Alas for him, and his gentle blood, and noble breeding, and his patrician greatness! Woe for the unlearned mother's son, who has made him great with such a training, that Rome's weal and his, Rome's greatness and his, must needs contend together—that 'Rome's happy victory' must needs be the blaze that shall darken him for ever!
Yet he storms again, with something like his old patrician fierceness; and yet not that, the tone is altered; he is humbler and tamer than he was, and he says himself, 'It is the first time that ever I have learned to scold'; but he is stung, even to boasting of his old heroic deeds, when Aufidius taunts him with his un-martial, un-divine infirmity, and brings home to him in very words, at last, the Poet's suppressed verdict, the Poet's deferred sentence, GUILTY!—of what? He is but A BOY, his nurse's boy, and he undertook the state! He is but A SLAVE, and he was caught climbing to the imperial chair, and putting on the purple. He is but 'a dog to the commonalty,' and he was sitting in the place of God.
Aufidius owns, indeed, to his own susceptibility to these particular and private affections. When Coriolanus turns to him after that appeal from Volumnia has had its effect, and asks:—
'Now, good Aufidius,
Were you in my stead, say, would you have heard
A mother less, or granted less, Aufidius?'
He answers, guardedly, 'I was moved withal.' But the philosopher has his word there, too, as well as the Poet, slipped in under the Poet's, covertly, 'I was moved with-all.' [It is the Play of the Common-weal.] And what should the single private man, the man of exclusive affections and changeful humours, do with the weal of the whole? In his noblest conditions, what business has he in the state? and who shall vote to give him the out-stretched wings and claws of Volscian armies, that he may say of Rome, all's mine, and give it to his wife or mother? Who shall follow in his train, to plough Rome and harrow Italy, who lays himself and all his forces at his mother's feet, and turns back at her word?
Aufidius. You lords and HEADS of the STATE, perfidiously
Has he betrayed your business, and given up
For certain drops of salt, your city Rome—
I say, your city—to his wife and mother:
Breaking his oath and resolution like
A twist of rotten silk; never admitting
Counsel of the war, but at his nurse's tears
He whined and roar'd away your victory,
That pages blushed at him, and men of heart
Looked wondering at each other.
[There is a look which has come down to us. That is
Elizabethan. That is the suppressed Elizabethan.]
Cor. Hear'st thou, Mars?
Auf. Name not the god thou Boy of tears.
Cor. Ha!