(I. ii. 95.)
except that Cassius feels Caesar’s predominance to be a personal affront, while Brutus characteristically extends his view to the whole community. But here Brutus is speaking under the excitement of Cassius’ “instigation,” and making himself Cassius’ mouthpiece to fill in the blanks. Assuredly the declaration is not on that account the less personal to himself; nevertheless in it Brutus, no longer attempting to square his action with his theory, falls back on the blind impulses of blood that he shares with the other aristocrats of Rome. And in this, the most republican and the only republican sentiment that falls from his lips, which for the rest is so little republican that it might be echoed by the loyal subject of a limited monarchy, it is only the negative aspect of the matter and the public amour propre that are considered. Of the positive essence of republicanism, of enthusiasm for a state in which all the lawful authority is derived from the whole body of fully qualified citizens, there is, despite Brutus’ talk of freemen and slaves and Caesar’s ambition, no trace whatever in any of his utterances from first to last. It has been said that Plutarch’s Brutus could live nowhere but in a self-governing commonwealth; Shakespeare’s Brutus would be quite at home under a constitutional king and need not have found life intolerable even in Tudor England. This indeed is an exaggeration. True, in his soliloquy he bases his whole case on the deterioration of Caesar’s nature that kingship might bring about; and if it were proved, as it easily could be from instances like that of Numa, which Shakespeare and therefore Shakespeare’s Brutus knew, that no such result need follow, his entire sorites would seem to snap. But though the form of his reflection is hypothetical and the hypothesis will not hold, the substance is categorical enough. Brutus has such inbred detestation of the royal power that practically he assumes it must beyond question be mischievous in its moral effects. This, however, is no reasoned conviction, though it is the starting point for what he means to be a dispassionate argument, but a dogma of traditional passion. And even were it granted it would not make Brutus a true representative of classic republicanism. Shakespeare has so little comprehension of the antique point of view that to him a thoughtful and public-spirited citizen can find a rational apology for violent measures only by looking at Caesar’s future and not at all by looking at Caesar’s past. This Elizabethan Brutus sees nothing to blame in Caesar’s previous career. He has not known “when his affections (i.e. passions) sway’d more than his reason,” and implies that he has not hitherto disjoined “remorse (i.e. scrupulousness) from power.” Yet as Coleridge pertinently asks, was there nothing “in Caesar’s past conduct as a man” to call for Brutus’ censure? “Had he not passed the Rubicon,” and the like? But such incidents receive no attention. Perhaps Shakespeare thought no more of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon to suppress Pompey and put an end to the disorders of Rome, than of Richmond’s crossing the Channel to suppress Richard III., and put end to the Wars of the Roses. At any rate he makes no mention of these and similar grounds of offence, though all or most of them were set down in his authority.[161]
Shakespeare’s position may be thus described. He read in Plutarch that Brutus, the virtuous Roman, killed Caesar, the master-spirit of his own and perhaps of any age, from a disinterested sense of duty. That was easy to understand, for Shakespeare would know, and if he did not know it from his own experience his well-conned translation of Montaigne would teach him, that the best of men are determined in their feeling of right by the preconceptions of race, class, education and the like. But he also read that Brutus was a philosophic student who would not accept or obey the current code without scrutinising it and fitting it into his theory. Of the political theory, however, which such an one would have, Shakespeare had no knowledge or appreciation. So whenever Brutus tries to harmonise his purpose with his idealist doctrine, he has to be furnished with new reasons instead of the old and obvious ones. And these are neither very clear nor very antique. They make one inclined to quote concerning him the words of Caesar spoken to Cicero in regard to the historical Brutus:
I knowe not what this young man woulde, but what he woulde he willeth it vehemently.
(Marcus Brutus.)
For what is it that he would? The one argument with which he can excuse to his own heart the projected murder, is that the aspirant to royal power, though hitherto irreproachable, may or must become corrupted and misuse his high position. This is as different from the attitude of the ancient Roman as it well could be. It would never have occurred to the genuine republican of olden time that any justification was needed for despatching a man who sought to usurp the sovereign place; and if it had, this is certainly the last justification that would have entered his head.
But the introspection, the self-examination, the craving for an inward moral sanction that will satisfy the conscience, and the choice of the particular sanction that does so, are as typical of the modern as they are alien to the classical mind. It is clear that an addition of this kind is not merely mechanical or superficial. It affects the elements already given, and produces, as it were, a new chemical combination. And this particular instance shows how Shakespeare transforms the whole story. He reanimates Brutus by infusing into his veins a strain of present feeling that in some ways transmutes his character; and, transmuting the character in which the chief interest centres, he cannot leave the other data as they were. He can resuscitate the past in its persons, its conflicts, its palpitating vitality just because he endows it with his own life. It was an ancient belief that the shades of the departed were inarticulate or dumb till they had lapped a libation of warm blood; then they would speak forth their secrets. In like manner it is the life-blood of Shakespeare’s own passion and thought that throbs in the pulses of these unsubstantial dead and gives them human utterance once more. This, however, has two aspects. It is the dead who speak; but they speak through the life that Shakespeare has lent them. The past is resuscitated; but it is a resuscitation, not the literal existence it had before. Nor in any other way can the phantoms of history win bodily shape and perceptible motion for the world of breathing men.
This may be illustrated by comparing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with the Julius Caesar of Sir William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Stirling, which seems to have been written a few years later than its more illustrious namesake. Alexander was an able man and a considerable poet, from whom Shakespeare himself did not disdain to borrow hints for Prospero’s famous reflections on the transitoriness of things. He used virtually the same sources as Shakespeare, like him making Plutarch his chief authority, and to supplement Plutarch, betaking himself, as Shakespeare may also have done, to the tradition set in France by Muretus, Grévin, and Garnier. So they build on much the same sites and with much the same timber. But their methods are as different as can well be imagined. Alexander is by far the more scrupulous in his reproduction of the old-world record. He adopts the Senecan type of tragedy, exaggerating its indifference to movement and fondness for lengthy harangues; and this enables him to preserve much of the narrative in its original form without thorough reduction to the category of action. This also in large measure exempts him from the need of reorganising his material: practically a single situation is given, and whatever else of the story is required, has to be conveyed in the words of the persons, who can repeat things just as they have been reported. And proceeding in this way Alexander can include as much as he pleases of Plutarch’s abundance, a privilege of which he avails himself to the utmost. Few are the details that he must absolutely reject, for they can always be put in somebody’s mouth; he is slow to tamper with Plutarch’s location of them; and he never connects them more closely than Plutarch has authorised. He does not extract from his document inferences that have not already been drawn, nor falsify it with picturesque touches that have not been already supplied, and he would not dream of contradicting it in small things or great. Even Brutus’ republicanism is sacred to the author of this “Monarchic Tragedy,” though he was to be Secretary of State to Charles I. and noted for his advocacy of Divine Right. He has a convenient theory to justify Brutus as much as is necessary from his point of view. He makes him explain:
If Caesar had been born or chused our prince
Then those, who durst attempt to take his life,