It is to Montaigne, then, that we now come, in terms of our preliminary
statement of evidence. When Florio's translation was published, in 1603,
Shakspere was thirty-seven years old, and he had written or refashioned
KING JOHN, HENRY IV., THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,
RICHARD II., TWELFTH NIGHT, AS YOU LIKE IT, HENRY V., ROMEO AND JULIET,
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, and JULIUS CAESAR. It is very likely that he
knew Florio, being intimate with Jonson, who was Florio's friend and
admirer; and the translation, long on the stocks, must have been
discussed in his hearing. Hence, presumably, his immediate perusal of
it. Portions of it he may very well have seen or heard of before it was
fully printed (necessarily a long task in the then state of the
handicraft); but in the book itself, we have seen abundant reason to
believe, he read largely in 1603-4.
Having inductively proved the reading, and at the same time the fact of
the impression it made, we may next seek to realise deductively what
kind of impression it was fitted to make. We can readily see what
North's Plutarch could be and was to the sympathetic and
slightly-cultured playwright; it was nothing short of a new world of
human knowledge; a living vision of two great civilisations, giving to
his universe a vista of illustrious realities beside which the charmed
gardens of Renaissance romance and the bustling fields of English
chronicle-history were as pleasant dreams or noisy interludes. He had
done wonders with the chronicles; but in presence of the long
muster-rolls of Greece and Rome he must have felt their insularity; and
he never returned to them in the old spirit. But if Plutarch could do so
much for him, still greater could be the service rendered by Montaigne.
The difference, broadly speaking, is very much as the difference in
philosophic reach between JULIUS CAESAR and HAMLET, between CORIOLANUS
and LEAR.
For what was in its nett significance Montaigne's manifold book, coming
thus suddenly, in a complete and vigorous translation, into English life
and into Shakspere's ken? Simply the most living book then existing in
Europe. This is not the place, nor am I the person, to attempt a
systematic estimate of the most enduring of French writers, who has
stirred to their best efforts the ablest of French critics; but I must
needs try to indicate briefly, as I see it, his significance in general
European culture. And I would put it that Montaigne is really, for the
civilised world at this day, what Petrarch has been too enthusiastically
declared to be--the first of the moderns. He is so as against even the
great Rabelais, because Rabelais misses directness, misses universality,
misses lucidity, in his gigantic mirth; he is so as against Petrarch,
because he is emphatically an impressionist where Petrarch is a framer
of studied compositions; he is so against Erasmus, because Erasmus also
is a framer of artificial compositions in a dead language, where
Montaigne writes with absolute spontaneity in a language not only
living but growing. Only Chaucer, and he only in the Canterbury Tales,
can be thought of as a true modern before Montaigne; and Chaucer is
there too English to be significant for all Europe. The high figure of
Dante is decisively mediaeval: it is the central point in mediaeval
literature. Montaigne was not only a new literary phenomenon in his own
day: he remains so still; for his impressionism, which he carried to
such lengths in originating it, is the most modern of literary
inspirations; and all our successive literary and artistic developments
are either phases of the same inspiration or transient reactions against
it. Where literature in the mass has taken centuries to come within
sight of the secret that the most intimate form of truth is the most
interesting, he went, in his one collection of essays, so far towards
absolute self-expression that our practice is still in the rear of his,
which is quite too unflinching for contemporary nerves. Our _bonne foi_
is still sophisticated in comparison with that of the great Gascon. Of
all essayists who have yet written, he is the most transparent, the most
sincere even in his stratagems, the most discursive, the most
free-tongued, and therefore the most alive. A classic commonplace
becomes in his hands a new intimacy of feeling: where verbal
commonplaces have, as it were, glazed over the surface of our sense, he
goes behind them to rouse anew the living nerve. And there is no theme
on which he does not some time or other dart his sudden and searching
glance. It is truly said of him by Emerson that "there have been men
with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance
of thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to
make the reader care for all that he cares for. Cut these words and they
bleed; they are vascular and alive." Such a voice, speaking at
Shakspere's ear in an English nearly as racy and nervous as the
incomparable old-new French of the original, was in itself a revelation.
I have said above that we seem to see passing from Montaigne to
Shakspere a vibration of style as well as of thought; and it would be
difficult to overstate the importance of such an influence. A writer
affects us often more by the pulse and pressure of his speech than by
his matter. Such an action is indeed the secret of all great literary
reputations; and in no author of any age are the cadence of phrases and
the beat of words more provocative of attention than in Montaigne. They
must have affected Shakspere as they have done so many others; and in
point of fact his work, from HAMLET forth, shows a gain in nervous
tension and pith, fairly attributable to the stirring impact of the
style of Montaigne, with its incessancy of stroke, its opulence of
colour, its hardy freshness of figure and epithet, its swift, unflagging
stride. Seek in any of Shakspere's plays for such a strenuous rush of
idea and rhythm as pulses through the soliloquy:
"How all occasions do inform against me,"
and you will gather that there has been a technical change wrought, no
less than a moral and an intellectual. The poet's nerves have caught a
new vibration.
But it was not merely a congenial felicity and energy of utterance that
Montaigne brought to bear on his English reader, though the more we
consider this quality of spontaneity in the essayist the more we shall
realise its perennial fascination. The culture-content of Montaigne's
book is more than even the self-revelation of an extremely vivacious and
reflective intelligence; it is the living quintessence of all Latin
criticism of life, and of a large part of Greek; a quintessence as fresh
and pungent as the essayist's expression of his special individuality.
For Montaigne stands out among all the humanists of the epochs of the
Renaissance and the Reformation in respect of the peculiar directness of
his contact with Latin literature. Other men must have come to know
Latin as well as he; and hundreds could write it with an accuracy and
facility which, if he were ever capable of it, he must, by his own
confession, have lost before middle life,[150] though he read it
perfectly to the last. But he is the only modern man whom we know to
have learned Latin as a mother tongue; and this fact was probably just
as important in psychology as was the similar fact, in Shakspere's case,
of his whole adult culture being acquired in his own language. It seems
to me, at least, that there is something significant in the facts: (1)
that the man who most vividly brought the spirit or outcome of classic
culture into touch with the general European intelligence, in the age
when the modern languages first decisively asserted their birthright,
learned his Latin as a living and not as a dead tongue, and knew Greek
literature almost solely by translation; (2) that the dramatist who of
all of his craft has put most of breathing vitality into his pictures of
ancient history, despite endless inaccuracies of detail, read his
authorities only in his own language; and (3) that the English poet who
in our own century has most intensely and delightedly sympathised with
the Greek spirit--I mean Keats--read his Homer only in an English
translation. As regards Montaigne, the full importance of the fact does
not seem to me to have been appreciated by the critics. Villemain,
indeed, who perhaps could best realise it, remarked in his youthful
eloge that the fashion in which the elder Montaigne had his child taught
Latin would bring the boy to the reading of the classics with an eager
interest where others had been already fatigued by the toil of grammar;
but beyond this the peculiarity of the case has not been much
considered. Montaigne, however, gives us details which seem full of
suggestion to scientific educationists. "Without art, without book,
without grammar or precept, without whipping, without tears, I learned a
Latin as pure as my master could give;" and his first exercises were to
turn bad Latin into good.[151] So he read his Ovid's Metamorphoses at
seven or eight, where other forward boys had the native fairy tales; and
a wise teacher led him later through Virgil and Terence and Plautus and
the Italian poets in the same freedom of spirit. Withal, he never
acquired any facility in Greek,[152] and, refusing to play the
apprentice where he was accustomed to be master,[153] he declined to
construe in a difficult tongue; read his Plutarch in Amyot; and his
Plato, doubtless, in the Latin version. It all goes with the peculiar
spontaneity of his mind, his reactions, his style; and it was in virtue
of this undulled spontaneity that he was fitted to be for Shakspere, as
he has since been for so many other great writers, an intellectual
stimulus unique in kind and in potency.
This fact of Montaigne's peculiar influence on other spirits,
comparatively considered, may make it easier for some to conceive that
his influence on Shakspere could be so potent as has been above
asserted. Among those whom we know him to have acted upon in the highest
degree--setting aside the disputed case of Bacon--are Pascal,
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Flaubert, Emerson, and Thoreau. In the case of
Pascal, despite his uneasy assumption that his philosophy was contrary
to Montaigne's, the influence went so far that the _Pensees_ again and
again set forth Pascal's doctrine in passages taken almost literally
from the ESSAYS. Stung by the lack of all positive Christian credence in
Montaigne, Pascal represents him as "putting all things in doubt;"
whereas it is just by first putting all things in doubt that Pascal
justifies his own credence. The only difference is that where Montaigne,
disparaging the powers of reason by the use of that very reason, used
his "doubt" to defend himself alike against the atheists and the
orthodox Christians, Catholic or Protestant, himself standing simply to
the classic theism of antiquity, Pascal seeks to demolish the theists
with the atheists, falling back on the Christian faith after denying the
capacity of the human reason to judge for itself. The two procedures
were of course alike fallacious; but though Pascal, the more austere
thinker of the two, readily saw the invalidity of Montaigne's as a
defence of theism, he could do no more for himself than repeat the
process, disparaging reason in the very language of the essayist, and
setting up in his turn his private predilection in Montaigne's manner.
In sum, his philosophy is just Montaigne's, turned to the needs of a
broken spirit instead of a confident one--to the purposes of a chagrined
and exhausted convertite instead of a theist of the stately school of
Cicero and Seneca and Plutarch. Without Montaigne, one feels, the
_Pensees_ might never have been written: they represent to-day, for all
vigilant readers, rather the painful struggles of a wounded intelligence
to fight down the doubts it has caught from contact with other men's
thought than any coherent or durable philosophic construction.
It would be little more difficult to show the debt of the _Esprit des
Lois_ to Montaigne's inspiration, even if we had not Montesquieu's
avowal that "In most authors I see the man who writes: in Montaigne, the
man who thinks."[154] That is precisely Montaigne's significance, in
sociology as in philosophy. His whole activity is a seeking for causes;
and in the very act of undertaking to "humble reason" he proceeds to
instruct and re-edify it by endless corrective comparison of facts. To
be sure, he departed so far from his normal _bonne foi_ as to affect to
think there could be no certainties while parading a hundred of his own,
and with these some which were but pretences; and his pet doctrine of
daimonic fortune is not ostensibly favourable to social science; but in
the concrete, he is more of a seeker after rational law than any
humanist of his day. In discussing sumptuary laws, he anticipates the
economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as in discussing
ecclesiastical law he anticipates the age of tolerance; in discussing
criminal law, the work of Beccaria; in discussing _a priori_ science,
the protest of Bacon; and in discussing education, many of the ideas of
to-day. And it would be difficult to cite, in humanist literature before
our own century, a more comprehensive expression of the idea of natural
law than this paragraph of the APOLOGY:
"If nature enclose within the limits of her ordinary
progress, as all other things, so the beliefs, the
judgments, the opinions of men, if they have their
revolutions, their seasons, their birth, and their death,
even as cabbages; if heaven doth move, agitate, and roll
them at his pleasure, what powerful and permanent authority
do we ascribe unto them. If, by uncontrolled experience, we
palpably touch [orig. "Si par experience nous touchons a la
main," _i.e._, nous maintenons, nous pretendons: an idiom
which Florio has not understood] that the form of our being
depends of the air, of the climate, and of the soil wherein
we are born, and not only the hair, the stature, the
complexion, and the countenance, but also the soul's
faculties ... in such manner that as fruits and beasts do
spring up diverse and different, so men are born, either
more or less war-like, martial, just, temperate, and docile;
here subject to wine, there to theft and whoredom, here
inclined to superstition, there addicted to misbelieving....
