There is no room for doubt in my mind, no faintest suspicion. Hallam and Heine, and all the cry of critics, are mistaken in this matter. Shakespeare admired Lord Herbert's youth and boldness and beauty, hoped great things from his favour and patronage; but after the betrayal, he judged him inexorably as a mean traitor, “a stealer” who had betrayed “a twofold trust”; and later, cursed him for his ingratitude, and went about with wild thoughts of bloody revenge, as we shall soon see in “Hamlet” and “Othello,” and then dropped him into oblivion without a pang.
It is bad enough to know that Shakespeare, the sweetest spirit and finest mind in all literature, should have degraded himself to pretend such an affection for the profligate Herbert as has given occasion for misconstruction. It is bad enough, I say, to know that Shakespeare could play flunkey to this extent; but after all, that is the worst that can be urged against him, and it is so much better than men have been led to believe that there may be a certain relief in the knowledge.
CHAPTER VI. THE FIRST-FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: BRUTUS
The play of “Julius Caesar” was written about 1600 or 1601. As “Twelfth Night” was the last of the golden comedies, so “Julius Caesar” is the first of the great tragedies, and bears melancholy witness to us that the poet's young-eyed confidence in life and joy in living are dying, if not dead. “Julius Caesar” is the first outcome of disillusion. Before it was written Shakespeare had been deceived by his mistress, betrayed by his friend; his eyes had been opened to the fraud and falsehood of life; but, like one who has just been operated on for cataract, he still sees realities as through a mist, dimly. He meets the shock of traitorous betrayal as we should have expected Valentine or Antonio or Orsino to meet it—with pitying forgiveness. Suffering, instead of steeling his heart and drying up his sympathies, as it does with most men, softened him, induced him to give himself wholly to that “angel, Pity.” He will not believe that his bitter experience is universal; in spite of Herbert's betrayal, he still has the courage to declare his belief in the existence of the ideal. At the very last his defeated Brutus cries:
“My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me.”
The pathos of this attempt still to believe in man and man's truth is over the whole play. But the belief was fated to disappear. No man who lives in the world can boast of loyalty as Brutus did; even Jesus had a Judas among the Twelve. But when Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” he still tried to believe, and this gives the play an important place in his life's story.
Before I begin to consider the character of Brutus I should like to draw attention to three passages which place Brutus between the melancholy Jaques of “As You Like It,” whose melancholy is merely temperamental, and the almost despairing Hamlet. Jaques says:
“Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine.”
This is the view of early manhood which does not doubt its power to cure all the evils which afflict mortality. Then comes the later, more hopeless view, to which Brutus gives expression: