Page:The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (The Warwick Shakespeare).djvu/23

 thrown into the other scale by the spectacle of Cæsar falling beneath the daggers of men whom he held among his dearest friends. When Brutus is fully convinced that the act is right, it seems to him that the fact that he, "Cæsar's angel", endorses it must convince every one that its justification is overwhelming. But to the world the act really appears to be one of rank personal treachery and disloyalty. Brutus loved the man he slew, but slew him for the general good; but the onlookers saw him repaying the trust of Cæsar by murdering him. In fact the plot was a moral shock to the world, and it was therefore utterly hopeless to carry through the policy intended on high moral grounds alone. It followed then that the enterprise was foredoomed to failure, unless, in the employment of means, the dictates of expediency were allowed to carry weight against those of abstract justice. In his very blindness to this lies much of the beauty of Brutus' character. He is so single-minded himself that he cannot realize the duplicity of others; so unselfish, that he credits every one else with a like purity of motive. Having made up his mind that a certain course will be right if it can be carried out in completeness, he never asks whether it can be so carried out without stooping to base methods, such as he will never countenance. The merely practical person, having fixed on the end, adopts the surest means without consideration of their moral justification; the entirely unpractical person assumes that because the end is desirable, it must be attainable by means of which he will approve. It is possible, however, to be as conscientious as Brutus, without ceasing to be practical—but then the cost must be counted beforehand, and the fact that the end cannot be attained will be recognized.

Brutus fails therefore because his unselfishness, his genuine patriotism, his conscientiousness, are combined with a want of judgment, an ignorance of men, a want of insight in affairs, which utterly unfit him for leadership. He is not wrecked by the vacillation of Hamlet, the passion of Othello; he does not swerve because he has a divided mind, nor suffer feeling to outweigh reason; but he reasons wrongly. He trusts his own