But it is from the lips of the mother, brought into this deadly antagonism with the manliness she has trained, compelled now to echo that popular rejection, that the Poet can venture to speak out, at last, from the depths of his true heroism. It is this Volumnia who strikes now to the heart of the play with her satire on this affectation of the graces of the gods,—this assumption of nobility, and manliness, and the fine strains of honour,—in one who is led only by the blind demon gods, 'that keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,'—in one who is bounded and shut in after all to the range of his own poor petty private passions, shut up to a poverty of soul which forbids those assumptions, limited to a nature in which those strictly human terms can be only affectations, one who concentrates all his glorious special human gifts on the pursuit of ends for which the lower natures are also furnished. Honour, forsooth! the fine strains of honour, and the graces of the gods. Look at that Volscian army there.
'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?'
He can not. There is no speech for that. It does not bear review.
'Why dost not speak?
Think'st thou it honourable for a noble man
Still to remember wrongs?'
'Let it be virtuous to be obstinate,' let there be no better principle of that identity which we insist on in men, that firmness which we call manliness, and the cherished wrong is honour.
It is but an interrogative point, but the height of our affirmation is taken with it. It is a figure of speech and intensifies the affirmative with its irony.
'This a consul? No.'
'No more, but e'en a woman, and COMMANDED
By such poor passion as the maid that milks,
And does the meanest chares.' [QUEEN.]
'Give me that man that is not passion's slave.
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice,
And could of men distinguish her election,
She hath seal'd thee for herself: for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing.