It is a common case; and many have by their very conscientiousness been hurried into a false position where they could not escape from committing blunders and incurring guilt. But generally the blunders are corrigible and the guilt is venial. It is Brutus’ misfortune, that his very greatness, his moral ascendancy with the prestige it bestows, gives him the foremost place, and shifts on his shoulders the main responsibility for all the folly and crime.
For it is inevitable that he should proceed as he does. Yet it is not easy for him. There is a conflict in this sensitive and finely tuned spirit, which, with all his acquired fortitude, bewrays itself in his bearing to Cassius before any foreign suggestion has entered his mind, which afterwards makes him unlike himself in his behaviour to his wife, which drives sleep from his eyes for nights together, which so jars the rare harmony of his nature, in Antony’s view his chief perfection, that he seems to suffer from an insurrection within himself. And it is not hard to understand why this should be. Morality is the guiding principle of Brutus’ character, but what if it should be at variance with itself? Now two sets of moral forces are at strife in his heart. There are the more personal sentiments of love and reverence for Caesar and of detestation for the crime he contemplates. Even after his decision he feels the full horror of conspiracy with its “monstrous visage”; how much more must he feel the horror of assassinating a friend! On the other side are the more traditional ethical obligations to state, class, and house. It is almost as fatal to this visionary to be called Brutus, as it is to the poet to be called Cinna. For a great historic name spares its bearer a narrow margin of liberty. It should be impossible for a Bourbon to be other than a legitimist; it would be impossible for a Romanoff to abandon the Orthodox Church; it is impossible for a Brutus to accept the merest show of royal power. The memory of his stock is about him. Now Cassius reminds him of his namesake who would brook the eternal devil in Rome as easily as a king; now the admonition is affixed with wax upon Old Brutus’ statue; now he himself recalls the share his ancestors had in expelling the Tarquin. If such an one acquiesced in the coronation of Caesar, he must be the basest renegade, or more detached from his antecedents than it is given a mortal man to be. And in Brutus there is no hint of such detachment. The temper that makes him so attentive and loyal to the pieties of life, is the very temper that vibrates to all that is best in the past, and clings to the spirit of use-and-wont. Let it again be repeated that Brutus reveals himself to Shakespeare very much in the form of a cultured and high-souled English nobleman, the heir of great traditions and their responsibilities, which he fulfils to the smallest jot and tittle; the heir also of inevitable preconceptions.
But in Brutus there is more than individual morality and inherited ethos: there is superimposed on these the conscious philosophic theory with which his actions must be squared. He has to determine his conduct not by instinct or usage, but by impersonal, unprejudiced reason. It is to this tribunal that in the last resort he must appeal; and in that strange soliloquy of his he puts aside all private preferences on the one hand, all local considerations on the other, and discusses his difficulty quite as an abstract problem of right and wrong. He sees that if the personal rule of Caesar is to be averted, half measures will not suffice. There are no safeguards or impediments that can prevent the supremacy of so great a man if he is allowed to live. This is his starting point: “It must be by his death.” But then the question arises: is the death of such an one permissible? And in answering it Brutus seems at the first glance to show admirable intellectual candour. He acquits Caesar of all blame; the quarrel “will bear no colour for the thing he is.” What could be more dispassionate and impartial, what more becoming the philosopher? There is no sophistication of the facts in the interest of his party. But immediately there follow the incriminating words:
Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities.
(II. i. 30.)
There is a sophistication of the inference. Surely this line of argument is invented to support a foregone conclusion. Already that hint to his conscience, “Fashion it thus,” betrays the resolve to make out a case. And does the mere future contingency justify the present infliction of death? Brutus is appealing to his philosophy: by his philosophy he is judged: for just about this date he was condemning the suicide of Cato because he found it
Cowardly and vile,
For fear of what might fall, so to prevent
The time of life.