The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

In vain the hero struggles with his yielding passion, and seeks to retain it. In vain he struggles with a sentiment which he himself describes as 'a gosling's instinct,' and seeks to subdue it. In vain he rallies his pride, and says, 'Let it be virtuous to be obstinate'; and determines to stand 'as if a man were author of himself, and knew no other kin.' His mother kneels. It is but a frail, aged woman kneeling to the victorious chieftain of the Volscian hosts; but to him it is 'as if Olympus to a mole-hill stooped in supplication.' His boy looks at him with an eye in which great Nature speaks, and says, 'Deny not'; he sees the tears in the dove's eyes of the beloved, he hears her dewy voice; we hear it, too, through the Poet's art, in the words she speaks; and he forgets his part. We reach the 'grub' once more. The dragon wings of armies melt from him. He is his young boy's father – he is his fair young wife's beloved.

'O a kiss, long as my exile, sweet as my revenge.'

There's no decision yet. The scales are even now. But there is another there, waiting to be saluted, and he himself is but a boy – his own mother's boy again, at her feet. It is she that schools and lessons him; it is she that conquers him. It was 'her boy,' after all – it was her boy still, that was 'coming home.'

Well might Menenius say —

'This Volumnia is worth of consuls, senators, patricians, A city full; of tribunes such as you, A sea and land full.'

But let us take the philosophic report of this experiment as we find it; for on the carefullest study, when once it is put in its connections, when once we 'have heard the argument,' we shall not find anything in it to spare. But we must not forget that this is still 'the election,' the ignorant election of the common-weal which is under criticism, and though this election has been revoked in the play already, and this is a banished man we are trying here, there was a play in progress when this play was played, in which that revocation was yet to come off; and this Poet was anxious that the subject should be considered first from the most comprehensive grounds, so that the principle of 'the election' need never again be called in question, so that the revolution should end in the state, and not in the principle of revolution.

'My wife comes foremost; then the honoured mouldWherein this trunk was framed, and in her handThe grand-child to her blood. But, out, affection!  All bond and privilege of nature, break!  Let it be virtuous to be obstinate. —  What is that curtsey worth? or those doves' eyes,  Which can make gods forsworn?

['He speaks of the people as if he were a god to punish, and not a man of infirmity.']

'I melt, and am not  Of STRONGER EARTH than others. – My mother bows;  As if Olympus to a molehill should  In supplication nod: and my young boy  Hath an aspect of intercession, which  Great Nature cries, 'Deny not!' – Let the Volsces  Plough Rome, and harrow Italy; I'll never  Be such a GOSLING to obey INSTINCT; but stand,  As if a MAN were author of himself,  And knew no other kin.  These eyes are not the same I wore in Rome. Vir.  The sorrow that delivers us thus changed,  Makes you think so.

[The objects are altered, not the eyes. We are changed. But it is with sorrow. She bids him note that alteration, and puts upon it the blame of his loss of love. But that is just the kind of battery he is not provided for. His resolution wavers. That unrelenting warrior, that fierce revengeful man is gone already, and forgot to leave his part – the words he was to speak are wanting.]

Cor. Like a dull actor now,  I have forgot my part, and I am out,  Even to a full disgrace. Best of my flesh,  Forgive my tyranny; but do not say,  For that, Forgive our Romans. – O, a kiss  Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!  Now by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss  I carried from thee, dear; and my true lip  Hath virgin'd it e'er since. – You gods! I prate,  And the most noble mother of the world  Leave unsaluted: Sink, my knee, t'the earth; [Kneels.]  Of the deep duty more impression show  Than that of common sons.

Vol. O, stand up bless'd! Whilst, with no softer cushion than the flint, I kneel before thee; and unproperly Show duty, as mistaken—

[Note it – 'as mistaken,' for this is the kind of learning described elsewhere, which differs from received opinions, and must, therefore, pray in aid of similes.]

– and improperlyShow DUTY, as mistaken all the whileBetween the child and parent.

