Chapter IX: Introduction: Proposition (8)

At the same time he has a party politician's tact; his advice throughout the play is proved by the event to have been right, [=iii.= i. 145.] and he does himself no more than justice when he says his misgiving 'still falls shrewdly to the purpose.' [_Antony: his whole character developed and subjected to selfish passion._] Antony also has all the powers that belong both to the intellectual and practical life; so far as these powers are concerned, he has them developed to a higher degree than even Brutus and Cassius. His distinguishing mark lies in the use to which these powers are put; like Cassius, he has concentrated his whole nature in one aim, but this aim is not a disinterested object of public good, it is unmitigated self-seeking. Antony has greatness enough to appreciate the greatness of Cæsar; hence in the first half of the play he has effaced himself, choosing to rise to power as the useful tool of Cæsar. [esp. =i.= ii, from 190; comp. =ii.= i. 165.] Here, indeed, he is famed as a devotee of the softer studies, but it is not till his patron has fallen that his irresistible strength is put forth. There seems to be but one element in Antony that is not selfish: [=iii.= i, from 254; comp. 194-213.] his attachment to Cæsar is genuine, and its force is measured in the violent imagery of the vow with which, when alone for a moment with the corpse, he promises vengeance till all pity is 'choked with custom of fell deeds.' And yet this perhaps is after all the best illustration of his callousness to higher feelings; for the one tender emotion of his heart is used by him as the convenient weapon with which to fight his enemies and raise himself to power.

[_The Grouping as a whole surveyed._]

Such, then, is the Grouping of Characters in the play of _Julius Cæsar_. To catch it they must be contemplated in the light of the antithesis between the outer and inner life. In Brutus the antithesis disappears amid the perfect balancing of his character, to reappear in the action, when Brutus has to choose between his cause and his friend. In Cæsar the practical life only is developed, and he fails as soon as action involves the inner life. Cassius has the powers of both outer and inner life perfect, and they are fused into one master-passion, morbid but unselfish. Antony has carried to an even greater perfection the culture of both lives, and all his powers are concentrated in one purpose, which is purely selfish. In the action in which this group of personages is involved the determining fact is the change that has come over the spirit of Roman life, and introduced into its public policy the element of personal aggrandisement and personal risk. The new spirit works upon Brutus: the chance of winning political liberty by the assassination of one individual just overbalances his moral judgment, and he falls. Yet in his fall he is glorious: the one false judgment of his life brings him, what is more to him than victory, the chance of maintaining the calmness of principle amid the ruins of a falling cause, and showing how a Stoic can fail and die. The new spirit affects Cæsar and tempts him into a personal enterprise in which success demands a meanness that he lacks, and he is betrayed to his fall. Yet in his fall he is glorious: the assassins' daggers purge him from the stain of his momentary personal ambition, and the sequel shows that the Roman world was not worthy of a ruler such as Cæsar. The spirit of the age effects Cassius, and fans his passion to work itself out to his own destruction, and he falls. Yet in his fall he is glorious: we forgive him the lowered tone of his political action when we see by the spirit of the new rulers how desperate was the chance for which he played, and how Cassius and his loved cause of republican freedom expire together. The spirit of the age which has wrought upon the rest is controlled and used by Antony, and he rises on their ruins. Yet in his rise he is less glorious than they in their fall: he does all for self; he may claim therefore the prize of success, but in goodness he has no share beyond that he is permitted to be the passive instrument of punishing evil.

IX.

HOW THE PLAY OF JULIUS CÆSAR WORKS TO A CLIMAX AT THE CENTRE.

_A Study in Passion and Movement._

[_Passion and Movement as elements of dramatic effect._]

