At times, as when she threatens to give Charmian bloody teeth, or hales the luckless Messenger up and down by the hair, strikes him and draws her knife on him, she resembles (if I dare say it) Doll Tearsheet sublimated. She is a mother; but the threat of Octavius to destroy her children if she takes her own life passes by her like the wind (a point where Shakespeare contradicts Plutarch). She ruins a great man, but shows no sense of the tragedy of his ruin. The anguish of spirit that appears in his language to his servants is beyond her; she has to ask Enobarbus what he means. Can we feel sure that she would not have sacrificed him if she could have saved herself by doing so? It is not even certain that she did not attempt it. Antony himself believes that she did— that the fleet went over to Octavius by her orders. That she and her people deny the charge proves nothing. The best we can say is that, if it were true, Shakespeare would have made that clear. She is willing also to survive her lover. Her first thought, to follow him after the high Roman fashion, is too great for her. She would live on if she could, and would cheat her victor too of the best part of her fortune. The thing that drives her to die is the certainty that she will be carried to Rome to grace his triumph. That alone decides her.

The marvellous thing is that the knowledge of all this makes hardly more difference to us than it did to Antony. It seems to us perfectly natural, nay, in a sense perfectly right, that her lover should be her slave; that her women should adore her and die with her; that Enobarbus, who foresaw what must happen, and who opposes her wishes and braves her anger, should talk of her with rapture and feel no bitterness against her; that Dolabella, after a minute's conversation, should betray to her his master's intention and enable her to frustrate it. And when Octavius shows himself proof against her fascination, instead of admiring him, we turn from him with disgust and think him a disgrace to his species. Why? It is not that we consider him bound to fall in love with her. Enobarbus did not; Dolabella did not; we ourselves do not. The feeling she inspires was felt then, and is felt by women no less than men, and would have been shared by Octavia herself. Doubtless she wrought magic on the senses, but she had not extraordinary beauty, like

now,

Helen's, such beauty as seems divine. Plutarch says so. The man who wrote the sonnets to the dark lady would have known it for himself. He goes out of his way to add to her age, and tells us of her wrinkles and the waning of her lip. But Enobarbus, in his very mockery, calls her a wonderful piece of work. Dolabella interrupts her with the cry, 'Most sovereign creature,' and we echo it. And yet Octavius, face to face with her, and listening to her voice, can think only how best to trap her and drag her to public dishonour in the streets of Rome. We forgive him only for his words when he sees her dead:'She looks like sleep,

As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.'

And the words, I confess, sound to me more like Shakespeare's than his.

That which makes her wonderful and sovereign laughs at definition, but she herself came nearest naming it when, in the final speech (a passage surpassed in poetry, if at all, only by the final speech of Othello), she cries

'I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.'

The fire and air which at death break from union with

* Shakespeare, it seems clear, imagined Cleopatra as a gipsy. And this, I would suggest, is the explanation of a word which has caused much difficulty. Antony, when 'all is lost,' exclaims (IV, X, 38):

'O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,—

Whose eye beck'd forth my wars, and call'd them home,
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,-
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss.'

Others conjecture

Pope changed 'grave' in the first line into 'gay.' 'great' and 'grand.' Steevens says that 'grave' means 'deadly,' and that the word is often 'used by Chapman' thus; but his quotations do not prove his statement, and certainly in Shakespeare the word does not elsewhere bear that sense. It could mean 'majestic,' as Johnson takes it here. But why should it not have its usual meaning? Cleopatra, we know, was a being of 'infinite variety,' and her eyes may sometimes have had, like those of some gipsies, a mysterious gravity or solemnity which would exert a spell more potent than her gaiety. Their colour, presumably, was what is called 'black'; but surely they were not, as Tennyson imagined, 'bold black eyes.' Readers interested in seeing what criticism is capable of may like to know that it has been proposed to read, for the first line of the quotation above, 'O this false fowl of Egypt! haggard charmer.'

those other elements, transfigured them during her life, and still convert into engines of enchantment the very things for which she is condemned. I can refer only to one. She loves Antony. We should marvel at her less and love her more if she loved him more-loved him well enough to follow him at once to death; but it is to blunder strangely to doubt that she loved him, or that her glorious description of him (though it was also meant to work on Dolabella) came from her heart. Only the spirit of fire and air within her refuses to be trammelled or extinguished, burns its way through the obstacles of fortune, even through the resistance of her love and grief, and would lead her undaunted to fresh life and the conquest of new worlds. It is this which makes her 'strong toil of grace' unbreakable; speaks in her brows' bent and every tone and movement; glorifies the arts and the rages which in another would merely disgust or amuse us; and, in the final scenes of her life, flames into such brilliance that we watch her entranced as she struggles for freedom, and thrilled with triumph as, conquered, she puts her conqueror to scorn and goes to meet her lover in the splendour that crowned and robed her long ago, when her barge burnt on the water like a burnished throne, and she floated to Cydnus on the enamoured stream to take him captive for ever.*

