Love, thou invincible battle![17] Love, thou router of lucre, To capture the softness of youth And lodge in the bloom of its cheeks! 'Tis all one to thee if thou farest By sea, or dost loiter in farm-yards. It helps not to be an immortal; Mankind is no refuge from thee Who art of men the first madness. Thou dost ravish the just of their judgment, Dost snatch them to blame; Thou art the bicker that vexes The blood in the hearts that are kin. Vivid the promise of bride-bed Thou kindlest on eyelids of virgins, Great prescripts of past time undoing; So sports Aphrodite, and rules.
Shakspeare has inherited the antique single-mindedness, undisturbed by all our modern after-thoughts of sentiment. His heroines do not understand what refinements of torture a cultivated soul can invent to make itself wretched. They are frank and instantaneous; as when Miranda puts her heart into Ferdinand's hand, so sweetly unconscious of all that the action involves. She only knows that she has "no ambition to see a goodlier man," no arts to use to win him, no starting to overtake the passion with a pack of doubts.
"Hence, bashful cunning, And prompt me, plain and holy innocence! I am your wife, if you will marry me."
The only game she plays with him is chess, but she does better than stale-mate him.
Beatrice, for all her cleverness, shows that she loves Benedick in the first words she utters in the play. For she asks if he has returned from the wars, and gives him a fencing-term for a nickname, to pretend a profound unconcern; then disparages him in a most lively way, and asks whom he has now for a companion, seeming to allude to men, but expecting to know by the answer if his affections have become involved with any woman. And when he fences her wit with his bachelor banter, it piques her secret admiration. She has no other subtlety beyond her wit: she uses it to misprize the wedded state, and to mock indiscriminately at men,--a very common and transparent stratagem of a heart that is deeply engaged; and, beneath all the gay and flippant manner, she feels hurt because she thinks that Benedick is really cool and does not feign.
There is nothing but the mask of night upon Juliet's face to hide, the blush which her lips acknowledge. "Farewell compliment. Dost thou love me?" The bud of love becomes a beauteous flower in its first spring day, for it is too impatient to levy on the lagging warmth of summer; and the sudden heat sends every drop of Juliet's blood rushing into the frankest words that maiden ever spoke. She has not even mental device enough to hush what the most passionate women, of a type less frigid than our own, are quite content to feel if there's love enough to justify. So the verses which come fluent from Juliet's lips do not scald like the insinuations of some modern novels which plot random passions and ingeniously dally with them. Shakspeare has no pages of this elaborate suggestion. His mental style was like the archer's bolt that quivers in the middle of the boss: he never could have learned this modern practice of the boomerang, which dips, skims, makes ricochets, lingers, doubles corners, and plays back into the sender's hand.