Montaigne and Shakspere Part 6

"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 cla.s.sic culture into touch with the general European intelligence, in the age when the modern languages first decisively a.s.serted 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 cla.s.sics 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 a.s.serted. 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 Th.o.r.eau. In the case of Pascal, despite his uneasy a.s.sumption 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 pa.s.sages 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 cla.s.sic 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 convert.i.te 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 antic.i.p.ates the economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as in discussing ecclesiastical law he antic.i.p.ates 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 wh.o.r.edom, here inclined to superst.i.tion, 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sages 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 Th.o.r.eau 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 Th.o.r.eau, 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 mult.i.tude 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 pa.s.sional emotion, of the comedy of mirth and the comedy and tragedy of s.e.x--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, a.n.a.logous 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 const.i.tuents, 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 Sall.u.s.t, 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 Coriola.n.u.s 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 CORIOLa.n.u.s, 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 CORIOLa.n.u.s 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 CORIOLa.n.u.s 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 trans.m.u.ted 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 pa.s.sed through.

Finally, the most remarkable aspect of Shakspere's mind is not that presented by CORIOLa.n.u.s 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 exact.i.tude 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.

VI.

What then is the general, and what the final relation of Shakspere's thought to that of Montaigne? How far did the younger man approve and a.s.similate the ideas of the elder, how far did he reject them, how far modify them? In some respects this is the most difficult part of our inquiry, were it only because Shakspere is firstly and lastly a dramatic writer. But he is not only that: he is at once the most subjective, the most sympathetic, and the most self-witholding of dramatic writers.

Conceiving all situations, all epochs, in terms of his own psychology, he is yet the furthest removed from all dogmatic design on the opinions of his listeners; and it is only after a most vigilant process of moral logic that we can ever be justified in attributing to him this or that thesis of any one of his personages, apart from the general ethical sympathies which must be taken for granted. Much facile propaganda has been made by the device of crediting him in person with every religious utterance found in his plays--even in the portions which a.n.a.lytical criticism proves to have come from other hands. Obviously we must look to his general handling of the themes with which the current religion deals, in order to surmise his att.i.tude to that religion. And in the same way we must compare his general handling of tragic and moral issues, in order to gather his general att.i.tude to the doctrine of Montaigne.

At the very outset, we must make a clean sweep of the strange proposition of Mr. Jacob Feis--that Shakspere deeply disliked the philosophy of Montaigne, and wrote HAMLET to discredit it. It is hard to realise how such a hopeless misconception can ever have arisen in the mind of anyone capable of making the historic research on which Mr. Feis seeks to found his a.s.sertion. If there were no other argument against it, the bare fact that the tragedy of HAMLET existed before Shakspere, and that he was, as usual, simply working over a play already on the boards, should serve to dismiss such a wild hypothesis. And from every other point of view, the notion is equally preposterous.

No human being in Shakspere's day could have gathered from HAMLET such a criticism of Montaigne as Mr. Feis reads into it by means of violences of interpretation which might almost startle Mr. Donnelly. Even if they blamed Hamlet for delaying his revenge, in the manner of the ordinary critical moralist, they could not possibly regard that delay as a kind of vice arising from the absorption of Montaignesque opinions. In the very year of the appearance of Florio's folio, it was a trifle too soon to make the a.s.sumption that Montaigne was demoralising mankind, even if we a.s.sume Shakspere to have ever been capable of such a judgment. And that a.s.sumption is just as impossible as the other. According to Mr.

Feis, Shakspere detested such a creed and such conduct as Hamlet's, and made him die by poison in order to show his abhorrence of them--this, when we know Hamlet to have died by the poisoned foil in the earlier play. On that view, Cordelia died by hanging in order to show Shakspere's conviction that she was a malefactor; and Desdemona by stifling as a fitting punishment for adultery. The idea is outside of serious discussion. Barely to a.s.sume that Shakspere held Hamlet for a pitiable weakling is a sufficiently shallow interpretation of the play; but to a.s.sume that he made him die by way of condign punishment for his opinions is merely ridiculous. Once for all, there is absolutely nothing in Hamlet's creed or conduct which Shakspere was in a position to regard as open to his denunciation. The one intelligible idea which Mr. Feis can suggest as connecting Hamlet's conduct with Montaigne's philosophy is that Montaigne was a quietest, preaching and practising withdrawal from public broils. But Shakspere's own practice was on all fours with this. He sedulously held aloof from all meddling in public affairs; and as soon as he had gained a competence he retired, at the age of forty-seven, to Stratford-on-Avon. Mr. Feis's argument brings us to the very crudest form of the good old Christian verdict that if Hamlet had been a good and resolute man he would have killed his uncle out of hand, whether at prayers or anywhere else, and would then have married Ophelia, put his mother in a nunnery, and lived happily ever after.[162]

And to that edifying a.s.sumption, Mr. Feis adds the fantasy that Shakspere dreaded the influence of Montaigne as a deterrent from the retributive slaughter of guilty uncles by wronged nephews.

