་་ cares" should be construed into "fears," to the subversion of all due authority; and he is no sooner disappointed in his schemes to deprive the people, not only of the cares of the state, but of all power to redress themselves, than Volumnia is made madly to exclaim, "Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome, This is but natural: it is but natural for a mother to have more regard for her son than for a whole city; but then the city should be left to take some care of itself. The care of the state cannot, we here see, be safely intrusted to maternal affection, or to the domestic charities of high life. The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must courtesy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them: their power is at the expense of our weakness; their riches of our poverty; their pride of our degradation; their splendour of our wretchedness; their tyranny of our servitude. If they had the superior knowledge ascribed to them (which they have not), it would only render them so much more formidable, and from gods would convert them into devils. The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.// The people are poor; therefore they ought to be starved. "They are slaves: therefore they ought to be beaten. They work hard; therefore they ought to be treated like beasts of burden. They are ignorant; therefore they ought not to be allowed to feel that they want food, or clothing, or rest-that they are enslaved, oppressed, and miserable. This is the logic of the imagination and the passions; which seek to aggrandize what excites admiration. and to heap contempt on misery, to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches desperate; to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition of brutes. The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of poetical justice; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase though they do not share in the spoil. We may depend upon it that what men delight to read in books, they will put in practice in reality. [From Gervinus's “Shakespeare Commentaries.” *] It is by no means unimportant, in forming a judgment on this play, whether we take the political or the psychological idea as the basis for our consideration. If we take the political struggle between the two orders to be the main point, we shall readily arrive at wrong conclusions. To instance only one: We see Coriolanus, as the chief representative of the aristocracy, in strong opposition to the people and the tribunes; hence we naturally take up the view expressed by Hazlitt, that Shakespeare had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, to the aristocratical principle, inasmuch as he does not dwell on the truths he tells of the nobles in the same proportion as he does on those he tells of the people. Hazlitt has added excellent grounds for proving even the naturalness and need of this inclination in the poet. He shows that the poetic imagination is an exaggerating, exclusive, aristocratic faculty, that the principle of poetry is everywhere an anti-levelling principle, that we feel more admiration for the proud arbitrary man than for the humble crowd that bow before him, for the oppressor than for the oppressed. All this is very true, and seems to gain more * Shakespeare Commentaries, by Dr. G. G. Gervinus, translated by F. E. Bunnett: revised ed. (London, 1875), p. 748 fol. force by its application to Coriolanus. But Shakespeare's poetry is always so closely connected with morality, his imaginative power is so linked with sound reason, his ideal is so full of actual truth, that his poetry seemed to us always distinguished from all other poetry exactly by this: that there is nothing exclusive in it, that candour and impartiality are the most prominent marks of the poet and his poetry, that if imagination even with him strives sometimes after effect, exists by contrasts, and admits no middle course, yet in the very placing, describing, and colouring of the highest poetical contrasts there appears ever for the moral judgment that golden mean of impartiality which is the precious prerogative of the truly wise. Shakespeare has depicted the man of freedom, Brutus, nay, even the harder master-spirit of the revolution, Cassius, far nobler and with much more love than the man of the aristocracy, Coriolanus. It will be allowed that, from the example of Brutus, many more would be won over to the cause of the people than would be won over to aristocratic principles by Coriolanus. If we regard Coriolanus not merely in reference to the many, but if we weigh his character in itself and with itself, we must confess, after the closest consideration, that personified aristocracy is here represented in its noblest and in its worst side, with that impartiality which Shakespeare's nature could scarcely avoid. It may be replied, the people are not so depicted. Yet even on the nobles as a body our poet has just as little thrown a favourable light at last; for it lies in the nature of things that a multitude can never be compared with one man who is to be the subject of poetical representation, and who, on that very account, must stand alone, one single man distinguished from the many. But it may be said, the representatives of the people, the tribunes, are not thus impartially depicted. Yet where would have been the poetic harmony, if Shakespeare had made these prominent? Where the truth, if he had given dignity and energy to a new power created in a tumult? where our sympathy in his hero, if he had placed a Marcus Brutus in opposition to him in the tribu nate? In proportion as he had raised our interest in the tribunes, he would have withdrawn it from Coriolanus, who had already enough to do to bear his own burden of declension. If we observe closely, we cannot even find that the people are here represented as so very bad. We must distinguish between the way in which they really act and the way in which the mockers and despisers of the people represent them; we may then soon find that the populace in Julius Cæsar appear much worse than in Coriolanus. Great attention is here paid to the character of the age. In Antony and Cleopatra, where the people had ceased to be of any importance, they no longer appear; in Fulius Cæsar, where their degeneracy ruined the republic, they are shown in all their weakness; in Coriolanus, where they can oppose but not stop the progress of Rome's political career, they appear equally endowed with good and bad qualities. . . . If, however, we would find out the poet's estimate of democratic and aristocratic principles, we must, as intimated above, compare the highest representatives of both principles, Coriolanus with Brutus and Cassius; not the populace with Coriolanus, who is intended by the poet, expressly and in accordance with history, to tower like a hero above them. . . . The poet has taken great pains to make the exceptional pride and greatness of his hero possible. He has given him a mother glowing with patriotism, early left a widow, who has centred all her pride, her strength, and her love on making her only and early distinguished son the chief hero and ruler of his country. . . . He has been trained from childhood to an elevation above the ordinary and the vulgar; he has, says Volumnia, "affected the fine strains of honour, to imitate the graces of the gods." These overstrained demands on himself and others, springing from pride and B begetting a greater pride, made him in time unfit for every thing and ruinous to himself, because with them every good and every bad quality rose to a height that could not, as it were, support itself; he strove for a degree of merit "that stifled itself by its own excess.' No idle dream of honour impels him to seek for renown; he wishes to be, not to seem, the first. In this sense he is an aristocrat in the simplest and noblest meaning of the word; with him the name and the rank are nothing, but every thing consistent with true pride lies in real merit. It would not satisfy him, like Cæsar, to be the first in the smallest place in the world, but rather to be second in the greatest; he wishes to be, not the first in rank, but the greatest in deeds in the whole earth. What induced Shakespeare to endow the hero of this play with this superhuman, demi-godlike greatness? History imposed upon the poet a catastrophe of the rarest kind. Coriolanus, after his banishment, fights against his country, for which before he would have striven in the hardest battles without requiring any reward; he enters into a league with his bitterest enemy from a cold unfeeling thirst for vengeance; then, at the certain peril of his life, he suddenly abandons this revenge at the entreaty of his mother. These contradictions, Shakespeare thought, could only be imputed to a man who, from nature and education, had carried his virtues and his faults to extremes, which rendered natural the change of his different qualities into their opposites. This is managed with an art and a delicacy which can scarcely be suspected in the apparently coarse strokes of this delineation. First, his unmeasured thirst for glory, which in an heroic age can only seek its satisfaction in the praise bestowed on the highest valour. If valour be "the chiefest virtue," it is said of him that he is then "singly counterpoised in the world." Coriolanus so considered valour. Nowhere is his whole being so over-excited as in battle; not his blows only, |