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Updated: May 6, 2025
For the question, as he puts it, is the question between animal instinct, between mere appetite, and reason; and the question incidentally arises in the course of the exhibition, whether the common-weal, when it comes to anything like common-sense, is going to stand being gnawed in this way, for the benefit of any individual, or clique, or party.
Among the 'transient hieroglyphics' which the diseased common-weal produces on the scientific stage, when the question of its CURE is the question of the Play in that great crowd of forms, in that moving, portentous, stormy pageant of senators, and consuls, and tribunes, and plebeians, whose great acts fill the scene there are none more significant than these two, whom we saw at first 'seated on two low stools, sewing'; these two of the wife and mother the commanding mother, and the 'gracious silence.
Its aim was to disclose ultimately, and educate in every member of society that entire and noble form of human nature which 'each man carries with him, and whereby the individual man is naturally and constitutionally a member of the common-weal.
It was branded in the first scene, in the person of its Hero, as 'a dog to the commonalty. It is one of the wretched 'commons' who invents, in his distress, that title for it; but the Poet himself exhibits it, not descriptively only, but dramatically, as something more brutish than that eating the poor man's corn that the gods have sent him, and gnawing his vitals, devouring him soul and body, 'tooth and fell. It was shown up from the first as an instinct that men share with 'rats'. It was brought out from the first, and exhibited with its teeth in the heart of the common-weal.
But as for this affection that is tried here now, that the diagram of this scene exhibits so tangibly, 'as it were, to the eye, this poor and private passion, that sits here, with its imperial crown on its head, in the place of God, but lacking His 'mercy, this passion of the petty man, that has made itself so hugely visible with its monstrous outstretching, that lies stretched out and glittering on these hills, with its dragon coils unwound, with its deadly fangs those little fangs, that crush our private hearts, and torture and rend our daily lives exposed in this great solar microscope, striking the common-weal, as for this petty, usurping passion, there is a spectacle approaching that will undo it.
With less temper, he would have seen in this awful peril but an occasion of triumph over the Minister whom he had so long been struggling to overturn and, with less sagacity, he would have thrown away the golden opportunity of establishing himself for ever in the affections and the memories of Englishmen, as one whose heart was in the common-weal, whatever might be his opinions, and who, in the moment of peril, could sink the partisan in the patriot.
He is there to 'represent to the eye, because impressions on the senses are more effective than abstract statements, the divine right and sovereignty, the majesty of the COMMON-weal, the rule that protects each helpless individual member of it with the strength of all, the rule awful with great nature's sanction, enforced with her dire pains and penalties.
This play is the Cure of the Common-weal, the convulsed and dying Common-weal; and whether the assault be from within or without, this woman must undo her work. The tribunes have sent for her now: she must go forth without shrinking, and slay her son.
He makes use of this incident to complete that separation he is effecting in the hitherto unanalysed, ill-defined, popular notions, and received and unquestioned axioms of practice that separation of the instinctive military heroism, and the principle of the so-called heroic greatness, from the true principles of heroism and nobility, the true principle of subjection and sovereignty in the individual human nature and in the common-weal.
Here, indeed, in the Fable, in the proper hero of it, it is the struggle of the 'partliness' of pride and selfish ambition, lifting itself up in the place of God, and arraying itself against the common-weal, as well as the common-will; but the physical relation of the one to the many, the position of the individual who differs from his time on radical questions, the relative strength of the parties to this war, and the weapons and the mode of warfare inevitably prescribed to the minority under such conditions all this is carefully brought out from the speciality of this instance, and presented in its most general form; and the application of the result to the position of the man who contends for the common-weal, against the selfish will, and passion, and narrowness, and short-sightedness of the multitude, is distinctly made.
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