[8] All's Well that Ends Well, Act i. 7. Though I suspect here either a fragment of an early form of the play that kept its place in the stage copy and passed into print unchastened, or some phrases interpolated by actors. Something has been dropped out between Parolles's "Will you do any thing with it?" and Helena's recurrence to Bertram's leaving for the court, "There shall your master have a thousand loves;" so that the scene is in an imperfect condition.
[9] Reproduction of anthropophagi as heard from some guest by the host of the Garter Inn, in "Merry Wives of Windsor," iv. 5.
WOMEN AND MEN:
MARIA, HELENA, IMOGEN, CONSTANCE.
WOMEN AND MEN.
Man draws near to woman with the fly-net of his analysis, thinking to steal up and capture the secrets of her disposition. He finds a distance drawn across his way which he never entirely passes. It is the distance of sex. The greatest intimacy of marriage itself, which blends two beings into one fate, and compels them to set up housekeeping on the principle of mutualism, is still evaded by motives and moods which the woman holds in reserve, not by calculation, but through the instinct of a difference which the husband cannot entirely penetrate. It is not that man reaches results chiefly by the processes of judgment, and woman chiefly by a method which is not thinking so much as it is a taste or touch of the objects she observes. But she is removed from his scrutiny because the complexity of sex constructs her soul, becomes the essence of her motives, decides her virtues and her vices, and modifies the intellect itself. She contains all qualities, but not in the masculine proportion. Sex also irrevocably decides for the average man, as for the average woman, the plus and minus of each attribute. Woman's mode of life must so defer to the tendency of her sex, that a variety of objects are prevented from pressing into her experience. She is less actively in motion from place to place than man, who mingles with many crowds and learns to reflect upon their actions. Her brain is not so multifariously stored with facts and relations, because there are some scenes from which she must always be remote. If, apart from sex, a considerable portion of a person's training has been by hearsay, that person's judgments will be sentiments rather than reflections; but sex decides that hearsay shall enter largely into woman's training. The rude, fierce, cunning competition of naked men in the palæstra, without blush or apology, gave girth to the breasts which were bucklers before the glory and the arts of Greece. Many a situation that is as coarse as a pugilist puts us in prudent trim. Women derive from our education a benefit which their muscle is too delicately draughted to procure. Events that do not mince their speech give us a thorough knowledge of our mother-tongue. We overhear the other people, weigh their words, enrich ourselves with facts, or protect ourselves against omens. She is more likely to be well-behaved than man, but less likely to be tolerant of ill-behavior. When she feels particularly virtuous, she is apt to condemn swiftly and fatally where man would suspend his judgment till all the qualifying facts were put into the case. Human development has in this respect conferred upon man a great advantage that dates from the barbaric rule of the stronger, and has been re-enforced by the varied experience of every generation. Just as woman is entering upon a more independent career, she betrays a deficiency in the quality of humor. Man was turned loose in the pasture to feed at random upon all the plants that drew nutritious and poisonous saps: stramonium and clover were indiscriminately cropped; but Heaven gave to its wild creatures tough stomachs to begin with. They effect a compromise with such complacency that literature is charmed to celebrate it; and the dew of humor condenses beneath a long-suffering sky. A powerful and happy digestion does not prefer the noxious weeds; but it has learned how to account for them, and to measure their effects.
Women are not good readers of any kind of plays. The movement and lapse of events in a novel are more congenial to their secluded life. And I venture to impute to the average woman a thinly running vein of humor as the reason why she finds such difficulty in admiring Shakspeare. Many of the finest women can never conquer their repugnance. There seems to be in it something of impatience at the dramatic intervals and the movement by incessant colloquy, something of an equanimity of passion, something of fright at the broad and powerful statement, which flinches at nothing; blabs dreadfully of Juliet's clandestine feeling; keeps Helena in contented ear-shot of Parolles, and lets her devise an indelicate solution of the plot; shows the sweet Marianna of the moated grange ready to help on another play with the same alacrity, and leaves Nature everywhere, in the most passionate or vulgar phases, to her absolute sincerity, and concedes to her the freedom of the dictionary. Women do not like to be charmed along through scenes of tender and lofty feeling to stumble over the sentences of porters, carriers, camp-followers, fellows on a frolic; phrases that hiccough a decided waft of sack; clauses that throw a leer in passing. Even the high passionateness of kings and lovers, when it is the purest, seems to the average woman to blaze with extravagance. To her it is the overstatement that kidnaps true sentiment and brings it up for the stage. She does not recall a moment of her life that could have recognized such feeling, or have framed for her secretest thought a corresponding whisper. Do her brothers and acquaintances smoulder with these wraths and fervors inside of their demure suits of gray-mixed and black? Are all the men who circulate in society, and enframe her waist at balls, liable to attacks of this erysipelatous condition? Does she sit at divine service with such neat packages of rend-rock in the pew? So the Shakspearean ideal of the great passions of mankind has to be watered for her through the modern novel, trickle by trickle of protracted rhetoric, drop by drop of overflavored style. She turns with resentful cheeks from Juliet's expectant mood, and manages to read pages that are too sickly to kindle a blush. And yet perhaps they are equivocal enough to have puzzled Dame Quickly and frightened Falstaff. Certainly the equivoque has not lost its voice "with hollaing and singing of anthems."
Some offences, chiefly those which concern propriety and chasteness, are so repugnant to a woman's disposition that they excite a fanaticism which sometimes is slow, and sometimes eager, to condemn the reputed offender. That is to say, the same disposition is competent to give credence to an accusation slowly, or to give it impetuously and with loathing. If there be a case involving testimony, it is not deliberately weighed, its intricacies patiently pursued, its implications as well as its statements justly rated, and all the parts of it fitted to an opinion of innocence or guilt; but there results instead a state of feeling from previous opinions and assumptions, which no testimony, however strong, can do much to reverse. Women, indeed, naturally shrink from familiarity with the testimony, and do not wish to reach an opinion by probing it. The defendant may enjoy the immunity of a woman's assumption that the charge is in his case incredible, and refuted by all her previous associations with his life; or he may suffer from her want of any feeling derived from previous knowledge of his life, or from considerations dependent upon personal sentiment.