CRITICISM OF THE MARTIAL GOVERNMENT.
'Would you proceed _especially_ against _Caius_ MARCIUS?'
'Against him FIRST: He's a _very dog_ to THE COMMONALTY.'
In this exhibition of the social orders to which human society
instinctively tends, and that so-called _state_ into which human
combinations in barbaric ages rudely settles, the _principle_ of the
combination--the principle of gradation, and subjection, and
permanence--is called in question, and exposed as a purely instinctive
principle, as, in fact, only a principle of revolution disguised; and
a higher one, the distinctively human element, the principle of KIND,
is now, for the first time, demanded on scientific grounds, as the
essential principle of any permanent human combination--as the natural
principle, the only one which the science of nature can recognise as a
principle of STATE.
It is the PEACE principle which this great scientific war-hater and
captain of the ages of peace is in search of, with his new _organum_;
though he is philosopher enough to know that, in diseased states, wars
are nature's own rude remedies, her barbarous surgery, for evils yet
more unendurable. He has found himself chosen a justice of the
peace--the world's peace; and it is the principle of permanence, of
law and subjection--in a word, it is the principle of _state_, as
opposed to revolution and dissolution--which he is judging of in
behalf of his kind. And he makes a business of it. He goes about in
his own fashion. He gets up this great war-piece on purpose to find
it.
He has got a state on his stage, which is ceasing to be a _state_ at
the moment in which he shows it to us; a state which has the war
principle--the principle of conquest within no longer working in it
insidiously as government, but developed as war; for it has just
overstepped the endurable point in its mastery. It is a revolution
that is coming off when the curtain rises. For the government has been
gnawing the Roman common-weal at home, with those same teeth it
ravened the Volscians with abroad, till it has reached the vitals at
last, and the common-weal has betaken itself to the Volscian's
weapons:--the people have risen. They are all out when the play begins
on an armed hunt for their rat-like, gnawing, corn-consuming rulers.
They are determined to 'kill them,' and have 'corn at their own
price.' 'If the _wars_ eat us not, _they_ will,' is the word; 'and
there's all THE LOVE _they_ bear us.' '_Rome_ and _her rats_ are at
the point of battle,' cries the Poet. The _one_ side _shall have
bale_, is his prophecy. 'Without _good nature_,' he says elsewhere,
using the term _good_ in its scientific sense, '_men_ are only a
NOBLER kind of VERMIN'; and he makes a most unsparing application of
this principle in his criticisms. Many a splendid historical figure is
made to show its teeth, and rat-like mien and propensities, through
all the splendour of its disguises, merely by the application of his
simple philosophical tests. For the question, as he puts it, is the
question between animal instinct, between mere appetite, and reason;
and the question incidentally arises in the course of the exhibition,
whether the common-weal, when it comes to anything like common-sense,
is going to stand being gnawed in this way, for the benefit of any
individual, or clique, or party.
For the ground on which the classes or estates, and their respective
claims to the government, are tried here, is the ground of the
_common_-weal; and the question as to the fitness of any existing
class in the state for an exclusive, unlimited control of the welfare
of the whole, is more than suggested. That which stops short of the
weal of the whole for its end, is that which is under criticism here;
and whether it exist in 'the one,' or 'the few,' or 'the many,'--and
these are the terms that are employed here,--whether it exist in the
civil magistracy, sustained by a popular submission, or in the power
of the victorious military chief, at the head of his still extant and
resistless armament, it is necessarily rejected as a principle of
sovereignty and permanence, in this purely scientific view of the
human conditions of it. It is a question which this author handles
with a thorough impartiality, in all his political treatises, let them
come in what name and form they will, with more or less clearness,
indeed, as the circumstances seem to dictate.
But _nowhere_ is the whole history of the military government,
collected from the obscurity of the past, and brought out with such
inflexible design--with such vividness and strength of historic
exhibition, as it is _here_. It is traced to its beginnings in the
distinctions which nature herself creates,--those physical, and moral,
and intellectual distinctions, with which she crowns, in her happier
moods, the large resplendent brows of her born kings and masters. It
is traced from its origin in the crowning of the victorious chief on
the field of battle, to the moment in which the sword of military
conquest is turned back on the conquerors by the chief into whose
hands they gave it; and the sword of conquest abroad becomes, at home,
the sword of state.
