Montaigne and Shakspere Part 5

Equally inconclusive is the equally close parallel between Macbeth's

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"

and the sentence of Hercules:

"Nemo polluto queat Animo mederi."[124]

Such a reflection was sure to secure a proverbial vogue, and in THE TWO n.o.bLE KINSMEN (in which Shakspere indeed seems to have had a hand), we have the doctor protesting: "I think she has a perturbed mind, which I cannot minister to."[125]

And so, again, with the notable resemblance between Hercules' cry:

"Cur animam in ista luce detineam amplius, Morerque, nihil est. Cuncta jam amisi bona, Mentem, arma, famem, conjugam, natos, ma.n.u.s, Etiam furorem."[126]

and Macbeth's:

"I have lived long enough: my way of life Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf; And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have."[127]

Here there is indeed every appearance of imitation; but, though the versification in Macbeth's speech is certainly Shakspere's, such a lament had doubtless been made in other English plays, in direct reproduction of Seneca; and Shakspere, in all probability, was again only perfecting some previous declamation.

There is a quite proverbial quality, finally, in such phrases as:

"Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward To that they were before;"[128]

and

"We but teach b.l.o.o.d.y instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor."[129]

--which might be traced to other sources nearer Shakspere's hand than Seneca. And beyond such sentences and such tropes as those above considered, there was really little or nothing in the tragedies of Seneca to catch Shakspere's eye or ear; nothing to generate in him a deep philosophy of life or to move him to the manifold play of reflection which gives his later tragedies their commanding intellectuality. Some such stimulus, as we have seen, he might indeed have drawn from one or two of Seneca's treatises, which do, in their desperately industrious manner, cover a good deal of intellectual ground, making some tolerable discoveries by the way. But by the tests alike of quant.i.ty and quality of reproduced matter, it is clear that the indirect influence of the Senecan tragedies and treatises on Shakspere was slight compared with the direct influence of Montaigne's essays. Nor is it hard to see why; even supposing Shakspere to have had Seneca at hand in translation. Despite Montaigne's own leaning to Seneca, as compared with Cicero, we may often say of the former what Montaigne says of the latter, that "his manner of writing seemeth very tedious."

Over the DE BENEFICIIS and the DE IRA one is sometimes moved to say, as the essayist does[130] over Cicero, "I understand sufficiently what death and voluptuousness are; let not a man busy himself to anatomise them." For the swift and penetrating flash of Montaigne, which either goes to the heart of a matter once for all or opens up a far vista of feeling and speculation, leaving us newly related to our environment and even to our experience, Seneca can but give us a conscientious examination of the ground, foot by foot, with a policeman's lantern, leaving us consciously footsore, eyesore, and ready for bed. Under no stress of satisfaction from his best finds can we be moved to call him a man of genius, which is just what we call Montaigne after a few pages.

It is the broad difference between industry and inspiration, between fecundity and pregnancy, between Jonson and Shakspere. And, though a man of genius is not necessarily dependent on other men of genius for stimulus, we shall on scrutiny find reason to believe that in Shakspere's case the nature of the stimulus counted for a great deal.

Even before that is made clear, however, there can be little hesitation about dismissing the only other outstanding theory of a special intellectual influence undergone by Shakspere--the theory of Dr. Benno Tschischwitz, that he read and was impressed by the Italian writings of Giordano Bruno. In this case, the bases of the hypothesis are of the scantiest and the flimsiest. Bruno was in England from 1583 to 1586, before Shakspere came to London. Among his patrons were Sidney and Leicester, but neither Southampton nor Pembroke. In all his writings only one pa.s.sage can be cited which even faintly suggests a coincidence with any in Shakspere; and in that the suggestion is faint indeed. In Bruno's ill-famed comedy IL CANDELAJO, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio, "Che e la materia di vostri versi," and the pedant replies, "Litterae, syllabae, dictio et oratio, partes propinquae et remotae," on which Octavio again asks: "Io dico, quale e il suggetto et il proposito."[131] So far as it goes this is something of a parallel to Polonius's question to Hamlet as to what he reads, and Hamlet's answer, "Words, words." But the scene is obviously a stock situation; and if there are any pa.s.sages in HAMLET which clearly belong to the pre-Shaksperean play, the fooling of Hamlet with Polonius is one of them. And beyond this, Dr. Tschischwitz's parallels are flatly unconvincing, or rather they promptly put themselves out of court. He admits that nothing else in Bruno's comedy recalls anything else in Shakspere;[132] but he goes on to find a.n.a.logies between other pa.s.sages in HAMLET and some of Bruno's philosophic doctrines. Quoting Bruno's theorem that all things are made up of indestructible atoms, and that death is but a transformation, Dr.

