madness and sorrow, in which life is a phantom and destiny drives so
remorselessly, Taine finds on the stage and in the literature of the
period.

To do him justice, he finds something else, something that might give him
a hint of the innate soundness of English life in its thousands of sweet
homes, something of that great force of moral stability, in the midst of
all violence and excess of passion and performance, which makes a nation
noble. "Opposed to this band of tragic figures," which M. Taine arrays
from the dramas, "with their contorted features, brazen fronts, combative
attitudes, is a troop (he says) of timid figures, tender before
everything, the most graceful and love-worthy whom it has been given to
man to depict. In Shakespeare you will meet them in Miranda, Juliet,
Desdemona, Virginia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound also in
the others; and it is a characteristic of the race to have furnished
them, as it is of the drama to have represented them. By a singular
coincidence the women are more of women, the men more of men, here than
elsewhere. The two natures go to its extreme--in the one to boldness, the
spirit of enterprise and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and
unpolished character; in the other to sweetness, devotion, patience,
inextinguishable affection (hence the happiness and strength of the
marriage tie), a thing unknown in distant lands, and in France especially
a woman here gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and
duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing, and pretending only
to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has
freely and forever chosen." This is an old German instinct. The soul in
this race is at once primitive and serious. Women are disposed to follow
the noble dream called duty. "Thus, supported by innocence and
conscience, they introduce into love a profound and upright sentiment,
abjure coquetry, vanity, and flirtation; they do not lie, they are not