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But one can hear, in that wild lurid night, in the streets of Rome, amid the cross blue lightnings, what could not have been whispered in the streets of England then, or spoken in the ear in closets.

 
Cicero. [Encountering Casca in the street, with his sword drawn.]
  Good-even, Casca; brought you Caesar home?
  Why are you breathless? and why stare you so?
 

 
Casca. Are you not moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,
  I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
  Have rived the knotty oaks; and I have seen
  The ambitious ocean swell, and rage and foam,
  To be exalted with the threatening clouds;
  But never till to-night, never till now,
  Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
  Either there is a civil strife in heaven;
  Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
  Incenses them to send destruction.
 

But the night has had other spectacles, it seems, which, to his eye, appeared to have some relation to the coming struggle; in answer to Cicero's 'Why, saw you anything more wonderful?' Thus he describes them.

'A common slave, – you know him, well by sight, Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn Like twenty torches join'd. Against the Capitol I met a lion, Who glared upon me, and went surly by.'

[And he had seen, 'drawn on a head,']

 
'A hundred ghastly women,
Transformed with their fears; who swore they saw
  Men, all in fire, walk up and down the streets.
  And, yesterday, the bird of night did sit,
  Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,
  Hooting, and shrieking.'
 

An ominous circumstance, – that last. A portent sure as fate. When such things begin to appear, 'men need not go to heaven to predict imminent changes.'

Cicero concedes that 'it is indeed a strange disposed time?' and inserts the statement that 'men may construe things after their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves.' But this is too disturbed a sky for him to walk in, so exit Cicero, and enter one of another kind of mettle, who thinks 'the night a very pleasant one to honest men;' who boasts that he has been walking about the streets 'unbraced, baring his bosom to the thunder stone,' and playing with 'the cross blue lightning;' and when Casca reproves him for this temerity, he replies,

 
'You are dull, Casca, and those sparks of life
  That should be in a Roman, you do want,
  Or else you use not.'
 

For as to these extraordinary phenomena in nature, he says, 'If you would consider the true cause

 
Why all these things change, from their ordinance,
  Their natures and fore-formed faculties,
  To monstrous quality; why, you shall find,
  That heaven hath infused them with these spirits,
  To make them instruments of fear, and warning,
  Unto some MONSTROUS STATE.
  Now could I, Casca,
  Name to thee a man most like this dreadful night;
  That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars
  As doth the lion in the Capitol:
  A man no mightier than thyself, or me,
  In personal action; yet prodigious grown,
  And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.
 

Casca. 'Tis Caesar that you mean: Is it not, Cassius?

 
Cassius. LET IT BE WHO IT is: for Romans now
  Have thewes and limbs like to their ancestors;
  But, woe the while! our fathers' minds are dead,
  And we are govern'd with our mothers' spirits;
  Our yoke and sufferance shows us womanish.
 

 
Casca. Indeed, they say, the senators to-morrow
  Mean to establish Caesar as a king.
  And he shall wear his crown by sea, and land,
  In every place, save here in Italy.
 

 
Cassius. I know where I will wear this dagger then;
  Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius:
  Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong;
  Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat:
  Nor STONY TOWER, nor walls of beaten brass,
  Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
  Can be retentive to the strength of spirit.
  If I know this, know all the world besides,
  That part of tyranny, that I do bear,
  I can shake off at pleasure.
 

 
Casca. So can I;
  So every bondman in his own hand bears
  The power to cancel his captivity.
 

 
Cassius. And why should Caesar be a tyrant then?
Poor man! I know, he would not be a wolf,
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep
He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.
  Those that with haste will make a mighty fire,
Begin it with weak straws: What trash is Rome,
What rubbish, and what offal, when it serves
for the base matter to illuminate
So vile a thing as Caesar? But, O grief!
 Where hast thou led me? I perhaps, speak this
 BEFORE A WILLING BONDMAN: But I am arm'd
 And dangers are to me indifferent.
 

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

Cassius. There's a bargain made.