If sometimes we see one art to flourish, or a belief, and
sometimes another, by some heavenly influence; ... men's
spirits one while flourishing, another while barren, even as
fields are seen to be, what become of all those goodly
prerogatives wherewith we still flatter ourselves?"[155]
All this, of course, has a further bearing than Montaigne gives it in
the context, and affects his own professed theology as it does the
opinions he attacks; but none the less, the passage strikes at the
dogmatists and the pragmatists of all the preceding schools, and hardily
clears the ground for a new inductive system. And in the last essay of
all he makes a campaign against bad laws, which unsays many of his
previous sayings on the blessedness of custom.
In tracing his influence elsewhere, it would be hard to point to an
eminent French prose-writer who has not been affected by him.
Sainte-Beuve finds[156] that La Bruyere "at bottom is close to
Montaigne, in respect not only of his style and his skilfully
inconsequent method, but of his way of judging men and life"; and the
literary heredity from Montaigne to Rousseau is recognised by all who
have looked into the matter. The temperaments are profoundly different;
yet the style of Montaigne had evidently taken as deep a hold of the
artistic consciousness of Rousseau as had the doctrines of the later
writers on whom he drew for his polemic. But indeed he found in the
essay on the Cannibals the very theme of his first paradox; in
Montaigne's emphatic denunciations[157] of laws more criminal than the
crimes they dealt with, he had a deeper inspiration still; in the essay
on the training of children he had his starting-points for the
argumentation of _Emile_; and in the whole unabashed self-portraiture of
the ESSAYS he had his great exemplar for the _Confessions_. Even in the
very different case of Voltaire, we may go at least as far as Villemain
and say that the essayist must have helped to shape the thought of the
great freethinker; whose _Philosophe Ignorant_ may indeed be connected
with the APOLOGY without any of the hesitation with which Villemain
suggests his general parallel. In fine, Montaigne has scattered his
pollen over all the literature of France. The most typical thought of La
Rochefoucauld is thrown out[158] in the essay[159] _De l'utile et de
l'honneste_; and the most modern-seeming currents of thought, as M.
Stapfer remarks, can be detected in the passages of the all-discussing
Gascon.
Among English-speaking writers, to say nothing of those who, like Sterne
and Lamb, have been led by his example to a similar felicity of freedom
in style, we may cite Emerson as one whose whole work is coloured by
Montaigne's influence, and Thoreau as one who, specially developing one
side of Emerson's gospel, may be said to have found it all where Emerson
found it, in the Essay on Solitude.[160] The whole doctrine of
intellectual self-preservation, the ancient thesis "flee from the press
and dwell in soothfastness," is there set forth in a series of ringing
sentences, most of which, set in Emerson or Thoreau, would seem part of
their text and thought. That this is no random attribution may be
learned from the lecture on "Montaigne: the Sceptic," which Emerson has
included in his REPRESENTATIVE MEN. "I remember," he says, telling how
in his youth he stumbled on Cotton's translation, "I remember the
delight and wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had
myself written the book in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to
my thought and experience." That is just what Montaigne has done for a
multitude of others, in virtue of his prime quality of spontaneous
self-expression. As Sainte-Beuve has it, there is a Montaigne in all of
us. Flaubert, we know, read him constantly for style; and no less
constantly "found himself" in the self-revelation and analysis of the
essays.
After all these testimonies to Montaigne's seminal virtue, and after
what we have seen of the special dependence of Shakspere's genius on
culture and circumstance, stimulus and initiative, for its evolution,
there can no longer seem to an open mind anything of mere paradox in the
opinion that the essays are the source of the greatest expansive
movement of the poet's mind, the movement which made him--already a
master of the whole range of passional emotion, of the comedy of mirth
and the comedy and tragedy of sex--the great master of the tragedy of
the moral intelligence. Taking the step from JULIUS CAESAR to HAMLET as
corresponding to this movement in his mind, we may say that where the
first play exhibits the concrete perception of the fatality of things,
"the riddle of the painful earth"; in the second, in its final form, the
perception has emerged in philosophic consciousness as a pure
reflection. The poet has in the interim been revealed to himself; what
he had perceived he now conceives. And this is the secret of the whole
transformation which the old play of HAMLET has received at his hands.
Where he was formerly the magical sympathetic plate, receiving and
rectifying and giving forth in inspired speech every impression, however
distorted by previous instruments, that is brought within the scope of
its action, he is now in addition the inward judge of it all, so much so
that the secondary activity tends to overshadow the primary. The old
HAMLET, it is clear, was a tragedy of blood, of physical horror. The
least that Shakspere, at this age, could have done with it, would be to
overlay and transform the physical with moral perception; and this has
already been in part done in the First Quarto form. The mad Hamlet and
the mad Ophelia, who had been at least as much comic as tragic figures
in the older play, are already purified of that taint of their barbaric
birth, save in so far as Hamlet still gibes at Polonius and jests with
Ophelia in the primitive fashion of the pretended madman seeking his
revenge. But the sense of the futility of the whole heathen plan, of the
vanity of the revenge to which the Christian ghost hounds his son, of
the moral void left by the initial crime and its concomitants, not to be
filled by any hecatomb of slain wrongdoers--the sense of all this, which
is the essence of the tragedy, though so few critics seem to see it,
clearly emerges only in the finished play. The dramatist is become the
chorus to his plot, and the impression it all makes on his newly active
spirit comes out in soliloquy after soliloquy, which hamper as much as
they explain the action. In the old prose story, the astute barbarian
takes a curiously circuitous course to his revenge, but at last attains
it. In the intermediate tragedy of blood, the circuitous action had been
preserved, and withal the revenge was attained only in the general
catastrophe, by that daimonic "fortune" on which Montaigne so often
enlarges. For Shakspere, then, with his mind newly at work in reverie
and judgment, where before it had been but perceptive and reproductive,
the theme was one of human impotence, failure of will, weariness of
spirit in presence of over-mastering fate, recoil from the immeasurable
evil of the world. Hamlet becomes the mouthpiece of the all-sympathetic
spirit which has put itself in his place, as it had done with a hundred
suggested types before, but with a new inwardness of comprehension, a
self-consciousness added to the myriad-sided consciousness of the past.
Hence an involution rather than an elucidation of the play. There can be
no doubt that Shakspere, in heightening and deepening the theme, has
obscured it, making the scheming barbarian into a musing pessimist, who
yet waywardly plays the mock-madman as of old, and kills the "rat"
behind the arras; doubts the Ghost while acting on his message;
philosophises with Montaigne and yet delays his revenge in the spirit of
the Christianised savage, who fears to send the praying murderer to
heaven. There is no solution of these anomalies: the very state of
Shakspere's consciousness, working in his subjective way on the old
material, made inevitable a moral anachronism and contradiction,
analogous in its kind to the narrative anachronisms of his historical
plays. But none the less, this tragedy, the first of the great group
which above all his other work make him immortal, remains perpetually
fascinating, by virtue even of that "pale cast of thought" which has
"sicklied it o'er" in the sense of making it too intellectual for
dramatic unity and strict dramatic success. Between these undramatic,
brooding soliloquies which stand so aloof from the action, but dominate
the minds of those who read and meditate the text, and the old
sensational elements of murder, ghost, fencing and killing, which hold
the interest of the crowd--between these constituents, HAMLET remains
the most familiar Shaksperean play.
This very pre-eminence and permanence, no doubt, will make many students
still demur to the notion that a determining factor in the framing of
the play was the poet's perusal of Montaigne's essays. And it would be
easy to overstate that thesis in such a way as to make it untrue.
Indeed, M. Chasles has, to my thinking, so overstated it. Had I come to
his main proposition before realising the infusion of Montaigne's ideas
in HAMLET, I think I should have felt it to be as excessive in the
opposite direction as the proposition of Mr. Feis. Says M.
Chasles:[161]--
"This date of 1603 (publication of Florio's translation) is
instructive; the change in Shakspere's style dates from this
very year. Before 1603, imitation of Petrarch, of Ariosto,
and of Spenser is evident in his work: after 1603, this
coquettish copying of Italy has disappeared; no more
crossing rhymes, no more sonnets and concetti. All is
reformed at once. Shakspere, who had hitherto studied the
ancients only in the fashion of the fine writers of modern
Italy, ... now seriously studies Plutarch and Sallust, and
seeks of them those great teachings on human life with which
the chapters of Michael Montaigne are filled. Is it not
surprising to see Julius Caesar and Coriolanus suddenly taken
up by the man who has just (tout a l'heure) been describing
in thirty-six stanzas, like Marini, the doves of the car of
Venus? And does not one see that he comes fresh from the
reading of Montaigne, who never ceased to translate,
comment, and recommend the ancients ...? The dates of
Shakspere's CORIOLANUS, CLEOPATRA, and JULIUS CAESAR are
incontestable. These dramas follow on from 1606 to 1608,
with a rapidity which proves the fecund heat of an
imagination still moved."
All this must be revised in the light of a more correct chronology.
Shakspere's JULIUS CAESAR dates, not from 1604 but from 1600 or 1601,
being referred to in Weever's MIRROR OF MARTYRS, published in 1601, to
say nothing of the reference in the third Act of HAMLET itself, where
Polonius speaks of such a play. And, even if it had been written in
1604, it would still be a straining of the evidence to ascribe its
production, with that of CORIOLANUS and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, to the
influence of Montaigne, when every one of these themes was sufficiently
obtruded on the Elizabethan theatre by North's translation of Amyot's
PLUTARCH. Any one who will compare CORIOLANUS with the translation in
North will see that Shakspere has followed the text down to the most
minute and supererogatory details, even to the making of blunders by
putting the biographer's remarks in the mouths of the characters. The
comparison throws a flood of light on Shakspere's mode of procedure; but
it tells us nothing of his perusal of Montaigne. Rather it suggests a
return from the method of the revised HAMLET, with its play of reverie,
to the more strictly dramatic method of the chronicle histories, though
with a new energy and concision of presentment. The real clue to
Montaigne's influence on Shakspere beyond HAMLET, as we have seen, lies
not in the Roman plays, but in MEASURE FOR MEASURE.
There is a misconception involved, again, in M. Chasles' picture of an
abrupt transition from Shakspere's fantastic youthful method to that of
HAMLET and the Roman plays. He overlooks the intermediate stages
represented by such plays as ROMEO AND JULIET, HENRY IV., KING JOHN, the
MERCHANT OF VENICE, and AS YOU LIKE IT, all of which exhibit a great
advance on the methods of LOVE'S LABOUR LOST, with its rhymes and
sonnets and "concetti." The leap suggested by M. Chasles is exorbitant;
such a headlong development would be unintelligible. Shakspere had first
to come practically into touch with the realities of life and character
before he could receive from Montaigne the full stimulus he actually did
undergo. Plastic as he was, he none the less underwent a normal
evolution; and his early concreteness and verbalism and externality had
to be gradually transmuted into a more inward knowledge of life and art
before there could be superimposed on that the mood of the thinker,
reflectively aware of the totality of what he had passed through.
Finally, the most remarkable aspect of Shakspere's mind is not that
presented by CORIOLANUS and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, which with all their
intense vitality represent rather his marvellous power of reproducing
impressions than the play of his own criticism on the general problem of
life. For the full revelation of this we must look rather in the great
tragedies, notably in LEAR, and thereafter in the subsiding movement of
the later serious plays. There it is that we learn to give exactitude to
our conception of the influence exerted upon him by Montaigne, and to
see that, even as in the cases of Pascal and Montesquieu, Rousseau and
Emerson, what happened was not a mere transference or imposition of
opinions, but a living stimulus, a germination of fresh intellectual
life, which developed under new forms. It would be strange if the most
receptive and responsive of all the intelligences which Montaigne has
touched should not have gone on differentiating itself from his.