The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 38

_First Sen_. _Then_, WORTHY _Marcius_, Attend upon Cominius to these wars.

It is the relation of the spirit of military conquest, the relation of the military hero, and his government, to the true human need, which is subjected to criticism here; a criticism which is necessarily an after-thought in the natural order of the human development.

The transition 'from the casque to the cushion,' that so easy step in the heroic ages, whether it be 'an entrance by conquest,' foreign or otherwise, or whether the chieftain's own followers bring him home in triumph, and the people, whose battle he has won, conduct him to their chair of state, in either case, that transition appears, to this author's eye, worth going back, and looking into a little, in an age so advanced in civilization, as the one in which he finds himself.

For though he is, as any one who will take any pains to inquire, may easily satisfy himself,--the master in chief of the new science of nature,--and the deepest in its secrets of any, his views on that subject appear to be somewhat broader, his aspirations altogether of another kind, from those, to which his school have since limited themselves. He does not content himself with pinning b.u.t.terflies and hunting down beetles; his scientific curiosity is not satisfied with cla.s.sifying ferns and lichens, and ascertaining the proper historical position of pudding-stone and sand-stone, and in settling the difference between them and their neighbours. Nature is always, in all her varieties wonderful, and all 'her infinite book of secrecy,' that book which all the world had overlooked till he came, was to his eye, from the first, a book of spells, of magic lore, a Prospero book of enchantments. He would get the key to her cipher, he would find the lost alphabet of her unknown tongue; there is no page of her composing in which he would scorn to seek it--none which he would scorn to read with it: but then he has, notwithstanding, some _choice_ in his studies. He is of the opinion that some subjects are n.o.bler than others, and that those which concern specially the human kind, have a special claim to their regard, and the secret of those combinations which result in the varieties of sh.e.l.l-fish, and other similar orders of being, do _not_ exclusively, or chiefly, engage his attention.

There is another natural curiosity, which strikes the eye of the founder of the Science of Nature, as quite the most curious and wonderful thing going, so far, at least, as his observation has extended, though he is willing to make, as he takes pains to state, philosophical allowance for the partiality of species in determining this judgment, and is perfectly willing to concede, that if any particular species of sh.e.l.l-fish, for instance, were to undertake a science of things in general, that particular species would, no doubt, occupy the princ.i.p.al place in that system; especially if arts, tending to the improvement and elevation of it, were necessarily based on this larger specific knowledge.

Men, and their proceedings and organisms, men, and their habits and modes of combining, did appear to the eye of this scientific observer quite as well worth observing and noting, also, as bees and beavers, for instance, and their societies; and, accordingly, he made some observations himself, and notes, too, in this particular department of his general science. For, as he tells us elsewhere, he did not wish to map out the large fields of the science of observation in general, and exhibit to the world, in bare description, the method of it, without leaving some specimens of his own, of what might be done with it, in proper hands, under favourable circ.u.mstances, selecting for his experiments the princ.i.p.al and n.o.blest subjects--those of the most immediate human concern. And he has not only very carefully laboured a few of these; but he has taken extraordinary pains to preserve them to us in their proper scientific form, with just as little of the ligature of the time on them as it was possible to leave.

It is no kind of beetle or b.u.t.terfly, then, that this philosopher comes down upon here from the heights of his universal science--his science of the nature of things in general, but that great Spenserian monstrosity,--that diseased product of nature, which individual human nature, in spite of its natural pettiness and helplessness, under certain favourable conditions of absorption and accretion, may be made to yield. It is that dragon of lawless power which was overspreading, in his time, all the common human affairs, and infolding in its gaudy, baleful wings all the life of men,--it is that which takes from the first the speculative eye of this new speculator,--this founder of the science of things, and not of words instead of them. Here is a man of science, a born naturalist, who understands that _this_ phenomenon lies in his department, and takes it to be his business, among other things, to examine it.

It was, indeed, a formidable phenomenon, as it presented itself to his apprehension; and his own words are always the best, when one knows how to read them--

'He sits in state, like a thing made for Alexander.' 'When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading.'

'He talks like a knell, his hum is a battery; what he bids be done, is finished at his bidding. He wants nothing of a G.o.d but eternity, and _a heaven_ to throne in.' 'Yes,' is the answer; 'yes, _mercy_, if you paint him truly.' 'I paint him in character.'

'Is it possible that so short a time can alter the conditions of a _man_?' inquires the speculator upon this phenomenon, and then comes the reply--'There's a differency between a grub and a b.u.t.terfly, yet _your b.u.t.terfly was a grub. This Marcius is grown from_ MAN TO DRAGON; he has wings, he is more than a creeping thing.'

