Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/281

 the extravagant submission of a tender wife: they are all single strings of the old Greek lyre, never tuned to sweep into a perfect octave. The note which Alcestis emits is merely her willingness to die. Imogen sounds the same at the command of a husband who suspects her honor. But it wakes the harmony of other strings, and we listen to a chastity that is as spirited and deadly as it is submissive; to a love that is as eager as it is refined; to an honesty that exposes the discord of double dealing by chiming with a simplicity that scarce knows how to suspect; to a purity that is as unconscious as a girl, while it is as haughty as a man. The chords are rich and solid, and support the theme of her character through all its movements.

So women began to exist for the first time in literature. Shakspeare discovered woman, and took note of her generic peculiarity which upholds the specific differences of individual women. They all came forth to him as surely as flowers to the sun. He solicited each jealously interfolded sheath, and drew out of it the heart of its color. All of them are rooted in the common ground of sex; but each one lifts into the blossom her signals of a temper and modulation that are peculiarly her own. So that, although "each woman is a brief of Womankind," she is also a woman who must be designated by some one of Shakspeare's famous names.

In fact, genius was never penetrated with the varieties of woman's temperament till Shakspeare, picking up a few rustic specimens in Stratford, ran away with them to London, taking down there honest, red-fisted Audrey;