THE preceding chapters have been confined to two of the main elements in dramatic effect, Character and Plot: the third remains to be illustrated. Amongst other devices of public amusement the experiment has been tried of arranging a game of chess to be played by living pieces on a monster board; if we suppose that in the midst of such a game the real combative instincts of the living pieces should be suddenly aroused, that the knight should in grim earnest plunge his spear into his nearest opponent, and that missiles should actually be discharged from the castles, then the shock produced in the feelings of the bystanders by such a change would serve to bring out with emphasis the distinction between Plot and the third element of dramatic effect, Passion. Plot is an interest of a purely intellectual kind, it traces laws, principles, order, and design in the incidents of life. Passion, on the other hand, depends on the human character of the personages involved; it consists in the effects produced on the spectator's emotional nature as his sympathy follows the characters through the incidents of the plot; it is War as distinguished from _Kriegspiel_. Effects of such Passion are numerous and various: the present study is concerned with its _Movement_. This Movement comprehends a class of dramatic effects differing in one obvious particular from the effects considered so far. Character-Interpretation and Plot are both analytical in their nature; the play has to be taken to pieces and details selected from various parts have to be put together to give the idea of a complete character, or to make up some single thread of design. [_Passion connected with the movement of a drama._] Movement, on the contrary, follows the actual order of the events as they take place in the play itself. The emotional effects produced by such events as they succeed one another will not be uniform and monotonous; the skill of the dramatist will lie in concentrating effect at some points and relieving it at others; and to watch such play of passion through the progress of the action will be a leading dramatic interest. Now we have already had occasion to notice the prominence which Shakespeare in his dramatic construction gives to the central point of a play; symmetry more than sensation is the effect which has an attraction for his genius, and the finale to which the action is to lead is not more important to him than the balancing of the whole drama about a turning-point in the middle. Accordingly it is not surprising to find that in the Passion-Movement of his dramas a similar plan of construction is often followed; that all other variations are subordinated to one great Climax of Passion at the centre. [_The regular arch-form applicable to Passion-Movement._] To repeat an illustration already applied to Plot: the movement of the passion seems to follow the form of a regular arch, commencing in calmness, rising through emotional strain to a summit of agitation at the centre, then through the rest of the play declining into a calmness of a different kind. It is the purpose of the two remaining studies to illustrate this kind of movement in two very different plays. _Julius Cæsar_ has the simplest of plots; our attention is engaged with a train of emotion which is made to rise gradually to a climax at the centre, and then equally gradually to decline. _Lear_, on the contrary, is amongst the most intricate of Shakespeare's plays; nevertheless the dramatist contrives to keep the same simple form of emotional effect, and its complex passions unite in producing a concentration of emotional agitation in a few central scenes.

[_In Julius Cæsar the movement follows the justification of the conspirators to the audience:_]

The passion in the play of _Julius Cæsar_ gathers around the conspirators, and follows them through the mutations of their fortunes. If however we are to catch the different parts of the action in their proper proportions we must remember the character of these conspirators, and especially of their leaders Brutus and Cassius. These are actuated in what they do not by personal motives but by devotion to the public good and the idea of republican liberty; accordingly in following their career we must not look too exclusively at their personal success and failure. The exact key to the movement of the drama will be given by fixing attention upon _the justification of the conspirators' cause_ in the minds of the audience; [_this rises to the centre and declines from the centre._] and it is this which is found to rise gradually to its height in the centre of the play, and from that point to decline to the end. I have pointed out in the preceding study how the issue at stake in _Julius Cæsar_ amounts to a conflict between the outer and inner life, between devotion to a public enterprise and such sympathy with the claims of individual humanity as is specially fostered by the cultivation of the inner nature. The issue is reflected in words of Brutus already quoted:

[=ii.= i. 18.]

The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power.

Brutus applies this as a test to Cæsar's action, and is forced to acquit him: but is not Brutus here laying down the very principle of which his own error in the play is the violation? The assassin's dagger puts Brutus and the conspirators in the position of power; while 'remorse'--the word in Shakespearean English means human sympathy--is the due of their victim Cæsar, whose rights to justice as a man, and to more than justice as the friend of Brutus, the conspirators have the responsibility of balancing against the claims of a political cause. These claims of justice and humanity are deliberately ignored by the stoicism of Brutus, while the rest of the conspirators are blinded to them by the mists of political enthusiasm; this outraged human sympathy asserts itself after Cæsar's death in a monstrous form in the passions of the mob, which are guided by the skill of Antony to the destruction of the assassins. Of course both the original violation of the balance between the two lives and the subsequent reaction are equally corrupt. The stoicism of Brutus, with its suppression of the inner sympathies, arrives practically at the principle--destined in the future history of the world to be the basis of a yet greater crime--that it is expedient that one man should die rather than that a whole people should perish. On the other hand, Antony trades upon the fickle violence of the populace, and uses it as much for personal ends as for vengeance. This demoralisation of both the sides of character is the result of their divorce. Such is the essence of this play if its action be looked at as a whole; but it belongs to the movement of dramatic passion that we see the action only in its separate parts at different times. Through the first half of the play, while the justification of the conspirators' cause is rising, the other side of the question is carefully hidden from us; from the point of the assassination the suppressed element starts into prominence, and sweeps our sympathies along with it to its triumph at the conclusion of the play.

[_First stage: the conspiracy forming. Passion indistinguishable from mere interest._]

In following the movement of the drama the action seems to divide itself into stages. In the first of these stages, which comprehends the first two scenes, the conspiracy is only forming; the sympathy with which the spectator follows the details is entirely free from emotional agitation; passion so far is indistinguishable from mere interest. [=i.= i, ii.] The opening scene strikes appropriately the key-note of the whole action. [_Starting-point: signs of reaction in the popular worship of Cæsar._] In it we see the tribunes of the people--officers whose whole _raison d'être_ is to be the mouthpiece of the commonalty--restraining their own clients from the noisy honours they are disposed to pay to Cæsar. [=i.= i.] To the justification in our eyes of a conspiracy against Cæsar, there could not be a better starting-point than this hint that the popular worship of Cæsar, which has made him what he is, is itself reaching its reaction-point. Such a suggestion moreover makes the whole play one complete _wave_ of popular fickleness from crest to crest.

