Chapter III…

Chapter III

THE GRAND CONTRAST. SHAKESPEARE’S CONCEPTION OF THE SITUATION IN ROME

It is difficult to describe with any certainty the reasons for Shakespeare’s variations from Plutarch in his treatment of the people. They may, like some of those already discussed, be due to the dramatic requirement of compression. They may be due to the deliberate purpose of exonerating the hero. They may, and this is more likely, have arisen quite naturally and unconsciously from Shakespeare’s indifference to questions of constitutional theory and his inability to understand the ideals of an antique self-governing commonwealth controlled by all its free members as a body. In any case the result is a picture of the primitive society, from which some of Plutarch’s inconsistencies, but with them some of the most typical traits, have been removed. The grand characteristic which the Tudor Englishman rejects, or all but rejects, is the intuitive political capacity which Plutarch, perhaps in idealising retrospect, attributes to all classes of citizens in the young republic, and which at any rate in after development formed the distinctive genius of the Roman state. He has indeed an inarticulate sense of it that enables him to suggest the general impression. He could not but have a sense of it; for few men have been so pentrated with the greatness of later Rome as he, and he seems to have felt, as the shapers of the tradition and as Plutarch felt, that such a tree must have sprung from a healthy seed. So when we examine what his story involves, we have evidence enough of a general spirit of moderation, accommodation, compromise, that flow from and minister to an efficient practical patriotism; an ingrafted love of the city; and a conviction of the community of interests among high and low alike. Mr. Watkiss Lloyd puts this with great emphasis, and on the whole with great truth.

Rome is preserved from cleaving in the midst by the virtues of the state, the reverence for the political majority which pervades both contending parties. The senate averts the last evil by the timely concession of the tribunitian power first, and then by sacrifice of a favourite champion of their own order, rather than civil war shall break out and all go to ruin in quarrel for the privilege and supremacy of a part. Rather than this they will concede, and trust to temporising, to negociating, to management, to the material influence of their position and the effect of their own merits and achievements, to secure their power or recover it hereafter. Among the people, on the other hand, there is also a restraining sentiment, a religion that holds back from the worst abuses of successful insurrection and excited faction. The proposition to kill Marcius is easily given up. Even the tribunes are capable of being persuaded to forego the extremity of rancour against the enemy of the people and of their authority, when he is fairly in their power, and commute death for banishment; and, the victory achieved, they counsel tranquility, as Menenius, on the other hand, softens down; and all goes smoothly again like a reconciled household, after experience of the miseries of adjusting wrongs by debate and anger.

Similarly the interests of the country are supreme when Coriolanus, with his new allies, advances to the attack:

Some impatience of the people against the tribunes is natural, but the tribunes with all their faults, take their humiliation not ignobly, and the nobles never for a moment dream of getting a party triumph by foreign aid. The danger of the country engrosses all, and at last Volumnia presses upon her son the right and the noble, and employs all the influences of domestic and natural affection—but all entirely to the great political and national end,—and is as disregardful of the fortunes or interests of the aristocratical party, which might have hoped to seize the opportunity for recovering lost ground, as she is apparently unaware, unconscious, regardless of what may be the consequences personally to her much loved son.

And Mr. Lloyd clinches his plea by his estimate of the catastrophe.

In the concluding scene we appear to see the supremacy of Rome assured.... In the senate house of the Volscians is perpetrated the assassination, from the disgrace of which the better spirit of the Romans preserved their city: Aufidius and his fellows with equal envy and ingratitude take the place of the plotting tribunes, and the senators are powerless to control the conspirators and mob of citizens who abet them.

They are, in short, in comparison with Rome self-condemned; and this becomes more manifest if we contrast the finale of the play with the concluding sentences in Plutarch, which Shakespeare leaves unused.

Now Martius being dead, the whole state of the Volsces hartely wished him alive again. For first of all they fell out with the Æques (who were their friendes and confederates) touching preheminence and place: and this quarrell grew on so farre betwene them, and frayes and murders fell out apon it one with another. After that, the Romaines overcame them in battell, in which Tullus was slaine in the field, and the flower of all their force was put to the sworde: so that they were compelled to accept most shameful conditions of peace, in yelding them selves subject unto the conquerors, and promising to be obedient at their commandement.

It is at first sight rather strange that Shakespeare should give no indication that the Volscians, first by condoning Tullus’ crime, the breach of friendship from desire for pre-eminence, then by repeating it as a community, prepare the way for their own downfall. Perhaps he felt that no finger-post was necessary, and that all must see how in the long run such a state must inevitably succumb to the greater moral force of Rome.

A few slight qualifications would have to be made in Mr. Lloyd’s statement of his thesis to render it absolutely correct, but it is true in the main. Nevertheless, true though it be, it makes no account of two very important considerations. One of these is that despite the general appreciation which Shakespeare shows for the attitude of the Roman Civitas, he has no perception of the real issues between the plebeians and the patricians, or of the course which the controversy took, though these matters constitute the chief claim of the citizens of early Rome to the credit they receive in Plutarch’s narrative. And the other consideration is, that Shakespeare’s general appreciation of the community he describes is perceptible only when we view the play at a distance and in its mass: the impression in detail as we follow it from scene to scene is by no means so favourable to either party.

The first point is well brought out by the total omission in the drama of the initial episode in the discussion between the populace and the senate, and between the populace and Marcius. And the omission is all the more noticeable since Plutarch gives it particular prominence as directly leading to the establishment of the tribunate, which the drama, as we shall see, ascribes merely to an insignificant bread riot. Here is what Shakespeare must have read, and what slips from him without leaving more than a trace, though to modern feeling it is one of the most impressive passages in the whole Life.

Now (Martius) being growen to great credit and authoritie in Rome for his valliantnes, it fortuned there grewe sedition in the cittie, bicause the Senate dyd favour the riche against the people, who dyd complaine of the sore oppression of userers, of whom they borowed money. For those that had litle, were yet spoyled of that litle they had by their creditours, for lack of abilitie to paye the userie: who offered their goodes to be solde, to them that would geve most. And suche as had nothing left, their bodies were layed holde of, and they were made their bonde men, notwithstanding all the woundes and cuttes they shewed, which they had receyved in many battells, fighting for defence of their countrie and common wealth: of the which, the last warre they made, was against the Sabynes, wherein they fought apon the promise the riche men had made them, that from thenceforth they would intreate them more gently, and also upon the worde of Marcus Valerius chief of the Senate, who by authoritie of the counsell, and in the behalfe of the riche, sayed they should performe that they had promised. But after that they had faithfully served in this last battell of all, where they overcame their enemies, seeing they were never a whit the better, nor more gently intreated, and that the Senate would geve no eare to them, but make as though they had forgotten their former promise, and suffered them to be made slaves and bonde men to their creditours, and besides, to be turned out of all that ever they had; they fell then even to flat rebellion and mutinie, and to sturre up daungerous tumultes within the cittie. The Romaines enemies, hearing of this rebellion, dyd straight enter the territories of Rome with a marvelous great power, spoyling and burning all as they came. Whereupon the Senate immediatly made open proclamation by sounde of trumpet, that all those which were of lawfull age to carie weapon, should come and enter their names into the muster masters booke, to goe to the warres: but no man obeyed their commaundement. Whereupon their chief magistrates, and many of the Senate, beganne to be of divers opinions emong them selves. For some thought it was reason, they should somewhat yeld to the poore peoples request, and that they should a little qualifie the severitie of the lawe. Other held hard against that opinion, and that was Martius for one. For he alleaged, that the creditours losing their money they had lent, was not the worst thing that was thereby: but that the lenitie that was favored, was a beginning of disobedience, and that the prowde attempt of the communaltie, was to abolish lawe, and to bring all to confusion. Therefore he sayed; if the Senate were wise, they should betimes prevent, and quenche this ill favored and worse ment beginning. The Senate met many dayes in consultation about it: but in the end they concluded nothing. The poore common people seeing no redresse, gathered them selves one daye together, and one encoraging another, they all forsooke the cittie, and encamped them selves upon a hill, called at this daye the holy hill, alongest the river of Tyber, offering no creature any hurte or violence, or making any shewe of actuall rebellion; saving that they cried as they went up and down, that the riche men had driven them out of the cittie, and that all Italie through they should finde ayer, water and ground to burie them in. Moreover, they sayed, to dwell at Rome was nothing els but to be slaine, or hurte with continuell warres and fighting for defence of the riche mens goodes.

Plutarch goes on to tell how in this crisis the Senate adopts a conciliatory attitude, and how after the fable of Menenius, the mutineers are pacified by the concession of five Tribuni plebis, “whose office should be to defend the poore people from violence and oppression.” Then he concludes this part of his recital:

Hereupon the cittie being growen againe to good quiet and unitie, the people immediatly went to the warres, shewing that they had a good will to doe better than ever they dyd, and to be very willing to obey the magistrates in that they would commaund concerning the warres.

Now, in this account there is no question which side is on the right and has a claim on our sympathies. The plebs is reduced to distress by fighting for the state and for the aristocratic régime that was set up some twenty years before: its misery is aggravated by harsh and inadequate laws, the redress of which it seeks by a policy of passive resistance; its demands are so equitable that they are approved by a portion of the Senate, and so urgent that they are conceded by the Senate as a whole: but such is the strength of class selfishness, that when the hour of need is past, the patricians violate their explicit promise, and the grievances become more intolerable than before. Even now the plebeians break out in no violent rebellion, and hardly show their discontent in a casual riot. In their worst desperation they merely secede, and in their very secession they are far from stubborn. They admit Menenius’ moral that the Senate has an essential function in the state: and as a preliminary to their return, only stipulate for a machinery that will protect them against further oppression.

But hardly a line in the description of this movement which the plebeians conducted so moderately and sagaciously to a successful end, has passed into the picture of Shakespeare. He ignores the reasonableness of their cause, the reasonableness of their means, and fails to perceive the essential efficiency and steadiness of their character, though all these things are expressed or implied in Plutarch’s narrative. This episode, in which the younger contemporary of Nero favours the people, the elder contemporary of Pym summarily dismisses, and substitutes for it another far less important, in which they appear in no very creditable light, but which had nothing to do with the institution of the Tribunate, and occurred in consequence of the dearth only after the capture of Corioli.

Now when this warre was ended, the flatterers of the people beganne to sturre up sedition againe, without any newe occasion, or just matter offered of complainte. For they dyd grounde this seconde insurrection against the Nobilitie and Patricians, apon the people’s miserie and misfortune, that could not but fall out, by reason of the former discorde and sedition, betweene them and the Nobilitie. Bicause the most parte of the errable land within the territorie of Rome, was become heathie and barren for lacke of plowing, for that they had no time nor meane to cause corne, to be brought them out of other countries to sowe, by reason of their warres which made the extreme dearth they had emong them. Now those busie pratlers that sought the peoples good will, by suche flattering wordes, perceyving great scarsitie of corne to be within the cittie, and though there had bene plenty enough, yet the common people had no money to buye it: they spread abroad false tales and rumours against the Nobilitie, that they in revenge of the people, had practised and procured the extreme dearthe emong them.

This circumstance, combined with the still later demand for a distribution of corn, Shakespeare transposes, and makes the surely rather inappropriate cause of the appointment of the tribunes. Inappropriate, that is, to what the logic of the situation requires, and to what the sagacity of the traditional plebs would solicit. They ask for bread and they get a magistrate. But not inappropriate to the unreasoning demands of a frenzied proletariat. Many parallels might be cited from the French revolutions. But this is just an instance of Shakespeare’s inability to conceive a popular rising in other terms than the outbreak of a mob.

And this leads us to the second point. The general moderation and dignity implied in the attitude of Rome, viewed broadly and comprehensively, almost disappears when we are confronted with the full concrete life of the participants in all its picturesque and incisive details.

For consider first a little more closely the treatment of the people. We have seen that in many ways the proceedings which it and its representatives take against Coriolanus are more defensible in Shakespeare than in Plutarch: but, on the other hand, they have less rational grounds for the original insurrection, and are much less clear-sighted and consequent in choosing the means of redress. They are comparatively well-meaning and fair, neither bitter nor narrow-minded, but they are quite inefficient, far from self-reliant, very childish and helpless. They are conspicuously lacking in political aptitude, but they make up for it by a certain soundness of feeling. Plutarch’s plebeians go the right way about protecting themselves from unjust laws, but they pursue Coriolanus with rancorous chicane even when his policy has been overturned. Shakespeare’s plebeians seek to legislate against a natural calamity, but at the crisis they turn quite justifiably, if a little tardily, on a would-be governor who makes no secret of his ill-will. Taken as separate units, they may be unwashed and puzzle-headed, but they are worthy fellows whom misery has driven desperate, yet whose misery claims compassion, though their desperation makes them meddle in things too high for them. In the opening scene, the First Citizen, even when calling for the death of Marcius, does so merely because he imagines that it is the preliminary to getting cheap food:

The gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge. (I. i. 15.)

But even among the maddened and famishing crowd, Marcius is not without his advocate. The Second Citizen admonishes them:

Consider you what services he has done for his country? (I. i. 30.)

And though these the ringleader discounts on the ground that they were due not to patriotism, but to personal pride and filial affection, his apologist, persisting in his defence, points out that he is not responsible for his inborn tendencies.

What he cannot help in his nature, you account a vice in him. (I. i. 42.)

All this is candid enough: a benevolent neutral could not say more. These rioters have no thought of libelling their adversary. They deny neither his claims nor his merits; they only assert that these are outweighed by his offences. The Second Citizen proceeds in his plea:

You must in no way say he is covetous;

and the First rejoins:

If I must not, I need not be barren of accusations; he hath faults, with surplus, to tire in repetition. (I. i. 43.)

We have seen how Shakespeare adopts from Plutarch the motive for the plebeians’ initial support of Coriolanus at the election, but he makes it a more striking instance of their fairness, for he represents them as quite aware and mindful of the reasons on the other side.

