same time a master in the art of dissimulation-see his funeral oration in Julius Cæsar, and in this play the manner in which he takes Octavia to wife-and an open, honest character; he was in a way faithful, felt closely bound to his mistress and to his comrades-in-arms, and was yet alarmingly unstable. In other words, his was an artist-nature.

Among his many contradictory qualities two stood out preeminent the bent towards action and the bent towards enjoyment. Octavius says in the play that these two propensities are equally strong in him, and this is perhaps just about the truth. If, with his immense bodily strength, he had been still more voluptuously inclined, he would have become what in later history Augustus the Strong became, and Cleopatra would have been his Aurora von Königsmarck. If energy had been more strongly developed in him, then generalship and love of drink and dissipation would have combined in him much as they did in Alexander the Great, and Antony in Alexandria would have presented a parallel to Alexander in Babylon. The scales hung evenly balanced for a long time, until Antony met his fate in Cleopatra.

Shakespeare has endowed them both with extreme personal beauty, though neither of them is young. Antony's followers see in him a Mars, in her a Venus. Even the gruff Enobarbus (ii. 2) declares that when he saw her for the first time, she "o'erpictured that Venus where we see the fancy outwork nature." She is the enchantress whom, according to Antony, "everything becomes " -chiding, laughing, weeping, as well as repose. She is "a wonderful piece of work." Antony can never leave her, for, as Enobarbus says (ii. 2; compare Sonnet lvi.):

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy

The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her."

What matters it that Shakespeare pictures her to himself dark as
an African (she was in reality of the purest Greek blood), or that
she, with some exaggeration, calls herself old? She can afford to
jest on the subject of her complexion as on that of her age:-
"Think on me

That am with Phoebus amorous pinches black,

And wrinkled deep in time."

She is what Antony calls her when he (viii. 2) exclaims in ecstasy, "O thou day o' the world!"

In person and carriage Antony is as if created for her. It is not only Cleopatra's passion that speaks when she says of Antony (v. 2):—

"I dream'd there was an Emperor Antony .

His face was as the heavens . . "

And to the beauty of his face answers that of his voice :

"Propertied

As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder."

She prizes his rich, generous nature:

"For his bounty,

There was no winter in't; and autumn 'twas,
That grew the more by reaping:

In his livery

Walk'd crowns and crownets; realms and islands were

As plates dropped from his pocket."

And just as Enobarbus maintained that Cleopatra was more beautiful than that pictured Venus in which imagination had surpassed nature, Cleopatra, in her exaltation after Antony's death, maintains that his glorious humanity surpassed what fancy can invent:

"Cleopatra. Think you there was or might be such a man As this I dreamt of?

Cleopatra. You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.
But, if there be, or ever were, one such,

It's past the size of dreaming: nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet, to imagine
An Antony, were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite."

Not of an Antony should we speak thus now-a-days, but of a Napoleon in the world of action, of a Michael Angelo, a Beethoven, or a Shakespeare in the world of art.

But the figure of Antony had to be one which made such a transfiguration possible in order that it might be worthy to stand by the side of hers who is the queen of beauty, the very genius of love.

Pascal says in his Pensées: "Si le nez de Cléopâtre eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé." But her nose was, as the old coins show us, exactly what it ought to have been; and in Shakespeare we feel that she is not only beauty itself, but charm, except in one single scene, where the news of Antony's marriage throws her into a paroxysm of unbeautiful rage. Her charm is of the sense-intoxicating kind, and she has, by study and art, developed those powers of attraction which she possessed from the outset, till she has become inexhaustible in inventiveness and variety. She is the woman who has passed from hand to hand, from her husband and brother to Pompey,

from Pompey to the great Cæsar, from Cæsar to countless others. She is the courtesan by temperament, but none the less does she possess the genius for a single, undivided love. She, like Antony, is complex, and being a woman, she is more so than he. Vir duplex, femina triplex.

From the beginning and almost to the end of the tragedy she plays the part of the great coquette. What she says and does is for long only the outcome of the coquette's desire and power to captivate by incalculable caprices. She asks where Antony is, and sends for him (i. 2). He comes. She exclaims: "We will not look upon him," and goes. Presently his absence irks her, and again she sends a messenger to remind him of her and keep him in play (i. 3):

"If you find him sad,

Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report

That I am sudden sick . . .”

He learns of his wife's death. She would have been beside herself if he had shown grief, but he speaks with coldness of the loss, and she attacks him because of this :

"Where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill
With sorrowful water? Now I see, I see

In Fulvia's death how mine received shall be."

This incalculability, this capriciousness of hers extends to the smallest matters. She invites Mardian to play a game of billiards with her (an amusing anachronism), and, finding him ready, she turns him off with: "I'll none now."

But all this mutability does not exclude in her the most real, most passionate love for Antony. The best proof of its strength is the way in which she speaks of him when he is absent (i. 5):

"O Charmian!

Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?

Or does he walk? or is he on his horse?

O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony !

Do bravely, horse, for wott'st thou whom thou mov'st?
The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm

And burgonet of men."

So it is but the truth she is speaking when she tells with what immovable certainty and trust, with what absolute assurance for the future, love filled both her and Antony when they saw each other for the first time (i. 3):—

"No going then ;

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor,
But was a race of heaven."

Nor is it irony when Enobarbus, in reply to Antony's complaint (i. 2), "She is cunning past man's thought," makes answer, "Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love." This is literally true-only that the love is not pure in the sense of being sublimated or unegoistic, but in the sense of being quintessential erotic emotion, chemically free from all the other elements usually combined with it.

And outward circumstances harmonise with the character and vehemence of this passion. He lays the kingdoms of the East at her feet; with reckless prodigality, she lavishes the wealth of Africa on the festivals she holds in his honour.

XXVIII

THE DARK LADY AS A MODEL-THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC A WORLD-CATASTROPHE

ASSUMING that it was Shakespeare's design in Antony and Cleopatra, as in King Lear, to evoke the conception of a worldcatastrophe, we see that he could not in this play, as in Macbeth or Othello, focus the entire action around the leading characters alone. He could not even make the other characters completely subordinate to them; that would have rendered it impossible for him to give the impression of majestic breadth, of an action embracing half of the then known world, which he wanted for the sake of the concluding effect.

He required in the group of figures surrounding Octavius Cæsar, and in the groups round Lepidus, Ventidius, and Sextus Pompeius, a counterpoise to Antony's group. He required the placid beauty and Roman rectitude of Octavia as a contrast to the volatile, intoxicating Egyptian. He required Enobarbus to serve as a sort of chorus and introduce an occasional touch of irony amid the highflown passion of the play. In short, he required a throng of personages, and (in order to make us feel that the action was not taking place in some narrow precinct in a corner of Europe, but upon the stage of the world) he required a constant coming and going, sending and receiving of messengers, whose communications are awaited with anxiety, heard with bated breath, and not infrequently alter at one blow the situation of the chief characters.

The ambition which characterised Antony's past is what determines his relation to this great world; the love which has now taken such entire possession of him determines his relation to the Egyptian queen, and the consequent loss of all that his ambition had won for him. Whilst in a tragedy like Goethe's Clavigo, ambition plays the part of the tempter, and love is conceived as the good, the legitimate power, here it is love that is reprehensible, ambition that is proclaimed to be the great man's vocation and duty.

Thus Antony says (i. 2):

"These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
Or lose myself in dotage."