[_The Rise begins. The cause seen at its best, the victim at his worst._]

The second is the scene upon which the dramatist mainly relies for the _crescendo_ in the justification of the conspirators. It is a long scene, elaborately contrived so as to keep the conspirators and their cause before us at their very best, and the victim at his very worst. [=i.= ii.] Cassius is the life and spirit of this scene, as he is of the whole republican movement. Cassius is excellent soil for republican principles. The 'rash humour' his mother gave him would predispose him to impatience of those social inequalities and conventional distinctions against which republicanism sets itself. Again he is a hard-thinking man, to whom the perfect realisation of an ideal theory would be as palpable an aim as the more practical purposes of other men. He is a Roman moreover, at once proud of his nation as the greatest in the world, and aware that this national greatness had been through all history bound up with the maintenance of a republican constitution. His republicanism gives to Cassius the dignity that is always given to a character by a grand passion, whether for a cause, a woman, or an idea--the unification of a whole life in a single aim, by which the separate strings of a man's nature are, as it were, tuned into harmony. In the present scene Cassius is expounding the cause which is his life-object. Nor is this all. Cassius was politician enough to adapt himself to his hearers, and could hold up the lower motives to those who would be influenced by them; but in the present case it is the 'honourable metal' of a Brutus that he has to work upon, and his exposition of republicanism must be adapted to the highest possible standard. Accordingly, in the language of the scene we find the idea of human equality expressed in its most ideal form. Without it Cassius thinks life not worth living.

[=i.= ii. 95.]

I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.
I was born free as Cæsar; so were you;
We both have fed as well, and we can both
Endure the winter's cold as well as he.

The examples follow of the flood and fever incidents, which show how the majesty of Cæsar vanished before the violence of natural forces and the prostration of disease.

[115.]

And this man
Is now become a god, and Cassius is
A wretched creature and must bend his body,
If Cæsar carelessly but nod on him.

In the eye of the state, individuals are so many members of a class, in precisely the way that their names are so many examples of the proper noun.

[142.]

Brutus and Cæsar: what should be in that 'Cæsar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with them,
Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Cæsar.
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Cæsar feed,
That he is grown so great?

And this exposition of the conspirators' cause in its highest form is at the same time thrown into yet higher relief by a background to the scene, in which the victim is presented at his worst. [from 182.] All through the conversation between Brutus and Cassius, the shouting of the mob reminds of the scene which is at the moment going on in the Capitol, while the conversation is interrupted for a time by the returning procession of Cæsar. In this action behind the scenes which thus mingles with the main incident Cæsar is committing the one fault of his life: this is the fault of 'treason,' which can be justified only by being successful and so becoming 'revolution,' whereas Cæsar is failing, and deserving to fail from the vacillating hesitation with which he sins. Moreover, unfavourable as such incidents would be in themselves to our sympathy with Cæsar, yet it is not the actual facts that we are permitted to see, but they are further distorted by the medium through which they reach us--the cynicism of Casca which belittles and disparages all he relates.

[=i.= ii. 235.]

_Bru._ Tell us the manner of it, gentle Casca.

_Casca._ I can as well be hanged as tell the manner of it: it was
mere foolery; I did not mark it. I saw Mark Antony offer him a
crown;--yet 'twas not a crown neither, 'twas one of these
coronets:--and, as I told you, he put it by once: but, for all that,
to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him
again; then he put it by again: but, to my thinking, he was very
loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offer'd it the third
time; he put it the third time by: and still as he refused it, the
rabblement hooted and clapped their chapped hands and threw up their
sweaty night-caps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because
Cæsar had refused the crown that it had almost choked Cæsar; for he
swounded and fell down at it: and, for mine own part, I durst not
laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air....
When he came to himself again, he said, If he had done or said
anything amiss, he desired their worships to think it was his
infirmity. Three or four wenches, where I stood, cried, 'Alas, good
soul!' and forgave him with all their hearts; but there's no heed to
be taken of them; if Cæsar had stabbed their mothers they would have
done no less.

[_Second stage: the conspiracy formed and developing. Passion-Strain begins._]

At the end of the scene Brutus is won, and we pass immediately into the second stage of the action: the conspiracy is now formed and developing, and the emotional strain begins. The adhesion of Brutus has given us confidence that the conspiracy will be effective, and we have only to _wait_ for the issue. [=i.= iii--=ii.= ii.] This mere notion of _waiting_ is itself enough to introduce an element of agitation into the passion sufficient to mark off this stage of the action from the preceding. [_Suspense one element in the strain of passion._] How powerful suspense is for this purpose we have expressed in the words of the play itself:

[=ii.= i. 63.]

