II. SHAKESPEARE’S TRANSMUTATION OF HIS MATERIAL…

II. SHAKESPEARE’S TRANSMUTATION OF HIS MATERIAL

The examples given in the previous chapter may serve to show that from one point of view it is impossible to exaggerate Shakespeare’s dependence on Plutarch. But this is not the only or the most important aspect of the case. He alters and adds quite as much as he gets. No slight modification of the story is implied by its mere reduction to dramatic shape, at least when the dramatiser is so consummate a playwright as Shakespeare. And it is very interesting to observe the instinctive skill with which he throws narrated episodes, like that of the death of Cassius, into the form of dialogues and scenes. But the dramatisation involves a great deal more than this. Shakespeare has to fix on what he regards as the critical points in the continuous story, to rearrange round them what else he considers of grand importance, and to bridge in some way the gaps between. These were prime essentials in all his English historical pieces. The pregnant moments have to be selected; and become so many ganglia, in which a number of filaments chronologically distinct are gathered up; yet they have to be exhibited not in isolation, but as connected with each other, and all belonging to one system. And in Julius Caesar this is the more noticeable, as it makes use of more sources than one. The main authority is the Life of Brutus, but the Life of Caesar also is employed very freely, and the Life of Antony to some extent. The scope and need for insight in this portion of the task are therefore proportionately great.

Thus the opening scene refers to Caesar’s defeat of the sons of Pompey in Spain, for which he celebrated his triumph in October, 45 B.C. But Shakespeare dates it on the 15th February, 44 B.C., at the Lupercalian Festival.[152] Then, in the account of Caesar’s chagrin at his reception, he mixes up, as Plutarch himself to some extent does, two quite distinct episodes, one of which does not belong to the Lupercalia at all.[153] Lastly, it was only later that the Tribunes were silenced and deprived of their offices for stripping the images, not of Caesar’s “trophies,” but of “diadems,”[154] or, more specifically, of the “laurel crown”[155] Antony had offered him.

[152] Possibly he may have found a suggestion for this in Plutarch’s expression that at the Lupercalia, Caesar was “apparelled in a triumphant manner” (Julius Caesar); or, more definitely “apparelled in his triumphing robe” (Marcus Antonius).

[153] In the Julius Caesar it is at an interview with the Senate in the market place that Caesar, in his vexation, bares his neck to the blow, and afterwards pleads his infirmity in excuse; and nothing of the kind is recorded in connection with the offer of the crown at the Lupercalia. In the Marcus Antonius the undignified exhibition, as Plutarch regards it, is referred to the Lupercalia, and the previous incident is not mentioned.

[154] Julius Caesar.

[155] Marcus Antonius.

The next group of events is clustered round the assassination, and they begin on the eve of the Ides, the 14th March. But at first we are not allowed to feel that a month has passed. By various artifices the flight of time is kept from obtruding itself. The position of the scene with the storm, which ushers in this part of the story, as the last of the first act instead of the first of the second, of itself associates it in our minds with what has gone before. Then there are several little hints that we involuntarily expand in the same sense. Thus Cassius has just said:

I will this night, In several hands, in at his windows throw, As if they came from several citizens, Writings all tending to the great opinion That Rome holds of his name; wherein obscurely Caesar’s ambition shall be glanced at. (I. ii. 319.)

And now we hear him say:

Good Cinna, take this paper, And look you lay it in the praetor’s chair, Where Brutus may but find it: and throw this In at his window; set this up with wax Upon old Brutus’ statue. (I. iii. 142.)

We seem to see him carrying out the programme that he has announced for the night of the Lupercalia. Yet there are other hints,—the frequency with which Brutus has received these instigations (II. i. 49), his protracted uncertainty since Cassius first sounded him (II. i. 61), the fact that he himself has had time to approach Ligarius,—which presently make us realise that the opening scenes of the drama are left a long way behind.

And in this section, too, Shakespeare has crowded his incidents. The decisive arrangements of the conspirators, with their rejection of the oath, are dated the night before the assassination; Plutarch puts them earlier. Then, according to Plutarch, there was a senate meeting the morning after Caesar’s murder; and Antony, having escaped in slave’s apparel, proposed an amnesty for the perpetrators, offered his son as hostage, and persuaded them to leave the Capitol. On the following day dignities were distributed among the ringleaders and a public funeral was decreed to Caesar. Only then did the reading of the will, the speech of Antony, and the émeute of the people follow, and the reading of the will preceded the speech. After a while Octavius comes from Apollonia to see about his inheritance.

In the play, on the other hand, Antony’s seeming agreement with the assassins is patched up a few minutes after the assassination. Octavius, summoned by the dead Caesar, is already within seven leagues of Rome. Antony at once proceeds with the corpse to the market place. He has hardly made his speech and then read the will, when, as the citizens rush off in fury, he learns that Octavius has arrived.

A lengthy interval elapses between the end of Act III. and the beginning of Act IV., occupied, so far as Rome and Italy were concerned, with the rivalry and intrigues of Antony and Octavius, and the discomfiture of the former (partly through Cicero’s exertions), till he wins the army of Lepidus and Octavius finds it expedient to join forces with him and establish the Triumvirate. But of all this not a word in Shakespeare. He dismisses it as irrelevant, and creates an illusion of speed and continuity, where there is none. The servant who announces the arrival of Octavius, tells Antony:

He and Lepidus are at Caesar’s house. (III. xi. 269.)

“Bring me to Octavius,” says Antony. And the fourth act opens “at a house in Rome,” “Antony, Octavius and Lepidus seated at a table,” just finishing the lists of the proscription. The impression produced is that their conference is direct sequel to the popular outbreak and the conspirators’ flight. Yet it is November, 43 B.C., and nineteen or twenty months have gone by since the Ides of March. And the progress of time is indicated as well as concealed. Antony announces as a new and alarming piece of news

And now, Octavius, Listen great things:—Brutus and Cassius Are levying powers. (IV. i. 40.)

This too covers a gap in the history and hurries on the connection. The suggestion is that they are beginning operations at last, and that hitherto they have been inactive. Their various intermediate adventures and wanderings are passed over. We are carried forward to their grand effort, and are reintroduced to them only when they meet again at Sardis in the beginning of 42 B.C., just before the final movement to Philippi, where the battle was fought in October of the same year.

And this scene also is “compounded of many simples.” The dispute which the poet[156] interrupts, the difference of opinion about Pella, the appearance of the Spirit, are all located at Sardis by Plutarch, but he separates them from each other; the news of Portia’s death is undated, the quarrel about money matters took place at Smyrna, and other traits are derived from various quarters. Here they are all made

To join like likes, and kiss like native things.

[156] In the Lives Faonius or Phaonius, properly Favonius, a follower of Cato. (Marcus Brutus.)

Then at Philippi itself, not only are some of the speeches transferred from the eve to the day of the engagement; but a whole series of operations, and two pitched battles, twenty days apart, after the first of which Cassius, and after the second of which Brutus, committed suicide, are pressed into a few hours.

It will thus be seen that though the action is spread over a period of three years, from the triumphal entry of Caesar in October, 45 B.C., till the victory of his avengers in October, 42 B.C., Shakespeare concentrates it into the story of five eventful days, which however do not correspond to the five separate acts, but by “overlapping” and other contrivances produce the effect of close sequence, while in point of fact, historically, they are not consecutive at all.

In the first day there is the exposition, enforcing the predominance of Caesar and the revulsion against it (Act I. i. and ii.); assigned to the 15th February, 44 B.C.

In the second day there is the assassination with its immediate preliminaries and sequels (Act I. iii., Act II., Act III.) all compressed within the twenty-four hours allowed to a French tragedy, viz. within the interval between the night before the Ides of March and the next afternoon or evening.[157]

[157] Cassius says at the end of the long opening scene of the series: “It is after midnight” (Act I. iii. 163). In the last scene of the group, Cinna, on his way to Caesar’s funeral, is murdered by the rioters apparently just after they have left Antony.

In the third day there is the account of the Proscription in November, 43 B.C. (Act IV. i.). In the fourth day the meeting of Brutus and Cassius, which took place early in 42 B.C., and the apparition of the boding spirit, are described (Act IV. ii. and iii.). Both these days are included in one act.

The fifth day is devoted to the final battle and its accessories, and must be placed in October, 42 B.C. (Act V.).

But the selection, assortment and filiation of the data are not more conspicuous in the construction of the plot than in the execution of the details. There will be frequent occasion to touch incidentally on these and similar processes in the discussion of other matters, but here it may be well to illustrate them separately, so far as that is possible when nearly every particular instance shows the influence of more than one of them.

Thus while Shakespeare’s picture of the very perfect union of Brutus and Portia is taken almost in its entirety from Plutarch, who was himself so keenly alive to the beauty of such a wedlock, the charm of the traits he adopts is heightened by the absence of those he rejects. Probably indeed he did not know, for Plutarch does not mention it, that Brutus had been married before, and had got rid of his first wife by the simple and regular expedient of sending her home to her father. But he did know that Portia, too, had a first husband, Bibulus, “by whom she had also a young sonne.” The ideal beauty of their relation is unbrushed by any hint of their previous alliances.

So, too, he attributes the coolness between Brutus and Cassius at the beginning of the story merely to Brutus’ inward conflicts, and to Cassius’ misconstruction of his preoccupation. In point of fact, it had a more definite and less creditable cause. According to Plutarch, they had both been strenuous rivals for the position of City Praetor, Brutus recommended by his “vertue and good name,” Cassius by his “many noble exploytes” against the Parthians. Caesar, saying “Cassius cause is juster, but Brutus must be first preferred,” had given Brutus the chief dignity and Cassius the second: therefore “they grew straunge together for the sute they had for the praetorshippe.” But it would not answer Shakespeare’s purpose to show Brutus as moved by personal ambitions, or either of them as aspiring for honours that Caesar could grant.

There are few better examples of the way in which Shakespeare rearranges his material than the employment he makes of Plutarch’s enumeration of the portents that preceded the assassination. It is given as immediate preface to the catastrophe of the Ides.

Certainly, destenie may easier be foreseene then avoyded; considering the straunge and wonderfull signes that were sayd to be seene before Caesars death. For touching the fires in the element, and spirites running up and downe in the night, and also these solitarie birdes to be seene at noone dayes sittinge in the great market place: are not all these signes perhappes worth the noting in such a wonderfull chaunce as happened? But Strabo the Philosopher wryteth, that divers men were seene going up and downe in fire: and furthermore, that there was a slave of the souldiers, that did cast a marvelous burning flame out of his hande, insomuch as they that saw it, thought he had been burnt, but when the fire was out, it was found he had no hurt. Caesar selfe also doing sacrifice unto the Goddes, found that one of the beastes which was sacrificed had no hart: and that was a straunge thing in nature, how a beast could live without a hart. Furthermore, there was a certain soothsayer that had geven Caesar warning long time affore, to take heede of the day of the Ides of Marche (which is the fifteenth of the moneth), for on that day he should be in great daunger. That day being come, Caesar going into the Senate house, and speaking merily to the Soothsayer, tolde him, ‘The Ides of Marche be come’: ‘So be they’, softly aunswered the Soothsayer, ‘but yet are they not past.’ And the very day before, Caesar supping with Marcus Lepidus, sealed certaine letters as he was wont to do at the bord: so talke falling out amongest them, reasoning what death was best: he preventing their opinions, cried out alowde, ‘Death unlooked for.’ Then going to bedde the same night as his manner was, and lying with his wife Calpurnia, all the windowes and dores of his chamber flying open, the noyse awooke him, and made him affrayed when he saw such light: but more when he heard his wife Calpurnia, being fast a sleepe weepe and sigh, and put forth many fumbling and lamentable speaches. For she dreamed that Caesar was slaine, and that she had him in her armes.[158]

[158] Julius Caesar.

It is interesting to note how Shakespeare takes this passage to pieces and assigns those of them for which he has a place to their fitting and effective position. Plutarch’s reflections on destiny and Caesar’s opinions on death he leaves aside. The first warning of the soothsayer he refers back to the Lupercalia, and the second he shifts forward to its natural place. Calpurnia’s outcries in her sleep and her prophetic dream, the apparition of the ghosts mentioned by her among the other prodigies, the lack of the heart in the sacrificial beast, are reserved for the scene of her expostulation with Caesar, and are dramatically distributed between the various speakers, Caesar, the servant, Calpurnia herself. Shakespeare relies on the fiery heavens and the fire-girt shapes, the flaming hand and the boding bird for his grand effect, and puts them in a setting where they gain unspeakably in supernatural awe. Of course Shakespeare individualises Plutarch’s hints and adds new touches. But the main terror is due to something else. We are made to view these portents in the reflex light of Casca’s panic. He has just witnessed them, or believes that he has done so, and now breathless, staring, his naked sword in his hand, the storm raging around, he gasps out his amazement at Cicero’s composure:

Are not you moved, when all the sway of earth Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero, I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam, To be exalted with the threatening clouds: But never till to-night, never till now, Did I go through a tempest dropping fire. Either there is a civil strife in heaven, Or else the world, too saucy with the gods, Incenses them to send destruction. Cicero. Why, saw you anything more wonderful? Casca. A common slave—you know him well by sight— Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn Like twenty torches join’d, and yet his hand, Not sensible of fire, remain’d unscorch’d. Besides,—I ha’ not since put up my sword— Against the Capitol I met a lion, Who glared upon me, and went surly by, Without annoying me: and there were drawn Upon a heap a hundred ghastly women, Transformed with their fear; who swore they saw Men all in fire walk up and down the streets. And yesterday the bird of night did sit Even at noon-day upon the market place Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies Do so conjointly meet, let not men say, ‘These are their reasons: they are natural’: For, I believe, they are portentous things Unto the climate that they point upon. (I. iii. 3.)

Here the superstitious thrill rises to a paroxysm of dread; but the effect of dispersing the subsidiary presages through so many scenes is to steep the whole play in an atmosphere of weird presentiment, till Caesar passes up to the very doors of the Capitol.

But besides selecting and rearranging the separate details, Shakespeare establishes an inner connection between them even when in Plutarch they are quite isolated from each other. This is well exemplified by the manner in which the biography and the drama treat the circumstance that the conspirators were not sworn to secrecy. Plutarch says:

The onlie name and great calling of Brutus did bring on the most of them to geve consent to this conspiracie. Who having never taken othes together, nor taken or geven any caution or assurance, nor binding them selves one to an other by any religious othes, they all kept the matter so secret to them selves, and could so cunninglie handle it, that notwithstanding the goddes did reveal it by manifeste signes and tokens from above, and by predictions of sacrifices, yet all this would not be believed. (Marcus Brutus.)

The drama puts it thus:

Brutus. Give me your hands all over, one by one. Cassius. And let us swear our resolution. Brutus. No, not an oath: if not the face of men The suffrance of our souls, the time’s abuse, If these be motives weak, break off betimes: (II. i. 112.)

and so on through the rest of his magnificent speech that breathes the pure spirit of virtue and conviction. The nobility of Brutus that is reverenced by all, the conspiracy of Romans that is safe-guarded by no vows, move Plutarch’s admiration, but he does not associate them. Shakespeare traces the one to the other and views them as cause and effect.

Shakespeare thus greatly alters the character of Plutarch’s narrative by his ceaseless activity in sifting it, ordering it afresh, and reading into it an internal nexus that was often lacking in his authority. But this last proceeding implies that he also makes additions, and these are not only numerous and manifold, but frequently quite explicit and very far-reaching. It is important to note that Plutarch has furnished nothing more than stray hints, and often not even so much, for all the longer passages that have impressed themselves on the popular imagination. Cassius’ description of the swimming match and of Caesar’s fever, Brutus’ soliloquy, his speech on the oath, his oration and that of Mark Antony, even, when regarded closely, his dispute with Cassius, are all virtually the inventions of Shakespeare. The only exception is the conversation with Portia, and even in it, though the climax, as we have seen, closely reproduces both Plutarch’s matter and North’s expression, the fine introduction is altogether Shakespearian.

But it is not the purple patches alone of which this is true. The more carefully one examines the finished fabric, the more clearly one sees that the dramatist has not merely woven and fashioned and embroidered it, but has provided most of the stuff.

Sometimes the new matter is a possible or plausible inference from the premises he found in his author.

Thus Plutarch represents the populace as on the whole favourable to Caesar, but the tribunes as antagonistic. He also records, concerning the celebration of Caesar’s victory over Pompey’s sons in Spain:

The triumph he made into Rome for the same did as much offend the Romanes, and more, then anything he had ever done before; bicause he had not overcome Captaines that were straungers, nor barbarous kinges, but had destroyed the sonnes of the noblest man in Rome, whom fortune had overthrowen. And bicause he had plucked up his race by the rootes men did not thinke it meete for him to triumphe so for the calamaties of his contrie. (Julius Caesar.)

This is all, but it is enough to give the foundation for the opening scene, which otherwise, both in dialogue and declamation, is an entirely free creation.

Sometimes again Shakespeare has realised the situation so vividly that he puts in some trait from the occurrences as in spirit he has witnessed them, something of the kind that may very well have happened, though there is no trace of it in the records. Thus he well knows what an unreasonable monster a street mob can be, how cruel in its gambols, how savage in its fun. So in the account of the poet Cinna’s end, though the gist of the incident, the mistake in identity, the disregard of the explanation, are all given in Plutarch, Shakespeare’s rioters wrest their victim’s innocent avowal of celibacy to a flout at marriage, and meet his unanswerable defence, “I am Cinna the poet,” with the equally unanswerable retort, “Tear him for his bad verses.” (III. iii. 23.)

Some of these new touches do more than lend reality to the scene. Though not incompatible with Plutarch’s account, they give it a turn that he might disclaim and certainly does not warrant, but that belongs to Shakespeare’s conception of the case. Thus after describing the “holy course” of the Lupercal, and the superstition connected with it, Plutarch mentions that Caesar sat in state to witness the sport, and that Antony was one of the runners. There is nothing more; and Calpurnia is not even named. Shakespeare’s introduction of her is therefore very curious. Whatever else it means, it shows that he imagined Caesar as desirous, certainly, of having an heir, and, inferentially, of founding a dynasty.[159]

[159] Genée, Shakespeare’s Leben und Werke.

Occasionally, however, the dramatist’s insertions directly contradict the text of the Lives, if a more striking or more significant effect is to be attained, and if no essential fact is falsified. Thus Plutarch tells of Ligarius:

[Brutus] went to see him being sicke in his bedde, and sayed unto him: “O Ligarius, in what a time art thou sicke!” Ligarius risinge uppe in his bedde and taking him by the right hande, sayed unto him: “Brutus,” sayed he, “if thou hast any great enterprise in hande worthie of thy selfe, I am whole.” (Marcus Brutus.)

Shakespeare, keeping the phrases quoted almost literally, emphasises the effort that Ligarius makes, emphasises too the magnetic influence of Brutus, by representing the sick man as coming to his friend’s house, as well as by amplifying his words:

Lucius. Here is a sick man that would speak with you.... Brutus. O, what a time have you chose out, brave Caius, To wear a kerchief! Would you were not sick! Ligarius. I am not sick, if Brutus have in hand Any exploit worthy the name of honour.... By all the gods that Romans bow before I here discard my sickness! Soul of Rome! Brave son, derived from honourable loins! Thou, like an exorcist, hast conjured up My mortified spirit. Now bid me run, And I will strive with things impossible; Yea, get the better of them.... ... With a heart new-fired I follow you, To do I know not what: but it sufficeth That Brutus leads me on. (II. i. 310.)

So too Plutarch describes the collapse of Portia in her suspense as more complete than does the play, and makes Brutus hear of it just after the critical moment when the conspirators fear that Lena has discovered their plot:

Nowe in the meane time, there came one of Brutus men post hast unto him, and tolde him his wife was a dying.... When Brutus heard these newes, it grieved him, as is to be presupposed: yet he left not of the care of his contrie and common wealth, neither went home to his house for any newes he heard.

In Shakespeare not only is this very effective dramatic touch omitted, but Portia sends Brutus an encouraging message. As her weakness increases upon her, she collects herself for a final effort and manages to give the command:

Run, Lucius, and commend me to my lord: Say, I am merry: come to me again And bring me word what he doth say to thee. (II. iv. 44.)

Shakespeare may perhaps have been unwilling to introduce anything into the assassination scene that might distract attention from the decisive business on hand, but the alteration is chiefly due to another cause. These, the last words we hear Portia utter, were no doubt intended to bring out her forgetfulness of herself and her thought of Brutus even in the climax of her physical distress.

This, of course, does not affect our general estimate of Portia; but Shakespeare has no scruple about creating an entirely new character for a minor personage, and, in the process, disregarding the hints that he found and asserting quite the reverse. Thus Plutarch has not much to say about Casca, so Shakespeare feels free to sketch him after his own fancy as rude, blunt, uncultured, with so little education that, when Cicero speaks Greek, it is Greek to him. This is a libel on his up-bringing. Plutarch in one of the few details he spares to him, mentions that, when he stabbed Caesar, “they both cried out, Caesar in Latin, ‘O vile traitor, Casca, what doest thou?’ and Casca in Greek to his brother: ‘Brother, helpe me.’”

But some of Shakespeare’s interpolations are, probably unawares to himself, of a vital and radical kind, and affect the conception of the chief characters and the whole idea of the story. Take, for example, Brutus’ soliloquy, as he rids himself of his hesitations and scruples. This, from beginning to end, is the handiwork of Shakespeare:

It must be by his death: and, for my part I know no personal cause to spurn at him, But for the general. He would be crown’d: How that might change his nature, that’s the question. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, And that craves wary walking. Crown him?—that:— And then, I grant, we put a sting in him, That at his will he may do danger with. The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins Remorse from power: and, to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affections sway’d More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder, Whereto the climber upward turns his face: But when he once attains the topmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend. So Caesar may; Then lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel Will bear no colour for the thing he is, Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities: And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg, Which, hatch’d, would as his kind, grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell. (II. i. 10.)

These words are so unlike, or, rather, so opposite to all that we should have expected, that Coleridge cannot repress his amazement. He comments:

This speech is singular:—at least, I do not at present see into Shakespeare’s motive, his rationale, or in what point of view he meant Brutus’ character to appear. For surely ... nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him—to him, the stern Roman republican; namely,—that he would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome, would Caesar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be. (Lectures and Notes of 1818.)

And this in a way is the crucial statement of Brutus’ case. Here he has tried to get rid of the assumptions that move himself and the rest, and seeks to find something that will satisfy his reason. It is thus a more intimate revelation of his deliberate principles, though not necessarily of his subconscious instincts or his untested opinions, than other utterances in which he lets feeling or circumstance have sway. Of these there are two that do not quite coincide with it. One of them is not very important, and in any case would not bring him nearer to the antique conception. In his plea for a pure administration of affairs, he asks Cassius:

What, shall one of us, That struck the foremost man of all this world But for supporting robbers, shall we now Contaminate our fingers with base bribes? (IV. iii. 21.)

But this, one feels, is merely an argumentum ad hominem, brought forward very much in afterthought for a particular purpose. At the time, neither in Brutus’ speeches to himself or others, nor in the discussions of the conspirators, is Caesar accused of countenancing peculation, or is this made a handle against him. And if it were, it would not be incompatible with acquiescence in a royal government.[160]

[160] On this passage Coleridge has the note: “This seemingly strange assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends from ordinarily reprobate men? Caesar supported, and was supported by, such as these;—and even so Buonaparte in our days.” On this interpretation Brutus’ charge would come to nothing more than this, that Caesar had employed large armies. I believe there is a more definite reference to one passage or possibly two in the Marcus Antonius.

“(a) Caesar’s friends that governed under him, were cause why they hated Caesar’s government ... by reason of the great insolencies and outragious parts that were committed: amongst whom Antonius, that was of greatest power, and that also committed greatest faultes, deserved most blame. But Caesar, notwithstanding, when he returned from the warres of Spayne, made no reckoning of the complaints that were put up against him: but contrarily, bicause he found him a hardy man, and a valliant Captaine, he employed him in his chiefest affayres.

“(b) Now it greved men much, to see that Caesar should be out of Italy following of his enemies, to end this great warre, with such great perill and daunger: and that others in the meane time abusing his name and authoritie, should commit such insolent and outragious parts unto their citizens. This me thinkes was the cause that made the conspiracie against Caesar increase more and more, and layed the reynes of the brydle uppon the souldiers neckes, whereby they durst boldlier commit many extorsions, cruelties, and robberies.”

Plutarch is speaking of Antony in particular, but surely this is the sort of thing that was in Shakespeare’s mind.

The other is the exclamation with which he “pieces out” the anonymous letter that Cassius had left unfinished:

Shall Rome stand under one man’s awe? What, Rome? (II. i. 52.)

This certainly has somewhat of the republican ring. It breathes the same spirit as Cassius’ own avowal:

I had as lief not be, as live to be In awe of such a thing as I myself; (I. ii. 95.)

except that Cassius feels Caesar’s predominance to be a personal affront, while Brutus characteristically extends his view to the whole community. But here Brutus is speaking under the excitement of Cassius’ “instigation,” and making himself Cassius’ mouthpiece to fill in the blanks. Assuredly the declaration is not on that account the less personal to himself; nevertheless in it Brutus, no longer attempting to square his action with his theory, falls back on the blind impulses of blood that he shares with the other aristocrats of Rome. And in this, the most republican and the only republican sentiment that falls from his lips, which for the rest is so little republican that it might be echoed by the loyal subject of a limited monarchy, it is only the negative aspect of the matter and the public amour propre that are considered. Of the positive essence of republicanism, of enthusiasm for a state in which all the lawful authority is derived from the whole body of fully qualified citizens, there is, despite Brutus’ talk of freemen and slaves and Caesar’s ambition, no trace whatever in any of his utterances from first to last. It has been said that Plutarch’s Brutus could live nowhere but in a self-governing commonwealth; Shakespeare’s Brutus would be quite at home under a constitutional king and need not have found life intolerable even in Tudor England. This indeed is an exaggeration. True, in his soliloquy he bases his whole case on the deterioration of Caesar’s nature that kingship might bring about; and if it were proved, as it easily could be from instances like that of Numa, which Shakespeare and therefore Shakespeare’s Brutus knew, that no such result need follow, his entire sorites would seem to snap. But though the form of his reflection is hypothetical and the hypothesis will not hold, the substance is categorical enough. Brutus has such inbred detestation of the royal power that practically he assumes it must beyond question be mischievous in its moral effects. This, however, is no reasoned conviction, though it is the starting point for what he means to be a dispassionate argument, but a dogma of traditional passion. And even were it granted it would not make Brutus a true representative of classic republicanism. Shakespeare has so little comprehension of the antique point of view that to him a thoughtful and public-spirited citizen can find a rational apology for violent measures only by looking at Caesar’s future and not at all by looking at Caesar’s past. This Elizabethan Brutus sees nothing to blame in Caesar’s previous career. He has not known “when his affections (i.e. passions) sway’d more than his reason,” and implies that he has not hitherto disjoined “remorse (i.e. scrupulousness) from power.” Yet as Coleridge pertinently asks, was there nothing “in Caesar’s past conduct as a man” to call for Brutus’ censure? “Had he not passed the Rubicon,” and the like? But such incidents receive no attention. Perhaps Shakespeare thought no more of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon to suppress Pompey and put an end to the disorders of Rome, than of Richmond’s crossing the Channel to suppress Richard III., and put end to the Wars of the Roses. At any rate he makes no mention of these and similar grounds of offence, though all or most of them were set down in his authority.[161]

[161] Coleridge’s exact words, in continuation of the passage already discussed may be quoted. “How too could Brutus say that he found no personal cause, none in Caesar’s past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the Senate?—Shakespeare, it may be said, has not brought these things forward.—True;—and this is just the cause of my perplexity. What character did Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?”

The verbal answer to this is of course that personal cause refers not to Caesar but to Brutus, and means that Brutus has no private grievance; but the substance of Coleridge’s objection remains unaffected, for Brutus proceeds to take Caesar’s character up to the present time under his protection.

It may be noted, however, that Plutarch says nothing about the Gauls. If Shakespeare had known of it, it would probably have seemed to him no worse than the presence of the Bretons, “those overweening rags of France,” as Richard III. calls them, in the army of the patriotic and virtuous Richmond.

Shakespeare’s position may be thus described. He read in Plutarch that Brutus, the virtuous Roman, killed Caesar, the master-spirit of his own and perhaps of any age, from a disinterested sense of duty. That was easy to understand, for Shakespeare would know, and if he did not know it from his own experience his well-conned translation of Montaigne would teach him, that the best of men are determined in their feeling of right by the preconceptions of race, class, education and the like. But he also read that Brutus was a philosophic student who would not accept or obey the current code without scrutinising it and fitting it into his theory. Of the political theory, however, which such an one would have, Shakespeare had no knowledge or appreciation. So whenever Brutus tries to harmonise his purpose with his idealist doctrine, he has to be furnished with new reasons instead of the old and obvious ones. And these are neither very clear nor very antique. They make one inclined to quote concerning him the words of Caesar spoken to Cicero in regard to the historical Brutus:

I knowe not what this young man woulde, but what he woulde he willeth it vehemently. (Marcus Brutus.)

For what is it that he would? The one argument with which he can excuse to his own heart the projected murder, is that the aspirant to royal power, though hitherto irreproachable, may or must become corrupted and misuse his high position. This is as different from the attitude of the ancient Roman as it well could be. It would never have occurred to the genuine republican of olden time that any justification was needed for despatching a man who sought to usurp the sovereign place; and if it had, this is certainly the last justification that would have entered his head.

But the introspection, the self-examination, the craving for an inward moral sanction that will satisfy the conscience, and the choice of the particular sanction that does so, are as typical of the modern as they are alien to the classical mind. It is clear that an addition of this kind is not merely mechanical or superficial. It affects the elements already given, and produces, as it were, a new chemical combination. And this particular instance shows how Shakespeare transforms the whole story. He reanimates Brutus by infusing into his veins a strain of present feeling that in some ways transmutes his character; and, transmuting the character in which the chief interest centres, he cannot leave the other data as they were. He can resuscitate the past in its persons, its conflicts, its palpitating vitality just because he endows it with his own life. It was an ancient belief that the shades of the departed were inarticulate or dumb till they had lapped a libation of warm blood; then they would speak forth their secrets. In like manner it is the life-blood of Shakespeare’s own passion and thought that throbs in the pulses of these unsubstantial dead and gives them human utterance once more. This, however, has two aspects. It is the dead who speak; but they speak through the life that Shakespeare has lent them. The past is resuscitated; but it is a resuscitation, not the literal existence it had before. Nor in any other way can the phantoms of history win bodily shape and perceptible motion for the world of breathing men.

This may be illustrated by comparing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with the Julius Caesar of Sir William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Stirling, which seems to have been written a few years later than its more illustrious namesake. Alexander was an able man and a considerable poet, from whom Shakespeare himself did not disdain to borrow hints for Prospero’s famous reflections on the transitoriness of things. He used virtually the same sources as Shakespeare, like him making Plutarch his chief authority, and to supplement Plutarch, betaking himself, as Shakespeare may also have done, to the tradition set in France by Muretus, Grévin, and Garnier. So they build on much the same sites and with much the same timber. But their methods are as different as can well be imagined. Alexander is by far the more scrupulous in his reproduction of the old-world record. He adopts the Senecan type of tragedy, exaggerating its indifference to movement and fondness for lengthy harangues; and this enables him to preserve much of the narrative in its original form without thorough reduction to the category of action. This also in large measure exempts him from the need of reorganising his material: practically a single situation is given, and whatever else of the story is required, has to be conveyed in the words of the persons, who can repeat things just as they have been reported. And proceeding in this way Alexander can include as much as he pleases of Plutarch’s abundance, a privilege of which he avails himself to the utmost. Few are the details that he must absolutely reject, for they can always be put in somebody’s mouth; he is slow to tamper with Plutarch’s location of them; and he never connects them more closely than Plutarch has authorised. He does not extract from his document inferences that have not already been drawn, nor falsify it with picturesque touches that have not been already supplied, and he would not dream of contradicting it in small things or great. Even Brutus’ republicanism is sacred to the author of this “Monarchic Tragedy,” though he was to be Secretary of State to Charles I. and noted for his advocacy of Divine Right. He has a convenient theory to justify Brutus as much as is necessary from his point of view. He makes him explain:

If Caesar had been born or chused our prince Then those, who durst attempt to take his life, The world of treason justly might convince. Let still the states, which flourish for the time, By subjects be inviolable thought: And those (no doubt) commit a monstrous crime, Who lawfull soveraignty prophane in ought: And we must think (though now thus brought to bow) The senate, king; a subject Caesar is: The soveraignty whom violating now The world must damne, as having done amisse.

Brutus’ motives, which Shakespeare sophisticates, can thus be left him. But does this bit of reasoning, which reads like a passage from the Leviathan, and explains why King James called Alexander “My philosophical poet,” really come nearer the historic truth than the heart-searching of Shakespeare’s Brutus? And does Alexander, taking Brutus’ convictions at second hand and manufacturing an apology for them, do much more to revive the real Brutus, than Shakespeare, whose fervid imagination drives him to realise Brutus’ inmost heart, and who just for that reason

seeks into him For that which is not in him?

Here and generally Alexander gives the exacter, if not the more faithful transcript, but the main truth, the truth of life, escapes him; and therefore, too, despite all his painstaking fidelity, he is apt to miss even the vital touches that Plutarch gives. We have seen with what reverent accuracy Shakespeare reproduces the conversation between Brutus and Portia. In a certain way Alexander is more accurate still. Portia pleads:

I was not (Brutus) match’d with thee to be A partner onely of thy boord and bed; Each servile whore in those might equall me, Who but for pleasure or for wealth did wed. No, Portia spoused thee minding to remaine Thy fortunes partner, whether good or ill: ... If thus thou seek thy sorrows to conceale Through a distrust, or a mistrust of me, Then to the world what way can I reveale, How great a matter I would do for thee? And though our sexe too talkative be deem’d, As those whose tongues import our greatest pow’rs, For secrets still bad treasurers esteem’d, Of others greedy, prodigall of ours: “Good education may reforme defects,” And this may leade me to a vertuous life, (Whil’st such rare patterns generous worth respects) I Cato’s daughter am, and Brutus wife. Yet would I not repose my trust in ought, Still thinking that thy crosse was great to beare, Till I my courage to a tryall brought, Which suffering for thy cause can nothing feare: For first to try how that I could comport With sterne afflictions sprit-enfeebling blows, Ere I would seek to vex thee in this sort, (To whom my soule a dutious reverence owes); Loe, here a wound which makes me not to smart, No, I rejoyce that thus my strength is knowne; Since thy distresse strikes deeper in my heart, Thy griefe (lifes joy!) makes me neglect mine owne.

And Brutus answers:

Thou must (deare love!) that which thou sought’st, receive; Thy heart so high a saile in stormes still beares, That thy great courage does deserve to have Our enterprise entrusted to thine eares.

Here, with the rhetorical amplification which was the chief and almost sole liberty that Alexander allowed himself, Plutarch’s train of thought is more closely followed than by Shakespeare himself. King James’s “philosophical poet” does not even suppress the tribute to education, but rather calls attention to the edifying “sentence” by the expedient less common west of the Channel than among his French masters, of placing it within inverted commas. But, besides lowering the temperature of the whole, he characteristically omits the most important passage, at least in so far as Brutus is concerned, his prayer that “he might be founde a husband, worthie of so noble a wife as Porcia.”

Suppose that a conscientious draughtsman and a painter of genius were moved to reproduce the impression that a group of antique statuary had made on them, using the level surface which alone is at their disposal. The one might choose his station, and set down with all possible precision in his black and white as much as was given him to see. The other taking into account the different conditions of the pictorial and the plastic art, might visualise what seemed to him the inmost meaning to his own mind in his own way, and represent it, the same yet not the same, in all the glory of colour. The former would deliver a version more useful to the historian of sculpture were the original to be lost, but one in which we should miss many beauties of detail, and from which the indwelling spirit would have fled. The latter would not give much help to an antiquarian knowledge of the archetype, but he might transmit its inspiration, and rouse kindred feelings in an even greater degree just because they were mingled with others that came from his own heart.

The analogy is, of course, an imperfect one, for the problem of rendering the solid on the flat is not on all fours with the problem of converting Plutarch’s Lives to modern plays. But it applies to this extent, that in both cases the task is to interpret a subject, that has received one kind of treatment, by a treatment that is quite dissimilar. And the difference between William Alexander and William Shakespeare is very much the difference between the conscientious draughtsman and the inspired artist.

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III. THE TITULAR HERO OF THE PLAY

The modification of Brutus’ character typifies and involves the modification of the whole story, because the tragic interest is focussed in his career. This must be remembered, if we would avoid misconception. It has sometimes been said that the play suffers from lack of unity, that the titular hero is disposed of when it is half through, and that thereafter attention is diverted to the murderer. But this criticism is beside the point. Really, from beginning to end, Brutus is the prominent figure, and if the prominent figure should supply the name, then, as Voltaire pointed out, the drama ought properly to be called Marcus Brutus. If we look at it in this way, there is no lack of unity, though possibly there is a misnomer. Throughout the piece it is the personality of Brutus that attracts our chief sympathy and concern. If he is dismissed to a subordinate place, the result is as absurd as it would be were Hamlet thus treated in the companion tragedy; while, his position, once recognised, everything becomes coherent and clear.

But when this is the case, why should Shakespeare not say so? Why, above all, should he use a false designation to mix the trail?

It has been answered that he was wholly indifferent to labels and nomenclature, that he gives his plays somewhat irrelevant titles, such as Twelfth Night, or lets people christen them at their fancy, What You Will, or As You Like It. Just in the same way, as a shrewd theatrical manager with his eye on the audience, he may have turned to account the prevalent curiosity about Caesar, without inquiring too curiously whether placard and performance tallied in every respect.

And doubtless such considerations were not unknown to him. Shakespeare, as is shown by the topical allusions in which his works abound, by no means disdained the maxim that the playwright must appeal to the current interests of his public, even to those that are adventitious and superficial. At the same time, it is only his comedies, in which his whole method is less severe, that have insignificant or arbitrary titles. There is no instance of a tragedy being misnamed. On the contrary, the chief person or persons are always indicated, and in this way Shakespeare has protested in advance against the mistake of viewing King Lear as a whole with reference to Cordelia, or Macbeth as a whole with reference to Lady Macbeth.

But in the second place, Julius Caesar, both in its chronological position and in its essential character, comes as near to the Histories as to the Tragedies; and the Histories are all named after the sovereign in whose reign most of the events occurred. He may not have the chief role, which, for example, belongs in King John to the Bastard, and in Henry IV. to Prince Hal. He may even drop out in the course of the story, which, for example, in the latter play is continued for an entire act after the King’s death: but he serves, as it were, for a landmark, to date and localise the action. It is not improbable that this was the light in which Shakespeare regarded Caesar. In those days people did not make fine distinctions. He was generally viewed as first in the regular succession of Emperors, and in so far could be considered to have held the same sort of position in Rome, as any of those who had sat on the throne of England.

But this is not all. Though it is manifest that Brutus is the principal character, the protagonist, the chief representative of the action, the central figure among the living agents, the interest of his career lies in its mistaken and futile opposition to Julius, to the idea of Caesarism, to what again and again, in the course of the play, is called “the spirit of Caesar.” The expression is often repeated. Brutus declares the purpose of the conspirators:

We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar; And in the spirit of men there is no blood: O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit, And not dismember Caesar. (II. i. 167.)

Antony, above the corpse, sees in prophetic anticipation,

Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge. (III. i. 273.)

The ghost of Caesar proclaims what he is,

Thy evil spirit, Brutus. (IV. iii. 282.)

And at the close Brutus apostrophises his dead victim:

Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords In our own proper entrails. (V. iii. 95.)

It is really Caesar’s presence, his genius, his conception that dominates the story. Brutus is first among the struggling mortals who obey even while resisting their fate, but the fate itself is the imperialist inspiration which makes up the significance of Caesar, and the play therefore is fitly named after him.[162]

[162] See Professor Dowden, Shakespeare’s Mind and Art.

This is brought home to us in a variety of ways.

In the first place, Shakespeare makes it abundantly clear that the rule of the single master-mind is the only admissible solution for the problem of the time.

