Julius CÆsar beside his Murderers and his Avenger.

A Study in Character-Grouping.

Every lover of art feels that the different fine arts form not a crowd but a family; the more familiar the mind becomes with them the more it delights to trace in them the application of common ideas to different media of expression. We are reminded of this essential unity by the way in which the arts borrow their terms from one another. 'Colour' is applied to music, 'tone' to painting; we speak of costume as 'loud,' of melody as 'bright,' of orchestration as 'massive.' Two classes of oratorical style have been distinguished as 'statuesque' and 'picturesque'; while the application of a musical term, 'harmony,' and a term of sculpture, 'relief,' to all the arts alike is so common that the transference is scarcely felt. Such usages are not the devices of a straitened vocabulary, but are significant of a single Art which is felt to underlie the special arts. So the more Drama is brought by criticism into the family of the fine arts the more it will be seen to present the common features. We have already had to notice repeatedly how the idea of pattern or design is the key to dramatic plot. We are in the present study to see how contrast of character, such as was traced in the last study between Lord and Lady Macbeth, when applied to a larger number of personages, produces an effect on the mind analogous to that of grouping in pictures and statuary: the different personages not only present points of contrast with one another, but their varieties suddenly fall into a unity of effect if looked at from some one point of view. The grouping in Julius CÆsar rests on the antithesis of the practical and inner life.An example of such Character-Grouping is seen in the play of Julius CÆsar, where the four leading figures, all on the grandest scale, have the elements of their characters thrown into relief by comparison with one another, and the contrast stands out boldly when the four are reviewed in relation to one single idea.

This idea is the same as that which lay at the root of the Character-Contrast in Macbeth—the antithesis of the practical and inner life. It is, however, applied in a totally different sphere. Instead of a simple age in which the lives coincide with the sexes we are carried to the other extreme of civilisation, the final age of Roman liberty, and all four personages are merged in the busy world of political life. Naturally, then, the contrast of the two lives takes in this play a different form. This takes the form of individual sympathies v. public policy.In the play of Macbeth the inner life was seen in the force of will which could hold down alike bad and good impulses; while the outer life was made interesting by its confinement to the training given by action, and an exhibition of it devoid of the thoughtfulness and self-control for which the life of activity has to draw upon the inner life. But there is another aspect in which the two may be regarded. The idea of the inner life is reflected in the word 'individuality,' or that which a man has not in common with others. The cultivation of the inner life implies not merely cultivation of our own individuality, but to it also belongs sympathy with the individuality of others; whereas in the sphere of practical life men fall into classes, and each person has his place as a member of these classes. Thus benevolence may take the form of enquiring into individual wants and troubles and meeting these by personal assistance; but a man has an equal claim to be called benevolent who applies himself to such sciences as political economy, studies the springs which regulate human society, and by influencing these in the right direction confers benefits upon whole classes at a time. Charity and political science are the two forms benevolence assumes correspondent to the inner life of individual sympathies and the outer life of public action. Or, if we consider the contrast from the side of rights as distinguished from duties, the supreme form in which the rights of individuals may be summed up is justice; the corresponding claim which public life makes upon us is (in the highest sense of the term) policy: wherever these two, justice and policy, seem to clash, the outer and inner life are brought into conflict. It is in this form that the conflict is raised in the play of Julius CÆsar. To get it in its full force, the dramatist goes to the world of antiquity, for one of the leading distinctions between ancient and modern society is that the modern world gives the fullest play to the individual, while in ancient systems the individual was treated as existing solely for the state. 'Liberty' has been a watchword in both ages; but while we mean by liberty the least amount of interference with personal activity, the liberty for which ancient patriots contended was freedom of the government from external or internal control, and the ideal republic of Plato was so contrived as to reduce individual liberty to a minimum. And this subordination of private to public was most fully carried out in Rome. 'The common weal,' says Merivale, 'was after all the grand object of the heroes of Roman story. Few of the renowned heroes of old had attained their eminence as public benefactors without steeling their hearts against the purest instincts of nature. The deeds of a Brutus or a Manlius, of a Sulla or a CÆsar, would have been branded as crimes in private citizens; it was the public character of the actors that stamped them with immortal glory in the eyes of their countrymen.' Accordingly, the opposition of outer and inner life is brought before us most keenly when, in Roman life, a public policy, the cause of republican freedom, seems to be bound up with the supreme crime against justice and the rights of the individual, assassination.

