The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar Part 4

This man Is now become a G.o.d, and Ca.s.sius is A wretched creature, and must bend his body If Caesar carelessly but nod on him. [I, ii, 115-118.]

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs. [I, ii, 135-137.]

Thus he overflows with mocking comparisons, and finds his pastime in flouting at Caesar as having managed by a sham heroism to hoodwink the world.

And yet Shakespeare makes Caesar characterize himself very much as Ca.s.sius, in his splenetic temper, describes him. Caesar G.o.ds it in his talk, as if on purpose to approve the style in which Ca.s.sius mockingly G.o.ds him. This, taken by itself, would look as if the dramatist sided with Ca.s.sius; yet one can hardly help feeling that he sympathized rather in Antony's great oration. And the sequel, as we have seen, justifies Antony's opinion of Caesar. The subsequent course of things has the effect of inverting the mockery of Ca.s.sius against himself.

The final issue of the conspiracy, as represented by Shakespeare, is a pretty conclusive argument of the blunder, not to say the crime, of its authors. Caesar, dead, tears them and their cause all to pieces. In effect, they did but stab him into a mightier life; so that Brutus might well say, as indeed he does at last,--

O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!

Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords In our own proper entrails. [V, iii, 94-96.]

The Nemesis which a.s.serts itself so sternly in the latter part of the play may be regarded as a reflex of irony on some of the earlier scenes.

This view infers the disguise of Caesar to be an instance of the profound guile with which Shakespeare sometimes plays upon his characters, humoring their bent, and then leaving them to the discipline of events.

BRUTUS

Coleridge has a shrewd doubt as to what sort of a character Shakespeare meant his Brutus to be. For, in his thinking aloud just after the breaking of the conspiracy to him, Brutus avowedly grounds his purpose, not on anything Caesar has done, nor on what he is, but simply on what he _may become_ when crowned. He "knows no personal cause to spurn at him"; nor has he "known when his affections sway'd more than his reason"; but "he would be crown'd: how that might change his nature, there's the question"; and,

Since the quarrel Will bear no colour for the thing he is, Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities; And therefore think him as a serpent's egg Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous, And kill him in the sh.e.l.l. [II, i, 28-34.]

So then Brutus heads a plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate the man who, besides being clothed with the sanctions of law as the highest representative of the state, has been his personal friend and benefactor; all this, too, not on any ground of fact, but on an a.s.sumed probability that the crown will prove a sacrament of evil, and transform him into quite another man. A strange piece of casuistry indeed! but nowise unsuited to the spirit of a man who was to commit the gravest of crimes, purely from a misplaced virtue.

And yet the character of Brutus is full of beauty and sweetness. In all the relations of life he is upright, gentle, and pure; of a sensitiveness and delicacy of principle that cannot bosom the slightest stain; his mind enriched and fortified with the best extractions of philosophy; a man adorned with all the virtues which, in public and private, at home and in the circle of friends, win respect and charm the heart.

Being such a man, of course he could only do what he did under some sort of delusion. And so indeed it is. Yet this very delusion serves, apparently, to enn.o.ble and beautify him, as it takes him and works upon him through his virtues. At heart he is a real patriot, every inch of him. But his patriotism, besides being somewhat hidebound with patrician pride, is of the speculative kind, and dwells, where his whole character has been chiefly formed, in a world of poetical and philosophic ideals. He is an enthusiastic student of books. Plato is his favorite teacher; and he has studiously framed his life and tuned his thoughts to the grand and pure conceptions won from that all but divine source: Plato's genius walks with him in the Senate, sits with him at the fireside, goes with him to the wars, and still hovers about his tent.

His great fault, then, lies in supposing it his duty to be meddling with things that he does not understand. Conscious of high thoughts and just desires, but with no gift of practical insight, he is ill fitted to "grind among the iron facts of life." In truth, he does not really see where he is; the actual circ.u.mstances and tendencies amidst which he lives are as a book written in a language he cannot read. The characters of those who act with him are too far below the region of his principles and habitual thinkings for him to take the true cast of them. Himself incapable of such motives as govern them, he just projects and suspends his ideals in them, and then misreckons upon them as realizing the men of his own brain. So also he clings to the idea of the great and free republic of his fathers, the old Rome that has ever stood to his feelings touched with the consecrations of time and glorified with the high virtues that have grown up under her cherishing. But, in the long reign of tearing faction and civil butchery, that which he worships has been substantially changed, the reality lost. Caesar, already clothed with the t.i.tle and the power of Imperator for life, would change the form so as to agree with the substance, the name so as to fit the thing.

But Brutus is so filled with the idea of that which has thus pa.s.sed away never to return that he thinks to save or recover the whole by preventing such formal and nominal change.

And so his whole course is that of one acting on his own ideas, not on the facts that are before and around him. Indeed, he does not _see_ them; he merely dreams his own meaning into them. He is swift to do that by which he thinks his country _ought to be benefited_. As the killing of Caesar stands in his purpose, he and his a.s.sociates are to be "sacrificers, not butchers." But that the deed may have the effect he hopes for, his countrymen generally must regard it in the same light as he does. That they will do this is the very thing which he has _in fact_ no reason to conclude; notwithstanding, because it is so _in his idea_, therefore he trusts that the conspirators will "be called purgers, not murderers." Meanwhile, the plain truth is, that if his countrymen had been capable of regarding the deed as a sacrifice, they would not have made nor permitted any occasion for it. It is certain that, unless so construed, the act must prove fruitful of evil; all Rome is full of things proving that it cannot be so construed; but this is what Brutus has no eye to see.

So too, in his oration "to show the _reason_ of our Caesar's death," he speaks, in calm and dispa.s.sionate manner, just those things which he thinks ought to set the people right and himself right in their eyes, forgetting all the while that the deed cannot fail to make the people mad, and that popular madness is not a thing to be reasoned with. And for the same cause he insists on sparing Antony, and on permitting him to speak in Caesar's funeral. To do otherwise would be unjust, and so would overthrow the whole nature of the enterprise as it lives in his mind. And because in his idea it ought so to be, he trusts that Antony will make Caesar's death the occasion of strengthening those who killed him, not perceiving the strong likelihood, which soon pa.s.ses into a fact, that in cutting off Caesar they have taken away the only check on Antony's ambition. He ought to have foreseen that Antony, instead of being drawn to their side, would rather make love to Caesar's place at their expense.

Thus the course of Brutus serves no end but to set on foot another civil war, which naturally hastens and a.s.sures the very thing he sought to prevent. He confides in the goodness of his cause, not considering that the better the cause, the worse its chance with bad men. He thinks it safe to trust others because he knows they can safely trust him; the singleness of his own eye causing him to believe that others will see as he sees, the purity of his own heart, that others will feel as he feels.

Here then we have a strong instance of a very good man doing a very bad thing; and, withal, of a wise man acting most unwisely because his wisdom knew not its place; a right n.o.ble, just, heroic spirit bearing directly athwart the virtues he worships. On the whole, it is not wonderful that Brutus should have exclaimed, as he is said to have done, that he had worshiped virtue and found her at last but a shade. So worshiped, she may well prove a shade indeed! Admiration of the man's character, reprobation of his proceedings,--which of these is the stronger with us? And there is much the same irony in the representation of Brutus as in that of Caesar; only the order of it is here reversed. As if one should say, "O yes, yes! in the practical affairs of mankind your charming wisdom of the closet will doubtless put to shame the workings of mere practical insight and sagacity."

Shakespeare's exactness in the minutest details of character is well shown in the speech already referred to; which is the utterance of a man philosophizing most unphilosophically; as if the Academy should betake itself to the stump, and this too without any sense of the incongruity.

