Casca. You speak to Casca; and to such a man, That is no fleering tell-tale. Hold my hand: Be factious for redress of all these griefs: And I will set this foot of mine as far, As who goes farthest.
Cassius. There's a bargain made.
This is sufficiently explicit, an unprejudiced listener would be inclined to say—indeed, it is difficult to conceive how any more positively instructive exhibition of the subject, could well have been made. Certainly no one can deny that this fact of the personal helplessness, the physical weakness of those in whom this arbitrary power over the liberties and lives of others is vested, seems for some reason or other to have taken strong possession of the Poet's imagination. For how else, otherwise should he reproduce it so often, so elaborately under such a variety of forms?—with such a stedfastness and pertinacity of purpose?
The fact that the power which makes these personalities so 'prodigious,' so 'monstrous,' overshadowing the world, 'shaming the Age' with their 'colossal' individualities, no matter what new light, what new gifts of healing for its ills, that age has been endowed with, levelling all to their will, contracting all to the limit of their stinted nature, making of all its glories but 'rubbish, offal to illuminate their vileness,'—the fact that the power which enables creatures like these, to convulse nations with their whims, and deluge them with blood, at their pleasure,—which puts the lives and liberties of the noblest, always most obnoxious to them, under their heel—the fact that this power resides after all, not in these persons themselves,—that they are utterly helpless, pitiful, contemptible, in themselves; but that it exists in the 'thewes and limbs' of those who are content to be absorbed in their personality, who are content to make muscles for them, in those who are content to he mere machines for the 'only one man's' will and passion to operate with,—the fact that this so fearful power lies all in the consent of those who suffer from it, is the fact which this Poet wishes to be permitted to communicate, and which he will communicate in one form or another, to those whom it concerns to know it.
It is a fact, which he is not content merely to state, however, in so many words, and so have done with it. He will impress it on the imagination with all kinds of vivid representation. He will exhaust the splendours of his Art in uttering it. He will leave a statement on this subject, profoundly philosophical, but one that all the world will be able to comprehend eventually, one that the world will never be able to unlearn.
The single individual helplessness of the man whom the multitude, in this case, were ready to arm with unlimited power over their own welfare—that physical weakness, already so strenuously insisted on by Cassius, at last attains its climax in the representation, when, in the midst of his haughtiest display of will and personal authority, stricken by the hands of the men he scorned, by the hand of one 'he had just spurned like a cur out of his path,' he falls at the foot of Pompey's statue—or, rather, 'when at the base of Pompey's statue he lies along'—amid all the noise, and tumult, and rushing action of the scene that follows—through all its protracted arrangements, its speeches, and ceremonials—not unmarked, indeed,—the centre of all eyes,—but, mute, motionless, a thing of pity, 'A PIECE OF BLEEDING EARTH.'
That helpless cry in the Tiber, 'Save me, Cassius, or I sink!'—that feeble cry from the sick man's bed in Spain, 'Give me some drink, Titinius!'—and all that pitiful display of weakness, moral and physical, at the would-be coronation, which Casca's report conveys so unsparingly—the falling down in the street speechless, which Cassius emphasises with his scornful 'What? did CAESAR SWOON?'—all this makes but a part of the exhibition, which the lamentations of Mark Antony complete:—
'O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure?'
This? and 'the eye' of the spectator, more learned than 'his ear,' follows the speaker's eye, and measures it.
'Fare thee well.
But yesterday the word of Caesar might
Have stood against the world: now lies he there.
And none so poor, to do him reverence.'