Caesar, with his transcendent gifts, was chosen by Providence to preserve the Roman State from shipwreck, and steer it on its triumphant course; and even if the helmsman perished, the course was set. Shakespeare was guided to this view by Plutarch. The celebrant of the life of ancient Greece was indeed very far from idealising the man who consolidated the supremacy of Rome. He records impartially and with appreciation, some of his noble traits, and without extenuation many that were not admirable. But he “honours his memory” very much “on this side idolatry,” reserves his chief enthusiasm for Brutus, and never seems to take a full view of Caesar’s unique greatness in the mass. None the less, he is now and again forced to admit that he was the man, and his were the methods that the emergency required. Thus talking of the bribery and violence that then prevailed in Rome he remarks:

Men of deepe judgement and discression seeing such furie and madnes of the people, thought them selves happy if the common wealth were no worse troubled, then with the absolut state of a Monarchy and soveraine Lord to governe them. Furthermore, there were many that were not affraid to speake it openly, that there was no other help to remedy the troubles of the common wealth, but by the authority of one man only that should commaund them all.[163]

Again, commenting on the accident by which Brutus did not learn of the victory that might have averted his final defeat, he has the weighty reflection;

Howbeit the state of Rome (in my opinion) being now brought to that passe, that it could no more abide to be governed by many Lordes, but required one only absolute Governor: God, to prevent Brutus that it shoulde not come to his government, kept this victorie from his knowledge.[164]

[163] Julius Caesar.

[164] Marcus Brutus.

And in one of those comparisons that Montaigne loved, he is more emphatic still:

Howbeit Caesars power and government when it came to be established, did in deede much hurte at his first entrie and beginning unto those that did resist him: but afterwardes unto them that being overcome had received his government, it seemed he had rather the name and opinion[165] onely of a tyranne, then otherwise that he was so in deed. For there never followed any tyrannicall nor cruell act, but contrarilie, it seemed that he was a mercifull Phisition, whom God had ordeyned of speciall grace to be Governor of the Empire of Rome, and to set all thinges againe at quiet stay, the which required the counsell and authoritie of an absolute Prince.... But the fame of Julius Caesar did set up his friends againe after his death, and was of such force, that it raised a young stripling, Octavius Caesar, (that had no meanes nor power of him selfe) to be one of the greatest men of Rome.[166]

[165] Reputation.

[166] The comparison of Dion with Brutus.

On these isolated hints Shakespeare seizes. He amplifies them and works them out in his conception of the situation.

The vast territory that is subject to Rome, of which we have glimpses as it stretches north and west to Gaul and Spain, of which we visit the Macedonian and Asiatic provinces in the east and south, has need of wise and steady government. But is that to be got from the Romans? The plebeians are represented as fickle and violent, greedy and irrational, the dupes of dead tradition, parasites in the living present. They have shouted for Pompey, they strew flowers for Caesar: they can be tickled with talk of their ancient liberties, they can be cajoled by the tricks of shifty rhetoric: they cheer when their favourite refuses the crown, they wish to crown his “better parts” in his murderer: they will not hear a word against Brutus, they rush off to fire his house: they tear a man to pieces on account of his name, and hold Caesar beyond parallel on account of his bequest.

Nor are things better with the aristocrats. Cassius, the moving spirit of the opposition, is, at his noblest, actuated by jealousy of greatness. And he is not always at his noblest. He confesses that had he been in Caesar’s good graces, he would have been on Caesar’s side. This strain of servility is more apparent in the flatteries and officiousness of Decius and Casca. And what is its motive? Cassius seeks to win Antony by promising him an equal voice in disposing of the dignities: and he presently uses his position for extortion and the patronage of corruption. Envy, ambition, cupidity are the governing principles of the governing classes: and their enthusiasm for freedom means nothing more than an enthusiasm for prestige and influence, for the privilege of parcelling out the authority and dividing the spoils. What case have these against the Man of Destiny, whose genius has given compass, peace, and security to the Roman world? But their plea of liberty misleads the unpractical student, the worshipper of dreams, memories, and ideals, behind whose virtue they shelter their selfish aims, and whose countenance alone can make their conspiracy respectable. With his help they achieve a momentary triumph. But of course it leads not to a renovation of the republic, but to domestic confusion and to a multiplication of oppressors. So far as the populace is concerned, the removal of the master means submission to the unprincipled orator, who, with his fellow triumvirs, cheats it of its inheritance and sets about a wholesale proscription. So far as the Empire is concerned, the civil war is renewed, and the provincials are pillaged by the champions of freedom. Brutus sees too late that it is vain to strive against the “spirit of Caesar,” which is bound to prevail, and which, though it may be impeded, cannot be defeated. He is ruined with the cause he espoused, and confesses fairly vanquished:

O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet.[167] (V. iii. 94.)

[167] All this is so obvious that it can hardly be overlooked, yet overlooked it has been, though it has frequently been pointed out. In his not very sympathetic discussion of this play, Dr. Brandes makes the truly astounding statement: “As Shakespeare conceives the situation, the Republic which Caesar overthrew, might have continued to exist but for him, and it was a criminal act on his part to destroy it.... ‘If we try to conceive to ourselves’ wrote Mommsen in 1857, ’a London with the slave population of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople, with the non-industrial character of modern Rome, and agitated by politics after the fashion of the Paris of 1848, we shall acquire an approximate idea of the republican glory, the departure of which Cicero and his associates in their sulky letters deplore.’ Compare with this picture Shakespeare’s conception of an ambitious Caesar striving to introduce monarchy into a well-ordered republican state” (Brandes, William Shakespeare). Of course Shakespeare had not read Mommsen or any of Mommsen’s documents, save Plutarch; and if he had, neither he nor any one else of his age, was capable of Mommsen’s critical and constructive research. But considering the data that Plutarch delivered him he shows marvellous power in getting to the gist of the matter. I think we rise with a clearer idea, after reading him than after reading Plutarch, of the hopelessness and vanity of opposing the changes that Caesar represented, of the effeteness of the republican system (“Let him be Caesar!” cries the citizen in his strange recognition of Brutus’ achievement), of the chaos that imperialism alone could reduce to rule. If Shakespeare’s picture of Rome is that of “a well-ordered republican state,” one wonders what the picture of a republic in decay would be. And where does Dr. Brandes find that Shakespeare viewed Caesar’s enterprise as a criminal act?

Again, though it may seem paradoxical to say so, the all-compelling power of Caesar’s ideal is indicated in the presentation of his own character. This at first sight is something of a riddle and a surprise. Shakespeare, as is shown by his many tributes elsewhere, had ample perception and appreciation of Caesar’s greatness. Yet in the play called after him it almost seems as though he had a sharper eye for any of the weaknesses and foibles that Plutarch records of him, and even went about to exaggerate them and add to them.

Thus great stress is laid on his physical disabilities. When the crown is offered him, he swoons, as Casca narrates, for, as Brutus remarks, he is subject to the falling sickness. There is authority for these statements. But Cassius describes how his strength failed him in the Tiber and how he shook with fever in Spain, and both these touches are added by Shakespeare. Nor is it the malcontents alone who signalise such defects. Caesar himself admits that he is deaf, though of his deafness history knows nothing.

And not only does Shakespeare accentuate these bodily infirmities; he introduces them in such a way and in such a connection that they convey an ironical suggestion and almost make the Emperor ridiculous. At the great moment when he is putting by the coronet tendered him by Antony that he may take with the more security and dignity the crown which the Senate will vote him, precisely then he falls down in a fit. This indeed is quasi-historical, but the other and more striking instances are forged in Shakespeare’s smithy. It is just after his overweening challenge to the swimming-match that he must cry for aid: “Help me, Cassius, or I sink” (I. ii. 3). In his fever, as Cassius maliciously notes,

That tongue of his that bade the Romans Mark him and write his speeches in their books, Alas, it cried ‘Give me some drink, Titinius,’ As a sick girl. (I. ii. 125.)

A pretty saying to chronicle. He says superbly to Mark Antony, “Always I am Caesar”; and in the very next line follows the anticlimax:

Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf. (I. ii. 213.)

But if his physical defects, which after all have little to do with the real greatness of the man save in the eyes of spiteful detractors, are thus brought into satirical relief, much more is this the case with his mental and moral failings, which of course concern the heart of his character.

Already on his first appearance, we see this lord of the world the credulous believer in magic rites. At the Lupercal he enjoins Calpurnia to “stand directly in Antonius’ way” and Antony to touch her in his “holy chase” (I. ii. 3 and 8), and he impresses on Antony the observance of all the ritual: “Leave no ceremony out” (I. ii. 11). It was not ever thus. The time has been when he held these things at their true value, and it is only recently, as watchful eyes take note, that his attitude has changed.

He is superstitious grown of late, Quite from the main opinion he held once Of fantasy, of dreams and ceremonies. (II. i. 195.)

And this is no mere invention of the enemy. He does have recourse to sacrifice, he does inquire of the priests “their opinions of success” (II. ii. 5); though afterwards, on the news of the portent, he tries to put his own interpretation on it:

The gods do this in shame of cowardice: Caesar should be a beast without a heart, If he should stay at home to-day for fear. (II. ii. 41.)

He is really impressed by his wife’s cries in her sleep, as appears from his words to himself, when he has not to keep up appearances before others, but enters, perturbed, in his nightgown, and seems urged by his anxiety to consult the oracles. He affects to dismiss the signs and omens:

These predictions Are to the world in general as to Caesar; (II. ii. 28.)

But it is clear that he attaches importance to them, for, when Decius gives Calpurnia’s dream an auspicious interpretation, he accepts it, and once again changing his mind, presently resolves to set out:

How foolish do your fears seem now, Calpurnia! I am ashamed I did yield to them. Give me my robe, for I will go. (II. ii. 105.)

Thus we see a touch of self-deception as well as of superstition in Caesar, and this self-deception reappears in other more important matters. He affects an absolute fearlessness:

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear. (II. ii. 33.)

His courage, of course, is beyond question; but is there not a hint of the theatrical in this overstrained amazement, in this statement that fear is the most unaccountable thing in all his experience? One recalls the story of the young soldier who said that he knew not what it was to be afraid, and received his commander’s answer: “Then you have never snuffed a candle with your fingers.” That was the reproof of bravado by bravery in the mouth of a man so fearless that he could afford to acknowledge his acquaintance with fear. And surely Caesar could have afforded to do so too. We see and know that he is the bravest of the brave, but if anything could make us suspicious, it would be his constant harping on his flawless valour. So, too, he says of Cassius:

I fear him not: Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know the man I should avoid So soon as that spare Cassius ... I rather tell thee what is to be fear’d Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar. (I. ii. 198, 211.)

Why should he labour the point? If he has not fears, he has at least misgivings in regard to Cassius, that come very much to the same thing. His anxiety is obvious, as he calls Antony to his side to catechise him on his opinions of the danger.

In the same way he prides himself on his inaccessibility to adulation and blandishments.

These couchings and these lowly courtesies Might fire the blood of ordinary men, And turn pre-ordinance and first decree Into the law of children. Be not fond To think that Caesar bears such rebel blood, That will be thaw’d from the true quality With that which melteth fools; I mean, sweet words, Low crooked court’sies and base spaniel fawning. (III. i. 36.)

We may believe that he does indeed stand secure against the grosser kinds of parasites and their more obvious devices; but that does not mean that he cannot be hood-winked by meaner men who know how to play on his self-love. Decius says:

I can o’ersway him: for he loves to hear That unicorns may be betray’d with trees, And bears with glasses, elephants with holes, Lions with toils, and men with flatterers; But when I tell him he hates flatterers, He says he does, being then most flattered. Let me work. (II. i. 203.)

And Decius makes his words good.

In like manner he fancies that he possesses an insight that reads men’s souls at a glance. When he hears the cry: “Beware the Ides of March,” he gives the command, “Set him before me; let me see his face.” A moment’s inspection is enough: “He is a dreamer: let us leave him: pass” (I. ii. 24). Yet he fails to read the treachery of the conspirators, though they are daily about him, consults with Decius whom he “loves,” and bids Trebonius be near him.

And then he elects to pose as no less immovable in resolution than infallible in judgment. When we have been witnesses of all his vacillation and shilly-shally about attending the senate meeting—now he would, now he would not, and again he would—it is hard to suppress the jeer at the high-sounding words:

I could be well moved, if I were as you: If I could pray to move, prayers would move me: But I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament. The skies are painted with unnumber’d sparks, They are all fire, and every one doth shine, But there’s but one in all doth hold his place: So in the world: ’tis furnish’d well with men, And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive; Yet in the number I do know but one That unassailable holds on his rank, Unshaked of motion: and that I am he, Let me a little show it, even in this. (III. i. 58.)

Now, all these things are wholly or mainly the fabrications of Shakespeare. In Plutarch Caesar does not direct Calpurnia to put herself in Antony’s way, nor is there any indication that he attached importance to the rite. It is in the wife and not in the husband that Plutarch notes an unexpected strain of credulity, remarking with reference to her dream: “Capurnia untill that time was never geven to any feare or supersticion.”[168] Plutarch cites noble sayings of Caesar’s in regard to fear, for instance that “it was better to dye once, than alwayes to be affrayed of death:”[169] but he never attributes to him any pretence of immunity from human frailty, and makes him explicitly avow the feeling in the very passage where in Shakespeare he disclaims it. “‘As for those fatte men, with smooth comed heades,’ quoth he, ‘I never reckon of them: but these pale visaged and carian leane people, I feare them most.’” The dismissal of the soothsayer after a contemptuous glance is unwarranted by Plutarch. There is no authority for his defencelessness among flatterers, or for his illusion that he is superior to their arts. Yielding in quite a natural way and without any hesitation to the solicitations of Calpurnia and the reports of the bad omens, Caesar in Plutarch resolves to stay at home, but afterwards is induced to change his mind by Decius’ very plausible arguments. There is no hint of unsteadiness in his conduct, as there described; nor in the final scene is there any of the ostentation but only the reality of firmness in his rejection of Metellus Cimber’s petition.

[168] Julius Caesar.

[169] Ibid.

Considering all this it is not difficult to understand the indignation of the critics who complain that Shakespeare has here given a libel rather than a portrait of Caesar, and has substituted impertinent cavil for sympathetic interpretation. And some of Shakespeare’s apologists have accepted this statement of the case, but have sought to defend the supposed travesty on the ground that it is prescribed by the subject and the treatment. Thus Dr. Hudson suggests[170] that “the policy of the drama may have been to represent Caesar, not as he was indeed, but as he must have appeared to the conspirators; to make us see him as they saw him; in order that they might have fair and equal justice at our hands.” With a slight variation this is also the opinion of Gervinus:[171] “The poet, if he intended to make the attempt of the conspirators his main theme, could not have ventured to create too great an interest in Caesar: it was necessary to keep him in the background, and to present that view of him which gave reason for the conspiracy.” And alleging, what would be hard to prove, that in Plutarch, Caesar’s character “altered much for the worse, shortly before his death,” he continues, in reference to his arrogance: “It is intended with few words to show him at that point when his behaviour would excite those free spirits against him.” But this explanation will hardly bear scrutiny. In the first place: if Shakespeare’s object had been to provide a relative justification for the assassins, he could have done so much more naturally and effectively by adhering to the data of the Life. Among them he could have found graver causes of resentment against Caesar than any of those he invents, which at the worst are peccadillos and affectations rather than real delinquencies. And Plutarch does not slur them over: on the contrary the shadows in his picture are strongly marked, and he lays a long list of offences to Caesar’s score; culminating in what he calls the “shamefullest part” that he played, to wit, his support of Clodius. Here was matter enough for the dramatic Advocatus Diaboli. It would have been as easy to weave some of these damaging stories into the reminiscences of Cassius, as to concoct harmless fictions about Caesar’s having a temperature and being thirsty, or his failing to swim a river in flood. All these bygone scandals, whether domestic or political, would have immensely strengthened the conspirators’ case, especially with a precisian like Brutus. But Shakespeare is silent concerning them, and Brutus, as we have seen, gives Caesar in regard to his antecedents a clean bill of health. Of course almost all Caesar’s previous history is taken for granted and left to the imagination, but the dubious passages are far more persistently kept out of sight than such as tend to his glory. And that is the bewildering thing, if Shakespeare’s delineation was meant to explain the attitude of the faction. It is surely an odd way of winning our good will for a man’s murderers to keep back notorious charges against him of cruelty, treason and unscrupulousness, to certify that he has never abused his powers or let his passion overmaster his reason, and then to trump up stories that he gives himself airs and is deaf in one ear. It reminds one of Swift’s description of Arbuthnot: “Our doctor has every quality and virtue that can make a man amiable or useful; but, alas, he hath a sort of slouch in his walk.” Swift, however, was not explaining how people might come to think that Dr. Arbuthnot should be got rid of.

[170] Shakespeare, His Life, Art and Characters.

[171] Shakespeare Commentaries.

Again his tendency to parade by no means alters the fact, that he does possess in an extraordinary degree the intellectual and moral virtues that he would exaggerate in his own eyes and the eyes of others. Independence, resolution, courage, insight must have been his in amplest store or he would never have been able to

Get the start of the majestic world And bear the palm alone; (I. ii. 130.)

and there is evidence of them in the play. He is not moved by the deferential prayers of the senators: he does persist in the banishment of Publius Cimber; he has in very truth read the heart and taken the measure of Cassius:

Such men as he be never at heart’s ease, Whiles they behold a greater than themselves; (I. ii. 208.)

he neither shrinks nor complains when the fatal moment comes. The impression he makes on the unsophisticated mind, on average audiences and the elder school of critics, is undoubtedly an heroic one. It is only minute analysis that discovers his defects, and though the defects are certainly present and should be noted, they are far from sufficing to make the general effect absurd or contemptible. If they do so, we give them undue importance. It was not so that Shakespeare meant them to be taken. For he has invented for his Caesar not only these trivial blemishes, but several conspicuous exhibitions of nobility, which Plutarch nowhere suggests; and this should give pause to such as find in Shakespeare’s portrait merely a wilful or wanton caricature. Thus in regard to the interposition of Artemidorus, Shakespeare read in North:

He marking howe Caesar received all the supplications that were offered him, and that he gave them straight to his men that were about him, pressed neerer to him and sayed: “Caesar, reade this memoriall to your selfe, and that quickely, for they be matters of great waight and touch you neerely.” Caesar tooke it of him, but coulde never reade it, though he many times attempted it, for the multitude of people that did salute him: but holding it still in his hande, keeping it to him selfe, went on withall into the Senate house.[172]

[172] Julius Caesar.

Compare this with the scene in the play:

Artemidorus. Hail, Caesar! read this schedule. Decius. Trebonius doth desire you to o’er-read, At your best leisure, this his humble suit. Artemidorus. O Caesar, read mine first, for mine’s a suit That touches Caesar nearer: read it, great Caesar. Caesar. What touches us ourself shall be last served. (III. i. 3.)

Can one say that Shakespeare has defrauded Caesar of his magnanimity?

Or again observe, in the imaginary conclusion to the unrecorded remonstrances of Calpurnia, how loftily he refuses to avail himself of the little white untruths that after all pass current as quite excusable in society. They are beneath his dignity. He turns to Decius:

Caesar. You are come in very happy time, To bear my greeting to the senators And tell them that I will not come to-day; Cannot, is false, and that I dare not falser: I will not come to-day: tell them so, Decius. Calpurnia. Say he is sick. Caesar. Shall Caesar send a lie? Have I in conquest stretch’d mine arm so far, To be afeard to tell graybeards the truth? Decius, go tell them Caesar will not come ... The cause is in my will: I will not come. (II. ii. 60.)

But this last instance is not merely an example of Shakespeare’s homage to Caesar’s grandeur and his eagerness to enhance it with accessories of his own contrivance. It gives us a clue to the secret of his additions both favourable and the reverse, and points the way to his conception of the man. For observe that this refusal of Caesar’s to make use of a falsehood is an afterthought. A minute before he has, also in words that Shakespeare puts in his mouth, fully consented to the proposal that he should feign illness. He pacifies Calpurnia:

Mark Antony shall say I am not well; And, for thy humour, I will stay at home. (II. ii. 55.)

This compliance he makes to his wife, but in presence of Decius Brutus he recovers himself and adopts the stricter standard. What does this imply? Does it not mean that in a certain sense he is playing a part and aping the Immortal to be seen of men?