Fourth Citizen. You have deserved nobly of your country, and you have not deserved nobly. Coriolanus. Your enigma? Fourth Citizen. You have been a scourge to her enemies, you have been a rod to her friends; you have not indeed loved the common people. (II. iii. 94.)

It is all very well for the candidate to turn this off with a flout, but it is the sober truth. That the despised plebeian should see both sides of the case shows in him more sanity of judgment than Coriolanus ever possessed: that he should nevertheless cast his vote for such an applicant shows more generosity as well. And the generosity, if also the simplicity, of the electors is likewise made more pronounced than in Plutarch by their persevering in their course despite the scorn with which Coriolanus treats them; of which Plutarch of course knows nothing. Even that they forgive till the tribunes irritate the wounds and predict more fatal ones from the new weapon that has been put into such ruthless hands.

Did you perceive He did solicit you in free contempt When he did need your loves, and do you think That his contempt shall not be bruising to you, When he hath power to crush? (II. iii. 207.)

All these instances of right feeling and instinctive appreciation of greatness are in Shakespeare’s picture, while they are either not at all or in a much less degree in Plutarch’s. And these citizens are capable of following good leadership as well as bad. They listen to Menenius, and are “almost persuaded” by his argument, without, as in Plutarch, making their acceptance of it merely provisional. Under Cominius they quit themselves, as he says, “like Romans,” and he gives them the praise:

Breathe you, my friends: well fought. (I. vi. 1.)

Afterwards too he recognises that they are earning their share of the spoil, even as before they had borne themselves stoutly:

March on, my fellows: Make good this ostentation, and you shall Divide in all with us. (I. vi. 85.)

This is said to the volunteers who come forward at Marcius’ summons, an episode for which there is hardly a hint in Plutarch. There, indeed, we read that he cannot call off the looters from the treasures of Corioli:

Whereupon taking those that willingly offered them selves he went out of the cittie:

which supplies the sentence,

I, with those that have the spirit, will haste To help Cominius. (I. v. 14.)

But this hint, if hint it were, Shakespeare uses anew with far stronger and brighter colouring in the incident of Marcius’ stirring appeal to Cominius’ men and their enthusiastic response: which is to be found only in the drama:

If any such be here— As it were sin to doubt—that love this painting Wherein you see me smear’d: if any fear Lesser his person than an ill report; If any think brave death outweighs bad life And that his country’s dearer than himself; Let him alone, or so many so minded, Wave thus, to express his disposition, And follow Marcius.

[_They all shout and wave their swords, take him up in their arms, and cast up their caps._] (I. vi. 67.)

If they are handled in the right way, these citizen soldiers can play their part well. But they need to be rightly handled, they need to have their feelings stirred. They have no rational initiative of their own, and cannot do without inspiration and guidance. For, consider the grounds for their rising. Shakespeare not only completely suppresses the remarkable secession to the Mons Sacer, but barely mentions the social grievances that led to it. The First Citizen says indeed of the patricians:

[They] make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will. (I. i. 83.)

But this is a mere passing remark, and no stress is laid on these, the real causes of the discontent, in comparison with the dearth, which for the rest seems to end with the Coriolan campaign, when there is, as Cominius promises, a “common distribution” of the spoils. Now the dearth is represented as a mere disastrous accident, for which no one is responsible, and for which there is no remedy save prayer—or such a foray as presently took place. Menenius expressly says so:

For the dearth, The gods, not the patricians, made it, and Your knees to them, not arms, must help. (I. i. 74.)

It is alleged, no doubt, by the mutineers that the “storehouses are crammed with grain,” but there is no confirmation of this in the play, and the way in which “honest” Menenius reports the rumour, and Marcius, who is never less than honest receives it, implies that it is mere tittle tattle and gossip of the chimney corner.

Marcius. What’s their seeking? Menenius. For corn at their own rates: whereof, they say, The city is well stored. Marcius. Hang ’em! They say! They’ll sit by the fire, and presume to know What’s done i’ the Capitol; who’s like to rise, Who thrives and who declines; side factions and give out Conjectural marriages; making parties strong And feebling such as stand not in their liking Below their cobbled shoes. They say there’s grain enough! (I. i. 192.)

In short their temper is hardly parodied in the modern skit,

Who fills the butchers’ shops with large blue flies?

And if they resemble the ignorant fanatics of later days in the unreasonableness of their complaints, they resemble them too, as we have seen, in the unreasonableness of their remedies. If things were as the play implies what help would lie in constitutional reform? They are no better than the starving Sansculottes who sought to allay their hunger by snatching new morsels of the royal prerogative. It really reads like a scene in Carlyle’s Paris of 1790 A.D., and not like any scene in Plutarch’s Rome of 494 B.C., when Coriolanus describes the delight of the famine-stricken crowds at getting their representatives:

They threw their caps As they would hang them on the horns o’ the moon, Shouting their emulation. (I. i. 216.)

Moreover, when left to themselves, or when their sleeping manhood is not awakened, these plebeians, otherwise than those of Plutarch, have not even the average of physical courage. They can fight creditably under the competent management of Cominius, or heroically under the stimulus of Marcius’ rousing appeal: but if such influences are lacking, they fail. Menenius says of them:

Though abundantly they lack discretion, Yet are they passing cowardly. (I. i. 206.)

Marcius ironically invites them to the wars by indicating what would be, and turns out to be, provision for their needs:

The Volsces have much corn: take these rats thither To gnaw their garners. Worshipful mutineers, Your valour puts well forth: pray, follow. (I. i. 253.)

And the citizens steal away. In truth the low opinion of their mettle seems justified by events. At Corioli the troops under Cominius do well, but those in Marcius’ division, perhaps because his treatment does not call out what is best in them, seem to deserve a part at least of his imprecations:

All the contagion of the south light on you, You shames of Rome! You herd of——. Boils and plagues Plaster you o’er, that you may be abhorr’d Further than seen, and one infect another Against the wind a mile! You souls of geese, That bear the shapes of men, how have you run From slaves that apes would beat! Pluto and hell! All hurt behind! backs red, and faces pale With flight and agued fear! (I. iv. 30.)

Nor do they appear in a better light in the moment of partial victory, for they at once fall to plunder instead of following it up and helping their fellows. This touch, of course, Shakespeare derived from Plutarch.

The most parte of the souldiers beganne incontinently to spoyle, to carie awaye, and to looke up the bootie they had wonne. But Martius was marvelous angry with them, and cried out on them, that it was no time now to looke after spoyle, and to ronne straggling here and there to enriche them selves, whilest the other Consul and their fellowe cittizens peradventure were fighting with their enemies; and howe that leaving the spoyle they should seeke to winde them selves out of daunger and perill. Howbeit, crie, and saye to them what he could, very fewe of them would hearken to him.

But Shakespeare is not content with this. He quite without warrant describes the articles as worthless, to emphasise the baseness of the pillagers.

See here these movers that do prize their hours At a crack’d drachma! Cushions, leaden spoons, Irons of a doit, doublets that hangmen would Bury with those that wore them, these base slaves, Ere yet the fight be done, pack up. (I. v. 5.)

This strain of baseness appears in another way afterwards, when they yell and hoot at their banished enemy, like a pack of curs at a retreating mastiff, or when at his threatened return they eat their words and their deeds.

First Citizen. For mine own part, When I said, banish him, I said ’twas pity. Second Citizen. And so did I. Third Citizen. And so did I: and, to say the truth, so did very many of us.... First Citizen. I ever said we were i’ the wrong when we banished him. Second Citizen. So did we all. (IV. vi. 139 and 155.)

What then is Shakespeare’s opinion of the people as a whole? Despite his sympathy with those of whom it is composed, it is to him a giant not yet in his teens, with formidable physical strength, with crude natural impulses to the good and the bad, kindly-natured and simple-minded, not incapable of fair-dealing and generosity; but rude, blundering, untaught, and therefore subject to spasms of fury, panic, and greed, fit for useful service only when it finds the right leader, but sure to go wrong if abandoned to its own or evil guidance.

To the danger of evil guidance, however, it is specially exposed, for it loves flattery and is imposed on by professions of goodwill: so Shakespeare reserves his severest treatment for those who cajole it, the demagogues of the Tribunate. No doubt in his tolerant objective way he concedes even to them a measure of justification. He was bound to do so, else they would have been outside the pale of dramatic sympathy; and also the culpability of Coriolanus would have been obscured. So there is something to be said even for their policy and management. They are quite right in fearing the results of Coriolanus’ elevation to the chief place in Rome:

Sicinius. On the sudden, I warrant him consul. Brutus. Then our office may During his power, go sleep. (II. i. 237.)

Their admonitions to the electors are such as the organisers of a party are not only entitled but bound to give to a constituency:

Could you not have told him As you were lesson’d, when he had no power, But was a petty servant to the state, He was your enemy, ever spake against Your liberties and the charters that you bear I’ the body of the weal: and now, arriving A place of potency and sway o’ the state, If he should still malignantly remain Fast foe to the plebeii, your voices might Be curses to yourselves. (II. iii. 180.)

These forebodings of what is likely to occur are not only thoroughly justifiable but obvious.

Then, though their abandonment of the methods of violence and acceptance of a trial are discounted partly by the perils of open force, partly by their confidence in and manipulation of a verdict to their minds, their willingness to substitute the penalty of banishment for the extreme sentence of death, must stand, as we have seen, to the credit, if not of their placability, at least of their moderation and prudence. Moreover, if we could disregard the dangers of war, their “platform,” as we should now call it, seems approved by its success. One cannot but sympathise with the satisfaction of Sicinius at the results of Marcius’ expulsion:

We hear not of him, neither need we fear him: His remedies are tame i’ the present peace And quietness of the people, which before Were in wild hurry. Here do we make his friends Blush that the world goes well, who rather had, Though they themselves did suffer by ’t, behold Dissentious numbers pestering streets, than see Our tradesmen singing in their shops and going About their functions friendly. (IV. vi. 1.)

And when the citizens pass with their greetings, the tribune has a right to say to Menenius:

This is a happier and more comely time Than when these fellows ran about the streets, Crying confusion. (IV. vi. 27.)

Even Menenius has to give a modified and grudging approval of the new position of things:

All’s well: and might have been much better, if He could have temporised. (IV. vi. 16.)

And when the disastrous news comes in, after the first outburst of incredulous wrath and terrified impatience, the two colleagues bear themselves well enough. There is shrewdness and good sense in Sicinius’ words to the citizens:

Go, masters, get you home: be not dismay’d; These are a side that would be glad to have This true which they so seem to fear. Go home, And show no sign of fear. (IV. vi. 149.)

When this very natural and probable conjecture proves false, they both rise to the occasion, or seek to do so, the cross-grained Sicinius somewhat more effectually than the glib-tongued Brutus, and show a certain dignity and justness of feeling. Their remonstrance with and petition to Menenius, if we grant the patriotism on the one side as well as the other, are not without their cogency:

Nay, pray, be patient: if you refuse your aid In this so never-needed help, yet do not Upbraid’s with our distress. (V. i. 33.)

When Menenius objects that his mission will be futile, Sicinius’ reply comes near being noble:

Yet your good will Must have that thanks from Rome, after the measure As you intended well. (V. i. 45).

When Menenius, returning from his fruitless mission, describes Coriolanus in his unapproachable, inexorable power, the tribune’s rejoinder is again the true one:

Menenius. He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in. Sicinius. Yes, mercy, if you report him truly. (V. iv. 24.)

Yet these various traits so little interfere with the general impression, that perhaps many tolerably careful readers who are familiar with the play, hardly take them into account. In the total effect they both seem to us pitiful busybodies, whose ill-earned influence only leads to disaster; or, as Menenius describes them:

A pair of tribunes that have rack’d for Rome, To make coals cheap. (V. i. 16.)

The first feature we notice in them is their pride, a vice which they blame in Coriolanus, and with which their own is expressly contrasted. For his is the haughty, unbending self-consciousness that is based on the sense of indwelling force, and has a shrinking disgust for praise. Theirs, on the other hand, revels in popularity, and their power depends entirely on the support which that popularity secures them. As Menenius tells them:

You are ambitious for poor knaves’ caps and legs. (II. i. 76.)

Your helps are many, or else your actions would grow wondrous single: your abilities are too infant-like for doing much alone. (II. i. 39.)

They are really consequential and overweening rather than proud. And magnifying their importance and their office, they are apt to take too seriously any trifle in which they are concerned, and to become irritated at any mishap to their own convenience. Having no standard but themselves by which to measure the proportion of things, they are fussy over minor points and lose their tempers over petty troubles. This is the point of Menenius’ banter.

You wear out a good wholesome forenoon in hearing a cause between an orange-wife and a fosset-seller; and then rejourn the controversy of three pence to a second day of audience. When you are hearing a matter between party and party, if you chanced to be pinched with the colic, you make faces like mummers; set up the bloody flag against all patience; and, in roaring for a chamber-pot, dismiss the controversy bleeding, the more entangled by your hearing: all the peace you make in their cause is, calling both the parties knaves. (II. i. 77.)

This is, they are disposed to treat a molehill as a mountain, but if they are galled, to break out in indiscriminate and unjustified abuse. Menenius gives it them home in respect of these foibles:

You talk of pride: O that you could turn your eyes toward the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves! O that you could! Brutus. What then, sir? Menenius. Why, then you should discover a brace of unmeriting, proud, violent, testy magistrates, alias fools, as any in Rome. (II. i. 41.)

This is the utterance of an enemy; nevertheless it is confirmed by their behaviour, and is moreover a prophecy of their action in regard to Marcius. In the first place their pride has been insulted by his:

Sicinius. Was ever man so proud as is this Marcius? Brutus. He has no equal. Sicinius. When we were chosen tribunes of the people,— Brutus. Mark’d you his lip and eyes? Sicinius. Nay, but his taunts. Brutus. Being moved, he will not spare to gird the gods— Sicinius. Bemock the modest moon. (I. i. 256.)

