Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/244

 on the cheek. But her blood seems richer in the red corpuscles: it wins, therefore, and is more visited by, the air of heaven. There is no blush so daunting, no look so penetrating to dissolve, no silence of a surprised conscience so unanswerable. And when she grieves, it seems as if the eyes were re-enforced, for all the founts of motherhood are weeping.

This ability to vindicate the right and to repudiate the wrong can easily become absurd to the spectators when it is charged with some excess of temper. Literature does ample justice to the termagant vein, and shows that it is ludicrous because it devotes a high degree of choler to a low measure of affront. In pantomimes, an enormous gun is pointed toward the audience, with extravagant anticipation of its exploit on the faces of the performers. For a moment we are cowed, but laughter fills the vast space between the faint puff and the noise we expected.

I presume that Xantippe felt justified in making the home of Socrates so unpleasant that he preferred the market, the forum, and the leather-dresser's shop, because she thought he neglected her for all those places, and wasted time, and kept her drudging, while he ran to find men and make their coarse grain revolve to sharpen his soul's edge against it. Perhaps, as Socrates was famed for falling into brown studies, which sometimes lasted all day, with contempt for food, it was a case of chronic absence of mind on the subject of dinner; for that is as vital as [Greek: to prepon kai kalon], the ethically proper and the beautifully true; and no household can