Chapter II: Criticism of the Martial Government

'Would you proceed _especially_ against _Caius_ MARCIUS?'
'Against him FIRST: He's a _very dog_ to THE COMMONALTY.'

In this exhibition of the social orders to which human society instinctively tends, and that so-called _state_ into which human combinations in barbaric ages rudely settles, the _principle_ of the combination--the principle of gradation, and subjection, and permanence--is called in question, and exposed as a purely instinctive principle, as, in fact, only a principle of revolution disguised; and a higher one, the distinctively human element, the principle of KIND, is now, for the first time, demanded on scientific grounds, as the essential principle of any permanent human combination--as the natural principle, the only one which the science of nature can recognise as a principle of STATE.

It is the PEACE principle which this great scientific war-hater and captain of the ages of peace is in search of, with his new _organum_; though he is philosopher enough to know that, in diseased states, wars are nature's own rude remedies, her barbarous surgery, for evils yet more unendurable. He has found himself chosen a justice of the peace--the world's peace; and it is the principle of permanence, of law and subjection--in a word, it is the principle of _state_, as opposed to revolution and dissolution--which he is judging of in behalf of his kind. And he makes a business of it. He goes about in his own fashion. He gets up this great war-piece on purpose to find it.

He has got a state on his stage, which is ceasing to be a _state_ at the moment in which he shows it to us; a state which has the war principle--the principle of conquest within no longer working in it insidiously as government, but developed as war; for it has just overstepped the endurable point in its mastery. It is a revolution that is coming off when the curtain rises. For the government has been gnawing the Roman common-weal at home, with those same teeth it ravened the Volscians with abroad, till it has reached the vitals at last, and the common-weal has betaken itself to the Volscian's weapons:--the people have risen. They are all out when the play begins on an armed hunt for their rat-like, gnawing, corn-consuming rulers. They are determined to 'kill them,' and have 'corn at their own price.' 'If the _wars_ eat us not, _they_ will,' is the word; 'and there's all THE LOVE _they_ bear us.' '_Rome_ and _her rats_ are at the point of battle,' cries the Poet. The _one_ side _shall have bale_, is his prophecy. 'Without _good nature_,' he says elsewhere, using the term _good_ in its scientific sense, '_men_ are only a NOBLER kind of VERMIN'; and he makes a most unsparing application of this principle in his criticisms. Many a splendid historical figure is made to show its teeth, and rat-like mien and propensities, through all the splendour of its disguises, merely by the application of his simple philosophical tests. For the question, as he puts it, is the question between animal instinct, between mere appetite, and reason; and the question incidentally arises in the course of the exhibition, whether the common-weal, when it comes to anything like common-sense, is going to stand being gnawed in this way, for the benefit of any individual, or clique, or party.

For the ground on which the classes or estates, and their respective claims to the government, are tried here, is the ground of the _common_-weal; and the question as to the fitness of any existing class in the state for an exclusive, unlimited control of the welfare of the whole, is more than suggested. That which stops short of the weal of the whole for its end, is that which is under criticism here; and whether it exist in 'the one,' or 'the few,' or 'the many,'--and these are the terms that are employed here,--whether it exist in the civil magistracy, sustained by a popular submission, or in the power of the victorious military chief, at the head of his still extant and resistless armament, it is necessarily rejected as a principle of sovereignty and permanence, in this purely scientific view of the human conditions of it. It is a question which this author handles with a thorough impartiality, in all his political treatises, let them come in what name and form they will, with more or less clearness, indeed, as the circumstances seem to dictate.

But _nowhere_ is the whole history of the military government, collected from the obscurity of the past, and brought out with such inflexible design--with such vividness and strength of historic exhibition, as it is _here_. It is traced to its beginnings in the distinctions which nature herself creates,--those physical, and moral, and intellectual distinctions, with which she crowns, in her happier moods, the large resplendent brows of her born kings and masters. It is traced from its origin in the crowning of the victorious chief on the field of battle, to the moment in which the sword of military conquest is turned back on the conquerors by the chief into whose hands they gave it; and the sword of conquest abroad becomes, at home, the sword of state.