A man who gibes at the gods, the moon, and above all the tribunes, is evidently a profane and irreverent fellow who should be got rid of. And perhaps it is anxiety not only for the public good but for their own authority that makes them dread their office may “go sleep,” during his consulship. At any rate the disrespect with which they have been treated is one main motive of their indignation: “Our Aediles smote, ourselves resisted!” they exclaim in pardonable horror (III. i. 319).

Then the means they take to ruin Coriolanus, though not without its astuteness, and similar enough to what is practised every day in parliamentary tactics, is altogether base: it is the device of mean, paltry, inferior natures. They speculate on the defect of their enemy’s greatness, they reckon on his heroic vehemence and forcefulness to destroy him, and lay plans to betray his nobility to a passion that will embroil him with the people. It is as easy, says Sicinius, to drive him to provocation “as to set dogs on sheep” (II. i. 273). But easy though it is, they are careful to give minute directions to their gang. Sicinius tells them that any condition proposed to him,

Would have gall’d his surly nature, Which easily endures not article Tying him to aught; so putting him to rage, You should have ta’en the advantage of his choler And pass’d him unelected. (II. iii. 203.)

Then, after engineering the disavowal of the elected candidate, Brutus calculates

If, as his nature is, he fall in rage With their refusal, both observe and answer The vantage of his anger. (II. iii. 266.)

And here are his final instructions for the behaviour of the people at the trial:

Put him to choler straight: he hath been used Ever to conquer, and to have his worth Of contradiction: being once chafed, he cannot Be rein’d again to temperance; then he speaks What’s in his heart; and that is there which looks To break his neck. (III. iii. 25.)

The suggestion for these proceedings comes, as we saw, from Plutarch; but in this one respect his tribunes are by no means so wily. They contrive a dilemma in which Coriolanus will have either to humble or to compromise himself; but though they would prefer the latter alternative, they do nothing to bring it about.

Yet with all their activity in the matter, they are meanly desirous of evading responsibility and saving their own skins.

Brutus. Lay A fault on us, your tribunes; that we labour’d, No impediment between, but that you must Cast your election on him. Sicinius. Say you chose him More after our commandment than as guided By your own true affections, and that your minds, Pre-occupied with what you rather must do Than what you should, made you against the grain To voice him consul: lay the fault on us. (II. iii. 234.)

And parallel with this is the crowning vulgarity of their triumph:

Go, see him out at gates, and follow him, As he hath follow’d you, with all despite; Give him deserved vexation. (III. iii. 138.)

This is perhaps the supreme instance of their headstrong, testy and inconsiderate violence, for, as we shall see, it embitters the wavering Marcius and drives him to alliance with the foe. But the same violence has abundantly appeared before. The rest do all in their power to appease the tumult and procure a hearing for Sicinius, he uses the opportunity to add fuel to the fire and deserves Menenius’ rebuke:

This is the way to kindle, not to quench. (III. i. 197.)

When Brutus proceeds in the same way, Cominius interrupts:

That is the way to lay the city flat; To bring the roof to the foundation, And bury all, which yet distinctly ranges, In heaps and piles of ruin. (III. i. 204.)

Menenius has to admonish them:

Do not cry havoc, where you should but hunt With modest warrant. (III. i. 274.)

And again:

One word more, one word. This tiger-footed rage, when it shall find The harm of unscann’d swiftness, will too late Tie leaden pounds to’s heels. (III. i. 311.)

They do yield at last, but clearly the game they were playing in unreflecting impatience was most hazardous for the populace itself. Indeed, even when they have accepted more moderate counsels, the expulsion of Coriolanus seems an act not only of ingratitude but of recklessness. Their low cunning has attained an end, good perhaps in itself for the party they represent, but even for that party of insignificant advantage in view of the wider issues. Volumnia’s taunt is very much to the point:

Hadst thou foxship To banish him that struck more blows for Rome Than thou hast spoken words? (IV. ii. 18.)

For after all, the pressing need in that period of constant war, as Plutarch and Shakespeare imagine it, was defence of the whole state, the plebs as well as the senate, against the foreign enemy, and the danger of an invasion was one of the ordinary probabilities of the case. Most men who had any sense of proportion would, in the circumstances, pause before they banished the sword and soldiership of Rome. No doubt the tribunes were to be excused for not foreseeing the renegacy of Coriolanus; when it is announced as a fact Menenius can hardly credit it.

This is unlikely: He and Aufidius can no more atone Than violentest contrariety. (IV. vi. 71.)

It is less excusable that they should neglect the danger of a new attack from the Volsces, for though Cominius, as we saw, makes a similar error, he does so when Marcius is still on the side of the Romans. Menenius’ exclamation, when the invasion actually takes place and when the news of it is first brought to Rome, describes a situation, the possibility or probability of which every public man should have anticipated.

’Tis Aufidius, Who, hearing of our Marcius’ banishment, Thrusts forth his horns again into the world: Which were inshell’d when Marcius stood for Rome, And durst not once peep out. (IV. vi. 42.)

This, though of course an understatement, for in point of fact Aufidius did not wait for Marcius’ banishment, is at any rate the least that was to be expected. But the tribunes, with a sanguine and criminal shortsightedness that suggests a distinguished pair of British politicians in our own day, refuse to admit as conceivable a fact the likelihood of which the circumstances of the case and recent experience avouch.

Brutus. It cannot be The Volsces dare break with us. Menenius. Cannot be! We have record that very well it can, And three examples of the like have been Within my age. (IV. vi. 47.)

Besides, the Volscians were not the only jealous neighbours the young republic had to guard herself against.

But their reception of the unwelcome tidings is a new instance of the ignoble strain in the tribunes’ nature. The first effect they have on Brutus is to enrage him against the informant: “Go see this rumourer whipp’d”; and Sicinius seconds the humane direction, but improves on it that the public may be duly cautioned against telling unpalatable truths: “Go whip him ’fore the people’s eyes.” Menenius may well remonstrate:

Reason with the fellow, Before you punish him, where he heard this, Lest you shall chance to whip your information, And beat the messenger who bids beware Of what is to be dreaded. (IV. vi. 51.)

This is not merely an illustration of their habitual touchiness and irritability at whatever thwarts them. Once more we think of the words of the messenger in Antony and Cleopatra when he fears to report the worst: “The nature of bad news infects the teller”; and of Antony’s reply: “When it concerns the fool and coward.” There is beyond doubt more than a spice of folly and cowardice in the self-important quidnuncs, with their purblind temerity and shifty meanness. We are very glad to hear in the end of Brutus being mishandled by the mob and very sorry that Sicinius goes free: but at least he has had his dose of alarm and mortification, and in the future his influence will be gone; which is well. Yet they are not bad men. They are very like the majority of the citizens of Great and Greater Britain, and no inconsiderable portion of those who govern the Empire and its members. They have a certain amount of principle, shrewdness, and, if the test of misfortune comes, even of proper feeling. They would have made very worthy aldermen of a small municipality. But measured against the greatness of Rome, or even of Coriolanus, they are as gnats to the lion.

The picture, then, of the people and its elect is not flattering if we follow it in detail, but a similar examination is hardly more favourable to the nobles. Of course their behaviour is to a certain extent accounted for by the peculiarity of their position. Hitherto, since the expulsion of the kings, the “honoured number” have had it all their own way in the state, and Shakespeare imputes no blame to their management, unless it be their excessive arrogance towards the populace they rule and employ. But now bad times have made that populace seditious, and they have discovered that, rightly or wrongly, they must give it a share of the power. Their pride, their traditions, the consciousness of their faculty for government, pull them one way, the necessities of the case pull them another. A dominant caste is placed in a false position when it is forced to capitulate to assailants for whom it feels an unreasonable contempt and a reasonable mistrust. When we consider the difficulties of the situation and the broad results, the patricians, as we saw, come off respectably enough, and we must give them credit for circumspection, adaptability, and civic cohesion. But in detail their attitude betrays the uncertainty and weakness that cannot but ensue in a man or a body of men when there is a conflict between conviction and expediency, and an attempt to obey them both. Their scorn of the plebeians, followed by the very brief effort for their champion and very prompt acquiescence in his expatriation, makes an unpleasant impression; and this is more noticeable in the drama than in the biography. Plutarch repeatedly states that they disagree among themselves, many of them sympathising with the popular demands and only the younger men favouring the harsh and reactionary views of Coriolanus.[260] This distinction has left no trace in the play except in the stage direction which represents him as departing into exile escorted to the gates by his friends, his relatives, and “the young nobility of Rome”: but otherwise Shakespeare makes no use of it. Coriolanus is mouthpiece for the ideals not of heedless youth but of all the aristocracy, though most of them may be more politic than he and not so frank. Nevertheless his presuppositions are theirs, and therefore they seem temporisers and poltroons beside their outspoken advocate. Indeed, through Menenius, they admit they have been to blame:

We loved him; but, like beasts And cowardly nobles, gave way unto your clusters, Who did hoot him out o’ the city. (IV. vi. 121.)

[260] See especially the passage that describes his behaviour after he has been rejected for the consulship: “Coriolanus went home to his house, full fraighted with spite and malice against the people, being accompanied with all the lustiest young gentlemen, whose mindes were nobly bent, as those that came of noble race, and commonly used for to followe and honour him. But then specially they floct about him, and kept him companie, to his muche harme; for they dyd but kyndle and inflame his choller more and more, being sorie with him for the injurie the people offred him.”

Nor do they act very vigorously when destruction threatens Rome. They do not indeed seek to separate their cause from that of the whole community and make terms with their former friend for their own class. Beyond some naturally bitter gibes at the “clusters” and their leaders, not unaccompanied for the rest by bitter outbursts against themselves, there is no trace of the dissensions with the people which Plutarch describes. But they have no thought of organising any attempt at resistance. True, there are circumstances in Shakespeare that account for this supineness as it is not explained in his authority. It is partly due to the feeling that they are in the wrong, which Shakespeare in a much greater degree than Plutarch attributes to them. As their own words show:

Cominius. For his best friends, if they Should say, “Be good to Rome,” they charged him even As those should do that had deserved his hate, And therein show’d like enemies. Menenius. ’Tis true: If he were putting to my house the brand That should consume it, I have not the face To say, “Beseech you, cease.” (IV. vi. 111.)

And again:

If he could burn us all into one coal, We have deserved it. (IV. vi. 137.)

Partly, too, there has been no time for preparation, for, as we have seen, the invasion is a bolt from the blue, and after it has first struck there is no convenient truce of thirty days before its recurrence. Entreaty, says Sicinius, might help

More than the instant army we can make; (V. i. 37.)

and it is the opinion of all.

Partly, too, the inertness of Rome is a tribute to the greatness of the adversary, which is enhanced beyond the hyperboles of Plutarch, and with which to inspire them the Volscians are irresistible.

He is their god: he leads them like a thing Made by some other deity than nature That shapes men better: and they follow him, Against us brats, with no less confidence Than boys pursuing summer butterflies, Or butchers killing flies. (IV. vi. 90.)

But contrition, unpreparedness, despair of success hardly excuse the palsy of incompetence into which this proud aristocracy has now fallen. It does not of course sink so low as in Plutarch. Of the first of the repeated deputations he narrates:

The ambassadours that were sent, were Martius familliar friendes and acquaintaunce, who looked at the least for a curteous welcome of him, as of their familliar friende and kynesman. Howbeit they founde nothing lesse. For at their comming, they were brought through the campe, to the place where he was set in his chayer of state, with a marvelous and unspeakable majestie, having the chiefest men of the Volsces about him: so he commaunded them to declare openly the cause of their comming. Which they delivered in the most humble and lowly wordes they possiblie could devise, and with all modest countenaunce and behaviour agreeable for the same. When they had done their message; for the injurie they had done him, he aunswered them very hottely and in great choller.

This is evidently the foundation of the interviews with Cominius and Menenius respectively, and it is worth while noting the points of difference.

In the first place single individuals are substituted for an unspecified number. Just in the same way the final deputation consists of “Virgilia, Volumnia, leading young Marcius, Valeria, and Attendants,” without any of “all the other Romaine Ladies” that accompany them in Plutarch. In the last case it is the members and the friend of Coriolanus’ family, in the previous cases it is his sworn comrade Cominius and his idolatrous admirer Menenius who make the appeal: and this at once gives their intercessions more of a personal and less of a public character. One result of this with which we are not now concerned, is that the rigour of Coriolanus’ first two answers is considerably heightened; but at present it is more important to observe that the impression of a formal embassy is avoided. Cominius and Menenius strike us less as delegates from the Roman state, than as private Romans who may suppose that their persuasions will have special influence with their friend. There is nothing to indicate that Cominius was official envoy of the republic, and we know that Menenius went without any authorisation, in compliance with the request made by Sicinius and Brutus in the street. Shakespeare’s senate is spared the ignominy of the recurring supplications to which Plutarch’s senate condescends. If these are not altogether suppressed, the references to them are very faint and vague.

And also the suppliants bear themselves more worthily. Menenius is far from employing “the most humble and lowly wordes” that could possibly be devised or “the modest countenaunce and behaviour agreeable for the same.” Cominius indeed tells how at the close of the interview, we may suppose as a last resort, he “kneeled before” Coriolanus, but there was no more loss of dignity in his doing so, consul and general though he had been, than there was afterwards in Volumnia’s doing the same; and his words as he repeats them do not show any lack of self-respect.

Still the inactivity, the helplessness, the want of nerve in the Roman nobles in the hour of need are somewhat pitiful. It was the time to justify their higher position by higher patriotism, resourcefulness and courage. They do not make the slightest effort to do so. Remorse for their desertion of Coriolanus need not have lamed their energies, since now they would be confronting him not for themselves but for the state. Even their “instant armies” might do something if commanded and inspired by devoted captains. At the worst they could lead their fellow-citizens to an heroic death. One cannot help feeling that if a Coriolanus, or anyone with a tithe of his spirit, had been among them, things would have been very different. But while they retain much of the old caste pride, they have lost much of the old caste efficiency.

