herself, disguised as or metamorphosed
into a boy.... But let us look well at him: let him finish his song and
raise his audacious eyes; let him rise and be pulled to and fro, bashful
with false bashfulness half covering his mischievous, monkish impudence,
while Susanna is mumming him up in petticoats and kerchiefs; let us look
at him again now, and we shall see that he is no Jehan de Saintre, no
male Mignon, no Viola in boy's clothes, no sweetly pure little romantic
figure, but an impertinent, precocious little Lovelace, a serio-comic
little jackanapes, sighing and weeping only to giggle and pirouette
on his heels the next moment. From the Countess he will run to the
gardener's daughter, from her to the waiting-maid, to the duenna, to all
womankind; he is a professed lady-killer and woman-teaser of thirteen.
There is indeed something graceful and romantic in the idea of this
pretty child consoling, with his poetical, absurd love, the poor,
neglected, ill-used lady. But then he has been smuggled in by that
dubious Abigail, Susanna; the sentimental, melancholy Countess is amused
by dressing him up in women's clothes; and when, in the midst of the
masquerade, the voice of the Count is heard without, the page is huddled
away into a closet, his presence is violently denied, and the Countess
admits her adored though fickle lord with a curious, conscious,
half-guilty embarrassment. We feel vaguely that Shakspeare would never
have introduced his boy Ganymede or his page Cesario into that
dressing-room of the Countess Almaviva; that the archly jesting Maria
would never have dreamed of amusing the Lady Olivia with such mummings;
we miss in this proudly sentimental lady, in this sly waiting-woman, in
this calf-loving dressed-up boy the frank and boisterous merriment of
Portia and Nerissa in their escapades and mystifications; there is in
all this too much locking of doors and drawing of curtains, too much
whispered giggling, too little audible laughter; there hangs an
indefinable sense of impropriety about the whole scene. No, no, this is
no delicate and gracious young creature of the stock of Elizabethan
pages, no sweet exotic in the France of 1780; this Cherubino is merely a
graceful, coquettish little Greuze figure, with an equivocal simplicity,
an ogling _naivete_, a smirking bashfulness, a hidden audacity of
corruption; a creature of Sterne or Marivaux, tricked out in imitation
Mediaeval garb, with the stolen conscious wink of