Brutus is the central figure of the group: in his character the two sides are so balanced that the antithesis disappears. This evenness of development in his nature is the thought of those who in the play gather around his corpse; giving prominence to the quality in Brutus hidden from the casual observer they say:

Of another it would be said that he was a poet, a philosopher; of Brutus the only true description was that he was a man! It is in very few characters that force and softness are each carried to such perfection. Force of his character. The strong side of Brutus's character is that which has given to the whole play its characteristic tone. It is seen in the way in which he appreciates the issue at stake. Weak men sin by hiding from themselves what it is they do; Brutus is fully alive to the foulness of conspiracy at the moment in which he is conspiring.

His high tone he carries into the darkest scenes of the play. The use of criminal means has usually an intoxicating effect upon the moral sense, and suggests to those once committed to it that it is useless to haggle over the amount of the crime until the end be obtained. ii. i. 162.Brutus resists this intoxication, setting his face against the proposal to include Antony in CÆsar's fate, and resolving that not one life shall be unnecessarily sacrificed. He scorns the refuge of suicide; and with warmth adjures his comrades not to stain—

The scale of Brutus's character is again brought out by his relations with other personages of the play. Casca, with all his cynical depreciation of others, has to bear unqualified testimony to Brutus's greatness:

We see Ligarius coming from a sick-bed to join in he knows not what: 'it sufficeth that Brutus leads me on.' And the hero's own thought, when at the point of death he pauses to take a moment's survey of his whole life, v. v. 34.is of the unfailing power with which he has swayed the hearts of all around him:

Above all, contact with Cassius throws into relief the greatness of Brutus. i. ii.At the opening of the play it is Cassius that we associate with the idea of force; but his is the ruling mind only while Brutus is hesitating; as soon as Brutus has thrown in his lot with the conspirators, Cassius himself is swept along with the current of Brutus's irresistible influence. Cf. ii. i. 162-190; iii. i. 140-146, 231-243; iv. iii. 196-225, &c.In the councils every point is decided—and, so far as success is concerned, wrongly decided—against Cassius's better judgment. In the sensational moment when Popilius Lena enters the Senate-house and is seen to whisper CÆsar, Cassius's presence of mind fails him, iii. i. 19.and he prepares in despair for suicide; Brutus retains calmness enough to watch faces:

In the Quarrel Scene Cassius has lost all pretensions to dignity of action in the impatience sprung from a ruined cause; Brutus maintains principle in despair. Finally, at the close of the scene, when it is discovered that under all the hardness of this contest for principle Brutus has been hiding a heart broken by the loss of Portia, iv. iii, from 145.Cassius is forced to give way and acknowledge Brutus's superiority to himself even in his own ideal of impassiveness:

The force in Brutus's character is obvious: it is rather its softer side that some readers find difficulty in seeing. But this difficulty is in reality a testimony to Shakespeare's skill, for Brutus is a Stoic, and what gentleness we see in him appears in spite of himself. It may be seen in his culture of art, music, and philosophy, which have such an effect in softening the manners. Nor is this in the case of the Roman Brutus a mere conventional culture: these tastes are among his strongest passions. iv. iii. 256.When all is confusion around him on the eve of the fatal battle he cannot restrain his longing for the refreshing tones of his page's lyre; and, the music over, he takes up his philosophical treatise at the page he had turned down. iv. iii. 242.Again Brutus's considerateness for his dependants is in strong contrast with the harshness of Roman masters. On the same eve of the battle he insists that the men who watch in his tent shall lie down instead of standing as discipline would require. iv. iii, from 252.An exquisite little episode brings out Brutus's sweetness of demeanour in dealing with his youthful page; this rises to womanly tenderness at the end when, noticing how the boy, wearied out and fallen asleep, is lying in a position to injure his instrument, he rises and disengages it without waking him.

Brutus's relations with Portia bear the same testimony. Portia is a woman with as high a spirit as Lady Macbeth, and she can inflict a wound on herself to prove her courage and her right to share her husband's secrets. But she lacks the physical nerve of Lady Macbeth; ii. iv.her agitation on the morning of the assassination threatens to betray the conspirators, and when these have to flee from Rome the suspense is too much for her and she commits suicide. Brutus knew his wife better than she knew herself, and was right in seeking to withhold the fatal confidence; yet he allowed himself to be persuaded: no man would be so swayed by a tender woman unless he had a tender spirit of his own. In all these ways we may trace an extreme of gentleness in Brutus. This is concealed under stoic imperturbability.But it is of the essence of his character that this softer side is concealed behind an imperturbability of outward demeanour that belongs to his stoic religion: this struggle between inward and outward is the main feature for the actor to bring out. iii. ii, from 14.It is a master stroke of Shakespeare that he utilises the euphuistic prose of his age to express impassiveness in Brutus's oration. The greatest of the world has just been assassinated; the mob are swaying with fluctuating passions; the subtlest orator of his day is at hand to turn those passions into the channel of vengeance for his friend: Brutus called on amid such surroundings to speak for the conspirators still maintains the artificial style of carefully balanced sentences, such as emotionless rhetoric builds up in the quiet of a study.

Brutus's nature then is developed on all its sides; in his character the antithesis of the outer and inner life disappears. It reappears, however, in the action; ii. i. 10-85.for Brutus is compelled to balance a weighty issue, with public policy on the one side, and on the other, not only justice to individual claims, but further the claims of friendship, which is one of the fairest flowers of the inner life. And the balance dips to the wrong side. If the question were of using the weapon of assassination against a criminal too high for the ordinary law to reach, this would be a moral problem which, however doubtful to modern thought, would have been readily decided by a Stoic. But the question which presented itself to Brutus was distinctly not this. ii. i. 18-34.Shakespeare has been careful to represent Brutus as admitting to himself that CÆsar has done no wrong: he slays him for what he might do.

It is true that Shakespeare, with his usual 'dramatic hedging,' softens down this immoral bias in a great hero by representing him as both a Roman, of the nation which beyond all other nations exalted the state over the individual, and a Brutus, compare i. ii. 159.representative of the house which had risen to greatness by leading violence against tyranny. But, Brutus's own conscience being judge, the man against whom he moves is guiltless; and so the conscious sacrifice of justice and friendship to policy is a fatal error which is source sufficient for the whole tragedy of which Brutus is the hero.

The character of CÆsar is one of the most difficult in Shakespeare. Under the influence of some of his speeches we find ourselves in the presence of one of the master spirits of mankind; other scenes in which he plays a leading part breathe nothing but the feeblest vacillation and weakness. It is the business of Character-Interpretation to harmonise this contradiction; it is not interpretation at all to ignore one side of it and be content with describing CÆsar as vacillating. The force and strength of his character is seen in the impression he makes upon forceful and strong men. The attitude of Brutus to CÆsar seems throughout to be that of looking up; and notably at one point the thought of CÆsar's greatness seems to cast a lurid gleam over the assassination plot itself, and Brutus feels that the grandeur of the victim gives a dignity to the crime:

The strength and force of Antony again no one will question; and Antony, at the moment when he is alone with the corpse of CÆsar and can have no motive for hypocrisy, apostrophises it in the words—

And we see enough of CÆsar in the play to bear out the opinions of Brutus and Antony. Those who accept vacillation as sufficient description of CÆsar's character must explain his strong speeches as vaunting and self-assertion. But surely it must be possible for dramatic language to distinguish between the true and the assumed force; and equally surely there is a genuine ring in the speeches in which CÆsar's heroic spirit, shut out from the natural sphere of action in which it has been so often proved, leaps restlessly at every opportunity into pregnant words. We may thus feel certain of his lofty physical courage.

A man must have felt the thrill of courage in search of its food, danger, before his self-assertion finds language of this kind in which to express itself. In another scene we have the perfect fortiter in re and suaviter in modo of the trained statesman exhibited in the courtesy with which CÆsar receives the conspirators, ii. ii, from 57.combined with his perfect readiness to 'tell graybeards the truth.' iii. i. 35.Nor could imperial firmness be more ideally painted than in the way in which CÆsar 'prevents' Cimber's intercession.

Commonplace authority loudly proclaims that it will never relent: the true imperial spirit feels it a preliminary condition to see first that it never does wrong.

It is the antithesis of the outer and inner life that explains this contradiction in CÆsar's character. Like Macbeth, he is the embodiment of one side and one side only of the antithesis; he is the complete type of the practical—though in special qualities he is as unlike Macbeth as his age is unlike Macbeth's age. Accordingly CÆsar appears before us perfect up to the point where his own personality comes in. The military and political spheres, in which he has been such a colossal figure, call forth practical powers, and do not involve introspection and meditation on foundation principles of thought.

The tasks of the soldier and the statesman are imposed upon them by external authority and necessities, and the faculties exercised are those which shape means to ends. But at last CÆsar comes to a crisis that does involve his personality; he attempts a task imposed on him by his own ambition. He plays in a game of which the prize is the world and the stake himself, and to estimate chances in such a game tests self-knowledge and self-command to its depths. but lacking in the inner life.How wanting CÆsar is in the cultivation of the inner life is brought out by his contrast with Cassius. i. ii. 100-128.The incidents of the flood and the fever, retained by the memory of Cassius, illustrate this. The first of these was no mere swimming-match; the flood in the Tiber was such as to reduce to nothing the difference between one swimmer and another. i. ii. 102.It was a trial of nerve: and as long as action was possible CÆsar was not only as brave as Cassius, but was the one attracted by the danger. Then some chance wave or cross current renders his chance of life hopeless, and no buffeting with lusty sinews is of any avail; that is the point at which the passive courage born of the inner life comes in, and gives strength to submit to the inevitable in calmness. This CÆsar lacks, and he calls for rescue: Cassius would have felt the water close over him and have sunk to the bottom and died rather than accept aid from his rival. In like manner the sick bed is a region in which the highest physical and intellectual activity is helpless; the trained self-control of a Stoic may have a sphere for exercise even here; but the god CÆsar shakes, and cries for drink like a sick girl. The conception brought out by personal contact with Cassius.It is interesting to note how the two types of mind, when brought into personal contact, jar upon one another's self-consciousness. The intellectual man, judging the man of action by the test of mutual intercourse, sees nothing to explain the other's greatness, and wonders what people find in him that they so admire him and submit to his influence. On the other hand, the man of achievement is uneasily conscious of a sort of superiority in one whose intellectual aims and habits he finds it so difficult to follow—yet superiority it is not, for what has he done? i. ii. 182-214.Shakespeare has illustrated this in the play by contriving to bring CÆsar and his suite across the 'public place' in which Cassius is discoursing to Brutus. Cassius feels the usual irritation at being utterly unable to find in his old acquaintance any special qualities to explain his elevation.

Similarly CÆsar, as he casts a passing glance at Cassius, becomes at once uneasy. 'He thinks too much,' is the exclamation of the man of action:

The practical man, accustomed to divide mankind into a few simple types, is always uncomfortable at finding a man he cannot classify. Finally there is a climax to the jealousy that exists between the two lives: CÆsar complains that Cassius 'looks quite through the deeds of men.'

There is another circumstance to be taken into account in explaining the weakness of CÆsar. A change has come over the spirit of Roman political life itself—such seems to be Shakespeare's conception: CÆsar on his return has found Rome no longer the Rome he had known. Before he left for Gaul, Rome had been the ideal sphere for public life, the arena in which principles alone were allowed to combat, and from which the banishment of personal aims and passions was the first condition of virtue. In his absence Rome has gradually degenerated; the mob has become the ruling force, and introduced an element of uncertainty into political life; politics has passed from science into gambling. A new order of public men has arisen, of which Cassius and Antony are the types; personal aims, personal temptations, and personal risks are now inextricably interwoven with public action. This is a changed order of things to which the mind of CÆsar, cast in a higher mould, lacks the power to adapt itself. His vacillation is the vacillation of unfamiliarity with the new political conditions. i. ii. 230.He refuses the crown 'each time gentler than the other,' showing want of decisive reading in dealing with the fickle mob; i. ii. 183.and on his return from the Capitol he is too untrained in hypocrisy to conceal the angry spot upon his face; he has tried to use the new weapons which he does not understand, and has failed. ii. i. 195.It is a subtle touch of Shakespeare's to the same effect that CÆsar is represented as having himself undergone a change of late: