(i. iii. 2.)
Is it then all artifice? Are all her eddying whims and contradictions mere stratagems to secure her sway? For a moment Antony seems to think so. “She is cunning past man’s thought,” he says in reference to her swooning: and perhaps it is because of her cunning as well as her sinuous grace that his endearing name for her is his “Serpent of old Nile” (i. v. 25). Enobarbus’ reply is in effect that her displays of emotion are too vehement to be the results of art; they are the quintessence of feeling: “her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love” (i. ii. 151).
And both these views are correct. It is her deliberate programme to keep satiety afar by the swiftness and diversity of the changes she assumes; but it is a programme easy to carry out, for it corresponds to her own nature. She is a creature of moods. Excitement, restlessness, curiosity pulse in her life-blood. In Antony’s absence she is as flighty with herself as ever she was with him. She feeds on memories and thoughts of him, but they plague rather than soothe her. In little more than a breathing-space she turns to music, billiards, and fishing; and abandons them all to revel once in her day-dreams.
When the messenger arrives after Antony’s marriage, she in her ungovernable eagerness interrupts him and will not let him disclose the tidings for which she longs. When she hears what they are, she loses all restraint; she stuns him with threats, curses, blows; she hales him by the hair and draws a knife upon him. Then, sinking down in a faint, she suddenly recovers herself with that irrepressible vitality and inquisitiveness of hers, that are bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh:
Go to the fellow, good Alexas; bid him
Report the feature of Octavia, her years,
Her inclination, let him not leave out
The colour of her hair.
(iI. v. 111.)
And while we are still smiling at the last little touch, comes that moving outburst of a sensitive and sorely stricken soul: