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weeps over that dear

sulted head ith so gentle a pity, that you might ancy it was the tender voice of a deolate but delighted mother, kissing me pale ips of her child:

"O you kind gods,
Cure this great breach in his abused nature!
The untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up
Of this chi d-changed father!.

my dear father! Restoration hang
Shy medicine on my lips; and let this kiss
Kepair those violent harms that my two sisters
Have in thy reverence made! Was this a

face

To be opposed against the warring winds?

...

Mine enemy's dog, The ugh he had bit me, should have stood that night

Aga 1st my fire.

How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?"

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out he is handling the unruly passions which make their character, and he never hits upon the moral law which restrains them; but at the same time, and by the same faculty, he changes the inanimate masks, which the conventions of the stage mould on ar identical pattern, into living and illa sory figures. How shall a demon be made to look as real as a man? Iago is a soldier of fortune who has roved the world from Syria to England, who, nursed in the lowest ranks, having had close acquaintance with the horrors of the wars of the sixteenth century, had drawn thence the maxims of a Turk ciples he has none left. "O my repuand the philosophy of a butcher; printation, my reputation!" cries the disIf, in short, Shakspeare comes across honored Cassio. "As I am an honest a heroic character, worthy of Cor- man," says Iago, "I thought you had neille, a Roman, such as the mother of received some bodily wound; there is Coriolanus, he will explain by passion, more sense in that than in reputawhat Corneille would have explained tion."* As for woman's virtue, he by heroism. He will depict it violent looks upon it like a man who has kept and thirsting for the violent feelings company with slave-dealers. He esti of glory. She will not be able to re-mates Desdemona's love as he would frain herself. She will break out into accounts of triumph when she sees her son crowned; into imprecations of vengeance when she sees him banished. She will descend into the vulgarities of pride and anger; she will abandon herself to mad effusions of joy, to dreams of an ambitious fancy,f and will prove once more that the impassioned imagination of Shakspeare has left its trace in all the creatures whom

it has called forth.

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estimate a mare's: that sort of thing lasts so long-then.. And then he airs an experimental theory with precise details and nasty expressions like a stud doctor. "It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor, nor he his to her.... These Moors are changeable in their wills; ..

the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must change for youth: when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice." t Desdemona on the shore, trying to forget her cares, begs him to sing the praises of he sex. For every portrait he finds the She in most insulting insinuations.

sists, and bids him take the case of a deserving woman. "Indeed" he re plies, " She was a wight, if ever suct wight were,

to suckle fool and chronicle small beer." He als says, when Desdemona asks him what he would write in praise of her: "O gentle lady do not put me to't; for I I am nothing, if not critical."§ This is the key to his character. He despises man; to him Desdemona is a litt'e

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VIII.

225

wanton wench, Cassio an elegant word-speare could transform abstract treach shaper, Othello a mad bull, Roderigo ery into a concrete form, and how an ass to be basted, thumped, made Iago's atrocious vengeance is only the to go. He diverts himself by setting natural consequence of his character these passions at issue; he laughs at life and training. it as at a play. When Othello, swooning, shakes in his convulsions, he rejoices at this capital result: "Work on, my medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught."* You would take him for one of the poisoners of the time, studying the effect of a new potion on a dying dog. He only speaks in sarcasms: he has them ready for every one, even for those whom he does not know. When he wakes Brabantio to inform him of the elopement of his daughter, he tells him the matter in coarse terms, sharpening the sting of the bitter pleasantry, like a conscientious executioner, rubbing his hands when he hears the culprit groan under the knife. "Thou art a villain !" cries Brabantio. "You are a senator!" answers Iago. But the feature which really completes him, and makes him take rank with Mephistopheles, is the atrocious truth and the cogent reasoning by which he likens his crime to virtue.† Cassio, under his advice, goes to see Desdemona, to obtain her intercession for him; this visit is to be the ruin of Desdemona and Cassio. Iago, left alone, hums for an instant quietly,

then cries:

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When this advice is free I give and honest, Probal to thinking and indeed the course To win the Moor again."‡ To all these features must be added a diabolical energy,§ an inexhaustible inventiveness in images, caricatures, obscenity, the manners of a guardroom, the brutal bearing and tastes of a trooper, habits of dissimulation, coolness, hatred, and patience, contracted amid the perils and devices of a militarv life, and the continuous miseries of long degradation and frustrated hope; you will understand how Shak

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Othello, ii. 3.