This is Coriola.n.u.s at the head of his army; but in Julius Caesar, it is nature in the wildness of the tempest--it is a night of unnatural horrors, that is brought in by the Poet to ill.u.s.trate the enormity of the evil he deals with, and its unnatural character--'to serve as instrument 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?

[I paint him in character.]

_Ca.s.sius_. Let it be--WHO IT IS: _For Romans now_ Have thewes and limbs like to their ancestors.'

CHAPTER IV.

POLITICAL RETROSPECT.

'I think he'll be to Rome As is the osprey to the fish, who _takes_ it By sovereignty of nature.'

FLOWER OF WARRIORS

The poet finds, indeed, this monstrosity full-blown in his time. He finds it 'in the civil streets,' 'talking plain cannon', 'humming batteries' in the most unmistakeable manner, with no particular account of its origin to give, without, indeed, appearing to recollect exactly how it came there, retaining only a general impression, that a descent from the celestial regions had, in some way, been effected during some undated period of human history, under circ.u.mstances which the memory of man was not expected to be able to recall in detail, and a certificate to that effect, divinely subscribed, was understood to be included among its properties, though it does not appear to have been, on the face of it, so absolutely conclusive as to render a little logical demonstration, on the part of royalty itself, superfluous.

It was not very far from this time, that a very able and loyal servant of the crown undertook, openly, to a.s.sist the royal memory on this delicate point; and, though the details of that historical representation, and the manner of it, are, of course, quite different from those of the Play, it will be found, upon careful examination, not so dissimilar in purport as the exterior would have seemed to imply. The philosopher does not feel called upon, in either case, to begin by contradicting flatly, in so many words, the theory which he finds the received one on that point. Even the _poet_, with all his freedom, is compelled to go to work after another fashion.

'And _thus_ do we, of wisdom, and of reach, With _windla.s.ses_, and with a.s.sAYS of BIAS, By indirections find directions out.'

He has his own way of creating an historical retrospect. No one need know that it _is_ a retrospect; no one will know it, perhaps, who has not taken the author's clue elsewhere. The crisis is already reached when the play begins. The collision between the civil want and the military government is at its height. It is a revolution on which the curtain rises. It is a city street filled with dark, angry swarms of men, who have come forth to seek out this government, in the person of its chief, who stop only to conduct their summary trial of it, and then hurry on to execute their verdict.

But the poet arrests this revolution. Before we proceed any further, 'Hear _me_ speak,' he cries, through the lips of the plebeian leader.

The man of science demands a hearing, before this movement proceed any further. He has a longer story to tell than that with which Menenius Agrippa appeases his Romans. There is a cry of war in the streets. The obscure background of that portentous scene opens, and the long vista of the heroic ages, with all its pomp and stormy splendours, scene upon scene, grows luminous behind it. The foreground is the same. The arrested mutineers stand there still, with the frown knit in their angry brows, with the weapons of their civil warfare in their hands; there is no stage direction for a change of costume, and none perceives that they have grown older as they stand, and that the shadow of the elder time is on them. But the manager of this stage is one who knows that the elder time of history is the childhood of his kind.

There is a cry of war in that ancient street. The enemy of the infant state is in arms. The people rush forth to conflict with the leader of armies at their head. But this time, for the first time in the history of literature, the philosopher goes with him. The philosopher, hitherto, has been otherwise occupied. He has been too busy with his fierce war of words; he has had too much to do with his abstract generals, his logical majors and minors, to get them in squadrons and right forms of war, to have any eye for such vulgar solidarities. 'All men are mortal. Peter and John are men. Therefore Peter and John are mortal,' he concludes; but that is his nearest and most vivacious approach to historical particulars, and his cell is broad enough to contain all that he needs for his processes and ends. He finds enough and to spare, ready prepared to his hands, in the casual, rude, unscientific observations and spontaneous distinctions of the vulgar.

His generalizations are obtained from their hasty abstractions. It has never occurred to him, till now, that he must begin with criticising these _terms_; that he must begin by making a new and scientific terminology, which shall correspond to _terms in nature_, and not be air-lines merely;--that he must take pains to collect them himself, from severest scrutiny of particulars, before ever he can arrive at 'the notions of nature,' the universal notions, which differ from the spontaneous specific notions of men, and their chimeras; before ever he can put man into his true relations with nature, before ever he can teach him to speak the word which she responds to,--the words of her dictionary--the word which is _power_.

