Page:The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (The Warwick Shakespeare).djvu/22

 as incomparably the shrewdest; the man who can take an initiative; who sees the course which policy requires; who understands other men and knows their true value and danger, unless he is blinded by personal prejudice. He reads Casca like a book; he can even manage Brutus to some extent; he alone recognizes the latent capacities of the arch-foe Antony. It is the moral elevation of Brutus which makes us forget the great qualities that are in Cassius; and in that moral elevation is the essence of the tragedy, because it is in great part directly responsible for the failure, the ultimate defeat, of the project to which Brutus had devoted himself. That is a rather dangerous statement on the face of it, requiring some explanation.

The problem with which Brutus has to deal is a complex one; the motives which stir his coadjutors are various. No one knows better than the arch-conspirator, Cassius, that the assassination is very difficult to justify, and that most of those who take part in it are not actuated by a spirit of abstract justice; that the cause is not good enough to depend for success on strenuous moral conviction. Now had every man engaged in the conspiracy been as Brutus was—unmoved by personal resentments and jealousies, and wholly convinced that the act was right—the movement would have been attended by that moral force which would have carried public feeling irresistibly along with it. As it was, public feeling could be counted on to only a very limited extent, and required to be supported by the active exercise of physical force. Brutus, strong in his own conviction of the righteousness of his cause, measuring his companions and even the general public by his own standard, confident that it needs nothing more than a plain statement of the case to ensure the support of any honest patriot, insists on being content with the death of Cæsar himself, on letting loose Antony to fire the popular mind, on letting go the means absolutely required to make a miscellaneous army efficient. The purity of his own motives prevents him from seeing the selfishness in those of his companions, or the immense moral weight