This is sufficiently explicit, an unprejudiced listener would be inclined to say – indeed, it is difficult to conceive how any more positively instructive exhibition of the subject, could well have been made. Certainly no one can deny that this fact of the personal helplessness, the physical weakness of those in whom this arbitrary power over the liberties and lives of others is vested, seems for some reason or other to have taken strong possession of the Poet's imagination. For how else, otherwise should he reproduce it so often, so elaborately under such a variety of forms? – with such a stedfastness and pertinacity of purpose?

The fact that the power which makes these personalities so 'prodigious,' so 'monstrous,' overshadowing the world, 'shaming the Age' with their 'colossal' individualities, no matter what new light, what new gifts of healing for its ills, that age has been endowed with, levelling all to their will, contracting all to the limit of their stinted nature, making of all its glories but 'rubbish, offal to illuminate their vileness,' – the fact that the power which enables creatures like these, to convulse nations with their whims, and deluge them with blood, at their pleasure, – which puts the lives and liberties of the noblest, always most obnoxious to them, under their heel – the fact that this power resides after all, not in these persons themselves, – that they are utterly helpless, pitiful, contemptible, in themselves; but that it exists in the 'thewes and limbs' of those who are content to be absorbed in their personality, who are content to make muscles for them, in those who are content to he mere machines for the 'only one man's' will and passion to operate with, – the fact that this so fearful power lies all in the consent of those who suffer from it, is the fact which this Poet wishes to be permitted to communicate, and which he will communicate in one form or another, to those whom it concerns to know it.

It is a fact, which he is not content merely to state, however, in so many words, and so have done with it. He will impress it on the imagination with all kinds of vivid representation. He will exhaust the splendours of his Art in uttering it. He will leave a statement on this subject, profoundly philosophical, but one that all the world will be able to comprehend eventually, one that the world will never be able to unlearn.

The single individual helplessness of the man whom the multitude, in this case, were ready to arm with unlimited power over their own welfare – that physical weakness, already so strenuously insisted on by Cassius, at last attains its climax in the representation, when, in the midst of his haughtiest display of will and personal authority, stricken by the hands of the men he scorned, by the hand of one 'he had just spurned like a cur out of his path,' he falls at the foot of Pompey's statue – or, rather, 'when at the base of Pompey's statue he lies along' – amid all the noise, and tumult, and rushing action of the scene that follows – through all its protracted arrangements, its speeches, and ceremonials – not unmarked, indeed, – the centre of all eyes, – but, mute, motionless, a thing of pity, 'A PIECE OF BLEEDING EARTH.'

That helpless cry in the Tiber, 'Save me, Cassius, or I sink!' – that feeble cry from the sick man's bed in Spain, 'Give me some drink, Titinius!' – and all that pitiful display of weakness, moral and physical, at the would-be coronation, which Casca's report conveys so unsparingly – the falling down in the street speechless, which Cassius emphasises with his scornful 'What? did CAESAR SWOON?' – all this makes but a part of the exhibition, which the lamentations of Mark Antony complete: —

 
'O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure?'
 

This? and 'the eye' of the spectator, more learned than 'his ear,' follows the speaker's eye, and measures it.

 
'Fare thee well.
  But yesterday the word of Caesar might
  Have stood against the world: now lies he there.
  And none so poor, to do him reverence.'
 

The Poet's tone breaks through Mark Antony's; the Poet's finger points, 'now lies he there' – there!

That form which 'lies there,' with its mute eloquence speaking this Poet's word, is what he calls 'a Transient Hieroglyphic,' which makes, he says, 'a deeper impression on minds of a certain order, than the language of arbitrary signs;' and his 'delivery' on the most important questions will be found, upon examination, to derive its principal emphasis from a running text in this hand. 'For, in such business,' he says, 'action is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant more learned than the ears.'