In the hands of Herr Stedefeld, who in 1871 antic.i.p.ated Mr. Feis's view of HAMLET as a sermon against Montaigne, the thesis is not a whit more plausible. Herr Stedefeld ent.i.tles his book[163]: "Hamlet: a Drama-with-a-purpose (TENDENZDRAMA) opposing the sceptical and cosmopolitan view of things taken by Michael de Montaigne"; and his general position is that Shakspere wrote the play as "the apotheosis of a practical Christianity," by way of showing how any one like Hamlet, lacking in Christian piety, and devoid of faith, love, and hope, must needs come to a bad end, even in a good cause. We are not ent.i.tled to charge Herr Stedefeld's thesis to the account of religious bias, seeing that Mr. Feis in his turn writes from the standpoint of a kind of Protestant freethinker, who sees in Shakspere a champion of free inquiry against the Catholic conformist policy of Montaigne; while strictly orthodox Christians have found in Hamlet's various allusions to deity, and in his "as for me, I will go pray," a proof alike of his and of Shakspere's steadfast piety. Against all such superficialities of exegesis alike our safeguard must be a broad common-sense induction.

We are ent.i.tled to say at the outset, then, only this, that Shakspere at the time of working over HAMLET and MEASURE FOR MEASURE in 1603-1604 had in his mind a great deal of the reasoning in Montaigne's Essays; and that a number of the speeches in the two plays reproduce portions of what he had read. We are not ent.i.tled to a.s.sume that these portions are selected as being in agreement with Shakspere's own views: we are here limited to saying that he put certain of Montaigne's ideas or statements in the mouths of his characters where they would be appropriate. It does not follow that he shared the feelings of Claudio as to the possible life of the soul after death. And when Hamlet says to Horatio, on the strangeness of the scene with the Ghost:

"And therefore as a stranger give it welcome!

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy"--

though this may be said to be a summary of the whole drift of Montaigne's essay,[164] THAT IT IS FOLLY TO REFER TRUTH OR FALSEHOOD TO OUR SUFFICIENCY; and though we are ent.i.tled to believe that Shakspere had that essay or its thesis in his mind, there is no reason to suppose that the lines express Shakspere's own belief in ghosts. Montaigne had indicated his doubts on that head even in protesting against sundry denials of strange allegations: and it is dramatically fitting that Hamlet in the circ.u.mstances should say what he does. On the other hand, when the Duke in MEASURE FOR MEASURE, playing the part of a friar preparing a criminal for death, gives Claudio a consolation which does not contain a word of Christian doctrine, not a syllable of sacrificial salvation and sacramental forgiveness, we are ent.i.tled to infer from such a singular negative phenomenon, if not that Shakspere rejected the Christian theory of things, at least that it formed no part of his habitual thinking. It was the special business of the Duke, playing in such a character, to speak to Claudio of sin and salvation, of forgiveness and absolution. Such a singular omission must at least imply disregard on the part of the dramatist. It is true that Isabella, pleading to Angelo in the second Act, speaks as a believing Christian on the point of forgiveness for sins; and the versification here is quite Shaksperean. But a solution of the anomaly is to be found here as elsewhere in the fact that Shakspere was working over an existing play;[165] and that in ordinary course he would, if need were, put the religious pleading of Isabella into his own magistral verse just as he would touch up the soliloquy of Hamlet on the question of killing his uncle at prayers--a soliloquy which we know to have existed in the earlier forms of the play. The writer who first made Isabella plead religiously with Angelo would have made the Duke counsel Claudio religiously. The Duke's speech, then, is to be regarded as Shakspere's special insertion; and it is to be taken as negatively exhibiting his opinions.

In the same way, the express withdrawal of the religious note at the close of HAMLET--where in the Second Quarto we have Shakspere making the dying prince say "the rest is silence" instead of "heaven receive my soul," as in the First Quarto--may reasonably be taken to express the same agnosticism on the subject of a future life as is implied in the Duke's speech to Claudio. It cannot reasonably be taken to suggest a purpose of holding Hamlet up to blame as an unbeliever, because Hamlet is made repeatedly to express himself, in talk and in soliloquy, as a believer in deity, in prayer, in h.e.l.l, and in heaven. These speeches are mostly reproductions of the old play, the new matter being in the nature of the pagan allusion to the "divinity that shapes our ends." What is definitely Shaksperean is just the agnostic conclusion.

