principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast.
It admits of no medium. It is everything by excess.
It rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings
and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance.
It shows its head turretted, crowned, and crested.
Its front is gilt and blood-stained. Before it
’it carries noise, and behind it tears’.
It has its altars and its victims, sacrifices, human
sacrifices. Kings, priests, nobles, are its train-bearers,
tyrants and slaves its executioners.—’Carnage
is its daughter.’ Poetry is right-royal.
It puts the individual for the species, the one above
the infinite many, might before right. A lion
hunting a flock of sheep or a herd of wild asses is
a more poetical object than they; and we even take
part with the lordly beast, because our vanity or
some other feeling makes us disposed to place ourselves
in the situation of the strongest party. So we
feel some concern for the poor citizens of Rome when
they meet together to compare their wants and grievances,
till Coriolanus comes in and with blows and big words
drives this set of ‘poor rats’, this rascal
scum, to their homes and beggary before him.
There is nothing heroical in a multitude of miserable
rogues not wishing to be starved, or complaining that
they are like to be so: but when a single man
comes forward to brave their cries and to make them
submit to the last indignities, from mere pride and
self-will, our admiration of his prowess is immediately
converted into contempt for their pusillanimity.
The insolence of power is stronger than the plea of
necessity. The tame submission to usurped authority
or even the natural resistance to it has nothing to
excite or flatter the imagination: it is the
assumption of a right to insult or oppress others
that carries an imposing air of superiority with it.
We had rather be the oppressor than the oppressed.
The love of power in ourselves and the admiration
of it in others are both natural to man: the
one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. Wrong
dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more
attraction than abstract right.—Coriolanus
complains of the fickleness of the people: yet
the instant he cannot gratify his pride and obstinacy
at their expense, he turns his arms against his country.
If his country was not worth defending, why did he
build his pride on its defence? He is a conqueror
and a hero; he conquers other countries, and makes
this a plea for enslaving his own; and when he is prevented
from doing so, he leagues with its enemies to destroy
his country. He rates the people ’as if
he were a God to punish, and not a man of their infirmity’.
He scoffs at one of their tribunes for maintaining
their rights and franchises: ‘Mark you his
absolute shall?’ not marking his own absolute
will to take everything from them, his impatience
of the slightest opposition to his own pretensions
being in proportion to their arrogance and absurdity.
If the great and powerful had the beneficence and