Tschischwitz cites as a reproduction of it Hamlet's soliloquy:

"O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!"

It is difficult to be serious over such a contention; and it is quite impossible for anybody out of Germany or the Bacon-Shakspere party to be as serious over it as Dr. Tschischwitz, who finds that Hamlet's figure of the melting of flesh into dew is an ill.u.s.tration of Bruno's "atomic system," and goes on to find a further Brunonian significance in Hamlet's jeering answers to the king's demand for the body of Polonius.

Of these pa.s.sages he finds the source or suggestion in one which he translates from Bruno's CENA DE LE CENERI:--

"For to this matter, of which our planet is formed, death and dissolution do not come; and the annihilation of all nature is not possible; but it attains from time to time, by a fixed law, to renew itself and to change all its parts, rearranging and recombining them; all this necessarily taking place in a determinate series, under which everything a.s.sumes the place of another."[133]

In the judgment of Dr. Tschischwitz, this theorem, which antic.i.p.ates so remarkably the modern scientific conception of the universe, "elucidates" Hamlet's talk about worms and bodies, and his further sketch of the progress of Alexander's dust to the plugging of a beer-barrel. It seems unnecessary to argue that all this is the idlest supererogation. The pa.s.sages cited from HAMLET, all of them found in the First Quarto, might have been drafted by a much lesser man than Shakspere, and that without ever having heard of Bruno or the theory of the indestructibility of matter. There is nothing in the case approaching to a reproduction of Bruno's far-reaching thought; while on the contrary the "leave not a wrack behind," in the TEMPEST, is an expression which sets aside, as if it were unknown, the conception of an endless trans.m.u.tation of matter, in a context where the thought would naturally suggest itself to one who had met with it. Where Hamlet is merely sardonic in the plane of popular or at least exoteric humour, Dr.

Tschischwitz credits him with pantheistic philosophy. Where, on the other hand, Hamlet speaks feelingly and ethically of the serious side of drunkenness,[134] Dr. Tschischwitz parallels the speech with a sentence in the BESTIA TRIONFANTE, which gives a merely Rabelaisian picture of drunken practices.[135] Yet again, he puts Bruno's large aphorism, "Sol et h.o.m.o generant hominem," beside Hamlet's gibe about the sun breeding maggots in a dead dog--a phrase possible to any euphuist of the period.

That the parallels amount at best to little, Dr. Tschischwitz himself indirectly admits, though he proceeds to a new extravagance of affirmation:

"We do not maintain that such expressions are philosophemes, or that Shakspere otherwise went any deeper into Bruno's system than suited his purpose, but that such pa.s.sages show Shakspere, at the time of his writing of HAMLET, to have already reached the heights of the thought of the age (Zeitbewusstsein), and to have made himself familiar with the most abstract of the sciences. Many hitherto almost unintelligible pa.s.sages in HAMLET are now cleared up by the poet's acquaintance with the atomic philosophy and the writings of the Nolan."

