Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/59

Rh modem jingo agitator he conjures up the picture of the threatening triumph of their national adversaries in order to silence the “class-war”:

This is a splendid piece of mass-psychology. Is it necessary to refer to a still more glorious example of it, the Marc-Antony scene in Julius Cæsar, with its brilliant mixture of rhetorical means? Frederick Tupper, junr., who has given an elaborate analysis of them, explains the effects of this great speech with the very words, that “Antony fires the multitude not by working upon its reason, its critical spirit” for “a mob can make no response to reason and conscience, and higher motives are above the understanding of an entranced multitude” (l.c. 506, 507). That is exactly what the author of the insurrection-scene in Sir Thomas More fails to see. The idea would probably have appeared child-like to a man of Shakespeare’s realism, to make the mob-rebels (it says: “all,” not a single person!) after the appeal to their reason and conscience exclaim: “fayth a saies trewe letts do as we may be doon by.” To write this a more sentimental mind than Shakespeare’s is required. And indeed there is a slight strain of sentimentality in the whole of the speech. Compare the lines:

Here again the case is misconstrued in a characteristic way. The proud and “saucie aliens,” whom we have just been witnessing behaving in an outrageous way to the good citizens of London and to their wives, become suddenly a pitiable lot of distressed people, the impudent “libertins” who enticed the citizens’ wives away from their husbands and later on had the insolence of charging the husbands the costs for their “boarding,” or tried to get hold of pretty women by employment of force in the street, have turned into hard-struggling, grief-bowed, injured fathers of families who are particularly worthy of commiseration because of their “poor luggage” and the little children, whom they bear on their backs as the dearest possessions, as the wives of Weinsberg whilom did