last deed and words of Brutus, when he offers his blood as an appeasement to quiet the ghost that haunts him: Cæsar, now be still, I kill'd not thee with halfe so good a will. To get this culminating impression of the tragic conquest of Brutus and his ideas by Cæsarism, Shakespeare resorted to the agency of the supernatural, both in the omens that preceded the assassination and in the avenging ghost that followed it. A ghost was an effective instrumentality of viewless power in the sixteenth century, not to be so readily accepted, to be sure, by the twentieth century. Yet of all that a ghost means psychologically and hypnotically of inward compunction and of conviction of an inescapable, unseen influence, impossible to frustrate by brute force, Shakespeare's ghost remains symbolic to every sympathetic reader. The contrast between the weakness of Cæsar's bodily presence in the first half of the play and the might of his spiritual presence in the latter half is emphasized and perhaps over-emphasized,' Dowden says. Ten Brink states more clearly the purpose of Shakespeare's over-emphasis, and the dramatic force of his contrast, when he asserts that the less adequate the embodiment in Cæsar's person of the idea that was projected into the world by Cæsar, the more distinctly does the full significance of the idea as such stand out. Or, to be more explicit, it is embodied not so much in Cæsar's person as in his position, his power, in the judgment, the mood, the character of the people.' Thence it is that the majestic Ghost of Sardis derives his credentials. Shakespeare presents thus, in 'Julius Cæsar,' a period His of historic crisis when an old order is passing, with a struggle, and a new one centering about a debatable figure is establishing itself, despite the struggle. presentation proves deficient only when partizan bias demands a more flattering picture of one side or the other than a dramatic summing up of the two-sided conjoint humanized fact admits. He loves a hero too wisely to make a god of him, too well not to make him faultily human, too profoundly not to know how to enhance the influence among men of his subtler and enduring qualities by means of his social and affectional nature. So treated, what are called by critics like Shaw the weaknesses of Shakespeare's Cæsar constitute an appreciable part of his strength. With Antony and the Roman populace they play no small part in the success of Cæsarism. Brutus and Cæsar's ghost are the partner factors in Shakespeare's drama of the Fall of Cæsar and the Rise of Cæsarism. It is idle to quarrel with the importance of either factor, since Cæsar's ghost would not dominate the play so subtly if the Brutus who is forced to appease it were petty or insincere, and since, if Cæsar instead of Cæsar's ghost were dominant, the action of Brutus would be ignoble at first and lack tragic force in the end. A third element has been consummately employed in the dramatic structure of Julius Cæsar.' It is no less noticeable than the two elements of Republicanism and Cæsarism, embodied respectively in Brutus and Cæsar's ghost. It has been but little commented upon as a token of the profundity of Shakespeare's presentation of the political issues involved in the Roman crisis dramatized in Julius Cæsar.' Yet this third element is more fundamental to that crisis than either Republicanism or Cæsarism were without it, since it is the cause of the downfall of the one and the triumph of the other. In a word, it is the fulcrum of power in the play, as it was in reality. Antony adroitly made use of it to get leverage enough for the overthrow of Brutus and Cassius and the establishment of Cæsarism. That fulcrum of power is the budding will of the People in public affairs. Shakespeare has managed to express dramatically the historic fact that Cæsarism derived its potency from this yet undeveloped democratic source of power. He has also shown that the secret of Cæsar's appeal to the populace lay in his human, faulty side, in the amiable humanitarian liberalism of which his partiality for Antony, the masker and reveler, his dislike of the seldom-smiling Cassius, and his indulgent, generous temper toward the hardships and the pleasures of the plebeian class, are the signs. The noble but bookish rigor of Brutus is in strong contrast to the affectional relation Cæsar and Antony sought to establish with the populace. Whatever alloy of the politic there was in it, the success of the Cæsarian policy lay in the belief of the Roman public that it was sincere. Of course the plebeians were cheated. That has never been infrequent in any age. Nor need the fact lead the modern critic to feel any more scorn of the cheated than of the cheaters, nor to assume that Shakespeare felt more. On the whole, the plebs were justified in concluding that they played a somewhat less insignificant part in the regard and comprehension of Cæsar's party than in that of the Roman patricians with whom Brutus consented to conspire. The solidest result of Mommsen's investigation of the sources of Cæsar's greatness and the ultimate value of his ideas is not the light he has thrown merely upon the brain and character of Julius Cæsar, nor even upon the localism of the Republicanism of Brutus. This light has caused the modern hero-worship of the practical Cæsar and depreciation of the idealistic Brutus, neither of which Shakespeare satisfies. The solidest result of Mommsen's monumental investigations in Roman history is, let us venture to say, the affirmation that the closest friend and ally the Roman populace had at that time was Cæsar, and not the patrician senatorial party, calling itself the lover of liberty, but really representing the losing cause of classpower. This fact Shakespeare shows, not theoretically and explicitly, of course, but dramatically, in character, dialogue, and action. He has fashioned the structure of his play so that the plot takes its rise from the fears of the anti-Cæsarian party lest the people should identify their interests with Cæsar's ambition. The opening scene brings on the stage just such Commoners'. so Shakespeare's First Folio stage direction designates them as he had seen in England. Almost to be detected in the picture is the bluff yeoman spirit of his uncle, Henry Shakespeare of Snitterfield, who was fined for refusing to wear on Sundays and holidays the cap of wool decreed for men of mean estate by the statute repealed only a year or so before this play was written. scene is a pure invention of Shakespeare, an addition to Plutarch which no dramatist of even ordinary ability could devise at the outset of his play without being well aware that he was laying the corner-stone of his dramatic action on the readiness of the plebs to befriend Cæsar, and in so doing supplying it for later use at the climax and turning-point of the plot, in the This third act, in answering the crucial question: Will the people side with Cæsar now?' The scene sets graphically before the eye the sympathy of the Commoners with Cæsar in his triumph, and the scolding uneasiness of Flavius and Marullus over the consequences likely to result. Their object in driving the Vulgar from the streets' is expressly said to be to pluck from Cæsar's wing' these 'growing feathers' and པ make him flye an ordinary pitch, Who else would soare above the view of men, Throughout the play it is the anti-Cæsarian who fears or scorns the People. Brutus himself says: I do feare the People choose Cæsar For their king. It is the envious Caska' who bitingly describes the 'howting Rabblement' with its 'sweatie night-cappes' and its stinking breath,' and who makes it a jeering reproach to Cæsar that he let the tag-ragge people clap him and hisse him according as he pleas'd and displeas'd them, as they use to doe the Players in the Theatre.' Antony, on the other hand, seeks the voice of the commons, and proposes to try In my Oration, how the People take The cruell issue of these bloody men.' And the prudent Cassius remonstrates against letting Antony speak a word, lest the people may be mov'd By that which he will utter.' Scorn of the People and aloofness from them on Brutus's side are shown to have little chance of success against even the pretense on Cæsar's side of love and friendliness. A bit of purely Shakespearian invention in the second |