All this belongs to the uncritical method of the German Shakspere-criticism of the days before Rumelin. It is quite possible that Shakspere may have heard something of Bruno's theories from his friends; and we may be sure that much of Bruno's teaching would have profoundly interested him. If Bruno's lectures at Oxford on the immortality of the soul included the matter he published later on the subject, they may have called English attention to the Pythagorean lore concerning the fate of the soul after death,[136] above cited from Montaigne. We might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lines, trace the verses on the "shaping fantasies" of "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,[137] to such a pa.s.sage in Bruno as this:--

"The first and most capital painter is the vivacity of the phantasy; the first and most capital poet is the inspiration that originally arises with the impulse of deep thought, or is set up by that, through the divine or akin-to-divine breath of which they feel themselves moved to the fit expression of their thoughts. For each it creates the other principle. Therefore are the philosophers in a certain sense painters; the poets, painters and philosophers; the painters, philosophers and poets: true poets, painters, and philosophers love and reciprocally admire each other. There is no philosopher who does not poetise and paint. Therefore is it said, not without reason: To understand is to perceive the figures of phantasy, and understanding is phantasy, or is nothing without it."[138]

But since Shakspere does not recognisably echo a pa.s.sage which he would have been extremely likely to produce in such a context, had he known it, we are bound to decide that he had not even heard it cited, much less read it. And so with any other remote resemblances between his work and that of any author whom he may have read. In regard even to pa.s.sages in Shakspere which come much nearer their originals than any of these above cited come to Bruno, we are forced to decide that Shakspere got his thought at second or third hand. Thus the famous pa.s.sage in HENRY V.,[139] in which the Archbishop figures the State as a divinely framed harmony of differing functions, is clearly traceable to Plato's REPUBLIC and Cicero's DE REPUBLICA; yet rational criticism must decide with M. Stapfer[140] that Shakspere knew neither of these treatises, but got his suggestion from some English translation or citation.

In fine, we are constrained by all our knowledge concerning Shakspere, as well as by the abstract principles of proof, to regard him in general as a reader of his own language only, albeit not without a smattering of others; and among the books in his own language which we know him to have read in, and can prove him to have been influenced by, we come back to Montaigne's Essays, as by far the most important and the most potential for suggestion and provocation.

IV.

To have any clear idea, however, of what Montaigne did or could do for Shakspere, we must revise our conception of the poet in the light of the positive facts of his life and circ.u.mstances--a thing made difficult for us in England through the transcendental direction given to our Shakspere lore by those who first shaped it sympathetically, to wit, Coleridge and the Germans. An adoring idea of Shakspere, as a mind of unapproachable superiority, has thus become so habitual with most of us that it is difficult to reduce our notion to terms of normal individuality, of character and mind as we know them in life. When we read Coleridge, Schlegel, and Gervinus, or even the admirable essay of Charles Lamb, or the eloquent appreciations of Mr. Swinburne, or such eulogists as Hazlitt and Knight, we are in a world of abstract aesthetics or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakspere, who became an actor for a livelihood in an age when the best actors played in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little brutal; then added to his craft of acting the craft of play-patching and refashioning; who had his partnership share of the pence and sixpences paid by the mob of noisy London prentices and journeymen and idlers that filled the booth theatre in which his company performed; who sued his debtors rigorously when they did not settle-up; worked up old plays or took a hand in new, according as the needs of his concern and his fellow-actors dictated; and finally went with his carefully collected fortune to spend his last years in ease and quiet in the country town in which he was born. Our sympathetic critics, even when, like Dr.

Furnivall, they know absolutely all the archaeological facts as to theatrical life in Shakspere's time, do not seem to bring those facts into vital touch with their aesthetic estimate of his product; they remain under the spell of Coleridge and Gervinus.[141] Emerson, it is true, protested at the close of his essay that he "could not marry this fact," of Shakspere's being a jovial actor and manager, "to his verse;"

but that deliverance has served only as a text for those who have embraced the fantastic tenet that Shakspere was but the theatrical agent and representative of Bacon; a delusion of which the vogue may be partly traced to the lack of psychological solidity in the ordinary presentment of Shakspere by his admirers. The heresy, of course, merely leaps over the difficulty, into absolute irrelevance. Emerson was intellectually to blame in that, seeing as he did the hiatus between the poet's life and the prevailing conception of his verse, he did not try to conceive it all anew, but rather resigned himself to the solution that Shakspere's mind was out of human ken. "A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence," he said; "but not into Shakspere's; we are still out of doors." We should indeed remain so for ever did we not set about patiently picking the locks where the transcendentalist has dreamily turned away.