Nay, this Play goes farther, and embraces the contingency of a foreign rule--one, too, in which the _conqueror_ takes his surname from the _conquest_; it brings home 'the enemy of the whole state,' as a king, in triumph to the capital, whose streets he has filled with mourning; and though the author does not tell us in this case, at he does in another, that the nation was awed 'with an offertory of standards' in the temple, and that 'orisons and Te Deums were again sung,'--the victor 'not meaning that the people _should forget_ too soon _that he came in by battle_'--points, not much short of that, in the way of speciality, are not wanting. More than one conqueror, indeed, looks out from this old chieftain's Roman casque. 'There is a little touch of _Harry_ in the scene'; and though the author goes out of his way to tell us that 'he must by no means say his hero is _covetous_,' it will not be the Elizabethan Philosopher's fault, if we do not know _which_ Harry it is that says--

_If you have writ your annals true_,'tis there,
That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
Flutter'd your Volsces in Corioli:
_Alone_, I did it.

* * * * *

_Auf_. Read it, noble lords;
But tell _the traitor_, in the _highest degree_
He hath abused your powers.

_Cor_. Traitor!--How now?

_Auf_. Ay, _traitor_, Marcius.

_Cor_. _Marcius_!

_Auf_. AY, _Marcius, Caius_ Marcius; Dost thou think
I'll grace thee with THAT ROBBERY, _thy_ STOLEN NAME
CORIOLANUS in CORIOLI?'--[_the conqueror in the conquest_.]

Never, indeed, was 'the garland of war,' whether glistening freshly on the hero's brow on the fresh battle-field, or whether glittering, transmuted into civic gold and gems, on the brow of his hereditary successor, subjected to such a searching process before, as that with which the Poet, under cover of an _aristocrat's_ pretensions, and especially under cover of his pretensions to an elective magistracy, can venture to test it.

This _hero_, who 'speaks of the people as if he were a _god_ to punish, and not a man of their infirmity,' is on trial for that pretension from the first scene of this Play to the last. The author has, indeed, his own views of the fickle, ignorant, foolish multitude,--such views as any one, who had occasion to experiment on it personally, in the age of Elizabeth, would not lack the means of acquiring; and amidst those ebullitions of wrath, which he pours from his haughty hero's lips, one hears at times a tone that sounds a little like some other things from the same source, as if the author had himself, in some way, been brought to look at the subject from a point of observation, not altogether unlike that from which his hero speaks; or as if he might, at least, have known how to sympathise with the haughty and unbending nature, that had been brought into such deadly collision with it. But in the dramatic representation, though it is far from being a flattering one, we listen in vain for any echo of this sentiment. In its rich and kindly humour there is no sneer, no satire. It is the loving eye of nature's own great pupil--it is the kindly human eye, that comes near enough to point those jests, and paint so truly; there is a great human heart here in the scene embracing the lowly. It was the heart that was putting forth then its silent but resistless energies into the ages of the human advancement, to take up the despised and rejected masses of men from their misery, and make of them truly one _kind_ and kindred.

And though he has had, indeed, his own private experiences with the multitude, and the passions are, as he intimates--at least as strong in him as in another, he has his own view, also, of the common pitifulness and weakness of the human conditions; and he has a view which is, in his time, all his own, of the instrumentalities that are needed to reach that level of human nature, and to lift men up from the mire of these conditions, from the wrong and wretchedness into which, in their unaided, unartistic, unlearned struggle with nature,--within and without,--_the kind_ are fallen. And so strong in him is the sense of this pitifulness, that it predominates over the sharpness of his genius, and throws the divinest mists and veils of compassion over the harsh, scientific realities he is constrained to lay bare.