How much more visible is this mpassioned and unfettered genius of Shakspeare in the great characters which sustain the whole weight of the drama! The startling imagination, the furious velocity of the manifold and exuberant ideas, passion let loose, rushing upon death and crime, hallucinations, madness, all the ravages of delirium bursting through will and reason such are the forces and ravings which engender them. Shall I speak of dazzling Cleopatra, who holds Antony in the whirlwind of her devices and caprices, who fascinates and kills, who scatters to the winds the lives of men as a handful of desert dust, the fatal Eastern sorceress who sports with love and death, impetuous, irresistible, child of air and fire, whose life is but a tempest, whose thought, ever barbed and broken, is like the crack ling of a lightning flash? Of Othello, who, beset by the graphic picture of physical adultery, cries at every word of Iago like a man on the rack, who, his nerves hardened by twenty years of war for grief, and whose soul, poisoned by and shipwreck, grows mad and swoons jealousy, is distracted and disorganized in convulsions and in stupor? Or of old King Lear, violent and weak, whose half-unseated reason is gradually toppled over under the shocks of incredi ble treacheries, who presents the frightful spectacle of madness, first increasing, then complete, of curses, howlings, superhuman sorrows, into which the transport of the first access of fury carries him, and then of peaceful in coherence, chattering imbecility, into which the shattered man subsides; a marvellous creation, the supreme effort of pure imagination, a disease of reason, which reason could never have con ceived?* Amid so many portraitures let us choose two or three to indicate

*See again, in Timon, and Hotspur more unreasoning imagination.

See his conversation with Brabantio, then particularly, perfect examples of vehement and with Roderigo, Act i

the depth and rature of them all. The critic is lost in Shakspeare, as in an immense town; he will describe a couple monuments, and entreat the reader to imagine the city.

"I thank you, general;

But cannot make my heart consent to take A bribe to pay my sword."

The soldiers cry, Marcius! Marcius and the trumpets sound. He gets into a passion rates the brawlers:

Plutarch's Coriolanus is an austere, coldly haughty patrician, a general of" No more, I say! For that I have not

the army. In Shakspeare's hands he becomes a coarse soldier, a man of the people as to his language and manners, an athlete of war, with a voice like a trumpet; whose eyes by contradiction are filled with a rush of blood and anger, proud and terrible in mood, a lion's soul in the body of a bull. The philosopher Plutarch told of him a lofty philosophic action, saying that he had been at pains to save his landlord in the sack of Corioli. Shakspeare's Coriolanus has indeed the same disposition, for he is really a good fellow; but when Lartius asks him the name of this poor Volscian, in order to secure his liberty, he yawns out :

66

'By Jupiter! forgot. I am weary; yea, my memory is tired. Have we no wine here?":

He is hot, he has been fighting, he must drink; he leaves his Volscian in chains, and thinks no more of him. He fights like a porter, with shouts and insults, and the cries from that deep chest are heard above the din of the battle like the sounds from a brazen trumpet. He has scaled the walls of Corioli, he has butchered till he is gorged with slaughter. Instantly he turns to the army of Cominius, and arrives red with blood, "as he were flay'd.” "Come I too late?" Cominius begins to compliment him. "Come I too late?" he repeats. The battle is not yet finished : he embraces Cominius:

"O! let me clip ye

In arms as sound as when I woo'd, in heart
As merry as when our nuptial day was done."t

For the battle is a real holiday to him.
Such senses, such a strong frame, need
the outcry, the din of battle, the excite-
ment of death and wounds. This
haughty and indomitable heart needs
the joy of victory and destruction.
Mark the display of his patrician arro-
gance and his soldier's bearing, when
e is offered the tenth of the spoils :
• Coriolanus, 1. 9.
↑ Ibid. 1. 6.

wash'd

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This loud voice, loud laughter, blunt acknowledgment, of a man who can act and shout better than speak, foretell the mode in which he will treat the he cannot find abuse enough for the plebeians. He loads them with insults cobblers, tailors, envious cowards. down on their knees for a coin. beg of Hob and Dick!" "Bid them wash their faces and keep their teeth clean." But he must beg, if he would be consul; his friends constrain him. It is then that the passionate soul, incapable of self-restraint, such as Shakspeare knew how to paint, breaks forth without hindrance. He is there in his candidate's gown, gnashing his teeth, and getting up his lesson in this style:

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"What must I say?

pray, sir'-Plague upon't! I cannot bring My tongue to such a pace:-'Look, sir, mi wounds!

I go them in my country's service, when Some certain of your brethren roar'd and raz From the noise of our own drums. The tribunes have no difficulty in stop ping the election of a candidate who begs in this fashion. They taunt him in full senate, reproach him with his speech about the corn. He repeats it. with aggravations. Once roused, nei ther danger nor prayer restrains him :

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"Hence, old goat!

...

