Part 38 (1/2)

_First Sen_. _Then_, WORTHY _Marcius_, Attend upon Cominius to these wars.

It is the relation of the spirit of military conquest, the relation of the military hero, and his government, to the true human need, which is subjected to criticism here; a criticism which is necessarily an after-thought in the natural order of the human development.

The transition 'from the casque to the cus.h.i.+on,' that so easy step in the heroic ages, whether it be 'an entrance by conquest,' foreign or otherwise, or whether the chieftain's own followers bring him home in triumph, and the people, whose battle he has won, conduct him to their chair of state, in either case, that transition appears, to this author's eye, worth going back, and looking into a little, in an age so advanced in civilization, as the one in which he finds himself.

For though he is, as any one who will take any pains to inquire, may easily satisfy himself,--the master in chief of the new science of nature,--and the deepest in its secrets of any, his views on that subject appear to be somewhat broader, his aspirations altogether of another kind, from those, to which his school have since limited themselves. He does not content himself with pinning b.u.t.terflies and hunting down beetles; his scientific curiosity is not satisfied with cla.s.sifying ferns and lichens, and ascertaining the proper historical position of pudding-stone and sand-stone, and in settling the difference between them and their neighbours. Nature is always, in all her varieties wonderful, and all 'her infinite book of secrecy,' that book which all the world had overlooked till he came, was to his eye, from the first, a book of spells, of magic lore, a Prospero book of enchantments. He would get the key to her cipher, he would find the lost alphabet of her unknown tongue; there is no page of her composing in which he would scorn to seek it--none which he would scorn to read with it: but then he has, notwithstanding, some _choice_ in his studies. He is of the opinion that some subjects are n.o.bler than others, and that those which concern specially the human kind, have a special claim to their regard, and the secret of those combinations which result in the varieties of sh.e.l.l-fish, and other similar orders of being, do _not_ exclusively, or chiefly, engage his attention.

There is another natural curiosity, which strikes the eye of the founder of the Science of Nature, as quite the most curious and wonderful thing going, so far, at least, as his observation has extended, though he is willing to make, as he takes pains to state, philosophical allowance for the partiality of species in determining this judgment, and is perfectly willing to concede, that if any particular species of sh.e.l.l-fish, for instance, were to undertake a science of things in general, that particular species would, no doubt, occupy the princ.i.p.al place in that system; especially if arts, tending to the improvement and elevation of it, were necessarily based on this larger specific knowledge.

Men, and their proceedings and organisms, men, and their habits and modes of combining, did appear to the eye of this scientific observer quite as well worth observing and noting, also, as bees and beavers, for instance, and their societies; and, accordingly, he made some observations himself, and notes, too, in this particular department of his general science. For, as he tells us elsewhere, he did not wish to map out the large fields of the science of observation in general, and exhibit to the world, in bare description, the method of it, without leaving some specimens of his own, of what might be done with it, in proper hands, under favourable circ.u.mstances, selecting for his experiments the princ.i.p.al and n.o.blest subjects--those of the most immediate human concern. And he has not only very carefully laboured a few of these; but he has taken extraordinary pains to preserve them to us in their proper scientific form, with just as little of the ligature of the time on them as it was possible to leave.

It is no kind of beetle or b.u.t.terfly, then, that this philosopher comes down upon here from the heights of his universal science--his science of the nature of things in general, but that great Spenserian monstrosity,--that diseased product of nature, which individual human nature, in spite of its natural pettiness and helplessness, under certain favourable conditions of absorption and accretion, may be made to yield. It is that dragon of lawless power which was overspreading, in his time, all the common human affairs, and infolding in its gaudy, baleful wings all the life of men,--it is that which takes from the first the speculative eye of this new speculator,--this founder of the science of things, and not of words instead of them. Here is a man of science, a born naturalist, who understands that _this_ phenomenon lies in his department, and takes it to be his business, among other things, to examine it.

It was, indeed, a formidable phenomenon, as it presented itself to his apprehension; and his own words are always the best, when one knows how to read them--

'He sits in state, like a thing made for Alexander.' 'When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading.'

'He talks like a knell, his hum is a battery; what he bids be done, is finished at his bidding. He wants nothing of a G.o.d but eternity, and _a heaven_ to throne in.' 'Yes,' is the answer; 'yes, _mercy_, if you paint him truly.' 'I paint him in character.'

