It says much for his intrinsic force, that when all these things rise up in judgment against him, he can still maintain to himself and others the essential nobility of the deed that has brought about all the woe and wrong; and without any faint-hearted penitence, continue to insist that their doings must conform to his conception of what has been done: that if that conception conflicts with the facts, it is the facts that must give way. Yet on that very account he is quite impracticable and perverse, as every enthusiast for abstract justice must be, who lets himself be seduced into crime on the plea of duty, and yet shapes his course as though he were not a criminal.
Brutus has brought about an upturn of society by assassinating the one man who could organize that society. His own motives were honourable, though not so unimpeachable as he assumed, but they could not change wrong into right and they could not be taken for granted in others than himself. Now in the confusions that ensue he finds, to his horror, that revolutions are not made with rose water, that even champions of virtue have to reckon with base and dirty tools. So he condemns Pella for bribery. Cassius judges the case better. He sees that Pella is an efficient and useful officer of whose services he does not wish to be deprived. He sees that in domestic broils the leaders must not be too particular about their instruments, that, according to the old proverb, you must go into the water to catch fish. But Brutus will not go into the water. He thinks that an assassin should only have Galahads in his troops. And sometimes his offended virtue becomes even a little absurd. He is angry with Cassius for not giving him money, but listen to his speech:
I did send to you
For certain sums of gold, which you denied me:
For I can raise no money by vile means:
By heaven, I had rather coin my heart,
And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring
From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash
By any indirection: I did send
To you for gold to pay my legions,