Or, as he puts it in another place: 'What is sensible always strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner impresses itself, than what is intellectual. Thus the memory of brutes is excited by sensible, but not by intellectual things. And therefore it is easier to retain the image of a sportsman hunting, than of the corresponding notion of invention– of an apothecary ranging his boxes, than of the corresponding notion of disposition– of an orator making a speech, than of the term Eloquence – or a boy repeating verses, than the term Memory—or of A PLAYER acting his part, than the corresponding notion of – ACTION.'

So, also, 'Tom o' Bedlam' was a better word for 'houseless misery,' than all the king's prayer, good as it was, about 'houseless heads, and unfed sides,' in general, and 'looped, and windowed raggedness.'

'We construct,' says this author, in another place – rejecting the ordinary history as not suitable for scientific purposes, because it is 'varied, and diffusive, and confounds and disturbs the understanding, unless it be fixed and exhibited in due order' – we construct 'tables and combinations of instances, upon such a plan and in such order, that the understanding be enabled to act upon them.'

CHAPTER II

CAESAR'S SPIRIT

I'll meet thee at Phillippi.

In Julius Caesar, the most splendid and magnanimous representative of arbitrary power is selected – 'the foremost man of all the world,' – even by the concession of those who condemn him to death; so that here it is the mere abstract question as to the expediency and propriety of permitting any one man to impose his individual will on the nation. Whatever personalities are involved in the question here– with Brutus, at least – tend to bias the decision in his favour. For so he tells us, as with agitated step he walks his orchard on that wild night which succeeds his conference with Cassius, revolving his part, and reading, by the light of the exhalations whizzing in the air, the papers that have been found thrown in at his study window.

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

Pretty sentiments these, to set before a king already engaged in so critical a contest with his subjects; pleasant entertainment, one would say, for the representative of a monarchy that had contrived to wake the sleeping Brutus in its dominions, – that was preparing, even then, for its own death-struggle on this very question, which this Brutus searches to its core so untenderly.

'Have you heard the argument?' says the 'bloat king' in Hamlet. 'Is there no offence in it?'

Now, let the reader suppose, for one instant, that this work had been produced from the outset openly, for what any reader of common sense will perceive it to be, with all its fire, an elaborate, scholarly composition, the product of the profoundest philosophic invention, the fruit of the ripest scholarship of the age; – let him suppose, for argument's sake, that it had been produced for what it is, the work of a scholar, and a statesman, and a courtier, – a statesman already jealously watched, or already, perhaps, in deadly collision with this very power he is defining here so largely, and tracking to its ultimate scientific comprehensions; – and then let the reader imagine, if he can, Elizabeth or James, but especially Elizabeth, listening entranced to such passages as the one last quoted, with an audience disposed to make points of some of the 'choice Italian' lines in it.

Does not all the world know that scholars, men of reverence, men of world-wide renown, men of every accomplishment, were tortured, and mutilated, and hung, and beheaded, in both these two reigns, for writings wherein Caesar's ambition was infinitely more obscurely hinted at – writings unspeakably less offensive to majesty than this?

But, then, a Play was a Play, and old Romans would be Romans; there was, notoriously, no royal way of managing them; and if kings would have tragical mirth out of them, they must take their treason in good part, and make themselves as merry with it as they could. The poor Poet was, of course, no more responsible for these men than Chaucer was for his pilgrims. He but reported them.

And besides, in that broad, many-sided view of the subject which the author's evolution of it from the root involves, – in that pursuit of tyranny in essence through all its disguises, – other exhibitions of it were involved, which might seem, to the careless eye, purposely designed to counteract the effect of the views above quoted.

The fact that mere arbitrary will, that the individual humour and bias, is incapable of furnishing a rule of action anywhere, – the fact that mere will, or blind passion, whether in the One, or the Few, or the Many, should have no part, above all, in the business of the STATE, – should lend no colour or bias to its administration, – the fact that 'the general good,' 'the common weal,' which is justice, and reason, and humanity, – the 'ONE ONLY MAN,' – should, in some way, under some form or other, get to the head of that and rule, this is all which the Poet will contend for.

