Cassius knew his Brutus well. Alone after Brutus had left him, Cassius gives us his impressions of their talk:* “Well, Brutus, you have a great reputation for nobility; but I see now that with all your high character you can be perverted like other men: you should keep only with good men like yourself. You are not strong enough, after all, to stand up against men like me. I have a grudge against Cæsar: you have none. If I were in your place now, you should not turn me against Cæsar as I have turned you." It has been pleaded that it is not Cassius' arguments that decide Brutus. But there stands the fact that certain arguments are used to produce a certain result, and that result is produced. In such circumstances denial of cause and effect requires very strict proof. Unfortunately Brutus himself later on admits that it was Cassius that moved him: Alone in his own house he weighs the matter of Cæsar's murder. He was determined to do this thing. "It must be by his death" are his first words. Being by no means a conscienceless man, he has to satisfy his conscience, he has to square the assassination with his high moral character. He can find nothing against Cæsar personally, nor can he say that he ever knew Cæsar to allow passion to sway him against reason. There is no charge to be founded on his past; ah! but who knows what he may do? Crown him and he will leave all his goodness behind. We will prevent his coronation by killing him and so save him from himself. We shall be serving a high moral purpose.* Was ever man more easily selfpersuaded? Conceive a really honest man justifying assassination solely on the plea of what the victim might do, his past admittedly giving no ground for evil foreboding? If he is crowned? Cæsar had just refused to be crowned; and it was purely conjectural that there was any intention even to offer him a crown again. The whole soliloquy is the sophistic device of a man squaring his moral character with his intention. The situation is clinched by the eagerness with which Brutus snatches at the papers thrown in through the window. "Brutus, thou sleep'st . . . speak, strike, redress." Then comes the melodramatic apostrophe, with himself as audience: ... O Rome! I make thee promise: Brutus is noble when it is a question emn humbug. A significant touch is of words before the deed, but when the time comes to act on them he and his "gentle friends" forget their gentle words and turn butchers, while their "vile daggers hack one another in the sides of Cæsar," and deal their three-andthirty wounds. The immaculate poser shows clearer with each successive step. The murder done, Cæsar's body not yet cold, Brutus takes up Casca's pleasantry that to cut short life is merely to abridge the fear of death, and argues solemnly that therefore they are Cæsar's friends, and have conferred on him a benefit because they have lessened his time of fearing death. Such callousness will hardly be found even in an enemy; how then in a patriot who had done an awful deed, had murdered a dear friend, impelled thereto solely by a sense of duty? The next moment Brutus bids his friends bathe their hands in Cæsar's blood up to the elbows. In him this is not mere vindictive savagery, as it seems, but just his incurable posing. At this supreme moment Brutus, and even Cassius, think first of making a solemn show, by producing a theatrical effect: How many ages hence, Shall this our lofty scene be acted over? says Cassius. How many times [answers Brutus] shall That now on Pompey's basis lies along Brutus' first thought is of the figure he will cut in history; how will he look in groups representing Cæsar's murder? Comparing this revelation of Brutus' mind with his previous protestations and fine sentiments, we are forced to the conclusion that Marcus Brutus was a sol added when Antony comes on the scene Your voice shall be as strong as any man's The difference between Brutus and Cassius is that Cassius is frankly unscrupulous, Brutus most scrupulously so. Instinctively one looks to the end of these men; and the end one feels is as it should be. The murder "most foul and O Julius Cæsar, thou art mighty yet! In our own proper entrails. Conscience at last is allowed to speak unprompted. And, dying, Brutus says: Cæsar, now be still: I kill'd not thee with half so good a will. That is at once his confession and his absolution. By his own voluntary death he is expiating Cæsar's. And Antony, Cæsar's avenger and representative, in his eulogy of Brutus pronounces the forgiveness which the unparalleled clemency of Cæsar would certainly have granted. |