Plutarch has a short pa.s.sage which served as a hint, not indeed for the matter, but for the style of that speech. "They do note," says he, "in some of his epistles that he counterfeited that brief compendious manner of speech of the Lacedaemonians. As, when the war was begun, he wrote unto the Pergamenians in this sort: 'I understand you have given Dolabella money: if you have done it willingly, you confess you have offended me; if against your wills, show it then by giving me willingly.'... These were Brutus' manner of letters, which were honoured for their briefness." The speech in question is far enough indeed from being a model of style either for oratory or anything else, but it is finely characteristic; while its studied primness and epigrammatic finish contrast most unfavorably with the frank-hearted yet artful eloquence of Antony.

And what a rare significance attaches to the brief scene of Brutus and his drowsy boy Lucius in camp a little before the catastrophe! There, in the deep of the night, long after all the rest have lost themselves in sleep, and when the anxieties of the issue are crowding upon him,--there we have the earnest, thoughtful Brutus hungering intensely for the repasts of treasured thought.

Look, Lucius, here's the book I sought for so; I put it in the pocket of my gown. [IV, iii, 252, 253.]

What the man is, and where he ought to be, is all signified in these two lines. And do we not taste a dash of benignant irony in the implied repugnance between the spirit of the man and the stuff of his present undertaking? The idea of a bookworm riding the whirlwind of war! The thing is most like Brutus; but how out of his element, how unsphered from his right place, it shows him! There is a touch of drollery in the contrast, which the richest steeping of poetry does not disguise. And the irony is all the more delectable for being so remote and unp.r.o.nounced; like one of those choice arrangements in the background of a painting, which, without attracting conscious notice, give a zest and relish to what stands in front. The scene, whether for charm of sentiment or felicity of conception, is one of the finest in Shakespeare.

BRUTUS AND Ca.s.sIUS

The characters of Brutus and Ca.s.sius are nicely discriminated, scarce a word falling from either but what smacks of the man. Ca.s.sius is much the better conspirator, but much the worse man; and the better in that because the worse in this. For Brutus engages in the conspiracy on grounds of abstract and ideal justice; while Ca.s.sius holds it both a wrong and a blunder to go about such a thing without making success his first care. This, accordingly, is what he works for, being reckless of all other considerations in his choice and use of means. Withal he is more impulsive and quick than Brutus, because less under the self-discipline of moral principle. His motives, too, are of a much more mixed and various quality, because his habits of thinking and acting have grown by the measures of experience; he studies to understand men as they are; Brutus, as he thinks they ought to be. Hence, in every case where Brutus crosses him, Brutus is wrong, and he is right,--right, that is, if success be their aim. Ca.s.sius judges, and surely rightly, that the end should give law to the means; and that "the honorable men whose daggers have stabb'd Caesar" should not be hampered much with conscientious scruples.

Still Brutus overawes him by his moral energy and elevation of character, and by the open-faced rect.i.tude and purity of his principles.

Brutus has no thoughts or aims that he is afraid or ashamed to avow; Ca.s.sius has many which he would fain hide even from himself. And he catches a sort of inspiration and is raised above himself by contact with Brutus. And Ca.s.sius, moreover, acts very much from personal hatred of Caesar, as remembering how, not long before, he and Brutus had stood for the chief praetorship of the city, and Brutus through Caesar's favor had got the election. And so Shakespeare read in Plutarch that "Ca.s.sius, being a choleric man, and hating Caesar privately more than he did the tyranny openly, incensed Brutus against him." The effect of this is finely worked out by the dramatist in the man's affected scorn of Caesar, and in the scoffing humor in which he loves to speak of him. For such is the natural language of a masked revenge.

The tone of Ca.s.sius is further indicated, and with exquisite art, in his soliloquy where, after tempering Brutus to his purpose, and finding how his "honorable metal may be wrought," he gently slurs him for being practicable to flatteries, and then proceeds to ruminate the scheme for working upon his vanity, and thereby drawing him into the conspiracy; thus spilling the significant fact, that his own honor does not stick to practice the arts by which he thinks it is a shame to be seduced.