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

[_The background of tempest and supernatural portents a device for increasing the strain._]

But besides the suspense there is a special device for securing the agitation proper to this stage of the passion: throughout there is maintained a Dramatic Background of night, storm, and supernatural portents.

The conception of nature as exhibiting sympathy with sudden turns in human affairs is one of the most fundamental instincts of poetry. To cite notable instances: it is this which accompanies with storm and whirlwind the climax to the _Book of Job_, and which leads Milton to make the whole universe sensible of Adam's transgression:

Earth trembl'd from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan;
Sky lowr'd, and muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completing of the mortal sin
Original.

So too the other end of the world's history has its appropriate accompaniments: 'the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall be falling from heaven.' There is a _vagueness_ of terror inseparable from these outbursts of nature, so mysterious in their causes and aims. They are actually the most mighty of forces--for human artillery is feeble beside the earthquake--yet they are invisible: the wind works its havoc without the keenest eye being able to perceive it, and the lightning is never seen till it has struck. Again, there is something weird in the feeling that the most frightful powers in the material universe are all _soft things_. The empty air becomes the irresistible wind; the fluid and yielding water wears down the hard and massive rock and determines the shape of the earth; impalpable fire that is blown about in every direction can be roused till it devours the solidest constructions of human skill; while the most powerful agencies of all, electricity and atomic force, are imperceptible to any of the senses and are known only by their results. This uncanny terror attaching to the union between force and softness is the inspiration of one of Homer's most unique episodes, in which the bewildered Achilles, struggling with the river-god, finds the strength and skill of the finished warrior vain against the ever-rising water, and bitterly feels the violation of the natural order--

That strong might fall by strong, where now weak water's luxury
Must make my death blush.

[=i.= iii; =ii.= ii, &c.]

To the terrible in nature are added portents of the supernatural, sudden violations of the uniformity of nature, the principle upon which all science is founded. The solitary bird of night has been seen in the crowded Capitol; fire has played around a human hand without destroying it; lions, forgetting their fierceness, have mingled with men; clouds drop fire instead of rain; graves are giving up their dead; the chance shapes of clouds take distinctness to suggest tumult on the earth. Such phenomena of nature and the supernatural, agitating from their appeal at once to fear and mystery, and associated by the fancy with the terrible in human events, have made a deep impression upon primitive thought; and the impression has descended by generations of inherited tradition until, whatever may be the attitude of the intellect to the phenomena themselves, their associations in the emotional nature are of agitation. They thus become appropriate as a Dramatic Background to an agitated passion in the scenes themselves, calling out the emotional effect by a vague sympathy, much as a musical note may set in vibration a distant string that is in unison with it.

This device then is used by Shakespeare in the second stage of the present play. We see the warning terrors through the eyes of men of the time, and their force is measured by the fact that they shake the cynical Casca into eloquence.

[=i.= iii. 3.]

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

And the idea thus started at the commencement is kept before our minds throughout this stage of the drama by perpetual allusions, however slight, to the sky and external nature. [compare =ii.= i. 44, 101, 198, 221, 263; =ii.= ii.] Brutus reads the secret missives by the light of exhalations whizzing through the air; when some of the conspirators step aside, to occupy a few moments while the rest are conferring apart, it is to the sky their thoughts naturally seem to turn, and they with difficulty can make out the East from the West; the discussion of the conspirators includes the effect on Cæsar of the night's prodigies. Later Portia remonstrates against her husband's exposure to the raw and dank morning, to the rheumy and unpurged air; even when daylight has fully returned, the conversation is of Calpurnia's dream and the terrible prodigies.

[=i.= iii.]

Against this background are displayed, first single figures of Cassius and other conspirators; [=ii.= i. 1-85.] then Brutus alone in calm deliberation: [=ii.= i. 86-228.] then the whole band of conspirators, their wild excitement side by side with Brutus's immovable moderation. [=ii.= i, from 233.] Then the Conspiracy Scene fades in the early morning light into a display of Brutus in his softer relations; [=ii.= ii.] and with complete return of day changes to the house of Cæsar on the fatal morning. Cæsar also is displayed in contact with the supernatural, as represented by Calpurnia's terrors and repeated messages of omens that forbid his venturing upon public action for that day. [_Cæsar still seen at a disadvantage;_] Cæsar faces all this with his usual loftiness of mind; yet the scene is so contrived that, as far as immediate effect is concerned, this very loftiness is made to tell against him. The unflinching courage that overrides and interprets otherwise the prodigies and warnings seems presumption to us who know the reality of the danger. [=ii.= ii. 8-56.] It is the same with his yielding to the humour of his wife. Why should he not? his is not the conscious weakness that must be firm to show that it is not afraid. Yet when, upon Decius's explaining away the dream and satisfying Calpurnia's fears, Cæsar's own attraction to danger leads him to persevere in his first intention, this change of purpose seems to us, [=ii.= i. 202.] who have heard Decius's boast that he can o'ersway Cæsar with flattery, a confirmation of Cæsar's weakness. So in accordance with the purpose that reigns through the first half of the play the victim is made to appear at his worst: the _passing_ effect of the scene is to suggest weakness in Cæsar, while it is in fact furnishing elements which, upon reflection, go to build up a character of strength. [_and the justification of the conspirators still rising._] On the other hand, throughout this stage the justification of the conspirators' cause gains by their confidence and their high tone; in particular by the way in which they interpret to their own advantage the supernatural element. [=i.= iii. 42-79.] Cassius feels the wildness of the night as in perfect harmony with his own spirit.

[=i.= iii. 46.]

For my part, I have walk'd about the streets,
Submitting me unto the perilous night,
And, thus unbraced, Casca, as you see,
Have bared my bosom to the thunder-stone;
And when the cross blue lightning seem'd to open
The breast of heaven, I did present myself
Even in the aim and very flash of it.

And it needs only a word from him to communicate his confidence to his comrades.

[=i.= iii. 72.]

_Cassius._ 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 Cæsar that you mean; is it not, Cassius?

[_Third stage. The Crisis: the passion-strain rises to a Climax._]

The third stage of the action brings us to the climax of the passion; the strain upon our emotions now rises to a height of agitation. The exact commencement of the crisis seems to be marked by the soothsayer's words at the opening of Act III. [=ii.= iii--=iii.= i. 121.] Cæsar observes on entering the Capitol the soothsayer who had warned him to beware of this very day.

_Cæsar._ The ides of March are come.

_Sooth._ Ay, Cæsar; but not gone.

Such words seem to measure out a narrow area of time in which the crisis is to work itself out. There is however no distinct break between different stages of a dramatic movement like that in the present play; [_Devices for working up the agitation._] and two short incidents have preceded this scene which have served as emotional devices to bring about a distinct advance in the intensification of the strain. [_Artemidorus_; =ii.= iii. and =iii.= i. 3.] In the first, Artemidorus appeared reading a letter of warning which he purposed to present to Cæsar on his way to the fatal spot. In the Capitol Scene he presents it, while the ready Decius hastens to interpose another petition to take off Cæsar's attention. Artemidorus conjures Cæsar to read his first for 'it touches him nearer'; but the imperial chivalry of Cæsar forbids:

What touches us ourself shall be last served.

[_Portia;_ =ii.= iv.]

The momentary hope of rescue is dashed. In the second incident Portia has been displayed completely unnerved by the weight of a secret to the anxiety of which she is not equal; she sends messengers to the Capitol and recalls them as she recollects that she dare give them no message; her agitation has communicated itself to us, besides suggesting the fear that it may betray to others what she is anxious to conceal. Our sympathy has thus been tossed from side to side, although in its general direction it still moves on the side of the conspirators. [_Popilius Lena._] In the crisis itself the agitation becomes painful as the entrance of Popilius [=iii.= i. 13.] Lena and his secret communication to Cæsar cause a panic that threatens to wreck the whole plot on the verge of its success. Brutus's nerve sustains even this trial, and the way for the accomplishment of the deed is again clear. Emotional devices like these have carried the passion up to a climax of agitation; and the conspirators now advance to present their pretended suit and achieve the bloody deed. To the last the double effect of Cæsar's demeanour continues. Considered in itself, his unrelenting firmness of principle exhibits the highest model of a ruler; yet to us, who know the purpose lurking behind the hypocritical intercession of the conspirators, Cæsar's self-confidence resembles the infatuation that goes before Nemesis. [from 58.] He scorns the fickle politicians before him as mere wandering sparks of heavenly fire, while he is left alone as a pole-star of true-fixed and resting quality:--and in answer to his presumptuous boast that he can never be moved come the blows of the assassins which strike him down; [compare 115.] while there is a flash of irony as he is seen to have fallen beside the statue of Pompey, and the marble seems to gleam in cold triumph over the rival at last lying bleeding at its feet. The assassination is accomplished, the cause of the conspirators is won: pity notwithstanding we are swept along with the current of their enthusiasm; [_The justification at its height in the appeal to all time._] and the justification that has been steadily rising from the commencement reaches its climax as, their adversaries dispersing in terror, the conspirators dip their hands in their victim's blood, and make their triumphant appeal to the whole world and all time.

[111.]

_Cassius_. Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

_Brutus_. How many times shall Cæsar bleed in sport,
That now on Pompey's basis lies along,
No worthier than the dust!

_Cassius._ So oft as that shall be,
So often shall the knot of us be call'd
The men that gave their country LIBERTY!