This is, in fact, the first time that the philosopher has undertaken to go abroad. It is the first time he has ever been in the army.

Softly, invisibly, he goes. There is nothing to show that he is there.

As modestly, as unnoticed, as the Times 'own correspondent,' amid all the clang and tumult, the pomp and circ.u.mstance of glorious war, he goes. But he is there notwithstanding. There is no breath of scholasticism, no perfume of the cell, that the most vigorous and robust can perceive, in his battle. The scene unwinds with all its fierce reality, undimmed by the pale cast of thought: the shout is as wild, the din as fearful, the martial fury rises, as if the old heroic poet had it still in hand.

But it is not the poet's voice that you hear, bursting forth into those rhythmical ecstasies of heroic pa.s.sion,--unless that faint tone of exaggeration,--that slight prolonging of it, be his. That mad joy in human blood, that wolfish glare, that lights the hero's eye, gets no reflection in his: those fiendish boasts are not from _his_ lips.

Through all the frenzy of that demoniacal scene, he is still himself, with all his _human_ sense about him. Through all the crowded incidents of that day of blood--into which he condenses, with dramatic license, the siege and a.s.sault of the city, the conquest and plunder of it, and the conflict in the open field,--he is keeping watch on his hero. He is eyeing him, and sketching him, as critically as if he were indeed an entomological or botanical specimen. He is making a specimen of him, for scientific purposes,--not 'a preservation,'--he does not think much of dried specimens in science. He proposes to dismiss the logical Peter and John, and the logical man himself, that abstract notion which the metaphysicians have been at loggerheads about so long. It is the true heroism,--it is the sovereign flower which he is in search of. This specimen that he is taking here will, indeed, go by the board. He is taking him on his negative table. But for _that_ purpose,--in order to get him on his 'table of rejections,' it is necessary to take him _alive_. The question is of government, of supreme power, and universal _suffrage_, of the abnegation of reason, of the annihilation of judgment, in behalf of a superiority which has been understood, heretofore, to admit of _no_ question. The question is of awe and reverence, and worship, and submission. The Poet has to put his sacrilegious hand through the dust that lies on antique time, through the sanct.i.ty of prescription and time-honoured usage, through 'mountainous error' 'too highly heaped for truth to overpeer,' in order to make this point in his scientific table. And he wishes to blazon it a little. He will pin up this old exploded hero--this legacy of barbaric ages, to the ages of human advancement--in all his actualities, in all the heroic splendours of his original, without 'diminishing one dowle that's in his plume.'

But this retrospect has not yet reached its limit. It is not enough to go back, in the unravelling of this business, to the full-grown hero on the field of victory. 'For that which, in speculative philosophy, corresponds to the cause in practical philosophy becomes the rule;'

and it is the Cure of the Common Weal, which the poet is proposing, and having determined to proceed specially against Caius Marcius, or against him _first_, he undertakes now to 'delve him to the root.' We are already on the battle field; but before ever a stroke is struck _there_, before he will attempt to show us the instinct of the warrior in his _game_,--'he is a lion that I am proud to hunt,'--when all is ready and just as the hunt is going to begin, he steals softly back to Rome; he unlocks the hero's private dwelling, he lays open to us the secrets of that domestic hearth, the secrets of that nursery in which his hero had had his training; he shows us the b.r.e.a.s.t.s from which he drew that martial fire; he produces the woman alive who sent him to that field. [Act 1, Scene 3. _An apartment in the martial chieftain's house; two women, 'on two low stools, sewing_.' 'There is where your throne begins, whatever it be.'] In that exquisite relief which the natural graces of youth and womanhood provide for it, in the young, gentle, feminine wife, desolate in her husband's absence, starting at the rumour of news from the camp, and driving back from her appalled conception, the images which her mother-in-law's fearful speech suggests to her,--in that so beautiful relief, comes out the picture of the Roman matron, the woman in whom the martial instincts have been educated and the gentler ones repressed, by the common sentiments of her age and nation, the woman in whom the common standard of virtue, the conventional virtue of her time, has annihilated the wife and the mother.

_Virgilia_. Had he died in the business, madam, what then?

_Volumnia_. Then his good report should have been my son, _I therein would have found issue_.

It is the multiplied force of a common instinct in the nation, it is the pride of conquest in a whole people, erected into the place of virtue and usurping all its sanct.i.ty, which has entered this woman's nature and reformed its yielding principles. It is the _Martial_ Spirit that has subdued her, for she is virtuous and religious. It is her people's G.o.d to whom she has borne her son, and in his temple she has reared him.