[And the prostrate form of that which should command, is represented in the kneeling mother. The Poet himself points us to this hieroglyphic. It is the common-weal that kneels in her person, and the rebel interprets for us. It is the violated law that stoops for pardon.]

Cor. What is this? Your knees to me? to your corrected son? Then let the pebbles on the hungry beach Fillip the stars; then let the mutinous winds Strike the proud cedars 'gainst the fiery sun; Murdering impossibility, to make What cannot be, slight work.

Vol. Thou art my warrior; I holp to frame thee.

[But it is not of the little Marcius only, the hero – the Roman hero in germ – that she speaks – there is more than her Roman part here, when she adds – ]

Vol. This is a poor epitome of yours,  Which by the interpretation of full time  May show, like all, yourself.

[And hear now what benediction the true hero can dare to utter, what prayer the true hero can dare to pray, through this faltering, fluctuating, martial hero's lips, when, 'that whatsoever god who led him' is failing him, and the flaws of impulse are swaying him to and fro, and darkening him for ever.]

Cor. 'The god of soldiers  With the consent of SUPREME JOVE,' – [the Capitolian, the                                    god of state] – 'inform  Thy thoughts with NOBLENESS;' – [inform thy thoughts.]                                  'that thou may'st prove  The shame unvulnerable, and stick i'the wars  Like a great sea-mark, standing every flaw,  And saving those that eye thee.'

[But this hero's conclusion for himself, and his impulsive nature is – ]

'Not of a woman's tenderness to be,Requires nor child, nor woman's face to see.I have sat too long.'

But the mother will not let him go, and her stormy eloquence completes the conquest which that dumb rhetoric had before well nigh achieved.

Yes, Menenius was right in his induction. His abstraction and brief summing up of 'this Volumnia' and her history, is the true one. She is very potent in the business of the state, whether you take her in her first literal acceptation, as the representative mother, or whether you take her in that symbolical and allusive comprehension, to which the emphasis on the name is not unfrequently made to point, as 'the nurse and mother of all humanities,' the instructor of the state, the former of its nobility, who in-forms their thoughts with nobleness, such nobleness, and such notions of it as they have, and who fits them for the place they are to occupy in the body of the common-weal.

Menenius has not exaggerated in his exposition the relative importance of this figure among those which the dumb-show of this play exhibits. Among the 'transient hieroglyphics' which the diseased common-weal produces on the scientific stage, when the question of its CURE is the question of the Play – in that great crowd of forms, in that moving, portentous, stormy pageant of senators, and consuls, and tribunes, and plebeians, whose great acts fill the scene – there are none more significant than these two, whom we saw at first 'seated on two low stools, sewing'; these two of the wife and mother – the commanding mother, and the 'gracious silence.'

'This Volumnia' – yes, let her school him, for it is from her school that he has come: let her conquer him, for she is the conserver of this harm. It is she who makes of it a tradition. To its utmost bound of consequences, she is the mother of it, and accountable to God and man for its growth and continuance. Consuls, and senators, and patricians, and tribunes, such as we have, are powerless without her, are powerless against her. The state begins with her; but, instead of it, she has bred and nursed the destroyer of the state. Let her conquer him, though her life-blood must flow for it now. This play is the Cure of the Common-weal, the convulsed and dying Common-weal; and whether the assault be from within or without, this woman must undo her work. The tribunes have sent for her now: she must go forth without shrinking, and slay her son. She was the true mother; she trained him for the common-weal, she would have made a patrician of him, but that craved a noble cunning; she was not instructed in it; she must pay the penalty of her ignorance – the penalty of her traditions – and slay him now. There is no help for it, for she has made with her traditions a thing that no common-weal can bear.

Woe for this Volumnia! Woe for the common-weal whose chiefs she has reared, whose great men and 'GOOD CITIZENS' she has made! Woe for her! Woe for the common-weal, for her boy approaches! The land is groaning and shaken; the faces of men gather blackness; the clashing of arms is heard in the streets, blood is flowing, the towns are blazing. Great Rome will soon be sacked with Romans, for her boy is coming home; the child of her instinct, the son of her ignorance, the son of her RELIGION, is coming home.

