Not one of Shakspeare's women utters one line that is inspired by any form of hysteria: the perfect balance of the functions was not yet impaired; so that no nerve-centre could exercise a petty tyranny, nor suggest the morbid fancies and curious superfluities which dedicate so many late romances to St. Vitus, the patron of spasm.
In an admirable book upon "Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls," I found embedded in an excellent vein of common sense the following obscure statement, quoted from another author: "Peripheral influences of an extremely powerful and continuous kind, where they concur with one of those critical periods of life at which the central nervous system is relatively weak and unstable, can occasionally set going a non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may localize itself in those nerves upon whose centres the morbific peripheral influence is perpetually pouring in." Here be words almost as depressing as the ills which the flesh of the modern woman is heiress to; but that legacy cannot be traced as far back as the poetry of that age when the Queen rode along the line of her English soldiers at Tilbury Fort, while Dorcas and Mopsa helped to stack barley to malt the ale for her maids of honor. I doubt if Shakspeare was familiar with many cases, transpiring in the town or the country, of women demolished by "morbific peripheral influence."
So the bodies of his women mature like all the nature out of doors, and become capable of entertaining the great passion with its own strenuous, unconscious innocence, with its honest ardor, with its native directness. Obscure ailments do not warp his verses, nor twang sick pathos out of their nerves. And we seek the society of these unsensational women, just as we seek Shakspeare's verse itself; with the same hope to earn repose for the soul which has been so taxed by the strained rhetoric of later writers. For relief, we recur to the pregnant moderation of Shakspeare's style. Pyrotechnics tire the eye, and send the dazed spectator groping home, as they seem to make more darkness by exploding. One reason for the revival of interest and love for Shakspeare may be found in a natural reaction from artifice and over-wrought expression. The heated mind has discovered an oasis and deep well that wait in this sirocco-stricken age with coolness for our hearts. How eagerly we run toward this shadowed margin where his great power is greatly tempered to our human feeling! His vivacity has been so bred by repose that it never strays beyond the line where stimulus becomes inebriation. He not only despises the abrupt effects which are darlings of the modern pen, but he resolutely refuses to represent abruptness; and his fancy makes its rapid time by even and placid motion; as a great sea-bird, with outstretched wings, in which you scarcely can detect a winnow, will follow the speed of your ship and be seen constantly poised just above the stern. All his figures have the same breadth and floating quality: they take you, as on an expanse of Fortunatus's carpet, upon a great journey silently. They are not apothecary's expedients to raise a blister by sharp surprise, to lash up a jaded taste by some cantharides of metaphor and simile, to rouse a torpid skin by acupuncture, or dull a heavy pain by injected morphia, as our modern practitioners of the ideal do, who have abused tired Nature's sweet restorer and the digestion that should wait on appetite.