The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

But the cry of the enemy is heard without; and this same principle, which shows itself in such questionable proofs of love at home, becomes with the change of circumstances – patriotism. But the Poet does not lose sight of its identity under this change. This love, that looks so like hatred in the Roman streets, that sniffs there so haughtily at questions about corn, and the price of 'coals,' and the price of labour, while it loves Rome so madly at the Volscian gates – this love, that sneers at the hunger and misery of the commons at home, while it makes such frantic demonstrations against the common enemy abroad, appears to him to be a very questionable kind of love, to say the least of it.

In that fine, conspicuous specimen of this quality, which the hero of his story offers him – this quality which the hostilities of nations deify – he undertakes to sift it a little. While in the name of that virtue which has at least the merit of comprehending and conserving a larger unity, a more extensive whole, than the limit of one's own personality, 'it runs reeking o'er the lives of men, as 'twere a perpetual spoil'; while under cover of that name which in barbaric ages limits human virtue, and puts down upon the map the outline of it – the bound which human greatness and virtue is required to come out to; while in the name of country it shows itself 'from face to foot a thing of blood, whose every motion is timed with dying cries,' undaunted by the tragic sublimities of the scene, this Poet confronts it, and boldly identifies it as that same principle of state and nobility which he has already exhibited at home.

That sanguinary passion which the heat of conflict provokes is but the incident; it is the principle of acquisition, it is the natural principle of absorption, it is the instinct that nature is full of, that nature is alive with; but the one that she is at war with, too – at war with in the parts – one that she is forever opposed to, and conquering in the members, with her mathematical axioms – with her law of the whole, of 'the worthier whole,' of 'the greater congregation'; it is that principle of acquisition which it is the business of the state to set bounds to in the human constitution – which gets branded with other names, very vulgar ones, too, when the faculty of grasp and absorption is smaller. That, and none other, is the principle which predominates, and is set at large here. The leashed 'dog' of the commonalty at home, is let slip here in the conquered town. The teeth that preyed on the Roman weal there, have elongated and grown wolfish on the Volscian fields. The consummation of the captor's deeds in the captured city – those matchless deeds of valor – the consummation for Coriolanus in Corioli, for 'the conqueror in the conquest,' is – 'NOW ALL'S HIS.' And the story of the battle without is – 'He never stopped to ease his breast with panting, till he could call both field and city – OURS.'

The Poet sets down nought in malice, but he will have the secret of this LOVE, he will have the heart out of it – this love that stops so short with geographic limits, – that changes with the crossing of a line into a demon from the lowest pit.

But it is a fair and noble specimen, it is a highly-qualified, 'illustrious instance,' of this instinctive heroic virtue, he has seized on here, and made ready now for his experiment; and even when he brings him in, reeking from the fresh battlefield, with the blood undried on his brow, rejoicing in his harvest, even amid the horrors of the conquered town, this Poet, with his own ineffable and matchless grace of moderation, will have us pause and listen while his Coriolanus, ere he will take food or wine in his Corioli, gives orders that the Volscian who was kind to him personally – the poor man at whose house he lay – shall be saved, when he is so weary with slaying Volscians that 'his very memory is tired,' and he cannot speak his poor friend's name.

He tracks this conqueror home again, and he watches him more sharply than ever – this man, whose new name is borrowed from his taken town. CORIOLANUS of CORIOLI. Marcius, plain Caius Marcius, now no more. He will think it treason – even in the conquered city he will resent it – if any presume to call him by that petty name henceforth, or forget for a breathing space to include in his identity the town – the town, that in its sacked and plundered streets, and dying cries – that, with that 'painting' which he took from it so lavishly, though he scorned the soldiers who took 'spoons' – has clothed him with his purple honours: those honours which this Poet will not let him wear any longer, tracked in the misty outline of the past, or in the misty complexity of the unanalysed conceptions of the vulgar, the fatal unscientific opinion of the many-headed many; that old coat of arms, which the man of science will trace now anew (and not here only) with his new historic pencil, which he will fill now anew – not here only – which he will fill on another page also, 'approaching his particular more near' – with all its fresh, recent historic detail, with all its hideous, barbaric detail.

He is jealous, – this new Poet of his kind, – he is jealous of this love that makes such work in Volscian homes, in Volscian mother's sons, under this name, 'that men sanctify, and turn up the white of the eyes to.' He flings out suspicions on the way home, that it is even narrower than it claims to be: he is in the city before it; he contrives to jet a jar into the sound of the trumpets that announce its triumphant entry; he has thrown over all the glory of its entering pageant, the suspicion that it is base and mercenary, that it is base and avaricious, though it puts nothing in its pocket, but takes its hire on its brows.

Menenius. Brings a victory in his pocket. Volumnia. On's brows Menenius.

He surprises the mother counting up the cicatrices. He arrests the cavalcade on its way to the Capitol, and bids us note, in those private whispers of family confidence, how the Camp and the Capitol stand in this hero's chart, put down on the road to 'our own house.' Nay, he will bring out the haughty chieftain in person, and show him on his stage, standing in his 'wolfish gown,' showing the scars that he should hide, and asking, like a mendicant, for his hire. And though he does it proudly enough, and as if he did not care for this return, though he sets down his own services, and expects the people to set them down, to a disinterested love for his country, it is to this Poet's purpose to show that he was mistaken as to that. It is to his purpose to show that these two so different things which he finds confounded under one name and notion in the popular understanding here, and, what is worst of all, in the practical understanding of the populace, are two, and not one. That the mark of the primal differences, the original differences, the difference of things, the simplicity of nature herself divides them, makes two of them, two, – not one. He has caught one of those rude, vulgar notions here, which he speaks of elsewhere so often, those notions which make such mischief in the human life, and he is severely separating it – he is separating the martial virtue – from the true heroism, 'with the mind, that divine fire.' He is separating this kind of heroism from that cover under which it insinuates itself into governments, with which it makes its most bewildering claim to the popular approbation.

He is bound to show that the true love of the common-weal, that principle which recognises and embraces the weal of others as its own, that principle which enters into and constitutes each man's own noblest life, is a thing of another growth and essence, a thing which needs a different culture from any that the Roman Volumnia could give it, a culture which unalytic, barbaric ages – wanting in all the scientific arts – could not give it.

He will show, in a conspicuous instance, what that kind of patriotism amounts to, in the man who aspires to 'the helm o' the State,' while there is yet no state within himself, while the mere instincts of the lower nature have, in their turn, the sway and sovereignty in him. He will show what that patriotism amounts to in one so schooled, when the hire it asks so disdainfully is withheld. And he will bring out this point too, as he brings out all the rest, in that large, scenic, theatric, illuminated lettering, which this popular design requires, and which his myth furnishes him, ready to his hand. He will have his 'transient hieroglyphics,' his tableaux vivants, his 'dumb-shows' to aid him here also, because this, too, is for the spectators – this, too, is for the audience whose eyes are more learned than their ears.

It is a natural hero, one who achieves his greatness, and not one who is merely born great, whom the Poet deals with here. 'He has that in his face which men love —authority.' 'As waves before a vessel under sail, so men obey him and fall below his stern.' The Romans have stripped off his wings and turned him out of the city gates, but the heroic instinct of greatness and generalship is not thus defeated. He carries with him that which will collect new armies, and make him their victorious leader. Availing himself of the pride and hostility of nations, he is sure of a captaincy. His occupation is not gone so long as the unscientific ages last. The principle of his heroism and nobility has only been developed in new force by this opposition. He will have a new degree; he will purchase a new patent of it; he will forge himself a new and better name, for 'the patricians are called good citizens.' He will forget Corioli; Coriolanus now no more, he will conquer Rome, and incorporate that henceforth in his name. He will make himself great, not by the grandeur of a true citizenship and membership of the larger whole, in his private subjection to it, – not by emerging from his particular into the self that comprehends the whole; he will make himself great by subduing the whole to his particular, the greater to the less, the whole to the part. He will triumph over the Common-weal, and bind his brow with a new garland. That is his magnanimity. He will take it from without, if they will not let him have it within. He will turn against that country, which he loved so dearly, that same edge which the Volscian hearts have felt so long. 'There's some among you have beheld me fighting,' he says. 'Come, try upon yourselves what you have seen me?' He is only that same narrow, petty, pitiful private man he always was, in the city, and in the field, at the head of the Roman legions, and in the legislator's chair, when, to right his single wrong, or because the people would not let him have all from them, he comes upon the stage at last with Volscian steel, and sits down, Captain of the Volscian armies, at Rome's gates.

'This morning,' says Menenius, after the reprieve, 'this morning for ten thousand of your throats, I'd not have given a doit.' But this is only the same 'good citizen' we saw in the first scene, who longed to make a quarry of thousands of the quartered slaves, as high as he could prick his lance! That was 'the altitude of his virtue' then. It is the same citizenship with its conditions altered.

So well and thoroughly has the philosopher done his work throughout – so completely has he filled the Roman story with his 'richer and bolder meanings,' that when the old, familiar scene, which makes the denouement of the Roman myth, comes out at last in the representation, it comes as the crowning point of this Poet's own invention. It is but the felicitous artistic consummation of the piece, when this hero, in his conflicting passions and instincts, gives at last, to one private affection and impulse, the State he would have sacrificed to another; when he gives to his boy's prattling inanities, to his wife's silence, to the moisture in her eyes, to a shade less on her cheek, to the loss of a line there, to his mother's scolding eloquence, and her imperious commands, the great city of the gods, the city he would have offered up, with all its sanctities, with all its household shrines and solemn temples, as one reeking, smoking holocaust, to his wounded honour. That is the principle of the citizenship that was 'accounted GOOD' when this play began, when this play was written.

'He was a kind of nothing, titleless, – Till he had forged himself a name i' the fire Of burning Rome.'

That is his modest answer to the military friend who entreats him to spare the city.

'Though soft-conscienced men may be content to say it was for his country, he did it to please his mother, and to be partly proud.'

Surely that starving citizen who found himself at the beginning of this play, 'as lean as a rake' with this hero's legislation, and in danger of more fatal evils, was not so very wide of the truth, after all, in his surmise as to the principles of the heroic statesmanship and warfare, when he ventured thus early on that suggestion. The State banished him, as an enemy, and he came back with a Volscian army to make good that verdict. But his sword without was not more cruel than his law had been within. It was not starving only that he had voted for. 'Let them hang,' ay – (ay) 'and BURN TOO,' was 'the disposition' they had 'thwarted', – measuring 'the quarry of the quartered slaves,' which it would make, 'would the nobility but lay aside their ruth.' That was the disposition, that was the ignorance, the blind, brutish, demon ignorance, that 'in good time' they had thwarted. They had ruled it out and banished it from their city on pain of death, forever; they had turned it out in its single impotence, and it came back 'armed;' for this was one of rude nature's monarchs, and outstretched heroes.

Yet is he conquered and defeated. The enemy which has made war without so long, which has put Corioli and Rome in such confusion, has its warfare within also, and it is there that the hero is beaten and slain. For there is no state or fixed sovereignty in his soul. Both sides of the city rise at once; there is a fearful battle, and the red-eyed Mars is dethroned. The end which he has pursued at such a cost is within his reach at last; but he cannot grasp it. The city lies there before him, and his dragon wings encircle it; there is steel enough in the claws and teeth now, but he cannot take it. For there is no law and no justice of the peace, and no general within to put down the conflict of changeful, warring selfs, to suppress the mutiny of mutually opposing, mutually annihilating selfish dictates.

In vain he seeks to make his will immutable; for the single passion has its hour, this 'would-do' changes. With the impression the passion changes, and the purpose that is passionate must alter with it, unless pure obstinacy remain in its place, and fulfil the annulled dictate. For such purpose, one person of the scientific drama tells us – one who had had some dramatic experience in it, —

'is but the slave to memory,  Of violent birth, and poor validity,  Which now, like fruit unripe, stick on the tree,  But fall unshaken when they mellow be.  What to ourselves in passion we propose,  The passion ending doth the purpose lose.'

That is Hamlet's verbal account of it, when he undertakes to reduce his philosophy to rhyme, and gets the player to insert some sixteen of his lines quietly into the court performance: that is his verbal account of it; but his action, too, speaks louder and more eloquently than his words.

The principle of identity and the true self is wanting in this so-called self-ishness. For the true principle of self is the peace principle, the principle of state within and without.

'To thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man'

That is the doctrine, the scientific doctrine. But it is not the passionate, but thoughtful Hamlet, shrinking from blood, with his resolution sicklied o'er with the pale cast of conscientious thought; it is not the humane, conscience-fettered Hamlet, but the man who aspires to make his single humours the law of the universal world, in whom the poet will show now this want of state and sovereignty.

He steels himself against Cominius; he steels himself against Menenius. 'He sits in gold,' Cominius reports, 'his eye red as 'twould burn Rome' – a small flambeau the poet thinks for so large a city. 'He no more remembers his mother than an eight year old horse,' is the poor old Menenius querulous account of him, when with a cracked heart he returns and reports how the conditions of a man are altered in him: but while he is making that already-quoted report of this superhuman growth and assumption of a divine authority and honour in the Military Chieftain, the Poet is quietly starting a little piece of philosophical machinery that will shake out that imperial pageant, and show the slave that is hidden under it, for it is no man at all, but, in very deed, a slave, as Hamlet calls it, 'passion's slave,' 'a pipe for fortune's finger to sound what stop she please.' For that state, – that command – depends on that which 'changes,' – fortuities, impressions, nay, it has the principle of revolution within it. It is its nature to change. The single passion cannot engross the large, many-passioned, complex nature, so rich and various in motivity, so large and comprehensive in its surveys – the single passion seeks in vain to subdue it to its single end. That reigning passion must give way when it is spent, or sooner if its master come. You cannot make it look to-day as it looked yesterday; you cannot make it look when its rival affection enters as it looked when it reigned alone. An hour ago, the hue of resolution on its cheek glowed immortal red. It was strong enough to defy God and all his creatures; it would annul all worlds but that one which it was god of.

This is the speech of it on the lips of the actor who comes in to interpret to us the thinker's inaction, the thinker's irresolution, for 'it is conscience that makes cowards of us all.' Here is a man who is resolute enough. His will is not 'puzzled.' His thoughts, his scruples will not divide and destroy his purpose. Here is THE UNITY which precedes ACTION. This man is going to be revenged for his father. 'What would you undertake to do?' 'To cut his throat i' the church.'

'To hell allegiance, vows to the blackest devil.Conscience and grace to the profoundest pit.I dare damnation. To this point I stand  That both the worlds I give to negligence,  Let come what comes, only I'll be revenged  Most thoroughly for my father.' [Only.]

That is your passionate speech, your speech of fire. That was what the principle of vindictiveness said when it was you, when it mastered you, and called itself by your name. Ay, it has many names, and many lips; but it is always one. That was what it said an hour ago; and now it is shrunk away you know not where, you cannot rally it, and you are there confounded, self-abandoned, self-annulled, a forgery, belying the identity which your visible form – which your human form, was made to promise, – a slave, – a pipe for fortune's finger. This is the kind of action which is criticised in the scientific drama, and 'rejected'; and the conclusion after these reviews and rejections, 'after every species of rejection,' – the affirmation is, that there is but one principle that is human, and that is GOOD yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and whose is true to that is true, in the human form, to the self which was, and will be. He cannot then be false to his yesterday, or tomorrow; he cannot then be false to himself; he cannot then be false to any man; for that is the self that is one in us all – that is the self of reason and conscience, not passion.

But as for this affection that is tried here now, that the diagram of this scene exhibits so tangibly, 'as it were, to the eye,' – this poor and private passion, that sits here, with its imperial crown on its head, in the place of God, but lacking His 'mercy,' – this passion of the petty man, that has made itself so hugely visible with its monstrous outstretching, that lies stretched out and glittering on these hills, with its dragon coils unwound, with its deadly fangs – those little fangs, that crush our private hearts, and torture and rend our daily lives – exposed in this great solar microscope, striking the common-weal, – as for this petty, usurping passion, there is a spectacle approaching that will undo it.

Out of that great city there comes a little group of forms, which yesterday this hero 'could not stay to pick out of that pile which had offended him,' that was his word, – which yesterday he would have burnt in it without a scruple. Towards the great Volscian army that beleaguers Rome it comes – towards the pavilion where the Volscian captain sits in gold, with his wings outspread, it shapes its course. To other eyes, it is but a group of Roman ladies, two or three, clad in mourning, with their attendants, and a prattling child with them; but, with the first glance at it from afar, the great chieftain trembles, and begins to clasp his armour. He could think of them and doom them, in his over-mastering passion of revenge, with its heroic infinity of mastery triumphant in him, – he could think of them and doom them; but the impressions of the senses are more vivid, and the passions wait on them. As that group draws nearer, one sees, by the light of this Poet's painting, a fair young matron, with subdued mien and modest graces, and an elder one, leading a wilful boy, with a 'confirmed countenance,' pattering by her side; just such a group as one might see anywhere in the lordly streets of Palatinus, – much such a one as one might find anywhere under those thousand-doomed plebeian roofs.

But to this usurping 'private,' to this man of passion and affection, and not reason – this man of private and particular motives only, and blind partial aims, it is more potent than Rome and all her claims; it outweighs Rome and all her weal – 'it is worth of senators and patricians a city full, of tribunes and plebeians a sea and land full' – it outweighs all the Volscians, and their trust in him.

His reasons of state begin to falter, and change their aspects, as that little party draws nearer; and he finds himself within its magnetic sphere.

For this is the pattern-man, for the man of mere impression and instinct. He is full of feeling within his sphere, though it is a sphere which does not embrace plebeians, – which crushes Volscians with clarions, and drums, and trumpets, and poets' voices to utter its exultations. Within that private sphere, his sensibilities are exquisite and poetic in their depth and delicacy. He is not wanting in the finer impulses, in the nobler affections of the particular and private nature. He is not a base, brutal man. Even in his martial conquests, he will not take 'leaden spoons.' His soul is with a divine ambition fired to have all. It is instinct, but it is the instinct of the human; it is 'conservation with advancement' that he is blindly pursuing, for this is a generous nature. He knows the heights that reason lends to instinct in the human kind, and the infinities that affection borrows from it.

And the Poet himself has large and gentle views of 'this particular,' scientific views of it, scientific recognitions of its laws, such as no philosophic school was ever before able to pronounce. Even here, on this sad and tragic ground of a subdued and debased common-weal, he will not cramp its utterance – he will give it leave to speak, in all its tenderness and beauty, in its own sweet native dialect, all its poetic wildness, its mad verities, its sober impossibilities, even at the moment in which he asks in statesmanship for the rational motive, undrenched in humours and affections – for the motive of the weal that is common, and not for the motive of that which is private and exclusive.