with delicate skill he withholds the purer woman from prominent contact with the wanton Queen, and does not, like Dryden, bring the two to a scolding-match." Character of Antony. Mark Antony is regarded by our best historians as one of the most mixed and at the same time one of the least artificial characters of antiquity. With the seeds both of great virtues and great vices in his nature, he was educated into habits of more-than-military frankness under the great Julius, in whose school of Epicurean free-thinkers his tastes and principles were mainly formed. While the master lived, his wild and boisterous impulses were measurably awed and restrained. But, as he had nothing of the natural justness and harmony of that stupendous man, so, such external restraint being withdrawn, those tastes and principles were not long in working out to their legitimate results. Though, at a need, he could act the part of a most profound dissembler, yet his disposition was to be perfectly open, downright, and unreserved. Therewithal he had all the ambition of the first Cæsar, without any of his deep wisdom and policy to guide it; and all his recklessness of prescription too, but none of that native rectitude of genius which made it comparatively safe for him to be a law unto himself. Such, in brief, appears to be the character of the man as delivered in history. Antony's leading traits, as Shakespeare renders them, have been to some extent involved in what I have said of the heroine. He is the same man here as in the play of Julius Cæsar, only in a further stage of development: brave and magnanimous to a fault, transported with ambition, and somewhat bloated with success; bold, strong, and reckless alike in the good and the bad parts of his composition; undergoing a long and hard strugle between the heroism and voluptuousness of his nature; the latter of which, with Cleopatra's unfathomable seductions to stimulate it, at last acquires the full sway and mastery of him. His powers are indeed great, but all unbalanced. Even when the spells of Egypt are woven thick and fast about him, the lingerings of his better spirit, together with the stinging sense of his present state, arouse him from time to time to high resolutions and deeds of noble daring: yet these appear rather as the spasms of a dying manhood than the natural and healthy beatings of its heart; the poison of a fevered ambition overmastering for a while the subtiler poison of a gorged and pampered sensuality. "There's a great spirit gone," he exclaims, on hearing of Fulvia's death; and long afterwards, when disaster and self-reproach overtake him, and his faith in the Queen is shaken, then the image of Octavia with "her modest eyes and still conclusion" reclaims his thoughts, and she is to him a gem of women." But still he cannot unchain his soul from the "great fairy": however, in his fits of despondency, he may doubt her fidelity and resent her supposed treachery, yet she has but to play her forces upon him in person, and her empire is at once re-established. Thus when she, weeping, comes upon him after the terrible disgrace of Actium: 66 Ant. O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt? See, By looking back what I have left behind 'Stroy'd in dishonour. My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings, And when she further entreats his pardon : Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates All that is won and lost: give me a kiss; Still better, when, some time later, he is in a flush of success, and she comes into his presence, glowing with admiration of his prowess: O, thou day o' the world, Chain mine arm'd neck! leap thou, attire and all, Such is the thraldom to which his heart is reduced; yet it stands half excused to us by our own sense of the too potent witchcraft that subdues him. We think of him as "the noble ruin of her magic"; and of her magic too, as more an inspiration than a purpose, so that she can hardly help it. And he is himself sensible that under her mighty charms his manhood is thawing away, and thence takes a melancholy forecast or presentiment of the perdition that is coming upon him; a presentiment that is only bound the closer upon his thoughts by his inability to break the spell. The cluster and succession of images in which he dimly anticipates his own fall is unsurpassed for the union of poetry and pathos: Ant. Eros, thou yet behold'st me? Ay, noble lord. Ant. Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish; A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon't, that nod unto the world, And mock our eyes with air: thou'st seen these signs; Ant. That which is now a horse, even with a thought I made these wars for Egypt; and the Queen, — A million more, now lost; — she, Eros, has Nay, weep not, gentle Eros; there is left us Here we have the great Triumvir's irregular grandeur of soul melting out its innermost sweets in the eloquence of sorrow. Antony and Cleopatra seem made for each other: their fascination, howsoever begotten, is mutual; and if in the passion that draws and holds them together there be nothing to engage our respect, there is much that compels our sympathy. Witness the heroine's strain at the close: Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have To praise my noble act. - Husband, I come: Now to that name my courage prove my title! I'm fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life. And when, on seeing Iras fall, she gives this as the reason for hastening to overtake her, If she first meet the curlèd Antony, He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss we feel that the poetry of passion can go no further. Our reprobation, too, of their life is softened with a just and wholesome flow of pity at their death. Charmian and Iras. The dia Of the minor characters, the Queen's two favourite women, Charmian and Iras, especially the former, besides having no little interest in themselves, are full of relative significance. Their spirited, frolicsome levity and wantonness of thought and speech, together with their death-braving constancy to their mistress, show the moral and social qualities of the atmosphere which Cleopatra creates about her. logue they hold with Alexas, Enobarbus, and the Soothsayer, in the second scene, is exceedingly artful; though not so much for what it contains as for what it suggests and infers. The intense sexuality of the heroine's thoughts, while it abates nothing of her charms in Antony's eyes, since his own thoughts are pitched in the same key, would however, if directly expressed, take off much of the fascination which she exercises and was meant to exercise upon us. And in fact we have only two or three hints of it from her mouth, though these are indeed charged to the utmost with meaning. But we have a vivid reflection of it in the talk of her nearest attendants, who of course habitually trim their tongues in the glass of her private example. Order is thus taken, in the outset of the play, that what the Queen's thoughts in this respect are made of shall become known to us indirectly; her dignity being thus spared, and yet her character |