It is a noteworthy point also that Ca.s.sius is too practical and too much of a politician to see any ghosts. Acting on far lower principles than his leader, and such as that leader would spurn as both wicked and base, he therefore does no violence to his heart in s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g it to the work he takes in hand; his heart is even more at home in the work than his head; whereas Brutus, from the wrenching his heart has suffered, keeps reverting to the moral complexion of his first step. The remembrance of this is a thorn in his side; while Ca.s.sius has no sensibilities of nature for such compunctions to stick upon. Brutus is never thoroughly himself after the a.s.sa.s.sination; that his heart is ill at ease is shown in a certain dogged tenacity of honor and overstraining of rect.i.tude, as if he were struggling to make atonement with his conscience. The stab he gave Caesar planted in his own upright and gentle nature a germ of remorse, which, gathering strength from every subsequent adversity, came to embody itself in imaginary sights and sounds; the spirit of justice, made an ill angel to him by his own sense of wrong, hovering in the background of his after life, and haunting his solitary moments in the shape of Caesar's ghost. And so it is well done, that he is made to see the "monstrous apparition" just after his heart has been pierced through with many sorrows at hearing of Portia's shocking death.

PORTIA

The delineation of Portia is completed in a few brief masterly strokes.

Once seen, the portrait ever after lives an old and dear acquaintance of the reader's inner man. Portia has strength enough to do and suffer for others, but very little for herself. As the daughter of Cato and the wife of Brutus, she has set in her eye a pattern of how she ought to think and act, being "so father'd and so husbanded"; but still her head floats merged over the ears in her heart; and it is only when affection speaks that her spirit is hushed into the listening which she would fain yield only to the speech of reason. She has a clear idea of the stoical calmness and fort.i.tude which appears so n.o.ble and so graceful in her Brutus; it all lies faithfully reproduced in her mind; she knows well how to honor and admire it; yet she cannot work it into the texture of her character; she can talk it like a book, but she tries in vain to live it.

Plutarch gives one most touching incident respecting her which Shakespeare did not use, though he transfused the sense of it into his work. It occurred some time after Caesar's death, and when the civil war was growing to a head: "Brutus, seeing the state of Rome would be utterly overthrown, went ... unto the city of Elea standing by the sea.

There Portia, being ready to depart from her husband Brutus and to return to Rome, did what she could to dissemble the grief and sorrow she felt at her heart. But a certain painted table (picture) bewrayed her in the end.... The device was taken out of the Greek stories, how Andromache accompanied her husband Hector when he went out of the city of Troy to go to the wars, and how Hector delivered her his little son, and how her eyes were never off him. Portia, seeing this picture, and likening herself to be in the same case, she fell a-weeping; and coming thither oftentimes in a day to see it, she wept still." The force of this incident is reproduced in the Portia of the play; we have its full effect in the matter about her self-inflicted wound as compared with her subsequent demeanor.

Portia gives herself that gash without flinching, and bears it without a murmur, as an exercise and proof of fort.i.tude; and she translates her pains into smiles, all to comfort and support her husband. So long as this purpose lends her strength, she is fully equal to her thought, because here her heart keeps touch perfectly with her head. But, this motive gone, the weakness, if it be not rather the strength, of her woman's nature rushes full upon her; her feelings rise into an uncontrollable flutter, and run out at every joint and motion of her body; and nothing can arrest the inward mutiny till affection again whispers her into composure, lest she say something that may hurt or endanger her Brutus.

ANTONY

Shakespeare's completed characterization of Antony is in _Antony and Cleopatra_. In the later play Antony is delineated with his native apt.i.tudes for vice warmed into full development by the great Egyptian sorceress. In _Julius Caesar_ Shakespeare emphasizes as one of Antony's characteristic traits his unreserved adulation of Caesar, shown in reckless purveying to his dangerous weakness,--the desire to be called a king. Already Caesar had more than kingly power, and it was the obvious part of a friend to warn him against this ambition. Here and there are apt indications of his p.r.o.neness to those vicious levities and debasing luxuries which afterwards ripened into such a gigantic profligacy. He has not yet attained to that rank and full-blown combination of cruelty, perfidy, and voluptuousness, which the world a.s.sociates with his name, but he is plainly on the way to it. His profound and wily dissimulation, while knitting up the hollow truce with the a.s.sa.s.sins on the very spot where "great Caesar fell," is managed with admirable skill; his deep spasms of grief being worked out in just the right way to quench their suspicions, and make them run into the toils, when he calls on them to render him their b.l.o.o.d.y hands. Nor have they any right to complain, for he is but paying them in their own coin; and we think none the worse of him that he fairly outdoes them at their own practice.

But Antony's worst parts as here delivered are his exultant treachery in proposing to use his colleague Lepidus as at once the pack-horse and the scape-goat of the Triumvirate, and his remorseless savagery in arranging for the slaughter of all that was most ill.u.s.trious in Rome, bartering away his own uncle, to glut his revenge with the blood of Cicero; though even here his revenge was less hideous than the cold-blooded policy of young Octavius. Yet Antony has in the play, as he had in fact, some right n.o.ble streaks in him; for his character was a very mixed one; and there was to the last a fierce war of good and evil within him.

Especially he had an eye to see, a heart to feel, and a soul to honor the superb structure of manhood which Rome possessed in Julius Caesar, who stood to him, indeed, as a kind of superior nature, to raise him above himself. He "fear'd Caesar, honour'd him, and lov'd him"; and with the murdered Caesar for his theme, he was for once inspired and kindled to a rapture of the truest, n.o.blest, most overwhelming eloquence.

Noteworthy also is the grateful remembrance at last of his obligations to Brutus for having saved him from the daggers of the conspirators.

THE PEOPLE

That many-headed, but withal big-souled creature, the mult.i.tude, is charmingly characterized in _Julius Caesar_. The common people, it is true, are rather easily swayed hither and thither by the contagion of sympathy and of persuasive speech; yet their feelings are in the main right, and even their judgment in the long run is better than that of the pampered Roman aristocracy, inasmuch as it proceeds more from the instincts of manhood. Shakespeare evidently loved to play with the natural, unsophisticated, though somewhat childish heart of the people; but his playing is always genial and human-hearted, with a certain angelic humor in it that seldom fails to warm us towards the subject. On the whole, he understood the people well, and they have well repaid him in understanding him better than the critics have often done. The cobbler's droll humor, at the opening of this play, followed as it is by a strain of the loftiest poetry, is aptly noted by Campbell as showing that the dramatist, "even in dealing with cla.s.sical subjects, laughed at the cla.s.sic fear of putting the ludicrous and sublime into juxtaposition."

IX. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

As a whole, _Julius Caesar_ is inferior to _Coriola.n.u.s_, but it abounds in scenes and pa.s.sages fraught, with the highest virtue of Shakespeare's genius. Among these may be specially mentioned the second scene of the first act, where Ca.s.sius sows the seed of the conspiracy in Brutus's mind, warmed with such a wrappage of instigation as to a.s.sure its effective germination; also the first scene of the second act, unfolding the birth of the conspiracy, and winding up with the interview, so charged with domestic glory, of Brutus and Portia. The oration of Antony in Caesar's funeral is such an interfusion of art and pa.s.sion as realizes the very perfection of its kind. Adapted at once to the comprehension of the lowest mind and to the delectation of the highest, and running its pathos into the very quick of them that hear it, it tells with terrible effect on the people; and when it is done we feel that Caesar's bleeding wounds are mightier than ever his genius and fortune were. The quarrel of Brutus and Ca.s.sius is deservedly celebrated. Dr. Johnson thought it "somewhat cold and unaffecting."

Coleridge thought otherwise. See note, p. 123. But there is nothing in the play that is more divinely touched than the brief scene, already noticed, of Brutus and his boy Lucius--so gentle, so dutiful, so loving, so thoughtful and careful for his master, and yet himself no more conscious of his virtue than a flower of its fragrance. There is no more exquisite pa.s.sage in all Shakespeare than that which tells of the boy's falling asleep in the midst of his song and exclaiming on being aroused, "The strings, my lord, are false."

AUTHORITIES

(With the more important abbreviations used in the notes)

F1 = First Folio, 1623.