To him, as to the dying husband of Octavia, this creature of his own hand
might have boasted herself that the loveliest and purest among all her
sisters of his begetting,
with her modest eyes
And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour,
Demurring upon me.
To sum up, Shakespeare has elsewhere given us in ideal incarnation the
perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect
mistress, or the perfect maiden: here only once for all he has given us
the perfect and the everlasting woman.
And what a world of great men and great things, "high actions and high
passions," is this that he has spread under her for a footcloth or hung
behind her for a curtain! The descendant of that other his ancestral
Alcides, late offshoot of the god whom he loved and who so long was loth
to leave him, is here as in history the visible one man revealed who
could grapple for a second with very Rome and seem to throw it, more
lightly than he could cope with Cleopatra. And not the Roman Landor
himself could see or make us see more clearly than has his fellow
provincial of Warwickshire that first imperial nephew of her great first
paramour, who was to his actual uncle even such a foil and counterfeit
and perverse and prosperous parody as the son of Hortense Beauharnais of
Saint-Leu to the son of Letizia Buonaparte of Ajaccio.
Pages:
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197