It is imperative that we should recommence vigilantly with the concrete facts, ignoring all the merely aesthetic and metaphysic syntheses. Where Coleridge and Schlegel more or less ingeniously invite us to acknowledge a miraculous artistic perfection, where Lamb more movingly gives forth the intense vibration aroused in his spirit by Shakspere's ripest work, we must turn back to track down the youth from Stratford; son of a burgess once prosperous, but destined to sink steadily in the world; married at eighteen, under pressure of circ.u.mstances, with small prospect of income, to the woman of twenty-five; ill at ease in that position; and at length, having made friends with a travelling company of actors, come to London to earn a living in any tolerable way by means of his moderate education, his "small Latin and less Greek," his knack of fluent rhyming, and his turn for play-acting. To know him as he began we must measure him narrowly by his first performances. These are not to be looked for in even the earliest of his plays, not one of which can be taken to represent his young and unaided faculty, whether as regards construction or diction. Collaboration, the natural resort of the modern dramatist, must have been to some extent forced on him in those years by the nature of his situation; and after all that has been said by adorers of the quality of his wit and his verse in such early comedies as LOVE'S LABOUR LOST and THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, the critical reader is apt to be left pretty evenly balanced between the two reflections that the wit and the versification have indeed at times a certain happy naturalness of their own, and that nevertheless, if they really be Shakspere's throughout, the most remarkable thing in the matter is his later progress. But even apart from such disputable issues, we may safely say with Mr. Fleay that "there is not a play of his that can be referred even on the rashest conjecture to a date anterior to 1594, which does not bear the plainest internal evidence of having been refashioned at a later time."[142] These plays, then, with all their evidences of immaturity, of what Mr. Bagehot called "clever young-mannishness," cannot serve us as safe measures of Shakspere's mind at the beginning of his career.

But it happens that we have such a measure in performances which, since they imply no technical arrangement, are of a h.o.m.ogenous literary substance, and can be shown to be the work of a man brought up in the Warwickshire dialect,[143] are not even challenged, I believe, by the adherents of the Baconian faith. The tasks which the greatest of our poets set himself when near the age of thirty, and to which he presumably brought all the powers of which he was then conscious, were the uninspired and pitilessly prolix poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and THE RAPE OF LUCRECE, the first consisting of some 1,200 lines and the second of more than 1,800; one a calculated picture of female concupiscence and the other a still more calculated picture of female chast.i.ty: the two alike abnormally fluent, yet external, unimpa.s.sioned, endlessly descriptive, elaborately unimpressive. Save for the s.e.xual attraction of the subjects, on the commercial side of which the poet had obviously reckoned in choosing them, these performances could have no unstudious readers in our day and few warm admirers in their own, so little sign do they give of any high poetic faculty save the two which singly go so often without any determining superiority of mind--inexhaustible flow of words and endless observation of concrete detail. Of the countless thrilling felicities of phrase and feeling for which Shakspere is renowned above all English poets, not one, I think, is to be found in those three thousand fluently-scanned and smoothly-worded lines: on the contrary, the wearisome succession of stanzas, stretching the succinct themes immeasurably beyond all natural fitness and all narrative interest, might seem to signalise such a lack of artistic judgment as must preclude all great performance; while the apparent plan of producing an effect by mere multiplication of words, mere extension of description without intension of idea, might seem to prove a lack of capacity for any real depth of pa.s.sion. They were simply manufactured poems, consciously constructed for the market, the first designed at the same time to secure the patronage of the Maecenas of the hour, Lord Southampton, to whom it was dedicated, and the second produced and similarly dedicated on the strength of the success of the first. The point here to be noted is that they gained the poet's ends. They succeeded as saleable literature, and they gained the Earl's favour.

