Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare: Twelve Essays

by John Weiss

"How will she love, when the rich, golden shaft
Hath kill'd the flock of all affections else
That live in her! when liver, brain, and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill'd
(Her sweet perfections) with one self king!"

Yet Portia, whom Nature made capable of this rapture, had wit enough to invent comedies of life and character, judgment enough to devise the best ways, acumen that astonished Venetian subtlety, as it baffled Shylock so neatly that the surprise of wit is imparted to us. No modern parson could speak with such sweet gravity of persuasion upon the quality of mercy; no bright schemer of novels could spice her conversations with such raillery, or construct them upon such instinct for character, as we notice in the scene where she amuses Nerissa with those sketches of her various lovers' foibles. What does such a woman want for tools,—pencil, brush, goose-quill, or tribune? She is made to have her choice of occupations. Does she have a call to utter the great truths of morals and religion? Undoubtedly, Nature has ordained her. Therefore, thou Reverend D.D., with all respect for dulness which is miraculous, that pulpit where you labor like a vessel water-logged is wanted: we people in the pews are faint with emptiness on board your craft, and despair of making any harbor. Persuade him, O Portia, to cede that domain to you: we would fain have the droppings of the sanctuary like the gentle dew from heaven upon the earth beneath.

Here is another Daniel come to judgment! We would say, let another judge's seat be placed for her, if we did not observe that it was love which enlisted her wit to screen the friend of her lover. Here again Shakspeare has derived her public attitude from the emotions which her sex involves: the triumph of the court-room is a stratagem inspired by inclination. In a panel of jurors, how many women we should have to challenge on the ground of unfitness by reason of the element which makes up every verdict of our life! She is disqualified by that exquisite superiority. Her private feeling is liable to be so profoundly interested that sometimes she acquits or condemns, not as a judge, but as a person. Her element, which attains to equilibrium in the world's broad atmosphere, might, if condensed into the Leyden jar of a court-room, explode with singular effects. Upon the bench it might happen that she would make our bail too light, or refuse it altogether. By common consent, Justice has always been a woman; but it was found necessary to blindfold her, that she may not see into which scale to throw a heart.

But this heart of woman, so liable to hurried action, is the centre of her bravest and least calculated gestures. Her profession is that of heroine. Wherever it be natural to recoil, she flouts Nature and declines the job of shrinking. Portia and Helena might be two sisters of the healing art, gratefully welcomed by their own sex's modesty, but self-possessed and prompt wherever suffering tears down the pales of convention; sisters of mercy, hunting after wounds in the rear of battle, dressing maimed soldiers down the sighing wards of hospitals, appalled at no hurt the most hideous, repelled by no festering squalor; the mates of man in courage and dexterity. Let a university be founded for their training.

What shall a Portia undertake to do? That which is level to Portia's capacity. Must she do it? That is as she herself may decide. But we let our women do the dirty drudgery of kitchens, expose themselves to the publicity of saloons, grow sallow and stooping over spindles, and spend all day dodging poverty behind a counter. We pay our money to see them exercise their various talents on the stage, where no exigency of the plot surprises us, no shifts of costume seem inappropriate, no want of it amazing. Oh, we gentlemen are such sticklers for propriety, so interested to keep our women well sequestered! She must not speak in public, but she may sing: Jenny Lind's open mouth does not look indecent, but Lucretia Mott's is an outrage of our modesty! Where will you draw a line through the crowd of competent intelligences? I would draw it very quickly by putting cleverness in the place of dulness, though many a preacher and schoolmaster, many a vapid lecturer, would have to budge. Why should inferiority in a swallow-tail be so valued and protected against superiority in skirts? Napoleon said, "Careers are open to talents;" but he dreaded lively and gifted women, and got them out of the country, wisely suspecting that their insight would fathom his weakness. But no country can flourish till the talents and morals of women mix with its affairs. I cannot see why dulness is more respectable in a man than in a woman. Does it hurt our feelings more to see a woman fail in any public attitude than to see a man do it? No doubt it does; for we cannot entirely disenchant those youthful reveries in which woman, though so close to us, seemed to hover upon an unapproachable horizon, a shape that commanded loyalty from our sense of harmony and proportion,—nothing in excess, nothing in defect; an embodiment of a perfect tone's vibration that thrilled in our ideal of life and promised it a future. We could not tolerate any discrepancy with the allurement of this mystery. Our own sexual distinction enhanced it to the pitch of astonishment and reverence. We could not bear to see her clothed and adorned in a way to jar the taste which she first woke in us. We cannot bear it now. No pretext of convenience in locomotion, whether by horseback, rail, steamer, velocipede, or mangle, can rub out of our preference the lines which trace the reserve that protects our youthful dream. And how can this being, only half suggested yet clearly not ourselves, put a scrawl of crudity in place of those fluent curves that describe something less angular than we are? The gestures of her mind, when they are publicly displayed to throw a glove into the mob of us from the edge of a platform, must always indorse our preconception. Any thing harsh, some acidity of tone, sentences that stride or bandy with arms akimbo, will pique the unconverted world into taking up her glove to crush and not to kiss. So we cannot bear to see a woman pushed forward into premature expression which the gift will not confirm. A man's stupidity does not inflict so great a hurt on our imagination. Distance doth breed divinity; and we shrink to find a woman capable of dulness, and yet able to show it. All this may be conceded to be a natural instinct which men will not abandon. But its root is in regard for woman; so that men should be the first to sound a trumpet before the lists to champion her genius, whatever it may be, and to see that fair play is enforced in the tournament. Shall the gifted woman enter the lists? Let her poverty, if not her preference, consent and decide.

But a woman, however poor she may be, and burdened with claims upon her relationship, cannot try to do what Portia did not need to do unless her talent can justify the attempt. If she presumes upon the deference which man spontaneously pays to her sex, or calculates that curiosity will be piqued to see her exhibition, she cannot, even with the help of her natural allies, flowers, costume, and manner, long conceal some inadequacy for the part she aspires to play. Then she will wreak discredit upon the independence of woman; and, if that be the special cause which she advocates, her presence on the platform will be an advertisement of its failure. For mankind, which has invented the motto for woman which styles her the weaker sex, does not like to be taken at its word, and will not sit patiently where this weakness bores it. It withdraws into the retreats where this accredited weakness is a delight and power. Of course, wherever masculine ineffectiveness appears, men are put out by it, except in a meeting-house; and there it is tolerated in deference to numerous tea-drinkings, marriages and funerals, and hours of pastoral gentleness; and the imminent inadequacy of speech is arrested by the organ. But the platform has neither tradition nor liturgy: the gaze of the audience is a mitrailleuse that sweeps it. There is no rose-window to throw a tint on bloodless speech. Men compromise no truth of their own, and damage no cause when they refrain from listening; for man is already the proprietor of all that he desires, and more than he deserves. This is not the case with woman,—not, at least, in the regions where there are too many mouths and too scanty subsistence; nor in those where cultivated women cherish an interest in equality of opportunities; nor in those where the public law discriminates against them; nor in those where woman dislikes the liberty to be taxed without the right to vote upon the taxing. It is all the more incumbent upon women to be jealously careful that their self-respect, at least, should be adequately represented. They defeat their own thought when they applaud the thin speech which sometimes lends its want of voice to it. It is a "childish treble" that "pipes and whistles in its sound." There is no reason, because its piping and whistling were never tolerated before, that the new chance should confer immunity upon it. The liberty of later times must not be, for either sex, an unchartered libertine. Truth, eternal nature, the laws of mind and the moods of feeling, combine to take a mortgage upon it, whose interest must be paid in coin that is accepted as legal tender by the gifts that hold it. Recognizing this, perhaps the time will come when a superior womanhood shall remand masculine incapacity swiftly to the oblivion it deserves, whenever it mars blocks of marble, squanders paint, debauches music, or drones an absurd bass about God, Religion, and the awful morals. Pray Heaven to have woman restrained from the dilettantism of modern times!

When Portia's heart unties the spasm of joy that tightened round it at Bassanio's choice, it beats again with the grave and sweet dignity that is as native to her as her playful wit. Her mind recognizes the serious change that must befall her fortune: in the first moment of it there comes a deep humility that makes her speech kneel at the feet of the man whom she will marry. For her great superiority is free from the taint of conceit, save "a noble and a true conceit of godlike amity."

We sometimes discover that gifted women are over-consciously aware of the effect which they produce. While we admire the iris on the peacock's neck, a bridling runs through it as if to set the colors in a better light, and our attention is divided by the motion. The orator's greatest gift is self-absorption. It strips his person to clothe his thought. His morals seem to gather luminosity out of the air, to become visible to men. The moment that the speaker listens to his own words, and snatches time between them to make the audience captive to his little private ovation, the people are less absorbed, begin to study the cut of his garments, and nod to each other how well they fit. Then the thought that was beginning to condense goes back like Ariel to the elements. When a woman's excellence reads on our faces that it is delightful, and begins also to be delighted, it throws a shadow: as we stand in it she seems less chaste than we thought her. All of Portia's talents share the inviolable reserve of her person, which seems to convey its modesty into the unspoken thought. How adorable is her humility!—

"You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand,
... an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd:
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But she may learn; and happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn;
Happiest of all, in that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed,
As from her lord, her governor, her king."

Does this language seem to you slavish and old-fashioned? And do you, madam, declare that you never saw the man yet for whom you would so demean yourself? Then I shall know that just at present you are not in love. Perhaps you never have been; for it is the perfect language of a woman's first hours which follow love's declaration, when she feels that her life and soul are to be made complete by marriage. She storms herself with questions never before suggested. What could he see in her? What has she got with which to repay this exquisite flattery, this shuddering delight at being summoned out of millions of her sex? The first impulse is to spill the soul in a libation to the deity of the hour: let the whole of it drench my lover; let me not dare to reserve a portion to teach me a first selfish lesson. All, all is yours, my king! Come, drain it at the chalice of my lips!