But, alas, HOW? The unspeakable difficulties in the way of the solution of this problem, – the difficulties which the radical bias in the individual human nature, even under its noblest forms, creates, – the difficulties which the ignorance, and stupidity, and passion of the multitude created then, and still create, appear here without any mitigation. They are studiously brought out in their boldest colours. There's no attempt to shade them down. They make, indeed, the TRAGEDY.

And it is this general impartial treatment of his subjects which makes this author's writings, with all their boldness, generally, so safe; for it seems to leave him without any bias for any person or any party – without any opinion on any topic; for his truth embraces and resolves all partial views, and is as broad as nature's own.

And how could he better neutralise the effect of these patriotic speeches, and prove his loyalty in the face of them, than to show as he does, most vigorously and effectively, that these patriots themselves, so rebellious to tyranny, so opposed to the one-man power in others, so determined to die, rather than submit to the imposition of the humours of any man, instead of law and justice, – were themselves but men, and were as full of will and humours, and as ready to tyrannise with them, too, upon occasion, as Caesar himself; and were no more fit to be trusted with absolute power than he was, nor, in fact, half so fit.

Caesar does, indeed, send word to the senate – 'The cause is in MY WILL, I will not come; (That is enough,' he says, 'to satisfy the senate.') And while the conspirators are exchanging glances, and the daggers are stealing from their sheaths, he offers the strength of his decree, the immutability 'of his absolute shall,' to the suppliant for his brother's pardon.

But then Portia gives us to understand, that she, too, has her private troubles; – that even that excellent man, Brutus, is not without his moods in his domestic administrations, – for on one occasion, when he treats her to 'ungentle looks,' and 'stamps his foot,' and angrily gesticulates her out of his presence, she makes good her retreat, thinking 'it was but the effect of humour, which,' she says, 'sometime hath his hour with every man'; and, good and patriotic as Brutus truly is, Cassius perceives, upon experiment, that after all he too is but a man, and, with a particular and private nature, as well as a larger one 'which is the worthier,' and not unassailable through that 'single I myself': he, too, may be 'thawed from the true quality with that which melteth fools,' – with words that flatter 'his particular.' In his conference with him, Cassius addresses himself skilfully to this weakness; – he poises the name of Caesar with that of Brutus, and, at the last, he clinches his patriotic appeal, with an appeal to his personal sentiment, of baffled, mortified emulation; for those writings, thrown in at his window, purporting to come from several citizens, 'all tended to the great opinion that Rome held of his name;' and, alas! the Poet will not tell us that this did not unconsciously wake, in that pure mind, the feather's-weight that was perhaps needed to turn the scale.

And the very children know, by heart, what a time there was between these two men afterwards, these men that had 'struck the foremost man of all the world,' and had congratulated themselves that it was not murder, and that they were not villains, because it was for justice. Precious disclosures we have in this scene. It is this very Cassius, this patriot, who had as lief not BE as submit to injustice; who brings his avaricious humour, 'his itching palm,' into the state, and 'sells and marts his offices for gold, to undeservers.' Brutus does indeed come down upon him with a most unlimited burst of patriotic indignation, which looks, at first, like a mere frenzy of honest disgust at wrong in the abstract, in spite of the partiality of friendship; but, when Cassius charges him, afterwards, with exaggerating his friend's infirmities, he says, frankly, 'I did not, till you practised them on ME.' And we find, as the dialogue proceeds, that it is indeed a personal matter with him: Cassius has refused him gold to pay his legions with.

And see, now, what kind of taunt it is, that Brutus throws in this same patriot's face after it had been proclaimed, by his order, through the streets of Rome, that Tyranny 'is dead': after Cassius had shouted through his own lungs.

'Some to the common pulpits, and cry out LIBERTY, FREEDOM,

ENFRANCHISEMENT.' (Enfranchisement?)

