cient hand, who sees the fact with clear-cut edges, and achieves the necessary deed with logical precision, which is pitiless but not cruel,-Octavius is successful. Yet we should rather fail with Brutus. Prosperity or adversity in the material world is here a secondary affair. By this time Shakspere himself, by use of means which he would not reject, however distasteful they were, had succeeded he had practically mastered life from the material point of view. But the breaking down or the building up of character seemed to him, now more than ever before, of supreme importance. In Julius Cæsar, Shakspere makes a complete imaginative study of the case of a man predestined to failure, who nevertheless retains to the end the moral integrity which he prized as his highest possession, and who with each new error advances a fresh claim upon our admiration and our love. To maintain the will in a fruitful relation with facts, that was what Romeo could not do, because he brooded over things as they reflected and repeated themselves in his own emotions; what Hamlet could not do, because he would not or could not come into direct contact with events, but studied them as they endlessly repeated and reflected themselves in his own thinking. Henry V. had been a ruler of men, because, possessing a certain plain genius for getting into direct relation with concrete fact, and possessing also entire moral soundness, his will, his conscience, his intellect, and his enthusiasms had all been at one, and had all tended to action. spere's admiration of the great men of action is immense, because he himself was primarily not a man of action. He is stern to all idealists, because he was aware that he Shak might too easily yield himself to the tendencies of an idealist. When Shakspere feels himself shooting up too rapidly he "stops" himself, as gardeners do a plant, that he may throw out shoots below, and increase in strength and massiveness. If his feelings begin to order that by coming into idealise, he stops them, in more fruitful relation with fact he may add force and amplitude to his feelings. If his ideas tend to become abstract and notional, he plunges them into concrete matter in order that they may enrich and vitalise themselves. Against his idealising tendency Shakspere constantly plays off his humour, resolved that he will not let himself escape from the real world, and from the whole of it. But with his sternness to idealists there is mingled a passionate tenderness. He shows us remorselessly their failure, but while they fail we love them. Shakspere "stops" himself, because he has entire confidence in the vigour of both his intellect and of his heart, and also in the good powers of this present world. He does not suppose that his thoughts will be less strong and fruitful because he plunges his ideas back into concrete fact. He does not suppose that he will cease to love becauses he chooses to see things as they are, and each thing on every side, rather than refine things away into the abstractions of the heart, which are desired by the purist or the sentimentalist. He does not fear that his will may grasp things with less energy or less tenacity, because he knows his purpose, and can refrain. And accordingly, while we may note many particulars which distinguish Shakspere's later writings from those of his earlier years, the great distinction of all is this, that his power of thought, while losing none of its litheness and celerity, became, as time went on, more massive and sternly capable of endurance, so that he dared to confront the most awful problems of life, and could at will either stoically detain his mind from contemplation of the unknown, or could brood upon it with long and wistful intensity; and at the same time his feelings, increasing in ardour and swiftness, grew in massiveness and complexity, until from such lyric melody of passion as reaches us from Romeo and Juliet we make transition to the orchestral symphony of emotion which envelops us when we approach King Lear. Brutus is the political Girondin. He is placed in contrast with his brother-in-law Cassius, the political Jacobin. Brutus is an idealist; he lives among books; he nourishes himself with philosophies; he is secluded from the impression of facts. Moral ideas and principles are more to him than concrete realities; he is studious of selfperfection, jealous of the purity of his own character, unwilling that so clear a character should receive even the apparent stain of misconception or misrepresentation. He is, therefore, as such men are, too much given to explanation of his conduct. Had he lived he would have written an Apology for his life, educing evidence, with a calm superiority, to prove that each act of his life proceeded from an honourable motive. Cassius, on the contrary, is by no means studious of moral perfection. He is frankly envious, and hates Cæsar. Yet he is not ignoble. Brutus loves him, and the love of Brutus is a patent which establishes a man's nobility: The last of all the Romans, fare thee well! It is impossible that ever Rome Should breed thy fellow.* And Cassius has one who will die for him. Titinius crowns the dead brow of the conspirator: Brutus come apace, And see how I regarded Caius Cassius. By your leave, gods-this is a Roman's part: Cassius has a swift and clear perception of the fact. He is not, like Brutus, a theorist, but "a great observer," who "looks quite through the deeds of men." Brutus lives in the abstraction, in the idea; Cassius lives in the concrete, in the fact. The conspiracy has been conceived and hatched by Cassius. The one thing wanting to the conspirators, as he perceives, is moral elevation, and that prestige which would be lent to the enterprise by a disinterested and lofty soul like that of Brutus. The time is the feast of Lupercal, and Antony is to run in the games. Cæsar passes by, and as he passes a soothsayer calls in shrill tones from the press of people, "Beware the Ides of March." Cæsar summons him forward, gazes in his face, and dismisses him with authoritative gesture, "He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass." It is evidently intended that Cæsar shall have a foible for supposing that he can read off character from the faces of men: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. *These lines are taken almost word for word from North's Plutarch. Besides having read Plutarch it seems probable that Shakspere was acquainted with the translation of Appian, 1578, from which he probably obtained the hints for his great speeches of Brutus and of Antony. Cæsar need not condescend to the ordinary ways of obtaining acquaintance with facts. He asks no question of the soothsayer. He takes the royal road to knowledge, -intuition. This self-indulgence of his own foibles is, as it were, symbolized by his physical infirmity, which he admits in lordly fashion-"Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf." Cæsar is entitled to own such a foible as deafness; it may pass well with Cæsar. If men would have him hear them, let them come to his right ear. Meanwhile, things may be whispered which it were well for him if he strained an ear-right or left -to catch. In Shakspere's rendering of the character of Cæsar, which has considerably bewildered his critics, one thought of the poet would seem to be this, that unless a man continually keeps himself in relation with facts, and with his present person and character, he may become to himself legendary and mythical. The real man Cæsar disappears for himself under the greatness of the Cæsar myth. He forgets himself as he actually is, and knows only the vast legendary power named Cæsar. He is a numen to himself, speaking of Cæsar in the third person, as if of some power above and behind his consciousness. And at this very moment-so ironical is the time-spirit-Cassius is cruelly insisting to Brutus upon all those infirmities which prove this god no more than a pitiful mortal. Where he Julius Cæsar appears in only three scenes of the play. In the first scene of the third act he dies. does appear the poet seems anxious to insist weakness rather than the strength of Cæsar. upon the He swoons when the crown is offered to him, and upon his recovery |