But it is characteristic of this spirit which really makes a man a law to himself and the measure of things, that though by all his training and prejudices inclined to the traditional and conservative in politics, yet, if use-and-wont presses hard against his own pride, he shows himself an innovator of the most uncompromising kind. He objects once and again to the prescriptive forms of election, and at last breaks out:
Custom calls me to ’t!
What custom wills, in all things should we do ’t,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept
And mountainous error be too highly heapt
For truth to o’er-peer.
(iI. iii. 124.)
Here he blossoms out as the reddest of radicals, though a radical of the Napoleonic type.
But, further, his feeling for family, class and country is pre-eminently feeling. It belongs to those natural tendencies that almost seem to come to us by heredity and environment, and have analogies with the instincts of animals. It is, at least in the form it assumes with him, not to be ranked among the moral convictions which can stand the examination of conscience and reason, and in the production of which conscience and reason have co-operated. It is rather an innate impulse, a headlong passion, and resembles a blind physical force of which he can give no account. His understanding is without right of entry into this part of his life. We have seen, no doubt, that his presuppositions once granted he can form a very acute estimate of the situation. But he never uses his judgment either in examining his presuppositions or in discovering the treatment that the situation requires. He has not the width of outlook or the self-criticism that enable Menenius and Cominius, and even the ordinary senators, to see the relative importance of the principles for which they contend, and prefer any compromise to laying the city flat and sacking great Rome with Romans. He has not the astuteness of Volumnia, who perceives that strategy is to be used in government as in war and bids him stoop to conquer:
I have a heart as little apt as yours,