'O mother, mother!What hast thou done?..O my mother, mother! O,You have won a happy victory to Rome, —  But for your son – '

Alas for him, and his gentle blood, and noble breeding, and his patrician greatness! Woe for the unlearned mother's son, who has made him great with such a training, that Rome's weal and his, Rome's greatness and his, must needs contend together – that 'Rome's happy victory' must needs be the blaze that shall darken him for ever!

Yet he storms again, with something like his old patrician fierceness; and yet not that, the tone is altered; he is humbler and tamer than he was, and he says himself, 'It is the first time that ever I have learned to scold'; but he is stung, even to boasting of his old heroic deeds, when Aufidius taunts him with his un-martial, un-divine infirmity, and brings home to him in very words, at last, the Poet's suppressed verdict, the Poet's deferred sentence, GUILTY! – of what? He is but A BOY, his nurse's boy, and he undertook the state! He is but A SLAVE, and he was caught climbing to the imperial chair, and putting on the purple. He is but 'a dog to the commonalty,' and he was sitting in the place of God.

Aufidius owns, indeed, to his own susceptibility to these particular and private affections. When Coriolanus turns to him after that appeal from Volumnia has had its effect, and asks: —

'Now, good Aufidius,Were you in my stead, say, would you have heard A mother less, or granted less, Aufidius?'

He answers, guardedly, 'I was moved withal.' But the philosopher has his word there, too, as well as the Poet, slipped in under the Poet's, covertly, 'I was moved with-all.' [It is the Play of the Common-weal.] And what should the single private man, the man of exclusive affections and changeful humours, do with the weal of the whole? In his noblest conditions, what business has he in the state? and who shall vote to give him the out-stretched wings and claws of Volscian armies, that he may say of Rome, all's mine, and give it to his wife or mother? Who shall follow in his train, to plough Rome and harrow Italy, who lays himself and all his forces at his mother's feet, and turns back at her word?

Aufidius. You lords and HEADS of the STATE, perfidiously  Has he betrayed your business, and given up  For certain drops of salt, your city Rome —I say, your city– to his wife and mother: Breaking his oath and resolution like A twist of rotten silk; never admitting Counsel of the war, but at his nurse's tears  He whined and roar'd away your victory,  That pages blushed at him, and men of heart  Looked wondering at each other.

[There is a look which has come down to us. That is Elizabethan. That is the suppressed Elizabethan.]

Cor. Hear'st thou, Mars?

Auf. Name not the god thou Boy of tears.

Cor. Ha!

Auf. No MORE. [You are no more.]

Cor. Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart  Too great for what contains it. Boy? O Slave!  … Boy? False hound!

[These are the names that are flying about here, now that the martial chiefs are criticising each other: it is no matter which side they go.]

'Boy? O slave!

  … Boy? False hound! ['He is a very dog to the commonalty.']  Alone I did it. BOY?

But it is Volumnia herself who searches to the quick the principle of this boyish sovereignty, in her satire on the undivine passion she wishes to unseat. It is thus that she upbraids the hero with his un_manly_, ungracious, ignoble purpose: —

'Speak to me, son.Thou hast affected the fine strains of HONOUR,To imitate the graces of the gods;To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air,And yet to charge thy sulphur with a boltThat should but rive an oak. Why dost not speak?Think'st thou it honourable for a NOBLE MANStill to remember wrongs?

For that is the height of the scientific affirmation also; the other was, in scientific language, its 'anticipation.' He wants nothing of a god but an eternity, and a heaven to throne in (slight deficiences in a god already). 'Yes, mercy, if you paint him truly.' 'I paint him in character.'

NOBILITY, HONOUR, MANLINESS, HEROISM, GOOD CITIZENSHIP, FREEDOM, DIVINITY, PATRIOTISM. We are getting a number of definitions here, vague popular terms, scientifically fixed, scientifically cleared, destined to waver, and be confused and mixed with other and fatally different things in the popular apprehension no more – when once this science is unfolded for that whole people for whom it was delivered – no more for ever.