Let us consider the situation. Caesar, a man with the human frailties, mental and physical, which are incident to men, is nevertheless endowed by the Higher Powers with genius that has raised him far above his fellows. By his genius he has conceived and grasped and done much to realise the sublime idea of the Roman Empire. By his genius he has raised himself to the headship of that great Empire which his own thought was creating. Private ambitions may have urged and doubtful shifts may have helped his career. He himself feels that within his drapery of grand exploits there is something that will not bear scrutiny; and hence his mistrust of Cassius:

He is a great observer and he looks Quite through the deeds of men. (I. ii. 201.)

But these things are behind him and a luminous veil is drawn over them, beyond which we discern him only as “the foremost man of all this world,” “the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times,” devoted to the cause of Rome, fighting and conquering for her; filling her public treasuries, her general coffers, with gold; sympathising with her poor to whom it will be found only after his death that he has left his wealth. The only hints of unrighteous dealing on his part are given in Artemidorus’ statement to himself: “Thou hast wronged Caius Ligarius,” and in Brutus’ statement about him that he was slain “but for supporting robbers.” But it is never suggested that he himself was guilty of robbery: and the wrong to Ligarius, who was accused “for taking parte with Pompey,” and “thanked not Caesar so muche for his discharge, as he was offended with him for that he was brought in daunger by his tyrannicall power,”[173] hardly deserves the name, at least in the common acceptation. Besides Shakespeare has a large tolerance for the practical statesman when dowered with patriotism, insight, and resolution; and will not lightly condemn him because he must use sorry tools, and takes some soil from the world, and is not unmoved by personal interests. Provided that his more selfish aims coincide with the good of the whole, and that he has veracity of intellect to understand, with steadiness of will to satisfy the needs of the time, Shakespeare will vindicate for him his share of prosperity, honour, and desert. And this seems to be, in glorified version, his view of Caesar. The only serious charge he brings against him in the play, the only charge to which he recurs elsewhere, is that he was ambitious. But ambition is not wholly of sin, and brings forth good as well as evil fruit. Indeed when a man’s desire for the first place merges in the desire for the fullest opportunity, and that again in the desire for the task he feels he can do best, it is distinguishable from a virtue, if at all, only by the demand that he shall be the agent. So is it, to compare celebrities of local and of universal history, with the ambitious strain in the character of Henry IV.; it is not incompatible with sterling worth that commands solid success; it spurs him to worthy deeds that redeem the offences it exacts; and these offences themselves in some sort “tend the profit of the state.” No doubt with both men their ambition brings its own Nemesis, the ceaseless care of the one, the premature death of the other. But that need not prevent recognition of their high qualities, or their just claims, or their providential mandate. Such men are ministers of the Divine Purposes, as Plutarch said in regard to Caesar; and in setting forth the essential meaning of his career, Shakespeare can scorn the base degrees by which he did ascend. Partly his less creditable doings were necessary if he was to mount at all; partly they may have seemed venial to the subject of the Tudor monarchy; at worst, when compared with the splendour of his achievement, they were spots in the sun. In any case they were not worth consideration. With them Shakespeare is not concerned, but with the plenary inspiration of Caesar’s life, the inspiration that made him an instrument of Heaven and that was to bring peace and order to the world. So he passes over the years of effort and preparation, showing their glories but slightly and their trespasses not at all. He confines himself to the time when the summit is reached and the dream is fulfilled. Then to his mind begins the tragedy and the transfiguration.

[173] Marcus Brutus.

He represents Caesar, like every truly great man, as carried away by his own conception and made a slave to it. What a thing was this idea of Empire, this “spirit of Caesar,” of which he as one of earth’s mortal millions was but the vehicle and the organ! He himself as a human person cannot withhold homage from himself as the incarnate Imperium. Observe how he speaks of himself habitually in the third person. Not “I do this,” but “Caesar does this,” “Caesar does that,” alike when talking to the soothsayer, to his wife and to the senate.[174] It is almost as though he anticipated its later use as a common noun equivalent to Emperor: for in all these passages he describes, as it were, what the Emperor’s action and attitude should be. And that is the secret of the strange impression that he makes. It is a case, an exaggerated case, of noblesse oblige. The Caesar, the first of those Caesars who were to receive their apotheosis and be hailed as Divi Augusti, must in literal truth answer Hobbes’ description of the State, and be a mortal god. He must be fearless, omniscient, infallible, without changeableness or shadow of turning: does he not represent the empire? He has to live up to an impossible standard, and so he must affect to be what he is not. He is the martyr of the idea that has made his fortune. He must not listen to his instincts or his misgivings; there is no room in the Caesar for timidity or mistake or fickleness. But, alas! he is only a man, and as a man he constantly gives the lie to the majesty which the spirit of Caesar enjoins. We feel all the more strongly, since we are forced to the comparison, the contrast between the shortcomings of the individual and the splendour of the ideal role he undertakes. And not only that. In this assumption of the Divine, involving as it does a touch of unreality and falsehood, he has lost his old surety of vision and efficiency in act. He tries to rise above himself, and pays the penalty by falling below himself, and rushing on the ruin which a little vulgar shrewdness would have avoided. But his mistake is due to his very greatness, and his greatness encompasses him to the last, when with no futile and undignified struggle, he wraps his face in his mantle and accepts the end. Antony does not exaggerate when he says:

O, what a fall was there, my countrymen! Then I, and you, and all of us fell down; (III. ii. 194.)

for it was the Empire that fell. But to rise again! For the idea of Caesarism, rid of the defects and limitations of its originator, becomes only the more invincible, and the spirit of Caesar begins its free untrammelled course.

[174] Of course the substitution of the third for the second or first person is very noticeable all through this play, and may have been due to an idea on Shakespeare’s part that such a mode of utterance suited the classical and Roman majesty of the theme. But this rather confirms than refutes the argument of the text, for the usage is exceptionally conspicuous in regard to Caesar, in whom the majesty of Rome is summed up.

The greatness of his genius cannot be fully realised unless the story is carried on to the final triumph at Philippi, instead of breaking off immediately after his bodily death. It is in part Shakespeare’s perception of this and not merely his general superiority of power, that makes his Caesar so much more impressive than the Caesar of contemporary dramatists that seem to keep closer to their theme.

Not only then is Julius Caesar the right name for the play, in so far as his imperialist idea dominates the whole, but a very subtle interpretation of his character is given when, as this implies, he is viewed as the exponent of Imperialism. None the less Brutus is the leading personage, if we grant precedence in accordance with the interest aroused.

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IV. THE EXCELLENCES AND ILLUSIONS OF BRUTUS

Thus Shakespeare has his Act of Oblivion for all that might give an unfavourable impression of Caesar’s past, and presents him very much as the incarnate principle of Empire, with the splendours but also with the disabilities that must attend the individual man who feels himself the vehicle for such an inspiration.

He somewhat similarly screens from view whatever in the career of Brutus might prejudice his claims to affection and respect: and carries much further a process of idealization that Plutarch had already begun. For to Plutarch Brutus is, so to speak, the model republican, the paragon of private and civic virtue. The promise to the soldiers before the second battle at Philippi of two cities to sack, calls forth the comment: “In all Brutus’ life there is but this only fault to be found”: and even this, as the marginal note remarks, is “wisely excused”; on the plea, namely, that after Cassius’ death the difficulties were very great and the best had to be made of a bad state of things. But no other misconduct is laid to his charge: his extortionate usury and his abrupt divorce are passed over in silence. All his doings receive indulgent construction, and the narrative is often pointed with a formal éloge. In the Comparison, where of course such estimates are expected, attention is drawn to his rectitude, “only referring his frendschippe and enmitie unto the consideracion of justice and equitie”; to “the marvelous noble minde of him, that for fear never fainted nor let falle any part of his corage”; to his influence over his associates so that “by his choyce of them he made them good men”; to the honour in which he was held by his “verie enemies.” But already the keynote is struck in the opening page:

This Marcus Brutus ... whose life we presently wryte, having framed his manners of life by the rules of vertue and studie of philosophie, and having employed his wit, which was gentle and constant, in attempting of great things: me thinkes he was rightly made and framed unto vertue.

And the story often deviates from its course into little backwaters of commendation, as when after some censure of Cassius, we are told:

Brutus in contrary manner, for his vertue and valliantnes, was well-beloved of the people and his owne, esteemed of noble men, and hated of no man, not so much as of his enemies: bicause he was a marvelous lowly and gentle person, noble minded, and would never be in any rage, nor caried away with pleasure and covetousness, but had ever an upright mind with him, and would never yeeld to any wronge or injustice, the which was the chiefest cause of his fame, of his rising, and of the good will that every man bare him: for they were all perswaded that his intent was good.

This conception Shakespeare adopts and purifies. He leaves out the shadow of that one fault that Plutarch wisely excused: he leaves out too the unpleasant circumstance, which Plutarch apparently thought needed no excuse, that Brutus was applicant for and recipient of offices at the disposal of the all-powerful dictator. There must be nothing to mar the graciousness and dignity of the picture. Shakespeare wishes to portray a patriotic gentleman of the best Roman or the best English type, such “a gentleman or noble person” as it was the aim of Spenser’s Faerie Queene “to fashion in vertuous and gentle discipline,” such a gentleman or noble person as Shakespeare’s generation had seen in Spenser’s friend, Sir Philip Sidney. So Plutarch’s summaries are expanded and filled in partly with touches that his narrative supplies, partly with others that the summaries themselves suggest.

To the latter class belongs the winning courtesy with which Brutus at his first appearance excuses himself to Cassius for his preoccupation. His inward trouble might well have stirred him to irritability and abruptness; but he only feels that it has made him remiss, and that an explanation is due from him:

Vexed I am Of late with passions of some difference, Conceptions only proper to myself, Which give some soil perhaps to my behaviours: But let not therefore my good friends be grieved— Among which number, Cassius, be you one— Nor construe any further my neglect, Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war, Forgets the shows of love to other men. (I. ii. 39.)

So with his friends. Shakespeare invents the character of Lucius to show how attentive and considerate Brutus is as master. He apologises for having blamed his servant without cause.

Bear with me, good boy, I am much forgetful. (IV. iii. 255.)

He notes compassionately that the lad is drowsy and overwatched (IV. iii. 241). At one time he dispenses with his services because he is sleeping sound (II. i. 229). At another he asks a song from him not as a right but as a favour (IV. iii. 256). And immediately thereafter the master waits, as it were, on the nodding slave, and removes his harp lest it should be broken.

But it is to his wife that he shows the full wealth of his affectionate nature. He would fain keep from her the anxieties that are distracting his own mind: but when she claims to share them as the privilege and pledge of wifehood, with his quick sympathy he sees it at once:

You are my true and honourable wife, As dear to me as are the ruddy drops That visit my sad heart. (II. i. 288.)

And yielding to her claim as a right, he recognises that it is a claim that comes from an ideally noble and loving soul, and prays to be made worthy of her. What insight Shakespeare shows even in his omissions! This is the prayer of Plutarch’s Brutus too, but he lifts up his hands and beseeches the gods that he may “bring his enterprise to so goode passe that he mighte be founde a husband worthie of so noble a wife as Porcia.” Shakespeare’s Brutus does not view his worthiness as connected with any material success.

And these words are also an evidence of his humble-mindedness. However aggressive and overbearing he may appear in certain relations, we never fail to see his essential modesty. If he interferes, as often enough he does, to bow others to his will, it is not because he is self-conceited, but because he is convinced that a particular course is right; and where right is concerned, a man must come forward to enforce it. But for himself he has no idea of the high estimation in which his character and parts are held. When Cassius insinuates that everyone thinks him the man for the emergency, if he would only realise it, his reply is a disclaimer: he has never supposed, and shrinks from imagining, that he is fit for such a role. Yet such is his personality that, as all of the faction feel, his help is absolutely necessary if the conspiracy is to have a chance of approval. Cinna exhorts Cassius to win him to the party, Casca bears witness to his popular credit and to the value of his sanction in recommending the enterprise, Ligarius is willing to follow any course if Brutus leads, the cynical Cassius admits his worth and their great need of him.

For his amiable and attractive virtues are saved from all taint of weakness by an heroic strain, both high-spirited and public-spirited, both stoical and chivalrous. Challenged by the solicitations of Cassius he for once breaks through his reticence, and discloses his inward temper. We may be sure that even then he speaks less than he feels.

If it be aught toward the general good, Set honour in one eye, and death i’ the other, And I will look on both indifferently: For let the gods so speed me, as I love The name of honour more than I fear death. (I. ii. 85.)

This elevated way of thinking has been fostered and confirmed by study, just as in the case of Sidney, and by study of much the same kind. Plutarch says:

Now touching the Greecian Philosophers, there was no sect nor Philosopher of them, but he heard and liked it: but above all the rest, he loved Platoes sect best, and did not much give himself to the new or meane Academy as they call it, but altogether to the old Academy.

He has striven to direct his life by right reason, and has pondered its problems under the guidance of his chosen masters. His utterance, which Plutarch quotes, on suicide, shows how he has sought Plato’s aid for a standard by which to judge others and himself.[175] His utterance, which Shakespeare invents, on the death of Portia, shows how he has schooled himself to fortitude, and suggests the influence of a different school.

We must die, Messala: With meditating that she must die once, I have the patience to endure it now. (IV. iii. 190.)

[175] Compare the argument in the Phaedo, with its conclusion: “Then there may be reason in saying that a man should wait and not take his own life till God summons him.” Jowett’s Plato, Vol. I.

He is essentially a thinker, a reader, a student. Plutarch had told how on the eve of Pharsalia, when his companions were resting, or forecasting the morrow, Brutus “fell to his booke and wrote all day long till night, wryting a breviarie of Polybius.” And in his last campaign:

His heade ever busily occupied to thinke of his affayres, ... after he had slumbered a little after supper, he spent all the rest of the night in dispatching of his waightiest causes, and after he had taken order for them, if he had any leysure left him, he would read some booke till the third watch of the night, at what tyme the Captaines, pety Captaines and Colonells, did use to come unto him.

Shakespeare only visualises this description when he makes him find the book, that in his troubles and griefs he has been “seeking for so,” in the pocket of his gown, with the leaf turned down where he stopped reading.

Does then Shakespeare take over Plutarch’s favourite, merely removing the single stain and accenting all the attractions, to confront him as the embodiment of republican virtue, with Caesar, against whom too no evil is remembered, as the embodiment of imperial majesty? Will he show the inevitable collision between two political principles each worthily represented in its respective champion?

This has been said, and there are not wanting arguments to support it. It is clear that the contrast is not perplexed by side issues. Brutus has no quarrel with Caesar as a man, and no justification is given for the conspiracy in what Caesar has done. On the contrary, his murderer stands sponsor for his character, acknowledges his supreme greatness, and loves him as a dear friend. But neither on the other hand is anything introduced that might divert our sympathies from Brutus by representing him as bound by other than the voluntary ties of affection and respect. And this is the more remarkable that in Plutarch there are two particulars full of personal pathos which Shakespeare cannot have failed to note, and which lend themselves to dramatic purposes, as other dramatists have proved. One of them, employed by Voltaire, would darken the assassination to parricide. In explanation of the indulgence with which Caesar treated Brutus, Plutarch says:

When he was a young man, he had been acquainted with Servilia, who was extreamelie in love with him. And bicause Brutus was borne in that time when their love was hottest, he perswaded him selfe that he begat him.[176]

And then follows what can be alleged in proof. “What of anguish,” says Mr. Wyndham, “does this not add to the sweep of the gesture wherewith the hero covered his face from the pedant’s sword!”

This is a mere casual hint; but the other point finds repeated mention in the Life, and is dwelt upon though explained away in the Comparison. It is the circumstance that Brutus had fought on Pompey’s side, and that thereafter Caesar had spared him, amnestied his friends, and loaded him with favours.

The greatest reproache they could make against Brutus was: that Julius Caesar having saved his life, and pardoned all the prisoners also taken in battell, as many as he made request for, taking him for his frende, and honoring him above all his other frends, Brutus notwithstanding had imbrued his hands in his blood.[177]

[176] Voltaire decorously invents a secret marriage!

[177] The comparison of Dion with Brutus.

Plutarch indeed instances this as the grand proof of Brutus’ superiority to personal considerations; but it looks bad, and certainly introduces a new element into the moral problem. At all events, though it involves in a specially acute form that conflict of duties which the drama loves, and was so used by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, as early as Muretus and as late as Alexander, Shakespeare dismisses it.

Attention is concentrated on the single fact that Brutus felt it his duty to take the life of Caesar, and no obligations of kinship or gratitude are allowed to complicate the one simple case of conscience.

The victim and the sacrificer are thus set before us, each with an unstained record, and in only those personal relations that arise from warm and reverent friendship.

Of their mutual attachment we are left in no doubt, nor are we ever suffered to forget it. Cassius in talk to himself, bears witness that Caesar “loves Brutus” (I. ii. 317). Antony, in his speech to the people, appeals to this as a notorious fact:

Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel: Judge, O you Gods, how dearly Caesar loved him. (III. ii. 185.)

But the strongest testimony is Caesar’s own cry, the cry of astonishment and consternation, whether from the betrayed when the beloved is the traitor, or from the condemned when the beloved is the judge:

Et tu Brute! Then fall, Caesar! (III. i. 77.)

Nor is less stress laid on Brutus’ feeling. He avows it in the Forum, as before he had assured Antony that “he did love Caesar when he struck him” (III. i. 182). Cassius tells him:

When thou didst hate him worst, thou lovedst him better Than ever thou lovedst Cassius. (IV. iii. 106.)

But here again the most pathetic evidence is to be found in the assassination scene itself. When Brutus stoops in the guise of petitioner, we cannot suppose it is merely with treacherous adroitness:

I kiss thy hand, but not in flattery, Caesar. (III. i. 52.)

Knowing the man, do we not feel that this is the last tender farewell?

But though all this is true it cannot be maintained, in view of the soliloquy before the conspirators’ meeting, that Shakespeare makes Brutus the mouthpiece of republicanism, as he makes Caesar the mouthpiece of imperialism. The opposition of principles is present, but it is of principles on a different plane.

Caesar, the spirit of Caesar, is indeed the spirit of Empire, the spirit of practical greatness in the domains of war, policy, organisation: of this he is the exponent, to this he is the martyr. Brutus’ spirit is rather the spirit of loyalty to duty, which finds in him its exponent and martyr too.

He is lavishly endowed by nature with all the inward qualities that go to make the virtuous man, and these he has improved and disciplined by every means in his power. His standard is high, but he is so strenuous and sincere in living up to it, that he is recognised as no less pre-eminent in the sphere of ethics, than Caesar in the sphere of politics. Indeed their different ideals dominate and impel both men in an almost equal degree. And in each case this leads to a kind of pose. It appears even in their speech. The balanced precision of the one tells its own tale as clearly as the overstrained loftiness of the other, and is as closely matched with the part that he needs must play. Obviously Brutus does not like to confess that he has been in the wrong. No more in the σώφρων than in the Emperor is there room for any weakness. After his dispute with Cassius he assumes rather unjustifiably that he has on the whole been in the right, that he has been the provoked party, and that at worst he has shown momentary heat. But even this slight admission, coming from him, fills Cassius with surprise.

Brutus. When I spoke that, I was ill-temper’d too. Cassius. Do you confess so much? Give me your hand. (IV. iii. 116.)

The Ideal Wise Man must not yield to anger any more than to other passions, and it costs Brutus something to own that he has done so. But he minimises his confession by accepting Cassius’ apology for his rash humour and promising to overlook any future offences, as though none could be laid to his own door. We like him none the worse for this, his cult of perfection is so genuine: but sometimes the cult of perfection becomes the assumption and obtrusion of it. Read the passage where Messala tells him of Portia’s death.

Messala. Had you letters from your wife, my lord? Brutus. No, Messala. Messala. Nor nothing in your letters writ of her? Brutus. Nothing, Messala. Messala. That, methinks, is strange. Brutus. Why ask you? hear you aught of her in yours? Messala. No. my lord. Brutus. Now, as you are a Roman, tell me true. Messala. Then like a Roman bear the truth I tell: For certain she is dead, and by strange manner. Brutus. Why, farewell, Portia. (IV. iii. 181.)

Now Brutus had received earlier tidings. He may profess ignorance to save himself the pain of explanation, though surely it would have been simpler to say, “I know all.” But the effect is undoubtedly to bring his self-control into fuller relief in presence of Messala and Titinius even than in the presence of Cassius a few minutes before; for then he was announcing what he already knew, here he would seem in the eyes of his informants to be encountering the first shock. Too much must not be made of this, for Cassius who is aware of the circumstances, is no less impressed than the others, and Cassius would have detected any hollow ring. But at the least it savours of a willingness to give a demonstration, so to speak, in Clinical Ethics.

A man like this whose desires are set on building up a virtuous character, but who is not free from the self-consciousness and self-confidence of the specialist in virtue, is exposed to peculiar dangers. His interests and equipment are in the first place for the inward life, and his chief concern is the well-being of his soul. But precisely such an one knows that he cannot save his own soul alone. It is not open to him to disregard the claims of his fellows or the needs of the world, so he is driven to take in hand matters for which he has no inclination or aptitude. He may be quite aware of his unfitness for the work and shrink from investing himself with qualities which he knows he does not possess. All the same, if the call comes, the logic of his nature will force him to essay the ungrateful and impossible task; and he will be apt to imagine a call when there is none. So it is with Brutus. It is true that many of the best respect do look up to him and designate him as their leader: it is none the less true that the unsigned instigations which he takes for the voice of Rome, are the fabrications of a single schemer. He would not be Brutus if he suspected or shirked the summons. This votary of duty cannot acknowledge a merely fugitive and cloistered virtue; this platonic theorist can easily be hood-winked by the practised politician. So Brutus, who is so at home in his study with his book, who is so exemplary in all the private relations of friend, master and husband; predestined, one would say, for the serene labours of philosophic thought and the gracious offices of domestic affection, sweeps from his quiet anchorage to face the storms of political strife, which such as he are not born to master but which they think they must not avoid.

It is a common case; and many have by their very conscientiousness been hurried into a false position where they could not escape from committing blunders and incurring guilt. But generally the blunders are corrigible and the guilt is venial. It is Brutus’ misfortune, that his very greatness, his moral ascendancy with the prestige it bestows, gives him the foremost place, and shifts on his shoulders the main responsibility for all the folly and crime.

For it is inevitable that he should proceed as he does. Yet it is not easy for him. There is a conflict in this sensitive and finely tuned spirit, which, with all his acquired fortitude, bewrays itself in his bearing to Cassius before any foreign suggestion has entered his mind, which afterwards makes him unlike himself in his behaviour to his wife, which drives sleep from his eyes for nights together, which so jars the rare harmony of his nature, in Antony’s view his chief perfection, that he seems to suffer from an insurrection within himself. And it is not hard to understand why this should be. Morality is the guiding principle of Brutus’ character, but what if it should be at variance with itself? Now two sets of moral forces are at strife in his heart. There are the more personal sentiments of love and reverence for Caesar and of detestation for the crime he contemplates. Even after his decision he feels the full horror of conspiracy with its “monstrous visage”; how much more must he feel the horror of assassinating a friend! On the other side are the more traditional ethical obligations to state, class, and house. It is almost as fatal to this visionary to be called Brutus, as it is to the poet to be called Cinna. For a great historic name spares its bearer a narrow margin of liberty. It should be impossible for a Bourbon to be other than a legitimist; it would be impossible for a Romanoff to abandon the Orthodox Church; it is impossible for a Brutus to accept the merest show of royal power. The memory of his stock is about him. Now Cassius reminds him of his namesake who would brook the eternal devil in Rome as easily as a king; now the admonition is affixed with wax upon Old Brutus’ statue; now he himself recalls the share his ancestors had in expelling the Tarquin. If such an one acquiesced in the coronation of Caesar, he must be the basest renegade, or more detached from his antecedents than it is given a mortal man to be. And in Brutus there is no hint of such detachment. The temper that makes him so attentive and loyal to the pieties of life, is the very temper that vibrates to all that is best in the past, and clings to the spirit of use-and-wont. Let it again be repeated that Brutus reveals himself to Shakespeare very much in the form of a cultured and high-souled English nobleman, the heir of great traditions and their responsibilities, which he fulfils to the smallest jot and tittle; the heir also of inevitable preconceptions.

But in Brutus there is more than individual morality and inherited ethos: there is superimposed on these the conscious philosophic theory with which his actions must be squared. He has to determine his conduct not by instinct or usage, but by impersonal, unprejudiced reason. It is to this tribunal that in the last resort he must appeal; and in that strange soliloquy of his he puts aside all private preferences on the one hand, all local considerations on the other, and discusses his difficulty quite as an abstract problem of right and wrong. He sees that if the personal rule of Caesar is to be averted, half measures will not suffice. There are no safeguards or impediments that can prevent the supremacy of so great a man if he is allowed to live. This is his starting point: “It must be by his death.” But then the question arises: is the death of such an one permissible? And in answering it Brutus seems at the first glance to show admirable intellectual candour. He acquits Caesar of all blame; the quarrel “will bear no colour for the thing he is.” What could be more dispassionate and impartial, what more becoming the philosopher? There is no sophistication of the facts in the interest of his party. But immediately there follow the incriminating words:

Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities. (II. i. 30.)

There is a sophistication of the inference. Surely this line of argument is invented to support a foregone conclusion. Already that hint to his conscience, “Fashion it thus,” betrays the resolve to make out a case. And does the mere future contingency justify the present infliction of death? Brutus is appealing to his philosophy: by his philosophy he is judged: for just about this date he was condemning the suicide of Cato because he found it

Cowardly and vile, For fear of what might fall, so to prevent The time of life. (V. i. 104.)

But the argument is the same in both cases, and if it does not excuse self-murder, still less does it excuse the murder of others.

The truth is that Brutus, though he personates the philosopher, is less of one than he thinks. It is not his philosophy but his character that gives him strength to bear the grief of Portia’s death; as Cassius says:

I have as much of this in art as you, But yet my nature could not bear it so. (IV. iii. 194.)

At the end he casts his philosophy to the winds rather than go bound to Rome: he “bears too great a mind” (V. i. 113). And just as on these occasions he is independent or regardless of it, so here he tampers with it to get the verdict that is required. For even in his own eyes he has to play the part of the ideally wise and virtuous man; and though the obligations of descent and position, the consideration in which he is held, the urgings of a malcontent, and (as he believes not altogether without reason) the expectations formed of him by his fellow citizens, supply his real motives for the murder, he needs to give it the form of ideal virtue and wisdom before he can proceed to it.

Now, however, he persuades himself that he has the sanction of reason and conscience, and he acts on the persuasion. His hesitations are gone. He can face without wincing the horror of conspiracy. With an impassioned eloquence, which he nowhere else displays, he can lift the others to the level of his own views. No doubts or scruples becloud his enthusiasm now.

If not the face of men, The sufferance of our souls, the time’s abuse— If these be motives weak, break off betimes, And every man hence to his idle bed; So let high-sighted tyranny range on Till each man drop by lottery. (II. i. 114.)

His certainty has advanced by leaps and bounds. A few minutes ago there was no complaint against Caesar as he was or had been, but it could be alleged that he might or would change: now his tyranny, lighting by caprice on men, is announced as a positive fact of the future or even of the present. But by this time Brutus is assured that the plot is just and that the confederates are the pick of men, both plot and confederates so noble that for them an ordinary pledge would be an insult:

Unto bad causes swear Such creatures as men doubt: but do not stain The even virtue of our enterprise, Nor the insuppressive metal of our spirits, To think that or our cause or our performance Did need an oath. (II. i. 132.)

He carries them away with him. They abandon the oath; they accept all his suggestions; we feel that their thoughts are ennobled by his intervention, that, as Plutarch noted to be the effect of his fellowship, he has made them better men, at least for the time.

Meanwhile it is a devout imagination, an unconscious sophistry that lends him his power; and this brings its own Nemesis at its heels. In the future Brutus will be disillusioned of the merit of the exploit. In the present, persuading his associates of its unparalleled glory, he makes them take their measures to suit. He will not hear of the murder of Antony, for that would be bloody and unnecessary. And his clemency is based on disparagement of Antony’s abilities and contempt for his moral character. Of this “limb of Caesar,” as he calls him, “who can do no more than Caesar’s arm when Caesar’s head is off,” he cries:

Alas, good Cassius, do not think of him: If he love Caesar, all that he can do Is to himself, take thought and die for Caesar: And that were much he should; for he is given To sports, to wildness and much company. (II. i. 185.)

It is not so in Plutarch:

Brutus would not agree to it. First for that he sayd it was not honest: secondly, bicause he told them there was hope of chaunge in him. For he did not mistrust, but that Antonius being a noble minded and coragious man (when he should knowe that Caesar was dead) would willingly helpe his contrie to recover her libertie, having them an example unto him to follow their corage and vertue.

In this hope of converting a rusé libertine like Antony, there is no doubt a hint of idealism, but it is not so marked as in the high-pitched magnanimity of Shakespeare’s Brutus, who denies a man’s powers of mischief because his life is loose.

Yet though Antony would always be a source of danger, the conspirators might find compensation in the reputation for leniency they would gain, and the danger might be reduced were effective steps taken to render him innocuous. But this is only the beginning of Brutus’ mistakes. If indeed they had not begun before. With his masterful influence he has dissuaded his friends from applying to Cicero, on the ground that Cicero will not share in any scheme of which he is not the author. It may be so, but one would think it was at least an experiment well worth the trying. Apart from the authority of his years and position, there would have been the spell of his oratory; and of that they were soon to be sorely in need, again through Brutus’ crotchet that their course evinced its own virtue, and that virtue was a sufficient defence.

“The first fault that he did,” says Plutarch, “was, when he would not consent to his fellow conspirators, that Antony should be slayne: and therefore he was justly accused, that thereby he had saved a stronge and grievous enemy of their conspiracy. The second fault was when he agreed that Caesars funeralls should be as Antony would have them: the which in deede marred all.”

This hint Shakespeare works out. He sees clearly that this further blunder marred all, and heightens the folly of it in various ways. For in Plutarch the question is debated in the Senate, after it has been determined that the assassins shall be not only pardoned but honoured and after provinces have been assigned to them, Crete to Brutus, Africa to Cassius, and the like. Only then, when their victory seems complete and assured, do they discuss the obsequies.

Antonius thinking good his testament should be red openly, and also that his body should be honorably buried, and not in hugger mugger, least the people might thereby take occasion to be worse offended if they did otherwise: Cassius stowtly spake against it. But Brutus went with the motion and agreed unto it.

That is the amount of his error: that when all seemed to be going well with the faction, Antony, who had shown himself in seeming and for the time their most influential friend, commended the proposal on opportunist grounds, and Cassius opposed it, but Brutus supported it and voted with the majority. In the Play his responsibility is undivided, and all the explanatory circumstances have disappeared. He is not one member of an approving Senate, who, when the assassination seems once for all a chose jugée, accepts a suggestion, made apparently in the interests of peace and quiet, by the man to whom, more than to anyone else, the settlement of the affair is due. While the position is still critical, without any evidence of Antony’s good will, without any pressure of public opinion or any plea of political expediency, he endows the helpless suppliant with means to undo what has been done and destroy those who have done it. No wonder that Cassius when he hears Brutus giving Antony permission to speak in the market place, interrupts: “Brutus, a word with you,” and continues in the alarmed aside:

You know not what you do: do not consent That Antony speak in his funeral: Know you how much the people may be moved By that which he will utter? (III. i. 232.)

But Brutus waves his remonstrance aside. He is now so besotted by his own sophisms that he will listen to no warning. He thinks all risk will be averted by his going into the pulpit first to show the “reason” of Caesar’s death. He has quite forgotten that the one reason that he could allege to himself was merely a hazardous conclusion from doubtful premises; and this forsooth is to satisfy the citizens of Rome. But meanwhile since their deed is so irreproachable and disinterested, the conspirators must act in accordance, and show their freedom from any personal motive by giving Caesar all due rites:

It shall advantage more than do us wrong.

The infatuation is almost incredible, and it springs not only from generosity to Antony and Caesar, but from the fatal assumption of the justice of his cause, and the Quixotic exaltation the assumption brings with it.

For were it ever so just, could this be brought home to the Roman populace? Brutus, who is never an expert in facts, has been misled by the inventions of Cassius, which he mistakes for the general voice of Rome. Here, too, Shakespeare departs from his authority to make the duping of his hero more conspicuous. For in Plutarch these communications are the quite spontaneous incitements of the public, not the contrivances of one dissatisfied aristocrat.

But for Brutus, his frendes and contrie men, both by divers procurementes, and sundrie rumors of the citie, and by many bills also, did openlie call and procure him to doe that he did. For, under the image of his auncestor Junius Brutus, that drave the kinges out of Rome, they wrote: “O, that it had pleased the goddes that thou wert now alive, Brutus: and againe that thou wert with us nowe.” His tribunall (or chaire) where he gave audience during the time he was praetor, was full of such billes: “Brutus, thou art a sleepe, and art not Brutus in deede.”

All these in Plutarch are worth their face value, but in Shakespeare they are not: and it is one of the ironies of Brutus’ career that he takes them as appeals from the people when they are only the juggleries of Cassius. So far from objecting to Imperialism, the citizens when most favourable to Brutus call out, “Let him be Caesar!” “Caesar’s better parts shall be crowned in Brutus” (III. ii. 56). This is the acme of his success and the prologue to his disillusionment.

But even if the case of the conspirators could be commended to the populace, Brutus is not the man to do it. It is comic and pathetic to hear him reassuring Cassius with the promise to speak first as though he could neutralise in advance the arts of Antony. Compare his oration with that of his rival. First, in the matter of it, there is no appeal to the imagination or passions, but an unvarnished series of arguments addressed exclusively to the logical reason. Such a speech would make little impression on an assembly of those who are called educated men, and to convince an audience like the artisans of Rome (for such was Shakespeare’s conception of the People), it is ridiculously inadequate. But the style is no less out of place. The diction is as different as possible from the free and fluent rhetoric of Antony. Shakespeare had read in Plutarch:

They do note in some of his Epistells, that he counterfeated that briefe compendious maner of speach of the Lacedaemonians. As when the warre was begonne, he wrote unto the Pergamenians in this sorte: “I understand you have geven Dolabella money; if you have done it willingly, you confesse you have offended me: if against your wills, shewe it then by geving me willinglie.” An other time againe unto the Samians: “Your counsels be long, your doinges be slowe, consider the ende.” And in an other Epistell he wrote unto[178] the Patareians: “The Xanthians despising my good wil, have made their contrie a grave of dispaire: and the Patareians that put them selves into my protection, have lost no jot of their libertie. And therefore whilest you have libertie, either choose the judgement of the Patareians, or the fortune of the Xanthians.”

[178] i.e. in reference to.

Thus prompted Shakespeare makes Brutus affect the balanced structure of Euphuism. Not only in his oration. Read his words to Cassius at their first interview:

That you do love me, I am nothing jealous; What you would work me to, I have some aim; How I have thought of this and of these times, I shall recount hereafter; for this present, I would not, so with love I might entreat you, Be any further moved. What you have said I will consider: what you have to say I will with patience hear, and find a time Both meet to hear and answer such high things. (I. ii. 161.)

Nothing could be more neat, accurate and artificial than this Euphuistic arrangement of phrases. It at once suggests the academic studious quality of Brutus’ expression whenever he gives thought to it. But it is a style unsuitable to, one might almost say incompatible with, genuine passion. So it is noteworthy that when he lets himself go in answer to Cassius and introduces the personal accent, he abandons his mannerisms. And could the symmetrical clauses of his oration move the popular heart? It has a noble ring about it, because it is sincere, with the reticence and sobriety which the sincere man is careful to observe when he is advocating his own case. But that is not the sort of thing that the Saviour of his Country, as Brutus thought himself to be, will find fit to sway a mob. Nevertheless his eloquence was notorious. Plutarch states that when his mind “was moved to followe any matter, he used a kind of forcible and vehement perswasion that calmed not till he had obteyned his desire.” There is a rush of emotion in his words when he is denouncing the conventional pledge or wanton bloodshed, but if any personal interest is involved, the springs are dry. In the Forum it is characteristic that he speaks with far more warmth—a transition indicated not only by the change of style, but, after Shakespeare’s wont, by the substitution of verse for prose—when he no longer pleads for himself but tries to get a hearing for Mark Antony.

And this is the man with his formal dialectic and professorial oratory, impassioned only on behalf of his enemy, who thinks that by a temperate statement of the course which he has seduced his reason to approve, he can prevent the perils of a speech by Caesar’s friend. He does not even wait to hear it: but if he did, what could he effect against the sophistries and rhetorical tricks, the fervour and regret, the gesticulation and tears of Antony’s headlong improvisation?

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V. THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF BRUTUS. PORTIA

Brutus had been doubly duped, by his own subtlety and his own simplicity in league with his conscientiousness; for in this way he was led to idealise his deed as enjoined both by the inward moral code and the demands of his country, and such self-deception avenges itself as surely as any intentional crime. He is soon disabused in regard to the wishes of Rome and its view of the alleged wrongs it has suffered from Caesar. His imagination had dwelt on the time when his ancestors drove out the Tarquin; now he himself must ride “like a madman” through the gates. It is not only the first of his reverses but a step towards his enlightenment, for it helps to show that he has been mistaken in the people. Still, the momentary mood of the populace may not always recognise its best interests and real needs, and may not coincide with the true volonté générale. There is harder than this in store for Brutus. By the time we meet him again at Sardis a worse punishment has overtaken him, and his education in disappointment has advanced, though he does his utmost to treat the punishment as fate and not to learn the lessons it enforces.

This scene has won the applause of the most dissimilar minds and generations. We have seen how Leonard Digges singles it out as the grand attraction of the play, by which, above all others, it transcends the laboured excellences of Catiline or Sejanus. It excited the admiration and rivalry of the greatest genius of the Restoration period. Scott says of the dispute between Antony and Ventidius in All for Love: “Dryden when writing this scene had unquestionably in his recollection the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, which was so justly a favourite in his time, and to which he had referred as inimitable in his prologue to Aureng-Zebe.

But spite of all his pride, a secret shame Invades his breast at Shakespeare’s sacred name: Awed, when he hears his godlike Romans rage, He in a just despair would quit the stage; And to an age less polished, more unskilled, Does with disdain the foremost honours yield.”

In the eighteenth century Dr. Johnson, though he finds Julius Caesar as a whole “somewhat cold and unaffecting,” perhaps because Shakespeare’s “adherence to the real story and to Roman manners” has “impeded the natural vigour of his genius,” excepts particular passages and cites “the contention and reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius” as universally celebrated. And Coleridge goes beyond himself in his praise: “I know no part of Shakespeare that more impresses on me the belief of his being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and Cassius. In the Gnostic heresy it might have been credited with less absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create, previously to his function of representing characters.” Yet it is not merely in the revelation of character that the scene is unique. More than any other single episode, more than all the rest together, it lays bare the significance of the story in its tragic pathos and its tragic irony. And the wonder of it is increased rather than lessened when we take note that it is a creation not out of nothing but out of chaos. For there is hardly a suggestion, hardly a detail, that Shakespeare did not find in Plutarch, but here in confused mixture, there in inert isolation, and nowhere with more than the possibilities of being organised. It is Shakespeare, who, to borrow from Milton’s description of the beginning of his Universe, “founded and conglobed like things to like, and vital virtue infused and vital warmth.”

The nucleus of this passage is found just after the account of Brutus’ exploits in Lycia.

About that tyme, Brutus sent to pray Cassius to come to the citye of Sardis, and so he did. Brutus understanding of his comming, went out to meete him with all his frendes. There both their armies being armed, they called them both Emperors. Nowe, as it commonly hapneth in great affayres betwene two persons, both of them having many friends, and so many Captaines under them; there ranne tales and complaints betwixt them. Therefore, before they fell in hand with any other matter, they went into a little chamber together, and bad every man avoyde, and did shut the dores to them. Then they beganne to powre out their complaints one to the other, and grew hot and lowde, earnestly accusing one another, and at length fell both a weeping. Their friends that were without the chamber hearing them lowde within, and angry betwene them selves, they were both amased and affrayd also lest it would grow to further matter: but yet they were commaunded that no man should come to them. Notwithstanding, one Marcus Phaonius, that had bene a friend and follower of Cato while he lived, and tooke upon him to counterfeate a Philosopher, not with wisedom and discretion, but with a certaine bedlem and frantick motion: he would needes come into the chamber, though the men offered to keepe him out. But it was no boote to let Phaonius, when a mad moode or toy tooke him in the head: for he was a hot hasty man, and sodaine in all his doings, and cared for never a Senator of them all. Now, though he used this bold manner of speeche after the profession of the Cynick Philosophers (as who would say, doggs), yet this boldnes did no hurt many times, bicause they did but laugh at him to see him so mad. This Phaonius at that time, in despite of the doore keepers, came into the chamber, and with a certain scoffing and mocking gesture which he counterfeated of purpose, he rehearsed the verses which old Nestor sayd in Homer:

My lords, I pray you harken both to mee, For I have seene moe yeares than suchye three.

Cassius fell a-laughing at him: but Brutus thrust him out of the chamber, and called him dogge, and counterfeate Cynick. Howbeit his comming in brake their strife at that time, and so they left eche other.

Here there seems little enough to tempt the dramatist; the two generals quarrel, Phaonius bursts in, Cassius laughs at him, Brutus turns him out, but the interruption temporarily patches up a truce between them. And this petty incident is made the most pregnant in Shakespeare’s whole play; and that by apparently such simple means. To get the meaning out of it, or to read the meaning into it, he does little more, so far as the mechanical aspects of his treatment are concerned, than collect a few other notices scattered up and down the pages of his authority. He had found in an earlier digression Cassius described as

a hot cholerick and cruell man, that would often tymes be caried away from justice for gayne: it was certainly thought that he made warre, and put him selfe into sundry daungers, more to have absolute power and authoritie, than to defend the liberty of his contrie.

Again after describing Brutus’ success with the Patareians, Plutarch proceeds:

Cassius, about the selfe same tyme, after he had compelled the Rhodians every man to deliver all the ready money they had in gold and silver in their houses, the which being brought together, amounted to the summe of eyght thousande talents: yet he condemned the citie besides, to paye the summe of five hundred talents more. When Brutus in contrary manner, after he had leavyed of all the contrye of Lycia but a hundred and fiftye talents onely: he departed thence into the contrye of Ionia, and did them no more hurt.

Previously with reference to the first meeting of the fugitives after they collected their armies and before they came to Sardis at all, Plutarch narrates:

Whilst Brutus and Cassius were together in the citie of Smyrna: Brutus prayed Cassius to let him have some part of his money whereof he had great store, bicause all that he could rappe and rend of his side, he had bestowed it in making so great a number of shippes, that by meanes of them they should keepe all the sea at their commaundement. Cassius’ friendes hindered this request, and earnestly disswaded him from it: perswading him, that it was no reason that Brutus should have the money which Cassius had gotten together by sparing, and leavied with great evil will of the people their subjects, for him to bestowe liberally uppon his souldiers, and by this meanes to winne their good willes, by Cassius charge. This notwithstanding, Cassius gave him the third part of his totall summe.

Then at Sardis, but not on occasion of the dispute interrupted by Phaonius, mention is made of the affair with Pella:

The next daye after, Brutus, upon complaynt of the Sardians did condemne and noted Lucius Pella for a defamed person, that had been a Praetor of the Romanes, and whome Brutus had given charge unto: for that he was accused and convicted of robberie, and pilferie in his office. This judgement much misliked Cassius; bicause he him selfe had secretly (not many dayes before) warned two of his friends, attainted and convicted of the like offences, and openly had cleered them: but yet he did not therefore leave to employ them in any manner of service as he did before. And therefore he greatly reproved Brutus, for that he would shew him selfe so straight and seveare in such a tyme, as was meeter to beare a little, then to take thinges at the worst. Brutus in contrary manner aunswered, that he should remember the Ides of Marche, at which tyme they slue Julius Caesar: who nether pilled nor polled the contrye, but onely was a favorer and suborner of all them that did robbe and spoyle, by his countenaunce and authoritie. And if there were any occasion whereby they might honestly sette aside justice and equitie: they should have had more reason to have suffered Caesar’s friendes, to have robbed and done what wronge and injurie they had would, then to beare with their owne men. For then, sayde he, they could but have sayde they had bene cowards: “and now they may accuse us of injustice, beside the paynes we take, and the daunger we put our selves into.”

Lastly at the end of the Life of Brutus, Shakespeare would find a short notice of the death of Portia. No indication is given of the date at which this took place, except that Plutarch seems on the whole to discredit the idea that she survived her husband.

And for Porcia, Brutus’ wife: Nicolaus the Philosopher, and Valerius Maximus doe wryte, that she determining to kill her selfe (her parents and frendes carefullie looking to her to kepe her from it) tooke hot burning coles, and cast them into her mouth, and kept her mouth so close, that she choked her selfe. There was a letter of Brutus found wrytten to his frendes, complayning of their negligence, that his wife being sicke, they would not helpe her, but suffered her to kill her selfe, choosing to dye rather than to languish in paine. Thus it appeareth, that Nicolaus knewe not well that time, sith the letter (at the least if it were Brutus letter) doth plainly declare the disease and love of this Lady, as also the maner of her death.

Now in Shakespeare’s scene all these detached jottings find their predestined place, and together have an accumulated import of which Plutarch has only the remotest guess. They are so combined as to bring out at once the ideal aspect of Brutus’ deed, and its folly and disastrousness in view of the facts. He maintains his manhood under the most terrible ordeal, which is well; he clings to his illusion in the face of the clearest proof, which is not so well. He is gathering evil fruit where he looked for good, but he refuses to admit that the tree was corrupt; and of the prestige that his clear conscience confers, he still makes baneful use. He is raised to the heroic by his persistence in regarding the murder as an act of pure and disinterested justice, but for that very reason he makes his blunders, and puts himself and others in the wrong.

Perhaps indeed his loss of temper is to be ascribed to another cause. He is in a tense, over-wrought state, when the slightest thing will provoke an outbreak. In Cassius’ view his private and personal sorrow, the only one Cassius could understand, might quite well, apart from all the rest, have driven him to greater violence:

How ’scaped I killing when I cross’d you so? (IV. iii. 150.)

No wonder he uses stinging words to his friend, taxes him most unfairly with the boast of being a better soldier, and flings aside Cassius’ temperate correction of “elder,” with the contemptuous, “If you did, I care not.” No wonder he drives out the poet, while Cassius merely laughs at him. Yet even here, though he is undoubtedly the angrier and more unreasonable in the quarrel, his moral dignity just before has saved him from an indiscretion into which Cassius falls. When the other begins to complain before the soldiers, Brutus checks him:

Cassius, be content; Speak your griefs softly; I do know you well. Before the eyes of both our armies here, Which should perceive nothing but love from us, Let us not wrangle: Bid them move away; Then in my tent, Cassius, enlarge your griefs, And I will give you audience. (IV. ii. 41.)

In the onset of misfortune Brutus does not forget his weightier responsibilities, though the strain of resisting it may impair his suavity. The fine balance of his nature that was overthrown by suspense, may well be shaken by his afflictions. For they are more numerous than Cassius knew and more poignant than he could understand.

Portia’s suicide with all its terrible accessories Brutus brings into relation with himself. It is absence from him, and, as his love tells him, distress at the growing power of his enemies that caused her madness. The ruin of that home life which was his native element, the agony and death of the wife he worshipped, are the direct consequences of his own act.

And with this private there has come also the public news. The proscription has already swept away seventy senators; Cicero, despite his “silver hairs,” his “judgment,” and his “gravity” being one; and the number given, according to Messala, is an understatement. Brutus had talked of each man’s dropping by lottery under Caesar’s rule, but however much Caesar had degenerated, would he have decreed a more wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter than this? Was there anything in his career as described by Brutus himself, that foreshadowed a callousness like that of the Triumvirs in pricking down and damning their victims, among them the most illustrious members of Brutus’ own class? And the perpetrators, far from injuring their cause by these atrocities, are in a position to take the field with a “mighty power.” So the civil war with all its horrors and miseries will run its full course.

But even that is not the worst. Brutus has to realise that his associates were not the men he supposed them. Their hands are not clean, their hearts are not pure, even his brother Cassius connives at corruption and has “an itching palm” himself. Even when the soi disant deliverers wield the power, what are things better than they would have been under Caesar who was at least personally free from such reproach and whose greatness entitled him to his place in front? Surely there are few more pathetic passages even in Shakespeare than the confession of disillusionment wrung from Brutus by the force of events, a confession none the less significant that he admits disillusion only as to the results and still clings to his estimate of the deed itself.

Remember March, the ides of March remember: Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake? What villain touch’d his body, that did stab, And not for justice? What, shall one of us, That struck the foremost man of all this world But for supporting robbers, shall we now Contaminate our fingers with base bribes, And sell the mighty space of our large honours For so much trash as may be grasped thus? I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon, Than such a Roman. (IV. iii. 18.)

It has come to this. In anticipating the effects of Caesar’s rule, he had said he “had rather be a villager than to repute himself a son of Rome” in the probable conditions. But his attempt at remedy has resulted in a situation even more intolerable. He would rather be a dog than such Romans as the confederates whom he sought to put in Caesar’s place are disclosing themselves to be.

It says much for his intrinsic force, that when all these things rise up in judgment against him, he can still maintain to himself and others the essential nobility of the deed that has brought about all the woe and wrong; and without any faint-hearted penitence, continue to insist that their doings must conform to his conception of what has been done: that if that conception conflicts with the facts, it is the facts that must give way. Yet on that very account he is quite impracticable and perverse, as every enthusiast for abstract justice must be, who lets himself be seduced into crime on the plea of duty, and yet shapes his course as though he were not a criminal.

Brutus has brought about an upturn of society by assassinating the one man who could organize that society. His own motives were honourable, though not so unimpeachable as he assumed, but they could not change wrong into right and they could not be taken for granted in others than himself. Now in the confusions that ensue he finds, to his horror, that revolutions are not made with rose water, that even champions of virtue have to reckon with base and dirty tools. So he condemns Pella for bribery. Cassius judges the case better. He sees that Pella is an efficient and useful officer of whose services he does not wish to be deprived. He sees that in domestic broils the leaders must not be too particular about their instruments, that, according to the old proverb, you must go into the water to catch fish. But Brutus will not go into the water. He thinks that an assassin should only have Galahads in his troops. And sometimes his offended virtue becomes even a little absurd. He is angry with Cassius for not giving him money, but listen to his speech:

I did send to you For certain sums of gold, which you denied me: For I can raise no money by vile means: By heaven, I had rather coin my heart, And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash By any indirection: I did send To you for gold to pay my legions, Which you denied me: was that done like Cassius? Should I have answer’d Caius Cassius so? When Marcus Brutus grows so covetous To lock such rascal counters from his friends, Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts; Dash him to pieces! (IV. iii. 69.)

What does all this come to? That the superfine Brutus will not be guilty of extortion, but that Cassius may: and then Brutus will demand to share in the proceeds. All this distress and oppression are his doing, or at least the consequences of his deed, and he would wash his hands of these inevitable accompaniments. He would do this by using Cassius as his âme damnée while yet interfering in Cassius’ necessary measures with his moral rebukes.[179]

[179] It will be noticed that in this episode Shakespeare has altered Plutarch’s narrative in two respects. In the first place Cassius did give money to the amount of “the thirde part of his totall summe.” This is not very important, as in the play he disclaims having ever refused it. But in the second place Brutus was neither so scrupulous nor so unsuccessful in raising supplies, but had used them in a quite practical way, that Captain Mahan would thoroughly approve, in developing his sea power: “all that he could rappe and rend ... he had bestowed it in making so great a number of shippes that by meanes of them they should keepe all the sea at their commaundement.”

This of course is between Cassius and himself, and if Cassius chooses to submit, it is his own concern. But Brutus plays the Infallible to such purpose, that, what with his loftiness of view, his earnestness, and his marvellous fortitude, he obtains an authority over Cassius’ mind that has disastrous results. Though Cassius is both the better and the elder soldier, he must needs intermeddle with Cassius’ plan of campaign. Here, as so often, Shakespeare has no warrant for his most significant touch. Plutarch had said that Cassius, against his will, was overruled by Brutus to hazard their fortunes in a single battle. But that was afterwards, at Philippi. There is no hint that Cassius was opposed to the movement from Sardis to Philippi, and it is on this invented circumstance that Shakespeare lays most stress. In the play Brutus, in the teeth of his fellow generals’ disapproval, insists on their leaving their vantage ground on the hills, chiefly as it appears because he dislikes the impositions they are compelled to lay on the people round about:

They have grudged us contribution; (IV. iii. 206.)

and because he has a vague belief that this is the nick of time;

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their lives Is bound in shallows and in miseries. (IV. ii. 218.)

These are the arguments which he opposes to Cassius’ skilled strategy. He will not even listen to Cassius’ rejoinder:

Cassius. Hear me, good brother— Brutus. Under your pardon: (IV. iii. 212.)

and he runs on. The spiritual dictator carries his point, as he always does, and as here especially he is bound to do, when their recent trial of strength has ratified his powers afresh. Cassius is hypnotised into compliance, “Then, with your will, go on.” But Brutus is wrong. He is doing the very thing that the Triumvirs would have him do and dare not hope he will do. Octavius, when he hears of the movement, exclaims:

Now, Antony, our hopes are answered: You said the enemy would not come down, But keep the hills and upper regions: It proves not so. (V. i. 1.)

The adoption of Brutus’ plan, which he secured in part through the advantage he had gained in the quarrel, leads directly to the final catastrophe.

Here then we have the gist of the whole story. The tribulations of Brutus that ensue on his grand mistake, the wreck of his dearest affections, the butchery at Rome, the oppression of the provinces, the appalling discovery that his party is animated by selfish greed and not by righteous zeal, and that Caesar bore away the palm in character as well as ability; the dauntless resolution with which despite his vibrant sensibility he bears up against the rudest blows; the sustaining consciousness that he himself acted for the best, and the pathetic imagination even now that the rest must live up to his standard; the warrant this gives him to complete the outward ruin of the cause that already is rotten within—all this is brought home to us in a passage of little more than two hundred lines. It is not merely a masterpiece in characterisation; it at once garners the harvest of the past and sows the seeds of the future. Nor is the execution inferior to the conception; the passion of the verse, the fluctuation of the dialogue, provide the fit medium for the pregnancy and wealth of the matter.[180]

[180] Two objections have been made to this scene, or, rather to the whole act. The first, in Mr. Bradley’s words that it has a “tendency to drag” (Shakespearian Tragedy), is put more uncompromisingly by Mr. Baker (Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist); “[Shakespeare] produced in Julius Caesar a fourth act probably not entirely successful even in his own day”; and afterwards he refers to it as “ineffective to-day.” In view of Digges’ testimony, it is difficult to see how Mr. Baker can say that it was not entirely successful in Shakespeare’s day. As to the impression it makes now, one must largely depend on one’s own feeling and experience. Certainly I myself have never been conscious that it dragged or was ineffective, nor have I noted that it failed to stir the audience. I have never been present at a first-rate performance, but I have seen it creditably presented in Germany, England and Australia; and on every occasion it seemed to me that the quarrel scene was the most popularly successful in the play. This statement is, I believe, strictly accurate, for having Digges’ lines in my mind I was on the watch to see whether the taste of the Elizabethan coincided with the taste of a later generation.

The second criticism is that in the economy of the piece it leads to nothing, “unless,” as Mr. Bradley says, “we may hold that but for the quarrel and reconciliation, Cassius would not have allowed Brutus to overcome his objection to the fatal policy of offering battle at Philippi.” This is quite true, though the proviso is a most important one. But it does very manifestly connect with what has gone before, and gives the essence and net result of the story. We could sooner dispense with the Fifth Act than the Fourth, for the Fifth may with less injustice be described as an appendix than the Fourth as an episode. Not only is it less unique in kind, but for the most part it works out issues that can easily be foreseen and that to some extent are clearly indicated here. Of course this is not to say that it could be rejected without mutilating the play, for it works them out far more impressively than we could do in our own imaginations, even with Plutarch to help us.

But the scene is not yet at an end. Even now we are not for a moment allowed to forget Brutus, the considerate gentleman and cultured student, in Brutus, the political pedant and the incompetent commander. We have a momentary glimpse of him with Lucius, unassuming and gentle, claiming the indulgence, consulting the comfort, tending the needs of his slave. This moving little passage is, as we have seen, entirely due to Shakespeare, and it seems to be introduced for the sake partly of the dramatic contrast with the prevailing trouble and gloom, partly of the indication it gives that Brutus is still unchanged at heart. In the stress of his suffering he may be irritable and overbearing with Cassius, but he has more than a woman’s tenderness for the boy.

His habit of reading at night is mentioned by Plutarch, but when we consider the circumstances, has it not a deeper meaning here? His love for Portia we know, but after his brief references to her death, he seems to banish her from his mind, and never, not even in his dying words, does her name cross his lips again. Is this an inadvertence on Shakespeare’s part, or an omission due to the kinship of Julius Caesar with the Chronicle History? Is it not rather that he conceives Brutus as one of those who are so bound up in their affections that they fear to face a thought of their bereavement lest they should utterly collapse? Is it fanciful to interpret that search for his book with the leaf turned down, in the light of Macaulay’s confession on the death of his sister: “Literature has saved my life and my reason; even now I dare not in the intervals of business remain alone a minute without a book”?

But this little interlude, which sets Brutus before us with all his winsome and pathetic charm, leads back to the leading motif, the destruction he has brought on himself by his own error, though he may face it like a man and keep the beauty of his soul unsoiled. Here, too, Plutarch points the way, but Shakespeare advances further in it. What he found was the following bit of hearsay:

One night very late (when all the campe tooke quiet rest) as he was in his tent with a little light, thinking of waighty matters, he thought he heard one come in to him, and casting his eye towards the doore of his tent, that he saw a wonderfull straunge and monstruous shape of a body comming towards him, and sayd never a word. So Brutus boldly asked what he was, a god, or a man, and what cause brought him thither. The spirit aunswered him, “I am thy evill spirit, Brutus, and thou shalt see me by the citie of Philippes.” Brutus beeing no otherwise affrayd, replyed again unto it: “Well, then, I shall see thee agayne.” The spirit presently vanished away: and Brutus called his men unto him, who tolde him that they heard no noyse, nor sawe any thinge at all.

Shakespeare’s Brutus is not at the outset so unconcerned as Plutarch’s. Instead of “being no otherwise affrayd,” his blood runs cold and his hair “stares.” On the other hand, he is free from the perturbation that seizes Plutarch’s Brutus when he reflects, and that drives him to tell his experience to Cassius, who “did somewhat comfort and quiet him.” The Brutus of the play breathes no word of the visitation, though it is repeated at Philippi, till a few minutes before his death, and then in all composure as a proof that the end is near, not as a horror from which he seeks deliverance. He needs not the support of another, and even in the moment of physical panic he has moral courage enough: he summons up his resolution, and when he has “taken heart” the spectre vanishes. This means, too, that it has a closer connection with his nerves, with his subjective fears and misgivings, than the “monstruous shape” in Plutarch, and similarly, though he alleges that Lucius and his attendants have cried out in their sleep, they are unaware of any feeling or cause of fright. And the significance of this is marked by the greatest change of all. Shakespeare gives a personality to Plutarch’s nameless phantom: it is individualised as the ghost of Caesar, and thus Caesar’s spirit has become Brutus’ evil genius, as Brutus had been Caesar’s angel. The symbolism explains itself, but is saved from the tameness of allegory by the superstitious dread with which it is enwrapped. The regrets and forebodings of Brutus appear before him in outward form. All day the mischievousness of his intervention has been present to his mind: now his accusing thoughts take shape in the vision of his murdered friend, and his vague presentiments of retribution at Philippi leap to consciousness in its prophetic words. But all this does not abash his soul or shake his purpose. He only hastens the morning march.

Thus he moves to his doom, and never was he so great. He is stripped of all adventitious aids. His private affections are wrecked, and the thought of his wife has become a torture. Facts have given the lie to his belief that his country has chosen him as her champion. He can no longer cherish the dream that his course has been of benefit to the Roman world. He even seems at last to recognise his own guilt, for not only does he admit the might of Caesar’s spirit in the suicide of Cassius, but when his own turn comes, his dying words sound like a proffer of expiation:

Caesar, now be still; I kill’d not thee with half so good a will. (V. v. 50.)

The philosophic harness in which he felt so secure, he has already found useless in the hour of need, and fit only to be cast aside. So he stands naked to the blows of fate, bereft of his love, his illusions, his self-confidence, his creed. He has to rely solely on himself, on his own nature and his own character. Moreover his nature, in so far as it means temperament, is too delicate and fine for the rough practical demands on it. Suspense is intolerable to his sensitive and eager soul. Ere the battle begins, he can hardly endure the uncertainty:

O that a man might know The end of this day’s business ere it come! But it sufficeth that the day will end, And then the end is known. (V. i. 123.)

The patience in which he tries to school himself cannot protect him from a last blunder. He gives the word too soon and his impetuosity ruins all. No doubt he is not so unsuccessful as Titinius thinks, but he has committed the unpardonable fault of fighting for his own hand without considering his partner. Thus his imprudence gives the final blow to the cause that all through he has thwarted and ennobled.

But in inward and essential matters his character victoriously stands the test, and meets all the calls that are made upon it. Even when his life-failure stares him in the face, he does not allow it a wider scope than its due, or let it disturb his faith in the purity of his motives.

I am Brutus, Marcus Brutus, I: Brutus, my country’s friend. (V. iv. 7.)

Even now he can see himself aright, and be sure of the truth of his patriotism. Even now he can prefer the glory of this “losing day” to the “vile conquest” of such men as the authors of the proscription. And he is not without more personal consolations. When none of his friends will consent to kill him, their very refusal, since it springs from love, fills his soul with triumph. It is characteristic that this satisfaction to his private affections ranks with him as supreme at the end of all.

Countrymen, My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but he was true to me. (V. v. 33.)

We need not bemoan his fate: he is happy in it: indeed there is nothing that he could live for in the world of the Triumvirs, and this is what he himself desires:

My bones would rest, That have but labour’d to attain this hour. (V. v. 41.)

At the side of this rare and lofty nature, we see the kindred figure of his wife, similar in her noble traits, similar in her experiences, the true mate of his soul. Their relations are sketched in the merest outline, or, to be more correct, are implied rather than sketched. Only in some eighty lines of one scene do we see them together and hear them exchange words. In only one other scene does Portia appear, when we witness her tremors on the morning of the assassination. And in a third we hear of her death in detached notices, which, with the comments they call forth, barely amount to twenty lines. Yet the impression made is indelible and overpowering, not only of the lady’s own character, but of the perfect union in which she and Brutus lived. There is no obtrusion of their love: it does not exhale in direct professions. On her part, the claim to share his troubles, the solicitude for his success, the distraction because of his absence and danger; on his, the acceptance of her claim, two brief outbursts of adoration—and his reticence at her death. For he is not the man to wear his heart on his sleeve; and the more his feelings are stirred the less inclined is he to prate of them. Just as after slaying Caesar though “he loved him well,” he never alludes to the anguish he must have endured, so after his “Farewell, Portia,” he turns to the claims of life (“Well, to our work alive!”), and never even in soliloquy refers to her again. Even in the first pang of bereavement, the one hint of grief it can extort from him is the curt retort, “No man bears sorrow better.” We might fail to recognise all that it meant for him if we did not see his misery reflected in the sympathy and consternation of other men; in the hesitating reluctance of Messala, to break, as he thinks, the news; in the dismay of Cassius and his wonder at Brutus’ self-control. Cassius indeed cannot but recur to it despite the prohibition, “Speak no more of her.” When they have sat down to business his thoughts hark back to the great loss: “Portia, art thou gone?” “No more, I pray you,” repeats Brutus, who cannot brook the mention of her, and he plunges into the business of the hour.

And this woman, of whom Brutus felt that he was unworthy, and prayed to be made worthy, noble and devoted as himself, is involved too in his misfortunes. On her also a greater load is laid than she can bear. He is drawn by his political, and she by her domestic ideal into a position that overstrains the strength of each. She demands, as in Plutarch, though perhaps with father less of the dignity of the Roman matron and rather more of the yearning of the affectionate wife, to share in her husband’s secrets. She does this from no curiosity, intrusiveness or jealousy, but from her unbounded love and her exalted conception of the marriage tie. And she is confident that she can bear her part in her husband’s cares.

She has a great spirit, but it is lodged in a fragile and nervous frame. Does she make her words good? She gains her point, but her success is almost too much for her. She can endure pain but not suspense: like Brutus she is martyr to her sense of what is right. We presently find her all but ruining the conspiracy by her uncontrollable agitation. The scene where she waits in the street serves the function in the main story of heightening our excitement by means of hers, in expectation of what will presently be enacted at the Capitol; but it is even more important for the light it throws on her character. She may well confess: “I have a man’s heart, but a woman’s might.” Her feverish anxiety quite overmasters her throughout, and makes her do and say things which do not disclose the plot only because the bystanders are faithful or unobservant. She sends the boy to the senate house without telling him his errand. She meaningly bids him

take good note What Caesar doth, what suitors press about him. (II. iv. 15.)

She interrupts herself with the fancy that the revolt has begun. She plies the soothsayer with suspicious questions that culminate in the most indiscreet one on his wish to help Caesar:

Why, know’st thou any harm’s intended towards him? (II. iv. 31.)

Then she almost commits herself, and has to extemporise a subterfuge, before, unable to hold out any longer, she retires on the point of fainting, though even now her love gives her strength to send a cheering message to her lord.

For her as for Brutus the burden of a duty, which she assumes by her own choice, but which one of her nature must assume, is too heavy. And in the after consequences, for which she is not directly responsible, but which none the less flow from the deed that she has encouraged and approved, it is the same inability to bear suspense, along with her craving for her husband’s presence and success, that drives her through madness to death.

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VI. THE REMAINING CHARACTERS

Far beneath this pair are the other conspirators who rise up against the supremacy of Caesar.

Among these lower natures, Cassius is undoubtedly the most imposing and most interesting.

The main lines of his character are given in Caesar’s masterly delineation, which follows Plutarch in regard to his spareness, but in the other particulars freely elaborates the impression that Plutarch’s whole narrative produces.

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look: He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.... He reads much; He is a great observer, and he looks Quite through the deeds of men; he loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music; Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort As if he mock’d himself and scorn’d his spirit That could be moved to smile at anything. Such men as he be never at heart’s ease Whiles they behold a greater than themselves, And therefore are they very dangerous. (I. ii. 194 and 201.)

Lean, gaunt, hungry, disinclined to sports and revelry, spending his time in reading, observation, and reflection—these are the first traits that we notice in him. He too, like Brutus, has learned the lessons of philosophy, and he finds in it the rule of life. He chides his friend for seeming to fail in the practice of it:

Of your philosophy you make no use, If you give place to accidental evils. (IV. iii. 145.)

And even when he admits and admires Brutus’ self-mastery, he attributes it to nature, and claims as good a philosophic discipline for himself. There is, however, a difference between them even in this point. Brutus is a Platonist with a Stoic tinge; Cassius is an Epicurean. That strikes us at first as strange, that the theory which identified pleasure with virtue should be the creed of this splenetic solitary: but it is quite in character. Epicureanism appealed to some of the noblest minds of Rome, not as a cult of enjoyment, but as a doctrine that freed them from the bonds of superstition and the degrading fear of death. This was the spirit of Lucretius, the poet of the sect:

Artis Religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo:

and one grand motif of his poem is the thought that this death, the dread of which makes the meanness of life, is the end of all consciousness, a refuge rather than an evil: “What ails thee so, O mortal, to let thyself loose in too feeble grievings? Why weep and wail at death?... Why not rather make an end of life and labour?” And these are the reasons that Cassius is an Epicurean. At the end, when his philosophy breaks down, he says:

You know that I held Epicurus strong And his opinion: now I change my mind, And partly credit things that do presage. (V. i. 77.)

He has hitherto discredited them. And we seem to hear Lucretius in his noble utterance:

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit: But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself. (I. iii. 93.)

Free from all superstitious scruples and all thought of superhuman interference in the affairs of men, he stands out bold and self-reliant, confiding in his own powers, his own will, his own management:

Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves, that we are underlings. (I. ii. 139.)

And the same attitude of mind implies that he is rid of all illusions. He is not deceived by shows. He looks quite through the deeds of men. He is not taken in by Casca’s affectation of rudeness. He is not misled by Antony’s apparent frivolity. He is not even dazzled by the glamour of Brutus’ virtue, but notes its weak side and does not hesitate to play on it. Still less does Caesar’s prestige subdue his criticism. On the contrary, with malicious contempt he recalls his want of endurance in swimming and the complaints of his sick-bed, and he keenly notes his superstitious lapses. He seldom smiles and when he does it is in scorn. We only once hear of his laughing. It is at the interposition of the poet, which rouses Brutus to indignation; but the presumptuous absurdity of it tickles Cassius’ sardonic humour.

For there is no doubt that he takes pleasure in detecting the weaknesses of his fellows. He has obvious relish in the thought that if he were Brutus he would not be thus cajoled, and he finds food for satisfaction in Caesar’s merely physical defects. Yet there is as little of self-complacency as of hero-worship in the man. He turns his remorseless scrutiny on his own nature and his own cause, and neither maintains that the one is noble or the other honourable, nor denies the personal alloy in his motives. This is the purport of that strange soliloquy that at first sight seems to place Cassius in the ranks of Shakespeare’s villains along with his Iagos and Richards, rather than of the mixed characters, compact of good and evil, to whom nevertheless we feel that he is akin.

Well, Brutus, thou art noble: yet, I see, Thy honourable metal may be wrought From that it is disposed: therefore it is meet That noble minds keep ever with their likes: For who so firm that cannot be seduced? Caesar doth bear me hard: but he loves Brutus: If I were Brutus now and he were Cassius, He should not humour me. (I. ii. 312.)

It frequently happens that cynics view themselves as well as others in their meaner aspects. Probably Cassius is making the worst of his own case and is indulging that vein of self-mockery and scorn that Caesar observed in him.[181] But at any rate the lurking sense of unworthiness in himself and his purpose will be apt to increase in such a man his natural impatience of alleged superiority in his fellows. He is jealous of excellence, seeks to minimise it and will not tolerate it. It is on this characteristic that Shakespeare lays stress. Plutarch reports the saying “that Brutus could evill away with the tyrannie and that Cassius hated the tyranne, making many complayntes for the injuries he had done him”; and instances Caesar’s appropriation of some lions that Cassius had intended for the sports, as well as the affair of the city praetorship. But in the play these specific grievances are almost effaced in the vague statement, “Caesar doth bear me hard”; which implies little more than general ill-will. It is now resentment of pre-eminence that makes Cassius a malcontent. Caesar finds him “very dangerous” just because of his grudge at greatness; and his own avowal that he “would as lief not be as live to be in awe” of a thing like himself, merely puts a fairer colour on the same unamiable trait. He may represent republican liberty and equality, at least in the aristocratic acceptation, but it is on their less admirable side. His disposition is to level down, by repudiating the leader, not to level up, by learning from him. In the final results this would mean the triumph of the second best, a dull and uniform mediocrity in art, thought and politics, unbroken by the predominance of the man of genius and king of men. And it may be feared that this ideal, translated into the terms of democracy, is too frequent in our modern communities. But true freedom is not incompatible with the most loyal acknowledgment of the master-mind; witness the utterance of Browning’s Pisan republican:

The mass remains— Keep but the model safe, new men will rise To take its mould.

[181] This explanation is offered with great diffidence, but it is the only one I can suggest for what is perhaps the most perplexing passage in the play, not even excepting the soliloquy of Brutus.

Yet notwithstanding this taint of enviousness and spite, Cassius is far from being a despicable or even an unattractive character. He may play the Devil’s Advocate in regard to individuals, but he is capable of a high enthusiasm for his cause, such as it is. We must share his calenture of excitement, as he strides about the streets in the tempest that fills Casca with superstitious dread and Cicero with discomfort at the nasty weather. His republicanism may be a narrow creed, but at least he is willing to be a martyr to it; when he hears that Caesar is to wear the crown, his resolution is prompt and Roman-like:

I know where I will wear this dagger then: Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius. (I. iii. 89.)

And surely at the moment of achievement, whatever was mean and sordid in the man is consumed in his prophetic rapture that fires the soul of Brutus and prolongs itself in his response.

Cassius. How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown! Brutus. How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport That now on Pompey’s basis lies along No worthier than the dust![182] (III. i. 111.)

[182] What a strange effect these words are apt to produce on auditor and reader! “How true!” we say, “The prophecy is fulfilled. This is happening now.” And then the reflection comes that just because that is the case there is no prophecy and no truth in the scene; the whole is being enacted, in sport. We experience a kind of vertigo, in which we cannot distinguish the real and the illusory and yet are conscious of both in their highest potence. And this is a characteristic of all poetry, though it is not always brought so clearly before the mind. In Shakespeare something of the kind is frequent: compare the reference to the “squeaking Cleopatra” in Antony and Cleopatra, which is almost exactly parallel; compare too his favourite device of the play within the play, when we see the actors of a few minutes ago, sitting like ourselves as auditors; and thus, on the one hand their own performance seems comparatively real, but on the other there is the constant reminder that we are in their position, and the whole is merely spectacular. Dr. Brandes has some excellent remarks in this connection on Tieck’s Dramas in his Romantic School in Germany.

And even to individuals if they stand the test of his mordant criticism, he can pay homage and admiration. The perception that Brutus may be worked upon is the toll he pays to his self-love, but, that settled, he can feel deep reverence and affection for Brutus’ more ideal virtue. Perhaps the best instance of it is the scene of their dispute. Brutus, as we have seen, is practically, if not theoretically, in the wrong, and certainly he is much the more violent and bitter; but Cassius submits to receive his forgiveness and to welcome his assurance that he will bear with him in future. This implies no little deference and magnanimity in one who so ill brooks a secondary role. But he does give the lead to Brutus, and in all things, even against his better judgment, yields him the primacy.

And then it is impossible not to respect his thorough efficiency. In whatsoever concerns the management of affairs and of men, he knows the right thing to do, and, when left to himself, he does it. He sees how needful Brutus is to the cause and gains him—gains him, in part by a trickery, which Shakespeare without historical warrant ascribes to him; but the trickery succeeds because he has gauged Brutus’ nature aright. He takes the correct measure of the danger from Antony, of his love for Caesar and his talents, which Brutus so contemptuously underrates. So, too, after the assassination, when Brutus says,

I know that we shall have him well to friend;

he answers,

I wish we may: but yet I have a mind That fears him much; and my misgiving still Falls shrewdly to the purpose. (III. i. 144.)

Brutus seeks to win Antony with general considerations of right and justice, Cassius employs a more effective argument:

Your voice shall be as strong as any man’s In the disposing of new dignities. (III. i. 177.)

He altogether disapproves of the permission granted to Antony to pronounce the funeral oration. He grasps the situation when the civil war breaks out much better than Brutus:

In such a time as this it is not meet That every nice offence should bear his comment. (IV. iii. 7.)

His plans of the campaign are better, and he has a much better notion of conducting the battle.

All such shrewd sagacity is entitled to our respect. Yet even in this department Cassius is outdone by the unpractical Brutus, so soon as higher moral qualities are required, and the wisdom of the fox yields to the wisdom of the man. We have seen that however passionate and wrong-headed Brutus may be in their contention, he has too much sense of the becoming to wrangle in public, as Cassius begins to do. Another more conspicuous example is furnished by the way in which they bear anxiety. Shakespeare found an illustration of this in Plutarch, which he has merely dramatised.

When Caesar came out of his litter: Popilius Laena, that had talked before with Brutus and Cassius, and had prayed the goddes they might bring this enterprise to passe, went into Caesar and kept him a long time with a talke. Caesar gave good eare unto him. Wherefore the conspirators (if so they should be called) not hearing what he sayd to Caesar, but conjecturing by that he had told them a little before, that his talke was none other but the verie discoverie of their conspiracie: they were affrayed everie man of them, and one looking in an others face, it was easie to see that they all were of a minde, that it was no tarying for them till they were apprehended, but rather that they should kill them selves with their owne handes. And when Cassius and certaine other clapped their handes on their swordes under their gownes to draw them: Brutus marking the countenaunce and gesture of Laena, and considering that he did use him selfe rather like an humble and earnest suter, then like an accuser: he sayd nothing to his companions (bicause there were amongest them that were not of the conspiracie) but with a pleasaunt countenaunce encouraged Cassius. And immediatlie after, Laena went from Caesar, and kissed his hande; which shewed plainlie that it was for some matter concerning him selfe, that he had held him so long in talke.

Shakespeare, by rejecting the reason for the dumb show, is able to present this scene in dialogue, and thus bring out the contrast more vividly. Cassius believes the worst, loses his head, now hurries on Casca, now prepares for suicide. But Brutus, the disinterested man, is less swayed by personal hopes and fears, keeps his composure, urges his friend to be constant, and can calmly judge of the situation. It is the same defect of endurance that brings about Cassius’ death. Really things are shaping well for them, but he misconstrues the signs just as he has misconstrued the words of Lena, and kills himself owing to a mistake; as Messala points out:

Mistrust of good success hath done this deed. (V. iii. 66.)

This want of inward strength explains the ascendancy which Brutus with his more dutiful and therefore more steadfast nature exercises over him, though Cassius is in many ways the more capable man of the two. They both have schooled themselves in the discipline of fortitude, Brutus in Stoic renunciation, Cassius in Epicurean independence; but in the great crises where nature asserts herself, Brutus is strong and Cassius is weak. And as often happens with men, in the supreme trial their professed creeds no longer satisfy them, and they consciously abandon them. But while Cassius in his evil fortune falls back on the superstitions[183] which he had ridiculed Caesar for adopting on his good fortune, Brutus falls back on his feeling of moral dignity, and gives himself the death which theoretically he disapproves.

[183] The trait is taken from Plutarch who, after enumerating the sinister omens before Philippi, adds: “the which beganne somewhat to alter Cassius minde from Epicurus opinions.”

Yet, when all is said and done, what a fine figure Cassius is, and how much both of love and respect he can inspire. Plutarch’s story of his death already bears witness to this, but Shakespeare with a few deeper strokes marks his own esteem.

Cassius thinking in deede that Titinius was taken of the enemies, he then spake these wordes: “Desiring too much to live, I have lived to see one of my best frendes taken, for my sake, before my face.” After that, he gote into a tent where no bodie was, and tooke Pyndarus with him, one of his freed bondmen, whom he reserved ever for suche a pinche, since the cursed battell of the Parthians, when Crassus was slaine, though he notwithstanding scaped from that overthrow; but then casting his cloke over his head, and holding out his bare neck unto Pindarus, he gave him his head to be striken of. So the head was found severed from the bodie: but after that time Pindarus was never seene more. Whereupon some tooke occasion to say that he had slaine his master without his commaundement. By and by they knew the horsemen that came towards them, and might see Titinius crowned with a garland of triumphe, who came before with great speede unto Cassius. But when he perceived by the cries and teares of his frends which tormented them selves the misfortune that had chaunced to his Captaine Cassius by mistaking; he drew out his sword, cursing him selfe a thousand times that he had taried so long, and so slue him selfe presentlie in the fielde. Brutus in the meane time came forward still, and understoode also that Cassius had bene over throwen: but he knew nothing of his death, till he came verie neere to his campe. So when he was come thither, after he had lamented the death of Cassius, calling him the last of all the Romanes, being impossible that Rome should ever breede againe so noble and valliant man as he: he caused his bodie to be buried, and sent it to the citie of Thassos, fearing least his funerals within the campe should cause great disorder.

In the play Pindarus is not yet enfranchised, and though he gains his freedom by the fatal stroke, would rather remain a slave than return to his native wilds at such a price. Titinius places his garland on the dead man’s brow, and in fond regret slays himself, not with his own but with Cassius’ sword. Brutus, with hardly a verbal change, repeats the eulogy that Plutarch puts in his mouth,

The last of all the Romans, fare thee well! It is impossible that ever Rome Should breed thy fellow.

But he does not stop here. Flushed with his initial success, he expects to triumph and to live, and the years to come seem darkened with grief for his “brother”:

Friends, I owe more tears To this dead man than you shall see me pay. I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time. (V. iii. 99.)

The minor conspirators, with the adherents of the cause and the humbler dependents, are of course sketched very slightly, as proportion requires, but they have all something to individualise them in gait or pose. Even in the crowded final act, where, as in the chronicle histories which Shakespeare was leaving behind him, a number of persons are introduced with whom we are almost or entirely unacquainted, there is no monotony in the subordinate figures. They are distinguished from or contrasted with each other in their circumstances, sentiments or fate. Thus Pindarus and Strato are both described as servants, they are both attached to their masters, they are both reluctantly compelled to assist in their masters’ death. Should we have thought it possible to differentiate them in the compass of the score or so of lines at the dramatist’s disposal? But Cassius’ slave, who, since his capture, has been kept like a dog to do whatever his owner might bid him, will not abide the issue and uses his new liberty to flee beyond the Roman world. Strato, to whom Brutus characteristically turns because he is “a fellow of a good respect” with “some snatch of honour” in his life, claims Brutus’ hand like an equal before he will hold the sword, confronts the victors with praise of the dead, hints to Messala that Brutus’ course is the one to follow, and has too much self-respect to accept employment with Octavius till Messala “prefers,” that is, recommends him.

So too with the three captains, all on the losing side, all devoted to their leaders. Titinius, who seems to feel that his love for Cassius exceeds that of Brutus

(Brutus, come apace, And see how I regarded Caius Cassius)

will not outlive him. Lucilius is quite ready to die for his general, but spared by the generosity of Antony, survives to exult that Brutus has fulfilled his prophecy and been “like himself.” Messala, who brought word of Portia’s death, must now tell the same tale of Cassius with the same keen sympathy for Brutus’ grief; and though Strato seems to censure him for consenting to live “in bondage,” he shows no bondman’s mind when he grounds his preferment of Strato to Octavius on the fact of Strato’s having done “the latest service to my master.”

More prominent, but still in the background, are the subaltern members of the faction in Rome. Ligarius, the best of them, with his fiery enthusiasm and personal fealty to Brutus, is an excellent counterpart to the ingratiating and plausible Decius, the least erected spirit of the group. Between them comes Casca, the only one who may claim a word or two of comment, partly because he is sketched in some detail, partly because he is practically an original creation. Plutarch has only two particulars about him, the one that he was the first to strike Caesar and struck him from behind; the other that when Caesar cried out and gripped his hand, he shouted to his brother in Greek. Shakespeare, as we have seen, summarily rejects his acquaintance with Greek, but the stab in the back sets his fancy to work, and he constructs for him a character and life-history to match.

Casca is a man who shares with Cassius the jealousy of greatness—“the envious Casca,” Antony described him—but is vastly inferior to Cassius in consistency and manhood. He seems to be one of those alert, precocious natures, clever at the uptake in their youth and full of a promise that is not always fulfilled: Brutus recalls that “he was quick mettle when we went to school” (I. ii. 300). Such sprightly youngsters, when they fail, often do so from a certain lack of moral fibre. And so with Casca. He appears before us at first as the most obsequious henchman of Caesar. When Caesar calls for Calpurnia, Casca is at his elbow: “Peace, ho! Caesar speaks.” When Caesar, hearing the soothsayer’s shout, cries, “Ha! who calls?” Casca is again ready: “Bid every noise be still: peace yet again!” Cassius would never have condescended to that. For Casca resents the supremacy of Caesar as much as the proudest aristocrat of them all: he is only waiting an opportunity to throw off the mask. But meanwhile in his angry bitterness with himself and others he affects a cross-grained bluntness of speech, “puts on a tardy form,” as Cassius says, plays the satirist and misanthrope, as many others conscious of double dealing have done, and treats friend and foe with caustic brutality. But it is characteristic that he is panic-stricken with the terrors of the tempestuous night, which he ekes out with superstitious fancies. It illustrates his want both of inward robustness and of enlightened culture. We remember that Cicero’s remark in Greek was Greek to him, and that Greek was as much the language of rationalists then, as was French of the eighteenth century Philosophes. Nor is it less characteristic that even at the assassination he apparently does not dare to face his victim. Antony describes his procedure

Damned Casca, like a cur, behind Struck Caesar on the neck. (V. i. 43.)

Yet even Casca is not without redeeming qualities. His humour, in the account he gives of the coronation fiasco, has an undeniable flavour: its very tartness, as Cassius says, is a “sauce to his good wit.” And there is a touch of nobility in his avowal:

You speak to Casca, and to such a man That is no fleering tell-tale. Hold, my hand: Be factious for redress of all these griefs, And I will set this foot of mine as far As who goes farthest. (I. iii. 116.)

But among those little vignettes, that of Cicero is decidedly the masterpiece. For this Shakespeare got no assistance from any of the three Lives on which he drew for the rest of the play. Indeed the one little hint they contained he did not see fit to adopt. In the Marcus Brutus Plutarch says of the conspirators:

For this cause they durst not acquaint Cicero with their conspiracie, although he was a man whome they loved dearlie and trusted best: for they were affrayed that he being a coward by nature, and age also having increased his feare, he would quite turne and alter all their purpose.

In the play their reason for leaving him out is very different:

He will never follow anything That other men begin. (II. i. 151.)

It seems to me, however, highly probable that Shakespeare had read the Life of Cicero and obtained his general impression from it, though he invents the particular traits. The irritable vanity and self-consciousness of the man, which Brutus’ objection implies, are, for example, prominent features in Plutarch’s portrait. So too is his aversion for Caesar and Caesarism, which makes him view the offer of the crown, abortive though it has been, as a personal offence: Brutus observes that he

Looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes As we have seen him in the Capitol Being cross’d in conference with some senators. (I. ii. 186.)

But he is very cautious, and even when venting his vexation in one of those biting gibes to which, by Plutarch’s statement, he was too prone, he takes care to veil it in the safe obscurity of a foreign language. “He spoke Greek ... but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads” (I. ii. 282). This has sometimes been misinterpreted. Shakespeare has been taxed with the absurdity of making Cicero deliver a Greek speech in a popular assemblage. Surely he does nothing of the kind. It is a sally that he intends for his friends, and he takes the fit means for keeping it to them; much as St. John might talk French, if he wished to be intelligible only to those who had made the Grand Tour and so were in a manner of his own set. Plutarch lays stress on his familiarity with Greek, as also on his study of the Greek Philosophers. This may have left some trace in the description of his bearing in contrast to Casca’s, when they meet in the storm. Cool and sceptical, he cannot guess the cause of Casca’s alarm. Even when the horrors of earthquake, wind and lightning, are described in detail, he asks unmoved:

Why, saw you anything more wonderful? (I. iii. 14.)

And after the enumeration of the portents, he critically replies:

Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time: But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. (I. iii. 32.)

And then after a passing reference[184] to current affairs, he bids Casca good night. To him the moral of the whole tempest is: “This disturbed sky is not to walk in.” Opinions may differ as to this being the real Cicero; none will deny that it is a living type.

[184] Trivial to him, to us full of tragic meaning.

Apart from the main group of personages, more or less antagonistic to Caesar, stands the brilliant figure of his friend and avenger, the eloquent Mark Antony. Shakespeare conceives him as a man of genius and feeling but not of principle, resourceful and daring, ambitious of honour and power, but unscrupulous in his methods and a voluptuary in his life. Caesar tells him that he is “fond of plays” and “revels long o’ nights.” Cassius calls him a “masker and a reveller.” Brutus says that he is given “to sports, to wildness and much company.”

He makes his first appearance as the tool of Caesar. With Asiatic flattery, as though in the eastern formula, to hear were to obey, he tells his master:

When Caesar says “do this,” it is perform’d. (I. ii. 10.)

He perceives his unspoken desires, his innermost wishes, and offers him the crown. It is no wonder that Brutus should regard him but as a “limb of Caesar,” or that Trebonius, considering him a mere time-server, should prophesy that he will “live and laugh” hereafter at Caesar’s death. But they are wrong. They do not recognise either the genuineness of the affection that underlies his ingratiating ways, or the real genius that underlies his frivolity. Here, as everywhere, Cassius’ estimate is the correct one. He fears Antony’s “ingrafted love” for Caesar, and predicts that they will find in him “a shrewd contriver.” Of the love indeed there can be no question. It is proved not only by his public utterances, which might be factitious, nor by his deeds, which might serve his private purposes, but by his words, when he is alone with his patron’s corpse.

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers! Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of times. Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood! (III. i. 254.)

It is worth noting the grounds that Antony in this solitary outburst alleges for his love of Caesar. He is moved not by gratitude for favours past or the expectation of favours to come, but solely by the supreme nobility of the dead. To the claims of nobility, in truth, Antony is always responsive and he is ready to acknowledge it in Brutus too. “This was the noblest Roman of them all”; so he begins his heartfelt tribute to his vanquished foe. This generous sympathetic strain in his nature is one of the things that make him dangerous. He is far from acting a part in his laments for Caesar. He feels the grief that he proclaims and the greatness he extols. His emotions are easily stirred, especially by worthy objects, and he has only to give them free rein to impress other people.

But along with this he has a subtle, scheming intellect; he is as much a man of policy as a man of sentiment. After the flight of Brutus and Cassius, we see him planning how he and his colleagues may cut down Caesar’s bequests, of which in his speech he had made so much; how he may shift some of the odium of his proceedings on to Lepidus’ back; how they may best arrange to meet the opposition. This mixture of feeling and diplomacy is especially shown in his words and deeds after the assassination. He does not shrink from any base compliance. His servant appears before the murderers, and at his bidding “kneels,” “falls down,” lies “prostrate” in token of submission, promising that his master will follow Brutus’ fortunes. But even here it is on the understanding that Caesar’s death shall be justified; and when he himself enters he gives his love and grief free scope.

O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well. I know not, gentlemen, what you intend, Who else must be let blood, who else is rank: If I myself, there is no hour so fit As Caesar’s death’s hour, nor no instrument Of half that worth as those your swords, made rich With the most noble blood of all this world. I do beseech ye, if you bear me hard, Now, whilst your purpled hands do reek and smoke, Fulfil your pleasure. Live a thousand years, I shall not find myself so apt to die; No place will please me so, no mean of death, As here by Caesar, and by you cut off, The choice and master spirits of this age. (III. i. 148.)

What could be more loyal on the one hand, or more discreet on the other? For, as he is well aware, if he comes to terms with the assassins at all, he is liable to an alternative accusation. Either his love for Caesar was genuine, and then his reconciliation with the murderers implies craven fear; or, if he can freely take their part, his previous homage to Caesar was mere pretence. As he himself says:

My credit now stands on such slippery ground, That one of two bad ways you must conceit me, Either a coward or a flatterer. (III. i. 191.)

And what more dexterous course could he adopt than to assert his devotion to Caesar without restraint, with undiminished emphasis: and at the same time to profess his respect for the conspirators, “the choice and master spirits of this age,” and his readiness to join them if they prove that Caesar deserved to die. This honourable and reasonable attitude, which honour and reason would in reality prescribe, must especially impress Brutus, to whom Antony is careful chiefly to address himself. He enters a doubtful suppliant; at the end of the scene not only are his life and credit safe, but he has won from Brutus’ magnanimity the means to overthrow him.

It is characteristic of Antony that he has no scruple about using the vantage ground he has thus acquired. He immediately determines to employ the liberty of speech accorded him against the men who have granted it. To Octavius’ servant, who enters ere he has well ended his soliloquy, he says:

Thou shalt not back till I have borne this corse Into the market place: there shall I try, In my oration, how the people take The cruel issue of these bloody men. (III. i. 291.)

He does not hesitate, though this course will involve in ruin those who have generously spared him and given him the weapons against themselves. Not even for his country’s sake will he pause, though, with his prescient imagination, he sees in all their lurid details the horrors of the

Domestic fury and fierce civil strife (I. iii. 263.)

that must inevitably ensue.

And he effects his purpose, without any other help, by his wonderful address to the citizens. Perhaps nowhere else in History or Literature do we find the procedure of the demagogue of Genius set forth with such masterly insight. For Antony shows himself a demagogue of the most profligate description, but as undeniably the very genius of the art of moving men. Consider the enormous difficulties of his position. He is speaking under limitation and by permission before a hostile audience that will barely give him a hearing, and his task is to turn them quite round, and make them adore what they hated and hate what they adored. How does he set about it?

He begins with an acknowledgment and compliment to Brutus: “For Brutus’ sake I am beholding to you.” He disclaims the intention of even praising the dead. He cites the charge of ambition, but not to reply to it, merely to point out that any ambition has been expiated. But then he insinuates arguments on the other side: Caesar’s faithfulness and justice in friendship, the additions not to his private but to the public wealth that his victories secured, his pitifulness to the poor, his refusal of the crown. Really these things are no arguments at all. They have either nothing to do with the case, or are perfectly compatible with ambition, or may have been its very means or may have been meant to cloak it. Such indeed we know that in part at least they were. But that does not signify so far as Antony’s purpose is concerned. They were all matters well known to the public, fit to call forth proud and grateful and pleasing reminiscences of Caesar’s career. The orator has managed to praise Caesar while not professing to do so: if he does not disprove what Brutus said, yet in speaking what he does know, he manages to discredit Brutus’ authority. And now these regretful associations stirred, he can at any rate ask their tears for their former favourite. Have they lost their reason that they do not at least mourn for him they once loved? And here with a rhetorical trick, which, to his facile, emotional nature, may have also been the suggestion of real feeling, his utterance fails him; he must pause, for his “heart is in the coffin there with Caesar.”

We may be sure that whatever had happened to his heart his ear was intent to catch the murmurs of the crowd. They would satisfy him. Though he has not advanced one real argument, but has only played as it were on their sensations, their mood has changed. Some think Caesar has had wrong, some are convinced that he was not ambitious, all are now thoroughly favourable to Antony.

He begins again. And now he strikes the note of contrast between Caesar’s greatness yesterday and his impotence to-day. It is such a tragic fall as in itself might move all hearts to terror and pity. But what if the catastrophe were undeserved? Antony could prove that it was, but he will keep faith with the conspirators and refrain. Nevertheless he has the testament, though he will not read it, which, read, would show them that Caesar was their best friend.

Compassion, curiosity, selfishness are now enlisted on his side. Cries of “The will! The will!” arise. He is quick to take advantage of these. Just as he would not praise Caesar, yet did so all the same; so he refuses to read the will, for they would rise in mutiny—this is a little preliminary hint to them—if they heard that Caesar had made them his heirs.

Renewed insistence on the part of the mob, renewed coyness on the part of Antony; till at last he steps down from the pulpit, taking care to have a wide circle round him that as many as possible may see. But he does not read the will immediately. Partly with his incomparable eye to effect, partly out of the fullness of his heart (for the substance of his words is the same as in his private soliloquy), he stands rapt above the body. Caesar’s mantle recalls proud memories of the glory of Caesar and of Rome, the victory over the Barbarian.[185] And this mantle is pierced by the stabs of assassins, of Cassius, of Casca, of Brutus himself. He has now advanced so far that he can attack the man who was the idol of the mob but a few minutes before. And he makes his attack well. The very superiority of Brutus to personal claims, the very patriotism which none could appreciate better than Antony, and to which he does large justice when Brutus is no more, this very disinterestedness he turns against Brutus, and despite all he owes him, accuses him of black ingratitude. There is so much speciousness in the charge that it would be hard to rebut before a tribunal of sages: and when Antony makes his coup, withdrawing the mantle and displaying the mutilated corpse,

Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold Our Caesar’s vesture wounded? Look you here, Here is himself, marr’d, as you see, with traitors: (III. ii. 199.)

the cause of Brutus is doomed. Antony has a right to exult, and he does so. There is the triumphant pride of the artist in his art, when, on resuming, he represents Brutus as the rhetorician and himself as the unpractised speaker. He is no orator as Brutus is, and—with sublime effrontery—that was probably the reason he was permitted to address them. But

Were I Brutus And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue In every wound of Caesar, that should move The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny. (III. ii. 230.)

Note the last words: for though Antony feels entitled to indulge in this farcing and enjoys it thoroughly, he does not forget the serious business. He keeps recurring more and more distinctly to the suggestion of mutiny, and for mutiny the citizens are now more than fully primed. All this, moreover, he has achieved without ever playing his trump card. They have quite forgotten about the will, and indeed it is not required. But Antony thinks it well to have them beside themselves, so he calls them back for this last maddening draught.

[185] Plutarch’s account of Caesar’s personal prowess in the battle with the Nervii, and of the honours decreed him by the Senate, shows why Shakespeare chose this exploit for special mention: “Had not Caesar selfe taken his shield on his arme, and flying in amongest the barbarous people, made a lane through them that fought before him; and the tenth legion also seeing him in daunger, ronne unto him from the toppe of the hill, where they stoode in battell,{note} and broken the ranckes of their enemies; there had not a Romane escaped a live that day. But taking example of Caesar’s valliantnes, they fought desperatly beyond their power, and yet could not make the Nervians flie, but they fought it out to the death, till they were all in manner slaine in the field.... The Senate understanding it at Rome, ordained that they shoulde doe sacrifice unto the goddes, and keepe feasts and solemne processions fifteene dayes together without intermission, having never made the like ordinaunce at Rome, for any victorie that ever was obteined. Bicause they saw the daunger had bene marvelous great, so many nations rising as they did in armes together against him: and further the love of the people unto him made his victorie much more famous.”

{note} battle order

And all the while, it will be observed, he has never answered Brutus’ charge on which he rested his whole case, that Caesar was ambitious. Yet such is the headlong flight of his eloquence, winged by genius, by passion, by craft, that his audience never perceive this. No wonder: it is apt to escape even deliberate readers.

Such a man will go fast and far. We next see him practically the ruler of Rome, swaying the triumvirate, treating Octavius as an admiring pupil whom he will tutor in the trade, ordering about or ridiculing the insignificant and imitative Lepidus.[186]

[186] In Plutarch Antony treats Lepidus with studied deference.

But he has the hybris of genius, unaccompanied by character and undermined by licence. It would be an anomaly if such an one were to be permanently successful. Shakespeare was by and by, though probably as yet he knew it not, to devote a whole play to the story of his downfall; here he contents himself with indicating his impending deposition and the agent who shall accomplish it. There is something ominous about the reticence, assurance, and calm self-assertion of the “stripling or springall of twenty years” as Plutarch calls Octavius. At the proscription Lepidus and even Antony are represented as consenting to the death of their kinsfolk: Octavius makes demands but no concessions. When Lepidus is ordered off on his errand, and Antony, secure in his superiority, explains his methods, Octavius listens silent with just a hint of dissent, but we feel that he is learning his lessons and will apply them in due time at his teacher’s expense. Already he appropriates the leadership. Before Philippi, Antony assigns to him the left wing and he calmly answers:

Upon the right hand I, keep thou the left. Antony. Why do you cross me in this exigent? Octavius. I do not cross you: but I will do so. (V. i. 18.)

All these touches are contributed by Shakespeare, but the last is especially noticeable, because, though the words and the particular turn are his own, the incident itself is narrated not of Antony and Octavius but of their opponents.

Then Brutus prayed Cassius he might have the leading of the right winge, the whiche men thought was farre meeter for Cassius: both bicause he was the elder man, and also for that he had the better experience. But yet Cassius gave it him.

Octavius too has a higher conception of the dignity of his position. In that strange scene, another of Shakespeare’s additions, when the adversaries exchange gabs, like the heroes of the old Teutonic lays or the Chansons de Gestes, it is Antony who suggests the somewhat unseemly proceeding and it is Octavius who breaks it off. And at the close he, as it were, constitutes himself the heir of Brutus’ reputation, and assumes as a matter of course that he has the right and duty to provide for Brutus’ followers and take order for Brutus’ funeral.

All that served Brutus, I will entertain them ... According to his virtue let us use him With all respect and rites of burial Within my tent his bones to-night shall lie. (V. v. 60 and 76.)

For the first of these statements there is no warrant in Plutarch, and the second contradicts the impression his narrative produces; for in all the mention he makes of the final honours paid to Brutus, he gives the credit to Antony.

Antonius, having found Brutus bodie, he caused it to be wrapped up in one of the richest cote armors he had. Afterwards also, Antonius understanding that this cote armor was stollen, he put the theefe to death that had stollen it, and sent the ashes of his bodie to Servilia his mother. Marcus Brutus.

And more explicitly in the Marcus Antonius:

(Antony) cast his coate armor (which was wonderfull rich and sumptuous) upon Brutus bodie, and gave commaundement to one of his slaves infranchised to defray the charge of his buriall.

By means of these additions and displacements Shakespeare shows the young Octavius with his tenacity and self-control already superseding his older and more brilliant colleague. We see in them the beginning as well as the prophecy of the end.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

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