[_Catastrophe, and commencement of the Reaction._]

_Enter a servant:_ this simple stage-direction is the 'catastrophe,' the turning-round of the whole action; the arch has reached its apex and the Reaction has begun. [=iii.= i, from 122.] So instantaneous is the change, that though it is only the servant of Antony who speaks, yet the first words of his message ring with the peculiar tone of subtly-poised sentences which are inseparably associated with Antony's eloquence; it is like the first announcement of that which is to be a final theme in music, and from this point this tone dominates the scene to the very end.

[125.]

Thus he bade me say:
Brutus is noble, wise, valiant, and honest,
Cæsar was mighty, bold, royal, and loving,
Say I love Brutus, and I honour him;
Say I fear'd Cæsar, honour'd him, and lov'd him.
If Brutus will vouchsafe that Antony
May safely come to him, and be resolv'd
How Cæsar hath deserved to lie in death,
Mark Antony shall not love Cæsar dead
So well as Brutus living.

In the whole Shakespearean Drama there is nowhere such a swift swinging round of a dramatic action as is here marked by this sudden up-springing of the suppressed individuality in Antony's character, [=ii.= i. 165.] hitherto so colourless that he has been spared by the conspirators as a mere limb of Cæsar. [=iii.= i. 144.] The tone of exultant triumph in the conspirators has in an instant given place to Cassius's 'misgiving' as Brutus grants Antony an audience; [from 164.] and when Antony enters, Brutus's first words to him fall into the form of apology. The quick subtlety of Antony's intellect has grasped the whole situation, and with irresistible force he slowly feels his way towards using the conspirators' aid for crushing themselves and avenging their victim. [=iii.= i. 211, compare 177.] The bewilderment of the conspirators in the presence of this unlooked-for force is seen in Cassius's unavailing attempt to bring Antony to the point, as to what compact he will make with them. Antony, on the contrary, reads his men with such nicety that he can indulge himself in sailing close to the wind, [from 184.] and grasps fervently the hands of the assassins while he pours out a flood of bitter grief over the corpse. It is not hypocrisy, nor a trick to gain time, this conciliation of his enemies. Steeped in the political spirit of the age, Antony knows, as no other man, the mob which governs Rome, and is conscious of the mighty engine he possesses in his oratory to sway that mob in what direction he pleases; when his bold plan has succeeded, and his adversaries have consented to meet him in contest of oratory, then ironical conciliation becomes the natural relief to his pent-up passion.

[220.]

Friends am I with you all and love you all,
_Upon this hope, that you shall give me reasons_
Why and wherein Cæsar was dangerous.

It is as he feels the sense of innate oratorical power and of the opportunity his enemies have given to that power, that he exaggerates his temporary amity with the men he is about to crush: it is the executioner arranging his victim comfortably on the rack before he proceeds to apply the levers. Already the passion of the drama has fallen under the guidance of Antony. The view of Cæsar as an innocent victim is now allowed full play upon our sympathies when Antony, [from 254.] left alone with the corpse, can drop the artificial mask and give vent to his love and vengeance. [231-243.] The success of the conspiracy had begun to decline as we marked Brutus's ill-timed generosity to Antony in granting him the funeral oration; [=iii.= ii, from 13.] it crumbles away through the cold unnatural euphuism of Brutus's speech in its defence; [=iii.= ii, from 78.] it is hurried to its ruin when Antony at last exercises his spell upon the Roman people and upon the reader. The speech of Antony, with its mastery of every phase of feeling, is a perfect sonata upon the instrument of the human emotions. [=iii.= ii. 78.] Its opening theme is sympathy with bereavement, against which are working as if in conflict anticipations of future themes, doubt and compunction. [95, 109, &c.] A distinct change of movement comes with the first introduction of what is to be the final subject, [133.] the mention of the will. But when this new movement has worked up from curiosity to impatience, [177.] there is a diversion: the mention of the victory over the Nervii turns the emotions in the direction of historic pride, [178.] which harmonises well with the opposite emotions roused as the orator fingers hole after hole in Cæsar's mantle made by the daggers of his false friends, [200.] and so leads up to a sudden shock when he uncovers the body itself and displays the popular idol and its bloody defacement. [243.] Then the finale begins: the forgotten theme of the will is again started, and from a burst of gratitude the passion quickens and intensifies to rage, to fury, to mutiny. [_The mob won to the Reaction._] The mob is won to the Reaction; [=iii.= iii.] and the curtain that falls upon the third Act rises for a moment to display the populace tearing a man to pieces simply because he bears the same name as one of the conspirators.

