But the truth is that the love of Antony and Cleopatra is genuine and intense; and if it leads to shame as well as to glory, this is to be explained, apart from the circumstances of the time, apart from the characters of the lovers, in the nature of the variety to which it belongs.
Plutarch, whose thoughts when he is discussing such subjects are never far from Plato’s, has a passage in which he characterises Antony’s passion by reference to the famous metaphor in the Phaedrus.
In the ende, the horse of the minde, as Plato termeth it, that is so hard of rayne (I meane the unreyned lust of concupiscence), did put out of Antonius’ heade all honest and commendable thoughts.
Certainly it is not the milder and more docile steed that takes the lead in Antony’s affection. But it is perhaps a little surprising that Plutarch did not rather go for his Platonic illustration to the Symposium, where the disquisitions of Aristophanes and Diotima explain respectively what Antony’s love is and is not. Aristophanes, with his myth that men, once four-legged and four-armed, were split in two because they were too happy, and now are pining to find their counterparts, gives the exact description of what the love of Antony and Cleopatra is.
Each of us when separated is but the indenture of a man, having one side only like a flat-fish, and he is always looking for his other half.... When one of them finds his other half, ... the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment.[227]
And, on the other hand, Diotima’s opposite theory does not apply to this particular case, at least, to begin with or superficially:
You hear people say that lovers are seeking for their other half; but I say that they are seeking neither for the half of themselves, nor for the whole, unless the half or the whole be also a good. And they will cut off their own hands and feet and cast them away, if they are evil.... For there is nothing which men love but the good.[228]
We may put the case in a somewhat more popular and modern fashion. All love that really deserves the name must base more or less completely on sympathy, on what Goethe called Wahlverwandschaft, or elective affinity. But such affinity may be of different kinds and degrees, and according to its range will tend to approximate to one of two types. It may mean sympathy with what is deepest and highest in us, our aspiration after the ideal, our bent towards perfection; or it may mean sympathy with our whole nature and with all our feelings and tendencies, alike with those that are high and with those that are low. The former is the more exacting though the more beneficent. It implies the suppression and abnegation in us of much that is base, of much that is harmless, of much, even, that may be good, for the sake of the best. In it we must inure ourselves to effort and sacrifice for the sake of advance in that supersensible realm where the union took place.
The second is less austere, and, for the time being, more comprehensive. It is founded on a correspondence in all sorts of matters, great and small, noble and base, of good or of bad report. If it lacks the exclusive loftiness of the other, it affords many more points of contact and a far greater wealth of daily fellowship. And of this latter variety, the love of Antony and Cleopatra is perhaps the typical example. At first sight it is evident that they are, as we say, made for each other. They are both past the first bloom of youth. Cleopatra, whom at the outset Plutarch makes twenty-eight years of age, and of whose wrinkles and waned lip Shakespeare, though in irony and exaggeration, finds it possible to speak, has relatively reached the same period of life as Antony, whom Plutarch makes at the outset forty-three or forty-six years of age, and whom Shakespeare represents as touched with the fall of eld. And they correspond in their experiences. Neither is a novice in love and pleasure: Cleopatra, the woman with a history, Antony, the masquer and reveller of Clodius’ set, have both seen life. They are alike in their emotionalism, their impressibility, their quick wits, their love of splendour, their genial power, their intellectual scope, their zest for everything. Plutarch narrates—and it is strange that à propos of this he did not quote Aristophanes’ saying in the Symposium—
She, were it in sport, or in matter of earnest, still devised sundrie new delights to have Antonius at commaundement, never leaving him night nor day, nor once letting him go out of her sight. For she would play at dyce with him, drinke with him, and hunt commonly with him, and also be with him when he went to any exercise or activity of body. And sometime, also, when he would goe up and downe the citie disguised like a slave in the night, and would peere into poore men’s windowes and their shops, and scold and brawle with them within the house: Cleopatra would be also in a chamber-maides array, and amble up and downe the streets with him, so that oftentimes Antonius bare away both mockes and blowes.