There is no open dramatic embodiment in this play of the true ideal nobility, and manliness, and honour, and divinity. This is the false affirmation which is put upon the stage here, to be tried, and examined, and rejected. For it is to this Poet's purpose to show – and very much to his purpose to show, sometimes – what is not the true affirmation. His method is critical, but his rejection contains the true definition. The whole play is contrived to shape it here; all hands combine to frame it. Volscians and Romans conspire to pronounce it; the world is against this 'one man' and his part-liness, though he be indeed 'every man.' He himself has been compelled to pronounce it; for the speaker for the whole is the speaker in each of us, and pronounces his sentences on ourselves with our own lips. 'Being gentle wounded craves a noble cunning,' is the word of the noble, who comes back with a Volscian army to exhibit upon the stage this grand hieroglyphic, this grand dramatic negative of that nobility.

But it is from the lips of the mother, brought into this deadly antagonism with the manliness she has trained, compelled now to echo that popular rejection, that the Poet can venture to speak out, at last, from the depths of his true heroism. It is this Volumnia who strikes now to the heart of the play with her satire on this affectation of the graces of the gods, – this assumption of nobility, and manliness, and the fine strains of honour, – in one who is led only by the blind demon gods, 'that keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,' – in one who is bounded and shut in after all to the range of his own poor petty private passions, shut up to a poverty of soul which forbids those assumptions, limited to a nature in which those strictly human terms can be only affectations, one who concentrates all his glorious special human gifts on the pursuit of ends for which the lower natures are also furnished. Honour, forsooth! the fine strains of honour, and the graces of the gods. Look at that Volscian army there.

'To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air, And yet to charge thy sulphur with a bolt  That should but rive an oak.  Why dost not speak?'

He can not. There is no speech for that. It does not bear review.

'Why dost not speak?Think'st thou it honourable for a noble manStill to remember wrongs?'

'Let it be virtuous to be obstinate,' let there be no better principle of that identity which we insist on in men, that firmness which we call manliness, and the cherished wrong is honour.

It is but an interrogative point, but the height of our affirmation is taken with it. It is a figure of speech and intensifies the affirmative with its irony.

'This a consul? No.'

'No more, but e'en a woman, and COMMANDEDBy such poor passion as the maid that milks, And does the meanest chares.' [QUEEN.]

'Give me that man that is not passion's slave.

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, And could of men distinguish her election,  She hath seal'd thee for herself: for thou hast been  As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing.

But the man who rates so highly 'this single mould of Marcius,' and the wounded name of it, that he will forge another for it 'i' the fire of burning Rome,' who will hurt the world to ease the rankling of his single wrong, who will plough Rome and harrow Italy to cool the fever of his thirst for vengeance; this is not the man, this is not the hero, this is not THE GOD, that the scientific review accepts. Whoso has put him in the chair of state on earth, or in heaven, must 'revoke that ignorant election.' Whatever our 'perfect example in civil life' may be, and we are, perhaps, not likely to get it openly in the form of an historic 'composition' on this author's stage, whatever name and shape it may take when it comes, this evidently is not it. This Caius Marcius is dismissed for the present from this Poet's boards. This curule chair that stands here empty yet, for aught that we can see, and this crown of 'olives of endless age,' is not for him.

'Would you proceed especially against Caius Marcius?Against him first.'We proceed first by negatives, and conclude after everyspecies of rejection.'

On the surface of this play, lies everywhere the question of the Common-Weal, in its relation to the good that is private and particular, scientifically reviewed, as a question in proportion, – as the question of the whole against the part, – of the greater against the less, – nay, as the question of that which is against that which is not. For it is a treatment which throws in passing, the shadow of the old metaphysical suspicion and scepticism on that chaotic unaxiomatical condition of things which the scientific eye discovers here, for the new philosophy with all its new comprehension of the actual, with all its new convergency on practice, is careful to inform us that it observes, notwithstanding the old distinction between 'being and becoming.' This is an IDEAL philosophy also, though the notions of nature are more respected in it, than the spontaneous unconsidered notions of men.