[_Last stage. Development of an inevitable fate: passion-strain ceases._]

The final stage of the action works out the development of an inevitable fate. The emotional strain now ceases, and, as in the first stage, the passion is of the calmer order, the calmness in this case of pity balanced by a sense of justice. From the opening of the fourth Act the decline in the justification of the conspirators is intimated by the logic of events. The first scene exhibits to us the triumvirate that now governs Rome, and shows that in this triumvirate Antony is supreme: [Acts =iv, v. iv.= i.] with the man who is the embodiment of the Reaction thus appearing at the head of the world, the fall of the conspirators is seen to be inevitable. [=iv.= ii. 3.] The decline of our sympathy with them continues in the following scenes. The Quarrel Scene shows how low the tone of Cassius has fallen since he has dealt with assassination as a political weapon; and even Brutus's moderation has hardened into unpleasing harshness. [=iv.= iii. 148, &c.] There is at this point plenty of relief to such unpleasing effects: [=iv.= iii. from 239.] there is the exhibition of the tender side of Brutus's character as shown in his relations with his page, [=iv.= iii.] and the display of friendship maintained between Brutus and Cassius amid falling fortunes. But such incidents as these have a different effect upon us from that which they would have had at an earlier period; the justification of the conspirators has so far declined that now attractive touches in them serve only to increase the pathos of a fate which, however, our sympathy no longer seeks to resist. [=iv.= iii. 275.] We get a supernatural foreshadowing of the end in the appearance to Brutus of Cæsar's Ghost, [=v.= i. 80.] and the omen Cassius sees of the eagles that had consorted his army to Philippi giving place to ravens, crows, and kites on the morning of battle: this lends the authority of the invisible world to our sense that the conspirators' cause is doomed. [=iv.= iii. 196-230.] And judicial blindness overtakes them as Brutus's authority in council overweighs in point after point the shrewder advice of Cassius. Through the scenes of the fifth Act we see the republican leaders fighting on without hope. [_Justification entirely vanishes as the conspirators recognise Cæsar's victory._] The last remnant of justification for their cause ceases as the conspirators themselves seem to acknowledge their error and fate. Cassius as he feels his death-blow recognises the very weapon with which he had committed the crime:

[=v.= iii. 45.]

Cæsar, thou art revenged,
Even with the sword that kill'd thee.

And at last even the firm spirit of Brutus yields:

[=v.= v. 94.]

O Julius Cæsar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.

X.

HOW CLIMAX MEETS CLIMAX IN THE CENTRE OF LEAR.

_A Study in more complex Passion and Movement._

[_The plot of Lear highly complex_.]

IN _Julius Cæsar_ we have seen how, in the case of a very simple play, a few simple devices are sufficient to produce a regular rise and fall in the passion. We now turn to a highly elaborate plot and trace how, notwithstanding the elaborateness, a similar concentration of the passion in the centre of the play can be secured. _King Lear_ is one of the most complex of Shakespeare's tragedies; its plot is made up of a number of separate actions, with their combinations accurately carried out, the whole impressing us with a sense of artistic involution similar to that of an elaborate musical fugue. Here, however, we are concerned only indirectly with the plot of the play: we need review it no further than may suffice to show what distinct interests enter into it, and enable us to observe how the separate trains of passion work toward a common climax at the centre.

Starting from the notion of pattern as a fundamental idea we have seen how Plot presents trains of events in human life taking form and shape as a crime and its nemesis, an oracle and its fulfilment, the rise and fall of an individual, or even as simply a story. [_The main plot exhibits the Problem form of dramatic action._] The particular form of action underlying the main plot of _King Lear_ is different from any we have yet noticed. It may be described as a _Problem Action_. A mathematician in his problem assumes some unusual combination of forces to have come about, and then proceeds to trace its consequences: so the Drama often deals with problems in history and life, setting up, before the commencement of the play or early in the action, some peculiar arrangement of moral relations, and then throughout the rest of the action developing the consequences of these to the personages involved. Thus the opening scene of _King Lear_ is occupied in bringing before us a pregnant and suggestive state of affairs: imperiousness is represented as overthrowing conscience and setting up an unnatural distribution of power. [_The problem stated._] A human problem has thus been enunciated which the remainder of the play has to work out to its natural solution.

Imperiousness seems to be the term appropriate to Lear's conduct in the first scene. This is no case of dotage dividing an inheritance according to public declarations of affection. The division had already been made according to the best advice: [=i.= i. 3, &c.] in the case of two of the daughters 'equalities had been so weighed that curiosity in neither could make choice of either's moiety'; and if the portion of the youngest and best loved of the three was the richest, this is a partiality natural enough to absolute power. The opening scene of the play is simply the court ceremony in which the formal transfer is to be made. [38.] Lear is already handing to his daughters the carefully drawn maps which mark the boundaries of the provinces, [49.] when he suddenly pauses, and, with the yearning of age and authority for testimonies of devotion, calls upon his daughters for declarations of affection, the easiest of returns for the substantial gifts he is giving them, and which Goneril and Regan pour forth with glib eloquence. [84.] Then Lear turns to Cordelia, and, thinking delightedly of the special prize he has marked out for the pet of his old age, asks her:

What can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters?

But Cordelia has been revolted by the fulsome flattery of the sisters whose hypocrisy she knows so well, and she bluntly refuses to be drawn into any declaration of affection at all. Cordelia might well have found some other method of separating herself from her false sisters, without thus flouting her father before his whole court in a moment of tenderness to herself; or, if carried away by the indignation of the moment, a sign of submission would have won her a ready pardon. [compare =i.= i. 131.] But Cordelia, sweet and strong as her character is in great things, has yet inherited a touch of her father's temper, and the moment's sullenness is protracted into obstinacy. Cordelia then has committed an offence of manner; Lear's passion vents itself in a sentence proper only to a moral crime: now the punishment of a minute offence with wholly disproportionate severity simply because it is an offence against personal will is an exact description of imperiousness.

As Lear stands for imperiousness, so conscience is represented by Kent, who, with the voice of authority derived from lifelong intimacy and service, interposes to check the King's passion in its headlong course.

[141-190.]

_Kent._ Royal Lear,
Whom I have ever honour'd as my king,
Loved as my father, as my master follow'd,
As my great patron thought on in my prayers,--

_Lear._ The bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft.

_Kent._ Let it fall rather, though the fork invade
The region of my heart: be Kent unmannerly
When Lear is mad. What wilt thou do, old man?
Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,
When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour's bound,
When majesty stoops to folly. Reverse thy doom....

_Lear._ Kent, on thy life, no more.

_Kent._ My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thy enemies, nor fear to lose it,
Thy safety being the motive....

_Lear._ O, vassal! miscreant!

[_Laying his hand on his sword._

_Albany._ } Dear sir, forbear.
_Cornwall._ }

_Kent._ Do:
Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow
Upon thy foul disease. Revoke thy doom;
Or, whilst I can vent clamour from my throat,
I'll tell thee thou dost evil.

In the banishment of this Kent, then, the resistance of Lear's conscience is overcome, and his imperious passion has full swing in transferring Cordelia's kingdom to her treacherous sisters.

The opening scene has put before us, not in words but figured in action, a problem in human affairs: the violation of moral equity has set up an unnatural arrangement of power--power taken from the good and lodged in the hands of the bad. Here is, so to speak, a piece of moral unstable equilibrium, and the rebound from it is to furnish the remainder of the action. The very structure of the plot corresponds with the simple structure of a scientific proposition. The latter consists of two unequal parts: a few lines are sufficient to enunciate the problem, while a whole treatise may be required for its solution. So in _King Lear_ a single scene brings about the unnatural state of affairs, the consequences of which it takes the rest of the play to trace. The 'catastrophe,' or turning-point of the play at which the ultimate issues are decided, appears in the present case, not close to the end of the play, nor (as in _Julius Cæsar_) in the centre, but close to the commencement: at the end of the opening scene Lear's act of folly has in reality determined the issue of the whole action; the scenes which follow are only working out a determined issue to its full realisation.

[_The solution of the problem in a triple tragedy._]

We have seen the problem itself, the overthrow of conscience by imperiousness and the transfer of power from the good to the bad: what is the solution of it as presented by the incidents of the play? The consequences flowing from what Lear has done make up three distinct tragedies, which go on working side by side, and all of which are essential to the full solution of the problem. First, there is the nemesis upon Lear himself--the double retribution of receiving nothing but evil from those he has unrighteously rewarded, [(1) _Tragedy of Lear._] and nothing but good from her whom, he bitterly feels, he has cruelly wronged. [(2) _Tragedy of Cordelia and Kent._] But the punishment of the wrong-doer is only one element in the consequences of wrong; the innocent also are involved, and we get a second tragedy in the sufferings of the faithful Kent and the loving Cordelia, who, through Kent as her representative, watches over her father's safety, until at the end she appears in person to follow up her devotion to the death. When, however, the incidents making up the sufferings of Lear, of Kent, and of Cordelia are taken out of the main plot, there is still a considerable section left--[(3) _Tragedy of Goneril and Regan._] that which is occupied with the mutual intrigues of Goneril and Regan, intrigues ending in their common ruin. This constitutes a third tragedy which, it will be seen, is as necessary to the solution of our problem as the other two. To place power in the hands of the bad is an injury not only to others, but also to the bad themselves, as giving fuel to the fire of their wickedness: so in the tragedy of Goneril and Regan we see evil passions placed in improper authority using this authority to work out their own destruction.

[_An underplot on the same basis as the main plot._]

To this main plot is added an underplot equally elaborate. As in _The Merchant of Venice_, the stories borrowed from two distinct sources are worked into a common design: and the interweaving in the case of the present play is perhaps Shakespeare's greatest triumph of constructive skill. The two stories are made to rest upon the same fundamental idea--[compare =i.= i, fin.] that of undutifulness to old age: what Lear's daughters actually do is that which is insinuated by Edmund as his false charge against his brother.

[=i.= ii. 76, &c.]

I have heard him oft maintain it to be fit, that, sons at perfect
age, and fathers declining, the father should be as ward to the son,
and the son manage his revenue.