It would have been strange, indeed, if in so general and philosophical a view of the question, that sacred, domestic institution, which, through all this sublime frenzy for equal rights, maintained itself so peacefully under the patriot's roof, had escaped without a touch.

Brutus says: —

 
'Hear me, for I will speak.
Must I give way and room to your rash choler?
Shall I be frighted when a madman stares?'
 

'Look when I stare, see how the subject quakes.'

This sounds, already, as if Tyranny were not quite dead.

'Cassius. O ye gods, ye gods, must I endure all this!

Brutus. All this? ay more: Fret till your proud heart break; Go, show YOUR SLAVES how choleric you are, And bid YOUR BONDMEN tremble. Must I budge? Must I observe you? Must I stand and crouch Under your testy humour? By the gods, You shall digest the venom of your spleen Though it do split you.'

So it was a mistake, then, it seems; and, notwithstanding that shout of triumph, and that bloody flourishing of knives, Tyranny was not dead.

But one cannot help thinking that that shout must have sounded rather strangely in an English theatre just then, and that it was a somewhat delicate experiment to give Brutus his pulpit on the stage, to harangue the people from. But the author knew what he was doing. That cold, stilted harangue, that logical chopping on the side of freedom, was not going to set fire to any one's blood; and was not there Mark Antony that plain, blunt man, coming directly after Brutus, – 'with his eyes as red as fire with weeping,' with 'the mantle,' of the military hero, the popular favourite, in his hand, with his glowing oratory, with his sweet words, and his skilful appeal to the passions of the people, under his plain, blunt professions, – to wipe out every trace of Brutus's reasons, and lead them whither he would; and would not the moral of it all be, that with such A PEOPLE, – with such a power as that, behind the state, there was no use in killing Caesars – that Tyranny could not die.

'I fear there will a worse one come in his place.'

But this is Rome in her decline, that the artist touches here so boldly. But what now, if old Rome herself, – plebeian Rome, in the deadliest onset of her struggle against tyranny, Rome lashed into fury and conscious strength, rising from under the hard heel of her oppressors; what if Rome, in the act of creating her Tribunes; or, if Rome, with her Tribunes at her head, wresting from her oppressors a constitutional establishment of popular rights, – what if this could be exhibited, by permission; what bounds as to the freedom of the discussion would it be possible to establish afterwards? There had been no National Latin Tragedy, Frederic Schlegel suggests, – because no Latin Dramatist could venture to do this very thing; but of course Caesar or Coriolanus on the Tiber was one thing, and Caesar or Coriolanus on the Thames was another; and an English author might be allowed, then, to say of the one, with impunity, what it would certainly have cost him his good right hand, or his ears, or his head, to say of the other, – what it did cost the Founder of this school in philosophy his head, to be suspected of saying of the other.

Nevertheless, the great question between an arbitrary and a constitutional government, the principle of a government which vests the whole power of the state in the uncontrolled will of a single individual member of it; the whole history and philosophy of a military government, from its origin in the heroic ages, – from the crowning of the military hero on the battle field in the moment of victory, to the final consummation of its conquest of the liberty of the subject, could be as clearly set forth under the one form as the other; not without some startling specialities in the filling up, too, with a tone in the details now and then, to say the least, not exclusively antique, for this was a mode of treating classical subjects in that age, too common to attract attention.

And thus, whole plays could be written out and out, on this very subject. Take, for instance, but these two, Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, – plays in which, by a skilful distribution of the argument and the action, with a skilful interchange of parts now and then, – the boldest passages being put alternately into the mouths of the Tribunes and Patricians, – that great question, which was so soon to become the outspoken question of the nation and the age, could already be discussed in all its vexed and complicated relations, in all its aspects and bearings, as deliberately as it could be to-day; exactly as it was, in fact, discussed not long afterwards in swarms of English pamphlets, in harangues from English pulpits, in English parliaments and on English battle-fields, – exactly as it was discussed when that 'lofty Roman scene' came 'to be acted over' here, with the cold-blooded prosaic formalities of an English judicature.