And the rest of the poet's literary career, from this point forward, seems to have been no less prudently calculated. Having plenty of evidence that men could not make a living by poetry, even if they produced it with facility; and that they could as little count on living steadily by the sale of plays, he joined with his trade of actor the business not merely of playwright but of part-sharer in the takings of the theatre. The presumption from all we know of the commercial side of the play-making of the times is that, for whatever pieces Shakspere touched up, collaborated in, or composed for his company, he received a certain payment once for all;[144] since there was no reason why his partners should treat his plays differently in this regard from the plays they bought of other men. Doubtless, when his reputation was made, the payments would be considerable. But the main source of his income, or rather of the acc.u.mulations with which he bought land and house and t.i.thes at Stratford, must have been his share in the takings of the theatre--a share which would doubtless increase as the earlier partners disappeared. He must have speedily become the princ.i.p.al man in the firm, combining as he did the work of composer, reviser, and adaptor of plays with that of actor and working partner. We are thus dealing with a temperament or mentality not at all obviously original or masterly, not at all conspicuous at the outset for intellectual depth or seriousness, not at all obtrusive of its "mission;" but exhibiting simply a gift for acting, an abundant faculty of rhythmical speech, and a power of minute observation, joined with a thoroughly practical or commercial handling of the problem of life, in a calling not usually taken-to by commercially-minded men. What emerges for us thus far is the conception of a very plastic intelligence, a good deal led and swayed by immediate circ.u.mstances; but at bottom very sanely related to life, and so possessing a latent faculty for controlling its destinies; not much cultured, not profound, not deeply pa.s.sionate; not particularly reflective though copious in utterance; a personality which of itself, if under no pressure of pecuniary need, would not be likely to give the world any serious sign of mental capacity whatever.

In order, then, that such a man as this should develop into the Shakspere of the great tragedies and tragic comedies, there must concur two kinds of life-conditions with those already noted--the fresh conditions of deeply-moving experience and of deep intellectual stimulus. Without these, such a mind would no more arrive at the highest poetic and dramatic capacity than, lacking the spur of necessity or of some outside call, it would be moved to seek poetic and dramatic utterance for its own relief. There is no sign here of an innate burden of thought, bound to be delivered; there is only the sensitive plate or responsive faculty, capable of giving back with peculiar vividness and spontaneity every sort of impression which may be made on it. The faculty, in short, which could produce those 3,000 fluent lines on the bare data of the stories of Venus and Adonis and Tarquin and Lucrece, with only the intellectual material of a rakish Stratford lad's schooling and reading, and the culture coming of a few years'

a.s.sociation with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital culture, into the poet of LEAR and MACBETH. But the vital culture must come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of his way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear hardship in order to win knowledge, would not have settled down so easily into the actor-manager with a good share in the company's profits. There is almost nothing to show that the young Shakspere read anything save current plays, tales, and poems. Such a notable book as North's PLUTARCH, published in 1579, does not seem to have affected his literary activity till about the year 1600: and even then the subject of JULIUS CaeSAR may have been suggested to him by some other play-maker, as was the case with his chronicle histories. In his contemporary, Ben Jonson, we do have the type of the young man bent on getting scholarship as the best thing possible to him. The bricklayer's apprentice, unwillingly following the craft of his stepfather, sticking obstinately all the while to his Horace and his Homer, resolute to keep and to add to the humanities he had learned in the grammar school, stands out clearly alongside of the other, far less enthusiastic for knowledge and letters, but also far more plastically framed, and at the same time far more clearly alive to the seriousness of the struggle for existence as a matter of securing the daily bread-and-b.u.t.ter. It may be, indeed--who knows--that but for that peculiarly early marriage, with its consequent family responsibilities, Shakspere would have allowed himself a little more of youthful breathing-time: it may be that it was the existence of Ann Hathaway and her three children that made him a seeker for pelf rather than a seeker for knowledge in the years between twenty and thirty, when the concern for pelf sits lightly on most intellectual men.

The thesis undertaken in LOVE'S LABOUR LOST--that the truly effective culture is that of life in the world rather than that of secluded study--perhaps expresses a process of inward and other debate in which the wish has become father to the thought. Scowled upon by jealous collegians like Greene for presuming, actor as he was, to write dramas, he must have asked himself whether there was not something to be gained from such schooling as theirs.[145] But then he certainly made more than was needed to keep the Stratford household going; and the clear shallow flood of VENUS AND ADONIS and the RAPE OF LUCRECE stands for ever to show how far from tragic consciousness was the young husband and father when close upon thirty years old. It was in 1596 that his little Hamnet died at Stratford; and there is nothing to show, says Mr. Fleay,[146]

that Shakspere had ever been there in the interval between his departure in 1587 and the child's funeral.

But already, it may be, some vital experience had come. Whatever view we take of the drama of the sonnets, we may so far adopt Mr. Fleay's remarkable theory[147] as to surmise that the central episode of faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and impa.s.sion the plastic personality of the rhymer of VENUS AND ADONIS; to add a new string to the heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too, he was undergoing the kind of culture and of psychological training involved in his craft of acting--a culture involving a good deal of contact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, so far as then translated, and a psychological training of great though little recognised importance to the dramatist. It seems obvious that the practice of acting, by a plastic and receptive temperament, capable of manifold appreciation, must have counted for much in developing the faculties at once of sympathy and expression. In this respect Shakspere stood apart from his rivals, with their merely literary training. And in point of fact, we do find in his plays, year by year, a strengthening sense of the realities of human nature, despite their frequently idealistic method of portraiture, the verbalism and fact.i.tiousness of much of their wit, and their conventionality of plot. Above all things, the man who drew so many fancifully delightful types of womanhood must have been intensely appreciative of the charm of s.e.x; and it is on that side that we are to look for his first contacts with the deeper forces of life. What marks off the Shakspere of thirty-five, in fine, from all his rivals, is just his peculiarly true and new[148] expression of the living grace of womanhood, always, it is true, abstracted to the form of poetry and skilfully purified from the blemishes of the actual, but none the less convincing and stimulating. We are here in presence at once of a rare receptive faculty and a rare expressive faculty: the plastic organism of the first poems touched through and through with a hundred vibrations of deeper experience; the external and extensive method gradually ripening into an internal and intensive; the innate facility of phrase and alertness of attention turned from the physical to the psychical. But still it is to the psychics of s.e.x, for the most part, that we are limited. Of the deeps of human nature, male nature, as apart from the love of woman, the playwright still shows no special perception, save in the vivid portrait of Shylock, the exasperated Jew.

The figures in which we can easily recognise his hand in the earlier historical plays are indeed marked by his prevailing sanity of perception; always they show the play of the seeing eye, the ruling sense of reality which shaped his life; it is this visible actuality that best marks them off from the non-Shaksperean figures around them.

And in the wonderful figures of Falstaff and his group we have a roundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature thus far could be compared. But still this, the most remarkable of all, remains comic reality; and, what is more, it is a comic reality of which, as in the rest of his work, the substratum was pre-Shaksperean.

For it is clear that the figure of Falstaff, as Oldcastle, had been popularly successful before Shakspere took hold of it:[149] and what he did here, as elsewhere, with his uninventive mind, in which the faculty of imagination always rectified and expanded rather than originated types and actions, was doubtless to give the hues and tones of perfect life to the half-real inventions of others. This must always be insisted on as the special psychological characteristic of Shakspere. Excepting in the doubtful case of LOVE'S LABOUR LOST, he never invented a plot; his male characters are almost always developments from an already sketched original; it is in drawing his heroines, where he is most idealistic, that he seems to have been most independently creative, his originals here being doubtless the women who had charmed him, set living in ideal scenes to charm others. And it resulted from this specialty of structure that the greater reality of his earlier male historic figures, as compared with those of most of his rivals, is largely a matter of saner and more felicitous declamation--the play of his great and growing faculty of expression--since he had no more special knowledge of the types in hand than had his compet.i.tors. It is only when his unequalled receptive faculty has been acted upon by a peculiarly concentrated and readily a.s.similated body of culture, the English translation by Sir Thomas North of Amyot's French translation of Plutarch's Lives, that we find Shakspere incontestably superior to his contemporaries in the virile treatment of virile problems no less than in the sympathetic rendering of emotional charm and tenderness and the pathos of pa.s.sion.

The tragedy of ROMEO AND JULIET, with all its burning fervours and swooning griefs, remains for us a picture of the luxury of woe: it is truly said of it that it is not fundamentally unhappy. But in JULIUS CaeSAR we have touched a further depth of sadness. For the moving tragedy of circ.u.mstance, of lovers sundered by fate only to be swiftly joined in exultant death, we have the profounder tragedy of mutually destroying energies, of grievously miscalculating men, of failure and frustration d.o.g.g.i.ng the steps of the strenuous and the wise, of destiny searching out the fatal weakness of the strong. To the poet has now been added the reader; to the master of the pathos of pa.s.sion the student of the tragedy of universal life. It is thus by culture and experience--culture limited but concentrated, and experience limited but intense--that the man Shakspere has been intelligibly made into the dramatist Shakspere as we find him when he comes to his greatest tasks. For the formation of the supreme artist there was needed alike the purely plastic organism and the special culture to which it was so uniquely fitted to respond; culture that came without search, and could be undergone as spontaneously as the experience of life itself; knowledge that needed no more wooing than Ann Hathaway, or any dubious angel in the sonnets. In the English version of Plutarch's LIVES, pressed upon him doubtless by the play-making plans of other men, Shakspere found the most effectively concentrated history of ancient humanity that could possibly have reached him; and he responded to the stimulus with all his energy of expression because he received it so freely and vitally, in respect alike of his own plasticity and the fact that the vehicle of the impression was his mother tongue. It is plain that to the last he made no secondary study of antiquity. He made blunders which alone might warn the Baconians off their vain quest: he had no notion of chronology: finding Cato retrospectively spoken of by Plutarch as one to whose ideal Coriola.n.u.s had risen, he makes a comrade of Coriola.n.u.s say it, as if Cato were a dead celebrity in Coriola.n.u.s' day; just as he makes Hector quote Aristotle in Troy. These clues are not to be put aside with aesthetic plat.i.tudes: they are capital items in our knowledge of the man.

And if even the idolator feels perturbed by their obtrusion, he has but to reflect that where the trained scholars around Shakspere reproduced antiquity with greater accuracy in minor things, t.i.thing the mint and anise and c.u.min of erudition, they gave us of the central human forces, which it was their special business to realise, mere hollow and tedious parodies. Jonson was a scholar whose variety of cla.s.sic reading might have const.i.tuted him a specialist to-day; but Jonson's ancients are mostly dead for us, even as are Jonson's moderns, because they are the expression of a psychic faculty which could neither rightly perceive reality, nor rightly express what it did perceive. He represents industry in art without inspiration. The two contrasted pictures, of Jonson writing out his harangues in prose in order to turn them into verse, and of Shakspere giving his lines unblotted to the actors--speaking in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration, as spontaneously as he breathed--these historic data, which happen to be among the most perfectly certified that we possess concerning the two men, give us at once half the secret of one and all the secret of the other. Jonson had the pa.s.sion for book knowledge, the patience for hard study, the faculty for plot-invention; and withal he produced dramatic work which gives little or no permanent pleasure. Shakspere had none of these characteristics; and yet, being the organism he was, it only needed the culture which fortuitously reached him in his own tongue to make him successively the greatest dramatic master of eloquence, mirth, charm, tenderness, pa.s.sion, pathos, pessimism, and philosophic serenity that literature can show, recognisably so even though his work be almost constantly hampered by the framework of other men's enterprises, which he was so singularly content to develop or improve. Hence the critical importance of following up the culture which evolved him, and above all, that which finally touched him to his most memorable performance.

V.

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 ill.u.s.trious 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 CORIOLa.n.u.s 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 ma.s.s 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 cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.sing 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: