Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/222

 to her from the point of appreciating her act which disenchants him. All this we have to put down tediously to rescue Shakspeare's compactness from Coleridge's misrepresentation.

But it gives me an opportunity to suggest that women are less hypocritical to their own minds than men are, not because they feel less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more of its outward consequences, but because they have an organic instinct, that is due to difference of sex, to be swayed first by passions and inclinations that are entirely frank and unconventional, and afterwards by motives arising out of abstract principles. Therefore they are natively unconscious of something which men smile at or deplore, as they call it insincerity. In the description of one of his characters, Bulwer says, "That strange faculty in women which we men call dissimulation, and which in them is truthfulness to their own nature, enabled her to carry off the sharpest anguish she had ever experienced by a sudden burst of levity of spirit."

Thackeray shows how this native trait can run to viciousness: "When I say I know women, I mean I know that I don't know them. Every woman I ever knew is a puzzle to me, as, I have no doubt, she is to herself. Say they are not clever? Benighted idiot! She has long ago taken your measure and your friends'. She knows your weaknesses, and ministers to them in a thousand artful ways. She knows your obstinate points, and marches round them with the most curious art and patience, as you will see an ant on a journey turn round