The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 32

'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 circ.u.mstance,--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_ fas.h.i.+on, 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, Ca.s.sius?

_Ca.s.sius_. 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.

_Ca.s.sius_. I know where I will wear this dagger then; Ca.s.sius from bondage will deliver Ca.s.sius: Therein, ye G.o.ds, you make the weak most strong; Therein, ye G.o.ds, you tyrants do defeat: Nor STONY TOWER, nor walls of beaten bra.s.s, 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.

_Ca.s.sius_. _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_.

_Ca.s.sius_. 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 n.o.blest, 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 pa.s.sion 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 mult.i.tude, in this case, were ready to arm with unlimited power over their own welfare--that physical weakness, already so strenuously insisted on by Ca.s.sius, 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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, Ca.s.sius, or I sink!'--that feeble cry from the sick man's bed in Spain, 'Give me some drink, t.i.tinius!'--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 Ca.s.sius 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 princ.i.p.al 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 Ca.s.sius, 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, Fas.h.i.+on 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 Sh.e.l.l.'

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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sages 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 furnis.h.i.+ng a _rule_ of _action_ anywhere,--the fact that mere will, or blind pa.s.sion, 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 n.o.blest forms, creates,--the difficulties which the ignorance, and stupidity, and pa.s.sion of the mult.i.tude 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.