Thus Shakespeare, when he comes to the concrete, views with some severity both the popular and the senatorial party. They show themselves virulent and acrimonious in their relations with each other, yet inconsequent even in their virulence and acrimony: then, after having respectively enforced and permitted the banishment of their chief defender, they are ready to succumb to him without a blow when, it has well been said, he returns not even as an émigré using foreign aid to restore the privileges of his own order and the old régime, but as a barbarian bringing the national foe to exterminate the state and all its members. And we cannot help asking: Is this an adequate representation of the young republic that was ere long to become the mistress of the world? We must look steadily at those general aspects of the story which we have noticed above, as well as at the doings of the persons and parties amidst which Coriolanus is set, if we would get the total effect of the play. Then it produces something of the feeling which prompted Heine’s description of the ancient Romans:

They were not great men, but through their position they were greater than the other children of earth, for they stood on Rome. Immediately they came down from the Seven Hills, they were small.... As the Greek is great through the idea of Art, the Hebrew through the idea of one most holy God; so the Romans are great through the idea of their eternal Rome; great, wheresoever they have fought, written or builded in the inspiration of this idea. The greater Rome grew, the more this idea dilated: the individual lost himself in it: the great men who remain eminent are borne up by this idea, and it makes the littleness of the little men more pronounced.[261]

[261] Reisebilder, 2ter Theil; “Italien, Reise nach Genua,” Cap. xxiv.

The Idea of Rome! It is the triumph of that which yields the promise and evidence of better things that the final situation contains. The titanic intolerance of Coriolanus after being expelled by fear and hatred from within, has threatened destruction from without, and the threat has been averted. The presumptuous intolerance of the demagogues, after imperilling the state, has been discredited by its results, and their authority is destroyed. The Idea of Rome in the patriotism of Volumnia has led to her self-conquest and the conquest of her son, and is acclaimed by all alike. Thus we have borne in upon us a feeling of the majesty and omnipotence of the Eternal City, and we understand how it not only inspires and informs the units that compose it, but stands out aloft and apart from its faulty representatives as a kind of mortal deity that overrules their doings to its own ends, and against which their cavilling and opposition are vain. What Menenius says to the rioters applies to all dissentients:

You may as well Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them Against the Roman state, whose course will on The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs Of more strong link asunder than can ever Appear in your impediment. (I. i. 69.)

This, then, is the background against which are grouped with more or less prominence, as their importance requires, Coriolanus’ family, his associates, his rival, round the central figure of the hero himself.

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IV. THE KINSFOLK AND FRIENDS OF CORIOLANUS

Of the subordinate persons, by far the most imposing and influential is Volumnia, the great-hearted mother, the patrician lady, the Roman matron. The passion of maternity, whether interpreted as maternal love or as maternal pride, penetrates her nature to the core, not, however, to melt but to harden it. In her son’s existence she at first seems literally wrapped up, and she implies that devotion to him rather than to her dead husband has kept her from forming new ties:

Thou hast never in thy life Show’d thy dear mother any courtesy, When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood, Has cluck’d thee to the wars and safely home, Loaden with honour. (V. iii. 160.)

Marcius is thus the only son of his mother and she a widow; but these reminiscences show how strictly the tenderness, and still more the indulgence, usual in such circumstances, have been banished from that home. In Plutarch the boy seeks a military career from his irresistible natural bent:

Martius being more inclined to the warres, then any young gentleman of his time: beganne from his Childehood to geve him self to handle weapons, and daylie dyd exercise him selfe therein.

In Shakespeare the direction and stimulus are much more directly attributed to his mother, and it is she who first despatches him to the field. This she herself expressly states in her admonition to Virgilia:

Volumnia. I pray you, daughter, sing; or express yourself in a more comfortable sort: if my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honour, than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love. When yet he was but tender-bodied and the only son of my womb, when youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way, when for a day of kings’ entreaties a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding, I, considering how honour would become such a person, that it was no better than picture-like to hang by the wall, if renown made it not stir, was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him; from whence he returned, his brows bound with oak. I tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man. Virgilia. But had he died in the business, madam; how then? Volumnia. Then his good report should have been my son; I therein would have found issue. Hear me profess sincerely: had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action. (I. iii. 1.)

He is the object of her love because he is to be the ideal which she adores. She trains him to all the excellence she understands, and would have him a captain of Rome’s armies and a force in the state. She has to the full the sentiment of noblesse oblige, and is inspired by the same feeling which in Plutarch moves Marcius to bid the patricians show that

they dyd not so muche passe the people in power and riches as they dyd exceede them in true nobilitie and valliantnes.

She is full of the virtues and prejudices of her class, and, with the self-consciousness of an aristocrat, looks from the plebs only for the obedience and approval due to their betters. They are quite unqualified for self-government or for the criticism of those above them. In comparison with the noble Coriolanus, the people, whom she calls the rabble, are “cats” (IV. ii. 34). Naturally she is tenacious of the supremacy of her order, and would fain see it make good its threatened privileges. She remonstrates with her son for his contumacy:

I am in this, Your wife, your son, these senators, the nobles; And you will rather show our general louts How you can frown than spend a fawn upon ’em, For the inheritance of their loves and safeguard Of what that want might ruin. (III. ii. 64.)

Her dream has been that Marcius shall be consul to establish once more the power of the patricians. When he enters in his great triumph from Corioli, she exclaims in expectation of that result:

I have lived To see inherited my very wishes, And the buildings of my fancy: only There’s one thing wanting, which I doubt not but Our Rome will cast upon thee. (II. i. 214.)

Yet she has one feeling that outweighs both her maternal and her aristocratic instincts, and that is devotion to her country. This is the first and last and noblest thing in her. It is the basis and mainspring of the training of her son; she wishes him to serve the fatherland. It is the basis and mainspring of her patrician partisanship; she honestly believes that the nobles alone are fit to steer Rome to safety and honour. And to it she is willing to sacrifice the two other grand interests of her life. When the call comes she is ready for Rome, with its mechanics and tribunes as well as its senators and patricians, to persuade her son to the step that will certainly imperil and probably destroy him. It is public spirit of no ordinary kind that makes such a nature disregard the dearest ties of family and caste, and all personal motives of love and vengeance, to intercede for the city as a whole. But she puts her country first, and her words show that she never even questions the sacredness of its claim:

Thou know’st, great son, The end of war’s uncertain, but this certain, That, if thou conquer Rome, the benefit Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name, Whose repetition will be dogg’d with curses; Whose chronicle thus writ: “The man was noble, But with his last attempt he wiped it out: Destroy’d his country, and his name remains To the ensuing age abhorr’d.” (V. iii. 140.)

She feels, as well she may, that she is basing her plea on eternal right, and is willing to stake her success on the irresistible truth of her argument.

Say my request’s unjust, And spurn me back: but if it be not so, Thou art not honest. (V. iii. 164.)

Such a woman is made to be the mother of heroes. It is no wonder that she has bred that colossal Übermensch, her son. But she has the defects of her qualities. Her devotion is narrow in its intensity, and in normal circumstances spares little recognition or tolerance for those beyond its pale. Her contempt for the plebeians is open and unrestrained. She was wont, says Coriolanus,

To call them woollen vassals, things created To buy and sell with groats, to show bare heads In congregations, to yawn, be still and wonder, When one but of my ordinance stood up To speak of peace or war. (III. ii. 9.)

Even when trying to pacify her son, she cannot bridle her own resentment. When he recklessly cries of his opponents: “Let them hang!” she instinctively approves: “Ay, and burn too.”[262] The energy of her love of glory has nothing sentimental about it, but often becomes savage and sanguinary. She gloats over her robust imaginings of the fight:

Methinks I hear hither your husband’s drum, See him pluck Aufidius down by the hair, As children from a bear, the Volsces shunning him: Methinks I see him stamp thus, and call thus: “Come on, you cowards! you were got in fear, Though you were born in Rome”: his bloody brow With his mail’d hand then wiping, forth he goes, Like to a harvest-man that’s tasked to mow Or all or lose his hire. Virgilia. His bloody brow! O Jupiter, no blood! Volumnia. Away, you fool! it more becomes a man Than gilt his trophy: the breasts of Hecuba, When she did suckle Hector, look’d not lovelier Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood At Grecian sword, contemning. (I. iii. 32.)

[262] There is no authority for taking this most characteristic utterance from Volumnia and assigning it to “a patrician” as some editions do.

And when she has heard the actual news, she triumphantly exclaims:

O, he is wounded; I thank the gods for’t. (II. i. 133.)

As Kreyssig points out, even great-hearted mothers, proud of their warrior sons, do not often like to dwell so realistically on havoc and slaughter and blood. But tenderness and humanity are alien to her nature. When Valeria narrates how young Marcius tore in pieces the butterfly, she interrupts with obvious satisfaction: “One on’s father’s moods” (I. iii. 72). At her hearth Coriolanus would not be taught much kindliness for Volscians or plebeians or any other of the lower animals. Indeed, her own relations with her son depend on his reverence rather than on his fondness. In the two collisions of their wills he resists all her entreaties and endearments, but yields in a moment to her anger and indignation. She beseeches him to submit to the judgment of the people—all in vain till she loses patience:

At thy choice, then: To beg of thee, it is my more dishonour Than thou of them. Come all to ruin: let Thy mother rather feel thy pride than fear Thy dangerous stoutness, for I mock at death With as big heart as thou. Do as thou list. (III. ii. 123.)

At this his efforts to propitiate her are almost amusing:

Pray, be content: Mother, I am going to the market-place: Chide me no more. I’ll mountebank their loves, Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved Of all the trades in Rome. Look, I am going. (III. ii. 130.)

Similarly, at the end, all argument and complaint, all pressure on the affections of Coriolanus are without avail, till she turns upon him with a violence for which, as in the previous case, Shakespeare found no authority in Plutarch:

Come, let us go: This fellow had a Volscian to his mother; His wife is in Corioli, and his child Like him by chance. Yet give us our dispatch: I am hush’d until our city be afire, And then I’ll speak a little. (V. iii. 177.)

And the great warrior and rebel cannot bear her rebuke.

These are instances both of the degree and the manner in which Volumnia’s forceful character influences her son. Indeed it is easy to see that for good and evil he is what she has made him. She is entitled to say:

Thou art my warrior: I holp to frame thee. (V. iii. 62.)

And though elsewhere she puts it,

Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’dst from me, But owe thy pride thyself; (III. ii. 129.)

the impartial onlooker cannot make the distinction. He is bone of her bone and blood of her blood; and all her master impulses reappear in him, though not so happily commingled or in such beneficent proportion. The joint operation is different and in some respects opposite, but there is hardly a feature in him that cannot be traced to its origin in Volumnia, whether by heredity or education. This is just what we might expect. Modern conjecture points to the mother rather than the father as the source of will-power and character in the offspring; and in the up-bringing of the boy Volumnia has had it all her own way. Plutarch, as we saw, in his simple fashion, notices this as a disadvantage: and though we may be sure that Plutarch’s insinuation of laxity could never be breathed against Shakespeare’s Volumnia, still she could not give her son more width and flexibility than her own narrow and rigid ideals enjoined. Moreover, her limitations when transferred to the larger sphere of his public efforts, would cramp and congest his powers, and displace his interests.

Nor was there any other agency to divide the young man’s allegiance to his mother or to counteract or temper her authority. Generally the most powerful rivals of home influence are the companionship of friends, and the love that founds a new home in marriage. But both of these are either wanting in Coriolanus’ life, or serve only to deepen the impressions made on him by Volumnia.

If, for example, we consider the relation of friendship, we cannot but notice that Shakespeare gives him no intimate of his own years. A French tragedian would infallibly have placed by his side the figure of a confidant. Shakespeare was dispensed from the necessity by the freer usage of the Elizabethan stage and was at liberty to follow out the hints which he found in Plutarch. Marcius was

churlishe, uncivill, and altogether unfit for any mans conversation.... They could not be acquainted with him, as one cittizen useth to be with another in the cittie. His behaviour was so unpleasaunt to them, by reason of a certaine insolent and sterne manner he had, which bicause it was to lordly, was disliked.

So in Shakespeare he has no personal relations with any of the younger generation, even their resort to him as their congenial leader surviving, as has already been pointed out, only in the desiccated phrase of a stage direction; and his only associates are old or elderly men like Titus Lartius, the Consul Cominius, and Menenius Agrippa. What sort of antidote could they supply against his mother’s intolerant virtue? As Shakespeare conceives them, they respectively follow in Marcius’ wake, or are powerless to change and check his course, or even urge him forward.

Take Lartius, whom Shakespeare has drawn in a few rapid and vigorous strokes. He is old and stiff, but ready if need be to lean on one crutch and fight with the other, prompt to take a sporting wager, and, when he wins, eager to remit the stake in his admiration for the noble youngster, to whom with all his years he grants priority, whom on his supposed death he laments as an irreplaceable jewel, whom he hails as the living force that dwells within the trappings of their armament. Clearly from this cheery old fighting man, with his reverential enthusiasm for Marcius’ fighting powers in voice, looks and blows, we need not expect much correction of Marcius’ restiveness at the civic curb.

Cominius would seem more likely to prove a fitting Mentor, for to his love and esteem he adds discretion. In Shakespeare, though he “has years upon him,” he is the avowed friend and comrade-in-arms of the younger man; the brave and prudent general, “neither foolish in his stands, nor cowardly in retire”; who, perhaps from seniority, holds the position to which the other might aspire, but who confidently appeals to his promise of service. For their mutual affection is untouched by jealousy, and Cominius not only extols his heroism in the camp, but is his warmest advocate in the Senate. He resents the citizens’ fickleness and the tribunes’ trickery at the election as unworthy of Rome as well as insulting to her hero, and is indignant at the attempt to arrest Coriolanus; but he abhors civil brawls, and, just as in the field so in the city, he bows to “odds beyond arithmetic,” and considers that

Manhood is call’d foolery, when it stands Against a falling fabric. (III. i. 246.)

