Like a dull actor now,
I have forgot my part, and I am out,
Even to a full disgrace.
(V. iii. 40.)
How could this man, whose personal pride and family pride are so interwoven, whose self-love and whose virtues are so much an inheritance of his line, ever hope to sever himself from what makes up his very being? The home instincts must triumph.
It is well that they should, and this is the redeeming touch that cancels much of the guilt of apostasy which brands the close of his career. But all the same we feel that his self-surrender to the obligations of the family is a less noble thing than his mother’s self-surrender to the obligations of the state. Of course, in a way, family and class must with all come before the whole community. Men, that is, are bound to be more interested in those of their own circle and their own set than in their fellow-citizens with whom they have less relation. That gives a very good ground for a man’s constant unremitting occupation with his nearest and dearest. But, nevertheless, when the call comes, it is the wider community that has the more imperative claim.
And it is easy to see that Volumnia, though at the supreme moment she shows that she herself has the right feeling for the relation, is responsible for the inverted order in the conception of her son. Her contempt for the masses, her exaltation of the patricians, her high-handed insistence on the family authority were almost bound to be exaggerated in a child growing up under her influence and subjected to no corrective views. And she must have added to the dangers of her tuition by dangling before his eyes the ideal personal honour as the grand prize of life. He wins it and lets it slip again and again, and when he grasps it at last, it is rent and mangled in his hands. There is something typical in the episode of his son and the butterfly, as Valeria narrates it:
I saw him run after a gilded butterfly; and when he caught it, he let it go again; and after it again; and over and over he comes, and up again; catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or how ’twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it: Ο, I warrant, how he mammocked it!
(i. iii. 65.)
Young Marcius is described as the facsimile and “epitome” of his father, and Volumnia is well pleased with this example of the family bent. She must not disclaim her share in the preparation, when the father enacts the apologue in the larger theatre of life.