227

Cog their hearts from them and come home be loved

Of all the trades in Rome.' *

He goes, and his friends speak for him Except a few bitter asides he appears to be submissive. Then the tribunes proncunce the accusation, and summon him to answer as a traitor :

"Cor. How! traitor!

Men. Nay, temperately: your promise. Cor. The fires i' the lowest hell fold-in the people!

Call me their traitor! Thou injurious tribune!

Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,

In thy hands clutch'd as many millions, in Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say, 'Thou liest,' unto thee with a voice as free As I do pray the gods." ↑

Hence, rotten thing! or I shall shake thy His friends surround him, entreat him :

bones

Out of thy garments!"

He strikes him, drives the mob off: he fancies himself amongst Volscians. "On fair ground I could beat forty of them!" And when his friends hurry him off, he threatens still, and

"Speak(s) o' the people, As if you (he) were a god to punish, not A man of their infirmity." § Yet he bends before his mother, for he has recognized in her a soul as lofty and a courage as intractable as his own. He has submitted from his infancy to the ascendency of this pride which he admires. Volumnia reminds him: "

My praises made thee first a soldier." Without power over himself, continually tost on the fire of his too hot blood, he has always been the arm, she the thought. He obeys from involuntary respect, like a soldier before his general, but with what effort!

"Coriolanus. The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take

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he will not listen; he foams at the
mouth, he is like a wounded lion :
"Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian
death,

Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger
But with a grain a day, I would not buy
Their mercy at the price of one fair word." I
The people vote exile, supporting by
their shouts the sentence of the tribune:
"Cor. You common cry of curs! whose breath
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose love I prize
I hate
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you. . . .
spising,

De

There is a world elsewhere." §
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
Judge of his hatred by these raging
words. It goes on increasing whilst
waiting for vengeance. We find him
next with the Volscian army before
Rome. His friends kneel before him,
he lets them kneel. Old Menenius,
who had loved him as a son, onl
comes now to be driven away. "Wife
mother, child, I know not."|| He
knows not himself. For this strength
of hating in a noble heart is the same
as the force of loving. He has trans-
ports of tenderness as of rage, and can
contain himself no more in joy than in
grief. He runs, spite of his resolution,
to his wife's arms; he bends his knee
before his mother. He had summoned
the Volscian chiefs to make them wit-
nesses of his refusals; and before them,

he grants all, and weeps. On his
return to Corioli, an insulting word
* Ibid. iii. 2.
↑ Ibid., iii. 3.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. v. 2.

from Aufidius maddens him, and drives | mine eyes!" He is disturbed by a him upon the daggers of the Volscians. word which the sleeping chamberlains Vices and virtues, glory and misery, uttered: greatness and feebleness, the unbridled passion which composes his nature, endowed him with all.

If the life of Coriolanus is the history of a mood, that of Macbeth is the history of a monomania. The witches' prophecy has sunk into his mind at once, like a fixed idea. Gradually this idea corrupts the rest, and transforms the whole man. He is haunted by it; he forgets the thanes who surround him and "who stay upon his leisure;" he already sees in the future an indistinct chaos of images of blood:

...

66 Why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs?

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My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not." *

This is the language of hallucination. Macbeth's hallucination becomes complete when his wife has persuaded him o assassinate the king. He sees in the air a blood-stained dagger, "in form as palpable, as this which now I draw." His whole brain is filled with grand and terrible phantoms, which the mind of a common murderer could never have conceived the poetry of which indicates a generous heart, enslaved to an dea of fate, and capable of remorse :

"Now o'er the one half world Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder, Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design

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Moves like a ghost. [A bell rings.] I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell." ↑ He has done the deed, and returns tottering, haggard, like a drunken man. He is horrified at his bloody hands, Nothing these hangman's hands." now can cleanse them. The whole ocean might sweep over them, but they would keep the hue of murder. "What hands are here? ha, they pluck out ↑ Ibid. . I.

• Macbeth, i. 3.

"One cr.ed, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the

other;

As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.

Listening their fear, I could not say 'Amen,*
When they did say, ' God bless us!
But wherefore could not I pronounce
men!'

I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen
Stuck in my throat.”*

A

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This idea, incessantly repeated, beats in his brain, with monotonous and quick strokes, like the tongue of a bell. Insanity begins; all the force of his mind is occupied by keeping before him, in spite of himself, the image of the man whom he has murdered in his sleep:

"To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself. [Knock.] Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would

thou couldst!"§ Thenceforth, in the rare intervals in which the fever of his mind is assuaged he is like a man worn out by a long malady. It is the sad prostration of maniacs worn out by their fits of rage: "Had I but died an hour be. ore this chance, I had lived a blessed time; for, from this in stant

There's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is d-awn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of." ||

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