Out, insolent!—thy bastard shall be king,

That thou mayst be a queen, and check the world !— more than justifies all the keenness of retort that follows. That she resents the insults thus added to the injuries of her foes, infers but little pride. To have remained silent under them, would have been nothing less than meanness in any womanmost of all in a sovereign princess on so public an occasion. Again, in all her exclamations on the betrayal of her cause by her selfish allies, we find, indeed, all the sensitive and intellectual widow and mother,

Oppress'd with wrongs, and therefore full of fears;

but where is the proud self-will? It seems extraordinary that Mrs. Jameson and others should not have reflected that, had a particle of it been represented as belonging originally and inherently to the character of Constance, it would utterly have marred the grand, the sublime effect of her concluding words in this majestic scene. It is simply because there is no pride in her nature-nothing but the indispensable self-respect of the woman, the mother, and the princess, and more especially because the whole previous tenour of this scene itself exhibits her as anything but "an impersonation of pride”

For I am sick, and capable of fears;

Oppress'd with wrongs, and therefore full of fears;
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears;

A woman, naturally born to fears—

that the passage in question is so wonderfully impressive. It is not the proud, fierce, haughty woman, but the sensitive and apprehensive woman alone, lashed out of all her usual habits of mind and temper, by direst injury and basest treachery, into intense resistance and resentment, to whom it can ever occur to say,

I will instruct my sorrows to be proud;
For grief is proud, and makes his owner stout.
To me, and to the state of my great grief,
Let kings assemble; for my grief's so great,
That no supporter but the huge firm earth

Can hold it up. Here I and Sorrow sit;

Here is my throne-bid kings come bow to it!

Here is pride indeed! wrung, for the first time, from a noble tender nature, by the awful climax of indignant sorrow, and placing the "gentle Constance" on that towering eminence from whence, in the desolate majesty of afflicted right, she hurls the keen lightningst of her eloquence upon the mean-souled great ones around her. Theirs, indeed, is the gain, but hers is the triumph!

So much have we deemed it necessary to say in vindication of the moral qualities wherewith Shakespeare has endowed his heroine. We must now say something, for the guidance, it may be, both of the reader and the performer, in correction of some erroneous views, as we esteem them, to which the authoress above-cited, and others, have given circulation, respecting the intellectual powers developed in this character. The substance of Mrs. Jameson's observations on this head is contained in the following sentence:- "The moral energy, that faculty which is principally exercised in self-control, and gives consistency to the rest, is deficient; or rather, to speak more correctly, the extraordinary developement of sensibility and imagination, which lends to the character its rich poetical colouring, leaves the other qualities comparatively subordinate."

66

Following out this view of the matter, Mrs. Jameson speaks of the dramatic Constance as a generous woman, betrayed by her own rash confidence." Generous she is; but where is the rashness of her confidence? What better resource have she and her son, than to trust in the solemn protestations which the potentates best able to assist them are made to deliver at the opening of the second act? What weakness of intellect is here implied? It is clearly her best policy to confide in them. Again, Mrs. Jameson desires us to observe, that the heroine cannot, from her intellectual resources, "borrow patience to submit, or fortitude to endure." But, all feeling apart,

1

what, we would ask, betrayed on every hand, and friendless as she is, has she to gain by submitting and enduring? Constance herself understands her own position as clearly, as she feels it keenly; and states it, too, with her own ever forcible and coherent logic. In answer to the legate's observation, respecting the excommunication of King John—

There's law and warrant, lady, for my curse

most justly does she reply,—

And for mine too: when law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong:
Law cannot give my child his kingdom here,
For he that holds his kingdom holds the law:
Therefore, since law itself is perfect wrong,
How can the law forbid my tongue to curse? *

Equally logical-more strikingly and terribly consequential than the cool reasonings of the Cardinal himself are these sentences addressed to him in her despairing scene :—

And, father cardinal, I have heard you say,

That we shall see and know our friends in heaven.

If that be true, I shall see my boy again;

For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child,

To him that did but yesterday suspire,

There was not such a gracious creature born.

But now will canker sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meagre as an ague's fit;
And so he'll die; and, rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven,
I shall not know him: therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more!

Here, indeed, her heart may be said to stimulate her intellect to a sort of preternatural activity; but she does not rave, she reasons herself into the climax of despair. Yet Mrs. Jameson speaks of "the bewildered pathos and poetry of this address ;" and in a subsequent page proceeds in the same strain-"It is this exceeding vivacity of imagination which in the

* The omission of this passage in acting, mutilates the developement of the intellectual part of this interesting character.

end turns sorrow to frenzy,"-and calls the sublime effusions of her despair "the frantic violence of uncontrolled feeling." This is nothing less than using to the afflicted mother the language addressed to her by the cold-blooded papal diplomatist,

Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow :

and Constance's own answer to the Cardinal is a triumphant refutation of all such criticism:—

Thou art not holy, to belie me so.

am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;
My name is Constance; I was Geffrey's wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost :
I am not mad ;-I would to heaven I were !
For then, 'tis like, I should forget myself:
Oh, if I could, what grief should I forget!-
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canóniz'd, cardinal;
For, being not mad, but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be deliver'd of these woes,
And teaches me to kill or hang myself.
If I were mad, I should forget my son,
Ör madly think a babe of clouts were he:
I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity!

*

But in spite of this convincing protest, Mrs. Jameson sees only, in the lady's invocation to Death, that she "heaps one ghastly image upon another with all the wild luxuriance of a distempered fancy" :

O amiable, lovely death!

Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness!
Arise forth from thy couch of lasting night,
Thou hate and terror to prosperity;

And I will kiss thy détestable bones,

And put my eye-balls in thy vaulty brows,

And ring these fingers with thy household worms,
And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust,
And be a carrion monster like thyself!

Come, grin on me, and I will think thou smil'st,
And buss thee as thy wife! Misery's love,

Oh, come to me!

* The omission of these eight lines in performance, is another mutilation, of the same nature as the one last-mentioned, and even more injurious.

For our own part, we can only exclaim upon this, oh! tremendous and resistless logic of high and true passion! oh, "lion sinews" lent to the intellect by the fearful pressure of despair upon the heart!

We deem it requisite to dwell a little longer upon Mrs. Jameson's general view of this matter, because the error into which she seems to us to fall respecting it, is an essential one, and pervades her criticism of Shakespeare's more poetical characters. The two following passages from this same essay of hers shall be

our text:

"In fact, it is not pride, nor temper, nor ambition, nor even maternal affection, which, in Constance, gives the prevailing tone to the whole character; it is the predominance of imagination. In the poetical, fanciful, excitable cast of her mind, in the excess of the ideal power, tinging all her affections, exalting all her sentiments and thoughts, and animating the expression of both, Constance can only be compared to Juliet." Again: "Some of the most splendid poetry to be met with in Shakespeare may be found in the parts of Juliet and Constance; the most splendid, perhaps, excepting only the parts of Lear and Othello; and for the same reason, that Lear and Othello as men, and Juliet and Constance as women, are distinguished by the predominance of the same faculties passion and imagination."

Here seems to us to lie a radical error, that of regarding the "excess of the ideal power," the predominance of passion and imagination, as productive of "the most splendid poetry." For the very reason that Lear and Othello, Juliet and Constance, are sublime poets, that is, possess the creative mental power in the highest degree, neither fancy nor passion, however vigorous in them, can be predominant, but must exist in due proportion to the strength of the reasoning faculty. Otherwise, the result would be, not poetry, but mere wild, incoherent raving, such as Mrs. Jameson has mistakingly attributed to the most impassioned speeches of Constance herself.