The play of “Julius Caesar” was written about 1600 or 1601. As “Twelfth
Night” was the last of the golden comedies, so “Julius Caesar” is the
first of the great tragedies, and bears melancholy witness to us that
the poet's young-eyed confidence in life and joy in living are dying, if
not dead. “Julius Caesar” is the first outcome of disillusion. Before it
was written Shakespeare had been deceived by his mistress, betrayed by
his friend; his eyes had been opened to the fraud and falsehood of life;
but, like one who has just been operated on for cataract, he still sees
realities as through a mist, dimly. He meets the shock of traitorous
betrayal as we should have expected Valentine or Antonio or Orsino to
meet it--with pitying forgiveness. Suffering, instead of steeling his
heart and drying up his sympathies, as it does with most men, softened
him, induced him to give himself wholly to that “angel, Pity.” He will
not believe that his bitter experience is universal; in spite of
Herbert's betrayal, he still has the courage to declare his belief in
the existence of the ideal. At the very last his defeated Brutus cries:
“My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me.”
The pathos of this attempt still to believe in man and man's truth is
over the whole play. But the belief was fated to disappear. No man who
lives in the world can boast of loyalty as Brutus did; even Jesus had a
Judas among the Twelve. But when Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” he
still tried to believe, and this gives the play an important place in
his life's story.
Before I begin to consider the character of Brutus I should like to draw
attention to three passages which place Brutus between the melancholy
Jaques of “As You Like It,” whose melancholy is merely temperamental,
and the almost despairing Hamlet. Jaques says:
“Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine.”
This is the view of early manhood which does not doubt its power to cure
all the evils which afflict mortality. Then comes the later, more
hopeless view, to which Brutus gives expression:
“Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this;
Brutus had rather be a villager
Than to repute himself a son of Rome
Under these hard conditions as this time
Is like to lay upon us.”
And later still, and still more bitter, Hamlet's:
“The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!”
But Shakespeare is a meliorist even in Hamlet, and believes that the
ailments of man can all be set right.
The likenesses between Brutus and Hamlet are so marked that even the
commentators have noticed them. Professor Dowden exaggerates the
similarities. “Both (dramas),” he writes, “are tragedies of thought
rather than of passion; both present in their chief characters the
spectacle of noble natures which fail through some weakness or
deficiency rather than through crime; upon Brutus as upon Hamlet a
burden is laid which he is not able to bear; neither Brutus nor Hamlet
is fitted for action, yet both are called to act in dangerous and
difficult affairs.” Much of this is Professor Dowden's view and not
Shakespeare's. When Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” he had not reached
that stage in self-understanding when he became conscious that he was a
man of thought rather than of action, and that the two ideals tend to
exclude each other. In the contest at Philippi Brutus and his wing win
the day; it is the defeat of Cassius which brings about the ruin;
Shakespeare evidently intended to depict Brutus as well “fitted for
action.”
Some critics find it disconcerting that Shakespeare identified himself
with Brutus, who failed, rather than with Caesar, who succeeded. But
even before he himself came to grief in his love and trust, Shakespeare
had always treated the failures with peculiar sympathy. He preferred
Arthur to the Bastard, and King Henry VI. to Richard III., and Richard
II. to proud Bolingbroke. And after his agony of disillusion, all his
heroes are failures for years and years: Brutus, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear,
Troilus, Antony, and Timon--all fail as he himself had failed.
There is some matter for surprise in the fact that Brutus is an ideal
portrait of Shakespeare. Disillusion usually brings a certain bitter
sincerity, a measure of realism, into artistic work; but its first
effect on Shakespeare was to draw out all the kindliness in him; Brutus
is Shakespeare at his sweetest and best. Yet the soul-suffering of the
man has assuredly improved his art: Brutus is a better portrait of him
than Biron, Valentine, Romeo, or Antonio, a more serious and bolder
piece of self-revealing even than Orsino. Shakespeare is not afraid now
to depict the deep underlying kindness of his nature, his essential
goodness of heart. A little earlier, and occupied chiefly with his own
complex growth, he could only paint sides of himself; a little later,
and the personal interest absorbed all others, so that his dramas became
lyrics of anguish and despair. Brutus belongs to the best time,
artistically speaking, to the time when passion and pain had tried the
character without benumbing the will or distracting the mind: it is a
masterpiece of portraiture, and stands in even closer relation to Hamlet
than Romeo stands to Orsino. As Shakespeare appears to us in Brutus at
thirty-seven, so he was when they bore him to his grave at
fifty-two--the heart does not alter greatly.
Let no one say or think that in all this I am drawing on my imagination;
what I have said is justified by all that Brutus says and does from one
end of the play to the other. According to his custom, Shakespeare has
said it all of himself very plainly, and has put his confession into the
mouth of Brutus on his very first appearance (Act i. sc. 2):
“Cassius
Be not deceived: if I have veiled my look
I turn the trouble of my countenance
Merely upon myself. Vexed I am
Of late with passions of some difference,
Conceptions only proper to myself,
Which gives some soil, perhaps, to my behaviours,
But let not therefore my good friends be grieved,--
Among which number, Cassius, be you one,--
Nor construe any further in neglect,
Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war,
Forgets the shows of love to other men.”
What were these “different passions,” complex personal passions, too,
which had vexed Brutus and changed his manners even to his friends?
There is no hint of them in Plutarch, no word about them in the play. It
was not “poor Brutus,” but poor Shakespeare, racked by love and
jealousy, tortured by betrayal, who was now “at war with himself.”
I assume the identity of Brutus with Shakespeare before I have
absolutely proved it because it furnishes the solution to the
difficulties of the play. As usual, Coleridge has given proof of his
insight by seeing and stating the chief difficulty, without, however,
being able to explain it, and as usual, also, the later critics have
followed him as far as they can, and in this case have elected to pass
over the difficulty in silence. Coleridge quotes some of the words of
Brutus when he first thinks of killing Caesar, and calls the passage a
speech of Brutus, but it is in reality a soliloquy of Brutus, and must
be considered in its entirety. Brutus says:
“It must be by his death: and for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him
But for the general. He would be crowned:--
How that might change his nature, there's the question?
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking. Crown him?--that;
And then, I grant, we put a sting in him
That at his will he may do danger with.
The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power: and to speak truth of Caesar,
I have known his affections swayed
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upwards turns his face;
But when he once attains the topmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may:
Then, lest he may, prevent. And since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus: that, what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities:
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg,
Which, hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous;
And kill him in the shell.”
Coleridge's comment on this deserves notice. He wrote: “This speech is
singular; at least, I do not at present see into Shakespeare's motive,
his _rationale_, or in what point of view he meant Brutus'
character to appear. For surely ... nothing can seem more discordant
with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the
intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here
attributed to him--to him, the stern Roman republican; namely, that he
would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome,
would Caesar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be!
How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal cause--none in
Caesar's past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he
not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the
Senate? Shakespeare, it may be said, has not brought these things
forward. True;--and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What
character did Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?”
All this is sound criticism, and can only be answered by the truth that
Shakespeare from the beginning of the play identified himself with
Brutus, and paid but little attention to the historic Brutus whom he had
met in Plutarch. Let us push criticism a little further, and we shall
see that this is the only possible way to read the riddle. We all know
why Plutarch's Brutus killed Caesar; but why does Shakespeare's Brutus
kill the man he so esteems? Because Caesar may change his nature when
king; because like the serpent's egg he may “grow mischievous”? But when
he speaks “truth” of Caesar he has to admit Caesar's goodness. The
“serpent's egg” reason then is inapplicable. Besides, when speaking of
himself on the plains of Philippi, Shakespeare's Brutus explicitly
contradicts this false reasoning:
“I know not how
But I do find it cowardly and vile,
_For fear of what might fall_, so to prevent
The term of life.”
It would seem, therefore, that Brutus did not kill Caesar, as one
crushes a serpent's egg, to prevent evil consequences. It is equally
manifest that he did not do it for “the general,” for if ever “the
general” were shown to be despicable and worthless it is in this very
play, where the citizens murder Cinna the poet because he has the same
name as Cinna the conspirator, and the lower classes are despised as the
“rabblement,” “the common herd,” with “chapped hands,” “sweaty
night-caps,” and “stinking breath.”
It is Dr. Brandes' idea and not Shakespeare's that Brutus is a “man of
uncompromising character and principle.” That is the Brutus of Plutarch,
who finds in his stern republican love of the common good an ethical
motive for killing the ambitious Caesar. But Shakespeare had no
understanding of the republican ideal, and no sympathy with the public;
accordingly, his Brutus has no adequate reason for contriving Caesar's
death. Shakespeare followed Plutarch in freeing Brutus from the
suspicion of personal or interested motive, but he didn't see that by
doing this he made his Brutus a conspirator without a cause, a murderer
without a motive. The truth is our gentle poet could never find a
convincing ground for cold-blooded murder. It will be remembered that
Macbeth only murders, as the deer murders, out of fear, and the fact
that his Brutus can find no justification of any sort for killing
Caesar, confirms our view of Shakespeare's gentle kindness. The
“uncompromising character and principle” of the severe republican we
find in Plutarch, sit uneasily on Shakespeare's Brutus; it is apparent
that the poet had no conception of what we call a fanatic. His
difficulties arise from this limitation of insight. He begins to write
the play by making Brutus an idealized portrait of himself; he,
therefore, dwells on Brutus' perfect nobility, sincerity, and
unselfishness, but does not realize that the more perfect he makes
Brutus, the more clear and cogent Brutus' motive must be for undertaking
Caesar's assassination.
In this confusion Shakespeare's usually fine instinct is at fault, and
he blunders from mistake to mistake. His idealizing tendency makes him
present Brutus as perfect, and at the same time he uses the historical
incident of the anonymous letters, which goes to show Brutus as
conceited and vain. If these letters influenced Brutus--and they must be
taken to have done so, or else why were they introduced?--we have a noble
and unselfish man murdering out of paltry vanity. In Plutarch,
where Brutus is depicted as an austere republican, the incident of the
letters only throws a natural shade of doubt on the rigid principles by
which alone he is supposed to be guided. We all feel that rigid
principles rest on pride, and may best be led astray through pride. But
Shakespeare's Brutus is pure human sweetness, and the letters are worse
than out of place when addressed to him. Shakespeare should never have
used this incident; it is a blot on his conception.
All through the first acts of the play Brutus is incredible, for he is
in an impossible position. Shakespeare simply could not find any valid
reason why his _alter ego_, Brutus, should kill Caesar. But from
the moment the murder is committed to the end of the play Brutus-
Shakespeare is at peace with himself. And as soon as the dramatist lets
himself go and paints Brutus with entire freedom and frankness, he rises
to the height of tragic pathos, and we can all recognize the original of
the portrait. At first Brutus is merely ideal; his perfect
unsuspiciousness--he trusts even Antony; his transparent honesty--he
will have no other oath among the conspirators
“Than honesty to honesty engaged”;
his hatred of bloodshed--he opposes Cassius, who proposes to murder
Antony; all these noble qualities may be contrasted with the subtler
shortcomings which make of Hamlet so vital a creation. Hamlet is
suspicious even of Ophelia; Hamlet is only “indifferent honest”; Hamlet
makes his friends swear to keep the ghost's appearance a profound
secret; Hamlet lives from the beginning, while Brutus at first is a mere
bundle of perfections individualized only by that personal intimate
confession which I have already quoted, which, however, has nothing to
do with the play. But later in the drama Shakespeare begins to lend
Brutus his own weaknesses, and forthwith Brutus lives. His insomnia is
pure Shakespeare:
“Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,
I have not slept.”
The character of Brutus is superbly portrayed in that wonderful scene
with Cassius in the fourth act. With all the superiority of conscious
genius he treats his confederate as a child or madman, much as Hamlet
treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
“Shall I be frighted when a madman stares?”
Cassius is mean, too, whereas Brutus is kindly and generous to a degree:
“For I can raise no money by vile means:
By heaven, I had rather coin my heart,
And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring
From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash
By any indirection....
- - - - - - - - - -
When Marcus Brutus grows so covetous,
To lock such rascal counters from his friends,
Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts,
Dash him to pieces.”
And, above all, as soon as Cassius appeals to his affection, Brutus is
disarmed:
“O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb
That carries anger, as the flint bears fire;
Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark,
And straight is cold again.”
This is the best expression of Shakespeare's temper; the “hasty spark”
is Hamlet's temper, as we have seen, and Macbeth's, and Romeo's.
And now everything that Brutus does or says is Shakespeare's best. In a
bowl of wine he buries “all unkindness.” His affection for Cassius is
not a virtue to one in especial. The scene in the fourth act, in which
he begs the pardon of his boy Lucius, should be learned by heart by
those who wish to understand our loving and lovable Shakespeare. This
scene, be it remarked, is not in Plutarch, but is Shakespeare's own
invention. His care for the lad's comfort, at a time when his own life
is striking the supreme hour, is exquisitely pathetic. Then come his
farewell to Cassius and his lament over Cassius' body; then the second
fight and the nobly generous words that hold in them, as flowers their
perfume, all Shakespeare's sweetness of nature:
“My heart doth joy, that yet in all my life
I found no man, but he was true to me.”
And then night hangs upon the weary, sleepless eyes, and we are all
ready to echo Antony's marvellous valediction:
“This was the noblest Roman of them all;
- - - - - - - - - - - -
His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, 'This was a man!'”
But this Brutus was no murderer, no conspirator, no narrow republican
fanatic, but simply gentle Shakespeare discovering to us his own sad
heart and the sweetness which suffering had called forth in him.