It is the largeness of the objective whole, the historic whole and the faculty in man of comprehending it, and the sense of relation and obligation to it, as the highest historic law, – the formal, the essential law of kind in him, it is the breadth of reason, it is the circumference of conscience, it is the grandeur of duty which this author arrays here scientifically against that oblivion and ignoring of the whole, that forgetfulness of the world, and the universal tie which the ignorance of the unaided sense and the narrowness of passion and private affection create, whether in the one, or the few, or the many. It is the Weal of the whole against the will of the part, no matter where the limit of that partiality, or 'partliness,' as the 'poor citizen' calls it, is fixed whether it be the selfishness of the single self, or whether the household tie enlarges its range, whether it be the partiality of class or faction, or the partiality of kindred or race, or the partiality of geographic limits, the question of the play, the question of the whole, of the worthier whole, is still pursued with scientific exaction. It is the conflict with axioms which is represented here, and not with wordy axioms only, not with abstractions good for the human mind only, in its abstract self-sustained speculations, but with historical axioms, axioms which the universal nature knows, laws which have had the consent of things since this nature began, laws which passed long ago the universal commons.

It is the false unscientific state which is at war, not with abstract speculation merely, but with the nature of things and the received logic of the universe, which this man of a practical science wishes to call attention to. It is the crowning and enthroning of that which is private and particular, it is the anointing of passion and instinct, it is the arming of the absolute – the demon – will; it is the putting into the hands of the ignorant part the sceptre of the whole, which strikes the scientific Reviewer as the thing to be noted here. And by way of proceeding by negatives first, he undertakes to convey to others the impression which this state of things makes upon his own mind, as pointedly as may be, consistently with those general intentions which determine his proceedings and the conditions which limit them, and he is by no means timid in availing himself of the capabilities of his story to that end. The true spectacle of the play, – the principal hieroglyphic of it, – the one in which this hieroglyphic criticism approaches the metaphysical intention most nearly, is one that requires interpretation. It does not report itself to the eye at once. The showman stops to tell us before he produces it, that it is a symbol, – that this is one of the places where he 'prays in aid of similes,' – that this is a specimen of what he calls elsewhere 'allusive' writing. The true spectacle of the play, – the grand hieroglyphic of it, – is that view of the city, and the woman in the foreground kneeling for it, 'to her son, her corrected son,' begging for pardon of her corrected rebel – hanging for life on the chance of his changeful moods and passions. It is Rome that lies stretched out there upon her hills, in all her visible greatness and claims to reverence; it is Rome with her Capitolian crown, forth from which the Roman matron steps, and with no softer cushion than the flint, in the dust at the rebel's feet, kneels 'to show' – as she tells us – to show as clearly as the conditions of the exhibition allow it to be exhibited, DUTY as mistaken, – 'as mistaken,' —all the while between the child and parent.

It is Jupiter that stoops; it is Olympus doing obeisance to the mole-hill; it is the divineness of the universal law – the formal law in man – that is prostrate and suppliant in her person; and the Poet exhausts even his own powers of expression, and grows inarticulate at last, in seeking to convey his sense of this ineffable, impossible, historical pretension. It is as 'if Olympus to a mole-hill should in supplication nod; it is as if the pebbles on the hungry beach should fillip the stars; as if the mutinous winds should strike the proud cedars against the fiery sun, murdering impossibility, to make what can not be, slight work,' – what can not be.

That was the spectacle of the play, and that was the world's spectacle when the play was written. Nay, worse; a thousandfold more wild and pitiful, and confounding to the intellect, and revolting to its sensibilities, was the spectacle that the State offered then to the philosophic eye. The Poet has all understated his great case. He has taken the pattern-man in the private affections, the noble man of mere instinct and passion, and put him in the chair of state; – the man whom nature herself had chosen and anointed, and crowned with kingly graces.