So he counsels Marcius’ withdrawal from the hostile mob, and afterwards dispassionately states the three courses open to him, with some hesitation sanctioning the method of compromise if the hothead can bring himself to give it fair play. When his doubts prove true, he interposes first with a remonstrance to his friend, and then with a solemn appeal to the people; and though in neither case is he allowed to finish, his efforts do not flag. He wishes to accompany the exile for a month, and maintain a correspondence with him and have everything in readiness for his recall. And if, when the invasion takes place, he rails at those who have brought about the calamity, that does not hinder him from his vain but zealous attempt at intercession. Altogether a sagacious, loyal, generous, but somewhat ineffective character, who wins our respect rather for what he essays than for what he achieves; for he brings nothing to a successful issue. With the best will in the world, which he has, and with more freedom from class prejudice than can in point of fact be attributed to him, such an one could do little to tame or bridle his friend.

There remains Menenius, with his much more strongly marked character, and with the fuller opportunities that a close intimacy could procure. Were Marcius and he of the same flesh and blood, their affection could hardly be greater. When debating with himself whether to try his mediation, this thought encourages the old man: “He call’d me father” (V. i. 3). He tells the Volscian sentinel:

You shall perceive that a Jack guardant cannot office me from my son Coriolanus. (V. ii. 67.)

And when they meet, he hails him:

The glorious gods sit in hourly synod about thy particular prosperity, and love thee no worse than thy old father Menenius does! O, my son, my son! (V. ii. 72.)

Nor are these statements idle brags; they are borne out by Coriolanus’ own words when he dismisses him:

For I loved thee, Take this along; I writ it for thy sake, [Gives a letter And would have sent it. (V. ii. 95.)

And again he tells Aufidius:

This last old man, Whom with a crack’d heart I have sent to Rome, Loved me above the measure of a father; Nay, godded me, indeed. (V. iii. 8.)

But the last expression may give an explanation both of the young man’s condescension to fondness and of the unprofitableness of Menenius’ influence. He is too much dazzled by the glories of his splendid adoptive son. His enthusiasm knows no bounds. No lover is more enraptured at receiving a billet doux from his mistress, than is the old man when the youth on whom he dotes, deigns to write to him.

A letter for me! it gives me an estate of seven years’ health; in which time I will make a lip at the physician; the most sovereign prescription in Galen is but empiricutic, and, to this preservative, of no better report than a horse-drench. (II. i. 125.)

He may occasionally interpose a mild hint of remonstrance against Marcius’ vehemence, but it is solely on the ground of expediency, not at all on the ground of principle; and on the whole he belongs to that not very edifying class of devotees who can say of a friend,

Whate’er he does seems well done to me.

Of which he himself is not altogether unaware. He tells the Volscian sentinel:

I tell thee, fellow, Thy general is my lover: I have been The book of his good acts, whence men have read His fame unparallel’d, haply amplified: For I have ever verified my friends, Of whom he’s chief, with all the size that verity Would without lapsing suffer: nay, sometimes, Like to a bowl upon a subtle ground, I have tumbled past the throw; and in his praise Have almost stamp’d the leasing. (V. ii. 13.)

This attitude, then, accounts for Coriolanus’ predilection for the old senator, and also reduces the value of the relation as an educative agency. Youthful recklessness will meet with no inconvenient thwarting, i.e. with no salutary rebuke, from such an adorer. But of course in the blindest friendship there is always the unconscious influence and criticism of the admirer’s own walk and conversation. And at first sight it might seem that this influence and criticism Menenius was well fitted to supply. He, too, like Volumnia, puts Rome before all other considerations, as is shown not only by his undertaking the mission to the Volscian camp, but by his action all through the drama. He is ever willing to play the part of mediator. Now we find him soothing the people, now we find him soothing Coriolanus. When the banishment is an accomplished fact, he endeavours to mitigate the outbursts of Volumnia; and Sicinius bears witness:

O, he is grown most kind of late. (IV. vi. 11.)

During all the tumult of the election and the émeute he keeps his head and his heart; for he is inspired by the right civic feeling that there must be no civil war.

Proceed by process; Lest parties, as he is beloved, break out, And sack great Rome with Romans. (III. i. 314.)

And with this patriotism, partly as its result, he combines singular moderation, at least in principle and thought, if not in language. He is always ready to commend and accept compromises. He says to the tribune,

Be that you seem, truly your country’s friend, And temperately proceed to what you would Thus violently redress. (III. i. 218.)

On the other hand, when Marcius draws he sees the mistake and interposes: “Down with that sword” (III. i. 226); and only when the tribunes persist in their attack does he himself resort to force, which, however, he is glad to abandon at the first opportunity. And this moderation comes the more easily to him that he has a real kindliness even for the plebeians. It is assuredly no small compliment that at the very height of the popular violence this patrician and senator, the known and avowed friend of Coriolanus, should be chosen by the tribunes themselves as their own delegate:

Noble Menenius, Be you then as the people’s officer. (III. i. 329.)

This confirms the testimony given him by the First Citizen in the opening scene: “He’s one honest enough” (I. i. 54); and the Second Citizen describes him as

Worthy Menenius Agrippa; one that hath always loved the people. (I. i. 52.)

He has indeed a sympathy with them, that shows itself in the russet and kersey of his speech. The haughty Coriolanus despises the household words of the common folk, and cites them only to ridicule them, but Menenius’ phrases of their own accord run to the homespun and proverbial. He addresses the obtrusive citizen: “You, the great toe of this assembly” (I. i. 159). The dissension at Rome is a rent that “must be patch’d with cloth of any colour” (III. i. 252). Coriolanus’ rough words he excuses on the ground that he is

ill school’d In bolted language: meal and bran together He throws without distinction. (III. i. 321.)

He figures the relentlessness of the returned exile as “yon coign o’ the Capitol, yon corner-stone” (V. iv. 1), and is at no loss for illustrations of the change that has come over the outcast:

There is a differency between a grub and a butterfly, yet your butterfly was a grub. (V. iv. 11.)

And with similes for Coriolanus’ present temper he positively overflows:

He no more remembers his mother now than an eight-year-old horse. The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes. (V. iv. 16.)

There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger. (V. iv. 29.)

All his thoughts clothe themselves in the pat, familiar image, and this is no doubt a great help to him in persuading his auditors, for which he has an undeniable talent. His famous apologue, besides being a masterpiece in its kind, worthy of La Fontaine at his best, completely answers its immediate purpose; and in the later scene he is able to lull the storm that Coriolanus and the tribunes have raised, and obtain from the infuriated demagogues what are in some sort favourable terms. But he is assisted in this by his genuine joviality and bonhomie. He is one of those people who permit themselves a little indulgence that we hardly blame, for it is only one side of their pervasive good nature. Menenius is in truth something of a belly-god and wine-bibber. When he hears news of Marcius he promptly decides how to celebrate the occasion:

I will make my very house reel to-night; (II. i. 121.)

and he has already confessed that he is known to be

one that loves a cup of hot wine with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t; ... one that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning. (II. i. 52 and 56.)

It is almost comic to hear him consoling Volumnia on her son’s banishment when she moves off to lament “in anger, Juno-like,” with an invitation: “You’ll sup with me?” (IV. ii. 49). And wholly comic is his explanation of Cominius’ rebuff by Coriolanus, an explanation suggested no doubt by subjective considerations:

He was not taken well; he had not dined: The veins unfill’d, our blood is cold, and then We pout upon the morning, are unapt To give or to forgive; but when we have stuff’d These pipes and these conveyances of the blood With wine and feeding, we have suppler souls Than in our priest-like fasts; therefore I’ll watch him Till he be dieted to my request, And then I’ll set upon him. (V. i. 50.)

But the worthy bon-vivant is thoroughly in earnest, and in the crisis of his altercation with the sentinel harks back to this key of the position, as he supposes it to be:

Has he dined, canst thou tell? for I would not speak with him till after dinner. (V. ii. 36.)

All these, however, are very human weaknesses, that sort well with the geniality of the man, and, just because they are very human weaknesses, might have a wholesome rather than a prejudicial effect on the overstrained tensity of Marcius. So far then, despite the excessive and uncritical in Menenius’ love, his patriotism, his moderation, his popular bent, commended by his persuasive tongue and companionable ways, might tend to supplement the defects and transcend the limitations of Volumnia’s training. But Menenius has other qualities akin to, or associated with, those that we have discussed, which would have a more questionable and not less decisive influence. He admits that he is

said to be something imperfect in favouring the first complaint. (II. i. 53.)

That is, he neglects the wise counsel, “Hear the other side,” and jumps to his conclusion at once. This is quite in keeping with the partiality that makes him magnify the virtues of his friends, and with his assumption that, since his own intercession has failed, that of Volumnia can have no effect. He prejudges, in other words he is prejudiced. We do not have any instance of this in his acts, but we have many in his unconsidered sayings, that, as he imagines, are to have no consequence beyond the moment.

Then he goes on to confess that he has the reputation of being “hasty and tinder-like upon too trivial motion” (II. i. 55), which means that he loses patience and fires up without adequate ground; and of this too we have ample evidence. He is wonderfully forbearing and longsuffering if matters of any moment are at stake, but if he has gained his point, or if there is nothing to gain and nothing to lose, he rails and mocks in Coriolanus’ own peculiar vein. Thus, when he has convinced the mob, he feels free to make the ringleader his butt. When the tribunes profess to “know him,” that is, to understand his character, he overwhelms them with peppery banter. When the news of Coriolanus’ invasion arrives, in unrestrained indignation he upbraids the people and their blind guides with their imbecility. But it will be observed that no harm ever comes by any of these ebullitions. They have no after-effects. If something has to be done, no one could be more sagacious and conciliatory than Menenius. Dr. Johnson said of him, perhaps more in exercise of his right as a sturdy old Tory to twit those in high places, than in deliberate appreciation of the facts: “Shakespeare wanted a buffoon and he went to the Senate House for that with which the Senate House would certainly have supplied him.” Similarly, in the play Brutus is rash enough to answer him back:

Come, come, you are well understood to be a perfecter giber for the table than a necessary bencher in the Capitol. (II. i. 90.)

But Menenius deserves neither taunt. It was no parliamentary wag or social lampooner whom the Senate entrusted with the task of addressing the rioters, or who persuaded the triumphant tribunes to a compromise. The charges nevertheless have a foundation in so far that Menenius, partly in jest, partly in irritation, gives his tongue rein unless he sees reason to curb it, and allows his choleric impulses full expression. These random ejaculations are taken at their proper value by himself and others. As he says:

What I think I utter, and spend my malice in my breath. (II. i. 58.)

He is obviously one of those estimable and deservedly popular people whose deliberate views are just and penetrating, and who are gifted with the power of commending them, but who are none the less liked because they do not always think it necessary to have themselves in hand, but let themselves go on the full career of their own half-jocular, half-serious likes and dislikes, when for the moment they are free from graver responsibilities.

Now this of itself was no very good example for Coriolanus. He adopts Menenius’ headlong frankness, but without Menenius’ tacit presupposition of good-humoured hyperbole. He utters what he thinks but he does not spend his malice in his breath. His friend would do nothing to teach him restraint and reserve, but would rather, if he influenced him at all, influence him to surcharge his invectives and double-barb his flouts.

But not only so. These instinctive likes and dislikes, which the old patrician could not but feel but which he never allowed to interfere with his practical policy, were the guiding principles of his less cautious friend. It must be admitted that there is no abuse of the citizens or their officers to which Coriolanus gives vent, but can be paralleled with something as strong from the mouth of Menenius. This worthy senior who hath always loved the people, turns from the tribunes with the insult:

God-den to your worships: more of your conversation would infect my brain, being the herdsmen of the beastly plebeians. (II. i. 103.)

In this mood he asks them in regard to Coriolanus:

Your multiplying spawn how can he flatter— That’s thousand to one good one? (II. ii. 82.)

He has to the full the aristocratic loathing for the uncleanly populace:

You are they That made the air unwholesome, when you cast Your stinking greasy caps in hooting at Coriolanus’ exile. (IV. vi. 129.)

You are the musty chaff: and you are smelt Above the moon. (V. i. 31.)

These are his authentic innate prejudices that he controls and represses by the help of his reason and his patriotism, when the emergency requires: but they are there; and he would be no more careful to restrain them in his familiar circle than a squatter at his club feels called upon to restrain his opinions about the Labour Party, though he may be very proud of Australia, and a very kindly master, and though he would neither publish them in an election address nor perhaps justify them in his serious moments to himself. And this, we may suppose, was the sort of conversation Marcius would hear as a lad from his old friend. There would be little in it to modify the pride and prejudice he derived from his mother.

And lastly, coming to the other possible corrective, would his wife be likely to soften the asperities of temper and opinion that were his by nature and by second nature? At first we might say Yes. She takes comparatively little pleasure in the brilliance of his career and is more concerned for his life than for his glory. When Volumnia recalls how she sent him forth as a lad to win honour, Virgilia’s heart pictures his possible death, and how would that have been compensated? For she loves in the first place not the hero but the husband, and her love makes her timorous. She has none of her mother-in-law’s assurance that his prowess is without match and beyond comparison. When “wondrous things” are told of him how characteristic are their respective comments:

Virgilia. The gods grant them true! Volumnia. True! pow, wow. (II. i. 154.)

How differently they feel about his contest with his rival:

Virgilia. Heavens bless my lord from fell Aufidius! Volumnia. He’ll beat Aufidius’ head below his knee And tread upon his neck. (I. iii. 48.)

