronze lioness was dedicated to Leæna, a girl of humble birth, beloved by Aristogiton, who, with Harmodius, conspired to kill the tyrant Hippias. She "was sentenced to the torture, and, that the pain might not wring from her any confession of the secrets of the conspiracy, she bit out her tongue." Some scoffer will say, What greater sacrifice could a woman make?
But she earned, and ought to have had, a verse in the poem of Kallistratus,[20] to wreathe around her name the myrtle-bough of the two patriots.
In "Far from the Madding Crowd," a novel written by Thomas Hardy, Bathsheba has hotly denied being in love; but she resents being taken in earnest by her confidant. "O God, what a lie it was! Heaven and my love forgive me! And don't you know that a woman who loves at all thinks nothing of perjury when it is balanced against her love?"
Lady Macbeth has the kind of wifehood which devotes itself. Hurried by her husband's hopes, she throws herself without reserve into the abyss they dig at her feet. All her character is lavished to consolidate his state. She is not a vulgar murderess, because her soul is without a flaw of egotism. She is not a perfect woman; but she is most perfectly and irrevocably married. The imperfect wives are egotistical, from various motives. They have some knack or talent which craves airing, and earns the superficial admiration which is the discord of a household. Harlots are not the only women who live upon the street. Lady Macbeth's mind has no specialty, no gift that itches to be noticed, no facility save that of aggrandizing at any expense the man she loves and is absorbed in.
To be perfectly married, and perfectly bound up in a husband for weal or woe, does not imply loss of personality. Lady Macbeth is still immensely personal, even in the devotion of her love. For love alone preserves the person such as she intrinsically is. A feebler love, a more imperfect attachment, may favor idiosyncrasy, and permit the woman to assert some traits in isolation instead of letting them be merged in the total influence of her attachment. Greater love hath no man—and no woman—than this, that an individuality lays down its life to sustain a personality.
So when Macbeth tells her that he cannot proceed any farther in the business, for Duncan is in the castle, "in double trust," as king and guest,—and, besides, he does not like to risk the golden opinions he has lately won,—her language is an affront to the womanly sentiments which always charmed Macbeth and drew from him such phrases of fondness: all the horrors of this tragedy cannot frighten them from his lips. She is "my dearest love," the "dear wife," and "dearest chuck." After the murderer has told him that Banquo is slain, he falls into musing which she strives to dispel: her words recall to him what a "sweet remembrancer" she is.
Therefore she hammers stern sentences out of the "undaunted mettle" of her love. They are iron levers to swing him out of the slough of his moods: disdainful smitings on the lover's cheek, they are, to bring them up to regal purple:—
"Shame itself!
Why do you make such faces?"
"Fie! for shame!"
She could never be capable of risking this style if she had not been wont to soothe his ear with words selected by choice moments of inclination. She would fain recur to them, but there must be a coronation first. When the day comes, there will be bystanders and observers, else she would bend over him with the old-time prattle and remarry him as king.