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and one of a high mind and great courage, that lacked the gravity and affability that is gotten with judgment of learning and reason, which only is to be looked for in a governor of state.' The citizen was altogether absorbed in the son; for 'the only thing that made him to love honour was the joy he saw his mother did take of him.' A temper so unsocial might have sufficed to account for Coriolanus' rupture with his countrymen. But Plutarch dwells so vindictively upon the machinations of his enemies, the tribunes, to bring it about, that the sympathy of his readers is all given to the banished man. Moreover, when allied with the enemies of Rome Coriolanus uses his power with statesmanlike moderation, demanding for his Volscian allies only admission to the Latin league and the restoration of their conquered lands,-reasonable demands, which his countrymen meet with arrogant defiance or with panic-stricken prayers for mercy.

If Plutarch's Coriolanus is of somewhat varying complexion, his description of the Roman polity abounds in inconsistencies. He regards the Roman plebs with prepossessions derived from the mob of his own time, and their victory is for him a triumph of the poor needy people and all such rabble as had nothing to lose and had less regard of honesty before their eyes' over 'the noble honest citizens whose persons and purse did dutifully serve the commonwealth in their wars.'1 But even in the blurred tradition he followed, some traits of a different and more authentic stamp had been preserved, and he faithfully records them. Thus, at the very outset, the plebeian rabble are seen to be the military mainstay of the city, whose valour puts the nobles themselves to shame; their method of seeking redress for intolerable grievances is the peaceful retreat to the Sacred Mount-a masterstroke 1 North, p. 284.

of sagacious self-control and disciplined civil temper. Having extorted a constitutional reform of the first importance, the creation of tribunes, they return, 'doing harm to no man,' and the 'city grows again to good quiet and unity.' All these facts Plutarch records; but aristocratic bias colours every detail, and he rarely speaks of the popular leaders but as 'the seditious tribunes,' or 'busy prattlers that sought the people's good-will by flattering words.'

Thus Plutarch, in his scrupulous regard for conflicting traditions, overlays the germs of tragedy which the legend clearly possessed. No such scruples impeded the art of Shakespeare. His Rome is still farther than Plutarch's from the Rome of history. He drew the Roman plebeians in the light of Plutarch's animus, and ignored the inconsistent facts embedded in his narrative. His plebs is a rabble, devoid of political ideas, craving nothing but bread. The retreat to the Sacred Mount resembles, in his hands, the revolt of Jack Cade, and the 'rebels' have a similar blatant communism put in their mouths. We are reminded with remorseless iteration that their caps are greasy and their breath foul. What is more, they are cowards in battle,―hares and geese where they ought to be lions and foxes. In this last point Shakespeare diverged point blank from Plutarch. His tribunes deserve Plutarch's scornful epithets even better than their prototypes. Few characters in Shakespeare less serve to illustrate his large humanity. The violent but honest party leader is still discernible in Plutarch behind the unscrupulous demagogue: Shakespeare effaces the finer traits and brings out the baser with incisive emphasis. His tribunes are more concerned for their own official authority than for the rights of the plebs whom they heartily despise: they speculate on the 'ancient malice' which will

drive his merits into oblivion on the least offence (ii. 1. 243); they attack him with vamped-up charges which impose only upon the docile herd they lead, and calculate upon his native rashness of speech to provide under that provocation the means of breaking his neck (iii. 3. 25). In Plutarch the reaction which deprived Coriolanus of the consulship is due to the cautious after-thoughts of the plebeian electors who had approved it: in Shakespeare it is the work of the sleepless jealousy of the tribunes.

Such enemies gave some pretext to Coriolanus' scorn. And Coriolanus himself stands out, in Shakespeare, yet more than in Plutarch, as a giant among pigmies. He has the surpassing excellences of the true aristocrat, and seems to embody at once the aristocratic ideals of heroic Greece and of feudal chivalry. He scorns money and pain; he has a natural eloquence always at command, and everything he says is impressed with an indefinable greatness. Less 'churlish and solitary' than in Plutarch, for Shakespeare gives him the adoring friendship of Menenius and Cominius, he is at bottom more 'uncivil,' less fit for citizenship, more impracticable in his passionate self-will. This aspect of his character Shakespeare has emphasised with a series of admirably imagined strokes. It is only in the drama that Coriolanus revolts against the traditional ceremony of displaying his wounds, and declaims, with the naïve unreason of a headstrong nature, against the authority of 'custom,' on which his own patrician privilege ultimately rested. His vengeance is far more sweeping and uncompromising. He comes to burn Rome, not to get reasonable concessions for his allies; far from 'keeping the Noble men's lands and goods safe from harm and burning,' he sternly dismisses the appeal of his noble friends for discrimina

tion: he cannot stay to pick the few grains of wheat in a pile

Of noisome musty chaff (v. 1. 25).

Political partisanship is effaced in the fury of personal vengeance. Here and there the egoism of the aristocratic temper triumphs in a trait of sarcastic humour, as in the case of the poor man in Corioli who had befriended him and whose life he wished to save, but whose name was 'By Jupiter! forgot.' Lastly, this vehement, impracticable Coriolanus of Shakespeare is moved only by one force, with which reason has nothing to do the passionate bond of sympathy with his mother. This fine trait, so well seized by Plutarch, is for Shakespeare also the raison d'être of the whole story; and he makes it plausible by a profusion of subtle psychological strokes. It is Volumnia who prevails upon her son, as candidate for the consulship (iii. 2.) as well as in the greater crisis before the walls of Rome, to be mild,' against his nature; and the earlier triumph prepares us for the later. A hint of Plutarch's, that 'at her desire' he took a wife, suggested the conception of Virgiliathe 'gracious silence' beside the great moving and controlling voice. Volumnia differs from her son in her keener and subtler brain. Shakespeare, as has been said, adopts almost all that Plutarch had given her to say. But her fiery outbursts and her flashes of penetration are his alone. In the great appealspeech the Shakespearean touch is easily recognised in the fierce irony of the climax 'Come let us go: this fellow had a Volscian to his mother' (v. 3. 178 f.). In the speeches at the earlier crisis we find such strokes of penetrating criticism as

I have a heart as little apt as yours,

But yet a brain that leads my use of anger

To better vantage.

Or,

You might have been enough the man you are,
With striving less to be so.

It marks the comparative sobering of Shakespeare's imagination in this last of the great tragedies, that such dicta of the cool, critical judgment are finally seen to exhaust the situation. We accept for the moment Enobarbus' criticism of Antony, and Kent's of Lear; but as the tragedy deepens, a change insensibly steals over the ethical proportion of things, the verdict of the sober judgment appears of a less absolute competence, fatuity itself acquires higher faculties of vision and utterance; Lear in his frenzy and Antony in the final transports of his passion, discover their sublimest selves. But the fatuity of Coriolanus undergoes no such imaginative alchemy. He is sublime in battle, and in the final renunciation, where his mother's heroic heart beats in accord with his, and his with hers; but his stubborn refusal to distinguish between the conditions of a civic community and those of a camp, is, at bottom, stupid, and its stupidity is never felt sublime. He is bolder than the devil, but not so subtle; and his want of serpentine craft or of comprehension of it excites neither admiring pity, as in Brutus, nor tragic horror, as in Othello, but the half-amused sympathy with which we look on the blunders of a giant more brave than wise. Those critics who have spoken with least reserve of the heroic greatness of Coriolanus have admitted that 'the temper in which Shakespeare presents him is almost unsympathetic; it is surprisingly free from . . . suggestions of deep personal feeling.' Coriolanus, says Mr. Barrett Wendell, owes his fate to 'a passionate excess of inherently noble traits, whose very nobility unfits them for survival in the ignoble world about them.' He represents 'aristo

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