So she shrinks from the thoughts of blood and wounds over which Volumnia gloats, and trembles at the dangers of the campaign. Devoured by suspense, she is in no mood to meet the ordinary social claims on her rank and sex, but shuts herself up within her four walls, and wears out the time over household tasks. Her seclusion, and the attempts to withdraw her from it, must not be misunderstood. They have sometimes been taken as pictures of domestic narrow-mindedness on the one hand, and callous frivolity on the other. But frivolity is unthinkable in Volumnia; we may be sure she would never advise or do anything unbefitting the Roman matron. And it is quite opposed to the impression Valeria produces; we may be sure she would never suggest it. In Plutarch’s story it is she who proposes and urges the deputation of women to Coriolanus, and though Shakespeare, to suit his own purpose, transfers by implication the credit of this to Volumnia, Plutarch’s statement was enough to prevent him from transforming the true authoress of the idea into the fashionable gadabout that some critics have alleged her to be. On the contrary, with him she calls forth the most purely poetical passage in the whole play, and she does so by the vestal dignity and severity of her character. Coriolanus greets her in the camp:

The noble sister of Publicola, The moon of Rome, chaste as the icicle That’s curdied by the frost of purest snow And hangs on Dian’s temple: dear Valeria! (V. iii. 65.)

The woman to whom this splendid compliment is paid by one who never speaks otherwise than he thinks, is assuredly no more obnoxious than Volumnia herself to the charge of levity. They are both great high-hearted Roman ladies who do not let their private or public solicitudes interfere with their customary social routine, and Valeria visits her friend to cheer her in her anxiety, as she would have her, in turn, visit and comfort their common acquaintance. But Virgilia is cast in a gentler mould; though neither is she lacking in character, spirit and magnanimity. Of course she is not an aggressive woman, and she feels that the home is the place for her. She speaks seldom, and when she does her words are few. It is typical that she greets her husband when he returns a victor with no articulate welcome, but with her more eloquent tears. He addresses her in half humorous, half tender reproach:

My gracious silence, hail! Wouldst thou have laugh’d had I come coffin’d home, That weep’st to see me triumph? (II. i. 192.)

A wonderful touch that comes from a wonderful insight. It may well be asked, as it has been asked, how Shakespeare knew that Virgilia’s heart was too full for words.

But with all this, she shows abundant resolution, readiness and patriotism. She is adamant to the commands of her imperious mother-in-law and the entreaties of her insistent friend when they urge her to break her self-imposed retirement. She, too, has her rebuke for the insolent tribunes. Above all, she, too, plays her part in turning Coriolanus from his revenge. In that scene, after her wont, she does not say much, less than two lines in all, that serve to contain the simple greeting and the quick answer to her husband’s warning that he no longer sees things as he did:

The sorrow that delivers us thus changed Makes you think so. (V. iii. 39.)

But who shall say that

those dove’s eyes Which can make gods forsworn, (V. iii. 27.)

did not shed their influence on his mother’s demand, and help him to break his vindictive vow. Remember, too, that the sacrifice this implied would mean more to her than to Volumnia, for though she likewise can dedicate what she holds dearest on the altar of her country, her affections, her home, Marcius as an individual, bulk more largely in her life.

And if she loves him, we see how fondly he loves her. More than once or twice he alludes to his happiness as bridegroom, husband, and father. When she appears before him, his ejaculations and the tenderness of his appeal,

Best of my flesh, Forgive my tyranny, (V. iii. 42.)

speak volumes in a mouth like his for the keenness of his affection. To express the bliss that he feels in the salute of reunion, this hero-lover can find analogues only in his banishment and his vengeance:

O, a kiss Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge! Now, by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss I carried from thee, dear: and my true lip Hath virgin’d it e’er since. (V. iii. 44.)

This woman, then, with her love and sweetness, that strike such responsive chords in the rude breast of her lord, is apparently well fitted to smooth the harshness of his dealings with his fellow-men: and this would seem all the more likely since her gentleness is not of that flabby kind that cannot hold or bind, but is strengthened by firmness of will and largeness of feeling.

All the same, she exerts no influence whatever before the very end on her husband’s public life or even on his general character, because she has no interest in or aptitude for concerns of his busy, practical career. She has chosen her own orbit in her home, and her love has no desire to step beyond. We have seen that, according to Plutarch, Volumnia was entrusted with the selection of her son’s wife. This Shakespeare omits, perhaps as incongruous with the spontaneousness of the relation between his wedded lovers, but it may have left a trace in the position he assigns to Virgilia. The mother-in-law has and claims the leading place; and, as Kreyssig remarks, with a woman of the daughter-in-law’s steady inflexibility, collisions more proper for comedy than for tragedy must inevitably ensue, unless there were a strict delimitation of spheres. Volumnia continues to be prompter and guide in all matters political. She has all the outward precedence. On his return from Corioli, her son gives her the prior reverence and salutation, and, only as it were by her permission, turns to his wife. When the deputation of ladies appears in his presence before Rome, he seems for a moment to be surprised out of his decorum, and his first words of passionate greeting are for Virgilia; but he presently recovers, and, with a certain accent of reproof, turns on himself:

You gods! I prate, And the most noble mother of the world Leave unsaluted: sink, my knee, i’ the earth: Of thy deep duty more impression show Than that of common sons. (V. iii. 48.)

Evidently, his love for his wife, intense though it be, is a thing apart, a sanctuary of his most inmost feeling, and is quite out of relation with the affairs of the jostling world. In them his mother has supreme sway, and Virgilia’s unobtrusive graciousness does not exercise even an indirect influence on his ingrained principles and prejudices. She is no makeweight against the potent authority of Volumnia.

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V. THE GREATNESS OF CORIOLANUS. AUFIDIUS

In the atmosphere then of Volumnia’s predominance we are to imagine young Marcius growing up from infancy to boyhood, from boyhood to youth, environed by all the most inspiring and most exclusive traditions of an old Roman family of the bluest blood. After the expulsion of the Tarquins, we must suppose that there was no more distinguished gens than his. The tribune Brutus gives the long bead-roll of his ancestry, the glories of which, as has already been shown, are even exaggerated in his statement through Shakespeare’s having made a little mistake in regard to Plutarch’s account, and having included representatives of later among those of former generations. But Volumnia is not the mother to let him rest on the achievements of his predecessors; he must make them his own by equalling or excelling them. He begins as a boy, and already in his maiden fight his exploits rouse admiration. Plutarch describes the circumstance:

The first time he went to the warres, being but a strippling, was when Tarquine surnamed the prowde ... dyd come to Rome with all the ayde of the Latines, and many other people of Italie.... In this battell, wherein were many hotte and sharpe encounters of either partie, Martius valliantly fought in the sight of the Dictator; and a Romaine souldier being throwen to the ground even hard by him, Martius straight bestrid him, and slue the enemie with his owne handes that had overthrowen the Romaine. Hereupon, after the battell was wonne, the Dictator dyd not forget so noble an acte, and therefore first of all he crowned Martius with a garland of oken boughs.

This furnishes Cominius with the prologue to his eulogy:

At sixteen years, When Tarquin made a head for Rome, he fought Beyond the mark of others: our then dictator, Whom with all praise I point at, saw him fight, When with his Amazonian chin he drove The bristled lips before him: he bestrid An o’erpress’d Roman and i’ the consul’s view Slew three opposers: Tarquin’s self he met And struck him on his knee: in that day’s feats, When he might act the woman in the scene, He proved the best man i’ the field, and for his meed Was brow-bound with the oak. (II. ii. 91.)

But it will be noticed that in Shakespeare’s version Marcius’ prowess is enhanced: not one opponent but three fall before him; he confronts the arch-enemy himself, and has the best of it. Similarly his derring-do at Corioli is raised to the superhuman. Plutarch’s statement, as he feels, makes demands, but it is moderate compared with Shakespeare’s.

Martius being in the throng emong the enemies, thrust him selfe into the gates of the cittie, and entred the same emong them that fled, without that any one of them durst at the first turne their face upon him, or els offer to slaye him. But he looking about him and seeing he was entred the cittie with very fewe men to helpe him, and perceyving he was envirouned by his enemies that gathered round about to set apon him: dyd things then as it is written, wonderfull and incredible: ... By this meanes, Lartius that was gotten out, had some leysure to bring the Romaines with more safetie into the cittie.

Here he is accompanied at least by a few, among whom, it is implied, the valiant Lartius is one, and Lartius having extricated himself, comes back with reinforcements to help him. But in Shakespeare he is from beginning to end without assistance, and his boast, “Alone I did it,” is the literal truth. The first soldier says, discreetly passing over the disobedience of the men:

Following the fliers at the very heels, With them he enters; who, upon the sudden, Clapp’d to their gates: he is himself alone To answer all the city. (I. iv. 49.)

And Cominius reports:

Alone he enter’d The mortal gate of the city, which he painted With shunless destiny; aidless came off. (II. ii. 114.)

But he is not merely, though he is conspicuously, a soldier. He is also a general who once and again gives proof of his strategic skill. Nor do his qualifications stop here. He has the forethought and insight of a statesman, at any rate in matters of foreign and military policy. He has anticipated the attack of the Volsces with which the play begins, as we learn from the remark of the First Senator:

Marcius, ’tis true that you have lately told us; The Volsces are in arms. (I. i. 231.)

So after their disaster at Corioli, he estimates the situation aright, when even Cominius is mistaken, and conjectures that the enemy is only waiting an opportunity for renewing the war:

So then the Volsces stand but as at first, Ready, when time shall prompt them, to make road Upon’s again. (III. i. 4.)

And this, as we presently learn, is quite correct.

Even in political statesmanship, the department in which he is supposed to be specially to seek, he has a sagacity and penetration that show him the centre of the problem. This does not necessarily mean that his solution is the true one; and still less does it mean that he is wise in proclaiming his views when and where he does so: but the views themselves are certainly deep-reaching and acute, and such as would win approval from some of the greatest builders of states, the Richelieus, the Fredericks, the Bismarcks. He is quite right in denying that his invectives against the policy of concession are due to “choler”:

Choler! Were I as patient as the midnight sleep, By Jove, ’twould be my mind! (III. i. 84.)

His objections are in truth no outbreaks of momentary exasperation, though that may have added pungency to their expression, but mature and sober convictions, that have a worth and weight of their own. As we might expect; for Shakespeare derives almost all of them from Plutarch; and Plutarch, who had thought about these things, puts several of his favourite ideas in Coriolanus’ mouth, even while condemning Coriolanus’ bigotry and harshness; and while, for dramatic fitness, suppressing the qualifications and provisos that he himself thought essential.

To Marcius the root of the matter is to be found in the fact that the Roman Republic is not a democracy but an aristocracy, and in this respect he contrasts it with some of the Greek communities.

Therefore sayed he, they that gave counsell, and persuaded that the corne should be geven out to the common people gratis, as they used to doe in citties of Graece, where the people had more absolute power; dyd but only nourishe their disobedience, which would breake out in the ende, to the utter ruine and overthrowe of the whole state.

Shakespeare’s transcription is, but for the interpolated interruption, fairly close:

Coriolanus. Whoever gave that counsel, to give forth The corn o’ the storehouse gratis, as ’twas used Sometime in Greece,— Menenius. Well, well, no more of that. Coriolanus. Though there the people had more absolute power, I say, they nourished disobedience, fed The ruin of the state. (III. i. 113.)

That being so, he regards it as a kind of treason to the constitution to pay court to the plebs, or let it have a share of the government.

He sayed they nourished against them selves, the naughty seede and cockle of insolencie and sedition, which had bene sowed and scattered abroade emongest the people, whom they should have cut of, if they had bene wise, and have prevented their greatnes.

This is only a little more explicit in Shakespeare:

I say again, In soothing them, we nourish ’gainst our senate The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition, Which we ourselves have plough’d for, sow’d, and scatter’d, By mingling them with us, the honour’d number, Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that Which they have given to beggars. (III. i. 68.)

For, and this is one of Shakespeare’s additions, if they have any share at all, being the majority they will swamp the votes of the superior order.

You are plebeians, If they be senators; and they are no less, When, both your voices blended, the great’st taste Most palates theirs. (III. i. 101.)

And their magistrate, strong in the support he receives, dictates his ignorant will to the experience and wisdom of the senate.

[They should] not to their owne destruction to have suffered the people, to stablishe a magistrate for them selves, of so great power and authoritie, as that man had, to whom they had graunted it. Who was also to be feared, bicause he obtained what he would, and dyd nothing but what he listed, neither passed for any obedience to the Consuls, but lived in all libertie acknowledging no superieur to commaund him, saving the only heades and authors of their faction, whom he called his magistrates: ... [The Tribuneshippe] most manifestly is the embasing of the Consulshippe.

This arraignment of the populace and its elect as mischief-makers whenever they try to rule and interfere with competent authority, goes to Shakespeare’s heart, and he makes the passage much more nervous and vivid; but the idea is the same.

O good but most unwise patricians! why, You grave but reckless senators, have you thus Given Hydra here to choose an officer, That with his peremptory “shall,” being but The horn and noise of the monster’s, wants not spirit To say he’ll turn your current in a ditch, And make your channel his. (III. i. 91.)

By Jove himself! It makes the consuls base. (III. i. 107.)

The result must be division and altercation with all the resulting anarchy.

The state [of the cittie] as it standeth, is not now as it was wont to be, but becommeth dismembred in two factions, which mainteines allwayes civill dissention and discorde betwene us, and will never suffer us againe to be united into one bodie.

Here, too, with some variation in the wording Shakespeare keeps close to the sense.

My soul aches To know, when two authorities are up, Neither supreme, how soon confusion May enter ’twixt the gap of both, and take The one by the other. (III. i. 108.)

The grand mistake was the distribution of corn, for, as Plutarch puts it very clearly:

They will not thincke it is done in recompense of their service past, sithence they know well enough they have so ofte refused to goe to the warres, when they were commaunded: neither for their mutinies when they went with us, whereby they have rebelled and forsaken their countrie: neither for their accusations which their flatterers have preferred unto them, and they have receyved, and made good against the Senate: but they will rather judge we geve and graunt them this, as abasing our selves, and standing in feare of them, and glad to flatter them every waye.

These weighty arguments, which Coriolanus is quite entitled to call his “reasons,” for reasons they are, are substantially reproduced in Shakespeare:

They know the corn Was not our recompense, resting well assured They ne’er did service for’t: being press’d to the war, Even when the navel of the state was touched, They would not thread the gates. This kind of service Did not deserve corn gratis. Being i’ the war, Their mutinies and revolts, wherein they show’d Most valour, spoke not for them: the accusation Which they have often made against the senate, All cause unborn, could never be the motive Of our so frank donation. Well, what then? How shall this bisson multitude digest The senate’s courtesy? Let deeds express What’s like to be their words: “We did request it; We are the greater poll, and in true fear They gave us our demands.” Thus we debase The nature of our seats and make the rabble Call our cares fears: which will in time Break ope the locks o’ the senate, and bring in The crows to peck the eagles. (III. i. 120.)

That seems convincing enough. Their refusal of military service shows that the citizens merited no leniency from the state, the charge that the patricians were hoarding stores was universally known to be baseless, so the malcontents can only infer that the senate gave the largesse in fright, and find in this encouragement for their usurpations. And in the meantime, while doubt exists as to the real centre of authority, the effect must be vacillation in the policy of the republic and neglect of the most urgent measures. This was a consideration that came home to Shakespeare, who never forgot the weakness and misery of his own country when it was torn by civil strife, so he calls urgent attention to it at the close. This is the only portion of the speech that is quite original so far as the thought is concerned.

This double worship, Where one part does disdain with cause, the other Insult without all reason, where gentry, title, wisdom, Cannot conclude but by the yea and no Of general ignorance,—it must omit Real necessities, and give way the while To unstable slightness: purpose so barr’d, it follows, Nothing is done to purpose. (III. i. 142.)

Your dishonour Mangles true judgment and bereaves the state Of that integrity which should become’t, Not having the power to do the good it would, For the ill which doth control’t. (III. i. 157.)

All this contains a measure of truth that is valid in all times; from the point of view of the aristocratic republican it is absolutely true. Coriolanus’ diagnosis of the case is minutely correct and every one of his prognostics is fulfilled. The plebs does proceed with its encroachments; the power of Rome is strangely weakened as the immediate result of the struggle; the foreign policy is short-sighted and unwise; the pressing need of defence is overlooked. Of course the answer is that his uncompromising suggestions might have led to a worse revolution, and that in the long run a great deal more was gained than lost: but the important point to note is that his views are certainly arguable, that much could be said for them, that at the very least they assert one aspect of the real facts, and are as far as possible from being the mere tirades of a brainless aristocratic swashbuckler. As already pointed out they give just the sort of estimate that some of the wisest statesmen who have ever lived would have formed of the situation. It is quite conceivable that his proposals if carried through with vigour and ruthlessness would have settled things satisfactorily at least for the moment. So besides his pre-eminence in war and generalship and his foresight in foreign affairs, we may claim for Coriolanus not indeed political tact but political grip.

And to these qualifications of physical prowess and intellectual force he adds others of a more distinctively moral description.

Among these the most obvious is his extreme truthfulness. He has no idea of equivocation or even of reticence. Menenius says of him:

His heart’s his mouth: What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent. (III. i. 257.)

Nor is his veracity confined to words; he is honest and genuine to the core of his nature and will not stoop to a gesture that belies his feeling:

I will not do’ Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth And by my body’s action teach my mind A most inherent baseness. (III. ii. 120.)

And following on this is his innate loyalty. Nothing revolts him like a breach of that obligation, and in the crises of his career it is the accusation of treason that rouses him to a frenzy. Thus, after his imprudent speech, Sicinius cries:

Has spoken like a traitor, and shall answer As traitors do. (III. i. 162.)

And Coriolanus bursts out:

Thou wretch, despite o’erwhelm thee.

It is the same word that scatters his prudent resolutions in the trial scene:

Sicinius. You are a traitor to the people. Coriolanus. How! traitor! Menenius. Nay, temperately; your promise. Coriolanus. The fires i’ the lowest hell fold-in the people! Call me their traitor! Thou injurious tribune! Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths, In thy hands clutch’d as many millions, in Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say “Thou liest” unto thee with a voice as free As I do pray the gods. (III. iii. 66.)

And similarly when Aufidius calls him traitor, he repeats the word “Traitor! how now!” in a wrath that is for the moment almost speechless, till it overflows in a torrent of reckless abuse. It is part of the tragic irony of the play that with his ingrained horror of such an offence, he should yet in very truth let himself be hurried into treason against his country. For all his instincts are on the side of faith and troth and obligation. When he wishes to express his hostility to Aufidius he can think of no better comparison than this:

I’ll fight with none but thee; for I do hate thee Worse than a promise-breaker. (I. viii. 1.)

One result of this is that he has a simple reverence for all prescriptive ties, which suffuses his stern nature with a certain tinge of kindly humanity. His piety to his mother comes of course from Plutarch; but his tenderness for his wife and delight in his son, lightly but strongly marked, are Shakespearean traits. So is the intimacy with Menenius, which greatly removes the impression of “churlishness” and “solitariness” that Plutarch’s portrait conveys; and his self-effacement in obedience to the powers that be and to the word that he has pledged, appears in his willing acceptance of a subordinate rank. The tribunes wonder that

His insolence can brook to be commanded Under Cominius; (I. i. 266.)

and attribute it to base calculation in keeping with their own natures; but to this view Shakespeare’s story gives no support. The real explanation is simpler: it is his former promise and he is constant (I. i. 241).

Even more pleasant is the famous instance of his respect for the claims of hospitality. This episode is obtained from Plutarch, but in several respects it is completely altered. After describing how Coriolanus declined all special reward, the original narrative proceeds:

“Only this grace (sayed he) I crave, and beseeche you to graunt me. Among the Volsces there is an olde friende and hoste of mine, an honest wealthie man and now a prisoner, who living before in great wealthe in his owne countrie, liveth now a poore prisoner in the handes of his enemies: and yet notwithstanding all this his miserie and misfortune, it would do me great pleasure if I could save him from this one daunger: to keepe him from being solde as a slave.” The souldiers hearing Martius wordes, made a marvelous great showte among them.

Compare this with the scene in Shakespeare:

Coriolanus. The gods begin to mock me. I, that now Refused most princely gifts, am bound to beg Of my lord general. Cominius. Take’t; ’tis yours. What is’t? Coriolanus. I sometime lay here in Corioli At a poor man’s house: he used me kindly: He cried to me; I saw him prisoner; But then Aufidius was within my view, And wrath o’erwhelmed my pity: I request you To give my poor host freedom. Cominius. O well begg’d! Were he the butcher of my son, he should Be free as is the wind. Deliver him, Titus. Lartius. Marcius, his name? Coriolanus. By Jupiter! forgot. I am weary; yea, my memory is tired. Have we no wine here? (I. ix. 79.)

The postponement of pity to wrath is a new characteristic detail which shows how these gentler impulses in Coriolanus must yield to his ruling passions. On the other hand his host is transformed from a rich to a poor man, and thus his humanity acquires a wider range, and we see how it can extend beyond his own class if only there is a personal claim on it. Above all there is the new illuminating touch of the lapse of memory. Sometimes this has been taken as betraying the indifference of the aristocrat for an inferior whose name he does not think it worth while to remember. Surely not. Coriolanus is experiencing the collapse that follows his superhuman exertions, the exhaustion of body and mind when one cannot think of the most familiar words: but he rallies his strength for a last effort, and is just able to intercede for his humble guest-friend ere he succumbs.

And this last passage brings before us another of his magnanimous qualities. He has refused most princely gifts. No one can accuse him of covetousness. His patrician bigotry aims at power and leadership, not at material perquisites. After the double battle, won almost entirely by his instrumentality, when Cominius offers him the tenth, he makes the generous answer:

I thank you, general; But cannot make my heart consent to take A bribe to pay my sword: I do refuse it. (I. ix. 36.)

He deserves the encomium of the consul:

Our spoils he kick’d at, And look’d upon things precious as they were The common muck of the world: he covets less Than misery itself would give; rewards His deeds with doing them, and is content To spend the time to end it. (II. ii. 128.)

He “rewards his deeds with doing them,” without thought of ulterior profit or of anything beyond the worthy occupation of the moment. This leads to the next point, his cult of honour; and it must be confessed that he conceives it in a very lofty and noble way. His view of it reminds one of Arthur’s saying in Tennyson’s Idylls:

For the deed’s sake my knighthood do the deed, Not to be noised of.

Honour, of course, is not the highest possible principle. It implies a certain quest for recognition, and in so far has a personal and even selfish aspect. But in the right kind of honour the recognition is sought, in the first place, for real excellences that, in the second place, are determined only by competent judges, in some cases only by the individual’s own conscience. In both respects Coriolanus bears examination.

Of course, when there is any pursuit of honour at all, it is almost impossible to exclude some admixture of rivalry and emulation: for the desire of recognition, if only by oneself, carries with it the desire of being recognised as having achieved the very best: and rivalry and emulation must to that extent have an egoistic direction. Coriolanus has these feelings to the full, and often gives them extreme expression in regard to his one possible competitor Aufidius. He calls him “the man of my soul’s hate” (I. v. 11); and tells him: “I have ever followed thee with hate” (IV. v. 104). Aufidius has equal animosity against Coriolanus. His correspondent, to give an idea of his rival’s unpopularity with his townsmen, writes of

Marcius your old enemy, Who is of Rome worse hated than of you. (I. ii. 12.)

Lartius reports how the Volscian has said,

That of all things upon the earth, he hated Your person most. (III. i. 14.)

Marcius, hearing he is at Antium, sums up for both:

I wish I had a cause to seek him there, To oppose his hatred fully. (III. i. 19.)

As Tullus sums up on his side:

We hate alike; Not Afric owns a serpent I abhor More than thy fame and envy. (I. viii. 2.)

Still, it is precisely in his relations with Aufidius, and in comparison with Aufidius’ passions and purposes, that Coriolanus’ finer conception of honour becomes apparent. The true warrior values these encounters for themselves, and has a rapture in them second to none that he knows. He exclaims:

Were half to half the world by the ears, and he Upon my party, I’ld revolt, to make Only my wars with him: he is a lion That I am proud to hunt. (I. i. 237·)

This has sometimes been regarded as a hint in advance of Marcius’ readiness to desert the national cause. But that seems to be taking au pied de la lettre one of those conversational audacities that much discreeter men than he often permit themselves. It is rather an exaggerated expression of his delight in the contest, and an ironical comment on his later abandonment of it for the sake of revenge. At any rate even if the worst interpretation be put on it, it suggests a more respectable motive for desertion than the parallel outburst of Aufidius:

I would I were a Roman; for I cannot, Being a Volsce, be that I am. (I. x. 4.)

For Coriolanus would change sides in order to confront the severest test, Aufidius would do so in order not to be of the defeated party. There is a meanness and bitterness in Tullus from which his rival is wholly free. All through, Marcius shows the generosity of conscious heroism. He is very handsome in his acknowledgment of Aufidius’ merits:

They have a leader, Tullus Aufidius, that will put you to’t. I sin in envying his nobility, And were I anything but what I am, I would wish me only he. (I. i. 232.)

In their trials of valour he takes no advantage, but rather makes a point, first of facing his foe though he himself is wearied and wounded, and, second, of rousing him to put forth all his strength.

The blood I drop is rather physical Than dangerous to me: to Aufidius thus I will appear, and fight. (I. v. 19.)

Then, when they meet, he dissembles his hurts, and cries:

Within these three hours, Tullus, Alone I fought in your Corioli walls, And made what work I pleased: ’tis not my blood Wherein thou seest me mask’d: for thy revenge Wrench up thy power to the highest. (I. viii. 7.)

They are pledged to slay each other or be slain. Tullus has told the senators:

If we and Caius Marcius chance to meet, ’Tis sworn between us we shall ever strike Till one can do no more. (I. ii. 34.)

And to this he adds boasts of his own, which Coriolanus omits. Nevertheless, though his professions are the loudest, Aufidius makes good neither pledge nor boasts, but lets himself be driven back despite the assistance of his friends. And then, just as he would rather be a successful Roman than a defeated Volsce, his thoughts turn to getting the better of his victor by whatever means; he cannot take his beating in a sportsmanlike way, and thus shows finally how hollow is the honour after which he strives. Whether intentionally or not, Lartius’ report gives a true description of his feeling:

He would pawn his fortunes To hopeless restitution, so he might Be call’d your vanquisher. (III. i. 15.)

“Be call’d”; as though the vain ascription of superiority were all that he desired. But in truth he has already made the same confession in so many words, with the more damaging admission that he now feels as though he no longer cared by what foul play such ascription is won.

By the elements, If e’er again I meet him beard to beard, He’s mine, or I am his: mine emulation Hath not that honour in’t it had: for where I thought to crush him in an equal force, True sword to sword, I’ll potch at him some way Or wrath or craft may get him. (I. x. 10.)

My valour’s poison’d With only suffering stain by him: for him Shall fly out of itself: nor sleep, nor sanctuary, Being naked, sick, nor fane nor Capitol, The prayers of priests, nor times of sacrifice, Embarquements all of fury, shall lift up Their rotten privilege and custom ’gainst My hate to Marcius: where I find him, were it At home, upon my brother’s guard, even there, Against the hospitable canon, would I Wash my fierce hand in’s blood. (I. x. 17.)

On this passage Coleridge comments:

I have such deep faith in Shakespeare’s heart-lore, that I take for granted that this is in nature, and not as a mere anomaly; although I cannot in myself discover any germ of possible feeling, which could wax and unfold itself into such a sentiment as this.

It seems strange that Coleridge should say this, for it is proved by not a few examples that baffled emulation may issue in an envy which knows few restraints. Perhaps it was the avowal rather than the temper which struck him as verging on the unnatural or abnormal. Those who deliberately adopt such an attitude do not usually admit it to themselves, still less to their victims, and least of all to a third party. Which may admonish us that Aufidius’ threats were not deliberate, but mere frantic outcries wrung from him in rage and mortification. Yet they spring from authentic impulses in his heart, and though they may for a time be hidden by his superficial chivalry, they will spread and thrive if the conditions favour their growth. When they have overrun his nature and choked the wholesome grain, he will not point to them so openly and will name them by other names. But they are the same and differ from what they were only as the thorny thicket differs from its parent seeds. They have always been there and it is well that we should be aware of their presence from the first. Coleridge concludes his criticism: “However I perceive that in this speech is meant to be contained a prevention of the shock at the after-change in Aufidius’ character.” In short, it is not to be taken as his definite programme from which he inconsistently deviates when the opportunity is offered at Antium for carrying it out, but as the involuntary presentiment, which the revealing power of anguish awakens in his soul, of the crimes he is capable of committing for his master passion, a presentiment that in the end is realised almost to the letter.