'Is it possible that so short a time can alter the conditions of a _man_?' inquires the speculator upon this phenomenon, and then comes the reply--'There's a differency between a grub and a b.u.t.terfly, yet _your b.u.t.terfly was a grub. This Marcius is grown from_ MAN TO DRAGON; he has wings, he is more than a creeping thing.'

This is Coriola.n.u.s at the head of his army; but in Julius Caesar, it is nature in the wildness of the tempest--it is a night of unnatural horrors, that is brought in by the Poet to ill.u.s.trate the enormity of the evil he deals with, and its unnatural character--'to serve as instrument of fear and warning unto _some_ MONSTROUS STATE.'

'Now could _I_, Casca, Name to _thee_ a man most like this dreadful night; That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars As doth the lion in the Capitol: A _man no mightier_ than thyself, or me, In _personal action, yet prodigious grown_, And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.

_Casca_. Tis _Caesar_ that you mean: Is it not, Ca.s.sius?

[I paint him in character.]

_Ca.s.sius_. Let it be--WHO IT IS: _For Romans now_ Have thewes and limbs like to their ancestors.'

CHAPTER IV.

POLITICAL RETROSPECT.

'I think he'll be to Rome As is the osprey to the fish, who _takes_ it By sovereignty of nature.'

FLOWER OF WARRIORS

The poet finds, indeed, this monstrosity full-blown in his time. He finds it 'in the civil streets,' 'talking plain cannon', 'humming batteries' in the most unmistakeable manner, with no particular account of its origin to give, without, indeed, appearing to recollect exactly how it came there, retaining only a general impression, that a descent from the celestial regions had, in some way, been effected during some undated period of human history, under circ.u.mstances which the memory of man was not expected to be able to recall in detail, and a certificate to that effect, divinely subscribed, was understood to be included among its properties, though it does not appear to have been, on the face of it, so absolutely conclusive as to render a little logical demonstration, on the part of royalty itself, superfluous.

It was not very far from this time, that a very able and loyal servant of the crown undertook, openly, to a.s.sist the royal memory on this delicate point; and, though the details of that historical representation, and the manner of it, are, of course, quite different from those of the Play, it will be found, upon careful examination, not so dissimilar in purport as the exterior would have seemed to imply. The philosopher does not feel called upon, in either case, to begin by contradicting flatly, in so many words, the theory which he finds the received one on that point. Even the _poet_, with all his freedom, is compelled to go to work after another fas.h.i.+on.

'And _thus_ do we, of wisdom, and of reach, With _windla.s.ses_, and with a.s.sAYS of BIAS, By indirections find directions out.'

He has his own way of creating an historical retrospect. No one need know that it _is_ a retrospect; no one will know it, perhaps, who has not taken the author's clue elsewhere. The crisis is already reached when the play begins. The collision between the civil want and the military government is at its height. It is a revolution on which the curtain rises. It is a city street filled with dark, angry swarms of men, who have come forth to seek out this government, in the person of its chief, who stop only to conduct their summary trial of it, and then hurry on to execute their verdict.

But the poet arrests this revolution. Before we proceed any further, 'Hear _me_ speak,' he cries, through the lips of the plebeian leader.

The man of science demands a hearing, before this movement proceed any further. He has a longer story to tell than that with which Menenius Agrippa appeases his Romans. There is a cry of war in the streets. The obscure background of that portentous scene opens, and the long vista of the heroic ages, with all its pomp and stormy splendours, scene upon scene, grows luminous behind it. The foreground is the same. The arrested mutineers stand there still, with the frown knit in their angry brows, with the weapons of their civil warfare in their hands; there is no stage direction for a change of costume, and none perceives that they have grown older as they stand, and that the shadow of the elder time is on them. But the manager of this stage is one who knows that the elder time of history is the childhood of his kind.

There is a cry of war in that ancient street. The enemy of the infant state is in arms. The people rush forth to conflict with the leader of armies at their head. But this time, for the first time in the history of literature, the philosopher goes with him. The philosopher, hitherto, has been otherwise occupied. He has been too busy with his fierce war of words; he has had too much to do with his abstract generals, his logical majors and minors, to get them in squadrons and right forms of war, to have any eye for such vulgar solidarities. 'All men are mortal. Peter and John are men. Therefore Peter and John are mortal,' he concludes; but that is his nearest and most vivacious approach to historical particulars, and his cell is broad enough to contain all that he needs for his processes and ends. He finds enough and to spare, ready prepared to his hands, in the casual, rude, unscientific observations and spontaneous distinctions of the vulgar.