Why is it that, although we close the book in a triumph which is more than reconciliation, this is mingled, as we look back on the story, with a sadness so peculiar, almost the sadness of disenchantment? Is it that, when the glow has faded, Cleopatra's ecstasy comes to appear, I would not say factitious, but an effort strained and prodigious as well as glorious, not, like Othello's last speech, the final expression of character, of thoughts and emotions which have dominated a whole life? Perhaps this is so, but there is something more, something that sounds paradoxical: we are saddened by the very fact that the catastrophe saddens us so little; it pains us that we should feel so much triumph and pleasure. In 'Romeo

* Of the 'good' heroines, Imogen is the one who has most of this spirit of fire and air; and this (in union, of course, with other qualities) is erhaps the ultimate reason why for so many readers she is, what Mr Swin burne calls her, the woman above all Shakespeare's women.'

and Juliet,' 'Hamlet,' 'Othello,' though in a sense we accept the deaths of hero and heroine, we feel a keen sorrow. We look back, think how noble or beautiful they were, wish that fate had opposed to them a weaker enemy, dream possibly of the life they might then have led. Here we can hardly do this. With all our admiration and sympathy for the lovers we do not wish them to gain the world. It is better for the world's sake, and not less for their own, that they should fail and die. At the very first they came before us, unlike those others, unlike Coriolanus and even Macbeth, in a glory already tarnished, halfruined by their past. Indeed one source of strange and most unusual effect in their story is that this marvellous passion comes to adepts in the experience and art of passion, who might be expected to have worn its charm away. Its splendour dazzles us; but, when the splendour vanishes, we do not mourn, as we mourn for the love of Romeo or Othello, that a thing so bright and good should die. And the fact that we mourn so little saddens us.

A comparison of Shakespearean tragedies seems to prove that the tragic emotions are stirred in the fullest possible measure only when such beauty or nobility of character is displayed as commands unreserved admiration or love; or when, in default of this, the forces which move the agents, and the conflict which results from these forces, attain a terrifying and overwhelming power. The four most famous tragedies satisfy one or both of these conditions; 'Antony and Cleopatra,' though a great tragedy, satisfies neither of them completely. But to say this is not to criticise it. It does not attempt to satisfy these conditions, and then fail in the attempt. It attempts something different, and succeeds as triumphantly as 'Othello' itself. In doing so it gives us what no other tragedy can give, and it leaves us, no less than any other, lost in astonishment at the powers which created it.

A. C. BRADLEY.

Art. III. THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD.

1. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. By W. Holman Hunt. Two vols. London: Macmillan, 1905.

2. Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais. By John Guille Millais. Two vols. London: Methuen, 1899. 3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: his Family-letters. With a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti. London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895.

4. Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters. Edited by W. M. Rossetti. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1900.

5. Ford Madox Brown: a record of his Life and Work. By F. M. Hueffer. London: Longmans, 1896.

6. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. By G. B. J. [Lady Burne-Jones]. Two vols. London: Macmillan, 1904. 7. The Life of William Morris. By J. W. Mackail. Two vols. London: Longmans, 1899.

8. The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters. By Percy H. Bate. London: Bell, 1899.

Now that Mr Holman Hunt has so ably stated his own case and that of Sir John Millais, as the joint leaders and originators of the movement called Pre-Raphaelite, and now that the Brotherhood has been dead for nearly half a century, we may fairly make an attempt to solve that least clear of æsthetic modern problems: what was PreRaphaelism? Pre-Raphaelism was, of course, a return to Nature-it was nothing more and nothing less. It was a thing, in its inception, as perfectly clear, as simple and as sharp-cut as a ray of sunlight driven through the gloom of a cellar from a keyhole. But it fell, this particular ray, at a moment when there were so many vapours, so many winds, so many cross-currents in the air, and in the ensuing half-century so many other rays have since whirled and flashed from so many other searchlights, that it is difficult now for any who have not studied au fond this relatively unimportant byway of human thought and its projections to see the original ray in its clear definiteness.

n

Pre-Raphaelism was a revolt in the midst of a revolt, a Gironde, a 'mountain' in a very French revolution of the arts. As a producing agency, it gave to the world