And in the fulfilment, as in the anticipation, he has an eye merely to the results, and seeks only to obtain the first place for himself whether he deserve it or no. When Coriolanus consents to the peace with Rome, Aufidius soliloquises:

I am glad thou hast set thy mercy and thy honour At difference in thee: out of that I’ll work Myself a former fortune. (V. iii. 200.)

It is the adventitious superiority and the judgment by appearances that always appeal to him. Listen to the interchange of confidences between his accomplice and himself:

Third Conspirator. The people will remain uncertain whilst ’Twixt you there’s difference; but the fall of either Makes the survivor heir of all. Aufidius. I know it: And my pretext to strike at him admits A good construction. (V. vi. 17.)

He will be heir of all, and his action will admit a good construction; that is enough for him. It only remains to keep another construction from being suggested; and he approves the conspirator’s advice:

When he lies along, After your way his tale pronounced shall bury His reasons with his body. (V. vi. 57.)

It has sometimes been questioned whether such a man would give his fugitive rival a welcome which at the first and for some time seems so magnanimous, and if he did, whether the magnanimity was sincere. But Aufidius, though he is above all a lover of pre-eminence at whatever cost and therefore cannot for long stand the ordeal of being surpassed, is not without a soldier’s generosity; and moreover, the course which he was moved to adopt (and this is a more important consideration) would be one congenial to his meretricious love of ostentation and display. There is no rôle more soothing to worsted vanity and at the same time more likely to gain it the admiration it prizes, than that of patron to a formerly successful and now unfortunate rival. In the reflected glory, the benefactor seems to acquire the merits of the other in addition to a magnificence all his own. This, we may assume, was in part the motive of Aufidius; as appears from his own words, in which he shows himself well aware of his own generous behaviour:

He came unto my hearth; Presented to my knife his throat: I took him; Made him joint-servant with me; gave him way In all his own desires; nay, let him choose Out of my files, his projects to accomplish, My best and freshest men; served his designments In mine own person; holp to reap the fame Which he did end all his; and took some pride To do myself this wrong; till, at the last, I seem’d his follower, not partner, and He waged me with his countenance, as if I had been mercenary. (V. vi. 30.)

The hasty flash of generosity, the hope of winning new credit, would soon be extinguished or transmuted by such persistent success, superiority and pride. And Coriolanus’ popularity with the troops at the expense of his Volscian colleague, would be bitter to the most high-minded benefactor. It is brought out to us by his question to his lieutenant in the camp near Rome: “Do they still fly to the Roman?” (IV. vii. 1). Evidently the soldiers of Antium flock to the banners of this foreigner rather than to those of their own countrymen. The suggestion for this is furnished by Plutarch, but with Shakespeare a sting is added. In the Life Tullus stays behind as reserve with half the army to guard against any inroad, while Coriolanus acts on the offensive and captures a number of towns. Thereupon,

the other Volsces that were appointed to remaine in garrison for defence of theur countrie, hearing this good newes, would tary no lenger at home, but armed them selves, and ranne to Martius campe, saying they dyd acknowledge no other captaine but him.

It is much less wounding to Aufidius that his men should wish to exchange inaction for the excitement of war, than that he should witness their resort to his rival who is, in name, only his equal in command. Indeed his lieutenant in the play regrets that he did not do precisely what he did do according to Plutarch.

I wish, sir,— I mean for your particular,—you had not Join’d in commission with him; but either Had borne the action of yourself, or else To him had left it solely. (IV. vii. 12.)

Thus Shakespeare gives Tullus a stronger motive, and in so far a better policy for his treason. On the other hand he bases it more exclusively on personal envy. For in Plutarch the truce of thirty days which Coriolanus grants Rome is the original occasion of the movement against him, in which other Volscians besides Aufidius share; and this movement culminates only after he has conceded peace on conditions which even Plutarch considers unfair to his employers. But in the play, as we have seen, the truce is omitted, and Tullus has determined on the destruction of his supplanter even at a time when he confidently expects that Rome cannot save herself:

When, Caius, Rome is thine, Thou art poor’st of all: then shortly art thou mine. (IV. vii. 56.)

Thus the last shred of public spirit is torn away from his selfish ambition and spite.

In contrast with all this lust for precedence and vainglorious egotism, we cannot but feel that Marcius is striving for the reality of honour and is eager to fulfil the conditions on which honour is due.

And connected with this is another point which we might regard as the natural and inevitable consequence, but which Shakespeare only inferred and did not obtain from Plutarch, who gives no indication of it. This is Marcius’ indifference to or rather detestation of all professed praise. His distaste for eulogy does not of course lead him to reject a distinction and acknowledgment like the surname of Coriolanus that he is conscious of having deserved. On the contrary he prizes it and clings to it, and among the circumstances that overthrow his self-control in the final scene, the fact that Aufidius withholds from him this appellation has a chief place.

Aufidius. Marcius! Coriolanus. Marcius! Aufidius. Ay, Marcius, Caius Marcius; dost thou think I’ll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol’n name Coriolanus in Corioli?

Just in the same way, his aversion from mercantile profit does not lead him to refuse a gift from a friend when he feels that he has earned that friend’s approval. So when Cominius bestows on him the charger, and bids the host hail him with his new title, he answers graciously enough if a little awkwardly:

I will go wash; And when my face is fair, you shall perceive Whether I blush or no: howbeit I thank you. I mean to stride your steed, and at all times To undercrest your good addition To the fairness of my power. (I. ix. 68.)

But except on such semi-official occasions, which he is obliged to recognise, any sort of commendation abashes him and puts him out. Even Lartius’ burst of admiration he immediately checks:

Pray now, no more: my mother, Who has a charter to extol her blood, When she does praise me, grieves me. (I. ix. 13.)

When Cominius persists, he would fain cut him short:

I have some wounds upon me, and they smart To hear themselves remember’d. (I. ix. 28.)

When the host spontaneously breaks out in acclamation, he feels it is over much, and is more irritated than pleased:

May these same instruments, which you profane, Never sound more! When drums and trumpets shall I’ the field prove flatterers, let courts and cities be Made all of false-faced soothing! When steel grows soft as the parasite’s silk, Let him be made a coverture for the wars! No more, I say! For that I have not wash’d My nose that bled, or foil’d some debile wretch,— Which, without note, here’s many else have done,— You shout me forth In acclamations hyperbolical; As if I loved my little should be dieted In praises sauced with lies. (I. ix. 42.)

So, too, with the welcome of the crowd at his homecoming:

No more of this; it does offend my heart; Pray now, no more. (II. i. 185.)

Where the formal, and therefore up to a certain point, conventional panegyrics have to be pronounced in the senate, he is honestly ill at ease and would rather go away. To the senator who seeks to stay him, he answers:

Your honour’s pardon: I had rather have my wounds to heal again Than hear say how I got them. (II. ii. 72.)

And he adds, as he actually leaves his seat:

I had rather have one scratch my head i’ the sun When the alarum were struck, than idly sit To hear my nothings monster’d. (II. ii. 79.)

He can dispense with the admiration of others, because he seeks “the perfect witness” of his own approval, and abhors any extravagant applause because he measures his actions by the standard of absolute desert. In other words, both his self-respect and his ideal of attainment are abnormally, one might say morbidly, developed. And this explains both his humility and his self-assertion. Volumnia tells him:

Thou hast affected the fine strains of honour, To imitate the graces of the gods. (V. iii. 149.)

If that is the goal, how far must even the mightiest fall short of it, and how much must he resent the adulation of his prowess as the highest to be attained. On the contrary he “waxes like the sea,” sets himself to advance

From well to better, daily self surpassed;

and every glory he achieves is, as Shakespeare read in Plutarch, less a wage that he has earned than a pledge that he must redeem.

It is daylie seene, that honour and reputation lighting on young men before their time, and before they have no great corage by nature, the desire to winne more, dieth straight in them, which easely happeneth, the same having no deepe roote in them before. Where contrariwise, the first honour that valliant mindes doe come unto, doth quicken up their appetite, hasting them forward as with force of winde, to enterprise things of highe deserving praise. For they esteeme, not to receave reward for service done, but rather take it for a remembraunce and encoragement, to make them doe better in time to come: and be ashamed also to cast their honour at their heeles, not seeking to increase it still by like deserte of worthie valliant dedes. This desire being bred in Martius, he strained still to passe him selfe in manlines: and being desirous to shewe a daylie increase of his valliantnes, his noble service dyd still advaunce his fame.

But, on the other hand, though he, as not having attained, presses forward to the mark of his high calling, he has but to spend a glance on his fellows, and being an honest man he must perceive that his performance quite eclipses theirs. When the citizen asks him what has brought him to stand for the consulship, his reply is from the heart: “Mine own desert” (II. iii. 71). He feels poignantly the indignity of having to ask for what seems to him his due, and this partly explains the reluctance, which Shakespeare invents for him, to face a popular election.

Better it is to die, better to starve, Than crave the hire which first we do deserve. (II. iii. 120.)

In bitter self-irony he belies the disinterestedness of his exploits, and libels them as mere contrivances to win favour:

Your voices: for your voices I have fought; Watch’d for your voices; for your voices bear Of wounds two dozen odd; battles thrice six I have seen and heard of; for your voices have Done many things, some less, some more. (II. iii. 133.)

His fault lies in an opposite direction. His sense of dignity and self-esteem makes him inflexible to any concession that would seem to disparage himself and the truth.

His nature is too noble for the world: He would not flatter Neptune for his trident. Or Jove for’s power to thunder. (III. i. 255.)

And he is entitled to this consciousness of his worth, for it is not merely individual. It collects in a focus the most valued traits of various social fellowships that are greater and wider than himself. He is—he has been taught to consider himself and to become—the peculiar representative of the great family of the great aristocracy of the great city of Rome. If he transcends the dimensions of ordinary human power and human error, this consideration enables us to see how he has come to do so, and brings him back to our ordinary human sympathies. These are the three concentric orbits in which his universe revolves, the three well-heads that feed the current of his life. They give impetus to his love of honour and volume to his pride.

His civic patriotism he lives to abjure, but at first it is eager and intense. It is this feeling that is affronted by the retreat of his townsmen before Corioli and that boils over in curses and abuse: he is wroth with them because they are “shames of Rome.” The climax to his appeal for volunteers is to ask if any thinks “that his country’s dearer than himself” (I. vi. 72): and in the moment of triumph he classes himself unreservedly among all his comrades who have been actuated by his own and the only right motive, love for the patria.

I have done What you have done; that’s what I can: induced As you have been; that’s for my country: He that hath but effected his good will Hath overta’en my act. (I. ix. 15.)

He cherishes a transcendent idea of the state, and is wounded to the heart that its members fall short of it.

I would they were barbarians—as they are, Though in Rome litter’d—not Romans—as they are not, Though calved i’ the porch o’ the Capitol. (III. i. 238.)

And he is similarly, but more closely bound up in his own order. The nobles, the patricians, the senate, are to him the core of the commonwealth, the very Rome of Rome. They are, as he says, “the fundamental part of state” (III. i. 151). His first thought on his return from the campaign is to pay his due respects to their dignity:

Ere in my own house I do shade my head, The good patricians must be visited. (II. i. 211.)

He is scandalised by the insolence of the plebs in revolting against such authority:

What’s the matter, That in these several places of the city You cry against the noble senate, who, Under the gods, keep you in awe? (I. i. 188.)

His gorge rises at the thought of a representative of the people imposing his mandate on so august a body.

They choose their magistrate, And such a one as he, who puts his “shall,” His popular “shall” against a graver bench Than ever frown’d in Greece. (III. i. 104.)

He hates any innovation that is likely

To break the heart of generosity And make bold power look pale. (I. i. 215.)

For to him the power that is vested in the generous, that is, the high-born classes, is a sacred thing.

But the domestic tie is the closest of all. The whole story brings out its compulsive pressure and no particular passages are needed to illustrate it. Yet in some passages we are made to realise with special vividness how it binds and entwines him, as in that exclamation when he sees the deputation of women approaching:

My wife comes foremost; then the honour’d mould Wherein this trunk was framed, and in her hand The grandchild to her blood. (V. iii. 22.)

It is as son, husband and father that the depths of Coriolanus’ nature can be reached. In his greetings to his wife, in his prayers for his boy, we have glimpses of his inward heart; but of course this family feeling is concentrated on his mother who, as it were, sums up his ancestry to him, and who, by her personal qualities and her parental authority, fills his soul with a kind of religious reverence. We have seen how she has fashioned him, how she commands and awes him. When she inclines her head as she appears before him, he already feels that it is incongruous and absurd:

My mother bows: As if Olympus to a molehill should In supplication nod. (V. iii. 29.)

When she kneels, it is prodigious, incredible; he cannot believe his eyes:

What is this? Your knees to me? to your corrected son? Then let the pebbles on the hungry beach Fillip the stars; then let the mutinous winds Strike the proud cedars ’gainst the fiery sun: Murdering impossibility, to make What cannot be, slight work. (V. iii. 56.)

Not only then is Coriolanus in other respects a singularly noble personality, but even his pride is certainly not devoid of ethical content when it embodies the consciousness of the city republic, the governing estate, the organised family, with all their claims and obligations. These are the constituent elements that have supplied matter for his self-esteem, and all of them are formative, and capable, as we saw, of producing such a lofty, though limited moral character as that of Volumnia. Yet it is precisely to them, or at least to the way in which they are mingled in his pride, that Coriolanus’ faults and misfortunes may be traced.

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