No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented.
(V. ii. 361.)
So the last word is a testimonial to himself.
These are eulogies of the understanding, not of the heart. They are very different in tone from the tributes of Antony to his patron Julius or his opponent Brutus. The tears and emotion, genuine though facile, of the latter are vouched for even by the sarcasms of Agrippa and Enobarbus. Octavius’ utterance, when he pronounces his farewell, is broken, we may be sure, by no sob and choked by no passion. His éloge has been compared to a funeral sermon, and will not interfere with the victor’s appetite for the fruits of victory. But though his feeling is not stirred to the depths, he is fairly just and fairly acute. He is no contemptible character, this man who carries off the palm from one of infinitely richer endowment. The contrast between the two rivals, and the justification of the success of the less gifted, is summed up in a couple of sentences they exchange at the banquet off Misenum. When Octavius shrinks from the carouse, Antony bids him: “Be a child o’ the time” (ii. vii. 106). “Possess it, I’ll make answer,” is Octavius’ reply and reproof.
CHAPTER V
MARK ANTONY
“Be a child o’ the time,” says Antony, and he carries out his maxim to the letter. Only that time could bring forth such a devotee of the joys of life and lavish on him such wealth of enjoyment. But the time was one that devoured its own children. Those who chose to be merely its products, must accept its ordinances, and it was cruel as well as indulgent. It was the manlier as well as the safer course for the child to possess the time, to repudiate its stock, and, if might be, to usurp the heritage.
We must bear the counter admonition of Octavius in mind when we approach the personage to whom it was addressed. All who have a wide range of interests, and with these warmth of imagination and spontaneity of impulse, must feel that their judgment is apt to be bribed by the attractions of Mark Antony. He is so many-sided, so many-ways endowed, so full of vitality and vigour, potentially so affluent and bright, that we look to find his life a clear and abundant stream, and disbelieve our senses when we see a turbid pool that loses itself in the sands. If we listen to the promptings of our blood, we hail him as demi-god, but the verdict of our reason is that he is only a futility. And both estimates base on Shakespeare who inspires and reconciles them both.
Of course we are apt to carry with us to the present play the impression we have received from the sketch of Antony in Julius Caesar. And not without grounds. He is still a masquer and a reveller, he is still a shrewd contriver. But we gradually become aware of a difference. First, the precedence that these characteristics takes is reversed. In Julius Caesar it is the contriving side of his nature that is prominent, and the other is only indicated by the remarks of acquaintances: in Antony and Cleopatra, it is his love of pleasure that is emphasised, while of his contrivance we have only casual glimpses. And the contrast is not merely an alteration in the point of view, it corresponds to an alteration in himself; in the earlier drama he subordinates his luxury to his schemes, and in the latter he subordinates his schemes to his luxury. But this is not all. In the second place, his two main interests have changed in the degree of what may be called their organisation. In Julius Caesar he concentrates all his machinations on the one object of overthrowing the tyrannicides and establishing his power; his pleasures, however notorious, are random and disconnected dissipations without the coherence of a single aim. In Antony and Cleopatra, however manifold they may be, they are all subdued to the service of his master passion, they are all focussed in his love for Cleopatra; while his strategy is broken up to mere shifts and expedients that answer the demand of the hour. Passion has become not only the regulative but the constitutive force in his character.
When the action begins, he is indemnifying himself with a round of indulgence for the strenuous life between the fall of Julius and the victories at Philippi, some of the toils and privations of which, passed over in the earlier play, Octavius now recalls in amazement at the contrast. It is not so strange. One remembers Professor von Karsteg’s indictment of the English that they spare no pains because they live for pleasure. “You are all in one mass, struggling in the stream to get out and lie and wallow and belch on the banks. You work so hard that you have all but one aim, and that is fatness and ease!”[208] Something similar strikes us in Antony. It is natural that action should be followed by reaction and that abstinence should lead to surfeit. It is doubly natural, when effort and discipline are not prized for themselves or associated with the public good, but have only been accepted as the means to a selfish aim. By them he has acquired more than mortal power: why should he not use it in his own behoof, oblivious of every call save the prompting of desire? A vulgar attitude, we may say; but it is lifted above vulgarity by the vastness of the orbit through which his desire revolves. It is grandiose, and almost divine; in so far at least as it is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. He has a gust for everything and for everything in the highest degree, for each several pleasure and its exact antithesis. In what does he not feel zest? Luxury, banqueting, drunkenness, appeal to him, so that Pompey prays they “may keep his brain fuming” (ii. i. 24). Or he acts the god, and with Cleopatra as Isis, dispenses sovereignty from the “tribunal silver’d,” as they sit on their “chairs of gold” (iii. vi. 3). Or he finds a relish in vulgar pleasures, and with the queen on his arm, mingles incognito in the crowd, wandering through the streets “to note the qualities of people” (i. i. 52). Or he goes a-fishing, in which art he is a novice and presently becomes a dupe, when he pulls up the salt-fish “with fervency” (ii. v. 18). And a willing dupe, the conscious humorous dupe of love to his tricksy enchantress, he is pleased to be in many other ways: