'Let Caesar seat him sure,
For we will shake him, or worse days endure.'
But in the interval, that night of wild tragic splendour must come, with its thunder-bolts and showers of fire, and unnatural horror. For these elements have a true part to perform here, as in Lear and other plays; they come in, not merely as subsidiary to the 'artistic effect'—not merely because their wild Titanic play forms an imposing harmonious accompaniment to the play of the human passions and their 'wildness'—but as a grand scientific exhibition of the element which the Poet is pursuing under all its Protean forms—as a most palpable and effective exhibition to the sense of that identical thing against which he has raised his eternal standard of revolt, refusing to own, under any name, its mastery.
But one can hear, in that wild lurid night, in the streets of Rome, amid the cross blue lightnings, what could not have been whispered in the streets of England then, or spoken in the ear in closets.
Cicero. [Encountering Casca in the street, with his sword drawn.]
Good-even, Casca; brought you Caesar home?
Why are you breathless? and why stare you so?
Casca. Are you not moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,
I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks; and I have seen
The ambitious ocean swell, and rage and foam,
To be exalted with the threatening clouds;
But never till to-night, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven;
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.
But the night has had other spectacles, it seems, which, to his eye, appeared to have some relation to the coming struggle; in answer to Cicero's 'Why, saw you anything more wonderful?' Thus he describes them.
'A common slave,—you know him, well by sight, Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn Like twenty torches join'd. Against the Capitol I met a lion, Who glared upon me, and went surly by.'
[And he had seen, 'drawn on a head,']
'A hundred ghastly women,
Transformed with their fears; who swore they saw
Men, all in fire, walk up and down the streets.
And, yesterday, the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,
Hooting, and shrieking.'
An ominous circumstance,—that last. A portent sure as fate. When such things begin to appear, 'men need not go to heaven to predict imminent changes.'