Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola,
Helena, and Isabella are all, not without a tinge of knight-errantry
that does not do the least violence to the conception of tender,
delicate womanhood, the good geniuses of the little worlds in which
their influence is made to be felt. Events must inevitably have gone
tragically but for their intervention. But with the advent of the second
period all this changes. At first the women, like Brutus' Portia,
Ophelia, Desdemona, however noble or sweet in character and well
meaning in motive, are incapable of grasping the guiding threads of the
events around them and controlling them for good. They have to give way
to characters of another kind, who bear the form without the nature of
women. Commencing with Lady Macbeth, the conception falls lower and
lower, through Goneril and Regan, Cressida, Cleopatra, until in the
climax of this utter despair, "Timon," there is no character that it
would not be a profanity to call by the name of woman.
126. And just as womanly purity and innocence quail before unwomanly
self-assertion and voluptuousness, so manly loyalty and unselfishness
give way before unmanly treachery and self-seeking. It is true that the
bad men do not finally triumph, but they triumph over the good with whom
they happen to come in contact. In "King Lear," what man shows any
virtue who does not receive punishment for the same? Not Gloucester,
whose loyal devotion to his king obtains for him a punishment that is
only merciful in that it prevents him from further suffering the sight
of his beloved master's misery; not Kent, who, faithful in his
self-denying service through all manner of obloquy, is left at last with
a prayer that he may be allowed to follow Lear to the grave; and beyond
these two there is little good to be found.
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