The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 36

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, n.o.ble 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 CORIOLa.n.u.s 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, trans.m.u.ted 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 _G.o.d_ 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 mult.i.tude,--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 ma.s.ses 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 mult.i.tude, and the pa.s.sions 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 compa.s.sion over the harsh, scientific realities he is constrained to lay bare.

And, in fact, it takes this monstrous pretence, and claim to _human leaders.h.i.+p_, which he finds pa.s.sing unquestioned in his time, to bring him out on this point fairly. The statesmans.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sions, his private affections,--his mere caprice,--his mere will; the motive of the public action;--the statesmans.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d 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 quant.i.ty_, 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 n.o.bility and greatness, of the true statesmans.h.i.+p, of the personal fitness of an individual to a.s.sume 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, pa.s.sions, 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 _n.o.bler_ kind of vermin,' a _man_, a _n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble, 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 ingrat.i.tude,--abandoning its private claim, and ascending by that conquest to the divineness.

CHAPTER III.

INSURRECTION'S ARGUING.

'What is granted them?'

'Five Tribunes to defend their vulgar wisdoms.'

'The rabble should have first unroofed the city, Ere so prevailed with me.'

The common people themselves have some inkling of this. This Roman who has established his claim to rule Romans at home, by killing Volscians abroad, appears to their simple apprehension, at the moment, at least, when they find themselves suffering the gnawings of hunger through his legislation, to have established but a questionable claim to their submission.

And before ever he shows his head on the stage, this question, which is the question of the play, is already started. For it is the people who are permitted to come on first of all and explain their wants, and discuss the military hero's qualifications for rule in that relation, and that, too, in a not altogether foolish manner. For though the author knows how to do justice to the simplicity of their politics, he knows how to do justice also to that practical determination and straightforwardness and largeness of sense, which even in the common sense of uneducated ma.s.ses, is already struggling a little to declare itself.

They have one great piece of political learning which their lordly legislators lack, and for lack of sense and comprehension cannot have.

They are learned in the doctrine of their own political and social want; they are full of the most accurate and vivid impressions on that subject. Their notions of it are altogether different from those vague general abstract conceptions of it, which the brains of their refined lordly rulers stoop to admit. The terms which that legislation deals with, are one thing in the patrician's vocabulary, and another and quite different thing in the plebeian's; hunger means one thing in the 'patrician's vocabulary,' and another and very different thing in the plebeian's. They know, too, 'that meat was made for mouths,' and 'that the G.o.ds sent not corn for the rich men only.' They are under the impression that there ought to be bread for them by some means or other, when the storehouses that their toil has filled are overflowing, and though they are not clear as to the process which should accomplish this result, they have come to the conclusion that there must be some error somewhere in the legislation of those learned _few_, to whom they have resigned the task of governing them. They are strongly of opinion that there must be some mistake in the calculations by which those venerable wise men and _fathers_, do so infallibly contrive to sweep the results of the poor man's toil and privation into their own garners,--calculations which enable the legislator to enjoy in lordly ease and splendour, the sight of the plebeian's misery, which enable him to lavish on his idlest whims, to give to his dogs that which would save lifetimes of unreckoned human misery. These are their views, and when the play begins, they have resolved themselves into a committee of the whole, and are out on a commission of inquiry and administrative reform, armed with bats and clubs and other weapons,--such as came first to hand, intending to make short work of it. This is their peace budget, and as to war, they have some rude notions on that subject, too;--some dim impression that nature intended them for some other ends than to be sold in the shambles, as the purchase of some lordly chieftain's t.i.tle. There's an incipient statesmans.h.i.+p struggling there in that rude ma.s.s, though it does not as yet get fairly expressed. It will take the tribunes.h.i.+p and the refinements of the aristocratic leisure, to make the rude wisdom of want and toil eloquent. But it has found a tribune at last, who will be able to speak for it, through one mouth or another, scientifically and to the purpose too, ere all is done.

'Before we proceed any further, _hear me speak_,' he cries, through the Roman leader's lips; for his Rome, too, if it be not yet 'at the point of battle,' is drifting towards it rapidly, as he sees well enough when this speech begins.

But let us take the Play as we find it. Take the first scene of it.

The stage is filled with the people,--not with their representatives, --but with the people themselves, in their own persons, in the act of taking the government into their own hands. They are hurrying sternly and silently through the city streets. There has been no practising of 'goose step,' to teach them that movement. They are armed with clubs, staves and other weapons, peace weapons, but there is an edge in them now, fine enough for their purpose. The word of the play is the word that arrests that movement. The voice of the leader rings out,--it is a HALT that is ordered.

'BEFORE WE PROCEED ANY FURTHER, HEAR ME SPEAK,' cries one from the ma.s.s.

'Speak! speak!' is the reply. They are ready to hear reason. They want a speaker. They want a voice, though never so rude, to put their stern inarticulate purpose 'into some frame.'

'You are all resolved rather TO DIE than TO FAMISH,' continues the first speaker. Yes, that is it precisely; he has spoken the word.

'RESOLVED! RESOLVED!' is the common response; for the revolutionary point is touched here.

'FIRST, _you know_, Caius Marcius is CHIEF ENEMY to the people'--a rude grasp at causes. This captain will establish a common _intelligence_ in his company _before they proceed any further_; that their acting may be one, and to purpose. For there is no command but that here.

_Cit._ We know't, we know't.

_First Cit._ Let us _kill him_, and we'll have corn at our own price.

Is't a verdict?

_Cit. No _more talking on't_. Let it bone done: away, away.

'_One word_, good citizens,' cries another, 'who thinks that the thing will bear, perhaps, a little further discussion. And this is the hint for the first speaker to produce his cause more fully. 'GOOD CITIZENS,' is the word he takes up. "_We_ are _accounted_ POOR CITIZENS; the patricians GOOD.' [That is the way the account stands, then.] 'What AUTHORITY _surfeits_ on would relieve us. If they would yield us _but the superfluity_ while it were _wholesome_, we might guess they relieved us _humanely_; but they think we are _too dear_.'

[They love us as we are too well. They want poor people to reflect their riches. It takes plebeians to make patricians; it takes our valleys to make their heights.]

'The leanness that _afflicts us_, the object of _our_ misery, is as an _inventory_ to particularize _their abundance_. _Our_ sufferance is a gain to _them_.--Let us revenge this with our pikes, ere we become rakes: for the G.o.ds know, I speak this in _hunger_ for bread, and not in _thirst_ for _revenge_.

_Second Cit_. Would you proceed _especially_ against Caius Marcius?

_First Cit_. Against him _first_;--he's a _very dog_ to the commonalty.

_Second Cit_. Consider you what _services_ he has done for _his country_?

[That is one of the things which are about to be 'considered.']

_First Cit. Very well_, and could be content to give him good report for'it, but that he _pays himself_ with _being proud_.

_Second Cit_. Nay, but speak not maliciously.

_First Cit_. I say unto you, what he hath done famously, he _did it to that end_: though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for HIS COUNTRY, he did it to _please his mother_, and to be _partly_ proud; which he is, even to the _alt.i.tude of his virtue_.

_Second Cit_. What he _cannot help_ IN HIS NATURE, you account a _vice_ in him. You _must in no way_ say he is covetous.

_First Cit. If I must not_, I need not be barren of accusations; he hath faults with surplus to tire _in repet.i.tion_. [_Shouts within_.]

What shouts are these? The other side o' the city is risen. Why stay we prating here? _To the Capitol_!

_Cit_. Come, come.