And, in fact, it takes this monstrous pretence, and claim to _human leadership_, which he finds passing unquestioned in his time, to bring him out on this point fairly. The statesmanship of the man who undertakes to make his own petty personality the measure of a _world_, who would make, not that reason which is in us _all_, and embraces the _world_, and which is _not_ personal,--not that conscience which is the sensibility to reason, and is as broad and impartial as that--which goes with the reason, and embraces, like that, without bias, the common weal,--but that which is particular, and private, and limited to the individual,--his senses,--his passions, his private affections,--his mere caprice,--his mere will; the motive of the public action;--the statesmanship of the man who dares to offer these to an insulted world, as reasons of state; who claims a divine prerogative to make his single will good against reason; who claims a divine right to make his private interest outweigh the weal of the whole; who asks men to obliterate, in their judgment, its essential principle, that which makes them men, the eternal principle of the whole;--this is the phenomenon which provokes at last, in this author, the philosophic ire. The moment this thing shows itself on his stage, he puts his pity to sleep. He will show up, at last, without any mercy, in a purely scientific manner, as we see more clearly elsewhere, the common pitifulness of the human conditions, in the person of him who claims exemption from them,--who speaks of the people as if he were a god to punish, and not a man of their infirmity.

'There is formed in every thing a _double nature_';--this author, who is the philosopher of _nature_, tells us on another page,--'there is formed in _every thing_ a double nature OF GOOD, the one as everything is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is a _part_ or _member_ of a greater body; whereof the _latter_ is in degree the greater and the worthier, because it _tends to the conservation of a more general form_. Therefore we see the iron in _particular sympathy_ moving to the loadstone; but yet, if _it exceed a certain quantity_, it forsakes the affection to the loadstone, and, like a good patriot, moves to the earth. This double nature of good is MUCH MORE (hear)--much _more_ ENGRAVEN on MAN, if he _de_GENERATE not--(decline not from the law of his _kind_--for that _more_ is SPECIAL) unto whom the conservation of DUTY to the PUBLIC ought to be much more _precious_ than the conservation of life and being, according to that memorable speech of Pompey THE GREAT, [the truly great, for this is the question of greatness,] when BEING IN COMMISSION OF PURVEYANCE FOR A FAMINE AT ROME, and being dissuaded, with great vehemency and instance, by his friends about him, that he should not hazard himself to sea in an extremity of weather, answered, 'Necesse est ut eam, non ut vivam.'

But we happen to have set out here, in our play, at the very beginning of it, the specific case alluded to, in this general exhibition of the radical human law, viz., the case of a famine in Rome, which we shall find differently treated, in this instance, by the person who aspires to 'the helm o' the state.'

When the question is of the true nobility and greatness, of the true statesmanship, of the personal fitness of an individual to assume the care of the public welfare, the question, of course, as to this double nature, comes in. We wish to know--if any thing is going to depend upon his single _will_ in the matter, we must know, which of these two natures is SOVEREIGN in himself,--which good he supremely affects,--that of his senses, passions, and private affections, that good which ends in his private and particular nature,--a good which has its _due_ place in this system, and is not unnaturally mortified and depressed, as it is in less scientific ones,--or that good of the _whole_, which is each man's highest good;--whether he is, in fact, a _man_, or whether, in the absence of that perfection of the human form, which should be the end of science and government, he approximates at all,--or undertakes to approximate at all, to the true human type;--whether he be, indeed, a man, in the higher sense of that word, or whether he ranks in the scale of nature, as 'only a _nobler_ kind of vermin,' a _man_, a _noble man_, a man with a divine ideal and ambition, _degenerate_ into that.

When it is a candidate for the chief magistracy, a candidate for the supreme power in the state, who is on his trial, of course that question as to the balance between the public and private affections, which, those who know how to trace this author's hand, know he is so fond of trying elsewhere, is sure to come up. The question is, as to whether there is any affection in this claimant for power, so large and so noble, that it can embrace heartily the common weal, and take _that_ to be _its_ good. The trial will be a sharp one. The trial of human greatness which is magnanimity, must needs be. The question is, as to whether this is a nature capable of pursuing that end for its own sake, without respect to its pivate and merely selfish recompence; whether it is one which has any such means of egress from its particular self, any such means of coming out of its private and exclusive motivity, that it can persevere in its care of the Common Weal, through good and through ill report, through personal wrong and ingratitude,--abandoning its private claim, and ascending by that conquest to the divineness.