Part 73

No other feeling can be traced through the whole of her frantic scene: it is grief only, a mother's heart-rending, soul-absorbing grief, and nothing else. Not even indignation, or the desire of revenge, interfere with its soleness and intensity. An ambitious woman would hardly have thus addressed the cold, wily Cardinal:--

And, Father Cardinal, I have heard you say, That we shall see and know our friends in heaven: If that be true, I shall see my boy again: For since the birth of Cain, the first male child, To him that did but yesterday suspire, There was not such a gracious creature born. But now will canker eat my bud, And chase the native beauty from his cheek, And he will look as hollow as a ghost; As dim and merge as an ague's fit; And so he'll die; and rising so again, When I shall meet him in the court of heaven I shall not know him: therefore never, never. Must I behold my pretty Arthur more!

The bewildered pathos and poetry of this address could be natural in no woman, who did not unite, like Constance, the most passionate sensibility with the most vivid imagination.

It is true that Queen Elinor calls her on one occasion, "ambitious Constance;" but the epithet is rather the natural expression of Elinor's own fear and hatred than really applicable. Elinor, in whom age had subdued all passions but ambition, dreaded the mother of Arthur as her rival in power, and for that reason only opposed the claims of the son: but I conceive, that in a woman yet in the prime of life, and endued with the peculiar disposition of Constance, the mere love of power would be too much modified by fancy and feeling to be called a passion.

In fact, it is not pride, nor temper, nor ambition, nor even maternal affection, which in Constance gives the prevailing tone to the whole character; it is the predominance of imagination. I do not mean in the conception of the dramatic portrait, but in the temperament of the woman herself. In the poetical, fanciful, excitable cast of her mind, in the excess of the ideal power, tinging all her affections, exalting all her sentiments and thoughts, and animating the expression of both, Constance can only be compared to Juliet.

In the first place, it is through the power of imagination that when under the influence of excited temper, Constance is not a mere incensed woman; nor does she, in the style of Volumnia, "lament in anger, Juno-like," but rather like a sibyl in a fury. Her sarcasms come down like thunderbolts. In her famous address to Austria--

O Lymoges! O Austria! thou dost shame That bloody spoil! thou slave! thou wretch! thou coward! &c.

it is as if she had concentrated the burning spirit of scorn, and dashed it in his face: every word seems to blister where it falls. In the scolding scene between her and Queen Elinor, the laconic insolence of the latter is completely overborne by the torrent of bitter contumely which bursts from the lips of Constance, clothed in the most energetic, and often in the most figurative expressions.

ELINOR.

Who is it thou dost call usurper, France?

CONSTANCE.

Let me make answer; Thy usurping son.

ELINOR.

Out insolent! thy bastard shall be king, That thou may'st be a queen, and check the world!

CONSTANCE.

My bed was ever to thy son as true, As thine was to thy husband; and this boy Liker in feature to his father Geffrey, Than thou and John in manners: being as like As rain to water, or devil to his dam. My boy a bastard! By my soul, I think His father never was so true begot; It cannot be, an if thou wert his mother.

ELINOR.

There's a good mother, boy, that blots thy father.

CONSTANCE.

There's a good grandam, boy, that would blot thee.

* * * *

ELINOR.

Come to thy grandam, child.

CONSTANCE.

Do child; go to its grandam, child: Give grandam kingdom, and its grandam will Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig: There's a good grandam.

ARTHUR.

Good my mother, peace! I would that I were low laid in my grave; I am not worth this coil that's made for me.

ELINOR.