Did Shakspere, then, derive this agnosticism from Montaigne? What were really Montaigne's religious and philosophic opinions? We must consider this point also with more circ.u.mspection than has been shown by most of Montaigne's critics. The habit of calling him "sceptic," a habit initiated by the Catholic priests who denounced his heathenish use of the term "Fortune," and strengthened by various writers from Pascal to Emerson, is a hindrance to an exact notion of the facts, inasmuch as the word "sceptic" has pa.s.sed through two phases of significance, and may still have either. In the original sense of the term, Montaigne is a good deal of a "sceptic," because the main purport of the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE appears to be the discrediting of human reason all round, and the consequent shaking of all certainty. And this method strikes not only indirectly but directly at the current religious beliefs; for Montaigne indicates a lack of belief in immortality,[166]

besides repeatedly ignoring the common faith where he would naturally be expected to endorse it, as in the nineteenth and fortieth essays hereinbefore cited, and in his discussion of the Apology of Socrates. As is complained by Dean Church:[167] "His views, both of life and death, are absolutely and entirely unaffected by the fact of his profession to believe the Gospel." That profession, indeed, partakes rather obviously of the nature of his other formal salutes[168] to the Church, which are such as Descartes felt it prudent to make in a later generation. His profession of fidelity to Catholicism, again, is rather his way of showing that he saw no superiority of reasonableness in Protestantism, than the expression of any real conformity to Catholic ideals; for he indicates alike his aversion to heretic-hunting and his sense of the folly of insisting on the whole body of dogma. When fanatical Protestants, uncritical of their own creed, affected to doubt the sincerity of any man who held by Catholicism, he was naturally piqued.

But he was more deeply piqued, as Naigeon has suggested, when the few but keen freethinkers of the time treated the THEOLOGIA NATURALIS of Sebonde, which Montaigne had translated at his father's wish, as a feeble and inconclusive piece of argumentation; and it was primarily to retaliate on such critics--who on their part no doubt exhibited some ill-founded convictions while attacking others--that he penned the APOLOGY, which a.s.sails atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion, but with a most unfamiliar energy and splendour of style, as a manifestation of the foolish pride of a frail and perpetually erring reason. For himself, he was, as we have said, a cla.s.sic theist, of the school of Cicero and Seneca; and as regards that side of his own thought he is not at all sceptical, save in so far as he nominally protested against all attempts to bring deity down to human conceptions, while himself doing that very thing, as every theist needs must.

Shakspere, then, could find in Montaigne the traditional deism of the pagan and Christian world, without any colour of specifically Christian faith, and with a direct lead to unbelief in a future state. But, whether we suppose Shakspere to have been already led, as he might be by the initiative of his colleague Marlowe, an avowed atheist, to agnostic views on immortality, or whether we suppose him to have had his first serious lead to such thought from Montaigne, we find him to all appearance carrying further the initial impetus, and proceeding from the serene semi-Stoicism of the essayist to a deeper and sterner conception of things. It lay, indeed, in the nature of Shakspere's psychosis, so abnormally alive to all impressions, that when he fully faced the darker sides of universal drama, with his reflective powers at work, he must utter a pessimism commensurate with the theme. This is part, if not the whole, of the answer to the question "Why did Shakspere write tragedies?"[169] The whole answer can hardly be either Mr. Spedding's, that the poet wrote his darkest tragedies in a state of philosophic serenity,[170] or Dr. Furnivall's, that he "described h.e.l.l because he had felt h.e.l.l."[171] But when we find Shakspere writing a series of tragedies, including an extremely sombre comedy (MEASURE FOR MEASURE), after having produced mainly comedies and history-plays, we must conclude that the change was made of his own choice, and that whereas formerly his theatre took its comedies mostly from him, and its tragedies mostly from others, it now took its comedies mostly from others and its tragedies from him. Further, we must a.s.sume that the gloomy cast of thought so pervadingly given to the new tragedies is partly a reflex of his own experience, but also in large part an expression of the philosophy to which he had been led by his reading, as well as by his life. For we must finally avow that the pervading thought in the tragedies outgoes the simple artistic needs of the case. In OTh.e.l.lO we have indeed a very strictly dramatic array of the forces of wrong--weakness, blind pa.s.sion, and pitiless egoism; but there is already a full suggestion of the overwhelming energy of the element of evil; and in LEAR the conception is worked out with a desperate insistence which carries us far indeed from the sunny cynicism and prudent scepticism of Montaigne. Nowhere in the essays do we find such a note of gloom as is struck in the lines:

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the G.o.ds: They kill us for their sport."

And since there is no pretence of balancing that mordant saying with any decorous plat.i.tude of Christian Deism, we are led finally to the admission that Shakspere sounded a further depth of philosophy than Montaigne's unembittered "cosmopolitan view of things." Instead of reacting against Montaigne's "scepticism," as Herr Stedefeld supposes, he produced yet other tragedies in which the wrongdoers and the wronged alike exhibit less and not more of Christian faith than Hamlet,[172] and in which there is no hint of any such faith on the part of the dramatist, but, on the contrary, a sombre persistence in the presentment of unrelieved evil. The utterly wicked Iago has as much of religion in his talk as anyone else in OTh.e.l.lO, using the phrases "Christian and heathen," "G.o.d bless the mark," "Heaven is my judge," "You are one of those that will not serve G.o.d, if the devil bid you," "the little G.o.dliness I have," "G.o.d's will," and so forth; the utterly wicked Edmund in LEAR, as we have seen, is made to echo Montaigne's "sceptical"

pa.s.sage on the subject of stellar influences, spoken with a moral purpose, rather than the quite contrary utterance in the APOLOGY, in which the essayist, theistically bent on abasing human pretensions, gives to his scepticism the colour of a belief in those very influences.[173] There is here, clearly, no pro-religious thesis. The whole drift of the play shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in stellar control, though he puts the expression of the disbelief in the mouth of a villain; though he makes the honest Kent, on the other hand, declare that "it is the stars ... that govern our conditions;"[174] and though he had previously made Romeo speak of "the yoke of inauspicious stars," and the Duke describe mankind as "servile to all the skiey influences," and was later to make Prospero, in the TEMPEST[175] express his belief in "a most auspicious star." In the case of Montaigne, who goes on yet again to contradict himself in the APOLOGY itself, satirising afresh the habit of a.s.sociating deity with all human concerns, we are driven to surmise an actual variation of opinion--the vivacious intelligence springing this way or that according as it is reacting against the atheists or against the dogmatists. Montaigne, of course, is not a coherent philosopher; the way to systematic philosophic truth is a path too steep to be climbed by such an undisciplined spirit as his, "sworn enemy to obligation, to a.s.siduity, to constancy";[176]

and the net result of his "Apology" for Raimond Sebonde is to upset the system of that sober theologian as well as all others. Whether Shakspere, on the other hand, could or did detect all the inconsistencies of Montaigne's reasoning, is a point on which we are not ent.i.tled to more than a surmise; but we do find that on certain issues on which Montaigne dogmatises very much as did his predecessors, Shakspere applies a more penetrating logic, and explicitly reverses the essayist's verdicts. Montaigne, for instance, carried away by his master doctrine that we should live "according to nature," is given to talking of "art" and "nature" in the ordinary manner, carrying the primitive commonplace indeed to the length of a paradox. Thus in the essay on the Cannibals,[177] speaking of "savages," he protests that

"They are even savage, as we call those fruits wild which nature of herself and of her ordinary progress hath produced, whereas indeed they are those which ourselves have altered by our artificial devices, and diverted from their common order, we should rather call savage. In those are the true and more profitable virtues and natural properties most lively and vigorous;"[178]

deciding with Plato that

"all things are produced either by nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and fairest by one or other of the two first; the least and imperfect by this last."

And in the APOLOGY,[179] after citing some as arguing that

"Nature by a maternal gentleness accompanies and guides" the lower animals, "as if by the hand, to all the actions and commodities of their life," while, "as for us, she abandons us to hazard and fortune, and to seek by art the things necessary to our conservation,"

though he proceeds to insist on the contrary that "nature has universally embraced all her creatures," man as well as the rest, and to argue that man is as much a creature of nature as the rest--since even speech, "if not natural, is necessary"--he never seems to come within sight of the solution that art, on his own showing, is just nature in a new phase. But to that point Shakspere proceeds at a stride in the WINTER'S TALE, one of the latest plays (? 1611), written about the time when we know him to have been reading or re-reading the essay on the Cannibals. When Perdita refuses to plant gillyflowers in her garden,

"For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature,"

the old king answers:

"Say there be: Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean; so o'er that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentle scion to the wildest stock And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of n.o.bler race: This is an art Which does mend nature--change it rather; but The art itself is nature."[180]

It is an a.n.a.lysis, a criticism, a philosophic demonstration; and the subtle poet smilingly lets us see immediately that he had tried the argument on the fanatics of "nature," fair or other, and knew them impervious to it. "I'll not put," says Puritan Perdita, after demurely granting that "so it is"--