But the poet is not satisfied with all this. It is not enough to introduce us to the hero's mother and permit us to listen to her confidential account of his birth and training. He will produce the little Coriola.n.u.s himself--Coriola.n.u.s in germ--he will show us the rudiments of those instincts, which his unscientific education has stimulated into such monstrous 'o'ergrowth' (but _not_ enlightened), so that the hero on the battle-field who is winning there the oaken crown, which he will transmit if he can to his posterity, is only, after all, a boy overgrown,--a boy with his _boyishness unnaturally prolonged by his culture_,--the impersonation of the childishness of a childish time,--the crowned impersonation of the instinct which is SOVEREIGN in an age of instinct. He shows us the drum and the sword in the nursery, and the boy who would rather look at the military parade than his schoolmaster;--he shows us the little viperous egg of a hero torturing and tearing the b.u.t.terfly, with his 'confirmed countenance, in one of his father's moods.'

Surely we have reached 'the grub' at last, 'the creeping thing' that will have one day imperial armies in its wings. And we return from this little excursion to the field again, in time for the battle; and when we see the tiger in the man let loose _there_, and the boy's father comes out in one of his _own_ moods, that we may note it the better; we begin to observe where we are in the human history, and what age of the Advancement of Learning it is that this poet is driving at so stedfastly, and trying to get dated; and whether it is indeed one from which the advancing ages of Learning can accept the bourne of the human wisdom, the limit of that advance.

'And to speak _truly_ [and that after all _is_ the best way of speaking] _Antiquitas seculi juventus mundi_.'

'Those times are the ancient times, when the _world_ is ancient and not those we account ancient by a computation _backward_ from _ourselves_.'--_Advancement of Learning_. But that was put down in a book in which we have only general statements, very wise indeed, and both new and true, most exactly true, but not ready for practice, as the author stops to tell us, and it is practice he is aiming at. That is from a book in which we have only 'the husks and sh.e.l.ls of sciences, _all the kernel_ being forced out,' as the author informs us, 'by the _torture and press_ of the method.' But it was a method which saved them, notwithstanding. This is the book that contains the 'nuts,' and _this_ is the kernel that goes in that particular sh.e.l.l or a corner of it, '_Antiquitas seculi juventus mundi_.'

There, on the spot, he shows us the process by which a king,--an historic king,--is made. He detects and brings out and blazons, the moment in which the inequality of fortune begins, in the division of the spoils of victory. His hero is _not_, as he takes pains to tell us, covetous,--_unless_ it be a sin to covet honour, if it be, he is the most offending soul alive;--it is because he is not mercenary, that his soldiers will enrich him. The poet shows us where the throne begins, and the machinery of that engine which the earth shrinks from when it moves. On his stage, it is the moment in which, the soldiers raise their victorious leader from his feet, and carry him in triumph above them. We are there at the ceremony, for this is selected, illuminated history; this, too, is what he calls 'visible history,'

but amid all those martial acclamations and plaudits, the philosopher contrives to get in a word.

'He that has effected his _good will_, has o'ertaken my act.'

From the field he tracks his hero to the chair of state. First we have the news of the victory in the city, and its effect:--

'I'll report it Where _senators_ shall mingle tears with smiles; Where great _patricians_ shall attend, and _shrug_; I' the end admire; where ladies shall be frighted, And, gladly quaked, hear more; where the _dull tribunes_, That, with the fusty plebeians, hate thine honours, Shall say against their hearts, We thank the G.o.ds _Our Rome_ hath such a soldier.'

Then we have the hero's return--the conqueror's reception; first in the city whose battle he has won, and afterwards his reception in the city he has conquered. Here is the latter:--

'Your native town _you_ entered _like a post_, And had no welcomes home; but he returns, Splitting the air with noises.

And _patient fools_, _Whose children he hath slain, their base throats tear_ WITH GIVING HIM GLORY.'

'A goodly city is this Antium! City, 'Tis _I_ that made thy widows; many an heir Of _these fair edifices, 'fore my wars_ Have I heard groan and droop. Then know me not, Lest that thy wives with spits, and boys with stones, In _puny battle slay me_.' [--_know me not--lest_--'

'Let us kill him, and we will have _corn_, at our own price.']

But the Poet does not forget that it is the proof of the military virtue, as well as the history of the military power, that he has undertaken; 'the touch of its n.o.bility,' as he himself words it. He is trying it by his own exact scientific standard; he is putting the test to it which the new philosophy, which is the philosophy of nature, authorises.