I will with patience hear, and find a time
Both meet to hear and answer such high things.
(I. ii. 161.)
Nothing could be more neat, accurate and artificial than this Euphuistic arrangement of phrases. It at once suggests the academic studious quality of Brutus’ expression whenever he gives thought to it. But it is a style unsuitable to, one might almost say incompatible with, genuine passion. So it is noteworthy that when he lets himself go in answer to Cassius and introduces the personal accent, he abandons his mannerisms. And could the symmetrical clauses of his oration move the popular heart? It has a noble ring about it, because it is sincere, with the reticence and sobriety which the sincere man is careful to observe when he is advocating his own case. But that is not the sort of thing that the Saviour of his Country, as Brutus thought himself to be, will find fit to sway a mob. Nevertheless his eloquence was notorious. Plutarch states that when his mind “was moved to followe any matter, he used a kind of forcible and vehement perswasion that calmed not till he had obteyned his desire.” There is a rush of emotion in his words when he is denouncing the conventional pledge or wanton bloodshed, but if any personal interest is involved, the springs are dry. In the Forum it is characteristic that he speaks with far more warmth—a transition indicated not only by the change of style, but, after Shakespeare’s wont, by the substitution of verse for prose—when he no longer pleads for himself but tries to get a hearing for Mark Antony.
And this is the man with his formal dialectic and professorial oratory, impassioned only on behalf of his enemy, who thinks that by a temperate statement of the course which he has seduced his reason to approve, he can prevent the perils of a speech by Caesar’s friend. He does not even wait to hear it: but if he did, what could he effect against the sophistries and rhetorical tricks, the fervour and regret, the gesticulation and tears of Antony’s headlong improvisation?
CHAPTER V
THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF BRUTUS.
PORTIA
Brutus had been doubly duped, by his own subtlety and his own simplicity in league with his conscientiousness; for in this way he was led to idealise his deed as enjoined both by the inward moral code and the demands of his country, and such self-deception avenges itself as surely as any intentional crime. He is soon disabused in regard to the wishes of Rome and its view of the alleged wrongs it has suffered from Caesar. His imagination had dwelt on the time when his ancestors drove out the Tarquin; now he himself must ride “like a madman” through the gates. It is not only the first of his reverses but a step towards his enlightenment, for it helps to show that he has been mistaken in the people. Still, the momentary mood of the populace may not always recognise its best interests and real needs, and may not coincide with the true volonté générale. There is harder than this in store for Brutus. By the time we meet him again at Sardis a worse punishment has overtaken him, and his education in disappointment has advanced, though he does his utmost to treat the punishment as fate and not to learn the lessons it enforces.
This scene has won the applause of the most dissimilar minds and generations. We have seen how Leonard Digges singles it out as the grand attraction of the play, by which, above all others, it transcends the laboured excellences of Catiline or Sejanus. It excited the admiration and rivalry of the greatest genius of the Restoration period. Scott says of the dispute between Antony and Ventidius in All for Love: “Dryden when writing this scene had unquestionably in his recollection the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, which was so justly a favourite in his time, and to which he had referred as inimitable in his prologue to Aureng-Zebe.
But spite of all his pride, a secret shame
Invades his breast at Shakespeare’s sacred name: