speare's point of view, as from
most men's the Nietzschean arrogance which led Coriolanus to become a
traitor to his city is a theme for sadness, not (as apparently with Mr.
Whibley) for enthusiasm. "Shakespeare," cries Mr. Whibley, as he quotes
some of Coriolanus's anti-popular speeches, "will not let the people off.
He pursues it with an irony of scorn." "There in a few lines," he writes
of some other speeches, "are expressed the external folly and shame of
democracy. Ever committed to the worse cause, the people has not even the
courage of its own opinions." It would be interesting to know whether in
Mr. Whibley's eyes Coriolanus's hatred of the people is a sufficiently
splendid virtue to cover his guilt in becoming a traitor. That good Tories
have the right to become traitors was a gospel preached often enough in
regard to the Ulster trouble before the war. It may be doubted, however,
whether Shakespeare was sufficiently a Tory to foresee the necessity of
such a gospel in _Coriolanus_. Certainly, the mother of Coriolanus, who
was far from being a Radical, or even a mild Whig, preached the very
opposite of the gospel of treason. She warned Coriolanus that his triumph
over Rome would be a traitor's triumph, that his name would be "dogg'd
with curses," and that his character would be summed up in history in one
fatal sentence:

The man was noble,
But with his last attempt he wiped it out,
Destroyed his country, and his name remains
To the ensuing age abhorr'd.

Mr. Whibley appears to loathe the mass of human beings so excessively that
he does not quite realize the enormity (from the modern point of view) of
Coriolanus's crime. It would, I agree, be foolish to judge Coriolanus too
scrupulously from a modern point of view. But Mr. Whibley has asked us to
accept the play as a tract for the times, and we must examine it as such
in order to discover what Mr. Whibley means.

But, after all, Mr. Whibley's failure as a portrait-painter is a failure
of the spirit even more than of the intellect. A narrow spirit cannot
comprehend a magnanimous spirit, and Mr. Whibley's imagination does not
move in that large Shakespearean world in which illustrious men salute
their mortal enemies in immortal sentences of praise after the manner of

He was the noblest Roman of them all.

The author who is capable of writing Mr. Whibley's character-study of Fox
does not understand enough about the splendour and