The great motives and impulses of human nature do not find themselves made obsolete by Shakspeare's genius: we meet the central passion of Love animating every play, and modified by the various characteristics of his women. They appear in the plots, as in the world, to discharge that great function of their being. Steele once said of a woman, "To have loved her was a liberal education,"--a happy phrase which has done duty since in other connections. There must have been floating in Steele's mind the verses of Biron in "Love's Labor Lost;" at least, the pith of his sentence is there anticipated:--
"For when would you, my lord, or you, or you, Have found the ground of study's excellence, Without the beauty of a woman's face? From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They are the ground, the books, the Academes, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. For where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?"
"Without love I can fancy no gentleman," says Thackeray.
When Shakspeare shows his characters in love, the passion is as fresh and uncompromising as if it were still the morning of the world. His verse "dallies with the innocence of love, like the old age." The curious considerations of the modern novelist were not then invented. His lovers trump up no obstacles out of over-nice and subtle reflection: all that hampers them is circumstance, a family feud, a transparent jealousy, a disguise of fortune, a father's will, or a conspiracy. They do not take themselves apart before us, as lecturers do their manikin, to show how cunningly morbid the organs may become. There is no mesh of motives woven around and across, so intricately that if the lover breaks from one of his own threads he can catch himself by another, and keep worrying the poor fly of his feeling. Shakspeare's women love without sparing a moment for analysis: the rose is crushed to the bosom, a glory of stamens, petals, and perfume, whose names are unknown and unheeded; for the botanizing of emotions was the æsthetic of a later day when men cull a herbarium from their mothers' graves. In this regard Shakspeare is as direct as the Greeks, though far more vital. He puts into his live people the passion which the old chorus used to hold up like a placard:--