Auf. No MORE. [You are no more.]
Cor. Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart
Too great for what contains it. Boy? O Slave!
…. Boy? False hound!
[These are the names that are flying about here, now that the martial chiefs are criticising each other: it is no matter which side they go.]
'Boy? O slave!
… Boy? False hound! ['He is a very dog to the commonalty.']
Alone I did it. BOY?
But it is Volumnia herself who searches to the quick the principle of this boyish sovereignty, in her satire on the undivine passion she wishes to unseat. It is thus that she upbraids the hero with his un_manly_, ungracious, ignoble purpose:—
'Speak to me, son.
Thou hast affected the fine strains of HONOUR,
To imitate the graces of the gods;
To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air,
And yet to charge thy sulphur with a bolt
That should but rive an oak. Why dost not speak?
Think'st thou it honourable for a NOBLE MAN
Still to remember wrongs?
For that is the height of the scientific affirmation also; the other was, in scientific language, its 'anticipation.' He wants nothing of a god but an eternity, and a heaven to throne in (slight deficiences in a god already). 'Yes, mercy, if you paint him truly.' 'I paint him in character.'
NOBILITY, HONOUR, MANLINESS, HEROISM, GOOD CITIZENSHIP, FREEDOM, DIVINITY, PATRIOTISM. We are getting a number of definitions here, vague popular terms, scientifically fixed, scientifically cleared, destined to waver, and be confused and mixed with other and fatally different things in the popular apprehension no more—when once this science is unfolded for that whole people for whom it was delivered—no more for ever.
There is no open dramatic embodiment in this play of the true ideal nobility, and manliness, and honour, and divinity. This is the false affirmation which is put upon the stage here, to be tried, and examined, and rejected. For it is to this Poet's purpose to show—and very much to his purpose to show, sometimes—what is not the true affirmation. His method is critical, but his rejection contains the true definition. The whole play is contrived to shape it here; all hands combine to frame it. Volscians and Romans conspire to pronounce it; the world is against this 'one man' and his part-liness, though he be indeed 'every man.' He himself has been compelled to pronounce it; for the speaker for the whole is the speaker in each of us, and pronounces his sentences on ourselves with our own lips. 'Being gentle wounded craves a noble cunning,' is the word of the noble, who comes back with a Volscian army to exhibit upon the stage this grand hieroglyphic, this grand dramatic negative of that nobility.