credible and intelligible-not like those monstrous caricatures we meet with in history MEDON. In history?-this is new! ALDA. Yes! I repeat, in history, where certain isolated facts and actions are recorded, without any relation to causes or motives, or connecting feelings; and pictures exhibited, from which the considerate mind turns in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive and, I may add, reasonable incredulity. I have lately seen one of Correggio's finest pictures, in which the three Furies are represented, not as ghastly deformed hags, with talons, and torches, and snaky hair, but as young women, with fine luxuriant forms and regular features, and a single serpent wreathing the tresses like a bandeau-but such countenances!-such a hideous expression of malice, cunning, and cruelty! and the effect is beyond conception appalling. Leonardo da Vinci worked upon the same grand principle of art in his Medusa Where it is less the horror than the grace 'Tis the melodious tints of beauty thrown And Shakspeare, who understood all truth, worked out his conceptions on the same principle, having said himself, that "proper deformity shows not in the fiend so horrid as in woman." Hence it is that whether he portrayed the wickedness founded in perverted power, as in Lady Macbeth; or the wickedness founded in weakness, as in Gertrude, Lady Anne, or Cressida, he is the more fearfully impressive, because we cannot claim for ourselves an exemption from the same nature, before which, in its corrupted state, we tremble with horror or shrink with disgust. MEDON. Do you remember that some of the commentators of Shakspeare have thought it incumbent on their gallantry to express their utter contempt for the scene between Richard and Lady Anne, as a monstrous and incredible libel on your sex? ALDA. They might have spared themselves the trouble. Lady Anne is just one of those women whom we see walking in crowds through the drawing-rooms of the worldthe puppets of habit, the fools of fortune, without any particular inclination for vice, or any steady principle of virtue; whose actions are inspired by vanity, not affection, and regulated by opinion, not by conscience: who are good while there is no temptation to be otherwise, and ready victims of the first soliciting to evil. In the case of Lady Anne, we are startled by the situation: not three months a widow, and following to the sepulchre the remains. of a husband and a father, she is met and wooed and won by the very man who murdered them. In such a case it required perhaps either Richard or the arch-fiend himself to tempt her successfully; but in a less critical moment, a far less subtle and audacious seducer would have sufficed. Cressida is another modification of vanity, weakness, and falsehood, drawn in stronger colours. The world contains many Lady Annes and Cressidas, polished and refined externally, whom chance and vanity keep right, whom chance and vanity lead wrong, just as it may happen. When we read in history of the enormities of certain women, perfect scarecrows and ogresses, we can safely, like the Pharisee in Scripture, hug ourselves in our secure virtue, and thank God that we are not as others are:--but the wicked women in Shakspeare are portrayed with such perfect consistency and truth, that they leave us no such resource— they frighten us into reflection—they make us believe and tremble. On the other hand, his amiable women are touched with such exquisite simplicity-they have so little external pretension and are so unlike the usual heroines of tragedy and romance, that they delight us more "than all the nonsense of the beau-idéal!" We are flattered by the perception of our own nature in the midst of so many charms and virtues: not only are they what we could wish to be, or ought to be, but what we persuade ourselves we might be, or would be, under a different and a happier state of things, and, perhaps, some time or other may be. They are not stuck up, like the cardinal virtues, all in a row, for us to admire and wonder at-they are not mere poetical abstractions-nor (as they have been termed) mere abstractions of the affections, But common clay ta'en from the common earth, MEDON. Beautiful lines!-Where are they? |