Nay, this Play goes farther, and embraces the contingency of a foreign
rule--one, too, in which the _conqueror_ takes his surname from the
_conquest_; it brings home 'the enemy of the whole state,' as a king,
in triumph to the capital, whose streets he has filled with mourning;
and though the author does not tell us in this case, at he does in
another, that the nation was awed 'with an offertory of standards' in
the temple, and that 'orisons and Te Deums were again sung,'--the
victor 'not meaning that the people _should forget_ too soon _that he
came in by battle_'--points, not much short of that, in the way of
speciality, are not wanting. More than one conqueror, indeed, looks
out from this old chieftain's Roman casque. 'There is a little touch
of _Harry_ in the scene'; and though the author goes out of his way to
tell us that 'he must by no means say his hero is _covetous_,' it will
not be the Elizabethan Philosopher's fault, if we do not know _which_
Harry it is that says--
_If you have writ your annals true_,'tis there,
That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
Flutter'd your Volsces in Corioli:
_Alone_, I did it.
* * * * *
_Auf_. Read it, noble lords;
But tell _the traitor_, in the _highest degree_
He hath abused your powers.
_Cor_. Traitor!--How now?
_Auf_. Ay, _traitor_, Marcius.
_Cor_. _Marcius_!
_Auf_. AY, _Marcius, Caius_ Marcius; Dost thou think
I'll grace thee with THAT ROBBERY, _thy_ STOLEN NAME
CORIOLANUS in CORIOLI?'--[_the conqueror in the conquest_.]
Never, indeed, was 'the garland of war,' whether glistening freshly on
the hero's brow on the fresh battle-field, or whether glittering,
transmuted into civic gold and gems, on the brow of his hereditary
successor, subjected to such a searching process before, as that with
which the Poet, under cover of an _aristocrat's_ pretensions, and
especially under cover of his pretensions to an elective magistracy,
can venture to test it.
This _hero_, who 'speaks of the people as if he were a _god_ to
punish, and not a man of their infirmity,' is on trial for that
pretension from the first scene of this Play to the last. The author
has, indeed, his own views of the fickle, ignorant, foolish
multitude,--such views as any one, who had occasion to experiment on
it personally, in the age of Elizabeth, would not lack the means of
acquiring; and amidst those ebullitions of wrath, which he pours from
his haughty hero's lips, one hears at times a tone that sounds a
little like some other things from the same source, as if the author
had himself, in some way, been brought to look at the subject from a
point of observation, not altogether unlike that from which his hero
speaks; or as if he might, at least, have known how to sympathise with
the haughty and unbending nature, that had been brought into such
deadly collision with it. But in the dramatic representation, though
it is far from being a flattering one, we listen in vain for any echo
of this sentiment. In its rich and kindly humour there is no sneer, no
satire. It is the loving eye of nature's own great pupil--it is the
kindly human eye, that comes near enough to point those jests, and
paint so truly; there is a great human heart here in the scene
embracing the lowly. It was the heart that was putting forth then its
silent but resistless energies into the ages of the human advancement,
to take up the despised and rejected masses of men from their misery,
and make of them truly one _kind_ and kindred.
And though he has had, indeed, his own private experiences with the
multitude, and the passions are, as he intimates--at least as strong
in him as in another, he has his own view, also, of the common
pitifulness and weakness of the human conditions; and he has a view
which is, in his time, all his own, of the instrumentalities that are
needed to reach that level of human nature, and to lift men up from
the mire of these conditions, from the wrong and wretchedness into
which, in their unaided, unartistic, unlearned struggle with
nature,--within and without,--_the kind_ are fallen. And so strong in
him is the sense of this pitifulness, that it predominates over the
sharpness of his genius, and throws the divinest mists and veils of
compassion over the harsh, scientific realities he is constrained to
lay bare.
And, in fact, it takes this monstrous pretence, and claim to _human
leadership_, which he finds passing unquestioned in his time, to bring
him out on this point fairly. The statesmanship of the man who
undertakes to make his own petty personality the measure of a _world_,
who would make, not that reason which is in us _all_, and embraces the
_world_, and which is _not_ personal,--not that conscience which is
the sensibility to reason, and is as broad and impartial as
that--which goes with the reason, and embraces, like that, without
bias, the common weal,--but that which is particular, and private, and
limited to the individual,--his senses,--his passions, his private
affections,--his mere caprice,--his mere will; the motive of the
public action;--the statesmanship of the man who dares to offer these
to an insulted world, as reasons of state; who claims a divine
prerogative to make his single will good against reason; who claims a
divine right to make his private interest outweigh the weal of the
whole; who asks men to obliterate, in their judgment, its essential
principle, that which makes them men, the eternal principle of the
whole;--this is the phenomenon which provokes at last, in this author,
the philosophic ire. The moment this thing shows itself on his stage,
he puts his pity to sleep. He will show up, at last, without any
mercy, in a purely scientific manner, as we see more clearly
elsewhere, the common pitifulness of the human conditions, in the
person of him who claims exemption from them,--who speaks of the
people as if he were a god to punish, and not a man of their
infirmity.
'There is formed in every thing a _double nature_';--this author, who
is the philosopher of _nature_, tells us on another page,--'there is
formed in _every thing_ a double nature OF GOOD, the one as everything
is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is a _part_ or
_member_ of a greater body; whereof the _latter_ is in degree the
greater and the worthier, because it _tends to the conservation of a
more general form_. Therefore we see the iron in _particular sympathy_
moving to the loadstone; but yet, if _it exceed a certain quantity_,
it forsakes the affection to the loadstone, and, like a good patriot,
moves to the earth. This double nature of good is MUCH MORE
(hear)--much _more_ ENGRAVEN on MAN, if he _de_GENERATE not--(decline
not from the law of his _kind_--for that _more_ is SPECIAL) unto whom
the conservation of DUTY to the PUBLIC ought to be much more
_precious_ than the conservation of life and being, according to that
memorable speech of Pompey THE GREAT, [the truly great, for this is
the question of greatness,] when BEING IN COMMISSION OF PURVEYANCE FOR
A FAMINE AT ROME, and being dissuaded, with great vehemency and
instance, by his friends about him, that he should not hazard himself
to sea in an extremity of weather, answered, 'Necesse est ut eam, non
ut vivam.'
But we happen to have set out here, in our play, at the very beginning
of it, the specific case alluded to, in this general exhibition of the
radical human law, viz., the case of a famine in Rome, which we shall
find differently treated, in this instance, by the person who aspires
to 'the helm o' the state.'
When the question is of the true nobility and greatness, of the true
statesmanship, of the personal fitness of an individual to assume the
care of the public welfare, the question, of course, as to this double
nature, comes in. We wish to know--if any thing is going to depend
upon his single _will_ in the matter, we must know, which of these two
natures is SOVEREIGN in himself,--which good he supremely
affects,--that of his senses, passions, and private affections, that
good which ends in his private and particular nature,--a good which
has its _due_ place in this system, and is not unnaturally mortified
and depressed, as it is in less scientific ones,--or that good of the
_whole_, which is each man's highest good;--whether he is, in fact, a
_man_, or whether, in the absence of that perfection of the human
form, which should be the end of science and government, he
approximates at all,--or undertakes to approximate at all, to the true
human type;--whether he be, indeed, a man, in the higher sense of that
word, or whether he ranks in the scale of nature, as 'only a _nobler_
kind of vermin,' a _man_, a _noble man_, a man with a divine ideal and
ambition, _degenerate_ into that.
When it is a candidate for the chief magistracy, a candidate for the
supreme power in the state, who is on his trial, of course that
question as to the balance between the public and private affections,
which, those who know how to trace this author's hand, know he is so
fond of trying elsewhere, is sure to come up. The question is, as to
whether there is any affection in this claimant for power, so large
and so noble, that it can embrace heartily the common weal, and take
_that_ to be _its_ good. The trial will be a sharp one. The trial of
human greatness which is magnanimity, must needs be. The question is,
as to whether this is a nature capable of pursuing that end for its
own sake, without respect to its pivate and merely selfish recompence;
whether it is one which has any such means of egress from its
particular self, any such means of coming out of its private and
exclusive motivity, that it can persevere in its care of the Common
Weal, through good and through ill report, through personal wrong and
ingratitude,--abandoning its private claim, and ascending by that
conquest to the divineness.