227 3. ROSALIND WITH PHEBE, AND WITH JAQUES. [July 27th, 1844.] THE love affair between Phebe and Silvius contrasts beautifully with that between Orlando and Rosalind. The young shepherd's passionate devotion to "the proud disdainful shepherdess" yet unexperienced in the wounds invisible That love's keen arrows make, presents a charming foil to that mutual passion and affection in the two leading personages of the piece, which we find so constant and progressive from the moment of their first interview. It is also the principal means of developing that healthy proportion with which the poet has so exquisitely endowed this heroine's character, between the play of the feelings and the activity of the intellect. She is not love-sick and languishing; she is love-inspired, to more active benevolence and more happy invention. Thus, upon the old shepherd's intimation to her and Celia If you will see a pageant truly play'd If you will mark it, she eagerly replies Oh come, let us remove; The sight of lovers feedeth those in love :- So, indeed, she proves. In the scene that follows, to borrow one of her own subsequent expressions, she "speaks to some purpose." We can hardly, therefore, agree with Mrs. Jameson, that, in the dialogue in question, Phebe is "more in earnest" than her monitress. It is not, however, the wholesome lecture which she reads the scornful beauty, that begins to bring her to reason; but the impression which her look and accent make upon her in the assumed person of Ganymede, as described in that celebrated passage from Phebe's own lips, which we have cited in the first of these papers. Among those lines, how admirably expressive of that essential tenderness which Shakespeare has so constantly combined, in this character, with even the keenest flashes of wit and intellect—that fear of wounding, even in reproof -is Phebe's remark And faster than his tongue In the subsequent scene where she reads the letter addressed to her as Ganymede by the shepherdess, her prompt and apt inventiveness is yet more conspicuous, in the means which she devises to increase the disabusing effect of the communication which she makes to Silvius of Phebe's treacherous offer, by first describing it to him, in exaggerated terms, as a letter of scornful defiance,-though her counsel to the shepherd, not to "love such a woman," is as much thrown away upon the man whom, as she says, "love hath made a tame snake," as her exhortation to requital of his love had been upon the shepherdess herself. It is remarkable, that the dramatist seems to have studiously heightened the effect of these passages exhibiting the intellectual ascendancy of his heroine, by the juxtaposition in which he has placed them with others which peculiarly unfold her lively tenderness of feeling. The former scene comes upon her at the moment when she is impatiently expecting Orlando's fulfilment of his first wooing appointment: the latter, in like manner, comes just when she is anxiously awaiting him the second time, his hour being already expired; and is followed immediately by the agitating narrative which produces the fainting scene spoken of in our last paper. Let us here observe the art with which, after so inauspicious an opening of their courtship, a happy union is brought about between the shepherd and shepherdess without violating probability. First, the instant fulfilment of her lover's prediction O dear Phebe, If ever (as that ever may be near) You meet in some fresh cheek the power of fancy, Then, her first sympathetic relenting- Silvius, the time was, that I hated thee; Next, her wooing Ganymede by the very lips of Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis, to love. It is, to be all made of faith and service; It is, to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes; All adoration, duty, and obeisance,— All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,— And so am I for Phebe. Thus, the very eloquence which she borrows to plead her own passion, is made to appeal to her awakened feelings more impressively than ever on her lover's behalf. So that when, at last, the flow of those feelings in their original channel is suddenly and hopelessly stopped by the discovery of the real sex of the seeming youth, we can well believe the disappointed shepherdess where, turning to her constant adorer, she says in conclusion Thy faith my fancy to thee doth combine. Over all this, however, the beneficently inventive genius of Rosalind presides. But it is the contact into which she is brought with the great misanthrope X of the piece, that most eminently draws forth that sound moral wisdom with which the poet has endowed her. They who have speculated upon the question, how far the melancholy of Jaques might be supposed to have been identified with Shakespeare's own feelings at the particular period when this play was composed, might have spared themselves much profitless conjecture, had they attended more closely to his conversations-not only with the "motley-minded" cynic of the piece-but with those three several personages in it who so amply and triumphantly proclaim the theory as well as exhibit the practice of genial humanity and active benevolence-the exiled father of Rosalind, her exiled lover, and her exiled self. The rebukes which the duke administers to the self-absorbed and sarcastic ruminations of the sated voluptuary (not excepting the celebrated speech on the " seven ages," which it has been so customary to cite as Shakespeare's own deliberate and impartial view of human life), are summed up in those two remarkable passages, so characteristic of the generous fortitude of the man whose misfortunes have not been of his own procuring, as contrasted with the self-engrossed complaining of the man who has been the principal artificer of his own misery : Fie on thee! I can tell what thou wouldst do;- As sensual as the brutish sting itself; And all the embossed sores and headed evils Again : Thou seest, we are not all alone unhappy : Presents more woeful pageants than the scene In the like spirit, Orlando answers the proposal of Jaques, that they two shall sit down together and rail against their mistress the world, and all their misery :— I will chide no breather in the world, but myself; against whom I know most faults. But it is Rosalind who is made to reprove, in one breath, both the misanthrope and the cynic, immediately after her first scene with Phebe: Jaq. I pr'ythee, pretty youth, let me be better acquainted with thee. Ros. They say, you are a melancholy fellow. Jaq. I am so; I do love it better than laughing. Ros. Those that are in extremity of either, are abominable fellows; and betray themselves to every modern censure, worse than drunkards. Then, when Jaques has described his melancholy as resulting from the sundry contemplation of his travels": Ros. A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear, you have sold your own lands, to see other men's: then, to have seen much, and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes_and_poor hands. Jaq. Yes, I have gained my experience. Ros. And your experience makes you sad: I had rather have a fool to make me merry, than experience to make me sad; and to travel for it, too. And even when Jaques is hurrying away at the approach of Orlando, the dramatist makes her pursue him with that exquisite characterization of the prevalent coxcombries of returned travellers in general: Farewell, monsieur traveller. Look you lisp, and wear strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your nativity; and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are; or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola. Having now carefully traced, on the page of Shakespeare, the poet's own conception of this exquisitely ideal character, up to its highest intellectual developement, it is time to shew succinctly the degradation which it has undergone at the hands of the critics; and how this critical perversion itself has originated, for the most part, in false theatrical interpretation. |
