So women began to exist for the first time in literature. Shakspeare discovered woman, and took note of her generic peculiarity which upholds the specific differences of individual women. They all came forth to him as surely as flowers to the sun. He solicited each jealously interfolded sheath, and drew out of it the heart of its color. All of them are rooted in the common ground of sex; but each one lifts into the blossom her signals of a temper and modulation that are peculiarly her own. So that, although "each woman is a brief of Womankind," she is also a woman who must be designated by some one of Shakspeare's famous names.
In fact, genius was never penetrated with the varieties of woman's temperament till Shakspeare, picking up a few rustic specimens in Stratford, ran away with them to London, taking down there honest, red-fisted Audrey; Phebe, the village coquette, a little above her condition, who reads and quotes tender love-lore, and learns to despise a swain; Mopsa and Dorcas, doting on ballads, watchful after pedlars to chaffer with across the hedge for tapes and ribbons; and Juliet's gossipy, free-spoken, easy-minded Mrs. Gamp. With this humble retinue, his imagination travelled down to the great city, and seemed to have introduced them soon, past all the barriers of etiquette, into Elizabeth's circle of ladies, where they went into the service of high-born qualities, and retailed to him the very heart-secrets of their mistresses. The dames of wealthy citizens sat in full costume for his "Merry Wives;" the noble partners of his friends and patrons yielded each to him a whisper of their chasteness, their high-spirit, their control, their tenderness.
"In the blazon of sweet beauty's best
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,"
he mastered Beauty of the form and soul, and gave to each her portion, from Imogen to Cleopatra,—
"The worser spirit, a woman color'd ill."
One could not, of course, claim for Shakspeare that his pages include all the varieties of women which Nature is capable of producing. He has no daughters of the people, like Egmont's Clara and Faust's Margaret: they are conceptions of a later date. But they are implied in the quality of his women; and we incline to think that Nature will not be able to invent a fresh style of woman, or to modify the standard types, unless she sets out with that essential peculiarity, the Womanliness, which Shakspeare has described. As all the instruments of an orchestra are tuned upon a single pitch, and as all future modifications of the instruments must defer to the same if they mean to take rank in harmony, so all the women who are still possible to Nature must accord with her influential note. Shakspeare is content to strike that. Through all the chords which cluster around his different characters, we detect it: he seems to be making tuning-forks on the same pitch, but of various materials, to emphasize it to the ear. His plays take from it a consonant vibration that extends through scenes and lapses of time during which no woman's face appears. The tonic of her heart is diffused beyond the limits of her person; as when Ophelia's bloom clings to the fate of Hamlet, even while she waits in death for him to reach her funeral-rite. So the beautiful soul of Cordelia, that is little talked of by herself, and is but stingily set forth by circumstance, engrosses our feeling in scenes from whose threshold her filial piety is banished. We know what Lear is so pathetically remembering: the sisters tell us in their cruellest moments; it mingles with the midnight storm, a sigh of the daughterhood that was repulsed. In the pining of the Fool we detect it. Through every wail or gust of this awful symphony of madness, ingratitude, and irony, we feel a woman's breath.
Since Shakspeare's day, new countries have been discovered and peopled; new colonies have carried his mother-tongue around the earth; the language of woman, like the girdle of a goddess, is a zone drawn round all other climates to hold them in the clasp of her charm. The wider culture and the opportunities derived from modern wants have already increased the number of her gifts, and set her person in fresh shadings of character. Perhaps Macaulay's New Zealander, who is expected to meditate in the future over the ruins of London, will turn out to be a woman, of a variety which Shakspeare has nowhere precisely drawn. But, if all his plays should by that time have shared the fate of an extinguished England, there would she sit, the survivor in the direct line of descent from his essential Woman; by virtue of her sex the Sibyl foretelling the women who will be possible to Nature.
"Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo:
Jam redit et Virgo."
Woman, as she resembles man, was of less consequence to Shakspeare than woman in herself, apart from what she can do, can earn, or can aspire to. He merely received the feminine side of Nature into his recreating thought, the essential Woman, without respect to the exigencies of any period or style of culture,—the only She, such as woman must remain to the end of time underneath all her activities and requirements. Her sex is the unalterable decree which she can cast no ballot to vote away from her, and assume no profession to raze it from the eternal tablets of her distinction. All the purely modern questions which relate to her career; the efforts to equalize with man's her wages, to multiply her opportunities, to claim her interest in the politics of human rights, to secure her alleviating presence in the rude scenes of republicanism,—successful as these tendencies may be,—cannot transform Woman; and she will not step out of her Shakspearean Self. On the figured coast of his page her Essence stands, as yet without the right of suffrage, limited to household cares, or raised to queenly ones; as learned as Portia can become, but not yet admitted to the profession which she mimicked; provided for by the various dexterities of man, and still undriven by the modern threat of starvation into risking a single quality that is her birthright. There she stands; the modern world, stooping at her feet, will have to yield some of the reputed exclusiveness of men, but only such traits of it as Imogen, Cordelia, Beatrice, Portia, will select. In all this complicated period of over-crowded cities, over-stimulated competition, vices overfed, employers over-purse-proud, and politicians over-careless, there is no strait cruel enough to compel the essential woman to choose a career which would have unsexed one of Shakspeare's plays. I have no fear. Stand aside: cease that frantic bracing of the masculine back against so many doors of prescription. Throw them wide open, and let Shakspeare's stately crowd pass up and down to scan the vista through them. Come, patient, chaste, obedient, high-spirited Imogen, too docile Ophelia, frank Perdita, warm Julia, bright and witty Beatrice, whose tongue is a pen already, or the etcher's tool; come, thou accomplished, grave, acute, and self-possessed Portia; thou unsophisticated Miranda, who would fain share thy lover's toil; thou shifty, prompt Maria, hater of humbug; thou tender Viola,—come, choose how many of these men's garments you will continue to wear, preferring to be women. Not one of them, I venture to declare, which your eternal instinct will feel to cramp or to disguise the form. "Dost thou think," says Rosalind, "though I am caparison'd like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?"
Perdita, I think, if she were not discovered to be a king's daughter, might take to floriculture, and earn a living by it. She would no longer keep her dainty pique against the gilly-flower, but learn to marry