ANSWERED UNHEARD. 215 left it on record, as we are pertinently reminded in the Essay on Liberty, that he always studied his adversary's case with as great intensity as his own, if not still greater. And what Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires, as the essayist urges, to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. For he who knows only his own side of the case, is convicted of knowing little of that: his reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them; but if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, what rational ground has he for preferring either opinion? Before leaving the general subject of "Answered unheard," reference may be allowed, in passing, to a sort of constitutional or temperamental habit some people have of breaking in upon another speaker, before hearing him out, and on the assumption, complacent and satisfactory in them, provoking and often unjust to him, that they fully apprehend and comprehend his meaning, and will spare him, therefore, the superfluous trouble of further enunciating it. They, in point of fact, discourteously, however innocent of designed offence,answer the matter before they hear it, answer the man unheard. Tu quidem ex ore orationem mihi eripis—you are really taking the words out of my mouth. But the unheard ones might entirely alter the question. The author of The Original is sore against that "class of listeners who cut off everything that is said to them by answering before they have half heard, and of course for the most part very erroneously." This author was a London police magistrate, and knew the value of the maxim de audiendo alteram partem. And such “listeners" he pronounced "the most unsatisfactory of all, and the less one has to do with them the better." Some 216 BROTHERS AT STRIFE. people, said Swift, will never learn anything, because they understand everything too soon. Their impatience is as perverse and as unprofitable as Hotspur's in Shakspeare: "Before the game's afoot, thou wilt let slip." THE XX. BROTHERS AT STRIFE. PROVERBS xviii. 19. and HE Book of Proverbs declares a brother offended to be harder to be won than a strong city; their contentions are like the bars of a castle." It is evident by facts, observes a commentator on the passage, that when bitter contentions are excited among brethren or near relations, their resentment becomes more implacable, and the consequences more terrible, than in quarrels among strangers: it is more difficult to conciliate their differences than to take a fortified city; and their stubborn minds resist all endeavours to bend them to a cordial reconciliation, with a resistance like that of the iron bars of a castle. Love and Hate are half-brothers in Spenser's allegory, "though of contràrie natures to each other," "both strongly arm'd, as fearing one another." In a later book of the Faerie Queene we have "two comely squires." in conflict, brothers, and most unbrotherly, Bracidas and Amidas, "bending against themselves their cruel arms." Manuel and Cæsar, the royal brothers in Schiller's fateful tragedy, Die Braut von Messina, cherish unmitigable deadly hate, that spurns all kindred ties, all youthful fond affections; triumphant over BROTHERS AT STRIFE. 217 nature's holiest bands, bursts forth that wild storm of brothers' hate. The mother that in vain has sought to reconcile them, foresees and foretells when her dim eye shall behold them, "foot to foot, close, like the Theban pair, with maddening gripe, and fold each other in a last embrace-each press with vengeful thrust the dagger home," nor even then shall discord be appeased; the very flame of their funeral pyre shall tower dissevered. Oliver and Orlando, in As You Like It, have their hands at each other's throat, and keep them there despite old Adam's piteous appeal, "Sweet masters, be patient; for your father's remembrance, be at accord;" but in their case, bitter as the feud is, reconciliation ensues in a fifth act, nay, earlier, in a fourth; when the elder brother, harder to be won than a strong city, and, as the wrongdoer, the more implacable of the two, by the rule of odisse quem læseris, is saved from the "sucked and hungry lioness" by the younger, that found him sleeping, and twice indeed turned his back, and proposed to leave him so; but kindness, in its best sense of kinship,"But kindness, nobler ever than revenge, Made him give battle to the lioness," most and anon there was reconciliation, and tears kindly bathed" their "recountments" each to each. No such turning-point in the strife of Edgar and Edmund in King Lear. None such in the fratricidal feud of Ferrex and Porrex in Sackville's tragedy, the oldest in English extant. Tanta est discordia fratrum, says Ovid. Sophocles paints it at its blackest in the feud between Polynices and Eteocles. Livy and his like exemplify it in Romulus and Remus. Gibbon exposes it in the "unnatural contest" of Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. Arguing that Lewis the Eleventh was not incapable of the crime imputed to him, of having taken off by poison his brother the Duke of Guienne, Michelet 218 CARACALLA AND GETA. speaks incidentally of that crime as exceedingly common in that day. It would seem, he says, that fratricide, enrolled at this period in the Ottoman law, and ordained by Mahomet II., was in general use in the fifteenth century among Christian (even most Christian) princes. Hawthorne somewhere moralizes on those family feuds which render hatred the more deadly, by the dead and corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison. Every dissension of man with man, according to Dr. Thomas Brown, excites in us a feeling of painful incongruity; but we feel a peculiar "incongruity" in the discord of those whom one roof has sheltered in early life, and whose dust should, as Cicero puts it, be mingled under one common stone-sepulchra habere communia. History is rife with specimens of this incongruity, more easily to be remembered than contrasted ones of the saving grace of congruity (as schoolmen talk). One thinks of antagonistic brothers at all degrees of antagonism-some cases being where the enmity, like the Irishman's reciprocity, is all on one side. There are Caracalla and Geta, for instance, sons of Severus, and joint emperors of Rome,-of whom the disappointed. father foretold, in his anguish, that the weaker and milder of his sons would fall a sacrifice to the stronger and fiercer, who, in his turn, would be ruined by his own vices. The divided form of government prescribed by Severus would, in Gibbon's opinion, have proved a source of discord between the most affectionate brothers; it was impossible that it could long subsist between two implacable enemies, who neither desired nor could trust a reconciliation. It was obvious that one only could reign, and that the other must fall; and each of them, as the historian shows, judging of his RECORDS OF FRATRICIDE. 219 rival's designs by his own, guarded his life with the most jealous vigilance from the repeated attacks of poison or the sword. "Their rapid journey through Gaul and Italy, during which they never ate at the same table or slept in the same house, displayed to the provinces the odious spectacle of fraternal discord." The emperors are described as meeting only in public, in the presence of their afflicted mother, and each surrounded by a numerous train of armed followers; while, even on these occasions of ceremony, the dissimulation of courts could ill disguise the rancour of their hearts. If Severus too truly foretold the event, happier was he in dying first than had been Philip V. of Macedon, in living to see Demetrius done to death by Perseus. Both Perseus and Caracalla are credited with a certain amount of remorse, but hardly of the nobler sort that afflicted Timoleon in respect of his slaughtered elder brother, Timophanes. Records of fratricide dating from the firstborn of Adam, would comprise mention of the sons of David; of Aristobulus and Antigonus, whose blood mingled on the pavement of the Temple; of Aristobulus and Alexander Jannæus; of Herod and his brother Joseph; of Gundebald the Burgundian, a triple fratricide-for in succession he slew his brothers Chilperic, Godemar, and Godesil, and to the too credulous and compassionating Avitus, Bishop of Vienne, he professed to be very sorry about the first and second crimes, before he turned his hand to the third; and again, of Henry II. of Castile, who slew his brother Don Pedro with his own hand; and of Aurungzebe, who put to death all three brothers, Múrad, Dára, and Shujà, after they had vainly struggled against him year by year continually. The list of brothers at strife, and hard to be won, may be swelled by the names of the sons of Childebert, William I., and of Henry II. Peter the Cruel and his brothers would figure in it—not |